I have followed The 1619 Project at The New York Times Magazine from its inception last year and into this with enthusiasm, and I now realise that I have been remiss in posting on it. From time to time I have also noted the disquiet and some controversy amongst historians and others; interesting in itself, but not something I am able to offer a qualified opinion on.
The premise of the project lay in placing the birth of America as a nation not at 1776 but with the arrival of the first ship of enslaved Africans in Virginia in August, 1619, and the profound consequences in determining the course of American history and society. As Jake Silverstein, the magazine’s editor-in-chief says:
Out of slavery — and the anti-black racism it required — grew nearly everything that has truly made America exceptional: its economic might, its industrial power, its electoral system, its diet and popular music, the inequities of its public health and education, its astonishing penchant for violence, its income inequality, the example it sets for the world as a land of freedom and equality, its slang, its legal system and the endemic racial fears and hatreds that continue to plague it to this day. The seeds of all that were planted long before our official birth date, in 1776, when the men known as our founders formally declared independence from Britain.
The goal of The 1619 Project is to reframe American history by considering what it would mean to regard 1619 as our nation’s birth year. Doing so requires us to place the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of the story we tell ourselves about who we are as a country.
“Why we published The 1619 Project”, Jack Silverstein, Dec. 20 2019
It seems this remains an ongoing project, and I hope so for there is a lot more to be said, already there is a bounty of interesting and “edgy” material, and in light of recent events (also, ongoing – for better or worse) this is surely a good time to think again (or still) about issues of race and racism that may not only be systemic, but are certainly so entrenched in societal and institutional structures that without being addressed at their root will forever inhibit a more equable American society.
Beyond the historical, in literary terms, and especially given my relatively recent discovery of Jesmyn Ward, I was particularly arrested by this instalment. Singing with their particular brand of poetry and prose, sixteen writers pay tribute to some of the not so well known moments of American history that have left their mark on a continent and its people. Jesmyn Ward’s short fiction remembers the enactment of the “Act Prohibiting Importation of Slaves” on January 1, 1808, and how little that did to alleviate the suffering and brutality of the antebellum South. I recall reading a year or so ago that her next novel will be set in that time and place so this may be a tiny extract; certainly something she’s thinking about a lot.