The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story

by Nikole Hannah-Jones

While interstates were regularly used to destroy Black neighborhoods, they were also used to keep Black and white neighborhoods apart. Today, major roads and highways serve as stark dividing lines between Black and white sections in cities like Buffalo, Hartford, Kansas City, Milwaukee, Pittsburgh, and St. Louis. In Atlanta, the intent to segregate was crystal clear. Interstate 20, the east-west corridor that connects with I-75 and I-85 in Atlanta’s center, was deliberately plotted along a winding route in the late 1950s to serve, in the words of Mayor Bill Hartsfield, as “the boundary between the white and Negro communities” on the west side of town. Black neighborhoods, he hoped, would be hemmed in on one side of the new expressway, while white neighborhoods on the other side of it would be protected. Racial residential patterns have long since changed, of course, but the awkward path of I-20 remains in place.10

Inequality lives, in part, because Americans of every generation have been misled into believing that racial progress is inevitable and ongoing. That racial progress is America’s manifest destiny. That racial progress defines the arc of American history since 1619. That “things have changed dramatically.” In fact, this has more often been rhetoric than reality, more often myth than history. Saying that the nation can progress racially is a necessary statement of hope. Saying that the nation has progressed racially is usually a statement of ideology, one that has been used all too often to obscure the opposite reality of racist progress. And it’s been this way since the beginning.

“When the Hebrews were emancipated, they were told to take spoil from the Egyptians. When the serfs of Russia were emancipated, they were given three acres of ground upon which they could live and make a living. But not so when our slaves were emancipated. They were sent away empty-handed, without money, without friends and without a foot of land to stand upon. Old and young, sick and well, were turned loose to the open sky, naked to their enemies.”

According to a 2020 report by the Equal Justice Initiative, white Americans lynched at least 6,500 Black people from the end of the Civil War to 1950, an average of three every two weeks for eight and a half decades.52 (Since 2015, law enforcement has killed, on average, nearly five Black people a week.53)

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.”

This remarkable imperviousness to facts when it comes to white advantage and architected Black disadvantage is what emboldens some white Americans to quote the passage from Martin Luther King’s 1963 “I Have a Dream” speech about being judged by the content of your character and not by the color of your skin. It’s often used as a cudgel against calls for race-specific remedies for Black Americans—while ignoring the part of that same speech where King says Black people have marched on the capital to cash “a check which has come back marked ‘insufficient funds.’

That 2019 Yale University study, discussed in “The Misperception of Racial Economic Inequality,” found that most Americans believe that Black households hold $90 in wealth for every $100 held by white households. The actual amount is $10. About 97 percent of the study participants overestimated Black-white wealth equality, and most assumed that highly educated, high-income Black households were the most likely to achieve economic parity with white counterparts. That is also wrong. The magnitude of the wealth gap only widens as Black people earn more income.

The Duke study shows that the racial wealth gap is not about poverty. Poor white families earning less than $27,000 a year hold nearly the same amount of wealth as Black families earning between $48,000 and $76,000 annually.72 It’s not because of Black spending habits. Black Americans have lower incomes overall but save at a slightly higher rate than white Americans with similar incomes. It’s not that Black people need to value education more. Black parents, when correlated by household type and socioeconomic status, actually offer more financial support for their children’s higher education than white parents do, according to the study.73 And some studies have shown that Black youths, when compared with white youths whose parents have similar incomes and education levels, are actually more likely to go to college and earn additional credentials.74 But what’s probably most astounding to many Americans is that college simply does not pay off for Black Americans the way it does for other groups. 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.