The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story

by Nikole Hannah-Jones

‘nations need to control national memory, because nations keep their shape by shaping their citizens’ understanding of the past.’

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.

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.

It is what enables a private landowner to fence off natural resources and forests and rivers, assets that originally belonged to no one and were stewarded by the surrounding community, transforming common goods into commodities controlled by a single person or business entity.

The framers helped create a doctrine of private property strong enough to justify and enforce human trafficking, so much so that abolitionists publicly burned copies of the Constitution.

People could be sold much more easily than land, and in multiple Southern states, more than eight in ten mortgage-secured loans used enslaved people as full or partial collateral.

“slave owners worked their slaves financially, as well as physically,” by mortgaging people to buy more people.39

41 In several Southern counties, mortgages taken out on enslaved workers injected more capital into the economy than sales from the crops harvested by workers themselves.

Black college graduates are about as likely to be unemployed as white Americans with a high school diploma, and Black Americans with a college education hold less wealth than white Americans who have not even completed high school.

A truly great country does not ignore or excuse its sins. It confronts them, and then works to make them right.

Any example of countries that have actually done this successfully?