An antidote to hopelessness

A review of 'Don't Go: Stories of Segregation and How to Disrupt it'

It’s been hard to pay attention to the national news lately. When I do, I am tempted to feel powerless and hopeless about the divisiveness and animosity that seems to be consuming our country.

But I don’t want to respond by burying my head in the sand. I want to find and take in content that helps me feel hopeful about the future and generous toward others. So, as I have done since beginning to work on Just Action, I’ve been seeking out examples of local actions that advance efforts to redress segregation, expand housing opportunity, and reduce racial disparities. Even as the presidential election and national politics have dominated the news, local efforts to advance these goals have continued and some are achieving real successes. For example, since the election, New York City passed its most ambitious zoning code update in decades, increasing density across the city to permit building “a little more housing in every neighborhood.” And Philadelphia’s Residential Property Assessment Task Force began to meet to study property tax disparities and make recommendations for bringing more equity and fairness to the assessment process. These are just two recent examples that can remind us that not only is there nothing in national political events that prevent these efforts from advancing, but that we also shouldn’t use the election results as an excuse to stop pushing for them.

It keeps me hopeful to learn about efforts like these. I thought paying attention to these types of initiatives would be what I needed to get through the next four years. But then I got my hands on a book that reminded me that focusing on positive policy change isn’t enough, I also want to hear about stories of positive personal change. Just like redressing segregation requires both reforming systems and shifting interpersonal dynamics and internal beliefs, staying hopeful about the future of our country, for me, requires seeking out stories of positive change on the policy and individual levels.

The book is Tonika Lewis Johnson’s and Maria Krysan’s Don’t Go: Stories of Segregation and How to Disrupt It (2024). Readers of Just Action might remember Tonika Johnson, a social justice artist who uses her art to highlight and challenge segregation in Chicago. She created the Folded Map Project and photographed “map twin” homes, those with the same numbers on the north and south ends of the same street, one in the predominantly white, North Side neighborhood of Edgewater and one in the predominantly black, South Side neighborhood of Englewood. She introduced the residents of the map twin homes to each other and invited them to get to know each other and their respective neighborhoods. Through these interactions, they learned about their city’s segregation and its impact on each others’ lives. Many of the map twins had never been to the other side of town, let alone had a personal relationship with someone who lives there.

In 2019, Johnson presented to incoming Northwestern University students about the Folded Map Project. She asked the attendees to raise their hands if they were new to Chicago. Most did. She then asked if they had been told not go to the city’s South Side. Again, most hands went up. This is one way segregation is perpetrated, she told them.

A social media post about this presentation got the attention of a Chicago Tribune contributor who then wrote about it in a column that went viral. Readers responded to the article with their own stories of being told “don’t go.” Johnson set up an email account to receive the stories and over 70 poured in over the first few days. She teamed up with Maria Krysan, a sociology professor at the University of Illinois Chicago, and they started to interview the respondents.

The bulk of Don’t Go is the personal stories of 24 people Johnson and Krysan interviewed together. They tell the story of how Chicago’s segregation is maintained through implicit and explicit messages that the city’s majority-black South Side and West Side neighborhoods are dangerous, unsafe, and places non-black residents should stay away from at all costs. They explain, “’Don’t Go’ is a generational problem—often people say ‘Don’t Go’ because their parents or grandparents said it to them. And so often, those parents and grandparents said ‘Don’t Go’ because someone told them the same. In short, lots of people say ‘Don’t Go’ because someone else said ‘Don’t Go.’ Fun Fact: Most people who say Don’t Go have never gone.”

The stories weren’t only from people who were warned away from visiting those neighborhoods. Several of the interviewees grew up in the South or West Sides. Their stories show the impacts these messages have on those who live in the “Don’t Go” areas, who are told by teachers, classmates, and co-workers that nothing good comes out of their neighborhoods.

Zachary (the authors refer to interviewees by first names only), who grew up in Morgan Park, on the South Side, explains:

“…calling places trash, and all of the other warnings people toss out about places like where I grew up, hurts the places because it deters other people from going there, and from spending their money there. And hurts the people who live there who are dehumanized because these warnings and stuff deter us from seeing that real people actually live in these communities.

That might be the most important part. When you forget that people – real people – live in these places. And that they do the same thing that everyone else does – which is, you know, eat, sleep, go to work, whatever. People have a hard time humanizing the South Side.”

The “Don’t Go” messages the interviewees heard aren’t unique to Chicago. Readers from any urban area likely have heard similar messages about segregated parts of their cities. What’s unique about the stories in Don’t Go is that the storytellers defied these messages and went anyway.

When Soren, a white student raised in a Detroit suburb, was a freshman at the Illinois Institute of Technology on Chicago’s South Side, he was told by school security and others not to leave campus to venture into the neighborhoods surrounding it. He didn’t listen and went exploring anyway.

“I was basically on a quest to explore “don’t go” zones, which included where I went for my daily coffee ritual….

I told myself, ‘With this short distance, even if those warnings are true, probably nothing’s going to happen.’

But I was afraid….

Over time, following trip after trip where nothing bad happened, my perspective started to change. I would be working on my homework or ordering a drink and I would overhear people talking about a garden they were working on or getting their kid into a good school. I remember thinking,

‘Oh, they’re just regular people. This is just a neighborhood.’”

Story after story tells a similar narrative of people who went against what they had been told, taught, or absorbed. Some did so initially because they wanted to find out for themselves if the messages were true, some got lost on the “bad” side of town and were surprised to find that nothing bad happened, some ended up in “Don’t Go” neighborhoods for work or school and realized the areas weren’t at all what they were told to expect from those “Don’t Go” messages.

The people sharing their stories in this book are not activists, they didn’t defy the “Don’t Go” messages to make a political point. Most did it to expand their own and others’ understanding of their city. They were or became social workers, small business owners, engineers, educators, artists, piano repairmen, and others. They went where they were warned not to, or lived in those areas and challenged the messages they heard about their neighborhoods, and then became messengers among their families and social circles about why “Don’t Go” messages should be questioned. They share about their favorite cafes, restaurants, and stores in South and West Side neighborhoods. And in doing so, they become disrupters of segregation and, the authors note, “agents of positive change.”

Don’t Go reminds us of what we miss out on if we listen to a narrative that tells us who should feel comfortable in certain neighborhoods and what there is to gain from finding out for ourselves. It reminds us that there are disrupters out there, going about their lives, defying these narratives and in so doing, creating new stories that challenge rather than reinforce divisions. Those individual actions matter, the authors argue. “Big systemic issues – and segregation is one of them – can feel overwhelming for individuals to tackle. And they are. But this doesn’t mean that individuals don’t matter. In fact, individual actions and personal relationships plant the seeds for the big solutions: collective action, policies, laws, and structural change.”

Johnson writes, in describing her motivation for the Folded Map Project (and which also applies to Don’t Go), “Laws and policies are important, but if we really want to disrupt segregation, we have to get to know each other. I wanted all of us to realize what we have in common and become curious about our differences – I want us to care about each other.”

Amongst all of the messages we all hear these days telling us that we are a hopelessly divided country where everyone only cares about their own, it’s more important than ever to collect stories that challenge that narrative, to hear about people, actions, and policies that seek to connect rather than divide, and to remind ourselves that the dominant narrative doesn’t have to be the only one. Don’t Go is a great place to start.