Three years ago the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations published Global Chicago, a collection of essays by local leaders and Chicago Tribune writers that painted a glowing picture of a city robust and cosmopolitan enough to hold its own with the likes of London and New York. But independent scholar Paul Street says his book, Racial Oppression in the Global Metropolis: A Living Black Chicago History (published this summer by Rowman & Littlefield), demonstrates what Global Chicago left out: that the city continues to be gripped by racism. Last week he hauled a boxful of copies up the stairs to the offices of In These Times for a lecture to that effect, sponsored by Open University of the Left. “I’m from Chicago, and I love Chicago,” he declared. “But our great city rests on social injustice.” There were a mere dozen people in the audience, none black.
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Street, a historian who served as vice president and research director for the Chicago Urban League from 2000 to 2005, has a machine-gun delivery and an arsenal of statistics, many drawn from a report he did for the Urban League three years ago, “Still Separate, Unequal: Race, Place, Policy and the State of Black Chicago.” It got little media attention, he says, because it was belatedly released and barely promoted. But the data are compelling. After noting that his information was mostly based on the 2000 census and that some results would likely be worse today, he let them fly. Here’s a sampling:
a More than a third of black children lived in poverty, and 11 of the city’s 15 poorest neighborhoods were at least 94 percent black.
This “stealth” racism “does not necessarily involve individual white bigotry,” Street says, and is sometimes conducted with the collaboration of African-Americans. He cites public figures like Bill Cosby, who epitomize and sometimes espouse the “Oprah effect,” which Street describes as the illusion that racial obstacles have been eradicated and that success is simply a matter of individual effort.
Muti, who abandoned a Royal Opera performance at Covent Garden a few years ago because of changes the Brits made to the set, was forced out at La Scala in 2005 after allegedly engineering the dismissal of general manager Carlo Fontana. The La Scala musicians voted almost unanimously to side with Fontana. But things are complicated in Italy, where the opera house is as politicized as city hall: the musicians were allied with the left, Muti reportedly had more support from the right. So we can’t really know what it all meant–and besides, he looks wonderful. Meanwhile La Scala will be making do with Barenboim, who, though not technically taking over Muti’s job, signed on as “maestro scaligero” there last year.
