We Live Here

This week's We Live Here podcast is something a little different. Recently, we've been looking at health and the way that toxic stress can impact...

A year after Michael Brown’s death, is the landscape around racial and economic disparities in St. Louis and beyond starting to shift? Can some changes already be seen?

A single school can tell us a lot about the health of the community in which it exists. It can also tell us a lot about how systemic problems with transportation, food, housing and crime adversely impact impoverished communities and the health of the people who live there.

Given that treating people is already a challenging task, imagine the extra challenge that comes from treating people who experience toxic stress — the stress that comes from constant exposure to poor housing conditions, lack of quality food or exposure to violence.

While most people think of the "Delmar Divide," as simply a line that separates a mostly white community to the south and a mostly black community to the north, the reality is that the divide represents huge disparities in health.

A sliver of the 1.5 million people in federal and state prisons will remain in prison for life. But the vast majority are released at some point. How does someone adjust to life outside after spending years behind bars?

Even pleading guilty to a misdemeanor can come with some other penalties. These are called collateral consequences, and they're the focus of this episode of We Live Here.

In this episode of We Live Here, we explore the price and perils of our public defender system.

On this episode of We Live Here we introduce you to four police officers who discuss not only what life is like during the day-to-day grind of work, but also the question of whether or not race makes a difference for African-American officers in majority white police departments.

We Live Here spent the last several weeks ramping up to explore race in St. Louis and, specifically, how systems intersect with people to create a lot of the inequality in our region... and around the country. Now, we are moving from the general to the specific. We will spend the next several months exploring the criminal justice system.

This episode of We Live Here is all about talking about race without actually talking about race.

Now that we've looked at the jigsaw puzzle of St. Louis County, we consider the children. In a place where people from different backgrounds — and especially different races — seldom live next to each other, we ask the question: What does that mean for kids?

Within St. Louis' system of municipalities, people are largely divided — white, black, rich and poor. They rarely live next to each other.

We didn’t want to just tell another story about the inequalities that exist in our region. We wanted to tear into the issues, break apart the theory from the reality, demonstrate how the systemic problems that plague our region play out in real people’s lives. And we want to know why we still have these problems — no matter how much academic research and scholarly material there is available to explain the existence of racial inequality, why does it still exist? And so, we came up with We Live Here.