Great book, about a topic I'm really interested in, and it provided a lot of good insight on if school districts matter, and if sending kids to a "good school" is just racist garbage and promoting segregation (spoiler alert, it is). The author did a really good job of mixing the journalism side of it, and the memoir side, making it both full of interesting stories and research, but also having a narrative to follow. That being said, the narrator felt a little sanctimonious sometimes. ( )

A journalist and mother wades through the decision about where to send her first daughter to school: the closest Oakland public school, where the majority of students are Black and brown, or try to get into another public school - or even a private school - where more students are white. Martin holds up her own values and her wishes for her daughter, and chooses the nearby school - then spends some time figuring out how best to support the principal, teachers, and other families there. After only a couple years at the school, the pandemic hits, heightening the differences between the schools, both in terms of resources and community.

See also: Nice White Parents (podcast), Having and Being Had by Eula Biss, On Immunity by Eula Biss, Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria by Beverly Tatum, Waking Up White by Debby Irving

Quotes/notes

Every person has to come to terms with - even if just for themselves - the gap between what they believe and how they live their lives. (18)

We act mystified by this inequity, all the while propping it up with our choices. (19)

Children of the Dream by Rucker C. Johnson (31)

"Green factors": faculty, staff, transportation, extracurricular activities, facilities (Green vs. County School Board of New Kent County, 1968) (43)

...schools like Emerson...feel unorganized to parents like me because they don't prioritize us or speak our language....We have come to equate respect with efficiency. But respect in multicultural city schools is about something else. (64)

Even while not exactly admitting that whiteness, middle-class-ness, is a culture, we elevate it as the preferred norm....But by never fully admitting that we are part of a culture, we evade critique. (76)

"You have to separate your ideology from your parenting. It's not the same." (118)

Show up, shush up, and stay put. (repeated)(131)

One of the great losses that comes from privilege is having a range of experience so narrow that it makes you emotionally bullish. (173)

Minor Feelings, Cathy Park Hong (173)

Ghosts in the Schoolyard, Eve L. Ewing (198)

"I'm not here to be right. I'm here to get it right." (Brene Brown, 209)

And just like that, my kid can read. Which is to say, she is practicing my religion for the first time. The world is hers. (260)

"Teaching can be a very radical thing, or it can be basically brainwashing everyone into the same false story." (Mrs. Minor, 263)

"You're not called to make decisions in a perfect world. You're called to make decisions in an imperfect world." (Dr. Yee, 280)

"Choosing an integrating school is not so much a sacrifice as it is reprioritizing what matters in building a world we want our children to be adults in." (Courtney Everts Mykytyn, 301)

"Five A.M. in the Pinewoods" by Mary Oliver: "I was thinking: / so this is how you swim inward / so this is how you flow outward / so this is how you pray." (312)

"Speak from what you know. Ask questions from what you don't know." (Lakisha Young, Oakland REACH, 342)

...even in racially diverse schools, the nodes of power - the PTA, the SSC, other spaces and times where power accrues and influences how the school runs and what it cares about and invests in - are often dominated by White and/or privileged women. The only way to disrupt that is for White and/or privileged women to cede leadership to parents of color. (347)

We are kind, or so we think, to individual people of color (this is where we feel we have control), while participating in the systems that disenfranchise, exploit, and sometimes even kill them (this is where we pretend we have no control). (358)

"One of the most important qualities a person can have in our time - a person who wants to make this a better world - is the capacity to stand in the tragic gap between corrosive cynicism and irrelevant idealism, between what is and could be." (Parker Palmer, 359) ( )