I stared reading Our America with my almost nonexistent knowledge about the south side of Chicago. What little knowledge I had came from the seven o’clock news or newspaper articles. This limited knowledge continued to mock me as I read the book. The south side of Chicago for me was packaged into four things, gangs, violence, drugs, and the projects, but what I never really questioned or thought about in great detail were its residents. People lived there but it was like a completely different place, a place I would not go to because my place was where I lived. The detachment I realized while reading the book shocked me. The book lets you understand what a news report never can, unless you go and speak to the people living in the south side. There are people living and breathing the same as me. LeAlan Jones and Llyod Newman made me open to the eyes to what life is like in the south side. I’m not saying I can ever understand what they went through or what anybody goes through when living in a community like their but the book made the people real. They were no longer a number or a picture on the news. It is shameful, for me how little I knew about a neighborhood which probably only 10 or 15 miles from my home.
Reading this book opened my eyes to the fact that the things that happen in the south side are a dreary reality for the people living there. For example when the boys interview other people, they casually mention who has died in the neighborhood, be it former classmates, friends, or neighbors. Their life is living these conditions which have over time become the norm. People dying, friends turned drug dealers and the like appeared to be an everyday occurrence in the book. This was shocking for me in the beginning but when your life is like a war zone you have to accept it or you might not survive. It was depressing to see that for the children living in this neighborhood they are being bombarded daily with negative experience and their chances of getting out of the vicious cycle are low. The two boys, Johnny (10) and Tyrone (11) who pushed off five year old Eric Morse from a window to his death were part of this cycle. LeAlan discusses in his interviews how nobody taught the boys right from wrong so they grew up imitating what they say around them. The same can be said for Eric Morse’s older brother; after he saw his brother getting pushed off the building his mother tells the boys how he is more aggressive and gets into trouble. It might be his way of coping but what does it do to his life? He is now serving a 71 year sentence for killing Illya Glover.
To see that only a small percent of those children in the book will be able to come out neighborhood they live in scary. I could sit here and write about what should be done and the like but then I would just be fooling myself. I do believe that neighborhoods like the Ida B Wells neighborhood need to be changed with a permanent solution but I cannot say how because honestly I have no experience in the area nor can I claim to know the neighborhood. I was glad to find that LeAlan Jones managed to break off the cycle and fight for what he believes in. He is now a journalist, a part of the Green Party and he ran for the Illinois senate in 2010.
I also found this video online which relates to the book.
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