Kozol's Letter to NYTimes Editor--Shame of the Nation Review

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johnkarls
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Kozol's Letter to NYTimes Editor--Shame of the Nation Review

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Jonathan Kozol's Protest Re NY Times' Selection of Nathan Glazer to review "Shame of the Nation: The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America"

New York Times – Letters to the Editor
Shame of the Nation
Published: October 23, 2005

To the Editor:

I was startled by your decision to assign Nathan Glazer, whom I have criticized repeatedly and severely, both in print and in many public settings, to review my book ''The Shame of the Nation'' (Sept. 25). At the very least, Glazer should have so informed your readers, so that they could have some opportunity to question his impartiality.

In your ''Up Front'' comments, you speak of this review as ''a classic Glazer performance.'' Indeed it is. Under the guise of superficial evenhandedness, Glazer manages to misstate and distort my views as artfully as he has done with those of many of my liberal colleagues in his long career. He says, for instance, that I wouldn't be deterred from my support for racial integration even ''if no positive effects could be shown'' when, in fact, I say nothing of the sort and, indeed, devote a lengthy section of the book to demonstrating the consistently successful outcomes of a number of good interdistrict integration programs, presenting data he does not dispute and relying also on my own experience as a former teacher in one of these programs in suburban Boston.

But it is Glazer's tone, more than his factual inaccuracy, that is most injurious. He correctly notes, for example, that New York's whitest and most wealthy suburbs spend approximately twice as much per pupil as is spent on the black and Hispanic kids I write about in the South Bronx, and he says, as if he is perplexed by this, that I express ''outrage'' at these numbers. For his part, Glazer makes it clear that he is happily immune to outrage on such matters.

Much to the reverse, he writes, ''I have often been amused by these per-student expenditure figures,'' and then wanders off into one of his familiar ''thought experiments,'' as if he were no longer talking about real and living children but about some abstract entity that brings him cerebral enjoyment. It must be nice to live in a world in which you can be pleasantly amused about injustices from which you do not suffer. The 6- and 8- year-olds whom I describe do not have that luxury.

Glazer insists that white indifference or racism are not the major obstacles to integrated education. ''Rather, other values, which are not simply shields for racism, stand in the way,'' he says, one of which, he adds, is ''freedom from state imposition.'' Is it not strange that no such exculpation was provided by Mr. Glazer or by any other reputable Northern intellectuals to white segregationists in Mississippi when they raised exactly the same clarion call of ''freedom from state imposition'' (or, in that case, ''federal imposition'') to defend their own apartheid system 50 years ago? Why was it so transparently ''racism'' in the South? And why is it now conveniently discovered to be ''other values'' when it comes to Northern states such as New York?

New York has the infamy today of being the most segregated and unequal state for black and Hispanic students in the nation. The New York Times may rightly be embarrassed by the segregation -- educational and residential -- it has calmly tolerated in its own backyard for far too many years; but it was a cynical injustice to drag out a neoconservative war horse, gifted at genteel equivocation, to sweeten this story for consumption by your readers. The shame of the nation is not simply that conditions of near-absolute apartheid now prevail in New York City's schools and those of a growing number of its suburbs, but that those who have the power to define the borders of permissible debate refuse to name and to confront this unacceptable reality. Glazer's long, inaccurate and inconclusive essay (it's not really a review, because it scarcely touches on the narrative that makes up nine-tenths of my book) serves its purpose, I suppose. It helps to lower the temperature of the debate and to appease the conscience of those people in New York and other Northern cities who pretend to honor Dr. Martin Luther King while ripping apart the dream for which he died.

The great equivocators will not win in the long run. There is a surge of rising indignation among tens of thousands of young people in this nation, including those many idealistic and determined teachers who come into inner-city schools and don't pretend that educational apartheid is simply a piece of distant history but know it is alive and well right now, because they see it every day before their eyes. They will rise up one day before too long to resurrect the spirit of risk-taking action that their parents' generation has abandoned. When they do, they will shake the very foundations of an unjust social order that condemns the children of the black and brown to a subordinate existence. No nation can get away with crimes against its own children forever.

Jonathan Kozol
Byfield, Mass.

*****

Nathan Glazer replies:
I was not aware that I had been ''criticized repeatedly and severely, both in print and in many public settings'' by Jonathan Kozol when I was reviewing his book, and only learned of this criticism from his letter. I am not referred to in ''The Shame of the Nation'' nor, I believe, in the one earlier book by Kozol I have read. I assume the editors of the Book Review were also not aware of his criticism, and that if they had been they might not have asked me to write the review. In any case I hold no animus against Kozol. We both agree on the desirability, justice and fairness of racial and group integration and of equal public financial support for students' education. The issues between us are how and whether we can move further toward these objectives under our political system and its distinctive version of democracy.

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