The Onion ran a story about a month ago with the headline "Environmental Study Finds Air In Chicago Now 75% Bullets." This was right on the heels of the Fourth of July weekend shootings, a series of violent incidents which resulted in 82 people being shot, 14 of whom died from those injuries. The Onion is a comedy site, but it doesn't stray too far from how people are thinking and feeling.
This paints the kind of image of the city that no one wants to see. Crime seems to be getting the upper hand against a police force that an do nothing but stand still and staring in a moment of silence. In response to all of this, August began with Mayor Rahm Emmanuel and Gov. Pat Quinn striking a deal to move 40 state troops from outside of Chicago into the city. The plan is to give the ranks a boost with the direct purpose of finding and bringing into custody fugitives in some of Chicago's most dangerous neighborhoods. The problem has gotten so bad, that it now takes State intervention to capture known fugitives.
So Chicago must be the most dangerous city in the country or something right? Like I said, this picture doesn't look too pretty from where we're standing. Except, Chicago is only dangerous depending on the neighborhood you find yourself in. Like any city, there are safe neighborhoods and dangerous ones. It just so happens that the dangerous ones here are especially problematic. You are almost 15% more likely to be a victim of crime in the city's most dangerous neighborhood as you are in its safest. There are places where crime isn't something to worry about at all, and places where you're reminded of it every day by expert analysis in national newspapers.
Now you might want to just accept that anywhere you go you're going to find a yin and a yang or that there's nothing that's going to change it, but theres something there in the numbers.
In 2010 Yale University Scholar Bill Rankin made a map of the city. [http://www.radicalcartography.net/index.html?chicagodots] What was special about his map that instead of mapping geography, he mapped people. He grouped people into four different colors of dots based on their ethnicities. White people were pink, Black people blue, Hispanics orange, Asians green, and all other a sort of grey.
What stands out about this map is how harsh the lines are. In a lot of the boundaries between one community area and another there is only a single street, but it separates two solid blocks of color. Not that the city doesn't have its gradients, just that those aren't what stand out. When you hover your mouse over the map, the lines marking off the community areas toggle on and off. What makes this map striking is that you can see the borders even with the lines toggled off.
19 of the 77 Community areas are made of of more than 90% of the same race. 22 more of them are comprised of 75% of only one race. Bill Rankin's map doesn't show you a map of a city, it shows you color bars.
The problem with color bars is it makes it very easy to draw partitions [Beyonce?] in to political policy. It creates a sense of otherness that can poison relations. Chicago may be one city, but its very easy to identify yourself with smaller brackets. Just as someone might be proud to say they're from Houston but not Austin, a Chicagoan might want to make it known that they're a South Sider rather than a North Sider. Even beyond that, its easy to say that you're Proud to live in Pilsen but wouldn't want to ever be associated with South Lawndale and those neighborhoods are adjacent. Regional identities are things to be proud of but they do make it easy to say that while yes, we are both Chicagoans, no, we don't live in the same city.
This doesn't just seep into cultural arguments about who makes the best hotdog in town or White Sox vs. the Cubs, it's more pervasive than that. The identity is so strong that its easy for someone like Rahm Emmanuel to think that the South Side isn't part of their city, or that the South Side is separate from the North Side. The Mayor has been critisized by many for his approach to the Southern parts of his City. Last September he attended a charity basketball game in the South Side where he was booed upon introduction. Under his policy, Teachers, mental health employees, and public workers are seeing their jobs cut due to the looming threat of a budget disaster for the city.
These cuts hit the black community harder than any other. Of course, that's a bit misleading. It hits the South Side community more than any other. It just so happens that the southside is, according to Bill Rankin's map at least, almost exlusively black. Now, its hard to tell for sure, but the level of division in the city creates an atmosphere where its very easy, easy to the point where I don't feel comfortable completely dissuading the notion, that this is about race. You can look at it one of two ways: South Siders are being cut, or Blacks are being cut. If the city was more integrated, we would be seeing these cuts as a financial problem but because of the way things are, it gets muddled.
The fact of the matter is that wealthy, predominently white, areas are receiving money and poorer, predominently black communities, are bleeding money and loosing jobs. Depaul University is receiving 55 Million Dollars for a new Arena and the Chicago Public Schools system recently released a list of 129(!!!) schools they are considering closing. Many of these schools are in the Northside, but the sheer volume of South and West side schools dwarfs the rest. Theres no question that these are predominently black schools being closed.
So why is this happening? It's complicated, but it goes back to that idea of the other.
Say you live in a neighborhood that's going through a pretty bad drought. Many people in the town have stopped watering their lawns to compensate. You're feeling the effects too. Your neighbor knocks on the door and asks if she can borrow some water so she can give her son a bath. You've lived next to this woman for the past few years and you know her and you know her son so chances are, you're going to try to help her as best you can. Now what happens if a woman from a few blocks away asks for some water? You don't really know her, she lives over there and you live over here. She wants to give her kid a bath but you've never met this kid. You might have questions for her. Why didn't she ask her neighbors for water? How come they didn't have any to give her? You might come to the conclusion that if that whole block doesn't have water, they must have squandered it. It must have been their fault. Its easy for you to ]assume things about this person who you don't know. Your neighbor you know didn't waste her water, but what about this woman from a few blocks over?
Thats the problem Chicago has. Well, its one of them. There is a lack of understanding of communities other than the insular ones that you might belong to.
When thew fourth of July brings with it a rash of gun violence that gets the Newspapers to hail it as a meteorogical condition, its not seen as an us problem. Its seen as a them problem. We don't have problems with guns in the Northside, here on our street, so why do those people in the South Side, a few blocks over there, have problems? Surely if we have water in the drought, they should be able to have water too. They must be their problem. Except its not, its our problem. Its easy for us to look around the corner and leave them alone, to just make sure that our corner is alright. Its easy to think that the South Side isn't the North Side so its not our problem.
Shootings in the South Side can be rationalized as shootings in the South Side, not shootings in Chicago.
And this doesn't just go for Chicago either. Most of the world comes down to this.
Empathy takes energy, unfortunetly.
