Nikole Hannah-Jones’ Racism Is Why Her Daughter Can’t Do Math

Nikole Hannah-Jones has curated herself an extremely lucrative, notoriety-winning career by blaming white people for black people’s problems. In her latest article for The New York Times Magazine, she does it again. It’s titled, “In Fighting for Every Black Child, Did I Betray My Own?” In it, the creator of the scholarly abomination known as the 1619 Project admits that her warped educational ideas have harmed her daughter’s future and their relationship. When her daughter finally convinced her parents to let her attend a more challenging high school, she went from getting straight As in math to “barely keeping up”: “After an assessment, the center’s director called me in and told me that Najya knew very little algebra and had huge gaps in many of the building blocks of math that she should have learned in elementary school, like mastery of long division and fractions.” This was after Najya had gotten As in a previous algebra class and been on her middle school’s honor roll. For elementary, Hannah-Jones and her husband had deliberately enrolled their daughter in one of New York City’s worst public schools, which Hannah-Jones calls “a poor Black one.” In 2016, Hannah-Jones’ daughter was literally on the cover of NYT Magazine to flaunt her mother’s decision. “In the outside world, my choice had earned me valor,” Hannah-Jones writes in her latest essay for NYT Magazine. But it earned her daughter unnecessary suffering and academic delays. As early as first grade, Hannah-Jones writes, her daughter endured unsupervised, violent lunch periods: “Children were running wild, chasing, hitting and pushing each other while the teacher’s aides and cafeteria workers stood by looking bored.” The staff ignored the chaos. The same continued in Najya Hannah-Jones’ middle school, with teachers assigning no homework, violence regularly taking over instruction time, and “fights in the hallway.” Federal statistics show the public schools with the most black students also have the highest percentages of black teachers and staff. The likelihood that many of the staff allowing children to attack each other during lunch were black is high, especially since state racial bean-counting shows that more than half of Najya’s elementary staff are black. Yet Hannah-Jones blames the staff’s laziness and cowardice not on bad leadership, bad training, bad character, bad parenting, or any other proxy for personal responsibility, but on the only culprit she apparently believes in — racism. To the extent racism was at play, the most likely form of it is the racism Hannah-Jones has become a well-known name promoting. That would be false accusations of racism any time someone who isn’t white, male, or Christian faces accountability. Yes, people are so scared of these false accusations — which have ruined many people’s lives — they will do anything to avoid them, including failing to reprimand unruly children and giving poor students bad grades. Further, part of the reason teachers in majority non-white schools are often low-quality is that leftist cries of “racism” have gutted academics at every level that leads to a teaching job, from K-12 to college and teacher certification. It was to “diversify teaching ranks” that New York eliminated its already low-quality teacher certification test in 2017. It’s because corruptly elevated people like Hannah-Jones blame “racism” for non-white kids’ worse outcomes instead of demanding personal responsibility that standards in schools are low enough to allow for this: [A] few days before school let out for winter break, I received a folder in Najya’s backpack with the math assignments I had been requesting since our conference. Once I tucked her into bed, I sat at my dining room table and scanned one page, then another and another. None of them were graded. I started checking Najya’s work and discovered most of her answers were wrong. Najya believed herself to be good at math — it was her favorite subject. But now I understood she thought she was correctly solving all her problems because her teacher was not checking her work. Similarly, Najya’s writing assignments were rife with uncorrected punctuation, capitalization and grammar errors. Instead of recognizing she’s a top contributor to this problem, Hannah-Jones complains about the outcomes she’s spent her professional life earning gobs of money and prestigious awards creating. Indeed, the very tests that Hannah-Jones also demonizes as — what else? — instruments of white supremacy are essentially the only reason she finally gets her daughter tutoring to overcome her school-induced deficiencies. To the extent that racism is to blame for Hannah-Jones and her husband’s mismanagement of their daughter’s childhood, there’s a good case to be made it’s mostly their own. That’s because refusing to hold people of some skin colors accountable to the same standards everyone else must meet, solely on the basis of their skin color, is classic bigotry. This is how the Marxist ideology dressed as “diversity, equity, and inclusion” works: when the “oppressor group” — like men or whites — face the obvious consequences of their actions, they deserved it. When the “victim group” — like black people or women — face the obvious consequences of their actions, it’s someone else’s fault. This is the racist heuristic that the Hannah-Joneses applied to their education decisions for their daughter, and it’s responsible for their daughter’s suffering. This is true not just for their daughter, but also for the children Hannah-Jones claims she damaged her daughter to help. That’s because what all those rioting first graders needed and deserved was discipline, which they’d get more of if most of their parents were married like responsible people. But DEI doctrine labels disciplining non-white kids “racist.” Therefore, black and brown kids are spared rebuke, which is a loving refusal to allow them to destroy their lives through vice. While blaming fake racism, the real racism of DEI actually harms those it claims to serve. Just like Hannah-Jones and her husband. “A NYT reporter in a high-poverty school f-ing changes the school … I can go to that school and say there is a problem and it gets fixed immediately” – Nikole Hannah-Jones pic.twitter.com/Dk7wuIsPEK— Marc Porter Magee 🎓 (@marcportermagee) September 21, 2026 It’s the delivery of painful but accurate information about reality through negative test results that gives Najya the truth she needs to advocate for herself to, incredibly, her very own parents. It’s repeatedly low test results that finally result in her parents giving Najya tutoring and a better school. Without them, her daughter might still believe she’s a top student due to her corruptly awarded As and honor roll status. Incredibly, Hannah-Jones blames for this whole debacle the very instruments that rescued her child in the end: testing and school choice. This story is why the DEI Marxism that Hannah-Jones has profited from her entire life is so evil. It’s because it lies to people about reality. It tells them that they have no agency, no responsibility for their own lives if they are born into a certain ethnicity. Just as it almost derailed Najya’s acquisition of basic, elementary-school-level knowledge for life, DEI’s erasure of individual accountability destroys human lives and ultimately civilization itself. Cultural Marxism insulates its targets from the constructive criticism that every human being needs daily to improve who we are and, consequently, the neighborhoods and countries to which we belong. Accurate feedback, which includes negative feedback when warranted, pushes people towards the highest excellence we personally can achieve. Wise men love rebuke, the Bible says, exactly for this reason. That’s why it would have been far kinder to give Najya Bs and Cs earlier, and even hold her back a grade if necessary, rather than putting her on the honor roll when she didn’t deserve it. If Hannah-Jones had gotten some constructive criticism to heart decades ago, when everyone was obviously biting their tongues because she’s female and half-black, imagine not only how much suffering it would have saved her daughter but also many other kids. Instead of winning awards for telling big lies, she actually could have helped someone. Instead, because she can’t accept she is ultimately responsible for her actions, the odds are that Hannah-Jones will keep damaging millions more people than even her daughter’s violent former classmates do. Joy Pullmann is executive editor of The Federalist and the writer and host of The Federalist's lawfare podcast series, "Overruled." Her latest book with Regnery is "False Flag: Why Queer Politics Mean the End of America." A happy wife and the mother of six children, her ebooks include the NEW "300 Classic Books for Ages 9 to Adult," and the bestselling "Classic Books For Young Children." An 20-year education and politics reporter, Joy has testified before nearly two dozen legislatures on education policy and appeared on major media including Tucker Carlson, CNN, Fox News, OANN, NewsMax, Ben Shapiro, and Dennis Prager. Joy is a grateful graduate of the Hillsdale College honors and journalism programs who identifies as native American and gender natural. Joy is also the cofounder of a high-performing Christian classical school and the author and coauthor of classical curricula. Her traditionally published books also include "The Education Invasion: How Common Core Fights Parents for Control of American Kids," from Encounter Books. 1619 Projectbigotrycancel culturecultural MarxismDEIeducationk-12Media CriticismNew York Times MagazineNikole Hannah-Jonespublic schoolsRaceracismschool disciplinetestingtestsWokeismYT Magazine