The Gradual and Immediate Violence of an Engineered Conflict: School Closings,Public Housing,Law Enforcement,and the Future of Black Life in Chicago

Critical Race Spatial Analysis and Policy Formation

This document expands a conversation offered by Charles Mills (1997) and Stephen Haymes (1995) on racism/white supremacy. Where white supremacy is often discussed in relationship to its individual and collective affects, scholars in critical spatial analysis have begun to map the effects of racism on the material world (Morrison et al., 2017). In his seminal 1997 book The Racial Contract, Mills critiques posited the concept of a racial contract that identifies white supremacy as “the unnamed political system that has made the modern world what it is today” (p. 1). For Mills, white supremacy contains three elements: It operates existentially (it has existed for many years), conceptually (as a political system), and in method (as a contract between people in power who have been determined to possess membership in a group determined to be white). Stephen Haymes, in Race, Culture and the City (1995), posited that “white supremacist thinking and attitudes that undergird urban mythologies about Blacks have resulted in their spatial regulation and control in cities” (p. 5). This is particularly evident in a city like Chicago, where some residents live under conditions of extreme segregation. Although both of these works are more than 20 years old, they serve as generative accounts in the discussion of Chicago, including the policies and practices whereby Black people “develop self-definitions or social identities that are linked to a consciousness and politics of resistance” (Haymes, 1995, p. 11).

Critical race spatial analysis (CRSA) is of particular importance to this account. As an “explanatory framework and methodological approach that accounts for the role of race, racism, and white supremacy in examining geographic and social spaces” (Vélez & Solórzano, 2017, p. 20), it also allows the ability to challenge “white supremacy within these spaces as part of a larger goal of identifying and challenging all forms of subordination” (p. 20) As a critical race theorist, I hold sentiments that converge with Vélez and Solórzano’s in the attempt to reimagine “spatial” research and teaching tools that work for racial justice, and expanding the reach and use of these tools to eliminate subordination in and beyond the academy. The remainder of this article should be considered a CRSA project, given its commitment to understanding the spatial and racial ramifications of Black disposability sin Chicago.

The nexus of school closings, public housing, and law enforcement allows us to understand the traditional concept of “engineering” as creating space to “improve” function. Complicating the process of “improvement” as long-term state-sanctioned violence, the article speaks to efforts by city government to spatially mark certain Black communities for gentrification, extreme isolation, and/or containment. School closings are also positioned in this document as connected to the process of “slow violence,” whereby residents of a neighborhood experience a gradual erasure, reminiscent of a crumbling building that slowly erodes until the edifice is reduced to rubble (Nixon, 2009). Because school closings are commonly thought of as the shuttering of a physical building, the article expounds on the idea that numerous forms of school closure exist in Chicago. Under the auspices of closure, the article considers five types of closure: (1) wholesale closure, (2) closure and consolidation, (3) consolidation, (4) phaseout, and (5) reconfiguration. All include either being moved into newly closed buildings, or an entire school staff being summarily fired and replaced by a new staff. Coupled with hypersegregation, given the relationship between school closings and disinvestment, some residents become perpetually contained in spaces that are void of life-sustaining entities (quality education, living wage employment, access to health care, etc.).

The housing section of the article considers the Plan for Transformation of the Chicago Housing Authority (CHA). Touted as a solution to the problem of disrepair in CHA, the plan in its entirety never came to fruition. What happened instead was extreme displacement and destruction of more than 80% of Chicago’s public housing stock. When former public housing residents were displaced, many of the schools that served those residents were closed because of rapid population loss. Simultaneously, law enforcement strategies of the Chicago Police Department (CPD) in the late 1990s specifically aimed at curbing gang activity and illicit drug sales directly contributed to conflict when leadership structures of street organizations (popularly known as “gangs”) were targeted, with the hope that they would dismantle. It also speaks to the theory posited by CPD that it was “outgunned” by warring gang factions. Instead of exploring a theory of hyperviolent youth, this contribution looks at the fracturing of street organizations through the process of displacement and the failure of incarceration strategies originally intended for members of organized crime (popularly known as the Mafia). The concluding section of this article considers community organizations that have moved toward viable solutions to engineered conflict through means that are rarely considered in traditional policy.

Understanding Engineered Conflict

This particular inquiry of engineering begins with the concern of the elimination of human error. ² At the micro level, engineers are consulted to find out if the load-bearing wall in a house can serve as the primary support mechanism for its roof. Along with other scientists, at the macro level, engineers can make sure planes are aerodynamically correct or explore whether automotive companies can improve fuel economy and improve safety. On the more concerning side, engineers can alternatively be used to perfect the war machine of local, state, and national governments. From the carrying out of drone attacks to the building of border walls and reinforcement, engineering is rife with practical utility and/or destruction. Most notably used in the field of cognitive engineering, a widely shared concept in the field is that the “highest level specification of a desired action (is) an intention” (Norman, 1983, p. 254). An error in the intention is called a mistake. An error in carrying out the intention is called a slip (Norman, 1983). Germane to this pattern of thinking is a series of concepts that are of certain importance to understanding state-sanctioned violence in Chicago.

If Chicago’s interests as a provider of amenities, services, corporate destinations, and tourism are the primary goals, what does the city understand to be the issues and concerns that prevent it from achieving its objectives? What accounts for the “mistakes” and “slips” in this rationale? More directly, who is considered to be the mistakes and slips? Where do they live? What are their experiences? Where do they go to school? What are their experiences with law enforcement? How are these “errors” eliminated or severely reduced? Who is considered the error? More importantly, How does Chicago demonstrate its disregard for the “errors”?

In reference to city planning, engineering is of particular importance because the city is always watching for error. Under these conditions, the city can appear to care more about its tourists than its long-term residents. When the error of the presence of some of the long-term residents is viewed as distorting its branding, Chicago’s response has been to try to pass over its realities on the margins of the city. The loss of viable employment, affordable housing, and access to healthy food options and health care has rendered many Black residents of the city to the deep margins, both spatially and materially. Taking these dynamics into account, this article examines the dynamic that continues to place poor and working-class Black people on the deep political and spatial margins of the city. For the remainder of this article, the working definition of “engineered conflict” includes the policies and practices created, maintained and expanded by loyal state or federal entities to ensure the disposability of Black people, with specific regard to housing, education, and law enforcement, subsequently heightening the possibility of disputes between individuals or within groups, often with fatal results. If we take this working definition into consideration, this article also understands engineered conflict as foundational in contemplating the prolonged, permanent, and structural punishment imposed on the bodies of Black people.

To grapple with the concept of engineered conflict, the work of Michael Dumas offers guidance and clarity, particularly his assertion that

any incisive analyses of racial(ized) discourse and policy processes in education must grapple with cultural disregard for and disgust with blackness . . . deeply and inextricably embedded within racialized policy discourses is not merely a general and generalizable concern about dis- proportionality or inequality, but also, fundamentally and quite specifically, a concern with the bodies of Black people, the signification of (their) blackness, and the threat posed by the Black (person) to the educational well-being of other students. (Dumas, 2016, p. 12)

Dumas provides precision to the rationale placed on Black bodies solely because of their Blackness. If you live in a situation where the police consider you a criminal before you are considered human, the possibility is the greater that you will be in conflict with the criminal legal system. Unlivable costs for daily sustenance in Chicago creates a situation where those who historically have the least are often left with even less. When people are pressed under these conditions, it makes for a space where tensions can run high, and blame is placed solely on the individual who has engaged in a violent act. Instead of considering people who are in conflict with one another as “bad actors,” we need to consider that much of this conflict is engineered through structural processes, with the goals of containment and/or outright removal. In other words, their conditions are an organized abandonment; the hope is that the affected population will hit (and kill) each other in perpetuity. Complicating the process of “improvement” as long-term state-sanctioned violence, the efforts by city government to isolate certain Black communities for either gentrification or extreme isolation and containment constitute a historical strategy. The removal of certain Black bodies (read: low-income/no income, housing insecure, food insecure, underemployed, etc.) is considered part of the long-term improvement goals of the city. The process also includes the closure of schools, the destruction of housing, and the increasing of surveillance and brutality by law enforcement. For Black residents of the city who reside either in gentrifying neighborhoods or in communities on the outer rungs of the city, the intersection of school closings, public housing, and law enforcement is not as much a straightforward process as it uneven, layered, and sporadic. Even if it feels like a constant barrage for Chicagoans experiencing displacement, isolation, and containment, the collective undercurrent reveals political and economic moves that appear to be uncoordinated at first glance. At the same time, proponents of market-rate housing, privatization of schools, and tougher law enforcement all share the idea that something has to be done about Chicago’s “unsightly” and disposable residents. For Chicago, shootings and homicides (particularly death by gun violence) should also be considered outcomes of conflict exacerbated by planned scarcity, given that tensions are heightened when access to education, affordable housing, living-wage employment, and health care becomes harder to secure.

Taking these dynamics into account, this article seeks to examine the dynamic that has placed poor and working-class Black people on the deep margins of the city to offer the following inquiry: How is the disposability of certain Black people positioned for prolonged, permanent, structural punishment in the form of state-sanctioned violence in schooling systems, housing, and law enforcement?

The point here is not to incite conspiracy theory. Ruth Wilson Gilmore and Lisa Marie Cacho have reminded us of how neoliberal policies continue to justify the disposability of racialized populations through overreliance on carceral mechanisms such as prisons, immigration policies rooted in containment, and underresourced schools (Cacho, 2012; Wilson Gilmore, 2007) . In Chicago, the issue is to understand these conditions as contestations of Black life in Chicago under a set of rules and conditions that keep significant portions of the population at the margins. Where earlier attempts by the city to contain and isolate large segments of its Black population included overt tactics (i.e., policy of “slum removal” in the 1930s and 1940s, the Chicago 21 Plan of 1971), the current moment may not appear to be as clearly defined (Rast, 2019). The immediate narrative of news outlets remains violent (primarily gun violence in the form of homicides), but history, policy, and geography provide a clearer view on the making of the margins. If we understand how the attempt to control race, place, and space in Chicago in certain Black neighborhoods is part and parcel of an engineered conflict, we will also understand the process that makes it easier for people to be in conflict with each other under these conditions.

Long-term physical and emotional stressors in the form of housing insecurity, educational mobility, and continued contact with law enforcement can heighten conflict. At the same time, the absence of the aforementioned conditions in popular rhetoric on violence allows mainstream media outlets and public opinion to reduce violence to a singular act or event. Because homicides and other forms of violence are often tried in the criminal legal system as singular events, missing from the analysis is state-sanctioned and structural violence. Both are deliberate forms of violence that are “slow-paced but open-ended, eluding the tidy closure, the narrative containment, imposed by the visual orthodoxies of victory and defeat” (Nixon, 2009, p. 445).

Place, Positionality, and Chicago

The concept of engineered conflict in Chicago is not intended to reflect the city’s attempt to sell itself as the newly reconstructed neoliberal bastion that will improve life and well-being for all Chicagoans. Instead, many may read this take on the political economy of Chicago as overly harsh and unfair. In response to such critique, I offer that white supremacy is overly harsh and unfair, requiring an explicit discussion on its function while highlighting community resistance to it. Given the brutality of structural racism in the form of school closings, housing insecurity, and punishment by law enforcement, Chicago’s treatment of its Black residents who do not have access to life-sustaining resources (healthy food options, sustainable affordable housing, quality health care, viable education, long-term living-wage employment, etc.) in significant sections of the South Side and the West Side does not reflect a friendly encounter. Instead, the attempt here is to offer meditations on the continued intensity of the current moment. Because one historical moment is not “more important” or “more serious” than the next, it is important to note that life for many segments of Black people in the Western Hemisphere (and throughout the globe) under the veil of white supremacy is a constant reminder that things have always been serious. Given the realities of the COVID pandemic, the moment of the health crisis has only heightened what many have known for quite some time. As Chicagoans experience their lives among the socially constructed realities of race, class, gender, age, (dis)ability, and sexuality, we are also connected to other parts of the country and planet where this disposability has been normalized under flawed tropes of “development” (i.e., gentrification) and “free-market strategies” (i.e., school privatization, privatization of public goods, etc.). As Black people are racialized in Chicago, they are also placed in opposition to whiteness and the ruling classes in New York, City, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Oakland, Houston, Miami, Seattle, Atlanta, Detroit, Milwaukee, London, Madrid, Rio de Janeiro, Toronto, Montreal, Rome, and Paris. In all of these cities, people are refusing the spoils of the neoliberal state and are developing formations to “live in and despite” the war raged against Black bodies (Sharpe, 2016). As a global city, Chicago, like other international urban centers, is saturated in the logics of containment and isolation for some, while others benefit from historical and structural theft rooted in imperialism, colonization, and white supremacy. Despite the severity of the situation, there are residents who continue to resist.

Engineered Conflict Is a Structural Concern

Rarely are systems or institutions (in this case, a city) charged with being the instigators of conflict. If we take the documented increase in homicides in the city during 2021 (812 recorded in the calendar year), the national narrative extended to discuss the city as overrun with criminals intent on victimizing its residents. Although the tragedy of the loss of human life should never be downplayed, the point here is to take into account the mitigating factors that increase the chances of violent conflict. As a society, we need to understand that homicides do not take place in a singular context. When mainstream media highlights the story of the grieving family and/or the violent offender, rarely are policies discussed in the area where vertical violence (violence from systems of power—closing schools, destruction of affordable housing, policing) influences horizontal violence (violence between people in similar locations and or/positions in life). As Chicago experiences upticks in violence, much of the purported solutions include “tough-on-crime” legislation that involves law enforcement targeting “high-crime” areas or tougher punishments for violent infractions. It is widely known that these policies do not decrease crime, but instead result in higher arrest rates and loss of employment for Black residents of Chicago already struggling through chronic disinvestment and destabilization.

Thousands of Black Chicagoans have been overly burdened by a preponderance of exorbitant parking tickets and red-light camera violations (Bakala, 2018). In some areas, if you live in or near a gentrifying neighborhood, your rent or property taxes have increased exponentially (“The New Woodlawn,” 2019). Until 2018, if you tried to make a collect call from the Cook County Jail, your call could cost as much as $15 an hour (Wildeboer, 2012). Depending on your situation, the city is positioned to punish you for trying to live in it.

David Harvey’s work stands as a literal depiction of life in Chicago, given that much of gentrification occurs under the process of “accumulation by dispossession” (Harvey, 2005). As community spaces are deemed either blighted or valuable, the combination of city planners and private developers moves in, dispossessing people of communities they’ve come to know as home. Critical to this juncture is that any discussion of forced removal or displacement involves people. In placing the human component of displacement before any cost–benefit analysis, Chicago must contend with the fact that there are lives in the balance of its development aspirations—for it is in these spaces that we are allowed to understand the contrasts and contradictions in a shifting city.

Education, Housing, and Law Enforcement as the Nexus of Engineered Conflict

If you are perpetually preoccupied with a city’s structured attempt to deem you disposable, the conditions can make it difficult to see people experiencing the same suffering as potential comrades in struggle. Instead, enemies are manufactured as the result of continued displacement, hypersegregation, and dispossession. In these instances, people are often quicker to punch each other than to identify the enemy as white supremacy and late-stage capitalism. The conditions can compel you to hit each other because you no longer see the purpose of responding to the genesis of the harm; you are too preoccupied with their manufactured contradictions of capital (lack of quality education, housing insecurity, few options outside of low-wage service-sector employment, health disparities, and food insecurity). When people are pressed under these conditions, it makes for a space where tensions can run high, and blame is solely placed on the individual who has engaged in a violent act (Fanon, 1963). Instead of considering people who are in conflict with one another as “bad actors,” these dynamics push me to grapple with the idea that we need to consider that much of this conflict is engineered.

From the outset, the first question offered in response to my analysis is: engineered by whom and for what purpose? My initial response, as a Chicagoan, is: the city of Chicago, to instill in its Black population that few will be accepted, and most will be removed because they have been deemed disposable. If we take the example of housing, a prima facie example would be a series of public housing units known as the State Street Corridor. Originally developed as temporary housing for Black residents who could not find housing on the city’s South or West Side, the corridor was the primary provider of housing for large families with children who did not have large incomes. The Robert Taylor Homes, Stateway Gardens, Dearborn Homes, Harold Ickes Homes, and Hillard Homes at one time represented the most populous continuous set of public housing developments in the world. Although all the developments have been demolished except Dearborn Homes and Hilliard Homes, conceptualizing the largesse of the corridor is difficult to contemplate given that large swaths of the area remain vacant. At one in time, more than 25,000 people lived on a continuous, 4-plus-mile stretch of street. More incredible is that, at one time, despite two other high schools being in proximity to the corridor (Paul Laurence Dunbar Vocational and Wendell Phillips), only one high school was considered the neighborhood high school (Jean Baptiste Point DuSable High School). Upon the destruction of more than 80% of the corridor, Black families were dispersed throughout the South and West Sides, suburbs adjacent to the western and southern rim, central Illinois, southern Wisconsin, Iowa, and Minnesota (Institute for Research on Race and Public Policy, 2021). Given the mass exodus of Black families from the city proper or displacement to other parts of the city, there is specific meaning for poor and working-class Black people who have remained in the city. Their experiences with displacement, depopulation, and abandonment are real and apparent regarding the shuttering of schools, lack of affordable housing, and violent experiences with law enforcement. Housing, or the lack thereof, has deeply contributed to Chicago’s 20-year purge of Black people (amalgamating in the loss of more than 260,000 Black people since 2000), setting the stage for conflict for those who remain.

Chicago was once a city steeped in living-wage industrial labor; the shift to a service sector economy has unearthed logics of the free market economy that utilize the rhetoric of “choice” as the façade for providing sustenance and stability for the historically excluded. Additionally, as a city steeped in political corruption in the form of patronage, restrictive covenants, and numerous iterations of racketeering, Chicago perpetually finds itself rationalizing the gratuitous punishment placed on Black bodies. As a result, those on the margins find themselves rationalized as those who have made “poor choices” and are deserving of their lots in society. The contradiction, however, is that the schools and housing in the areas with the largest masses of people in this predicament are not in precarious conditions that are due to the “bad choices” of the residents. Instead, their situations are largely rooted in actions sanctioned by the state to permanently divest from housing, education, and public safety infrastructure.

There can be no discussion of Black life in Chicago absent the complex and shifting realities of race, class, gender, age, (dis)ability, and sexual orientation; it is in these layered realities that we are able to understand the necessity of people’s refusal to accept things the way they are. Education scholar and activist Eve Ewing (2018) is correct in that “this form of violence creates systems with which death and despair are quiet but inevitable, and the weapons at hand are history, policy and racism” (p. 151). On the city’s South and West Sides, experiences with this type of structural, state-sanctioned violence also serve as focal points for resistance.

Reconsidering School Closings

Eve Ewing identified the moment when community members come to grips with the permanent closure of their neighborhood school as “institutional mourning.” Described as the “social and emotional experience undergone by individuals and communities facing the loss of a shared institution they are affiliated with” (Ewing, 2018, p. 127), Ewing’s meditation on school closings also reflects the tragedy of neighborhood loss. While others wonder why people would mourn a place that has been rendered dysfunctional, Ewing is correct that the fight to save such places “can mean losing their very world” (p. 127).

The phaseout series of closures largely happened at the high school level; the school would stop admitting freshmen, letting each subsequent class graduate. A type of erasure takes place as the number of staff members at the phased-out school dwindles each year because families hear about the phaseout and begin to enroll their children in other schools. By the final year of phaseout, some schools would have fewer than 20 students. The most documented instance of this was the phaseout of Dyett High School in the South Side neighborhood of Washington Park. Although a community-driven effort to reopen Dyett in the form of a hunger strike succeeded, the 2013 graduating class of Dyett had only nine students. The 2015 community-driven effort to reopen Dyett was organized during the two-year period when the building was shuttered. When considering the perpetual disposability of poor Black residents of the South and West Sides of the city, it is important to note that community members literally risked their lives to reopen a community-serving school.

“Turnaround” is an interesting choice of words in relation to the actual event taking place. In the past, the process was called “reconstitution,” but an executive decision was made to change the terminology. Turnarounds represent the second largest grouping of closings between 2002 and 2013 (26 schools), often resulting in the loss of staff and, in some cases, students. This process was common at both the grade school and high school levels; turnaround schools were supposedly targeted for chronically low performance, high teacher turnover, and student mobility. The process includes the removal of the current staff (existing staff could reapply for their positions in the turnaround school, but few did) and revamping the curriculum.

Policy Considerations on the Future of Black Life

As an interrogation of state-sanctioned structural violence, this article applies a question posed by Anderson and Samudzi (2018) in relation to Black communities throughout Chicago: “Why not directly challenge the authority of oppressive political institutions when our social placement primes us to do so?” (p. 109). Their assertation is rooted in a fugitive understanding, meaning that there is a conscious determination that the accepted rules and regulations of the state do not work necessarily for many Black residents in the city. Instead, the conditions of engineered conflict are present, and there is an abundant need to create spaces that meet one’s needs. These spaces are often created regardless of compliance with the orthodoxy of existing systems. They are fugitive in that they do not rely on existing systems; instead, they are reflective of a broader freedom dream centered in changing the conditions of those experiencing engineered conflict.

Three organizations in Chicago have dared to resist engineered conflict throughout the city. Their actions are important; they are not the only organizations addressing issues of education, housing, and public safety, but they are unapologetically nonreliant on the state for sustenance. Because they do not rely on the state, policy makers could learn valuable lessons from their commitment to engage societal problems by centering their work in the issues and concerns of community residents.

One of the organizations is Ujimaa Medics (umedics.org), started by a group of healthcare professionals and community organizers who were seeking to address the perpetual lack of access to health care in Black communities experiencing marginalization. This organization’s actions speak to community needs in real time. Members of the community noticed that emergency responders (particularly ambulances) would not answer requests for service to treat gunshot victims, so they created a community response network. One of the organization’s first community trainings was a series of community workshops that taught residents how to treat and stabilize gunshot victims. From these initial workshops, Ujimaa Medics moved into mental health and wellness workshops, offered free of charge to community residents. Its example is critical for policy makers; Ujimaa Medics provides tangible examples of the necessity of free healthcare systems for people experiencing medical precarity.

The Let Us Breathe Collective began from an effort to respond to the needs of protesters in Ferguson, Missouri, after the police execution of Michael Brown (letusbreathecollective.com). When they responded to a call to deliver gas masks, they also paid attention to the mutual aid provided to protesters during the uprising in Ferguson. When they returned to Chicago, they began a “free store” that provided clothing free of charge. As a collective, they began to think about direct community needs in terms of food, shelter, and public safety. As part of a public awareness and public safety campaign, they staged a 40-day encampment known as “Freedom Square.” Central in this effort was public awareness of a black-ops police site where West Side residents were repeatedly tortured over a 40-year period (Ackerman, 2015). Their hosting of art workshops, community concerts, and peace circle trainings provided tangible examples of the possibilities of noncarceral public safety. To policy makers, a tangible example of what safety looks like, absent police presence or surveillance, is instructive.

Equity and Transformation (EAT; eatchicago.org) takes into account community participation in the informal economy, recognizing the ways that people have become self-reliant. If community residents have been limited to formal access to education, housing, and living-wage employment, many have made ends meet through the “hustle economy.” From bucket drummers, to the selling of essential oils and informal food stands that serve communities, EAT recognizes that many who have come in contact with the criminal legal system are often limited in their options, given the constraints of felony disenfranchisement. EAT’s development and proposal to create an Informal Workers Association, an Informal Workers Bill of Rights, and a guaranteed income program offer direct suggestions for policy makers when pathways for residents returning from incarceration are being considered.

Instead of ending with the adage, “There’s nothing we can do about it,” we should also understand that people who find the aforementioned positions to be unacceptable are operating in ways that are proactive and compelling. Local organizations throughout the city have created their own unique processes in developing strategies to address affordable housing, quality education, and public safety. Their consideration of fugitive possibilities (strategies that are not based in commonplace policy solutions offered by the state) and actions are critical in a city that attempts to enforce a logic of disposability on their bodies. Although this article does not reveal a detailed nuance and particularity of engineered conflict, the concept should be considered in any policy effort to improve life for residents experiencing white supremacy in the form of structural disinvestment, displacement, and marginalization. As there are lessons to learn from the efforts of other industrialized nations in relation to affordable housing, quality education, and noncarceral practices of public safety, there are also lessons to be learned from Black communities in Chicago who dare to resist.