The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story

by Nikole Hannah-Jones

African people had lived here, on the land that in 1776 would form the United States, since the White Lion dropped anchor in the year 1619. They’d arrived one year before the iconic ship carrying the English people who got the credit for building it all.

A 2018 report by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) called Teaching Hard History found that in 2017 just 8 percent of U.S. high school seniors named slavery as the central cause of the Civil War, and less than one-third knew that it had taken a constitutional amendment to abolish it.

two-thirds of Americans believe that the legacy of slavery still affects our society today. They can see and feel the truth of this fact—they just haven’t learned a history that helps them understand how and why.

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

It was precisely because white colonists so well understood the degradations of actual slavery that the metaphor of slavery held so much power to consolidate their disparate interests: no matter a colonist’s politics, background, or class, by being white, he could never fall as low as the Black people who were held in bondage.

That next month, Dunmore issued a proclamation offering freedom to any enslaved person belonging to a Patriot if he fled his enslaver and joined Dunmore’s “Ethiopian Regiment

The specter of their most valuable property absconding to take up arms against them “did more than any other British measure to spur uncommitted white Americans into the camp of rebellion,” wrote the historian Gerald Horne in The Counter-Revolution of 1776

And yet none of this is part of our founding mythology, which conveniently omits 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.

Virginia and the rest of the American South constituted one of just five “great slave societies” in the history of the world, according to the historian David W. Blight.40 This meant that the colony did not simply engage in slavery as many nations had for centuries before; it created a culture where, as Blight puts it, “slavery affected everything about society,” its social relationships, laws, customs, and politics.

Whiteness proved a powerful unifying elixir for the burgeoning nation. Whether laborer or elite planter, “neither was a slave. And both were equal in not being slaves.”43 And so it served the interests of both groups to defend slavery.

1857 Dred Scott decision, declaring that Black people, whether enslaved or free, came from a “slave” race. This made them permanently inferior to white people and, therefore, incompatible with American democracy. Democracy existed for citizens, and the “Negro race,” the court ruled, was “a separate class of persons,” one the founders had “not regarded as a portion of the people or citizens of the Government” and who had “no rights which the white man was bound to respect.”56 This belief, that Black people were not merely enslaved but a slave race, is the root of the endemic racism we 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,

The many gains of Reconstruction were met with widespread and coordinated white resistance, including unthinkable violence against the formerly enslaved, wide-scale voter suppression, electoral fraud, and even, in extreme cases, the violent overthrow of democratically elected biracial governments. Faced with this violent recalcitrance, the federal government once again settled on Black people as the problem and decided that for unity’s sake, it would leave the white South to its own devices.

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 quasi-slavery.

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 overseas while brutally suppressing democracy for millions of American citizens.

Now that a white elite no longer profited from the children Black women bore, they painted Black women’s procreation as stealing money from white taxpayers.

her? A study by the Georgetown Law Center on Poverty and Inequality showed that adults tend to view Black girls between ages five and fourteen as less innocent and more adult-like than their white peers and treat them as if they are grown-ups. This phenomenon is so common that the term “adultification” is used to describe it.

Black women were crucial to the racial-classification system established by white colonists to maintain and manage slavery. The colonial legal apparatus treated them as innately unrapeable and their children as innately enslaveable, while the culture justified that barbarity by slandering them as lascivious Jezebels.

In a 2015 study of healthful food availability in Topeka, Kansas, researchers at Kansas State University found that even low-income white neighborhoods were twice as likely to have a food store as Black ones. “Food deserts and food insecurity,” they concluded, “are perhaps the most important deleterious consequence of residential segregation in the United States.”

Of the more than 7,750 demonstrations that took place in the United States between May 26 and August 22, nearly 95 percent were nonviolent, according to the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project. Fewer than 220 locations reported any form of “violent demonstrations”; in the tally, that term was defined to include any acts of vandalism (including graffiti and toppling of statues), property destruction, or violence of any kind against individuals.

As James Baldwin explained a half century earlier, when “any white man in the world says, ‘Give me liberty or give me death,’ the entire white world applauds. When a Black man says exactly the same thing—word for word—he is judged a criminal and treated like one, and everything possible is done to make an example of this bad [n——] so there won’t be any more like him.”

Everywhere the pattern was the same: white people enslaved, raped, terrorized, and murdered Black people, mostly for profit and also to enforce a rigid racial hierarchy in which they maintained both status and power. Black people resisted and rebelled, often violently. White fear of Black rebellions soared after each rumored or attempted revolt, leading to heightened surveillance, brutal patrolling, and new waves of laws or policies that aimed to permanently subdue the enslaved population.

But when Black rebellions swept our nation, they were cast as deviant, criminal, and irrational. Hinton observes, “It was only when white people no longer appeared to be the driving force behind rioting in the nation’s cities, and when Black collective violence against exploitative and repressive institutions surfaced, that ‘riots’ came to be seen as purely criminal, and completely senseless, acts.”

The impulse to resist efforts by Black people to gain freedom and equality and to respond with punishment or violence, no matter whether demands are made through peaceful protest, lobbying, or outright rebellion, has been the defining feature of Black-white race relations since the first slave ships arrived on American shores.

As the historian Alan Gallay has documented, at least thirty to fifty thousand Indigenous Southerners were enslaved by Anglo colonists before the year 1715.

In the colonial period, Charles Towne (now Charleston, South Carolina) was a major site for the sale of both African and Native people, as was New Amsterdam (New York City). These captives stood on the same auction blocks, traversed the Atlantic on the same ships, and finally ended up in the same Northern households or Southern or Caribbean plantations, where they lived, labored, suffered, and surely dreamed together.19 These shared circumstances of enslavement led to the merger of families, cultures, and fates.

although it is the case that enslavers in Native nations were always a small minority of their populations (approximately 2.3 percent by the 1860s, in comparison with approximately 20 percent in the white South), they were also elite members of their rapidly changing societies.

Members of the Descendants of Freedmen of the Five Civilized Tribes Association were party to a decisive legal suit that ended in a 2017 federal court ruling requiring the Cherokee Nation to extend civil rights to descendants of formerly enslaved people after decades of resistance on the part of the tribe.

A 2011 study of twenty-three long-standing democracies identified the United States as the only country in the group that had four “veto points” empowered to block legislative action: the president, both houses of Congress, and the Supreme Court. Most other democracies in the study had just a single veto point.

America’s present-day tax system, however, is regressive and insipid in part because it was born out of political compromise steered by debates over slavery. This generates inequality and enables large corporations to avoid paying their fair share—or any share. In 2018, sixty Fortune 500 companies, including Amazon, Chevron, Delta Air Lines, and Netflix, paid no federal income taxes.

a defining characteristic of American capitalism ever since. It is the culture of acquiring wealth without work, growing at all costs, and abusing the powerless.

The United States remains the sole advanced democracy missing a Labor Party, one dedicated, at least in original conception, to representing the interests of the working classes.

Given the choice between parity with Black people—by inviting them into unified unions—and poverty, white workers chose poverty, spoiling the development of a multiracial mass labor movement in America. That decision, wrote W.E.B. Du Bois, “drove such a wedge between white and black workers that there probably are not today in the world two groups of workers with practically identical interests who hate and fear each other so deeply and persistently and who are kept so far apart that neither sees anything of common interest.”

If today America promotes a particular kind of low-road capitalism—a union-busting capitalism of poverty wages, gig jobs, and normalized insecurity; a winner-take-all capitalism of stunning disparities not only permitting but rewarding financial rule-bending; a racist capitalism that ignores the fact that slavery didn’t just deny Black freedom but built white fortunes, originating the Black-white wealth gap that annually grows wider—one reason is that American capitalism was founded on the lowest road there is.

But a close examination of the beliefs of Tea Party activists shows a movement consumed with resentment toward an ascendant majority of Black people, Latinos, Asian Americans, and liberal white people. In Change They Can’t Believe In: The Tea Party and Reactionary Politics in America, their survey-based study of the movement, for example, the political scientists Christopher S. Parker and Matt A. Barreto show that Tea Party Republicans were motivated “by the fear and anxiety associated with the perception that ‘real’ Americans are losing their country.”

While neutral on their face, these methods—the assaults on the legitimacy of nonwhite political actors, the casting of rival political majorities as unrepresentative, the drive to nullify democratically elected governing coalitions—are downstream of ideas and ideologies that came to fruition in the defense of human bondage and racial segregation. And as long as there are enough Americans who do not trust democracy to protect their privileges—as long as there are those who see in political equality a threat to their power and standing—these ideas and ideologies will have a path to power.

McLean affirmed that all those born in the United States were citizens by birth: “Being born under our Constitution and laws, no naturalization is required, as one of foreign birth, to make him a citizen.”30 When it came to the Constitution and anti-Blackness, McLean quipped, “This is more a matter of taste than of law.”

Justice Curtis offered a more thorough analysis, one that aligned directly with the arguments that had been made in the colored conventions: “The free native-born citizens of each State are citizens of the United States [and] as free colored persons born within some of the States are citizens of those States, such persons are also citizens of the United States.”

Bates plainly restated the matter: “Who is a citizen? What constitutes a citizen of the United States?” He scoured court decisions and the “action of the different branches of our political government” and discovered no clear answer:

“Every person born in the country is, at the moment of birth, prima facie a citizen; and he who would deny it must take upon himself the burden of proving some great disfranchisement strong enough to override the ‘natural born’ right as recognized by the Constitution in terms the most simple and comprehensive, and without any reference to race or color, or any other accidental circumstance.”

Despite the pleas, despite the British overrunning Charleston, the South Carolina government flat out refused to enlist the enslaved. The state’s leaders said they would rather surrender to the British (and take their chances with the king as traitors) than to see those whom they held captive armed.

Schurz unveiled a travelogue of death. He documented hunting parties where Black men were chased down and shot, with dogs left to devour their faces.67 Near Montgomery, Alabama, he wrote, “negroes leaving the plantations, and found on the roads, were exposed to the savagest treatment.” At Selma, he relayed the report from Major J. P. Houston that twelve “negroes were killed by whites.”68 In Choctaw County, Alabama, on separate occasions, Black men were roasted alive; one of them was “chained to a pine tree and burned to death.”69 Then there were the “ ‘gallant young men’ [who] make a practice of robbing [Black people]…. If any resistance is made, death is pretty sure to be the result.”70 Between 1865 and 1868, white people murdered more than one thousand African Americans in one area of Texas. In Pine Bluff, Arkansas, white people “set fire to a black settlement and rounded up the inhabitants. A man who visited the scene the following morning found ‘a sight that apald (sic) [him] 24 Negro men woman (sic) and children were hanging to trees all round the Cabbins.’ ”71 As Black people tried to defend themselves, white people massacred African Americans in Memphis; New Orleans; Colfax, Louisiana; and Hamburg, South Carolina.

In 2020, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights reported on the racial implications of Stand Your Ground laws: the criminal justice system is ten times more likely to rule a homicide justifiable if the shooter is white and victim is Black than the other way around.102 In fact, the report notes that when a white person kills an African American, it is 281 percent more likely to be ruled a “justifiable homicide” than a white-on-white killing.

American slavery evolved into a perverse regime that denied the humanity of Black people while criminalizing their actions. Bondage itself was only one part of the system; the myth of racial difference and a belief in white supremacy were another. As the Supreme Court of Alabama explained in an 1861 ruling, enslaved Black people were “capable of committing crimes,” and in that capacity were “regarded as persons,” but in most every other sense they were “incapable of performing civil acts” and considered “things, not persons.”

white Americans countered the emergence of Black elected officials and entrepreneurs with mob violence. After Reconstruction, rejection of racial equality intensified with convict leasing, a scheme in which white policy makers invented offenses—congregating after dark, vagrancy, loitering—that could be used to arrest Black people, who were then jailed and “leased” to businesses and farms, where they labored under brutal conditions. An

war on drugs, mandatory minimum sentences, three-strikes laws, children tried as adults, “broken windows” policing—these policies were not as expressly racialized as the Black Codes, but their implementation involved many of the same features. Today, it is Black and other nonwhite people who are disproportionately targeted, stopped, suspected, arrested, incarcerated, and shot by the police or prosecuted in courts.

In 1898, armed white people stormed Wilmington, North Carolina, an affluent majority-Black city. The biracial Fusion Party had managed to win election to a number of city offices, enraging white supremacists in the area, who plotted a violent overthrow of the local government. The mob murdered dozens of Black residents and forced thousands of others to flee their homes in what remains, to this day, the only successful coup in U.S. history.

A study of 222 white medical students and residents published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in 2016 showed that half of the students and residents endorsed at least one false idea about biological differences between Black people and white people, including that Black people’s nerve endings are less sensitive than those of white people.12 When asked to imagine how much pain white or Black patients experienced in hypothetical situations, the medical students and residents who held more false beliefs were more likely to maintain that Black people felt less pain, and thus they were less likely to recommend appropriate treatment.

pervasive, long-running racial bias in the U.S. healthcare system, an erroneous set of deep-seated beliefs formulated during slavery and perpetuated over the decades since by social, political, and economic inequality.

America has the lowest life expectancy, the highest incidence of chronic disease, and the highest rate of avoidable hospitalizations and avoidable deaths when compared to other high-income countries, despite spending more money on healthcare by far.

it was largely at the behest of Southern Democrats that farm and domestic workers—who made up more than half the nation’s workforce at the time, and an even higher percentage of the Black workforce—were excluded from New Deal policies, including the Social Security Act; the Wagner Act, which ensured the right of workers to collective bargaining; and the Fair Labor Standards Act, which set a minimum wage and established the eight-hour workday. The same voting bloc ensured that states controlled crucial programs like Aid to Dependent Children and the 1944 Servicemen’s Readjustment Act, better known as the GI Bill. In the South, especially, state leaders then excluded Black Americans from these programs through a variety of dubious mechanisms,