‘I was not prepared’: Nikole Hannah-Jones on the backlash she received from Black communities for her NYT article
TheGrio...
In her first interview since publishing her viral article, Nikole Hannah-Jones reflects on becoming the center of social media debates.
When Nikole Hannah-Jones hit submit on her now-viral article“In Fighting for Every Black Child, Did I Betray My Own?” she braced herself for mixed reactions. However, in a recent conversation with Michael Harriot for Contranband Camp, the New York Times reporter revealed that she was not prepared for the large influx of criticism she’s been receiving, particularly from members of Black communities.
“I was fully prepared for a lot of white folks to attack the piece. And frankly, I’ve been dealing with that for so long, I was like, ‘I don’t even care…whatever,’” Hannah-Jones told Harriot. “I was not prepared for the number of Black people who didn’t just critique the piece…I was not prepared for the gleeful way, at least it has felt in some ways, that some Black people have piled on. I will never be used to that, and I wasn’t—naively—expecting it.”
Though she acknowledges that she was, in fact, critiquing her own choices throughout the article, the inundation of think pieces on social media has taken on a life of its own. In the midst of readers sharing their various takes, a collective of social media users have chimed in on the conversation without even reading the piece, thus leading to more personal, negative attacks on Jones.
“Look, I’m critiquing myself in the piece, right? Like, I’m literally questioning whether we made the right choices. I’m questioning my parenting. I’m questioning the ability to live my values and how that impacted my child,” she said, explaining how she anticipated the debates online. In fact she expressed her appreciation for the Black parents who have emailed her “nuanced, thoughtful, complex” reflections on the article.
“This is what we hope as journalists is to be able to write something that leads to this introspection and this discourse, and hopefully leads us to really expose and challenge these systems that put us as Black people in a position where there seems like there are very little good choices. We’re all trying to make the choice that we think is the least bad choice.”
In the New York Times article, Jones draws on her experience navigating the New York City public school system with her child to shed light on the debate many Black parents face about their children’s academic experience: Do you prioritize cultural diversity or academic rigor? Is there a way to get both? Why aren’t there more accessible options to get both? And when Jones and her husband decided to put their child, Najya, in a predominantly Black school, a low-income school, they thought they would be able to challenge the status quo by using their privilege to improve a school that has been caught in the cycle of inequalities within the system. However, as her daughter grew older, her dissatisfaction with her academic experience became more vocal, forcing the Pulitzer-winning journalist to confront the other side of the argument.
“I’ve definitely been humbled by my experience with my child. I was judgmental about the choices other Black folks made that I didn’t think were communal enough. I have to own that, now, I’m getting what I gave to a degree…now where I am is just saying I do wish most of us understood our obligation to each other,” she admitted. “I have regrets about how I handled certain things with my child. I wish I would have taken her concerns more to heart. I’ve definitely been humbled by my ability to mitigate what was happening in the school. I actually didn’t think I was putting my child in a bad situation. I thought I could raise the level of everything happening there, not be crushed by it. And I will never ever regret, though, that I didn’t just think about my child, that I live in this community, and I feel an obligation to this community.”
She continued: “The most disheartening thing to me has been the number of people who have not critiqued the system. The concern for her [Najya], I wish they had for all the other kids in the school that you’re saying I was neglectful to my child for having the audacity to put her in the school with. I just wish that was the outrage.”
As she continues to try to find resolution within herself about whether or not she “sacrificed” her child for her values, Jones underlines that one of the biggest pain points she continues to grapple with is the way it seems the majority of society, particularly Black communities have leaned into individualism—an individualism that arguably makes it easy for many people to acknowledge injustices, but not pursue actions that would actually lead to systemic change.
“That truly has been the most hurtful thing…the number of people who actually feel that trying to live your politics was what was wrong with me,” she shared. “I wrote this story to shine a light on the system, to say I know some of what millions of Black children in this country are experiencing every day because I was also in that school with my child. The piece is a critique of all of us—including myself—who allow our children to languish in these schools, who cannot sustain our outrage, who cannot turn our outrage into policy, who are not every day out there calling on our officials to do something about this because we are able to remove our children from that harm, and so we we lose a sense of the stakes.”
Ultimately, through a deeply personal first-person account, Hannah-Jones had hoped the article would lead to critics of “a system that is forcing us as Black people to make these bad choices of which harm will we expose our child to.”
“I dared to try to put my child in a community school with the people in our community in order to expose the injustice of what we do to our kids, and we’re not using our ink to decry a system to call for change, to call for these kids to get what they need,” she concluded. “We’re focusing on my child, one child, one privileged child, and you focus on her because I chose to tell a story about her, and the rest of the children remain nameless…faceless, and unfortunately, not enough of our concern.”
Click here to watch the full conversation.