I'm Karen Griegsby-Bates and this is Coatswitch from NPR.

If you've been paying attention to race news at all this year, or last year, or the year before,

there's almost certainly one name you've heard over and over again.

Nicole Hannah Jones. She's a professor, a journalist, and MacArthur genius, and she's become one of

the most well-known, though not necessarily well-understood, figures at the center of her national

conversation on race. Our play cousins at NPR's Thru Line podcast sat down with Nicole Hannah Jones

to talk about her work, how it's been interpreted, misinterpreted, and the lessons about history

that she thinks people still aren't learning. Which is really important because as the Thru Line team

argues... The past is never past. This phrase, which is a remix of a passage by the famous American

writer William Faulkner, is basically the tagline for this show. But it isn't just a tagline.

It's kind of like a guiding principle. Here on Thru Line, we're constantly trying to understand

the mechanics of history, its limits, the way it oscillates between the light and shadows,

darkness, and hope. And ultimately, how the past and our interpretation of it has shaped the

world we live in today. This task can be especially challenging when it comes to the history of the

country we live in, the United States, the complex, murky, painful, and beautiful history of this

country has always been ammunition for the political battles of the present. This is because the story

we're told about the past shapes the way we view the world and our role in it. So history becomes

something we're always updating and fighting over. Whose stories are being told? Whose are being

left out? Who gets to decide what stories we teach our children? Who gets the final word on truth?

There's a battle waging across this country over these questions. And there's one person who,

for the last few years, has been at the center of it. My name is Nicole Hannah Jones. I'm a reporter

at The New York Times and the creator of the 1619 Project. In 2019, Nicole Hannah Jones conceived

...