Sacrificial Logic

You’re wrong about Nikole Hannah-Jones

James Shanahan
September 25, 2026

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Did you even read the article? Did we read the same article?

I said in Monday’s links that I thought the best thing to do was to sit with the Nikole Hannah-Jones article. It wasn’t a topic or tone that demanded a quick take. Of course, the takes did come quick and with the full range of possible tones. It’s also clear that a lot of people didn’t read the article, didn’t read the original 2016 piece, and are only adding their commentary to advance whatever priors they have. In other cases, people are reading things into the article that aren’t necessarily there. We don’t know much about Hannah-Jones personal level of involvement. We only know what she chose to tell us about in writing and from the few times she’s talked about her experiences over the last ten years. That hasn’t stopped people from inventing all kinds of notions about how she was a neglectful parent but also a helicopter parent full of hubris but also a strident ideologue who harmed her daughter on purpose. People bat around school funding numbers and per-pupil expenditures and make a big deal out of Nikole Hannah-Jones being biracial and it’s all a bit nuts to me because I feel like the discourse is trying really hard to be about anything other than the actual content of the essay. Instead of adding my own opinion, I wanted to take todays post and focus in on one particular area of commentary: the idea that Nikole Hannah-Jones sacrificed her daughter. It’s a misreading of the article and getting it wrong means you probably misunderstand the whole thing.

Who or what was sacrificed?

One of the main things I’ve seen in discussions of NHJ’s article is the assertion that she sacrificed her daughter. The idea these criticisms put forward is that Najya has been permanently harmed by Hannah-Jones choice to send her to an underperforming segregated school. I don’t think that’s really true, nor do I think that is the sacrifice being talked about. When the discourse brings up sacrifice, they talk about the academic setbacks Najya faced and how she initially struggled to succeed in her highly selective high school. The sacrifice, for most critics, appears to be access to a top-notch education. I don’t think that’s the sacrifice Nikole Hannah-Jones is talking about. I don’t think she sees an academic sacrifice at all. We need to understand that point to better understand what the article is about.

If we look at the two times that the word sacrifice was actually used in the article, in both cases the context for the sacrifice is the civil rights movement and the battle to racially integrate schools. The first invocation of sacrifice comes after a phone call from Najya last June. Nikole Hannah-Jones, having just looked back over “pages and pages” of emails with principals and teachers, is feeling emotionally distraught. Najya picks up on it and Nikole offers an apology twice.

On the phone, I knew if I tried to brush off Najya’s question, she would simply keep asking. She’s like me in that way: relentless. So I told her that I’d been reading through the old emails and that I was feeling really sad that she had gone through so much and that I had not listened more to her. “I feel like you got cheated,” I said. “And I’m sorry for that.”

For a moment, Najya said nothing. Then she told me, “Sometimes I wish instead of always thinking about other kids, you would have thought about me. I never really got the education I wanted.”

This is when I would have normally responded with something like “I did think of you, and I knew you’d be OK” or “You are doing just fine at your selective high school.” But not this time. I just said, simply, “I acknowledge to you that I didn’t do the best for you, and I am so sorry.”

Najya’s response, though, is that she’s actually okay with Nikole Hannah-Jones decision about where to send her to school.

The line grew silent again. Then, “I am kind of happy that you are seeing this.”

She then said she was glad she had not spent her early years in a white environment as many of the Black students at her high school had, because she’d developed a strong sense of her identity and had the confidence to speak up against the casual racism they sometimes experienced. Najya said that spending the last two years in classrooms full of privileged kids had taught her that these students weren’t smarter or even necessarily better behaved than the kids she had gone to school with before; they just had more.

All of this is preamble to the first use of the word sacrifice and it is really important context that we shouldn’t ignore. Najya is now woke, in the original meaning of that term. She is woke because she is now experiencing life in a privileged space where black people are a small minority and compares that space with what she had in her predominantly black elementary and middle schools. She is now aware of the struggle and sees it. Only then do we read the word sacrifice.

As I hung up the phone, my mind raced. The segregation we were battling in 2026 was supposed to have been banished by the sacrifices of Black children nearly seven decades ago, when their parents sent them to integrate their local schools to enforce the Supreme Court’s 1954 prohibition on school segregation after the government did not.

For Hannah-Jones, the sacrifice is not academic. The sacrifice is not that Najya needed math tutoring to help with long division and fractions — and she’s “doing just fine” now anyways. The sacrifice was not in sending Najya to an underperforming segregated school. The sacrifice didn’t happen in 2016 when Nikole accept the 3K slot at PS 307. The act of integration is the sacrifice; it sacrifices the familiarity, safety, and belonging of Najya’s black school for the opportunities of her selective high school.

Seen in this light, Hannah-Jones is not apologizing to her daughter for her poor quality elementary and middle schools. She is apologizing for inadequately preparing her daughter to face a whiter wealthier school climate where she will encounter racism and discrimination. And she did face racism:

Najya started ninth grade buzzing with freshman nerves, excitement and high hopes. But just two weeks later she came home distraught, asking if she could transfer to Banneker, a rigorous predominantly Black high school in Brooklyn.

She was experiencing culture shock. My daughter had never been part of a minority in a school, and now she sat in classrooms where some classmates casually tossed around racial slurs as if it were cool. In her Black schools, there was not a doubt among her peers that one could be Black and smart. But in this predominantly white and Asian school, some of her classmates now made comments that demeaned her or the other Black kids enrolled in the schools they shared the building with. Najya would call me during lunch upset because one of them had insinuated she wasn’t that intelligent or made a joke about her being “ghetto.”

I had tried to prepare Najya for this — this educational experience I knew intimately. While the majority-white schools I went to provided me the best public education my small town offered, they had often been socially isolating and rife with racial tension. Long before I started reporting on school segregation, I decided I would never want my child to experience being one of a small number of Black kids in a school. Yet this is exactly what she’d chosen for herself.

I listened to Najya pour out her distress, then told her sympathetically but firmly that she had made her decision, that life was never going to be easy and that successful people do not give up when things get hard. She’d have to stay.

The sacrifice is the one Najya chose: to pursue educational opportunity at the cost of social and cultural safety. Yet, as the later phone call illustrates, Najya’s time in elementary and middle school actually helped her better speak up on behalf of those “ghetto” students. The sacrifice is not academic.

To burnish this point, Nikole Hannah-Jones uses the word sacrifice one more time a few paragraphs after the first invocation when talking to Leona Tate, one of the three children who originally integrated schools in the South. She writes about how these children never got the education they deserved but look closely at what she says constitutes that education.

Her parents later sent her to desegregate another white elementary school. And then a white middle school, and then a white high school. Society benefited from their dismantling of Jim Crow, but Leona Tate and the other girls wore the scars of our “advancement.” They were threatened by white strangers, hit and spit upon by white classmates and emotionally abused by white teachers. They never got the education they deserved in hopes that future generations would. “It wasn’t easy for us,” Tate told me, “but we had to.”

Tate’s education was the racism and abuse by her white peers and teachers. The education she deserved wasn’t solely an academic one. Even so, Tate says she doesn’t resent her parents for their choice and that “I think it was a hard decision, a courageous decision, to put your children on the front line like that. And I probably would do the same thing. I’m glad I did what I did when I did it. Somebody had to do it.” This serves as another explanation establishing that Hannah-Jones is talking about integration and not about the quality of the education in segregated schools. Integration requires a sacrifice. She then directly compares her daughter’s sacrifice to Tate’s civil rights era integration of public schools. She also acknowledges the inability of any one child’s sacrifice to meaningfully change the system.

But like Tate’s, my daughter’s sacrifice could not transform a system that those who hold the most power refuse to change. These days, the outcry and efforts my story helped provoke 10 years ago have mostly gone silent. Black children in New York’s schools, and this nation’s, are as segregated now as they were a decade ago, two decades ago, three. And in profound ways, we’ve actually moved backward, with a federal government that no longer gives even lip service to integration but instead is weaponized against it.

The system, the structure of policy and economics and culture that create segregation in the first place, are what create the need for integration and therefore the need for a sacrifice.

Logical Conclusions

It’s just not logically coherent to see the use of sacrifice by Nikole Hannah-Jones in this essay in any other way. That’s why criticisms that argue she should have sent her child to the best possible school, or even a nearby high performing predominantly black school are missing the point. She may have had the choice to do something different for Najya but so many other parents don’t. While they may have the legal option to exercise choice, especially in New York City where the entire school system is built around choice, many parents lack the capacity to make that choice for one reason or another. The larger point, too, is that the choice shouldn’t be necessary in the first place. All children deserve schools where they both feel belonging and have access to academic rigor. The system creates the need for black parents to choose one or the other. The beef is not with the few parents who can make a choice, can let their kids sacrifice culture and affinity for opportunity, but with the system that makes them choose at all.