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Recorded live at the third Black Books Matter Festival, this conversation brings together Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones, creator of The 1619 Project, and journalist and culture critic Michael Harriot, author of Black AF History: The Un-Whitewashed Story of America.
MahoganyBooks co-founder Ramunda Young opens the afternoon with the reason the store exists. She grew up in Tulsa, one mile from Black Wall Street, and never learned about it in school. Then Hannah-Jones and Harriot take on "the real America." They talk about why most Americans are never taught a history that centers slavery, why The 1619 Project drew such fierce pushback, and why they reject the idea that George Washington's slaveholding was a mere "flaw." Hannah-Jones traces how Virginia's slaveholding elite shaped American republicanism and connects that line to the Electoral College. Both argue that Black Americans didn't only build this country's wealth. They also helped define what liberty and democracy actually mean.
Hannah-Jones closes with a charge: learn your history, because it shows you what you're capable of. Then the whole room says it together: Black books matter.
Shop books from Nikole Hannah-Jones, Michael Harriot, and more at MahoganyBooks.com.
Takeaways:
- Nikole Hannah-Jones explains that most Americans never learn a slavery-centered history. Official school curricula don't teach it, popular culture rarely tells it, and even Black Americans often have to seek it out on their own.
- Hannah-Jones argues that many white Americans have built their personal identity on the belief that the U.S. is an exceptional nation. When asked how much of the ignorance is willful, Michael Harriot says some people were never taught, but that by 1988 or 2015 it had to be a deliberate choice.
- The speakers reject framing George Washington's slaveholding as a minor "flaw." They cite his pursuit of Ona Judge and his sale of people who tried to escape to the Caribbean, and they argue the founders knew slavery was wrong and chose it anyway.
- Hannah-Jones argues that the heart of the American Revolution was Virginia, not Boston or Philadelphia. She traces American republicanism, where a small group of elite landowning white men govern for everyone else, to a colony whose poor were largely enslaved and couldn't vote. She connects that idea to the Electoral College.
- Hannah-Jones says reducing Black Americans' contribution to forced labor reinforces white supremacy. She argues Black people also gave the nation intellectual labor, turning the Declaration of Independence into a document about liberty and pushing democracy to mean that everyone has a say.
- Hannah-Jones argues that telling this story "kills their myth" of American exceptionalism. She says that threat, more than the history itself, is why this work is targeted and banned. She calls the current administration's attack on history tactical, not superficial.
- Hannah-Jones urges listeners to learn their history and "get that ancestral knowledge." She warns that what's planned for Black Americans is something most people in the room have never lived through. She adds that fear is okay, because courage requires fear.
Mentioned in this episode:
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