Chicago’s neighborhoods are full of surprises.
Along Albany Park’s Lawrence Avenue, for instance, you’ll find an Asian hosiery shop alongside discount shoe stores and the corner groceries with tortillas, leche and huevos on sale. But mostly, you’ll notice the seemingly endless variety of people–immigrants, many of them, with food, language and music that can make this street feel warm, even on a cold winter day.
A group of civic leaders is trying to help the rest of us learn more about these folks, partly through a new book called “Global Chicago,” a project of the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations.
Among other things, its writers assert that Chicago can do much more as a player on a global stage, which requires us to adopt a new way of thinking. Too many immigrants, some of the authors believe, live largely in isolation, reliant on a network of friends and helpful organizations that often can’t do enough for them.
And this has consequences for the rest of us. I hope, for instance, that you won’t see what I saw a few weeks ago, as I drove past one of Albany Park’s popular linen stores, its blankets proudly displayed along the sidewalk under its awning. There was a giant Statue of Liberty. And a larger-than-life eagle hung nearby–right next to a Confederate flag.
I had to make one more pass to confirm what I had seen. Yep, there was the flag, with “Southern Pride” scrawled near the top. Only this wasn’t the South, or a NASCAR rally, or even one of Chicago’s few hillbilly bars. This was a public street in a neighborhood, where people–people of all colors–seemed to live.
My face got hot as I thought about the store owners. How could they? How could they declare their hatred for black people–in a city with this many of us–so openly?
A Southerner’s pride aside, the flag remains a problematic symbol for many African-Americans of all generations. (My high-school age niece confirmed how offended she’d be if she ever saw one.)
A few errands later, though, somehow my curiosity had outweighed my anger. I parked and entered the store. Most of the customers had brown skin. Some spoke Spanish, but others, with African features, exchanged words I didn’t recognize. I wandered for a few minutes amid the rainbow of drapes and shower curtains, until a young woman with Mexican features asked if she could help me.
We chatted, and I learned that she was a Chicago native. I also learned that the Confederate blankets were selling like hotcakes–a huge hit, it seemed, with white customers from Kentucky and other Southern states. I asked her if anyone had ever complained about them, and she shook her head.
Suddenly, I realized how wrong I had been. They didn’t hate black people. They really didn’t know what they were selling.
She had just thought it was some kind of “special American flag.” When I told her of its connection to slavery, she gasped. “Really? I-I’m embarrassed that we’re selling them.”
And then I realized something else: Outside of a handful of store owners, few of the immigrants I know–or their first- or second-generation children–have much connection at all to black Chicago. To them it is a dangerous place, filled with crime, violence and poverty, images that only get confirmed by television and newspapers. It is not a place to shop or dine, much less raise a family, they are taught.
Until immigrants learn something different, how will we confront the segregation that has kept too many of our institutions separate and unequal? As they begin their quest for the American dream, our city’s newcomers shouldn’t be confined to a handful of mostly North Side neighborhoods.
But for that to change, more of us must be willing to put our own assumptions in check–as well as to challenge theirs.
I’m not sure if I had anything to do with it or not, but I haven’t seen the Confederate blanket outside the linen shop since my visit. Hopefully, someday the woman I talked to will take the same kind of drive I did that day in Chatham, or Auburn-Gresham, or South Shore.
She might be surprised at what she wouldn’t see.
