By Kiljoong Kim
It’s no secret that Chicago has a history of segregation. The issue has been debated and researched for decades and has resulted in significant books including Black Metropolis, American Apartheid, There Are No Children Here and American Project, to name a few. While there are ever so slight signs of progress, there is a residential pattern seldom discussed but so persistent that it is a reminder that we are still very much divided as ever.
Many recent issues around the city can be traced to the uneven distribution of residents across the city: The ignorant parents who are too afraid to send their children to other neighborhoods for a baseball game; massive closure of schools under the label of under-enrollment in some parts of the city while many schools in other neighborhoods are bursting at their seams; and numerous shootings that are ignored by the media and remain uninvestigated by the police. All are about negligence of our environment and failure to think beyond few blocks of where we live.
For all intents and purposes, we live in separate cities within miles of each other, begging the question: Why?
Posted on May 7, 2013