Readers: No Consensus on St. Louis’ State of Race Relations
In the poll last week 40.99% thought race relations were improving while 29.19% thinks they are declining with almost as many (21.74%) indicating they are holding steady:
Q: The State Of Race Relations In St. Louis Are…
- Improving Slowly 62 [38.51%]
- Holding Steady 35 [21.74%]
- Declining Slowly 29 [18.01%]
- Declining Rapidly 18 [11.18%]
- Unsure/No Answer 13 [8.07%]
- Improving Rapidly 4 [2.48%]
While I think overall race relations are slowly improving, we’ll unfortunately see a rapid decline between now and the March 5th primary election. Regardless of which candidate prevails in the Democratic primary and April general election I hope we can all come together.
— Steve Patterson
The legacy of STL race relations (albeit German/Irish/Native) combined with distrust of (and because of) the “Big Cinch” have left the city gov’t structured almost uniquely in this county and not for the positive. Recent strides such as the alderman reduction and regained control of the Police are nice but don’t begin make up for the loss of Progressive reform that most other cities began over 100 years ago and the weak position of the Mayor. STL seems perpetually locked in it’s historic struggles with voters looking to the political machine to solve it’s problems. Black/White relations play right into that…..time to move past it.
While the results don’t really surprise me, it would have been interesting to cross reference them to the demographics of the people polled – native versus transplant, white versus black, older versus younger, etc. As an older, white transplant, I think I see more racism than many natives do or want to admit to . . . .