Talk:Nikole Hannah-Jones

Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment
This article was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment, between 21 September 2021 and 16 November 2021. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): Doucereuse.

Above undated message substituted from Template:Dashboard.wikiedu.org assignment by PrimeBOT (talk) 01:38, 18 January 2022 (UTC)

2020 Pulitzer Prize For Commentary
Hannah-Jones was awarded the Pulitzer Price for Commentary in 2020.

Education
"Nikole Hannah-Jones received a B.A. (1998) from the University of Notre Dame and an M.A. (2003) from the University of North Carolina." Kimles (talk) 00:00, 16 October 2017 (UTC)kimles

What I plan to write/edit
I plan to go into more depth regarding her investigative journalism,this will include things such as what kind of investigative journalism she has gone into and also the journey she went through to get there,this may include her own struggles alongside already pursuing the challenges of investigative journalism.There is also very little information on Wikipedia as to what inspired her to pursue this particular career and what drives her to continue it today,therefore I hope to display her reasons as to why this is.I may then also look at the Ida.B Wells Society and the significance of why there is a need for such a society today. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Maariya012 (talk • contribs) 14:14, 18 November 2019 (UTC)

Edits
Nikole Hannah-jones was inspired to go into journalism when she first started writing for her high school newspaper,where she wrote about a desegregation programme that was taking place.Her dream of becoming an investigative journalist stems from the reporters she looks upto.This includes Ida B. Wells and Claude Sitton,who have also fought to expose the injustice within America long before Nikole Hannah Jones was even alive.Nikole Hannah -Jones has worked as an investigative reporter in New York City analysing ways in which official policy was being used to maintain segregation within both housing and schools.She is currently a domestic reporter for the New York Times working against racial injustice.

Passage
This passage .... 'is a baseless assertion that has been 'vigorously disputed' by Northwestern University history professor Leslie M. Harris, who wrote 'the protection of slavery was not one of the main reasons the 13 Colonies went to war' is unacceptable. Calling an assertion by a historian 'baseless' is simply opinionated. People disagree about history. Her view is supported in detail by several historians including Professor Gerald Horne and Professor van Cleve in his heavily researched 'A slaveholders Union'. I propose to delete these comments.

Agreed. I was shocked to see such a statement on Wikipedia. Languagehat (talk) 01:06, 25 June 2020 (UTC)

Controversy Section: Op-Ed
The section concludes with the quote from Hannah about not hating white people. This is misleading, because she goes on to say that she thinks the white race if inferior, and as a result had always had a chip on their shoulder and needed to prove something. “Not hating” is a far cry from the tone of the op-Ed. The most charitable conclusion she has for white people there is “I don’t hate you, I pity you for being inferior.” I propose the section be edited to reflect this. Anyone can go online and read this op ed. Failing to change this would violate wikipedia’s Neutrality standards, and would erode credibility in this project. Azahariev (talk) 01:23, 28 June 2020 (UTC)


 * But, ... Hannah is likely more 'white' than 'black'?


 * 1) 1/2 of Hannah's familial DNA comes from characteristically 'white' sources and
 * 2) the other 1/2 also likely contains some of the same (yep, despite being a horribly racist country most black people in America express ~15% of characteristic European genotypes (segregation obviously not working well ... as is evident by H-J herself)) and
 * 3) she manifestly expresses 'white' racial characteristics (melanogenesis, facial features, ... ) and
 * 4) she was brought up culturally 'white' and
 * 5) the nexus of her emotive thought is typically 'catholic' (a semitic derived, white ideology/religion)
 * ... one can only conclude the amount of self-loathing/race-hate she feels is either a feature of a conflicted/racialised mind or, a product of or, a calculated attempt to assimilate with the dominant ideological culture on American campuses. 2001:8003:70F5:2400:28B1:DC83:2136:3927 (talk) 06:36, 13 December 2022 (UTC)

I want to know why there's no longer any reference or mention of it on the article. This is important information and it needs to be properly put out there. 2601:681:200:43C0:B89A:5E9A:3A12:41CD (talk) 06:14, 6 December 2020 (UTC)

Shell-sponsored appearance in Texas
It seems that Hannah-Jones' appearance in Texas in December 2019 was sponsored by the oil company Shell, a subsidiary of Royal Dutch Shell which is currently on trial in The Hague for complicity in crimes including the murder and rape of Africans: https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2019/12/18/shell-d18.html JezGrove (talk) 20:04, 10 October 2020 (UTC)


 * If the point of relevance is 'Africans' ... please note Hannah is not African and these companies are accommodated on a daily basis by all kinds of 'upstanding' people and organisations. 2001:8003:70F5:2400:28B1:DC83:2136:3927 (talk) 06:39, 13 December 2022 (UTC)

Categorisation
You just added Category:American conspiracy theorists to the article. It is important that references are included to support information, especially on biographies of living people. To warrant a category it must also be a defining characteristic, otherwise it will be removed. Richard Nevell (talk) 19:51, 18 November 2020 (UTC)

Please don't remove other people's comments on talk pages without good reason. Richard Nevell (talk) 20:02, 18 November 2020 (UTC)

https://twitter.com/nhannahjones/header_photo Unknown0124 (talk) 18 November 2020 (UTC)


 * You have linked to a photo on Twitter without any context. Please could you elaborate on what you mean? Richard Nevell (talk) 20:18, 18 November 2020 (UTC)


 * Sure. What this photo presents is two dates: July 4, 1776 (the day the United States declared independence from the British monarchy), and August 20, 1619 (when the first African slaves arrived to what would become the American colonies). The first date I mentioned is struck out, but the second one is not, and this is what gets me as someone who studies history. I don't want to arbitrarily put up things without sourcing them, so I will source whatever I can. Back to the two dates, in a controversial portion of the 1619 Project, which was removed without a notice, it tries to revise American history, rejecting 1776 as our founding and "understanding 1619 as our true founding, and placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of the story we tell ourselves about who we are." (source: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/01/inclusive-case-1776-not-1619/604435/) However, I do not feel that honoring the 400th anniversary of the arrival of the African slaves in what would become Virginia is anything controversial, and that a deeper look into what they went through should be sought after. Unknown0124 (talk) 18 November 2020 (UTC)
 * Ok but I'm still unclear on how this constitutes a conspiracy theory, or how this would be a defining characteristic of Hannah-Jones. Richard Nevell (talk) 21:33, 18 November 2020 (UTC)

Criticism of the 1619 Project
Two issues about the "Criticism of the 1619 Project" part of this page.

1. Should this even be here (on Nikole Hannah-Jones's biographical page)? Why not just relegate this to the separate 1619 Project page?

2. The phrases "leading historians" and "leading historians of the American Revolution and the Civil War" are unclear. Which historians, in particular, are being invoked here? And how is their status as a leading historian being assessed? The historians that were named (Gordon Wood and James McPherson) produced major scholarship for their fields. However, that scholarship is by no means the most up-to-date and those scholars are by nearly all accounts not particularly active in their fields today. There is a bias issue here because it seems that fellow critics of the 1619 Project invoke this particular language of status in order to further legitimize and strengthen their critiques. That is, using the phrases here is repeating a talking point of those leveling critiques at the 1619 Project, not neutrally describing who some of those critics are.

Cjslaby (talk) 18:22, 3 May 2021 (UTC)


 * With regards to 1), the criticism is presumably here because Hannah-Jones won her Pulitzer prize as a result of her work on the project. With regards to 2), "leading" etc. should only be used if sourced, i.e. not in Wikipedia's "voice". JezGrove (talk) 18:38, 3 May 2021 (UTC)

BLP policy violations
Per WP:BLP, "contentious material about living persons that is unsourced or poorly sourced should be removed immediately and without discussion." Such material "must be attributed to a reliable, published source".

Per WP:RSP, Fox News, New York Post, and National Review are known by the Wikipedia community to be biased, partisan, or generally unreliable, especially with regard to politics. NYP especially shows a lack of concern for fact-checking or corrections, including a number of examples of outright fabrication. Washington Free Beacon and Knewz are not known as reliable sources either. Per BLP, "material not meeting this standard may be removed". —Jade Ten (talk) 04:30, 21 May 2021 (UTC)


 * Your edits clearly violate the Reliable Sources policy, but I'm not going to bother wasting my time since you are clearly more intent on imposing a political agenda with sourcing only from left-wing sources. If someone else wants to take up the mantle and actually improve the article, feel free to modify my work, I think the intro paragraph could have been more concise. EagleBoss (talk) 06:01, 21 May 2021 (UTC)
 * Look who's talking. —Jade Ten (talk) 06:39, 21 May 2021 (UTC)
 * the New York Post is so unreliable that it has its own direct link (WP:NYPOST) asking you to not use the source. Jade is right, WP:FOXNEWS and the National Review are marked in yellow and they should be used cautiously especially if it involves living people. I don't know which RS policy you read but it's definitely not the WP:RS or WP:RSP policy. (CC) Tb hotch ™ 19:12, 21 May 2021 (UTC)

"Controversy"
2 of the 3 things mentioned under Controversy are about tweets, with the "Controversy" being accidentally tweeting a picture with a phone number, and retweeting something that turned out to be wrong. Does that really fulfill the criteria to be mentioned here? The 1619 Criticism section could be expanded instead considering how strongly she is involved with it. jonas (talk) 04:49, 7 July 2021 (UTC)

I could find no support in the referenced source to this claim: " investigative journalism, which is the least common type of reporting.[68]." Is it less common than watchdog journalism or trade journalism? I don't know. Unless there is a source giving numbers of various kinds of journalism, I think the claim should be removed. Kdammers (talk) 12:43, 7 July 2021 (UTC)
 * Wikipedians have collectively decided that the world must never, ever, forget a tweet that was retweeted that caught the attention of a hyper-online 'journalist' who then pushed a story to press in 15 minutes, which was then churnalized by a half dozen other outlets hungry for ad revenue. When journalism is crappy, so is Wikipedia. Same as it ever was. --Animalparty! (talk) 04:27, 10 September 2022 (UTC)

UNC section rife with errors
I began editing to correct some obvious errors in the section on NHJ's appointment at UNC. But after doing further research, I've discovered that the section contains gross inaccuracies, is completely out of sequence, and gives an exceedingly misleading overall picture of the subject. Chronologically:


 * Susan King, dean of the Hussman j-school had been courting NHJ for some time, and the Knight Chair NHJ subsequently accepted had been changed to one involving race in anticipation of her appointment. Knight Chairs do not always come with tenure—indeed, the terms of the Knight Foundation's agreement with UNC is that the Chair will be a 5-year appointment.
 * In private communications with some UNC officials, including Susan King, newspaper publisher and donor Walter Hussman Jr.—long known as a nonpartisan proponent of journalistic ethics—raised concerns about NHJ's impartiality and whether she had misrepresented facts in favor of a political agenda and the possibility that her appointment would damage the values and journalistic standards at the school that bears his name.
 * Anticipating her appointment, NHJ submitted a tenure application in 2020, and received recommendations from both the department faculty and the broader tenure committee.
 * In January 2021, her tenure application was submitted to the Board of Trustees but they didn't vote on it, apparently an uncommon occurrence. A board member's questions and request for time to get more information postponed bringing it to a vote. As far as I'm aware, none of this was publicly reported until months later.
 * Since fixed-term appointments don't require the BOT's approval, as a "work-around" to the BOT postponement, the school offered her a 5-year appointment.
 * She formally accepted the appointment and signed her contract in February 2021—despite, according to her own statement, being "crushed" that the BOT had failed to approve her tenure and likely wouldn't do so in the future.
 * In April 2021, her appointment and intention to start teaching in July were reported—but those reports did not specifically make an issue of the fact that she hadn't been granted tenure—and there was no public complaint or controversy about the terms of the contract she'd signed.
 * Significant public criticism of her appointment began— before any reporting on the issue of her tenure. But our current article falsely suggests that the BOT refused to award her tenure after —and as the result of —"conservative criticism" of her hiring.
 * According to NHJ herself, she continued to refrain from making any complaint about her lack of tenure because: "I did not want to face the humiliation of letting everyone know" and "I did not want to wage a fight with my alma mater or bring to the school and to my future colleagues the political firestorm".
 * The issue of NHJ's lack of tenure only became public on May 19, 2021, when Joe Killian at the left-wing NC Policy Watch published a report asserting that "After conservative criticism, UNC backs down from offering acclaimed journalist tenured position". None of this had to do with Hussman's private emails, which weren't made public until three weeks later. Much of the report misleading and some inaccurate, presumably in part because Killian didn't know the actual history of the issue—and this report appears to be the source of the incorrect sequence in the instant article.
 * A firestorm of reporting followed Killian's report, triggering outrage, protests, etc.
 * With the particulars of the job offer she'd accepted now public, NHJ lawyered up with a big litigation firm and the NAACP; reneged on her signed contract; said she would only re-accept the appointment if it included tenure; claimed for the first time (regarding this issue) that she was the victim of racial, sexual, and political discrimination; accused Hussman of persecuting her; and threatened litigation with a one-week deadline.
 * Under threat of continuing bad PR and lawsuits, the BOT finally brought NHJ's application to a vote in June 2021—the first and only time it was voted for—and approved it (almost the exact opposite of the "board refused tenure after public pressure from conservatives" narrative that the Wikipedia article and many reports portray).
 * Despite UNC's offer meeting her demands, on July 6th NHJ released a statement turning down the tenured Knight Chair at UNC, instead accepting a tenured Knight Chair at Howard, the creation of which was announced on the same day.

The article currently doesn't even begin to accurately portray the events or their sequence. Remarkably, it doesn't even note that NHJ had signed a contract and was planning to teach at UNC, knowing full well she wasn't getting tenure—and that only after the public hue and cry did she renege on her agreement and begin alleging discrimination. Given all the errors, I think it's worth considering a complete rewrite of the section—I'm happy to take a whack at it, or to discuss further here first. Thanks! Elle Kpyros (talk) 21:04, 1 August 2021 (UTC)

Hussman
From my reading there seems to be a particular individual who was reported as largely being the cause for these concerns, a UNC major donor. I don't see that reflected in the article where it currently vaguely says, "...particularly from conservative groups". Hussman is later mentioned relatively indirectly in the article (making the link between Hannah-Jones' comment, "it became really clear to me that I just could not work at a school named after Walter Hussman" a little confusing. I had to read up about what Hussman had to do with all this).

Later reporting after the incident calls out this connection. I'm not sure if this should be added (or how), so I'm leaving a note for others to consider.


 * https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/media/one-of-the-voices-objecting-to-nikole-hannah-joness-hiring-at-unc-a-newspaper-baron--and-major-donor/2021/06/02/b4abf72c-c2f3-11eb-9a8d-f95d7724967c_story.html
 * https://ncpolicywatch.com/2021/06/03/unc-mega-donor-walter-hussman-denies-exerting-pressure-over-hannah-jones-hiring/
 * https://arktimes.com/arkansas-blog/2021/08/05/unc-chapel-hill-emails-tell-a-tale-of-hussman-influence-nikole-hannah-jones-and-unc-faculty-respond

Ckoerner (talk) 02:49, 8 December 2021 (UTC)

Hannah-Jones is neither African nor, Black!
Hannah-Jones is neither African nor, Black! She (like many other pretenders) has derived a remarkable amount of currency by erroneously claiming she belongs to these diasporas. Hannah-Jones is a mixed-race American. When she personalises her experiences she speaks as an American ... not a Black person and certainly, not an African! 2001:8003:70F5:2400:28B1:DC83:2136:3927 (talk) 02:07, 13 December 2022 (UTC)

Hyphenated Last Name
The article should be consistent in how it references Nikole Hannah-Jones when only the last name is used. There are 3 instances that only use "Jones".

Is there a standard with regard to how we reference hyphenated last names?

I'm going to update these 3 to "Hannah-Jones"; I'm happy to revert if there's a standard I've missed. Mapping Data (talk) 21:24, 12 July 2023 (UTC)