10
8
T
a
-
N
e
h
i
s
i
C
o
a
T
e
s
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One
day,
I
was
in
Chicago,
reporting a story about the his- tory of segregation in the urban North and how it w
as
engineered by government
policy.
I
was
trailing some
of
-
ficers
of the county
sheriff as
they made their rounds. That day I
saw
a black man losing his home. I followed the
sher
iff
’
s officers
inside the house, where a group of them were
talking
to the
man
’
s wife,
who
was also
trying to tend to her two
children.
She had
clearly
not been warned that the sheriff would be coming, though something in her
husband
’
s
demeanor told me he must have known. His
wife
’
s eyes r
eg
ister
ed,
all
at once, shock at the circumstance, anger at the
officers,
and anger at her husband. The offi-
cer
s
stood in the
man
’
s
living room, giving him or
der
s
as
to what would now happen. Outside there were men
who
’
d been hired to remove the
family
’
s possessions.
The
man
was humiliated,
and I imagined that he had probably for some time carried, in his head, alone, all that w
as
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B
e
T
w
e
e
N T
h
e
w
o
r
l
d
a
N
d
M
e
1
09
threatening
his family
but could not bring
himself
to admit it to
himself
or
his wife.
So he now changed
all
that energy into anger, directed at the
officers.
He cursed. He yelled. He pointed wildly. This particular
sher
iff
’
s
department
was
more progressive than most. They were concerned about
mass incarceration.
They would often bring a social worker to an
eviction.
But this had nothing to do with the underlying and
relentless
logic of the world this man in
-
habited,
a
logic
built on
laws
built on
history
built on con
-
tempt for this man and his
family
and their
f
ate
.
The man ranted on. When the
officers
turned
away,
he ranted more to the group of black men
assembled
who
’
d been hired to sit his
family
out on the
street.
His manner
was
like all the powerless black people
I
’
d
ever kno
wn,
exaggerating
their bodies to conceal a fundamental plun
-
der that they could not prevent. I had
spent
the week
exploring this cit
y
,
walking
thr
ough its vacant lots, watching the aimless boys, sitting in the
pews
of the
striving
chur
ches,
reeling
before the
street
m
u
-
rals
to the dead. And I would, from time to time, sit in the humble homes of black people in that city who were en
-
tering their tenth decade of life. These people were pr
o
-
found. Their homes were filled with the emblems of honorable
life
—
citizenship awards,
portraits of husbands and wives
passed
away,
several
generations of children in cap and gown. And they had drawn these
accolades
by cleaning big houses and living in one-room Alabama
shacks
before moving to the city. And they had done this
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11
0
T
a
-
N
e
h
i
s
i
C
o
a
T
e
s
despite
the
cit
y
,
which
was supposed
to be a r
espite
,
reveal- ing
itself
to
simply
be a more intricate specimen of plun
-
der. They had worked two and three jobs, put children through high school and college, and become
pillars
of their community. I admired them, but I knew the whole time that I
was
merely encountering the
survivors,
the ones
who
’
d endured the banks and their
stone-faced
con
-
tempt, the r
ealtor
s
and their
fake
sympathy
—“I’m
sorry, that house just sold yesterda
y”—
the r
ealtor
s
who steered them back toward ghetto
blocks,
or blocks earmarked
to
be ghettos soon, the
lender
s
who found this captive class and tried to strip them of everything they had. In those homes I
saw
the best of us, but behind each of them I knew that there were so many
millions gone
.
And I knew that there were children born into these
same
caged neighborhoods on the
Westside,
these ghettos, each of which
was as
planned
as
any
subdivision.
They are an elegant act of
racism,
killing
fields
authored by federal
policies,
where we are, all
again,
plundered of our dignity, of our
families,
of our wealth, and of our
lives.
And ther
e
is no difference between the killing of Prince
J
ones
and the mur
der
s
attending these
killing fields because
both are rooted in the
assumed
inhumanity of black people. A leg-
acy
of
plunder,
a network of
laws
and
traditions,
a heritage, a
Dream,
murdered Prince
J
ones
as sure as
it mur
der
s
black people in North Lawndale with frightening regularity.
“Black
-on-black cr
ime”
is jargon, violence to language, which vanishes the men who engineered the covenants,