The impossible choices Black parents face when seeking the best education for their children
TheGrio...
OPINION: The debates surrounding Nikole Hannah-Jones and Nolan Wells reveal the impossible choices Black parents face in an education system that fails our children.
Editor’s note: The following article is an op-ed, and the views expressed are the author’s own. Read more opinions on theGrio.
The debates surrounding Nikole Hannah-Jones and Nolan Wells reveal a painful truth: Black parents are expected to make impossible choices about their children’s educational futures in a country that cares little about their bodies and even less about their brains.
This weekend, Nikole Hannah-Jones published a New York Times essay detailing the educational choices she made for her daughter, Najya. Hannah-Jones wrestles with supporting a predominantly Black, lower-income school while confronting her daughter’s resentment over not attending a more affluent institution. Many weaponized her vulnerability as a confession of guilt, using it to validate their own decisions to send their children to predominantly white schools.
A similar judgment unfolded after the tragic death of Nolan Wells. Before the full circumstances of his death were established, a photograph circulated of Nolan as the only Black boy among white peers. The image was used to criticize and to question his mother, Christine Wonsley’s, educational choices, suggesting she should have known better than to place her son in predominantly white environments.
Both stories landed on my feed. And according to the internet, both Black mothers were wrong. And there was a lot of anger.
Black people have plenty of reasons to be angry. As Solange so eloquently said, “I got a lot to be mad about.” Decades earlier, James Baldwin described being conscious as a Black person in America as a near-constant state of rage. But beneath the anger directed at these mothers, I recognize something deeper: helplessness.
It is easier to direct our rage toward two Black mothers than confront generations of institutional neglect and educational inequality that have shaped the choices available to Black families.
Anti-racist educator Tema Okun identifies individualism, power hoarding, and either/or thinking as characteristics of white supremacy culture. In education, these tendencies encourage us to believe the only way to secure our children’s futures is to individually escape the institutions failing them. Find the better school. Move to the better neighborhood. Pay the tuition. Get YOUR child out. And if you cannot afford to escape? Well, that’s your problem.
Black people experienced white flight post integration. Then created our own Black flight. Leaving public education for private, charters, religious, or other institutions.
This thinking creates a false dichotomy in Black parenting: racial affirmation or academic achievement. Collective responsibility or individual success. Safety or opportunity.
But this is a newer issue. Last month, I attended a Black philanthropy gala where Rhesa Ortique McDonald reflected on integrating a New Orleans school. She described physical harassment in the cafeteria, verbal harassment upon entering the building, and the social isolation of being among the only Black children in the building. Her words reminded me I’d rewashed New Orleans history.
While I’d always imagined my hometown of New Orleans as more diverse and more accepting, McDonald’s story reminded me that all of our institutions had to be integrated. And it came at a cost.
We revere Ruby Bridges and Leona Tate for their courage, yet do we sit with all they lost? The childhood they sacrificed?
Decades later, I attended Louisiana’s top high school – a privilege afforded to me. While I did not experience physical harassment, the verbal assaults on my race and the social isolation Hannah-Jones says Najya felt were very real to me. I resented my mother for placing me there. My mother, who attended predominantly Black institutions from kindergarten through college, put me in a white environment. Did she see how it hurt me?
As my daughter prepares to enter an educational experience more like Najya’s than Nolan’s, I know there will be sacrifices. As a former educator, I understand the challenges inside our schools. And I won’t front like I’m sending my baby just anywhere. But my husband and I are doing the work beyond choosing her school. We are paying attention to school board elections, pursuing charter school board service, developing curriculum, and investing in organizations improving educational outcomes.
Now, I realize my mother did the same. She embodied the Kwanzaa principle of Ujima, which means collective work and responsibility. My mother understood that Ujima is not just for December. Our responsibility to our community does not disappear when our children graduate, transfer, or enroll elsewhere. As an elected school board member, my mother worked to improve education for children she would never meet. She challenged education reforms she believed harmed Black children and educated future teachers at HBCUs.
But to continue that work, we have to interrogate whether we are interested in dismantling white supremacy or simply finding a morsel, a crumb, of opportunity beneath it. Do we genuinely believe education is a human right? Do we believe we can build an education system that challenges Black children academically while nurturing their racial identities? Or have we accepted binary thinking and have resigned ourselves to hoard power?
Some of us will have to push past that first layer of anger. Because underneath our anger is the fear that no matter how hard we work, how much money we make, or how carefully we choose, we still may not be able to protect our babies.
And that fear is precisely why we cannot afford to make each other the enemy. Black parents should not have to choose between their own children’s futures and the futures of every other child. Our children deserve more than individual escape. They deserve collective liberation.
Julienne Louis-Anderson is a Black mother and former educator who writes about the intersection of culture and politics with education and human development. You can find her on all social media platforms @juliennelouisanderson.