The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story

by Nikole Hannah-Jones

The unsexy answer is that we produce constantly evolving interpretations, not facts.” Hicks explained that historians can look at the same set of facts—President Lincoln’s public remarks on colonization, for example—and come to different conclusions about whether his speeches reflected his personal views on repatriating Black Americans outside the United States or that he was simply engaging in a political strategy to avoid scaring away white moderates who opposed both slavery and Black citizenship. “The reality is,” she wrote, “a valid interpretation could come down on both sides of the issue.”18

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.

Protesters recognized that white fear of the racial “other” is not limited to the police or even to our criminal injustice system, but is endemic to our society as a whole. In fact, just weeks before Floyd was murdered, another viral video had revealed to the nation—and much of the world—that white fear is easily and routinely weaponized by ordinary people with potentially deadly consequences.

As James Baldwin explained a half century earlier, when “any white man in the world says, ‘Give me liberty or give me death,’ the entire white world applauds. When a Black man says exactly the same thing—word for word—he is judged a criminal and treated like one, and everything possible is done to make an example of this bad [n——] so there won’t be any more like him.”7

As historian Carol Anderson observes in White Rage, the mere presence of Black people was not the problem; the problem was “blackness with ambition, with drive, with purpose, with aspirations, and with demands for full and equal citizenship.”75 Just as in the days of the Haitian Revolution and before, nothing frightened and enraged white people more than Black people who were determined to be free.

It took hours. My mother and I got home in the middle of the day, and sat at the kitchen table to confer. I pulled out a small recorder I’d purchased just for this occasion. “I can’t believe I just did that,” my mother said. “I voted for a Black man who might actually win.”