What Nikole Hannah-Jones Doesn’t Say

‘M y daughter,” wrote Nikole Hannah-Jones in 2024, “is not worth more than any other child.”

This assessment was offered as part of a reflection on a New York Times essay that Hannah-Jones had written eight years earlier on the subject of choosing an appropriate school. In tandem, she imparted two other reflections: that the school she’d made such a commotion about picking was clearly “failing”; and that, regardless, she still believed she had “made the right choice.”

Two years later, she has changed her mind. Or, rather: Two years later, her daughter has changed her mind for her. Having eventually learned what her mother had done to her, her daughter “just shook her head, her face a mask of disbelief, and something else: betrayal,” the writer admitted this week in the Times.

For penning this mea culpa, Hannah-Jones has received a good deal of praise. Well, you can count me out of all that. Her actions were morally indefensible and analytically ignorant, and her supposed metamorphosis remains invisible to the naked eye. She has always been a ridiculous zealot. Now, she’s a cautionary tale, too.

To propose that one’s own child “is not worth more than any other” is an ugly — perhaps even an evil — sentiment. You may call me whatever names you wish in response to this assertion, but you must understand that it will not change a thing. My job as a parent is to prioritize my children. I owe it to them, and they rely upon me to follow through with that obligation. It is true that, in a detached, cosmic sense, my children are no more important than are any others. But for me? Yes, they are. They represent the primary purpose of my existence, and, insofar as it is in my power and is consistent with the law, I intend to advance their interests without apology, embarrassment, or regret. Far from representing a societal flaw or some selfish personal shortcoming, that instinct is the most natural thing in the world — which is why, historically, the only the thing that has ever been able to break it is the entrenchment of totalitarian ideology. The fanatics who “informed” on their family members during the worst days of the Soviet Union were not admirable for their commitment to the cause; they were anti-human freaks who upset the natural balance of the universe. Nikole Hannah-Jones’s sin was far lesser than theirs, but it was still a sin. Outside of a waterboarding chamber, no parent should ever say, “My daughter is not worth more than any other child.”

Back in 2016, Hannah-Jones’s husband seems to have reflexively understood that what his wife was proposing was madness. And yet, having been guilt-tripped, he appears to have gone along with it anyway:

As I told Faraji my plan, he slowly shook his head no. He wanted to look into parochial schools, or one of the “good” public schools, or even private schools. So we argued, pleading our cases from the living room, up the steps to our office lined with books on slavery and civil rights, and back down, before we came to an impasse and retreated to our respective corners. There is nothing harder than navigating our nation’s racial legacy in this country, and the problem was that we each knew the other was right and wrong at the same time. Faraji couldn’t believe that I was asking him to expose our child to the type of education that the two of us had managed to avoid. He worried that we would be hurting Najya if we put her in a high-poverty, all-black school. “Are we experimenting with our child based on our idealism about public schools?” he asked. “Are we putting her at a disadvantage?

The answer, quite obviously, was “yes.”

Some readers have responded to Hannah-Jones’s admission by proposing that the fault lay not in her instinct, but in its execution. I do not think that such a clean distinction can reasonably be drawn, but I can certainly agree with the implication that this entire experiment was built on stuff and nonsense. In her original essay, she expressed a desire to avoid “segregation.” Yet she sent her daughter to a school that hosted more students of her daughter’s race than attended the ones she eschewed. Defending her decision, she explained her belief that a profitable educational environment involved sedulous parental involvement. Yet, by her own admission, she was so neglectful of her daughter’s progress that, for years, she remained unaware that she had fallen badly behind. Nikole Hannah-Jones’s New York Times biography notes that her “journalism has tended to focus on school.” Which makes it all the more shameful that she still has no idea why schools tend to fail. Like many of her colleagues, she ignores the available data and instead pins the blame on funding gaps that don’t exist, racism that cannot be identified, and attitudes that nobody in our current era actually exhibits. Perhaps, going forward, she might “focus” a little harder?

What does Hannah-Jones believe now? She doesn’t say. By itself, this omission prevents her essay from being “brave” or “admirable,” and relegates it to the unlovely status of a humblebrag. If she had right-of-center politics, the Times would undoubtedly have forced her to spell out her mistake. The confession would have been the overture; the rest of the performance would have been the detailed explanation of how exactly she was wrong, and the exhaustive “therefore . . .” that included hard statistics, legible arguments, and the outlining of an alternative agenda. But, of course, the Times did no such thing, and Hannah-Jones has made no such effort under her own steam. Given that Nikole Hannah-Jones has extremely strong views about what, how, and where other American children should be taught, it would be useful to know what, having watched her assumptions fail her own child, she now thinks about America’s education system. She isn’t going to tell us.

Which, I’m afraid, is entirely typical. I do not mean to be unduly waspish here, but it ought not to be a surprise that Nikole Hannah-Jones believed that her daughter was getting As despite doing no homework, given that getting As despite doing no homework is exactly how Nikole Hannah-Jones’s own career has played out thus far. Hannah-Jones is a writer who doesn’t write; a historian who knows little history; an advocate with no mastery of her brief — and for this, she has been rewarded with extravagant public-speaking fees, a cushy sinecure at the New York Times, a Pulitzer Prize in commentary, two George Polk Awards, three National Magazine Awards, a MacArthur Fellowship, and at least ten years of the sort of detached, flighty, consequence-free existence that allows one to sacrifice the mind of one’s own child for a couple of mawkish newspaper pieces and the cheap mollification of one’s ego.