Dialect And Dialectic On Chicago's South Side
01/14/2010
A+
|
a-
Print Friendly and PDF
Heather Mac Donald points out the irrelevance of Alinskyite dialectic (where poverty is blamed on the rich and powerful) on the South Side of black-dominated Chicago:
"The disaster failed to dim the romance of community organizing. But by the time Obama arrived in Chicago in 1984, an Alinskyite diagnosis of South Side poverty was doubly irrelevant. Blacks had more political power in Chicago than ever before, yet that power had no impact on the tidal wave of dysfunction that was sweeping through the largest black community in the United States. Chicago had just elected Harold Washington, the city’s first black mayor; the heads of Chicago’s school system and public housing were black, as were most of their employees; black power broker Emil Jones, Jr. represented the South Side in the Illinois State Senate; Jesse Jackson would launch his 1984 presidential campaign from Chicago. The notion that blacks were disenfranchised struck even some of Obama’s potential organizees as ludicrous. ”Why we need to be protesting and carrying on at our own people?” a prominent South Side minister asked Obama soon after he arrived in Chicago. ”Anybody sitting around this table got a direct line to City Hall.”[Chicago's Real Crime Story, by Heather Mac Donald, City Journal, Winter 2010]
The minister quoted here is talking "Negro dialect"—the quote is from Dreams from My Father.If you have the audiobook, version, you can probably hear it read by Obama in his own voice.
Print Friendly and PDF