May 4, 2016

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SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY The South Side Weekly is an independent nonprofit newsprint magazine written 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.

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Cover photo by Andrea Giugni

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

Promises Made and Positions Lost Springfield’s passage of a $600 million plan for higher education has failed to end the budget crisis at Chicago State University (CSU). CSU made good on its previous promise that some employees would lose their jobs by April 30 by laying off three hundred employees this past Saturday. None of those laid off this time were faculty, in the interest of not disrupting teaching as term wrapped up. But with the latest class of 850 students graduating last Thursday, teaching cuts are coming up fast. The faculty’s contracts end on May 15, at which point the South Side school will move towards its goal of halving its current monthly payroll. And the Illinois legislature has given the school only scant consolation: the $20.1 million allocated to CSU by the state legislature’s recent plan is less than sixty percent of what the predominantly African American university expected to receive from the state.

HAGS, CTU There is a war going on for those final days of the school year, those halcyon days when “HAGS” is written in yearbooks and little attention is paid to academics. At the moment, the academic year ends on June 21—two days earlier than the district had originally planned. June 22 and 23 are unpaid furlough days. For now, the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) and Chicago Public Schools (CPS) are at an impasse with regards to a strike; a fact-finding report is in the works during a thirty-day “cooling-off period.” At the earliest, the teachers could declare ten days’ notice for a strike on May 16, and walk out on May 27. But this kind of ending to the school year seems unlikely. Despite the possible excitement of an extra day of summer, a strike near the end of the year would cause difficulties for graduating seniors, further frustrate hordes of child-care-seeking parents, and leave teachers at risk of having healthcare for the summer or their final paycheck of the year rescinded. “If CPS provokes us, and unilaterally effects change, all bets are off,” Jesse Sharkey, vice president of CTU, told the Sun-Times this month. At one point, the district alluded to the withdrawal of a seven percent pension benefit, but CPS has recently said that the benefit would stay while the fact-finding process was playing out. “In the absence of that,” Sharkey continued, “I get a sense that our members would not be looking at a strike in May.” Justice Served Cold The sinister power of Starbucks is finally being challenged by none other than a fellow Chicagoan. One Stacy Pincus filed a lawsuit against the caffeine conglomerate for five million dollars, claiming that the ice in Starbucks iced coffee has been deceiving loyal customers, tempting them with promises of a “Venti” when they get barely half the liquid advertised. Burning with the flames of righteous anger at being served fourteen ounces of sort-of-okay coffee instead of twenty-four ounces of sort-of-okay coffee, the lawsuit states, “Starbucks’ advertising practices are clearly meant to mislead consumers when combined with the standard practice of filling a cold drink cup with far less liquid than the cup can hold.” At press time, Starbucks had yet to admit its deception, instead deflecting: “Our customers understand and expect that ice is an essential component of any ‘iced’ beverage. If a customer is not satisfied with their beverage preparation, we will gladly remake it.”

IN THIS ISSUE performing reality, embracing style

“I didn’t have to live a double life, which often one does have to.” andrea giugni...................................4 section

8.4

“The mayor would have to be willing to face a potential strike to change the existing contracts.” sam stecklow....................................6 be aggressive! b-e aggressive!

“I am the epitome of a girly-girl. My strength has surprised me.” sonia schlesinger.............................8 at the root of sleep

“I have to set myself up to work with blinders on—to let the materials speak for themselves.” grace hauck.....................................10 who's playing with oby?

“Since I’m Isaiah Oby, OBY can never die because I’m not dead.” jon poilpre.......................................11 have a little faith

“I just want to allow people the same excitement about living as I remembered.” zoe makoul......................................13 reinvesting in our own

Yet this Black neighborhood stands firm. karen ford......................................15

OUR WEBSITE S ON SOUTHSIDEWEEKLY.COM South Side Weekly Radio soundcloud.com/south-side-weekly-radio

MAY 4, 2016 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 3

Performing Reality, Embracing Style Margo Jefferson on growing up in a black aristocracy

BY ANDREA GIUGNI

I

run behind Margo Jefferson’s red coat as we rush into the historic Artist’s Cafe on Michigan Avenue. On a rainy day in Chicago, Jefferson is beaming. She is fresh off her panel with longtime friend and fellow writer, Darryl Pinckney, for the Chicago Humanities Festival’s spring programs. The talk was held in the Fine Arts Building’s Studebaker Theatre, and is one of the venue’s first events open to the public. Jefferson, a New York Times theatre critic who won the Pulitzer Prize for criticism in 1995, and Pinckney, a longtime contributor to the New York Review of Books, brought many interested festival-goers to the grand halls of the decorative theatre to listen to impassioned discussions on Style and the Black Bourgeoisie.

Both writers read excerpts from Negroland and Black Deutschland, their respective recent books.

Both books center on themes of black aristocracy, family rituals and customs in 1950s and 1960s Chicago, and the ways gender roles and racial expectations impacted both their childhood and adult lives. Jefferson and Pinckney settled back into the two chairs laid out for them and proceeded to talk about how the social structures of their youth were shaken by the march towards integration. Pinckney spoke of how black boys are taught to become “men of the world,” possessing knowledge of both street and school. Jefferson mentioned the particulars of Negroland, while praising the social stature of “clubwomen” who were both domestically and socially adept. She went on to note how her perception of these women influenced her creation of a cultural self in the face of aggressions that were permanently beneath the surface.

After the panel, Jefferson was bombarded with audience members praising her message and sharing personal stories while they get their copies of Negroland signed. Jefferson is the embodiment of the carefully groomed social butterfly of her cheerleader high-school days, but with a heavy dose of sincerity as she charms all who meet her. At the Artist’s Cafe, she orders a Greek salad as we talk style, black womanhood and aristocracy, and identity politics.

What is it like for you, seeing the Chicago before and Chicago now, especially near the Hyde Park area?

It’s a strange combination of old buildings and sights that I’ve known all my life and then these sudden, new structures, and also over the years the neighborhood went through various permutations. I used to come back more, because my mother was alive. She just died about a year and a half ago, so I came quite regularly and I had friends here.

How did those experiences with your white classmates, with the school years at the University of Chicago Lab School you write about in Negroland and in the early stages of Hyde Park integration, shape your understanding of Negroland when you were young?

Did those interactions fit into your concep-

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tion of Negroland, or did you conceive of that as something completely separate?

It turned out to be part of my version of Negroland because the world was starting to integrate and my parents chose, as did some of their friends, to place us in a progressive, largely white school really from our very early years. Those were decisions certain Negroland parents made. So, you know, I think it did a lot of things. It gave me a sense that integrated friendships were normal and even natural, which prepared me well for the world that was to follow. At the same time, it also did expose me to certain assumptions and, I won’t say open conflicts, but the little rules and rituals that governed relations between the races—some spoken, some not. Some in facial expressions.

Sometimes seemingly very present, intrusive, and other times, seemingly not there. So, you

learned different languages and codes, which did have to do with racial conventions, discriminations, attempts at real liberalism and genuine goodwill. All of that, all of that.

Was there ever a moment where you felt you could exist without being othered?

You mean at Lab? Yeah, there were absolutely moments. I would say more in grammar school because, you know, adolescence is tricky anyway. We all become hideously self-conscious about our place in the world and our status, what groups we’re in, and put race and ethnicity on top of that. And your parents, all sets of parents, are worried about, you know, are you going to date across the line? And that became black, white, Jewish, gentile, all of that.

You were inheriting all those anxieties and to some extent, we were acting them out. I had a black social life—all black, entirely outside of school—that was made up of mostly the children of my parents’ friends. Some of us went to white schools, some of us went to all-black schools. Darryl [Pinckney] was talking about code-switching and certainly, in that way, girls needed to code-switch, too. You know, we needed to show that we could do the dances and had the hip expressions.

Similarly, in your book, you talk about the decision to let a couple of white friends come join— Yeah, join in on a party! A club party!

Exactly! I remember reading that and thinking that was so interesting because there is a weird power dynamic established there, where it seems to be almost reversed.

Absolutely. It was reversed, it was reversed. My sister was three years ahead of me and already

there was more integration in my class. But I ran into a good friend of hers from Lab, who remembered Denise inviting her one Sunday to spend the afternoon on our father’s Cabin Cruiser. And we would often invite friends, but I had only remembered black friends coming—but Carol, a white friend of Denise’s, she had such a happy memory of it. She saw it as a real privilege, to get this invitation from Denise outside of school and kind of experience this.

Let’s talk a little bit about the theme of the Chicago Humanities Festival, Style. I’m thinking of style in relation to these rituals that are understood, sometimes spoken, sometimes not spoken, and the way that girls and black girls were taught to exist and in some way—their style and the style that was “correct” became a large part of identity.

How did this understanding and this black aristocratic style shape your own identity as you were younger, and then as you got older?

When I was growing up, something in me really, really enjoyed all those little particulars of, “this is what you’re supposed to do.” I loved fashion magazines, and all of this I really adhered to. I think some of that was just my temperament. And some of it was, I wore these thick glasses and I worshipped adorableness and girls who were pretty and cute, black or white, and didn’t seem to have any problem with it. Likewise, adult women. It was important for me as a little girl to do it properly, to follow the instructions that attractive, glamorous women and fashion magazines gave me.

In some ways I was kind of an all-American girl in style, in high school—I was a cheerleader. I liked matching this-and-that and I carried that, to some extent, into college, then I started to vary it. The late sixties, the counterculture, everything from hippiedom to Black Power. You have an afro, you’re wearing

LITERATURE

an African-print dress even if you bought it in Saks Fifth Avenue or at a little shop in a black neighborhood. But you’re also wearing miniskirts and dripping shawls and big earrings and tie-dyed things. Your parents and your friends’ parents—they don’t love it. Yes, in some way, it’s another uniform because everyone’s doing it, but you’re also finding your own version of it. It does have to do with, “whoa, I’m making choices and I’m making them in opposition to decades of—centuries in a sense if you track women in fashion—codes.” And then when feminism hit, it definitely read as “I’m a new person.” No girdles, etc. Even something that seems as trivial as “I’m not always shaving under my arms.” people laugh at that now. You know, those needed to be nose-thumbed.

Definitely, I think about young girls who have had these codes, these rituals put into their minds since birth.

Yes, since day one. They’re visual codes and they are also literally body-movement codes. For example, stockings tear very easily, so you’re always thinking about how you’re walking. All of that, these physical and social confinements.

How did you think of your narrative style in relation to so many of the discussions of style in the text?

I didn’t want it to be driven by wholly chronology—I thought of it more as a mosaic or collage, and that felt entirely appropriate as I was living several different lives, constructing and being instructed to construct, and adjusting internally and having to adapt. I’m living in several worlds, I’m performing in each, and I’m being instructed on the conventions of appropriate internal and external performance. All of those sequences could change, modes of consciousness could change, switch in an instant.

Even the pronouns could change. Initially, I tried to write more traditionally and I realized it just wasn’t going to work. It wasn’t going to get me through this book.

It seems like performance was very often a part of your reality. I think we tend to try to separate performance and reality but I believe that, in your case, those really existed simultaneously. Could you speak to how that changed with your understanding of feminism, and if there was ever a dichotomy between what was being performed and what was being lived?

I was lucky to be, in those first years of femi-

ANDREA GIUGNI

nism, I wasn’t yet employed any place that had a dress code. I was a young woman making her way in New York. My first job, I think I was a secretary at Planned Parenthood. Then I went to graduate school the next year, there was freedom there. I didn’t have to live a double life, which often one does have to. If I was living a double life—I was laughing about this with a friend—we were all struggling with the contradiction which young women still do with the mini-mini-skirt and the tank top and the “how dare you!” But really it was, “how dare you talk to me in that way.” But I do remember that there were, among feminists, debates about how flaunting you were or how not.

Did you ever look back on some of the codes or behaviors you adhered to as a child and think, “oh, that was so anti-feminist?”

Oh, yes, that was part of the analysis. Whether you were a black, Latina, or white feminist, the codes of girlhood were central to the analysis.

Clothes, manners, all of them: undergirded by assumptions about sexual and intellectual propriety. There wasn’t a sense of destiny, not until

feminism came about. Of course there were always people, particularly in the arts, where it was more acceptable for a woman to want to be a dancer, to want to be a writer even. But if you wanted to be a lawyer or a doctor…And women were not given the respect for political movements they had been involved in. The sense of actions you could take on any front, that would have consequences. And then I write about that, so I’m not saying anything new, but it was such an amazing sequence of civil rights, anti-war, Black Power, and then the women’s movement, and then gay rights. Each one in some way demanded that you readjust, realign, expand, take apart certain ways you had lived emotionally, psychologically, and visually—and stylistically!

At today’s panel, you talked briefly about guilt and the idea of guilt being part of one’s consciousness, and I’m thinking about that along with this line from your book: “What I would have to do later, starting in college and in the years following, to become a person of inner consequence: break that fawning inner self into pieces.” That fawning inner self

and how so much of who one is is projected externally—how does that impact your inner self? And how did that change you put yourself through, motivated by guilt, anger, and shame, contribute to that?

They’re all emotions, they all have their real uses. You have to internalize your changes in some other ways, in ways you can feel at peace with because that allows you to be more creative with them. If you’re constantly responding or taking action out of shame and what you’ve done before, that stays in your consciousness, but it has to be transmuted into something else, into something positive, you should forgive that word. But the changed you has to become a you that somehow gives you pleasure.

Guilt and shame aren’t pleasurable and they can make you react even cowardly if you don’t take hold of them and use them creatively. ¬

MAY 4, 2016 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 5

Section 8.4

The unstable future of the city’s police misconduct records

BY SAM STECKLOW This report was produced in collaboration with City Bureau, a Chicago-based journalism lab.

W

hen it comes to legal rulings, incremental change doesn’t warrant big headlines. You can’t say “Building Still Standing,” and you can’t say “Files Not Destroyed.” But what’s often lost in an individual ruling is what could have been—as in, the building is still standing after a wrecking crew was stalled at the last minute. Such is the case in the latest court ruling over police misconduct records in Chicago.

What are potentially hundreds of thousands of files detailing all levels of misconduct by the Chicago Police Department have been saved from destruction. Labor arbitrator George Roumell ruled on April 29 that the files, which date back to 1967, should be preserved at least as long as the Department of Justice’s civil rights investigation into the police department is ongoing. This investigation could take several years.

The files have been the subject of legal drama since 1985, two years after the expiration of the first contract between the city and the Fraternal Order of Police Lodge 7, the union that represents eighty-three percent of sworn rank-and-file CPD officers. And despite Roumell’s recent ruling, the battle for these files is not over.

The central issue involves a stuboorn clause in the FOP’s contract with the city of Chicago: Section 8.4, which states, in so many words, that the Chicago Police Department has to destroy all misconduct records found to be “not sustained” that are five to seven years old (the exact length depends on the type of misconduct). For reference, the Independent Police Review Authority (IPRA), which investigates most allegations of police misconduct, finds cases to be “not sustained” about ninety-six percent of the time, according to a Tribune analysis; CPD’s Office of Professional Standards (OPS), which IPRA replaced in 2007 during a police brutality scandal, ruled “not sustained” ninety percent of the time, a Human Rights Watch report found.

After an appellate court ruled in March

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2014 that police misconduct files are public documents, and thus available via the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), two things happened. First, the Invisible Institute’s Jamie Kalven, the Tribune, and the Sun-Times all filed separate but similar extensive FOIA requests for misconduct documents dating back to 1967. Then, the FOP and the Police Benevolent and Protective Association (PBPA), the union that represents CPD’s sergeants, lieutenants, and captains, both sued in Cook County Circuit Court. The unions hoped to block access to those files on the grounds of Section 8.4. Judge Peter Flynn granted both of the unions injunctions that temporarily blocked the public’s access to many of those documents, and ordered the parties into arbitration. Arbitration is a legal process separate from the courts in which both parties (in this case, the unions and the city) agree voluntarily to accept the decision of a third party. The arbitrations that Flynn ordered would decide the ultimate future of the documents.

Strikingly, before the arbitrators in both the FOP and PBPA cases went on to find in favor of preserving the documents in some way, they both initially delivered decisions favoring the unions. On November 4 of last year, longtime Chicago labor negotiator Jules Crystal issued an award in favor of the PBPA, writing that the CPD failed to uphold the contract when it did not purge old digital misconduct records (notably, though, he interpreted his case as not at all relevant to misconduct files on physical paper). And on January 13, Michigan State University law professor George Roumell, Jr. found that the language in the FOP’s Section 8.4 was too binding. He ordered the city to come up with a list of files it thought specifically should be kept under the law, and wrote that the rest of the files, physical or digital, had to be destroyed.

According to court records obtained by the Chicago Defender, it was only after the city filed to vacate that ruling that Crystal reversed his decision this February, writing that he could not “ignore the fact that the posture of this case is different from what it was when the matter was arbitrated in 2015.” He argued, essentially, that the social and political climate

These arbitration awards are not the end of the battle over these records... Though the awards are legally binding, they are subject to appeal. in Chicago had changed enough to warrant a reversal of his earlier ruling. Crystal directed the city and the PBPA to write a replacement for Section 8.4 “that is not inconsistent with court rulings, judicial pronouncements, and/or legislative enactments.” All three PBPA contracts expire at the end of this June.

Further developments also influenced Roumell’s April 29 decision in favor of the city.

On Friday, he too issued a complete reversal of his January interim award. The federal prosecutor leading the DOJ’s investigation into the CPD sent letters to a law firm hired by the city requesting that all police misconduct records be preserved. The letter specifically mentioned those records contested in arbitration. This letter, Roumell wrote, directly influenced his decision, as did Crystal’s February reversal. He claims it was against the interests of all parties involved for him to ignore the DOJ’s preservation requests and its ongoing investigation, since that would likely trigger future litigation from the DOJ. His decision was issued a full two weeks after the original due date set by Judge Flynn, which is not mentioned in the decision itself at all. Roumell didn’t return a request for comment.

The Previous Contracts Previously, the CPD and the two unions have attempted to work this out between themselves. The FOP claims it first became aware of the department’s practice of hanging onto all of its police misconduct records in 2011, when the union’s grievance counsel, Richard Aguilar, filed complaints with the city for not destroying records more than seven years old.

In a letter responding to the FOP’s grievances, CPD’s current director of human resources Commander Donald J. O’Neill expressed his surprise at the claims of the grievances. At the time, O’Neill was a lawyer with the department’s Management and Labor Affairs Section.

“As the union well knows, this practice is the result of several Federal Court orders issued in litigation dating back to the early 1990s involving matters of police misconduct,” he wrote, going on to cite three separate court cases the FOP had been involved with that dealt intimately with Section 8.4.

It’s impossible not to note that the FOP’s grievances came at a time when the movement to make misconduct files public was gaining momentum. As O’Neill noted, it’s difficult

POLICING

2001

2008

1976

2011

2014

2016

Police misconduct records, 1976–2016

Subject to destruction in arbitration between city and police unions Available to the public on cpdb.co BACI WEILER

to believe that the FOP was unaware of the department’s practice of keeping misconduct files, regardless of what Section 8.4 reads.

There has been a Section 8.4 in every version of the FOP and PBPA contracts since the police department was unionized. In an email, G. Flint Taylor, a civil rights attorney and one of the founding members of the People’s Law Office (PLO), wrote that nearly all of the city’s contracts with the police unions have been negotiated in secret and approved by City Council without debate. Even Crystal and Roumell didn’t know much about the initial negotiation process; as Crystal wrote in his initial decision in favor of the PBPA, “While the…language in Section 8.4 may have been the result of hard fought negotiations and/or a [simple] compromise, the end result is language that is clear and unambiguous.”

Darka Papushkewych, the city’s chief labor negotiator at the time when the very first FOP contract was signed, did not reply to a request for comment. Papushkewych is now general counsel at the Metropolitan Pier and Exposition Authority, which owns and manages Navy Pier and McCormick Place.

G. Flint Taylor and the People’s Law Office In the case of Monroe v. Pape, the 1961 U.S. Supreme Court ruled in part—after hearing testimony about how thirteen Chicago police officers ransacked the home of a black family with six children, made them stand naked in a room, and arrested the father, holding him for two days on false charges before freeing him—that municipalities were not people.

Therefore, the city of Chicago could not be held liable for the actions of its employees— the police—under a provision of the Civil Rights Act of 1875. In 1978, however, the Supreme Court overruled Monroe in the case of Monell v. Department of Social Services of New York, which found that municipalities could be “people” and could be sued for deprivation of rights.

Beginning in the late 1980s, the PLO, an activist Noble Square law firm perhaps best known for representing the family of Fred Hampton, took advantage of Monell. By filing civil rights cases against the city, the PLO was able to make extremely broad discovery requests of the city and the police department.

These requests covered both complaint register (CR) files, which detail complaints against police officers, and “repeater lists,” lists of officers known to the department to have a habit of noteworthy misconduct.

The city and department rarely gave up these files willingly, according to Taylor, but beginning in 1991, a series of court orders in federal cases the PLO brought against the city ensured that these files were being produced. More importantly, these court orders preserved the files from being destroyed under Section 8.4 by referring to the portion of the contract that prohibits destruction of records dealing with current litigation.

In a 2002 letter to the CPD, Jeffrey Given, then the city’s Chief Assistant Corporation Counsel in charge of litigation surrounding police misconduct, explained how the PLO successfully stymied the city’s attempts to comply with Section 8.4 by taking advantage of Monell. “Typically, [the PLO takes] an expansive view of this claim and essentially contend[s] that all disciplinary files are relevant,” Given wrote. In a 1991 PLO case called Fallon v. Dillon, federal judge Milton Shadur ordered that all misconduct files be preserved moving forward. Since then, CPD has indeed pre-

served all the files, though they have not been accessible to the public.

“Surprisingly, at least to me, given the city’s conduct in a lot of cases, they followed those orders,” said Taylor. Indeed, in his fourteen-year-old letter, Given writes that “the scope of the requests makes it virtually impossible not to retain every CR that has existed since the time of Fallon.”

Taylor, who is seventy years old, takes a long view of his battles against the police establishment. “Now it’s 2016,” he said in a phone interview, “and we started in the 1980s, so you could pretty much say we’ve been fighting for thirty years a running battle with the city and the unions for production of these files, for preservation of these files, and for transparency with regards to these files.”

Jamie Kalven and the Stateway Civil Rights Project In 2001, a decade after the People’s Law Office made significant inroads with the retention of police misconduct files, writer and activist Jamie Kalven and Craig Futterman, a University of Chicago law professor, started

MAY 4, 2016 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 7

POLICING

the Stateway Civil Rights Project. The project was a collaboration between residents of the Bronzeville Stateway Gardens public housing development, where Kalven was living at the time, and Futterman’s students at his Civil Rights and Police Accountability Project, housed at the UofC’s Mandel Legal Clinic.

The fifth federal civil rights suit filed by the Stateway project was filed on behalf of Diane Bond, a Stateway Gardens resident who along with other residents had been attacked multiple times by a group of white CPD officers, who had claimed to be searching for drugs. Futterman, Kalven, and their students made PLO-style extensive discovery requests in the case, which was designed to reveal background information on how the back-end of how CPD deals with misconduct. Then Kalven, acting as a journalist, filed to intervene in the case on behalf of the public, requesting that the obtained misconduct files be made public.

Surprisingly, Judge Joan Lefkow allowed the intervention and approved the request, but the city obtained a stay, or a pause in legal proceedings. After two years of legal back-andforth, Lefkow’s decision was overruled, but that ruling left the option to file Freedom of Information Act requests to attempt to obtain the misconduct files, which Kalven did. After the city declined to fight the requests in July 2014, Kalven’s team at the Invisible Institute received the data from the discovery requests made in the Bond case. They also received data requested in Moore v. Smith, in which the PLO represented the mother of an elevenyear-old who was beaten and falsely arrested.

These discovery requests yielded some 56,000 complaints against over 8,000 Chicago police officers between 2001-2008 and 2011-2014 (data for 2009 and 2010 was not available in either case). With help from some students of Futterman’s, the Institute built a website to house the available misconduct data called the Citizens Police Data Project, viewable at cpdb. co.

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What’s ahead These arbitration awards are not the end of the battle over these documents. Both Crystal and Roumell’s decisions simply keep the records from being. And though the awards are legally binding, they are also subject to appeal, and both Kalven and Futterman hedged when discussing their merits with the Sun-Times, calling them “sort of a reprieve,” and a “timeout,” respectively.

Both Kalven and Futterman believe that only state legislation can truly resolve the matter, but while there are multiple bills that deal explicitly with the preservation of police misconduct records, none have received their public support. Additionally, University of Illinois at Chicago political science professor Dick Simpson opined that these bills have little chance of being passed in the near future. “Because we are coming to the end of the legislative session with many bills pending,” he said, “including critical budget legislation and many others, it is unlikely, but still possible, that controversial legislation like the police legislation will pass despite the desirability of having laws to protect misconduct records.”

Simpson also sees more obstacles on the horizon stemming from the arbitration awards. Crystal’s decision explicitly instructs the PBPA and the city to reconstruct Section 8.4. The city’s current contract with the FOP expires next June, and if public attention and opinion about the CPD maintains its current scrutiny, it’s difficult to believe the city will get away with signing another contract that includes Section 8.4 as it stands now.

Changing the contract won’t be easy, however. “The mayor would have to be willing to face a potential strike to change the rules of the existing contracts,” said Simpson. “It is a fight the mayor and the city government should undertake to end both police abuse and corruption, but [which they are] unlikely to pursue when the unions push back.”

A request for comment to FOP president Dean Angelo went unreturned. ¬

Be Aggressive!

B-E Aggressive!

West Englewood high-schoolers found South Side’s first girls’ rugby team

BY SONIA SCHLESINGER

T

hree days a week, twenty-two girls from Lindblom Math and Science Academy, a West Englewood selective enrollment high school, put in mouth guards, play catch, and then practice knocking each other down. They do so on the grass by the playground—“watch out for glass,” they are told over and over—because the baseball and soccer teams use the nicer turf of the fields next door. Still, their enthusiasm is unbridled.

They are the members of Lindblom’s new girls’ rugby team—currently in its inaugural season—its self-appointed “founding mothers.”

Coach Jessica Regalski, who teaches art and yoga at Lindblom, started the team after years of playing rugby herself because she wanted to provide an outlet for young girls to play an aggressive sport, one that requires significant contact and endurance. “It’s been kind of a dream come true to get this team started,” she said. “A lot of times people don’t think girls will come out to contact sports but girls will come out in droves for contact sports if you give them the opportunities. They have just as much aggression as guys do, and are just as tough.”

Right now the team is only considered a club by the high school, meaning it lacks the funding and insurance coverage that recognized sports teams receive. Regalski had to look to the school for funding for their jerseys—“Which, with the CPS [Chicago Public Schools] budget crisis has been a trip and a half,” she explained. They received the funding and the girls are continuing to raise money for the team through a GoFundMe account, aiming to raise $3,000 for transportation and insurance costs.

As far as aggressive sports go, equipment needs for rugby are light: the sport requires

only mouth guards, special thick shorts, socks, and cleats. “Rugby’s actually safer than football because of the fact that we have no padding,” said team member April Cruz, a junior at Lindblom. “As long as you stick with the fundamentals and learn how to fall, there’s no reason you should get hurt.”

As the only high school girls’ rugby team on the South Side and one of only three in the city, the girls will play mostly suburban schools.

In their first “friendly” match, which does not count toward the regular season standings, they played the state champions. “They lost, but they were so enthusiastic,” Regalski recalled. “They were all out there screaming for each other.”

Practice started in February, though Regalski encouraged the girls to join the boys’ wrestling team during the winter, which she also coaches, to get a feel for aggressive sports.

For some of the girls with no aggressive sport experience, the transition to rugby was particularly challenging. “I played with Barbie dolls my whole life,” freshman Destiny Elmore explained. “My bedroom was pink and I am the epitome of a girly-girl. My strength has surprised me.” Her teammates confirmed that she is up for the challenge: “She tackles beautifully,” said junior Alexa Barnes.

This kind of support is typical for the girls, many of whom refer to the group as a family. They praise each other’s passes, promise each other they’re ready for upcoming games, and joke “That’s sexy!” when taking out their mouth guards. “People playing the scariest sports tend to be nicer,” observed junior Grace Law. “We’re really close. To be able to get next to someone’s butt and then kick it around, you have to have a bond with that person; you really have to know them.” Junior Chandler Bell

RUGBY

agreed. “Before I started rugby, I was a cool person but I didn’t really interact with people.

I wasn’t like a body-contact person and that really changed.”

The girls unanimously agree that the tackles are their favorite part, not only as a bonding activity and release of aggression, but also as a chance to prove themselves as female athletes.

“For female sports, the ideal tends to be ‘see it to believe it,’ so until people saw us practice, no one really thought we could take people as easily as we do,” said Cruz. They appreciate that any girl can do so. Captain Symone Cirton, a junior, explains: “I like that anybody can play.

My friend said she didn’t have the body to join, and I was like there is no one body. The pack are the bigger stronger girls, and the back are the smaller girls who can run fast, and both are essential.”

After practice on the first warm day in April, Regalski assigned homework: go home and draft a list of what makes a good captain,

MARGARET GLAZIER

“People don’t think girls will come out to contact sports but girls will come out in droves for contact sports if you give them the opportunities.”

manager, team member, and coach. They plan to compile the responses as a code of conduct over spring break. If a typical practice is any indication, this assignment will not be difficult.

The girls contend with the team-membership question every time they play together, and they know the answer to the coach question

—Coach Jessica Regalski as well: as they leave practice and trickle down 61st Street, a few at a time, Cruz turns and gestures toward Regalski. “Best coach ever,” she yells, and her teammates concur. ¬

MAY 4, 2016 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 9

At the Root of Sleep “On Being Sessile” at 4th Ward Project Space

BY GRACE HAUCK

A

t about six in the evening, sculptor Elena Ailes slips out of her black pickup, key ring in hand, and leads me through a locked alleyway. We pass through an oppressively normal Kimbark backlot, where a single drip of hardened terracotta plaster dots the grass like a telling bloodstain, guiding us down into the hidden subterranean gallery known as the 4th Ward Project Space. Below the earth, we talk about plants.

“On Being Sessile,” a sculpture exhibition by School of the Art Institute of Chicago master’s student Ailes, studies the idea of active rest. “Sessility” is a biological term about two things: immobility and grounding. It has botanical implications: a flower, for example, is sessile if its petals are directly attached to its stem—grounded to both itself and the dirt.

For Ailes, however, sessility extends beyond plant life. It also applies to humans, objects, and everything in between.

“The work comes around ideas of stillness, sleeping, and the worlds that are contained inside our worlds—like when we’re dreaming or lucid dreaming,” Ailes said.

Her work explores what happens when creatures or objects experience that immobility—not just “sessility,” but being sessile. Even plants, though forever stuck in the soil, are living. They experience metabolism, growth, and activity. Oysters and coconut seeds, Ailes explained, can travel quite far throughout their lifetime, carried along by the ocean and the wind.

I didn’t think it possible, but the small, whitewashed basement gallery was even smaller than anticipated. A sparse array of isolated forms scatters the space. They range from simple wood frames to metal sheets. But the room, devoid of color and life, is missing something.

“There’s actually a plant that’s supposed to be in here. It’s upstairs in an apartment right now because it’s too cold, but it’s the inspiration for a way of thinking that the work kind of ‘stems’ from,” Ailes laughed. “That’s a bad pun…”

Ailes gave some background on the absent form: “When I was a kid, one of my neighbors happened to grow it in a greenhouse—the Cup of Gold vine, or the chalice vine (Solandra 10 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY

¬ MAY 4, 2016

maxima). I found out a couple years ago from another artist, Beatriz Santiago, that when they bloom, they produce a pheromone that we release when we’re falling in love or having sex. I was caught by the idea that one reproductive cycle and another reproductive cycle that don’t have anything to do with each other still have these accidental overlaps.”

Part of the nightshade family from Central America, this psychotropic vine is a hallucinogen (no, Ailes has never tried eating it), and though the plant installed in the exhibition has since branched away from its original roots, botany remains a grounding influence.

In the center of the room stands a dismembered bedframe, oriented vertically. Ailes has woven thin white rope across it—more trellis than bedsprings. The string, however, thick and wound, appears nautical, and the woven pattern, an orthogonal grid, more closely resembles modern design dogma than an organic fence.

The trellis’s severed limb, a wooden headboard, leans against a nearby wall. The sculpture itself is tight, yet altogether uninteresting—save for Ailes’s choice to manufacture a plastic shadow on the wall behind the frame.

The “shadow” doesn’t actually exist, but, perhaps in another dimension, it could.

“It’s a rupture—kind of a surrealist experience, right?” Ailes said. “It becomes a world inside a world, which is how I think about lucid dreaming, or even how we exist together.

It’s just a…proposition to another world, creating its own special reality. As a viewer, it’s not a logic that I live, but it is actually what I see.”

If we take the severed bedframe as a comment on sleep as a human’s most plantlike, sessile state, and a nod to the different worlds contained in that state, then Ailes’s metal sculptures on the opposite half of the gallery act as a related, though alternative, departure: a meditation on sculptural material.

Speaking of sessility, Ailes said, “For me, this translates as a type of attentiveness, especially to material. I push against the world and the world pushes against me. That’s where that material intimacy comes from. This piece, these are lead sheets, and maybe on a political or chemical level they push against our bodies in a way. But in this work, they’re embossed, with a wallpaper pattern that I redrew from memory—some crazy Japanese wallpaper that was in my grandparent’s house.”

The way Ailes speaks about her creative process, it’s almost as if she views herself as a sculpture too. In these lead works, two thin sheets lie folded across a raised lead bar while a crystallized pool of the same medium sits in a puddle below: point and counterpoint. The folded pieces, Ailes explained, are an expression of sculptor’s manipulation. To cut and to emboss, Ailes physically pressed herself against these sheets. The pool below, however, is leadfree and uncorrupted. This is the substance, the

VISUAL ARTS

metal itself—the material that presses against her in life.

This lead piece is perhaps the most successful element of Ailes’s exhibition. It hits on sleep in its exploration of state, dimension in its structure and folding, and botany in the floral curves of the Japanese print. It’s far subtler than the trellis frame, elegant, and precise in concept and execution.

“This work, for me, feels like sculpture with a capital ‘S.’ I have often made work that is more text-based or more language-based, even in my sculptural work. There’s something about the formal singularity of it that feels really right. Making sculpture means that I’m in relationship with these materials. We’re being slow together—you can’t rush any of these things even if parts happen quickly, like pouring metal on the ground. Everything takes its own material time,” Ailes said.

Beyond attention to medium, Ailes was keenly sensitive to the basement where she worked, detecting the structural nuance of the earth and cultivating art to match. In a far corner where a pipe strikes the ground, a divot has formed in the grey concrete. Rather than overlook this spacial subtlety, Ailes feels out the floor’s variation by filling in the dip with tiny copper spheres, almost as if water droplets have gathered there in a pool. This piece lies a mere two feet from the lead sheets. While the lead imitates nature on a conceptual, and physically larger level, the copper spheres break nature down to its minuscule components, mimicking its forms.

“Normally, people who make sculpture want there to be lots of space around these autonomous objects that you experience in 360,” Ailes said. “But because it’s so small, I almost put more work in here than I normally would have so that you experience this other kind of

‘pushing.’ Only two feet between sculptures, tiny things tucked in the corners, a random piece of gum, an eyelash—these things that are able to be both super small and super big just because it’s the space.”

Despite her preoccupation with state and immobile activity, Ailes actually inhibited her own pursuit of the sessile. Take the slice of the flowerpot on the floor beneath the gallery’s lone window: it’s the iconic gardening pot— sienna plaster—but now Ailes has filled it to the brim with plaster. It looks like a shabby job, overflowing slightly with scattered white patches. There were initially three of these sculptures, but due to the extreme temperature variation in the basement, the pots began to expand and contract, cracking and discoloring.

“They were these perfectly made sessile objects, and here they are with a life of their

GRACE HAUCK

own,” Ailes said.

Ailes decided to remove two pots and reconfigure the third. She attempted to manufacture growth—the pot’s “metabolism”— when a more hands-free approach would have been far more effective in the scope of the exhibition’s themes—and she knew it. It’s the paradox of a degrading perfectionism.

“I have to set myself up to work with blinders on—to let the materials speak for themselves and make stuff on accident,” Ailes said.

Above it all, and almost invisible, three delicate shuttlecocks perch among the rafters.

Ailes crafted each from the feathers of significant birds in her life: a vulture she hit with her car on the highway in Ohio, her friend’s shedding parrot, and the crow another friend found dead in her backyard (in spirit only for

the last—she actually had to order feathers online).

“These are the hardest thing for me to talk about. I used to say I loved them because they’re self-orienting objects. You know, when you’re playing, they turn themselves around— operate on their own logic,” Ailes said. “From a bird’s eye view, I think of our collective exhaustion, and that’s our shared state.”

Ailes spoke extensively of her own fatigue: beaten and wedged between worlds like the library copy of André Breton’s book What is Surrealism?, discreetly tucked beneath a wall.

Though “On Being Sessile” is not a surrealist exhibition itself, Ailes chose to incorporate this text, topped with a dead spider, to import yet another layer of sessility. She also just happens to be a fan.

“I often think that as an artist, I am myopically zoomed in on my own life but also zoomed out ten times by ten. The past few years for me have been marathon living: working and thinking and working and thinking. It feels like, now, there’s this weird antagonism in the world. Like we’re all on top of each other in a way that doesn’t stem from empathy—politics, race in Chicago, the global climate crisis.

Even on a personal level,” Ailes said.

“We’re asked to do so much in the course of our days—to sprint around performing all this mental and physical labor. Turning ourselves inside out to work and make our work and make our way. Sometimes we need to turn our brains off—and I think that makes for good work.” The 4th Ward Project Space (4WPS), run by artists Mika Horibuchi, James Kao, and Valentina Zamfirescu, is open Saturdays 1pm—5pm or by appointment. “On Being Sessile” runs until May 7.

MAY 4, 2016 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 11

Have a Little Faith

Father Wolf Werling discusses faith, history, and his South Shore nonprofit

BY ZOE MAKOUL

I

met Father Wolf Werling when I volunteered to help restore one of the five houses that will become the campus for his nonprofit, Lights of Honor International (LHI). Chuckling about his adolescence and making references to Raising Arizona to a group mostly unfamiliar with the film, with his long hair tied back, he used a crowbar to remove the rotting floorboards of what will become a playroom for young children. His willingness to very literally get his hands dirty—he is recognized in the neighborhood as the priest who picks up garbage off the street—is only one aspect of his immense unorthodoxy. Werling hopes the houses he has saved from demolition will form an “Epcot-like campus” where groups of South Shore residents can learn about environmentalism, history, and heritage.

A fourth-generation South Chicagoan, Werling came back to Chicago in 2008 after spending time as a professor and activist in Toruń, Poland. Upon his return, he found a neighborhood vastly different from the Polish millworker community he grew up in. We chatted over a tuna sandwich lunch about LHI, staying positive, and the desire to help a rapidly changing population find strength in history.

M

y experience of South Shore was that there was a large change after the old generation that had worked in the mills basically earned enough money to start moving away. There was a transition with a lot more of an African-American population moving in and a greater presence of Hispanic households. By the time I was in school, I think two-thirds of those in my class were Hispanic. A couple kids were still Polish, because the neighborhood where I was in was almost all Polish or Scandinavian or Slovakian. But again, it was really more of a time where the steel mills were winding down, even there, and the writing was on the wall: it was over. You started to see more and more vacant buildings. That was the late sixties through the seventies. By the eighties, we had moved out ourselves, out to the suburbs. However, we had property there [in South Shore] and family and relatives still there. The parish of Saint Michael the Archangel had always been our family parish. My great-grandparents were married there in 1893.

What drew you back to Chicago and to the South Side?

I always wrestle with this because it does seem 12 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY

¬ MAY 4, 2016

like things have moved on there. Ultimately, I feel a connection to the people, even though those who are there were not the classmates or people I identify my actual experiences with.

Yet, they are part of the future, and I just want to allow people the same excitement about living as I remembered. When it comes to providing them an opportunity to enjoy life—that is important to me, regardless of whatever religious convictions I might have. There’s always the challenge, wondering if it will happen and if I can do this, so it’s a personal question of if the idea can really grow.

Is there a particular part of the LHI program that you’re most excited about?

I’m always interested in the people parts.

Buildings come and go, and there are always things you can build in a physical sense. But if I can get some kids to learn the history and become this kind of “docent”—it would be cool to have tour guides all with their own personality and their own beat. They’d describe the history of the past in today’s vocabulary, and they would embody history. In the end, it’s about moral change and character development and being a leader. When you learn the history, you learn the skills that make you

JORDAN JACKSON

marketable, so you can earn a living, but also that help you internally be a better person in a way you can pass on.

The docents would be showing people around the cluster of buildings that are being renovated now?

Yes. You need to have a brick and mortar; you have to have a place where people can go inside to learn, and that’s a challenge in and of itself. How do I come up with a creative way to use the space? But in the end, I just want to see kids running and laughing and jumping and passing that joy on to their friends and parents and classmates. I want them to know that someone cared enough to help.

Has there been a part of the project that has been more difficult than you expected?

People are funny. I think they’re well-intended and they like the idea when they hear it, but it’s like the seed that gets planted on different types of ground—you have to find a place where the roots can grow. People don’t always do what they say they are going to do, which leaves me with a sequence of events that gets backed up. It’s like the image of the plates spinning on the rods, and when one starts to slow down I have to run over and keep it going. In the end, that’s why it’s a real spiritual call to doing this. I’m saying, “Lord, you’re in charge of this whole thing and if it falls down, that’s on you. Let’s find a way to get shepherds

NEIGHBORS

to this flock of sheep and send in those people who know how to organize stuff.”

It is too much for one person, and as much as I try, I do realize that I need to scale back. We’ve had one building that’s ready to go with a lot of things, since it was lived in before LHI got it, but it’s been dormant because some piece of the puzzle hasn’t been applied…

Needless to say, there’s been some letdown.

Once everything takes off, what is the best possible ideal outcome of LHI? What I would love is to have people back to the days of hanging out on their porch, walking down the streets safely, trusting each other, and an idea of accountability. Sometimes apathy and sloth creep in, and people think there’s no use in trying. But you’re going to fail at something, and you can always try again.

I’ve been thinking a lot about joy, and what joy means at a spiritual level, and that needs to be applied into a mechanism where kids, parents, teachers, and ministers are all focused on the same outcome and the path to get there. That’s where I hope this neighborhood goes. Everyone has a role to play in the building-up, and then it just blossoms.

Do you see this project expanding into other neighborhoods?

I’d love to expand. I have no monopoly on grace; I have no best ideas. If I see something that’s being done, I’ll help and join. This approach is universal, and it highlights the past without trying to live in it. Some parts of the past were better, some were not, but they all teach us something. Parts of the past happened behind closed doors and are kept secret, and that’s unhealthy. I’m trying to bring everything

out to the forefront and talk about it, realizing that there are sensitive things that need a place where there’s structured support and proper channels for dealing with that. People say they just need jobs, they just need money in their pocket, but I’ve lived in some pretty poor places around this world, and being poor doesn’t give you the right to steal from somebody or to act out in a harmful or self-destructive way. I’ve seen people who have remained very spiritually centered and self-actualizing. It’s more rewarding in a lot of ways. People think they are facing moral dilemmas and the worst things ever, but I’ll tell them, “Hey, this has been solved in the sixth century.” People have been dealing with the same human problems for so many years. It’s just a matter of reflection, no matter who or where you are.

What’s nice about the neighborhood we’re in now is that on the street, they greet me with “Yo, priest,” and it’s just so fun, because that’s a way of saying they know who I am— they know I’m a priest who’s walking around picking up the garbage. I remember how I was around people who seemed larger than life, and it was intimidating, yet inviting. Like the veterans—one of our programs is to support the veterans—and it seems like they’ve been through their battles.

When I hitchhiked to California at fifteen, following a girl, I didn’t know or care about anything. But that experience is still important. All the difficult parts of my life make sense now. Priests all have gifts, but mine helps with the formation of a person’s soul and with knowing how to love. My experiences give me the credibility to say that I’ve been there too.

When you empathize with someone, those are the only answers that really make sense.

My father said to me when I was in high school, “You will either be the greatest success

“When you empathize with someone, those are the only answers that really make sense.”

—Father Wolf Werling

or the ultimate failure.” There is no in-between with me. I think people are afraid to get started because they might look bad or fail, but I’ve learned that fear and anger, which I have felt since I was young, make much more sense when you apply them to service. LHI is all about bringing lights to people and recognizing that they have the light inside themselves.

You have to engage with the person and tell them that their light is beautiful. You might not realize how awesome your light is either, until you see it reflected in the other person. I hope people can embrace their fears. It’s worth the effort.

I see these little kids, and they’re looking up at me asking me when we’ll open. I don’t want to overpromise, so I just tell them I’m working at it every day. I’m not just going to do it and leave. The scaffolding has been there for almost a year, and when we open, we’ll be there for a long time. Neighbors is the Weekly’s new series that profiles ordinary people with extraordinary stories to tell.

Think we should profile someone you know? Send your pitches to editor@southsideweekly.com.

MAY 4, 2016 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 13

Who's Playing with OBY?

COURTESY OF OBY

The sixteen-piece on its musical origins and keeping track of all of its members

BY JON POILPRE

O

BY, a hip-hop big band group made entirely of musicians who also play in local churches and whose ethos is a fusion of hip-hop with gospel and jazz, has been making a splash in the last few months. Following the February release of their first EP, <i>Becoming</i>, OBY has taken to playing shows throughout the city, bringing their smooth sound and rolling groove to tiny practice rooms, the wide stage of The Metro, and anywhere in between. The full sixteen-piece band includes keyboard players, a horns section, and a disc jockey. The Weekly spoke with three members of the group—James Boyd III, Isaiah Oby, and Terry Patrick—at Columbia College about their musical roots, what it takes to bring together sixteen unique sounds, and their and connections to Chicago.

What are your origins in music?

James: This started with me being like a little kid and wanting to be like my dad, ‘cause he played the drums, I started to love the drums. I started playing drums in the church. I didn’t really make that decision that I wanted to do this the rest of my life until I was in high school. I 14 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY

¬ MAY 4, 2016

kinda became a musician when I started to play the piano too, cause drums are loud. Once I got to college, I realized how I really wasn’t good at piano. [Then] I met OBY—I wasn’t a band member at first.

Isaiah: (laughing) That’s right, he wasn’t a band member at first. He just kept coming to rehearsals.

J: Next thing I know, he threw a bongo in my hands and was like, “play percussion.” I get a song, gradually becoming a member.

I: My origins in music are actually really embarrassing. I am a pastor’s kid, from Madison, Wisconsin. There’s a very strong community in music there, but I just wasn’t aware of it, or part of it. I was really nerdy in high school. Started playing drums, then bongos, took lessons, but I just played in school. Thought I was cold, but I wasn’t very good. Then we got cable—the Jonas Brothers was popping, High School Musical was that stuff. So because of High School Musical, I joined show choir. I loved performing, singing and dancing. So then Camp Rock came out: I watched Joe Jones woo a girl on the guitar, like, “I could probably do that.” So I picked up a

guitar, started learning that.

Terry: I started playing piano around five or six— I: He was actually born cold. Out the womb snapping. Transcribing Bill Evans right out the womb.

T: —my father was practicing on the keyboard and he was like “Son, play this.” He told me the notes to play and then the next day he asked me if I remembered it, and he showed me. The next day after that, I remembered it. It was “Ode to Joy,” a little Beethoven piece. In church I wanted to play drums. Then the jazz band, playing keys. I met Oby when I got here at Columbia [and they asked], “You wanna be in my band?”

I said no at first. After that, like a year later, I— I: Then he heard we was good, and he was like,

MUSIC “I guess I’ll join.”

T: There was a series of other keyboard players that left. I was like, “Who’s playing with Oby?” They were like “Sure, come play.”

Isaiah, as the emcee, how do you handle decision making in the band?

I: I try my best to make decisions the band would agree with. We’ve had to turn down a lot of shows recently based on who can make it.

Like these two—they’re super busy and really good, and I wouldn’t want to waste their time.

T: Most decisions that affect us directly are brought up in the group chat.

I: (laughs) Yeah, that’s how we work together.

T: Sometimes in a not-so-timely manner, but most of the time, ahead of time.

I: (laughs) I used to be like, “Oh, we have a gig tomorrow.” One time Terry got mad at me cause I didn’t tell everyone the details, because I’m not good with the management side—but I’m getting better at that.

Is it hard to manage such a large group?

I: Managing the band is very, very difficult; they make my job really easy in a lot of ways. There’s not a lot of ego, which is great. As far as everyone bringing in their own sound, I’m trying to encourage more individuality. There are two types of musicians: the creator, and people whose musicianship is a craft. They [the latter] can play the instrument, kind of like carpentry—if you give someone the schematics of the bookshelf, exactly like it’s on the paper. One is not better than the other, but one usually needs the other.

A lot of the members are the carpenters, who are really good at their craft, and then there are creators too—so I’m just trying to bring that out of them. For the album, I tried to get people to bring to the table their own ideas. I might have a motif, and then we jam off of that.

In regards to lyrics, do you each represent purely your own ideas? Or do you represent the ideas of the whole band as a collective?

I: The album is more of a collective, in terms of subjects, but for the EP though, I’ve been circling around the theme of the art and the artist and where God fits in in that. For me, it’s the art, and is there anything else here? I’m a Christian, but I don’t want to shove that down anyone’s throat—just to lead people down that journey of self-discovery and hope they get there. I do that by personal storytelling. With the next project, it’s going to be a lot more collaborative based, from the band [OBY], while the album is going to be, like, Oby. How have you found the Chicago hip-hop scene to be inclusive or exclusive?

I: I wouldn’t even say we’re in the hip-hop scene, to be honest.

J: If you know how to make relationships with people, and get connected, it will be easy for you to get in. You just have to be out and around, the weekends, go to shows, introduce yourself, talk to the people, the bands, show your face a lot.

I: Definitely not part of the hip-hop scene.

Maybe the “alternative live band hip-hop fusion” culture? At these shows, no one’s performing without a band. Psychedelic funk music, alt-rock, and OBY [are all] on a bill. That community is extremely supportive. I’m a nobody from Wisconsin. I would not be where I was without them. I’ve never booked a gig myself.

Ever. All the gigs we’ve had have been promoters, which has been a blessing. But now I’m learning.

I: The scene is inclusive and exclusive. If you wanna be in the scene, just show up somewhere.

Throw a rock. Whoever you hit, ask them where the next concert is at—see a show and talk to someone. And you’re already in it. But at the same time, I’m not in the metal scene, or the rock scene, or the punk scene. So if you ask me when the next experimental punk show was, I’d tell you to throw a rock somewhere else.

You also play in a lot of churches. Does that influence how you work with each other?

J: Once you’re in church music you’re good at knowing where to go, not just listening to another person.

T: We can use it as a reference point. It’s the basis of improv: you have to know what’s going on around you. That’s already in our minds.

It’s much easier for us to communicate during shows if anything changes.

So, do you play for churches on the South Side?

J: I play for Paradise Missionary Baptist Church on 43rd.

T: Uhh… I: He plays for like 18 churches.

T: I play for 3 churches, [including] my dad’s church, on 89th and Vincent.

I: Your dad’s a pastor?

T: No, he’s an organist—I play with him.

And who are some of your mentors?

I: Sidewalk Chalk [an internationally renowned hip hop fusion band, also from Chicago] is a big mentor for us. Charlie, the piano player from Sidewalk Chalk, a faculty member at Columbia, has taken us under his wing. Oby is a student run class here—it’s a credit. School pays for studio sessions and management and such. So the school is also a mentor in a lot of ways.

Does it help that you all have gotten your start at a college like Columbia?

J: I think it helped in a way. I say that because in Columbia you get a whole bunch of connections. It would’ve been a lot harder to book shows if we were just our own band.

T: Columbia’s a great platform to get us connections. A lot of our shows now are not even Columbia based. We definitely have a lot of promoters just seeking us.

I: But at the same time, it’s easy to get stuck here and never leave. There was a time where I decided, “No more Columbia gigs!” But I’m really glad that we didn’t move from the Columbia scene to the Chicago scene before we did, because we weren’t ready. Now we’re way ready.

But it’s different here, like writing a research paper in class versus writing about something and trying to get published. It’s very, very different.

Are you looking to get signed?

I: I think it depends. It depends on the offer. As a band, we do everything by ear. If it works, it works; if it doesn’t, it doesn’t. If it’s an ideal deal.

So, what do you see as the future of OBY? J: This album will put us more out there, so we’ll get more connections. So we can grow. And make money, and make a living. That’s what I see right now after this album.

I: I’d say see as far as it can go. If we’re all friends. Since I’m Isaiah Oby, OBY can never die because I’m not dead. If for some reason everybody peaces out, that’s okay. We’re all friends though and we’ll always be playing with each other. If it works, it works; if it doesn’t, it doesn’t.

T: I feel as though we have a good potential to be great. If we keep doing what we’re doing, some opportunities will open up. And we can have an opportunity to show ourselves and be great. You can find OBY and their music online at obyofficial.bandcamp.com and obyofficial.com. They will also be performing at Reggies on May 11.

MAY 4, 2016 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 15

COLUMN

Reinvesting in Our Own Black-owned small businesses continue to face challenges on the South Side

Karen Ford

A

uburn Gresham is a neighborhood of single-family homes, apartment buildings, and myriad small business. The area boasts one of the busiest bus lines of the CTA, the 79th Street bus, and two major business thoroughfares: 79th Street and 87th Street. The neighborhood has survived several economic downturns, the loss of businesses and services due to white flight, and increased violence. Yet this Black neighborhood stands firm. The homeowners are Black. The renters in the apartment buildings are Black. The students at the schools are Black. The CTA drivers are Black.

But other than several doctors’ offices, hair salons, barbershops, beauty supply stores, and Harold’s Chicken Shack, all the businesses are owned by other minority groups.

There are many establishments in Black neighborhoods on the South Side that are owned and operated by Arab, Chinese, Greek, and Korean people.

Yet if you were to visit Chinatown, you would find that there are no Black-owned businesses there. I would imagine this to be the same in Albany Park on the northwest side of the city, parts of which are known as Little Arabia. Devon Avenue on the city’s North Side is known for large Indian and Pakistani populations. The inhabitants of Pilsen and Little Village are predominantly Mexican, although Pilsen is in the midst of gentrification. In each of

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these neighborhoods, though, the descendants of the business owners still reflect the makeup of that community. This is not the case in the South Side’s many Black communities.

In her recently released book, The South Side, author Natalie Y. Moore makes the case that segregating Chicago’s Black residents was and still is intentional. Communities were allowed to openly discriminate and the Supreme Court of Illinois even upheld the rights of neighborhood residents to discriminate against Blacks. This legal discrimination coupled with redlining by banks has worked to keep Blacks in economically depressed neighborhoods.

Redlining is the discriminatory practice of denying or limiting certain financial services, such as loans or mortgages, within specific geographic areas based on the race or ethnic makeup of those areas. Sponsored by the Home Owners Loan Corporation, redlining was common across the U.S. starting in the 1930s.

Private banks soon adopted this practice during the substantial expansion of home ownership. The federal government eventually outlawed housing discrimination with the passage of the Fair Housing Act of 1968. Yet the legacy of redlining and neighborhood discrimination laws lives on even today.

Today, no bank would openly admit to redlining or discriminating against Black business owners, yet there are very few Black-owned businesses in Black communities. Despite recent attempts by the Small Business Administration (SBA) to support more Black- and minority-owned businesses, the number of loans to Black-owned business has decreased. According to the Wall Street Journal, only 2.3 percent of the 54,000 small business loans from the SBA were given to Black-owned businesses in 2014, as compared to eleven percent in 2008. With so few Black businesses in the neighborhood, money is not reinvested because few of these other business own-

ers live, shop, or bank in the neighborhoods where they make money.

In 2015, the SBA reported that its two major lending programs loaned Black business owners $119,850,900 or approximately 1.5 percent of its lending budget. Compare that to the nineteen precent loaned to Asian businesses and the six percent loaned to Hispanic businesses. White-owned businesses received the bulk of the loans—just a hair under two-thirds of the SBA’s budget.

Why do so many people from other minority groups open businesses in the Black community, communities in which they don’t reside, shop, or do their banking? It’s partially because Black business owners still face immense challenges to opening their own businesses.

I have heard that other minority groups work with family members to save money in order to secure loans from banks and the SBA. However, poor credit and restrictive eligibility standards make it virtually impossible for the average Black business to obtain a loan.

Many of these Black-owned businesses are necessary because they serve a purpose in their community. But we do have a choice. Utilize services provided by Black-owned businesses. Shop at Blackowned stores as much as possible. Eat in restaurants owned by Black folks. It is not necessary to stop frequenting businesses owned by other minorities, but require folks doing business in your community to treat you with respect and ask the owners if they would be willing to hire employees from the neighborhood. Finally, remember your neighborhood is only as good as the folks who live in it. We can make a change but we have to do it together.

This legal discrimination coupled with redlining by banks has worked to keep Blacks in economically depressed neighborhoods.

Karen Ford is the author of Thoughts of a Fried Chicken Watermelon Woman and runs the blog caviar-grits.blogspot.com. She lives in Auburn Gresham.

ILLUSTRATION BY JAVIER SUAREZ

EVENTS

BULLETIN C$2 A Day: Living on Almost Nothing in America Harold Washington Library Center, 400 S. State St. Thursday, May 5, 9am–11:30am. (312) 782-2698. RSVP at bit.ly/1X5lxFx. chipublib. bibliocommons.com As the saying goes, the first step is admitting you have a problem. What, then, is to be done with the problem of a poverty “so deep that we, as a country, don’t think it exists?” Kathryn Edin, the author of $2.00 A Day: Living on Almost Nothing in America, will grapple with this reality in a reading hosted by the Woods Fund of Chicago. (Christopher Good)

Disruption: The #BlackLivesMatter Imperative For Queer, Trans and Cis Bodies Chicago Theological Seminary, 1407 E. 60th St. Thursday, May 5, 5pm–8pm. Free. (773) 8962400. RSVP at bit.ly/1NiIHX5. ctschicago.edu Rev. Dr. Pamela Lightsey from Boston University will deliver the Chicago Theological Seminary's annual Gilberto Castañeda lecture, intended to foster theological discussion around LGBTQ issues. Lightsey has been heavily involved in the Black Lives Matter movement and is "currently the only out African American queer lesbian ordained as an elder in full connection in the United Methodist Church," according to her Boston University faculty page. (Christian Belanger)

but it’s not to walks of a more historical nature; in 1966, Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Freedom Movement marched there amid vitriolic opposition. This event, celebrating Marquette’s vibrant African American, Muslim, and Jewish communities, will serve as a living monument to King until a physical monument is built this fall. (Neal Jochmann)

Funding Equity: Town Hall Chavez Elementary Multicultural Academy Center, 4747 S. Marshfield Ave. Monday, May 9, 5:30pm–7:30pm. RSVP at bit.ly/1X50FhP Come out this Monday to discuss Senate Bill 231, which would increase state funding of Chicago Public Schools, among other ways to improve equal access to quality education. The town hall is hosted by Illinois for Education Equity. State Senators Patricia Van Pelt and Andy Manar will be present. (Anne Li)

Mother’s Day Peace Celebration Kennedy-King College Auditorium, 740 W. 63rd St. Saturday, May 7. Celebration noon–2pm; march at 2pm. Free. (773) 868-6667. earthheartfoundation.org Who holds the keys to peace in our time? The answer, according to the EarthHeart Foundation, is mothers. Celebrate the importance of motherhood at this event, hosted by journalist Robin Robinson and featuring Kim Foxx, current Democratic candidate for State’s Attorney. A “Peace March” along 63rd Street will follow. (Hafsa Razi)

MLK Living Memorial: Marquette Park Walk

VISUAL ARTS

Inner-City Muslim Action Network, 2744 W. 63rd St. Saturday, May 7, 10:30am–12:30pm.

Free. friendsofdowntown.org

“Picture Me” Student Exhibition

Marquette Park is new to “Jane’s Walk,” a series of walking tours in city neighborhoods,

Mana Contemporary, 2233 S. Throop St. Open Thursday, May 5–Sunday, May 7, 11am–5pm; closing reception on Sunday, May 7, 2pm. Free.

(312) 850-0555. manacontemporarychicago.com

South Side Weekly Civic Journalism Workshops

The Art of the Feature A reporting & editing workshop with Chicago Magazine Culture Editor

Elly Fishman

Sunday, May 8, 2016 3pm–5pm Experimental Station 6100 S. Blackstone Ave. The Chicago Civic Journalism Project is presented by the South Side Weekly, City Bureau, University of Chicago Careers in Journalism, Arts, and Media, and Chicago Studies.

MAY 4, 2016 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 17

EVENTS

Join a number of young Chicago artists for the fifteenth annual “Picture Me” exhibition, a selection of works created in the Museum of Contemporary Photography’s after-school teenage photography club. If a picture is worth a thousand words, then “Picture Me” is several paragraphs well worth reading. (Christopher Good)

Celebrate with the students of teaching artist Victoria Martinez—and their own students!

This collaborative installation is the result of an artistic exchange between Pilsen-based high school and elementary students. That resulting artwork represents student perspectives on Pilsen architecture and identity.

(Corinne Butta)

Dialogues, re-Visioned Cobalt Studio, 1950 W. 21st St. Opening reception Friday, May 6, 5pm–10pm; additional viewing Sunday, May 15, noon–5pm. Free.

(773) 644-1163.

How do hospital gowns, quilts, and woven baskets speak to each other? Re-think the conversation with an emerging group of Chicago-based art therapists, who explore how the materials of everyday life can speak volumes about personal and shared experience. (Corinne Butta)

Art is What Resists, Even If It Is Not the Only Thing That Resists Logan Center for the Arts, 915 E. 60th St., Room 201. Friday, May 6, 4pm. Free. (773) 702-8596. arts.uchicago.edu How, then, is this thing we call “art” resistance? Raymond Bellour, a world-class film critic and Critical Inquiry’s Distinguished Visiting Professor for Spring 2016, can’t promise any easy answers—but he will use the theorist Gilles Deleuze’s immortal words as a window into “the work of art,” “the struggles of men,” and “the act of resistance.” (Christopher Good)

Miguel Del Real: FREQUENCY Pilsen Outpost, 1958 W. 21st St. Opening Friday, May 6, 6pm–9pm; exhibition runs Wednesday–Sunday, 10am–8pm; Monday–Tuesday by appointment. Through May 29. Free. (773) 492-2412. pilsenoutpost.com.

Get on Miguel Del Real’s frequency with his first solo show at Pilsen Outpost. The printmaker and muralist explores line and movement through calligraphy, Pre-Columbian patterning, and urban art. Be sure to stay for Del Real’s unveiling of a new zine and special edition t-shirt. (Corinne Butta)

Traveling Minds Opening Reception Carlos & Dominguez Fine Arts Gallery, 1538 W. Cullerton St. Friday, May 6, 6pm–9pm.

Free. (773) 580-8053. carlosanddominguez. weebly.com 18 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY

¬ MAY 4, 2016

MUSIC Evil Sword Archer Ballroom, 3012 S. Archer Ave. Thursday, May 5, 9pm. notdiychi.com.

Have you ever heard a funeral dirge with a recorder solo? From the slinky no wave basslines to the color guard drum bursts, Evil Sword’s hallucinogenic take on freak folk fills a niche that wouldn’t otherwise exist. Also performing: Toupee, Lovely Little Girls and Our Life Path. (Christopher Good)

Palm WHPK, 5706 S. University Ave. Friday, May 6, 9pm—10:30pm. Free. (773) 702-8424. whpk.org/stream Philly punk quartet Palm drops by WHPK FM this Friday to perform at the station’s weekly free Pure Hype show, open to the public. The band comes by fresh off a strong 2015, with two EPs under their belt that captured the flannel hearts of punk fans across the nation. (Bilal Othman)

Ragnarökkr Metal Apocalypse

Reggies Rock Club, 2105 S. State St. Friday-Saturday May 6-7, doors 5pm on Friday, 4pm on Saturday. $40 for single day pass, $80 for two day pass. 17+ for Rock Club, 21+ for Music Joint. (312) 949-0120. reggieslive.com Metal appreciation in the United States is on a decline that only two nights of head banging can fix. Over seventeen bands and their die-hard fans, known as einherjar, will converge on Reggies at the bequest of THOR and ODIN to join in the “final battle” for the glory of the genre. (Emily Lipstein)

Silk and Soul Punch House, 1227 W. 18th St. Wednesday, May 11, 9pm. Free. (312) 526-3851 punchhousechicago.com.

Put on your most purple suit, get in your little red Corvette, and party like it’s 1999 as Viet-

nam-native DJ KJH guides attendees through the hits of late legend Prince. KJH plans not just to play Prince’s iconic hits, but also songs from the Purple One’s much-vaunted songwriting career. Show up next Wednesday to honor the wide-spanning genius of a legend gone too soon. (Kezie Nwachukwu)

STAGE & SCREEN In My Father’s House Studio Movie Grill, 210 W. 87th St., Thursday, May 5, 7pm. $6. (773) 322-1450. southsideprojections.org “In my father’s house are many mansions,” goes the bible verse, but in this 2015 documentary, screened by South Side Projections in partnership with Black World Cinema, award-winning rapper Che “Rhymefest” Smith returns to his childhood home on the South Side to reconnect with the father who abandoned him as a kid. (Camila Cuesta and Julia Aizuss)

Golub & Golub: Late Works are the Catastrophes Kartemquin Films. Streaming online from Friday, May 6 – Thursday, May 12. Free. (773) 472-4366. kartemquin.com Nasty, brutish, and only available for a short time? As Kartemquin continues to ring in its semi-centennial, two documentaries on the Monster Roster’s own Leon Golub will be made available for free streaming online.

Even one decade after his death, Golub’s visceral depictions of graft and despots are as compelling as they are horrifying. (Christopher Good)

Black Cinema House, 7200 S. Kimbark Ave. Friday, May 6, 7pm–10pm. (312) 857-5561. rebuild-foundation.org Black Cinema House’s series picks up this month with a title familiar from last month’s installment: Imitation of Life, this time Douglas Sirk’s 1959 remake. Still following the story of an African-American daughter hoping to pass for white and abandon her roots, this adaptation attempted to modernize the characters for an audience watching amid the birth of the Civil Rights Movement. (Camila Cuesta and Julia Aizuss)

Spring Awakening Staged Reading Augustana Lutheran Church, 5500 S. Woodlawn Ave. Friday, May 6, 8pm. $5 at the door. hydeparkcommunityplayers.org This compelling hour-long production, performed by the Hyde Park Community Players, consists of songs from the 2006 musical, with text from the 1891 play embedded throughout. Got questions? Be sure to take advantage of post-show snacks and discussion with the Players themselves. (Neal Jochmann)

100 Hauntings: Storytelling Workshop Dorchester Art + Housing Collaborative, 1456 E 70th St. Saturday, May 7, 4:30pm—6:30pm.

Free. (312) 857-5561. rebuild-foundation.org “What haunts Chicago?” To answer this question, join the artists of Free Street Theater, as they lead all-ages workshops on crafting and performing ghost stories at the intersection of personal experience and the history of the South Side. (Neal Jochmann)

milkwhite + pool (no water)

Migration

Chicago Art Department West, 1932 S. Halsted #100. Friday, May 6–Sunday, May 8; 7–9pm.

Contains nudity and adult language; recommended for mature audiences. (312) 725-4223. www.bit.ly/kinematix

eta Creative Arts Foundation, 7558 S. South Chicago Ave. Fridays and Saturdays at 8pm; Sundays at 3pm between Friday, April 29– Sunday, June 19, 3pm. $35. (773) 752-3955. etacreativearts.org

Chicago’s Kinematics theatre collective will present two plays: Mark Ravenhill’s pool (no water), a vicious look at high art in low places, and the world premiere of Anthony Kochensparger’s milkwhite, a “one-act play about becoming invincible.” Both titles might be stylized in lowercase, but there’s nothing understated about the razor-sharp insights they share. (Christopher Good)

The history of the great migration can be overwhelming—a confluence of important cultural strains, people, and institutions all loaded with historical import. Migration tries to capture the complicated interactions that brought thousands of African Americans to northern cities through music, dance, and dialogue. (Adam Thorp)

Seeds of Disunion: Imitation of Life

LIT Cook County ICU at the Semi-

nary Co-op

Greater Grand Crossing Speaks

Seminary Co-op Bookstore, 5751 S. Woodlawn Ave. Wednesday, May 4, 6pm. Free, book $16.95. (773) 752-4381. semcoop.com

Stony Island Arts Bank, 6760 S. Stony Island Ave. Saturday, May 7, 11am–12:30pm. Free.

(312) 857-5561. rebuild-foundation.org

This Wednesday the Co-op will host a discussion with Dr. Cory Franklin, the former director of intensive care at Cook County Hospital. He’s just come out with a book about the “thirty years of unforgettable patients and odd cases” seen during his time at the hospital. Mark Siegler, professor of medicine at the UofC, will be joining him to discuss the book. ( Jake Bittle)

The Rebuild Foundation will play oral histories recorded between seniors and local teens, followed by a panel featuring some of those interviewed. The intergenerational interviews were hosted by Chicago Cares and recorded

by StoryCorps in Chicago. Afterward, join the weekly public tour of the Stony Island Arts Bank. (Sarah Claypoole)

K.B. Jensen Book Launch 57th Street Books, 1301 E. 57th St. Saturday, May 7, 2pm. (773) 684-1300. semcoop.com K. B. Jensen, founder of Indie City Writers, releases her second book, A Storm of Stories.

Framed as the stories told by two people stranded during a whiteout storm, the tales travel across the globe as the two wait out the weather in rural Wisconsin. (Sarah Claypoole)

Krystyna Dabrowska Reading University of Chicago Classics Building, 1010 E. 59th St., room 110. Wednesday, May 11, 6pm–7:30pm. Free, book $20. (773) 752-4381. semcoop.com Krystyna Dabrowska, renowned poet and recipient of the Wisława Szymborska Prize, joins fellow poet Karen Kovacik and translator Antonia Lloyd-Jones for a discussion of Polish female poetry and the art of poetry translation. The event will be moderated by UofC professor Bożena Shallcross and will offer refreshments and a book signing afterward. (Kezie Nwachukwu)

MAY 4, 2016 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 19