Dehumanizing of Children in Jonathan Kozol’s, “Amazing Grace: the Lives of Children and the Conscious of a Nation”

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Of all the evils of modern society, one of the greatest is evil done unto children. They represent the most innocent members of society, and in them, we place our hopes for the future. Parents try to their best for their children but America today, the supposed land of equal opportunity and equal rights, there are still areas that experience segregation. In some places children do not get the education they deserve, or the healthcare they need, or even basic necessities. Often they live in these areas because the city has moved them there, along with some of the poorest and sickest people in the nation. In Jonathan Kozol’s, “Amazing Grace: The Lives of Children and the Conscious of a Nation” he explores the suffering of children in the South Bronx of New York. They suffer dehumanization through the institutions that are supposed to help them and the ideologies of those who control these institutions. The children living in the South Bronx of New York often live below the poverty level, in abysmal conditions, while only a few miles away exist some of the richest neighborhoods in the country. The dehumanization of the people of the South Bronx allow the people living in these neighborhoods justify their lifestyles while in the same city people are starving. They have become so ‘other’ that the injustices they suffer do not seem like crimes. Kozol quotes Reverend Martha Overall of St. Anne’s church, “Only a very glazed and clever culture in which social blindness is accepted as a normal state of mind which could possibly permit itself this luxury” (Kozol 1995, 188). The people of New York have become blind to the true situation of the poor because they see the poor as something less human than themselves. This definition of ‘other’ has come from the social institutions that allow people to be dehumanized, like the welfare system where recipients are only a

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