East St. Louis has been a pit forever. My Dad has some great stories about hauling cattle to the railroad yards down there in the early 50's.
That ought to stir things up a bit.
There may be serious pollution in East St. Louis, but's that's not the causative factor for the dysfunctional society that has arisen there.
And the proper question to ask is not why is East St. Louis in particular so bad, but why do we have these dysfunctional ghettoes all over the country in places like Detroit, South Bronx, Cabrini-Green in Chicago, Compton in LA, etc. etc.?
Are people from the ghetto discriminated against by employers? Yes, of course and for good reason. No rational employer wants to hire employees infused with the destructive ghetto culture.
First, many of the problems are the direct result of failed government policies arising out of LBJ's "War on Poverty":
- concentrating poor people into massive housing projects. Many of these people are not poor because of lack of opportunity or racism, but because of drug or alcohol addiction, mental illness, criminality, etc. And by concentrating all of these people into one physical space, the social pathologies spread and infect nearly everyone living there. Also, people living there don't have an ownership stake in their home and many of them therefore treat it like sh!t.
- AFDC and other programs which have contributed to the destruction of the black family. Illegitimacy rates in these areas approach 100%. Because of the way welfare programs have been set up, the federal government has essentially kicked the black father out of the family and has itself taken over that role. Furthermore, it is an iron rule that whatever one subsidizes, one gets more of. By subsidizing "babies born to babies", the problem gets exponentially greater with each generation.
- Forcing these families to send their children to failing public schools. Because so much energy of the teachers is spent trying to maintain a minimum level of discipline in classrooms filled with ghetto thugs, no one learns anything. Teachers are basically just babysitting and killing time. There is literally no hope for an intelligent, hard-working kid to acquire the skills needed to succeed honestly in the society at large. Private schools, especially catholic schools that impose strong discipline, have a remarkable record of success with inner-city minorities but the public school teachers union sees these schools as a threat and successfully defeats programs like vouchers which would help ghetto kids get into schools that will actually help them succeed.
And second, the blacks living in these areas are failed by their political and cultural leaders.
- the prevailing belief system is the ideology of "victimhood." People are told they can never succeed because "the Man" will always keep them down. Their political leaders continually repeat these messages to the people in these areas in order to keep themselves in power.
- "It's the culture, stupid." Criminals and gangsters are esteemed and glorified in movies, music and on the streets. And the culture feeds the unrealistic idea that kids can achieve success in the NBA or NFL, which only happens in reality to an infinitesmally small percentage of people.
But as you can see, a proper diagnosis of these problems lays the fault for these problems at liberal policies and liberal cultural institutions. This is a direct threat to the position of liberals in universities and government, and so it can never be admitted, and the only way these liberals can keep their positions is to cry "racism" and play on the politics and sociology of victimhood.
"Chill, don't kill"
I will never forget it. I about died laughing, for so many reasons.
Lauralee, I'd suggest that you look into the example of the Kansas City schools. About 20 years ago, there was a big lawsuit along the lines of Kozol's complaint. The court ruled that the city had to spend an enormous amount of money equalizing the amount spent on students by race. If memory serves, over the course of a decade several billion (yes billion with a b) was spent. The per pupil expenditure became higher there than anywhere else.
This results were remarkable. Two billion dollars and all the costs of the litigation returned nothing to the taxpayers and children. Test scores did not budge. The achievement gap did not change. Nor did the rhetoric--it was as this failed experiment never happened.
The Cato Institute published a monograph on this a while back. It might still be on the web somewhere. Try googling "Cato Institute" "Kansas City".
As for Kozol is an ideologue with his eyes closed to all facts that contradict his preconceived notions. He is stuck in the 1960s. Any professor who doesn't realize this is probably not too current.
I grew up in the area, and it has to be one of the worst polluted places anywhere. There used to be considerable chemical manufacturing and metal works just south of East St. Louis in the village of Sauget. (There is still manufacturing there, but the nature of it has changed some.) An area of ESL, called Rush City, which looks like something out of the third world, is right in the path of the factories' emissions. And believe me, there was some bad stuff coming from the factories. One summer, something got loose and killed a lot of the trees in my neighborhood, which was several miles away from the factories.
Another problem came from toxic pollution of land and water from a waste dump in the village of Sauget, owned by the Sauget family. About thirty years ago, it was discovered that pollutants had leached into Dead Creek, which meandered from Sauget into neighboring towns. Dead Creek, dry most of the time, smoked and glowed during one hot summer, so the EPA checked it out. (There was even a report that a dog had rolled in it, and a few days later the dog's skeleton was found -- but that may be an urban legend.) Paul Sauget, the mayor of the village of Sauget, and the owner of the Sauget waste dump, called the EPA "troublemaking SOB's" and, as far as I know, the investigation and cleanup were swept under the rug until just a few years ago. (Mayor Sauget resigned in 2003 after it was discovered that he had racked up $100,000 in personal expenses on a village credit card.)
The issue of pollution aside, ESL has always been a rough town. But there was a time when it was a viable city, even within my lifetime. It has been overrun with political corruption -- one city administration after another -- as well as the usual urban pathologies of crime, gangs, drug abuse, etc. The school administration was so corrupt that the state took over the school district. There was no money to fund the city's sanitation department, so trash was not picked up for years. ESL once had considerable manufacturing and meatpacking facilities and a busy shopping district. In high school, I worked for a jeweler in ESL that had been in business 75 years-- when it closed. I haven't been back in that part of the city for a long time, but my impression is that any significant business of any kind is long gone.