Thursday, Dec. 3, 2020
IDS Indiana Daily Student | idsnews.com
IU's great big COVID-19 experiment, pg. 7
'Making change loudly' IU QB Tattoo artist fights to make space for Black people in Bloomington FOOTBALL
Penix out for season
By Ty Vinson vinsonjo@iu.edu | @ty_vinson_
T
erin J.D. starts his tattoo sessions by telling his client he’s going to waste more of their time than anyone else ever could. On Sept. 24, he was scheduled to create a custom tattoo for Phoebe Powell, 19. It was the day after dozens of people gathered in People’s Park just down the street from Cry Babies Electric Tattooing to protest the Kentucky attorney general’s decision not to charge the officers who killed Breonna Taylor with anything related to her death. Taylor was a Black woman who was killed by police March 13 in her home. Terin had planned to record portions of that day’s tattoo process for a documentary project, which probably would have been about the protest if he had been able to go. But before Terin sat Phoebe down to start sketching out the new permanent installation of neotraditional art on her arm, a darker shade of melanin Terin specializes in tattooing, he needed her to do something for him. “Today we’re giving her a lot of Black business,” Terin said in reference to one of the previous owners of Moon Stones, a local gem, rock and jewelry shop. He handed Phoebe a few bucks and asked her to go buy something at the bohemian shop and mention she was getting a tattoo next door. Terin has been in what he calls a “petty war” with the neighboring local business. It started when a woman who had previously owned the store, upset that Moon Stones’ designated spot was taken, parked behind some other cars in the lot with her light gold Mercedes SUV. It was a sort of deal the current owners of Moon Stones made, according to current owner Cheyenne Kollum — if someone parks in their spot, they’ll block the person in and hope they come into the store to be unblocked. It really blew up on Sept. 14, when, as Terin was cleaning his shop and preparing it for the day, he watched the SUV park in the alley separating his shop from Moon Stones. Terin stood up from his stool and apologized for what he was about to do. “It’s like the most petty thing I’m doing right now,” he said, rummaging through signs and canvases in the corner of the room. Before the woman could get out of her car, Terin was out there, standing up against the wall holding a white canvas spray painted with the words “My parking” with an angry face drawn next to it. He wanted the message to be obvious: The sign was making fun of the owners of the store for getting so mad when someone was in the spot. When she got out of her car, she asked, “Can I help you?” He told the woman that blocking people in with her gold Mercedes SUV was the most disgusting example of white privilege he’s seen. She took out her phone and asked him to repeat that, so she could post it on Facebook. He went inside to grab his professional camera to do the same. She drove off. So when Phoebe walked into Moon Stones 10 days later, she did what Terin said and told the woman she felt like popping by to peruse the gems before getting a tattoo at the shop out back. The woman said she’d never heard of the shop out there and asked if Phoebe knew of this other, women-run tattoo place instead. She then asked Phoebe what kind of tattoo she was getting, in which Phoebe responded with “A mom tattoo.” “Is your mom dead?” she recalled the woman asking. “No, I just love my fucking mom,” Phoebe responded.
Evan Gerike egerike@iu.edu | @EvanGerike
Sophomore quarterback Michael Penix Jr. is out for the season after suffering a torn ACL, IU head coach Tom Allen announced in a Zoom conference Monday. “Our heart breaks for Michael, and his family is here with him," Allen said. "Really feel for him, all he's worked for.” Penix suffered the injury in the third quarter of IU’s game against Maryland on Saturday after he landed awkwardly while running out of bounds. Penix leads the Big Ten with 1,645 passing yards and 14 touchdowns in six games this season. He set a career high in passing yards against Ohio State on Nov. 21 with 491yards, the second highest in program history. Sophomore Jack Tuttle, a transfer from the University of Utah, is expected to start against Wisconsin on Dec. 5.
Terin said the idea is to scare the owners of Moon Stones with Black business — that if he keeps this up for a year, any internalized racism she may have as a white woman will make her think something bad is going to happen if she’s continuously getting Black business, bringing her bias to the forefront, Terin hopes. He later sent some of his shop helpers and apprentices over to keep it up. He loves testing white authority in Bloomington. “You don’t change culture by being quiet,” he said. “The only way you change a market like Bloomington is loudly.” * * * ABBIE GRESSLEY | IDS
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nce Terin sat Phoebe down for her tattoo, they started to talk. As Terin pierced her skin, his needle feeling like nails digging into a raw sunburn that would leave a permanent shrine to Phoebe’s mother, he asked her about growing up as a Black woman in Bloomington. She told Terin of the conversations she had with her mom about Bloomington not being a good place for Black people to raise families. Terin agreed, saying it’s hard for people to see that when there are louder voices drowning out those of minorities. “It’s always white people saying they don’t feel that way,” Terin said. “White people cancel Black talking points here because white people are more respected here, no matter your level.” The city’s history shows just that: Narratives have been created about Black people in Bloomington, and oftentimes they don’t match up with what people have actually experienced. Accounts of some Black neighborhoods are nonexistent, harmful nicknames have been glamorized and Black people have been beaten blocks from their homes, according to documentation from the Monroe County History Center. The Black community has constantly been forced out of spaces in Bloomington, but Terin is trying to fix that. At 31, Terin has been tattooing for seven years and has lived in Bloomington for 10. He grew up in Indianapolis with a religious mother and a complicated relationship with his father figures, so he changed his last name to “J.D.” He’s a high school dropout. He was the kind of kid to be talkative in class and get yelled at for it, clad in black leather jackets, Hot Topic band tees and pink gem gauges. He loved pushing the boundaries of what it meant to be a Black man and identify as such. He said he loves being beaten up for his beliefs. Terin ended up going back to school and getting into IUPurdue University Indianapolis in 2010 where he felt more at home than he ever did in high school. There were Black weirdos, guys who would pierce their noses in class. All
Top Terin works on a client’s wrap-around snake tattoo Oct. 28. He wears a light on his forehead to see the tattoo better while keeping the lighting of his studio aesthetically pleasing. Middle Terin shows his apprentices different skills while tattooing a client Oct. 9. His apprentices have started to play a bigger role in the shop and even take walk-ins. Bottom Phoebe Powell, 19, got a tattoo from Terin a few weeks ago. It was a surprise tattoo for her mom in honor of the support she shows for Phoebe.
the Black artsy kids went to IUPUI, and the Afro punk scene wasn’t hidden in the shadows. One day Terin was stopped by a woman at the store after she noticed his IU shirt. She asked him if he went there, and out of panic, he said yes. She asked him about the Memorial Stadium construction and how it’s supposed to be more like a horseshoe, and she asked him what dorm he lived in. He told her it was one of the big ones.
“To be a leader in Bloomington you got to let go of something special. After you lead and everything else, it’s a community that will never thank you. It will only come for you, try to destroy you, try to take everything from you.” Terin J.D., local tattoo artist
Never before had IU really been on the plate for him; it was a big university, something he felt he didn’t belong to. But that didn’t stop him from applying — and getting in. He moved here in 2011 at 21 and finished his bachelor’s degree in studio art. But Terin has noticed a lack of a scene in Bloomington for Black art students, artists and Black people in general. His business gets a lot of outside foot traffic. He said he constantly sees people stop and grimace at the “Support Black Artists” posters on the windows. When he first moved into the building on East Grant Street in 2018, surveillance cameras showed people tearing down the signs and throwing things at the building. And it’s right down the street from People’s Park, a place for
gathering and activism, and a home for many, that was once a Black market bathed in culture and shattered by racist violence. These instances of overt racism have happened since the city’s inception. Terin said it’s easy to see Bloomington as a progressive oasis because it at least isn’t as bad as other communities. “We don’t have Black people dying in the streets,” he said. “It’s easy to sit on your high horse and say, ‘We’re a great community. I’ve never seen a cop kill a Black person here.’” Bloomington’s safe, Bloomington’s easy, he said. You don’t have to worry about getting called out for being racist because there aren’t any minorities to do the calling out. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, Bloomington had an estimated population of more than 85,000 in 2019. Around 80% of the population is white, and only 4.3% is identified as Black or African American. The City of Bloomington explains the history of Black people in the city and key points that shaped the city’s diversity much differently than Black and Brown people do. According to the City of Bloomington’s African American Walking Tour pamphlet, two Black men bought land the year the city was founded in 1818. The pamphlet gives their names, William Cooley and Aaron Wallace, but that’s all. No more information is available for their families. The pamphlet also talks of a neighborhood on the east side of Bloomington that was “commonly called ‘Bucktown.’” According to a 2007 written history of Black people in Bloomington in 1922 by Dan Combs and Dr. James Madison, Black leaders in the community didn’t call it Bucktown, other than a couple “bad houses.” Official records
of life in this area are practically nonexistent, aside from oral histories and writings from residents. One account describes the “Bucktown” neighborhood in 1903, when a group of white men called “whitecappers” abducted a young white woman and a Black man, took them to what is now known as Dunn Meadow at IU, stripped them naked and whipped them with barbed wire. Megan MacDonald, research library manager at the Monroe County History Center, said there isn’t much of a collection on diversity in Bloomington. “Part of the reason being that Bloomington just wasn’t a historically diverse town, or at least not diverse enough that white folks felt the need to preserve history outside their own,” she said. The Monroe County History Center is located on Sixth and Washington Streets, where what used to be “The Colored School” stood in the 1800s. It was a segregated school for Black elementary students until 1915, when the increasingly white neighborhood it was located in wanted a Carnegie Library. The students were then moved to a temporary school and then to the Banneker School on the west side, where it stayed segregated until 1951. Despite these often misleading narratives from the city, there are some residents who have taken it upon themselves to document the stories of people who have actually lived here and faced oppression.
ALEX DERYN | IDS
Redshirt sophomore quarterback Michael Penix Jr. prepares to throw the ball Nov. 28 at Memorial Stadium. Penix will miss the rest of the season with a torn ACL.
IU offers winter COVID-19 tests By Matt Cohen mcd1@iu.edu | @Matt_Cohen_
imilar to Terin, Liz Mitchell, 67, hated Bloomington when she first came here. She and her husband Jim moved to
IU announced Tuesday it will begin a voluntary asymptomatic COVID-19 testing program on the Bloomington and IU-Purdue University Indianapolis campuses. The announcement says 500 testing slots will be open each week and filled on a “first-come, first-served basis.” The tests will all be free. However, the release states these voluntary testing slots will only be available during IU’s intersession — Nov. 30 through Feb. 8 — when far fewer students are in Bloomington because all classes have moved online. All on-campus housing is closed for the entirety of the intersession. In his weekly webinars, Dr. Aaron Carroll, IU’s director of mitigation testing, has gotten many questions about whether IU will offer voluntary testing. He has said at some point that may happen with the school’s own labs opening. With the labs now running, IU is able to offer this program. Previously, the only way to get a test through IU while asymptomatic was being selected for mitigation testing. Students could only request a COVID-19 test if they had symptoms, which required going through an online screening with an IU nurse who then determines if the student would get an ap-
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