Articles that made me sad

For the past few days my son and I have been without my wife Caro, as she is working in a remote part of rural Colombia evaluating an alternative development project. This is probably the main reason I've been dragging a bit lately on the emotional front. I'll write more about this stint without my wife in another post.

Anyway, aside from feeling lonely, there are a few things I've read lately that made me sad.

The first article touches on a subject I've discussed before: the flight of blacks from Chicago proper to the southern states. This latest article focuses on individual stories of older people who came north decades ago, and their thinking in terms of returning or not to the South. It really puts a human face on the census trend of blacks moving back South. Again, it makes me sad that my city is losing population (almost all of Chicago's population decline in the past decade was accounted for by blacks leaving the city), and especially that it's losing people pertaining to the very culture that in my eyes is the city's most important. Despite Chicago's rich, amazing melting pot of cultures, at least in my lifetime blacks have really been the defining cultural matrix that defines the city's character as a whole. To me, whatever the color of your skin, if you're Chicagoan you're at least a little black.

It's odd that I should feel so sad about the black return to the South, because in many ways it is in line with many other values I hold. I believe in the value of roots, of place, of maintaining an authentic local culture, and for most blacks in the US, the best place to do this is probably in the South. Granted, many new black emigrees (or returnees) will be returning to cities and suburbs like Atlanta and Memphis, as opposed to returning to rural homesteads (though the article discusses that too). But perhaps the US black culture will to some extent return to the rural and small-town roots that have defined the populace for most of their time in the New World. I lament when people migrate from rural areas to urban ones, thus weakening the rich tapestry of local rural cultures that have traditionally existed in any country. In Colombia I'm a big advocate of people's returning to smaller cities and rural areas to make a simpler, more dignified living, as many people we know are indeed doing, sick as they are of Bogota's inhumanity and hassle. So in most respects I should objectively applaud the black exodus to the South.

The problem is that I'm from Chicago, and I can't be totally objective about its disintegration. I happen to have been born well after the Great Migration, so for me the normal or desireable state of things is how my city was after the influx of millions of black folk. As I've said before, I can't blame people for choosing a warmer climate and a sense of family history over the neglected, shitty urban landscape that many of Chicago's black neighborhoods have become. This is especially the case when Chicago no longer seems like a better choice in terms of racism, risk of murder, or job opportunities, as was the situation during the Great Migration. I do wonder what will happen when fossil fuel scarcity makes motor transport and air-conditioning less viable lifestyle options. I'll bet quite a few people will lament having left behind well-planned, walkable cities in the milder Northern climates. But as I've discussed in a past post, that is a colorblind issue that applies to anyone who would move to slapdab, shittily-planned and -built Sun Belt subdivisions, not just to blacks heading south.

My concerns about this article coincide with my reading of Malcolm X's autobiography to my son Sam (as well as Black history month). Rereading this classic has somewhat lifted my spirits in the past few days. It is interesting to read about Malcolm's rural upbringing, which was in the North but nevertheless filled with hatred, persecution, and murder from local white folk. In many ways Malcolm X is the archetypical American (though of course he'd probably hate my identifying him with the US as opposed to Africa). His father was an emigree from the rural South to the rural North, and then Malcolm went from the rural Midwest to the urban East Coast. His life story mimics our path as a nation over that period, and especially our black brothers' trajectory as a people, not just from South to North, but from cringing serfs to proud, modern men and women. I wonder what he'd think of our country and our black culture today, in the post-modern era.

Aside from the representativeness of his migration trajectory, Malcolm X is for me an ideal American because of his moral rectitude. He never backed down or compromised his values, yet at the same time he is one of our only public figures that drastically changed and evolved his viewpoints and his positions on things. Most politicians and leaders are one-trick ponies. They settle on a trope and stick with it the rest of their lives. But when it was necessary to totally reinvent himself in order to remain true to his beliefs, Malcolm did so. I can count at least three times: when he became a street hustler (which was a rational decision based on his belief that the world is not to be trusted), when he became a member of the Nation of Islam, and finally when he began to break away from the Nation and approach a more orthodox version of Islam. This last moral stand cost him his life.

Another news item that made me a bit sad recently was this bit marking the tipping point in China's transition from a rural to an urban society. That's right--according to China's official news service, just over 50% of the country's populace finds itself in cities today. I don't know what this means exactly--depending on the country, sometimes statisticians consider small cities like Urbana or even Dwight, Illinois as "urban", despite the fields that surround them and the traditional culture that permeate them. On the other hand, agrarian-style self-sufficiency and connection to the land can still be found in many big cities in the form of home gardens and backyard hunting and trapping. So this doesn't necessarily mean that agrarian culture is on the way out in China. Still, it saddens me some, because it marks the transition of perhaps our world's most enduring, diverse, and vibrant rural culture one step closer to the ugly, soulless consumerism that seems to be flourishing in China's cities.