Features » July 20, 2011

Black Chicago Divided (cont’d)

Airing dirty laundry

Even before the Great Recession began taking its toll, class fractures were developing in the African-American community. “Disadvantaged blacks have really been hard hit by changes in the economy. Meanwhile, trained and educated blacks are benefiting from changes in the economy,” said William Julius Wilson in an interview on PBS’s Frontline in 1998. “Take a look at black income today. If you divide black income into quintiles, the top quintile has now secured almost 50 percent of the total black income, which is a record.” This skewed distribution of income continued throughout the 2000s, as longstanding class animosities marinated in black communities across the country.

The most salient public expression of these tensions was made by Bill Cosby during a May 2004 speech commemorating the 50th anniversary of Brown v. Board. At an NAACP confab celebrating the ruling that outlawed “separate but equal” educational policies, Cosby said, “People marched and were hit in the face with rocks to get an education, and now we’ve got these knuckleheads walking around … the lower economic people are not holding up their end of the deal.”

Despite the outrage of some, his comments sparked a slow roll of support from black commentators who argue that views like Cosby’s are suppressed in the black community in order not to air dirty laundry in public.

“There is some truth to that,” says Raynard Villa Hall, publisher of the popular online newsletter BRONZECOMM. “We are uncomfortable making those kinds of arguments in public venues.” And for good reason, he notes. “Any weakness would be mercilessly exploited by enemies of black progress.”

While Harold Lucas, President and CEO of the Black Metropolis Convention & Tourism Council, and Mark Carter operate on opposite ends of the class spectrum, they share a belief in the perfidy of the city’s black elite. “We have reached new levels of class stratification in Chicago,” says Lucas.

Lucas is well known for his passionate focus on a campaign promoting Chicago’s historic “Bronzeville” neighborhood as a designated African-American heritage tourist destination. Once known as the “Black Metropolis,” it is one of the nation’s most significant landmarks of African-American urban history.

The area had fallen on hard times until the mid 1990s, when various redevelopment efforts—coupled with the demolition of several housing developments–began changing the face of the neighborhood. Long-time residents increasingly are seen as threats to the economic aspirations of their gentrifying neighbors. Lucas believes this class divide could be negotiated more effectively if black middle-class Chicagoans were more active in community development projects designed to help the less fortunate among them.

“Those of us who have had some success in this system have an obligation to help the least fortunate,” Lucas says. “But since we have not done that, those people are now turning on the black middle class and trying to take what they have.”

Best of times, worst of times?

In 2007, the Pew Research Center published a study titled “Blacks See Growing Values Gap between Poor and Middle Class.” Most commentators interpreted the findings as confirmation of Cosby’s views and further proof that class divisions were widening.

Hall is unconvinced. A veteran of bruising battles for black-community control of institutions in the city’s South Shore neighborhood, he is reluctant to diagnose as class antagonism the growing exasperation with criminogenic culture and community crime. “I think we’re sometimes too glib in ascribing criminal behavior as something normal for low-income people,” he says. “I know many poor folks who didn’t grow up to be criminals.”

Though he may resist class stereotypes, Hall shares much of the same anger expressed by Carter and Lucas at the black middle-class’ neglect of the black poor. But like Lucas, Hall realizes that a black middle class is essential for any kind of successful community development.

Author and filmmaker Ytasha Womack wonders why classes are pitted against each other at all. Her 2010 book, Post Black: How A New Generation Is Redefining African American Identity, argues that black folks are leaving former notions of “blackness” behind. Womack is frustrated by views like Carter’s, which she says give unnecessary credence to old and dysfunctional paradigms. (Although she does share some of his scorn for the generational arrogance of those black baby boomers, who were the first generation to take advantage of racial openings made possible by the civil rights revolution.)

Womack argues that black people are making extraordinary strides and accomplishing goals their parents would never have imagined–a view in direct collision with the crimped vision that nourishes flash mob mentalities.

The graphic reality is that both conditions exist in the African-American communities of 2011. The statistics that tell of historically high levels of education, of college attendance doubling over the last 25 years are real, as are those detailing huge increases in the prison inmate population. A Dickensian division into best of times, worst of times, applies perfectly to the black community circa 2011–albeit, the Great Recession is steadily eroding historic successes.

“I’m hearing a lot more dissatisfaction about the worsening conditions and a lot more unproductive anger at the lack of progress,” says Mark Allen, the South Street Journal editor. There are clear strategies available that “could lift us out of our chronic state of dependency,” he says, noting the economically self-reliant Black Wall Streets (or concentrated retail centers) that once existed in many areas of the United States, including Chicago. “But,” he says, “our middle-class, intellectual elite would rather hold a symposium to discuss it.” Meanwhile, he warns, a social volcano is smoldering below the surface.

“The Other Chicago” is supported by the Local Reporting Initiative of Community News Matters, underwritten by The Chicago Community Trust with help from the McCormick, MacArthur, Knight and Driehaus Foundations, and administered by The Community Media Workshop and The Chicago Reporter.