This is the best writeup I've seen about Hyde Park on the south side of Chicago. It tells a lot about Obama and guys in his neighborhood.
"Palin would no doubt beg to differ, but Obama friend and lifelong resident Valerie Jarrett puts it this way: "Hyde Park is the real world as it should be. If we could take Hyde Park and we could help make more Hyde Parks around our country, I think we would be a much stronger country."
Blueprint of Diversity
Mainstream, as mainstream is commonly defined, is not Hyde Park.
The average white metropolitan resident lives in a neighborhood 80 percent white and only 7 percent black, says Northwestern University professor Mary Pattillo, who calls Hyde Park "anomalous for whites." Census tracts in the exurbs and the countryside tend to be even whiter.
By contrast, the 2000 census found that 43.5 percent of the 29,000 residents in Hyde Park proper called themselves white, 37.7 percent black, 11.3 percent Asian and 4.1 percent Hispanic. Another 3.4 percent answered "other." In economic terms, there are plenty of six-figure earners, yet one in six residents lives in poverty. The median household income is about $45,000, roughly the national average.
"Given all this," Pattillo says, "you can better understand the foreignness of a place like Hyde Park."
Uncommon Ground - washingtonpost.com
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