Based on my own experiences as a South Asian immigrant who grew up in a white (conservative-leaning and heavily evangelical) middle class border South suburb in the 1970s, I have many different foundational beliefs than Nikole Hannah-Jones about how we should address the problems of racial difference and discrimination in the US, but I too deeply appreciate that she wrote this thought-provoking piece. In very important ways it is searingly honest and self-critical. It must have been hard for her to write, and I commend her for doing so. But in one important way, the self-criticism falls short imo: it fails to come to terms with how much bad ideological ideas, of the sorts that she has championed, have contributed to heightening the divides in academic performance, along with the structural impediments created by race and class that she cogently outlines. NHJ has high praise in the piece for the principal at her daughter's middle school, who shares her "anti-racist" worldview. And that principal does sound like a thoughtful, caring and dedicated administrator. But the school didn't assign any homework "because studies show that it does not have much impact on academic achievement"? (Given her daughter's subsequent difficulties in high school compared to the privileged white kids who were assigned homework in the lower grades, seems like those studies may be wrong, no?) Her daughter got As in algebra and was told she was excelling even though she "had huge gaps in many of the building blocks of math that she should have learned in elementary school, like mastery of long division and fractions"? Yes, the structural factors that create separate and unequal schools are a very real problem. But so are the counterproductive, radical chic ideas that have taken root with many activists. (To be fair to NHJ, she gestures at this in her piece with the one statement from the principal that in lowering standards they may have practiced "racism under the guise of antiracism.") But goddamn, I can't get past the maddening truth that black and brown enrollments in NYC's elite high schools used to be much greater, back in the '70s and '80s when racial tensions in NYC were much higher and overtly discriminatory beliefs more widespread in American cities. But then in the name of detracking anti-racist activists demanded that g&t programs in the elementary and middle schools in NYC's poor and minority be dismantled, and as a result the number of kids passing the entry exams to schools like Stuyvesant plunged, and have remained abysmally low ever since. That's not the fault of structural racism, however real, that's an own goal.