The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story
- Mar 11, 2025
- 4 min read
★★★★☆
The 1619 Project, an ongoing initiative of The New York Times Magazine, began life nearly five years ago, in August 2019, the 400th anniversary of the beginning of American slavery. As usual, I’m late to the party, but as it’s ongoing, I’ll imagine it as an open house where everyone is invited to show up whenever they’d like. Early, on-time, fashionably late … There is no wrong time to show up to this book. But everyone—everyone—should show up to this book. And the sooner the better.
For those who don’t know, The 1619 Project’s central framing is to reimagine American history with slavery and its continuing legacy at the center of our national narrative. That is, our history looks very different when seen through the lens of human enslavement than it does when seen as we have most often been taught it. Greatly expanding on the original magazine issue, this book weaves together 19 essays with 36 poems and works of fiction. The essays demonstrate how the inheritance of 1619 reaches into every part of contemporary society, while the poems and works of fiction illuminate key moments of struggle and resistance.
You know you’ve shined a light where many would prefer darkness to remain when reactionary books are written in response. Like Howard Zinn’s brilliant A People’s History of the United States, which prompted the conservative A Patriot’s History of the United States, The 1619 Project spawned the similarly reactionary and conservative-minded 1776 Commission (aka the 1776 Project). Why is it that a certain segment of our society can’t look honestly at our history and confront the uncomfortable truths that lie there? Why must teaching those truths and the ongoing impact of those truths be framed as “a twisted web of lies” and “a form of child abuse” as President Trump did during his first term in office? Amongst other things, I’ll submit Guilt, Shame, and Anxiety. How can we grow as a nation, as a melting pot of 340 million people, if we can’t be truthful with ourselves and each other? The answer is: We can’t. Why must we cloak ourselves in a mythology of unchecked patriotism and unabashed exceptionalism? In reductive catchphrases like “America, love it or leave it” and “Make America Great Again”? We don’t confront our racist past and our racist present (and without change, our racist future) because we don’t have to. Whether or not we want to—or that we would if only—is not the point. We don’t because we don’t have to. And that makes us weak, not strong. It makes us compromised, not secure. It makes us broken, not whole.
Unlike what conservative circles might have you believe, The 1619 Project is not some liberal guilt trip. It is not about making white people feel ashamed for the sins of their fathers. It is an invitation to see and think about our collective history differently, to view what happened from another perspective, to understand that history is contextual, and that context doesn’t just matter, it’s everything. Those who would keep us in the dark want to write history to suit their purposes, their agenda. Their agenda is not an American agenda, though wrapped in the flag, it is packaged and sold and consumed as such. We have a fever, and it’s called jingoism. As counterintuitive as it might sound, The 1619 Project is an antidote to that aggressive nationalism, and to the retreating civility, evaporating empathy, and partisan polarization currently ascendant in these (so far, at least) United States.
If there are weaknesses in the book, they come on two fronts. First, though I think it was both useful and necessary to organize chapters by topic (e.g. Democracy, Dispossession, Self-Defense, Traffic), it does leave room for repetition as many of the same historical events are cited over and again. Second, some chapters feel too slight, as if there wasn’t quite enough substance to give the subject its due, though I do appreciate the editorial integrity not to artificially pad things. These are minor criticisms of what is otherwise an exemplary work, breathtaking in its scope, rigorous in its scholarship, and, at nearly 500 pages, thoroughly readable.
In the end, The 1619 Project calls for reparations, and that, I think, is the crux of the Guilt, Shame, and Anxiety I mentioned above. We may feel guilt and shame about the history of slavery in this country. The anxiety enters when we think about having to acknowledge and atone for that history and its ongoing legacy. So we tell ourselves that, yes, it was an awful thing, and so were Black Codes and Jim Crow and lynchings and all the rest of it, but isn’t it great how far we’ve come? The reality is, we haven’t come nearly as far as we think, and white supremacist rhetoric and sloganeering aside, we’ve simply gotten craftier in how we enact and transact it. And the reality is, the country needs to pay the debt we began incurring four hundred years ago when it decided that human beings could be purchased and held in bondage. As the project’s creator, Nikole Hannah-Jones, writes in the closing chapter, “It is one thing to say you do not support reparations because you did not know the history, that you did not understand how things done long ago helped create the conditions in which millions of Black Americans live today. But you have now reached the end of this book, and nationalized amnesia can no longer provide the excuse. None of us can be held responsible for the wrongs of our ancestors. But if today we choose not to do the right and necessary thing, that burden we own.”
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