Renegade Dreams: Living Through Injury In Gangland Chicago

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Author: Laurence Ralph

Pages: 272

Size: 3.132,94 Kb

Publication Date: September 15,2014

Category: Urban



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Every morning Chicagoans awaken to the same stark headlines that read like some macabre score: “13 shot, 4 dead over night over the city,” and just about any early morning the same elision occurs: what of the nine additional victims? Much like war, a lot of our concentrate on inner-town violence is on the loss of life toll, but the actuality is that a lot more victims live to find a later date and must cope with their accidents―both physical and mental―for the others of their lives. Eventually he implies that the many accidents these people bring―like dreams―are an essential type of resilience, and that people should all take into account the ghetto differently, much less an abandoned island of unmitigated violence and its own helpless victims but as a community, full of homes, as part of the bigger society in which most of us live, together, among each other. Walking the roads of 1 of Chicago’s most violent neighborhoods―where the neighborhood gang has been energetic for a lot more than fifty years―Laurence Ralph talks with people whose lives are irrecoverably broken, seeking to know how they cope and how they could be better helped.

Heading deep right into a West Part neighborhood most Chicagoans just know from news reviews―a place where kids have been shot simply for crossing the incorrect road―Ralph unearths the fragile humanity that fights to remain alive there, to thrive, against all chances. He talks to moms, grandmothers, and pastors, to activists and gang leaders, to the maimed and the hopeful, to aspiring rappers, sportsmen, or those that simply want secure passage to college or a steady work. It’s not really a warzone but a community, a location where people’s dreams are projected against the background of unemployment, dilapidated casing, incarceration, addiction, and disease, the countless hallmarks of urban poverty that harden like therefore many scars within their lives. Gangland Chicago, he shows, is really as challenging as ever. Recounting their tales, he wrestles using what it means to become an outsider in a location like this, whether his try to understand, to help, may not in reality inflict its own harm. Renegade Dreams is certainly their story.


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