Nikole Hannah-Jones (‘The 1619 Project’) explains why it’s necessary to still examine how slavery affects American life [Exclusive Video Interview]
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Nikole Hannah-Jones knew that “The 1619 Project” was bound to get push back from conservative circles, but she didn’t plan on the outcry going all the way up to the President of the United States. “That’s why the project had to exist in the first place, is that we have not wanted to really grapple as a nation with how foundational slavery is to the country that it developed and how that legacy still shaped so much of our society,” she tells Gold Derby during our recent Meet the Experts: TV Documentary panel (watch the exclusive video interview above). The level of the orchestrated opposition to the project really came into focus for her during the racial justice protests that happened in 2020. “This idea of a 400 year struggle in America really became the lexicon of those protests that year as we saw monuments being torn down and really questioning about our founding myths.”
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Before becoming a documentary series on Hulu, “The 1619 Project” was first published in The New York Times Magazine and aimed to explore how slavery has had and continues to have an effect on every piece of American life. Hannah-Jones uses stories from her own family as well as those of others throughout the country to illustrate these points. The series is nominated for three Emmys this year: Best Documentary or Nonfiction Series, Best Nonfiction Picture Editing and Best Nonfiction Cinematography.
The main impact that Hannah-Jones wanted to have was making sure that Americans knew of the year 1619 in the same way that they know the year 1776. “I wanted us to grapple with what it means that slavery is one of the oldest institutions in the United States; that it predates the American Revolution by 150 years. That has been accomplished. People know that date.” Even with the attacks that people have leveled at the project, it still achieves the main impact she set out to make. “Even when Donald Trump was disparaging ‘The 1619 Project,’ that also meant that all of his followers also know the date 1619, whether they read a page of the book or they watch an episode of the documentary series or not.”
Hannah-Jones does find it tough to have optimism about where the country is going but does think that the project can provide something for people to draw from. “The power of ‘The 1619 Project’ is that it shows us that the reality that we all live in is not inevitable. That this is not the society that we have to have. That this society was created and if we know that then we know we have the power to create something else.” In the end, it’s all up to us as citizens to forge that path. “I don’t feel like we’re powerless in our society and that we should know that whatever our future is going to be in America and in the world, it’s the future that we choose.”
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