Excerpt

Both the Commission on Unalienable Rights, chartered in July 2019, and the 1619 Project, launched by the New York Times one month later, have reflected upon how the ideal of equality has interacted with the practice of slavery in the U.S. tradition. But while the commission's report¹ took July 4, 1776, to be the founding moment of the United States, the 1619 Project suggests that “the country's true birth date, the moment that its defining contradictions first came into the world, was in late August 1619 … when a ship arrived at Point Comfort in the British colony of Virginia,…