The Devil You Know: A Black Power Manifesto

“The street was lined with stately buildings and imposing mansions, some worn, some refurbished, giving the aura of a district aiming earnestly to reset and recover, one trying to reclaim a bygone prosperity that had given way to hope and aspiration, memory and longing, an angst in the air.”

Blow cultivates a keen observation of the contemporary world in the extravagant facades of Southside Chicago. Like many other destination cities, Chicago is in the grip of gentrification, a process of urban redevelopment that displaces longtime Black residents to attract young, mobile white people. While gentrification is often portrayed as urban renewal, Blow characterizes it as another form of oppression, one that erases Black people and rejuvenates their former dwellings and businesses for white purposes.

“In the abstract, when there were few Blacks in northern cities, people there could look down their noses at the racists in the South. But, when hundreds of thousands of Black people showed up, those northerners had to live up to their ideals. They didn’t. Instead, they employed many of the same brutal tactics—oppressive policing, housing discrimination, restrictive employment—that southern racists had used to keep Black folks subordinate and separate.”

Directly referencing the immoral equivalency of the North and South, Blow makes his case against the white liberal and moderate North. While on the surface white northerners appear genteel and progressive, white supremacy is insidious and has taken hold of every corner of the country. Blow makes this point to later support his proposal that Black people should separate from northern societies and return to the South.

“‘We, who had the skills and the experience’ to help provide the economic security that Black people needed ‘did not share that with our less fortunate brother and sister’ as had been done for them, Tim told me.”

Though he does not seek to divide Black people, Blow occasionally refers to the close connection between the Black elite and white supremacist structures. In advocating for northern mass migration, many elites and advocacy groups preached assimilation and submission to integrate into white society, but they failed to advocate for their own people once they arrived in the North.