In my course Inequality in Education we are reading Savage Inequalities by Jonathan Kozol. I have connected multiple findings that relate to our discussions, readings, and exercises in Hunger and Homelessness. Kozol’s strategy for obtaining his research was to listen to the children’s voices. He noted that the children’s voices were largely absent from the discussion. In Voices from the Street, Jessica Morrell takes the same approach when investigating homelessness. Morrell gathered her research through interviews with homeless people in Portland, Oregon. The perspective of listening to the people who experience these circumstances is necessary because an outsider can never truly understand the lived realities.  Kozol captures the voices of many children by visiting thirty neighborhoods in Washington D.C., New York, and San Antonio.

Kozol starts by describing a school in East St. Louis, Illinois. The city is ninety-eight percent black, seventy-five percent of the population collects welfare, and there is exposure to raw sewage and lead poisoning. There is a defined difference because the two nicest buildings in the city are the Federal Court House and City Hall. I observed a similar situation in the Tenderloin District of San Francisco, where many homeless reside. I found it ironic that City Hall was in the middle of the Tenderloin. On the lawn of City Hall homeless people would rest, talk, sleep, and sell drugs. The homeless people were prohibited from using the bathrooms in City Hall. Kozol questions, “Why Americans permit this is so hard for somebody like me, who grew up in the real Third World, to understand…” (17). The heightened separation draws attention to these injustices.

Negative stigmas exist about marginalized people that are often untested and untrue. Kozol spoke with the superintendent who shared, “gifted children are everywhere in East St. Louis, but their gifts are lost to poverty  and turmoil and the damage done by knowing they are written off by their society” (34). This theme of being “written off” is persistent to the way that homeless people are treated. Often, judgments can be made about their current state that is untrue. Like the gifted children in St. Louis, homeless people may have the ability but lack resources and opportunities to succeed.

Kozol also notes the multiple obstacles that the children and their parents face. Many of these obstacles are shared by the homeless community. These obstacles include: crime, poverty, lack of education, insufficient health care, and unemployment. The family can significantly influence your type of life; one might be born into a family who lives in poverty which impacts every aspect of one’s life.

Yet, despite these obstacles, in a conversation Kozol had with a reverend in North Lawndale, Chicago the reverend shared, “there’s something here being purified by the pain. All the veneers, all the facades, are burnt away and you see something genuine and beautiful that isn’t often found among the affluent” (43). When people lack resources perhaps they have something that people with resources, like me, do not. Maybe they have a heightened awareness for what they do have. Maybe they treasure their relationships more.

In reading Kozol’s book I was able to link two social injustices together, homelessness and inequality in education. I found common obstacles and themes due to structural inequalities.

*Both books Voices from the Street and Savage Inequalities can be purchased on Amazon.