Despite the record highs in temperature, snowflakes were seen in South side Chicago.

After a mega-long ten hour ride on the MegaBus, our group arrived in Chicago at 6am Sunday morning.  We made our way to our church, unpacked, talked for a little while and then decided to get some breakfast and explore the city.  We ventured all over town, seeing lots of things in the process, and ended our evening by watching the KU game at Kincade’s, a local restaurant owned by KU alumni.  As Chicago is home to many KU alumni and fans, the environment at Kincade’s would have made you think you were in Lawrence.  Needless to say, after little-to-no sleep on the MegaBus followed by several miles of walking in record-setting 80+ degree weather, we were all pretty exhausted when we got home to the church Sunday evening.

Monday morning, John and I woke up at 5:30 to catch our 6:24 bus that would take us 16 miles to the Chicago’s notorious south side, home to Perspectives Leadership Academy where we would be shadowing and assisting Miss Warshaw, a Teach for America high-school humanities teacher.  Details about our classroom experiences will surely follow in future blogs, but I wanted to use this opportunity to draw a connection from our initial experience back to something that we learned in our “mini-break”.

For our ‘mini-break’, our group had an informative question and answer session with a Teach for America representative from Kansas City named Jeff.  In this session, in discussing the inequity in the public education system in Chicago, he showed us a graph illustrating the stark racial segregation throughout the city.  In the graph, different racial and ethnic populations were represented with red, green, and blue dots that were highly concentrated in different parts of the city yet never mixing or overlapping.  Seeing this representation in the graph was ‘eye-opening’, but as John and I made the hour-and-a-half bus ride to the south side, this stark segregation, that for us at one point had been represented by mere dots on a graph, was now being represented with actual warm-bodies and faces.  When we boarded the bus in Chicago’s affluent Lincoln Park neighborhood, all of the other passengers were white; when we descended the bus 16 miles away on the south side, all of the other passengers were black.  The only white faces that John and I would see for the rest of the day, bar none, were those of teachers employed at the school.   

For us (two white hetero-sexual, middle-class, male students living in Lawrence, Kansas), being the “minority”, and the feelings that come along with it, is not something that we are accustomed to feeling.  I can’t even count how many classes I’ve had at KU where every single student in the class, except for one, was white.  Furthermore, going back to Cody Charles’ discussion on privilege, being a part of the “majority” is something that John and I are used to being, whether consciously or subconsciously, on a daily basis—just as the able-bodied person doesn’t recognize the hassle of entering Strong Hall without using the steps until they themselves break their leg and have had to maneuver around campus in a wheelchair or crutches. Well, sticking with that analogy, we found out today what it was like "to take the back door into Strong".

As John and I walked along the sidewalk in search of the entrance to the Perspectives Leadership Academy, students were huddled around the doors or sitting on the steps talking amongst each other waiting for school to start, when a smiling young girl broke from her conversation with a group of giggling young girls to greet us, “Good morning snowflakes!”