I especially enjoyed the inclusion of archival records in the podcast and that they supplement one another. I read all of the essays and then listened to the podcast episodes, and highly recommend both formats. The 1619 Project is a collection of essays that examines the legacy of slavery and is a good first step for people looking to educate themselves and confront their privilege. Read all the stories | Listen to the PodcastFrom traffic to healthcare to incarceration, every facet of our society can be traced to the history of slavery and continued racism in our country.
I'm glad this exists and if read by the right people it could do some good, but I left disappointed. You will never be able to publish something actually radical (especially Black and radical) in the NYT, but Jones knows that and the NYT knows Jones isn't radical anyway. The reality is if you could only pick one mode of analysis, then you could do much more to solve the problems raised here by examining capitalism than by examining slavery (of course you can and should use both modes of analysis, but I'm highlighting the point), so to not examine capitalism at all is a significant failure in the project.
In fact, the opening essay actually tries to claim that capitalism can be "liberating" if only practiced correctly (whatever correctly means). But 1) Not everything is reducible to slavery (as a minor example, the claim that contemporary black hair styles come out of slavery is such a simplification of history as to be essentially false and erases the impact of the "Black is Beautiful" movement of the 1960s) and 2) tracing everything back to slavery ignores the question of why slavery started in the first place, namely capitalism. Yes, slavery is crucial to understanding America. My issue with this collection is that it is too simplistic in its analysis in a way that verges on counterproductive at times.
0 kommentar(er)
