Bigotry loses big in Chicago

By Jim Sacco

Published: November 5, 2008

Growing up in Chicago – not the suburbs but the actual city – provided me with a frontline view of race relations.

They do say, after all, that Chicago is the most segregated city in the world. And, growing up in its famed Little Italy just a juiced-up Sammy Sosa home-run shot from the Sears Tower, the racial lines were very obvious.

There were black streets and white streets. Your safety walking there was based solely upon the color of your skin. There were black parks and white parks, not by law, but the product of years of comfort-level play and generations of deeply imbedded hate.

Yet, despite all of this, talk to someone who is from Chicago and they’ll speak of their fair city with pride. To blazes with those cake-eating suburbanites. They weave themselves into the fabric of a unique city, whether we true residents like it or not. They could never understand.

And this is what made Tuesday night so special to me. This is why I smiled as whatever your news channel of choice is cut to Chicago’s Grant Park. My Chicago. My Grant Park. 

My hometown where I witnessed too many people hit over the head with spray-paint cans simply because they were black. Or I heard screams from a lady with a bloody lip and swollen face given to her because she forgot what street she was walking on and paid no mind to the old-school, bigoted color barriers a lesser generation slapped all over that fair city.

Total disclosure here, if my minor in political science and world and constitutional law taught me anything, it’s that the Electoral College system this country relies on for presidential elections is a farce. And I exercise my freedoms and rights won by countless lives by choosing not to partake in this comedy of errors.

But that doesn’t make me immune to what we, as a country, witnessed Tuesday. We witnessed history and I witnessed it the way I choose — by just watching. That’s the journalist in me, I suppose, preferring to watch life-changing events take place rather than partake in them.

That’s the sports columnist in me, I guess, choosing to watch Buffalo Gap’s Pickle Nuckols run over would-be tacklers as opposed to grabbing the ball and trying to do it myself. (Yes, I stress the word “trying.”) I enjoy standing on the sidelines and telling the story of those who do the work. And, as always, watching history take place is one of the greatest things we can be blessed with.

To see black men, women and children with tears streaming down their faces at the pure joy of Barack Obama’s election was nothing short of awe inspiring. No, this it not some “white-guilt” mindset, just the result of studying history and knowing that a race of people this country has crapped upon and whose shoulders it used to build itself up has the loudest voice of all now. Sorry, there’s no guilt there. These are called facts, folks.

And the epicenter was my beloved Windy City.

You know how I feel about career politicians and the voting process. I long for the days when, after being president, you went back to being a cobbler and shunned the public life.

I wish, when we didn’t like something our government did, the masses would sharpen their pitchforks, sling a muzzle-loader over their shoulder and march to that swamp along the Potomac and demand change.

That’s just me, a Whiskey Rebellion guy living in a Coca-Cola world. Somehow, I manage. By choice, I observe.

And there was nothing better than watching one significant battle in the war against gray-haired bigotry take place in the unlikeliest of all places.

Sweet home, Chicago.

Jim Sacco is a sports columnist for The News Virginian.