My city has taught me how to hate
Istand here at the crossroads of love and hate for my city. I am enraged by the racism that still ebbs and flows and stings my eyes, like the riotous smoke of brick and mortar and the last fabric of hope set aflame.
And I am resigned at long last to accepting the idea that perhaps Carl Sandburg’s “City of Broad Shoulders” indeed has no shoulder upon which black folks can depend for that so-called “liberty and justice for all.” Almost completely convinced that in Chicago, in America, there is, for us, no equality and no justice — just us.
Amid the trial of Jason Van Dyke, the white Chicago police officer charged with firstdegree murder in the Oct. 20, 2014, shooting death of 17-year-old Laquan McDonald, who is black, I am torn between the Chicago I love and the Chicago I hate. Two worlds.
At age 7, I stood on Pulaski Road in April 1968 — the night after the West Side was set aflame upon news of Dr. King’s assassination. Today, at 57, I fear that news of a “not guilty” verdict could ignite new Chicago flames. That this could seal my hate for the city I have always loved, even when there were perhaps more reasons as a black man to hate.
And if, in the end, I choose hate, it is because my beloved city has taught me, like others before me, how to hate.
Dear Leanita McClain, my departed sister writer who also once loved then grew to hate Chicago, I finally know your agonizing pain. Two worlds. I too stand with one foot in each world.
One of them I knew growing up in the West Side’s K-Town. The other as a man whose education and career as a writer paved my extrication, though not without daily reminders of the skin I’m in, which is my inescapable truth — my scarlet letter.
Two worlds: one black, the other white. One where poverty flows violently and relentlessly. Where Law & Order are judge, jury and street executioner.
The other Chicago — much like America, bathed in the blood and cruel history of slavery, racial oppression and the prevailing stereotypes of black men — sees us as inconsequential, disposable inhabitants of the American landscape.
Two cities. One Chicago that hates me. That hated Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. before me. That hated Black Panthers Fred Hampton and Mark Clark. That hated Harold Washington. And before all of them — all of us — that hated Eugene Williams, who, like Laquan, was 17 when he was slain.
Williams and other black boys were swimming in Lake Michigan that July of 1919 when they crossed into the “white” side of the beach. A group of young white men began pelting them with rocks. Williams drowned, igniting the Chicago Race Riot of 1919.
Almost 100 years later, black men and boys are still Chicago’s ban — legally extinguishable for the crime of walking, swimming, living or breathing while black. And by our deaths, our yearning for justice finally is extinguished, like dreams too long deferred.
I am a native son born in Bigger Thomas’ town on the winds of the lynching of Emmett Till. And I was a middle-aged man when by Van Dyke’s 16 shots Laquan’s breath and dreams were stilled.
Sixteen shots against a black boy with a 3-inch pocketknife.
It has caused every repressed memory of Chicago’s hate ever inflicted upon the black body — and soul — to come rushing back to my consciousness like a flood.
The case, for me, represents a fight for the city’s soul.
I hate. And yet I love. I stand here at a crossroads.