Rebecca Maskos <rmasko1@uic.edu> Date: Tue, 6 Mar 2001
Mayor Richard Daley <MayorDaley@cityofchicago.org>,
As a German exchange student at the UIC Department of Disability Studies and Human Development, I am outraged and appalled by the aggressive and ignorant way in which my host institution destroys its historic neighborhood at Halsted and Maxwell Street.
Coming to Chicago, a City rich in working class history and with a tradition of racial diversity, I expected to encounter a huge variety of culturally and ethnically diverse neighborhoods, cherished and preserved by its city officials. Instead, I see the City of Chicago, accomplice of its state universities' imperialistic way of misappropriation, tearing down the US' cradle of urban electric blues and driving off its traditional inhabitants, often well respected blues musicians themselves.
I found remainders of Chicago's spirit buried under UIC's parking lots, and the city's blindness for cultural diversity and historical awareness to be a great disappointment for me. I am shocked by the way people of color, people with disabilities and other minorities are treated in the land that gave birth to civil rights and equal opportunity, in the City which once was the Midwest's safe harbour for African American (with Maxwell Street being its Ellis Island).
Being a Fulbright scholar, my mission is to promote an exchange of ideas between the US and my home country, Germany. In my function as a cultural messenger, I will take back this message, disappointed and frustrated by this American policy.
Deeply concerned,
Rebecca Maskos
DHD, College of Health and Human Development, UIC
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