Monday night on television showcased the best and worst of America’s third largest city: On one channel, the Chicago Cubs were winning their 100th game of the season — a first since 1935. On almost every other channel, Donald Trump was reminding us that Chicago has had “thousands” of shootings this year. This month, the city passed the grim milestone of 500 homicides in 2016.
Trump made me cringe — and not in the way he makes many Americans cringe. As a defender of Chicago, I cringed because he’s right, and I wondered what the estimated 80 million viewers must think about the city I love.
I’ve had a soft spot for Chicago and its inner city since high school, when, as a reporter for the Carl Sandburg High School student newspaper, I left my suburban enclave to report on life as a student growing up in the city. Kids in the suburbs only knew Chicagoans from the bloody top stories on the local news.
On field trips to downtown museums I’d hear comments like, “Do you know what you’d see down here at night?” I’d think, “Yes, a lot of tourists on Michigan Avenue and hard-working commuters trying to get home after a late night at the office.”
Of course, crime is a factor in any large city, but I wondered why there were such stereotypical views of city life. As a Chicago Public Schools principal, my father often brought me to his school in Marquette Park on the South Side, where the kindness I experienced from students of all races further softened my heart. It gave me a different perspective of the inner-city life that most suburbanites only pass on their way to the Bears game.
My answer to such close-mindedness appeared in May of 1994 on the front page of my high school paper “The Aquila”: a collection of articles from three South Side high schools profiling students whose struggles turned out to be both similar and wildly different than my peers. “The City You Haven’t Seen” was the headline, next to a photo of a school in the shadows of the Robert Taylor Homes, a housing project (now demolished) along the Dan Ryan Expressway that stood as a monument to the worst of city life.
Even now, I remember the guilt I felt over giving this story the lead position on the front page of the school paper when most students were buzzing about graduation and summer break, not cultural disparity. But it was my senior year and my platform to tell this story was about to vanish, so I hijacked the news cycle in hopes I would bridge a gap between city and suburbs, stereotypes and truths, whites and blacks.
It’s the same divide I want bridged today, as I watch Chicago admonished on a scale much larger than the school bus bombast that motivated me years ago. A case can be made for Chicago not to bear the brunt of national outrage: its per capita murder rate over the last 30 years is actually lower than cities like St. Louis, Detroit and New Orleans. Its downtown and lakefront museum campus is even more vibrant than when I graduated from college in 1998 with a journalism degree. In a bid to attract younger workers, McDonald’s is moving its corporate headquarters from the suburbs to a brand new campus on Oprah Winfrey’s former Harpo Studios lot in the West Loop.
How could a city this grand be so maligned in the national spotlight?
Then last year, as a television producer, I covered the Black Friday protest in Chicago following the police shooting of black teenager Laquan McDonald. It culminated in the blockage of store entrances on the Magnificent Mile in a surreal scene that brought Chicago’s premiere shopping district to a standstill. The protesters’ point was this: as the Magnificent Mile flourishes, as city fathers bask in the success of their crown jewels downtown and on the North Side, we can’t be forgotten; the neighborhoods stuck in cycles of poverty and gang violence need attention too.
They’re right — the city has been developed for me. That suburban kid who now wants a life in the city; who wants to root on the Cubs; who wants to enjoy Millennium Park concerts and happy hours in Lincoln Park. I realize now I defend Chicago because of what it does for me, not what it does — or doesn’t do — for the 1.5 million black and Hispanic people that may see it a different way.
The problems in Chicago are rooted in history — a city more segregated than New York and Los Angeles that allows for economic disparity to fall along racial lines. Gangs and gun violence flourish in this economic void. I don’t know if it’s all the fault of city government, or if those protesting could be more a part of the solution in their own lives, but I do know that when protesters shut down the Magnificent Mile last year they had enough respect not to destroy it. So I’m listening.
In a few weeks, I’ll be listening a lot more to the roar of Cubs fans who hold out hope that their century-long World Series drought will come to an end. If it happens, it will change the worldwide narrative on Chicago; the city will celebrate and the world will join in. It will bring the kind of headlines that don’t make me cringe. But I now realize that good news alone won’t fix life for those stuck in poverty and who fear that their children won’t make it home from school.
A World Series does not bring a better life. The last one came to Chicago in 2005, when the White Sox brought the crown to the South Side. Neighborhoods suppressed by violence finally had reason to celebrate, though it didn’t last.
Fireworks, we now know, can only mask gunshots for so long.
