Barack Obama's Speech on Racism and Religion

As many of you may know (and have already watched or read), Barack Obama gave a speech on Tuesday in response to controversial comments about racism and US foreign relations by his minister, Rev. Jeremiah Wright. Whether you are voting for Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, John McCain, or even Ralph Nader, I'm sure we can all agree that what Obama says in this speech is perhaps the most honest treatment of racism and religion that I've heard in my lifetime.
You can read the transcript of the speech printed in the New York Times.
You can also watch the video of the speech.
Many people ask me why I, as a 23-year-old, college-educated, white woman from Eugene, OR would want to be working with predominantly African-American middle school and high school students from inner city Chicago. The reason is the myriad of reasons given in Obama's speech about how our country is still suffering from racism and inequality 143 years after slavery.

Shooting at Crane, 20th CPS student killed

On March 7th, a fight at Crane High School, on the West Side, resulted in the shooting and killing of one student and another student being in a coma after a savage beating with a golf club. Police are saying the fight was due to gang rivalries and as of today, more than 200 students who live in the ABLA housing projects where the shooter was from have to be given a police escort to school when it resumes next Monday due to fear of retaliation. There are many fingers being pointed at different directions, but just for curiosity's sake I looked up in our Tutor/Mentor Connection Program Locator, where Crane High School and the ABLA homes are located, and how many tutoring and mentoring programs for high school students are in that zip code. Not surprisingly, there are only 4 programs in the 60612 zip code that offer tutoring and mentoring programs.

Starting in May, I will be transitioning to my role for the next year as the Tutor/Mentor Connection Coordinator. One of my roles will be doing outreach to programs in areas such as that around Crane High School and helping to possibly new programs out there. Another one of my roles will be coordinating the Tutoring and Mentoring Networking and Leadership Conference, which will be held Thursday May 29th and Friday May 30th at Northwestern Law School in downtown Chicago. We are still looking for people who are wanting to hold workshops or be a part of panels. I will be mediating two panels myself, one on Thursday morning on strategies for running successful tutoring and mentoring programs and the other one on Friday morning, on volunteer recruitment and retention.

Finally, on another sad note, 20 CPS students so far this year have been killed by some act of violence. It's only March 18th and that is way too many young lives lost too soon. Almost all of them are from neighborhoods where tutoring and mentoring programs are few and far between. While many of these students who were killed were good students and citizens, they would have certainly benefitted from tutoring and mentoring programs in their areas as safe havens from the violence of their neighborhoods. Even more so, their killers would've also benefitted from tutoring and mentoring programs as an alternative activity to the violence they chose to inflict on another human being.

Love and Consequences, and the consequence of lying

In an earlier post, that you may have read, and which I have recently taken down, I wrote about Margaret B. Jones, a supposed former gang member who wrote a memoir, profiled in the New York Times about growing half-white/half-Native American in an African American foster family in South-Central Los Angeles. I wrote about what an inspiration Ms. Jones was, getting out of the inner city and graduating from the University of Oregon, but still staying true to her roots by writing her memoir. I wrote about how Ms. Jones is an inspiration to my students, who have to face a similar choice of going to college and leaving their neighborhood.

Sadly, this story is not true. Margaret B. Jones is actually Margaret Seltzer, who is all-white, who grew up in a middle class home in Sherman Oaks, CA and who never graduated from the University of Oregon. Ms. Seltzer has supposedly worked in gang reconciliation, but she never grew up in an African-American foster family in South-Central LA, never was a member of the Bloods and is not part Native-American. In an article published last evening in the New York Times, Ms. Seltzer asserts that she based her supposed memoir on stories of "friends," but felt their stories couldn't be published any other way.

Ms. Seltzer is correct in asserting that a lot of the stories that you would've found in Love and Consequences aren't told and need to be brought forth to the public. Unfortunately, the fact that she fabricated the fact that the story is hers (she could've very well written Love and Consequences as fiction, "inspired by true stories"), makes the reality of inner city America less true. Facts, such as 1 out of 9 African-American men are incarcerated (and 1 out of every 100 Americans) or that just this past weekend 3 Chicago Public School students were shot and killed and 5 were wounded are horribly true, just like much of what Ms. Jones wrote about in her supposed memoir is true, it just didn't happen to her.

If there are any lessons to be learned by my students about Ms. Seltzer's story, it is that it does not pay to lie and in the end, you will be caught. An interesting read are the comments to the article about Ms. Seltzer's fabricated story.

Art Show!

Last Friday evening, Cabrini Connections had their art show, which was held at the Pallette and Chisel Art Gallery in the Gold Coast area. The space was absolutely beautiful because the building used to be a mansion. It was so wonderful seeing the kids walk in and their faces light up when they saw their artwork on the walls.

Overall, I think the art show was a great success. There were a lot of kids, both in the art club and those just in Cabrini Connections. There were also a lot of parents and siblings who looked so proud of their kids/brothers and sisters.

In addition to the Art Show, the video cub showed their documentary detailing the past, present and future of Cabrini Green. I remember seeing a preview for the documentary at the Year-End dinner last June and being blown away by what they had already put together. Finally getting to see the end-product was even more incredible and it was so great to hear the kids talk about their experiences creating the documentary in the question-and-answer session afterwards.

Mostly, though, I was really happy that all my friends came to see the art show. They've all heard my stories throughout these past 7 months about my experiences and Cabrini Connections, so it was so great for them to put names with faces and to actually see something the kids created. It also made me so happy that a lot of them went up to the kids and asked them about their paintings and see how proud the kids were to talk about the paintings. Some of my friends even bought some of the artwork and DVD's of the documentary, which meant a lot as well to me.

Hopefully, Cabrini Connections will be able to do more events like the Art Show because I think it's a great way to showcase what these kids can do and show what we have brought to their community.

Great Article Summarizing Sudhir Venkatesh's Research

In the Chicago Tribune today, there is a great article that summarizes Sudhir Venkatesh's research for "Gang Leader for a Day." A lot of it I already knew, but it's nice to know the backstory behind his research.

Shout out in the Chicago Sun-Times!

Cabrini Connections, Tutor/Mentor Connection was mentioned in an article today on making a difference in the Chicago Sun-Times. They list tutoring a child as a very tangible way of improving the world - something I've been promoting for a long time. Enjoy the article:

http://www.suntimes.com/news/commentary/779262,CST-EDT-Edit06.article

Dialogue between Sudhir Venkatesh and Alex Kotlowitz

In my daily perusings of online news sources, I have come across a thoughtful and very important discussion betweeen Sudhir Venkatesh, a blogger for the Freakonomics blog on the New York Times online, as well as the author of the recently published "Gang Leader for a Day," and Alex Kotlowitz, author of various works depicting issues in our public housing and education systems, to name a few (probably his best known work is "There Are No Children Here"). Both Kotlowitz and Venkatesh have strong ties to Chicago and are well-versed in the crises that have surrounded the breakdown of the public housing system. In this discussion they touch on many of the issues that Venkatesh raises in "Gang Leader for a Day." However, the discussion takes an interesting turn when Kotlowitz and Venkatesh debate over how academic researchers should compensate their subjects for the information that they have gleaned from them.

What makes the discussion especially interesting to me, though, is when the discuss the breakdown of the public housing system in Chicago and talk about the flight of the urban poor to the nearest surrounding suburbs. I have discussed this before in my blog, talking about how gentrification pushes the poorest people out of the city, and out of many people's consciousness. Kotlowitz and Venkatesh both compare this phenomenon to what has happened in many European and Latin American cities where the affluent center of the city is literally ringed by poverty.

This is something that I know very well, because I witnessed it first hand living in Paris for a year. I get a lot of quizzical looks from people who I meet through Cabrini Connections when I tell them that I was a French and International Studies major in college. However, I believe all paths eventually connect and this is an instance where I find myself seeing the same phenomenon of urban poor being pushed from the inner city to the outer suburbs. This is especially the case in Paris, where the poorest of the poor, mostly North and West African immigrants live in high-rise building blocks, that don't look much different from the Whites of Cabrini-Green. In my brief encounters with people who lived in these areas (a lot of them were cab drivers who were delighted to talk to an American who spoke fluent French about their lives), these people intimated a similar sense of hopelessness, frustration and anger with authority that I encounter at Cabrini Connections. Although, it almost seems to be worse there in certain ways because, as a cab driver who was of Algerian descent put it, "In America, they may hate you because you're black, but they never challenge that you're an American. In France, they not only hate you because you're black, but also because they tell you that you're not French, even if your family has lived in France for generations."

What I'm trying to get at, is in both France, America, and other places, the urban poor are being forgotten, and that's not a good thing. Fortunately, there are people like Sudhir Venkatesh and Alex Kotlowitz who are making sure that these people are not forgotten.