Don't Go
Stories of Segregation and How to Disrupt It
-
-
5.0 • 1 Rating
-
-
- $20.99
-
- $20.99
Publisher Description
Multiple times a day, in cities across the US and beyond, a simple yet powerful message is repeated by the well-meaning, the ill-informed, and the bigoted: “don’t go” – avoid at all costs those Black and Brown disinvested neighborhoods that have become bywords for social disorder and urban decay.
This book is a collection of intimate stories and evocative photos that uncover the hidden influence of both subtle and overt “don’t go” messages and the segregation they perpetuate in Chicago. Told by everyday people to Tonika Lewis Johnson and Maria Krysan – a Black artist and a White academic who met through their shared passion for anti-segregation work – the stories paint a rich picture of life in a segregated city.
One by one, the storytellers upend pessimism with candid, deeply personal, humorous, and heartbreaking tales, and with novel ideas for simple actions that can serve as antidotes to both racism and “place-ism.”
By inviting readers into the lives of regular people who have ignored the warning to stay away from “don’t go” neighborhoods or who live in those very same neighborhoods, the stories in Don’t Go illuminate the devastating consequences of racial segregation and disinvestment as well as the inevitable rewards of coming together.
Also available as an audiobook.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Visual artist Johnson and sociologist Krysan (Cycle of Segregation) deliver an eye-opening compilation of interviews they conducted with Chicago residents who disregarded frequently heard advice to avoid the city's predominantly Black and Hispanic neighborhoods on the South and West sides. Many interviewees are white residents of the North Side and near suburbs who describe coming to the painful realization that the concern for "safety" that had imbued such advice, which usually came from relatives and friends, was motivated by racism; others are transplants to the city, who were similarly advised not to stray into supposedly "violent" neighborhoods and were then bemused to discover them to be perfectly pleasant. These firsthand accounts provide a fascinating window into the bizarre emotionality of racism: one white interviewee reports her relatives going into near-apoplectic fits of hysteria when they found out she had gotten off the highway one stop too early on her way to Beverly, an all-white South Side enclave; another white respondent describes her queasy apprehension as she forced herself out of her comfort zone, inculcated by racist parents, and took her kids to an outdoor play date on the South Side. Elsewhere, a Black interviewee recollects how a "heat map" of gun violence was used by a potential white roommate as an almost talismanic tool for derailing any conversation about renting an apartment on the South Side. It's a deeply revealing examination of the psyche of a city.
