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Michael Fletcher
Gladyse Taylor could feel the
piercing glances from her
new neighbors in the pricey
condominiums across the
street. To her, their eyes
seemed to ask, Who is she?
whenever they spotted her in
front of her three-story graystone, the one she still describes as
"a work in progress" 15 years after she moved in.
"Sometimes I’ll be outside with a raggedy sweatshirt and
my hair all over my head, but I’m just cleaning up my yard,"
Taylor says. "People who have lived in the neighborhood for a
long time will come by and say hello." But not the new African-
Americans who started moving into her neighborhood three
years ago. "They have paid $250,000 to $350,000 for brand-new
condos, and now they think they’re the cat’s meow," she says.
"They have no idea who’s inside these old homes that were here
long before they even got here."
The tension Taylor describes, a product
of her neighborhood’s surge of new developments
and renovations, isn’t that unusual
in this once-poor section of Chicago’s
South Side, or Black hubs such as Atlanta
or Harlem, for that matter. As more Black
professionals move into traditionally underserved
areas looking for neighborhoods
on the rise and city living, there is a growing
gulf between the haves and the havenots.
"Maybe it’s because of ‘generational
improvement,’ " Taylor says. "They don’t
have any idea what their parents or grandparents
lived through. I think you are supposed
to come back and give, but not hold
your nose in the air." She says these new
neighbors don’t try to get to know their
own community. She proudly adds, "I
haven’t forgotten where I came from."
A WIDENING GULF
In some ways, the social and economic differences
separating African-Americans in
major urban centers like Chicago, Atlanta
and Harlem are not unlike the disparities
that have tested our interactions for
generations. E. Franklin Frazier’s controversial
1950’s book, Black Bourgeoisie,
argued that integration has torn the
Black middle class from its traditional
moorings, leaving it with no cultural
roots in either the Black or White world.
The differences described by Frazier
have only increased in the half-century
since he wrote his book. In communities
across the country, the gap between the
working class and the middle class has
grown wider than ever before. Even while
a large number of African-Americans—
almost one quarter, according to census
statistics—remain mired in poverty,
roughly 30 percent are considered middle
class, with household incomes of
$50,000 a year or better. While the rise
of the Black middle class is a development
that is celebrated, it’s also one that
has created an undercurrent of friction
nationwide. "Class stratification within
the race is worse than White racism,"
says Harold L. Lucas, president of the
Black Metropolis Convention & Tourism
Council in Chicago.
In Harlem the poor are being pushed
out of brownstone apartments and tenement
walk-ups that no one else wanted
for decades. Replacing them is a new
generation of African-American middle
class residents with the money to renovate,
who are drawn by Harlem’s prominent
place in Black history and its proximity to
the corporate offices downtown.
The infamous housing projects that
once towered over Chicago’s State Street
just minutes south of the Loop are now
mostly gone. Housing developments
that shadowed fading neighborhoods
closer to Lake Michigan have also been
demolished, accelerating the transformation
of Bronzeville, the historically
Black South Side community that formerly
abutted the projects. Now redbrick
condominium buildings are being
erected in long-empty lots next to stately
three-story graystone mansions. As a result
of this transformation, class wars
once fought between Blacks and Whites
have been replaced by conflicts in which
the battle lines are drawn solely by us.
Gladys McKinney, a resident of the
South Side since 1955, says she has seen
her neighborhood go from upscale to
run-down and back again in the past 50
years. Now retired after a long teaching
career in Chicago’s public schools,
McKinney, 76, lives in public housing
not far from scenic Lake Michigan.
"I have no problem with the new people,"
she says, explaining that she introduces
herself to all the new residents and
believes the neighborhood receives better
services because the community is on
the rise. But change hasn’t been as easy
for others. Newcomers grumbled about
people sitting on the stoops, a behavior
they associated with longtime residents.
Loud music was also a problem. "It was
a struggle," she says. "People were like,
‘You’re not going to come and take over.’ "
Despite her welcoming attitude,
McKinney, a community leader, has warned
newcomers not to look down on those living
in public housing, like herself: "I said,
even though I’m in public housing, I am just
as good as home owners paying thousands
for their homes. This is nothing but brick
and mortar. It’s what you are on the inside
as an individual, that’s what counts."
Natascha Neptune, a 31-year-old engineer,
recently bought an apartment in a
new mixed-income development in
Chicago. "They feel we think we’re better
and fuss over little things," she says of
public-housing tenants in the building.
Does she think some of the problems
are a result of two different classes of people
living in the same building?
"Yes," she says with a sigh. "I guess they
feel they don’t have a choice in matters, but
that’s not the case."
Amina Green, a single mother who rents
an apartment in the Kenwood area of
Chicago, says many of the new people in
her neighborhood seem uncomfortable
with the longtime residents. "I remember
being out talking to a friend who was working
in the yard, and across the street in a
new development someone was working in
their yard. We said hello, but they would
not speak. The same thing happens when
they are out jogging or walking their dogs.
They often just look away," Green says. "The
new people have come in, but they have
not exactly been neighbors. There seems to
be a lot of discomfort."
Such resentment was muted in a bygone
era when Black doctors, musicians
and politicians lived on the same block or
at least in the same communities with
Black custodians, railroad workers and
cooks. But integration has swept away
many of the old boundaries, paving the
way for the remarkable socioeconomic
gains African-Americans have been making
in recent decades. The percentage of
Black households earning $100,000 a year
or more has increased 50 percent since
1990 and sixfold since 1974.
Not only did income go up for many
African-Americans, but increasing numbers
of Black people also chose to live in
the suburbs, putting physical distance
between the affluent and the less prosperous.
But with the rise of mixed-income
living and the fact that more and more
well-off Americans are returning to the
cities, African-Americans are forced to
live together again, a circumstance that
has illuminated the divide.
"What’s happening is that people who
have moved onward and upward don’t
really want to be reminded from whence
they came,’’ says Shirley J. Newsome,
chairman of the North Kenwood-Oakland
Conservation Community Council in
Chicago. "They feel that if I can make it
you should make it. And in many cases
they were on the low end; they struggled;
they went to school. It’s almost like a feeling
of resentment."
Before the revitalization in Chicago,
Newsome explains, many of today’s socalled
lower-class Blacks were once considered
middle class and looked down
on people in public housing. "They were
people of means—retired blue-collars,"
she says. "I warned them that at some
point you are going to be ‘those people.’
And that is exactly what happened. Now
the tables are being turned, and they are
considered lower-income—just above
the people in public housing."
The class wars currently going on
among African-Americans can be very
dangerous, says Michael Eric Dyson, professor
and author of Debating Race (Perseus
Book Group).
"All of this means that there is tremendous
tension in Black America over the
class struggle," he says, adding that these
issues have always been there, but the
difference is that Black Americans in the
past—regardless of class—had more limits
imposed on them.
However, Black Americans today, Dyson
explains, are making more than ever before
and their allegiances are increasingly
focused on individual success, rather than
on the success of the race.
"As the Black middle class moves back
into the city, they may not have the same
kind of racial solidarity or consciousness
as they had before," he says, adding that
class issues are being played out in the
churches, in schools, in hip-hop and on
television. He points to Bill Cosby’s comments
chastising poor Black Americans as
a prime example of the tension.
The solution? "We must struggle for
social justice for poor Black Americans
while also using every resource in our
fraternities and sororities and other
charitable organizations to help them,"
says Dyson.
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