Yesterday’s New York Times magazine section was entirely devoted to the 1619 Project, an ambitious collection of essays and art commemorating the arrival of the first enslaved people to what is now the United States. “No aspect of the country that would be formed here has been untouched by the 250 years of slavery that followed,” says the blurb. The writers and artists talk about the history and the enduring legacy of slavery.
What did you learn? What did you like? What did you take away?
Some quick takes:
Not a lot of the history was a surprise. Maybe none of it. I hadn’t known, or maybe just hadn’t considered, that in law, enslaved people were considered “things, not persons” for the purposes of rights, but people for the purposes of culpability for crimes. They had no more civil rights than your car, but they were considered capable of committing crimes and could be punished by the legal system.
Check out the the sounds and wordplay in the poem about the Black Seminoles, enslaved people who escaped south to Florida:
I’ll take away the notion of calling plantations “forced-labor camps,” because they were and it’s more accurate.
All in all, the issue didn’t teach me new ideas. It just taught me a different way to think about what I already knew.
I skimmed some of the pieces and found a couple of compelling points, especially about the connections between slavery and capitalism, slavery and our prison system.
Very thought-provoking, and as you said it opens my mind to ways of approaching history.
It can be fun to just dip in to the issue. I recommend the essay on criminal justice on page 81; it’s a quick read, just the one page. Or take a look at the wonderful poem by Tyehimba Jess on page 58.
I have been following Nikole Hannah-Jones for several years. She did a “This American Life” story in 2015 about desegregation. Finding voices like hers has made my understanding more full. I am grateful for her. Her essay at the beginning was amazing.
I haven’t looked at it in depth yet, but I wish they had started with slavery coming to the New World, not just the English colonies. It was likely already a practice in Florida, Puerto Rico, and the Virgin Islands, all current parts of the US, for 100 years or so already.
Columbus planted sugar cane in the Caribbean on his second voyage, 1493-96. I guess after they killed off most of the local inhabitants, they decided to bring in slaves from Africa. A very ugly history.
Well, they’re commemorating the 400th anniversary of enslaved people coming to the English colonies that became our country, not the anniversary of enslaved people coming to the Americas. The editors could have made a different choice, but the choice they made works. It’s not like they don’t have enough words to fill up the magazine, even though they restrict the work to events after 1619.
^ Well, Florida, Puerto Rico, and the Virgin Islands became part of our country, too, albeit not at the founding. I certainly think 1619 is worth commemorating, but I also think greenwitch makes a valid point. You don’t need to bring in all of the Americas, but a more comprehensive look at the entire country would provide some useful context. We tend to think of slavery starting in Virginia in 1619 and spreading from there to other colonies and later states, but in fact there were multiple routes of entry. The Dutch brought slaves to New Amsterdam (New York) in 1626., just a few years after the British brought slaves to Virginia.
If the 1619 Project had started with enslaved black people coming to the Americas, I don’t see that how it would have been much different.
It’s not a history book; it’s a collection of pieces. There’s an essay about how a desire for racial segregation when the highway system was built makes for traffic jams now in Atlanta. There’s an essay about the economics of growing cotton. There’s one about how an unknown enslaved person named Antoine developed the pecan tree, and a poem about the four little black girls murdered in the Birmingham church bombing. There are pictures of young law students at Howard, with their parents and grandparents. The whole magazine skips around like that. I don’t see what pushing the date earlier than 1619 would have changed, in practice.
It gives some good questions to think about when reading the essay. Hannah-Jones makes clear that she is trying to augment what we have previously learned about the founding of our country, and how we think about it. For example,
The mention of the Black Panther Party for Self Defense on page 79 does not mention its role in getting open-carry of firearms heavily restricted in California (the Mulford Act, with bipartisan and NRA support).
Isn’t that what “before gun laws/ shifting in the wake of organized strength” is referring to? Gun laws shifting in the wake of the organized strength of the Black Panthers?
I have yet to read the whole issue. I had a lot of work over the weekend and into Monday, but I picked it up last night and started reading around. One of the common themes that was striking was the systematic post-Emancipation confiscation or devaluation of Black-owned property. I knew that intellectually, but the issue was putting it into the context of people’s lives, of families that worked hard and prospered and were robbed of their prosperity.
The Spaniards, I believe, never really developed an African slave trade. The Portuguese did, in a big way; that’s why there’s such a large population of African descent in Brazil. The Spaniards tended to concentrate on enslaving the indigenous population (or, in the southern cone, simply eliminating indigenous people and importing European workers for less labor-intensive projects).
The French had an African slave trade also, in the Caribbean and Louisiana. The Caribbean sugar plantations were notoriously brutal, even in the context of chattel slavery.