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--:-- Shamita Basu: Welcome to In Conversation from Apple News Today. I'm Shamita Basu. Every weekend, we're taking you deeper into the best journalism on Apple News.
--:-- Nicole Hannah-Jones: I'm Nicole Hannah-Jones, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter for the New York Times Magazine and the creator of the 1619 Project.
--:-- Shamita Basu: I thought we would start with something a little bit different, kind of like a speed round. So I'm going to go through the first dozen or so presidents of the United States. And I want you to tell me whether they enslaved people or not.
--:-- Nicole Hannah-Jones: Okay.
--:-- Shamita Basu: George Washington. Yes.
--:-- Nicole Hannah-Jones: Yes.
--:-- Shamita Basu: John Adams. No.
--:-- Nicole Hannah-Jones: No.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Thomas Jefferson. Yes.
--:-- Nicole Hannah-Jones: Yes.
--:-- Shamita Basu: James Madison. Yes.
--:-- Nicole Hannah-Jones: Yes.
--:-- Shamita Basu: James Monroe. Yes.
--:-- Nicole Hannah-Jones: Yes.
--:-- Shamita Basu: John Quincy Adams. No.
--:-- Nicole Hannah-Jones: No.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Andrew Jackson. Yes.
--:-- Nicole Hannah-Jones: Yes.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Martin Van Buren. Yes.
--:-- Nicole Hannah-Jones: Yes.
--:-- Shamita Basu: William Henry Harrison. Yes.
--:-- Nicole Hannah-Jones: Yes.
--:-- Shamita Basu: John Tyler. Yes.
--:-- Nicole Hannah-Jones: Yes.
--:-- Shamita Basu: James K. Polk. I believe so, yes.
--:-- Nicole Hannah-Jones: Yes.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Zachary Taylor. Yes.
--:-- Nicole Hannah-Jones: Yes.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Nicole Hannah-Jones is a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter for the New York Times Magazine and the creator of the 1619 Project. If you're not familiar with the project, it establishes an important date that isn't mentioned in many history books. 1619, the beginning of American slavery. The year the first people were brought from Africa to the United States and sold to the colonists.
--:-- Nicole Hannah-Jones: This project called for a reframing of American history around this starting point.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Now, Nicole has expanded on the idea and turned it into a book called The 1619 Project, A New Origin Story.
--:-- Nicole Hannah-Jones: The 1619 Project and Nicole Hannah-Jones herself have been the targets of fierce conservative backlash.
--:-- Shamita Basu: The basic premise of the 1619 Project was that American history was founded in evil, and basically that evil has infused the entire body politic in every aspect of American life.
--:-- Nicole Hannah-Jones: That project is the work of an out-of-the-closet racial extremist called Nicole Hannah-Jones.
--:-- Shamita Basu: They are indoctrinating our students with false ideas.
--:-- Nicole Hannah-Jones: The 1619 Project wants to indoctrinate America's kids and teach them to hate America, to believe that America was founded not on human freedom, but on racism, to think that slavery was not an aberration, but the true heart of America.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Nicole would probably agree with that last point. Slavery is at the heart of America's founding story, but she comes to a different conclusion than her critics claim, one that's not about hating this country for its sins, but rather about recognizing our harms as part of our history.
--:-- Nicole Hannah-Jones: That's the only way this country will be able to live up to the ideals we say were built on.
--:-- Shamita Basu: In my conversation with Nicole Hannah-Jones, we talk about what's in this new, expanded edition of the 1619 Project and why she says it's important to know that the people who ran our country from the very beginning, 10 of our first 12 presidents, enslaved people.
--:-- Nicole Hannah-Jones: It means something that the most powerful men in the nascent years of establishing a country, that nearly all of them engaged in the institution of slavery.
--:-- Shamita Basu: We would understand that meant something if it was any particular occupation. And enslaving was an occupation.
--:-- Nicole Hannah-Jones: This was how these men got the wealth and the education and the status and the stature to become presidents of the brand new country.
--:-- Shamita Basu: So when we think about that, our politics, and we could do this with the Supreme Court. We could do this with the men who are considered the founders who signed the declaration with the men who sat in the Constitutional Congress.
--:-- Nicole Hannah-Jones: And if we understand that so many of the people who were shaping the politics and the policies of our brand new nation were also people who relied upon slavery for their wealth and power, I think that fundamentally alters your understanding of the country.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And even talking about them as enslavers, I mean, there's some very deliberate language choices that you make in this book. For example, using enslaved person instead of the word slave.
--:-- Nicole Hannah-Jones: Violence against enslaved people is often referred to as white terrorism in this book.
--:-- Shamita Basu: How did you want language to function in this project?
--:-- Nicole Hannah-Jones: We understand as journalists that words and word choice are very powerful and that the words you use can either illuminate or they can obscure.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And we have used language to obscure the horrors of slavery, the atrocity of slavery, the choice of slavery.
--:-- Nicole Hannah-Jones: So when we think about someone like George Washington, and we call him a planter, as if he were out in the fields planting tobacco, planter is a euphemism.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Planter allows us to imagine that this was not a man who was running a forced labor camp, which is also a choice of language that we use in the 1619 Project.
--:-- Nicole Hannah-Jones: Instead of plantation. Exactly. Who was not getting his wealth from the forced labor of human beings who only worked for him because of the fear of violence and the use of violence and the threat of violence and other coercion.
--:-- Shamita Basu: So all of these words enable us to really downplay the horrors of slavery and the hypocrisy of founders who said they were forging a new country based on individual and inalienable rights and yet came to prominence by denying all of those rights to the human beings who gave them their wealth.
--:-- Nicole Hannah-Jones: So that is why the language really matters If we called a plantation a forced labor camp which is what they were definitionally what they were then I imagine it would be so easy to hold weddings and graduations and dances and parties on these places the same way that you would never see that happening at a concentration camp in Poland or in Germany.
--:-- Shamita Basu: So the language covers the crime and we want to expose the crime.
--:-- Nicole Hannah-Jones: I've heard you say that we tend to think of American slavery as a racist institution. But first and foremost, slavery was an economic institution.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And many of the arguments made in this book are about how slavery defined American institutions.
--:-- Nicole Hannah-Jones: So why is it an important distinction to make to call it an economic institution, first and foremost?
--:-- Shamita Basu: Because we almost feel better about slavery if we think it wasn't necessary to the success of our nation.
--:-- Nicole Hannah-Jones: So many of us were kind of raised thinking that slavery was pre-modern, that slavery was an ineffective and inefficient form of labor, that it wasn't profitable, which when you think about the type of propaganda it takes to believe that every single colonial power would be involved in the trade of human beings, would transport some 13 million human beings across the ocean for a venture that didn't make a lot of money.
--:-- Shamita Basu: It's actually not logical, but that's how we've been taught to think about slavery.
--:-- Nicole Hannah-Jones: And so if we just think about it as racist, then it almost feels more benign because it's about someone's feelings.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And it's not about the very conscious, strategic, and economic reasons that we engage in slavery.
--:-- Nicole Hannah-Jones: So slavery, first and foremost, was an economic institution. It was about exploiting human beings for maximum profit, meaning you could turn human beings into a commodity that could be bought, sold, leveraged, mortgaged, collateralized in order to make a lot of money.
--:-- Shamita Basu: But the way that you convince yourself that you are still good people and that you are a country based on freedom while engaging in slavery is you have to say, these people are not human like we are.
--:-- Nicole Hannah-Jones: These people are less than we are.
--:-- Shamita Basu: These people don't feel pain the way that we feel pain.
--:-- Nicole Hannah-Jones: And in fact, if they don't have slavery, they can't even take care of themselves.
--:-- Shamita Basu: We are civilizing these uncivilized people through the institution of slavery.
--:-- Nicole Hannah-Jones: So racism comes to justify the economic exploitation of African people.
--:-- Shamita Basu: I was hoping we could talk also about another American institution shaped by slavery that's talked about in this book, which is policing.
--:-- Nicole Hannah-Jones: And I'm thinking specifically, I mean, I know it's addressed in multiple places, but I'm thinking of the essay written by sisters, Leslie Alexander, right, the historian, and Michelle Alexander, the legal scholar.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And they draw these links between the way that enslaved people who rebelled were policed and the way that today's protesters for racial justice have been met with militarized police forces in cities across America.
--:-- Nicole Hannah-Jones: So can you talk a little bit about that chapter?
--:-- Nicole Hannah-Jones: So that is the chapter called Fear. And it's really trying to help us understand where this innate fear of Black people comes from.
--:-- Shamita Basu: The type of fear that allows unarmed Black people to be killed and the people who killed them to get off.
--:-- Nicole Hannah-Jones: Because Black people are so frightening that even if you have a weapon, you are not the aggressor.
--:-- Shamita Basu: So where does that come from?
--:-- Nicole Hannah-Jones: And what's important is we must understand people do not submit to slavery.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And the people who were enslaving Black people knew that at any chance Black people would run away.
--:-- Nicole Hannah-Jones: They feared that Black people would try to hurt them in order to get their freedom the same way that the colonists fought and used violence to get their own freedom from the British.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And so Black people came to be seen as this, quote unquote, internal enemy of people who are living in the midst of white Americans because white Americans were dependent upon them for their labor, but who were always plotting against them.
--:-- Nicole Hannah-Jones: And so you get this system of the slave patrols and the slave patrols and slave law, slave codes deputize any white person who can stop any black person at any time and question that person, demand their papers, make sure that that black person is where he or she is supposed to be.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And that is what has to undergird the entire system of slavery.
--:-- Nicole Hannah-Jones: So you have these kind of twin ideas of constant surveillance and fear.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And we still see that, right? Like how many stories do we see of what we kind of colloquially now would call the Karens, right?
--:-- Nicole Hannah-Jones: Any white person who sees a black person where they don't think the black person should be bird watching, walking in the wrong neighborhood, in the sense that I have a right to stop and question you because black people are suspicious and likely to be doing something they're not supposed to be doing or being where they're not supposed to be.
--:-- Shamita Basu: You saw this with Ahmaud Arbery.
--:-- Nicole Hannah-Jones: So this essay really traces both the modern police force, which at least in the South, comes directly out of the slave patrols.
--:-- Shamita Basu: I mean, they even had badges in the slave patrols.
--:-- Nicole Hannah-Jones: And also this idea of having to surveil and control and the right of any white person to question any black person comes out of the history of slavery.
--:-- Shamita Basu: The essay by Leslie and Michelle Alexander also brings up the Haitian Revolution. and the role it played in stoking fear of Black revolt in the United States.
--:-- Nicole Hannah-Jones: The revolution in Haiti began on August 22, 1791, when enslaved people on what was then the island of Saint-Domingue revolted against the French colonists.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And it worked. More than a decade later, the island became a sovereign state, slavery in the new nation was abolished, and Haiti became the first country to be founded by formerly enslaved people
--:-- Nicole Hannah-Jones: This was the most successful revolt of enslaved people in modern history
--:-- Shamita Basu: And yet the Haitian Revolution is mostly not taught in American schools
--:-- Nicole Hannah-Jones: So we all learn about the French Revolution, but we do not learn about the Haitian Revolution.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And of course, there's a reason for that, because in the Haitian Revolution, enslaved people rise up against their masters and overthrow their enslavers and bankrupt Napoleon.
--:-- Nicole Hannah-Jones: It's the reason that the United States is able to purchase the Louisiana territory more than doubling the size of the United States for bargain rates.
--:-- Shamita Basu: It's because these Black people who have been brought to Haiti in slavery overthrow their enslavers.
--:-- Nicole Hannah-Jones: And why are we not taught about that?
--:-- Shamita Basu: One, because they end slavery on their own almost 70 years before the United States does so with a war.
--:-- Nicole Hannah-Jones: And you get this free black republic in a sea of slave colonies. Every other colony is surrounding Haiti, including the colonies of the United States, and they are all engaging in slavery.
--:-- Shamita Basu: So we don't learn about that story because it stands in stark contrast to the story we want to tell ourselves as Americans, which is we were the first liberators.
--:-- Nicole Hannah-Jones: We were the first people to believe in abolition.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Actually, African people who were enslaved were the first abolitionists, and the Haitian Revolution shows that.
--:-- Nicole Hannah-Jones: Many of those white Haitians, the French, actually come to the United States, they flee Haiti, and they bring their enslaved people with them to the United States.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And then those people, having just gone through a revolution, begin to share that information with enslaved people in America and saying, you can't overthrow your masters.
--:-- Nicole Hannah-Jones: And that begins, of course, to stoke a great deal of fear and a really violent repression of Black life after that revolution.
--:-- Shamita Basu: You know, that brings me to my next point, because you talk a lot in the book about the experience of being a student and your school days and learning history, and just how much was left out and how baffling that was for you even when you were younger.
--:-- Nicole Hannah-Jones: But it made me think about the way that we still continue to learn history and the fact that history is taught as a sort of absolute subject, right?
--:-- Shamita Basu: It's taught alongside math, which has a right answer and a wrong answer.
--:-- Nicole Hannah-Jones: Why is it so challenging to approach history as something that should be open to interpretation and that interpretation should be open to change over time?
--:-- Shamita Basu: That's such a great question.
--:-- Nicole Hannah-Jones: And that's clearly why the biggest controversy over the 1619 Project is one line in one essay about the American Revolution and slavery.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Why of the thousands and thousands of words in the project is that the thing that made people so angry and that they held in such disbelief?
--:-- Nicole Hannah-Jones: And it's because there's a sense that if this were in fact true, if slavery had anything to do with the revolution, we would have learned it.
--:-- Shamita Basu: So it must not be true because no one ever taught us that.
--:-- Nicole Hannah-Jones: And that's why it's important to examine when we're talking about history, what do we mean?
--:-- Shamita Basu: There's the field of history, the field of historiography, where scholars are engaging in scholarship and they understand that all history is revision.
--:-- Nicole Hannah-Jones: Otherwise, you wouldn't need to have historians because everything would already have been written and we'd know everything that there is to know about the past.
--:-- Shamita Basu: So we tend to think of history as this happened on this day, at this time, and this is why.
--:-- Nicole Hannah-Jones: And it's settled.
--:-- Shamita Basu: But that's not actually true, right?
--:-- Nicole Hannah-Jones: And what the history that most of us learn is a manipulated history.
--:-- Shamita Basu: It is a history in service of nationalism.
--:-- Nicole Hannah-Jones: It is a history in service of patriotism.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And so it is a curated history that's designed to really uphold the image of America that we want to have about ourselves.
--:-- Nicole Hannah-Jones: And that's a very curated history.
--:-- Shamita Basu: But we tend to think that there's one meaning, one truth, one set of facts.
--:-- Nicole Hannah-Jones: And of course, that could never be the case.
--:-- Shamita Basu: One, we could never know all that there is to be known.
--:-- Nicole Hannah-Jones: And as I say in the opening essay of the book, history is not just what we learn about who and when and why, but it's what we don't learn.
--:-- Shamita Basu: It's all the people we don't learn about.
--:-- Nicole Hannah-Jones: It's all of the events that aren't held up, that are kind of erased from our national memory.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And then so much of history is interpretive.
--:-- Nicole Hannah-Jones: To this day, scholars duel about whether the Constitution of the United States was pro-slavery or anti-slavery.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Now, they're all looking at the same set of facts.
--:-- Nicole Hannah-Jones: They're looking at the same actors.
--:-- Shamita Basu: They're looking at the same text.
--:-- Nicole Hannah-Jones: And yet, you can come to vastly different conclusions about that document depending on how you interpret what was happening back then.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And I think if anything good can come out of the debates around this project, well, I hope a lot of good can come from the debates, is that we have to understand that history as a field and our understanding of history is about interpretation and it's about power.
--:-- Nicole Hannah-Jones: It's about who gets to choose what we remember and who gets to decide what we forget.
--:-- Shamita Basu: You know, Nicole, that brings me to my next question for you, which is about patriotism.
--:-- Nicole Hannah-Jones: Because what's so striking to me, I mean, a common criticism of the book and of you is that it's anti-American.
--:-- Shamita Basu: It's unpatriotic.
--:-- Nicole Hannah-Jones: But if anyone actually spent even a minute reading any content in the book, they would know that it's it is very patriotic.
--:-- Shamita Basu: In fact, it makes the argument for patriotism specifically for African-Americans in this country.
--:-- Nicole Hannah-Jones: I guess I want to know from you, like, what does patriotism mean to you?
--:-- Shamita Basu: Because it feels like different people claim it in different ways.
--:-- Nicole Hannah-Jones: And this book strikes me, or at least your writing in this book strikes me as a sort of reclamation of the word patriotism that isn't about blind, uncritical love of country.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Yes So I deeply conflicted even about my own essay arguments that I make I conflicted about what does patriotism look like for people who are only here because of slavery who chose or want to be a part of America but were forced
--:-- Nicole Hannah-Jones: And because we were forced, have then tried to carve out our space in this country.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And the criticism from the left, of course, is that my essay is too patriotic.
--:-- Nicole Hannah-Jones: So it has been fascinating that some people have read my essay as being anti-American because it clearly couldn't be further from the truth.
--:-- Shamita Basu: The arguments in my essay are that despite everything that this country has done to black people, black people have believed in this nation's highest ideals and have fought harder than any other group as a group to bring those ideals to fruition.
--:-- Nicole Hannah-Jones: And I think that is patriotism.
--:-- Shamita Basu: The idea that patriotism is unquestioning, that patriotism is uncritical, that patriotism says, love my country, good or bad, as opposed to saying the highest faith and belief in a country is to say we are better than this.
--:-- Nicole Hannah-Jones: And we have to try to improve the lives of our fellow citizens to live up to the majestic ideals of the Declaration.
--:-- Shamita Basu: I can't tell you how many times I get, and I imagine you've probably gotten this yourself a time or two, when you criticize something for people to say, if you don't like it, just leave it.
--:-- Nicole Hannah-Jones: To me, anyone who would say the answer to problems in your country is to abandon your country is clearly not a patriot.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And anyone to call on people to abandon their country as opposed to trying to improve their country are also not patriots.
--:-- Nicole Hannah-Jones: So even though I'm conflicted, I do think we have to reclaim this idea of what patriotism is and who gets to be patriotic and that the fact that Black Americans have consistently fought for all marginalized people, I can't imagine a higher level of patriotism than that.
--:-- Shamita Basu: So much has happened since you first published the magazine feature.
--:-- Nicole Hannah-Jones: How did the events of the past two years inform what you wanted to include by the time this book came out?
--:-- Shamita Basu: In terms of the subject areas, I don't think that they've influenced it much at all.
--:-- Nicole Hannah-Jones: Because what was really important, and we were very careful not to make really much of this book about Trump or what's happening in our politics right now, because we think that the arguments are not about one moment in time.
--:-- Shamita Basu: They would have been true 10 years ago.
--:-- Nicole Hannah-Jones: They'll be true 10 years from now.
--:-- Shamita Basu: So we didn't want it to feel like we were writing to the moment.
--:-- Nicole Hannah-Jones: But what has shaped the project in the last two years has been the criticism.
--:-- Shamita Basu: I had a very, and I know our entire editorial team had a very sincere desire to speak to the criticism that was made in good faith, to answer it, to strengthen the arguments, to show our rigor, to consult more experts.
--:-- Nicole Hannah-Jones: I actually think an amazing part of scholarship is to put something out into the world, to have it critiqued by brilliant minds, and then to use that critique to improve the work, which is what people in the profession of historiography do all of the time.
--:-- Shamita Basu: So that has been the way that we have responded to what's happened in the last two years.
--:-- Nicole Hannah-Jones: And frankly, that was the most enjoyable part to me because one, I took it as a challenge.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And I always say I get my revenge through study and writing.
--:-- Nicole Hannah-Jones: And it was just a tremendous opportunity to just learn more and read more.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And they actually sharpened my weapons.
--:-- Shamita Basu: One last quick thought for you, which is just it's called a project because it's ongoing.
--:-- Nicole Hannah-Jones: If you had to revisit this in 50 years and write the chapter of now, what would be crucial to understand about this moment?
--:-- Shamita Basu: I think that I know that we are in a very dangerous moment in American history.
--:-- Nicole Hannah-Jones: As someone who has studied the history of this country more than half of my life, And it was particularly studied the fact that we have not had a democracy, a true democracy or semblance of democracy, except for 60 years, that for the vast history of our country, the idea of democracy was a democracy for white people and the violent suppression of a multiracial democracy.
--:-- Shamita Basu: If you look at where we are right now with the largest wave of voter suppression laws that we've seen since the Voting Rights Act was passed in 1965, which is when we got true democracy.
--:-- Nicole Hannah-Jones: If you look at all of these laws being passed to ban books and to prohibit laws, to prohibit the teaching of ideas that people don't like, if you look at—
--:-- Shamita Basu: Including your own books. including my book by name, was happening with the Supreme Court.
--:-- Nicole Hannah-Jones: And that settled case law, for instance, around women's reproductive rights is now up for challenge.
--:-- Shamita Basu: That Kyle Rittenhouse got a standing ovation at a conservative rally for killing two other Americans.
--:-- Nicole Hannah-Jones: I think our democracy has always been precarious.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And I think that if you look at those who study fascism, authoritarianism, who are trying to ring the alarm about the dangers of the moment that we're in, the chapter that we write may be about how we entered the second great nadir, how we gained our rights and we lost them again.
--:-- Nicole Hannah-Jones: And I'm not being hyperbolic at all.
--:-- Shamita Basu: I really fear that that may be the story that we write about this moment 50 years from now.
--:-- Nicole Hannah-Jones: Thank you so much for your time and for your book.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Thank you.
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