where we live
Eula Biss writes beautifully in the February issue of The Believer (which I am always slow to read despite subscribing) about fear and racism and being a so-called “pioneer” in a “bad neighborhood.” She compares the experience of Laura Ingalls Wilder and Wilder’s “ambivalence” and “sense of loss” in displacing American Indians with Biss’s own experience as a pioneer in a racially and economically mixed neighborhood. In describing her initial experiences, Biss writes,
During my first weeks in Rogers Park, I was surprised by how often I heard the word pioneer. I heard it first from the white owner of an antiques shop with signs in the windows that read WARNING, YOU ARE BEING WATCHED AND RECORDED. When I stopped off in his shop, he welcomed me to the neighborhood warmly and delivered an introductory speech dense with code. This was a “pioneering neighborhood,” he told me, and it needed “more people like you.” He and other “people like us” were gradually “lifting it up.”
Understandably, Biss is frustrated with the word “pioneer,” and comments,
The word pioneer betrays a disturbing willingness to repeat the worst mistake of the pioneers of the American West—the mistake of considering an inhabited place uninhabited. To imagine oneself as a pioneer in a place as densely populated as Chicago is either to deny the existence of your neighbors or to cast them as natives who must be displaced. Either way, it is a hostile fantasy.
In catching up with my TV watching while sweating like a beast on the treadmill, I saw this highly disturbing segment from the TV version of the ever brilliant This American Life.
I realize that a tremendous amount of research has documented gentrification in American cities and many of its ugly consequences. But these two bits of media put the issue in particularly stark relief for me. I personally have had some experience with some of what Biss writes about in Park Slope, Brooklyn, where organic food coops and pricey boutique knick-knack stores slowly morph into un-ironic dollar stores and frequently held-up KFCs.
With young people returning to cities in recent years, we can only expect these unspoken tensions and sometimes open hostilities to expand. What to do about it is a very difficult question. Of course, city council members are all too eager to see neighborhoods “redeveloped.” And many of the so-called pioneers deserve some sympathy. Lot of them are college graduates who were promised that there would be professional jobs upon graduation, but have had to resort to living in a cheap apartment, working for a temp agency, and sheepishly borrowing money from their parents to pay bills. On the other hand, what are poor families to do? At one point, a young black boy on a bike shouts out to Biss, “Don’t be afraid of us!” How heartbreaking that young kid should have to grow up with the idea that he is by birth a person feared in his own neighborhood.
