1619 Project’s Nikole Hannah-Jones claims Americans are taught ‘the history of a
New York Times reporter Nikole Hannah-Jones said the American people will not “willfully” work to confront the “anti-Blackness” in society, said that they have been “taught the history of a country that does not exist,” and suggested there must be a “serious examination” after mainstream journalists “got caught up in the Republican propaganda campaign” to discredit the 1619 Project.
Hannah-Jones, who authored the 1619 Project and was named to TIME‘s list of the “100 most influential people” in 2021, made the remarks during an interview with The Associated Press.
“I think that we are in a very frightening time,” Hannah-Jones told AP, referencing the standing of American democracy. “People who are much, much smarter than me, who have studied this much, much longer than I have are ringing the alarm.”
She added, “I think we have to ask ourselves … the narrators, the storytellers, the journalists: Are we ringing the alarm in the right way? Are we doing our jobs to try to uphold our democracy?”
Asked what she had learned this year about America’s current position on “racial justice and our reckoning with history,” Hannah-Jones said 2021 is “reflective” of what she had “always understood” about America.
“And that is that steps forward, steps towards racial progress, are always met with an intensive backlash,” Hannah-Jones said. “That we are a society that willfully does not want to deal with the anti-Blackness that is at the core of so many of our institutions and really our society itself.”
Attempting to justify her point, Hannah-Jones said “the fact that very powerful people are so concerned about a work of journalism called The 1619 Project that they would seek to discredit it, that they would seek to censor it, that they would seek to ban it from being taught” proves that “there are millions of Americans who want a more honest accounting of our history, who want to better understand the country that we’re in, who are open to new narratives.”
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Hannah-Jones also said there should be a “serious…
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