In a hyper-competitive economy where test scores and college admissions and lifetimes earnings are all linked, Hannah-Jones has seen that the soft benefits of integration, like empathy or compassion, are low on a family’s priority list. “Most white people are willing to trade that,” she has found.

An edited transcript of their conversation is below.

Jeffrey Goldberg: You and I have both had these conversations with my colleague Ta-Nehisi Coates about the arc of history and which way it bends. I’ve adopted the viewpoint of Barack Obama, that history is an arrow and the moral arc of the universe is long but it bends toward justice. And Ta-Nehisi says that there really is no moral arc, but if there were it would just bend toward chaos. Are you in the camp of people who say that long-term optimism is premature?

Nikole Hannah-Jones: I think it has not a lot of basis in historical fact. I would say the arc is actually a circle. It just perpetually turns back on itself.

Goldberg: But let’s use African-Americans as an example. Life has gotten better, no? Before there was before there was Brown v. Board of Education, there was no Brown v. Board of Education. Before there was a Civil Rights Act, there was no Civil Rights Act. We don’t live in a period of history free of lynchings, but the number of lynchings has gone down. There are more African-Americans in the middle class since Reconstruction. Life in America for African-Americans has gotten better. It’s been stutter stepped, but we ain’t in 1866 or 1873.

Hannah-Jones: I am not a slave. That's true.

Goldberg: Well … All right.

Hannah-Jones: If that’s the bar.

Goldberg: No, no, no.

Hannah-Jones: None of us would argue that there hasn’t been progress in a range of things. I guess I get almost offended by people who want us to pause and be congratulatory about forward progress.

Goldberg: I just want it known for the record that I'm offending you already. And we haven’t even started.

Hannah-Jones: I mean, in a country that has set itself apart as a beacon of democracy, the fact that we’re applauding that black folks now have had, for 40 years, full citizenship rights in the country of their birth, in the country of their grandparents’ birth, in the country their great grandparents’ birth—it's just hard to feel a lot of optimism.

Goldberg: I’m not arguing for applauding. Obviously there is a long road to go. I’m just saying that there is a direction to things.

Hannah-Jones: Well, there’s forward progress and then we move back. We’re clearly right now moving back. So yes, we get the Voting Rights Act and now we get the gutting of the Voting Rights Act. We see a wave of voter suppression. We get Brown v. Board of Education and now black children are more segregated than they’ve been since the 1970s. We never made any real progress on housing segregation outside of the South and the West even though we outlawed housing discrimination in 1968. The wealth gap for black and white Americans is the largest that it’s been since we started really recording this in the 1970s. There are more black men incarcerated than were black men enslaved during slavery. There are more black men killed by police than there were black men lynched in a year.