FALL FLICKS
TEXAS TOWN STARS IN NBC PODCAST.
A year ago, Mike Hixenbaugh and Antonia Hylton didn’t know much about Southlake, the upscale suburb of around 31,000 people 25 miles northeast of Fort Worth.
That all changed when Hixenbaugh, a former Houston Chronicle reporter who’s now an NBC News national reporter and host of the “Do No Harm” podcast, was working on a piece about how demographically shifting Texas suburbs were becoming flash points in the culture wars. While interviewing then Texas Republican Party chairman and current gubernatorial candidate Allen West, the name of “Southlake” came up.
“He told me, basically, there’s these parents who banded together and prevented this Black Lives Matter attempted takeover of their school district,” says Hixenbaugh. “I was like, ‘what’s he talking about?’ ”
What he was talking about was the furor that erupted in 2018 after a video went viral showing white students from Southlake’s Carroll High School at a party shouting the N-word. The ensuing controversy caused the school board — operating in a city that is roughly 78 percent white, under 2 percent African American with the remainder Asian and Latino — to initiate diversity and inclusion training for all K-12 students, which in turn sparked a loud backlash among some white parents who claimed the plan was an overreaction. Meanwhile, many parents and students of color in Southlake said the video was just the tip of a very toxic iceberg that seemed to be only visible to them.
That’s the setup for “Southlake,” a deep-dive, six-part podcast from Hixenbaugh and NBC News correspondent Antonia Hylton that begins streaming Aug. 30. “What was really interesting is this was all before anyone was saying anything about critical race theory,” says Hixenbaugh. “We basically stumbled into a town that had a two-year head start on the fight that is now spread across the country.”
In early 2021, Hixenbaugh wrote a story about the controversy for NBC News and Hylton filmed a report for “NBC Nightly News,” both touching off a torrent of response from readers and viewers.
So they pitched the idea of working together for something more in-depth, and a podcast seemed to be the best way to do that. “We have some pretty harrowing, gut-punching stories of what’s happened with students in this district,” Hylton says. “As much as I love the stories I do for ‘Nightly,’ two minutes and 30 seconds doesn’t do a story like this justice.”
Hixenbaugh and Hylton say it was sometimes tough to earn the trust of those involved. “It’s always difficult to get people who’ve been through anything traumatic to open up,” says Hixenbaugh. “And it was very challenging to get parents who are opposed to the diversity plan … to speak with us. … Their voices are very well-represented in the podcast because they’ve done so much talking in public. … There was a lot of people turning us away because they just did not trust that the mainstream media would tell their story without painting them as racists.”
Hylton says the students were often easier to talk to than the adults. “What I consistently hear from young kids in Southlake is that it’s very strange to them how angry and animated the adults are,” she says. “They’re the ones who hear the N-word in the classroom. They were the ones who were called the F-word. They’re living it but they’re less emotional than the adults who they see fighting with each other at these meetings every month.”