Editor’s Note: The New York Times’s 1619 Project won its lead writer, Nikole Hannah-Jones, the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for historical fiction. She addresses here the backlash she created by revealing how she ruined her daughter’s life by placing her in New York City’s public school system.
Read more Will AI Destroy Humanity? There May Be a Bigger Threat
More than a decade ago, I enrolled my daughter, Najya, in an underperforming, violent, and predominantly Black Brooklyn elementary school because it was in my best interest. Virtue signaling Black solidarity at the expense of my daughter accurately reciting the alphabet held ultimate sway.
So, if one Black woman with a high opinion … of herself can’t fix underfunded, systemically racist schools with mostly minority students, what can?
Najya’s former elementary school spends $52,349 per pupil, a paltry sum despite being the highest in the nation. Progressivism dictates money must be thrown at any problem regardless of continual poor performance. I was well off when I enrolled her, contributed a hefty sum to the PTA, and expected African American grades to skyrocket as a result.
Perhaps I naïvely believed collectivism and not unbridled anarchy would warmly embrace Najya and those around her merely based on my omnipresence.
I how “my parents’ decision to pull me out of my segregated neighborhood school made the possibility of my getting from there to here — staff writer for The New York Times Magazine — more likely. Integration was transformative for my husband and me. Yet the idea of placing our daughter in one of the small number of integrated schools troubled me.”
Why? If you’ve read my work, you know it’s the one thing that always troubles me: white people.
“These schools are disproportionately white and serve the middle and upper middle classes, with a smattering of poor Black and Latino students to create ‘diversity,’” I wrote, only to later realize those poor black and Latino families probably moved mountains to enroll their children in those schools.
Yes, I in good conscience consigned my daughter to an impoverished, mostly Black school when I could’ve afforded better, whiter options. To describe my decision’s results as a piffling kerfuffle is tantamount to describing what happened at Chernobyl as a glitch in power distribution.
I should’ve known something was amiss when I checked her math homework and saw 2 + 2 = purple. And the note her teacher wrote next to it: “Correk!” Yet she somehow scored straight A’s, which were as genuine as Mayor Zoran Mamdani’s claim that he believes Israel has a right to exist.
Worse, her fifth-grade reading curriculum included Clifford the Big Red Dog and nothing by Ibram X. Kendi, Robert Mapplethorpe, or me.
Read more Pope Leo XIV, Louis XVI, and the Catholic Faith That Wouldn’t Die
Despite all that, my radical ideology trumped prudence, and I enrolled Najya in another equally dysfunctional middle school. Unfortunately for me, she began noticing that perhaps it was not in her best interest to attend a school where lunchtime in the cafeteria resembled a slightly more dangerous version of Thunderdome.
“Did you know my school was bad like this when you decided to put me here?” she asked and later queried, “So, you had money to send me to one of the best schools, and you chose not to? Because other kids are disadvantaged, you didn’t want to put me in a great school?”
What could I say other than “exactly?” And while it might not have been worth it for her — Najya once thought pi equaled pumpkin — do you know how many paid speaking gigs I received partially because of my 2016 essay? I won a $625,000 MacArthur Fellowship grant in 2017, and of course I deserved every penny. The money and adulation just rolled in.
And how would it have looked to NPR, The Atlantic, and the rest of my adoring contemporaries had I admitted defeat and yanked Najya out of her failing school and enrolled her in a superior one crawling with white students? Everyone would’ve pulled a Gayle King and said, “I have to sit with that for just a second.”
I allowed Najya to choose which high school to attend. She picked one with teachers who can read, fewer children with felony convictions, and, sadly, white teenagers, many of whom are racist because I say so. Truly I have failed as a parent who believes in selective inclusion.
So, if one Black woman with a high opinion — bordering on a god complex — of herself can’t fix underfunded, systemically racist schools with mostly minority students, what can?
I already hear Caucasian (i.e., conservative) braying about teachers’ unions making it near impossible to fire inept educators, and how stable, two-parent families produce children who are more likely to succeed educationally than kids from one-parent households.
As an impartial, unbiased reporter, it might be interesting to investigate how many children from Najya’s former elementary/middle schools are being raised by two functional parents compared to single parents and examine their grades.
The answer could be uncomfortable and might force me to reexamine reasons why students fail. Nah. It’s simply easier to cry racism with my fingers plugged into my ears.
Read more In Vino Veritas — and Civilization
READ MORE from Matt Manochio:
The White Supremacists Have Taken Over!
2025: Everyone Won, Everyone Lost, and Everything Burned
The Disastrous KJP New Yorker Interview
About the Author
