In 2015, I drafted a manifesto, “Youth Advocacy and Action (Y2A).” I did not want to start another organization or youth program, but I wanted to be clear what I was looking for in work collaborating with youth. This manifesto is indebted to a number of scholars, activists and organizations that appear in another blog […]
ReGeneration Fund
My family started the ReGeneration Fund, through the Community Foundation of East Central Illinois (CFECI) to support young people working toward racial, economic, and environmental justice locally. The ReGeneration Fund can grow from its current modest size to greater potential if others contribute as well. Go to the CFECI website if you would like to […]
Mutuality between campus and community?
In preparation for Sounds Like Community, an online event that the Urbana-Champaign Independent Media Center has been organizing ever since the pandemic started over a year ago, I thought I would (re)post these lists of Tips and Tricks that were collaboratively generated in 2014 when I had a fellowship at the University of Bristol in […]
Examining White Supremacy, Again
Places of Intervention, Spaces of Possibilities
Seeing Poorly. Feeling a Lot.
My eyesight has deteriorated in my sixties. Those times when I cut a thread with blunt scissors, it unwinds as I try to insert it into the eye of a needle. The needle has an eye and my eyes can barely see it. The thread bends and goes off to one side or the other […]
Panicky Pandemicky Thoughts
Readings and Listenings and Recollections Bambara, Toni Cade. “An Interview with Toni Cade Bambara.” By Kay Bonetti. Conversations with Toni Cade Bambara. Ed. Thabiti Lewis. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 2012. 35–47. Campt, Tina. Listening to Images (Duke UP, 2017). https://www.dukeupress.edu/listening-to-images Hartman, Saidiya. Wayward Lives: Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women and […]
Walking Down a Black-and-White Road
My parents, my two older sisters and I lived in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, between 1960-1963. I was in third to fifth grades. During our years there, we marched in protest of segregated restaurants, movie theatres, and drugstores, boycotted segregated businesses, did voter registration drives, staged sit-ins, and were threatened by gun-wielding white men. The […]
Bank of America?
We are actively starting dumpster fires with our extractive technologies. I emailed the following message to two CEOs of Bank of America today. Their emails were not on the corporate website, but after some searching I came up with what I hope works: brian.t.moynihan, anne.m.finucane at bankofamerica dot com I didn’t tell the CEOs that I […]
Alberto Aguilar moves on a human scale, Gallery 400
Chicago-based artist Alberto Aguilar has assembled a wonderful exhibit, “moves on a human scale,” at Gallery 400. The show closes June 15, 2019. I left feeling buoyed by family love and delighted at the way the Aguilars–four children, Aguilar’s wife, Sonia, and Alberto himself–all seemed invested in daily art creation. For example, “Pizza Parade” of […]
