Last summer, Albany Park was spotlighted after a leftist community group advocated for the development of a community garden at a lot located on Lawrence and Central Park avenues that will be developed into affording housing by Celadon Holdings LLC. Celadon is run by Scott Henry and Thad Garver, two former executives of JP Morgan.
Albany Park is a historic village and trading site. Today, there is a large Native population in the area and the site of three Native community organizations. Albany Park is also the home of the First Nations Garden, located at Wilson Avenue and Pulaski Road, which my family co-found with CNYC. My family, like so many others have, recently been gentrified out of Albany Park due to increasing rents.
JP Morgan Chase, the U.S.’s largest bank and parent company of JP Morgan, has a long history of racially discriminatory lending practices. In 2017, 49 years after the federal Fair Housing Act banned racial discrimination in lending, the bank agreed to pay a $55 million settlement for offenses of modern-day redlining that took place between 2006 and 2009 and broke laws under the Fair Housing Act and the Equal Credit Opportunity Act.
“Don’t come at me saying ‘housing is a human right’ and then advocate to give money to developers to gentrify our communities,” Dr. Sophia Marjanovic, Oglala Lakota, wrote on Facebook. CNCY met Dr. Majanovic in Washington, d.c., and learned about her fight for stronger protections for survivors of domestic violence, rape, human trafficking, sexual assualt and harrassment through lobbying.
“The housing disparities I’m seeing in Albany Park due to gentrification is the new iteration of forced removal and racism,” said Adrien “A.J.” Pochel, a member of Chi-Nations Youth Council and my nephew.
Pochel added that reserves, reservations, ghettos and slums are all a direct result of legal displacement and policing.
“The ability and access to own and acquire property and lands continues to be a barrier for anyone who ain’t white.” said A.J. Pochel. At the center of racial segregation, displacement and policing are ongoing efforts to protect whiteness in America.
“America has always been against my people. The first time my race was introduced to school, the slogan was ‘Kill the Indian, Save the Man’ and many people still carry traumas from those days,” said Windfield WoundedEye, a member of Chi-Nations Youth Council. “Many ancestors were kept in those schools and were never the same coming out of them.”
It’s been more than six decades since the Supreme Court declared “separate but equal” schools unconstitutional in Brown v. Board of Education. However, Chicago Public Schools (CPS) remains an example of how heavily segregated modern public education is.
In 1963, 200,000 Chicagoans boycotted CPS as a reaction to the segregationist policies of then-Superintendent Benjamin Willis. Fast forward to 2013, when Mayor Rahm Emanuel announced an unprecedented 50 school closures, mainly displacing thousands of Black and brown schoolchildren and teachers.
The combination of gentrification, segregation and displacement may seem more complicated than they appear. However, these ongoing events and policies are the evolution of racist ideologies including manifest destiny which absolves America of the atrocities caused by the systematic disenfranchisement of BIPOC people. Urban Natives are absent within America’s collective imagination by design — white settler colonial denial erases our occupation of and relationships to our ancestral lands, such as Chicago.
“White supremacy is an American problem created by white people,” Tamez-Pochel said. “They need to stop relying on us to do all the labor and face all the consequences of abolishing whiteness.”