Chana Joffe-Walt: Nice White Parents

About five years ago, This American Life producer Chana Joffe-Walt began exploring her options for sending her child to public school in New York City. It turned out she had many: She could choose her local zoned school, or a magnet school, or a gifted program, or perhaps a language program. In order to decide, she started touring the schools, and quickly noticed she had something in common with virtually every other parent being guided through the halls: She was white. This was true even though the administrators giving the tours, and the children in the classrooms, were almost always people of color—with the exception of the gifted classrooms. They had the white kids.

Joffe-Walt recounts this anecdote at the beginning of her new podcast Nice White Parents, which arrived in late summer to a country grappling explicitly with racism amid the pandemic, an audience of exhausted parents, and a predictable conservative backlash. She acknowledges that, as a veteran education reporter, she “knew the schools were segregated” and “shouldn’t have been surprised.” And yet, as she told me recently, “There’s knowing, and then there’s, like, knowing.”

“When we look for what’s broken, for how our schools are failing, we focus on who they’re failing—poor kids, Black kids, and brown kids,” Joffe-Walt says in the show’s first episode. “We ask, why aren’t they performing better? Why aren’t they achieving more? Those are not the right questions.” Instead, she suggests, we should be looking at who is benefiting from the status quo, and thus has an interest in impeding change. Enter the