“Should I have written this?”
In her 23-year career as a journalist and Pulitzer Prize winner, Nikole Hannah-Jones had never asked herself that question before. Then again, she told me, she had never written a piece as personal and vulnerable as her September article in The New York Times Magazine, “In Fighting For Every Child, Did I Betray My Own?”
The 8,000-word piece grapples with the consequences of her and her husband’s decision to enroll their daughter, Najya, in predominantly Black, low-income schools in New York City. The article is a follow-up to one Nikole wrote 10 years ago about Najya, who is now a teenager — and who now disagrees with her parents’ schooling decisions for her.
To write the piece with integrity, Nikole said, she had to lay herself bare — and, in doing so, exposed herself and her daughter and effectively handed ammunition to critics of hers and her choices. So for a quick minute, as she read some of the online criticism of the article, she wondered if it was worth it.
I recently spoke with Nikole about that, what went into writing the piece, readers’ reactions and whether she agreed with any of the criticism. Our interview has been edited and condensed for length and clarity. (A slightly more condensed version of the interview is available as a video.)
PATRICK HEALY: You had to make the decision about whether to put a very public spotlight on your daughter. How did you go about making that decision?
NIKOLE HANNAH-JONES: With the original essay, I had never intended to write about our family’s experience. But then our school became embroiled in this national integration fight. I had been covering these issues since my first job, and it seemed impossible not to write about it.
So I pitched it, and my editors were very excited about it, and then I immediately regretted the original pitch because I’m like, man, I have to expose my child. Where I ultimately came down — I am always writing about other parents, children who are struggling through these issues of school segregation. And it almost felt hypocritical that, when it came to my own family, I would say this is the one case where we have to not tell the story of a child.
PATRICK: Many people have trusted you over the years to tell their stories. What is it like having your daughter put that kind of trust in you? What is that sense of responsibility like?
NIKOLE: Heavy. To me, it felt like a matter of integrity. When I wrote the first piece 10 years ago, so many people responded to that story, that story meant so much to them. And here was my child saying, I had a different experience. And so, as a journalist, as just a person who tries to walk through the world with integrity, I felt I had to be honest about how it went. What were the struggles? Were we able to hold the line? And what were the impacts on the person who was on the cover of that magazine?
PATRICK: When you think about the educational choices that you were making for Najya, do you feel like you made the right choice?
NIKOLE: I love that you’re asking that because I actually think, no offense, that’s the wrong question.
PATRICK: Yeah, tell me.
NIKOLE: That’s a question that has been so much of the focus since the piece came out — is whether this one family’s choice for their one child was right or wrong. To me, the question is, why do we abide a system that forces this choice?
And that’s really what I wanted us to question, to say, you know, even a parent who has all of these resources was getting crushed by the system of inequality. So if it can crush me, what do you think it’s doing to our most marginalized children? That, to me, is really the question.
I will never regret that we made a decision that we wanted to try to struggle alongside our community. I grew up in a very working class family. I spent my first few years in segregated, high-poverty schools. It’s very personal to me that children do not deserve to be robbed of an opportunity to receive an education because their families don’t have resources. And that everyone who can leave shouldn’t leave. I believe that strongly. So I think the choice was right. My mistake and my regret is not taking enough into account how it would and that it did affect my child in a negative way.
PATRICK: Were there details you started putting into the piece and then thought — that’s too much, or, I don’t want to go there?
NIKOLE: Pretty much all the examples that I thought were important ended up in the story. I was worried that with some of the examples I wanted to use, Najya would say, I really don’t want that published. And if she had told me that, I would have respected that. That’s no different than how I treat any child whose stories I’ve told. But there wasn’t anything that she disagreed with.
All I kept saying to myself as I was writing it was, I know I am giving people ammunition, I know the critiques that are going to come with it, and yet I have to be truthful. So even if that truth is very unflattering to me, I feel like we get into this to try to tell the truth and that has to include yourself if you’re going to put yourself out there.
PATRICK: Was there any part of the criticism of the article or of you that you agreed with?
NIKOLE: I mean, of course. It would sound crazy if I’d say none of the critique was valid. But I’m like, what is the critique? So can you critique my parenting? Sure, join the club, right?
And then there’s some critique that I think is just a misreading of what I was arguing. So I’ve seen the critique of, like, I had the hubris to think one person could change New York City public schools. Never say that, never believe that — in fact, I say the opposite. The critique that, you know, it was naïve. It wasn’t naïve. I knew what to expect. It didn’t make it easier, but I knew to expect it. And then, of course, the conservative critique, which is that this is an argument for school choice, which I adamantly push back on, because New York City is a system of school choice. And school choice is actually what has led to the inequality. And any other critiques of me personally, I don’t care.
PATRICK: Yeah, you’ve been to that rodeo before.
NIKOLE: Well, yeah, and also, what does it matter? Like what someone thinks about me personally, that’s not really relevant to what the journalism is trying to do. I guess there were some people who felt I didn’t spend enough time talking about high-achieving Black high schools. Valid. You’re not a journalist worth your salt if you’re not constantly assessing the little things you didn’t get right or looking back at your writing and wishing you had done things better.
There was some online discourse that was pretty brutal. And, you know, I have experienced some brutal discourse through the years, but usually not about me as a parent. That was hard. And for a minute, I’m like, man, should I have written this? And I’ve actually never, ever as a journalist questioned should I have written something. And there was a moment where I was just like, I did not have to subject myself to this. Should I have done this? I can’t regret that either. You know, in the end, I’m fine. I will be fine. My feelings got a little hurt because I’m a human being, but in the end, people are talking about these kids who don’t have a platform, who don’t have a choice.
The mayor of New York has been forced to respond, has now promised to release a plan to address it. That doesn’t happen without me writing a piece like this. It is the power of what we can do with our platform, and what I would argue is our responsibility to do.
PATRICK: One thing we hear from readers about Times journalism is, why do you write about this and not that? I’ve heard from some readers about your piece saying, I would have been more interested if there had been more about teachers unions and kind of the role of them and quality. Do you try to anticipate readers’ expectations for a piece while also thinking, I have an intent for doing it this way?
NIKOLE: That’s a good question. I have lots of thoughts on the teachers’ union, but I’m not going to dump one sentence in there that doesn’t deal with the complexity. No piece can do everything. I mean, this is why I’ve been writing about school segregation for 20 years. If you could just write one story, and that one story told us everything that we needed to know, you’d never need to write about it again. So I would just hope that readers read something like this with more curiosity and less certainty.
PATRICK: Part of the honesty of the piece is that uncertainty — that there aren’t easy answers. I wonder, during the writing process, if you felt like, maybe I need to be leaning more into black and white? Or if you felt like the ambiguity is where the truth is?
NIKOLE: I think that I feel ambiguous myself. I’ve been covering this for so long. There’s been so little change, sustained movement. I’m ambiguous on, do we really actually care? And will we ever actually do something? And, in ten years, will my own child feel differently than she feels today? Ten years ago when I wrote the first piece, I put that question in there, right? Like, one day my child is probably going to question this choice and I won’t know how to answer it, and I still don’t know how to answer it, except it was worth the try. We should have tried. We all should try more.
PATRICK: I love that answer. I want to push you on one part of the answer.
NIKOLE: Push me. C’mon.
PATRICK: Can we care and yet not know what —
NIKOLE: What to do? Yes.
PATRICK: How do people reconcile that? How do policymakers reconcile that? How do you build a constituency, or even, dare I say, like a consensus around what to do?
NIKOLE: I can never give a sound bite answer to this because it is complex, but, you know, we’re all complicit in these structures of inequality. It doesn’t mean we agree with them, but we’re also not really doing anything to end them. And many of us actually take advantage of them or we benefit from them. That is why, ultimately, if we’re going to change this it has to be at a policy level, it has to be from leadership on top. It’s not going to come from individual parents. You may be able to go into a school. You may be able to change a school, but you’re not going to change the system.
So, I think, what I tried to put forth in this essay is a woman who was humbled, right? Is a woman who still believes in the rightness of what I tried, but also said, man, was it hard. And I don’t know that I got it quite right. No, actually, I know I did not get it quite right because my child has told me this.
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