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Segregation And Segregation In Chicago

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It’s Thanksgiving. There’s a traffic jam of dishes being passed, “moooom” being called, and fresh stains on the table cloth. As the chaos calms down, you glance down the table to your younger cousin’s plate. They’ve always been a picky child. Their plate is perfectly separated into compartments of food. No foods are overlapping, let alone mixing. That younger cousin’s perfectly separated plate of food is Chicago. Chicago where neighborhoods have been separated since the city’s formation. Chicago where people are compartmentalized to areas they’re “allowed” to go to. Chicago where people don’t mix. To truly understand Chicago, one must grasp the concept of the Chicago neighborhood and the separation and segregation that it breeds. Because of …show more content…

Although these neighborhoods do not have drawn-out lines, they are distinctly segregated by race and ethnicity. This segregation of neighborhoods began during the Great Migration, when millions of African Americans fled from the Jim Crow laws of the south to the swept-under-the-rug racism of the North. In Chicago, African Americans were only allowed to live in a certain area that was deemed “the Black Belt”. The Black Belt was not ready to account for the influx of African American people due to the great migration, which caused there to be overcrowded living situations and a lack of resources available. When African Americans tried to leave the Black Belt and live in different neighborhoods, they were met with white violence. This increased racial tensions in Chicago, and eventually was part of the cause of a race riot that would forever change how different races interacted and lived in the city. The cause of the riot was based on these imaginary lines that people had drawn to exclude certain groups. Specifically the riot happened because an African American boy accidentally floated into “white territory” while playing in Lake Michigan(Pcgya). Although it is difficult to fathom, the imaginary lines that outlined neighborhoods became even more strict and defined after the Race Riot of …show more content…

This is evident in how the city government treats environmental issues. Because of the Chicago neighborhood system the city can easily disregard a community on purpose, like how many minority neighborhoods on the South and West sides are subject to higher levels of pollution in order to keep the Northside neighborhoods clean. These neighborhoods are ignored in the city’s green plans and during citywide clean ups, yet these are the neighborhoods that need it the most. Many of these neighborhoods reside near old power plants or landfills making them more susceptible to the pollutants these sites exude (Ruppenthal). The city continuously overlooks these neighborhoods because of the racial prejudice that is present in Chicago and preserved because of the segregation brought on by the split-up

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Although a main area that the African-Americans were segregated from the white Americans was housing. As many of the property owners where white they refused to sell or rent their property to the African-Americans in ‘White neighbourhoods’. So the African-Americans found themselves starting their own neighbourhoods, these neighbourhoods were generally overcrowded and became unhealthy for the African-Americans to be living in. African-Americans who were courageous enough to buy homes in the ‘white neighbourhoods' soon realised that white Americans in the North America could be just as violent as southern Americans. The African-American homeowners were threatened and beaten, while their homes were bombed and burned to force them out of the area.

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They argue that institutional racism in the housing market enacted by the US Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), private loan and real estate institutions and actors, and white residents effectively and permanently isolated African Americans. Institutionalized racist practices of the housing market such as redlining and steering, coupled with white flight and structural disinvestment in African American neighborhoods, effectively isolated African Americans and further contributed to the creation of black ghettos. Thus, residential segregation concentrates poverty, erodes institutional and economic support, and ultimately causes its residents to normalize their problematic social environment of high levels of joblessness, teenage pregnancy, drugs, and violence. If the segregation of African Americans were to be resolved by their economic achievement and class mobility, middle-class African Americans should be able to enter white neighborhoods of comparable income levels. However, as Massey and Denton show, once the threshold of “too many black families” is crossed, white flight occurs and poorer black families move into the neighborhood, creating (and expanding) racially segregated

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In this speech, I will begin by explaining what gentrification is along with a short background on the Lincoln Park gentrification, then I will proceed to explain how the families in these areas fought for their homes, and finally I will be discussing the gentrification that is affecting citizens of Chicago today. Body I. Gentrification is the process of renovating an area to meet the standards of a different social class, typically the upper middle class. Throughout this process the price of renting and owning a home increases while family owned businesses become bankrupt. Low-income families are left homeless and without the support of a

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There are five aspects of urban neighborhoods. These aspects characterize areas of high deviance within cities. To my knowledge, no member of the Chicago school ever listed this particular set, but these concepts permeate their whole literature starting with Park, Burgess, and McKenzie's classic. The City (1925), And they are especially prominent in the empirical work of the Chicago school (Faris and Dunham, 1939; Shaw and McKay, 1942), Indeed, most of these factors were prominent in the work of 19th-century moral statisticians such as the Englishmen Mayhew and Buchanan, who were doing ecological sociology decades before any member of the Chicago school was born. These essential factors are (1) density; (2) poverty; (3) mixed use; (4) transience;

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