Friday afternoon, April 19

Karen J. Wada, Los Angeles Times, presiding: For nearly 30 years, Jonathan Kozol has written about the poor and the powerless in America. He has taken a hard look at the way our country has tried to help these communities. Efforts, he says, that sometimes meet with success, thanks to great if unsung heroes, but too often suffer from incompetence, lack of resources, neglect and even malice. His books expose bigotry and bureaucracy, and the more insidious hypocrisy, shown perhaps by one woman whom he writes about in his first book, “Death at an Early Age.” She is a fellow teacher in the Boston schools, and she disapproves of his plan to tell his class of young black students about slavery. “I don’t know,” she says, as if this were some terrible secret, “if we should be telling these children that they are black.” This, as they stood in one of the city’s most segregated neighborhoods in the midst of the 1960s. Such an attitude of “I know what’s good for you,” or what’s good enough, permeates many of the institutions that Mr. Kozol writes about — from that first book, which chronicles the first of his many years teaching in Roxbury, through books on homelessness, illiteracy, and what he calls the savage inequalities of public education, through his most recent work, “Amazing Grace,” which tells the story of the people of the South Bronx.

Mr. Kozol has received many honors including the National Book Award in Science, Philosophy, and Religion and the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award. But a more telling tribute to him, he thinks, are the many thousands of letters from readers and the many friendships he has formed with the people about whom he writes. Critics have praised his ability to create powerful portraits of people who are too often disdained or dismissed entirely, people who maintain a very keen if cutting sense of self-awareness. This is seen most clearly in children like the boy who said he knows most Americans probably go to bed each night sort of hoping that poor folks like him disappear by the time they get up. “That way,” he says, “they won’t have to worry about us, or worry if they have to worry about us.” Through children he also makes extraordinarily grim lives seem ordinary or accessible. You may have to help your mother lug drinkable water up seven flights of stairs each morning, but she’ll be there to tuck you into bed at night. And children tell him their dreams and the nightmares that children should never have. He asks them what scares them, and they say hunger and rats. One child told him, bashfully but bluntly, “I’m scared of growing up.”

There are some who ask how a white guy, who went to Harvard and was a Rhodes scholar, could write about race and poverty. These questions of credibility, motivation and perspective are familiar in our business and deeply ingrained in these very volatile topics. Mr. Kozol answers these questions, the critics say, with the diligence of his reporting, the power of his writing, and the weight of experience that stretches from “The Great Society” to “The Contract With America.” I think he would add that he hopes he has brought a voice to the voiceless, to the so-called have-nots, and, to paraphrase the old hymn, has helped the blind to see. Please help me in welcoming Jonathan Kozol.

Remarks by Jonathan Kozol

Thank you very much Karen, and thanks also to Matt Storin from the Boston Globe, who arranged for my visit here. The Boston Globe is my hometown paper. It has remained my favorite paper, and the paper I trust most in the United States.

I’m in kind of a somber mood today. A couple of days ago the grandson of a family I’m close to in the inner city, a black family, one of the many families I have known first as a writer, then as a friend, went up into the attic of his grandma’s house and hanged himself. This is just the most recent of many, many losses I’ve seen among black children these last few years. Suicide used to be very rare in the black community, but it has become far too common now. Still, it’s only one of many ways many of these kids have died.

I was asked to criticize, to a degree, the way the press handles the neighborhoods I’ve worked in these 30 years. It’s hard to do that, first, because I’m very much aware of my own failings, and, second, because I have so many friends in the press, some who are here today. And, to be honest, a writer doesn’t lightly criticize newspaper editors who have the power of life and death over a writer’s work, or at least his access to the public. Maybe I’m brave about some things, but not about this. I’m very much alone my work. I don’t have powerful allies. I spend more of my time with children than I do with grown-ups. Sometimes, when the press gets rough with me, I feel like a six-year-old who has been smacked across the face and isn’t quite sure why.

I’m wearier now than I have been at any time in 30 years. It’s been a time of deep political discouragement for people like me who came of age in the days of Dr. King. If it weren’t for the beautiful little children in the South Bronx who have come to be my friends, and their good mothers and grandmothers, I’m sure I would have given up a long, long time ago. People often congratulate me. Old friends say, “It’s nice that you go up there to the Bronx so much.” I’ve been there almost ever other week since my book was published — because I want to be with the folks there who are my friends. Some white people misunderstand. They think I’m doing a good deed. I don’t go there to give blessings. I go there to be blessed. I feel blessed that so many people in a neighborhood like that treat me with love. I am very grateful to these families.

The neighborhood where most of these families live is called Mott Haven. In 1993 it was said to be the single poorest section of the South Bronx, which is the poorest congressional district in America. The median household income was $7,600. A lot of young people died in the neighborhood during the two years just before my visit: 24 young people were killed in a six block area, half of them were children. A quarter of all the mothers of newborn babies in the neighborhood test positive for HIV when they go to the hospital. The AIDS rate is said to be one of the highest in the western world. Virtually every child has a mother, brother, sister, uncle or aunt who has died of AIDS.

Asthma is endemic in the neighborhood. I haven’t been anywhere else in the world, including Haiti where I spent a good deal of time, where so many children were wheezing all the time. They carry little pocket pumps with them. The pumps are so precious that a heroin dealer told me they’re more valuable than heroin. There’s a black market in asthma pumps.

Sanitation is shameful. Rats are one of the clichés of journalistic writing about an inner city, but they are no cliché in this neighborhood. These huge rats are real. At the time I was writing, a woman in the neighborhood showed me a sign the city sanitation department had passed out that said not to touch this special kind of rat. It said they were Norway rats. She was fascinated by this specificity. She said, “I wonder how they know they came from Norway.” Rats as big as cats. She once described being kept up all night and into the early morning watching a rat eating a squirrel on a branch outside her building.

Virtually every child in the neighborhood has a relative in prison. New York City’s Rikers Island is now the largest penal colony in the entire world. You can see it any time you fly into New York. If you’re coming in from Washington, when the wheels from the Delta shuttle go down, you’re right over the women’s section of Rikers Island. There’s also a prison barge in the South Bronx, which, as one newspaper once described, is intended to hold the overflow from Rikers Island. A lot of people in the neighborhood are sensitive to language like that. They see a word like overflow as a sanitation metaphor. The prison barge — five stories, four of them underwater — is next to a sewage plant, appropriately. A massive juvenile prison is near completion, opposite two public schools in the neighborhood. The city spends a little more than $7,000 yearly on a second grade child, but $70,000 a year if that child commits a crime that puts the child in juvenile detention.

This is one of the most deeply segregated places in the United States. There were 800 children at the public school that I described in my book. One child was white. The third grade teacher who taught that child looked at me one day and said, “I’ve been at this school 18 years. This is the first white student I’ve ever had.” This is virtually apartheid. Whether it’s de jure or de facto makes no difference to the kids who live there. I doubt there was ever a place in Mississippi 30 years ago, where racial segregation was more absolute than what you’d see today in the South Bronx. The press in New York seldom refers to the neighborhood as being segregated. You almost never see that adjective in the newspapers in New York — not when they’re speaking of New York. They’ll use that word if they’re talking about a town in Mississippi. They’ll use it if they’re speaking of your city, or Chicago, or somewhere else, but in reference to New York, they tend to use curious euphemisms in order to dodge the issue. A typical modifier that is used instead of segregated is “gritty.” I don’t know why. They’ll refer to a gritty community or a hard-bitten community, or, occasionally, an undisturbed community. They’ll never say segregated. I sense they find it embarrassing. There’s a great deal of humiliation in the fact that a city, which 30 years ago sent some of its best and brightest and most noble young people down south to save the soul of Mississippi, should now be a bastion of apartheid in the western world. I think they do verbal somersaults and reach for undernourished adjectives in order to avoid the obligation of the press, which Thomas Merton once described as calling things by their right names.

The segregation of this neighborhood is not simply the consequence of demographic shifts or immigration. A lot of ingenuity went into it. In the late 1980s, thousands of homeless families in New York were shipped there purposely by the city in an orchestrated effort to clean up Manhattan, as the city worded it, to raise the quality of life in midtown neighborhoods, where many of these poor people had been living in shelters and hotels. The presence of the homeless in midtown had been a great embarrassment to New York City’s image, offending business interests and hurting tourism. These people were right in the theater district. The last thing the theater owners wanted was for tourists to spend $200 for two tickets to “Les Miserable,” only to go out on the street afterward and see the real thing. They got them out of sight, and they did it aggressively and ingeniously. The homeless had to be put somewhere. So, in large numbers they were put in places like Mott Haven.

This was an evil thing to do. I don’t use that word lightly, but no lesser word is equal to this action. I never sense a recognition of this sin in the newspapers. The sadness of the South Bronx and the pathologies that the press loves to talk about are described as poignant, but somehow autonomous phenomena. The intentionality, the dynamics that created these problems are not addressed. This is true to some degree all over the nation.

Life is hard and often brief for children in this Mott Haven. Four kids died in needless household fires while I was writing my book. I kept having to update it even in page proofs. Some died in crossfires. One was shot on New Year’s Eve a year ago in a hallway of a building I had just left. The grandma, who is a friend of mine, lived near the top of the building and had come downstairs to smoke a cigarette and make sure the street was quiet. She was going back up the stairs when the young man was shot dead — a young man whose mother had sent him to Georgia for a year so he would be safe. He had been home 24 hours when he was killed.

Not all the children are victims of gunfire. Some are simply the direct victims of municipal abandonment — tax cuts for the rich, and cuts in service for the poor. One wonderful little boy, an 8-year-old named Bernardo Rodriguez, a good student, a religious, lovely boy, whose family I now know very well, died in an elevator shaft. His grandma had complained for months to the city that the elevator door was loose and would fly open, even if the elevator wasn’t there. The children have to play in the hallway. The real outside is too dangerous. Grandma complained and complained, but the elevator door was never fixed. If it had been midtown Manhattan or Back Bay Boston, where my father and mother live, you can bet the door would have been fixed, but not in this neighborhood. One day, little Bernardo was out in the hall, and, as kids do, he forgot and brushed against the door. It flew open, and he fell five flights to his death. His body wasn’t found until his blood began to drip on passengers.

Most of these kids believe in God. They talk about God continually. Many cry a great deal. Many pray. Many have breathing machines next to their beds because it’s so hard to draw a deep breath. Many are hungry. One little boy, who has come to be a close, beloved friend, was eating raw oatmeal for dinner in the early months of 1994, right out of the box. This little boy, Anthony, is Puerto Rican. He was 12 when we met. When people review my books, they often say this is a typical inner-city youth or an example of a survivor. Anthony isn’t an example of anything. I don’t write about typical. I don’t use human beings that way. He is himself. Everybody whom I write about is unique. No one stands in for anybody. He is a rare, wonderful human being.

The first time I met Anthony, I asked, “What is your life like?” I knew his uncle was dying of AIDS, that he had another uncle in prison and that he was hungry. When we first met, he couldn’t pronounce my last name, so he called me Mr. Jonathan. A lot of kids call me that now. Anthony said, “Mr. Jonathan, my life is like the life of Edgar Allen Poe.” I was stunned that he had heard of Edgar Allen Poe. I asked, “How do you know of Poe?” He said, “I’ve read his books.” I asked, “In school?” He said, “No.” I asked, “Where did you find them?” He said, “In junk stores, little stores.” I asked, “Do you spend much time in little stores?” He said, “Many good things have I found in little stores.” He tended to invert his sentences. He had what the priest called a charming kind of dyslexia. I asked him, “Why is your life like that of Edgar Allen Poe?” And he said, “Because he had not a very happy life.” But he had a happy side, too, and he smiled said, “Besides he never finished anything he started, and that’s my problem, too.” That’s probably what he told his teachers in school. I asked, “How do you do in school, Anthony?” He said, “Not good. Not good at all. Not even excellent,” ... this odd reversal of concepts in his mind. I’m repeating his words from memory. The exact text is in my book. I hope, however, even with my imperfect memory, I’m doing justice to these kids.

One of Anthony’s neighbors is a little girl named Anabelle, whom I met when I visited sixth grade in the neighborhood. I visit schools a lot because I like to go into the classroom. I asked the kids, as I frequently do, “What’s the most beautiful thing in the world?” In this neighborhood, nine out of 10 children will say heaven. So I asked them “What’s heaven like?” Anabelle, who is 11 years old, a charming little girl, like a wood spirit ... I got to love to run into her in the neighborhood because every time I saw her it would cheer me up. ... jumped up and said, “A peaceful place with only the innocent.” I asked, “Who gets to go there?” She said, “All the little children who have died in our neighborhood will go there. They are already there watching over us.” I asked, “Do grown ups get to go?” She said, “Some. A few.” Then she said, “All dogs.” I asked, “Where do the dogs go? The same place we go?” She said, “No, they go to a separate section called animal heaven.” I must have looked disappointed because my dog had just died, and I was mourning for her. She looked at me and said, “But don’t worry. If you had a dog you loved, you can spend weekends together,” ... like visiting hours. I asked, “What do people wear in heaven?” She said, “In heaven they don’t wear clothes. They wear night gowns, white because they’re angels. In hell they wear red pajamas.” I asked, “How do you pay for things in heaven?” She said, “In heaven you don’t pay for things with money. You pay for things you need with smiles.”

In my writing, I often ask one person to comment on the comments of another. I repeated Anabelle’s words to Anthony, and he, being a year older, told me he thought that she was immature. Since he was 12 and she was 11, he thought she didn’t really understand theology. I, being an old school teacher, jumped at this chance and asked, “Hey, why don’t you write me a paper about that?” It was June, so I said, “You could do it during the summer.” He immediately looked put upon, smacked his head in a goofy way, and said, “Only I, in all the world, will have to do a homework paper in the summer.” But the wonderful thing is that a month later when I met him, he said, “I did it.” And he gave it to me. I’d like to read it to you, as best I can from my notes.

“God’s kingdom,” it began, that’s what he called heaven. “God will be there. He’ll be happy that we have arrived. People shall come hand in hand. It will be bright, not dim and glooming like on earth.” I like that word glooming. “All friendly animals will be there but no mean ones. As for television, forget it. If you want vision, you can use your eyes to see the people that you love. No one will look at you from the outside. People will see you from the inside. All the poor people from the street will be there. My uncle will be there, and he will be healed.” That was the man who was dying of AIDS. “He might seem happy for a change. The prophets will be there and Adam and Eve and all the disciples, except Judas,” and — this is the part I like best — “as for Edgar Allen Poe, yes, he will be there, too, but not like somebody important. He will be a writer teaching children. No violence will there be in heaven, there will be no guns or drugs or IRS. You won’t have to pay taxes. You’ll recognize all the children who have died when they were little. Jesus will be good to them and play with them. At night he will come and visit at your house. God will be fond of you.” Something about the softness of that line I loved particularly. God will be fond of you. “How do you know that you are there? Something will tell you, this is it. Eureka! If you still feel lonely in your heart, you’ll know that you are not there.” On the bottom of the last page, just as kids often do, he wrote check in back with an arrow. I turned it over and on the back he had drawn a picture of a big, goofy-looking bird, but it looks a little more like a crocodile, and out of the mouth of the bird he had drawn a line pointing to a bubble. Inside the bubble he wrote “never more.”

Anthony’s uncle died in October that year. Anthony, who was an acolyte at his church, asked the priest if he could do the funeral, and he did. At his uncle’s funeral he chose to read a passage out of Revelation, which I used in the front of my book because I wanted everything in my book in one way or another to come from the people in the neighborhood: “And I saw a new heaven and a new earth: for the first heaven and the first earth were passed away. ... And I heard a great voice out of heaven saying, Behold I make all things new and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain: for the former things are passed away and God shall wipe away our tears.”

Anthony, as you can imagine, is going to win a good deal of attention from the world. He already has in the wake of the publication of my book. People all over the country write to him, or write to me wanting to be in touch with him. He will have many opportunities. But most of the children in his neighborhood will never have these opportunities. Most will live as they have always lived, as outcasts and exiles in our rich society. Their lives will be anonymous. Their births will be celebrated by no sociologist. Their marriages will not be reported in the social pages. When they die, they will get no obituaries. That’s why I ended my book with 24 obituaries.

The depth of the despair in which these children live is not reflected faithfully in our newspapers. Not in the least. Instead, there is a tendency to sweeten and romanticize our cruelty to children, as in those almost mandatory, upbeat stories newspapers run periodically — stories about individuals who beat the odds, a new block of renovated buildings, or a unique school in the ghetto that is somehow turning things around. There’s one like that every five years. These are what I call happy ghetto stories, very reminiscent of the press 40 years ago in Mississippi: “Look, we’re giving them a brand new school, a real nice park, some new low-rise apartment buildings, a new gym, a swimming pool. ... Our colored folks are really very happy over there.” The image of the ghetto seems terribly important to newspapers. But the ghetto itself — its persistence, its perpetuation as a permanent cancer on the body of our cities, as a permanent disfigurement upon the body of American democracy — is no longer even questioned.

Tomorrow, I’m going up to Harvard for a conference to commemorate the 100th anniversary of Plessy vs. Ferguson. Friends of mine in the press say, “Jonathan, we don’t cover that because it isn’t news anymore.” In New York, a journalist said to me that we never talk about the racial line at 96th Street where the city turns from white to black and brown. He said it’s not news. If that’s not news, why are hemlines news? Why are new fashions news? Why is a new restaurant with some new kind of sushi news? What is news? Who defines it? If the press has really given up this issue, if this is off the agenda as it seems, if the only goal now is to to make a pretty ghetto, to improve perception of the ghetto, if the ghetto is accepted as a permanent piece of American reality, then we should stop waxing nostalgic every spring for Martin Luther King. We should stop talking about the dream. Because if that’s the case, the dream is simply being used as a device to substitute nostalgia for integrity.

A classic example of the upbeat ghetto story in New York almost always bears the same headline, “Hope rises from the ashes. The Bronx is coming back.” A tabloid version is usually, “Bronx bounces back.” It’s a news story on how something has improved. The press never bothers to tell you the last 20 times this promise was made and then betrayed.

A couple of years ago I showed one of these stories to an Episcopal priest in the South Bronx, Martha Overall, a remarkable woman who attended Radcliffe College, became a lawyer, practiced with Louis Nizer, then gave it all up to serve the poor. We talked about one of these stories. A few days later she showed me a pile of identical stories going back to 1972, with the identical headlines. One from 1973 said, “The next 10 years we will see a new South Bronx. New hope is rising. South Bronx renaissance. Innovations in urban planning.” She looked at me and said, “If there is one thing more destructive and demoralizing to poor people than to live in desolation, it is to have false hopes reawakened at routine intervals. Do that to me enough times and I’ll never hope again. It is like shooting someone up with drugs. This is how you turn poor people into zombies.”

Some journalists I know think it’s a kind of favor to the poor to write these stories, an act of kindness to say something nice about the ghetto for a change. I disagree. In most poor neighborhoods in the Bronx you can’t buy the New York Times. It’s not sold there. And you can’t get home delivery. My mother gets home delivery in Boston, but you can’t get it in the Bronx. It’s even hard to find the paper at the newsstand. People in the South Bronx get angry when I speak of this. They want to know why you can get the paper in a little town in Massachusetts, but not in their neighborhood. So these stories don’t speak to the poor. Writing these stories doesn’t do any favor to the poor. It does a favor for the rich. It pacifies us.

The way to comfort the afflicted is not by sugarcoating or denying their affliction, but by challenging and fighting those who afflict them. Don’t romanticize the ghetto. Confront those who have designed and perpetuated it, as well as those who don’t in principle approve of these arrangements, but in practice find them quite convenient. The latter, of course, are precisely the affluent readers whom many of your advertisers want to reach. And saddened or guilt-laden or heartsick readers don’t flock into the expensive stores to buy expensive clothes, or spend $200 for a dinner at Lutèce or the Four Seasons. They are more likely to go to church and ask God for forgiveness. Prayer and shame and mercy do not help to sell expensive clothing. Civic and commercial boosterism wears continually against the obligation of newspapers in the cities to speak truth to power. I say this cautiously and with respect for many decent editors who have conceded much the same to me and find it troubling. I think it is troubling, too. They say they do the upbeat story to throw a bone to the people in the Bronx. Baloney! They’re throwing a bone to Wall Street. They’re throwing a bone to powerful people so that they can sleep at night.

A woman with AIDS in the South Bronx, in my book I call her Mrs. Washington, is a very important person in my life, one of thousands of those who, against their will, were shipped from Manhattan into the Bronx. She is an eloquent, prophetic human being who is dying now in the filthy place in which we put her. She never chose to live there. Never. Once I quoted her a story that had interviewed a bunch of black nationalists, or blacks who sounded nationalist, who said they favored segregation. She noted they were all middle-class, and she said, “I notice none of them live in my neighborhood.”

The white press is only too delighted to find a handful of black people who will praise the virtues of apartheid. We use it shamefully when we do that. This woman is the kind of woman who to me is a blessing because she is so honest and eloquent. This is what she said about these stories, which are like bouquets, these upbeat stories on the ghetto: “If you like me, ask me to your home and ask my children to your neighborhood. Tell them that your playground is their playground. Find them a place to sit next to your child in your child’s public school. If you do not like me, if you send me somewhere else to die, then don’t pretend. Don’t send me flowers. I don’t want them. I’m going to throw them out.” That is her message to newspapers.

This is a shrewd, perceptive, angry critic of the press, this woman, but the insights and anger of people in her situation are not given much attention in newspapers. To the degree that poor people are cited voicing anger, it’s usually anger that is directed at somebody in their neighborhood, a drug dealer on the corner or another woman in the building who is doing something wrong. Very seldom do we hear the anger that she feels about the privileged, about the things we do and say. I was discussing with her once the way the papers in New York were trying to explain the growing meanness toward the homeless and the poor. There was a lot of pressure in the last few years to drive beggars out of the subways and get homeless people out of midtown Manhattan. They started posting signs that said don’t give to beggars. The priest that I know paraphrased it, “Do not give that which ye have to the poor.” The head of the subway system said this is the “New Gospel” with New York. I remember the priest was stunned at the insensitivity of using the word “gospel.” I think it was in the Christmas season.

Anyway, I was talking about this with Mrs. Washington because the papers were explaining it not as the evidence of racism or cruelty or greed or anything disparaging to their readers, but as a kind of existential weariness that wealthy people feel at seeing so much poverty in front of them and not seeing anything get better. The phrase the papers used was “compassion fatigue.” I’m sure you’ve used that term as well. I showed it to Mrs. Washington. She studied it for a long, long time repeating the phrase a bit sarcastically, almost as if she were tasting wine. She kept saying it, compassion fatigue, compassion fatigue. At last she shook her head and said, “I just don’t understand what they have done to get so tired. When I was living in the homeless shelter near Times Square, I got tired and my kids got tired at carrying water buckets up the stairs. Maybe the wealthy people and reporters down there got exhausted just from watching us.” This was a shelter that had no water so they had to lug buckets down seven flights to the street and go to a bar to get water.

I never see a voice like that cited fully and openly in the newspapers. Let me give two more examples. This is an important one. One Sunday in July in ’93 the city was going through a period of record heat. Mrs. Washington’s apartment was stifling, choking in humidity, with not the slightest motion of air. She showed me a story about the heat that spoke with great compassion of the misery and discomfort of the carriage horses in Central Park. “It wasn’t much of a week to be a horse,” the writer said, “People at least have air conditioners and friends with pools.” “I guess that puts me closer to the horses,” Mrs. Washington remarked. There is no one in her neighborhood, or virtually no one, who has an air conditioner, and certainly nobody has a pool.

These kinds of stories, especially those in the lifestyle pages, as well as many fashion stories, do a lot more damage than some of my friends in journalism may believe. What is going on here is a kind of cultural deletion, a sanitizing of reality. On the fashion pages you’ll see stories that use the word people in the same way as the story I just quoted, “People at least have air conditioners and friends with pools.” Then who is Mrs. Washington? Is she not a person? In the fashion pages you’ll see sentences like this, “Women this year are bored with the little black dress and buying more ornate designs.” Baloney, women this year in her neighborhood, probably in most neighborhoods, are wearing the same old dress they bought six years ago because they are too poor to buy a new dress. So you look at that and you want to know which women. Who is this for? Who is left out and who has been deleted? That pervades the lifestyle pages in big city papers and, of course, the social pages and particularly the obituaries. Deletion of this kind is worse than bigotry, especially when it has that glitzy, upper-class sound. A bigot at least admits that you exist. He may despise you, he may fear you, he may demean you, but he recognizes that you are there. He does not deny your reality, he doesn’t sugarcoat your suffering, he doesn’t poison you and then report that you’re actually quite happy.

All of this is part of a tendency that newspapers have. Maybe it comes under the category of civility. If that’s the word used to justify it, I don’t think it’s a good use of the word. It’s more like diluting the truth in order to make it bearable for the powerful. The priest at St. Ann’s refers to suffering as sacred wine. She says, “If you water it, it isn’t sacred anymore, but watering the wine of suffering is terribly important for the people who don’t suffer. Some of the newspapers are very good at this.” I think that’s true.

I talk a lot about religion, and many of my old friends in the press, some who have known me since college days, find this bewildering. Some of my friends from Harvard even look at me clinically when I talk about religion. That used to happen when I was at Harvard, too. I lived, God help me, in a place called Eliot House, where people were so self-consciously sophisticated that if you said you believed in God, they would give you a funny look — as if maybe you needed to go to health services. I find this very troubling. A lot of sophisticated people, particularly northeastern liberals, have been far too patronizing on this subject. By steering away from anything that has to do with religion or morality or ethics, many of us who view ourselves as liberals have left a tremendous vacuum that has been filled skillfully by people on the far right, like the Christian Coalition. This is our fault.

You can’t even start to speak about a place like the South Bronx if you don’t speak about religion. I don’t mean writing seasonal stories at Easter or Christmas. Perhaps, I ought to use a word like faith. Faith in the real sense. That is intimately linked to what led me to the South Bronx. I didn’t go there, initially, to write a book. I went there because I was morally and emotionally exhausted. Although I couldn’t have said so at the time, I went in search of my own salvation. I felt that I was dying on the flatlands of political exhaustion, euphemism, and abstraction. Particularly, in the world of education, I got sick of dehumanizing, business-minded jargon like downsize, restructure, privatize, decentralize, and hyphenated doublespeak like outcome-based-instruction. I felt like a thirsty person who was being given a glass of sand to drink. When I went up to the South Bronx, I wanted to find strength, something to restore my soul. The irony is that I should have found it in one of the poorest places in the world. It came from children. It came from grandmothers.

One of the kids, who is one of the greatest blessings in my life, is the little girl pictured on the cover of my book. Her name is Jessica. She was chosen because she symbolizes what I mean by grace. I’m sure you know the words to the hymn from which the title of my book comes, “Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound that saved a wretch like me. I once was lost and now I’m found, was blind but now I see.” What I mean by that title is that the children I’ve met are full of grace already, and most of them see clearly. It is our nation that is blind. It is our nation that has somehow lost its soul. I feel that every time I open up a paper. I feel it every time I come back here to Capitol Hill. Tonight, if you have a copy of my book and are alone in your hotel room, and are in a mood not to be clever, not to be urbane, not to be sophisticated, but just to be exposed to your own feelings, look at the eyes of that little girl on the cover of the book. Those eyes can tell you something about decency, about integrity, about grace, and, certainly, about clarity of vision.

But they also tell us something about danger, because they look so piercingly into a future that has been imperiled for her by our actions and decisions. Every time I meet her, and I meet her often in the street, I feel in the presence of a question. She doesn’t say this, but I feel she is always asking, “What do you plan to do with me? What use are you going to make of me? Do you see me of real human value, or am I superfluous? Do you see me as if I might be your child, or do you really wish that I were never born?” I’ve spent my whole life among poor children like Jessica. I love being with them. They bless us by their mere existence on the earth. The question I ask myself is whether this nation plans to bless them in return. That is the question that I see within her eyes. That is the question that has not been answered, not by our government, not by our politicians, and not by our daily press. I hope that some of you will have a chance to give an answer. Thank you very much.

Wada: Mr. Kozol, we’re running a little bit late, so we’re only going to have time for a few questions. It is for members only please. Yes sir?

Questions from the floor

Arnold Rosenfeld, Cox Newspapers: I’ve edited in a number of places. I can’t seem to keep a job. And I’ve sponsored a number of stories that you’ve been talking about. On the one hand, some readers will say, “No more hard luck stories.” On the other hand, from the community you will hear, “You’ve insulted our neighborhood. You haven’t caught it.” Obviously, we are not doing it right. Can you give us some feeling for how to do it right? Because if these stories don’t reach people ... reaching people is the only reason to do them.

Kozol: Absolutely. It’s nice to see you again, by the way. In the case of your paper, what I am about to say isn’t an issue. If it is a newspaper that doesn’t seriously want poor people as its readers, and doesn’t even sell its papers and provide delivery in their neighborhoods, then don’t pretend that it’s for them, because it isn’t. That’s a different situation. In general, what newspapers wrestle with is there is the bad ghetto story, the drug bust, the mother who abused her child, the Elisa Izquierdo story in New York, and then, sometimes at the pressure of the somewhat middle-class black or Hispanic reporter, occasionally there is the good ghetto story. They are really the flip side of the same coin that we can keep alternating for the next hundred years.

My question is when will newspapers reflect the angle of a woman like Mrs. Washington, who grew up in the ’60s as I did? She is about 50 years old now, and wonders why there is still a ghetto a quarter century after the martyrdom of Dr. King. Is this the way it’s going to be for another century? What are the dynamics that create a ghetto? What perpetuates it? The people in the South Bronx are literally poisoned. The city puts toxic industries in their neighborhood that they won’t put in Manhattan, that have been blocked in Manhattan. That’s one reason there is so much chronic asthma in the neighborhood. It is no favor to people to allow them to be poisoned and then, like a bad doctor, say, “But actually the patient is doing quite well.” Our obligation is not to poison them, and if they are poisoned, to expose it and the culprit. In other words, there has been far too much emphasis in recent years on improving the perception of the ghetto than on transforming its reality. I would like to see less emphasis on perception, what Ms. Washington would call fewer flowers, fewer bouquets, and more real changes. She’d like flowers to grow in her neighborhood. She’d like beautiful parks. She’d celebrate the day her neighborhood got a park as beautiful as Central Park, instead of having funds cut back for the park in her neighborhood, and Central Park being privatized. She is very shrewd about the dynamics of what is going on now in New York and in America.

I don’t see the reality of the creation and perpetuation of misery reflected in the papers. All the emphasis is on the pathology of the poor. No attention is given to the pathology of the powerful. With all these debates about the good or bad family values of black families in Harlem or South Side Chicago, no attention is given to the values of the people who have redlined them into these neighborhoods. No attention is given to the values of people who object to paying enough taxes to provide these people with even marginally decent health care, and then grandly go off to the British West Indies for the winter and spend $20,000 for a holiday. No attention is given to our values. I would like to see the day that our pathologies were scrutinized as searchingly as those of our victims. Yes?

Cole C. Campbell, Norfolk Virginian-Pilot: I’d like to ask you a question with a yes or no answer. If newspapers did a superb job of communicating the conditions in all of our communities including ghettos and low-income neighborhoods, would society respond?

Kozol: Yes, I am positive it would.

Wada: Thank you very much.

Kozol: I want to reinforce that last point. I not only believe that newspapers would make a difference, but I think people at powerful newspapers often don’t recognize the degree to which they have a direct and indirect effect in orchestrating opinion. There are a few newspapers in America that when I read them one day, I know what’s going to be on Good Morning America the next day. I know what stories CNN will cover. That handful of newspapers — completely apart from what their circulation might be, whether it is currently up a bit or down a bit — do not simply describe reality. To a large degree, they define reality. They orchestrate the borders of what is considered real, legitimate and important. In that sense, whether circulation rises or falls in the years ahead, newspapers will, probably more than any force in our society, define the ethics, the decency, or the betrayal of ethics of this nation. I am a great believer in newspapers and deeply admire people in even papers that I criticize, and I hope this can be the beginning of a long dialogue. Thank you very much.

Wada: Now, Jane Healy, managing editor of the Orlando (Fla.) Sentinel, is going to give us an example of “Journalism That Made A Difference.”

Remarks by Jane E. Healy

From 1989 through 1993 crime ravages the picturesque island of St. Thomas. Twenty-five thousand violent crimes are reported, but only 1,400 cases go to trial, and half of those are dismissed. The Virgin Islands Daily News wants to know why. In a 10-part series, the small daily with a news staff of 21 reveals that a failing criminal justice system is contributing to the rising crime rate. “Everybody and his uncle has access to the key police evidence room,” explains reporter Melvin Claxton, who wrote the stories. His six-month investigation results in the firing of the police commissioner and the attorney general, the arrest of 11 police officers, and reprimands for 30 others. The Daily News receives a Pulitzer Prize for public service in 1995. “We weren’t trying to win an award,” says city editor, Marilyn Bailey. The motivation was purely to right a wrong in the community. A newspaper that stood up for what was right and brought real reform, another example of journalism that made a difference.