(ThySistas.com) Nikole Hannah-Jones wrote something this past weekend that a lot of us are still chewing on. The woman behind the 1619 Project used a fresh New York Times Magazine essay to admit her own daughter thinks the family got education wrong. Not a stranger’s kid. The girl is sixteen now, and she told her mother, flat out, that the schooling never measured up. Reading a parent cop to that in print, in a magazine that big, does something to a person.
Let me back up for anybody who needs the context. Waterloo, Iowa is home ground, born there in 1976, and the decades since have gone to reporting on how race decides who gets a strong education and who gets handed the scraps. These days the work runs deep: a teaching post at Howard, a Pulitzer on the shelf, and a steady habit of building institutions. The newest venture, a bookstore and bar called North Star, is set to open in Brooklyn this fall. So we are not talking about somebody who wandered into this subject by accident. This is a life’s work, a whole heartbeat.
Around 2015, the journalist and her husband set something in motion. Living in Brooklyn, the couple enrolled their only child, Najya, in prekindergarten at P.S. 307, a predominantly Black, high-poverty public school that many wealthier families had avoided. Private tuition sat well within their budget. Other public school options were available, too. Both got waved off, on purpose, the hope being that their presence and their pull might lift the place for everybody’s babies and not only their own. The reasoning was rooted in belief. Our people deserve better than what the system usually hands out, and putting skin in the game felt like one way to say so.
Plenty of us feel that ache in the chest already. You reach a crossroads with your kid and both directions look like a gamble. Down one path sits the neighborhood spot where a baby lands among faces that look familiar, where the auntie on the corner knows the name, where nobody makes a young one feel like a guest in her own skin. Down the other path sits a place with newer books, more offerings, teachers who actually stick around, and results that shine on paper. Both roads cost something dear. Neither one comes free.
Najya, by her mama’s own telling, gained something precious on that block. The girl grew up rooted, secure about who she was, never fretting over whether the room had space for one more. That is not a small thing. Plenty of our young ones move through fancy academies feeling like the only raisin in a bowl of oatmeal, and it wears a hole in the spirit over time. Yet the tougher high school told a different tale. An assessment turned up real holes in the math, gaps in algebra and the basics that should have been locked down years before. Tutoring helped the climb, and by the end of her first semester, she was bringing home mostly A’s and B’s. She also passed her state algebra examination by the end of the school year. Still, the girl put it plain. The schooling she wanted never showed up when she needed it most.
Before anybody piles on this mother, let me say something clear. Every one of us weighing these same options is guessing. Nobody hands you a crystal ball at the hospital. Ask the Sistas doing this right now, up past midnight at the kitchen table with enrollment forms everywhere, trying to guess what a child will need five years out. Do you send your baby where the heart feels held, or where the mind gets pushed? Where the spirit is safe, or where the transcript shines? Anybody who calls that arithmetic simple has never sat down and done it. So let me put it straight to my fellow Sistas. Standing at that same fork, would you make the call this mother made for your own kids?
There is a genuine cost to being the one forever explaining yourself. Black women who came up as the only face in the room remember that particular loneliness, the constant code switching, the teacher who assumed the worst before the first bell. A neighborhood campus can spare a kid every bit of that. It can hand over friendships that feel like kin, a lunchroom where the jokes land just right, a mirror wherever the eyes land. Belonging is not some luxury item. For a heart still forming, it is oxygen.
And yet. Friendships and comfort do not teach fractions. Roots, deep as they run, do not cover the science a university will one day expect a student to know cold. That is the whole bind, laid bare. A child can be happy and still get shortchanged, both at once, and a good parent misses it because those smiles at dinner are not fake. Black women have carried this exact math for generations. Do you choose the place that keeps her safe, or the one that pushes her harder? Most make that call with nobody clapping.
Here is what the whole saga reminds me. Our young ones are not props for our beliefs, however righteous those beliefs may be. Najya did her own homework, literally. A closer look at how her school measured up, and the cold numbers landed in her mama’s lap. That young lady held an opinion and deserved a real hearing long before the fallout ever showed up on a placement test. For anybody still weighing it, start asking sooner than feels comfortable. What do you actually want? Which building makes you feel most like yourself? What lights you up? A ten year old cannot run the entire household, of course, but a growing heart carries clues a grown woman should never wave off.
I don’t have a clean answer, and I won’t fake one, because what works in my house might flop in yours. Some children thrive right on their own block, held up by folks who love them. Others need the harder class and the bigger door even if it pulls them away from home for a while. What matters is watching close and being ready to reconsider the day your child tells you the truth. Nikole got there. Once her daughter made it clear that she wanted something different, this mother gave the teenager the freedom to choose her own public high school. The transition was not easy, and Najya soon discovered that a more demanding classroom brought challenges of its own. She even considered transferring to another school shortly after arriving. Yet her mother listened, found her the academic support she needed, and helped her work through those difficult first months. That took love.
What sits heaviest with me is the willingness to stand up and say, in front of God and everybody, that a big thing got done wrong. Sistas, how many of us can hold our own mess up to the light like that, let alone share it with the entire country? Staying quiet and guarding the legacy like a jewel was an option, and it got skipped. Choosing her daughter and the plain truth instead, this writer handed the rest of us permission to carry both grief and grace about the calls we have made for our families.
As of this week, the calendar stays full: teaching, building, catching heat and applause in nearly equal measure. The bookstore is on the way. The 1619 work rolls forward. And somewhere in Brooklyn, a teenager is continuing her education with a stronger academic foundation and a mother who has learned to listen more closely to what her daughter needs.
So here is my closing word to the Sistas reading this with a form to fill out and a knot sitting low in the stomach. Trust your gut, but check it against theirs. Weigh the ranking, and then refuse to bow to it. Grown Black women already know community holds a growing girl up, a good teacher does the stretching, and most children need both to grow into who they are becoming. Nobody gets it perfect. That is fine. The main thing a young one needs is a parent who keeps listening and will change her mind when the facts change. That beats any ranking on a chart, and it is the part of an education that sticks.
Staff Writer: Brenda Poole
BP writes about entertainment, relationships, faith, and life in general… She enjoys speaking on things Black women can relate to and hopefully giving a sista something useful along the way…
Feel free to email her at BrendaP@ThySistas.com.