Homeroom with Sal & Nikole Hannah-Jones - Thursday, July 30
Hi, everyone, Sal here from Khan Academy. Welcome to our Homeroom live stream. I'm very, very excited about our conversation that I'm about to have with Nikole Hannah-Jones. But before we jump into the conversation, I wanna give my standard announcements reminder. That Khan Academy is a not-for-profit organization. We can only exist through philanthropic donations from folks like yourself, so if you're in a position to do so, please think about donating to Khan Academy @khanacademy.org/donate. I also wanna give a special shout-out to several organizations that have stepped up over the last several months. We were running at a deficit even pre-COVID, and then COVID hit and you can imagine traffic to Khan Academy has been almost three times what's normal. And so our costs have gone up and we're trying to accelerate a whole series of programs, including this live stream. So special thanks to Bank of America, Google.org, AT&T, Fastly, and Novartis. So with that, I'm super excited to invite or to introduce Nikole Hannah-Jones, a journalist at The New York Times, creator, leader, founder of The 1619 Project. Nikole, thanks so much for joining.
Thank you.
So there's a lot to talk about. And I wanna encourage anyone who's listening. You can go on the YouTube or the Facebook message boards, and we'll try to surface as many questions as possible to Nikole and myself, if it's interesting. But Nikole, maybe a good place to start is, what is The 1619 Project? And what is the significance of that year?
Sure, thank you so much for having me on today. So The 1619 Project, published a year ago in August, is a project that really examines the modern legacy of slavery. So it looks at all of these different aspects of contemporary American life and uses history to trace these various aspects of our society back to the institution of slavery and the anti-black racism that developed to justify slavery. So the main premise is that slavery was foundational to the United States and that almost nothing has been left untouched by that institution and our decision to be a country founded on both ideas of freedom and slavery. So 1619 is the year that the first Africans were sold into colonial America. It was in that year that a ship called the White Lion brought a cargo of between 20 and 30 enslaved Africans who had been stolen, and they were sold into slavery to the Virginia colonists. So that year marks the beginning of slavery in what would become the United States.
And it's fascinating. I mean, I've been reading a lot of what's been written and it's a whole, it's not just one article or one series of writing, it's even evolving into a kind of supplemental curriculum of sorts. What did you feel, or you and The New York Times Magazine feel, was the gap? What was missing in our public knowledge or the education system?
Sure, so I guess I should have said a little bit more about what the project consists of. The project is an entire issue of The New York Times Magazine. And that issue has about 10 essays written by writers and historians, and each one examines a different aspect of American society. So I wrote the opening essay that was on democracy. There's an essay on capitalism, on why we consume so much sugar, on why we're the only Western industrialized country without universal healthcare, on traffic. So really the key was we wanted to surprise readers who we have been taught. When you ask kind of what's that, what's been absent? The way that we're typically taught about slavery is kind of as an asterisk to the American story. That it was an unfortunate thing that we did, but it wasn't that big of a part of America, that it's more of a marginal story that we tell ourselves. And because of that, we've never really confronted what it means to be a nation that was founded in slavery and the ongoing legacy. So what we try to do with the magazine was, again, to show that whether we acknowledge that legacy or not, it operates often invisibly all across our society and it has these effects all across our society.
The project also included a special section of the newspaper, and that special section was done in partnership with the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, DC. And the special section is really a visual history of slavery using artifacts from the museum. And between those two, they were complementary because the magazine was really looking at the modern and ongoing legacy. And the special section was giving us the history that we don't get because we are just so poorly taught about this history. The Southern Poverty Law Center Research has shown that only 8% of American high school students even know that the Civil War was fought over slavery. So I think that gives us a good idea of how poorly we've been taught this. And then the final part of The 1619 Project is a podcast, and the podcast is called 1619. It goes over the course of five episodes, several of the areas in the project that we address, and the reaction has been really that people are very surprised by what they learned in this project. They realize how little we've been taught about an institution that has had such an influence on the society that we've become.
I have to admit, you know, I considered myself someone who's reasonably well-versed in American history. But the more reading I did, especially with The 1619 Project, the more I realized that yeah, I had a thread of the narrative but not the complete picture by any stretch of the imagination. You know, there's really interesting things. And I think even word choice is sometimes folks can get skeptical of all if you call something this or that, but you know, when you refer to plantations, I grew up in Louisiana, and obviously, we had plantations. People would visit, we would take family members down, take pictures, people have weddings at them. But you kind of call them for what they are: forced labor camps. You point out that the great majority of the framers of the Constitution owned slaves, many of them lived in homes, and they were continuing to perpetuate it. Do you think—I've always had at least maybe a rationalization in my mind, obviously, my family came as immigrants—but I have always been kind of an American exceptionalist, like look at the Enlightenment and the Declaration of Independence, how beautiful this is. There was clearly this amazing group of people who came together, and they were imperfect, but they created something that could become a more perfect union. Do you think that the framers of the Constitution or the founders of our country appreciated some of the hypocrisy or ironies or tensions and that maybe they were uncomfortable with them, or do you think it was just they compartmentalized their mind in this in a certain way?
I think it was both. Certainly, the framers understood the hypocrisy of arguing that they deserve to be liberated from Great Britain while holding 1/5 of a population in absolute bondage and chattel slavery. One of the things we hear a lot is we shouldn't judge people back then by today's morals and standards, but we should be clear. There was never a time when we did not know that it was wrong to own other human beings, to force them through torture, to work for you, to buy and sell human beings, to sell children away from their parents. There was never a time where we didn't understand that was wrong. And if you read the writings of many of the colonists at that time, for instance, Thomas Jefferson, he's really dealing with that hypocrisy. I mean, he writes that if there is a just God, America will pay for the practice of slavery, and you see that again and again. George Washington talks about being conflicted over this really barbaric practice. But the way that they dealt with it is really the way that we still deal with it in society. Now we justify it, we kind of fail to really grapple with what it means that nearly half of the Founding Fathers owned human beings, that the reason they had the wealth and the privilege and the education to believe they could break off from the wealthiest, most powerful empire in the world at the time, which was the British Empire, was because of the money and profit they made off of human slavery. And we want to downplay that because it is completely antithetical to the ideals of this country, and that founding hypocrisy, you know, if you look at the Federalist Papers, and you look at how James Madison, considered the father of the Constitution, they're trying to camouflage what they're doing. They are trying to both sustain slavery, but in their documents really erase slavery because they do understand that hypocrisy. And actually, Britain and those who were loyalists seized upon that hypocrisy when the colonists were making their case for freedom. And they were saying, well, how can you be making a claim for freedom when you're trafficking in human beings? And so a lot of people, when they read the Constitution, they'll say, well, the Constitution doesn't mention slavery. It does not, but that was very intentional. We all know that the 3/5 compromise is about how do you count enslaved people for representation? And yet you don't see the word slavery in that document. So they're doing this kind of sleight of hand thing, because what makes America unique is it is not unique that we engaged in slavery. Yes, it is true that slavery as an institution lasted, you know, it predated America by thousands of years, that many different cultures and countries practiced slavery. But we were the only country founded on ideals of unalienable rights of universal freedoms, that also was founded on slavery. We didn't just start practicing slavery at some point in our history. At our founding, we practiced slavery while we were saying that we were a nation built on freedom, and 10 of the first 12 of our presidents were enslavers. They forced people through torture to labor for them for free, that's not incidental, even though we would like to pretend that it is.
And you know, one of the things and some of the imagery in your writing I think is super powerful. And I think the imagery really matters. There's a part in your introductory essay where you write about Thomas Jefferson writing the Declaration of Independence, which you would imagine as this almost religious moment in our history, but he was waited on in Philadelphia by one of his slaves who was his wife's half-brother.
Yes, yes, so when we think about the way that we are taught history, what we are not taught, what is left out is just as important as what is put in that story. And so when you're brought up hearing the story of Thomas Jefferson writing the Declaration of Independence in Philadelphia, the fact is that yes, he owned 130 human beings on his forced labor camp in Monticello, which was built entirely through forced labor at the time that he's writing these universal words of freedom, some of the most famous words in the English language, most of us can say these words without even having to look at the paper, we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, endowed by their creator with inalienable rights. These are majestic words, but as he writes them, he knows that fully 1/5 of a population in the 13 colonies will be deprived of all rights, including his own family members. So yes, he brings his wife's half-brother, who is a product of a sexual relationship with his wife's father and one of the enslaved women that he owned—which of course, by the nature of slavery was a coerced relationship—and they own that. They own their own family members, which was a very common practice that enslavers would own their own children, as Thomas Jefferson did; they would own their own cousins. They would own their own nieces and nephews. And he brought his wife's half-brother to Philadelphia with him as he's gonna draft this document for the world saying why the colonists deserve to be free. An unfree man was taking care of him and making sure he was comfortable. So we have to ask ourselves, because the pushback of course, against The 1619 Project has been why are you rewriting history? Well, all of these are facts, but we've only learned some of those facts. And it is an intentional decision that we're gonna talk about Thomas Jefferson, but not about the enslaved relative that he brought with him or the 130 enslaved people who are back in Monticello creating the wealth that allowed him at the age of 33 or so years old to be tasked with drafting of the document that would allow us to leave the British Empire. All of these facts matter, but we're only taught some of those facts. And the project is attempting to unearth a more complete story.
And how do you know, as you just mentioned, it has been met with some critics, some of them very prominent historians. How do you reconcile? I have a reconciliation in my head, I'm happy to share, but how do you reconcile that? It seems like we're in this world where people think you either have to be ultra proud and think that your nation's founding story is perfect and holy in every way, or if you don't believe that, you're the cynic and you're embarrassed of your country. Isn't there a world where you can do both? You can be very proud of your country and where it's come from, but also know all of its wounds and know what all the healing that's left to be done.
Of course. It's been interesting because people have, some of the critics have said that The 1619 Project is anti-American. I don't understand how anyone can read my opening essay, which is on how black people, even though we were not even considered humans or citizens of this country, actually saw those words of the Declaration and the Constitution, believed in them, and fought to make them true. And how we actually have helped democratize America. That that is a patriotic essay that is not a project or an essay that says we should hate America, but we certainly have to be honest about where we came from. How do we explain why people are in the streets right now having to proclaim to this country that Black Lives Matter? When black people have been here for 400 years, if we don't understand where we came from, and if we don't understand that founding hypocrisy of what it means to be a country founded in chattel slavery and ideas of freedom at the same time, we cannot be afraid of that. I understand, and we all know that the way that we're taught history is really a nationalistic endeavor. It is, as any country, the history you teach yourself about your own country is one to uplift the narrative of who you are as a people and to really unite all of us around a common sense and shared sense of identity. But that's simply impossible without acknowledging the only reason black people existed in the United States is because of slavery. And so, because that is so inconvenient, we're largely just left out of the story altogether, but then you can't understand your country. You can't understand who we are as a people if you don't understand the entire truth.
Yeah, I mean, there's just so much even in your initial essay and much less than in the entire project. I mean, even this notion that were liberty from the British Empire, we kind of imagine this as this oppressive regime and they may have been oppressive in certain dimensions. Liberty without representation and taxing things like tea and whatever else, but they abolished slavery 30 years in their colonies, 30 years before we did. And they didn't do it by force, they decided to do it.
That's right. I mean, even at the time of the revolution, black people were picking sides and black people were picking the side where they felt they had the greatest chance of freedom. So lots of black people at the time of the revolution actually fought on and helped the side of the British. They didn't have loyalty to the colonists. They didn't have loyalty to the British; they had loyalty to freedom. So you have to, again, really think about what does that mean to be told a narrative of our founding? Which is that we were founded because we believed in representative government, that people should be able to rule themselves, that everyone should have a right to choose their leaders. And yet we were denying all of that to a large segment of the population here. There were lots of motivations for the revolution. Some colonists joined the revolution because the King had ordered that they couldn't take any more indigenous land, and they wanted more land. Some joined it because they did believe that people should have a right to self-governance. And some joined it because they were worried that the British Empire was going to take away their right to enslave people. So we just have to get past these very simplistic narratives that define our founding, that define our founders. And one thing that I always ask people who say, well, you know, slavery was bad, but you have to look at the whole person. How would you think of someone who bought and sold you or your children? Would you look for the good side of that person? Would you say, yeah, but look at all the other great things that person did? We have to think about that in that way. I took my daughter to Thomas Jefferson's Monticello right before the COVID shutdowns. We got a private tour, one that really focused on the enslaved people who built Monticello. And we go to the back of the house, and there's fingerprints in the bricks of enslaved children who were forced, instead of going to school like Thomas Jefferson's own children, these children were having to, through torture and the threat of violence, build and make the bricks that would build Thomas Jefferson's house. You can't ask us to ignore that. We just have to confront it and be honest about what that means.
No, it's very powerful imagery. It's so easy to just have a few sentences here and there. But when you really imagine those moments, generation after generation, family separated, bought and sold, tortured, 400 years of that, then it starts to sink in. And there's so much. I obviously want people to read, look at the whole project, but just, even in my research for this interview, some of the things that were just mind-blowing to me, Abraham Lincoln, I think for most of us—and I will say still—Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln are kind of these larger-than-life figures in America. And Abraham Lincoln seems to have been a very forward-thinking person for his time. But even Abraham Lincoln was not without issues. He asked a group of African American leaders that if they were liberated, that perhaps they should leave.
Yes, Abraham Lincoln, until a few years before his death, believed in colonization. He believed that black people were incompatible with white democracy and that there were too many hard feelings, and black and white people were too different. So the only way that black people could be free would be if they were to leave the United States altogether. Now keep in mind, of course, that black people have been in this country for hundreds of years. And also, through the process of slavery, had lost any connection to any other country. So there was nowhere for black Americans to go back to, even in the way of European immigrants. European immigrants all knew what country they came from, what language they used to speak, but black people lost all of that. So America really was our only country, and the man who we've all been taught to think of as a great emancipator—and he was a great emancipator—was a human being. He was a man who, like most white Americans at that time, believed that black people were inferior and he actually blamed black people for the Civil War. He actually says to those men, if you were not here, we wouldn't be fighting our white brothers in the South, as black people wanted to be in the United States and enslaved. So again, your reaction is the reaction we've gotten again and again to The 1619 Project—it's I just didn't know, I had no idea. And I think that troubling of the narrative is so critical because how do we address the ongoing inequality and the legacy of that if we don't acknowledge what actually happened? If we don't know what actually happened.
And I think if I say there's one theme of The 1619 Project which was really eye-opening for me, is when we learn American history, we look at, okay, some great words were written on the Declaration of Independence and in the Constitution, and in other kinds of supporting documents, Federalist Papers, other things like it. But we say, okay, but people were of their time, it was kind of a flawed history, but look, those words helped us evolve to become a more perfect union. And look at us, decade by decade, although to your point there were definitely some regressive moments, but it seems like we're getting better.
Well, we're not.
But to your point, we haven't evolved just because those words were written in the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution. It was a struggle for essentially Black Americans over the last 240 years since our founding to make those words less hypocritical or to make them all the ironies so that we get closer to the reality. I mean, I love this quote from your essay: "What if America understood finally, in this 400th year—so 400 years after 1619—that we have never been the problem, but the solution?" I thought that was a super powerful. And I'm speaking as an immigrant who kind of got benefits from the fruits of us becoming a more perfect union. When my family immigrated in the late '60s and early '70s, explain what you mean by never been the problem, but the solution.
Right. So if you do a Google search on the Negro problem, the black problem, you will find an unending number of articles, whether they be journalistic articles, social science articles, trying to resolve the problem with black people, what is wrong with black people? And I really assert in this project that there's nothing wrong with black people. There's certainly something wrong with a country that would enslave human beings for profit, and all of the statistics and data that we use to say that there's a problem with black people are perfectly predictable in a country built on chattel slavery. But when we think of the role of black people, we never think about that black people have actually been the primary democratizing force in this country. That ever since they read those words of the Declaration, they took those words literally. They didn't see them as some great ideas that looked good on paper. They actually believed that all men and women are created equal and that every human being is entitled to universal rights. And you see them using this language of universal rights before anyone else is really using it, even before the Declaration. So we think about this history, it has been black Americans, through bloody struggle after bloody struggle in the United States against their own countrymen, who have fought really to make those ideas true. The period after the Civil War, known as Reconstruction, which is this brief 12-year period where we see this large expansion of rights. We get the abolishment of slavery with the 13th Amendment, the 14th Amendment, which is the equal protection of the Constitution, and then the 15th Amendment, which says you can't deny people the right to vote because of their race. This all comes because of the organizing of formerly enslaved people to ensure equal rights for anyone regardless of race. And then you see that what we know as the civil rights struggle, which once again through the law is trying to end legal discrimination and force the country to live up to its founding ideals.
Today, we're burying one of the greatest Americans that this country has produced. And without someone like John Lewis and Dr. King and Diane Nash, we couldn't call ourselves a democracy, because this was a country that was going abroad and fighting fascism, fighting Nazis, fighting other countries to democratize them while brutally denying democracy to its own citizens. Even your own story, your family being able to immigrate here in the late 1960s, early '70s, is because of the black resistance struggle. Prior to 1965, this country had a racist immigration quota system, and it denied nearly all immigrants of color from entering the United States in order to keep the United States more white because of the civil rights movement. We passed the 1965 Immigration and Nationalization Act, and it ends that racist immigration quota system. That's when you start to see large numbers of Asian, African, and South American and Caribbean immigrants being allowed into the U.S. for the first time. And on top of that, when your family finally got here, because of the black resistance struggle, all legal discrimination was ended through the law. So you were not only able to come, but to enter into a country where it was no longer legal to discriminate against you because of your race or national origin. And this was all because of the black resistance struggle, but we're not taught that history that way. And we're not taught that history in a way that not only were black people fighting for their own rights, but they were fighting to democratize and make equal our entire country. Just the last point I'll add on that. I make this point in my essay: every other marginalized group, whether it be women, whether it be those who are disabled, whether it be gay Americans or immigrants, have all used the tools and the tactics and the rights expansions of the black civil rights movements to expand their own rights. And probably the best examples of that is when the Supreme Court ruled that gay marriage was constitutional. They used the 14th Amendment equal protection clause pushed by formerly enslaved in order to make that ruling. And when recently the Supreme Court ruled that it was illegal to discriminate against gay Americans in employment, they used the 1964 Civil Rights Act, pushed again through the resistance and civil rights struggles of black Americans to make that ruling. So when I made that sentence, I was simply arguing we are all taught. And I actually think for immigrants, that is part of the Americanization process, is to be taught anti-blackness, to be taught that black people are a problem, and you have to separate yourself from these problematic people if you want to succeed in America, when in fact we have been the equalizing force in this country. And what would it mean if we thought about black people in that way?
I think that's so powerful. I will say very openly, coming from an immigrant Asian community, the community does not realize this. I've gotten into arguments at Thanksgiving dinners, saying, you don't realize. And I think there's sometimes a narrative in immigrant communities, it's like, look, we came here, we just had $8 in our pocket, and look at what we did. Well, first of all, you were kind of creamed off the crop, cream of the crop, but in that country where you got the education, et cetera, et cetera. You came, you did not have 400 years of families being torn apart, being torn away from your cultural legacy, et cetera, et cetera. And then you were able to come to this country really on the foundation that you just laid. You're absolutely true. I mean, my father immigrated to this country in 1968. Exactly for the reasons you came, he came; he was a medical professional, and we had a shortage at the time, but if he would not have been allowed to come five or six years before that, and all of what applies around segregation and everything would have likely applied to my father, we don't know.
Absolutely. We weren't allowed. So I think a lot of the immigrant communities need to internalize how much of what we have has been built on this foundation. I do wanna make sure that we get to so many incredible questions coming out. So from Facebook, Carol Smith Kapur says, what is your reaction to Tom Cotton's assertion that The 1619 Project is going to lead to racial division?
We have a white nationalist president in the White House right now and for more than two months, we've had people marching in the streets trying to make the statement that Black Lives Matter. So we are in racially divided country already. We know that Donald Trump won with virtually all white supports. He lost the majority of black, Asian, Latino, and Native voters, and he has run on a pretty openly racist campaign. So when Tom Cotton says something like that, it's not anything that I take seriously. What he's really saying is if we actually tell the truth about our country, that is something that we can't handle as Americans. And that's divisive, but I don't think confronting the facts about who we are is ever going to be divisive. And in fact, you cannot heal a racial rift if you ignore what has caused it.
Yeah, and I'll just underline that. I mean, I'm confused by comments like that, because especially The 1619 Project, the way that it was done, it is really just knowledge and information about our shared history. And it's kind of like, I don't want to make, when you have a good friend, but there's something that's kind of inside of you. And one of them that they have a problem with, it doesn't help anyone to just sweep it under the rug. It's always healthy, any psychotherapist will tell you, it's healthy to say look, this happened, this is a reality. We need to talk about it. And I think that's all this project is, it's not saying don't be incredibly proud of your country, don't be patriotic, it's saying the most patriotic thing we can do is to really understand our good, the bad, the ugly. The same thing about your family. All of our families, we have great stories. We have not-so-great stories; we have to own all of them. And then we actually become a family, I think is really what's going on here. Maybe let's see one more question or one or two if you have time. From Facebook, Adrian T. White says, "As a black man in the South, I remember our elementary school teacher only gave us about one chapter about slavery and indentured servitude. And we didn't get to learn about our past. I even remember the publisher of our social studies book, Houghton Mifflin. How can we help neutralize some of the systemic plans to leave us out of the conversations? It's so empowering to know where you came from, and I'll just add, do you think this is intentionally done? Or do you think it's just kind of built kind of a momentum of itself, and it's unintentional, or it's kind of a combination?
I definitely think it's intentional. The history is available, so nothing in The 1619 Project that I just singlehandedly unearthed. We got everything from studying the history books that have been written about this. But when you think about, again, what is the role of U.S. history as taught in K-12 education? And it is to create a shared national narrative. So you necessarily are playing up the parts that glorify your country, and you're playing down the parts that do not. So you don't get very much about what happened to native people; you don't get very much about slavery. There's a great deal of discomfort with actually dealing with what that means. And I do think that's intentional. I talk about a lot how I took my first African American studies course. It was an elective course in high school and how transformative that class was for me, because in that one semester, I learned more about the history and contributions of people of African descent than I had learned in my entire education up until that point. And it's a very demeaning thing to be taught that the only contributions black people ever made is someone owned them, and then this great white man freed them. And then that's the end of your story. And so to have a different view of that, and a more full history—and I wish there could be a 1619 project for Indigenous people and their stories as well. And for Asian people, there's just—it’s the beauty of America is it is this great multiracial nation. And it was founded on these amazing ideas. We just fail to live up to them. And the most patriotic thing you can do is to fight to make those ideals real and true, not to ignore all of the failings. So I think one thing that we have done with The 1619 Project is we partner with the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, and they've created an entire free curriculum. And that curriculum is available at the Pulitzer Center, and teachers all across the country are using that to supplement the standard curriculum that they have to give students a broader perspective, but also just to teach them the question. So every time you're exposed to a narrative that you hadn't heard before, you don't have to believe that narrative, but it should cause you then to question, what are we taught and why, and what am I not being taught? And hopefully to seek out more knowledge, and Khan Academy is such a great stage for us to have this conversation, because that is exactly what you're built on, is helping people to seek out knowledge and different ways of understanding things. And that's what we're trying to do with the project as well.
That's so powerful, and maybe one last question. This is I think an interesting forward-looking question. For actually there's two questions here related from YouTube, AZ asks, why do you think people still have a racist mindset? And do you think racial equality will ever be possible? I was also asked, do you think Martin Luther King's dream will come true? And we will be, you know, race won't matter at some point, or will we be racially equal?
So those are two kinds of separate questions. Do I think that racial equality is possible? Yes, of course it's possible, because the racial inequality that we see is not natural, it's not inevitable, it was created and it's sustained. So if we chose to make a different choice, if we decided to put in the type of resources to undoing inequality as we did to creating it, then we certainly could get rid of it. But do I think that will do that? Well, you know, The 1619 Project is celebrating the 400th year of this struggle, and now the 401st year, and black people are still trying to fight to say our lives matter, that we shouldn't be killed by the police, black people are dying at the highest rates from COVID, black people have the highest rates of unemployment right now. The highest rates of people who are unable to pay their rent and mortgage because of COVID. So I don't think that if we are not willing to confront our past and then to do something very extensive to address the disadvantage that created this disadvantage, that we will ever achieve equal society. But we certainly are all charged with trying to help us get closer to the society that I won't say that our founders envisioned, but that our founders laid down on paper.
I think that's a very, very, very powerful idea. And it'll be clear something that we have to work for. Nikole, thank you so much for joining. I think just in the research for this conversation, I learned so much, and obviously, talking to you, that so much depth and texture. I really appreciate it. Thank you for all the work you've been doing. I mean before The 1619 Project, but especially The 1619 Project, I think is an important part of our collective education.
Thank you so much for hosting me.
So everyone, thanks again for joining the live stream. As you could see, a really powerful conversation with Nikole and The 1619 Project, I learned a lot. I thought I knew a lot about American history and my big takeaway here is if I continue to be confused why anyone would believe that learning more about our history would somehow polarize or somehow demean our history. It gives us more and more ownership of where we come from collectively. And so I think projects like this are not only important, I think they're essential. So thanks so much for joining, and I look forward to seeing y'all I think next week on this live stream. See you then. (logo chiming)