There is nothing worse than looking into your child’s eyes and realizing they’ve been struggling—and somehow, you missed it. I know that look. And years later, I still carry the guilt.
I read Nikole Hannah-Jones’s devastating piece in The New York Times, “In Fighting for Every Black Child, Did I Betray My Own?”
That part—
I could feel her daughter looking at her. “Did you know…when you decided to put me here?”
The question hit me straight in the heart and took me back a number of years to my own guilt bomb.
Flashback: 2023
My dearest darling daughter was in her senior year of high school, and she was flailing.
I can remember her soft brown eyes glancing up at me, filled with despair, like she had just realized her mother was human and not a superhero. In those small irises were water droplets and the look of failure.
Seeing that in your child’s eyes is worse than a nightmare.
My daughter had been homeschooled from the very beginning, and I can still remember clicking through the web searching for school programs, drilling through curricula—from IXL to Abeka—constructing strengths-and-weaknesses charts, researching resources, all nine yards, trying to choose a program that aligned with our family values and had the flexibility to accommodate an active-duty military man and a scientist-type, consulting, writer mom.
Homeschooling fit the demands and worked until about third grade, when I realized Georgia’s limited homeschooling oversight could allow my child to miss key testing and other things. We decided to switch her to public school.
We lucked out and found a hybrid county public school, Connections Academy. They had everything—or at least promise of everything. High praise from teachers and students, a solid curriculum, and the majority of the classes would still be taught in an online atmosphere . My daughter could continue to be at home or travel with me while attending school.
I believed deeply in flexible, in-depth education. I still do. I believe in investing in my child’s education, so when there were weaknesses and I couldn’t help, I found tutors, sought out additional summer programs like Kumon, and did whatever was required to make sure my baby learned and enjoyed learning.
From third through eleventh grade, my daughter got A’s and B’s.
I thought she was fine.
She wasn’t.
In her senior year, my daughter cracked under the pressure. She had a pile of unfinished assignments, grades dipping toward D’s and F’s because of incompletes, and she started talking about not wanting to go to college. Then she admitted she had trouble reading and keeping up and that, when stressed, numbers floated.
I was in shock.
I reached out to the school for help. It took a while for the emails to return from the void, but there was no real help. Mandated county testing for this type of situation wasn’t a priority for them. Perhaps they, too, were shocked that an A-B student could have such problems. It soon became obvious that this excellent school didn’t have the resources or desire to be part of the solution.
My husband and I had to save her on our own.
We worked with our doctors to get her diagnosed.
I was stunned by the diagnosis. My daughter had a learning disability that had gone undiagnosed for years.
I’m not going to get too deeply into her private medical information. But some of its characteristics look like ADHD. It definitely bears anxious fruit, and it can affect her ability to perform certain mathematical processes. She required accommodations and a learning plan. Hubby and I had to implement them to get my daughter back to wanting to learn.
Back to the Present
I read Hannah-Jones’s piece, and my heart broke for her and her daughter.
A mother’s guilt knows no end.
Something inside crumbles, ripping at our insides, when our child is in agony—or worse, when they look up with failure written in their eyes and they see it written in ours.
How did we let this happen?
These kids are right to put some of the blame on us. We are the busy, opinionated generation with all these high moral principles, but sometimes lacking the time to invest, dissect, and implement.
My daughter is now thriving and enjoying her college experience, but part of me still bears this grief.
How did I not see it?
How many years of suffering happened because I missed the problem?
Then guilt joins in:
How could I have spent this much time thinking about my child’s education and not known?
How could I not recognize that she was struggling? Sorry doesn’t cut it. We can’t give time back.
I’ve learned that looks deceive. I had interpreted working around the clock as passion. You simply do that when you love learning.
Maybe that belief kept me blind.
Achievement can disguise struggle.
You can love your child ferociously. You can research. You can advocate. You can pay attention. You can invest time and money. You can believe you are doing everything you’re supposed to do for them and the next generation—and still fail.
Back to Hannah-Jones
In her New York Times article, Nikole Hannah-Jones talks about the battle of advocating against segregated schools and trying to create an equal, common baseline for schoolchildren everywhere. She had to reckon with the fact that schools with inequities based on the complexion of their student body or a lack of a strong tax base don’t always make it up to snuff. Sometimes folks do the bare minimum, not the unpaid extra that can make a difference. Putting middle-class or rich kids into these schools doesn’t automatically change what’s happening.
And she had to trade her fear of putting her kid in a higher-performing school, where rich kids can exhibit both racism and classism, for the opportunity to give her daughter a competitive, quality education.
She thought she was doing the right thing by placing her only daughter, her only child, in her neighborhood public school. She may have been deluded into thinking that the predominantly Black neighborhood school wouldn’t play in her face because she writes for The New York Times.
Unfortunately, she found that some allowed neglect to fester into behavioral issues at lunchtime; she found folders of ungraded schoolwork, which made it harder to ensure a student corrected mistakes and learned. Hannah-Jones’s daughter fell behind and needed many tutoring sessions to catch up.
The Ruby Bridges Interlude
On September 8, Ruby Bridges turned seventy-two. She was the famous six-year-old who, in 1960, became the first Black child to integrate William Frantz Elementary School in New Orleans. Federal marshals escorted her past screaming white crowds to get her into the building.
I made a birthday post about her, and more than a hundred thousand people on Instagram (and Facebook) have viewed it.
We know the picture.
The little Black girl.
The white dress.
The braids.
Or maybe we know Norman Rockwell’s rendering of that walk, The Problem We All Live With.
But what I wanted people to remember was what existed outside the frame, beyond the braids and the federal marshals.
Picture the crowd.
The slurs. The angry men and women screaming at her. The death threats. The image of a Black baby doll in a coffin. Ruby had nightmares about that.
White parents who defied the boycott and continued sending their children to William Frantz were threatened too. Federal marshals also escorted white children into the school.
All this chaos because people wanted a better education for their children.
Sometimes history is easier to tolerate when we crop the photograph and look at the child, not the system.
Many of us have had to deal with the system, particularly when it comes to education.
We celebrate that courage now because of the success of school integration. But most of us don’t have the guts or the fearlessness it took to be Ruby—or any of the kids who attended with her.
Back to the New York Times
Nikole Hannah-Jones wrote an extraordinary and painful essay in The New York Times titled “In Fighting for Every Black Child, Did I Betray My Own?”
Please read the whole thing.
Don’t read only a headline. Don’t read a social-media snippet. Don’t even rely on the pieces I’m quoting here. Read the essay.
Hannah-Jones wrestles with something that I think is far more complicated than a debate about public schools, private schools, integration, vouchers, property taxes, or school choice.
She’s wrestling with what happens when our ideals collide with our children.
Hannah-Jones deliberately chose a public-school education for her daughter, Najya, while advocating for educational integration and equality. Looking back years later, she confronted the possibility that her daughter had borne a cost for that decision.
Najya told her:
“Sometimes I wish instead of always thinking about other kids, you would have thought about me. I never really got the education I wanted.”
Wow. She might as well have said that she did not get the education she deserved.
I know that Hannah-Jones had to herself:
Why didn’t I see it?
Hannah-Jones apologized to her daughter and admitted that Najya “had borne the cost not only of our unjust society but also of my ideals.”
That’s a transparent admission.
It holds a lot of grief and what-ifs.
I think we are all okay if our values or busyness cost us something.
We are destroyed when they cost our children.
There’s another little girl from New Orleans, Leona Tate, who integrated McDonogh 19 Elementary School at the same time Ruby Bridges integrated William Frantz. She was another of the little Black girls helping to dismantle Jim Crow, but the victory we inherited was purchased partly with their childhoods.
When Hannah-Jones asked Tate about her parents’ decision to put her on that front line, Tate did not condemn them.
She said:
“Somebody had to do it.”
She’s right.
Somebody had to do it.
But I don’t know how any parent can stand by and let their child be miserable for the greater good.
On The View, the ladies discussed Hannah-Jones’s essay, and the conversation quickly exposed how complicated this becomes for actual parents. Sunny Hostin talked about making a different decision for her own children: predominantly white private schools where they excelled academically but encountered racism and struggles around identity. Ana Navarro raised questions about Florida’s voucher system and who can actually afford private-school tuition even with a voucher. Alyssa Farah Griffin talked about choosing public school while also acknowledging that her family chose to live in a well-off community with excellent neighborhood public schools.
Those aren’t identical experiences.
They expose the dilemma.
We want to repair systems.
But we also want to protect our babies.
These two desires will always be on a collision course.
Here are dilemmas I didn’t have the strength for:
If my child could help integrate a school, but she’d be bullied, threatened, psychologically or physically wounded, do I send her?
No.
If my child’s presence could make things better for the children coming ten years later, twenty years later, sixty years later—how much of her childhood am I allowed to spend purchasing that future?
That one, I don’t know.
I simply don’t know.
I want to tell you I would be brave.
I want to tell you my convictions would hold.
I want to tell you I would stand against the darkness and raise a light high enough for everybody behind me to see.
But when it comes to my child?
I’m not a lantern leading the way.
I’m not a flashlight with a steady beam.
I’m barely a candle.
A little one with a flame cupped between two hands, trying desperately to stay lit in the wind.
That’s why I research and write about the women who were lanterns and steady flashlights, who made sacrifices for the race, for women, for all our children.
The Wrap-Up
I understand the argument for equity in the school system. I understand the argument that every place of learning should have excellent teachers, sufficient resources, and genuine expectations for every child. I understand why people advocate for integration, for school choice, for charters, for vouchers, for greater investment in neighborhood schools—and why other people challenge those approaches or their consequences.
Those are public-policy questions, and they deserve serious debate.
But parenting isn’t a policy paper.
Parenting is looking at one particular face.
Your baby’s face.
And catching those eyes.
As for me and this house, my child’s eyes can never hold that type of failure again.
This week’s booklist includes:
The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story by Nikole Hannah-Jones & The New York Times Magazine
A collection of essays, fiction, and poetry that places slavery and its continuing consequences at the center of the American story—and provides essential context for Hannah-Jones’s thinking about race, opportunity, and education.
Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria? by Beverly Daniel Tatum
A foundational examination of racial identity and the psychology of racism, particularly valuable for thinking about what Black children experience while navigating integrated educational spaces.
The Sum of Us: Adapted for Young Readers by Heather McGhee
McGhee examines how racial divisions have shaped American public goods—including schools—and argues that inequality ultimately extracts a cost far beyond the people initially targeted by it.
Other People’s Children: Cultural Conflict in the Classroom by Lisa Delpit
Delpit examines the disconnect that can arise between educators and children from different racial and cultural backgrounds and asks what genuinely effective teaching requires
Writer in Residence by Rhonda McKnight. A struggling novelist escapes to the South Carolina Lowcountry hoping to recover her words, only to find romance, buried family secrets, and teaching opportunities.
FoxTale Book Shoppe, has signed copies of Rhonda McKnight’s books on hand.
And FoxTale Book Shoppe has a few signed copies of Fire Sword and Sea and my other titles.
You can also try one of my partners in the fight, bookstores large and small, who are in the trenches with me.
You can find my notes on Substack or on my website, VanessaRiley.com, under the podcast link in the About tab.
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