CNN+ host Chris Wallace asked 1619 Project author Nikole Hannah-Jones to respond to White parents who may feel she makes their children “feel bad” by “telling my kids that we’re all racist.”
Ms. Hannah-Jones and Mr. Wallace demonstrated everything a news interview should be during the latest episode of the CNN+ series Who’s Talking to Chris Wallace, engaging in an unsparing conversation about the difficult topics that are the subject of Hannah-Jones’ journalism.
Much of the interview centered around Hannah-Jones’ essay and book on the 1619 Project, which has its fair share of critics and admirers. Wallace asked Hannah-Jones to respond to a particular criticism from some parents, that “you’re tellin’ my kids that we’re all racist, and you’re making them feel bad about their country.”
Ms. Hannah-Jones emphatically rejected that critique:
CHRIS WALLACE: Okay, you know the reaction, especially from a lot of White parents, which is that you’re tellin’, in school particularly, that you’re tellin’ my kids that we’re all racist, and you’re making them feel bad about their country. How do you respond to that?
NIKOLE HANNAH-JONES: I would love any of those parents to point out any passage, any argument in the 1619 project that says anything about all white children are racist or all White people are racist. That’s clearly not our argument.
CHRIS WALLACE: No it does not say that. But it does say that it’s at the very center of our national narrative.
NIKOLE HANNAH-JONES: It is.
CHRIS WALLACE: What’s your response when people say that you’re saying the country’s racist and that this is a central part and making us feel, making them, kids, feel bad about it. Are you saying parents are wrong?
NIKOLE HANNAH-JONES: Yes, I think that I don’t know how one can argue we were not founded as a racist country. I believe that we were. I believe that the record is clear. If you’re founded as a country where Black people because they are Black, don’t have rights don’t have freedom. If you have a supreme court that’s dominated by enslavers 10 of the first 12 presidents dominated by enslavers, our founding fathers dominated by enslavers. If you have these things the Father of the Constitution wasn’t enslaver. The drafters of the declaration was an enslaver of the Bill of Rights. So to argue that people who were explicitly white supremacist in their writings, I mean, the notes on the state of Virginia says Black people are inferior as a race. That is a racist foundation. This is just a factual rendering to me. Now, does that mean that most white Americans are racist? The project doesn’t argue that. But what it does say is that systems of racism that have been set up over centuries don’t simply disappear, because we pass laws in the 1960s, saying you can no longer explicitly discriminate against Black Americans. What I say in that essay, I’m 45 years old, until a decade before I was born, it was legal to discriminate against Black people in every aspect of American life simply because we were Black. And this was in federal law, state law and local law. So I don’t understand how factually, anyone argues that we were not a racist country, because we were racist by law, for the vast history of our country for the first 350 years after the colonists landed at Virginia. But there’s a different argument than saying, our country has done some terrible things, and saying you are responsible for what our country did a long time ago, nothing in this project or critical race theory argues that white Americans today bear responsibility for what happened in the past, they’ll certainly I would argue, they bear responsibility. So for what they are doing about the inequality that this past created.
Watch above via CNN+.
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