BILL MOYERS: INEQUALITY MATTERS
Address to New York University
JUNE 3, 2004

Complete address at Inaquality.org

It is important from time to time to remember that some things are worth getting mad about.

Here's one: On March 10 of this year, on page B8, with a headline that stretched across all six columns, The New York Times reported that tuition in the city's elite private schools would hit $26,000 for the coming school year – for kindergarten as well as high school. On the same page, under a two-column
headline, Michael Wineraub wrote about a school in nearby Mount Vernon, the first stop out of the Bronx, with a student body that is 97 percent black. It is the poorest school in the town: nine out of ten children qualify for free lunches; one out of 10 lives in a homeless shelter. During black history month this past
February, a sixth grader wanted to write a report on Langston Hughes. There were no books on Langston Hughes in the library – no books about the great poet, nor any of his poems. There is only one book in the library on Frederick Douglass. None on Rosa Parks, Josephine Baker, Leontyne Price, or other
giants like them in the modern era.

In fact, except for a few Newberry Award books the librarian bought with her own money, the library is mostly old books – largely from the 1950s and 60s when the school was all white. A 1960 child's
primer on work begins with a youngster learning how to be a telegraph delivery boy. All the workers in the book – the dry cleaner, the deliveryman, the cleaning lady – are white. There's a 1967 book about telephones which says: "when you phone you usually dial the number. But on some new phones you can push buttons." The newest encyclopedia dates from l991, with two volumes – "b" and "r" – missing. There is no card catalog in the library – no index cards or computer.

Something to get mad about.

Here's something else: Caroline Payne's face and gums are distorted because her Medicaid-financed dentures don't fit. Because they don't fit, she is continuously turned down for jobs on account of her appearance. Caroline Payne is one of the people in David Shipler's new book, The Working Poor:
Invisible in America. She was born poor, and in spite of having once owned her own home and having earned a two-year college degree, Caroline Payne has bounced from one poverty-wage job to another all
her life, equipped with the will to move up, but not the resources to deal with unexpected and overlapping
problems like a mentally handicapped daughter, a broken marriage, a sudden layoff crisis that forced her to sell her few assets, pull up roots and move on. "In the house of the poor," Shipler writes "...the walls are thin and fragile and troubles seep into one another."

Here's something else to get mad about.

Two weeks ago, the House of Representatives, the body of Congress owned and operated by the corporate, political, and religious right, approved new tax credits for children. Not for poor children, mind you. But for families earning as much as $309,000 a year-families that already enjoy significant benefits from earlier tax cuts. The editorial page of The Washington Post called this "bad social policy, bad tax
policy, and bad fiscal policy. You'd think they'd be embarrassed," said the Post, "but they're not."