When the New York Times’s 1619 Project was unveiled last year, it began with an audacious claim: “the moment [America] began,” it said, was on an August day four centuries before, when about 20 enslaved Africans were brought ashore in Virginia and sold. This incident, the Times writers said, “is the country’s very origin.” Although the nation’s “official birthdate” came long after, it is really “out of slavery—and the anti-black racism it required” that “nearly everything that has truly made America exceptional” grew.
Timothy Sandefur is Vice President for Legal Affairs at the Goldwater Institute. His book 'You Don’t Own Me: Individualism and the Culture of Liberty' has just been published by the Cato Institute.
