The Fear Factory

Fucking White People...

I know people who live in fear of cities. I’m not talking about immigrants or the poor. I’m talking about white people. People I grew up with. People who look like me. People who ask, “Why would you live in Milwaukee? Why Chicago? Isn’t it dangerous?”

They say it like it’s concern, but what they really mean is they’ve built their lives inside a bubble of fear. They watch the news, see one video of violence on a loop, and think the whole city’s a war zone. They’ve never been here. They’ve never walked down 18th Street or Mitchell or Humboldt. But they know. The TV told them so.

I live here. I walk these streets. I see something completely different.

My barber in Chicago is Mexican. He doesn’t speak much English, and I barely speak Spanish, so we use Google Translate on our phones to talk. The guy is an artist with clippers, meticulous, proud, and skilled. He fades hair like he’s sculpting marble. And you know what? I won’t say the name of his shop because I’m scared ICE could show up there one day. That’s the fucked-up part. Not the danger my white friends think exists. The real danger comes from government raids and the constant threat that good people can be treated like criminals for simply existing.

When I tell people about my barber, they shake their heads. “You really go down there?” Like I’m stepping into a war zone. I tell them about my favorite pizza spot, my walks through neighborhoods where families fill the parks, where kids play soccer, where music echoes out of open windows. I tell them I’ve never once felt unsafe. They look at me like I’m lying.

What I see are people living, working, laughing, building lives, celebrating culture. What they see is danger. That’s the difference between living and spectating. City life is vibrant, messy, and human. Suburbia is sanitized. We’ve scrubbed out the color, the chaos, the sound, the rhythm, and then we call it safe.

White America’s fear is the most destructive force in this country. It’s not just ignorance. It’s complicity. Fear keeps ICE funded. Fear keeps police armored up. Fear builds walls instead of bridges. Fear justifies treating brown skin like probable cause. Every time someone says, “I’d never live there,” what they’re really saying is they’d rather not see the world as it really is.

And let’s talk about the guns. Because this is where the hypocrisy really shines.

It’s not the cities where everyone’s armed to the teeth. It’s the small towns, the cul-de-sacs, the so-called safe places. Every third garage in the suburbs has an AR-15 locked up for protection. You go to a country bar and there’s a pistol in the glove box of half the trucks in the lot. People in small towns have arsenals that could outfit a militia, but somehow they think the danger is on my block.

I was talking to someone not long ago about a building in the city that went on lockdown because someone had a gun. She said, “See, that’s why no one wants to go into the city.” I just stared at her with this what-the-fuck expression. There’s a gun in this house. In your comfortable cul-de-sac. Your teenage son keeps it under his bed. But sure, the city’s the dangerous place. That’s the delusion that fear builds, the idea that geography decides morality.

What’s funny is how many white people still come into the city. They drive in for a Brewers game or a Bulls game, they hit the museums or a five-star restaurant, then they scurry back to their suburb telling stories about how crazy the city is. They have the audacity to eat our food, soak up our culture, and then talk about how they could never live here. They say it like a badge of wisdom, but it’s just fear disguised as pride.

I’ve been to rural Wisconsin bars where the talk is about “the next civil war” like it’s fantasy football. These are the same folks clutching their pearls about Chicago. The same people watching cable news and muttering about crime while their own neighbor has been stockpiling ammo for years. The truth is, the gun culture in white America has turned into a religion built on paranoia, not protection.

I’ve watched cops shake down brown-skinned men for legally carrying handguns. I’ve never once seen a white guy get the same treatment. And I’ve never heard my suburban friends talk about that kind of threat. They don’t want to see it. Because seeing it would mean admitting they’re part of it.

What’s happening in Chicago right now with ICE isn’t random. It’s an extension of white fear. The same fear that built redlining. The same fear that moved white flight. The same fear that funds the police and defunds the schools. It’s fear wrapped in law and order. And it’s propped up by a culture that worships guns and security systems and property values more than it values humanity.

Cities are living organisms. They pulse. They breathe. They fight to stay alive. The suburbs are the embalmed version of America. Preserved, perfumed, and rotting from the inside out.

And here’s something I never hear anyone talk about. City people don’t complain about the suburbs or the country the way suburban and country people complain about the city. You never hear someone in Chicago say, “I’d never live in Brookfield, it’s too dangerous.” You never hear someone in Milwaukee say, “I couldn’t live in a place with that many guns.” We don’t talk about the suburbs because we don’t fear them. We just don’t need them to validate our lives. But they sure can’t stop talking about us.

I love city life. I love its contradictions. I love walking down a block where I hear three languages in a single minute. I love being reminded that the world is bigger than me. I don’t want a life surrounded only by people who look like me and think like me. That’s not safety. That’s death.

So when my white friends say, “Be careful down there,” I tell them, you be careful up there. Your fear is killing empathy. Your fear is making you complicit. And your fear is the reason ICE feels emboldened to raid barbershops full of artists and fathers.

City life isn’t the danger. Cowardice is.