Nikole Hannah-Jones’s Daughter Is Not the Only Victim

Unsatisfied with miseducating Americans about their country’s founding through her ahistorical 1619 Project, Nikole Hannah-Jones took it upon herself to personally wreck her daughter’s schooling. She admitted as much this week in a viral essay: Hannah-Jones deliberately enrolled her child in New York’s abysmal public schools and watched her flail along with the rest of her classmates, mostly poor, black students. The decision was made to puncture these schools’ “segregation” and “systemic inequality” by closing off opportunities for one more affluent pupil.

The narrative makes for a depressing read. But although the author acknowledges that she sacrificed her child’s education to the cause of racial balancing, the damage her ideology has caused to education more broadly goes far beyond one girl. For those in Hannah-Jones’s progressive tradition, it matters not whether any individual student’s learning is better off — just that educational systems are fairer in a cosmic sense.

About the Author

John R. Puri

John R. Puri is the Thomas L. Rhodes Fellow at National Review.

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Unsatisfied with miseducating Americans about their country’s founding through her ahistorical 1619 Project, Nikole Hannah-Jones took it upon herself to personally wreck her daughter’s schooling. She admitted as much this week in a viral essay: Hannah-Jones deliberately enrolled her child in New York’s abysmal public schools and watched her flail along with the rest of her classmates, mostly poor, black students. The decision was made to puncture these schools’ “segregation” and “systemic inequality” by closing off opportunities for one more affluent pupil.

The narrative makes for a depressing read. But although the author acknowledges that she sacrificed her child’s education to the cause of racial balancing, the damage her ideology has caused to education more broadly goes far beyond one girl. For those in Hannah-Jones’s progressive tradition, it matters not whether any individual student’s learning is better off — just that educational systems are fairer in a cosmic sense.