In Fighting for Every Black Child, Did She Betray Her Own?

I’ve wanted to write about this one since the headline dropped.

Ten years ago Nikole Hannah-Jones put her daughter, Najya, in a high-poverty Brooklyn public school. The point was to fight New York’s segregated system instead of using the family’s money and connections for a “better” seat. Najya stayed through elementary and middle school. She collected A’s and still fell behind. At 16 she asked her mother, “Did you know my school was bad like this when you decided to put me here?”

Wayne Lawrence for The New York Times. Najya Hannah-Jones, 16.

You can read Hannah-Jones’s essay here.

In the new Times Magazine essay, “In Fighting for Every Black Child, Did I Betray My Own?”, Hannah-Jones writes that she felt “overcome with regret,” that she had “failed both my values and my child,” and that her only daughter “looked to me to protect her… And I had not chosen her.” She kept Najya in those schools for years. She let her leave only when it was time to pick a high school. Najya chose a selective public school of the kind her mother had argued against.

The article is a parent’s ledger and a policy brief in the same piece. The two columns do not add up the same way for every reader.

Here’s mine

I don’t have children. I’m a long way from sitting in that car and deciding where a child of mine would go to school. I can barely conceive of how you weigh it.

My own path was different from Najya’s, of course. In Chicago we didn’t have middle school the way she did. What I keep seeing is that she was able to determine her next step.

I wish my parents had weighed that decision differently. My late mother especially decided it was more important that I not go halfway across the city. It bothered her too much that I would have to go “too far” from home for school.

Unlike Najya, I didn’t grasp how big a decision high school would be. In eighth grade I applied to two schools—not counting Harlan, which was the default. One accepted me. The other I never heard from.

My eighth-grade teacher was worrying me about answering the school that said yes. Somehow that letter got lost in the papers at home. I found it in the newspapers we were about to throw away. By then it was already too late.

Regardless, my decision-making about my own education in those days was a fiasco. I sometimes wished that my parents had been more willing to send me to any school I was capable of attending. Though back in the day, before eighth grade, I was never fully the student who applied himself.

Hannah-Jones held her daughter in a failing school for a cause. My mother held me close to home for comfort. I don’t put those motives on the same moral shelf. I do think they rhyme. In both cases an adult’s preference decided the building, and the child paid in lost ground.

Najya at least got a late vote. I ultimately didn’t. A child that age cannot run the whole process. Somebody has to keep the letter off the newspaper pile—and be willing to put the kid on the bus.

Who comes first: the child, the cause, or the shorter ride home? Let’s hear it in the comments.