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| South Bronx, 1980 |
After reading the excerpt from Jonathan
Kozol’s “Amazing Grace,” I began to immediately make some connections with the
prior texts read in class. The community members that Kozol visit in his text
are extremely destitute and reside in Bronx, New York. One woman in particular,
Alice Washington, paints an unfortunate look of her neighborhood and its
inhabitants through interviews with Kozol. Many of those living in the
community have contracted the AIDS virus, while several use intravenous drugs,
twenty-seven people in Washington’s building alone (Kozol 13). The picture Mrs.
Washington paints is altogether grim, leaving the reader to feel as if their
neighbor had been forgotten, or thought of as unimportant, by those in power
who could help.
The first text I connected Kozol’s
text to was Johnson’s text Privilege,
Power, and Difference. There Johnson lists and comments on different
instances of “what privilege looks like in everyday life”. One of the bulleted ideas
is, “Most whites are not segregated into communities that isolate them from the
best job opportunities, schools, and community services” (Johnson 29). It seems
as if Alice Washington’s community is just that, isolated from the people and
services that can help. On Kozol’s journey to meet Mrs. Washington and others,
he notes that, first, many taxicabs refuse to take him to the part of town he
needed to go. Secondly, when he travels via train, he notices by the time he
reaches near the end of the line, and Kozol’s own destination, there are fewer
and fewer white riders. Kozol makes sure to comment that the train that he
rides to meet his interviewees goes from “the seventh richest congressional
district in the nation” at the start of the line to the poorest all in a “18-minute
ride” (Kozol 3).
Washington recounts a story in which she tells
Kozol how difficult it is to obtain help from government programs like
supplements for food stamps or SSI. In her sickened condition, she must travel
across town to different government offices. Washington often wonders “…how
sick you have to be to qualify for SSI” (especially after being denied SSI when
she was living with cervical and uterine cancer). In addition to that, Washington’s
community has become a dumping ground for other communities. Even after oppositions
from community members, an incinerator was installed that burns “red-bag
products”, some of it containing “amputated limbs and fetal tissue” and medical
waste from 14 different New York City hospitals (Kozol 7). It is worth noting
that parents and families who lived in Manhattan, an economically better area,
were successfully able to keep the incinerator from being built in their
community.
It is here that I made a connection to another
one of the class reading, this time from Lisa Delpit’s “The Silenced Dialogue”. The parents, who live in Manhattan, as
Kozol has already pointed out, are among the richest in the nation; and they,
as Delpit would say, are a part of the culture of power. Due to their inclusion
of this group, the parents were successfully able to ban the construction of
the waste burning center citing cancer risks to children (Kozol 7). Unfortunately,
for people like Cliffie and Alice Washington, who are located firmly out of the
culture of power, such demands cannot be made to those in power.
Washington’s son tells Kozol, “Most
of the addicts and prostitutes are black. Some are Hispanic. But they’re all
people of color. It made me feel frightened for my race” (Kozol 23). The
similarities and correlations between power, ethnicity, and economic class are
clear.
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