Jasmine Jamillah Mahmoud

performance geographer

Touring the Divided City

Uncategorized

Our geography divided us into two teams. Blue marked those from Jeff-Vander-Lou; red designated those of us from Forest Park Southeast. And then, with a simple reorientation, those divisions vanished, at least temporarily.

In their stead: new partnerships. Each pair included blue and red forged across neighborhood boundaries. My partner and I—both black women in our 30s—boarded the school bus together. Born in St. Louis, she grew up and spent most of her life in Jeff-Vander-Lou (JVL); recently she completed an international MBA. The beaches in Thailand, and the heat in India, the revelry in Ireland—this filled our conversation.  Time on our phones on Facebook trying to figure out if we had friends in common also filled our time.

Read the entire article, at the Common Reader‘s site, here.