The New York Times is launching a podcast series that appears to blame “Nice White Parents” for longstanding issues with the US public school system, deflecting responsibility off incompetent officials onto the bogeyman du jour.
The paper of record debuted a sample of its “Nice White Parents” podcast on Thursday, promoted as a miniseries “about the 60-year relationship between white parents and the public school down the block.” Spoiler alert: the white parents are the bad guys.
Set to upbeat music, the teaser tells the story of a group of white New York City parents who lobbied heavily in 1963 for the Board of Education to move a planned new school from the proposed site, close to a housing project, to a new site closer to a white neighborhood so kids of all races could attend school together. This was less than a decade after the Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision struck down “separate but equal” and rendered segregation effectively illegal, and “integration” was one of the hottest issues of the day. Also on rt.com ‘White Fragility’ is an exhausting, dull, racially obsessed book that only serves to deepen divisions
However, integrating schools was easier said than done, as the New York school board episode proved: when the school was finally built, close to the white neighborhood as those “nice white parents” suggested, they (according to the podcast, at least) refused - every single one! - to send their own kids there. Host Chana Joffe-Walt cheerfully ends the segment by posing the question “What is getting in the way of giving each child an equal opportunity, an equal education?” and hinting the answer lies not with the schools themselves, but with Whitey.
I think you can’t understand what’s broken [in our school systems] if you don’t look here, at one of the most powerful forces shaping public education: white parents.
There were eye-rolls across social media as people wondered if there was anything the Times wouldn’t blame on white people