Jennifer Hudson
recently released a new music video, which was filmed in Chicago's Wicker Park neighborhood. According to the article, the producers wanted to show off Wicker Park, and Hudson wanted to be able to do a music video while visiting her family.
The choice to do a music video in Wicker Park has raised some eyebrows. Hudson is a Chicagoan, and Wicker Park is a Chicago neighborhood, but she is, quite famously, from the South Side. And not just any South Side neighborhood, but from Englewood - a once-thriving neighborhood that really, really hasn't been doing well in the last three decades or so.
Even in the comments to the article, people have wondered if Hudson should have done a music video in Englewoood - show a neighborhood that usually doesn't make the news unless there's a shooting in a more positive light. But the obvious counterpoint to this is, well, while Englewood has
some neat buildings that survived from its golden days, it's really not scenic at all.
Plus, there's the whole safety thing.
On the other hand, I had to wonder if the video would have worked in other, better-off South Side neighborhoods. If rule out the ones where, quite frankly, you don't see a whole lot of black people, you'd still get
Kenwood, Avalon Park,
Calumet Heights,
Wrightwood... Even Chatham, which, admittedly, has had a rough couple of years. Even mixed-race neighborhoods like
Hyde Park,
Beverly, Morton Park and
Pullman might have done the trick.
It just feels like, far too many times, when people from outside Chicago come to film anything, they only focus on popular parts people already know about, ignoring some neat, but more under the radar areas.
As I thought that, I decided to actually see the music video. And then, I realized something interesting.
Click to view
The video depicts an alternate version of Wicker Park. It's a Wicker Park populated entirely by African-Americans, a Wicker Park featuring a lot of stereotypical African-American neighborhood markers - hair salons, shirtless men playing basketball. All that's missing is currency exchanges and churches. And a chicken joint, I guess.
My first thought was that the music video producers created a black neighborhood without bothering to go anywhere near a black neighborhood. But that's not quite it. At least not entirely.
They created a black neighborhood where the business corridor is thriving, the aforementioned hair salon is more high end than one would expect, not a single house has been boarded up or vacant, the parks are clean and well-maintained. A neighborhood where a well-dressed black woman could safely walk around at night.
I tried to think if there's any African-American neighborhood in Chicago that's like that. There are neighborhoods that have some of those things, but not all of them. Not all at once.
And that made me sad.