There Is Light Here As Well
March 20, 2016 11:39 AM   Subscribe

"Growing up in this home, I was ensconced in blackness — and as an adult, I now see and appreciate the ways that affirmed my identity. I finally saw Ferris Bueller’s Day Off when I was 24, and I was shocked that it was lauded as a 'staple of teen comedy.' I had always thought that the classic tale of Chicago youth skipping class was Cooley High. I didn’t learn whiteness as a default, or the limitations placed on those who exist outside of it, until I was much, much older." Jasmine Sanders (@ToniAliceZora) writes for Buzzfeed on growing up in one of Chicago's poorest black neighborhoods.

"This is what movies like Chi-Raq get wrong: Not all poor and black environs are dysfunctional. And even if there is dysfunction, it does not always exist independent of warmth and happiness. Our neighborhoods are broken in so many ways, but there is light here as well."
posted by capricorn (18 comments total) 50 users marked this as a favorite
 
Very interesting post. Here's the entire series.
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 12:00 PM on March 20, 2016 [3 favorites]


That was really beautiful. Thanks for posting it.
posted by heyho at 12:21 PM on March 20, 2016


Beautifully moving and wonderful.
posted by SecretAgentSockpuppet at 1:20 PM on March 20, 2016


Around 2008, I taught in a predominantly black high school in south Seattle. On the last day of school, with me doing mostly wrap-up paperwork, I offered to let my students (juniors) watch films. I'd brought in some DVD's, and among them were Ferris Bueller and the Breakfast Club. As I'd become much more sensitive to inclusion in media as an adult than I was when I was a kid, I kind of shrugged and apologized and said, "These are great movies, but they're admittedly really, really white."

Unanimous verdict: "That's cool, Mr. K, put it on!"

I didn't try to make sure they were watching. Again, last day of school, I didn't even really mind cell phones that day. Then one kid picked up a call from another student who hadn't shown up, and I heard him say, "Nah, it's cool, you're not missing anything. Mr. K's showin' us some movie about white people."

I've never been able to watch a "teen movie" the same way since.
posted by scaryblackdeath at 1:38 PM on March 20, 2016 [44 favorites]


"These are great movies, but they're admittedly really, really white."

Reminds me of the Mad TV sketch: Pretty White Kids With Problems
posted by Fuzzy Monster at 1:51 PM on March 20, 2016 [4 favorites]


You know, this article really has nothing to do with Ferris Bueller's Day Off, or white teen movies at all. It's unfortunate that paragraph was chosen to frame the FPP, because it's badly misleading out of context. It's a really good article about growing up in, and learning to love, an environment that looks pretty bad from the outside, the Robert Taylor projects in Chicago.
posted by Harvey Kilobit at 2:30 PM on March 20, 2016 [5 favorites]


I didn't get the impression from reading the comments here that anyone was thinking the piece was all about Ferris or movies. I didn't think that when I clicked through to read the piece, either. I thought the pullquote was a pretty good bite of the whole.
posted by rtha at 3:20 PM on March 20, 2016 [5 favorites]


This is lovely, thank you.
posted by triggerfinger at 3:40 PM on March 20, 2016


Lovely writing, thanks for sharing it.
posted by msbubbaclees at 5:17 PM on March 20, 2016


This was a great read, thanks for posting.
posted by migrantology at 5:17 PM on March 20, 2016


It really is interesting to read this as a white guy who lived as a teenager in a middle-class neighborhood on the North Side. My friends warned me against going anywhere in the South and West Side--I think that the Museum of Science and Industry may be the farthest south that I've ever been in the city that wasn't on an interstate, even now--and the projects were supposed to be even worse, lawless warrens on the order of Manhattan's notorious Five Points slum. On the other hand, Ferris Bueller's Day Off always seemed unintentionally funny to me because his big adventure took place in the city that I was familiar with--even though the parade scene was set in downtown, I always associated it with Lincoln Square because of the German stuff.
posted by Halloween Jack at 5:50 PM on March 20, 2016 [1 favorite]


rtha: "I didn't get the impression from reading the comments here that anyone was thinking the piece was all about Ferris or movies. I didn't think that when I clicked through to read the piece, either. I thought the pullquote was a pretty good bite of the whole."

Yeah, I picked the pull quote because for me, it described really well the strength of community and identity in Robert Taylor Homes and explained the value of growing up in that community to the author. I hope that was clear to most of you and wish I could have been clearer for the rest!

I lived in the South Side myself as a University of Chicago student and I loved the article for giving me a different perspective and different viewpoint on the South Side, helping me better understand the community I was briefly a part of and contributed to.

And at the same time since I'm also a minority in certain (mostly-invisible) ways I always like anything that recognizes the value and importance of nonwhite or non-Anglo narratives that place normally othered populations at the center of their own stories.
posted by capricorn at 6:33 PM on March 20, 2016 [3 favorites]


Powerful piece of writing. Thanks for posting. I'm a white man from the exurbs of Chicago, but, back when I was a in my very early twenties, I always had a knack for getting lost in Chicago after nightfall and ending up driving right through Cabrini Green. I never experienced gunfire, thankfully, but, man, it was tough to fend off the "vendors" who saw a car full of white kids and wanted to sell us basically anything illegal that we wanted.

I can understand the nostalgia, but I'm really glad they tore all those projects down. I sure hope life is better for all the former residents who were forced to live there while simply trying to make their lives better.

I'm disappointed that I've never heard how it turned out for the "good" people (please forgive the phrasing) who were residents of those projects.
posted by InsertNiftyNameHere at 6:56 PM on March 20, 2016 [1 favorite]


Damn. That was amazing, and has me wistful for home in an impossible sort of way.

I haven't read the others in the series, but one is titled "Home is Where the Cat is" and I guess that holds true for me.
posted by Ghidorah at 9:51 PM on March 20, 2016 [1 favorite]


I can understand the nostalgia, but I'm really glad they tore all those projects down. I sure hope life is better for all the former residents who were forced to live there while simply trying to make their lives better.

I'm disappointed that I've never heard how it turned out for the "good" people (please forgive the phrasing) who were residents of those projects.


For anyone curious about this subject more generally: please, please give The Pruitt-Igoe Myth a watch. (Previously. It looks like someone even has the film up on YouTube right now.) The popular narrative of why high-density public housing projects were such a spectacular failure in the U.S. is reductive, and personal experiences of them varied. Thanks for this post.
posted by thetortoise at 11:44 PM on March 20, 2016 [10 favorites]


I can understand the nostalgia, but I'm really glad they tore all those projects down. I sure hope life is better for all the former residents who were forced to live there while simply trying to make their lives better.

Chicago hasn't built even a tiny fraction of the promised replacement housing. Also the Chicago Housing Authority is probably the only part of Illinois that is sitting on a budget surplus and has over funded pensions. The problem is they allow developers to buy their way out of their requirement for a percentage of units to be affordable and they almost all do. So next to no affordable housing is getting built particularly in the north side. So the people who were kicked out when these places were demolished that were promised replacement housing have been waiting for years and years. The CHA waitlist is currently something like 50,000 long and it was closed in 2008 or so.

The Chicago Sun-Times is currently running a series on the Housing Authority that started with a hatchet piece on housing vouchers that immediately set off spectacular streams of racist commenting on the north side neighborhood forums. It does contain some interesting details and information beneath the tabloid treatment.
posted by srboisvert at 6:38 AM on March 21, 2016 [4 favorites]


Thanks for a good post and already really interesting comments.

When I was in architecture school, my professors were old modernists who had turned to be post-modern critics of modernism. And they would go on and on about the dullness of the (social housing) suburbs. When I grew brave enough I asked them about what they would do when they got students who had grown up out there, and had fond memories, of friendships and romance and families. Architecture is important, but life is more so and life shapes our view of our environment.
Lo and behold, when I was graduating, we were in mixed studios, and one of the freshmen came in every morning at 8, carrying a tabloid and two strong beers. He had grown up in the projects, was a bricklayer, and had taken night school classes to get into architecture school. He loved his concrete suburb and was a hard worker. Professors were completely baffled and had no idea what to do and I couldn't stop laughing and teasing them, not least because I had found all their old modernist stuff and it was rather cool.
posted by mumimor at 12:13 PM on March 21, 2016 [2 favorites]


I finally saw Ferris Bueller’s Day Off when I was 24, and I was shocked that it was lauded as a 'staple of teen comedy.'

Me too (I was around that age when it came out). I always saw it as a fantasy of what shitty suburban rich kids ("white" was a given) can get away with.
posted by aught at 1:07 PM on March 21, 2016


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