DISILLUSIONED

THURSDAY
MARCH 21 
​NOON

VIRTUAL
​REGISTER HERE

Brooke O’ Harra leads a conversation with beat and investigative reporter Benjamin Herold and mother and education organizer Bethany Smith (whose experience in the Penn Hills suburbs is one of the case studies of his recent book Disillusioned). In Disillusioned, Herold investigates how heavily subsidized suburbs have allowed upwardly mobile white families to extract resources from communities only to leave behind the burden of bills on the Black and Brown families that follow them. This conversation will focus on the relationship between journalism and ethnography made evident in the collaboration between Bethany and Benjamin. Bethany wrote the epilogue to the book.

Through the stories of five American families, a masterful and timely exploration of how hope, history, and racial denial collide in the suburbs and their schools...

Outside Atlanta, a middle-class Black family faces off with a school system seemingly bent on punishing their teenage son. North of Dallas, a conservative white family relocates to an affluent suburban enclave, but can’t escape the changes sweeping the country. On Chicago’s North Shore, a multiracial mom joins an ultraprogressive challenge to the town’s liberal status quo. In Compton, California, whose suburban roots are now barely recognizable, undocumented Hispanic parents place their gifted son’s future in the hands of educators at a remarkable elementary school. And outside Pittsburgh, a Black mother moves to the same street where author Benjamin Herold grew up, then confronts the destructive legacy left behind by white families like his. Disillusioned braids these human stories together with penetrating local and national history to reveal a vicious cycle undermining the dreams upon which American suburbia was built. 

BETHANY SMITH

Bethany Smith is an entrepreneur who champions public education through a fellowship with Education Voters of Pennsylvania. She helped author the critically acclaimed book Disillusioned: Five Families and the Unraveling of America's Suburbs, which shares pieces of her life.


Bio photo credit: E.A. Smith of CREW Production

BENJAMIN HEROLD

Benjamin Herold explores America's beautiful and busted public schools. His award-winning reporting has appeared in Education Week, PBS NewsHour, NPR, Huffington Post, WHYY, The Hechinger Report, and the Public School Notebook. Herold has a master's degree in urban education from Temple University in Philadelphia, where he lives with his family.
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Bio photo credit: Naomieh Jovin