Citizen and the Death of Eric Morse

While reading Citizen by Claudia Rankine, I was reminded of my first experience reading about race and understanding the complexities of racism in America. In eighth grade, I was introduced to the story of Eric Morse. At the age of five, he was pushed out of the Ida B. Wells projects by two young boys. When reading about the story and the book Our America, I found the most disturbing aspect to be the environment of the projects of Chicago. Violence was normalized to such an extreme, it was like the children there were surrounded by poison and were expected to suck it up and deal. The themes Rankine discusses in her book, particularly the way in which African Americans are invisible, applies to the projects of Chicago in the 90’s. If an entire neighborhood of white people were subject to the level of violence in Ida B. Wells, I feel like it would have been a much bigger issue. There would have been a stronger public outrage, but because this horrible incident occurred in an almost entirely black neighborhood, people tended to turn the other way. Almost as if this community and the family of Eric Morse were invisible. There was most definitely a strong public reaction, because this death involved such young children. But after the initial histeria, very little was done to fix the situation within the projects. No one looked at the community the young boys were living in and took concrete action to improve it.