Publisher’s Note: The publisher has had no role in editing this column, which is published as the writer submitted it with the intention of publication in BEACONS.
By Cal Seeley
Ms. Nikole Hannah-Jones, creator of the 1619 project, has taken the responsibility upon herself to teach Americans falsehoods and shortcomings that have gone overlooked in our history. Her Pulitzer Prize-winning piece is a powerful, vibrant story that weaves herself and her family into the greater narrative of American lies about slavery and racism. Her piece is a long, winding journey that is made up of two main arguments, as illustrated in her title: “Our democracy’s founding ideals were false when they were written. Black Americans have fought to make them true.”
She begins her piece referring to the internal conflict she has between herself and her father about flying the American flag above her home in her red-lined neighborhood that sits in a segregated Iowan town. She wonders how her father can be proud to fly the flag of a nation that had routinely oppressed him and others who looked like him.
Her story progresses and she begins to reckon with the nation’s history, particularly its shortcomings with Black people and the nation’s founding based on the famous quote from the Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal…”
Her overall argument revolves around the hypocrisy of that one line. How can a nation find pride in that statement when its authors, the slave-owning founding fathers, failed to recognize its own truth? “The United States is a nation founded on both an ideal and a lie,” she wrote.
Ms. Hannah-Jones calls it as it is: a blatant lie. Through effective usage of historical facts that have gone overlooked in most American history textbooks, she is able to clearly convey her message to the reader. One after the other, she highlights the blatant racism in America’s most prominent and beloved political figures. In a particularly eye-opening passage, Ms. Hannah-Jones describes a meeting between a handful of prominent Black men and President Lincoln. The president had invited them to the White House to discuss the future of Black people in America, particularly the possibility of sending the freed Black people to another country. “‘Why should they leave this country? This is, perhaps, the first question for proper consideration,’ Lincoln told them. ‘You and we are different races. ... Your race suffers very greatly, many of them, by living among us, while ours suffer from your presence. In a word, we suffer on each side.’”
Disclaimer: Before I continue, I would like to acknowledge my privilege as a white man and the fact that I will never know the struggles and hardships of Black Americans on a personal level. That being said, this is simply a review of how effective I thought the piece to be.
As the piece progresses, her focus shifts from the historical lies towards the role Black Americans had in calling for and creating change in the United States. The piece also becomes much more personal and prideful. “My father...knew what it would take me years to understand: that the year 1619 is as important to the American story as 1776. That black Americans, as much as those men cast in alabaster in the nation’s capital, are this nation’s true ‘founding fathers.’ And that no people has a greater claim to the flag than us.”
This pride continues and she even starts to attack and point fingers at other groups who have been in the way of Black people. A particularly ineffective part of the story is when the author makes a jab at Asian-Americans. “It is a truly American irony that some Asian-Americans, among the groups able to immigrate to the United States because of the black civil rights struggle, are now suing universities to end programs designed to help the descendants of the enslaved.” The author seems to add this quip at the end of a paragraph and never brings it up again. She never adds area for further research or ties this into the rest of her piece. It makes the reader question the author’s focus while also impeding the effectiveness of the author’s call-to-action to her readers.
The pride continues, however she changes her tone and focuses on the incredible ability of Black Americans to make leaps of progress under the pressures associated with racism. Beautifully, she ties in a short personal story that encapsulates the meaning of her article. Her conclusion is concise and sums up the article’s focus: “We were told once, by virtue of our bondage, that we could never be American. But it was by virtue of our bondage that we became the most American of all.”
Ms. Hannah-Jones excels in teaching her audience. Her immaculate use of forgotten history and facts is sure to make readers skeptical of their own education. Through her personal stories of hardship, she is able to craft a deeply brutal, yet uplifting story of the great accomplishments of Black Americans.
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