Savage Inequalities

Page 9-13: He first starts how he was privileged as a white by talking about how he his family was able to easily gain an apartment with the help of his grandfather, who was established way before because he was white. Also the complex was segregated at first and so even after the end of the “apartheid” it was still hard for the people of color to come in. He then talks about how he was able to gain a sweet job which would lead to his stardom as an antiracist activist. But the only way he ever got this job was because he knew two people. Two people he met a Tulane, his college. And the fact that he was able to go to Tulane was in itself because of white privilege. It was because he was white that his mother was able to easily gain a loan. And this loan was only gained because his mother’s family being white was able to have a house to use for collateral for the loan.

     In Savage Inequalities, Jonathan Kozol documents the devastating inequalities in American schools, focusing on public education’s “savage inequalities” between affluent districts and poor districts. From 1988 till 1990, Kozol visited schools in over thirty neighborhoods, including East St. Louis, the Bronx, Chicago, Harlem, Jersey City, and San Antonio. Kozol describes horrifying conditions in these schools. He spends a chapter on each area, and provides a description of the city and a historical basis for the impoverished state of its school. These schools, usually in high crime areas, lack the most basic needs. Kozol creates a scene of rooms without heat, few supplies or text, labs with no

He was pushed to leave New Hampshire's Noyes Academy boarding school due to community protest over African-American students. He was again denied study due to his skin color few years later, this time at the General Theological Seminary. But by perseverance and many struggles, He became the first black student to graduate from the University of Cambridge in 1853. He was an advocate of African Americans having higher education opportunities, and he found the American Negro Academy. He showed that with freedom, you could express your thoughts and set your mind to what you believe in. This quote relates to today prove that people will not get anywhere if they don’t think about education seriously and they would not be able to step to their expectations or goals in

F. Scott Fitzgerald’s depiction immigrants and minorities did start to change although it took and a bit of learning and of course a bit of time. Alan Margolies shows that in 1921 F. Scott Fitzgerald visited Europe and after his trip, he wrote a letter to his friend, Edmund Wilson. In the letter he described his distaste of minorities “taking over” and threatening to “ruin” the Nordic race. He also makes a comment about how Germany should have won World War I so that white people and minorities would not be allowed to be friends with each other. Later on F. Scott Fitzgerald commented on what he had previously stated and apologized for his pretentious and offensive words. Although in the same sentence Fitzgerald goes on to say, “‘I believe at last in the white man's burden. We are as far above the modern Frenchman as he is above the Negro,’” (Margolies 80). Although Fitzgerald may have not fully understood racial equality he did seem to begin to take these things into consideration. He understood that it was wrong to believe that whites exist with minorities, but he still did not grasp the idea that the white man’s burden was not real. Though it is the little things that further this idea that Fitzgerald is starting to see another side of equality.

(Contemporary Black Biography 1993). By being born into slavery he wanted to better the lives

form of education would save Black people from themselves. It appears that he felt like a savior to a doomed group of people who were living in a depraved state. They required direction, guidance, and education provided by White people to improve their current conditions. He further believed that domination and democracy were interconnected, and Black people strongly desired to be a part of society (Watkins, 2001, p.60-61).

While I was able to apply almost every concept from the course to some aspect of my own life, I believe that the most important thing was learning to recognize just how much privilege I have experienced. At the very beginning of the quarter, Professor Roy used the example of the fish not being aware that it lives in water. I think that translates perfectly to my experience – as it should for many of us taking this class. While I recognized the privilege of having basic needs like food and shelter taken care of, other things like my race, gender and education really hadn’t resonated with me until I took this course.

The political … the economic philosophy of black nationalism only means that we have to become involved in a program of reeducation, to educate our people into the importance of knowing that when you spend your dollar out of the community in which you live, the community in which you spend your money becomes richer and richer, the community out of which you take your money becomes poorer and poorer. And because these Negroes, who have been misled, misguided, are breaking their necks to take their money and spend it with the Man, the Man is becoming richer and richer, and you're becoming poorer and poorer. And then what happens? The community in which you live becomes a slum. It becomes a ghetto. The conditions become rundown. And then you have the audacity to complain about poor housing in a rundown community, while you're running down yourselves when you take your dollar out. [applause]

“I think this is more of a race-thing than anything else. They can’t allow a system to exist that allows black kids to succeed. If we start succeeding, they won’t need their welfare programs, prisons, and every other nanny state social program that has smothered the black population since the days of the New Deal and Great Society. The power structure in this nation is scared to death of any system that might actually empower black America, and equip black people with the skills necessary to live self-sufficient lives.”

Fitzgerald uses language in order to create a clear division between the rich and the poor. In many ways such as the use of colour imagery and the description of people and places, a clear division between classes can be seen. Although, through the actions of the people in these classes Fitzgerald makes the division seem less prominent.

There are many ladders to scale in life. Individuals are constantly looking for the next opportunity, climbing rung by rung to reach new levels of achievement. But what happens when rungs on these ladders are missing? What does one do when opportunity is out of reach due to factors outside of their individual control? One such insurmountable ladder in society is academic achievement— those on the bottom rungs face a gap vast in size and unable to be scaled by meritocracy alone. Specific inequalities maintain this gap, and polarize the academic potentials of students nationwide. In this paper, I assert that the disparity in school nutrition levels between varying socioeconomic classes in American society is a significant contributor to the achievement

His family was poor and being one of four children, Black was only able to attend university via a scholarship as “the family budget couldn’t otherwise have stretched to yet another university student.”

Empirical studies have applied different indices to various health variables one of these variables are health financing indicators (Erreygers et al. 2012). Most commonly used income inequality measures are generalized entropy indices and the Atkinson index. These indices have an ability to examine the effects of inequalities in different areas of the income spectrum, enabling more meaningful quantitative assessments of qualitatively different inequalities (Maio 2003). First group of inequality measures are family of entropy measures. Theil and The Mean Logarithmic Deviation (MLD) are members of family of entropy measures. Theil index derives from the notion of entropy in information theory. It is a measure that assess the value of different

Two forms of structural inequalities that has a definite influence in the way people live and how they live are: education and employment! I am a firm believer that education can lead to equality for everyone on Earth, with education we have the possible power to create a world where no one is poor and struggling with the burdens the poor or even the lower class hold. Not all education, however, is accessible for one as it is for another, which is the obvious problem. Since not all of us are capable or can afford a college/university level education, we are forced to be fit into a class and are categorized based on how much information we know/what we don’t. Even when people get into college they are less advantaged than some of the rest, college classes cost a fortune for many in state students, but

On the other end of the spectrum, Fitzgerald includes a set of lower class and socialistic characters.  These characters, like the wealthy and capitalist characters, are described unsympathetically.