How America’s History of Racism Informs the Current Moment

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR: And so building on that, back in 2016, you wrote an essay called “The Grief That White Americans Can’t Share,” four years ago. What is that grief?

NIKOLE HANNAH-JONES, PULITZER PRIZE-WINNING JOURNALIST: We in this country, white Americans are raised to think of themselves as individuals, and they have been allowed for 400 years to be individuals. But black people are a collective. We are a collective, because, by virtue of being assigned the race of black, what we were and were not able to do legally, what circumstances we would live in, what schools we could go to, what neighborhoods we could live in, what jobs we could have were all constrained by our membership in a race. And, to this day, we see incidents. It doesn’t matter how much education you have. It doesn’t matter what type of job you have. You are treated — quote, unquote — “as a black person” in this country, which means your rights can be violated at any moment. And so we see this as a collective pain. These are not individual incidents of rogue cops. This is a continuing pattern of violence against black Americans. And even though I don’t know George Floyd, he’s like a family member. I know that what happened to him could happen to my uncle, it could happen to my cousin. And that is the grief I think that is very difficult for white Americans to feel. Maybe they have felt it in incidents like 9/11, where there was this kind of collective grieving, but that is our regular experience. That collective grieving for the desecration of black life is a regular, daily experience for black people in this country.