I saw the Nikole Hannah-Jones article and my stomach tightened. I’d been expecting it, and I knew exactly what came next. I made the decision several years ago to send my white kids to a majority Black and brown, low-income public school a block from our apartment, and I haven’t exactly been quiet about it since. I insert myself into neighborhood school-choice chats. I talk to the 3-K and pre-K families at my kids’ school about how leaving for kindergarten harms our under-enrolled school (they all leave anyway). And for a little over a year, I’ve led the local NYC chapter of Integrated Schools, where we host forums about making this decision. So when the article came out I knew I’d be expected to say something, and that the people who doubted my decision would treat this as an “I got you” moment. The pings on my phone started almost immediately.
Of course I would have liked to hear that her daughter was grateful for her mother’s choice. That would have been a comfort. But I know myself, and I know how steady I am in this decision, so what I mostly worried about was something else. I worried that the essay would let white families off the hook. Families who had been considering this choice might take it as a reason not to try. Families who would never have considered it might take it as a justification, one that spares them any self-reflection.
I live in Fort Greene, Brooklyn. My kids are in 3-K and first grade at PS 46, a school we absolutely love. My first grader is one of five white kids in grades K-5. PS 46 mostly serves children from the Walt Whitman Houses, a NYCHA development near the Farragut Houses, the housing project across from PS 307, the school Hannah-Jones chose for her daughter. The two schools are similar, though PS 307 actually has a few more resources and extracurriculars than 46.
People think I’m crazy for sending my kids there, especially because it isn’t even our zoned school. We’re zoned for PS 20, one block away in the other direction, which has a gardening teacher, honeybees on the roof, a long list of extracurriculars, and a PTA budget of close to $1 million that pays for much of it.
Anyone who isn’t paying close attention to New York City integration would call PS 20 integrated and diverse. It’s about 40% white. So people bristle when I say I chose not to send my kids there because I didn’t want to contribute to segregation. They don’t think they’re doing that. It’s a public school, after all, and it’s diverse. But white children make up about 17% of New York City K-8 students in traditional public schools, so a school that’s 40% white has more than twice the city’s share of white students and far fewer low-income students than the city overall. A 2026 analysis by NYU’s Research Alliance for New York City Schools found that fewer than 2% of the city’s elementary and middle schools come close to reflecting the city’s racial makeup. Only about a quarter of elementary schools reflect their own district’s demographics, and the researchers note that many of those are in districts that are almost entirely one race, which isn’t integration at all.
Many of the white families at PS 20 pat themselves on the back for choosing public school at all, comparing themselves to neighbors who chose private schools or “progressive” charters. But that’s a comparison to people making an even more harmful choice, not a defense of their own. If you only measure yourself against families taking more of the pie, it’s easy to feel like the one making a sacrifice, and there will always be someone taking more. They are not comparing themselves to the families at PS 46. They haven’t even thought about them until meeting me.
I get all kinds of reactions when I tell people where my kids go to school. Puzzled faces. Which school is that? (Often asked by families who live on the block.) Oh, is it… getting better? I’ve been called a white savior, told I’m sacrificing my child on the altar of social justice, and made to defend my decision constantly. Nobody ever asks families who choose private schools to defend their decisions the same way. You live in Bed-Stuy and send your white kid to St. Ann’s? Isn’t that kind of… racist? These families are never expected to report back or prove anything. Nobody asks the parents at the well-resourced public schools how their kids are holding up. Has little Johnny internalized racial and class hierarchies yet? What about the myth of meritocracy? Is he angry that you sent him to a school that contributes to segregation and contradicts everything you say you believe? How are you going to handle that??
It never ceases to astonish me that people find it so much easier to understand wanting the best for your own child than wanting the best for all children. Even Ms. Rachel gets attacked for suggesting the latter is worth caring about.
Sadly, the comments on Hannah-Jones’s essay have been beyond cruel. NHJ made a decision for her own family that didn’t require anything of other families except to observe it, and I recognize the anger and confusion that alone provokes. People don’t like when someone makes a choice that so clearly reflects their values, because it exposes their own choices for what they are. If everyone is just trying to get the best for their kid, the status quo can stay a neutral, logical option. For white families, it isn’t. It’s a choice that upholds white supremacy.
I know I bring a certain amount of power with me to my child’s school. I like to think I can add resources the school didn’t have before, and that when families like ours enroll in schools like this one, it challenges other families with similar values to follow. But that isn’t the reason I made this choice. As a white person, I just couldn’t make a choice that so clearly feeds segregation.
NHJ frames her daughter’s experience as part of a long tradition of Black children carrying the weight of their parents’ ideals. The stakes of the choice are different when your child isn’t inheriting that lineage. White children come from a long tradition of their own: being the exception to their parents’ ideals. For generations, white parents have had every excuse under the sun for why they believe in integration but can’t send their child to that school. He’s too gifted. She’s too sensitive. They need to learn French.
Najya’s teacher assumed the “flagging competency” of low-income Black kids when assessing her. It is hard for me to believe my white child would be overlooked like that, I’ve already noticed the ways he is seen differently and he’s only in first grade. Expectations for him are sky high. If my kids grow up, decide I was wrong, and want a spot at one of the best public high schools in the city, I have no doubt they’ll glide into that world, because it IS their world.
I don’t believe I’ve had to choose between being a good parent and being a good person. My first grader runs into his school building every morning and at pick up I’m greeted by the incredibly warm community of families and staff that make up our school. The school goes out of their way, often with far too few resources, to make sure that every student feels seen and heard. PS 46 serves children across different cultures, languages, abilities, and immigration statuses, and my white kids are learning, early, that their experience isn’t the standard. It isn’t perfect. Do I wish at times that there was a music program at the school? Sure, but not enough to opt into segregation in order to get it and not enough to give up the things I love about PS 46 that cannot be captured in a test score or rating. This week I gave my 3-K’er a hundred hugs every morning at drop-off, because that’s what he needed. He deserves my hugs more than any other child, but he doesn’t deserve a “better school” than anyone else’s child. We can give our kids endless unconditional love and only proportional resources.
It’s heartbreaking to hear Hannah-Jones say she doesn’t know what her choice accomplished, because her 2016 essay is a big part of why I made my choice. It helped launch the Integrated Schools movement, and for many of us it’s a kind of gospel. It’s also embarrassing to admit that it took a Black family making this choice, more than sixty years after Brown v. Board, for me and so many others to finally pay attention.
That’s the history. Black families have always been asked to put their children on the front line. They were plaintiffs in Brown. They walked their kids through white mobs. Leona Tate, who integrated a school at six, told Hannah-Jones she doesn’t resent it and that someone had to do it. That’s an extraordinary thing to ask of a child, and it was asked of Black children for generations while the rest of us watched. And again, it is not the same decision for white families. White families, you do NOT get to use this incredibly vulnerable article to justify a choice you would have made regardless of her daughter’s reaction.
It’s time for white families to step up more, not less. Not to read her daughter’s honesty as a reason to retreat, and not to file this essay under “well, that didn’t work.” Her reflection is a reason to go further and show up in numbers, because one family can’t do it alone.
I’ll end this with NHJ’s ending in case you didn’t get this far in the article, because THIS was the takeaway: As long as we continue to rescue our own children from the failing schools where we allow other people’s children to languish simply because those children have been born Black and poor in a nation of racism and riches, there is no absolution here. Not for me. Not for you. Not for any of us.
+ And one more thing, because it’s worth saying here. A lot of the integration conversation, beyond it being morally right, is about reassuring white parents that their kids will perform just as well in integrated schools. Your kid will be fine. I’ll admit I found that comforting at first. Now I find it problematic. Many people hear it as a promise that their child will get the same test scores and the same success as society defines it. But that is still a very narrow definition of success, one dictated by white supremacy. If we’re choosing integrating schools only because we’ve been told our kids will still get into Stuyvesant or an Ivy League school or make more money than other people, what exactly are we doing?
I’m not sending my son to PS 46 while secretly hoping he ends up at Columbia or Cambridge. I’m sending him there because it’s fair, and because the experiences he’ll have there, about what true equity does and does not look like, can’t be taught in so-called progressive spaces that only claim to be inclusive. Sure, it’s an ideological decision. But show me a parenting decision that isn’t. I happen to think it matters for my children to see me live out my values, and choosing a school is a huge opportunity to do that. I don’t know what success will look like for him, but part of making different choices is changing how you think about success entirely.
A lot of people question my decision because they wonder about his trajectory. I want to be clear: I’m not comparing my children’s trajectory to Hannah-Jones’s daughter’s. The stakes are completely different and this is a call to action for white families. But since people keep bringing up trajectory, let’s talk about where it actually leads. As Hannah-Jones reports, only three Black students were admitted to Stuyvesant this year, yet most New York parents would still want their kids there. I myself attended Stuyvesant, and I got in because of tutoring my parents paid for and who knows what else, not because of anything I learned in elementary school. I also don’t think I got a great education there. Everyone cheated constantly, and I don’t remember any kind of love for learning happening. If I don’t want PS 20 for my son, why would I want that? Every year the SHSAT produces the same racially disparate results, and every year we keep treating it as the ultimate marker of success in New York City high schools. And segregation doesn’t stop at graduation.
Honestly, my belief in higher education has been shaken over the last few years. Why would I want my son at Columbia, where students are in theory taught to stand up against genocide and occupation, then arrested when they do? Or at Cambridge, where Jason Arday, its youngest-ever Black professor, was pushed out and died under a barrage of public scrutiny and a racist playbook for discrediting Black academics?
I don’t have exact answers for what my son’s future will look like, but neither does anyone. School choice and the hoarding of resources only give you a false sense of control.
Jenny is a White mom in Brooklyn and NYC Chapter Leader, she is a social worker by training and author of the book Race Cars, a children’s book about White privilege.
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