"Nice White Parents" - Ep. 2 Podcast Review

Episode 2 - I Still Believe in It

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This morning on my drive to work I listened to the second episode of the "Nice White Parents" podcast about a cohort of white parents enrolling their kids in SIS, a public middle school in Brooklyn. The parents claim to be diversifying the neighborhood and bringing their fundraising backgrounds to SIS. Throughout the first episode you get a very clear understanding that the PTA at SIS is struggling with the increased difference in the socio economic status of the children attending the school.

This whole push for increasing the level of "diversity" in public spaces creates this perfect innocent sense of idealism that the white parents are striving for. This innocence and idealism allows white folks to do the bare minimum of tolerating people of color, rather than reconcile those relationships. It's almost as if these white folks are saying, we still don't want you here but we will tolerate you if it makes us feel like we are doing a good thing. Throughout this podcast I keep coming back to the term, homogeny. The new white parents at SIS believe they are doing a good thing by bringing money and more students to their neighborhood school. They have these notions about what the school was like before their save-the-day approach, and they are not flattering. Prior to the white families' arrival the school was dirty, in desperate need of repair, "ghetto", the teachers weren't good, the students (students of color) didn't know how to behave or listen. I find issue with these parents being racist while thinking they are doing a good deed and with their ideals of white saviorism. They call themselves progressive or forward thinkers or activists but where exactly are these so-called white activists participating?

10:15 - “Schools and community are one together...”

When we compare communities to the quality of the school institution we notice that we are still engaging in practices that are racist, we still support laws that violate human rights, we are segregated to the point where white folks can live their lives freely and claim innocence. The schools that are being overcrowded are schools with the majority being students of color which can lead to students being forced to learn in shifts. What are the schools like in your communities and how does that compare to the racial demographics?

This idea of building community around schools is not new, it's a concept that many people fail to understand. This idea that "schools are community are one together" is a great idea, but what if this idealism and innocence that society has surrounding schools becomes flipped around? What if the tables were turned on white neighborhoods and a child had been hit by a beer truck while playing in the street during recess because the schoolyard was closed. What if your schoolyard was considered too dangerous for kids to play in so they had to spend their recess time playing on the crowded sidewalks and narrow streets? Then would you listen?

There have been student protests always coming from communities of color against the oppressive nature of the school system and continued racial segregation, this time there were 460,000 kids in New York that participated. There have also been protests for integration at the middle school in the past, in fact this was not the first time that white families were forcibly trying to diversify a neighborhood they segregated. In this podcast we hear an interview with one of the parents who had been wanting to integrate schools back in the 1960's but had ultimately moved her family to another school district. A school out of the city in a suburban neighborhood near the good schools, a white neighborhood.

This makes me think back to what the current parents and students thought about the kind of school that SIS is and the students it represents. These parents still continue to have negative impressions of the “chaotic school” disruption caused by students of color. They believed these kids were uneducated, scored low on tests and generally just difficult students to have in the class. I can see that these new white teachers were scared to teach these kids, they raised questions of their own personal racial fears while being in the school. White folks saw the education of these students of color to be a challenge because they were unprepared and lazy.

37:30 - “Schools were not made for them.”

At this point in the podcast, the woman being interviewed is one who had been an parent pushing for school integration, but not for her kids. I found the ending of this podcast to be really powerful for many reasons but mostly because the words this parent says come so easily out of her mouth. This idealism of white supremacy comes out when white folks "allow" integration but only as much as they are comfortable with, remember that number in schools is 26% white kids. In other words, these white folks are asking to stop integration when it feels too much.

It's time that we look at the reality of segregation and racism within our society and actually do something about it. The education system continues to better serve the group in which the system was made exclusively for.

Continued in part 3.....