Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times writer Nikole Hannah-Jones once penned a polemical letter to her college newspaper denouncing the white race as "barbaric."
"The white race is the biggest murderer, rapist, pillager, and thief of the modern world," she wrote in a 1995 letter published in the Notre Dame Observer, according to a report by the Federalist. She added that white Europeans "committed genocide ... in their greed and insatiable desire to destroy every non-white culture."
Her essay goes on to compare Christopher Columbus to Hitler, claim that Christianity was an "excuse" for genocide, and state the white race continues to subdue the black community in a similar fashion to this day.
"The descendants of these savage people pump drugs and guns into the Black community," she writes.
Hannah-Jones also implied that the descendants of white Europeans are racist because of their ancestors.
"After everything that those barbaric devils did, I do not hate them or their descendants," she says. "Because of some lacking, they needed ot [sic] constantly prove their superiority."
Hannah-Jones's editorial was written in response to an editorial by a fellow sophomore, Fred Kelly, who had defended Columbus's legacy after protests were staged against his murals hung in a campus building.
Hannah-Jones won the Pulitzer Prize for commentary in May for her "1619 Project" on the legacy of slavery in the United States. It has been frequently criticized by historians for its inaccuracies, such as its claim that the American Revolution was fought primarily to preserve slavery in the colonies.
In December 2019, five distinguished American historians wrote a letter to the magazine editor, saying they were "dismayed at some of the factual errors in the project and the closed process behind it."
The "1619 Project" has also been sent as curricula to thousands of classrooms with the help of the Pulitzer Center.