The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story

by Nikole Hannah-Jones

Considering the confusing and obfuscatory way school curricula tend to address the institution of slavery, this is unsurprising. Myriad examples exist. As recently as six years ago, a McGraw-Hill world geography textbook referred to African people brought to the Americas in the bowels of slave ships not as the victims of a forced migration who were violently coerced into labor but as “workers,” a word that implies consensual and paid labor.3 Within the last decade, Alabama social studies courses for second graders listed Harriet Tubman, the woman who became famous for escaping slavery and then helping others do the same, as an “exemplary” American without ever mentioning the words “slave” or “slavery.”4

But this scholarship, so uncontroversial among historians, has often struggled to permeate mainstream understanding of American history, which is still wedded to a mythology of our founders as unimpeachable heroes and our founding as divine event.