When people think of the Brown v. Board of Education decision of 1954, they often think of an end to segregation in schools. The U.S. Supreme Court decision stated that the idea of “separate but equal” in public education was inherently racist in how it denied Black children the equal opportunity they are guaranteed under the Fourteenth Amendment. Brown v. Board of Education meant progress — but it certainly did not mean resolution.
The current American public school system is ridden with problems, and many of those problems revolve around race. De facto segregation is very much still happening, as is the subject of the bestselling book “Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria?” Students of color are also “especially vulnerable” to the school-to-prison pipeline, as the American Civil Liberties Union wrote. Folks of color still don’t have the same educational experiences that White folks do.
This is the topic of a new podcast from The New York Times and Serial Productions, released in mid-July. The title of the five-episode series clearly states who is largely responsible for these differing experiences: “nice white parents.” The podcast starts conversations that White people need to be having to understand their role in the problems of America’s public schools.
Chana Joffe-Walt, a producer for “This American Life,” is the main voice of the podcast. Joffe-Walt’s narration is supplemented by some archival footage and a lot of recorded interviews. The archival footage is primarily from the era immediately after Brown v. Board anchors the contemporary interviews in the long history of the problems of America’s public schools. In 2015, Joffe-Walt was part of a team that won a Peabody Award in 2015 for a radio story on school desegregation. She has also worked as a reporter for NPR, and her years of experience come across in “Nice White Parents,” which The New York Times referred to as a “five-year process.”
“Nice White Parents” looks at a specific school in Brooklyn, New York City: the School for International Studies. SIS was made up mainly of students of color, but then a group of White parents decided to enroll their children there. The school then fell into conflict between the longtime community members and the newbies. The addition of White students, with their more privileged backgrounds, ends up taking opportunities away from students of color, often by way of budget cuts and discontinued extracurricular activities. Joffe-Walt skillfully tells the saga of SIS which entails everything from Parent-Teacher Association drama to a French embassy. Essentially, the well-intentioned — and well-off — White families caused the school’s formerly close-knit community to unravel.
Like many of Serial Productions’ podcasts — including the original Serial and also S-Town — “Nice White Parents” looks at one specific instance and uses it to analyze society more broadly. Joffe-Walt’s reporting is on a school in New York City, but it’s relevant to the public school systems across the country.
If White people want to begin to truly address problems that revolve around race, they must educate themselves on their role in creating those problems. There are overt instances of White racism, but there are also more subtle acts, such as messing with the public school system. “Nice White Parents” is a superb way for White people to begin the work of understanding the subtle, yet crucial effects that even the friendliest of White folks can instigate. Even when White folks think their actions are going to improve the education system for all students, they often wind up ruining things, and this disproportionately harms students of color.
