Search

Given the size and importance of Chicago's Polish community, the Chicago story, as pridefully told in this book, stands in for the history of Polish America, interweaving the affairs of neighborhood parishes and local organizations with the general history of Poles in the United States, which those parishes and organizations played a great role in making. Pacyga demonstrates that a Polish Chicago still exists, but shows that it is a new Polish Chicago comprising Solidarity- and post-Solidarity-era immigrants and ethnic Poles who have moved to Chicago's suburbs. But wishful liberal nostrums which paper over the long history of racialism in America or rely upon rainbow fantasies to transcend it fail to appreciate how deeply entrenched white racism still is in American society and American institutions; how deeply white supremacism has penetrated portions - perhaps large - of contemporary America, despite no less palpable racial progress; and how difficult it will be to root these out when, it appears (in the wake of the 2020 presidential election) that sizable numbers of white Americans would rather keep racial matters in America much as they have been since the end of slavery days. "Chicago's Polonia lives on", Pacyga writes, "not simply in memory but as a vibrant Polish American community in both the city and suburbs... Chicago's Polonia has been yet again resurrected anew" (p. 267). [Extracted from the article]