@HydeSnark at #457: Ohmygoodness - if I had a dime for every time I was called some sort of racial insult from members of the AA community while I lived in Chicago, I’d be rich now. You are naive if you think the racism is one-sided. The difference now, at least, is that there seem to be appropriate repercussions whenever it’s uttered by a white kid. We had visiting friends chased back to HP by angry black residents of - yes - Washington Park. Their crime? They wandered into the wrong neighborhood when exploring the area. Being from the SF Bay Area, they had no idea such tension, animosity, and - yes, racism - existed between AA and white. There are so many issues involving the Beverly’s/Mt Greenwoods of the South Side that are beyond the scope of this thread. Needless to say, BLM’s own hate speech has pretty much always been protected and will likely continue to be. That should make you quite happy.
“Have you been to Austin? There’s nothing suburban about it.” Bingo. And yet it abuts some pretty white suburbs (Oak Park is the most integrated at about 20% AA). Proximity to the 'burbs doesn’t explain the neighborhood. Where you see blight, there has been White Flight. Where you see predominantly white neighborhoods and communities abutting primarily black ones, you see proactive measures stemming from strategic development to overt racism (and everything in between) in order to “protect the neighborhood” / “keep out the blacks” (depending on your point of view). Such is the predicament of the South Side. Given this ongoing history, Hyde Park is actually quite an extraordinary community.
@Zinhead “The Loop has elevated levels of all types of crime, but that is largely impacted by the large transient population of workers and tourist that flow into and out of the Loop every day. The crime per thousand residents is a poor measure for the Loop.”
True, but that also is true for Hyde Park to a lesser extent. The University employs over 15,000 people, most of whom commute in from elsewhere. Much of the faculty may live near campus, but all the people working in the Hospital and so forth mostly do not. So by your reasoning, Hyde Park is even safer than it already seems (which is pretty darn safe).
The Loop is a different sort of “neighborhood”. Most of the “thefts” involve retail establishments, pickpocketing of tourists, etc. It is not primarily a residential neighborhood that happens to have a business or retail district. Even with the significant presence of the university, some K-12 schools, etc., it’s simply not the same thing.
@JBStillFlying I didn’t say it was the same thing. I said that the same principle applied, in terms of having an elevated population during the day. UChicago is the largest employer in the city other than the various branches of government. (the feds, the City, the Chicago school system).
@ThankYouForHelp - you are correct, but the crime stats that are reported for the Loop have more to do with the very heavy retail and business presence (easy pickins’ for the 5-finger discount), rather than just a transient population that sees people coming and going depending on time of day.
@ThankYouforHelp - The Loop has a population of 29,283. Combined, there are more than 320,000 public and private sector jobs in the Loop.
Hyde Park has a population of 25,681, and a large percent of UChicago employees likely live in the area. There might be some effect due to university employees coming from outside the area, but the scale is vastly different from the Loop and likely more similar to other communities in Chicago with large employment centers.
For someone who insists on data, that’s a heck of a leap of faith, both as to where “most of the kids” come from, and what the crime rates are in the suburbs where those kids grew up who are in fact from the suburbs. If I tick through the kids I know who have been at the University of Chicago in the past decade or so, most of them are from large cities or small cities (i.e., college towns), not suburbs, although there are a few suburban kids. It’s only anecdata, of course, but I have the sense from families I know here that Chicago is more attractive to kids who feel comfortable in a city, so the student body may not have the same composition in this regard as Princeton’s.
As for crime rates, I don’t think any of the affluent suburbs around here have crime rates anywhere near as low as Mount Greenwood seems to have. When crime rates are relatively low – as they are in the affluent suburbs I know – people tend to discount them even further.
(In case anyone saw my prior post before I edited it, I apologize. I had some claims about Hyde Park crime rates that were based on a population number that I got from a website but that seems inconsistent – more than 3x larger – with any other number I could find for HP population. Needless to say, that affects what one says about the crime rate.)
@Zinhead Statistics may be factual, but they are not objective. If you give someone the raw data, they will almost inevitably conclude that they should completely avoid Washington Park because the data says it is dangerous. Often, they make the further jump that they should completely avoid any predominately Black neighborhood in Chicago.
Is this the correct conclusion? I don’t think so, because the victims of those crimes are overwhelmingly the people who live there, are poor and are Black. These statistics tell anyone who isn’t in those categories very little about their personal safety in Washington Park and only continues the narrative that Black neighborhoods and Black people are dangerous and have an unavoidable criminal element to them. Then they grow up and have strong biases against living near Black people or hiring Black people, and the cycle of systematic racism continues.
Still, even in the worst neighborhoods, for every 1000 people living there, only 3 will experience violent crime that goes reported. From my experience in those communities, being a direct victim of a crime is still considered fairly rare - and something that, though there is always a chance, can be mitigated by hanging out with the “right” people in school, staying inside after hours, etc. Even the people living there tend not to worry about getting shot walking to the Green Line. Muggings is more of a present problem, but I don’t think it’s more prevalent in those neighborhoods than anywhere else. It’s a city, be aware of your surroundings.
I think your point about many students coming from suburban areas is a very salient one. One of the reasons we have such a long o-week is to get students acquainted to living in a city. And in practice - everything is fine. O-week works, students are very, very, very rarely the victim of a crime.
@JBStillFlying I’m not condoning harassment of any kind. Still, change needs to start in the White communities. Black attitudes towards White people are largely a reaction to racism, and you can’t fix the dependency before fixing the problem that created it.
@HydeSnark you are a principled young person who cares deeply about racial disparities. That much is clear. But your reasoning is flawed. When those awful hate criminals tortured that poor special needs man and posted it on Facebook was that a reaction to white on black racism or were they just being hateful racist thugs themselves? The systemic issues are deep, for sure, but they are a little more nuanced than you are describing. A good start for a remedy would be to hold every individual accountable for his or her behavior. Regardless of skin color.
@JBStillFlying It can be both racist (as in - a crime committed on the basis of race) and a reaction against racism (as in - the systematic discrimination they faced as young Black people). It’s a little more nuanced than you’re describing.
I think it’s pretty clear who isn’t being held accountable, and it wasn’t the four Black torturers that are going to spend the rest of their lives in jail while that white torturer walks free in Idaho.
@HydeSnark assuming that actual news and not fake news it’s troubling indeed.
@JHS Not sure whether most kids at Uchicago hail from the burbs or the big city or have lived in the sticks or the cosmopolitan urban areas of the world. Most are not going to be used to the crime present on the southside – not in Hyde Park specifically but in the surrounding area.
Individual accountability is very convenient position for affluent white people to take. The problem is that systemic racism typically works through callous indifference toward what happens to others rather than through overt and explicitly racist actions. There’s always deniability for the people who benefit from the system. By contrast, people who point out how the system works and the very disparate treatment it leads to get castigated as racists. Both aspects of this dynamic have been on display in this thread.
Most people are good. Those who aren’t taint our perceptions of entire groups (or in the case of this discussion, neighborhoods) too easily sometimes.
Courageous individuals are required to build bridges.
The longer I live, the more I believe these to be truthful:
If you are good to others, most of the time, they will be good to you
Caring for others and helping them are their own payment
Good people can get stuck in bad circumstances. You should support them (tough love, advice, money, whatever is called for given their plight and personality), and they should fight on. Giving up solves nothing and can only breed overreactive misunderstanding, misanthropy, insecurity and jealousy, etc.
There is systemic racism, but most people working in it are not racist per se. I think we improve be, but it's two steps forward, one step back. We overreact to sensitive issues: fireworks become bombs.
Anyone can be a racist. If you treat others differently based on their race, you are discriminating racially. If you think of them differently based on race, you are a racial bigot.
We can all learn and change and improve. Let go of pride, past hurt and preconceived notions, and talk to the person rather than judging book by cover and walking away. Bridges aren't built without research and toil.
Do not judge. If you see someone doing wrong, examine yourself first, and then teach.
Love your children and teach them to evaluate people based on their words and actions, not on their looks or circumstances.
To change the molecules and mixtures, we have to start with the atoms: us.
The RUR ranking agency exists since 2013 and publishes international rankings system of universities Round University Ranking (RUR). Raw data for the RUR Rankings system is provided by an international company Clarivate Analytics (formerly the IP&Science business of Thomson Reuters). The Agency also offers consulting services for universities to strengthen their competitiveness in the higher education sector. The RUR Agency is based in Moscow, Russian Federation.
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