NYT ‘1619 Project’ Founder Demonized the ‘White Race’ as ‘Barbaric Devils,’ ‘Bloodsuckers’ in 1995

Nikole Hannah-Jones, the founder of The New York Times‘ “1619 Project,” showed her true colors in a racist letter to the editor of the Notre Dame University student newspaper, The Observer, in 1995. That letter condemned Christopher Columbus as “no different” from Adolf Hitler and demonized the “white race” as the true “savages” and “bloodsuckers.”

Hannah-Jones wrote to condemn a November 9, 1995 op-ed by sophomore Fred Kelly entitled “Natural law over multiculturalism: God bless Columbus.”

“What responsible editor would print an article that applauds and dignifies the white race’s rape, plunder, and genocide of a whole race of people? I find it hard to believe that any member of the white race can have the audacity and hypocrisy to call any other culture savage. The white race is the biggest murderer, rapist, pillager, and thief of the modern world,” Hannah-Jones wrote in her letter, published November 21, 1995.

“Europeans have colonized and destroyed the indigenous populations of every continent of this planet. They have committed genocide against cultures that have never offended them in their greed and insatiable desire to control and dominate every non-white culture,” Hannah-Jones, then a sophomore at Notre Dame, added.

“Christopher Columbus and those like him were no different then [sic] Hitler. The crimes they committed were unnecessarily cruel and can only be described as acts of the devil,” she alleged.

Hannah-Jones argued that “Africans had been to the Americas long before Columbus or any Europeans.” She advanced the theory that African cultures had crossed the Atlantic and influenced Native Americans, from the “pyramids of the Aztecs” to the “great stone heads of the Olmecs.”

“It was not enough for whites to come to the Americas and learn, they looked upon the native people as inferior and a people to be annihilated. Their lasting monument was the destruction and enslavement of two races of people,” she claimed. “Using Christianity as their excuse, the white race denied the native people their humanity.”

Hannah-Jones appears oblivious to the fact that Christians among the Spanish Scholastics and the Scottish Enlightenment condemned the mistreatment of Native Americans and blacks. She also attributed European diseases to “filth and uncleanliness,” apparently overlooking the dark history of the Black Death that decimated Europe in the Middle Ages.

“Even today, the descendants of these savage people pump drugs and guns into the Balck [sic] community, pack Black people into the squalor of segregated urban ghettos, and continue to be bloodsuckers in our communities,” she added. “Yes, it was Columbus that set the platforms for these racist American institutions. A devil calling someone a savage is like the pot calling the kettle black.”

Hannah-Jones concluded her letter by insisting on her own virtue and suggesting that the “descendants” of “these barbaric devils” “need to constantly prove their superiority.”

“But after everything that these barbaric devils did, I do not hate them or their descendants. I understand that because of some lacking, they need to constantly prove their superiority,” Hannah-Jones wrote. Addressing Kelly, the author of the November 9 article, she added, “Fred Kelly, I pity you for feeling that just because you are white and Christian, you can celebrate the destruction of another human being.”

Then, in a telling preview of the core of the “1619 Project,” she quoted Rodney King, the black man whose vicious beating from members of the Los Angeles Police Department triggered riots in 1992. “In closing, a famous American, who was beat down by members of the christian society, once said ‘why can’t we all just get along?’ Why? Because white America’s dream is colored America’s nightmare. To Kelly I say: It does not feel good to have your culture put under a microscope, does it?”

Is it any surprise that the Notre Dame sophomore who wrote that “white America’s dream is colored America’s nightmare” would later go on to lead The New York Times in a project to redefine American history, centering the founding on the arrival of the first black slaves in 1619, rather than on the Declaration of Independence in 1776? The woman who called “the white race” a group of “bloodsuckers” and “barbaric devils” helped launch a project that demonized white people as oppressors and fanned the flames of race riots.

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