John Oliver explains the massive school segregation problem all over the US
HBO's "Last Week Tonight" host kicked off the segment on Sunday night with the alarming statistic that between 1988 and 2011, American schools in which 1% or less of the population is white, also referred to as "apartheid" schools, doubled.
"Even as our society has grown more diverse, nearly 7,000 schools have the racial makeup of the audience of your average Tyler Perry movie," Oliver said. "And that one white guy is [film critic] Leonard Maltin, and he has to be there. It's his job."
What's even more interesting is where the problem of segregated schools is most prevalent. According to the UCLA Civil Rights Project, the South is the least segregated region of America while the most segregated state is New York. And that's primarily driven by the large amount of segregated schools in New York City.
"Of course racism exists in New York. Have you never seen 'West Side Story'?" Oliver joked. "It's a musical about love transcending the obstacle of one person being Puerto Rican. It will never work!"
It turns out that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 forced states to integrate schools where there were segregation laws. So many of the Northern states got away with never integrating their schools at all.
Oliver explained, "So if a New York school was all white, because it was drawn from an all-white area, even if that area had been kept that way due to a host of explicitly racist housing policies, that was somehow fine."
And just in case we still held the belief that the North was much more accepting of integrated schools, Oliver played a clip of a black man describing the bigoted community welcome he received when he was being integrated into a white neighborhood in Boston.
"Things got just as ugly as they did down South," Oliver said.
Why is it important to focus on segregation in schools?
"Funding tends to follow white people around the way white people follow the band Phish around," the host said.
Watch the video below: