Understanding the Present Through the 1619 Project: A Conversation with Professor Roopali Mukherjee

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Professor Roopali Mukherjee was the featured speaker at the Spring 2025 Pizza and Prof event. Photo: Ha Nguyen

On Thursday, April 10th, students gathered in the Honors Hub to join Professor Roopali Mukherjee for the Spring 2025 Pizza and Prof talk. Mukherjee, a professor of Race, Media, and Communication, presented a talk titled “Understanding the Present: Lessons from the 1619 Project.”

The 1619 Project was created by The New York Times Magazine in August 2019, marking the 400th anniversary of the beginning of American slavery. The project’s goal is to reframe the country’s history by examining the consequences of slavery and highlighting how Black Americans are central to the narrative of the United States. Mukherjee described the project as a scholarship that teaches and builds upon our capacities to not be deceived by power and to encourage each citizen to be a better member of the country.

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Photo: Theo Nims

Mukherjee began the talk by proposing the question: “What would we bring into focus if we narrated the story of the United States, not from 1776, but 1619?” This is the same question that The New York Times Magazine posed when it launched the project.

“There is virtually no aspect of contemporary American life that doesn’t connect to the enslavement of Black people.” 

After discussing the intricacies and methodologies of the Project, Mukherjee introduced her book, The Racial Order of Things: Cultural Imaginaries of the Post-Soul Era. The book examines why affirmative action, implemented in the late 1960s and early ’70s, faced such strong backlash in the mid-1990s. It also seeks to map the cross-pollination of different domains of discourse.

After completing the book, Mukherjee said she found that “you can’t kill affirmative action until you tell a racist story about a Black person, and it tells us how power connects to knowledge and how that connects to race.”

Mukherjee also wrote The Blacking Factory: Brand Culture and the Technologies of the Racial Self, which she said approaches these ideas from an entirely new standpoint — focusing on the role of capitalism. The book seeks to engage with two ongoing scholarly dialogues: the first being the current moment of neoliberal capitalism, and the second being biocapitalism, which is the commodification of the south. 

“It commodifies and exploits the material practices of the body. It targets the so-called underclass. In order to live, more and more of us have less and less choice... we make ourselves into hot commodities.”

Mukherjee wrapped up her discussion of The 1619 Project and her two books, then opened the floor to questions. One student asked about the gentrification of London and similar cities.

“People are enticed by the option to rub shoulders and brush up on, very safely, of exciting and thrilling places. Real estate agencies brand a neighbor as how it 'used to be.' Blackness plays a significant role in the fetishization of these types of neighborhoods.”

Students had the opportunity to ask questions and take part in a lively conversation following Mukherjee’s presentation. Photo: Ha Nguyen

If you’re interested in learning more about Mukherjee’s work, you can mukherjee [at] comm [dot] umass [dot] edu (contact her by email).