To the editors:
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
But the juxtaposition of white neighborhoods and black neighborhoods is an uneasy one. As black families seek to improve their living conditions by moving into white neighborhoods, white home owners fear that the patterns of the 60s and 70s may reappear. In the last 12 months interest rates have fallen dramatically and, once again, conditions are conducive to “white flight.” At the same time, the irony of the 60s and 70s continues: blacks who move into white neighborhoods do so not because they hope that the neighborhood will resegregate but, on the contrary, because they hope to live in a stable integrated neighborhood.
Thirty-five years after Brown v. The Board of Education residential segregation continues as the norm of this nation. Nineteen years have passed since the Kerner Report warned that the United States was moving towards two separate but unequal societies. Yet integration itself as a public issue is moribund. It is not fashionable to argue against American apartheid; Americans prefer to offer summary judgment to South Africans instead, and the American dilemma so clearly foreseen by the Myrdals moves inexorably towards its Armageddon — not in this century, but, if the evil of segregation is not destroyed, inevitably in the next.
