Nikole Hannah-Jones almost goes back to work

Nikole Hannah-Jones, author of the “1619 Project”, almost brought herself to lift a finger in defense of affirmative action — almost. She took to Twitter on Thursday to denounce the recent Supreme Court ruling striking down affirmative action. The anger was not strong enough, though, to make it worth picking up the pen.

Hannah-Jones tweeted: “Was going to write an essay about it, but why even bother. (Also, Clarence Thomas is actually irrelevant here. So thanks but no thanks)” The Wall Street Journal’s new editor-in-chief has criticized the work ethic of the paper’s staff, but clearly the New York Times is not much better — Hannah-Jones wrote her last piece for the paper in February 2023, which itself was the first in two years. 

Cockburn covered Hannah-Jones’s absence back in December — and it seems that not much has changed since. Her brief reappearance in February was to write a review of two children’s picture books about black history. Doubtless a strenuous task.

It seemed for a moment that Hannah-Jones would appear in the Times’s storied pages yet again to join the progressives’ assault on the US Supreme Court. After the court’s Thursday decision, she tweeted, “An elite, white majority determining after just 50 years of weak, half-hearted affirmative action efforts, that they are the ones to decide that enough has been done to address centuries of explicit racial exclusion against Black people is the most American ruling ever.”

If Hannah-Jones really thinks the ruling is so horrific, why not… write about it? Cockburn has a theory. This could be what happens when “wokeness” comes full circle: when you lose faith in America and its people, you no longer feels it’s worth the time or emotional labor it takes to convince others.