The Chicago Way, Part One

One issue that I think is very important right now is Mayor Rahm Emanuel's plans to close down 54 Chicago public schools this year.  If successful, this would be by far the largest year of school closings in any American city, ever.

Here is a graph that was put up by the Washington Post last month:

As you can see, the vast majority of school closings in Chicago will be affecting Black students.  From the Chicagoist, here is a map depicting the locations of the schools to be closed:

Go back to that demographic map of Chicago from my last post, and you'll see how the school closings almost perfectly match-up with the African American neighborhoods in the city.

Emanuel was elected mayor in 2011, when he won with 59 percent of the city's Black vote.  Since then, he has systematically moved to gut the city of all of its services, such as closing half of the city's mental health clinics (predominately on the South Side),  or raising public transportation fares, which again hits hits working class and minority families.

Of course, Emanuel is acting within a longstanding policy of making life in Chicago less comfortable for African Americans in the hope that they will leave.  From 2000-2010, Chicago shrank by about 200,000 people - and 180,000 of those people were African American.  Without access to housing, jobs, health care, transportation, and, now, education, Black people really don't have much incentive to stay in Chicago.  Which is a good thing for Rahm.

Now, Rahm hopes to attract more business to the city by calling on taxpayers to foot $100 million for a new basketball stadium for DePaul University - at the same time that he is citing a (dubious) $1 billion shortfall as justification for shutting down 54 public schools on the South and West side.  In addition, plans are in the pipes to call for public funding of two new "mega" hotels near downtown "in the hopes of aggressively growing convention and meeting business in Chicago."

And this is the pattern that has been ongoing for decades: Slash funding for public services needed by the poor and minorities in the hope that they'll just "go away," and then use public money to fund private enterprises where the public never gets their money back.

And we haven't even mentioned the UNO Charter Schools, and the massive profits that come from running a charter school in Chicago!