By: omarfidel

omarfidel — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 05:02:34 +0000

This is really fun to look at and to extrapolate the explosion that occurred. I would love for a false color map that shows the diaspora of white flight and the introduction of black southerners into the north states done with a time progression.
I remember my grandmother showing me 16 mm film of town meetings in the chicago suburbs that were forming in the late 50s and into the 60′s, how irate the whites got, how rabid they were against blacks encroaching on “their” white enclaves. People forget, or perhaps most of my generation is rather clueless to how racist, how xenophobic northern whites really were in that period of time. Gary indiana is another example. There is a mythology, an aura of mystique surrounding gary, its almost a right of passage for a group of white ignorant suburbanites to go on a road trip to gary and then brag about it the next day in school. Not like street cred, but more like survival cred. Call it xenophobia, racism, cultural chauvinism, cultural shock, but as a person of mix race and of dual class status I got to see the inside of both these worlds. One world of privledge, my mother and her husband moved to the exclusive white enclave, nearly a gated community in a sense where i grew up. Though my mother was from gary and her new husband was from blue collar portage indiana, they “made” it. Living in Shorewood became their badge, their pedigree/provenance, i was the tag along.
My mothers mother and my paternal grandparents remained in gary indiana, I experience the plight of the faltering economies of north lake county, the result of white flight. Every weekend i was in two worlds, every summer i vacationed for weeks or months either in texas or in nwin, and chicago.
Being a half-breed/ half cast, i always was in two worlds, being a product of divorce i always had two families, and coming from two different social classes i always had two different views. Integration is not something that many people want. Blacks are racist, they like their own people they have a different set of cultural norms, in gary they dont need gates, they have a myth protecting them from the whites. You will never see the gentrification of gary indiana like the neighborhoods of the watts area in los angeles. You will never see the virtually gated communities of Valparaiso a county seat, or crown point also a county seat ever openly accept a black diaspora. These people remember bitterly the overflow from chicago entering into their once all white christian city of gary. The whites who had the means like lemmings quickly escaped to the burbs, making new encroachments. They though did not intermingle with the “white trash/country people” even though in terms of education or earnings they were hardly much removed from those that they scoffed at. Nwin and the chicagoland region is always in a flux, ethnic whites enclaves morph, and every generation their are new ethnic mixes. Always self segregating though. My mothers gary local was once mostly jews and greeks, macedonians, serbs/croats.. then it started to become sub middle class white, and finally blacks from chicago started coming in. The south no longer had work because of mechanization and their were lots of semi skilled labor jobs to be had in the Steel and auto industries of nwin and chicago.It was a magnet for everyone. These neighborhoods these gated communities these islands of privileged and class distinction show you how city-statesque and Machiavellian we as americans really are. We only kid ourselves about not having class warfare, in london even the superrich sometimes take public transit, the english have a more common sense approach to class distinction. They have accepted the reality of their system, we are still in denial. Still falling for all that american propaganda how we are all equal and all valuable, will we ever have a social uprising. Probably not, your site illustrates exactly why, absence is greater than presence, by manipulating our socio econmoic enviornment by creating micro-climates through social and racial stratification we insure the status quo. Suburbs keep the people in cocoons self contained utopian city states. These insulate the truth, these keep us from encroaching into each segments own reality. This idea of the insular, of the gate moat and castle, of the city-state and every man for himself is the real america. Behind every Rebel iconoclast, behind every irreverent contrarian is some seething resentment that he or she didnt get his fair share.
I see the world from another point of view outside of the norms of race and class but also of being a sexual minority. Outside the racially segregated city of gary, and the white mirror of poverty that portage,hessville, and black oak used to be. Their is a gay ghetto where Segregation is even more polarizing, it puts all of your census information on its head: You have your coal queens, in two flavors, chocolate and vanilla, you have your snow queens in 3 flavors, you have the white guy who is a sinophile, you have the asian guy who is wanting to be “white”. They ignore people in a crowded room, they do the same thing socially that these rich people do in their island building. Gay asians tend to act “sticky” like sticky rice. Sinocentrism. Ive seen much more than this even, because of my travels. Also many of my cousins are mixed with either mexican, Puerto rican, chinese, or mixed ethnic white plus white. Lets not even get into how confusing Blatino is to the whole mix. The problem with america is the racial distinction and the class distinction are confused, or merge, so that they are entangled and thus its hard to mobilize one group out of the many even though their plights are the same, they see each other through a stereotyped and xenophobic lens. If you think about this, sometimes i ponder that this is the culture that is best suited to keep people in their place. Divide and conquer. The french revolution comes to mind, phrases like let them eat cake seems like something that would be on the tounge of so many of these people with affluenza. Look at the radical change in the city plan of paris after the revolution the wide streets to separate people and to make it more difficult for mobs to block attack routes. Cities always breed the anarchists, the intellectual, the malcontents and the dissenters. Why would government want that. We live in a period of American empire which is ruled by division. The so called middle class is the bridge between the two worlds, if you kill the middle the rest will die. Many of the rich are so wealthy that they can in fact endure the absence of the middle and turn the lower class or working class blue collar into the new Deletes(as they say in india)or more commonly referred to as the untouchable. The old south is reborn again, the plantation effect. This time around though the slaves have no inherent worth or value, in turn fellow americans become 3rd world factory grunts, units of labor to compete with the other 3rd world provincials. Ah slaves of the empire, do you hear that, i think i hear a violin, nero must be ready for his swan song solo.

By: Edward H. Davis

Edward H. Davis — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 20:58:01 +0000

Professor Higley-
Your data on Oak Brook’s Asian population is fascinating. I wonder why we haven’t heard more about this new phenomenon. Surely there are geographers studying the Asian immigration into the US, so there ought to be a geographer investigating the clustering of wealthy Asians into neighborhoods. There are plenty of interesting questions that could be asked: What are the reasons migrants might give for choosing gated communities like The Midwest Club? How do the Indian, Chinese and Filipino groups interact – do they see some common ground as Asians?
By the way, your site taken as a whole contains an astonishing wealth of information, and I love the maps. Thank you for your efforts to document these important places.
-Edward H. Davis

Comments on: West Suburban Chicago: Hinsdale & Oak Brook

By: omarfidel

By: Edward H. Davis