"Ghetto Bus Tour"

I came across an old copy of the Daily Illini from July in a shop on campus today, and picked it up because the full-page image of a woman with a microphone on a school bus and the headline "Touring the Projects" caught my eye.

The story highlights the work of Beauty Turner, a former resident of the Robert Taylor Homes in Chicago. Ms. Turner shows the $20-paying customers on her "Ghetto Bus Tour" that "all those news reports [about the violence and drug-activity in the projects] distorted what day-to-day life was like." She says, "All the horror stories that you heard about in the newspapers, it was not like that at all." These tours, she hopes, will help to raise awareness of her cause, alleviating the plight of former residents of the various projects that are being destroyed as part of the Chicago Housing Authority's $1.6 billion "Plan for Transportation." Where are they supposed to go? is what she wants to know. Quite wisely, she observes, "People that come in [to these neighborhoods] don't want to look across the street and see seven little black churches in a three-block radius. What they want to see is a Dominick's, and sushi joints and a Starbucks."

Don Babwin, the AP journalist who wrote the article, doesn't seem to be entirely convinced. Or he might just be presenting both sides of the argument. Anyway, he lists a few of what Turner refers to as the "horror stories" and mentions that the Housing Authority are accusing her of only showing the "bad things" and of "taking a circuitous route so she doesn't have to drive by the new stuff."

Frankly, I'm behind Turner. What exactly will the planned progress look like? Where are these former residents going to live, and where are the seven little black churches going to fit? Without knowing, admittedly, too much about this Plan for Transformation, I'm still a little skeptical.

That said, a tour? How useful is a tour? Babwin reports that Turner's clientele consists of "students, academics, activists, journalists and residents of Chicago and surrounding suburbs -- most of them white and visiting a part of Chicago they've only seen on television or from the expressway as they sped by." I'm torn, because I'm part of that group. I've never spent any time in any of those neighborhoods; I've seen them from the Dan Ryan. At the same time though, making a tourist attraction of people instinctively feels wrong to me. But what would be better?




In other news, classes started today. One of my profs, after placing a fan on the desk on one of my classmates, literally inches from his face, asked us to write down all of our contact information on these recycled business cards that she passed out. But they were already printed on both sides? And then she wrote on the board "Name," "Where you're from," and "Doing with your life" and asked us to introduce ourselves with that information.

Doing with my life? Oh I don't know, today I've been thinking about Ghetto Bus Tours. I'll probably get some coffee later.