I can't stand Nikole Hannah-Jones
And I would sooner have bowel surgery in the woods with a stick than read any more of the 1619 Project.
With much fanfare in August 2019, theĀ New York Times published a special 100-page edition of its Sunday magazine called the ā1619 Project.ā Consisting of essays and artistic works focused on āplacing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of the story we tell ourselves about who we are,ā the occasion was the 400th anniversary of the initial arrival of 20 African slaves at Point Comfort in Virginia, a British colony in North America. This, the project claims, was the true founding of our nation.
When it was first released, I didnāt pay much attention. I thought that the purported goal of the 1619 Project ā centering the contributions that African Americans have made to the country throughout history ā was a noble one, and that any ambition to reframe Americaās conversation about race in accordance with egalitarianism was laudable. But I recently watched the 1619 Project documentary on Hulu and found that it offers only ahistorical nonsense in the form of totalizing assertions that donāt withstand further scrutiny.
Then I learned about how thousands of schools have made the 1619 Project part of the curriculum. So, I decided to read the thing in its entirety. And oh boy, itās pretty infuriating. The project is little more than a series of essays presenting American history as an interminable struggle between African Americans and white racismāa politically motivated, reactionary, race-based falsification of our nationās past that distorts the truth and instead promotes a deliberately skewed, monocausal narrative in which inconvenient facts get discarded. All of history is to be explained from the existence of a supra-historical emotional impulse. Slavery is viewed and analyzed not as a specific economically rooted form of the exploitation of labor, but as the manifestation of white racism, and this invocation of white racism takes the place of any concrete examination of the economic, political, and social history of our country.
āOur democracyās founding ideals,ā the lead essay by founder Nikole Hannah-Jones, proclaims, āwere false when they were written.ā According to her, the U.S. is supposedly founded upon not just slavery but āwhite supremacy,ā and present-day American politics, economics, and culture are rooted in concerted efforts to subjugate African Americans. Among other things, the project argues that modern accounting methods, urban traffic patterns, resistance to adopting universal health care,Ā overconsumption of sugar, and American capitalism itself are some of the insidious ways that the legacy of slavery continues to shape our society.1
The 1619 Projectās central thesis ā that the American Revolution was launched as a conspiracy to defend slavery against pending British emancipation ā is nothing less than bizarre. Hannah-Jones writes:
Conveniently left out of our founding mythology is the fact that one of the primary reasons the colonists decided to declare their independence from Britain was because they wanted to protect the institution of slavery. In other words, we may never have revolted against Britain if the founders had not understood that slavery empowered them to do so; nor if they had not believed that independence was required in order to ensure that slavery would continue. ⦠[S]ome might argue that this nation was founded not as a democracy but as a slavocracy.
Never mind that slavery wasnāt abolished in the United KingdomĀ until 1833, nearly six decades after the Declaration of Independenceāweāre supposed to ignore this and every other fact that doesnāt mesh with the projectās historical retelling, because, as Hannah-Jones and her obsequious editor Jake Silverstein argue, theyāre creating āa new narrativeā to replace the āwhite narrative.ā
This Isnāt History
Anyone who has a basic understanding of and respect for American history will see the 1619 Project for what it really is: propaganda. That is truly the only conclusion to draw from what is essentially an unethical, error-riddled mythical racial narrative that ignores the actual social development of the African American population over the last 150 years.
It is not history.
The 1619 Project doesnāt even have a bibliography, for Godās sake. The authors and editors didnāt consult any scholarship on slavery, the American Revolution, the abolitionist movements, the Civil War, or Jim Crow segregation. No reference to any piece of scholarly work is ever used to substantiate a claim.
Moreover, Nikole Hannah-Jones has never once demonstrated she knows anything more than the intersectional version of American history she no doubt picked up in some overpriced freshman seminar hall. She wouldnāt know Gettysburg from a Super 8 in Valdosta. Indeed, she herself has admitted that despite peddling the project as an attempt to educate, this was not her goal. Her goal was to distort and pervert history in the service of a political agenda:
You cannot read the entire magazine and not come away understanding that a great debt is owed and itās time for this country to pay. . . When my editor asks me, like, whatās your ultimate goal for the project, my ultimate goal is that thereāll be a reparations bill passed. . . I write to try to get liberal white people to do what they say they believe in. . . Iām making a moral argument. My method is guilt.
Although she acknowledged that a reparations bill is unlikely to happen (and just to clarify, when she says reparations she means cash payments), Hannah-Jones wants āthis projectā¦[to] get white people to give up whiteness.ā And in any event, āit can certainly expose for them what whiteness is.ā
Her assertion, which is repeated over and over again, that our unprecedentedly multicultural and multiracial democracy today is a mere front for āwhite supremacyā is ridiculous. Hereās a partialĀ listĀ of the national origins of U.S. citizens whoseĀ median earningsĀ are higher than that of white people in America: Indian, Chinese, Japanese, Pakistani, Iranian, Lebanese, Sri Lankan, Armenian, Hmong, Vietnamese. But weāre supposed to believe that the modern United States is some kind of apartheid nation in which being white is integral to happiness and success.
The 1619 Project has been widely criticized by leading historians, and rightly so. To wit, five of theĀ worldās foremost scholarsĀ of the period were quick to point out the deep historical carelessness and oversights in a very public letter to the editor, even while explaining āwe applaudā the projectās spirit. The Times largelyĀ dismissedĀ the scholarsā serious concerns, offering a relativistic explanation that āhistorical understanding is not fixed; it is constantly being adjusted by new scholarship and new voices.ā
Separately, a dozen Civil War scholars and political scientists wrote a letter to the New York Times Magazine, but their letter was never published. The researchers, who teach atĀ Princeton, Yale, Notre Dame, Washington & Lee, Loyola, Villanova, and other universities, published their complaint and the Timesā response, independently, at a later date inĀ George Washington Universityās History News Network.
Gordon Wood, a leading historian of the American Revolution and emeritus professor at Brown University, told RealClearInvestigations that the Times material āis full of falsehoods and distortions.ā In its current form, without corrections, the only way to use it in the classroom, he said, would be āas a way of showing how history can be distorted and perverted.ā Northwestern University professor Leslie Harris, who teaches the history of African American life and slavery, explained in a Politico essayĀ how she was chosen as a fact-checker for the project and that despite her objections and advice, they still didnāt fix anything.
I could probably spend days going through all the ways the 1619 Project is an utter abomination, but many people much smarter than me have already done an excellent job exposing the thing as the hot garbage that it is.
So, why am I writing this, and why does it matter?
With the imprimatur of the New York Times and its partners, the 1619 Project has been adopted as educational material in thousands of classrooms across the country; in many cases, entire school districts and systems have made it part of the curriculum. Free material from an āauthoritative institutionā like the New York Times is attractive to schools that are struggling financially, and itās concerning that this kind of egregious, outcome-oriented material is being taught without undergoing the normal vetting required for textbooks. I cannot emphasize this enough: The 1619 Project is a deliberate falsification of history, one that uses a monocausal argument to explain hundreds of years of complex, cumulative events that have led us to contemporary America. For this to be taught to todayās youth is a travesty.
I think itās absurd that Nikole Hannah-Jones has been showered with accolades when there have been so many documented incidents that reveal her true character, her lack of professionalism, and her disregard for journalistic ethics. Itās an indictment of the Pulitzer organization and the MacArthur foundation. There are so many writers and journalists out there who are more deserving of the opportunities and awards sheās been presented with despite her lengthy rap sheet of being a garbage human being. More on this below.
The UNC Episode
Nikole Hannah-Jones was the subject of media outrage after it was reported that she didnāt receive a tenured professorship at the University of North Carolinaās Hussman School of Journalism and Media. Instead of a life-time appointment for her first academic position, Hannah-Jones, who has a Masterās degree in journalism from UNC and was awarded the schoolās Distinguished Alumna Award in 2019, was offered and accepted a fixed five-year sinecure with the possibility of tenure at the end of her term.
She was thus appointed the schoolās Knight Chair in Race and Investigative Journalism as a Professor of Practice with funding from the Knight Foundation. Previous Knight chairs got tenure right off the bat; Hannah-Jones did not. Somewhat ironically, the decision was roundly decried on the Left as an example of ācancel culture,ā even though she was not in fact cancelled, she just didnāt receive tenure.
Hannah-Jones receiving tenure despite having no academic background, a lamentable claim to fame due to just a single, error-riddled piece of revisionist history that continues to be foolishly celebrated by people eager to express fealty to woke politics, and a laughably scant history of merit, not to mention her history of being a crappy person, would be the equivalent of an NBA rookie with a history of petty crime and multiple sexual assault allegations receiving a super-max contract before playing a single game as a professional. Professors who receive tenure almost always have an academic background; Hannah-Jones does not. Professors who receive tenure almost always have a doctorate; Hannah-Jones does not. Professors who receive tenure almost always have a breadth of scholarly works; Hannah-Jones does not.
Sheās been given some of the most prestigious awards in scholarship despite being woefully undeserving of them. Her total body of work at the New York Times consists of just 27 bylines (only 18 of which were solo) over the course of nearly a decade. And the woman is utterly obsessed with presenting every single issue, from education and policing to the founding of our country, through a racial prism.
There are thousands of people who have dedicated their entire lives to producing scholarly works, and they often go years struggling to find a steady job. Graduate students hoping to attain an academic position in their field of expertise toil year after year, and they do so while making next to nothing as teaching and research assistants. For your standard academic types, the process of actually getting tenure usually takes about seven years, and it entails all manner of hoops one must jump through before receiving approval by a board of trustees. Despite its importance for protecting academic freedom, itās rare for academics to achieve the status of tenure, with the American Association of University Professors reporting that the share of faculty with tenure in the U.S. has declined to 21%. Meanwhile, Hannah-Jones was being handed a five-year tenure-track position at UNC on a golden platter.
Back in January 2021, the provost submitted a package of faculty appointments to the UNC board of trustees for approval, including a proposal to offer Hannah-Jones a tenured position at Hussman. Chuck Duckett, the trustee who chairs the relevant board committee, replied with questions about Hannah-Jones. Other tenured appointments were approved. The board never voted on hers one way or the other. Instead, UNC converted its offer into a five-year contract, which Hannah-Jones accepted.
What concerns did Duckett and presumably other trustees have about giving Hannah-Jones immediate tenure? This is a private matter about which they declined to share details, at least not on the record, which of course means the media had a field day speculating, accusing the board of racism, sexism, and infringing on academic freedom. Hannah-Jones devotees alleged that the trustees were all āRepublican-appointed,ā which means #Fascists. Any sensible person applying an ideological litmus test would find that the majority of professors who receive tenure at UNC-Chapel Hill are politically left-of-center, but of course her acolytes donāt fall under the sensible category, theyāre just looking to twist reality until it conforms to their preconceived worldview, as all political fundamentalists are wont to do.
Ultimately, Nikole Hannah-Jones backtracked, telling UNC that she wouldnāt join the faculty unless given tenure. Youāll be shocked to learn that UNC immediately caved, only for Hannah-Jones to decline the tenure she had been complaining about and instead join the faculty at Howard University.
The truth is that what really distinguishes Nikole Hannah-Jones is her poor character. It starts with her lack of humility and ends with all the times sheās been caught lying. When she was challenged about her sloppy, if not intentionally inaccurate research and her empirically indefensible half-truths, Hannah-Jones ducked, and weaved, and then proceeded to personally smear her critics.
But letās talk about the time Hannah-Jones ādoxxedā another reporter.
It should come as no surprise that sheās been a key cog in the machinations and drama in the New York Times newsroomādrama that resulted in the very public defenestrations and (forced) resignations of several notable colleagues, including Bari Weiss, Andrew Sullivan, and Don McNeil. The case involving Don McNeil, which had previously been investigated and dismissed by the paper in 2019 before Hannah-Jones and her fellow woke colleagues decided to bring it up again in February 2021 so they could get him fired, concerned his one-time usage of the N-word within an academic context.
āWe do not tolerate racist language regardless of intent,ā Dean Baquet, the paperās executive editor, told staff in an email following McNeilās departure. A spokesperson also stated that racial epithets had āno place in the newspaper.ā And yet, just six days before McNeilās dismissal, the Times had used the N-word in an article entitled, āHe Wants to Save Classics From Whiteness. Can the Field Survive?ā
Aaron Sibarium, a reporter for the Washington Free Beacon, sent a professional email to Hannah-Jones about all the times she has used the N-word on X and whether her intent mattered. Instead of replying back, she took his inquiry ā which included his personal information, like his cell phone number ā and posted it on her X account (a violation of Xās terms of service). She left it up for 47 hours, deleting it only after the Times was notified, claiming that she āhadnāt known it [the phone number] was thereā despite Sibariumās pleas for her to take it down (he received a torrent of hateful text messages and voicemails, of course).
The Times stood by Hannah-Jones and claimed that she had āinadvertentlyā posted the phone number. This was easily proven a lie considering that Hannah-Jones acknowledged she posted it:
When confronted with proof that sheād flat-out lied, she deleted her entire X history and proceeded to claim that the sudden erasure had nothing to do with her being a scumbag and was purely coincidental.
While weāre talking about X, letās pause and take a gander at her bios above. I think this is revealing, and Iād ask that you keep in mind sheās considered a figure of repute who was even selected as the Knight Chair at UNC.
The quasi-appropriation of the name Ida B. Wells? Iām not going to touch it. Seems a little questionable, but okay.
Letās start with āAKA The BeyoncĆ© of Journalism.ā Cute. What is this, sophomore yearbook class?
āSlanderous & nasty-minded mulattress.ā Why would anyone even jokingly refer to themselves in this way?
And saved for last, āsmart and thuggish.ā Allow me to submit that anyone who feels compelled to publicly announce theyāre āsmartā is, beneath the guise, probably not the brightest star in the intellectual Orion. That, or theyāre just so arrogant that they canāt help themselves. And āthuggishā?
I guess we shouldnāt be surprised after Hannah-Jones wrote that āit would be an honorā to call the 2020 unrest that caused $2 billion in (insured) damages to businesses across the country āthe 1619 Riots,ā andĀ claimedĀ that property destruction does not amount to violence.
Stealth Editing and Deception
Perhaps the crown jewel of examples highlighting the dishonesty of Nikole Hannah-Jones, her chief cheerleader and New York Times MagazineĀ editor Jake Silverstein, and the New York Times organization as a whole was the attempt to memory hole the key claim that came to symbolize theĀ Timesā blurring of historical analysis with editorial hyperbole: That the true founding of our country was not in 1776, but 1619.
As noted by Phillip W. Magness, discovery of this edit came about whenĀ Nikole Hannah-Jones went on CNNĀ to deny that she had ever sought to displace 1776 with a new founding date of 1619.
Luckily, since Hannah-Jones is an X queen ā the sort of person whoās always on the social media platform and thinks a successful argument is a post that goes viral amongst people who already agree with her ā we have plenty of proof that sheās actually arrogant enough to think she can go on live national television and just lie with impunity.
Hannah-Jones on CNN:Ā āOf course, we know that 1776 was the founding of this country. The Project does not argue that 1776 was not the founding of the country.ā
And yet, hereās what she said previously:
Of course, this wasnāt the first time that Hannah-Jones tried to alter her self-depiction of the projectās aims. She attempted a similar revision a few months prior during anĀ online spatĀ with conservative commentator Ben Shapiro.
As if that werenāt enough already, the Times made another edit to further conceal the ātrue foundingā bunk. Prompted by the discovery of the first deletion, some peopleĀ discoveredĀ another change to the projectās text. The earlyĀ print edition of the 1619 Project contained an introductory passage reading:
TheĀ TimesĀ didnāt disclose these edits of one of the most controversial claims in the entire 1619 Project. They simply made the problematic passages disappear, hoping that nobody would noticeāa complete lack of professional ethics and intellectual integrity.
Note that these are not mere word changes. The ātrue foundingā claim was the core element of the projectās assertion that all of American history is rooted in and defined by white racial hatred of African Americans. According to this narrative as trumpeted by Hannah-Jones, the American Revolution was a preemptive racial counterrevolution waged by white people in North America to defend slavery against British plans to abolish it. As Tom Mackaman and David North pointed out:
TheĀ TimesāĀ ādisappearing,ā with a few secret keystrokes, of its central argument, without any explanation or announcement, is a stunning act of intellectual dishonesty and outright fraud. When it launched the 1619 Project in August 2019, theĀ TimesĀ proclaimed that its aim was to radically change what and how students were taught about American history. With the aim of creating a new syllabus based on the 1619 Project, hundreds of thousands of copies of the original version of the narrative, as published in theĀ New York Times Magazine, were printed and distributed to schools, museums and libraries all across the United States. A very large number of schools declared that they would align their curricula in accordance with the narrative supplied by theĀ Times.
The National Association of Scholars wrote a damning public letter with 21 signatories calling upon the Pulitzer Prize Board to rescind the prize awarded to Hannah-Jones. Included in the letter is the following passage, which is worth quoting at length:
Hannah-Jonesās refusal to correct her errors or engage her critics, we have recently learned, was accompanied by surreptitious efforts by the New York TimesĀ to alter the record of what it had published in the original magazine of August 18, 2019. Providing no public explanation or acknowledgment of its actions, theĀ TimesĀ amended the digital version of the Project text. Not until September 19, 2020, when historian Phillip Magness compared the original and digital versions of the essay in the journalĀ Quillette, did the alterations come to light.Ā These were not changes to Hannah-Jonesās essay itself, but to the crucially important introductory materials whose claimsāfor example, the āreframingā of American history with the year 1619 as the nationās ātrue foundingāāform the underlying rationale of the entire Project.
Correcting factual errors in their published works, of course, is an important responsibility of both the journalistic and scholarly press. But such corrections are typically and rightly made openly and explicitly. The author and the publisher acknowledge an error and correct it. That is not what happened in this case. Rather, the false claims were erased or altered with no explanation, and Hannah-Jones then proceeded to claim that she had never said or written what in fact she has said and written repeatedly, assertions that the Project materials also made. Fortunately, we have a documentary record to the contrary, in the form of the original publication, in addition to extensive video footage of Hannah-Jones (and Silverstein) making precisely the claims that she now denies having made.
The duplicity of attempting to alter the historical record in a manner intended to deceive the public is as serious an infraction against professional ethics as a journalist can commit. A āsweeping, deeply reported and personal essay,ā as the Pulitzer Prize Board called it, does not have the license to sweep its own errors into obscurity or the remit to publish ādeeply reportedā falsehoods.ā
Itās important to note that the case I laid out includes only the more prominent examples of lies and deception. Regardless, the 1619 Project shouldnāt be part of any curriculum, and Nikole Hannah-Jones doesnāt belong anywhere near a classroom. Her trite writing, unprofessional conduct, lack of scholarship and accountability, propensity for smearing and falsely accusing others, and disdain for journalistic ethics would disqualify anyone else from teaching at any university, let alone tenure at a prestigious, taxpayer funded institution.
Every organization has standards. Professional standards, ethical standards, dress standards, intellectual standards, decorum standards, speech standards, behavior standards. Even if these specific standards arenāt penned and posted, theyāre still tacitly agreed upon and enforced. And when you compromise those standards, you donāt just run the risk of establishing a slippery slope, you send a message to the world. The message coming from the Times and Howard University couldnāt be more clear.
This is known as āAfro-pessimism,ā and thereās a whole branch of thought that goes along with it.
No this isn't about history.... and something I think is important to understand is that it isn't really about race either. The roots of this date from the 60s when the white middle class intelligentsia started to hate and despise their fellow whites along with the nation that was cosseting them in their privileged positions in universities and places like the NYT. Getting pious about 'racism' whether real or imaginary became a great way to feel virtuous and superior to their ordinary white peers. With this intelligentsia at their back it was only a matter of time before a whole lot of Nikole-Claudine-type black race-grifting would opportunistically emerge as a new phoney sainthood for these NYT-type whiteys to kneel down before.
N H-J does seem like an ugly person and is an obvious hack, but in the spirit of Christmas I want to try to be generous to her, and in the intellectual spirit of our times, I will try to do this using the lens of social constructionism, which is the trendy bauble every ambitious academic must have and which is the American version of wearing glasses to look smart.
That being said, there is something truly tragic that happens to young black minds under the white liberal dispensationāthey are encouraged to constantly be venting rage and performing victimhood, trained to throw tantrums for advancement and attention, to cry about how exhausted they are, indoctrinated to believe that the world is out to get them and that all their misery is caused by white conservatives, who just coincidentally happen to be the blood enemies of white liberals.
Our new class of angry black antiracist fundamentalists are the 21st-century's version of Blues singers or the whipped slaves pictured in those postcards the Abolitionists used to circulateāthe method is different but the goal is the same: they parade their scars for money and attention, to manipulate white people with shame and guilt, their skin color made into a credential and the historical pain of their people sold as a commodity for hungry masochists and political opportunists. (In the case of the NYT, black pain becomes just another luxury product like a Rolex watch or Chanel purse.)
The real tragedy of black writers/thinkers in modern America is that they are always wielded as symbols and never get to be flesh-and-blood fallible humans, and that their white liberal benefactors (who produce and direct the modern White Guilt Industrial Complex, and who rolled out the 1619 Project like a summer blockbuster) have segregated them into color-coded playpens and condemned them to intellectual infancy, where they perform Black Rage! for book deals and tenure.
N H-J is simply following the incentives offered by her environment, where white liberals will worship her and strew her path with blank checks as long as she always makes sure to aim her rage at white conservatives and always offer a path to absolution for white liberals.
She is Malcolm X crossed with P.T. Barnum and knows that there's a (rich white) sucker born every minute.