Happy Father’s Day!
As a fan and creator of hip hop, I enjoy a good Easter egg. Every time I encounter a good one, it brings a smile to my face. Not the literal ones, obviously, rather the secondary or tertiary meaning behind a line, the strange connection to something unrelated, or a bit of info that leads to an entirely different journey. I think it’s a sign of hip hop done well personally, but that’s just me. In a weird sort of way, I have been uncovering real world Easter eggs recently, not always ones that bring a smile though. The most recent one was bittersweet, but far more bitter than sweet.
I currently live in the suburbs. As a city kid, I always thought I would prefer the burbs over city life due to the perceived safety, the quiet, and ample parking. I never thought the people were better people or anything like that, I just know with a change in socio-economic norms comes a change in the bullshit people do. In reality, moving to the burbs exposed the hidden and overt racism that’s in many of them. Overt racism is whatever at this point, we’re living through Trump 2.0 so overt racism is expected now. The revelation I had recently occurred while I was sitting in traffic trying to get to the city.
I had this thought that it sucks that there’s only one way into the city or around the area even as population increases. Meanwhile, in the city, businesses owners are being forced out, their property encroached on, and then prices jacked up to gentrify the rest. This playbook has been in place for a long time, but it just dawned on me why this is so fucked up. In the neighborhood I grew up in, there’s an expressway a few blocks away, an elevated train line a few blocks in the other direction, commuter and freight train lines and other public service depots nearby. In the various suburban settings I’ve lived, there is an expressway nearby because I chose that area, but nothing else. Sounds like a win for the city, but then I thought about when and why those locations were chosen in the city.
When former President Eisenhower pushed for the interstate system, they intentionally made it go through minority communities, as to not disturb the land owned by European Americans if possible. It was nothing to displace Black or Hispanic people though. That said, they ran these things through business districts and residential areas and gave nothing in the form of compensation to these communities. I don’t have the actual figures, but I would venture to say the interstate system did more to ruin these neighborhoods then than the police do now. Economic and social stability was taken from Black people to ensure European Americans specifically were able to drive across the country with their homes and businesses intact.
Growing up I thought it was more convenient to have access to everything like that, not knowing there was already access to everything in my neighborhood before it was taken and replaced with a lack of resources. That lack of resources is what made generational poverty a thing. Generational poverty is what led to mass incarceration by way of drug distribution and drug addiction, which led to many kids, me included, growing up in psychologically tough environments. So, when I dreamt of “making it out” as a kid, I had no idea my means of getting around was one of the many branches on this evergreen tree of racism.
“Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced”
James Baldwin
Now, as I drive to the city from my “affluent” suburb, inconvenienced by this single pathway to reach it with little to nothing of interest on the way, I’m reminded that this inconvenience was the best way possible not to disturb the wealthy landowners of yesteryear. I also see it on my Nextdoor app now as well. The objections of the local folks to any and everything that would actually advance the area being heeded by the government. Meanwhile, in the city, people are still talking about the ill effects of imminent domain to make space for on-ramps and off-ramps for the highway expansion. The bottleneck of traffic near me is crazy, but it opens up just fine when you get to the Brown communities.
I don’t think it’s truly possible for any European American to fully grasp how deep systemic racism truly goes. I used an evergreen tree as an example earlier, but it’s more like the Pando clone at Fishlake National Forest. The similarity is that on the surface, it looks like 10’s of thousands of individual trees, in reality though, they’re all tied together at the root. The root in America is racism and there are thousands of occurrences and examples of it playing out daily in ways that we don’t always acknowledge. On one hand it’s probably best to ignore some of it, but on the other if you don’t know the cause, you’ll never know the remedy. Which is exactly why our educational system ignores any source information as it pertains to current inequality, in favor of pointing at the result of it.
All that being said, next time you’re driving through a city, and you pass through an economically depressed area, just know there’s a good chance that it was thriving before that road was put there. The people that were there when it was thriving were 8 times out of 10 Black, and the current inhabitants who probably are as well are demonized because of the opportunities and generational wealth taken from their forebears. America will never repay its debt to Black people, it’s too easy to keep us as the scapegoat for everything wrong with our society…while simultaneously using our culture, without attribution, to highlight everything that’s right. As they say, it is what it is, but more specifically “IT” is racism working as designed.