On April 27th my friends, Emily Kats, Abby Lambert and I went to go hear an author speak at the University of Illinois at Chicago. The author, Alex Kotlowitz wrote the book An American Summer; Life or Death in Chicago which my friends and I have all read so we were interested in hearing the author talk. The drive down to the UIC was not the easiest considering it was pouring/snowing during most of the drive down there. Once we finally got there, I was almost shocked at how nice the area the UIC was located in considering I had never been there. The town was super cute with lots of restaurants and shops and just looked very put together in general. We had a difficult time trying to find parking and once we did we had kind of a long walk to get to the building where the presentation took place so we had some time to look around.

When we entered the lecture hall we were shocked at what we saw. There were well over 100 people sitting and waiting to hear Kotlowitz talk. We never expected the event to be this big and to see so many people. It really put it into perspective for us how prevalent the topic is and to see how many people enjoyed his book as much as we did. We found our seats and waited for Kotlowitz to come out.

 

 

An American Summer: Life or Death in Chicago, is a contemplation of stories speaking of the brutalities and violence black people have to face every day living in some of the most dangerous and impoverished neighborhoods of Chicago. Kotlowitz spent years of his life exploring these neighborhoods and trying to figure out the violence that comes with them. In his discussion, he spent a lot of time retelling the stories of the people mentioned in his book which was a nice reminder, but I also felt it was unnecessary considering most people there had already read the book. One of the topics he discussed though that stood out to me was the fact that we never seem to do anything to help these troubled neighborhoods and the idea of these social traps we are stuck in. By Wikipedia’s definition, social traps are situations in which a group of people act to obtain short-term individual gains, which in the long run leads to a loss for the group as a whole. Kotlowitz talked about how there is little change being made to these neighborhoods because everyone believes it is not their issue to deal with. That someone else will take care of it when in reality, if we all have this mindset, nobody is expected to make a change.

This concept made me make a connection to another article called the Cycle of Socialization by Bobbie Harro. Harro writes, “‘What does it have to do with me, anyway?’ say many agents. ‘This isn’t my problem. I am above this.’ We fail to realize that we have become participants just by doing nothing. This cycle has a life of its own. It doesn’t need our active support because it has its own centrifugal force. It goes on, and unless we choose to interrupt it, it will continue to go on. Our silence is consent.” (Harro 50). Even though all this violence is occurring within our own city we still don’t consider it an issue unless we are living through the situation. We stay silent and continue to let this dilemma drag on until we are able to realize that our silence has gotten nowhere. The violence in Chicago is our issue. Any issue occurring within our state should be an issue of ours. People will complain and argue about the dynamic and incredibly expensive state of Illinois, which is affecting every town and area in a different way, but they fail to realize in order to fix the whole state you must start small within each neighborhood. And fixing the poverty and violence in the Chicago neighborhoods is the first start.

Overall my experience at the UIC was an enjoyable one. I liked being able to explore the campus and walk around, but I was not as impressed with the presentation as I thought I would be. I was hoping for more discussion on the book rather than retelling the stories within the book, but it was still very interesting to hear from the author. It was also very unifying seeing so many people come together to listen and hear this topic and want to make a change.