POST 3: "AMAZING GRACE" JONATHAN KOZOL

 

"AMAZING GRACE" Jonathan Kozol

Connections

    

    Over the past few weeks, our class has read three articles by three different authors. The first was "Privilege, Power, and Difference" by Allan Johnson, the second was "Other People's Children" by Lisa Delpit, and the most recent has been "Amazing Grace" by Jonathan Kozol. By reading all three, there is an evident difference between Kozol's piece and the others. Kozol does not make claims directly, place direct blame, or give a single opinion of his own. In contrast to the two former authors, Kozol acts as an audience himself, as we are his audience. He is an interviewer, drifting through the neighborhoods of the Bronx, that he is out of place within, and observes what he sees. It's through his eyes, and not by his voice or beliefs, that he allows us, the readers, to experience what the people living in these tragic conditions have to endure each and every day. 

    So far, this piece has been the most powerful to read. Johnson and Delpit gave a very structured approach in displaying the issues within our society. They both offer solutions they believe will help the people living in poor communities, but where they are weakest is in their emotional descriptiveness of the real horrors in living in these desperate communities. Where those authors were weak, Kozol was strongest, using almost the entire section to describe the circumstances of the St. Ann's neighborhood. 

    This article has such a strong emotional effect through its content, that it doesn't need to make claims about our society to know where the problems lie. He makes a comment toward the end about a statement from Lawrence Mead, a professor of political science at New York University, in which he quotes "If poor people behaved rationally, they would seldom be poor for long in the first place." Reading this after reading of the neighborhood incinerator, the conditions of the neighborhood hospitals, the children's park that offers needles and condoms to prostitutes and addicts, and all of the other horrors Kozol describes in his research, it is a slap in the face to hear a quote like this, and it is clear that blame should be placed on the system that allows these things to happen.