“1619 Project” founder and newly-tenured Howard University professor Nikole Hannah-Jones said that Cuba’s communist regime has brought about the greatest racial equality of any country in the Western Hemisphere.
Hannah-Jones, a journalist for the New York Times, made the comments in 2019 during a Vox Media podcast hosted by Vox editor-in-chief Ezra Klein. Klein has taken trips sponsored by the Chinese Communist Party in exchange for his “favorable coverage” of the regime.
“Cuba has the least inequality between black and white people of any place really in the hemisphere,” Hannah-Jones told Klein on the podcast. “I mean the Caribbean — most of the Caribbean it’s hard to count because the white population in a lot of those countries is very, very small, they’re countries run by black folks, but in places that are truly at least biracial countries, Cuba actually has the least inequality, and that’s largely due to socialism, which I’m sure no one wants to hear.”
Before making the comments, Hannah-Jones had laughed and said she was “no expert” on international race relations. Hannah-Jones is the main author of The New York Times’ “1619 Project,” a widely discredited revision of American history which asserts that slavery, not British tyranny, was the main motive behind the American Revolution.
Hannah-Jones’ comments understandably received immense backlash from conservative figures online. Among them was Mercedes Schlapp, a former director of strategic communications in former President Donald Trump's White House. She called upon Hannah-Jones to “go to Cuba and stay in Cuba.”
Please go to Cuba And stay in Cuba - Nicole Hannah-Jones. the Anti-American factions in our own country fail to understand the horrors of Communism. https://t.co/VQEYQkgKPu
— Mercedes Schlapp (@mercedesschlapp) July 18, 2021
I am sure Nikole Hannah-Jones though intends on being a part of the higher ups of the communist party here so she can maintain her lifestyle.
— BenjaminF3 (@SouthronGA1) July 19, 2021
Of course she is not going to leave, but if Hannah-Jones were to move her life 90 miles south of the Florida Keys, she probably wouldn’t mind all that much. Hannah-Jones visited Cuba in 2008, and returned to pen an op-ed in The Oregonian titled “The Cuba We Don’t Know.” In the piece, she praised Cuba’s high literacy rate, low HIV infection rate, and government-run healthcare system.
In making her “equality” comments, Hannah-Jones failed to account for the fact that people of all races enjoy a significantly higher standard of living in the United States than in Cuba.
According to the Economic Policy Institute, White American households earned an average of $76,057 in 2019, compared to $46,073 for Black American households. Racial discrepancies are not reported in Cuba’s official income statistics — inserting uncertainty into Hannah-Jones’ “economic inequality” argument — but its median annual salary of 242,400 pesos amounts to just $10,100 in the U.S.
When even the poorest racial group in the U.S. earns more than 450 percent than the average Cuban citizen, any reasonable contention of greater “equality” must go out the window. Equality, in any form, is meaningless if it exists alongside economic misery and political instability.
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