Nikole Hannah-Jones says there have been only two occasions when she looked around a first-class cabin and saw that every passenger was Black. She says that when that happens, something else is going on as well.
“White passengers come on, turn the corner, see that the entire first class is Black and there is a pause. Because it is very normal to fly coach… if the people in first class are white. But all of a sudden coach gets real shabby to you if everybody in first class is Black. And that’s a metaphor for America," she says.
“You don’t ask: why does there have to be a first class and a coach? Why can’t you make the whole plane first class? That’s not a problem to you. You only question first class if the wrong people are in it. And this is America writ large,” she adds before a crowd of hundreds at the Texas Theatre, as part of the Hay Festival in Dallas. Everyone listens attentively. Then comes another thunderous round of applause. Then the requests for photos, the festival’s longest line for a book signing, and countless people thanking her for her work.
Hannah-Jones, 50, is a journalist at The New York Times Magazine and the creator of the 1619 Project, a landmark reporting initiative on the legacy of slavery in the United States. She won the Pulitzer Prize in 2020, turned the project into a documentary series that earned an Emmy Award, and expanded it into two books, both of which became bestsellers.
That came with consequences. In Florida, the 1619 Project was explicitly barred from being taught in public schools, while in Texas schools, educators were prohibited from requiring students to study it. Efforts to keep it out of classrooms spread across Republican-led states. During his first term, U.S. President Donald Trump cited the project as an example of the “toxic propaganda” he said was dividing the country and announced the creation of the 1776 Commission to promote what he called “patriotic education.”
“The most openly white nationalist administration knows that to control power you have to teach a history that justifies your power. Control of history is never superficial,” Hannah-Jones says.
In a later interview with EL PAÍS, the journalist points to how Trump uses the idea of memory and history: “He gets his legitimacy by evoking a past where white men were the natural leaders of this country. He recalls that past to justify the open racism of his administration, saying ‘this is who we are as Americans.’ If the people who built this country were white men, it becomes a divine destiny that they should rule. He’s saying, ‘no matter what the country looks like, you will be on top.’”
The author is clear about who is receiving that message: white Americans unsettled by the country’s demographic changes, many of whom are themselves living on the brink of poverty.
She points to the example of a woman in Texas waiting in line at a food bank who was asked whether she regretted voting for Trump three times. She said she did not, but wished he had begun deportations sooner. “She thinks her suffering is okay, as long as the wrong people can’t be in the country and the right people are also suffering,” says Hannah-Jones, adding that race is being deliberately weaponized in such cases: “We spend too much time focusing on people we think should be out lessers, instead of recognizing who is exploiting all of us.”
Hannah-Jones believes it is precisely this “resentment” that Trump has successfully tapped into. “Trump understands America more than the Democrats,” she says. “He understands how effectively you can use racism as a Trojan horse. You don’t have to have great economic policy or great international policy. You can constantly lie to people, but if you provoke their sense of racial resentment, none of that will matter.”
“I don’t think Democrats have been willing to acknowledge how much race still animates and drives American politics,” she continues. “They tend to have an innate belief about the goodness of America and that everything will work out. Trump has a very realistic understanding of this country that he exploits.”
The journalist, whose career has focused on investigating race and inequality, founded the Center for Journalism and Democracy at Howard University, as well as the Ida B. Wells Society for Investigative Reporting, which is dedicated to training and supporting Black investigative journalists.
One of her most recent essays, on segregation in the U.S. education system, has once again thrust her into the center of a national debate. Hannah-Jones and her husband, both upper-middle-class professionals living in New York, chose to enroll their daughter in an under-resourced public school in Brooklyn where most students are Black. “I believed Faraji and I could bring some of that power with us,” she writes. “We had connections and time and status that should not matter, but that we all know do. And more than that, we believed strongly that if families like ours went into schools like this one, it would challenge other families with similar values to do the same.”
In the essay, she recounts her daughter’s sense of “betrayal” when she learned of the decision. Hannah-Jones has defended it, noting that her daughter was ultimately admitted to the predominantly white high school she wanted to attend. “I’ve often been told that I ‘sacrificed’ my daughter,” she says. “But we are so willing to sacrifice a whole lot of our children. And we’re okay with that. I wanted to use the story of this one child to stand in for the story of millions of children whose parents can’t just pull them out of a school when it goes bad.”
In doing so, Hannah-Jones once again shines a spotlight on educational segregation, a subject she has spent two decades investigating. She also sees the attacks on books and higher education as what she calls “the earliest attacks on democracy in the United States in this most recent moment.”
“If you study any fascist regimes, they always go after institutions of higher education because they teach you critical thinking. They teach you to question,” she explains. “And regimes don’t want people who question their power. And then they have to turn us against each other — that is the most important part.”
The upcoming midterm elections are looming large over cultural events across the country, particularly in Texas, where Democrats believe a long-awaited breakthrough may be within reach.
When asked what the headlines will be on November 4, the day after the midterms, Hannah-Jones replies: “I never try to predict the future because I think that’s the easiest way for journalists to look like an idiot. I just fear that, if we look at what the administration is saying and doing, we will not have a result on November 4 that is accepted. So I think the headline is going to be that the Trump administration is only going to accept one outcome in the election.”
Sign up for our weekly newsletter to get more English-language news coverage from EL PAÍS USA Edition