Melonie Parker: We have an important
moment right now to advance
dialogue and action surrounding
racial equity around the world.
That starts within each of us as
individuals, and it starts
at places like Google.
Google's values are
based on three respects.
First, we respect all of our users because
a problem is never
solved if it's only
solved for some.
Second, we respect the opportunity.
Working at Google comes
with the responsibility to
do the right thing and
to accomplish
things that matter.
And third, we
respect each other.
We co-create a culture
where everyone belongs.
These values are
the foundation for
our concrete commitments
to racial equity.
Building sustainable
equity within Google,
building products
that, for example,
help Black users investing in
economic opportunities for
Black business owners
and entrepreneurs,
closing gaps in STEM education,
supporting racial justice
organizations, and more.
This series is a forum to
empower all of us to do even more.
We'll explore topics
and issues surrounding
racial equity in its many forms with
some of the world's leading
voices in the space.
Our goal is to amplify
those voices and come
together as a global community
to make real change.
Thank you for joining us as we
search for racial equity.
Bobb:
My name is Kamau Bobb.
I am the Global Lead for Diversity,
Strategy, and Research at Google.
I like to welcome you to this episode
of the "Search for Racial Equity."
Today I have the
distinct honor of having
a dialogue with
Nikole Hannah-Jones.
She is the Pulitzer Prize-winning author
and creator of The 1619 Project.
The MacArthur Genius
Foundation committee
determined that she
is, in fact, a genius,
and she is a truth teller.
Nikole is also one
of the most sought
after opinion makers
of the moment,
and so we're really deeply
honored to have you,
Nikole, thank you
for joining us.
Hannah-Jones: Thank you. Happy to be here.
Bobb: It's a real pleasure.
So, as I said, I know that, uh,
your time and attention
is sought after as
the country is in flux
at the moment for
a host of very serious reasons.
But prior to getting
into the dialogue,
it's useful to know
a little bit about you.
In my experience,
I don't like just talking
about myself just on cue,
so let's do the following.
Your Twitter handle
for example, is Ida B. Wells,
and you're also the co-creator
of the Ida B. Wells Center for
Investigative Journalism.
So if you would, say a little bit about
who Ida B. Wells is and her spirit
and how her spirit
reflects you.
Hannah-Jones: Sure. Thank you for
interviewing me today.
My Twitter handle is actually
Ida Bae Wells, uh, not Ida B. Wells.
Um, and of course,
it's a Black
Twitter nod to, um,
whom I consider to be
the most badass investigative journalist
this country has ever produced.
Uh, I first came, um, to know Ida B. Wells
the way many people did,
she was one of the few
Black people you learned
about during Black History
Month in public school.
And they said that she
was a journalist, but
never really taught us what
her journalism was about.
And it wasn't until
college that I read
her autobiography
and was just
captivated that a woman
born into slavery,
not even five feet tall,
had the moxie and the
courage to go into
communities that
had just lynched
a Black man or woman and
start asking questions.
And for those who don't know,
she was a journalist,
she was really the
person who put lynching
on the global map in
the United States,
she was a co-founder
of the NAACP,
she was a suffragette,
she was a civil rights leader,
and she was a feminist.
So, you know, she
hyphenated her name
before that was en vogue
for women, and
even after she had a baby,
she would take her child
or children out on
the investigative
trail with her.
The reason that I helped co-found
the Ida B. Wells Society for Investigative
Reporting, though,
is that even though Ida B. Wells was doing
investigative reporting
right after the end of slavery,
I, as a kid, didn't have really
any examples of Black women
investigative reporters.
And when I decided
that this was
a career I wanted to pursue,
all of the examples I had ever seen
of people who did this
work were white men.
So, when we founded
this organization to help train and
grow the number
of Black and other journalists
of color who do
investigative reporting,
we named it after Ida B. Wells
so that we could show that there
has actually been
a long tradition of
Black people doing this reporting,
of us innovating
investigative-reporting techniques,
and that it's really critical.
Lynchings were occurring,
just no white media were
investigating them.
And that's the role that
Black journalists still play,
is things are happening in
our communities that get largely ignored
by mainstream journalism
unless we end up doing
the reporting on those.
So we want to
ensure that there are
many more Ida B. Wells
and that we also understand that
important legacy.
Bobb: Thank you for that.
So in your own process,
though, in pursuing
investigative journalism,
was there like an innate--
a missing truth that you were
after that you felt
that there was
something not there that
you wanted to discover?
Hannah-Jones:
Yeah. I first started writing--
I mean, my
journalism career
began in high school.
And it began--
I was bused into
white school starting
in the second grade,
I went to a majority-white high school
and most of the Black kids
in my school were also bused
from the other side of town as
part of a desegregation program.
And I went to my high-school
African-American studies
teacher and complained
to him about
how our high-school newspaper
never wrote about kids like me,
the Black kids who were
bused into the school,
and how we face a lot of
discrimination in that school.
And being, you know, the great Black
educator that he was,
he told me to either join the paper or
shut up and don't come in his room
complaining about it anymore.
So me being a Aries,
if you challenge me to do something,
I will always take you
up on that challenge.
So I joined my high-school paper and
started writing about kids like me.
The first journalism award
I ever won
was for a column I did on all of
the stereotypes that people
had of our community,
the Black community on
the east side of my city,
and I won Iowa High School
Press first place award.
And that kind of put me
on the trajectory to
pursue journalism as a career,
was understanding that we
have to write our own stories.
That if we only allow the narratives
of our communities to be shaped
by those outside of our communities,
we'll never have a
accurate portrayal of
both our struggles
and our triumphs.
So that's really what made
me want to become a
journalist from a young age,
and I only ever wanted to be
a journalist to write about Black people
and racial inequality.
I've written about lots
of different things,
but those things were not
why I became a journalist.
Bobb: One of the reasons that I was saying
in the introduction that
you're a truth teller and
I appreciate that about you
is the singularity of your mission.
It seems that the kinds
of things that you write
about have always been
singularly focused,
and that part of it,
I think, is revealed
in the trajectory of your work.
So, that said, help us out now
with the things that you're typically
asked to talk about.
The 1619 Project,
its origins, and ultimately
that truth that's been missing
from American history.
If you could frame that
up for us a little
bit so that we can
go from there.
Hannah-Jones:
Sure. So The 1619 Project
published actually
almost a year ago.
It published in
August of last year.
And in some ways,
I've been thinking about
The 1619 Project since
I was in high school.
That same class
where Mr. Radile told
me to join the newspaper
or shut up and don't
complain anymore
was also the class where I came
across the year 1619
for the first time.
When that class was over, I got
this obsession with
learning Black history.
I remember
feeling really angry when
I took that class because
in that one semester,
I learned more about Black
Americans, Africans,
and our contributions
to the world than
I had learned in my
entire K-12 education.
And I became really angry because
I thought about
all the years where I felt really
demeaned by our curriculum,
where people would tell us
we were inferior and I had
no evidence or facts
or history to push
back on that notion.
I mean, I knew it didn't feel true,
but I had nothing,
no facts to argue.
And I remember thinking, "All this time,
"you all knew this history existed, and
no one thought it was
important for us to learn it?"
So you know, high school was already
a period of radicalization,
and taking that class,
being a Black student
bused into a white school,
I just became obsessed
to learn this history.
I understood the power
of that knowledge even
as a 16- or 17-year-old child.
So when that class ended,
I kept going back to that teacher,
and I'd tell him to give me another book.
We only got one
semester of Black studies,
but I was not done with
my Black studies curriculum.
So one of the books
he put in my hand was
a book called "Before the Mayflower"
by Lerone Bennett.
And, you know, page 35 or so,
he mentions the year 1619,
and it was like a lightning bolt.
I was like, "Wait a minute,
we've been here that long?"
The title of the
book made sense to me then.
I was like, "Wait, we've been
here before the 'Mayflower.'"
The "Mayflower" lands in 1620.
Every American child learns
about the "Mayflower."
No American child learned
about the "White Lion,"
which came in 1619.
So people who know me
know that I've been obsessed
with that date since high school.
I've thought about that date since
high school and what that meant
and really the power of erasure.
1619 happened, but if we don't know what
happened, it's like it didn't happen.
And that erasure
is so critical to our
understanding of who we are.
So fast forward to,
really, the end of 2018,
I was finishing up
my book leave,
and I was thinking about,
you know, what I was gonna do when
I came back to "The Times."
And I was also
thinking about that
this 400th anniversary
was approaching in
that next year and it was likely
gonna pass with no acknowledgment,
no real commemoration.
Like so much about the Black experience,
it was just going to be invisible.
And here I am at "The New York Times,"
one of the biggest megaphones
in the world,
and I started to think,
"Well, what can I do about that?"
And simply me writing
an essay just felt way
too small for the moment.
Four hundred years of an institution that
was so foundational to the
United States,
and yet one that we have
completely marginalized from
our story that we've
treated as an asterisk.
So I just started
thinking that we
should dedicate an
entire issue of
"The New York Times Magazine"
to really assessing
that legacy and to
proving my kind of
lifelong theory,
which is that if you name
anything in America,
I can relate it back to slavery.
That slavery is so foundational
to our political systems,
to our cultural systems,
to how we socialize,
to our infrastructure,
to our economy
that almost nothing
has been left untouched.
But it operates invisibly
because we have been in
such denial about the role of
slavery and really have
wanted to treat it,
as I said, as an asterisk.
So that's what I decided to do
when I pitched
The 1619 Project, and the
rest is kind of history.
Bobb:
I appreciate the significance
of the history that you've given
and your relationship to it,
and I think it's profound.
But just to make sure,
for those guest who are
listening that might
not actually know
what happened in 1619,
if you could say that
so that it's unmistakably understood.
Hannah-Jones:
Yes, of course, and
thank you for reminding me that
not everyone knows what
The 1619 Project is.
So in August in 1619,
that is when the first Africans
were sold into the Virginia colonies.
They arrived on a ship
called the "White Lion,"
and they were sold
against their will.
So that is the introduction
of what would become
chattel slavery in British North America.
So why that matters, of course,
is the English landed
at Jamestown in 1607.
And the fact that it only took
12 years before racialized slavery was
introduced into the colonies
I think really speaks to
how foundational slavery would be
to the country that would develop.
This is 150 years before we even
decide we want to be
a country of our own.
This is before we have established
any real institutions
on this land.
And so one of the first institutions
that gets established here
is slavery.
That matters.
And there's a reason
we don't learn that date,
because then one has to
understand that if you think that
the pilgrims landing at Plymouth Rock is
foundational
to the American story, clearly,
the first Africans being sold on
the "White Lion" is more foundational
to the American story.
And that's why it's a date
that most of us have never learned.
Bobb:
So in this spirit,
one of the things that struck
me about what you just
said is curricula as weapons,
in part because of the
things that they omit.
So, in this case, the nature of
the foundational elements
of the American story
that you allude to, it's not there.
We just went through
the Juneteenth moment.
It was clear from the national convulsion
that many people had never heard of it.
They had no idea what that was about.
So given what you're trying to do,
how do you see the integration of
this kind of foundational knowledge into
the American educational infrastructure
so that it can be
better understood so that
we can then combat it?
Hannah-Jones:
Sure. So I mean,
I agree 100% with your theory.
When you look at how we are taught
American history in our K-12 education,
it is taught to give us
a shared sense of identity,
it is taught--
And every country does that.
You teach a history that
glorifies your national identity,
and it's to create this
shared national memory.
So, in America, what is the ideology that
we want to put forth
to our children about who we are?
It is that we are a country founded
on freedom, that we are the greatest,
most liberatory democracy in the world,
that we had to break off from
the British Empire so that
we could be free and self-govern.
Well, Black people are
very, very inconvenient to that narrative.
How do you talk about Thomas Jefferson
and the Declaration
and how exceptional America is
and then acknowledge that he
had his own enslaved
brother-in-law there with him,
whom he owned to keep him
comfortable as he's writing these words?
That one fifth of the population
at our founding was in chattel slavery.
They would know not a single liberty
laid out in the Declaration
or the Constitution.
These are very complicated
narratives that really pierce
that idea that we are exceptional.
So we're just really not taught that.
People are shocked
when I say simple things
like 10 of the first 12
presidents were enslavers.
That's shocking to people.
This is not unearthing some
obscure American history.
Bobb: Right.
Hannah-Jones: George Washington,
the first president,
Thomas Jefferson, the drafter of
the Declaration of Independence,
James Madison,
who wrote the Constitution,
had their wealth and
their power based on
enslaving hundreds
of human beings
on forced labor camps.
That is not the narrative
of America that we want to have.
So we obscure it. We downplay it.
We have had to pretend that
slavery wasn't that bad.
That it was just, you know,
like, you know,
experiencing some level of prejudice.
The brutality, the atrocity,
the immorality,
all of that has had to
have been sectioned off
in a couple pages or a separate chapter
and not seen as foundational.
But if you're arguing that
these ideals of liberty were foundational,
then you also have to argue
that the very framework
of American freedom
was also defined by slavery
and the deprival of absolute rights
to a large percent of the population.
And you also have to acknowledge--
because the way we've
kind of dealt with
that dichotomy is this
North-South intellectual divide.
And that North-South
intellectual divide says,
the true heart of America was the North,
and the North was free.
And the South, they don't really count.
They were just backwards and not
really representative of America.
Well, one, slavery was practiced
in all 13 of the colonies,
and the biggest slaves state at
the turn of the 18th century
was New York.
It was not actually a Southern state.
You also have to pretend
that Southerners were
not dominant in our national
story at the beginning.
George Washington is a Virginian,
James Madison is a Virginian,
Thomas Jefferson is a Virginian.
So we do all of these crazy kind of
psychological things because we
cannot deal with slavery.
And we are seeing
in what's happening in
our country right now,
the rotten fruit of that denial,
which is a white officer's belief
that he can kneel on a Black
man's neck with cameras
recording him for 8 minutes
and 46 seconds,
and there will be no consequence,
because we had to create
a psychology that denies
the full humanity of
Black people to actually
deal with the fact that
our founders did appalling things
to human beings
because they were Black.
Bobb:
So, in that--
and what I appreciate,
like I said before,
is the singularity
of that message.
And I think for those
who understand--
Hannah-Jones:
I didn't even answer your question
about curriculum, did I? Sorry.
Bobb:
You did. No, no, no, but it's
the disavowal of that kind
of truth that makes
a curricula that's organized around
this liberatory story of the United States
that makes it a weapon because it's not
including the reality
that you just mentioned.
So the question that I have now is,
given that--
It seems like there are two objectives.
One is to just teach that
to both people, because, I mean,
everybody growing up
here has been left
out of that information.
But the other is the
mechanism for doing it.
And I wonder what thoughts
you have on the way that--
Because you're not only
challenging the American narrative,
I mean, in the history of
James Baldwin and others
who've been doing
this for a long time,
there's also the actual mechanism
about getting this into curricula,
getting this into standardized tests,
getting this into entrance exams,
getting this into the basic expectations
of what American education means.
And what views do you have on that?
Hannah-Jones: Yeah, so, before I get
to that question,
I just want to comment,
just add a little bit more to why
this erasure is so important and why it
matters so much.
So, of course, W.E.B. Du Bois called
is the propaganda of history.
That which historical facts were taught
and which ones we aren't,
and how we're taught
them is often
because we're engaging
in a campaign of propaganda.
And what that has meant
is that white Americans,
and I would say large numbers
of Black Americans, too,
and other Americans
who are not Black,
they cannot really process
the country that we live in.
They cannot really understand
why we have so much inequality,
why Black Americans are on
the bottom of every indicator
of well-being,
why Black Americans struggle so much,
because in their heads, slavery
was not that big of a deal,
it was a long time ago.
And, of course, we get
our freedom in 1865,
and then, you know,
it's like we blink, and it's 1963,
and nothing happens
in that 100 years in between.
So, when you don't have
that understanding,
then you have this kind of
knee-jerk response to programs
that are trying to help deal
with that legacy.
And so, you know,
so many Americans don't support something
like racial affirmative action.
They don't support reparations.
They don't support race-specific programs.
And I feel like a big part of that lack of
support is a lack of
understanding of the
history of how we got here.
And that is also why
people have seen The 1619 Project,
some people, as so dangerous.
Because it is
really troubling, that narrative,
and will force--
if people, if you read
The 1619 Project and
accept our arguments,
you cannot accept the
society that we have.
You cannot morally accept
the society that we have.
And the biggest fight and pushback
and campaign
against The 1619 Project came when it was
understood that schools
all over the country
were adopting 1619 as curriculum.
When it was just a newspaper story,
people didn't care that much.
But when it became clear--
So we partnered with the Pulitzer Center.
And the Pulitzer Center has
a long track record
of turning journalism into curriculum,
into free curriculum that
high schools can download.
And The 1619 Project,
within a month,
became the most downloaded
project of the year
and is now one
of the most downloaded curricula
that they've implemented.
We know it's being taught in every state
in the country by at least one school,
and some major school districts
like Chicago Public Schools,
the third largest school
district in the country,
has made it mandatory curriculum.
That is when we started to see
the most kind of vociferous
pushback against the project,
was this idea that young
children will be growing up
with a very different understanding of
America than what was forced onto us.
And I think that that is liberatory.
But for those who need to protect
this idea of American exceptionalism,
this light on the hill
nonsense that really
didn't ever reflect all of
the Black and brown folks in
the shadows and trampled
underneath so somebody could hold
that damn light up on the hill,
that there is a sense
that they will lose something
if this truth is revealed.
I believe, if your foundation is strong,
then the truth can't do anything
to hurt your foundation.
But the ability to
reshape for young people
their understanding of their country,
their understanding
of why things are like they are--
For those who have read The 1619 Project,
it's really not a history,
it is about the ongoing legacy of slavery,
and it uses history
to explain modern America.
And I think that's what people find so
dangerous is we are saying,
"Look around your country right now,
"and all of these things that you
think have nothing to do
with our decision to engage
in human bondage actually do."
That is the power.
It gives a true understanding.
I say it's like taking the
red pill in "The Matrix."
Suddenly, if you read the whole project,
you see all of the code that was written
that has created
the vastly unequal society
that we have today.
And if you're white in this country,
then you have to understand that
whether you personally are racist or not,
whether you personally engage
in racist behavior or not,
you are the beneficiary
of a 350-year system
of white supremacy and racial hierarchy,
and you don't have to do
a single racist thing
to benefit from that system every day.
And I think that is
what people have really feared,
is that revealing of what
our country truly is
and also the centering of Black people
as the true founding fathers.
Some folks didn't like that either.
[laughter]
Bobb:
Well, I have to say that in
the beginning when I was saying to you
that it was a real honor to have
this conversation, it wasn't platitudes.
It was in part because I knew
how influential this work
that you've done has become.
I want to ask about that infrastructure.
The other part of the body of work
that you've done
has to do with
the educational platforms themselves
and segregation in schools and so on.
Given that the degree of segregation--
I want to just kind of throw
this whole thing at you
and just let you respond.
But given the degree of segregation
that there is
currently in U.S. public education--
well, education period,
but certainly in public education,
the challenge of having
a crosscutting effective curricula
that's equally yoked
in both sets of separate systems,
it seems overwhelming to me,
given the depths of
what the segregation implies.
So, given that, how do
you view the relationship
between the actual educational system
and the work that you're trying to do?
Hannah-Jones:
I think they're clearly linked,
though I don't think the biggest problem
when it comes to curricula is segregation.
The biggest problem is
that curricula is very
politicized in general,
and it is often
state boards of education that are
determining what can be taught,
what are the standards,
what type of textbooks.
They actually play a role in
the writing of textbooks.
So we know, for instance, in Texas,
where they felt
that learning ethnic studies
was too demeaning
to America and the story of America,
where they really wanted to downplay
slavery and so wanted
to change the language,
they wanted to call enslaved people
"workers," that sort of thing.
It is that, you know...
What's been fascinating--
So I've studied history.
I majored in history in undergrad.
I've studied history a long time.
And I've always known that history has
never been about just the facts.
There's never been one version.
But most Americans actually have
no idea how historiography works,
and so they tend to think that
there's just one truth,
and the history they got in school was
the truth, and anything else is not.
And so they don't understand
the degree to which these
histories are manipulated,
how certain facts
are never included
or how we interpret facts.
For instance, was the Civil War about
slavery, or was it about states' rights?
Well, we can all look at the same facts
and, depending on your
ideological perspective,
argue two different things.
There's a truth in there,
but you won't necessarily get it.
So I don't think a lot of people have
understood how politicized
history curriculum,
in particular, is in K-12.
And one of the big pushbacks
against The 1619 Project,
which, by the way, is voluntary,
free curriculum.
It's not supplanting
the traditional history
in school, and it can't,
because this is history
centered in slavery,
and there's lots of other histories.
For instance, there should
be an indigenous--
It wouldn't be a 1619 Project, but
a project like that for indigenous people.
So there's lots of different ways
that you can teach this history,
but there's not one way
to teach the history.
So people have called
The 1619 Project revisionist history.
Well, if you're a historian, you know,
all history is revision,
or else historians would have
nothing to do, right?
If everything that is to know is
already known
and if we can
get no new understanding--
Like, historians don't
just sit around and read
other people's work.
They try to uncover more
original source periods,
They bring new interpretations.
Like, that is the nature
of history is to be revisionist.
But that gets used as
a derogatory term when
Black people do it, for one,
and when that revisions are no
longer adhering to
the narrative that we have
all been taught and wanted to teach.
So segregation is a
problem in and of itself,
mainly of resources.
But the problem of
curriculum is a national problem.
We don't have a standard way
of teaching this history.
I don't know that we should,
have one standard of teaching it,
because I think it would be impossible
to have one standard
that does everything that it needs to do.
But we certainly should have
a more standardized understanding,
that in Texas, you can't say that enslaved
people were just workers,
and in Iowa,
you say something completely different.
I wish that there was a way to have
more honest history being taught.
Bobb: Well, now that you've
gone down--
[clears throat] Excuse me, gone down
that road of history itself,
it seems to me like there's
a conflation between history and heritage.
So what's your view on those two things?
Hannah-Jones:
So taking the flag issue aside--
and I'll come back to that--
yes, our history is our heritage.
We inherit our history.
And, you know,
the Declaration of Independence is
part of our heritage, it is part
of kind of our national identity,
and for many white Southerners,
the Confederate flag is as well.
Here's the problem.
You want to fly a Confederate
flag in your house?
By all means, do whatever
the hell you want to.
But in public spaces,
you don't have a right to that heritage
in public spaces, because, actually,
when it comes to the Confederate flag,
it's the heritage of
a traitorous would-be nation
that took up arms against
the United States.
We wouldn't fly Al-Qaeda's flag in
the United States,
so why would we fly the Confederate flag?
The other thing, though,
that I think is more important in
that conversation is
the way that that idea,
that the Confederate flag
is a Southern heritage,
erases the entire Black
population of the South.
Half of Black Americans
live in the South.
At the time of the Confederacy,
98% of Black Americans lived in the South,
and that flag surely
was not their heritage,
and they surely were not fighting to
preserve the heritage of that Confederacy.
And in a place like Mississippi,
where nearly 40%
of the population is Black--
It is the most heavily Black state
in the country.
Black people are taxpayers,
Black people are voters,
Black people are citizens of that state.
And to force them
to go into public offices
with the flag of the people who fought
to enslave them, it's immoral.
And so we have to stop allowing
white Southerners to lay claim to
the Southern identity and erase and
ignore the millions of Black people
who live in the South
and the millions of Black people
whose only heritage in this country that
they can trace is to the South.
And that is why,
like, that language and erasure
that we're talking about, is so critical.
Now, that might be
white Southern heritage,
but don't make the white silent,
because Black people have been
fighting against that flag for decades,
and they've been fighting
against the Confederate flag for decades.
And the last thing about that,
and I know you know this,
is heritage and history can be the same,
but they're also not the same.
They're the facts. So, when white people
in the South say,
"I don't see it as a racist flag,
it's just about Southern heritage,"
it's not really relevant how you see it.
There is a historical record, and we know.
You can look at the secession documents
of the Confederacy and
they made it very clear,
they were wanting to leave
the United States over slavery.
They believed in white supremacy.
It was not a euphemism back then.
They literally said,
"We believe in white supremacy."
So you can feel what you want,
but the facts are the facts.
And I think as all of
us need to be much more
clear with our language and much more
specific in the arguments
that we're allowing.
Bobb:
Do you think that it's--
What part of the current moment do
you think has been--
has catalyzed the ability
to make that case?
Like Mississippi all of
a sudden took down the flag.
Hannah-Jones:
Yeah.
Bobb: Like, you know,
the arguments
about it have been around,
as you said, for generations.
Hannah-Jones:
Yes.
Bobb: And then all of a sudden,
they're doing it.
And beyond that, I'm
going to go into what
you think about this particular
sector that we're in.
Hannah-Jones:
I feel very
cynical about what's
happening right now.
Um...
Anyone, if you study history,
you know that
these social movements do not
create change that quickly.
That they are often
decades of fighting to see
any type of substantial change.
And my fear is that
when, you know, these public officials,
when these corporations started
seeing how sustained these protests were,
how widespread they were,
that they were occurring in all 50 states,
they began to get worried,
and as power always does,
power protects itself.
And so I think there became a sense of,
what superficial things can we do
to take the glare
off of the deep inequities
that are actually
gonna cause for some
serious transformation
and reordering of a hierarchy?
That's what I think we're seeing.
And while these symbolic changes
are important, clearly,
or people wouldn't hold so fast to their
symbols and they wouldn't have fought
so hard to keep their symbols,
I worry that then everyone is gonna
say, "Well, this is enough.
We gave you Juneteenth,
"we painted 'Black Lives Matter' on
"the street, and we took
down, you know, this
"monument of Robert E. Lee
in a majority Black city
that was being paid for
by Black taxpayers."
So I don't know that NASCAR,
after however the hell long NASCAR
has been in existence,
suddenly realized that allowing people
to fly the Confederate flag
was against their values.
Do I believe that? I do not.
I think it was
these more superficial reactions...
In hopes of subverting the harder
and more challenging
and transformative change.
So we'll see, but, you know,
what legislation have we
seen to end police violence
getting passed through?
What laws have been changed
around those issues?
Who's having conversations about
fundamentally changing
economic inequality,
school segregation,
housing segregation?
All of these things that actually
really impact Black lives,
we're not seeing it yet.
And even the media has largely moved on.
I mean, turn your TVs on
now and see how much time
they spend on the protests.
They're still happening,
but we're not covering them.
Bobb:
So let me ask you to speculate,
'cause that is a concern of mine as well.
But the fundamental question
that you raise is,
what causes a country to come to terms
with cultural contrition?
I mean, we have to get to
the root of this thing.
And if this kind of moment is not it--
I mean, you're the historian,
but I'm thinking
about places like Germany and Japan.
I mean, they were destroyed in order
for them to really come to terms
with what they had done.
Hannah-Jones: Yeah.
Bobb: What do you think
is our moment?
If the American exceptionalism idea
is one that we hold fast to,
then it seems like we should be able to
interrogate ourselves and be better.
But I get the impression
that you don't think so.
So help me frame what you think
is really necessary to move us forward.
Hannah-Jones:
I mean, the true American exceptionalism
is we've been exceptional
in our hypocrisy.
So I don't know that we're going to
rise to the occasion
of the exceptionalism.
With that said, this moment at least,
it did feel different.
We'll see if it
continues to feel that way.
But I also think, you know,
what you said is true,
that the true moments of
transformation in this country,
much like Germany, Japan,
occurred at revolutionary periods
when we were on the brink of destruction.
The Civil War--
that's the deadliest war in the history of
the United States,
and we nearly tore our entire country
apart to purge the institution of slavery.
The Civil Rights Movement
was a decades-long,
sustained battle where Black people
were getting killed weekly
for decades, trying to
fight for basic civil rights.
And, you know,
it was the culmination of the...
Vietnam War becoming kind of
a global embarrassment and
us being out in the
world saying that we're
killing all these brown
people for democracy,
and at the same time,
there's images of us
violently suppressing democracy on
Black citizens here that led
to the transformative change.
With that said,
we are, I think, in one of those
periods where it does feel like we're
on the brink of destruction, right?
We followed the first Black president
by electing an openly racist white
nationalist to the White House.
Millions of Americans
are testing positive in the pandemic.
We have no leadership to
control that pandemic.
We have the highest
unemployment rate since
the Great Depression.
People are dying, 130,000 so far,
and we're only at the beginning
of this pandemic.
So we are in one of those
ruptures right now.
And on top of that, people are taking
to the streets to protest,
to make Black lives matter.
So I think that's where
you see the potential existing,
because we are
at a place where it feels like our country
is pulling apart at the seams,
and it is our inability to get
over this death pact
with white supremacy that we've had.
There's no way the man who's
in office should be in office.
There's no way that the man
who's in office
should be able to do the things that he's
doing, and yet he has.
So, if there is the potential
for that change, it's now.
But I just know enough
about history to know that
that might not be enough.
Bobb:
There is a part of what you--
The elements of your writing and work
that I followed,
the part that I really appreciate,
and you've written about it explicitly,
which is about the lessons to America
that Black people have offered.
Hannah-Jones:
Yes.
Bobb: The virtue of our having to be
kind of continually
triumphant and hopeful,
and we are the ones
who have basically
forced the country to live up--
to the extent that it has--
to its best ideals
and its best principles.
So given that theme
that you, I think, beautifully articulate,
how do you see that
manifesting itself now?
Hannah-Jones:
It's in Black people who are in
the middle of a pandemic that is
killing us at the highest
rates of all people,
taking to the streets
to fight for democracy,
taking to the streets
by the hundreds of thousands
and forcing our brown and white and Asian
brothers and sisters
with us into the streets to say
that in a democracy,
you should not be able to be murdered
on national TV by an agent of the state,
and that agent of the state
faces no repercussions.
That at the very least,
in a country that thinks that it is
the civilizing and freedom-enforcing force
of the world,
the marginalized caste should not be
murdered without consequence.
So we are still playing that role.
We are literally the ones dying
who can least afford to be exposed
in public spaces and yet
have felt that we have had
to take to the streets en masse
for weeks and weeks on end
and forcing our country to continue
to acknowledge the way that we fail
at this idea of democracy,
because if you do not protect
the rights of your most
marginalized citizens,
then you protect the rights of no one.
And I think for a lot of white Americans,
when they saw that police
will push down a man--
a white man on a cane
and walk over him
and then quit their jobs
when they're forced
to show any kind of contrition for that,
that they will beat white women who are
marching peacefully in the street,
when white people saw that,
then they understood
why allowing this type
of brutality against
your least citizens actually
takes away your freedom as well.
So Black people have always
had to play this role.
We've played this role
since before the Revolutionary War...
because we have been the people
who were denied citizenship
in our own country
and have not been able to take
for granted the ideals of the revolution
because we never had--
we were never allowed
to live those ideals.
We've had to fight for them.
It's not that we are superior,
but what it means is we have
been in a position where
we have never been allowed to
take our freedoms for granted,
the way where if you were
a white in this country,
you just expect that the country
is going to work in your favor,
that your rights will be protected.
We don't have that expectation, and that--
We have been this nation's
greatest freedom fighters,
and we fought for the rights
of all marginalized people.
It was not lost on me
that during the middle of these protests,
these Black Lives Matter protests,
the Supreme Court rules
that you cannot discriminate
against gay people in employment.
And they rule using
the 1964 Civil Rights Act
that Black people died for to get passed,
because that has always been our role.
We've never fought just
for our own rights.
We've always fought for the expansion
of rights for all Americans.
And that's why I argue that we are
actually the perfectors of this democracy.
And it would just be nice
if so much of the time
we didn't have to stand alone,
and it would be nice if our
white brothers and sisters
would actually fight for us
the way that we have fought for them.
I have gotten to the point in my career,
and it's largely because so
much of my work about inequality
has nothing to do with Trump
or Trump supporters or red-state voters.
It has to do with white liberals,
white progressives who
say they believe in equality
except when it comes to the neighborhood
they live in
or the school they send their kids to,
and then they don't really believe in it.
They believe in equality in the abstract.
The most segregated communities and
schools in this country are all
in very blue states, in very blue cities--
New York, Chicago,
you know, Philadelphia, go down the list.
And so, at this point in my career,
I don't even want people to ask me
what white people need to do
to fix what white people created.
No one asked us how to create segregation.
No one asked us how to create inequality.
They didn't consult with us about,
how do we create this architecture
and this racial hierarchy?
So you don't need to consult with us
about how to undo it.
White people can figure out,
you know, just about
anything that they want to,
but there's this forced
fake helplessness when it
comes to race and racial inequality,
as if we're the race whisperers.
We're not. We didn't create
these systems, so...
Bobb:
So let me refer back
to one of the issues that you just raised,
that some of the most segregated
public-school systems
in the country are
in the most progressive locations.
So you alluded to liberal,
progressive white people
and the distinction
between theory and practice
and what integration means.
So, if we could just take a little bit
of a turn, some time ago,
you wrote about the
Normandy School District in Missouri,
and you talked about
the thing that was most untested
that seemed to be
the most likely predictor
of collective academic
success was integration,
and we just haven't done it.
Hannah-Jones: Yes.
Bobb: Here, what I'm interested
in, ultimately,
is your thoughts on the relationship
between this kind of
cohesive movement to
a better understanding of what America is
and the critical importance
that education plays
and the resistance to
the integration that you just alluded to.
Hannah-Jones: Sure.
So, I mean, I'm sure everyone watching
this knows about the racial
achievement gap.
They know about all of
these efforts to reform
and erase that achievement gap,
but the research is very clear.
There's only ever been one thing in
this country that has worked on scale
to close the racial achievement gap,
and that's school integration.
And it's clear why that is.
There's nothing about white kids that
makes Black kids smart
if they sit next to them.
But in a country that was
built on racial caste,
in a country where it was
illegal for Black people to
learn to read at one point,
where Black people didn't even
have high schools when white
people had high schools,
that if Black kids aren't in the classroom
with white kids,
we've never shown in
a single place that they get
the same resources as white kids do.
And integration works
because it simply gets
Black kids the resources we guarantee
that white children will have,
and that is the one thing
that we don't want to do.
I have--
Bobb: Wait. If I can interrupt you.
Just restate that. Just...
Hannah-Jones: What?
Restate what?
Bobb:
Restate the reason that
integration works for
Black students is the following.
Hannah-Jones:
The reason that integration works
for Black kids is the only way that
Black kids have ever gotten
the resources that white kids
get is to sit in the classrooms
that white kids sit in, period
To this day heavily Black and
brown schools get
$28 billion less resources
than white schools.
That's just a fact, and I have
given speeches all over the country.
In every community that I'm in,
I say, "Show me the community in America
"where the heavily Black school has
the same resources as the
heavily white school."
I dare people to disprove me
in a single place in this country.
And it doesn't matter
if I'm in the South,
the West, the East, the North,
if I'm in a rural area,
suburban or urban area.
The fact is the more
Black kids in a school,
the less resources that school has.
We've never been able to
break up that caste system.
So integration works.
It also works just because I'm--
You know, I don't really
care about private schools,
I don't believe in private schools.
I believe that public schools are
our most democratic and
democratizing institutions,
and I believe we should invest
in each other
and invest in each other's kids.
So, when I look at public schools--
and I ask people all the time, you know,
where are your actual values?
Because it is easy to say,
"I believe in equality,
"but just not for my kid.
When it comes to my kid,
I need every advantage."
You can't have both of those things.
And I have documented this
again and again.
Very well-meaning white people, they have
Black Lives Matter signs in their yards,
but when you ask them where they
send their kids to school,
they're not sending their kids to school
with the children of the people
they say they're marching for.
And if you can't do that,
then you don't actually believe that
Black lives matter
because you're not actually
believing that
the youngest Black lives matter.
So, if we can't have integrated schools,
we'll never actually have
any semblance of equality
in our democracy,
and I don't expect that we will,
because we know.
We know that the schools
we put Black kids in are not up to par.
You know, I'll hear parents say,
"Well, it's not about the kids,
it's the resources."
Okay, so whose kids are deserving of going
to those schools, then?
And how do we change a system
where white kids draw resources
and Black kids don't
if you don't use that power that you have
to draw those resources to that school?
And I also don't ever believe that it's
just about resources either.
I mean, it's clear
white families don't want, in general,
their kids in a school
with more than 20% Black kids.
That's what the research shows,
and when it gets more than that,
they start to believe
that the school is in decline,
whether the data actually
show that or not.
Bobb:
So let me do this.
I think that what you're laying out is
the street-level parameters
of what we have to do going forward.
So a last thought here is,
in response to all of this,
there's been a flood of
money coming to Black institutions--
technical tablets and things of that sort.
But there's also the basic
presumption that we can use
technology in some ways
to facilitate learning,
to provide equitable infrastructure
for students
and their capacities to learn.
We can also affect curricula
because we can spread these things
in very fast and robust ways.
Give a response to the utility
of that assumption based
on what you just said.
Hannah-Jones:
Yeah, I have so many thoughts on this.
We're gonna talk for,
like, another two hours.
So let me first say that,
clearly, technology is critical
for all of our kids,
and technology has the ability
to enhance education for our kids in ways
that we didn't have the benefit of--
Or I don't how old you are,
but we didn't really have
the benefit of that when I was in school.
So, you know, I would never discount
the role of technology.
But when I hear
big tech companies or
any philanthropical organizations who
say that they're going
to solve educational
inequality with tech,
that's just bullshit,
and it's really trying to get
equality on the cheap.
And I'm going to give you
a very clear example.
So Harvard University just
announced that they are going to
be all online for the fall,
and they are facing a revolt.
Students are saying,
"Why should we have
"to pay for tuition
for online learning?
"We go to Harvard because we want to
sit in a classroom
with other students and be taught by
a great educator in person."
That's what we know in this country to
be the most valuable asset of education.
It is not a computer screen.
It is not a tablet.
It is not a Google Chromebook.
So, when we were doing
our talk before this,
and I told you when I hear that,
what I say is,
"Look at the wealthy private schools
"that we hold up as a model,
"and ask, 'How are they
delivering instruction for their kids?
"'What are those parents paying
$50,000 a year for to go to Dalton?'"
And I don't even know,
maybe more than $50,000.
It's not for technology.
So the same thing that
wealthy people want for
their kids is what our kids need.
More than a Chromebook,
our kids in segregated,
high-poverty schools
need a quality teacher.
They need quality curriculum.
They need someone who can stand in
front of them
and deliver a curriculum and expand
learning and open their minds,
and if the Chromebook is
a tool of that, that's great.
But if you have that Chromebook or not,
they don't actually need it.
They need quality instruction.
I think that...
you know, places like Google
and the tech industry,
they're trying to offer solutions
in the way that they work,
but they're not really understanding
that the solutions are much
more simple than that.
So imagine if a place like
Google used its efforts to try
to get into the lobbying campaign
for school segregation--
school integration.
If a place like Google tried to
actually use its heft
to push the message out
that the best thing
for our kids
are highly funded public schools,
well-resourced schools, and putting
the most resources into
the schools that need it.
How about into advocating for broadband as
a universal right, right?
Because you can give
this kid this Chromebook,
and then he goes home,
and he has no Internet service,
because Black people have
the highest rates of lack
of Internet at home of all racial groups,
and Latinos would be second.
So, you know...
I have seen--I spent, year before last,
a year in Detroit public schools,
which is...
Detroit is the poorest major city
in the country.
It's the blackest major city
in the country.
It has the lowest-performing
school district in the country,
and I was in the poorest school
in the poorest school district
in the country,
and they had Chromebooks for days,
and those Chromebooks
sat locked up in a cage somewhere
because no one had taught the teachers
how to use them.
The kids couldn't take them home because
they didn't have Internet at home.
Chromebooks were not
gonna save those kids.
We have to think much, much bigger.
And we have to think much,
much more simple
because I doubt that there's
anybody, an executive at Google
who wants their kid to do
online learning for eight hours a day
and thinks that's a quality education.
You don't.
These are tools that enhance education.
They can't replace it.
And the last thing I'll say on that...
is I also think it's
really critical in our language
to talk specifically about Black people,
and you look at a place like Google,
and the diversity numbers
don't look so bad if you
don't disaggregate by race.
But when you look at
Black people who are
the people upon which the system
of racial caste was built,
the people who are the most segregated,
whose children are in
the most disadvantaged schools,
they are vastly underrepresented
at a place like Google.
So it's great that you want to give
some scholarships
to some kids at Howard,
but that is extremely superficial
because most Black kids are never even
gonna get a chance to go to Howard
because they're not even graduating
from a school
that prepares them to go to college.
So I think that...
if a place like Google,
with the power that it has,
with the resources that it has,
is serious,
you're gonna have to think much,
much deeper than giving out
some Chromebooks and giving
some scholarships
to a few kids whose futures
are already very bright
because they're already in college.
Bobb:
Nikole, I think your gift
to the country is your ability
to be precise with the truth,
and I think in this instance,
that has been really informative...
Hannah-Jones: Thank you.
Bobb: In, ultimately, what is this search
for racial equity.
I want to have you close
by saying what you think
your personal charge is now
in the moment that we're in,
in the next moment ahead.
Hannah-Jones:
My personal charge is to try
to get H.R.40 passed.
H.R.40 is the reparations bill
in Congress.
It's to put together a committee
to talk about how reparations would occur.
The piece that I just published in
"The New York Times Magazine,"
"What Is Owed",
really lays out how there's
almost nothing Black people
can do on our own to
close the racial wealth
gap that was created
after 350 years of legal discrimination.
So, if folks want,
I will give this one advice
to our allies--
call your congressperson and tell them
to get that bill out of committee,
and let's actually work as a country
to address
the gaping economic inequality
that a majority of Black
people experience.
You know, most Black people will never be
brutalized or killed by the police,
but nearly every Black American
in this country
struggles from lack of wealth.
Bobb: You've offered a
perfect summary here.
You've taken us through the
journey into the truth.
Nikole Hannah-Jones,
thank you very much
for participating in this episode
of "The Search for Racial Equity."
Thank you for the conversation.
Hopefully, one day we'll find it.
[laughter]
Parker:
I'm Melonie Parker.
Thank you for joining us
for "The Search for Racial Equity."
person:
Let us march on...
till victory is won.
