Savage Inequalities

“‘The two tiers—Bluffs and Bottoms—' writes James Nowlan, a professor of public policy at Knox College, 'have long represented...different worlds.' Their physical separation, he believes, 'helps rationalize the psychological and cultural distance that those on the Bluffs have clearly tried to maintain.' People on the Bluffs, says Nowlan, 'overwhelmingly want this separation to continue.’”

This quote highlights how physical separation creates psychological and cultural distance. The Bluffs and Bottoms are a system not just of separation, but of hierarchy. In this hierarchy, separate tiers of economic life are reserved for the privileged and unprivileged. These tiers largely conform to categories of race and class. Kozol wishes to imply this hierarchy seems, to those on the bottom, as permanent as the demographic’s geography. However, unlike the geography, it is maintained by the efforts of those above. The people at the top want the separation to continue and work to do so.

"The pattern of concentrating black communities in easily flooded lowland areas is not unusual in the United States. Farther down the river, for example, in the Delta town of Tunica, Mississippi, people in the black community of Sugar Ditch live in shacks by open sewers that are commonly believed to be responsible for the high incidence of liver tumors and abscesses found in children there. Metaphors of caste like these are everywhere in the United States. Sadly, although dirt and water flow downhill, money and services do not."

The topographical divide between high and low becomes a metaphor for an informal caste system in America. Kozol details this through the imagery of flooding: protection from flooding, and the protection from corrupting toxins and harmful influences are privileges those at the top have, and that those at the bottom do not. At the bottom, the implicit worthlessness of the land reflects the fortunes of the people living on it, fortunes that are not just bad, but actively degrade with each generation.

"In very few cases, in discussing the immerisation of this city, do Illinois officials openly discuss the central fact, the basic evil, of its racial isolation. With more efficient local governance, East St. Louis might become a better-managed ghetto, a less ravaged racial settlement, but the soil would remain contaminated and the schools would still resemble relics of the South post-Reconstruction. They might be a trifle cleaner and they might perhaps provide their children with a dozen more computers or typewriters, better stoves for cooking classes, or a better shop for training future gas-station mechanics; but the children would still be poisoned in their bodies and disfigured in their spirits."

Kozol is skeptic of "local solutions." His belief is that the problems of the ghetto do not come within it, but from without: ghettos are made by the power of those who live outside of them. Kozol points to the contamination and the material want as implications of class: the training of "future gas-station mechanics" is for him an imposition of those who have reserved lower-earning work for others. Finally, the "poison" that Kozol talks about is as much figurative as literal: The indifference and the isolation of these circumstances corrupts and contaminates both the residents' culture and their soil.

"Four little boys are still asleep on the green rug an hour later when I leave the room. I stand at the door and look at the children, most of whom are sitting at a table now to have their milk. Nine years from now, most of these children will go on to Manley High School, an enormous, ugly building just a block away that has a graduation rate of only 38 percent. Twelve years from now, by junior year of high school, if the neighborhood statistics hold true for these children, 14 of these 23 boys and girls will have dropped out of school. Fourteen years from now, four of these kids, at most, will go to college. Eighteen years from now, one of those four may graduate from college, but three of the 12 boys in this kindergarten will already have spent time in prison."

This quote outlines the dire outcomes created by educational disparity, and the negative conditions for the children involved. For those children, college is an unlikely outcome, one that few expect from them. The children's fates seem sealed, unlike what we might expect of children of wealthier communities. It is difficult to imagine that these children's potential is being fully realized.

"Cities like Chicago face the added problem than an overly large portion of their limited tax revenues must be diverted to meet nonschool costs that wealthy suburbs do not face, or only on a far more modest scale. Police expenditures are higher in crime-ridden cities than in most suburban towns. Fire department costs are also higher […]. Public health expenditures are also higher where poor people cannot pay for private hospitals. All of these expenditures compete with those for public schools. So the districts that face the toughest challenges are also likely to be those that have the fewest funds to meet their children's needs."

This quote engages with the division between school and "nonschool" problems, showing that problems that occur outside of school substantially harm educational opportunities. The connection between public health crises and disadvantages has been documented throughout Savage Inequalities. Kozol illustrates how education funds must compete with other crises, and how the lack of money for education in turn reinforces the “nonschool” crises.

"The system has the surface aspects of a meritocracy, but merit in this case is predetermined by conditions that are closely tied to class and race. While some defend it as, in theory, "the survival of the fittest," it is more accurate to call it the survival of the children of the fittest—or of the most favored. Similar systems exist in every major city. They are defended stoutly by those who succeed in getting into the selective schools."

This quote gets at the duplicity of the current system, which purports to honor one form of aboveboard, formal competition but in actuality fosters competition on a different level. The meritocracy is superficial, as it pretends to grant special privileges to those with special qualifications, but instead favors the children of the privileged. The emphasis of this quote, however, is on those who defend this system. Kozol implies that there is a strong element of deceit in convincing constituents that this meritocracy is real, and that their privileges are not inherited.

"The same political figures who extol the role of business have made certain that these poor black people would have no real choice. Cutting back the role of government and then suggesting that the poor can turn to government and then suggesting that the poor can turn to business who lobbied for such cuts is cynical indeed. But many black principals in urban schools know very well that they have no alternative; so they learn to swallow their pride, subdue their recognitions and their dignity, and frame their language carefully to win the backing of potential 'business partners.' At length they are even willing to adjust their schools and their curricula to serve the corporate will: as the woman in Chicago said to train the ghetto children to be good employees. This is an accomplished fact today."

This is a rebuke of both the corporate-centered interventions into the public-school system and the school administrators and officials who cooperate with said corporations. Kozol contends that businesses are behind the drawbacks in public education that they later, cynically, try to prevent, and that school officials are complicit in this cynicism. Kozol believes that the "corporate will" is also duplicitous; their desire is to train children to be employees, not to achieve their potential and choose their own outcomes. What this quote underscores is the lack of alternatives these officials have, in the face of cuts and drawbacks.

"New York City manages expertly, and with marvelous predictability, whatever it considers humanly important. Fax machines, computers, automated telephones and even messengers on bikes convey a million bits of data through Manhattan every day to guarantee that Wall Street brokers get their orders placed, confirmed, delivered, at the moment they demand. But leaking roofs cannot be fixed and books cannot be gotten in Morris High in time to meet the fall enrollment. Efficiency in educational provision for low-income children, as in health care and most other elementals of existence, is secreted and doled out by our municipalities as if it were a scarce resource. Like kindness, cleanliness, and promptness of provision, it is not secured by gravity of need but by the cash, skin color, and class status of the applicant."

The argument made in this quote is that New York City is divided in how it identifies its priorities and follows them. This quote distinguishes between the energy spent in the private sector and the energy spent in public education; the supposition is that efficiency is just a pretext for the lack of political will. The reason for this lack of political will, Kozol argues, is the differences in class and race, differences that earmark less cash and less effort for the poor’s education.

"To be in favor of 'good families' or of 'good administration' does not take much courage or originality. It is hard to think of anyone who is opposed to either. To be in favor of redistribution of resources and of racial integration would require a great deal of courage—and a soaring sense of vision—in a president or any other politician. Whether such courage or such vision will someday become transcendent forces in our nation is by no means clear."

Kozol argues that "good families" and/or "good administration" taking the place of well-funded and supported schools lacks moral courage. Specifically, Kozol's idea is that the only policies that can truly fix the inequality in public schools are policies of racial integration and the redistribution of resources. Policies that fail to focus on the responsibility of schools and governments to alter the status quo lack courage and vision. Moreover, they shift the blame away from those who enact racist and classist policies to those who suffer from them.

"Throughout the discussion, whatever the views the children voice, there is a degree of unreality about the whole exchange. The children are lucid and their language is well chosen and their arguments well made, but there is a sense that they are dealing with an issue that does not feel very vivid, and that nothing we say about it to each other really matters since it's 'just a theoretical discussion.' To a certain degree, the skillfulness and cleverness that they display seem to derive precisely from this sense of unreality. Questions of unfairness feel more like a geometric problem than a matter of humanity or conscience."

In this quote, Kozol describes a debate on the crisis in education conducted by wealthy, suburban New York students. Kozol remarks that the students have a grasp on the problems that affect these communities, more so than expected. However, what gives Kozol pause is the detachment with which they discuss these problems. On one hand, their superior educational training has given them a thorough understanding of the complex issues at stake. On the other hand, their ability to hold this kind of debate is, ironically, their complete detachment from its significance.

"All of these children say the Pledge of Allegiance every morning. Whether in the New York suburbs, Mississippi, or the South Bronx, they salute the same flag. They place their hands across their hearts and join their voices in a tribute to ‘one nation indivisible’ which promises liberty and justice to all people. What is the danger that the people in a town like Rye would face if they resolved to make this statement true? How much would it really harm their children to compete in a fair trade?"

The subject of this quote is the real-world application of the sentimental patriotism in American schools. Kozol draws out the irony that American children are led to believe that they are part of an indivisible union, but the policy that affects them treats them unequally. The promise of liberty and justice, Kozol claims, is not extended to all Americans. The reason for this is the unwillingness of wealthier communities to provide the non-affluent with the opportunity to compete on a level playing field.

"It will be noted that the Journal never says that money ‘does not matter.’ This would be implausible to those who read the Wall Street Journal to acquire knowledge about making money. What it says is that it matters ‘much less than we think,’ or that it is less important than ‘some other factors,’ or that it is ‘not the only factor,’ or that it is not the ‘fundamental’ factor, or that it will not show instantaneous results, or that money used to lower class size will not matter if this is the only change, or if class size isn't lowered very much. Out of this buildup of discouraging and cautionary words, a mood of cumulative futility is gradually formed. At length it is transformed into a crystal of amused denunciation of the value of equality itself."

This quote rebuts the claim in the Wall Street Journal that "money doesn't matter" in education. Kozol's rebuttal is that this claim is purposefully simplistic, and does not actually seek to refute or rebut any of the reformist opinions out there, but instead seeks to derail and realign the debate in uncertain and unrealistic terms. Kozol does not believe that the Journal has a real stake in education reform, and is not arguing honestly. Arguments that emphasize the difficulty and cost of education reform, in Kozol's view, understate the cost of our unequal education system.

“‘A boy named Joselito and his brother,’ says the principal, ‘set the science room on fire. Another boy set fire to the curtains in the auditorium. He had no history of arson. He was doing well in school...it puzzles me. This school may be the safest place in life for many of these children. Why do they set fires? They do these things and, when I ask of them, they do not know why.’”

This quote, describing an instance of arson in the Camden school system, underlies the hopelessness and destructiveness that is endemic to the schools. In the chapter, Kozol makes the connection that the negative environment affects students in destructive ways. This is a reversal of the argument that the culture of these communities is responsible for the environment.

“Everyone who could leave, he says, has now departed. ‘What is left are all the ones with broken wings. I can't tell you what it does to children to grow up amid this filth and ugliness. The toxic dangers aren't the worst. It is the aesthetic consequences that may be the most damaging in the long run. What is the message that it gives to children to grow up surrounded by trash burners, dumpsites, and enormous prisons? Kids I know have told me they're ashamed to say they come from Camden.’”

This quote reinforces the theme of toxic environments. Departure is a treated as a rational end, brought on by the damage created by these toxic environments. The argument—that aesthetics matter as much as material, substantive differences—is unusual and difficult to prove, but it does seem reasonable to contend that growing in a toxic industrial cesspit of a city would have damaging psychological effects.

"The crowding of children into insufficient, often squalid spaces seems an inexplicable anomaly in the United States. Images of spaciousness and majesty, of endless plains and soaring mountains, fill our folklore and our music and the anthems that our children sing. ‘This land is your land,’ they are told; and, in one of the patriotic songs that children truly love because it summons up so well the goodness and the optimism of the nation at its best, they sing of ‘good’ and ‘brotherhood’ ‘from sea to shining sea.’ It is a betrayal of the best things that we value when poor children are obliged to sing these songs in storerooms and coat closets."

This quote illustrates the contrast between the patriotic anthems these children sing and the deplorable conditions in which children are made to sing them. Kozol uses the crowding of children in squalid spaces to argue that the nation's schools fail to live up the promises of societal values. The idea of "betrayal" communicates that the values that the school system preaches are not values it actually practices. The point that will be developed in this and subsequent chapters is that the "brotherhood" and equanimity promised by America falls apart due to class- and race-based segregation.

"What may be learned from the rebuttals made by the defendants in New Jersey and from protests that were sparked by the decision of the court? Much of the resistance, it appears, derives from a conservative anxiety that equity equates to ‘leveling.’ The fear that comes across in many of the letters and the editorials in the New Jersey press is that democratizing opportunity will undermine diversity and even elegance in our society and that the best schools will be dragged down to a sullen norm, a mediocre middle ground of uniformity. References to Eastern European socialism keep appearing in these letters. Visions of Prague and Moscow come to mind: Equity means shortages of toilet tissue for all students, not just for the black kids in New Jersey or in Mississippi. An impoverished vision of America seems to prevail in these scenarios."

This passage provides context for the resistance to redistributive approaches to reform, as tied to fears of communism. This fear is expressed in the pejorative term "leveling.” Kozol describes "leveling" as "democratizing," while the defenders of the status quo see it as a step toward socialism. Significant within this context is an implied zero-sum mentality, in which equity translates to paucity. However, Kozol argues that this implication is based on a distinction between one's own children and the children of other people. In this distinction, other people's children have no value or potential to bring out; affluent parents would rather have the Black children of Mississippi or New Jersey have nothing, than have their own children have less.

"So they know this other world exists, and when you tell them that the government can't find the money to provide them with a decent place to go to school, they don't believe it, and they know that it's a choice that has been made—a choice about how much they matter to society. They see it as a message: 'This is to tell you that you don't much matter. You are ugly to us so we crowd you into ugly places. You are dirty so it will not hurt you to pack you into dirty places.' My son says this: 'By doing this to you, we teach you how much you are hated.' I like to listen to the things my children say. They're not sophisticated so they speak out of their hearts."

This quote illustrates the lucidity children have in reflecting on their circumstances. The children immediately disbelieve in the excuses given by the system, and understand its ironies and falsities. Their disbelief predicates the impression that they are not cared for and they are not wanted. The children already know what Kozol has come to learn—that they are crowded into these places because it is believed they have no value.

"Over 30 years ago, the city of Chicago purposely constructed the high-speed Dan Ryan Expressway in such a way as to cut off the section of the city in which housing projects for black people had been built. The Robert Taylor Homes, served by Du Sable High, were subsequently constructed in that isolated area as well; realtors thereafter set aside adjoining neighborhoods for rentals only to black people. The expressway is still there. The projects are still there. Black children still grow up in the same neighborhoods. There is nothing ‘past’ about most ‘past discrimination’ in Chicago or in any other northern city."

This quote rebuts the idea of segregation and discrimination being only in the past, charging instead that segregation and discrimination still exist. The Dan Ryan Expressway is a deliberate, visible fact of segregation; as long as the structure exists, segregation is active. The schools serve segregated communities, which reinforce these divisions. This point echoes one of the major points of the book, which is to explore the ways in which segregation has transformed itself, and continues to do so. The implication of this point is that the roots of segregation are themselves deeper than what can be fixed by the courts or acts of Congress.

"Night after night, on television, Americans can watch police or federal agents rounding up black men and black teenagers. The sight of white policeman breaking down the doors of houses, back people emerging with their heads bent low in order to avoid the television cameras, has become a form of prime-time television entertainment in America. The story that is told by television cameras is a story of deformity. The story that is not told is the lifelong deformation of poor children by their own society and government. We hear of an insatiable attraction to consumer goods like sneakers, stereos, and video recorders. The story that we do not hear is of the aggressive marketing of these commodities in neighborhoods where very poor black people live: neighborhoods where appetites for purchasable mediocrity are easily inflamed because there sometimes is so little that is rich and beautiful to offer competition. Once these children learn that lovely and transcendent things are not for them, it may be a little easier to settle for the cheaper satisfactions."

Kozol argues that Americans receive an idea that "black culture" is not merely different from theirs, but separate and negative. The "deformity" implies that it is regular culture gone bad. Kozol argues that this deformity is the result of the forces placed on these communities; he attests that Black culture is not separate from American culture, but rather its victim. The commercialism and materialism that privileged whites get to scorn can be directly tied to the poor’s denial of other, more intangible and "transcendent" goods." Kozol argues that the public school system represents the first arena in which this denial is made clear.

"Press discussion of these matters rarely makes much reference to the segregated, poorly funded, overcrowded schools in which these children see their early dreams destroyed. The indignation of the press is concentrated on the poor behavior of the ghetto residents; the ghetto itself, the fact that it is still there as a permanent disfigurement on the horizon of our nation, is no longer questioned. Research experts want to know what can be done about the values of poor segregated children; and this is a question that needs asking. But they do not ask what can be done about the values of the people who have segregated these communities. There is no academic study on the pathological detachment of the very rich, although it would be useful to society to have some understanding of these matters."

Kozol argues the press and media are complicit in the detachment of the psychological detachment of affluent communities, and the ensuing segregation. The placement of poor children in poorly funded, overcrowded schools has extreme negative consequences for the children, and ultimately for the health of the communities in which they grow up. However, instead of these patterns, Kozol argues that the press focuses on the behavior of the residents of the ghetto and ignores how this ghetto came to be, in addition to any analysis of the forces that preserve it. Kozol's claim is that the insistence on values is one-way: People speak about values to impugn and separate others, not to reflect upon their own obligations and capabilities.

"The freedom claimed by a rich man [John Coons], says, 'to give his child a preferential education, and thereby achieve the transmission of advantage by inheritance, denies the children of others the freedom inherent in the notion of free enterprise.' Democracy 'can stand certain kinds and amounts' of inherited advantage. What democracy cannot tolerate is an aristocracy padded and protected by the state itself from competition from below...' In a free enterprise society, he writes, 'differential provision by public school marks the intrusion [of] heresy, for it means that certain participants in the economic race are hobbled at the gate—and hobbled by the public handicapper.'"

Kozol presents the "freedom" purported by the proponents of the status quo as the freedom to deny opportunity to others. Furthermore, Kozol makes the point that this is directly inimical to democracy, forming an aristocracy. In doing so, he compares economic participation to a race, in which some participants are purposefully handicapped—hobbled by the public from the start. The argument runs that not only is an informal aristocracy ethically wrong, and against American ideals, but in the end, such an aristocracy weakens the fortunes of all.

"If Americans had to discriminate directly against other people's children, I believe most citizens would find this morally abhorrent. Denial, in an active sense, of other people's children is, however, rarely necessary in this notion. Inequality is mediated for us by a taxing system that most people do not fully understand and seldom scrutinize. How this system really works, and how it came into existence, may enable us to better understand the difficulties [that] will be confronted in attempting to revise it."

Kozol underlies why the systems of discrimination persist informally, rather than formally and directly. Formal discrimination creates moral outrage and is harder to deny, as the stakeholders cannot defend the measures they have taken. In the informal system practiced today, none can point to deliberate instances of discrimination, and the system is treated as "fair," even if, in actually, this system only benefits some, while indirectly harming others. The argument is that Americans—whether willfully or not—do not understand the implicit unfairness of their system; in turn, this enables such unfairness to persist.

"In surveying the continuing tensions that exist between the claims of local liberty and those of equity in public education, historians have noted three distinguishable trends within this century. From the turn of the century until the 1950s, equity concerns were muted and the courts did not intrude much upon local governance. From 1954 (the year in which Brown v. Board of Education was decided) up to the early 1970s, equity concerns were more pronounced, although the emphasis was less on economic than on racial factors. From the early 1970s to the present, local control and the efficiency agenda once again prevailed. The decisive date that scholars generally pinpoint as the start of the most recent era is March 21 of 1973: the day on which the high court overruled the judgement of a district court in Texas that had found the local funding scheme unconstitutional—and in this way halted in its tracks the drive to equalize the public education system through the federal courts."

Here, Kozol focuses on the point at which the efforts to equalize the schools were stopped. In doing so, he highlights that this was not a decision by local authorities, but by federal courts. This refutes the claims that local liberty and equity are in contest. Instead, the author argues that the "efficiency" agenda, which effectively adopts a tiered system for minority and underprivileged children, was unofficially sanctioned.