I am an uppity Negress.
I used to wear a black T-shirt with that phrase emblazoned on it in white bubble letters. I consider myself uppity not in the sense of being bougie or stuck-up. I’m uppity by speaking up as a black woman. I don’t let race or gender hinder or box me in.
Historically, whites have used the word “uppity” or phrase “uppity nigger” to describe blacks who didn’t “stay in their place.” Those black women and men who didn’t capitulate to white authority sometimes faced violence.
I thought about that shirt and the concept of being uppity after the death of suburban Chicago native Sandra Bland. She spoke up for herself and challenged a Texas state trooper who pulled her over after a minor traffic violation in July 2015. A dashcam video showed that the trooper threatened to Taser her. He dragged Bland out of her car when she asked why she had to put out her cigarette. He slammed her on the ground. Then Bland, 28, sat in jail in an orange jumpsuit for three days, and authorities say she committed suicide. All for not using her turn signal after the trooper tailed her and she sought to move out his way.
I covered Bland’s funeral at her home church, DuPage African Methodist Episcopal, in a western Chicago suburb. Family and friends wore all white. They talked about how the Black Lives Matter movement inspired Bland so much that she returned to her college alma mater in Texas for a new job. Joyfulness filled the sanctuary as they remembered her young life. Bland’s family disputes that Sandy, as she’s known, hanged herself in a jail cell. U.S. senator Dick Durbin spoke about the need for her death to be investigated. On his trip to Chicago for the funeral, he observed that plenty of people change lanes without using their signal and still keep their lives.
Outside Bland’s funeral, strangers held signs reading “#sayhername.” In cases of police- and state-sponsored violence, the stories of black women have largely been rendered invisible because society isn’t used to standing up for black women; black men dominate the narrative around violence. Bland’s story is a notable exception. Her death is a tragedy, no matter if she committed suicide. An overly aggressive law enforcement official didn’t like that she asked him questions. He bullied her and must have viewed Bland as an uppity negress who didn’t submit to his authority. Watching the video of their exchange made my stomach hurt.
I also remembered my own run-in with Chicago police at age 19 while I was home from college on Christmas break.
It was 1995, and a group of black childhood friends and I decided to go ice skating downtown. Three of us stood inside the warming center to rent skates when a police officer singled us out and ordered us to leave. Why? I asked. He didn’t say. I was embarrassed to be pulled out of line and felt I had the right to know why, especially when I hadn’t done anything wrong.
After we went outside near the rink, a sea of white police officers descended. One officer threw a friend on the ground. I screamed, “What’s going on?” and then another officer placed me in handcuffs. Then I yelled, “Get this white bitch off me!” The officers threw three of us into a police van. The other two friends wisely remained quiet. I knew I’d gone too far as we were hauled off to jail, but I had no idea why the situation had escalated.
Turns out one friend had exchanged words with an employee, who felt threatened and called the police. As the police instructed her to leave, she told them she still had friends on the premises. That’s why the officer interrupted our ice skate rental.
Once at the police station, officers made fun of us for being college girls. In return, we retorted that out of all the criminals in the city, they handcuffed three teenagers. They brought us in for resisting arrest. We were searched, they took off most of our clothes, our mug shots were taken, then we were put in separate cells with bologna sandwiches. I kept quiet and went to sleep. By now humility had set in.
Our disappointed and worried parents came to get us. My mother was in tears. That night my parents gave me and my siblings the don’t-talk-back-to-police talk. I should’ve known better. In high school, I drove a 1984 brown Chevy Bonneville. I remember instances of police officers pulling me over only to check my ID. Without first seeing me, I think they assumed I was a guy because my car was seen as a “gang car.” During those episodes, I kept quiet and patient.
Still, my parents didn’t blame me completely for the ice skating debacle. I know I shouldn’t have cursed at the female officer, but rage had boiled in my silly 19-year-old veins. Three months later, I returned to Chicago for my court date. The police report said I screamed “bitch” repeatedly at the top of my lungs—which was untrue; I only said it once—and officers feared for their safety. I am five feet tall and probably weighed 90 pounds. I had no weapon on me. The case got thrown out.
My story could easily have turned out worse.
I was no martyr during my police run-in, but I recognize how quickly things can turn for people without power faced with people in power. I have no doubt that race played a role in our arrest. Why was backup called? Why were we handcuffed? Why weren’t we treated like teenagers? I asked questions and never got an answer outside of the silver bracelets slapped on my wrists.
Having a police story is almost like a rite of passage for black people.
* * *
From New Orleans to Ferguson to Baltimore, we are having another national conversation around race, institutional racism, police brutality and a rigged criminal justice system.
I see the deliberateness of segregation. I remain steadfast in my belief that segregation is crippling because it’s the common denominator in innumerable challenges in black communities, from housing to jobs to food access to education to violence. Communities should be uplifted without conceding to whiteness as superior, and investment should never cease in black communities. But unofficial “separate but equal” isn’t working out too well for us. Banks, businesses and housing and education policies participate in and perpetuate segregation.
Exploring contemporary segregation in Chicago and its insidious effects has challenged me. Throughout my reporting, some people have questioned whether my antisegregation stance is anti-black and pro-white. No, it is not. That said, the term “black segregation” sounds as if black people are to blame for the conditions that have thrust them into onerous circumstances. Often black space is talked about solely from a deficit angle. We don’t use the term “segregation” to describe white homogenous areas. Martin Luther King Jr. once said that segregation is the Negro’s burden and America’s shame.
The phrase “white segregation” should be applied frequently. White segregation is furthered, both historically and currently, with housing, banking and school policies. In Racism Without Racists: Color-Blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in the United States, sociologist Eduardo Bonilla-Silva describes the high level of white social and residential segregation. Nothing irks a white person more than to be called racist because often that conjures up card-carrying membership in the Ku Klux Klan or unflinching use of the word “nigger.” That narrow definition of racism gives the illusion that whites are somehow color-blind. Bonilla-Silva refers to white segregation as a white habitus, “a racialized, uninterrupted socialization process that conditions and creates whites’ racial taste, perceptions, feelings, and emotions and their views on racial matters.”1 The consequences of “white habitus” promote a sense of white belonging and solidarity while projecting negative views toward nonwhites. White segregation turns blacks from the white orbit, reinforcing stereotypes, prejudice and the idea that discrimination is abstract. Segregation is one of the spokes in white supremacy, and it should be dismantled.
Still, black communities are beautiful and complicated places. Chatham produced me. Bronzeville’s struggles don’t cancel out a strong legacy. Englewood is full of neighbors who care about their community.
Even the First Lady basks in that exquisiteness.
In a 2015 commencement speech at King College Prep High School on Chicago’s South Side, Michelle Obama instructed graduates to seize the narrative about their communities:
Too often, we hear a skewed story about our communities: a narrative that says that a stable, hardworking family in a neighborhood like Woodlawn or Chatham or Bronzeville is somehow remarkable, that a young person who graduates from high school and goes to college is a beat-the-odds kind of hero. I can’t tell you how many times people have met my mother and asked her, “How did you ever manage to raise kids like Michelle and Craig in a place like South Shore?” And my mom looks at these folks like they’re crazy, and she says, “Michelle and Craig are nothing special. There are millions of Craigs and Michelles out there, and I did the same thing that all those other parents did—I loved them, I believed in them, and I didn’t take any nonsense from them.”
This is the story of the South Side I lived. Black life in Chicago is a place of loveliness and contradictions and negotiation. And not just for black males; I’m speaking for a particular portion of South Side black girls as well. Knowing how to talk to police. Knowing how to interact with a cross section of socioeconomic black people. Knowing how to switch between myriad black and white worlds.
Growing up, we had our garage broken into and heard police sirens. I learned how to ski and play the piano, dance to the percolator and the waltz, be a debutante and a Girl Scout, fix my face in the fancy department stores and on the subway.
I learned how to be down and uppity.
* * *
Chicago’s slogan is that we are a city of neighborhoods.
The mentality is both provincial and identity-driven. Our neighborhoods connect and divide us.
Can black neighborhoods achieve equity? How can the city be desegregated? Chicago’s not a snow globe waiting to be shaken up to disperse people all over. One of the perplexities of Chicago is that diversity and segregation can go together easily within the same landscape.
As I contemplate these questions, I think about a neighborhood that’s organically changing despite its filthy racial history.
Black kids grew up intuitively knowing not to roam Bridgeport. If they crossed the invisible “no blacks allowed” sign at the border, someone might hiss “nigger” at them. The White Sox baseball park offered the only safe space for blacks to wander, because whites knew that black spectators would return to their own neighborhoods after the ninth inning. Besides sorry race relations, the white South Side neighborhood is noted for its historic political heft; Bridgeport produced five Chicago mayors—including two with the last name Daley.
This traditional Irish enclave, mothership to the Democratic political machine, has a long history of animosity toward blacks. A commission that investigated Chicago’s 1919 race riot concluded that it was not only impossible for Negroes to live there but dangerous. In the 1950s, whites routinely used violence to keep blacks from moving in. Even decades after the tumultuous transition toward open housing in Chicago that shifted racial patterns, Bridgeport remained mostly white, its parishes and ethnic clubs intact. Working-class whiteness endured in the small frame homes and bungalows while Latinos comprised a small and growing demographic on one side of the neighborhood. Mayor Richard M. Daley stunned the city in 1993 when he moved out of Bridgeport to a nascent neighborhood on the outskirts of downtown, perhaps understanding that a mayor who purported to be the mayor for all had to physically leave his roots behind.
The mayor’s move notwithstanding, racial incidents in Bridgeport continued.
In 1997, a posse of white teenagers beat a black boy into a coma. In 2005, a Confederate flag was draped over a wooden porch across the alley where my sister’s black friend lived. When I asked why he lived there after I dropped him off one night, he responded pragmatically: cheap rent. In 2012, a black comedian and his wife settled with a white couple over a housing discrimination lawsuit after the white couple backed out of a verbal agreement to sell them their house.
An expressway separates Bridgeport from Bronzeville. In 2006, the city shut it down for major repairs. The road work allowed me to get reacquainted with the neighborhood since one of the alternative routes ran straight through Bridgeport.
As I sped along, I spotted new bars, art galleries and signs in Chinese and Spanish. The acclaimed Chinese American artists the Zhou brothers opened an 87,000-square-foot art center in 2004 that hosts studio space, exhibits and parties. Two rising black male artists used studio space there, and when I visited them, they gave me a knowing look that said, “Yeah, two black Chicago dudes in Bridgeport. How did this happen?” I stumbled upon Pancho Pistolas, a Mexican restaurant with tasty margaritas and al fresco seating. Inside, the place served a surprisingly diverse crowd that included black patrons.
When Brandi, my Chatham childhood friend with whom I had my “L” train race moment, moved back to Chicago, I suggested we meet at Pancho Pistolas for lunch. “Bridgeport?” she asked incredulously. “Yes, trust me,” I replied. “It’s weird, but Bridgeport is changing.”
I experienced some cognitive dissonance hanging out in Bridgeport; it’s hard not to think of the neighborhood’s legacy. I’ve never been chased out, yelled at or felt uncomfortable. I also only go to places that express openness.
Today more than half of Bridgeport is composed of Asian and Hispanic households. The other half is white. The neighborhood isn’t a model of racial utopia by any means. Blacks visit and leave. An influx of artists, spacious new townhomes and Michelin Bib Gourmand—a coveted dining list—restaurants have not gentrified Bridgeport. A blue-collar aesthetic exists amid the neighborhood’s reinvention. Old-school watering holes dot some of the streets along with old athletic clubs and diners with blue-plate specials.
One of my favorite bars in the entire city is Bridgeport’s very own Maria’s Packaged Goods & Community Bar. It’s a classic slashie—half liquor store, half neighborhood tavern. Maria Marszewski, a Korean woman who married a Polish cop, worked the front liquor store. She began operating the bar in 1986, and white women in the neighborhood would scream racial shit at her all the time. But inside her tavern, Maria wouldn’t tolerate overt racism, and that’s how she created a diverse environment.
In 2010, she handed over the bar to her sons Ed and Mike, and the brothers retooled it.
Wood tables and wood paneling give a log cabin look. Beer-bottle chandeliers hang from the copper ceiling. Maria’s is cozy and takes its music seriously, but the bar doesn’t take itself too seriously. It has the casualness and familiarity of a dive but without the grit. People of different races and ages park at the bar, including neighborhood folk. During the Christmas holidays, I brought my visiting sister. We heard Wu-Tang Clan and a dog barking “Jingle Bells” during the same DJ set while a bartender wore an ugly Christmas sweater.
The community bar portion takes its name from people who bring in a drink recipe and get it on the menu. Craft beers and cocktails are emphasized at reasonable prices. Old Style, a Chicago classic beer, is on the menu, as is “a random shitty beer” for two bucks. I’ve gotten used to listening to Biggie or A Tribe Called Quest or classic soul at Maria’s. The cognitive dissonance is slowly fading. I look at Bridgeport mostly through a positive lens: A neighborhood can change. Diversity begets positivity.
Over the years, I’ve gotten to know co-owner Ed Marszewski, who’s committed to neighborhood change. I hung out with him one afternoon sipping ginger ale as he smoked a cigarette at an indoor wood picnic table in another Bridgeport property he owns. The experimental gallery hosted a temporary park exhibit in which the artist crowdsourced plants. Hence the picnic table in the middle of a loft space.
Ed told me about his days as a teenager when his mother, a restaurant operator, first opened in Bridgeport. “People would say ‘get the fuck out of here you fucking chink or gook.’ I’d say ‘get the fuck out of my neighborhood you fucking wop or whatever.’”2 Growing up in the suburbs of Chicago, he learned how to fight in first or second grade and could beat the crap out of fifth graders.
“I’ve always been aware I’m a mutant kid,” Ed says of having a Korean mother and a Polish father. “My whole life I’m growing up with racism. You realize in Chicago everyone hates everyone on the next block. It’s tribalism. You get used to it. I was a union carpenter for a while. These old guys would say racist jokes. Throw the same jokes back at their face and nine times out of ten they couldn’t take it.”
Ed once thought Bridgeport would be the location of the racial apocalypse. “Working at Maria’s, the Mexican kids would say ‘hey, Bruce Lee,’ which is the height of absurdity. Every ethnic group hated each other equally, but they hated blacks more than anyone else.”
Bridgeport grew on him over the years. “Once people got to know you, people would stop calling [you] gook. You started to see diversity around 2005,” Ed told me.
When Ed and Mike took over Maria’s, they wanted to make the bar warm and relaxed. They stocked the shelves with stuff they liked to drink, cleaned it up and put good cocktails on the menu. They took out the television, emphasized music more and used the bar for community meetings on how to improve the neighborhood.
“Beer lovers and foodies don’t care who you are. That is what freaked me out: the rise of the cocktail, the notion of ‘cool,’” Ed told me. Maria’s didn’t market itself. As the demographics of the neighborhood changed and outsiders felt safer or welcome, its popularity spread.
Again, Bridgeport is hardly a racial utopia. Blacks still don’t live there. Racial animus from white old-timers is real if not overt. Yet if Bridgeport can slowly change, maybe other neighborhoods can. Bridgeport seemed to evolve naturally. But usually when it comes to desegregation, deliberate action must be taken. In the Chicago region, suburban Oak Park is seen as a beacon of diversity. In the late 1960s, the suburb passed an open housing ordinance on the heels of the federal Fair Housing Act. Real estate agents were banned from blockbusting and panic-peddling, tactics used to spur nervous white homeowners who saw black migration on the horizon into fleeing. Oak Park started a housing center and community relations committee that welcomed black newcomers and monitored housing practices. The result wasn’t perfect, but it was an intentional effort to have an integrated community.
That type of intentionality doesn’t exist throughout the region.
Since the 1970s, Chicago’s changing neighborhood story has been one of a dwindling middle class and growing income inequality. There’s the Chicago Google headquarters effect in the West Loop with trendy restaurants and expensive condos, near the overpriced barbecue joint where my friend Jenny and I ate. Yet rampant and stubborn unemployment in pockets of the West and South Sides creates a dichotomy of two cities. Today the median income and housing value in once-stable communities are being squeezed.
Gentrification often is the buzzword when figuring out who are winners and losers in cities. Researchers at the University of Illinois at Chicago conducted a gentrification index in 2014 and mapped out socioeconomic trends in all of the city’s neighborhoods. Scoring neighborhoods based on the index, Chicago’s 77 neighborhoods were grouped into nine categories ranging from “stable upper/middle class,” meaning index scores remained high since the 1970s, to “severe declines,” meaning those scores dropped significantly. Only nine neighborhoods fit that “gentrifying” classification, almost all of them in downtown Chicago or just north of it, areas that have been historically white. Fourteen neighborhoods in “severe decline” were black and segregated. And black middle-class neighborhoods experienced declines in median incomes and home values. Neighborhoods exhibiting no change or stability were either white or integrated neighborhoods like mine, Hyde Park.3
Bridgeport is not gentrifying. According to the study, it’s an “improving” neighborhood.
* * *
Journalists are often not solution oriented. In this book, I’ve tried not only to plainly lay out the problems of segregation but offer remedies from various people entrenched in neighborhood work. Segregation can seem so intractable, so cemented among Chicagoans, particularly those who have lived here for generations. But as education civil rights scholar Gary Orfield says in Chapter 5, on the failure of school integration, a lack of creativity continues to stifle Chicago and the greater metropolitan area.
Housing is at the heart of segregation in Chicago and America, and until policy addresses that exclusionary isolation, ghettoization will continue.
I’d love cities to establish real commissions—not window dressing, not stacked with so-called experts because it is politically expedient to include them—that contemplate segregation and subsequently offer solutions. Decades after the Kerner Commission’s report, our country is still “two societies.” The burning rage we watched erupt in Ferguson and Baltimore can be directly linked to residential segregation that the U.S. government created to contain ghettos. Today a growing chorus is challenging the old mentality.
Keeping in the spirit of finding solutions, I asked several activists, scholars and artists who either live in Chicago or study the city to weigh in on what the city can do to lessen or even end segregation.4 These ideas are applicable to other urban places in America.
Mary Pattillo, professor of sociology and African American studies at Northwestern University and author of Black Picket Fences: Privilege and Peril Among the Black Middle Class, pushed back against the idea of integration a bit. She told me that the question about ending segregation suggests that segregation itself is the problem. She argues segregation is a problem only because it allows for the unequal distribution of resources. She says it’s true that segregation allows state governments and private investors to invest in white neighborhoods and not invest in black neighborhoods and often leads to bad outcomes for black people and black families.
Pattillo is not arguing for a separate-but-equal doctrine, but “given how hard it is to undo segregation using the mechanisms we’ve used already, we could imagine a different direction, which is we have predominantly black neighborhoods that are underresourced, that are underinvested, disinvested systematically. We could imagine increasing resources, improving opportunities, flushing those neighborhoods with resources and they would improve. The children who live there would have better outcomes; the families who live there would have happier lives, the housing stock would be more expensive—all of the things would happen that we would imagine and that might make those neighborhoods more attractive for nonwhites to move into, and that would decrease segregation. I think the question of ‘How do we end segregation?’ first has to begin with the question ‘Is ending segregation first the right approach, or is improving predominantly black neighborhoods as predominantly black neighborhoods—should that be our first goal, and might that result in more racial integration because it would make those neighborhoods more appealing for nonblacks to move into?’”
Achy Obejas is a novelist and poet who bought a condo in the black North Kenwood/Bronzeville area before the housing boom and bust. “I really thought we were moving toward a greater diversity of people and a greater sort of economic bounty,” she told me. “It really seemed like there was this possibility because there was a lot of construction going on and most of the people moving in were middle class. It wasn’t initially this big wave of white folks or anything like that; it was economically diverse. Nobody talks about that. Everybody always talks about segregation strictly in terms of race, but economics has a lot to do with that. A lot of people made a quick buck and then came the bust. People lost their jobs and, in some weird way, the neighborhood has kind of frozen in a tougher situation. We don’t see the furniture and evictions the way we did a few years back anymore. But if you drive around, you’ll see that we have way too many housing units in this area. I live across the street and I can count five, six empty units just from my window. It also means that we’re at risk for squatters, for particular kinds of property crime. And it keeps small businesses from coming here; it keeps other kinds of businesses from coming here. The economic development that could actually anchor this neighborhood and make it attractive to all kinds of people and that would therefore diversify the neighborhood and thus organically end segregation, rather than through some forced plan, doesn’t happen.”
Even though I’ve repeated that Chicago is almost equally black, white and Latino, I’ve spent a great deal of time in this book describing black neighborhoods and exploring the black-white divide. But I don’t mean to minimize the Latino influence that runs through the city. Primarily and historically, the Latino immigration flow to Chicago has been from Mexico. Robert Sampson is professor of social sciences at Harvard University and former University of Chicago professor/scientific director of a long-term study of Chicago that evolved into the book Great American City: Chicago and the Enduring Neighborhood Effect. Sampson told me that some of the cities and regions of the country that have seen the greatest declines in, or at least lower levels of, segregation, especially economic segregation, are areas that are more diverse. “We should start thinking about affordable housing, keeping crime down, improving public schools, increasing diversity and immigration of the population as major forces in society and in cities that predict the extent to which integrated communities thrive. It used to be historically, at least racially integrated communities in Chicago were relatively few and far between. They had strong institutions, like, for example, in Hyde Park you have the University of Chicago, but most neighborhoods don’t. That’s why I would really look to these broader social forces and I would argue that policies really need to stay in tune to the extent which they can support these general factors and if that’s possible.” Sampson is fairly optimistic about racial segregation but a little less optimistic about the economic segregation part. “Englewood is a very troubled area. It’s poor; it’s distant from the center of the city, from the lake. It also has a housing stock that has really declined tremendously. It really doesn’t have a lot of the features that, at least in a typical market, create a lot of demand. The city should think outside the box and invest and allow unusual, maybe even radical, housing plans to grow in communities like that. If I were the mayor, I would offer some houses—maybe not ones that are completely run down—but perhaps give them up for free to either institutions or individuals that commit to the neighborhood.”
I’ve longed admired Lisa Yun Lee’s philanthropic and social justice work throughout Chicago. Currently, she’s director of the School of Art and Art history at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Before that she ran the university’s Jane Addams Hull-House Museum. “When we talk about Chicago being segregated, what we’re actually talking about is a kind of apartheid that exists in the city where the segregation is not the root cause but it’s a symptom of white supremacy,” Lee told me. “It’s a symptom of the lack of resources that are being doled out to certain segments of society. You have to look at ending segregation in Chicago in an intersectional way, and you’d have to really address issues of white supremacy. You have to be really honest about thinking about who wins and who loses by a city being segregated. I’m a cultural activist by day, and that’s what really drives me. I really do believe that if you look at our city and where culture lives, we should really invest in those pockets. Things that seem trivial or to be the extras in life—dancing, house music, the kind of food you’re eating—are actually at the core of what it means to be a human being in the city. If we were to really focus on the cultural life of the city and how to bring people to experience a vast array of different cultural experiences in the city, I feel like that would actually end segregation a lot faster because it’s also a way people understand one another. When they start to appreciate what one another has to offer, that’s where new forms start to develop so there’s not just a fetishization of one notion of authenticity on what it means to be Latino or African American.” Culture takes place all over Chicago, the city where house music was born. Lee is imagining culture in all sorts of spaces, not just large museums and cultural institutions. “Chicago should really take the lead: be the city of Ida B. Wells-Barnett and Jane Addams and say let’s be a model for the rest of the world and not be afraid to say when we talk about desegregating the city, we’re talking about creating a more equitable Chicago for everyone,” Lee told me.
Emile Cambry Jr., founder of Blue 1647, a technology and entrepreneurship center in Englewood, echoes Lee. He advocates something called Sister Neighborhoods, where different communities partner with other neighborhoods. “How do we have those communities interact with those communities and make sure that it’s okay to talk with those communities or make sure we have that interchange and that kind of communication? That will break down a lot of barriers. Or find ideas like that to encourage participation around things we all celebrate and enjoy, food and festivals for example. You have a lot of people who don’t feel welcome in certain communities because you’re either not wealthy enough, you’re going to get in trouble, or some people are going to say, why are those people over here?” Cambry told me.
Artists in Chicago are responding to segregation with cultural intentionality. The Chicago Home Theater Festival, for example, brings strangers to people’s living rooms, kitchens and backyards in neighborhoods all over the city during the month of May. Several artists perform, and attendees give donations. It’s a hyperlocal response to hypersegregation. My husband and I attended one in the black Greater Grand Crossing neighborhood in 2014. I’ve never seen so many white people there. The following year, we hosted a play, dancers and performance art in our home. We hardly knew anyone in attendance. Afterward a DJ kept the party going as people munched on buttermilk pies, homemade ice cream, spinach or navy beans. It was a magnificent experience.
Of course, eradicating segregation would take years, even generations, and it’s not as easy to see the first step in how to dismantle segregation. But Steve Bogira, race/segregation reporter for the weekly Chicago Reader, says there is an easy first step. “One of the first things we should do in Chicago is crack down on people who are discriminating against people who want to move into what are usually white neighborhoods on the North Side. This includes other areas too, where African Americans and sometimes Latinos have tried to move and they don’t get calls back when they apply for an apartment,” Bogira told me. In the fair housing world, testing consists of sending out people in pairs with everything equal except race—the kind my aunt and uncle did when they lived in Beverly. The Lawyers’ Committee for Better Housing tests throughout neighborhoods in Chicago and finds that discrimination frequently occurs. “It’s happening,” Bogira said, “but we’re not stopping landlords from doing it. We need to crack down on that kind of overt discrimination. There also needs to be more affordable housing for people throughout the city. This is also complicated by zoning practices, which make it easy for a community to say we just don’t build properties that are affordable in our area.” Chicago developers are required to put affordable apartments in all new developments of ten or more units that seek zoning changes. Developers flout that rule by making a payment to the city instead.
Experts like Janet Smith, associate professor of urban planning at University of Illinois at Chicago and codirector of the Nathalie P. Voorhees Center for Neighborhood and Community Improvement, says zoning is a regional tool that can put a dent in segregation. Many suburbs use “home rule” and exclusionary zoning to keep out affordable housing or apartments. “One of the things that’s been a big push in the Chicago area and around the country is to eliminate exclusionary zoning and make zoning more inclusionary—making sure a certain amount of units are going to be set aside for affordable housing. We know there’s a strong need for affordable housing and for people who are nonwhite. . . . If all of these municipalities just started to attack this problem from those regulatory perspectives, then you start to see this idea of furthering the fair housing movement opening the doors up,” Smith explained.
Since the 1960s, there’s been policy and advocacy from people who believe that integration is the end gain that we should be pursuing by any means possible, Smith told me. “They blame racial segregation—and I do too—on the reason the conditions are poor and undesirable, but they forget that there are other strategies that also might lead to integration: improve the housing, the schools, access to transportation, all the things that make a good neighborhood. A good neighborhood means that people want to live there. We want to make sure people really do have a choice to live where they want to live. And in regards to segregation, there’s been a bit of a pushback on this in the last decade or so—partly because of this movement that wants to push people out but also because people have integration fatigue. At this rate, we’re not going to reach a fully integrated society for dozens of decades in terms of the data projecting out, so why are we trying so hard and making such little progress? Maybe we need to understand, let people choose where they want to live, make the community better and not worry so much about segregation. What we do need to worry about though is when segregation is something that prevents people from having choices, prevents people from having quality neighborhoods to live in and leads to discrimination and uneven access to resources.”
The 1968 Fair Housing Act hasn’t filled its goals and obligation to prevent discrimination. But there’s been a recent shift on the federal level with two key 2015 actions. In a move that surprised many in the fair housing community, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the Fair Housing Act is violated if minorities are segregated into low-income areas even if the policy is unintentional. A couple of weeks after that ruling, the Obama administration announced new rules on what’s known as affirmatively furthering fair housing. Any municipality or public housing authority that receives money from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development must come up with a plan for diversifying housing. To help, HUD will give the authorities reams of demographic data so communities can examine segregation and make better decisions going forward.
These were two big wins for affordable housing and integration, and neither is a radical step. Institutional racism and segregated housing patterns are often “unintentional,” so the Supreme Court ruling doesn’t gut the Fair Housing Act. And putting communities on notice that they actually have to think about segregation before spending their money may be just the clarion call needed. This rule will especially benefit places outside of central big cities.
Douglas Massey, professor of sociology and public affairs at Princeton University and coauthor of American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass, told me that in addition to enforcing the Fair Housing Act, residential mobility programs need to be in place. The original residential mobility program was in Chicago, known as the Gautreaux program. He says it was quite successful in opening up opportunity for low-income residents in the city of Chicago and areas throughout the entire metropolitan area and ended up improving a lot of people’s lives. “It’s not about black people wanting to live with white people. It’s about the willingness of African Americans to deal with white people in order to get access to all the benefits and resources of American society. Inevitably, benefits and resources are unevenly distributed around the metropolitan area. To access them, you have to move. And historically in the United States, poor groups have come in, for example, and they settle in lousy neighborhoods as they move up the economic ladder and seek to move up the residential ladder. African Americans have never been given those first few steps up the ladder because the residential mobility has been so constrained. You have to bring race and segregation back into the debate in a very direct and straightforward way and not mince words. You find very few politicians are willing to do this.”
And segregation has a price tag, says Marisa Novara, planning director at the Metropolitan Planning Council, a nonpartisan nonprofit that works on regional Chicago growth issues. “We have traditionally looked at the costs of concentrated poverty for people who live in poverty, and that’s incredibly important. When we leave it at that, we leave out a lot of people who may feel like that’s unfortunate but it’s not my problem. Until we understand the real cost of living so separately from one another, we won’t fully embrace what we need to do to change that,” Novara explained to me. “We know a lot about concentrations by income and how that affects us as a city, and we know a lot about what that does to countries. We know that countries that are more economically concentrated perform worse in many economic measures. But we have not really drilled down yet as a city, as a region.”
One of the reasons we get stuck on segregation is because it’s addressed only as a hearts-and-minds issue instead of something a little more pedestrian and operational. “Why do people choose to live where they live?” Bridget Gainer, a Cook County board commissioner, asked me rhetorically. Often it’s a matter of lifestyle—schools and restaurants, family and faith institutions. “The question becomes, how do we take neighborhoods that have a lot to offer and make them more attractive to residents of all stripes? Because you could argue that segregation around income is just as damning as segregation around race. Should there be a marketing plan for neighborhoods that would make it interesting for people of all races but also all income levels, or at least a wider band of income level, to live in this neighborhood? Much of what’s going to drive the health and vitality of a city is going to be more mobile, younger workers who don’t want to buy a house, they want to rent. Our neighborhoods are not just going to be populated with people who work in the city center and want to buy a house, have a mortgage with two kids. You used to only have to appeal to that narrow band; now you have to appeal to a greater. Do you have food trucks, do you have pop-up retail, do you have natural amenities that drive people to be around somewhere, do you have running tracks, do you have gyms? As crazy and mundane as it sounds, people are going to make decisions that fit with their life, so now we just have to get ahead of that curve to determine what is it that makes someone willing to move to a community that they don’t know and don’t live in. When rethinking a neighborhood, we should really go around the world. Open it up to the architects and planners and artists and people from around the world to say ‘What would you do if you had an open slate here?’ That’s going to get people get interested, rather than saying ‘How do we get a Target?’”
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Segregation is a regional and a hyperlocal issue. But it’s more than policy. I choose to see the humanity in the people behind the policies. Change is possible.
Promoting integration can be problematic because it can come off as if black people are a problem that need white fixing. My entire life is a jumble of contradictions within black self-expression. I grew up in Jack and Jill and the black cultural nationalist theater scene on the South Side. I attended Howard University, a space that allowed me to grow and articulate my brand of blackness. I’ve been a member of black professional organizations. I married a black man. I’m okay being called a hypocrite. I wouldn’t give up any of those black spaces in the name of lambasting segregation. Desegregation isn’t about black people giving up their institutions.
Self-selection and self-identification are not the same as state-sponsored segregation in either Chicago or America.