Children are not simply commodities to be herded into line and trained for the jobs that white people who live in segregated neighborhoods have available.

I emphasize teachers because they are largely left out of the debate. None of the bombastic reports that come from Washington and think tanks telling us what needs to be 'fixed' - I hate such a mechanistic word, as if our schools were automobile engines - ever asks the opinions of teachers.

Apartheid does not happen spontaneously, like bad weather conditions.

I beg people not to accept the seasonal ritual of well-timed charity on Christmas Eve. It's blasphemy.

An awful lot of people come to college with this strange idea that there's no longer segregation in America's schools, that our schools are basically equal; neither of these things is true.

When I was young, I was religious.

The rich...should beg the poor to forgive us for the bread we bring them. Healthy people sometimes feel they need to beg forgiveness too, although there is no reason why. Maybe we simply ask forgiveness for not being born where these poor women have been born, knowing that if we lived here too, our fate might well have been the same.