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One's Own Sort

Making race the basis of citizenship

Illinois Times

April 30, 1987

When a federal judge ruled that at-large voting under Springfield's commission government denied African Americans their voting rights, the question arose: How to fix it? Various proposals were offered; all required a switch to more localized system of representation, specifically wards whose boundaries roughly corresponded to the city's racial residential patterns.

 

The debate, such as it was, inspired this righteous rant. As I write, Springfield has had a ward-based government for more than 30 years, and the only problem it solved was how to comply with the terms of the federal suit that inspired it. City government is more representative in a narrow sense, but in most other ways worse than it was.

The original has been here lightly edited to indulge more recent sensibilities about sex and race and to clarify points left muddled in the rush to deadline.

See also Legislative Little Mes.

 

I haven’t followed the debate as carefully as perhaps I ought—I’ve been building birdhouses, which keeps me in the garage a lot—but I recall that one of the contended points between the plaintiffs, the city council, and Judge Baker’s court in the voting rights suit is whether a newly constituted city council should be made to contain ten aldermen or twenty.

 

Ten would do, I guess, but twenty would be more consistent with a developing trend which that suit will probably hasten in Springfield, a trend which will someday give the capital city a city council of 50,000 members or so. The exact number, of course, will be limited by how many free parking spaces can be found within a half-block of the municipal building or however many adults of voting age may still be living here.

 

The case for such a carnival-like expansion is implicit in the proposals for a new city government. Whatever its ultimate form, that new government will make race an explicit criterion for representation. The gerrymandering of ward boundaries under the various proposed plans are intended to concentrate the black vote in effective ward majorities to guarantee election of a black alderperson from at least one ward. (Gerrymandering maps? Race-based quotos? In the federal courts, two wrongs often make a right.)

 

The assumption which underlies such schemes—that a black person can only be represented by another black person—is pernicious on its face, if not actually racist. In any event it is richly contradicted by history. Black people on Chicago’s South Side have been represented at city hall by other black people for decades; that their interests were not materially advanced seems plain enough for even a political scientist to grasp.

 

Whatever disappointments may ensue in the new black wards, the official endorsement of race as a qualification for municipal office is an awkward precedent. M. A. Miller put the question nicely in an exasperated letter to the State Journal-Register several weeks ago. “Judge Harold Baker seems to say that the only way one can be represented is by one’s own sort,” she wrote. She proceeded, with more rigorous attention to cause-and-effect than did the judge, to insist on a tongue-in- cheek remedy: half of all elected city posts should be reserved for women.

 

Miller’s proposal is unlikely to sway the court; by the crude measures used in the local debate, African Americans have a superior claim to preferences under the law, since no black person has ever sat on the council, while at least one woman has. Miller did however, introduce some interesting questions about race, racism, and representativeness. Those questions have been largely absent from a public debate that is conducted in hopelessly—there is no other way to put it—black- and-white terms, but then a debate that relies on a lawyer, a politician, and a chain of newspaper editors could be expected to lack a certain nuance.

 

For example, the present city council was widely described as an unchanging, unchangeable bastion of the white establishment. That same council is historically unique for the appearance on it of ethnic minorities (Italian-Americans, foreign-born) and religious groups (Roman Catholics) who were themselves victims of political discrimination not many years past. Those hapless servants might even be offered as evidence of admittedly slow (it took exactly fifty years for the first Italian American to win a seat on the council) but steady opening of the local electoral process. That point is largely irrelevant in the face of the plaintiffs’ impatience.

 

A more troubling error was the assertion that the present city council, being white, is inherently more attentive to the interests of other white people than to those of people of color because of their whiteness. The last time I heard this argument made in my hearing it came from a third-grader, who was quickly corrected by her teacher who later wondered out loud where kids pick up such dumb ideas.

 

These particular white men share my gender and my skin color, but they differ from me in every other crucial respect, from religion and neighborhood to school background and political preoccupations. True, the council in recent years (acting principally through the mayor’s office) has built new streets and sidewalks in my neighborhood, also installing new streetlights, parks, and tennis courts, but then I live in Pioneer Park where most of my neighbors are black, so I can hardly explain their generosity in terms of white solidarity.

 

On issues of relevance beyond my block, furthermore, I am unlikely to find a sympathetic ear at city hall, no matter what color that ear might be. I am an environmentalist the way some people are black. The council’s repeated failures over the years to deal constructively with such issues as recycling, energy efficiency, land use, municipal forestry, burning bans, and the like has left me despairing. Springfield city councils in general represent no one especially well except perhaps the business community. Of course they do not represent the interests of poor blacks. They don’t represent poor whites either. Or feminists. Or environmentalists. To the extent that holders of such minority views are submerged by the present at-large system of voting, they all may be said to be disenfranchised.

 

The objection will be made, and properly, that when environmentalists suffer the bigotry endured by black people they too will merit special consideration. My point is not that black grievances aren’t valid—although I do think them largely misplaced—but that the structural remedies proposed to ease them are flawed. I believe for example that an expanded city council, feared in some quarters as anarchistic, is in fact anachronistic, as I will try to explain.

 

The council’s failures to tend to my interests in terms I acknowledge as appropriate have little to do with conventional politics. (That’s part of the problem; conventional politics in Springfield is a matter of who gets what, not who does what.) Our disagreements derive from conflicts of broader values. Me and the city council, everybody else and Congress—the trend is evident everywhere. People are no longer voting party or even pocketbook. Instead they are using the vote to make what amounts to cultural assertions—the Right about religion and family, feminists about equal pay, the Left about defense, and so on. The result has been to realign politics along class lines. (To some extent this has always been true; the reform movement which led to the adoption of the commission government in Springfield in 1911 was essentially an expression of class values on the problem of government structure.)

 

Geography offers no trustworthy maps to these new realms. This is true even in the cozy confines of Springfield. Yes, class and income are related, as are income and place of residence, but the connections are not reliable. I can tell you with some assurance that any given house in Westchester contains a well-off family. I cannot tell you what kind of well-off family lives there. If that family is black, I probably have more in common with them than I do with the poor whites who live up my own street. The constituency to which I belong—literate, assertive of certain communal values over private ones, of modest income—is scattered all over town. There will never be a symphony ward or a mandatory recycling ward in Springfield the way there will be a rich ward or a black ward.

Of course, nearly everyone is a member of some disenfranchised minority or another. At what point, and on what evidence, are they entitled to structural redress? There is a priority of claim, here, obviously, but considered in the abstract—which is how judges and political scientists prefer to consider things—are we not compelled to honor Ms. Miller’s logic and someday install income, marital status, or religion as valid criteria for representation?

 

A ward system which has race as its implicit criterion is a lowest-level-of-analysis political system whose installation leaves the city ill-prepared to accommodate the new complexities of class politics. Further reforms seem inevitable. I see the new council augmented in time by at-large representatives of specific, sanctioned constituencies defined by issues or demographics—a feminist delegate to the council, in effect, joined in time by a divorced person’s delegate, an anti-vivisectionist, and so on. The flaw in the plan is obvious: people with wide-ranging or confused views would hear them echoed by perhaps dozens of council members, while the indifferent or the stupid might have only one or two allies there. The result would be a failure of representation in a new form.

 

Perfectly refined, a city government would represent each citizen with an alderman who perfectly matched that citizen’s ethnic, religious, social, economic, and political predilections. Each person would have to be his own alderman, in short, because nobody else would have the qualifications. ●

SITES

OF

INTEREST

John Hallwas

Essential for anyone interested in Illinois history and literature. Hallwas deservedly won the 2018 Lifetime Achievement Award from the Illinois State Historical Society.

Lee Sandlin Author

One of Illinois’s best, and least-known, writers of his generation. Take note in particular of The Distancers and Road to Nowhere.

Chicago Architecture Center

See Home Page/Learn/

Resources for a marvelous building database, architecture dictionary, even a city planning graphic novel. Handsome, useful—every Illinois culture website should be so good.

The Encyclopedia of Chicago

 

The online version of The Encyclopedia of Chicago. Crammed with thousands of topic entries, biographical sketches, maps and images, it is a reference work unmatched in Illinois.

Illinois Great Places

The Illinois chapter of the American Institute of Architects in 2018 selected 200 Great Places in Illinois that illustrate our  shared architectural culture across the entire period of human settlement in Illinois.

McLean County Museum

of History

A nationally accredited, award-winning project of the McLean County Historical Society whose holdings include more than 20,000 objects, more than 15,000 books on local history and genealogy, and boxes and boxes of historical papers and images.

Mr. Lincoln, Route 66, and Other Highlights of Lincoln, Illinois

 

Every Illinois town ought to have a chronicler like D. Leigh Henson, Ph.D. Not only Lincoln and the Mother road—the author’s curiosity ranges from cattle baron John Dean Gillett to novelist William Maxwell. An Illinois State Historical Society "Best Web Site of the Year."

Illinois Digital Archives

 

Created in 2000, the IDA is a repository for the digital collections of the Illinois State Library and other Illinois libraries and cultural institutions. The holdings include photographs, slides, and glass negatives, oral histories, newspapers, maps, and documents from manuscripts and letters to postcards,  posters, and videos.

The Illinois State Museum

 

The people's museum is a treasure house of science and the arts. A research institution of national reputation, the museum maintains four facilities across the state. Their collections in anthropology, fine and decorative arts, botany, zoology, geology, and  history are described here. A few museum publications can be obtained here.

Chronicling Illinois

“Chronicling Illinois” showcases some of the collections—mostly some 6,000 photographs—from the Illinois history holdings of the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library.

Chicagology

I will leave it to the authors of this interesting site to describe it. "Chicagology is a study of Chicago history with a focus on the period prior to the Second World War. The purpose of the site is to document common and not so common stories about the City of Chicago as they are discovered." 

Illinois Labor History Society

The Illinois Labor History Society seeks to encourage the preservation and study of labor history materials of the Illinois region, and to arouse public interest in the profound significance of the past to the present. Offers books reviews, podcasts, research guides, and the like. 

Illinois Migration History 1850-2017

The University of Washington’s America’s Great Migrations Project has compiled migration histories  (mostly from the published and unpublished work by UW Professor of History James Gregory) for several states, including Illinois. The site also includes maps and charts and essays about the Great Migration of African Americans to the north, in which Illinois figured importantly. 

History on the Fox

An interesting resource about the history of one of Illinois’s more interesting places, the Fox Valley of Kendall County. History on the Fox is the work of Roger Matile, an amateur historian of the best sort. Matile’s site is a couple of cuts above the typical buff’s blog. (An entry on the French attempt to cash in on the trade in bison pelts runs more than

2,000 words.)

BOOKS

 OF INTEREST

SIUPromoCoverPic.jpg

Southern Illinois University Press 2017

A work of solid history, entertainingly told.

Michael Burlingame,

author of Abraham 

Lincoln: A Life 

One of the ten best books on Illinois history I have read in a decade.

Superior Achievement Award citation, ISHS Awards, 2018

A lively and engaging study . . .  an enthralling narrative.

James Edstrom

The Annals of Iowa

A book that merits the attention of all Illinois historians

as well as local historians generally.

John Hoffman

Journal of Illinois HIstory

A model for the kind of detailed and honest history other states and regions could use.

Harold Henderson 

Midwestern Microhistory

A fine example of a resurgence of Midwest historical scholarship.

Greg Hall

Journal of the Illinois

State Historical Society

Click  here 

to read about

the book 

Click  here 

to buy the book 

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Southern Illinois University Press

SIU Press is one of the four major university publishing houses in Illinois. Its catalog offers much of local interest, including biographies of Illinois political figures, the history (human and natural) and folklore of southern Illinois, the Civil War and Lincoln, and quality reprints in the Shawnee Classics series.

University of

Illinois Press

The U of I Press was founded in 1918. A search of the online catalog  (Books/Browse by subject/Illinois) will reveal more than 150 Illinois titles, books on history mostly but also butteflies, nature , painting, poetry and fiction, and more.  Of particular note are its Prairie State Books,  quality new paperback editions of worthy titles about all parts of Illinois, augmented with scholarly introductions.

University of

Chicago Press

The U of C publishing operation is the oldest (1891) and largest university press in Illinois. Its reach is international, but it has not neglected its own neighborhood. Any good Illinois library will include dozens of titles about Chicago and Illinois from Fort Dearborn to

Vivian Maier.

Northern Illinois University Press

The newest (1965) and the smallest of the university presses with an interest in Illinois, Northern Illinois University Press gave us important titles such as the standard one-volume history of the state (Biles' Illinois:
A History of the Land and Its People) and contributions to the history of Chicago, Illinois transportation, and the Civil War. Now an imprint of Cornell University Press.

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Reviews and significant mentions by James Krohe Jr. of more than 50 Illinois books, arranged in alphabetical order

by book title. 

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Illinois Center for the Book

Run by the Illinois State Library, The Center promotes reading, writing and author programs meant to honor the state's rich literary heritage. An affiliate of the Library of Congress’s Center for the Book, the site offers award competitions, a directory of Illinois authors, literary landmarks, and reading programs.

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