Nikole Hannah-Jones Sacrificed Her Kid For Race Communism

“I just want what’s best for you.” My parents said that to me countless times when I questioned a decision they made on my behalf. Most parents say some version of that. Even though as children we may not understand why our parents did something, we could trust that our parents were in fact doing what was best for us and were trying to put us first.

But Nikole Hannah-Jones’ daughter cannot say the same. For, as Hannah-Jones herself writes in a New York Times op-ed, she “had not chosen [her daughter]” nor had she given her “what she needed to thrive.”

Instead, Hannah-Jones sacrificed her daughter for race communism.

In the op-ed, the creator of the 1619 Project explained that she and her husband failed their daughter, Najya, by placing her in a failing public school despite having the means to provide their daughter with a good education. Hannah-Jones explained how her money, connections, and advocacy could improve the school for every child, with her daughter being used as the conduit to make that a reality.

“Najya deserved better,” Hannah-Jones wrote. “They all did. But she was mine. This girl, my only child, looked to me to protect her, to give her what she needed to thrive. And I had not chosen her.”

Najya confronted Hannah-Jones with this herself, telling her mother: “Sometimes I wish instead of always thinking about other kids, you would have thought about me. I never really got the education I wanted.”

“This is when I would have normally responded with something like ‘I did think of you, and I knew you’d be OK’ or ‘You are doing just fine at your selective high school.’ But not this time. I just said, simply, ‘I acknowledge to you that I didn’t do the best for you, and I am so sorry,’” Hannah-Jones wrote.

But as Oilfield Rando pointed out on X in response to this astonishing admission, “If they will intentionally harm their own children to advance their cause, imagine what they’ll do to YOUR children.”

It’s that reality that makes Hannah-Jones’ article much bigger than just a personal admission of guilt. Hannah-Jones knew which schools affluent people — like herself — avoided sending their kids to. In fact, she wrote an article in 2016 about her decision to send her daughter to one of these schools. Hannah-Jones previously explained that she was having to navigate “our nation’s racial legacy in this country” and that when deciding where to send her daughter to school, she found the “schools are a disturbing reflection of New York City’s stark racial and socioeconomic divisions.”

“Getting Najya into one of the disproportionately white schools in the city felt like accepting the inevitability of this two-tiered system: one set of schools with excellent resources for white kids and some black and Latino middle-class kids, a second set of underresourced schools for the rest of the city’s black and Latino kids,” Hannah-Jones wrote a decade ago.

In other words, she argued, the type of schools she ultimately chose to send her daughter to had a resource problem caused by systemic racism. To fight that systemic racism, she decided she should send her daughter to that type of school and, with her daughter, her resources.

Hannah-Jones’ daughter was the price she was willing to pay to virtue-signal to leftists about righteousness because, as always, the left has no problem sacrificing other people’s time, money, and, in this case, education, if it makes them feel good about it — especially when they’re not the one suffering the consequences. Hannah-Jones could have donated to a struggling school, even advocated on behalf of other children as a Good Samaritan. But in Hannah-Jones’ calculation, she thought her daughter belonged to the cause of fighting so-called systemic racism — systemic racism that was purportedly the cause of underfunding and other maladies.

Hannah-Jones explains that she and her husband chose to send their daughter “to the type of school that wealthier families with choices uniformly avoid — one that is low-income and mostly Black.” Hannah-Jones said she and her husband could make large donations, cover supplies, use their connections and power to help advocate for students and teachers. She described how when she first wrote about her decision (in the aforementioned 2016 article) to send her daughter to a known failing school, she received “valor” from the “outside world.”

That “valor” was more important than her daughter — who seemingly complained about the education she was receiving every single year. To Hannah-Jones, “valor” from the “outside world” made her feel righteous and good because virtue-signaling is the highest currency in the left-wing ecosphere.

No supervision, sometimes no teachers, no homework, difficulty learning due to misbehaved students and disinterested teachers — all complaints raised to Hannah-Jones consistently. In fact, Hannah-Jones herself witnessed this after attending her daughter’s lunch one day.

In another instance, Hannah-Jones learned Najya’s fourth grade math assignments weren’t being graded and that Najya did not know how to do math even though Najya thought math was her best subject. Hannah-Jones and her husband seemingly confronted the teachers and principals and superintendents. Yet even as they watched their daughter struggle, they committed to keeping her in the school because they worried what would happen to other children if Najya got the education she needed.

“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 with power had?”

Hannah-Jones could see her daughter was not getting what she needed. She also saw other children were suffering. But rather than conclude her daughter needed a different school, Hannah-Jones decided her daughter should suffer more as Hannah-Jones and her husband settled on using their daughter as a guinea pig in their efforts to “desegregate” public schools because, in Hannah-Jones’ calculation, they could send their resources, donations, and time alongside their daughter into these schools and fight systemic racism.

But there was one glaring problem with this calculus. The school Hannah-Jones sent her daughter to wasn’t actually underfunded or lacking in resources.

As The Manhattan Institute pointed out, PS 307 — the school Najya was sent to — pays teachers on average upward of $100,000 per year. Roughly $50,000 is spent on each student per year — more than the city-wide average. The student-to-teacher ratio 9:1.

By all metrics, this school was actually well funded and resourced. Yet Najya, like many other students, was not getting a return on the investment.

Hannah-Jones chalked that up to systemic racism and segregation. But no matter how much money or additional resources Hannah-Jones provided the school or her daughter, it wasn’t helping.

Eventually, Najya looked up her middle school’s status, and she realized her parents had set her up for failure by placing her in that school despite having the means to get her a better education.

“So you had money to send me to one of the best schools, and you chose not to?” Najya confronted her mother. “Because other kids are disadvantaged, you didn’t want to put me in a great school?”

“Najya was asking what I’d accomplished by not choosing the ‘best’ school for her. And the honest answer is, I don’t know,” Hannah-Jones wrote. “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.”

Hannah-Jones said that after the confrontation she decided she would let Najya choose her own high school. Upon entering a predominantly white, higher-ranked high school, Najya discovered she was failing algebra. In fact, Hannah-Jones got her daughter a tutor, who informed Hannah-Jones that Najya “knew very little algebra and had huge gaps in many of the building blocks of math that she should have learned in elementary school, like mastery of long division and fractions.”

Hannah-Jones describes feeling “overcome with regret” because of her choice, an understandable reaction.

Hannah-Jones couldn’t even put her own flesh and blood first. She instead sacrificed critical years of her daughter’s life to try and prove a point about race communism. And when confronted about what sacrificing Najya accomplished, Hannah-Jones had no answer because it was all performative virtue-signaling that ultimately ended in foreseeable (foreseeable to everyone but Hannah-Jones, apparently) failure.

Hannah-Jones diagnosed the problem of failing schools as being the result of underfunding and lack of resources stemming from systemic racism. But that wasn’t the case. Yet for Hannah-Jones (and many other leftists), systemic racism is still the problem in their minds — because they are conditioned to view everything through the lens of racism, and as a result, they think all their decisions are justified in pursuit of ending said racism.

Hannah-Jones sacrificed her daughter at the altar of race communism for no reason. Imagine what Hannah-Jones and others like her would do to your children if given the chance?

Brianna Lyman is an elections correspondent at The Federalist. Brianna graduated from Fordham University with a degree in International Political Economy. Her work has been featured on Newsmax, Fox News, Fox Business and RealClearPolitics. Follow Brianna on X: @briannalyman2