What It Looked Like to Police Ourselves This Summer: An Ode to De-Escalation on My Chicago Block
This summer, my neighbors didn’t call the cops — they looked after one another
I live right on the border of Chicago’s Uptown and Edgewater neighborhoods. Uptown is a rare spot of relative racial diversity in Chicago’s otherwise hyper-segregated map; from the ’50s to the early ’80s, it was a Southern migration hub, a place where Black, hillbilly, Latinx, and Native people rubbed elbows with one another.
As the descendant of white northern Appalachians, and Tennessean melungeons, I appreciated inhabiting a neighborhood where people who shared all my lines of ancestry had converged. I’m a transplant from suburban Ohio, and am undeniably part of the city’s gentrification; still, it felt like some part of me had unwittingly wound up where I was meant to be.
Edgewater is the neighborhood immediately to the north of Uptown. It was once a part of Uptown, but split off from it officially in 1980; it is Chicago’s “youngest”…
