Alexander, a 16-year-old student who was brought here [to the South Bronx] by his parents from Jamaica just a year ago, says this: “You can understand things better when you go among the wealthy. You look around you at their school, although it’s impolite to do that, and you take a deep breath at the sight of all those beautiful surroundings. Then you come back home and see that these are things you do not have. You think of the difference. Not at first. It takes a while to settle in.”

I ask him why these differences exist.

“Let me answer that,” says Israel, a small, wiry Puerto Rican boy. “If you threw us all into some different place, some ugly land, and put white children in this building in our place, this school would start to shine. No question. The parents would say: ‘This building sucks. It’s ugly. Fix it up.’ They’d fix it fast—no question.”

[…]

Alexander then begins an explanation of the way that inequality becomes ensconced. “See,” he says, “the parents of rich children have the money to get into better schools. Then, after a while, they begin to say, ‘Well, I have this. Why not keep it for my children? In other words, it looks them into the idea of always having something more. After that, these things—the extra things they have—are seen like an inheritance. They feel it’s theirs and they don’t understand why we should question it.

“See, that’s where the trouble starts. They get used to what they have. They think it’s theirs by rights because they had it from the start. So it leaves those children with a legacy of greed. I don’t think most people understand this.”