Nikole Hannah-Jones: 'If we do nothing, they will co-opt our history and use it against us'

[Brexiter]

Count on Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones to pull white supremacists in hiding right into the light. Author of “The 1619 Project,” which asserts that “no aspect of the country” has been “untouched” by “years of slavery,” Hannah-Jones has become a favored target of conservatives seeking to ban books written by people of color in schools and detract from the racial justice George Floyd’s death sparked. In that effort, those who opposed the Black journalist speaking at an event to honor Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. called her a “discredited activist” who is “unworthy of such association with King.”

Hannah-Jones, however, has one thing going for her that her critics do not. Well, she has many, but we’ll just discuss the one. She knew what Dr. King was fighting for. Hannah-Jones tweeted on Monday: “So, I scrapped my original speech and spent the entire first half of it reading excerpts from a bunch of Dr. King’s speeches, but without telling anyone that I was doing so, leading the audience to think King’s words were mine. And, whew, chile, it was AMAZING.”

So, I scrapped my original speech and spent the entire first half of it reading excerpts from a bunch of Dr. King's speeches, but without telling anyone that I was doing so, leading the audience to think King's words were mine. And, whew, chile, it was AMAZING.

— Ida Bae Wells (@nhannahjones) January 17, 2022

Here are several excerpts from her speech channeling Dr. King: (Hannah-Jones notes that she swapped out “Negro” with “BLACK” so as not to give her experiment away.)

"For more than 200 years Africa was raped and plundered, a native kingdom disorganized, the people and rulers demoralized and throughout slavery the BLACK slaves were treated in a very inhuman form…”

“White Americans must recognize that justice for Black people cannot be achieved without radical changes in the structure of our society… The evils of capitalism are as real as the evils of militarism and racism.”

“The problems of racial injustice and economic injustice cannot be solved without a radical redistribution of political and economic power. A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.”

“The crowning achievement in hypocrisy must go to those staunch Republicans and Democrats of the Midwest and West who were given land by our government when they came here as immigrants from Europe. They were given education through the land grant colleges.”

“These are the same people that now say to black people, whose ancestors were brought to this country in chains and who were emancipated in 1863 without being given land to cultivate or bread to eat; that they must pull themselves up by their own bootstraps.”

"What they truly advocate is Socialism for the rich and Capitalism for the poor.”

"We know full well that racism is still that hound of hell which dogs the tracks of our civilization."

"Ever since the birth of our nation, White America has had a schizophrenic personality on the question of race, she has been torn between selves. A self in which she proudly professes the great principle of democracy and a self in which she madly practices the antithesis of democracy."

"The fact is, there has never been a single, solid, determined commitment on the part of the vast majority of white Americans to genuine equality for Black people."

"The step backwards has a new name today, it is called the white backlash, but the white backlash is nothing new. It is the surfacing of old prejudices, hostilities, and ambivalences that have always been there."

"The white backlash of today is rooted in the same problem that has characterized America ever since the Black man landed in chains on the shores of this nation."

“Whites, it must frankly be said, are not putting in a similar mass effort to reeducate themselves out of their racial ignorance … with each modest advance the white population promptly raises the argument that Black Americans HAVE come far enough.”

"...for the good of America, it is necessary to refute the idea that the dominant ideology in our country, even today, is freedom and equality and that racism is just an occasional departure from the norm on the part of a few bigoted extremists."

"If America does not respond creatively to the challenge to banish racism, some future historian will have to say, that a great civilization died because it lacked the soul and commitment to make justice a reality for all men."

"Why do white people seem to find it so difficult to understand that the Black people are sick and tired of having reluctantly parceled out to THEM those rights and privileges which all others receive upon birth or entry in America?"

"I never cease to wonder at the amazing presumption of much of white society, assuming that they have the right to bargain with the Blacks for their freedom."

The journalist said that after she read Dr. King’s words, an “uncomfortable silence” followed. “Then I read all the names that white Americans called King,” she said, listing “charlatan, demagogue, communist, traitor.”

Hannah-Jones tweeted that she told her audience of the more than three-quarters of Americans who opposed King at his death, while 94% approve of him now.

“I left them with this: People who oppose today what he stood for back then do not get to be the arbiters of his legacy,” Hannah-Jones said. “The real Dr. King cannot be commodified, homogenized, and white-washed, and whatever side you stand on TODAY is the side you would have been back then.”

When the speech was over, Father Pfleger, who had been been cheering me on from the crowd, whispered in my ear: That's what you call the "You Gone Learn Today" speech and I ?. Because, yeah.

— Ida Bae Wells (@nhannahjones) January 17, 2022

Hannah-Jones concluded her Twitter thread with a link to a Boston Review article about former President Ronald Reagan using legislation he signed to establish the holiday in honor of Dr. King on Nov. 2, 1983, to undermine the civil rights leader’s legacy.

“Reagan, who thought little of King, ultimately used the creation of a national holiday honoring King as a way to coopt his legacy, enabling Reagan ironically to oppose key civil rights laws in the name of aligning himself with King’s supposedly colorblind dream,” journalists Christopher Petrella and Justin Gomer wrote in the article. “In so doing, Reagan became one of the most successful proselytes of what sociologist Eduardo Bonilla-Silva terms’ colorblind racism,’ and Reagan’s frequent citation of King marked the beatification of King not as a champion of racial justice but of colorblind ideology.”

Hannah-Jones wrote:

"This is why the 1619 Project exists. This is why the decades of scholarship that undergirds the 1619 Project exists. Because if we do nothing, they will co-opt our history and use it against us."

“Dr. King was a radical critic of racism, capitalism and militarism. He didn't die. He was assassinated. And many, including (Reagan), fought the national holiday we're (now) commemorating. If you haven't read, in entirety, his speeches, you've been miseducated & I hope that you will”

The tweets were liked on Twitter more than 30,000 times.