To the editors:
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
I am a black long-time Hyde Park resident. Appalled, I ask: Why did the Reader publish an outmoded type of sociological study which degraded Hyde Park, current race relations, human interactions, and the black communities? “Slim and Bart” by Mitchell Duneier [August 7] was excerpted from a dissertation published by the University of Chicago Press. That’s their problem.
Throughout the piece, Duneier referred to “the ghetto,” “on the margin of the ghetto,” “the black belt,” the “black districts,” and Stacy Adams shoes as the epitome of black men’s footwear. If Duneier’s print models were sociological books and studies from the 1940s, he needs to come into the 1990s. It was disgusting to read this drivel in the Reader. If the author was well-meaning, he missed the mark–by at least 50 years.
