Still Separate Still Unequal

Racial segregation and racism is one of the world’s major issues today. Many people are unaware of how much racism still exists in schools and anywhere else where social lives are occurring. It’s obvious that racism is not a good thing as many decades ago, but it is still occurring in society, and especially in schools, even though the government abolished it several decades ago. Two articles—“Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria?” by Beverly Tatum and “From Still Separate, Still Unequal: America’s Educational Apartheid” by Jonathan Kozol—present two opposite views on the inequality in public schools. On the one hand, Tatum focuses on African- American racial identity development and the role of race in classrooms with
He started off by mentioning the social status of students enrolled in a neighborhood high school in a two page part of his article. He uses about twenty examples of high black to white ratios to prove his claim such as Bronx, for instance, more than 90 percent of students are black or Hispanic. At John F. Kennedy High School in 2003, 93 percent of the enrollment of more than 4,000 students was black and Hispanic (Kozol, 2015, p. 378). He continues to make his case by using multiple different sources, statistics, and facts that show what he believes portrays the immense educational inequality between minorities and the
In a way, his ideas and the flow of his article get interrupted with all the source information. Had he been careful about using too many sources and statistics his overall idea wouldn’t feel overwhelming or lose focus. He loses track of the problem he is trying to prove by placing too many statistics all together. Instead, he should have evenly spaced them throughout the article to make his point clearer. It is apparent that both Tatum and Kozol use outdated programs as examples to back up their arguments leaving their examples to be irrelevant. For example, it is apparent that Tatum had been gathering data since her college days because the Metropolitan Council for Educational Opportunity program she used was not existent until 1966 (Tatum, 2015, p. 385). This is irrelevant because society continues to change and so does, the results she got from the study. She found that there is a small amount of minorities who can participate in this program,