school segregation

“…NIKOLE HANNAH-JONES: It’s hard. We have so much inequality that everything both in housing and in schools is the extremes and there are a handful of truly integrated schools but that’s not the experience in most of the schools. The inequality makes it even harder. I write about how black poor schools are deprived systematically of resources and then you’re asking someone who has resources to put their kid in a school that I’ve just said doesn’t have resources. That inequality makes it difficult and also makes it convenient. Then you can say it’s not that I don’t want to but this school is just not actually good, right. It’s those two things when you have such inequality in a system and integration becomes even harder.

CHRIS HAYES: It’s also because, what I find maddening about it too is that the structure, I’ve talked about this on the podcast in the context of housing, right. The structure is sort of invisible to you, it’s just there and then you walk around making these individual choices of whether a citizen or as a consumer and you unilaterally can’t overcome the structure. For instance, in New York you as a white person you can move into a majority black neighborhood. You’re going to bring with that all sorts of different… it does, right? The structure is still there. It has to be a collective political project to undo it. It has to be a collective…

NIKOLE HANNAH-JONES: Work to undo it.

CHRIS HAYES: Yeah.

NIKOLE HANNAH-JONES: What I always say is, the inequality is systemic, but it is also held up by individual choices.

CHRIS HAYES: Right….”