Last week,the Guardian ran a video from Ed Pilkington highlighting what he calls the “recent” spike in gang- and violence-related murders of children on Chicago’s South side.
I sent the video around to people I know. For those unfamiliar with Phillip Jackson, the response to the first three minutes was usually to the effect that he must have spent a significant portion of his life trapped in a cabinet, and must have gone to college on the moon, to honestly believe that President Obama is somehow connected to or responsible for Chicago’s racially disparate violence simply because his house is south of Roosevelt Road. Those more familiar with Jackson and his work, however, know that he’s no fool.
Jackson’s claims that all Obama has to do is “say the word” to stop the violence do indeed appear to come from someone who’s looking at American socio-political issues from the outside in, and certainly someone with a loose handle on Chicago’s long history of political corruption and institutionalized segregation. It may come as a surprise to some readers, then, to learn that Jackson is (unlike Obama) Chicago born, raised, and educated, and is the founder of Black Star, a education and support coalition for disadvantaged youth with headquarters in the Bronzeville neighborhood on Chicago’s South Side.
Jackson’s main directive is that South Side children not die, with supporting their academic development in a horrifically unfavorable educational environment coming in at a close second. Therefore, he’s obviously going to milk the “President from this neighborhood” thing relentlessly for every drop of awareness and support for the cause he can get out of it. Anyone in his position would. After all, when the hell is there ever going to be another black South Sider in the White House? Jackson’s remarks make a lot more sense when considered in the context of someone immersed and versed in the historical details of institutionalized segregation in Chicago; his pretended ignorance on the locations of these children’s deaths is, I suspect, affected for the sake of presentation, and for impact on the Guardian's readership in the UK, Canada, and other areas who only know Chicago minimally, from the outside in. Jackson knows full well where those children lived, and what color those babies were, without Post-Its on a map. And so do most Chicagoans, and Americans at that, for whom Jackson’s short “tutorial” on neighborhood-specific violence acquires an almost tongue-in-cheek quality.
While this video undoubtedly helps raise international awareness of racially disparate violence in Chicago, it also does much to over-simplify the issue, particularly in its treatment of the problem as a recent phenomenon. Jackson’s presentation seems to be an attempt to “ease” non-native viewers into the knowledge that Chicago has been a war zone for minority children since at least the early twentieth century, like a sort of 101 class for the non-desensitized. We had Our First Race Riot here in Chicago in 1919, a result of post-WWI housing shortages aggravated by Jim Crow-era restrictive covenants that enforced de facto borders around African American neighborhoods (also of note is that Chicago’s 1968 race riot still stands as the worst in US history, worse even than L.A.’s Rodney King riots in 1992). The South Side then was a death trap where astronomically high rents forced families to double- and triple- up in tiny apartments, often without their own bathrooms or running water, and children (and adults, who aren’t as cute but are at least as statistically significant) were regularly killed or maimed by fires and rat attacks–yes, RAT ATTACKS.
Fast forward to the mid-to-late twentieth century to find the housing shortage addressed by the widespread construction of Chicago’s infamous public housing projects. Among the more notoriously squalid were Stateway Gardens, so crime-ridden the Chicago Police Department created an entirely new unit for the sole purpose of patrolling it, and the arson-scarred Robert Taylor Homes, where Phillip Jackson grew up. Many of these projects are gone now, torn down in more recent attempts to create “mixed-income” neighborhoods where festering cesspits of crime, corruption, and death once stood, but their legacy of poverty, crime, and general sociological devastation remains, to which this video bears striking testimony.
Add to this nearly a half-century of a notoriously corrupt family dynasty in the Mayor’s office and you have a complex scenario indeed. Mayor (from 1955-1976, the year he died) Richard J. Daley, father of current Mayor (since 1989) Richard M. Daley, was dubbed the American Pharaoh in a 2001 biography of the same name, and was called Chicago’s “overseer” in a 1968 cartoon by R. Crumb. When we remember that Barack Obama was born just seven years earlier, in 1961 (in Honolulu, not Chicago or any of the US’s other blighted inner cities), though, we have to wonder what it is exactly that Jackson thinks Obama should or could do to ameliorate a problem so far-reaching and long-standing. I wish the Guardian would have asked him, but it’s unclear, really, what anyone can do to give a twelve-year-old with an AK-47 a snowball’s chance in hell.
Ed Pilkington notes in his intro to this clip that Obama’s election has drawn the world’s attention to Chicago’s South Side; his own journalistic foray into neighborhoods that few white Chicagoans will ever see is evidence enough of that. For decades, the South Side has been Chicago’s own dirty secret, an entire half of the city swept under the rug, one hundred blocks amputated from tourist maps. Throughout the Guardian clip, South Side community leaders and parents of murdered children repeat the same sentiment: these things happen all the time, but nobody does anything about it. Nobody’s listening. Nobody seems to care. Stories like "Murdered Youth: Chicago’s Lost Generation,” with all their ambiguities, may at the very least help that to change.
-Originally appeared in November 2009 on Colin Horgan's now-defunct news and culture forum "Yesterday's Weirdness (is Tomorrow's Reason Why)", which has since been resurrected here!
[author's note, 1/2011: I have this down as "Murdered Youth etc.", but upon revisiting the vid link I see it's called "Youth Murders etc". Either I got it wrong the first time, or the title has been changed since.]
No comments:
Post a Comment