Nearly two weeks after it was published, people are still talking about the latest essay from New York Times Magazine staff writer Nikole Hannah-Jones, an honest and at-times wrenching look at the aftermath of her decision, ten years earlier, to enroll her daughter in P.S. 307, a lower-performing Brooklyn elementary school, in an effort to improve New York’s segregated public-school system. Her story sparked feverish discourse, and not just here in the city. Some of the pushback has targeted Hannah-Jones personally, with people ridiculing her or declaring her a bad mother. Others have praised her thoughtfulness and courage. Regardless, the essay has reignited the debate over school segregation and what to do about it. Earlier this week, Mayor Mamdani called her piece “devastating” but didn’t have much to say about what he’ll do to address the inequalities it raised.

Hannah-Jones wanted her essay to prompt a conversation and knew the response would be intense, she told me, but she also hoped it would focus more on what’s happening to other children and families instead of just her own. We spoke about what she thinks is missing from the debate, the needs of struggling schools, Mamdani’s nonresponse, whether she has any regrets, and why she thought it was important to let her now-teenage daughter, Najya, have her say. Our full conversation is below.

How did you come to the decision to revisit the choice about your daughter’s school and share what had transpired since?It was ten years since the original published, and I still regularly got questions about how my daughter was doing. Other people were sharing their stories about how the article inspired them to make choices about their own children’s education. So it just felt like it made sense. I wanted to have some integrity to revisit it and say this is how it turned out, and, frankly, no one was bothering to talk about the issue of school segregation anymore. Seemed like all of the movements on that had pretty much gone dormant, so it also felt like an opportunity to spark this conversation again.

Did you ever have any hesitation about moving forward with it, considering the potential reaction you might’ve received?I pitched it, and I wrote it, so … [Laughs.] Look, I literally told my daughter before the piece published — she was the first person I asked before I decided to even pitch the piece — I asked her, would she mind, and did she want to participate? And when it published, I said, “Make your social media private because Mommy is about to get dragged.”

I knew, and it’s okay. I felt it was important to be honest about how it went. I felt it was important to show how impossible it is for us to expect that any individual can go up against this type of systemic inequality. There are few people who could command an audience on this like I can. So I just felt it was necessary to tell this story, and, to tell it, I had to tell it in this most personal way. So, no, there wasn’t any hesitation, but I also didn’t go in naïvely thinking I wasn’t going to get some of the response that I’ve gotten.

It certainly has prompted plenty of conversation from readers debating whether you made the right choice, as well as people sharing their own experiences in the city’s school system. Was there anything that surprised you about the response?Yes, one, I remember a few weeks before we published having a conversation with my editor and just saying, “Can anything even break through anymore?” Feels like such a different publishing world than it was ten years ago. Feels like attention spans are even shorter. It’s harder for longform, I feel, to find a massive audience sometimes. So, we really were just like, “Can you even publish something that reaches a lot of people?” Well, yes, you can. The response has been overwhelming, far exceeding the response to the first essay. The only thing in my career that I would say that has come close to the response of “The 1619 Project” has been on this. I’m still getting emails every single day. I have hundreds, literally, of emails that I haven’t even gotten to read yet, DMs on every space. So that’s been surprising.

And I would say the other thing that has been most surprising is the way a certain segment of the internet, of the Black internet, has responded to the piece. This is a piece that is a critique of the systemic inequality that most Black children in this country have to endure every day. I did not expect such, at times, brutal and cruel commentary on me as a parent over the critique of the system. I expected critiques of my parenting for sure. This is a piece of me critiquing my own parenting and questioning my own decisions. But I didn’t think the focus would be so........

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