The articles in The New York Times’ 1619 Project — observing the 400th anniversary of American slavery and its implications — are worth your time, and mine. It’s a beautiful online interactive, but very inconvenient if you want to gradually work you way through the articles over a span of days. I poked around, but couldn’t find a simple list of links to articles, so here’s one:
- Our democracy’s founding ideals were false when they were written. Black Americans have fought to make them true, by Nikole Hannah-Jones
- If you want to understand the brutality of American capitalism, you have to start on the plantation, by Matthew Desmond
- Myths about physical racial differences were used to justify slavery — and are still believed by doctors today, by Linda Villarosa
- America holds onto an undemocratic assumption from its founding: that some people deserve more power than others, by Jamelle Bouie
- For centuries, black music has been the sound of artistic freedom. No wonder everybody’s always stealing it, by Wesley Morris
- What does a traffic jam in Atlanta have to do with segregation? Quite a lot, by Kevin Kruse
- Why doesn’t the United States have universal health care? The answer begins with policies enacted after the Civil War, by Jeneen Interlandi
- Slavery gave America a fear of black people and a taste for violent punishment. Both still define our prison system, by Bryan Stevenson
- The sugar that saturates the American diet has a barbaric history as the ‘white gold’ that fueled slavery, by Khalil Gibran Muhammad
- A vast wealth gap, driven by segregation, redlining, evictions and exclusion, separates black and white America, by Trymaine Lee
- Their ancestors were enslaved by law. Today, they are graduates of the nation’s preeminent historically black law school, a photo essay by Djeneba Aduayom
Here is, what I am told, a full PDF version of all these articles, as they appeared in print. Here is where to buy it in print.
The NYT site promises more to come. I’m not sure how I’ll learn about them, but if/when I do, I’ll update this list.
