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“This is the tax families like mine pay, the one families in the majority never even see on the bill.”
The author and her mother — both members of Delta Sigma Theta Sorority, Inc. — at Fisk University marking the 100th year of the Alpha Beta Chapter.wrote an article for The New York Times Magazine , entitled “In Fighting for Every Black Child, Did I Betray My Own?
” In the essay, she says that she sent her daughter to a struggling school on principle, and that now, years later, she believes her girl “got cheated. ” The internet did what it does, rushing to decide whether she was a hero or a cautionary tale. But that conversation needs a harder truth, the one Black mothers have carried for generations: A decision can come from love and still land as harm.
Both of those things can be true at the same time. My family has lived both sides of it. When you are raising a Black child in America, you are presented with two doors and told to choose. Behind one is the neighborhood school, full of community and belonging and, too often, too few resources.
Behind the other are the resources, paid for in a different currency: sacrificing belonging for microaggressions, in learning far too young that you are always being watched. Neither door is free. This is the tax families like mine pay, the one families in the majority never even see on the bill. Even calling it a “choice” is generous.
This country runs on the idea of neighborhood schools, and thanks to redlining and generations of systemic racism, our neighborhoods are segregated by design. You do not simply pick where your child goes to school. You are zoned.
Attending a school outside your zone is a privilege, not a right, available only if you can win a seat through a special initiative like a majority-to-minority transfer for diversity, or a magnet or special-focus program or a charter school that is under no obligation to take you at all. And here in Florida, the district does not provide transportation to the school you fought to get your child into.
So the choice narrows again, down to the families with the means and the flexibility to drive. Choice, it turns out, is both a privilege and an illusion. In the seventh grade, my mother was cherry-picked as one of the few Black students chosen to integrate a classroom at Austin High School in Decatur, Alabama. My grandparents were proud.
Their daughter had been selected, held up as proof that the world was finally moving forward. But my mother was never given a choice. She was a child who was told what her whole generation was told: This was the price of progress. From the outside, it all seemed to work out.
On the inside, the cost went unnamed for years. She grew up without the ordinary gift of peer validation. She was expected to perform, and to keep performing, in the midst of hostility. At school, she learned not to expect safety or protection, two things every child deserves and most take for granted.
That arithmetic did not end with her, because I inherited it. My own parents bought a home in a historic Black neighborhood, rich in everything but school funding, and my mother, who knew the terrain because she had survived it, spent my childhood maneuvering: a private school, then a transfer she engineered through a Black principal and a family friend who taught in the building. She was playing chess while the system played checkers with our lives.
It took years before a magnet program near our home finally gave me something she never had at my age, enough of us in one room that I got to be a person instead of a symbol. But here is the part of my mother’s story I hold onto hardest. The moment she had agency of her own, she ran straight into the arms of an HBCU. Fisk University thawed what those years had frozen.
History. Culture. Belonging. She joined a Black Greek Letter Organization, Delta Sigma Theta Sorority, Inc. She found, at last, the safety and the mirror that a seventh-grade classroom had denied her.
And she became the advocate her own childhood never gave her. So was it worth it? My mother would say yes, without hesitation, and that answer is hers to give. Sacrifice is only worth it when it is not in vain, and she made certain hers was not.
But I have watched what those years asked of her, the way they shaped her womanhood and her mothering long after she walked out of that school, some of it into strength and some of it into scar tissue she may never fully name. A sacrifice can be worth it and still cost more than the one who made it will ever admit. My mother decided that her suffering would matter, and it did.
The child who was left unprotected advocated for her children with a ferocity only someone who went without could summon. Her legacy is my birthright. I advocate for my own children now because she first advocated for me. I drove my daughter 30 minutes each way, in rush hour, for three years, because no bus would carry her to the school where she could finally be seen.
My mother taught me that a child’s sense of belonging is worth every mile. That is the grace I wish more of us would extend to Nikole Hannah-Jones. We never know, in the moment we decide, how a choice made with love and prayer and the best information we had will be judged by the children who live it. While her daughter’s hurt is real, I hope she never doubts the mother’s love behind it.
It does not erase the impact. But it lets us hold both truths at once, which is the only honest way to hold them. Our children may not always understand, in real time, what we are doing or why. But we can give them what my mother gave me, underneath the choices: a foundation of trust in who we are and what we stand for.
And maybe that is the reframe we have earned. Black mothers have been making lemonade out of lemons for generations, taking what the world extracted from us and pouring it, sweeter, into the children who come next. What was handed to us as a tax, we have always turned into an investment. My mother paid in what she never agreed to owe, and I am the interest, compounded from everything she survived.
My children are the dividends, and one day so will theirs be, still paying out long after any of us are here to count them. , where she blends clinical perspective and cultural experiences with real-world motherhood to help families feel informed and a little less alone. Do you have a compelling personal story you’d like to see published on HuffPost? Find out what we’re looking for
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