President Donald Trump’s second term has swung a wrecking ball at diversity, equity, and inclusion policies and programs throughout the country. Few writers seem better suited to explain this unique moment in America than Nikole Hannah-Jones.
A New York Times journalist and Howard University professor, Hannah-Jones has spent years studying and shaping compelling—and at times controversial—narratives about American history. In 2019, she created The 1619 Project, a series of stories and essays that placed the first slave ship that arrived in Virginia at the center of the US’ origin story. Today, the Trump administration is pushing against that kind of historical reframing while dismantling federal policies designed to address structural racism. Hannah-Jones says she’s been stunned by the speed of Trump’s first few months.
“We haven’t seen the federal government weaponized against civil rights in this way” since the turn of the century, Hannah-Jones says. “We’ve not lived in this America before. And we are experiencing something that, if you study history, it’s not unpredictable, yet it’s still shocking that we’re here.”
On this week’s episode of More To The Story, host Al Letson talks to Hannah-Jones about the rollback of DEI and civil rights programs across the country, the ongoing battle to reframe American history, and whether this will lead to another moment of rebirth for Black Americans.
Credits
Producer: Josh Sanburn | Editor: Kara McGuirk-Allison | Theme music: Fernando Arruda and Jim Briggs | Digital producer: Nikki Frick | Interim executive producers: Brett Myers and Taki Telonidis | Executive editor: James West | Host: Al Letson
Dig Deeper
Read: Trump Shuts Down Diversity Programs Across Government (Mother Jones)
Listen: 40 Acres and a Lie (Reveal)
Read: The 1619 Project, created by Nikole Hannah-Jones
Note: If you buy a book using our Bookshop link, a small share of the proceeds supports our journalism.
Transcript
More To The Story transcripts are produced by a third-party transcription service and may contain errors. Please be aware that the official record for More To The Story is the audio.
| Nikole Hannah-Jones: | We see Donald Trump running on this idea of economics, but enacting policies that are designed to stoke racial animus and polarization. He’s enacting policies to make it impossible for us to grapple with the complexities of this society. |
| Al Letson: | Hey, y’all, I have really been looking forward to this. Today, on More To The Story, we have the incomparable Nikole Hannah-Jones. She’s a historian, a journalist, and more importantly, at least to me, she’s my buddy. Today, we’re talking about Trump’s second term, the extreme backlash against civil rights, life after The 1619 Project and the mythology of American history. Stick around, it’s going to be a good one. It is the notorious Nikole Hannah-Jones. Girl, I haven’t seen you in a bone age. |
| Nikole Hannah-Jones: | I know. I actually can’t remember the last time I saw you. |
| Al Letson: | It’s been forever and a day. How you doing? |
| Nikole Hannah-Jones: | Trying to survive America, man. |
| Al Letson: | This is More To The Story. I’m Al Letson. When I think about contemporary writers of the black experience in America, a few names immediately come to mind. People like Ta-Nehisi Coates, Imani Perry, and today’s guest, Nikole Hannah-Jones, creator of The 1619 Project. Nikole Upended how we think about American history by placing the arrival of the first slave ship in Virginia at the center of our country’s origin story. The New York Times Project was lauded and became part of the curriculum in some public schools, and that’s when all hell broke loose. Today, President Trump’s administration is rewriting, even erasing black history. And like Nikole says, that makes it impossible for us to grapple with the complexities of American history. When the name Nikole Hannah-Jones comes up, I think what a lot of people obviously think about is that you are a top tier journalist. And I think about that too, but I think the thing that comes to mind for me the most is that you are very much a historian. You have studied the history of America and the world, but really specifically, America and race and all of those subjects. That’s, in my mind, your specialty. So as a historian, how are you processing this current moment that we’re in right now? |
| Nikole Hannah-Jones: | That’s a great question, and I actually have been thinking a lot about how historians will process and write about this moment when we’re reading about where we are now 20 years from now, 30 years from now. And I think if we want to understand a parallel to what we’re seeing today, we have to actually go back 100 years. A lot of folks are saying that this administration is rolling back the sixties, but I’m like this administration is actually going back further than that. We haven’t seen the federal government weaponized against civil rights in this way since the period known as the nadir, since the turn of the century. So how I’m thinking about this is that people my age and your age and even our parents’ age, we’ve not lived in this America before and we are experiencing something that if you study history it’s not unpredictable yet it’s still shocking that we’re here. |
| Al Letson: | During the election a lot of people that were voting for Kamala, people that were advocating for the Democratic Party were saying that if President Trump gets reelected, it’s going to be way worse than his first term. It’s interesting because I’m thinking about a conversation that I heard that Ta-Nehisi Coates was having with somebody and he was just saying that the Democratic Party has to do better because I am so tired of being told that this election is the election of my lifetime. And I agreed with him when he said that because that’s the messaging that the Democratic Party always depends on. And after three or four elections of hearing that same rhetoric, it loses his punch. But now we’re in that world and I don’t think that… I’m just speaking for myself, I didn’t think that it would move this quickly. I knew the pendulum was going to swing, but I didn’t expect it to swing this hard and this fast. How are you taking it? |
| Nikole Hannah-Jones: | I think that’s a common experience. Again, I’m not surprised. Many of us were predicting that this is exactly what was going to happen in a second Trump term, that the first term was somewhat of a fluke. But by the second term, those who are guiding him and creating his policy had a plan, had a strategy. I knew there was going to be an efficiency. I mean, they were so confident that they put out the plan, they published it. But even knowing all of that, and even those of us who have also realized the guardrails were already feeling, that the normal institutions that could stop autocracy had already been eroded, I too am surprised by how quickly the gutting of the federal government has occurred, the rollback of civil rights. Every Republican administration takes a somewhat oppositional stance to civil rights protections, but they weren’t eliminating entire civil rights offices. They weren’t pretending that if you try to integrate that that is somehow violating the 1964 Civil Rights Act. What DOGE is doing, the takeover, none of us could have really predicted the efficiency that this has happened. |
| Al Letson: | You made probably one of the most monumental projects when it comes to journalism and the history of the United States, The 1619 Project, which I’ve given you flowers on it because it’s just an awesome endeavor. But I feel like in a lot of ways you had to have paid a really heavy price with that because you put out this thing that is widely celebrated but also widely attacked. I want to talk about the work, but I just want to talk about the personal level. How did you handle that? I mean, I’ve been on Twitter and five people have told me I’m a bad person and I feel like the whole world is collapsing. You had a whole machine against you. |
| Nikole Hannah-Jones: | Yeah. If I look back on that period, the height of the attacks, which also happened to coincide with Covid, like you said, there were a few months when the project first published, and it faced your typical conservative outrage, which I was expected, and then it went away. And mostly, the project was really, really well received. But then it came out that the project was starting to go into schools and that there was a curriculum and that educators were starting to teach the project. And that’s when you started to see what became a really organized campaign against the project. So I used to live on Twitter, especially during Covid, we just had endless hours to scroll. And I was reading everything and it was a really dark period for me. I did not initially handle it well. I was doing battle every day. Anyone who said anything about the project, I would argue against it. I sometimes in a fit of rage would tweet things that would become an entire Fox News segment that could be taken out of context or that honestly wasn’t thoughtful enough. It took me a while to realize that I wasn’t just Nikole Hannah-Jones, the kind of reporter that you only knew if you were nerdy and followed school segregation, but that I had become this symbol and that I was giving people ammunition against the work. |
| So it was a dark time, especially when you have the most powerful men in the world targeting your project, when you have his family members targeting your projects. There were threats. Someone threatened to burn my mother’s house down. People threatened to come burn my house down. But in the end, one, I survived it and I learned a lot from that period. And some of my closest friends really helped me get through it, of course, and my family. I think the thing that finally clicked for me was a really good writer friend of mine was like, “You’ve won. Nikole, what are you out here fighting these fools for who no one pays attention to until you respond to them? That’s why they’re baiting you.” He was like, “You don’t have the president and all of these folks coming after your work because your work has not succeeded.” He said, “The only one at this point who can discredit your work is you.” | |
| Al Letson: | I know you well enough to say that everything that you have gotten in your career, in your life, you have had to fight tooth and nail for. Nothing came easy for Nikole Hannah-Jones. And I know that. The saying that I think about a lot, especially applying it to myself, is that the tools that I used to get here are not the tools that I need to stay here or not the tools that I need to go to the next level. But it’s hard to put those down- |
| Nikole Hannah-Jones: | Absolutely. |
| Al Letson: | … when that’s the thing that got you where you are. That’s how you survived is by fighting and not taking anything from anybody. I know it had to be hard. |
| Nikole Hannah-Jones: | Listen. So that’s what Ta-Nehisi told me. He was like, “You’re out here street fighting, but you’re not in the streets no more. You don’t have to battle that way. You used to have to battle that way.” And that’s so true. Coming from where we come from… Again, my mom was a probation officer, my dad drove a bus. There was no one who could call and get me an internship. There was no one who could call and be like, “Hey, I have a talented person. Why don’t you look at their resume?” People weren’t just throwing the doors open for some girl from Waterloo, Iowa who wanted to write about race. I had to scrap. I worked from a tiny bi-weekly newspaper. I worked two jobs since I was 30 years old. I was a newspaper reporter and selling mattresses on the side. So to then have people say, “You didn’t earn it. You were given this. Your work doesn’t stand up,” I felt like I had to defend everything. Because when you come from where we come from and you’re so used to being disrespected, you always feel like you can’t let any disrespect slide. |
| Al Letson: | I think about the work and all the collaborators on The 1619 Project, the work that Ta-Nehisi Coates has been doing, Imani Perry, I can just go on and on. It feels like all of that work is really a battle against the mythology of what people believe America is. I wonder, is myth stronger than truth? |
| Nikole Hannah-Jones: | I don’t think that myth is stronger than truth, but I think myth speaks to the heart and truth speaks to the mind and it’s always easier to coerce the heart. I just think it’s simpler. Myth speaks to emotion. Myth is like what we count on to explain ourselves to ourselves and to justify ourselves. Think of anything, a family myth, a community myth, a national myth. So I think myth gets so tied up in identity the way that truth does not. Truth, as best as we can discern it, it’s, at its heart, a dispassionate accounting of the facts. But myth is about who we believe ourselves to be, and so we’re always going to hold so much more tightly to that than we do to facts. I mean, you can look at what Donald Trump is doing. |
| I’ve been thinking a lot about the purge of the books from the library at the Naval Academy. Think about how important myths are that you would tell college students… These are adults… That you have to protect them from books that are just factual books about black people and the history of race, but you don’t have to protect them from folks that are not actually factual, which is like Mein Kampf, which is the musings of a man who would enact a genocide. Though I also think you should read that. In fact, I did read it when I was in college as well. That what that’s about is protecting the fragile psyche that holds power together, that allows power in this nation to dominate without question. And truth forces us to question. So I think truth is more important. I don’t think that mythology ultimately wins, but I think truth is something that requires constant defending and mythology is just easily absorbed. | |
| Al Letson: | Yeah. Because the base mythology of America is this idea that America was born through rugged individualism. And I think that that idea of rugged individualism is what most Americans carry in their heart, especially white Americans when they hear that they’ve had it easier than say a black American. I personally think that the system isn’t working for anybody. And so I understand why people feel like, “Wait a second, I worked hard to get here.” It’s just the disconnect in understanding that other people might’ve had to work harder. And I don’t know how you bridge that gap to making people understand that your work and your life is valid and what you’re saying is valid, but also, what other people have gone through is just as valid. |
| Nikole Hannah-Jones: | Part of the problem is mythology means we don’t have to have complicated conversations. |
| Al Letson: | Absolutely. |
| Nikole Hannah-Jones: | And so you aren’t even able to have that nuanced conversation to say yes. And I say this all the time, I’m never arguing white people haven’t worked hard. What I’m saying is you’ve worked hard in a society designed to help move you forward, and other people have worked hard in a society designed to hold them back. And so you both can be working hard, but you’re working hard is going to pay off more for you, even though now it’s not really paying off that much. This is why we see Donald Trump running on this idea of economics, but enacting policies that are designed to stoke racial animus and polarization and that he’s enacting policies to make it impossible for us to grapple with the complexities of this society. |
| If the first time that you ever heard that this nation was founded on slavery, that our systems of capitalism and politics were created around the institution of slavery, that there has been this long legacy of black Americans being systematically held back by law, that it wasn’t just discrimination like the Irish experienced, that this was an entirely different and singular system. If the first time you ever hear that is when you’re 35 years old and you hear something about The 1619 Project, your response to that is going to be to reject that. Because if it were true, how could I just be hearing about that? I’ve already established my entire view of this nation as this exceptional nation, this exceptionally free nation. We treat the founders as these demigods. We deify them. We don’t offer this complex history. And so it is shocking to people who have always been the good guy in the story, who’ve always been the only people who have ever really moved this country forward to hear a different story. If you get that history earlier, then you don’t personalize it the way that they personalize it when they get it older. So that’s why the efforts are to restrict the understanding of that history. | |
| But the other big part of that is we as black people know, we’ve never been able to think about ourselves in terms of just being individuals because of slavery and because of Jim Crow. It didn’t matter what we did individually. We were restricted from neighborhoods, from schools, from jobs, from opportunities simply because of our race. No matter how smart we were, how hard we worked, whatever our acumen or ambition was. White people have never had that experience. I was looking at the efforts to really rebrand the 1964 Civil Rights Act as being a race neutral policy. And of course it’s not. The only reason it exists is because of structural racism, and it was designed to eliminate that racism against black Americans and help black Americans enter into all these areas that we have been banned from. But if you erase all that history and context, then you can just say, “Hey, man, if they even talk about race at all, that’s a violation of this act because we have a society that doesn’t acknowledge race.” And when they’re saying get back to a colorblind meritocracy, they cannot tell you when that existed. | |
| Al Letson: | No. |
| Nikole Hannah-Jones: | I’m constantly confronted with white Americans because of this idea of rugged individualism. But again, in a society where race does not matter to you because race does not hold you back. So what operates invisibly is that you only ever want to see yourselves as individuals. Now the problem with that is, is here we are. And when you get to a society that only wants to see you as individuals, it also means we don’t believe that we have an obligation to help anyone else outside of ourselves. So you see the gutting of social infrastructure. You see people who are struggling to pay student loans, because once we stop believing that we owe each other something, we stop funding higher ed. We no longer fund public hospitals. We no longer believe in a social safety net. We don’t feel that we owe anyone else anything because it’s all about the individual. And now white Americans are also paying the price for that, except they’re blaming the wrong people. |
| Al Letson: | Coming up on More To The Story, how Trump is using race to fuel the divide in our country. |
| Nikole Hannah-Jones: | And unfortunately, because of the history of our country that we haven’t grappled with, race is always going to be what politicians go to when they want to polarize a society. |
| Al Letson: | More with Nikole Hannah-Jones in just a minute. But while I’ve got you here, have you followed or subscribed to reveal in your favorite podcast app? If you have, would you give us a rating or a review? How about sharing reveal with your friends? All of these things help us build our reveal community that you are already a part of. We can’t do it without you. All right. Don’t go anywhere. There’s More to the Story. |
| This is More To The Story. I’m Al Letson here with incredible journalist and historian Nikole Hannah-Jones. It seems like the way the administration is moving with their focus on two things, one, on immigration and putting the blame for all of America’s problems on the backs of immigrants, and then also deconstructing the social safety net, it feels like those two things work together. If we deconstruct the social safety net and people are beginning to lose any kind of assistance from the federal government, but you’re telling them with the other hand that all of our problems are by immigrants, it keeps people from actually realizing and seeing where the actual problem is coming from. | |
| Nikole Hannah-Jones: | Absolutely. I mean, it’s strategic. It’s clearly strategic. That, the DEI, and the anti-trans issue. So we are going to get people all stoked up about these so-called cultural issues in order to distract from the fact that we are becoming an oligarchy, that all of the wealth in this country is moving upwards, that people’s standard of living is not better than their parents. And if we are logical thinkers… I’ve done so many interviews on this and I ask people, “Well, do you know somebody who lost a job to an immigrant?” “No, no.” When you ask them to actually name what in their life has been made worse because of immigrants, they can’t name them. But it’s a feeling, it’s a feeling that we’re losing something. And so they’ve been very effective at that. And the problem is that progressives, instead of countering it and pushing back forcefully with the argument and saying, “This is who we are, this is a net benefit,” they’ve moved to the right. The response was, “Well, let’s just become that but light.” |
| I talk to my students about this all the time, Al. One of the reasons I became a journalist was I understood the power of narrative is more powerful than any data, any research, any peer-reviewed study that you can have, it’s who controls the narrative? Because people, at their heart, they want the easy and convenient story. And so it doesn’t matter so much what the facts are, it matters who is the most powerful at harnessing the narrative. And unfortunately, because of the history of our country that we haven’t grappled with, race is always going to be what politicians go to when they want to polarize a society. | |
| Al Letson: | So after the election, I feel like the collective feeling in the black community… And please correct me if you felt like it was a little bit different. I think the collective feeling by a lot of black folks was just like, “You know what? We really worked hard to save democracy.” Which you’ve written about so eloquently that black folks are the perfectors of democracy and that we have been on the front lines of trying to save it since the beginning of this country. And I think that there was just a collective weariness of America is doing America again, and I’m just going to sit this out and let y’all figure it out, because when you look at the numbers, black women and black men overwhelmingly voted for a different path than what we’re seeing happen in the country right now. I guess the question I have is do you think that’s going to shift? Because in order for change to really happen, I feel like it’s going to take everybody working together to figure it out. |
| Nikole Hannah-Jones: | Yeah. So I think that that narrative is really taking hold, but I don’t know that it’s true. Certainly, right after the election, a lot of black folks were exhausted, demoralized, and honestly felt betrayed. And so of course there were all those memes going around of, “We’re watching this shit burn down. We’re not even trying to help put out the fire.” But I don’t think that ever was going to be true for long, because it is true that every four years we are called upon to save democracy, and then as soon as we do, we get dropped like a bad habit. Black Americans were basically blamed, black and gay people for the loss of the election. So what I do know is black folks are organizing. There’s all types of organizing, strategy, legal and otherwise happening. But what they aren’t doing is doing it in the public, and they’re not joining these other protests that white Americans are holding. |
| I am hearing constantly, “You know what? Y’all go and do your thing to defend and we’re going to wait and sit back and see.” Are you serious? Meanwhile, we are doing our own strategy of self-protection. So I think black folks are for a while done with being the sacrificial lambs and are really focusing on trying to do what’s necessary to protect black institutions, black civil rights and black gains, because it wasn’t just a sense that there was a betrayal by many white Americans, but also betrayal by other people of color whom we have always worked in coalition with and defended. And it seemed like when it came down to it, what I’m hearing, what I’ve been hearing for the last few months is it seemed like black Americans had no allies, had no one. | |
| I’ve been reading a lot about fascism, but particularly from what black folks in America had said about fascism decades ago. And what I know is black people know what that looks like, because while there’s a belief that that’s only ever been something that had to have been fought in Europe, we lived in it in the United States. It’s not that we’re magical, it’s that we have had to have an understanding of this country that many other groups have not. We’ve never been able to believe in a mythology, we’ve never been able to believe that our democracy will hold, that if you gain rights, you will always have those rights. We took what was happening seriously in a way that maybe others did not. And so there wasn’t a sense of exhaustion and betrayal, but it was never going to be that black folks are just going to sit this out. We don’t have that luxury. We’ve never had that luxury, and I think folks should not take the fact that they’re not seeing the work that’s being done. It’s not for you to see right now. I think black folks are just really working on self-protection. | |
| Al Letson: | When you look at your work and the long arc of history, what do you see as a way forward? |
| Nikole Hannah-Jones: | Best-case scenario or worst-case scenario? |
| Al Letson: | Let’s hear both. |
| Nikole Hannah-Jones: | I mean, best-case scenario is that this is another one of those cataclysmic moments of… Well, I guess it’s best-case and worst-case scenario actually. Moments of rebirth. That when we look at the few times in this country where we actually started to work towards inclusive, multiracial democracy, they were at catastrophic moments. The Civil War, the deadliest war in the history of the United States, ends slavery, leads to our second founding. We have this brief period of reconstruction out of those fires where we get equality before the law, the 15th Amendment, the 13th Amendment, the 1866 Civil Rights Act. Black people start moving into government. We see what America could be. It only lasts 12 years. And then the next catastrophic moment was created by the Civil Rights Movement, which was a decades-long movement that really came to a head in the 1960s. And out of that deadly and violence period, we get the Civil Rights Acts and we get our next founding. |
| And once again, we see this potential, and then we lose heart and we go backwards. And so we are in one of those backwards, catastrophic periods, but I think out of that, again, is hope for rebirth. Out of destruction you hope that there will be a rebirth that moves us forward again. But the problem with that is, in every one of these periods of backlash, there’s so much death, so much harm, and then decades to try to recover. And I just wonder, how long are we going to have to, as black people and as a society, continue that cycle? When will we actually try in a sustained way to become the country that we pretend we are? | |
| Al Letson: | Nikole, it is always good to see you. I love interviewing you because A, you’re ridiculously smart, but B, you get deep with me. I love it. |
| Nikole Hannah-Jones: | I know. It’s like a therapy session every time. |
| Al Letson: | Every time, we be good. Nikole Hannah-Jones, thank you so much for coming to talk to me today. |
| Nikole Hannah-Jones: | Thank you, Al, as always. |
| Al Letson: | That was journalist and historian Nikole Hannah-Jones. You can find her work including The 1619 Project at the New York Times. Follow her on Blue Sky and Instagram. If you love this conversation, check out our landmark three-part reveal series, 40 Acres and a Lie, which was just named a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize. It’s a fascinating and infuriating investigation into how the government gave land to the formerly enslaved after the Civil War, only to take it back. We track down descendants and unearthed stories that have long been misunderstood or forgotten entirely. We’ll put a link in the show notes. Lastly, just a reminder, we are listener-supported. That means listeners like you. You can help us thrive by making a gift today. By going to RevealNews.org slash gift. Again, that’s RevealNews.org slash gift. And thank you. |
| This episode was produced by Josh Sanburn and Kara McGurk-Allison. Theme music and engineering help by Fernando [inaudible 00:30:39] and Jay Breezy, Mr. Jim Briggs. I’m Al Letson. Let’s do this again next week. This is More To The Story. |