"Apartheid does not happen spontaneously, like bad weather conditions"
About this Quote
Apartheid isn’t a storm that rolls in unannounced; it’s a construction project. Kozol’s line works because it yanks a soothing metaphor out from under the reader. “Bad weather” is the language of helplessness: regrettable, nobody’s fault, best endured with patience. By refusing that frame, he’s insisting on agency, planning, and culpability. Systems of separation are made by people with names, budgets, and memos, then maintained by everyone who learns to treat them as background noise.
Kozol’s intent is less to define apartheid than to block the escape hatch that often follows any discussion of structural racism: the shrugging fatalism that treats inequality as natural drift. “Spontaneously” is the key word. It calls out the myth that social harm emerges accidentally from “culture” or “choices,” rather than from policy decisions, real estate practices, school zoning, policing strategies, and the quiet arithmetic of who gets resources and who gets surveillance.
The subtext is accusatory but also strategic. If apartheid is weather, no one can change it; if it’s architecture, it can be redesigned. That’s where Kozol’s broader context matters: his career documenting segregated schooling and urban disinvestment in the United States, where the term “apartheid” is often resisted as too foreign or too extreme. He uses it anyway to force a moral reclassification: not unfortunate disparity, but intentional separation with predictable outcomes.
It’s a sentence that turns discomfort into a demand: stop forecasting; start naming the engineers.
Kozol’s intent is less to define apartheid than to block the escape hatch that often follows any discussion of structural racism: the shrugging fatalism that treats inequality as natural drift. “Spontaneously” is the key word. It calls out the myth that social harm emerges accidentally from “culture” or “choices,” rather than from policy decisions, real estate practices, school zoning, policing strategies, and the quiet arithmetic of who gets resources and who gets surveillance.
The subtext is accusatory but also strategic. If apartheid is weather, no one can change it; if it’s architecture, it can be redesigned. That’s where Kozol’s broader context matters: his career documenting segregated schooling and urban disinvestment in the United States, where the term “apartheid” is often resisted as too foreign or too extreme. He uses it anyway to force a moral reclassification: not unfortunate disparity, but intentional separation with predictable outcomes.
It’s a sentence that turns discomfort into a demand: stop forecasting; start naming the engineers.
Quote Details
| Topic | Human Rights |
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