Chicago’s South Side is drowning in excuses, dependency and decay
As I recover from foot surgery in Chicago, my break from the Walk Across America has given me time to do more than reflect. I’ve seen so many things on my walk so far through small towns, big cities, ghettos, suburbs, open-air drug markets, posh farmers markets and even the occasional country market. Throughout it all, I’ve seen Americans of so many stripes, and they’re all moving forward, moving with a sense of purpose in their work and in their belief in God.
And when I returned home to the South Side of Chicago, I was struck by the stillness I felt here.
It pains me to say this, but it was as if I had never left. The same problems remained. People complained about the same issues they complained about the year before, and the year before that, not recognizing that fateful pattern of doom. Although my team has greatly reduced violence in our immediate community, it remains high on the surrounding blocks. Herds of teens continue to raid the Loop, wreaking havoc and destroying what others have built.
The pattern is obvious and undeniable. On my Walk Across America, I saw people moving toward something better, no matter if it was one step a day or 20,000. They moved forward in the faith of a good life and an eternal reward.
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Here on the South Side, while many do struggle toward something better, the current moves overwhelmingly in the wrong direction.
The current moves toward dysfunction, not potential. Toward dependency on government, not self-reliance. Toward violence, not two-parent households. Toward the instant gratification of the drug trade, not the inner strength that comes from lasting education. And anyone who dares to swim against this current gets mocked as an Uncle Tom.
My time away revealed something I had grown too close to see clearly, and that is how fiercely we protect the dysfunction around us. It has become our identity, our internal compass, our security blanket. It is almost as if we would not know who we were without it.
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I have had many supporters in my efforts to build a transformative Leadership and Economic Opportunity Center on the South Side. But I have faced far more criticism — and I want to sit with that for a moment, because it breaks my heart. Criticism for trying to get kids off the streets and into a safe environment where they can simply be children. Criticism for bringing trades — construction, electrical work, skilled work — so young Americans can reverse the fortunes of their lives. Criticism for believing that the young people on my block deserve opportunity, not just sympathy. For these things, I am called a black conservative, as if that were an insult rather than a description of a man who believes his community deserves better than what it is being offered.
These attacks have produced exactly the opposite of progress.
I want to be honest about something that no politician in this city will say out loud. Unlike Mayor Brandon Johnson’s belief, white supremacy does not run these streets. I saw the KKK march in the streets of Kenton, Tennessee, when I was a boy, but I’ve never seen them march since then, and never in Chicago.
There is no external force orchestrating our destruction from the shadows. If there is any racism holding us back today, it is the soft bigotry of low expectations, the quiet condescension of voices that tell us we are permanent victims who need government programs instead of God, family and hard work. They peddle a lie that feels like comfort: It’s not your fault, the system is rigged, just vote the right way and everything will change. And while they are saying it, another generation slips away.
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Our worst enemy is post-1960s liberalism and our own unwillingness to confront what it has done to us.
I will tell you another truth, and I ask you to hear it the way I heard it, not with defensiveness, but with the grief of a man who loves his people deeply.
On my Walk Across America, several Americans told me they feel that everything that could be done for Black Americans has been tried. Government programs. Affirmative action. Protests. Movements. Decades of bending institutions and budgets in our direction. And still, they said, nothing gets better. When I heard that, I did not get angry at them. I got sad. Because they are not entirely wrong. And the question that haunts me is not whether America has failed us, but whether we have failed ourselves by choosing the comfort of our grievances over the hard work of our freedom.
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We have squandered so much by prizing dysfunction over progress. We have valued victimhood over merit, a strange fate, since none of us suffered slavery and most of us never lived under legal segregation. Yet we reach backward to the past for our identity instead of forward to a future where our talents and our character write our own story.
If we are to join the rest of America on the path forward, we must kill every excuse available to us. We must kill the excuse of systemic racism as an all-purpose answer to self-inflicted wounds. We must kill the excuse that past oppression permanently defines present potential. We must kill the excuse that this country is irredeemably hostile to us and wants us back in bondage. Not because our history is not real — it is — but because these excuses are anchors, not life preservers. They do not protect us. They drown us.
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I say all of this as a man who has given his body to this mission. I have walked across this country on a broken heel for the children of the South Side. I have slept in strange places, fought through pain, and kept moving when everything in me wanted to stop. I did not do that because I think our community is hopeless. I did it because I know it is not.
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Yet I remain hopeful. Deeply, stubbornly, biblically hopeful. Jeremiah 29:11 tells us that God has plans for us — plans to prosper us and not to harm us, plans to give us a future. That promise does not belong only to the comfortable. It belongs to the South Side too.
If enough of us start swimming against this current, there is always the chance we can reverse its direction. We have no choice but to try.
And we will be all the better for it.