ABSTRACT
Nice White Parents is a podcast series about an ordinary middle school in New York.1 It charts how, over the school's 50-year history, White parents have consistently, and almost always unwittingly, exercised their enormous unsaid power in the public education system to directly and indirectly hamper the school's mission of providing a progressive and integrated education to children of all racial and socioeconomic backgrounds. Other scenarios are less directly analogous, but nonetheless relate to power dynamics and individuals’ ability to navigate a complex system – wealthy professionals seeking NHS referrals on the basis of private medical reports, and individuals demanding specific investigations or treatments on the basis of informal conversations with medical family members or friends. The nature of a publicly funded system, whether it is health or education or any other sector, is that every decision needs to be seen through two lenses – at the individual and the population levels.