We Live Here spent the last several weeks ramping up to explore race in St. Louis and, specifically, how systems intersect with people to create a lot of the inequality in our region... and around the country. Now, we are moving from the general to the specific. We will spend the next several months exploring the criminal justice system.

This episode of We Live Here is all about talking about race without actually talking about race.

Now that we've looked at the jigsaw puzzle of St. Louis County, we consider the children. In a place where people from different backgrounds — and especially different races — seldom live next to each other, we ask the question: What does that mean for kids?

Within St. Louis' system of municipalities, people are largely divided — white, black, rich and poor. They rarely live next to each other.

We didn’t want to just tell another story about the inequalities that exist in our region. We wanted to tear into the issues, break apart the theory from the reality, demonstrate how the systemic problems that plague our region play out in real people’s lives. And we want to know why we still have these problems — no matter how much academic research and scholarly material there is available to explain the existence of racial inequality, why does it still exist? And so, we came up with We Live Here.