I like a good hypocrite
It is rare that someone caught in a charge of hypocrisy throws their hands in the air and says, “Yes, I’m a hypocrite.” It reminded me of the old truism that if the men in white coats come along to section you for insanity your worst line of defense is to say, “You’ve got the wrong person. I’m not mad.” Much rarer but more honest is the person who says, “Gosh I’m glad you’ve finally caught up with me. I’ve been a lunatic for years.” My point is that there is something refreshing about honesty. Especially when it is embarrassing.
Which brings me to the matter of Nikole Hannah-Jones. Some readers might be fortunate enough never to have heard of her but Hannah-Jones made her name some years ago with the “1619 Project.” This was an attempt – backed by the New York Times – to reframe the American national story.
It started from the premise that the United States began when the first slaves were transported across the North Atlantic. The aim of Hannah-Jones’s project was to claim that absolutely everything in American history was the result of slavery and white supremacy and that everything in the American national story – including emancipation – should be viewed through this remorselessly negative light.
Among the claims of the 1619 project was that capitalism is white supremacist because people who ran slave plantations used bookkeeping and numbers. Thus any American worker sitting in front of a spreadsheet in the 2020s is unwittingly perpetuating a system founded in slavery. Of course they are also perpetuating a system that goes back to Ancient Mesopotamia, but let us, like Hannah-Jones, not let facts detain us.
In her crusade to stop whiteness Hannah-Jones chose to use her daughter as a cultural battering-ram
During the American cultural revolution of the past decade Hannah-Jones was a fixture. She was retained by the NYT on a six-figure salary, though her workload does not seem to have been especially onerous.
Yet this week Hannah-Jones broke her silence and wrote something honest. Specifically she wrote an essay about the choice she had made to educate her daughter. Ten years ago she had written about how she was determined to educate her in the American state school system and accused that system – like everything else in America – of “perpetuating whiteness.” In her crusade to stop whiteness Hannah-Jones chose to use her daughter as a sort of cultural battering-ram.
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“Did you know my school was bad like this when you decided to put me here?” she asked.
