No Stars Upon Thars
by Lani T. Montreal

There’s a highway that cuts through the city like a stab wound, separating races, the haves and have-nots, and despite (or because of) widespread gentrification, the gash lives and festers inside Chicagoans wherever they go, breeding animosity and distrust.

The 509th Chicago public school student killed in the last 17 months died a block from our place. We live in a mixed income, mixed ethnic neighborhood where carniceria groceries exist benignly along Lawrence Avenue with Filipino turo-turo restaurants, Korean department stores and halal butcher shops. And proudly so, because if you should know anything about Chicago at all, it is that it’s deemed one of the most segregated cities in the US. There’s a highway that cuts through the city like a stab wound, separating races, the haves and have-nots, and despite (or because of) widespread gentrification, the gash lives and festers inside Chicagoans wherever they go, breeding animosity and distrust.

In our neighborhood, nothing much exciting happens, but lately there have been writings on the walls, cops cuffing teens in broad daylight, and For Sale signs popping up like weeds in front lawns.

His name was Franco, 17, a 10th grader at Roosevelt High School, shot March 10, at 7:50 p.m. Sometimes, we walk Ringo around that time. Sometimes, we come home from work that time, perhaps look for parking right by his house, where a vase of 12 red roses is now propped against a scraggly bush showing early greens. But that night we were having dinner with a friend when the gunfire rang out, six successive shots, and we stopped for a moment and looked at each other. “What?” said P, our guest. “What?” said C, our foster son. “Did someone just get shot?” asked the six-year-old street veteran, and we said, maybe, and hurried his dinner so he could go to bed and I could read him the Sneetches by Dr Seuss, where the Sneetches with stars on their bellies walked on the beaches with their chins up, looking down upon Sneetches with no stars upon thars.

Concerned emails flew back and forth condo unit owners. The 27th CPS student is gunned down this schoolyear, while we worry about property value going down and not getting refinanced again.
 
A description of the shooter was not immediately available, the cops interviewed in The Sun said. He might have been the same age. Might have had a Facebook like Franco did. Might have been one of the hoodied boys that stand on the corner of the street or play street hockey in the alley in the summertime. Might have seen Soprano, Scarface or the Wire like we had.

Yes, The Wire. The HBO show so captivating we saw all episodes of one season in one weekend. It had all the elements of a good gangster series—charismatic cops, corrupt suits, shootings, ruthless gang leaders, vacillating foot soldiers, a hot, tough-talking lesbian detective—oh wait—that's actually the new angle—a beautiful no-nonsense African-American dyke detective paralleled by a gay, honor-bound gang leader, with love interests to boot.

The dialogue is crisp, almost enchanting, but at times draining, contrived, or too clever like in Will & Grace, where everyone has a wise crack and punchlines are a dime a dozen.(Like anybody really talks like that.) In The Wire, cops and gangsters share a vernacular that makes for a somewhat intimate relationship. In one episode a white cop named Prezbylewski was reassigned to listening and recording telephone conversations between suspected gangsters (hence The Wire). This is his slap on the wrist for blinding a defiant yet unarmed black youth with the butt of his .45. While on the job, the cop heard Wallace, a disillusioned 16-year-old gang member, talking to his friends from his grandma's house in the country. He was saying how misses "the game” and how he doesn’t make a “good country n-.” Wallace left the projects totally traumatized by the sight of the mangled body of a rival gang member he had fingered.

Prezbylewski smiled as he listened and jotted "irrelevant" on the log. Wallace eventually hitchhiked his way back home only to be shot by friends he'd known since he was little.

The Wire made me think about my students in two of the City Colleges where I have taught. Majority of those who go to the city colleges of Chicago come from public high schools. Inner-city youth is what they call them—mostly black, mostly Latino. It makes me think now about Franco. Franco’s stepfather said the boy had expressed his desire to leave the gang, but he didn’t stand a chance.

We started talking about oppression as something that goes beyond someone pissing someone off because he had his Ipod on too loud while on the train.

Once, when we were discussing the series on the way to work, I told L, my partner, how I wish they would show not just the cops and the gangsters, but the lives of those caught in the crossfire. But then again, I wonder if it truly mattered. How many times have my students talked/written about an uncle, brother, sister, mother who's either a user or a dealer, about an absentee father who died from an overdose, the lines between victim and perpetrator constantly crossed and blurred… Just the other day, my student M made a presentation on the book My Bloody Life about the Latin King gangsters and shared the story of how she had seen her own boyfriend get shot and die in the playground. She is only 19. Talk about genocide, one neighborhood at a time.

But I have hope that things will change, and not just because a black man has just been elected President of the United States.
Yesterday, my students and I discussed Martin Luther King’s essay “The Ways of Meeting Oppression,” and we had a breakthrough. Or I think we did. We started talking about oppression as something that goes beyond someone pissing someone off because he had his Ipod on too loud while on the train.

Bound, said D. Held back, S said. Because of who we are, K added. Yes! I thought. And what do you think makes us who we are? Where we come from, J said. Our color. Our family. Our accents. Who we know. Who we love… In that space and time my students and I belonged to each other. We shared an understanding of a word we had experienced in different yet similar ways.

I tell L how I challenge myself all the time when I walk the streets, remind myself that this black or Latino teen that's making me feel a little more cautious could very well be my student or nephew. One time, my students told me how they saw me walking Ringo in the neighborhood. I asked them, "How come you didn't say Hi?" But they said that I just looked past them and hurried on.

Outside the classroom we are lost to each other. Just Sneetches with stars and no stars upon thars, crossing paths created for us by the greedy McBeans.

I thought about the power of media, how its portrayals of black and Latino youth have embedded themselves in the American psyche—and of course the psyches of the rest of the Americanized world, including my own colonized people, Filipinos. Seriously, if not for JLo and Marc Anthony, my family would have dismissed my Puerto Rican spouse as another Tony Montano wanna-be. Never mind that he’s not the same kind of Latino. (Meanwhile, Pacino is not even Cuban.)

At Malcolm X College, where majority of students are African-American, I have students who get profiled on a weekly basis, their cheeks grown intimate with the cold metal of the cop car’s hood, have lost loved-ones from drive-by shootings, walk daily through streets planked by hookers and dealers. It IS a big deal for them just to get to school each day in one piece, and so I feel very honored to be their teacher—to challenge the way they think, in the same way that they challenge me to see them beyond the stereotypes they are portrayed to be. They urge me to see my own privilege as an educator, to be aware of my own prejudices, to never stop questioning and struggling against the system that sustains my alienation from them and their alienation from me.

EDITOR'S NOTE: The above essay first appeared in the Sunday Philippine Inquirer, May 24, 2009 and reprinted with permission from the author.

© Lani T. Montreal

top | about the author