Today, Explained - The new secession

Episode Date: June 4, 2019

Wealthy white residents are trying to secede from East Baton Rouge Parish, Louisiana. The Atlantic’s Adam Harris says they’re part of a growing trend of school resegregation. (Transcript here.) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

You asked for a Quip for the kids, they made a Quip for the kids. It's got the same guiding pulses, it's got the same two-minute timer, but it's also got some watermelon-flavored toothpaste. The Quip starts at just $25 and you can go to getquip.com slash explained right now and get your first refill pack for free. That's G-E-T-Q-U-I-P dot com slash explained. Something unusual is happening in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. In the southeastern corner in this unincorporated area, a group of parents and advocates is seeking to essentially create their own city.

Adam Harris writes about education for the Atlantic. It grows out of this movement of trying to create school districts in order to have these separate schools. This is a process that began in around 2012 and is continuing on to today, where in October, they'll be voting on essentially whether or not they'll be able to create their own city. A movement began to form a new city in the unincorporated southern area of East Baton Rouge Parish. This area is known as St. George. These parents and advocates were kind of fed up in a way with the local schools. The schools in East Baton Rouge Parish had been rated consistently as the lowest performing in the state, and there was violence in the schools and all of these different things

that amount to this coded language. The citizens of the proposed city of St. George were hopeful their legitimate concerns about education and the direction of the parish would be heard and that things would improve. Unfortunately, these families have watched taxes increase, violent crime explode, and schools continue to fail. And so these white, predominantly wealthy parents essentially said, we want to create our own school district. So they file a petition. They try to get the state legislature to allow them to create their own school district. And the state legislature is like, wait, you guys can't do that.

You don't have the votes to do that. By 2014, they're like, well, maybe we should just create our own city. If we create our own city, we've seen another school district central do it. If we create our own city, we've seen another school district, Central, do it. If we create our own city, we can have our own school district. It'll give us more ammo for those purposes. Hello, friends. This map could be the future of East Baton Rouge Parish. You are looking at the boundaries of the proposed city of St. George.

The people inside those... They create this petition. They get thousands and thousands of signatures to create their own city. And they come up short. The battle over the potential city has raged on for months. Supporters say it's past time they break away from a city they believe overtaxes and underdelivers. This group called Better Together that was really advocating for keeping Baton Rouge together to keep those tax dollars in the same place gets thousands of signatures of their own and basically gets people to recant their signatures on the petition. And the movement fails. So St. George goes back and they're like, well, let's regroup. We have all of this energy behind

us still, even though we came up 71 votes short. But now we can cut back on our area. We know where our supporters are. So they cut out and carve out a couple of housing projects, essentially, apartment complexes that weren't supportive of the movement. The area gets whiter. It gets wealthier. And they go back and they need fewer signatures on the petition because the area is a little bit smaller. So this time around, they're able to get the amount of signatures that is needed to basically put it on the ballot to vote to create their own city. And what will St. George look like in comparison to the city it's breaking off of? East Baton Rouge Parish is almost about 50-50 between black

residents and white residents. And the city of St. George, by comparison, will be more than 70% white. So it's going to be a largely white area. The schools in East Baton Rouge Parish are about 81% black. The schools in St. George will be predominantly white. How's it going down in Baton Rouge? How are people feeling about this? What does it look like on the ground? In East Baton Rouge Parish, there are a lot of upset families, particularly those who know that by pulling those resources out of that school district in East Baton Rouge, by pulling those tax dollars out, it's going to deepen that inequality.

Karen Carter-Peterson from New Orleans, she said the entire process has, quote, racial implications. I didn't get sent here to sit at my desk and watch injustices and unfairness happen. It'll be a goddamn shame if this bill passes. And are the parents advocating for this sort of separation, this branching off, aware of how this might look to everyone else in East Baton Rouge Parish? They are. You know, I reached out to several people from the St. George movement, sending them messages on LinkedIn and Facebook and Twitter and emails and sent them a long list of questions and didn't get a response. But they did speak with Frontline. When I read headlines such as the fact that this is nothing but a secession to get away from the low-income citizens as well as making it a race issue, it's extremely disturbing to me.

I've been called a racist in no uncertain terms. I'm not a racist. I can't, you know, I'm not going to try to attempt to defend it. What I do is I let my actions speak. He's arguing that it's not about race. It's about pulling away for those resources to benefit the children in this St. George area. In a statement today, St. George said the movement has nothing to do with class or race and says this documentary does not accurately portray their movement. The advocates for St. George said the movement has nothing to do with class or race and says this documentary does not accurately portray their movement. The advocates for St. George like to argue that this isn't a racial thing, but there's this long lineage of arguing that school secessions were not about race.

They were about taking ownership of your tax dollars. They were about local control of that money. What began five years ago as an effort to spin off from the parish school district has become a case for representation. How are the St. George supporters dealing with all this blowback? So one of the things that they've started doing is they don't talk about the schools as much. And that's an important distinction because the schools argument, it's not the best argument because if you're trying to create the separated school district, it's going to further and deepen inequality in one school district.

It doesn't seem to stand up to a kind of legal wrangling. Essentially, their argument is that it's not a completely segregated school district even though it's going to create a more intensely segregated school district in Baton Rouge. Is this just limited to Louisiana or is this happening elsewhere in the country? So this is sort of happening across the country where you've had these micro districts break off into smaller entities of their own to create their own school districts. This charge has kind of been led in recent years by the South. According to a report from EdBuild, which is kind of this nonprofit that's looking at public school funding, and there have been 73 communities that have split off to form their own districts since 2000. In the last two years, that rate has kind

of accelerated. Originally, it was just breaking off from districts into your own school district. And now it's full on breaking off into your own city from these kind of unincorporated districts to create not only your own schools, but also your own services. It's interesting. It's like an evolution of white flight, which was just moving your kids to the suburbs to avoid whatever school districts that were perceived as lesser. What is this one called? Does it have a name? Well, we call it the new secession, but it is kind of an exacerbated white flight where instead of moving to a suburb, you're creating a suburb all its own. My name is Stephen Baham. I have a child attending Woodlawn Middle School, and I am against the St. George breakaway.

I live in East Baton Rouge Parish, right outside the city limits of Baton Rouge, and we live in the part of town that would become St. George. We're pretty satisfied with the schools and our daughter's education at the schools. She's been one of the children chosen to be part of the Gifted and Talented program. The school is very diverse. You have students from all walks of life and all different types of backgrounds, religious backgrounds, socioeconomic backgrounds, racial backgrounds. We are a, I guess, middle-income Christian family. We're African-American. When I drop our daughter off in the morning, I see kids speaking to their parents in Spanish.

I see kids speaking to their parents in Arabic. Ultimately, I would like her to be able to interact with people from all walks of life and be appreciative of each person's culture. I recall recently that she told me about a couple of the kids in her class that had to go home early because it was the start of Ramadan. And the kids also explained what that meant and how their family goes through that celebration. The St. George breakaway is now more about separating an economic subset of society from the rest of the East Baton Rouge parish and Baton Rouge the city. I would hope that people who live in this St. George district would vote down

it becoming a split city simply because it's in the better interest of the kids and the parents of those kids to utilize the East Baton Rouge Parish school system and those parents to interact with those schools to help improve the school district as a whole. There was this historic Supreme Court decision that was supposed to prevent stuff like this from happening, but it looks like it's not doing so hot in its 65th year. I'm Sean Ramos for him. That's in a minute on Today Explained. Hello? Tim from Brooklyn? It's me. Sometimes I feel like you're my only friend.

I feel like you're the only one who calls me, that's for sure. Not enough people use the phone anymore, Tim. The millennials killed the phone. Yeah, we're trying. We're trying real hard. It's not taking. You know what the millennials didn't do is kill the toothbrush. Well, we kill the toothbrush.

As we established on the program yesterday, I saw you in Brooklyn recently, your home, and brought you some Quip refills. What we did not establish is whether or not you actually changed the refills. If you're brushing with a fresh new refill right now, Tim from Brooklyn. That's true. Millennials also killed the remembering to do things when you're supposed to do them industry. You haven't changed it yet? I still haven't changed it. I'm sorry. I spared you going to getquip.com slash explained, G-E-T-Q-U-I-P dot com slash explained to buy the quip where you would have paid something around $25 or more if you wanted to soup it up and you would have gotten your first refills for free. I spared you all that and you just couldn't even pop the thing on?

Well, you didn't show me how to do it. You know what, Tim from Brooklyn? Here's what I pledge to you. By week's end, we will have your Quip electric toothbrush free refill brush head placed upon your Quip brush and have you brushing your way to a nice sunny weekend. Will you do this, Sean from D.C.? Will you call me tomorrow and walk me through it? Tim from Brooklyn, you have my word.

This is the best podcast service ever. The Supreme Court of the United States has decided that separate public educational facilities for the races are inherently unequal. And therefore, compulsory school segregation laws are unconstitutional. I guess it's a little ironic to talk about this like new secession 65 years after Brown v. Board of Education. Aren't there laws in place to prevent this kind of thing from happening? There are laws in place to prevent this kind of thing from happening, but it's kind of like tax dodges, right? Where a new tax law will go into place and rich people will

find a way around it. So if you're looking at the school segregation laws that we have on the books, people have been able to find ways around that. One, they stop talking about race. They say this is a race-neutral thing. Or simply, oh, we want to create a city so that we can have our tax resources go towards the programs that we want. So at a base level, there's a matter of whether or not the Justice Department will vigorously enforce the laws that are currently on the books. Brown was argued in 1952. How does 2019 compare to the early 1950s in terms of school segregation? So there was a period where you had busing and you had places that were kind of forced by the government to kind of try to integrate their schools. Little Rock, Arkansas, and the first phase of the trouble. The white population are determined to prevent colored students from going to the school

their own children attend. Any school that is predominantly Negro in Boston is an inadequate school. The buses then roll. They're assigned mission to transport nearly 9,000 of Pontiac youngsters in an effort to achieve racial balance in the city's elementary and junior high schools. And you did see some improvement, I mean, from literally state-sanctioned segregation to a modicum of desegregated schools. But if you're looking at this on a continuum, Black students are more likely to attend segregated schools now than they were 50 years ago.

There was a desegregation of schools. Now there's, as Nicole Hannah-Jones has called it, a resegregation of schools. And the interesting thing there is that truly integrated schools. That's something that we've never really had. That's shocking. How can Black students be more likely to attend segregated schools now than they were in the early 1950s when this was actually legal? I think as this kind of wealth inequality has grown

and as gentrification has driven people out of cities, that's where you're seeing some of that intense segregation happening. People don't live near each other. You're also seeing this cityhood movement where people are actively breaking away from each other and creating their own school districts. So as there has been less vigorous enforcement of the civil rights laws and as places have started to create their own school districts, as Black families have been driven out of areas, and even as white families and white liberals have sent their kids to schools that have more white students, it has created schools that are pretty deeply unequal and segregated.

How do we even start to fix this? There are the top-down laws on the books, but then also there's this idea that people want to send their kids to good schools. Honestly, it's also about people choosing to send their kids to good schools. Honestly, it's also about people choosing to send their kids to integrated schools. We won't have integration until we have people that are actively buying into the idea of integrated schools. And this isn't all East Baton Rouge, Louisiana, right? This is happening in other parts of the country too, right? Oh, yeah.

If you're looking in Chicago or you're looking in New York or you're looking in places like L.A. where housing is kind of very race-specific, the schools reflect that. I've reported on segregation in New York and I've also reported on segregation in the South. And there are pieces, bits and pieces of it that are incredibly similar. There was a video that circulated, I want to say last spring, with some pretty liberal parents in New York where they're at the school board meeting and they're talking about segregation in their schools and they're talking about changing how the schools are districted. An 11-year-old, you worked your butt off and you didn't get that, what you needed or wanted. You're telling them you're going to go to a school that's not going to educate you in the same way you've been educated. Life sucks. Is that what the DOE wants to say? These parents are furious and they're yelling and they're crying and they're talking about where their students are going to be going to school and how they could get the best education. And it's kind of all this coded language.

And it creates this really interesting picture where if you're not talking about integration and segregation head on, it's not something that you can address. You can't fix a problem without first identifying the problem. But what do you say to a parent who's like, I want to get my kids away from violence or slackers or kids who disrupt my kids' education? There's always going to be a parent who feels that way, right? Children are kind of this inherently selfish thing, right? Where people are, they see their kids as extensions of themselves and they want the best for their kids. We've kind of created this model of education that's saying,

I want the best for my kid as opposed to having the best for the country. What is the best for all children? If people decided, yes, the best thing for all of our kids would be to send them to classrooms together so that they could learn and work together where people are saying that maybe we could start to address some of these social ills by desegregating schools, by living and working in this integrated environment. That could fundamentally change things. Thanks to the Quip Electric Toothbrush people for supporting the show today. The Quip electric toothbrush starts at just $25. And if you go to getquip.com slash explained, a.k.a. getquip.com slash explained right now, your first set of refills comes free of charge, which, amazing. Avery Truffleman, you make all kinds of podcasts.

What are the podcasts that you've made that people would have heard? I work for a show called 99% Invisible, and I make my own little show about fashion and clothes called Articles of Interest. But right now, I'm working on a new show for Vox Media and Curbed and it's called Nice Try! I love the name. What is it about? Failed Utopias. It's fascinating. It's the stories of people who've tried to make a new world for themselves. They don't like where they are and so they branch off and they try to do things their own way and in some way or another, it just doesn't go according to plan and there's just a lot we can learn from it.

Are these like big examples of utopias? Are they small scale? Is it like let's build a treehouse utopia or like what can we expect here? Well, let me tell you the first story is about the founding of America. Are we in a giant utopia? What is this experiment we're all in? What? It was utopia-esque for some, but maybe

less so for others. It's up for debate for some people whether or not America ever found success, but definitely in its first stages, in the early, early, early stages, it was just like failure all around. Just no one liked it. Everyone was miserable. Bad for all parties. And people can find that episode now? That episode is out right now. And there are going to be new utopias out every Thursday

for the next six weeks. Rate, review, subscribe. Nice try.