Ending Apartheid, In America

 WHEN I WAS IN HIGH SCHOOL, in the early nineteen seventies,I was enrolled in a supposedly desegregated school district, in full compliance with Brown vs. Topeka Board. Only, I wasn't. Sure, our school of about a thousand students included both black and white, white in the large majority, and indeed both races inhabited the same building. But there the "desegregation" ended. You know the drill. Before school every morning, when hundreds of students gathered together to mill about and visit, the African-American kids clumped together in a corner of the building on the first floor, the same corner every day. Everybody knew exactly which corner, and stayed out. The rest of the campus belonged to us. We white kids segregated only according to social and economic class, jocks and eggheads, cool and uncool,  blue collar and white collar,  the usual all white cliques, but not race.  Again, if you were white, you stayed out of the black section. Everybody know it. The feeling was mutual. Both races knew their turf. The arrangement was strictly if informally enforced. Even then thought the situation kind of "sucked", but,in reality, I was fine with it.All my friends were white, upper middle class, cool. Rhodes scholar Jonathan Kozol began his teaching career in  in 1967, and immediately noticed that rock solid racial segregation ruled in the generally racist city. He wrote a book about it, "Death A An Early Age", which took the education world by storm. It detailed the brutal treatment of African-American kids,and caused a game changing uproar. Then, he spent the next fifty years furthering his  research. Now, Kozol has published probably his last, culminating study of the same situation, which, he maintains, has not only not improved, but,in some ways, worsened. The new seminal monograph is titled: "An End To Inequality: Breaking Down the Walls of Apartheid Education in America". Today;s racism in public education is less overt, but ultimately, no less brutal. The sanctioned physical brutality visited upon the minority by the majority with administrative heads turned  the other way is perhaps less extreme; the segregation  in the classroom and the different treatment of students according to race is not. The affluent white students are tracked into an ambitious curriculum, the black kids in what to the author is an obvious pattern, are placed in and educated through a more generic, less ambitious course of study, regardless of intelligence or capacity for high academic achievement.The assumption is that African-Americans from poor Boston neighborhoods simply will not be going  to college. He has recently seen misbehaving black students locked away in closets as an official means  of punishment. Isolation from the community, isolation which Kozol maintains somehow fails to include white students in any way even remotely proportional. As you might suspect, the author offers recommendations, including a comprehensive systemic change with the goal of achieving the dream martin Luther King articulated in 1963: that of an all inclusive education system based on human equality. But in a country infested with the conservative ideology of pretending that racism no longer exists anywhere in America, prohibiting the teaching of the truth about America's enduring racism, of denying the realities revealed by Critical Race Theory, our best expectation and indeed only hope is that the progressive community will step forward, and, as always, lead the way in creating a new and improved America, an America that was meant to be by its founders, who themselves  failed to live up to their own aspirations. There is no acceptable alternative.