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 an act 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.