Trending Now
We have updated our Privacy Policy and Terms of Use for Eurasia Group and its affiliates, including GZERO Media, to clarify the types of data we collect, how we collect it, how we use data and with whom we share data. By using our website you consent to our Terms and Conditions and Privacy Policy, including the transfer of your personal data to the United States from your country of residence, and our use of cookies described in our Cookie Policy.
{{ subpage.title }}
Was modern America built on slavery?
At the start of the Revolutionary War, slaves made up 20 percent of the population in British North America. They later built iconic buildings of US democracy like the Capitol and the White House in Washington.
But what if slavery was more than just America’s original sin? What if the institution of slavery itself was foundational to modern America?
That's what Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones defends — in very simple terms — in the 1619 Project. This sprawling collection of essays, short stories, and poetry published in 2019 argues that American history begins not in 1776 with the Declaration of Independence but rather 157 years earlier, when the first slave ship arrived in the British colonies on the other side of the Atlantic.
The 1619 Project landed like a cultural atom bomb. And soon later, the formerly obscure academic field known as “critical race theory” or CRT took center stage at conservative rallies and school board meetings.
What's the relationship, if any, between the two? Ian Bremmer explains.
Nikole Hannah-Jones pushes back against "disqualifying" 1619 Project criticism
Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones has often had to defend her work as the creator of the 1619 Project, a piece of modern journalism that has gained as much praise on one end of the US political spectrum as it has sparked outrage on the other.
Hannah-Jones admits some of the criticism was fair game — and that's one reason she’s just published an extended version of the project in book form, entitled The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story. But she rejects those who’ve tried to disqualify her and the project.
"People were saying these facts are wrong... [and] that this journalism needed to be discredited, and that's not normal," she explains. "And I don't agree with that type of criticism because... it's not true.”
According to Hannah-Jones, part of the problem is the mistaken perception that the 1619 Project claimed that slavery was uniquely American. It did not, she says, but did argue that the history of US slavery is quite exceptional in another way.
"There is something clearly unique about a country engaging in chattel slavery that says it was founded on ideas of individual rights and liberty. And that was not Brazil. That was not Jamaica. That was not any of the islands in the Caribbean. They didn't pretend to be a nation founded on God-given rights. We did."
Watch all of Hannah-Jones' interview with Ian Bremmer on the upcoming episode of GZERO World.