Blog Post #4

I am glad your back for week 4. Before I discuss this week’s reading in Shame of the Nation, I wanted to return for just a minute to my discussion last week of Lean On Me. In the portion of the book I discussed in week 3, Kozol had not mentioned Joe Clark, the principal that is profiled in the movie. One portion of this week’s reading discussed the tendency to think that superhero administrators can come in and fix a broken school and Kozol mentioned Clark (199-200). As I suspected, Kozol was no fan of Clark. He leveled some of the same criticisms at Clark that I discussed last week and generally criticized Clark for letting his ego get ahead of making real change to the high school. Kozol also confirmed my suspicion that after Clark left, the school returned to its bad state because Clark had not actually made any long-lasting changes through his harsh discipline. (200).

This week Kozol turned his attention to potential solutions to the school segregation problem. He discussed failed ideas to improve the segregated schools without doing anything to encourage integration. He also discussed some of the various school choices and charter school movements which he characterized as ineffective. (224-25), Ultimately, he settled on the solution as fighting against the segregation that comes from rigid district lines that match school placement with housing patterns (222-23).

This connection of housing to school segregation highlights how multiple public policies need to work together to make changes. One of the suggestions that Kozol made was to encourage the building of low-income housing in suburbs that can be used for section 8 housing vouchers (223-24). This would allow minorities to move to places with mostly white schools which over time would increase the integration of these schools.

Kozol’s comments about the need for encouraging integrated housing to facilitate integrated schooling got me thinking about some of the statements and steps that were taken by the Trump Administration during 2020 as it relates to housing. One of Trump’s major reelection campaign arguments was that he was going to save the suburbs from integration in housing. In a campaign event in Pennsylvania, Trump told supported that they should like him “more than anybody here because I ended the regulation that destroyed your neighborhood. I ended the regulation that brought crime to the suburbs.” Trump was referring to ending Obama-era regulations that made it easier for minorities to bring housing discrimination claims. Trump’s statement was a clear play to white suburbanites which he believed feared minorities moving into their neighborhoods. 

The Trump statements and policy go precisely in the opposite direction of what Kozol advocated when he wrote his book almost two decades ago. I have come away from the book and my following of the new today believing that there still is a base fear that many white people have about living near minorities. Kozol makes the point that when blacks and whites are brought together at a young age, racial issues seem to evaporate. (234). But adults don’t seem willing to be open to the same type of racial mixing as children. That is why demagogues like Trump can obtain (or at least almost) obtain power by making us afraid of each other. 

 So many of the problems that Kozol describes in his book are ones that could be fixed by people opening up to those that are not like themselves. But Kozol shows us again and again, how close-minded people are to this type of change. For example, he told the story about a proposed busing program between the town of Roosevelt and East Meadow on Long Island. Roosevelt, a predominantly minority school, had its facilities fall into disrepair so an agreement was made between the two towns to set up a bussing program. In response, citizens of East Meadow went on a campaign to block the program by saying that property values will go down and crime will go up. (150-160).

These arguments are almost the same ones that Trump made in his campaign. The good news of course is that Trump lost and perhaps President Biden will take steps to encourage housing integration and reverse what Trump did. But I fear that real change will only come only with generational change. It has been almost 60 years since Martin Luther King gave the “I Have A Dream” speech in which he saw a world where irrational racial fear disappears. But current events show that King’s dream still has not come and Trump’s vision still gets millions of votes. 

I do have hope that my generation will be the one to bring bout the change and I think Trump’s defeat, after running a campaign touting segregation, was a positive development. But his argument about a minority invasion of the suburbs still persuaded a lot of people, which tells me that we are not there yet when it comes to accepting integration in housing or schooling.

Works Cited:

Choi, Matthew. “Trump Boasts of Pushing Low-Income Housing out of Suburbs.” POLITICO, POLITICO, 29 July 2020, www.politico.com/news/2020/07/29/trump-housing-policy-low-income-suburbs-386414. 

Kozol, Jonathan. The Shame of the Nation: The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America. Three Rivers Press, 2005. 

Singh, Namita. “Trump Begs Suburban Women to 'like Me' in Plea at Rally.” The Independent, Independent Digital News and Media, 14 Oct. 2020, www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-election/trump-rally-pennsylvania-pleads-suburban-women-us-election-biden-b1030464.html.