Plus: The Smut Peddler Who Was Too Real For The Art Institute
1. Third-World Meets World-Class.
The press release:
A new book, Twenty-First Century Chicago, Second Edition, investigates the social, economic, political, and governmental conditions of the Chicago metropolitan area and analyses the region’s role in today’s globalized economy.
The book, published Thursday by Cognella, focuses on Chicago’s efforts in recent years to establish itself as a top-tier Global City and it examines the governmental actions and politics of Mayors Richard M. Daley and Rahm Emanuel as they grappled with the city’s most pressing challenges.
“In this new edition, we included Mayor Emanuel’s re-election speech from April 7th this year because he lists some of his goals for city and states how he intends to govern,” said Dick Simpson, one of the books’ three editors, a political science professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago, and a former Chicago alderman.
“We also included several articles that are highly critical of the mayor in the book, which is an anthology of news stories, memoirs, first-hand accounts, and little known research reports advocating change for Chicago.”
In addition to Simpson, co-editors of the book are Constance A. Mixon, associate professor of political science and director of urban studies at Elmhurst College, and Melissa Mouritsen, assistant professor of political science at the College of DuPage.
The 288-page book is organized into seven parts: Choosing Chicago’s Future; Race and Class; Chicago Politics; Chicago Government; Global Chicago; Metropolitan Chicago; and the New Chicago. The introductions to all seven parts are completely new and one-third of the 34 articles have been added since the first edition was published in 2012.
In the introduction to Part III – Chicago Politics, the editors describe Emanuel’s Money Machine that relies on mutually beneficial deals between the mayor and his top campaign contributors. “His power comes from his ability to raise money,” said Mixon.
Simpson, Mouritsen and Beyza Buyuker co-authored an article explaining that Chicago’s city council has become more of a rubber stamp under Emanuel than under either of the two Mayor Daleys. They document that the city’s legislative branch is unable and unwilling to check and balance a strong chief executive.
In an article entitled “A Tale of Two Cities: Education and Human Capital in Global Chicago,” Mixon details how educational institutions in Chicago reflect an organized hierarchy that is segregated, like Chicago’s neighborhoods, into haves and have-nots.
She documents disparities in the Chicago Public School System and explains how charter schools have become an integral part of the city’s policy agenda that advances privatization, deregulation and free markets.
She also argues that higher education’s increased focus on workforce preparation has deepened existing conflicts at colleges and universities over the democratic purposes of education and global demands for increased job training.
Mouritsen was the lead author of an article entitled, “Windy City Corruption Blows Across the State.” She writes: “The City of Chicago attracts local, national, and even international attention for its long and salient culture of corruption. But the media and the general public tend to overlook the abundant political corruption that also exists in many of the region’s suburbs. The predominant stereotype of the suburbs is that they have clean, efficient governments. Yet patronage, nepotism, cronyism, abuse of power and criminal activity flourish, sometimes for decades in numerous city halls, police stations and special government agencies in the suburbs surrounding Chicago and in the collar counties.”
In the “Race and Class” section of the book, the editors and authors describe how race and class are intertwined in Chicago. Residential segregation, which is all too common throughout the Chicagoland area, leaves minorities confined to ghettos with underperforming schools and few job opportunities.
In another article, “The Case for Reparations,” author Ta-Nehisi Coates describes how “Chicago’s long history of racial segregation was created by two housing markets – one legitimate and backed by the government, the other lawless and patrolled by predators.”
He explains how the gap in wealth, achievement, and in a wide range of health and well-being outcomes between black and white Americans is the result of governmental policy decisions.
Here’s Simpson, Mixon and political consultant Don Rose discussing the book’s first edition in 2012:
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2. A New Deal For Bronzeville.
From SIU Press:
During the Great Migration of the 1920s and 1930s, southern African Americans flocked to the South Side Chicago community of Bronzeville, the cultural, political, social and economic hub of African-American life in the city, if not the Midwest.
The area soon became the epicenter of community activism as working-class African Americans struggled for equality in housing and employment.
In this study, Lionel Kimble Jr. demonstrates how these struggles led to much of the civil rights activism that occurred from 1935 to 1955 in Chicago and shows how this working-class activism and culture helped to ground the early civil rights movement.
Despite the obstacles posed by the Depression, blue-collar African Americans worked with leftist organizations to counter job discrimination and made strong appeals to New Deal allies for access to public housing.
Kimble details how growing federal intervention in local issues during World War II helped African Americans make significant inroads into Chicago’s war economy and how returning African American World War II veterans helped to continue the fight against discrimination in housing and employment after the war.
The activism that appeared in Bronzeville was not simply motivated by the “class consciousness” rhetoric of the organized labor movement but instead grew out of everyday struggles for racial justice, citizenship rights, and improved economic and material conditions.
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3. Unequal City.
“Ask yourself this question: Were you aware of inequality growing up? Your answer may depend in part on where you went to high school. Students at racially diverse schools, particularly black and Hispanic students, are more tuned in to injustice than students going to school mostly with kids that look like them,” NPR reports.
“That’s one of the main threads of a new book by Carla Shedd, an assistant professor of sociology and African-American studies at Columbia University. In Unequal City: Race, Schools, and Perceptions of Injustice, Shedd goes straight to the source: the students at four Chicago public high schools.”
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From the publisher:
Chicago has long struggled with racial residential segregation, high rates of poverty, and deepening class stratification, and it can be a challenging place for adolescents to grow up.
Unequal City examines the ways in which Chicago’s most vulnerable residents navigate their neighborhoods, life opportunities, and encounters with the law.
In this pioneering analysis of the intersection of race, place, and opportunity, sociologist and criminal justice expert Carla Shedd illuminates how schools either reinforce or ameliorate the social inequalities that shape the worlds of these adolescents.
Shedd draws from an array of data and in-depth interviews with Chicago youth to offer new insight into this understudied group.
Focusing on four public high schools with differing student bodies, Shedd reveals how the predominantly low-income African American students at one school encounter obstacles their more affluent, white counterparts on the other side of the city do not face.
Teens often travel long distances to attend school which, due to Chicago’s segregated and highly unequal neighborhoods, can involve crossing class, race, and gang lines.
As Shedd explains, the disadvantaged teens who traverse these boundaries daily develop a keen “perception of injustice,” or the recognition that their economic and educational opportunities are restricted by their place in the social hierarchy.
Adolescents’ worldviews are also influenced by encounters with law enforcement while traveling to school and during school hours.
Shedd tracks the rise of metal detectors, surveillance cameras, and pat-downs at certain Chicago schools. Along with police procedures like stop-and-frisk, these prison-like practices lead to distrust of authority and feelings of powerlessness among the adolescents who experience mistreatment either firsthand or vicariously.
Shedd finds that the racial composition of the student body profoundly shapes students’ perceptions of injustice. The more diverse a school is, the more likely its students of color will recognize whether they are subject to discriminatory treatment.
By contrast, African American and Hispanic youth whose schools and neighborhoods are both highly segregated and highly policed are less likely to understand their individual and group disadvantage due to their lack of exposure to youth of differing backgrounds.
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4. The Smut Peddler Who Was Too Real For The Art Institute.
“[T]hings came to a head when her faculty adviser called her in for a meeting and more or less advised her to uglify her own work. There was too much detail, too much realism, they complained. Her pictures actually looked like something.
“She said, ‘You know what you need to do? Get a canvas and put it against the wall. Are you right-handed? OK. Take a broom handle and tie a paintbrush to [it], and put it in your left hand, and then put your back to the canvas. And paint that way!'” she recalls.
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5. Album Reviews In Comic Book Form.
“The concept is simple: each week Chris portrays a cartoon version of himself, a die-hard music fan, reviewing a band’s new album over the course of six comic book panels. ”
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Comments welcome.
Posted on November 20, 2015