sociology writing

Savage Inequalities, p. 1 of 10

Excerpt: Savage Inequalities By

Jonathan Kozol

East St. Louis, Illinois, 1990 “East of anywhere,” writes a reporter for the Saint Louis Post Dispatch, “often

evokes the other side of the tracks. But for a first-time visitor suddenly deposited on its

eerily empty streets east Saint Louis might suggest another world.” The city, which is

98% black, has no obstetric services, no regular trash collection, and few jobs. Nearly a

third of its families live on less than $7,500 a year: 75% of its population lives on welfare

of some form. The US Department of Housing and Urban Development describes it as

the most distressed small city in America.

Only three of the 13 buildings on Missouri Ave. One of the city's major

thoroughfares are occupied. A 13-story office building, tallest in the city, has been

boarded up. Outside, on the sidewalk, a pile of garbage fills a 10-foot crater.

The city, which by night and day is clouded by the fumes that pour from vents

and smokestacks at the Pfizer and Monsanto chemical plants, has one of the highest

rates of child asthma in America.

It is, according to a teacher at Southern Illinois University, “a repository for a

nonwhite population that is now regarded as expendable.” The Post-Dispatch describes

it as “America's Soweto.”

Fiscal shortages have forced the layoff of 1,170 of the city's 1,400 employees in

the past 12 years the city, which is often unable to buy heating fuel or toilet paper for the

City Hall, recently announced that it might have to cashier all but 10% of the remaining

work force of 230. In 1989 the mayor announced that he might need to sell the City Hall

and all six fire stations to raise needed cash. Last year the plan had to be scrapped

after the city lost it's City Hall in a court judgment to a creditor. East Saint Louis 's

mortgaged to the next century but has the highest property tax rate in the state.

The dangers of exposure to raw sewage, which backs up repeatedly into the

homes of residents in East St. Louis, were first noticed, in the spring of 1989, at a public

housing project, Villa Griffin. Raw sewage, says the Post-Dispatch, overflowed into a

playground just behind the housing project, which is home to 187 children, “forming an

oozing lake of. . . tainted water.” . . . A St. Louis health official voices her dismay that

children live with waste in their backyards. “The development of working sewage

systems made cities livable 100 years ago,” she notes. “Sewage systems separate us

from the Third World.” . . .

The sewage, which is flowing from collapsed pipes and dysfunctional pumping

stations, has also flooded basements all over the city. The city’s vacuum truck, which

uses water and suction to unclog the city’s sewers, cannot be used because it needs

Savage Inequalities, p. 2 of 10

$5,000 in repairs. Even when it works, it sometimes can’t be used because there isn’t

money to hire drivers. A single engineer now does the work that 14 others did before

they were laid off. By April the pool of overflow behind the Villa Griffin Project has

expanded into a lagoon of sewage. Two million gallons of raw sewage lie just outside

the children’s homes. . ..

Sister Julia Huiskamp meets me on King Boulevard and drives me to the Griffin

homes.

As we ride past blocks of skeletal structures, some of which are still inhabited,

she slows the car repeatedly at railroad crossings. A seemingly endless railroad train

rolls past us to the right. On the left: a blackened lot where garbage has been burning.

Next to the burning garbage is a row of 12 white cabins, charred by fire. Next: a lot that

holds a heap of auto tires and mountain of tin cans. More burnt houses. More trash

fires. The train moves almost imperceptibly across the flatness of the land.

Fifty years old, and wearing a blue suit, white blouse, and blue headcover, Sister

Julia points to the nicest house in sight. The sign on the front reads MOTEL. “It’s a

whorehouse,” Sister Julia says.

When she slows the car beside a group of teen-age boys, one of them steps out

toward the car, then backs away as she is recognized.

The 99 units of the Villa Griffin homes – two-story structures, brick on the first

floor, yellow wood above – form one border of a recessed park and playground that

were filled with fecal matter last year when the sewage mains exploded. The sewage is

gone now and the grass is very green and looks inviting. When nin-year-old Serena and

her seven-year-old brother take me for a walk, however, I discover that our shoes sink

into what is still a sewage marsh. An inch-deep residue of fouled water still remains.

Serena’s brother is a handsome, joyous little boy, but troublingly thin. Three other

children join us as we walk along the marsh: Smokey, who is nine years old but cannot

yet tell time; Mickey, who is seven; and a tiny child with a ponytail and big brown eyes

who talks a constant stream of words that I can’t always understand.

“Hush, Little Sister,” says Serena. I ask for her name, but “Little Sister” is the only

name that the children seem to know.

“There go my cousins,” Smokey says, pointing to two teen-age girls above us on

the hill.

The day is warm, although we’re only in the second week of March; several dogs

and cats are playing by the edge of the marsh. “It’s a lot of squirrels here,” says

Smokey. “There go one!”

“This her squirrel is a friend of mine,” says Little Sister.

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None of the children can tell me the approximate time that school begins. One

says five o’clock. One says six. Another says that school begins at noon.

When I ask what song they sing after the flag pledge, one says, “Jingle Bells.”

Smokey cannot decide if he is in the second or third grade.

Seven-year-old Mickey sucks his thumb during the walk.

The children regale me with a chilling story as we stand beside the marsh.

Smokey says his sister was raped and murdered and then dumped behind his school.

Other children add more details. Smokey’s sister was 11 years old. She was beaten with

a brick until she died. The murder was committed by a man who knew her mother.

The narrative begins when, without warning, Smokey says, “My sister has got

killed.”

“She was my best friend,” Serena says.

“They had beat her in the head and raped her,” Smokey says.

“She was hollering out loud,” says Little Sister.

I ask them when it happened. Smokey says, “Last year.” Serena then corrects

him and she says, “Last week.”

“It scared me because I had to cry,” says Little Sister.

“The police arrested one man but they didn’t catch the other,” Smokey says.

Serena says, “He was some kin to her.”

But Smokey objects, “He weren’t no kin to me. He was my momma’s friend.”

“Her face was busted,” Little Sister says.

Serena describes this sequence of events: They told her go behind the school.

They’ll give her a quarter if she do. Then they knock her down and told her not tell what

they had did.”

I ask, “Why did they kill her?”

“They was scared that she would tell,” Serena says.

“One is in jail,” says Smokey. “They cain’t find the other.”

“Instead of raping little bitty children, they should find themselves a wife,” says

Little Sister.

“Give her another chance to live,” Serena says.

“My teacher came to the funeral,” says Smokey.

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“When a little child dies, my momma say a star go straight to Heaven,” says

Serena.

“My grandma was murdered,” Mickey says out of the blue. “Somebody shot two

bullets in her head.”

I ask him, “Is she really dead?”

“She dead all right,” says Mickey. “She was layin’ there, just dead.”

“I love my friends,” Serena says. “I don’t care if they no kin to me. I care for them.

I hope his mother have another baby. Name her for my friend that’s dead.”

“I have a cat with three legs,” Smokey says.

“Snakes hate rabbits,” Mickey says, again for no apparent reason.

“Cats hate fishes,” Little Sister says.

“It’s a lot of hate,” says Smokey.

Later, at the mission, Sister Julia tells me this: “The Jefferson School, which they

attend, is a decrepit hulk. Next to it is a modern school, erected two years ago, which

was to have replaced the one that they attend. But the construction was not done

correctly. The roof is too heavy for the walls, and the entire structure has begun to sink.

It can’t be occupied. Smokey’s sister was raped and murdered and dumped between

the old school and the new one.” …

The problems of the streets in urban areas, as teachers often note, frequently

spill over into public schools. In the public schools of East St. Louis this is literally the

case..

“Martin Luther King Junior High School,” notes the Post-Dispatch in a story

publish3ed in the early spring of 1989, “was evacuated Friday afternoon after sewage

flowed into the kitchen… The kitchen was closed and students were sent home.” On

Monday, the paper continues, “East St. Louis Senior High School was awash in sewage

for the second time this year.” The school had to be shut because of “fumes and

backed-up toilets.” Sewage flowed into the basement, through the floor, then up into the

kitchen and the students’ bathrooms. The backup, we read, “occurred in the food

preparation areas.”

School is resumed the following morning at the high school, but a few days later

the overflow recurs. This time the entire system is affected, since the meals distributed

to every student in the city are prepared in the two schools that have been flooded.

School is called off for all 16,500 students in the district. The sewage backup, caused by

failure of two pumping stations, forces officials at the high school to shut down the

furnaces.

Savage Inequalities, p. 5 of 10

At Martin Luther King, the parking lot and gym are also flooded. “It’s a disaster,”

says a legislator. “The streets are under water; gaseous fumes are being emitted from

the pipes under the schools,’ she says, “making people ill.”

In the same week, the schools announce a layoff of 280 teachers, 166 cooks and

cafeteria workers, 25 teacher aides, 16 custodians and 18 painters, electricians,

engineers, and plumbers.The president of the teachers’ union says the cuts, which will

bring the side of kindergarten and primary classes to 30 students, and the size of fourth

to twelfth grade classes up to 35, will have “an unimaginable impact” on the students. “If

you have a high school teacher with five classes each day and between 150 and 175

students…, it’s going to have a devastating effect.” The school system, it is also noted,

has been using more than 70 “permanent substitute teachers,” who are paid only

$10,000 yearly, as a way of saving money…

East St. Lous, says the chairman of the state board, “is simply the worst possible

place I can imagine to have a child brought up… The community is in desperate

circumstances.” Sports and music, he observes, are , for many children here, “the only

avenues of success.” Sadly enough, no matter how it ratifies the stereotype, this is the

truth; and there is poignant aspect to the fact that, even with class size soaring and one

quarter of the system’s teachers being given their dismissal, the state board of

education demonstrates its genuine but skewed compassion by attempting to leave

sports and music untouched by the overall austerity.

Even sports facilities, however, are degrading by comparing with those found and

expected at most high schools in American. The football field at East St. Louis High is

missing almost everything – including the goalposts. There are a couple of metal pipes

– no crossbar, just the pipes. Bob Shannon, the football coach, who ahs to use his

personal funds to purchase footballs and has had to cut and rake the football field

himself, has dreams of having goalposts someday. He’d also like to get his students

new uniforms. The ones they wear are nine years old and held together somehow by a

patchwork of repairs. Keeping them clean is a problem, too. The school cannot afford a

washing machine. The uniforms are carted to a corner laundromat with fifteen dollars’

worth of quarters…

In the wing of the school that holds vocational classes, a damp, unpleasant odor

fills the halls. The school has a machine shop, which cannot be used for lack of staff,

and woodworking shop. The only shop that’s occupied this morning is the auto-body

class. A man with long blond hair and wearing a white sweat suit swings a paddle to get

children in their chairs. “What we need the most is new equipment,” he reports. “I have

equipment for alignment, for example, but we don’t have money to install it. We also

need a better form of egress. We bring the cars in through two other classes.”

Computerized equipment used in most repair shops, he reports, is far beyond the high

school’s budget. It looks like a very old gas station in an isolated rural town…

Savage Inequalities, p. 6 of 10

The science labs at East St. Louis High are 30 to 50 years outdated. John

McMillan, a soft-spoken man, teaches physics at the school. He shows me his lab. The

sis lab stations in the room have empty holes where pipes wer once attached. “It would

be great if we had water,” says McMillan.

Leaving the chemistry labs, I pass a double-sized classroom in which roughly 60

kids are sitting fairly still but doing nothing. “ This is supervised study hall,” a teacher

tells me in the corridor. But when we step inside, he finds there is no teacher. “The

teacher must be out today,” he says.

Irl Solomon’s history classes, which I visit next, have been described by

journalists who cover East St. Louis as the highlight of the school. Solomon, a man of

564 whose reddish hair is turning white, has taught in urban schools for almost 30

years. A graduate of Brandeis University, he entered law school but was drawn away by

a concern with civil rights. “After one semester, I decided that the law was not for me. I

said, ‘Go and find the toughest place there is to teach. See if you like it.’ I’m still here…

“I have four girls right now in my senior home room who are pregnant or have

just had babies. When I ask them why this happens, I am told, ‘Well, there’s no reason

not to have a baby. There’s not much for me in public school.’ The truth is, that’s a pretty

honest answer. A diploma from a ghetto high school doesn’t count for much in the

United States today. So, if this is really the last education that a person’s going to get,

she’s probably perceptive in that statement. Ah, there’s so much bitterness – unfairness

– there’ you know. Most of these pregnant girls are not the ones who have much self-

esteem…

“Very little education in the school would be considered academic in the suburbs.

Maybe 10 to 15 percent of students are in truly academic programs. Of the 55 percent

who graduate, 20 percent may go to four-year colleges: something like 10 percent of

any entering class. Another 10 to 20 percent may get some other kind of higher

education. An equal number join the military”…

“I don’t go to physics class, because my lab has no equipment,” says one

student. “The typewriters in my typing class don’t work. The women’s toilets…” She

makes a sour face. “I’ll be honest,” she says, “I just don’t use the toilets. If I do, I come

back into class and I feel dirty.”

“I wanted to study Latin,” says another student. “But we don’t have Latin in this

school.”

“We lost our only Latin teacher,” Solomon says.

A girl in a white jersey with the message DO THE RIGHT THING on the front

raises her hand. “You visit other schools,” she says. “Do you think the children in this

school are getting what we’d get in a nice section of St. Louis?”

I note that we are in a different state and city.

Savage Inequalities, p. 7 of 10

“Are we citizens of East St. Louis or America?” she asks…

In a seventh grade social studies class, the only book that bears some relevance

to black concerns – its title is The American Negro – bears a publication date of 1967.

The teacher invites me to ask the class some questions. Uncertain where to start, I ask

the students what they’ve learned about the civil rights campaigns of recent decades.

A 14-year-old girl with short black curly hair says this: “Every year in February we

are told to read the same old speech of Martin Luther King. We read it every year. ‘I

have a dream…’ It does begin to seem – what is the word?” She hesitates and then she

finds the word: “perfunctory.”

I ask her what she means.

“We have a school in East St. Lous named for Dr. King,” she says. “The school is

full of sewer water and the doors are locked with chains. Every student in that school is

black. It’s like a terrible joke on history.”

It startles me to hear her words, but I am startled even more to think how seldom

any press reporter has observed the irony of naming segregated schools for Martin

Luther King. Children reach the heart of these hypocrisies much quicker than the grown-

ups and the experts do…

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Rye, New York, 1990 The train ride from Grand Central Station to suburban Rye, New York, takes 35 to

40 minutes. The high school is a short ride from the station. Built of handsome gray

stone and set in a landscaped campus, it resembles a New England prep school. On a

day in early June of 1990, I enter the school and am directed by a student to the office.

The principal, a relaxed, unhurried man whom unlike many urban principals,

seems gratified to have me visit in his school, takes me in to see the auditorium, which

he says, was recently restored with private charitable funds ($400,000) raised by

parents. The crenellated ceiling, which is white and spotless, and the polished dark-

wood paneling contrast with the collapsing structure of the auditorium at [another school

I visited]. The principal strikes his fist against the balcony: “They made this place

extremely solid.” Through a window, one can see the spreading branches of a beech

tree in the central courtyard of the school.

In a student lounge, a dozen seniors are relaxing on a carpeted floor that is

constructed with a number of tiers so that, as the principal explains, “they can st retch

out and be comfortable while reading.”

The library is wood-paneled, like the auditorium. Students, all of whom are white,

are seated at private carrels, of which there are approximately 40. Some are doing

homework; others are looking though the New York Times. Every student that I see

Savage Inequalities, p. 8 of 10

during my visit to the school is white or Asian, though I later learn there are a number of

Hispanic students and that 1 or 2 percent of the students in the school are black

According to the principal, the school has 96 computers for 546 children. The

typical student, he says, studies a foreign language for four or five years, beginning in

the junior high school, and a second foreign language (Latin is available) for two years.

Of 140 seniors, 92 are now enrolled in AP [advanced placement] class. Maximum

teacher salary will soon reach $70,000. Per pupil funding is above $12,000 at the time I

visit.

The students I meet include eleventh and twelfth graders. The teacher tells me

that the class is reading Robert Coles, Studs Terkel, Alice Walker. He tells me I will find

them more than willing to engage me in debate, and this turns out to be correct. Primed

for my visit, it appears, they arrow in directly on the dual questions of equality and race.

Three general positions soon emerge and seem to be accepted widely. The first

is that the fiscal inequalities “do matter very much” in shaping what a school can offer

(“That is obvious,” one student says) and that any loss of funds in Rye, as a potential

consequence of future equalizing, would be damaging to many things the town regards

as quite essential.

The second position is that racial integration – for example, by busing of black

children from the city or a nonwhite suburb to this school – would meet with strong

resistance, and the reason would not simply be the fear that certain standards might

decline. The reason, several students say straightforwardly, is “racial” or, as others say

it, “out-and-out racism” on the part of adults.

The third position voiced by many students, but not all, is that equity is basically a

goal to be desired and should be pursued for moral reasons, but “will probably make no

major difference” since poor children “still would lack the motivation” and “would

probably fail in any case because of other problems.”

At this point, I ask if they can truly say “it wouldn’t make a difference” since it’s

never been attempted. Several students then seem to rethink their views and says that

“it might work, but it would have to start with preschool and the elementary grades” and

“it might be 20 years before we’d see a difference.”

At this stage in the discussion, several students speak with some real feeling of

the present inequalities, which, they say, are “obviously unfair,” and one student goes a

little further and proposes that “we need to change a lot more than the schools.” Another

says she’d favor integration “by whatever means – including busing – even if the

parents disapprove.” But a contradictory opinion also is expressed with a good deal

fervor and is stated by one student in a rather biting voice: “I don’t see why we should

do it. How could it be of benefit to us?”

Throughout the discussion, whatever the views the children voice, there is a

degree of unreality about the whole exchange. The children are lucid and their language

Savage Inequalities, p. 9 of 10

is well chosen and their arguments well made, but there is a sense that they are dealing

with an issue that does not feel very vivid, and that nothing that we say about it to each

other really matters since it’s “just a theoretical discussion.” To a certain degree, the

skillfulness and cleverness that they display seem to derive precisely from this sense of

unreality. Questions of unfairness feel more like a geometric problem than a matter of

humanity or conscience. A few of the students do break through the note of unreality,

but, when they do, they cease to be so agile in their use of words and speak more

awkwardly. Ethical challenges seem to threaten their effectiveness. There is the sense

that they were skating over ice and that the issues we addressed were safely frozen

underneath. When they stop tolook beneath the ice they start to stumble. The verbal

competence they have acquired here may have been gained by building walls around

some regions of the heart.

“I don’t think that busing students from their ghetto to a different school would do

much good,” one student says. “You can take them out of the environment, but you can’t

take the environment out of them. If someone grows up in the South Bronx, he’s not

going to be prone to learn.” His name is Max and he has short black hair and speaks

with confidence. “Busing didn’t work when it was tired,” he says. I ask him how he

knows this and he says he saw a television movie about Boston.

“I agree that it’s unfair the way it is,” another student says. “ We have AP courses

and they don’t. Our classes are much smaller.” But, she says, “putting them in schools

like ours is not the answer Why not put some AP classes into their school? Fix the roof

and paint the halls so it will not be so depressing.”

The students know the term “separate but equal,” but seem unaware of its

historical associations. “Keep them where they are but make it equal,” says a girl in the

front row.

A student named Jennifer, whose manner of speech is somewhat less refined

and polished than that of the others, tells me that her parents came here from New

York. “My family is originally from the Bronx. Schools are hell there. That’s one reason

that we moved. I don’t think it’s our responsibility to pay our taxes to provide for them. I

mean, my parents used to live there and they wanted to get out. There’s no point in

coming to a place like this, where schools are good, and then your taxes go back to the

place where you began.”

I bait her a bit: “Do you mean that, now that you are not in hell, you have no

feeling for the people that you left behind?”

“It has to be the people in the area who want an education. If your parents just

don’t care, it won’t do any good to spend a lot of money. Someone else can’t want a

good life for you. You have got to want it for yourself.” Then she adds, however, “I agree

that everyone should have a chance at taking the same courses…”

I ask her if she’d think it fair to pay more taxes so that this was possible.

Savage Inequalities, p. 10 of 10

“I don’t see how that benefits me,” she says.

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Credit: From Savage Inequalities by Jonathan Kozol, © 1991 by Jonathan Kozol. Used

by permission of Crown Publishers, a division of Random House, Inc.