I've seen things down in the tunnels. I've seen a raccoon run a pyramid scheme. I've seen a pigeon sue a statue. But I had never seen a journalist write a viral essay about her regrets, get criticized for it, and then decide the real victim of the whole affair was the essay.
Until this week.
Nikole Hannah-Jones, the New York Times journalist who founded the 1619 Project, told the Times on Wednesday that the response to her September essay was "pretty brutal." That essay, as Fox News reported, admitted she regretted parts of her decision to send her daughter, now 16, to predominantly Black public schools as a stand against segregation, after her daughter told her she hadn't gotten the education she wanted.
Let's walk through the evidence, the way we do down here, by flashlight.
Exhibit A: the essay itself. "Now I felt overcome with regret," she wrote. A decade earlier, she had written a whole magazine piece defending the choice. So the record shows one essay announcing the experiment and a second essay announcing the results. The only person who never got a byline was the test subject.
Exhibit B: the reaction. Critics, including school choice advocates, accused her of sacrificing her child's education for her values. Hannah-Jones told the Times, "I know it would sound crazy if I say none of the critique was valid, but I'm like, what is the critique?"
I have an old source named Gus, a retired sewer rat who once spent eleven years chewing through the same pipe because he'd publicly committed to it. "Kid," Gus told me, "when you write ten thousand words about a mistake, the critique is the ten thousand words." Then he went back to the pipe. He's still on it. He says it's about the principle now.
Exhibit C: the soul-searching. "For a minute I'm like, 'Man, should I have written this?'" she said. She added that she had "never, ever, as a journalist, questioned, 'Should I have written something?'" Down in the tunnels we call that a load-bearing sentence. The 1619 Project went through famous fights with historians, and the first piece she ever second-guessed was the one about homework.
Exhibit D: the recovery. Within the same interview, Hannah-Jones concluded she was fine. "My feelings got a little hurt because I'm a human being," she said, then explained that the city's mayor "has been forced to respond" and has promised a plan. "That doesn't happen without me writing a piece like this."
So let's total it up. A child spent years in schools her own mother now says didn't serve her. The mother wrote about it. The internet was mean. And the moral of the story, per the author, is that the author is the reason anyone is talking about it.
That's not a regret. That's a press release with a tear stain.
To be fair, she's right about one thing: people are talking about these schools now. Parents across the country have been talking about them for years. They just did it at the kitchen table instead of in the Sunday magazine, and nobody called their kitchen table "brutal discourse."
Down in the tunnels, we have a name for an experiment where only the scientist gets to publish the findings, twice. We call it a column.
The Demorat is satire. Tunnel Tucker is a fictional character, and so is Gus. Quotes from real people are taken from their public statements, interviews, and reporting; everything else is made up for laughs.
The real story that inspired this
