OT EUGENICS STILL KILLS IN AMERICA: Excerpts from "Amazing Grace" by Jonathan Kozol

[Context: As Eugenics And Racist Jokes make NYC AM-Radio Listeners
Laugh Out Loud, the Children in the Bronx keep on trying to make it]

As class lets out at three P.M., the sidewalk in front of P.S. 65 is
filled with mothers and grandmothers waiting to escort their children
and grandchildren to their homes. Some of the older children slip loose
from the other kids and enter a bodega on the corner of the street. A
toddler with a canvas backpack that looks almost as big as he is says
goodbye to another toddler, hugs her awkwardly, then reaches up to take
his grandmother's hand.

As long as I have visited in inner-city schools like P.S. 65, I have
always found the sight of children coming out at three o'clock, their
mothers and grandmothers waiting to collect them, tremendously exciting
and upsetting at the same time.

The sheer numbers of the children, the determination of the older women
to protect them, and the knowledge that they cannot really be protected
in the face of all the dangers that surround them fill a visitor with
foreboding. You wish that while they were in class, someone with magic
powers had appeared and waved a wand and turned the world outside the
building into fields of flowers.

Sympathy for these children, though movingly expressed in some news
stories, is not of the magnitude one would expect within a richly
cultivated city.

One of the radio talk-show hosts who broadcasts on the ABC affiliate in
New York City, who refers to African blacks as "savages" and advocates
eugenics in America, recently wondered aloud, during a monologue about
black people, "how they multiply like that," then answered, "It's like
maggots on a hot day. You look one minute and there are so many
there.... You look again and wow! they've tripled."

These are not unusual statements these days on the radio in New York
City. It often seems as if the hatred for black women in particular is
so intense that there is no longer any sense of prohibition about
venting the same hatred on their children.

"I didn't breed them.... I don't want to feed them," says a woman cited
in the Times. The woman, who lives in Arizona, is speaking of Mexican
children who enter border towns illegally.

[But that] sentiment is not unlike the one you hear repeatedly in New
York City from a number of the talk-show hosts whose scorn for children
of black and Hispanic people, frequently conveyed with searing humor,
seems to stir the deepest, most responsive chords among white
listeners.