Cristian Farias:
This is it, the final episode of this season of The Bully’s Pulpit, Trump versus the First Amendment. Over the last 12 episodes, we have run the gamut, that many, many ways the current president is challenging our understanding of the First Amendment, the winners, the losers, the fighters, the folders. We began the arc of this series with Rümeysa Öztürk, one of the faces of Trump’s campaign of terror against international students who believed the war in Gaza must end. I’ve since spoken to a farmer who believes the government shouldn’t be allowed to purge climate science.
Speaker 2:
I see it as an attempt to control population in general. It’s horrible.
Cristian Farias:
To a civil rights attorney representing protesters who challenged border agents’ attempt to seize and search his phone.
Speaker 3:
Because I knew they weren’t going to be able to deny me coming into the United States. I mean, they can’t deport me back to Detroit where I was born. Big deal.
Cristian Farias:
To a public radio leader at a tiny tribal radio station in Colorado fighting to survive.
Speaker 4:
We’re unwavering in the work that we’re doing and that won’t change whether or not we lose public funding. We will move forward unwavered because our community counts on us.
Cristian Farias:
I spoke with Anna Gomez, a public official in Washington sounding the alarm about her agency’s own attacks on the First Amendment.
Anna Gomez:
The government is silencing dissenting voices and that’s a sign of weakness, not a sign of strength.
Cristian Farias:
I also spoke to a day laborer in Los Angeles organizing to protect his people from ICE.
Speaker 6:
It’s rough to be in the streets because day laborers are highly invisible, people deem them the symbols of the immigration system.
Cristian Farias:
To young scientists at Cornell advocating for the science that will sustain tomorrow’s world.
Speaker 7:
This initiative is one component of a larger cultural shift in academia that our generation of scientists is going to make sure happens.
Cristian Farias:
To a White House correspondent who knows exactly how the president’s attacks on his colleagues are harming democracy.
Speaker 8:
To me, the big scandal was that the rest of us didn’t rise up and say absolutely not when they did the Associated Press, and we should have.
Cristian Farias:
I also spoke with another public official in New York, wants to stop ICE from arresting people at their court hearings.
Speaker 9:
Once you start seeing families separated and people abducted, you feel like you’ve got to do everything you can to raise your voice.
Cristian Farias:
I connected with the president of a small liberal arts college who cannot, who will not stop speaking out against Trump’s attacks on higher education.
Speaker 10:
If people in my kind of position don’t exercise their right to speak out, it’ll be much easier to take that right away.
Cristian Farias:
Then, last week with a former White House counsel and law firm partner who knew exactly how unlawful and harmful Trump’s attacks on the legal profession have been.
Speaker 11:
Fundamentally, these cases are about the government using its awesome power to punish those who disagree with it.
Cristian Farias:
The First Amendment has been at the center of every one of these conversations, and I’ll never forget them. The Bully’s Pulpit is now part of the public record, something I’ll show my kids one day when they asked what I was doing during this chaotic moment in time. Preserving history, even terrible, shameful history is how we make sense of the world now and how we shape our future. Today’s show is all about that.
Our final episode is all about the meaning of memory, of our shared history, of the public’s understanding of facts and the world and how the First Amendment is implicated whenever the government tries to erase or suppress that information, especially when it comes to black history, racial justice, LGBTQ rights, and the broader struggle for a more perfect union to think through some of the legal implications of that, we have a very special guest with us. Emerson Sykes is a senior staff attorney at the ACLU’s Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project. By virtue of that work, I believe he may have some personal and professional ties to people here at the Knight Institute. He’s also been a podcast host for some time so I’m a little scared that he’ll try to turn the tables on me and make me answer questions. Emerson, it’s a pleasure to have you on the show.
Emerson Sykes:
Thanks so much, Christian. It’s an honor to be with you.
Cristian Farias:
Now, Emerson, let’s start a little bit personal. What made you become a lawyer and more specifically a First Amendment lawyer?
Emerson Sykes:
I think the moment that I can point to was as a kid, my neighbors were a South African family who had been active in the struggle against apartheid. And when I was a kid, I’m 42, so in the late ’80s, seeing student activists taking to the streets of Soweto, taking to the streets of all over South Africa to demand change to how they were being taught, to what they were being taught, and ultimately to the oppressive system that was controlling the laws and policies and social structures of their country, it was those moments that sparked in me a desire to participate in change and I was lucky enough to go to South Africa with that family in ’97 when Mandela was president. And to see what can happen when folks take up the mantle of change, especially students, was something that stuck with me throughout my career.
Cristian Farias:
I think I heard you on another podcast mentioned how also your father may have inspired some of your own journey as a lawyer.
Emerson Sykes:
So my dad has inspired me in many ways, sartorially truthfully I would say, but he’s inspired me in many ways. One thing that I learned after I joined the ACLU in 2018 was that my dad, who was an English teacher from Louisiana, had actually been one of the founders of a chapter of the ACLU in Shreveport, Louisiana, and he left the ACLU over the fact that the ACLU represented the Nazi’s right to march in Skokie. And so, it was only when I joined the ACLU in 2018 that he came back around and renewed his membership. So I have a deep family connection that I wasn’t even aware of to the ACLU, and not just to the ACLU but to ACLU First Amendment controversies.
Cristian Farias:
That’s incredible. And what a way to come full circle. Now, correct me if I’m wrong, but I’m a Latino legal journalist in a blindingly white field, and as a result I noticed these things. But it seems to me that there are very many Black lawyers such as yourself doing First Amendment law. Is that a fair assessment and why do you think that is?
Emerson Sykes:
It’s absolutely a fair assessment. I mean, on the one hand, it feels very lonely a lot of the time. On the other hand, soon after I arrived here, the ACLU was a very different place, but we were doing First Amendment cases representing all kinds of folks, civil rights activists, white supremacists, and everywhere in between. And so, the first Black lawyer to litigate First Amendment things at the ACLU was a very long time ago, and there have been many, so I don’t mean to overlook that long and very proud history, but we are few and far between, and I think that can be attributed to a lot of different factors.
Free speech over at least a lot of my lifetime has been equated with the right to be offensive and racist. Of course, that’s not all that’s covered by free speech and I think we are at a moment where both the right and the left have taken up the mantle of free speech in a way that wasn’t necessarily true. In 2018 when I came in here, a lot of what I was working on was convincing folks on the left and folks who care a lot about racial justice, that free speech is also their friend and that free speech is necessary to their activism because the First Amendment, as problematic as its history has been and its application has been, it includes a deep insight about those in powers impulse to abuse that power. The First Amendment is not going to fix racism, but we’re not going to fix racism without it.
Cristian Farias:
There’s this uncomfortable tension between doing racial justice work and doing free speech work. Classic example is defending the rights of the KKK to be racist and odious in public, to name one historic example. Can you speak to those very valid concerns without diminishing them both as a lawyer and personally?
Emerson Sykes:
I’ll say as someone who actually does this work who actually litigates First Amendment cases at the ACLU, we get very frustrated because some folks perceive us as only caring about the First Amendment rights of far-right Nazis, and there’s some folks who criticize us for no longer being willing to protect the rights of said offensive, obnoxious, racist people. And so, we get criticized on both ends and I think what really is the truth from my experience over the last several years, we take these cases, they’re not the majority, they’re not by any means the majority of our cases, but every so often they come up and they’re deeply difficult and we take these cases because there is a doctrinal line that we think is worth protecting.
That is easily said and much more difficult to do. When we take on these cases, I tend not to eat very well or sleep very well and I’m not my best as a parent or as a partner. And most often what we do in a situation where there is hateful or racist or homophobic speech that is nonetheless protected by the First Amendment and a government tries to crack down on that speech, we have continued to weigh in on behalf of the First Amendment rights of all people to be free of government censorship of their ideas.
Cristian Farias:
The First Amendment has been key to many huge civil rights victories. Many people don’t know that New York Times versus Sullivan, the Seminole free press case was at heart a dispute about publicizing the civil rights of Black Americans without fear. Likewise, you have cases like NAACP versus Alabama, which is also another huge landmark protecting the rights of free association of a central civil rights organization. Can you talk about this centrality of the First Amendment to the rights of Black and other marginalized people?
Emerson Sykes:
I mean, look, there are plenty of examples of Landmark First Amendment cases from this era, defending the rights of civil rights protesters, and we rely on those cases to this day, and I think it’s hard to imagine protests without a strong First Amendment, any social movement, including of course the civil rights movement. I think you cannot have any social movement, any social change without some protections. No one will be willing to take to the streets. And I think we have seen those erode over time. We have seen them be challenged again and again and again and we are definitely in a time where the right to protest, the right to speak, academic freedom, freedom of the press, right to access books, all of these things are under attack. And so, we rely on these precedents. We marshal all of these First Amendment precedents to counter restrictions from the government, whether that’s the federal government, the current administration or any state government, whether they be red, blue, purple, or any other stripe.
Cristian Farias:
Yeah. There’s another case from the 1950s, I don’t know if you’re familiar with it, One V. Olesen, a case in which the Supreme Court upheld protections for pro-gay writing. And one of the things this case did was to disentangle writing about homosexuality and obscenity. Now, in a way, this shows that the First Amendment has many dimensions that can be beneficial to different struggles for equality, not just Black equality, but also LGBTQ rights and other struggles for justice.
Emerson Sykes:
The history of in particular the ACLU, but many other organizations as well in defending gay rights, the right to protest, the right to participate in public assemblies, the right to privacy, the right to intimate privacy. There’s a long history. I’ve been litigating some drag protection cases under the current wave of anti-drag restrictions that we’ve seen over the last few years. But when we started digging into the archives, the first ACLU drag case was in the 1930s. We have been doing this work for a very, very, very long time. And all of that is to say there is deep First Amendment precedent. There is a long and rich history of defending these rights, but at the same time, they’re still under threat.
I don’t mean to ignore the reality of how challenging things are from healthcare perspective, from a bathroom perspective, names, all those sorts of things are really troubling. But we continue to think it’s important to fight for First Amendment rights, both to speak and to protest, but also to access reading materials because LGBTQ books and literature have been, I think, probably the prime target for book bans that we’ve seen over the last several years as well.
Cristian Farias:
Absolutely. Together with book bans, the impetus for today’s episode is that a lot of this history, a lot of these stories are important. They matter, they’re worth preserving. Yet we live in a time when the sitting president is trying to erase much of it from government websites, museums, from military academies, national parks, and other public spaces. Can you reflect on why this erasure of past struggles is a First Amendment problem? Because to a regular person, they may not think of it as the government erasing these artifacts and words as a First Amendment issue.
Emerson Sykes:
So to answer that, we have to say a little bit about the First Amendment. I know this is a Knight First Amendment Institute podcast, so everybody listening is likely a First Amendment scholar, but it’s worth repeating 1,000 times that the First Amendment only comes into play when you have government regulation of private speech. So when you ask why is this a First Amendment problem, the question is in what way is this a government regulation of private speech? And so, if the government is editing its own websites, as obnoxious and an affront to history that as that may be, to be honest, generally that’s not going to be a First Amendment problem because there’s no private speaker who’s having their speech restricted.
Now, if we start talking about museums and grants and any other ways that historians or writers or artists are having their speech restricted by the government because of what they want to say, that’s a potentially a First Amendment problem, that’s when we think about the speaker who’s being silenced. There is also a First Amendment right to receive information, and this is often thought of as a corollary right or a partner right to the right to speak, but as I have Frederick Douglass on the wall of my office and what he said was to suppress free speech is a double wrong. It violates the rights of the hearer as well as those of the speaker. And what we have also tried to litigate, and in some cases successfully, is the right of people to receive information without government censorship. So that includes in public libraries, in public schools, we’ve argued and many other fora. And so, to the extent that the government is not just changing its own messaging but limiting what kinds of messaging can be shared and received by others, then it becomes a First Amendment problem.
Cristian Farias:
Let’s talk about something as simple as climate science and let’s say this is information produced by the government that then gets disseminated and then all of a sudden the next government decides, “Oh, we don’t like climate science, we want to take it down.” Are you saying that the government can do that and there’s nothing we can do about that?
Emerson Sykes:
Absolutely not saying that, no. So listen, there’s whether something is a First Amendment problem and then there’s whether there’s anything else we can do about it. So let’s take the specific example of scientific grants and the ACLU is litigating multiple cases relevant to this idea. And in some cases, we can argue that if you’re banning grants on LGBTQ issues because they promote gender ideology, then that is a viewpoint-based restriction on otherwise permissible speech. So there could be a First Amendment argument that they’re actually trying to target the viewpoint that’s being expressed, even if that’s not the situation, even if there’s no valid First Amendment claim, what we have often seen is that the Trump administration has withdrawn these grants and changed these structures without following the normal processes. They technically do have authority to regulate federal grants to a large degree, but they have to go through the normal processes and it can’t just be a bald-faced effort to eliminate certain people or certain ideas from the public discourse.
Cristian Farias:
Obviously, with respect to grants and references to past racial justice struggles, there’s other things too that the Trump administration has been doing. They’ve been removing references to transgender people and activists and references to the Stonewall Monument in New York as well as on the National Park Service website. We’ve seen the administration now shortens the acronym from LGBTQ+ to include just LGB. They’re literally erasing trans people from a lot of these public-facing websites. We’ve seen the attempts to erase indigenous American history by scrubbing the history of Navajo Code Talkers from federal websites. Now, what authority does the government have to carry out these erasures? It seems like there must be a way to stop this.
Emerson Sykes:
This battle over our nation’s history, how we understand our history, who we include in our national narrative, and especially for my own work, how we convey our history to students in our K-12 schools and also in higher education, has been a point of contention for generations. Public schooling, public education has always been a place where people argue over what our history is and who gets highlighted within it.
The way I describe it is when I was a kid, there was not a ton of Black history in our curriculum. I didn’t see myself reflected in my curriculum, but it was more than in my parents’ generation. And what we’ve seen is a decades-long effort to provide a more inclusive and reflective curriculum, especially in our public schools, but also in private schools and also in higher education. And we’ve seen not perfect progress, but incredible progress in having a more research-driven inclusive and reflective curriculum.
And what we’ve seen more recently is the backlash, and we’ve seen an effort to re-whitewash our history. And this is done, I think, to score political points because it gets people irritated and nostalgic. But I think it also is extremely dangerous, because if we really are deleting chapters of history to fit a political narrative and beyond whatever claims we can successfully bring in federal court, which are always going to be limited, I think this is a problem for our democracy and for our society.
Cristian Farias:
Yeah, people can and should take action outside the courts to stop what’s happening and preserve it themselves. Now, one form of thought control in the current moment is Trump’s erasure of or attacks against diversity, equity, and inclusion as values worth believing in. All of these attacks strike at the Constitution’s guarantee of equality for all, but they’re also First Amendment issues. Now, this is not necessarily a legal question, but why and how should we defend DEI as a free speech issue?
Emerson Sykes:
I’ll focus in on the case that I’m currently litigating, which is challenging in some of Trump’s executive orders and their implementation and Department of Defense schools on military bases around the world. And these executive orders talk about gender ideology, which is basically saying that even implying that trans people exist is a lie. And also what they call DEI, which they’ve renamed discriminatory equity ideology as opposed to its original meaning diversity, equity, and inclusion. So we are right now litigating how these have been implemented in DOD schools.
So if you remember, it’s hard to think back to January of 2025, it feels like several years ago, but there was the flood executive orders in the first couple of months including banning gender ideology, banning DEI, banning these concepts in the military, banning these concepts in public schools. Now, a lot of people were alarmed that he was banning DEI in public schools. A New York City chancellor where my kids are in public school sent out an email immediately saying, “Nothing changes. We’re going to continue as normal.” And I think a lot of school districts reacted with a wait and see, because public schools are generally under local control except public schools run by the Department of Defense on military bases. They are directly under the control of the Department of Defense, but they’re in every other way normal public schools.
But what we saw was at the day after these executive orders, Pete Hegseth, the Secretary of Defense, issued memos canceling Black History Month within the DOD, re-emphasizing the bans on DEI and gender ideology and a whole host of other vaguely defined terms. And then within days, DoDEA, which runs the schools issued directives to begin pulling books and identified curriculum that might potentially include any of these ideas.
We sued in May. And in the course of the litigation, at first, DoDEA refused to divulge any information about what they were actually pulling from shelves, but students held walkouts long before the ACLU got involved. Students were holding walkouts and protesting the removals of books. They were seeing books disappear. Whole sections of the library disappear in their schools, and they were being told nothing by the administration of their schools or of DoDEA, more generally.
So we sued on behalf of several families all around the world, and over the course of the litigation, DoDEA admitted to pulling 596 books from the shelves, and we finally got a hold of the list after much litigation, and not surprisingly, it includes a variety of titles, heavily LGBTQ. One of my favorite books, Julian is a Mermaid, is on the list. A popular book about summer camp, which has one trans character called Lumberjanes was banned. A is for Activist, a kid’s board book, was banned. Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates was banned. The list of books is just staggering.
And so, what we’ve seen is that in some ways, these DoDEA schools are the canary in the coal mine, because they are under the direct control of the Trump administration and this is their vision for what they want to see in schools. They want Black voices eliminated, they want LGBTQ voices eliminated, and they want to control the narrative of who is allowed in polite society and who are cheered as the heroes. One of the things that was cut was Civil War biographies about a soldier who was born female but fought as a man. There’s no question about the historical record, it’s just a piece of history that they don’t want to include. They even banned parts of the AP psychology course on gender and sexuality. So students who were literally having to take the AP exam had their prep books banned. So it’s just staggering the kinds of things that we’re seeing this administration try to go after in their effort to whitewash history.
Cristian Farias:
Absolutely. Emerson, I’m curious, based on what you just said, what is the definition of DEI to the government or woke ideology whenever they’re pressed? Have they come up with an actual definition?
Emerson Sykes:
They avoid using these terms, and it really gets flipped around on us and they’re saying, “Oh, all we’re trying to do is fight racism and prevent discrimination.” What they mean, of course, is racism against white people and discrimination against conservative white Christian voices, this perceived discrimination. So what they’ve said is we must ban these Black voices in order to ensure the comfort of our white students. We have a case in Oklahoma which literally, it includes discomfort. You’re not allowed to teach anything that causes anyone discomfort on account of their race or sex. And this has been used to say all this talk about white guilt, all this talk about racism, institutional racism, implicit bias makes white children feel bad, and that’s a violation of their civil rights. It’s discrimination against them. And so, in an effort to fight racism and prevent discrimination, we are banning DEI.
Cristian Farias:
What would you say to a normal person who perhaps doesn’t think in terms of legal challenges or causes of action, the stuff that lawyers talk about, why should they care that DEI is under attack? What would you tell them to defend this value and other values irrespective of what the courts do?
Emerson Sykes:
The reason that we care so much is that the government is attempting to demonize people and ideas through this catch-all phrase. Any woman leader or Black leader who the administration doesn’t approve of is somehow a DEI hire. We are all subject to this type of attack. It is not just the diversity officers, it is not just those who are enforcing fair hiring processes. That’s what I think of or used to think of as DEI. This is an attempt to regulate what books our kids can read, what ideas we can share. This strikes to the very heart of our freedom as a nation in terms of our ability to express ideas that the government doesn’t agree with.
And especially this is dangerous because no one can even agree on the definition of this idea, but it’s being thrown around as a reason to limit all sorts of people, their voices, their participation. And so, even if it doesn’t feel like DEI or LGBTQ issues are front of mind for you, it’s important to pay attention to this sort of government overreach because anyone who has any daylight with this administration could be subject to the same treatment.
Cristian Farias:
Emerson Sykes is a senior staff attorney at the ACLU Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project. Emerson, it’s been wonderful having this very wonky and legal conversation with you.
Emerson Sykes:
Love wonky and legal. Good to be with you Christian, and thanks so much to everybody at Knight.
Cristian Farias:
One writer in the United States who has been chronically in the erasure of our shared history and the contributions Black people have made toward multiracial democracy is Nikole Hannah-Jones. Nikole is a Pulitzer-winning staff writer at the New York Times magazine and the Knight Chair in Race and Journalism at Howard University where she founded the Center for Journalism and Democracy. Nikole, it’s an honor to have you on the show.
Nikole Hannah-Jones:
Thank you. Thanks for having me.
Cristian Farias:
Before we start, and because this is a show about the First Amendment, can you tell me what the First Amendment to the US Constitution means to you?
Nikole Hannah-Jones:
What the First Amendment means to me is that our founders is deeply flawed as they were, understood that if you were trying to build a free society or put forth the documents for a free society and people had to have a right to assemble, to protest their government, to make their concerns heard, that you had to have a free press because that is what would inform the citizenry about the way their government was working that would expose abuses. And so, if you don’t have good information from an independent source in any country, then you can’t have people who are self-governing. And then, of course, the freedom to worship, which was one of the fundamental freedoms that those who are considered the official founders were seeking when they first decided to leave their own countries and come to North America. So the First Amendment is to meet the fundamental building block of a free society.
Cristian Farias:
Before we get even deeper, I want you to tell me about your experience earlier this summer visiting Mississippi. You went there with your daughter to a commemoration of the 100th anniversary of Medgar Evers’ birth, and you wrote an Instagram about what it was like spending time with these Black men who, as you put it, are older than our democracy and who endure so much trying to “democratize America.” What did you feel and why is it so important to preserve these stories and to honor this history?
Nikole Hannah-Jones:
Because our mythology is not served as well. Our mythology about this being the oldest continuous democracy in the world, I think helps us get to the point where we are in society right now, where because we believe that our democracy has withstood all of these pressures throughout time, that it’s got to be stronger than this current moment because it has existed for 250 years. Then, as we are losing it, we don’t understand that we’re losing it. So for me, to be in that moment with my child and to sit in a room and understand that my 15-year-old daughter is living within the lifespan of men and women who had to fight for the rights that were laid out in that constitution, these rights that we consider to be innate, that we consider to be foundational to this country, were not rights that were widely shared by the majority of the population.
And oftentimes because we think of the Civil Rights Movement as a Black rights movement and not a movement to actually democratize this entire country, then I think we have a very hard time holding in our hands the truth of what this country is. And that mythology in a moment like this, in this unprecedented moment in American history is actually quite dangerous. So those were the things that I was thinking about when I was there in Mississippi. Medgar Evers was born in the most thoroughly apartheid state in America and went and fought a war to free European people from fascism and came home and was killed in the war to free Americans from fascism by another World War II vet.
I just think that is important for us to think about and to understand the reality as painful as that might be for some people or as shocking is just the truth. And again, to be there with my 15-year-old child in the room with the men who waged that war also tells us how close that time was, that it is not despite the grainy black and white images something in the far-begone past that those people are living with us now, that lives with us now.
Cristian Farias:
You are one of the few people and writers who conceptualize of our democracy that way, that our democracy is barely 60-plus years old, and before that, we didn’t have a true democracy. And precisely now that we’re seeing all these rollbacks, we just saw the Supreme Court issue an order essentially questioning whether the Voting Rights Act is constitutional under the 14th Amendment. It’s mind-blowing to me. Now, since the beginning of Donald Trump’s second presidency, there has been a concerted effort on the part of his administration to do precisely that, to erase the executive orders or other actions, key civil rights gains in the past 60 years. There are obviously too many to name, but of all those actions, is there one that gets you or perhaps that hits close to home?
Nikole Hannah-Jones:
I think what stands out to me the most is the way that this administration is wielding the 14th Amendment and the 1964 Civil Rights Act against the people for whom it was created.
Cristian Farias:
Yeah, absolutely.
Nikole Hannah-Jones:
So it’s not just one thing. It is that he’s using these two fundamental laws that do not exist outside of the Black freedom struggle, and using them to dismantle everything that that 14th Amendment and the 1964 Civil Rights Act were created to address. And that’s why this erasure of the history is so important. You can only use the 14th Amendment against Black people’s voting rights, if there is no historical context to grapple with at all. Otherwise, it’s nonsensical. Those are the things that are, to me, the most dangerous in the moment that we’re in, that I think are going to have the most lasting impacts, by the way, not just for Black folks, which I think is often the case, is this framing that we have to help people understand it’s not just about Black folks. Every marginalized group in society has used the 14th Amendment to validate and vindicate their rights. So there’s going to be a lot of suffering because of this.
Cristian Farias:
In your most recent essay for the magazine, you write about how this Civil Rights Act wasn’t just a litigation tool, but it was an affirmative weapon to force compliance with civil rights by using the threat of funding cuts for any institution that was dependent on federal money that discriminated against people on the basis of race, sex, and other protected categories. Now, that threat of defunding worked so well for decades that deploying that weapon was rare, but now Trump is using it to go after colleges and universities on a range of issues, from anti-Semitism to so-called woke or gender ideology. In a way, it seems to me that the Civil Rights Act has been bastardized, and as crazy as this sounds, we may never get it back. Have you given thought to how we might go about fixing or reclaiming this crown jewel of the Civil Rights Movement? I know, it’s a big question.
Nikole Hannah-Jones:
The times feel so dark that it’s hard to see a way out of it. There is no opposition, there’s no real opposition to what’s happening. As I write in that piece where I say that we are entering a second nadir for race relations in the United States, what I say in there is that conservatives have been for years now saying they really want to overturn the 1964 Civil Rights Act. They see the ’60s as going too far and the ’64 Civil Rights Act, the Great Society programs that they would love to actually repeal it. That’s probably politically impossible. So instead, they can render it as such a weapon against its own aims that it is useless, and that’s what they’re doing. And yet, as you know, Christian, the opposition to how they’re wielding it has been so muted.
I was reading the Settlement with Columbia University, so they’re using the 1964 Civil Rights Act Title VI is a revision of that act that prohibits discrimination based on race, nationality, religion, gender. They’re wielding that and using anti-Semitism as the violation, but mandating that the university and all diversity programs and open up its books and show all the hiring data and all the admission data based on raise. And yet, we’ve seen no outcry about the ’64 Civil Rights Act being used to dismantle integration programs. So I don’t see any political will to try to return the understanding of the ’64 Civil Rights Act and this tremendous power back towards equity and integration.
I mean, these figures are astounding. Think how rare you’ve ever have seen a $200 million civil rights settlement. And part of the provision was I think $21 million for Jewish employees of Columbia who felt they had been discriminated against, in which the Trump administration said was the largest EEOC settlement in at least two decades. That’s astounding considering that we know the group that faces the most employment discrimination in the United States are Black Americans, that the people who report the most discrimination are Black Americans, and yet we are seeing settlement numbers unlike anything that we’ve really seen and no defense of multiracial campuses, of multiracial democracy of efforts to provide diversity and to ensure that students of color included no defense of that really whatsoever. And I think that makes it hard to see how we get out of this anytime soon.
Cristian Farias:
Rewinding a little bit, during Trump’s first term, when The 1619 Project came out, you yourself became a target of the president’s wrath. And at the time, we began to see a faint outline of a president directing the government to investigate a state education system and threaten to pull federal funding over any reliance on The 1619 Project. Now looking back at that period, which seems like ages ago, what do you make of it and what does it feel like to live rent-free in the president’s brain?
Nikole Hannah-Jones:
I was speaking out back then, so what we saw was Tom Cotton and Mitch McConnell put forth the Saving American History Act, which was a bill to try to federally defund any school district that taught The 1619 Project. That bill didn’t make it through Democratic controlled Congress at the time. And then, you saw a proliferation of those laws across the country, and of course everyone from Donald Trump to Mitch McConnell to Ted Cruz attacking The 1619 Project. And there was not a robust defense against those laws, which again, if we’re talking about the First Amendment, to have government attacking and trying to prohibit the teaching of a particular text, as far as we know, it’s the only time you’ve seen these sorts of bans around a single text. There was not a robust pushback, even from free speech organizations against that.
And I was clear then, it wasn’t going to just be about The 1619 Project. No matter what people thought about that project, that it was a test balloon. Power always looks to see what it can get away with. And of course, true enough, after the attacks on The 1619 Project, we saw the anti-critical race theory propaganda campaign. We saw all across the country the introduction of these divisive concept laws proliferated at the K-12 level. And then, you started to see the attacks on multiculturalism on college campuses and southern states forcing the closing of multicultural centers and banning what they call DEI and divisive concepts at the collegiate level. There just wasn’t ever a robust pushback against that.
And so, we’re here and I’m the least surprised person in America that we’re here. It was clear that this was where it was leading. How did it feel at the time? It felt extremely lonely. It felt extremely lonely to be a journalist and to see the silence of so many of my colleagues of free speech organizations as not so much me, I’m fine, but this work was dragged through the mud. And again, it wasn’t about the content of the work, it was about are we going to defend free speech or not? And people I think felt if they didn’t speak up, it would just be about this one work. Now, we’re having to live with the consequences of that.
Cristian Farias:
You said something very important there, Nikole, and that is that you felt lonely, but at the same time, in this absence of support, you’ve responded with more speech in the sense that The 1619 Project almost blossomed and bloomed and became a book, became all these other sub-projects related to it. And the lack of speech from others begat more speech from you and now The 1619 Project lives on and all these different media, which it’s fascinating thing to see. I’m curious as a reporter, did you ever feel this chilling effect on your own reporting from all these attacks from the White House and the broader conservative movement?
Nikole Hannah-Jones:
Never. Not for a second, because one, the people who were attacking me and this work and other Black writers who were writing about these issues, they have a fundamental misunderstanding of why we do what we do. And I have always seen myself in a tradition, it’s not just being cute that I pay homage to Ida B. Wells in my social media. I understood that I come from a lineage of Black writers who were determined to try as best as we could to tell the truth about this country, and that will always come at a cost if you’re doing it well.
I said being attacked by the President of the United States and being legislated against felt very lonely, but also it’s a badge of honor when it’s this President of the United States, because what that meant is that the work was having impact, that the work was seen as dangerous because of that impact, and that’s why Ida B. Wells was attacked by some of the most powerful white men in the world at the time because of that similar work, and that is the tradition of a Black journalist. So I knew I had to keep working in this area that in fact, the attacks came to make you afraid, to try to silence you, to make your news organization fearful of publishing you, to try to force you to pull back. In fact, I felt even more determined to continue to do the work that I feel that I was put on this earth to do.
Cristian Farias:
That’s wonderful to hear, Nikole. And for the listeners, what Nikole is referring to with Ida B. Wells on her social media, she goes by Ida Bae Wells on Bluesky and other places as a tribute to that great historic Black journalist. Now, we have a First Amendment right to receive information and ideas, but with this purging that we’re seeing of history, artifacts, and narratives that center the struggles of Black and other marginalized people, the Trump administration is trying to rewrite our shared history to tell a different story by the United States, and it’s the reason that Trump has tried to assert control over the leadership of cultural institutions, museums, even the Library of Congress. We’ve seen the book bans in military academies. What do you think this concerted effort does to current and future generations, to the ability to govern ourselves?
Nikole Hannah-Jones:
What we’re seeing is it is in the fundamental playbook of autocratic regimes. We know this, that taking control of cultural institutions, trying to marginalize and censor artists and thinkers, trying to really inhibit what universities are allowed to produce and what is allowed to be taught at universities, attacking the press, attacking information, trying to control how we get common understanding of our society through museums and monuments, that this is all part of a playbook and it is designed to control thought and therefore to control population. And it stands in stark opposition to democracy and a free society.
I recall, as I’m sure you do, and most of our listeners, that those lessons on democracy from grade school and middle school, when you’re taught about the marketplace of ideas, and in a free society, all ideas go into the marketplace and the best ones rise to the top. But in a oppressive society, you don’t want all ideas. And I’ve said again and again that if this administration, if these people believed they could make a stronger argument, if they believed accurate history was on their side, they would simply make that argument. So this comes from the belief that you can’t win in the marketplace, and so you have to then control what information is available. And that actually makes us all fundamentally less free.
We can look at the books that are being banned. When I was in college, I read Mein Kampf, it’s a repugnant text. Of course, it shouldn’t be banned. How could I understand how Nazi Germany could come to power if I can’t read those texts? And yet, you can go to a military academy, which these are adults, by the way, adults who can go to war and die for this country who have to now be protected from books about race, but not books written by Hitler. That reveals what these bans and what these prohibitions are really about, which is trying to control our national memory, trying to control how we understand our past so that you can pass restrictive policies for our present.
How we tell our history is always contentious because that collective memory is how people in power are able to shape our present reality. And that’s what makes this moment so particularly dangerous is voting adults right now are making political choices based on a curated history that doesn’t actually explain the present that we’re living in and therefore leads us ill-prepared to make electoral decisions based on the reality of the country that we have.
Cristian Farias:
There’s been litigation around some of these issues with the book bans and with the taking down of climate science data and other related erasure of public documents. But I’m curious if a civil society can do something to stem the tide or should we just assume that we’re toast for the next three plus years? I’m curious if you’ve thought of how we can respond to this moment.
Nikole Hannah-Jones:
Civil society is the last backstop at this point. So civil society must and can. And civil society is responding. I don’t know that the response is big enough for what we’re facing right now, but we know that there are folks who worked at some of these government agencies like NIH, CDC who are saving that data and have downloaded that data and are posting that data and trying to make sure that we have an archive of it. We know that there are people who are trying to make up for funding losses to our arts and other cultural organizations. We know people are founding after school and other types of programs to ensure that children are still gaining access to this literature that’s being banned from schools and histories that are being banned from schools. So I think civil society is responding. I don’t think it’s responding in the magnitude that is necessary.
So when you study societies that start to slide into autocracy, it is civil society that has to provide that resistance to what’s happening all across the government. But what we also know is that it takes a minute for people to really realize that it’s as bad as it is. I’ve been obsessing a lot about how will we write about this period 30 years from now? Because it’s so hard to see it when you’re in it, and most people are just going about their day-to-day lives because of what’s happening, hasn’t trickled down to the regular person yet. And the fear is by the time it does, reversing this is not going to be impossible, but it’s going to be really hard.
Cristian Farias:
Yeah, it almost reminds me of the tariffs where they’re really destructive to the national economy, but because the stock market is doing well for now and other things, we don’t see the long-term damage both to the macro economy, but also to our relationship with other nations and what that will do to the global order. And when the pain arrives, it’ll be really painful. Now, as a journalism professor, Nikole, what do you make of Trump’s assault on public media, the Associated Press, all these frivolous lawsuits against news organizations, and what do you tell your students about the brave new world they’re about to enter?
Nikole Hannah-Jones:
Yeah, again, it’s all part of a playbook. You have to be able to gain control or hobble media in order to hold on to this power. This is where people get an independent understanding of what’s happening. This is how people know what their government is doing and what are the impacts of what the government is doing. And so, public opinion is shaped more than anything by the media. So to go after not just public media. We’ve seen capitulation clearly of private-owned media, like you said, these frivolous lawsuits. That is all about narrowing the amount of information and controlling how people understand what’s happening. And so, ultimately controlling the political choices that people make. And it’s extremely dangerous.
All we have to do is think about if we change the name of the country and put in any of these countries that we consider to be unfree, Cuba, China, Saudi Arabia, then list out what’s happening. We would be very clear that this is dangerous and anti-democratic. And so, that is my fear. And I actually, through my center at Howard, my center’s called the Center for Journalism and Democracy. It was founded in the waning days of the Trump administration, or at least conceptualized because I felt that our profession was failing to really understand the dangers of our eroding democracy.
And now, we’re here and my center works for the consortium of nine historically Black colleges and universities to try to really build up explicitly pro-democracy investigative reporting. I don’t think we can, as journalists, clearly we can’t be neutral on democracy as we can see by what’s happening. And I just had a training with students who are taking an investigative course with me this fall across eight campuses. And what I told them, this is the time for such a time as this is why we become journalists.
So even though it feels again so dark, this is the moment when we are most needed, that this is the time to come into this profession with a determination to expose, to bear witness, and to make sure that Americans, and particularly those Americans who are most marginalized, understand what’s happening all around them in the way their government is being deployed against them. This is not a frivolous time for our profession. This is a time for our profession when we understand why there is a First Amendment and understand hopefully why we’re called to this profession.
Cristian Farias:
Indeed. Just the other day, I counseled a young student from Spelman College on how to enter legal journalism. And you bet I gave all the advice I could to pursue her dreams. Now, Harvard, Columbia, and other Ivy League schools suck all the air out of this coverage about how Trump is going after higher education. Yet Howard and other HBCUs haven’t been exempted from this damage all in order to comply with the president’s anti-DEI directives and other priorities. Now, what are you hearing from others on the ground at Howard regarding this moment?
Nikole Hannah-Jones:
It’s a frightening time, and not just specifically at Howard, but HBCUs are largely just waiting for the moment that Trump turns his target to them. They are the most vulnerable, for obvious reasons. There’s 104 HBCUs and Harvard has a larger endowment than all 104 HBCUs combined. They rely very heavily on federal support. And Howard is federally chartered, the only federally chartered HBCU in the country, which means a significant portion of its funding comes from the federal government. And so, while Trump has not really targeted them as of yet, and seems almost as if he takes some pride in the perception that he is a supporter of HBCUs, I think HBCUs are trying to plan for what could be the type of cuts that could shut them down and are just really trying to keep their heads down and hope Donald Trump remains distracted by going after these elite colleges.
HBCU, for your listeners, in case they don’t know, it’s a official federal designation for institutions that were founded to serve Black students before the end of racial apartheid in the United States, so prior to 1968. But there’s a lot of fear, a lot of fear. HBCUs for Black America are the engines to the middle class. They produce a majority of Black doctors, the majority of Black lawyers, a majority of STEM scientists, and a whole host of other areas even though they’re only 100 schools. So there’s a lot of fear, a lot of planning for what feels like an inevitability, but also an effort just to keep your head down and hope he doesn’t notice you right now.
Cristian Farias:
It’s interesting what you just said about HBCUs because Donald Trump signed this executive order in April seeming to throw his support behind schools like Howard. The executive order was titled White House Initiative to Promote Excellence and Innovation at HBCUs. It almost seems like a bait and switch, and I’m curious if maybe that’s perhaps giving school leaders a false sense of security.
Nikole Hannah-Jones:
I don’t think they have a sense of security. I think they are very clear that they’re vulnerable, but I think they have some hope that for whatever reason Trump likes, he bragged during his first administration, he’s bragged on the campaign trail for his second run that he was the greatest funder of HBCUs in the history of the country. He seems to take some pride for that, but for obvious reasons, HBCUs are extremely vulnerable. They serve a majority Black student population. Their stated reason for existing is to help Black students and those who descended from slavery in the United States to achieve and go out into these professions. You can’t see a grant at an HBCU that is not talking about race, that is not trying to explore and close racial gaps and racial disparities. That is the reason that these institutions exist. They talk about race in everything that they do. The entire campus is DEI.
To see simultaneously the Trump administration passing an executive order saying that he supports HBCUs and yet saying that diversity, equity and inclusion is illegal. That if you focus on race, if you talk about race, that you’re violating the 1964 Civil Rights Act, seeing them going after, for instance, medical schools at Johns Hopkins or at Duke University or Harvard or other institutions because they are trying to diversify their medical staff or because they, as I read the Johns Hopkins complaint filed by Stephen Miller’s law firm, America First saying that if you pay attention to racial disparities, that violates the ’64 Civil Rights Act because it is ideological and discriminatory.
That is what all of the programs and scientific research, not all but most at HBCUs do. This is their mission. I don’t think they’re naive at all about the danger, but what do they do? They cannot exist and function for the reason that they ever even came into the world. And for the students and communities they serve, if they’re not able to address race and racial inequality and racial injustice and racial disparities and try to produce Black scholars who go out into the world and make this country more equal. And so, it’s just a matter of trying to prepare as best as they can and waiting for that shoe to drop, which fortunately hasn’t dropped yet, but I think they all feel there’s an inevitability about it.
Cristian Farias:
Your essays don’t always prescribe solutions, but rather illuminate current and impending crises through a historical lens. Yet the current moment for many people screams for solutions. And what do you say to folks who may not see any on the horizon and are prone to despair? And maybe to help you think through that answer, what we need is not solutions in the public policy sense, but maybe something much deeper and structural. Some say we probably need a third reconstruction, and you mentioned the second nadir earlier, and I’m curious about what you think.
Nikole Hannah-Jones:
I often give a trite answer to questions like that, which is to say, I became a journalist so I could expose the problems, but it’s up to everybody else to fix them. My job is to illuminate, or as Ida B. Wells said, “The people must know before they can act, and there’s no educator like the press.” So I think the answers will be political for obvious reasons, but they must also necessarily be cultural. They must be social. We have to ask ourselves what type of society are we that five years ago, we had the largest protest for racial justice in the history of the world.
And now, here we are having twice elected a man who began his presidency basically on a white nationalist campaign of birtherism and calling Mexicans rapists. And we have elected him again. And now, he is using that power to dismantle not just everything that was discussed in 2020, but that folks have been working on for six decades. What country are we? And his support amongst the people who voted for him has not declined almost at all despite everything we’ve seen. So I think that yes, we will require a third reconstruction, but we have to then understand the ugliness that people had to endure for decades before we got our first and our second, that you get reconstruction comes after a tremendous tearing of the fabric of a society. It comes after destruction.
Cristian Farias:
Indeed.
Nikole Hannah-Jones:
Reconstruction is bringing back together what has been destroyed. It’s hard to already look ahead to the reconstruction when we’re in the midst of the destruction. And sometimes people will say to me, especially Black folks, our people have been through worse and we survive. And I’d just like to remind us how many people didn’t survive or how many people had to suffer even if they did survive, they didn’t survive whole. And we’re just at the beginning of that suffering.
And so, I feel like we want to move on to the repair when we haven’t even dealt with the crisis that we’re in. And that’s a very American thing, I think, that American optimism to always think progress is inevitable. It’s not inevitable, at least not progress in the way that I would like to see it. We are in a moment of great racist progress, of great progress for those who want to make our society more narrow and more stingy and more mean and more ugly. We’re in that sort of progress right now. And I think we need to just sit in that and figure out how the hell are we going to get out of this, and then we can figure out where the repair and the reconstruction comes from.
But what I was trying to do in this recent essay is to say we think that once we have established certain things in this society, certain rights, certain mores, that we can’t go back. And the history of this country, if taught right, shows us that we can, and in fact, we have, and in fact, we likely will. And we need to disabuse ourselves of this idea that there’s a line that we won’t cross. That’s not true. Whether or not the arc of the universe bends towards justice or bend towards tyranny is going to depend on us, and how we bend it and how we allow it to be bent, and now I don’t see it bending towards justice.
Cristian Farias:
Nikole Hannah-Jones. She is a Pulitzer winning staff writer at the New York Times Magazine and the Knight Chair in Race and Journalism at Howard University. Nikole, you gave me a lot to think about and it’s a sobering conversation, but I am so happy that you came on the show.
Nikole Hannah-Jones:
Thank you. So great to hear from you and talk to you. It’s been a long time.
Cristian Farias:
What a way to end the season of The Bully’s Pulpit. It’ll be forever etched in my memory. I really hope you, our listeners, carry it with you. Of course, the attacks on the First Amendment aren’t going away. Sadly, they’re only getting started and I expect them to continue until the end of the second Trump administration. One through line, one constant throughout this show has been how people and communities are fighting back. The show is not just about Trump. The show is about all of us. My challenge to you, pick one issue that we covered on our show, the defense of immigrant communities, press freedoms, funding for science and research, you name it, and join that fight. That’s the only way we preserve the First Amendment. Remember, the First Amendment isn’t just about free speech or just a litigation tool for lawyers. It’s about how we preserve our democracy, how we build the world we leave our children and future generations. That’s my sign-off. See you out there.
The Bully’s Pulpit is a production of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University. I’m your host, Christian Farias. This episode was written by me and co-produced by Ann Marie Awad and Candice White. Our associate producer for this episode is Kushal Dev. Fact-Checking by Kushal Dev, Ellie Fivas and Ella Sohn. Our sound engineer is Patrick McNameeking. Candice White is our executive producer. Our music comes from Epidemic Sound. The art for our show was designed by Astrid Da Silva. Thanks to Emerson Sykes and Nikole Hannah-Jones who joined us for this episode. The Bully’s Pulpit is available on Apple, Spotify, and wherever you listen to podcasts. Please subscribe, share, and leave a review. We’d love to know what you think. To learn more about the Knight Institute, visit our website knightcolumbia.org. That’s Knight with a K, and follow us on social media. Peace out.