The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story

White Americans desire to be free of a past they do not want to remember, while Black Americans remain bound to a past they can never forget.

While history is what happened, it is also, just as important, how we think about what happened and what we unearth and choose to remember about what happened

If we are truly a great nation, the truth cannot destroy us.

James Baldwin famously said, “Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed unless it is faced.

For a nation steeped in this self-image, it is embarrassing, guilt-producing, and disillusioning to consider the role that race and slavery played in shaping the national narrative.”38 To address these discomfiting facts, we have created a founding mythology that teaches us to think of the “free” and “abolitionist” North as the heart of the American Revolution. Schoolchildren learn that the Boston Tea Party sparked the Revolution and that Philadelphia was home to the Continental Congress, the place where intrepid men penned the Declaration and Constitution. But while our nation’s founding documents were written in Philadelphia, they were mainly written by Virginians.

Reparations amount to a societal obligation in a nation where our Constitution sanctioned slavery, Congress passed laws protecting it, and our federal government initiated, condoned, and practiced legal racial segregation and discrimination against Black Americans until half a century ago. And so it is the federal government that would pay [reparations].

The racism we are fighting today was originally conjured to justify working unfree Black people, often until death, to generate extravagant riches for ... all the ancillary white people ... who earned their living and built their wealth from that free Black labor.

Our myths have not served us well. We are the most unequal of the Western democracies. We incarcerate our citizens at the highest rates. We suffer the greatest income inequality. Americans’ life spans are shorter than those of the people in the nations we compare ourselves to.

A racist capitalism that ignores the fact that slavery didn't just deny Black freedom but built white fortunes.

As a source of the fledgling nation's financial might, slavery shaped our political institutions and founding documents, our laws governing private property and financial regulation, our management techniques and accounting systems, and our economic systems and labor unions.

America has a way of dancing with its own delusion.

Sovereignty soldiers, Black refugees, self-abolitionists, fighting through America’s history, marooned in a land they made their own, acre after acre, plot after plot, war after war, life after life.

Slavery persisted, and grew, protected by the argument that it was going away.

But it would be historically inaccurate to reduce the contributions of Black people to the vast material wealth created by our bondage. Black Americans have also been, and continue to be, foundational to the idea of American freedom. More than any other group in this country’s history, we have served, generation after generation, in an overlooked but vital role: it is we who have been the perfecters of this democracy.

Even as a teenager, I understood that the absence of 1619 from mainstream history was intentional. People had made the choice not to teach us the significance of the year. And it followed that many other facts of history had been ignored or suppressed as well. What else hadn’t we been taught? I was starting to figure out that the histories we learn in school or, more casually, through popular culture, monuments, and political speeches rarely teach us the facts but only certain facts.

This quantum leap served to wrap the Black experience up in a few paragraphs and a tidy bow, never really explaining why, one hundred years after the abolition of slavery, King had to lead the March on Washington in the first place. We were not actors but acted upon. We were not contributors, just recipients. White people enslaved us, and white people freed us. Black people could choose either to take advantage of that freedom or to squander it, as our depictions in the media seemed to suggest so many of us were doing.

I am the American heartbreak— The rock on which Freedom Stumped its toe— The great mistake That Jamestown made Long ago. —Langston Hughes, “American Heartbreak: 1619

Negro poverty is not white poverty…. These differences are not racial differences. They are solely and simply the consequence of ancient brutality, past injustice and present prejudice. They are anguishing to observe. For the Negro they are a constant reminder of oppression. For the white they are a constant reminder of guilt. But they must be faced, and they must be dealt with, and they must be overcome; if we are ever to reach the time when the only difference between Negroes and whites is the color of their skin.

Something about white America's desire for Blackness warps and perverts its source, lampoons and cheapens it even in adoration. Loving Black culture has never demanded a corresponding love of Black people. And loving Black culture has tended to result in loving the life out of it.

By the eve of the Civil War, the Mississippi Valley was home to more millionaires per capita than anywhere else in the United States.

Given the choice between parity with Black people—by inviting them into unified unions—and poverty, white workers chose poverty, spoiling the development of a multiracial mass labor movement in America.

Black people have seen the worst of America, yet, somehow, we still believe in its best.

Until Americans replace mythology with history, until Americans unveil and halt the progression of racism, an arc of the American universe will keep bending toward injustice.

Americans in both the North and the South came to see slavery as a necessary evil, the only way to pay off their debts and build the new nation.

In 1785, he led a delegation of abolitionists to Mount Vernon to convince the future first president of the United States to join their movement. But George Washington declined to sign the petition or publicly support the Methodists’ anti-slavery efforts, on the premise that “it would be dangerous to make a frontal attack on a prejudice which is beginning to decrease.

Americans built a culture of speculation unique in its abandon,” writes the historian Joshua Rothman in his book Flush Times and Fever Dreams. That culture would drive cotton production up to the Civil War, and it has been a defining characteristic of American capitalism ever since. It is the culture of acquiring wealth without work, growing at all costs, and abusing the powerless. It is the culture that brought us catastrophic downturns, like the Panic of 1837, the stock market crash of 1929, and the recession of 2008.

School curricula generally treat slavery as an aberration in a free society, and textbooks largely ignore the way that many prominent men, women, industries, and institutions profited from and protected slavery.

In exposing our nation’s troubled roots, the 1619 Project challenges us to think about a country whose exceptionalism we treat as the unquestioned truth. It asks us to consider who sets and shapes our shared national memory and what and who gets left out. As the Pulitzer Prize–winning historian David W. Blight writes in Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory, our nation’s “glorious remembrance” is “all but overwhelmed by an even more glorious forgetting.

We were not actors but acted upon. We were not contributors, just recipients. White people enslaved us, and white people freed us. Black people could choose either to take advantage of that freedom or to squander it, as our depictions in the media seemed to suggest so many of us were doing.

Minstrelsy's grotesquerie deluded white audiences into feeling better about themselves. It induced a bearable cognitive dissonance that outlasted enslavement. The caricatures of Black people as extravagantly lazy, licentious, vulgar, disheveled, and abject always drew a comforting contrast with a white person's sense of honor and civility, with a white person's simply being white.