Politics & Power Quote by Jonathan Kozol

Kozol’s sentence works like a cold splash of water: it starts with “an awful lot of people,” not to scold a fringe minority, but to name a mainstream delusion. The “strange idea” is doing double duty. It’s conversational enough to sound charitable, yet pointed enough to imply something harsher: this belief isn’t merely mistaken, it’s socially produced, taught, and protected. The line exposes how inequality survives best when it’s rebranded as history.

The pairing of claims - “no longer segregation” and “basically equal” - is a trap Kozol sets for the reader. Even if someone concedes that legal Jim Crow is gone, they can still cling to the softer myth of parity. Kozol collapses that escape route. His insistence that “neither of these things is true” is blunt to the point of impatience, reflecting a writer who has spent decades watching euphemisms (“neighborhood schools,” “choice,” “local control”) launder segregation into something that sounds accidental.

Context matters: Kozol’s work emerged in the era after formal desegregation victories, when many Americans wanted the moral credit of progress without the material cost of integration. By placing “segregation” in the present tense and tying it to “schools,” he targets the institution that Americans love to imagine as the great equalizer. The subtext is accusation: if college-educated people believe the problem is solved, it’s not innocence - it’s insulation. And insulation, Kozol suggests, is part of the machinery that keeps unequal schools politically tolerable.