Black and White and Wrong All Over
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Unfortunately titled “The Gatekeeper,” the profile-and-article focuses on Raymond and her still powerful hold on the Housing Center, which she founded in 1972 to insure long-lasting racial diversity in Oak Park. The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, fourth edition, 2000, defines “gatekeeper” this way: “1. One that is in charge of passage through a gate. 2. One who monitors or oversees the actions of others.”
So now the Housing Center, which this year will again get more than a half million in monies controlled by the village board, performs in, as Oak Parker Ron Lawless tells the Reader, an “integration system … based on whether or not we have enough blacks in Oak Park.”
The Housing Center’s moves that focused on boosting white demand have benefited from federal court rulings that it’s not racial steering, but I wonder if the current no-blacks practice could survive legal scrutiny. I don’t believe it should.
Continuation of those programs should be enough to insure our dream of a racially mixed community.
