It's the Brian Larry 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 colorblindness 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 colorblindness 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, 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 Colorblindness

Trap.

Nicole, nice to have you on.

Again, welcome back to WNYC.

Thank you so much for having me, Brian.

I'd like to start with a soundbite that you reference from nearly 60 years ago.

It's President Lyndon Johnson in his 1965 commencement speech at Howard University when in just this 20-second clip, he states

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