48 pages • 1 hour read
Jonathan KozolSavage Inequalities
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 1991A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapter 1Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 1 Summary: "Life on the Mississippi: East, St. Louis, Illinois"
Chapter 1 of Savage Inequalities begins with snapshot of East St. Louis, Illinois, focusing first on the city, before discussing its educational challenges. In so doing, Kozol provides historical and structural backdrops for the socioeconomic aspects of inequality and segregation in this community. Coupled with the crisis in education, the resulting portrait of East St. Louis is bleak.
Described by the US Department of Housing and Urban Development as "the most distressed small city in America," Kozol offers a collection of facts that provide context for this judgment: almost a third of its families subsist on less than $7,500 a year; three-quarters of the buildings on its main street, Missouri Avenue, are unoccupied; 1,170 of its 1,400 city employees have been laid off in recent years, and the city's garbage pickups have been halted since October 1987.
Looming over the city are the Pfizer and Monsanto chemical plants, which vent smoke and fumes incessantly. East St. Louis is in debt by more than $40 million, threatening the closure of its police and fire departments, and needed emergency loans to keep basic services functioning. Public health is notoriously bad in East St. Louis: the city ranks first in fetal death, first in premature birth, and third in infant death. Kozol cites the city's health director when offering that these troubling facts can be linked to the rampant pollution and crumbling infrastructure—the abnormally high lead content in the soil and frequent sewage spills are evidence of this. East St. Louis is 98% Black.
The economic and social history of East St. Louis sheds more light on these problems: at the turn of the 20th century, the city was the second-largest railroad junction in the nation. Black migration to East St. Louis from the South began shortly after, touching off bloody race riots by white mobs. Despite this, promises of employment drew more Black people to East St. Louis, yet in two generations, most of these larger-scale economic opportunities shut down, or moved elsewhere, leaving poverty and organized crime in their wake. Since 1945, the population of East St. Louis has shrunk from a peak of 80,000, to fewer than 30,000 today. The crisis in education, Kozol believes, stems directly from these social and economic issues.
Kozol introduces two East St. Louis schools—Martin Luther King Junior High School, and East St. Louis Senior High School—by focusing on recent incidents in which they were closed for sewage and pollution. Kozol cites other problems: increasing class sizes, teacher layoffs, poor facilities, and sparse school supplies; teen pregnancy and dropouts are common. The students and teachers themselves are well-aware of the persistent inequality of their situation, remarking that they believe their education is made demonstrably worse by these catastrophic conditions and endemic poverty. Citing one teacher, Kozol writes that roughly only one-fifth of the education at East St. Louis high schools is "academic"; that is, in preparation towards attending a four-year college. Indeed, in his own tour of the schools, many classrooms are totally unstructured and unsupervised.
In the chapter's closing pages, Kozol attributes the problems of the educational system of East St. Louis to its relative economic and racial isolation—its being a "ghetto." This is a point, he argues, that much of the thinking and policy on education conveniently ignores. The cost of crumbling local infrastructure and a dire socioeconomic situation, Kozol maintains, easily dwarfs the extra dollars spent on education. In addition to these factors, Kozol argues that it is the legacy of racial segregation itself—compounded by the past flight of commercial and economic interests—that escapes policymakers' attention, and, in so doing, helps perpetuate the poverty and hopelessness that dominates life in East St. Louis.
Chapter 1 Analysis
Chapter 1 of Savage Inequalities is intended as a reversal of many of the tropes and expectations of education-policy pieces: it does not center on classroom achievement, or student aptitude, or indeed even schools, and instead orients itself on the locality of East St. Louis, Illinois. In so doing, Kozol argues that the city of East St. Louis is more than a backdrop or a setting, but the primary character—arguably even its antagonist—in the story he is about to tell. The problems of this city are such that they largely rule out the qualities of its inhabitants and erode their ability to decide their own fates. In setting up the opening chapter in this way, Kozol intends to deliver his diagnosis of both the crisis in education in the US and the debate surrounding this crisis. Central to Kozol's argument is the contention that this crisis is first and foremost the result of racial segregation—of formal and informal varieties. To this end, Kozol highlights East St. Louis to illustrate this contentious and controversial argument—that in the US, Black children are expendable, and their communities are dumping grounds.
Kozol views East St. Louis as the literal instantiation of this. Situated in a low-lying flood plain beneath the Pfizer and Monsanto chemical plants, East St. Louis is beyond polluted: its uncollected garbage lies in the streets, its soil is abundant in lead, and sewage leaks are frequent. These deficiencies of infrastructure, Kozol argues, contribute to an unchecked public health crisis, one that has become normalized due to inattention and indifference. Central to these inequalities, Kozol argues, is a pattern of racial isolation and segregation that began nearly a century ago, and continues to the present day. To explain the declining fortunes of East St. Louis, Kozol connects the incidents the violent bigotry of the early 20th century, the successive retractions of its major commercial and economic industries, and the gradual departure of its white population. Even the interstate highway, Kozol cites, is built to skirt around East St. Louis. To wit, crime—often seen as preeminently characteristic of similarly impoverished, predominantly Black communities—Kozol ties to these declining social and economic prospects, and is treated by Kozol as a pretext for further divestment and isolation. Kozol argues that East St. Louis' educational problems are the extension of these larger, historically based patterns.
Kozol begins his treatment of East St. Louis school system with incidents of school closures due to sewage leaks. The image bluntly reinforces not just the dire circumstances in which these students must live and work, but highlights the indifference of the surrounding community and State of Illinois toward this locality. Moving through stories of students and teachers attempting to persevere amidst these incredible obstacles, Kozol's prose attempts shame and shock that such destitute and desperate conditions are even possible in the US. The answer to this implicit "how," Kozol argues, is none other than a committed posture of racial segregation and isolation, an inequality he describes—in no uncertain terms—as "a basic evil" (47).
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