Racial Segregation Not an Issue for Rahm and Opponents

It’s an established fact that Chicago is in the top five cities for being racially segregated which experts say has contributed to the high unemployment in the black community. The problem has existed since the 1960s when a ruling from a district court judge ordering that racial segregation in Chicago be reversed. Despite the ruling, not much has changed.

Paul John Higgins

The Chicago Reader reports its unlikely to change in the future.

It must have been fixed—otherwise why isn’t racial segregation an issue in the mayor’s race?

Try finding a mention of it on the websites of any of the candidates. Editorial boards have decreed Chicago’s most important concern to be its budget problems. Other issues winning attention have been school and ethics reform, job creation, the head tax, crime, transportation, privatization, the O’Hare airport expansion.

The city’s finances are indeed a mess. But financial troubles come and go for Chicago. Segregation endures.

According to the Attorney who brought the original suit, politicians and candidates don’t talk about segregation because “Politically, it doesn’t play.”

The “shootings, robberies, rapes, fires, joblessness, single-parent families, dreadful schools and high dropout rates, rampant alcoholism and heroin addiction, abandoned buildings and vacant lots” of the 1960s ghettos are continuing to plague the black communities of today into the future.