A little more than three years ago I began a series for medium which
was one of my first real forays into
contemporary issues in 'Educating About Education'
The thesis for my article, which I believe is still very much on
point, was simple:
Everybody has something to say: Democrats, Republicans, talking
heads, parents, the media, people who don’t live the state, people who don’t
attend the schools. Every single person who has a voice in this fight has been
quoted, interviewed or made a tweet. We’ve heard from everybody in America on
this subject.
Except, of course, the people who everyone claims that this is about.
The children who go to these schools. I
am not surprised by this because for everything we claim to be doing for our
children, in reality it is all just another one in a long line of proxy wars
that every single group in the world is fighting for through someone else.
The impetus for the series was the one that I took the longest time
to get to: the battle for integration of public schools. This led me to Ruby Bridges and while I
started my article with a trigger warning of sorts I didn't hold back in my
opinion:
Ruby Bridges was six years old when she became the first
African-American child to attend a whites-only school in Louisiana. According
to the page on Wikipedia, her parents responded to a request from the NAACP to
volunteer to participate in the integration of the New Orleans school system.
Her father was resistant but went along because her mother thought this was
better to give her daughter a better education but to take this step forward
for all African-American children.
‘Volunteered her’. We’ve seen the famous portrait by Norman Rockwell.
According to Bridges, “she saw the crowd” but because she lived in New Orleans,
“she thought it was Mardi Gras.” She was walked to school by marshals, who were
proud of her courage. Did anybody even consider the fact that she might not
have comprehended what was happening to her?
Only one person in the entire school agreed to teach Bridges. For one
year, that teacher taught her along as if she were teaching a whole class.
Bridges was threatened with poison, marshals only allowed her to eat
the food she brought from home. She could not participate in recess.
We commemorate Ruby Bridges as a hero. In actuality she went through
an entire year of intense trauma, threats of violence and was essentially
isolated from a proper educational experience in the name of progress. And
there’s no indication she was asked if she wanted to do this. She was
‘volunteered’. Her parents basically put her through a year of immense torment
that no doubt has to have given her immense emotional scars that probably she
has had to deal with for the rest of her life. The fact that Bridges has
essentially disappeared from public view not long after this happened is hardly
surprising.
I remember discussing this with a friend of mine who is similar to me
in his politics but blunter in his dialogue. He told me point blank that Ruby
Bridges's parent were guilty of child abuse in his opinion. I didn't state that
directly in my article (though I came very close to saying it outright) but
I've always felt their was much truth to that:
To be clear I believe entirely in civil rights, in every aspect of
integration, in every aspect of equality. I have little doubt people will read
the previous paragraph and call me a bigot regardless. But look at the world we
live in now. Just as it was fifty years ago, children are still at the center
of wars they don’t understand as to why they are being fought. Many of them didn’t ask to be put at the
center of these wars, but their parents, then as now, considered their concerns
irrelevant to the battles they are waging.
That these battles are being fought in a world that most of the
combatants never set foot it should not shock us – the soldiers are never a
factor to the generals or politicians.
I was reminded of all this with crystal clarity when I read an
article online in the Times Magazine this weekend. The headline and the Lede
tell you why:
In Fighting for Every Black Child, Did I Betray My Own?
A decade ago, I made a decision about my daughter's education that I
hoped would challenge New York City's separate and unequal school system. Now
16, she thinks I made the wrong choice.
Perhaps it should come as little surprise that the author of this
article is none other than Nikole Hannah-Jones whose 1619 Project has
been condemned by major historians almost since it came out and that
Hannah-Jones never backed away from. I had little reason to like Hannah-Jones
as a historian or a writer; now I know for certain she is a reprehensible human
being who is more interested in making a point then she is about fixing the
problem.
The entire article, for the record, makes clear her narcissism in a
way that is even less attractive. Even though it's clear from the opening
paragraph that her own daughter believes that her mother has betrayed her for a
cause she didn't know she was fighting, Hannah-Jones first instinct is to
nevertheless make the story about the system and its failures. This is not an apology to society or her own
daughter but an argument in the paper of record to try and frame it so her
daughter Najya is the victim of the system and not her parents. And just to be
clear most of the article has less to do with Nayja's suffering or the
recriminations but Hannah-Jones restating the argument about America is a
racist society and still using her daughter as a proxy.
Hannah-Jones says that both she and her husband has managed to avoid
segregated schools and had attended integrated ones. She acknowledges "the
integrated education my husband and I received set the foundation that has
allowed us to become the successful middle-class family that my daughter was
born into. In other words she is a child who has bene the beneficiary of her
system.
To be clear Hannah Jones compares herself – with no apparent irony –
to the generations of black parents who made these decisions "based on the
collective good and not just our individual advantage. Faraji (her husband) and
I decided that our role in this struggle meant upending the status quo and
sending our child not to a wealthy white school but a poor black one."
This is how she puts it:
We thought by sending Najya to a mostly low-income and Black school,
we could help improve it for all the children there. I knew that P.T.A.s at
poor schools often can raise only a few thousand dollars but Faraji and I could
write checks that exceeded the annual P.T.A budget…I believed Faraji and I
could bring some of that power with us. We had connections and time and status
should not matter, but that we all know do. And more than that, we believed
strongly that if families like ours went into schools like this one, it would
challenge other families with similar values to ours."
Note the constant use of we and ours. Hannah-Jones has the arrogance
of so many left-wing people – and that I see in our current President – that
she, her money and time could succeed where generations had failed. This
narcissism alone is bad enough before you consider that, just like those
generations of black parents before her, she 'volunteered Najya to participate'.
And to remind you the generations before were far poorer and has less
opportunities then Hannah-Jones had and admitted she benefited from.
To be clear Hannah-Jones decided to write an essay for the Times
Magazine and put her daughter on the cover. Hannah-Jones insists she wasn't
planning to do this but we're only getting her version of events and I have
little doubt she is no different from any other progressive who wants to speak
about a cause when she's really talking about herself talking about the cause. She
also points out how much personal, public response she received and how
much activism she led. "In the outside world my choice had earned me
valor."
At this point Nayja confronts her which is in seventh grade:
"Did you know my school was bad like this when you put me here?"
Hannah-Jones tries to deny but then her daughter tells her that she has looked
up her school.
Hannah-Jones then says:
I told her everything I had said a hundred times on stages, in
interviews, in discussions since I had made her a symbol of how the
choices we make can help sustain – or dismantle – equality.
I bet a thirteen year old girl must have loved being told that her
mother referred to her as 'a symbol' rather than her daughter. Her daughter had
no room for this nonsense:
"So you had money to send me to one of the best schools, and you
chose not to?" she said, hurling her words. "Because other kids are
disadvantaged, you didn't want to put me in a great school?
If everything her mother hadn't been enough to make me feel love for Nayja
Hannah-Jones that statement – said at thirteen – would have sealed the deal. In
a single sentence she has dismantled the myth that her mother has built up
around her, justifying everything that we've seen her do all that time. The
fact that Hannah-Jones now admits that she failed "both my values and my
child" is telling. Even an article that is about her child, she lists that
failing her values as the first point.
The next several articles detail that as early as first grade Nayja
is making it clear just how bad it is for her at school. Hannah-Jones is an
active parent and witnesses much of the chaos that unfolds but continues to
shift the blame to others – the faculty, the teachers., the aides. She points
out that by this point all but one of the white children and the middle class
children who started the school with Najya left but "we felt we could not
abandon the school and our convictions at the moment we experienced the
dysfunctions we knew defined so many of the segregated schools serving poor
black children. We had to stay and fight for the students who did not have
options."
The italics are mine because I'm pretty sure Hannah-Jones didn't
retreat because she wanted to abandon neither the savior trope she'd decided
she had nor the fact that the left never admits defeat even in the sight of
clear failure. They put their convictions ahead of their daughter – and again,
they didn't have to.
Hannah-Jones talks in great detail about how her daughter was clearly
started to suffer academically and failing in both reading and multiple
subjects. Rather than try to help their daughter – who should be their priority
– they continue to visit the principal and get the superintendent involved.
They also acknowledge they got private tutoring for Najya but made no effort to
take her out of the school.
And she doesn't hide it:
Our child was suffering, but all these children were – they were
languishing in classrooms with educators who did not take their academic
potential seriously and largely refused to teach. What would happen to those
children if we abandoned them as everyone else in power had?
Again Hannah Jones and her husband still refuse to put their own
daughter ahead of 'the greater good' even though by this point it has been five
years of no real results. And to be very clear there were many ways to do what
she did that did not involve making her daughter a personal sacrifice: she
could have withdrawn her child and continued to help from behind the scenes. In
fact after she graduates the elementary school, she then doubles down and
enrolls her in a middle school that is very much just as bad.
At that point Najya makes it clear she was going to prep for an exam
for a prestigious high school that admits on a single entrance exam. She and
her husband oppose them and as a result hadn't discussed them with her
daughter. I think the only reason she agrees with this is that they'd had the
confrontation in the car and there have been countless arguments between mother
and daughter, which Hannah-Jones ever the writer, no doubt edited out.
By the time she reaches eighth grade Nayja is forces the decision
I explained our decision over and over but my answers never satisfied
her. "But what did it do?" she'd ask. "Putting me in this school
didn't change anything. I was not trying to be in this type of environment. It
makes no sense."
Now I have no doubt this is the mildest version (and most printable)
Najya gave her mother over the years.
I respected her growing independence…but it also unsettled me. Her
adamance started to seed a fear that if I continued to force her to live my
values, it could haunt our relationship far past her school years.
Again I'm pretty sure this is the mother's version of events to make
herself seem the heroine and again she frames the decision to let her daughter
make her own decision – but again she limits it by saying she has to choose a
'public school'
Najya, to be clear, chooses a school that is very much 'the type of
public school she has spent her career arguing against'. But it's clear Najya
makes it very clear that the link between race and educational opportunity is
clear to her daughter.
But again Hannah-Jones makes it clear that the real agony is her own:
How could I spare myself the judgment I had meted out to others when
they justified why they – despite believing in integration – sent their own
children to schools that entrenched inequality?
The obvious answer is that a good parent, regardless of their race,
wants what's best for their child. It's telling Hannah-Jones seems more upset
that she betrayed the cause then her own daughter. This could be seen as
ordinary teenage rebellion – and far more moderate and justifiable then so many
– but Hannah-Jones makes it about her. Then when things get bad for her
daughter culturally and academically Hannah-Jones seems almost smug at her for
making the bad choice. As for her daughter's failures – very much the cause of
the kind of education her mother basically forced upon her without consent –
she can only manage to achieve her goals by the benefit of the privilege that
comes with the wealth Hannah-Jones inherited as a benefit.
Tellingly the story ends not with Najya's graduation but Hannah-Jones
bringing he daughter to talk with the principal from her own school.
And the essay ends basically still about the mother more than the daughter:
For years I had been defending my decision to Nayja, trying hard to
balance empathy for her with the justification of her father's and my choices.
I wanted my child to see it my way; to see the struggles she was having as part
of a lineage and a mandate, to understand the tremendous privilege that I
believed inoculated her against the worst consequences of the dysfunction and
at times educational malpractice that she and her classmates experienced.
Najya's answer speaks volumes:
"Sometimes I wish instead of always thinking about other kids,
you would have thought about me, I never really got the education I wanted."
Hannah-Jones said: "I realized what she'd been yearning for most
was my acknowledgement that she had borne thee cost not only of our unjust
society but also my ideals." And then to undercut it: "In this, Najya
had become part of a long, unwanted tradition in Black communities."
Just to drive the point home she openly uses the story of Ruby
Bridges and makes it clear yet again that, all her words and contrition to the
contrary, there's still a part of her that believes she was playing a role of
one of those people all those year's ago, that some day her daughter's
sacrifice will be worth it. The fact that she is still willing to monetize her
own daughter's suffering and neglect as a story for her own brand
My sympathy, as you might expect, is entirely for Najya Hannah-Jones
who was used as a pawn by her parents in a battle she didn't ask to fight, who
when she called her mother on it, her mother was more interested in defending
her decision then her daughter, who is still as much a symbol to her mother
than she may ever have been a child, whose mother really still seems to care
more about the state of the world then her own daughter's happiness.
I see you, Najya Hannah-Jones, even though I'm not sure your mother
ever truly did. You were drafted into a
battle not only without your consent, but your parents had no reason to put you
through. You paid the cost for your parents convictions, and their decision to
keep putting you through even in the sign of the clear pain and suffering you
were feeling is as much neglect and abuse as so many of the children that do
suffer from these problems but don't have the means your parents do. Your
parents chose essentially to cosplay you in the world of segregated education
not for your own good but for their well-being, their status, their
recognition. And even now its clear your mother doesn't see the damage she's
done you and still sees you only as a
mirror for her actions. They have forced you into what will no doubt takes years of therapy to overcome – and that
you are fortunate to have the funds to deal with it.
I suspect your mother's version of events is the mildest version but
your independence and clarity shows that somehow you managed to come through
the other side. So what I think the world needs to hear – and deserves to – is
your version of events. What was the cost of being the symbol of your mother's
values?
You don't have to tell this story now, or ever. But you should know
that if and when you do, there will be people like me who will have your back
and support you for it. Your mother is
not the victim in this story, you are. If you were to permanently cut off ties
with them when you graduate from college I think countless millions could blame
you.
And always remember: the system did not fail you. Your parents did. Your
mother had delusions of grandeur combined with the fanaticism of a true
believer and chose to make you the cause. She forgot you were a child first.
And that is a crime as bad as anything you will face in America today.
And as to your mother, the question you raised was not rhetorical.
And I'm pretty sure daughter knows it too.
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