I started Little Brother: Love, Tragedy, and My Search For The Truth by Ben Westhoff last year as I was flying abroad, and I accidentally left it at Ben-Gurion Airport in Tel Aviv! The book discusses streets and neighborhoods I know very well, and I even know some of the people discussed.
I have had countless friends murdered in St. Louis City and County, several murdered on the very Kinloch and Berkeley blocks discussed in this book, and my mother, nephew, and brother-in-law have all been murdered in St. Louis in recent years. So, not only does this book discuss familiar terrain, but it also evoked many memories of the streets discussed and the constant and ever-present threat of lethal violence that many of us live with.
Author Ben Westhoff uses the murder of his Little Brother Jorell Cleveland from the Big Sisters and Big Brothers program to examine the generational poverty, substandard education, and endless cycle of violence in the impoverished northern suburbs of St. Louis. Westhoff discovers he didn't know his Little Brother like he thought he did and learns more about him after his murder which takes him into the world of St. Louis hip-hop, street crews, heroin addiction, and murder. Westhoff is seeking answers through the criminal justice system as someone who has raised and acculturated to believe in the system. The streets want justice in blood or are indifferent, and the average Black resident wants more cops on the street and not less. Reality is where the doughy eyed ideas of liberals and academics go to die.
It can feel in St. Louis, like you're not really living in America. Like you're not in the "First World". So detached from opportunity for many of us and so full of bad memories. When you're in your 30's and 40's and half of your childhood friends are dead, in jail, or dopefiends, you wonder why you stayed? So many of the best and brightest have left, particularly to Atlanta, Dallas, and Houston. Not only is the lifestyle and standard of living well below that of the "hot metros", even worse is the mentality.
I left myself as soon as I could to the DMV and Brooklyn, and later to Dallas, but always end up back here. To have even moderate success here, I've had to isolate myself from nearly everyone I grew up with, keep many people at a distance, maintain a small circle of close friends, constantly have my guard up, and seek to cultivate new friendships and relationships with more positive people. Plus books and travel and a lot of it! If not for my conversion to Islam at age seventeen, beyond the shadow of any doubt in my mind, my fate would've been that of Jorell Cleveland before I saw 21. For some it's religion, for some it's sports, education, a trade, the military, or maybe even the Big Brothers program, but without something many of our local youth have two options- an early death or prison.
In my eyes St. Louis is somewhere well-behid European nations, the Gulf, Israel, Turkey, Malaysia, etc. and above Afghanistan and Syria in terms of standard of living for low-income residents (particularly if they're Black). This is why I no longer support refugee resettlement to our city. I will always be super annoyed by St. Louis urbanists and civic boosters waving their city flags, glossing over our issues, ignoring the carnage on our streets, and dismissing our murder rate as "it's just the way they count the numbers". This is indifference and is no different than the wealthy in the gated neighborhoods of Caracas, Johannesburg, Mumbai, Karachi, and Nairobi who eat well, send their kids to good schools, and aren't bothered by the crippling poverty surrounding them.
I've said for years that the future of American cities will look a lot like apartheid era South Africa. Wealthy progressives in the urban core, relatively affluent traditionalists in the exurbs, and the poor, disproportionately Black, fighting to survive in desolate and impoverished suburban areas like Kinloch that look no different than the 1980's shanty towns outside of Johannesburg.
As a native of North St. Louis County, I would also like to thank Ben Westhoff. I was honestly a little skeptical. Would this be just another book full of buzzwords, popular academic jargon, and painful naivete? It wasn't. Ben made a few small mistakes regarding north county history, but overall, he did a masterful job. In 2014, national and international media descended upon Ferguson and north county, and I personally took a number of journalists to Kinloch and other places in north county. Many wrote good stories then, and for the first time, the very severe issues of racism, white-flight, poverty, violence, drug abuse, failing schools, and inadequate public education in north county were being discussed in a serious manner. Then the academics and non-profit industrial complex arrived, north county wasn't interesting to them, and they headed to south St. Louis City. Ben returned with this book and did so in a thought-provoking manner.
The indifference is exasperating. I'm always struck by the line "the opposite of love is indifference" and we definitely don't love our neighbor in St. Louis. The indifference is often accompanied by an 'intentional ignorance' where we deny how bad/hard it is for people in North St. Louis and refuse to hear anything different.