I have spent my entire life in Evanston, Illinois. Bordering Chicago to the north, this city of approximately 74,000 is home to Northwestern University, fantastic beaches, and the largest high school under one roof in the country. Growing up in Evanston, the term “diversity” was thrown around often as a distinguishing and celebratory characteristic of the city. Residents love to promote the diversity of their town both in personal interactions with outsiders and through established institutions like the public education system. Evanston’s proclaimed diversity is widely celebrated and often referred to as a deciding factor for people moving here. Especially considering the increasingly less diverse North Shore suburbs to the north. Evanston’s diversity is a wonderful aspect of the city on the surface, but upon further examination and analysis of what is really going on in Evanston, there are deep rooted issues surrounding segregation, diversity, and race.
Evanston is 65% White. It is 18% Black, 9% Latino, 8% Asian, 3% two or more races and 3% “some other race”. On the surface, Evanston is one of the most diverse cities in the greater Chicagoland area. Northern suburbs like Wilmette, Winnetka, and Northbrook have White populations that soar above 85% and a Black population below 1% (in the case of Winnetka, the Black population does not even qualify as that). Relatively speaking, Evanston is diverse. Statistics like these are helpful in understanding the surrounding communities and are what residents use to back up their arguments that their own community is exceptionally diverse.
Growing up, this diversity was evident in public education but not particularly in the physical layout of the city. My interest in this issue was brought up again when we read The Case for Reparations and Evanston showed up on the interactive census map. This is what it looked like:
Blue (and its increasingly darker shades) represents the White population while red represents the Black population. As you can see, there is an obvious separation by race in terms of neighborhoods. Evanston residents are the first to tell you how diverse their city is, but how diverse can a city be if Black people are separated almost entirely from White people into the city’s 5th ward, while White people take up quite literally the rest of the city?
Evanstonians proclaiming diversity in an obviously segregated community can be seen as an example of implicit racism, similar to the argument for colorblindness as a tool to fix racial and social issues. If residents proclaim that their city is diverse and have data (demographics) to backup their claims, they will turn a blind eye to the true problem of segregation because in their eyes, there is no problem and there is statistical evidence year after year to prove that there is no racial bias or segregation in Evanston. This leads to the issue never coming to the public’s attention as a pressing social issue when in reality, it is. It is then never dealt with and the implicit racial bias and segregation are reinforced as the years go on. Are members of the Evanston community actively trying to segregate Black people into one specific area of the city? No, but it has happened anyway and the excuse of proclaimed diversity hides this issue extremely well.
Implicit segregation is observable from a macro-perspective, focusing on Evanston as a whole, but it is also evident on a smaller scale. The implicit segregation hiding behind the facade of proclaimed diversity is evident at Evanston Township High School. Of the approximate 3,300 students, 43.3% identify as White, while 30.4% identify as Black. Once again, these demographics look exceedingly impressive on paper (especially compared to New Trier High School to the North with 85.1% identifying as White while 0.6% identify as Black). After attending ETHS for all four years of high school, I can say that the overall demographics are not representative of the educational experience. Classes are divided into regular, honors, and AP courses. There are a disproportionate number of White students in the AP and honors courses, further emphasizing the segregation within a seemingly diverse system. This has led to the administration adopting an “earned-honors” system in order to better integrate the classes. Classes now are a much more diverse mix of students who then have to take optional and additional exams to earn honors credit. The earned-honors system is a step in the right direction and by acting on it, the ETHS administration validates the legitimacy of the problem in the community surrounding diversity and segregation. The small-scale segregation in the classroom is indicative of the larger problem. Fixing the diversity problem in Evanston starts with being aware that there is a problem and not simply defending the current status of the city with its demographics.
References
Population Information and Statistics From Every City, State and County in the US.
(n.d.). Retrieved March 19, 2017, from https://suburbanstats.org/
Coates, T. (2015, September 15). The Case for Reparations. Retrieved March 17, 2017, from
EVANSTON TWP HIGH SCHOOL (9-12) EVANSTON TWP HSD 202. (n.d.). Retrieved
March 19, 2017, from https://illinoisreportcard.com/school.aspx?source=studentcharacte
Evanston reminds me a lot of a city north of Indianapolis, Carmel Indiana. Carmel has an extremely disproportionate white population in comparison to Indianapolis which is a direct result of "white flight" and urban sprawl which brought people with money, mostly white upper class families, into the suburbs above the city limits. I see a lot of similarities between Evanston and Carmel, notably with education. There are public schools in inner city Indianapolis that are nowhere near the academic status of public schools in Carmel. From my experience, Carmel families say that they live in Carmel because the education is better, which is true, but families who cannot afford to uproot and move to a wealthy white area to attend a school, for the same price (free) as their inner city schools, suffer from an inadequate education which contributes to the cycle of poverty that exists in the city.
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