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Michael I. J. Bennett and Richard T. Schaefer 6 Race Relations Chicago Style: Past, Present, and Future THE INTRODUCTORY chapter in this volume quotes Miller and d’Eramo’s description of Chicago as the “most American of cities,” believing ,“toknowAmerica,youmustunderstand Chicago” (Miller 1997, 17; d’Eramo 2002). This chapter details the past, present, and projected future components of conflict, contest, and collaboration among the racial groups that make up Chicago and its metropolitan region, with an emphasis on black, white, and Latino relationships . DEFINING WHITENESS Race has little to do with biology. Even the latest research from the Human Genome Project documents the difficulty of labeling as “race” clustersofcharacteristicsasdistinctivetoanyhuman grouping. Race is a social construct that allows the dominant group, the oppressor, to identify who is privileged and who is not. As definitions of race crystallized, this defining and redefining of people in Chicago reflected American society as a whole. Michael Omi and Howard Winant (1994) coined the term “racial formation” to connote the socio-historical process by which racial categories are created, inhibited, transformed, and destroyed. Those in power depend on racist structure to define groups. The Native American people who had settled along the shore of Lake Michigan quickly became seen as “outsiders” in their own land, and were subjected to federal policy and military campaigns that largely disregarded tribal differences and treated indigenous people collectively as hostile (Winant 2003). Racial formation in Chicago manifested itself among people who, by today’s standards, would be considered white. German, Polish, Irish, and Italian immigrants and their children were regarded as unworthy of the privileges extended to the descendants of settlers of English extraction . The different immigrant groups did not move into Chicago’s social environment randomly , and acceptance was not automatic. Forexample,Irishimmigrantsarrivedtofind anti-Roman Catholic prejudice running at a feverish pitch. The nineteenth-century stereotyping of the Irish was accepted as fact: Irish Catholics were the “most depraved, debased, worthless, and irredeemable drunkards,” proclaimed the Chicago Tribune (Cohen and Taylor 2000, 19). Prominent national figures, such as the inventor and painter Samuel F. B. Morse, fanned local anti-Irish fervor, warning that the Pope planned to move the Vatican to the Mississippi Valley (Duff 1971, 34). William Julius Wilson (1978, 2–3) describes three stages of “black-white contact” in America—“pre-industrial,industrial,andmodern industrial”—each shaped by a combination of the economic and political arrangements reigning at the time. In his terms, the pre-industrial, slavery period was characterized by “plantation economy and racial-caste oppression ”; the industrial period, running from the end of the nineteenth century through the 1940s,featured“industrialexpansion,classcon- flict, and racial oppression”; and the modern industrial period, roughly the 1950s through the Race Relations Chicago Style 83 1970s,wasatimeof“progressivetransitionfrom racial inequalities to class inequalities.” The latter two stages characterize the Chicago experience , however, with one significant alteration to Wilson’s third stage: Although evidence indicated growing class inequities, race remained a prominent stumbling block to black social, economic , and political progress. The situation in Chicago illustrates Derrick Bell’s description of the dynamics surrounding blacks in America as “faces at the bottom of the well.” As long as other groups—whites, in particular—can look down the long dark shaft of America’s social and economic well and see faces looking up—black faces, in particular— they will always share a comforting feeling of hegemony (Bell 1992). THE BEGINNINGS OF THE BLACK METROPOLIS (1900–1950s) The presence of African Americans in Chicago increased sharply after World War I, when the black population leaped from 44,000 in 1910 to 277,000 in 1940. The growth was almost entirely from the northern migration of blacks fleeing theJimCrowcultureoftheformerslave-holding states. Although northern industrial cities like Chicago offered more opportunities to newcomers , many migrants encountered less acceptance than they had anticipated in the housing and labor markets. During the first half of the twentieth century , overt segregation was one of the starkest realities to confront African Americans new to Chicago. Unlike Irish, Polish, Jewish, or Italian immigrants from Europe, who may have sought out enclaves of their fellow countrymen for linguistic and cultural reasons, blacks found themselves confined through systematic, long-term discrimination to a densely packed section on Chicago’s South Side. The population of this “Black Belt,” stretching from 26thto 47th Streets between the Rock Island railroad tracks on the west and Cottage Grove Avenue on the east, was more...

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