The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story edited by Nikole Hannah - Jones

The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story created and edited by Nikole Hannah-Jones is based on the New York Times Magazine's "1619 Project." The book is named after the year that the first enslaved Africans arrived in what was then the British colony of Virginia on the ship the White Lion and the book takes as its central thesis that the history of the United States should be reexamined with the idea of slavery and the contributions of enslaved people and descendants of enslaved people as the framing device for looking at the history of the United States. There are eighteen chapters in the book, each written by a different author on a different theme. 

In August 1619, just twelve years after the English settled Jamestown, Virginia, one year before the Puritans landed at Plymouth, and some 157 years before English colonists here decided they wanted to form their own country, the Jamestown colonists brought twenty to thirty enslaved Africans from the English pirates. The pirates had stolen them from a Portuguese slave ship whose crew had forcibly taken them from what is now the country of Angola. Those men and women who came ashore on that August day mark the beginning of slavery in the thirteen colonies that would become the United States of America. (page 9, Chapter 1: Democracy by Nikole Hannah - Jones)

The book has received its share of criticism, has been banned in many states, and has raised the ire of many a politician. It's also been used to develop curriculum for teaching about hard topics revolving around race and history from elementary school through college, spawned a podcast series, a poetry book, a children's book, and lots of discussions about the role historians play in building narratives.

Like any edited volume, the chapters vary in quality based on the topic and the author. Did my eyes roll back into my head very far in the music chapter by Wesley Morris that just listed pages and pages of black artists? Why, yes, yes, they did. Did the last paragraph in the sugar chapter by Khalil Gibran Muhammad in which is he switched entirely from talking about the role of black people in sugar fields and plantations to talking about the role of sugar in modern diets make me insane? For sure. But, overall, there was so much I learned and I just respect Hannah-Jones and the rest of the contributors for doing such rigorous research and sticking to their guns when criticisms were being hurled at them. 

The book starts with a poem by Langston Hughes and in the interstitial space between chapters, the book includes photos, creative writing, and assorted other ephemera from history. I know each and every bit of the book was carefully considered and curated and I was there for all of it.

I am the American heartbreak-

The rock on which Freedom
Stumped its toe - 
The great mistake 
That Jamestown made
Long ago. 
-Langston Hughes
"American Heartbreak: 1619" (page xv - epigraph)

I legitimately marked dozens and dozens of passages in this book and don't even know where to start whittling it down to what to post here. I guess I suggest you just read the book. It's a commitment at almost 600 pages (20% are footnotes!), but it's a commitment worth making in terms of understanding what is going on in race relations today and how we got there.

5/5 stars

Lines of note:

In exposing our nation's troubled roots, the 1619 Project challenges us to think about a country whose exceptionalism we treat as the unquestioned truth. It asks us to consider who sets and shapes our shared national memory and what and who gets left out. (page xxx, preface by Nikole Hannah-Jones)

I think it's always interesting to see history written from a different lens. I don't see this as more radical a project than centering history around women rather than "great men" or centering it around daily running of households rather than wars, but this project did get a lot of criticism for its reframing of American history.

...we [Black Americans] are the stark reminders of some of its most damning truths. 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 the ideals of freedom. (page xxxi, preface by Nikole Hannah-Jones)

Eight in ten. Imagine what the demographics of this country would be if slavery hadn't existed here.

...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. (page 16, Chapter 1: Democracy by Nikole Hannah - Jones)

This sentence was the spark for much of the controversy about the original 1619 Project. Hannah-Jones included the words "some of the" to quiet some of her detractors. I actually had never, not once in my life, really thought about the role slavery played in the American Revolution and found this chapter absolutely fascinating. The fact that the Founders used the metaphor of slavery to talk about throwing off the shackles of British rule is absolutely unconscionable in light of the actual chattel slavery occurring in the colonies. 

The bedrock of this statutory scheme was a network of laws passed in the colonial era governing sex and race. These laws, which created the racial-classification systems we still live with today, were primarily concerned with policing interracial sex...The laws that invented race also created a regime intent on policing Black women's sexuality and controlling Black women's bodies. (page 48, Chapter 2: Race by Dorothy Roberts)

Oh, this whole chapter was hard to read, particularly about Black women's bodies and how the treatment of enslaved women continues to have repercussions to this day.

Enslaved Black women gave birth to enslaveable children even if the fathers were white...The law allowed white men to profit from their sexual assaults on Black women...white men could rape enslaved women with total impunity, maintaining their domination while increasing their wealth. Their control over Black women's bodies was key to creating a permanent labor supply. (page 50, Chapter 2: Race by Dorothy Roberts)

Imagine thinking of your own children as merely "labor supply." I mean, I guess that was true in poor white farming families, but at least the white children knew they could grow up and leave. 

The specific forms of repression and control may have changed over time, but the underlying pattern established during slavery has remained the same. Modern-day policing, surveillance, and mass criminalization, as well as white vigilante violence and "know-your-place" aggression," have histories rooted in white fear - not merely of Black crime or Black people but of Black liberation. Nothing has proved more threatening to our democracy, or more devastating to Black communities, than white fear of Black freedom dreams. (page 101, Chapter 4: Fear by Leslie Alexander and Michelle Alexander)

This chapter was so important. I didn't include any quotes about how white enslavers feared slave revolts, but basically all early law enforcement was about preventing and halting slave revolts and that has had a huge psychological impact on how non-Black people perceive Black people. 

Slavery, he [Thomas Jefferson] once quipped, was akin to having a "wolf by the ear" - white people could not release their grip on it, but they also knew that beneath the surface boiled a formidable Black rage that could not be fully contained.

From the founding of the original thirteen colonies, white people in the North and South lived in constant fear that the men and women they whipped, raped, and forced to work without pay would, if given the chance, rise up and take revenge on their white enslavers. This is why governmental surveillance and severe punishment of Black people began almost concurrently with the introduction of slavery itself. (page 102-103, Chapter 4: Fear by Leslie Alexander and Michelle Alexander)

The successful Haitian revolution (1791-1804) led to a great deal of fear among enslavers in the United States. 

It was obvious to everyone concerned that white people frequently became enraged when their status or power was threatened, and that they were willing to maintain the racial order through violence—including burning buildings, looting homes, and attacking or lynching Black people. But when Black rebellions swept our nation, they were cast as deviant, criminal, and irrational. (page 118, Chapter 4: Fear by Leslie Alexander and Michelle Alexander)

Alexander and Alexander making explicit links from policing in the antebellum period to today.

Most of the credit that powered the sectors of the American economy based on the labor of enslaved Black people came from the London money market. Years after abolishing the African slave trade in 1807, Britain, and much of Europe along with it, was bankrolling slavery in the United States. To raise capital, state-chartered banks pooled debt generated by mortgages on enslaved workers and repackaged it as bonds promising investors annual interest. During slavery’s boom time, banks did swift business in bonds, finding buyers in Hamburg and Amsterdam, in Boston and Philadelphia. (page 176, Chapter 6: Capitalism by Matthew Desmond)

Even when Britain absolished slavery decades before the US did, hands were not clean.

Slavery pulled down all workers’ wages. Labor power had little chance when the bosses could instead choose to buy people, rent them, contract indentured servants, take on apprentices, or hire children or prisoners. Within this environment, white workers formed labor unions and advocated for better pay, improved conditions, and shorter work days. Yet nearly all those unions withheld membership from free Black workers. 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. (page 182, Chapter 6: Capitalism by Matthew Desmond)

In a capitalist society, money is a zero sum game and if someone else has it, you don't. Using this to create racial tension is a crucial component of the modern American economy.

Among the duties of the enslaved was the enslavers’ entertainment. Black people were called upon to fiddle and dance for their white owners and their guests. Musicians were loaned out to other enslavers. (page 366, Chapter 14: Music by Wesley Morris)

I knew a little bit about slaves being forced to sing work songs, but I didn't actually consider that enslaved people were forced to provide entertainment for white people. Ugh. 

When the long sweep of American history is cast as a constant widening of equity and justice, it overlooks this parallel constant widening of inequity and injustice. The two forces have existed in tandem, dueling throughout our history. (page 424, Chapter: 17: Progress by Ibram X. Kendi)

Kendi's argument in their chapter is that the arc of American history doesn't bend towards justice and we need to acknowledge that and start dealing with it.

At the time of the Civil War, the value of the enslaved human beings held as property added up to more than all of this nation’s railroads and factories combined. And yet, enslaved people saw not a dime of this wealth. They owned nothing and were owed nothing from all that had been built from their toil. (page 458, Chapter 18: Justice by Nikole Hannah - Jones)

I imagine Hannah-Jones's argument that reparations are necessary is another highly controversial aspect of this book.

...college simply does not pay off for Black Americans the way it does for other groups. Black college graduates are about as likely to be unemployed as white Americans with a high school diploma, and Black Americans with a college education hold less wealth than white Americans who have not even completed high school. (page 471, Chapter 18: Justice by Nikole Hannah - Jones)

My husband and I actually looked this up. You can find a graph on page 6 of this report. I'd still definitely recommend Black Americans go to college, but I'd caution them that they need to be very wise about how much debt they take on. 

Things I looked up:

Negro Act of 1740 (page 105) - Passed in South Carolina as a response to the Stono Rebellion. It prevented enslaved people from assembling in groups, earn money, learn to write, and made it legal for owners to kill their slaves. It prevented slaves from going beyond the boundaries of their own plantations, and allowed constables to deputize anyone they wanted to search for missing slaves.

iatrophobia (page 311) - intense fear of doctors, medical care, or the medical care system