Learning in a World We Didn’t Make: James Peterson on Nikole Hannah-Jones’s School Experience

By Dr. James Peterson

Nikole Hannah-Jones’s recent New York Times Magazine essay about the life-altering decisions Black parents make in educating our children is, for me, even more powerful than The 1619 Project. The 2019 landmark long-form journalism project was a definitive historical intervention, centering the experiences of enslaved Africans and their descendants in the story America tells about itself. As someone descended from people enslaved in this country, that intervention is deeply personal to me.

Several years ago, my daughter worked with a historian at the African American Museum in Philadelphia to conduct a deep dive into our genealogy. During Kwanzaa, she gave our family an audiovisual presentation tracing generation after generation of our ancestry. I remember sitting there, watching my daughter teach our family about itself, and thinking about the education that had prepared her to conduct that research, synthesize it and stand before us as our teacher. But as glorious as that day was, I also know the more painful stories of my daughter’s educational journey. I know my son’s stories, too.

Not all of those stories belong to me. My children are adults now—college graduates pursuing professional degrees and careers—and they own their experiences. But there are a few stories they have told themselves that illuminate what Hannah-Jones’s essay asks us to confront. When my son was in first grade at an elementary school in Delaware County, his teacher taught a lesson about American slavery. At recess afterward, some of his white classmates called him “a slave.” Imagine being six years old and discovering that history can chase you during recess on the playground.

It was one of those moments Black parents know too well: the moment when you have to decide how much of America’s racial reality your child is old enough to understand. You want to protect their innocence. You also know that ignorance will not protect them. A few years later, after a job took our family to central Pennsylvania, my daughter found herself the only Black girl in her entire grade—not her classroom, her grade. One day at recess, she wanted to jump rope with some white girls. One of them told my light-skinned Black daughter that they did not jump rope with “brown girls.”

Most can dismiss such encounters as children being children. Black parents do not have that luxury. We have to see the incident through the eyes of the child experiencing it. We have to understand that school is teaching our children even when the teacher isn’t teaching. The cafeteria teaches. The playground teaches. The tracking system teaches. The gifted program teaches. The books that are assigned—and those that never appear on a syllabus—teach.

Racism teaches.

That is why Hannah-Jones’s essay, “In Fighting for Every Black Child, Did I Betray My Own?,” is so important. Ten years after writing about her family’s decision to enroll their daughter, Najya, in a high-poverty, predominantly Black Brooklyn public school, Hannah-Jones returns to that decision with an extraordinary degree of vulnerability. The most poignant voice in the new essay is not Hannah-Jones’s. It is her daughter’s.

Najya is now old enough to wrestle with some of the decisions her parents made for her. She can measure the difference between the education her parents hoped she was receiving and the education she actually received. And she can, and did, ask the devastating question at the center of this entire debate: “Because other kids are disadvantaged, you didn’t want to put me in a great school?” There is no easy answer to that question. And that is precisely the point.

Much of the reaction to Hannah-Jones’s essay has tried to force her experience into familiar ideological boxes. Public schools or private schools. Integration or Black educational spaces. Academic rigor or cultural affirmation. Individual advancement or collective responsibility. But perhaps the most important thing we can do with Hannah-Jones’s extraordinary act of public self-reflection is resist the temptation to judge one mother’s decision and instead confront the society that made the decision so impossible in the first place.

Because Black parents know that the actual decision matrix is much more complicated. What happens when the school offering greater academic opportunity also exposes your child to racial isolation? What happens when the school where your Black child feels affirmed cannot consistently provide the academic preparation your child needs? Sometimes the “better” school requires moving into a neighborhood you cannot afford. Sometimes the private school costs more than your mortgage. 

When the neighborhood school is under-resourced, leaving it means taking your resources, your advocacy, and your child with you – and that’s ok. But too often every available choice requires your child to surrender something of themselves on the altar of their own education. That is the lose-lose proposition embedded in too many Black educational journeys.

W.E.B. Du Bois gave us the language of double consciousness to describe the peculiar experience of seeing oneself through one’s own eyes while simultaneously being forced to negotiate the gaze of a society structured by race. Black parents encounter a version of that double consciousness every time we make educational decisions for our children. We are asking two questions at once: Where can my child get the best education? And: What will that education do to my child? Those are not the same question.

But I believe there is another institution missing from much of the debate Hannah-Jones has generated. The school in the home. Anyone who has participated in a privilege-walk exercise knows the questions: Were there books in your home growing up? More than 100? Hundreds? A thousand? Those questions matter because education has never been confined to a school building. Our children grew up in a house with thousands of books. But the number of books is only part of the story. The real question is what kind of intellectual culture exists inside a home.

The dinner table should be set for discourse. Black parents have to teach history, introduce authors, visit museums, and encourage questions. When the school omits something the family considers essential, the family must teach it.

My wife and I are educators, and that gave our children an enormous privilege. We understood early that we could not outsource their entire education to whatever institution happened to enroll them. So we became teachers at home. If we went to Hilton Head, Spain, Canada, Curaçao or somewhere else, my wife and I searched for what I came to think of as the Black spot: the museum, neighborhood, historical site, restaurant, cultural tradition or piece of diasporic history that could turn the destination into a classroom. We wanted them to understand that Black history did not begin with American slavery and that Black life did not stop at the borders of the United States. We were trying to construct an education large enough to contain them.

That matters because there will always be things no school can give a child. But it also exposes another inequality. Not every parent has the time, money, education, schedule or access to build that kind of supplementary school at home. We did. That is a privilege, too. And acknowledging it should complicate rather than end the conversation.

When I look back on our children’s educational journeys, I realize that we were conducting our own longitudinal experiment. We were homeschooled. We tried Montessori education. Quaker schools. Catholic schools. Private schools. Public schools. HBCUs. Predominantly white institutions. Local institutions and distant ones. Eventually, even Ivy League education entered the journey. There was no single institutional model that solved for anything in any lasting way.

One of the best educational decisions we made was homeschooling our children when they were young. We could not do it for very long, but those years gave us the ability to shape their relationship to learning before handing substantial portions of that responsibility to institutions. Today, both of our children are college graduates. Both graduated magna cum laude. Those achievements make us extraordinarily proud. But diplomas do not erase scars. 

My son can earn degrees and still have been the first-grader whom white classmates called a slave. My daughter can become an accomplished scholar and professional and still have been the third-grader told that white girls didn’t jump rope with brown-skinned girls. Success does not retroactively make those experiences acceptable. That is another reason I resist the rush to turn Hannah-Jones’s story into a referendum on whether she was “right” or “wrong.”

The far more interesting question is: Why are Black parents repeatedly required to solve contradictions they did not create? Hannah-Jones knew what would happen when she published this essay. Her critics would seize upon her family’s most intimate decisions as evidence against her politics and scholarship. Some would treat her daughter’s difficulties as a kind of ideological gotcha. Others would insist that the experience proves Black schools inevitably fail Black children. Still others would argue that her mistake was believing an individual family could intervene meaningfully in a system shaped by generations of segregation and inequality.

That reaction misses what makes the essay valuable. Hannah-Jones is doing something increasingly rare in American public life: revisiting a deeply held conviction after reality has complicated it. She is letting her daughter speak back to the choices her parents made. She is admitting uncertainty. That is not hypocrisy. It is a reflection. And more importantly, it is generative.

Her family’s experience has provoked a national conversation precisely because millions of families recognize some version of the dilemma even when the particulars are different. Black parents are asked to navigate educational systems in which academic quality, racial belonging, cultural competency, safety, resources, opportunity and proximity are too often distributed among different institutions instead of concentrated within the same one. That is the real scandal.

There is one more dimension to this conversation that deserves attention: class. The reductive language of “school choice” can make educational decision-making sound like consumer preference. Choose the school the way you choose a grocery store, a cellphone plan or a car. But choices are only meaningful when people possess comparable options. 

Some parents can move to gain access to a particular public school. Others cannot. Some can pay private-school tuition. Others cannot. Some know administrators, trustees, donors or elected officials. Others do not. Some can hire tutors when their child’s school leaves gaps. Others cannot. Some can take time away from work to sit in a principal’s office and demand action. Others risk losing wages—or losing their jobs—if they do. So when affluent and powerful people talk about educational opportunity, we should always ask what their own decision matrix looks like.

Do they confront the same risks? Or do they possess enough wealth, influence and social capital to buy their way out of educational failure? Until the people designing educational systems understand—or are held accountable to—the choices ordinary families actually face, American education will continue reproducing inequality while describing the results as individual decisions.

I don’t read Nikole Hannah-Jones’s essay as a confession of failure. I read it as documentation. It documents the impossible calculus that Black parents are too often forced to perform. It asks all of us how much racial isolation is too much; how much academic compromise is acceptable; how far should we uproot our families and/or how much can we afford? This commitment to the community almost always places an unfair burden on our children.

For some of us, distinguishing between protecting our children and participating in a system that protects some children precisely because it has abandoned others is an impossible charge. There is no formula that solves those equations. What our own family’s educational journey taught me is that parents must consider every resource available to them.

There is the school. And there is the school in the home. There are teachers. And there are parents, grandparents, aunties, uncles, librarians, coaches, pastors, neighbors and mentors. There is a curriculum. And there are museums, books, dinner-table arguments, family histories, road trips, neighborhoods, music, food, art and travel. Black families have always understood this, in part because our history taught us never to place the entirety of our children’s intellectual development in the hands of institutions that have not always valued their humanity. But families cannot compensate indefinitely for systemic failure.

The answer cannot be that parents with resources construct elaborate educational safety nets while children whose parents lack those resources are simply allowed to fall. That is why Hannah-Jones’s story matters.