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When Global Truths Collide
Nikole Hannah-Jones makes case for reparations at the United Nations
On Juneteenth, the news outlet Democracy Now! produced a holiday special. Their audience was treated to a replay of the keynote address delivered to the United Nations on the International Day of Remembrance of the Victims of Slavery and the Transatlantic Slave Trade in March.
The keynote speaker was no other than Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones. Hannah-Jones was born in 1976. Her father is African-American and her mother is white of Czech and English descent.
Hannah-Jones revealed that her father was born in a shack on a cotton plantation in 1945 and her grandmother only had a 4th-grade education. Jones said her grandmother resisted Mississippi’s racial caste system by relocating north, so her children would not have to pick cotton their entire lives, and that the defining story of black people in America is not slavery but black people’s resistance to subjugation.
Hannah-Jones insisted that it wasn’t merely enlightenment ideas that brought slavery to an end but constant revolt from the enslaved. She highlighted how the people of the African diaspora resisted slavery at its inception, and, today, the descendants of slaves are resisting the systemic conditions that make them suffer the…