Activist New York Times journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones made news in 2019 as principal author of the error-ridden, Times-produced 1619 Project, which erroneously dates America’s founding from the arrival of the first slaves on our continent’s shores and falsely describes our country’s founding mainly as a project to preserve slavery. Hannah-Jones’s fanciful racialization of our national past, perhaps inspired by her revealing early-life comment that the “white race is the biggest murderer, rapist, pillager and thief of the modern world,” drew sharp rebukes from professional historians of all political stripes, and even from some of her own colleagues at the Times, which initially stood by the author and her flawed work but later issued a series of halting and dilatory corrections.
Nevertheless, the 1619 Project was a great career boon for Hannah-Jones, who had already obtained employment at the former paper of record and, in 2017, was awarded a lucrative MacArthur Fellowship. Her introductory essay to the 1619 Project won her the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for Commentary. A year later, she was elected to the once-prestigious American Academy of Arts and Sciences. A generously endowed tenured professorship in “Race and Journalism” and center directorship at historically black Howard University quickly followed, despite her having neither received a doctorate nor previously taught as a university faculty member. The 1619 Project went on to inform curricula in thousands of school districts.
Over this past weekend, however, Hannah-Jones descended from the Olympian heights of minority privilege to make a startling admission in the pages of the Times’ magazine. “These days,” she wrote of her teenaged daughter Najya, “I feel that I failed both my values and my child . . . by not choosing the ‘best’ school for her.” Despite considering her family “upper-middle class,” thanks to her husband’s access to integrated military schools and her own racially mixed parents’ availing of integration measures to send her to a predominantly white school, Hannah-Jones consigned Najya to New York City Public School 307, whose poor, troubled, and predominantly black student body has caused it to become known as “Little Rikers Island”—named for New York City’s infamous prison, which is allegedly so bad that it is slated to be decommissioned. According to a Manhattan Institute investigation, P.S. 307 spends about $52,000 per student every year despite alarmingly poor academic results.
As well-paid, nationally famous professionals, who in 2018 reportedly paid $1.5 million for a brownstone house in Brooklyn’s hip Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood, the Hannah-Joneses might have sent Najya to a much better school, public or private, or at least one that used its resources more judiciously. But they chose not to, in the belief that sending their only child to P.S. 307 would strike a blow for social justice and encourage other progressive parents to do the same. “We thought by sending Najya to a mostly low-income and Black school, we could help improve it for all the children there,” Hannah-Jones condescendingly reflects, as though her family’s mere presence in the impoverished school’s community would work on it like some sort of educational fertilizer. As recently as 2024, the The New York Post reported, she wrote that after eight years of watching P.S. 307 underserve her daughter, “I still know we made the right choice.”
Najya, whom Hannah-Jones claims is an honors student, appears to disagree, showing impressive powers of analysis and insight. “So you had money to send me to one of the best schools, and you chose not to?” her mother reports hearing from her after a disheartening school pickup. To grind salt into the wound, Najya, now entering high school and, presumably, looking forward to college, appears to have rejected her parents’ values. She chose to attend a competitive secondary institution that requires an entrance examination, rather than continue in circumstances that force her to cosplay her parents’ social justice fantasies.
Hannah-Jones clearly has a great deal of guilt emerging from the cognitive gap between her theory and her praxis. Perhaps the best lesson might have been learned by Najya, whom Hannah-Jones quotes in her Times piece saying, “Sometimes I wish instead of always thinking about other kids, you would have thought about me. I never really got the education I wanted.” If those are her true feelings, Najya’s resentment could plague the Hannah-Jones family for decades to come. After all, her parents’ choice was not driven by poverty, ignorance, or misfortune but by a deliberate indulgence in ideology at the expense of opportunity and bloodline success—and it was made when Najya was at a stage in life when she was too young to do or say anything about it.
In the privacy of their posh urban digs, Hannah-Jones may be cynical enough to try to convince Najya that her reduced educational opportunities boosted her mother’s public image, thus bringing far greater resources to their family. It is conceivable that Najya could accept that counterintuitive reasoning and buy into a corrupt and self-perpetuating system that benefits her, especially if 10 years of suffering through P.S. 307 helped her mother access enough income to endow her with a handsome trust fund.
Or, if she is as bright as Hannah-Jones’s confession makes her seem, she could follow the path her mother describes to its natural conclusion, see through its hypocrisy, fully reject her parents’ values, and become a conservative. We should welcome her.