Perspective: Hey, Wadsworth, Get Over It!
January 10, 2025
Hey, Wadsworth, Get Over It! Perspective #72 John Addison Teevan January 10, 2025
CHICAGO (AP) —The closure of Wadsworth Elementary School in 2013 was a blow to residents of the majority-Black neighborhood it served, symbolizing a city indifferent to their interests. So, when the city reopened Wadsworth (in 2023) to shelter hundreds of migrants without seeking community input, it added insult to injury. Black residents are frustrated that long-standing needs are not being met while the city's newly arrived are cared for with a sense of urgency, and with their tax dollars.
Infuriated Black Chicagoans showed up in force at a City Council meeting on Wednesday (April 17) to protest Mayor Brandon Johnson’s request for an additional $70 million in taxpayers' funds to be spent on tackling the city’s migrant crisis…’ The progressive mayor…(has) already poured $300 million into housing, food, and healthcare for the recently arrived migrants. “Our voices are not valued nor heard,” says Genesis Young, a lifelong Chicagoan who lives near Wadsworth. (AP and Fox. April 19, 2024).
Africa: Over the decades we have make promises to Africans in the areas of health care and economic development. That money has either not been delivered, disappeared, or has been channeled through the IMF or World Bank. Then this came as I wrote on April 20. (Note in January we see updates on several fronts including a reduction in a pending Title IX expansion just yesterday).
(Bloomberg) – Chad called on the US to withdraw its troops from an army base in the central African country that’s one of the West’s few remaining outposts to fight a roiling jihadist insurgency in the region. The move comes a month after Niger — another key Western ally in the region — suspended its security agreement with the US, amid a series of coups that have seen military-ruled governments in the Sahel forge closer ties with Russia while cutting those with the West. (Bloomberg April 19, 2024).
What if we have not abandoned our posture of favoring the Black community, but we have just moved on? Race is still interesting but no longer as interesting as Palestinians or the favored issue of gender identity. For the ideologues race is passé as a new opportunity has appeared. The areas of intense interest are now all the activities of securing rights for young people who are either dysphoric or seeking transitional medications and surgeries. The new compassionate civil right of having adolescents pursue a new gender identity arises from a concern for mental health. “A live daughter or a dead son?” Indiana has 450 so far.
Did we ask the Black community how they feel about gender identity? About equating LGBTQ with the seriousness of the Black experience? The Black community is allowed to have their churches, their Christian faith, and their focus on family life and their grandmothers, but there's no need to worry about those relic institutions anymore. The church is virtually a hate crime, the family is now a clear enemy of the enlightened.
Did anyone ask the Black community if they are ok with this? MLK day is nice but it's getting long in the tooth and the fashionable effort is now to redefine MLK as a follower of Gandhi (not Jesus) and as one who would have joined the violence-prone Malcolm X (after MLK’s peaceful non-resistance phase).
People like those in Chicago last April are still desperate today, and they stare in disbelief at their leaders, neighbors, and mayors, who express an indifference to their concerns. These are Black families whose children lost two years of school to Covid not white parents who are gob-smacked that their children’s lives face a dangerously misguided sense of rights for 12-year-olds. Are Black parents ok with this?
While others share concerns for many oppressed people, few share America’s extreme views of gender issues. England, France, and Germany think we should tone it down. They do not lavish medicines or surgeries for adolescents so indiscriminately and wonder why we do. They wonder if we just went mentally numb or if someone said, “I am oppressed,” and boom; it was a self-evident national cause opposition to which is not only disinformative but an evil threat to our democracy. Or is it a threat to someone’s power?
That leaves most of the Black community out in the cold. They say it’s even chillier with the inflation of the Latin migrant population. U.S. Black people are becoming just another minority. Why? The Black story is apparently compelling, but it is old. Now the “escape from oppression” story of Latin immigrants or gender dysphoric children is fresh and new. Hey, Wadsworth, our leaders have moved on. Get over it.
Jesus invites us to a purpose and values that delivers us from this despair and leads to a genuine hope.