Melville House
Lansing, Illinois, was a picture card. In the 1990s, if one opened the card, the message would read like patriotic verse, offering the infectious hospitality of hot dogs on the grill, fireworks on the Fourth of July, and a rambunctious young boy sliding into home.
I was fortunate to have my formative experiences in Lansing—a Midwestern slice of suburbia twenty-five miles south of Chicago. My parents, our beloved dogs, and I lived in a split-level home within walking distance of several parks, basketball hoops, and ice-cream parlors . . . .
Lansing shared one public high school with the nearby town of Lynwood. In an inversion of Chicago’s demographic geography, the south side of Lansing was mostly middle class, professional—tree-lined streets and handsome houses with big backyards—while the north side had more apartment buildings, including the universally despised and feared “Section 8” complex. Lynwood recreated the stratification of class dynamic but with a more blue-collar characteristic . . . . Waving high above [the high school] and casting a political and cultural shadow over a small town in Illinois—a state with the slogan “Land of Lincoln”—was the Confederate Flag.
When the town began to diversify in the 1990s, many Black parents, staff, and students—understandably baffled and outraged—began to demand the removal of all Confederate banners and imagery from school grounds. More than mere protest, Black families, along with a minority of white supporters, petitioned the school board and city halls of Lansing and Lynwood to make the elimination of Confederate iconography official. Recalling historian Carol Anderson’s observation that Black progress provokes “white rage” and that Black demands, no matter how reasonable or pedestrian, are typically the impetus for racial collision, the Lansing fiasco seems less absurd.
Samuel Kye, a sociologist at Baylor University, conducted an extensive study of suburbs surrounding large metro areas in 2018. Inspecting the population shifts and changes of those counties, he found a disturbing but predictable pattern. As suburbs became more diverse, whites left in large numbers. Kye found that white flight was actually likelier to occur in suburban, middle-class communities, as opposed to poor or blue-collar towns in decline. His data indicate that much more than reduction in property values or loss of tax revenue, the influx of Black, Latino, and/or Asian residents was the “independent motivator” of white flight.
The movement of aggrieved suburban whites into more desolate exurban areas accounts for many of the so-called mysteries of the recent political cycle: a surge in “rural” votes for Donald Trump, working-class counties flipping for Trump even if most working-class voters supported Democrats, the increasingly radical and hateful profile of Republicans in Congress, and state party platforms drawing on the desires of their isolated constituents rather than attempting to appeal to voters who share streets, schools, and public squares with Democrats from a variety of racial or religious backgrounds.
The electoral map of 2020 for the south suburbs of Chicago and the small towns of Northwest Indiana shows with perfect clarity that the Trump strongholds were the towns east and south of population density.
An interesting divergence between the blue and red communities, with the notable exception of Crown Point, is the existence or lack of a walkable city center. My wife and I live within walking distance of the main street of our community, where we can meet the eclectic characters of the small commercial district, walk through farmers markets, and feel a genuine connection to the place where we’ve made our home. One of the most fascinating features of exurbia is its establishment of sprawl as a geographic and communal ethos. Most of the exurban towns in Northwest Indiana lack any visible city center or main street. Various residential plots surround a four-to-eight-lane busy street that cuts through life, prevents commuting by foot, and leads to almost nothing but multinational corporate chain stores and restaurants. As big businesses like Chick-fil-A or Home Depot arrive, the town must adjust with the installation of stoplights, creating an absurdity of heavy traffic and slow movement in a lightly populated area. Those who live in the newly built houses of exurbia enjoy a degree of isolation that would inspire galleries of Edward Hopper paintings, should the great realist painter find himself resurrected from the grave. The escape has gone to the extreme lengths of creating a silo where homeowners could conceivably have no interaction with fellow townspeople or even neighbors. A tour of an exurban residential plot will enhance the oddity through the revelation of an absence even stranger than the missing downtown: There are no sidewalks. The further an American moves from the city, the less likely he is to find a walkable path in a residential zone.
When Ed Ward, a friend of mine who is a Catholic priest, moved to a new parish assignment in an exurban section near Joliet, Illinois, he found his nightly routine of taking a leisurely stroll after dinner suddenly difficult. “I have to walk down the street, and if a car comes along, it starts honking at me.” With the use of esoteric theological terminology, he asked, “What the hell?”
Anastasia Loukaitou-Sideris, a professor of urban planning at the University of California, Los Angeles, has an answer to Ed’s rhetorical question: “There is this perception that if we have sidewalks, we’re going to bring people who do not belong to our neighborhoods.” The same hope for exclusion extends to urban design without city centers.
Political scientist Robert Putnam’s classic treatise on the loss of community in American life has the title Bowling Alone. In the exurbs, Americans are walking, driving, and living alone. The politics of escape has left them isolated and increasingly paranoid. Trump spun his supporters into a frenzy of terror with dramatic tales of rapist immigrants and vicious gangs of Mexicans stabbing random whites. Studies show that his hate speech resonated most with voters who live in counties “least likely to have immigrants” among the local population. It is easy to believe propaganda when you are sitting inside your living room in a neighborhood with no sidewalks, watching a maniac scream at you. Credulity hits the wall if you live next to the supposed rapists and drug dealers whose kids play in your son’s Little League.
The splendid isolation of the rightwing movement is the consequence of the retreat from diversity and democracy that, in the trajectory I witnessed, took voters from marching the streets with Confederate flags far into the exurbs with low taxes and no public square.
Chloe Maxmin, the youngest woman ever elected to the state senate in Maine, represented a Republican district as a social liberal whose primary political interest was the adoption of more aggressive policies to mitigate the effects of global warming. In an interview with Bill Maher, her interlocutor challenged her to answer, yes or no, if her white constituents who pledge fidelity to Trump and the far-right policies he champions are “racist.” Maxmin managed to dodge his trap by referring to the complexity of the dynamic. They aren’t necessarily racist, she insisted, but for a “variety of reasons” they have come to “believe racist things.”
Lee Atwater, one of the most malevolent and masterful Republican strategists, gave the game away in 1981 when he confessed:
You start out in 1954 by saying, “[N-word, N-word, N-word].” By 1968, you can’t say “[N-word]”—that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites.”
This Machiavellian operator, an adviser to Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush and former chairman of the Republican National Committee, reveals how economic language is often the disguise with which racists smuggle their ideas through customs. Trump, not exactly the most delicate of political communicators, attempted an Atwater move in the 2020 election, continually warning his audience, “You have this beautiful community in the suburbs, including women. [This is an actual quote, “including women” is not explained.] I ended where they build low-income housing projects right in the middle of your neighborhood. If [Joe] Biden goes in, he already said it’s going to go at a much higher rate than before. They want low-income housing, and with that comes a lot of problems, including crime.”
In a total fabrication, Trump claimed that Biden planned to appoint Cory Booker, the anodyne Black senator from New Jersey, “in charge of the suburbs.” No such suburban czar exists, or has ever existed in American history, but Trump’s hallucination projected a clear image to the voters he hoped to persuade: Blacks and Latinos would destroy the escapist enclave, bringing poverty, drug dependency, and criminal predation.
Because the escape is an attempt to flee significant percentages of the American people and the progress of American culture that began in the 1960s and, more or less, continues into the present for racial minorities, LGBTQ+ people, and women, the escapees have grown not only isolated but estranged. Estrangement from their country means an inability to understand its culture and diminution of loyalty to its institutions. The presidency of Donald Trump, and the insurrection of January 6, 2023, despite all the weepiness over the flag and the “heroes of the military,” is possible only when large masses of voters no longer respect the United States. They do not respect its diversity. They do not respect the expansion of freedom and opportunity to previously exiled groups, and they do not respect a democratic system that would challenge their stranglehold on power, authority, and resources.
The estrangement accounts for a few eccentricities among a group that is still the majority of one of the country’s two major political parties. Republican voters routinely tell pollsters that the next election, regardless of the year, is the “last chance to save America” from impending doom. They also find themselves alienated from the energy and activity of American life. The counties that went for Biden in 2020 are responsible for 71 percent of America’s gross domestic product.
Lansing illustrates the contrast between suburbia and exurbia. It is striking that for all the fear and forecasts of doom in the 1990s, not much has changed in the small town. The southern portions remain commercially vibrant and middle class, while the northern edge signals decay with empty storefronts and battered apartment buildings. The [high school] football team is no longer the Rebels. It is the Red Wolves, and the school itself, with a predominantly Black student body, has high graduation and college placement rates. For the students without university ambition, it offers innovative trade programs in cosmetology and culinary arts. Chicago Magazine recently named Lansing one of the best south suburbs for first-time home buyers.
One of the most noticeable additions to Lansing is Fox Pointe—a midsize outdoor concert space in the heart of town. At a spring performance in 2022, Lauren Dukes, a singer with a pretty, big smile and a prettier and bigger voice, and who is popular throughout the region, entertained a crowd with renditions of pop hits of recent decades and indelible classics from Motown Records. Teenage girls danced with hula hoops, a young Black boy devoured an ice-cream cone as if he had not eaten in weeks, and an elderly white couple held hands across their lawn chairs. At an intermission in Dukes’s show, a town official encouraged residents to return to Fox Pointe for upcoming summer events, classic car cruise nights, and, although it seemed like a long time away, the annual fall fest. A scene like Fox Pointe reduces even the most astute scholar of sociology and political theory to naivete. The only question one can ask is: What was everyone so afraid of?
Excerpted from Exurbia Now: The Battleground of American Democracy by David Masciotra. Copyright © 2024 by David Masciotra. Published by Melville House. Used with permission. All Rights reserved.