East St. Louis, Englewood, The Ville Essay

Anderson makes a strong case for the inevitability of ghetto life--in other words, once "ghettoization" begins, it continues its course without regard to a neighborhood's tentative and transitory movement toward gentrification. The middle class and well-heeled whites and minority cultures who move into regenerating urban communities are attracted to city life for its vibrancy and "charm," yet they ultimately are playing with fire when it comes to sharing the same neighborhood which was formerly the turf of gangs, prostitutes, drug dealers, and other societal deviants. Such areas are frequently called "colorful," when they are, in fact, dangerous. Charm and color quickly turn to fear and suspicion after more than enough reports of car break-ins, gang retaliations, and drug deals gone bad fill the local news. As Anderson (1990) points out in his conclusion:

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.

To help counter these negative racial effects, there have been different movements in the borough to help concentrate the influence of communities that have traditionally lived in the area. Middle class African Americans in Brooklyn, specifically, have searched for ways to continue to help define Brooklyn in a way that isn’t resistant to change, but that helps to keep the influence of groups such as black Brooklynites inside the

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).

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

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.

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

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.

Racism is a constitutive feature of capitalism. Along with other modes of domination, racism constructs and enshrines those social hierarchies that legitimize expropriation, naturalize exploitation, and produce the differential value capital instrumentalizes in the interest of profit (Rodney 1981; Robinson 2000; Melamed 2015; Pulido 2016). Historically in the U.S., race has been produced in and through space. Housing, lending, zoning and environmental policies, as well as foundational and ongoing confiscatory processes at the heart of racial capitalism have linked race, place, and power in pernicious, “death-dealing” ways (Gilmore 2002:16; Lipsitz 2007; Fraser 2016). From the frontier to the plantation, the border to the reservation, the constitutive geographies of U.S. nationhood have inextricably bound race and space. Scholars of racial capitalism embed uneven development within this active and ongoing co-production of race and space. They emphasize that social difference is foundational, not incidental, to the production of the uneven spatial forms that underwrite racial capitalism. Race has been produced with and through space via urban renewal, restrictive covenants, systemic abandonment and the ‘racialization of state policy’ (Gotham 2000:14) by which the benefits of housing, lending and other urban policies have been afforded to some and denied to others (see Coates 2014; Shabazz 2015 for Chicago). Thus, vacant land and buildings on Chicago’ s South Side are not

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

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

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

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.

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).