Crime and gentrification are hot button issues that easily polarize racially diverse neighborhoods. How do residents, activists, and politicians navigate the thorny politics of race as they fight crime or resist gentrification? And do conflicts over competing visions of neighborhood change
necessarily divide activists into racially homogeneous camps, or can they produce more complex alliances and divisions? In Us versus Them, Jan Doering answers these questions through an in-depth study of two Chicago neighborhoods. Drawing on three and a half years of ethnographic fieldwork, Doering
examines how activists and community leaders clashed and collaborated as they launched new initiatives, built coalitions, appeased critics, and discredited opponents. At the heart of these political maneuvers, he uncovers a ceaseless battle over racial meanings that unfolded as residents strove to
make local initiatives and urban change appear racially benign or malignant. A thoughtful and clear-eyed contribution to the field, Us versus Them reveals the deep impact that competing racial meanings have on the fabric of community and the direction of neighborhood change.
Acknowledgements
1. Introduction
2. A Brief History of Living Together
3. Racial Displacement in Action? Safety Activism and Its Racial Entanglements
4. "You've got reason to be afraid": Crime and Race in Electoral Campaigning
5. Resisting Gentrification and
Criminalization
6. "White Vigilantes?" Two Case Studies of Positive Loitering
7. Racial Identities and Political Standpoints: Expected and Unexpected Alignments
8. Crime and Gentrification Beyond Black and White
9. Conclusion
Appendix: About the
Fieldwork
Notes
References
Index
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Jan Doering is Assistant Professor of Sociology at McGill University.
