Even closer to home.
From an article in Time Magazine on Trinity United Church of Christ:
The bulk of Trinity-goers are among the thousands living on Chicago’s South Side, a sprawl of cracked sidewalks and boarded buildings that inspires fear among the city’s middle classes, and even its wizened cabbies. “You won’t find a ride back,” the taxi driver told this reporter upon arriving at the church. For South Side residents, the best jobs are two hours away via public transport: a bus, an el transfer, and then another bus brings you to Hyde Park, the area’s lone upscale community. The few city-planning efforts to assist South Siders only worsened the situation. The most notorious were the Robert Taylor Homes, prison-like warrens with barred windows, circling police and neglected facilities that often left residents without electricity, heat and plumbing housed thousands until they finally came down in February 2007. The majority of those who died during the 1994 heat wave that killed more than 700 people were South Side residents. Before Katrina, it was the deadliest natural catastrophe in the U.S. since the 19th century. The morgues ran out of room. Bodies were piled in milk trucks.
And that right there is what happens when reporters stroll write about the Chicago of their imaginations instead of the Chicago that exists, the Chicago that is the third largest city in the country behind New York and Los Angeles and one of the most segregated. While it is true that you can drive for an hour and not see a white face on the South Side, the many black neighborhoods it comprises are hardly all crumbling slums, the Robert Taylor Homes were about 50 city blocks north of that church, and Hyde Park (home to the University of Chicago) is definitely not the only upscale neighborhood on it. It seems beyond comprehension for many that black folks might actually live well in segregated neighborhoods.
Trinity stands about 3 ½ miles from the last house I lived in before leaving Chicago at age 10 to live with my mother in Oakland, California. The area in which I grew up, Chatham, was a solid working- and middle-class community. My street was mostly single-family frame houses, bungalows, and a few brownstone apartment buildings, my neighbors a mix of young professionals with families and older, retired folks who yelled at us to get off their finely-manicured lawns when we played kickball in the street.
Inspired by the Time article and my imminent visit to Illinois (Springfield, not Chicago) to get my 96-year-old grandmother and bring her back to California with me, I decided to look up my old house on Google Maps, and thanks to streetview, I was able to actually see it. It’s been sold and remodeled since my grandmother moved out a few years after I left, but I still remember sitting on that porch while one of the girls from down the block gave me cornrows for the first time. I remember chasing fireflies down that very-much-not crumbling sidewalk, putting out nuts for the fat brown squirrels that lived in that big tree out front, playing double-dutch with my cousins Debbie and Luanna, being hit in the shoulder with a lawn dart one summer, eating apple pies made from the fruit of the tree in our backyard until it was struck by lightning during a thunderstorm. We weren’t rich by any stretch of the imagination—my grandmother retired from her civil service job shortly after I was born to help take care of me and was on a fixed income, and my mother sent her AFDC checks to Nana every month—but I don’t remember wanting for much then.
(Living with my mother was a completely different story, but ironically it was in integrated neighborhoods in the East Bay and Miami Beach where I encountered real poverty while in her care.)
A simple search on Google today led me to a real estate website that describes my old neighborhood thusly:
A strong history of prestigious African American-owned businesses established a solid base for a prosperous and successful Chicago neighborhood that is still present in Chatham and spills over into beautiful residential blocks and a viable commercial and dining district.
And Chatham is hardly the only such black neighborhood on the South Side.
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Thinking more about the trip I’m about to take to Illinois, I’m stuck with a lot of frustration. I’m angry at my great-aunt, with whom my grandmother has been living for the last eight years and who is now, in effect, kicking her out, and at my mother, who is too much of a nervous wreck to do anything in preparation for her mother’s arrival. I can’t help but wonder if this is what it was like for her, over two decades ago, when I moved here to live with her for the first time in my memory. She was a year older than I am now before she had to be responsible for her only child, and I know that she didn’t have the easiest time making the adjustment. Her behavior now—indulging in the worst kind of avoidance and self-pity, drinking every night after work—makes me wonder if this is what she was like before Nana and I stepped off that plane at Oakland International Airport in 1986.
I wouldn’t be surprised.
Close to home.
Last June, after leaving my last job in the video game industry, I decided to spend the summer doing volunteer work. One organization with which I became involved is Just Cause Oakland, a community-based organization dedicated to protecting affordable housing for people of color and working folks. JCO came into being in 2000, and its first campaign was to pass Measure EE, a citywide ordinance that prevents tenant eviction without cause–a huge issue at that time thanks to the dot-com boom happening on the other side of the bay.
Since then, JCO has fought gentrification in Oakland, pushing for inclusionary zoning policies that require real estate developers to create affordable housing alongside the $600,000 condos and McLofts being built in East, West, and downtown Oakland. Just Cause is also involved in the fight to protect existing public housing, much of which is being demolished all over the country to make way for private development, and has uncovered some of the less-noticeable side effects of the subprime mortgage crisis–namely, renters being forced out of foreclosed properties when banks refuse to pay for water service or trash collection.
Of course, there is never an end to the tribulations we Bay Area renters face. The Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association, the property owners who got Proposition 13 passed in 1978, thereby slashing property taxes statewide and virtually bankrupting California schools, is at it again.
Proposition 98 will be presented to voters on the June 3rd ballot, disguised as protection against eminent domain seizure. What the proposition really calls for, however, is the end of rent control across California. Its passage would also prohibit inclusionary zoning practices and do away with various environmental protections.
Just Cause Oakland and other organizations have taken up the fight. I spoke at a rally yesterday in protest of this dangerous piece of legislation and was quoted in the San Francisco Chronicle and Oakland Tribune.
“Bow to the woman,” or Revisiting the racism of white feminism.
I’ve been told that my post yesterday (which also appeared on my Livejournal) quoting from writings and speeches by Frederick Douglass and Elizabeth Cady Stanton was “a cheap shot” and “ineffectual.” Apparently there are no connections to be made between the political stances of the leaders of the suffrage movement in the mid-19th century and their ideological great-grand daughters now. I dressed down the LiveJournal commenter for his rudeness, primarily, but also his lack of critical analysis, which, despite the cop-out he offered in apology, has nothing to do with his race (white) or his gender (male). What it does have to do with is the lack of attention anyone is paying to the history of American feminism, and how that history is influencing the ways this presidential race is being framed by white women, Clinton’s most strident supporters on almost every blog and message board I’ve seen.
The guy who commented and I are cool now, but I thought it might be worthwhile to expound a bit–connect the dots, as it were–for anyone else who’s missing my point.
There’s nothing cheap at all about quoting one of the leaders of the proto-feminist movement who, when it looked like black men might vote before white women, in the midst of the terrorism against black people that followed the Civil War, decided to draw a line in the sand–despite the fact that Douglass was her co-vice-president of the Equal Rights Association and continued to support [white] women’s suffrage. (The voting rights of black women were, of course, not even on the table. Just ask Sojourner Truth. Ain’t she a woman?)
Stanton and the MAJORITY of the suffrage movement opposed the passage of the 15th Amendment on the same grounds that underlie the various editorials and statements that have come from no less than Gloria Steinem, Robin Morgan, Erica Jong, Roseanne Barr, and most recently Geraldine Ferraro: a fundamental sense of entitlement on the part of white women to walk through that “celestial gate” into the White House before “Sambo.”
To drive home this point, I will quote from “Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria?” And Other Conversations About Race by Dr. Beverly Daniel Tatum, president of Spelman College and former professor of psychology at Mount Holyoke College:
Several years ago, one young White woman wrote the following sentence…: “I am in favor of affirmative action except when it comes to my jobs.” I wrote in response, “Which jobs have your name on them?”
The sense of entitlement conveyed in the statement was striking. Of course, she wanted to get the jobs she applied for, … yet she seemed to assume that because she wanted them, they belonged to her. She assumed that she would, of course, be qualified for the job, and would therefore be entitled to it. What was she thinking about the candidates of color? She did not seem to take into account the possibility that one of them might be as qualified, or more qualified, than she was. The idea that she as a White woman might herself be the recipient of affirmative action was apparently not part of her thinking. While she expressed a desire for equity and justice, she also wanted to maintain her own advantage.
And so, this is what we’re reading and hearing in the media–the same assumptions are being made about how much Senator Clinton “deserves” the presidency (why, exactly?); the same argument abounds that the success of black men has somehow exceeded that of white women in government and corporations (patently false); the same claims of Senator Obama being unqualified and his successful candidacy the result of “affirmative action” (a charge that could easily be lobbed at Senator Clinton as well); the same erasure of black women from the discourse, except for when we’re being insulted or our experiences exploited. (In Jong’s effusive memorializing of mistreated female leaders, she notably leaves out Shirley Chisholm’s presidential run in 1972. Steinem and Morgan both talk about imaginary black female candidates as though we haven’t had them before–and don’t have one now in Cynthia McKinney, running for the Green nomination.)
One would think that after 150 years, white women might have gotten over such divisive politics. But while white feminists have surely made strides, recognizing their own racial privilege is not one of them.
Those who forget history will be doomed to repeat it.
All quotes below pulled from Women, Race & Class by Angela Y. Davis….
Frederick Douglass, in an article titled “The Rights of Women” published in his abolitionist newspaper North Star, July 1848:
In respect to political rights, we hold woman to be justly entitled to all we claim for men. We go further, and express our conviction that all political rights which it is expedient for men to exercise, it is equally so for woman. All that distinguishes man as an intelligent and accountable being, is equally true of woman, and if that government only is just which governs by the free consent of the governed, there can be no reason in the world for denying to woman the exercise of the elective franchise, or a hand in making and administering the law of the land.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton, abolitionist and suffragist, in a letter to the editor of the New York Standard, December 1865:
Although this may remain a question for politicians to wrangle over for five or ten years, the black man is still, in a political point of view, far above the educated white women of the country. The representative women of the nation have done their uttermost for the last thirty years to secure freedom for the negro; and as long as he was lowest in the scale of being, we were willing to press for his claims; but now, as the celestial gate to civil rights is slowly moving on its hinges, it becomes a serious question whether we had better stand aside and see “Sambo” walk into the kingdom first. As self-preservation is the first law of nature, would it not be wiser to keep our lamps trimmed and burning, and when the constitutional door is open, avail ourselves of the strong arm and blue uniform of the black soldier to walk in by his side, and thus make the gap so wide that no privileged class could ever gain close it against the humblest citizen of the republic?
Elizabeth Cady Stanton speaking at the first annual meeting of the Equal Rights Association, May 1867:
With the black man, we have no new element in government, but with the education and elevation of women, we have a power that is to develop the Saxon race into a higher and nobler life and thus, by the law of attraction, to lift all races to a more even platform than can ever be reached in the political isolation of the sexes.
Frederick Douglass speaking at the Equal Rights Association convention in 1869:
When women, because they are women, are dragged from their homes and hung upon lamp-posts; when their children are torn from their arms and their brains dashed upon the pavement; when they are objects of insult and outrage at every turn; when they are in danger of having their homes burnt down over their heads; when their children are not allowed to enter schools; then they will have [the same] urgency to obtain the ballot.
Fighting Words. 