Nikole Hannah-Jones on Colorblindness

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Brian Lehrer: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning again, everyone. With us now, New York Times Magazine correspondent Nikole Hannah-Jones on her recent essay that you may have seen in the Times Magazine about the history and current politics of colorblindness in American racial politics. It's called The 'Colorblindness' Trap: How a Civil Rights Ideal Got Hijacked.

The news hook is the Supreme Court ruling last year that bans most race-based affirmative action in higher education and the legal follow-ups to that even. This may sound surreal and like a bad satire if it wasn't so serious, but the so-called colorblindness movement is even challenging HBCUs, historically Black colleges and universities like Howard where Nikole also teaches, on whether they can take race into account in their admissions process even as the Supreme Court made it harder to get in elsewhere.

Nikole Hannah-Jones is probably best known for her Pulitzer Prize-winning essay in the Times, 1619 Project, which she spearheaded. She's a MacArthur Genius Grant winner and even won an Emmy recently for the Hulu TV 1619 docuseries. The book version of The 1619 Project is also about to be released in paperback. Again, her recent essay in the Times that we'll be talking about is called The 'Colorblindness' Trap. Nikole, nice to have you on. Again, welcome back to WNYC.

Nikole Hannah-Jones: Thank you so much for having me, Brian.

Brian Lehrer: I'd like to start with a soundbite that you referenced from nearly 60 years ago. It's President Lyndon Johnson in his 1965 commencement speech at Howard University when, in just this 20-second clip, he states the rationale for affirmative action programs to follow the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

President Lyndon Johnson: You do not take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains and liberating, bringing up to the starting line of a race and then say you are free to compete with all the others and still justly believe that you have been completely fair.

Brian Lehrer: That classic clip, though I wonder how many of you listening right now have never heard it before. President Lyndon Johnson in 1965. Nikole, maybe this is so obvious, a place to start. It doesn't even need to be said, but could you expand on what LBJ said in that clip that might sound contradictory to some people that to achieve the civil rights ideal of colorblindness, many progressives believe it takes race-conscious policies, not race-neutral policies.

Nikole Hannah-Jones: Absolutely. I think the proper framing is to realize that colorblindness was always a goal. It is aspirational. It is saying that out of the civil rights movement, we hope to, one day, achieve a society where race does not matter, where it's irrelevant to your opportunities. Understanding that in a society built on 350 years of color consciousness used to subjugate Black Americans and those whose ancestors were enslaved that you couldn't simply say, "Okay. Now, we're not going to pay attention to race anymore," that you had to then counterbalance the use of race that had been used to hold Black people back by using race to try to help Black people gain equality.

Then once you were able to do that, then we could achieve a colorblind society. It might sound somewhat antithetical to how people perceive the ideals of the civil rights movement. Now, we have a society where everyone is taught to believe you shouldn't pay attention to race. It's actually just logical. I think Lyndon B. Johnson, who, of course, helped propel through the greatest civil rights legislation since the period of Reconstruction, understood that. What he was saying was he was making an argument that equality requires more than just equality in the law. It requires equality as a fact. You were going to have to pay attention to race, of course, to achieve that.

Brian Lehrer: That LBJ speech was on June 4th, 1965. Did the backlash to affirmative action begin on June 5th?

Nikole Hannah-Jones: [chuckles] He gave that speech actually at the commencement at Howard University, by the way. The backlash begins, yes, almost immediately. We have to think about what's happening in that period. We're seeing Black Americans for the first time achieving full legal equality. The passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which prohibits race-based and other discrimination and public accommodations. The Voting Rights Act is being passed. We really see a society that is trying legally to bring about equality.

There's an understanding that that is simply the baseline. That's simply granting Black Americans the civil and legal rights that every other American already had, which is the baseline. Now, as LBJ, I actually really recommend your listeners read that speech in its entirety. What he says is, in some ways, that was the easiest part. We know that passing those civil rights laws was not easy, that many, many people gave their lives and were brutalized to get those laws passed. He's saying that's the easier part.

The hardest part then is to actually bring about a society where race is not hobbling Black Americans. Yes, we instantly see resistance as soon as conservatives and even a significant number of white moderates can no longer use race in a way that is negative to Black people. Race is a way that discriminates against Black Americans. You see this effort to say, "Well, we can't use race at all." At the moment where paying attention to race can actually help Black Americans to catch up, we see a backlash to using race at all, and really what begins the co-optation of the language and the rhetoric of the civil rights movement.

Brian Lehrer: Much of your article traces the legal history of challenges to affirmative action at the Supreme Court. We love doing history on this show and tying it to the present. One of the reasons we invited you on for this particular essay. Then it looks forward, your article looks forward, to the warning letter that Howard University's law school got. We'll get to that, but let's go over some of this history because there's a whole generation of listeners that may not know it. Could you remind people of what the Bakke case was that reached the Supreme Court in 1978 and the era-defining way that it was decided?

Nikole Hannah-Jones: Sure. I'm just going to go back a little bit further because I actually argue that this co-opting of the ideas of colorblindness begins right at the end of slavery. I think that's important to know that this is not a new phenomenon that during Reconstruction when we have this brief period of the nation really grappling with the fact that it had been a slave nation for its entire history wanted to pass specific programming through the Freedmen's Bureau to help those who had just been released from generational bondage to acquire land, to acquire education, to be able to make employment contracts.

Even at that moment, you have some white politicians who are saying, "Well, now, you're being unfair to white people. Now, you're trying to give Black people something special. Our society cannot abide paying attention to race." The roots of this belief that race is okay if it's being used to subordinate Black people, but that it's not okay if it's being used to help Black people is really very old.

What happens in the 1960s after we see this great civil rights legislation being passed and you see this argument coming out of the federal government for affirmative action-- and just to be clear, what affirmative action always met was that Black people had been systematically discriminated against. They had been locked out of opportunities. Most colleges in this country would not enroll Black Americans or, if they did, it was a handful of Black Americans.

We're still in the period where colleges are being sued to comply with Brown v. Board of Education's integration mandate that we begin to see colleges begin to say, "Well, we have to do something to affirmatively enroll Black Americans," that we can't just say the law means we must admit you now. We have to take action to try to bring people in. A medical school, part of the University of California system, began an affirmative action program, not just for Black Americans but for other racially marginalized groups.

Within a few years of that, really only two years of that, it's already being sued by a white man named Allan Bakke. Allan Bakke applied to several medical schools. He was denied entry to all of those schools, and yet he sued the University of California, which had a two-tiered admission track. It had its standard medical school admission track and then it had a special admissions track that was just for marginalized groups and so we sued.

Less than a decade after affirmative action began in earnest, the Supreme Court takes up Bakke's case and it overrules affirmative action. It's actually a pretty astounding ruling. You have Justice Powell, who is basically saying that the experience of Black Americans is no different than the experience of a white boy from Idaho, that it takes out really the heart of affirmative action, which is saying you cannot use affirmative action to address past injustice.

You can't use it to address the long history of exclusion that Black Americans experienced, the long history of having to go inferior segregated schools. You also can't use affirmative action to address current injustices, racial inequality that Black Americans experience, that the only constitutional way that you can use affirmative action is for this idea of diversity. This will be familiar to your listeners because when we talk about affirmative action now, all we do is talk about diversity and diversity being what most benefits white students.

The rationale that really guts the heart of affirmative action is saying, "We only allow affirmative action as a free speech, a First Amendment issue, that colleges have a right to create an incoming class that will prepare students for a diverse world." Well, obviously, people of color were already living in a diverse world. We see from the beginning, this attack on the constitutionality of affirmative action, and really changing affirmative action from being a program about trying to redress the longstanding exclusion and segregation of Black Americans to one of simple diversity.

Brian Lehrer: You're right about the effect of hanging the existence of affirmative action on a school's interest in diverse student bodies. That was the only thing that the Supreme Court allowed after the Bakke case. That sidelined, as you were just describing, the central fact that descendants of enslaved Black people were disadvantaged uniquely by American history. Then interestingly, you question progressive organizations that adopted the term "people of color," which you say flattened all African-descended people of color into a single category. Can you expand on that critique of the term "people of color" and how you argue that it applies to progressive institutions, not just conservative ones?

Nikole Hannah-Jones: Yes. Of course, what happens, you actually see this happening at the very beginning of affirmative action. Affirmative action was not created to address generalized discrimination that any group had faced. Affirmative action, born out of the civil rights movement, was created to address the singular experience of those whose ancestors had been enslaved in this country, right? Those who went through generational chattel slavery and then lived under 100 years of racial apartheid and exclusion.

It was a very particular racial justice program, but we've always been a bit uncomfortable in the United States with any programming that is specific to Black Americans who descend from slavery. Even at the beginning when I talked about the University of California, the affirmative action program, it wasn't just for descendants of slavery. It was also for other racial minorities. We really saw progressives, especially after the Supreme Court ruled that diversity was the only constitutional means to enact affirmative action.

Progressives really take up this lexicon of people of color and that these programs were about helping people of color. What that did, I think, is really opened these programs up to attack because you see people like Edward Blum, who, of course, is the architect of the case that brought down affirmative action, the case that gutted the Voting Rights Act. He began to say, "Well, these programs are just about skin color. They're giving people an advantage because they happen to be born into a different skin color."

They begin to deploy that language against these racial redress programs. They point out that these programs can go to anybody whose "skin color" is Black even if they are from Africa, even if their ancestors never went through slavery or Jim Crow. I'm not arguing, of course, against inclusivity, but what I am saying is that we embrace inclusivity at a way that ultimately also excludes Black Americans who are descendants of slavery.

If you look, for instance, at an institution like Harvard, which, of course, was one of the plaintiffs in the affirmative action lawsuit, what data shows is that African immigrants or second-generation Black immigrants are disproportionately represented amongst the Black population at Harvard, and that the least likely to get in are actually Black Americans who descend from American slavery.

I'm trying to help us understand that the specificity of language, if we are thinking about affirmative action in the right way, is critical because so many of these programs have helped other marginalized groups, which we absolutely should help other marginalized groups, but to the exclusion of those who have always been on the bottom of American society. I'm, in some ways, arguing for a new lexicon that other advocates for descendants of slavery have been arguing for, which is that Black Americans deserve to have their own ethnicity. They deserve to have racial redress and justice programs that are specific to their experience.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, we have about 10 more minutes with Nikole Hannah-Jones on her New York Times Magazine essay called The 'Colorblindness' Trap: How a Civil Rights Ideal Got Hijacked. Anybody who read it want to react or tell a story just based on your listening to Nikole right now right here? Black listeners, do you experience the civil rights ideal of colorblindness as now being used against you or how do you feel or think about it at all? 212-433-WNYC.

To what Nikole was just describing about how even progressive institutions that adopted the term "people of color" and the broad approach to diversity that came from the Bakke Supreme Court decision back in the '70s, that does not give unique status to descendants of enslaved people in this country. How it misses the point, or at least an important point, do you feel that way too? What would be a new lexicon? What would be a new way forward? 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692. Nikole, I guess, now, we get to the Howard University story, which the article starts with and comes back to near the end. What's this warning letter that Howard's medical school got from a conservative group?

Nikole Hannah-Jones: Following the Supreme Court ruling prohibiting affirmative action in college admissions, Howard University and other medical schools received a letter. The letter basically said that they are not allowed to take race into account in admissions and that this organization would be monitoring Howard. If it believed that Howard was using race as one of the factors that it was looking at when admitting medical students that it would sue. I led with this anecdote because I think nothing better epitomizes the co-optation of both the goals of the civil rights movement and the goals of colorblindness. I would really--

Brian Lehrer: Did we lose Nikole's line? Nikole, are you there? All right. We're going to try to get Nikole's line rehook. She points out to this point, and this may be where she was just about to go, that Howard is one of only four HBCU medical schools in the country, just four, and that only 5% of the nation's physicians are Black. It need to be about triple that much to be the same as the overall Black population.

From a conservative standpoint, if they already wanted the Supreme Court on getting race out of all the other schools, now, I guess they're at least considering even going after the HBCUs. Nikole, I was just describing to the listeners while we were getting you back on the line, how your article points out that only 5% of the nation's physicians are Black. It would need to be about triple that much to be the same as the overall Black population, the same percentage.

Nikole Hannah-Jones: Yes, absolutely. The majority of Black doctors come out of historically Black colleges and universities. As I was saying, I think before my connection faded out, historically Black colleges and universities literally exist because of the history of exclusion where Black Americans' descendants of slavery were excluded from medical schools, were excluded from institutions of higher education.

These institutions came into being to educate descendants of slavery and those who have been enslaved because they could not be educated anywhere else. That is their mission. That is their reason for existing. To say that we are going to make it more difficult for Black Americans to enter medical schools or other professional schools at predominantly white institutions, but then to also attack, to use the 14th Amendment, which, of course, was a Reconstruction amendment that gave Black Americans equal protection under the law.

It was designed to help those who have been enslaved to achieve legal equality. The 1964 Civil Rights Act, again, a law that came because those who descended from slavery were being discriminated against across American life. To now use those laws and deploy them against Black people who are trying to uplift themselves is an extreme perversion and speaks to a really ugly vision for what America will be and the permanent secondary status that some people want Black Americans to exist at.

It's really unthinkable. I think most people thought if any higher-ed institution will be saved, it would be historically Black colleges and universities, which have never excluded any students by race, which have always enrolled students of any race, but existed because Black Americans not only were excluded but remain excluded from many avenues to success in many professions, including the medical field.

Brian Lehrer: Cindy in Manhattan, you're on WNYC with Nikole Hannah-Jones. Hi, Cindy.

Cindy: Yes, hi. I have always wondered about what Nikole was writing about because back in the '80s, I worked at one of the networks. One of the staff told me he was going back to school to study law. I said, "That's going to be very expensive." He said, "No, the company's paying for it." I said, "How come?" He said, "It's under the affirmative action program." I said, "But you're Spanish from Argentina or somewhere." He says, "No, I'm Jewish." That left me with my mouth open because I was under the impression that affirmative action was for Black people or people of color. I couldn't figure out how he qualified, so I always thought of this at the back of my mind. Now, he's right about it.

Brian Lehrer: That the definition got too expanded to include too many different-

Cindy: A lot of people or everybody for that matter.

Brian Lehrer: -historically marginalized groups or everybody as in that experience as you recall it anyway. Let's go to Gio in Queens. You're on WNYC with Nikole Hannah-Jones. Hello. Do we have Gio in Queens?

Gio: Hello?

Brian Lehrer: Hello.

Gio: Hello?

Brian Lehrer: Do we have Gio?

Gio: Yes. Hi, Brian.

Brian Lehrer: Yes, go ahead.

Gio: Can you hear me?

Brian Lehrer: Yes, go ahead.

Gio: As a white man and being with a lot of white people, I can tell you that until white people really begin to understand the effects of slavery are still in effect today and the disastrous effect that it has had on African Americans, until white people begin to accept that, this argument is going to keep happening over and over and over. Because what I hear is that, "Oh, well, they're just getting it because they're Black. They're just getting it because the government is liberal and wants to give this out and get votes." That's, I think, the reasoning that really has to be taken into account when we talk about all this.

Brian Lehrer: Gio, thank you very much. There's the political aspect of it, at least to some degree, Nikole, right?

Nikole Hannah-Jones: Yes. What that caller referenced is a common refrain that we hear. This is part of the reason why my essay is so long because I understand that I'm writing it against people who don't understand this history who think that this is a political issue, who have not been taught to think about this as a justice issue. That flattening of affirmative action from a racial justice or racial redress program to a diversity program has made that easier.

Because what it does is when Justice Powell says, "We can give a point to a Black kid from Newark just the same way we would give a point to a white kid from Idaho," what you're saying is you're equating these two things, and that anyone who has experienced discrimination can say, "Well, I deserve something." This isn't about giving Black kids something they haven't earned. It's about saying, "We have a long history of exclusion, of inequality," and so we have to try to make programming to address that. I think because we don't know that history, that's a common sentiment that people feel is that affirmative action is unfair to them.

Brian Lehrer: One more call. I think Kai in Prospect Lefferts Gardens goes right to your point. Kai, you're on WNYC. Hello.

Kai: Hi. Oh, my God. I'm fanboying out. Professor, a huge fan. I'm literally holding your book right now. I am a mixed-race person, Black ancestry from southern Ohio. I even have other mixed-race families who pass as white. I've been really trying to embrace the term "ADOS," American Descendants of Slavery, to really address the Black experience in the US because I do think we are our own ethnic group.

Also, just one other point. I think that when talking about reparations, reparations should be the experience of ADOS, American Descendants of Slavery. That should be one entire deal with a different conversation. Then we can redress the experience of racial discrimination that impacts Black people from all over the diaspora and other people of color. I also hate that term. It drives me crazy. Those are two different things. Anyway, thank you. I can't believe I'm on the phone with you.

Nikole Hannah-Jones: Thank you.

Brian Lehrer: Kai, thank you. As we run out of time, Nikole, how could the United States move forward in the direction that you're advocating and writing about and that that last caller, Kai, is interested in?

Nikole Hannah-Jones: Yes. One, I think we just have to be honest about our history and why we need a program like affirmative action that, as Thurgood Marshall said, we should not think about affirmative action as a program that is excluding someone else, but a program that is including those who have been systematically left out. Now that the Supreme Court has said you cannot engage race-conscious admissions, I am arguing for lineage-based admissions that colleges convert from race-conscious to scholarships to admission programs for those who descend from slavery.

I don't know whether some people argue you should call Black American descendants of slavery, Friedman, you should call them ADOS. I don't care as much about what particular verbiage we all decide on or forever collectively decide on, but we do have to acknowledge that Black Americans who descend from slavery in the United States have not only a distinct culture but a distinct disadvantage.

We have to find a way to address that because, ultimately, as you know in the essay, my argument, Brian, is that as long as we sustain this level of racial inequality, we'll never have sustained internal peace in this nation that equality and injustice requires repression. Then if we want to be the country of our highest ideals, we have to make things right. Part of how we make things right is by redressing the long-standing exclusion, subjugation, and disadvantage of those of us whose ancestors were enslaved here.

Brian Lehrer: Nikole Hannah-Jones, New York Times Magazine correspondent, Howard University professor, The 1619 Project founder. The book version comes out in paperback shortly, and now the author of The New York Times essay called The 'Colorblindness' Trap: How a Civil Rights Ideal Got Hijacked. Nikole, you were just referencing how long the essay is. I'll tell people that for those who don't think you can read a long essay, they also published a SparkNotes version, which is called Five Takeaways from Nikole Hannah-Jones's Essay on the 'Colorblindness' Trap. Look that one up on The Times website if you want the short version. Nikole, thank you for coming on.

Nikole Hannah-Jones: Thank you so much.

 

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