A Republican got offended I called the founding U.S. citizens "colonizers,"—rebuking me that “the original 13 colonies were beacons of freedom.”
I asked him to repeat that part...slowly. Apparently "colonies" is respectful—but calling those who built colonies "colonizers" is not.🤔
Also, I'm sure the enslaved, Native Americans, women, and anyone not a WASP wealthy land owner would likely disagree with that whole "beacon of freedom" part.
"White people regularly deployed lynchings, massacres, and generalized racial terrorism against Black people who bought land, founded schools, built thriving communities, tried to organize sharecroppers’ unions, or opened their own businesses, depriving white owners of economic monopolies and the opportunity to cheat Black buyers."
Nikole Hannah-Jones, Justice, in The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story
"Today Black Americans remain the most segregated group of people in America and are five times as likely as white Americans to live in high-poverty neighborhoods."
Nikole Hannah-Jones, Justice, in The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story
"The prosperity of this country is inextricably linked with the forced labor of the ancestors of more than 30 million Black Americans, just as it is linked to the stolen land of the country’s Indigenous people."
Nikole Hannah-Jones, Justice, in The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story
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“Negro poverty is not white poverty…. These differences are not racial differences. They are solely and simply the consequence of ancient brutality, past injustice and present prejudice. They are anguishing to observe. For the Negro they are a constant reminder of oppression. For the white they are a constant reminder of guilt."
Excerpted from The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story (Nikole Hannah-Jones)
"French scholar Alexis de Tocqueville, who traveled across the United States in the early 1830s, had a different observation. “The prejudice of the race appears stronger in the States which have abolished slavery, than in those where it still exists; and nowhere is it so intolerant as in those States where servitude has never been known"
Ibram X. Kendi, Progress, in The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story (created by Nikole Hannah-Jones
"In 1875, Congress passed the Civil Rights Act, which prohibited racist discrimination in public places and public facilities, including those that provided transportation or food."
Ibram X. Kendi, Progress, in The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story (created by Nikole Hannah-Jones
[Whites who moved to suburban Atlanta blocked efforts to provide public transportation to the suburbs] During the 1960s, roughly sixty thousand white people left the city [Atlanta], another hundred thousand left in the 1970s...suburbanites waged a sustained campaign against the Metropolitan Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority (MARTA) from its inception.
Kevin M. Kruse, Traffic, in The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story (created by Nikole Hannah-Jones)
"Arline T. Geronimus, a professor at the University of Michigan School of Public Health..
coined the term “weathering” to explain how high-effort coping in the face of continuous racial insults exacts a physical price on the bodies of Black Americans."
Linda Villarosa, Medicine, in The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story (created by Nikole Hannah-Jones)
"A study of 222 white medical students and residents published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in 2016 showed that half of the students and residents endorsed at least one false idea about biological differences between Black people and white people, including that Black people’s nerve endings are less sensitive than those of white people."
Linda Villarosa, Medicine, in The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story (Nikole Hannah-Jones)
"...racial health inequality transcends class, and even well-educated Black people with access to healthcare...are more vulnerable to a number of serious diseases."
Linda Villarosa, Medicine, in The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story (created by Nikole Hannah-Jones)
"Samuel Cartwright, a physician and professor of “diseases ofthe Negro” at the University of Louisiana in New Orleans, now Tulane University...maintained that enslaved people were prone to a “disease of the mind” called drapetomania, which caused them to run away from their enslavers."
Linda Villarosa, Medicine, in The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story (created by Nikole Hannah-Jones)
"The United States has the highest rate of incarceration of any nation on earth: this country contains 4 percent of the planet’s population but 20 percent of its prisoners."
Bryan Stevenson, Punishment, in The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story (created by Nikole Hannah-Jones)
"In 2008, EJI established that all of the thirteen- and fourteen-year-old children in this country sentenced to life in prison without parole for non-homicide offenses were Black, Latino, or Native."
Bryan Stevenson, Punishment, in The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story (created by Nikole Hannah-Jones)
"After Reconstruction, rejection of racial equality intensified with convict leasing, a scheme in which white policy makers invented offenses—congregating after dark, vagrancy, loitering—that could be used to arrest Black people, who were then jailed and “leased” to businesses and farms, where they labored under brutal conditions."
Bryan Stevenson, Punishment, in The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story (created by Nikole Hannah-Jones)
"Formal slavery may have ended in 1865, but the social, legal, economic, and political system built in the South to sustain slavery survived by evolving into new forms."
Bryan Stevenson, Punishment, in The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story (created by Nikole Hannah-Jones)
"Even emancipated and free-born Black people were often considered to be presumptive fugitives to be hunted, captured, and sold into slavery. As one nineteenth-century court ruled,“The presumption arising from the color of a person indicating African descent is, that he is a slave.”"
Bryan Stevenson, Punishment, in The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story (created by Nikole Hannah-Jones)
"For a nation that prides itself on being exceptionally committed to freedom, America has produced an endless list of harsh, extreme, and cruel sentences, across the fifty states, for minor and major crimes."
Bryan Stevenson, Punishment, in The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story (created by Nikole Hannah-Jones)
"In 2020, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights reported on the racial implications of Stand Your Ground laws: the criminal justice system is ten times more likely to rule a homicide justifiable if the shooter is white and victim is Black than the other way around."
Carol Anderson, Self-Defense, in The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story (created by Nikole Hannah-Jones)
"White people continue to use self-defense laws to protect themselves from perceived harm from African Americans; Black people often cannot use self-defense to protect themselves from actual harm by white people."
Carol Anderson, Self-Defense, in The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story (created by Nikole Hannah-Jones)
"The Second Amendment was motivated in large part by a need for the new federal government to assure white people in the South that they would be able to defend themselves against Black people."
Carol Anderson, Self-Defense, in The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story (created by Nikole Hannah-Jones)
"The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, in particular, meant that even Black people who were born free, or had managed to buy their freedom or escape slavery, had no legal right to that freedom and limited legal means to defend themselves."
Carol Anderson, Self-Defense, in The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story (created by Nikole Hannah-Jones)