REBUILDING

From page 1 employment program. The first program is a free 6-week training that prepares people to build trades apprenticeships and the second is a 20-week paid

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The gym would have created a physical barrier between the Harlem neighborhood and the campus, but he said students and residents occupied the administration buildings to put a stop to its construction.

Modern-day diversity, equity and inclusion efforts — which center on diversifying curricula, faculty and students — have used diversity to “meet administration and corporate needs of brand management,” Baldwin said, moving away from the intentions of Black Studies.

Baldwin said he recommends coupling DEI with the principles of abolition, reparations, investment and security, known as ARIS.

“(ARIS) is built on the 1960s liberation moment to see the campus as a site for not just the production of knowledge, but a core fulcrum and today’s knowledge economy,” Baldwin said. “(Black Studies) was directly engaging the role that higher education was playing within the political economy and American empire.”

A roundtable with history and African American Studies Prof. Sherwin Bryant, religious studies Prof. KB Dennis Meade, Communication and African American Studies Prof. Dotun Ayobade and African American Studies Prof. Kennetta Perry then discussed the question: “What is the Black in Black studies?”

The panelists then explored the topic by examining how Black Studies functions across the world.

Ayobade said many Africans would not call themselves Black, but many trends that have started in Africa were inspired by Black Power movements challenging colonialism worldwide. For instance, in the 1970s many Nigerian artists smoked marijuana, practiced nudity and made music as part of a global movement of Black anticolonial resistance, he said.

Ayobade added scholars often do not address the modern complexities of Africa in their studies.

“Africa tends to show up as a kind of historic, ancestral space of origin, when in fact, Africans continually engage with the legacies of empire colonialism,” Ayobade said.

Following the panel, Communication freshman Cydney Hope Brown shared her poetry. Through her work, she discussed her experiences with grief and pride. Over the summer, Brown said she plans to write a series of poems from the vantage point of famous Black women in history to inspire young Black girls.

She then recited a poem entitled “Black Girl,” which she said depicts her refusal to let other peoples’ assumptions control her worldview. Self-love is an active choice, Brown said, and is important career training program.

With these programs, Rebuilding Exchange helps break down existing barriers to trade careers, Share said.

“We’re helping to create a more equitable future for the trades,” Share said. “We’re definitely seeing an

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to her lifestyle.

Culture and film critic Zeba Blay, who served as the second keynote speaker at Friday’s event, gave a talk titled, “What it Means to be Black and Carefree in an Unfree World.” Her speech centered freedom, which she said requires the unpacking of fear.

Being a “fat, dark-skinned, immigrant, queer, neurodivergent Black woman” comes with inherited traumas, she said. Though she experiences fear, Blay said, she has resonated with radical Black artists like Nina Simone, who have created “portals to dream.”

“I exist in a world that consistently devalues people like me, a world that simultaneously ignores and actively perpetuates the violences, both physical and spiritual, against folks who look and live like me,” Blay said. “The world has always been chaotic, dangerous (and) precarious for Black folk.”

Blay wrote a 2021 collection of essays titled “Carefree Black Girls,” which paints a portrait of Black women in pop culture as a way to explore representation, rest and liberation. In 2013, she was the first to use #CarefreeBlackGirl on Twitter after coming across a video of 20th-century Black movie star and dancer Josephine Baker dancing.

Blay said she was enthralled by Baker’s movements, which exuded freedom, and wondered how she could channel similar energy into her own life. Though Blay wrote about carefreeness and celebration, she felt trapped and unfree — a tension Blay wanted to explore in her own writing.

Carefreeness can be a tool to fight for freedom, but Blay said defining freedom is an “elusive task.”

The U.S. uses freedom as a branding tool intertwined with a sense of entitlement and violence, she added.

Blay said she aimed to understand how to claim carefreeness as less of a performative gesture on social media, but rather as a “lived, embodied experience.” Freedom encompasses the political, social and economic dimensions of Black life, she said, while carefreeness centers the spiritual dimension. Blay added freedom and carefreeness need each other to survive.

“Freedom requires sober dedication. It requires work,” Blay said. “Being carefree entails experiencing ease, joy, lightness and liberation, despite the overwhelming fear.” joannahou2025@u.northwestern.edu jessicama2025@u.northwestern.edu kristenaxtman2025@u.northwestern.edu improvement for that; we’re getting people jobs and it’s amazing.”

Jay Dugar contributed reporting.

In the spirit of building community, Rebuilding Exchange will host its Summer House Party on June 3 at the Chicago location. The event will include local craft vendors, food trucks, music and the organization’s “Scraptacular Challenge” — where competitors take scraps of building materials and craft them into something new. shannontyler2025@u.northwestern.edu

From page 1 is to ensure residents and landlords do not have to pay out of pocket for sustainable home upgrades.

Pratt said the One Stop Shop upgrades will focus on “improved health outcomes, energy efficiency, reduced carbon emissions (and) reduced utility bills.”

The program’s pilot is set to launch in the next few months. It will serve up to 50 Evanston households in two census tracts, located in the 5th and 8th wards, which Markus said have higher concentrations of affordable housing units, low-income residents and residents of color.

Bob Dean, chief strategy and program officer for the Center for Neighborhood Technology, said organizers are also looking at state and federal grants in hopes of securing long-term funding for the One Stop Shop program.

While 50 homes is “a drop in the bucket” in terms of addressing the need for affordable housing improvements, Dean said, he hopes to make the program “bigger and better” in the coming years.

“Evanston is a pretty residential city, and so you really have to do something about housing stock in order to get us on a good path,” he said.

With opportunities like the One Stop Shop still waiting to launch, more residents have been looking into ways to install their own energy-efficient systems.

Ninth Ward resident Jeff Balch’s home has had solar panels on its roof since he moved into it in 1996. While the original solar panels were installed by the last homeowner, Balch recently upgraded them after they were damaged during a storm.

Balch said seeing solar panels on just one home can spark interest by neighbors, creating a domino effect.

“There are, I think, five homes within a couple hundred yards of our house that have solar and got it in the last couple of years,” Balch said. “We’ve had a number of calls from friends who see our system, and they’ve come by and they’ve asked for an explanation.” lilycarey2025@u.northwestern.edu

While upfront costs for technologies like solar panels remain high, homeowners like Balch and Neumann said they’ve gotten significant savings in the long term. Because buildings with solar panels produce much of their own energy, residents don’t have to pay typical amounts on electric bills.

Contractors often refer to a “payback period” for solar panels. If residents use them for several years, they will often save enough from not paying energy bills to offset the initial cost of solar panel installation. In Illinois, the average payback period for solar panels is less than nine years.

There’s still an “activation energy” needed to get residents educated about the economic benefits of solar panels, Balch said. And local groups like Climate Action Evanston alongside residents and city officials, are trying to figure out ways to boost awareness of sustainable technology, according to CAE Energy Program Lead Joel Freeman.

“We’re trying to make this transition (to clean energy) into a strategic plan, as opposed to an emergency,” Freeman said.

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