February 28, 2018 by South Side Weekly

Blackstone Bicycle Works

Weekly Bike Sale Every Saturday at 12pm Wide selection of refurbished bikes! (most bikes are between $120 & $250)

Blackstone Bicycle Works is a bustling community bike shop that each year empowers over 200 boys and girls from Chicago’s south side—teaching them mechanical skills, job skills, business literacy and how to become responsible community members. In our year-round ‘earn and learn’ youth program, participants earn bicycles and accessories for their work in the shop. In addition, our youths receive after-school tutoring, mentoring, internships and externships, college and career advising, and scholarships. Hours Tuesday - Friday 1pm - 6pm 12pm - 5pm Saturday

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773 241 5458 6100 S. Blackstone Ave. Chicago, IL 60637

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SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY The South Side Weekly is an independent nonprofit newsprint magazine and radio show produced for and about neighborhoods on the South Side of Chicago. We publish in-depth coverage of the arts and issues of public interest alongside oral histories, poetry, fiction, interviews, and artwork from local photographers and illustrators. The South Side Weekly is dedicated to supporting cultural and civic engagement on the South Side and to providing educational opportunities for developing journalists, writers, and artists. Volume 5, Issue 19 Editor-in-Chief Hafsa Razi Managing Editors Julia Aizuss, Andrew Koski Directors of Staff Support Baci Weiler Community Outreach Jasmin Liang Senior Editors Christian Belanger, Mari Cohen, Sam Stecklow, Olivia Stovicek Politics Editor Adia Robinson Education Editor Rachel Kim Stage & Screen Editor Nicole Bond Visual Arts Editor Rod Sawyer Food & Land Editor Emeline Posner Music Editor Christopher Good Contributing Editors Maddie Anderson, Elaine Chen, Mira Chauhan, Bridget Newsham, Adam Przybyl, Amy Qin, Rachel Schastok, Kristen Simmons, Michael Wasney, Yunhan Wen Data Editor Jasmine Mithani Radio Editor Erisa Apantaku Radio Hosts Andrew Koski, Olivia Obineme, Sam Larsen Social Media Editors Bridget Newsham, Sam Stecklow Visuals Editor Ellen Hao Deputy Visuals Editor Lizzie Smith Photography Editor Jason Schumer Layout Editor Baci Weiler Staff Writers: Ashvini Kartik-Narayan, Kiran Misra Staff Radio Producer: Bridget Vaughn Fact Checkers: Abigail Bazin, Sam Joyce, Bridget Newsham, Adam Przybyl, Hafsa Razi, Sam Stecklow, Tiffany Wang Staff Photographers: Denise Naim, Jason Schumer Staff Illustrators: Natalie Gonzalez, Courtney Kendrick, Turtel Onli, Raziel Puma Webmaster

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The Weekly is produced by an all-volunteer editorial staff and seeks contributions from across the city. We distribute the paper each Wednesday in the fall, winter, and spring. Over the summer we publish every other week. Send submissions, story ideas, comments, or questions to editor@southsideweekly.com or mail to: South Side Weekly 6100 S. Blackstone Ave. Chicago, IL 60637 For advertising inquiries, contact: (773) 234-5388 or advertising@southsideweekly.com

Cover photo collage by Kamari Robertson

IN CHICAGO

A week’s worth of developing stories, odd events, and signs of the times, culled from the desks, inboxes, and wandering eyes of the editors

The Plot Thickens Around School Closings Chicago Public Schools (CPS) has advanced its plan to close or phase out four Englewood high schools—Harper, Hope, Robeson, and TEAM Englewood—and replace them with an $85 million new school at the Robeson site. But while CPS cited declining enrollment and “community support” to justify the decision, attentive observers have cringed. Parents and students complained that the declining enrollment itself is a result of, not a reason for, disinvestment. Moreover, the “community support” cited by CPS only invites more controversies. As the Sun-Times reported, none of the closings’ major supporters are Englewood-based: the West Englewood Coalition, which had a standoff with parents at public meetings, is based in Homewood, IL; Leon Finney Jr. is a connected pastor whose Metropolitan Apostolic Community Church is in Bronzeville and has activist roots in Woodlawn; and Dori Collins, a longtime CPS contractor co-chairing Englewood’s CPS Community Action Council (CAC), doesn’t live or work in South Side communities. The presence of outsiders is made possible by CAC’s ability to set their own rules on residency, and Englewood’s CAC is open to everyone. With the board of education scheduled to vote Wednesday on closing these Englewood high schools and the South Loop’s National Teachers Academy (NTA), the calls for cancelling or postponing the decision have grown stronger. Another reason? Just forty-eight hours before the vote, CPS released the findings of a report on the proposal to close NTA, merge it with South Loop Elementary, and open a high school in the NTA building. As the Sun-Times’s Lauren Fitzpatrick said, the report seemed to skip over the question of whether NTA should close and jumped right to developing an equitable plan for the closing. Something Stinks to High Heaven in the MWRD If you think something smells in the sewers, it’s not just the human excrement you might find down there. Rather, the smell is the $722 million in contracts that Democrats elected to the Board of Commissioners of the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District of Greater Chicago (MWRD) have awarded to the donors who helped get them elected in the first place. This is according to data from IllinoisSunshine.org and the MWRD portal, compiled the Illinois Green Party and the candidates they’ve endorsed for the MWRD Board. If anything, human excrement would be a good innuendo to describe the giant crap the MWRD Board has apparently taken on the democratic system that put them in office: indeed, sixty percent of the taxpayer money that they’ve divvied out in the form of contracts over the past five years—which, ostensibly, should be given to organizations most fit to improve aspects of the MWRD—were given to campaign donors. These contracts are the MWRD officials’ thanks for the $408,789 they’ve received from their donors—so, unlike your toilet, whose one-way valve generates a unidirectional flow, this cash stream is going two ways. And this quid pro quo isn’t the only thing that stinks: MWRD officials are contracting loathsome companies like Veolia Water, which pronounced Flint, Michigan’s water safe to drink shortly before the nation learned otherwise. It’s time to flush these politicians down the drain. A Comeback at Comiskey In November of last year, Nevest Coleman was released from prison after spending twentythree years wrongfully incarcerated for charges of rape and murder. Prior to his 1994 arrest, Coleman was a well-respected member of the grounds crew team for Guaranteed Rate Field, back when it was called Comiskey Park. After Coleman’s childhood priest connected Coleman with an interview with the White Sox two weeks ago, Coleman received a call early last week with an offer for Coleman to rejoin the grounds team. Coleman is one of at least 146 people in Cook County who have recently been freed from prison after new DNA findings. The month after his release, Coleman filed a federal civil rights lawsuit against the detectives who had called him racial slurs and physically abused Coleman during his arrest. All detectives had extensive previous involvement in cases resulting in wrongful convictions due to false confessions. Despite everything Coleman has been through, “I can’t be mad no more,” Coleman told the Tribune. “Time to live. Time to live. Time to live.”

IN THIS ISSUE the staples letters: the stories teachers tell

How To Teach Your Students To Blame Themselves For This Grossly Unequal Country We Call Home staples...............................................4 food policy summit offers alternative histories and solutions

“May our strength be strengthened.” emeline posner.................................5 grounding principles

All four proposals included some mix of retail, commercial, and nonprofit space, along with a communal area. christian belanger & amy qin.......6 where do i send my kids?

“We invest in the school by sending our kids there. But I know for a fact that’s not often the case.” rachel kim........................................8 room by room, project by project

“How do we create something that is appetizing, inviting, and accessible to folks that have been denied access to institutions?” as told to jed lickerman..............10

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FEBRUARY 28, 2018 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 3

LIT

The Stories Teachers Tell

nspired by C.S. Lewis’ The Screwtape Letters, the Staples Letters are a series of essays in the South Side Weekly written in the form of letters from a veteran teacher, Staples, giving advice to a young teacher, Ms. T. All events in the Staples Letters are drawn directly from real-life experiences in Chicago schools, and names and identifying details have been removed in the interest of privacy. Though fictional in form, the letters are used to address a variety of issues in education, from quotidian classroom considerations to national policy. Ms. T— Wow, that guy sounds terrible—I really hope he isn’t at your school much longer. The problem is, there always seem to be people like this around, and that is because there are always compelling stories that justify their bad behavior. I would stand up to these creeps wherever and whenever possible, but to really eradicate them, you need to attack the stories. So take this dean at your school constantly screaming at and cussing out the kids. Obviously you’ve seen this person for who he is— =one of these adults obsessed with “respect,” who treat every encounter as a referendum on their own manliness or sense of control. The type who love that “you’re going to do this NOW because I SAID SO” kind of routine. It’s clear: they act this way because they enjoy it. That’s the whole reason. But they couldn’t get away with that as their justification. So, they tell a story. In this case, the story is that there are certain students who “need” this kind of treatment, who only “respond” to yelling, screaming, belittling intervention.

ILLUSTRATION BY LIZZIE SMITH

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And if it’s a little rough? So be it. It gets RESULTS. You want results, don’t you? Total BS. The best case scenario here is occasionally coercing certain students to put their phone away or stop talking. If that’s your goal as an educator—a room full of angry, silent seventeen-year-olds—then congrats. The real joke is that even this dubious achievement only happens with the students who don’t “cause trouble” to begin with. The toughest students, the ones this approach allegedly works wonders with, often end up screaming back at the adult, leading to a suspension or worse. The game is rigged. When they don’t “get results,” the adult just blames the kid, anyway. It’s like in the movie Best in Show, when the guy is explaining his job as the chief hostage negotiator charged with talking down people threatening to jump off tall buildings. “How many people have you successfully talked down?” they ask him. “Oh, they all jump,” he replies. So that’s one story to be on the lookout for. Another related story goes back to what we were talking about before, how some people just act like suffering is a good thing for its own sake; that a kid will really benefit in some bizarre way from bad things happening to them, that it will really teach them some kind of sick lesson. Lots of times you’ll hear these adults say the kids “better get used to it now.” I heard one of the security guards enacting that one the other day. A kid had forgotten their ID to swipe into our building and the guard was really letting him have it. “Just imagine if you were a doctor or something. Doctors have to swipe to get into work. What happens to them if they forget their ID?” So, again, in this case, the adult is acting like they are doing some sort of favor for the kid. And, again, it is total BS. Let’s break it down. First, this is a teenager we are dealing with, not a fully grown adult with an advanced medical degree. So the expectations and consequences actually should not be the same. Also, adults forget their IDs all the time! I forget my ID to get into that very building with those very guards constantly! Do I get screamed at? Of course I don’t. And will screaming at a student make them remember their ID more often? Or will it just make them more likely to ditch altogether? It’s not about helping the student; it’s not about solving a problem; it’s about power. The adult can get away with screaming at the kid, so that’s who gets screamed at. I think all of these stories serve to legitimize abuse, but the abuse doesn’t always take the form of anger or outright bullying. There’s another, subtler version, however, that can be even more insidious. This story centers around either “tough love” or GRIT. I really hope you don’t have an administrator obsessed with grit at your school. Grit is the idea that students in poor schools just lack the tenacity or perseverance to overcome obstacles.

That they just give up too easily. This one really makes my blood boil. Take this girl in my class. She’s eighteen, has a one-year-old daughter, and works full time. She leaves school at around four and works until midnight everyday. I asked her how she can possibly get enough sleep and she told me she smokes weed right when she gets home, which puts her right to sleep. So, full-time job, full-time school, and a kid. I asked about the father. She said he isn’t in the picture and has a new girlfriend. This is an extremely common thing at my school. So, I was a high school success and she barely gets by because I had so much more grit? I possess so much more perseverance? That’s a sick joke, right? My life was a million times easier, and still is. But the proponents of this story would have you believe we each had the exact same odds, the same obstacles and advantages, and that any discrepancy in outcomes was a personal, somehow moral failing. It is literally sickening. But lots of adults tell that story! Lots find it completely reasonable. They even make PowerPoints and give presentations on it: How To Teach Your Students To Blame Themselves For This Grossly Unequal Country We Call Home. No institution ever tries to alleviate these problems in any kind of material way; it’s one hundred percent on the teenager to just figure it out. All any adult has to offer them is a lecture. This one is just a convenient way for people to act like they’re doing something positive even as they uphold and defend the very system creating the need for grit in the first place! Worst of all, some students do start to believe this themselves. I constantly hear them talk about “the choices” they’ve made, as in: “Well, around the time I was in junior high, I made some bad choices.” This sort of accountability would be refreshing coming from politicians and CEOs, but it utterly depresses me when it comes from the students. Call me a dreamer, but I don’t believe a person should be able to ruin their life with some “choices” at age eleven. All these people want to teach students to fit into the world as it is. Instead, it should be your goal to inspire students to change the world to fit them. Delegitimize this rhetoric; attack the stories. Start telling your own story, or better yet, listening to the ones your students already know. That’s a choice you get to make. To not be a horrible ghoul. Maybe print a sign up and hang it on your door: Room 1947—No Ghouls Allowed. Your affectionate cousin, Staples

FOOD

Food Policy Summit Offers Alternative Histories and Solutions At CFPAC, the fight against racist food systems continues BY EMELINE POSNER

“I

have a shout—” “—OUT,” the room called back. Ninety people had filed into a small room in the South Shore Cultural Center for a workshop on the history of Black and Latinx farming movements, one of the morning’s first workshops at the thirteenth annual Chicago Food Policy Action Council (CFPAC) summit last Friday. For the first thirty minutes, the workshop took a call-and-response format. Participants were given green slips of paper, containing a sentence about an organization, movement, or event important to Black and Latinx farming movements, to read aloud in English, Spanish, or both. “1969: Shirley and Charles Sherrod started the New Communities farm cooperative, the first land trust in the U.S.A., owning 5,700 acres shared by twelve families.” “May our strength be strengthened,” the room responded. The workshop leaders gathered each slip, taping them onto a timeline that stretched from 10,000 BCE to 2017 at the front of the room. The first slip honored African women who braided the seeds of barley, sorghum, okra, and more into the hair of their daughters and granddaughters before they boarded transatlantic slave ships. Other slips recognized the role of Tuskegee University in the sustainable farming movement and the organizing of the United Farm Workers union by Dolores Huerta and César Chávez.

CAROLINA SÁNCHEZ

The last slip posted on the timeline brought it home to Chicago, celebrating the passage of the Good Food Purchasing Program (GFPP) in 2017—a city council ordinance that requires city agencies to contract with local food providers with strong labor and environmental practices, healthy products, and a track record of animal welfare practices. Among other significant changes, the GFPP will be able to provide leverage against the exploitation of Black and Latinx workers, who are disproportionately impacted by wage theft and discriminatory hiring practices in the food industry. 2017 was a momentous year for food justice advocates, and there was much to celebrate at CFPAC. In addition to the passage of the GFPP last fall, CFPAC chair member and Urban Growers Collective CEO Erika Allen held up the Urban Stewards Action Committee, a new collaboration between food justice leaders in Little Village and Englewood, as one of the most promising outcomes of the past year. CFPAC works on a grassroots level to formulate and promote justice-oriented food policy. Over the course of the day, leaders from CFPAC and other organizations— Little Village Environmental Justice Organization, the Urban Growers Collective, the Asociación Vendedores Ambulantes, and the Centro de Trabajadores Unidos—came together to strategize about the problems farmers and foodworkers are currently facing in Chicago: how to uplift new farmers, especially farmers of color,

how to organize worker cooperatives, and how to establish the wording for a new urban agriculture license. The leaders of the first workshop were neither the first nor the last to hone in on the importance of racial justice and historic farming movements to food justice. In the keynote speech that kicked off the summit, poet, educator, and farmer Amani Olugbala talked about grounding her work in appreciation for earlier generations of farmers and activists from the perspective of reparations and land justice. “When we’re talking about the food system, it’s built on stolen land, not just stolen labor,” Olugbala said, acknowledging the thousands of Potawatomi and Illini people forcibly removed from the Chicagoland area. “And when we talk about justice or progress...we want to make sure we are keeping the original stewards of this land in mind.” Olugbala is also part of the team at Soul Fire Farm, a farm led by people of color and based in Grafton, New York dedicated to ending racism within the food system and to achieving reparations for farmers of color. As part of their work, Soul Fire runs a subsidized produce share program for community members facing food apartheid (“food apartheid,” because Olugbala and other activists say “food desert” does not adequately convey the agency government officials and food corporations have in perpetuating produce scarcity in Black and Latinx neighborhoods). They also run leadership programs and Black and

Latinx farmer immersion programs, which have gained national recognition in the food justice community, and which several CFPAC attendees have participated in. One program alum, Viviana Moreno, a grower and organizer with Little Village Environmental Justice Organization, received a special shout-out from Olugbala for helping to kick-start Soul Fire’s most recent project: a nationwide map designed to facilitate reparations for Black, Latinx, immigrant, and Indigenous farmers. “Oppression and all systems that it gives birth to, it doesn’t want us to see ourselves as a community, it doesn’t want us to see ourselves as intimately connected and related to...seeming strangers,” Olugbala continued. “I’m happy that we’re harnessing that and continue to do that [work] the rest of the weekend.” Organizers and attendees carried forward Olugbala’s intentions for the rest of the day, providing a space for policy to be informed and shaped by recognition of historical injustices and the impacts of racism, and the ways in which sustainable farming techniques and equitable food policies have been appropriated by policymakers. An oft-cited example is the fact that the U.S. government demonized the Black Panther Party for its “radical” tactics, all the while using its free breakfast program—which fed up to 10,000 children nationwide at its peak and was an integral part of the Black Panthers’ organizing— as the blueprint for its own free breakfast program. FEBRUARY 28, 2018 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 5

FOOD

After the call-and-response session during the first workshop, participants broke off into smaller groups according to their role in the food system—producers, distributors, processors, retailers, consumers—with the task of brainstorming policies that could better align the current food system with the needs and interests of communities of color. The takeaways highlighted areas for increased attention in the coming years: the need for a better distribution system between community gardens and residents, for more cooperatives and worker-owned kitchens to lower obstacles for food processors, and for increased communications between existing farms, schools, and stores in the interest of distributing fresh, local produce in under-resourced communities. LeRoy Chalmers, a strategic partnership manager for Habitat for Humanity and one of the three workshop leaders, noted at the workshop’s end that there were no attendees who represented the distribution sector of the food industry. “So there’s a gap from farm to table right now...Most drivers are people of color,” he said. “So, why are we missing that [sector of the food industry here]?” Many of these conversations about equity in representation and access, already ongoing in community organizations across the South and West Sides, continued throughout the day. To this end, CFPAC provided translation services on-site, allowing Spanish speakers to hear real-time translations transmitted through headsets, and to have their comments and questions translated into English. (The latter process was not as smooth, but offering formal two-way translation services was nevertheless an improvement.) Erika Allen and Jose Oliva, codirectors of the Food Chain Workers Alliance, talked about the need to focus resources on farmers of color before

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the implementation of GFPP—which may open doors for smaller producers to get city contracts. CFPAC is lobbying Cook County to pass its own, more progressive version of GFPP, one that includes racial justice and gender justice among the list of priorities when offering contracts to food providers. Already, Chicago is the first city outside of California to pass the GFPP. To pass the more progressive version on the county level would be an exciting step, Oliva said, making Chicago home to the most bold GFPP policy. In the meantime, however, they’re focused on making sure “the new folks start participating now,” so that the contracts that do open up through the GFPP don’t go to larger-scale and white-led farms and companies by default. “If we’re not communicating with and commissioning those that are in need, or come from marginalized communities, then we’re just replicating the same system,” Oliva said. Later, organizers from the Centro de Trabajadores Unidos and Chicago Community and Workers Rights discussed the centrality of cooperatives to workers rights movements, and examined the benefits—and legal difficulties—of being recognized as a worker-owned cooperative in Illinois. Moreno, one of the organizers of the first workshop, said that when they first proposed their workshop, there was some doubt towards CFPAC about whether a history-oriented workshop would fit into a policy-oriented summit. But more than half the summit’s attendees showed up to talk history, policy, and their intersections in the cramped room on the second floor. On a February morning, even the windows had to be cracked to keep the room at a reasonable temperature. “To me, it’s clear that we are answering a need,” Moreno said. “I feel like this indicates to me that we can organize ourselves.” ¬

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Grounding Principles

Woodlawn residents weigh in on the development of the Washington Park National Bank Building in a series of meetings

BY CHRISTIAN BELANGER & AMY QIN

ast Tuesday, the Cook County Land Bank Authority and Metropolitan Planning Council wrapped up the last of three public meetings with Woodlawn residents held as a precursor to the development of the long-vacant Washington Park National Bank Building at 63rd Street and Cottage Grove. The meetings were part of the Corridor Development Initiative (CDI), a community-oriented process designed to ensure that Woodlawn residents’ suggestions would be incorporated into the final plan for the development. The CDI, a program of the Metropolitan Planning Council (MPC), is being presented as an opportunity to change Woodlawn’s historically fraught relationship with new development. Rob Rose, executive director of the Cook County Land Bank Authority (CCLBA), which acquired the building in December, mentioned at the first meeting on February 4 that the purpose of the three meetings was to end a long history of private developers picking up property in Woodlawn on the cheap and starting to build without any input from the community. Janita Marshall, a resident, remarked at that meeting that it was time for what was being built to reflect what would be useful for “people who actually live within the community.” The bank building itself, which currently stands vacant, is part of a larger redevelopment process underway at the intersection, including a renovation of the

Cottage Grove Green Line station and Woodlawn Station, a new mixed-income, mixed-use development by Massachusettsbased affordable housing nonprofit Preservation of Affordable Housing. In addition to providing the chance for a community-based development process, the bank building presents an attractive opportunity for developers; when the CCLBA acquired the building in an auction sale for buildings with delinquent taxes, they also acquired a special tax certificate that wiped out $500,000 of unpaid property taxes, according to Rose. A new developer would therefore be able to start from a clean slate. The January 30 community meeting aimed to brainstorm potential uses for the building and gauge residents’ priorities. Throughout the evening, participants responded anonymously to multiple choice questions on small keypads at each table. According to several keypad polls, roughly sixty-four percent of poll participants agreed that it was difficult to find healthy food around 63rd and Cottage Grove, and fortyone percent thought that the intersection was very unsafe at night. “We know in Woodlawn when disinvestment occurred, the first thing to go was entertainment,” said one resident during a group brainstorming session. “We used to be a mecca for cinema and jazz. We know that communities that lack that, what happens is that you don’t have money come

DEVELOPMENT

into the community, and money also goes out because people wanna have fun, but elsewhere.” Another group voiced support for responsible retail that would benefit youth in Woodlawn, such as a coffee shop or bookstore. At the second meeting, on February 6,

residents participated in various exercises, like building block activities, to create proposals for the use of the building. The final meeting, on February 20, included an overview of some of these proposals and a panel discussion between developers who had been invited to give feedback on the community’s proposals, and point out any opportunities or dangers that might come up during the development process. The four representative community proposals discussed at the meeting shared some broad traits. All four proposals included some mix of retail, commercial,

and nonprofit space, along with a communal area, usually green space. Only one proposal included residential units, all of them priced at market rates. Though the building itself is structurally sound, Rose did point out that almost the entire interior of the building would have to be renovated, and a slide on the screen behind him listed some of the problems with the building in its current state: four to five feet of standing water in the basement, eroding masonry and limestone, and a collapsing skylight in the lower roof, among other issues. Given that, strategies like using a historical tax credit for rehabilitation could be offset by the cost of repairs, according to panelist Jacques Sandberg, vice president at the development company Related Midwest. The panelists also raised a couple of other points during the panel. Bridget Jones, a consultant who worked on Whole Foods’s Englewood store, noted that the suggestion in one of the proposals to build an underground parking lot was unnecessary. “The way to sell development to retailers is to emphasize how pedestrian-friendly it is,” she said. “I’m trying to think of how different traffic patterns make the street more vibrant

at different times.” Maurice Williams, a vice president at the Chicago Community Loan Fund emphasized that the development process often takes a while. “It’s a thirty-six-monthperiod,” he said. “The first year is finding the right people, the second year is getting money, and the third year is actually building it.” Residents also raised concerns about how the construction process would include Woodlawn residents and businesses. In response, Rose said that the CCLBA would require that any developer use “a certain percentage” of Woodlawn residents and businesses in the planning and construction process. He also mentioned that the CCLBA had hired CANDO Corporation, a consulting firm specializing in diversity and inclusion. The CCLBA will give another presentation to the community at the Woodlawn Community Summit on March 3. After the agency has incorporated the community feedback into its Request for Proposals that will be released to potential developers, there will also be a further period for public comment.

These illustrations show renderings, drawn from community proposals, for the redevelopment of the Washington Park National Bank Building. Two of the figures (left) are rehabs of the existing building, while the two others (right) are completely new construction.

COURTESY OF METROPLANNING. RENDERINGS BY SOM & BKV GROUP

Rose ended last week’s final meeting on a cautionary note. “There might be something built here that some of you will say you never voted for,” he said. “What we’re trying to do is establish grounding principles.” ¬

FEBRUARY 28, 2018 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 7

Where Do I Send My Kids? Three CPS educators on why they want their kids to attend public schools BY RACHEL KIM

hen students’ education is on the line, having more options isn’t always better if it means that parents and their children are being forced to choose between nonnegotiable fundamental values like community, academic rigor, and safety. Yet, many parents and their children face this predicament when selecting between public neighborhood, public selective enrollment, or private schools in Chicago. To some, the fact that such a decision must be made is evidence of the unacceptable inequities in Chicago’s education system; but others frame the decision as one of personal choice and shrouded in privacy and individual agency. Parents are especially likely to put it in those terms when the parents in question have a stake in Chicago Public Schools (CPS). In a 2011 interview with NBC Chicago, when newly elected Mayor Rahm Emanuel was asked about his decision to send his kids to a private school, he responded with his notorious temper: “The decision I’m going to make as it relates to my kids is one I’m going to make as a father, and not as a mayor...They’re not public tools,” he said. “Let me break the news to you, my children are not in a public position. The mayor is.”

ELLEN HAO

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EDUCATION

Emanuel then unclipped his microphone and left after ten minutes of a twenty-minute interview. He’s not the only government official to send his children to schools outside of the CPS system. Certain high-ranking CPS officials have done so too. Recently-ousted CEO of CPS Forrest Claypool, thenCPS Board Vice President Jesse Ruiz, and former CPS CEO Arne Duncan sent their kids to private schools in Chicago. A 2004 Fordham Institute Study found that thirtynine percent of CPS teachers did the same. Understandably, critics have pointed out that the decisions of the mayor, CPS officials, and even teachers to send their kids to private schools don-t bode well for CPS’ future. Others have reiterated that, in reality, the things that make CPS schools attractive—a sense of community, funding from the city, and diversity—are being systematically removed by the policy decisions made by CPS officials themselves. These policy decisions include school closings, disinvestment, and funding issues. Meanwhile, CPS educators who support public schools through their work and advocacy often have an impossible choice to make between committing to that support and choosing what they feel is best for their kids. Moreover, CPS educators who are also parents have certain privileges in knowledge and experience that allow them to be better equipped at tackling selective enrollment processes or more discerning in finding ideal educational environments for their children. To some degree, the future of CPS will be impacted by individual decisions— and how they can be used to either uphold a system of segregation and disinvestment or push for more resources and increased confidence in CPS’ schools, teachers, and students. As employees of CPS, do educators have a professional or ethical obligation to stand by their schools and send their kids to them too? Doing so would be a vote of confidence in CPS, but would also turn a blind eye to the widening gaps between CPS schools and alternative educational options—the private and public selective enrollment schools that are less harried by dwindling resources, lack of transparency, and unstable politics of the CPS. The Weekly spoke separately with three CPS educators who sent their children to CPS schools about their respective experiences with CPS as both educators and parents. Their responses have been compiled below. The names of several individuals

and schools were left out of this article to protect the privacy of the teachers who were interviewed in this piece and their families. Tamela Chambers, a CPS librarian for almost eight years, cites her personal experience as a student in CPS schools as a large influence in her decision making process as a parent. She currently has three school-aged children—two in middle school and one in high school. David Stieber is in his eleventh year as a social studies teacher with CPS. He has two children in CPS: one in kindergarten, and one that will enter pre-school next year. Stieber declined to name the schools his children attended for the sake of privacy. Sashai Jasper, who worked in the district as a high school teacher in both a selective enrollment and neighborhood high school in South Shore, also worked in CPS’ central office for several years before resigning in March of 2017. Last year, she penned an Education Post blog post about how she pulled her daughter out of a private Catholic elementary school in order to enroll her into National Teachers Academy (NTA) in the South Loop. Jasper is now currently involved in efforts to save NTA from being closed and reopened as a high school. Jasper: The reason I’m sharing about my background and intimate relationship with CPS is that if it’s difficult for me, I can’t imagine how difficult it is for people who aren’t knowledgeable who don’t know the ins and outs of the system. It’s difficult to navigate and that’s by design. I’m interested in learning your thought process as an educator and a parent. How did you make the decision to send your children to CPS schools instead of private schools? Chambers: I am a lifelong Chicagoan born and raised on the South Side, and I attended my neighborhood elementary school and CPS high school. I lived in a neighborhood where my teachers and even my cafeteria ladies were my neighbors, which created a sense of a strong community. We had a relationship. It wasn’t just a teacher, you were also my neighbor. It also made teaching a desirable profession—an honorable profession or something that I could aspire to. So when I had children of my own, it wasn’t even a second thought. It was great for me; I didn’t expect anything different for my children.

Stieber: Teaching at CPS can be a challenge because of all of the politics about how CPS is run. My wife is also a CPS teacher so we both try to make our schools better for our students. It can be really depressing because of what I want my students to get that they don’t have. Before I had kids, I loved my students more than anything. But now that my kids attend CPS, it puts more pressure on me to work continuously to improve the schools for both my students and my kids who attend. It puts me under stress personally and professionally. My wife is against the selective enrollment process. She teaches at the neighborhood high school we live in and our son goes to the elementary school that will feed into that high school. I personally envision [that] our son will go to the school he’s at up till sixth grade and go to the neighborhood public school as a freshman. Our kids will be in public school and CPS as long as we live in Chicago. We want to make our neighborhood schools good as well and that’s a whole other struggle. Jasper: The only reason [my daughter] was in a Catholic school is because St. Phillips was convenient, down the street, and had a strong community-like family feel. I felt like their pre-K and kindergarten programs were strong and better [than the other schools in the neighborhood], but not necessarily with their upper levels. But it was very clear in my head that [St. Phillips] was a temporary place for her. She was going to be there to experience the socialization but I knew she was going to need to be challenged. As a parent, you know your kid and you know what they need and you think you know what they need. Once she was in kindergarten, I could see that she wasn’t being challenged academically. She also wasn’t being fed or receiving the messages to adapt socially and emotionally. She started coming home and not wanting to go to school. She asked me “Am I white? People are telling me that I’m white.” By being in a 98-99% Black school, she was confused and kids were othering her. Of course, I want to protect her, but I wanted her to be exposed to other cultures. I was born and raised in Humboldt Park, and I went to Richard Yates Elementary which was in a predominantly Black and Puerto Rican neighborhood. We had Polish students, white students, so there was more of a mix back then. Chicago is hyper-segregated; in many ways, I feel like it’s gotten worse over the years. It wasn’t

until I went to CPS high school that I truly felt diversity that I felt was unreal. I definitely wanted [my daughter] to have what I experienced in elementary school and she wasn’t getting that. [My daughter] is not at Bouchet [Elementary Math & Science Academy] because it’s not diverse. I want her to be around other cultures, other classes. I want her to be open and cultured and she’s not going to get that at Bouchet. What NTA offers in terms of their programs and community involvement is so key to me. Parents at NTA are so organized and have been very active. It’s a flat out lie to say that a select group of parents—or white parents—are the ones making the noise. Everybody is involved and everybody is making noise. I am not one of the most involved parents—I am just doing my part, whatever that is, whether that’s writing an article or going to a board meeting. It’s really a concerted effort by the community. There are people who are in this fight who don’t even have kids that go to NTA. It’s about equity—people are fed up. Would you do anything differently? Do you have any plans to change as they get older? Chambers: I’m pretty much satisfied with the experience. I didn’t bring them to the places I worked only because I wanted them to develop as their own individual person. I think if your child attends the school you work at it makes it difficult to establish their own identity. Other than that, I wouldn’t change anything about it. Stieber: I believe in public education; it should be with great schools with teachers who care about their kids. And the vast majority of CPS teachers care about their kids a lot. But my kids are now experiencing having schools that aren’t being funded the way that they should be and not having enough staff. With the violence in our city, the odds are my kids are going to know people that have been impacted by violence. All that stuff is in your head and is scary, and I have various levels of privilege that shield me more than others because of my income and race, but sending your kids to CPS is scary on many levels because of the way it’s being run at the top. What do you think it says when CPS teachers won’t send their kids to CPS schools? FEBRUARY 28, 2018 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 9

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Stieber: I understand the reasons why they might do that. Working in CPS for eleven years and seeing people who worked longer—how have people worked with the chaos of CPS? We’ve had eight CEOs in my eleven years of teaching. It’s one of the biggest reasons why CPS teachers send their kids to non-public schools—they don’t want their kids to deal with what their students deal with or what they don’t have in schools. I get it.

Stieber: Parents don’t want to look for schools—they want to send their kids to the schools right near them, they don’t want to deal with the selective enrollment because it’s stressful and time consuming. Improve the neighborhood schools. And I think a major first step is to have an elected school board—that shows that people care what parents think, along with no longer closing public schools, or cutting librarians and social workers.

Jasper: I’m not surprised by that [thirty-nine percent] statistic. I would have never sent my daughter to [a neighborhood high school] when I was teaching there given what was happening in the area. The academic rigor wasn’t there because we were fighting other battles. There were many times when I would go to work and just focus on classroom management. It was very different when I went to South Shore International College Prep, which is a selective enrollment IB and AP school. The student profile there was different, parents were involved, there was a different culture, a different feel. There were teachers, assistant principals, and office staff that sent their kids there. I knew I wanted to work there because that spoke volumes to me that the assistant principal’s daughter was in my AP class. Or that the security guard and cheerleading coach also sent their kids there. We invest in the school by sending our kids there. But I know for a fact that’s not often the case. Is that only the case for Walter Payton, Whitney Young? If that’s true, that’s sad. That’s sad that if you work at a neighborhood high school, you don’t feel that way.

Jasper: I think the biggest disconnect right now between our education and our community is that there is no real conversation. I think what we need to do is get to know our communities. There is inevitably a disconnect when you have someone who lives in Beverly and works in Englewood. They go there as a job, not because it’s their community. When I went to Roseland every day from South Shore, it was different from me teaching in South Shore when I lived right down the street. When I go to Walgreens, I see my students. When I go to the gas station, I see my kids. They were my neighbors. Me staying for a basketball game or cheerleading practice was not a big deal. Principals and staff need to do a better job of getting to know their community. Going to community events, bringing in neighborhood clubs for local school council meetings or open houses. There has to be more communication and openness, and it needs to be a partnership. I think that will change that mentality. There needs to be a shift in the places where we go to every day. Your work should become an extension of you and your family. In the service of educating students, it is a service. You shouldn’t have the attitude that this is just a job. It’s about your willingness to invest in that community, regardless of whether you live there or not. ¬

From the eyes of both a parent and an educator, what could or should CPS do to incentivize CPS teachers to send their kids to CPS schools?

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Room by Room, Project by Project Kristiana Rae Colón discusses the origins, history, and upcoming projects of the #LetUsBreathe collective AS TOLD TO JED LICKERMAN Kristiana Rae Colón is a poet, playwright, educator, and one of the founders of the #LetUsBreathe Collective.

e are an abolitionist alliance of artists and organizers coming together through a creative lens to imagine a world without prisons and police. The #LetUsBreathe Collective [was] formed in 2014 in response to the Ferguson uprisings after the death of Mike Brown. We drove down to Ferguson—we actually sent several caravans of artists delivering supplies to the resistance effort in Ferguson. But then our intention was to go down there, drop off supplies, figure out what organization was doing good work, and then write them a check with the balance of what we had raised. What ended up happening was: We got to Greater [St. Mark Family] Church off the main thoroughfare in Ferguson, where people were convening and collecting supplies, and they were overstocked. They had like water bottle pallets stacked to the ceiling, they had whole tables of medical hygiene supplies, and they couldn’t accept any more donations. So they sent us around Ferguson to different pantries to drop stuff off, but then they were like “Oh yeah, and if you really want to get the scoop on what’s

happening in Ferguson, there are these people that are camping in the protest area. They’re camping out there, occupying the space. You should go talk to them, they see everything. They’re out there twenty-four hours a day.” So we’re like: “Yeah, if it’s folks living outside, those should be the people that we rock with first. They obviously need some supplies, some reinforcement. Let’s go check them out.” My stereotypes… whatever…like when I heard it was folks camping in the protest area, I envisioned more of the Occupy crowd, the granola crunching crowd—definitely white people is what I thought it was going to be. But, in fact, it was young Black folks, Mike Brown’s contemporaries, mostly folks who had some kind of contact with the criminal justice system, and their intention was not to come outside and occupy. They didn’t set out to launch an occupation. In the early days of the Ferguson protests, the Ferguson police were doing this very illegal, unconstitutional thing called the [five] second rule, where if you stopped marching for more than [five] seconds at a time, you could be arrested for disorderly conduct. It’s very ableist. And it’s just one of the examples [from] the Department of Justice’s report saying that the Ferguson

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police are corrupt, like endemically, racistly corrupt—that’s the type of policing that they’re referring to: arbitrary, revenue extracting, policing practices to really economically harass and oppress the Black population in Ferguson. And we came back the next day and started building with the young people who were out there, because it was really like mostly young people, like fifteen to twenty-three, with some older folks as well—some thirty, forty year olds— but it was mostly very young people. And when we talked to them, we found out that it was Bloods and Crips, who had previously been beefing, who dropped their gang colors to unite against the Ferguson police. So they literally were walking around with these gray bandanas that they were using to cover their faces to protect themselves from tear gas. But they were like: “Yeah, we specifically chose the color gray, because we’re dropping our red and

blue flags and we’re uniting under one flag, because the only gang we really need to be opposing is the police. They’re the real gang out here.” And the folks from Chicago, all these artists, who mobilized these caravan supply deliveries, were so inspired by that, especially since this is during the height of the national narrative of Chicago as Chiraq. I was like, “Man, young people in Chicago need to hear these young people in Ferguson articulate that, because that’s so powerful for young people to come to that political awakening on their own—outside of academia, outside of institutions that they’ve been denied access to.” And so we were really inspired to build with them. And we came back the next week and asked them if we could launch a pop-up gallery on their campsite. So we printed the photos that we had taken the week before, we brought down easels, and we created a pop-up gallery on the camp site—that was sort of

the first gesture, the first portal of this loose collective of artists that would later become #LetUsBreathe, using art as an access point for political education and engagement, turning the Ferguson protest’s occupation into an art gallery. And then we just continued going down to Ferguson almost every weekend, hoping to sustain this campsite and then filming a documentary about these young protesters. Once the documentary was finished, we started programming events around the documentary for them to travel and tell their story with these screenings. And that avalanched into us using art as a portal to galvanize people into direct action—we were curating these political arts events in Chicago and transporting protesters from Ferguson to Chicago. We had them feature at Kuumba Lynx in Uptown. We had them feature at Young Chicago Authors in Wicker Park. And at the end of the show,

we would do a film screening, and they would do a talkback. They might do some poetry, and then we would lead the audience out into the street and take the streets and immediately galvanize people into direct action. So you think you’re just showing up to the theater for a show, and the next thing you know, you’re shutting down traffic, and that became our model of using art as this portal to get people who might not otherwise be involved in a march or a protest into the street, and that has been our brand. In 2015, we started supporting the Say Her Name campaign. A young woman named Rekia Boyd was killed by CPD officer Dante Servin. He was allegedly responding to a noise complaint. He fired into a crowd of people; supposedly he saw a gun—it was actually a cell phone. He ended up hitting Rekia Boyd in the back of the head and killing her—she was twenty-two years old—across the street from her alma mater, Collins High School in Douglas Park in North Lawndale. A lot of the Black Lives Matter organizers in Chicago were rallying around Rekia and launching the Say Her Name campaign specifically to raise awareness around police violence against Black women and femmes. Around that time, these different groups started flooding the CPD board meetings at police headquarters every month: this kind of open house where they let you come sign up for however many minutes on a night— maybe it’s three minutes on the mic—to address the board. And every month, we were supporting this Chicago coalition of Black Lives Matter organizers in demanding that the CPD board fire Dante Servin, because, even though he had murdered this young woman, he was still on the CPD’s payroll. We really wanted to do an action on Memorial Day, because we kind of got into the rhythm of doing an action every holiday once a month. So we wanted to do something on Memorial Day that rebranded Memorial Day as not just memorializing soldiers that are fighting our illegal wars abroad, but memorializing the people who have fallen to the war on Black lives, and we wanted to do something in Douglas Park around the Say Her Name campaign honoring Rekia. But as we started thinking critically about what it meant to bring that disruptive

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style of protest to North Lawndale, we really wanted to be self-reflective and selfcritical about how appropriate it is to shut down traffic in a neighborhood that is such an over-policed, harassed, socially divestedfrom neighborhood. North Lawndale is [one of ] the most incarcerated zip codes in the state of Illinois. It is the most socially divested-from neighborhood in Chicago; when Rahm did the first round of school closings and closed fifty schools, nine of those schools were in North Lawndale. It’s really disproportionate divestment from education in that neighborhood—similar divestment from mental health clinics, similar illegal housing practices. Wanting to do this in Douglas Park in North Lawndale but really thinking critically about what it means to shut down traffic in that neighborhood, we decided to rebrand, remix the arts protest as kind of our steez. Instead of having a protest march where we’re shutting down traffic, we rebranded it as a service parade. We were marching through the streets picking up trash. We had a Radio Flyer wagon full of books, giving out free books, and a grocery cart full of free food, giving out free food, juice, and water. We were using the rolling sound system that we would normally use at a protest to have a traveling open mic and doing pop-up open mics on the street corner, inviting people to come down off their porches and spit, tell their story, whatever and then use that as an access point for political engagement, spreading awareness about Dante Servin and circulating a petition to get him fired. That organizing model, combining art and service as an access point for political education, became the next evolution of our arts organizing. The purpose of which is to combine the people that are most directly impacted by mass incarceration, artists, and organizers into a format that is more accessible than an organizing meeting or a protest. So we are acknowledging the limitation that most organizing is structured very similar to academia, corporate America, or the nonprofit industrial complex— institutions that have denied access to so many people, primarily people that are most impacted by the things that we are fighting against. How do we create something that is

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appetizing, inviting, and accessible to folks that have been denied access to institutions? The Breathing Room event series was our answer to that. It’s formatted like a curated open mic: Everyone has four minutes and it will be a mixture of performance and political education. So you might get a report back from Assata’s Daughters on their most recent protests, a teach-in on Assata Shakur, a teach-in on solitary confinement, or a teach-in on the grass gap. [For example] Tom Tresser came and gave a teach-in on Tax Increment Financing. These micro moments of political education— four minutes or less—you’ve got to make accessible or mixed in with rap, comedy, movement, music, dance, or storytelling: every performance discipline you can think of. After like four months of successfully programming the Breathing Room series, we lost our space. And that timed out perfectly with the launch of Freedom Square. So two months later, we launched a protest occupation very much in homage to our genesis with the organizers in Ferguson, across the street from the Homan Square CPD facility that has illegally detained and tortured thousands of Black and brown people in Chicago over the past several decades. CPD still claims that it’s just an inventory warehouse. But over the course of our forty-five day occupation, people came up to us almost every day from the neighborhood telling us that they had been detained and tortured in there. So we held this space—this vacant lot across the street from Homan Square. We dubbed it Freedom Square. We claimed it as a liberated police-free zone. And we set out to embody the world that we would like to have: the things that we believe the city should be investing in instead of police, the seven resource areas—restorative justice, education, employment, mental health and addiction treatment, housing, nutrition, and art. Those are the things that we believe actually keep people safe, not men with guns who can kill you with impunity. We are calling for a divestment from Homan Square, a divestment from police. Chicago spends forty percent of its [operations budget] on the police. That’s ridiculous. We’ve got potholes to fill, people to employ

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that don’t kill people, teachers to pay, and textbooks to buy. There’s no way that we should be spending forty cents of every tax dollar on more guns, surveillance equipment, and men who can kill with impunity. That’s ridiculous. That’s four million dollars a day. So if you can imagine what the city of Chicago could do with four million dollars a day besides giving it to militarized weaponry, surveillance, and people who can kill with impunity—I can think of some creative things for four million dollars a day here. Yes. In the midst of Freedom Square, we applied for and won this building grant. This property was historically a Franciscan monk friary built in 1898. The monks lived in the main house where Su Casa is now housed, and the building that we’re in now, which is now #BreathingRoom, used to be the press building where the Franciscan Herald was printed. The building before we got in here was uninhabitable—like rotting water damage for like five years—and we basically proposed what I describe as bringing our outdoor style of organizing into a brick and mortar location and having a sustained headquarters for that style of organizing. And we won that proposal. In January of 2017, we started the rehab: we fixed a lot of the water damaged walls. Su Casa fixed the plumbing. And we have just been slowly, room by room, project by project, trying to get space off the ground. The room that we’re in now is actually the youth engagement lounge and childcare. In a digital media lab/activists and residents lab there’s literacy programming, and there’s the Free Store/gallery space. Coalition conference rooms are another one of the visions of the space: any organization doing resistance work in Chicago can use #BreathingRoom as headquarters for meetings, trainings, workshops, and events, and we provide a space for free or very cheap or an exchange model, intentionally trying to be as anti-capitalist as possible. We also have a library, we’re building a recording studio and have a restorative justice lab, peace/talk it out/conflict de-escalation room, and a mental health lounge, where our aim is to partner with individual mental health care providers to volunteer a certain number of hours. There are four bedrooms that we hope to develop into live/work visual art studios.

So that is the total vision of space. We’ve also got some garden beds going in the front courtyard where we hope to develop some food sustainability. #BreathingRoom is the #LetUsBreathe collective’s headquarters. #BreathingRoom is a Black-led arts, healing, and organizing hub on the South Side of Chicago. It is a coalition-building, consciousness-raising headquarters, where we are combining solidarity work with anti-capitalist, abolitionist artistic production. We also have a monthly rent party called the Black Magic Kickback to keep our fundraising as grassroots as possible—it’s a suggested donation event that folks can come to, to support us out of our monthly expenses. We’re having sort of an open house orientation day called Tribe Day on [March 10 from 2pm-7pm]. Manifest Monday is every Monday [a creative co-working space for the community], but at the Manifest Monday on MLK Day, we announced our envisioning Justice Initiative. We are partnering with the Illinois Humanities Council on a yearlong initiative to use arts and humanities to re-envision the criminal justice system. We’re one of six community hubs in Chicago that will be a part of that program. We prefer human capital to monetary capital. Our organizing meetings are every Thursday from 6pm to 8:30pm So we encourage people to show up and figure out a way to give their selves, their talents, and their presence, but if they can’t do that, they can donate via PayPal. letusbreathe2015@gmail. com, if you don’t care about a tax deduction. If you do care about a tax deduction then you can donate to Su Casa’s PayPal, which is sucasacw@gmail.com, with #LetUsBreathe in the memo line, and that will go directly towards our rent costs. ¬ You can visit #LetUsBreathe’s official website at letusbreathecollective.com to find out more about them, and you can buy t-shirts to further support their work. Follow @LetUsBreathe773 on Twitter and on Instagram to stay up to date on their activity. A version of this interview previously aired on South Side Weekly Radio. Listen at southsideweekly.com/category/radio

EVENTS

BULLETIN The Big Idea Show BOP Biz Chatham Suites, 644 E. 79th St. Every Friday, March 2 through March 30, 9am–11am. Free. (773) 891-5939. bit.ly/thebigideashow Every Friday, the Big Idea Show provides a platform for business owners, activists, and entrepreneurs alike to discuss their big ideas. Hosts Linda Perez and Toure Muhammad—business owners in their own right—will discuss the secret to succeeding in Chicago with their guests. Find out that secret for yourself by attending this Friday. (Michael Wasney)

9th Annual Woodlawn Community Summit UofC School of Social Service Administration, 969 E. 60th St. Saturday, March 3, 8am– 12:30pm. Registration opens at 7:45am. Free. (773) 324-6926. bit.ly/woodlawnsummit Woodlawn residents, business owners, and elected officials will converge at the UofC’s School of Social Service Administration for the 9th Annual Woodlawn Summit. The summit will be an opportunity to network with other residents and organizations while discussing the future of Woodlawn. (Michael Wasney)

City Colleges of Chicago iOS Boot Camp Truman College, 1145 W. Wilson Ave and Kennedy-King College, 6301 S. Halsted St. Apply by March 5; classes begin April 2. Two evenings a week, and Saturdays 8am–2:30pm. Free. (773) 265-5343. ccc.edu/everyonecancode City Colleges of Chicago collaborated with Apple to develop this five-month pilot course that will teach students to use the Swift programming language to build iOS apps. Students who complete the course will be able to code on their own and access programming internships and entry-level job opportunities through City Colleges of Chicago. (Tammy Xu)

Understanding Our Criminal Justice System

Artist Talk with Amanda RossHo

Microsoft Technology Center Chicago at Aon Center, 200 E. Randolph St. Wednesday, March 7, 6pm–7:30pm. Free. RSVP online. bit.ly/CriminalJusticeData

Midway Studios, 915 E. 60th St. Monday, March 5, 6pm–7pm. Free. arts.uchicago.edu

The Chicago Data Collective combines efforts by newsrooms, academics, and nonprofits to understand Chicago’s criminal justice system. Learn more about the mission of their newly launched project by joining representatives from Injustice Watch, DataMade, City Tech, and more. (Abigail Bazin)

VISUAL ARTS Muxeres En Rebeldia La Catrina Cafe, 1011 W. 18th St. Friday, March 2, 6pm–11pm. Two for $5, or one for $3. facebook.com/ChiResists ChiResists hosts the MUXERES EN REBELDIA/WOMXN in REBELLION exhibition and fundraiser to benefit Mariposas de la Diaspora, a group of nine local women healers of color headed to Mexico to take part in the Convocation to the First International Gathering of Politics, Art, Sport & Culture for Women in the Struggle. There will be art, music, poetry, and workshops. ( Joseph S. Pete)

Towards a Politics of Healing: Ethics of Storytelling Arts and Public Life Arts Incubator, 301 E. Garfield Blvd. Sunday, March 4, 1pm–3pm. Free with RSVP. facebook.com/artspubliclife Patricia Nguyen’s workshop explores the ethics behind sharing and profiting from historical stories of people of color who have suffered violence and forced migration. How does one ethically enter a conversation about power dynamics, politics of representation, and capitalism? Participants will be invited to join the conversation.( Joseph S. Pete)

Celebrate and support Black talent in Chicago with an evening curated by the Butterfly Collective at Fuller Park’s Phantom Gallery. Performances will include spoken word by TK, a set by DJ Skoli, music by Curt Cohiba, and live painting by artist Dionne Victoria. (Christopher Good)

The UofC’s Department of Visual Arts (DoVA) Open Practice Committee presents an artist talk with Amanda Ross-Ho. Her work deals with collapsing boundaries between private work and public display, as well as personal imagery and autobiographical artifacts. (Roderick Sawyer)

Kahil El’Zabar The Promontory, 5311 S. Lake Park Ave. Friday, March 2, doors 7pm, show 8pm. $10 standing room, $15 general seating, $18 tables. All ages. (312) 801-2100. promontorychicago.com

Artist Talk with Nelly Agassi Midway Studios, 915 E. 60th St. Thursday, March 1, 12:30pm–1:30pm. Free. arts. uchicago.edu Join the UofC’s Department of Visual Arts (DoVA) Open Practice Committee as they present an artist talk and exploration of works by Nelly Agassi. Agassi’s work utilizes mediums of performance, installation, video, textile, and paper, in order to explore the body and intimacy within public space and its relation to architecture. (Roderick Sawyer)

Holographic Body Closing Reception baby blue gallery, 2201 S. Halsted St. 3–4s. Sunday, March 4, 3pm–5pm. facebook.com/ babybluegallery If the big snowfall earlier this month kept you from attending the opening reception of “Holographic Body,” this closing reception is for you: take a little time out of your Sunday afternoon to stop by this group exhibition of work that is processbased and “unabashedly formalist and abstract.” ( Julia Aizuss)

MUSIC Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop: 365 Black Phantom Gallery, 436 E. 47th St. Thursday, 7pm–9pm. $16 tickets at bit.ly/365-black. (708) 733-2936. phantomgallery.blogspot.com

Jazz percussionist Kahil El’Zabar was born and raised on the South Side, but he’s a global citizen if there ever was one; a performer whose rich knowledge of African music was demonstrated through high-caliber collaborations (Stevie Wonder, Nina Simone). Don’t miss his homecoming. (Christopher Good)

Futura from LA in Chicago ChiTown Futbol, 2343 S. Throop St. Friday, March 2, doors 7pm, show 8pm. $7. All ages. (312) 226-1988. (312) 226-1988. chitownfutbol.com When you come to ChiTown Futbol this Friday, leave your cleats at home. Mysterious LA hardcore group Futura is making a tour stop, with support (and blast beats) from local acts Primitive Teeth, Warrior Tribes, Social Quarantine, and Molcajete. (Christopher Good)

Pathopraxia ALULU Brewpub, 2011 S. Laflin St. Saturday, March 3, 8pm–3am, show 11pm. $5 suggested donation. 21+. (312) 6009865. bit.ly/pathopraxia Artist Mark Banks has curated a spread of local artists and musicians to explore the intersection between emotional experiences, “pathos”, and technical practices, “praxis” at this craft brewery. Come early to meet and support the artists and stay for an energetic lineup featuring Impulsive Hearts, Cute Plus Awful, and Batteries Not Included. (Veronica Karlin)

FEBRUARY 28, 2018 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 13

EVENTS

Soul-Frica Sundays

Renaissance Bronzeville, 4641 S. King Dr. Sundays, 7pm. No cover. (773) 690-5416. renaissancebronzeville.com End your week right and dance the night away in Bronzeville. Resident DJs Terry Hunter and Greg Winfeld––each with a formidable history in Chicago’s house scene––will spin soul, R&B, and whatever else gets the people moving. (Christopher Good)

STAGE & SCREEN A Ballerina’s Tale

The Hyde Park Community Players takes full advantage of small production size to stage this play in a real residential living room, mirroring the intimate story. It examines two women, one an established short story writer and the other her younger protégé, and their complicated relationship. The family donating their living room has a dog. (Tammy Xu)

Casting Call: “Do You Love Me Still?” University Church, 5655 S. University Ave, 2nd floor. Monday, March 5, 7pm– 10pm. feedyourspiritmedia@gmail.com, doyoulovemestill.com

Journalist and critic Nelson George directed this 2015 documentary on the rise of Misty Copeland, the first-ever Black principal dancer for the American Ballet Theater; join Black Cinema House for a screening and post-film discussion about the doc’s focus on race and body image in ballet. ( Julia Aizuss)

Feed Your Spirit Media, in partnership with New Birth Productions, will audition actors and vocalists for an original stage play opening this June at The Revival in Hyde Park. The tragic love-triangle drama asks the question: now that you know everything about me, Do You Love Me ...Still? Please bring a current headshot and resume and be prepared to read from the script. Character synopses are available for review online, and rehearsals are Monday and Friday evenings beginning March 9. (Nicole Bond)

South Side Irish Parade Film Festival

Eye of the Storm: The Bayard Rustin Story

Beverly Arts Center, 2407 W. 111th St. Saturday, March 3, 3pm–7pm. $9–$25. (773) 445-3838. beverlyartcenter.org

eta Creative Arts Foundation, 7558 S. South Chicago Ave. Friday, February 9–Sunday, March 11. Fridays and Saturdays 8pm, Sundays 3pm. $40, discounts available for seniors, students, and groups. (773) 7523955. etacreativearts.org

Dorchester Art + Housing Collaborative, 1456 E. 70th St. Friday, March 2, 7pm– 10pm. Free. (312) 857-5561. rebuild-foundation.org

A week before the South Side Irish Parade marches through Beverly, the neighborhood will celebrate the Emerald Isle with the South Side Irish Film Festival. The BAC will screen the Irish films Life is Short, The Boxer, Uisce Beatha and The Secret Scripture, a Sebastian Barry adaptation with a stacked cast that includes Vanessa Redgrave, Rooney Mara, and Eric Bana. ( Joseph S. Pete)

Collected Stories Private Hyde Park residence, location emailed with ticket confirmation. March 2–4 and March 9–11. Friday–Saturday, 7pm; Sunday, 3pm. $15, seniors and students $12. hydeparkcommunityplayers.org

14 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY

Playwright McKinley Johnson tells the story of the behind-the-scenes Civil Rights Movement organizer Bayard Rustin, whose work garnered him the moniker The Architect of the March on Washington. Despite Rustin’s efforts and achievements, he was persecuted for being gay. In conjunction with the play, a Contemporary Conversation on Race, Sexuality and Politics was the topic of a joint panel scheduled with eta and the UofC Center for the Study of Race, Politics, and Culture held Saturday, February 10 with the playwright as well as social justice leaders and scholars from Chicago. (Nicole Bond)

¬ FEBRUARY 28, 2018

All of Me

Midwest Urban Farmers Summit

La Catrina Cafe, 1011 W. 18th St. Wednesday, February 28, 7pm. Free. southsideprojections.org

The Plant, 1400 W. 46th St. Saturday, March 10 and Sunday, March 11, 7am–7pm. Sliding scale for tickets. (779) 772-4142. midwesturbanfarmers.org

Llévate Mis Amores (All of Me) documents a multigenerational group of women who provide food, clothing, and sundries to migrants riding the rails to the United States. Film critic Marco Escalante will lead a post-screening discussion on the first film in South Side Projections’s long-in-the-works screening series about undocumented immigrants. ( Joseph S. Pete)

FOOD & LAND Vegetable Gardening Basics Orozco Community Academy, 1940 W. 18th St. Saturday, March 10, 3pm–6pm. Free. This three-hour gardening workshop, offered both in Spanish and English, will get you up to speed on the 101s of outdoor gardening: what crops grow well in limited space, what vegetables are best transplanted, and which best seeded directly. Materials and refreshments will be provided. (Emeline Posner)

Chicago Community Gardeners Conference Kennedy-King College, 740 W. 63rd St., Building U. Saturday, March 3, 8:30am–2:15pm. $25, $15 for students and children, $5 discount for CCGA volunteers. chicagocommunitygardens.org/conference Calling all community gardeners: the CCGA’s sixth annual “Garden to Garden” conference is quickly approaching. The six workshop sessions cover topics from heavy metal contamination of soil to planning a community garden from scratch. There will also be presentations from some of Chicago’s most-loved gardeners and “speed gardening” (we’re not entirely sure what that means—you’ll have to find out for yourself ). You’ll be sure to leave well-prepared for the upcoming growing season. Spanish translation available. Meals included in registration. (Emeline Posner)

At the Midwest Urban Farmers Summit, urban farmers will gather to discuss best practices, ask questions, and learn about financial viability at the Plant, a closedloop food production space housed in a former pork processing plant in Back of the Yards. There will be presentations on the state of urban agriculture, a talent show, roundtable talks, and networking. No one will be turned away for lack of funds. ( Joseph S. Pete)

South Branch Parks Framework Plan Park 571, 2828 S. Eleanor St. Wednesday, March 14, 5:30pm–7:30pm. Free. (312) 9225616. metroplanning.org On Wednesday evening, the South Branch Park Advisory Council will host a “visioning meeting” for the South Branch of the Chicago River. For those who live along or spend time in any of the South Branch Parks (Canalport, Canal Origins, or Park 571), this meeting may be the place to learn about what changes are coming to these parks, and to offer input. (Emeline Posner)

Greenhouse Production Workshop South Chicago Farm, 8900 S. Green Bay Ave. Saturday, March 17, 8:30am–5pm. $100, scholarships available. (773) 376-8882. urbangrowerscollective.org The Urban Growers Collective’s workshop “Greenhouse Production: Seeding, Transplanting & Marketing Crops” offers hands-on training for planting, harvesting, and packaging crops. Growers can also pick up valuable tips about marketing to sell at restaurants, farmers markets, and Community Supported Agriculture programs. In addition, the collective will host group discussions and Q&A sessions. ( Joseph S. Pete)

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March 11

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arts.uchicago.edu/logan/gallery

SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY

Logan Center Gallery • Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts • 915 E 60th St Chicago IL 60637

THE MYTH

January 26

Mike Cloud —

FEBRUARY 28, 2018 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 15

SCREENINGS

All over the South Side Now thru March 11 oneearthfilmfest.org #OEFF2018

ONE EARTH FILM FESTIVAL

Fly by Light Dolores Chasing Ice Sea of Life Happening Making Waves Evolution of Organic What Lies Upstream