>> When you are a white American, you don't actually know what it means to be erased, to never see anyone like you being an actor, in the literature that you read, in the museums that you go to.

And that erasure is really demeaning and it's really powerful.

♪♪ >> Hello and welcome to "GZERO World."

I'm Ian Bremmer, and today we take a fresh look at U.S. history and the role black people have played in it with a woman who is reshaping our national conversation.

When Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones published "The 1619 Project" a couple of years ago, not even she could have predicted its cultural impact.

And frankly, it's hard to think of another piece of modern journalism that's attracted such widespread praise while at the same time sparking such intense outrage.

And now her new book, "The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story," expands on her initial work.

Don't worry, I've also got your "Puppet Regime."

>> What in the name of God is this contraption?

>> But first a word from the folks who help us keep the lights on.

>> Major corporate funding provided by founding sponsor First Republic.

At First Republic, our clients come first.

Taking the time to listen helps us provide customized banking and wealth-management solutions.

More on our clients at firstrepublic.com.

Additional funding provided by... ...and by... >> Sometimes to fully understand American history, you have to read between the lines.

These are actual U.S. government pay stubs from 1794 and 1795 for construction work on two of Washington, D.C.'s most famous buildings, the White House and the U.S. Capitol.

But if you look closely, you'll see that the people being paid aren't the ones actually doing the work.

Take this voucher made out to James Clagett, who hired out his slave George to help build the president's house in 1794.

Pierre L'Enfant, who planned the city of Washington, attempted to hire workers from as far as Europe but found himself short-staffed.

So what did he do?

He turned to slave labor, leasing African-Americans like George from owners like Clagett.

And according to the National Archives, a list of construction workers for the Capitol building and the White House between 1795 and 1800 contains 122 names of African-Americans, the majority of whom, if not all, were slaves.

The fact that slave labor built the seat of modern democracy may not be news to you.

At the start of the Revolutionary War, about 20% of British North America's 2.5 million residents was enslaved.

Even Patrick Henry, who famously declared "Give me liberty or give me death," owned as many as 112 slaves in his lifetime.

But what if slavery was more than just America's original sin?

What if, like those slaves who built Washington, the institution of slavery was foundational to modern America?

That is the case that investigative journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones made when she published a large collection of essays, short stories and poetry.

It was called "The 1619 Project" in The New York Times in 2019.

This country, she argued, did not begin with the Declaration of Independence in 1776, as many of us, including me, were taught in school, but rather in 1619 with the arrival of the first slave ship to American soil.

Unless you've been living under a rock for the past two years, which given politics these days, actually kind of sounds nice, you know that "The 1619 Project" landed like a cultural atom bomb, and with it, the formerly obscure academic field known as critical race theory, or CRT, took center stage at conservative rallies and school board meetings across the country.

>> Teaching this horrible doctrine to our children is a form of child abuse.

>> I will do everything I possibly can to fight to the bitter end until you prove to me that you are not teaching my children that they are racist just because they're white.

>> Culture wars have political implications.

In the Virginia governor's race last fall, a Republican candidate running on essentially an anti-CRT education platform beat out the Democratic favorite.

So how did a piece of journalism named after a year in the 17th century spark one of today's hottest culture wars?

And what responsibility do we have to our children when we teach them American history?

My guest is the author herself, Nikole Hannah-Jones, and she joins me now.

Nikole Hannah-Jones, thanks so much for joining me today.

>> Thanks for having me on.

>> So I wanted to start a little bit with your own personal education.

When you talk about "The 1619 Project," so much of it is about how we learn and what we learn as a kid.

Can you talk a little bit about growing up yourself, what you learned from school, about black American history?

>> Yes, so I grew up in the '80s and the '90s, and I believe I had a fairly common educational experience, which was we learned a little bit about black people during Black History Month, usually the same four or five people -- Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglass, Ida B.

Wells, Sojourner Truth and George Washington Carver -- and then a little bit about slavery, largely because they had to discuss the Civil War.

And then black people pretty much disappeared from the story until the civil rights movement.

And there was really no African history.

Even though we had global studies, there was no really larger understanding of how Black Americans fit into the larger story of America.

And there certainly wasn't the teaching of black people as actors in the American story.

We were always kind of the asterisk.

When you are a white American, you don't actually know what it means to be erased, to never see anyone like you being an actor in the history, in the literature that you read, in the museums that you go to.

And that erasure is really demeaning and it's really powerful.

So when I realized that actually there is a ton of history, there's a ton of scholarship, there's a ton of literature, there's a ton of art that could be studied then I also realized that people had made the decision that this wasn't important enough for us to learn, and I determined that I was going to learn as much of it as I could.

>> Let me turn now to our history.

And, you know, you mentioned once that every kid in the U.S. knows the story of the Mayflower, but nobody knows the story of the White Lion, and I bet that a majority of the people watching us on this show right now don't know that story, don't know what that ship is, and I'd like you to tell us.

>> Yes.

So, "The 1619 Project" is named after the year 1619, which is when the first Africans were sold into the colony of Virginia and sold into slavery.

So your more astute viewers will know that the Mayflower Compact is 1620, and so this other ship called the White Lion that carried this cargo of human beings that were traded for food and other necessities that that came a year earlier but had been kind of completely erased from our national mythology, our national narrative and even the history we get in history books.

But I would argue as we do that that ship was actually more important to the country that would be built in some ways than the Mayflower.

So when we think about -- I have 11-year-old child.

She certainly has learned about the pilgrims.

Many American children are asked to dress up like the pilgrims and the natives, but by the time that happened, there were actually three racial groups on the continent.

And one of them gets erased and the other one's story gets erased, which are indigenous people.

>> I've heard you say before that slavery is a foundational institution on which the United States has been built.

What do you mean when you say that?

>> Yeah, I think it's inarguable.

If you just look at not just the facts of history, but look at all of the tensions, kind of the defining tensions of American life, the ways that we are exceptional to the world, a lot of that goes back to the date 1619.

So, when we understand that the first British colonists settled Jamestown in 1607 and just 12 years later, we have begun African slavery here, that means there's almost nothing older than slavery than African slavery in the original 13 colonies that would form the United States in 1776.

At the time of the Revolution, one fifth of the population in those 13 colonies are enslaved.

All 13 colonies engaged in slavery.

And then when we think about who are the kind of most important founders who drafted our Declaration of Independence, who was the father of the Constitution, who was the father of the Bill of Rights, who was the first president?

They were all Virginians who were enslavers, and we see an entire architecture of laws, of policies, of science and religion that is built up to justify slavery and to justify the fact that the wealthiest colonies in this country were the colonies that engaged in slavery.

>> It's beyond belief the wealth that was there, and of course, it was all built on cotton and all built on slavery.

>> Right.

And think about something like the Industrial Revolution.

What do we think that textiles were being made of in these northern factories?

It was enslaved-grown cotton.

When we learn about technological advancements and I remember being taught like we all are about the cotton gin, but nobody connects the fact that the cotton gin is what makes slavery extremely profitable.

Look at your Ivy League universities -- Harvard, Princeton, Yale.

They were all funded, to some degree, by money that was being made by enslaved people.

New York City becomes one of the most important financial sectors in the world because they are creating policies to ensure the enslaved, slave mortgages, collateralizing slavery and trading the commodities that are being picked by slaves, enslaved people, including cotton, sugar and indigo and rice.

So we've kind of tried to section slavery off as if it was just in the realm of the backward South.

But this was an American endeavor, and our nascent capitalism was really built on the institution of slavery.

So what we're arguing is it's just central to the American story.

We did not need slavery to be successful, but we chose slavery and that led to our success in many ways.

>> So to take all of this and bring it to the present day, I mean, I'm thinking about this election that we just had in Virginia that was so dominated.

The most important issue that voters were saying was critical for them to vote was education and specifically issues around critical race theory.

Why is it that something that's based in 400 years ago is so incredibly divisive and even in some cases dominant in political races today?

>> Well, because we, as Americans, are deeply, deeply invested in this mythology of exceptionalism.

You know, we we really are indoctrinated into this idea that these intrepid colonies broke off from Great Britain so that they could advance the ideas of liberty and individual rights.

And to believe in that, then you have to downplay the role of slavery.

You have to downplay how we have been plagued by racism and inequality from our beginning.

You have to ignore that one fifth of the population was enslaved when Thomas Jefferson wrote, "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal."

Our collective identity is really hinged on this idea that we are the freest country and the most equal country the world has ever seen.

But it's actually in defiance of that.

We are we are the most unequal of the Western democracies.

We're the only country where citizens don't have a right to healthcare.

All of these things are the legacy of slavery and the reason why -- you can call it critical race theory.

I call it these anti-history laws, this anti-history propaganda.

The reason why we saw the stoking of that was after we witnessed last year this massive effort to reckon with the legacy of slavery and voters really starting to say, "Well, we need policies to address this legacy of slavery."

Then we see this tactic to stoke white resentment to win campaigns, which is really the oldest wedge issue in the books.

>> After George Floyd, there was a lot more people of all different sort of backgrounds and races coming together to protest police brutality.

Why is it that it seemed like that was less of a polarizing issue for the country than critical race theory and "The 1619"?

>> George Floyd was one of the most barbaric things we could possibly witness.

And you see throughout history these inflection points where kind of the normalized violence that we just accept for black Americans, that something happens that's so egregious that it causes people to act.

I mean, you can look at Emmett Till.

Emmett Till became an inflection point for the civil rights movement not because it was unusual for black people to be murdered and lynched, but because it was so barbaric.

And that's what what happened with George Floyd.

I mean, we all basically watched a lynching on national television.

And yes, millions of people came out.

I looked at some data on this.

They say one of every 10 Americans protested.

And what was different about this was it was multiracial.

It was multi-generational.

It was happening in small white towns and big cities.

So in some ways, if you are a student of history, then you know that this white backlash that we're seeing was the most predictable thing to a big struggle for racial equality, that politicians can take advantage of the fact that, okay, we saw this big push.

Now, how do we divide these people who were finding common cause in black equality?

And you do that by saying, you know, we believe, you know, what happened to George Floyd was wrong, but it's gone too far now.

Now they're trying to make you feel like there's something wrong with your whiteness.

Now they're taking away your icons, they're knocking down your statues and they want to tell your children that your children are evil.

This has been, you know -- This backlash comes every time there is a movement for progress for black Americans.

It seems to have some success.

And so none of this is surprising.

>> You know, you put out a book like this.

It's obviously by virtue of the topic going to be a controversial book.

There's been a lot of criticism and some of the criticism is stupid and insane, and some of the criticism seems much more balanced and reasonable.

What's fair criticism of your book and this work as you would see it?

>> I think there's a lot of fair criticism, and I hope that people who read the book will see that we have responded to that criticism.

It's not -- You cannot create an ambitious, large project and think that everything about that project was perfect or above critique.

Every single historian's work gets critiqued, and valid criticisms are offered.

So, for instance, you know, I spent a lot of time doing additional research on the role of slavery in the revolution.

The argument is stronger.

I made sure the language was much more precise and much more clear.

Everything I've ever done, I thought, could be done better after publication, and I always read things and wish that I had had, you know, reached a higher height.

I think that if you are not that type of person, you are in the wrong field.

But I think the difference here was the criticism of this project was seen as disqualifying, not normative for the field, not a matter of interpretation, but that people were saying these facts are wrong and that people are saying that this journalism needed to be discredited, and that's not normal.

And I don't agree with that type of criticism because I don't -- it's not true.

And when people look at the book, there are more than a thousand end notes.

We cite our sources and every claim made in the project is based off of scholarship.

It might not be scholarships that is the consensus amongst all historians, but when it comes to black American history and slavery, consensus can be hard.

>> For me as someone who just works on global issues as opposed to the U.S., my most significant "gripe," if you will, is that the impression is that slavery is a much more uniquely American institution that I take away, where I mean, obviously there was a lot of slavery globally.

There was a lot in Latin America.

They have that experience.

>> We nod to that and acknowledge that.

But this is a project on America, and it's not arguing that slavery didn't exist anywhere else.

It is arguing that the type of slavery practiced in America and the Americas was unlike any other type of slavery that existed in the world.

And we also argue that there is something clearly unique about a country engaging in chattel slavery that says it was founded on ideals of individual rights and liberty.

And that was not Brazil.

That was not Jamaica.

That was not any of the islands in the Caribbean.

And the last thing I'll say, my response to this critique is, do we do that about anything else, right?

If I want to write a book on the American Civil War, how much do I have to talk about the fact that there's always been civil wars in the world and that civil war is not unique?

We don't expect that.

But somehow when we want to talk about slavery, we have to talk about how this is an old institution that everyone engaged in.

And I feel like that's a way to try to let ourselves off the hook for what we did.

This is a story about the United States and so we focused on the United States, but there's nothing in this project that even pretends to say that slavery was unique to America.

What was unique, though, I think, was the hypocrisy of America.

>> But when all of that is true, how do we take a curriculum like this and teach it in a way that is constructive and patriotic and allows Americans of all colors to feel like they are part of something that is important and that can be greater?

>> So I'm going to challenge the question because I don't think the role of education should be patriotism and teaching children to be patriots.

I think the role of an education and the role of history is to help us understand the world that we live in and how did we get here.

And that idea of patriotism is why the black story, the indigenous story, the Mexican-American story, the Asian American story has been erased because we don't think we can have a patriotic story if we have to talk about all the ways that we failed people of color in this country and failed to live up to those ideas, so I don't think that that should be the role of an education.

And in fact, I think the histories that we've been taught really render us incapable of understanding the world that we live in because we've been taught a history where we just believe things are going to work out, and they're not.

They work out if we make them work out, and if we don't, then we can do really, really egregious things in this country.

So to me, nothing in "The 1619 Project" and nothing in most curricula that teachers are teaching are asking white children or white people to feel individual guilt for things that they have not done.

Should you feel badly about slavery?

Absolutely.

When I study the Holocaust, I had nothing to do with the Holocaust.

I feel badly about that.

And I think that is a normal, empathetic human emotion in the face of tragedy.

I think we have to stop pretending that the teaching of these hard histories is somehow implicating Americans today.

What it is saying is you -- we are all living with the legacy of this, and that legacy affects you differently if you're a white American than if you're a black American.

And I happen to believe that children are able to engage with complex understandings and ideologies.

I understand the need for a kind of unifying narrative, but it can't be a unifying narrative if so many of the people in your country feel excluded from it.

I frankly think my opening essay for "The 1619 Project" is the most patriotic thing I've ever written.

I didn't even realize I had that much patriotism in me.

The only way that you can't see that as patriotic is if white Americans can't see themselves in the black American struggle because the Black American freedom struggle is a struggle to perfect the ideals of our country, and I think that's something we can all take pride in.

>> So given all of this and clearly there's been progress and not just progress in ending slavery, asking you today in 2021, as divided as this country is economically, politically, vaccines, you name it, what gives you the most hope?

>> Not much.

>> Oh, come on.

Don't do that to me.

>> We do have progress.

I was not born into a country that allowed racial apartheid like my father was.

But we also know that the wealth gap between black Americans and white Americans has been unchanged since the time that Dr. Martin Luther King was assassinated, literally unchanged.

The gap in income unchanged.

So yes, there's progress, but progress only occurs if we make it.

It's not natural, that saying -- "the arc of the universe is long, but it bends towards justice."

We either bend it or not, but it doesn't bend on its own.

So I don't...

I don't spend a lot of time worrying about hope.

I think hope is an action.

We either take the action to make the country what we want it to be, but hope alone isn't enough.

So to answer your question, I feel hope in my child.

And that's about it.

>> Nikole Hannah-Jones, thanks so much for joining me on "GZERO World."

>> Thank you.

♪♪ >> And now to "Puppet Regime," where world leaders are having a hard time getting into the holiday spirit.

>> Merry Christmas, everybody.

>> Don't you mean happy Christmas?

>> Not with these supply chain problems, it isn't.

Ha!

Anyway, it's time for our annual world leader Secret Santa.

Now, who wants to be -- >> [ Speaking French ] Uh-huh, it's a toy submarine.

Who did this?

>> That was I because, you know, it's all behind us, right, Manu?

>> You will pay for this, you miserable -- >> What was that?

>> You go next.

>> What the name of God is this contraption?

>> I believe in your language they call it a hairbrush.

>> What am I supposed to do with that?

>> Hey, America is back.

Let's move on.

I'll go next.

Let's see what we got here.

An empty box?

>> So you can clean out your desk when you lose next election, ha!

>> Oh, very funny, Vladimir.

Well, I'm going to blame you when that happens.

>> I know.

Okay, my turn.

Hopefully this is better than useless shirt I got last year.

Oh, how thoughtful.

A new way to accelerate decline of Western democracy.

Mark, you shouldn't have.

>> Just think of it as a kind of Meta gift.

>> Now it's my turn.

Hmm, a postcard from Taiwan saying, "I'm yours."

[ Needle scratches ] >> Hey, guys, that's not funny.

Who gave him that?

>> [ Laughs ] What do you mean, Sleepy Joe?

He's gifting it to himself.

>> "Puppet Regime"!

>> That's our show this week.

Come back next week, and if you like what you see or, you know, you want to find out what happens after "The 1619 Project" -- How about 1620?

We got that for you.

Check us out at gzeromedia.com.

♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ >> Major corporate funding provided by founding sponsor First Republic.

At First Republic, our clients come first.

Taking the time to listen helps us provide customized banking and wealth-management solutions.

More on our clients at firstrepublic.com.

Additional funding provided by... ...and by...