Savage Inequalities

"Residents of Illinois do not need to breathe garbage smoke and chemicals of East St. Louis. With the interstate highways, says a supervisor of the Illinois Power Company, 'you can ride around the place and just keep going...'"

From this quote, we receive a symbol of the physical segregation between black and white communities. However, in choosing this image, and elaborating its context through the quote from an Illinois Power Company employee, further insight is generated. There is more at stake than the separation of East St. Louis from the residents of St. Louis. The (perhaps) unwitting remark by the power company employee sheds more light on how public architecture divides and restricts. How the interstate highway works is as important as its presence: the circumvention of East St. Louis shows how competition works, as one community bypasses another. This will become important to Kozol's arguments on segregation and isolation throughout the book.

“‘The two tiers—Bluffs and Bottoms—' writes James Nowlan, a professor of public policy at Knox College, 'have long represented...different worlds.' Their physical separation, he believes, 'helps rationalize the psychological and cultural distance that those on the Bluffs have clearly tried to maintain.' People on the Bluffs, says Nowlan, 'overwhelmingly want this separation to continue.’”

This quote highlights how physical separation creates psychological and cultural distance. The Bluffs and Bottoms are a system not just of separation, but of hierarchy. In this hierarchy, separate tiers of economic life are reserved for the privileged and unprivileged. These tiers largely conform to categories of race and class. Kozol wishes to imply this hierarchy seems, to those on the bottom, as permanent as the demographic’s geography. However, unlike the geography, it is maintained by the efforts of those above.