WATTS: I am here with artist, author, photographer, social justice activist, you wear so many hats, Tonika Lewis Johnson. Thank you so much for talking to me today. I really appreciate you being here.
LEWIS JOHNSON: Well, thank you for having me and thank you for knowing all of the hats.
WATTS: For maybe some people who don’t know, tell me a little bit about how you first started to get involved with social justice and activism here in Chicago.
LEWIS JOHNSON: It really started in my mid to late twenties, when I was becoming a new homeowner, a first-time mom, a new wife and my ex-husband and I were both from Englewood and, you know, we were starting our new family and we wanted to, you know, buy a home and so we began our journey and we realized we couldn’t afford to live in the neighborhoods that we had grown up thinking were nice. But prior to that, you know, just growing up in the
neighborhood and having a deep connection to my home neighborhood is really the ultimate seed of of everything me loving my neighborhood, me loving the history of what brought me to be raised in that neighborhood, all of those things is the foundation of what led me to want to be more involved as an adult.
WATTS: Yeah, so on the topic of neighborhoods, tell me a little bit about the Folded Map
Project and all that you did to kind of get that going and what went into it.
LEWIS JOHNSON: So Folded Map is, I love to tell people, it is my life story in a multimedia art project. That is literally what it is. Folded Map is a project that uses Chicago’s grid map to demonstrate that there are twin addresses on our reticular grid system. There’s addresses that are the same that exist in the predominantly white neighborhoods on the North Side of Chicago and the predominantly Black neighborhoods on the South Side of Chicago and I call those addresses that are similar address pairs. And then I brought people who live in those address pairs together to have a conversation and meet each other and I call those individuals map twins. So the project is a visualization of Chicago’s segregation using its grid map. And then also bringing people together who live in racially and economically different neighborhoods together to meet each other and I recorded those conversations so people can see not only the commonalities that we all have and that we want as Chicagoans, but also how segregation makes very regular conversations awkward and uncomfortable.
WATTS: Yeah, definitely, and you talk a little bit about the folded map project in your book, “Don’t Go,” so tell me a little bit about why you decided to write that book in the first place and what kinds of things surprised you during that process.
LEWIS JOHNSON: Well, first, the first surprise was even becoming aware of the don’t go narrative. I started to do a lot of presentations because my Folded Map Project gained some popularity in the large Chicago public and so I started to be invited to do presentations to institutions, universities, schools, and I just would ask the question when I wanted to talk about how segregation is perpetuated today. I just started asking the question out of curiosity, not because I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt this was going to be the case. I just asked, you know, raise your hand if you have been told, you know, Chicago’s South Side is dangerous. This was just my personal investigation and I was consistently surprised that it didn’t matter if I asked a group of 30 or 600, everyone, everyone would raise their hand. After that, I put out a call on my social media and I said, you know, have you all been told to don’t go to Chicago’s South or West Side because it’s dangerous? And if you have, email me your stories. And you know, more than 80 people responded with long, detailed stories of who told them that advice, how long it took them before they disrupted it. What they learned about themselves and race when they went and ultimately how disappointed they were that this is what was being spread about neighborhoods that they just blindly believed and, and they were bothered by it. And so we decided to interview just a collection of these people. We decided to interview 30 of these people and in my body of work that really focuses on my predominantly Black neighborhood of Greater Englewood. This was a, a different expansion of the work that included the perspective and voices of, of white Chicagoans essentially and them contributing to this conversation in a way that could push it forward and not be extractive, that was really pulling from the honesty of them realizing that they have been programmed to be racist without knowing it. And they were sharing these honest reflections and I, and I knew that this was a powerful contribution to see the full story of segregation because oftentimes when we think about segregation, we just think of, oh, Black neighborhoods are segregated, brown neighborhoods are segregated, and this project was helping demonstrate that white neighborhoods are segregated and people, white Chicagoans are taught to fear Black neighborhoods, and this book was demonstrating that in a way that was really honest and and personable and and so that is why I consider this book a necessary expansion of Folded Map, because it also includes stories of people who are from don’t go neighborhoods and how they felt when they first heard that people were told to not visit them, essentially.
WATTS: The train on the theme of our broadcast, also kind of has that stigma of you can’t ride this certain line or the CTA is dangerous. Tell me a little bit about what those kinds of narratives and stigma do and how that kind of contributes to the don’t go, don’t visit certain places narrative as well.
LEWIS JOHNSON: It creates this horrible narrative of fear. That prevents other people from not experiencing the wealth of relationships and beauty that exists on the south side and oh, what a sad life that is to be in a city like Chicago and not get to experience the amazing history and life that exists on the predominantly Black side of the city, you know, with so much culture that emerges from that side of the city and, and people are getting left out of it.
WATTS: For people who are maybe still feeling a little apprehensive, afraid, afraid to break out of that mindset of all that they’ve been taught, what would you tell them about breaking that stigma and getting out of their comfort zone and really experiencing Chicago for all that it has to offer?
LEWIS JOHNSON: I would say first off that they can use my Folded Map Action Kit, and my action kit is a self-guided way for people to experience the city if you do not know anyone on either side of the city because segregation worked. We all know that you will never truly understand a place if you don’t do what the locals do. I think that is a motto of traveling, that if you really want to get to know some place, you got to do what the locals do. And one way to do that in your own city that you’re living in or that you’re from is to run errands in a neighborhood that’s racially and economically different. Go to the grocery store, go see how different that experience is. It’s crazy how segregation has influenced the way you buy lotion in different neighborhoods, you know. Go take out $20 at an ATM. These are errands that you can run so that you can see how different sectors treat neighborhoods differently. And so you don’t even have to know anybody to understand what is fair and what is not. And if you just run errands in a neighborhood that is racially and economically different, you’ll see the difference, you know, and you’ll say, oh. I get it now. I get why some people don’t need to leave their neighborhood. I get why others have to leave their neighborhood.
WATTS: Tonika, thank you so much for talking to me. I really appreciate it. I learned so much from this conversation.
LEWIS JOHNSON: Thank you so much.