Podcast Corner: Nice White Parents gives us a glimpse into liberal America
"Nice White Parents is brought to you by Serial Productions, a New York Times company." That's the first line you hear on pressing play on this just concluded five-episode series.
A quick primer: Serial season one, released in October 2014, led the charge of podcasting into the mainstream.
Following a 1989 murder and the possibility that the person sent to prison for it was actually innocent, Sarah Koenig opened the doors for a whole host of copycat podcasts - and vice versa: Created new audiences for the swathes of podcasts created in subsequent years.
An offshoot of This American Life, Serial has since released two completely different series (one about a US soldier in Afghanistan, the other a widescreen look at the court system) as well as S-Town - "from the producers of Serial and This American Life".
In late July, during a year of big podcast purchases, it was announced that the New York Times had purchased Serial Productions for a reported $25m (€21m) and " entered into an ongoing creative and strategic alliance with “This American Life". And now, less than a month later, comes Nice White Parents.
This is not season four of Serial - Koenig and Ira Glass feature as editors in the credits. Presented by New York Times journalist Chana Joffe-Walt, a self-confessed nice white parent, she spent five years reporting on a Brooklyn middle school, with topics quickly encompassing historic racism, segregation, education inequality, and the idea that history is doomed to repeat itself.
"I don't think I've ever felt my own consumer power more viscerally than I did shopping for a public school as a white parent," she says in the introduction.
The affable and inquisitive Joffe-Walt is soon charting how this School for International Studies saw a rush from seemingly good-natured white parents looking to enrol their children in a 'diverse' school. The intentions slowly mutate across the first hour-long episode as the diversity turns to gentrification.
The access that Joffe-Walt gets to parents and the board of education is what elevates the episode. It's like the parents can't even see their prejudices - but surely the listener might be able to identify theirs?
The rest of the series looks at the history of the school as Joffe-Walts becomes ever more sure that the best intentions usually falter.
The American school system can seem baffling to Irish ears, but Nice White Parents is a well-told and broad story.
It may not inspire as many podcasts as Serial, but it looks to set an agenda - and sets the bar high for any other such investigative podcasts.
