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

We cannot change the hypocrisy upon which we were founded... We cannot make up for all of the lives lost and dreams snatched, for all the suffering endured. But we can atone for it. We can acknowledge the crime. And we can do something to try to set things right, to ease the hardship and hurt of so many of our fellow Americans. …nationalized amnesia can no longer provide the excuse.

“even as the fed government decided that Black people were undeserving of any restitution, it was bestowing millions of acres in the West on white Americans… 46 mil adults today, are descended from those homesteaders… If that many white Americans can trace their legacy of wealth & property ownership to a single entitlement program, then the perpetuation of Black poverty must also be linked to national policy"

“To this day, the only Americans who have
ever received government restitution for slavery were white enslavers in
Washington, D.C., whom the federal government compensated after the Civil
War for their loss of human property.
… contemplate what it means to achieve freedom without a home to live in, without food to eat, a bed to sleep on, clothes for your children, or money to buy any of it.”

"How can you thank a man for giving you what's already yours?" he asked, speaking of the Civil Rights Act, which was making its way through Congress at the time.
"You haven't even made progress, if what's being given to you, you should have had already. That's not progress" Malcolm X

"The negro has saved himself," Ralph
Waldo Emerson observed, "and the white man very patronizingly says, I have saved you." … Upon this myth, each successive generation of white Americans is let off the hook for the legacy of slavery. … can claim that this sin remains a part of the past, that the country has rid itself of the stain, and that there is no need for antiracist remedies like reparations.

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. … when a white person kills an African American, it is 281 percent more likely to be ruled a "justifiable homicide" than a white-on-white killing.

America has evolved into one of the world's most inequitable societies… roots back
to slavery and its aftermath. If today America promotes…low-road capitalism--…of poverty wages, gig jobs,
and normalized insecurity…; a racist capitalism that ignores the fact that slavery didn't just deny Black freedom but
built white fortunes…-one reason is that American capitalism was founded on the
lowest road there is.

the pattern established during slavery has remained... Modern day policing, surveillance, & mass criminalization, as well as white vigilante violence & "know-your-place aggression," have histories rooted in white
fear-not merely of Black crime or Black people but of Black liberation. Nothing has proved more threatening to our democracy, or more devastating to Black communities, than white fear of Black freedom dreams