The South Side of Chicago has long been considered among many the unofficial capital of Black America, the estuary into which the many rivers of the Great Migration flowed. That’s a big reason an itinerant young community organizer named Barack Obama was so drawn to the South Side in the mid-1980s, when he was trying to help make sense of his own identity and his relationship to Blackness. It’s the place he famously got his first humbling practical political education, where met his wife, where he put down roots. It was always the most obvious site for his future presidential library.
And now it’s almost here: the $850-million Obama Presidential Center is set to officially open this month. But almost from the moment the Obamas announced that they were going to build the library in Jackson Park, many residents of the South Side have been up in arms. There was pushback and lawsuits from folks angry that the library would gobble up dozens of acres of accessible, landscaped public parks and open them to further private development. There were the many Black and brown organizers and neighbors on the South Side who worried that the library would supercharge the soaring housing costs in the area and lead to more people getting pushed out. The Obama Foundation maintained that building the center there would be a net good – bringing visitors to businesses in the area and spurring new investment. In many ways, it’s the classic gentrification script, only in this case, the big, land-grabby actor was the first black President of The United States.
Kamil Krzaczynski/AFP via Getty Images
But the rancor around the Obama Center seems oddly fitting to me, as it underlined so many of the central and unspoken fissures in Black life and politics from the Obama era — namely, the distance between the affective Black aspiration that he and his family came to personify and the very different material conditions that Black folks without much institutional power were experiencing at the same time. “The most profound changes in Black life in the past several decades have been along the lines of class and status, creating political and social chasms between élites and ordinary Black people,” the historian Keeanga Yamahtta Taylor wrote for The New Yorker back in 2022. (The South Side has been emblematic in this way, too, — with a sizable Black bourgeoisie living near Black enclaves where the poverty rate is often north of 50 percent.)
But the fact that Obama’s presidential library, museum and learning center is likely to become a site of pilgrimage for the Huxtable set and Democrats more broadly — while also serving as a catalyst for the displacement of poor and working Black folks on the South Side — are deep tensions, ones that can’t be papered over with callbacks and invocations to the ascendant #representationmatters vibes of a decade ago.
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ON THE POD
Hundreds of thousands of people came to the U.S. as small children — it’s the only home they’ve ever known. And even though they weren’t citizens, many received special protections so they could keep living and working in the country. Today, those now-grown people find themselves in legal limbo, as the Trump administration tightens the screws on those protections, effectively pausing their professional and personal lives while putting them at real risk of deportation.
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