Nikole Hannah-Jones: NC has taken steps backward in education

North Carolina isn’t the relatively progressive southern state it once was, journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones told a group of education professionals Tuesday afternoon in a virtual presentation.

Hannah-Jones, a former education reporter in North Carolina, returned to the Tar Heel State (virtually) for the North Carolina Public School Forum’s Color of Education 2021 conference. She discussed the role of public schools, the furor over critical race theory, and how North Carolina has changed since she last lived here.

As conservative lawmakers and activists push to curb discussions about race in classrooms, Hannah-Jones said educators and community members need to be just as vocal on teaching about race and other issues as their opponents.

She spoke in conversation with a former UNC journalism professor Harry Amana and took audience questions.

In her comments Tuesday, she pushed for investment in public education from the standpoint of a communal good, rather than a consumer good.

“I’ve never pretended that public school can solve all of the ills of society,” though that is often an expectation of education, she said.

But schools can bring people together to learn from each other and reduce polarization in society, she said.

“It’s a way you can actually create community,” she said.

Hannah-Jones, a graduate of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, New York Times journalist and winner of the Pulitzer Prize, was the keynote speaker at the inaugural Color of Education event in 2019.

That’s the same year her “1619 Project” was published by The New York Times. That collection of essays, poems and stories — written by numerous authors — explored the beginning of slavery in what would become the United States and its profound influence on the nation in the ensuing 400 years.

It’s been lauded for its exploration of a different historical perspective. Some historians have disputed some passages in the essays. The project won the Pulitzer Prize in Commentary last year.

On Tuesday, education leaders asked to speak with the Public School Forum said educators need to have more conversations with parents about what’s happening in schools and more conservations with students about what they need. That could help ease divisiveness over what goes on in schools, they said.

“I think that being separated due to safety measures has prevented us from having conversations with parents,” Edgecombe County Public School Superintendent Valerie Bridges said. But the pandemic hasn’t stopped other people from talking, she said.

Backlash over the 1619 project and critical race theory

Hannah-Jones said backlash against the 1619 and “critical race theory” stems from conversations sparked last year after a white Minneapolis policer officer suffocated George Floyd, a Black man, to death.

After that, support for Black Lives Matter grew and more people acknowledged the existence of structural racism, she said.

Now, school boards prominently feature parents concerned that critical race theory is being taught in local schools. Those parents fear white children will be made to feel bad or that an overemphasis on identity groups will lead to more divisiveness.

“Critical race theory” refers to studying history or current times through the lens of how race may play a role. Oftentimes, it involves examining the possibility of systemic racism contributing to different problems. It’s not a set of beliefs, though critical race theorists may draw similar conclusions. Academics and educators have contended it is not being taught in schools.

Conservatives are angry and acting and liberals are, comparatively, not, Hannah-Jones said.

“We’re really being outgunned right now because this is not an issue that’s getting enough people on the left angry,” she said.

But people should be angry that anyone might push back against books by Toni Morrison or books about Ruby Bridges, because those books help children understand the different experiences of other people and prepare them for adulthood in a diverse world, Hannah-Jones said.

Many state legislatures have introduced and passed bills banning teachers from using the 1619 project in classrooms.

“I have a vested interest in this,” she said Tuesday. “My own project is being banned in several states and I’m paying attention I’m not seeing any real organizing effort on my side”

Hannah-Jones said she does not want the 1619 Project to replace school curriculum but to supplement it and get students talking about how history affects them.

In North Carolina, lawmakers passed a bill, while activists were pushing back on critical race theory, that restricts teachers from teaching things they fear critical race theory will cause students to conclude, such as students being "inherently" racist or sexist.

Those who opposed the bill argued that's not what critical race theory does, and they feared the scope of the bill would keep teachers from discussing certain parts of history to avoid being complained about.

The Republican-pushed House Bill 324, passed this summer, also prohibits teaching the idea that believing the U.S. is a meritocracy — in which a person’s success is dictated by their merits alone — is “an inherently racist or sexist belief.” It also bars teaching that people have inherent racial or sexist biases, promoting affirmative action or promoting the concept of reparations for acts committed by prior generations. That reparations should be made to descendants of people who were enslaved is a commonly held belief among Democrats.

Steps 'backward' in NC

Hannah-Jones said she expects conservative takeovers of school boards in relatively progressive areas.

She noted the conservative takeover of the Wake County Board of Education in 2009.

The state has changed in recent years, she said.

“North Carolina was really a progressive state for southern state and it has lost any semblance (of that)… because of the gerrymandering,” Hannah-Jones said.

She noted that politicians have closed the poverty center at UNC and banned attorneys employed by UNC from representing poor and minority clients at the UNC law schools’ Center for Civil Rights.

Long-time education leader Dudley Flood, who helped North Carolina schools desegregate, said he felt Hannah-Jones was an optimist, despite some of her warnings about the state of education.

Educators can act from the right mindset, of trying to lift others up, he said.

“I’m running for that little child who cannot run for himself, he said.

‘Return’ to NC

Hannah-Jones did not discuss her recent interactions with higher education in the state.

Earlier this year, she was hired as the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill’s Knight Chair in Race and Investigative Journalism, though she later opted not to work at UNC.

Hannah-Jones was offered only a five-year contract that did not immediately include tenure, as previous contracts for Knight Chairs had done. Her supporters said the decision was because of her work on the 1619 Project.

Hannah-Jones signed the contract but had been unaware that it was unusual.

The namesake of the school — Arkansas newspaper publisher Walter E. Hussman Jr., donor of $25 million to the school — had emailed school leaders questioning her hire and taking issue with the 1619 Project.

Hannah-Jones declined the UNC job this summer, after the university Board of Trustees granted her tenure on a divided vote, and accepted a position with Howard University as the inaugural Knight Chair in Race and Journalism.

Hannah-Jones earned a Master’s degree from UNC in 2003 and later covered Durham Public Schools for the News & Observer.