The Problem with Nikole Hannah-Jones

Ravi Gupta (0:00)

Welcome to The Lost Debate, a show for political eclectics. I'm Ravi Gupta, and let's start in 1991, Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

One night, a 14-year-old boy escaped from the apartment of the serial killer, Jeffrey Dahmer.

He was naked and disoriented. Bystanders on the street saw this boy and were very concerned and called the police. But when the officers arrived, they accepted Jeffrey Dahmer's claim that the boy was his adult boyfriend and helped return the kid to Jeffrey's apartment. They didn't verify anything about his age or the story or anything like that. And after they left, Dahmer killed him and did Lord knows what after that. The reason why I mention this is because one of those officers who led the boy back to his death was a guy named John Balcerzak. And this guy, understandably, was fired eventually because of his incompetence in that moment cost a boy his life. That's how it should go, right? But unfortunately, that's not the end of the story. Because Balcerzak was a member of the police union, he successfully appealed and got his job back with back pay.

And that's not even the end of the story. So later, his fellow officers in Milwaukee thought, hey, this is the kind of guy we need leading us. And they elected him the president of the Milwaukee Police Association. He was the head of the police union. This is not accidental. So if you go to unions all across the country, whether it's police unions, teachers unions, etc., these unions are often led by some of the least competent members of that workforce. And they're there to protect the least competent and to de-professionalize and remove any accountability from that workforce. So I want you to keep that story in mind when we talk today about the subject of the moment, which is Nikole Hannah-Jones, who is a thought leader, shall we say, who has written a series of pieces that have captured our attention. And the story really goes all the way back to June 2016, when Nikole Hannah-Jones wrote a piece called Choosing a School for My Daughter in a Segregated City, in which she outlined her decision to send her kid to the quote unquote bad zoned school in the neighborhood, which was more black and concentrated more poverty than where somebody with Nikole Hannah-Jones' resources could have gotten into a quote unquote better school, right? That was June 2016 That became a huge conversation around the country. Nikole Hannah-Jones eventually won a MacArthur Genius Grant, wrote a bunch of books and became like a leader in the educational conversation. So that was 2016

But then 10 years later, September 20th, 2026, which a couple of weeks ago, Nikole Hannah-Jones wrote a piece called In Fighting for Every Black Child, Did I Betray My Own? And I'm going to go line by line through this piece from September.

But basically, Nikole Hannah-Jones in this piece says, hey, I think I made a mistake. My daughter is upset at me because the school that I sent her to was not a great school. And I'll get into the details of that. Then, five days later, Nikole Hannah-Jones did an interview with her daughter for This American Life in which they discussed the decision to go to the school and the piece that Nikole Hannah-Jones wrote and all that.

So we're going to discuss all of that, right? And I want to say that in an ideal world, I would have jumped on this story right away, given, you know, you're a long-time listener. You know, I have a lot to say about education. I was a charter school principal down south, in Nashville, Tennessee, and a superintendent of six schools in Tennessee and Mississippi.

I've been advising schools ever since, talking about education, writing about education, but my book came out two weeks ago, so I have been a bit busy, and I wasn't able to take advantage of the virality of the moment. But I'm actually glad I had some time to take a step back here, and what I did was every time I would read a piece or a tweet or overhear somebody or have an idea about this whole debate, I would put it into a notebook, and that notebook got really long. And what I'm doing here today is I was flying here to Nashville today for a book event, and I was looking at my notes on the airplane, chatting up a fellow depressed Buffalo Bills fan next to me, who happened to live in Mississippi because her son is actually one of the assistant coaches for the Bills.

And she was watching me move my notes around, and she's like, what's going on? And so I started to tell her the story of Nikole Hannah-Jones in the schools, and she lives outside of Jackson, Mississippi, so she knows my schools. And so we had this long conversation, and she was like, well, you should talk about that. I was like, you know what? I think I'm going to do that today when I get to my Airbnb, because I have a couple hours before I do a book event. So that's what I'm doing today. And what I think is important here to say is that this can't be a viral moment. So in some ways, it's good that I waited. It has to be an ongoing conversation. It can't be like some Hollywood murder trial or a celebrity breakup. It has to be a long-term conversation that just doesn't come and go. And the signs are pointing when we talk about this public debate about Nikole Hannah-Jones. There's some trouble in the way that we're talking about it. And I will get to it in quite a bit. Like as I get to the end of this episode, I'll talk more about the way this conversation is evolving, especially in New York. It seems like we're learning the wrong lessons from her piece. This may come across as a little didactic, kind of like my Israel-Palestine explainers, because my goal here is not necessarily to entertain you, but to put together some comprehensive thoughts about what's going on here. And I'll quote at length from different pieces that I've read that have inspired me. And we're going to have longer than normal show notes on this one. Like there will be a lot of links in the show notes for this, because I want you to be able to look things up for yourself. So let's start. And the way I'm going to organize the beginning of this episode is I'm going to kind of go through point by point some of the things that Nikole Hannah-Jones says in her piece, kind of give you my reactions to it, and in some cases other people's reactions to it. Then I'll start to go through other people's pieces about Nikole Hannah-Jones, and then I'll end by talking about where we are in cities like New York and blue states, et cetera, and why I think we have a long way to go to address some of the things that Nikole Hannah-Jones outlines in her piece.