Last week, Nikole Hannah-Jones wrote the bombshell essay, “In fighting for every black child, did I betray my own?,” about how she deliberately kept her daughter in a terrible black school as a kind of political experiment. And just to shelve the opening question, yes, Hannah-Jones, you absolutely did betray your daughter. You also betrayed the brave generations of black parents who fought, marched, sued, and sometimes literally risked their lives for the simple right to send their children to better schools. Those parents fought all the way to the Supreme Court to get their kids out of inferior, segregated classrooms, and you inherited that hard-won freedom. You were bused to predominantly white schools in Waterloo, Iowa, through a voluntary desegregation program, and by your own account, that education is what allowed you to flourish. Then, like a spoiled brat who doesn’t appreciate what her parents gave her, you threw it away, choosing educational deprivation for your own child as a demonstration of your virtue. Only someone who never had to fight for every scrap of opportunity could treat it with such disdain. You are a narcissistic black elite who has made a fortune larping as a member of the oppressed class, and you arrogantly believed you could discard those benefits for the sake of the greater community, or your own vanity project, or whatever the hell this was.
You, Nikole Hannah-Jones, came up in a world, at least in the waters you swim in, where being black confers a kind of automatic authority, the doctoral expertise of lived experience, and where institutions offer nothing but affirmations, step-ladders, and cushions. You have only ever known a world in which blacks are unfairly advantaged in academia, where failing to even speak grammatical English is celebrated. American universities had explicitly considered race in undergraduate admissions for roughly half a century by the time the Supreme Court ended racist admissions in 2023. Harvard’s racist policies roughly quadrupled a black applicant’s odds of admission compared with a white applicant with similar academic credentials. At the University of North Carolina, where you went to school, out-of-state black applicants in the middle academic tier were 33 times more likely to be admitted than equally qualified Asian Americans. Off campus, more than half of American workers say their workplace now holds DEI trainings or meetings, some of which are cartoonishly racist and unlawful.
Maybe you assumed the racist cushion you have helped stitch would catch your daughter, too. Or maybe, despite cosplaying as someone who opposes classist segregation, you rolled the dice knowing you could yank the parachute cord at any time. As you put it, “Her father and I knew that we could provide for her tutoring and any other assistance to make up for what her school may have lacked.” But you couldn’t. As I wrote on Notes:
I would never sacrifice my child to my politics. The one thing you’re supposed to do as a parent is give your child the best opportunity you can in life. Not risk their future so you can run a political experiment on them. What kind of person decides to make their own daughter go slumming so they can wash themselves in the moral glow? And then pimp them out for content? Good on her for owning the mistake, I suppose, for whatever that’s worth. But as a parent who actually works hard to give his child everything he can in life, I cannot imagine the thought of this ever entering my mind.
But I want to address something I have not seen anyone online address. I want to address the actual logic behind Hannah-Jones’ decision not to send her daughter to a white, affluent school. Instead, she put her child in pre-K at P.S. 307, the Daniel Hale Williams school in Brooklyn’s Vinegar Hill neighborhood, a high-poverty public school where almost all the students are black and Latino.
P.S. 307 performs extremely poorly on standardized tests. In 2024, only 28% of students met the state standard in English and 27% in math. In 2023, it was only 17% in English, against a state average of 49%, and 27% in math against 52%. Out of 4,346 schools in the state, P.S. 307 ranks 4,031st. In other words, the school Hannah-Jones chose for her daughter is one of the worst in New York. It wasn’t always, which I’ll get to shortly. But making matters worse, she actually campaigned against a “yuppie invasion” of kids from whiter areas into her daughter’s failing school. Here’s The New York Post’s report:
She and her husband crusaded against letting more students from affluent backgrounds into their daughter’s struggling, mostly-black Brooklyn elementary school — while decrying New York’s hopelessly “segregated” public school system … Hannah-Joneses stood firmly against a Department of Education rezoning initiative, which seemed poised to flood their kid’s school with local tots from wealthy backgrounds. This despite the couple themselves being well-off non-native New Yorkers living in Bed-Stuy in a completely different school district. At the time, nearby public school PS 8 was overflowing with students, at 148% capacity and had a multi-year waitlist. PS 307 … was underutilized, at just 50% capacity.
The change would have relieved the overcrowding at P.S. 8, desegregated both schools, and brought together kids whose paths might otherwise never cross, bridging a gap between rich and poor, black and white. It would also likely have brought more resources, more funding, and more parental clout, the very things that could have helped lift those poor black and Latino kids up, the very things Hannah-Jones claims she put her own child there to accomplish. As Hannah-Jones herself bragged: “A New York Times reporter in a high-poverty school fucking changes the school, right? Like, there are certain things that just are not gonna happen in that school. I can go to that school and say there is a problem and it gets fixed immediately.”
But if you read her essay, you find that this was arrogant bluster. She did not have the power to transform the school, and the result of her political experiment is that she badly harmed her own daughter, who is now a teenager scrambling to fill in math she should have learned in elementary school. She also harmed all the other kids at P.S. 307, the very kids she claimed she was helping, by sacrificing her own child, by working against desegregation and against more parents just like her coming into the same school, something that might have actually produced the result she claimed she wanted. Yet in her recent essay, she writes, “We had connections and time and status that should not matter, but that we all know do. And more than that, we believed strongly that if families like ours went into schools like this one, it would challenge other families with similar values to do the same.”
The incoming school, the Post reports, “had rapidly become one of the borough’s best and most desirable.” But Hannah-Jones’ husband, Faraji, was furious and opposed the plan. If this was desegregation, and from a highly successful school, the academic benefit to students at P.S. 307 could have been revolutionary. So why oppose it? Well, at the time, 85% of P.S. 8’s pupils were white. Faraji even said of incoming, affluent parents — right after she bragged about the change affluent parents like her can make happen — “When those affluent parents come in, we do not want to alienate the parents who live across the street in the Farragut.”
Listen to how she justified it. She didn’t want to “alienate” black Farragut parents by having them send their black kids to a school with white kids. Writing to the Post this month, she explains she wanted to “slow the process down to ensure parents had input.” But Americans have heard that language before. In 1956, 101 Southern congressmen signed the Southern Manifesto, warning that desegregation was “destroying the amicable relations between the white and Negro races” and that “parents should not be deprived by government of the right to direct the lives and education of their own children.” The segregationists who fought Brown v. Board of Education rarely said they wanted to keep black kids out. They said they wanted to go slow, protect community harmony, and give parents a voice. The Manifesto did not attack blacks. Instead, it spoke of keeping little white children in an environment that “confirmed their habits, traditions, and way of life,” meaning of course, a white way of life. Agree or disagree, that is the heart of the segregationist position, and as you read on, I’d like you to ask yourself whether Hannah-Jones truly wants desegregation, as she claims, or simply a black version of the exact same thing I just quoted.
