The history of slavery is, problematically, usually limited to just a single image: slaves laboring. Slavery, for the most part—for most people—means little more than sweaty black laborers in a field picking cotton and all the myriad miseries that entails. The real truth—the larger truth—of the matter is that slavery was a systemic economic process that only began in the fields. By the time the fruits of that labor had completed its journey, it is not going too far to suggest that quite literally every single American had profited to some degree as well as a goodly chunk of Europeans. And slavery doesn’t end with abolition. The fruits of the racism which instigated and maintained slavery are still being flowering today. The long hot summer of 2020 is proof enough of that.
What the 1619 Project sets out to do and accomplishes with a great flourish is to reveal the extent to which slavery is so much more than the slaves themselves. That is not to suggest that they are not the central concern and issue, of course. But to those who would suggest that once they were no longer forced into bondage and handed something graciously called “freedom” and therefore the issue is over and done with, it is of extreme importance to learn just how far in time and space from the “slaves” of slavery that the issue of slavery extends.
Anyone who thinks that the history of African-Americans following the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment is inseparable and identical to the history of Italian-Americans or Russian-Americans or Irish-Americans need only look at the statistics. It is documented fact that as a minority group, blacks in Americans have historically suffered at the hands of worse health care, discriminatory economics, physical segregation, denial of opportunities, and an overall lower quality of life than white immigrants from any country or region. And it all comes down to the fact white immigrants came to America voluntarily with an understanding of being treated on equal grounds while black immigrants came here against their will with an understanding being an inferior “race.”
In addition to revealing—apparently for what will be the very first time to some readers—that “race” does not exist in scientific terms but is a man-made construction, the 1619 Project illuminates how the entire history of the United States has been propagated under the perpetration of this fraud. Everything that has and currently exist in the minds of anyone about racial differences—in other words, any racist thought—is based upon an idea that simply does not exist. There is no such thing as racial difference other the most obvious: skin color. And yet, the entire story of America has been predicated upon a universal acceptance of this myth as unquestioned scientific fact. And that explains why the 1619 Project was greeted in some quarters with such fierce opposition and virulent rejection that one might well have thought it was written by Karl Marx.
