real children living in apartheid America
An interview with Jonathan Kozol
by Julie A. Wortman

On April 20, 1999, students Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold killed 12 of their peers and a teacher at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colo., a community to the southwest of Denver. In the aftermath of this tragedy, there has been a wide-ranging public discussion about the hidden lives of this nation's young people (see TW 4/99). Educator Jonathan Kozol's new book, Ordinary Resurrections: Children in the Years of Hope (Crown Publishers) is one of the latest contributions to this conversation. Like Kozol's best-selling Amazing Grace, this book describes the children of New York's South Bronx and the roles St. Ann's Episcopal Church and the public schools play in their lives, but this time from the vantage point of the children. In these pages, too, Kozol offers a more personal and reflective assessment of these children and their prospects for the future.

Julie A. Wortman: Ordinary Resurrections focuses very specifically on the lives of particular children that you've come to know in Mott Haven in the South Bronx. Why should people in Denver, for example, read the book?

Jonathan Kozol: Well, there are neighborhoods almost exactly like this in every major city in the U.S. In fact, I'm always fascinated at the number of people in places like Denver or Seattle or Los Angeles who will write me letters and tell me they want to go immediately to the South Bronx to meet the children and the priest that I've described. I always politely suggest to them that they don't need to come 3,000 miles to New York to see racism inequality and the physical illness in a poor community. Sometimes the longest journey they'll ever take is the one across town in their own city.

JW: So what you're saying is: As the South Bronx goes, so goes the rest of the nation?

JK: No, I wouldn't say that, because every city has its unique dilemmas. Only New York has Mayor Guiliani, for example. I have always written about specifics. But although my first book about children, Death at an Early Age, was about black children in the segregated public schools of Boston, it is read in education schools in all 50 states and I don't think at this point anybody thinks the issues it raises are unique to Boston.

JW: You make a point in the book that these days when we talk about inner-city children we really put a false emphasis on how different they are from other children.

JK: The conditions of their lives are dramatically different from those of suburban children. About a quarter of the children in this section of the South Bronx have asthma. I don't know any other neighborhood in the developed world in which so many children suffer chronic asthma. Approximately 75 percent of the men in the neighborhood are unemployed. Nearly 95 percent of the families live on incomes of about $10,000 a year. Also, an awful lot of the children I know see their fathers only when they visit them in jail or in prison. But in the details of their lives and in the things they long for and the things that they find funny and the things that they find sad, they are very much like children everywhere.

Take Elio, one of the children in the book. The number one subject on Elio's mind last year was the New York Yankees. He's a baseball player. Like children anywhere he and the other kids in Mott Haven start telling you what they want for Christmas way before Thanksgiving, you know? Elio started last September. He wanted a Ken Griffey, Jr. baseball mitt, which he got thanks to Santa Claus. Another child in the book, Pineapple, goes to the store -- tugs her little sister to the store to buy candy, which she's not supposed to have because she's plump, but she does it anyway. Just like kids everywhere. And she gets the same kind of red licorice sticks that kids everywhere buy. They're called Twizzlers. They all watch Sesame Street when they're little. When Mr. Rogers came to visit them with me, it seemed like all the kids knew who he was. Elio wasn't sure at first, but as soon as somebody told him who he was, Elio went running up to him and kissed him. I went back with Mr. Rogers just three weeks ago and Elio went right up to him and said, "I missed you."

That's one reason that I put the focus in this book on what I call the details of life. There are too many big labels that we plaster on inner-city children. The experts tell us that they are really premature adults -- precocious criminals, we're told by experts at conservative think tanks who probably don't know many children of the inner city, but who read each other's statistics.

Baloney! These are real children and, by and large, remarkably innocent. And in many cases their innocence persists well into their teenage years. Ariel, who's one of the little girls in the book -- a very generous little girl who's very tender towards Elio -- is now a young teenager and she's still as innocent and graceful and pure of spirit as she was at the time I met her. In fact, if there's one way that these children differ from wealthy children, it's that they're certainly more religious than most affluent kids I know -- and their religion is not perfunctory. And it's not simply liturgical. It's religion of the heart, profound religious faith.

JW: Yes. I enjoyed reading the scene in the book where the children ask the priest to bless them with holy water -- "Bless me Mother," they all cry, and she does.

JK: To me, watching the priest sprinkling holy water on the children was one of the most beautiful experiences I've ever had -- a very poignant experience to see the faces of the children when Mother Martha [Overall] did that and to see her face, too, because she glowed with joy when she did it. She said at one point, "Of all the things I have to do here at the church, this is the part I love the best!"

JW: From what you wrote, it sounded like she sprinkles them with holy water a lot?

JK: Yes, she does. If the children ask her to bless them, she delivers the goods. One reason it's so moving to me is that these children don't get too many blessings from our society these days. Congress hasn't blessed them in a good long while. President Clinton in signing the welfare "reform" bill certainly didn't bless them. The mayor of New York City doesn't seem to try too hard to bless children of color in the poorer sections of New York. The newspapers don't really bless them, except in the convenient month preceding Christmas and then, suddenly, poor children become the object of sympathetic news stories.

Mother Martha, however, doesn't simply limit herself to rituals and symbols, she blesses the children in thousands of other ways. She runs one of the best after-school programs in the U.S. And she started this long before it became fashionable, before the White House was talking about after-school programs. It's a very intense program with very strong academic content. She goes to court when they're going to be evicted from their home. She goes to court to get a juvenile released from prison. She uses every bit of skill she has -- and, fortunately for the children, she has tremendous resources because of her prior experience as an attorney. It's very unusual to walk into a church in the poorest neighborhood and find a priest who went to Radcliffe and studied with John Kenneth Galbraith and took the same courses that I took at Harvard.

Most of all, she blesses them by her own playful personality. She engages them at their own level. And that, I am sure, is why the children love her so much. She doesn't come to this as a missionary. There's no missionary condescension; there's nothing saccharine about her ministry.

She's far more in the tradition of Dorothy Day than she is in the tradition of Mother Teresa.

JW: As I read your book I thought to myself, Kozol's revealing a scandal -- he's revealing the existence of an apartheid system within our country, and not only within New York, but within every city, within every community, at some level.

JK: As I point out in the book, 99.8 percent of the children in Mott Haven's public schools are black or Hispanic, so it's a virtually absolute apartheid. It's a scandal which the northern press no longer talks about. Even The Boston Globe, which is one of the best newspapers in the U.S., very seldom condemns racial segregation in Boston any longer. And I never see The New York Times refer to the South Bronx as a ghetto, a segregated neighborhood. The press, in fact, is beginning to advance the notion of the perfectible ghetto.

JW: Now what is THAT?

JK: The happy ghetto which has nice townhouses and pretty parks and slightly improved schools. But the press in the major northern cities no longer directly challenges the banks and real estate firms and the other powers and principalities for creating and reinforcing an indomitable system of apartheid. They condemned every element of apartheid when the issue was Mississippi, but never today. Not in New York. Instead, almost any week you can find a story in the newspaper about how happy people are in the South Bronx now that we gave them a pretty new park or something like that.

JW: Despite the political perspective of your book, it comes across as kind of a contemplative journal.

JK: Well, it is a journal. And in fact I was reading Thomas Merton's journals as I was writing the book. It was reading those religious journals that enabled me to feel that it was okay to wander and not to give any chapter a tight discipline. If the chapter was mostly about asthma, but a child told me a funny story about her dog, then I wrote about her dog.

JW: The book has a bioregional flavor, too, in the way you immerse the reader in the specifics of this community.

JK: Yes. I think that emphasis tends to make people more political. Mother Martha, for example, doesn't say in her sermons that affluent, white people in the suburbs have advantages. She says they TAKE advantages. She's very specific, because she knows that the school funding in New York state is contrived -- is rigged! -- to give the advantage to suburban children who get two to three times as much spent on their public schools as the children in the South Bronx. She sees a direct connection and when she's invited to preach in a wealthy parish she doesn't let them off easy! She doesn't sugarcoat it. Mother Martha never settles for a box of used clothes from a wealthy suburban church; she asks them to join the struggle for justice. And that means to find the courage to confront directly the local inequalities which are reflections of national inequalities, because these are endemic patterns. Every state, as you know, has unequal public schools because of the archaic property tax.

JW: What is the best advice for someone of means in terms of developing a political consciousness -- to go to their own inner city and spend time, or to pay attention in a very detailed way to what's around them with respect to the children?

JK: I would say both at once. The problem with purely localized decency is that for those who live in an entirely affluent community, it never involves them in any high risk of confrontation with the social order. It makes it too easy to be good Judeo-Christians. It seems to me we have to try to do both at once. For example, for those in relatively affluent parishes of New York state who read this book it seems important that they do more than simply advance enlightened attitudes about children and gender and race in their own immediate community, though that's a starting point.

When I'm asked by affluent congregations in New York state or nearby areas, "What should we do?" I often will say, it starts at home, in your own town, but, ultimately, I would hope that you would join us when we go to Albany to demand an end to the savage inequalities of school financing in New York state. And that means sacrificing something, because if I were talking to somebody in Scarsdale, I'd have to point out that they are sending their children to schools in which teachers are paid $25,000 to $30,000 more than the teachers in the South Bronx. As long as they do that, all their children's victories and lives will be contaminated because they will be victors in a game that they rigged to their advantage. I say that constantly and I find that most serious Christians do NOT mind when I talk candidly. I tell them, don't simply deplore the fact that the South Bronx is one of the most segregated ghettos in North America. Ask how the housing patterns in your hometown guarantee that! Because there couldn't be a South Bronx without a segregated Great Neck.

At the point where decent people of faith in largely white, affluent communities are willing to face these issues and join us, not just in the state capitals, but also in Washington, in fighting these issues, it's at that point that they cross over from charity to justice. And that is the transition that I always ask of devout people, who write me very moving letters about my books.

JW: I'm interested in your commentary about the commodification of children as economic units -- and how even those who are the advocates for children get seduced into justifying the dollars spent on their behalf with talking about them as "future workers," or saying, "If you spend money on this child now, you won't be spending money later to house them in prison."

JK: Well, this business about commodifying children and seeing the value of a child only in her future earning power simply devalues the lives the children are living now. What if they don't live to be 25-year-old wage earners? And what if a child dies when she's 15? Does that mean that her childhood was useless? I don't like the idea of valuing children only as economic units in our society. This way of looking at children has become so fashionable that even liberal advocates are forced to buy into it in order to lobby effectively. And I've done it, too. I cannot tell you how many times I've gone up to Capitol Hill and pleaded with members of the Senate and House to put more money into Head Start because it will save money later on. As I look back, I feel a sense of great distaste for that argument. If we are truly acting on Judeo-Christian principles, we should be doing it because they're children and deserve to have some blessings in their lives while they're still children and it should have no connection with how they might possibly benefit America's economic interests later on.

And, in fact, the most wonderful kids, if they're really well-educated and grow up to think independently for themselves and to find their way into unusual careers such as poetry or art or ministry, will never be of any use to the economic system -- Thank God! God help us if Toni Morrison had been looked at when she was 12 years old, you know, and valued solely for her possible future payoff to IBM. Thoreau certainly was of no use to American industry. Nor was Gwendolyn Brooks.

Julie A. Wortman is publisher and co-editor of The Witness, <julie@thewitness.org>.