If we have the courage and tenacity of our forebears, who stood firmly like a rock against the lash of slavery, we shall find a way to do for our day what they did for theirs. ~Mary McLeod Bethune I’d never been to Alabama before our trip in November 2024. Actually I’ve hardly spent any […]
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 […]
What’s Next with “No Budget”?
The president of the University, Tim Killeen, just sent an email to everybody in the University of Illinois system called “No state budget.” I do not want to minimize the enduring damage that has been done to programs and services that have benefited many people in the state and that have had to close due […]
On Not Moving On
I am reading Glen Sean Coulthard’s Red Skin, White Masks (2014). One strategy I use when I am confused and trying to figure out next steps in politico-cultural action is to pick a book like Coulthard’s and find passages in it that help me understand what might be going on. Not that Coulthard is or […]
Women, Information Technology, and Scholarship (WITS) Revisited
In September 2013, I was privileged to be part of a conversation with four former members of the Women, Information Technology, and Scholarship (WITS) group, which was active at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign through most of the 1990s: Jenny Barrett, Leigh Estabrook, Gail Hawisher, and Angharad Valdivia. Here is the video recording of our […]
Institutional Racism and the Morrill Act
I was recently on a panel at the University YWCA in Champaign called “Institutional Racism 101.” This is part of a series the YW presents that provides participants a “racial justice certificate” when the series concludes. Gia Lewis-Smallwood organizes the series. Kudos to her and the Y! I was pleased to meet a whole new […]
Jano Justice Systems and Jury Selection
I was recently on jury duty and did some informal inquiry and observation about the current ways in which Champaign County (IL) finds jurors. On a Monday morning, about 35 of us showed up at the courthouse in downtown Urbana and had a brief orientation. The staff handed us badges with bar codes and our […]
Memorial Day and Beyond the Chief
I have spent this rainy Memorial Day thinking more about responses to the vandalism of “Beyond the Chief,” by artist Edgar Heap of Birds. Because this art installation of twelve red and white signs is to honor and remember those tribes and peoples who have come before us, I wondered about parallels between the damage […]
