The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story

by Nikole Hannah-Jones

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.36

What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciation of tyrants brass fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade, and solemnity, are, to him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy—a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices, more shocking and bloody, than are the people of the United States, at this very hour.37

came then and afterwards to realize how the silence and neglect of science can let truth utterly disappear or even be unconsciously distorted.”

Whiteness proved a powerful unifying elixir for the burgeoning nation. Whether laborer or elite planter, “neither was a slave. And both were equal in not being slaves.”43 And so it served the interests of both groups to defend slavery.

It is, therefore, not incidental that ten of this nation’s first twelve presidents were enslavers.