Tabitha here: I read Nikole Hannah-Jones’ article in the New York Times titled “In Fighting For Every Black Child, Did I Betray My Own?” with a familiar feeling in my body. It was a profound mix of heaviness, exhaustion, sadness and resignation. As a Black mother to two Black multiracial children, as a justice-minded mama, as an organizer, as an antiracist parenting educator, I often experience this combination of feelings in the midst of raising my children in today’s world while trying to center values of justice and equity. Hannah-Jones’ article focused on a decision she and her partner made a decade ago to send her Black daughter to an under-resourced, predominantly Black school and the impact it has had on her child’s education over the years. It’s a long read but please, if you read nothing else this week, read this article. I applaud Hannah-Jones for the bravery it took to release all of this from within her, with full knowledge that the anti-DEI, segregation voices are poised to weaponize this against us all.
Adam here: I remember Hannah-Jones’ original article from 2016. I was working in a variety of New York City schools, from very low-resourced schools to highly resourced private schools, and most often, the distinction between schools was drastic and obvious. And sometimes these schools were blocks away from each other. I even helped launch a local community school, part of the NYC Department of Education small school movement, that faced (and still faces) so many of the challenges listed in the article. However, the vibe, the joy and the sense of community in that school was different, something that was rarely replicated in the higher-resourced schools. My work and my colleagues’ work were both informed by and reflective of Hannah-Jones’ article. It was also around that time that Tabitha and I were enrolling our child in school for the first time, and this line from the article really sticks with me: “But I was no longer a mere observer of this system wreaking havoc on other people’s children. Now I was experiencing it with my own.”
As with everything that hits popular consciousness, there is so much commentary about Hannah-Jones’ choices, her daughter’s experience and everything in between. Amidst it all, we want to gently tease out a few things for us parents to consider. Before we share these, we want to first say:
We don’t present any conclusions or judgements.
We don’t claim to agree or disagree with the author’s choices.
And we don’t come to you with answers for any of this business of raising children.
If we take nothing else away from Hannah-Jones article, please take this:
Black and Brown parents face impossible choices. We have to hold the system accountable for this and try not to turn on each other.
But we do want us to ponder 3 main things:
1) Racism is systemic. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t address how it shows up on individual, institutional and interpersonal levels.
Adam here: Hannah-Jones’ article resonated deeply. As parents and educators, we try to fight racism on multiple levels. Hannah-Jones tried to combat it on an individual and institutional level within a system that remains incredibly racist. Even though one family or one school may seek to do better, they exist within a system that deprioritizes our Black and Brown children and, in many cases, causes them real harm. This doesn’t mean that, as parents, we shouldn’t still try to tackle inequities on multiple levels. It means that unfortunately, it takes relentless work that sometimes seems discouraging.
Tabitha here: Especially if you live in a Black or Brown body, combatting racism can wear on us in significant ways. It can lead to stress and anxiety which have real-life consequences on our health and well-being. We all exist within racist societies. Some societies hide it more than others but it is still the air we breathe, the ocean we swim in. So even when us parents try to do better for our kids and try to raise them antiracist, we’re doing so amidst major opposition and a vast majority of white people who are still looking at us wide-eyed and in disbelief when we say that racism is in everything around us. They still think we’re being “too much” even as people like Hannah-Jones, someone with privilege and positionality within her Blackness, illustrates how devastatingly difficult it is to try to solve racism within the realms of the power we hold. Organizing across class is absolutely a must if we are to begin to address these inequities.
As Hannah-Jones writes, “I knew the consequences of this educational neglect would follow them throughout their lives, as the failures here would be passed on to the next grade and the next. And then our society would blame their academic limitations on the dysfunctional culture and poor choices of their marginalized families, because blaming poor families is more convenient than calling for the dismantling of segregation.”
2) Parenting is a researched experiment. Raising justice-minded children is a researched experiment.
Tabitha here: When I started doing antiracist parenting work more than a decade ago, I was basing my work on pathways that emerged from both my personal experience and our community of parents. As time went on, I yearned to know what the research told us about raising justice-minded children. I earned a spot in an inaugural Masters in Education for Equity & Social Justice program and learned about previous studies involving children and teaching anti-racism. I eventually did a study on the 6 Building Blocks of Antiracist Parenting (that Adam and I developed) that led to an article published in the Journal of Progressive Human Services.
I studied the research.
I did the research.
And I still think that none of us are experts on how to raise our kids.
Each kid is a brand new prototype of themselves. They’re 1 of 1. And each parent is trying to figure out the best way to raise this new human with new stages every other day while we ourselves experience life in new ways.
In our workshops, we encourage anybody raising kids to not just teach age-appropriate lessons, but also kid-appropriate lessons. We each know our kid best, even if we’re not experts.
Add to that, many of us are trying to infuse lessons on justice and equity and kindness because we know we have to raise a generation of folks that both carry on the legacy of our ancestors while not repeating the harm done in previous years. We can’t keep repeating to folks why the ‘n’ word is not okay for white people to say. We can’t keep fighting the maternal health crisis forever. We have to raise kids who do better.
But this is all an experiment. We are trying. And that shouldn’t take the heaviness of the responsibility off our middle-aged (aching) shoulders. The reality is that, with every experiment, sometimes you get it right, sometimes you don’t and most times, you fall somewhere in the middle. Addressing societal inequities requires community interventions, and is also made more difficult by the fact that we need to make individual choices. Those of us with societal privilege often have more leeway with our choices. Around here, we give each other grace on the journey because none of us are getting it perfectly right and few are getting it all wrong.
3) White parents, and Black and Brown parents should read this article differently.
Adam here: The discourse online about this article has been largely split but one thing remains abundantly clear. White parents should not weaponize this article to stop doing the work they need to urgently do to desegregate schools and make all schools places of safety, learning and equitable opportunity for kids of all racial backgrounds.
White people created racism. It’s on white people to fix it.
Use your power, privilege and positionality to advocate for all kids, not just your kids. Support the PTA with resources if you have it, time and commitment. Also recognize when PTAs at neighboring schools are under-resourced because of racism, and use your resources and privilege to build coalitions that help lift up all schools. Be a part of your community in humble and meaningful ways. Go to school board meetings. Use that white privilege for some good. And most importantly, whether your kid attends a multiracial school or a PWI (predominantly white institution), do the work of antiracist parenting at home so your child does not perpetuate harm in the classroom and on the playground, making it hard for Black and Brown kids to feel safe while learning. Do the work needed so Black and Brown parents don’t have to make the impossible choices that Hannah-Jones had to make for her daughter.
To the many Black and Brown parents who may read Hannah-Jones’ article and feel that cocktail of emotions I described, we hear you. We see you.
The grim reality is that no matter where Black and Brown kids attend school in the United States, they will face inequity and racism. If they exist in predominantly white spaces, they may struggle with self-identity, awareness and the debating of the power of their own voice because of the lack of mirrors. They may face outright racism within halls meant for learning, even if they receive a different level of education. Because of systemic racism, if they attend predominantly Black schools, they may face a lack of resources, systemic underfunding of their education and other disparities that actually have nothing to do with Blackness and everything to do with racism, even as they may benefit from a level of cultural competence that will serve them well their entire lives. Hannah-Jones’ article struggles with this in a very raw, open way: “Across the country, I’d lectured about how educational inequality is systemic, but that this fact did not absolve each of us of our individual choices. And in the end, I could not even sustain the cause within my own family.”
As with so much of parenting, there are many opinions but few right answers.
As with so much of parenting, you’ll do the best you can with what you’re given for your kiddo.
As we said, we don’t have a conclusion for this article. We don’t have advice. Our hope is that folks read Hannah-Jones’ article and not get despondent. Don’t get discouraged. It’s grim out there for our little ones and there is no one educational solution that’ll benefit all Black children. Black ancestors fought to desegregate schools but they didn’t have it easy, either. We also hope that white parents read the article and pause to consider how the ills of racism affect everyone, all generations, all ages. And we hope a part of reading this article includes deep reflection that turns into action.
If you’re receiving our article, you’re a part of this tiny slice of the internet where parents are striving to be anti-racist for our little ones. We’re attempting to combat racism at the individual, interpersonal, systemic and institutional level for the world we want to build with our kids. We’re trying to raise antiracist children and that goal binds us together. This huge experiment called parenting invites us to fight for our kids with all we got and do better when we fall short. And we’re doing that together, one day at a time.
That’s all we got today. Stay safe and be on the right side of history, right?
Tabitha and Adam