Little-seen liberal TV host Samantha Bee recently aimed her loud and incoherent nightly monologue at Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, accusing her of discrimination against minorities.
But it seems it’s Bee herself with a troublesome history on race and education. She’s currently fighting New York City to keep her kids from having to attend a public school with mostly black and Hispanic children.
You can’t spell bigotry without “bee”.
The exchange started with a Washington Post article on DeVos, who suggested parents be able to choose their child’s school the same way one chooses a taxi or car service.
“DeVos: Picking a school should be like choosing among Uber, Lyft or a taxi,” the Post tweeted while sharing the article on Twitter.
That drew a predictably lame response from Bee, whose TBS program consists mostly of her shouting things apparently taken from the comments section of a liberal news site.
“3 options poor people can’t afford. Got it,” the privileged white Bee tweeted.
But unlike most topics she tackles, Bee does have personal experience when it comes to school choice and the poor.
She’s currently fighting New York City to keep racial minorities out of her children’s mostly white school.
“New York City has an integration problem,” Slate magazine reported last June. “This is nothing new, of course; the supposedly most diverse city in the world has long had some of the most segregated schools in the country, and that’s saying something.”
One of the reasons New York schools are racially segregated? Liberal elitists, like Bee, whose children attend the disproportionately white P.S. 452.
“Like so many public schools in New York City, P.S. 452 has a lopsided enrollment, with a population that’s three-quarters white and Asian, with only 13 percent of kids qualifying for free lunch, in a district that’s 43 percent white and Asian and 48 percent low-income, according to a Chalkbeat story on the brewing controversy,” Slate reports.
But now school officials want to move the school to a larger building a few blocks away, closer to a public housing project, to relieve overcrowding and allow black and Hispanic children a chance to attend.
“P.S. 452, which opened in 2010 to relieve overcrowding in other nearby sought-after schools, quickly became overcrowded itself. And so the city proposed moving the school, which currently shares a building with two other schools, 16 blocks south, to a site with more space that happens to be just adjacent to large housing projects. In one swoop, the city could solve the school’s capacity problem while improving its diversity,” Slate reports.
“But of course, in an as-if-scripted repetition of the integration fights that have gone down since the birth of busing, many current P.S. 452 parents are up in arms against the proposal,” Slate reports.
The thought of their children encountering non-white kids in close proximity to a housing project has set off Bee and her husband, comic Jason Jones, who totally insists he’s not racist for not wanting his kids to attend a school with children who live in public housing.
“To portray any opposition as classist or racist is as bad as it can get,” said Jones, who claims it’s simply a matter of convenience.
“So what’s going to happen?” Slate reports. “If precedent is any guide, the well-organized—and well-heeled—parents of P.S. 452 will likely win the day. Last year, a similar drama went down in the neighborhood when the city proposed changing the attendance zones so that some of the kids at the overcrowded (and also mostly white and middle-class) P.S. 199 would be reassigned to the under-enrolled (and also mostly minority and poor) P.S. 191.”
No wonder Bee had such a visceral response to DeVos’ proposal to desegregate schools.
School choice is the needle that would pop her liberal, white-privileged bubble.