YOUTH NOW
Chicago Is the Land of the Listener
Introducing my nonprofit, Young Chicago Authors
We live in a time of radical unlistening. We think while others speak, searching for a response, twitching for our phones, ready to clap back. We are awash in abstraction, generalizations, a broad brush stroke of others, a preconceived notion of their stories. We live in the lie of monolithic narratives, while in truth we are as different and distant from one another as the stars.
Tragically, ironically, Chicago is one of the most segregated cities in the country. Chicago has also, arguably, produced the world’s greatest listeners: Ida B. Wells reporting the horrors of the South to the deafness of the North; Upton Sinclair uncovering the inhumane conditions of the slaughterhouse at the dawn of industrialization; Ms. Gwendolyn Brooks tuning into the idiosyncrasies of a neighborhood and a people working; Studs Terkel turning the tape recorder into a megaphone of the masses.
We come from a long line of listeners—people who cared deeply about the goings-on and the specific experiences of the other, who made it their job to refrain from generalizations, in part because that would be lazy journalism (or verse-journalism, as Ms. Brooks called it) and in part because generalizations are a kind of erasure, erasure is a…
