Fear and Loathing in Suburbia

By Tim Wise, AlterNet. Posted June 20, 2001.

If intellectual gymnastics were an Olympic sport, we white folks would be the team to beat. Especially whites from the suburbs, who go to amazing lengths to convince others (and perhaps themselves) that their wish to steer clear of blacks in the cities isn't the least bit racist.

And the stars of the team would have to be those south suburb Chicagoans who recently voted to keep a black parish school from participating in their Catholic league athletic conference. By the time you read this, the decision in question may have been reversed, due to bad publicity. Nevertheless, there is little question that the initial vote more accurately represented the gut feelings of the persons involved.

Oh sure, there were the usual assurances that the decision wasn't racial, but based only on concern for the "safety" of white kids and moms who would have to travel to the black community of Auburn-Gresham, on Chicago's south side for games. You know how those people can be, after all: just waiting to jump Miss Daisy and Peppermint Patty as they pull up in their Jeep Cherokee.

Yet the protestations of innocence rising from the manicured lawns of the outer ring are dubious to say the least. Many of these white families are merely maintaining the tradition started by their parents three and four decades ago: whites who moved from the city as soon as blacks began moving in. Now, these second-generation refugees from post-segregation America are looking to move even farther away; to avoid even the middle-class and above blacks moving into what they consider nice, safe (read: white) communities. For most, their hang-up isn't class and it isn't crime. It's race.

Just listen to them. One caller to a Chicago columnist put it this way: "If they want to change the way white people view them, they have to clean up their own act first. Get rid of the gang-bangers, the drug dealers, and reduce the crime rates in their own neighborhoods."

The fact that black crime in the cities, including Chicago, is down dramatically in the past ten years hardly matters it seems, and has certainly not been met with a corresponding reduction in white fear.

That whites in Chicago are two-to-three times more likely to be violently victimized by another white person than by a black person apparently matters even less.

And the fact that those black drug dealers are staying in business in large part due to the drug habits of some of these suburban whites themselves -- well, that's the truth that dare not speak its name.

Or consider the musings of one white suburban mom, terrified at the thought of her freckle-faced young'uns venturing into the city: "I'm not worried about the kids we'd be playing against," she said, "But the people around the school, who knows what they would do."

Why, impale you with poison-tipped spears and eat you of course. Don't these silly people know anything?

This same mom then explained: "There are black people and then there are black people."

True enough. And by the same token, there are white people, and then there's John Wayne Gacy.

Gacy, you'll recall, was a white Chicago suburbanite who lured dozens of young white men to their deaths while their white parents were probably patting themselves on the back for getting out of the shadow of Comiskey Park, in the "dangerous" part of town.

Oh -- and not to put too fine a point on it -- but while Windy City white folk have been hyperventilating about would-be black predators on the South side, word is out that a fine, upstanding product of the mostly-white Chicago suburb of Oak Forest killed at least a half dozen women from 1995-1997.

That's right, yet another white male serial killer. And in keeping with the proud heritage of crazy white men for whom killing one person is just not enough, Paul Runge apparently fancied dismembering his victims and scattering their body parts across two states. Nice.

It makes one wonder if perhaps the black parents from Auburn-Gresham should rethink their attempts to join this league. After all, some flesh-eating, body-burying-under-the-house wingnut might be cruising the ball fields of Pleasantville. Better to stay in the 'hood, where you normally have to really piss someone off before they kill you; where no one hears voices telling them to make a soufflé out of their parents or sacrifice small woodland creatures to Satan; and where someone might notice if their child was building three dozen bombs in the house, or planning to shoot up the school.

Truth be told, racists have always found excuses for their prejudices, and not surprisingly, they have usually involved fear of black violence.

In slave times, defenders of chattel ownership insisted that white domination was needed to prevent blacks from raping white women and running wild.

Jim Crow laws too, were often rationalized as a necessary mechanism for controlling black impulses -- sexual and violent ones first and foremost.

And whites who resisted desegregation almost always conjured up images of blacks with switchblades attacking little Susie and Johnny as part of some insatiable Negro bloodlust. Yet, all would have sworn they weren't racists. They were just being "realistic." After all, "those people" really do have higher crime rates, don't they?

Well yes, if by "crime" you mean the traditional interpretation of the term: violence or property offenses committed on the street or in the home, which are punished as crimes by the justice system. Since these kinds of offenses are highly correlated with low socioeconomic status, there will be a higher rate of offending in communities of color, which thanks to the interplay of race and economic marginalization will tend to be poorer.

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