Apartheid America

Clearly, you're angry.

"Shame of the Nation" is a dead serious book, the angriest book I've written in my life. It is not a recipe book for polishing the apple of apartheid. It's a call for an all-out struggle for decent citizens to wage an onslaught on apartheid schooling itself. The percentage of black children who now go to integrated public schools is at its lowest level since 1968. If you took a photograph of the classes I visit in New York, Chicago or St. Louis, it would look exactly like a class from Alabama in the 1940s.

Your view of the government and prevailing American culture is quite scathing. But do you really think policymakers and suburban families are actively racist? Or is this simply a case of cruel indifference?

Look, whether it's cruel indifference or the natural predilection of a parent to do the best she can for her own child, or originates in some very profound racist suppositions about minority children -- it doesn't make a damn bit of difference to the kids that I write about. There are unquestionably overtly racist white folks in the country, but I don't think that is an accurate portrayal of most white people in America. I think there is something peculiar about the culture wars that thrive in New York City; there's a venomous atmosphere around racial issues here that I don't find in most of the United States. Most white Americans with whom I talk -- and I don't mean people who read the Nation and the New York Times, just regular Americans -- are fair-minded and generous.

For instance, some of the children I write about endear themselves to readers. One little girl in the Bronx named Pineapple, whom I first met in kindergarten, and still remain close friends with, was just an irresistibly charming little kid; she used to boss me around, like a pint-sized Oprah Winfrey. And people read about her in Ohio or wherever, and they fall in love with her. And if they met her, they would do anything they could to give her the same opportunities they gave their own children. The genius of segregation in America is that it never gives most decent white Americans the opportunity to meet a child like Pineapple. And because they don't know these children in their years of innocence, they are protected from their own best instincts. If they knew them, most good people in this country could not tolerate the destruction of these children's destinies. People are more decent than the politicians they elect. At the highest levels of government -- and especially George W. Bush -- our politicians appeal to the worst instincts of Americans rather than their most generous.

I couldn't help thinking as I was reading your book that one unexpected outcome of Hurricane Katrina has been that it has revealed to Americans the state of poverty and segregation in their country, and given a pretty clear picture of what happens when the privileged desert the powerless.

Yes, it's a lot easier for white folks of good conscience to acquiesce in the immiseration of thousands of black and Latino children if we keep them at a distance. To me, segregation is not simply a demographic dilemma or some kind of a bureaucratic mistake -- it is a conscious, deliberate and morally intolerable form of social policy. It doesn't happen by accident, it's not like a weather pattern. American segregation has been created by men and will only be undone by the acts of men and women. And that's why this book calls for another passionate political upheaval in this country. I hope I live to see it. I think there is a huge, untapped political restlessness in young people today, especially young teachers. And the teachers are the best witnesses to this crime because they see it in front of their eyes every day. You can't tell them that apartheid is a vestige of the past; you can't buy them off with sentimental stories of black kids crossing the color line 40 years ago.

Segregation is the oldest failed experiment in U.S. social history. We all know it didn't work in the century just past, and it's not going to work in the century ahead. And those that tell us otherwise are guilty of absolute deception. And if you read the newspapers, you know how it works -- every year there is a new plan. This year it's small segregated and unequal schools, last year it was segregated and unequal schools with scripted phonics texts and kids in uniforms, and another year it was segregated and unequal schools with self-help incantations plastered on the walls. There is a kind of evasive game being played by many liberals, which is basically, "Let's try another cute and poignant way to make these schools more 'innovative'" -- and the press loves this because it gives them something entirely unthreatening to promote. But if interesting and even benevolent innovations on the part of school reformers were able to create successful segregated schools, we would have learned it in the past 100 years.

Is segregation simply inherently incompatible with effective education?

Yes, I don't believe that segregated schools, with the exception of a very few boutique examples, will ever be equal to the schools that serve the mainstream of society.

And that is because there are more than academic issues at stake when you talk about school segregation?

Yes, it goes far beyond the question of academic concerns -- it goes to the question of whether we are going to be one society or two, whether our children will grow up to know one another as friends or view each other eternally as strangers, and especially as fearful strangers. But it also speaks directly to academic issues, because overwhelmingly segregated schools in the United States are the schools that have the lowest scores, the highest class sizes, the least experienced teachers, and the most devastating dropout rates. And of course these are the schools that always receive the least amount of money. Segregated schools, despite occasional exceptions, are almost always funded at far lower levels than the schools that serve white and middle-class children. Nationally, on average, a school serving primarily black and Latino students gets $1,000 less per pupil than an overwhelmingly white school. That's a lot of money when you realize that kids aren't educated individually but in a class of 25-30 kids -- that's a difference of $25,000-$30,000 every year for every class. So when the neocons ask in their perennially idiotic way, "Can you really buy your way to better education?" I want to tell them to ask any principal anywhere in America what she could do with an extra $25,000 per class. In New York, the difference is twice that high. The kids up in the Bronx that I write about get a little over $11,000 per pupil, per year. But lift up one of them in your grown-up arms and plunk her down 10 miles away in the Westchester suburb of Bronxville, and she'd be getting $19,000 every single year.

Next Page: In poor schools, kids are perceived as economic units, like pint-size deficits or assets for the American economy

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