Twitter conversations with public intellectuals are rarely worthy of note, but a recent combative exchange I had with Nikole Hannah-Jones, famed mastermind of the New York Times’ 1619 Project, was symptomatic of widespread tendencies in left-liberal culture and brought up important issues.
Hannah-Jones is a spokeswoman for wokeness, the cultural phenomenon that, as I’ve written elsewhere, is brilliantly undermining the left and providing grist for the mill of the right-wing outrage machine. Historically, a crucial method of undermining the left is to divide the working class according to race and ethnicity, fostering resentments and enmity between groups of people who share economic and political interests. Accordingly, in a characteristic statement, Hannah-Jones tweeted that “it is Black people who are the greatest agents of democracy the United States has ever seen. No one see[s] this country with more clarity than Black Americans. It is why while so many other[s] falter, we always muster the courage to do what must be done.” Divide people by race, elevating some and lowering others, with the effect of undercutting interracial solidarity: that’s the way of the conservative and the liberal, not the leftist.
Regarding Hannah-Jones’s tweet, we may pass over the grandiloquent language, as if “Black Americans” (as a group) have never “faltered” and have “always” mustered the courage “to do what must be done.” Only one thing is worth noting here: this is explicitly the language of myth-making, of glossing over messy reality in order to
— source sublationmedia.com | Chris Wright | Aug 24, 2023