Life & Wisdom Quote by Jonathan Kozol

Kozol’s line lands like an accusation disguised as a fact pattern: you don’t have to be cruel, active, or even interested to be implicated. The power move is the “Even if” opener, which shuts down the most common escape hatch in inequality debates - the idea that guilt only attaches to bad actors. Kozol aims at the comfortable bystander who believes decency is the same thing as innocence. In his framing, neutrality is not a moral position; it’s a dividend.

The “unjust system” is deliberately nonspecific, because he’s not litigating one policy. He’s naming a structure: schools financed by property taxes, housing markets shaped by segregation, workplaces sorted by inherited networks, courts and healthcare that treat some lives as riskier than others. Kozol’s career-long project - especially around public education - has been to show that what Americans call “local control” or “merit” often functions as a polite alibi for abandonment.

The metaphor of winning “a game that was rigged” does two things at once. It makes inequality legible in everyday terms (rules, referees, scoreboards) while stripping away the romance of individual achievement. “Winner” sounds like praise until the next clause reveals it as indictment: your victory is preloaded. The subtext is strategic: if you can accept unearned advantage as real, you can’t keep demanding gratitude from those forced to play on hard mode. Kozol isn’t asking for private shame; he’s setting up a public obligation. If you’re already benefiting, then “doing nothing” isn’t a harmless default - it’s participation.