Still Separate, Still Unequal

In watching the Katrina news coverage, one could not help but be struck by the lack of diversity of the victims in New Orleans. Jonathon Kozol, writing in Harpers Magazine (September 1, 2005) has alerted us to the fact that segregation is a fact of life in more cities than New Orleans. In an impassioned article, “Still Separate, Still Unequal: America's Educational Apartheid,” Kozol observes . . .

“Many Americans who live far from our major cities and who have no firsthand knowledge of the realities to be found in urban public schools seem to have the rather vague and general impression that the great extremes of racial isolation that were matters of grave national significance some thirty-five or forty years ago have gradually but steadily diminished in more recent years. The truth, unhappily, is that the trend, for well over a decade now, has been precisely the reverse. Schools that were already deeply segregated twenty-five or thirty years ago are no less segregated now, while thousands of other schools around the country that had been integrated either voluntarily or by the force of law have since been rapidly resegregating.

“In Chicago, by the academic year 2002-2003, 87 percent of public-school enrollment was black or Hispanic; less than 10 percent of children in the schools were white. In Washington, DC, 94 percent of children were black or Hispanic; less than 5 percent were white. In St. Louis, 82 percent of the student population were black or Hispanic; in Philadelphia and Cleveland, 79 percent; in Los Angeles, 84 percent; in Detroit, 96 percent; in Baltimore, 89 percent. In New York City, nearly three quarters of the students were black or Hispanic.”

To read the entire Kozol article, click here.

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