If you grow up in the South Bronx today or in south-central Los Angeles or Pittsburgh or Philadelphia, you quickly come to understand that you have been set apart and that there’s no will in this society to bring you back into the mainstream.

Kozol is describing the lived experience of structural exclusion in segregated, high-poverty urban neighborhoods. The places he names function as shorthand for communities shaped by deindustrialization, racialized housing patterns, underfunded public services, and especially unequal schooling—recurring themes in his work. The phrase “set apart” emphasizes not just economic hardship but enforced separation from opportunity and civic belonging. His claim that there is “no will…to bring you back into the mainstream” indicts political and social indifference: the problem is not a lack of knowledge about inequality, but a lack of collective commitment to remedy it. The quote thus frames marginalization as systemic and maintained, not accidental.