The Liberal Scold Who Spent Years Wagging Her Fingers At Conservatives Admits She Raised Her Child All Wrong

By John Loftus

Nikole Hannah-Jones, a race-focused New York Times journalist and author of the “1619 Project,” admitted Sunday she failed her daughter by placing her in a high-poverty, predominantly black New York City public school a decade ago to fight “segregation” and put her “antiracist” ideology into action.

In a 2016 New York Times Magazine piece, Hannah-Jones said she and her husband were sending their daughter, Najya, to P.S. 307 in Brooklyn to fight the “segregated” public school system rather than following in the footsteps of other wealthy, white-collar New York families. 10 years later, Hannah-Jones said she regrets the decision and that her daughter is worse off for it. (RELATED: Liberals’ Favorite Race Grifter Glorifies Terrorist, Inadvertently Drags Harriet Tubman Down With Her)

“When it comes to the choices my husband and I have made about public education, these days I feel that I failed both my values and my child,” she wrote in a New York Times Magazine essay headlined, “In Fighting for Every Black Child, Did I Betray My Own?”

Hannah-Jones’ essay detailed how Najya struggled academically once she went to high school and realized that, despite earning good grades in middle school at Urban Assembly Unison, she wasn’t fully prepared for a more challenging environment. Hannah-Jones wrote that Najya’s education suffered because of limited homework, a loose environment of high absence rates and fights, and inexperienced, disengaged teachers who sometimes failed to properly check and correct her daughter’s math assignments.

“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,” Hannah-Jones wrote. “Najya’s writing assignments were rife with uncorrected punctuation, capitalization and grammar errors.”

“I sat there silently for several minutes, conjuring the image of my little girl thinking she was soaring in class when she was failing, and my devastation morphed into hot rage,” she said.

Hannah-Jones also discussed the confrontation she had with Najya over her choice to send her to low-income schools, and how she agreed to let her daughter choose where to go for high school. (RELATED: Author Of ’1619 Project’ Nikole Hannah-Jones To Receive Honorary Doctorate)

“So you had money to send me to one of the best schools, and you chose not to?” Najya, who is now 16, told her. “Because other kids are disadvantaged, you didn’t want to put me in a great school? Sometimes I wish instead of always thinking about other kids, you would have thought about me … I never really got the education I wanted.”

“I feel like you got cheated,” Hannah-Jones replied.

Hannah-Jones was the author of the “1619 Project,” a revisionist history project that argued that America’s “true founding” was when slaves were first brought to the country. Launched in 2019, it attempted to reframe history to center on slavery and its consequences.

She was also a champion of Critical Race Theory, an “antiracist” ideology that teaches people to view every social interaction and person in terms of race and advocates for race-based policymaking. In 2021, Hannah-Jones called CRT backlash “fake hysteria” and said conservatives were using it as a “propaganda tool.” She similarly dismissed grassroots CRT opposition, which helped Republican Glenn Youngkin win a gubernatorial race in Virginia, as a “propaganda campaign.” (RELATED: Nikole Hannah-Jones Calls Opposition To Critical Race Theory, 1619 Project ‘Dangerous’)

“I would say the governor’s race in Virginia was decided based on the success of a right-wing propaganda campaign that told white parents that they needed to fight against their children being indoctrinated … as being called racist,” Hannah-Jones said in Dec. 2021.

Hannah-Jones’ latest essay received a mixed response on social media. The Atlantic’s Thomas Chatterton Williams called the essay a “predictable” follow-up.

“I am so thankful my dad wasn’t trying to prove any points to himself or the world and just wanted to send my brother and me to the safest and best schools he could afford (which were not the best around, and it tormented him that he couldn’t do more, so he taught us and our friends at home). He did this because he’d been forced into segregated, under-resourced schools before civil rights and knew you have one shot at an education and this isn’t a game,” he wrote on X.

However, conservative writer Helen Andrews offered praise.

“The people sneering at Hannah-Jones for ‘sacrificing her daughter’s well-being for political virtue signalling’ are wrong,” Andrews wrote. “There is nothing contemptible about living by your principles and trying to uplift your community. Her failure was not moral but analytical. She thought the schools were failing from not enough money, parental involvement, or administrative attention — all of which she was in a position to provide. If her diagnosis had been correct, her decision would have been laudable.”

One X user pointed out that PS 307, where Hannah-Jones’ daughter went for elementary school, receives over $52,000 in per-pupil funding.

This is the per-pupil funding for the elementary school Nikole Hannah-Jones sent her daughter to.

If you subscribe to the funding theory of education, how much would have been enough? It’s already crossed the average per capita annual income threshold. Maybe $100k? $200k? https://t.co/AC0EyRab4q pic.twitter.com/Y9gQActCyo

— Jack (@tracewoodgrains) September 20, 2026

“If you subscribe to the funding theory of education, how much would have been enough? It’s already crossed the average per capita annual income threshold. Maybe $100k? $200k?” he wrote.