“What makes people rebel against suffering is not really suffering itself but the senselessness of suffering.”
Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality: A Polemic
“Divisiveness affirms things in people.”
Consuela Hendricks, People Matter
1919 Chicago
Demographics were changing quickly in Chicago as blacks were streaming in from the South; 50,000 in a period of one decade. They moved primarily into a handful of neighborhoods on the southside of the city where housing was substandard and cheap. They came to a city with limited resources, and the poor whites on the southside resented the fact they were there.
The flashpoint was when a teenage boy named Eugene Williams was swimming in Lake Michigan on July 27, 1919. A group of young white men threw rocks at him, and he ended up drowning. In practice, beaches were segregated, and we do not know whether the rock throwing was what caused him to swim across the “line.” The police did little and riots ensued. 38 people died, hundreds were injured, and there was significant property damage.
2024 Chicago
As of June, this year, 43,058 migrants have arrived in Chicago since 2022. Finding adequate housing has been a problem, and this influx has made an already critical problem even worse. Shelter space was already limited because of the homeless problem, so the city created 30 temporary shelters in hotels, industrial buildings, and municipal buildings. Since 2022, Chicago has spent more than $300,000 million of city, state, and federal funds for mostly South American migrants. This has stirred widespread resentment among Black Chicagoans and it has created tensions between the city’s large Mexican American community and those new migrants, many of whom come from Venezuela.
How to Think about This
My first thought is that this is the same story, just 100 years apart; and to a large extent, that is accurate. We see anger mixed with resentment, and people acting on those emotions.
David Hume in An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748) wrote that if you put people of equal status together and treat them unequally, you will create resentment and an actionable response to that resentment. Adam Smith in The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) called resentment an “unsocial passion” that was capable of motivating a forceful behavioral response. More recently, Frans De Waal in The Age of Empathy (2009), observed that “Human history is filled with ‘let them eat cake’ moments that create resentment, sometimes boiling over into bloody revolt.” (p. 190)
Warren TenHouten, a sociologist at UCLA, and the person who probably knows more about resentment than anyone, defines resentment as a negative sentiment “relating to grievances, injuries, patterns of unfair treatment, violation, unfulfilled or frustrated desires, and, most generally, unjustified suffering at the hands of another or others. The sentiments associated with resentment include ill-will, bitterness, and anger.”
We live in societies that are open, fluid, contiguous, poorly governed, and structured by group identities. It is safe to say that resentment will always be with us.
A few things we need to know:
- Resentment has an important antecedent condition. There must be a perceived denial of space, the existence of a grievance, or a sense of unjustified suffering. This is the trigger.
- Resentment is a tertiary emotion; it only shows up after primary and secondary emotions have already taken place. You start with anger, surprise, or disgust (primary emotions), shift into outrage, contempt, or shock (secondary emotions); sprinkle in some cognitive awareness about some perceived injustice, and resentment follows. If you try to map how we get there, you see a lot of causal arrows and variant paths.
- Resentment is an emotional reaction directed at someone; it is an automatic response to a perceived provocation by a person or group. You aren’t sitting around thinking about who to blame or who is at fault; you already made that decision. That is who you resent.
- Resentment is actionable. The anger in resentment mobilizes resources to address the perceived injustice. It may be helpful in some instances; it may be destructive in others.
- Resentment is an emotion that builds over time; you carry it with you and it adapts from one real world observation to the next. As such, it comes in more than one form. We have the automatic emotional response, but there is also a generalized sense of resentment that TenHouten refers to as ressentiment. This is “a deep and long-lasting sentiment … [that] suggests a sense of weakness or inferiority;” one that manifests itself in “hostility and malice;” and is directed to those who are perceived as “causing suffering and associated frustration.” This is resentment as expressed in ideas, values, and beliefs.
- If you look closely, you will find in resentment a sense of hope, a belief that something can be done. Those engaged in ressentiment tend to feel helpless and have likely given up.
Everyone is Mad at the Wrong People”
Much of what is going on in Chicago is resentment. But certain groups, such as Black Chicagoans, justifiably have developed a strong sense of ressentiment.
There is tension between Mexican-Americans and the newly arrived immigrants from South America. When Mexican Americans arrived in the US, many were undocumented and were not given work permits. They found low-paying jobs that no one else wanted; working in restaurants, cleaning houses, and mowing lawns. They perceived their lives in Chicago as one of “living in the shadows.”
Mexican-Americans in Chicago think the new immigrants are “living out in the open.” They get media coverage, access to community resources, work permits, and better housing options.
The Little Village or La Villita community in Chicago is the primary placement area for the new migrants from South America; Spanish is the dominant language and given the large Latino presence, the thinking is it would be more culturally adaptable. That has not been the case, as there have been clashes over cultural differences and access to resources.
Anna Marin and Marcela Rodriguez in The Fulcrum (October 2, 2024) describe the enormous division in La Villita.
“[T]ensions have risen as established residents and new neighbors have scrambled for food pantry items, space to work as street vendors, affordable rents and available housing units. ‘It’s as if a kind of racism is being created between us Latinos, even though it’s not their fault,’ said… a Little Village resident about the influx of new residents from Venezuela and other parts of Latin America.”
The easy and emotionally automatic reaction for Mexican-Americans is to blame the newly arrived South Americans for this injustice. The problem is that it is not their fault.
In the past, relocation was gradual and organic; many arrived at a waiting social or familial network, and local non-profits provided services and resources. Then, the shock, as we saw a record 2.5 million arrivals at the Southwest border in fiscal year (FY) 2023. The existing system could not handle this.
The crisis called for a clear federal response where the federal government would take responsibility for where to send the migrants and compensate the states and localities. This did not happen. In its place, the Migration Policy Institute characterized the urban response as a wide “spectrum of adaptation.” Costs have far outpaced federal reimbursements, and cities have tried all kinds of strategies from becoming more restrictive to becoming more open. There was no consistency in funding and no best practices. Cities demanded assistance, but a dysfunctional federal government sat on their hands.
What Should Communities Do?
In the ideal world, community leaders should take advantage of the complexity of resentment and channel these emotions into something productive and constructive. There are times when anger, disgust, and resentment are appropriate and justified; and it would be wonderful if they could redirect the anger to the true cause of the problem.
In Chicago, the primary strategy is to focus on racial unity and channel the public’s frustrations into agitating for the greater good. Earlier this year, conversations were started between Latino and Black Chicagoans on matters of housing, jobs, and immigration. These racial dialogues alternate between the mostly black neighborhood of East Garfield Park and the largely Latino neighborhood of Pilsen. Adriana Cardona-Maguigad of WBEZ writes “Some Black participants say that before these dialogues, they hadn’t taken the time to try to understand Latinos and their struggles. “It was very helpful,” said Melissa Warren. “I didn’t know a lot of Hispanics and Latinos [are] actually going through the same thing as African Americans… I got a better understanding of everybody.”
We also see the attempt to build broader coalitions. Wendy Wei and Leslie Hurtado in South Side Weekly (April 29, 2024), reference Consuela Hendricks, co-founder of People Matter, an interracial advocacy organization.
“Both Black and brown people who are in these situations right now are all suffering,” Hendricks said. “It’s so important to redirect our hatred or anger towards people who actually are causing us pain versus towards people who have nothing to do with our suffering.”
“Divisiveness affirms things in people, but I think that solidarity can bring more hope out of people,” Hendricks said, “because there is hope out there.”
Leone Jose Bicchieri, Founder and Executive Director of Working Family Solidarity, a majority-Hispanic labor rights group, claims: “If left unchecked, we all panic, we’re all scared, we’re going to retreat to our corners… The truth is that this city wouldn’t work without Black and Latino people.”
