The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story

by Nikole Hannah-Jones

What would it mean to reframe our understanding of U.S. history by considering 1619 as our country’s origin point, the birth of our defining contradictions, the seed of so much of what has made us unique? How might that reframing change how we understand the unique problems of the nation today—its stark economic inequality, its violence, its world-leading incarceration rates, its shocking segregation, its political divisions, its stingy social safety net?

Not all Americans have been so willing to forget. Black Americans, because of our particular experience in this land, because we have borne the brunt of this forgetting, are less given to mythologizing America’s past than white Americans. How do you romanticize a revolution made possible by the forced labor of your ancestors, one that built white freedom on a Black slavery that would persist for another century after Jefferson wrote “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal”?

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.36

Eight in ten Black people would not be in the United States were it not for the institution of slavery in a society founded on ideals of freedom. Our nation obscures and diminishes this history because it shames us.

In our national story, we crown Lincoln the Great Emancipator, the president who ended slavery, demolished the racist South, and ushered in the free nation our founders set forth. But this narrative, like so many others, requires more nuance. Douglass would never forget that the president initially suggested that the only solution, after abolishing an enslavement that had lasted for centuries, was for Black Americans to leave the country they helped to build.

“Tyranny is a central theme of American history,”

Black naming practices, so often impugned by mainstream society, are themselves an act of resistance. Our last names often derive from 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.

But crucially, you cannot view those statistics while ignoring another: that Black people were enslaved here longer than we have been free. As a woman in my forties, 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 fifty.

glaring double standard reflects a centuries-old pattern in which Black strivings for liberation have been demonized, criminalized, and subjected to persecution, while white people’s demands for liberty are deemed rational, legitimate, and largely unthreatening.

Nothing has proved more threatening to our democracy, or more devastating to Black communities, than white fear of Black freedom dreams.