The 1619 Project: Understanding How Slavery Shaped America | Nikole Hannah-Jones

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Nikole Hannah-Jones was named a MacArthur Genius for “reshaping national conversations around education reform”. This is but one honor in a growing list: she’s won a Peabody, a Polk, and a National Magazine Award for her story on choosing a school for her daughter in a segregated city. Most recently, her New York Times Magazine’s The 1619 Project, on the history and legacy of American slavery, went viral and garnered her even more honors for her groundbreaking journalism.

[claibornebanks]

I like the thesis that my people created things most unique in a land that never truly accepted us. A land where slavery is praised as an efficient economic system. That idea jettisoned me from a economics course taught by a man who I believe was from India. The university where that course was taught was upstate New York. I was about 19 years old at the time. Over the next near 50 years I was bludgeoned both psychologically and several times even physically all for being an African American man. Unbelievable isn’t it? Not to the millions of African American men and women who had similar experiences. Black people never were to be accepted as equals in what were the colonies then America. I believe it was this lady who said it so well: When white Americans didn’t need Black people any more, they turned on Black people. That lack of need wasn’t an organic outcome. It was a byproduct of the Civil War. Note the similarity in the posture of many white Americans ready, willing, and able to kill to keep America from becoming a true multicultural democracy in this 21th Century. Just like the sentiment among white Americans in the Civil War era. The more things change the more they stay the same.
Note Miss Jones choking back her emotions when she started talking about her share-cropper aunt. The trauma of slavery, of being treated like property reverberates in this very moment.