The word innocent comes up early in the new podcast Nice White Parents, about separate and unequal education at a public school in Brooklyn. Its hosted and reported by Chana Joffe-Walt, a producer for This American Life. In New York City, as with many places in the U.S., school segregation has long been de facto, and differences in school resources correspond closely with race; the city, in lieu of an integration plan, has focussed on school reform, along with an elaborate, choice-based system that involves testing, wait lists, and parental strategizing. In the series, Joffe-Walt, who is white, homes in on the insidious, sometimes unwitting role of white parents in perpetuating an unjust system that benefits their kids. The innocence we hear about, you may not be surprised to learn, comes from those parents describing themselves.
The public school in question is the School for International Studies, in Cobble Hill, where Joffe-Walt lives. She began reporting on S.I.S. in 2015, when the students theremiddle schoolers and high schoolerswere mostly Black, Latino, and Middle Eastern, and from working-class and poor families. Enrollment was shrinking. The district was rapidly gentrifying, and white families tended to send their kids to the same three middle schools, which were becoming packed. S.I.S., like many of the underattended schools, was actively recruiting. As the series opens, Joffe-Walt and some other white parents are being shown around local schools by administrators, usually people of color. Most of the children they see are Black and brown, except for a gifted class, which is mostly white. No one on the tours mentions race.
The episode then reveals what happens when a group of white families, en masse, decide to send their kids to S.I.S.and, as a kind of bargaining chip, persuade the school to start a French dual-language program. What follows is like a farce. At a PTA meeting, we learn that new parents have launched an aggressive fund-raising campaign, and that the French Embassy has already pledged ten thousand dollars. A PTA co-president, Imee Hernandez, an even-tempered social worker, is rattled but polite; the PTA, which allocates school funds, knew nothing about the campaign. (Id rather have a dinner where people of different cultures bring their food and we share together than have somebody else cater it, she tells Joffe-Walt. Thats how I feel you build community.) Soon, parents are planning a lavish gala in Manhattan, at the French Embassys Cultural Services center. A new parent urges befuddled PTA members to help drum up auction items: Knicks tickets, Coach bags, Tiffany pieces. At the gala, a guest enthuses about her apartment in Saint-Germain-des-PrésOctober is my saison préférée . . . you wear your scarf, your foulard and tells Hernandez, who is bilingual, Its so important to learn another language. More money and white students begin flooding into S.I.S., not for the benefit of all, and subsequent episodes reveal a similar dynamic throughout the schools sixty-year history.
Nice White Parents was made by Serial Productions, which was recently bought by the Times. Like all podcasts in the This American Life and Serial family, its expertly crafted. (The producer is Julie Snyder.) The sound design features plucky but nonintrusive original music (with a hint of Vince Guaraldi), incisive interview clips, and evocative archival recordings. In the second episode, we hear audio of chanting Black and Puerto Rican protesters at Freedom Day, a mass New York City school boycott in 1964, and of a teen-ager there, speaking to ABC News, who points out the armed police on horseback and says, All we want is equal education. Thats all. The richness of vocal inflection is perhaps the most powerful element of the podcast form; in that clip, the teens earnest calm contrasts with the skeptical, rat-a-tat tone of the interviewer. Later, we hear a similar calm from a modern-day eleventh grader, Tiffani Torres, when she asks Mayor Bill de Blasio, on a WNYC call-in show, when city schools will be integrated. Tiffani, with all due respect, I really think youre not hearing what were saying to you, so Ill repeat it, de Blasio says, with blithe impatience. Then he tells her that a task force is studying the issue.
We hear revealing tones in surprising places, such as in interviews with white parents who advocated for the integration of Brooklyn schools in the sixties; their voices brighten with pride as they describe the progressive bona fides of the private schools they actually sent their kids to. But the most distinguishing sound of Nice White Parents is Joffe-Walts narration, which is abundant, direct, and full of zingers. It happens again and againwhite parents wielding their power without even noticing, like a guy wandering through a crowded store with a huge backpack, knocking things over every time he turns, she says. The backpack analogy will resonate with New Yorkers, who have observed such behavior in the cramped spaces we used to occupy all over townand, in many ways, Nice White Parents seems to be speaking specifically to New Yorkers, and to well-off white ones, though it listens closely and with care to kids, parents, and administrators of color. Joffe-Walt often uses white as shorthand for affluent and educated, and, in neighborhoods like Cobble Hill, the association is apt, but it isnt so everywhere in the country, or even in New York. The show has an astringently self-critical quality of wanting to straight-talk nice white parents into taking action, but in doing so it can feel unnervingly clubby. It can also create an impression of being told what to think, even as we agree; when this happened in school, listeners might recall, we didnt like it.
Another new series about race and education in the Northeast, Fiasco: The Battle for Boston, hosted by Leon Neyfakh, takes a different approach. In September of 1974, the city of Boston faced a test, Neyfakh says. What would happen if thousands of white and Black children living in segregated neighborhoods were forced to go to school together? In an archival clip, we hear a little girl named Joanne, who is Black, tell an NBC reporter, When we go up there, were going to be stoned. Its not fair. She isnt wrong. The series tells the story of the school system, the Black activists and parents who initiated change, and the inter-district busing, which resulted in several years of violence and mayhem, usually perpetrated by enraged white people: bus stonings, firebombings, threats, demonstrations, street scuffles. Even the gangster Whitey Bulger got involved.
Neyfakh, formerly of Slates Slow Burn podcast, was a marquee hire for Luminary, Fiasco s subscription-based platform, which launched in 2019. His work tends to focus on late-twentieth-century political scandals and the experience of living through them; he chooses historical episodes that listeners think they know and upends their assumptions. Here, he starts with the busing crisis, the conflicts name in much popular memory. As Tom Atkins, the head of the Boston N.A.A.C.P. at the time, says in an archival interview, Busing was a nationwide code word for keeping Black people in their place. People could run racist campaigns without making racist statements, he says. Neyfakh is white, and he and his team quickly learned that busing wasnt the best way to describe desegregation: when they used the term, potential interviewees hung up on them.read more
“Nice White Parents,” “Fiasco,” and America’s Public-School Problem
