On a recent work Zoom a colleague bragged about having barbecue for breakfast. “Burnt ends with a bourbon sauce. Better than Eggo any day.”
“Oh man, no fair!” a coworker chimed in. “I want barbecue for breakfast!”
“Come on out to the suburbs,” my colleague said. “You’re all welcome at my table!”
It was a tempting offer except I’d have to go to Orland Park and that’s a deal-breaker. You see, I’m afraid of the suburbs.
That fear made me think of the athletic director at the fieldhouse in the Chicago park where my son participates in league sports, who recently told me that he was dealing with being “the only Black family on the block.” He said he’d grown up in South Side neighborhoods where things could get hairy but at least you knew where you stood. This was different.
As a result, he’s taken to driving into the city to go on his morning runs and tries to smile at everyone he makes eye contact with when he’s walking his dog on the block. “My wife,” he said, “she’s always lived out here and knows how to be ‘the only one.’ But this shit is new to me and it’s scary.“
I don’t think a lot of people realize this still happens in the suburbs in 2022, but it does. And honestly, that’s terrifying.
But back to the Zoom. I work for a diverse organization with folks from all walks of life. As I scanned my computer screen, I wondered how many of the faces Brady-Bunching back at me would be welcomed if they headed out to Orland Park for barbecue. I’m betting a few of them would get pulled over for no good reason. Imagine what would happen if they tried to move onto the block? After all, an awful lot of Chicago suburbs were built by white flight.
Look, we’re still unearthing details about racial exclusion in housing covenants, urban planning and intentional developments designed specifically to bar access and at times erase non-white residents. Typically, these are portrayed as things that happened a long time ago—they were outlawed by the Supreme Court in the forties! People act as though they’re simply lessons from the past which we’ve learned from and changed.
But is that really true? There’s an awful lot of data to suggest otherwise. Racist clauses are still tied to real property all over the state and it wasn’t until January of 2022 that Illinois passed a law allowing homeowners to remove racist language from their property deeds. I don’t think it’s a coincidence.
I’ve gotten pretty heavy here, I’ll admit. But it’s not only racial issues that make me lock my doors and roll up my windows when I find myself in Tinley Park after dark. After all, there is diversity in the suburbs—at least some of them. And I’m a forty-something white guy with a clean record so I’m mostly safe when I get pulled over or turn down the wrong cul-de-sac.
The stultifying car-focused culture and suburban obsession with convenience also gives me the heebie-jeebies.
I long for the days of comprehensive transit systems and walkable neighborhoods. Did you know Chicago once claimed the largest streetcar system in the world, with more than 3,000 passenger cars and a thousand miles of track? (WTTW’s “Ask Geoffrey” column provides a delightful overview.)
Forget San Francisco and all that Rice-A-Roni bullshit. Chicago had them beat. But it all got destroyed in the postwar baby boom with its incessant pursuit of car culture at all costs and subsequent white flight and suburban development.
Half a century later, it’s a regular scrum to get in and out of the city for work. Of the three million or so daily commuters who travel to work three-quarters are heading to jobs in the suburbs where transit is sketchy at best and sidewalks or bike lanes are nowhere to be seen. And all those cable cars? They got tossed in the landfill because cars kept breaking down and they couldn’t drive around them.
Every time someone pipes up about congestion in Chicago, I want to be like “Y’all made this happen! Talk to your racist dad, Danny Boy! He could make America greater by ditching his SUV and McMansion and taking the Metra!”
Just try to drive to O’Hare on a Tuesday morning and see how that’s going to go for you. I’ve seriously gotten into a mile-long gapers block from cars lined up for a Portillo’s drive-thru and suburbanites want to piss and moan about traffic in the city.
And who isn’t weary of hearing suburbanites prattle on about how violent Chicago is. The fact is crime rates are up everywhere, including the suburbs.
Researchers at organizations like Third Way have found murder rates are worse on average in red states than blue states and cities like Jacksonville, Florida, or Bakersfield, California, have a much, much worse problem than Chicago.
Speaking of rolling up the windows, let’s not forget COVID-19 and the fact that most suburbs more or less pretended it didn’t exist. While I was singing the “A-B-C” song to make sure I washed my hands long enough and wearing surgical gear on the El, people in Wheaton were going about their business and slinging spittle everywhere. How much worse were the surges and mutations because of wall-to-wall germ swapping at Walmarts across the Chicagoland region?
Speaking of Walmart, thank goodness Chicago said hell no to that big-box invasion. Leave that mess in Arlington Heights with the Bears.
And we haven’t even gotten to politics. For all the articles and hand-wringing about places like the Appalachian hills where I grew up being responsible for MAGA and electing Trump, it was suburban white voters who got him into office in 2016. I don’t need to conjure up some sort of boogeyman this Halloween. I’ll just envision an old white man from Edison Park wearing his MAGA hat and whacking me with his walker. Svengoolie was right about Berwyn all along. It’s a scary place!
So, the next time barbeque is on the table for breakfast let’s skip the trip to Plainfield and grab some ribs from Lem’s. We can eat them in my backyard on the West Side, no Zoom required.
