No, nothing to do with Mrs. O'Leary's cow. How old do you think I am? But I do have two memories of Chicago blazes, each seen from my car while driving city streets or highways. The first was late at night, in Cabrini-Green, notorious breeding ground for all of America's urban housing-project woes. This was in the mid-1990s. I had just moved back to Chicago, alone, and I still had a car, although I lived in the downtown Streeterville neighborhood and really did not need one. I will mention the make of the car, only because it really does make a difference to the story: imagine a single, young, white woman driving through the projects in the middle of the night . . . in a Saab. What the hell? you might well ask. Well, I was returning home from a late-night excursion in Bucktown or Wicker Park, probably the latter. I really wasn't thinking about where I was, only about where I wanted to go, which was back to my apartment to crash. I was tired. But not too tired to be completely oblivious to my surroundings. Crossing the Chicago River, on West Chicago Avenue I believe it was, and suddenly I was stopped at a red light. To my left, I remember seeing blighted housing, hearing a sudden chaos of noise in the cross-street about a block and a half away, or its equivalent. The streets did something strange around there, didn't go through, so it was hard to judge a block—these were the literal and metaphorical dead-end streets of the city. Suddenly, more shouting, and flames shooting up into the night sky. A blaze of orange heat. Not a building on fire; this was in the street. Did someone ignite the contents of a trash can, or was it a car on fire? Worse, I imagined, a person? I saw shadow-cloaked figures running, and although the traffic light was still red, I stepped on the gas. I needed to shake the feeling of being a sitting duck for who knows what violations. And really, what did the red light matter? I remember, more than anything, thinking that if a patrol car wanted to pull me over for running the light, I'd be more than happy to pay a ticket in exchange for a police escort out of the neighborhood. Without incident, I made it home. It was not the first and not the last time I'd find myself in the "wrong" section of a city; this was not even a close shave, not really. Only in the realm of the hypothetical, perhaps. I have never considered myself a skittish person, but call it intuition—on that night, sitting in my luxury car at a red signal, a guiding voice told me to "Gun it!" and I did, before someone else could work their own gun magic in the middle of this agitated night.
The worst kind of prejudice is the kind that slips under the radar. It's too subtle to cause a stir (and if you point it out, you'll usually get a sideways look: you're the one making too much of nothing), but its corrosive message nevertheless seeps in—subliminally, insidiously—beating down the spirit of the group it belittles or excludes. I am blessed to have been raised by two parents who were sensitive to prejudicial undercurrents; they fought against them in their own distinct ways through the tumultuous 1960s, and into the 70s and 80s as I was growing up. And it seems, thinking about it now, that they never missed a good learning moment with me: we often discussed issues of bias, prejudice, stereotype, and their harmful effects. This week, images in some of my kindergartener's reading books gave me pause. And in wrestling with how to handle these, I remembered something I hadn't thought of in many years: the library at the Brentwood Science Magnet School in ...
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