Story at a glance
- ”Nice White Parents“ is a new podcast series by The New York Times and Serial Productions, which the Times bought in July.
- The series delves into issues of desegregation and inclusion in one New York City public school.
- Changing American talked to reporter Chana Joffe-Walt and producer Julie Snyder.
Chana Joffe-Walt isn’t out to get nice white parents. In fact, she and her producer, Julie Snyder, are nice white parents themselves.
“Nice White Parents,” a new podcast series by The New York Times’s Serial Productions, started as an examination of desegregation and integration in American public schools. But as they sifted through more than five years of interviews and research, Joffe-Walt and Snyder found themselves coming back to one common thread.
“Often reforms, policies, discussions, they’re focusing on who the schools are failing, they’re focusing on the Black and brown students. And I think it is important to ask, who is the school serving?” Snyder told Changing America.
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Joffe-Walt, who was researching schools for her son, went into the project genuinely curious about understanding what was happening at the Boerum Hill School for International Studies. The mini-series of five episodes, each about an hour long, focuses on the School for International Studies and what happened when, in 2015, an influx of white children with wealthy parents came into a mostly Black and Latino student body.
“In a lot of ways I recognized myself and was like ‘Oh, crap — that was me. That was me four years ago.’ And I think I related a lot to the choices and the actions that a lot of the white parents were making,” said Snyder, the co-creator and producer of “Serial” and “S-Town,” who has two kids in New Jersey public schools.
So who are nice white parents?
Joffe-Walt defined them as “white parents who will say they are committed to public schools and integration and equality and make choices that don’t line up with those values.”
At first, the producer for “This American Life,” was simply documenting what was happening, attending PTA meetings, talking to students and trying to understand the narrative of what was happening in the school.
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“It was very evident in those interviews that people had different stories about what was happening in the school and that they weren’t speaking to one another or hearing one another — particularly that the white parents were not hearing the parents of color and understanding where they were coming from,” she said.
The history of segregation in American schools is a long one, which the podcast delves into to some extent in the context of this particular school. In the second episode of the series, Joffe-Walt dives into a pile of letters written by white parents pushing for a new integrated school in Brooklyn in 1963. But after following up, she learned that none of them had actually sent their children to that school.
“Even within one building there is so much more context and clarity when you are looking back in addition to looking at what is in front of you right at the moment, especially when it comes to race and power in schools,” said Joffe-Walt.
Of course, not everyone agrees with this version of history. Even before the podcast was released, its title generated controversy from conservatives including Ben Shapiro and Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas).
Disintegrationists are now claiming that if you are a good parent who wants to educate your child in the best possible way, you are inherently racist because you are exacerbating racial inequality. This holds only if you are white. https://t.co/MOeIMe6JbL
— Ben Shapiro (@benshapiro) July 23, 2020
When a major news outlet unapologetically embraces racism…. https://t.co/bSgU3navUx
— Ted Cruz (@tedcruz) July 23, 2020
Since it was published in late July, some critics have argued that nice white parents shouldn’t be held responsible for decades of structural racism and that policy and income inequality have a lot more to do with educational inequity. Joffe-Walt and Snyder do agree on one thing — there was a lot that didn’t make the final cut in production.
“We struggled with a lot of those questions. We kept on coming back to the advantaged white families that are part of the New York City public school system,” Snyder said. “Those are things that we have considered, but ultimately decided that the impact of this one part of this doesn’t necessarily change the overall story that we’re telling.”
That story resonated with many listeners, putting the podcast among the top 10 podcasts in the U.S. listed on Apple Podcasts this month.
“There are a lot of different families, white families and families of color, saying that they are understanding their experiences both as kids in New York City public schools as well as their experience as parents now and learning things about the way that they had experienced school as a kid,” Joffe-Walt said.
By the end of the series, even some of the characters in the story had changed their perspective, raising hope for other communities and schools in similar situations. The podcast is a story about one school system in one community in one part of America. But in the visceral reactions to the title and journey of nice white parents in “Nice White Parents,” there is one feeling Joffe-Walt settles on: shame.
“Nice white parents can’t grab every advantage for our own children and also maintain our identities as good citizens who believe in equitable schools. The shame is telling us we have a choice,” she says in the conclusion of the series. “But we can’t have both.”
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