John Oliver slammed New Yorkers Sunday for not being model citizens when it comes to providing equal opportunities for all school kids.
Oliver cited a 2014 ProPublica report that found that as of 2011, there exist in the U.S. 6,727 so-called "apartheid schools" where the population of white students sits at or below 1 percent.
"Even as our society has grown more diverse, nearly 7,000 schools have the same racial makeup as the audience of your average Tyler Perry movie," Oliver said. "And that one white guy is Leonard Maltin and he has to be there, it's his job."
Contrary to the popular narrative, New York state public schools, in large part due to historically left-leaning New York City, are the most segregated in the country.
"Oh shit, liberal white New Yorkers. Twist ending: you were racist the whole time," Oliver said. "Put back those persimmons you bought yourselves as a treat from Fairway, you don't deserve them anymore."
"It would still be problematic even if these schools were roughly equivalent academically, as that would still be in violation of" Brown v. Board of Education, he continued. "But in practice, they are very rarely equal in any way."
According to a 2013-14 report from the U.S. Department of Education, "Black, Latino, and American Indian or Alaska Native students are more likely to attend schools with higher concentrations of inexperienced teachers."
The Civil Rights Act, Oliver explained, "exempted the so-called 'racial imbalance' of northern schools. So if a New York school was all-white because it was drawing from an all-white area — even if that area had been kept that way due to a host of explicitly racist housing policies — that was somehow fine."
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