August 19, 2025
Nikole Hannah-Jones will not sit by and permit Jillian Michaels to unfold “dangerous nonsense” in regards to the painful realities of slavery.
Nikole Hannah-Jones is sounding off in response to Jillian Michaels’ current claims that “lower than 2% of white Individuals owned slaves.”
The 1619 Venture creator took to Instagram Aug. 18 for an impromptu historical past lesson in response to Michaels’s controversial statements throughout a current panel on CNN NewsNight with Abby Phillip. Based on Hannah-Jones, the instances are “far too harmful” to permit “dangerous nonsense” to unfold in ways in which legitimize “the erasure of our historical past.”
“I’ve to first state that the instances are far too severe and harmful for us to lend our platforms to dangerous nonsense,” Hannah-Jones mentioned at the beginning of her almost eight-minute video. “It’s merely irresponsible with all the pieces that’s occurring on this nation to have somebody as credentialess as Jillian Michaels on a serious community present legitimizing the erasure of our historical past.”
Hannah-Jones criticized the “right-wing framing” in Michaels’s Aug. 14 remarks, which claimed that “lower than 2% of white Individuals owned slaves” and that “slavery is 1000’s of years previous.” Earlier than breaking down the claims, the investigative journalist cautioned her followers that what she was about to share can be ‘loads.’
“You see, that is how numbers and knowledge, although technically true, will also be lies,” Hannah-Jones mentioned. “And because of this we will’t let dangerous religion actors set the parameters of the controversy or of our collective understanding.”
Whereas Michaels’ declare was “technically incorrect,” Hannah-Jones took it under consideration when making a modern-day comparability to the proportion of Individuals who personal social media or know-how corporations. Whereas solely a small quantity, Hannah-Jones famous the big affect they will have on America as a complete.
“It’s a tiny share. I’m uncertain if it’s even 1% of Individuals. And but nobody would credibly argue that social media corporations are usually not ubiquitous throughout American life, that they don’t play a serious affect on our political, social, and financial life in America,” she defined.
Earlier than bringing the trendy instance again to her concentrate on slavery, Hannah-Jones additionally famous how a lot of the house owners of main American tech corporations are “amongst the wealthiest on this planet and exhibit how a small cadre of tremendous rich males can have an outsized affect on American politics and tradition.”
“So if we wish to play the numbers recreation, the rather more necessary measure is what share of Individuals owned slaves? No. However what share of these in energy did?” Hannah-Jones mentioned.
Hannah-Jones countered Michaels’s remarks with historic proof, stating that a number of U.S. presidents, members of Congress, Supreme Court docket justices, and even each determine featured on American forex had been enslavers. She additionally highlighted how cotton, produced by means of slave labor, accounted for half of U.S. exports on the time, and the way rich white enslavers constructed banks and companies on the backs of slavery.
By the Civil Battle, the U.S. held the most important enslaved inhabitants on this planet. Hannah-Jones argued that Michaels’s try to attenuate these truths disregards the lived experiences of enslaved folks and their descendants and undermines an trustworthy acknowledgment of America’s historical past.
“That is merely plain. With out slavery, our nation can be unrecognizable to us. We can’t allow them to select the parameters of the dialog in an effort to obfuscate the reality. That’s disinformation,” Hannah-Jones mentioned.
“And the instances are too severe for us to proliferate a simplistic, unsophisticated, and infantile understanding of the historical past of slavery in america as a result of they’re utilizing this mythology to justify erasing our historical past as a result of they wish to erase our rights.”
Her video response got here simply days after Michaels appeared on CNN, the place she defended Donald Trump’s name for a evaluation of Smithsonian reveals to make sure they “have a good time American exceptionalism, take away divisive or partisan narratives, and restore confidence in our shared cultural establishments.” Michaels argued that many U.S. museum reveals unfairly hyperlink “imperialism, racism, and slavery to only one race.”
Hannah-Jones, nonetheless, wasn’t about to let that narrative slide.
RELATED CONTENT: ‘The 1619 Venture’ Has Been Tailored Into Two Books, Together with One For Youngsters
