Board of Education and now black children are more segregated than they’ve been since the 1970s. So yes, we get the Voting Rights Act and now we get the gutting of the Voting Rights Act. Hannah-Jones: Well, there’s forward progress and then we move back. I’m just saying that there is a direction to things. Goldberg: I’m not arguing for applauding. Hannah-Jones: I mean, in a country that has set itself apart as a beacon of democracy, the fact that we’re applauding that black folks now have had, for 40 years, full citizenship rights in the country of their birth, in the country of their grandparents’ birth, in the country their great grandparents’ birth-it's just hard to feel a lot of optimism. Goldberg: I just want it known for the record that I'm offending you already. I guess I get almost offended by people who want us to pause and be congratulatory about forward progress. Hannah-Jones: None of us would argue that there hasn’t been progress in a range of things. It’s been stutter stepped, but we ain’t in 1866 or 1873. Life in America for African-Americans has gotten better. There are more African-Americans in the middle class since Reconstruction. We don’t live in a period of history free of lynchings, but the number of lynchings has gone down. Before there was a Civil Rights Act, there was no Civil Rights Act. Board of Education, there was no Brown v. Life has gotten better, no? Before there was before there was Brown v. Goldberg: But let’s use African-Americans as an example. It just perpetually turns back on itself. I would say the arc is actually a circle. Nikole Hannah-Jones: I think it has not a lot of basis in historical fact. Are you in the camp of people who say that long-term optimism is premature? And Ta-Nehisi says that there really is no moral arc, but if there were it would just bend toward chaos. I’ve adopted the viewpoint of Barack Obama, that history is an arrow and the moral arc of the universe is long but it bends toward justice. Jeffrey Goldberg: You and I have both had these conversations with my colleague Ta-Nehisi Coates about the arc of history and which way it bends. “Most white people are willing to trade that,” she has found.Īn edited transcript of their conversation is below. In a hyper-competitive economy where test scores and college admissions and lifetimes earnings are all linked, Hannah-Jones has seen that the soft benefits of integration, like empathy or compassion, are low on a family’s priority list. “It’s literally, will you receive a quality education or not? Will you be a full citizen in the country of your birth?” “If one were to believe that having people who are different from you makes you smarter, that you engage in a higher level of thinking, that you solve problems better, there are higher-level ways that integration is good for white folks,” Jones says.įor black children, the benefits of attending an integrated school are much more drastic. In a recent episode of The Atlantic Interview, Nikole Hannah-Jones and The Atlantic’s editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, discuss how integrated schools are good for white children and black children. “We have a system where white people control the outcomes, and the outcome that most white Americans want is segregation,” she says. “If their neighborhood school is black, they want choice.” Charter schools and magnet schools spring up in place of neighborhood schools, where white students can be in the majority. “White communities want neighborhood schools if their neighborhood school is white,” she says. Nikole Hannah-Jones has chronicled this phenomenon around the country, and seen it firsthand in her neighborhood in Brooklyn. But the schools remain stubbornly segregated. Public schools in gentrifying neighborhoods seem on the cusp of becoming truly diverse, as historically underserved neighborhoods fill up with younger, whiter families.
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