Listening to Nice White Parents is at once validating and a dagger to the heart. It covers a bunch of stuff that I experienced first hand as a public school student in New York. Things that felt weird at the time but that I couldn't quite put my finger on https://www.thisamericanlife.org/712/nice-white-parents

My parents were very much like the "Nice White Parents" of the sixties and seventies described in the second episode. They moved into the community I grew up in, the community they still live in, wanting to raise their children in an integrated system.

But they also embraced the "accelerated track" program that largely established a class segregation if not a racial one. There were black and brown children in the gifted program at my school, but it was majority white while the rest of the school was not.

The program had two entry points, one in middle school and one in junior high school. I had an interesting vantage point at the time. I qualified in middle school along with all of my classmates but was denied entry when the gatekeepers found out I was learning disabled.

The kids who entered in middle school were overwhelmingly white and put in a French immersion program that included an expensive study aboard trip (just like the Brooklyn school in the podcast).

But I wasn't allowed to enter the program in middle school So I spent time in floating back and forth between "accelerated" and "normal" tracks from jr high on. Once in high school I decided to stay in accelerated science, history, english and drop down to "normal" math.

It stuck me as weird that there was even a distinction since the normal math class covered the exact same material with the exact same statewide test at the end. The only difference seemed to be that "normal" was where all the black and brown kids were.

I remember feeling that the accelerated track felt like a community. We all knew each other and had been in the same classes together for years. The normal math class felt like a whole new world filled with strangers.

But I also hated the accelerated track because it was filled with people who felt they were better than me and run by teachers who would frequently tell me the only way someone with my learning problems could get the scores I was getting was by cheating.

Years later when Facebook became a thing I would look up all those supposed "gifted" students and take satisfaction with how little they had accomplished. The lesson I had learned was that intellectual elitism is bullshit and entitlement kills potential.

But now listening to Chana Joffe-Walt's reporting I realize the lesson I should have learned is that the accelerated track was not for gifted students at all. It was for white students. It was a ploy to lure white families and their money into the public school system.

My family fell for it hook, line and sinker. My peers accepted that the white students did better than the majority black/brown students because we were better. We didn't notice that we were separated even in classes that had no academic ranking like gym, art and music.

This has put a lot of the critical moments and experiences of my childhood in a completely different context. I've spent my whole life with a chip on my shoulder about this "elite" program. Realizing that it was all about reinforcing my white privilege is a strange feeling.