Hey everybody just a heads up before you listen to this episode there's a good bit of

salty language in it if you're not in the mood for that or if you're listening with

somebody you don't want to expose to that then try this one later thanks

otherwise enjoy then try this one later. Thanks. Otherwise, enjoy.

This is the United States of Anxiety, a show about the unfinished business of our history and its grip on our future.

Brown versus Board of Education declared school-based racial segregation to be unconstitutional.

It was intended to desegregate schools, but that isn't exactly what happened.

There's not an easy answer, and I we always wanted to be easy but undoing racial

cast in an educational system is not easy.

And I say segregation now, segregation tomorrow, and segregation forever.

I never really realized how unequal things were until I came back here.

We're talking about physical placement. We're not talking about a culturally

competent education. Students are not resting. We are not going to rest because this is not

okay. It's not fair and a public school system should not be propagating inequities between communities.

Welcome to the show, I'm Kai Wright. Schools. It is hard to find a more plain example of unfinished business in our history than the very long debate over how to equitably educate our kids.

From pre-K all the way up to graduate programs, it's been a core challenge since at least

reconstruction, culturally, politically politically and legally.

And yet we are constantly reminded how little progress has actually been made.

Schools remain starkly segregated by both race and class. Even among seemingly integrated school systems,

it often turns out there's stark segregation within each school, as the

pandemic has dramatically reminded us.

So in today's show, we returned to a story we began telling just before the pandemic erupted.

...