The Memoir Spot
A snapshot review of a book related to the Non-fiction Feature
Also in this Monthly Bulletin:
The Non-fiction Feature: Race at the Top by Natasha Warikoo
The Product Spot: “Sold a Story” – podcast
The Pithy Take
This is, at its core, a book about our education systems, the White privilege entangled in those systems, and the deep breaths and vulnerability it requires to face it squarely. Courtney E. Martin, a journalist, is a White mother who lives in Oakland, suddenly facing the prospect of picking a school for her young daughter.
Does she pick the several wealthy (White-dominated) schools slightly farther away from her neighborhood, with bubbly tours of the campuses, or does she pick the school across the street from her, filled predominately with students from low-income families? What does it mean to share our resources, to integrate schools, and how can well-meaning White families show up in a non-savior manner? Martin is consistently critical of herself — channeling her overthinking onto the page — but publishing that type of expansive self-questioning is laudable, and those of use who are not questioning should begin to.
I suspect that White economically privileged and well-intentioned people have shirked our moral responsibility to the common good for decades under the cover of responsible parenting. In a time of eroding public institutions and soaring economic inequality, we have normalized private solutions whereby our children won’t have to endure the most broken American systems–public education, health care, the courts. By doing so, we’ve inadvertently created one of the country’s biggest problems: increasing and unconscionable inequity. We act mystified by this inequity, all the while propping it up with our choices.
Learning in Public: Lessons for a Racially Divided America from My Daughter’s School
Author: Courtney E. Martin
Publisher: Little Brown and Company
400 pages | 2022
Purchase
