Writing in The New York Times, journalist and 1619 Project creator Nikole Hannah-Jones recently copped to the fact that she sent her daughter to poorly performing New York City public schools out of an ideological commitment to ending what she sees as structural or systemic racism, among other ills. She notes that she and her husband, who are both African American, attended integrated schools and benefited from the experience. Which helps to explain why her husband was at first steadfast against her plan. "As I told Faraji my plan, he slowly shook his head no. He wanted to look into parochial schools, or one of the 'good' public schools, or even private schools."
But Hannah-Jones ultimately won the argument by standing firm to her political commitments. "I understood that so much of school segregation is structural," she writes, "a result of decades of housing discrimination, of political calculations and the machinations of policy makers, of simple inertia. But I also believed that it is the choices of individual parents that uphold the system, and I was determined not to do what I'd seen so many others do when their values about integration collided with the reality of where to send their own children to school."
