Mason  🏃‍♂️ ✂️

she is a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist on the legacy of slavery (and earned her role on the 1619 Project during a long, successful career), who is now saying "yall should reflect on the fact you're getting super worked up about defending a statue of a man who owned a slave"

meanwhile a bunch of mostly white people with roughly (a month? two months? zero months?) of 101-level lit review on racial justice under their belts are saying "the Black people should be grateful we're defending a slave owner -- they must be forgetting he did some good things!"

The things you put in quotes are hardly representative of my thoughts. I do agree that the social cost of anything other than full throated support, even mostly-full-throated-support, is not worth it.

social cost? my point is that NHJ is on the side of "it's more nuanced than good/evil, lets think critically about history" on both Grant *and* Castro, and is getting attacked for that by people who know far less and desperately want it to be simple and fit neatly in a box

I wish there was a “take a break until you finish Ron Chernow’s Grant biography and whatever the best Fidel bio book is which I sadly don’t know” button and then we could all come back together and have a deep discussion.

Eh. I read Chernow on Rockefeller and the house of Morgan. It was fine. I was ruined by Caro.

I’m still only halfway through House of Morgan.

Also Nikole Hannah Jones is impressive and had an incredible body of work prior to joining NYT and 1619 at ProPublica. Would not write her off.