One really important problem with Nikole Hannah-Jones's approach to and values about education are right there in her headline:
She is "fighting for every black child." But there are no white parents who make their education decisions within a framework of "fighting for every white child" or Asian parents who are "fighting for every Asian child."
Rather, members of these groups understand their kids as competing with other white or Asian children for scarce opportunities for social advancement. Whites and Asians are competing for those scarce opportunities with whites and Asians from all over the country, so no matter how well their kid may be performing relative to the local cohort, they always need to push harder, move faster and do and be more.
In a setting where everyone is white and there are no race politics implicated, white people have absolutely no compunction about pulling the highest performers out of a class and putting them on a gifted track, and pulling the low performers out of the class and putting them on a special education track, and getting the discipline problems out of the classroom entirely. And then the special ed parents advocate for special ed, and the gifted parents advocate for gifted funding, because everybody is advocating for the resources they think their kid needs to compete against all the other kids.
Hannah-Jones believes whites and Asians favor academic tracking and sorting through standardized testing and selective admissions primarily as a ploy to separate their groups from blacks and Latinos, because she perceives all of politics as being about groups that practice internal solidarity lobbying for collective benefits over other groups.
She despises people who are not like her and limits her contact with them to the point that she does not understand them and has no theory of mind for them. She simply assumes they are a mirror of herself and therefore she assumes white people hate black people the way she hates white people. She thinks all the sorting of children whites and Asians do is actually a shell game that is just meant to keep people like her out. But the truth is, people like her aren't even part of the consideration, because kids like hers are not part of the competition.
This has historically worked out fine for children like her daughter, because affirmative action has historically meant kids like hers have seats reserved and don't have to outperform whites and Asians for a spot. As long as her kid was doing well among her cohort, she could go to any college she wanted. That is now less true since SFFA.
Najya perceived that the schools that weren't like hers were better than her school, and Nikole tries to blame that disparity on resources or on privilege or on systemic racism. But the truth is, it's about values and it's about the perception of school as a competition that brings about better outcomes. Nikole Hannah-Jones has a values system built around resentment and complacency.
She doesn't think in terms of trying to beat an Asian kid on a math test, instead she dismisses the test as an inaccurate instrument steeped in racist assumptions. But then it turned out her kid really couldn't do math.
And, like her daughter, she didn't learn anything.
The daughter is correct. I called this at the time.