Author/activist Jonathan Kozol, full of grace, accepts Chapter's Carroll Kowal Journalism Award
Prize-winning essay decries America's failure to protect its children
By Deborah K. Shepherd, CSW, Assistant Director
"As a writer, it is my obligation to speak and write with the same intensity of pain as the people
who trust me with their stories," noted Jonathan Kozol as he accepted NASW's Fifth Annual
Carroll Kowal Journalism Award on May 22.
The award is given each year to a journalist who has been most effective in enhancing the
public's awareness of social conditions in New York City and of related efforts in the delivery of
services in health and social welfare.The award was created to honor the memory of Carroll
Kowal, an outstanding social worker who brought the profession into the field of housing and
who was an exemplary leader in social welfare.
Mr. Kozol, author of Death at an Early Age, Savage Inequalities, and the current national best-seller, Amazing Grace:The Lives of Children and the Conscience of a Nation, was honored for
his Time Magazine essay, "Spare Us the Cheap Grace."
"Spare Us the Cheap Grace, reprinted in its entirety on page 7, appeared in the December 11,
1995 issue of Time. On the cover of that issue was the haunting face of six-year-old Elisa
Izquierdo, beaten to death, allegedly at the hands of her mother, with the caption "A Shameful
Death...Let down by the system...a little girl symbolizes America's failure to protect its children."
In the essay, Mr. Kozol castigates public officials who "...cut back elemental services of life
protection for poor children and then show up at the victim's funeral to pay condolence to the
relatives and friends..." and reminds us that hand wringing is hypocritical and that talk, without
accompanying action needed to protect our most vulnerable children, is not only cheap, but evil.
In presenting the award to Mr. Kozol, Dr. Barbara Silverstone, past Chapter President and
Executive Director of The Lighthouse, where the award reception was held, said that " 'Spare Us
the Cheap Grace' reflects the essence of Jonathan Kozol's magnificent writings over four decades
which have been such an inspiration to social workers over this time. We also honor him for a
literary and journalistic career that has been unflinching in its focus on the social problems that
pervade our society, by throwing a spotlight on its soul..."
In his remarks, Mr. Kozol noted that he was especially pleased to accept NASW's award because
"...I've been very close to social workers all these years. I don't think I could have written
Amazing Grace if it weren't that social workers trusted me and really led me by the hand to meet
the families and children."
He urged his audience to become more political in advocating for poor children and their
families, while acknowledging that "...social workers are just running to keep from drowning,
never stopping, living on four, five, six hours of sleep a night, always on the edge of emotional
collapse because of the tension. It's hard for them to think politically, but in a way that's the
ultimate victory of neo-conservatives who dominate social policy in New York: That they have
put us on the defensive, cut our budgets so badly, overloaded us so heavily that we don't even
have time to fight back...but we have to find the time," he added, pointing out that he was
"preaching here tonight in the most affluent Congressional district in America [the Upper East
Side] after returning from the poorest this afternoon in Mott Haven, South Bronx."
He bitterly condemned public officials and the press for "taking the suffering of the poor, which
is pure wine, and watering it down so that it will be digestible by the rich, so it won't spoil their
appetite for consumption at midtown restaurants...so it won't make it too hard for them to
purchase heavily at Saks Fifth Avenue...This whole tendency to neutralize pain by
undernourished euphemisms, by softening the story, is the best way to preserve the cruelties of
the status quo."
Racism, he declared, is the underlying foundation of this status quo, and in referring to the plight
of Elisa and her mother, said that "...one poor drug addicted woman could take only one life, but
the policies our government is enforcing now are going to take thousands of lives, and not all of
them are going to be dramatic ones which will make the headlines. There are also the quiet
deaths of just brilliantly gifted children who will never be able to lead fulfilling lives and will
never contribute to our society. These deaths aren't included in the homicide rates but those are a
form of homicide, and I agree with the angriest Black and Latino grandmothers whom I know
trust me with their real beliefs that this city would not permit these things to be done if these
were mostly Caucasian children."
To fund needed programs, he recommended adding "a 25% surtax to everybody who earns more
than a million dollars" and recalled that while he was writing Amazing Grace three years ago,
there was "...a man on Wall Street who earned four times as much as all 48,000 people in Mott
Haven. A 25% tax on his income would have lifted everyone in Mott Haven out of poverty."
In concluding his remarks, Mr. Kozol, a self-described "old fashioned and angry guy" paid
tribute to the social work profession and, at the same time, put public officials and the press on
notice by defending the legitimacy of our anger at this moment in history: "I don't think we
should trim our sails to be acceptable to those who orchestrate opinion and who apparently never
advocate ardently or courageously for the changes that would prevent the tragedies. Until the
powerful take the position of moral advocacy, of truly befriending the weakest in our midst, they
do not have the right to condemn the frontline soldiers, the social workers of this city."
Also on the evening's program were John Kowal, Carroll Kowal's husband, and Chapter
President Dr. Barbara Brenner. Mr. Kowal praised the choice of Mr. Kozol as this year's winner,
calling it "...a great tribute to Carroll...We are honoring a person in Carroll's tradition of
compassion and humanity."
Dr. Brenner thanked Mr. Kozol for extolling the role and value of social work in his writings,
paid tribute to Dr. Carol H. Meyer, chair of the Kowal Award jury panel, and acknowledged
members of the jury: Harry Blumenfeld, Vanessa Marshall, John Oakes, Dr. Rosa Perez-Koenig,
Dr. Mary Ann Quaranta, Sam Roberts, Susan Sheehan, and Jill Kirschenbaum, the last three also
former Kowal award winners.
(The Carroll Kowal Journalism Award was made possible by donations from The Foundation
for Child Development, Chase Bank, Fleet Bank, The Lighthouse, John Kowal, and NASW
members.)
It is hard to say what was more shocking about the death of Elisa Izquierdo-the endless savagery
inflicted on her body and mind, or the stubborn inaction of the New York City agencies that were
repeatedly informed of her peril. But while the murder of Elisa by her mother is appalling, it is
hardly unexpected. In the death zones of America's postmodern ghetto, stripped of jobs and
human services and sanitation, plagued by AIDS, tuberculosis, pediatric asthma and endemic
clinical depression, largely abandoned by American physicians and devoid of the psychiatric
services familiar in most middle-class communities, deaths like these are part of a predictable
scenario.
After the headlines of recrimination and pretended shock wear off, we go back to our ordinary
lives. Before long, we forget the victims' names. They weren't our children or the children of our
neighbors. We do not need to mourn them for too long. But do we have the right to mourn at all?
What does it mean when those whom we elect to public office cut back elemental services of life
protection for poor children and then show up at the victim's funeral to pay condolence to the
relatives and friends? At what point do those of us who have the power to prevent these deaths
forfeit the entitlement of mourners?
It is not as if we do not know what might have saved some of these children's lives. We know
that intervention programs work when well-trained social workers have a lot of time to dedicate
to each and every child. We know that crisis hot lines work best when half of their employees do
not burn out and quit each year, and that social workers do a better job when records are
computerized instead of being piled up, lost and forgotten on the floor of a back room. We know
that when a drug-addicted mother asks for help, as many mothers do, it is essential to provide
the help she needs without delay, not after a waiting period of six months to a year, as is
common in poor urban neighborhoods.
All these remedies are expensive, and we would demand them if our own children's lives were at
stake. And yet we don't demand them for poor children. We wring our hands about the tabloid
stories. We castigate the mother. We condemn the social worker. We churn out the familiar
criticisms of "bureaucracy" but do not volunteer to use our cleverness to change it. Then the next
time an election comes, we vote against the taxes that might make prevention programs possible,
while favoring increased expenditures for prisons to incarcerate the children who survive the
worst that we have done to them and grow up to be dangerous adults.
(June/July 1996)
Jonathan Kozol
Spare Us the Cheap Grace
What makes this moral contradiction possible?
Can it be, despite our frequent protestations to the contrary, that our society does not particularly value the essential human worth of certain groups of children? Virtually all the victims we are speaking of are very poor black and Hispanic children. We have been told that our economy no longer has much need for people of their caste and color. Best-selling authors have, in recent years, assured us of their limited intelligence and low degree of "civilizational development." As a woman in Arizona said in regard to immigrant kids from Mexico, "I didn't breed them. I don't want to feed them"-a sentiment also heard in reference to black children on talk-radio stations in New York and other cities. "Put them over there," a black teenager told me once, speaking of the way he felt that he and other blacks were viewed by society. "Pack them tight. Don't think about them. Keep your hands clean. Maybe they'll kill each other off."
I do not know how many people in our nation would confess such contemplations, which offend the elemental mandates of our cultural beliefs and our religions. No matter how severely some among us may condemn the parents of the poor, it has been an axiom of faith in the U.S. that once a child is born, all condemnations are to be set aside. If we now have chosen to betray this faith, what consequences will this have for our collective spirit, for our soul as a society?
There is an agreeable illusion, evidenced in much of the commentary about Elisa, that those of us who witness the abuse of innocence-so long as we are standing at a certain distance-need not feel complicit in these tragedies. But this is the kind of ethical exemption that Dietrich Bonhoeffer called "cheap grace." Knowledge carries with it certain theological imperatives. The more we know, the harder it becomes to grant ourselves exemption. "Evil exists," a student in the South Bronx told me in the course of a long conversation about ethics and religion in the fall of 1993. "Somebody has power. Pretending that they don't so they don't need to use it to help people-that is my idea of evil."
Like most Americans, I do not tend to think of a society that has been good to me and to my parents as "evil." But when he said that "somebody has power," it was difficult to disagree. It is possible that icy equanimity and a self-pacifying form of moral abdication by the powerful will take more lives in the long run than any single drug-addicted and disordered parent. Elisa Izquierdo's mother killed only one child. The seemingly anesthetized behavior of the U.S. Congress may kill thousands. Now we are told we must "get tougher" with the poor. How much tougher can we get with children who already have so little? How cold is America prepared to be?
(Reprinted with permission from Time Magazine-December 11, 1995)