I grew up an only child in a troubled but highly educated, liberal and academic household in the shadow of the University of Chicago, with a front-row seat for the great social movements of the Nineteen Sixties. My father, who struggled heroically with hemophilia and (less heroically) with alcohol, was a liberal-left sociologist. Physical disability kept him of his two preferred professions: jazz piano and journalism. My mother taught elementary school in the middle of the desperately poor Robert Taylor Homes in the historical heart of Black Chicago. She brought me to her all-Black classroom twice a year to get a sense of the savage, Dickensian race-class inequalities that mocked America’s “democratic” pretenses within and beyond Chicago.
Introduction to The Paul Street Report
Introduction to The Paul Street Report
Introduction to The Paul Street Report
I grew up an only child in a troubled but highly educated, liberal and academic household in the shadow of the University of Chicago, with a front-row seat for the great social movements of the Nineteen Sixties. My father, who struggled heroically with hemophilia and (less heroically) with alcohol, was a liberal-left sociologist. Physical disability kept him of his two preferred professions: jazz piano and journalism. My mother taught elementary school in the middle of the desperately poor Robert Taylor Homes in the historical heart of Black Chicago. She brought me to her all-Black classroom twice a year to get a sense of the savage, Dickensian race-class inequalities that mocked America’s “democratic” pretenses within and beyond Chicago.