Moore called herself a "would-be gentrifier" when she returned to Chicago as a condo buyer in the historic Chicago Black Belt. The two strikes against her were buying at the height of a real estate bubble and on the South Side, where the dearth of capital confounded me on the urbanism beat a decade earlier. As a native Moore knows that the South Side never really gentrifies. There's a lot of history to that, which the reporter views from the perspective of her own middle-class upbringing in the Chatham neighborhood. Chicago's power structure has never really come to grips with systemic barriers, nor the Black community with its power to challenge them.

review here ( )

A terrific examination of the South Side of Chicago through intersections of class, education, politics, and geography magnified through the lens of race. Chapter 6, "Kale is the new Collard," is particularly adept at examining so-called food deserts and helping us understand the importance of local economy in areas that have yet to thrive. ( )

I appreciate the argument that maybe desegregation is not the Holy Grail of curing social ills. Maybe it's more practical to focus on distributing equitable resources fairly to ALL neighborhoods and to allow people to sort themselves out. I'm glad I read this book, but I did sometimes get my whiteness tromped on...So I need to point out that the author sometimes uses succinct but inaccurate shorthand, like using "whites" as a stand in for citizens-who-fought-Harold-Washington. (Yes they were all white; but not all white people fought him. Young white people were very energized by Harold: I was one of them!) Moore does very well in describing the greater trends at play, especially the politics that prevented Chicago from going ballistic over school bussing: the Machine just made sure there was no bussing. And she outlines the Council Wars well, so that I can process that messy period in a clearer way. We're still living with the fallout of such history: I'm glad Moore puts a spotlight on it. ( )

In The South Side, local resident Natalie Moore weaves three themes into a long taut braid. There are her memoirs of growing up in south side Chicago, garlanded by its history and characters. There is the socioeconomic backdrop which altered that history and twisted it into less than it could have been and still could be. And there is the racism, overt, underlying and institutional that tortures countless lives. This is a worldwide phenomenon of course, but it is worthwhile to examine it in real terms in America’s Second City, which is mired in it, mostly thanks to machine local government.

Moore devotes chapters to housing, schools and food, pointing out the overt, the underlying and the institutional racism they incorporate. Her own experience is straight middle class, largely free of racist incidents and overt prejudice. Nonetheless, she has developed into a thoughtful, perceptive and in her words “uppity negress,” which is really fundamental to telling this story properly. The book is not scientific, prescriptive or complete; it is personal and selective.

The South Side ends on several positive notes, as barriers appear to be falling. Blacks and whites are mixing, housing is opening up some, and attitudes are slowly changing as integration and multiculturalism become assets rather than taboos. As one interviewee put it – segregation isn’t the problem; the diversion of resources is the problem. Blacks need not be desegregated to thrive; they need to stand up to whites to get access to the resources they have an equal say in and right to.

David Wineberg ( )