It's the Brian Laird show on WNYc.

It's the Brian Laird Show on WNYC.

Good morning again everyone.

With us now, New York Times Magazine correspondent

Nicole Hannah Jones on her recent essay

that you may have seen in the Times magazine

about the history and current

politics of color blindness in American racial politics. It's called the

color blindness trap how a civil rights ideal got hijacked.

The news hook is the Supreme Court ruling last year

that bans most race-based affirmative action

in higher education and the legal follow-ups to that,

even, and this may sound surreal and like a bad satire if it wasn't so serious but the

so-called color blindness movement is even challenging HBCUs, historically black colleges and universities like Howard, where

Nicole also teaches, on whether they can take race into account in their admissions process,

even as the Supreme Court made it harder to get in elsewhere.

Nicole Hannah Jones is probably best known for her Pulitzer Prize winning essay in The Times

1619 project, which she spearheaded. She's a MacArthur Genius Grant winner and even

won an Emmy recently for the Hulu TV 1619 docu series the book version of the 1619 project is also about to be released in

paperback. Again, her recent essay in The Times that we'll be talking about is

called The Color Blindness Trap. Nicole, nice to have you want to get that we'll be talking about is called the color blindness trap.

Nicole, nice to have you on again.

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