Page 1 Page 2 Page 3 Page 4 Page 5 Page 6 Page 7 Page 8 Page 9 Page 10 Page 11 Page 12 Page 13 Page 14 Page 15 Page 16 Page 17 Page 18 Page 19 Page 20 Page 21 Page 22 Page 23 Page 24 Page 25 Page 26 Page 27 Page 28 Page 29 Page 30 Page 31 Page 32 Page 33 Page 34 Page 35 Page 36 Page 37 Page 38 Page 39 Page 40 Page 41 Page 42 Page 43 Page 44 Page 45 Page 46 Page 47 Page 48 Page 49 Page 50 Page 51 Page 52 Page 53 Page 54 Page 55 Page 56 Page 57 Page 58 Page 59 Page 60 Page 61 Page 62 Page 63 Page 64 Page 65 Page 66 Page 67 Page 68 Page 69 Page 70 Page 71 Page 72 Page 73 Page 74 Page 75 Page 7630 Plough Quarterly • Winter 2015 J O N A T H A N K O Z O L What Do We Owe America’s Children? The stories of the black and Latino children in New York City that Jonathan Kozol tells in his latest book Fire in the Ashes cannot be read with indifference. The author is no snapshot journalist, flitting in and out of lives with quick judgments; he approaches his subjects with an astute eye and an open heart. These painful, beautiful stories make us ask, “When did the system break? And what can we do about it?” Kozol reflects: T he word “accountability” is very much in fashion now. Children in the inner cities, we are told, must be “held account- able” for their success or failure. But none of these children can be held account- able for choosing where they have been born or where they have led their childhood. Nor can they be blamed for the historic failings of their schools. Nor, of course, are any of these children responsible in any way at all for the massive unemployment, and the flight of businesses and industries, that have put so many young men on the corners of the streets with no useful pur- poses within their daily lives. . . . The question might be reasonably asked: If all of these externally determined forces of dis- couragement had not been present when these kids were growing up, would some of them have fallen into turbulent and painful lives in any case, or forfeited their lives before they even grew into maturity? There’s no way to know, but I suppose the answer would be yes. Unhealthy and self-destructive inclinations are not the “special illnesses” of young men and women who grow up in inner-city neighborhoods. I recall, from my father’s sixty years of practic- ing psychiatry, that he treated many affluent young people who seemed “hell-bent,” as he put it, “on finding any way they can to ruin their own lives,” and some of them attempted suicide repeatedly. But, for the children of a ghettoized com- munity, the pre-existing context created by the social order cannot be lightly written off by cheap and facile language about “parental failings” or by the rhetoric of “personal respon- sibility,” which is the last resort of scoundrels in the civic and political arena who will, it seems, go to any length to exculpate America for its sins against our poorest people. The question of exceptionality needs to be dealt with here. Pineapple lived in the Diego-Beekman housing and trudged up the street to P.S. 65. That was where she had the teacher she called “Mr. Camel,” one of the seven unprepared instructors who came and went throughout her third- and fourth-grade years. Jeremy lived in a tower of decrepitude where he was robbed at knifepoint, and sometimes had to walk the stairs to get to his apartment when the elevator, as he put it, didn’t “want to come” down to the lobby. He was fortunate to go to P.S. 30; but he was often beaten up and bullied when he was in middle school. Yet both these children, as well as several of the others I was close to at St. Ann’s [Episco- pal Church in the South Bronx], rose above the problems and the perils of the neighborhood, finished their schooling in a healthy state of mind, went on to college, and are now envision- ing the range of opportunities their education will allow. . . . Charity Is No Substitute for Justice