I caught the Nikole Hannah-Jones talk at Penn last week — and man. It got me thinking about so many things. I live-tweeted the event, so you can check out that thread:
.@nhannahjones “the issue of segregation in schools is not abstract. There are real children in real schools waiting.” This talk is going to be fire. pic.twitter.com/YP38NkGt22
— Stephen Danley (@SteveDanley) September 25, 2019
But I wanted to touch on a few things here, and some of the discussion that came out of it. The critiques Hannah-Jones made were powerful, and to those who’ve read her work, familiar. The arguments that slavery and segregation have carried forward, they’re present and damaging in our current society. And we need to make radical changes. Perhaps the vivid moment of this critique was when she discussed segregation in schools today:
"If you're okay with it now, you would have been okay with it then." @nhannahjones pic.twitter.com/SVjpB9m4YA
— Haisheng Yang (@yanghais) September 25, 2019
Had a chance after the talk to catch up with friends and talk about where these critiques take us. Increasingly, this is a big part of my work. There are the big policy responses (reparations, school integration) — but my work increasingly shows that segregation shows up in the small details of design, or the structure of school choice, or the ways philanthropy funds (or doesn’t fund) grassroots nonprofits.
I think, ultimately, this is an underplayed point. That we need not only the big, overarching policies that address segregation. But that segregation is part of the day-to-day fabric of communities, and exclusion needs to be intentionally addressed in those micro-spaces.
I’m interested in trying to figure out how to do that, and would love to hear your thoughts about it.
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