November 1, 2022 • 38 mins
Khalil and Ben revisit the city where their friendship began. They speak on stage at the 2022 Chicago Humanities Festival. Come for the tales of Ben’s first job delivering bagels around Chi-town and Khalil’s first discovery that he had a Chicago accent — stay for the real connection with a hometown audience, and a conversation about the hard work of studying and loving a city that can be tough to love at times.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:14):
Push it. This is a tough city to love. Yeah,
this is a city that hurts you, and to be
in love with it is like being in an abusive relationship.
Sometimes that's how I feel in this relationship with you.
I hope not. I hope not. I'm Khalil Jibra Muhammad.
(00:38):
I'm Ben Austin. We're two best friends, one black, one white.
I'm a historian and I'm a journalist, and this is
some of my best friends are so yeah. So here
we are back with season two. We are going to
be talking about everything from politics to pop culture, and
(01:01):
we're gonna have guests on too. This season. History always
matters and everything we cover, and of course this is
an election year. We got mid terms. We're gonna be
talking on this show in the midst of the launch
of the presidential race. So there's going to be so
much to figure out and to invite so many best friends,
some old, some new to help us make sense of
(01:21):
the madness of the moment we're still living in. So
today's episode is really special. Khalil, we got to do
a live taping together in our hometown. The boys are
back in town. We went back to where it all began,
that's right. So it was actually on September eleventh, ye
(01:42):
and it was a crazy rainy day. There was a
torrential rain. There was also the Bears home opener. I
remember that we got caught in some traffic monsoon conditions.
But you know what they say about rain, like you know,
and rain for weddings is like a good sign. It's
a sense of renewal, promise of a fresh start. I
felt that way, perfect metaphor. We did the taping as
(02:02):
part of the Chicago Humanities Festival, and we got to
talk at this amazing venue, the South Sure Cultural Center,
you know, where we both spent time and as kids.
This just beautiful space that we sat in, like a
glass atrium, just about a block from Lake Michigan. You know,
even on that rainy day, once it cleared, like the
sun started to come in and just the space itself
(02:25):
felt magical. It's a place where for many decades some
of Chicago's elite Southsiders would go there to play golf,
and you know, it was not a place that was
actually welcoming to everyone, but it is today. And that's
what's so important about the Chicago Humanities Festival hosting it there,
and for you and I to be in that space
(02:46):
to not only talk about what it means to be chicagoing,
but to do it with our own hometown community very special.
So let's cut to the live tape. I mean, here
we are in reality, but let's go to the recording.
Let's do it just to place this moment in context.
(03:13):
We're here at south Shore Cultural Center. I mean I
remember walking by here as a kid. I literally spent
my earliest years at sixty ninth in Oglesby, which is
four blocks from where we are, just across the street,
at a place. It was a non discript apartment building,
but I went to a nursery pre k place called
Toddler's Inn. So Ben, Yeah, I grew up in south Shore.
(03:37):
So I grew up not too far from here and
played tennis here when it was still it was called
the South Shore Country Club, but wasn't really a country
club anymore. And actually people from my neighborhood helped preserve
it and then restore it. Yeah, there was sort of
a discussion about what would happen, what its next iteration
would be. And here we are. Yeah, it looks great,
(03:58):
you know, here we are in Chicago, and we're in
a city that's demonized all the time and that has
all sorts of population changes going on, and even with
a mayoral race, you know, heating up. There's so many
discussions about the city in its present form and its future,
and so this question of like, well, what does it
mean to be a Chicago and what is a Chicago identity?
(04:21):
And a way to come at that is just to
talk at least at the start of like what it
means to us. Yeah. Yeah, so our producers of the
show often tell us, like, our listeners only care so
much about Chicago. So since we're here, we get to
lean into that a little bit and actually talk about
our origin story. Yeah, so let's start with a Chicago
What is your Chicago origin story? Yeah? How did you
(04:43):
get here? Yeah? So you heard I teach at Harvard,
which is you know what you think it is really
snobby and arrogant and this sort of thing, but a
lot of smarts to everybody. That's how long it took
him to mention Harvard, Like that is the that's the
longest so far. It's a guarantee there it is whatever. Whatever. So,
(05:08):
So it came up because I was teaching just this week,
and we were talking about the fact that I happened
to be a third generation Chicagoan. So my parents were
born here. Shorty Ruff by the way, for a listeners,
since he regards as my mother's nicknames as a tough customer.
(05:29):
My mother was born here, her mother was born here,
and that's the third generation. And so it happens. My
great grandmother, Laura Oliver, married in the nineteen twenties a
man named Eugene Gavin. This is your mother's side of
the Fantasies, my mother's side of who migrated from Mississippi.
(05:50):
They both migrated from Mississippi. They could not marry there,
but they married here in the nineteen twenties. And so
I take a measure of pride of actually being basically
the sentence of people who got here at the turn
of the century, or not quite the turn of the century,
but in the nineteen twenties and therefore the early great migration. Yeah,
so you you have a lot of roots here, a
(06:11):
lot of routes. So I was born here and my parents,
who were in the audience wave Boston's, Yes, they moved
to Chicago in their early thirties. My father got a
job at the University of Chicago. So there they you know,
I'm I guess I'm like that make me a first
(06:32):
generation And and they stayed, you know, they moved here
and stayed, which is another sort of you know, cities
are about are measured in some ways by their um
you know, their their ability to attract people and attract
business and then to retain them, right um and so um.
(06:54):
You know you're talking about the black migration, and you
know before that, the you know, the beginning of the
twentieth century, and even before immigrants from Europe. Uh. And
in the nineteen nineties, so many people from Mexico who
moved here, and you know, to the point that Latinos
are a third of the population. Now do you have
some Latino heritage? This is I'm just riffing here. So yeah,
(07:20):
and then and then i'd say that, uh, you know,
my wife and I had a kind of professional walk
about where we moved all over the country and decided
at some point about ten years ago that we wanted
to come back home and we wanted our kids to
be raised here around our family. And this is where
(07:40):
sort of you know, we wanted to make our stand.
You know, like when you you live in other cities,
there's a kind of there's a kind of great freedom
at times of not being rooted there where you don't
have to worry so much about the messy history, you
don't have to own it, and here you have to
own it, but the stakes are higher. Yeah. Yeah, so
I h I have moved from Chicago since essentially I
(08:03):
was twenty two years old, so unlike Ben Um, I
haven't been back, and I've been enjoying the city by
virtue of family and relatives who live here. My mom
lived here until quite recently her entire life had never
lived literally anywhere else. So I'm a little bit opposite
to Ben and that I chose not to come back
(08:24):
to Chicago. But is this a good place to make
your announcement at the return run from mayor? Yeah? Yeah,
well isn't everybody doing that? I mean to bring that
up inside Joe, because I said if I ever came
back Chicago, I'd want to come back to be mayor.
So this is actually this is actually real talk. But
(08:46):
but I want to say just one more thing about
the other side of my family, which is more famous.
And again, listeners of the show at least know this.
So it turns out that Ben lives today a couple
of blocks from where my great grandfather, Elijah Muhammad, who
was also a migrant from Georgia born in eighteen ninety nine,
arrived in Chicago sometime in the night thirties and ultimately
(09:12):
built the Nation of Islam, which all of you know
is part of the Hyde Park, Knwid area and where
Ben and Danielle's family currently live. And of course that's
another kind of Chicago story that makes not only the
city quite unique and interesting, but also makes this entire
area and thinking about a Chicago identity fascinating. Going something
(09:33):
we talked about when we were thinking about this show,
like where else in America could you imagine like Muhammad Ali,
Elijah Muhammad, Jesse Jackson, eventually Michelle and Barack Obama and
Harold Washington as notes of some of the most important
political debates movements in America. Pretty awesome. Hey, this is Khalil.
(10:02):
We need to take a short break. We'll be right back.
Welcome back to some of my best friends are I'm
(10:23):
doing that time space continuum thing and I'm not at
the live event. But now we're going to go back
to the live event from the Chicago Humanities Festival, and
so so we talked about, you know, what are our
Chicago origin stories. But there's a way where to feel
like there's also a consciousness about being a Chicago and
(10:45):
a kind of Chicago being sort of imprinted on your DNA.
And we were younger before people really got tattoos of
like the Chicago flag or anything like that or three
one two tattoos or seven seventy three or so, you know,
let's talk about that moment where we really sort of
started to think of Chicago as integral to our identity. Okay, yeah,
(11:08):
do it how you first? Okay, for me, it had
to do with driving. I could think of a specific moment.
I think it's the summer after high school, so this
is like nineteen eighty nine, and maybe it was nineteen
ninety and I had a job as a bagel delivery man,
I remember that. And then to have the white pickup truck. Then, see,
(11:29):
you had to you had to make it scary. I
had a job as a bagel delivery man and I
had to get up at five am, and it was
called the Bagel Nosh and it was a bagel store
on rush Street and Rush Street of nineteen eighty nine
or nineteen ninety was sort of like in transition that
if you're older, Rush Street signifies kind of, you know,
(11:53):
something a red light district or a sort of like
kind of sleazy a little bit, and today it's pretty
gentrified and ritzy. It was sort of both at that moment,
or like probably more on the sleazy side. And now
I'd get there at five am, and I'd have to
pull in an alley behind the shop and like flash
my brights to clear out all the rats who would
scurry away. And then I would load up the truck
(12:15):
with bagels and drive all over the city. And there
was a feeling of as a young person too, of
moving through the city at a time when there weren't
a lot of people there and where it felt like
I kind of had ownership of the city. It felt
like something out of like a Carl Sandburg poem, where
like this this Goliath which is asleep and and and
(12:41):
here I am, you know, seeing and part of the
mechanism that's going to be when it wakes, and you
know they're the only other people out there were other
delivery people, you know, the newspaper trucks and things like that,
and also traversing the city in a way that I
hadn't before, either of going through the loop, but also
like the south side and you'd have to come back
on State Street, down the State Street corridor of where
(13:04):
there were you know, used to be public housing for miles,
and I just felt like I got a better understanding
of the city, of being a part of it, of
its geography and its segregation. And yeah, I felt at
that point like like a kind of pride of place. Yeah. So,
you know, people often say that you have to leave
(13:25):
a city to actually appreciate what you've lost or what
you had, and I think of this kind of consciousness
Chicago consciousness of a slightly different way. So I was
about nine years old when my father moved to New York.
He'd left Chicago. He'd worked at Johnson and Johnson Publishing
as a photographer. He spent an entire career as a photojournalist,
(13:47):
but he got his start with Johnson Publishing, and he
leaves for Charlotte in nineteen seventy eight, land in New
York by nineteen eighty and he's still there. So I
visited him about nine years old for the first time,
and I'm visiting with his friends, his new New York
area friends who have kids, and the mom in this
(14:10):
relationship is keeping me for the weekend because by then
my father was a bachelor, and so you know, he's
keeping me for the summer, where I really spent a
lot of childhood summers from about nine to fifteen or sixteen.
And so I meet this brood of like kids of
all ages, younger than me, older than me. They welcome
me into their family and within seconds of talking to them,
(14:31):
someone's like, you have a funny accent. I was like,
what are you talking about? And they were like, you
just said ten And I was like what ten. They're like,
no ten. I was like, no ten. Anyway, it was
by Mississippi accent by way of Chicago that these New
Yorkers who were my peers as kids were picking up on.
(14:53):
And that was literally the first moment when I thought
to myself, holy smokes, like I sound different. Yeah, yeah,
and so it's it's then you had to be like
us and them, and I'm on team us. I'm on
team Chicago. Well it did make me very proud out
This is just did you did you do the thing?
Where you then like went home and like practice, So
(15:14):
you didn't say you said, Ken, Well, you know, I
wanted to get to Harvard eventually, so I had to
get rid of the accent. I mean, so so I
had something similar. I mean maybe everyone does who's from
Chicago where you travel? And maybe maybe this is even
more of a white thing where other where you meet
people and they're like, oh, you're from Chicago. I'm from Chicago.
And I would always call it like the double question, yep,
(15:34):
because the next question was where are you from? Right?
Not not from Chicago. They want to know if you're
from Deerfield or Wheneck or whatever. They didn't really meet Chicago, ye.
And so there's also that, you know, not just defining
it of another city, but of like suburb or city. Right. Yeah,
So I wanted to talk about the first time I
remember being pissed off as a Chicago in two and
(15:57):
that is when I was about ten years old. I
had to commute to Chatham from Regent's Park where I
lived by that age. And this was Regent's Park is
a fifty first and Lakeshore drive. To this day, you
can actually see it on a clear day from from
just outside this window. And I was especially going to
(16:20):
this elementary school at eighty third and Saint Lawrence called
Dixon Elementary, and my mom just wanted continuity. So rather
than me coming to go to Ray or something like that,
I stayed going to Dixon. So I had catched the
number one from Lakeshore Drive to Cottage Grove and the
number four Cottage Grow from fifty first to eighty third
STREETEP Deep Deep Chicago, Deep Chicago. And I remember one
(16:44):
winter day it was about negative forty degrees, as was
commonly true back in those days, in early eighties, when
global warming wasn't what it is today, and the bus
took forever to come. When it finally arrived, it was
so full with people it didn't even stop at the
like and this is a memory series in my marria.
(17:05):
I literally screamed out of frustration, picked up the nearest
rock I could find, and hurled it at the back
of the bus. I mean, this is not a prideful moment,
but it is the moment when I thought, like this
city sucks, right, like trying to get to school and
I'm freezing. So that was a story. The last one
(17:25):
I want to tell about being a Chicagoan. Is so
you heard about the Schomberg Center, which is a cultural
institution in Harlem, been around since in nineteen twenties, really
important place. But for anyone who's visited Harlem, has anyone
visited Harlem in this audience, Okay? You know Harlem mights
think that black Harlem is the as used to be called,
(17:46):
the Negro capital of the world, and therefore tremendous amounts
of pride in that place. And I kind of spent
the first couple of years as the director of the
Schaumberg in twenty eleven, kind of pushing back against that.
I mean, like literally from the stage of the institution,
reminding them that Harlem had never produced the political geniuses
(18:09):
and the political grates that Chicago had produced, going back
to Oscar DePriest, who was the first black person to
go to Congress after reconstruction, and that Adam Clayton Powell Junior, who,
of course, with the famous Congressman, didn't get there to
nineteen forty four, and then of course all the other
stuff leading up to the President Obama and all that
was just gravy. But I felt very prideful in Harlem
(18:32):
reminding them that my city was actually better. Yeah, so
that makes me think that there's another way that you
you get a Chicago consciousness or for us, like we're
as professionals, we've also studied Chicago. I've written about Chicago.
It's part of our work, and so maybe we just
(18:53):
talk about that a little bit, about approaching it the
city when it becomes an idea that you are grappling
with in that way. And one of the things I started,
as you know, you've written this book, tell tell everyone
about well I wrote my first book is about public
housing in Chicago. It's about Cabrini Green is called High Risers,
but and and working on it. I also start to
(19:13):
think about how little Chicago as a subject was part
of my education. Was that true for you too? Did
you ever have like, yeah, no, it's formally. I we
talked about this a lot, like situating ourselves as kids
in this important city we don't remember, like being taught
(19:35):
about this first black mayor in the moment, and the
significance of that as something transformational both for the national
politics but also for the meaning of the city itself.
Even though we literally lived, you know, in the same
neighborhood as Harold Washington did. Yeah, I don't even remember, like, uh,
you know when I say remember, meaning it could have happened.
I just wasn't paying attention, but being assigned books like
(19:58):
The Jungle or uh, you know, Upton Sinclair's muck Raking book.
Remember Richard write books? You know, Native Son, h a
Black Boy. I don't remember. Those were not books. It's
part of the curriculum. Um, you didn't take the African
American Literature elective at Kenwood. Is that part of it? Yea, yeah, yeah, maybe, Okay,
(20:18):
see you you you were you know, you were still wrestling.
I was still whiteness, Jewish identity kind of thing still.
So yeah, just it was not it was not so prevalent.
So I think, you know, part of it was like
just going back and devouring everything, studying the history of
the city and the literature about the city, and like,
(20:39):
you know, if you're going to be a Chicago writer,
like to try to learn everything about it. Yeah. And
I think it's something about the richness of everything we
experienced in a community of people nurturing us that made
it possible to look back and later see the city
as something worth knowing. So, for example, Ben's father as
(21:00):
the University of Chicago professor emeritus. We both were at
Reagenstein as kids, but by accident I ended up writing
about the University of Chicago in my work because it
was the first real place for the study of the
city and the study of the city as a place
of immigrant assimilation. The study of the city is quote
(21:21):
unquote back then race relations. And here we were literally
part of this community at products of it and then
later able to look back on it. Yeah, And I
think we write about it and other people do too,
because the city is endlessly fascinating, that the history and
the present is so frought with that history of you know,
(21:42):
problematic stuff and interesting things, and it's alive in so
many ways. I mean, I think about now that there's
this John Bird's curriculum in the public schools, right, you
want to tell them who John Burges, John Birds, the
police officer who you know, was was part of a
midnight crew and a station two hundred people. Yeah, tortured
more than one hundred men black men into false confessions,
(22:06):
and as part of reparations, the city agree to teach
this curriculum. That's that's you know, I think, I think
you know we we've talked about this before, even on
the show when we're talking about critical race theory that
I think both of us believe professionally and personally that
you have to engage with the really messy and difficult
(22:27):
history of a place and that is what is uh,
you know it is you know you talked about on
the bus in Chicago and hating the city. This is
a tough city to love. Yeah, this is a city
that hurts you, and to be in love with it
is like being in an abusive relationship. Sometimes that's how
I feel relationship with you. I hope not. I hope
not like it's dysfunctional. Um, and you know it, it's
(22:53):
it is all of the magnificent things. And it is
the richness of the history which is so so to
fraught with who we are as a country and as
a city that that makes us an important place and
a place to try to to make it better in
some ways. Yeah, and I think it's fair to also
think about some influences. So, um, we haven't talked about
(23:15):
this on the show, but I think it's fair to say,
like your brother, Jake, Jake Austen is here, basket and
we all went to I school together. Jake is a
couple of years older than us, but you know, we
had we had that experience. We all went to Kinnwood,
and your brother was in many ways a booster for
the city, um, long before you and I were even
(23:37):
thinking about these issues, um, both as a as a
zine editor and being able to describe the music scene
in the city, like I mean, I wouldn't pay that
close attention, but enough attention to know that this is
what Jake was doing. He began writing about the city.
He literally has a TV show called chick A Go Go.
(23:58):
I mean, you can't be more of a booster than that.
A theme song, yeah you want to sing it now,
but if in the podcast version of it is yea
(24:30):
and we'll lave it and it's fun. So so let's
let's talk about a harder subject, which is you know,
nobody really talks about Chicago now without talking about, say,
the violence, right, And you know, you're either when you
even talk about being a booster, you're sort of saying
there's more to the city than that, but you're actually
sort of responding to it or you're engaging with it,
(24:50):
and it really is part of every conversation here, and
I wanted to actually pick up on a theme because
you've sort of already talked a little bit about this.
But a lot of the work that I do as
an academic is around policing. And at one point, you know,
someone asked us we met someone earlier today, said you know,
like what inspired you to do the show? And the
(25:13):
short answer is that we had an opportunity through the Pushkin,
which is a company co owned by Malcolm Gladwell, the
journalist and writer, and Jacob Weisberg. But the idea of
the show came because I was doing academic work on
the criminal justice system I'd written about as a historian,
and I was doing work with other social scientists around
(25:36):
how to think about a different kind of policing. And
Ben was actually reporting on policing in the early days
of Black Lives Matter, sort of from the Michael Brown
moment to the Lakwan McDonald moment, and was on the
ground reporting around the city about various forms of activism
and talking about the tough stuff. Like for us, it
(25:58):
was not just the tough stuff and the questions about
like what's wrong with your city, but it was also
about trying to answer these tough questions and to think
about like what's the future of the city, Like is
this a moment for us in different capacities to talk
through what it means to solve for these problems. Yeah, yeah,
I mean I know that as a Chicago writer, I
(26:18):
am trying to push against the stereotypes of the city,
you know, the shy rack image, or we have a
there's a Republican running for governor now and he's been
he's been really pushing this idea of the Chicago as
hellhole of sort of adopting the language American carnage. This
is a very adopting the Trump language to sort of
you know, it's you know, it's also fear of crime
(26:39):
in Chicago and bail reform. But it's like it's an
easy dog whistle and it's probably even more explicit than
dog whistle um to rile up people. Yeah, I did.
I did a reporting uh project once not too long ago,
where I went around to twenty high schools in the
city and my idea was I would interview and profile
(27:00):
all the valedictorians of all these different high schools that
that that there is much representative of the city and
children in the city and then the public school system
as either victims or perpetrators of violence. Right, and you know,
in some ways much much more representative of you know,
most students. Yeah, and you know that was that was
the thing. It was amazing thing to even just like
(27:22):
to be inside twenty different high schools across the city.
So I take a much shorter version of like how
to defend against the negative stereotypes, and that is I
just tell people, Chicago's the greatest beach town on Earth.
Each town where where where else can you have access
to this amazing lake, like at just a crossing a bridge,
(27:43):
It's amazing. So yes, that that's the simple version. But
here we are, right, and here we are. M I
got here on Friday and on the hour and a
half drive, which was about as long as it took
to fly here from the East Coast two Hyde Park.
WBZ was reporting on the killing of a seventeen year
(28:04):
old blocks away from our high school. He was out
at lunch at a high school, stated high school student,
middle of the day at twelve thirty five. Yeah, and
also was killed in a parking lot on East End,
which is the very parking lot I crossed for ten
years of my life to leave my apartment building to
come to high school, to go anywhere else from Hi. Yeah, yeah,
(28:26):
I mean I've been thinking about this a lot of
just this young man. I think he just transferred to
the school this year, and that this beautiful start to
the school year. I've been walking around the neighborhood and
seeing Kenwood students out and about playing football and practicing
band and lacrosse, and just like just so energetic and
(28:48):
to think to think this his life is over. And
you know, as much as I'm saying of pushing against
the stereotype and writing about other things, this is a fact, right.
It happened, right, and and the reverberations are real. People
make choices at that point to leave the city, to
(29:10):
not send their kids to Kenwood High School to get away.
You know, why would I if that's where danger is.
And and then there's all the sort of like political
things that happen, you know, in this case, the school
board accusing Lori Lightfoot of not keeping children safe, of
you know, asking for more policing, all these other things
(29:31):
that we know intellectually, like there's no police officer that
can stop that crime. You can respond to it in
some way, and then you can say like maybe they could,
you know, hunt these people down, but that's it's not
a policing issue, but something something happened that that is
both real and undeniable and and really tears at the
fabric of our community. Yeah, yeah, Ben, Ben and I
(29:53):
have been talking a lot about the depopulation of the city,
um and and Ben's been doing some writing about it.
Uh more generally. Uh, it's personal. I mean I think
that's the point. It's personal. It's not just it's not
just our neighborhood, and it's not just the people who
are one degree removed. As you know, a year ago
there were a series of of just outrageous shootings in
(30:17):
Hyde Park that we actually talked about in one of
our episodes. And so here we are again. Many of
you know, My mom left the city after having purchased
a handgun for personal protection and told me, you know
that her her handgun was on its way, And I'm like,
what are you talking about. It's like she's in her
apartment on the citizen app and as far as she's concerned,
(30:39):
they're coming for her eventually. She's got a shaky hand. Yeah,
she's got yeah, this is not good. But I think
you know, so now she's with us, but I think
I think we don't want that, right. So the challenge
for us as people who do get to speak on
behalf of the city, whether whether we get it right
(31:00):
or wrong in terms of how we describe Chicago, the
challenge for us is to simultaneously be honest about what
these existential realities mean for people who live their lives
here every day and simultaneously push back against the bad
ideas that push us towards a past that is not
(31:23):
the source of the solution in this case. Yeah, yeah,
So when Ben talks about policing won't save us, like,
we do have to remember that in any instance police
are reactive to violence. They actually you know, unless we
could imagine a future where their checkpoints on every corner,
which did come up in some of the conversation about
what happened at the University of Chicago last year or
(31:43):
in the fifty Thursday there. But as we know, that's
not going to happen, and it shouldn't happen. So we
have to think about what do we want in terms
of an infrastructure that is healthier, that is safer, that
is more about economic security for people, and not to
say that those guys who killed this guy needed more
money in their pockets and it wouldn't have happened. But
(32:05):
what we're really talking about is a kind of society
we live and where guns are ubiquitous, poverty is growing,
and therefore the combination of people feeling like they're at
the short end of a stick and they're all operating
on short fuses. It's something we can do something about. Yeah, yeah,
and I think it's not. On the other hand, but
(32:29):
in moments like this, we also have to recognize that
there is some immediate need, that people are hurting and
they're full of fear and they need something, and then
in the void of good ideas, they'll be sort of
these these these old ideas that have been tried already
(32:49):
and we know don't work right um, and but that
there really is trauma they're suffering right right now, and
there's there's there's something you know, devastating and and I mean,
you know, another neighborhood. To many places, you know it's
it's you know, it's it's it's why you know, it
happens a lot, But when it's very close to home,
(33:12):
you see it up close. Yeah, you have to recognize that. Yeah,
so let's leave folks with three good ideas or about
the future. Right, So three good ideas. One, we really
do have to make sure that we give young people
summer youth employment and massive recreational opportunities. Both of us
had them really important because we know, I'll just use
(33:35):
the social science research tells us that kids who actually
get to work at fourteen put money in their pocket.
Kids who they're no barrier to the recreational opportunities they
want or the ways to explore their own creative expression
do much better than kids who essentially have a lot
of free time. Two, we want to make sure that
(33:57):
we invest in violence interruption. Yeah, Chicago is really one
of the birthplaces for this idea, but Chicago has been
one of the hardest places for violence interruption to take root.
It is being exported to Jacksonville, Ball to more. New
York is one of the places with the most significant
investment in violence interruption. And so one of the things
(34:18):
that we know we don't know, we still haven't learned
exactly what set this off. But violence interrupters get ahead
of it. They actually do the work that police can't do,
which is that they have trust within those communities talk
people off the ledge so that they're not inclined to
use violence. Because, as public health experts day, violence is
a disease and it is contagious and once you catch it,
(34:39):
you're much more likely to express it. So those two
ideas about investing in our young people as well as
investing in actual things that work to keep people from
killing people, to me, are very productive and it's no
reason why Chicago can't invest in those rather than continuing
to have a conversation in this next mayoral race about
(35:01):
how much policing, how much more policing. Yeah, and we're
reminding ourselves. I was talking about the governor's race when
when the Republican candidate called Chicago a hellhold, there was
an online sort of social media response of you know,
post something about Chicago that it's you know, conflicts with
that that shows it's beauty and don't just show the
(35:22):
skyline and you know, this is a place full of
love and this is a place full of beauty, and
those things are not erased. They're they're side by side
with a lot of the problems, but they're they're they're
not they're not. They're not gone. They're always here too. Yeah.
So you know, we usually sign off the show in
the way that most people know, and I think we're
(35:42):
going to do the same. But I want to add
to that that not only that love you, man, but
I love this city. I love you, and I love
this city too. All Right. Some of My Best Friends
(36:04):
Are is a production of Pushkin Industries. The show is
written and hosted by Khalil Jibron Muhammad and my best
friend Ben Austin. It's produced by John Asante and Lucy Sullivan.
Our editor is Jasmine Morris, our engineer is Amanda k Wan,
and our executive producer is Mia Lobell. At Pushkin thanks
to Leita Mulad, Julia Martin, Heather Faine, Carly Migliori, John Schnars,
(36:30):
Gretta Kone, and Jacob Weisberg. Our theme song, Little Lily,
is by fellow Chicagoan the brilliant Avery R. Young, from
his album Tubman. You definitely want to check out his
music at his website Avery R. Young dot com. You
can find Pushkin on all social platforms at pushkin Pods,
and you can sign up for our newsletter at Pushkin
(36:52):
dot Fm. To find more Pushkin Podcast, listen on the
iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you like to listen.
And if you like our show, please give us a
five star rating and a review and listen. Even if
you don't like it, give it a five star rating
and a review, and please tell all of your best
friends about it. Thank you. On this episode, we have
(37:13):
to give us special thanks to the Chicago Humanities Festival
for bringing us together and letting us speak at their
amazing event. That's right, and we also need to thank
Jake Austin, your brother, my brother, and the Goblins were
letting us use their music on this episode. Man, you
can watch Chicago go online, look it up on YouTube
(37:33):
and you know, definitely listen to the music and Chicago go. Wait. Wait,
So on the show that we recorded in Chicago, you
(37:55):
said that your great grandfather and your great grandmother couldn't
get married in the South. Yeah, man, how come they
couldn't get married? Well, what I forgot to say is
that my great grandfather was basically a white dude and
basically makes it Wait when you say, when you say basics,
what is basically a white through man? How well he
he looked white? He was white presenting, and his siblings
(38:16):
passed as white, so basically his whole family considered themselves white. Dude,
you you are talking about like running for office in
Chicago or in Illinois, and you could pull this Barack
Obama shit of being like my my great white great grandfather.
Like you gotta use that. You gotta use that. You can't.
You gotta like put that forward, like that is power. Yeah,
(38:38):
like you gotta you could have like only in America
can the great grandson of a white dude from Mississippi,
my white great growndfather and my
Push it. This is a tough city to love. Yeah,
this is a city that hurts you, and to be
in love with it is like being in an abusive relationship.
Sometimes that's how I feel in this relationship with you.
I hope not. I hope not. I'm Khalil Jibra Muhammad.
(00:38):
I'm Ben Austin. We're two best friends, one black, one white.
I'm a historian and I'm a journalist, and this is
some of my best friends are so yeah. So here
we are back with season two. We are going to
be talking about everything from politics to pop culture, and
(01:01):
we're gonna have guests on too. This season. History always
matters and everything we cover, and of course this is
an election year. We got mid terms. We're gonna be
talking on this show in the midst of the launch
of the presidential race. So there's going to be so
much to figure out and to invite so many best friends,
some old, some new to help us make sense of
(01:21):
the madness of the moment we're still living in. So
today's episode is really special. Khalil, we got to do
a live taping together in our hometown. The boys are
back in town. We went back to where it all began,
that's right. So it was actually on September eleventh, ye
(01:42):
and it was a crazy rainy day. There was a
torrential rain. There was also the Bears home opener. I
remember that we got caught in some traffic monsoon conditions.
But you know what they say about rain, like you know,
and rain for weddings is like a good sign. It's
a sense of renewal, promise of a fresh start. I
felt that way, perfect metaphor. We did the taping as
(02:02):
part of the Chicago Humanities Festival, and we got to
talk at this amazing venue, the South Sure Cultural Center,
you know, where we both spent time and as kids.
This just beautiful space that we sat in, like a
glass atrium, just about a block from Lake Michigan. You know,
even on that rainy day, once it cleared, like the
sun started to come in and just the space itself
(02:25):
felt magical. It's a place where for many decades some
of Chicago's elite Southsiders would go there to play golf,
and you know, it was not a place that was
actually welcoming to everyone, but it is today. And that's
what's so important about the Chicago Humanities Festival hosting it there,
and for you and I to be in that space
(02:46):
to not only talk about what it means to be chicagoing,
but to do it with our own hometown community very special.
So let's cut to the live tape. I mean, here
we are in reality, but let's go to the recording.
Let's do it just to place this moment in context.
(03:13):
We're here at south Shore Cultural Center. I mean I
remember walking by here as a kid. I literally spent
my earliest years at sixty ninth in Oglesby, which is
four blocks from where we are, just across the street,
at a place. It was a non discript apartment building,
but I went to a nursery pre k place called
Toddler's Inn. So Ben, Yeah, I grew up in south Shore.
(03:37):
So I grew up not too far from here and
played tennis here when it was still it was called
the South Shore Country Club, but wasn't really a country
club anymore. And actually people from my neighborhood helped preserve
it and then restore it. Yeah, there was sort of
a discussion about what would happen, what its next iteration
would be. And here we are. Yeah, it looks great,
(03:58):
you know, here we are in Chicago, and we're in
a city that's demonized all the time and that has
all sorts of population changes going on, and even with
a mayoral race, you know, heating up. There's so many
discussions about the city in its present form and its future,
and so this question of like, well, what does it
mean to be a Chicago and what is a Chicago identity?
(04:21):
And a way to come at that is just to
talk at least at the start of like what it
means to us. Yeah. Yeah, so our producers of the
show often tell us, like, our listeners only care so
much about Chicago. So since we're here, we get to
lean into that a little bit and actually talk about
our origin story. Yeah, so let's start with a Chicago
What is your Chicago origin story? Yeah? How did you
(04:43):
get here? Yeah? So you heard I teach at Harvard,
which is you know what you think it is really
snobby and arrogant and this sort of thing, but a
lot of smarts to everybody. That's how long it took
him to mention Harvard, Like that is the that's the
longest so far. It's a guarantee there it is whatever. Whatever. So,
(05:08):
So it came up because I was teaching just this week,
and we were talking about the fact that I happened
to be a third generation Chicagoan. So my parents were
born here. Shorty Ruff by the way, for a listeners,
since he regards as my mother's nicknames as a tough customer.
(05:29):
My mother was born here, her mother was born here,
and that's the third generation. And so it happens. My
great grandmother, Laura Oliver, married in the nineteen twenties a
man named Eugene Gavin. This is your mother's side of
the Fantasies, my mother's side of who migrated from Mississippi.
(05:50):
They both migrated from Mississippi. They could not marry there,
but they married here in the nineteen twenties. And so
I take a measure of pride of actually being basically
the sentence of people who got here at the turn
of the century, or not quite the turn of the century,
but in the nineteen twenties and therefore the early great migration. Yeah,
so you you have a lot of roots here, a
(06:11):
lot of routes. So I was born here and my parents,
who were in the audience wave Boston's, Yes, they moved
to Chicago in their early thirties. My father got a
job at the University of Chicago. So there they you know,
I'm I guess I'm like that make me a first
(06:32):
generation And and they stayed, you know, they moved here
and stayed, which is another sort of you know, cities
are about are measured in some ways by their um
you know, their their ability to attract people and attract
business and then to retain them, right um and so um.
(06:54):
You know you're talking about the black migration, and you
know before that, the you know, the beginning of the
twentieth century, and even before immigrants from Europe. Uh. And
in the nineteen nineties, so many people from Mexico who
moved here, and you know, to the point that Latinos
are a third of the population. Now do you have
some Latino heritage? This is I'm just riffing here. So yeah,
(07:20):
and then and then i'd say that, uh, you know,
my wife and I had a kind of professional walk
about where we moved all over the country and decided
at some point about ten years ago that we wanted
to come back home and we wanted our kids to
be raised here around our family. And this is where
(07:40):
sort of you know, we wanted to make our stand.
You know, like when you you live in other cities,
there's a kind of there's a kind of great freedom
at times of not being rooted there where you don't
have to worry so much about the messy history, you
don't have to own it, and here you have to
own it, but the stakes are higher. Yeah. Yeah, so
I h I have moved from Chicago since essentially I
(08:03):
was twenty two years old, so unlike Ben Um, I
haven't been back, and I've been enjoying the city by
virtue of family and relatives who live here. My mom
lived here until quite recently her entire life had never
lived literally anywhere else. So I'm a little bit opposite
to Ben and that I chose not to come back
(08:24):
to Chicago. But is this a good place to make
your announcement at the return run from mayor? Yeah? Yeah,
well isn't everybody doing that? I mean to bring that
up inside Joe, because I said if I ever came
back Chicago, I'd want to come back to be mayor.
So this is actually this is actually real talk. But
(08:46):
but I want to say just one more thing about
the other side of my family, which is more famous.
And again, listeners of the show at least know this.
So it turns out that Ben lives today a couple
of blocks from where my great grandfather, Elijah Muhammad, who
was also a migrant from Georgia born in eighteen ninety nine,
arrived in Chicago sometime in the night thirties and ultimately
(09:12):
built the Nation of Islam, which all of you know
is part of the Hyde Park, Knwid area and where
Ben and Danielle's family currently live. And of course that's
another kind of Chicago story that makes not only the
city quite unique and interesting, but also makes this entire
area and thinking about a Chicago identity fascinating. Going something
(09:33):
we talked about when we were thinking about this show,
like where else in America could you imagine like Muhammad Ali,
Elijah Muhammad, Jesse Jackson, eventually Michelle and Barack Obama and
Harold Washington as notes of some of the most important
political debates movements in America. Pretty awesome. Hey, this is Khalil.
(10:02):
We need to take a short break. We'll be right back.
Welcome back to some of my best friends are I'm
(10:23):
doing that time space continuum thing and I'm not at
the live event. But now we're going to go back
to the live event from the Chicago Humanities Festival, and
so so we talked about, you know, what are our
Chicago origin stories. But there's a way where to feel
like there's also a consciousness about being a Chicago and
(10:45):
a kind of Chicago being sort of imprinted on your DNA.
And we were younger before people really got tattoos of
like the Chicago flag or anything like that or three
one two tattoos or seven seventy three or so, you know,
let's talk about that moment where we really sort of
started to think of Chicago as integral to our identity. Okay, yeah,
(11:08):
do it how you first? Okay, for me, it had
to do with driving. I could think of a specific moment.
I think it's the summer after high school, so this
is like nineteen eighty nine, and maybe it was nineteen
ninety and I had a job as a bagel delivery man,
I remember that. And then to have the white pickup truck. Then, see,
(11:29):
you had to you had to make it scary. I
had a job as a bagel delivery man and I
had to get up at five am, and it was
called the Bagel Nosh and it was a bagel store
on rush Street and Rush Street of nineteen eighty nine
or nineteen ninety was sort of like in transition that
if you're older, Rush Street signifies kind of, you know,
(11:53):
something a red light district or a sort of like
kind of sleazy a little bit, and today it's pretty
gentrified and ritzy. It was sort of both at that moment,
or like probably more on the sleazy side. And now
I'd get there at five am, and I'd have to
pull in an alley behind the shop and like flash
my brights to clear out all the rats who would
scurry away. And then I would load up the truck
(12:15):
with bagels and drive all over the city. And there
was a feeling of as a young person too, of
moving through the city at a time when there weren't
a lot of people there and where it felt like
I kind of had ownership of the city. It felt
like something out of like a Carl Sandburg poem, where
like this this Goliath which is asleep and and and
(12:41):
here I am, you know, seeing and part of the
mechanism that's going to be when it wakes, and you
know they're the only other people out there were other
delivery people, you know, the newspaper trucks and things like that,
and also traversing the city in a way that I
hadn't before, either of going through the loop, but also
like the south side and you'd have to come back
on State Street, down the State Street corridor of where
(13:04):
there were you know, used to be public housing for miles,
and I just felt like I got a better understanding
of the city, of being a part of it, of
its geography and its segregation. And yeah, I felt at
that point like like a kind of pride of place. Yeah. So,
you know, people often say that you have to leave
(13:25):
a city to actually appreciate what you've lost or what
you had, and I think of this kind of consciousness
Chicago consciousness of a slightly different way. So I was
about nine years old when my father moved to New York.
He'd left Chicago. He'd worked at Johnson and Johnson Publishing
as a photographer. He spent an entire career as a photojournalist,
(13:47):
but he got his start with Johnson Publishing, and he
leaves for Charlotte in nineteen seventy eight, land in New
York by nineteen eighty and he's still there. So I
visited him about nine years old for the first time,
and I'm visiting with his friends, his new New York
area friends who have kids, and the mom in this
(14:10):
relationship is keeping me for the weekend because by then
my father was a bachelor, and so you know, he's
keeping me for the summer, where I really spent a
lot of childhood summers from about nine to fifteen or sixteen.
And so I meet this brood of like kids of
all ages, younger than me, older than me. They welcome
me into their family and within seconds of talking to them,
(14:31):
someone's like, you have a funny accent. I was like,
what are you talking about? And they were like, you
just said ten And I was like what ten. They're like,
no ten. I was like, no ten. Anyway, it was
by Mississippi accent by way of Chicago that these New
Yorkers who were my peers as kids were picking up on.
(14:53):
And that was literally the first moment when I thought
to myself, holy smokes, like I sound different. Yeah, yeah,
and so it's it's then you had to be like
us and them, and I'm on team us. I'm on
team Chicago. Well it did make me very proud out
This is just did you did you do the thing?
Where you then like went home and like practice, So
(15:14):
you didn't say you said, Ken, Well, you know, I
wanted to get to Harvard eventually, so I had to
get rid of the accent. I mean, so so I
had something similar. I mean maybe everyone does who's from
Chicago where you travel? And maybe maybe this is even
more of a white thing where other where you meet
people and they're like, oh, you're from Chicago. I'm from Chicago.
And I would always call it like the double question, yep,
(15:34):
because the next question was where are you from? Right?
Not not from Chicago. They want to know if you're
from Deerfield or Wheneck or whatever. They didn't really meet Chicago, ye.
And so there's also that, you know, not just defining
it of another city, but of like suburb or city. Right. Yeah,
So I wanted to talk about the first time I
remember being pissed off as a Chicago in two and
(15:57):
that is when I was about ten years old. I
had to commute to Chatham from Regent's Park where I
lived by that age. And this was Regent's Park is
a fifty first and Lakeshore drive. To this day, you
can actually see it on a clear day from from
just outside this window. And I was especially going to
(16:20):
this elementary school at eighty third and Saint Lawrence called
Dixon Elementary, and my mom just wanted continuity. So rather
than me coming to go to Ray or something like that,
I stayed going to Dixon. So I had catched the
number one from Lakeshore Drive to Cottage Grove and the
number four Cottage Grow from fifty first to eighty third
STREETEP Deep Deep Chicago, Deep Chicago. And I remember one
(16:44):
winter day it was about negative forty degrees, as was
commonly true back in those days, in early eighties, when
global warming wasn't what it is today, and the bus
took forever to come. When it finally arrived, it was
so full with people it didn't even stop at the
like and this is a memory series in my marria.
(17:05):
I literally screamed out of frustration, picked up the nearest
rock I could find, and hurled it at the back
of the bus. I mean, this is not a prideful moment,
but it is the moment when I thought, like this
city sucks, right, like trying to get to school and
I'm freezing. So that was a story. The last one
(17:25):
I want to tell about being a Chicagoan. Is so
you heard about the Schomberg Center, which is a cultural
institution in Harlem, been around since in nineteen twenties, really
important place. But for anyone who's visited Harlem, has anyone
visited Harlem in this audience, Okay? You know Harlem mights
think that black Harlem is the as used to be called,
(17:46):
the Negro capital of the world, and therefore tremendous amounts
of pride in that place. And I kind of spent
the first couple of years as the director of the
Schaumberg in twenty eleven, kind of pushing back against that.
I mean, like literally from the stage of the institution,
reminding them that Harlem had never produced the political geniuses
(18:09):
and the political grates that Chicago had produced, going back
to Oscar DePriest, who was the first black person to
go to Congress after reconstruction, and that Adam Clayton Powell Junior, who,
of course, with the famous Congressman, didn't get there to
nineteen forty four, and then of course all the other
stuff leading up to the President Obama and all that
was just gravy. But I felt very prideful in Harlem
(18:32):
reminding them that my city was actually better. Yeah, so
that makes me think that there's another way that you
you get a Chicago consciousness or for us, like we're
as professionals, we've also studied Chicago. I've written about Chicago.
It's part of our work, and so maybe we just
(18:53):
talk about that a little bit, about approaching it the
city when it becomes an idea that you are grappling
with in that way. And one of the things I started,
as you know, you've written this book, tell tell everyone
about well I wrote my first book is about public
housing in Chicago. It's about Cabrini Green is called High Risers,
but and and working on it. I also start to
(19:13):
think about how little Chicago as a subject was part
of my education. Was that true for you too? Did
you ever have like, yeah, no, it's formally. I we
talked about this a lot, like situating ourselves as kids
in this important city we don't remember, like being taught
(19:35):
about this first black mayor in the moment, and the
significance of that as something transformational both for the national
politics but also for the meaning of the city itself.
Even though we literally lived, you know, in the same
neighborhood as Harold Washington did. Yeah, I don't even remember, like, uh,
you know when I say remember, meaning it could have happened.
I just wasn't paying attention, but being assigned books like
(19:58):
The Jungle or uh, you know, Upton Sinclair's muck Raking book.
Remember Richard write books? You know, Native Son, h a
Black Boy. I don't remember. Those were not books. It's
part of the curriculum. Um, you didn't take the African
American Literature elective at Kenwood. Is that part of it? Yea, yeah, yeah, maybe, Okay,
(20:18):
see you you you were you know, you were still wrestling.
I was still whiteness, Jewish identity kind of thing still.
So yeah, just it was not it was not so prevalent.
So I think, you know, part of it was like
just going back and devouring everything, studying the history of
the city and the literature about the city, and like,
(20:39):
you know, if you're going to be a Chicago writer,
like to try to learn everything about it. Yeah. And
I think it's something about the richness of everything we
experienced in a community of people nurturing us that made
it possible to look back and later see the city
as something worth knowing. So, for example, Ben's father as
(21:00):
the University of Chicago professor emeritus. We both were at
Reagenstein as kids, but by accident I ended up writing
about the University of Chicago in my work because it
was the first real place for the study of the
city and the study of the city as a place
of immigrant assimilation. The study of the city is quote
(21:21):
unquote back then race relations. And here we were literally
part of this community at products of it and then
later able to look back on it. Yeah, And I
think we write about it and other people do too,
because the city is endlessly fascinating, that the history and
the present is so frought with that history of you know,
(21:42):
problematic stuff and interesting things, and it's alive in so
many ways. I mean, I think about now that there's
this John Bird's curriculum in the public schools, right, you
want to tell them who John Burges, John Birds, the
police officer who you know, was was part of a
midnight crew and a station two hundred people. Yeah, tortured
more than one hundred men black men into false confessions,
(22:06):
and as part of reparations, the city agree to teach
this curriculum. That's that's you know, I think, I think
you know we we've talked about this before, even on
the show when we're talking about critical race theory that
I think both of us believe professionally and personally that
you have to engage with the really messy and difficult
(22:27):
history of a place and that is what is uh,
you know it is you know you talked about on
the bus in Chicago and hating the city. This is
a tough city to love. Yeah, this is a city
that hurts you, and to be in love with it
is like being in an abusive relationship. Sometimes that's how
I feel relationship with you. I hope not. I hope
not like it's dysfunctional. Um, and you know it, it's
(22:53):
it is all of the magnificent things. And it is
the richness of the history which is so so to
fraught with who we are as a country and as
a city that that makes us an important place and
a place to try to to make it better in
some ways. Yeah, and I think it's fair to also
think about some influences. So, um, we haven't talked about
(23:15):
this on the show, but I think it's fair to say,
like your brother, Jake, Jake Austen is here, basket and
we all went to I school together. Jake is a
couple of years older than us, but you know, we
had we had that experience. We all went to Kinnwood,
and your brother was in many ways a booster for
the city, um, long before you and I were even
(23:37):
thinking about these issues, um, both as a as a
zine editor and being able to describe the music scene
in the city, like I mean, I wouldn't pay that
close attention, but enough attention to know that this is
what Jake was doing. He began writing about the city.
He literally has a TV show called chick A Go Go.
(23:58):
I mean, you can't be more of a booster than that.
A theme song, yeah you want to sing it now,
but if in the podcast version of it is yea
(24:30):
and we'll lave it and it's fun. So so let's
let's talk about a harder subject, which is you know,
nobody really talks about Chicago now without talking about, say,
the violence, right, And you know, you're either when you
even talk about being a booster, you're sort of saying
there's more to the city than that, but you're actually
sort of responding to it or you're engaging with it,
(24:50):
and it really is part of every conversation here, and
I wanted to actually pick up on a theme because
you've sort of already talked a little bit about this.
But a lot of the work that I do as
an academic is around policing. And at one point, you know,
someone asked us we met someone earlier today, said you know,
like what inspired you to do the show? And the
(25:13):
short answer is that we had an opportunity through the Pushkin,
which is a company co owned by Malcolm Gladwell, the
journalist and writer, and Jacob Weisberg. But the idea of
the show came because I was doing academic work on
the criminal justice system I'd written about as a historian,
and I was doing work with other social scientists around
(25:36):
how to think about a different kind of policing. And
Ben was actually reporting on policing in the early days
of Black Lives Matter, sort of from the Michael Brown
moment to the Lakwan McDonald moment, and was on the
ground reporting around the city about various forms of activism
and talking about the tough stuff. Like for us, it
(25:58):
was not just the tough stuff and the questions about
like what's wrong with your city, but it was also
about trying to answer these tough questions and to think
about like what's the future of the city, Like is
this a moment for us in different capacities to talk
through what it means to solve for these problems. Yeah, yeah,
I mean I know that as a Chicago writer, I
(26:18):
am trying to push against the stereotypes of the city,
you know, the shy rack image, or we have a
there's a Republican running for governor now and he's been
he's been really pushing this idea of the Chicago as
hellhole of sort of adopting the language American carnage. This
is a very adopting the Trump language to sort of
you know, it's you know, it's also fear of crime
(26:39):
in Chicago and bail reform. But it's like it's an
easy dog whistle and it's probably even more explicit than
dog whistle um to rile up people. Yeah, I did.
I did a reporting uh project once not too long ago,
where I went around to twenty high schools in the
city and my idea was I would interview and profile
(27:00):
all the valedictorians of all these different high schools that
that that there is much representative of the city and
children in the city and then the public school system
as either victims or perpetrators of violence. Right, and you know,
in some ways much much more representative of you know,
most students. Yeah, and you know that was that was
the thing. It was amazing thing to even just like
(27:22):
to be inside twenty different high schools across the city.
So I take a much shorter version of like how
to defend against the negative stereotypes, and that is I
just tell people, Chicago's the greatest beach town on Earth.
Each town where where where else can you have access
to this amazing lake, like at just a crossing a bridge,
(27:43):
It's amazing. So yes, that that's the simple version. But
here we are, right, and here we are. M I
got here on Friday and on the hour and a
half drive, which was about as long as it took
to fly here from the East Coast two Hyde Park.
WBZ was reporting on the killing of a seventeen year
(28:04):
old blocks away from our high school. He was out
at lunch at a high school, stated high school student,
middle of the day at twelve thirty five. Yeah, and
also was killed in a parking lot on East End,
which is the very parking lot I crossed for ten
years of my life to leave my apartment building to
come to high school, to go anywhere else from Hi. Yeah, yeah,
(28:26):
I mean I've been thinking about this a lot of
just this young man. I think he just transferred to
the school this year, and that this beautiful start to
the school year. I've been walking around the neighborhood and
seeing Kenwood students out and about playing football and practicing
band and lacrosse, and just like just so energetic and
(28:48):
to think to think this his life is over. And
you know, as much as I'm saying of pushing against
the stereotype and writing about other things, this is a fact, right.
It happened, right, and and the reverberations are real. People
make choices at that point to leave the city, to
(29:10):
not send their kids to Kenwood High School to get away.
You know, why would I if that's where danger is.
And and then there's all the sort of like political
things that happen, you know, in this case, the school
board accusing Lori Lightfoot of not keeping children safe, of
you know, asking for more policing, all these other things
(29:31):
that we know intellectually, like there's no police officer that
can stop that crime. You can respond to it in
some way, and then you can say like maybe they could,
you know, hunt these people down, but that's it's not
a policing issue, but something something happened that that is
both real and undeniable and and really tears at the
fabric of our community. Yeah, yeah, Ben, Ben and I
(29:53):
have been talking a lot about the depopulation of the city,
um and and Ben's been doing some writing about it.
Uh more generally. Uh, it's personal. I mean I think
that's the point. It's personal. It's not just it's not
just our neighborhood, and it's not just the people who
are one degree removed. As you know, a year ago
there were a series of of just outrageous shootings in
(30:17):
Hyde Park that we actually talked about in one of
our episodes. And so here we are again. Many of
you know, My mom left the city after having purchased
a handgun for personal protection and told me, you know
that her her handgun was on its way, And I'm like,
what are you talking about. It's like she's in her
apartment on the citizen app and as far as she's concerned,
(30:39):
they're coming for her eventually. She's got a shaky hand. Yeah,
she's got yeah, this is not good. But I think
you know, so now she's with us, but I think
I think we don't want that, right. So the challenge
for us as people who do get to speak on
behalf of the city, whether whether we get it right
(31:00):
or wrong in terms of how we describe Chicago, the
challenge for us is to simultaneously be honest about what
these existential realities mean for people who live their lives
here every day and simultaneously push back against the bad
ideas that push us towards a past that is not
(31:23):
the source of the solution in this case. Yeah, yeah,
So when Ben talks about policing won't save us, like,
we do have to remember that in any instance police
are reactive to violence. They actually you know, unless we
could imagine a future where their checkpoints on every corner,
which did come up in some of the conversation about
what happened at the University of Chicago last year or
(31:43):
in the fifty Thursday there. But as we know, that's
not going to happen, and it shouldn't happen. So we
have to think about what do we want in terms
of an infrastructure that is healthier, that is safer, that
is more about economic security for people, and not to
say that those guys who killed this guy needed more
money in their pockets and it wouldn't have happened. But
(32:05):
what we're really talking about is a kind of society
we live and where guns are ubiquitous, poverty is growing,
and therefore the combination of people feeling like they're at
the short end of a stick and they're all operating
on short fuses. It's something we can do something about. Yeah, yeah,
and I think it's not. On the other hand, but
(32:29):
in moments like this, we also have to recognize that
there is some immediate need, that people are hurting and
they're full of fear and they need something, and then
in the void of good ideas, they'll be sort of
these these these old ideas that have been tried already
(32:49):
and we know don't work right um, and but that
there really is trauma they're suffering right right now, and
there's there's there's something you know, devastating and and I mean,
you know, another neighborhood. To many places, you know it's
it's you know, it's it's it's why you know, it
happens a lot, But when it's very close to home,
(33:12):
you see it up close. Yeah, you have to recognize that. Yeah,
so let's leave folks with three good ideas or about
the future. Right, So three good ideas. One, we really
do have to make sure that we give young people
summer youth employment and massive recreational opportunities. Both of us
had them really important because we know, I'll just use
(33:35):
the social science research tells us that kids who actually
get to work at fourteen put money in their pocket.
Kids who they're no barrier to the recreational opportunities they
want or the ways to explore their own creative expression
do much better than kids who essentially have a lot
of free time. Two, we want to make sure that
(33:57):
we invest in violence interruption. Yeah, Chicago is really one
of the birthplaces for this idea, but Chicago has been
one of the hardest places for violence interruption to take root.
It is being exported to Jacksonville, Ball to more. New
York is one of the places with the most significant
investment in violence interruption. And so one of the things
(34:18):
that we know we don't know, we still haven't learned
exactly what set this off. But violence interrupters get ahead
of it. They actually do the work that police can't do,
which is that they have trust within those communities talk
people off the ledge so that they're not inclined to
use violence. Because, as public health experts day, violence is
a disease and it is contagious and once you catch it,
(34:39):
you're much more likely to express it. So those two
ideas about investing in our young people as well as
investing in actual things that work to keep people from
killing people, to me, are very productive and it's no
reason why Chicago can't invest in those rather than continuing
to have a conversation in this next mayoral race about
(35:01):
how much policing, how much more policing. Yeah, and we're
reminding ourselves. I was talking about the governor's race when
when the Republican candidate called Chicago a hellhold, there was
an online sort of social media response of you know,
post something about Chicago that it's you know, conflicts with
that that shows it's beauty and don't just show the
(35:22):
skyline and you know, this is a place full of
love and this is a place full of beauty, and
those things are not erased. They're they're side by side
with a lot of the problems, but they're they're they're
not they're not. They're not gone. They're always here too. Yeah.
So you know, we usually sign off the show in
the way that most people know, and I think we're
(35:42):
going to do the same. But I want to add
to that that not only that love you, man, but
I love this city. I love you, and I love
this city too. All Right. Some of My Best Friends
(36:04):
Are is a production of Pushkin Industries. The show is
written and hosted by Khalil Jibron Muhammad and my best
friend Ben Austin. It's produced by John Asante and Lucy Sullivan.
Our editor is Jasmine Morris, our engineer is Amanda k Wan,
and our executive producer is Mia Lobell. At Pushkin thanks
to Leita Mulad, Julia Martin, Heather Faine, Carly Migliori, John Schnars,
(36:30):
Gretta Kone, and Jacob Weisberg. Our theme song, Little Lily,
is by fellow Chicagoan the brilliant Avery R. Young, from
his album Tubman. You definitely want to check out his
music at his website Avery R. Young dot com. You
can find Pushkin on all social platforms at pushkin Pods,
and you can sign up for our newsletter at Pushkin
(36:52):
dot Fm. To find more Pushkin Podcast, listen on the
iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you like to listen.
And if you like our show, please give us a
five star rating and a review and listen. Even if
you don't like it, give it a five star rating
and a review, and please tell all of your best
friends about it. Thank you. On this episode, we have
(37:13):
to give us special thanks to the Chicago Humanities Festival
for bringing us together and letting us speak at their
amazing event. That's right, and we also need to thank
Jake Austin, your brother, my brother, and the Goblins were
letting us use their music on this episode. Man, you
can watch Chicago go online, look it up on YouTube
(37:33):
and you know, definitely listen to the music and Chicago go. Wait. Wait,
So on the show that we recorded in Chicago, you
(37:55):
said that your great grandfather and your great grandmother couldn't
get married in the South. Yeah, man, how come they
couldn't get married? Well, what I forgot to say is
that my great grandfather was basically a white dude and
basically makes it Wait when you say, when you say basics,
what is basically a white through man? How well he
he looked white? He was white presenting, and his siblings
(38:16):
passed as white, so basically his whole family considered themselves white. Dude,
you you are talking about like running for office in
Chicago or in Illinois, and you could pull this Barack
Obama shit of being like my my great white great grandfather.
Like you gotta use that. You gotta use that. You can't.
You gotta like put that forward, like that is power. Yeah,
(38:38):
like you gotta you could have like only in America
can the great grandson of a white dude from Mississippi,
my white great growndfather and my
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