Take a quick drive around Chicago neighborhoods and suburbs and it is visually clear how dominant racial segregation still is in 2008. With flocks of 20-year-olds and young professionals flocking to bucolic Lincoln Park, it is often missed that the color line is still very distinct in this urban area. Often, when the late twenty somethings move out of Lincoln Park and embark on their 2008 version of white flight to the suburbs, the thought of segregation never enters one’s mind.
With the demolition of Cabrini Green and the Robert Taylor homes underway, racial tension is rising at an alarming rate in our city, forcing Chicago to confront for prejudice, violence and gentrification. It seems that the Chicago Public Housing authority’s plan to create a mixed income neighborhood in River West is failing. While the wrecking balls chisel away at the walls of this mid to high level poverty stricken housing project, the limestone facades of two million dollar single family homes send a taunting message from across the street: “low income minority families are not welcome.”
“It’s shocking to see how people are living in those cages at Cabrini. No one should live like that, not even an animal.”
Andrew, 24, a Detroit transplant who encountered this project for the first time Tuesday.
Although African Americans are the individuals feeling the brunt of the segregation with the destruction of Section 8 housing, members of other races are marginalized into mini-cities within the city that have a color line serving as an invisible fence to corral their race. Hispanics in particular have been pushed into creating their own neighborhoods like the Little Village and Pilsen. Stepping out around 26th & California is remarkably similar to taking a walk in Mexico City or Tijuana. Street vendors sell churros to local friends and family, while sidewalks are filled with neighbors, friends and merchants conversing away in Spanish. Other neighborhoods mimic a similar feel for other racial groups like Little Italy, Engelwood and Bridgeport.
What will it take for our city to become more integrated? The answer to that question needs to come soon as more violence erupts in Chicago everyday, especially murders and shootings. Children should not be encountering other races for the first time in their twenties when they decide to venture out of their shell and explore the city. By then, their ideas of other cultures are already skewed because they have based their racial profiles off of often biased news reports and cultural undertones. Perhaps the bigger picture begs the question, where does acceptance of change and differences begin, with the group or within an individual?