On Bullying and School Violence

In 2010, there was a noticeable increase in nationwide reporting on violence directed towards queer youth. In the summer of the following year, Boystown (Chicago’s gay area, located in the Lakeview neighborhood on the North Side) burst into an intense and sometimes violent series of incidents and altercations following a stabbing.

Chicago is a city with a long history of racism, often misleadingly described as “segregation.” The city’s very infrastructure, including its planning and transportation, is designed to ensure that its Brown and Black populations, concentrated on the South and West Sides of the city and not coincidentally among its much poorer populations, are not allowed to move into or visit the mostly White North Side neighborhoods.

The phrase “not allowed” might seem extreme, in a post-Jim Crow world, in a United States with its first Black president, who even hails from Chicago. But the events of 2011 indicated only too clearly that racial tensions simmer barely below the surface of an urban metropolis where the presence of Black people in White and/or gentrifying neighborhoods constantly incites paranoia on the part of residents. Events indicated that White residents would not hesitate to echo the most racist and derogatory statements about Black/queer youth under cover of expressing anxiety about their own safety.

Following the stabbing incident, and the wide circulation of a video of the same, Boystown residents, mostly White and affluent, began issuing demands that the city step up its policing and surveillance of Black youth. Boystown is home to the Center on Halsted (COH), the city’s gay and lesbian community center, which also provides (extremely nominal and troublingly policed) social services to queer and trans* youth. For most of the youth population it claims to serve, the Center is the only resource and they must travel there from the South and West Sides, where most of them live (Gender JUST’s interactions with the COH’s problematic lack of restorative justice is recorded and archived on our Web site).

In the wake of the incident, and a community meeting that exploded and devolved into accusations from all sides, residents created a Facebook page, “Take Back Boystown,” with LGBTQ members (the photo is of a rainbow pride flag) ostensibly concerned with how “their” neighborhood was being taken over by criminal (read: Black) elements.

The very language of “taking back” was emblematic of how residents saw Black people as always-outsiders and the page, even though continually cleaned up, still shows evidence of the racist discourse and narratives that undergird the Boystown events and, indeed, Boystown itself. In a recent post, dated May 20, 2013, one member writes:

Alright gang, here we go again. The warmer weather has brought the black kids out like roaches again. . . . And for those of you who are offended that I reported the nuisance as being “black kids”—sorry, but I call it like I see it. I intentionally watched to see if any Latino or White kids were involved. Nope. Those kids seem to know their place that late at night. Lakeview neighbors—I say we call and report this stuff every night it happens. I’ll call all night if I have to. Who can sleep with all the noise anyway. Perhaps we can take up a fund to send these morons back to their own neighborhoods . . . or pay their parents to take them back.

In an earlier post, another member, “John Smith,” writes that he “[c]ame across a roaming band of wildebeests last night at 1130p on Belmont—about 10–13 of them.”

Since 2011, public attention to Boystown in this context has waned and been redirected towards state-specific and federal campaigns for “marriage equality,” and the fairly recent repeal of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell (DADT). But every summer, as the above quotes make clear, residents respond to the presence of Black youth in “their” neighborhood like farmers preparing for annual pestilence.

As an intergenerational organization of queer and trans* people working specifically to make Chicago schools safe and affirming for all students, Gender JUST developed a response to the dominant narrative...