Last week there was an arresting story on NPR’s Morning Edition. Reporter David Schaper chronicled the events leading up to the beating death of a high school student in the daily after-school brawls that take place at Fenger High School in South Side Chicago. It was widely reported in the media, everyone was outraged (for about ten minutes) then most of us promptly moved on to other concerns. What makes this killing all the more tragic is that it occurred in the exact neighborhood where Barack Obama decided to leave his cushy New York job and get involved in community organizing: Altgel Gardens, a sprawling and desperately poor public housing project.
Regardless of your political persuasion every thinking person should read Obama’s account of those years he spent in the decay of those neighborhoods. Dreams from My Father: a Story of Race and Inheritance could serve as a text book for what is wrong with our inner cities, how the violence that took 16 year-old Derrion Albert’s life is nothing new, and how resistant to change the problem has remained.
Obama details the years of frustration in Chicago dealing with Altgel Gardens, the bureaucracy of Chicago politics, and the sense of apathy that led to a paralysis of progress. Because he knows the area and its problems better than anyone in government, he sent Attorney General Eric Holder and Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, who was formerly CEO of the Chicago Public Schools, to investigate. What they discovered is eerily similar to what the idealistic young college graduate found in 1983: Mothers with multiple children fathered by many different men, none of whom were around; no stable male in the household, high unemployment and crumbling infrastructure, schools that are failing and spawn violence between neighborhoods, drugs, prostitution, and teenage violence that is a daily occurrence.
In Barack Obama’s decision to leave Chicago and go to law school at Harvard, the book shifts its focus from the problems with which he struggled, with only modest success, to a search for personal identity. What makes this compelling reading is that except for the love of a handful of people, our President could have easily fallen into the unchanging pattern of the Altgel teenagers with the same fatal results.
In spite of a father who was little more than a symbol, and a failed one at that, Obama was flanked by two family members, his mother and his grandmother, who quietly and consistently applied just enough pressure to keep him from taking to the mean streets as many of his friends did.
No one should be optimistic about what a couple of Cabinet members can accomplish in South Side Chicago; certainly the President is realistic about their prospects; he’s been there, done that.
Here’s the really important message: It only takes a few loving people to turn around a potentially violent and dangerous teenager. Throw money at the problem, design a new system, rebuild the infrastructure—all that is important, but to defeat the apathy, the real villain, it takes people who passionately care about their children. That the President has now sent two highly-placed officials to look at the failure of the work he started twenty-six years ago indicates two things: He doesn’t give up and he doesn’t forget his goals. Many do not agree with his approach to governing but the story of how he survived is compelling.
When President Obama received the Nobel Peace Prize last week, he was the first to say he didn’t believe he had earned it. He has a point, but given where his heart has been all these years, we should give him the chance to prove he does.
If this book is read as a narrative of change, not as a document for personal purpose you may set aside your politics and your time will be well spent.
By Hayden Hollingsworth [email protected]