Race/Related: Fairy-Tale College Applications

Trafficking in the worst stereotypes of black America.

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Saturday, June 1, 2019

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The Times debuts a new TV show, "The Weekly," Sunday night on FX and Monday on Hulu. The premiere episode tells the story of two Washington correspondents, Katie Benner and Erica Green, investigating a small Louisiana school, T.M. Landry, which falsified transcripts, made up student accomplishments and trafficked in the worst stereotypes of black America to manufacture Cinderella stories.

We asked Ms. Benner to discuss the story behind the episode. Please tune in at 10 p.m. Eastern time Sunday on FX or stream it on Hulu. --Adeel Hassan

"The Weekly"/FX/Hulu/Vanessa Carr for The New York Times

Katie Benner

Some of the fraud at the heart of our T.M. Landry investigation is not so different from the schemes employed in other college admissions scandals. This was certainly not the first time, or the last, that we had seen people lie to get their children into college.

But race sets T.M. Landry apart from more recent cases of education fraud, as was evident in the school's appeal to prospective students and in how it got them into college.

T.M. Landry's founders, Mike and Tracey Landry, put the very real obstacles that exist for some minorities — a higher proportion of first-generation college applicants, limited access to wealthier school districts, and a scarcity of affordable college application coaches and tutors, to name a few — at the very heart of their pitch.

The Landrys explicitly vowed to get black students into top universities; to level a vastly uneven playing field; to put into reach a college education that many teenagers and their parents worried was outside their grasp.

Their magnetic pitch had students staying at T.M. Landry despite enduring what they described as severe emotional and physical abuse. "He seemed to see in us what we didn't see in ourselves," Raymond Smith, a T.M. Landry alumnus, said of Mr. Landry.

In addition, dozens of parents have continued to stand by the Landrys. "The reason I'm here is return on investment," one woman said in an audio recording of a parents' meeting convened after our initial investigation was published in November. The Landrys "give us hope that I never would have imagined going after," she said.

But the Landrys could not have attracted students without also delivering results. Transcripts were littered with inflated grades, nonexistent extracurricular activities and fictitious classes. In recommendation letters, they fabricated and exaggerated stories of hardship that played on negative racial stereotypes. And they encouraged students to do the same.

In this way, the Landrys painted their students in the "most stereotypical light that they possibly could be in to try and gain some white sympathy to get them into school," Mr. Smith said.

Or as Eddie Glaude, a professor of African-American studies at Princeton, told MSNBC: Mike Landry was "playing on a kind of soft bigotry, where the idea of educating African-American children is often thought of as a philanthropic enterprise, as a charitable gift."

This was perhaps the grimmest indictment of the college admissions process, because it seemed to work.

Black families were desperate to believe that the Landrys would help them in a world where no other institutions seemed to care. White, elite institutions were blind to how stereotypes had twisted their ability to assess what it means to be a qualified black candidate.

T.M. Landry is a disquieting story in many ways, not least because it appealed to truths that we tend to ignore in a nation where higher education is the foundation of our supposedly meritocratic society.

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