“What did you do?”

Nikole Hannah-Jones asked a question heard around the country during her keynote speech at this year’s MLK Breakfast: “What will history say about you?”

Because, as the creator of The 1619 Project, New York Times journalist, and Knight Chair in Race and Journalism at Howard University tells Embrace, our children and grandchildren will one day ask us what we did today when the history of this time is written.

If we want to make sure they grow up in a democracy where their voices matter, we must confront the injustices of our present and past—even if it means putting our comfort and careers on the line.

Here’s an excerpt of our interview with Hannah-Jones, lightly edited for length and clarity.

On America’s fundamental contradictions

Nikole Hannah-Jones: I think America right now is confirming and reflecting exactly the America that so many of us have claimed it to be. There's not much that is surprising about this moment. The argument of The 1619 Project is that we were founded on this grave hypocrisy: claiming freedom and liberty while engaging in genocide and slavery, and from the beginning really only believing that one race was entitled to liberty, human dignity, and a political voice in a democracy. In many ways, what we're seeing is just the manifestation of that critique — and all of those people who claimed that seeing America that way was un-American, unpatriotic — I don't know what their arguments can be today.

On whether today’s moment is “unprecedented”

I think it's complicated. In some ways, we are in an unprecedented moment. I don't think we've ever had as blatant and explicit corruption as we see in the presidency now. We've certainly never had a 34-time convicted felon as president. There's always been corruption, but it hasn't been this explicit and out in the open, and we're seeing a complete collapse of our systems of checks and balances.

But if we're talking about racism, racial inequality, white nationalism, and white hegemony — no, we're not seeing something unprecedented. Attacks on democracy? Not unprecedented. The belief that only white Americans should determine the direction of our democracy? Not unprecedented. Book bans, efforts to control historical and other narratives? Not unprecedented.

So many people right now are asking that we return to the status quo — but the status quo is actually what gets us here. Our willingness to accept a version of democracy that only looks like what democracy looked like at our nation's founding — led by wealthy white men — is not going to disappear.

Nikole Hannah-Jones. (Photo: Wikimedia Commons)

On finding truth in the age of misinformation

It's not incidental that we are being swarmed by misinformation and disinformation at a time when we're also seeing eroding democracy — these two things go together. Some of the earliest tactics of the Trump administration in his first term were to discredit the media, to discredit purveyors of vetted information. That's where "fake news" and "you can't trust the press" came from. Now we're seeing the ultimate manifestation: the discrediting of science and expertise.

All of that is intentional, because it makes it almost impossible for us to determine what is real and what is not — to have any sense of shared reality.

We have more information than we've ever had in the history of humankind, and yet in many ways we know less. If you want to understand why something is the way it is, just ask who benefits from it. We have to have discernment — to understand that expertise exists, and that being in a place where we don't trust anything makes us all very vulnerable.

On honoring the true, radical legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and other civil rights leaders

It wasn't just white people who softened the legacy of Dr. King. I can think back to any number of Martin Luther King Day celebrations held in Black spaces where, unless they were radical Black spaces, they were only talking about his "I Have a Dream" speech. And in many cases, that's because that's all they knew, too.

I don't have the answer, but what I can say is this: those of us who are the scholars, who are bearing witness, who are the artists and writers trying to record this moment — once we're out of it, we also have to be the keepers of that memory. We have to ensure we're not allowing others to craft a new history of what happened. That work is often not popular. When bad things happen, people want to move on. We as Americans, more than many other cultures, are forward-looking people. But the past is what creates our future.

I think all I can do — I'm in my dissent-writing stage of my career now — is write for a future society that can take something and do something with it.

On her advice to people who want to be on the right side of history

The easy thing is explaining what happened. The hard thing will be explaining what we did. That's what I'm trying to call people into. It would be easy to tell a story that places us at a distance — they did this, Trump did that, Republicans did this. But when someone is telling the story of the Civil Rights Movement, the inevitable question from a grandchild is: "What did you do? Did you march? Did you do a sit-in? Did you refuse?" And we have to answer to that.

I hear all the time: "I'd really like to speak up, but I can't risk my job." And I think: every single right we have, every privilege, every possibility, is because people risked their livelihoods, their property, and in many cases their lives. That excuse is going to sound really hollow one day when your kids or grandkids ask what you did, and you say you didn't want to lose your job.

For those who haven't seen this America before: it's about to get really bad. We haven't even begun to see how bad it's going to be. So we better figure out who we are, and what we're willing to sacrifice — to try to save our communities and ourselves.

The Fine Print

THE BIG PICTURE

GOOD TROUBLE

THE READING ROOM