Critics lambasted New York Times writer Nikole Hannah-Jones for using her own daughter as a prop to virtue signal about alleged systemic racism by deliberately sending her to poor-performing Big Apple schools – scolding the mother for treating her education as a sick “game.”
Hannah-Jones, 50, who helped craft the outlet’s controversial 1619 Project, said she and her husband – who purchased a $1.5 million Bed-Stuy brownstone in 2018 – “thought by sending Najya to a mostly low-income and black school, we could help improve it for all the children there.”
But after years of attending mostly low-income schools like PS 307 and Urban Assembly Unison, Hannah-Jones found her bright now-16-year-old daughter lacked the basic skills to keep up in high school, and was hopping mad that she had put “other kids” before her.
Gob-smacked readers were also quick to bring the author to task for putting activism before her own daughter’s future.
“I am so thankful my dad wasn’t trying to prove any points to himself or the world and just wanted to send my brother and me to the safest and best schools he could afford (which were not the best around and it tormented him that he couldn’t do more, so he taught us and our friends at home),” The Atlantic writer Thomas Chatterton Williams, who is also a faculty member at Bard College, wrote on X.
“He did this because he’d been forced into segregated, under-resourced schools before civil rights and knew you have one shot at an education and this isn’t a game,” he seethed.
Jack Despain Zhou, founder of Center for Educational Progress, a nonprofit think tank, said Hannah-Jones failed her child.
“You have a duty to your children. It is wrong to use them as vehicles for activism instead of fighting for their interests,” he wrote on X.
Still, Zhou praised the controversial writer for coming clean.
“I don’t want to take a victory lap here, because NHJ could have simply never written this article, and it’s incredibly important that she did,” he added.
In her essay published Sunday in the New York Times Magazine, Hannah-Jones admitted that her decision, made despite having the means to send her daughter to top schools, left her feeling like she “failed” her child.
“Najya was asking what I’d accomplished by not choosing the ‘best’ school for her,” Hannah-Jones wrote. “The honest answer is, I don’t know.
“When it comes to the choices my husband and I have made about public education, these days I feel that I failed both my values and my child.”
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