It’s been hard to pay attention to the national news lately. When I do, I am tempted to feel powerless and hopeless about the divisiveness and animosity that seems to be consuming our country. But I don’t want to respond by burying my head in the sand. I want to take in content that helps me feel hopeful about the future and generous toward others.

Then I got my hands on a book that reminded me that staying hopeful requires seeking out stories of positive change on the policy and individual levels.

The book is Tonika Lewis Johnson’s and Maria Krysan’s Don’t Go: Stories of Segregation and How to Disrupt It . Readers of Just Action might remember Johnson (pictured above), a social justice artist who uses art to highlight and challenge segregation in Chicago. She created the Folded Map Project and photographed “map twin” homes, those with the same numbers on the north and south ends of the same street, one in the predominantly white, North Side neighborhood of Edgewater and one in the predominantly black, South Side neighborhood of Englewood. She introduced the residents of the map twin homes to each other and invited them to get to know each other and their respective neighborhoods. Many of the map twins had never been to the other side of town, let alone had a personal relationship with someone who lives there.

In 2019, Johnson presented to incoming Northwestern University students about the Folded Map Project. She asked the attendees to raise their hands if they were new to Chicago. Most did. She then asked if they had been told not go to the city’s South Side. Again, most hands went up. This is one way segregation is perpetrated, she told them.

A social media post about this presentation got the attention of a Chicago Tribune contributor who then wrote about it in a column that went viral. Readers responded with their own stories of being told “don’t go.” Johnson set up an email account to receive the stories; over 70 poured in over the first few days.

She then teamed up with Krysan, a sociology professor at the University of Illinois/Chicago. The bulk of Don’t Go is the personal stories of 24 people Johnson and Krysan interviewed together. They tell the story of how Chicago’s segregation is maintained through implicit and explicit messages that the city’s majority-black South and West Side neighborhoods are dangerous places non-black residents should stay away from at all costs.

They explain, “’Don’t Go’ is a generational problem – often people say ‘Don’t Go’ because their parents or grandparents said it to them. And so often, those parents and grandparents said ‘Don’t Go’ because someone told them the same.… Fun Fact: Most people who say ‘Don’t Go’ have never gone.”

Several of the interviewees grew up in the South or West Sides. Their stories show the impacts these messages have on those who live in “Don’t Go” areas, who are told by teachers, classmates, and co-workers that nothing good comes out of their neighborhoods. Zachary (the authors refer to interviewees by first names only), who grew up in Morgan Park, on the South Side, explains:

“…calling places trash, and all of the other warnings people toss out about places like where I grew up, hurts the places because it deters other people from going there, and from spending their money there, and hurts the people who live there who are dehumanized because these warnings and stuff deter us from seeing that real people actually live in these communities. That might be the most important part. When you forget that people – real people – live in these places.”

The “Don’t Go” messages aren’t unique to Chicago. Readers from any urban area likely have heard similar messages. What’s unique about the stories in Don’t Go is that storytellers defied these messages and went anyway.

Some did so initially because they wanted to find out for themselves if the messages were true, some got lost on the “bad” side of town and were surprised to find that nothing bad happened, some ended up in “Don’t Go” neighborhoods for work or school and realized the areas weren’t at all what they were told to expect from those “Don’t Go” messages.

Soren, a white student raised in a Detroit suburb, was a freshman at the Illinois Institute of Technology on Chicago’s South Side, and was told by school security and others not to venture into the neighborhoods surrounding it. He didn’t listen and went exploring anyway.

“Over time,” he said, “following trip after trip where nothing bad happened, my perspective started to change. I would be working on my homework or ordering a drink and I would overhear people talking about a garden they were working on or getting their kid into a good school. I remember thinking,

‘Oh, they’re just regular people. This is just a neighborhood.’”

The people sharing their stories in this book are not activists, they didn’t defy the “Don’t Go” messages to make a political point. They were or became social workers, small business owners, engineers, educators, artists, piano repairmen, and others. They went where they were warned not to, or lived in those areas and challenged the messages they heard about their neighborhoods, and then became messengers among their families and social circles about why “Don’t Go” should be questioned.

Don’t Go reminds us that there are disrupters out there, going about their lives, defying these narratives and in so doing, creating new stories that challenge rather than reinforce divisions.

Johnson writes, in describing her motivation for the Folded Map Project (and which also applies to Don’t Go), “Laws and policies are important, but if we really want to disrupt segregation, we have to get to know each other. I wanted all of us to realize what we have in common and become curious about our differences – I want us to care about each other.”

Among all the messages we hear these days telling us that we are a hopelessly divided country where everyone only cares about their own, it’s more important than ever to challenge that narrative, to hear about people, actions, and policies that seek to connect rather than divide, and to remind ourselves that the dominant narrative doesn’t have to be the only one. Don’t Go is a great place to start.

Leah Rothstein is an affordable housing consultant in the San Francisco Bay Area. This is a lightly edited version of a posting that originally appeared on December 23rd, 2024 in Just Action, a Substack authored by her and her father, Richard Rothstein, and is republished here with their permission. They are also the authors of the book Just Action: How to Challenge Segregation Enacted Under the Color of Law.

  #BreakingBarriers, #ChallengeStereotypes, #Chicago, #Community, #DismantlingDivision, #DisruptDivision, #Empathy, #FoldedMapProject, #HopefulChange, #HumanConnection, #InclusiveNarratives, #SegregationDisruption, #SharedHumanity, #SocialJustice, segregation