In 2019, the New York Times gave the star treatment to Nikole Hannah-Jones’s “The 1619 Project,” which averred that America is a misbegotten nation because it had its origins in slavery and the Founders failed to abolish slavery as they cobbled together their fragile coalition. For that reason, everything that America has ever done or achieved, every beneficence of blood and treasure it has extended to the world, every benefit to humanity it has created (including a citizenry with a hugely high standard of living and a planet of people desperate to cross our border), is irrelevant: America is tainted, irreparably and forever.
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The fact that her “project” bastardized American history (so badly that even leftists objected) and ignored world history (especially African and Muslim history) when it comes to slavery and the slave trade is irrelevant. The 1619 Project is now a part of multiple school curricula across America. The Democratic Socialists of America, most of whom are young, are an example of the fruit of that poisonous 1619 Project tree.
Despite achieving tremendous renown (and, indeed, power) for her work, Nikole Hannah-Jones is still angry, very, very angry. In a recent interview with The Meteor, a progressive, feminist media company, Hannah-Jones said that even reparations won’t save America from her endless wrath:
“Paying reparations is an admission of the crime. But it’s not an admission of the crime of a handful of bad apples or a few years of bad policy. It is the crime of the entire existence of the United States,” Hannah-Jones said.
One can’t reason with someone like Hannah-Jones. It doesn’t matter to her that welfare is reparations. Indeed, in the 1960s, many black men were reluctant to lose their dignity and value by handing over to the government the responsibility for caring for their families. However, they were told they were not receiving charity; they were being paid what they were owed (that is, reparations). Nor does she care that the South became impoverished for a century thanks to the Civil War, so the benefit that accrued from slavery was erased from the balance sheet. She’s also clearly unmoved by decades of affirmative action, which was also sold to Americans as reparations.
Those arguments won’t work, though, because Hannah-Jones has already made it clear that there is only one way to purge this original sin, and she uses Cuba as her shining example.
To understand what she’s contending, you must remember that Cuba, which was under Spanish control for centuries before the U.S. effectively liberated it with the Spanish-American War, had one of the cruelest slave systems in the entire Caribbean. As with all sugar plantations, slaves were routinely worked to death under sadistic circumstances.
Ironically, if one pays attention to living conditions in Cuba over the last several decades, unmediated by Marxist-colored glasses—that benighted nation, under the communists, still has slavery. This time, though, the slavery isn’t racial; it extends to the entire citizenry, with the government as both master and overseer.
That reality won’t work for Hannah-Jones either. In several interviews, Hannah-Jones has made it clear that she thinks the world of Cuba, seeing it as the standard-bearer for righting past wrongs. In a 2019 podcast, she explained,
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“Are there candidates right now or even just places that you think have a viable and sufficiently ambitious integration agenda, and if so, what is it?” [Ezra] Klein asked Hannah-Jones, who briefly laughed at the question while admitting not being an “expert” on race relations internationally.
“If you want to see the most equal, multiracial democ … it’s not a democracy — the most equal, multiracial country in our hemisphere, it would be Cuba,” Hannah-Jones replied, citing socialism as her reason.
“Cuba has the least inequality between black and white people of any place really in the hemisphere,” she continued. (Emphasis mine.)
The fact that the Cuban people’s “equality” means being equally miserable and impoverished isn’t a problem for Jones. It is enough that they live under the glories of socialism, which has, effectively, purified all remnants of colonial sins.
I’ve heard this song before. My father’s siblings were ardent German communists in the 1920s and 1930s. After the war, his sister found her way to Israel, where she lived for a few years. By 1950, though, she couldn’t stand it anymore. Israel’s soft socialism was inadequate. She was going back to Berlin…to East Berlin.
When people remonstrated with her, pointing out that she would be living among the same people who sent Jews to the gas chambers, Dad’s sister was unfazed. All past sins were forgiven. “Communism,” she said, “purified them.”
And there it is in a nutshell: For the hardcore Marxists rising within the Democrat party, the only thing that will rid America of the sins that make its very existence a crime is a complete Marxist overthrow of the government. Once these young Marxists and their Islamic fellow travelers are the masters and overseers of the new American plantation, and the citizens are the slaves, all will be well.
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