Systemic Racism Is an Invention; Serious Questions About the Pulitzer Prizes Won by Nikole Hannah-Jones

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"Systemic Racism" Is an Invention; Serious Questions About the Pulitzer Prizes "Won" by Nikole Hannah-Jones, The New York Times, and The Washington Post

by Gene Kizer, Jr.

On July 12, 2020, Mark Levin, on his show Life, Liberty and Levin on Fox News, said to Dr. Thomas Sowell, "You hear this phrase systemic racism, systemic oppression. You hear it on our college campuses. You hear it from very wealthy and fabulously famous sports stars. You hear it from media types. You hear it – first of all, what does that mean? And whatever it means, is it true?"1

Dr. Sowell answered:

It really has no meaning that can be specified and tested in the way that one test hypotheses. It does remind me of the propaganda tactics of Joseph Goebbels during the Age of the Nazis, in which he is supposed to have said that people will believe any lie if it’s repeated long enough and loud enough, and that’s what we’re getting.

I don’t think – it’s one of many words that I don’t think even the people who use it have any clear idea what they’re saying. The purpose is served by having other people caving in.2

Dr. Sowell is exactly right.

Ever since Barack Obama became a two-term black president, which would be impossible in a racist nation, the left has been scrambling to find racism and hate behind every bush. When they can’t find it, they invent it, and that’s what the charge of "systemic racism" is about.

For years now, the American public, made up of mostly good, decent people, have had to endure for 24 hours a day, seven days a week, the Nazi-type false accusation of "systemic racism," as Dr. Sowell states, because the left needs to tell the big lie and repeat it over and over: America is racist and needs to change into the left’s idiotic vision where the police are defunded and Democrat mayors in big cities allow crime against law-biding citizens.

All the riots and violence we have had in the past two months are not the result of an organic movement. They are the result of one thing and one thing only: Weak Democrat mayors allowing crime to happen.

Many of these Democrats (some aren’t evil, they are just incompetent) don’t give a damn about the good people who work every day and try to raise their families to be good people and citizens, the folks who love their country and serve in the military and respect law enforcement. Those people are racist hatemongers according to the left, cloaked in white privilege. The media are obsessed with it.

The left needs hate because it is not interested in ideas that benefit all Americans such as a great economy with unlimited opportunity for all to make money and succeed.

In fact, the left hates capitalism. They are mostly big-government socialists so that they can control everybody and everything. They want to give out the rewards and punishments.

The left hates the rugged individualism, the Horatio Alger tales of working hard and succeeding in a capitalist economy, of building a business. Remember Obama’s "you didn’t build that," though you did build it. You busted ass to build it. You maxed out your credit cards and went deeply into debt to build it. You didn’t need Obama. You will never need somebody as mediocre as Obama and Biden.

The left is invested in racist identity politics, in tribalism, in skin color. They have done the math and are convinced that non-whites have a higher fertility rate than whites. To those non-whites, add Hispanics pouring across the southern border, and the future will belong to the Democrats. All they will have to do is pass a bill legalizing illegal immigrants and instantly bring millions of new Democrat voters into the fold.

Nancy Pelosi’s House has already passed a statehood bill for Washington, D.C. which will give them two more Senate seats.

The possibility of being able to rule America forever as a one-party government has the left giddy with anticipation and in a white heat of desire. They know they can do this and now is the time. Even if they lose in four months, the future is still theirs. They no longer have to be civil. They can claim what they think is their birthright with violence and intimidation. That’s why they’ve got Antifa and BLM.

As long as they can keep black people and other non-whites on the Democrat Party plantation, they got this.

Hate and racism work so it is OK for them to hate everything about America’s founding.

Mark this in your diary because this is the first year in American history that the 4th of July is racist. Those bad old white people stole the land from the Indians, though the left never mentions that the Indians stole the same land from other Indians.

America was founded so white people could own slaves, says the left.

They don’t understand that slavery was not an end in itself. It was 100% economic. It was a way to get the cotton picked because the wealth and power of antebellum America was based on King Cotton. Cotton alone was 60% of U.S. exports in 1860 and the South controlled it all.

That does not excuse slavery in the least, but it does help explain it.

Besides, New Englanders had been making huge fortunes on slavery from the beginning. They brought all the slaves here, and the British before them. Northerners were slave traders all the way until the last nations on earth abolished slavery: Cuba, in 1886, and Brazil in 1888.3

In 1862, during the War Between the States, 54 years after the United States Constitution outlawed the slave trade (1808), Boston and New York were still the largest slave trading ports on the planet.4

The North shipped Southern cotton and got filthy rich in the process, and it manufactured for the growers of that cotton and made even more money through federal tariffs, bounties, subsidies and monopolies given to Northern business and industry by the Federal Government. No wonder Northerners loved the Federal Government. They were the "Federals" in the war. The South was providing employment, wealth and power to the North.

Southern money filled the federal treasury but three-fourths of that money was spent in the North. How long do you think Yankees would stay in a Union in which they were paying three-fourths of the taxes, but three-fourths of the tax money was spent in the South?

The left never mentions that blacks owned slaves too. One of the largest slaveholders in South Carolina was the famous black cotton gin maker, William Ellison, of Sumter County who owned over 60 slaves.

The left never mentions that slavery started with blacks themselves in Africa, the result of tribal warfare. Black tribal chieftains had their poor captives lined up in places like Bunce Island off modern Sierra Leone, and in the barracoons mentioned by the famous African American anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston in her book Barracoon.5

The left never mentions that slavery was dying out and would not have lasted another generation. Machines to pick cotton were on the horizon with automobiles, airplanes and telephones. Southerners wanted to do like Yankees and hire and fire according to business demands, rather than taking on the birth to death commitment of slavery.

The left wants you to believe that white people would have owned slaves to this very day. With that kind of narrative it makes hate a lot easier. That’s why Confederate monuments are low hanging fruit to them, even though those monuments were put up a century or more ago to honor war dead in a horrific war in which 750,000 people died, and over a million were maimed.6

Drew Gilpin Faust in her excellent book, This Republic of Suffering, Death and the American Civil War, uses the earlier statistics of 620,000 total deaths compiled by William F. Fox, and she writes that those deaths were "approximately equal to the total American fatalities in the Revolution, the War of 1812, the Mexican War, the Spanish-American War, World War I, World War II, and the Korean War combined."7 If you use Hacker’s statistics, you’d have to add Vietnam, both Gulf Wars, Afghanistan and the war on terror; in other words, deaths in the War Between the States were higher than all other American wars combined, with plenty of room to spare.

Faust says the rate of death "in comparison with the size of the American population, was six times that of World War II. A similar rate, about 2 percent, in the United States today would mean six million fatalities."8

Confederate soldiers "died at a rate three times that of their Yankee counterparts; one in five white Southern men of military age did not survive the Civil War."9

Faust quotes James McPherson who writes that "the overall mortality rate for the South exceeded that of any country in World War I and that of all but the region between the Rhine and the Volga in World War II."10

You have to ask yourself, would 94.3% of white Southerners, who did not own slaves, sacrifice that much so that the 5.7% who did could keep them?

Basil Gildersleeve answers that question for us. He is still known today as the greatest American classical scholar of all time. He was a Confederate soldier from Charleston, South Carolina. He sums it up nicely in The Creed of the Old South, published 27 years after the war:

All that I vouch for is the feeling; . . . there was no lurking suspicion of any moral weakness in our cause. Nothing could be holier than the cause, nothing more imperative than the duty of upholding it. There were those in the South who, when they saw the issue of the war, gave up their faith in God, but not their faith in the cause.11

The lie that Confederate monuments went up to proclaim white supremacy is easily disproven by reading any of the 40 year run of the original Confederate Veteran magazine. Every penny raised for Confederate monuments is in Confederate Veteran, penny by penny, and all of those monuments went up with pennies from school children, and such, in an impoverished region that suffered until World War II.

Talk about prejudice! How about the Yankee shipping differential that made it expensive to ship goods from the South to the North, but cheap from North to South. The shipping differential fertilized Northern industry but paralyzed Southern industry.

Maybe Southerners should dig that out of the past and start rioting and looting since that is the way to get what you want in today’s America.

Since the riots, nobody has stood up the mob. Anything the mob wants it gets. It got the 125 year old John C. Calhoun monument here in Charleston after the city was vandalized and looted by a violent mob on May 30th and Democrat mayor John Tecklenburg got in political trouble.

The Charleston Post and Courier, which is part of the mob, agitated to remove the Calhoun monument at the mayor’s behest. They made a hero out of the mayor for a few days but voters won’t forget that Tecklenburg destroyed a big part of Charleston’s history when he could have chosen the option to add another monument to celebrate some aspect of African American history.

That would have been inclusive and added to Charleston’s history but he chose destruction instead, and it was the most dishonorable, disgraceful hour in Charleston history. It was completely unnecessary because we had the monument debate a year ago and had decided to leave all our monuments alone.

One good thing about the destruction of Ulysses S. Grant’s monument. It proves the War Between the States was not fought to free the slaves because if it was, Grant’s monument would have been spared. I mean, the mob knows about these things.

Luckily, the New York Times’ 1619 Project will establish the truth of American history for us. The 1619 Project did have a rocky start when it claimed the American Revolutionary War was fought so the colonists could preserve slavery. That is an absurd proposition but that’s how Nikole Hannah-Jones, the 1619 Project founder, thinks. She has been called out on it but that doesn’t matter.

She won a Pulitzer Prize for Commentary for the 1619 Project and now Oprah is involved to give the project the "full Hollywood treatment":12

Under the deal, the controversial series of articles that sought to reframe American history around slavery will be adapted for the big and small screens – feature films, television series, documentaries, and various forms of unscripted content. Lionsgate will serve as the studio while Winfrey has come aboard as a producer.13

Hannah-Jones said last month it would be an "honor" if the murderous violent riots after the death of George Floyd "were remembered as the ‘1619 Riots’".14

Krystina Skurk writes that "The purpose of the [1619] project is to reframe American history by claiming that America’s founding is based on racism instead of equality and liberty."15 She goes on:

[O]ne of the project’s key historical claims, that the Revolutionary War was fought to preserve the slave system, had to be corrected . . . numerous renowned historians have criticized the project for relying more on an ideological narrative than on historical fact. Like Howard Zinn before her, Hannah-Jones chose a narrative and then bent bits and pieces of facts to fit into it.16

Skurk makes an excellent point when she writes:

It is fascinating that two of the most privileged women in America, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Hannah-Jones and media empire queen Oprah Winfrey, are advancing the claim that black people are still systematically oppressed. No reasonable person denies that there are still instances of racism and pockets of people with provincial racist attitudes, but to call fundamentally oppressive a country that has provided its citizens more opportunity than any society in history is nonsensical. Winfrey and Hannah-Jones’ own success are a testament that, although there might be obstacles, success in this country is possible for anyone.17

And, of course, Barack Obama’s election two times as a black president, regardless of how mediocre he was, proves America is not a racist country.

A Pulitzer Prize does not mean much these days.

The New York Times and The Washington Post both won one for "’deeply sourced’ stories were phony" writes Peter Lucas in the Boston Herald18 last year:

It was all a hoax hatched by anti-Trump, pro-Hillary/Obama rogues at the FBI and the Justice Department. Unfortunately for President Trump and the country, the Trump-hating left-wing media con job of collusion by the papers set the tone for the media outlets across the country. They tried to bring down a president on fabricated stories all based on questionable leaks and anonymous sources. It almost succeeded. And in retrospect, it might have brought down a lesser man, but not Trump, the counter puncher.19

He says "the two papers were able to jointly win journalism’s highest honor in 2018 for reporting as fact something that did not happen. And that was the hoax of Trump’s collusion with the Russians . . .".20

How could this happen! How could The New York Times and Washington Post win Pulitzers for reporting on something that did not happen?

They won Pulitzer awards because "the two papers control the board that makes the awards, that’s how. Talk about collusion."21

And corruption.

Look carefully at what’s going on with Nikole Hannah-Jones and The New York Times’ 1619 Project. The Pulitzer Center is "The 1619 Project’s official education partner."22

As The 1619 Project’s official education partner, the Pulitzer Center has connected curricula based on the work of Hannah-Jones and her collaborators to some 4,500 classrooms since August 2019.23

Highlights of the Center’s 1619 Project education work include:24

* Tens of thousands of students in all 50 states engaged with the curricular resources, which include reading guides, lesson plans, and extension activities.

* Tens of thousands of copies of the magazine were shipped by The New York Times and the Pulitzer Center to students and educators at K-12 schools, community colleges, HBCUs, and other campuses.

* Five school systems adopted the project at broad scale: Buffalo, New York; Chicago; Washington, DC; Wilmington, Delaware; and Winston-Salem, North Carolina.

Does this pass the smell test?

The Pulitzer organization gives The New York Times and Washington Post a Pulitzer Prize because, according to Peter Lucas of the Boston Herald, The New York Times and Washington Post control the board that gives out the awards.

Next up is Nikole Hannah-Jones of The New York Times who wins a Pulitzer Prize for the 1619 Project, while the Pulitzer Center is an "official education partner" and involved intimately with the 1619 Project.

Then, Oprah and Lionsgate show up and now there will be films, TV series and a host of other things that will go on in perpetuity that will generate millions upon millions of dollars across the country. The New York Times will make a ton of money and have the prestige of having founded the 1619 Project.

The prestige of Pulitzer Prizes unquestionably helps Hannah-Jones and her 1619 Project and The New York Times, every step of the way.

Tucker Carlson or Peter Lucas or somebody like that should look into these incestuous goings-on and report on them thoroughly.

It might all be perfectly fine, but it doesn’t look that way to me.