Apartheid. USA 1988

December 28, 1986:

On Chicago's South Side stand the high-rise buildings of the Robert Taylor Homes, the world's largest public housing project, where 20.000 residents, virtually all black, live in concentrated poverty. Victoria Barton looks younger than 17 years old. Her first child is expected in February. The unmarried teenager who lives in the project with her mother and some of her nine sisters and brothers, admits she is worried about feeding and caring for an infant. However, a special project is set up that will see to it that expectant mothers receive prenatal care so that their children escape the social and medical costs of low birth weight. The under-

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taking, supported by an unusual mix of government and private financing, is largely the inspiration of Irving B Harris, a Chicago businessman who has poured 20 million dollars into philanthropic projects.^12.

Professor Ross K Baker of the political science department of Rutgers University published on the Op-Ed page of the Times some comments under the headlines EXPECT MORE RACISM. ‘We need to be reminded that blacks and whites live side by side harmoniously in very few places in America - even though overt expressions of racism are no longer fashionable and part of the popular culture. Especially television sit-coms, depict blacks more favorably than it did a generation ago.’ Pointing out that blacks remained economically the disadvantaged in America, Professor Baker continued, ‘Whites' exorcism of racism must begin not with pieties but with bedrock efforts to eliminate the economic gulf between blacks and whites. Old-fashioned Democratic largesse is not the answer. Black and white Americans have lived together in a political system that has been legally color blind for only one generation. The onset of that generation was preceded by Jim Crow in many parts of the country. We are so remote from the melancholy past that we will not be contaminated by its horrors. Slavery has been dead merely 121 years - not long in a nation's history. We are not so far along on the road of progress that upbeat sit-coms depicting black-white harmony and TV's black role models can be taken as a measure of real progress.’^13.

12. The New York Times, from a report by Kathleen Teltsch

13. The New York Times, page opposite the editorial page