The Black Middle Class

I called my old neighbor
from Keystone
to help my new neighbor
capture some animals
that had gotten into his roof

After I asked my old neighbor
what he thought of my new neighbor,
he said he was weird.

Weird, I asked,
How?
Remember when we
was talking?
Yeah?
Well, he called me over
while I was talking to you.
So?
I didn't like his, tone.
What do you mean,
was his tone, too wh...
No, just weird.

West of Humboldt Park

I never heard anyone who lived in West Humboldt Park actually say they lived in West Humboldt Park, never. It has to be something created by the real estate industry, or created by some community organization in an effort to describe their location, something to the effect of, "We serve an area west of Humboldt Park, south of Augusta, north of Chicago Avenue, and east of Pulaski." Somehow the name morphed into West Humboldt Park and that name got appropriated, and today that is what the area is called on the southwest border of the actual community of Humboldt Park, mostly to non-profits, City and Federal agencies, the media, and those not from the area. If you actually asked a resident, like some teenager hanging out on Chicago Avenue, what neighborhood he lives in, he may say, "I'm from Harding and Iowa" or some other cross street. It is just interesting, this fetish for neighborhood naming; the need to name a space, not only that, it's interesting to try and backtrack the history of neighborhood identity. Attaching a name to a space has all kinds of sociological, political, and economic meanings and implications. In the past the area was named for, among other things, the farmer that owned the land, then maybe the parish, then the cross streets, then maybe the gang territory, then maybe to sell houses, then maybe to organize a community, then maybe to give context to a crime on the evening news. As my church moves deeper west of Humboldt Park, the actual park, will the area around the church, which just bears the names of the cross streets, or unofficial names such as Grand City or Cameron City, the names given to the area by the gang bangers that inhabit the space; will the area be defined anew by us? And what sociological, political, economic, and moral implications will our definition of the space leave on the area we are being called to serve?

A Different World

It's warm out. Everyone is out along Chicago Avenue and it's side streets. I went into the meeting feeling I was a resident of the neighborhood, where my church will be moving. I left feeling like I was in a different world, just one mile south of where I use to live. I think what overwhelms me about the boundary of Chicago to Grand, Kedzie to Pulaski is the randomness of it all. There are so many people on the street, and so many random acts of movement and stimulation that it's hard to get an easy feeling. You don't know where to look, but everywhere. It's not fear, maybe confusion, then fear, of the unknown. You just don't know what is going on and why it's going on. My church will be moving shortly to the intersection of Grand and Division, the literal intersection intersection of "race and poverty", as my pastor puts it, between black and Latino. Straddling that line is going to be work for me, but it's where our church needs to engage and where I'm preparing to engage. We can't fall over too deep, one way or the other. Right now, I fall to the north of Grand. I much prefer the area north of Grand Avenue. At least it's randomness I can wrap my head around.