Analysis of American Grace - Book Report/Review Example

After reading the book, "American Grace,"poverty causes programs such as child welfare, which is an economic strain on the country. Child welfare is a set of government and private services that protects children and encourages family stability. These services include investigations of alleged child abuse, foster care, adoption services, and services that can provide support at-risk families so that they can remain intact especially in poorer countries where the government infrastructure is much weaker (Child Welfare 2003). However, there are many challenges that child welfare is facing due to lack of funding and resources. Some of these challenges come from child abuse, where parents' rights come first rather than the child's best interest. From there, when there is a case of child abuse, it seems that the parents' rights come before the child's best interest because the welfare system wants to keep family unity intact; however in some cases, it is clear that there are no chances of loving environment. In return, when it is clear that there is no chance of a loving environment, the child should be removed from the home immediately and into the potential adopted home since he or she have suffered enough from the abuse (Bartholet 1999). Another challenge is adoption because so many potential parents are rejected due to their race and more children are left limbo (Bartholet 1999). Unfortunately, there are challenges in adoption because potential parents are turned away from adoption agencies to their race. Furthermore, there are some children that are kept within the adoption program due to their age or physically disability. This is an issue because the adoption agencies do not view them as adoptable children so they stay in limbo for many years by being bounced from home to home when there are parents who are interested in adopting them (Bartholet 1999). In the distant future, child welfare will only become more beneficial to those who need it the most because there are new laws that are being created to favor children. However, in the meantime, there are solutions for these issues and they remain unused, which puts child welfare into an unfair position and leaving children in poverty. This book is richly intense with the tragic conversations of daily life from residents of South Bronx, New York. The book does not over dramatize life's realities. It gives the reader an honest view of reality of the lives of many children and adults that somehow go beyond surviving their rigorous obstacles of their environment. It does not describe life in a third world country nor the lives of people that lived in another century. It discusses the present day lives of children and their families. Kozol embarked in a journey of interviews and conversations that did not merely describe the mundane lives of residents from the South Bronx. In his writing he does not overwhelm the reader within own personal opinions regarding the political arena that keeps the poor at risk residents, poor and at risk. On the contrary, he brings voices to life in a manner that is respectful and validates those that take the time to share their story. I am not proficient in the art of interviewing nor in the degree of listening that Kozol takes to truly present these stories honestly. He shares exactly what is presented to him. I was impressed with his own self acknowledgment of how these stories and experiences have changed his own perspective of people and their struggle for daily survival (American Grace). Furthermore, it has been discovered most ethnic groups that live in the United States consist of young people, which means by staying in this country, they grow accustom to their surroundings. Once they have grown accustom to living here, they feel like this is their home to start a life with their own families. This continues the growing number of ethnic groups in this country. Due to the educational accommodations that schools and college campuses make for students that have ethnic backgrounds, there is not enough prejudice of one group to let a Holocaust to occur in the United Stated. Furthermore, this country believes in freedom of speech to allow one ethnic to be isolated from the rest and condone any imprisonment to be carried out. According to Essed, Philomena and Theo Goldberg of "Race Critical Theories" believes race is a social construct and not biological. For example, since it has been clearly proven that Westerners and Asian American think and learn differently from one another, it would be effective to bring their parents into the learning process so that every child can learn the same way even though they will process it in a different. If school systems would accept this concept of diversity in learning, there would be no feeling of failure for the no child left behind program. In order to learn, people need to see that learning is about diversity, which needs to become a part of the education school system. This is because with education, children and adults can be educated enough to not be in poverty. Education brings enlightenment and from that, people can bring themselves up from poverty by knowing and understanding the right steps to take not to contribute to it. This book broke my heart, and made me cry. It also made me even more determined to make a difference. It is one of the few books I have read that has made me rethink my philosophy of life and how the world is. This book made me outraged and passionate; it made me realize that things -must- change, and that I can change them. Donating food to local homeless shelters, or buying toys for the Toys for Tots program may not be saving the world, but I honestly believe that if each person thought that what they did mattered, we could change the world. If everyone would be willing to give a little... to try to make life better for someone else, and to do this without expecting something in return, we could change the world (American Grace). More than 5,000 adolescents between the ages of 15 and 24 commit suicide every year. Nearly 30 percent of those deaths are attributed to emotional turmoil regarding sexual orientation.(Hillier & Harrison, 2004). With that, risk factors and reasons for suicide among young people have been studied very carefully. The suicide rate among young people rose 300 percent between 1960 and 1980. By the mid-80's, suicide was the second leading cause of death among young people ages 15-19. Inner city youth teenagers are more likely to commit suicide than their peers. However, very little research concerning this demographic has been completed (Proctor & Grove, 1994). "One of the greatest challenges for professional school counselors is the retention and success of students who are at risk for academic failure (Edmondson & White, 1998). The dropout rate among at-risk students has reached epidemic proportions in many communities. In the inner cities, where students may be placed at risk both by their minority and their socioeconomic status (National Center for Education Statistics, 2000; Turner & Lapan, 2003), high school graduation rates are often less than 50% (Greene, 2002), with many students dropping out of school as early as the ninth grade. These low graduation rates have devastating effects on communities and thus on the nation as a whole. "Children who do not graduate with a high school diploma stand little chance of sustaining themselves or a family in today's economy" (Greene and Turner 2007). Many adolescents who commit suicide leave behind a myriad of unanswered questions. Family members often struggle to make sense of this hopeless reality. The describing factors for suicidal females point towards a lack of an underlying system of support like friendship and community. Also, it showed that no single individual characteristic is shown to be a reliable protective factor for women and the underlying social system of women need to be researched further to fully understand how familial and kinship ties safeguard against completed suicide. More specifically, research should focus on which family members, kinship and friendship ties actually form and perpetuate the support system (Nisbet,1996). For inner-city black teenagers, the homicide rate is astronomical.4 The huge rise in gun crime perpetrated by older urban teenagers has not been replicated in other areas. In the suburbs, where legal restrictions on guns are generally less severe, the mortality rate has stayed about the same. Gun control advocates sometimes convey the impression that current murder rates are dramatically higher than ever before. And if one looks at statistics for particular age groups, one finds a substantial rise in murder arrests. From 1985 to 1991, arrests of adults for murder declined, but arrests for murder of 17-year-old males rose 121%; arrests of 16-year-old males rose 158%; arrests of 15-year-old males rose 217%; and arrests of boys 12 and under rose 100% (Kopel). Young individuals who identify themselves as a part of a minority group often discusses their status with families who affirm their minority identity. In contrast, this almost never occurs for same-sex attracted individuals whose parents are most likely to be heterosexual. Many gay, lesbian, and bi-sexual youth are over-represented in homeless populations and many turn to alcohol, drugs, or suicide to escape their hostile environments. To the enormous crisis of the inner city, many liberals and conservatives offer the same, seemingly easy solution: use government coercion to remove the evil item that is the cause of violence. Many liberals look to guns as the cause of the inner-city's social pathologies, and fail to recognize that the willingness of many criminals to use guns, and the necessity for law-abiding residents of the inner city to carry guns for protection, are symptoms of deeper afflictions. No set of criminal justice approaches focused on "gun control" are likely to reduce the inner-city problems regarding guns. Solutions must be found in dealing with the more complex pathologies of the lack of hope and economic opportunity, and the decay of cultural values (Kopel). Suicide rates have increased most rapidly among African Americans. African American youth were more likely than white youth to report having made a suicide attempt. The problem of suicidality among minority youth may be even more dramatic in inner-city areas where rates of attempted suicide among African-American adolescents have been found to be about twice the national rate for this population (Anhalt et al., 1998). From there, population, economics, and education contribute to poverty as well they are the solution to it. "The "threat economy" is a term of Kenneth Boulding's, applied to the economy of arms races. At the micro level, however, resources similarly have to be allocated to protection-against social predation. As the earlier discussion of political stability suggested, demographic pressures are one among various factors that might be expected to harm the social fabric. R. Kaplan (1996) gives an anecdotal account of such harm in various countries of West Africa and West and Central Asia, arguing for at least partial demographic causation. The erosion of social capital is not easily reversed: indeed, it is likely to result in forms of social organization that are antithetical to economic and political development. Such forms-warlordism, for instance-might offer protection for some but at the expense of predation on others; plausibly they would entrench both pre-transition demographic outcomes and widespread poverty" (McNicoll, 1999). From there, according to the book, "American Grace," population and poverty are contributing factors of one another can be resolve within one another along with education. Read More