whiteis.qxd
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
(1) Several times in the article, references are made to public housing residents who don’t work. Yet a significant number of these residents are women with children. Raising children is, in fact, work–difficult, socially productive work. It should be acknowledged and rewarded as such.
(2) One doesn’t need to be a conspiracy theorist to be impressed with the way in which scattered-site housing, long an anathema to city fathers across America, suddenly became desirable public policy after the Los Angeles Rodney King riots of 1992 reminded the overclass of what can happen when too many angry, impoverished people are allowed to live in close proximity to one another for too long. Apparently the specter of concentrated political power (to say nothing of anger) among poor, disenfranchised black folks is even scarier to America’s power elite than the possibility of one or two of those folks moving in next door.
Unfortunately, racism–as well as profit–causes government to let public housing deteriorate and then to tear it down because it’s in such bad shape. I don’t know of any reason to think that racism would wither away even if private profit were outlawed.
