The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story

by Nikole Hannah-Jones

This is a capitalist society. It’s a fatalistic mantra that seems to get repeated to anyone who questions why America can’t be more fair or equal. But around the world, there are many types of capitalist societies. Some are more equitable, and some are more exploitative; some more restrained, and some more unregulated. When Americans declare that “we live in a capitalist society”—as a real estate mogul told the Miami Herald in 2018 when explaining his feelings about small-business owners being evicted from their Little Haiti storefronts—what they’re often defending is our nation’s peculiarly brutal version of capitalism: “low-road capitalism,” the University of Wisconsin–Madison sociologist Joel Rogers has called it.2 In a capitalist society like ours, wages are depressed as businesses compete over the price, not the quality, of goods, and so-called unskilled workers are typically incentivized through punishments, not promotions. Inequality reigns and poverty spreads.