1619 project opening essay

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Nikole Hannah-Jones’ essay from ‘The 1619 Project’ wins commentary Pulitzer

Of all the thousands upon thousands of stories and projects produced by American media last year, perhaps the one most-talked about was The New York Times Magazine’s ambitious “The 1619 Project,” which recognized the 400th anniversary of the moment enslaved Africans were first brought to what would become the United States and how it forever changed the country.

It was a phenomenal piece of journalism.

And while the project in its entirety did not make the list of Pulitzer Prize finalists, the introductory essay by Nikole Hannah-Jones , the creator of the landmark project, was honored with a prestigious Pulitzer Prize for commentary.

After the announcement that she has been awarded the Pulitzer Prize, Hannah-Jones told the Times’ staff it was “the most important work of my life.”

While nearly impossible, and almost insulting, to try and describe in a handful of words or even sentences, Hannah-Jones’ essay was introduced with this headline: “Our Democracy’s Founding Ideals Were False When They Were Written. Black Americans Have Fought to Make Them True.”

In her essay, Hannah-Jones wrote, “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.”

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Hannah-Jones’ and “The 1619 Project,” however, were not without controversy. There was criticism of the project, particularly from conservatives. Former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich called it “propaganda.” A commentator for The Federalist tweeted the goal of the project was to “delegitimize America, and further divide and demoralize its citizenry.”

But the most noteworthy criticism came from a group of five historians. ln a letter to the Times , they wrote that they were “dismayed at some of the factual errors in the project and the closed process behind it.” They added, “These errors, which concern major events, cannot be described as interpretation or ‘framing.’ They are matters of verifiable fact, which are the foundation of both honest scholarship and honest journalism. They suggest a displacement of historical understanding by ideology.”

Wall Street Journal assistant editorial features editor Elliot Kaufman wrote a column with the subhead: “The New York Times tries to rewrite U.S. history, but its falsehoods are exposed by surprising sources.”

In a rare move, the Times responded to the criticism with its own response . New York Times Magazine editor-in-chief Jake Silverstein wrote, “Though we respect the work of the signatories, appreciate that they are motivated by scholarly concern and applaud the efforts they have made in their own writings to illuminate the nation’s past, we disagree with their claim that our project contains significant factual errors and is driven by ideology rather than historical understanding. While we welcome criticism, we don’t believe that the request for corrections to The 1619 Project is warranted.”

That was just a portion of the rather lengthy and stern, but respectful response defending the project.

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In the end, the 1619 Project — and Hannah-Jones’ essay, in particular — will be remembered for one of the most impactful and thought-provoking pieces on race, slavery and its impact on America that we’ve ever seen.

And maybe there was another reason for the pushback besides those questioning its historical accuracy.

As The Atlantic’s Adam Serwer wrote in December , “U.S. history is often taught and popularly understood through the eyes of its great men, who are seen as either heroic or tragic figures in a global struggle for human freedom. The 1619 Project, named for the date of the first arrival of Africans on American soil, sought to place ‘the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of our national narrative.’ Viewed from the perspective of those historically denied the rights enumerated in America’s founding documents, the story of the country’s great men necessarily looks very different.”

There’s no question that Hannah-Jones’ essay, which requires the kind of smart thinking and discussion that this country needs to continue having, deserved to be recognized with a Pulitzer as the top commentary of 2019. After all, and this is not hyperbole, it’s one of the most important essays ever.

In addition, we should acknowledge the other two finalists in this category: Washington Post sports columnist Sally Jenkins and Los Angeles Times columnist Steve Lopez.

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Jenkins continues to be among the best sports columnists in the country. Meanwhile, has any writer done more to shine a light on homelessness than Lopez? This is the third time in the past four years (and fourth time overall) that Lopez has been a finalist in the commentary category.

In any other year, both would be deserving of Pulitzer Prizes. But 2019 will be remembered for Nikole Hannah-Jones’ powerful essay and project.

More Pulitzer coverage from Poynter

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• Here are the winners of the 2020 Pulitzer Prizes
• Here are the 2020 Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoons
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The 1619 project details the legacy of slavery in america.

PBS News Hour PBS News Hour

• Copy URL https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/the-1619-project-details-the-legacy-of-slavery-in-america

Four hundred years ago this month, the first enslaved people from Africa arrived in the Virginia colony. To observe the anniversary of American slavery, The New York Times Magazine launched The 1619 Project to reframe America’s history through the lens of slavery. The project lead, reporter Nikole Hannah-Jones, joins Hari Sreenivasan to discuss.

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Notice: Transcripts are machine and human generated and lightly edited for accuracy. They may contain errors.

Hari Sreenivasan:

Today, the New York Times published the print edition of the 1619 Project. The name marks this month's 400th anniversary of the arrival of the first enslaved people brought from Africa to the then-Virginia colony. The Times says the project aims to reframe the country's history, understanding 1619 as our true founding and placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of the story we tell ourselves about who we are. The project is led by New York Times magazine reporter Nikole Hannah-Jones, who is the author of the opening essay. She joins me now.

You have been working on this for a number of years, but you put this together very quickly. First of all, why? Why this topic? Why this issue?

Nikole Hannah-Jones:

Well, you don't have very many opportunities to ever celebrate the 400th anniversary of anything, and it seemed to me that this was a great opportunity to really, as you said in your opening, reframe the way that we have thought about an institution that has impacted almost everything in modern American society, but that we're taught very little about, that we're often taught is marginal to the American story. And we wanted to do something different. We wanted to use the platform of The Times to force us to confront the reality of what slavery has meant for our development as a nation.

And this isn't just about sort of the kind of textbook ideas of what happened to slaves. You've got essays in here about health care, about geography, about sugar, about music, all of these different ripple effects that happened throughout the economy and really life here. You said — in a sentence, you said, you know we would not be the United States were it not for slavery. This is kind of one of the original fibers that made this country.

Absolutely. The conceit of the magazine is that one of things we hear all the time is, well that was in the past; why do you have to keep talking about the past? Well, one, I think the past is clearly instructive for the future, for how we are right now, but also the conceit of the magazine is that you can look at all of these modern phenomenon that you think are unrelated to slavery at all and we are going to show you how they are. And so we have a story in there about traffic patterns. We have a story about why we're the only Western industrial country without universal health care, about why Americans consume so much sugar, about capitalism, about democracy. We're really trying to change the way that Americans are thinking that this was just a problem of the past that we've resolved and show that it isn't. What many people don't know, and I point this out in my essay, is that one of the reasons we even decide to become a nation in the first place is over the issue of slavery and had we not had slavery we might be Canada. That one of the reasons that the founders wanted to break off from Britain is they were afraid that Britain was going to begin regulating slavery and maybe even moving towards abolishment. And we were making so much money off of slavery that the founders wanted to be able to continue it.

We're not taught that when we're taught about our origin stories, and not knowing that then it really does not allow us to grapple with a nation that we really are and not just the nation that we're taught in kind of American mythology.

And that money ends up fueling so much more of what made this country.

Of course. It's not incidental that 10 of the first 12 presidents of the United States were slaveowners. This is where, at that time, this kind of very burgeoning nation was getting so much of its wealth and its power. It's what allows this kind of ragged group of colonists to believe that they could defeat the most powerful empire in the world at that time. And it went everywhere. It was north and south. We talk about the industrial revolution — where do Americans believe that the cotton that was being spun in those textile mills was coming from, was coming from enslaved people who are growing that cotton in the south. The rum industry, which was really the currency of the slave trade, that rum was being processed and sold in the United States. The banking industry that rises in New York City is rising largely to provide the mortgages and insurance policies and to finance the slave trade. The shipbuilders are northern shipbuilders. The people who are sending voyages to Africa to bring enslaved people here are all in the north. So this is a truly national enterprise but we prefer to think that it was just some backward Southerners, because that is the way that we can kind of deal with our fundamental paradox that at our beginning that we were a nation built on both the inalienable rights of man and also a nation built on bondage.

And you even talked about Wall Street's name comes from something that most of us don't recognize.

Absolutely. So Wall Street is called Wall Street because it was on that wall that enslaved people were bought and sold. That's been completely erased from our national memory and completely erased from the way that we think about the North. At the time of the Civil War, New York City's mayor actually threatened to secede from the union with the South because so much money was being made off of slave-produced cotton that was being exported out of New York City. It is that erasure I think that has prevented us from really grappling with our history and so much in modern society that we see that is still related to that.

You know, one of the essays in here about health care, which is fascinating, is that some of the myths that started then are still perpetuated today in modern health care and that there are still gross misunderstandings that could actually have very serious health consequences.

Absolutely. So Linda Villarosa has this compelling essay that talks about how during slavery enslavers were using enslaved people to do these medical experiments, but also we were using medical technology to justify slavery by saying enslaved people don't feel pain the way, or people of African descent don't feel pain the way that white people do, that they have thicker skin. And so you can beat them or torture them and it's not going to hurt as bad. Well, these are all justifications for slavery, but if you look at modern medical science, in our understanding they're still using these calculations that say, for instance, lung capacity was one of the things that Linda writes about, that black people have worse lung capacity. And the reason enslavers said that was they said that working in the fields and doing this hard labor was good for black people because it helped them increase their lung capacity. Well, what Linda points out is today doctors and medical science are still accounting for what they think is a lessened lung capacity of black Americans and it's simply not true. But we've never purged ourselves of that false science that was used to justify racism.

You talked about how basically that the black American or there's the black experience has been inconvenient to the narrative of this nation in all of these different categories, that it's been something that we have struggled to deal with but oftentimes just not dealt with it as a result that it was thorny.

Absolutely. So when you think about the story of who we are, that we are this country built on individual rights. We are the country where, if you are coming from a place where you are not free, you can come to our shores and you can get freedom. Well then you have black people. And every time you look at black Americans, you have to be reminded that there was one-fifth of our population who, we had no rights, no liberties, no freedom whatsoever. We are the constant reminder of really the lie at our origins that while Thomas Jefferson was writing the Declaration of Independence his enslaved brother-in-law was there to serve him and make sure that he's comfortable. So I think this explains a lot the continued perception that black people are a problem, that black people are as Abraham Lincoln said "a troublesome presence" in American democracy because every time you see us you have to be reminded of our original sin, and no one wants to be reminded of sin. We're ashamed of sin.

You know, one of the things that you mentioned a couple of nights ago when this project launched is the story of your grandmother who grew up a sharecropper. And here you are today. She didn't live to be able to see this magazine, but I'm assuming she'd be proud.

Yeah, I think she would. My grandmother died when I was still in college, and she would be astounded to see what I became. And I think that that's an important part of this story. We hear all the time what people consider the problems of the quote-unquote "black community" and people like to point out statistics that they think are indicative of black failure. But when we think that, as I point out in the magazine, I'm part of the first generation of black Americans in the history of this country who was born into a country where it was not legal to discriminate against me just because I descended from people from Africa. We've made tremendous progress in a very short period of time. Really just one or two generations out of legal Jim Crow, you could have someone like me at the New York Times producing this work. And it really is a story of black ascension once the legal barriers have been removed.

You talk in eloquent terms about how black people really are the perfecters of this democracy, that we had these original documents but really it took this all the way almost to the civil rights struggle for us to start seeing what those words actually meant.

Absolutely. What I argue is that no one values freedom more than those who never had it. And so while the founders were writing these lofty and aspirational words, even as they knew that they were going to continue a system of slavery, black people had no choice but to believe in the literal interpretation of those words, that all men are created equal and are born with inalienable rights. And so black people really from the moment we landed on these shores have been resisting and trying to push this society toward a more equal society of universal rights. And that has really been our role. You can look at the fact that black people have fought in every single war this country has ever fought, but we've also engaged in a 250-year internal war against our own country to try to force our country to also bring full democracy here and not just abroad.

This magazine is also showing up in 2019 in a climate where at this point all you have to do is just look at your Twitter feed, look at the hashtag, and you see people who have an incredibly different narrative that they believe very strongly, that they'd look at this magazine, The Times, everything else as part of a larger propaganda campaign, this is part of a conspiracy, etc. How do you deal with that?

There's two things that I would say to that. Every piece in here is deeply researched. It is backed up by historical evidence. Our fact checkers went back to panels of historians and had them go through every single argument and every single fact that is in here. So it's really not something that you can dispute with facts. But the other thing is if we truly understand that black people are fully American and so the struggle of black people to make our union actually reflect its values is not a negative thing against the country, because we are citizens who are working to make this country better for all Americans. That is something that white Americans, if they really believe as they say that race doesn't matter, we're all Americans, should also be proud of and embrace that story. We cannot deny our past. And if you believe that 1776 matters, if you believe that our Constitution still matters, then you also have to understand that the legacy of slavery still matters and you can't pick and choose what parts of history we think are important and which ones aren't. They all are important. And that narrative that is inclusive and honest even if it's painful is the only way that we can understand our times now and the only way we can move forward. I think what, if people read for instance a story on why we don't have universal health care, what it shows is that racism doesn't just hurt black people but there are a lot — there are millions of white people in this country who are dying, who are sick, who are unable to pay their medical bills because we can't get past the legacy of slavery. This affects all Americans no matter if you just got here yesterday, if your family's been here 200 years, no matter what your race. Our inability to deal with this original sin is hurting all of us and this entire country is not the country that it could be because of it.

So just connect that dot. What is the connection between universal health care and slavery?

Well, what we know is that white support for universal programs declines if they think that large numbers of black people are going to benefit from it. And this is a sentiment that goes all the way back to right after the end of the Civil War when the Freedmen's Bureau starts to offer universal health care for people who had literally just come out of bondage, had not a dollar to their name, had no way to live, had nothing. And white people immediately pushed back against that believing that even people who had just come out of slavery should not get anything quote-unquote "for free," even though their labor clearly had built the entire, most of the economy of the country. And so that sentiment continues to this day. And if you look at across western industrialized nations, European nations, we have the stingiest social safety net of all of those nations. And it's because we are the only one on whose land we practiced slavery. So our inability to get past that is hurting. It's not just in terms of universal health care, but you can look at why we don't have universal child care, why we have the stingiest parental leave, why we have the lowest ability to have people represented by unions. All of this goes back to the sentiment that if black people are going to benefit, white Americans would not support it, large numbers of white Americans.

So this is the actual physical edition that a lot of people in the country might not be able to get if they don't have a newsstand that sells the New York Times. But it's also all of it is online, right?

All the essays are online and this was a special section. This was in partnership with the Smithsonian, right?

And so you've got curriculum that's online, you've got all of the New York Times Magazine that's online. You're doing a lot of different kinds of outreach projects. Right after this you're going to a 1619 brunch and this is happening in different parts of the country as well?

Yes. So people all across the country are holding brunches to really sit and discuss this, which is more than my wildest dreams for this project. I think just because of what's happening in the country right now, people are really searching for answers. We raised money so that we could print more than 200,000 additional copies that we are distributing in various places across the country for free because we really want not just Times subscribers to get access to this but communities where it's difficult to get the Times, where people can't afford to get the Times. We truly think that this is a public service project that is important for all Americans, not just our subscribers to get access to.

Nikole Hannah-Jones, thank you so much.

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The 1619 Project

93 pages • 3 hours read

The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story

A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Preface-Chapter 4

Chapters 5-9

Chapters 10-14

Chapters 15-18

Key Figures

Index of Terms

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Summary and Study Guide

The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story is an anthology curated by Nikole Hannah-Jones that provides a new perspective on American history. Hannah-Jones and the authors in this work challenge conventional teachings of American history, often offered only through a white lens. Using historical record, essays, fiction, and poetry, the authors of The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story present a new understanding of the American identity, one that has been forged by the contributions, labor, and intellectualism of the country’s Black citizens. This book represents the culmination of an original issue of The New York Times Magazine commemorating the arrival of enslaved Africans to American shores in 1619. Since the issue’s publication, The 1619 Project has expanded, including a television mini-series, podcasts, and school curriculum. Nikole Hannah-Jones is the winner of the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for Commentary. The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story was named one of the ten greatest works of journalism between 2010-2019 by New York University’s Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute.

This guide refers to the 2021 hardback edition by The New York Times Company.

Content Warning: The source material contains graphic descriptions of slavery, physical and sexual abuse, sexual assault, and murder. The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story also covers historical resources that may use outdated or racist language. This guide reproduces this language only when using direct quotations.

Using essays, fiction, and poetry, The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story reframes American history in a new light, challenging pervasive white, colonial perspectives. The project began when Hannah-Jones encountered the title date as a teenager, learning that a ship called the White Lion brought enslaved Africans to the Virginia Colony, long before the nation’s founders ever signed the Declaration of Independence. Hannah-Jones realized that American slavery was a part of the foundation of American life. The work expands upon this idea by examining the motivations and nuances of important historical events.

Each chapter explores a different aspect of slavery’s impact on American structures and institutions and connects historical events with contemporary issues. The essays are accompanied by short vignettes, providing brief details about important historical events and acts of resistance by Black Americans and enslaved Africans, as well as poems that help to contextualize the experiences of those living during these historic moments.

In the Preface-Chapter 4, the authors examine the early days of slavery and its connection to the American Revolution , sugar, and democracy. Chapter 1 connects slavery and democracy, arguing that Black Americans have contributed to advancements in equality and democracy. Chapter 2 uncovers the origin of the idea of “race” and how it was developed by enslavers to ensure the longevity of slavery. In Chapter 3, author Khalil Gibran Muhammad details how sugar production created the justification for slavery and gave birth to American capitalism. Chapter 4 examines the prevalence of white fear in both historical and contemporary contexts.

Chapters 5-9 spotlight dispossession, capitalism, politics, citizenship, and self-defense. Chapter 5 details the relationship between Black and Indigenous people in the United States throughout history and juxtaposes their status and treatment within American policies. In Chapter 6, Matthew Desmond contends that slavery defined the nation’s extreme adherence to capitalism and created a model for oppression and wealth advancement. Chapter 7 analyzes the connection between slavery and the structure of the US government and political policies. In Chapter 8, Martha S. Jones draws attention to the efforts of Black Americans to redesign the meaning of citizenship.

Chapters 10-14 unpack other forms of disparity and activism in US history. Chapter 10 traces the link between the violent control and punishment during slavery to the modern incarceration system. Chapter 11 elucidates the false promise of Reconstruction , examining the many ways in which Black citizens were denied rights following Emancipation. In Chapter 12, Linda Villarosa focuses on the historical relationship between Black people and the American healthcare system. Chapter 13 spotlights the interconnectedness of Black churches and activism, and Chapter 14 focuses on the development of Black music in popular American culture.

Chapters 15-18 identify more issues of racial discrimination and their connection to slavery while providing a roadmap for America’s future. In Chapter 15, Interlandi details the backlash to the Affordable Care Act in 2008 and connects it to earlier efforts by emancipated enslaved people to develop systems of healthcare. Chapter 16 exposes how problems with transportation and infrastructure are rooted in segregationist efforts following the Civil War. Ibram X. Kendi challenges the idea of continued progress and advocates for persistence and diligence in Chapter 17, while Nikole Hannah-Jones outlines a roadmap for justice in Chapter 18.

As each chapter analyzes American history and the relationship between slavery and various American institutions and ideologies, the authors also lift up Black voices and acts of Black resistance that informed the American identity and culture.

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From the Editor’s Desk: 1619 and All That

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From the Editor’s Desk: 1619 and All That, The American Historical Review , Volume 125, Issue 1, February 2020, Pages xv–xxi, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/rhaa041

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On Thanksgiving Day, I trekked up the highest hill in Brooklyn, the peak of which happens to be the site of a Civil War memorial in Green-Wood Cemetery. Two things struck me about the inscription on the Civil War Soldiers’ Monument, which was erected in 1869. The first was that an astounding 148,000 residents of New York City (17 percent of the city’s 1860 population) served in the Union’s military forces during the Civil War. The second was the statement that they did so to defend the Union and preserve the Constitution. The inscription contains not a word about slavery or emancipation, let alone black military service.

I really did not want to devote this column to the recent dispute between the New York Times and the handful of prominent historians who have offered sharp criticism of that publication’s purportedly revisionist narrative of the American story—the 1619 Project—that puts racism and the struggle for black liberation at the core of the national experience. But of course, it was all anyone asked me about at the AHA’s Annual Meeting during the first week of January, so I feel I must.

By now, most historians are familiar with the basic contours of this public scuffle between journalists and members of our profession. In mid-August, with much fanfare, the New York Times Magazine devoted an entire issue to the 1619 Project. Spearheaded by journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones, the project is designed, in Times editor Jake Silverstein’s words, to impart the idea that “the country’s true birth date, the moment that its defining contradictions first came into the world,” was not 1776, but rather “late August of 1619,” when the first enslaved Africans arrived on the shore of what would eventually become the Commonwealth of Virginia. Naturally—and entirely appropriately—this was as much a media event as a considered historiographic intervention. The “reframing” of the country’s “origins” was a rhetorical move, one that impressed upon a wider public an interpretive framework that many historians probably already accept—namely, that slavery and racism lie at the root of “nearly everything that has truly made America exceptional.” The aim, Silverstein observed, was to “place the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of the story we tell ourselves about who we are as a country.” 1 If some historians might quibble with this or that specific conclusion drawn from such an approach, the overall reorientation strikes me as laudable, if unexceptional.

In fact, many scholars initially greeted 1619 with excitement and effusive praise. In part, I suspect that this was because the basic impulse behind the collection of eighteen articles and many additional short essays—by journalists, historians, sociologists, poets, legal scholars, English professors, artists, playwrights, and novelists—reflects how many, if not most, American historians already teach about that past in the undergraduate classroom. Speaking for myself, for three decades now I have emphasized in my U.S. survey class that the African American experience must be considered central to every aspect of American history. You cannot understand anything about the latter, I inform my students, unless you incorporate the former into the narrative. Yes, that includes the Revolution and the founding of the nation. It includes, obviously, the reason the first republic and its Constitution, so revered, lasted about as long as the USSR, a mere seventy-four years, before dissolving into the bloodiest conflict of the nineteenth century. For my part, I always considered this a pretty weak foundation on which to erect unconditional veneration. As Eric Foner argues in his newest book, The Second Founding , the creation of the new republic and a transformed Constitution after the Civil War were inseparable from the black freedom struggle. 2 Foner’s argument is elegantly made, but I have long assumed that the case he makes was a given among nearly all American historians. The contours of the twentieth century’s modern political economy, constructed by the New Deal (and the reaction against it), have long required an understanding of the enduring legacy of white supremacy and the subsequent struggle to destroy (or reconfigure) the racial order. Again, these strike me as unremarkable points among historians today; the 1619 Project merely seeks to consolidate these arguments and invites a wider audience to reckon with them. And it does so in the tradition of the time-honored, and sometimes uncritical, practice of recognizing significant anniversary dates, for better or for worse. This year we will get the Pilgrims, which should bring its own media spectacle. 3

So why the hostile, if somewhat belated, reaction? Here I admit to being perplexed—hence my initial hesitation to wade into the debate. The initial caveats came from an unlikely precinct, at least for a mainstream public intellectual knock-down, drag-out. In early September, the website of the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI) fired a broadside at the Times , denouncing the 1619 Project as “a politically motivated falsification of history” designed, in their view, to bolster the Democratic Party’s alignment with “identity politics” at the expense of any serious engagement with class inequality. This attack came not from the expected quarters of the right , which one imagines would find offensive and unpatriotic the denigration of the American promise as irredeemably racist, but from the Trotskyist left. As good Marxists, the adherents of the Fourth International denounced the project for its “idealism,” that is to say, its tendency to reduce historical causation to “a supra-historical emotional impulse.” By mischaracterizing anti-black racism as an irreducible element built into the “DNA” of the nation and its white citizens, the Trotskyists declared, the 1619 Project is ahistorical and “irrationalist.” This idealist fallacy requires that racism “must persist independently of any change in political or economic conditions,” naturally the very thing that any materialist historian would want to attend to. “The invocation of white racism,” they proclaim, “takes the place of any concrete examination of the economic, political and social history of the country.” Perhaps even worse, “the 1619 Project says nothing about the event that had the greatest impact on the social condition of African-Americans—the Russian Revolution of 1917.” 4 (Well, OK, I was with them up to that point.) In some ways, the debate merely reprises one fought out nearly half a century ago: Which came first, racism or slavery? Who is right, Winthrop Jordan or Edmund Morgan? 5

But that, it turns out, was merely the opening salvo. In October and November, the ICFI began to post a series of interviews with historians about the 1619 Project on its “World Socialist Web Site,” including (as of January 11) Victoria Bynum (October 30), James McPherson (November 14), James Oakes (November 18), Gordon Wood (November 28), Dolores Janiewski (December 23), and Richard Carwardine (December 31). 6 As many critics hastened to note, all of these historians are white. In principle, of course, that should do nothing to invalidate their views. Nevertheless, it was a peculiar choice on the part of the Trotskyist left, since there are undoubtedly African American historians—Marxist and non-Marxist alike—sympathetic to their views. Barbara Fields comes immediately to mind, as she has often made similarly critical appraisals of idealist fallacies about the history of “race” and racism. 7

If these scholars all concern themselves in one way or another with historical dilemmas of race and class, they hardly are cut from the same cloth. Bynum, best known for her attention to glimmers of anti-slavery sentiment among southern whites, some of which was driven by class grievances, doesn’t always take the Trotskyists’ bait. For example, she points out that “we cannot assume that individual [southern] Unionists were anti-slavery,” even if they “at the very least connected slavery to their own economic plight in the Civil War era.” Similarly, McPherson, the dean of Civil War historians, acknowledges in his interview that initially most Union Army soldiers fought to “revenge an attack on the flag.” (As the Green-Wood memorial indicates, that’s how many chose to remember it as well.) Still, McPherson complains that the 1619 Project consists of “a very unbalanced, one-sided account, which lack[s] context and perspective on the complexity of slavery.” Yet it is safe to say that he would not sign on to the Marxist version of the Civil War preferred by the ICFI—“the greatest expropriation of private property in world history, not equaled until the Russian Revolution in 1917.” 8

McPherson insists in his interview that “opposition to slavery, and opposition to racism, has also been an important theme in American history.” Sure, but it wouldn’t be difficult to find a dozen historians who could say, with confidence, yes, but on balance, slavery and racism themselves have probably been just as, if not more, important. In his interview, Oakes, one of the most sophisticated historians of the rise of the nineteenth-century Republican Party and its complex place within an emergent anti-slavery coalition, offers a bracing critique of the recent literature on slavery and capitalism, scholarship that underpins sociologist Matthew Desmond’s contribution to 1619. But other than gamely defending Lincoln against the charge of racism, Oakes doesn’t really direct much fire at the 1619 Project in particular. For his part, Wood (described by the Trotskyists as “ the leading historian of the American Revolution”) seems affronted mostly by the failure of the 1619 Project to solicit his advice, and appears offended by the suggestion that the Revolutionary generation might have had some interest in protecting slavery. Yet, oddly enough, even he seems to endorse what has become one of the project’s most controversial assertions—that “[Lord] Dunmore’s proclamation in 1775, which promised the slaves freedom if they joined the Crown’s cause, provoked many hesitant Virginia planters to become patriots.” Those are Wood’s words, and they are part of his wide-ranging and fascinating discussion of the place of anti-slavery and pro-slavery sentiment in the Revolutionary era and the Revolutionary Atlantic World more generally.

Taken as a whole, the interviews are of enormous interest, but more for what they have to say about these scholars’ own interpretations of key aspects of American history than as a full-on attack on the 1619 Project. Reading closely, one sees the interviewed historians trying to avoid saying what the Trotskyists would like them to say, offering a far more nuanced view of the past. This certainly entails dissent from some of the specific claims of 1619, but it hardly requires them to embrace fully the Trotskyist alternative, which I suspect at least several of them would be reluctant to do. Frankly, I wish the AHR had published these interviews, and I hope they get wide circulation. Not for the critique of the 1619 Project itself, but because collectively they insist on the significance of historical context, the careful weighing of evidence, the necessity of understanding change over time, and the potential dangers of reductionism. I would urge anyone to read them.

I have focused on the interviews with Bynum, McPherson, Oakes, and Wood because these four scholars became the protagonists in the subsequent, and far less enlightening, act of the drama. On December 20, the New York Times Magazine published a letter to the editor circulated by Princeton’s Sean Wilentz and signed by these four interviewees, “to express [their] strong reservations about important aspects of The 1619 Project.” 9 In particular, the letter objected to “the factual errors in the project and the closed process behind it.” This was followed by a spirited rebuttal from Times editor Jake Silverstein, and then rapidly spiraling coverage in the Atlantic , the Washington Post , and elsewhere, including follow-ups on the WSWS. More than a few people have asked me if perhaps the Times didn’t invite the historians’ letter, as it has certainly put a second wind in the 1619 Project’s media sails. No doubt, the Trotskyists who lit the match that started this fire—with whom I confess I am often intellectually sympathetic—achieved Internet traffic beyond their wildest dreams, and more press than they have enjoyed since they opposed American entry into World War II.

The letter itself is, it must be said, signed by a motley crew. If it was the Trotskyists who brought these folks under the same banner, they have managed to give a whole new meaning to “Popular Front.” The animus of the Fourth International types seems clear—in placing race at the center of history, 1619 elides the central role of class and class conflict in the history of settler colonialism, continental dispossession, and rapacious capitalism. But that is probably not the same hill that Wilentz and the gang of four are planting their flag on. So what gives?

What is odd about the letter is that it implies that the singular problem with the 1619 Project is that journalists are practicing history without a license. Reading only the WSWS interviews and the subsequent historians’ letter, one might be surprised to learn that several well-respected historians actually contributed material directly to the Times project: Anne Bailey, Kevin Kruse, Khalil Gibran Muhammad, Tiya Miles, and Mary Elliott (who curated a special supplementary Times “broadsheet” for the 1619 Project organized around objects in the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture). So clearly it is not that the editors at the Times shut out the voices of historians; it seems that they consulted with the wrong historians. Given the qualifications of the scholars who did work on the project, that is a most unfortunate impression to convey.

The letter writers do not just object to errors they claim to have identified; they call for the Times to issue corrections. What, in fact, might these look like? The primary offender seems to be Nikole Hannah-Jones, in her sweeping essay that frames the entire project. Again, one could read the critics and miss the fact that the 1619 Project includes dozens of elements beyond Hannah-Jones’s opening essay. Many others may—or may not—contain errors, but Hannah-Jones’s essay has been singled out as representative of the whole. Particularly objectionable, the historians insist, is her assertion that “one of the primary reasons the colonists decided to declare their independence from Britain was because they wanted to protect the institution of slavery.” As the letter bluntly points out, “This is not true.” Admittedly, at a minimum, her formulation seriously overstates the anti-slavery bona fides of the British Empire at the time, not to mention the universality of pro-slavery views in the colonies. Fair enough. So, then, what would suffice in its stead? “One of the primary reasons the colonists decided to declare their independence”? How about “some of the Patriots fought for independence in the knowledge that it would secure their investments in slavery”? Presumably at least some of the letter writers would find the following counter-formulation no less objectionable: “there were many reasons the colonists decided to declare their independence, but the preservation of slavery was not among them.” While Hannah-Jones may be guilty of overstatement, this is more a matter of emphasis than it is of a correct or incorrect interpretation.

Similarly, the letter declares “misleading” Hannah-Jones’s emphasis on Lincoln’s 1862 advocacy of colonization, as the movement to encourage blacks to “self-deport” was called, to the exclusion of any examples of his commitment to racial equality. This, too, is a matter of emphasis and nuance, neglecting evidence that Lincoln ultimately favored some (limited) form of black citizenship. It would have been nice if Hannah-Jones had balanced colonization against some of that countervailing evidence, but many fine historians will find her general case against Lincoln persuasive. Surely, as Frederick Douglass himself pointed out during his 1876 oration on the anniversary of Lincoln’s assassination, colonization was only one among many examples that Lincoln “shared the prejudices of his white fellow-countrymen against the Negro” and that the Great Emancipator “was pre-eminently the white man’s President, entirely devoted to the welfare of white men.” 10 I only point this out because it is usually the critics of the 1619 Project who like to present Douglass as the avatar of faith in constitutional liberty and racial equality. Here, in 1876, he sounds a good bit more like Hannah-Jones—or vice versa.

A third “error” asserted in the letter is Hannah-Jones’s blanket statement that “for the most part” (an important qualifier) black Americans have fought their freedom struggles “alone,” which the historians charge is “distorted.” But let’s face it—one can argue with this view, or else propose that such struggles may have succeeded only when they were interracial, but Hannah-Jones does have a point. It is hard to deny that interracial struggles for racial justice and full equality have been the exception in the American past far more than the rule. Should Silverstein or Hannah-Jones issue a correction along the lines of “white Americans have often joined forces with blacks to advance struggles against racism”? In some very general sense, that is true; but many historians (including me) would regard such a view itself as a serious distortion of the past. One might also quote her following sentence: “Yet we never fought only for ourselves.” I take that as an inspirational way of acknowledging the indispensable African American contribution to liberty, rather than “a displacement of historical understanding by ideology,” as the letter writers charge.

Three examples of disputable errors, or perhaps overstatements, in a single essay. Even if bolstered by what the letter refers to as “verifiable fact,” that’s not much on which to rest a dismissal of the entire project. The signatories to the letter seem especially perturbed at the massive effort to inject “an authoritative account that bears the imprimatur and credibility of The New York Times ” into America’s K-12 classrooms, fearing that this may lead to a deformation of U.S. history. But even a cursory glance at the curricular materials provided by the project suggests otherwise. The lesson plans accompanying Hannah-Jones’s essay, for example, emphasize the role played by the black freedom struggle in advancing democracy and liberty in America. The focus is less on the role of blacks as perpetual victims of persistent white racism than on the fact that all Americans are beneficiaries of their ceaseless fight for racial justice. To the degree that the curriculum might perpetuate the primary error identified by the historians—the misconstrual of the American Revolution as a pro-slavery insurrection—it rests on this question: “What evidence can you see for how ‘some might argue that this nation was founded not as a democracy but as a slavocracy’?” 11 A reasonable prompt, and only one among many in the curriculum accompanying the project.

None of this is to defend unconditionally what appears in the 1619 Project. Historians would be justified to complain that the Times presents as a radical reorientation an interpretation that differs little from a long-term, if still incomplete, trend to move African American history to the center of the American narrative. I share my colleagues’ frustration that journalists occasionally draw on years of our unacknowledged research to publish under the banner of “Extra, extra, never been told before!” Reasonable interpretive disagreements can stem from the bad habit some journalists have of substituting dramatic overstatement for historical analysis, and there is no shame in pointing these out. The treatment of American slavery in isolation from the presence of the so-called “peculiar institution” in the larger Atlantic World is out of step with current historiography. The project’s emphasis on continuity (especially in economic history), rather than change, deserves to be challenged. And, as the Trotskyists point out, Marxists may find the substitution of “race” for class relations disconcerting. But singling out errors in one essay does not suffice to dismiss the project in its entirety. So far, the critiques by historians have paid little or no attention to the section based on the NMAAHC material. I have yet to see mention of Khalil Muhammad’s essay on sugar, Tiya Miles’s reflections on the entangled histories of Wall Street and enslavement, or Kevin Kruse’s account of the racist origins of urban sprawl. Essays on music, public health, mass incarceration, and more seem to go unmentioned either by the Trotskyists or in the historians’ letter. To my knowledge, no specific, detailed analysis of the proposed K-12 curriculum accompanying the 1619 Project has yet been offered by teachers or scholars of history-teaching. I find these lacunae puzzling and ultimately inadequate to the vigor of the objections.

Let me return to the monument on the hill in Brooklyn. As a visitor gazes down on the towers of Wall Street, the Statue of Liberty, and New York’s upper harbor, contemplating the glorious history of the struggle for freedom that still frames the public national narrative for most Americans, she would be forgiven for thinking that African Americans were not a part of the story. Even a memorial commemorating the single moment in U.S. history most undeniably entangled with slavery and race neglects the place of African Americans in that narrative. To find that, a visitor to Green-Wood would have to trudge back down the hill to the neglected “Colored Lots,” which are confined to the southwest corner of the cemetery. 12 I fear this remains closer to the rule than the exception in the national memorial culture. That deserves to change, and it would be a shame if historians stood in the way of such a transformation.

                        A.C.L.

1 Jake Silverstein, “1619,” New York Times Magazine , August 18, 2019, 4–5.

2 Eric Foner, The Second Founding: How the Civil War and Reconstruction Remade the Constitution (New York, 2019).

3 Thanks to Associate Editor Michelle Moyd for this trenchant observation.

4 Niles Niemuth, Tom Mackaman, and David North, “The New York Times ’s 1619 Project: A Racialist Falsification of American and World History,” World Socialist Web Site, September 6, 2019, https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2019/09/06/1619-s06.html .

5 Winthrop D. Jordan, White over Black: American Attitudes toward the Negro, 1550–1812 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1968); Edmund S. Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia (New York, 1975).

6 All of the interviews, along with other material on the dispute, can be found at https://www.wsws.org/en/topics/historySubCategory/h-uslab/ .

7 Most powerfully in Barbara Jeanne Fields, “Slavery, Race and Ideology in the United States of America,” New Left Review 181 (May–June 1990): 95–118.

8 Niemuth, Mackaman, and North, “The New York Times ’s 1619 Project.”

9 The letter can be found at https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/20/magazine/we-respond-to-the-historians-who-critiqued-the-1619-project.html .

10 The digitized full text of Douglass’s well-known “Oration by Frederick Douglass, delivered on the occasion of the unveiling of the Freedmen’s Monument in memory of Abraham Lincoln, in Lincoln Park, Washington, D.C., April 14th, 1876,” can be found in the Daniel Murray Pamphlet Collection, Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/resource/lcrbmrp.t0c12/?st=gallery .

11 “Lesson Plan: Exploring ‘The Idea of America’ by Nikole Hannah-Jones,” Pulitzer Center, August 13, 2019, https://pulitzercenter.org/builder/lesson/lesson-plan-exploring-idea-america-nikole-hannah-jones-26503 .

12 Natalie Meade, “Unearthing Black History at Green-Wood Cemetery,” New Yorker , March 6, 2019, https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/unearthing-black-history-at-green-wood-cemetery .

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The 1619 Project and the Battle over Black American History

“The United States is a nation founded on both an ideal and a lie. Our Declaration of Independence, signed on July 4, 1776, proclaims that ‘all men are created equal’ and ‘endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights’. But the white men who drafted those words did not believe them to be true for the hundreds of thousands of black people in their midst. ‘Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness’ did not apply to fully one-fifth of the country. Yet despite being violently denied the freedom and justice promised to all, black Americans believed fervently in the American creed. Through centuries of black resistance and protest, we have helped the country live up to its founding ideals.”  Nikole Hannah Jones, creator of the 1619 Project

“Critical race theory, the 1619 Project and the crusade against American history is toxic propaganda, ideological poison that, if not removed, will dissolve the civic bonds that tie us together. “  Donald Trump

“The #1619Project is a powerful and necessary reckoning of our history. We cannot understand and address the problems of today without speaking truth about how we got here.” Kamala Harris

In August 2019, the New York Times Magazine published The 1619 Project issue to commemorate the 400th anniversary of the arrival of the first enslaved Africans to the British colonies in North America. 

The 1619 Project, created and organized by Professor Nikole Hannah-Jones, asserts that if we want to understand American history, we must begin with slavery and its consequences because slavery is at the center of our history, not on the margins. Ms. Hannah-Jones won a Pulitzer Prize for her opening essay . The project includes other essays, as well as photographs, poems, and podcasts on a wide range of topics, including: 

• Undemocratic Democracy by Jamelle Bouie
• Capitalism by Matthew Desmond
• Traffic by Kevin M. Kruse
• Municipal Bonds by Tiya Miles
• A Broken Health Care System by Jeneen Interlandi
• The Wealth Gap by Trymaine Lee
• Sugar by Khalil Gibran Muhammad
• Mass Incarceration by Bryan Stevenson
• American Popular Music by Wesley Morris
• Why Can’t We Teach This? by Nikita Stewart

Since its publication, The 1619 Project has been widely read and discussed; reactions to it have included high praise, sharp criticism, and passionate debates, especially about how to best teach American history. Coming up on three years after its publication, The 1619 Project continues to play a major role in reshaping public conversations about the consequences of slavery and racism in America.  

Many conservatives have pushed back at The 1619 Project, particularly its use in classrooms. Newt Gingrich called it “brainwashing” and “left-wing propaganda masquerading as the truth”.  Senator Tom Cotton proposed the “Saving American History Act of 2020” to ban using federal funds to teach anything related to the 1619 Project because (according to him) it “is a racially divisive and revisionist account of history that threatens the integrity of the Union by denying the true principles on which it was founded.” Not one to be outdone, President Trump established the 1776 Commission, appointing 18 conservative critics to craft an opposing response to the 1619 Project. The 1776 Report has been widely criticized for factual errors and overall lack of academic rigor .

The 1619 Project and its portrayal of Black American History continues to provoke us to think in new, deeper ways. This provocation can be uncomfortable for white Americans, who have been shielded from the realities of Black Americans. But it is critical that Americans of all colors be able to talk openly, honestly, and peacefully, about our painful shared past. 

Listen to the 1619   podcast

Read The 1619 Project

Watch an interview with Nikole Hannah-Jones

Study with Teaching Hard History: A Framework for Teaching American Slavery

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The debate over the 1619 Project

The reframing of U.S. history around slavery and racism continues to draw ferocious opposition

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The reframing of U.S. history around slavery and racism continues to draw ferocious opposition. Here's everything you need to know:

What is the 1619 Project?

It was a New York Times Magazine special issue last year marking the 400th anniversary of American slavery, in which the Times proposed regarding 1619 as "our nation's birth year." In August of that year about 20 slaves from present-day Angola were sold in chains to British colonists in Jamestown, Virginia. The establishment of slavery in the British colonies, the Times argued, was as formative to U.S. history as the signing of the Declaration of Independence in 1776. The new nation was more "slavocracy" than democracy, staff writer Nikole Hannah-Jones wrote in a Pulitzer Prize–winning opening essay, arguing that the founding ideals of equality and liberty were "a lie." Other articles in the 1619 Project traced the influence of slavery on modern-day diets, politics, criminal justice, health care, capitalism — even traffic patterns in Atlanta. The issue spawned podcasts and upcoming Oprah Winfrey–backed films and TV shows, and hundreds of thousands of copies were sent to libraries and schools. It quickly became a new front in the culture war: In June, protesters spray-painted "1619" across a toppled statue of George Washington, while President Trump and Fox News frequently deride the project as an attack on America itself.

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What are the most controversial claims?

The Times argued that progress toward racial equality is stunted because "anti-Black racism runs in the very DNA of this country." Hannah-Jones wrote that an American "racial caste system" was put in place before the nation's founding, and that "one of the primary reasons" colonists declared independence from Britain was "because they wanted to protect the institution of slavery." White men like Thomas Jefferson, who drafted the Declaration with a Black slave waiting on him, were empowered to break from the British Empire because of "dizzying profits generated by chattel slavery," she wrote. Black Americans, she said, have been largely alone in fighting for their freedoms, and their struggle for equality makes them "this nation's true Founding Fathers." These assertions ignited a debate that is still raging a year later.

Why so much controversy?

The 1619 Project argues that the systemic racism that is slavery's legacy remains deeply rooted in every American institution and is still an ever-present factor in the lives of Black Americans. The pessimism in that view has been assailed by critics such as City University of New York historian James Oakes. If racism is in the country's DNA, Oakes asked, "What can you do? Alter your DNA?" Critics particularly focused on Hannah-Jones' claim that colonials rebelled partly out of fear England would outlaw slavery, noting that the abolitionist movement did not gain strength in England until a decade later — and that it was actually inspired by anti-slavery arguments in the U.S. Princeton historian Sean Wilentz demanded several factual corrections, contending that the Framers left the word "slavery" out of the Constitution not to erase the humanity of slaves, as Hannah-Jones argued, but because they didn't want to "validate slavery in national law."

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Who else attacked the Times?

Many historians and scholars were critical of some of its claims, with conservatives rejecting its premise that slavery and racial oppression should be central themes in U.S. history. One highly visible attack came from inside the Times, with conservative columnist Bret Stephens writing last month that the project was "simplistic" and "has failed" to defend its most controversial assertions. Slavery was hardly unique to America, he said, noting that slave traders from Europe and other continents sold human beings, and that the odious practice was found throughout the Western Hemisphere. Though the Founders were flawed, Stephens said, what made this country exceptional was not slavery, but America's revolutionary founding principle that "all men are created equal" and its 250 years of struggling to realize its ideals. The 1619 Project has become a rallying cry on the Right, with President Trump invoking it at the National Archives Museum in September, calling it an example of how "the Left has warped, distorted, and defiled the American story with deceptions, falsehoods, and lies." This summer, Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) proposed a bill to bar federal funds from districts that incorporate the project into their history curriculum, saying it's meant to "indoctrinate our kids to hate America."

Does the Times defend its story?

Yes, although the Times tweaked the text online. The paper issued a "clarification" stating that only "some of" the colonists revolted from Britain in order to protect slavery. Hannah-Jones apologized for saying it was a primary motivation for the revolution, saying, "I'm absolutely tortured by it." The paper also removed a phrase describing 1619 as the date of "our true founding." But the Times by no means disowns its work. Publisher A.G. Sulzberger said the project's deep exploration of the lasting impact of slavery and racism is "a journalistic triumph that changed the way millions of Americans understand our country." Jake Silverstein, editor-in-chief of The New York Times Magazine, says ongoing updates — and the debate the project has inspired — are a virtue, not a failure. "Revision and clarification," he said, "are important parts of historical inquiry."

The 1619 Project in the schools

The Pulitzer Center partnered with the Times to distribute teaching materials based on the 1619 Project, and more than 4,500 classrooms in all 50 states, from kindergarten to college, have crafted lessons using those resources. School systems in Buffalo; Chicago; Washington, D.C.; Wilmington, Delaware; and Winston-Salem, North Carolina incorporated the project more broadly into their history curriculum. In many districts, discussions of the role of slavery and racism in American history were previously very limited. In 2017, the Southern Poverty Law Center surveyed 1,700 social-studies teachers nationwide, and 60 percent of them said their textbooks failed to adequately cover slavery. The SPLC survey showed, for example, that about 92 percent of high school students didn't even know that slavery was the main cause of the Civil War. "American students are typically taught that slavery came and went, that it's a relic of our past," said Mark Schulte, the Pulitzer Center's Education Director. "The 1619 Project shows its pernicious repercussions." Project editor Silverstein said it was never intended "to replace all of U.S. history. It's being used as supplementary material."

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Book Summary and Reviews of The 1619 Project by Nikole Hannah-Jones

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The 1619 Project

A New Origin Story

by Nikole Hannah-Jones

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• Genre: History, Current Affairs and Religion
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Book Summary

A dramatic expansion of a groundbreaking work of journalism, The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story offers a profoundly revealing vision of the American past and present.

In late August 1619, a ship arrived in the British colony of Virginia bearing a cargo of twenty to thirty enslaved people from Africa. Their arrival led to the barbaric and unprecedented system of American chattel slavery that would last for the next 250 years. This is sometimes referred to as the country's original sin, but it is more than that: It is the source of so much that still defines the United States. The New York Times Magazine 's award-winning "1619 Project" issue reframed our understanding of American history by placing slavery and its continuing legacy at the center of our national narrative. This new book substantially expands on that work, weaving together eighteen essays that explore the legacy of slavery in present-day America with thirty-six poems and works of fiction that illuminate key moments of oppression, struggle, and resistance. The essays show how the inheritance of 1619 reaches into every part of contemporary American society, from politics, music, diet, traffic, and citizenship to capitalism, religion, and our democracy itself. This is a book that speaks directly to our current moment, contextualizing the systems of race and caste within which we operate today. It reveals long-glossed-over truths around our nation's founding and construction—and the way that the legacy of slavery did not end with emancipation, but continues to shape contemporary American life. Featuring contributions from: Leslie Alexander • Michelle Alexander • Carol Anderson • Joshua Bennett • Reginald Dwayne Betts • Jamelle Bouie • Anthea Butler • Matthew Desmond • Rita Dove • Camille T. Dungy • Cornelius Eady • Eve L. Ewing • Nikky Finney • Vievee Francis • Yaa Gyasi • Forrest Hamer • Terrance Hayes • Kimberly Annece Henderson • Jeneen Interlandi • Honorée Fanonne Jeffers • Barry Jenkins • Tyehimba Jess • Martha S. Jones • Robert Jones, Jr. • A. Van Jordan • Ibram X. Kendi • Eddie Kendricks • Yusef Komunyakaa • Kevin M. Kruse • Kiese Laymon • Trymaine Lee • Jasmine Mans • Terry McMillan • Tiya Miles • Wesley Morris • Khalil Gibran Muhammad • Lynn Nottage • ZZ Packer • Gregory Pardlo • Darryl Pinckney • Claudia Rankine • Jason Reynolds • Dorothy Roberts • Sonia Sanchez • Tim Seibles • Evie Shockley • Clint Smith • Danez Smith • Patricia Smith • Tracy K. Smith • Bryan Stevenson • Nafissa Thompson-Spires • Natasha Trethewey • Linda Villarosa • Jesmyn Ward.

Please be aware that this discussion guide will contain spoilers!

• What do you think it means to be an American?
• What is the purpose of history? Who gets to decide what and who is remembered from the past? What are the consequences of those decisions? How has what's deemed history and how history is recorded changed during your lifetime? Has it changed for the better or the worse, in your opinion?
• Do you feel the United States can come to a place of truth and reconciliation about the history and legacy of slavery, and if so, how? What's standing in the way?
• What does freedom mean ...

You can see the full discussion here . This discussion will contain spoilers! Some of the recent comments posted about The 1619 Project: “Until Americans replace mythology with history...an arc of the American universe will keep bending toward injustice.” What are your thoughts, comments, or reactions in response to this quote? Totally agree with the quote. Sadly, I don't know what is necessary to change the trajectory other than for each of us to speak up when we see the mythology spoken or written. - BuffaloGirl “We are at one of those critical moments...when we will either double down on romanticizing a false narrative about our violent past or accept that there is something better waiting for us.” Where do you think we are as a country? At this point in our country, I’m not sure whether we are doubling down or moving ahead slowly especially with a presidential election on the horizon. Change is not linear…. It grows forward and back and forward again. - angelaw “What would it mean to reframe our understanding of U.S. history by considering 1619 as our country’s origin point?” How would you answer the author? Would your opinion have been different before reading the book? I don't agree that 1619 was America's origin point. And honestly, I do have a problem with the authors promoting this. America's and the rest of the Western Hemisphere's origin point, in my view, was when the first indigenous ... - BuffaloGirl "If we are a truly great nation, the truth cannot destroy us..[F]acing the truth liberates us to build the society we wish to be." Do you agree? What would that society look like, and what changes would need to be made? ritah hit the nail on the head with the quote from Diderot. Old white men (and those who hang on their coattails) need to quit thinking about theirselves and their fortunes and do what is right for ALL of America. - BuffaloGirl Did the Black Lives Matter movement impact your understanding of racism in the US and if so, in what ways? Have you had conversations with friends or relatives about the movement in recent years? What were those conversations like? I had an extremely racist father which honestly made me look at what racism was, how I as a white child growing up in the 1960s was part of it, and how it impacted non-whites. For me, Black Lives Matter was and is an organized movement as was and ... - BuffaloGirl

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Media Reviews

Reader reviews.

"In this substantial expansion of the New York Times Magazine 's 2019 special issue commemorating the 400th anniversary of the arrival of the first enslaved Africans in America, Pulitzer winner Hannah-Jones and an impressive cast of historians, journalists, poets, novelists, and cultural critics deliver a sweeping study of the 'unparalleled impact' of African slavery on American society... a bracing and vital reconsideration of American history." — Publishers Weekly (starred review) "Those readers open to fresh and startling interpretations of history will find this book a comprehensive education. A much-needed book that stakes a solid place in a battlefield of ideas over America's past and present." — Kirkus Reviews (starred review) "Readers will discover something new and redefining on every page as long-concealed incidents and individuals, causes and effects are brought to light by Hannah-Jones and seventeen other vital thinkers and clarion writers...The revelations are horrific and empowering...This visionary, meticulously produced, profound, and bedrock-shifting testament belongs in every library and on every reading list...[An] invaluable and galvanizing history...revelatory." — Booklist (starred review) "Powerful...This work asks readers to deeply consider who is allowed to shape the collective memory. Like the magazine version of the 1619 Project, this invaluable book sets itself apart by reframing readers' understanding of U.S. history, past and present." — Library Journal (starred review) "[A] groundbreaking compendium...These bracing and urgent works, by multidisciplinary visionaries ranging from Barry Jenkins to Jesmyn Ward, build on the existing scholarship of The 1619 Project , exploring how the nation's original sin continues to shape everything from our music to our food to our democracy. This collection is an extraordinary update to an ongoing project of vital truth-telling." — Esquire , Best Books of Fall 2021

Author Information

Nikole hannah-jones.

Nikole Hannah-Jones is a Pulitzer Prize–winning reporter covering racial injustice for the New York Times Magazine , and creator of the landmark 1619 Project. In 2017, she received a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, known as the Genius Grant, for her work on educational inequality. She has also won a Peabody Award, two George Polk Awards, three National Magazine Awards, and the 2018 John Chancellor Award for Excellence in Journalism from Columbia University. In 2016, Hannah-Jones co-founded the Ida B. Wells Society for Investigative Reporting, a training and mentorship organization geared toward increasing the number of investigative reporters of color. The 1619 Project is an ongoing initiative from the New York Times Magazine that began in August 2019, the four hundredth anniversary of the beginning of American slavery. It is led by Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones, along with New York Times Magazine editor-in-chief Jake Silverstein, Ilena Silverman, and Caitlin Roper.

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Commentary: ‘The 1619 Project’ provides a ‘needed interpretation of America’s history’

Posted By: David Dupont December 26, 2021

By HOLLY MCCALL

Ohio Capital Journal

You’d have to be completely out of the political loop — and I suspect you aren’t, if you are reading this — to not have heard of “The 1619 Project” and the brouhaha surrounding it.

A publication of journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones and The New York Times, “1619” first appeared in an August 2019 issue of the New York Times Magazine. In May 2020, Hannah-Jones was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Commentary for her opening essay.

It was in 1619 that African slaves were first brought to America — the year before the Mayflower arrived — and the dust jacket of the expanded book version of the project refers to it as “a new origin story.” 1619, writes Hannah-Jones, is when the real story of America began, not 1776 when the American Revolution began.

I managed to miss out on reading the original version in the Times and I may not have maintained interest in it were it not for former President Donald Trump.  Trump introduced  many people to the project in September 2020, when he lumped it in with critical race theory, an academic concept many Americans had never heard of before. He called both “a crusade against American history … toxic propaganda, ideological poison that, if not removed, will dissolve the civic bonds that tie us together, will destroy our country.”

I’m one of the people who had never heard of critical race theory before and now that I’m familiar with it, I feel confident telling you that your kids in public school aren’t going to get schooled in it. While “The 1619 Project” has developed a curriculum that can be taught in schools, I also feel confident that wasn’t going to happen in Tennessee schools even before the Tennessee General Assembly passed a law earlier this year banning the instruction of critical race theory.

But I like a challenge and there’s nothing like the president of the United States calling writing “toxic” to make me want to check it out. I bought the book as soon as I could, read it as fast as possible and now I’m here to review it.

There’s been so much sturm and drang over “The 1619 Project” from right wing groups like “Moms For Liberty” and Trump supporters, I was surprised the book didn’t arrive with a big “Trigger warning!” sticker on it. I went into the book with an open mind, frankly expecting to be surprised by historical revelations.

I wasn’t surprised, as much of the book seems to be common sense, but I learned a hell of a lot.

One of the most controversial assertions of Hannah-Jones’ is that slavery was a primary motivation for the American Revolution. Most of us are taught a heroic story of America’s founding, told that a group of upright white men pushed back against the tyranny and unfair taxation of the British Crown.

That’s true, but of course, there is more to the story. The primary writers of the Declaration of Independence, Constitution and Bill of Rights were Virginians who were enslavers. We’ve long known Thomas Jefferson fathered at least six children with an enslaved woman, Sally Hemings, but both George Washington and James Madison also operated plantations with the labor of the enslaved.

Princeton University historian Sean Wilentz was one of a handful of historians  to criticize  Hannah-Jones’ theory, pointing out that not every man who was part of our Founding Fathers was pro-slavery.

That’s also true, but many of us consider our own well-being when taking measures that may be publicly applauded, and more than one thing can be true. We can agree with Hannah-Jones that a number of America’s early leaders may well have been attempting to protect their own interests by breaking off from England while also acknowledging that wasn’t the only factor.

How else to account for the virulent reaction by colonists to the Dunmore Proclamation, the document through Virginia’s royal governor, John Murray, the Earl of Dunmore, who announced if settlers took up arms against Britain, he’d free all the slaves in the state? It’s not far-fetched to accept Hannah-Jones’ theory that leading Virginians didn’t want to lose access to slave labor but also to acknowledge the settlers may have also been fed up with King George III telling them what to do.

I’m barely scraping the surface of the book and much of its contents are inarguable. Ample studies exist to back up the information in Linda Villarosa’s essay on medicine: the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released data showing Black Americans were 1.4 times as likely to die of COVID-19, for instance. And no one will be surprised at claims African-American musicians and performers have had an incalculable influence on American culture.

When the pandemic started, I began taking history courses online through the Harvard Extension School for fun and I’ve been reminded over the last 18 months that interpretations of historical events evolve in much the way science does: As we explore our past, our knowledge grows. “The 1619 Project” adds a different and needed interpretation of America’s history to our national discourse: It’s nothing to be feared or vilified.

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The 1619 Project

Curriculum, reading support and discussion prompts, podcasts and streaming media, doing your own research on the 1619 project and related subjects, multidisciplinary resources, reference librarian/business liaison.

• 1619 project : New York Times magazine [special issue], August 18, 2019 The goal of The 1619 Project is to reframe American history by making explicit how slavery is the foundation on which the United States of America is built, and by considering what it would mean to regard 1619 as the nation's birth year.
• Why we published The 1619 Project Includes a table of contents for The 1619 Project. An introduction by the editor of The New York Times Magazine, Jake Silverstein.

• The 1619 Project Broadside A companion piece to The 1619 Project, featuring objects from the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture.

The 1619 Project: Index of Literary Works

Page 28 ....... Clint Smith on the Middle Passage Page 29 ....... Yusef Komunyakaa on Crispus Attucks Page 42 ....... Eve L. Ewing on Phillis Wheatley Page 43 ....... Reginald Dwayne Betts on the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793 Page 46 ....... Barry Jenkins on Gabriel's Rebellion Page 47 ....... Jesmyn Ward on the Act Prohibiting Importation of Slaves Page 58 ....... Tyehimba Jess on Black Seminoles Page 59 ....... Darryl Pinckney on the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863  Page 59 ....... ZZ Packer on the New Orleans massacre of 1866 Page 68 ....... Yaa Gyasi on the Tuskegee syphilis experiment Page 69 ....... Jacqueline Woodson on Sgt. Isaac Woodard Page 78 ....... Rita Dove and Camille T. Dungy on the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing Page 79 ....... Joshua Bennett on the Black Panther Party Page 84 ....... Lynn Nottage on the birth of hip-hop Page 84 ....... Kiese Laymon on the Rev. Jesse Jackson’s “rainbow coalition” speech Page 85 ....... Clint Smith on the Superdome after Hurricane Katrina

• Reading guide for the 1619 Project essays Includes previews, main topic lists, and discussion questions for each of the 18 essays included in the 1619 Project.
• Reading guide for The 1619 Project creative works Lists discussion or response questions that can be used with the reading of the 17 creative texts (poems and fiction pieces) that explore major events in U.S. history and are included in The 1619 Project.
• The 1619 Project Curriculum Includes lesson plans, reading guides, and other materials for teaching The 1619 Project. Materials range from K-12 education and beyond, and can be adapted for classroom use.

• The 1619 Project Podcast Listening Guide A guide to each episode of the podcast, including questions and discussion prompts.

• If you’re interested in finding only books, or a specific book title, then our library catalog Ignacio might be a more appropriate place to begin.
• If you’re looking specifically for statistical data, or encyclopedia/dictionary entries, or images, it would be better to use databases devoted to those specific types of information.
• If you're looking for a specific Journal title, you should use our Journal Finder.
• I’m very proficient using the subject-specific databases in my field. Is there any reason I should use Fusion?
• Because Fusion will have such broad coverage, it may locate relevant materials published in other fields that you wouldn’t otherwise find in a subject-specific database.

• Anti-Racism Resources by Nicola Andrews Last Updated Mar 15, 2024 227 views this year
• White Privilege Resource Guide by Amy Gilgan Last Updated Aug 30, 2023 1413 views this year
• Last Updated: Jun 11, 2024 5:18 PM
• URL: https://library.usfca.edu/the-1619-project

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Heterodoxy in the Stacks

"Am I Racist?" (Film Essay)

Matt walsh’s devastating exposé of the dei industry offers important insights into current approaches to social justice in librarianship..

[ Warning: contains major spoilers ].

To the uninitiated observer, the profession of librarianship in the 21 st Century might appear to be only tangentially concerned with the acquisition, description, organization, and provision of documents for use by the public. Instead, such an observer could easily be forgiven for concluding that the purpose of librarianship was to locate systems of oppression , to destroy white supremacy , to confront biases , and to commit itself to anti-racism and opposing fascism .

Such, at any rate, might be their conclusion based on a perusal of our professional literature, curricula, professional development training, and conference programs , which have in recent years—like much of higher education and the corporate sector —become thoroughly dominated with the imperatives associated with Diversity, Equity and Inclusion . The mainstream acceptance of DEI ideology in librarianship is such that its lexicon thoroughly permeates our official documents, most recently illustrated with the release of the Ontario Library Association’s “ Commitment Towards Inclusive Librarianship ”, (previously analyzed on this Substack ), a text replete with such concepts as “anti-oppression”, “intersectionality”, and “dismantling systemic oppressive practices”.

However, the drafters of this document could hardly have anticipated that these very words—delivered with such earnest solemnity—would soon be eliciting howls of uproarious (if uneasy) laughter from audiences at multiplexes across the continent attending the new Matt Walsh documentary “ Am I Racist ?” in which the deadpan conservative podcaster brilliantly trolls DEI trainers and the field’s leading luminaries, including none other Robin ( White Fragility ) DiAngelo. On the surface, there is nothing in the film that has anything whatever to do with librarianship, apart from (at a stretch) the fact that it is a stack of anti-racist books purchased at a bookstore that launches Walsh’s journey. Yet, the extent to which DEI ideology has been integrated into almost every aspect of our work means that this film is directly concerned with what has become a major focus of our profession.

Framed as a “personal journey” on the part of Walsh to discover what the present cultural and political obsession with race and racism is all about, the film moves from one cringe-inducing encounter to the next, as Walsh adopts the persona (and appearance) of a woke anti-racist “expert” complete with ill-fitting blazer, “man bun” wig, and proof of DEI certification—the latter purchased online for less than $30.  Going simply by “Matt”, he insinuates himself into a number of anti-racist trainings, ultimately hosting at the climax of the film his own (disastrous) DEI workshop.

Currently scoring an audience rating of 98% on Rotten Tomatoes —despite having garnered in its first ten days not a single review from major media critics—the film earned $4.75 million in its opening weekend , coming in 5 th place in North American box office, right behind the Marvel/Sony hit Deadpool & Wolverine . Produced by the conservative media website The Daily Wire (which hosts Walsh’s podcast) and directed by Justin Folk (who also directed Walsh’s 2022 broadside against gender identity ideology What is a Woman ?), Am I Racist? plays very much like a cross between a Michael Moore film and the 2006 mockumentary film Borat . However, where the latter saw its star Sasha Baron Cohen dupe, hoax and humiliate many of the everyday Americans encountered in the film, Walsh’s targets are the leaders of the DEI industry, while his “people on the street” interviews are often sympathetic and touching, even if his subjects are befuddled by his ridiculous persona.

Much of the online commentary regarding Am I Racist? has been (in my view) undertaken in fairly bad faith by those who haven’t even seen the movie, or refuse to do so, yet still condemn it as “right wing” or racist. This is why it has garnered no mainstream reviews while those YouTubers who have posted reviews have themselves been subject to online accusations of racism . Yes, Matt Walsh is a conservative Christian, but his personal political and religious convictions play no role in the film’s content.

Before proceeding, it’s important to stress that the current headline-making reactions against the excesses of DEI are not only coming from conservatives like Walsh or Republican governors like Ron DeSantis ; in fact, they are also being articulated by DEI practitioners themselves, some of whom are pointing out that the current training practices related to such concepts of “unconscious bias” are based on no reliable metrics and appear to be ineffective on their own terms. As DEI consultant Lily Zheng writes in the Harvard Business Review , the “big, poorly kept secret” in the industry is that

[u]nconscious bias training rarely changes actual behaviors and has little impact on explicit biases. A meta-analysis of hundreds of prejudice-reduction interventions found few that unambiguously achieved their goals. Many popular interventions run the risk of backlash, strong adverse reactions that sustain or even worsen the inequity that practitioners attempt to eliminate. Even “the business case for diversity,” a decades-old rhetorical framing and justification for DEI work, has been found to backfire on marginalized groups’ feelings of belonging and weaken support for diversity programs when organizational performance drops.

She argues that current practices may “purport[] to end inequity but instead sustain[] it at great cost to marginalized populations.” Conor Friedersdorf concurs, arguing in The Atlantic , that there is a level of cynicism at work in the DEI industry:

A more jaded appraisal is that many kinds of DEI spending symbolize not a real commitment to diversity or inclusion, let alone equity, but rather the instinctive talent that college-educated Americans have for directing resources to our class in ways that make us feel good. In that telling, the DEI-consulting industry is social-justice progressivism’s analogue to trickle-down economics: Unrigorous trainings are held, mostly for college graduates with full-time jobs and health insurance, as if by changing us, the marginalized will somehow benefit. But in fact, the poor, or the marginalized, or people of color, or descendants of slaves, would benefit far more from a fraction of the DEI industry’s profits.

These views also align with that of radical LIS scholar Eino Sierpe, who critiques DEI regimes as being little more than “ liberal illusions” disguising the “white supremacy” in the profession.

In other words, it would be a mistake to view Am I Racist? in isolation from many mainstream—event radical—objections to DEI regimes.

There are four main themes in the film: one, that the ideology and precepts taught by DEI literature and educators are incoherent and place their intended audience (i.e., white people) in an endless series of no-win and morally-freighted scenarios in which they can never escape their racism, but must nonetheless continuously “do the work” to confront and “de-center” their whiteness; second, because well-intentioned white people agree they must “do the work” for the rest of their lives, this leaves them vulnerable to those seeking to take economic advantage of their guilt—in other words, the ideology of DEI has led to the creation of a veritable “racism industry” which is little more than a grift; and, third, that many of those in the DEI industry often engage in hypocrisy.

The fourth revelation is far more troubling: that, carried to their logical conclusion, the imperatives of anti-racism are nothing short of dehumanizing, and have the very real potential to drive people to do terrible things to one another.

A scene early on in the film (before Walsh adopts his “Matt” disguise) perfectly illustrates the no-win scenario. In the course of interviewing DEI educator Dr. Katie Slater, the topic of Disney princesses is raised, with Walsh saying (to Slater’s approval) that his 3-year old daughter likes Moana ; but since she also wants to be Moana for Halloween, Walsh asks, would dressing her in South Sea Islander costume be cultural appropriation? Slater replies yes, that she “wouldn’t f***ing do it.” Walsh points out that the choices—that white children can either like and emulate only white Disney princesses, or engage in cultural appropriation—both lead back to racism. That this manufactured moral conundrum is being imposed on small children is only one of the many troubling issues raised by the film.

The second theme—the nature of the grift—is highlighted throughout, with price tags placed on the screen indicating the amounts paid to the DEI educators to have them speak in the film (DiAngelo proposed and was paid $15,000, which, she has announced on social media , was donated to the NAACP legal fund). The film suggests that the financial temptations are such that some people will make extraordinary accusations of racism, such as the black mother who complained that her children were snubbed on camera by a Sesame Place mascot character , and sued the theme park for $25 million despite not even knowing if the actor in the suit was white; or engage in outright hate crime hoaxes, as did actor Jussie Smollett, for which he was convicted, sentenced to 150 days in prison and ordered to pay more than $145,000 in fines and in restitution to the city of Chicago . (One shortcoming of the film is that its re-enactment of the “incident” with “Matt” assuming the Smollett role doesn’t make it entirely clear that it never happened, which might confuse some viewers).

Hypocrisy—or, at the very least, a total lack of self-awareness—was also on display in the awkward “ race to dinner ” scene, in which consultants Regina Jackson and Saira Rao are invited to a high-end dinner party with a table of white women (for which “Matt” acts as a server) in order to berate them for their complicity in white supremacy. At one point (in a scene included in the film’s trailer ) Rao declares that “the entire system has to burn. This country is not worth saving, this country is a piece of s***”—all the while enjoying fine dining and (presumably) expensive wine.   

Where the dark side of DEI is truly exposed is the film’s climax, in which “Matt” takes everything he’s learned and puts on his own public workshop entitled, “Do the Work Workshop” (the event included an absurd website intended to promote the film). What follows is a shocking scenario in which he introduces his own proverbial “racist uncle” Frank—an elderly and apparently helpless man bent over in a wheelchair, whom he proceeds to verbally abuse and yell at for the better part of a minute, excoriating him for having told a racist joke about Mexicans 20 years previously. Not only do his participants do nothing whatever to intervene and defend the unresponsive victim of this tirade, but two of the attendees are actually inspired to follow his lead and spew their own hatred at “Uncle Frank.”

After “Frank” is wheeled out, “Matt” brings out a box of whips and paddles for the participants to literally flagellate themselves. With this, two people storm out, one sputtering “this is ridiculous!” but the remaining class members accept the devices and appear to be contemplating actually using the instruments on themselves. At this point, however,  “Matt” brings the event to an abrupt close, “realizing” he has gone too far.

That supposedly progressive convictions can lead to cruelty towards others was also revealed by James Lindsay, Helen Pluckrose and Peter Boghossian in their famous “grievance affair” hoax academic papers , one of which argued that

privileged students shouldn’t be allowed to speak in class at all and should just listen and learn in silence,” and that they would benefit from “experiential reparations” that include “sitting on the floor, wearing chains, or intentionally being spoken over.” The [peer] reviewers complained that this hoax paper took an overly compassionate stance toward the “privileged” students who would be subjected to this humiliation, and recommended that they be subjected to harsher treatment. 

If anything, the outcome of Walsh’s “social experiment” bears more than a passing resemblance to the notorious Stanley Milgram experiments in the early 1960s, which saw subjects (under the belief they were a confederate of the researcher) continue to press buttons to (supposedly) administer electric shocks to an unseen—and increasingly agitated and desperate—person in the next room, even to the point of believing they were “killing” them, all because the researcher instructed them to do so. Am I Racist? forwards similarly disturbing conclusions about deference to authority, but perhaps with even with greater intensity because it is imbued with a moral and ideological imperative.

What, then, might librarianship learn from Am I Racist ? I see four takeaways:

1.      The abstruse, theoretical language of DEI and Critical Social Justice may not be the best approach to communicating with the public. 

Much of the humor in the film comes from the confused reaction of everyday people to “Matt’s” attempts to engage them using the lexicon of DEI, strongly suggesting that while these ideas comprise the core vocabulary in scholarly LIS journals and within a small bubble of academia, they may have little resonance among the general public. This calls into question the pragmatic and community-relations value of the sorts of documents characterized by the OLA Commitment Towards Inclusive Librarianship : are they in fact intended to connect with stakeholders in the community, or are they actually performative virtue-signalling within the profession and the academy? This question becomes more troubling when we consider that…

2.      The lexicon of Critical Social Justice includes socially toxic connotations which are incompatible with the values of librarianship. 

That so many of the “Do the Work Workshop” participants in the film did nothing to defend a helpless old man or were eager to vent their own vitriol against him before picking up whips to flagellate themselves is a pretty good indication that the concepts associated with DEI may not what they appear to be. Most reasonable people would probably agree that principles of diversity, equity, and inclusion (as generally understood) sound positive and benign—who could possibly object to them? Yet when one examines them more closely according to the lexicon of Critical Social Justice they convey deeper and quite illiberal meanings. As James Lindsay writes at his New Discourses website ,

“Diversity”…tends to mean uniformity of viewpoint about ideological matters … Where equality means that citizen A and citizen B are treated equally, equity means “adjusting shares in order to make citizens A and B equal.” In that sense, equity is something like a kind of “social communism” …[inclusion] means to create a welcoming environment specifically for groups considered marginalized, and this entails the exclusion of anything that could feel unwelcoming to any identity groups …Thus, inclusion is an expansive concept that could apply to silencing certain ideas like conservatism, meritocracy, or support for freedom of speech , usually in the name of safety and preventing the “trauma” or “violence” that such ideas could inflict upon progressives who see them as ideologies that perpetuate systemic harm (emphasis added) . 1

Ideological uniformity, administering equal outcomes rather than creating equal opportunities, and the forbidding or elimination of ideas, speakers, groups, or books to which particular groups may object: these are distinctly illiberal values quite at odds with what we have traditionally held to be the goals of librarianship. The Jefferson Council at the University of Virginia puts it this way: “DEI programs chill free speech and undermine a culture of civil dialogue, the free exchange of competing ideas, and intellectual diversity throughout the University.”

The film also suggests that DEI initiatives not only fail on their own terms but actually exacerbate racism: in one memorable scene, a young man on the street tells “Matt” after listening to him for a few minutes that he’s the most racist person he’s ever met. As Matt Osborne notes at The Distance , “Matt Walsh does not start out racist: he becomes racist by applying his DEI ‘education.’…At the end of the film, Walsh performs the realization that he has made his ‘students’ more hateful.”

For these reasons and more—and as we saw above—DEI training programs are increasingly the subject of controversy, and not because their critics are “bigots”.

3.     There are other ways beside DEI regimes to ensuring that organizations can meet the needs of diverse clientele.

In a genuinely touching moment, Walsh interviews an older black gentleman who immigrated to the U.S. years ago from (if I recall correctly) French Guiana, and who tells Walsh that he never really experienced racism. When Walsh asks him what Americans should do about racism, he replies simply, “love one another.”

This speaks to, I think, our commitment as library workers and administrators to “meet library users where they are,” to respond to diverse needs whether our users are experiencing a disability, are newly-arrived immigrants with minimal English language skills, or are students (of whatever racial or ethnic background) struggling in poorly-funded schools. We are more than prepared and willing to comply with accessibility legislation (such as the Americans with Disabilities Act , or in Canada, disability-related legislation at the Provincial levels), and to design and deliver programming aimed at specific and identified needs in the community. Nobody disputes this. However, where such efforts part ways with the critical ideology of DEI is that they are oriented to meeting the needs of individuals , not essentializing entire groups of people according to immutable characteristics or notions of self-identification. This is the difference between liberal conceptions of social justice, and Critical Social Justice. As such…

4.      Librarians should not be promulgating DEI through our institutions and professional associations as the only acceptable lens through which to view or approach matters of social justice.

We need to understand that 21 st century DEI regimes are not the inheritors of the Civil Rights movements of the 1960s, which sought to extend the promise of the American way of life to African Americans, women, and same-sex attracted people, stressing our shared humanity and universal human rights. In contrast to the tenets of Critical Social Justice, those earlier movements championed liberal social justice premised on Enlightenment values, including individual liberty, evidence-based decision making, free speech, freedom of thought, and equality before the law. Instead, DEI is essentialist regarding social categories and therefore polarizing—one is either an oppressor or among the oppressed—and seeks to “disrupt and dismantle” institutions rather than improving their integrity and resilience (recall Saira Rao’s remark, “the entire system has to burn”). This message is driven home in the film’s final moments when Walsh (in something of a fantasy sequence) stands up in a coffee shop and declares that we should all treat each other as fellow human beings, regardless of race, and refuse to let ideologues divide us—a message that would hardly have been out of place at a 1960s Civil Rights rally.

I sincerely hope that this sentiment may once again soon become common currency in librarianship.

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The New York Times

Magazine | america wasn’t a democracy, until black americans made it one, america wasn’t a democracy, until black americans made it one.

By NIKOLE HANNAH-JONES AUG. 14, 2019

Our founding ideals of liberty and equality were false when they were written. For generations, black Americans have fought to make them true.

Our democracy’s founding ideals were false when they were written. Black Americans have fought to make them true.

By Nikole Hannah-Jones AUG. 14, 2019

My dad always flew an American flag in our front yard. The blue paint on our two-story house was perennially chipping; the fence, or the rail by the stairs, or the front door, existed in a perpetual state of disrepair, but that flag always flew pristine. Our corner lot, which had been redlined by the federal government, was along the river that divided the black side from the white side of our Iowa town. At the edge of our lawn, high on an aluminum pole, soared the flag, which my dad would replace as soon as it showed the slightest tatter.

My dad was born into a family of sharecroppers on a white plantation in Greenwood, Miss., where black people bent over cotton from can’t-see-in-the-morning to can’t-see-at-night, just as their enslaved ancestors had done not long before. The Mississippi of my dad’s youth was an apartheid state that subjugated its near-majority black population through breathtaking acts of violence. White residents in Mississippi lynched more black people than those in any other state in the country, and the white people in my dad’s home county lynched more black residents than those in any other county in Mississippi, often for such “crimes” as entering a room occupied by white women, bumping into a white girl or trying to start a sharecroppers union. My dad’s mother, like all the black people in Greenwood, could not vote, use the public library or find work other than toiling in the cotton fields or toiling in white people’s houses. So in the 1940s, she packed up her few belongings and her three small children and joined the flood of black Southerners fleeing North. She got off the Illinois Central Railroad in Waterloo, Iowa, only to have her hopes of the mythical Promised Land shattered when she learned that Jim Crow did not end at the Mason-Dixon line.

Grandmama, as we called her, found a house in a segregated black neighborhood on the city’s east side and then found the work that was considered black women’s work no matter where black women lived — cleaning white people’s houses. Dad, too, struggled to find promise in this land. In 1962, at age 17, he signed up for the Army. Like many young men, he joined in hopes of escaping poverty. But he went into the military for another reason as well, a reason common to black men: Dad hoped that if he served his country, his country might finally treat him as an American.

The Army did not end up being his way out. He was passed over for opportunities, his ambition stunted. He would be discharged under murky circumstances and then labor in a series of service jobs for the rest of his life. Like all the black men and women in my family, he believed in hard work, but like all the black men and women in my family, no matter how hard he worked, he never got ahead.

So when I was young, that flag outside our home never made sense to me. How could this black man, having seen firsthand the way his country abused black Americans, how it refused to treat us as full citizens, proudly fly its banner? I didn’t understand his patriotism. It deeply embarrassed me.

I had been taught, in school, through cultural osmosis, that the flag wasn’t really ours, that our history as a people began with enslavement and that we had contributed little to this great nation. It seemed that the closest thing black Americans could have to cultural pride was to be found in our vague connection to Africa, a place we had never been. That my dad felt so much honor in being an American felt like a marker of his degradation, his acceptance of our subordination.

Like most young people, I thought I understood so much, when in fact I understood so little. My father knew exactly what he was doing when he raised that flag. He knew that our people’s contributions to building the richest and most powerful nation in the world were indelible, that the United States simply would not exist without us.

In August 1619, just 12 years after the English settled Jamestown, Va., one year before the Puritans landed at Plymouth Rock and some 157 years before the English colonists even decided they wanted to form their own country, the Jamestown colonists bought 20 to 30 enslaved Africans from English pirates. The pirates had stolen them from a Portuguese slave ship that had forcibly taken them from what is now the country of Angola. Those men and women who came ashore on that August day were the beginning of American slavery. They were among the 12.5 million Africans who would be kidnapped from their homes and brought in chains across the Atlantic Ocean in the largest forced migration in human history until the Second World War. Almost two million did not survive the grueling journey, known as the Middle Passage.

Before the abolishment of the international slave trade, 400,000 enslaved Africans would be sold into America. Those individuals and their descendants transformed the lands to which they’d been brought into some of the most successful colonies in the British Empire. Through backbreaking labor, they cleared the land across the Southeast. They taught the colonists to grow rice. They grew and picked the cotton that at the height of slavery was the nation’s most valuable commodity, accounting for half of all American exports and 66 percent of the world’s supply. They built the plantations of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, sprawling properties that today attract thousands of visitors from across the globe captivated by the history of the world’s greatest democracy. They laid the foundations of the White House and the Capitol, even placing with their unfree hands the Statue of Freedom atop the Capitol dome. They lugged the heavy wooden tracks of the railroads that crisscrossed the South and that helped take the cotton they picked to the Northern textile mills, fueling the Industrial Revolution. They built vast fortunes for white people North and South — at one time, the second-richest man in the nation was a Rhode Island “slave trader.” Profits from black people’s stolen labor helped the young nation pay off its war debts and financed some of our most prestigious universities. It was the relentless buying, selling, insuring and financing of their bodies and the products of their labor that made Wall Street a thriving banking, insurance and trading sector and New York City the financial capital of the world.

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.

The United States is a nation founded on both an ideal and a lie. Our Declaration of Independence, approved on July 4, 1776, proclaims that “all men are created equal” and “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights.” But the white men who drafted those words did not believe them to be true for the hundreds of thousands of black people in their midst. “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness” did not apply to fully one-fifth of the country. Yet despite being violently denied the freedom and justice promised to all, black Americans believed fervently in the American creed. Through centuries of black resistance and protest, we have helped the country live up to its founding ideals. And not only for ourselves — black rights struggles paved the way for every other rights struggle, including women’s and gay rights, immigrant and disability rights.

Without the idealistic, strenuous and patriotic efforts of black Americans, our democracy today would most likely look very different — it might not be a democracy at all.

The very first person to die for this country in the American Revolution was a black man who himself was not free. Crispus Attucks was a fugitive from slavery, yet he gave his life for a new nation in which his own people would not enjoy the liberties laid out in the Declaration for another century. In every war this nation has waged since that first one, black Americans have fought — today we are the most likely of all racial groups to serve in the United States military.

My father, one of those many black Americans who answered the call, knew what it would take me years to understand: that the year 1619 is as important to the American story as 1776. That black Americans, as much as those men cast in alabaster in the nation’s capital, are this nation’s true “founding fathers.” And that no people has a greater claim to that flag than us.

In June 1776, Thomas Jefferson sat at his portable writing desk in a rented room in Philadelphia and penned these words: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” For the last 243 years, this fierce assertion of the fundamental and natural rights of humankind to freedom and self-governance has defined our global reputation as a land of liberty. As Jefferson composed his inspiring words, however, a teenage boy who would enjoy none of those rights and liberties waited nearby to serve at his master’s beck and call. His name was Robert Hemings, and he was the half brother of Jefferson’s wife, born to Martha Jefferson’s father and a woman he owned. It was common for white enslavers to keep their half-black children in slavery. Jefferson had chosen Hemings, from among about 130 enslaved people that worked on the forced-labor camp he called Monticello, to accompany him to Philadelphia and ensure his every comfort as he drafted the text making the case for a new democratic republic based on the individual rights of men.

At the time, one-fifth of the population within the 13 colonies struggled under a brutal system of slavery unlike anything that had existed in the world before. Chattel slavery was not conditional but racial. It was heritable and permanent, not temporary, meaning generations of black people were born into it and passed their enslaved status onto their children. Enslaved people were not recognized as human beings but as property that could be mortgaged, traded, bought, sold, used as collateral, given as a gift and disposed of violently. Jefferson’s fellow white colonists knew that black people were human beings, but they created a network of laws and customs, astounding for both their precision and cruelty, that ensured that enslaved people would never be treated as such. As the abolitionist William Goodell wrote in 1853, “If any thing founded on falsehood might be called a science, we might add the system of American slavery to the list of the strict sciences.”

[Listen to a new podcast with Nikole Hannah-Jones that tells the story of slavery and its legacy like you’ve never heard it before. ]

Enslaved people could not legally marry. They were barred from learning to read and restricted from meeting privately in groups. They had no claim to their own children, who could be bought, sold and traded away from them on auction blocks alongside furniture and cattle or behind storefronts that advertised “Negroes for Sale.” Enslavers and the courts did not honor kinship ties to mothers, siblings, cousins. In most courts, they had no legal standing. Enslavers could rape or murder their property without legal consequence. Enslaved people could own nothing, will nothing and inherit nothing. They were legally tortured, including by those working for Jefferson himself. They could be worked to death, and often were, in order to produce the highest profits for the white people who owned them.

Yet in making the argument against Britain’s tyranny, one of the colonists’ favorite rhetorical devices was to claim that they were the slaves — to Britain. For this duplicity, they faced burning criticism both at home and abroad. As Samuel Johnson, an English writer and Tory opposed to American independence, quipped, “How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of Negroes?”

Conveniently left out of our founding mythology is the fact that one of the primary reasons some of the colonists decided to declare their independence from Britain was because they wanted to protect the institution of slavery. By 1776, Britain had grown deeply conflicted over its role in the barbaric institution that had reshaped the Western Hemisphere. In London, there were growing calls to abolish the slave trade. This would have upended the economy of the colonies, in both the North and the South. The wealth and prominence that allowed Jefferson, at just 33, and the other founding fathers to believe they could successfully break off from one of the mightiest empires in the world came from the dizzying profits generated by chattel slavery. In other words, we may never have revolted against Britain if some of the founders had not understood that slavery empowered them to do so; nor if they had not believed that independence was required in order to ensure that slavery would continue. It is not incidental that 10 of this nation’s first 12 presidents were enslavers, and some might argue that this nation was founded not as a democracy but as a slavocracy.

Jefferson and the other founders were keenly aware of this hypocrisy. And so in Jefferson’s original draft of the Declaration of Independence, he tried to argue that it wasn’t the colonists’ fault. Instead, he blamed the king of England for forcing the institution of slavery on the unwilling colonists and called the trafficking in human beings a crime. Yet neither Jefferson nor most of the founders intended to abolish slavery, and in the end, they struck the passage.

There is no mention of slavery in the final Declaration of Independence. Similarly, 11 years later, when it came time to draft the Constitution, the framers carefully constructed a document that preserved and protected slavery without ever using the word. In the texts in which they were making the case for freedom to the world, they did not want to explicitly enshrine their hypocrisy, so they sought to hide it. The Constitution contains 84 clauses. Six deal directly with the enslaved and their enslavement, as the historian David Waldstreicher has written, and five more hold implications for slavery. The Constitution protected the “property” of those who enslaved black people, prohibited the federal government from intervening to end the importation of enslaved Africans for a term of 20 years, allowed Congress to mobilize the militia to put down insurrections by the enslaved and forced states that had outlawed slavery to turn over enslaved people who had run away seeking refuge. Like many others, the writer and abolitionist Samuel Bryan called out the deceit, saying of the Constitution, “The words are dark and ambiguous; such as no plain man of common sense would have used, [and] are evidently chosen to conceal from Europe, that in this enlightened country, the practice of slavery has its advocates among men in the highest stations.”

With independence, the founding fathers could no longer blame slavery on Britain. The sin became this nation’s own, and so, too, the need to cleanse it. The shameful paradox of continuing chattel slavery in a nation founded on individual freedom, scholars today assert, led to a hardening of the racial caste system. This ideology, reinforced not just by laws but by racist science and literature, maintained that black people were subhuman, a belief that allowed white Americans to live with their betrayal. By the early 1800s, according to the legal historians Leland B. Ware, Robert J. Cottrol and Raymond T. Diamond, white Americans, whether they engaged in slavery or not, “had a considerable psychological as well as economic investment in the doctrine of black inferiority.” While liberty was the inalienable right of the people who would be considered white, enslavement and subjugation became the natural station of people who had any discernible drop of “black” blood.

The Supreme Court enshrined this thinking in the law in its 1857 Dred Scott decision, ruling that black people, whether enslaved or free, came from a “slave” race. This made them inferior to white people and, therefore, incompatible with American democracy. Democracy was for citizens, and the “Negro race,” the court ruled, was “a separate class of persons,” which the founders had “not regarded as a portion of the people or citizens of the Government” and had “no rights which a white man was bound to respect.” This belief, that black people were not merely enslaved but were a slave race, became the root of the endemic racism that we still cannot purge from this nation to this day. If black people could not ever be citizens, if they were a caste apart from all other humans, then they did not require the rights bestowed by the Constitution, and the “we” in the “We the People” was not a lie.

On Aug. 14, 1862, a mere five years after the nation’s highest courts declared that no black person could be an American citizen, President Abraham Lincoln called a group of five esteemed free black men to the White House for a meeting. It was one of the few times that black people had ever been invited to the White House as guests. The Civil War had been raging for more than a year, and black abolitionists, who had been increasingly pressuring Lincoln to end slavery, must have felt a sense of great anticipation and pride.

The war was not going well for Lincoln. Britain was contemplating whether to intervene on the Confederacy’s behalf, and Lincoln, unable to draw enough new white volunteers for the war, was forced to reconsider his opposition to allowing black Americans to fight for their own liberation. The president was weighing a proclamation that threatened to emancipate all enslaved people in the states that had seceded from the Union if the states did not end the rebellion. The proclamation would also allow the formerly enslaved to join the Union army and fight against their former “masters.” But Lincoln worried about what the consequences of this radical step would be. Like many white Americans, he opposed slavery as a cruel system at odds with American ideals, but he also opposed black equality. He believed that free black people were a “troublesome presence” incompatible with a democracy intended only for white people. “Free them, and make them politically and socially our equals?” he had said four years earlier. “My own feelings will not admit of this; and if mine would, we well know that those of the great mass of white people will not.”

That August day, as the men arrived at the White House, they were greeted by the towering Lincoln and a man named James Mitchell, who eight days before had been given the title of a newly created position called the commissioner of emigration. This was to be his first assignment. After exchanging a few niceties, Lincoln got right to it. He informed his guests that he had gotten Congress to appropriate funds to ship black people, once freed, to another country.

“Why should they leave this country? This is, perhaps, the first question for proper consideration,” Lincoln told them. “You and we are different races. ... Your race suffer very greatly, many of them, by living among us, while ours suffer from your presence. In a word, we suffer on each side.”

You can imagine the heavy silence in that room, as the weight of what the president said momentarily stole the breath of these five black men. It was 243 years to the month since the first of their ancestors had arrived on these shores, before Lincoln’s family, long before most of the white people insisting that this was not their country. The Union had not entered the war to end slavery but to keep the South from splitting off, yet black men had signed up to fight. Enslaved people were fleeing their forced-labor camps, which we like to call plantations, trying to join the effort, serving as spies, sabotaging confederates, taking up arms for his cause as well as their own. And now Lincoln was blaming them for the war. “Although many men engaged on either side do not care for you one way or the other ... without the institution of slavery and the colored race as a basis, the war could not have an existence,” the president told them. “It is better for us both, therefore, to be separated.”

As Lincoln closed the remarks, Edward Thomas, the delegation’s chairman, informed the president, perhaps curtly, that they would consult on his proposition. “Take your full time,” Lincoln said. “No hurry at all.”

Nearly three years after that White House meeting, Gen. Robert E. Lee surrendered at Appomattox. By summer, the Civil War was over, and four million black Americans were suddenly free. Contrary to Lincoln’s view, most were not inclined to leave, agreeing with the sentiment of a resolution against black colonization put forward at a convention of black leaders in New York some decades before: “This is our home, and this our country. Beneath its sod lie the bones of our fathers. ... Here we were born, and here we will die.”

That the formerly enslaved did not take up Lincoln’s offer to abandon these lands is an astounding testament to their belief in this nation’s founding ideals. As W.E.B. Du Bois wrote, “Few men ever worshiped Freedom with half such unquestioning faith as did the American Negro for two centuries.” Black Americans had long called for universal equality and believed, as the abolitionist Martin Delany said, “that God has made of one blood all the nations that dwell on the face of the earth.” Liberated by war, then, they did not seek vengeance on their oppressors as Lincoln and so many other white Americans feared. They did the opposite. During this nation’s brief period of Reconstruction, from 1865 to 1877, formerly enslaved people zealously engaged with the democratic process. With federal troops tempering widespread white violence, black Southerners started branches of the Equal Rights League — one of the nation’s first human rights organizations — to fight discrimination and organize voters; they headed in droves to the polls, where they placed other formerly enslaved people into seats that their enslavers had once held. The South, for the first time in the history of this country, began to resemble a democracy, with black Americans elected to local, state and federal offices. Some 16 black men served in Congress — including Hiram Revels of Mississippi, who became the first black man elected to the Senate. (Demonstrating just how brief this period would be, Revels, along with Blanche Bruce, would go from being the first black man elected to the last for nearly a hundred years, until Edward Brooke of Massachusetts took office in 1967.) More than 600 black men served in Southern state legislatures and hundreds more in local positions.

These black officials joined with white Republicans, some of whom came down from the North, to write the most egalitarian state constitutions the South had ever seen. They helped pass more equitable tax legislation and laws that prohibited discrimination in public transportation, accommodation and housing. Perhaps their biggest achievement was the establishment of that most democratic of American institutions: the public school. Public education effectively did not exist in the South before Reconstruction. The white elite sent their children to private schools, while poor white children went without an education. But newly freed black people, who had been prohibited from learning to read and write during slavery, were desperate for an education. So black legislators successfully pushed for a universal, state-funded system of schools — not just for their own children but for white children, too. Black legislators also helped pass the first compulsory education laws in the region. Southern children, black and white, were now required to attend schools like their Northern counterparts. Just five years into Reconstruction, every Southern state had enshrined the right to a public education for all children into its constitution. In some states, like Louisiana and South Carolina, small numbers of black and white children, briefly, attended schools together.

Led by black activists and a Republican Party pushed left by the blatant recalcitrance of white Southerners, the years directly after slavery saw the greatest expansion of human and civil rights this nation would ever see. In 1865, Congress passed the 13th Amendment, making the United States one of the last nations in the Americas to outlaw slavery. The following year, black Americans, exerting their new political power, pushed white legislators to pass the Civil Rights Act, the nation’s first such law and one of the most expansive pieces of civil rights legislation Congress has ever passed. It codified black American citizenship for the first time, prohibited housing discrimination and gave all Americans the right to buy and inherit property, make and enforce contracts and seek redress from courts. In 1868, Congress ratified the 14th Amendment, ensuring citizenship to any person born in the United States. Today, thanks to this amendment, every child born here to a European, Asian, African, Latin American or Middle Eastern immigrant gains automatic citizenship. The 14th Amendment also, for the first time, constitutionally guaranteed equal protection under the law. Ever since, nearly all other marginalized groups have used the 14th Amendment in their fights for equality (including the recent successful arguments before the Supreme Court on behalf of same-sex marriage). Finally, in 1870, Congress passed the 15th Amendment, guaranteeing the most critical aspect of democracy and citizenship — the right to vote — to all men regardless of “race, color, or previous condition of servitude.”

For this fleeting moment known as Reconstruction, the majority in Congress seemed to embrace the idea that out of the ashes of the Civil War, we could create the multiracial democracy that black Americans envisioned even if our founding fathers did not.

But it would not last.

Anti-black racism runs in the very DNA of this country, as does the belief, so well articulated by Lincoln, that black people are the obstacle to national unity. The many gains of Reconstruction were met with fierce white resistance throughout the South , including unthinkable violence against the formerly enslaved, wide-scale voter suppression, electoral fraud and even, in some extreme cases, the overthrow of democratically elected biracial governments. Faced with this unrest, the federal government decided that black people were the cause of the problem and that for unity’s sake, it would leave the white South to its own devices. In 1877, President Rutherford B. Hayes, in order to secure a compromise with Southern Democrats that would grant him the presidency in a contested election, agreed to pull federal troops from the South. With the troops gone, white Southerners quickly went about eradicating the gains of Reconstruction. The systemic white suppression of black life was so severe that this period between the 1880s and the 1920 and ’30s became known as the Great Nadir, or the second slavery. Democracy would not return to the South for nearly a century.

White Southerners of all economic classes, on the other hand, thanks in significant part to the progressive policies and laws black people had championed, experienced substantial improvement in their lives even as they forced black people back into a quasi slavery. As Waters McIntosh, who had been enslaved in South Carolina, lamented, “It was the poor white man who was freed by the war, not the Negroes.”

Georgia pines flew past the windows of the Greyhound bus carrying Isaac Woodard home to Winnsboro, S.C. After serving four years in the Army in World War II, where Woodard had earned a battle star, he was given an honorable discharge earlier that day at Camp Gordon and was headed home to meet his wife. When the bus stopped at a small drugstore an hour outside Atlanta, Woodard got into a brief argument with the white driver after asking if he could use the restroom. About half an hour later, the driver stopped again and told Woodard to get off the bus. Crisp in his uniform, Woodard stepped from the stairs and saw the police waiting for him. Before he could speak, one of the officers struck him in his head with a billy club, beating him so badly that he fell unconscious. The blows to Woodard’s head were so severe that when he woke in a jail cell the next day, he could not see. The beating occurred just 4½ hours after his military discharge. At 26, Woodard would never see again.

There was nothing unusual about Woodard’s horrific maiming. It was part of a wave of systemic violence deployed against black Americans after Reconstruction, in both the North and the South. As the egalitarian spirit of post-Civil War America evaporated under the desire for national reunification, black Americans, simply by existing, served as a problematic reminder of this nation’s failings. White America dealt with this inconvenience by constructing a savagely enforced system of racial apartheid that excluded black people almost entirely from mainstream American life — a system so grotesque that Nazi Germany would later take inspiration from it for its own racist policies.

Despite the guarantees of equality in the 14th Amendment, the Supreme Court’s landmark Plessy v. Ferguson decision in 1896 declared that the racial segregation of black Americans was constitutional. With the blessing of the nation’s highest court and no federal will to vindicate black rights, starting in the late 1800s, Southern states passed a series of laws and codes meant to make slavery’s racial caste system permanent by denying black people political power, social equality and basic dignity. They passed literacy tests to keep black people from voting and created all-white primaries for elections. Black people were prohibited from serving on juries or testifying in court against a white person. South Carolina prohibited white and black textile workers from using the same doors. Oklahoma forced phone companies to segregate phone booths. Memphis had separate parking spaces for black and white drivers. Baltimore passed an ordinance outlawing black people from moving onto a block more than half white and white people from moving onto a block more than half black. Georgia made it illegal for black and white people to be buried next to one another in the same cemetery. Alabama barred black people from using public libraries that their own tax dollars were paying for. Black people were expected to jump off the sidewalk to let white people pass and call all white people by an honorific, though they received none no matter how old they were. In the North, white politicians implemented policies that segregated black people into slum neighborhoods and into inferior all-black schools, operated whites-only public pools and held white and “colored” days at the country fair, and white businesses regularly denied black people service, placing “Whites Only” signs in their windows. States like California joined Southern states in barring black people from marrying white people, while local school boards in Illinois and New Jersey mandated segregated schools for black and white children.

This caste system was maintained through wanton racial terrorism. And black veterans like Woodard, especially those with the audacity to wear their uniform, had since the Civil War been the target of a particular violence. This intensified during the two world wars because white people understood that once black men had gone abroad and experienced life outside the suffocating racial oppression of America, they were unlikely to quietly return to their subjugation at home. As Senator James K. Vardaman of Mississippi said on the Senate floor during World War I, black servicemen returning to the South would “inevitably lead to disaster.” Giving a black man “military airs” and sending him to defend the flag would bring him “to the conclusion that his political rights must be respected.”

Many white Americans saw black men in the uniforms of America’s armed services not as patriotic but as exhibiting a dangerous pride. Hundreds of black veterans were beaten, maimed, shot and lynched. We like to call those who lived during World War II the Greatest Generation, but that allows us to ignore the fact that many of this generation fought for democracy abroad while brutally suppressing democracy for millions of American citizens. During the height of racial terror in this country, black Americans were not merely killed but castrated, burned alive and dismembered with their body parts displayed in storefronts. This violence was meant to terrify and control black people, but perhaps just as important, it served as a psychological balm for white supremacy: You would not treat human beings this way. The extremity of the violence was a symptom of the psychological mechanism necessary to absolve white Americans of their country’s original sin. To answer the question of how they could prize liberty abroad while simultaneously denying liberty to an entire race back home, white Americans resorted to the same racist ideology that Jefferson and the framers had used at the nation’s founding.

This ideology — that black people belonged to an inferior, subhuman race — did not simply disappear once slavery ended. If the formerly enslaved and their descendants became educated, if we thrived in the jobs white people did, if we excelled in the sciences and arts, then the entire justification for how this nation allowed slavery would collapse. Free black people posed a danger to the country’s idea of itself as exceptional; we held up the mirror in which the nation preferred not to peer. And so the inhumanity visited on black people by every generation of white America justified the inhumanity of the past.

Just as white Americans feared, World War II ignited what became black Americans’ second sustained effort to make democracy real. As the editorial board of the black newspaper The Pittsburgh Courier wrote, “We wage a two-pronged attack against our enslavers at home and those abroad who will enslave us.” Woodard’s blinding is largely seen as one of the catalysts for the decades-long rebellion we have come to call the civil rights movement. But it is useful to pause and remember that this was the second mass movement for black civil rights, the first being Reconstruction. As the centennial of slavery’s end neared, black people were still seeking the rights they had fought for and won after the Civil War: the right to be treated equally by public institutions, which was guaranteed in 1866 with the Civil Rights Act; the right to be treated as full citizens before the law, which was guaranteed in 1868 by the 14th Amendment; and the right to vote, which was guaranteed in 1870 by the 15th Amendment. In response to black demands for these rights, white Americans strung them from trees, beat them and dumped their bodies in muddy rivers, assassinated them in their front yards, firebombed them on buses, mauled them with dogs, peeled back their skin with fire hoses and murdered their children with explosives set off inside a church.

For the most part, black Americans fought back alone. Yet we never fought only for ourselves. The bloody freedom struggles of the civil rights movement laid the foundation for every other modern rights struggle. This nation’s white founders set up a decidedly undemocratic Constitution that excluded women, Native Americans and black people, and did not provide the vote or equality for most Americans. But the laws born out of black resistance guarantee the franchise for all and ban discrimination based not just on race but on gender, nationality, religion and ability. It was the civil rights movement that led to the passage of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, which upended the racist immigration quota system intended to keep this country white. Because of black Americans, black and brown immigrants from across the globe are able to come to the United States and live in a country in which legal discrimination is no longer allowed. It is a truly American irony that some Asian-Americans, among the groups able to immigrate to the United States because of the black civil rights struggle, are now suing universities to end programs designed to help the descendants of the enslaved.

No one cherishes freedom more than those who have not had it. And to this day, black Americans, more than any other group, embrace the democratic ideals of a common good. We are the most likely to support programs like universal health care and a higher minimum wage, and to oppose programs that harm the most vulnerable. For instance, black Americans suffer the most from violent crime, yet we are the most opposed to capital punishment. Our unemployment rate is nearly twice that of white Americans, yet we are still the most likely of all groups to say this nation should take in refugees.

The truth is that as much democracy as this nation has today, it has been borne on the backs of black resistance. Our founding fathers may not have actually believed in the ideals they espoused, but black people did. As one scholar, Joe R. Feagin, put it, “Enslaved African-Americans have been among the foremost freedom-fighters this country has produced.” For generations, we have believed in this country with a faith it did not deserve. Black people have seen the worst of America, yet, somehow, we still believe in its best.

They say our people were born on the water.

When it occurred, no one can say for certain. Perhaps it was in the second week, or the third, but surely by the fourth, when they had not seen their land or any land for so many days that they lost count. It was after fear had turned to despair, and despair to resignation, and resignation to an abiding understanding. The teal eternity of the Atlantic Ocean had severed them so completely from what had once been their home that it was as if nothing had ever existed before, as if everything and everyone they cherished had simply vanished from the earth. They were no longer Mbundu or Akan or Fulani. These men and women from many different nations, all shackled together in the suffocating hull of the ship, they were one people now.

Just a few months earlier, they had families, and farms, and lives and dreams. They were free. They had names, of course, but their enslavers did not bother to record them. They had been made black by those people who believed that they were white, and where they were heading, black equaled “slave,” and slavery in America required turning human beings into property by stripping them of every element that made them individuals. This process was called seasoning, in which people stolen from western and central Africa were forced, often through torture, to stop speaking their native tongues and practicing their native religions.

But as the sociologist Glenn Bracey wrote, “Out of the ashes of white denigration, we gave birth to ourselves.” For as much as white people tried to pretend, black people were not chattel. And so the process of seasoning, instead of erasing identity, served an opposite purpose: In the void, we forged a new culture all our own.

Today, our very manner of speaking recalls the Creole languages that enslaved people innovated in order to communicate both with Africans speaking various dialects and the English-speaking people who enslaved them. Our style of dress, the extra flair, stems back to the desires of enslaved people — shorn of all individuality — to exert their own identity. Enslaved people would wear their hat in a jaunty manner or knot their head scarves intricately. Today’s avant-garde nature of black hairstyles and fashion displays a vibrant reflection of enslaved people’s determination to feel fully human through self-expression. The improvisational quality of black art and music comes from a culture that because of constant disruption could not cling to convention. Black naming practices, so often impugned by mainstream society, are themselves an act of resistance. Our last names belong to the white people who once owned us. That is why the insistence of many black Americans, particularly those most marginalized, to give our children names that we create, that are neither European nor from Africa, a place we have never been, is an act of self-determination. When the world listens to quintessential American music, it is our voice they hear. The sorrow songs we sang in the fields to soothe our physical pain and find hope in a freedom we did not expect to know until we died became American gospel. Amid the devastating violence and poverty of the Mississippi Delta, we birthed jazz and blues. And it was in the deeply impoverished and segregated neighborhoods where white Americans forced the descendants of the enslaved to live that teenagers too poor to buy instruments used old records to create a new music known as hip-hop.

Our speech and fashion and the drum of our music echoes Africa but is not African. Out of our unique isolation, both from our native cultures and from white America, we forged this nation’s most significant original culture. In turn, “mainstream” society has coveted our style, our slang and our song, seeking to appropriate the one truly American culture as its own. As Langston Hughes wrote in 1926, “They’ll see how beautiful I am/And be ashamed —/I, too, am America.”

For centuries, white Americans have been trying to solve the “Negro problem.” They have dedicated thousands of pages to this endeavor. It is common, still, to point to rates of black poverty, out-of-wedlock births, crime and college attendance, as if these conditions in a country built on a racial caste system are not utterly predictable. But crucially, you cannot view those statistics while ignoring another: that black people were enslaved here longer than we have been free.

At 43, I am part of the first generation of black Americans in the history of the United States to be born into a society in which black people had full rights of citizenship. Black people suffered under slavery for 250 years; we have been legally “free” for just 50. Yet in that briefest of spans, despite continuing to face rampant discrimination, and despite there never having been a genuine effort to redress the wrongs of slavery and the century of racial apartheid that followed, black Americans have made astounding progress, not only for ourselves but also for all Americans.

What if America understood, finally, in this 400th year, that we have never been the problem but the solution?

When I was a child — I must have been in fifth or sixth grade — a teacher gave our class an assignment intended to celebrate the diversity of the great American melting pot. She instructed each of us to write a short report on our ancestral land and then draw that nation’s flag. As she turned to write the assignment on the board, the other black girl in class locked eyes with me. Slavery had erased any connection we had to an African country, and even if we tried to claim the whole continent, there was no “African” flag. It was hard enough being one of two black kids in the class, and this assignment would just be another reminder of the distance between the white kids and us. In the end, I walked over to the globe near my teacher’s desk, picked a random African country and claimed it as my own.

I wish, now, that I could go back to the younger me and tell her that her people’s ancestry started here, on these lands, and to boldly, proudly, draw the stars and those stripes of the American flag.

We were told once, by virtue of our bondage, that we could never be American. But it was by virtue of our bondage that we became the most American of all.

Correction August 15, 2019

An earlier version of this article referred incorrectly to the signing of the Declaration of Independence. It was approved on July 4, 1776, not signed by Congress on that date. The article also misspelled the surname of a Revolutionary War-era writer. He was Samuel Bryan, not Byron.

Editors’ Note March 11, 2020

A passage has been adjusted to make clear that a desire to protect slavery was among the motivations of some of the colonists who fought the Revolutionary War, not among the motivations of all of them. Read more .

Nikole Hannah-Jones is a staff writer for the magazine. A 2017 MacArthur fellow, she has won a National Magazine Award, a Peabody Award and a George Polk Award. Adam Pendleton is an artist known for conceptually rigorous and formally inventive paintings, collages, videos and installations that address history and contemporary culture.

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