Race in Oak Park--sort of--
the topic of a professor's study

By ERIC LINDEN

Jay Ruby is continuing to study Oak Park in a year-long examination of
the village and its policies relating to race relations and community
diversity in the community.

But Ruby, a cultural anthropologist from the University of Temple in
Philadelphia who is an Oak Park native and a 1953 graduate of Oak Park
and River Forest HIgh School, doesn't believe that "race" is the key
issue for either Oak Park or its residents.

"While it is unfortunately understandable, I am saddened to see a
community of educated people misuse the term `race.' Race is a
biological term that has for some time been regarded by the scientific
community as not a productive concept when it comes to the behavior of
(people)," Ruby writes in a progress report section of "Maintaining
Diversity: An Ethnographic Study of Oak Park, Illinois," which is the
dry title of the report.

In that report, then, when Ruby uses the term race, he places the word
in quotation marks. He cites reports from the American Association for
the Advancement of Science and the American Anthropological Association
and issues regular reminders that "social and behavioral differences
about (human beings) are not genetic or biological and therefore not
racial."

Ruby for about the last year has conducted interviews and done other
research in the village.

"I want to understand the socio-economic `costs' of maintaining a
diverse community," Ruby wrote in an update of the study published on a
web site at Temple University. "To do so, I must obtain an understanding
of the historical roots of change over the past 40 years and the
contemporary means whereby Oak Parkers continue their experiment in
`racial,' economic, religious and sexual diversity."

Ruby started last year by focusing his work on three local
organizations, which he called "excellent ways in which to understand
the changes": the Nineteenth Century Woman's Club, the Oak Park Regional
Housing Center and the gay and lesbian community in Oak Park.

According to Ruby, the club based at 178 N. Forest Ave. is "an anomaly"
but has survived for more than a century because "it was able to change
with the times--admitting African American women when the village was
integrating and more recently men to make up for its shrinking female
membership.

"In some respects, the transformation of the Nineteenth Century Woman's
Club is a microcosm for the changes that occurred in Oak Park," Ruby
says.

The Housing Center, 1041 South Blvd., was formed in the 1960s chiefly to
make sure that the integrating and integrated Oak Park would keep and
has kept its place as an attractive destination for whites. The center
in recent years has expanded its rental counseling and some other
programs to include suburbs beyond Oak Park.

As for the gay and lesbian community, which grew to have a public impact
on Oak Park life in the late 1980s, Ruby has been looking at how the
"integration" of gays and lesbians in to Oak Park life plays in the
village's image as a "tolerant" community or at least more open to
differences that most other area municipalities.

Ruby's study has broadened since its start, however, and now also
includes work in other areas, including the public schools as "as a
mechanism for maintaining Oak Park," the attraction and importance of
liquor licenses to the village's development and the advancement of
tourism as embodied efforts to promote famous former Oak Park residents
Frank Lloyd Wright and Ernest Hemingway.

But even without endorsing the word race, the Ruby always is returning
to "question of race" and how Oak Park residents, local governments and
local organizations have been addressing the issue for the last four
decades. It was in the 1960s that Oak Park concerns began resistance to
the prospects that the village would be hurt by social factors that
damaged major parts of Chicago. To many but hardly all in Oak Park, that
resistance remains that main reason for continuing policies of so-called
"integration maintenance" programs.

Beginning in the 1960s, Ruby recalled, official Oak Park "was able to
stem the tide of `white flight' and `black ghettoization' that moved
westward in Chicago to create economic and social havoc as close as
Austin," which is the Chicago community adjacent to Oak Park on the
east. "An important question to be asked in this study is why was Oak
Park able to successfully integrate and transform itself into a stable
and diverse place when few other places have been able to do so."

During his time spent studying Oak Park, Ruby has interviewed many of
the familiar figures in the historical efforts for diversity, which has
led to a decidedly establishment view of the definitions of "diversity"
in the village.

"Since the '60s, Oak Parkers have been consumed with the so-called race
issue," Ruby also has found. "Their reasonable anxiety has been that Oak
Park will resegregate like Austin, driving property values down, causing
`whites' ... to flee, businesses to close and the community to be
destroyed."

To what extent that fear exists today is unclear, but Ruby still
believes that Oak Park has much to offer.

"We need to learn from examples of communities that successfully
maintain diversity like Oak Park," said Ruby. "My goal is to provide
insight into a community that has been able to maintain itself as a
stable and diverse place--a community devoted to the social experiment
of tolerating difference.

"Oak Park is a model of the diverse and tolerant community in which many
residences are actively engaged in maintaining this character. It
appears to be a kind of place that most people aspire to live in. Can we
learn something from this place that will ease the ethnic and religious
tensions in other places that appear to be worsening through time? Can
Oak Park serve as a model of the tolerance and heterogeneity that other
communities can use? I believe so."