The Hidden Inequality

"Sometimes the residents of affluent school districts point to certain failings in their own suburban schools, as if to say that 'all our schools' are 'rather unsuccessful' and that 'minor differentials' between urban and suburban schools may not therefore be of much significance. 'You know,' said the father of two children who had gone to school in Great Neck, 'it isn't just New York. We have our problems on Long Island too. My daughter has some high school teachers who were utterly inept and uninspired. She has had a devil of a time at Sarah Lawrence...' He added that she had friends who went to private school who were given a much better preperation. 'It just seems terribly unfair,' he said.

Defining unfairness as the difficulty that a Great Neck graduate encounters at a top-flight private college, to which any child in the South Bronx would have given her right arm to be admitted, strikes one as a way or rendering the term so large that it means almost nothing. 'What is unfair,' he is saying in effect, 'is what I determine to be unfair. What I find unfair is what affects my child, not somebody else's child in New York.'

The loss of distinction in [this] statement serves to blur the differences between the inescapable unhappiness of being human and the needless misery created by injustice. It also frees the wealthy from the obligation to concede the difference between inconvenience and destruction.

Poor people do not need to be reminded that the contest is unfair. 'They know they are living in a rich society. They see it on TV, and in advertisements, and in the movies. They know that [other people] were given something extra. They don't know exactly what it is, but they have seen enough. They know this other world exists, and, when you tell them that the government can't find the money to provide them with a decent place to go to school, they don't believe it and they know it's a choice that has been made about how much they matter to society. They see it as a message: 'This is to tell you that you don't much matter. You are ugly to us so we crowd you into ugly places. You are dirty so it will not hurt you to pack you into dirty places. By doing this we teach you how much you are hated.'"

--Johathan Kozol, 1991.