Jonathan Kozol

Superior Essays
No matter how hard people work to get out of poverty, those who are not affected by poverty are blind to these issues of poverty and therefore cannot help. This divide between the haves and have nots in our society is part of what perpetuates the problems that the poor in society face. In our society, we preach that if you work hard in life that you will be able to get anywhere. Unfortunately, the American Dream that we speak of is often much more difficult to achieve than well-off Americans make it out to be. Authors Jonathan Kozol and bell hooks both discuss issues surrounding the impoverished in our society. Jonathan Kozol makes his case regarding poverty by using experiences told to him by the poor in society and comparing them to the words of the well-off. He then supplements the words of the poor with statistics that support their claims to add credibility to his piece. He writes about his belief that we are in an unjust society that separates haves and have nots from each other with policies and biased personal belief systems. Gloria Watkins, better known by her pen name of bell hooks chooses to focus instead on how the popular culture views poverty and presents images of poverty, and analyzes what these images tell us regarding how we view the poor and what we assume about them. Kozol opens his piece suggesting that people who do not live in major cities and who have no firsthand knowledge about realities of urban public schools are not able to see the problems of racial isolation that people face in these areas. …show more content…
Kozol says that many Americans “seem to have the rather vague and general impression that the great extremes of racial isolation that were matters of grave national significance some twenty-five or thirty years ago have gradually but steadily diminished in more recent years” (Kozol 348). He claims that “schools that were already deeply segregated twenty-five or thirty years ago are no less segregated now” (Kozol 348). Kozol also believes that schools that had been segregated are resegregating rapidly. Kozol uses these pieces of information to show the stark difference between how poverty is seen in the outside world not affected by poverty and the people who are living in it. Chicago is just one example of the segregation that still plagues our nation, where less than 10 percent of children in the public schools of the area are white (Kozol 348). The segregation of these schools is only one part of the bigger picture of poverty in America’s big cities. Financially, these schools in impoverished areas do not receive the help that they need in order to enable them to work towards improving their schools. Well-educated and sophisticated people dismiss the challenges facing schools in poverty. Kozol has had experience talking with these well educated people, and claims that the responses that he gets when asking about improving public schools are all of the same nature. He is often asked, “Is the answer really to throw money into these dysfunctional schools? (Kozol 356). Because the government does not look at the root of the problem for these schools in the poor communities, the poor communities and these schools are never able to improve, because the schools never get any real, life-changing help. bell hooks takes a different approach, looking at the differences between the ideas of poverty that society creates and the …show more content…
Discussing a young single mom Victoria Houser in western New York, she shows an example of a family that may look put together on the surface, but which could fall apart at any second. “At first glance, her life doesn’t look all that bad”, Fessler says. “She lives in a cozy two-bedroom apartment. She has food, furniture and toys for her almost 2-year-old son, Brayden. He even likes playing a game called Fruit Ninja on her electronic tablet.” Looking past the aspects of her life that make it seem as if she is financially stable, one can see that “her life is teetering on the edge”. Houser explains that there have been drug busts in the apartment complex. “Her next-door neighbor was recently arrested for allegedly murdering someone and stuffing the body in a cupboard”, Fessler says of Victoria

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