The Strange Racial Solidarity of Nikole Hannah-Jones

By Rich Lowry

Tuesday, September 22, 2026

 

The New York Times writer Nikole Hannah-Jones thought she was making her educational choices to favor the interests of black people, and she was — just the wrong ones.

 

In a long essay for the New York Times Magazine, the radical African-American journalist writes about how her decision to send her daughter to dreadful New York City public schools for ideological reasons ended in tears.

 

Hannah-Jones, who achieved notoriety as the lead editor of the paper’s 1619 Project, believed that putting her daughter in rotten elementary and middle schools would strike a blow for racial equity.

 

In her view, it’s unfair that so many black kids are trapped in underperforming New York City schools, and if she trapped her own daughter in them, she and her husband — with their superior wherewithal — could make the schools better for everyone.

 

What started as a project motivated by a savior complex ended as essentially an episode of educational Munchausen syndrome by proxy.

 

Her bright young daughter fell far behind where she could have been academically.

 

Most parents who are paying attention and who have the means would immediately get a kid out of a school where there are fights during the lunch period, where there is no homework, where the principal and teachers are routinely absent, and where schoolwork isn’t graded — but Nikole Hannah-Jones persisted.

 

By the time her daughter was old enough to realize what was going on and force her mother to let her apply to better high schools, she didn’t know algebra despite getting excellent grades in math at the subpar schools.

 

Hannah-Jones should be furious at the adults who failed her daughter so abysmally, but she’s, in effect, still on their side by portraying school choice as a racist scam and complaining about a lack of resources.

 

The New York City officials, administrators, principals, and teachers who are blighting the futures of young people aren’t white supremacists; by and large, they agree with Nikole Hannah-Jones politically, and many of them are African-American.

 

You can either be with them, and their narrow interest in protecting the school system from serious challenge, or with the kids.

 

Hannah-Jones is in a version of the same conundrum as the Black Lives Matter activists who believed it was “anti-racist” to agitate against the police. Then, when they got their way and the police stepped back, more black people were killed.

 

Here, it is supposedly “anti-racist” to keep everyone in disorderly, incompetent public schools — and the victims are black children who have no idea of how little they’ve learned until it’s too late.

 

This is a strange form of racial solidarity.

 

There is no doubt that schools have a tougher job when they have a high population of disadvantaged students. But the problem is not funding, as Hannah-Jones suggests. Studies from the centrist Brookings Institution note both that high-poverty, non-white districts spend more per pupil than lower-poverty districts and that higher spending doesn’t ensure better results.

 

The Success Academy charter schools in New York City have shown that disadvantaged kids can thrive when there’s an old-fashioned mix of high expectations, strict discipline, and rigorous instruction — in other words, what the traditional public schools, mired in a self-interested, unaccountable bureaucracy, can’t deliver.

 

When she sent her daughter to failing schools, Nikole Hannah-Jones imagined herself acting in the tradition of pioneering parents during the civil rights movement who sent their children through the mobs to integrate whites-only schools. Those parents desperately wanted a better education for their kids, though, whereas Hannah-Jones fed her daughter into terrible public schools in the forlorn hope that maybe she’d be okay. If not, at least Hannah-Jones had steered her clear of competitive schools with lots of white and Asian kids.

 

That, of course, was a perverse priority. The famous line is that a neoconservative is a liberal mugged by reality. The New York City public schools mugged Nikole Hannah-Jones, and yet she still doesn’t want to press charges.