The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story

by Nikole Hannah-Jones

Through centuries of Black resistance and protest, we have helped the country live up to its founding ideals.

See this is an angle I never considered. It makes me want to act. Do something. Be somebody. Be me.

It was precisely because white colonists so well understood the degradations of actual slavery that the metaphor of slavery held so much power to consolidate their disparate interests: no matter a colonist’s politics, background, or

The specter of their most valuable property absconding to take up arms against them “did more than any other British measure to spur uncommitted white Americans into the camp of rebellion,”

“How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of Negroes?”34

while our nation’s founding documents were written in Philadelphia, they were mainly written by Virginians.

This I never realized.

Bacon’s Rebellion in 1676, where an alliance of white and Black indentured servants and enslaved Africans rose up against Virginia’s white elite,

Whether laborer or elite planter, “neither was a slave. And both were equal in not being slaves.”

As Frederick Douglass would explain in 1849, the Constitution bound the nation “to do the bidding of the slave holder, to bring out the whole naval and military power of the country, to crush the refractory slaves into obedience to their cruel masters.”46

I did not realize this. I've read all of these things but didn't pick up the implications. Only that there was nothing for us. Not for our protection or freedom.

This belief, that Black people were not merely enslaved but a slave race, is the root of the endemic racism we cannot purge from this nation to this day. If Black people could not ever be citizens, if they were a caste apart from all other humans, then they did not require the rights bestowed by the Constitution, and the “we” in the “We the People” was not a lie.

In 1816, a group of white enslavers and politicians in Washington, D.C., created the American Colonization Society (ACS) to promote the removal of free Black people, who would be encouraged to leave the United States and resettle in West Africa.

?!!!! No idea this existed

It was 243 years to the month since the first of their ancestors had arrived on these shores—before Lincoln’s family, long before most of the white people insisting that this was not their country. The Union had entered the war not to end slavery but to keep the South from splitting off, yet Black men wanted to fight to restore the Union and liberate their people. And now Lincoln was blaming them for the war, and urging them to persuade the Black population to leave their native land.

Douglass then launched into a breathtaking litany of Lincoln’s shortcomings,

The little i know about this man makes me regret now. I need to read this speech.

“Still, the final stage of Lincoln is still a person who only believes in partial Black inclusion and who is only advocating for inclusion of certain Black people on certain terms. It’s valid to expect that he would have continued to evolve, but what we do know is that in the unfortunately short period of his presidency, Lincoln wasn’t an advocate for full equality.”69

no Black people had ever been allowed to serve in any elected office in the U.S. Congress or in most states and so their names do not often appear in the political histories.

This why Black American history skips from civil war to world war and the right to vote.

For the fleeting moment known as Reconstruction,

I did not know such a time existed. I know of the reconstruction era but as a sort of cleaning up the country after the civil war made a mess, literally. For black people, seemingly figuring out what to do with themselves after slavery was abolished. Like the book The Conductors. Not of any Black people being in government or voting or changing laws. Just massive migration and poverty and Jim Crow immediately.

World War II ignited what became Black Americans’ second sustained effort to democratize this nation.

Woodard’s blinding is largely seen as one of the catalysts for the decades-long rebellion we have come to call the civil rights movement.

The bloody freedom struggles of the civil rights movement laid the foundation for every other modern rights struggle.

Our founding fathers may not have actually believed in the ideals they espoused, but Black people did.

This evokes a fighting spirit within me. Cause its so true. We could leave en masse and be petty but we would wind up on someone else's land and become not unlike Israel. I dont want that. I also wonder if we are currently going through a third fight for equality.

Black people have seen the worst of America, yet, somehow, we still believe in its best.

Is this what hoteps and some others believe is our naivety. Pur swallowing the pills, the fairy tale the white man has fed to us.

Out of our unique isolation, both from our native cultures and from white America, we forged this nation’s most significant original culture. In turn, “mainstream” society has coveted our style, our slang, and our song, seeking to appropriate the one truly American culture as its own.

Yes, this is why we yell about cultural appropriation. Because while many overseas do it without knowing, in ignorance. Many here do so knowing our history and also doing nothing to support or change things.

But it was by virtue of our bondage that we became the most American of all.

Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s 1965 report The Negro Family: The Case for National Action furthered the theory that Black mothers were responsible for the disintegration of the Black family and the consequent failure of Black people to succeed in America.

Smh

Ross believes it is possible to contest sexual violence against Black women while also celebrating Black women’s sexuality.

I like that there are positive and hopeful developments included.

Domestically, the sugar produced from sugarcane and sugar beets remains one of the country’s most important agricultural products. Louisiana’s sugarcane industry is by itself worth $3 billion, generating an estimated 16,400 jobs.

Had no clue it was still this big of a big business.

73 pounds of sugar and related sweeteners, such as high-fructose corn syrup, are consumed per person per year, according to United States Department of Agriculture data.2 That makes us the biggest per capita consumers of sugar in the world. Those nine million tons we grow each year aren’t nearly enough to meet our demand, so we import an additional three million tons annually.

Jeez.

slavery shaped our political institutions and founding documents, our laws governing private property and financial regulation, our management techniques and accounting systems, and our economic systems and labor unions. By

On the other hand, states like Virginia and Georgia vehemently defended the right to own and sell Black people.

This reminds me of the back and forth regarding owning guns and gun laws.

Great Compromise was proposed in July. Congress would be divided into two houses, a lower house based on population—with each enslaved Black person counting as three-fifths of a citizen—and an upper house that gave all states an equal number of votes.

The Southern advantage conferred by the Three-fifths Clause was extended to the executive branch through the Electoral College, proposed by Madison, which provided each state a number of electors that aligned with its representation in the lower house of Congress. Slaveholding states secured outsized political power in both Congress and the presidency, which was controlled by pro-slavery advocates until the election of Lincoln in 1860.11

The Constitution empowered all states with “a practical veto on national policy,” according to historian Mark Graber, which made it effectively impossible for the federal government to regulate slavery without the South’s consent. To this day, the fifteen states where slavery remained legal as of 1861 still hold the power to block a constitutional amendment supported by the other thirty-five.12

So if Washington often feels broken, that’s because it was built that way.

but Southern enslavers quickly realized that that would require them to pay more than Northerners who didn’t enslave people.

Slavery is over, can we stop using laws set up to support it since theybdont qork for really anybody anymore. Sputh got all these damn concessions for something they no longer have or do. Dead that.

It was not until 1861, when the bill for the Civil War came due, that the nation was finally forced to establish an income tax and an Internal Revenue Service to collect it (originally called the Bureau of Internal Revenue). The

What?!

The federal government didn’t acquire the power to “lay and collect taxes on incomes” until 1913, when the Sixteenth Amendment was ratified.

Wow, this makes so much sense about why pur taxes are messy. All the hidden tax codes. Different levels of taxes per state. Regular citizens having to figure out their own taxes in confusion.

“One consequence,” writes the historian Robin Einhorn, “may well be the exceptionally powerful devotion to individual property rights that made American business stronger, American labor weaker, and the American welfare state a comparative ‘laggard.’ ”18

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. Capitalism depends on private property, and private property depends on the law.

it has been a defining characteristic of American capitalism ever since. It is the culture of acquiring wealth without work, growing at all costs, and abusing the powerless.

This reminds me of work smarter not harder. Why can't we change? Also history repeating itself.

“unhallowed alliance between the lords of the lash and the lords of the loom.”37

Historians have tended to connect the development of modern business practices to the nineteenth-century railroad industry, viewing plantation slavery as precapitalistic, even primitive.

This is why i didnt know hamilton came up with the stock exchange or about the panic of 1897, just mentioned.

In her book Accounting for Slavery, the historian Caitlin Rosenthal writes of one Jamaican plantation where, in 1779, the owner supervised a top attorney (a kind of financial manager), who supervised another attorney, who supervised an overseer, who supervised three bookkeepers, who supervised sixteen enslaved head drivers and specialists (like bricklayers), who supervised hundreds of enslaved workers. This organizational form was very advanced for its time, displaying a level of hierarchal complexity equaled only by large government structures, like that of Britain’s Royal Navy.

The uncompromising pursuit of measurement and scientific accounting displayed in slave-labor camps predates industrialism.

It was not so much the rage of the poor white Southerner as the greed of the rich white planter that drove the lash. The violence was neither arbitrary nor gratuitous. It was a rational part of the plantation’s design.

The large-scale cultivation of cotton by enslaved people hastened the development of the factory, an institution that propelled the Industrial Revolution and changed the course of history.

“Do not let them make niggers out of you,” a machine stitcher told a crowd of mill workers in 1860, encouraging them to strike and demand a higher wage.77 Whiteness colored the American labor movement’s initial identity and governed its boundaries of solidarity, ultimately limiting its power.

White workers viewed Black people not only as rate busters but also as political adversaries, since Black constituencies were generally aligned with the Republican Party—the party of Lincoln and emancipation, but also the party of big business—while white union members sided with the Democratic Party, seen as more sympathetic to labor and immigrants.

Looking back at this now, it parallels the current climate against immigrants. Particularly Latino ones but every non-white is a threat to jobs and livelihood for no good reason.

Given the choice between parity with Black people—by inviting them into unified unions—and poverty, white workers chose poverty, spoiling the development of a multiracial mass labor movement in America.

“all nonslavery appear as freedom,”

white workers too often persuaded that their whiteness was advantage enough.

plantations didn’t just produce goods; they produced ideas, too.