Chicago is one of the few places on earth where an immigrant from Kazakhstan can study Thai martial arts taught by a Moroccan instructor. It’s one of the few places on earth where the children of Chinese and Mexican immigrants can enjoy Italian pasta while making jokes in Spanish.
Johannesburg is one of the few places on earth where you’d hear Hausa, Zulu, and Swahili down one street. But when you take a turn, on the next street you’ll hear a blend of Afrikaans, English, and Portuguese.
In grade school, we were always taught that the United States was a “Melting Pot” of people of all nations.
Reflecting upon South Africa’s diversity, Archbishop Desmond Tutu called it the “Rainbow Nation.”
I’ve lived in both Chicago and Johannesburg for a combined half decade now. The farther they become separated in my mind by time, the more similar they appear. We don’t melt together. We don’t reflect the rainbow—at least not in the way the colours of a rainbow blend in nature. We look more like one that’s been scribbled by a kindergartener who has picked up markers for the first time. Each line of colour visibly and clumsily drawn, yet separate and distinct.
Summertime in Johannesburg, 2015
In Johannesburg, it’s Sandton and the rich northern suburbs in a standoff versus Alexandra (the city's poorest, most densely populated neighbourhood) and the surrounding Southern and Western townships. In Chicago, it’s the Loop and the North Side in a disparate coexistence with their West Side and South Side neighbours.
In Johannesburg, the M1 highway stands guard between South Africa's best schools, wealthiest estates, shopping malls and Alexandra township’s tin foil shacks, crowded streets, and rivers of garbage. As a reporter, I would spend the morning interviewing an old man who lost his grandson in a shack fire. At night, I would retreat into my gated sanctuary to enjoy a hot meal, shower, and warm bed.
In Chicago, the Red Line looks like a colour gradient that gets darker as the trains move further South. As a videographer, I would spend the morning capturing streets filled with boarded up windows and police cameras. At night, I would retreat back to a haven of restaurants, parks, and bright lights back North.
Living as an immigrant and former expat while doing the work I do, I’m constantly in transit, crossing rifts between islands of wealth and oceans of poverty, in a world populated by borders, translated signeage, and racial-ethnic checkboxes. I seek to find the ever-so-elusive ability for humanity to unite—to forgo the perceived differences and alienation of the other.
No wonder it’s easy to see this city as an opulent utopia.
Chicago and Johannesburg have both shown me how monumental of a task that is. They’ve also shown me how insidiously effective we are at carving divisions. How do I reconcile the old man’s burnt-down shack in Alexandria with my neat one-bedroom cottage in Pine Park? How do I reconcile the sheer wealth of Michigan Avenue with the boarded-up businesses of 63rd Street and Cottage Grove? How do I reconcile million-dollar rugby complexes with footballs made out of plastic bags? How do I reconcile my habit of buying fresh fruits with another neighbourhood filled with Church’s Chickens and Shark’s?
I have caught few glimpses of communities that have flourished on the foundation of cross-cultural understanding, too few. But I have seen countless communities splintered by ignorance: both unintended and the mal-intended. Maybe it’s our human tendency to lean towards negativity. Or maybe the damage done to those splintered communities left too many scars in my mind, scars that the love of people trying to build something together cannot fully heal.
It’s easy to cross the rifts but difficult to build bridges. I can do the former but cannot even lay down a single brick to do the latter. Yet I stay in transit. I keep trying. Out of a persistent or perhaps foolish ideal that doing something and failing is better than doing nothing.