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When a Woke Icon Sacrifices Her Own Child to Angry Progressive Gods Just Because She Can

  

Category:  Op/Ed

Via:  s  •  2 months ago  •  20 comments

When a Woke Icon Sacrifices Her Own Child to Angry Progressive Gods Just Because She Can

S E E D E D   C O N T E N T


I don't know how many times over the years I've been here, I've used ' FOR THE CHILDREN ' in a story about woke progressives and authoritarian-inclined socialists.



It's their rallying cry, their excuse for every abomination they attempt to shove down the throat of usually resistant citizens, and a smug rejoinder to anyone who questions them. Because, you know, saving that one mythical child is worth all the harm, restrictions, and loss of freedom that their plans bring to everyone else.

Which has always struck me as tremendously hypocritical, because there is no one more invested in using children as props to advance their causes than wokesters and socialists, while advocating for their extermination in the policies and causes they actually fight to the death for.

None of those AWFLs gathered outside the courthouse in their pink Lindsay Clancy T-shirts are weeping for those murdered babies. They are cheering the murder and encouraging more women to be like her. Kids bug you, and you're having an off day?

You know what to do, and don't you dare feel any worse about yourself for it. The ghouls in the grass will cheer for you.

Maura Healey signed legislation at a table surrounded by adoring females of various ages, which effectively allows women to execute newborns and yet pretends that her focus is on the health of those same newborns by threatening state nurse home visits for 'assessments.' I guess they have to make it past that critical stage at the hospital in Massachusetts first. You know - where mom changes her mind at the last minute.

Pick a lane, chicas.

Sacrificing children isn't merely a constant theme with the Moloch worshippers on the Left - they are more than happy to do it. It's better if they can experiment and use your child as a guinea pig, be it, say, 'transing' them without parental knowledge, or indoctrinating them in the various current fads they're into.


But they have absolutely no hesitation in throwing their own children into the communal stew pot if they believe the virtue signaling will gain them some sort of brownie points and higher social status at the next communist club meeting, or when comparing notes in line with another believer at Whole Foods or Costco.

Sure, their kids are collateral damage who wind up helping destroy the society their parents are busy tearing down - you can probably tote up trans Hollywood spawn on both hands in ten seconds without really trying. But it feels good for those folks to parade their little man in a dress and earn street cred for walking the walk, besides having the talk down pat.

What is unusual in the Nikole Hannah-Jones case (the race-baiting   1619 Project   author - 'nuff said there) that's causing such comment is that she's gone public. Hannah-Jones came forward in a NY Times piece to say the daughter she smugly sacrificed to the progressive virtue-signaling gods is really pissed at her all these years later. Why?

For sending her to some of the   worst schools in New York City .

The daughter is correct. I called this at the time.   pic.twitter.com/RDyLe6yuCd — Thomas Chatterton Williams (@thomaschattwill)   September 20, 2026

She used her daughter  as both a sop to her own ingrained prejudices and to earn those virtue-signaling ticky marks, purposefully choosing the lowest-performing schools to prove that 'middle-class parents' could raise the performance levels.   This is a woman who could have easily afforded to give her child the best education she could from the very beginning.


Nikole Hannah-Jones is having a moment every parent dreads: questioning whether her parenting decisions have harmed her child. In her case, the evidence seems clear… it did.

In   The New York Times Magazine , Jones, who makes a healthy six-figure salary, including receiving tens of thousands of dollars for paid speeches, decided to send her daughter to an economically deprived public school out of an obligation to the greater good instead of giving her daughter more advantages that could help her get into a better college and perhaps a high-paying career.

Jones first wrote about choosing her daughter’s school in   2016 , when she described her desire to send her child to public school but the difficulty of selecting a school in a “segregated city.”

“In a city where white children are only 15 percent of the more than one million public-school students, half of them are clustered in just 11 percent of the schools, which not coincidentally include many of the city’s top performers.”

This is one of the first fallacies of Jones’ logic on segregation to begin with: more than two-thirds of the city’s public school population at the time was Latino or black (the black student enrollment has since plummeted along with the overall student population); the city is not segregating the 15 percent as if they are a protected class. Jones is under the impression that there’s a constitutional right for every child to be in proximity to a white student. Perhaps it’s because they believe they can enshrine the child with the wisdom that comes from interacting with Black girl magic; perhaps it’s because she believes the city will invest more equitably if it knew white students were more fairly spread around, as if Caucasian students were a commodity.


This is inconceivable to me from personal experience, as this is precisely the dilemma major dad and I had when we were both on active duty in California. We made this choice. The Santa Ana school system at the time was so poor; it had one textbook for every three students, and, because the non-English-speaking student population was so high where Ebola would have gone to elementary school, the first half of every class was taught in English and the second half was spent reteaching it in Spanish. 

No one learned anything. 

What would have probably been vacation money went to private and Catholic schools for his early and elementary education, until we moved east eight years later. Hannah-Jones decided to do the opposite, though she could certainly afford the best for her child with little sacrifice to herself.

But that - her   daughter   - wasn't her priority.

Virtue signaling was.

“ Did you know my school was bad like this when you decided to put me here ?” she asked.

Yes. Your mother knew and did it purposefully.

...I had braced myself for this moment, spent nearly a decade expecting it, preparing for it.  When Najya was entering pre-K, my husband, Faraji, and I decided to send her to the type of school that wealthier families with choices uniformly avoid — one that is low-income and mostly Black. Our decision had been informed by values shaped by my years of reporting on the enduring and too often seemingly hopeless battle for school integration.


 Witness to woke-speak.

It   informs   her dialogue to this day.

...But my child just shook her head, her face a mask of disbelief, and something else: betrayal.

“ So you had money to send me to one of the best schools, and you chose not to?” she said, hurling her words. “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. 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.

Oh, boohoo for you, Nikole. You see here who is meant to be the victim - Hannah-Jones. 

Not the child whose mother had all the resources in the world, but kept her in crappy NYC schools. Not only for kindergarten, first or second grade, but for   TEN YEARS.

Oops   https://t.co/y3DMEctgGf — SarahLee (@sarailola)   September 21, 2026

TEN YEARS

When the hell does Hannah-Jones wake up to the damage she's doing in this story?

Oh.   NEVER.

And now   she gets to write a mea culpa   for the wokesters surrounding her who will glance over her daughter's heartrending...

...For a moment, Najya said nothing. Then she told me, “S ometimes 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.”

The line grew silent again. Then,   “I am kind of happy that you are seeing this.”


...while applauding Hannah-Jones's own Greek tragic performance. Which she naturally turns into a ' but I'm sure glad my daughter can still hate white people .'

... She then said she was glad she had not spent her early years in a white environment as many of the Black students at her high school had, because she’d developed a strong sense of her identity and had the confidence to speak up against the casual racism they sometimes experienced . Najya said that spending the last two years in classrooms full of privileged kids had taught her that these students weren’t smarter or even necessarily better behaved than the kids she had gone to school with before; they just   had   more.

Nothing about the learning years her daughter will never get back.

Not that the city didn't spend a buttload ' not ' educating Hannah-Jones's daughter. Because they did.

Unbelievable. The government school that the 1619 Project founder admitted failed her daughter spends over $52,000 per student per year.

That's $676,000 for a K-12 "education."

Throwing more money at the problem won't fix it.   pic.twitter.com/cUiUwdOI3f
— Corey A. DeAngelis, school choice evangelist (@DeAngelisCorey)   September 21, 2026

Money for nothing. But at least it wasn't a white school, right?

If you're surprised Miss 1619 is the kind of person who'd put her commitment to progressive racialism over the needs of her own child, you're either a compete moron or you really were born yesterday.   https://t.co/JoF4ZR5bqx — Varad Mehta (@varadmehta)   September 20, 2026

Article is LOCKED by author/seeder
[]
 
Sean Treacy
Professor Principal
1  seeder  Sean Treacy    2 months ago

[✘] Not Ms. Jones. She sent her kid to a struggling school (despite being given $52,000 a year, per student) and her kid paid the price. Hard to wrap your head around caring for your kid that little.

 
 
 
Sean Treacy
Professor Principal
1.1  seeder  Sean Treacy  replied to  Sean Treacy @1    2 months ago

Fascinating story. [✘] progressives [✘] or [✘] teacher union officials once they have the means will not even consider putting their kids anywhere near a bad public school. Private all the way. As we saw with the national guard being called for a few dozens illegals on Martha's Vineyard, progressives are often (Again, not exclusively, heavens no!) of the "good for thee, not for me" variety.

 
 
 
charger 383
Professor Silent
2  charger 383    2 months ago

And what did this accomplish? 

 
 
 
Thomas
Professor Guide
3  Thomas    2 months ago

Per GPT-6 Sol Medium:

Evaluation: HotAir on Nikole Hannah-Jones and her daughter’s schooling

Overall assessment

Veracity: Mixed. The central event is real. Nikole Hannah-Jones and her husband deliberately chose predominantly Black, low-income public schools for their daughter, Najya. Najya later described serious educational gaps and told her mother she wished they had put her needs first. archive.is

Truthfulness: Poor. HotAir takes Hannah-Jones’s admission of a painful mistake and turns it into proof that she sought social approval, cared little about her daughter, and represents a wider progressive practice of harming children. Those conclusions require evidence the article does not supply. hotair.com

Candor: Low. The article quotes Hannah-Jones’s apology but then tells readers she never recognizes the damage. It also omits important parts of Najya’s subsequent experience, including the support that helped her catch up academically. hotair.com

Central diagnosis: This is a defensible criticism of a parental decision wrapped in unsupported claims about motive, unrelated culture-war accusations, and one plainly false claim about Massachusetts law.

1. The school decision

Verdict: Substantially accurate, and open to serious criticism.

Hannah-Jones says she and her husband enrolled Najya at P.S. 307 in 2015 because they believed their money, involvement, and influence might improve the school for other children and encourage similarly situated families to participate. She also says they knew it was a high-poverty school that affluent families tended to avoid. archive.is

Her account describes inadequate supervision, ungraded work, gaps in foundational mathematics, and a difficult transition to a more demanding high school. It is fair to ask why the parents continued with their approach after those problems emerged. HotAir does not have to accept their reasoning or excuse the decision. archive.is

The distinction is between criticizing what they chose and claiming to know why they chose it .

2. “Virtue signaling” as the alleged motive

Verdict: Speculation stated as established fact.

HotAir says Hannah-Jones used Najya to earn social approval and that her daughter “wasn’t her priority.” The record supports a narrower conclusion: the parents consciously weighed a hoped-for collective benefit against their daughter’s individual advantage, and Hannah-Jones now believes Najya bore a cost. hotair.com

That may be an indictment of their judgment. It does not establish that praise, status, or indifference to Najya motivated them. Hannah-Jones describes financial contributions, school advocacy, repeated complaints to administrators, and private tutoring. Those actions do not prove the original choice was wise, but HotAir’s portrait of a mother interested only in applause does not account for them. archive.is

3. Does Hannah-Jones acknowledge the harm?

Verdict: HotAir’s characterization is contradicted by the essay it cites.

The article asks when Hannah-Jones wakes up to the damage and answers, “NEVER.” Yet her essay says Najya deserved better, recounts the academic deficiencies, acknowledges that her ideals imposed a cost on her daughter, and records a direct apology. Najya responds that she is glad her mother finally sees it. hotair.com

A critic could reasonably argue that the acknowledgment came too late , or that Hannah-Jones still assigns too much blame to the school system. Saying she never recognizes the harm is another claim altogether.

HotAir also treats Najya’s appreciation for the identity and confidence she gained as though it cancels her complaint about her education. In Hannah-Jones’s account, Najya expresses both views. HotAir selects the second to imply that the first has been forgotten. hotair.com

4. What happened after Najya changed schools?

Verdict: Material context omitted.

Najya initially struggled at her selective high school. An assessment found major gaps in algebra and earlier math. Hannah-Jones says she arranged intensive tutoring, worked with the school, and that Najya earned mostly A’s and B’s by the end of the semester and later passed the state algebra exam. archive.is

None of that restores the years of instruction Najya says she missed. It does, however, matter when assessing the article’s implications about lasting damage and her parents’ response. The substantiated conclusion is a serious educational setback followed by substantial recovery , with Najya still entitled to feel she was denied the education she wanted.

5. The $52,349 spending claim

Verdict: A reported figure used to support an invalid extrapolation.

A school data site lists spending of $52,349 per pupil for P.S. 307. HotAir reproduces a social-media claim multiplying roughly that amount across 13 years to arrive at $676,000 for a kindergarten-through-12th-grade education. www.districtfacts.com

P.S. 307 serves prekindergarten through fifth grade. A single reported annual figure for that school cannot establish what was spent on Najya at other schools in other years. New York City describes its per-pupil expenditure reports as annual estimates with multiple categories of spending. HotAir does not examine those categories or establish what caused the instructional failures it describes. www.districtfacts.com

High reported spending alongside poor instruction is a legitimate question. The multiplication is not an answer.

6. The Massachusetts newborn claim

Verdict: False, and unrelated to the school story.

HotAir asserts that legislation signed by Gov. Maura Healey effectively lets women “execute newborns.” The Massachusetts provision concerns abortion during pregnancy . It does not authorize killing a newborn. As of the article’s September 22 publication, the amended provision was scheduled to take effect November 8. hotair.com

The article then connects that law to nurse visits for new parents. The visits are a separate proposal to expand a program Massachusetts describes as free and voluntary. The proposed expansion had not been enacted by the abortion legislation. www.mass.gov

This passage does no work in explaining Hannah-Jones’s decision. It supplies an alarming but false premise to establish the article’s opening theme that political opponents sacrifice children.

7. Framing and logical structure

The article moves through three steps:

  1. Hannah-Jones made a decision that she and her daughter now question.
  2. Therefore, Hannah-Jones knowingly valued progressive approval above her child.
  3. Therefore, this episode illustrates how progressives generally treat children.

Step one is supported. Step two is an unsupported motive attribution. Step three is selection followed by extrapolation. The detours through the Lindsay Clancy case, abortion, and transgender children offer no demonstrated causal or evidentiary connection to Najya’s schooling. hotair.com

The headline completes the shift. “Sacrifices Her Own Child” borrows the language of grave physical harm for a real educational loss, then “angry progressive gods” supplies a motive and a political explanation before the evidence has been examined. It is effective invective. It is poor description. hotair.com

Ratings

Criterion Rating Reason
Factual accuracy 5/10 The central school account is real; the Massachusetts newborn claim is false, and the spending calculation misleads.
Evidence and sourcing 4/10 It draws on Hannah-Jones’s firsthand account but relies heavily on another opinion piece and social-media reactions for its interpretation.
Context and completeness 3/10 It omits important details of parental involvement, Najya’s academic recovery, and the distinct legal facts behind its Massachusetts claim.
Veracity and truth-directedness 3/10 Genuine facts are repeatedly made to carry conclusions about motive and political groups that they cannot establish.
Candor and fairness 2/10 Its “NEVER” characterization conflicts with the acknowledgment and apology it quotes.
Logical integrity 2/10 Motive attribution, guilt by association, and extrapolation from one family dominate the argument.
Rhetorical effectiveness 7/10 Its language is forceful and memorable, though much of that force depends on exaggeration.

Factual substance-to-bullshit ratio: approximately 40:60. That is a qualitative judgment, not a count of sentences. The article’s factual spine is significant enough to warrant discussion. Most of its broader accusation rests on rhetoric and inference presented with the confidence of fact.

Final characterization

Hannah-Jones has given critics a serious question to press: When a parent sees repeated failures in a child’s education, how long is it defensible to keep pursuing a hoped-for benefit to the wider school? Her own essay makes that question sharper by acknowledging that Najya paid a price.

HotAir could have built a strong critique around it. Instead, it assigns an unproved selfish motive, misrepresents her admission of regret, inserts a false newborn claim, and makes one family’s decision stand for an entire political movement. It has a real story, but its larger verdict is not established by that story.
 
 
 
Sean Treacy
Professor Principal
3.1  seeder  Sean Treacy  replied to  Thomas @3    2 months ago

chatgpt off

The strongest defense

The central point of the HotAir article is   not merely that Hannah-Jones chose a bad school . It is that she consciously subordinated her daughter's educational interests to a larger ideological project—and that Hannah-Jones's own account supplies the evidence for that interpretation.

Hannah-Jones explicitly says that she and her husband knew they were choosing a school that wealthier families with options generally avoided. More importantly, she explains   why : they believed their money, connections, status, and presence could improve the school and encourage other middle-class families to enter it. She says they felt they could not abandon the school and their convictions once they encountered the dysfunction there.   Afavicons?domain=https%3A%2F%2Farchive.is&sz=128 Archive.is

That is a considerably stronger factual basis for HotAir's argument than the critique acknowledges.

1. “Virtue signaling” isn't an invented premise

The critique says HotAir has to prove that Hannah-Jones wanted   social approval .

That's one possible meaning of “virtue signaling,” but it isn't the only relevant one in the context of a polemical column. HotAir is making an argument about   public ideological performance and status within a political culture , not claiming to have discovered Hannah-Jones's private psychological state.

The underlying sequence is documented:

  • Hannah-Jones had   the resources to   choose differently.

  • She consciously rejected   the safer educational   option.

  • She did so partly because she wanted her family's participation to advance a   theory about school   integration.

  • She regarded remaining   at the school   despite serious problems   as part of   maintaining her commitment   to that project.

  • Her daughter ultimately says that her mother had thought about other children   rather than her.

  • Hannah-Jones herself concedes that she did not give her daughter the education she wanted.   Afavicons?domain=https%3A%2F%2Farchive.is&sz=128 Archive.is

So a columnist describing that as   “virtue signaling”   is making an interpretation from disclosed facts. It isn't equivalent to claiming, as a factual matter, “I have evidence that Hannah-Jones secretly wanted strangers to applaud her.”

And there is an especially important piece of evidence the critique underplays: Hannah-Jones doesn't merely say   we accidentally ended up at a bad school . She says they encountered dysfunction and   remained committed because leaving would mean abandoning the school and their convictions .   Afavicons?domain=https%3A%2F%2Farchive.is&sz=128 Archive.is

That gives HotAir a legitimate basis for arguing that the ideological commitment became more important than simply asking,   Is this still the best educational environment for my child?

2. “Her daughter wasn't her priority” can be defended as a criticism of priorities

This is probably the most defensible interpretation of the HotAir line.

It doesn't have to mean:

“Hannah-Jones didn't love her daughter.”

It can mean:

“When her daughter's interests conflicted with her larger political/educational commitments, she repeatedly chose the latter.”

And   Hannah-Jones's own chronology makes that argument possible .

The problem wasn't one bad semester. Her account describes problems continuing through elementary school. In fourth grade, she discovered that assignments weren't being graded and that her daughter had significant gaps in basic mathematics and writing. She and her husband arranged tutoring and fought administrators, but the educational problems persisted.   Afavicons?domain=https%3A%2F%2Farchive.is&sz=128 Archive.is +1

The decisive fact for HotAir's argument is what Hannah-Jones says about the family's response:

they “could not abandon the school and our convictions”

That sentence is extraordinarily useful to HotAir's case.   Afavicons?domain=https%3A%2F%2Farchive.is&sz=128 Archive.is

The article therefore doesn't have to establish that Hannah-Jones was malicious or indifferent. It can argue that   her stated convictions caused her to tolerate educational conditions that she would not have tolerated if the overriding consideration had been maximizing her daughter's educational opportunity.

That's a legitimate moral criticism.

3. The apology actually strengthens HotAir's case in one respect

The critique says HotAir unfairly portrays Hannah-Jones as refusing to acknowledge the damage because she eventually apologizes.

That's a fair correction to the literal word   “never.”   But it doesn't defeat the broader argument.

The apology comes after Najya confronts her mother directly:

“Sometimes I wish instead of always thinking about other kids, you would have thought about me.”

And Hannah-Jones responds that she didn't do the best for her and is sorry.   Afavicons?domain=https%3A%2F%2Farchive.is&sz=128 Archive.is

But notice what the daughter is accusing her of:   always thinking about other kids instead of her.

That is almost precisely the conflict HotAir is highlighting.

The apology establishes   retrospective recognition , not that the underlying criticism was mistaken.

In fact, Hannah-Jones's article is essentially an admission that her daughter paid an educational price for her parents' experiment. The disagreement is over what lesson should be drawn from that admission.

HotAir's lesson is:

You had the means to protect your own child, knowingly chose a risky ideological experiment instead, persisted after warning signs, and eventually acknowledged that your child paid the price.

That's a perfectly coherent argument from the evidence.

4. “But she paid for tutoring and fought the school” doesn't answer the criticism

The critique emphasizes Hannah-Jones's interventions: complaints to administrators, tutoring, contacting the superintendent, and using her connections.

Those facts are important—but they don't necessarily exonerate the original decision.

Indeed, they can be incorporated into HotAir's argument.

A wealthy, highly educated parent can be extremely involved in a bad school and still have made a bad decision by putting the child there in the first place.

Hannah-Jones's own account says that despite all the family's resources, they ultimately felt   “wholly defeated”   by the system.   Afavicons?domain=https%3A%2F%2Farchive.is&sz=128 Archive.is

That actually raises the question HotAir wants readers to ask:

If an exceptionally well-connected family couldn't overcome the school's deficiencies, what was the justification for expecting their child to bear those deficiencies for years?

The fact that the parents fought hard after the problems appeared demonstrates parental concern. It doesn't demonstrate that their initial judgment was sound.

5. The critique treats the daughter's positive comments as though they rebut the educational criticism

They don't.

Najya apparently derived meaningful benefits from her experience, including a strong racial identity and an understanding that affluent students weren't inherently smarter or better behaved. Hannah-Jones also includes those points in her essay.   Afavicons?domain=https%3A%2F%2Farchive.is&sz=128 Archive.is

HotAir is entitled to say:   those benefits don't erase the educational deficiencies.

This is an important distinction.

A child can say:

  • “I valued my   racial identity.”

  • “I learned things   from those schools.”

  • “I wouldn't want   to have spent   my childhood in   an entirely white   environment.”

and simultaneously say:

  • “I didn't get   the education I   wanted.”

  • “I wish   my mother had   prioritized me.”

Those propositions aren't   contradictory.

And the latter is particularly significant because   it is the daughter's own assessment of the tradeoff , not HotAir's invention.   Afavicons?domain=https%3A%2F%2Farchive.is&sz=128 Archive.is

6. HotAir is a polemic, not a neutral academic paper

This matters when evaluating language such as “progressive gods,” “virtue signaling,” “child sacrifice,” and “Greek tragic performance.”

Those are plainly rhetorical devices. They are not presented as findings from a controlled investigation.

You can reasonably dislike that rhetoric. But criticizing the rhetoric doesn't establish that the underlying argument is false.

The appropriate question is:

If you remove the inflammatory language, is there still an argument?

Yes:

Hannah-Jones knowingly chose a low-performing, high-poverty school because she believed her family's participation could advance school integration and improve conditions for disadvantaged children; she continued despite serious problems; her daughter later reported that she had sacrificed educational opportunities and wished her mother had prioritized her; Hannah-Jones now acknowledges that she failed to provide her daughter the education she deserved.

That argument survives almost entirely intact after removing HotAir's rhetoric.   Afavicons?domain=https%3A%2F%2Farchive.is&sz=128 Archive.is

7. The strongest answer to the “unsupported motive” objection

I'd phrase it this way:

The critic is demanding proof of an internal motive when the article is actually arguing from revealed priorities.

HotAir doesn't need to prove:

“Hannah-Jones secretly wanted applause.”

This is funny on its own.  The "win" was making her a racial identarian. 

Najya apparently derived meaningful benefits from her experience, including a strong racial identity 
 
 
 
Thomas
Professor Guide
3.1.1  Thomas  replied to  Sean Treacy @3.1    2 months ago

Chat gpt

You have changed the claim you are defending.

Hannah-Jones says she and her husband stayed because they felt they could not abandon the school and their convictions. Najya later said she wished her mother had thought more about her . Those facts support a serious criticism: the parents kept pursuing a goal for the school after they had reason to question what it was costing their daughter. I made that criticism in my original assessment.

HotAir made a further claim. It said Hannah-Jones wanted “brownie points and higher social status.” You have replaced that accusation with the more defensible argument that her convictions affected her priorities. Evidence for the second claim is not evidence for the first.

The same substitution occurs when you say the apology strengthens HotAir’s case. It strengthens the criticism of the decision . It contradicts HotAir’s assertion that she never recognized the harm. A polemical tone cannot make “never” accurate.

And your final line makes another unsupported leap. Najya said she valued developing a strong sense of herself as a Black girl. She also said she wanted a better education and ultimately chose a more selective school. Calling the supposed “win” the creation of a “racial identitarian” assigns a purpose to her mother and a political identity to her daughter that neither statement establishes.

There is a sound argument here about parental judgment. You have stated it. But it does not rescue HotAir’s claims about status seeking, its denial of the apology, or its attempt to turn one family’s mistake into a verdict on progressives generally.

Sources: Hannah-Jones’s account and the HotAir column .

 
 
 
Sean Treacy
Professor Principal
4  seeder  Sean Treacy    2 months ago

Another good essay:

              

Her actions were morally indefensible and analytically ignorant, and her supposed metamorphosis remains invisible to the naked eye. She has always been a ridiculous zealot. Now, she’s a cautionary tale, too.

To propose that one’s own child “is not worth more than any other” is an ugly — perhaps even an   evil   — sentiment. You may call me whatever names you wish in response to this assertion, but you must understand that it will not change a thing. My job as a parent is to prioritize my children. I owe it to them, and they rely upon me to follow through with that obligation. It is true that, in a detached, cosmic sense, my children are no more important than are any others. But for   me ? Yes, they are. They represent the primary purpose of my existence, and, insofar as it is in my power and is consistent with the law, I intend to advance their interests without apology, embarrassment, or regret. Far from representing a societal flaw or some selfish personal shortcoming, that instinct is the most natural thing in the world — which is why, historically, the only the thing that has ever been able to break it is the entrenchment of totalitarian ideology. The fanatics who “informed” on their family members during the worst days of the Soviet Union were not admirable for their commitment to the cause; they were anti-human freaks who upset the natural balance of the universe. Nikole Hannah-Jones’s sin was far lesser than theirs, but it was still a sin. Outside of a waterboarding chamber, no parent should ever say, “My daughter is not worth more than any other child...

”  In her original essay, she expressed a desire to avoid “segregation.” Yet she sent her daughter to a school that hosted more students of her daughter’s race than attended the ones she eschewed. Defending her decision, she explained her belief that a profitable educational environment involved sedulous parental involvement. Yet, by her own admission, she was so neglectful of her daughter’s progress that, for years, she remained unaware that she had fallen badly behind. Her  New York Times  biography notes that her “journalism has tended to focus on school.” Which makes it all the more shameful that she still has no idea  why  schools tend to fail. Like many of her colleagues, Nikole Hannah-Jones ignores the available data and instead pins the blame on funding gaps that don’t exist, racism that cannot be identified, and attitudes that nobody in our current era actually exhibits. Perhaps, going forward, she might “focus” a little harder?

  Given that she has extremely strong views about what, how, and where   other   American children should be taught, it would be useful to know what, having watched her assumptions fail her own child, she now thinks America’s education system should look like. She isn’t going to tell us.

Which, I’m afraid, is entirely typical. I do not mean to be unduly waspish here, but it ought not to be a surprise that Nikole Hannah-Jones believed that her daughter was getting A’s despite doing no homework, given that getting A’s despite doing no homework is exactly how Nikole Hannah-Jones’s own career has played out thus far. Hannah-Jones is a writer who doesn’t write; a historian who knows little history; an advocate with no mastery of her brief — and for this, she has been rewarded with extravagant public-speaking fees, a cushy sinecure at the   New York Times , a Pulitzer Prize in commentary, two George Polk Awards, three National Magazine Awards, a MacArthur Fellowship, and at least ten years of the sort of detached, flighty, consequence-free existence that allows one to sacrifice the mind of one’s own child for a couple of mawkish newspaper pieces and the cheap mollification of one’s ego.

 
 
 
JohnRussell
Professor Principal
5  JohnRussell    2 months ago
What is unusual in the Nikole Hannah-Jones case (the race-baiting   1619 Project   author - 'nuff said there)

I wonder how many conservatives ever actually looked at the 1619 Project. My semi-educated guess is zero. 

 
 
 
Sean Treacy
Professor Principal
5.1  seeder  Sean Treacy  replied to  JohnRussell @5    2 months ago
many conservatives ever actually looked at the 1619 Project

Have you? It claims the revolution was fought to protect slavery. Is racist slop designed to pander to racial identarians on the left. Even the non-racist left found it incredibly  dishonest. Here's one example from impeccably left wing Jacobin.  

 
 
 
JohnRussell
Professor Principal
5.1.1  JohnRussell  replied to  Sean Treacy @5.1    2 months ago
It claims the revolution was fought to protect slavery

The 1619 Project was eight long essays almost all of which were not directly about the Founding Fathers. The part about the revolution was just a part of it. 

=

CHAT GPT

If we separate what the 1619 Project got historically right from its more controversial interpretations, there is a substantial amount that is well supported by mainstream historical scholarship.

The American Historical Review commissioned a 19-scholar forum on the project. Its editors noted that, whatever the disagreements over particular claims, historians credited the project with bringing the history of slavery and Black Americans to a much larger public audience and opening new ways of thinking about the American past.

1. Slavery was central to American economic development

This is probably the strongest part of the project.

Slavery wasn't a peripheral institution confined to the South. Enslaved labor—particularly cotton production—became deeply connected to American and international commerce, finance, manufacturing, shipping and insurance.

The important distinction is that saying “slavery was enormously important to American economic development” is much less controversial than saying “American capitalism was fundamentally created by slavery.” The former has extensive historical support; the latter is an interpretation over which historians disagree. Even critics of 1619 acknowledge that studying slavery's economic role is essential.

2. Slavery existed alongside the nation's founding ideals

The United States proclaimed principles of liberty and equality while millions of people were enslaved.

That's not a controversial discovery of the 1619 Project—it is an undeniable historical contradiction.

The project was right to emphasize that the American founding cannot be understood solely through the Declaration of Independence, Constitution and revolutionary ideals without also considering slavery, racial hierarchy and the status of enslaved people.

Thomas Jefferson is an obvious example: he wrote that “all men are created equal” while enslaving people himself.

3. Enslaved people were active historical actors

One valuable contribution of the project was shifting attention away from treating enslaved people merely as victims of a system.

They:

  • resisted slavery;
  • escaped;
  • organized families and communities;
  • maintained religious and cultural traditions;
  • negotiated with slaveholders;
  • participated in revolts;
  • enlisted in the Union Army;
  • sued for freedom;
  • and ultimately contributed enormously to destroying slavery.

That perspective is consistent with decades of scholarship in African-American history.

4. The Civil War cannot be separated from slavery

This is another area where the broader 1619 emphasis is justified.

There were numerous political, constitutional and economic issues surrounding the Civil War, but slavery and its expansion were fundamental to the sectional conflict.

The seceding states themselves provide unusually strong evidence because several explicitly identified slavery as a reason for secession. Mississippi's declaration, for example, stated that its position was “thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery.”

So you don't need the stronger 1619 interpretation of American history to establish the basic point:

The United States cannot adequately explain the Civil War without slavery.

5. Reconstruction and its collapse matter enormously

The project also deserves credit for emphasizing what happened after emancipation.

Ending slavery did not immediately produce racial equality.

The country went through:

emancipation → Reconstruction → Black political participation → white Southern resistance → disenfranchisement → segregation → Jim Crow

That sequence is essential to understanding American history.

And the consequences weren't confined to the South. Northern and Western states had their own forms of racial discrimination and segregation.

6. The legacy of slavery didn't simply disappear in 1865

This is perhaps the most important distinction between history and politics in the 1619 debate.

It is historically defensible to investigate whether institutions that developed during or after slavery contributed to later racial disparities.

For example:

  • Jim Crow;
  • discriminatory housing practices;
  • racial restrictions on voting;
  • unequal access to education;
  • employment discrimination;
  • segregation;
  • discriminatory lending and housing policies.

There is extensive historical evidence for these things.

The disagreement begins when historians and social scientists move from:

“This institution historically contributed to this outcome.”

to:

“Therefore this present-day outcome is primarily caused by that historical institution.”

The second proposition requires considerably more evidence and is much more contestable.

7. The project was right to challenge an overly sanitized version of American history

This is where I think the project had its greatest public-history success.

There was—and remains—a tendency in some presentations of American history to tell a sequence like:

1776 → Constitution → Civil War → emancipation → civil rights → present

while giving comparatively little attention to the experience of enslaved people.

The 1619 Project forced a much larger audience to ask:

What does American history look like if enslaved Americans aren't a footnote?

That's a legitimate and valuable historical question.

And interestingly, this doesn't require rejecting 1776.

You can simultaneously believe that:

1776 was a foundational moment in American history

and

1619 represents an enormously important earlier moment in the history of Africans and slavery in English North America.

Those aren't necessarily mutually exclusive propositions.


Where I would draw the line

The strongest version of the 1619 Project sometimes moves from documented history into large causal interpretations.

The most famous example is the original claim that one of the primary reasons colonists declared independence was protecting slavery.

That claim generated substantial criticism from historians. The New York Times subsequently clarified the statement by changing it to say that protecting slavery was one of the primary reasons for “some of the colonists,” particularly those in the Southern colonies.

That's an important distinction.

Similarly, historians disagree about how much weight should be given to slavery in explaining the development of American capitalism. The American Historical Review forum explicitly describes these disputes as involving “interpretive overreach and factual slippage,” while also recognizing the project's contribution to public understanding.

So my bottom line would be:

The 1619 Project was strongest when it said, “You cannot understand America without putting slavery, enslaved people, Black Americans and the long aftermath of slavery much closer to the center of the story.”
It became much more controversial when it tried to turn that insight into a comprehensive explanation of America's founding, capitalism and present-day society.
 
 
 
JohnRussell
Professor Principal
5.1.2  JohnRussell  replied to  Sean Treacy @5.1    2 months ago
Have you?

I didnt read all of it by any means, it was many thousands of words (and that is just the New York Times version, there also a full length book)  but I most certainly did look at it. 

 
 
 
Jeremy Retired in NC
Professor Guide
5.1.3  Jeremy Retired in NC  replied to  JohnRussell @5.1.2    2 months ago
I didnt read all of it by any means

Explains you relying on AI instead of actual knowledge of the subject. 

 
 
 
Sean Treacy
Professor Principal
5.1.4  seeder  Sean Treacy  replied to  JohnRussell @5.1.1    2 months ago
The part about the revolution was just a part of it

So lying to create a fake foundation myth for our country is okay for historians because they say other things that aren't lies. 

 
 
 
Snuffy
Professor Participates
5.1.5  Snuffy  replied to  Sean Treacy @5.1.4    2 months ago

So lying to create a fake foundation myth for our country is okay for historians because they say other things that aren't lies. 

Why not? After all, it has worked well for the Smithsonian.
 
 
 
JohnRussell
Professor Principal
5.1.6  JohnRussell  replied to  Jeremy Retired in NC @5.1.3    2 months ago

LOL. 

 
 
 
Split Personality
Professor Participates
5.1.7  Split Personality  replied to  Snuffy @5.1.5    2 months ago

Maybe you can publish an article about what myths the Smithsonian has perpetrated?

 
 
 
Thomas
Professor Guide
5.2  Thomas  replied to  JohnRussell @5    2 months ago

It is funny... Some people want us to discard everything we learn while seeking the facts if one part is proven false.

Prove each claim. Don't worry if it takes time to reach a conclusion.

Sean is defending an article that asks us to conclude:

Hannah-Jones knowingly put progressive approval ahead of her daughter’s education, and her decision reveals how progressives generally treat children: as instruments of ideology rather than people whose interests come first. The article’s closing pitch presents Trump’s education agenda as the corrective.

The crucial step is the jump from “her convictions influenced a consequential school decision” to “she sought status and this is what progressives do.” The first has support in her account. The article wants the reader to accept the second as though it follows automatically.

(per ChatGPT)

So Sean’s defense asks us to accept the article’s claim that a mother knowingly put her child in a school she knew would provide an insufficient education, seeking progressive approval for doing so.

Where is the evidence for that? Hannah-Jones says the school had a strong principal when Najya enrolled, that Najya initially seemed to be learning on grade level, and that the family hoped its involvement would help improve the school for other children. She knew the school carried risks. That does not mean she knew the particular failures Najya would encounter.

None of this means the parents made the right choice. Once serious failures became apparent, their decision to stay deserves scrutiny. But criticism of that decision does not prove that Hannah-Jones chose the school for social status, knew in advance how Najya’s education would suffer, or that her decision tells us how progressives generally treat their children. Those are separate claims. Prove them.

 
 
 
Sean Treacy
Professor Principal
5.2.1  seeder  Sean Treacy  replied to  Thomas @5.2    2 months ago
e’s claim that a mother knowingly put her child in a school she knew would provide an insufficient education, seeking progressive approval for doing so.

She admitted she did it and publicized it while doing so

 That does not mean she knew the particular failures Najya would encounter.

Lol. No is accusing of her having the ability to tell the future. It's like telling a kid to play in traffic. The parent doesn't "know" they will be killed by a car, and it's possible that the kid could be killed by a car even without playing in traffic, but every sentient person in the world understands putting a child in a terrible school (terrible despite massive funding b/c progressive policies have ruined education) increases the likelihood of a bad outcome substantially. 

 
 
 
Dismayed Patriot
Professor Quiet
5.3  Dismayed Patriot  replied to  JohnRussell @5    2 months ago
I wonder how many conservatives ever actually looked at the 1619 Project. My semi-educated guess is zero.

Many conservatives don't like learning things they hadn't already been taught in Sunday school. [Deleted][✘]

 
 
 
charger 383
Professor Silent
6  charger 383    2 months ago

I hope the child remembers this when it is time to pick a nursing home for  Hannah-Jones

 
 

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