The Shame of the Nation: The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America

In The Shame of the Nation: The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America, Kozol examines the damaging effects of segregated education on both Black and white communities. He argues that educational policies that keep children separated by race and socio-economic status increase the racial divide in American society by isolating children of color and leaving them unprepared to participate in mainstream American culture. By contrast, when children of different races attend school together, Kozol argues that society as a whole is made stronger.

As a young teacher in Boston’s segregated elementary schools, Kozol’s Black mentors taught him that desegregating schools was “the moral starting-point for all the rest” (5). Racially isolated children are shut out of many opportunities and confined to a “caste-and-color sequestration [that] divorced them from the mainstream of American society” (6). They don’t develop the confidence to interact with white people and are often unaware of many important cultural markers. According to the landmark Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court ruling, segregated education “generates a feeling of inferiority as to [children’s] status in the community that may affect their hearts and minds in a way unlikely ever to be undone” (29).