Nikole Hannah-Jones and her daughter’s education
There’s a great deal of commentary around the blogosphere on this article by Nikole Hannah-Jones in The New York Times Magazine. You remember NHJ, don’t you? She was the mind behind the 1619 Project, the duplicitous Times rewriting of the American founding to be all about slavery.
This time NHJ is in a confessional mood. I haven’t read all of the article because it’s behind a paywall, but there are copious excerpts at Ace’s: see this. Here are some samples, which should give you the general idea. The title is “In Fighting For Every Black Child, Did I Betray My Own?”:
A decade ago, I made a decision about my daughter’s education that I hoped would challenge New York City’s separate and unequal school system. Now 16, she thinks I made the wrong choice. …
“Did you know my school was bad like this when you decided to put me here?” [my daughter] asked.
My hands tightened on the steering wheel as I worked to keep my face neutral, buying a few moments to gather my thoughts. …
I had braced myself for this moment, spent nearly a decade expecting it, preparing for it. When Najya was entering pre-K, my husband, Faraji, and I decided to send her to the type of school that wealthier families with choices uniformly avoid — one that is low-income and mostly Black. Our decision had been informed by values shaped by my years of reporting on the enduring and too often seemingly hopeless battle for school integration.
Leftist race activists are often accused of compromising by sending their own children to elite private schools in order to protect them from a terrible public school system, opening the activists to accusations of hypocrisy. NHJ made a very different decision, which was to sacrifice her own child’s education in order to avoid such charges. When her daughter realized what had happened, she was angry – rightfully so, I think.
It’s amazing to me that NHJ wrote the piece at all, although apparently she sees herself as a well-meaning idealist rather than someone with insufficient regard for her daughter. I wonder if her daughter okayed the article, because it also seems like a possible invasion of privacy (as I said, I didn’t have access to the whole thing, so perhaps that issue is addressed in the article).
I think most leftists with the money probably opt for protecting their children and giving them a good education, unlike NHJ. But her approach has adherents, too – people for whom the principle overrides the person of the child. One such father was Leo Tolstoy, and the fight over the issue of education was a prominent and recurrent feature of his tumultuous relationship with his wife Sonya. Tolstoy had come to disbelieve in the value of education, but his wife Sonya wanted their children to have every advantage in that realm and she made sure they did.
[NOTE: I haven’t found much information online about the details of the Tolstoy battle over the children’s education, but I recall quite a bit about it after having read two books years ago that were devoted to the stormy Tolstoy marriage, and here’s a post I wrote on the subject.]
NHJ has been a promoter of the notion that the issues black people face in this life are due to abuses by nefarious (white) people, as opposed to the human condition (as it is expressed in a materially comfortable society), their own preference architecture, bad actors in their own population, the vested interests of public bureaucracies and occupational guilds, and the witless social ideology abroad in those occupational guilds. The white wage earner whose son has been compelled to stand in front of a middle school classroom and recite slop about his ‘white privilege’ is not causing blacks of any description trouble. The white pharmacist who moved to a suburban tract and put his kids in an ordinary suburban school is not either. Nor is the (white) office supervisor who just had to fire a (black) employee for insubordination or absenteeism.
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The people making the world worse for slum blacks are (1) teacher training faculty, (2) school administrators, (3) schoolteachers, (4) managers in the police department, (5) core city politicians, (6) slovenly prosecutors, (7) judges, (8) the har-de-har public interest bar, and (9) officials of public employee unions (the teachers unions especially), There are some indirect contributions from suburban politicians and the voters who put up with them, of course. Addressing actual issues injuring slum blacks is something in which NHJ has no interest. Their worldview is entirely driven by status games.
I fell in love with the mind which had created “Anna Karenina” and “War and Peace.”
Then I read a biography of Tolstoy.
He really put his wife through the wringer of his ideals of absolute honesty and changing spirituality.
It reminds me of the 60s/70s experiments with radical openness which mostly didn’t work out well for relationships.
I see NHJ as part of that program. It’s weirdly admirable that she risked her daughter’s education to NHJ’s ideals, then wrote honestly about it afterward.
(We are so used to leftists living the high life and leaving ordinary people to suffer the consequences of leftist ideals.)
But there is still something monstrous about it.
Do read the longer excerpt @ace.
What struck me is that, ultimately, the original “rationale” made no logical sense – as if the mere act of sending her kid to the school as a statement of solidarity and participation would somehow make a difference in the big picture. The author half-realizes that now: “Najya was asking what I’d accomplished by not choosing the ‘best’ school for her. And the honest answer is, I don’t know.” Of course, she’s not going to write explicitly, It made no sense.
Another thing I wondered but which is not included in the excerpt and may not be addressed in the full article: OK, so you made your point by sending your daughter to the local school. Did you also do things in the afternoon and evening – supplemental home-schooling, tutoring, etc – to make up for the poor schooling so that the girl could have a better chance at solid SATs and possibly a good college? Or did you just let her do work at the school’s average level?
And Sonny Hostein while interviewing NJH admitted sending her daughter to an exclusive majority white school where she admitted her daughter excelled. Yet was somehow subjected to “racism “. No matter what, they are always victims.
This bypasses the paywall:
https://archive.ph/8MWYn
One can usually use archive.ph to get around the paywall.
Five or so years ago I read about a woke white father worrying that reading bedtime stories to his children would give them an unfair advantage over many black children, thus contributing to racial inequality.
My mind boggles. This father needs to do some serious rethinking of his premises and priorities.
Instead of pouring money from a variety of sources into local monopolies and hoping for good results, the ideal system would be funded by a simple Educational Endowment bestowed on each individual student.
Provision of educational services should look like what the demonopolized telecommunications industry has become, large intensively competitive high tech providers. These providers would be competing to offer educational services that worked, and that parents and students wanted
This ideal system would protect its users from poor teaching performance. If a student failed to exhibit minimum educational achievement, payment would not be made. Instead, it would accrue in the student account, providing twice the amount the next year to the provider who could catch the student up.
Endowing students and moving to a free market is the only solution.
Their worldview is entirely driven by status games. — Art Deco
Art has a very good analysis, then offers this last sentence as something of an aside. Not only is that sentence true, as well as applying to a great many people outside the scope of this discussion; but it is key to answering the big question here. Why did NJH do it?
It’s a type of self-indulgence at the expense of others. And in this case, her own child. Most of us here are familiar with, and probably adhere to the notion that we want our children to excel beyond our life’s reach. That makes this story rather shocking.
I would add that “status games” nowadays usually includes quite a bit of identity image crafting. NJH built an identity image that worked for her, and she abided by it. I also marvel these days about people’s failures to discern which items in life are very important (there aren’t all that many) and focus on getting them right.
Well Nicole walked the walk and sees now it was a mistake, wonder if she figured out her theory was all wrong. That equality doesn’t mean what she thought it should be.
Na, she hasn’t learned anything from this except she was a higher elite than she should have been.
We cannot get into NHJ’s head to know when she decided to do this or why. I put it down to virtue-signaling on her part: she wanted to prove her daughter could receive a good education at a poor school, so she could later say complaints about public education are overblown.
What I don’t understand is why she didn’t do homework with her daughter; didn’t help her daughter succeed to further emphasize that the school is not the problem. Ironically, she proved just the opposite. She also proved she is a poor parent. She gambled with her daughter’s future and lost, but it’s her daughter who will pay the price.
Based on her 1619 project, I’d say she’s no better a historian than she is a mother.
So . . . was there no time in that “nearly a decade,” when NHJ and Faraji noticed that Najya was sailing along with high grades in school, but couldn’t do simple arithmetic or read/write with reasonable comprehension/cohesion?
Sure, black messiah NHJ embarked on a ten-year virtue-signaling mission, the product of which would be a book excoriating whitey and whitey’s racist system, all the while sacrificing her daughter’s education — and most likely more than that.
I need not wonder what it would have been like socially for Najya to be immersed in that sh!thole culture all day every day for that amount of time. I well imagine Najya was sailing along as either a ‘ho’-in-training or a miserable bullied outcast, (again) without NHJ and Faraji noticing in the least what was happening to her.
They were far too busy making their precious point, eagerly anticipating all the applause from their fellow elites. Good thing they didn’t strangle the girl with an exercise band.
She leaned into quality Learing through published instruction made viable by virtue of association with NYeT privilege. That said, planned pupilhood is next to planned parenthood is a wicked solution.
DEI, oh. DEI, oh. Daylight comes and reveals her character full of pride and prejudice.
NHJ got a MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant in 2018. That’s $625k per year over 5 years. No strings money.
NHJ is a proud alum of the University of Notre Dame, South Bend, Indiana. She probably learned identity politics at ND.
ND has plenty to answer for, but nothing will happen. ND is rich and arrogant. They have all their liberal professors who influence the minds of the next generation of Leftists. Just like the Ivys. But Notre Dame is even better than an Ivy as Pete Buttegig’s dad taught there. He was THE expert on Italian communist Antonio Gramasci. I first learned about Gramasci here.
She learned identity politics from her mother. Notre Dame may have added to it.
Althouse has been blogging about this, and I mentioned over there that my parents also inflicted this on me and my three siblings back in the late 60s. The only difference is that we were white, and got sent to 90%+ black elementary and middle schools. My parents’ rationale was to “support” the city and the public schools rather than leave for the suburbs like most white middle class people with kids were doing. The main issue was safety, as there were still some good teachers and we did manage to learn. I wasn’t angry at my parents at the time, but in retrospect I can see they sacrificed our well-being for the sake of some abstract and pointless ideology.
After having read the NYT article, I have some sympathy for HNJ. She did try to improve the schools her daughter attended, to no avail. Nonetheless, I have little sympathy for her informing us that “segregation” is the problem with black schools.
The problem is with poorly behaved students and schools that do not know how to deal with them. I am reminded of my teaching in a 3% white school. I had problems with classroom management. After several of my students got sent to other schools, classroom behavior improved markedly. Note that HNJ does not approve of booting out misbehaving students. Several students who were sent to other schools were not in the school’s attendance zone, but given the school choice available in the district, they chose to attend the school where I taught. They apparently chose my school because they knew it was a school that had behavior problems, where they could get away with more. Until they couldn’t. 🙂
I wonder how they turned out.
HNJ’s daughter facing up to 9th grade:
I am reminded of the transition from 8th to 9th grade of the son of a childhood friend. He decided that instead of attending the excellent public schools where he lived, and ending up at State Univ, like his parents, he wanted to go to an elite university. He chose one of the elite private boarding schools. The transition was difficult, as the private boarding school was much more demanding than his good quality public school. He graduated with honors from the private boarding school, went on to an elite university, and has had a successful career as a writer. BTW, he and his parents are black.
Correction. $625k paid over 5 years.
I looked it up. The MacArthur Foundation has about $10b in assets. It employs over 200 people. The President is a Harvard lawyer who is the Seventh. It is a perpetual motion machine funding liberals.
@TommyJsy: Their worldview is entirely driven by status games. — Art Deco
AD is predictably cynical about pretty much everyone … except himself. Such cynicism is a low bar. We are a status-seeking species and no one is exempt.
Though it is much easier to ascribe such seeking to the Other Side.
I don’t know NHJ’s mind or heart. Howevver, most of the people I knew on the left were sincere. We really believed our efforts and sacrifices could make a positive difference for the future.
I’m now on This Side, so I am persuaded that the left was mostly mistaken or misinformed. Nonetheless.
Here’s the beginning of a Marge Piercy poem describing how many of us saw ourselves.
_____________________________
Rough Times
We are trying to live
as if we were an experiment
conducted by the future.
–Marge Piercy, “Living in the Open” (1976)
_____________________________
Piercy was a New Left/Feminist who wrote poetry and novels. I thought she walked her talk pretty well.
huxley:
Your character assessment of Art Deco isn’t particularly insightful; you two have a history IMO.
HNJ abused her daughter in that she did not put her in the best situation for success. Instead she used her daughter in an attempt to influence and change the bureaucracy that is a city school system. She failed but the result and consequence of this failure accumulates only to her daughter. In a just society the daughter would be removed from the abusive care of her mother.
huxley, yes, NHJ and her husband (who’s barely mentioned) seem to have treated their child as an experiment. I’ve been thinking about this quite a bit over the past couple of days, and what has finally crystallized for me is that this mother treated her child as a black child first, and a human being second.
This is the ultimate racism, the precise thing NHJ has spent her career supposedly trying to eradicate. I imagine that one of her worst fears is that bad actors in the world will see her child as black first rather than human first. And yet, this mother was so focused on skin color and so blind to the true essence of her child she used her child’s blackness as the reason to send her to a lousy school. Had she thought first of her child’s humanity — as she calls on everybody else to do — would she have done that? Weren’t there ways she could have focused on helping other kids with fewer options while still protecting her own child, who had nobody else to look out for her?
Just wait and see folks.
Regardless of the daughter’s educational deficiencies and academic failures (despite receiving A’s), she will be accepted to any college she applies to; and this includes the Ivy League schools.
Once they see her name, she will be accepted.
Nikole and Faraji Hannah-Jones allowed their daughter’s photo to appear on the cover of The New York Times Magazine when the child was only six years old, for a story about NHJ’s choosing, on principle, what turned out to be a poor school for their child.
Now, ten years later, photos of their daughter break up blocks of NHJ’s prose in the current mea culpa.
The girl’s sullen expression is no surprise.
How else would she look, when she’s spent most of her life not just as a racial-grievance trainee but also as a prop in her midwit parents’ very public social-justice morality play?
No one in my family from grandparents to grandchildren went to a government school. We thought they were awful. The exception is a sister who went to Stuyvesant HS in NY which is the most competitive HS in NYC if not America.
I married into a family with (2) government school teachers. They both represent the intersection of arrogance and ignorance. They have firm opinions on all subjects. When I confront them with facts that contradict their opinions. they tell me they just don’t have time to inform themselves.
Every 10 years I ask them the same question and get the same answer. Wouldn’t it have been great if Albert Einstein taught physics at your Government school.
Teachers: “Absolutely not, Einstein didn’t have a teaching certificate.”
You can’t fix stupid.
I’m going to be generous here, and assume that she really believed that “challenging” the system in this way would bring about some sort of constructive change. Of course that hardly ever works but her own prejudices prevented her from realizing that because it didn’t fit her narrative.
What I find interesting is that a supposedly poorly educated teenaged girl apparently recognized the problem before her mother did.
Hold on.
Can we just back up a tad?
I was under the impression that demanding a good education, that expecting a good education, that wanting a good education (etc.) was RACIST, WHITE SUPREMACIST or at the very least WHITE ADJACENT.
(Isn’t THAT how she’s made her name and her fortune?)
So unless she is trying to help overhaul public education—a worthy project that must include toppling or radically restructuring the teachers’ unions—then WHAT ON EARTH IS SHE COMPLAINING ABOUT??? After all, she gave her daughter the education she wanted her to have, sacrificing her daughter on the altar of her own identity politics; which as Huxley stated above—if I understand him correctly—REFUSING to compromise her principles (such as they are):
Admirable yet monstrous indeed! Though I’m inclined to believe that one can’t have it both ways; that is, one must choose…admirable OR monstrous?
Maybe her next magnum opus ought to be “The Perverse Parental Project; How I Willingly Sacrificed My Daughter on the Altar of Racist America”…
From the partial view of this whole situation that I have right now, I concur with Watt and F: why didn’t she provide evening and other support to her daughter? And was she at the school investigating and exploring what was working and what was not, to help “improve the system”? I suspect it would not have taken her more than a few days or weeks to figure out serious problems were not going to be fixed without a major PR and correction program, led by herself or someone else.
Cornhead: glad you provided that correction on the MacArthur Foundation yearly payouts. The initial # did not seem to be right, based on my long time ago exposure to that figure. Even the lower yearly value is not chicken feed, but I suspect living and working in NYC it does not go as far as many might think.
“It’s her daughter who will pay the price”
Maybe not, Najya is apparently a lot more on the ball than her mother.
A narcissist completely untethered from reality.
@ R2L > “I suspect it would not have taken her more than a few days or weeks to figure out serious problems were not going to be fixed without a major PR and correction program, led by herself or someone else.”
With only a little effort, she would have discovered that the problems with the school were not the fault of any white supremacists, that correcting or even just publicizing them would indict the Democrats and the Teachers’ Unions of all the ills we know so well, and that she would have been cast out of the club had she done so.
She knew what was wrong.
She let her daughter suffer through it rather than admit her own principles and idealogy were wrong.
Perhaps her daughter will go the way of the older son of Madalyn Murray O’Hair, the activist atheist (and communist), who became a Baptist minister; or Mosab Hassan Yousef, the son of a Hamas founder, who speaks openly in the US about the dangers of the Islam.
50 worst school districts in the USA. There is a lot of ruin in this table. This is a national security issue and must be turned around. Throwing more $$$ to the school districts is not the solution.
https://www.instagram.com/p/Ddetyj-tui6/
But. I thought giving high school diplomas to illiterate 18-year-olds was just reparations.
I knew a guy that quit teaching because of the discipline problem. He had students threaten his life and nothing was done about it; the administration tolerated that behavior.
JG3
Just because Einstein was a brilliant theorist it doesn’t follow he was an effective teacher. And, yes, a teacher’s cert is no guarantee of a good teacher also. And given what has happened in the Ed departments over the last 25 years, such a cert is al.ost a guarantee of poor teaching.
Given the track record of these Potemkin intellectuals, I wouldn’t be surprised if none of this were true, and the daughter in question was aborted half a decade ago. Hell, are we sure Titania McGrath isn’t behind this? Interesting times, indeed.
Enjoy the teenage rebellion, dumbass.
Exactly. [Emphasis mine]
(Though it could well be the case that Randi Weingarten and her unfortunate ilk, including dear Mom herself, are themselves white or white adjacent supremacists, whose sole role in their miserable lives is to keep the Black man/women down while enriching themselves…. Seems like a real possibility, anyway; but that’s likely fodder for another post…)
Physics guy said:
“JG3
Just because Einstein was a brilliant theorist it doesn’t follow he was an effective teacher. And, yes, a teacher’s cert is no guarantee of a good teacher also. And given what has happened in the Ed departments over the last 25 years, such a cert is al.ost a guarantee of poor teaching.”
You missed the point entirely.
I will make it easier for you: Substitute Socrates, Descartes, Sir Isaac Newton et. al. for Einstein and see if you get the idea.
John Galt II:
Socrates is notable for having, wait for it, students.
No so much for Newton or Einstein.
Richard Feinman is notable for being an exceptional university teacher and physicist. He was unique.
But a crappy teacher with a cert. is still a crappy teacher.
Agree with om and physicsguy, brilliance is no guarantee of being a good teacher. In fact it may be a hindrance because you don’t understand what lesser people have to go through to learn what came so easy to you. Similar to sports where superstar athletes rarely become good managers/coaches.
Me? I refused to put my kids thru forced busing to use them as tools to integrate all-black schools in Durham, NC. back in the day Parochial schools did just fine, and I was not Catholic then, but a little prayer can’t hurt except if the parents are secular fools.
Related:
“NAILED IT…”
https://instapundit.com/824739/
+ Bonus…
‘Milei calls UN ‘useless’ during General Assembly address;
‘Argentine President Javier Milei blasts the UN as “useless,” accusing it of hypocrisy, bureaucratic overreach and bias against Israel in a fiery speech.’—
https://www.israelnationalnews.com/news/433566
Alas…if it were only useless…
Monica Showalter asks a question and gives an answer.
https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2026/09/so-why-did-nikole-hannah-jones-expose-new-york-city-s-horrible-public-schools-now/
We can improve slum schools considerably. Officialdom choose not to due to vested interests, social ideology, and status games.
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