Earlier this month, WNYC hosted a panel discussion about race, gentrification and a segregated New York City school system that is eerily similar to the south of the civil rights era despite being in the melting pot capital of the world.
The discussion, called “Power Lines: A Conversation on Race, Class, a City and Its Schools,” was produced by, Rebecca Carroll, a Black woman with a son in the Brooklyn public school system. Carroll is a writer and author who now produces for WNYC’s “Power Lines,” a new series that’s dedicated to discussing the changing race and economic demographic of the city and its effects on different communities. She went through great lengths (visiting various schools) to put her biracial son in a school that would include kids and teachers who looked like her.
While putting the discussion together, Carroll didn’t have a specific demographic in mind or particular message that she wanted to get across. She simply wanted to start a discussion about an issue that cannot be swept under the rug.
“I wanted for people who are not thinking about it to think about it … for people who didn’t realize that this issue is integral to their lives, i.e., people who don’t have children in these school systems. It is still an issue that they need to be thinking about,” said Carroll in a phone interview with the AmNews. “It is a community story. It is a story about the livelihood of the city.”
The idea to have this event came about, in part, because of the outcry over the Department of Education’s plans to rezone Dumbo and Brooklyn Heights. It would force some kids from the affluent, predominately white but overcrowded P.S. 8 to go to the underperforming predominately Black and Latino P.S. 307, which has room to spare. Whites are upset about sending their kids to a school that lacks resources and where their children will be a minority, and Blacks are apprehensive about what having kids from the affluent side of town could mean for their pockets—more whites could move in to be closer to P.S. 307 and drive up the cost of living.
Panelists included activist and former NFL player Wade Davis II, Fusion reporter Collier Meyerson and documentary filmmaker Hamilton Harris—all three are Black. Having an all-Black panel was not the intention of Carroll. Television critic Matt Zoller Seitz, a single white father of two teenagers in the Park Slope public school system, was supposed to be on the panel but got stuck in traffic on the way to the event. The balance would have been welcomed, however the three Black panelists had experiences that gave people in the audience a varied perspective.
For the first 20 minutes, the event was mediated by Staceyann Chin, a Jamaican-born poet, performing artist, activist and mother, before she had to run and Carroll took over. Before leaving, Chin shared that when she first moved to Crown Heights, her spacious one bedroom was just $900. Gentrification has upped that price, and like so many, she’s feeling the effects of a tightening purse string. She also chimed in about the facelift that Brower Park, an infamous playground in Crown Heights, has undergone. It used to be a place filled with drugs, gangs and roaming pit bulls, but now it’s cleaned and filled with Black nannies caring for white babies.
In certain neighborhoods, Davis pointed out, there are several businesses that deal with check cashing , liquor and bail bonds, but once the neighborhood becomes whiter, those stereotypical institutions mysteriously disappear and are replaced by things such as community gardens. There are policies put in place that ignore the needs of a community until whites move in.
“I think the scary thing about gentrification is what happens before gentrification, there is a stripping of resources, there is the allowing of communities to decay,” said Davis.
Shortly before the panelists began their discussion, a short audio clip of people sharing their thoughts on the changes in the community played.
“Look there, you see those lights? Those lights were never put here ’til the number of white people increased,” said a man from Farragut, Brooklyn. “The message is: Our lives matter, but some more than others.”
A white mother from Bed-Stuy was in the audience and admitted that she was a part of the wave of white people who moved in and displaced many Blacks. She wanted to know how she could build relationships, make a difference and open up a conversation about race with members of her neighborhood—those who are white and the few Blacks remaining.
The panel agreed that coming to an event such as this one was a step in the right direction, because she was acknowledging how her presence in her community had taken something away from someone else.
“I think that there is some time that needs to be spent sitting in that privilege and feeling really lousy about it,” said Carroll during the discussion.
The audience was predominantly white.
“I was slightly surprised that it was a bit more white than Black or other people of color, but I also feel that, that speaks very much to the WNYC audience and listenership,” Carroll told the AmNews.
Most WNYC listeners are white liberals, which Carroll hopes will get more whites talking more about race amongst one another. By default, people of color are always the ones left to figure out how to maneuver the implications of race—that’s what America was built on.
Carroll is also working on new strategies to bring the “Power Lines” discussion to more people of color so that they can be involved in a more racially integrated conversation.