Can I get one autographed by Paul Sereno? For the person who has everything: a California company is selling fossilized dinosaur dung at $11.95 a poop.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Why Daley will win, according to Salim Muwakkil in In These Times (October 31): “Few black leaders in this city are willing to contest the argument that an African-American candidate must be fielded. Black nationalism [as opposed to Harold Washington’s coalition-building] is the flavor of the times….Structural economic changes have shrunk the economic pie for all Americans and increased the competition for scarcer resources. And because of the demonizing of affirmative action policies, that competition is often framed in racial terms….The absence of a viable, race-transcendent ideology is also feeding the growth of nationalist politics. With the discrediting of Marxism–along with its various offshoots within the African diaspora–and the widespread disenchantment with the interracial ideals that inspired the civil rights movement, race-based ideologies are the only ones left standing.”
“Let us not indirectly address [racial conflict] or avoid the discussion by hiding under an effort to create a ‘Marshall Plan for the Cities,’” writes Wilson Riles Jr. in Poverty & Race (September/October). “That Plan is needed and may be more politically palatable than reparations [for slavery and subsequent discrimination]. However, if what was stolen from African-Americans is not directly spoken of in the Plan, a likely result would include propelling low-income African-Americans out of the urban core. Cities would be successfully rehabilitated, but the conditions of the African-American community would not change. It has happened before.”
