The founder of the 1619 Project sent shockwaves through the internet over the weekend when she acknowledged in a new essay for The New York Time Magazine that she failed her daughter by sending her to poor New York City public schools as part of a virtue signaling experiment gone wrong.
The Essay
In the piece, Nikole Hannah-Jones wrote that she is “overcome with regret” over her decision to send her now 16-year-old daughter to predominantly black, high-poverty public schools in Brooklyn after the teen blamed her for not receiving the education she desired.
“Najya deserved better,” Hannah Jones admitted. “This girl, my only child, looked to me to protect her, to give her what she needed to thrive. And I had not chosen her.”
This was meant to be a follow-up piece to a buzzy 2016 essay Hannah-Jones wrote for The Times titled “Choosing a School for My Daughter in a Segregated City,” in which she explained why she would be sending her daughter to troubled schools with terrible test scores despite being able to afford better.
This is a fact her daughter is now apparently using against her. “So you had money to send me to one of the best schools, and you chose not to?” Hannah-Jones recalled her asking. “Because other kids are disadvantaged, you didn’t want to put me in a great school?”
In the new essay, Hannah-Jones wrote about the academic problems that became impossible to ignore as her daughter got older. In fourth grade, for example, she discovered Najya’s teachers hadn’t actually been grading her schoolwork. That meant her belief that she was good at math, her favorite subject, was actually just a facade.
“Now I understood she thought she was correctly solving all her problems because her teacher was not checking her work,” Hannah-Jones wrote. “Similarly, Najya’s writing assignments were rife with uncorrected punctuation, capitalization and grammar errors.”
Things didn’t get any better in middle school, where Hannah-Jones wrote that Najya earned good grades and took honors courses but weren’t actually being challenged by teachers.
When it came time to select a high school, she decided to let her daughter research and decide which public schools she wanted to consider. A few days later, Najya came back with a list of options that were “heavily white and screened their students” (i.e. “the type of public schools [she] had spent [her] career arguing against”).
After getting into her top choice, Hannah-Jones wrote that her daughter experienced “cultural struggles” and academic ones too. She needed tutoring and specialized help from teachers to “catch up” to her peers and “find her footing.”
Possible Motive
On Monday’s show, Megyn said Hannah-Jones’ “humiliating” mea culpa is “the epitome of wokeism [and] virtue signaling.” As she has discussed countless times before, “the whole point of wokeism,” Megyn explained, “is to virtue signal so other people think you are better than you are and than they are.”
“That is wokeism in a line… [and] that’s what she did. Only here, the person she was hurting wasn’t some terrible white conservative, it was her own child,” Megyn continued. “And now we’re supposed to give her points for breaking the update in her column, like, ‘Oh yay, good for her for owning it’… I’m sorry, but absolutely wrong. She had to because the daughter insisted on getting out of these schools… All she should be feeling is shame and embarrassment.”
Hannah-Jones’ daughter is now entering her junior year of high school, and Megyn had a theory about the timing of the essay. “I don’t believe in any of the self-reflective bullshit that she is putting in this piece. I’ll tell you what Nikole Hannah-Jones is actually thinking about. This is my opinion. The kid is 16 now… and when you are a 16-year-old junior, you are starting to think about college,” she posited.
“I will venture a guess she is not at the top of her class at this new school and I’ll bet she’s probably not doing so well on the practice SATs, given the fact that she wasn’t learning math for her entire education, thanks to her mother,” Megyn continued. “I guarantee you Nikole Hannah-Jones is trying to very publicly grease the path into whatever vaunted university she wants her daughter to go to… and just telegraph to everybody these terrible scores and these terrible grades are her mother’s fault, not hers.”
In Megyn’s view, such a tactic is not beneath the writer. “I’m telling you, Nikole Hannah-Jones is a bad person. She is a total liar. Read her piece about Charlie Kirk. It’s a disgusting, filthy, defamatory smear. She smeared him in his grave. She didn’t give a shit what that would do to his legacy, his children, his wife. She enjoys heaping pain on white people who are conservative,” she argued.
“So I don’t believe for one second she has had a come to Jesus moment,” Megyn concluded. “She is greasing the wheels for her now uneducated daughter to sail right into whatever university of choice she and the husband went to. That is what she’s doing.”
You can check out Megyn’s full analysis by tuning in to episode 1,402 on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you like to listen. And don’t forget that you can catch The Megyn Kelly Show live on SiriusXM’s The Megyn Kelly Channel (channel 111) weekdays from 12pm to 2pm ET.