Tuning In: Nice White Parents

Happy Friday! A quick recommendation of a long listen this week, another podcast out of NYC.

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Nice White Parents starts with a school tour. Host Chana Joffe-Walt (This American Life) recalls the season five years ago when she started "learning about my options" for where to send her child to school in the New York City education system. Shopping. School administrators would show interested parents around their schools, highlighting the qualities, features, and amenities on offer; because of the direct relationship between enrolment and funding in the public school system, administrators at those schools weren't just principals, but salespeople. Behind, around, and throughout the pitches and tours, what struck Joffe-Walt was the unspoken racial segregation: students of colour, teachers of colour, principals of colour, and white parents.

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.

In the five episodes of Nice White Parents Joffe-Walt tells the story of one Brooklyn middle/high school and lays out how the choices of white parents have shaped it from before the first shovel bit the dirt for its foundations. What happens when white parents choose to make this school their place? When they choose not to? What misunderstandings and unseen forces trail in their wake? Joffe-Walt uses a conversational blend of interviews, archival material, and audio recordings (edited and produced by the stellar team at Serial Productions) to examine the gravitational pull of "nice" white parents on the public education system.

There are full reviews at Vulture and The New Yorker that do the show justice. It's difficult to enact any analysis or tell any story in the intersection of race, class, identity, and pedagogy perfectly, but Joffe-Walt and the Serial team do it well. The podcast speaks most directly and relevantly to urban white parents, so while the topic of public education is of pretty broad general interest, if you're in the target audience like me this is an especially thought-provoking listen.