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181 ILLINOIS 31 The Discrete and Insular Majority Craig M. Bradley I was born in late 1945 and grew up in the Chicago suburb of Downers Grove, Illinois, a town that grew from around ten to twenty thousand people during the seventeen years of my childhood there. There was only one black family in town. The father was the caretaker at a small private school. I didn’t know them but, as far as I was aware, they attended the local schools without (public) incident. I, of course, had no knowledge of what private slights they might have endured. I can remember my mother pointing to them with pride if one of the children appeared in the Fourth of July parade or some other event as exemplifying the notion that blacks and whites could live together in harmony. On the other hand, my parents spoke with considerable disapprobation of blockbusting, though it never happened in Downers Grove and surrounding suburbs. This was a practice whereby a single black family would buy a home in an all-white neighborhood. This would cause all the neighbors to become nervous that if they stayed, others would sell, driving down prices. Thus there would be a rush to sell and soon the neighborhood would be all black. This was generally thought to be the fault of the blacks, rather than of the prejudices of the whites. The blockbusters were believed to be speculators who intended to profit from this panic, rather than individual black families who simply wanted to live in a nicer neighborhood. However, even if one were perfectly willing to have blacks as neighbors, the fear of blockbusting was real, since it could spell financial disaster to have the value of one’s home reduced by 50 percent. Moreover, there seemed to be some foundation to the belief that blacks were not good neighbors. On occasional visits to Chicago, which took us through the largely black South Side (no freeways in those days to whisk you past uncomfortable realities), it could be seen that houses and lawns did not exemplify the suburban ideal of neatness and order. I don’t recall anybody recognizing that this might have more to do with class than race. Of course, at that time, race was class. Very few blacks were members of the middle class. 182 De Facto States My father exhibited the casual racism of the day, generally disapproving of blacks’ lifestyle and lack of initiative, and occasionally referring to blacks without rancor in terms that today would be shockingly unacceptable. yet, when family friends brought a black guest to the all-white swimming pool at which my father was manager, he admitted them. Although he was undoubtedly well aware of the implications of this action, he responded to complaints by shrugging and pointing out that the rules said that if a member wanted to bring a guest, he had to pay fifty cents. Period. The rules said nothing about race. Whether this was because nobody thought to include it in the rules or because the good people of the Downers Grove Pool Association balked at any such outward declaration of discrimination, I don’t know. Probably some of both. Thus there was a distinction between “our Negroes”—the unthreatening family who lived in Downers Grove, black friends of friends, et cetera— and Negroes in general, a group that was regarded with suspicion, though not outright hostility. My own feeling as a child when we drove through black neighborhoods was that these were vaguely alien beings—that it was indeed “another country,” in James Baldwin’s words, and a very distant and somewhat dangerous one at that. I don’t recall ever meeting a black child during my entire childhood. I was, in short, a member of a discrete and insular majority. While I don’t remember the Brown case itself, I distinctly remember Eisenhower sending troops to Little Rock to enforce the decision there. My mother, who was more likely to express her views on political matters than my father was, thought that Brown was a good decision and that once blacks and whites went to school together for a few years, racial problems would disappear—a naive view that was widely shared by liberals in those days. Thus we regarded the Arkansans as unenlightened rednecks who deserved having federal troops inflicted on them. I wonder about the disconnect between this view and the attitude toward blockbusting. Perhaps we regarded Southerners with as much...

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