Our Black Year (29 page)

The efforts to drive out poor Blacks along with the threats they supposedly represent to property values are becoming less and less covert. Hyra affirms that upwardly mobile Blacks cooperate with various entities in gentrifying neighborhoods to exclude the most impoverished Blacks,
so that those who have enjoyed “individual success and achievement” have pushed the neediest to other high-poverty neighborhoods.

The situation obviously generates a fair amount of hostility between longtime residents and the recently arrived middle-class Blacks and Black professionals, but some neighborhoods are working to minimize the tensions. In Bronzeville, for example, several African American community groups started collaborating in 1990 with the city government and private entities to encourage economic development while retaining longtime residents. Together they devised a plan, “Restoring Bronzeville,” which emphasized “historic preservation and racial heritage tourism.” The tours of “historic Bronzeville” featured signs and monuments paying tribute to local entertainment, business, and political heroes as well as pointed out sites of civil rights and music history interest. The plan also called for mixed-income housing and pushed for owner-occupied units.

Longtime residents and recent transplants liked the idea of economic development because they agreed that Bronzeville was dying economically and had been for some time. Instead, their goal was to attract members of the Black middle class, which is why their campaign emphasized, in part, racial heritage tourism.

The logic, as I see it, was to honor Bronzeville and to restore some cultural identity, which would prevent outsiders from taking over and converting the neighborhood into just another pretentious, overpriced, pseudosuburban enclave. The strategy did foster a sense of ownership in Bronzeville that only the people who were from there could feel, while indicating to the gentrifiers that the pride of Bronzeville was not for sale.

To ease low-income residents' concern of being displaced just when the neighborhood was becoming a safe, desirable place to live, supporters of that middle-class influx promoted the belief that middle-class folks needed to embrace “group advancement” as part of their civic responsibility—a version of the “rising tide lifts all boats” aphorism.

According to Michelle Boyd, an associate professor of African American studies and political science at University of Illinois–Chicago, there is an assumption “that whatever class differences do exist among blacks are easily overshadowed by similarities. Blacks were united by the common
threat of whites.... [But] the problem lies in how reference to these commonalities can be used to sidestep the issue of competing interests” between middle-class and low-income Blacks. Poor families in Bronzeville and other low-income neighborhoods want affordable housing, jobs that pay a living wage, and child care that suits their schedules in those jobs. Owners of higher-priced housing “want to increase the price of housing as well as the quality and cost of neighborhood goods and services,” Boyd notes.

The two often conflict. Guess who loses?

“One reason poorer residents do not present sustained opposition,” Boyd writes, “is that they are filtered out of the community development process.” Not only were their needs less likely to be discussed, but they experienced a great deal of friction with more affluent residents during the planning process. This “homogenizing” is a classic political technique used not only with gentrification but also in any process in which lower-class Black buy-in is needed to achieve the goals of others, including middle- and upper-class Blacks. Politicians, both Black and White, use it to get votes. Likewise, gentrifiers, both Black and White, use it—the “we're all in this together” line or the “we are doing this to create jobs and improve schools” cant—to get approval for the profit-driven upheaval in their neighborhoods.

The Black middle-class alliances with outsiders complicate the dynamics of gentrification. Often White-owned development firms, financial institutions, and political power brokers convert middle-class Blacks into what sociologist Mary Pattillo calls “brokers.” Perhaps a better term would be sellouts. They bridge the gap between powerful Whites and neighborhoods looking to catch a break.

As Pattillo explains, “disputes between black residents with professional jobs and those with no jobs, between black families who have been in the neighborhood for generations and those who moved in last year, and between blacks who don fraternity colors and those who sport gang colors, are simultaneously debates over what it means to be black.”

This is exactly what is so disturbing about gentrification: its tendency to divide Blacks along economic lines. Wealthier Blacks need to
be concerned about the displacement and exploitation issues that affect poor Black people in neighborhoods with rising property values. It is our duty as members of the Talented Tenth. Our ascendance was supposed to facilitate new systems and ideas, like gentrification, that would lead to our collective advancement. Instead of ensuring a higher quality of life for all of us, those developments created an environment that breeds the perpetual Black ghetto.

See what I mean about how complicated this can get? You have these honorable folks like Joslyn Slaughter of Jordan's Closets and Tracye Dee of WineStyles scratching out an existence as they present wonderful role models and clearly help their neighborhoods. Yet conditions being what they are, the people most in need seem to have been abandoned.

These two women had slightly different experiences with gentrification. By the time Tracye had moved to the South Loop, it had already been gentrified, and she was grateful, as a businesswoman, for the neighborhood's new cachet that, in her opinion, helped with community building. Joslyn, however, had located her boutique on the outskirts of Bronzeville because that was pretty much all she could afford. She witnessed former residents of the 'burbs rehabbing and inhabiting the buildings.

“They would go to work and go home and that was pretty much it,” she recalled. “They still didn't feel safe shopping in the neighborhood. Their disposable income was not being spent here.” Part of the reason, Joslyn said, was that higher-end stores in Bronzeville were somewhat scarce.

Then the recession hit, and rehabbing slowed before stopping altogether. Now, in Bronzeville at least, gentrification is mostly theoretical.

“I had mixed emotions [about gentrification],” Joslyn said. “Bronzeville had been a beautiful area and . . . I'd love to see it return to that,” but she worried about a nicer neighborhood forcing out residents who'd lived there for decades. Still, she thought gentrification would improve the area.

“Things need to change and evolve,” Joslyn said. “As African Americans, we need to learn that we deserve to live in a different environment.”

And then there is my buddy, Mell Monroe, who has lived in Bronzeville since 2002. With nearly three decades of corporate, entrepreneurial, and community-organizing experience, Mell moved to Chicago in 1992 and then to the South Loop. In 2002, nudged by his wife, Angela, they moved to a historic, seven-thousand-square-foot, red-brick Romanesque Queen Anne in Bronzeville. He fell in love with the history, beautiful homes, and prime location of the neighborhood. Mell founded and became president of the Bronzeville Area Residents and Commerce Council and created the Annual Historic Bronzeville Bike Tour. In 2006 he ran for city council. We met him in the middle of 2009, when he'd heard about us and asked, through a mutual friend, if we would have brunch at his home, which he was converting to a B & B. We enthusiastically accepted. He liked what we were preaching and, a few months later, agreed to host the December wine tasting at his elegantly restored home.

The buzz happening in Bronzeville excited Mell—and us too. It was hard not to be excited. He also bristles at the word gentrification, but for slightly different reasons than we do.

“I don't know how to respond to that word when I hear it,” he told me. “It actually puts middle-income people on the defensive. I think a better way to put it,” he said, “is that middle-income people want neighbors to behave in a manner that doesn't interfere with the public or social order, just like in any neighborhood. We would like to have nice amenities like everybody else.”

Low-income residents concerned about middle- and upper-income folks' supposed plans to push out the less fortunate should stop worrying, Mell said. In Bronzeville the objective—as in virtually every neighborhood that may be experiencing the G-word—is safe, clean streets with decent services and businesses that provide jobs. Forget about all the class warfare, he said. If everyone pulls together to tout Bronzeville's rich history, location, and housing stock—and everybody behaves—everybody wins.

Here's the real rub for us: By patronizing businesses in Bronzeville and the South Loop, we were part of the problem.

Yes, those businesses needed our support and we loved them. The more their businesses grew, the greater the chance that other Black businesses could find success too, and probably, the more the neighborhood would improve, which would create the wonderful ripple effect John and I like to talk about.

But like I've said, we were hoping The Empowerment Experiment would reach those most in need of help. Supporting Black-owned businesses in gentrifying places like Hyde Park and Bronzeville funnels dollars to those businesses that, in effect, would expedite the displacement of the most vulnerable folks. By no means were the African American entrepreneurs of the South Side's Bronzeville any less or more courageous and committed to the community than those on the West Side's Austin, Lawndale, or Garfield Park, and neither one was more deserving of our support than the other. But for every leg up the owners in gentrifying areas received, in effect, the West Side lost something. Blacks from the South Side and West Side have a long-standing disregard for one another that boils down to class distinction. But both were once at least united in the struggle—win or lose. Gentrification was eroding that, and fast.

I wanted to shop on the West Side but just couldn't. At the moment our objective to reach brothers and sisters who most needed a hand was looking increasingly improbable, which brings me back to a variation of the question I posed earlier: Where does gentrification leave places like the West Side? Who is going to rescue the children there?

Gentrification is not designed to preserve a neighborhood's racial and socioeconomic demographics, which is why I'm highly suspicious of it. Virtually everything I've read indicates that it works to drive out the economically distressed, not empower them, so that they won't impede the economic development that'll elevate property values. It's a calculated, even heartless scheme. At worst, it is a modernized form of racist economic exploitation.

I can no more be a proponent of gentrification than I can be for giving tax cuts to the richest 1 percent as a way to build small businesses, infuse
more money into the economy, and counter unemployment. Gentrification resembles the false promise of trickle-down economics: It just doesn't work. The wealthy folks, politicians, and groups that back these tax cuts are adamant, as if our very liberty and democracy were at stake. But when it comes to the trickling part, folks seem to just sort of wait and hope, and the trickle turns out to be more like a single drop. I'm all for waiting and hoping as long as we eventually ride the river of prosperity.

One of my biggest fears is that in promoting gentrification as a means to rescue underserved Black areas, its shortcomings would become acceptable. We'd expend all this energy and celebrate the benefits of the “urban pioneers”—the arrival of locally owned businesses, stable home ownership, a general cleaning up of the neighborhoods—but somehow ignore the needs of the residents who were there to begin with. That's unacceptable in my book.

I don't want to minimize the impact gentrification can have on the residents of these areas, but I can't get on board because it does not respect the people living there nor does it acknowledge the potential of these communities. These locales aren't being valued for what they are but only as a “blank canvas” on which the developers, businesses, and corporations can build.

However, if gentrification can be used to
improve
the welfare of those who would be displaced, then I think it can help achieve glorious things. If more Black people—young professionals, grad students, and even older, middle-class Blacks—take charge of the gentrification process with that overall goal in mind, this would fit The Empowerment Experiment's ideals and the essence of Du Bois's Talented Tenth doctrine. This is possible, but it will take a lot of sophisticated thinking, hard work, and, maybe most difficult of all, trust. If gentrification can't accomplish economic development in distressed areas via empowering “indigenous” residents and businesses—especially the least powerful—then it contradicts what we stand for.

In thinking through these issues I've found it useful to keep in mind the words of Sudhir Alladi Venkatesh, a professor of sociology and
African American studies at Columbia University. In a 2007 piece for the
Boston Globe,
he wrote, “What is the responsible position of the black middle class? . . . The question goes back at least to the 1890s, when W. E. B. Du Bois wrote his seminal study of urban development, ‘The Philadelphia Negro.' Du Bois wrote that the indigenous and more cosmopolitan Black middle class will forever oppose the newly arriving Southern migrant, unless the two recognize their conflicts only serve to strengthen the whites in power.”

Chapter 11

A
LMOST EXACTLY 177 YEARS AFTER MARIA STEWART GAVE her landmark but largely forgotten speech in Boston, I stood, possibly just as pissed off, in front of 350 members of Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management Black Alumni Club, of which John is an active member. As guest speaker at a November evening reception thrown in our honor and dubbed “An Evening with the Andersons,” I was trying to convey all the frustration and fatigue we'd experienced during the past months so the audience could understand my pain and anger. In a sense, that indignation, mostly due to Karriem's store closing and the herculean task of simply trying to find food, was pushing us toward the finish line.