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The 1619 Project

by Nikole Hannah-Jones (ed.) et al, 2021

Published: 2022.01.19

Home > Book Reviews > Nikole Hannah‑Jones > The 1619 Project

 

Photo by Wil C. Fry.

★★★★ (of 5)

(* 480 pages does not include A Note About This Book, Preface, Acknowledgements, Notes, Contributors, Credits, and Index. The book is listed at 624 pages.)

 

This book is an expansion on the series of essays presented as the The 1619 Project in The New York Times Magazine in 2019. As explained in the preface, some essays from the original project were expanded, others edited, and new pieces were added to make this book. According to creator Nikole Hannah-Jones, the original project “aims to reframe the country’s history by placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of Black Americans at the very center of the United States’ national narrative.” The idea is that U.S. History, as widely taught in public and private schools for generations, has largely excluded Black people, often mentioning them only in two contexts: (1) the regrettable time when they were slaves (but we freed them!) and (2) the triumphant time when they won complete civil rights in the 1960s and systemic racism ended forever. (And that’s a fairly accurate depiction of the history I learned in my public school experience.)

The book (and the project it stemmed from) gets its name from the year 1619, which is when the first Africans arrived in Virginia — captives from the Kingdom of Ndongo (part of modern-day Angola), the 20-odd people were sold to the governor of Virginia. Though not the first enslaved people of African origin in the Americas (the Portuguese and Spanish colonizers had been bringing enslaved Africans to South America since the mid-1500s), these 20-something people are believed to be the first people owned as slaves in British North America, in the colonies that would become the original United States.

The book moves forward through history from 1619, sometimes focusing on time periods and other times focusing on topical issues, ending up very near the present. In a way it is the history of the United States, only told from the perspective of Black people, some of them descendants of enslaved Africans, rather than from the perspective of propertied white people, the descendants of the colonizers. The various writers examine how slavery and its underpinnings of white supremacy affected everything in our nation’s history, including the way our government was set up, how the Constitution came to be, the economy, customs, culture, and yes, even traffic jams.

The original project faced backlash, some from academic historians and much stronger criticism from hardcore right-wing politicians. One noted historian, for example, complained that “The 1619 Project is not history; it is conspiracy theory” and attempts to prove his claim by exaggerated hyperbole about the project, almost exactly as if he’s never actually read it. (In fact, I’m certain he never read it; he makes claims about the text that are absurd and simply not true.) On the political side, lunatic fringe politicians created the 1776 Commission in order to combat the “twisted web of lies” that is the 1619 Project. A recent U.S. president, beloved by modern white supremacists, said teaching school children about the historic systemic racism in the United States is “a form of child abuse” and actually claimed that “the 1619 Project... will destroy our country.” About four months after its beginning, the 1776 Commission was disbanded, having failed to include any historians specializing in U.S. history and having issued a report “filled with errors and partisan politics”.

The book itself is impressive, filling in hundreds of gaps in common U.S. history education. Perhaps its primary weak point is that it’s the work of many people, resulting in jarring shifts of style and viewpoint from one chapter to the next. Almost as if few of the contributing authors consulted with one another, they often repeat the same quotations and historical incidents (for example, the story of white mobs massacring Black people in Tulsa in 1921 was told several times, slightly differently, in various chapters).

It’s difficult to say how eye-opening this book would have been for me, on its own. Perhaps unlike many readers, I have recently read The Second (about how the Second Amendment was never meant to apply to Black people), Never Caught (the story of an enslaved woman who escaped from President George Washington and stayed on the run her entire life), The Burning (history of the Tulsa race massacre), The Black Friend, The Warmth Of Other Suns (history of the Great Migration of Black workers from the South to the rest of the U.S. in the 20th Century), An Indigenous People’s History Of The United States, The New Jim Crow, The Souls Of Black Folk, Policing The Black Man, A People’s History Of The United States, and others, all of which touched on the subjects in this book — primarily racism and white supremacy, but a plethora of other issues that directly affect Black Americans. Because of this past reading, much of The 1619 Project was already-ingested information for me, though I suspect it would not be so for many readers. It is for this reason that I highly recommend it.

If you’re still not sure if this project is worthwhile, consider that Texas politicians reacted to it by immediately banning any public school discussions about racism or white supremacy.

 





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