Arrogance and obliviousness verging on hubris. What a tragic overestimation of her own expertise, importance and moral goodness compounded by a totally unjustified confidence in her chosen profession's power to influence events and circumstances in the real world. https://t.co/QRi5OntnQ6
— Thomas Chatterton Williams (@thomaschattwill) September 22, 2026
More from Chatterton Williams:
By her own admission in the article, but this point she’d already been dealing with a principal that blew her off and didn’t respond to emails, whether or not they were sent from an NYT account
Imagine thinking you could change the deeply entrenched culture, attitudes and practices of an entire institution simply by existing in proximity to it.
First imagine that you accomplished the success of the 1619 Project as quickly and easily as she did — powered by the NYT — and then it wouldn't be so absurd to believe you could say I'm here from the New York Times, and you could make your vision a reality. At least you should dare, not merely focus on the privileges you could bestow on your one little girl.
संदेश
49 टिप्पणियां:
But she was too busy.
It's only hubris if she failed. So she failed her daughter. Presto chango kambalakazam, accountability avoided!
The success of the1619 Project? To quote our second Black president, "You didn't build that."
In a private school, yes! Public school, who cares?
1. Your first duty is to yourself and to your family. You have no duty or responsibility to fix a public school in NYC. And it probably can't be fixed by anyone. The culture - across the Board - is too badly broken.
2. In 2016, she got $625k - paid over five years - as a grant from the MacArthur Foundation. She could have used that money to send her daughter to a decent school. Or move to a better school district.
3. The Society of Jesus has two Cristo Rey schools in NYC and one is in Brooklyn.
4. Since NHJ went to Notre Dame, why didn't she look into Catholic grade schools in Brooklyn.
"I can go to that school and say there is a problem and it gets fixed immediately.”
The problem was the kids weren't learning. And she wasn't about to say that.
DEI, oh. DEI, oh. Daylight comes and her pride and prejudice are on show.
1916 project filled with half-truths and distortions.
oops 1619.
An editor at The Free Press writes:
"It’s tempting to kick an ideological opponent when they’re down, writes Coleman Hughes of the admission, but it’s far better to learn from their mistakes."
I respond: surely we are good enough at multitasking that we can do both!
racism and eternal victimhood trump reason, logic and your own family.
Changing the course of history is easy, getting an institution to change is difficult.
We should not be surprised that a Leftist sacrificed her own child based on some dingbat idea. At least the daughter has a chance to recover.
The question that keeps rolling around in my brain - how could the author not know her daughter was not learning. For years and years. Did the author ever look at her daughter’s papers. How often did author visit the school?
This lady failed as a parent. Her head was in the proverbial sand. What a doofus.
'...It’s tempting to kick an ideological opponent when they’re down...'
Also interesting to contemplate the track record when the situation is reversed. No guessing required. And I notice that fair criticism is warranted, richly so, as are the spot-on comments about hubris, and yet - gosh we can't kick someone when they're down. How very RINO of you !
All of the things democrats control make life worse. Clues.
Imagine an employee of the most powerful newspaper in the world, with the power to make an entire school bend to her wishes, and who sees it as her mission to convince children their nation’s founding wasn’t a 1776 inspiring revolution but the 1619 launch of an immoral slave trade.
BTW, her total NYT output in 2026 has been 3 opinion pieces.
If teachers can't effectively teach reading and math, they probably aren't reading the NYT and aren't impressed by it. The power of the teachers' unions trumps any power that the Times can command. Fixing the schools would take a lot more than even full-time presence and oversight. Giving teachers and principals a few notes every now and then certainly won't do it, and considering what consultants did to American industry, I wouldn't trust an army of educational consultants to get anything right either.
Bahaha!
This is a very unpleasant woman, the type that sends 11 page emails to her daughter's teachers with observations, suggestions and so on.
Is this an assumes-facts-not-in-evidence situation? That her daughter's educational achievements would have been significantly better elsewhere? The mother does not strike me as a strong argument for it. A NYT job for a black woman who spouts briefly trendy sophistry says little.
"In New York, a combination of housing segregation and “academic” sorting, called school choice, that begins as early as pre-K means most Black students — even middle-class ones — are forced to attend racially segregated schools with high rates of poverty. And nationally, schools in predominantly nonwhite districts receive $23 billion less in annual funding than their heavily white counterparts, according to a 2019 analysis by EdBuild." - writes NHJ
"The Ed Build study cited by NHJ counted only state and local revenue, explicitly excluding federal funds. She doesn't mention this in her NYT piece. When you include federal funding (as Brookings does) the numbers reverse."
https://x.com/marcportermagee/status/2102052330203906264
So is she dishonest or sloppy? What has she learned?
Big picture, the culture at the school and the culture at the NYT is the same culture.
You have to work for it,ann.
Someone has to actually teach your child and monitor they are learning.
Parents PARTICIPATE actively in good public schools. They go in to help kn library days. They volunteer in the classrooms as needed and help plan room parties. They know their kids, check homework, meet with teachers more than just on pta night. At the end, this mother got it. Her presence actually mattered.
You professional mothers want people to know where you work, and that you are ... watching. You dont want to do the work, just make sure people know who you are and where you work.
How does that benefit the child and their education?
Her kid is black and has a great college essay here.
She is getting into an Ivy or 5he UW Madison. Don't worry about the poor black kid, ann...
Worry about the system you working moms created serving two masters and failing both. Lol at your consolation prize meade
It's "By the Power of Greyskull ... I have the Power," not "By the Power of the Old Gray Lady." She would have done better to get an amulet and invoke "Mighty Isis" ...
Has Hannah-Jones' experience here turned her into a school-choice advocate? No? What happened to fighting for the fortunes of poor black children?
This is what an ideologue looks like.
It’s the reverse scenario of wanting your children to be better off than you are. She needs to keep the “oppression” going, even if she has to do the oppressing herself.
Proving America is irredeemably racist by acting like a slave.
Bozetta the Clown.
This woman probably got most of her crazy ideas at Notre Dame.
Notre Dame failed her and America.
Identity politics is a complete cancer on the body politic.
By the power of the NYT, Nikole Hannah-Jones was able to change the course of history.
Why wouldn't she think she had the power to transform her daughter's school?
1: Because even she knows she used the power of the NYT to push out and out lies
2: Fixing her daughter's school would involve fighting the Left, which is to say the "Teachers'" Union, vs the Right and normal people. To win in a fight to improve her daughter's school, she'd have to team up with people outside her social class, and face the reality that her side is wrong, and that student discipline matters, and that kids have to be punished, even suspended and expelled, to protect those who are at least willing to learn
Tl;dr:
She's all about politics, and her politics wouldn't let her be successful in that fight
Go spank yourself dave.
Hard.
Kevin said...
"I can go to that school and say there is a problem and it gets fixed immediately.”
The problem was the kids weren't learning. And she wasn't about to say that.
No, the problem is that the teachers weren't teaching, and didn't care.
The problem is that every single left wing approach to education is an absolute failure at actually educating kids. So she couldn't accomplish anything without becoming a heretic.
And her kid just wasn't worth that to her
Surprise! The ability to make a newspaper do something they're dying to do anyway does not translate to the ability to make a school do something they're dead-set against.
The judgement and decision making of a woman who apparently thinks that Bozo The Clown hair is a good look is already going to be suspect, even before child abuse enters the picture.
Twenty years ago, they wouldn't have let her work in the NY Times Gift Shop.
Her husband, Faraji Hannah-Jones, seems to be as invincibly ignorant as Nikole. He "is a parent activist who organizes around issues of school integration." (https://steinhardt.nyu.edu/metrocenter/vue/conversation-faraji-hannah-jones). Their poor daughter never had a chance.
When she finally enrolled her daughter in good school some other kid called her “ghetto “.
I taught in an inner city high school. Black kids would call each other ghetto. In this context, ghetto refers to ethos, not race or skin color.
Kids have a way of getting right to the point.
I wonder if HNJ understands the enormity of damage she has done to her daughter.
"imagine that you accomplished the success of the 1619 Project as quickly and easily as she did" What Zrimsek said. Imagine being so caught up in your own prog worldview that you don't realize that you can succeed easily in things that go with the left flow, not so easily if you go against it. Now imagine you try to construct a, what shall we call it, narrative that ignores actual data, like the superior resources going to your kid's school, and evade the obvious, like policies that undermine discipline and kids and families not giving a damn about education, and in the end not learning a damn thing yourself but falling back on the old woke tropes of racism and segregation. That would be sad, wouldn't it? It would mean you sacrificed your own child's wellbeing for absolutely nothing.
If I went to the board of my kid's school and said "I'm from [important employer]. So you will, of course, make these changes ...". I'd be fired.
But I'm a productive employee at a productive company. Unlike ...
Even with his extraordinary charisma and influence, Steve Jobs complained about the difficulty of leading an organization to change. It is the rare person who truly can bring about change, and even then, it generally requires luck, timing, and other forces. NHJ's arrogance is impressive.
Kevin said...
"I can go to that school and say there is a problem and it gets fixed immediately.”
In I.T. support we have a saying, "You can't fix stupid."
In I.T. support we have another saying, "I can explain it to you, but I can't understand it for you "
I wonder if she even realizes how damaged her daughter is.
@Gunner: '...Twenty years ago, they wouldn't have let her work in the NY Times Gift Shop. ...'
Did you mean to say, 'NY Times Grift Shop'?
From the article:
"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 witnessed how dismissive school officials could be to lower-income parents who lodged complaints or made demands for resources and how deferential they were to wealthy ones. I believed Faraji and I could bring some of that power with us. We had connections and time and status that should not matter, but that we all know do."
The school officials probably found her attitude tiresome, not persuasive. I mentioned in another thread that I've known parents in smaller communities who have even served on the school board and still couldn't get things changed for the better in the schools. It comes down to the policies that are set by the superintendent of the school system and the principals of the schools. If they emphasize teaching the basics and maintaining discipline, the teachers will act accordingly. See Mississippi as a recent example.
"See Mississippi as a recent example."
The best thing Hannah-Jones could have done for her daughter is to have moved to Mississippi.
The run down from Ross K.
An ideologue sacrifices her own child
"If I were Najya Hannah-Jones, I’d be furious. And I think she is. Though at some point you have to forgive your parents, and it seems she is doing that as well.
Short version: Najya is the daughter of famous racist Nikole Hannah-Jones. Nikole and her husband intentionally sent their daughter to a bad public school because of some sort of ideological commitment to public school and not wanting to send their daughter to a school with a lot of white kids. The results were bad…predictably bad. And as Najya, a smart and motivated girl, came to realize that her parents had sacrificed her to make a political/social point, she grew understandably resentful. Nikole offers some regrets but I think she misses very much because her blind spots are enormous.
The biggest problem with this remarkable story is that Nikole Hannah-Jones, one of the most prominent and successful and celebrated racists in America, continues to blame “the system” and white people when a massive part of the blame has to go to black adults (men and women) for having children knowing the father won’t be around, and to teachers unions for caring only about money and not about students, and to Democrats who care only about the teachers unions’ money and not about children. In short, most of the problem is caused by Hannah-Jones’s political allies whom she refuses to criticize."
She won a MacArthur Grant and a Pulitzer. She may have failed her daughter, but she herself hasn't failed. Her book about this is sure to be a bestseller and maybe even when another Pulitzer. That'll pay for some more remedial schooling for her kid. I wonder how her parents are doing. It's about time some reporter blew the lid off discriminatory practices in the nursing home industry.......Maybe her daughter can go into the family business and write a book detailing the many ways in which her mother, aided and abetted by the surrounding racist society, failed her. Molly Jong Fast can ghost write it.
NHJ, Colin Kaepernick, Angela Davis, Kathleen Cleaver...
Willfully invoke the one-drop rule for working the grift, and in some cases, outright malice.
Despite her manifest intellectual weakness, the woman does know how to self-promote.
And given that she is currently the talk of the WSJ, Althouse, the NYT, Instapundit, The Free Press, and multiple other Substacks, she is very good at it.
Some kids fail the Stochastic Aptitude Test. It's hard to imagine a kid more favored by fortune and birth than that Crawford son who recently OD'ed. I wonder how things will turn out for her kid. That kid already seems to have a well developed sense of grievance. Perhaps that will serve as a form of vaccination for future setbacks. Most everyone's life is destined to have a lot of disappointments, rejections, and betrayals. Some kids acquire that knowledge too late to handle it. Her daughter is fully vaccinated.
एक टिप्पणी भेजें
Please use the comments forum to respond to the post. Don't fight with each other. Be substantive... or interesting... or funny. Comments should go up immediately... unless you're commenting on a post older than 4 days. Then you have to wait for us to moderate you through. It's also possible to get shunted into spam by the machine. We try to keep an eye on that and release the miscaught good stuff. We do delete some comments, but not for viewpoint... for bad faith. Also: No italics, even briefly. Use asterisks for emphasis. And don't play with the format by changing fonts or using boldface or all caps. Never include more than one extra line break between paragraphs.