Nikole’s cup is half empty
My experience with the Pulitzer Prize winning producer of the 1619 Project.
EDIT on 2/24/23: Many words have been spilled on our contemporary “critical” activists. Very little of what others have said about Nikole Hannah Jones or Ibram X. Kendi interests me, so I forced myself to complete this piece. It went through my light-hearted sausage maker. If you are looking for empirical, persuasive arguments on canonizing or cancelling, or spending your school district’s professional development dollars on the 1619 Project, it ain’t me.
Here’s my previous post hauling out Ms. Hannah-Jones’ whole bloody transcript.
From 12/9/22
Am I making too big a deal out of Nikole Hannah-Jones’s appearance at the University of Minnesota Tuesday night? — yes, clearly, the deeper I repose into her world. It’s a mind numbing time-suck. But I’m doing it because I know this person wields massive influence over the idea-capture on critical race theory (CRT), her 1619 Project. CRT, at ground-level in K12 schools, and I say this as one who practiced diversity principles my entire teaching career, is just the cooking of all essential oils of schooling down to race, to the exclusion of other topics: multiplication, phonics, chemical bonding, world history. CRT never played well as a both-and buzzword to incorporate into K12 philosophy. It’s not an either-or. It’s the foundation on which all learning stands, if one listens long enough to Nikole Hannah-Jones, or her friends, as she named them, Ta-Nehisi Coates, and Ibram X. Kendi. “As my good friend Ta-Nehisi says..” About the 1619 book, she said: “Ibram X. Kendi’s essay comes second to last .. [it’s] so brilliant. Read it. Please read this.”
Hannah-Jones grew up in Waterloo, Iowa, four hours down Highway 63 from me, or I mean us. I could hear it in her Minnesota-adjacent enunciation of such words as “about,” sounding like a blond cheerleader: “a-baAaOuT.”
Introduced by Star Tribune reporter, and fellow Pulitzer Prize winner, Kyndell Harkness (“How ya doin’, Nikole?”) Hannah-Jones kicked off the show saying, “It’s cold here.” It is. It’s frigid, but hearts are warm with repressed aw-shucks whiteness. My guess is the editorial huddles at 620 Eighth Avenue in NYC are much, much warmer. Here in Minnehopeless, as I like to call it, we drink peppermint schnapps, line our pockets with tater tot hot-dish hand warmers, and fall into snowbanks to keep warm.
Anyway, now I’m teetering into humor, and Nikole is not funny, I’m telling you. She is dead-serious about the extraction of black bodies at the hands of Robocop-Derek-Chauvin-Clone-Armies, about reparations and, and, and, well, once I say anything halfway lippy, you know I’m going in all the way to snark.
I like Nikole, though. I do. If I were in high school with her, for sure “Ida” had a crush on her. She has a great smile, miles of Manic-Panic hair, she’s smart, she clearly loves creative writing, though I don’t know if she was into Rilke or anybody sad like I was.
I have to abbreviate her name, it’s three names, and she has a three-name alias in Ida Bae Wells. Altogether, that’s six names, and I don’t do six for English earls, either. So from here on, she’s NHJ.
NHJ claimed “our people go back earlier than anyone else except indigenous people on this land.” You know, I’m not a historian, but there was intermittent traffic in the 1500s up to Jamestown in 1607. Come on now. Don’t be so absolute. See, what this whole 1619 thingy needed from the get-go was less absolutism. We all know from our privileged teachers, nonetheless, that history is goddamned complicated. NHJ’s chattel slavery history doesn’t start with the sale of “black bodies” by “black bodies.” That had been going on in Western Africa for a minute before 1619. It’s atrocious what the founders here did — atrocious. I am appalled at man’s inhumanity to man on our land. This is where I invoke “both/and” thinking because it suits the argument that not only were white people atrocious, but so were indigenous to indigenous, Mayans to Mayans, western explorers in the Caribbean and Mexico, current Chinese CCP to Uighurs, and sigh, yes, English and Vikings to Irish, especially those damn Danes. Occupations, seizures, rape and pillaging went on hundreds of years before Cromwell’s plantations in Ireland.
Moving along now.
NHJ claimed that if a white person pitched a feature at the Magazine, and it didn’t work out well, “You just fucked up.” But if a black person did and it was shit-canned, every black person behind her in line would know her failure. And maybe that’s true. This however is creative writing. Who knows the identities of black failures versus white failures in publishing? Where’s the collective identity in failure? I need schooling on that. Isn’t a failure a reason to get up, as I’ve had to, dust myself off, and garner more rejections with which to tape on my wall of shame? I mean, I’ve been rejected by some folks!
NHJ talks a lot about the ordering and sequencing of the project, about decisions that had to be made over six months, about replacing a lynching photo of a black man hanging, with one that shows the white people in the foreground enjoying the lynching, so that it becomes a moment of historical atrocity. Our history is brutal. The fact we hanged 38 “Sioux” in Mankato, Minnesota in the 1862 Dakota Indian Wars was disgraceful. Lincoln was told of 300 death sentences, and commuted all but 39 of them. Not much relief. It’s still terrible. The Chinese who built the railroads, the Japanese imprisoned at Manzanar, the Irish brought here on coffin ships, the experiences of anyone arriving here changing their names because they looked or sounded like our country’s enemies du jour, is irrefutable. All that was bad, but blacks had it worse than anybody. I think people who trifle in this argument against NHJ’s findings, and the findings of all the actual historians, should just give her this point. There’s nothing salient to argue against, as in which subjugated culture had it worse than all the other subjugated cultures. It’s obvious. My 1960s education made that clear to me how singular it was. I’m not arguing it. Arguments pitting indigenous suffering ahead of or lengthier than blacks’ suffering are a waste of time.
But this essentialist, sufferings litany, this battle about it being worse than all, persisting longer, past Jim Crow and redlining, past Civil Rights and Affirmative Action, still going on today, bad as ever, probably gonna be here in 30 years, as NHJ said, leaving her hopeless, is a hard sell. But not hard enough to not sell curriculum contracts to K12 schools.
4,500 schools nationwide bought units
How educators are spreading the 1619 Project.
Many times NHJ spoke of black struggles using the pronoun “we” and present tense, or near-past tense:
If we leave the slavery world, we know the outcome, right? Right, when we ran away, nine-tenths of us knew the outcome, and yet we did it all the time. See this is creative nonfiction storytelling. I really think Nikole soars at this method.
NHJ said, the difficulty of not learning about black Americans’ resistance to their just pursuit of basic American ideals,
We’re endowed with these inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness .. So they’re saying [presumably our early freedom fighters], ‘Oh, 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.
What?
If it was so bad, why didn’t it get fixed? Why don’t we just wait for white people to liberate us? Instead of liberating ourselves? But we were, and we did.
Stop. My inner hothead, Hotspvrre, is lit now because of having listened to a few other loose uses of that term, pinning white supremacy onto others’ collective identities.
Who? Where’s the white supremacist? Let’s get him.
I’m a bit touchy on this subject, having been a leftist teacher virtually dragged behind the BLM car from 2016-2019. You didn’t just sell that, Ms. Nikole. You left the WS term out there, pinging around, so. No. Who’s drinking that besides an emotionally imbalanced fanclub?
I would like to know more about the pronoun “we” that she uses to describe slaves, and the raconteur’s time stamp of now. One must think about history, the ancient, past, near-present, and weigh all the complex fabrics that bring us to today. We glimpse a muddled but interesting, everlasting “now” when Nikole is asked by Harkness to discuss Ibram X. Kendi’s essay, “Progress.”
Her interviewer Harkness quotes from Kendi.
I’m gonna read this quote that I like in here. It says that, “The United States has come a long way in the past” .. and how “America has a long way to go.”
That’s it, Ms. Harkness? That’s all Kendi said? Well damn, I thought our country’s progress was done when Ye, formerly Kanye, took the microphone from Taylor Swift.
NHJ referred to a past-future logic that compelled generation after generation to overlook the .. presence of racism. “We’re always talking about “How great we’re doing! and we’re not doing so great.”
I totally agreed, for a heartbeat, with NHJ. Who doesn’t see all the suffering and scars today in the community, in school, and in prison? All the disproportionate representation? That’s what I, and any other teacher with a conscience has fought our entire careers. But also, why ignore that blacks murder each other, in some estimates, by proportion, many more times than white people? She could pause and ask, is white supremacy really the reason why? I can’t stretch the dotted line in my imagination from white supremacy thinking to these terrible numbers of “black bodies.” And why won’t NHJ talk about it? It’s ungodly, we should, we should all care about solving this emergency now.
The historian, NHJ, proceeds back to talking about her father’s life, and how things were hard, and things haven’t gotten much better.
“The black white wealth gap. Unchanged from the time King was assassinated. Unchanged. The gap between black white income? Unchanged. Incarceration rates? Worse. So you look at all these things.”
Returning to Kendi’s essay’s notion of past-future, people claiming progress has been made, NHJ said, “It is a particular society, that George Floyd moment, where a white police officer kneeled on a man and leached the literal life out of his body.”
Society creates that moment. That’s not about Derek Chauvin. That is about him understanding he exists 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.
NHJ said 2020 brought about a racial reckoning. This is a handy handle others like to slap onto 2020. People I know know that we’ve struggled watching media lies about Black Lives Matter, its blurry past narrative, Mike-Brown-and-Trayvon-Martin-were-murdered, Let’s Outrage! into a blurry present where George Floyd, a Texas transplant to Minnesota who was not born yet when redlining ended, tells cops twice in a year during stops that he can’t breathe, begs cops to put him down on the ground, and his heart disease and a brutal cop, Derek Chauvin, leans on him for nine and a half minutes, expediting his drugged body’s pre-existing heart failure, and depriving him of lifesaving measures.
NHJ: “This larger system .. that picture is Floyd in the neighborhood, that red-lined, segregated neighborhood.” You know, Nikole, I hate to nitpick, but I am going to. Redlining ended here in, best I can tell, 1956. George Floyd was born in 1974. Grew up in Texas. Come on, I — wait, I’ll let it go. The “red lines” are my own, depicting George Floyd’s general location in Minneapolis at the time of death. Historically, redlining took place south and west “preserving” the “nice” neighborhoods.
Anyway, Nikole goes on to discuss the (she said three times) “extremely short-lived” racial reckoning. I laughed when she said Sephora claimed to have 15% creators of color. That NASCAR decides “maybe we better not let people fly confederate flags. Maybe that’s a bad idea.” I did laugh. I agreed! She’s a good storyteller once she gets up and running.
But George Floyd’s death as part of a larger structure. I strove to find NHJ’s facts about how George Floyd’s death represented how things are for all black people today, but I did not hear any evidence. I heard about “350 years of economic extraction from black bodies.” And I agree! Three hundred fifty years cannot be easily reckoned with. She and interviewer Harkness said reparations are where the conversation is at, now.
NHJ: That’s where it all leads. The only road we can lead. Where it all ends.
Harkness said “Maybe we could talk about why it’s so hard for people to wrap their heads around the money.”
NHJ: “Besides anti-blackness? Haha.” Then she built up again, a narrative of historical, atrocious wrongdoings, the “13 million human beings transported across the Atlantic Ocean.” Then set free with no home or property or clothing to continue, then again after Jim Crow, set free with no education or prospects.
NHJ: [to the government]: “But you didn’t make up for 350 years of extractions.”
When Harkness asked her about hope, NHJ said,
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 thought that comment was central to NHJ’s worldview.
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 [as a nation]. They just wanna be let off.
I don’t have hope that we’ll do the right thing, that every 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.
Do you know what she meant by that white people statement? I am not at all sure. This nation forged on individuality would like a word. Not only did I find that groundless and vague, it’s bigoted. It’s racist. See Nikole now, boiling it all down. At what point does race essentialism dribble over into straight-up racism? NHJ reached that point for me when she said that, and I hope 2023 has no use for that offensive language. She seems terminally afflicted with a certain deeply ingrained sensibility, or sensitivity, to white people holding back love when they gush on her everywhere she goes. Somehow white people hold some oppressive, persistent vice grip on her. I think it serves her to keep it up. The omnipresent, light-pigmented, straw-man will never loosen its imaginary grip on her.
It’s okay to be hopeless. I’m hopeless a lot of the time, except when I wake up, realize I’m not dead yet, and turn on the espresso machine, and it still works. Now it’s time to let you, dear reader, take her words to the next level, because I’m tired, and I think I’ve given this project 36 hours longer than I had to give it.