Much of the essay is a series of rationalizations and excuses for an indefensible choice to make her own child a tool for accomplishing a political agenda. Way back when daughter Najya was a little girl, Hannah-Jones virtue signaled her fool head off in a Times Magazine feature, “explaining” that she was sending her child to bad school in a black neighborhood so as a rich and famous parent she could change the culture of the school, its administration and its faculty. What incredible hubris, though as one wag pointed out, she’s faked her way to an imaginary U.S. history that embedded critical race theory in public and private schools, a Pulitzer Prize, a permanent platform at the New York Times and a tenured chair at Howard with no legitimate accomplishments at all, so why wouldn’t she labor under a delusion of power?
Which is more unethical: progressive hypocrites like the Obamas, who opposed school choice (you know: teachers unions!) and still sent their daughters to the ritziest private school in D.C., or Hannah-Jones (and her ex-husband) who knowingly sacrificed their own kid not to be a part of a “privileged” system that allowed the white and wealthy to flee the failing public schools, leaving inner city schools underfunded and underachieving? The ethicist’s vote: Oh, Hannah-Jones is more unethical by miles. At least the Obama girls got the best education available. Hannah-Jones sacrificed her own daughter and accomplished nothing.
The National Populist Newsletter published a long, detailed defenestration of the Hannah-Jones’s lament. It concludes,
Neither Jones nor her daughter can admit the hard truth that these black students didn’t have less when it came to school spending. In fact, because of New York City’s Fair Student Funding rule, she and her classmates actually had more.
In the comment section of the article, Jones said her daughter doesn’t believe she’s being hard enough on herself, and there’s a lot of truth to that. How did she knowingly put her child in an unsafe, failing school without supplemental tutoring? Why did she wait till the fourth grade to realize that none of her work was being graded? For someone who claims to be an education expert, Jones was constantly surprised. Still, aside from running to the principal or emailing the teacher, she didn’t do personalized follow-up to make sure her daughter met her standards. It’s question after question on a slow-moving train wreck that’s supposed to conclude with the thought that at least she was honest. But is that enough? Because if she had her way, her daughter would still be on track for a much harder life, where she failed to meet the basic needs of a college freshman. So she would have been left behind, and it would have been nearly impossible ever to catch up.
Jones worries that in fighting for all children and standing true to her values, she let her child down, but she’s asking the wrong question entirely. It’s not that raising your children with values rooted in your ideological framework is a bad decision; it’s the choice most parents make, whether that be based on religion, culture, or politics. The problem is that Jones’ ideology is inherently poisonous.
All of her answers to the problems were because of whiteness, structural racism, funding, poor teachers, or understaffing; on deeper examination, all of those explanations fall apart. Jones is so profoundly inept at analyzing cause and effect that at this point it’s a moral failing.
You’d be hard-pressed to find a single Asian or white parent who makes decisions for their children because they’re fighting for every child of that race. They understand their child will compete with every other member of their race for the rest of their life. They are not separating themselves from failing schools because they hold an animosity against black students the way [Hannah-Jones] holds a venom against whites. She assumes the worst of other people because they are mirror images of herself, and her answer to this was to disenfranchise her own child instead of making her compete in their schools and prove she was as gifted, talented, and intelligent as them.
Instead, Jones’ daughter is a victim of her mother’s virtue signaling, her lack of attention to her daughter’s education, and her refusal to ever believe that her own worldview not only imprisoned her in an endless cycle of the identitarian victimhood mind virus, but also hurt her child.
Her arguments are all about a thematic struggle when she lost sight of what was right in front of her eyes. Even when she talks about disparities in funding for black-majority schools, she’s not talking about New York City schools receiving as much, if not more, than white- and Asian majority schools. And in the need to address the greater “struggle” at large, she failed to see that the racially-lensed progressivism that she bathed in did not prioritize her daughter.
“In fighting for every black child, did I betray my own?” she asks. Why yes! Next question? But incidentally, you weren’t even fighting for every black child. You just thought you were, because bias made you stupid.
