The 1619 Project

By Max J. Castro Last updated Sep 4, 2019

The New York Times is engaging in an extraordinarily ambitious journalistic endeavor called the 1619 Project. The goal is to rewrite the American origin story, from the relentlessly Eurocentric and celebratory one we learn in grade school. The revision foregrounds racism and oppression of blacks as a foundational and highly consequential component of the American story, from 1619, when enslaved Africans first were brought into what is now Virginia, until the present instant.

The first installment argues persuasively that there are surprisingly strong connections between the legacy of slavery and racism and everything from the dysfunctionality of our transportation system, the miserly nature of our safety net, including health care, and the savagery of American capitalism compared to Western European capitalism.

Many people are bound to think, what could possibly be the connection between our current nightmare of interminable commutes in Miami and bumper-to-bumper traffic in Atlanta and racism?

Our transportation system, built around the car and high-speed expressways, was in no small part developed to ensure segregation in housing, schools and public accommodations. Middle class whites in Atlanta, for example, can get in their cars in the city and drive to lily-white suburbs in the next county over, avoiding city traffic and city folks, overwhelmingly black.

The desire of Atlanta whites to have as little as possible to do with black Atlantans is evident in how suburban counties have voted on the issue of expanding the area’s rapid transit system, the Metropolitan Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority (MARTA). Time and again, suburbanites have voted ‘No’ by comfortable or overwhelming margins. Traffic congestion is preferable for these voters than the prospect of easy access for blacks seeking employment or housing.

The same dynamic has been taking place all over the country, and those affected adversely by it are not only African Americans but everyone who doesn’t own a car or is unable to drive—mainly the poor, the elderly, and disabled people: The usual victims. The long arm of racism harms not only the intended targets but a lot of other people too.

Then there is the fact that the blueprint for our authoritarian system of relations between bosses and workers is the plantation and the relation between master and slave. While workers in Western European countries generally have unions, bargaining rights, contracts, the right to appeal dismissal, in the United States generally the law stipulates employees can be dismissed “at will.”

This system of firing by wish and whim means that should your boss find out you intend to vote for the wrong candidate, should you dye your hair the wrong color, or should you just rub your boss the wrong way, you can be gone in a New York minute, regardless of performance, ability or anything else. The law does prohibit bosses from firing you because of your race, religion, disability, or membership in a handful of other protected classes. But in the context of the right to fire by wish and whimsy, these illegal firings happen often. And, the serf-like status of employees goes a way toward explaining why bosses got away for so long with everything from violent sexual assault to garden-variety sexual harassment. Powerlessness breeds abuse, and American women in the work force, as all other employees, have been powerless.

How does race help explain the meagerness of our safety net and our mercenary medical system that privileges profits over care for all and even life? People everywhere are less generous with their tax money when they think it will be spent on people unlike themselves ethnically or racially than they are when they think it will go to help people like themselves. In the United States this tendency is especially strong because of centuries of slavery that had to be justified by casting blacks as inferior children of a lesser god. That was followed by a century of pseudo-freedom, a racial caste system rationalized by the same lies that were used to justify slavery.

The strongest reason for the puny U.S. safety net is simply the fact that so many white Americans don’t want to have their dollars used to support a “a shiftless, lazy, libertine” sector of the population. And who are they? “Those people,” as Paul Krugman writes satirizing such a view. Mainly, the mythical “welfare queens and bucks using food stamps to buy prime steaks” are black or, increasingly, Latino.

Racism may not be the root of all evil, but it is the source of a good proportion of it, including the emergence of Donald Trump. The 1619 Project is not a response to Trump’s racism as such but an attempt to explore and begin extirpating the deep genetic origins of the malady. Trump is a malignant mass, but he is not the primary tumor. The metastasis has been ongoing since 1619 and this country has not yet found the way to stop it.