Apartheid America.

• Author: Karnasiewicz, Sarah
• Position: Black Struggles for Justice - Jonathan Kozol - Interview

"Segregation is not something that happens by chance, like weather conditions," says Jonathan Kozol. "It is the work of men." So it is not without irony that it has taken a hurricane--and the excruciating images of stranded black faces, beamed across cable airwaves--for Americans to confront the reality that vast numbers of their fellow citizens live in segregated ghettos and suffer from abject poverty. But for Kozol, who has built his career on exposing the race- and class-based injustices endemic to the United States' educational system, the knowledge that we live in a deeply divided society has long been a foregone--if heartbreaking--conclusion.

For 40 years, in bestselling books such as Savage Inequalities and Amazing Grace, Kozol has reported from urban schools across the nation, befriending teachers and students who, despite the promises of Brown v. Board of Education, still live and learn in crumbling buildings and in overcrowded classrooms with scarce supplies. "I cannot discern even the slightest hint that any vestige of [the Brown decision] has survived within these schools and neighborhoods," he writes in his new book, The Shame of the Nation. "I simply never see white children."

The America Kozol describes in Shame is in essence an apartheid state. White suburban districts receive disproportionate funding and praise, while inner-city schools that serve minorities are denied equitable federal aid, threatened by repressive testing mandates, and drained of creativity and joy. The book is also something of a polemic.

Kozol accuses the Bush administration of implementing sinister educational policies in which rote memorization is valued more than imagination and children are treated as capitalist commodities to be molded into an army of obedient entry-level workers. Using the voices of dissatisfied students and teachers as a rallying cry, Kozol calls upon "decent citizens" of all political stripes to rise up against social and educational segregation--and reclaim the ideals of the civil rights movement.

Kozol, 69, lives outside Boston but was in New York on his book tour. I sat down with him and, in between sips of coffee and puffs on his cigarette, he explained why he believes that newspapers are partly to blame for America's reluctance to discuss race, Winnie the Pooh is more essential than standardized tests, and lazy liberals need to "get off their asses" and fight for educational equity.

In some of your earlier books you raised fears that the aims of Brown v. Board of Education were quietly being undermined. But Shame of the Nation goes so far as to call the contemporary American educational system an apartheid regime.

In earlier books, like Amazing Grace, I certainly made it evident that the schools of the South Bronx were stunningly segregated. But it wasn't until the last five years that I realized how sweeping this change has been throughout the nation, and how reluctant the...