In hindsight, I should have suspected we had crossed over some bizarre new threshold of weaponized policy rhetoric when the education bureaucrats selling a new middle school admissions system to an auditorium full of brow-furrowing Brooklyn parents began their PowerPoint slideshow with a black-and-white picture of a family celebrating the unanimous Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education.
It was the summer of 2018, after all, not the spring of 1954, in the heart of progressive Park Slope, not Pentecostal Topeka. And most relevantly to how the next 13 months of strategic citizen-shaming and pre-emptive silencing would go, the "segregation" under discussion was not an airtight set of rules created and strictly controlled by government, but rather a dynamic and mostly voluntary clustering and unclustering of racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic population subgroups out of and then back into 11 public schools and their environs, in one of the country's most famously diverse cities. We were being invited to feel segregationist shame about the distribution of a middle school population that's 42 percent Latino, 32 percent white, 12 percent Asian, and 12 percent black.
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