I am a Grenade

Jonathan Kozol's piece "Amazing Grace" was extremely depressing.  He goes through describing the every-day struggles of the poor in New York--more specifically the effects on the poor children.  Right from the beginning of the piece Kozol highlights an important class distinction in parts of New York as illustrated by the subway.

"When you enter the train, you are in the seventh richest congressional district in the nation.  When you leave, you are in the poorest" (Kozol 3).

Kozol goes on to describe income, the percentage of poor in the area, the conditions that they are living in and so on.  Kozol's main purpose in pointing these things out is to show how differently and unequally the poor/lower class are treated--especially minorities.  Kozol describes the hospital conditions, highlighting the cyclical nature of the class system that keeps the lower class, lower class. Lower class people are more subject to illness due to their environment, such as the medical waste incinerator that was forced into their neighborhood.  The hospitals in the area are "cesspools" and do more harm than good.  So the lower class are sicker, cannot get better, miss work or school due to illness, making it nearly impossible for class mobility to exist because of these problems.

It is clear in Kozol's piece that the dominant ideology surrounding the lower class is that they are not worth anything--the time, energy, resources, medical help, public service, etc.  The dominant ideology says that these people deserve the place that they are in, and we see just how untrue that is.