YouSaid · the spoken record

Nikole Hannah-Jones

lines on the record: 64
first: 2020-09-17
most recent: 2020-09-17
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“I think every black parent tries to simultaneously preserve as much of your child's innocence as possible, but also give them the armor to go out into the world. That's what I tried to do with my daughter. She is very aware of racial inequality and very aware of racial injustice. She's also very aware that she is much more privileged than most of the kids who look like her. To me, while I don't have hope that we are going to see a transformed America, I certainly have hope in my own life and what I'm able to do and provide for my own child. And I see my work is trying to expand those opportunities for other children like her and other people like our community.”
2020-09-17 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 405 — Nikole Hannah-Jones · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“people are in poverty. That reparations be paid, and then we do nothing to help the least of these amongst all races. We can do all of those things and we should be advocating to do all of those things.”
2020-09-17 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 405 — Nikole Hannah-Jones · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right, and it is restitution. And the other thing I would say is I also am strongly in support of universal anti-poverty programs. I don't think we should be having these conversations in isolation. I do believe in universal health care. I believe in a universal basic income. I believe that every American should be able to have access to safe and quality housing. We can do those things to address the poor and also understand that the experience of black Americans is a singular experience. There is a singular disadvantage. One does not argue that because someone else has diabetes, we can't spend money on cancer research. You don't make that argument. You have to address this particular harm. And what I try to show in the piece that I wrote is even amongst the poor, white poor are advantage compared to black poor. White poor don't live in the typical white.”
2020-09-17 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 405 — Nikole Hannah-Jones · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, first, to be clear, reparations is not paid by white people. Reparations is paid by the federal government. And if you understand that reparations is to address a specific legacy of chattel slavery and anti-Blackness where black people were excluded from the ability to accumulate wealth over time, then it is about a societal debt and not an individual.”
2020-09-17 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 405 — Nikole Hannah-Jones · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So if we're talking about to address racial inequality, of course, I think the biggest change that needs to occur is we need to pass a reparations bill. I make the argument in my piece what is owed that almost everything about what makes Black Lives so hard is the wealth disparity and the forced wealth poverty that black Americans experience. You can't fix everything, but that certainly would substantially change the material lives of black Americans and the vulnerability that black Americans face and everything from housing to schools to ability to get a college education to ability to just feed your family or whether our financial storm. I also think that we need strong enforcement of existing civil rights laws. Literally every time they measure it, black people are facing rampant discrimination.”
2020-09-17 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 405 — Nikole Hannah-Jones · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, he did. So, I mean, again, like when you think about that when I said on national TV that you should not call burning a building down, you should not use the same terminology about violence when you're talking about burning a building down as you do as police killing a black man. Threats of people who say, I'm going to come burn your house down. But when the president somehow says it is okay, it's not okay to burn down this camera shop, but it is okay. You know, I can understand why he had to shoot and kill someone. It actually makes the whole point of the movement that we are valuing certain things like property over the lives of human beings.”
2020-09-17 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 405 — Nikole Hannah-Jones · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Wright said that he was representative of counter protesters. And those counter protesters were not expected to condemn him. And in fact, they refused to. And the president.”
2020-09-17 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 405 — Nikole Hannah-Jones · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not even hesitant. I mean, there's a refusal. So while, you know, Black Lives Matter protesters are expected to be held accountable for everything that anyone who comes in many of these, again, people have nothing to do with it. And actually, it's been shown to some of them are actually white nationalists who are intentionally being destructive. No one is expecting that same type. The young man who shot and killed those people in Kenosha says...”
2020-09-17 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 405 — Nikole Hannah-Jones · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Would condone the destruction of property or violence of any kind. But I also think that unfair focus on that and the expectation that people, you know, the police can't please themselves. That's why people are out in the streets right now. And these are people who are being paid to do that. But the expectation is that those who are leading protests can somehow police every single person who shows up to a protest. It's just not fair.”
2020-09-17 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 405 — Nikole Hannah-Jones · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So that we don't really have to engage in the transformative change that's necessary. The other thing is we know that we spend so much time condemning property damage. And that actually sends a message to people. It sends a message that if you want folks to pay attention, that you have to do something like that to get folks to pay attention. And so it ends up being this counterintuitive. When Trump goes to Kenosha and doesn't speak on the police brutality that led people to the streets, but speaks on someone's property being damaged, it only affirms why people are out in the streets in the first place, which is that we are a country that seems to value things over black lives. So, no, I don't know any reputable person who”
2020-09-17 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 405 — Nikole Hannah-Jones · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, one, let me just say, I think it's fundamentally unfair to expect that people organizing protest control the behavior of every single person who shows up to a protest, and especially people, you know, this.”
2020-09-17 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 405 — Nikole Hannah-Jones · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“that attention to sustained efforts to reduce inequality and to truly transform our society, the tension span is always fleeting in this country. And it doesn't take long before folks are ready to move on or feel very prime to those who say, okay, it's getting out of hand now. So, you know, it was fine as long as nobody was writing. And now that some folks haven't behaved properly, then it's time to move on to other things. So I'm really worried. Yeah, I'm worried that the steam is running out and that the people whose views were changing are starting to slip back.”
2020-09-17 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 405 — Nikole Hannah-Jones · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I don't tend to be a hopeful person in general. It doesn't ever feel that useful in my life. So I don't know, you know. In June, I wrote a piece, a cover story for the magazine called What Is Old, and I argued that this period felt different from what we had seen before and that in order to make it different, we had to ask for much larger reforms than simply laws that say, please can't kill you without consequence. And at that time, when we were still seeing daily protests and wall-to-wall coverage of the protests and the protests were in all 50 states, and it had been sustained for weeks upon weeks, it felt like we were right at the edge of something transformative. I'm already feeling like that is slipping away.”
2020-09-17 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 405 — Nikole Hannah-Jones · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Should be discredited and not be taught or not be considered. That has been unexpected and that has been difficult. And I certainly didn't see a year later that it would become part of the national. Yeah, I was going to say, you know, well, I mean,”
2020-09-17 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 405 — Nikole Hannah-Jones · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Anyone would have been extremely naive to think that you could produce a project like this that says, what if we were to consider 1619 our true founding and not 1776 and that black people are the perfectors of our democracy and the true founding fathers and not think you're going to get some pushback? Of course you are. And I think criticism is good. It sharpens your argument. No one produces perfection ever. And historians argue with each other all the time. What has been difficult has been the extent to which a small group of people have really tried to discredit the project, not simply to say we don't agree with that. We wouldn't have written that way. We don't think there's enough evidence of that claim. But to Actually, try to say that the entire project”
2020-09-17 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 405 — Nikole Hannah-Jones · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I should have been more savvy about understanding how deeply we as a society want to protect the purity of our founding. And we don't learn the narratives that another motivation was the desire to take more Indigenous lands and that another motivation was the desire not to pay off their debts, the colonists' debts. And then, of course, also the desire to have representation, a representative government. So there were all of these things happening back then, but I did not provide enough evidence and left myself open for criticism. And believe me when I say in the book, I will be providing all of the source material for that claim. So I think”
2020-09-17 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 405 — Nikole Hannah-Jones · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so the main criticism is the single What I will say is in hindsight, I should have been more careful with my language and I should have provided more evidence of the claim because in not doing so, I left it open to exactly what has happened since then. I didn't sit at home one day and say I'm just going to make up something about the American Revolution. I got that from the work of historians. And this is actually the revolutionary period and particularly the role of slavery in the motivations of colonists, particularly in Virginia, Georgia, and South Carolina, is hotly contested in the field of historiography and early American history, which I did not know when I kind of dropped that bomb in the middle of my essay that I was stepping into a major argument that is being had in the field right now.”
2020-09-17 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 405 — Nikole Hannah-Jones · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Many of them written by some of the preeminent historians in their field. And we get to expand into areas that the original project didn't get to cover and further bolster our argument. And I think continue to hopefully transform our understanding of this country.”
2020-09-17 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 405 — Nikole Hannah-Jones · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think the power of the project is that it is rooted in the now, that had we simply done a history, yes, people would have learned some things, but I don't think they would have engaged with it the same way because, you know, black people hear all the time, slavery was a long time ago. Why don't you get over it? And I wanted this project to show that we can't get over something that's so foundational and that we have not dealt with. And we can't get over as black people because our country hasn't gotten over it. And so we are expanding into a series of books. There are going to be books from picture books for young children to middle school older readers and then an adult book. We're working on the adult book right now, which is going to come out next year. And I'm so excited about it because we're adding about eight additional essays.”
2020-09-17 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 405 — Nikole Hannah-Jones · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Past, but that was really going to be about the ongoing modern legacy, that it was going to every story would start with today and trace it back. And I knew I wanted to do democracy and capitalism, music, and why we're the only Western industrialized country without universal health care. And then we conveyed a bunch of scholars to brainstorm about what should some of the other pieces be. But that was how it began.”
2020-09-17 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 405 — Nikole Hannah-Jones · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I had, you know, so I was thinking like, how could you do that? And simply writing like one piece just was far too small to assess a 400-year legacy of an institution that is so foundational to the American story but yet has been treated as an asterisk to the American story. And I've long argued that if you name anything in American life, I can trace it back to slavery. So I started thinking, well, we should actually just take over the entire issue of the magazine and look at all of these different American institutions that we think have nothing to do with slavery and show how they do. And that's really what the idea was and how it was born. So I was back at the times for maybe a week and I pitched the idea of doing a special issue on the foreign fifth anniversary, but an issue that wasn't going to be about just the”
2020-09-17 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 405 — Nikole Hannah-Jones · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, I do know. So I was getting ready to come back to work and thinking about, I've been gone for a year and a half. What's the first thing I want to work on when I get back? And I just kept thinking about that was going to be the 400th anniversary of the beginning of American slavery. And yet almost no Americans, you know, few Americans had ever heard of that date. And so that it was probably just going to pass with almost no acknowledgement or recognition like so many things having to do with slavery and the black experience. And I wanted to use my platform at the time to force 16, 19 into the national lexicon, if possible, you know, just a small little goal. Right. If you're going to shoot.”
2020-09-17 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 405 — Nikole Hannah-Jones · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The 1619 project. So literally we talked about this. I've been thinking about the year 16, 19 since high school. And people who know me know that it's a date that I bring up and evoke often. And as the anniversary, so the end of 2018, I had been on book leave for about a year and a half. It was supposed to be a year, but as you know, it's hard for me to book deadline.”
2020-09-17 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 405 — Nikole Hannah-Jones · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We had a conversation. I mean, the first conversation we had was I told him, I'm not going to come if I can't write about race, that I don't need to leave one bad situation for another. And he assured me that that's exactly why they wanted me and the rest is history.”
2020-09-17 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 405 — Nikole Hannah-Jones · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The industry at that point because when I got there, I got there in 2006, I left in 2011. As many of the listeners may know, this is when the news industry was in a free fall newspapers were laying off thousands of people across the country. And so I couldn't leave. There weren't other jobs to go to. And I also couldn't write about what I got into journalism to write about so I just. really thought strongly about leaving in almost all of my friends of journalists of color who had come into the Oregonian with me had left before I did. And the only reason I didn't leave was I just couldn't think of what else I wanted to do with my life. I wanted to be a journalist since I was in high school.”
2020-09-17 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 405 — Nikole Hannah-Jones · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, so I think that it's always important when people see someone who has garnered a certain level of acclaim in their career to understand that the path has often not been easy and that many of the challenges that many younger black journalists, brown journalists face, many of us who have some success now have faced those as well. I went to Portland with understanding that I wanted to write about race. And once I got there, however, that understanding seemed to disappear. And I was really marginalized for wanting to write stories about racial inequality. I was told that I was, you know, I was too biased. I was showing my bias, that this wasn't the reporting that the vast majority of the Oregonians readership wanted. And I really struggled. I nearly left.”
2020-09-17 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 405 — Nikole Hannah-Jones · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Justification for lynchings was that black men were raping white women. And Ida B. Welles began to investigate the real reasons behind lynchings. And that's how her newspaper was burned down for writing about the true causes of lynchings and also that there were many consensual relationships between black men and white women. She was also a suffragist. She was a civil rights activist. She was one of the original co-founders of the NAACP. And yeah, so she's long been kind of, I call her my spiritual grandmother because when I was thinking about wanting to be an investigative journalist, I didn't see a black woman doing what I wanted to do, but I had this historical icon who was little known to most Americans, but not to me.”
2020-09-17 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 405 — Nikole Hannah-Jones · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Absolutely. So I was actually, I spoke at that street renaming in Chicago. I was there for that event and I was very proud because it's a major thoroughfare where oftentimes those types of street renamings don't happen in major thoroughfares. So Ida B. Wells, of course, was an investigative journalist. She was a black woman born into slavery who began investigating lynchings right at the end of Reconstruction. It was an incredibly dangerous time to be black in this country. And as the South was trying to reinstate the racial order of slavery, they began a reign of terror against particularly black men, but black people in general. And the kind of common”
2020-09-17 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 405 — Nikole Hannah-Jones · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Calmed me and it helped me understand that oh so what they're saying about why black people live in these conditions is not actually true this this is a constructed inequality and history teaches you how it was constructed so i knew that in becoming a journalist i had to always be mining that history and always using that history to inform my work and inform the reader so yeah that that is why i wanted to become a journalist to to really wed those two loves in a way that i hoped would help people better understand the country that we that we live in”
2020-09-17 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 405 — Nikole Hannah-Jones · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, so I was a history in African-American studies major at Notre Dame. And I took that year off because I wasn't sure if I wanted to be a historian or a journalist. And I needed to figure it out. And ultimately, I decided on journalism because journalists write for the masses. And I felt like you can reach a lot more people and maybe actually change your society. I've always been deeply influenced by how empowering history has been for me that understanding the architecture upon which these inequalities were built”
2020-09-17 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 405 — Nikole Hannah-Jones · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is important context. Now, again, would I write that today? Of course not. You know, you do a lot of shit when you're 19 that you wouldn't do now, but I certainly didn't think it was presented fairly and it wasn't presented in the context. And I don't remember the response on campus. I'm sure it was hot. That was a heated time. There were heated debates happening. But in some ways, you know, I sent it to my editor and I was like, Federalists found this thing I wrote when I was 19. And she was like, that sounds like you. So I was sharpening my writing arsenal, but at 44 years old, I certainly would not have written it that way. But I would have definitely stood up for my friends.”
2020-09-17 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 405 — Nikole Hannah-Jones · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Said that Native people were rapists and cannibals, and Columbus did us all a favor. So I was so, so if you notice the Federalists does not publish or point to the article that I was responding to. I was so hurt for my friends that they would have to read something like that. And the opening line of that letter I wrote is how dare I was going to max tone for tone what he was saying about Native people I was going to say about white people and I ended by saying how does it feel to have your entire race written about in that way so I don't remember”
2020-09-17 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 405 — Nikole Hannah-Jones · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, I honestly don't remember. I didn't even remember writing that letter. I'm 44 years old now. That was so long ago. And when I saw the letter and I started reading it, I was like, I wrote this. So then I had to do some research and look up what it was that I was responding to. And then it all kind of came back to me. So yes, I was 19. I was at a university where I felt extremely racially isolated. I was very angry, which is clear. We had been joining in protest Black Student Union had been joining in protests with one of the Native American groups against these racist Christopher Columbus murals in the administration building. And this guy wrote this editorial where he basically justified genocide.”
2020-09-17 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 405 — Nikole Hannah-Jones · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“She knew I couldn't make it. And I knew I couldn't make it. I knew I wasn't going to class, but that the work wasn't hard. So I left that meeting actually determined to prove her wrong. And that's what I did. There was a black dean there who approved me to take a double load at summer school. I took, I think, six classes at summer school that summer. I caught up and I graduated on time. So yeah, I almost didn't make it. My whole life, I have always used people underestimating me as motivation when I wasn't able to find motivation.”
2020-09-17 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 405 — Nikole Hannah-Jones · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Help you financially in a school like this, like, you cannot fail. And I got called in second semester. I was on academic probation. I got called in to the Dean of Freshman Year. I'd never met this woman before in my life. The first time we ever met was when she called me in to tell me that I should withdraw from Notre Dame because I was going to be kicked out for my academic performance and it would be much easier for me to get into another school if I withdrew as opposed to got kicked out. I remember leaving that meeting so angry that she never asked me once why I was struggling.”
2020-09-17 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 405 — Nikole Hannah-Jones · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't think I realized that at the time, but I certainly went into a depression my first year and I just stopped going to class. I just felt so uncomfortable there. I earned my first Fs in my life at Notre Dame. My very first report card, I tried to get the mail before my parents got it, but I didn't get there quite fast enough. And I had a B, a C, and three F's on my report card. And second semester was almost as bad. And I remember my parents talking to me and they're like, do you know what it's taken for us to?”
2020-09-17 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 405 — Nikole Hannah-Jones · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was so Notre Dame was never challenging for me, well, I won't say it wasn't challenging for me academically, but I never struggled there in terms of being able to do the work. But I certainly struggle culturally. Notre Dame is a very elite place. It is also very, it's quite conservative for a college campus and also very, very small black population. And I really struggled with the race and class dynamics there. I was called, you know, a nigger for the first time at Notre Dame. It was really hard. And I think I”
2020-09-17 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 405 — Nikole Hannah-Jones · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I found it was, yep, it was about six hour drive. I looked at the demographics and I decided to apply there. It was the only school that I applied to.”
2020-09-17 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 405 — Nikole Hannah-Jones · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“His name was O'Shea Sadler. He had a Notre Dame Letterman jacket on. And I was like, oh, I never heard of a black person who's gone or met a black person who went to Notre Dame. And I asked him if he went there. He said yes. So I went home and I looked it up. There wasn't internet. At least I didn't have internet at that time. And I went home and looked it up in our world book encyclopedia set. Yes.”
2020-09-17 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 405 — Nikole Hannah-Jones · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Interesting choice. So I was, you know, I had a lot of colleges recruiting me in high school. I had good grades. I tested very well. I took the hardest classes that my high school offered. And I was totally overwhelmed by the choices having never been away from home. But I knew I had to go to a school that was within driving distance because my parents could not afford to fly me home if I wanted to come home for holidays. I wanted to be somewhere that was close to a city with black people in it. And I wanted a school that had a prestigious name because I believed that if I could attach myself to a prestigious school, I wouldn't have to spend my whole life proving to people that I was a smart black person. So those were the three things. And I was working at the grocery store one day and this guy came.”
2020-09-17 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 405 — Nikole Hannah-Jones · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, we were actually just texting the other day. I tell him, you know, I say his name all the time. And yep, he isn't. He's still in Iowa and he's now a preacher”
2020-09-17 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 405 — Nikole Hannah-Jones · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I remember how powerful that date was to me because I was just absolutely shocked that black people had been here that long and that slavery started that long ago. And I understood that there was a reason no one told us that date, that date held a power and that erasure held a power. It was also in that same class that I joined my high school newspaper because the same teacher, I went to him and I complained about how our high school paper didn't write about the black kids at our school and the challenges that we faced. And he said, well, either join the paper and write those stories yourself or shut up and don't come in here and complain anymore. That's what I did. So it's just so... You know, you couldn't have predictions.”
2020-09-17 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 405 — Nikole Hannah-Jones · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Absolutely. You know, it's amazing what high school, the path that high school can actually lead you on. It was my high school, which was I was bus into that high school, was about 20% black. And it offered a one semester black studies elective. And in that one semester, I learned more about the history of black people than I had learned in my entire education to that point. And I kind of became obsessed with learning the history. So when that class ended, I asked that teacher who was the only black male teacher I ever had, Mr. Ray Dial, to keep giving me more books. I started self-study. And one of the books he put in my hand was Before the Mayflower. And so I believe as a junior in high school that I came across the date 1619.”
2020-09-17 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 405 — Nikole Hannah-Jones · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Kids look like them. It's not fun to spend your whole life as one of a tidy minority in every environment that you've ever been in. But we have just never treated black kids the same when they are separated. We see that in every school district in the country where there are significant numbers of black kids.”
2020-09-17 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 405 — Nikole Hannah-Jones · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Be equal, of course, right? There's nothing about white kids that makes black kids smarter or makes black kids want to learn. It is certainly possible to have all black schools that are excellent. That is possible. The problem is we have never for a single day in this country provided the same resources to black schools as we have to white schools. Right now, a majority black and Latino schools nationwide get about $28 billion less than funding every year than majority white schools. And on top of that, Black schools now are also facing a double segregation. They also are often of concentrated poverty, which we know is just not good for the learning environment. So we have kids that are the most disadvantaged societally being placed in schools with the fewest resources. So I would like, you know, I didn't put my daughter in. I put my daughter in a segregated school on purpose. And I think that black people should certainly have a choice if they want to put their kid in a school.”
2020-09-17 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 405 — Nikole Hannah-Jones · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, first, let me say, just in terms of terms, I don't believe in desegregation. I believe in integration. And I don't think that those are the same thing. When I was one of five black kids in my all-white elementary school, that was not integration. That was allowing a handful of us in to someone else's school where we did not share in that school in the culture. And it never was our school. I believe in integration, which is about not tokenism. It's not just about one way. It includes the educators and where we're actually building schools that are serving multiple populations that I do believe in. I don't think that anything about the way that we understand racial hierarchy in this country and the study of history or even the present would lead us to believe that separate can be equal in this country.”
2020-09-17 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 405 — Nikole Hannah-Jones · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I never, yeah, I never experienced, I never experienced that. I know a lot of black people say it was kind of hard to straddle those two worlds. I've never experienced that. It was never a problem for me.”
2020-09-17 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 405 — Nikole Hannah-Jones · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My neighborhood friends were completely different. They never mixed my white school friends could never come to my house. They could never come to anything on our side of the town. I could only ever go to their houses or the parks on their side of the town. So even at a really young age, I would say by fifth grade, definitely by sixth grade, I saw how clearly both the racial and class lines were drawn. And I imagine that not just academically did that experience allow me to get where I am, but it also was definitely shaping my thinking and my understanding of the world.”
2020-09-17 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 405 — Nikole Hannah-Jones · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So the program got me into the wealthiest and also the whitest public schools in my hometown got me access to the best public education that my hometown had to offer. But it was extremely isolating. It is hard to state what it feels like to be the only kid. The bus would literally go and pick up all the black kids on my side of town, which is why my bus ride was so long and then drop us off to various white schools on the other side of town. At the end of the day, we all had to get on that bus and go home. And all the other kids were walking home. This was their neighborhood and their school. And it was always very clear to us that this was not our community. This was not our school. We were being allowed to come there to get something and then, you know, to go back home. So my school friends and my home”
2020-09-17 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 405 — Nikole Hannah-Jones · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I've spent so much of my career writing about school segregation and integration, but I didn't realize at the time that I was part of an integration program. I mean, when you're in second grade and your parents tell you you're going to a different school, you just get on the bus and go wherever you're headed. I certainly noticed that my bus ride got a lot longer and the people in my school looked a lot different than the kids I've gone to class with. But I never had a conversation about why that was. I later found out that it was a voluntary program only in, and you will know this, that at that time, the department”
2020-09-17 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 405 — Nikole Hannah-Jones · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source