Amazing Grace Social Work
Amazing Grace
In the documentary-style book Amazing Grace, Jonathan Kozol writes about the realities of living in Mott Haven, one of the South Bronx poorest neighborhoods. His goal is to inform readers of the realities of children living in a slum and the unfairness of it all. The population of 600,000 live in the South Bronx of New York City and 43,000 make up Washington Heights and Harlem which is separated by a narrow river, make up one of the most racially segregated concentrations of poor people in our Nation. The question “why should their childhood be different from others across the country?” often arose and should be examined by all.
The facts in Amazing Grace written in 1995 startled me. There are literally hundreds of thousands of people living in broken, crowded, and rundown apartment buildings, “That,” says Kozol, “most people would not even kennel their dogs in.” The first fact that jumped out at me was in 1991 the median income for the area was $7,600 for a family of three or four. The neighborhood is full of rat infested buildings where faulty electrical wiring, bad elevator doors, and broken staircases are a norm. The absurdity of it all is that if we were to kennel our pets in conditions like that , we would have all kinds of rights activists protesting for being inhumane, yet we house people there to little fan fair or protests. The local hospitals are not much better. Kozol writes of several instances where the elderly have to wait in the halls to be seen. Another health statistic that causes me great alarm is with the percentage of people that have asthma. Individuals suffering from severe cases asthma have reached epidemic proportions. Hospital Admissions have reached six or more for one thousand people in the South Bronx neighborhood and only 1.8 per thousand for the rest in statewide New York. In the six chapters and epilogue of Amazing Grace we come to know and care about individuals
In the documentary-style book Amazing Grace, Jonathan Kozol writes about the realities of living in Mott Haven, one of the South Bronx poorest neighborhoods. His goal is to inform readers of the realities of children living in a slum and the unfairness of it all. The population of 600,000 live in the South Bronx of New York City and 43,000 make up Washington Heights and Harlem which is separated by a narrow river, make up one of the most racially segregated concentrations of poor people in our Nation. The question “why should their childhood be different from others across the country?” often arose and should be examined by all.
The facts in Amazing Grace written in 1995 startled me. There are literally hundreds of thousands of people living in broken, crowded, and rundown apartment buildings, “That,” says Kozol, “most people would not even kennel their dogs in.” The first fact that jumped out at me was in 1991 the median income for the area was $7,600 for a family of three or four. The neighborhood is full of rat infested buildings where faulty electrical wiring, bad elevator doors, and broken staircases are a norm. The absurdity of it all is that if we were to kennel our pets in conditions like that , we would have all kinds of rights activists protesting for being inhumane, yet we house people there to little fan fair or protests. The local hospitals are not much better. Kozol writes of several instances where the elderly have to wait in the halls to be seen. Another health statistic that causes me great alarm is with the percentage of people that have asthma. Individuals suffering from severe cases asthma have reached epidemic proportions. Hospital Admissions have reached six or more for one thousand people in the South Bronx neighborhood and only 1.8 per thousand for the rest in statewide New York. In the six chapters and epilogue of Amazing Grace we come to know and care about individuals