Najya Hannah-Jones Parents Her Mother in Revealing Interview

In a typical parent-child relationship, it is the parent who is responsible for dispelling the child’s fantastical notions about how the world works and what the likely consequences of an ill-considered decision will be.

This dynamic is inverted in the case of Nikole Hannah-Jones and her daughter, Najya.

Days after Hannah-Jones released her widely read essay acknowledging that she had erred in sending her daughter to a struggling New York City public school in the name of social justice, the pair sat down for an interview on This American Life to reflect on the consequences of the decision.

Throughout the interview with producer Chana Joffe-Walt, 16-year-old Najya tries her best to remove her mother’s ideological blinders and reveal to her that any imagined social-justice gains she hoped would flow from her parenting decisions were outweighed by the real-world costs of a poor education.

“So you put me on the line to help a school, but it didn’t work,” Najya tells her mom.

“Yeah, I put you on the line in hopes of making a change,” she replies. “It’s not like I never had any doubts about my choice. I did. And the only reason I’m okay with my choice now is I’m like, you’re fine. I felt this was important. I tried to do the right thing.”

But Najya, who comes off as wise beyond her years, points out that her mother thinks she’s fine only because she now attends an academically competitive high school, which she selected against her mother’s wishes. “I feel like if I picked a different choice that you wanted me to, I don’t think I would be fine.”

In her essay, Hannah-Jones explains that Najya was one of the brightest students in her PS 307 class, but she still could not pass the state algebra exam. Hannah-Jones recalls finding her daughter’s math folder filled with ungraded assignments that included mostly the wrong answers. A school literacy coach told her that Najya’s teacher had “most likely never performed the school’s mandatory reading assessments for Najya or any of her classmates.”

Even after witnessing the failure of her daughter’s public school for herself, Hannah-Jones had still hoped Najya would choose a low-performing, predominantly black high school in the name of living out her values. She was left disappointed when Najya decided to prioritize her education instead.

Hannah-Jones tells This American Life that she “internally cringed” when her daughter presented her a list of selective, high-performing high schools she wanted to attend.

“My child came up with the exact opposite of my life’s work,” she told Joffe-Walt. “And every school on there is a school that screens and has hardly no black kids.”

Not only was she discouraged that Najya had the ambition to attend one of the city’s best schools; she recalls being “disappointed” when her daughter came home in middle school and announced that she wanted to go to Harvard, despite Hannah-Jones’s having primed her, since she was a toddler, to attend Howard University, a historically black research university.

“I was like, we have never mentioned the word ‘Harvard’ in our household. What the hell is happening?” she said. “We don’t even discuss [predominantly white institutions] as an option in our household.”

“I’m disappointed,” she added. “I’m like, what is wrong with you? You have to admire that the child is like, ‘Whatever is the best, that’s what I want.’ I both admired it and was appalled at the same time.”

Najya’s Harvard dreams were short-lived, however, and she now aims to go to Howard as her mother prefers.

And while Hannah-Jones can now admit that she doesn’t know if she made the right choice in her daughter’s schooling, she still insists that her instinct not to prioritize her own daughter’s well-being over that of every other black child in New York City was just.

“What do we then do? Do we just say, well, there’s nothing I can do? Or do you try in some way to make some intervention? It’s like, why should my child be the one that’s rescued? You should escape what we consign so many other kids just like you to. I just will never feel right about that,” she said during the interview.

As the realist in the relationship, it was incumbent on Najya to inform her mother that her argument “makes no sense.”

“You’re talking about, oh, I’m just going to give you the worst just because it’s not fair that you — I didn’t ask to be born,” she said. “All you’re supposed to do is just put me in a good school. Like, oh, well, I didn’t want to put you in a great school and have you have advantages over other kids. Isn’t that what you want? Isn’t that what you want me to have? Is that not a normal thing you want me to have?”

Hannah-Jones could only argue that her daughter does have advantages over other kids.

“The stakes were so high for me personally,” Hannah-Jones says at another point in the interview. “I feel like the seas are so high when it comes to the  issue of integration and equality that I couldn’t admit to her that, yes, you did bear a cost. And I don’t know that we made the right choice. I don’t know what the right choice would be.”

Headline Fail of the Week

Texas Democrats claim “Resurfaced Audio Spotlights Ken Paxton’s Callous Remarks on the Tragic Uvalde School Shooting” — but there’s a great deal of context Democrats are leaving out.

In fact, even Politifact stepped in to fact-check them.

Democrats are amplifying a viral tweet from Shannon Watts, founder of the gun-control advocacy group Moms Demand Action, that reads: “NEWLY UNCOVERED AUDIO: Texas GOP US Senate candidate Ken Paxton calls the Uvalde shooting a ‘plan’ by ‘God’ and says ‘life is short’ about children murdered in an elementary school. This man is vile.”

The post includes a clipped video of Paxton from 2022 saying, “Look, there’s always a plan. I believe God always has a plan. Life is short no matter what it is.”

But the post removes the context of Paxton’s comments. He had been asked to “speak a word of comfort or something of encouragement” to the families of the Uvalde victims “as a follower of Jesus.”

“Look, I, I think it’s, it’s difficult to give comfort,” Paxton replied. “If I lost one of my children, I’d be pretty devastated. Especially in a, you know, way that is so senseless and, you know, seemingly has no purpose.”

“I think I would say, I would just have to — if I had the opportunity to talk to people I’d have to say look, there’s always a plan. I believe God always has a plan. Life is short no matter what it is and certainly we’re not gonna make sense of, you know, a young child being shot and killed way before their life expectancy. And so even though we can’t make sense of it, I would just have to encourage them to hold on to their faith and to hold on to their belief that there really is purpose in, in what God does and we may not know it now, but someday we will.”

Media Misses

• MS NOW’s Morning Joe spread several falsehoods about the ICE shooting in Austin last week. Co-host Willie Geist relied on misinformation from Wilber Garces Perez’s attorney, saying her client “entered the country lawfully as an asylum seeker and had a legal work permit.”

“This was a DoorDash driver who says he was swiped and effectively run off the road and then shot in the back,” Geist added. “A bullet that’s still there laid on a concrete floor in ICE detention center, not getting the medical care he needs, the surgery he needs for his spine. And yet in these statements, you just see no reflection, no humanity, no anything from DHS or ICE.”

But Fox News aired video of the interaction that led up to the shooting. Perez should have clearly understood that he was being pursued by law enforcement, as the ICE vehicles, though unmarked, flashed their emergency lights. Authorities also clarified that Perez had a deportation order issued against him, despite the co-hosts’ claims that he was here legally.

“By the way, being undocumented, civil offense,” Mika Brzezinski said. But Perez was actually committing a criminal offense by remaining in the country in defiance of his deportation order.

• New York Times shareholders filed a lawsuit last week against the paper’s parent company in an attempt to obtain internal records over how its editors have handled certain topics, including the Israel-Hamas war.

The State Board of Administration of Florida (SBA) and conservative nonprofit National Center for Public Policy Research (NCPPR) filed the suit in New York County Supreme Court claiming the paper had a recent history of “materially false or baseless factual assertions,” citing a peer-reviewed study published in 2024 that found the Times admitted 72 errors in its Israel-Hamas war coverage between October 2023 and June 2024.

“The Company’s repeated publication of materially false or baseless factual assertions, many later admitted internally or disproven externally, supports a reasonable inference that the Board has not only failed in its obligation to monitor the Company’s internal controls, but it has allowed such flagrantly selective application of the internal controls to support the conclusion that in the absence of any Board-level oversight, journalistic standards have been weaponized within the Company to serve the personal agendas of unchecked editors,” the petition read.

A spokesperson for the Times told Fox News that the lawsuit “has no merit and was brought for an improper purpose.”

• The Associated Press reported that the death of Tasia Fortune, and other black Americans, had “stirred distressing memories of the grim history of lynchings across the U.S. South.” Fortune’s body was found hanged from a tree in Mississippi last month, but her mother told the AP she did not believe her daughter’s death was racially motivated and instead said she believed there were “personal” circumstances behind the murder. The AP reported that the suspect in the case is also black and acknowledged that, at the time of its reporting, police and prosecutors had not announced a suspected motive. Days after the report was published, investigators revealed that they believe Fortune was killed in a drug dispute and that the hanging was “staged.”