Chicago’s real crime story – City Journal

City Journal

Barack Obama has exploited his youthful stint as a Chicago community organizer at every stage of his
political career. As someone who had worked for grassroots “change,” he said, he was a different kind of
politician, one who could translate people’s hopes into reality. The media lapped up this conceit,
presenting Obama’s organizing experience as a meaningful qualification for the Oval Office.
This past September, a cell-phone video of Chicago students beating a fellow teen to death coursed over
the airwaves and across the Internet. None of the news outlets that had admiringly reported on Obama’s
community-organizing efforts mentioned that the beating involved students from the very South Side
neighborhoods where the president had once worked. Obama’s connection to the area was suddenly lost
in the mists of time.
Yet a critical blindness links Obama’s activities on the South Side during the 1980s and the murder of
Derrion Albert in 2009. Throughout his four years working for “change” in Chicago’s Roseland and
Altgeld Gardens neighborhoods, Obama ignored the primary cause of their escalating dysfunction: the
disappearance of the black two-parent family. Obama wasn’t the only activist to turn away from the
problem of absent fathers, of course; decades of failed social policy, both before and after his time in
Chicago, were just as blind. And that myopia continues today, guaranteeing that the current response to
Chicago’s youth violence will prove as useless as Obama’s activities were 25 years ago.

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