American Muslim Women: Negotiating Race, Class, and Gender within the Ummah

2. Race, Class, and Residence in the Chicago Ummah: Ethnic Muslim Spaces and American Muslim Discourses

51 2 Race, Class, and Residence in the Chicago Ummah Ethnic Muslim Spaces and American Muslim Discourses The racial landscape of a city influences how close American Muslims have come to fulfilling the ummah ideals there. When I arrived in Chicago in the spring of 2002 to research Muslims in the city, two things stood out. One was the city’s diversity. Chicago was a nexus of global flows. Filled with people from all over the world—Bosnians, Mexicans, Nigerians, and Vietnamese—Chicago fit my idea of a global village. But alongside these global flows were major inequalities, particularly in the racially segregated housing, the second thing that stood out. Indeed, Chicago has always been known for its racist residential patterns and ethnic neighborhoods. “Germans settled on the North Side, Irish on the South Side, Jews on the West Side, Bohemians and Poles on the Near Southwest Side.”1 In the nineteenth century, European immigrants carved out ethnic lines across the city which, with the rise of black migration to Chicago in the 1920s, soon had viciously racist and economically devastating consequences . Fear and widespread propaganda created large-scale white resistance to African Americans. As whites maneuvered to keep blacks out of their neighborhoods and fled from the ones where blacks did settle, African Americans were confined to and concentrated in the South Side’s Black Belt. Business owners then moved from this expanding black area and invested their resources and profits elsewhere. As the community’s resources declined and the population grew, neighborhoods in the Black Belt steadily turned into overcrowded slums.2 Outside the South Side’s Black Belt, a flourishing metropolis took form, setting the stage for Chicago to become a major international city. 52 Race, Class, and Residence in the Chicago Ummah If Chicago resembles a global village, it has done so at the expense of blacks and through the political will of the late Mayor Richard J. Daley (1955–1976). Committed to racial segregation, Daley “preserved the city’s white neighborhoods and business district by building” highways and housing that acted as “a barrier between white neighborhoods and the black ghetto.” Daley is remembered especially for authorizing the construction of towering high-rise projects to contain thousands of African Americans in a small, restricted space. His most tragic enterprise was building the Robert Taylor Homes in the late 1950s, a collection of highrises once described as a “public aid penitentiary.”3 Today, 78 percent of African Americans in Chicago continue to live in majority-black communities, most of them on the South Side of Chicago.4 Although majority black usually means more than 50 percent, most of these areas are more than 90 percent black. South-Side African American neighborhoods disproportionately rank among the city’s lowest per-capita income areas, along with the majority-black and majority-Latino communities on the West Side. Middle-class African Americans also live in majority-black neighborhoods on the South Side, in middle-income communities like Calumet Heights and Avalon Park, and in majority-black neighborhoods in the south suburbs like Hazel Crest and Markham.5 Racial discrimination continues to determine where many African Americans live, no matter what their income is. Instead of moving out of black inner-city areas and integrating into majority-white neighborhoods, upwardly mobile African Americans tend to move along the periphery of historically black areas. This means that many African Americans with incomes as high as $60,000 do not live far from African Americans living in poverty.6 The residential patterns of South Asians in Chicago are strikingly different . Most of Chicago’s South Asians live north of the city, where African Americans are less likely to settle. In addition, South Asians tend not to live in ethnic enclaves but in predominantly white, affluent areas in the north and northwest suburbs, with some also in ethnically mixed areas on the North Side. On the North Side, a large population of South Asians live around Devon, the avenue through a South Asian ethnic enclave and commercial district. But only 4.3 percent of the city’s Indian population lives in the areas bordering Devon Avenue. A larger number, though still a minority, of the city’s Pakistani (21.4 percent) and Bangladeshi (20.3 percent) immigrants live near Devon. Devon did not become a residential ethnic enclave until the late 1980s and 1990s, with the influx of Race, Class, and...