Arts & Culture · Chicago · Prose and Poetry · Student Voices

Chicago is My Kind of Town

iPhone Photos and Text by Emily Anne Evans

“The duty of the educator is to uncover the forces which form society so that the individual, equipped with the knowledge of the process, may form his own opinion and make a decision about his position in the world.”

—Lázló Maholy-Nagy, “Vision in Motion” (1947, page 354)

The streets and the people are the driving force behind each city’s unique dynamic. In Chicago, this combination produces similar trends in the arts, politics, sports and themes of everyday living: work, party, work, structural constraint and formal freedom, straight-up and on-the-sly, cultural coagulations and mixed-batter collaborations. Our educators are, in fact, the gangsters, the “do-gooders” and the artists — and many of our citizens embody aspects of all three.

Chicago has always been known as a working town. At the same time, it has always been known as a social town - though this is not a “work hard, play hard” city the way Tokyo is. Here we work not for our names, but so our families survive. We play — in the restaurants and bars; on the beaches and in the parks; at the theaters, museums and galleries — so that we can survive. And the hustlers, particularly in the art world, blend the two together so that our city survives.

The city was built on a marsh, was rebuilt after the fire and was on the cutting-edge of public transportation way-back-when. We are a gridded city with a zero-zero point at the heart of our beginnings and a handful of streets that break the rules. The city’s architecture embodies every stage of its own development - continuing to show the rest of the world our innovative capabilities in creative thinking and in engineering.

Our history does not disappear; it is forever in our blood. Comiskey Park and the Sears Tower will never cease to exist as such, despite corporations like U.S. Cellular and Willis Group Holdings sliding and slicing their way in, attempting to take over. On the flip-side, others moving in exhibit reverent respect — Victory Gardens and the Biograph have become one and the same. Simple examples, yes, but evidence of how change is manufactured in this town. We are a society that makes things happen on our agenda, individually or as a collective.

On the artistic front, we permeate all that we can. In the streets, in the storefronts, in the alternative spaces and apartment galleries, in museums and juried exhibitions, and in the lobbies and offices of banks and law firms. In the airwaves, on no formal stage at all, under the lights of small venues, in restored ballrooms and darkened theaters, and on college campuses. In our city’s many fairs and festivals, through the “mom and pop” establishments, in the local chains and at the franchises of multinational conglomerates. Despite any challenges faced, Chicago artists will figure out a way to be seen and heard.

Movements and aesthetics (artistic and otherwise) often start in pockets of our segregated city — many times in response to this very segregation. Sometimes it stays in the pocket. Lifts a culture up; brings a new solidarity and sense of identity. Often it spills over, and others, from different classes, ethnicities and backgrounds, get involved and find their place in an unfamiliar world. Those discovering new positions come with their own baggage, and their contributions to the city’s developing principles are that much the stronger for it.

Sometimes these explorers are accepted, sometimes not. Sometimes this integration of culture and purpose is real, sometimes not. And, yes, these patterns run deep throughout all of Chicago culture —Southside, Northside, Westside. From nighttime painted trains and permission walls to soul clubs, pool halls and frat bars. From the history (and varying support) of the Daleys and the Obamas to the projects dying and the condos rising. From the Payton and Jordan eras to the Sox and Cubs’s never-ending cross-league rivalry. From how the city makes money (parking tickets) to the filtration of our taxes to the top one percent choosing parks over schools.

If you are wise, you will pull your education from all the corners, all the alleys, and all the buildings. You will learn from the words and actions of all residents in our windy city (a phrase, by the way, that comes from our politicians’ deceit — not the jet streams and lake effect). Your place in our culture will never quite fit otherwise, no matter how powerful and satisfied you appear to be, or fool yourself into believing you are. Satisfaction does not come through isolation, especially in this town.

This may seem to be an unreasonable and exaggerated statement, however, when you get down to it you have not lived life — and Chicago is life — until you break out of your comfort zone. Until you push past the blatant American commodities and ideals and embrace diversity while maintaining pride in your own (mixed) heritage. And until you listen to the Chicago gangsters, the Midwest “do-gooders” and our unparalleled artistic masses – both under and above ground.

May 28th, 2010

Arts & Culture · Student Voices

Portraits of Chicago

Work samples from the inaugural “Arts in Chicago” Art History/Visual and Critical Studies undergraduate class

Hog Butcher

By Emily Anne Evans
visual communications;
Photography
4th year undergrad

 
 
 
 
 

Chicago 2010

By Ebony Marie Coward
Film, Video, and New Media
BFA 2010

My lifelong city
The city that works,
has ground
to a halt.
With it’s overpriced augmentations —
the prettiest picture
ever.

A life lived in this city
is like a life
lived
in a house
where you grew up with
an old man
that smacked you around a little.

To be here now
needy
and dreaming that my work
will one day
end
the neediness;
I tell the other
restless natives
when they ask
of my intentions —
and their faces change —
in doubt of me? In sympathy?
And they recite the familiar refrain
that must explain
why
I would attempt a thing
so unwise
as Art —
“… you know somebody?”

I feel
I’m fasting
in this city where
you feast.
I watch people on TV
dining and recommending
and I write down
the recommendations
and I say
we’ve got
to try
that spot.
And months later
I find the names
of restaurants
magnetized to our refrigerator
where I go for
potatoes
that we’re having — a different way —
but, again.
The museums were
my adolescent standbys
if we couldn’t see the movie
or split a pizza.
If it was too cold
for the lake —
we visited history and the stars —
science and the seas —
we took in
indecipherable pictures
in antique buildings
where no one hovered at the entrance
with an outstretched hand
because donations were really
only
suggested
and any amount would do
and still no entry fee
could get you
a smile
from the guards.
And the nice old lady
at the information desk
thought I
was so precious
giving my dollar
because I heard my mom when she said
they need to know that
we can give too.

And now the adolescents
living where I grew up
live in a city
of inaccessible
masterpieces.
And my own adolescent
who has a right
to more
than I can give
would have had
to settle
for learning in the nearby
lacking school
were it not for
an apologetic
ex-boyfriend
saying sorry
by saying
we lived
in his house.
Parents are
lucky
when they know people
socially conscious enough
to lie
for the good
of a child;
allowing us
to share
the lease
or have our
cell phone bill
sent there
so our kids
can go
to the good school too.

I’ve spoken to
company reps
on the phone —
they ask
“Where are you from?”
and I tell them.
And they tell me
“I knew it … you can tell by the accent”
Do I bleat my short a’s?
Turn my t-h’s into d’s?
I know that in familiar company
I forget the King’s —
and I go
BEV
which
here
is really just a faster
Mississippi, Alabama, Tennessee, Louisiana.
And when I’m angry —
which I am more often now —
my second language rages from my mouth
informing
“all ya’ll mutha fuckas betta leave my ass da’ fuck alone”
because I’m still here —
because I’ve always been here
and I still
don’t know
anybody.

Northbound Red Line

By Colin Grimm
PAINTING AND DRAWING
EXCHANGE STUDENT,
School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
BFA 2010

There was four of us. All strangers. All united in our quest to avoid the half-drinkin 40 oz. tumbling across the train car floor. There was eye contact, but no dialogue. It was Old English without a cap. It was like spin the bottle from hell. One sudden jerk of the train and the hobo-germ infused, stale flat liquid would come roaring out.
The man next to me stepped on the train from the Wilson platform. He wore paint splattered tan steel toes. He pretended not to be fazed by the possibility of falling victim to the back alley backwash, but I saw the concerned glance from the corner of his eye.
The women across from us had already been seated when I stepped on the train at Jackson. I immediately wondered how long she had been engaged in this painstaking activity. She wore black K-Swisses, which looked as though they had been through similar battles. And lost.
Next to her sat the young lady who I knew would never last in this twisted form of Old English Roulette. She got on at Belmont or Fullerton, I can’t remember which one. She wore gray suede boots that stopped just before her knees. If they weren’t new, she kept em looking that way. It’s not that I was rooting against her, it’s just that her reaction to getting soaked by the suds was the one I was most eager to see.

I was wearing Jordans. But they were bootleg XI’s that I got offline from China. I was concerned but didn’t allow my body language to show an ounce of it.
The bottle was rotating in full circles like a protractor. Small amounts of infectious liquid splashing out with every jolting stop of the outbound Red Line train. I expected at any moment one of us would break the seal and spring up from our seats to sprint to safety on the other side of the overcrowded, infrequent train.
We passed the Jarvis stop where an extremely obese man wearing flip-flops stepped on board. He looked at our section of the train, and with a crooked eye chose to stand uncomfortably instead of resting his legs in the only remaining seat.
It was at that point that it dawned on me … all four of us might make it! We passed the MENTAL 312 burner just south of Howard, where the talented young writer forgot the T in his name. It happens. The fill was clean. I smirked. Not because of the writer’s drunken mistake, but because we made it! Steel toes, K-Swiss, Belmont and myself had endured the rigorous journey to Howard teetering on the brink of destruction. Together, we played the twisted game of Old English Roulette and we won!

A Memoir of Unknowing

By Hannah Rodriguez
PRINTMAKING
1st year undergrad

I didn’t know from ages four to nine that my summer day trips to the “big city” — or as my mother always said “The place where her girls could see a working city work” — would be the same place I left to — my mother’s “baby girl” — to work in the working city that worked. I didn’t know for the three hours spent in the car, back and forth from my Grandpa Cook’s house to Cook County, that some day that trip’s time would be cut in half but frequented twice as often in order to fly my life between two worlds. I didn’t know I’d trade my tender Tennessee sunrises for hard high rises that ride skies and winds like my back porch back home’s chimes would cry apocalypse if mated with. I didn’t know when walking up and down Michigan with my commissioned hand grabbing at store door handles like last chances, afraid to miss a thing, that someday I’d walk the same strip like it was a shortcut to nowhere.
I didn’t know in that biggest, bestest store of all when I got the American girl doll to look like me, the one that probably broke my mother’s checkbook like water, that I would someday fast for weeks at a time, just so I could save up dimes, hoping to make up for maybe a quarter of the cost of that baby doll that I never had sense enough to play with, and would wear words like “fuck American consumerism,” like my doll wore that cardboard crown I bought her. I didn’t know that what I’d found then would be lost now. And I didn’t know that I’d find that I felt lost, more often than found, in the town where one can never hide but yet is never seen. And that the city scenery would morph into foregrounds — like bleed prints to page edges — so that I would always be walking with the framing behind my neck, and at my heels to feel what I should be facing, but never to heed to the pacing. To walk in the picture, without ever getting it — and being framed, for the crime of appreciation, which I have yet to commit.
I didn’t know in May of my third grade year when my father was framed for a crime he did not commit, but was still perceived guilty by the government and thus deemed unfit — though not yet under arrest. Did not know that when they tried to take us away, because my mother was away, and the state was to hold us custody that the place my mother was — instead of placing her arms around me ­— was Cabrini Green, doing service projects for the people who needed her more than I did. That this place would be the same place I fled to. Except that Cabrini Green would no longer exist, and maybe it’s because my mother cut her trip short, maybe it did need her more. Or maybe. I needed this place more than this place needed Cabrini. Or maybe. It’s survival of the fittest and I came to this city, like I needed it more than my own mother. So, I must have been stronger than Cabrini, which needed her enough to keep her from me. Although.
I didn’t hear Cabrini crying when I was hiding out in a basement for a week, hoping DCS didn’t have no tracking device on my tears. I didn’t see Cabrini’s father get carted off to jail the same year we stopped going to the city because planes flew into buildings then, and there is where the buildings were, and my mother thought it best that we would just stay put. I didn’t see Cabrini try to run as fast as the neighborhood kids rode bikes cause Daddy moved away, and then was locked away, and never got bike or taught Cabrini how to ride. Naw…
I didn’t see, hear, or feel Cabrini. And I don’t really see, hear, or feel Cabrini now. But I’m pretty sure Cabrini felt me. Felt what I was going through before I even existed. Or. Felt what I was going through before it didn’t exist and I did. And.
I didn’t know shit. Until. I did.

Homeless

Mugshot

By Coraline de Chiara
Acrylic on Canvas
(right)

Homeless

By Coraline de Chiara
Painting and Drawing Exchange Student,
beaux-arts de paris

coffee in the hand, cellphone stuck to ears,
oblivious passersby
walking, marching
to yet another meeting

Tattered pants, stained jacket
constant witness
standing defeated
everlasting
enduring

busy, blend, regulated
walkers, crawlers,
prowlers,
worker bees
in the windy hive

obscured
rejected
like the filthy trash
no movement
no change
no progress
jobless
vagrant
transient
invisible

homeless

City Dreaming

By YunSun Park
Interdisciplinary
2nd Year Undergrad

dazzling lights at night,
colorful flowers filling the city,
amazing! fascinating!
passion fueled with the dreaming of the city.
the mega-city took a young solo tourist’s breath away.

square windows,
grid-like streets,
everything has to be right angled
just like a shape of money.

highly decorated Magnificent Mile,
seasonal renovations for every corner of streets,
every matter has to be perfect
just like men’s customized black blazer.

where can I find some tolerance?

wheels on the cars go round and round —
the only roundness in this OCD city.

the city once was the young tourist’s dream place
should only be remained as a sweet dream.

Lincoln Park Zoo Lights

By Abigail Tarun
Interdisciplinary
2nd Year Undergrad
Pencil on Paper
(right)

April 29th, 2010

Student Voices

Peevee’s Taxes

April 12th, 2010

Duke Reiter · F News question · SAIC infrastructure

SAIC Present Wellington “Duke” Reiter Resigns

This week it was announced to the student body that SAIC’s president, Duke Reiter, has resigned after two years of holding the position.  In the email sent out to every student, he was quoted as saying that, “after much thought, I have decided to return to my ongoing work linking the fields of art, design and sustainable urbanism. These issues have always been my passion and I look forward to devoting my full attention to the creation of sustainable city models on a global basis.” Although I wasn’t personally present at the Strategic Planning meeting held today by the School to discuss upcoming changes in the core values and infrastructure of SAIC, it has come to my attention that some were holding the School accountable for President Reiter’s resignation. I’m sure there are many personal reasons for his decision to resign, and while no academic institution wants their leadership position in limbo, it seems that this accusation jumps to hasty conclusions.  Although not perfect - like any academic institution - SAIC is striving to involve the student body in new and upcoming decisions being made to better the infrastructure of the School. Rather than posing endless critiques and lamentations over what isn’t being done, this seems to be an appropriate time for those discontent with the School and its leadership, to voice their opinion constructively and to strive to make SAIC educate to its fullest potential.

This month the F News question is “What changes and/or improvements would you like to see at SAIC?” We want to be your sounding board.  If there are things you want changed, or issues you have with the School email us at editors@fnewsmagazine.com - your response will be considered for publication in the May issue of F.

Until then - Duke, we wish you well.

–Amanda Aldinger, School News editor

April 6th, 2010

Student Voices

Peevee “The Freelancer”

Doesn’t have health insurance

By Olivia Liendo, Photograph by Emily Anne Evans

March 5th, 2010

Sharp After Dark

By Megan Isaacs

What’s in your window?
Send F an image: artdirector@fnewsmagazine.com

March 4th, 2010

Student Voices

The Artist Inside Out

F asked four SAIC students to show us what an artist would look like through an X-Ray machine. These “Artist Views” are the results…

February 15th, 2010

Prose and Poetry · Student Voices

Tales from my Fisherman Father (If I follow my hands, can I shake the winter fish from the trees?)

  by Rachel Slotnick

In Tiburon, on a Wednesday, I saw a seabird with my father’s face. “Why don’t you get yourself a decent boyfriend?” it cawed. As it flew, it sprouted up and vanished, and it cast a flicker on the sand by my feet, like the limb of a tree, breathing out slowly.
*
On the night before a final exam, I dreamt that my father was eaten by a bear. There was blood everywhere. The bear’s belly bulged, and the very next day that same bear grew an enormous fisherman beard, and complained of uncontrollable cravings for seafood. I didn’t realize I was still dreaming the next day.
*
When I turned seven, my father’s beard filled with silver carp and curls of seaweed. His brown spotted cod eyes scrambled from reef to reef. When he spoke he emitted an enormous gurgling noise, which made everything prickle because it sounded like death. But to me, this was his lullaby. It was the sort of burbling tonality I needed in order to believe in things like that stuff that shifts the clouds.
*
When my father was a child, a shark bit his arm off. He replaced it with a wooden stump. Logically, he became a shark hunter of a fisherman, and he hated all trees for daring to resemble him. Stumps were the worst of the trees for my father, because he knew they were already dead.
*
My father was tormented by winter fish. He saw them everywhere, dangling, ornamenting the trees, reflecting lures chiseling the air, hiccups of green ocean swallowing the sky. I tried to explain that they were only apples. “See, they’re not fish at all,” I said as I plucked a red, ripe one, but his scaly skin tautened, and so, like he had taught me so many times, I threw it back. Like a falling plea, the apple hit the ocean.
*
“My skeleton is shivering,” he said to me once, when his thoughts were cataloguing the winter.
*
One Passover, I brought home a handsome, rich, fish of a boyfriend.
“Is he Jewish??” asked my father, clutching the neighborhood in the palm of his hand.
*
Once, in the Tiburon hospital, I understood my father’s sadness. I tried to tell him so by scooping an octopus and spooning it to him. He slurped it in like an inverted wind. I watched legs and legs and legs swarm, and as they were consumed, they clung to the curls of his silver beard. I had never felt my hands so concretely – so many fingers to follow, so many unnecessary digits. That was when I first noticed it, supple and brimming, a perfect tentacle eroding from the heart of my palm.
*
There we stood, just two humans looking out the hospital window, at the edges of the fish bowl, talking about the weather.
*
My father’s stump arm flailed wildly as the train shook. When it went underground my father got confused. “But, look,” he insisted. “There’s a beautiful glowing fish at the end of the tunnel.”
*
“We’ll call him Charlie,” my father said once of a tremendous rainbow trout, as he gutted it and the paint colors spilled out. The clouds were gray as fish skin. My father wiped the purple blood on his pants, and he said, “Don’t worry, Sweets, he’s already dead.”
*
I knew when the clocks were still in the fish skin sky, and the carp rained down from the dying trees like rotten apples. “Be stilled,” said my father, like fishing for rotten apples. The leaves hummed, and everywhere was tentacles for hearts. I knew then that this was the beginning of something slow.

December 8th, 2009

Strung

by Shane Graber

Walks right up, pulls it from the paper bag. Moves fluidly and
deliberately, like new shag carpeting.
She grabs my wrist, leads my hand right to its white cotton pocket, if
you can believe. I withdraw a long strip of purple construction paper.
“Her scarf.  Wants you to put it on her. Brrr.”
“Oh. Okay. There you are.”
Good thing no one watches. So forward and all.
“I think she likes you. Name’s Svatlana.”
Svatlana dangles before me for me. Bad timing. Want to avoid
entanglements. But those coal-dark eyes, woodsy cheekbones. I cave.
“Want to get out of here?”
“Out of where?”
“Not you.”
I reach out and take Svatlana by something.
“Let’s not ruin this with a lot of talk,” I say.
Uncontrollable nodding. She so gets me.

December 8th, 2009

Elaine Sturtevant

By Anne Knight Weber

For the first twenty minutes after I arrive to hear Elaine Sturtevant speak to the Contemporary Art Society at the Art Institute of Chicago, I view a series of the same very short film clips of around a minute each, over and over in a continuous loop.

While the films run, Sturtevant sits low in her chair on the very edge of the stage as far from the podium as possible, wearing a very short hair cut and trousers with a suit coat. Her appearance nearly disguises her gender, until I remember her first name is Elaine.

Funny things happen when I watch Elaine Sturtevant’s short film clips repeating over and over in a continuous loop. I am riveted to what appears to be a formless narrative. At first, I wonder if the films are slightly changed with each repetition, so each time I watch over and over, I am looking for some slight difference. That hand of the man thumbing the money, does he move his fingers differently each time I see the clip again? He doesn’t, so what does change, each successive time the film clip is repeated? When I see the same film clip over and over, what changes about how I view the film? When a film clip is repeated, is the piece different because I see it once again, in another version, which appears to be exactly the same? Will multiple viewings help me to find differences? How do I perceive a film clip that I thought I already viewed? Do I change how I see the piece? Does the piece change each time I see it again? Which time that I experience seeing a work of art will I value my experience the most and why? Do I change my perceptions and what I value about my experience each time I see the same film clip? How is each additional experience a repetition of what I thought I perceived in the first viewing?
If I get annoyed to be watching the same clip over again, why am I annoyed? In each successive viewing, am I having a different experience? If so, how is each experience different from the last?

The rest of the evening continues to be a zany exploration of how repeating an experience makes the original experience different. Sturtevant read from interviews printed in magazines that she had given previously. She selected an influential art critic from the audience to read the part of the influential art critic and Elaine Sturtevant read the part of Elaine Sturtevant, her own part. This both added to the original interview that had appeared in print and had merit standing alone as a current representation of a contemporary artist. Sturtevant seemed to enjoy herself, especially when a student asked a long rambling question and Sturtevant, barely containing her laughter, said, “Please repeat the question.”

September 28th, 2009

Olafur Eliasson

By Anne Knight Weber

THINK YOU UNDERSTAND LIGHTING? DON’T LIKE AMBIGUITY? DON’T TRY THIS AT HOME!

Recipe to change your perceptions:

One square room

Four mirrors mounted in the center of each of the four walls

Four tripods with lights beaming in various strategic directions

Museum of Contemporary Art goers

When I decide to step away, the imaginary world created by Olafur Eliasson’s set up of lights and mirrors disappears right along with me. My image in the mirror disappears for what feels like forever. Will I decide to come back to stand there again and gaze into a mirror to take myself in, or be taken in, by space and time and light? Who will see me there? As the saying goes, I can’t dip my toe in the same river twice.

An electrical cord trails irreverently away from each of four spotlights set high atop a tripod. Look, Eliasson seems to be saying, “No magic here, just an ordinary an electric lamp powered by a cord.” Yet, each light setting in the room plays endlessly engaging games with my notion of my head. Am I the subject of the lighting? Or alternatively, am I imagining myself the one who will use these lights to create an image? Or is another museum visitor the one being observed by me, who is both an observer and part of the scenario? If I stand next to this tripod, does what I experience have to do with where I look? Or is my experience about where I stand in relation to the pool of light?

Each of Olafur Eliasson’s four staged locations in a square room has the exact same deceptively simple ingredients: a tripod holding a spotlight , a round circle of pooled light cast strategically on the wall, the floor or at a mirror, a rectangular mirror and of course, reflections in the mirror. Despite the identical elements, each setting is organized differently, with a different stated goal: observer, spectator, visitor and user. Yet none of the four sets is strictly for one to just observe, or only to spectate, or merely to visit or only to use the space in a square room. Not one of the titles fits one of the areas of the square room precisely for only the one stated goal.

My first move is to stand smack inside the center of a pool of light cast on the floor from a tripod above me. I look around self-consciously. Phew, no one is looking at me, despite the fact I stand in center stage lighting. I can’t see myself and no camera or audience of any kind is aware of me there in the pool of light. I am invisible in a spotlight. I have nothing to do but spy on other museum goers’ interacting with light, space and time. So, I see a young woman enter the exhibit room in the mirror across the room from me. She is not aware I am watching her. I am like a man in a submarine looking through a periscope. I see her image in the mirror, the image bounces off the mirror as through a periscope mirror so that I see her without her being aware of being watched in the mirror. I am at one remove from my subject: a young woman entering the exhibit room. All at once I am using the light by standing in the pool, observing that I am not being watched, being spectator to another visitor and visiting an exhibit.

September 17th, 2009

School

Why your smartphone won’t work at SAIC

By Justin Rowe

Connecting to the SAIC wireless network via smartphone continues to be impossible, and frustrating. Some students report having figured out how to connect on their own, but the rest of us will have to wait a little longer for support from the CRIT help desk. According to Hiroko Yamamura, Director of School Information Technologies, “This spring we will have a workflow in place to assist with the connectivity of current generation iPhone 3G and iPod Touch products.”

The complications thus far stem from the wireless networking standard used by the school. They use 802.1x, as do many large enterprises and universities, to ensure a secure connection that protects sensitive information from being intercepted. Again, Mrs.Yamamura, “The primary reason we implement this is to permit only authorized Artic account users to access our wireless network and campus network resources and to protect our user’s ARTIC account credentials. Since students may be conducting personal transactions of a sensitive nature (e.g. accessing School records, banking, shopping, etc.) we feel it is important that we take additional steps to ensure that wireless connections provide a level of security which approaches that of physically wired connections.”

Blackberry, Palm and Windows Mobile device support is not currently in the offering. But, it appears users of current model Apple WiFi products will soon be spared wandering the halls of the MacLean Building searching in vain for a cell signal. My next tech question: “Why can’t I ever find a place to plug in my laptop to a power outlet? Really, even in the lounges. WTF?”

June 22nd, 2009

School · Student Voices

Holography Lab Petition

April 23rd, 2009

Student Voices

The Blackest History Month Ever

by QX Roper

Four score, and many centuries ago, my great ancestors were kidnapped from their homes, torn away from their families, robbed of their dignity and given the burden of creating one of the most powerful nations on this Earth.  Their children, descendants, and generations to follow carried this painful weight, not comprehending what their contribution would be to this great country called America.  Most of them did not understand their identity but all of them understood the struggle.

Today, I find myself laughing at the irony that a century ago a literate black man was to be outlawed, and here I am, an articulate journalist, speaking of how evil white people “used to be.”  These comments don’t come from a bitter place of resentment, but if we are to discuss exactly what Black History is, we can’t overlook the past realities of slavery, segregation, racism, prejudice, inequality, lynching, ridicule, gentrification, and psychological deterioration.  So how do we define this month and why is it important?

Well, in my opinion, the 28 day holiday serves as an annual reminder that, as a Black American, I must be on my ultimate hustle.  To achieve greatness, I have to work 12 times harder than any of my white peers just to be viewed as “equal”.  I used to get made fun of for being an overachiever. Most people don’t understand my need to work overtime as my passion to go to school full time. Everyone makes comments about me doing too much.  I used to have a part time job at Niketown and had a hard time making friends because being in grad school with high goals and no children while black was a bit odd. But when you experience the true meaning of being Black in America, it’s hard to accept anything less than perfect. You either go hard or go home.

Each February I am reminded of all the ridiculous, unrealistic, “Lifetime: Television Made for Women” BS I had to endure the previous year.  At the moment, I am reflecting about my life as an undergraduate at my former school’s Theatre Department.  This was a very special place where professors told me that I must minds because being in grad school with high goals and no children, while black, was a bit odd.  But when you experience the true meaning of being Black in America, it’s hard to accept anything less than perfect.  aster a black dialect because that would be 80% of my work, that I had good auditions but didn’t really quite “fit” any of the roles, and that my type would lead to a career playing stereotypes.  I graduated having played a criminal, a servant, a juvenile delinquent, and a voodoo priest in some of their productions.  Now, I am at SAIC pursuing a career in journalism.

For someone like me, Black History Month is a time to just think about how corrupt everything is. But it is also an opportunity to inspire change.  Oh, yes.  There’s that word again, “change”.  And thanks to Obama and his incredible league of good doers, the word has been beaten into our skulls.  But before we allow it become another cliche term (such as “getting jiggy”) we must really make an attempt to understand what changes can be made.  Do you acknowledge security guards on campus?  Do you surround yourself with a diverse group of people?  Have you ever watched BET?  Have you ever been on the south side?  Would you ever date someone outside of your race?  Do you have any role models who are not white? Did you answer “no” to any of these questions?  Are you lying to me?  Okay.  Now we are getting somewhere.

For the most part, no one takes this month seriously and I doubt anyone in my new setting will be actively engaged in anything beyond Oprah and Obama—but Black History Month is a little bit more than just reading a poster about Martin Luther King Jr. It’s a little bit deeper than knowing that Jackie Robinson played baseball and that Harriette Tubman was a conductor on the Underground Railroad. The bottom line, is that there is no excuse for any American of any race not to take interest in Black History Month because as the McDonald’s commercials say, “Black History is American History”. We should all be very aware of the history of our country included regardless of how uncomfortable it makes us feel.  Black History Month is a like a friendly Google reminder that pops up and says “Hey Bucko, Black people are important too!”  But do you click on the ads and do a little investigating on the subject or do you merely hit the ignore button?

So I strongly urge you to take a risk in February 2009. Go ahead!  You’re in school.  Educate yourself.  Yes, you might have voted for a Black president but there are still major problems with race in this country and knowledge is the first step in repairing that.  Before you can allow yourself to have any spirited reaction to this article, I would hope that it sparked an interest in more information.

And for those of you who have been protesting for a White History Month, may I remind you that every fourth thursday of November we are all forced to celebrate the genocide and extinction of Native Americans… I mean seriously, since when did going away parties become annual?

February 12th, 2009

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