Where Should I Send My Kid to School?

Call Your Girlfriend

Ann Friedman and Aminatou Sow

Society & Culture

4.7 • 4.2K Ratings

🗓️ 17 September 2021

⏱️ 52 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

A simple question with loaded answers.

On today's episode, we unravel a few of those knots with Courtney Martin and Dr. Dena Simmons, whose interracial friendship has weathered distance, accountability, academic rigor, heartbreak, and mutual support. They met over a decade ago when Courtney profiled Dena for her book about young activists, Do It Anyway. At the time, Dena was a classroom teacher. Since then she has earned her PhD and is writing her own book about breaking up with whiteness, the forthcoming White Rules for Black People.

Dena also gave Courtney notes on a subsequent book, Learning in Public, about Courtney's decision to send her white child to her neighborhood school in Oakland, rather than seeking a private school or other public school that centered whiteness. Dena's notes and questions to Courtney are included in footnotes and strikeouts in the main text.

This is a conversation about building better schools, deeper community, and how friendship can be at the heart of our activism.

Learning in Public by Courtney Martin

Dena's website

Courtney's website

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to Call Your Girlfriend, a podcast for long-distance besties everywhere.
0:06.2	I'm Amina Tussaud and I'm Anne Friedman.
0:09.6	I am so excited to hand over the mics for today's episode,
0:14.6	mics being plural, our guests are Courtney E. Martin and Dr. Dena Simmons.
0:20.6	And they are united by a couple of things, like one they are true,
0:25.9	deep, now long-running friends. They are intellectual collaborators,
0:31.7	people whose ideas about the world have really informed each other's work.
0:36.1	And most recently they have both been working on books
0:41.0	and were each other's accountability and kind of like feedback partners through that process.
0:46.4	Courtney's book is out now. It's called Learning in Public,
0:49.8	Lessons for Horatially Divided America from my daughter's school.
0:53.7	It is about her choice to send her daughter, who is white, like Courtney,
0:59.2	to just the public school down the block,
1:01.7	rather than trying to get her into a like,
1:06.7	air quotes here, better rated school, slightly further away,
1:10.5	or send her to private school.
1:11.8	And the book is about living your values,
1:15.3	living your anti-racist values specifically of your white,
1:18.4	and living in community holistically.
1:21.7	And Dena Simmons is also at work on a book, which is not out yet.
1:26.9	It's forthcoming in 2022 called White Rules for Black People.
1:30.9	And Dr. Simmons is an education expert.
	...

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