On Sunday afternoon a group, of say, 50 people gathered at the main library to talk about race in Oak Park. Doesn’t happen much. Rarely happens honestly. And very seldom does it happen that there are black people and white people in the same room when the conversation takes place.
We’ve never been good talking about race in Oak Park, in America. This winter we are all agog over having a black man running competitively for president. The back-patting is starting to wear thin and the temptation to convince ourselves we have made some magical “post-racial” leap is nonsensical. Progress aplenty, but we are still a nation and village trying with varying degrees of success to come to terms with our prejudices.
This spring, Oak Park will mark 40 years since its first decisive step toward fair housing. That’s four decades of a stated goal that it is better that whites and blacks live side-by-side. And that would give us some bragging rights except that it is also 40 years in which we haven’t really figured out how to talk to each other, how to parent each other’s kids, to figure out what’s “cultural,” what’s just unacceptable, and how we connect the two.
To me one of the beauties of Sunday afternoon was its black-and-white simplicity. About 15 years into Oak Park’s adventure in race, about 1985, it was no longer in vogue to talk about racial integration. Instead we celebrated our diversity. We had gays aplenty and biracial families, and even, in recent years, a small Hispanic and Indian population. Truth is that diversity-talking of diversity-was just more palatable. It papered over that we still had lots to learn about being black and white in Oak Park. We still had distinct problems to solve related specifically to race in Oak Park.
We don’t have a gay achievement gap at Oak Park and River Forest High School. There is not a radically disproportionate number of Indians in the behavior disordered classes in the grade schools. Whites don’t worry over class issues regarding Hispanics in Oak Park, though there may be some.
Ralph Lee, a board member at District 200, an African-American, a retired OPRF teacher, said on Sunday, “At Dist. 200, we want to talk about the [achievement] gap without talking about race even though we love to talk about our diversity.”
He’s right. That’s not going to get us there. And we owe it to ourselves to get there.
Several speakers Sunday-Carl Spight, the high school’s thorn-producing statistician; George Bailey, a Columbia College professor; John Williams, the township’s youth services director-made the point that talking about race in Oak Park creates discomfort. “People need to deal with their discomfort. Get over it. It is OK to be uncomfortable. We need to get a lot more uncomfortable,” said Bailey.
Williams, who does God’s work with our children and our families, was passionate Sunday about the current condition. Noting that he has worked in Oak Park since 1989, Williams said Oak Park children are being “abandoned” in greater numbers in all areas. Parents, schools and the wider community are all failing kids, he said. “Things are falling apart. … There are bleeding wounds in this community. We need to be much more fired up about this. Be pissed off if it helps you. … The background music in this community on race makes young people bleed. Especially young people of color. We need to get more uncomfortable. We need to stay vigilant. These are all our kids or they are nobody’s kids,” said Williams.
I hope, as this column wraps up, that you are uncomfortable. I believe, whether you are white or black, something in this column got your back up, your defenses up. It’s natural. Unhealthy but natural. You can turn the page-or you can turn a page and think anew.
