Spoiler alert: No, Los Angeles schools do not discriminate against white students.
But a new lawsuit from a conservative group is claiming that they do — and there are enough frustrated parents out there that it’s getting a lot of attention.
So here we are, folks, in the age of Trump, once again faced with those who are serving up vitriol disguised as sweet tea in the hopes you’ll down it willingly.
As my colleague Howard Blume wrote, a legal challenge with an anonymous LAUSD parent mentioned is seeking to dismantle protections for disadvantaged students of color that were originally put in place to comply with a court order meant to lessen the harms of segregation in our schools.
To put it simply, the Los Angeles Unified School District gives more resources to schools that are more than 70% non-white, which is the vast majority — about 600. The suit claims that about 100 schools are left without these additional resources, penalizing them with larger class sizes and fewer opportunities to meet with teachers, among other drawbacks.
This, the suit argues, is discrimination against white and Middle Eastern students, though there don’t seem to be any Middle Eastern students specifically represented.
As the parent of school-age kids, this does seem bad. Like all parents, I want the best schools — public schools — possible, and I want them to be fair. Which is what makes this lawsuit so appealing to believe. Of course all schools should get the same resources, right?
“It is a racist distraction,” Tyrone Howard, a UCLA professor of education, told me.
“Look, I want to be nuanced here,” Howard said. “I am sure there must be some white Americans somewhere in our country who have and are experiencing discrimination in some form. Surely there must be, but they’re not at all the overwhelming majority of citizens who are on the receiving end of race-based discrimination, not hardly.”
That goes for our schools and elsewhere.
The lawsuit comes from the 1776 Project Foundation, whose members also back anti-transgender policy and the “classical” education now favored in some Florida schools.
The president of the projectalso seemingly promotes a nostalgia for an America of white Anglo-Saxon protestants — WASPs, if you are old enough to remember that term — at least according to one recent social media post from another group he founded to advocate for a “dominant American future.”
Shaun Harper, a professor of education, public policy and business at USC, points out that the current system at LAUSD exists precisely because schools weren’t all getting the same resources when segregation was rampant, and in reality, schools today where students of color make up the majority often still face barriers to equity.
“The data across so many domains irrefutably show that the work of civil rights remains undone and that it is Black Americans and other people of color who continue to be on the losing end of that unfinished agenda,” Harper said.
I’d argue that this has as much to do with economics — specifically higher poverty rates in communities of color — than race itself (though racism is real, no doubt).
Put them on a map and it would likely be easy to see that even today, schools with high percentages of white students are in more affluent areas, including the Valley and the Westside, where the best teachers want to be, where parents have the time and knowledge to be heard, where English is the first language. Where, frankly, it’s often easier to learn for a multitude of reasons.
So — white, Black, brown — kids in disadvantaged areas still struggle, in ways that those in wealthier areas can at least mitigate for.
“Make that argument, say that we have a poverty issue in this country, and people across all ethnic and racial groups suffer from it, and white people suffer in large numbers,” Howard challenged. “But that’s not the argument they’re making.”
In fact, the founder of the 1776 Project Foundation, Ryan James Girdusky, acknowledged that white wealth was at the center of his lawsuit. In an interview he posted on social media, he explained that the idea for the suit came about because of the gentrification of Silver Lake and the resulting changes to schools.
“Their student population was changing pretty dramatically,” he said of the enclave that has morphed over the last few decades into some of the hottest real estate in L.A., where the average home price is about $1.5 million. “Gentrification had really brought in a lot of white families into the district.”
The hard bargain of public education has always been that it seeks to do the greatest good for the greatest number of kids, meaning it rarely offers perfection for individual children.
If parents in these schools with more white kids wanted to prioritize lower class sizes and more access to teacher conferences, they could live in a neighborhood with a more diverse student body, or simply opt for a school in those areas.
They have that choice. They don’t want it, and I get it. We all want the best neighborhood we can afford, with great schools.
The LAUSD policies aren’t an attempt to hurt schools with higher numbers of white students, but rather to raise up those schools that have larger numbers of students who historically have lacked opportunities — to meet the outcomes those wealthy-neighborhood schools already have.
When Silver Lake became a neighborhood ripe with advantage, the needs shifted. It is not discrimination, but rather, continuing to address the persisting harms of segregation, in schools and in communities.
“All it takes is visiting these schools and you see the material difference that exists,” Howard said.
But under this second Trump administration, white grievance has become not only fashionable but also lauded. This lawsuit is just one of many legal and social challenges pushing the idea that white people are under attack, and that the civil rights movement went too far.
Vice President JD Vance recently proclaimed that white people “don’t have to apologize for being white anymore,” as if they ever did. President Trump recently said that civil rights had left white people being “very badly treated.”
It’s not a rewriting of history. It’s an attempt to erase it and, like a pointillist painting, focus on only one dot while ignoring the big picture.
“It’s an effort by the current administration to say, ‘Look, white people suffer too,’ ” Howard said.
But discrimination requires power — the power to enforce unfair terms on the targeted group.
To believe that white students are being discriminated against in L.A. schools requires folks to also believe that white people in general do not still hold the majority of positions of power. Yes, our mayor is Black and some of our politicians are people of color.
But are people of color truly in the majority of decision-making roles?
“Overwhelmingly those positions of power are occupied by white people,” said Harper, who studies such things. “White people certainly, definitely have not lost power. They’re certainly not underrepresented.”
But — no different from those of any color frustrated by economic inequality — white people who see the unfairness in our current systems, from schools to retirement, are fed up and angry and rightfully want change. That makes lawsuits such as this powerful, if misleading.
The post The myth of anti-white discrimination in L.A. schools — and the politics behind it appeared first on Los Angeles Times.
