Amazing Grace

To me the most telling part of Jonathon Kozol's essay "Amazing Grace" was the issue on the incinerator.  Kozol is spending time in a particularly impoverished part of New York City.  As we might expect all the signs on there: the neighborhood is largely Black, schooling is inadequate, drug abuse is rampant, and AIDS presents a real threat to the population.  He discusses at one point how there was supposed to be the installation of an incinerator in a more affluent section of Manhattan.  However, in the end, the project was moved to the section of the city he was studying.

The important question is "why?"  Kozol mentions briefly that the parents were able to organize resistance to the incinerator.  From the reading, what can we infer these parents from Manhattan had that parents of the children from Harlem did not?

First, they had the free time to be able to organize themselves.  This means they were either working less or working hours that allow them to organize effectively.  Such hours would be a 9 to 5, typical professional hours, and a regular schedule rather than a "flexible" schedule that most low wage workers have.  Second would be ability or access to skills.  The parents from Manhattan have the means to organize meetings, talks, pickets, or whatever else they need to do in order to push back against the incinerator.  This case study shows us who is socialized or has access to learning such skills.  Finally, there is education.  The parents in Manhattan are educated enough to understand that an incinerator in their neighborhood is bad, causes asthma and other diseases, and would generally lower their quality of life.

At the same time, however, Kozol's study presents an outlook that can be taken to an unfortunate place.  By looking at the working class as helpless, uneducated, and incompetent, we can assume that they are not capable of improving their own condition.  This is why, I would argue, we need a historical perspective as well, which would look at working class self-activity and show us examples of times that people resisted incinerators (or whatever else) on their own terms.  The conclusion from the former outlook, based on only a single case study of conditions, could lead one to believe that what working class people need are condescending saviors -- people who have the skills and can come in a save a community.  A modern day Saul Alinsky, if you will.  However, looking at the class from a historical perspective (pace Marx, Thompson, Hobsbawm, or Zinn) we can see that despite it all (lack of education, institutional skills, time) have been willing and able to change their conditions.  Typically it has been professionals who tail already existing movements of the working class in terms of enacting reforms -- some prominent examples in modern American history could be the labor organizing of the 1930s and the New Deal legislation or the Black movements in America and Civil Rights legislation of the 1960s.