A hundred years later Trib still clueless on Chicago's racial divide

The Trib’s extensive coverage today of the centenary of the 1919 Chicago Race Riots is commendable.  While its history of the riots is detailed and informative, its editorial ‘Chicago’s race riots of 1919 and the epilogue that resonates today’ offers no value to resolving  the century long legacy of crime, poverty and despair that plague Chicago’s minority communities today. The Trib decries that prejudice and its sibling, public policy discrimination, continue. Yet, while bearing no overt prejudice toward minority communities, the Trib has spent the last century decrying virtually every societal program that will use tax dollars to rebuild decaying neighborhoods, giving those without hope jobs and opportunities that will uplift the entire community. Those proposing such programs  are  labeled ‘big government social experimenters’ who must be  kept out of the pockets of the well off. In addition, while over 2,000 annually are killed or wounded on Chicago’s mean streets, the Trib is AWOL on the need for sensible gun regulation to reduce the carnage by reducing the weapons of death flooding poor communities.

Simply calling for an end to prejudice offers nothing to communities left behind. If every prejudiced person somehow repented, the joblessness, gun violence and despair would continue apace. The highly influential and widely read Chicago Tribune must do better than “Can’t we simply  all get along”?