My own real life experience with Chicago and race with cab drivers and a real life chicago cop.
In reading the diary Overheard on the Bus I was taken back to my own wonderful transit experience in Chicago. I was there for a conference, my first foray into the city (been through the airport many times). I was lucky enough to get a way discounted room rate at the Palmer House that actually cost less than a suburban, aging, Birmingham Marriott Suites I once stayed in. One night during the conference, my business partner and I went to Buddy Guy's blues bar. We had a good time there with great music, but I'm kinda old and tired and left by ten pm. Great music, mixed crowd, memorable experience. My partner stayed on, made friends with Buddy Guy's brother and went with him to an after hours blues club where they listened to music till 4 in the morning. So far, awesome city, racial division not so much, people receptive, generous, and my partner had a once in a lifetime experience because he really loves the blues.
So as a part of the conference there was a party at a building on the end of this long amusement boardwalk place whose name I don't remember. Chicago people will know. It was a great place, Second City did a comedy set, and my experience in Chicago till then was that it was a really great city.
When I left, I took one of the cabs that was lined up at the entrance to the boardwalk area. The cab driver was an African guy, that is to say a guy from a place in Africa who was speaking a language into his cell phone that I had never heard before. We were at the left turn to my hotel, waiting for traffic to clear when the cab behind us honked and rammed the rear bumper of my cab. I looked back and there was this white cab driver with an Archie Bunker hat shouting at us. He rammed us again while screaming at us. I've only been driving for the last 40 years, but I could see that with on-coming traffic there was no way for my guy to turn. The other cabbie rammed us again and my driver got out. The white cabbie got out and began a racist tirade and spit in my cabbies face. None of the usual racial slurs were left out. This pissed me off, so I got out.
And then from the next lane over, a guy in an SUV rolls down his window and says he's Chicago PD and tells my driver that he will take him in if he doesn't get back into his cab right now. So I start to tell the cop that the other guy rammed our car. He just looked at me and told me to shut up and get in the car. He said nothing to the white cabbie.
So we got back in the car. As the car pulled up to the hotel, my driver had tears pouring down his face. He was devastated. I tried to comfort him and assure him that jerks like the other cabbie didn't rate thinking about, but we all know that those are pathetic excuses for this kind of treatment by the other cabbie and by the cop. This was one of the most wretched experiences of racism I have seen because it was personal racism that was condoned by a cop. Is it possible that in this great American city that this is the usual treatment for Africans?
The other diary, "Overheard on the Bus" presents a more benign picture. There were commenters didn't believe it, thought it was a fabricated feel-good story. I confess that after my Chicago experience, if the diary is true, then I feel much better about Chicago. But my experience reinforces the need for the dialogue that Barack Obama started. I am certain that that white cabbie is scared that his business is being eroded by foreigners and is terrified that his livelihood is disappearing. So, the dialogue started by the speech is not just important, to me it is imperative and urgent, because I never want to see another human being demeaned in this way.
And I want an administration that keeps the promise of America so that a white cabbie will realize where his real problems are coming from--not from an African driver, but from the corporate influence that denies us all lives free from worries about health care, retirement, our jobs, our futures.