John Oliver examines why school segregation is still a big problem
He also gives a shout-out to Boston’s ‘wildly popular’ METCO program.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o8yiYCHMAlM
John Oliver tackled the topic of school segregation on Sunday’s episode of Last Week Tonight. The host examined the history of segregation in both Northern and Southern states and wondered why the number of public schools in the U.S. with less than 1 percent of nonwhite students more than doubled between 1988 and 2011.
Oliver then called out liberal New Yorkers, whom he imagined gathering around the TV, ready to watch a criticism of Southern states’ racist policies. In fact, he said, the state of New York has the highest rate of segregated public schools in the country, largely due to the high number of segregated public schools in the historically liberal New York City.
“Oh s***, liberal, white New Yorkers. Twist ending: You were racist the whole time,” Oliver said. “Put back those persimmons you bought yourselves as a treat from Fairway. You don’t deserve them anymore.”
Though Oliver saved his pointed barbs for New York, the fact that Northern states have a fraught history of school integration is not news for longtime Boston residents. The Boston Busing Riots, during which crowds hurled epithets and projectiles at buses carrying minority students to traditionally white schools, garnered national attention starting in 1974 after a court ordered Boston public schools with more than 50 percent nonwhite students to use busing to become more balanced. Oliver played a clip from a 2015 Atlantic video in which a Boston man named Robert, one of the students attending an integrated school, recalled the racism he encountered.
“I got off the school bus, [and] right on the steps, in white paint, ‘N******, go back home to Africa,’” Robert said. “You got all these whites out there with signs calling us n******, [saying], ‘Go back home,’ and then some of these same kids you’d see in class.”
Later on, Oliver cited the longstanding local METCO program as one of the few success stories nationally in school integration.
“Boston has long had a voluntary program to send kids from the city to schools in the suburbs,” Oliver said. “It’s tiny, but it’s wildly popular.”
But the problem, Oliver pointed out, is many people take a NIMBY (“not in my backyard”) approach to integration efforts: They recognize that a lack of integration can have detrimental effects on minority children, but they don’t want to agree to anything that could jeopardize the quality of their own child’s education.
“The hard truth is, you don’t have to be intentionally racist to do things that have racist effects,” Oliver said. “In the ’60s, if you had insisted on separate lunch counters not because you hated black people, but just because you loved your son so much you wanted him to get his lunch quicker, the end result would have been exactly the same.”
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