Islands or Anomalies?

My book for the month of July has been Disintegration: The Splintering of Black America by Eugene Robinson. The book has been an enjoyable read, as so many books by journalists are. Like Philip Gourevich's We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will be Killed with our Families this book approaches a very serious and weighty, if a little over-done, issue without becoming bogged down in the theoretical speak and academic jargon to which I have grown accustomed. In essence, the book is incredibly accessible and gives me the illusion that I'm challenging myself when all I'm really doing is passively absorbing a pretty well written book.

Now, there are certainly things about the book I just roll my eyes at. Robinson breaks down the new, post-civil rights black America four names- the Mainstream, the Transcendent, the Emergent and the Abandoned. Robinson then procedes to give anecdotes and cursory histories of how these groups emerged from a previously monolithic black America. Where this book would do the most good, I believe, is in the hands of people who have not recognized a bourgeoning middle class in the African American population. As for me, there are parts of me that wrestle with the lack of detail in the book, the overuse of the word "culture" and the notion that cultures can be static and distinct entities that demand either preservation or assimilation with no room for other avenues of exchange. I don't think Robinson's mission was to go down these roads, but still that's where my mind goes.

However, as I read the chapters on "the Abandoned" something stuck out to me. Robinson discusses the process of gentrification in which poor black residents are forced out by aggressive development and city planning. Having been a Chicago resident, I know exactly what this process looks like before, during, and after. And what is so striking to me is a question of what my old neighborhood will look like in just a few years.

Hyde Park, where the University of Chicago is located, has always been a wealthy bubble surrounded by poverty. On numerous runs through the south side I have heard people yell "You in the wrong neighborhood!" and other, much less savory, quips. But what is more shocking is the way in which the University expanded its dorms south of the Midway and right up to the border it agreed never to cross with the community around it- 61st street to the south. Now, I lived on the other side of 61st street for two years, and I saw as the University Police Department moved its massive glass police station to the north side of 61st street and UCPD patrols began running in force. All of this was, of course, to ensure safety for the students. But it also began to create a strange border land. Just two blocks further south there are more empty lots than businesses and gang fights are common. There appears to be an implicit cooperation between the university and developers now, however. The way to really make students safe is to make the areas south of 61st street both more alluring to students and faculty and also inundating the area with police force.

There is of course the argument that by developing south of the Midway, the university (by way of outside developers) will bring more opportunity to the residents of the south side and thus increase the standard of living. A truly daunting task when one looks around the south side and the garbage, dollar generals with barbed-wire, and Western Unions. But what I now wonder is what the residents of Woodlawn (the community joining Hyde Park in the south) will do as developers aggressively work to reshape the urban landscape. And I wonder what Robinson's book would look like if he took Hyde Park and Woodlawn as a specific case of gentrification. Hyde Park has always had an uneasy relationship with its neighbors, and poverty is not out of sight and out of mind there. Certainly it is peripheral in many regards- we had our own regular pan-handlers who were known by name and thefts and robberies always brought about a new UCPD swarm to push out non-Hyde Parkers who appeared ready to do students harm. But still, to those who were observent enough, there was clearly a whole different south side than the one presented on campus. Its one where people live and constantly live with this other monolith living to their north. I wonder, as the years go on, how these communities will change and how they will struggle against a community that has many more resources at its disposal than they do.

So what of places like Hyde Park? Many residents are employed by the university, but at the same time those communities are perpetual threats that are slowly being battled by way of development. I wonder what someone like Robinson would have to say about places like Hyde Park. And I wonder if maybe I could, one day, have something to say about it. You know, something smart to say. We'll see