Short version: "My virtue signaling bit my kid in the ass,

and it took me years- and her education being screwed- to admit it."

We are more than 150 years past the end of slavery in America, and yet Nikole Hannah-Jones is more obsessed with race than any Confederate leaders whose likenesses are carved upon the side of Stone Mountain.

At some point, the craziness of racial obsession becomes so obvious that everyone can see it, and Nikole Hannah-Jones has passed that point.
Yes, she's the one who pushed 'The US started when slavery began', and even after various historians told her this was crap, she kept pushing it, and numerous schools more worried about being 'morally correct' than factually correct taught it.  And, of course, it's the kids suffering for it.

More on this mess here.
Hannah-Jones wants readers to see this as evidence of a broken, racially rigged system that owes her daughter something it never delivered. Some of what she documents is real: underfunded schools, high teacher turnover in high-poverty buildings, and the well-established fact that screened, selective public schools skew whiter and wealthier in a city like New York. That part of the argument isn’t fiction. It’s also not the part that determined what happened to Najya.

What determined what happened to Najya is that her parents, fully informed and financially able to choose otherwise, chose a demonstrably struggling school for seven consecutive years, and admit, in the mother's own essay, to reading every warning sign along the way.

Then something remarkable happens in the piece, and it’s the part that should have led the article: as an eighth grader, Najya finally got the freedom to choose her own high school, guided by her own criteria rather than her mother’s cause. She picked a rigorous, selective school her mother had spent a career arguing against.
And, let us not forget, the schools she approved of didn't handle discipline well, didn't actually teach worth a damn, but took every penny they could get.  And, I'll bet, they never missed teaching the kids to be racists who blame everyone not of the same skin color for all their problems.