Jonathan Kozol Quotes

Until we're educating every kid in a fantastic way, until every inner city is cleaned up, there is no shortage of things to do.

It's not enough to celebrate the ideals that we're built on, liberty and justice and equality for all. Those just can't be words on paper, the work of every generation is to make those words mean something, concrete in the lives of our children. And we won't get there as long as kids in Baltimore or Ferguson or New York or Appalachia or the Mississippi delta or the Pine Ridge reservation believe that their lives are somehow worthless.

I quit because I can’t stand seeing kids come to class hungry and needing shoes. I thought I could do more by organizing farm workers than by trying to teach their hungry children.

The public school system is not about educating black children. Never has been. Inner-city schools are about social control. Period. They’re operated as holding pens—miniature jails, really. It’s only when black children start breaking out of their pens and bothering white people that society even pays any attention to the issue of whether these children are being educated.

It seems that people are more comfortable with the private outrage about gay marriage, because when you are outraged about this issue, it requires no work. There's no work that you have to do when you're outraged about a gay couple. There is work that you have to do if you want to see black fathers raise their children. There is work that you have to do if you want to see a school develop.

Our experience at Teach For America has been that the more people understand educational inequity, the more they want to do something about it.

Black America surely faces an existential crisis, but not the one imagined in the condescending news media - of somehow getting non-black America to be more just and generous. The truth is, we've already been through that, and there is nothing left to do. We're out of 'affirmative actions' of all kinds.

This nation has always struggled with how it was going to deal with poor people and people of color. Every few years you will see some great change in the way that they approach this. We've had the war on poverty that never really got into waging a real war on poverty.

We still have two separate public school systems in this country. It’s not [any longer] based on race; it’s based on economics, but that’s related to race.

If you write about race in 1850, you end up talking about race today because in many ways, so little has changed.

As a parent, you want to protect your children, but the fact of racism in this country, of inequality, that is still a lesson my children are going to have to learn. I can't protect my kids from that.

It really is systematic oppression that is so deeply ingrained into the very fabric of American society... Shedding a light on it, in whatever way possible, is the only way to create change.

I think what Donald [Trump] is saying is that it's unacceptable to him that members of the African-American community - and I'm sure he will say this about other communities as well - who live in violence, who are subject of that, or who do not have the educational opportunities that every child in this country should have so they can reach their fullest potential, that that's unacceptable.

One of the things that even wealthy children need is an education, and I think the problems I saw really have nothing to do with economics. So I was unhappy with what my own children were getting even in the better schools, and then I was seeing so many children here recruited for failure.

How do we redefine education so that 30-50 percent of inner-city children do not drop out of school, thus ensuring that millions will end up in prison?

Policy, for the most part, has been made by white people in America, not by people of color. And they have tended to take care of those things that they think are important. Whether it's their agricultural subsidies, or other kinds of expenditures that are certainly not expenditures for poor people or for people of color. And so we have to band together and keep fighting back.

You can't tell parents to teach children the value of work when we don't have jobs and the jobs we have don't pay a decent wage. You can't tell children to achieve and then let them go to broken-down schools with teachers who don't care. We need a consistency of values in our public, corporate, and private lives.

The fact is in a city like Chicago, for example, unemployment in the black community is around 20 percent for adults, 35 percent for youth, they bail out the banks, public schools, there is a deep divide. We need a plan for reconstruction and redevelopment and I hope that - police are the gatekeepers but behind that gate are these problems of disparities and injustice.

Today, we have come a distance. We have made a lot of progress. That cannot be denied. You cannot dispute the fact that our country is so different from 50 years ago. But we still have problems. There are too many people that have been left out and left behind, and they are African American, they are White, Latino, Asian American, and Native American.

Cincinnati like so many other cities, we know that so many of our schools, when it comes to public schools, are still de facto segregated racially. It has to do with residential segregation. It has to do with James Crow, Jr., which is at work, de facto rather than legally so that some of the integration is taking place among more and more well-to-do.

Has he paid his dues? Is he black enough? John Lewis and I were out there marching and organizing sit-ins back in the '60s so that his children and my children would not have to do it. We would have been failures if had to do the same things we did.

In America, you can segregate the people, but the problems will travel. From slavery to equal rights, from state suppression of dissent to crime, drugs and unemployment, I can't think of a supposedly Black issue that hasn't wasted the original Black target group and then spread like measles to outlying white experience.

I want to yell so loud that Baby Girl can hear me that dirty ain't a color, disease ain't the Negro side a town. I want to stop that moment from coming - and it come in ever white child's life - when they start to think that colored folks ain't as good as whites. ... I pray that wasn't her moment, Pray I still got time.

You got two black folk representing us through the Sixties. One of them was for violence, one was against it, and they both are dead.

There are certain things in our nation and in the world which I am proud to be maladjusted and which I hope all men of good-will will be maladjusted until the good societies realize.