Outdoor Spaces

 

It was quite a revealing juxtaposition of events that occurred over the past week.  I visited upon the website of the Chicago Botanic Garden to check on their summer hours and happened upon the institution’s statement “Our commitment to racial justice and equity,” which I found a bit odd for a garden.

The statement included the following sentences:

In 2020, the Black Lives Matter movement catalyzed a process of self-examination and learning at the Garden.   We recognize that people of color often feel unwelcome in gardens, forest preserves, and parks, a direct result of historical oppression and violence in outdoor spaces.

I have questions and some observations about this remarkable assertion.

The statement chose to recognize BLM in all caps.  I wonder if it occurred to them that one of its founders, Patrice Cullors, leveraged her position to build a nice little real estate portfolio and that BLM while raising millions has, to my knowledge, while provided absolutely zero support for the expansion of outdoor spaces and outdoor programs for urban black youths.  Go figure. 

I’m not sure how the Garden came to the conclusion that people of color feel unwelcome in gardens, forest, preserves, and parks.  Did they do a survey?  How do they know this?  Every time I have visited the Chicago Botanic Garden, I have observed quite a panoply of people “of color” and not “of color” – whites,  African Americans, Indians (are they “of color”?), Asians, Middle Easterners both in hijabs and kippas, and actual Africans.  Once last summer, I saw a small trio of Africans playing African music with a group gathered around them, enjoying a balmy summer evening.  I saw no hint that any of them felt unwelcome.

There is tremendous irony in the last phrase of this absurd statement by the Chicago Botanic Garden.  In Chicago last 4^th of July weekend, nearly 100 people were shot, 17 were killed, 8 of them children.  Many of these incidents of violence are taking place in parks and outdoor spaces.  In my own old neighborhood, a 13 year old was shot in the head riding his bike on a Sunday morning.  Shootings routinely take place in and around Washington Park and Garfield Park. 

The statement by the Chicago Botanic Garden echoes the purported complicity in the normalization of violence against people of color by literature in the original faculty statement by the English Department at the University of Chicago. 

So, universities and gardens are unsafe places for people of color.

The hard truth that no one wants to acknowledge is that the violence of which these institutions decry is perpetrated by people of color, with people of color most often being the victims.  At the University of Chicago, two students have been violently killed… by people of color.  Last weekend, young Max Solomon was shot and killed on the “L” on his way to his summer internship.   The Woke organizations are beating their breasts about historical violence, yet ignore the violence that is going on each and every weekend…. and won’t discuss the perpetrators, and, in an era where even tulip bulbs and ferns are racialized, adeptly sidestep talking about their race.

As if to put an exclamation mark on things, a Chicago police officer and 2 ATF agents were shot directly in front of a police station on the South Side. 

Overlayed on this bloody weekend was the visit of our addled president, Joe Biden, to Illinois.  Biden, famously stated, “If you don’t vote for me, you ain’t black” and “[Republicans] want to put y’all back in chains.”  Yet, visiting Illinois a few days after the black community suffered one of the bloodiest weekends in Chicago history, Biden stayed far enough away from the South and West sides of the city that radiation from a nuclear blast wouldn’t reach him.  He assiduously avoided any contact with any black person that didn’t hold political office.

As more institutions like the Chicago Botanic Garden and the American Writers Museum go Woke, they, like their president, remain a safe distance from the actual, relentless violence that is occurring every week in Chicago.