Christopher Schroeder

Category: politics

  • So Long Sun-Times

    So Long Sun-Times

    I’ve discontinued my Chicago Sun-Times subscription, and am disappointed about doing so.

    The final factor was its required “Premium Edition” fee, which for those who had this fee waived is in fact a price increase. These editions are generally useless cash-grabs, and sometimes filled with AI hallucinations. Moreover, this fee is still not required by its cross-town competitor.

    I had switched my daily delivery subscription to the Sun-Times after it was acquired by Chicago Public Media. Since then, I’ve observed a reduction in its quality, such as fewer op-eds and less unique content, that only increases its contrast with its hedge-fund-owned rival.

    I’ve also asked for clarification of inconsistent and inaccurate price-increase processes, missed delivery promises, and subscriber-supporter differences, which are often unclear or even ignored. These issues become even more confusing given that the print newspaper is freely available in .pdf on its website.

    These observations and others, such as the increased content overlap between the Sun-Times and WBEZ or increased sponsor spots on the radio after the predictable federal funding loss, have initiated a seeming commercialized convergence, and produced a cross-platform credibility problem. The limited responses to my often ignored queries from a long-time donor have been less than reassuring.

    I realize that these conditions are part of larger concerns, such as a widespread performative progressivism. Regardless, I think these challenge the primary public media purpose, and its promise of facts and reason for its communities.

    I wonder in other words whether Chicago Public Media is the innovative institution that it describes itself as, and that I’ve long imagined it to be.

    I know that it will continue despite decreases in my modest financial support. I just hope that its leaders can restore my confidence in it as a crucial contributor to an informed Chicago and a functional American democracy.

    Such beliefs are perhaps more important now when hope for our future is harder to find.

  • The First Thing We Do

    The First Thing We Do

    I admire Zindy Marquez’s courage in confronting those of us who are retreating from “sustained advocacy, policy reform, civic engagement[,] and long-term commitments” to “racial justice” as these have become “politically and culturally unpopular,” and think she is right.

    I agree that those who believe that the United States isn’t still shaped by institutionalized inequality are ignoring “the very systems that continue to produce inequitable outcomes today,” and that such “coordinated” efforts misrepresent the past and distort the present to dictate an unequal future. And I accept her claims about the Chicago Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights and the communities with which it collaborates.

    I just think she has offered an incomplete account of the problem.

    Marquez to her credit mentions those who found the pursuit of social justice “easier in theory than in sustained practice,” but she ignores both the history of this inconsistency and the conditions of its continuation. In contrast, I would include the hypocrisy among activists, lawyers, teachers, and others

    Such conditions have been convincingly documented by Musa al-Gharbi (2024) in WE HAVE NEVER BEEN WOKE. He offers in this book a compelling account of the way that symbolic capitalists, or those whose status or prestige comes from the knowledge economy, have used social justice discourse, and especially cultural identity discussions, to increase their own influence while ignoring the underlying economic conditions, including their own position within such a hierarchy.

    Anyone who hasn’t read this book and cares about social justice should do so to discover the ways that we maintain existing inequalities while espousing the opposite. Such insights might make us more likely to make more productive changes, or at least more aware of the efforts we need to make if we’re to do so.

    These efforts could also challenge the persistent impression among some that progressives cannot be trusted to work and live with professional and personal integrity, which might mean more allies. If nothing else, these reduce the source of examples used by these “coordinated” critics.

    This fuller account might mean we avoid replacing one social hierarchy with another, which merely reverses this discrimination without moving the United States forward. At least it offers a more appealing account of institutionalized inequality and more convincing arguments about alternative, including shared sacrifices for a greater good.

    Those who pursue greater social justice do much harm by promoting our intellectual and moral superiority. Instead, we should demonstrate the existence of this discrimination, including the part we play in perpetuating it, and the greater benefits of more equitable options, and must do so in good faith over and over, and not just in our political ideas but also our personal choices with an obvious respect for everyone, including those with whom we disagree.

    That is a better, and potentially more productive, way to care for our entire community as we pursue a more perfect union, one in which everyone is more equal than we all are now.

  • Mixed At Most

    I hoped for more from The Mixed Marriage Project: A Memoir of Love, Race, and Family, which is the most recent book from Dorothy Roberts.

    In it, Roberts, who is the George A. Weiss University Professor of Law and Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania, offers an account of the summer she spent in a rented apartment near her Chicago childhood home where she sifted through boxes of her father’s research data, which she was bequeathed after the deaths of both her parents. She reads her father’s interviews of mixed-race married couples and reflects upon discovers about her parents, her younger twin sisters, and herself.

    Roberts’s father, who had been a Roosevelt University anthropology professor, began researching black-and-white marriages as a graduate student, and had seemingly been interested in such relationships even longer. For decades, he interviewed such couples, and was regularly assisted by his Jamaican wife Iris, whom he met when she was a Roosevelt student, and later graduate students.

    Roberts recalls that family discussions often involved her father’s research, and the book he was continually writing. She learns while reviewing these documents that he had two different contracts for this book for example but had to return both advances because he never completed a manuscript.

    Other discoveries seem more significant. For example she hadn’t realized the role that her mother had played in this project or the extent to which her parents’ marriage and even their family could have been part of her father’s research.

    These and others motivate Roberts to reconsider her college choice to identify as a black woman, and deny her white father, which could explain her reluctance to acknowledge her personal experience in her lectures and books. She also realizes that her father’s and her lifelong disagreement about race and relationships has been a persistent them in her own speaking and writing.

    Her father, who she claims never imposed his belief upon her, maintained that interracial intimacy could overcome racism, and consistently tried to convince her of that. She in contrast maintained that racism would end only when people recognize others of different races as equals, which is a prerequisite she believes for love.

    Roberts ultimately reconsiders her perspective, and admits to tempering her resistance to her father’s by the end of the summer. Nonetheless, she is still less hopeful than he, and still convinced of her own account.

    Roberts is right I think insofar that this book demonstrates the damage that race as a social construct can do to relationships and families even across generations. Her father for example waited until his mother had died to marry her mother, which then motivated his brother to disown him, and prevented her from meeting her Chicago cousins.

    I also admire her candor throughout this book, and appreciate the appeal of confronting her past and understanding its impact upon her present. I additionally can understand the way that this book could be considered the completion of the task her father started but never finished.

    Nonetheless, I wonder if Roberts not unlike her father hasn’t quite done so, if she like him still has unfinished business to complete. The reason is that this book seems more like a series of notes about and reflections upon these data and her experiences and less an interpretation and synthesis of these, which are expected of memoirs.

    This book clearly has a narrative frame — the summer Roberts spends near her Chicago childhood him reviewing her father’s research data — and an overarching insight — the complication of her race-and-relationships opinion — but needs more perspective if she intends to offer an account of her intellectual and emotional transformation. Perhaps a different organizing principle, or an additional draft, would enable her to complete the task she gave herself.

    I’m convinced having been married to a Filipina for thirty years that Roberts like her father has a book here and yet needs more sifting, sorting, and synthesizing to complete it.