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One thing I admire about Kozol is that he is much more upfront about his agenda and the sacrifices required than are many other advocates of reform. He admits that, “Attorneys in school-equalization suits have done their best to understate the notion of ‘redistribution’ of resources. They try instead, whenever possible, to speak in terms that seem to offer something good for everyone involved…. No matter what devices are contrived to bring about equality, it is clear that they require money-transfer, and the largest source of money is the portion of the population that possesses the most money.”
This is where the issue gets thorny. Moral outrage is one of Kozol’s strongest weapons, and seeing the conditions of the schools he visits, it is hard not to be outraged. The problem is that it is getting harder and harder to find a specific law or institution, let alone specific individuals, to be outraged at.
One of the book’s themes, with which I agree, is that disappointingly little has changed since Brown v. Board of Education outlawed legal segregation and indeed since Plessy v. Ferguson allowed segregated facilities provided they were equal. What we have now is a separate and unequal system of education. What has changed is that no one in particular is responsible for this patently unjust system. There is no law that says, “only blacks shall attend DuSable High School,” and no Southern governor barring the door of a white school. Instead, there are parents, often liberal parents who in theory favor school desegregation and even affirmative action, trying to do what is best for their own children. And who can blame them for that?
Honestly, I think we have to blame them. Not in an angry or condescending way, necessarily, but as a society we need to ask for more sacrifices from those who have the most. The fifty years since Brown have demonstrated that schools that were actively segregated are not going to desegregate themselves. White families have moved out of cities, gerrymandered school district lines, and even pulled their kids from public school systems altogether rather than see them attend integrated schools.
This is undoubtedly racism, but it isn’t, for the most part, the open and virulent racism embodied by groups like the Ku Klux Klan. Many of these families have had no problem inviting upper-middle-class blacks into their classrooms, their neighborhoods, their homes, and their lives. It isn’t black people per se that they fear, it is the idea that their children might receive anything less than the best education they could possibly provide for them. There’s nothing wrong with caring so much about your kids’ education, but there is a problem with providing such opportunities to your own children at the expense of other children. There is a problem with not caring, at least not caring enough to do anything really drastic, that so many other children will attend schools and live in neighborhoods that you have deemed unacceptable for your own progeny.
I am also not speaking here of a small group of especially wealthy or especially inconsiderate people. There were literally hundreds of thousands of white families who fled urban areas and their public education systems in the wake of the Brown decision. In a particularly striking passage, Kozol describes an upscale suburb of New York City called Riverdale, where
“Dozens of college students… went south during the civil rights campaigns to fight for… desegregation…. The parents of these students often made large contributions to support the work of SNCC and CORE. One generation passes, and the cruelties they fought in Mississippi have come north to New York City. Suddenly, no doubt unwittingly, they find themselves opposed to simple things they would have died for 20 years before. Perhaps it isn’t fair to say they are ‘opposed.’ A better word might be ‘oblivious.’ They do not want poor children to be harmed. They simply want the best for their own children. To the children of the South Bronx, it is all the same.”