Tom's guest is the award-winning journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones, an investigative correspondent who covers race and social justice issues for the New York Times Magazine. She won the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for Commentary for The 1619 Project, a multi-platform exploration of the history of enslaved people in America. That series began last summer. Last Sunday, Nikole Hannah-Jones wrote the cover story for the NY Times Magazine, a compelling essay about reparations for descendants of the enslaved, called What is Owed.
Calls for reparations are not new. Ta-Nehisi Coates made a Case for Reparations in a controversial Atlantic Magazine essay in 2014. What is new is the multi-racial and multi-generational protests taking place in communities large and small across the country, and in fact, around the globe. In a recent poll, half the registered voters in the US said they support the Black Lives Matter movement. Given the ubiquity and intensity of demonstrations for racial equality, is now the moment when the calls for reparations will finally lead to sustained action?
Nikole Hannah-Jones joins us via Zoom.
