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Authors: M.K. Asante Jr
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taxes, so my schools have much fewer resources per child and significantly less money to fund education.
My students are bringing noneducational issues like hunger, domestic violence, homelessness, abuse, and many other personal problems that demand greater resources. However, despite this, my schoolsare getting far less money than, say, suburban schools, which don’t have to deal with these issues.
Can I read you a passage? I came across it recently and it echoes this point.
Sure, go ahead.
This is from
Savage Inequalities: Children in America’s Schools
by Jonathan Kozol:
“Don’t tell students in this school about ‘the dream.’ Go and look into a toilet here if you would like to know what life is like for students in this city.”
Before I leave, I do as Christopher asked and enter a boys’ bathroom. Four of the six toilets do not work. The toilet stalls, which are eaten away by red and brown corrosion, have no doors. The toilets have no seats. One has a rotted wooden stump. There are no paper towels and no soap. Near the door there is a loop of wire with an empty toilet-paper roll
.
“This,” says Sister Julia, “is the best school that we have in East St. Louis.”
Almost anyone who visits in the schools of East St. Louis, even for a short time, comes away profoundly shaken. These are innocent children, after all. They have done nothing wrong. They have committed no crime. They are too young to have offended us in any way at all. One searches for some way to understand why a society as rich and, frequently, as generous as ours would leave these children in their penury and squalor for so long—and with so little public indignation. Is this just a strange mistake of history?
That’s the sad reality.
Along the same lines, the late, great artivist Ossie Davis once said, “I believe the ending of poverty is the cultural assignment of our time.” Do you agree?
Yes, and racism in this country is intertwined with poverty—so yes, poverty and racism. I mean, in America, the richest nation in the world, on any given night, 562,000 American children go to bed hungry.
Do you think the U.S. government cares?
Follow the money, the budget, and you’ll see what the government cares about. The U.S. budget represents not only political and economic interests, but moral ones as well. Don’t believe what politicians tell you their priorities are, look at the budget and decide for yourself.
A child is born into poverty every forty-three seconds, and without health insurance every minute in America. This is public information.
One of the most common misconceptions is that the government can’t solve the poverty problem and that everything that could possibly be done has been tried. The government can in fact solve the problem and it’s not that expensive. The reality is they haven’t been willing to consider eradicating poverty in this country.
So what do we do?
Didn’t Frederick Douglass say that “Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.”
Yeah, he did.
Well, there you go.
It’s up to the people, in me and outside of me, to make this a priority. Demand justice and true equality.
But they don’t understand because of misrepresentation. That’s why I agreed to this interview.
KRS-One once said, “It’s not a novelty, you can love your neighborhood without loving poverty.” Do you agree with that?
Most definitely. Poverty is nothing to love. My image has been distorted and misrepresented, though, so you have a white media that both glorifies and demonizes me at the same time, while never really addressing who I am.
So I take it you feel misrepresented?
Of course. There is me, as I am, with all of the institutional, political, economic, and structural racist policies, and then there is my image that fails to address any of this in a real way.
The misrepresentation leads to a public consensus about my residents. They believe, both those who reside
My students are bringing noneducational issues like hunger, domestic violence, homelessness, abuse, and many other personal problems that demand greater resources. However, despite this, my schoolsare getting far less money than, say, suburban schools, which don’t have to deal with these issues.
Can I read you a passage? I came across it recently and it echoes this point.
Sure, go ahead.
This is from
Savage Inequalities: Children in America’s Schools
by Jonathan Kozol:
“Don’t tell students in this school about ‘the dream.’ Go and look into a toilet here if you would like to know what life is like for students in this city.”
Before I leave, I do as Christopher asked and enter a boys’ bathroom. Four of the six toilets do not work. The toilet stalls, which are eaten away by red and brown corrosion, have no doors. The toilets have no seats. One has a rotted wooden stump. There are no paper towels and no soap. Near the door there is a loop of wire with an empty toilet-paper roll
.
“This,” says Sister Julia, “is the best school that we have in East St. Louis.”
Almost anyone who visits in the schools of East St. Louis, even for a short time, comes away profoundly shaken. These are innocent children, after all. They have done nothing wrong. They have committed no crime. They are too young to have offended us in any way at all. One searches for some way to understand why a society as rich and, frequently, as generous as ours would leave these children in their penury and squalor for so long—and with so little public indignation. Is this just a strange mistake of history?
That’s the sad reality.
Along the same lines, the late, great artivist Ossie Davis once said, “I believe the ending of poverty is the cultural assignment of our time.” Do you agree?
Yes, and racism in this country is intertwined with poverty—so yes, poverty and racism. I mean, in America, the richest nation in the world, on any given night, 562,000 American children go to bed hungry.
Do you think the U.S. government cares?
Follow the money, the budget, and you’ll see what the government cares about. The U.S. budget represents not only political and economic interests, but moral ones as well. Don’t believe what politicians tell you their priorities are, look at the budget and decide for yourself.
A child is born into poverty every forty-three seconds, and without health insurance every minute in America. This is public information.
One of the most common misconceptions is that the government can’t solve the poverty problem and that everything that could possibly be done has been tried. The government can in fact solve the problem and it’s not that expensive. The reality is they haven’t been willing to consider eradicating poverty in this country.
So what do we do?
Didn’t Frederick Douglass say that “Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.”
Yeah, he did.
Well, there you go.
It’s up to the people, in me and outside of me, to make this a priority. Demand justice and true equality.
But they don’t understand because of misrepresentation. That’s why I agreed to this interview.
KRS-One once said, “It’s not a novelty, you can love your neighborhood without loving poverty.” Do you agree with that?
Most definitely. Poverty is nothing to love. My image has been distorted and misrepresented, though, so you have a white media that both glorifies and demonizes me at the same time, while never really addressing who I am.
So I take it you feel misrepresented?
Of course. There is me, as I am, with all of the institutional, political, economic, and structural racist policies, and then there is my image that fails to address any of this in a real way.
The misrepresentation leads to a public consensus about my residents. They believe, both those who reside
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