The Grief of Doing What You Think Is Right

This week, the internet has been buzzing about Nikole Hannah-Jones's New York Times Magazine essay, "In Fighting for Every Black Child, Did I Betray My Own?" Before I came to Grieve Leave, I might have said it was a story about regret, disappointment, or anger. But one thing Grieve Leave has taught me is to name a feeling that often gets overlooked: grief. And when I finished this essay, grief is exactly what I felt.

This essay felt personal. When it came time to choose a school for my daughter, now nine, I picked an independent school where she could learn in a smaller setting and at her own pace. It was the right fit for who she is, but it came at a cost. Last year, she was the only Black student in a class of 20. She has chosen to stay, and I still wonder if I'm doing my Black child a disservice.

Hannah-Jones made the opposite choice. She's a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who has spent her career reporting on school segregation and how it shortchanges Black children. Because of her values, and the generations of Black families who sacrificed before her, she sent her daughter, Najya, to a high-poverty, mostly Black public school in Brooklyn. She believed that families like hers, with money, time, and influence, could push the school to do better for every child there, and inspire other families to do the same. The school didn't get better. Her daughter fell behind. And years later, Najya told her, "Sometimes I wish instead of always thinking about other kids, you would have thought about me."

Grief doesn't always come with a phone call or a diagnosis. Sometimes it's quieter: the slow realization that things didn't turn out the way you hoped for someone you love, and there's no going back.

That's the grief in this essay. Najya grieves the education she needed and never got. Her mother grieves a choice made with love and conviction that still cost her child. And grief rarely comes alone. One loss tends to stir up the ones that came before it.

Hannah-Jones' story carries generations of Black parents who sent their children to the front lines of integration so the next generation wouldn't have to. Seventy years later, their grandchildren's schools are still segregated. That is its own grief. So is living in a country that, as Hannah-Jones writes, "puts at odds trying to be a good person with trying to be [a] good parent." Parents didn't build that system, but they're the ones who have to choose inside it.

At the end of the essay, Hannah-Jones stops defending her decision and tells her daughter, "I didn't do the best for you, and I am so sorry." She doesn't try to justify it or explain what Najya gained. She just tells the truth, and that's what her daughter had been waiting years to hear.

We're often in a rush to find the bright side, the lesson, or the reason it was all worth it. But sometimes a loss doesn't need to be redeemed. It needs to be named and witnessed. It needs someone to say, "Yes, that cost you something, and I see it."

The verdict is still out on my own choice. It may be years before I know what it gave my daughter and what it cost her. But the grief is already here. I grieve that she has sat in a classroom where no other student looks like her. I grieve having to choose. And I grieve a system that still asks Black parents to choose at all.