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The 1619 Project’s creator Nikole Hannah-Jones discusses its cultural impact
Today, we take a fresh look at US history—and the role Black people have played in it—with a woman who is reshaping that national conversation. When Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones published the “1619 Project” in 2019, not even she could have predicted its cultural impact. It’s hard to think of another piece of modern journalism that has garnered such praise while also sparking such intense outrage. Now, her new book, The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story, expands upon her initial work. She joins Ian Bremmer for an in-depth look at how she’s trying to reshape US history, and the backlash it has caused.
Watch this episode of GZERO World with Ian Bremmer: Counter narrative: Black Americans, the 1619 Project, and Nikole Hannah-Jones
Nikole Hannah-Jones blames backlash against 1619 Project, CRT on the myth of US "exceptionalism"
Why is there such a strong conservative reaction to the 1619 Project and critical race theory?
For Nikole Hannah-Jones, the New York Times journalist who won a Pulitzer Prize for her work as creator of the 1619 Project, a big part of the problem is that we, "as Americans, are deeply, deeply invested in this mythology of exceptionalism.
"We really are indoctrinated into this idea that these intrepid colonists broke off from [...] Great Britain so that they could advance the ideas of liberty and individual rights. And to believe in that, then you have to downplay the role of slavery."
In other words, she adds, you must gloss over the fact that America has been "plagued by racism and inequality from our beginning."
What Hannah-Jones calls the white backlash against that narrative, she says, should not surprise us. Even after the horrific killing of George Floyd, which could have been an inflection point, Hannah-Jones laments, some politicians seized the opportunity to divide us even further on race.
"How do we divide these people who were finding common cause in Black equality? And you do that by saying, you know, we, we believe, you know, what happened to George Floyd was wrong, but it's gone too far now. Now they're trying to make you feel like there's something wrong with your whiteness. Now they're taking away your icons, they're knocking down your statues and they want to tell your children that your children are evil."
Watch this episode of GZERO World with Ian Bremmer: Counter narrative: Black Americans, the 1619 Project, and Nikole Hannah-Jones
Was modern America built on slavery?
At the start of the Revolutionary War, slaves made up 20 percent of the population in British North America. They later built iconic buildings of US democracy like the Capitol and the White House in Washington.
But what if slavery was more than just America’s original sin? What if the institution of slavery itself was foundational to modern America?
That's what Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones defends — in very simple terms — in the 1619 Project. This sprawling collection of essays, short stories, and poetry published in 2019 argues that American history begins not in 1776 with the Declaration of Independence but rather 157 years earlier, when the first slave ship arrived in the British colonies on the other side of the Atlantic.
The 1619 Project landed like a cultural atom bomb. And soon later, the formerly obscure academic field known as “critical race theory” or CRT took center stage at conservative rallies and school board meetings.
What's the relationship, if any, between the two? Ian Bremmer explains.
Nikole Hannah-Jones: America chose slavery — and benefited from it
Many people today still think US slavery was only prevalent in the South. They are wrong, says Nikole Hannah-Jones. All 13 colonies had slaves upon America's independence.
It's not just that the Founding Fathers were slave-owners, which we all know. Slave labor, the Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times journalist points out, powered the US Industrial Revolution by producing cheap cotton for textiles.
"We've kind of tried to section slavery off as if it was just in the realm of the backwards South, but this wasn't American endeavor and our nascent capitalism, [which] was really built on the institution of slavery."
In her view and that of the 1619 Project she created, slavery is central to the American story because it wasn't accidental at all.
"We did not need slavery to be successful, but we chose slavery. And that led to our success in many ways."
Watch this clip from her interview with Ian Bremmer on GZERO World.
Watch the full episode of GZERO World with Ian Bremmer: Counter narrative: Black Americans, the 1619 Project, and Nikole Hannah-Jones
Why do Black people feel "erased" from American history?
Growing up, New York Times journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones only learned a little about the plight of Black people in America during Black History Month. The Pulitzer Prize-winning creator of the 1619 Project studied some usual suspects such as Harriet Tubman or Frederick Douglass, and then discussed slavery to cover the Civil War.
But then Black people like herself, she says, vanish from the narrative until the civil rights movement.
“There was no really larger understanding of how Black Americans fit into the larger story of America. And there certainly wasn't the teaching of Black people as actors in the American story."
For Hannah-Jones, this explains why white Americans don't know what it means "to be erased" from US history as well as broader American culture and literature.
"That erasure is really demeaning, and it's really powerful.”
Watch this episode of GZERO World with Ian Bremmer: Counter narrative: Black Americans, the 1619 Project, and Nikole Hannah-Jones
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Counter narrative: Black Americans, the 1619 Project, and Nikole Hannah-Jones
According to the 1619 Project's’ Nikole Hannah-Jones, America was founded on liberty, equality, and…slavery. The institution of slavery, she argues, was the foundation upon which the country achieved its economic and political greatness. It’s a claim that set the cultural world on fire when the 1619 Project was published in the New York Times in 2019 and now, as she compiles and expands upon that project in a new book, controversy has erupted once again.
Why the 1619 Project triggered a US culture war?
America, the saying goes, was founded on liberty, freedom, and the pursuit of happiness. That's what makes the US "exceptional."
Not for Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones, who believes the institutional foundation upon which the US achieved its economic and political greatness is... slavery.
Almost three years ago, she published the 1619 Project, a landmark piece of modern journalism that's as loved on one end of the US political spectrum as hated on the other. And surely enough in today's divided America, it sparked a full-blown culture war.
Hannah-Jones admits some of the criticism was fair. In fact, she’s just published an extended version of the project in book form in part to improve the original. But she rejects those who’ve tried to disqualify her and the project altogether.
A lot of the backlash against her can be traced to many Americans never learning in school that slavery was not at all accidental. "We chose it,” she says, “and it led to our success in many ways."
Even Black people, she recalls from growing up, are "erased" from US history from the Civil War until the civil rights movement.
Most Americans, in her opinion, fail to see the problem because they "are deeply, deeply invested in this mythology of exceptionalism." And to believe in that, Hannah-Jones says that "then you have to downplay the role of slavery" in a nation that's been "plagued by racism and inequality from our beginning."
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Podcast: How we got here: Evaluating 1619 and US history with Nikole Hannah-Jones
Listen: When Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times journalist Nikole Hannah Jones published the “1619 Project” in 2019, not even she could have predicted its cultural impact. It’s hard to think of another piece of modern journalism that has garnered such praise while also sparking such intense outrage. Now, her new book, The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story, expands upon her initial work. She joins Ian Bremmer for an in-depth look at how she’s trying to reshape US history, and the backlash it has caused.
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Nikole Hannah-Jones pushes back against "disqualifying" 1619 Project criticism
Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones has often had to defend her work as the creator of the 1619 Project, a piece of modern journalism that has gained as much praise on one end of the US political spectrum as it has sparked outrage on the other.
Hannah-Jones admits some of the criticism was fair game — and that's one reason she’s just published an extended version of the project in book form, entitled The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story. But she rejects those who’ve tried to disqualify her and the project.
"People were saying these facts are wrong... [and] that this journalism needed to be discredited, and that's not normal," she explains. "And I don't agree with that type of criticism because... it's not true.”
According to Hannah-Jones, part of the problem is the mistaken perception that the 1619 Project claimed that slavery was uniquely American. It did not, she says, but did argue that the history of US slavery is quite exceptional in another way.
"There is something clearly unique about a country engaging in chattel slavery that says it was founded on ideas of individual rights and liberty. And that was not Brazil. That was not Jamaica. That was not any of the islands in the Caribbean. They didn't pretend to be a nation founded on God-given rights. We did."
Watch all of Hannah-Jones' interview with Ian Bremmer on the upcoming episode of GZERO World.