BLACK ON THE BLOCK: THE POLITICS OF RACE AND CLASS IN THE CITY | MARY PATTILLO (UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS)
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Pattillo’s participant-observer study of slowly gentrifying North Kenwood-Oakland began in 1998, when she bought a house at 4432 S. Berkeley. The house provides a point of entry into the history of the neighborhood; she traces NKO’s fortunes from late-19th-century prosperity to 1970s poverty and back to relative prosperity, then focuses on the uneasy position of the growing population of middle-class black professionals, who often find themselves acting as brokers between “the Man” downtown and the “littlemen” back in the hood.
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This thorough, fascinating account would be a feat for most authors, but for Pattillo it’s only a warm-up. The second half of Black on the Block examines NKO’s schools, housing, and crime in dispassionate detail. After two decades of gentrification the neighborhood has three new schools, less public housing, less crime, and a booming real-estate market. But most of its low-income kids still attend the old, underachieving schools. Former residents of the demolished public-housing high-rises have seen their promised right of return demolished as well. And the new black bourgeoisie is as enthusiastic about stopping the old timers’ sociable practice of boulevard barbecuing as it is about fighting crime. Through the lens of this neighborhood Pattillo depicts a city where liberty and justice for all is being transformed–ever so slowly, ever so reasonably–into order and tranquility for some.
Once a struggling parent’s main job was to make sure the kids attended school. Now parents face the catch-22 of having to negotiate a maze that favors those who already have writing skills, verbal assertiveness, and knowledgeable friends. This is the Daley way–the neoliberal, Clintonian way. “The model has changed,” writes Pattillo, “from one in which cities ‘deliver’ public services like education, health care, and protection from crime, to one in which residents ‘shop for’ these goods in a service landscape that includes more nongovernmental, private subcontractors.”
Public housing residents, Pattillo writes, “were from the very beginning fearful that the announced plans . . . were nothing more than a front for actual designs to reclaim now-prime lakefront land for the wealthy, including wealthy African-Americans. . . . In each case, what was regarded as paranoia on the part of public housing residents was actually keen foresight.”
