Mandela “set a moral example for the world,” the New York Times editorial board proclaimed. The best way to honor him is to follow that example. In Chicago, that should mean committing to end our own apartheid.
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The word “apartheid” is from Afrikaans, and means a state of living apart.
The poverty rates in most of the black neighborhoods mentioned above are five and ten times the poverty rates on the northwest side—in Edison Park, Norwood Park, Jefferson Park, Forest Glen, and Dunning, where the percentage of black residents is, respectively, .2, .9, 1.6, 1.8, and 1.2. Mayor Emanuel’s north-side neighborhood, Lakeview, is 4 percent black.
Americans were eager to condemn South Africa’s apartheid system, Massey and Denton observed, but less willing “to acknowledge the consequences of their own institutionalized system of racial separation.” And unwilling to even talk about it, the authors noted: “The topic of segregation has virtually disappeared from public policy debates. . . . Residential segregation has become the forgotten factor of American race relations.”
But imagine for a moment that we did in fact solve this problem. Imagine that we went from one of the most segregated cities in the nation to a town that was truly integrated, racially and economically—from Lake Michigan to Harlem, from 138th to Howard. And that we became a model for the many other U.S. cities in need of the same cure. Wouldn’t that be a world-class achievement? Could anything honor Mandela more?
