Richard Boykin, our Cook County commissioner, and Anan Abu-Taleb, Oak Park’s mayor, convened an interesting panel to talk about race — in Oak Park and in the nation — last week at the library.
With Charlottesville and the president’s response to white supremacists, Nazis and assorted low-life hangers-on as the starting point for the conversation, a diverse panel and a diverse audience spent two hours on the subject.
The conversation was blunt and got blunter as the evening proceeded. The conversation was hopeful and made more hopeful because the audience was not solely made up of well-intentioned Oak Park white people.
This was a group that blended races but also, as happens more and more often, blended neighborhoods — with both Oak Parkers and Austinites in attendance — and largely in agreement about the complexity and pervasiveness of racial bias and other forms of prejudice, about the essential need to acknowledge how deep-baked racism is in ourselves and in our institutions, to own up, if you are white, to the truth of white privilege.
It was a discussion of racial pain and painful truths, and for a panel with four elected officials, it was wondrously void of political blame and promises of easy fixes.
This page often notes that as Americans we are bad at talking about race. On the Greater West Side of Chicago, we are getting better at it.