Nikole Hannah-Jones, who stated that it would be an “honor” to have the riots in the aftermath of George Floyd’s death named after her 1619 Project, and who has earned millions of dollars from taxpayers since then, seems to be angry that the cash cow is giving less and less milk.
Hannah-Jones, who is easily triggered by any challenge to her fabulist narrative about the “slavocracy” that she claims is this country, was further angered after states began passing legislation forbidding the use of curriculum materials based on the 1619 Project (and the Critical Race Theory which “informs” it). Charging Republicans with “whitewashing history,” she tried to get the left “mad enough” to organize by warning them about the “dark and scary times.”
Her rage has only grown since the 2024 election. Hannah-Jones has been accusing President Trump of “erasing black history” — a laughable charge, given that Hannah-Jones knowingly distorts history in The 1619 Project and spin-off products, such as her picture book, where she asserts that “mommies” and “daddies” were “kidnapped” from Africa by white men.
Plus, President Trump has not been good for her (designer) pocketbook. The gigs that funded a lavish lifestyle seem to be fewer in number and flatlining at the fee she was earning back in 2020, the year after The 1619 Project first came out as a special issue of the New York Times Magazine. As I recounted in my book, Debunking The 1619 Project, given that Hannah-Jones was speaking an average of once every two weeks at public universities and earning $25,000 per appearance (often remotely due to Covid), her earnings from taxpayers amounted to about $650,000 in 2020.
Additionally, the Pulitzer Prize-winner was speaking at public libraries, events funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, educational organizations, and commemorations like Juneteenth, Martin Luther King, Jr.’s birthday, and the 1921 Tulsa “massacre.” In January 2022, she made $55,000 at the Martin Luther King Jr. Symposium at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. This is not to mention her salary at The New York Times (a largely no-show job) then also as professor (Knight Chair of Race and Journalism) at Howard University beginning in 2021, and royalties and fees from the 1619 Project hardcover books, films, and other spin-off products.
Her gig as commencement speaker was interrupted this year, however, by “new federal pressures” that prompted Harvard University, and other institutions, to stop funding and providing facilities for “affinity” graduations for groups based on such aspects as race, ethnicity, and disability.
Hannah-Jones was a commencement speaker, but not at her usual center-stage space. She addressed black graduates in a conference room of the Marriot Hotel in Cambridge (the location apparently not revealed publicly until after the May 27 ceremony, which was organized by black Harvard undergraduates and alumni).
According to Harvard Magazine, Hannah-Jones noted that the graduating class had “entered college in the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder by a police officer, during a ‘so-called racial reckoning.’” They had witnessed the reversal of promises to confront “legacies of racism,” including the laying off of “the team behind the Harvard Slavery Remembrance program” (the work outsourced to an outside company) and the renaming of the diversity office to the Office for Community and Campus Life. (We should take note of such strategies.)
Hannah-Jones inspired graduates with the accusation, “The same administration that has been cast as heroic for standing up to Trump over academic freedom caved almost immediately on issues of diversity and inclusion, and in doing so — in not standing up for y’all — it didn’t do one thing to stop Trump’s attacks on this university.”
“They gave you up for cheap,” she charged. “And I hope one day you will make them pay for that.”
Hellbound and Down 