White, Brown, and Black in South Side Chicago

Race relations is a subject that will never go away, that can hardly ever be avoided, and which can so strongly mark on an individual level, yet it is also one I seldom address.  With Chicago's South Side now thrust to the center of our nation's discourse on race, so much has been broadcast and written about this place, of which until this election season I had known almost nothing.  There are three narratives that stick to my mind: two by fellow TPMers and the third an eye-opening description of black experience in this rough city excepted from Rick Perlstein's Nixonland.  Each narrative is a disturbing read yet each creates an important context for the others.

The first is an excerpt from TPM reader Chauncey Baker's touching essay about his family in Chicago.  I hope he does forgive me for using his candid narrative here, but I was so struck by it, I find it cathartic to contextualize it here.  Among other things, Chauncey tells us:

Because they were one of the few white people in the neighborhood, they were terorized by a few thugs in the community that decided any white person was open to attack.

My grandmother bore the brunt of the attacks.  It started with her not being able to carry her groceries home because someone would knock them out of her hand.  It escalated with her being spit on.  It ended with her being beaten.

Who is to blame?  Who knows.  My grandmother was the perfect stereotypical German woman: Big boned and didn't take shit from nobody.  Who knows what she might have said to provoke the attacks.  But I can say this, anything she might have said was done out of fear and a complete misunderstanding of America at the time.  She thought that America was the land of opportunity. I guess she learned the hard way.

More recently, TPM reader Hard Truths shares her traumatic upbringing as an adopted brown Hispanic child growing up in two black families in Chicago.

Then and now, people stop me in grocery stores, gas stations and on the street to ask, "Are you mixed?" and "What are you mixed with?" as if having golden-colored skin grants all the world the right to inquire about my full familial history anytime or anyplace.

When I was twelve, I asked my second-adoptive mother to explain what it meant for me to be three different races. Since I had been raised in mostly black neighborhoods and educated in a strict ethnic culture, with little to no white or Hispanic interactions other than school, I simply wanted to get to know and love my own, multi-racial self.

She said, "You have to pick one or the other. Because you cannot be both." In a single sentence, my own mother had not only over-looked my Latino heritage altogether, as if it didn't even exist, she had commanded me to choose between being black or white, because society (which included my own parents) would not 'allow' me to be both. She might as well have said, "Which perfectly good arm do you want to cut off and throw away?"

For the the black experience segment, I quote from Rick Perlstein's Nixonland via Brad DeLong:

You could draw a map of the boundary within which the city's seven hundred thousand Negroes were allowed to live by marking an X wherever a white mob attacked a Negro. Move beyond it, and a family had to face down a mob of one thousand, five thousand, or even (in the Englewood riot of 1949, when the presence of blacks at a union meeting sparked a rumor the house was to be "sold to niggers") ten thousand bloody-minded whites. In the late 1940s, when the postwar housing shortage was at its peak, you could find ten black families living in a basement, sharing a single stove but not a single flush toilet, in "apartments" subdivided by cardboard. One racial bombing or arson happened every three weeks.... It neighborhoods where they were allowed to "buy" houses, they couldn't actually buy them at all: banks would not write them mortgages, so unscrupulous businessmen sold them contracts that gave them no equity or title to the property, from whcih they could be evicted the first time they were late with a payment.

I let these texts speak for themselves and with each other, together with any of your impressions.