Chris Wallace Doesn’t Think Young Civil Rights Era White People Were Racist, Nikole Hannah-Jones Sets Him Straight

Source: OLIVIER DOULIERY / Getty

Booooy, CNN+ host Chris Wallace should’ve just stayed his a** at Fox News because he just doesn’t fit the brand when it comes to non-conservative platforms where “not all white people” arguments just don’t fly. Recently, Wallace sat down with historian and creator of The 1619 Project Nikole Hannah-Jones and really tried to whitesplain to this scholar of African American studies that during and even before the civil rights era, it was only really old white people who were racist.

Now, obviously, this isn’t even a debate worth having. We’ve seen the iconic photos of school-aged white people verbally and physically attacking Black students like Ruby Bridges who integrated into their schools. The white people pouring liquid over the heads of Black people during sit-ins weren’t old white people with one foot in a retirement home and the other in a grave. They were young white men and women. They were “the greatest generation” in the eyes of men like Wallace. They were also racist AF.

Anyway, let’s get into how loud and wrong Wallace was during his interview with Hannah-Jones.

“Here’s where I take some objection,” Wallace said. “If you say the country that we were fighting for democracy overseas, and we were not living in, walking the walk, talking the talk at home, I completely agree with you. But you specifically say the greatest generation brutally suppress it, many of this generation, brutally suppressing democracy for millions of Americans.

“To me, and I think Tom Brokaw when he originally wrote the book, The Greatest Generation, was talking about 20-year-olds, 30-year-olds who came out of the farm fields of the Midwest, who came out of ethnic neighborhoods in Brooklyn and South Philly and storm the beaches of Normandy and, you know, fought to defeat the most, the worst regime, I would argue in world history,” he continued. “And to say that they were 20, 30-year-olds, the country was brutally suppressing Blacks, but the greatest generation wasn’t.”

“Well, they were,” Hannah-Jones replied.

“No, they weren’t,” Wallace protested. “You don’t be telling me that a farm, that a kid coming off a farm in Indiana or a kid who came from Brooklyn, is was suppressing Black people?” 

“Indiana has the largest population of the Klan in the United States,” Hannah-Jones, who was way more patient than I would have been, replied. “The Klan was raised, was reached first in Indiana.”

“I understand but that wasn’t the 20-year-old kid who…” Wallace began before Hannaj-Jines cut that white nonsense he was about to embark on short.

“You don’t think 20-year olds were in the Klan?” she asked.

“I didn’t think many of them were, no,” Wallace responded.

Bruh, Wallace really thinks the Klan was some 40 and up club that didn’t recruit white men under 30. And this, my friends, is why Black history needs to be taught properly in school. This white man is a whole journalist. I mean, there are countless points in civil rights movement history that prove Wallace wrong.

Obviously, Twitter had a field day with Wallace and his fragile white ignorant self.

Wallace displayed the same type of white fragility and delusion that has fueled the conservative war on critical race theory. Meanwhile, Black people are just exhausted. Hannah-Jones’ patience with Wallace is honestly the most notable thing about the interview.