Reviews tagging 'Hate crime'

The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story by Nikole Hannah-Jones

26 reviews

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“For generations we have believed in this country with faith it did not deserve. Black people have seen the worst in America yet somehow, we still believe in its best.”- The 1619 project 

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Style/writing: 4.5 stars
Themes: 4.5 stars
Perspective: 4.5 stars

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A journey through African American history in the United States.  Starting with slavery up until present.

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This is a collection of essays that are well worth reading, and cover the many contributions made by enslaved people and later by the freed Black people to America, whether economic, medical, religious, and the arts.  It is really unfortunate that a lot of this will be new information to people due to the white washing of history that is taught in a lot of schools.  Some of the essays are very hard to read due to the content, but it is important to know what really happened with the horrible ways Black people were enslaved, punished, or killed just for "succeeding" in life, because without understanding and acknowledging that, we cannot begin to move forward in reconciliation and reparations.  The ramifications of what happened in 1619 are still echoing down through the centuries today and influencing vast aspects of American life.  Some of the early history essays covered familiar ground for me (Government BA with a lot of History classes), so I personally enjoyed more the topics on Medicine, religion, art, etc, but there are some excellent essays there for people less familiar with that early history.  And even so, I still learned from those early essays.  The only reason I don't give this a full 5 stars is that a few of the essays did feel a bit repetitive, covering essentially the same ground.  A few essays felt a bit too short and I wished they had been expanded. 

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Started as a special edition in the the New York Times to commemorate the 400 year anniversary of the first African captives sold against their will as chattel slaves in Virginia, the 1619 Projects aims to be the framework for critical race theory, which looks at American history and adds back in the truths previously deemed unnecessary and to remove various beliefs about slavery. It's a devastating and necessary read. 

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A book blogger suggested that this is a great audiobook. I'm afraid I have to disagree. The authors read the essays; unfortunately, not all authors are great narrators. The performances of the poems would be the exception. After nearly falling asleep while driving the car, I decided to try reading it another way. Thankfully, Kindle had a sale that included both the written and audio versions of the book.

The essays are enlightening and contain the history I wish I had learned in school.

While there have been criticisms, I feel this New York Times response best describes the purpose of the book. "The very premise of The 1619 Project, in fact, is that many of the inequalities that continue to afflict the nation are a direct result of the unhealed wound created by 250 years of slavery and an additional century of second-class citizenship and white-supremacist terrorism inflicted on black people (together, those two periods account for 88 percent of our history since 1619). These inequalities were the starting point of our project — the facts that, to take just a few examples, black men are nearly six times as likely to wind up in prison as white men, or that black women are three times as likely to die in childbirth as white women, or that the median family wealth for white people is $171,000, compared with just $17,600 for black people. The rampant discrimination that black people continue to face across nearly every aspect of American life suggests that neither the framework of the Constitution nor the strenuous efforts of political leaders in the past and the present, both white and black, has yet been able to achieve the democratic ideals of the founding for all Americans."

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