The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story

by Nikole Hannah-Jones

“Conveniently left out of our founding mythology,” that paragraph began, “is the fact that one of the primary reasons the colonists decided to declare their independence from Britain was because they wanted to protect the institution of slavery.”

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.

Over the course of the war, thousands of enslaved people would join the British—far outnumbering those who joined the Patriot cause.

And yet none of this is part of our founding mythology, which conveniently omits the fact that one of the primary reasons some of the colonists decided to declare their independence from Britain was because they wanted to protect the institution of slavery.

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