Nikole Hannah-Jones on School Segregation, Detroit, and Dealing With Pressure

Could you tell me about your New America fellowship project?

I am working on a book about school segregation that is tracing the struggle for black children to get a quality and equal education going all the way back to slavery up to modern-day Detroit. I decided to do this project because I have been writing about school segregation, almost exclusively, for the last five years but still never felt like I could tell the entire comprehensive story that I wanted to tell.

I’m really looking forward to reading it. You mentioned feeling internal and external pressure as you write this book. Could you tell me a little bit more about that?

The internal pressure always exists. You spend a lot of time on something, you have a vision for it, and it feels impossible to reach the expectation of what you know it can be. I think a book is something much more substantial and permanent than any article you could write, so I want it to be the best that it can be. I’ve also spent so much time in classrooms with kids who we are sacrificing, and I feel a lot of internal pressure to do right by them and to do right by the communities that I write about.

I’m curious if you’ve found yourself in the peculiar situation in which you turn into a therapist for parents who want to talk to you about choosing a school for their child?

Absolutely. One of the most exhausting things about my work is the folks who want absolution. They want to feel badly for an hour and come and confess. I get a ton of folks who tell me how they really struggled with the decision and wanted to do the right thing, but they just couldn’t. I don’t know where the conversation is expected to go from there, but I find it very exhausting. What I will say though, is that the most surprising thing is the number of parents who have come up to me and said, “I’ve made a different choice for my child because of your work.” I did not expect that to happen. There’s a power to it, and it is sustaining because this work is exhausting. It’s hard not to feel completely pessimistic and utterly hopeless, so to hear every now and then that my work has helped move people to do the right thing for our kids, helps sustain me through those really low times.

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