WBEZ | depaul

Stigma and Culture: Global Migrations and the Crisis of Identity in Black America

Fri, 12 Apr 2013 10:42:00 -0500

The black Atlantic is a site of not just roots and cultures but also routes and convergences. We must add that an element of those convergences is oppositional identity-making among populations of African descent from diverse geographical origins.

Stigma and Culture with J. Lorand Matory, PhD. Duke University, explores the re-articulation of ethnic boundaries and cultural diacritica by which African and Caribbean immigrants to the United States, as well as Louisiana Creoles of color and Native American populations of partly African descent, endeavor to distinguish themselves from a supposedly more prototypical black American, with the intent to establish their worthiness of the American dream. Such self-construction in contrast to the stigmatized African American is taken as a case study of the role of stigma in the genesis of cultural identities generally in a time of global migrations.

This is one of our keynote speakers for DePaul University's conference, Remapping the Black Atlantic: (Re)Writings of Race and Space which took place April 12-14. More information on the conference can be found here.

Recorded live Friday, April 12, 2013 at DePaul University's Lincoln Park Student Center.

Local colleges need more Chicago prep talent

Mon, 18 Mar 2013 06:00:00 -0500

While colleges across the country celebrate getting into the NCAA men’s basketball tournament, there is no madness in Chicago. It has been years since Chicago had a spotlight on it for its men's college basketball prowess. This is difficult to understand with the quality of the players who excel on the high school courts of Chicago. Particularly since the Big Ten Conference (arguably the best in the country) just held court at the United Center for its tournament. It’s tough to see local teams in such a rut. It’s hard to watch the best talent from Chicago not play here on the NCAA Division I level.

Fifty years ago, the Loyola Ramblers celebrated the last time a time from Chicago won a national title. DePaul during the 70s and 80s was a nationally renowned team under Head Coach Ray Meyer. During the Blue Demons hey day, they were the basketball team in Chicago (not the Bulls). This of course was pre-Michael Jordan and six NBA titles. There have been Chicago schools in the NCAA tournament in the past few decades, but none have been a premier team in the country.

There have been times when Bradley, Northern Illinois, Southern Illinois and Illinois have produced winning men's programs. Illinois has made numerous appearances in the NCAA tournament. It was just eight years ago when Bruce Weber took the Illini with Dee Brown and Deron Williams to the brink of a NCAA championship. They lost to North Carolina in the final.

Many give credit to former coach Bill Self for bringing in those players before he bolted to Kansas and won the NCAA championship there. After the loss to the Tar Heels, Illinois saw erosion of talent. Weber was fired and now Illinois is under the leadership of John Groce. In his first season, the Illini coach is guiding the team to post season play. The #7 seed Illinois will play #10 seed Colorado in first round NCAA action on Friday in Austin, Texas.

Simeon High School’s Jabari Parker, the top national player and an excellent student, is headed to Duke. Why not? It is an elite program and has been consistently challenging for national titles. It is a huge shame that a team from this area, DePaul or Northwestern, was not even considered. Derrick Rose left here to play at Memphis for a year before leaping to the NBA.

Why is it hard to keep the best Chicago high school players? The factors are numerous: campus life, coaches, consistency of excellence, putting a distance from the streets of Chicago (and for some, the weather). Whatever the reasons, the local college teams see players leave and not become hometown heroes.

Here is a look at what the Chicago college teams did this season:

DePaul 11-21 (overall) 2-16 (Big East conference)

The Blue Demons been spinning their wheels for years. They have been the doormat in the conference and now they will be joining the new league of the Catholic schools. Playing in Rosemont is a huge negative for the school. Their last NCAA appearance was 2004.

Northwestern 13-19 (overall) 4-15 (Big Ten Conference)

They started the season 7-0. Numerous injuries and a suspension depleted the team’s roster. With the loss to Iowa in the first round on Thursday, Northwestern fired head coach Bill Carmody on Saturday after 13 years guiding the team. One of the names highlighted for this job is Duke assistant Chris Collins. He is from the area and his father Doug is a former Chicago Bulls coach. NU has never been to the NCAA tournament.

University of Illinois Chicago 17-15 (overall) 7-9 (Horizon Conference)

The Flames will go to the Collegeinsider.com tournament. It's a rather new event that gives some teams a chance to experience post season play. UIC has had four post season appearances, three NCAA, one NIT and no wins.

Loyola 15-16 (overall) 5-11(Horizon Conference)

Head coach Porter Moser has had the job for two years. The Ramblers have not been to the NCAA since their "Sweet 16" appearance in 1985.

Chicago State 11-21 (overall) 5-5 (Great West Conference)

They won the Great West Conference tournament, which they also hosted on Saturday. The win gave them a berth in the Collegeinsider.com tournament. It is the school’s first post-season appearance. The Cougars will join the WAC next year. Head coach Tracey Dilby is finishing his third season. He was a former DePaul and UIC assistant.

According to former players, it doesn’t take much to turn a basketball program. If a school can recruit one or two top notch players, it can catapult a college team. The challenge is convincing Chicago student athletes to stay here and make a difference.

Looking at what John Groce did in his first recruiting year may mean Illinois is moving in the right direction. He will have two players from Simeon high school playing for him next season: Kendrick Nunn and Jaylon Tate. Groce got some help from an Illinois alumni and former star Kendall Gill. The new coach asked him to recruit and it worked. Gill’s pitch is something his parents told him: stay in your home state and it will be beneficial when the playing career is completed. He believes the alumni base in Illinois helped him when his playing days in the NBA were over.

Follow Cheryl on Twitter @CRayeStout and Facebook Cheryl Raye Stout #AtTheGame.

Aborted baby flag removal sparks debate at DePaul University

Tue, 29 Jan 2013 05:00:00 -0600

Tuesday, January 22 marked the 40th anniversary of Roe v. Wade, the landmark court decision on abortion and women’s sexual health, but at DePaul University, that day will be remembered very differently.

In the university's quad, the conservative student group Young Americans for Freedom erected a pro-life memorial to their cited 54 million fetuses aborted in the decades since Roe's passage. To do so, the students hung pink and blue flags in the quad as a form of public protest. To counterprotest, another group of pro-choice students took the flags down, distributing them in garbage cans across campus.

According to a source close to the pro-choice protestors, they thought it was the most peaceful way to respond. Some students planned on writing affirming messages on the flags and returning them to their previous positions, as a reminder that this issue isn’t just about babies, it’s about women’s rights. They hoped that doing so would send a message to pro-life students on campus and start a dialogue at a school that often ignores issues of sexual health. No one expected it would go as far as it did. No one thought it would mean they might not graduate.

The problem began when an article from Fox News, the Pied Piper of American conservatism, threw ideological gasoline all over the conflict, branding the pro-choice students as “vandals” and Young Americans for Freedom as heroes of the GOP and warriors of free speech. Fox writer Todd Starnes—who comes personally endorsed by Sarah Palin and Sean Hannity—used the conflict as a way to bash the pro-choice students as being bigots. Other articles continue to refer to the students as “leftists” and “radicals” (or sometimes both!) and the act as a “trashing” of students' rights.

To further this indictiment, Fox spoke to Kristopher Del Campo, the DePaul chairman for Young Americans for Freedom. Del Campo said, “It is a sad thing to see that liberal minded students aren’t more tolerant, and don’t respect the views of those who respect the lives of the unborn. It’s really discouraging and I’m saddened by that.”

In a follow-up article in the DePaulia, the university’s student-run newspaper, Del Campo went much further, referring to the flags’ removal as an “act of hate.” (He also says that liberals are more likely to be the perpetrators of hate crimes.)

Despite an apology from the university’s Dean of Students, Art Munin, Del Campo advocated that the university go further, calling for expulsion for all the students involved. Del Campo told the DePaulia that YAF has surveillance footage of the students responsible and that they will show that alleged footage to the police. In the meantime, Del Campo stated that he like to see DePaul take responsibility in hunting down those responsible: “If you really want to find these students, put out pictures…Let other students see it and identify students.”

Del Campo’s advocacy for a student witch hunt isn’t the first time that the school’s faced free speech issues at DePaul, as a “satirical” Affirmative Action Bake Sale in 2006 highlighted the extreme divisions between conservative and liberal students on the nation’s largest Catholic campus.

One of the pro-choice students involved in the incident, who asked not to be identified (and will be referred to as “X"), stated that incidents like these are endemic of a divided campus, an ongoing problem that the university has failed to holistically tackle. When X started at the university in 2009, students put up swastikas in Corcoran Hall, a residence building at DePaul, and in some of the other dorms. In 2011, another incident arose when a student began to shout out anti-Semitic and anti-Muslim slurs in the student center.

According to X, the pro-choice students involved didn’t mean to “fuel this fire” at DePaul. This isn't what anyone wanted. They didn't even know that Young Americans for Freedom existed.

Because pro-choice groups are informally banned on campus, X—like many students I spoke with—assumed that pro-life groups would not be allowed to operate either, due to the university’s strict procedures on sexually charged material and student organizations. Per school policy, student organizations aren’t allowed to distribute condoms, and sex ed is heavily censored.

Currently, the university offers a Sexual Health and Violence Prevention center (that many students don't even know exists) and a undergraduate group called the Student Health Advocates. However, it's hard for these groups to be effective on a campus that won't allow them to hold public demonstrations on Safe Sex 101—and give students the educational resources they need. Because of their strained relationship with sex, DePaul University claimed the title of “Most Sexually Unhealthy University” in 2011.

The DePaul administration claims that the university’s Catholic affiliation precludes amending these policies, even though other religious institutions (like Siena) allow for the distribution of condoms on campus.

However, X believes that the strict adherence to Catholic doctrine in the school’s sexual policies is a strange double standard, as the university allows LGBTQ groups to operate very publicly on campus and has been a champion of queer student visibility. In addition to an LGBTQ studies department, the school boasts three active queer student groups and allows them to throw yearly drag shows, which are a tentpole of the spring quarter. The 2011 show even took place in the DePaul Atrium, the common space of the school's student center.

Because the university's LGBTQ leadership has often been stereotyped as male (which was also an issue when I was a DePaul undergraduate), X remarked that queer visibility has been easier for DePaul administration to swallow.

As a student heavily involved in both LGBTQ and feminist organizing at DePaul, X stated that feminists on campus are "treated differently because they have vaginas." This creates a culture where some female students feel unsafe, which include those students involved in last Tuesday's incident. X put it bluntly: "When you step on this campus, it feels like you don't have a choice."

Because of this gender gap, the student worried that DePaul is going to use the flag removal to further marginalize the school's feminist and pro-choice communities. When X was initially questioned about the event, the student told me that administrators were already looking for links to feminist groups and leaders on campus. They were searching for a target. Currently, the university is seeking possible expulsion for anyone who was involved in the flag removal.

Tracey Harkins, a senior DePaul student in Women and Gender Studies, agreed that gender inequality on campus is a huge problem and said that DePaul should show the same progressive stance to sexuality that they have demonstrated on queer issues. Instead of further silencing women’s voices on campus and scapegoating them for the university's problems, the university should use this as an opportunity to start a conversation on sexual health, a dialogue that should have taken place a long time ago.

According to Harkins, the conflict “speaks to a real issue at DePaul,” causing her to “question how DePaul handles a range of women-related issues.” Harkins cited this incident as yet another failure from the university in regards to its female population, as the school has yet to take action against sexual assaults that occurred on campus last fall. For Harkins, this is representative an ongoing problem at “campuses across the country,” where women are “made to feel devalued” by administrations that don’t take their sexual health seriously. She argued that “women cannot feel safe at an institutional level if they are considered unequal.”

In response to DePaul's sex problems, Harkins is working with a team of student organizers on “Say Yes to Consent,” which hopes to change the culture of sex at DePaul and on Chicago’s campuses. With student members from universities across the city—including the University of Illinois at Chicago, Columbia College and Northwestern University—the group hopes pressure university administrators to include policies educating students on sexual assault, consent and women's health, rather than sweeping these issues under the rug.

As statistics show that 1 in 4 women will be sexually assaulted before graduating college, Harkins feels the best way to commemorate Roe v. Wade is to continue the fight for greater awareness: “We’ve come a long way in the past 40 years, but our work is far from over.”

Nico Lang blogs about LGBTQ life in Chicago for WBEZ.org. Follow Nico on Twitter @Nico_Lang or on Facebook.

Revisiting the code of 'The Brickyard'

Tue, 20 Sep 2011 15:15:00 -0500

The local drug scene in Chicago was not just king pins and cartels. Drugs can erode day-to-day life; and for some, drugs consume most of life. Back in 2008, sociologist Greg Scott introduced listeners to a place where addicts got their fix; a place many called home. Known as “The Brickyard,” a community of addicts formed a community in the grounds of a legitimate brick salvage company on Cicero Avenue in Chicago. Scott was there to learn more about the code by which those in the community lived. Learning to abide by that code was, for many, a matter of life and death.

Greg Scott is a sociologist at DePaul University in Chicago. He also runs Sawbuck Productions, a multi-media production company. This story first aired in 2008 as part of Eight Forty-Eight's series The Brickyard.

Music Button: Sinister Luck Ensemble, "Small of the Back", from the album Anniversary, (Perishable)

'Dead Man Walking' nun donates personal collection to DePaul

Wed, 09 Feb 2011 21:49:00 -0600

A leading social justice activist is making Chicago the new home for her personal collections. Sister Helen Prejean is best known for her work with death row inmates detailed in the book and movie “Dead Man Walking.” Prejean's donation to DePaul University comes as Governor Pat Quinn is considering a bill to abolish the death penalty in Illinois. Prejean says she hopes the governor signs the bill.

“It's an important decision that he's doing, he's not lightly going to do it,” she said. “I just expect he is going to put his seal of approval on it. I don't think he is going to counter it.”

Quinn has until March 18th to act on the legislation. There has been a moratorium on executions in Illinois since 2000 when former Governor George Ryan called for a review of the death penalty.

At a press conference Wednesday, Prejean said DePaul’s commitment to social justice was what convinced her to donate her collection there. She said DePaul’s Center for Justice in Capital Cases’ leading Professor, Andrea Lyon, helped Governor Ryan draw attention to the death penalty. She acknowledged the role Ryan played in making current death penalty abolition legislation possible in Illinois.

“He stood up in front of the nation and he commuted those sentences,” she said. “It was so against what politicians would say was a wise thing to do.”

Prejean's 50 boxes of papers, spanning 30 years of work, will be used to teach law students starting this fall. The boxes contain letters to governors, correspondence with prisoners, speeches, and memorabilia from the set of “Dead Man Walking.” The archives will be open to the public sometime next year.

A peek at experimental animation at Eyeworks Festival

Fri, 05 Nov 2010 13:40:00 -0500

Everybody likes animation, whether it's classic Chuck Jones or Pixar or something from Adult Swim. But animation on the experimental, even avant garde side is the focus at Eyeworks.

The first ever Eyeworks Festival of Experimental Animation takes place Saturday at the DePaul CDM Theater located on S. State St. in Chicago. The theater is in the building’s basement, and the first program begins at 1 p.m. sharp.

This one day event features films with a whole array of animation styles - stop-motion, paper cutouts, computer generated 3D. Alexander Stewart is a co-founder of the fest, and he explained what's ahead at the fest.

Commodifying Hookers for Radio Consumption?

Thu, 23 Oct 2008 17:12:00 -0500

"Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible." (The Journalist and the Murderer, 1990, New York: Knopf) Eight-Forty Eight's story on women who exchange sex for money and/or drugs on the streets of Chicago's West Side drug economy took me nearly two months to produce. Of all the stories I've done so far, this one taxed me the most, emotionally, physically, and cognitively. You'd think it'd be simple: Find some hookers, interview each of them for 10 minutes, come back to the studio, and then start slapping sound together and hope they find coherence around some narrative arc. How could you go wrong? It's a story about hookers,‚ women who, as Cat (a crackhouse brothel matriarch) always reminds me, "have a 24 hour ATM between our legs." It speaks to a lurid and unseemly world, and the story is almost tantalizing on its face, really. And it plays to the average "normal" person's voyeuristic tendencies. Well, it hasn't been easy like this. In fact, it's been far more difficult than I ever anticipated. Why? Because journalism, especially when its practitioners interact with dispossessed populations, is in some ways morally indefensible. So let me begin with a qualified declaration of guilt: This story commits immoral acts. Or does it? Eight years ago I began living among the addicts, hookers, drug dealers, thieves, white collar workers, blue collar workers and others who patronize, frequent, traffic, and otherwise occupy The Brickyard. Having lived there, in a cardboard or plywood shanty, for a total of about two years (once you add together the many different sojourns spread across time), I developed hundreds of meaningful relationships with people who share the problem, the mental illness, of drug addiction. In the past six months, working as a freelance contributor for WBEZ, I have aspired to create a forum in which these dispossessed people can give voice to their lives, humanize themselves in ways often precluded by the very nature of the popular, profit-oriented mainstream press. The Eight Forty-Eight staff has amazed me with generous offerings of support, technical assistance, conceptual feedback, and all-around embrace of the work and the purpose behind it. But there's an internal contradiction I want to reveal right now: Helping to humanize the dehumanized among us-the hookers, addicts, and thieves-necessitates a form of dehumanization. That is, telling these stories, this one in particular, has required me to reduce complex human beings into "characters" who appear in a "story."‚ The act of humanizing requires dehumanizing the dehumanized, but in ways different from how they've been dehumanized to date. Their complicated lives-their hopes, biographies, passions-must get reduced to what we call "actualities," or the edited (sometimes heavily so), seemingly "natural", spoken passages that you hear between the voice over narration segments. Producing these stories hinges on my ability to transform these living, breathing, morally-concerned humans into disembodied, less complicated figures in a tale whose contours I determine. I create audio worlds for them to populate. I decide what kind of citizenship they will have in this audio world. I decide what kind of character they will have. And you trust me to get it right. You trust me to tell an accurate story. In this audio world I am the benevolent dictator. And they, the "subjects" (a term with dual connotation, technical and political) trust me to get it right. But more than that, they expect me to tell you their respective versions of THE TRUTH. Essentially, they figure that because we have this pre-existing bond, this quasi- or genuine friendship, I will present them in the most flattering ways possible. When I tell them "you're going to be in a radio show," they assume that I mean, "I'm going to present you in a story the way you would most like to see yourself." That, of course, doesn't happen. In the end, they may disagree with how I have reduced their lives, their persons, to relatively flimsy representations. They may disapprove of MY story, my account of how I see things. My perspective is informed by their perspectives, but it is not synonymous with them. After all, this is MY story to tell. Near the end of this story's production, a colleague of mine said, "Hey, it's great that your piece will be airing on the first day of pledge drive. That's gonna make some money for the station." I don't think my colleague fully appreciated the irony and contradiction inherent to this statement. Here I am, producing a story about women who "rent" their bodies in exchange for money, who prostitute themselves, who get pimped forcefully and subtly by the men in their lives, and their story, as a commodity, will "make money" for someone else. Throughout the process I have exploited their lives, their relationships, my relationships with them, to the end of producing a story that I hope causes people to think and talk differently about "that hooker" on the corner. I really hope to change the terms of the debate, to force people to realize, or at least consider the notion, that the people in The Brickyard are more similar to us, the so-called "normal people" than they are different. We're all prostitutes. We're all addicts. We're all thieves (e.g., remember those office supplies you took home without approval from the boss?). But we're not all equally situated to prevent these aspects of our lived experience from becoming the "master status" to which the rest of the world holds us accountable. Imagine your most shameful behavior, the most horrible thing you've done in your life. Now imagine that for the rest of your days you will be known, defined as that act, that moment. If this mental exercise works, you'll feel for a moment what it's like to BE a Brickyard resident. When the women in this story, and the women of the streets they represent, speak about themselves and talk about their lives, they pepper their narratives with verbs. They don't say, "I'm a prostitute," and they most definitely refrain from calling themselves "sex workers." If they talk about sex at all, they refer to the activities in which they engage to receive income. And money isn't money, at least not in the conventional sense. It's merely a very briefly possessed token whose redemption will afford them the drugs they need to satisfy, momentarily, their illness, their addiction. As Faye put it, "I can't wait for the next shot (of heroin) because the next shot will keep the next thought from coming. For me, thinking is dying. If I let myself really think about the situation I'm in, I'll probably die from the light of it."‚ So they speak and conceptualize themselves, their Selves, in verbs. They hustle, they work, they trick, they date, or they hook. The nouns associated with these verbs become symbolic prisons, lingusitic carceral cells in which they get reduced to what they are. "Sex is something we do," says Chrissy (my adoptive sister), "not something we are."‚ To embrace the noun (e.g., Whore) is to resign oneself to the degraded and static status of a spoiled identity. So does the production of a story on hookers become a form of second orderpimping? I have reduced these women to characters, manipulated theiractualities into a (hopefully) compelling story, one that you will consume happily, one whose consumption will inspire you to give your attention and your MONEY to WBEZ.‚ I have pimped the women yet again. (Notice that I did NOT say, "I am their pimp"...always avoid the noun). Is this accurate? If so, is it morally indefensible, as Janet Malcolm might suggest? Or is there some greater good, some positive contribution to public discourse that outweighs my exploitation of the lives of disadvantaged people? In the end, have I done more harm than good? And what about you?‚ Every interaction is suffused with moral phenomena, notions of and concerns about right and wrong. How was your experience listening to the story a moral instance?‚ How did it affect your moral sentience?‚ Let me know....