Now that two mornings have passed, it’s safe to say we aren’t going to wake up from this nightmare. Among the angry, despairing reactions to Trump’s victory, I keep seeing an impulse to blame it on progressives’ failure to empathize with his supporters. Because many of us in “blue” enclaves never have to deal with “red” voters, the thinking goes, we’re unable to understand the source of their values—and thus we can’t do the hard work of directly confronting those values we find toxic.
I’m writing to make explicit that the Reader‘s platform has always been and will continue to be open to those communities—women, people of color, immigrants, LGBTQ people, Muslims and other persecuted religious minorities, the disabled, the poor. Your stories are not only welcome here but also necessary, and not just because they can lend strength to the vulnerable. Though distribution of the Reader‘s print edition is confined to one of the bluest cities in the country, the Internet is everywhere—and every such story we publish has the potential to be the dart that bursts someone’s bubble of unexamined or unchallenged privilege. This is a permanent call for story pitches, then—for music-related stories that speak to and about those Chicagoans (and Americans) most in need of support and respect in the dark years to come. I especially encourage pitches from writers who belong to the communities in question—women, people of color, LGBTQ people, et cetera—but any writer with a generous heart can help.
