When state rep Juliana Stratton, scarcely a year in office, announced she was joining J.B. Pritzker’s campaign, a scramble ensued to represent the Fifth District in her stead. While it’s a majority-black district, gerrymandering has stretched its boundaries from Goethe Street in the Gold Coast to 80th Street in Avalon Park, running through some of the richest and poorest areas of Chicago with just 25 east-to-west blocks at its widest point. Three of the four candidates still in the race are African-American. Among them is Ken Dunkin, who held this seat for 15 years before Stratton and doesn’t appear to be actively fund-raising—his candidate committee received $1.3 million from the Bruce Rauner-aligned Illinois Opportunity Project in 2016. His two serious opponents are Lamont Robinson—a businessman receiving support from 4th Ward alderman Pat Dowell, house speaker Mike Madigan, and many unions—and Dilara Sayeed, a 48-year-old former teacher and founder of an education start-up who’s presenting herself as the “unbought and unbossed” candidate in this race.
I grew up in the city, I’m a Head Start kid, lived in the city all my life until we got married. And then my husband’s job took us to Naperville. We lived there for about 15 years and I became the first tenured American Muslim teacher in DuPage County. Helped introduce a race-and-class pluralism curriculum into the district. . . .Naperville taught me a lot about how to collaborate and work with different kinds of people and be a bridge builder. And then we moved back to the city five years ago.
I will knock on a door in South Shore and someone will open the door and they will say, “Oh, wow!”-I am not the typical candidate. So I get questions, we share things, we realize how many things we have in common. When I say, “Last week I walked into a retail store and I was ignored by the saleswoman until somebody else walked in who didn’t look like me,” that resonates with people. Discrimination resonates. We live in a time when racism still resonates. We live in a time when people understand that to be a Head Start kid and then to be able to build a life, make it, live where I live-that’s a celebration for us.
So you see the gerrymandering as a good thing?
When you have a strong education system and economic security you are actually alleviating the issues around public safety—alleviating criminal activity, you’re alleviating illegal guns, crime. So all three of those issues impact the entire district.
You’re exactly right, but that’s not the perception.
