Mythology and Culture: Part 2: Subtitled: The Curious Case of Ida Bae Wells

Ida Bae Wells' Historical Boogaloo or Bringing Back Blaxsploitation?

There are two+ threads in my mind: the first is just sketching out the general social-mythological and cultural periods in America. The first post in this series, which has been edited after publication because I butchered the ending in shoving it out the virtual door, is in that thread. The second is trying to detail out just what happened and how these myths were formed and adopted. Thanks to the 1619 Project we might be able to start putting together a picture of just how a seemingly seismic shift can take place, and we can watch it happen in real time. Neat. Nikole Hannah Jones is the face, and she often looks like a literal clown¹. Her articles are riddled with inaccuracies but this is not a mistake². Unfortunately, the only tool I have is the internet and no training, so this is going to be more questions than answers.

The 1619 Project’s Replacement Mythology

This is curious: the main narrative drive appears to be that the United States’ gains are ill gotten because they are all, or mostly, derived from black slaves. This ignores indentured servitude (which seems a great deal like slavery when examined and when the contracts were abrogated and extensions due to things like - running away, mouthing off, etc), people who were taken off the streets in Britain and shipped to the plantations, and other things that make you question the particulars of history and how much that we accept as true is the whole truth, partial omission, or bald lies.

The re-centering of the Black, Foundational Black Americans, as the true heroes of America is interesting for twofold reasons. First is that it inverts the value-hierarchy from the wealthy-aristocratic and intellectual people who set the course of the nation such that ever-increasing ideas of equality of man would flourish to the mere labor while dismissing the industrial laborers and their conditions in the North. Labor is necessary, yes, but labor is not the driver of ingenuity and labor didn’t write the Constitution; nor did mere manpower re-found the nation in the Civil War where a singular man moved the nation to a no-longer voluntary association of states.

The second curious thing is that it is the culmination and perhaps apex of the oppressed victim identity as the source of power and a rewriting of history to make them secretly the reason the nation was able to become as successful as it is. There’s a Chicago Bureaucrat writing about ethno-narcissism and reinterpreting history and this parallels that thinking but appears to add in the elevating of the oppressed class into the highest good in the public eye.

The Person Behind the Project?

Nikole Hannah-Jones is a GenX Iowan, and even as a young girl she was writing for her high school newspaper. After high school she was accepted as a student at Notre Dame and enrolled in order to become a journalist. The story she provides doesn’t make sense - the claim that an elite university education would be required for journalism. Nor does her reason for floundering with Fs at first and then, miraculously, recovering when she switched to tutelage under a modern African-American history professor and changed to a major in that area (no journalism degree from ND). There are other curious things about her time at Notre Dame. What’s interesting is that some of her early writings are public, available at https://archives.nd.edu/Observer/ should you use some keywords. It appears she was involved in campus activism and engaging in trying to persuade the community from early on. If she was networking via her professor Pierce nothing seems to have come of it at the time.

She then went on to be a Roy H. Park Fellow³ (the Park who founded the foundation is deceased) at UNC for journalism⁴. The Park Foundation today reads as an NGO or major foundation-lite. They are not quite on the cutting edge of what the others are doing, and their scope is apparently much smaller. After this she goes on to work for the Raleigh News & Observer doing a community beat. All of it is currently behind a paywall, but it’s far from hard-hitting judging by the ledes.

Her next stop is at the Oregonian starting in 2006 where she is again doing community reporting and other light work - not investigative journalism which is her theoretical claim to fame. And we’re a decade into her career.

During her tenure at the Oregonian she receives a fellowship from the Institute for Advanced Journalism Studies which sponsors black, including mixed-race, journalists. Their website is uninformative, they are listed as a grantee from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation in 2008, and I’m not good enough to know when else, if ever. This is a little bit curious, especially considering that under the IAJS fellowship Mrs. Hannah-Jones then goes to Cuba in 2008 sponsored by that group. The articles themselves aren’t particularly interesting and repeat flowery propaganda about Cuban education, healthcare, and the glorious revolution. Is she sympathetic, did she just enjoy the free trip, or can she just be bought? Is this a Claude McKay story - a useful black face to advance an agenda with an audience who wants to assuage their conscience and change society at the same time?

Three years later, in 2011, she is picked up by ProPublica, and I am forced to assume this is where Nikole gets her credential as an investigative journalist. ProPublica is funded by a number of large foundations: Sandler Foundation, Ford Foundation, MacArthur Foundation, the Carnegie Corporation, the Knight Foundation amongst others. Even Sam Bankman-Fried, of the FTX money laundering group, manages to kick them some money.

She does do investigative work: it is all bent in one direction, a racially charged one covering housing discrimination and segregation by the same means, for three years starting in 2015. It is one note from a high level, but I can’t be bothered to spend an hour reading them to see if they’re interesting. Nevertheless, she won some awards for her work there and let’s assume it is significantly better than what was published before⁵.

We must assume that because she was hired by the New York Times in 2015, and the NYT has an outward facing reputation⁶ as a serious institution for journalism. Being a premier news outlet the NYT carries significant cachet and is looked up to by the elites of the our nation, or at least people who want to be thinking the same things as the elites and following their trends. The NYT is paywalled and therefore I don't read anything over there even though doing so would keep me abreast of what's coming down the pipe (that and the Atlantic and some others, though there's a plot twist about what's upstream of them coming soon).

She continues to focus on her milieu at the NYT: segregation, racism in modern America, and from what I can tell contributing not too much that looks novel, groundbreaking, or otherwise noteworthy. This work is so good, though, that in 2017 she becomes an Emerson Fellow at the New America Foundation which is a DC based thinktank currently pushing Open Borders, Climate Change, Open Borders for Climate Refugees, and other bleeding edge narrative concerns who receives funding from a vast constellation of Foundations and others including, but not limited to:

• Rockefeller Foundation

• Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation

• Ford Foundation

• Pivotal Ventures (??)

• Siemens Foundation

• US Dept of State

Their mission statement indicates that they invest in thinkers "journalist, scholars, filmmakers, and public policy analysts."⁷ This sounds a great deal like propagandists and people who can generate what to propagandize. Networking for the dissemination and publication of lockstep views and narratives?

Work that gets to broad audiences and changes the way we think. Voices that represent the diverse backgrounds and ideologies of the American community.

In 2017, lucky woman that she is, Nikole Hannah-Jones also receives a MacArthur Fellowship which is a cool $625,000-800,000 grant to pursue a project. As far as I’m aware, the details of what she pursues with this are unknown. However, that’s a significant sum of money for someone already employed by the NYT and receiving other funding. The MacArthur Fellowship program website reads much like the NAF one does in that it is clearly in the same wheelhouse of pursuing progressive programs and changes. If one were to survey who has received a MacArthur fellowship over the years one could note significant changes, and the person currently overseeing it certainly matches a type. The site also lists DEI values prominently at the top which is a further indicator of what they’re going to be pushing.

MacArthur is placing a few big bets that truly significant progress is possible on some of the world’s most pressing social challenges, including advancing global climate solutions, decreasing nuclear risk, promoting local justice reform in the U.S.

The MacArthur Fellowship criterion are interesting:

• Creativity (? is her idea new? most of her work seems warmed over)

• Important future advances based on a track record of significant accomplishments (she had won awards, but the work doesn’t seem stellar - even Pulitzers can be bull these days with a significant political bent)

• Potential for the Fellowship to facilitate subsequent creative work (interesting)

• Exercise for "betterment of humanity" (raising racial tensions is questionable on that mark)

• "Committed to building a more just, verdant, and peaceful world" strategy for fellow selection (imitates common positive language used to conceal what is antithetical to those things)

• 
  

In 2019 the 1619 Project is approved. Ostensibly it is completed and released eight months later. This is highly unusual because the 1619 Project involved quite a few people, and quite a bit of production including research and networking to find historians (remember, NHJ was a history major at Notre Dame) who fit the bill. The timing is fast, I would say it is too fast and the project was begun some time earlier and possibly in the shadow of, say a Foundation, and funded through a Fellowship. Maybe, I don’t have any way of proving it.

Nevertheless, we have a significant propaganda project released to the public in 2019. There is some backlash, yes, and historians deride the works saying that there are quite a few factual inaccuracies: but the Grey Lady weathers it and life continues on. Incidentally, the factual inaccuracies don’t matter, and they may not be the point: the frame has already started to move if you’re arguing nitpicks and you’ve lost the argument. I had initially thought that was the end of it as things were fairly quiet.

However, the accolade that rolls in for the 1619 Project is, you guessed it, the Pulitzer Prize in Investigative Journalism. The Pulitzer of late (always?) is clearly politically influenced and does not appear to be based on accurate reporting but on narrative conformance. This whole thing is starting to seem like a self-creating and enforcing superstructure which can promote whatever it wants and provide itself the veneer of legitimacy. This selfsame history major and racial interest journalist didn’t know who Thomas Sowell was when someone brought him up to her on Twitter. Thomas Sowell is a well-known figure who has written on topics that she herself spent time working on like racial disparities in America.

There are school programs adopting the 1619 Project as a guideline with curricula that were developed. This all seems quite fast, quite ready made to be shoved into public institutions at scale.

Then Disney announced that there was going to be a 1619 Docuseries. Disney is the juggernaut of the entertainment and media industry. More money, more influence, and the messages are still alive. Is this a throwaway one-off or is it going to be a part of a centralized drive and narrative web spun about us? What is the end game?

The New York Times recently published an article in support of, and pressing for, reparations. I certainly hope that reparations, paying ~10% of Americans money for something most American’s ancestors probably had nothing to do with, is the final goal. I know that can’t be right, though, because nothing is ever enough and the frog isn’t going to jump.

Why is she in the spotlight?

Cui bono?

1. Or at least an avid practitioner of aposematism

I feel like I’m in danger

2. All journalism is activism https://www.cbsnews.com/news/nikole-hannah-jones-ida-b-wells/

3

zzzZZzzzz

4. http://hussman.unc.edu/park-fellowships

5. https://www.propublica.org/article/ferguson-school-segregation is certainly wordier

6. Wait who tells us journalists are trustworthy anyway? Journalists? Hollywood via All the President’s Men?

7. https://www.newamerica.org/jobs/fellowships/