Last Updated on February 17, 2022
The founder of the New York Times’ 1619 Project and Pulitzer Prize winner wrote a letter as a sophomore, colorfully condemning all white people in a barnstorming screed to the editor in Notre Dame’s The Observer.
A common theme in recent weeks has been anti-white racism, following the Black Lives Matter-led backlash that ensued after the in-custody killing of George Floyd. Several opinion pieces promoted fallacious notions of so-called “white privilege” – which is now widely accepted as gospel to many.
Nicole Hannah-Jones wrote a piece titled “Modern Savagery” in 1995 where she accused the “savage” white race of being “the biggest murderer, rapist, pillager, and thief of the modern world,” in a letter exercising questionable historical understanding.
She claims that white people have “committed genocide against cultures that have never offended them in their greed and insatiable desire to control and dominate every non-white culture,” bolstering the claims within her letter.
“Christopher Columbus and those like him were no different then [sic] Hitler,” she goes onto add, before suggesting that Native American and Africans traded technological and harbored a mutual respect. Aztec pyramids and Olmec heads were allegedly a testament to their long-standing friendship.
Whereas the white race’s “lasting monument was the destruction and enslavement of the two people,” she writes, in stark contrast to Native Americans.
Hannah-Jones later goes onto accuse “savage” white people of causing the ailments within the black community. She claims: “the descendants of these savage people pump drugs and guns into the Black community, pack Black people into the squalor of segregated urban ghettos and continue to be bloodsuckers in our community.”
The recent Black Lives Matter protests and riots have made race relations appear fragile a few months out from the 2020 U.S. Presidential elections.
Some have called for restlessness and disturbances until certain unspecified demands are met. The topic of reparations has gained increasing attention in the run up to the Democratic primaries.
The lead essayist for NYT’s 1619 starts wrapping up by writing, “but after everything that those barbaric devils did, I do not hate them. I understand that because of some lacking, they needed to [sic] constantly prove their superiority,” she explains.
According to The New York Times:
The 1619 Project is an ongoing initiative from The New York Times Magazine that began in August 2019, the 400th anniversary of the beginning of American slavery. It aims to reframe the country’s history by placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of our national narrative.
Despite the age of the piece, anti-white literature is seemingly on the rise. The New York Time’s Sarah Jeong caused a stir over her hiring when multiple anti-white tweets were discovered.