As an avid listener of This American Life, a weekly podcast broadcasted by Chicago Public Radio, I was enraptured by the two episodes “The Problem We all Live With” parts one and two. The podcast’s description reads as such: “Right now, all sorts of people are trying to rethink and reinvent education, to get poor minority kids performing as well as white kids. But there's one thing nobody tries anymore, despite lots of evidence that it works: desegregation. Nikole Hannah-Jones looks at a district that, not long ago, accidentally launched a desegregation program.” In the podcast, This American Life followed black middle school children as they tried to enroll in an all-white public school, and the difficulties they faced in doing so. This podcast touched on the housing segregation that modern day America still faces. This podcast served as a relevant basis for the housing articles that I read this past week, namely the book Not in My Neighborhood, a book by Antero Pietila. It became obvious that the residential segregation that Baltimore faced in 1945 is eerily similar to the racial struggles we are facing 70 years later, in 1945.
One significant difference is the feral living conditions that African-Americans lived in in the 1940’s. One study showed that 42.1% of black housing units lacked private baths, and 22.4% did not have running water. (Pietila 90) Truthfully, the west side of Baltimore today is not much better; many of the houses are still considered to be deplorable by its residents, although it has ameliorated some since the 1940’s. The black residents who were moving to the white side of Baltimore were deemed a “dangerous real estate situation” to the realtors who were living in the area. This would not be said outright today, although it is very difficult for a black family in Baltimore to move to a white neighborhood today. However, today we do not need blatant racism to segregate American cities: African-Americans earn less that white Americans, prohibiting most from moving into the affluent white communities. The realtors at the time acted abhorrently to their black customers, which was not unusual at the time. One advertisement in the Afro-American asked black families to come visit the open houses, so long as they were “sober, industrious” families. They specifically stated, “no loafers fed by hard-working wives.” (Pietila 99) Realtors did not try to appeal to their black clients, as they knew that black families had no other option at the time. Banks would not give them loans, and they were banned from most of the real estate market. To say the least, it was hard to find housing as an African-American individual in the US in the 20th century. Before reading the selected healthcare readings, I only had a glimpse of the problems that African-Americans faced when moving in the United States. I had more of an idea of the implications of living in segregated neighborhoods, but was ignorant about the realities of why housing is still so segregated today. After reading excerpts from Not in my Neighborhood, I have a better grasp of the history of housing segregation in Baltimore, although I wished it covered what was happening across the nation more too. That being said, the excerpts offered a telling glimpse into the problematic housing market in the 1940’s. Pietila, Antero. Not in my Neighborhood. Chicago: Northwestern University Press, 2010. Print.
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“African American men can expect to be sicker throughout their lives than an African-American girl or a white child of either gender.” (Katzen, 226) When I began to read Amy Katzen’s work African American Men’s Health and Incarceration, I immediately thought about the research that I had been doing on mass incarceration in our African American Studies course. I recalled the horrendous healthcare that prison inmates (read: African-American males,) received when they enter the jail. The journal African American Men’s Health and Incarceration mentioned imprisonment during the pages I was assigned to read, but I decided to delve deeper into additional pages of the book, which discussed the aforementioned link between healthcare and imprisonment.
Like Katzen had mentioned in her writing, I was aware that rates of HIV, hepatitis C, and tuberculosis were all higher in prison than outside of it. However, I was not aware that rates of asthma doubled in prison, or that one in five prison inmates developed hypertension and diabetes while they are incarcerated. After researching mass incarceration for a month, I had never seen statistics that were so alarming. After all, I had spent the last month researching the history of mass incarceration, and the origins of it in the United States. I was not as well up-to-date with the modern practices of American incarceration as I should have been. I also did not always think about the implications of prison rules as I should have. I was aware that sexual intercourse and drug usage were forbidden in the establishment. I also was realistic in assuming that both still occurred in prisons, despite the severe punishments that occur if caught. What I did not think about was the repercussions of these activities. If drugs and sex are both prohibited in the cells, but both still happen, obviously the inmates should have access to clean drug paraphernalia and proper barriers that protect against sexually transmitted diseases. However, they do not. The lack of access to certain items in prison leaves the prisoners vulnerable to many diseases that they otherwise could prevent in the outside world. Diseases are easily contracted in prison. These illnesses do not leave the prisoners once they are freed. Many of the health conditions obtained while serving time require long-term management, particularly asthma, hypertension (a consequence of living in a high-stress environment for a long period of time,) and diabetes. Additionally, 84% of the prisoners when they were leaving were diagnosed with some sort of mental health problem. (Katzen 235) All of these conditions require either medications or visits with a healthcare professional. Most inmates, however, cannot receive healthcare when they leave prison because they no longer have health insurance. Medicaid expires when one is in prison, and many other insurance policies do not cover convicts. In addition to this, many ex-prisoners leave jail with no access to federal housing, and no family to help them out. I thought I knew all there was to know about mass incarceration before I read an excerpt from Amy Katzen’s book, African American Men’s Health and Incarceration. I realize my error now. American prisons do an abysmal job of taking care of its inmates, who leave prison sick and then cannot obtain proper care in the outside world. This work opened my eyes to the problems that all African-American men may face while living in the United States, and the ever-present link between mass incarceration and modern day healthcare. Katzen, Amy L. African American Men's Health and Incarceration: Access to Care upon Reentry and Eliminating Invisible Punishments, 26 Berkeley J. Gender L. & Just. 221 (2011). A black woman is thronged by other black protestors as she shouts into video cameras that are surrounding her and the ensuing chaos. She yells to the reporters, “This was wrong, and that was coldhearted.” The footage is live from Ferguson, Missouri, in the exact spot where Michael Brown was shot just hours prior. The shouting woman is Leslie McSpadden, better known as Michael Brown’s mother. She continues: “You took my son away from me, you know how was it was for me to get him to stay in school and graduate? You know how many black men graduate? Not many!” This moment must be one of the hardest of her life. But out of all of the ways that she could have expressed her distress and outrage, she chose to express it by discussing school. In the following months, Michael Brown became a symbol of police violence towards African-American men, but he also became a symbol of the poor, segregated schooling system that has failed him completely. The public school system that never failed Michael Brown has failed many in the past, in particular when private corporations began to manage public schools in the 1990’s.
According to the private management companies, private management of schools are supposed to offer a plethora of upgrades that a normal public school cannot. They claim to increase parental involvement, improve relations between individuals and their communities, and provide a quality education. Michael Brown’s school could boast none of these perks. In 1992, a Baltimorean superintendent announced that a private management corporation had been hired to operate nine Baltimore public schools. Although the announcement was controversial, it provided many rewards in the first few months. One of them was that the schools became the biggest employer in Baltimore, hiring 11,000 professionals to help run the school, 70% of them being black. The business also improved the school’s deteriorating infrastructure: they painted schools, repaired broken toilets, and bought many new computers. But before long, parents became infuriated with the management’s decisions: namely, the reassignment of special-needs students into regular classrooms, a decision motivated by cutting educational costs. Thankfully, the teachers union successfully filed a lawsuit against the city of Baltimore and won. By 1994, the trend of private managements of running public schools fell to the wayside, as both teachers and parents realized that the corporations did not have their children’s best interests in mind. This experiment has kept public schools across America focused on the children, rather than money. However, there is still much more work to be done. A decade after the demise of the privatization of public schools, and there are still an abundance of problems with America’s education system. I was not aware that corporations had ever attempted to take over public education, though I did not find that surprising. I also was not surprised that the city of Baltimore would try such a controversial solution, as they are desperate to ameliorate their education systems, but to no avail. With data now proving that integration is a cost-effective way to significantly level the playing field for underserved black children, I hope that Baltimore will finally have accomplish trying a new education system and succeeding in doing so. Orr, Marion. Black Social Capital. Kansas City: University of Kansas Press. 1999. Print. |
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