Someone has characterized Oak Park as being an "overregulated Utopia." There is a lot of evidence to support that notion. Oak Parkers have a very particular vision for their community and feel entitled to enforce that vision with regulations like the one above painted on the elevated train underpass. Some might object to the "micromanagement" of everyday life in this community. On the upside, I almost never see an evidence of pigeons in Oak Park. As I regard them as "rats with wings" I think the ordinance is just fine.
This update is going to short and not really reflective of all of my activites but as I am going away for ten days, I felt that a short update was better than nothing. I was away at the American Anthropological Association meetings in San Francisco where I gave a paper OAK PARK: A STUDY OF GAY SUBURBAN INTEGRATION. The meetings were followed by the Thanksgiving holidays. In addition, I was preparing the lecture I will give at Oxford University on December 11th - SOME OAK PARK STORIES: EXPERIMENTAL VIDEO ETHNOGRAPHIES. So November was a relatively slow month for my studies.
I continued to shoot footage that I will use in three films - The Housing Center, a film about Helena McCullough and her family and a third film about Rebekah Levin and her family. I had hoped to have finished shooting material forthe Housing Center film but as I spend my Mondays as the receptionist there, my knowledge becomes deeper and deeper and I realize the complexity of the place and how it fits into a set of other institutions and village ordinances designed to maintain diversity. This increase in my knowledge caused me to see the need for additional interviews. I will be working on this film for several more months while I shoot footage for the other two films.
The "Helena" film will be a series of life histories of Helena, the 91 year old matriarch, her daughter, Katherine, and son-in-law, Robert, and their daughter, Sue. As Bob and Katherine live in one apartment in the same two-flat building that Helena lives, their lives are closely linked together. I will also explore the lives of Helena's son, Paul and his wife, Glynne. Organizing a multi-person life history that explore continunity and change in the village will be a challenge.
I have only begun to film the lives of Rebekah, Sophie and their children Ari and Ben. My intention is to explore how the everyday lives of a lesbian couple with children illuminate questions of diversity and a tolerance for difference in Oak Park.
Finally I am hoping to be able to film an Evangelical Christian family as conservatives in a avowedly liberal community, people with these religious values are strongly opposed to what the gay community regards as their civil rights. Recently the question was raised anew as the support for local Boy Scout troups was called into question becasue the Scouts discriminate against gay men. To date, I have not found a family willing to let me film them.
A final note - A recent article in the Chicago Reader, a weekly "underground" newspaper about the Housing Center foregrounded a problem I continue to face. The article was highly critical of the idea of "managed integration" as it is manifasted in the policies of the Housing Center. Many of those quoted felt their remarks were taken out of context and even misrepresented. No one associated with the Center thought the article did justice to the Center. While the author spent months "researching" the article, it was filled with inaccuracies and displayed a very superficial understanding of the complexities of intergration and how the Center tries to deal with white and black demand for rentals in Oak Park. (I will at some point write a longer piece about this situation.) I had two responses to the article. One was to again confront the difference between journalists and ethnographers. It is not uncommon for some people to confuse what I do with what journalists do and to be unwilling to talk to me because they do not trust journalists. Many journalists, even those who have a lot of time to do research, do not have the training to deal successfully with complex social issues. In addition they assume their readers want everything simplified. Ethnographers come to research with years of training and a body of knowledge about human society that equips them to unravel complex issues. Ethnographers assume they have a sophisticated audience and can therefore present a complicated situation in its complexity. Most journalists who try to deal with Oak Park's complex attempts to remain integrated often do a disservice to the community and make my work harder. There is an exception this statement. One of the two weekly Oak Park papers is doing a good job dealing with diversity questions.
Too bad the Reader journalist did spend some time with them. To make matters worse an Oak Park reporter who works for a local web newspaper borrowed the Reader article and without doing any investigation himself, assumed that the inaccurate position expressed by the Reader article was completely true. His reversioning made the Housing Center into a real villan if not a racist organization.
Is it any wonder that some
of us are not willing to even talk to journalists? In my usual
impolitic way, I told the two journalists what I thought of their
shoddy work. I did so not as a partisian of the Housing Center
but as someone trying to figure out what is happening in Oak Park.
I view their misrepresentations as making my work harder. I'm
certain some will misunderstand my actions as being "biased"
or "not objective." Since my notions of reflexive ethnography
are not well understood, I will, at some point, have to write
about why I think that "objectivity" is a dangerous
myth and that researchers must openly position themselves in relation
to the people they study. But that, as they say, is another story...
Few communities have achieved
the level of ethnic integration that is found in Oak Park. As
a consequence, a complicated question, with no easy answer, can
be asked. Do African-Americans and Euro-Americans have to equally
participate in public events, eat in the same restaurants, shop
in the same shops in order to consider Oak Park a success? If
I go some place and there are less then 30 percent of the people
African-American does that mean that Oak Park in not truly integrated?
Why are all the high school cheerleaders black and the "pom
pom" girls mainly white? Why do some sports attract certain
ethnicities more than others? The list is endless. It has been
my experience as an older upper middle-class educated white male
that the places I go to I seldom see many African-Americans and
with the exception of the YMCA? Is this the result of cultural
and class taste differences or what? Is there something about
the food at the restaurants I eat in, the food stores I frequent
or the products available at the Farmers' Market that appeal more
to my culture than to that of black Oak Parkers? Certainly.
When I sit by the doughnut stand drinking coffee listening to
the pickers play their guitars, banjos and fiddles, they are playing
mainstream Anglo-American folk music. Who else would they attract
but people like me? Is that a bad thing for the community? Do
African-Americans have sufficient goods and services and events
designed to appeal to their cultural tastes so that Oak Park truly
has a "separate but equal" situation. Some Oak Parkers
think not. Exploring this situation logically leads us to a larger
question - class differences. Oak Park has been for most of its
existence a community designed for people with upper middle-class
Euro-American tastes and income. Are the African-Americans I
do see more likely to be affluent and middle-class and those I
do not see from the lower socio-economic classes? These are more
rhetorical questions than ones that have easy answers but there
are questions Oak Parkers must face if they wish to retain the
diversity that the result Village Survey suggests they see as
an essential aspect of the identity of this community.