After a year of increasingly petty spats with academics on Twitter and a significant correction after fact-checkers confirmed that a key thesis of the 1619 Project was erroneous, Nikole Hannah-Jones, the self-described “Beyonce of journalism,” won this year’s Pulitzer Prize for Commentary, for her piece, “Our democracy’s founding ideals were false when they were written. Black Americans have fought to make them true.”
“For a sweeping, deeply reported and personal essay for the ground-breaking 1619 Project, which seeks to place the enslavement of Africans at the center of America’s story, prompting public conversation about the nation’s founding and evolution,” the Pulitzer Prize board said of Hannah-Jones’s introductory piece for the New York Times Magazine series.
Some of the entries in the 1619 Project, such as historian Kevin Kruse’s exploration of racial segregation’s impact on traffic and attorney Bryan Stevenson‘s study of slavery’s role in our current prison system, are riveting and inventive historical reads. Hannah-Jones’s essay itself was certainly insightful and not remotely as anti-American as some of her critics charged. But it was indeed premised on a crucial error — one that was later revealed to be no mere historical oversight but intentional revisionism that corrupted the project as a whole.
Critics’ primary objections to the project were bifurcated. First, historians challenged the project’s narrative restructuring placing 1619, the first year enslaved Africans were forcibly pushed to American soil, as the birth of a nation created as the result of a revolution over a century later. It followed that their second gripe would be with Hannah-Jones’s assertion that colonial revolutions were primarily motivated by a desire to preserve slavery.
The first critique is arguably a matter of opinion, one upon which the Woodson Center’s 1776 Project was built. But the second was a matter of fact — one that Hannah-Jones defended with such reasoning and such highbrow refutations as this:
— Ida Bae Wells (@nhannahjones) February 19, 2020
Less than a month after this tweet, the New York Times was forced to back off of the braggadocio when a fact-checker that had worked for the project dropped a bombshell in Politico Magazine: Hannah-Jones was warned before the project’s publication that her claim about slavery as the cause of the American revolution was patently false.
Northwestern University historian Leslie Harris wrote:
Both sets of inaccuracies worried me, but the Revolutionary War statement made me especially anxious. Overall, the 1619 Project is a much-needed corrective to the blindly celebratory histories that once dominated our understanding of the past—histories that wrongly suggested racism and slavery were not a central part of U.S. history. I was concerned that critics would use the overstated claim to discredit the entire undertaking. So far, that’s exactly what has happened.
Only then did the New York Times finally admit to publishing an erroneous central claim — a claim evidently made with the full knowledge that it was indeed erroneous.
There’s no question that slavery is our nation’s original sin and one that ought to continue to teach us about our history. The notion of rediscovering its place in American history is a noble one, and the New York Times ought to deserve recognition for that attempt. But Hannah-Jones’s willingness not just to publish deliberate historical revisionism but to do so while also melting down during Twitter spats and with the intention of infusing her essay into our children’s education isn’t just journalistic oversight or laziness. It’s intentional journalistic malpractice.
This award is a very sad commentary on the state of the Pulitzer, which is apparently now awarded for political, and not factual, correctness.
