(CAMPUS REFORM) Harvard University hosted New York Times journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones for a virtual event, where she discussed the 1619 Project and said that her father’s patriotism “deeply embarrassed” her. The comment was made during a September 21 event where she spoke on the “pressing issues of race, civil rights, injustice, desegregation, and resegregation.”
In the interview, Hannah-Jones recalled that she was “deeply embarrassed” that her father, who was born on a cotton plantation and served in the military, flew an American flag in her family’s yard.
As she says in her Pulitzer Prize-winning essay, “So when I was young, that flag outside our home never made sense to me. How could this Black man, having seen firsthand the way his country abused Black Americans, how it refused to treat us as full citizens, proudly fly its banner?
“I didn’t understand his patriotism. It deeply embarrassed me,” she wrote.
