The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story

by Nikole Hannah-Jones

The inclination to bandage over and move on is a definitive American feature when it comes to anti-Black racism and its social and material effects. The 2019 Yale University study describes this phenomenon this way: “A firm belief in our nation’s commitment to racial egalitarianism is part of the collective consciousness of the United States of America…. We have a strong and persistent belief that our national disgrace of racial oppression has been overcome, albeit through struggle, and that racial equality has largely been achieved.”62 The authors point out how many white Americans love to play up moments of racial progress like the Emancipation Proclamation, Brown v. Board of Education, and the election of Barack Obama, while playing down or ignoring lynching, racial apartheid, and the 1985 government bombing of a Black neighborhood in Philadelphia.63 “When it comes to race relations in the United States,” the study said, “most Americans hold an unyielding belief in a specific, optimistic narrative regarding racial progress that is robust to counterexamples: that society has come a very long way already and is moving rapidly and perhaps naturally toward full racial equality.”