A similar kind of rationale infused the move to orient the academic evaluation process around a standardized test. Yet, while Chicago school officials never missed a chance to remind people that all students in Chicago were evaluated by the same test—the “Iowa Tests”—and thus held to the same standards, the test in practice exacerbated already existing disparities between the city’s most elite schools, which were disproportionately middle class and white, and its lowest-achieving ones, which were overwhelmingly working-class black and Latino. In schools where scores were lowest, classroom time was dominated by lessons geared more towards test preparation than intellectual development. One researcher who sat in on classes in several such schools observed teachers making extensive use of materials on test-taking strategies, training students for hours on filling in multiple-choice bubbles, and having them recite slogans such as “three B’s in a row, no, no, no.”33 Understandably, such conditions contributed to higher dropout rates and disciplinary problems in poorly performing schools, whereas in schools with little risk of failure, teachers faced fewer test-related constraints and could more effectively orient their lessons to the interests and intellectual needs of their students.
In view of such glaring inequalities, it was becoming difficult to argue that Chicago’s school system represented a model to be emulated. And yet, while fewer and fewer observers seemed willing to make this case, some of the key ingredients in its so-called success story—the replacement of failing neighborhood schools with charter schools and the emphasis on standardized testing—were incorporated into President Obama’s education policy. Such circumstances beg the question of how, considering Chicago’s disproportionate share of the worst performing schools in the nation and its high rate of student homicides, the CPS had ever stopped being seen, as George H.W. Bush’s secretary of education William Bennett once referred to it, as the nation’s worst.
And how was it that the dire situation in the vast majority of black and Latino high schools did not stir up more opposition to Mayor Daley within these communities. Even when faced with an established black politician from the South Side like Bobby Rush—someone who, as a U.S. congressman, had earned political capital both locally and nationally—Daley still managed to capture around half of the black vote. Among Latinos, moreover, Daley’s support was so strong throughout his more than two decades in office that not a single Latino politician ever dared to make a serious run against him. These are questions that must be explored on a number of levels, and though this particular study has attempted to delineate a set of experiences that were somehow specific to the inhabitants of the 234 square miles of urban space that lie in the northernmost part of the state of Illinois, it is important to recall that Daley’s Chicago was embedded within a national political context that played a critical role in shaping the meaning of the circumstances transpiring within its borders. In other words, how working-class blacks and Latinos viewed their situation related, in part, to ideological currents that blew into the city from elsewhere—through their television sets, radios and stereos, computer screens, and telephones.
And what they increasingly saw and heard beginning in the late 1980s and continuing through the 1990s were images, stories, diatribes, polemics, and anecdotes that described the problems in their schools and neighborhoods as consequences of cultural deficiencies—of dysfunctional family situations and debased moral values—rather than as the by-products of economic marginalization and racial discrimination. Moreover, these were messages purveyed not merely by the right flank of the Republican Party. The antiwelfare crusade that began during the Reagan years had gained so much momentum that by the mid-1990s it had captured the nation’s entire political center. It was a Democratic president, Bill Clinton, in fact, who signed the famous 1996 Welfare Reform Act (officially known as the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act), which, as he proclaimed, “end[ed] welfare as we know it,” a move that followed his active sponsorship of the largest federal crime bill (the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act) in U.S. history. With the Republicans under the leadership of Newt Gingrich regaining both houses of Congress in the 1994 midterm elections, Clinton sought to steal their fire by keeping pace with their calls for a tougher approach to law enforcement and an end to a welfare system that had destroyed values of “personal responsibility” and hard work. The two pieces of legislation amounted to a continuation of the Reagan Revolution’s dramatic shift of federal funds from social spending to law enforcement—a trend that played a leading role in increasing the kinds of racial disparities in Chicago that had been so glaringly revealed by the 2000 census.34 And yet in the national discussion about the persistence of such racial inequalities, notions of “personal responsibility” and cultural deficiencies took center stage, pushing to the margins analyses focusing on the forces of racial discrimination.
Making matters worse was the fact that some of the most prominent voices arguing for a cultural interpretation of black inner-city poverty came from a number of black intellectuals who had themselves risen out of such conditions—scholars like Shelby Steele and Thomas Sowell of Stanford’s conservative Hoover Institute and the University of Chicago’s famed sociologist William Julius Wilson.35 That Wilson, a self-proclaimed “social democrat” favoring aggressive Great Society–style intervention in the urban labor market, found himself grouped with strident conservatives like Steele and Sowell was a sign of just how compelling the culture-of-poverty argument was to Americans in the late 1980s and 1990s. Wilson’s primary objective in both his landmark 1978 book The Declining Significance of Race and in his 1987 study The Truly Disadvantaged was to argue for class-based social policies that were better adapted to the specific circumstances of poverty faced by a black underclass trapped in spatially and socially isolated ghettos with poor schools and scarce job opportunities.36 But by making the corollary argument that fighting racial discrimination was no longer as necessary as it had been in the past, he left himself open to charges that he was minimizing racism as a cause of ghetto poverty, and in delineating the distinct conditions of black underclass poverty—single-parent families, juvenile delinquency, academic failure, the lack of positive role models, and the breakdown of community institutions—he seemed to some observers to be straying too far on to the well-worn ground of culture-of-poverty pathologies. Wilson, who served as an informal advisor to Bill Clinton during his first term and as a consultant to Mayor Daley, appeared to be telling Democrats to move past the kind of divisive race-based policies (for example, affirmative action) that had caused the defection of white middle-class moderates from the party since the late 1960s. Conservatives, for their part, were thrilled by Wilson’s apparent minimization of racism. Of course they were distorting his argument, and Wilson himself cried foul in a number of high-profile interviews, but the fact remained that a Chicago-based, black social democrat with impeccable academic credentials who had been raised by a single mother on welfare had signed his name to an award-winning book entitled The Declining Significance of Race.
MANAGING THE MARGINALIZED
The views of prominent black conservative scholars like Steele and Sowell and of somewhat misunderstood liberals like Wilson were less consequential to ordinary Chicagoans of color than the more popular ideological currents and political movements circulating through their neighborhoods. In the early 1990s, Chicago was at the center of what was then and still is the largest single mass mobilization in the black community since the era of civil rights—the Million Man March on Washington, DC, in 1995. Organized by Chicago-based Nation of Islam (NOI) leader Minister Louis Farrakhan, the march was called in an effort to “convey to the world a vastly different picture of the Black male” during a moment when law-and-order politicians and the culture industries alike were painting black youths as gangsters and drug dealers.37 The idea for the march took shape shortly after the Republican takeover of Congress, and march organizers sought to use the mobilization to register black voters for
the next elections and draw attention to issues facing black communities. Yet such political projects were subsumed by the overriding messages of personal responsibility, self-help, and spiritual atonement. In effect, ordinary African Americans were being told to mobilize collectively against racism but that the real path to their salvation was not political but rather spiritual and, above all, personal.
This package of ideas had been assembled on Chicago’s South Side, in the Nation of Islam’s headquarters at 7351 South Stony Island Avenue, where, since the mid-1980s, Farrakhan had been drawing increasingly large audiences to his mosque to hear elaborate rants sprinkled with anti-Semitism, homophobia, and a range of conspiracy theories. Nor was this recipe unique. About twenty blocks southwest of NOI headquarters, Reverend Jeremiah Wright had been touching on some similar themes—if in less sensationalist and provocative terms—in sermons from the pulpit of Trinity United Church of Christ. By the early 1990s Wright’s charisma had enabled him to amass a congregation of several thousand members—University of Chicago law professor Barack Obama and his wife, Michelle, among them. To be sure, Obama and many of his fellow congregants at Trinity would have been loath to think of themselves as somehow associated with the NOI, but it was hard to deny that Wright and Farrakhan belonged to the same context. It was not by chance, for example, that the two South Side religious leaders shared the stage at the Million Man March. But while Wright was rapidly becoming a powerful local figure, presiding over a congregation of more than six thousand by the time he retired in 2008, Farrakhan was moving into the national spotlight. By the early 1990s, the Nation of Islam’s membership was increasing nationwide, Farrakhan’s outrageous declarations about Jews and UFOs were making tabloid headlines, and a number of enormously popular rap artists, such as Public Enemy, Ice Cube, and X-Clan were incorporating excerpts of the NOI leader’s speeches into gold- and platinum-selling albums. And yet rap and the NOI made rather strange bedfellows. If a new generation of West Coast “gangsta rappers,” like NWA (Niggas With Attitude) and Ice Cube, had offered some penetrating critiques of what the Reagan Revolution’s vision of law and order had meant for a generation of black ghetto youths, by the time of the Million Man March, the images of criminality, violence, sexism, and immorality purveyed by rap music and videos had become a big part of the problem that the movement’s organizers were seeking to address. “By the summer of 1993 gangsta rap had been reduced to ‘nihilism for nihilism’s sake,’” writes historian Robin D.G. Kelley, and this sense of nihilism—much like the message of personal responsibility that stood dialectically opposed to it—only provided further confirmation for those claiming that black inner-city poverty was a cultural rather a structural issue.38 Nihilism, dysfunction, and pathology were the terms that defined the problem of black underclass poverty throughout the 1990s and into the early years of the twenty-first century. That even the eminent radical black activist and philosopher Cornel West would peer into the heart of the black ghetto and see a world of “nihilism,” as he did in his classic 1994 Race Matters, reflected a profound loss of faith in the political system among working-class blacks and their leaders across urban America.39
But in Chicago, in particular, where voter turnout was reaching new lows and mayoral elections were considered local jokes, the pessimism about the possibility of political solutions to the problems people faced in their daily lives was especially pronounced—a situation that seemed all too apparent during Bobby Rush’s uninspiring campaign of 1999. There were glimmers of hope from time to time, as when blacks turned out in 1993 to help elect the first black woman to the U.S. Senate, Carol Moseley Braun. However this was state and not local politics, and Moseley Braun was, in some sense, a gift from Daley, who not only endorsed her but also convinced many of his deep-pocketed donors to throw their financial support behind her as well. This was, in part, payback for services already rendered; in 1989, as a member of the U.S. House of Representatives, Moseley Braun had given her own endorsement to Daley, a deed she repeated in 1995.40
Another moment of political possibility, moreover, appeared to be developing in the months leading up to the 1995 aldermanic elections, when, out of the deepest reaches of apparent black underclass nihilism—the impoverished neighborhoods around the Robert Taylor Homes in Chicago’s Third Ward—an insurgent poor people’s movement crystallized around the candidacy of former Gangster Disciple (GD) Wallace “Gator” Bradley. The financing, manpower, and guidance behind Bradley’s campaign came from a political organization called 21st Century Vote, which Gangster Disciple kingpin Larry Hoover had launched in 1990 from a high security federal prison while serving a sentence of 150 to 200 years for murder. Hoover was running with the GDs in the late 1960s, when some of Chicago’s most fearsome gangs were trying to transform into political organizations, but his own personal awakening came not on the streets of Englewood but in a number of prisons, where he earned his GED and remade the Gangster Disciples into a political organization he called Growth and Development. While critics would maintain that Hoover’s turn to politics was a cover for his continuing leadership of the GDs’ massive drug trafficking enterprise, a taped telephone conversation between Hoover and Vice Lord leader Willie Lloyd in 1992 revealed an ambitious plan to mobilize “the poor people” around the housing projects, including the “dope fiends and wineys,” in order to take the aldermanic seat from Daley-backed Dorothy Tillman. In 1993, the organization moved into a second-floor office above an abandoned storefront in Englewood and promptly organized thousands of youths to march on City Hall to prevent the closing of some neighborhood health clinics and help settle a teacher’s strike; a year later, 21st Century Vote had registered several thousand voters and had raised well over $100,000 from mostly small donations. Yet, although Bradley was able to get national attention by forcing a runoff with Tillman, African Americans in the Third Ward were not ready to believe that gangbangers could become community leaders, and the thousands of Gangster Disciples who hit the streets for Bradley only seemed to make matters worse. Bradley lost badly in the general election, and 21st Century Vote faded into insignificance.41
The story of Larry Hoover and 21st Century Vote provides some insight into how Mayor Daley could have presided over the two Chicagos while arousing so little agitation from those living in the subaltern one, the Chicago of litter-strewn vacant lots, boarded-up buildings tagged with gang symbols, impossibly high unemployment, and gunshots piercing the night. If the term machine does not do justice to the sophisticated mechanisms of social control that characterized the administration of Richard M. Daley, countersubversive tactics that resembled those from the glory days of Richard J. Daley’s machine were certainly called to service in response to Gator Bradley’s challenge. The police turned up the heat on the Gangster Disciples in the days before the election with roundups and other forms of harassment, and from the beginning the Chicago press seemed much too zealous in its demonization of Hoover. Prior to one of Hoover’s parole hearings, for example, a Tribune editorial argued, “Hoover is a leader, all right. He helped lead neighborhoods down a self-destructive road of murder, drug abuse and despair. His release would undermine the authority of law-abiding folks who lead by example, yet don’t get a parade of politicians to sing their praises.” Whether City Hall had played a role in the Tribune’s crusade against Hoover we will never know for sure, but we do know that city officials came to every parole hearing to insist that Hoover was still the gangster he had always been.42 However, Hoover and his ragtag band of lumpenproletariat was all too easy for Daley to contain. Harder to explain was Daley’s role in anesthetizing the injuries of the city’s other half and paralyzing any forces of political opposition amidst a series of scandals, any one of which might have been enough to bring another mayor to his knees.
In late 1995, just months after the Daley administration had displayed its callous attitude towards the poor during the heat wave, a massive FBI sting known as Operation Silver Shovel revealed a culture of rampant corruption
within Daley’s City Hall, including bribes for city contracts, fraud, money laundering, drug trafficking, and organized crime activity. The more than 1,100 wiretap recordings made during this operation showed that everyone around Daley seemed to be on the take, and these were hardly victimless crimes. Chicago residents, whose property taxes were on the rise in the 1990s, had for years been paying what amounted to a “contract corruption” tax, and minority-owned contractors, which had enjoyed an affirmative action program put in place during the Washington years, were no longer seeing their rightful 24 percent share of the city’s construction business because of a range of fraudulent practices. In one of the worst cases, James M. Duff, one of the heads of a reputed organized crime family and a big financial supporter of Daley, had convinced an African American employee to pose as majority owner of one of his waste management companies in order to win a contract intended for minority-owned businesses.43
During this time, moreover, a series of investigations began to uncover a hideous pattern of police torture at the city’s South Side Area 2 police station, where, it was later determined, 137 African American men were tortured into confessions on the orders of police lieutenant Jon Burge between 1972 and 1991. Detainees had reportedly had plastic bags placed over their heads, guns shoved in their mouths, and electrical shocks and cigarette burns administered to their ears, nostrils, chests, and genitals. Daley was not mayor while most of this was going on, but as Cook County state’s attorney in the early 1980s, he had been informed of such practices by reliable sources and had refused to launch an inquiry. Based in part on the revelations of these coerced confessions, Illinois governor George Ryan halted all executions in the state of Illinois in 2000, and three years later commuted the death sentences of 167 prisoners on Illinois’s death row while pardoning four death row inmates tortured at the Area 2 station. Ryan’s bold moves, however, did little to change the killing going on in the streets. In 2001 and then again 2003, Chicago made headlines as the “murder capital” of the United States, registering more homicides than the significantly more populous cities of New York and Los Angeles.
Chicago on the Make Page 37