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

“Would have conversations about it. Sometimes I would clearly be bothered by it. I think she was a little stuck because these were her parents and I was her daughter. And this was a choice that she had made to get in this relationship and have children with this man. So I'm very close to my mom and she's probably, you know, she's about as left as you can get on every issue because while she is white at that time choosing to be with a black man meant when she was anywhere with her kids or her family, she also faced a lot of judgment. She also was treated as an outsider. This was a choice. It wasn't something she was born into, but she certainly had that experience of how you can be ostracized because of either your race or the relationship that you choose to be in.”
2020-09-17 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 405 — Nikole Hannah-Jones · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Conversations. Conversations at the table about how other we'd be having dinner at their house or something and they talk about something that black people did or how other black people were. I remember one time we were watching It must have been during the when Jesse Jackson was running for the presidency back in the 80s and my grandmother coming in and seeing that the speaker was Jesse Jackson's son was speaking and says, wow, he's really articulate for a black man. I'm surprised that he's a black man. So things like that, not being comfortable going in the black parts of town, that sort of thing. So it was always kind of there, even as they were amazingly loving and kind and generous with us. So there was always this. And so my mom and I.”
2020-09-17 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 405 — Nikole Hannah-Jones · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so we were always, I guess necessarily a house that talked about race. I mean, there really wasn't a way to get around it. Because even though, you know, my mom's parents, they were great grandparents to us. We spent a lot of time with them. We went on family trips together. They lived an hour away. We spent summers at their house. We were very close to them. But they also were racist in many ways, not to us, but it really showed the way that you can have intimate relationships with black people and see those black people as exceptional and still make all of these racist assumptions about black people writ large.”
2020-09-17 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 405 — Nikole Hannah-Jones · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And said, Your mother may be white, but you are black, you are going to be treated as black, and that is who you are. And I think he was trying to make very clear to us that you were not going to be the beneficiaries of your mom's whiteness and don't go through the world thinking that that's who you are because that's not how the world was going to treat you. And I'm grateful for that.”
2020-09-17 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 405 — Nikole Hannah-Jones · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's okay. I mean, it is important to pause on those moments because we kind of just take it for granted that this is what happened. But it's good to stop and think about what that actually means. And again, how recent this was a decade before I was born, my parents' marriage would have been illegal in the state of my dad's birth. Their entire relationship would have been illegal in the state of my dad's birth. And that's why when you say, you know, when I identify as black that there was not really a choice. I mean, in this country, we have long had the one-drop rule, which was as the anti-miscegenation laws intended to keep the white race pure. So any person who had any known quantity of black blood was considered black. And my dad certainly, I remember very vividly whom we were young had a conversation with my sisters and I.”
2020-09-17 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 405 — Nikole Hannah-Jones · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They have my older sister, and that's when my grandparents started speaking to my mom again because this was their first grandchild. My parents were married in 1976. I was actually in my mom's stomach during the wedding. She was about five months pregnant, four months pregnant with me when they got married. And of course, this is just less than a decade after the Supreme Court ruled in loving that it was unconstitutional to deny black and white people the right to marry, which is shows us how recent this history that we like to think is very far past is so as let me just stop you.”
2020-09-17 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 405 — Nikole Hannah-Jones · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so in the neighboring town in the metro area is the University of Northern Iowa. This is my mom's first time away from rural Iowa. She grew up in a very, very small town with no black people in it called Swisher, Iowa. And she came to go to school. And my dad actually, as he would say, would go up to the university to chase women. So he did not attend the university, but he would go up there to meet women. I guess he liked college educated women. And he met my mom one day actually on the way to another date. And I guess they hit it off and the rest was history. But my mother's parents disowned my mom when they found out that she was dating and living with this black man and my parents.”
2020-09-17 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 405 — Nikole Hannah-Jones · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, I think you can try to make that choice, but no, my father, well, okay, so I'll answer how we met him and tell you the conversation that my father had when we were young. So my father met my mom. My mother came to my hometown to go to college.”
2020-09-17 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 405 — Nikole Hannah-Jones · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“War pensions were administered in a racially discriminatory way. We know that the GI bill was administered in a racially discriminatory way. So no, again and again, even though black people have been disproportionately willing to fight for this country, they've been left out of many of the promises that that fight was to bring.”
2020-09-17 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 405 — Nikole Hannah-Jones · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Absolutely. I mean, there's a very long history of this. If you look black Americans have fought in every war, including the war that made us America, and have joined the military at the highest rates of all racial groups. And that has come out of a deep sense that in a country that has not treated you as citizens, the way that you can prove your citizenship is to be willing to die for your country. But unfortunately, Black Americans, for most of the history of this country, served in segregated military. They often had to fight just for the right to fight, at least up until the Civil War, they were not allowed to fight initially. And only when the army was or the military was losing. And so we have this long history of being willing to fight for our country, but then not being beneficiaries. We know that the civil...”
2020-09-17 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 405 — Nikole Hannah-Jones · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I did it. You know, I never did. I understood that to have that conversation would have felt very disrespectful to my dad. So while I had those feelings, they weren't feeling that I expressed to him. My dad was extremely proud of his service, like many black men. He saw the army not just as a way out of poverty, but as a way to prove his citizenship. And so he was very patriotic. And I didn't ever have that conversation. And in fact, people often ask me, well, when did you come to understand your dad's patriotism? And I said it was while I was reporting and reading research material for my essay. So it was last year. I truly never understood it until I started working on the piece on democracy.”
2020-09-17 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 405 — Nikole Hannah-Jones · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Who is starting to become really deeply aware of societies' inequities and my dad's position in this country, I was deeply embarrassed by this kind of outward exhibit of patriotism. It seemed to me that he was degrading himself by flying this flag in the yard. And so the project begins with that and how I came to understand that my dad was making a claim on a long legacy of black people who felt that no one had the right to tell them that this was not their country.”
2020-09-17 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 405 — Nikole Hannah-Jones · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The kids in the field start bringing water out to the workers who were picking cotton. And that's when my grandmother decided that her kids were not going to have a life working in the fields. And she loaded them up on the train and moved to Iowa. So I kind of opened the piece with my dad joined the military and served in the army. And then he flew this colossally big, at least in my mind at the time, flag in our front yard. And as a high school student,”
2020-09-17 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 405 — Nikole Hannah-Jones · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so thank you for having me on the podcast and I'm excited for the conversation. I start my essay, which is about democracy with the story of my father. So I am biracial. My mother is white from Iowa. My father is black from Mississippi. And I'm the product of the Great Migration. So my grandmother brought my father and two of his young siblings up from Mississippi on the Illinois Central Line when my dad was about three years old. He was born on a cotton plantation in Greenwood, Mississippi. For those who know civil rights history, Greenwood was the seat of Freedom Summer, who was considered one of the most violent places to be black in America. It was a very hard place. And at about the age, three or fours, when they start putting”
2020-09-17 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 405 — Nikole Hannah-Jones · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source