Nikole Hannah-Jones on American History

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Brian Lehrer: It's the Brian Lehrer show on WNYC. Good morning again everyone, with us now as Nikole Hannah-Jones, creator of The 1619 Project at the New York Times as a staff writer for the magazine. She had also been an investigative journalist there often focusing on racial inequities in education. Her opening essay for the project won a Pulitzer Prize for commentary, she won a MacArthur Foundation Genius Grant. She is now the chair in race in journalism at Howard University, where she has founded the Center for journalism and democracy.

Now the original special issue of the magazine, additional material in the newspaper and related podcast series have been expanded into a book with a lot of new material as well called The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story. Nikole, congratulations, first of all, and having deepened and elevated the national conversation about American history and the American present, and welcome back to WNYC.

Nikole Hanna-Jones: Thank you. Thank you so much for having me on.

Brian Lehrer: Would you start with a little 1619 Project one oh one for our listeners. A lot of people don't need it, but the whole idea has been spun so much by others by now that maybe it would be good for you to start from the beginning, for people who have never heard you start from the beginning. Where did the idea come from and why a 1619 project, and why 1619?

Nikole Hanna-Jones: Sure, so the year 1619 is the year that the first Africans from the country of Angola was sold into slavery in the Virginia colony. We really mark this as the beginning of American slavery, as the beginning of slavery in the 13 colonies that will become the United States. The project came out in 2019, which was the 400th anniversary of that date. What the project does, through a series of essays, is really argue that slavery is a foundational American institution, that it predates almost everything else in this country.

Jamestown was settled in 1607 and just 12 years later, we begin to engage in African slavery. Through these essays, it takes modern phenomena, things in modern American life from capitalism, to traffic patterns to why we're the only western industrialized country without universal health care, to the Second Amendment, and trace them back to the legacy of slavery. Really to argue that the legacy of slavery reaches into so many aspects of this country, as well as Black resistance to slavery and anti-Blackness and efforts to perfect this democracy.

Brian Lehrer: You write in the preface to the book that you're doing this not to tear down or further divide this country as some critics suggest, but so that we can truly become the country that we already claimed to be, your words. Why do you think so many people find the second part of that, the idea that it's constructive, not destructive, so hard to believe or just feel threatened by this fuller telling?

Nikole Hanna-Jones: I think the negative response to the project really speaks to why the project had to exist in the first place. In that we are very uncomfortable dealing with the legacy of slavery, because many of us believe in this idea of American exceptionalism. We believe in this mythological founding, where these intrepid colonists decide that they need to break off from the British Empire to form the greatest democracy in the world. That they believed in freedom and inalienable rights. It's dealing with that contradictions, that as white men, were making these claims to God given freedom, 20%, or one in five of the people in the 13 colonies were enslaved, they had no freedom whatsoever.

We are founded both on the ideals of freedom and the practice of slavery. That kind of foundational contradictional hypocrisy is very challenging for many Americans. Instead, we have downplayed the role of slavery. Of course, we all know that slavery existed, but we treat it more as an asterisk and not central to the American story. This response I think is that need to really protect this idea of American exceptionalism and that mythology that so many of us are indoctrinated into.

Our identity is so wrapped up in this notion that there has never been a freer country in the world, but how does one grapple with a country that also engaged in slavery, from the beginning. For 150 years before Thomas Jefferson pin those words of the declaration, and that it would take a war to end it, and that we had slavery here longer than we have not.

Brian Lehrer: On the centrality of that, on the teaching of slavery as an asterisk, as you put it. I think many white people might say, we were taught in school that slavery was evil, we were already taught to think about history that way. That it took a civil war to end that evil, and we fought that civil war, the North did. That Jim Crow persisted for a century after slavery and we were taught to think that that was astonishingly evil that that could have happened to for so long, and it took a civil rights movement to end it.

If you accept that premise, and maybe you don't, but if you do, at least about the basic white teaching of history to 1965. How does the 1619 Project fit within that model? Is it that telling the dark side of the origin story in more detail and more centrally helps get us closer to the country that we already claim to be, as you put it?

Nikole Hanna-Jones: Well, one, yes, we are taught that slavery was evil. We are also taught that slavery was an aberration. We are taught to think about slavery as something that was in the purview of a small number of backward white people in the backward south. We are not taught that slavery under-guarded our nascent capitalism. We're not taught that the men who wrote our founding documents, the reason that they had the money, the privilege to become founders was because they enslaved other human beings. We're not taught that the bodies of the enslaved were worth more than all of the factories and all the railroads combined.

When we're taught about the industrial revolution in the north, we're not taught to contemplate the industrial revolution does not happen without slavery, because it is enslaved grown cotton, that they're spinning in those textile mills. We're not taught about how our banking system in New York rises up to support slavery. How enslaved people are mortgaged. How they are used as collateral. We're not taught that the largest slave trading state and colony was Rhode Island. That so many of our universities, including our Ivy League, were funded based off of the money that was being made off of slavery.

When I say an asterisk, an asterisk means yes, we are taught that this existed, but we are not taught how foundational it was. Also that an entire system of laws, including the constitution, of policies, of science, of art, all rises to justify why a country founded on ideals of liberty can practice chattel slavery the most brutal slavery in the history of the world. David Blight, the Pulitzer Prize winning historian says that in all of human history, there were really only five great slave societies. Which means societies not just that practice slavery, but societies where the entire political and cultural systems are ordered around slavery. One of those five societies was the American South.

I think when people say that, what they have been taught is an extremely whitewashed version of our history. Then we're not really taught to contemplate, why then at the end of slavery, do we engage in 100 years of racial apartheid, because Jim Crow is a euphemism. That it wasn't just the South that was comfortable with explicit racial segregation, just because people descended from slavery. It wasn't just the South that was denying Black people the right to vote, it was America. If we were taught that history correctly, you wouldn't see the type of back-splash to this project.

The fact that people are saying, why are you talking about this in this way, tells us that we haven't been taught, because if we've been taught it, we wouldn't be so uncomfortable with these facts, people would not find this project revelatory.

Brian Lehrer: My guest is Nikole Hannah-Jones, creator of The New York Times 1619 project, and now editor of the book, The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story. Listeners, we can take your questions for Nikole Hannah-Jones, 212-433 WNYC, 212-433-9692 or you can tweet a question @BrianLehrer. You note in the preface that Republican Senator Tom Cotton introduced a bill called the Saving American History Act which would strip federal funding from public schools teaching the 1619 project, and more than a dozen Republican state legislatures have introduced similar bills.

Of course your book went to print before the election this month in Virginia in the place of critical race theory, or at least the term critical race theory in the Republican campaign. What do you think we just witnessed in Virginia?

Nikole Hanna-Jones: I think what we witnessed is a successful propaganda campaign that utilized the oldest wedge issue in American history. The oldest wedge issue in American history is race. It's fitting that it happened in Virginia because we know that the Bacon's rebellion when low-income white people, and enslaved and poor Black people, got together to rise up against the white elite. That's when we see the introduction of the slave codes, and the introduction of the idea that Black people, no matter their status will always be lower than white people, no matter their status.

It is in Virginia, which had the most racist laws of any state in the country that really architected, both how slavery would look at America, and how we would categorize and segregate Black people. That this would be the place that we would see a successful campaign. All of this, of course, this entire, critical race theory campaign, by conservatives begins in response to the Black Lives Matter Movement and Protests and the racial reckoning last year. Really decides to tap into a stoking white resentment, to tell white people, look, they want to take your monuments down. They want to steal your history. They want to tell you all of these men that you want to think are great or not great, and they want to make your children feel badly.

That's what we're seeing, but we need to call it for what it is. It is an orchestrated campaign that is intended to do what many of these campaigns have long done, which is tap into the racial fears of many white Americans.

Brian Lehrer: Katrina and Harlem, your on WNYC with Nikole Hannah-Jones. Hi Katrina.

Katrina: Hi. Thank you, Brian for taking my call and Nikole, thank you for the work that you're doing. I was at the event in BAM, and just listening to what you and Brian were just talking about. My question is about a comment that you made and didn't have a chance to finish. You were talking about how the conflict in our founding history makes us more susceptible to authoritarian ideas, which really speaks into what you're talking about now with Brian, with the elections and the public ethical. Can you talk more about that?

Nikole Hanna-Jones: Yes, sure. As I was saying at the opening event, I've been reading a lot about how do places that have managed to have a democracy lose their democracy and what are the signs that we're seeing in the United States. When we talk about the United States being the oldest continuous democracy, that's actually not true because the premise of representative governance in the United States was really predicated on Black people, not being involved in the body politics. Actually, predicated on women not being involved, and many white poor people not being involved.

I talk about this in the revision of the democracy essay for the book. Historian, Edmund Morgan and others really have argued that the reason that Virginia, who of course it's a Virginian who wrote the declaration, a Virginian who's the father of the constitution. A Virginian wrote the bill of rights. The reason that they could believe in representative democracy, was because, most of the poor in Virginia were enslaved and therefore could never challenge their power. Representative democracy really meant a democracy where only landed white men could vote.

They felt that they could actually create a society in that way, the way that they wouldn't, if all of these masses of poor people could challenge their power and authority. One of the ramifications of that, is from that time, except for a brief period during reconstruction all the way until 1965, Black people were not challenging, because majority of Black people could not vote as they were in the south and they had been denied the right to vote.

This idea that we have a democracy was predicated on large segments of the population being denied the right to vote. The loss of legitimacy between political rivals, as some scholars argue, comes when we start to have a multi-racial party. All of a sudden those same anti-democratic views that we see in Virginia at the time of the revolution that poor people, that people of color, can not be trusted to elect the leadership. We see that happening now when people of color, particularly Black people are now able to vote. This is what, I think is really critical when we talk about how polarized our politics are.

We look backwards to a greater air where there was more people working across the isle, that was because we had a political system that was almost entirely white. As we have diversified who can actually exercise their citizenship at the ballot, that is when we have seen the type of polarization that we have now. Of course the hyperpolarization comes with the election of Barack Obama where a white minority votes for a Black president and a majority does not, but in a multi-racial country the Black president still gets elected.

Brian Lehrer: Talk about that a little bit more with respect to Obama, because some people who maybe don't see the racial divide as so dramatically triggered by that election. Say, if you look at elections for the last number of decades, probably since the Civil Rights Laws were passed in the '60s. Whites in the main vote for the Republican for president. People of color in the main vote for the Democrat for president. That was true with Obama, it was true before Obama, it was certainly true with Trump, but also Obama was reelected. Hillary Clinton is the one who lost the election to Donald Trump. How do you see all that in the context of what you were just talking about?

Nikole Hanna-Jones: Sure. Yes, Obama was reelected with a white minority, and record turnout amongst Black voters. Actually, despite voter suppression laws being passed after Obama's first term, Black turnout actually increased. The fact that he was reelected many would like that to mean, that we were somehow a less racist country, but he was still reelected with a minority of the white vote and very high turnout around people of color.

Yes, it is absolutely true that after the Voting Rights Act in the Civil Rights Movement, you see a massive shift of white voters from the Democratic party to the Republican party and at least in presidential elections, you have not seen a majority of white people vote for a Democrat, since the time of Lyndon B Johnson, but that is true. What that signals though also is the extreme polarization that came with Black people starting to achieve their rights. Until about the '1970s, when you start to see a shift, there was a liberal wing and a conservative wing of both parties. Because of that, you were able to have, cooperation from the opposition party. What we've seen is that, that has continued to erode.

Then we get to Obama and we have seen really unprecedented things happening with the Republican party, a refusal to confirm a justice. A refusal to confirm hundreds of judges on the court. No longer a commitment actually to democracy. Yes, we were seeing a sign, but after we see a Black man ascent to the office, we see a level of polarization. Really an assuming of norms, that those who study democracy say are when you start to lose a democracy. Once we have seen that not only are white people not solely determining the election, but that I coalition of Black and brown and white people can put a Black man in the white house.

I don't think anyone can compare the type of polarization that you saw prior to Obama, to what we have seen with Donald Trump. When clearly the Republicans elected a authoritarian, someone who does not care about the norms that really hold our democracy together. A political party that is openly saying now, that an insurrection on the Capitol maybe wasn't so bad. That is willing to pass laws, to gerrymander, to ensure minority rule. State legislature that is trying to overturn a fair election. I think all of those things you cannot say were normative prior to Obama getting elected.

Brian Lehrer: Of course we see the big lie about election fraud focused on American cities, we know what that's code for. The Voting Rights crackdowns in many states, focus on ways that make it harder for people in cities in particular, to vote, and we know that that's code for. Ross in Brooklyn, you're on WNYC with Nikole Hannah-Jones, creator of The New York Times 1619 Project, now out in a book version, The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story. Hello, Ross.

Ross: Thank you so much honorable, and Mrs. Jones, the whole world thank you for your great efforts. I just want to make one point about H.R. 1242 that was signed into law by President Trump to be public law 115-102. The fact that the commemoration of this 400 year is being upheld by just one individual being Mrs. Jones is striking, because this is 400 years. 1607, Britain 400 year was commemorated by our Congress, but for some reason, the 400 year since 1619 was oblivious to most Americans. I have called into the honorable program, Mr. Brian, and I speak of H.R. 1242 to the mayor, to the governor, and it went unrecognized. I just want to commend her in her activism, and we only pray that H.R. 1242 is revisited so we could get to H.R. 40 to deal with reparation. Thank you.

Brian Lehrer: Ross, thank you very much. Hannah, anything you want to say about that particular legislation? Either one.

Nikole Hanna-Jones: Yes. In the book, the final essay of the book is an essay that I wrote called Justice, and it does argue for reparations for the descendants of American slavery. It basically makes the argument that once you have gone through the entire book, and you see how that legacy of slavery still shapes so much about Black life. Particularly, the material disadvantage that Black Americans across all income spectrums still suffer from. That a debt is owed, a collective debt, not a debt to be paid by white Americans, but a collective debt, and that you have to have restitution if you want to get to repair.

Brian Lehrer: I'll say, just so people know some of the details about the book, that you have all-star contributors. Some of the chapters are Sugar by Khalil Gibran Muhammad. Fear by Michelle Alexander. Politics by Jamelle Bouie. You added seven new essays such as on slavery and the Second Amendment. How the Haitian Revolution helped to deeply embed fear of Black Americans in the national psyche and punishment by Bryan Stevenson, another all-star contributor. A new closing essay written by you that you just mentioned on economic justice. Which, as you say, is in part a call for reparations. Take us one level deeper on that. I know people get bogged down in the details of how much paid to whom, in what ways. As big picture or as specific as you want, how do we get to economic justice?

Nikole Hanna-Jones: Yes, thank you for that question, and also for talking about the many ways that the book has expanded. For those who did read the original project you may be wondering, why would you want the book and every essay in the book has been expanded. Some of the most controversial parts of the original project we have steered into, and I think people will get a lot of that, and we've added a lot of new essays as well. I think that what I try to do with the justice essay on reparations is I try to look at every objection that I have heard about why this country should not pay reparations to the descendants of American slavery, and why Black people don't have any particular specific disadvantage compared to other groups. I really seek to answer that.

I think it's important that, when we think about American slavery, we tend to think about it as a racist institution, but slavery was an economic institution. It was about turning people into chattel so that you can exploit their labor to any degree that you wanted to, to extract a maximum amount of profit. Racism is what came to justify the treatment of human beings as if they were property, but it wasn't the other way around. That is the same thing for the 100 years of racial apartheid in this country, it was to maintain an exploitable class of labor. What that means is that Black people have a tremendous disadvantage when it comes to wealth, they also are disadvantaged when it comes to income.

Wealth is that thing that allows us to buy a home, or to send our children to college, or to weather a financial storm, if we lose our job, or if we have to go to the hospital. Black wealth compared to white wealth, white people have about 10 times more wealth than the average Black American, and white people with children have about 100 times the wealth of Black people with children. This has remained unchanged since the time of the Civil Rights Movement. The wealth gap between Black and white Americans is identical to what it was in 1965 when Dr. King was leading the Civil Rights Movement.

We talk about Dr. King. Most people know a couple lines from his I Have a Dream speech, but Dr. King spoke about the need to address the material disadvantage, the economic disadvantage that Black Americans face. This essay is really an argument to say, Black Americans have been generationally disadvantaged. During slavery, they weren't able to own any property, they had to labor every day of their lives, and all of that income went to the people who owned them. Then after slavery, Black people still were discriminated against in housing, they were kept out of the largest generators of wealth in America, which was housing and land grants.

That so much of a disadvantage that Black people face today has to do with that lack of the ability to acquire wealth. It's not saying, of course, that no white people are suffering. Of course, they are. It's not saying that no white people, or that white people have not worked hard for the things that they have. What it is saying is that white Americans have had certain generational economic advantages that Black people have been deprived of as a collective and that we owe a debt to those people.

My essay really argues that there has to be a wealth transfer to Black Americans, but that we in this country have the ability to help poor people of all races, to pass universal programs that help poor people of all races, but also to specifically redress the harms that Black Americans have faced.

Brian Lehrer: One more call. Bill in Rego Park, you're on WNYC with Nikole Hannah-Jones. Hello, Bill.

Bill: Hello, Brian. Hello, Professor Hannah-Jones. I want to thank you for your invaluable scholarship and courage as a public intellectual, as thinking about the title of Derrick Bell's book Faces at the Bottom of the Well or more specifically, the subtitle, which is the Permanence of Racism. I'd like to know your thoughts on whether racism in the United States is a permanent phenomenon. Thank you.

Brian Lehrer: Thank you, Bill.

Nikole Hanna-Jones: Thank you so much for that question. That book was such a profound book, and of course, Derrick Bell is one of the people who created critical race theory, even though most of the people who are arguing against critical race theory have never read Dr. Bell's work. It's an interesting question, I think, to some degree, racism is a permanent feature of our society, not necessarily speaking about individuals, though, I certainly could be convinced of that argument as well. That in a nation that embedded racism explicitly into our laws, into our science, into our private policies, into our residential patterns, into our educational patterns, into our systems of employment for 350 years.

That these practices, these laws, predate even the founding of our country by 150 years. That it would be very naïve to believe that that could be purged unless we are putting the same amount of resources into undoing structural racism as we put into building it. There's very little chance that we are going to invest the amount of dollars policy and legal work to undo that racism that was embedded. It's not that we have to, that racism is impossible to purge, and that structural racism is impossible to purge. It's that I think we have never had the political will to do what it takes to purge it.

Brian Lehrer: With that eye on the future, or at least potential futures, we are out of time. Nikole Hannah-Jones. The book version of The 1619 Project is now out. The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story. Thank you so much for sharing some of it with us.

Nikole Hanna-Jones: Thank you so much, Brian.

 

 

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