An author of an infamous revisionist historic work that paints the United States as racist has blamed ‘anti-blackness’ for Donald Trump’s electoral success with Latinos.
Nikole Hannah-Jones, creator of The 1619 Project, made the remarks Wednesday in response to Trump’s win.
The president-elect emphatically beat Kamala Harris after being backed by 46 percent of all Latino voters – the most by any Republican in modern history.
The result has surprised some, as it saw Trump increase his share of the demographic substantially since his loss to Joe Biden, when he only won 32 percent.
Factors like inflation and policies surrounding the border are thought to be the blame, but Hannah-Jones – much like her writings in a work known for contentious views of US history – had a decidedly different take.
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‘Anti-Blackness continues to be a powerful force in this country,’ part of her response on X read.
‘And anti-Blackness cannot just be attributed to white Americans.
‘The shock about the significant increase in Latinos choosing Trump, with his anti-immigrant rhetoric, family separation policy, and insults of Latin countries, over a Black woman tells me too many people fail to understand that anti-blackness is deeply embedded in Latino cultures,’ she continued.
‘[The interests] of that very large, multiracial, multi-nationality Latino category are not and not ever been necessarily aligned with those of Black people.’
As for why, the 48-year-old New York Times staff writer said: ‘[It’s] simply because many white Americans do not consider them to be white.
‘This is why, as I argued in my essay on the colorblindness scam, that we must stop lumping all non-white people into a single “of color” group,’ she asserted.
The latter statement had come in reference to her 2019 anthology of essays and poetry, which has since spawned a picture book and support from the Pulitzer Center.
The post to X was one of several aired in quick succession by the author, as she, like thousands of others early Wednesday, sought to explain what had just occurred.
Others assertions given were that the US is a ‘multiracial democracy [that’s] less than 60 years old’, that institutional racism has been instilled in minorities by ‘large swaths of white Americans’ over that span.
‘In the face of shifting demographics where white Americans will lose their numeric majority, we see a growing embrace of autocracy to keep the “legitimate” rulers of this country in power,’ one snippet with nearly 5million views reads.
‘History teaches us that we are in a perilous moment.’
Another insisted ‘it was naïve to believe that if [Harris] avoided discussing her race and gender, that if she evaded so-called identity politics, that she would nullify the liability of being a Black woman seeking the presidency in a country where racism and misogyny are embedded in the culture.
‘This is a country that responded to a multiracial electorate sending the first black president to the White House with a *minority* of the white vote by electing an openly white racist man over [Harris].
Harris, she pointed out, ‘could have become the nation’s first woman president’, while also airing unfounded claims that Trump had run the ‘most racist, sexist, and xenophobic campaign in modern history.’
Hannah-Jones went on to insist that black Americans today boast different perspectives than those had to fight for their civil rights – pointing to their hesitance to put Harris in the Oval Office as supposed proof.
‘Black Americans vote like they vote not because they align with every single Democratic policy but because they understand this country with a clarity that can be challenging for people who have not had to live under apartheid in the US,’ she wrote.
She added how these people have ‘never known what it’s like not to be able to cast a ballot, not to have rights of citizenship, not to be protected by this nation’s laws’, and thus also don’t sympathize with illegal immigrants.
‘Black Americans know American fascism because they lived under it – and that understanding overcomes any other policy choices that they might otherwise vote on,’ she eventually concluded, seemingly pointing out how many Latinos are black.
‘Black people uniquely understand this nation, and how awful it can get.’
Within a few hours, the posts had drawn millions of eyes, while eliciting some strongly worded replies.
‘Nobody is anti-black,’ one responded within minutes.
‘We’re against morons with terrible ideas, like yours.’
Similar sentiments have been aired by several Latino-Americans since the results were released Wednesday, after Trump, during his first term, appeared to implement policies that seemed to target them specifically.
This included a ‘zero tolerance’ approach to illegal immigration, which saw some parents separated from their children at the southern border.
Harris and Biden did away with the policy after assuming office, and the migrant crisis, as a result, has continued.
During his revived campaign this year, Trump doubled-down on his anti-illegal immigration stance – saying earlier this year migrants were ‘poisoning the blood of the US’ at legal immigrants’ expense.
Latino voters from battleground states such as North Carolina and Pennsylvania – many of whom fled their countries of origin in search of a better life – appeared to take note, according to a recent Siena poll conducted by The New York Times.
It found that more than 40 percent of Latino and Hispanic voters continued support to build a wall, and saw 63 percent of respondents say they do not ‘feel like [Trump] is talking about me’ when he discusses policies surrounding immigration.
Biden’s – and therefore Harris’s – failures there further fueled their belief that something more must be done when it comes to deportations and border scrutiny, as seen from the pronounced turnout from Latino Trump supporters Tuesday.
The pair’s failure to address inflation also proved decisive, said experts like University of Houston political science professor Jeronimo Cortina.
‘Latinos were saying, “I don’t care what Trump says. I want to be able to pay the bills I want to be able to send my kid to college. I want to pay the mortgage, to afford a new car,” he told Axios Thursday of Latino voters’ mindsets.
‘I think this is really a story of the headwinds that were obviously too much to overcome for Democrats structurally (and) with the economy’ added University of Texas Rio Grande Valley’s Álvaro J. Corral, while conceding he was surprised by ‘the magnitude of the shift’ seen since 2020.
Many Latinos, he pointed out to the website, are in the working class, adding that despite recent advances in helping the diminishing US dollar, ‘even inflation that’s trending downward is still not good.’
Such ideas appeared lost on Hannah-Jones Wednesday, weeks after she took to X to promote a visually driven spinoff of her controversial, long-form work.
‘The 1619 Project: A Visual Experience publishes Oct. 22 and everyone who pre-orders from a Black-owned bookstore can get a set of these beautiful postcards of art commissioned for this volume,’ she wrote to her 669,000 followers in September.
‘Also: signed books are available. Details below.’
The 1619 Project, meanwhile, has provoked significant anger in the past – over author’s bold framing of things as far-ranging from the American Revolution to tipping in restaurants as being deeply rooted in racism.
Originally published in August 2019 by journalist Hannah-Jones, the project has since been criticized – especially by academics – for attempting to reframe history.
Following initial success of its inaugural essays in The New York Times Magazine, the project has since developed an educational curriculum supported by the prestigious Pulitzer Center, as well as a popular podcast.
In 2020, the board for the center’s famed Pulitzer prize awarded the 2020 Pulitzer for Commentary to Nikole Hannah-Jones, credited as the publication’s creator.
She founded the 1619 project with the New York Times in 2019, using essays, photos, podcasts and eventually a book and guide for educators that argued America was founded the year a group of slaves arrived in the country and not when independence was granted in 1776.
The writer has said she believes she received backlash to her project and the subsequent book because Americans are ‘all taught this history so poorly,’ referencing education on the plight of African and Asian Americans.