What if, however, we were to tell you that the moment that the country’s defining contradictions first came into the world was in late August of 1619? That was when a ship arrived at Point Comfort in the British colony of Virginia, bearing a cargo of 20 to 30 enslaved Africans. Their arrival inaugurated a barbaric system of chattel slavery that would last for the next 250 years. This is sometimes referred to as the country’s original sin, but it is more than that: It is the country’s very origin.

Nikole Hannah-Jones

What if you aren't who you think you are? What if you, your family, your community and even your country turned out to be something else entirely? Not what you had been raised to believe by your parents and teachers, textbooks and TV sets? What if the Land of the Free turned out to be built on a vast foundation of oppression and enforced servitude, and the Home of the Brave harbored a people who had for centuries lied, denied and hidden from the fundamental truths of this legacy? A history older and more bloody than ever truly acknowledged? A history that was darker?

That would suck, obviously. But a lot of things might also begin to make more sense…

In August of 2019 the New York Times Magazine published a special editon to coincide with the 400th anniversary of the arrival of the first enslaved Africans in the modern-day United States, at Jamestown, Virginia. This consignment of some 20 and odd Negroes, recently seized from a Portuguese ship bound for the Spanish colonies, and traded for some food and suppies with the few English clinging precariously to the edge of this vast and unknown continent, was an, if not the, seminal moment in the history of America, according to journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones. More than the arrival of the English in 1607, of the Pilgrims in 1620, more so even that the widely-revered Declaration of Independence in 1776, this moment marked the true founding of America, hence the name, The 1619 Project. The whole issue of the magazine, along with an accompanying podcast and educational materials, was devoted to alternative perspectives on American history, tracing the impact of slavery on American industry, society, culture and life to this day. This was not new research, nor did it claim any ground-breaking discoveries, but rather a new analysis, and a radically-different framing of the American story, delivering uncompromising conclusions about the America of 2019.

We are the American heartbreak —
The rock on which Freedom
Stumped its toe —
The great mistake
That Jamestown made
Long ago.

Langston Hughes

The 1619 Project won a Pulitzer Prize. It inspired and disgusted, drew condemnation from a President1, won endorsement from the US Education Department2, and triggered ongoing waves of performative outrage from voices eager to exploit it as a proxy front in America's burgeoning culture wars. Five prominent American historians expressed their dismay at its factual errors, its closed process, and its misleading selection of material in a letter to the magazine. An article in Forbes echoing their words attributed its Pultitzer to ideology over excellence, and in October 2020 the National Association of Scholars called for the award to be rescinded. Amendments have been made to the online version in response to various critiques, as a result of which New York Times columnist Bret Stephens declared that the project had failed. James McPherson, a leading historian and signatory of the afore-mentioned letter, with a Pulitzer of his own, described the work as a very unbalanced, one-sided account, which lacked context and perspective.

Wow. So, before we go any further, what is all the fuss about?

The central premise of The 1619 Project is simple: that the United States was founded on both an ideal and a lie. All men were not created equal, nor were they counted as such by a Constitition that explicitly accorded an unfree person only three-fifths of the representative weight of a free one (Article 1, Section 2, Clause 3). And far from being endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, the negro possessed no rights which the white man was bound to respect, according to none other than the Supreme Court3. So far, so uncontroversial4, but this was just prologue. The 1619 Project maintains that this is not just history, that Emancipation and the Reconstruction did not make everything better, that the New Deal did not fix the issues, and that the Civil Rights movement did not succeed in drawing a line under it all. Rather it asserts that racism was and remains an inextricable part of America's DNA, that its malign and pervasive effects reach into most aspects of American life, and that this story is systematically underrepresented in the teaching of American history.

Before the great dawn of liberty in 1776, human beings had already been sold as chattel in America for over 150 years, and so they would continue to be afterwards. The claim that the revolutionaries of 1776 were motivated in large part by the desire to defend slavery was the one that drew the most condemnation of the Project, resulting in some modifications of the original language, but that was merely the lightening rod in this story. Politically it draws a line from these compromised beginnings, from the narrow scope of early electoral participation through the explicit protections afforded sectional interests and the emphasis on self-determination in American government. From John C. Calhoun's defence of the rights of any state subject to Federal laws to veto said laws5, through to William F. Buckley Jr's 1957 assertion that It is more important for any community, anywhere in the world, to affirm and live by civilised standards6, than to bow to the demands of the majority, the much lauded chacks and balances built into the government of the United States appear to be precisely calibrated to enable a permanent and hopeles minority (as Calhoun described the antebellum slave south) to frustrate the will of the majority. It traces this line of reasoning through Reagan conservatism in the 1980s through to the rise of the Tea Party (in response to demographic trends foreshadowing the end of white America's political majority), and with a couple of extra years' hindsignt could presumably have encompassed voting reforms and the defence of the Senatorial filibuster (an effective veto) in 2021.

Setting its sights upon another sacred cow, the Project debates the origins of America's comparatively extreme model of capitalism. Cotton profits derived from slavery and land appropriations drove the industrialisation of the nineteenth century and the rise of the financial industry, while an economy whose bottom gear was torture developed into a modern society characterised by radical wealth disparities, more adults living in poverty than any other OECD nation, and a markedly unregulated and underunionized workforce: in the words of economic historian Stanley Egerman, a malnourished and mean kind of freedom that kept you out of chains but did not provide bread or shelter.

Before the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth, we were here. Before the pen of Jefferson etched across the pages of history the majestic words of the Declaration of Independence, we were here.

Martin Luther King, Jr.

Beyond these central pillars of politics and economics, further essays examine the enduring legacy of slavery and endemic racism in less obvious spheres of life, in highway planning, public transport, and healthcare provision, as well as in America's penal system and exceptional rates of incarceration (the highest in the world, at 639 prisoners per 100,000 people in 2021).

Trymaine Lee reports on the chasm in wealth separating black and white American familes (an average of $17,600 against $171,000), on the dispossession of black families' lands after the Reconstruction, and upon their ongoing exclusion from government wealth-creation programmes, particularly guaranteed loans for mortgages for which they were ineligible to apply, and benefits legislated for jobs from which they were largely excluded. In a separate article for The Atlantic in 2014, author and essayist Ta-Nehisi Coates set out a compelling case for reparations to America's black communities not only for the criems of slavery but for the enduring segregation, exploitation and oppression since. Of present-day America's desire to move on, to declare a post-racial society in which the ills of the past have been cured and its sins remitted, he observed: It is though we have run up a credit card bill, and having pledged to charge no more, remain befuddled that the balance does not disappear. The effects of that balance, interest accruing daily, are all around us.

The impact of The 1619 Project has been far greater than the sum of its parts (not least because most of its detractors probably never bothered to read them all), amounting to a fundamental reassessment of American history. To what extent should we believe it, and what would this mean?

America did not begin in 1619. Nor of course did it begin in 1776, or in 1607, or even in 1492. Any attempt to impose a beginning to this story, an outer edge, is an attempt to frame it, to declare what belongs within the narrative and what does not. And the story, if we are to call it that, cannot simply be one of enduring oppression of black people by whites7. Errors of fact, of over-simplification, of selectively-presented evidence, and of comprehensively ignored nuance have certainly been made. Does this mean we should agree with Bret Stephens, that it has failed? If so, the same can be said of much of our history and most of our textbooks8. The picture painted by The 1619 Project is unbalanced, but not nearly so much as it might appear, nor as its critics maintain. That it seems so can be attributed to the opposite but far from equal imbalance of so much American history, histories that have methodically downplayed, diminished and categorically dismissed the oppression, discrimination, and violence black Americans have endured. As author, poet, and wypipologist9 Michael Harriot wrote, The fact that most people know about Betsy Ross’s amazing ability to sew or Paul Revere’s talent for riding and yelling, but have never heard of Mary Ellen Pleasant or Colonel Tye is proof that the American education system is filtered through the lens of whiteness10.

We could attribute this to a well-meaning desire not to expose schoolchildren to distressing or uncomfortable truths11, or to avoid nurturing a sense of grievance, persecution, or victimhood (even, or especially, in the case of those with every right to be aggreived when they or their families have been persecuted, are being victimised). Is this why the history books have so long glossed over the systematic destruction of the prosperous black district of Greenwood in Tulsa in 1921 and the mass murder of its residents? Or the violent overthrow of the biracial city government of Wilmington, North Carolina in 1898, destruction of black local businesses, and killings of at least 60 (described as the only successful coup in United States history)?

Or should we perhaps see the very deliberate hand of groups such as The United Daughters of the Confederacy, a southern organisation dedicated to preserving the memory of the Confederate dead and the so-called 'Lost Cause' of the South. The United Daughters achieved considerable success in influencing school history teaching and schoolboards' textbook choices, obliging publishers intent on nationwide adoptions to refer to the Civil War as 'The War Between the States', or even 'The War for States Rights', and to portray an antebellum South of happy and faithful slaves who went so far as to take up arms to defend their owners from Northern aggression. Early editions of American Pageant, a widespread high school text, went so far as to describe it as 'The War for Southern Independence', a struggle to throw off the yoke of 'King' Abraham Lincoln.

Wouldn't it be nice if history was nicer? Tautologically, yes. Historian Emil Pocock justly described American Pageant as a patriotic work that celebrates American progress and the free enterprise system, qualities which doubtless endeared it to many a schoolboard selection committee. Do we need to dwell on the unpleasant stuff? Couldn't we just move on?

Maybe we could, though you have to wonder where that would leave the study of history. But this isn't as ever, just history, and the suggestion might carry more weight if indeed society had moved on. As the authors of The 1619 Project, and so many others, attest, it hasn't. Not to the extent to which we might like to assure ourselves. As James Loewen wrote, When textbooks make racism invisible in American history, they obstruct our already poor ability to see it in the present. The past, as ever, is not dead.

Historians aim to reconstruct the past, what happened and why, from the facts as best we can understand them. But there are too many facts (and, of course, not enough), so we need to organise, select, assemble them into an orderly and instructive narrative. As readers, as students, as people we need these narratives, but every story, no matter how meticulously researched and impartially presented, is only a story. Every truth, even when it is nothing but the truth, cannot be the whole truth.

Yes, The 1619 Project is selective, like every history. Yes, it only presents one side of the story, and has been deliberately partial in its selection of facts and in its more subjective interpretations in order to support this case, but it has this in common with every other historical narrative, every other story. That it is so jarring, shocking, alarming even, is because it is not partial in the way we are used to and comfortable with. We have been shown something familiar in a new way, seen that it is not what we thought it was. Or, more crucially, not only what we thought it was. And we recognise that other people see it very differently. Our students, writes Steven Mintz, Professor of History at the University of Texas, need an honest, fair-minded understanding of the past, not a whitewashed, sanitized version. They need to engage with this country’s profound contradictions: that a land of opportunity and a haven for religious freedom, with its soaring ideals of liberty and equality and unmatched technological and scientific achievements, could, simultaneously, be a place of displacement and dispossession, slavery, discrimination and violence and death without a counterpart in the 19th-century Western world.

The fact is, slavery and Jim Crow are stains upon what is the greatest nation on the face of the earth and the greatest government ever conceived by man. But when we conceived this government and said all men were created equal we didn't in fact make all men equal, nor did we make women equal. We have worked to form a more perfect union, and part of forming a more perfect union is laws, and part of it is such as resolutions like we have before us today where we face up to our mistakes and we apologize, as anyone should apologize for things that were done in the past that were wrong. And we begin a dialogue that will hopefully lead us to a better understanding of where we are in America today and why certain conditions exist.

United States Congressman Steve Cohen, 2008

Bibliography

• Barnes, P. (2020) 'Ideology Over Excellence: Awarding The Pulitzer Prize To The 1619 Project' Forbes, 27th September 2020
• Bynum, V. et al. (2019) 'RE: The 1619 Project' The New York Times Magazine, 29th December 2019
• Coates, T. 'The Case for Reparations' The Atlantic, June 2014
• Suk Gerson, J. 'The Importance of Teachign Dred Scot' The New Yorker, 8th June 2021
• Hannah-Jones, N. et al. 'The 1619 Project' The New York Times Magazine, 14th August 2019
• Harriot, M. 'We Found the Textbooks of Senators Who Oppose The 1619 Project and Suddenly Everything Makes Sense', The Root, 6th May 2021
• Loewen, J. (2018) Lies My Teacher Told Me, New York: Simon & Schuster.
• Mintz, S. 'The 1619 Project and Uses and Abuses of History' Inside Higher Ed, 28th October 2020
• Stephens, B. (2020) 'The 1619 Chronicles' The New York Times Magazine, 9th October 2020