The 1619 Project Chapter 18 “Justice” by Nikole Hanna-Jones

Chapter 18: “Justice” Nikole Hanna-Jones

1. The core American narrative sees Americans as a good and freedom-loving people who have won their freedom, built a great civilization, and overcome obstacles.  Consequently, White people should reap most of the rewards.
   • What gets left out is the massive and faithful contribution of Black Americans who have contributed massive to the ideals of America’s constitutional democracy alongside of Whites.
   • The most ardent, courageous, and consistent freedom fighters within this country have been Black Americans.
   • She lists David Walker, Fannie Lou Hammer, Latosha Brown, and others
   • The Kerner Report, which followed the assassination of MKL , called for an end to racial discrimination and improvement in Black’s living conditions.
   • In 2020, a multiracial and multigenerational, multi-ethnic protest army braved a pandemic and took to the streets. The protesters gathered in all fifty states in places big and small, from heavily Black big cities to small, almost entirely white towns.
     • Despite the freshness of the George Floyd protests, months later Trump garnered more white votes than he did the first time.
2. Blacks’ lack of wealth
   • This single factor has dragged down black’s ability to find their way out of the prison they have long been in.
   • Wealth is not something most people create solely by themselves; it is accumulated across generations.
   • It is white Americans’ centuries-long economic head start that most effectively maintains racial caste.
   • Rules and policies involving money can be nearly as effective for maintaining the color line as legal segregation and disenfranchisement.
   • Blacks are 5 times more likely to live in an impoverished neighborhood.
   • Hanna-Jones argues that generational wealth enables Whites with lower incomes buy homes in more prosperous neighborhoods because they have generational wealth.
   • Slavery and Jim Crow were fundamentally forms of economic exploitation
   • By the Civil War the aggregate value of all enslaved persons in America equaled more than America’s railroads and factories combined.
3. Compensation
   • Freed Blacks, before and after the Civil War pled for compensation or pension to help them recover from generations of labor without compensation.
   • General Geo. Sherman came up with the 40 Acres and a mule idea, which was immediately overturned by Lincoln’s successor, Andrew Johnson.
   • It was during Reconstruction that any effort to compensate Blacks ended.
   • If the former slaves had access to the ownership of land, of property; if they had had a chance to be self-sufficient economically, to build, accrue and pass on wealth. The failure to compensate Blacks for their 250 years of uncompensated toil was an enormous lost opportunity for America to restore dignity and status to its African descent population.
4. Reparations
   • During Reconstruction elected Black lawmakers pushed Congress for special aid for Black Schools
   • Callie House, ex-slave from Tennessee, organized freed Blacks for mutual aid.  She organized tens of thousands of freed Blacks to pressure Congress to provide pensions for Blacks who had served in the Union Army.
     • In 1915 House hired a Black lawyer to sue the federal government for reparations.
     • House calculated that the US Government owed some 68M to Blacks based on the taxes it collected on cotton prophets.  The money could be paid out as pensions for the laborers who produced the cotton.
     • Woodrow Wilson reacted angrily saying that if pensions were owed they were owed by the masters.  A federal court confirmed the opinion that the government owed nothing.
   • Marcus Garvey, Audley Moore, Malcolm X, Adjoa Aiyetoro and Imari Obadele and others all advocated for reparations.  None have been forthcoming.
   • Blacks were the only race in American history to start out with Zero capital.
     • And much homelessness, starvation and other poverty driven difficulties have been the lot of American Blacks since the Emancipation Proclamation.
   • Homestead Act: the US Government was bestowing millions of acres of stolen land on White Americans.
     • From 1868 to 1934, the federal government gave away 246 million acres in 160-acre tracts, nearly 10 percent of all the land in the nation, to more than 1.5 million white families, native-born and foreign.
     • About 20 percent of America’s population came from ancestors who settled on Homestead Act lands.
     • The wealth divide between Blacks and others is the fruit of policy not racism.
     • The Redemption Period
   • The violence of this period together with the South’s rollback of reforms landed Blacks back in a working and poverty situation comparable to slavery.
   • Black people persisted despite opposition from Whites who attacked financial success by African descent people.
   • 6500 lynchings plus mob attacks on Black businesses and business zones kept Blacks subjected to White Supremacy.
5. Other economic deprivations directed at Blacks
   • Denial of entry into labor unions.
   • Blacks were confined to all-Black neighborhoods.
   • Blacks capable of becoming professionals had to leave the South to find opportunity elsewhere.
   • Book: Ira Katznelson, When Affirmative Action Was White. “The federal government…functioned as a commanding instrument of white privilege.”
   • Official governmental favoritism of Whites continued until the Civil Rights Era.
6. The Civil Rights Era ended the denial of rights under the law.  This did not end other forms of discrimination against Blacks.
7. There has never been a point in American history when even half of the Black children in this country have attended a majority-white school.
   • The Education of Blacks in the South, 1860–1935, by the historian James D. Anderson.
8. Redlining
9. Denying of Blacks GI Benefits following WWII
10. The informal discrimination against Blacks in the job market.
11. The American tendency to believe that we have made progress or eradicated racism while ignoring significant evidence that we haven’t
    • Americans are reluctant to face the primacy of economic reform.
    • MLK spoke of the move from achieving desegregation and moving on to economic justice.  Ending poverty is much more painful than ending discrimination.
      • racial income disparities today look no different than they did the decade before King’s March on Washington.
      • “No progress has been made over the past 70 years in reducing income and wealth inequalities between Black and white households,”
      • Add to this is the public’s impression that Black household wealth is much higher than it is.
      • “No progress has been made over the past 70 years in reducing income and wealth inequalities between Black and white households,”
      • None of the actions we are told Black people must take if they want to “lift themselves” out of poverty and gain financial stability—not marrying, not getting an education, not saving more, not owning a home—can mitigate four hundred years of racialized plundering. Wealth begets wealth, and white Americans have had centuries of government assistance to accumulate wealth, while the government has for the vast history of this country worked against Black Americans’ efforts to do the same.
12. Reparations: somehow the basic wealth which creates wealth must be restored to Blacks
    • Book: A. Kirsten Mullen, From Here to Equality: Reparations for Black Americans in the Twenty-first Century. Important points in this book:
      • Reparations are not about punishing Whites
      • The Federal government
      • Recipients would Black people who could trace their ancestry to slavery
      • Reparations would include vigorous enforcement of laws protecting Blacks from exploitation
      • To those who qualify would go a cash payment
    • America currently gives assistance to holocaust survivors and descendents of interred Japanese citizens during WWII.  America can be generous.
13. W.E.B. DuBois: “How does it feel to be a problem?”  And in the final pages of the final chapter, Du Bois answers with a rousing declaration that Black people are not this nation’s problem, but its heart. (P. 474)
    • There is a monumental debt owed to Black Americans, which is part of the rationale behind reparations
    • Native Americans are the other group that has contributed much without credit or payback. (p. 475)
    • Acknowledging and bringing Blacks and Native Americans around is what it means to live up to our own highest values.

Summary: This chapter makes the simple point that the contribution of Blacks to the American civilization is massive and spans from before the Mayflowers to the present day.  Blacks have fought in our wars, contributed lavishly to our culture, and importantly have been the laboring heart of America’s enormous wealth.  Sadly, the country, often by official decision has made a determined effort to prevent the formerly enslaved from recovering and sharing in America’s prosperity to which they contributed.  The chapter is a visionary call for America to bring its Black citizens collectively into the great inheritance that Whites and other groups have long enjoyed.  Additionally, the chapter convincingly accounts for why Black families, despite all the years that separate them from the days of slavery have barely budged in economic well-being when compared with Whites.  There are many reasons for that.  Perhaps the most important one, even now in our time of affirmative action and desegregation, is the simple fact that it takes wealth to generate wealth.  Black families are simply unable to pass wealth to their children, even when those children have gotten educations and higher paying jobs.  Blacks today, with the same education and job status as their white counterparts, hold less wealth, have worse health outcomes, and leave less money to their children.  For Nikole Hanna-Jones the answer is simple—the United States government must embody the simple justice of transferring some significant amount of money to those who are direct descendants to those ancestors who gave so much to  make America what it is.