An Interview with Nikole Hannah-Jones

By MORGAN LEE

Life Editor

The Exonian is indebted to New York Times reporter Nikole-Hannah Jones, whose 1619 Project inspired Since 1878. The following interview was conducted by Life Editor Morgan Lee, who spoke to Hannah-Jones over the summer.

Morgan Lee: First off, congratulations on your Pulitzer.

Nikole Hannah-Jones: Thank you.

Morgan Lee: I read that you grew up in Iowa, attending predominantly white schools. Could you tell me about your high school experience and if you enjoyed it?

Nikole Hannah-Jones: I was bused into predominantly white schools starting in second grade, all the way through twelfth grade. And my high school was probably about twenty percent Black or so, with most of the Black kids being bused in from a different neighborhood. 

I would say my high school experience was one where I really started engaging with activism. We spent a lot of time trying to push our high school to be more representative in terms of teaching staff. I led a walk out after a racial incident at our school between some white guys and some Black guys. We had a one-semester Black studies course, and we pushed to make that a yearlong, mandatory course—unsuccessfully. 

So high school, if I enjoyed it? I did. But mostly because it was a place where I really began to understand the way that racial dynamics worked and why I pushed to change the racial dynamics of my school. 

I was a good student, so school was pretty easy for me. I made good grades. I enjoyed the school academically. Unlike in elementary school and middle school, where… there might've been five other Black kids at my whole school. I went to a pretty big high school, so there was a big enough Black population where I didn't feel so isolated there. I guess that's how I would end that.

Morgan Lee: What was your path to being a journalist?

Nikole Hannah-Jones: Both of my parents are and were avid readers, and my dad always got two newspapers: our city paper and our state paper. So I grew up reading the newspaper. I used to read the newspaper with my dad and actually got my first letter to the editor published when I was a middle school student. I submitted a letter to the editor to our local paper, and it was published. 

Then, when I got to high school, I joined my high school newspaper really because I was disappointed that [the paper] never seemed to write about the Black kids like me, who got bused into the school and who faced what felt like a lot of discrimination within the school and stereotypes within the school… I had a column called "From the African Perspective," and I wrote about Black issues.

And that's when I really started thinking about journalism as a career. I was torn between whether I wanted to be a journalist or a high school history teacher. And I ended up only applying to one college. I applied to the University of Notre Dame and got in and decided I was going to go there.

Notre Dame did not have a journalism program at that time, so I studied history and African-American studies and then spent a year figuring out if I wanted to keep going and get a PhD in history or if I wanted to be a journalist. I ultimately decided that journalism was a way to marry my two loves—which were history and reporting and writing, in that more people read journalism than read history. Also, you can shape the world that you're in, instead of just studying the world that has been. So I went to graduate school at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. I did a Master's [Degree] in journalism, and then I had a very traditional career after that.

I started off at a small, bi-weekly newspaper, worked my way up to progressively larger newspapers and then got recruited to come work at ProPublica in New York as an investigative reporter and then was recruited to the New York Times.

Morgan Lee: That's incredible. I understand that someone who's inspired you or that one of your personal heroes is Ida B. Wells. I really like your Twitter handle, [Ida Bae Wells], by the way. What about her uplifts you, and how has she shaped how you carry your own work and your own story today?

Nikole Hannah-Jones: Ida B. Wells provided me, as a young Black woman, a template. I didn't grow up seeing Black investigative reporters and certainly not Black women investigative reporters. But someone who was born into slavery actually was one of the innovators of the profession of investigative reporting, and she really married her activism with her journalism. She was an early data reporter. She probably [became] one of the first data reporters in this country when she started to tabulate and collect data on lynchings and publish that data. So she's long been a source of inspiration for me because it's a reminder of that, even though we might not see a lot of examples of Black women investigative reporters, we actually have a very long lineage of that in this country. 

But also, I think she really speaks to the way that, when you're a person of color, you can never just be one thing. She was a suffragist, she was a civil rights activist. She helped co-found the [National Association for the Advancement of Colored People]; she fought very hard for women's rights to vote, as well as her journalism. And I think the fact that she was a feminist, that she was one of the first—not first, but one of the early women—to hyphenate her name, to not just give up her family name, but to keep both names. You didn't see a lot of examples of that back then. She married a man who wasn't going to try to keep her from having her career. She would take her babies out reporting with her sometimes. She was a modern woman, but not in modern times. 

The last thing is Ida B. Wells really just did not suffer fools. She spoke her mind, and she didn't hold her tongue, and she got in trouble for that. I would say that's similar to my personality as well.

Morgan Lee: That's awesome. Well, I can definitely say I've had so many conversations with my friends or my peers, and you're kind of—you are that inspiration for so many people.

Nikole Hannah-Jones: Thank you so much for saying that.

Morgan Lee: How did the whole 1619 Project come about? What inspired you? And was it difficult to get certain articles published because you address so many controversial issues, like reparations?

Nikole Hannah-Jones: Interestingly enough, this is one of the reasons I love talking to high school students. The groundwork or the seed of the 1619 Project was actually planted when I was in high school. That's when, of course, I started writing for my high school paper, but also that one semester of Black studies class that I took is when I was first introduced to the year 1619. We never got much Black history in my K-12 education. And, in this one semester class, I was introduced to more Black history than I had ever had my whole life. I became obsessed with learning this history. And, when the class was over, I would keep asking. The teacher's name was Ray Dial—I actually just texted with him the other day. And I would ask him to give me more books.

One of the books that he gave me was a book called Before the Mayflower by Lerone Bennett, Jr. And that's when I came across the year 1619. I remember being so shocked because I had no idea that black people had been here for that long and that slavery had existed for that long. I just understood that that erasure of that historical moment was intentional and profound. So I've thought about 1619 since I was in high school. And that's a long time. I graduated high school in 1994, so that was a long time ago. I'd been thinking about what that erasure has meant for how we think about ourselves as Americans. And so, as the four hundredth anniversary of that date was approaching, I was also thinking about how most Americans had never heard of the year 1619.

They didn't know anything about it. And [they didn’t know] so much about the history of people of color in this country that [this] tremendous anniversary was going to pass without any real acknowledgement. And I'm at the New York Times, and you don't have a bigger megaphone than the New York Times. So that's when I started thinking that we should do an entire project that forced us to confront the ongoing legacy of slavery and the way slavery still shapes so much about American life. And that's how I came up with the idea for the project.

Morgan Lee: There are a lot of people who believe that slavery is over, with no current or lasting effects. How do you engage in conversation with people who don't even believe that it's an ongoing issue?

Nikole Hannah-Jones: That's really the entire argument of the 1619 Project. It's speaking to those people who said slavery ended 150 years ago. ‘Why don't you get over it? It doesn't impact anything today.’ The entire conceit of the project is that we're going to show you all of these areas of modern American life that you think have nothing to do with slavery, and we're going to trace back through history and show how the society we live in today has been greatly shaped by the institution of slavery. It really was to answer that question.

It's funny—no one says that the Declaration of Independence doesn’t matter or shape our country because it happened 250 years ago. And no one says the Constitution is no longer shaping our country because it happened in the 1780s. But when it comes to slavery, we just want to pretend that a foundational institution has nothing to do with today, even as we look across our society, and we see the way that racism continues to plague—there's literally people marching in the streets right now. I was really hoping that the Project would make those connections for people who haven't been taught a proper history and [provide] a way to examine modern America that would help them understand that slavery's legacy is just as much a part of us as anything else.

Morgan Lee: More specifically, what do you believe is the role education has in creating America's anti-racist future?

Nikole Hannah-Jones: We know what our education is supposed to do for us: it's supposed to help us understand our world and our place in the world and how our world functions, but it's also designed—particularly when it comes to the way that we're taught history—to shape a common narrative and to give us a shared sense of understanding. 

If you look around your world and you see that Black people are on the bottom of every indicator of wellbeing—poverty rates, crime rates, health disparities—and you don't have any history that helps you understand why that might be, then you start to succumb to the stereotypes that we have about why Black people struggle. Education gives you the tools to process your world, to understand your world, to give context to your world.

And that's why it's so critical. If we want to build an anti-racist country, we have to have a better understanding of the systems and structures and institutions that have created the inequalities that we see so that we can work to undo them. I think that's what's so important. The reason I fell in love with history was because history helped me give context and understanding to the world that I saw that didn't make sense. 

I saw how hard Black people in my community worked. I certainly knew that Black people didn't want anything different for their lives than white people or anyone else. They wanted safe schools. They wanted safe neighborhoods. They wanted to make a decent living. They wanted a nice place to live. It was no different. And yet we were told that Black people lived in the conditions we lived in because we just didn't want better; we didn't want to work hard. Well, I didn't see that. But history then explained to me: this is why America looks like it does. And I think there's a lot of power in that, which is also why I think many of the critics of the 1619 Project are so afraid of the project—it's that, once you have that knowledge, you can't see your world the same way. And you can't accept the world as it is.

Morgan Lee: That's incredible. One of my favorite quotes of yours, “In a country built on racial caste, we must confront the fact that our schools are not broken. They are operating as designed.” At Exeter, the faculty—especially faculty who get tenure, faculty who stay the longest—are predominantly white and male. Marginalized faculty members, especially faculty of color, often don’t stay very long. I’ve observed that many students of color don't see ourselves reflected in the faculty. What concrete steps are there to fix the issue of non-diversity in large institutions and create a community where faculty of color feel comfortable staying?

Nikole Hannah-Jones: We know that, so often, the way that white institutions think about diversity is to have a handful of each group who are invited into an existing institution and then are expected to conform to that institution. They don't see it as truly being integrative, which means the institution must change as well. One of the things that I always think about, [when I think] about being bused into these schools, is that I was not part of an integration program. I was part of a desegregation program. And the difference is a desegregation program means a handful of us went into white schools. The schools never belonged to us. They never felt like our spaces. We always felt like we were visitors being allowed into someone else's space. And then, at the end of the day, those kids walked home to their neighborhood because the school was in their neighborhood. And we got on a bus and had to go back to our neighborhood.

Institutions, when they talk about diversity, what they largely mean is that they're not going to upset the racial balance too much. And they're certainly not going to change the institutions to reflect the people they want to bring in. The expectation is that we will adapt and conform to these institutions because we're lucky enough to be there. 

What that means then, of course, is you have high turnover rate of faculty. It always seems like they'll hire one faculty of color. And when that faculty of color leaves, they'll hire another faculty of color into that same seat, but they don't expand the number. They're like, "This is the minority seat. We'll always keep this a minority seat, but we're not actually expanding those seats to take the place of several positions." And they build institutions where they can bring people in, but they cannot keep them because, ultimately, they're expecting that those people will adapt to their ways. And that's never going to work long term. 

Same thing with students. If you want to be successful at Exeter, you have to conform to what this established, white institution wants you to [be]. And, if you don't, you're going to struggle. Students quickly learn that they have to assimilate, or they're going to struggle. And I don't think that a lot of these institutions really want to do the work of anti-racism, which is that you have to allow the people coming in to help reshape those institutions. And we have to adapt, of course, but the adaptation only ever seems to go one way. And these institutions, if they are going to be truly integrated, have to have everyone adapting and creating something new.

Morgan Lee: That's a really powerful idea. I just wanted to mention one thing that happened with The Exonian in the sports section. One of my friends—her name is Dennesha Rolle—is a graduate. She's Black, and she's an incredible athlete. There was a spotlight article about her, and a photo was used of another Black athlete who was in a completely different uniform. If we don't have a lot of Black students in the newsroom, does it affect the ways people report and the ways articles are assigned? And lastly, when issues can seem so persistent, how do you keep hope?

Nikole Hannah-Jones: That is inexcusable, and I'm sure you know that professional journalists make this mistake all the time. There was actually a story that ran this week about Usain Bolt, the track star. And they ran a picture of Kevin Hart. I literally don't understand how that happened. Usain Bolt is like, what, 6'5"? And Kevin Hart... Anyways. I think they just don't look anything alike. That’s really just inexcusable and bad journalism. 

And you shouldn't have to have a Black person in the newsroom for journalists to be able to tell two different Black people apart or two different Asian people apart. Black and Asian and Latino people—we don't make that mistake with white people because we are able to see them as individuals. So the fact that that happens in the inverse really shows that people don't tend to see us as individuals. They just lump us in as a group.

How do I keep hope? It’s an interesting question because I don't feel like I'm a hopeful person, in general. I'm motivated much more by a sense of outrage than I am by a sense of hope that I would change anything. I don't think that this country is probably ever going to fundamentally change something that is so foundational to it, which is a caste system with white on top and everyone else somewhere beneath that. But I do think that, whether you hope that you will be able to fundamentally change these systems or not, you are obligated—if you are in a position to fight, to change them—to do so. 

We just buried John Lewis. John Lewis grew up in a completely apartheid South, and I don't imagine he believed, when he started fighting it, that they would actually tumble apartheid in the South, but they did it. We do have to believe that if we keep pushing, we can make change. Even if it, ultimately, doesn't bring about full equality. And even if we don't, we're obligated to try. Every day, I wake up and I know that I have a sense of mission and purpose and that the work that I do is important. I don't think I'm going to live to see the day when racial inequality and racism are gone from this country, but I have to do my role in not letting us be comfortable with the status quo. And I think that's as much as I think we can hope for.

Morgan Lee: Thank you so much for your time. This was incredible.

Nikole Hannah-Jones: Thank you, and good luck with everything. I don't know you, but I'm proud that you reached out to a journalist like me.