“If It Is Not Good Enough for My Child, Then Why Are We Putting Any Children In Those Schools?”

Despite the1954, Brown V. Board of Education Supreme Court decision ruling that racial segregation of children in public schools violated the Equal Protections Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, many schools remain segregated or have re-segregated today.

Journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones told Fresh Air’s Terry Gross "It is important to understand that the inequality we see, school segregation, is both structural, it is systemic, but it's also upheld by individual choices. As long as individual parents continue to make choices that only benefit their own children ... we're not going to see a change."

Nikole Hannah-Jones chose to send her daughter to the neighborhood school with all the other children from their Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn neighborhood.  For her, it came down to making a moral decision. She believes that we cannot say, "This school is not good enough for my child" and then sustain that system. “I think that that is just morally wrong. If it is not good enough for my child, then why are we putting any children in those schools?” she asks.

I think Nikole Hannah-Jones raises some very valid points in her decision to send her daughter to the neighborhood school.  To learn more about why Nikole made the decision she made, continue reading the Terry Gross interview with her.