When Nikole Hannah-Jones writes, we get to talking. For plenty of folks, that talk is one more round of critiquing a Black woman. As for me and mine, she’s given us homework. That’s what I’ve been praying about.
In summer 2016, I read Hannah-Jones’s piece in The New York Times about the toughest choice her family had ever made; it helped me make ours. Her searing accuracy and the nakedness of her account convicted me. New York City runs one of the most deeply segregated school systems in the country, and one family was never going to undo that.
For our child, we’d take nearly the opposite path: the best private schools. Black women can make opposite choices and still root for each other “from the roota to the toota,” as the elders say.
Our families are now ten years into these decisions, and once again Hannah-Jones’ latest Times article sends me back to mine. My heart breaks while my fists clench at the systemic failures she describes. Those failures reach Black families one household at a time, and too many of us have tried to “lone wolf” our way through our children’s education.
Her piece left me with the question I’ve been asking myself for a decade: who are my people? Whose people am I?
Her 2016 piece sent me looking for my people as priority one. I found them among Black mothers who had made choices like ours. Together we set out to raise thriving, Black children inside elite, mostly white institutions. Her family and mine have learned the same lesson from opposite ends: wherever Black children go to school, educating them means a fight.
Now, her piece convicts me: the babies beyond my own circle are my responsibility too.
Elite white spaces have always been hard on Black children. Black students who face racism at school are 70% more likely to report persistent sadness or hopelessness, and more than three times as likely to have attempted suicide. Every head of school in this city should know those numbers by heart.
Instead, many are taking their cues from a movement, championed by a President, that wants ours out. Many private schools that created DEI positions in the past decade are reversing course in quiet compliance.
In their efforts at self-preservation, institutions tend to lose their missions. Only together will we remind (or convince) these schools that Black students and faculty are crucial to the mission, and that the school would be awful without us. Can you even imagine?
Under every effort to educate Black children sits the pernicious assumption racism plants: that our children are inferior. That same assumption supplies the wrong answer to a question this city keeps asking: why do so few Black students test into the specialized high schools?
This fall, Deputy City Council Speaker Nantasha Williams and Councilmember Lincoln Restler are pushing to repeal the Hecht-Calandra Act, the state law passed in 1971 to block efforts to admit more Black and Puerto Rican students. Racism says they couldn’t get in. History says they were never supposed to. The law still stands.
Part of the reason that the law still stands may be that so many Black families, mine included, have opted out of the public schools, taking our share of the organizing power with us. We’re all too busy fighting racism in our separate rings. I’m asking my own councilmember, Speaker Julie Menin, to back their resolution and bring it to a vote.
Ten years ago, Hannah-Jones’ writing had me seeking community. Now, it asks what that community owes to children beyond our own. As we say in the church: the only way out is through; the only way through is together.
Experts name three of the most lifesaving supports for youth in crisis: therapy, safe and trusted adults, and safe community. The church can offer the last two and must partner with licensed professionals for the first. But a church is an institution too, just as capable of losing its mission. Dissuading the faithful from mental health care as if suffering were a lack of faith; tolerating and protecting abusers; subverting safety for institutional preservation — these are sins we must atone for and fix at the highest levels. Each one ripples far beyond the church’s walls, and so must the repair.
I pastor a 216-year-old congregation on the Upper East Side that is now predominantly Black, and togetherness is our mandate. We follow the Jesus who centered children and said, “Let the children come.”
Our youth started this work themselves with six words they’d chosen to carry it: joy, enough, breathe, belong, courage, hope. At Listening Tables, where we asked our youth what they want, they told us they need monthly sessions away from their parents, and outside of school. More than a hundred teens have asked to join us, most with no direct tie to our church. We’re scheduling the first session now, with our youth hosting, a licensed clinical social worker and me leading, and parents from several schools advising. We’re starting in our corner of the city, and we want to learn from everyone already doing this work.
When Black youth thrive, the whole city thrives. Can you even imagine?
Nikole Hannah-Jones has spent her career educating this nation about itself. God knows the price she’s paid for that. Her turning the mirror turns mine too, and, as usual, I only like some of my reflection. I’ve got work to do, and so do we. Let’s fight for all the babies like they’re ours. They are.
The Rev. Kaji Spellman Douša is the senior pastor and CEO of Park Avenue Christian Church.
