2 Race, Class, and Residence in the Chicago Ummah Ethnic Muslim Spaces and American Muslim Discourses The racial landscape of a city influences how close American Muslims have come to fulfilling the ummah ideals there. When I arrived in Chicago in the spring of 2002 to research Muslims in the city, two things stood out. One was the city’s diversity. Chicago was a nexus of global flows. Filled with people from all over the world—Bosnians, Mexicans, Nigerians, and Vietnamese—Chicago fit my idea of a global village. But alongside these global flows were major inequalities, particularly in the racially segregated housing, the second thing that stood out. Indeed, Chicago has always been known for its racist residential patterns and ethnic neighborhoods. “Germans settled on the North Side, Irish on the South Side, Jews on the West Side, Bohemians and Poles on the Near Southwest Side.”1 In the nineteenth century, European immigrants carved out ethnic lines across the city which, with the rise of black migration to Chicago in the 1920s, soon had viciously racist and economically devastating consequences. Fear and widespread propaganda created large-scale white resistance to African Americans. As whites maneuvered to keep blacks out of their neighborhoods and fled from the ones where blacks did settle, African Americans were confined to and concentrated in the South Side’s Black Belt. Business owners then moved from this expanding black area and invested their resources and profits elsewhere. As the community’s resources declined and the population grew, neighborhoods in the Black Belt steadily turned into overcrowded slums.2 Outside the South Side’s Black Belt, a flourishing metropolis took form, setting the stage for Chicago to become a major international city. If Chicago resembles a global village, it has done so at the expense of blacks and through the political will of the late Mayor Richard J. Daley (1955–1976). Committed to racial segregation, Daley “preserved the city’s white neighborhoods and business district by building” highways and housing that acted as “a barrier between white neighborhoods and the black ghetto.” Daley is remembered especially for authorizing the construction of towering high-rise projects to contain thousands of African Americans in a small, restricted space. His most tragic enterprise was building the Robert Taylor Homes in the late 1950s, a collection of high-rises once described as a “public aid penitentiary.”3 Today, 78 percent of African Americans in Chicago continue to live in majority-black communities, most of them on the South Side of Chicago.4 Although majority black usually means more than 50 percent, most of these areas are more than 90 percent black. South-Side African American neighborhoods disproportionately rank among the city’s lowest per-capita income areas, along with the majority-black and majority-Latino communities on the West Side. Middle-class African Americans also live in majority-black neighborhoods on the South Side, in middle-income communities like Calumet Heights and Avalon Park, and in majority-black neighborhoods in the south suburbs like Hazel Crest and Markham.5 Racial discrimination continues to determine where many African Americans live, no matter what their income is. Instead of moving out of black inner-city areas and integrating into majority-white neighborhoods, upwardly mobile African Americans tend to move along the periphery of historically black areas. This means that many African Americans with incomes as high as $60,000 do not live far Copyright © 2009. NYU Press. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or applicable copyright law. from African Americans living in poverty.6 EBSCO Publishing : eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 8/13/2020 10:35 AM via UNIV OF NEBRASKA AT OMAHA AN: 1020876 ; Karim, Jamillah Ashira.; American Muslim Women : Negotiating Race, Class, and Gender Within the Ummah 40 Account: omaha The residential patterns of South Asians in Chicago are strikingly different. Most of Chicago’s South Asians live north of the city, where African Americans are less likely to settle. In addition, South Asians tend not to live in ethnic enclaves but in predominantly white, affluent areas in the north and northwest suburbs, with some also in ethnically mixed areas on the North Side. On the North Side, a large population of South Asians live around Devon, the avenue through a South Asian ethnic enclave and commercial district. But only 4.3 percent of the city’s Indian population lives in the areas bordering Devon Avenue. A larger number, though still a minority, of the city’s Pakistani (21.4 percent) and Bangladeshi (20.3 percent) immigrants live near Devon. Devon did not become a residential ethnic enclave until the late 1980s and 1990s, with the influx of immigrants who were less wealthy and less educated than the professionals in the first wave of Asian immigrants after 1965.7 An increasingly larger percentage of the South Asian population was unable to move into the white suburbs. However, they live in or near neighborhoods with good resources. For example, West Ridge, the area through which Devon Avenue runs, is a middle-class community (50 percent Hispanic, 22 percent Asian, 19 percent white, and 7 percent black) with a median income of $41,000.8 These residential patterns demonstrate that in Chicago, even African Americans and South Asian immigrants in the same income bracket tend to live separately. Although 19 percent of the city’s Indians and 29 percent of its African American population live below the poverty line (compared with 8 percent of whites), according to one report,9 poor Indians generally live on the North Side of Chicago and African Americans on the South Side. And the two ethnic middle classes tend to live even farther from each other, South Asians in the north and northwest suburbs and African Americans in the south and southwest suburbs, with some exceptions. This difference in residential options means that the South Asian middle class is more privileged. South Asians enjoy the advantages of living in white suburbs, where home values and schools often are comparably better than those in majority-black suburbs. It is in this metropolitan landscape, one marked by both the inequalities of racial segregation and the possibilities of an increasingly diverse urban population, that the Muslim community in Chicago has taken form. Racial segregation affects the extent to which the Chicago ummah—or Chicago’s network of Muslim spaces—functions as a site of interethnic solidarity. For the most part, American Muslims respond to power structures in Chicago by accepting them. The Chicago ummah assumes an ethnic geography mirroring the broader society, one in which the majority of South Asian immigrants live north of the city and African Americans live in the south. Its racial residential patterns, therefore, situate African American and South Asian Muslims in distinct and separate spaces in Chicago, which means that the Muslim spaces in which Muslims live, worship, and establish community are racially segregated. I refer to these spaces in which the two ethnic groups tend to segregate as ethnic Muslim spaces. Using the term ethnic Muslim space is not meant to imply that these spaces reflect one ethnic group exclusively. In subsequent chapters, we see that Muslims cross ethnic boundaries; therefore, these spaces indicate some level of diversity, even if small. Ethnic space nonetheless refers to space in which one ethnic group dominates. For example, African American mosques tend to be almost exclusively African American (90 percent or more), whereas South Asian Muslim spaces are more likely to include other ethnic groups, mainly other Muslim immigrants. I account for the fact that some South Asian Muslim spaces include substantial Arab populations by referring to them as immigrant spaces. Although a space shared by different Muslim immigrants is not the same as a South Asian space, African American Muslims often view, encounter, and characterize South Asians in spaces shared by various Muslim immigrants. In other words, these mixed immigrant spaces inform their notions and generalizations about South Asians. Although some African American Muslims do differentiate South Asians from Arabs, most lump them all together as immigrants. Copyright © 2009. NYU Press. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or applicable copyright law. This idea of ethnic Muslim spaces is apparent in one woman’s description of the Chicago ummah. EBSCO Publishing : eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 8/13/2020 10:35 AM via UNIV OF NEBRASKA AT OMAHA AN: 1020876 ; Karim, Jamillah Ashira.; American Muslim Women : Negotiating Race, Class, and Gender Within the Ummah 41 Account: omaha During the weekend of July 4, 2002, I attended the annual “Islam in America” conference held that year in Chicago by the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA). Seeking perspectives on the Chicago ummah, I talked to the handful of African American women attending the predominantly immigrant conference, and I asked Noni, an African American woman in her late twenties, to tell me about the Muslim community in Chicago: The community here in Chicago is very segregated. That has a lot to do with the fact that Chicago is one of the most segregated cities in the United States. In the South Side of Chicago, the majority of Muslims are African American. Going towards Midway Avenue, there is a south suburb called Bridgeview with mostly Palestinians. On the North Side, you find various nationalities, but everyone stays in their own individual precinct. For example, there is the Muslim Community Center [MCC], which is supposed to be a center for all Muslims, but the people who run it are Pakistani, and most of the people who go there are Pakistani.