The Divided ISSUE - Spring 2017

letter from

THE EDITORS Dear thoughtful readers,

PRESIDENT Laken Sylvander

EDITOR - IN - CHIEF Alicia Yang

VISUAL EDITOR Ed Lim

DESIGN CHIEF Miranda Hines

SENIOR EDITORS Emma Laplante Mariel Ehrlich

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Issues Magazine is predicated on the belief than an issue is not simply a problem or difficulty. An issue is the intersection of multiple perspectives. It is the beginning of a discussion, something unresolved that needs attention.

For this issue, we’ve collectively examined divisions—between people, between places, within cities, within communities. What are the forces that divide us? What are we doing to overcome these divisions? How do we overcome internal divisions? Can divisions make us stronger?

Our inspiration from this theme may feel especially relevant in light of recent events, but we know as citizens of St. Louis that divisions are not a new extreme we are facing today. Our current political climate is divisive, and deadly in its divisiveness, but experiencing this as a new phenomenon is a remarkable privilege that many St. Louisans do not hold. We are a city of deep, historical division—both physical and social—that has been erupting cyclically for decades. As a publication centering our urban landscape as the framework of our stance on social justice, it is critical we consider our place within St. Louis in addressing these divides.

Our writers explore adaptive reuse architecture that collapse time in the context of sustainable cities. We tackle barriers created by language. We speculate on the extremes of our political divisions, divides within our “unity.” We illustrate divisions, collisions, and the blurred lines between these visualizations. “A people divided” is no new phenomenon, but its implications adapt to the present in ways that we as a team grapple with, and invite you to grapple with us.

In solidarity, Laken Sylvander & Alicia Yang

What does it mean to be divided?

To be divided is to be

separated into parts or pieces

separated by a physical barrier

in disagreement or conflict with another separated by distance

Cover illustration by Ed Lim 3

in this Iss p.6 On the Rise of Charter Schools and Educational Iniquity

by Lauryn McSpadden

p.10 Divided at Home

by Alicia Zhang

p.12 Barriers of Language

by Anne Accardi

p.14 The Making of a Movement

by Swetha Nakshatri

p.16 Perspective

by Chenyu Zhang

p.20 Quotient

by Eleni Andris

p.22 A Letter to the Candidates of the 2017 St. Louis Mayoral Election

by Mariel Ehrlich

p.24 On Hyphens

by Alexis Vidaurreta

p.25 Asian Beauty

by Alicia Yang

p.28 Beyond the Delmar Divide: Pursuing Equitable Housing

by Emily King

p.30 CNN Exclusive: Space Shuttle To Trappist-1 Launches,

Brings Democrats With It;

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a satire by Emma LaPlante

Issue number 13 April 2017 Washington University in St. Louis

ue

Illustration by Ed Lim 5

On the Rise of Charter Schools and Educational Inequity Written by Lauryn McSpadden Illustrated by Ed Lim

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“The truth is,

charter schools are much more conducive to the isolation or ostracization of minorities.

At the moment, there is a heated debate surrounding the topic of charter schools in the American education system. On one side of the debate are parents and policymakers heralding cities like New Orleans and Boston as prime examples of the academic success of such schools. Others point to Detroit and Philadelphia as cities that exemplify the failing of charter schools to adequately rival, complement, or replace traditional public schools.

While each group makes valid points about the state of charter schools in the United States, there is one blinding aspect of the American charter school system that is undeniable – its immense potential for division.

Nowhere is there a better example of this division than in the education sector of the eccentric southern hub of New Orleans, Louisiana. To start, New Orleans’ charter schools have sparked a remarkable turnaround for what was once a failing, almost nonexistent school system post-Hurricane Katrina. According to Education Secretary Arne Duncan, the natural disaster was “the best thing that happened to the education system in New Orleans.” According to Stanford University Center for Research on Education Reforms, New Orleans charter

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school students are learning significantly more than they would have at traditional public schools. There is clearly a profusion of advantages when it comes to charter schools, including higher graduation rates and improved test scores.

However, there is also an ominous mark marring the nearly perfect image of the revitalized New Orleans’ school system – division. For example, “Brown at 62: School Segregation by Race, Poverty and State,” a 2016 Civil Rights Project research brief, examined charter schools across the nation in 2010, discovering that 70% of black students attending charter schools were in a school identified as “intensely segregated.” Similarly, half of Latino students in charter school were enrolled in an “intensely segregated” school. Many New Orleans parents and teachers claim the system has effectively exterminated the traditional public school system in the city and further widened the opportunity gap in New Orleans’ school system. Such statements are supported by evidence as out of 86 schools there are only five public schools left in the charter-school driven town. Many wonder why a public school must resort to chartering in

Although the public nature of the schools legally prohibits such discrimination, the frightening reality is that some of these schools are purposefully pushing out

minority students, whether implicitly based on race or disability.”

order to gain adequate supplies, teaching staff, and other needs. Others, like New Orleans resident Yvette Alexis, lament the destruction of the “oldest African-American high school in the history of New Orleans.” They fear this privatization of education is both unnecessary and unhealthy for the city, as it seems to strip the vibrant southern town of its rich and diverse culture.

many intellectuals, policymakers, and parents concerning the “preschool to prison pipeline.” When the activist organization filed a lawsuit against the district, the school system responded with a consent decree, an agreement that settled a dispute without liability on the school’s part, and a promise to increase observation of the acceptance process.

It is true that as the school system becomes more homogenous, it also becomes more competitive and divided as these school systems, public versus privatized, fight for the top spot in order to appeal to prospective families. This divide in the system has also led to a division within the makeup of these schools. After witnessing the immense success of these charter schools following Hurricane Katrina, and investigating the reasons behind this success, the Southern Poverty Law Center found that some schools had participated in expelling or rejecting the “hardest to serve” students.

More specifically, black students enrolled in charter schools are four times more likely than their white classmates to be suspended, fueling the argument of

The truth is, charter schools are much more conducive to the isolation or ostracization of minorities. Although the public nature of the schools legally prohibits such discrimination, the frightening reality is that some of these schools are purposefully pushing out minority students, whether implicitly based on race or disability.

Upon further investigation, it is clear that these burgeoning charter schools are rife with corruption and disunion. Despite the impressive success of these schools in a few metropolitan areas, such as New Orleans, this success must not overshadow the cultural and societal implications of how they are operated, who they choose to leave behind, and how they can further divide schools, communities, and, eventually, the nation.

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Divided at Home Written by Alicia Zhang

To exhausted university students, The Loop often represents a refuge from the grueling classes, assignments, and exams that assailed them during the past week. It is a place where friends and family come together, to enjoy a meal accompanied by the glare of the street’s neon lights, or a trip to the ice cream shop after surrendering to the urges of your sweet tooth. In all, it is easy to be mesmerized by the euphoric sentiments that accompany this location.

However, The Loop rests on a street that signifies more than an escape from the “WashU Bubble.” Delmar Boulevard, which extends beyond The Loop, is a physical and metaphorical line that segregates two distinct parts of St. Louis. Dubbed the “Delmar Divide” by a short BBC documentary, this street is a socioeconomic and racial dividing line. While the Delmar Divide is not especially famous, the issue of socioeconomic segregation and the overarching theme of division are extremely prevalent in our society, especially

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Walking along Delmar Boulevard, it is easy to distinguish the differences between these two neighborhoods. To the south, beautiful, neat brick houses worth more than $300, 000, according to BBC, line tributary streets that are secure behind high gates that keep out the subordinate ‘foreigners’ who are often misconceived as criminals or plain ‘bad people.’ The residents of this area are predominantly white (70% according to a 2010 US Census). However, to the chiefly black neighborhood (98% based on the same census) to the north, we find houses of the same architectural style, but that are dilapidated and often vacant. These houses are worth approximately $70, 000. The disparity extends beyond the observable. According to a 2014 Washington Post article,1 67% of adults who lived on the southern side of the Divide had a bachelor’s degree, while only one in twenty adults living on the other side had a college degree. Correlated with these statistics are the neighborhoods’ median household income; according to the BBC documentary, the median household income to the south is $50, 000, while the median household income to the north is a mere $18, 000.

continue with the conversation. (In other words, the realtor tells the potential buyer that there the property he or she is interested in is no longer on the market, even though it is, just because the realtor does not want to sell the property to people of a specific group). These practices support historical racial covenants that legally prevent property in ‘white neighborhoods’ to be sold to those who are not Caucasian. Ultimately, these actions allowed one side of Delmar Boulevard to prosper, while the other did not.

“The housing segregation is only one part of the problem of the racial tension, segregation, and injustice that plague our nation today.

Yet, in our community, it is perhaps the most visible.”

Segregation is not an abnormality in our society and in our history. During the Jim Crow Era, the city of St. Louis passed a residential segregation ordinance (1916) that stated that if a neighborhood had at least three-quarters of its residents of a single race, then no one from any other race could move into that same neighborhood.

Challenged by the NAACP, in 1917 residential segregation was overruled by the US Supreme Court. Though while the ordinance was thrown out, racial tension still hung in the air. Realtors and banks continued to segregate blacks and whites, via the process of red-lining (refusing one deemed poor or a financial risk a bank loan) driving them into their separate, different areas.

Currently, linguistic profiling is often practiced to prevent minority potential homebuyers from purchasing select properties. Using an analysis of a potential buyer’s voice during an inquiring telephone call, realtors can ‘figure out’ the other end’s race though their knowledge of racial linguistic stereotypes and, by extension, assume his or her socioeconomic status and decide whether or not to

While these racial covenants were eventually ruled as unconstitutional in the 1948 Shelley v. Kraemer Supreme Court case, events soon after solidified the Divide. According to St. Louis Magazine, Pleasant View, an African-American community, was destroyed to make room for Interstate 55. Another community, Mill Creek Valley, was labeled a slum and destroyed along with the home of 20, 000 African Americans.

Robertson and part of Kinloch became the expansion of an airport. These are only a few examples off the extensive list of cases of racial injustice.

The housing segregation is only one part of the problem of the racial tension, segregation, and injustice that plague our nation today. Yet, in our community, it is perhaps the most visible. The Divide impacts all of us, because it prevents the connection of two distinct, yet unique cultures who, if they had the opportunity to meet, would realize that there are many similarities and shared histories between them. The saying “the past cannot be changed” undoubtedly has truth to it, but regardless this does not mean that the mistakes of our history, that conspicuously remain today, have to be upheld. Delmar Boulevard will remain for the unforeseeable future, but the same should not be said for the Delmar Divide. We should work actively with our neighbors to help them empower their community and its development goals in order to resist the cyclical legacy of the racial covenants and redlining. Through the recognition of the socioeconomic situation of our neighbors to the north and the assistance of the rehabilitation of the area, both sides of the Delmar Boulevard can become part of the same community.

1. Harlan, Chico. “In St. Louis, Delmar Boulevard is the line that divides a city by race and perspective.” The Washington Post. WP Company, 22 Aug. 2014. Web. Title page image property of The Washington Post.

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Barriers of Language Written by Anne Accardi

Illustration by Yena Jeong If your native language is German, Chinese, or Estonian, statistically you are 30% more likely to save money than I am. You’re also 24% more likely to avoid smoking, 29% more likely to exercise regularly, and 13% less likely to be obese.

So, why are the odds stacked so heavily in your favor?

Do the German, Chinese, and Estonian nationalities somehow instill in their members a strong willpower and an unnatural affinity for physical exertion? Possible, but unlikely.

As it turns out, one’s native language is the strongest correlating factor between these statistics. That’s right— you can save money simply by speaking German or Mandarin. So, should you all go enroll in German 101 for next semester? Let’s consider the research.

It is true that there is a definite correlation between languages like German and Mandarin, and the successful attributes mentioned above. How could this possibly be the case? It turns out that this correlation might arise from the strength of the future tense in these languages. Speakers of languages with a stronger future tense (English, French) are less likely to be fiscally responsible than those who speak a weak-future language.

This surprising correlation is outlined in M. Keith Chen’s famous 2013 paper “The Effect of Language on Economic Behavior.” Chen mapped stronger and weaker future-tense languages across Eurasia and compared that data with future-oriented behaviors like fiscal planning and longterm health.

In German, for instance, the most common way to refer to the future is to use the present tense. “Ich mache meine Hausaufgaben” means “I do my homework”—present tense. But “tomorrow I will do my homework”—future tense—translates into “Morgen mache ich meine Hausaufgaben:” the exact same phrase, with an added time expression. There is no equivalent of the English word “will” in this sentence.

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“We think with language, so any division (or lack thereof) in our linguistic ˇ understanding of time is mirrored in our cognitive understanding of time.”

Mandarin’s future tense is, arguably, even weaker. The future time expression is understood through context, rather than explicitly stated. Chen provides a good example of this: if a Mandarin speaker is talking to a colleague about going to a seminar that afternoon, which is why they can’t go to the staff meeting, they would simply say: “Wˇo qù t¯ıng jiˇangzuò,” which translates as “I go listen seminar.” Once again, there is no explicit grammatical function which specifies the future.

It can seem surprising that this syntactic anomaly can have real-life economic impacts. But, as Chen and many other linguistic theorists argue, the way we speak both forms and is formed by the way we think. We think with language, so any division (or lack thereof ) in our linguistic understanding of time is mirrored in our cognitive understanding of time. If we as English

use an entirely different verb form when referring to future events, it seems plausible that, at least on a subconscious level, we perceive the future as being entirely distinct from the present. So why save money for a future that is so far removed from our current state of existence?

It’s important to note that although Chen’s research seems to make logical sense, it has yet to be followed up by any more substantive data or investigation into the causatory qualities of this phenomenon. It would be foolish to take his theories as gospel truth and attempt to adjust our behavioral or linguistic choices as a result. It does seem highly probable, though, that the way we talk could have some impact on the way we think, and the behavior we then exhibit.

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The Making of a movement Written by Swetha Nakshatri Illustration by Ed Lim In ten years, January 21, 2017 will likely be in history books. It marks the day that hundreds of thousands of women, men, and children marched in cities around the world in defiance and solidarity. The Women’s March on Washington brought people of all races, religions, genders, socioeconomic classes, and sexualities together to proclaim to the world that despite President Donald Trump’s election, his misogynistic rhetoric would not be tolerated.

Hours after the election results were confirmed on November 8, Theresa Shook, a grandmother in Hawaii, invited 40 of her Facebook friends to a march of protest, not expecting that by the next morning, over 10,000 people would confirm their attendance. It was then that she began collaborating with one of the march’s national co-chairs, Bob Bland, to make her idea a reality. However, they were soon contacted by the future chair of campaign operations, Vanessa Wruble, who expressed that as white women, Shook and Bland could not be the sole leaders behind the march, representing women of all identities.

With this, they invited three other national co-chairs: Tamika Mallory, an African-American gun control advocate, Linda Sarsour, daughter of Muslim Palestinian immigrants and executive director of the Arab American Association of New York, and Carmen Perez, executive director of Gathering for Justice. They changed the name from the Million Women March to the Women’s March on Washington so as to not overlook the original march of this name, conducted by African American women in Philadelphia in 1997. They recruited women of all backgrounds to their organizing team.

There were still issues. Many complained that the focus on female genitalia (particularly the word “pussy”) was trans-exclusionary. They worried that there was still a divide between women of different backgrounds, with women of color still feeling excluded by a predominantly white movement, despite the organizers’ attempts to bring marginalized people back into the movement with diverse leadership and a comprehensive group of speakers. To do this, it took a critical lens and advice from thousands of people who wrote blog posts and social media messages, arguing about the meaning of feminism and how leadership reflects this meaning.

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This raises a question of whether other organizations and

movements focused on nonprofit work and social justice are truly representative of collective identity and diversity at the leadership level. Are other groups willing to entrust their leadership to the people that they represent? Or are the very groups that claim to fight our hierarchies of power also contributing to systematic inequalities based on race, gender, and socioeconomic status?

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Are other groups willing to entrust their leadership to the people that they represent?

Women’s Health and Reproductive Rights

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It’s never been a secret: in spite of her contributions to women’s health, Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood, had undeniable links to eugenics. Of course, this doesn’t reflect the views of the modern reproductive rights movement, which nevertheless has been grounded in the power of white women. Planned Parenthood has only been led by a woman of color once and continues to award the Margaret Sanger award, completely disregarding her alliance with a racist movement. Like the Women’s March’s original inspiration from the Million Women March, modern, and predominantly white civil rights organizations often look to previous strides made specifically by black activists. A question arises whether these same groups welcome people of color, with their experience, into their leadership.The National Organization for Women’s (NOW) initial goal of founding “an NAACP for women” separated women of color from white activist leaders by forcing a divide between color and gender (NOW.org). This separation trickles down, as the whiteness and wealth of the movement’s leadership is reflected in its goals, which focus on legislation and the legality of abortion rather than the access to clinics that many low-income and non-white women lack.

Having majority white providers in predominantly white neighborhoods makes it difficult to deliver a standard of care to all women, due to distrust amongst communities of color and the obstacles to receiving information and accessing care. When answering a Planned Parenthood survey about cancer screenings, 22% of black and Hispanic women said that distance to a doctor’s office

was a barrier compared to only 7% of white women.

Despite this information, a majority of clinics are in predominantly white zip codes and women of color have not been recruited into developmental roles to combat this trend. It has forced women of color to form their own organizations, such as SisterSong, a reproductive health collective in response to a pro-choice movement “led by and representing middle class and wealthy white women.”

As women of color realized that they could never truly break into the cycle of privilege surrounding whiteness and leadership, women’s health has been divided into white women’s health and non-white women’s health.

Even in a movement for women, the fight against misogyny has perpetuated misogynoir.

While pro-choice activism has been gaining ground, we must be mindful that a collective of white women doesn’t know how to effectively respond to the needs of women of color. It’s not enough to believe that people of color are equal. The responsibility of leaders is now awareness of systematic inequalities and an active fight against them.

Environmental Justice What could be more universal than the air we breathe?

Unfortunately, this isn’t actually the case. In 2008, the American Lung Association reported that African Americans are 22% more likely to live in areas that violate federal air pollution standards than white Americans.

The incidence of environmental-related asthma is 2.5 times higher in Hispanic children than in non-Hispanic white children. It is African Americans in Flint, Michigan that are fighting for their right to clean drinking water.

Then why are the executive directors of Earthjustice, the Sierra Club, and the Environmental Defense Fund white men? Why are the people who face these environmental challenges struggling to be heard by the government while the white and wealthy can write checks and influence legislation?

According to Van Jones, the founder of Green for All, the environmental movement has been whitewashed from the top down, with organizations such as Greenpeace and the Sierra Club almost exclusively staffed and run by white people. The funding for environmental justice also largely overlooks smaller groups who focus on local issues, continuing to fund large organizations.

These bureaucratic structures tend to diffuse personal responsibility, inadvertently marginalizing blue collar workers and people of color in urban areas who are disproportionately affected.

What is the result? The National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy reported that from 2007 to 2009, only 15 percent of total environmental grants were awarded to projects or groups working in marginalized communities. People who are affected by environmental issues and have a history of fighting for environmental rights are being overlooked by the white leadership that controls finances.

Once again, we can see how white, wealthy leadership pushes a white, wealthy agenda. In the case of climate change, we all lose. Who gets to decide who deserves clean air or clean water? Do we love power so much that we would divide our constituents before giving them a voice?

So What?

These examples demonstrate an overall trend. The world dedicated to aiding marginalized people is guilty of establishing its own hierarchies, alienating those same people in the process. Overall, according to Nonprofit Quarterly, only 7 percent of nonprofit chief executives and 8 percent of board members are not white. For the last 18 years, this number has remained constant, despite two-thirds of nonprofits describing diversity as a core value. The Stanford Social Innovation Review found that 90 percent of employees in the field believe that their organizations respect diversity. Even in a sector focused on justice and challenging traditional power dynamics, they are very much in play, often without us recognizing it.

When did the template for leading social change become white, wealthy, and equipped with Ivy League degrees?

When these movements lack the insight of people of color, it imposes a white identity and perspective of privilege onto the recipients of aid and charitable acts. A necessary level of connection is lost, as unrepresentative leadership breeds distrust and often overlooks the needs of marginalized people. It also affects agenda. Leaders control funding and are more likely to target it towards activism that makes them comfortable. This is the reason why the life expectancy for trans-WOC is only 35 years old and likely will not change in the near future. This is the reason why cis-feminism still rallies around the word “pussy,” forgetting that anatomy does not make a woman.

When sheltered leaders prioritize their power over the multifaceted nature of social justice and the intersection of marginalized identities, they can’t help.

However, there are success stories such as the Women’s March that we can continue to learn from. The path to furthering diversity and equality in that movement began with recognizing and combating privilege. It involved being willing to reach out to people in seemingly disparate communities and integrate them into a team. It involved giving black women and the silenced the power to go viral and to give speeches. It involved engaging white women in activism beyond their comfort zone. It was through these efforts that it became largest single-day demonstration in United States history.

Other movements must similarly challenge the status quo, actively questioning common practices and recognizing that breaking down structures of privilege is difficult and uncomfortable. There is no urgent need for perfection. The Women’s March wasn’t perfect. Diversity in leadership doesn’t happen overnight. But as long as we turn a blind eye, who are we really helping?

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Perspective Cultural backgrounds disconnect individuals from different cultural groups and divide their communication through an invisible way. The obstacles built up walls.

Yet, on the other hand, those differences may be conquered and be added up to diversify the community. The series of photos intend to show the abstract disparity through physical subject matters.

Photography by Chenyu Zhang

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“To experience the City Museum is to time travel.”

“Using modern materials and recycled/ repurposed found objects, the space is transformed into a laboratory of exploration, a whimsical playground of slides and tunnels...”

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Quo/tient Written by Eleni Andris Illustrated by Ed Lim What does it mean to redefine space? To blur the lines between old and new, form and function?

Adaptive reuse architecture attempts to do just that.

It collapses time, bridging the past and the present and challenging pre-conceived notions of how we experience place. Through conservation and preservation, it endeavors to repurpose buildings and reimagine their uses. It produces structures that, in theory, seem contradictory, but in reality function seamlessly to unite otherwise detached parts of history.

Now more than ever, adaptive re-use architecture is critical in designing sustainable cities. The practice supports rapidly growing urban populations by making use of limited space and changing buildings’ functions to meet the needs of the times. Adaptive reuse promotes the utilization of pre-existing housing stock and encourages the recycling of building materials while allowing cities to maintain their unique architectural character without getting consumed by the homogeneity of modern, cookie-cutter architecture. Cities around the world have begun to embrace the practice: an architect in Brussels transformed a cigarette factory into a city hall, a former church in San Francisco now functions as a set of loft apartments,1 and designers in Copenhagen converted a water tower into a mixed-use building.2 Architects have only scratched the surface of the potential of adaptive re-use as we move into the future.

Over time, St. Louis itself has come to embrace this inventive and sustainable practice. Take the City Museum, for instance. To experience the City Museum is to time travel. The building, which was originally constructed to house a shoe factory, looks from the exterior like a typical 20th early/mid-century St. Louis commercial building.

Wildly unassuming, it touts a standard brick and stone facade, industrial-sized windows, and a fairly standardized floor plan. The bones of its interior are also emblematic of the early/mid-century, as decorative wrought iron balconies and detailed mechanical fixtures reminiscent of an older age adorn the space. Without its modern context and additions, the building itself seems fixed in the time period of its inception. If a passerby on the street were to glance up at it just so, from an angle in which the rocket ship, Ferris wheel, and series of interwoven tunnels that jut out from the side of the building were obscured, they would be transported back to the age of the building’s inception.

However, upon entering the building and crossing the threshold that separates the street and the private space, the City Museum tells a very different story. Using modern materials and recycled/repurposed found objects, the space is transformed into a laboratory of exploration, a whimsical playground of slides and tunnels that meander through the building and connect the inside to the outside back lot. Bob Cassilly, sculptor/entrepreneur and self-proclaimed dreamer, imagined the space and considered how he and his team of artisans could breathe life back into a stagnant and abandoned warehouse. He used the structure’s facade and foundation as a frame off of which to innovate and modernize. By preserving the essence of the original structure and filling the space with found objects, Cassilly and his team were able to preserve the architectural character of the surrounding area while also reinventing the building’s purpose. Through manipulating the built environment, Cassilly challenges museum goers to cross the divide between what was and what is; he transforms buildings into dynamic, living pieces of history.

1. http://inhabitat.com/tag/adaptive-reuse/ 2. http://www.archdaily.com/783283/20-creative-adaptive-reuse-projects

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A Letter to the Candidates of the 2017 St. Louis Mayoral Election Written by Mariel Ehrlich Dear St. Louis Mayoral Candidates,

When the ballots close on the evening of March 7th, one of you will become St. Louis’ first new mayor in 16 years. You will then have the immense responsibility to strengthen our city. You will be responsible for confronting the persistent fragmentation here, such as the many fissures in our schools, public safety, housing, and even leadership. I know that there is plentiful room for St. Louis to better its situation, but it may be difficult to convince the long-disappointed public of this proximate potential.

Between the lived experiences of many locals and the voice of the media, many St. Louisans understandably believe that our broken public systems have dug a rut that the city will have a very difficult time climbing out of. How can you, the next mayor, begin to restore faith in progress?

After extensively researching the cumbersome conditions of our city, I am writing to you with some suggestions about where to start these changes.

Considering the fact that this is the first election in the Trump Era and the first since the birth of the Black Lives Matter Movement, which is intrinsically tied to St. Louis, it is imperative that you collaborate with local activists and community stakeholders in education, safety, and housing. The fresh mayor needs to restore unity of urban resources and set a new tone for the inefficient Board of Aldermen. In order to create proactive policies that are personal to St. Louis, you must serve as a community advocate by collaborating with residents and local leaders alike. A racial equity lens must be the kingpin in immanent reforms that decrease divides in St. Louis.

Let’s begin with education, specifically public education, which has too long been precarious without the resources to holistically support students or compete with charter schools. The beauty of public education is that it is meant to provide pathways for students to equitably access opportunities beyond the classroom. I applaud one mayoral candidate, St. Louis Treasurer Tishaura Jones, for advocating for the importance of student economic empowerment by establishing a public school student trust fund that grows student savings for their futures so 22

that they will be empowered to access higher education or start businesses – two prospects that connect young people to their communities and decrease their crime and incarceration rates. In addition to furthering such programs, the next mayor should also implement similar educational reforms that respond to systemic issues like the prevalence of depression among young black men, gaps in educational outcome that correspond with family income, and violent crime in low-resource communities.

The work of youth advocates upholds the philosophy that education should connect students with growth potential rather than mass incarceration, but the even the classroom experiences in St. Louis criminalize students of color and thus force many of them into the prison pipeline. Black students in Missouri are ten times more likely to receive an out-of-school suspension than non-black students, according to St. Louis Public Radio.

This high suspension rate forces students away from education and therefore away from pathways to success.

Our incumbent mayor began to address this inequity through a 2016 ban on the suspension of Pre-K students (a punishment that is already absurd), but now it is the new mayor’s duty to address discriminatory suspensions in primary and secondary schools, as well. Addressing public education through this racial equity lens will strengthen citywide education as graduating students realize the opportunities to fortify their own livelihoods and the livelihoods of future generations of students.

Criminalization of specific groups directly conflicts with the trust of community policing and evidence-based arrests. The next mayor must prioritize public safety by taking a proactive approach that reforms the criminal justice system, builds trust between communities and law enforcement, and eliminates predatory policing. The school-to-prison pipeline can be disrupted by criminal justice reform that stops disproportionately targeting poor, homeless, and mentally ill civilians. Anti-bias training, along with stronger police ties to local organizations (schools, churches, and community centers), will strengthen police accountability to residents and decrease the epidemic of dehumanizing and

predatory policing in our city. In order to ensure that justice is targeting real criminals, another mayoral candidate, Alderman Antonio French, recommended installing cameras in city areas with the most homicides (these cameras already exist in wealthy, safer areas of the city). The next mayor should support actions like this one, as these videos would better identify the very few members of a population who do commit violent crime so that arbitrary arrests, which specifically profile black men as criminals, stop occurring.

Fragmentation in the region exists beyond distrust between communities and police; it is also in the city-county divide, in the cumbersome Board of Alderman, and in housing segregation. In order to progress amid all the competing interests in the region, the St. Louis mayor must be competent in purposeful collation building. Take the St. Louis City-St. Louis County divorce, for example, which seemed like a fruitful plan in 1876 when the city was booming. The divorce of the region was initiated by the city, which sought to keep its growing wealth contained. However, contemporary urban wealth has plummeted while most economic growth now happens beyond city limits, in the separate St. Louis County. In some recent efforts, these divergent regions have reunited in rare, regional coalitions like the St. Louis Economic Development Partnership.

This economic partnership should be celebrated and emulated as it has the potential to provide pathways for community empowerment, and even and eventual reincorporation of the city and county.

developments be mixed-income and racially representative of the city’s population, our new mayor can geographically distribute affordable housing to remedy obvious segregation between North and South St. Louis.

St. Louis should draw developers to mixed-income developments using tax incentives, in order to upgrade scores of vacant property into quality, socioeconomically diverse units that can hopefully depolarize the city.

Of course these recommendations are weighty, but the changes will not be solely your responsibility. As mayor, you should graciously rely on local leaders, such as the Board of Aldermen, to advocate community interests and then help shape impactful legislation. However, it will definitely be your responsibility to reform this very inefficient, 28-leader body of Aldermen so that real progress can be realized, which is often difficult with so many competing interests. Your Aldermen currently uphold processes of gerrymandering, which lead to inefficiency and preservation of the status quo, and the first step in your mission to streamline local government should be the eradication of this practice. Preserving the status quo of each neighborhood means that little collaboration occurs on the local level and St. Louis as a whole continues to operate under outdated policies of the past. The new mayor should provide guidance that will encourage the Board to fight for citywide interests of equity, rather than only the interests of their own ward. The inefficient processes that pit Aldermen against each other could also be reshaped to foster collaboration around a better future for St. Louis. Your leadership will set the tone of urban improvements, so you must lead by example in collaborating with community stakeholders throughout your term. Responsible mayoral engagement will show the Aldermen the value of listening to the whole city and thus reform the Board into a constructive body.

“A truly visionary mayor would see the futures of St. Louis City and St. Louis County as symbiotic”

A truly visionary mayor would see the futures of St. Louis City and St. Louis County as symbiotic, especially in a quest to entice residents to move back into the city and hopefully strengthen our tax base while integrating forgotten neighborhoods. To truly integrate the future of St. Louis and subsequently strengthen all communities, our next leader must raise the minimum requirements for affordable housing and proactively incentivize mixed income developments. In too many places, proximity to difference but the maintenance of physical separation is the norm, instead of integration. The too-common segregation that afflicts our city leads to patterns of racist judgment because St. Louis residents lack integrated understanding. However, a fresh commitment to mixed housing will fortify St. Louis communities with economic diversity and cultural understanding. Our next mayor should support housing integration by fully fundingthe Affordable Housing Trust and mixed-income residential (re)developments. Mayoral candidate, Alderman Lyda Krewson highlighted how necessary it is to spend the current Affordable Housing Trust funds, which often go untapped. Furthermore, by mandating that more future

Soon, one of you will carry the responsibility to rebuild St. Louis after decades of inequality. Past inattention to the city’s fragmentation has allowed poor education, predatory criminal justice, segregated housing, and weak leadership to persist. To counter this, your job as the next mayor must introduce a spirit of equity and teamwork that advocates for the futures of all residents.

Whether consulting researchers or community leaders, the next mayor’s first step must address the divides within our city so that St. Louis can begin a conversation about real change, together.

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On hyphens Written by Alexis Vidaurreta

Commas are overdone, periods are trite, and semicolons try too hard. Apostrophes, they’re condescending ones, and quotation marks are derivative or sarcastic at most.

Among the varying personalities of our punctuation, however, there is an unsung hero: the hyphen.

Hyphens valiantly brave false dichotomies to help everyone describe their own place in the world. I am Cuban-American, which means that my dad cooks rice every night but also lives and dies by apple pies. I am Cuban-American, so my mom learned Spanish at the age of 33 to stop her in-laws from talking “chisme” about her at the table. I am Cuban-American, so just as my family is determined to see Cuba for the first time together, we will also make it to the Grand Canyon one of these days, we swear!

It’s funny that someone gave this one-dimensional little symbol so much responsibility. In my personal experience the state of being Anything-American is more four dimensional, those dimensions being comprised of a million questions tessellating through space and time—do I need to prove myself Cuban, do I need to prove myself American, am I more one than the other, should I be? Yet the hyphen ties these intricacies of culture, belonging, and self together into a neat little label that means whatever I want it to mean.

In our new post-fact, maybe only slightly pre-apocalyptic world order we are strong-armed into aggressively categorical assumptions that discriminate among us and divide within us. The hyphen, the tiny straight line that could, shows us how simple it is to reject over-simplification and embrace complexity in our country and beyond.

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Asian Beauty Written and illustrated by Alicia Yang

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Since fashion and beauty industries revolve around creating and controlling a desirable image, calls for more diverse representation have been insufficient: adept media publications and creatives can simply erase all visual evidence of prejudice. Cosmetics and skin care might be the only things that are actually skin-deep, and the solutions have been appropriately surface-level. Within these industries, I believe a greater collective awareness and skepticism regarding established racial narratives (both dominant and “progressive”) would be more effective than incremental attempts to push back against underrepresentation and misrepresentation.

around the issue of race by ignoring black girls’ requests for better foundations, they have focused their attention on the cute aesthetic and innovative skin care of Asian Beauty. This strategic emphasis on Korean beauty renders Asian cultures as commodities to be bought, and Asian beauty in general as a temporary trend rather than a lifelong set of expectations for the billions of women worldwide identified as Asian. Large American companies such as Estée Lauder have seamlessly appropriated Korean innovations such as essences and bb creams while garnering attention for featuring its very first Asian model, Chinese-born Liu Wen. As American companies look to Korean companies for innovation and Japanese companies for quality manufacturing, they expand overseas to China to tap into the increased consumer power.

Unlike the fashion industry’s simple solution of inserting a non-white model into a campaign, the beauty industry is distinctly challenged by the reality of It’s already a bit absurd that different skin tones. “beauty” is something Despite frequent you can buy — “This strategic emphasis complaints from alongside clothing, on Korean beauty renders black girls looking home, and for non-ashy, accessories. Even Asian cultures as commodities to human-looking stranger, Asian be bought, and Asian beauty in foundations, many Beauty has makeup lines have developed into a general as a temporary trend failed to expand huge market sector rather than a lifelong set of their color range. of its own, perhaps Cosmetics made official by expectations for the billions companies are its acronym AB; it of women worldwide aware of infinite seems unimaginable variations on that White Beauty identified as Asian.” skin tone — that there or Black Beauty would are pink and yellow explicitly refer to undertones, both of which products instead of can be warm or cool, as well concepts. Asians as a whole as the enigmatic olive tone. This are seen as a financial asset, or is where uncomfortable are understood in economic terms socioeconomic realities seep in; for many in America: “Asians have gotten ahead mainstream makeup companies, it’s just not worth because they keep their heads down and work hard,” it to them to cater to darker skin tones. The huge or more bluntly, “You will be tolerated as long as gaps between medium and deep skin tones offer a you continue increasing the GDP of America.” This painfully simple metaphor for how certain races attitude rewards subservience and also are systematically hindered from participating in a silences Asian-Americans, whose human dignity cultural practice deeply tied to identity expression can be purchased. Increasingly, it feels wrong to give — from drag to editorial to no-makeup makeup. legitimacy to narratives of multicultural celebration and counternarratives of model minority Enter K-beauty, the behemoth which has infiltrated privilege. Though they carry elements of truth, American beauty cultures, listed as its own these well-meaning attempts to celebrate Asian category in between “new arrivals” and “sale” items cultures justify the exploitation and fetishization of on Sephora. While makeup companies have skirted Asian individuals.

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Beyond the Delmar Divide: Pursuing Equitable Housing Written by Emily King The famous Shelley v. Kramer case in St. Louis ruled against the upholding of residential racial covenants in 1948. Yet, American residential segregation is not just a relic of a stained past. It is not uncommon to hear people cite the “Delmar Divide,” a stark racial and socioeconomic divide along the opposite sides of Delmar Boulevard, in discussions of current residential concerns in St. Louis.

Such segmentation, however, is not isolated to the Delmar area, and has contributed to the social and educational segregation prevalent throughout greater St. Louis. The Economic Policy Institute’s Richard Rothstein believes that “We have a national myth that the reason our metropolitan areas are segregated is for informal reasons…

The reality is that [it] was established by the federal government with help from state and local governments.

It’s an officially established system.” Governing forces actively worked to support residential segregation in the 20th century by strategically affording housing opportunities, as evident in the awarding of housing benefits to white veterans, with the goal of racial homogeneity and pushing black citizens to public housing projects.

Today, black neighborhoods are continually marked as danger areas for mortgage lenders, leading to further lowering of their property values and negative social outcomes like more extreme class stratification.

Structural forces keeping people of color from owning homes contribute to the difficulty in accumulating wealth and passing it through generations, which creates a cycle of residential segregation. These patterns also keep children of color in resource-poor school systems that result in barriers to higher education, class mobility, and opportunities to constructively build within their present communities. St. Louis and New York currently employ different models to address residential segregation and I hope to consider the best framework for the future by evaluating them here.

Current efforts to correct this housing problem in St. Louis have primarily been via the provision of rent subsidy vouchers administered by Section 8 housing 28

programs that can be used outside of public housing.

While the organizers of these programs tell Section 8 housing tenants that they can redeem these vouchers at any building within their parameters, tenants have found that rejection of the vouchers from landlords still pushes them into lower-income residential areas. New policies ban the rejection of a potential tenant simply because of their participation in the voucher program, but it remains difficult to prove when this discrimination is occurring.

These programs are accepted as satisfactory “step[s] in the right direction,” as said by St. Louis Alderman Christine Ingrassia, which distracts from the subtler, insidious discrimination against lower-income communities of color.

In addition, voucher program caps on rent prices and unit availability prevent renters from living in higher-income neighborhoods. The Department of Housing and Urban Development has made mapping tools more accessible to aid in the planning of the programs. Interactive maps track the prevalence of voucher usage and the average annual income in an area, revealing a dangerous pattern: as you move further away from urban spaces where greater rental housing is available, there are less clusters of voucher usage due to low rental availability and wealthier urban neighborhoods’ rental prices surpass program caps. This situation serves to further concentrate residential patterns and keep low-income residents of color from expansion into other areas.

The East Coast, particularly New York and New Jersey, has employed a different approach to combat Section 8 discrimination. The East has just as long a history of segregation as St. Louis has, but the region has moved away from vouchers as corrective tools. In their place are newly constructed residential buildings outside of low-income areas that require developers to include a minimum percentage of low-income tenants. These programs, though new, have proven to be more effective in combating neighborhood segregation due to the socioeconomically diverse direct placement of tenants.

Through New York City’s moderate income housing programs that offer economic incentives to participatory developers, lower-income people can fill out applications for multiple locations at once. Applications are quite involved, requesting information on income, ethnicity, number of children, etc. In an interview with a woman who recently moved from the Bronx to a suburb in Westchester County, New York, I learned about some of the logistics of the programs. She said that these buildings have fairly diverse residents and she is glad to have the opportunity to live in her new neighborhood at a rental price appropriate for her family’s income.

Regarding acclamation to the new neighborhood, she shared, “Everyone here has been really nice. My girls are comfy.” Most of all, she is grateful for the opportunity to enroll her daughters in her new neighborhood’s school system. Her largest transitional challenge is transportation. She notes, “Everything here is so far, like you gotta drive everywhere.”

depict efforts in St. Louis. Not all neighborhoods will be welcoming or cooperative when a neighborhood transitions, nor will desegregation occur overnight. By assuming that programs are able to successfully move more lower-income tenants into higher-income areas, there will remain the threat of white flight from once-wealthy areas with morphing demographics. An exit of funds that support the school systems of the area tend to accompany such flight, as local taxes of the wealthy no longer support the public school systems. It is common practice in the St. Louis area for well-resourced families to send their children to charter and private schools, maintaining a lack of interaction across class and race.

Such early lack of interaction, in conjunction with majority white local law and municipal enforcers, preserves tensions. Simply switching the demographics of neighborhoods may superficially take on segregation in small sections, but does nothing to address the structural and institutional factors that maintain inequality.

When I asked about dissatisfactions with the programs, she said she would not change anything other than the considerable time invested in the process, a common grievance. People wait for extended periods of time, oftentimes years, to receive responses post application. The interviewee also shared that her particular building is placed in a neighborhood where most residents live in houses,but did not name this as a possible agent of segregation in and of itself. Her mention of this does indicate that these buildings, when placed in the suburbs, may present as a subset of their neighborhoods as opposed to being fully integrated within them.

This is a micro-separation from the rest of the area’s residents because, whereas the building is mixed-income, the houses are clearly for those with higher incomes. While micro-separation may not be prevalent in this interviewee’s experience, it can apply to that of many others. No program is perfect, but the contrast serves to show that there are wider options for the future of St. Louis housing programs. The experiences of the woman that I interviewed are individualized and not representative of all people in the New York program, nor can they be usedto accurately

While it is crucial to take actions that correct residential segregation, we must acknowledge that vouchers and lower-rent programs are temporary bandages as opposed to prevention of the wounds from institutional violence. This applies to all regions of the United States. Rothstein’s comments nod to the danger in proclamations that the issues lie in a broken system, when the system actually accomplished what was initially intended— housing segregation.

New systems founded in civil justice for all and an awareness of our history are more likely to bring expanded success. The market driven behaviors of landlords, developers, and banks— along with absurd income inequality and America’s embedded racism—point towards glaring issues with our class, social, and economic systems.

The New York model is more effective, but in both cases, the placement of low-income folks in high-income neighborhoods does not tackle the core issues of socioeconomic inequality. We can take measures to combat segregation in the short-run, but we need to confront our current systems and their creation of the multi-forced hydra of oppression against people at an intersection of marginalized identities.

“While it is crucial to take actions that correct residential segregation, we must acknowledge that vouchers and lower-rent programs are temporary bandages as opposed to prevention of the wounds from institutional violence.”

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CNN EXCLUSIVE: SPACE SHUTTLE TO TRAPPIST-1 LAUNCHES, BRINGS DEMOCRATS WITH IT Written by Emma LaPlante Illustration by Ed Lim and Yena Jeong Jan. 20, 2025 MERRITT ISLAND, Flo. — As thousands of Americans in red hats arrived in Washington, D.C., Monday morning for the third inauguration of President Donald J. Trump, the other half of the country turned its attention to a historic event occurring

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900 miles further south: the JFK Space Center launch of NASA’s Apollo 44, the first in a series of manned space shuttles to Pistis, one of three terrestrial planets orbiting the dwarf star TRAPPIST-1. The shuttle contains all the supplies necessary to start a rudimentary colony that can sustain itself until a second shuttle arrives several years later. Apollo 44 is the first manned spacecraft in history that will not be returning to Earth.

Although the shuttle is only twice the size of its largest Apollo predecessor, which carried a crew of only 3 people, Apollo 44 was recently adapted to carry 11 NASA astronauts and several dozen civilian volunteers.

To accommodate the civilians a small structure containing additional hibernation pods was affixed to the main shuttle, sidecar-style. The shuttle was originally going to carry the astronauts only, but after Justice Bannon led the Supreme Court in reversing samesex marriage and Roe v.

Wade in the wake of Justice Ginsburg’s suspicious death in 2023, NASA announced it would make some extra room.

To ensure fairness, NASA accepted civilian passengers on a first-come, first-served basis.

In the end, it took 54 civilians, though it received so many applications within the first 10 minutes that its website crashed.

“When God sends you an ark, you git on’er,” said passenger Cody Smith, a 46-year old Baptist coal miner with a Bernie Sanders tattoo.

The passengers seemed most excited by the fact that President Trump will have been out of office for hundreds of thousand of years by the time they arrive on Pistis. As the distance between Earth and the TRAPPIST-1 solar system is 39.5 light years, its crew and passengers will spend the majority of the 235,000,000,000,000-mile voyage asleep in hibernation pods while a team ofandroids conducts any necessary shuttle maintenance. According to NASA spokespeople, the agency has been sitting on this previously unheard-of technology for decades, waiting to unveil it until they felt that Americans “really needed a win.”

“ ”

‘When God sends you an ark, you git on’er,’ said passenger Cody Smith, a 46-year old Baptist coal miner with a Bernie Sanders tattoo.

The 54 civilian passengers are remarkable in that 50 of them voted for Elizabeth Warren in the 2020 election, the results of which were highly dubious. The other 4, the Rodriguez family, recently immigrated to the U.S. and could not vote. When we asked them if they were worried about the possibility that Pistis could be home to alien life forms that may harbor prejudices against or display hostility towards new arrivals, the Rodriguezes laughed.

Other passengers expressed a similar fearlessness when we asked them about the risks involved in leaving Earth. Many of them cited climate change, gun violence, and increasingly intolerant neighbors as some of the risks involved in staying.

CNN was the only news network to cover the launch in real time, directly defying the White House’s orders for news station to cover the inauguration and not NASA’s “fake launch.” (A one-time supporter of space exploration, President Trump changed his tune when NASA retweeted a message about melting ice caps from a Twitter account called “Alt National Parks Service.”)

CNN was recently sued off the air by the Department of Justice for its weeks-long on-air protest after Sean Spicer announced the cancellation of the 2024 presidential election, citing several Breitbart polls, FDR’s precedent, and “the people’s obvious desire to focus on the Syrian War right now.” The network therefore broadcast its coverage via Jake Tapper’s Facebook Live. When he learned in an interview with a NASA official that an elderly passenger had gotten overexcited while packing and subsequently died, leaving one hibernation pod unfilled, Tapper dropped his microphone and boarded the spacecraft mere minutes before its departure.

The shuttle was named after 44th U.S. President Barack Obama, who is also on board.

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meet our team Alexis Vidaurreta is a sophomore studying Architecture and Environmental Studies. You can contact her at avidaurreta@wustl.edu

Alicia Zhang is a freshmen intending to pursue a Psychology and Economics double major with a minor in Anthropology. She can be reached at aliciazhang@wustl.edu.

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Alicia Yang is the Editor-in-Chief of Issues Magazine. She is a junior majoring in English Literature and minorint in art. Contact Alicia at aliciayang@wustl.edu

Anne Accardi is a freshman from Kansas City, Missouri. She plans to major in English and Marketing, and is a member of The Aristocats.

She can be reached at aaccardi@wustl.edu.

Chenyu Zhang is from Wenzhou, China. She is a freshman, majoring in Architecture Design. Chenyu absolutely love geography, design, photography and films. She can be reached at chenyuzhang@wustl.edu.

Ed Lim is a junior and the Visual Editor for Issues Magazine. He is studying Communication Design. Contact him at edwardlim@wustl.edu

Eleni Andris is a sophomore studying Architecture and American Culture Studies. You can contact her at eleniandris@wustl.edu.

Emily King is a junior majoring in African & African-American Studies and Accounting. She is interested in the socio-economic realties of African-American and Afro-Latine populations.

Contact her at ecking@wustl.edu

Emma LaPlante is a junior English and Creative Writing major and Anthropology minor. She is an Issues Magazine Senior Editor can be contacted at emmalaplante@wustl.edu

Laken Sylvander is a the President of Issues Magazine. She is a senior studying French and Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies. Contact her at lsylvander@wustl.edu

Lauryn McSpadden is a freshman studying American Culture Studies and Entrepreneurship.

Feel free to contact her at l.mcspadden@wustl.edu.

Mariel Ehrlich is a sophomore and Issues Magazine Senior Editor studying Sociology, Urban Studies, and Latin American studies. Mariel can be reached at mehrlich@wustl.edu

Miranda Hines is a senior and the Design Chief of Issues Magazine. She is double majoring in Political Science and English Literature.She can be reached at mirandahines@wustl.edu.

Swetha Nakshatri is a freshman interested in Biology and Anthropology. Feel free to reach out to her at snakshatri@wustl.edu

Yena Jeong is a freshman in the Sam Fox School interested in studying Communication Design, and she obsessively creates typography in her free time.

She can be contacted at yenajeong@wustl.edu.

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Our Mission: Issues Magazine seeks to raise awareness of the intrinsic link that exists between architecture, design, and social issues. The spaces we inhabit each day mold our experiences, both by fostering interaction and by building barriers. Using the city of St. Louis as our primary lens, Issues Magazine will draw connections between both tangible and intangible aspects of the social environment. With both a print and an online version of the publication, Issues Magazine will reach out to a diverse readership, including students of Washington University and residents of the St. Louis region.

By utilizing a wide spectrum of media, Issues hopes to inspire action as well as awareness about the intersection of design and social justice.

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stay in touch with us read our articles online issuu.com/issuesmagazinewashu follow us on Facebook and Instagram www.facebook.com/issuesmagwashu issues.mag.washu contact us issues.mag.washu@ gmail.com

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