My new column at Salon: on racism, privilege talk, and schools

I’m happy to announce that today I begin a new gig as a columnist at Salon. I’ll be writing a bimonthly (or is it biweekly: I can never get that one straight) column on the kinds of things I write about here. Here’s my first column, on racism, privilege talk, and schools.

Facebook can be a weird place on Martin Luther King Day. Some of my friends post famous passages from MLK’s speeches. Others post statistics on racial inequality. Still others, mostly white parents, post photographs of their children assembled in auditoriums and schoolyards. These are always hopeful images, the next generation stirring toward interracial harmony. Except for one thing: nearly everyone in the photos is … white.

In her public school this year, my first-grade daughter learned that Daisy Bates helped integrate the Little Rock schools. She knows that Ella Baker, someone I’d never heard of till I went to college, was part of the civil rights movement. Meanwhile, her school has a combined black and Latino population of 15 percent, down from nearly 30 percent just seven years ago.

In school, white children are taught to be conscious of race and racism in a way I never was when I was as a kid in the 1970s. Yet they go to schools that are in some respects more segregated now than they were in the 1970s.

Read on here.

And if you have ideas for columns—stories that aren’t being reported, authors who are not being interviewed or reviewed, topics that need to be addressed—please don’t hesitate to email me at corey.robin@gmail.com. I’m always looking for material.