Nikole Hannah-Jones on the Power of The 1619 Project

journalism and the effects it can have. I'm talking about Nicole Hannah Jones. Nicole Hannah Jones is a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist, a staff writer for The New York Times,

and the winner of a MacArthur Genius Grant. She is the creator of the sixty nineteen Project, a long form journalism project drawing on history, sociology, and journalism together that seeks to highlight the contributions of African Americans to the story of the United States, while simultaneously recentering the historical

role of slavery and segregation to American history. The sixteen nineteen project, as you know, both proved wildly successful in terms of stirring and creating a national discussion and being adopted into curriculates some places, but it has also stirred up a significant amount of controversy. That controversy has gone so far as to lead Republican state legislators to propose laws that would ban the teaching of what's called critical

race theory. In those laws will leave aside the fact that it's not exactly the thing that has historically been identified as critical race theory, but those are laws that are motivated by an attempt to argue against the teaching that slavery played a central and indeed perhaps definitive role in the creation of our national experience. The sixty nine project is therefore an extraordinary and important example of journalism having power and on the relationship between the power of

institutional journalism, institutional history, and political response and reaction. We're very grateful that Nicole was open to appearing here on deep background, and we're thrilled that she is here now. Nicole, thank you so much for being here. Nicole, I want to begin by asking you about the extraordinary range and impact that the sixteen nineteen project has had. I'm really fascinated by that kind of complex, hybrid nature of the project.

You know history and journalism and public policy and education for a couple of reasons. One is I'm just, at a basic intellectual level, completely sympathetic to the idea that part of journalism's job is to explain how things got to be the way they are. I mean, that's why I have a podcast called Deep Background, and I don't think it's plausible at all that you could explain the way things are except by looking into their deep historical past.

So I love it because that makes perfect sense to me, and I'm fascinated by the ways that it was so innovative. The second reason I'm interested in it is that, you know, we're exploring here on Deep Background, this idea of the power of different institutions and different modes of thinking. And it seems to me I have a hypothesis that one of the reasons for the amazing power and influence of this project is exactly that you didn't think, oh, we

have to stay in our lane. You didn't think, oh, well, that's history and that's a job for historians and we're journalists. No, you thought, this is a job for a newspaper and a magazine, and we're going to include historians in our work. But we also think that that can be contiguous with journalists, And I wonder whether you agree that part of the

power of this project is that you broke the genre lines. God, I mean, I'd never thought that that's what we were doing or setting out to do, though clearly because of the response to the Pride, I see that that is how people understand what we did. But again, I've always done my own archival research, unearthed original documents, dug through the archives of cases that I was writing about and

people I was writing about. I feel like I've been trying to do that in my work for more than a decade now, where all of my writing is deeply historical, that all of my writing has been talking about modern day phenomena and trying to unearthed history in order to help us understand how did we get there and to explain you know, usually school segregation or housing segregation, or racialized policing. I've always always done journalism that didn't just

kind of drive by history. But you know, if you look at my work on school segregation, on housing segregation, two thirds of it is about the past and the rest is about what's happening right now. So when people talk about breaking genre. I've just like, this is journalism. This is the way that I've always done journalism, and

that the journalists I've admired have done journalism. I think what was different, though, What was different was it wasn't just a single article, but an entire project that was an entire issue of the magazine, a special section of the newspaper, live events, as well as a podcast series.

So we were doing something that, at least for The New York Times, had not been done before, and that we very explicitly set out the aims of the project, which was not just saying, hey, We're going to tell you something about your country that you didn't know, but saying we were explicitly seeking to reframe the narrative and understanding that we have all had about our country. And that is different. I mean, that's something that I think journalists don't typically do. Even if that is their aim,

they're not blastically stating it. So maybe that's that's what was so different. But I really I just felt like this was an extension of the work that I've always done and the way that I believe journalism should be. And we included history, we included historians, but historians are writing for journalistic organizations all at the time now, So I guess I just didn't and maybe I was naive. I mean, I felt naive in some ways just because of how visceral and kind of unrelenting the attacks on

the project have been. That to me, it just was a project that in that moment made sense and was part of the work I've always seen myself as doing.

That's a fascinating answer. It may be that the combination of the topic of race and racial justice, which is such a central topic to not only the American historical path between American present, and the enhanced institutional centrality of the New York Times in an era when other mainstream journalism is in certain ways declining and the power of the Times is in many ways greater than it's ever been.

You know, the historians, sociologists and others who participated in the project alongside you and other journalists have been saying the stuff that you've all been saying for a long time without it generating this kind of backlash. And so I guess I want to ask about the institutional power of the idea here of the New York Times. You know, do you think one reason that the people who are

upset are so upset. Is part of it that you think the objectors said, well, it's the New York Times saying it, and if it's in the New York Times, people will think it's true, and we really don't want people to think these things are true. Could that be part of it? Yes? I think absolutely that this project ran in the paper of record, the New York Times, as you said, probably the most powerful news organization, at least a news organization that's not television in the world.

That has been a major part of the response, both of those who support the project who were really surprised that the New York Times would run something like this, and those who have opposed a project who are also very surprised that the New York Times would run something

like this. And as a historian, you know this project is based on decades of scholarship, but that there has been kind of this wall between the scholarship and a popular understanding of the scholarship, right, it hasn't really breached for many people. The role of slavery, the role of flavory and the Revolution, Abraham Lincoln's racial views, slavery, capitalism, and developing the American economy. These are not radical thoughts

within the academy. But as you understand, history is academic, and then history is what is popularized, and what most Americans think of its history is often not what's actually in books written by actual historians. So to kind of breach that line with this project and then for it to be really embraced by high school teachers and by public schools, I think is where the huge backlash has

come from. It's one thing for Alan Taylor to write about slavery and the revolution in his poet Surprising books. It's another thing for high school students to now be questioning the role of slavery might have played to motivate the men that we are taught popularly to treat as demigods. And then we also can't discount who brought this project fourth, which is you know, a black woman, quite outspoken, who doesn't present the way that some people believe I should present.

I've been credentialed a lot, people asking well, how can she write this, she's not a historian, as if historians don't use journalism in their work every day consulting, you know, the New York Times. You know, My question to that has always been who did historians write for? If historians don't don't want lay people like myself, you know, I'm majored in history in Underground, but I'm not clearly an

academic historian. If historians don't want lay people to read their texts and use them in real life to understand their world, which is what I do as a journalist, then what why are historians produced in history? And who are they? Who are they doing it for? So I found that credentialing to be actually quite interesting, both from you know, the small group of academic historians who have publicly criticized the project, but also from many people who

just don't believe the project should exist at all. Nicole, there's so many fascinating strands and what you just said, let me just plug out three and maybe we'll talk about them in turn. First the idea of the New York Times as this incredibly powerful institution and the fight over what it would or wouldn't do. Then the national

narrative point about the high school teachers. And then third the credentialing argument focused on you with the idea that an African American woman who doesn't have a PhD in history how could she be the person setting the tone for this whole national conversation. So I want to talk about all three of those strands. Let's start with The Times and its power in the center of the story. Is it a good thing that The New York Times is as extraordinarily institutionally powerful as it is right now?

I mean, I tend to think better to still have The Times than not to have The Times, given that the alternative would be to have no institution like this. That said, would we be better off in a world where there were more news organizations that had credibility and some claim to use a term that will come to later quote unquote objectivity. So I would say yes to both of those things. I think The Times is critically

important for our democracy and for understanding our world. There are few news organizations that have the resources to cover the globe the way that The New York Times does, and it has done no unparalleled reporting that I think is necessary. And there aren't many places that could have produced a project like the sixteen nineteen project period, not just because of amount of money or resources put into it, but because of the platform that The New York Times provides.

So I think that's critical. But I also think that in order for news to be the firewall of our democracy, news itself needs to be democratized, and that the fewer voices, the fewer institutions, particularly local news, that are out there and have the resources to publish and do accountability journalism and do journalism that's just more reflective of our very diverse nation and very diverse world. I think that we

are less informed because of that. I think power is less held to account because of that, And so I think that, yes, it's absolutely critical to have both the things. I think we need institutions like the New York Times that are unparalleled, and I think we also need institutions like local news reporting, you know, ethnic press. I mean all of that. We need to be in a news rich environment, particularly in the world that we're in right now.

But we need to be in a news rich environment where the people providing that news actually have some ethics and standards of the trade. And I'm worried about how some of that is eroding. Yeah, I worry about that too, And I worry about, you know, since a newspaper does have as part of its DNA the idea of holding power to account there's also the question of, you know, who holds the newspaper to account, and in the past

the answer was other newspapers. And in that in that extent, if there's an institution that is sees that as its job, but there isn't a rich environment of other newspapers that see their job as holding that newspaper to account, you know that that potentially in the long run complicates things, especially if there are people, you know, let's say you're your political conservative and you think the New York Times skews liberal, which on certain things on its editorial policy,

of course it does. Then you might think, well, what's my alternative. It's Fox News And you know I love a journal. Yeah, the Journal on its editorial page, I agree, But the journal has such a rigorous distinction between its editorial page and its newspaper the national narrative point that you were raising, that is fascinating to me as well.

One of the reasons that the City nineteen project is so significant is that it actually you conceived it as planning to reach curriculum, and it is indeed reaching curriculum.

And then that in the backlash has produced these proposed pieces of legislation around the country purporting to outlaw something called critical race theory, which, since I'm a law professor, you know, I'm I know the critical race theory was produced by Derek Bell and Kimberly Crenshaw as a rich theoretical apparatus that was not actually primarily about the historical issues that you were writing about, so as a kind of terminological mismatch there. But in practical terms, it's a

reaction to you, guys into the sixty nineteen project. Why do you think the fight over the national narrative is so brutal right now? Is it just the polarization that we're already familiar with, or does it have something to do with the idea that we still don't want to recognize in many quarters, that are founders were not pure, and that they that they had a complex set of beliefs and attitudes, and that their institutions were in many ways profoundly inflected by by the structure of racism and

of slavery. Well, first, let me just correct the record a bit. The project was not originally conceived as curriculum. The project. I did not know that. Fascinating, Okay, thank you, Yeah, I conceived of the project as a work of journalism. That's what we set out to create. And it was later months down, once the project was already fully formed and conceived and that we were beginning to report and write the pieces, that we started talking about turning it

into curriculum. So I think that that has become the narrative that the project from conception was designed to infiltrate America's classrooms. It wasn't. I'm a journalist and I was producing a work of journalism and the Times, you know, it's a huge organization with many, many arms, and we actually have a curriculum division. So we started discussing that and then ultimately decided, you know, to partner with the Pulitzer Center, which turns regularly turns journalism into curriculum. And

no one has a problem with that. But it's just, you know, the sixteen nineteen project. So just to clear that up. But I've you know, I've thought a lot about the response to the project, particularly, I don't know another work of journalism that has been as legislated against

as the sixteen nineteen project. You know, the project has been mentioned in both of Donald Trump's impeachment trials for god knows why, except it's you know, being used as a tool of white resentment, these laws that are being passed all across the country, including in my home state. And I've thought a lot about why that is. And it's hard to sometimes grasp when you're in the middle of something, what are all the causes. This is why we like to study history, because with some distance you

can get more understanding of all of the forces. But several things are happening. The project came out in twenty nineteen during the Trump presidency, which some on the right saw as planned, though I certainly couldn't have planned for the four hundred anniversary to fall in twenty nineteen. That was put into motion four hundred years ago, and I was very careful at the project really not to mention Donald Trump at all, because the project was not about

a single moment in American history. The project was about the sweep of four hundred years, and whether Donald Trump was a president or Obama was a president, everything in

the project would have been just as true. But I think because it landed in that moment when we had replaced the first black president with I would say, an the white nationalist president, where we were seeing a lot of Americans really trying to understand because they believed that the election of Obama had somehow banished racism in America and we had reached this post racial age, and then

a white minority alex A white nationalists as president. And then after the project comes out, of course, we see George Floyd, Brianna Taylor, and the largest protests for civil rights in the history of our country. And with that is coming, I think a lot of fears being stoked about the changing demographics of our nation, a changing sense

of power. You started seeing, of course, all these companies embracing Black Lives Matter, a massive shift in white Americans embrace of Black Lives matter for the first time, more than fifty percent of white Americans supported that movement. White Americans were starting, I think large percentages of them were really starting to believe that maybe there is something systemic going on in this country that not just about individual black people choosing to take advantage. And the sixty nineteen

Project is in the middle of all of that. And I think what happens then is there as a tremendous pushback by those who are in power. We're talking about sitting us senators, We're talking about the Secretary of Defense, right, we're talking about Nicky Haley, who was at the United Nations.

People who are standing for institutional power in a almost entirely white political party began to see the sixty nineteen project as as symbolic of some larger I think, cultural shift and that this could be something that could be a useful political tool because it was, I think they were tapping into a feeling amongst many white Americans like, well, maybe maybe things have gone too far. Okay, I support Black Lives Matter, But now are they saying I have

to hate this country's founding. Now they want me to talk about the fact that George Washington wasn't Enslaver and Thomas Jefferson wasn't Enslaver. And we have a g deal of investment in the mythology of America. I mean, every country has investment in its own mythology. But what's so hard about the United States is no other country was founded on these ideals of liberty where their entire identity as a country is on this belief that we are

the freest, greatest, most liberatory country in the world. And so we have not wanted to grapple with what it means to be founded on slavery and freedom. That freedom for white people in this country was actually created on the enslavement of black people. That's why the project had

to exist in the first places. We haven't wanted to deal with that, and so to have this project come out and then this really turbulent time with Black Lives Matter protests and our president who is openly stoking white resentment, I think we got this really combustible mix, and that's where we are right now. We're seeing a massive pushback against the belief that black people's gains are coming too swiftly and they are coming at the cost of white Americans.

And we've seen this before, So that to me is why this is so fundamentally difficult and why we fight so hard not to be truthful about our past. Is we don't feel like the narrative of our nation can withstand the truth. And you know, I guess I'm just not sure what as a as a black person in this country who always say we're the most you know, inconvenient people to this nationalistic narrative that Americans need to have.

What are we then supposed to do with that? We are just supposed to ignore that we didn't have freedom, that we were held in bondage, that we're still fighting, you know, for equality. Now I can't do that and I won't do that. That's a fascinating and I think very astute historical analysis of the moment that you're in. And I agree that the fact of the social movement of Black Lives Matter and it's its successes and the relevant historical moment has to be understood in conjunction with

the with the response to Black Lives Matter. That also explains some of the personal attacks on you, you know, which may come in the form of attacking credentials, but are presumably also included in a very fundamental way, the idea that you're a black woman telling people, Hey, this is the truth, and here's all the proof that hits the truth, and it's hard for people to say it's not the truth because it is, and so their responses, who are you right? I mean, you don't have the

relevant credential. I mean that's sort of like the worst least convincing form of argument that can be imagined. But it doesn't mean it's not pretty difficult to have to sustain it on a day to day basis. Yeah, and

it's been I mean, it's actually been fairly successful. I think that argument because I mean, and you know this as as someone who works at academia, that disagreement is inherent to academia, and that history and the field of historiography is about interpretations of fact, and you can look at two historians can look at the same exact facts and come up with different and interpretations of them, and

that's not seen as disqualifying. But what has occurred with the sixteen nineteen project is really I can't even say the sixteen nineteen project. It's almost been exclusively just my opening essay in the sixteen nineteen project is the fact that some historians felt I made an argument too strong about the American Revolution and the role of slavery. That that has been used then to justify trying to discredit the entire project as well as me as a journalist.

And that's what I think we've been fighting against ever since. It doesn't matter how many times I put up pieces written by other historians who say, actually their interpretations are well within the range of accepted scholarship, we agree with their interpretations, it doesn't matter, because there really is a vested interest that really spans the political spectrum. It's not

just a vested interest of white conservatives. I think there's a vested interest of many white moderate and progressives as well to believe that we may have been a country that has failed in some ways, but that we are fundamentally good and we are founded by fundamentally good people. And I'm saying I don't it's not an argument about whether our founders were good or bad. Right, every human being is capable of doing really terrible things and really

great things. It's just a matter of what they did is what they did, and what they said about how they felt about black people is what they said. And I just don't see the benefit of obscuring that, even if it makes us very uncomfortable. We have to be able to have complex discussions about who we are as a people in a nation. We'll be right back, Nicole.

I'm glad that you raised this issue of interpretation as the kind of day in and day out work of historians and then the relationship of that to the work of journalism, because it leads us to one of the topics that to me is most important here, and that

is the contested idea of objectivity. Yeah, and so I want to spend a minute talking with you about, first of all, whether the word objectivity has different meanings in the context of journalism and the context of history, and second of all, about whether that word is useful at all to us in either of those contexts, because I think that's a hard question. I don't think there's a simple answer to it, but I think it does have something to do with why the fights here have been

enabled to be so brutal. I'm not in any way disputing what you're saying about there being vested interests, but you know, there are different kinds of vested interests. They are vest interests that are grounded in economic, interests that are grounded in capital, and then they're vested interests that are grounded into people's deeply held beliefs that may have something to do in some instances with underlying economic interests,

but also have a life of their own. So I guess I want to start with objectivity in journalism and then talk about objectivity in history, and then we'll talk about how they bump into each other. So you've you've spoken about this before. What's your view on objectivity in journalism? Yeah? Thank you, for that, and let me just just quickly

back up. I don't think the opposition to the sixteen nineteen project, or to kind of the rendering of history and society that the sixteen nineteen project poses is merely economic. I don't even know that it's primarily economic. It really is about the power to shape identity and how we think about ourselves as a nation and the fundamental goodness of America that we're indoctrinated into from when we take

our first breath. What that said, I think your question about objectivity and history and objectivity in journalism is a very interesting one and not one that I've gotten though I'm clearly working around both areas, and after I answer, I'd actually love to hear your answer on that. Sure so one. I think in some ways they're slightly different because journalism encompasses not to is kind of daily reporting,

just the facts reporting, but also opinion writing. You know, we do reporting that is accountability reporting, and I don't think you can when you're writing about Watergate, you're not being objective. You don't think the government should be corrupt, and there's explanatory reporting, and I think history you don't tend to think of of being about opinion, but really of unearthing what happened, in helping us understand why and

what it meant. So I think there's there's some differences there, but I do think both of them both field really do I would say, hide behind, but certainly offer up the armor of objectivity, that the person who is producing the work is not operating from their own personal sense of things or their own personal politics, that they're just going where the facts lead us. Of course, that's never bench true. I mean, we know that that's never been true.

And you know, you look at someone like Sean wilentzon no property in men. There's been plenty of other historians who have disagreed with the way that he sees the role of slavery and the Constitution in James Madison motivations for putting that right. So one could say that objectively, based on his understanding of that history, that's why he writes that. But I would say that's not actually coming from an objective perspective. That he is a man with

certain beliefs about this nation. He is a man who grew up in this nation racialized and genderized in a certain way, with a certain class status and that all of these things play into your and even your field of study. Right, have you spent a ton of time

studying slavery in particular or not? And I think all of those things then go into how you're interpret these different documents and the motivations, because what that really is about is trying to interpret the motivation and that is not unless the person you know, James Madison said I am putting this in here because I feel this way about slavery. Then we are trying to surmise based on

a lot of contextual things. And that's similar, I think to what journalism does, which is what we choose to study in the first place, both as historians and journalists rarely objective, almost always subjective, Who we study, what primary documents we use, what is going to be the focus of the work. These are not objective decisions. And when I think about objectivity, I think we should all strive for objectivity of method. And the word is useful in

that way. Right. Am I being fair? Am I being accurate? Am I accurately describing the events as they happened? And am I being fair to the parties involveolved in my rendering of the events that happened. But that's very different than pretending that what I'm doing is in and of itself objective. When I choose to write about school segregation as opposed to writing about something else in education, that's

a subjective choice. I think that it's important other journalists did not, and they didn't write about it that much, And I think we should just be more honest about the limits of this notion of objectivity, and that it has never existed, and that all of us are pursuing work through the framework of our own lived existence and what makes sense to us as we study scholarship, how

we interpret it. I write about this actually in the new in the preface for the sixteen nineteen book, and I talk about Abraham Lincoln and the offense that, you know, the small group of scholars took to thinking I was calling Abraham Lincoln racist, which actually didn't call him racist. I did say that, according to his own words, he

didn't believe in equality for black Americans. But two different historians can look at Lincoln's view on colonization, for instance, and one could argue that he believed in colonization as a political argument because he just didn't think white moderates would agree to abolish slavery if there were going to be a bunch of free black people living in America. And I think you could justify that based on what

we know about Lincoln. And others might say, well, we think Lincoln actually didn't believe black people had a place in our democracy and that they were going to be the troublesome presence, and that the best thing to do would be to leave them. That these were his personal beliefs. And I think you could support both of those things, which is the objective view in that case. But as you know, most Americans don't have a real understanding of how the field works, and so they think there is

an answer, a single right answer. But historians know better. And I think that's why some of the criticism, not the criticism, but the efforts to actually credit the facts that the project felt personal to me, which is I'm getting off on a TANTISI apologize. No no, if no, don't apologize, And it's not a tangent. I mean, I think everything you said hung together. Let me take up your invitation to just say a word about how it

looks from high perspective, I hear. I tend to agree with you that it's helpful to try to distinguish, both in journalism and in history the part of the work that is focused on getting facts and which should strive to objectivity. I'm not saying it can never perfectly reach it, but should strive to reporting and setting down factual events

in as accurate a way as possible. Right, So, let's say we're trying to figure out what Abraham Lincoln said to the group of five prominent Washington, DC African Americans who were invited to meet with him in the White House in the period right before he announced the Emancipation Proclamation or after he'd mentioned his draft. There was a meeting, there was a conversation there. We'll never get the exact

transcript of what was said, because it's not Watergate. There were no tapes, but we have various reports of what was said, and both a journalist and a historian would try really hard to get the facts of what was said at that meaning to the extent possible and knowing full well that there are gaps in the record. So, for example, you know, we've got some accounts of what Lincoln said, the accounts of what the African Americans who had been chosen for that delegation said are harder to

come by. They're there, but there it takes more work to find them. And you know, we weren't in the room. We don't know exactly what went down. But that's the part that I think we can strive for objectivity on.

Then comes the interpretation part, and there it's tricky because I think all working historians know and except that the job of historian isn't just to say what happened in the meeting, but to say what it meant, you know, how it fit together, and to try to speculate on why people said what they said, and also to specul on what they might have meant when they said what they said. So, you know, we know with pretty high degree of objectivity that Lincoln told that that group of

men they were men. You African Americans are the cause of the war. It's your fault. You know. He used this metaphor that Frederick Douglas was so horrified by afterwards, and it's still very horrifying today where he you know, he basically told them white people are killing each other over you, so you're you're the problem. That's very close

to verbat him. What Lincoln said, but to understand what he meant by that requires a work of interpretation, and that part, I think is much harder to describe as objectives because it's reconstructive. You know, it's an effort of trying to figure out what was in somebody's mind and what were the political circumstances. In means, that's true in journalism as well, and to that extent, there's an interpretive component to journalism as well, otherwise it would just be

a transcript. And so I think, you know, in both contexts, striving for objectivity, even knowing we'll never get there, is pretty valuable. But I also think at the same time that that claim to objectivity gives a lot of authority. What you were describing as the armor or the power of objectivity, it gives a lot of power, right, The

claim to objectivity is itself a claim to power. So that's my first thought on it, and my second has to do with what you were saying, Nicole about you know, each of us has it come from where people of a certain race and gender and historical context. I think that's all true, and it contributes to why we see things the way we see things. But I'm not sure that it's ever fully determinative, because you know, we could look at Sean Willentz and his interpretations, say of James Madison,

and then some other white guy historian. I'll use myself as an example who reads the same sources and reaches a different conclusion about James Madison's views based on Madison's own words. I think some of it is just the human work of interpretation is hard, and people will reach different conterpretations. Yeah, I mean, I certainly would not argue

that your race, gender, or class dat is determinative. I would argue that it is influential, and that even within white men of a certain age who grew up in a certain place, of a certain class, dad is they were certainly raised with different values, right, and raise with different backgrounds and histories. Maybe one is one step out

of poverty, maybe his family came from immigrants. There's lots of factors, but my larger point is is this belief somehow that we can share ourselves of our identity and just become objective kind of arbiters. I just don't think that that is realistic. And that's why when I say what I strive for and what I think we should, you know more honestly strive for is again objectivity of method, and objectivity of method is getting down all of your facts, right,

Like you said, who said what at that meeting? When did it occur, where did it occur, why did it occur? And then what is an accurate kind of presentation of based on what we know about Lincoln what we think he might have been trying to do with that meeting? Right, That, to me is what we're trying to do. But to then say, as Sean Mullins argued in his essay against the sixty nineteen project, it's just about the facts. To me, it's false and it is giving the idea of I

know the truth and this is not the truth. Now you could say that about did this meeting occur on this day? If I got the date wrong, then that is just about the facts. But saying the role of slavery in the revolution, when we know that slavery played a role, it's that type of credentialing that I think

I'm up against. And that's the same thing that I face in journalism when I say we don't see objective coverage, right, the fact that for years you weren't seeing any real accounting of police violence, and what we were seeing was newspapers and TV news again and again running the police report is fact. The police said that they shot him because he went for the gun, and then citizen journalists started putting up video showing actually he was running away

and got shot in the back, right. But we were saying that that was just subjective. We were just reporting the facts. That was I would argue a subjective decision. And I think that's what I'm trying to get at is to really help us understand that so much of the people who are helping us interpret our world that it's impossible to be interpreting that world through a sheerly objective lens, because objective means I'm completely impartial. I have a neutral point of view, and I'm just telling you

what happened. What I'm actually telling is what I think is important for you to know, and that's what I'm reporting on, and I think we should just be more honest about that. I agree with you, and I think

that's very powerfully put. What I always keep in the back of my mind is a debate between you and Sean Lenz is a debate at least in my view, between people of goodwill trying to get it right, and then off on the other side somewhere there's Donald Trump, for whom a debate about objectivity is just an opportunity to say, look, it's all relative, there is no truth, and then he can tell you with the Washington Post

counted what thirty thousand lies. And so if we undercut the idea of objectivity to such a degree that we don't think there is objectivity at all, that can make your really hard to say, well, wait, there are some things that are true, and there are always some things

that are false. We shouldn't fall into relativism. So I think what's best, at least in my view, and I think you and I probably agree about this, is that we should acknowledge objectivity as a goal and as a possibility with respect to facts, and therefore not feel like we have to give in to the Trumpian line that it's all interpretation, it's all relative their facts and then they're alternative facts, while still being able to say honestly

that when it comes to the interpretation of facts, whether in journalism or in history, there's no true objectivity and there probably can't be anything like true objectivity, and a lot of life is interpretation. A lot of life is picking and choosing which which facts you're going to focus on in order to interpret agree. But that's not the sound by society we live in. I mean, I think

is right. This is the struggle with my work, with your work, I think with being the country that we are is these are complex issues, but we want to be able to summarize them in very simplistic terms. And I think your example of Madison is a great you know, it's like I'm trying to complexify the narrative of history. And that's not saying we should hate James Madison and never talk about James Madison. It is to say, however, that our founders were human beings. They were deeply contradictory.

They both just like a drug dealer understands that selling drugs is wrong but has a financial, vested interest in still doing something that they know is wrong. That it's possible to hold contradictory views. In fact, most of us do. Most of us do, and that can be hard to have that complex conversation. Like even as I was saying that to you, I was just seeing the Fox News headline is probably going to run as soon as this

podcast posts, says Nicole. Hannah Jones compares James Madison to a drug dealer, like this is the society I'm telling you. I've spent the last few days with Fox News running NonStop one sentence of of a clip I talked about Cuba in an hour long interview, one sentence, you know, to make an argument against me. And this is this is the world that we're living in where very few people are wanting to verify. They're not interested in the

more complex, nuanced story. What gets, you know, through the fray of all of this information we have and disinformation and misinformation we have, are these tiny simplistic ways of saying someone hates America or someone loves America. Our founders were all good, or we're saying that they were evil, and it can be hard to do this kind of complex work and understanding that I think we're both working

towards in that environment. Thank you for that, And you know, if it'll add to their clip, I'll say that, you know, maybe Madison could be compared more to a drug addict and a drug drug dealer there so far as you know, he was born into the arms of an enslaved person, and an enslaved person closed his eyes when he died. His entire economic existence, the thing that enabled him to do the work he did for the country was based on slavery, and in that sense, he was completely dependent

on it. He couldn't do without it, And he also knew it was wrong at some level. I'm not sure Jefferson entirely knew that, but I think that Madison did know that slavery was fundamentally wrong and immoral, and the enslaving another human being was fundamentally wrong, and he went on doing it. I'm comparing him to a drug addict in that sense, who knows. I don't want to be on drugs, but I'm stuck on it, and you know what, I'm not going to not going to change my ways.

So people are complicated. I think I agree with you there, and it is a great challenge to contemplate our history and connect it to our future in the honest, acknowledgment that people in the past were deeply flawed and that people in the present, including us as well. And I want, I really want to thank you, Nicole for your extraordinary body of work and for your ongoing work in trying to complexify the way we think about our past, our present,

and our future. And congratulations on your new position at Howard, and congratulations to the students that you're going to have whom you're going to teach journalism alongside the journalism that you continue to do in the history that you continue to do. Thank you, Thank you so much. I really enjoyed this conversation. We'll be right back listening to Nicole

Hannah Jones. I was struck again and again by just how important and complicated the sixteen nineteen project is, and how thoughtful she is about the controversies that have arisen around it if you really think about it. The fact that the sixteen nineteen project appeared in The New York Times gave it a kind of institutional centrality to our American debate from the get go, because it appeared in

what is still broadly considered the paper of record. People who might have passed by this project altogether, either in support of it or in opposition to it, had it been produced in an academic journal focused and took it seriously. People who are attracted to the narrative of the sixteen nineteen project appreciated that the New York Times was willing to put its institutional prestige on the line by publishing something that had both historical and contemporary relevance and importance.

At the same time, people who were opposed to that narrative were particularly upset. I think because The New York Times stands for a journalistic objectivity, and if you wish to contest the historical interpretation that the sixteen nineteen project coalesces around, it's a lot harder to do so given that it did appear in The New York Times, which brings with it the association of journalistic objectivity than it would have been had these arguments appeared, as in many

cases they had before, in academic journals. Thus, the question of journalism's power was central to a debate that then quickly became a debate about another form of power, the power to set our national narrative. Who gets to do that. Politicians in state legislatures believe they should have the right to do that by determining by law what gets taught

in American schools about our history. Historians believe that they should have the institutional power to do that through their historical interpretation and through the work that they do in credential scholarly journals. And yet in reality, everybody who has a voice has the capacity to contribute to that national narrative,

and that includes journalism. In this sense, legacy media and The New York Times is the very essence of legacy media actually still plays a crucially important role, even in the age of social media, in defining who we think we are and in getting people to argue about that core question of who we are. A further theme that emerged from Nicole Hannah Jones's analysis is the theme of

objectivity and figuring out exactly what it means. Nicole believes in what she calls objectivity of method, where you try very hard to get the facts right, whether those facts are journalistic or historical. And yet the moment that we start asking which facts are we adducing to make a point, which facts matter, and what do the facts mean, we are, she says, out of the realm of objectivity and into

a different realm, a realm of opinion and interpretation. In her view, where you come from, what your sociological background is, those are important factors in determining what you end up thinking. If there was any nuanced disagreement between us. I think it may have been over how much of what we know about a person's point of view can be deduced

from those come from about the person. Finally, I think a key takeaway from what Nicole Hannah Jones has to say is that we do need to insist on getting the facts right. We shouldn't be relativists about facts. We should, however, be grown ups who recognize that interpretation is complex and that historical figures were complex. Plexity is for grown ups. If we can recognize that our foundation as a country grew simultaneously out of the impulse to liberty and the

impulse to slavery. If we can accept the reality that there were contradictions in people like James Madison and Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln, then we can realize that our own world is a complex one where we two are imperfect and we two are full of contradictions. Taking that on board may not be easy, but it is a crucial step towards being the kinds of grown ups we need to be as a nation to lead us into a better future. Deep Background is taking a two week

summer break. We will be back to you soon. With new and exciting episodes until the next time I speak to you. Breathe deep, think deep thoughts, and have a little fun. Deep Background is brought to you by Pushkin Industries. Our producer is Mola Board, our engineer is Ben Tolliday, and our showrunner is Sophie Crane mckibbon. Editorial support from noahm Osband. Theme music by Luis Gara at Pushkin. Thanks to Mia Lobell, Julia Barton, Lydia Jeancott, Heather Faine, Carlie Migliori,

Maggie Taylor, Eric Sandler, and Jacob Weisberg. You can find me on Twitter at Noah R. Feldman. I also write a column for Bloomberg Opinion, which you can find at Bloomberg dot com slash Feldman. To discover Bloomberg's originals later of podcasts, go to Bloomberg dot com slash Podcasts, and if you like what you've heard today, please write a review or tell a friend. This is Deep Background.