Kozol-Quotes

                Jonathan Kozol’s Amazing Grace is a wonderful example of a text that depicts racial chattel slavery in its afterlife. Perhaps we could address this text from merely a class standpoint but that would be to do the people Kozol mentions, and the other people like them that they represent, a great disservice. For it is the intersection of class and race that created the circumstances present in Kozol’s account. Kozol paints an incredibly bleak and despondent picture for his readers. The people in his story live a life that no one should have to live; a life that, if it were presented without certain details, people would more than likely assume took place in an “underdeveloped” nation as opposed to the “Great US of A”. In reality, as we can see from the text, these lives and stories very much do take place in the United States. I would argue that the history of the States makes these stories incredibly unsurprising. The past actions of the U.S. bleed into the present and work to create communities that seem more like fictive dystopias than real communities in New York (or California, or Mississippi…the list goes on).  

                Before I continue with this post I want to make it very clear: do not fall prey to poverty porn. Very often people will read accounts like these and begin to pity the people they read about. It becomes a sort of paternalistic ‘empathy’, one that works to dehumanize the folks that the readers supposedly care about. These people live lives that we see as depressing, and often times they certainly do as well (which we can see in several of the conversations Kozol recounts for us). However, there are certainly moments of happiness, moments of love and glory, which helps to make the tough times easier. I won’t spend too much time on this point, but I will direct y’all to Nikki Giovanni’s fantastic poem “Nikki Rosa” in which she addresses this.

                Hopelessness was a recurrent theme in Kozol’s piece, although it was not always explicitly stated as such. I personally do not see “hopeless” as an incredibly negative word which is why I feel comfortable using it so frequently in this analysis. For hopelessness can, at times, be the biggest motivator for resistance. Very often it is when we feel like our circumstances cannot get any worse that we become ready for revolutionary action. Sadly, that is not always the outcome (as we see in this text) but it can be, and this is something that I think we should always keep in mind.

                On page five Kozol notes that “in 1991, 84 people, more than half of whom were 21 or younger, were murdered in the precinct”.  This particular statement is salient because of the age that he uses as a marker. Twenty-one. Homicide is the leading cause for young Black males. It is a common adage in the Black community that a Black man should be grateful to make it past 21. This idea is evident in several hip-hop songs as well. In “ADHD” Kendrick Lamar, 23, states “Got a high tolerance when your age don’t exist”. In "Murder to Excellence" Jay Z notes “And they say by 21 I was supposed to die, so I’m out here celebrating my post-demise”. Lastly (for our purposes, although you can certainly Google and find many more examples),  in "So Appalled" Pusha T brags “CNN said I’d be dead by 21, Blackjack, I just pulled an ace”. In all of these cases (except, perhaps, Lamar) these Black men are celebrating, somewhat bitterly, the fact that they beat the odds. They survived past 21, oftentimes considered a feat in some parts of the Black community, like the community depicted in the Kozol text.

                Kozol spends a decent amount of time discussing the waste incinerator in the St Ann’s neighborhood. The incinerator “burns…‘red-bag products’…The waste products of some of these hospitals…were initially going to be burned at an incinerator scheduled to be built along the East Side of Manhattan, but the sitting of a burner there had been successfully resisted by the parents of the area because of fear of cancer risks to children” (7). Lo and behold, the incinerator wound up in the “ghetto”. It is not that the parents did not protest this, but rather their protestations were not taken into account, for their lives were not valuable enough to factor into the equation. The cancer risk that was a danger to the East Side Manhattan children seems to no longer be a problem when the children become those who live near Cypress Avenue.  This is what I would call violence. When talking about the trouble that she needs to go through in order to get her welfare re-instated Mrs. Washington notes that she “feel[s] like somebody beat [her] up” (20). Mrs. Washington feels that way because somebody did beat her up. Society is constantly beating her, her neighbors, and their children up. This is state sanctioned violence!

                To end this post on a depressing note (or, perhaps, perversely optimistic), I will quote the last page of the text. Kozol quotes David Washington as saying, when talking about the drug dealers and their deadly new heroin, “It’s like [the drug dealers are] saying, ‘Come on over here. I’ll show you how to end your life’” (24). Depressing, yes? Yes. However, there is this strange perverse beauty in it. Before you all think me to be sick and depraved let me first draw your attention to the various forms of slave resistance. Suicide was often a form a resistance that slaves, particularly those of the Igbo tribe, undertook. And it wasn’t exactly an act of desperation but rather an act of true rebellion and love. The Igbo, for example, believed that in death they would be returned back (flying Africans!) to their homeland to live with their ancestors; their loved ones. The perversely optimistic way of looking at the acts of suicide happening in modern-day America would be to view them as subconscious forms of resistance bred by hopelessness and desperation. For the shackles could not be cast off in this life, so perhaps it may be better to return to the ancestors. Certainly a reach, but sometimes when reading bleak texts like this Kozol piece even perverse optimism is welcome.

Works Cited

Kozol, Jonathan. Amazing Grace: The Lives of Children and the Conscience of a Nation. New York: Crown, 1995. Print.

Image from Anisfield-Wolf