Nikole Hannah-Jones’ Racism Is Why Her Daughter Can’t Do Math
Joy Pullmann Visit on Twitter@joypullmann
Public schools are terrible because DEI absolves families of responsibility for their choices.
Nikole Hannah-Jones has curated herself an extremely lucrative, notoriety-winning career by blaming white people for black people’s problems. In her latest article for The New York Times Magazine, she does it again. It’s titled, “In Fighting for Every Black Child, Did I Betray My Own?”
In it, the creator of the scholarly abomination known as the 1619 Project admits that her warped educational ideas have harmed her daughter’s future and their relationship. When her daughter finally convinced her parents to let her attend a more challenging high school, she went from getting straight As in math to “barely keeping up”: “After an assessment, the center’s director called me in and told me that Najya knew very little algebra and had huge gaps in many of the building blocks of math that she should have learned in elementary school, like mastery of long division and fractions.”
This was after Najya had gotten As in a previous algebra class and been on her middle school’s honor roll. For elementary, Hannah-Jones and her husband had deliberately enrolled their daughter in one of New York City’s worst public schools, which Hannah-Jones calls “a poor Black one.” In 2016, Hannah-Jones’ daughter was literally on the cover of NYT Magazine to flaunt her mother’s decision.
“In the outside world, my choice had earned me valor,” Hannah-Jones writes in her latest essay for NYT Magazine. But it earned her daughter unnecessary suffering and academic delays. As early as first grade, Hannah-Jones writes, her daughter endured unsupervised, violent lunch periods: “Children were running wild, chasing, hitting and pushing each other while the teacher’s aides and cafeteria workers stood by looking bored.” The staff ignored the chaos.
The same continued in Najya Hannah-Jones’ middle school, with teachers assigning no homework, violence regularly taking over instruction time, and “fights in the hallway.”
Federal statistics show the public schools with the most black students also have the highest percentages of black teachers and staff. The likelihood that many of the staff allowing children to attack each other during lunch were black is high, especially since state racial bean-counting shows that more than half of Najya’s elementary staff are black. Yet Hannah-Jones blames the staff’s laziness and cowardice not on bad leadership, bad training, bad character, bad parenting, or any other proxy for personal responsibility, but on the only culprit she apparently believes in — racism.
To the extent racism was at play, the most likely form of it is the racism Hannah-Jones has become a well-known name promoting. That would be false accusations of racism any time someone who isn’t white, male, or Christian faces accountability. Yes, people are so scared of these false accusations — which have ruined many people’s lives — they will do anything to avoid them, including failing to reprimand unruly children and giving poor students bad grades.
Further, part of the reason teachers in majority non-white schools are often low-quality is that leftist cries of “racism” have gutted academics at every level that leads to a teaching job, from K-12 to college and teacher certification. It was to “diversify teaching ranks” that New York eliminated its already low-quality teacher certification test in 2017. It’s because corruptly elevated people like Hannah-Jones blame “racism” for non-white kids’ worse outcomes instead of demanding personal responsibility that standards in schools are low enough to allow for this:
[A] few days before school let out for winter break, I received a folder in Najya’s backpack with the math assignments I had been requesting since our conference. Once I tucked her into bed, I sat at my dining room table and scanned one page, then another and another. None of them were graded. I started checking Najya’s work and discovered most of her answers were wrong. Najya believed herself to be good at math — it was her favorite subject. But now I understood she thought she was correctly solving all her problems because her teacher was not checking her work. Similarly, Najya’s writing assignments were rife with uncorrected punctuation, capitalization and grammar errors.
Instead of recognizing she’s a top contributor to this problem, Hannah-Jones complains about the outcomes she’s spent her professional life earning gobs of money and prestigious awards creating. Indeed, the very tests that Hannah-Jones also demonizes as — what else? — instruments of white supremacy are essentially the only reason she finally gets her daughter tutoring to overcome her school-induced deficiencies.