Some folks asked me to comment on Ferguson, MO. I don’t have anything to add to the massive amount that has already been written, but it did get me thinking about my own neighborhood and the racial dynamics that exist in America.
I live in a mixed race neighborhood on the North Side of Indianapolis called various names, including South of Broad Ripple (SoBro) and Keystone-Monon. It’s a racially diverse area, mostly featuring wood frame 2-3br/1-ba worker cottages built around wartime. It’s likely always been working class or starter home housing as the smallness of the homes limits their value in a city where there are near infinite tracts of similar building stock.
If asked to guess at the racial mix, I would have said 70% white/30% black. Clicking into the NYT census viewer, I discovered that my census tract is actually 49% black/42% white. Here’s a screen shot (click to enlarge):
Just to the west is Meridian-Kessler, one of the city’s most desirable residential neighborhoods. About a mile and a half north is the core of Broad Ripple, a commercial district known for its nightlife aimed at the 20s set.
One might think this area is primed for gentrification, but that’s not the case. As it happens, those more desirable neighborhoods I mentioned themselves have had a lot of challenges such as abandoned homes and commercial vacancies. There’s virtually nothing that could be considered gentrification in Indianapolis generally, and certainly not at extensive scale.
Because of its city location proximate to desirable commercial nodes, the area has seen an influx of young families, often in their 20s with one young child. Some savvy rehabbers have also purchased. But the backbone of the neighborhood remains the black and white working class, often homeowners.
Because there’s longstanding integration and little gentrification pressure – and because unlike Ferguson this area is embedded inside of a large and diverse municipality, I haven’t sense much in the way of racial tensions. People seem quite friendly to each other to the most part. Personally I think it’s a great neighborhood and love living there. So does everyone else I’ve talked to.
On the surface, this would appear to be a successful integrated neighborhood, by American standards especially. But everything is not as it seems.
I’ve only lived here about eight months, but what I observed is similar to what I previously saw in Fountain Square, a type of parallel societies. In Fountain Square I called this “Artists and Appalachians.” In that case both groups are white. They share the same neighborhood geography, and even patronize some of the same establishments such as Peppy’s Grill and the Liquor Cabinet, but there was little social interaction between them apart from surface pleasantries.
I see the same here, only with a racial dimension. Blacks and whites get along, and even patronize some of the same stores, but there does not appear to be much in the way of real social capital that has developed between the two groups. This leaves the neighborhood extremely vulnerable to racial divisiveness if anything goes wrong.
This was illustrated to me by our local neighborhood group on the Next Door platform. This app is very popular in my neighborhood. However, judging from the avatar photos, it appears to be overwhelmingly white people who use it. Here’s an application that is building social capital in the neighborhood – I used to it meet my neighbors at the corner when I needed to borrow an extension ladder – but which has developed along racial boundaries. It seems to be spreading by word of mouth, and since existing social networks seem to be predominantly intra-race, it’s no surprise the online manifestations of them are as well.
There have been some property crimes in the area recently. This is sadly ubiquitous in all urban neighborhoods these days. My building (especially the garages) in Chicago’s Lakeview neighborhood was burglarized many times and we had to spend a lot of money to install high security doors and locks to try to stop it. My aunt and uncle just had their car stolen in the heart of Lincoln Park and even before that happened they told me theft was out of control there. These are two of the wealthiest neighborhoods in Chicago. Even in my rural hometown theft is a common occurrence.
In short, I have no reason to believe the activity in my area is that unusual, either compared to other neighborhoods, or maybe even compared to the neighborhood’s own past. But thanks to apps like Next Door, we now know about every single incident of anything that occurs, whereas before that we would all have just gone about our business blissfully unaware of a lawnmower theft a couple blocks over unless it was we ourselves or someone we knew personally that got hit. (A neighborhood old timer posted a thread on Next Door to this very effect, saying that this ebb and flow of theft has been happening since he moved in during the 1970s)
As it happens, various neighbors believe believe they identified the culprit behind many similar incidents. As it happens, he’s an 18 year old black man from the neighborhood. I don’t know if he’s guilty or not, but apparently there’s a warrant out for him and he posted pictures of himself on Facebook pointing a pistol at the camera and such.
While people were zeroing in on their culprit, I noticed some started viewing any young black guy pausing too long in front of their house as suspicious. This was only a brief blip until such time as the specific person of interest was identified. However, this adds an instant racial dimension to matters, like it or not.
This wasn’t motivated by racial animus, but rather fear of being burglarized in a place where such burglaries were in fact occurring and where there was evidence that a particular black male was committing it. People in Lincoln Park and Lakeview can afford to take a philosophical view of theft. They are wealthy enough that having say a bicycle stolen is more annoyance than threat.
By contrast, in my working class area, not everyone can just whip out their debit card every time something goes wrong. In a response to an NYT piece extolling the virtues of minimalism, Tumblr writer Vruba suggested that living with minimal possessions is luxury for the well off:
Wealth is…having options and the ability to take on risk. If you see someone on the street dressed like a middle-class person (say, in clean jeans and a striped shirt), how do you know whether they’re lower middle class or upper middle class? I think one of the best indicators is how much they’re carrying….If I were rich, I would carry a MacBook Air, an iPad mini as a reader, and my wallet. My wallet would serve as everything else that’s in my backpack now. Go out on the street and look, and I bet you’ll see that the richer people are carrying less.
In a neighborhood where some people are only a few rungs up on the ladder that provides stability in life, vigilance over your stuff is important, because it’s not easily replaced. Only half of American households could come up with $400 in an emergency. Replacing a lawn mower probably means going into credit card debt (or more credit card debt) for them.
Nevertheless, what this illustrates to me is the potential racial powder keg that lies under the surface of even seemingly placid and well-integrated communities. Race is simply an inescapable subtext to any interaction that crosses the color line, no matter how much we try to avoid it, and it adds contingent risk to social stability.
Why do I say this? Because I believe there’s little to no interracial social capital in these places that can withstand a hit to neighborhood cohesion. There’s no genuine solidarity that comes from genuinely living life together in a way that goes deeper than everyday pleasantries. Thus the risk that racial tensions can end up erupting in some way is ever present.
This is not unique at all to my neighborhood, which, as I said and want to stress again, is a great place full of great people. For example, a couple weeks ago I had drinks with someone in Cincinnati whose neighborhood had nearly identical demographics and dynamics, right down to the use of Next Door. We have tried to solve racial problems in America through institutional solutions. As important as many of those are, they are not a substitute for the human connections that allow us to weather the vagaries of life together.
How do we create interracial social capital? It’s not easy. Earlier this year I had dinner with a resident of Over the Rhine in Cincinnati who wanted to create a personal connection to his black neighbors, but wasn’t sure how. Frankly none of us at dinner had any great ideas. I suggested perhaps joining a local black church, but that only works if attending church is something you do.
As the Next Door case shows, the path of least resistance doesn’t work here. Our default pathways for building social networks follow the color lines. And heck, books have been written about the decline in social capital within white America itself. Crossing the color line is even more difficult and requires a high degree of intentionality.
I spent some time in the Walltown neighborhood of Durham, NC last week. Walltown is a historically black neighborhood adjacent to Duke University. While gentrification and university encroachment are issues, again the housing stock type limits upside on pricing. There has been some influx of white resident as well as Latinos, but a strong black presence is still there.
I visited with people from a black church there as part of a tour led by Jonathan Wilson-Hartgove, a white resident who co-founded Rutba House, a Christian intentional community (their term is “new monasticism”). Half of their spaces are allocated for those in need of transitional housing (the homeless, ex-offenders, etc), mostly people of color. I’d guess Jonathan is to the left of your average Boulder resident. He named Rutba House after a town in Iraq he was at during a private 2003 peace tour of the country during the war, which should give you an idea.
A big part of what the various faith groups there are doing is trying to do is figure out a way for blacks and whites to actually exist together in real community in Walltown, not just live in the same geography. I think he’d be the first to tell you that they’ve had at best partial success. This shows the difficulty, even with lots of people of various races committing to make it work.
What’s the answer? I don’t know, but I do believe a big part of the problem is lack of social capital at ground level. Again, this isn’t necessarily solely a matter of race, as the Fountain Square example illustrates, but in multi-racial neighborhoods the racial dimension is always present to some extent and certainly amplifies things. So it shouldn’t surprise us that even in places where everyone does appear to get along, it doesn’t necessarily take much to set things off. I think most Midwest cities could easily have social unrest with the right triggering incident. While there are some unique aspects to Ferguson such as the political geography of St. Louis metro, no city should feel superior just because it didn’t happen there.
While I don’t pretend to have all the answers, I think we ought to spend some time thinking about the ways technology can actually make things worse. Not only does social media fan the flames of every debate – Twitter and Facebook may be great for many things, but substantive discourse isn’t one of them – but apps like Next Door that are designed to create social capital may actually have the unintended side effect of deepening racial divisions. This despite the fact that the one person I know who works for Next Door is passionate about creating the kind of interracial social capital I’m describing.
This perhaps should be a cautionary tale when it comes to technology-centric views of solving urban problems. There’s no app for solving America’s persistent racial gaps.
PS: I will be aggressively moderating comments or disabling commenting on this post if necessary.
Excellent, thoughtful, and troubling post, Aaron. It’s a very complex world and as much as social networking has brought me closer to many people it’s important that we also acknowledge how it can deepen divisions.
Also, thank you for noting that half of Americans could not pull together an extra $400 to replace something like a stolen mower or bike – an amount many people in the neighborhood next door would spend on a single meal with little thought.
I think it’d almost be impossible to fix the racial divisions you allude to within the modern structure of America. I think you can only build social cohesion, or capital, when people live and work and roughly in the same places. IMO, that’s the only way I’ve seen any progress. If people live together and but commute to other sides of town for work, or vice versa, it’s tough to create a meaningful level of synergy.
I know this isn’t a popular opinion, but I believe our cities were torn apart because the white community wasn’t prepared for or particularly interested in social cohesion. If we all stayed in the city and commuted downtown, it was obvious that eventually we’d have to all get along or society would become a mess. Rather than do that, however, our solution was to further decentralize and segregate the daily functions of life. We destroyed the city to maintain social hegemony.
There’s a reason why rich European nations are able to maintain high level urban environments much better than America. It’s not just that we love cars and they don’t. European countries are essentially monoethnic in comparison to America. They haven’t had to deal with the social issues we have. And, unfortunately, we’ve driven away from our own issues far too often. For the American experiment to continue to not just persevere – but thrive – we have to figure out a better way forward.
We all know that racism is alive and well. Whether it’s a casual remark from a friend or family member, or just a stranger at a bar, it’s clear we still have a lot of work to do.
I don’t know that I agree with the America/Europe comparison, George. Consider the recent ethnic and religious tensions between Muslims and Jews in the sections of Paris. Or issues of Indian and Muslim integration in neighborhoods in London. There’s been an increasing amount of North African and Middle Eastern immigrants into Europe and it doesn’t always go well…and is interestingly handled differently in each country, it seems. For example: If an immigrant wants to maintain/renew a visa in The Netherlands after the first year, they have to sit for testing that shows they have learned the Dutch language and history well enough to become a part of the culture before the visa is renewed; let alone citizenship.
It’s handled differently everywhere and I don’t think any specific instance is ultimately “right” and could be replicated elsewhere, because it’s what works for their culture. I’ve met enough unsavory people of my own race to know acting like a heathen isn’t race-specific. Unfortunately, that’s sometimes hard to teach without having had those experiences, because as the author mentions this is an issue of social networking, both on – and off – grid. It’s not that the different racial/socio-economic groups don’t have access to technology, they just choose to use it differently and the types and ways they use technology pertain to their social group.
I believe this to be a social issue that can only be solved at an individual level, by personal choices, over generations. However, I can offer only a personal anecdote to support my belief.
One of the shortcomings of my own (suburban and small city) upbringing was obvious to me when I went from the suburbs off to college in a large city. In my childhood, I had only known a handful of people who were not white Christians, though one of my close high school friends was Jewish. The university I attended had a very large (maybe 1/4 to 1/3) Jewish minority, with black and Asian students in rough proportion to the general population.
As a result, I was strongly in favor of my own children attending urban, diverse schools even though they were growing up in one of the majority-white, higher-income neighborhoods Aaron describes above. As a single dad later in my younger son’s school years, I reinforced that choice.
He went through 13 years of Indianapolis Public Schools’ magnet programs before attending our state’s A&T university. His five closest friends from high school are still close friends: two white guys, a black, a Latino , and a Vietnamese-American whose parents immigrated as refugees. Most of them have served or are serving in the US military and reserves, as he has.
I believe that having close friends from different cultures makes his life richer, allows him to fit in a wide range of settings, and makes him more tolerant and understanding than I remember being at his age. When I wrote on an earlier post about “the experiment worked”, this is what I meant: My son is educated, treats others with respect, understands service, and has good friends from different backgrounds, as well as a good entry-level career job. I couldn’t ask for more from him.
Lora, I don’t think Europeans handle diversity any better than Americans. It’s just that European countries, until quite recently, were basically monoethnic. Only now are countries like France truly beginning to approach the level of diversity you see in America. And even then, the majority of France is French, a single ethnic group. That’s way different than America.
The issues countries like France are having lately with immigrants shows that the world itself has a long way to go towards achieving racial harmony.
A very well done and thoughtful piece.
I think George V. has a very astute, if unpopular, point:
“I know this isn’t a popular opinion, but I believe our cities were torn apart because the white community wasn’t prepared for or particularly interested in social cohesion. If we all stayed in the city and commuted downtown, it was obvious that eventually we’d have to all get along or society would become a mess. Rather than do that, however, our solution was to further decentralize and segregate the daily functions of life. We destroyed the city to maintain social hegemony.”
The role that race played in the development of the suburbs, particularly in Rust Belt cities, is always underplayed. And even when we have what we believe are integrated communities, they’re actually parallel societies that just happen to inhabit the same space. This is something that a lot of blacks (like myself) seem to recognize, but is only beginning to reach the consciousness of whites who are coming back to cities.
I think Aaron’s key phrase here is “lack of interracial social capital”. That’s exactly what we have, and it’s exactly the kind of chasm that leads to events like Ferguson. It’s also a chasm that’s growing in visibility in cities and inner ring suburbs, where gentrification or minority suburbanization is upsetting old demographic boundaries.
I may be walking on thin ice with this, but “lack of interracial social capital” is what Spike Lee was inelegantly referring to this past winter in his rant about Brooklyn gentrification. Many newcomers are bringing their own social capital to new places, ignoring and by default weakening the existing ones in their new community. The reverse but related aspect of this is Ferguson, where the older white power structure withdrew from areas that were rapidly gaining black residents and created a vaccuum. There’s plenty of evidence of both in Rust Belt cities more than anywhere else in the U.S.
The solution lies in direct engagement, and I still don’t know if Americans, of all types, are ready for that.
George V is right on. It’s a recent problem, and we see that the European seem to actually be worse at handling the issue than Americans are, since they haven’t really had to up until now.
This goes along with an observation I saw a few years ago, perhaps on this site-that those smaller U.S. cities that are thriving, the Portlands and Austins of the U.S., tend to be much whiter and monocultural than average.
When you think of it, one of their hallmarks is that they have great downtowns, and had them well before most other similar sized cities did. Why? Probably because their lack of diversity (it could be political diversity as well in Austin) didn’t drive these places to abandon their central cities. This is not to say that these places have NO diversity, but only that it was less than other similar sized cities. The people in these areas saw their downtowns as “our downtowns” not “those people’s neighborhood”.
Taking a step back, the U.S. has never really been a melting pot. I once heard it described as a tossed salad. I think that’s more apt-we’re not blended into one mono-color shake, but we exist side by side and retain our features-a tomato is still a tomato, and so on.
Why? Studies suggest that we are hard-wired to be more trusting of those more similar to us. Makes sense. Back in the caveman days, if you met a new tribe, they may be hostile. You survived by placing your tribe at the center of your life, over other tribes. They were your lifeblood. Over time this tribal structure slowly changed as it became apparent that we are better off and can accomplish much more in bigger groups.
Unfortunately hard-wiring is hard to change, so we retain some of that fearfulness of different cultures and races. I find other races and cultures fascinating, but must admit I don’t find it easy to commingle with folks that are very different-I don’t have the same reference points and understandings they do.
Going back to the salad concept, do we really WANT to be all homogenous? I don’t think so. Great cities often advertise their ethnic neighborhoods, Little Italy, Chinatown, etc.
Think of all the contributions different cultures have made-I was thinking of food and music just this weekend. No black community in the U.S., no rock music, no jazz, no blues. No Mediterranean communities, no Hommus, olive oil, Italian food, gyros, etc. All things that I think are great about American society.
So the trick is getting us more comfortable, over our instinctive cautiousness, with different cultures and races, WHILE leaving them somewhat intact in my opinion. I don’t favor the European trend of making everyone blend to the dominant culture-I think culture is better when you add to your culture with different ethnic groups, which is what the U.S. essentially does. However, especially with black-white relations and the history there, this seems to cause much strife at times. I don’t see an easy solution.
I second Chris’ observation that the military is a remarkably effective force for racial integration, one rarely appreciated by ousiders. The whole boot camp experience, with white/black/asian/hispanic kids being put through a grueling experience together, does more to break down social barriers than practically anything else. Follow that up with those same young men and women (not kids anymore) needing to trust each other in dangerous circumstances (Iraq, etc), and you and up the most integrated slice of American life (and yes, I served active duty). The military may be the only institution in the world where it is no big deal to have a white guy working for a black guy, and that has been true since at least the 80s.
I believe that a return to compulsory national service in the US, whether in the military or a modern CCC or Americorps, would help rebuild social capital and knock down some socioeconomic barriers.
Very thoughtful and honest essay, Aaron. The phrase “lack of interracial social capital” is definitely worth reflecting further on.
Social capital, as per Pierre Boudieu, probably always needs to be understood in relation to other forms of non-economic capital (notably, cultural capital) but also in relation to plain old economic capital. One wonders if Aaron’s neighborhood is also economically mixed, or is there a general similarity in terms of middle-income status and relative household wealth in the neighborhood? If so, that would be a rare situation in the US and I think it would reduce the powderkeg dynamic seen in Ferguson and elsewhere.
I say this as a resident of Indianapolis’s Old North Side where you have renovated $300-700K historic homes, new section 8 housing, rentals at all price points, and distressed small properties, all within blocks of one another.
My sense is that, generally, folks with strong similarity in terms of economic capital (income and wealth) tend to pool around certain class-oriented activities (whether it’s pick-up sports games or airplane lessons, or family visits to the library or the equestrian stables, or unironic PBRs or artisanal cocktails). And these cultural activities are where social networks often occur “naturally” (though nothing is “natural” in class society). In our current “back to the cities” option within middle-class American civilization, sharing a geographic location without sharing a social and cultural world is indeed a process of building powderkegs.
My downtown Indy neighborhood has an interesting young and large conservative Presbyterian church that badly wants to be a church in the city, for the city, and a place of hospitality for all those in the city. Whole sermon series give a biblical basis for this mission. One can translate this to mean that they want to build interracial and inter-class social capital. It’s part of the church’s spiritual brand, so to speak. The congregants I see on Sundays are at least 90% white and distinctly middle-class looking. I’m guessing most have college degrees and steady employment, or if they’re under-20, are clearly on a track to college in a “Young Life” religious mindset.
In terms of cultural capital, the music is made by a professional quality band that sounds like a distillation of Arcade Fire and alt-country Americana. It’s quite good, but most of the congregation can’t really sing along because the songs are unfamiliar, given an alt-rock facelift. The audience for such music is fairly class-restricted. The preachers are all theologically conservative white men (women are forbidden to preach) and they very rarely mention actual social life in downtown Indianapolis, beyond cute anecdotes about individual outreach. Because the congregation is politically mixed, the preachers shy from discussions of any actual social or political issues beyond jokes about Hoosier basketball.
By contrast, I used to attend a church in another state that was more successful at interracial social capital building. It was a left-wing Episcopal church with a white preacher and a choir of amiable warblers led by a gay male gospel musician. It was the clear political and social vision of the place, along with its pious but broad Episcopal liturgy, that gathered very different people together. It was a small congregation, but people seemed to see eye to eye more across class and racial lines in part because the church’s social message spoke to them and their experiences in the world outside the church. I’m guessing the same thing might happen in the right-wing churches that mix together “black” and “white” elements more intentionally.
Quick addendum to my above reflection on Aaron’s essay.
To those reading at home from outside Indianapolis, the fast-gentifrying neighborhoods called the Old North Side and Herron Morton make up census tract 3909. According to the NYT link Aaron showed, the white population for 3909 since 2000 has gone up by 36% (currently 50%). The African-American population has gone down by 38% (currently 42%). I would venture to guess that these number map onto higher incoming and lower outgoing median family incomes as well. This is the kind of quintessential gentrification squeeze (with attending inter-class and inter-race alienation and friction) that also contributed to increased suburban poverty in places like North St Louis County, Missouri. Powderkegs for everyone beyond the gilded and guarded estates in the new America.
I posted these thoughts as one of my occasionsk columns in Reboot Illinois. http://www.rebootillinois.com/2014/09/22/editors-picks/petercreticos/using-fear-ferguson-symbolizes-grow-together/25473/
This is such a timely issue and post. I lived in Oak Park, Illinois for nearly 25 years where the community made a conscious effort from the highest levels to embrace the concept of racial diversity. It has not been perfect, but the point is that it became official Village policy, embraced by subsequent generations of leadership. Very few Midwest communities have followed this example.
I recently completed a consulting project in a Lake County community in which the local Latino community made a serious effort to make their desire for broader community engagement known. This community, which is largely Anglo, had no formal structure to address this but perhaps will move towards formal acknowledgements at the municipal level. They already have some informal events related to celebrating diversity led by a range of participants within the community. I am hopeful.
The bottom line is that diversity must absolutely, positively be supported at the highest levels of any local governance. It must be official municipal policy. Let me repeat that — IT MUST BE OFFICIAL MUNICIPAL POLICY.
Otherwise Ferguson.
Aaron’s neighborhood was on “the other side of the tracks” from 1900-1930 streetcar suburban development; it has been part of the core municipality of Indianapolis since it was developed. In that regard it is probably more like Chicago’s bungalow belt than like a first-ring suburb.
Indianapolis, for a supposedly stodgy Midwestern city, has pretty good diversity within city government. The City-County Council has a Democrat majority and the president is an African-American woman. One at-large councilor is a married gay man.
The police department, though, has acknowledged a diversity problem; the county is about 37% African-American and Latino and the police force is less than half that. That one problem has the potential to cause trouble since the odds are white officers will be responding to incidents in minority neighborhoods.
I don’t have anything brilliant to add. Community is a very intricate and sensitive thing, much easier to destroy than build up.
Too many seem to think that government is a replacement for community.
Ferguson, by normal crime stats didn’t look that bad but obviously something very wrong was going on under the surface.
Interesting, thoughtful piece. When I looked at the Census numbers, I wonder if there’s disengagement also because of the aspirations of those who live there. Namely, that at least as of 2010, the black population (down 22 percent) was falling much faster than the white population (down 2 percent). Having seen the neighborhood, I doubt that’s a sign of gentrification — I suspect like in a lot of cities blacks took advantage (as so many did) of easier-to-get mortgages to move to the suburbs. (Blacks are still very much a minority in the area’s fastest-growing county, Hamilton, but the increase in their population was substantial.)
I suspect an issue, also, is the general racial climate in America. There is a lot of historical (and earned) distrust, and it takes a long time to break down those barriers, assuming they can ever be broken. But as a nation whose minority share of the population is growing while the white share of the population is shrinking, we’re going to have to figure something out — white flight is no longer an option.
One of my favorite Indiana stats from the 2010 Census: as the state grew by a little more than 400,000 people, Hamilton County added 66,000 white residents over 10 years — the state’s other 91 counties, combined, added 1,000.
^Bob:
If I am reading your math correctly, you are saying that Indiana’s population gain of 400,000 was comprised of 334,000 non-whites? For that large a number, growth in Hispanics cant be the whole explanation (though the South Chicago-East Side-Hegewisch-South Suburb diaspora into NW Indiana is pretty remarkable). Is the Indy area a sort of market the attracts Rust Belt blacks as much as do the “New South” cities? And what of the various Asian populations.
Hispanic growth in Indiana — about 186,000.
http://www.census.gov/prod/cen2010/briefs/c2010br-04.pdf
African-American growth in Indiana — about 112,000.
http://www.census.gov/prod/cen2010/briefs/c2010br-06.pdf
Asian growth in Indiana — about 44,000
http://www.incontext.indiana.edu/2013/sept-oct/article4.asp
And with the white population up about 67,000, now you’re at 400,000.
By the way, Indiana’s white child population fell by 95,000 between 2000-2010 — but its minority child population increased by nearly 130,000.
http://www.incontext.indiana.edu/2011/july-aug/article1.asp
By the way, Hispanic population growth was responsible for more than half the nation’s growth between 2000 and 2010, so these Indiana numbers aren’t out of step. In fact, in proportion it’s a little behind the average. Where it’s above average is in its black population growth. The growth in the number of Asians was ahead of the growth in the number of blacks in the nation as a whole. Then again, Indiana has a much longer entrenched black population of size than it does an Asian population.
http://www.census.gov/prod/cen2010/briefs/c2010br-02.pdf
Thanks for the topic and discussion, Aaron. There is a lot in this to unpack. First of all, I’d like to suggest that the bigger piece here is culture, rather than race. (Culture = norms, traditions, worldviews, way of living life). Your example of “Artists and Appalachians” in Fountain Square illustrates this. Blending two very different cultures can be very challenging, even within a single “race” (such a tricky term!). People of different races that are more similar in culture have a much greater chance of bonding than people with very different cultures. Cultural differences can lead to different patterns of living that lead to the parallel societies that you write about. If the cultures are so different, there are fewer path-crossings that lead to common stakes (or shared capital). Now, having said that culture is the biggest piece, I also want to say that the black-white racial piece is by far the most complex and challenging in America and this is because of the incredibly tragic history that our country deals with. So in many instances, not only are there the big cultural differences between blacks and whites, there are is also the huge historical piece that makes things extra challenging in this particular interaction.
From my standpoint, it takes great intentionality, willingness to learn, and humility to build relationships across cultural and racial boundaries.
Practically speaking, a simple beginning is to have someone over for dinner. Sometimes something as simple as walking across the street can break down huge walls. I want to get to know you. I want to know more about you, your family, and how you see our neighborhood and the world. You may be invited to their house and the treads of a bond start to form. Vulnerability is key.
Aaron, I’m not sure if we are using the term the same way, but I think having shared stakes is just as, if not more, important than shared social capital. By this I mean if everyone has a particular outcome on which they are depending, and the stakes are high and common, there will be a greater willingness to build this social capital together and share it. An acute example is a flood in a neighborhood. Suddenly, no matter what the culture, race, or income, everyone is in the same boat (haha). The stakes are extremely high (saving lives and living quarters) and common. Do you have a shovel? Yes, I’ll bring it and be right over. I’ll hold this sand bag while you fill it. We need everyone in a line right now! After the water subsides, there may even be a teaming of neighbors across lines to petition the city to make public works improvements. Common social capital built. The need becomes greater than the distraction of cultural or race. There is no better way to get to really get to know another person than to spend time in a foxhole with them.
As Aaron touched on, if one of the two candidate groups for blending comes in with much greater social capital, they also have a greater chance of insulating themselves from the threats that often cause high, common stakes. E.g. school choice, stability in a housing market downturn, access to groceries, etc. This insulation allows for parallel lives and vastly different stakes that provide little or no incentive for common social capital to be built or shared.
The best example I’ve been a part of is a church that was culturally and ethnically diverse. At the heart of the gospel is the belief that all of us (regardless of culture, color, or cohort) are sinners deserving death and in need of the grace in the form of the cross. These stakes are extremely high and shared by all. There was also a ton of intentionality with diversity of leadership and musical worship styles.
Ziggy, I’d like to dig a little deeper into the Oak Park example. First, I realize you are acknowledging that the efforts have not been perfect. I also acknowledge and appreciate Oak Park’s intentionality at a high level. However, how do we really measure whether Oak Park is successful in truly being racially inclusive and integrated? From my standpoint, I feel that it is an ideal that Oak Parkers take a great deal of pride in and much ado is made of it. I feel that there are some good things that happen on this front. However, it feels like a thinner veneer that is not deeply embraced on a personal level in many instances. The census data is often cited as an indicator of racial integration (67.7% white, 21.7% African-American, 6.8% Hispanic). However, 50% of the African-American population is clustered along the eastern edge of the village within 4 blocks of Austin Boulevard. This street is the border between Oak Park and the Austin community area of Chicago, which is 85% African-American (more like 95% in the section bordering Oak Park). Austin Boulevard is a huge dividing line racially, socially, economically, and otherwise. Oak Park has strengthened this barrier by blocking off access on 10 of the 14 east-west local streets intersecting Austin Boulevard to prohibit vehicles from entering Oak Park from the Austin side.
Again, I think that Oak Park as a whole is, on some levels, way ahead of other areas as far as acceptance and integration and intentionality. There are a lot of amazing people there doing amazing things. However, there is still at least some underlying feeling of “we don’t have a problem with people of other races just as long as you do X, Y, and Z while we do things the way we do.” There is a substantial amount of living and educating in proximity, but how much of it is really parallel lives? What happens when a string of muggings takes place in the eastern half of the village? What happens when OPRF High School expels and fines students for living outside of attendance boundaries? Read the online OP news sources and watch the interactions. Is there shared social capital? There are measures within the village at ground level that need to be evaluated. I also feel that Oak Park’s relationship with its neighbor Austin should be considered in the evaluation of OP’s success on racial issues. Ziggy, I’d be curious about the successes you saw as well as areas for improvement.
C. Moore — I appreciate your thoughtful observations regarding race and culture.
Oak Park’s efforts over the last 40 years are a continuous work in progress, and despite the solid leadership at the highest levels image doesn’t always match reality:
http://www.oakpark.com/News/Articles/2-14-2014/Oak-Park-flunks-rental-housing-discrimination-test/
That said, I would argue that Oak Park’s embracing of diversity as official Village policy has gone a long way to foster a unique culture that clearly differentiates the Village from most other Chicago metro suburbs. When failures occur, they are taken very seriously.
There are a number of areas that have been the focus of improvement. One is having more diverse elected officials. Another is improving academic performance of minority students. The police department — led by an African American — has been superb in the eye of many.
Creating and maintaining a diverse community is ever a work in progress. Dynamics are constantly changing. Oak Park has a highly activist community. I was not involved for 15 of the 25 years I lived there and then it sucked me in. Through this I got to meet and interact with a wide swath of the local population. I think the activism, and a highly educated and politically savvy population are what keeps the cultural melting pot on the path towards strengthening its identity as a diverse community. Not perfect but always trying.
One more story. When my wife and I moved to Oak Park, we bought a house on North Lombard Ave in the late 1980s, halfway between Austin and Ridgeland Avenues. We were outsiders and didn’t really know or care about the opinions of some regarding the east side of the Village (we had rented on the east side further south for a couple of years and liked it).
We liked the Lombard neighborhood and the house was in our price range. We liked the fact that Oak Park’s east side was diverse and were willing to put our money where our mouths were.
To our pleasant surprise, it turned out the 60302 zip code became one the fastest appreciating Illinois zip codes throughout the 90s. Clearly the east side of Oak Park was highly undervalued at the time we bought our home. Because Oak Park was actively embracing diversity as official Village policy, my wife and I had a lot of faith that Oak Park’s east side was a good bet and it worked out very well.
It could not have happened without Oak Park’s leadership taking on the issue of diversity head on 15—20 years earlier. Their commitment strengthened investor confidence, and has continued to do so through the years. So there are huge economic development issues not often discussed to communities getting out in front of changing population dynamics.
Ziggy:
Is the same concentration-of-population dynamic playing out with Hispanics in the slice of Oak Park south of I-290 abutting Berwyn? I know of 2 upper income Mexican-American couples plus several renters that live in that part of the Village. It seems to draw 2nd/3rd generations that have “made it”, seek the high quality public schools yet still have proximity to the more authentic/hood areas of Berwyn, cicero and 26th Street for dining and cultural (although that New Reboso aint too shabby).
Trying to “solve the race problem” dances around basic human nature. Black or white, rich or poor, we all gravitate around people like ourselves. Political solutions only inflame the issue. It becomes about entitlement which only raises the friction level. If we all just go to our neighbor to “borrow a cup of sugar,” then these issues will continue to melt away. We have made great strides in Indianapolis and elsewhere. It’s all about simple and honest human connection. We need to quit talking about race to solve the race problem. Two of my three neighbors are of a different race and we NEVER talk about race when we socialize, which is often.