Nikole Hannah-Jones, author of the ‘1619 Project’, criticizes anti-shoplifting measures

The author of the ‘1619 Project’, Nikole Hannah-Jones, spoke on Twitter last week about the ‘demeaning’ experience of anti-theft measures inside stores.

Hannah-Jones, a New York Times reporter, said she believes that if stores are going to lock up items, they should at least be better prepared to handle the volume of customers.

“If you’re going to lock everything up at the drugstore, an already demeaning shopping experience, at least have enough workers to open the tills for all the customers who just need a razor,” Hannah-Jones. tweeted.

Stores like Walmart and Walgreens began locking merchandise in recent years as part of anti-theft measures put in place amid rising shoplifting rates.

‘It can’t be a financial winner. I spend a lot less because I’m not waiting every time I need to grab something from a different aisle or even a different shelf in the same aisle. You can’t read the labels etc. I literally walked away. It’s a terrible shopping experience,” he continued.

Many on the social media app agreed with the author, some even claiming they had to call store clerks to ask for things like toothpaste.

Others, however, pointed to an increase in retail theft that has worried some stores.

Just last week, reports indicated that New York City saw record levels for shoplifting for the consecutive year in 2022.

There were more than 63,000 reports of shoplifting in 2022. That marks a 45% increase from 45,000 in 2021 and a staggering 275% increase since the mid-2000s.

The hardest-hit retailers in the Big Apple are stores like Target and Duane Reed.

However, Hannah-Jones acknowledged those concerns.

The author and reporter cited an article from January CNBC address shoplifting issues.

‘For the past two years, Walgreens has been sounding the alarm about the increase in theft. As a result, he hired private security guards and locked up the merchandise so it cannot be accessed without a store associate,” reported Gabrielle Fonrouge.

‘[Chief financial officer James] Kehoe said the company has spent a “fair amount” to crack down on theft, but acknowledged that the private security companies they have hired have been “largely ineffective.” These guards can do very little more than call the police or hold a suspect until the police arrive,” the article says.

Hannah-Jones also responded to another person sharing a similar article, this one from the New York Times, citing Kehoe as saying she might have “cried too much” over the “organized robbery.”

Many in the comments agreed with Hannah-Jones on the measures, while others criticized her for the tweets. Others offered their own suggestions on how they can resolve both the theft and closed cases.

“Or armed security guards shooting looters,” one Twitter user responded.

The creator of the ‘1619 Project’ has been criticized in the past for her portrayal of crimes, both large and small.

In 2020, the New York Times reporter sparked outrage for saying she viewed the destruction caused by some protesters during George Floyd marches as “non-violence.”

“I think we have to be very careful with our language,” Hannah-Jones said at the time. “Yes, it’s disturbing to see property being destroyed, it’s disturbing to see people taking property from stores, but these are things,” she said.

‘And violence is when an agent of the state kneels on a man’s neck until all life is drained from his body. Destroying property, which can be replaced, is not violence. And putting those things, using the same language to describe those two things, I think really, it’s not moral to do that,’ he said at the time.

Last week, Hannah-Jones, speaking at an MSNBC event called “National Day of Racial Healing,” opened up about the backlash she received for what some have called “revisionist history” on her “1619 Project.”

Hannah-Jones founded the project with the New York Times in 2019, using essays, photos, podcasts, and eventually a book and guide for educators that argue that the United States was founded the year a group of slaves arrived in the country and not when independence was granted in 1776.

The writer has said that she believes in her project and subsequent book of the same name because Americans “are taught this history so badly”, referencing education about the plight of African and Asian Americans.

The ‘1619 Project’ will continue to spread in media circles with the debut of a six-part documentary to be streamed on Hulu later this year, produced by Oprah Winfrey.

“Their goal is to reframe the country’s history by placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of our national narrative,” NYT magazine wrote on its website.

The project won a Pulitzer Prize that year.

Published in August 2019, to mark the 400th anniversary of the arrival of the first enslaved Africans in the English colony of Virginia, the work has been criticized by some academics for its claims, and angered many others who saw it as unpatriotic.

In December, Hannah-Jones told the Associated Press that the ongoing debate was not surprising.

“They have taught us the history of a country that does not exist,” he said.

“They have taught us the history of a country that renders us incapable of understanding how we achieved an insurrection in the greatest democracy on January 6.”

He said the United States was “deliberately” avoiding its complicated and painful past, which is why his work was so controversial.

“Steps forward, steps toward racial progress, are always met with intense reaction,” he said.

“We are a society that deliberately does not want to deal with the fight against blackness that is at the core of many of our institutions and really our society itself.”

His work has sparked an intense debate about the teaching of history in schools.