I grew up in Peoria, Illinois when it was much more prosperous than it is today. Caterpillar still remains the dominant employer in Peoria. In the 50s, a high school graduate could get a job that could support an entire family. Until the Vietnam War, a lot of males did just that.
The Peoria I knew was very different than the Peoria of Richard Pryor. My parents chose to live in a part of Peoria that was almost completely white, thanks to redlining, with a newly built high school to accommodate the Baby Boomers that were coming. Being able to take advance placement courses, I placed out of a lot of first year courses when I went to Northwestern. That was not the case of all the high schools in the area.
Earlier this week, at a female high school basketball game, Morton, a very prosperous town about 15 miles from Peoria and defending champions last year, beat the East Peoria team 70-11. Both Morton and East Peoria are overwhelming white.
Here is the opening paragraph from the article about the game that appeared in the Peoria Journal Star
Morton’s Lady Potters 70, East Peoria 11
After a quarter, it was 25-2. At the half, 42-5. After three, 65-7. Yes, it sounds cruel. But what’s the good team supposed to do? Wear silver heels and prom dresses? Put on boxing gloves the last half? I guess they could carry umbrellas and before shooting ask, “Pretty please, may I?” Morton played 14 girls and would have suited up the grandmas in the third row except for the eligibility thing. Seriously. Seventy-eleven was an act of tender mercy. Morton’s really good while East Peoria’s really not. The cumulative score of their three meeting this season is 203-57.
I no longer live in Peoria. A friend on Facebook has a post about the Journal Star’s description of the game. I asked his permission to reprint what he wrote. Here is his response.
I find myself uniquely qualified to comment on your most recent story on the Morton-East Peoria game. After all, I spent more than a decade as a sportswriter (ironically inspired by you and your journey from Atlanta to IWU and reading your work in the The National and The Sporting News) and I’m now nearing the decade mark as a teacher -- all of them at East Peoria Community High School.
Today, I’ve seen you defend your writing as simply “praising Morton.” That defense simply does not fly when the first paragraph of a 70-11 game is described as a “tender mercy” and “the grandmas in the third row could have suited up and still won this game.” I could go on, but I think you know your bluff has been called. No sense in whipping a tired, old horse, right?
It’s no secret that EPCHS struggles athletically. It’s ok to kick a pro team that struggles -- the current incarnation of the New York Knicks or the Cincinnati Bengals, for example. After all, these are grown men getting paid sizable salaries because they are allegedly the best of the best. It serves notice to owners that they are not doing right by their fanbase by putting out an inferior product and still charging exorbitant amounts for tickets, parking and concessions.
It’s quite another to kick high-school athletes when they are down. You felt it right to run down some outstanding young ladies. Kids who are National Honor Society members, who have secured athletic and academic scholarships. One is even weighing an appointment to the U.S. Naval Academy. These kids weren’t laboring under the assumption that they were somehow Morton’s equals. How could they when they just secured their fourth win in 30 outings? They simply showed up with the goal of playing as hard as they could and letting the chips fall where they may.
Never mind that those chips are stacked against them daily.
When I started at East Peoria back in August of 2010, our poverty rate was 35% -- that is, a little more than 1 out of every 3 students qualified for free or reduced lunch. Today, that number is over 50%. Our middle class has been gutted by the disappearance of well-paying union jobs at Caterpillar that were replaced with service-industry jobs paying minimum wage in the levee district. I could bore you with statistics about how poverty affects the educational experience, but instead let’s continue to look at it from a real perspective.
Take, for example, tomorrow (Thursday). Tomorrow, my door will repeatedly open to reveal messengers from our Mom’s Who Care program. MWC is a remarkable program that came into existence because we had students in crisis -- kids who wore the same clothes daily, kids with no winter coat, kids with bread bags stuffed into the toes of their shoes to close the holes, kids who didn’t know where their next meal was going to come from. Today, these messengers will bring a lifeline to dozens of students in my junior class. You’ll see students come back to class loaded down with bags filled with food. And because these kids are so damn empathetic and caring, they’ll share with their friends who they know maybe didn’t get enough for their true need at home. Or they’ll open their doors to the kid who just had to extricate themselves from their situation at home (Don’t ask what kind of situations. You don’t want to know. The heavy burden that myself, my colleagues and our administrators carry is knowing that so many of our kids need help and being damn near helpless to provide it. It goes against the very reason so many of us got into teaching -- to help kids).
That’s the real rub of the deal. When the majority of our kids come to school, athletics is not the main thing on their mind. In a lot of cases, they can’t even think of playing because they have to hold down a job. When those who do play still have to work, our coaches see practice times cut to make sure the kids can still make it to work. There’s a decent chance academics may not be the main thing on their mind either. It may be that they know they can at least get two hot meals at school before going home to empty refrigerators and cupboards. It may be that they can charge their phone and ‘Chromebook because the power has been shut off at home. It may be that it’s a reprieve from an abusive parent or guardian. It could simply be a reprieve from a stressful family situation such as mom or dad losing a job or a sibling with medical issues.
And you know who’s on the front line fighting most of those battles? Our head coach, Khassandrae Brown. By day, she’s a dean for the back half of the alphabet. Visit her office at the end of most days and you’ll see a stack of outgoing paperwork that she’s worked tirelessly to whittle down...only to have our Dean’s Assistant bring in a new stack of paperwork for tomorrow. She is by turns a disciplinarian, an advisor, a counselor and, at heart, still a Special Education teacher. Contrast that with some coaches who hand out a worksheet or tell the kids to copy down the chapter vocabulary and then go back to obsessing over game tape.
There is no doubt that Morton is a fantastic program. I know full well how difficult it is to win one state championship, let alone four of the last five. You could have written a story that glorified the excellence that the Potters have come to expect of themselves. Instead, you took the low road. In doing so, it occurs to me that you cheated the Morton girls just as much you harmed ours. They deserve better as well.
I hope, good sir, that you will take some time to reflect on your role in this matter. May you once again find the writing style and skills that made you one of the most respected writers of a generation. I know I will be taking time to reflect on whether I should still look up to people I once wanted to be like.
Remember both of these high schools are overwhelmingly white.
The kind of descriptions of such a lopsided score in a high school basketball by the writer for the Journal Star is inexcusable.
More importantly, as my friend notes, there are real consequences to income inequality. In another context, the consequences of social inequality make Parasite such a powerful movie.
As someone pointed out to Bloomberg last night, people who aren’t billionaires work very hard, too.