The left has watered down a parent’s responsibility so much that they are willingly putting their children into situations that will see them fail to thrive.
Infamous “1619” author Nikole Hannah-Jones spent years arguing that, in order to solve New York City’s racist public school system, she and her husband would send their daughter, Najya, to a low-income black New York City school.
In her latest essay for The New York Times Magazine, Hannah-Jones said her decision to send Najya to a school wealthier families with options like hers would usually avoid was shaped by her reporting on school integration. She claimed she felt “an obligation to make educational decisions based on the collective good and not just our individual advantage.”
She now finds herself shocked that Najya needed intensive tutoring to overcome years of learning loss she suffered due to her parents’ decision to put race ideology above their daughter’s future. A tutoring director said she knew very little algebra and had large gaps in elementary building blocks, including long division and fractions.
A random person off the street could have predicted this outcome, but when you don’t view parenting in the traditional way, it’s easy to forget your child should come first.
Parents have a responsibility to give their children every legitimate advantage they can. Despite the left’s opposition, that is not a radical claim. You should look for the strongest school you can afford, the safest neighborhoods and classmates for them to grow up well-adjusted, and an unapologetic desire for your kid to do better than the kids around them. If you are not working toward that end, you are failing them. Political belief does not cancel parental duty.
This isn’t about setting unrealistic expectations that leave your children feeling unable to reach your standards. If you aren’t actively clearing the obstacles in their path, you are placing unnecessary burdens on them that will have generational consequences.
Najya’s situation is especially sad because her parents could have given her every opportunity for success but chose not to. This reality is made even more insane when Hannah-Jones admits that she benefited from going to a predominantly white school.
“Starting when I was in second grade, my parents enrolled me in a school-integration busing program that allowed a limited number of Black students to leave their segregated neighborhood schools for white ones on the other side of town,” she wrote. “Being given access to the most resourced public schools in my hometown allowed me to flourish academically, and I am convinced that the integrated education my husband and I received set the foundation that has allowed us to become the successful upper-middle-class family that my daughter was born into.”
“And yet decades later, integration now exists for a minority of Black children — usually those born to families like ours who have the money to pay for private schools or live in tonier ZIP codes zoned to heavily white public schools, or who can pay for tutoring that allows their children, from a very young age, to test into programs for ‘gifted’ students. Most Black students, however, languish in the type of schools that the law was supposed to have eradicated,” she continues.
“So, like the generations of Black parents who came before us, Faraji and I felt an obligation to make educational decisions based on the collective good and not just our individual advantage … Faraji and I decided that our role in this struggle meant upending the status quo and sending our child not to a wealthy white school but to a poor Black one.”
Hannah-Jones’s parents correctly understood that keeping her in a failing school would have disastrous effects on her future success, but when it came time to protect her daughter in the same way, her political religion required her to sacrifice her daughter, which she willingly did.
Najya said something to her mother that will stick with me.
“Sometimes I wish instead of always thinking about other kids, you would have thought about me. I never really got the education I wanted,” Najya said.
She saw the devastating truth, and when Najya had the chance to choose whether to continue the experiment, she chose one of New York City’s hardest public high schools to enter, in a wealthy, gentrified neighborhood. The daughter who had lived her mother’s radical, racial theory picked the white school the theory had treated as morally objectionable.
Najya will probably be fine. She is clearly smart and capable. Her parents have the money, time, and connections to close the gaps her earlier education created. But this story is larger than just Najya, Nikole, and Faraji. The families most likely to treat Hannah-Jones’s 2016 essay, where she originally admits why they sent her to a failing public school, as a guide will not have the same access to a private academic rescue plan. A parent with fewer resources cannot buy back early education failings.
The other children in Najya’s class, without their opportunities, were stuck. They didn’t have a choice. Hannah-Jones did and used it for years against her child’s best interests. It’s no wonder her daughter is disappointed. She left her to fail so she could continue writing woke essays and feeling morally superior to her upper-middle-class friends who chose differently.
The left has too often treated the idea of giving your child the best as morally embarrassing, so much so that they willingly deploy their child as an ideological experiment. Most of human history shows that the stronger the family unit, the more older generations protect the younger from educational, financial, and spiritual ruin, the better they fare. Hannah-Jones deserves to be ridiculed. Maybe her failure will teach others in her cult to stop sacrificing their children for politics.
