
In schools and community centers around the city, in every ZIP code in Chicago, we create spaces where people can tell their stories—spaces that bring together people who have historically been kept apart by red-lines and gang-lines and gerrymandered wards.
Tragically, ironically, Chicago is one of the most segregated cities in the country. Chicago has also, arguably, produced the world’s greatest listeners: Ida B. Wells reporting the horrors of the South to the deafness of the North; Upton Sinclair uncovering the inhumane conditions of the slaughterhouse at the dawn of industrialization; Ms. Gwendolyn Brooks tuning into the idiosyncrasies of a neighborhood and a people working; Studs Terkel turning the tape recorder into a megaphone of the masses.
We live in a time of radical unlistening. We think while others speak, searching for a response, twitching for our phones, ready to clap back. We are awash in abstraction, generalizations, a broad brush stroke of others, a preconceived notion of their stories. We live in the lie of monolithic narratives, while in truth we are as different and distant from on…