(Tapestry by Christopher Henry)

I have never really known the struggle. My eighteen years prior to college were all spent in the same city, in the same house, in the same neighborhood, on the same near-north side of Chicago. I have called Wicker Park my home since day one and will call it that on day infinity. The fluid nature of neighborhoods allows them to grow, mature, and change in conjunction with their inhabitants. The Wicker Park I know now is not the same Wicker Park I knew when I was a child. I witnessed the all too familiar whitewashing gentrification process first hand — Latinos ousted by hipsters with stroller toting yuppies following not far behind. Property values skyrocketed. Businesses flourished. Schools were attended. Crime rates fell. But this did not come without its consequences. Local mom-and-pop stores could not pay the new expensive rent causing them to close. Entire families slowly became displaced to more affordable parts of the city.

Gentrification usually leads to segregation and Chicago is not an exception. The minority populations of black people and Latinos are concentrated on the city’s South and West Sides. White people live on the North Side. There are pockets of small neighborhoods and families that defy this overly simplistic view of the city but for the most part the paradigm holds true.

Cabrini Green as photographed by Mary C. Johns

For a time, Chicago attempted to combat this segregation by building large scale affordable housing “projects” in wealthier neighborhoods of Chicago. A five-minute bus ride from my house lead to Cabrini-Green, one of the city’s most notorious projects. These massive rectangular housing units took up entire city blocks, stretched twenty stories, and contained thousands of units crowded together inside. The cramped living spaces and lack of organizational authority within the projects lead to rampant gang networks vying for control of the buildings. Drug trafficking and violence were rife in these large prison-like structures.

In the year 2000, the Chicago Housing Authority put its “Plan For Transformation” into place. This called for the demolition of these large project buildings, forcing the relocation of twenty-five thousand low-income families. The CHA provided these families with vouchers to help subsidize rent but the vouchers only went so far. Many of these families could still only afford housing on the city’s less prosperous South and West Sides (Ihejirika).

Map of Chicago shootings since January 1st, 2015 (Chicago Tribune)

Gangs that had previously controlled projects like Cabrini-Green were implanted into neighborhood blocks already run by different gangs and sets. This lead to rivalries and heightened tensions as these groups attempted to reconcile their new situations. Violence increased. Killing became a pandemic in Chicago. Eighty percent of youth homicides between 2008 and 2012 happened in the twenty-two African-American and Latino communities on the South and West sides (Loury). Gangbanging is the norm and these neighborhoods are their war zones. The numbers are staggering. Since 2001, Operation Enduring Freedom (our on-going involvement in Afghanistan) has seen 2,350 American losses. From 2003–2012 there were 4,797 people killed in Chicago (Thompson). These numbers earned my city the nickname “Chiraq” and increased the amount of media coverage paid to Chicago.

One neighborhood on the Southwest side called Englewood highlights the drastic consequences of systemic segregation, institutionalized racism, and the resulting gang violence. Chicago is a tale of two cities. Englewood’s dreary empty lots and crumbling buildings stand in stark contrast to prospering Wicker Park. Foreclosures, high levels of black unemployment, a racist justice system, and inadequate access to quality education have made gangbanging the easiest and sometimes only option for black youth. Fifteen percent of Chicago shootings occur in Englewood, a neighborhood that holds only two percent of Chicago’s population.

Apart from actually living in these neighborhoods, the only way outsiders can get any notion of Chicago’s dire situation is from media sources. Television and newspapers play a vital role in pointing out troubles in society and pushing us towards solutions. Media outlets have failed you, me, and especially South Side locals by improperly addressing the problems that are occurring there.

There are large racial disparities that occur when American news outlets cover crime. A story detailing the murder of a white person in Los Angeles is three times more likely to appear in The Los Angeles Times than if the victim was black (Dorfman). “Boys N The Hood” is arguably the most significant coming of age movie in the black community. It features Ice Cube’s acting debut and is set in Compton. At the end of the film, Doughboy (Ice Cube’s character) laments on this latent racism in media. His brother has just been shot and killed the previous day:

Turned on the TV this morning. Had this shit on about — about livin’ in a violent world. Showed all these foreign places…where foreigners live, and all. Started thinkin’, man. Either they don’t know…don’t show…or don’t care about what’s goin’ on in the ‘hood. They had all this foreign shit. They didn’t have shit on my brother, man.

News media has a history of excluding the struggle that is taking place in black neighborhoods. When they do decide to venture in to these forgotten communities their coverage is not adequate. Their stories dehumanize the victims of crimes, the perpetrators, and in turn, the residents of neighborhoods like Chicago’s South Side.

If you go online to the Chicago Tribune website and click on their crime section you will see headlines from the previous week that will read something like: “3 killed, 5 injured in Chicago shootings” or “Boy, 15, among four people wounded in shootings in Chicago”. These headlines are desolately familiar to most large city dwellers. Victims are treated like statistics in media coverage. When articles dealing with such emotional material have headlines that are presented as scoreboard tallies, we become desensitized. The deceased are treated like points in a sick twisted game. But they are not numbers. They are human beings.

Besides just debasing the lives of victims, there is a large amount of racial disparity in how the news media treats perpetrators of crimes. A study of Chicago news outlets found that black suspects are twice as likely as white suspects to be shown on camera under some type of police restraint. Another study found that white offenders were more likely to be portrayed through personal pictures while black offenders were more likely to be represented by their mug shots (Fitts). This desensitizes white people to the black struggle.

Articles and news stories do not often contain analysis explaining why these crimes are being committed. Media outlets brush off any breakdown by using the now fully accepted cop-out that a shooting was simply “gang-related”. Crimes are not treated as distinct and separate events. Coverage is based on two items: who is committing the crimes? And where are they occurring? They should be focused on why. This inadequate representation has lead to South Side residents being portrayed as faceless others in an otherwise inclusive city.