Shortly after we married, my husband and I moved to a part of Chicago that was once known as No Man’s Land. At the turn of the century, this was the sparsely populated place between the cities of Chicago and Evanston, a place where the streets were unpaved and unlit.

This neighbourhood is now called Rogers Park, and the city blocks of Chicago, all paved and lit, run directly into the city blocks of Evanston, with only a cemetery to mark the boundary between the two municipalities. The Chicago trains end here, and the tracks turn back in a giant loop around the gravel yard, where idle trains are docked. Seven blocks to the east of the train station is the shore of Lake Michigan, which rolls and crashes past the horizon, reminding us, with its winds and spray, that we are on the edge of something vast. There are a dozen empty storefronts on the avenue between the lake and the train station – a closed Chinese restaurant, a closed dry cleaners, a closed thrift shop, a closed hot-dog place. There is an open Jamaican restaurant, a Caribbean-American bakery, a liquor store, a shoe store, and several little grocery markets. Women push baby carriages here, little boys eat bags of potato chips in front of the markets, and men smoke outside the train station while the trains rattle the air.

We moved to Chicago because I was hired to teach at the university in Evanston, which is within walking distance of Rogers Park. Walking to campus along the lake shore for the first time, I passed the cemetery and then a block of brick apartment buildings much like the ones on my block. Then I began to pass houses with gables and turrets and stone walls and copper gutters and huge bay windows and manicured lawns and circular drives. I passed beaches where sailboats were pulled up on the sand, where canoes and kayaks were stacked, I passed fountains, I passed parks with willow trees, I passed through one block that was gated at both ends. I passed signs that read: “Private Road, No Access, Police Enforced.”

Evanston was still an officially segregated city in 1958 when Martin Luther King spoke there about the Greek concept of agape, love for all humanity. On my first visit to Evanston, after my job interview, I experienced a moment of panic during which I stood with the big, cool stone buildings of the university and its lawns and trees behind me while I called my sister to tell her that I was afraid that this might not be the life for me. I was afraid, I told her, that if I became a professor I would be forever cloistered here, insulated from the rest of the world. My sister, who is herself training to be a professor, was not moved. There are worse fates, she reminded me.

Of the 77 official “community areas” of Chicago, 24 are home to racial majorities that account for more than 90% of their population, and only 12 have no racial majority. Rogers Park is one of those few. It is celebrated as the most diverse neighbourhood in a hyper-segregated city. By the time I moved to Rogers Park, quite a few people had already warned me about the place. Two of them were colleagues at the university, who both made mention of gangs. Others were near-strangers, like my sister’s roommate’s mother, who asked her daughter to call me on the day I was packing my moving truck to share her suspicion that I might be moving somewhere dangerous. Then there was my mother, who grew up in a western suburb of Chicago but has, for almost 20 years now, lived in an old farmhouse in rural New York State. She told me she had heard from someone that the neighbourhood I was moving to might not be safe, that there were gangs there. “Ma,” I said to her, “what do you know about gangs?” And she said, “I know enough – I know that they’re out there.” Which is about as much as I know, and about as much as most white folks who talk about gangs seem to know, which is to say nothing.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A mural in Rogers Park. Photograph: Jean-Marc Giboux/The Guardian

Gangs are real, but they are also conceptual. The word “gang” is frequently used to avoid using the word “black” in a way that might be offensive. For instance, by pairing it with a suggestion of fear.

My cousin recently travelled to South Africa, where someone with her background would typically be considered neither white nor black but “coloured”, a distinct racial group in that country. Her skin is light enough that she was most often taken to be white – something she was prepared for, having travelled in other parts of Africa. But she was not prepared for what it meant to be white in South Africa, which was to be reminded, at every possible opportunity, that she was not safe and that she must be afraid. And she was not prepared for how seductive that fear would become, how omnipresent it would be, so she spent most of her time there in taxis, and in hotels, and in “safe” places where she was surrounded by white people. When she returned home, she told me: “I realised this is what white people do to each other – they cultivate each other’s fear. It’s very violent.”

We are afraid, my husband suggests, because we have guilty consciences. We secretly suspect that we might have more than we deserve. We know that white people have reaped some ill-gotten gains in this country. And so privately, quietly, as a result of our own complicated guilt, we believe that we deserve to be hated, to be hurt, and to be killed.

But, for the most part, we are not. Most victims of violent crimes are not white. This is particularly true for hate crimes. We are far more likely to be hurt by the food we eat, the cars we drive, or the bicycles we ride than by the people we live among. This may be lost on us in part because we are surrounded by a lot of noise that suggests otherwise. Within the last month, the Chicago Tribune has reported on an “unprovoked stabbing spree”, a “one-man crime wave”, a boy who was beaten in a park, and a bartender who was beaten behind her bar, the story being, again and again, that none of us are safe in this city.

In the spring of 2006, the New York Times published an analysis of all the murders that had been committed in New York City during the previous three years – a total of 1,662 killings. The article revealed one trend: people who were murdered tended to be killed by other people like them. Most of the killers were men and boys (a disturbing 93% – a number that, were we not so accustomed to thinking of men as “naturally” violent, might strike us as the symptom of an alarming mass pathology), and most killed other men and boys. In more than three-quarters of the killings, the killer and the victim were of the same race, and less than 13% of the victims were white or Asian. The majority of children were killed by a parent, and in more than half of all the cases, the victim and the killer knew each other.

Even as it made this point, the article undid its own message by detailing a series of stranger-killings. There was the serial murderer who shot shopkeepers; the KFC customer who stabbed a cashier; the man who offered a ride to a group of people he did not know and was then murdered for his car. These are the murders we find most fascinating, of course, because they allow us to be afraid of the people we want to be afraid of.

In a similar layering of popular fantasy with true information, the article went on to mention specific precincts in Brooklyn, the Bronx, and Harlem where murders were concentrated. It then quoted Andrew Karmen, an expert in victimology – the study of the victims of crime and the psychological effects of their experience – who explained: “The problem of crime and violence is rooted in neighbourhood conditions – high rates of poverty, family disruption, failing schools, lack of recreational opportunities, active recruitment by street gangs, drug markets. People forced to reside under those conditions are at a greater risk of getting caught up in violence, as victims or as perpetrators.” In other words, particular neighbourhoods are not as dangerous as the conditions that people live under within those neighbourhoods. It’s a fine line but an important one, because if you do not live under those conditions, you are not very likely to get killed. Not driving through, not walking through, not even if you rent an apartment there.

I worked, during my first year in New York, in some of the city’s most notorious neighbourhoods: in Bed-Stuy, in East New York, in Spanish Harlem, in Washington Heights. That was before I knew the language of the city, and the codes, so I had no sense that these places were considered dangerous. I was hired by the parks department to inspect community gardens, and I travelled all over the city, on train and on bus and on foot, wearing khaki shorts and hiking boots, carrying a clipboard and a Polaroid camera.

I did not understand then that city blocks on which most of the lots were empty or full of the rubble of collapsed buildings would be read, by many New Yorkers, as an indication of danger. I understood that these places were poverty-stricken and ripe with ambient desperation, but I did not suspect that they were any more dangerous than anywhere else in the city. I was accustomed to the semi-rural poverty and post-industrial decay of upstate New York. There, by the highways, yards are piled with broken plastic and rusting metal, tarps are tacked on in place of walls, roof beams are slowly rotting through. And in the small cities, in Troy and Watervliet, in Schenectady and Niskayuna, in Amsterdam and in parts of Albany, old brick buildings crumble, brownstones stand vacant, and factories with huge windows wait to be gutted and razed.

By the time I learned what I was really supposed to be afraid of in New York, I knew better, which isn’t to say that there was nothing to be afraid of, because, as all of us know, there are always dangers, everywhere.

But danger was an abstraction to me then, not something I felt. In fact, I can recall vividly the first time I made the intellectual deduction that I might be in a dangerous situation – I was riding the subway in Manhattan well past midnight, and I noticed after just a few minutes on the train that I was the only woman in that car. At the next stop, I walked into the next car, which was also full of men, and so I began travelling the length of the train. I eventually found a car where a woman was sleeping with her head resting on the man next to her, but by then I was unsettled. I looked into other trains as they passed us in the tunnels, and I looked at the people waiting on the platforms. Women did not ride the subway alone very late at night, I realised. And as I made this realisation I felt not fear, but fury.

Even now, at a much more wary and guarded age, what I feel when I am told that my neighbourhood is dangerous is not fear but anger at the extent to which so many of us have agreed to live within a delusion – namely, that we will be spared the dangers that others suffer only if we move within certain, very restricted spheres, and that insularity is a fair price to pay for safety. Fear is isolating for those that fear. And I have come to believe that fear is a cruelty to those who are feared. One evening not long after we moved to Rogers Park, my husband and I met a group of black boys riding their bikes on the sidewalk across the street from our apartment building. The boys were weaving down the sidewalk, yelling for the sake of hearing their own voices and drinking from bottles of beer. As we stepped off the sidewalk and began crossing the street toward our apartment, one boy yelled: “Don’t be afraid of us!”

I looked back over my shoulder as I stepped into the street, and the boy passed on his bike so that I saw him looking back at me also, and then he yelled again, directly at me: “Don’t be afraid of us!” I wanted to yell back, “Don’t worry, we aren’t!” but I was, in fact, afraid to engage the boys, afraid to draw attention to my husband and myself, afraid of how my claim not to be afraid might be misunderstood as bravado begging a challenge, so I simply let my eyes meet the boy’s eyes before I turned, disturbed, toward the tall iron gate in front of my apartment building, a gate that gives the appearance of being locked but is in fact always open.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The lakefront. Photograph: Jean-Marc Giboux/The Guardian

My love of swimming in open water, in lakes and oceans, is tempered only by my fear of what I cannot see beneath those waters. My mind imagines into the depths a nightmare landscape of grabbing hands and spinning metal blades and dark, sucking voids into which I will be pulled and not return. As a charm against my terror of the unseen, I have, for many years now, always entered the water silently repeating to myself this command: “Trust the water.” For some time after an incident in which one of my feet brushed the other and I swam for shore frantically in a gasping panic, breathing water in the process and choking painfully, I added: “Don’t be afraid of your own feet.”

I am accustomed to being warned away from the water, to being told that it is too cold, too deep, too rocky, that the current is too strong and the waves too powerful. Until recently, what I learned from these warnings was only that I could safely defy them all. But then I was humbled by a rough beach in northern California, where I was slammed to the bottom by the surf and dragged to shore so forcefully that sand was embedded in the skin of my palms and my knees. That beach happened to have had a sign that read “How to Survive This Beach,” which made me laugh when I first arrived, the first item in the numbered list being: “Do not go within 500 feet of the water.”

It is only since discovering that some warnings are legitimate that my fears of open water have become powerful enough to fight my confidence in my own strength. I tend to stay closer to shore now, and I am always vigilant, although for what, exactly, I do not know. It is difficult to know what to be afraid of and how cautious to be when there are so many imagined dangers in the world, so many killer sharks, and so many creatures from the black lagoon.

Now that we share a bookshelf, I am in possession of my husband’s dog-eared, underlined copy of Barry Glassner’s The Culture of Fear. Every society is threatened by a nearly infinite amount of dangers, Glassner writes, but societies differ in what they choose to fear. Americans, interestingly, tend to be most preoccupied with those dangers that are among the least likely to cause us harm, while we ignore the problems that are hurting the greatest number of people.

We suffer from a national confusion between true threats and imagined threats. And our imagined threats, Glassner argues, very often serve to mask true threats. The sensationalism around our “war” on illegal drugs has obscured the fact that legal drugs, the kind that are advertised on television, are more widely abused and cause more deaths. Worse than this, we allow our misplaced, illogical fears to stigmatise our own people. “Fear-mongers,” Glassner writes, “project on to black men precisely what slavery, poverty, educational deprivation, and discrimination have ensured that they do not have – great power and influence.”

Although I do not pretend to understand the full complexity of local economies, I suspect that fear is one of the reasons that I can afford to live where I live, in an apartment across the street from a beach, with a view of the lake and space enough for both my husband and myself to have rooms in which to write. Our lake home, we sometimes call it, with a wink to the fact that this apartment is far better than we ever believed two writers with student loan debt and one income could hope for. As one Chicago real-estate magazine puts it: “For decades, a low rate of owner-occupancy, a lack of commercial development … and problems with crime have kept prices lower in East Rogers Park than in many North Side neighbourhoods.” My feelings about fear are somewhat ambivalent, because fear is why I can afford to swim every day, now.

One of the paradoxes of our time is that the “war on terror” has served mainly to reinforce a collective belief that maintaining the right amount of fear and suspicion will earn one safety. Fear is promoted by the government as a kind of policy. Fear is accepted, even among the best-educated people in this country, even among the professors with whom I work, as a kind of intelligence. And inspiring fear in others is often seen as neighbourly and kindly, instead of being regarded as what my cousin recognised it to be – a violence.

On my first day in Rogers Park, my downstairs neighbours, a family of European immigrants whom I met on my way out to swim, warned me that a boy had drowned by the breakwater not too long ago. I was in my bathing suit when they told me this, holding a towel. They also told me that another neighbour, while walking his dog on the beach, had recently found a human arm. It was part of the body of a boy who had been killed in gang warfare and then cut up with a tree saw. The torso was found later, they told me, further up the shore, but the head was never discovered.

I went for my swim, avoiding the breakwater and battling a new terror of heads with open mouths at the bottom of the lake. When I retold the neighbours’ story to my husband later, he laughed. “A tree saw?” he asked, still laughing.

When the Irish immigrant Philip Rogers built a log cabin nine miles north of the Chicago courthouse in 1834, there were still some small Native American villages there. He built his home on the wooded ridges along the north shore after noticing that this was where the area’s original inhabitants wintered.

Rogers built just south of the northern Indian Boundary Line, which was the result of an 1816 treaty designating safe passage for whites within a 20-mile-wide tract of land that ran from Lake Michigan to the Mississippi River (this treaty was rendered meaningless by the Indian Removal Act of 1830, which dictated that all of the land east of the Mississippi would be open to white settlement). The northern Indian Boundary Line, originally a Native American trail, would eventually become Rogers Avenue. And my apartment building would be built on the north corner of Rogers Avenue.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A bookshop in Rogers Park. Photograph: Jean-Marc Giboux/The Guardian

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 neighbourhood warmly and delivered an introductory speech dense with code. This neighbourhood, he told me, needs “more people like you”. He and other “people like us” were gradually “lifting it up”.

And then there was the neighbour across the street, a white man who my husband met while I was swimming. He told my husband that he had lived there for 20 years, and asked how we liked it. “Oh, we love it,” my husband said. “We’ve been enjoying Clark Street.”

The tone of the conversation shifted with the mention of Clark Street, our closest shopping street, which is lined with taquerias and Mexican groceries. “Well,” the man said, in obvious disapproval, “we’re pioneers here.”

Use of that word betrays a disturbing willingness to repeat the worst mistake of the pioneers of the American West – 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 neighbours or to cast them as natives who must be displaced. Either way, it is a hostile fantasy.

My landlord, who grew up in this apartment building, the building his grandfather built, is a tattooed, Harley-riding man who fought in Vietnam and has a string of plastic skulls decorating the entrance of his apartment. When I ask him about the history of this neighbourhood, he speaks so evasively that I don’t learn anything except that he used to feel much safer here than he does now. “We never used to have any of this,” he says, gesturing towards the back gate and the newly bricked wall that now protects the courtyard of the building from the alley. “We never used to lock our doors, even – I used to come home from school and let myself in without a key.”

Walking out of my apartment one morning, I found a piece of paper on the sidewalk that read, “Help! We have no hot water.” This message was printed in pink ink above an address that I recognised as being nearby, but further inland from the lake. The paper was carried by the wind to the water’s edge, I imagined, as a reminder to me of the everyday inconveniences, the absent landlords and the delayed buses and the cheque-cashing fees, of the world beyond the one in which I live.

“Everyone who lives in a neighbourhood belongs to it, is part of it,” Geoff Dyer writes in Out of Sheer Rage. “The only way to opt out of a neighbourhood is to move out.”

But this does not seem to hold true of the thin sliver of Rogers Park bordering the lake, where many of our white neighbours drive in and out and do not walk down Howard to the train station, do not visit the corner store for milk or beer, do not buy vegetables in the little markets, do not, as one neighbour admitted to me, even park further inland than one block from the lake, no matter how heavily the lake shore is parked up or how long it takes to find a parking space.

Between my apartment building and the lake there is a small park with a stony beach and some cracked tennis courts, where people like to let their dogs run loose. In the winter, the only people in the park are people with dogs, people who stand in the tennis courts, holding bags of shit while their dogs run around in circles and sniff one another. In the summer, the park fills with people. Spanish-speaking families make picnics on the grass, Indian families have games of cricket, groups of black teenagers sit on the benches and young men play volleyball in great clouds of dust until dusk. “The warm weather,” my landlord observed to me not long after I moved in, “brings out the riff-raff”.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A dog-grooming salon in Rogers Park. Photograph: Jean-Marc Giboux/The Guardian

When my landlord said this, I was standing on the sidewalk in front of our building in my bathing suit, still dripping from the lake, and a boy leaving the park asked if I had a quarter. I laughed and told the boy that I don’t typically carry change in my bathing suit, but he remained blank-faced, as uninterested as a toll collector. His request, I suspect, had very little to do with any money I may have had or any money he may have needed. The exchange was intended to be, like so many of my exchanges with my neighbours, a ritual offering.

When I walk from my apartment to the train I am asked for money by all variety of people – old men and young boys and women with babies. Their manner of request is always different, but they are always black and I am always white. Sometimes I give money and sometimes I do not, but I do not feel good about it either way, and the transaction never fails to be complicated. I do not know whether my neighbours think, as I do, of these quarters and dollars as a kind of tax on my presence here. A tax that, although I resent it, is more than fair.

One day in the late summer after we moved to Rogers Park, my husband came home from the fruit market with a bag of tomatoes and a large watermelon, which he had carried the half-mile from the market to our house, stopping once to let some children feel how heavy it was. He was flushed from the sun, and as he split the melon, still warm, my husband mused, “I hope more white people don’t move here.”

My husband isn’t prone to sentimentality of any kind, or to worrying about white people, so I asked him why, and he said: “Because kids were playing basketball by the school and they had cheerleaders cheering them on, and black men say hello to me on the street, and I love our little fruit market, and I don’t want this place to change.”

But this place will probably change, if only because this is not a city where integrated neighbourhoods last very long. And we are the people for whom the new coffee shop has opened. And the pet-grooming store. “You know your neighbourhood is gentrifying,” my sister said, “when the pet-grooming store arrives.”

“Gentrification” is a word that agitates my husband. It bothers him because he thinks that the people who tend to use the word negatively, white artists and academics, people like me, are exactly the people who benefit from the process of gentrification. “I think you should define the word ‘gentrification,’” my husband tells me now.

I ask him what he would say it means, and he pauses for a long moment. “It means that an area is generally improved,” he says finally, “but in such a way that everything worthwhile about it is destroyed.”

My dictionary defines “gentrify” as meaning “to renovate or improve (esp. a house or district) so that it conforms to middle-class taste”. There is definitely the sense among the middle-class people in this neighbourhood that they are improving the place. New buildings fly banners that read “Luxury!” The coffee shop and pet-grooming store have been billed as a “revitalisation”.

When I walk home from the train station at night, I watch unmarked cars pull in front of black teenagers, who are patted down quickly and wordlessly. Some of the teenagers, my husband has noticed, carry their IDs in clear cases that hang from their belts for easy access. One evening, I watch the police interrogate two boys who have set a large container of Tide detergent down on the sidewalk next to them, and I cannot forget this detail, and the mundane tasks of living that it evokes. I consider going to one of the monthly beat meetings the police hold for each neighbourhood and making some kind of complaint, but month after month I do not go.

Walking down Clark Street, I pass a poster on an empty storefront inviting entrepreneurs to start businesses in Rogers Park, “Chicago’s most diverse neighbourhood”. It takes me some time, standing in front of this poster, to understand why the word “diverse” strikes me as so false in this context, so disingenuous. It is not because this neighbourhood is not full of many different kinds of people, but because that word implies some easy version of this difficult reality, some version that is not full of sparks and averted eyes and police cars. But still, I’d like to believe in the promise of that word. Not the sunshininess of it, or the quota-making politics of it, but the real complexity of it. The work of it, too – the work of being a neighbour.

This is an edited extract from Notes From No Man’s Land by Eula Biss, published by Fitzcarraldo Editions

• Follow the Long Read on Twitter at @gdnlongread, or sign up to the long read weekly email here