On August 31st, I extolled Clybourne Park (now playing at Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theatre), Bruce Norris’s 2011 Pulitzer Prize-winning drama about white flight in 1959 and white gentrification in 2009. That same day, in an example of life imitating arts criticism, liberal gentrifiers sent a 40-man SWAT team to smash down the door of an extended family of about 30 underclass blacks still living in Chicago’s Lincoln Park on the 1800 block of N. Sheffield Ave. (That’s right between Steppenwolf on N. Halsted and the Crate & Barrel on N. Clybourn.) 

Answering a question left hanging by Clybourne Park — Just how ruthlessly far will today’s liberals go to make the desirable parts of the inner city white again? — Mayor Rahm Emmanuel's city government evicted the pit bull-owning Harris clan from the two adjacent homes they’ve owned since 1970. ... One Lincoln Park resident explained, “People don’t pay $20,000 a year in property taxes to have neighbors like these.”