The black children of the south Bronx are old mentally before they mature physically. For example, when Kozol and Cliffie's mother speak, Cliffie makes his own observation:.
"[. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .] Our children start to mourn themselves before their time.".
Cliffie, who is listening to this while leaning on his.
elbow like a pensive grown-up, offers his tentative approval to his mother's words. "Yes," he says, "I think that's probably true.".
Amazing Grace, 11.
They experience racism and oppression starting at birth, and probably grow to realize and resent it.
Education is not only substandard, but propagandistic in nature. We learn about one of the textbooks used in one of the poor sections of the South Bronx:.
The textbook, written primarily for the use of teachers.
in the schools of the South Bronx, attempts to reconcile a .
sense of reverence for one of the Founding Fathers with an.
honest recognition of the contradictions in his life and .
background. While noting, for example, that his family did.
no merely use slaves on their lands but also traded slaves .
and used their labor as the workforce in an iron foundry.
that they operated in New Jersey, the author tries to place.
these enterprises in a mitigating context. "There is reason.
to believe," she writes, that the slaves owned by the Morris.
family "were treated more humanely than slaves else-.
where.".
Gouverner Morris himself, according to the text,.
grew up to be a critic of slave-holding, which he termed.
"the curse of Heaven in the states where it prevails," yet.
retained some of the slaves he had inherited to tend his.
manor house and raise his son.
Amazing Grace, 28.
Father Glenworth Miles says to Kozol on Christmas Eve day: " As a religious man, I see it as my obligation to speak.
out against this, not to bend the poor to be accommodated to injustice but to empower them to fight it and to try to.