City street lights mark the edges and corners of blocked off territory. Land labeled “ghetto” and “dangerous” translates to land that was ignored for the profit of the few. This land exists a short drive away from us, they are backyards to the neighborhoods we chose not to stray from. They are West Garfield Park, East St. Louis, Englewood, The Ville, and every impoverished community that suffered in isolation while those around watched. Our generation can be quick to judge the actions of oppressors or the lack of necessary change in our history, however a lot of these remarks can be made about today’s segregated neighborhoods. In cities such as St. Louis, where segregation is deep rooted and has allowed further issues to stem from such divisions, the voice of the community is often silenced by quick, misguided assumptions on such areas. These are not “bad neighborhoods” they are not populated by “bad people”, but are rather neglected portions of a city that has found it easier to accept these stereotypes than look beyond the superficial. We have the tools and knowledge to solidify that there is more to these neighborhoods than gangs or torn down houses, the question is now what do we do with them? We can’t begin to tackle the problem of education and poverty in neighborhoods such as The Ville and East St. Louis, without first learning about their history and connecting the dots between these issues. To paint a better picture of what segregation looked like across the
This article is the testimony of Gary Orfield who in 1996 testified as a witness for the Caldwell branch of the NAACP. Back in 1980 Orfield was appointed by the Court to create a report on housing and housing policies and practices. Specifically in St. Louis, Missouri, public resources and powers were used to promote segregation. The local government used federal funding to only build subsided housing in segregated areas. The local government also denied its ability to build subsided housing in other places besides the city. For the majority of his testimony Orfield talked about how school segregation affects housing. Orfield argued that schools were being used as tools in housing marketing. As a result, White families would choose to live
While segregation is said the have been abolished, we can still see its effects through “second-generation discrimination” (Nieto, 2010). Nieto describes this as unequal access to learning through practices such as inflexible tracking and differentiated curriculum in different classroom and schools. When I first heard this term, it made me think about how neighborhood develop. In the cities I have traveled to I see how different areas of a town can lead to similar cultures and races forming together in specific areas. I feel this ties directly into the previous topic of funding. Every major city I have lived in had the affluent neighborhood and, on the flip side, the poor section of town. Since areas have different income levels, they will contribute to the school districts in different ways. This situation becomes exacerbated over the years as people select where to live with their families and the gap becomes wider and wider. As an Army recruiter, while not
The essay “Still Separate, Still Unequal”, by Jonathan Kozol, discusses the harsh truth of public school systems, and how they have become an isolation and segregation of inequality that students are subjected to; as a result, to receive an education. Throughout the essay, Kozol proves evidence of the inequality that African American and Hispanic children face in the current school systems across the country. Kozol supports his testimony by providing the reader with factual statistics and percentages, of how segregated the public school systems have become within many major cities. He exposes the details and statistic of how wealthier schools received better funding and opportunity than the low-income and poverty struck school systems throughout the major cities across the country.
Savage Inequalities by Jonathan Kozol explains the inequalities of school systems in different poor neighborhoods. Kozol was originally a teacher in a public school in Boston. This school didn’t have very many resources and was unable to keep teachers for very long. After pursuing other interests, Kozol took the time from 1988-1990 to meet with children and teachers in several different neighborhoods to better understand issues relating to the inequality and segregation in the school systems. Kozol writes from his own perspective as he visits six different cities and the poorest schools in those cities. These cities consist of East St. Louis in Illinois, the South Side of Chicago in Illinois, New York City, Camden in New Jersey, Washington
In his essay “Still Separate, Still Unequal: America’s Educational Apartheid,” Jonathan Kozol brings our attention to the apparent growing trend of racial segregation within America’s urban and inner-city schools (309-310). Kozol provides several supporting factors to his claim stemming from his research and observations of different school environments, its teachers and students, and personal conversations with those teachers and students.
Understanding that the poverty of black Americans did not just stay within the home is a big step in understanding urban poverty. Urban poverty reached outside the home, into the parks, schools and playgrounds. With poverties reach being that extensive, there was something other than adversity causing this. Louis Gates wrote an article about this called “Black America and The Class Divide.” (Jr.)
Growing up a Caucasian, upper-middle-class child in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, I remember feeling perplexed every time I visited my neighborhood grocery store. While the groceries in one part of the store served a demographic population similar to my own, the other items catered to the low-income, predominately African-American population located in the adjacent neighborhood. My grocery store mirrored the demographic make-up of my city, yet was not reflected in my educational trajectory. My parents, like many financially secure families in my area, sent me to a private college-preparatory school to escape the deficiencies of the public school system in East Baton Rouge Parish. While white
Atlanta is one of the top ten fastest growing cities in the United States (Fry & Taylor 2012), and is one of the more diverse cities in the country. Despite this the distribution of demographics in Atlanta’s neighborhood points to a high level of segregation on the basis of income and race in the city’s housing markets. Atlanta is ranked twenty-second in terms of neighborhood segregation among the fifty largest cities in the country (Turner 2014).
Education and economic justice were two forms of systemic inequalities that make inequality difficult to talk about. Education is a requirement if someone wishes to have a better life, but not everyone has access to quality education. In the U.S there has always been a battle, people of color have fought to be able to access quality education, (Philips, 2016: 130) they are constantly attending inferior and ineffective school where there are many distractions for students to be fully successful in the classrooms. Often these schools where children of color attend lack quality facilities, educational resources, and qualified teachers. Someone can’t help to notice that in general such unqualified schools are mostly in color people’s neighborhoods.
However, Wacquant brings the term “inner city” to light, breaking down its meaning: “black and poor.” Living in Chicago gives one an exemplary example of the term “inner city” meaning “poor, black ghettos.” The references to “inner city” schools being synonymous with “poor quality” and “mostly African American” are damaging to urban terminology and creating a predetermined perspective of those who call the “inner city” home. The “hypersegregation” of the city of Chicago is a topic within itself, but the institution of segregation is, without question, existent here. In addition, “inner city” is becoming a label which implies unavoidable incarceration.
Many inner cities within the United States are comprised of people living in poverty and many of these people are people of color. One of the largest and poorest neighborhoods in the United States is the South Bronx. The South Bronx is extensively racially segregated and the plights that the residents face are horrendous (Kozol, 1995, p. 3). It is conservative belief that the people of color that inhabit the deteriorating inner cities of the US remain in such dire conditions is attributable to their own individual choices, lifestyle, and culture. This belief that the persistence of racial inequalities is attributable to individual lifestyle cannot explain the continuance of inequality once these individuals acquire the education and skills
America’s school system and student population remains segregated, by race and class. The inequalities that exist in schools today result from more than just poorly managed schools; they reflect the racial and socioeconomic inequities of society as a whole. Most of the problems of schools boil down to either racism in and outside the school or financial disparity between wealthy and poor school districts. Because schools receive funding through local property taxes, low-income communities start at an economic disadvantage. Less funding means fewer resources, lower quality instruction and curricula, and little to no community involvement. Even when low-income schools manage to find adequate funding, the money doesn’t solve all the school’s
Despite increased diversity across the country, America’s neighborhoods remain highly segregated along racial and ethnic lines. Residential segregation, particularly between African-Americans and whites, persists in metropolitan areas where minorities make up a large share of the population. This paper will examine residential segregation imposed upon African-Americans and the enormous costs it bears. Furthermore, the role of government will be discussed as having an important role in carrying out efforts towards residential desegregation. By developing an understanding of residential segregation and its destructive effects, parallels may be drawn between efforts aimed at combating
The health status according to the 2017 County Health Rankings, St. Louis has a homicide death rate of 33 people per 100,000 (“Crime,” 2017). The health care clinician to patient ratios for primary care physicians are 1 to 83 people, dentists are 1 to 48 people and mental health is 1 to 272 people (“Crime,” 2017). The population that are uninsured is eleven percent and are between the ages of 18 to 65 (“Crime,” 2017). The Missouri Health Improvement Act of 2007 (Senate bill 577) seeks to make MO HealthNet a prudent purchaser of high quality care and the Missouri Health Transformation Act of 2008 (Senate bill 1230) which requires hospitals to report adverse events and the state to publicly report results annually (Health Care, 2013).
In Savage Inequalities, Jonathan Kozol documents the devastating inequalities in American schools, focusing on public education’s “savage inequalities” between affluent districts and poor districts. From 1988 till 1990, Kozol visited schools in over thirty neighborhoods, including East St. Louis, the Bronx, Chicago, Harlem, Jersey City, and San Antonio. Kozol describes horrifying conditions in these schools. He spends a chapter on each area, and provides a description of the city and a historical basis for the impoverished state of its school. These schools, usually in high crime areas, lack the most basic needs. Kozol creates a scene of rooms without heat, few supplies or text, labs with no