712: Nice White Parents
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from W.B. E. Z. Chicago. It's this American life from Ira Goss. So, what about producers, Khanna Jafiwat, has been a few years reporting on the history of one school. It's a public school in a big city. And at the beginning, Khanna thought the story was about segregation and inequality in public schools. But the more she spoke to people and researched what had happened at this one school, the more she realized it was actually about the inordinate amount of power that white parents had at this one school. And she found so many stories there that we realized we couldn't fit it on to one episode of our program and that we would need to release it as its own little mini series podcast. So, last week, a little three-minute trailer was released. The name of the show was "Nice White Parents." And even before the first episodes appeared, it became this war. Thousands of ratings and comments online at Apple Podcasts, people saying it's divisive, that it's racist to talk about white parents, giving the show one-star reviews, other people giving it five-star reviews to cancel out the one-star reviews. Remember, nobody had heard the show yet. The comments were about some imagined thing that people thought that the show would be rather than the actual story that Khanna tells. Which is, you know, kind of funny. I think it also speaks to how the entire subject freaks people out so much. White parents. How rarely that is explicitly named as the subject of reporting. There is so much reporting on people of color as people of color and so little reporting on white people as white people. Even when they're at the heart of a story, as they are with this one. And when you listen to what Khanna found, you feel how rare it is. I personally found it illuminating. You can listen and judge for yourself. Today, we're presenting right here one of the stories that Khanna tells in her series about one of the big turning points in the school's recent history. Before we start, I want to note everything you're going to hear this hour was recorded before coronavirus arrived. So it is a world where people, you know, get together in person with no masks or anything. Don't be shocked. All right. Here's Khanna. I started reporting this story at the very same moment as I was trying to figure out my own relationship to the subject of this story. White parents in New York City public schools. I was about to be one of them. When my kid was old enough, I started learning about my options. I had many. There was a zoned public school in Brooklyn, or I could apply to a handful of specialty programs, a gifted program or a magnet school or a language program. So I started to look around. This was five years ago now, but I vividly remember these tours. I'd show up in the lobby of a school at the time listed on the website. Look around and notice that all or almost all of the other parents who had shown up for the 11 a.m. middle of the workday early in the shopping season school tour were other white parents. As a group, we'd walk the halls following a school administrator, almost always a man or woman of color, through a school full of black and brown kids. We'd peer into classroom windows, watch the kids sit in a circle on the rug, ask questions about the lunch menu, homework policy, discipline. Some of us would take notes. And the administrators would sell. The whole thing was essentially a pitch. We offer STEM. We have a partnership with Lincoln Center. We have a dance studio. They were pleading with us to please take part in this public school. I don't think I've ever felt my own consumer power more viscerally than I did shopping for a public school as a white parent. We were entering schools that people like us had ignored for decades. They were not our places, but we were being invited to make them ours. The whole thing was made so
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