“Nice White Parents” is a new podcast from Serial Productions, a New York Times Company, about the 60-year relationship between white parents and the public school down the block. Listen to the first two episodes now and keep an eye out for new episodes each Thursday, available here and on your mobile device: Via Apple Podcasts | Via Spotify | Via Google
The Book of Statuses
A group of parents takes one big step together.‘I Still Believe in It’
White parents in the 1960s fought to be part of a new, racially integrated school in Brooklyn. So why did their children never attend?“I depended on several excellent archivists and historians to track the history of one school,” said Chana Joffe-Walt of her five-year process reporting “Nice White Parents,” which follows what happened when a group of white families arrived at a predominantly Black and Latino school in New York City.
“And there are a few specific books that ran on a loop in my head as I went,” she said. “They were essential in helping me understand what I was seeing and learning.”
Here are a few of those books, and Chana’s thoughts on each of them:
Margaret A. Hagerman
“White Kids”
In episode one, a white boy, part of a large group of new white students, talks about how the school has improved “with us here” and is now ranked higher in the “book on statuses.” He’s communicating what he’s learned about race at 10 years old, despite being in a school where the adults are saying “all children are equal.” Margaret Hagerman’s sociological research reveals that white children learn about race as much from the choices they see their parents make as from what they hear their parents say.
Amanda E. Lewis and John B. Diamond
“Despite the Best Intentions”
Integration is not just bodies in the building together — and this book takes us to one school where the halls are racially mixed but the classrooms are not. Lewis and Diamond explore why that is, including a very human and helpful look at white parents and the concept of “opportunity hoarding.”
Clarence Taylor
“Knocking at Our Own Door”
This is the essential history of the movement for desegregation in New York City. It’s a deeply researched book that describes the years of organizing that led up to Freedom Day in 1964, one of the largest civil rights demonstrations in American history. I owe so much of what I know about the names and details of New York’s movement for integration to Clarence Taylor.
Vanessa Siddle Walker
“The Lost Education of Horace Tate”
When I first heard the archival tape of Mae Mallory, a civil rights activist, saying her lawsuit against the New York City Board of Education had “nothing to do with wanting to sit next to white kids,” I thought of this book. It’s a gripping narrative about the careful, savvy and often clandestine work of Black educators in Georgia to secure school buses, textbooks, playgrounds and school buildings for Black kids. These educators saw desegregation as a strategy, a means to achieve equality. Ms. Siddle Walker argues they got “second-class integration” that cost them their jobs and the very benefits they’d fought to protect instead.
Elizabeth Gillespie McRae
“Mothers of Massive Resistance”
There’s a phrase from Ms. Gillespie McRae’s carefully researched book that has stayed with me: that white women have been “segregation’s constant gardeners.” She documents many decades of the quiet, everyday activism of “good” white mothers who helped maintain racial lines through their work on PTAs, and as social workers, teachers and midwives. This is a critical history that should be taught right alongside Brown v. Board of Education.
Matthew F. Delmont
“Why Busing Failed”
Busing was the tool of choice for white people resisting desegregation in northern states. Mr. Delmont writes, “White mothers in New York were talking about busing before any school boards or courts anywhere in the country had ordered it.” The idea of busing took hold in subsequent conversations about desegregation across the country. In the process, white mothers insisted busing wasn’t about race or policy or justice. It was just about transportation.
Eve L. Ewing
“Ghosts in the Schoolyard”
While working on episode three, I put this book down and wrote “PURPOSEFUL FORGETTING” in red marker on a white board. Ms. Ewing helped me understand how school policy can pretend that history doesn’t exist. It’s an expertly told story about the closing of nearly 50 schools in Chicago in 2013. The Chicago schools superintendent said that these schools were selected for closure because they were underutilized and lacking resources. In response, Ms. Ewing asks, “How could the person charged with doling out resources condemn an institution for not having enough resources?” Then, with precision, she lays out exactly how they got that way.
Noliwe Rooks
“Cutting School”
Ms. Rooks began with curiosity about the rich college students she kept meeting who were interested in working in poor schools. What is it about the education of other people’s children, she wondered, that is so consistently compelling to the wealthy? Ms. Rooks traces the dynamics of private money in public schools from Reconstruction to the present. She argues that programs like Teach for America and charter schools depend on racial and economic segregation, what she calls “segrenomics.”
"behind" - Google News
July 30, 2020 at 06:50PM
https://ift.tt/30cVmVV
The Reading List Behind ‘Nice White Parents’ - The New York Times
"behind" - Google News
https://ift.tt/2YqUhZP
https://ift.tt/2yko4c8
Bagikan Berita Ini
0 Response to "The Reading List Behind ‘Nice White Parents’ - The New York Times"
Post a Comment