Nikole Hannah-Jones Chose Race over Her Own Daughter – Don't Make That Mistake | Jason Whitlock Harmony

Jason Whitlock (0:00)

Nikole Hannah-Jones had the money to send her daughter to one of the best schools in New York. She chose a failing one on purpose, and her daughter paid the price. That is the whole story, and her own long explanation in New York Times Magazine only makes it clearer and worse. Nikole Hannah-Jones' own parents made the opposite choice for her. They lived in Iowa. They put her on a bus in second grade out of a segregated neighborhood into a school where learning was expected. That bus ride carried her to Notre Dame, to North Carolina, to the New York Times. They chose the best experience for their child. Nikole Hannah-Jones chose the black experience for hers. Najah was enrolled at PS 307 in Brooklyn, a low-income segregated school that matched her mother's beliefs about justice. One choice worked, one failed in spectacular fashion. No honest parent should be surprised. Hannah-Jones is half black and half white. She built a public life around choosing a black identity over a Christian identity. Christianity says God is no respecter of persons. You raise a child as a soul loved by God, not as a symbol for a cause. Racial idolatry reverses that order. It says your first loyalty is to your race. Prove your loyalty, stay, sacrifice. That is what happened to Nikole Hannah-Jones' daughter. She turned her daughter into a sacrifice to a race war she built in her own mind. Send my child into dysfunction to prove integration can work, if good families just believe. Help lift the collective, even if my own child sinks. Scripture never asks that of a parent. A parent protects the child in front of him, not the idea in his head. She even admits she thought family privilege would protect Nyja from what she calls dysfunction and malpractice. That is an admission she knew what the building was. You do not send a child you love into malpractice and dysfunction and hope status saves her. Love picks a better room. I know this pressure because I lived it. I went to an all-black school through third grade in Indianapolis, PS 83 There was no peer pressure to achieve at school 83 If you made good grades, there was a good chance you were going to get ridiculed for acting white. When I moved into a mostly white school district, the pressure flipped completely. You got ridiculed for making bad grades. Children chase respect. They become what the room rewards. Nikole Hannah-Jones placed Najah in a room that rewarded very little. Najah told her early, the lunchroom was chaos every day. Work came home ungraded. Najah thought she was a good at math because no teacher marked the wrong answers. A child who thinks she is soaring while she is failing is not being harmed by history. She is being harmed by low expectations and a brain dead mother. Hannah-Jones describes rage at the teacher and the principal and the system. She called the superintendent. She paid for tutoring. She kept the ideology and blamed the people inside the building she selected. At every turn, the piece blames the principal. And I'm talking about the article she wrote about her daughter, the teacher, segregation, racism. It never says the plain truth. Hannah, Nikole Hannah-Jones chose the wrong building for her daughter out of racial loyalty. Najah said it better than any critic could. Putting me in this school did not change anything. You had money to send me to one of the best schools and you chose not to? Sometimes, this is the daughter, I wish I, instead of always thinking about other kids, you would have thought about me. What child wouldn't ask that question? When Najah finally got to choose, she chose a screen school with mostly white kids and super high standards. The daughter chose excellence. The mother chose symbolism. That symbolism comes from a career. The New York Times, the 1619 Project argues enslavement from 180 years ago and longer defines America. That worldview makes proving blackness the top job for people with dark skin. It is toxic and debilitating because it turns a child into proof, into an experiment. Najah did not need another lesson about oppression. She needed long division marked correct.

Nikole Hannah-Jones' article tries to justify what she did. It fails in her own words. Her parents loved her enough to seek the best room. She loved a cause enough to pick a worse room for her daughter. That is the price of racial idolatry. The turn from colorblind Christian love to skin first parenting. Stop worshiping race. Worship God. Protect your child. Today's show, I'm going to further unpack this New York Magazine article or this confession, this long piece that Nikole Hannah-Jones wrote about what she did to her daughter. I'm going to unpack it today so that tomorrow, we're going to have Delano and Shamika and TJ Moe and maybe Dre will have them on to talk about Nikole Hannah-Jones' decision making here and just how stupid it was. But I want to give you some more context. I want to read you some deeper excerpts from the article she wrote so that we're all on the same page. We all understand where she's coming from and we can all understand the point she was trying to make and the point that I'm making today. That this all connects to the show we did on Fearless today about Dion and coaching.