We
are the dust beneath your feet. We are the flowers that never bloom.
------beggars
in Bombay
Although bookshelves groan under the weight of tracts about U.S. racism, no one's writings on the topic are more unsettling than Jonathan Kozol's. He is among our greatest and most eloquent dissenters. He writes not from studied objectivity but with an impassioned conviction that sears the conscience and haunts the soul. His books, once read, stay with you; his insights, once seen, can never again be unseen. Horrors we once attributed to happenstance or personal failure are revealed by Kozol for what they are: our society's deliberate punishment of innocent poor people, whose very existence reminds us of moral failures we prefer to imagine do not exist.
Son
of a doctor, raised in Boston, Kozol majored in English literature at
Harvard, then won a Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford. When he got to the elite university
he felt as though he'd already been through the experience, as everybody at
Harvard had spoken in a phony Oxford accent. Bored, he abandoned the
scholarship and went to Paris, spending a couple of years trying to
learn how to write from top-flight authors there at the time,
including Richard Wright, William Styron, and James Baldwin.
He
returned to the United States with the intention of going to graduate
school and becoming an English professor, a career he says he "would
have loved," but dramatic political events in 1964 brought a
different destiny to the fore.
That
summer, thousands of young civil rights workers - black and white -
poured into Mississippi with the intention of breaking the back of
segregation in the state. Three among them - James Chaney, Michael
Schwerner, and Andrew Goodman - went ahead of the rest to locate
churches and other places where poor people could be taught to read
and write well enough to register to vote. They were arrested in
Philadelphia, Mississippi and released from jail late at night, then
taken into the woods and shot to death by a group of men, including
the deputy sheriff who had arrested them. Buried in an earthen dam,
their bodies were not discovered until weeks later.
Black
people had disappeared many times before without provoking a public
response. But this time the three who went missing were a mixed-race
group, and a wave of public alarm spread across the country at news
of its disappearance. Young people in particular felt an urge to do
something.
The
day Kozol was supposed to enroll in graduate school at Cambridge, he
got in his car and drove to South Boston instead. Entering a black
church, he asked the minister, "May I be of use?" The
minister replied, "Yes, you can, young man," and
congratulated him for realizing that one did not need to go all the
way to Mississippi to find black people who needed his help. He told
Kozol he could help black children learn to read right there in
Boston.
Kozol
worked briefly as a volunteer tutor in the church program and then
applied to be a substitute teacher in Boston, a move his father
cautioned him was a waste of his Rhodes Scholarship. His first
assignment was a fourth grade class of thirty-five students
(two-thirds black) that had had a string of substitutes all year, and
studied in the corner of an auditorium, as there were not enough
classrooms to go around.
Kozol
quickly discovered that his students were far short of where they
were supposed to be academically: nearly a third of the class read
two years behind grade level, and on the first math test, the class
average was 36%.
And the children were frankly wary of Kozol, wondering if he, too,
would soon abandon them like all the other teachers had.
One
shy student began mumbling to himself and was sent to the assistant
principal in the school basement, who beat him with a bamboo whip.*
Kozol's colleagues told him to go to the teacher supply store and get
his own whip. He went, and verified that whips were indeed a
classroom management tool available for purchase right next to the
blackboard pointers. A fellow-teacher instructed him on how to
properly use one: "Leave it (the whip) overnight in vinegar or
water if you want it to really sting the hands."
The
cruelty was more than a perverse professional duty. Kozol wrote that
there were times when "the visible glint of gratification
becomes undeniable" in the eyes of the teacher using the whip,
as it undoubtedly also had in the eyes of slave-masters down through
the generations. (Sadly, over sixty years later Kozol reports that physical beatings
continue in many states.)
In
spite of the shockingly common physical and psychological abuse, Kozol
learned that he was expected to pretend that everything was fine at
the school.
"You
children should thank God and feel blessed with good luck for all
you've got," his colleagues preached. "There are so many
little children in the world who have been given so much less."
Kozol
jotted in his notes why the claim was preposterous: "The books
are junk, the paint peels, the cellar stinks, the teachers call you
nigger, and the windows fall in on your heads," the latter a
reference to a window that fell out of its rotting frame while he was
teaching one day, and which Kozol quickly grabbed, a heads-up
reaction that "very possibly preserved the original shapes of
half a dozen of their heads," he wrote later.
Given
such conditions, the children were naturally distrustful, and it took
Kozol until spring to win them over. Eager to spark their interest in
anything, it occurred to him that there was nothing relevant
to their lives in the boring textbook he had been assigned to teach
from. Almost all the faces shown in the book were white, a monotony
broken only occasionally by a lightly tan face.
Determined
to find some way to engage the students, he went to the Cambridge
library and checked out a book of poems by Langston Hughes and
brought it to class. He read several of the poems aloud, including
"Ballad of the Landlord," a defiant verse depicting slum
conditions with raw honesty. In response, a girl Kozol had been
unable to reach all year, promptly got up from her seat, walked
almost the entire perimeter of the classroom to arrive where Kozol
was, then gently caressed his shoulder and said, "Thank you,"
before asking him if she could borrow the book overnight. That night,
the girl memorized the poem, came back to class the next day and
recited it to her classmates, reducing them to tears.
A
day after that, Kozol was unceremoniously fired, an event that
made headlines in the Boston Globe - "Rhodes Scholar
fired!" He was not even allowed to say goodbye to his students.
The cause of termination was "curriculum deviation," as
Langston Hughes was considered "inappropriate" material for
fourth grade students, and "Ballad of the Landlord" was not
on the approved list of poems.
"No
poetry that described suffering was felt to be suitable," Kozol
wrote later, nor was "Negro dialect" considered appropriate
in an English class.
A school official told Kozol that his offense was so serious that he
would never again be hired to teach in a Boston public school.
The
parents of Kozol's students were outraged, partly out of loyalty to
him, but also because of the Langston Hughes incident. They and Kozol
founded a Free School the following year, run by the mothers, with
Kozol as head teacher.
Kozol's
next public school position was in Newton,
an attractive suburb where
many of his new
colleagues were fine
teachers directed by an accomplished
principal, and all enjoyed much
more attractive physical surroundings than
anything he had seen in Roxbury. Still,
Kozol missed the depth of involvement he had experienced his
first year, and found
he wanted to return to Roxbury. So in 1965 he
moved there, describing his new neighborhood a decade later in the
pages of The Night
Is Dark and I Am Far from Home:
"Twenty
thousand people live here. With the exception of two redeveloped and
well-demarcated sections of the district, most of the residents are
Puerto Rican, black, poor-white, Chinese or Lebanese. In one
direction or another, it encompasses approximately fifty square
blocks. Many buildings have been boarded up; some are still partly
occupied, one or two families camping out in partly heated rooms.
There are many broken-down rooming houses, crumbling brownstones,
urine-smelling city welfare-projects. In the alleyways and on the
fringes of this neighborhood there are large numbers of poor
derelicts; solitary men and penniless old women, dozens of whom die
along the sidewalks or between the cars each winter, two thousand
heroin addicts and four thousand homeless men, many of them
alcoholics who live on the cheapest brand of sweet wine. The largest
numbers, though, are neither derelicts nor alcoholics. They are the
poor, the black, the undefended."
In
surroundings such as these, Kozol could not avoid a constant and
painful confrontation between his own class background and that of
the mass of poor people who lived all around him. It took all of his
considerable literary talent to describe this loss of innocence, but
he did so brilliantly, as in this haunting passage:
"BOSTON,
BLUE HILL AVENUE, TEN DAYS BEFORE CHRISTMAS: A child falls down in
the middle of Grove Hall. She is epileptic, but her sickness either
has not yet been diagnosed or else (more probable) it has been
diagnosed, but never treated. Tall and thin, fourteen years old, she
is intense and sober, devastated but unhating. Her life is a staccato
sequence of grand
mal convulsions:
no money, no assistance, no advice on how to get a refill of
expensive script for more Dilantin and more phenobarbital.
"This
night, she comes downstairs into the office where I work within the
coat-room underneath the church-stairs of a Free School: standing
there and asking me please if I would close the door and hold her
head within my arms because she knows that she is going to have an
epileptic seizure; and closing the door and sitting down upon the
cold cement while she lies down and places her head within my arms
and starts to shudder violently and moves about so that I scarcely
can protect her wracked and thin young body from the cement wall and
from the concrete floor; and seeing her mouth writhe up with pain and
spittle, and feeling her thrash about a second time and now a third;
and, in between, the terror closing in upon her as in a child's bad
dream that you can't get out of, and watching her then, and wondering
what she undergoes; and later seeing her, exhausted, sleeping there,
right in my arms, as at the end of long ordeal, all passion in her
spent; then taking her out into my car and driving with her to the
City Hospital while she, as epileptics very often feel, keeps saying
that she is going to have another seizure; and slamming on the brakes
and walking with her in the back door where they receive out-patient
cases, and being confronted on this winter night at nine P.M. in
Boston in the year of 1965 with a scene that comes from Dante's
Purgatory: dozens and dozens of poor white, black and Puerto Rican
people, infants and mothers, old men, alcoholics, men with hands
wrapped up in gauze, and aged people trembling, infants trembling
with fever; one hostile woman in white uniform behind the table
telling us, out of a face made, as it seems, of clay, that we should
fill an application out, some sort of form, a small white sheet, then
sit out in the hallway since the waiting room is full; and then to
try to say this child has just had several seizures in a row and
needs treatment, and do we need to do the form; and yes, of course
you need to do the form and wait your turn and not think you have any
special right to come ahead of someone else who has been sitting here
before you.
"Two
hours and four seizures later, you get up and go in and shout in her
cold eyes and walk right by and grab an intern and tell him to come
out and be a doctor to an epileptic child sitting like a damp rag in
the hallway; and he comes out, and in two minutes gives this child an
injection that arrests the seizures and sedates her, then writes the
script for more Dilantin and for phenobarbitol and shakes his head
and says to you that it's a damn shame: 'Nobody needs to have en
epileptic seizure in this day and age . . . Nobody but a poor black
nigger,' says the intern in a sudden instant of that rage that truth
and decency create. He nearly cries, and in his eyes you see a kind
of burning pain that tells you that he is a good man somehow,
deep-down, someplace where it isn't all cold stone, clean surgery and
antiseptic reason: 'Nobody but a poor black nigger needs to have an
epileptic seizure anymore.'
"So
you take her home and you go back to the church, down to the office
beneath the stairs, and look at the floor, and listen to the silence,
and you are twenty-eight years old, and you begin to cry; you cry for
horror of what that young girl has just been through; and you long
not to believe that this can be the city that you really live in. You
fight very hard to lock up that idea because it threatens all the
things that you have wanted to believe for so long; so you sit alone
a while and you try to lock these bitter passions into secret spaces
of your self-control. You try to decontaminate your anger and to
organize your rage; but you can't do it this time; you just can't
build that barrier of logical control a second time. It's eleven
o'clock now, and soon it's quarter of twelve; and it's cold as stone
down here beneath the wooden underside of the church-stairs, and
still you can't stop trembling. Grand
mal, you think to
yourself, means a great evil; it's twelve-fifteen and now you are no
longer crying so you get up and you lock the door of the coat-closet
which is the office of a Free School underneath the church-stairs;
and you go up the stairs and turn out the light and then you close
the door."
Kozol
stayed in Roxbury long term, honoring the loyalties he had formed in
his first teaching year, and continuing what would become a life-long
battle against poverty and educational apartheid. In fact, he formed
loyalties wherever he could find them in the struggle against such
evils, in the 1970s even traveling to Cuba to learn about the
island's astonishing success in its 1961 literacy campaign, which
reduced Cuban illiteracy to under five percent in nine months, while
the Latin American median remained 32.5%.
An appreciative Kozol commented: “Cuba's triumph in the eradication
of illiteracy . . . exceeded anything that has to this day been
achieved by any other nation in the world.”
The
means employed were as impressive as the outcome. Thousands of Cuban
children spent most of a year risking their lives and working like
demons while living on six hours sleep a night in the same houses and
sometimes even the same rooms as some of the poorest peasants in the
country, their hammocks slung above dirt floors. This remarkable
story Kozol published in “Children of the Revolution – A Yankee
Teacher In The Cuban Schools” in 1978.
“Cuba
had been weakened for centuries,” he wrote, “by the isolation of
the peasants and the consequent inability of urban students to
identify with rural poverty and exploitation.” Building a sense of
solidarity between these two groups was both a goal and consequence
of the literacy campaign.
As
he did in all his works, Kozol sought out usually unheard voices and
let them speak for themselves. One of those he spoke to in Cuba was
Armando Valdez, a twelve-year-old “teacher” who participated in
the literacy campaign and later became a member of the Cuban foreign
service: “I never could have known that people lived in such
conditions,” Valdez told him. “I was the child of an educated,
comfortable family. Those months, for me, were like the stories I
have heard about conversion to a new religion. It was, for me, the
dying of an old life, and the start of something absolutely new. I
cried, although I had been taught men must not cry, when I first saw
the desperation of those people – people who had so little . . .
No, they did not have 'so little,' they had nothing!”
Contrast
this painful but valuable insight with Kozol's remarkable description
of how the vast majority of Americans are trained to never see
poverty at all:
“There
is one city in North Africa I know which never has found its way into
the textbooks issued to the children in the U.S. schools. It is a
city that has, for several decades, been a diplomatic colony –
almost a military outpost – of the U.S. government. Each morning,
U.S. diplomats and businessmen and military attaches, their wives and
children come out from the hotel doorway and proceed across the city
square. Outside the hotel, in a long, long line of silence, patience
and despair, are dozens of very old and often crippled people,
wrapped all in white, the women in white veils as well, and often
with a quite small child standing at the side of mother or
grandfather.
“At
eight A.M., as the sun comes up above the city square, the oldest
people will be standing straight with palm outstretched before them,
the other hand resting gently on the child's head, the child's palm
outstretched as well. By twelve o'clock, the oldest people start to
bend somewhat, forehead declined beneath the heat of noon, eyes
closing slightly. By night, the old, old people are asleep, or
half-asleep, asleep in pain, in fixed and frightening immobility
there against the long white silence of the wall beneath the evening
heat.
“The
Americans pass, and pass again, as they go to and fro in crisp bright
jackets, seersucker and cord, attractive people, clever and adept,
graceful and well-tailored in the
modulation of their own compassionate reactions. Children at times
will pull their mother's or their father's arm, or cry, or shudder,
or in other ways react to what they see. Mother is cool and calm,
well-bred and cleanly limbed and neatly dressed for travel. Father is
concerned about his government assignment or his business plans.
“At
midnight often, when the hotel guests return from various places they
have been, voices shrill and bright with good delight and memory of
fine colonial service in some French or British club, the old blind
beggars have fallen down the full length of the wall, unspeaking,
uncomplaining and, but for the slow decline along that wall, unmoving
since the dawn. Crouched, huddled now, stooped over, bent in one
white triangle of silence, anaesthesia and oblivion, the beggar
slumbers at the bottom of the day's long journey downward while
infant, borrowed companion or grandchild sleeps as well, curled up
against the older person's side, sores on forehead, scars and scabs
and growths all over legs and arms, feet filthy, small toes bare, but
hand still open, outstretched still, with palm still pleading even in
the sleep of midnight on this silent street, where only the
attractive young Americans from New York or from San Francisco might
still chance to come by once, and shudder once, then to move on to
customary and appropriate places of refined and air-conditioned
slumber.
“The
child, unsophisticated, cries or questions. His parents, better
instructed in the disciplines of North American adulthood, know well
by know how to control their sense of unrest and to keep on with the
evening's pleasure. If they ever stop to think about this street of
misery at all, it might be only to persuade themselves that what they
see before them is, in some way, spurious or inauthentic: a trick to
fool the heart or to subvert the mind. In any event, they can assure
themselves that grief and pain of this variety and on this scale are
unrelated to the world of glass and steel in which they work and
dwell.
“At
worst, it is a matter of marginally perceived despair that is
permitted to exist somehow within the same world as seersucker and
fresh linen. Connections there are none: causations there are not
any. They are Americans: rich, fortunate, well-educated, skillful.
These others in the white veils are, admittedly, real people, but not
rich, or fortunate, well-educated, skillful. Clean steel edges in the
secret places of the well-indoctrinated brain have drawn explicit
demarcations. Things break down into acceptable divisions. They are,
indeed, well-educated: trained and schooled to logical postures of
oblivion and acceptable self-interest. They live in one world: the
starving beggars and their desperate children in another. It is a
property of reason, of good sense and civilized adulthood, both to
respect and understand the space that stands between.”
Such
obliviousness leads to schizophrenic social policy praising civil
rights leaders (in our better moments) while perpetuating an informal segregation not all that different from the Jim Crow version they achieved their fame opposing. Schools named after champions of
integration like Martin
Luther King, Rosa Parks, and Thurgood Marshall, Kozol has pointed out
for years, invariably
denote failing,
segregated schools housed in old, filthy, ugly, often rat-infested buildings
with the largest class
sizes, the
lowest funding, the
highest turnover
of teachers, and the worst
outcomes, including the
lowest graduation rates.
A
14-year-old East St. Louis girl Kozol talked to for his book Savage
Inequalities told him that it seemed like a "terrible
joke" was being played on history: "Every year in February
we are told to read the same old speech of Martin Luther King. We
read it every year . . . We have a school in East St. Louis named
for Dr. King. The school is full of sewer water and the doors are
locked with chains. Every student in that school is black."
Very seldom, comments Kozol, does any member of the capitalist press
point out the dark irony in this glaring feature of our “equal
opportunity” society.
At
the other end of the spectrum are wealthy white kids, who, Kozol has often
noted, tend to lose their verbal competence and stumble when serious
questions of poverty, inequality, and injustice are on the table for
discussion. As long as such topics are treated superficially, as
though they were an abstract consideration instead of a matter of
humanity and conscience, such students remain clever and adept at
expressing their views, which are often glazed over with a "What's
in it for us?" cynicism. Kozol warns that such self-interested
competence may have been won by sacrificing access to the deepest and perhaps most valuable parts of their being: "The verbal competence they have acquired
here may have been gained by building walls around some regions of
the heart," he says.
No
such walling oneself off from pain is possible for poor people. When
Kozol once asked an 11-year-old girl in the South Bronx how AIDS orphans handle their
ordeal, she replied softly, but without hesitation: "They cry.
They suffer. People die. They pray."
James
Baldwin once noted that the U.S. originally needed black people “for
labor and for sport,” but that, “now they can't get rid of us.”
The urge to be rid of the “problem” of race relations by
warehousing black and brown bodies in ghettoes far from affluent
areas puts the exploitation well out of sight and completely out of
mind, a great convenience for a capitalist social order that does not
want to be reminded of the cost of making profit the only goal that
counts. A 16-year-old girl Kozol spoke to in the South Bronx for his
book Amazing Grace said she thought white people would actually
feel relieved if all the poor people died or somehow vanished.
Another teenager ventured his opinion that the hideous conditions of
the ghetto might even be viewed optimistically by whites, in hopes
that,"maybe they'll kill each other off."
"A
sense of justified and prophetic rage," says Kozol, is voiced
freely by Harlem kids, but never by the press, which prefers to refer
to "racial sensitivities" and "racial tensions,"
but not exploitation and injustice.
In this, the kids are more straightforward than the journalists, who
know that successful careers are not built on exposing official lies
about American apartheid.
Ironically, Kozol never had children of his own, though his love for them is palpable and he has spent his life among the most vulnerable of them. Some of those he befriended years ago who survived the ordeal he writes so eloquently about, today help him out in his old age, undoubtedly a great blessing for a man who turns ninety in September. Meanwhile, Kozol will publish one final book - We Shall Not Bow Down - later this month.
This is what solidarity looks like - not slogans or ideological fights - but sensible people banding together and solving their common problems with courage and intelligence. As poverty widens amidst capitalism's ever-accelerating barbarism, few lessons seem quite so important to remember.
*A
quarter-century after publishing Death At An Early Age, Kozol
provided an update on this boy in Savage Inequalities, who was
an eight-year old orphan in 1965. Never given psychiatric care or
counseling, he was repeatedly whipped. He had one delightful talent -
drawing pictures - which the art teacher at the school shredded in
front of the class while saying, "he muddies his pants." In
response, the humiliated boy stabbed a pencil point into his hand.
Seven years later he was an alcoholic living on the streets,
demonically laughing at passersby. Three years after that he was in
jail, his face "scarred and ugly," Kozol wrote, his head
marked with jagged lines where it had been badly stitched together
after being shattered by a baseball bat. He was serving a 20-year
sentence for murder.
Footnotes
