Note: I am simply dumping the transcript of Nikole Hannah-Jones’s appearance at Northrop Auditorium on the University of Minnesota-Minneapolis campus, edited best I can with limited time, technology, and scrutiny, onto this space.
For a while I used time stamps assigned by one downloaded app, until that free feature timed out, then used another one that didn’t give time stamps. Lastly, I pored over the entire hour-plus, word-for-word, correcting machine errors. This left me with, probably, still hundreds of human errors. That’s where Nikole’s monologue ramps up to her comfortable pace of garrulous, colloquial speech, and it shows in my formatting as long, uninterrupted paragraph blocks. I’ll have some things to say later, but just want this talk available to the public who may wonder, what is the buzz about the 1619 Project. Is it truly deep, deep, probing and quality history? Hannah-Jones made no defenses nor mentions of her project’s grappling with its premises, nor inquiries that it may have contained errors, nor that it sleuth-redacted statements in subsequent publications of the 1619 Project. She never addressed the main tenets of the 1619 Project. Interviewer Harkness did not ask the question: Why 1619? Not everyone around us clapped. My only editorial comment on Ms. Hannah-Jones’s presentation Tuesday night at the University of Minnesota is that, I am very glad she was given the opportunity to appear and discuss her hard work. It was clearly a Herculean labor that possessed her a long time. I only wish that NYTimes Magazine had billed it as Creative Non-Fiction because first, it was produced lovingly with art and poetry. Second, it postulated that America became a nation because of black slaves. That emphasis is questionable, ignored, and that’s all I have to say. That’s all anyone should like to drive home. It’s questionable. And shouldn’t it be? That said, here’s the text.
Theo
Announcer: “It is my sincere pleasure to welcome all of you to this year's Distinguished Carlson lecture .. began in 1980 with a gift from Curtis L. Carlson to honor his late friend, our school's namesake, Vice President Hubert Humphrey.”
Tonight we are honored to have Nikole Hannah-Jones here .. she of course, is the Pulitzer Prize winning creator of the 1619 project and a staff writer at The New York Times Magazine.
The book version of the 1619 project was an instant number one New York Times best seller
Unknown 2:55
She has spent her career investigating racial inequality and injustice. And her reporting has now earned the MacArthur Fellowship otherwise known as the Genius Award and wait there’s more ..
Unknown 3:13
Peabody Award to George Polk Awards and the National Magazine Award not once or twice, but three times.
Unknown 3:27
She serves as the Knight Chair of race and journalism at Howard University where she
Unknown 3:40
she founded the Center for journalism and democracy. Nikole is also the co-founder of the Ida B Wells society for Investigative Reporting, which seeks to increase the number of investigative reporters and editors of color. And this year, she opened the 1619 Freedom School, a free after school literacy program in her hometown of Waterloo, Iowa.
Unknown 4:20
Nikole holds a Masters of Arts in mass communications from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and earned her Bachelors of Arts in History and African American Studies from the University of Notre Dame .. Nikole Hannah Jones.
Unknown 4:44
Unknown 6:06
And now please join me in welcoming Kyndell Harkness. And Nikole Hannah-Jones.
Unknown 6:44
Well it’s been good to see y’all. Thanks for showing up.
Unknown 6:47
Kyndell Harkness: So, what I'd like to do at this moment Nikole is ask you “How you doing?”
Unknown 6:54
Nikole Hannah-Jones: “It’s cold here.”
Unknown 7:01
KH: But the spirit is warm in the room as as many of you may know.
Unknown 7:06
NHJ: I’m a midwesterner I grew up four hours down Highway 63 Why are you glad it was so good to be back
Unknown 7:25
KH: when I think about this work, and I think about the emotional labor of talking about this work.
Unknown 7:39
KH: I think for us in Minnesota in Minneapolis. If you've been here for a few years you know what it's like to sort of carry those stories of George Floyd with you to friends who may not know I have sat and so George is only .. there's emotional labor in that so George's only a sliver of the names that are in this book.
Unknown 8:15
And so, as you're just you know, with all of the negative people sort of critically looking at this book and how so that was a reason why I missed the title.
Unknown 8:36
KH: And what does that mean to carry all that? Yes.
Unknown 8:40
NHJ: I appreciate so my response is, I always try to tell the joke so I don't have to feel other emotions.
Unknown 8:49
I mean, it's true, right? Like, that is such a loaded question.
Unknown 8:56
And really depends on the day you know, I just my instinct is to always go into humor to try to lighten up whatever the intense emotion is that I'm feeling because, as you know, fellow Pulitzer Prize winner is that
Unknown 9:24
Is this worth? This work is emotionally taxing. It's taxing to have to do the work, to have to spend days and weeks and months and now it's, you know, years really trying to excavate all of the horrors and tragedies that have been visited upon black people for no other reason.
Unknown 9:47
Besides the fact that our country wanted to make profit. Also, the exploitation of black labor.
Unknown 9:54
And, you know, catalog, the death to catalog the destruction to catalog as my good friend Ta-Nehisi says the plunder.
Unknown 10:04
So just being in that work is taxing and then once you produce the water the attacks that come with that are our taxes. Well, you know, I just posted on Instagram two days ago, a letter I received in the mail at the New York Times, that call me the N word Oh, four times while saying I was racist.
Unknown 10:31
Yeah, so So I will say I am better now than I was even you know, a year ago that I really have arrived at is in place about it. All that I've come to be reminded by one of my very good friends is one you will let these people kill you. Right like you, you will carry this and you and you won't be here to do the work because so many of our activists have other people that have filed for liberation. They don't live long lives and it's not because they were assassinated. It's because physically, their bodies break down and I really took that to heart.
Unknown 11:15
But also, really, you know, every time I come in a room like this, I'm reminded that all the backlash is because so many Americans want to engage with this work they want
Unknown 11:32
and I said it's warm in here and I just knowing that people would come out on an evening to discuss what is really hard to discuss, to discuss things we wanted to look away from. And if no one cared, this was not having an impact you would not be on this power. Fine. So that's actually quite affirming to me. Yeah, that's one so thank you for the question, which I now answered with sincerity.
Unknown 11:59
addition, as always, this is a journalist that will because the journey by again, you're not going to get off that whenever he asked that question.
Unknown 12:09
I forgot to do work.
Unknown 12:14
So I want to talk about talking about the book. And one of my favorite things about this book. This has contributed so much to me, in Germany and I want her to talk about his patriotism as as a man from Mississippi, who had to deal with Jim Crow, and he had an enormous American flag in your yard.
Unknown 12:53
Probably have seen it from a year or so. So as a junior in your learning in high school, you have Mr. Dial who introduced you to, you know, the football that led you to 1619 to date.
Unknown 13:11
How did your interpretation of your father's patriotism grow over time and change? Yeah, that's such a great question. And one of my favorite parts of the book is also that the very first thing to see is of my father and Oh, my father when he felt both the most American and the most free, which was being outside of America. Right because
Unknown 13:42
as a black person in America, you're always fighting as you can recognize as a whole citizen, as fully American. But when you are abroad, your primary identity is American. And so that is actually a very common experience that black people feel the most American when they're not here. And he was a very young man, he joined the military at 17 because he was a poor black child. And this was his way out of poverty and his way to see the world and so when I see him in that moment, it's before he realized, you know, all of his dreams and ambitions would never come to fruition. But starting with my father who passed away a little over a decade ago, it's just a reminder that everything He bore everything he suffered every indignity every you know, he was one of the smartest men I knew.
Unknown 14:38
Worked service jobs his entire life that he made my life possible. And if he could have seen, right that one way, like that, he didn't think he had accomplished much that he was at the front of his book. It's just it makes you emotional every time I think about it.
Unknown 14:55
And so, you know, I grappled with my dad's patriotism my entire life until I wrote this essay.
Unknown 15:05
People were like, when did you come to understand why your dad's patriotism? And I was like, at the age of 44 years old, 43 years old when I knew I wanted to write an essay on democracy. I didn't even know my dad was going to be in the essay. I didn't plan for my father, for my family to be in the essay. And I really wanted to write an essay that turned on his head idea to democratize our country who gets credit for democracy. So some people get credit for the idea of democracy. Right? But if you want to actually talk about actual democracy, black people have to get the credit for that. And yet without
Unknown 15:51
really thinking about the Civil Rights Movement as this period where we finally achieve as close to democracy as we have complex resistance, but as I started reading, I realized no, no, no, you have to go back way, way earlier than that you have to go you know, to the period of the revolution.
Unknown 16:11
And even before that, where your other black people
Unknown 16:18
in this country is in society that they believe in.
Unknown 16:22
And so it was them doing all of this research and reading black people.
Unknown 16:26
Literally when 95% of the black population was enslaved, saying, we're not leaving America. We built America. Our ancestors’ bones are in this soil. We shed blood in every war this nation ever fought.
Unknown 16:42
And I had to contemplate that that would most of your brothers and sisters are in absolute bondage with no right to citizenship in this country. And yet you are claiming this country as your own and saying that the highest calling of patriotism is not performative. It is saying our country is failing to live up to its highest ideals and we will fight our own country if we need to force it to, you can't get a higher patriotism than that. And was in doing that, that I understood what my father was doing. What my father was saying is our people go back earlier than anyone else except indigenous people on this land. And you will not rob us of our lineage or birthright or being able to claim the country that we built not just with our labor, right, but with our actual belief in our founding ideals. So that's how I can understand my father's patriotism and perhaps my own.
Unknown 17:49
you had that conversation?
Unknown 17:52
KH: Yeah, no. I think about my dad too, same, (died?) probably about 10 years.
Unknown 18:00
Yeah.
Unknown 18:03
NHJ: This is part of being an adult, right, coming back to your parents. Damn! you're right, you're right, like you say, right when you're young you think you know so much and you realize so little. So for the young folks in here like appreciate seriously appreciate your elders, and thank them so they can they can know that ..
Unknown 18:49
I wanted to talk a little bit about what I accomplished through that process.
Unknown 18:57
NHJ: So I first pitched the project in February of that year, which looking back on it, actually the same pitch on Friday is meant to 14 days about six and a half months.
Unknown 19:12
And a lot of people assume you have the battle to get this project in the New York Times and it wasn’t largely because I had somehow manage to put myself in a position where I worked for great people. My bosses at the magazine are the best editors I've ever worked for. But I also put myself in a position where I knew they were gonna say yes, which is a rare thing in my career.
Unknown 19:38
At that point, so it wasn't actually a battle and my my editors believed in the project from the beginning, that this was hard.
Unknown 19:48
It was hard in terms of just, you know, the sheer breadth of what we were trying to do. How do you tell the origin of your story?
Unknown 19:56
All the different ways we had essays we had short fiction prose art photography, a special section …? podcast series, and I had to do everything in there. I oversaw, I touched, I read, I selected, I'm looking at photos.
Unknown 20:15
And I'm also trying to write my own essay, which you know, I'm a writer, so I have a little bit of ego about my writing and I'm like, my essay cannot be the weakest link in the project. [laughter]
Unknown 20:30
right.
Unknown 20:31
Mine cannot be the one no one talks about.
Unknown 20:36
And it's the first you know, it's the first essay so I'm doing all of that while also trying to research and write my own my own essay.
Unknown 20:46
And at that moment, I think everyone who worked on this project intimately cried at some point, and I certainly cried multiple times from exhaustion from the pressure once you pitch it, understanding as a black woman that if I pitch something this ambitious about the legacy of slavery, and no one cares, no one reads it when it comes out.
Unknown 21:14
No one else is gonna get that chance after right? but we don't stand on our own. Right? This is just the reality right? If you're a white person and you pitch something, you just fucked up. [laughter]
Unknown 21:29
But if you’re a black person and you just pitched something that doesn't work out, like oh well, every black person behind you that I know … [inaudible.]
Unknown 21:38
Real. Yes, right. No, that was awesome. So and everything from I remember this moment we we had his legend for when I was adamant that this pilot was going to talk about the violence because I think the way we obscure and we rationalize the fact that we had chattel slavery for 250 years and racial apartheid 400 years to pretend that it's just about, you know, people having to work for free and not terror.
Unknown 22:06
We pretend that racial apartheid was about not being able to sit at the lunch counter, and not the sheer violence that undergirds that type of education. So … right. So the violence was like we're going to talk about the violence I'm going to show it but there's this photo. I ramble, you may know this about me. So there's this photo, it's photo now that we have to show what this looks like. But then when it's an I'm the only black person on our core editorial team, right? I understand that it's very it's right. So and when I looked at the photo, it showed you know, the face of the man would had been lynched so why, like I don't know. I want to show the violence but I also don't want to dehuman, further dehumanizing people who they did this to to humanize. I don't want a black person turning that page and feeling like I dehumanize them by doing that.
Unknown 23:09
So I had to call a friend like a black friend right like what do you think about this because I'm the only black person on the editorial team. It's not that I didn't trust my the editors but the sensibility’s different, right.
Unknown 23:21
And we ended up taking that photo out and showing a photo of the lynching, where the black person, the black man who was lynched, he’s far in the background, you can't really make his features out, but what you can see are all white people there who lynched him and enjoyed it, right? So it's like all of those little decisions over the course of six and a half months.
Unknown 23:41
Um, and so, at the magazine right before you publish the magazine, you lay out in print every page you play it out in a room just so you can see how does everything flow into the book. And I went in the wrong way. Wesley Morris wrote the music essay two times because I couldn't for the New York Times had to say, Good Lord, I know most of us could never dream they want to and it music essay is masterful. And if you haven't listened to the podcast that there's one episode you listen to music and so he's just a very dear friend of mine and we go in the room and look at this thing that we have created where like the fucking like we did this.
Unknown 24:27
And it was beautiful and it was powerful because the I had one mantra we will be unflinching. We're not going to worry about the New York Times audience. We know who they are. Right?
KH: They can learn something too.
Unknown 24:45
But we're not writing to them. We're not producing something that is palatable. They're worried about how he feels about it. And hopefully if he showed us this way that we turned off like we were going to produce what we felt needed to be produced.
Unknown 25:00
And so we'll see what happens. And we knew that we had done that thing. So we do we grab each other and we just start stabbing this news or my journalist you're not supposed to show emotion, right supposed to have this detachment, and you certainly are supposed to cry the newspaper right? But we didn't care. We didn't care. It just overtook us what, what we had done.
Unknown 25:25
And again, no idea how it would go up to the world that it will become what it became. But we knew we had done justice to our ancestors commitments.
Unknown 25:44
KH: So let's let's talk a little bit about you know, the amount of research you've done.
Unknown 25:54
NHJ: That's gonna be the whole rest of the lecture! I know, right? [laughter]
Unknown 25:58
KH: But I'm always when I was reading the book, there were a lot of surprises in that phase that I had not known. And I was just curious, like, what surprised you as a part of this research that you're like, I had no idea.
Unknown 26:13
KH: Man, I mean, so much.
Unknown 26:16
NHJ: You know, so I've been studying this history, since I was 15 years. Old. Right now, which is nice.
Unknown 26:26
(The Reverend Ray) Dial introduced me to the field of black studies. And once I took that course, I started reading on my own I studied like history in college. AFAM major, you should go to my house. That's literally all that's on my bookshelves. I read this history obsessively. And yet, having studied something for about 10 years .. Just playing! .. I’m a little older than that.
[laughter]
Unknown 26:51
KH: more than half my life right?
NHJ: More then the half my life every single essay.
Unknown 26:59
Almost everything. It's almost like every page there was something in there I had none.
Unknown 27:05
And it just tells you what how much there is to know. But also, what a superior job, people have done manipulated the history that we do know.
Unknown 27:25
to learn things, like the amount that you learn, right, am I like, the type of every type of person college professors right so I'm just the regular people read the book, but very learned people were like, Oh my God, I didn't know this I didn't know this right? I'm just learning to speak sound particularly that the history we've all been taught is particularly when it comes to slavery, and its legacy.
Unknown 27:52
But I'll tell you the thing that
Unknown 27:56
it's probably the most shocking and then I'm kind of ashamed that I never spent much time thinking about it is Dorothy Roberts, essay on race, and I assigned that essay to Dorothy Roberts is a sociologist who studies the intersection of race and gender, is probably her best known work, Killing the black body. And I really wanted a scholar who would write about how race, race, no matter what race we are, race, as a construct was created the wombs of black women, that we begin to construct race so that we can construct who will be enslavable and who will not. And that comes through the wombs of black women. So slavery is literally recreated and replenished and sustained through the black woman's womb. What does that meeaaan? So
Unknown 28:48
And it’s something I've never really read someone dealing with before in the way that I wanted to before is not just talking about what happened in the past, but talking about what that then means about how we think about black women now, and how we still act like black women’s wounds are dangerous to black children and black families. Right so I assigned this essay to her.
Unknown 29:07
And it talks about slave readings, which .. I don’t even like to use the phrase that we often think about the physical labor of slavery, but we don't think about the sexual labor that black women are forced under bondage, but that they were forced to reproduce when Black.
Unknown 29:33
during slavery, to be enslaved by law, you could not be “raped.” There was no such thing as a crime of rape. Against an enslaved woman. In fact, rarely.
Unknown 29:53
ever spent a lot of time thinking about what slavery has been like for black women who had no bodily autonomy, who are being forced to bear their .. children were taken away a lot of times
But we have to speak this history, right? This rainbow of colors we are, right? There’s a reason that we attach 25% of our DNA goes to Europe through the paternal mind. But we bury it. We bury it.
I will probably remember the most is that essay and then thinking about the way we still perceive of black women today.
And the children, the black women there that we have marked our children somehow, right? the super-predator remark from Hillary Clinton is in that same line of thought of black women reproducing pathology from their wombs, right, reproducing the conditions that the children were experiencing. But let me say one more thing. So I’m going to lighten the mood a little bit.
The other thing that I realized we have not been led to contemplate nearly enough is resistance. Hmm. There's also reason for that. Yes. Right.
People resisting constantly in ways big and small and resisting in a country where we're at 13%, at our peak 20% racial minorities. So we couldn't win, right? And we leave the slaver world, so we know the outcome, right? Right, when we ran away ninety percent of us knew the outcome, and yet we did it all of the time.
And you realize that they're not taught about resistance because again, you're taught about resistance that you have to contemplate what were they resisting in school, right? You know, our country founded on those ideals, right? That all men are created equal now. We’re endowed with these inalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
And yet 1/5th of your population is in passage in bondage, is never fighting and they are looking at your language and they're saying, “ohh you have the right to take up arms for your freedom? So do we.”
And we don't talk about that.
And what that does, is that also, then affirms white supremacist ideology.
Because if it was so bad, why didn’t we get to be freed? Why don’t we just wait for white people to liberate us? instead of liberating ourselves? But we were, and we did. And there’s a reason why we all learned about the French Revolution, but not the Haitian Revolution that occurred right ten years later.
Maybe when they looked to the American Revolution, were they also, some of them were brought in to help Americans to win that revolution, and then they have to go back home and they're like.
Well, we learned about that brand.
But we don't learn about because Haitian Revolution that became the first nation to abolish slavery in our hemisphere. The first free back republican world in a sea of slave colonies, and our great white republicans and by that I mean the republicans who believe in a Republic.
Put down the revolution.
So we don't verify it at all and so in general.
This entire book is about the silences and the way the silences is the things you don't learn .. silences.
Shaping our society and we don't even know it.
Yeah, I mean it's.
KH: Every every time I read something I was just blown away about again, what I didn’t learn.
The depth at which ..
That that labor and the complexities of that labor and what that means for us over time as we try to do what we’re doing.
Hideaway. Really. Perhaps.
KH: So I wanted to talk a little bit about Ibram Kendi’s project.
NHJ: Second to last.
KH: the “Idea of progress” as a cover for what's actually happening inside society so I'm gonna read this quote. Gonna read this quote that I like in here.
It says that.
KH reads Kendi quote: “The United States has come a long way in the past. And how America has.
And how America has come along with it uh, has a long way to go.”
That’s the whole quote by Kendi.
KH: This past-future logic has compelled generation after generation to overlook the present indeed the presence of racism
Has compelled generation after generation to overlook the present, indeed the presence of racism.
NHJ: Yes. I love that.
NHJ: It is just .. We’re always talking about “How great we’re doing!” And we’re not doing so good.
So the book is not chronological but
But there is a logic to the order of the book, and there's a reason that Ibram X. Kendi’s essay comes second to last and right before the final essay, which is justice, which is our argument for reparations for descendants of slavery and what's so brilliant. Please read this. Please read. Please read it.
What’s so brilliant about it is.
It forces us to confront the way that one (1) Americans are obsessed with this idea of progress. And we're obsessed with it because, you know, it alleviates that emergency, that forces us to do anything force, anything about conditions be allowed right now. So what we do is we say things were really bad. And you're right, maybe slavery was wrong.
Things are bad. Bad.
Jim Crow — bad idea.
KH: Bad idea.
NHJ: They're getting better.
Because they're limited to right now ...
And yeah, things aren't equal. We know things aren’t always equal now, but they're getting better, just they’ll be better in the future, always moving forward.
No it doesn't.
The arc of justice. The universe. Bends toward justice.
No, it doesn't.
They just keep coming back on itself. They argue it’s a circle that just keeps coming back on itself.
The period we benignly call “Jim Crow” which was a period of racial, enforced, terroristic, racial. Apartheid. That’s what it was. That's not slavery. But was not much better.
And so the fact it wasn’t slavery, we can't pat ourselves on the back because Jim Crow wasn’t slavery.
Just like now. We want to pat ourselves on the back because We no longer have legalized discrimination, though the conditions of black people have largely remained unchanged. We are in the city of Minneapolis where black people can be lynched on national television. Now I’m not arguing that the America I grew up in is the America my father grew up in. It was not.
But we shouldn't get caught in that.
We’ve been here 400 years and yet we are supposed to be grateful that I wasn’t born into apartheid, right, and apartheid by the way it ended a mere decade before I was born.
So,
I was born, so I was in 1976, and so 1968. You could discriminate against black people, in housing just because they descended from slavery.
A year before that it would have been illegal for my parents to marry because my mom was white and my father was black. Illegal in more than half the states in this country.
Two years before it was legal to discriminate against black people every aspect of American Society. What school we could go to, what parks we could go to, what restaurants we could eat in, what jobs we could have, you could explicitly discriminate against people not because black is a made-up thing.
I found the one thing. The one thing that Black people don’t suffer from worse than everyone else is osteoporosis. Lots of laughing. There’s a joke about carrying things that matter back strong but I’m not gonna make that joke. Why people do get osteoporosis more than we do. That’s the only thing I could find no but truly people like myself up on stage and you think that is the work of progress we are exceptional. We don’t reflect the conditions of both of the people in our community. We don’t reflect the conditions most of people in our community and when I go home to Waterloo, I don’t see anyone else who lives life than I do and I’m talking about sister’s cousin aunts uncles my direct family most people like the black white wealth gap unchanged since The time King was assassinated unchanged the gap between black white income unchanged incarceration rates. Worst life expectancy, barely budged that’s declined since Covid during the period of racial apartheid you could look back on things and say well that’s because of structural. Now we say all that’s gone so we don’t know where this comes from ..
KH: We had structural inequality?
[Laughing.]
Now we say all that’s gone.
That’s right this is what critical race theory teaches you: if you architect inequality into a society for 350 years, you can take down the laws. It doesn’t change the structure. It is a particular society, that George Floyd moment where a white police officer who kneel on a man and leaches the literal life out of his body, knowing he was being filmed, and does not worry that he will pay a single consequence. Society creates that moment. That’s not about Derek Chauvin. That is about him understand he exist in a society where he can do that in front of witnesses, being taped, and nothing will happen to him, so this idea of progress allows us to look at this moment, and we can say “But we’ve come so far!” only one black person was lynched last year, that’s how we look at it, so what he’s arguing is that [Ibram X. Kendi] because we believe that we are better than we used to be and we will get better in the future we accept all this grave inequality and debt and suffering Right now, and that is not the sign of a moral people and not the sign of a healthy society. Let me just say of all the essays in the book that one is perhaps the most indicting of us right because we take that comfort in it, we wanna think of ourselves as good people we know that in 2020 there was a what we considered a racial reckoning.
It was extremely short-lived, extremely short-lived, extremely short-lived.
We saw these pledges like Sephora says 15% of our creators is black. Don’t get me wrong; I love Sephora. NASCAR finally realizes that maybe we better not let people fly confederate flags maybe that’s a bad idea right so we see all the superficial changes and now that’s all gone to and then we’ll see what Ibram X Kendi says everytime we see raci-IAL progress we see rac-IST progress. We only wanna talk about the racial progress. We’re clearly experiencing it now right? We elect Obama, then we elect a white nationalist. We can see a racial reckoning and then we see this anti-critical-race theory, anti-voting, anti-trans, target-any-marginalized-group-we-can-to-hold-onto-power backlash, but Because we’re so busy patting ourselves on the back about how we’re not as bad as we were back then, we do nothing about what’s happening right now, and then 30 years from now, people will be looking at our period, Saying well we’re not as bad as we were 30 years ago, while fundamentally the structure of inequality among black, among the experience of indigenous people, Remains fundamentally unchanged, and we’re OK with that because it’s not as explicit because we don’t have to see it if we don’t want to. Because it doesn’t seem as bad as it once was, I said anything less than equality is not enough.
Kyndell Harkness: So that leads us to reparations.
NHJ: That’s where it all leads. The only road we can lead. Where it all ends.
KH: Um you know, Maybe we could talk about why it’s so hard for people to wrap their heads around the money.
NHJ: besides anti-blackness? Haha. So one, interestingly, I wrote what became the essay in that book, I wrote another version of that published after George Floyd died, after George Floyd was killed after those protest because because I was supposed to be finishing the 1619 book and I’m watching all of these protests and I just kept feeling the ask was too small in this moment, again, what happened to George Floyd the interaction with the police. For him it clearly was, but it stood in for this larger system that allows it to happen .. This larger system .. that picture is Floyd in the neighborhood, that red-lined, segregated neighborhood, that larger system that created his entire life, and the lives of so many others, and I’m like, you can’t just be asking police, please don’t kill us Right that’s the most basic thing in the world that the state cannot kill its citizens with no consequences when its citizens have done nothing to deserve death. So I thought I have to try and use this moment about this bigger anger is that what causes most suffering in this country is that we have close to zero wealth then that’s what shapes our inability to get an education, to buy a house in the same neighborhood, why there is so much crime like all of our health at all of these things that causes to suffer all heads back to slavery as an economic institution. We like to think it’s a racist institution but you don’t transfer 13 million human beings across the Atlantic Ocean because you just don’t like Africans. They did that to exploit this labor source to extract wealth from black bodies and redistribute that wealth to white people and white institutions, and then we create racism to justify this inhumane system of labor exploitation. So if I understand slavery as an economic system, and Jim Crow trying to reify that system of economic exploitation as close as possible, right, My father was born on a sharecropping farm outside of the fact that they could not leave the plantation when they wanted out because they were indebted, they made a dollar a day, so when we understand that all of the systems were systems of economic exploitation, and that Black people enter freedom with nothing .. When have you ever been asked to contemplate what freedom looks like for Black people? When all of a sudden we were told you’re free to go, but you have no land, no property no home, you have no tools, you have no food, you have no clothes, you have nothing, but then told, “Go live your life!” And then you’re forced to do 100 years where you are locked out of home ownership, you’re locked out of college, you’re locked out of any ability to work any kind of white collar job or well-paying job, and then in 1968 you’re told, “All right. Our bad.” But you didn’t make up for 350 years of extractions from black communities, somehow manage to scrape together some land … so I say all that to say, When we look at the fact The typical black household has 1/10 of the wealth of the typical white household, that poor white people have more wealth than middle-class black people, that white people with less than a high school degree had more wealth than black people who have graduated from college, that black people who are married have less wealth than a single, white mother, that every single thing black people are told is “if they just bootstrap ourselves up, they will have the same thing that anyone else has.” Nothing can replace 350 years of extraction except giving that resource back. We don’t know enough to have a conversation, Right? So if I just give the answer why white people are opposed to reparations without building in this history I think people can’t repeat it I think people have a knee-jerk response to reparations because they really think that black people’s experience is akin to any other people that suffered, right? I can tell you I’ve heard it all, usually on Twitter: “My family were Irish, they came here with nothing. They discriminated against the Irish.” Discrimination is not slavery. It’s not belittling the suffering of others. The black experience is singular. Only one group was brought here in chattel slavery. Only one group had to go through 100 years of racial apartheid all these implemented against Black people. And by the way, when black people fight, they fight for everyone so when we think about how poorly we’ve all been taught this history, how little we actually know, how slavery was an economic institution, Jim Crow was an economic institution. Why our black people had so little after the civil rights movement. It’s understandable. I worked hard. I know poor white people I know people, but they have a knee-jerk reaction because they really don’t know now. There’s a certain percentage of the population, they’re gonna be opposed to it, but I don’t know that that’s most Americans I know that we’ve suffered from poor history than most people have been taught And that if you can, this is where [inaudible] she has reset(?), hope my rage has to be filled by the ability that my rage can’t produce something right and that that is why people knew that we alleviate the suffering of our fellow Americans, and that we will try to become the moral people that we think that we are.
KH: Let’s talk about hope with this work. Let’s talk about emotional labor.
NHJ: I don’t find hope that personally useful. I believe in it for other people, y’all can have hope, It’s important, but it’s not what motivates me because I frankly I don’t think we’re ever going to fix it. I know that we can fix it that everything we see in our society all this inequality all the suffering it’s not natural right it doesn’t have to be we choose it. We built it! and so if you know that that it was all constructed, then you know that it can be deconstructed, but the differences, all of the power of our society went into constructing it all of the power of our society. The greatest minds well the greatest white minds, you know science the arts, government policy, private policy. All of these things went to create what we see and now when it comes time to fix it we want to do almost nothing power is not lined up to do anything and we don’t wanna put Any resources into fixing it? Now our country’s demographics are changing and so, inevitably we’ll have to know we won’t! How many majority black and brown cities exist now? We see the model, right? the south was the model, what we’re seeing right now with one major political party saying that democracy is multiracial, we don’t believe in democracy, they’re trying there’s a case of the Supreme Court right now that will allow elections to be taken, so I still .. it’s so long. I got so many ideas in my head I have hope about things I can control and I don’t have hope about anything outside of myself because I don’t think we’ll ever do right. They just wanna be let off. I’m not saying the question is sincere. But what they’re saying is oh my God you’re talking about all these terrible things were done so many terrible things there’s so many terrible things in our society but you hope it’s gonna get better right? So you can leave you can leave here and feel kind of OK about it and what I’m saying is it’s not OK and I don’t want us to feel OK but I want to leave here with a pit in your stomach that we could have a better society than we have and I want to be clear the 1619 project is not the story of black people. It’s a story of America. Black people may suffer the worst but we all are suffering. OK we are. An exceptional nation, in ways that we should not be proud we are the most carceral national in the world But the majority in prison or not black, we are disproportionately imprisoned, but the majority are not black. We have the highest rates of child poverty in the developed world in the richest nation with the highest child poverty most of those children are not black there are millions of white Americans who cannot go to the doctor when they are sick because we’re the only western industrialized country where your health care is determined by whether or not you have a job that Wants to offer it to you or not so all of these things are life expectancy, even white Americans, who live longer than Black people, but you live shorter lives than white people in other countries that we compare ourselves to so we are all suffering by our inability to get over our original sin, and we are content with that suffering. As long as we think that people who are supposed to be on the bottom half are worse off than us, so liberate our entire society, for all of us, to be free together for us, not to accept the suffering of those who are less than us, because there are certain people in the society that are letting all of us to collectively suffer as long as we are willing to let someone be below us, so what choice will we make about our society. So what choice? I don’t have hope that we’ll do the right thing that ever cross-racial cross-class movement that has been attempted in this country has been destroyed. White people will always choose their race over any form of solidarity. I’ve never seen that practice, broken for longer than an instance, and until that happens, I can’t have hope for our society I can hope for my child for the things I can control, but we have to collectively decide. That we were not a great society upon which we were built, but we’ll be a society that is based upon the ideals about which we were built.
Nikole Hannah-Jones Minneapolis 12.6.22