"in Gary, racism clearly trumped democracy"

December 14, 2014 5:13 AM

Yeah. Indiana’s got a constitution, which says you can’t pass special laws for one city, one town, etc. But they got around that, because instead of saying, “We want to eliminate the buffer zone around Gary,” they said, “We want to eliminate the buffer zone around a city that has a river that runs through it, and that has a steel mill…” and by the time you got down to it, there was only one city in the state that fit that description.

Gary, Indiana: the city that split in two.
posted by MartinWisse (38 comments total)

Wow, unbelievable.

Just curious... why can't they hire police that live in Gary instead of other areas?
posted by dozo at 6:02 AM on December 14, 2014 [2 favorites]

The Indiana Supreme Court is incredibly deferential to the legislature. The 'special laws' provision has only overturned legislation, to my knowledge, twice. At least on the state level.
posted by leotrotsky at 6:09 AM on December 14, 2014 [1 favorite]

...which means it's dead easy to get around the special laws provision with half competent drafting. It takes a particularly moronic legislator (we have plenty) to screw it up. E.g. Passing a bill that applies only to fraternities at IU, and not at any other state universities.
posted by leotrotsky at 6:17 AM on December 14, 2014 [1 favorite]

Looks like, under state law, a city can require that its cops live in the city for their first 5 years on the force, after which they can require that they live in the county or the county next door. (I'm having issues with links on mobile, but the code section is 36-8-4)
posted by jpe at 6:24 AM on December 14, 2014

Mayor Hatcher's answer to this question was interesting: What do you think the whole founding of Merrillville says about the democratic process?

He calls it a complete failure of the democratic process because in Gary, racism clearly trumped democracy. There is no question about that.

But it looks to me like there were enough racists to vote the changes they wanted into law. It's a reminder that democracy does not guarantee ethical choices; in a democracy, if enough people want a bad thing, they can get it.
posted by layceepee at 6:41 AM on December 14, 2014 [32 favorites]

That is a fantastic interview. Thanks for posting it. I was struck by his use of internal colonialism:

But the part of white flight that has been most damaging to Gary is that we have been colonized, in much the same way many African countries were by the British and the French. The latest estimate that I’ve seen is that our police department is close to sixty percent policemen who live outside of Gary, and most of them are white. They are the ones who are supposed to protect and serve the people of Gary.

That wikipedia link is actually really weak; it's a concept that got a lot of traction in the US starting in the 1960s as a way of understanding how political power at the local level was effected in ways that deliberately kept minority populations disempowered and with fewer economic options without the need for an explicit colonial apparatus (or apartheid in South Africa, say), and has been used as a conceptual tool in political organizing and administrations for many decades now.

So you could elect a smart and competent black mayor, but that didn't mean that you were in a position to address or control all of the other aspects of local power structures that controlled hiring and promotions in the police force, say (as has been explored in dozens of articles since the Ferguson protests began).
posted by Dip Flash at 6:43 AM on December 14, 2014 [8 favorites]

new orleans has that rule about it's police; I wouldn't say it's stopped racist police.

if you want to study the internal colonialism, Jackson, MS, would be an excellent place. I think Jackson is 86% african american at this point.

Recently, under Lumumba, wages were raised, and the city tax rolls zoomed up!

the city voted to tax itself, but then Barbour and state-level cronies intervened, and created a 13 member panel to oversee the mayor's spending of the city revenue.

Black people are straight up targets of extraction in the US.
posted by eustatic at 6:52 AM on December 14, 2014 [8 favorites]

Nu-redlining?
posted by clvrmnky at 7:30 AM on December 14, 2014 [1 favorite]

This article spelled out quite a few things I suspected, but never actually knew. I grew up right outside of Gary, and the ongoing deterioration of what was once a great city is absolutely heartbreaking.

After a lifetime of people making jokes about how 'bad' Gary was, it is sickening to realize that the jokes were always very thinly veiled racism, and were never really about the crime or industrial pollution.
posted by bibliogrrl at 7:32 AM on December 14, 2014 [14 favorites]

taking broadway south from i-94, it's pretty obvious that until you get to about lincoln highway that a good part of merrillville is economically depressed and blighted - then you get to us 30 and it's just another suburban mall environment

depressing and weird
posted by pyramid termite at 7:42 AM on December 14, 2014 [3 favorites]

After a lifetime of people making jokes about how 'bad' Gary was, it is sickening to realize that the jokes were always very thinly veiled racism, and were never really about the crime or industrial pollution.

I grew up in Goshen, IN and dated someone whose extended family lived near Gary where, she said, "they'd steal the gum right out of your mouth."

It took me a few years to crack the code on "they," helped along by going to a small college attended by lots of kids from "Da Region" who were sometimes deeply aggrieved that our Black Student Union hosted dances where "they didn't play music everyone could like."

That was kind of good, though. Because by the time I learned to see through the mildly constipated looks and hear through the elliptical racism, I was off to the army where all the shitkickers with their smokes rolled up in their sleeves said the same thing about the musical selection at the enlisted club we all had to share, only with slightly more open racial animus.

Some racists have big belt buckles and stuff socks down their pants and talk like unreconstructed Archie Bunkers. Some racists spend their undergraduate years developing remarkably sensitive readings of 19th century poetry and would retire to their room shocked and weeping if anyone ever accused them of "predjuhdiss." Some racists get their law degrees and turn the law into one big racial epithet.
posted by mph at 8:23 AM on December 14, 2014 [28 favorites]

NW Indiana is the most racist place I've ever experienced. When I has in high school, we lived in all-white Hobart, which is right next to Gary and Merrillville. In 1989, when the neighbors on one side of us were selling their house, a black family made an offer on it. The neighbors on the other side made serious plans to burn that house down. Other houses had been burned down in preceding years under similar circumstances. The police turned a blind eye in those cases. The only thing that stopped them was that the black family's financing fell through. Three guesses how that happened.
posted by double block and bleed at 8:26 AM on December 14, 2014 [6 favorites]

I grew up close enough to Gary to bike there- in working class, but mostly white Hammond- much less white today, though I went to the high school whose boundaries comprised East Hammond, the "black part of town" in rustbelt terms. Anyway, I was born in 1964, and I honestly never knew about Merrillville's history until today.

Lake County, Indiana is ALL about race. More than any place I've ever lived or visited. More than Mobile, Alabama. More than Trinidad.

Thank you for this. Thank you.
posted by ethnomethodologist at 8:28 AM on December 14, 2014 [6 favorites]

I've lived in north and south Indiana, (bloomington and South Bend) and surprisingly south bend is the way less racist of the two places. Not to say that it isn't high up on the racism scale, but Bloomington, despite it's university theme was rife with such absurd amounts of overt racism that it blew my mind. It was from both the townies and the students.

That said, Indiana always seemed to me like it was a one of those places with a huge simmering racial tension that gets swept under the rug because it's the midwest not the south.
posted by Ferreous at 8:33 AM on December 14, 2014 [4 favorites]

NW Indiana is the most racist place I've ever experienced. When I has in high school, we lived in all-white Hobart, which is right next to Gary and Merrillville

I grew up in Texas, but my parents grew up in Hobart. My extended family is all still in the area. (And they pretty much all work or have worked for US Steel.) I would agree that the people I know in NW Indiana are at least as racist as the people I know in Texas -- and I'm including my family members, because they haven't escaped that mindset. There's something about the racism there that's different -- I want to say harsher, although I can't quite articulate why. (I need to own up to white privilege here. What I mean is that the racism looks/sounds different to me, as an outsider. I'm not saying that people of color fare better in one place or the other because the white people are slightly less racist.)

Anyway, I don't have stats or anything to back it up, but my impression is that the white flight from Gary started earlier than the article says. My mom was born in Gary, and her parents moved out of there in the early 50s, to Hobart, because the neighborhood was "going downhill." Her uncles' families too, and her future step-dad's family. They were all USS people, though, so maybe something about company culture was driving their move, more than Gary's culture did.
posted by mudpuppie at 8:53 AM on December 14, 2014 [3 favorites]

So you could elect a smart and competent black mayor, but that didn't mean that you were in a position to address or control all of the other aspects of local power structures that controlled hiring and promotions in the police force, say (as has been explored in dozens of articles since the Ferguson protests began).

See Chicago's Council Wars for more of this.
posted by srboisvert at 8:55 AM on December 14, 2014 [3 favorites]

But it looks to me like there were enough racists to vote the changes they wanted into law. It's a reminder that democracy does not guarantee ethical choices; in a democracy, if enough people want a bad thing, they can get it.

Any modern democracy that does not protect minorities and individuals of all kinds is essentially broken.
posted by Seiten Taisei at 8:55 AM on December 14, 2014 [4 favorites]

Eustatic: The local option sales tax commission thing goes back to Mayor Harvey Johnson, who was a do-nothing mayor. Lumumba's sales tax increase for long-ago federally ordered water and sewer improvements was overwhelmingly approved by voters. It's all rather byzantine, but what you were talking about had zero to do with the late, one-year mayor. And Haley Barbour has not been in office for some time, nor does he run any old-school state machine, a la the Illinous Republican machine of old, of the sort that tea party candidate Chris McDaniel went on and on about.
posted by raysmj at 8:56 AM on December 14, 2014

Indiana was one of the states the KKK used to run, so this shouldn't be that surprising.
posted by Pogo_Fuzzybutt at 9:04 AM on December 14, 2014

Yeah, at times Hoosiers were the largest contingent in the KKK, I think. In our relatively small town, Gary was considered the scariest city in the state, even if, like others have said, I was fairly old before I understood exactly why. The adults I knew always seemed to have a ... contempt for Gary, although they covered it with concerns about pollution and the steel mill effects. Of course, my dad would reminisce about the good old days when towns still had sundown laws in effect, and I'm pretty sure I remember riding through Elwood in the mid-70's and seeing the sign at the edge of town.

Having lived here my whole life, I guess I've always considered Indiana to the northernmost Southern state. (And I'm sure there's a whole host of problems with that assessment.)
posted by worldswalker at 9:38 AM on December 14, 2014 [2 favorites]

I worked for a year in the North Lawndale neighborhood of Chicago and it has a similar story: white people started to move five miles out to the close-in suburbs and Sears, who had their headquarters there, left and the whole economy of the neighborhood collapsed and has never recovered. My bus stop was at the 'original' Sears tower-a huge building covering a couple square blocks that was, at least at the time, unused.
posted by geegollygosh at 9:44 AM on December 14, 2014 [2 favorites]

I always though a good description of Indiana was "where the south prolapsed north"
posted by Ferreous at 9:50 AM on December 14, 2014 [9 favorites]

It takes a particularly moronic legislator (we have plenty) to screw it up. E.g. Passing a bill that applies only to fraternities at IU, and not at any other state universities.

Thankfully, we still have the Federal courts to slap-down the idiots in the legislature.
posted by Thorzdad at 9:50 AM on December 14, 2014

When Merrillville first came into being, many people took an attitude like I did. If I was invited to something in Merrillville, I wouldn’t go. Shortly after becoming mayor, I was invited to this hotel in Merrillville to give a speech, and when I got there and I was looking around for the room, this waitress—she was absolutely a waitress—was walking by and she asked me, “What are you doing here?”

It should not have, but that really cut me to the bone. She thought I had no right to even be there. So after that, I wouldn’t go. Then some members of the news media got angry at me. They said, “That just shows he’s anti-white.”

Oh, how dare this black man, whom we hate, and all of his people, besides, HOW DARE HE HAVE SMIDGEN OF DISLIKE FOR US?! After all, those "people" are just supposed to take our boots in their faces forever, like it, and beg us for more! I mean, what's wrong with them? /sarcasm
posted by droplet at 9:56 AM on December 14, 2014 [12 favorites]

Can we fix racism? Can it be fixed?

Is there a model society out there where things were once racist and no longer are, at an institutional level, at least?*

* You're always going to have losers with nothing more to be proud of than a genetic attribute they were granted rather than their accomplishments.
posted by maxwelton at 10:14 AM on December 14, 2014

"Can we fix racism? Can it be fixed?"

I'm not sure the answer to that. But I'm pretty sure as long America is in denial about the problem it cannot be fixed. Until the racism is acknowledged, there is no chance.

This seems true with other problems.
posted by el io at 10:23 AM on December 14, 2014 [6 favorites]

There may not be a model society, but South Africa has a National Unity and Reconciliation Act. Although it apparently has had a mixed legacy, at the very minimum the Truth and Reconciliation Commission "inscribed the undoing of apartheid's legacy firmly on the political horizon of South Africa as a communal task" (Antje du Bois-Pedan). Not even anything remotely close to this happening in the US. There are those who bristle at the idea of the US being an apartheid state, but (just the most glaring example) the US incarcerates black Americans at a rate much higher than South African blacks under apartheid. Then there's the income gap. And on and on.
posted by blucevalo at 10:54 AM on December 14, 2014 [4 favorites]

I always though a good description of Indiana was "where the south prolapsed north"

"The Upper Peninsula of Alabama" is my dad's preferred term. We lived in South Bend for years, and yeah, Gary was essentially portrayed as Mordor.
posted by AdamCSnider at 11:28 AM on December 14, 2014 [2 favorites]

I grew up in Kentucky. Even most of Kentucky considers Indiana--north of, say, Columbus--to be a land of violent and open racism. While I lived in Louisville I was fond of my own motto for the state-- "Indiana: Minutes Away, Decades Behind." I once went into a highway rest stop in Central Indiana in the late 90s and found a stack of about 10 'Hoosier Klan' recruitment cards pinned to a cork board. I took one, and still have it somewhere.

I had friends involved in various militant anti-fascist groups around Bloomington in that same era, and they were involved in more terrifyingly violent clashes and feuds with local nazis and Klan dudes than anyone else I knew, anywhere in the world, involved in antifa stuff.
posted by still bill at 12:36 PM on December 14, 2014 [3 favorites]

The Indiana Klan was extremely powerful in the early 20th century. For a while, the governor and over half of the legislature were Klan members. Racism in Indiana shouldn't surprise anyone.
posted by TrialByMedia at 1:17 PM on December 14, 2014

But it looks to me like there were enough racists to vote the changes they wanted into law. It's a reminder that democracy does not guarantee ethical choices; in a democracy, if enough people want a bad thing, they can get it.

That's just one sort of democracy -- majority rule. Democracy literally translates as "rule of the people," and when people of color are left out, it is a failed democracy.
posted by maxsparber at 1:22 PM on December 14, 2014 [2 favorites]

One thing a lot of people who don't live in Indiana or the midwest might not realize is that the state of Indiana and Northwest Indiana (NWI) tend to be thought of as different things. Before they changed the time zones in Indiana, NWI and the rest of the state were on different times half of the year. Also, NWI gets news and TV from Chicago, while the rest of the state get it from more local news sources. It always felt like a third state, growing up there.

In my personal experience, people living in NWI think of themselves as more... cosmopolitan (? for lack of a better phrase) than the farmers downstate. Chicago doesn't want NWI, but then again neither did downstate IN. It was kind of a weird, liminal place to grow up.

The racism I encountered growing up, too, was always more covert than when I lived downstate. No one was very often outright verbally racist, it was always implied. It took a lot of years into my adulthood and not living there anymore to realize how pervasive it is. It's really astonishing (and horrifying).
posted by bibliogrrl at 1:28 PM on December 14, 2014 [3 favorites]

I'm from Evansville, just about as far south as you can get and still be in Indiana, and while I'd definitely not consider it a beacon of progressivism or anything, I don't recall anything so obvious and bald-faced as this. I definitely got the occasional sense of the sort of casual racism you see in a lot of places but not the open and hateful variety being described up north. Evansville is kind of in its own little bubble in a lot of ways relative to the rest of the state, though, so maybe this contributes to the difference? That said, I left long ago, don't return often, and could have been totally oblivious to it as a kid.
posted by feloniousmonk at 2:13 PM on December 14, 2014

Jackson 5 represent!
posted by bonefish at 2:17 PM on December 14, 2014

The racism I encountered growing up, too, was always more covert than when I lived downstate.

What genteel part of NWI did you live in? Munster? Valpo? Laporte? Because in HAMMOND that racism was the most overt I've ever experienced anywhere. My older brother, who is still a tea-parting dickbrain, used to call me a "nigger lover" all the time.

Hammond conversation:

Q: Hey, where'd you get (those shoes, that bike, those M-80s, whatever)?
A: Stole 'em off a dead nigger, want 'em back?

I have no idea how anybody could call Lake County (minus Munster, which is a weird north shore of Chicago style outlier, stinking rich, insular, with big Jewish and Asian populations, more Winnetka than Hobart) anything but infected with very overt, very obvious racial hatred.

If you're white you're all right, if you're brown stick around, if you're black go back (to Africa). That's Da Region, the white parts anyway.
posted by ethnomethodologist at 3:21 PM on December 14, 2014 [1 favorite]

Michigan legislature did the same thing for certain corporations they wanted to give tax abatements to that were not within established zones.
posted by quonsar II: smock fishpants and the temple of foon at 3:29 PM on December 14, 2014 [1 favorite]

The Indiana Klan enjoyed its biggest boom in the 1920s, during that era's nativism-fueled red scare.

Which reminds me:

My first newspaper job out of college in 1990, I went to work for the Attica Star Tribune, which is in Fountain County (right on the Illinois line, maybe 30 minutes from Purdue University). I was trying to get moved into my new apartment and was searching in the business white pages for "Indiana Public Service Company" (for utilities) when I spotted "Invisible Empire, Knights of the Ku Klux Klan" plus a phone number. Naturally, I called it.

Within a week, I was sitting across the table from the Imperial Wizard in the lodge at Turkey Run State Park. I got two hours of tape. Most of it was pretty classic David Duke-era "white pride" stuff, plus there was a period where I was made to turn off the tape recorder so he could explain that the real issue was communism, and that his local coroner was one—as had been JFK, Eisenhower and Nixon— as well as a necrophiliac. He was insistent that the Klan in Indiana wasn't really racist, and had never burned crosses or anything weird like that. I interviewed a few folks in town who remembered the Klan from their childhoods. Most of them said it was sort of like the Rotary, only with the hoods and crosses. One woman remembered the Klan making a big production of bringing charitable donations to church, all dressed in their hoods and marching down the aisle and presenting the donation, then walking back out. They were also insistent that there'd been no cross-burning or anything like that. I was able to go back to the photo morgue at the newspaper and find photos of hooded Klansmen standing around a burning cross in the '20s, which went into the article I wrote, right next to those claims.

I called the FBI office in Indianapolis and talked to an agent who said the guy I spoke to was mostly running a mail order operation — he did a little zine that had a lot of pictures of klansmen with captions like "WAKE UP WHITE MAN BEFORE ITS [sic] TO [sic] LATE!". He also suggested that there were other Klan organizations out there where I might not want to be quite so blithe about meeting their Imperial Wizards in isolated locations.

The main thing I remember from the zine he gave me was a cartoon with two klansmen standing next to each other. One has a floral print on his robes. The caption read "My designer is Kalvin Klein."

There's your banality of evil, I guess.
posted by mph at 5:12 PM on December 14, 2014 [20 favorites]

I don't know how race factors into it, but I avoid Gary because one year it was declared the murder capital of the U.S. The last time I drove through there (about 15 years ago, with my cousin, looking for a church where we wanted to go to a concert), we heard gunshots and went home. (My cousin's decision, she was driving, and I was about 16.)
posted by IndigoRain at 10:17 PM on December 14, 2014