Maria’s Reviews > The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story > Status Update

"In the eyes of white people, Black criminality was broadly defined. Anything Black people did to challenge the racial hierarchy could be seen as a crime, punished either by the law or by lawless lynchings, which were epidemic in the South but also took place in the West and the North."

"Th Thirteenth Amendment is credited with ending slaver, but it stopped short of that. It made an exception for those convicted of crimes .... And it could not abolish the tru evil of American slavery, which as the belief that Black people are less evolved, less human, less capable, less deserving, less trustworthy than white people."

“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.”

"Behind the cases of [white people who killed Black people] is a legacy of laws originally created to make it easer for white people to defend themselves against the Black people they enslaved, who were defined as "dangerous" because they wanted desperately to be free."

"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."

“[W]hen interracial violence does occur, these [self-defense] laws can end up protecting white people—but leaving Black people vulnerable to white violence.”

White Americans have a “chronic fear … of what true justice might require.”

“Without the stolen labor of formerly enslaved people, the region’s economy swiftly collapsed, and without the institution of slavery, there was no longer a formal mechanism for maintaining racial hierarchy and preventing “amalgamation” with a group of people considered intrinsically inferior and vile.”

“The Haitian act of independence radically upended the basic premise of white supremacy upon which slavery rested, and asserted Black people’s fundamental human rights to liberty and self-governance.”

“In Virginia, then, to be Black was to be enslaved. To be free and Black was to be a threat.”