4. I can be pretty sure that my neighbors in such a location will be neutral or pleasant to me
48. I have no difficulty finding neighborhoods where people approve of our household
I was born and raised in Chicago. Yes, Chicago the city. I can’t say that now, but up until third grade I was a “city” girl. Now, I’m a “suburb just north of Chicago” girl.
I lived on Berteau street, spitting distance from Wrigley Field. We constantly make fun of my dad because he’s not a sports fan whatsoever. He’s a Mayweather fan who loves when the Cubs are in the World Series or he runs into Jay Cutler on the street, but other than that never keeps up with sports. On the other hand, my mom is the opposite. Her nightly routine includes scrolling through Instagram as well as ESPN. She’s an avid Chicago sports fan who can spark conversation with anyone, mostly white males who are shocked that she knows as much as she does. Anyways, I lived in a white and green house, on the top bunk that I shared in a room with my sister. There were rats in our basement and chocolate brown scratches indented into our white door from our rescue dog Rudy, but I loved every piece of it.
The most special part about living in the city was my relationship with my neighbors. Directly next to me lived Ray and Dave. Dave had down syndrome. It was the first time I had ever met a person with special needs. As a 4 or 5 year old, I didn’t know there was anything different about Dave. I thought he talked differently and was the greatest artist in the world. His condition didn’t faze me. His dad, Ray, was an 80 year old man (at least he felt 80 years old). Every single morning, Dave was outside his brown and white house creating beautiful chalk illustrations of rainbows, butterflies, and slogans and Ray was on the porch, smoking a fat brown cigar. My sister and I would go out and draw with Dave, coloring in parts of his letters or symbols. We adored him. They moved one day. I never understood why or where they were going. They are going somewhere where Dave can get help, my mom and dad explained to my sister and I one day. At the time, I didn’t think Dave needed help. He was just like me? I went back up to my room peering out the window into Mike and Dave’s bare backyard, patiently awaiting my new neighbors.
They were the Smiths. The Smiths had four kids, and were Filipino. I had seen people of different races before, but didn’t have any close friends. I went to a private Jewish elementary school 45 minutes away in Hyde Park, Chicago. Predominantly, my preschool friends there were White and Jewish.
The Smiths loved to sing and act, and soon so did we. We performed Broadway on Berteau with the Grottinis and the Zeirs. It was an odd yet perfect mix: Jewish family, Christian family, Irish family, and Filipino family, all coming together to sing and dance RENT in the Zeir’s backyard. It was a beautiful mix yet I didn’t even know it was a mix. A melting pot of ethnicities and colors that I was blind to.
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Until it became more noticeable.
I moved to Glencoe in third grade. Glencoe was starkly different. Glencoe: a small suburb composed of 95% White people (noted, it took me a while to find that statistic). A public school composed of 5,000 students, where a merely 8% of students were Asian American, 4% were Hispanic, and a Black student statistic wasn’t available. My new house was hidden away past a long driveway with trees encompassing both sides of the modern squares.
“Why do we have those trees mom? They look so bad and out of place” I pondered.
“It’s for privacy, to make sure no one can see in,” my mom responded as I heard the wheels of the landscapers roll down the driveway.
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Ok, I guess that answer sufficed for my 8 year old reasoning.
My neighbors in Glencoe were much different. For one, I never really knew them. You’d think going from the busy and populated city to the spacious suburbs, it would be more of a community. Which it was. I had my family friends, and after school hangout spots; Little Red Hen where we walked after school and ordered chicken tenders and fries, Starbucks, where we got double chocolate chip Frappuccinos and felt like teenagers since we were drinking coffee, Einstein’s, where calories didn’t faze us and we got delicious warm chocolate chip bagels with giant shmears of blueberry cream cheese. The little town of Glencoe soon became my home. But as I reflect on my home and childhood, I see exclusivity and separation. My neighbors were blocked by daunting driveways and big grand houses. No one was ever out to play, and if they were, it was in their own driveways with their own basketball hoops, living their own lives.
The girls were different as well. They taught me what stores to shop at, what PG-13 movies to watch, when to tell a boy I liked him. I came from my Jewish Day School wearing long patterned skirts over leggings, I definitely didn’t look like the other girls. This made me obsessed with fitting in, making sure I looked and acted like the two new best friends I followed around like a puppy dog. If I didn’t know about the television show they watched, or the right outfit to wear I was laughed at, or worse ignored.
I hung onto my home in Berteau for just a tad bit longer. For my 10th birthday, I took my small group of girlfriends (all White) to my old “hood,” as I loved to call it. We took a White van down, had my favorite bim bim bops from the neighborhood Sushi restaurant and then went to hang out with my old neighbors. I loved being able to show my new world my old world. My new acquaintances were in awe when they saw my old house, my old street. I think they were confused. Puzzled that I was so friendly with my neighbors. That I used to actually live there. The white bus then drove 45 minutes back to the suburbs, the clear bubble enclosed on us as we exited the highway.
Before I knew it, the city faded before my eyes. I was surrounded with soccer, dance, my new friends, fun Halloween parties, first boyfriends, camp friends, and my relationships from the city were nothing but a separate life. Every one of my new friends in the suburbs were White. I wasn’t confronted with race or sexuality because mine didn’t stand out. It was invisible to me and the homogenous social groups that I was enveloped in. The Smiths and Grottinis and Zeirs were now just mere friends on Facebook.
Two years ago, I was scrolling aimlessly through Facebook and saw a picture of one of the Smith’s kids. He had changed his name and was transitioning into a woman. I followed her transformation, her struggles that she posted, the discrimination she faced, and the many wins she had getting her breasts done and other reconstructive surgery. She was the first person I knew personally to be transgender.
So what?
I lost touch with the girl I knew, who was friends with different types of people. I surrounded myself with people so alike to me, that I never had noticed anything different. I knew the individuals around me looked the same and came from similar backgrounds, but I never understood why. I had been enveloped in the luxury of obliviousness, the privilege to be unaware of all the structural racism and hierarchies, because it didn’t affect me. It didn’t dictate where I lived, what school I went to school, who I was friends with. I was confronted with my White fragility, the cushions of race and Whiteness that I never had to digest or had never truly affected me. Throughout these essays, I’m choosing to combat the path of least resistance, meaning the privilege to be unaware of all the structural racism and hierarchies. I’m choosing the other path. The path of anxiety, discomfort, shame. The path that better paints the picture of my life and how it came to be.
I enjoy reflecting back on my childhood in the city because there are so many different intersections of identity. Individuals with varying abilities, genders, sexualities, races. It makes me remember how beautiful it is when people express themselves fully and truly. It also reminds me of norms. What normal looks like in the U.S. and how individuals who don’t fit that identity are ridiculed, bullied, excluded, from policies and institutions.
When understanding why my life in the suburbs looked the way it did, I was confronted by redlining. Through research, I learned more about the history of redlining, but also the prevalence it has on minority groups today. It shaped more clearly why my world in the suburbs looked the way it did. Redlining is something banks carried out starting in the 1930s, where bankers “denied mortgages to people, mostly people of color in urban areas, preventing them from buying a home in certain neighborhoods or getting a loan to renovate their house” (Brooks, 2020). Chicago was one of the main cities this happened in. Due to this discriminatory policy, “91 percent of areas classified as “best” in the 1930s remain middle-to-upper-income today, and 85 percent of them are still predominantly white” (Jan, 2018).
Privilege is complicated. As is White privilege. I’ve come to understand, it is not always about individual people and their beliefs, but about the institutions and policies that are ingrained in our country that maintain these discriminatory notions and benefit certain types of people. While uncomfortable to admit, these policies made in the 1930s and banned by the Fair Housing Act in 1977, still continue today through innate forms of racism and prejudice. The implications of these policies are one result of why my community in the suburbs looked so different than my community in the city. While institutions and policies can be one reason that White people are privileged in the United States, it also can’t be deemed the only reason. These institutions often are a scapegoat for why White people don’t feel the need to confront their privilege. After learning about these policies that benefit me and others alike, I have the responsibility as an individual to share my knowledge and help shape human thought and understanding. To use my powerful privilege for good.
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