Sign up for our newsletters Subscribe
And now all I can hear is that music, and suddenly everything just fucking...
— Rahm Emanuel (@MayorEmanuel) February 24, 2011
Chicago's ghettos in the 1960s were notorious for their shootings, robberies, rapes, fires, joblessness, single-parent families, dreadful schools and high dropout rates, rampant alcoholism and heroin addiction, abandoned buildings and vacant lots.Bogira crunched the numbers, taken from census data, and discovered that Chicago was almost as segregated in 2011 as it had been 40 years earlier.
Lucky we fixed all that.
We must have fixed it—otherwise why isn't racial segregation an issue in the mayor's race?
Try finding a mention of it on the websites of any of the candidates. Editorial boards have decreed Chicago's most important concern to be its budget problems. Other issues winning attention have been school and ethics reform, job creation, the head tax, crime, transportation, privatization, the O'Hare airport expansion.
The city's finances are indeed a mess. But financial troubles come and go for Chicago. Segregation endures.
But perhaps the greatest evil of racial segregation is how it concentrates the poverty of blacks, as Massey and others have shown. Because of historical—and some continuing—discrimination, blacks are more likely to be poor. When this is combined with segregation, it means blacks are far more likely than any other group to live in concentrated poverty. It's hard to be poor; it's much harder to be poor and surrounded by poverty and all the harmful cultural norms and behavior, such as crime, that accompany it. It's a kind of poverty whites rarely experience, and one tough to escape.Then he asked the mayoral candidates (including Rahm) what they planned to do to fix it. Read it and see how much has changed.
Comments (3)
Showing 1-3 of 3