For those of us waiting for a powerful local institution to take notice of the deteriorating human conditions of black people in the St. Louis region and pledge to take leadership in addressing them, the Brown School of Social Work at Washington University is ready to go to work. “Our commitment to this work is for the long haul,” Edward F. Lawlor, dean of the Brown School, said Friday morning while opening the community conference where the final research report from the “For the Sake of All” initiative was released.
“This work,” in this instance, is addressing the race-based disparities in the St. Louis region that hold the region back. The title of the effort, taken from a lost Scott Joplin song, stresses that this is a report about the health and well being of African Americans, but its intended audience is regional and inclusive. The premise behind this regional inclusiveness should be familiar to readers of St. Louis American editorials. Simply put, there are too many African Americans in this region – 29 percent of the combined population of St. Louis city and county – for the region to compete and grow if the black community is faring as poorly as this study reveals.
Or, rather, as this study reminds us. Dean Lawlor was the first of several speakers at this community forum who confessed to having heard this one before. He said he recently read a 1915 book by George Mangold titled “The Challenge of St. Louis” that was “distressingly very similar” to “For the Sake of Us All.” We commend Dean Lawlor – and one of the Brown School’s junior faculty members, Jason Q. Purnell, who led the study – for refusing to be daunted by this unrelenting challenge of St. Louis. The challenge is the dire need to transform a human landscape where racial background and zip code are destiny. This is not to say that people who are not black or do not live in North St. Louis don’t have their own challenges; of course, they do. But the data in this report are clear: as a group, black people fare far worse than white people in this region by virtually every measure of health and well being, and the least healthy and safe black people live in north city and county.
So what will be done to answer the St. Louis challenge in 2014 that was not done in 1915 – or at any other point in the past century? Purnell said the next step is to simplify the report, which was prepared by himself and six other African-American researchers from Washington University and Saint Louis University, into study guides and distribute its findings as widely as possible. Then, he said, his team hopes to assemble a broad and diverse coalition to pursue its goals and to measure its progress.
The recommendations to address these perennial problems are also familiar. The researchers call for greater investment in early childhood education, the creation of new economic opportunities for low-income families, the establishment of coordinated school health programs, and an improvement in screening and treatment for mental health problems. All of these policy goals are geared toward the creation of a better-educated workforce that can make St. Louis and Missouri compete for the information-jobs of the future, which really are already the jobs of today – there just aren’t nearly enough of those jobs available here. “For the Sake of All” offers a data-based antidote to the dogma of tax-cut advocates. Investment in education, and better preparing more students for higher education, is more important for growing our economy than cutting taxes. And the data in this study make it painfully evident that the lagging performance of African Americans in this region must be improved if we expect to develop the workforce that knowledge economy employers require.
As the researchers move from data to social change, they will quickly realize why the St. Louis challenge has been so enduring. It can be difficult to persuade someone on the favorable side of a wide disparity that it is in their interest to narrow that disparity. There is the unstated fear that a new focus on improving the conditions of black people from a specific part of the region will neglect and worsen the needs of others. Macroeconomic arguments do not persuade everyone. Apathy, exhaustion and – it must be said – racism also make the challenge incredibly daunting. However, a powerful and credible local institution says its commitment to addressing the St. Louis challenge is “for the long haul.” We’re in too, also for the long haul. How about you?
