Introducing our new section editors! Arts Isabel Nieves @ilniev
Immigration Alma Campos @alma_campos
Community Organizing
Housing Malik Jackson @malik__x
Chima Ikoro @supernaira
Education Madeleine Parrish @maddieparrish61
SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY The South Side Weekly is an independent non-profit newspaper by and for the South Side of Chicago. We provide high-quality, critical arts and public interest coverage, and equip and develop journalists, artists, photographers, and mediamakers of all backgrounds. Volume 8, Issue 14 Editor-in-Chief Jacqueline Serrato Managing Editor Martha Bayne Senior Editors Christian Belanger Christopher Good Rachel Kim Emeline Posner Adam Przybyl Olivia Stovicek Sam Stecklow Arts Editor Politics Editor Education Editor Housing Editor Community Organizing Editor Immigration Editor
Isabel Nieves Jim Daley Madeleine Parrish Malik Jackson Chima Ikoro Alma Campos
Contributing Editors Lucia Geng Matt Moore Francisco Ramírez Pinedo Jocelyn Vega Scott Pemberton Staff Writers Kiran Misra Yiwen Lu Data Editor
Jasmine Mithani
Director of Fact Checking: Charmaine Runes Fact Checkers: Susan Chun, Grace Del Vecchio, Hannah Faris, Kate Gallagher, Maria Maynez, Olivia Stovicek Visuals Editor Haley Tweedell Deputy Visuals Editors Shane Tolentino Mell Montezuma Anna Mason Staff Photographers Davon Clark Staff Illustrators Mell Montezuma, Shane Tolentino Layout Editors Haley Tweedell Davon Clark Tony Zralka Web Editor Social Media Editor Webmaster Managing Director Director of Operations
AV Benford Davon Clark Pat Sier Jason Schumer Brigid Maniates
The Weekly is produced by a mostly all-volunteer editorial staff and seeks contributions from across the city. We distribute 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 by Madison Muller
IN CHICAGO City reopens Fifteen months after the COVID-19 pandemic shut down schools, businesses, and government offices, the City—after several false starts—is finally, officially, and fully reopening on June 11. On Monday, the city’s coronavirus positivity rate fell below two percent for the first time since the pandemic began; hospitalizations have similarly dropped off. But unvaccinated people are still susceptible to the virus, and fourteen Chicagoans died this week of COVID-19 as of press time. The majority of new cases are occurring in areas where fewer people are vaccinated, according to Dr. Allison Arwady, the Commissioner of the Chicago Department of Public Health—the South and West sides. Masks will still be required in schools, in health care settings, and on public transit, and unvaccinated people should continue to wear masks everywhere. Restaurants and bars are open for indoor seating at seventy-five percent capacity. Parks and beaches are open. The Buckingham Fountain is flowing. We’re getting there, Chicago. Sanctuary state? A bill that awaits Gov. J.B. Pritzker's signature could close all immigration detention centers in the state by the end of the year. The Illinois Forward Act would also prohibit law enforcement from asking for a person's citizenship status, as well as end much of the police cooperation with federal immigration agencies when carrying out an arrest or a raid on a suspected undocumented person. In May, McHenry County—one of three counties that detain immigrants—voted to maintain their jail contract with ICE, though it faced pushback from a large coalition of advocacy groups across northern Illinois. Extended relief for renters and homeowners The Illinois Housing Development Authority has extended the deadline by which landlords and tenants can jointly apply for rent relief—up to $25,000 per household—through the federally funded Illinois Rental Payment Program. Landlords still needed to initiate an application by June 7, but tenants now have until 11:59pm on Sunday, June 13, to follow up. A second application period for renters applying on their own opens at 9am on Monday, June 23, and remains open until 11:59pm on Sunday, July 18. See ihda.org/about-ihda/ illinois-rental-payment-program/ for information on eligibility and documentation. Meanwhile, the current eviction moratorium in Illinois is in place through June 26, but it’s expected that Pritzker will extend it until the end of August—by which time advocates hope that the ILRPP monies will have been disbursed, giving both landlords and tenants a little time to breathe.
IN THIS ISSUE introducing our new section editors
south side weekly................................4 public meetings report
A recap of select open meetings at the local, county, and state level. india daniels, documenters and jacqueline serrato...............................5 palestine scholars echo protest and popular resistance
A panel discussion brings the war in Gaza to Chicago. aly tantawy...........................................7 ‘free,
free palestine’
Thousands marched in Chicago in May for Palestine. monique beals and madison muller..................................10 a legacy of resistance
Three generations of Palestinian solidarity organizing in Chicago. alma campos........................................12 D2x: the crossover artist
New hip-hop. ryan rosenberger...............................14 from hyde park to hollywood
The new chief artistic and programming officer for Los Angeles’s Academy Museum of Motion Pictures. sonya alexander.................................17 calendar
Bulletin and events. south side weekly..............................21
Public Meetings Report ILLUSTRATION BY HOLLEY APPOLD
May 24 The final redevelopment phase of the former Henry Horner Homes site on the West Side will receive up to $27 million from the City in multi-family revenue bonds. In the City Council Committee on Finance meeting, Chicago Department of Housing project manager Jim O’Connell said that this Plan for Transformation site was the first to be demolished. It will undergo complete redevelopment as Westhaven Park and is expected to create about one hundred units, approximately thirty percent of which would be public housing. The third version of an ordinance to create a City-maintained police misconduct database remains in committee after discussion during a joint meeting of the City Council Committees on Finance and Public Safety devolved into confusion. It specifies that completed disciplinary investigations would be included in the database regardless of outcome. Also included would be records from the Chicago Police Department’s Bureau of Internal Affairs and oversight agencies created before the Civilian Office of Police Accountability was established in 2017. Chicago Inspector General Joseph Ferguson, whose office would maintain the database, wasn’t invited to the meeting, said Ald. Scott Waguespack, the chief architect of the ordinance. Tree roots don’t disrupt sewer lines—that’s an urban myth worth dispelling, said Malcolm Whiteside Jr., who manages the Bureau of Forestry under the Department of Streets and Sanitation. Whiteside and other City employees spoke at the City Council Committee on Finance meeting in favor of creating an Urban Forestry Advisory Board comprising thirteen relevant officials to protect the City’s tree canopy. During the Cook County Board of Commissioners Legislation and Intergovernmental Relations Committee meeting, descendants of Black people enslaved by Native tribes who traveled the Trail of Tears called in from Oklahoma to delay the recognition of Indigenous Peoples’ Day in Cook County. Black Freedmen drew attention to their fight for acceptance in Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Muscogee, and Seminole nations and demanded recognition. Many public commenters said replacing Columbus Day was anti-Italian but supported a separate day for Indigenous peoples. DePaul Professor John Burton pointed out Columbus was arrested when he returned to Spain due to his unjust treatment of Native Americans. May 25 The Forum, the historic Bronzeville jazz venue near the 43rd Street Green Line stop, was rezoned from a residential multi-unit district to a community shopping district. Owner Bernard Loyd continues to work on needed building renovations and envisions ground floor retail space, with restaurants, a bookstore, art gallery, and music school. The zoning reclassification passed the vote of the City Council Committee on Zoning, Landmarks and Building Standards and the full City Council this week.
A recap of select open meetings at the local, county, and state level for the June 10 issue.
BY INDIA DANIELS, DOCUMENTERS AND JACQUELINE SERRATO
May 26 An affordable housing development near a McKinley Park asphalt plant got the City Council votes needed for rezoning as a planned development and neighborhood mixed-use district, The new zoning paves the way for renovation into lofts and commercial space. Thirty-six Council members voted in favor and sixteen against after a motion to reconsider failed. Previously zoned light industrial use, the property contains two unused warehouses. Meanwhile, Council members deferred a vote on an ordinance to rename outer Lake Shore Drive after Jean Baptiste Pointe Du Sable for another month. Sponsoring Ald. David Moore retaliated by redirecting two dozen newly proposed ordinances to the Committee on Committees and Rules. How to use surplus funds from the 53rd Street Tax Increment Financing (TIF) District—including supporting school improvements—was discussed at the HydePark Kenwood Community Action Council meeting. Ideas included a pedway connecting Canter Middle School to Kenwood Academy, lighting for the Nichols Park baseball field, and parking lot repairs at Reavis High School. Jun 1 The city will excavate about 17,400 cubic yards of radioactive soil in Bronzeville, pack it in sealed bags, and ship it to a lab in Texas, officials said at a community meeting hosted by the 4th Ward Office and the Department of Assets, Information and Services. The site is near several senior housing apartments. From about 1915 to 1921, Carnotite Reduction Company’s elemental radium separation and refining facility operated at the north end of the former Michael Reese Hospital site. In 1979, state agencies determined that the contaminated soil was not a health threat but that dust raised during construction might be. Water misting will minimize spread of dust during the excavation, project representatives said, and because the level of radioactivity is not volatile, the work team will not install a circus tent over the site. City environmental engineer Abby Mazza added that weekly reports, daily data readings, and a live video feed will be posted publicly online. The Illinois Senate voted to pass an amendment for HB 2908, which would create an elected and representative school board for Chicago. Co-sponsor Rep. Delia Ramírez said she intends to call the bill for a concurrence vote by the House when it reconvenes in the coming weeks. “I am disappointed that the timeline for implementation is not what the community has demanded,” she said. “However, this bill still gets us to a fully elected board.” Jun 3 Homeowners who opt in to the Affordable Homeownership and Housing Pilot program will not necessarily receive lower property taxes, board members explained at the Chicago Community Land Trust meeting. This program benefit has been touted as a way to stabilize gentrifying neighborhoods. But staff and board member calculations show that houses with a market rate value of less than 120 percent of the area median income are less likely to see lower taxes. The board agreed to emphasize other benefits of the opt-in program, which include grants of up to $30,000 for building renovations. ¬ This information was collected in large part using reporting from City Bureau’s Documenters at documenters.org. JUNE 10, 2021 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 5
POLITICS
Palestine Scholars Echo Protest and Popular Resistance A discussion of the Palestinian struggle on the ground in Sheikh Jarrah. BY ALY TANTAWY
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or weeks, crowds of Chicagoans have been filling the Loop to express their fierce desire for Palestinian liberation. Armed with keffiyehs and tablas, protesters in Chicago and across the world have been crying “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free”—a decades-old slogan referencing the original land of historic Palestine between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. On May 19, five Palestinian scholars echoed these sentiments of resistance at a University of Chicago panel on the ongoing attempts to expel indigenous Palestinians from their homes and the mobilizations across Palestine to resist them. The panel, part of a series at the University’s Pozen Family Center for Human Rights, was presented in partnership with the Chicago Center for Contemporary Theory, the Global Studies Program, the Center for Middle Eastern Studies, and the Arab Studies Institute. The recent bombings in Gaza were present in the Zoom panel even as the discussion unfolded; one panelist, Jehad Abusalim, anxiously checked his phone throughout the event for updates from his family because his hometown in Gaza was being bombarded by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF). “Even when we are thousands of miles away [from Palestine] we get suspended in time—our lives are completely dominated by this violence each and every moment,” said panelist Rabea Eghbariah, a doctoral candidate at Harvard Law School.
Hadeel Badarni, a doctoral candidate in anthropology at the UofC, said that the protests function as both acts of solidarity and acts of defiance against a global order of capital and violent domination. “Palestinian popular resistance has caught up to the simultaneity of its oppression and is mobilizing with it movements on regional and global scales.” The panelists condemned twosides discourse that equates Hamas and other Palestinian resistance with the IDF. Describing the Israeli oppression of the Palestinian people as a conflict between equals does rhetorical violence, said Eghbariah, because it erases the unequal power dynamic between the Israeli state—which enjoys funding and legitimization from the United States and other global powers—and the Palestinian resistance. Eghbariah, who is also a human rights attorney with the Haifa-based Adalah legal center, called such framing “epistemic violence,” a term that describes harm exerted by colonizing powers when they produce narratives to maintain their supremacy. In Palestine, and for Palestinians across the world, its application damages their ability to speak, be heard, and craft their own narrative and identity. “The violence extends to the way that the Israeli propaganda machine extends its framing to mainstream media, not only in Israel, but also around the world,” Eghbariah said. Randa Wahbe, a PhD candidate in anthropology at Harvard University, agreed. “Palestinians, especially Palestinian women, are doing the work
“Sheikh Jarrah is a microcosm of Israel’s larger settlercolonial project, which views the Palestinian population as a demographic threat.” and the labor everyday to change the discourse, to reject the language of occupation, of clashes, of two-sides, and to center settler-colonialism, indigeneity, and liberation,” she said. Settler-colonialism is a form of colonization that aims to replace the indigenous population of the colonized area with a new population of settlers, rendering the indigenous population either stateless and displaced, killed, or second or third-class “citizens.” According to the Boycott, Divest and Sanctions Movement (BDS), Israel’s settler-colonial foundation is enshrined in its laws: “The superior status and rights of nationals are reserved for persons classified as “Jewish” in Israel’s Law of Return (1950), including new immigrants and settlers.” A Jewish resident of Chicago has the right to go to Israel and claim citizenship, while a Palestinian resident of the Gaza Strip does not. The 1950 Law of Return gives Jewish people across the world the right to live in historic Palestine and gain Israeli citizenship. “We need to destroy the rhetorical
separation between settler and soldier; they work in tandem, together and for the continued expulsion of Palestinians,” Wahbe asserted. Other examples of settler-colonial societies include the United States and Canada, where Europeans displaced and exterminated the Indigenous populations across Turtle Island—a name for North America based in Indigenous creation traditions—and settled there permanently. Eghbariah underscored the importance of counter-framing Israel’s narrative of equal citizenship for “Arab-Israelis,” calling it a myth. He explained that the Israeli state promotes Palestinians living in historic Palestine as “Arab-Israeli” citizens with the same rights as Israeli settlers. “This is an official story of Israeli propaganda to try to create a façade of ostensibly equal citizenship that applies to Palestinians,” he said. “But of course we know that this is not true.” Eghbariah said that Israel regulates Palestinians using multiple distinct legal systems in order to divide and conquer JUNE 10, 2021 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 7
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The U.N. report found that the “strategic fragmentation of the Palestinian people” legally and geographically is “the principal method by which Israel imposes an apartheid regime.” Such fragmentation of Palestinians is “a strategy of domination,” Eghbariah said. “It is a strategy of terminating a cause for liberation, a cause for freedom.” According to Al-Shabaka, a think tank where panelist Abusalim is a policy associate, considering the Palestinian liberation fight within the paradigm of human rights and international law can be useful. Human rights attorney Noura Erakat, an Al-Shabaka policy advisor, writes that U.N. assessments of the Palestinian struggle can be used as a tool in shifting the discourse in order to center it as a humanitarian one as opposed to one of security and threat. However, she cautions that international law is to be used as a tool, and not a general framework, because of its limitations. “Legal remedies are inherently limited because they seek to reform rather than to revolutionize. As such, a rights-based solution guarantees a non-revolutionary outcome that tolerates the structural inequalities that gave rise to conflict in the first place.” Affirming that the Palestinian cause is primarily a national liberation struggle, she emphasized that these assessments should be used in tandem with the work of national organizing structures and representational bodies such as the Palestinian Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions National Committee.
ILLUSTRATION BY DANYA ZITUNI
them, a practice the United Nations and human rights groups identify as apartheid. In 2014, the outgoing U.N. special rapporteur on human rights in Palestine issued a report charging Israel of maintaining an apartheid regime in its treatment of Palestinians. It asserted that Israel’s “oppressive” occupation “seems designed to 8 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY
¬ JUNE 10, 2021
encourage residents to leave Palestine, which is consistent with the apparent annexationist, colonialist and ethniccleansing goals of Israel.” Though Palestinian activists have been saying it for years, B’Tselem, a human-rights watchdog group based in Jerusalem, became the first Jewish-Israeli human rights organization to level the
same charge of apartheid last January. They noted that Palestinians are subject to different legal controls, ranging from civil law with special restrictions applied to Palestinians living under the Israeli regime in historic Palestine, to military law in the occupied West Bank and Gaza, to a permanent residency law in occupied East Jerusalem.
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he Palestinian struggle for freedom today can be understood only in relation to the Nakba, or “catastrophe” in Arabic, the panelists said. Abusalim, a doctoral candidate in history at New York University, explained that in the 1948 Nakba, at least 750,000 Palestinians were violently dispossessed of their land and homes by Zionist forces. Many of their houses still exist and now house Israeli settlers. The Nakba resulted in the destruction of Palestinian society and
POLITICS
the establishment of the Israeli state, he explained. “For Israel it is more territory, more wealth, and less Palestinians in body and mind,” Badarni added. Following the Nakba, the population of the Gaza Strip more than doubled as tens of thousands of Palestinians from Yafa and Bi’r as-Sab‘ were hurled into exile. “Those refugees in ‘48—they thought that their stay in the Gaza Strip and the refugee camps that were established there would be a temporary stay. It’s been seventy-three years,” Abusalim said. In 1967, during the Six-Day War, Israel took control of the Gaza Strip. The space allotted to Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, according to Abusalim, has been shrinking ever since its partition. He said that by 2005, about 8,000 Israelis—largely European immigrants— had settled one-third of the Gaza Strip. Two million Palestinians reside in the remaining two-thirds. Only 141 square miles in size, the Gaza Strip currently has one of the highest population densities in the world. Though Abusalim noted that many of their home villages are within walking distance of the overcrowded refugee camps where they currently live, Palestinians in the Gaza Strip are prevented from leaving or entering, creating what many call the world’s largest open-air prison. “Palestinians in Gaza from the cities of Majdal and ‘Asqalan can see their hometowns from the rooftops of their houses every night, every day.” “It is very important to remind ourselves that the Gaza Strip… in its current geographic and demographic composition is, was, and will continue to be a product of a war of conquest and aggression that the Zionist movement launched in 1947, 1948, and throughout its settler-colonial experiment in Palestine,” Abusalim said. The Nakba is “the common thread that combines all of what is happening across historic Palestine and connects all Palestinian communities, whether in the homeland or in exile.” Ethnic cleansing, or the killing and
expulsion of Palestinians from their homes to make way for Jewish settlers in Sheikh Jarrah, East Jerusalem, was one factor galvanizing the recent sweep of worldwide solidarity protests. Palestinian families have long been fighting Israeli settler groups in the courts, but the courts have consistently ruled against the families. According to panelist Lucy Garbett, a doctoral student of sociology at the London School of Economics who is currently in Sheikh Jarrah, twentyeight families were exiled from their homes in west Jerusalem. The Jordanian government, which controlled East Jerusalem and the West Bank until Israel conquered and annexed them in the Six-Day War, had granted homes in Sheikh Jarrah to those families in return for revocation of their refugee status; the Israeli courts do not recognize this agreement. The families, who own the homes, became tenants to settlers in the eyes of the courts. They face their impending displacement. “These Israeli courts are rigged in such a way that the legal structure aims to keep as much land as possible under Jewish-Israeli ownership,” Garbett said. According to Garbett, Sheikh Jarrah is a microcosm of Israel’s larger settler-colonial project, which views the Palestinian population as a demographic threat. “Israeli state and municipality policy has been one of constant planned displacement and has focused on keeping a sixty-forty ratio of Jews to Arabs in the city [of Jerusalem],” she said. The Israeli state maintains the demographic ratio via settlement in Palestinian neighborhoods, home demolition, and revocation of Palestinian residency rights, Garbett said. Palestinians in Jerusalem hold residency cards—not citizenship—which can be revoked at any time if Jerusalem stops being the center of their lives, a standard Israel monitors via bill statements, rental agreements, and random home visits, which have included checking to see whether toothbrushes in the bathroom appear used. Palestinian residents of Sheikh Jarrah
in East Jerusalem staged sit-ins every night of the holy month of Ramadan to protest the ongoing displacement efforts against them. These sit-ins, in addition to larger protests across Palestine, have faced fierce repression by Israeli police, who have unleashed what is known as skunk water, a putrid liquid that smells like rotting corpses, on protesters. “Protesters ended up having to dodge rubber bullets, charging police, mounted horses, armed settler groups, sound bombs, stun grenades, and most notoriously, the skunk truck,” Garbett said. Sheikh Jarrah has been transformed into a military zone, with checkpoints and harassment from police and settlers alike. Only Palestinians who can prove that they live in the neighborhood may enter. Any Israeli citizen, she said, can enter freely.
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attles over public space were met with brutal police repression and settler marches chanting “death to Arabs.” Though the media often frames brutality against Palestinians as stemming from mobs, Eghbariah stressed the connection between institutional and mob violence, saying that they both operate under the same logic. In cities like al-Lidd, Haifa, Yafa, and Nazareth, he said that “there is a condoning and allowing of the mobs to attack Palestinians, often surrounded by the police.” Garbett explained that settlercolonialism impacts every Palestinian. “As these images and videos of settler violence and humiliation, these logics of erasure and displacement, in the neighborhood went viral, they really struck a chord and spoke to every Palestinian because this process of displacement is ultimately what unites every Palestinian, no matter where they’re located,” Garbett said.
Displacement “sets the heart of the Palestinian cause, which is to remain and to belong to the land in the face of a settler-colonial project which seeks to replace, displace, and marginalize Palestinians from it,” she continued. Badarni said that the Palestinian people are powerful, noting that they are not relying on government, the bourgeoisie, or the international community—just on popular resistance. Palestinians organized a massive and historic strike of Unity and Dignity on May 18. “It ended up becoming the symbol of the ongoing ethnic cleansing from our lands and homes,” Garbett said. The panelists emphasized that liberation movements across the world are connected to each other, citing the abolitionist movement that erupted in the public consciousness of the United States after the state-sanctioned killing of George Floyd. “Palestinians have been practicing abolition in every sense of the word,” Wahbe said. “The fight we are fighting is to abolish the military court, abolish the borders, tear down the wall.” “All these anti-colonial fronts, all these forms of resistance, are converging today,” she added. “They are rising in concert and ultimately reverberating across Palestine and beyond Palestine.” Wahbe affirmed the determination of the Palestinian people. “This will be our final thrust in our struggle for freedom and we will realize our freedom,” she said. “Liberation is in our near future. It will happen in our lifetime.” ¬ Aly Tantawy is a writer and creative on the South Side who aims to cultivate resistance with their work. They have previously been involved with Students for Justice in Palestine. This is their first article for the Weekly.
JUNE 10, 2021 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 9
POLITICS
‘Free, Free Palestine’
Thousands marched in Chicago in solidarity with Palestinian people in May. BY MONIQUE BEALS AND MADISON MULLER
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n Saturday, May 16, several thousand people gathered in downtown Chicago to call for an end to what was then nearly a week of airstrikes by Israeli warplanes on Gaza. Demonstrators waved Palestinian flags as a steady chorus of car horns and chants of “Free, free Palestine” reverberated through the Loop. Some pushed elderly relatives in wheelchairs while others pushed strollers or carried toddlers on their shoulders, listening as speakers detailed the mounting deaths in Gaza— especially those of children. The rally was one of several that drew thousands to the Loop during the two weeks of fighting in Israel and Palestine, as organizers demanded action from the federal government. That Saturday, protesters demanded President Joe Biden stop blocking a United Nations Security Council resolution calling for a ceasefire between the Israel Defense Forces and Hamas, and called for Israeli forces to stop restricting Palestinians from worshipping at al-Aqsa Mosque, the third-holiest site in Islam. On May 21, Israel agreed to a ceasefire, ending eleven days of bloodshed that killed 256 Palestinians—sixty-six of them children—and thirteen people in Israel, including two children. “We are disappointed and extremely appalled that Biden has done nothing to stop murder of Palestinians and by the hypocrisy of the U.S. when it comes to Israel. We call on President Biden to take action,” Deanna Othman, an organizer with the Coalition for Justice in Palestine, said at the march. The Weekly interviewed May 16 demonstrators, including Othman, about the ongoing occupation and attacks.¬ 10 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY
¬ JUNE 10, 2021
Madison Muller recently completed her master’s degree at the Medill School of Journalism and is now a Barbara M. Reiss Fellow for the Medill Investigative Lab and The Washington Post. She last reported on CPD use-of-force reports. Monique Beals is currently pursuing her master’s at the Medill School of Journalism, where she is a Barbara M. Reiss Fellow with the Medill Investigative Lab and The Washington Post. This is her first article for the Weekly.
Sarah Mustafa, Oak Lawn Community High School teacher, twenty-five
“There’s a big population that’s growing of Arab Americans, and [the Israel Defense Forces] are killing people in Palestine especially during our holy month, occupying holy space, religious worship centers, killing children, burying people alive, bombing cities, evicting families from their homes. As a Palestinian American and a teacher of Palestinian Americans, it’s really important to end the occupation. It’s terrible what’s happening, and I open a platform to let [my students] feel safe and talk about it. I encourage them to use their social media, platforms, voices, and right to free speech that the people in Palestine don’t have. We have it here, and I tell them every day to use it.”
MEMBERS OF IFNOTNOW CHICAGO, A JEWISH-AMERICAN ORGANIZATION, HOLD SIGNS IN SUPPORT OF PALESTINIAN LIBERATION ON MAY 16, 2021 IN CHICAGO. (MADISON MULLER/SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY)
Haniya Fatima, University of Illinois at Chicago student, twenty-one
“We are here to help stand up for Palestine because they can’t do anything right now. They have a very corrupt government that is coming after them. They are destroying lives, destroying children’s innocence. They are giving them no life so we are here to help support and stand in defense of them. “We have all these people here today shouting ‘Free Palestine’ because yesterday marked seventy-three years of Israel’s occupation of that area, so we are here to just fight and peacefully protest. It’s amazing because you don’t really realize that we have so many people here supporting it from all different backgrounds. There’s Palestinians, Arabs, Indians, Pakistanis all these backgrounds here together for one cause. That’s just beautiful to me.”
SOME DEMONSTRATORS SCALE AN ENTRANCE TO THE ‘L’ TO WAVE PALESTINIAN FLAGS ABOVE THE GROUP AS THEY MARCH ON MAY 16, 2021 IN CHICAGO. (MADISON MULLER/SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY)
Sammy Ramadan
“It feels great to see this kind of solidarity in Chicago. This is a humanitarian cause, not a religious cause.”
Deanna Othman, Coalition for Justice in Palestine, Board Member of the Chicago chapter of American Muslims for Palestine
“It feels amazing to see people come out to support justice and acknowledge the suffering of Palestinian people. We know we have supporters and support is growing, but the fact that it is reaching the mainstream is amazing. There’s been a lot of fear associated with support for Palestinians, and we see people losing that fear. They see this is a social justice cause like any other. Palestinians deserve to live in freedom and safety in their homes without the threat of bombing. It is not a religious conflict between Muslims and Jews. It is based in settler colonialism.” A DEMONSTRATOR HOLDS A SMALL CHILD ON HIS SHOULDERS TO GET A BETTER LOOK AT THE SPRAWLING CROWD, WHICH INCLUDED MANY FAMILIES AND CHILDREN, GATHERED TO SUPPORT PALESTINE ON MAY 16, 2021 IN CHICAGO. (MADISON MULLER/SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY)
IMMIGRATION
A Legacy of Resistance
Hatem Abudayyeh’s family has organized Palestinian solidarity in Chicago for generations. BY ALMA CAMPOS
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n May, thousands of protesters marched in downtown Chicago, joining cities around the world in decrying the latest Israeli attacks against Palestinians. The attacks began when Israeli security forces stormed Jerusalem’s al-Aqsa mosque on May 7 and fired on worshippers with tear gas and rubber bullets in response to demonstrations against the eviction of Palestinian families in Sheikh Jarrah. Hamas, the militant political party that controls a majority of seats in the Palestinian Legislative Council and is the administrative government of Gaza, demanded the Israeli security leave the mosque by May 10. When the deadline passed, Hamas militants fired rockets into Israeli territory, and Israel began bombing Gaza. Between May 10 and 21, Israeli airstrikes and artillery killed 256 Palestinians in Gaza, including sixty-six children. Rockets fired by Hamas killed thirteen people in Israel, including two children. Hamas first called for a ceasefire on May 13; after international protest, Israel agreed to one on May 21. The evictions in Sheikh Jarrah, and the violence they precipitated, are only the latest expulsions of Palestinians from their ancestral homes to make way for settlements—evictions that began decades ago during the creation of Israel, according to Hatem Abudayyeh, the executive director of the Arab American Action Network (AAAN) and national chair of the U.S. Palestinian Community Network (USPCN) in Chicago. And May’s protests in Chicago are the latest in a long tradition of organizing for Palestinian solidarity here. Abudayyeh said the evictions in 12 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY
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Sheikh Jarrah are a continuation of the Nakba, or “the catastrophe, which is what we call the founding of the state of Israel.” During the 1947-49 war that established the state of Israel, more than 750,000 Palestinians—about eighty percent—fled or were forced from their ancestral homes by Israeli forces, who also killed 13,000, according to figures from American Muslims for Palestine. “That's what has led to us becoming a refugee population,” Abudayyeh said. “It is what led to the colonization of Palestine, and, ultimately, what led to the occupation of the rest of it. It's not a brand-new conflict.” Since then, Palestinians in Gaza and Jerusalem, as well as refugees in Chicago, have organized resistances to their displacement. In 1987, the First Intifada began as a series of protests against Israel’s then-twenty-year occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. During the Second Intifada, which lasted from 2000 to 2005, Palestinians rose up in response to the Israeli occupation and policies that violated international law and deprived Palestinians of their basic human rights. In 2014, the Israel Defense Forces invaded Gaza, sparking protests in Chicago and around the world, and in 2018 and 2019, solidarity marches were held in support of the Gaza Border Protests. Chicago and the Southwest suburbs have an extensive immigrant and refugee Palestinian community that has been active in organizing in solidarity with Palestine for decades. According to Dr. Louise Cainkar, Professor of Sociology & Social Welfare and Justice at Marquette University and author of a number of books on Arabs in the U.S., Palestinians have been living in Chicago for the last hundred years. The Chicago metropolitan
area has the largest concentration of Palestinians in the United States, according to Cainkar. The Census does not include information on how many residents come from the Middle East and North Africa, because the federal government labels them as white. Cainkar’s research shows that about 200,000 Palestinians Americans and their descendants live in the Chicago metropolitan area today. Early Palestinian immigration, according to Cainkar, consisted mainly of young men living on the South Loop. “You're hypervisible when it comes to surveillance and hate crimes and discrimination and bullying, but you're totally invisible when it comes to getting any kind of statistical information,” says Cainkar. “That's a problem.” Abudayyeh’s father, Khairy, immigrated to Chicago at the age of twenty in 1960 from Al Jib—a village near Jerusalem in the West Bank. He became a student organizer at Roosevelt University, having been an activist back home. “He had lived the Nakba,” Abudayyeh said. Khairy was eight years old during the Nakba. For many Palestinians who emigrated at that time, “it was very difficult economically to live in a situation in which you see the colonization happening next to you,” he said. In the 1980s, Palestinian families moved to Chicago’s Southwest suburbs such as Burbank, Oak Lawn, Hickory Hills, Bridgeview, Alsip, and Palos Hills. Palestinians contributed to the formation of the Mosque Foundation, a large mosque that opened in 1981 in Bridgeview, according to Cainkar.
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budayyeh’s father was in Chicago during the 1967 Six-Day War. Approximately two years later, Khairy went back to Palestine, married Abudayyeh's mother, Khairyeh, and they both returned to Chicago to raise a family. Khairy co-founded the Arab Community Center in 1975. The Center, which first opened in the Northwest Side and later moved to 63rd and Kedzie, focused on foreign policy and education about Palestine and the Arab homeland in North Africa and the Middle East, and is the city’s “hub for the Arab progressives and the Arab left,” Abudayyeh said. The American Community Center became a springboard for what is now the Arab American Action Network (AAAN), which combines political organizing and helping Arab immigrants and refugees in Chicago access social services. While raising her five children and holding a part-time job, Abudayyeh's mother also became an activist. She joined the Arab Community Center and served for some time as the president of the local chapter of the Palestinian Women's Association, a national organization. “My siblings and I learned about Palestine, about struggle, about the fight for national liberation by osmosis,” Abudayyeh said. When Abudayyeh was a child, his parents’ Northwest Side living room was often filled with friends and colleagues who would discuss the many issues close to Palestinian self-determination over the years: from the Lebanon War in 1982 and the Intifada of 1987 to the U.S. War in Iraq in 1991, the Oslo Accords in 1993, and more. “They spoke in an ideological language that I did not learn until much later in life, and they were so impressive,” Abudayyeh said. “I saw my mother and her colleagues as the organizers I wanted to emulate, those who dedicated their entire lives to their communities, those who brought the issue of Palestine to the forefront of U.S. discourse from the mid-seventies to the early nineties.” By the time Abudayyeh was a teenager, he already had a political education. After attending University of California, Los Angeles, Abudayyeh returned to his community in Chicago and began working as a youth program director at the Arab American Center
IMMIGRATION
ILLUSTRATION BY GWYN WHALEN
started by his father. Three years later, he was appointed executive director before his father passed away. Abudayyeh is also the national chair of the United States Palestinian Community Network (USPCN), formed in 2006. “USPCN is kind of like the legacy of the Arab Community Center. It's [run by] the children of the leaders.” With its largest membership in Chicago, USPCN was born to revilitize grassroots organizing in the Palestinian Community and work on campaigns and projects around Boycott Divestment Sanctions (BDS), defense against repression, political prisoners, and more. “Our strategy for organizing is really consciousness-raising,” said Abudayyeh. And because of this consciousnessraising, according to Abudayyeh, he and many Palestinian activists and supporters have come under attack by federal law enforcement. In 2010, the FBI raided Abudayyeh's North Side home and thirteen others under the pretense that they were supporting Palestinians back
home. At the time, he was at Advocate Lutheran Hospital in Des Plaines visiting his sick mother. His five-year-old daughter and then-wife were home. The FBI agents took possession of his laptop, paper records and anything with the word “Palestine.” As the agents ransacked his house, Abudayyeh’s daughter Maisa Assata— who was just five years old at the time— asked in Arabic, “‘Why are they looking at our Arabic language books? They don't seem like they would read Arabic,’” he said. “It was the cutest thing.” Abudayyeh said the raids and subpoenas were harassment, and an attempt by the federal government to repress activists’ rights to free speech and assembly, something often done to other immigrants and Black people in the U.S. The feds eventually subpoenaed a total of twenty-three Palestinian activists, including Abudayyeh, and ultimately did not arrest, charge, or indict anyone after the raids. “They didn’t realize that all twenty-three of us would be so unified
and would have such massive support, and they came to the realization that they wouldn't be able to force any of us to testify.” Abudayyeh said the twenty-three activists immediately spoke out against the raids. “There's nothing that we're doing that is illegal. Support for national liberation movements is our right. Solidarity is not a crime.” Abudayyeh said the FBI dropped the case since there is an eight-year statute of limitations. “They've become experts at criminalizing us, whether it's Black communities, immigrant communities, Palestinian, Arab and Muslim communities,” he said. “And they do it for political purposes. You criminalize Mexicans and Central Americans, so that you make it so that you can make the political argument as to why you want to militarize and shut down borders; you criminalize Palestinians so that you make the political argument as to why you have to support the settlercolonial, apartheid, racist state of Israel.” In 2013, agents from the Department of Homeland Security arrested Rasmea Odeh, a leader in the Chicago Palestinian and Arab communities and a member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. Odeh spent the 1970s in an Israeli prison based on a confession she says she was raped and tortured into falsely giving to Israeli security forces. In a federal court in Chicago in 2013, she was indicted for Unlawful Procurement of Naturalization based on the government’s claim that she did not disclose the imprisonment on an immigration form twenty years prior. Rasmea, supporters, and her lawyers say that the immigration charge is a justification to attack her for her support of the Palestine liberation movement. After many years in legal proceedings, Odeh was stripped of her US citizenship in a federal court and was deported to Jordan in 2017. Recently, the AAAN, the organization led by Abudayyeh, started a national campaign to free Atta Khattab, who was arrested by the Israeli military from in the occupied West Bank in February. Abudayyeh says Khattab has not been charged and has been in jail ever since. Khattab is a member of a dance troupe performing traditional Palestinian dances. “Because of his cultural work,
and being a leader in the cultural work, being an educator around these same things we do here...he was arrested,” said Abudayyeh. That Palestinians, Black Lives Matter, and immigrants in Chicago demonstrated together last month is not a coincidence, and there is hope, he said. “That was a part of my upbringing. So the idea that I’m anti-racist today or that I'm unequivocally in support of the Movement for Black Lives and in last year's uprising for George Floyd, that's not a surprise to anyone who would have known my parents, colleagues, comrades, and friends.” Abudayyeh says that under international law and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Palestinian refugees have the right to return to the homes from which they were exiled, but Israel has not allowed them back. “To me, the liberation of Palestine is from the river to the sea,” he says, referring to the combined areas of the West Bank Jerusalem, the Gaza Strip and the territory now controlled by Israel. He said thinks relationships with other oppressed groups such as those fighting for immigrants’ and workers’ rights, the Black Liberation Movement, and women are essential and all share the same enemy: The U.S. government, which supports Israel politically, militarily, economically and diplomatically. “Last year’s George Floyd uprisings and this year’s Palestinian resistance and worldwide support is proof ” that such intersectional relationships can and will happen, he said. Abudayyeh’s mother passed away some time ago, and he said he has been thinking of her. “My daughter, Maisa Assata, called me excitedly to say that a butterfly landed on her arm,” he said. “‘I looked up,' Maisa Assata told me, and she realized today is May 31, exactly ten years since her Sitto [grandmother] passed away. ‘Sitto loved butterflies, and she must have sent this one,’ she said. “Ya Ummi [Oh, mother], you were always right,” Abudayyeh said. “Palestine will win.” ¬ Alma Campos is the Weekly’s immigration editor. She last wrote about COVID-19 vaccination access in Latinx communities. JUNE 10, 2021 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 13
MUSIC
The Crossover Artist
D2x’s coming-of-age futurist hip-hop on The Color Blue. BY RYAN ROSENBERGER
I
PHOTO BY TIMMY RISDEN
“It’s really about understanding our past, understanding the things that we went through, not forgetting it and going back to that place.”
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n the opening scene of a short film released a few days after his debut studio album, The Color Blue, dropped, Chicago hip-hop artist D2x refers to himself as a “futurist.” Growing up on the South Side, he had dreams of becoming a pro basketball player, but altered course after realizing basketball might not work out. “I remember one time in class, I was like, ‘if basketball don't work out, I’m gonna just be a rapper,” X said. “Once I got into music, I knew exactly what I wanted to do.” Basketball dominated X’s life growing up. During the summers, he played Amateur Athletic Union (AAU) travel basketball. In high school, he played at St. Rita of Cascia at 79th & Western, where he garnered Division 1 interest, was nominated to play in the McDonald’s High School All American game, and was named to the Catholic League all-conference team during his senior year. In 2016, when it came time to make a decision about playing in college, he said he didn’t have too many options. After briefly attending Western Illinois University as a walk-on, he decided to come back to Chicago to pursue music full time. Nearly five years later, the Windy City wordsmith has made his mark. Released on March 26, The Color Blue is a thirteen-track, thirty-eight-minute coming-of-age story that sheds light on how the twenty-three-year old found purpose through his music. “I changed dreams, as far as I’ma take it/No matter where I’m grindin’, on my
way to be the greatest,” he raps on the first verse of “Time,” where he explores where his head was at when he decided to stop pursuing his basketball dream. Lyrically, The Color Blue sees X assuming an everyman persona—he is that one character in the cast that everyone is rooting for. His brightest lyrical highlights are his most human of moments, such as the track, “Day Job,” where he explores the hardships of working a menial job while chasing his dream. While X waxes poetic throughout the album about the determination he has to make it in music, he always stops short of giving himself too much credit. He is quick to shout out his faith in God, his family, and his biggest supporters, without all of whom he insists this album would not exist. “They’re the backbone of my art,” he said. Executive produced by GLOhan Beats and Ro Marsalis, the sounds on The Color Blue are steeped in soul, jazz, and blog-era hip-hop worship. The intro track, “Hues,” features a dusty big band horn section and some grumbling legato bass hits, while “Hoop Dreams” features a sunny chipmunk soul vocal sample. There is some live instrumentation too, with tracks such as “Blue Light Nights” and the album’s closer, “Picasso Blue/Thoughts From A Basquiat,” featuring some pretty soprano saxophone passages courtesy of Canadian producer and instrumentalist Zander Miller, also known as Millwood. D2x recently talked with the Weekly about his life and work. An edited transcript follows (a longer version of this interview is at southsideweekly.com).
MUSIC
Why does blue feature so prominently on this album? First and foremost, blue is my favorite color. But really, with the title and the meaning behind the album, it was more so a connection with my feelings and emotions. I was learning new things about every other month throughout the years, and the correlation I was able to build was that I started to look up the meaning about the color, and I saw that the color blue meant many things—it can mean rebirth. It’s a calming color; it can be connected to sadness. I read about spiritual realization and so many other things. When I saw that, I'm like, “Whoa, that's crazy,” because this is the type of period I feel like I have in my life. I feel like I'm in a transitional period, for my art, the transition period with getting married or overcoming trials and tribulations that I deal with in my life each and every day. Really just the ups and downs [of ] graduating college and going straight into adulthood, the responsibility that comes with being a man every day. Playing along with the title, I also learned about my influences with art, paintings, and jazz music—how the color blue is one of the most essential colors in jazz. I learned how Pablo Picasso had a blue period back in the early 1900s. He had a series of paintings throughout numerous years, but he was just painting every painting like different hues and different strands of blue. It started from one of the toughest times of his life, where one of his best friends committed suicide; that was his first painting that he made within that period. Overall, the color blue was just to create different moods and different shades—how color schemes could convey different arrays of emotions. Could you talk about your love of jazz? If I was in another life where hip-hop didn’t exist, I would have tried to be a jazz musician. It's just the way it makes you feel. I was learning more and more about jazz throughout the years, going back to Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue album or Blue Train by John Coltrane. Maiden
Voyage by Herbie Hancock. From that point on, I continuously kept playing different albums, and I created a playlist for myself. I started to continuously add songs... soulful songs, jazz songs and stuff that could give me inspiration to create my albums, and it turned out pretty well. The actual album title that I was sitting on at first, I had this title called Hoops. I was trying to do this basketball theme in a chronological order. But it felt like... it wasn't forced, but it was too constructive, to the point where I felt like I was stressing myself out trying to stick to a conceptual idea that can really become its own conceptual idea when I just write about my life, so the color blue was the main thing that has driven it all, and jazz music was the number one thing. What role has your family played in the success you have had? They helped me stay grounded, and they helped give me a shift from music. I feel like family is the most important thing. In order to have any type of structure in your life, you need family, and I feel like they give me the completeness and wholeness [and] what I needed in my life to be the best person I could be. I feel like without family, none of this would have happened because every day I'm trying to think of new ideas that are all inspired by my life and the people that I care about. Without them, this album wouldn't have been made, I wouldn't even be where I’m at, I wouldn't have grown as a person. So I feel like they're the backbone of my art. They're the backbone of me overall— spiritually, and physically, mentally.
Friday Night Lights was one of those projects. I still remember 2010 in my basement, I got my headphones on, I'm on a treadmill listening to “You Got It” by Wale and J. Cole, I'm just inspired. So that was one for me. The Warm Up as well, and The Come Up. Also Mac Miller's early projects. 1999 by Joey Bada$$, I love that one. It was so much cool rap that was around at that time; that’s the type of rap that I grew up on. I feel like that blog era of hip-hop overall was what’s driven me to kind of [be] like, “I could do this.” I've studied this type of music even before I thought about making it, and I wanted to bring that type of sound as a motivational aspect on my project so I could tap into everything that influenced me. I plan to continue that moving forward. I want to continue to grow, but [I want] to keep that style in my music because I feel like the best comes out of me when I rap over things that I've been used to for so long.
“Hoop Dreams” might be the most nostalgic cut in the tracklist. What was the transition like from basketball to pursuing a rap career full-time? I feel like I was nice in high school, definitely good enough to play somewhere [in college.] But certain things happened and I had to make a decision. I went to Western to go to a school, that was an actual university. There were other places that did have small scholarships to go to for basketball. There was a community college in Dallas, a small university in Missouri, and a few other places. I took a visit to the one in Missouri the summer going into college and I didn't like it ... didn't have many options. When I came to Western, I have like a million papers that they gave me to go through, [for] the clearance period with the NCAA, just be able to even try out. I'm like, “I don't want to do it.” I met with one of the coaches there when I first came, but that whole idea, I'm like, ‘nah.’ THE COLOR BLUE ALBUM COVER BY BLACKSNEAKERS
There is a lot of blog-era hip-hop homage on this album. What does that era mean to you? It means the world to me because that’s what I grew up on. Thinking back, I was playing basketball every day—at the park, AAU, summer travel basketball. These were the projects that was in my head when I was working out as a young adolescent, aspiring to be the best basketball player in the world. [ J. Cole’s] JUNE 10, 2021 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 15
MUSIC
“Hoop Dreams” was really looking at every point in my life, from middle school, to high school, to everything. The days we played in the park, the AAU games I had in the summer. I wanted to create a record that I was able to write a vivid storyline using different details with my words to capture a different type of storytelling. Also, this record called “School Daze” by J. Cole, I used to listen to it all the time. As I was making the album, just writing in my notes at home thinking like, “Okay, what should I put next?” you know, just structuring my tracks and stuff like that. I know I needed to make a record where I really tell a real story for it to feel like I did my due diligence with my work. I always played that track, but I played it again, and I used to always admire how Cole used to use so much vivid words. Overall, Cole is my favorite rapper ever. So it was thinking like, “Man, I got to
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give people this type of vibe that I always loved when I used to hear his music.’ I heard “School Daze.” I'm like, damn, I feel like I could do it too. So let me try my best to not use the same words, and just just completely tell a story and show that I could do it ... and it turned out to be that. What is something you hope listeners take away from The Color Blue? To know that we all have the ability to make things happen no matter what we got going on in our life. We all have that drive; we all destined to be special, we just got to figure out what we're special at. And that's why I made the correlation with basketball and music, because I feel like I was much more gifted as a musician than basketball, even though basketball was something I was talented at. I'm just
glad that I found my purpose. I feel like this album overall is about the search for finding that purpose. But also, utilizing the things that we've already been introduced to and we've experienced in our life as a motivational factor to push us to go towards the future. So it's really about understanding our past, understanding the things that we went through, not forgetting it and going back to that place.
Mentally, just realizing if I’ve gotten past one hundred percent of my worst days, there’s no reason why I can't continue to go forward. ¬ Ryan Rosenberger is a Chicago-based freelance music writer who specializes in Chicago’s hip-hop scene. He last covered a Chicago Votes benefit concert.
PHOTO BY TIMMY RISDEN
STAGE & SCREEN PHOTO COURTESY OF UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO
When did you first develop an interest in film? I watched a lot of old movies with my aunt late at night. I had never realized before that there were so many stories inside of movies. My aunt would tell me, “These two stars had an affair,” or a certain star was at a certain studio. I realized movies are connected to each other. You could follow what was going on with a star or a director. That was fascinating to me and really stuck with me. When did you first start exploring your love for film?
From Hyde Park to Hollywood An interview with Jacqueline Stewart. BY SONYA ALEXANDER
J
ust like the various regions of America are what make it whole, the many cities that contributed to the growth of the U.S. film industry make it what it is today. Chicago—and Black Chicago—was prolific in film production before Hollywood became the hub of the industry, and it was a center of film innovation in the early 1900s. Black contributions to the nascent days of film are often overlooked, but thankfully current-day torchbearers are working to preserve and disseminate
little-known facts about Black film and filmmakers. University of Chicago film studies scholar Jacqueline Stewart is one such leader—a griot by nature but an inquisitive film analyst and archivist by trade. On the U. of C. faculty since 2013, she was until earlier this year the director of the university’s Arts + Public Life program; she’s also the founder of the South Side Home Movie Project, and the host of the Turner Classic Movies’ weekly programming series “Silent Sunday Nights.” Very few of us
are lucky enough to take “home” with us wherever we go, but Stewart, a Chicago native, is this year able to represent her community even while distanced from it. On leave from her position at the university, she’s the newly appointed chief artistic and programming officer for Los Angeles’s Academy Museum of Motion Pictures, which opens its doors September 30, 2021. The Weekly spoke with Stewart about her work, past and future. This conversation has been edited for clarity.
When I went to college. I grew up on the South Side of Chicago; I went to Kenwood Academy. I got into Stanford University—amazing. I wanted to be a journalist; I started taking some classes in literature. It was around the time that Spike Lee was coming on the scene. I saw She’s Gotta Have It (1986), and I was so deeply conflicted. I’d never seen a Black film like that before by a Black director. We were all rallying to support this young original voice. There’s a rape scene in that movie. It seemed like it was a movie about a woman, but seen through the perspective of a man. I was grappling with it—how could I love it but have these kinds of questions about it at the same time? That’s when I discovered that people study film, and they pursue questions like that. I was reading stuff that bell hooks wrote about Spike Lee’s career. I started learning about feminist film theory. I was applying it to this immediate question I had in my mind about how to think about Spike Lee’s films, and that’s what I ended up writing my B.A. thesis about. What is your exact title now, and what does it entail? I’m the chief artistic and programming officer at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures. In that role, I oversee four areas: curatorial, so all of our exhibitions and our collecting strategies. Publications, because we’re doing books and catalogues related to many of our exhibitions, including an JUNE 10, 2021 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 17
STAGE & SCREEN opening exhibition on Hayao Miyazaki, the animator. We’ve created this gorgeous catalog for that one-ofa-kind exhibition. There are a lot of education programs, which means we will be doing a lot of work with youth. There’s a Shirley Temple Education Studio with classes in filmmaking, which will focus on the arts and sciences of film. And then film programs, which is thrilling to me, because showing films has always been an important part of my own practice. At the Academy Museum, we’ll be showing films seven days a week, 365 days a year in two theaters. People will be able to go through the galleries and learn about the different components of filmmaking, and then we’ll show people what the finished product is. What were the programs online in April? In April we kicked off some virtual programs. We wanted to start getting the public aware of the museum and the kinds of exhibitions we’ll have and the types of programs we’ll have in person. We thought the Oscars weekend would be a really great time to introduce some of the museum’s programming. So, that’s what we started in April, which people can now check out on YouTube. It’s
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called “Breaking the Oscars Ceiling.” It’s about four women who had historic Oscars wins. And we’re going to do other programs, all of them drawing on what’s happening in the galleries, especially our core exhibition, which is called “Stories of Cinema.” For example, Spike Lee is collaborating with the museum on a gallery space that really showcases his amazing collection of film posters and other items that relate to his influences. We’re going to do a conversation with Spike on September 7 about his gallery. How do you feel your Chicago roots prepared you for taking this position? Thank you for asking that question! I don’t really get to talk that much about my Chicago roots and their relationship to this. After going to Stanford, I went to the University of Chicago to get my PhD and did most of my dissertation research in Chicago. I wanted to trace the earliest history of African-American filmmaking, so I spent a lot of time trying to trace the filmmakers and film culture of Chicago, particularly the “Black belt” in Chicago, during the nineteen-teens. The stretch of State Street where IIT is at now was the mecca for Black Chicago. Before the Harlem Renaissance, Chicago was the urban destination for so many migrants coming up from the South. The Chicago Defender newspaper was the paper that Black people all over the country were reading. The Pullman porters were taking them all over on their runs. Chicago is so important in film history in general. Essanay Studios were in Chicago. Charlie Chaplin got his start in Chicago. Chicago was the center of film distribution. Projectors were made in Chicago. As an industrial center, in the early days, Chicago is key to the story of American filmmaking, and it’s key in Black filmmaking. Thinking and learning about Oscar Micheaux, the pioneer early Black filmmaker who lived in Chicago, founded his company here, and shot some of his early films here, I really carried that with me in the ways that I have understood Black history. Of course, there were people making films in lots of places, it was just on a smaller scale. Because of my interest in silent film and my interest
in regional film histories, I always want to keep Chicago on the map. It’s not just a story about Hollywood, it’s what happened before Hollywood and during Hollywood. Filmmaking in Chicago has been growing and growing and growing, and that’s really worth paying attention to. That’s a nice segue to my next question! What’s the relationship now between filming and underserved communities in Chicago? I think there’s a really important balance to strike. Bringing a production to a community can leave something good or it can be totally just on the surface.
I am fortunate to have spent a great amount of time with Cauleen Smith, an incredible artist and filmmaker. I’ve heard her talk about how when you’re making a film, it’s like you colonize the space. I think it makes a difference when you have to do that, that you inform people of what you’re doing, maybe you engage some of the local businesses to provide catering or extras….Use it as an opportunity to teach people what you’re doing. There’s a difference when you do something like that, leave a positive mark or give a contribution back to the people that facilitated your production, versus swooping in and leaving.
“It’s important for me to take whatever knowledge and resources I have to lift up my community, even if my work takes me elsewhere.”
PHOTO COURTESY OF UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO
STAGE & SCREEN If I can bring Spike back into the conversation, when Spike did Do the Right Thing, he was really mindful that filming would have an impact on the community. From what he said, the Fruit of Islam, the Nation of Islam security, actually cleaned up some crack houses in that area of Brooklyn. That was something that was necessary for the shoot, but it also benefited the community. So that's the kind of model that I think is really important for anything [on the] South Side of Chicago.
the board of Chicago Film Archives for quite a while. I admire Nancy Watrous and that project so much. It’s important that the Academy Museum be the kind of venue where local archives will be partners in terms of showing things that are in their collections and to shine a light on some of their work. I’m thinking about another organization I’ve worked with in its creation, Sisters in Cinema. Are you familiar with Yvonne Welbon’s project?
What kind of effect do you think your current position will have on the archival community of Chicago? Well, I hope it’s a positive effect. In the conversations I’m having with my colleagues at the museum about future exhibitions or about the ways our education programming should benefit people on site but also people more broadly, I’m always thinking about models, partners, and dear friends in Chicago. I served on
I’m on her board now. This is the kind of project that I can easily see connected to the Academy Museum because as she is creating these opportunities for Black women and girls to tell their stories, to learn the craft of writing and filmmaking, that also involves knowing film history. To whatever degree it would be helpful for those students to get access… I’m excited to provide access to the mwwuseum and its resources in order to do what is part of
Oh, yes. I am!
the museum’s mission, which is to really provide more access to broader groups of people. To make it seem possible that they can tell their own stories in this medium. What’s up with the South Side Home Movie Project? Still going strong! Thank you for asking about it. I founded it in 2005. It’s a project to collect amateur films shot by South Side residents. 16mm sometimes but mostly 8mm, super 8mm small gauge films. There’s so much of this material out there, but it’s all in private hands. People usually come across it when someone has passed away and they’re cleaning their house. They come across these Kodak boxes. They often don’t know what to do with them because people don’t have projectors anymore. No one really knows how to run one anymore, which is a shame because there’s something charming about the sound of the projector.
It has the same effect as a vinyl record. Totally. Many of the movies are home movies that show Black middleclass life, which is almost invisible when we look at commercial film history. Are you done teaching in Chicago? I’m on leave. I hope I’m never done teaching in Chicago! I hope someone will invite me to come talk to students (laughs). I continue to work with my graduate students. I’m a child of South Siders. It’s important for me to take whatever knowledge and resources I have to lift up my community, even if my work takes me elsewhere. ¬ Sonya Alexander is a Chicago native who currently resides in New Orleans. She does entertainment journalism as well as academic writing. She last wrote for the Weekly about the closure of St. Columbanus School.
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EVENTS
BULLETIN
Chicago Board of Education Meeting
Bystander Training: Anti-Asian/American Harassment
CPS Loop Office, 42 W. Madison St., Garden Level, Board Room. Wednesday, June 23, 10:30am. Free.
Jane Addams Senior Caucus, Zoom, Wednesday, June 16, 4pm–6pm. Free. Register at: rb.gy/xcazvu
The Chicago Board of Education’s June meeting will be live-streamed for the public at cpsboe.org. Public participation will be held virtually, and members of the public can register in advance as a speaker or an observer starting June 21 online at cpsboe. org or by phone at (312) 989-7313. (Maddie Parrish)
Many Asian/Americans want to know how they can be safe when they experience harassment. During this training, designed specifically for seniors, participants will learn how to respond to harassment at the moment it is taking place. Organizers will introduce safety tools and discuss ways to build resilience on an individual, personal, social level, and beyond. (Alma Campos)
DefundCPD’s Juneteenth Block Party The Breathing Room Space, 1434 W. 51st St. Saturday, June 19, 1pm. Free. rebrand.ly/BreatheJun19 DefundCPD is hosting a Juneteenth Block Party in Back of The Yards. The block party aims to provide space for community building and education through art making, music, food, and wellness. There will also be free resistance training. Volunteers are needed for set up/tear down, cooking, childcare, art activities, mutual aid and the training sessions. bit.ly/defundvolunteer619 (Chima Ikoro)
19th Ward Youth Day of Action Beverly Park, 2460 W. 102nd St. Saturday, June 19, 1pm–4pm. Free. rebrand.ly/19thWard19 Speakers from GoodKids MadCity and Students Strike Back will address a rally ahead of a march to demand 19th Ward Alderman Matt O’Shea support the Empowering Communities for Public Safety ordinance and co-sponsor the Treatment Not Trauma ordinance. The march will then return to the park for a picnic and teach-ins. ( Jim Daley)
The Gathering: Organizing for Effectiveness Zoom. Tuesday, June 22, 4:30-6:30pm. Free. Register at tinyurl.com/junegathering The Gathering is a monthly workshop series hosted by the #LSCs4All Coalition for Local School Councils members, public education advocates, parents and community members that seeks to create more effective and engaged LSCs. This Gathering will provide insight on effective preparation for the upcoming school year, including for the LSC organizational meeting, committee recommendations, and training dates. (Maddie Parrish)
City Council Meeting City Hall, 121 N. LaSalle St., and virtually via the City Clerk’s website. Wednesday, June 23, 10am. Free. rebrand.ly/CityClerk
March With the Coalition for Peace Chicago City Hall, 121 N. LaSalle St. Monday, June 21,11am-3pm. Free. sign.moveon.org/petitions/pass-the-peace-book-ordinance-now GoodKids MadCity is organizing a peace march to demand resources for gun violence prevention. These demands include free mental health resources, fair housing, and passing of GoodKids MadCity’s Peace Book Ordinance. The Peace Book requires the reallocation of at least two percent of CPD’s budget. This would fund a regularly published “book” that provides resources and opportunities in order to reduce youth incarceration and violence in the city. (Chima Ikoro)
Seminary Co-op Bookstore Reopens 5751 S. Woodlawn Ave. Saturday, June 12, 10am-5pm. See semcoop.com for additional hours. After fourteen months, the Hyde Park bookstore reopens for in-person shopping— but curbside pickup will remain available Tuesday-Friday, 2pm-5pm in the main lobby. On Thursday, June 10, at 4pm the bookstore hosts a free Zoom event with author and SAIC professor Romi Crawford and contributors to her new book, Fleeting Monuments for the Wall of Respect, which collects more than thirty artistic responses to the legendary and now-eradicated mural. Register at bit.ly/3x3q7dh. (Martha Bayne)
Palabras y Rimas Pilsen Arts & Community House, 1637 W. 18th St., Saturday, June 12 and Sunday, June 13, 2pm–5pm, Free. Get tickets at rb.gy/7ayqw1 This is a two-day family event that celebrates culture and diverse children’s books in English and Spanish. Meet local children’s book authors and enjoy sample readings. Organizers invite children to come in their favorite superhero costumes. There will be free food, music, and activities for all ages. (Alma Campos)
Latino Writers Initiative Virtual Writers Meet-Up Zoom. June 15, 5:45pm. Free. Register at tinyurl.com/latinowritersinitiative Hosted by the National Museum of Mexican Art and the Latino Writers Initiative, this virtual meet-up is for Mexican and Latinx writers of all levels to practice writing skills with writing prompts and fun exercises. There will also be opportunities to connect with other Latinx writers and get feedback. (Maddie Parrish)
Mayor Lori Lightfoot will preside over a meeting of the full City Council. The agenda may include competing proposals to honor Jean Baptiste Point DuSable, among other legislation. Members of the public can sign up to address the meeting on the day of at City Hall (enter from Washington St.), or sign up to comment via videoconference by calling (312) 744-6800 before Monday, June 21. ( Jim Daley) JUNE 10, 2021 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 21
EVENTS
VISUAL ART Chicago Comics: 1960s to Now Museum of Contemporary Art, 220 E. Chicago Ave., 4th Fl. June 19-October 3. Adult tickets $15. Free admission for people under eighteen. mcachicago.org/Exhibitions/2021/Chicago-Comics-1960s-To-Now Over forty cartoonists with Chicago ties are represented in an exhibition that explores the ways that comics are used not only to entertain readers, but to engage them in the relevant social and political issues of their time. The exhibit is divided into four sections spanning Chicago comics history, including 1960-1970s: The Underground; 1980-1990s: Alternative Weeklies, Comic Books, and Zines; 19902000s: Graphic Novels and Community; and 2010-Now: Chicago Rising. ( Jackie Serrato)
Planting and Maintaining a Perennial Garden: Shrouds by Faheem Majeed Hyde Park Art Center, 5020 S. Cornell Avenue, Chicago, IL (Hyde Park Art Center). Sunday, June 13, 9AM-8PM. Free. This ambitious new installation and exhibition furthers Chicago artist Faheem Majeed’s investigation of culturally specific institutions by focusing on the history and memory of the historic South Side Community Art Center (SSCAC). Curated by Allison Peters Quinn, Hyde Park Art Center director of exhibition and residency programs, the exhibition—available for in-person viewing—is up through July 24. Admission is free; advance registration is required. For hours and registration, visit www.hydeparkart.org (Isabel Nieves)
MUSIC Miyagi Records Record Store Day Event
FOOD & LAND 61st Street Market 6100 S. Blackstone Ave. Saturday, June 12, 9am–2pm. Free. (773) 241-6044. experimentalstation.org/market It’s back! Chicagoland farmers, cheesemakers, bakers and others hawk their wares every Saturday outside the Experimental Station. The market accepts LINK and Senior Farmers Market Coupons, and all LINK purchases are matched up to $25. (Martha Bayne)
Market at the Park Dvorak Park, 1119 W. Cullerton Ave. June 12. 9am-2pm. Free Saturday market on the basketball court. $25 to book a table. All vendor fees will go directly to the Dvorak Park Community Council in Pilsen. ( Jackie Serrato)
Hyde Park Farmers Market Grand Opening 5400 S Lake Park Ave W. June 13, 9am - 1pm. Free. Hyde Park is opening a brand new farmers market presented by the South East Chicago Commission. Market days will be Sundays from 9am-1pm. (Maddie Parrish)
Pilsen Vendor Market 1756 W. 19th St. Sundays April-October, 12-5pm. Free.
Silver Room, 1506 E. 53rd St., Saturday, June 12, noon-6pm. Free. thesilverroom.com The local record dealer hosts a Record Store Day event with a live performance by Mathien, DJ sets by Jaidot, K. Max, Nosha Luv, Shazam Bangles, and Trew, and deals on oodles of obscure and classic vinyl (soul, funk, jazz, Latin, hip-hop, disco, House, and more). (Martha Bayne)
DANCE Push/Pull: A Live Performance by The Seldoms feat. Faheem Majeed Hyde Park Art Center, 5020 S. Cornell Ave. In-person event in the Gallery 1 exhibition space. Thursday, June 10, 6-7pm, and Saturday, June 12, 2-3pm. Free, but advance registration required; hydeparkart.org The Seldoms company member Damon Green gives a live performance of Push/ Pull, followed by a Q&A with collaborators Carrie Hanson and Faheem Majeed. This short performance, choreographed by The Seldoms’ artistic director Hanson, 22 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY
activates Majeed's rubbing of the South Side Community Art Center as part of his HPAC exhibition Planting and Maintaining a Perennial Garden: Shroud. Push/Pull is also featured in a twenty-minute video performance, recorded in the New Bauhausdesigned gallery of SSCAC and currently playing on the HPAC’s facade from 3-10pm daily during the exhibition. (Isabel Nieves)
¬ JUNE 10, 2021
The Pilsen Vendor Market features local artists and makers in a weekly pop-up in indoor and outdoor spaces. (Isabel Nieves)
Visit The Food Pantry at The Church of St. Paul and the Redeemer 4945 S. Dorchester Avenue
Wednesday’s 3:30 - 5:30 p.m. No prepackaged bags, Guest Choice
Photo ID and proof of address required
MUST WEAR MASKS
