Rolling Stone, August 21, 2019: The 1619 Project’s patriotic work
I don’t need to send droplets of my blood in an envelope to some corporation to know that, for the most part, my forebears were not immigrants to this land. Yet I also know that unlike even our parents, my sister and I were fortunate to be born here with something approximating a complete set of civil rights. We are, in a different way of speaking, first-generation Americans.
Nikole Hannah-Jones, the New York Times Magazine reporter who pitched and then worked to produce the acclaimed 1619 Project over the last several months, can relate. She and I are both 43 years old, part of what she calls in her brilliant opening essay “the first generation of black Americans in the history of the United States to be born into a society in which black people had full rights of citizenship.” Though the 14th Amendment that supposedly ensures all natural-born American citizenship is just more than 150 years old, Jim Crow and other forms of institutional racism ensure that only within the last 50 years or so — since the passage of the last major federal civil-rights legislation in the wake of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s assassination — did black people become legally “free.”
