Odds and ends with some a bit odder than others:
Crossing Austin: Two weeks back, a group of students at OPRF mounted an original production they had created and then performed over three days. I saw the last performance before a packed house in the Little Theatre.
This was eye-opening and inspiring. The take of students on race and institutional racism in their school, their classrooms, their lunchroom. The effort by those students to sort out Oak Park’s imperfect but ballsy history in trying to create integration of races melded with white self-preservation and a white-defined determination of what the terms of that integration would be. The recognition by these writers and actors that Austin Boulevard is both a hard border and an enduring metaphor for our fears and our still-profound divisions. The appreciation that other borders are also real and immediate as, for instance, OPRF deals with Latino students crossing over from either Cicero or Mexico.
While some of the history was inevitably thin, it was a relief to me to see young Oak Parkers grapple with the truth that Oak Park is not accidental. The accomplishments of that moment in the late 1960s and into the 1970s — Fair Housing, the Housing Center, the buy-in of Realtors, the activism of middle-class whites, the reorganization of the schools — were monumental, invented on the run, generous and self-serving, crafted entirely by white people.
Also not accidental was the choice to build a physical and more-or-less impermeable wall between Oak Park and Austin, two communities, which, until that very moment, had a deep and loving bond. Cul-de-sacs at every non-commercial entry point along Austin from North Avenue to Roosevelt, and soon extended along Washington Boulevard and Chicago Avenue, too.
The program for the play had short biographical essays by each performer and writer in the play. These were, in ways, more revealing than the play itself.
“I have not crossed many borders in my life,” wrote a student. “I am white and I rarely cross racial borders. … Despite having lived less than two blocks from Austin for the majority of my life, I have never set foot in the West Side of Chicago, and until recently, I didn’t know anybody else who had either.”
This is the common experience. And in a challenging post-performance discussion led by OPRF teacher and activist Anthony Clark, both students and adults laid out the many ways that racism manifests itself every day at our high school, how perceptions and misperceptions foster ignorance and division.
That made this play especially brave and necessary.
Its creators understand that their work is not done, that the surface has been scratched.
One especially intriguing idea is to pursue this story from the other side of the boulevard. How do black teens who have grown up in Austin perceive and live with the border wall? How do they see Oak Park? We know well an after-school theater project in Austin. Putting these two groups together to talk, possibly to collaborate, would extend this story, deepen the understanding of the reality and the nonsense of this divide.
Lawn signs: In the next-to-final weekend of this well-contested election season in Oak Park and River Forest, came the reports of lawn sign thefts and destruction. Patty Henek, a trustee candidate in River Forest, is seeing her signs being mutilated for a second consecutive election cycle. In Oak Park, we’ve heard from partisans who have seen signs stolen from their lawns in the night.
You can write this off to hooliganism if you want. I think it is something more telling about the souring state of our civic dialogue.
