Jonathan Kozol's Amazing Grace Quotes and Analysis

Jonathan Kozol's Amazing Grace, the subject of today's analysis.

        During my reading of Jonathan Kozol’s Amazing Grace, a text that discusses the difficulties of childhood growing up in a city as segregated by both race and class as New York, a number of quotes stood out to me as particularly interesting for a number of reasons.

        The first of these quotes comes from the very first page, in the paragraph that details: “Brook Avenue… whose 48,000 people are the poorest in the South Bronx. Two thirds are hispanic, and one third black. Thirty-five percent are children. In 1991, the median household income of the area according to the New York Times was $7,600.”

Homeless children in New York City, as photographed by the New York Times.

This quote stuck with me for a number of reasons. First, the revelation that thirty-five percent of the people living in brutal impossibly low poverty are children. This isn’t a new facet of New York or even our national culture, but it’s difficult to try and actually imagine what thirty-five percent means, so I did the math. At 48,000 people, thirty-five percent is 16,800 children who don’t have enough money for food or a proper jacket or to pay their bills. That is an insane number to wrap your head around. According to Medium.com, you will only personally meet 10,000 people in your entire lifetime. For most people our age, you could likely look back at every person you’ve met in your life, and for every one of those people there are two children living in poverty in just Brooke Avenue, in the South Bronx in New York City in the United States. When you begin to realize the weight of poverty on our youth and the epidemic it truly is, your stomach begins to turn. It’s a horrifying thing to grapple with.

The second thing I realized is these kids are broken down into two-thirds hispanic, and one-third black. Now, as I’m sure you’ve done the math, you’ll come to realize that’s a complete fraction. While I’m sure there is some overlap in the two-thirds and one-thirds for kids of mixed races, this still implies that white children are so rare in this neighborhood that you could feasibly assume every single resident of this neighborhood is a person of color. This is a stunning illustration of the results of systematic oppression, and reinforces the idea that even in discrimination towards class rather than race, people of color are most certainly still at the disadvantage.

I also figured out what $7,600 is adjusted for inflation today: $16,758. Ignoring for now the stunning rise in inflation over just the last thirty years, this is far too low for a two person household working in New York City. For reference, I, as a 19-year-old working Wednesday’s and alternating weekends make $10,000 per year. This means that I make more than half what two families together in New York City make at the age of 19 at a part-time job. 

With all of these things in mind, I am brought to my next quote, and my personal favorite of any of our readings thus far: “There are children in the poorest, most abandoned places who, despite the miseries and poisons that the world has pumped into their lives, seem, when you first meet them, to be cheerful anyway.”

This quote sums up everything we’ve been processing so far about the horror these children have been forced to endure for their entire lives through poverty. If you weren’t able to fully process before that these are real children suffering through this every day, this is the line that will remind you. Furthermore, though it’s unrelated to the text, it reminds me of what I love so much about kids, and why I want to work with them so desperately. They are creatures designed to seek out the good of the world. This isn’t to say “oh, their situation isn’t so bad”, or “oh, there’s always light in the dark” or whatever, because sometimes things just suck and this situation these people are in really, really, really sucks. But a child's happiness and love for the world is something that needs to be fostered, and it’s important to me that kids growing up like this have the opportunities to be reassured of that. This is what being a teacher is about to me.

Finally, my third and final quote from this piece is a reminder that the government has caused this problem and continues to perpetuate this problem. “...a former cocaine addict who now helps addicted women and their children, she tells me that more than 3,000 homeless families have been relocated by the city in this neighborhood during the past few years, and she asks a question I will hear from many other people here during the months ahead. ‘Why do you want to put so many people with small children in a place with so much sickness? This is the last place in New York that they should put poor children. Clumping so many people, all with the same symptoms and same problems, in one crowded place with nothing they can grow on? Our children start to mourn themselves before their time.’”

These lines serve to remind us who caused this modern day horror: our own leaders and politicians, who would rather segregate all of the poverty and drug addiction and illness into a section of the city to fester rather than work to resolve systematically. This is why, immediately before quoting the woman, Kozol notes that she is a former cocaine addict who now helps addicted mothers to get clean. It is the people, not the government, who take care of each other. 

This is why these pieces are so important. People in power need to be reminded that the people they’re seeing as problems to be sectioned off and ignored have lives, and families, and futures that are being spoiled before they have the chance to try and shape them. Government leaders need to be reminded that these people- these children- are their responsibility, and they need to stop leaving them behind.