Don't Go

Starred review from October 7, 2024
Visual artist Johnson and sociologist Krysan (Cycle of Segregation) deliver an eye-opening compilation of interviews they conducted with Chicago residents who disregarded frequently heard advice to avoid the city’s predominantly Black and Hispanic neighborhoods on the South and West sides. Many interviewees are white residents of the North Side and near suburbs who describe coming to the painful realization that the concern for “safety” that had imbued such advice, which usually came from relatives and friends, was motivated by racism; others are transplants to the city, who were similarly advised not to stray into supposedly “violent” neighborhoods and were then bemused to discover them to be perfectly pleasant. These firsthand accounts provide a fascinating window into the bizarre emotionality of racism: one white interviewee reports her relatives going into near-apoplectic fits of hysteria when they found out she had gotten off the highway one stop too early on her way to Beverly, an all-white South Side enclave; another white respondent describes her queasy apprehension as she forced herself out of her comfort zone, inculcated by racist parents, and took her kids to an outdoor play date on the South Side. Elsewhere, a Black interviewee recollects how a “heat map” of gun violence was used by a potential white roommate as an almost talismanic tool for derailing any conversation about renting an apartment on the South Side. It’s a deeply revealing examination of the psyche of a city.