I am applying for a fellowship to support one phase of a long term ethnohistorical and ethnographic study of a middle-class Chicago suburb, Oak Park, Illinois. I wish to understand the social and economic cost of maintaining stability in a community where ethnic (racial) integration was planned and diversity sought after. I believe the results will have consequences that range from the personal to the professional and potentially the global. Let me explain. This is a study of my hometown. It will allow me to enhance my understanding of my own life in a unique way. Instead of producing a conventional autobiography in which I rely completely upon my own recollections, I will have at my disposal ethnographic insights together with the perceptions of those interviewed to challenge and broaden my own remembrances. I am therefore able to combine the autobiographical with the historical and ethnographic. This exploration of the personal and the professional will in turn offer the opportunity to examine the limits and benefits of reflexive ethnography. As both native and ethnohistorian/ ethnographer, I am positioned to investigate the relationship between knowledge gained ethnographically and the producer of that knowledge. Framed another way, one question to be explored is - do the advantages of my intimate knowledge of this community and my cultural competence outweigh the difficulties experienced in trying to get sufficient distance to produce a credible ethnography and ethnohistory?
I am concerned with giving the community under study a chance
to actively participate in the construction of this ethnohistory
and ethnography and to have access to and critique the results.
I have established an email listserv and a web page where I will
place progress reports (http://astro.ocis.temple.edu/~ruby/opp/).
I wish to activate a dialogue among community members as well
as with me that will continue after the research is completed.
I am committed to a long term relationship with the community.
Many Oak Park residents are convinced that their social experiment
in diversity can only succeed if there is a continual discussion
about how to maintain that diversity. Some believe that the moment
they stop working on this experiment the community will begin
to resegregate. I hope to assist their already existing dialogue
with this study. I plan to publish my findings in both written
and video form - accessible to anyone interested. In addition
to popular and professional written publications, digital 8mm
videos that cost next to nothing to make and little to disseminate
will be produced.
The study will provide a rare example of "studying sideways."
Social scientists have tended to study people from the lower socio-cultural
classes - people often with little political or economic power;
people who live in communities that exhibit serious social pathologies
like high crime, drug abuse and unemployment. Even studies of
middle-class suburbs often concentrate on problems like sprawl.
While anthropologist Laura Nader's admonition to "study up"
has resulted in some studies of the power elite, almost no one
has produced an ethnohistory or ethnography of an apparently successful
community populated primarily by advantaged upper middle-class
college educated people. The proposed site of this study, Oak
Park, is dominated by these people and is regarded as one of the
most successfully integrated and stably diverse places in the
U.S. In short, I will be examining my own world and my own people
and trying to understand why the community appears to be working
as well as it does.
While the personal and the professional consequences of the study
are important, I believe the knowledge I gain will be useful for
people elsewhere. Living in harmony in diverse communities may
be one of the most pressing problems humanity faces in the twenty-first
century. We live in a time when the comfort of only living with
people like ourselves is over. We must overcome our natural inclination
to surround ourselves with people who share our ethnic, religious,
and socio-economic identity. We no longer have the luxury of living
in homogenous societies. Catholics must learn to live with Jews
and Protestants and Muslims, the rich with the poor and Europeans
with people of color. We must learn to live with difference or,
as we have seen in the tragedy of Yugoslavia, we will destroy
ourselves. We need examples of communities that have sought and
maintained diversity as examples for others to follow. The goal
of my study of Oak Park is to provide insight into a community
that has been able to maintain itself as a stable and diverse
place - a community devoted to the social experiment of tolerating
difference. An understanding of how this community has succeeded
in accommodating people of various religions, ethnicities (races),
sexual orientations and socio-economic levels can give us insight
into how others might accomplish this essential task. Employing
the methods of ethnohistorical research and participant-observation
during an extended period of residence in the community, I will
produce documents comprehensible to the lay public, community
organizers, as well as scholars.
The historical and cultural changes that are the focus of the
study have occurred over the past forty years. They are profound
and far reaching. Using 1963 as a baseline, a contrastive study
of "old" and "new" Oak Park will be undertaken.
"Old" Oak Park was a homogenous and conservative "dry"
community where Protestant and affluent Euro-Americans dominated
and were intolerant of difference. Residents worked hard to ignore
the Frank Lloyd Wright houses, and the fact that Ernest Hemingway
was born there because the moral fiber of those two individuals
was in doubt. The "New" Oak Park is internationally
known for its success in deliberate stable integration. Today
it has a significant minority population (18.0 per cent African
Americans and 7.2 per cent other ethnicities), a highly visible
and politically active gay/lesbian population (a domestic partnership
initiative was passed in 1997 and the village has a trustee who
was the first lesbian elected to office in Illinois) and restaurants
that offer alcohol. During the 1970s, a portion of the northern
half of the village was declared a national historical district
because of the large number of Wright houses. A tour of the Wright
designed houses has become one of Chicago's primary tourist attractions.
Hemingway is now touted as the village's most prominent son. The
tale of Dr. Percy Julian, an African American and world renowned
research chemist, further illuminates the profundity of the transformation.
In the early 1950s when the Julians bought a house in Oak Park,
it was firebombed. Today there is a public school named after
him.
Oak Park has become a model of a diverse and tolerant community
where many residences are actively engaged in maintaining this
character. It appears to be a kind of place that many people aspire
to live in. The community was able to stem the tide of "white"
flight and black ghettoization that moved westward in Chicago
to create economic and social havoc as close as the neighborhood
of Austin, their Chicago neighbor on the eastern boundary. Can
we learn something from Oak Park that will ease the ethnic and
religious tensions that appear to be worsening through time? Can
Oak Park serve as a model of the tolerance and heterogeneity that
other communities can use? I believe so.
The focus of the study is upon the social and economic costs of
maintaining diversity. It can be divided into two main areas of
inquiry: 1. an ethnohistory of the development of integration
and creation of diversity, and 2. an ethnography of the contemporary
situation. If awarded, the fellowship will be used for the ethnohistorical
study - an essential precursor to the ethnographic phase of the
study. Funds are being sought elsewhere for the contemporary study.
Using 1963 as the starting point - the year the Oak Park Commission
on Human Rights was created, the ethnohistorical study will focus
mainly upon the decade ending in 1973. During this period the
Commission was instrumental in causing Oak Park to pass a Fair
Housing ordinance prior to the federal law. In addition, the Commission
was able to persuade, with the assistance of the village government,
the local realtors to be cooperative and assist in the constructive
integration of the housing market. By 1973 when the Commission
dissolved itself, the housing market was being positively integrated
and the Oak Park Housing Center was created to deal with the much
more difficult apartment rental situation. Oak Park's housing
is fifty per cent rental units. A quarter of a century later the
Housing Center continues to be a major factor in maintaining diversity
and will be a major focus of the ethnographic phase of this study.
Ethnohistory combines the methods of historical research with
that of the ethnographer who conducts interviews with participants
of recent historical events. During the period of the fellowship
I will: 1. conduct interviews with the people who participated
in the Commission, Housing Center and other related activities
as well as the realtors who at first resisted changes and later
became active in positively integrating Oak Park; 2. I will examine
the relevant resources at the Historical Society, village hall,
local library, newspapers, the private archives of the participants
in this period as well as the unpublished materials compiled by
local avocational historians; and 3. I will seek information that
will allow me to compare what happened in Oak Park with other
Chicago communities that did not successfully integrate but instead
resegregated in only a few years. The result of this phase of
my study will be an in-depth ethnohistorical analysis of a decade
of rapid social and economic changes in Oak Park. This study will
be complete and useful in its own right. It will also provide
an essential background to my proposed ethnographic study of the
contemporary situation.
My plan for this study is as follows:
1. I started preliminary work last March when I went to Oak Park for ten days and then again for the months of June and July. During that time I conducted some preliminary interviews and established my presence in the community as a researcher. I was able to gauge the breadth of the historical resources and compile a list of people involved in efforts to integrate who must be interviewed. I contacted several of them and conducted some preliminary interviews.
2. From September, 1999 to May, 2000, I will create a web page and email listserv and begin internet conversations with some Oak Parkers about the study. I will review relevant literature and write grant proposals to support the ethnographic study.
3. With the fellowship and other funds already secured, I will be able to return to Oak Park for the summer and fall semester, 2000 to do the historical research and conduct interviews. Ideally I will obtain other funds to permit me to stay in Oak Park for a full academic year to conduct ethnographic studies.
4. I assume that once the fieldwork is
completed I will return to my full time university responsibilities
and write and edit the study over the next academic year.