4/14/18 Session #13

This cold and rainy April morning was a smaller turnout for our group whom most are feeling the strain of the end of semester stress. I invited a fellow earlier this week to start us off with a guided meditation to help us feel more focused for the tasks at hand. After meditating, we began to review pictures and discuss the agendas and themes from the first year of Brown In Chicago and the experience from our culminating project last spring. I discussed the varieties of workshops and presentations that were held that day and unpacked our process of putting that together.

Before we began to break out to our brainstorming exercise I wanted to ground us with this consideration:

Think about why this project is important to you?
What motivates you to wake up early on a Saturday morning to join us?
How does this space feel to you?
How do can you recreate that feeling to share with others?

In the hallway I had large sticky notes sheets to the wall with the following questions in regards to creating a culminating project vision:

How we will show/tell our stories?
Poetry
Photo exhibit
Pannel
Art we created
personal testimonies
zine
What will we tell stories about?
expanding latinx/a/o identities
all latino cultures (beyond mexican)
healing from gen trauma
how our DNA results changed our parents/family perspective/ ideas about certain cultures/identities
internalized racism
colorism
our identity shifts
ACCESSIBLE ethnic studies with younger and elders
How results contributed to self
What will they (audience) be doing?
Be a representation of me and show the world how neat it is to be brown and struggle but also love yourself!!
DIY workshops (arts and crafts)
listening and interacting
thinking about their own experiences and owning them
meditations
ask questions

Who will be there?
Latinx Families/Other POC/friends
community members
Students/professors
Artist
How do we want to feel during and after the event?
Safe
validated
sense of belonging
empowered
reflective
shook
calm/celebrated/connected/ centered
How do we want our guest to feel?
If they are YT-Uncomfortable and guilty
If brown/black/ect welcomed and allow them to express their feelings/stories
Included/ POC Empowered/ resonance
learned something new

Afterwards, we collected the sheets and discussed what was shared and how do want to make these visions come to life. Our next meeting we will pick up where we left off and start to put together our agenda for this event!

1/27/18 Session #8

Our check in this morning revealed that with the momentum picking up for the new year many of us are beginning to feel overwhelmed with our daily responsibilities.There was a sense of feeling unbalanced within our roles, school, work, and personal lives. As a group we thought it would be best to center ourselves and practice mindfulness and meditation before diving into the discussion for today. We practiced an excerpt of a 21 day meditation series called Black Feminist Breathing Chorus , which focuses on a guided meditation lead by Alexis Pauline Gumbs. Each meditation day is inspired by the legacies of black feminist thinkers, writers and activist. We meditated to day two which features Poet Laureate Gwendolyn Brooks and the affirmation highlighted from this episode was, “I have hopes for myself.”

We planned to take time to discuss and debrief the 23andMe DNA ancestry results because a majority of the group received their results and were eager to process. We took turns going around and asking “what has changed about how we see ourselves after our results” or “what questions we have about the results?”  For those who did not get their results back they shared experiences they have had with instances of prejudice around the nuances of race/ethnicity/nationality.The following are the responses from the group:

Ashley- Which box do I check off on legal documents or surveys since I’m 75.8% Native American? I don’t have to check off the white box under the category for race but do I have that privilege to check off Native on the boxes? I want to continue to learn more about the indigenous side of my family.

Pedro- While filling out border card to go from O’Hare to London during my recent study abroad trip,I filled out my nationality as Latino/Hispanic  on some paperwork and the TSA agent aggressively crossed out my selection and told me, “NO, you’re AMERICAN!” I didn’t want to argue so he can get on my flight safely without being detained.

Annisa- When I shared my results with my parents my father teased her about having 33% Native American ancestry and about continued on how I inherited that ancestry from my mother’s side.

Lucas- Receiving my results inspired me to travel to Spain and Italy more!

Roxy- Uncovering that her grandmother isn’t my “maternal” grandmother and now I’m trying to discover the stories and rumors about her papers being fake or stolen might be true.

Brittany- I am trying to understand where Native American identity fits into my own identity? I find it so weird that I come from Europe/Spain when ethnically I am from the islas like Puerto Rico and Dominican Republic. How can I be both?

Austin-I think we construct our own identity but also we honor our families and ancestors. I have learned so much about who I am from my mother and am starting to understand how these identities intersect.

Emma- I’m feeling overwhelmed and processing these fresh results still.

Juliet- Reclaiming African diasporic identity is helping me counter the anti-blackness within my family and also to accept that I am mezitaze and how mixed my own heritage is.

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We ended our meeting to a quick field trip down the street to visit Hairpin Arts Center, for their latest guest installation called, For the People Art Collective “DO NOT RESIST? 100 Years of Chicago Police Violence.” We had a private tour curated for our group around the different exhibit art pieces that addressed Chicago Police Brutality over the last 100 years. Art that was represented from as early as the 1919 Chicago Race Riots to #BlacklivesMatters demonstration photography from the last few years. I also spotted a photo of my fellow LSNA Youth Organizing colleague Lili with her five year old daughter at a #BlacklivesMatters protest we attended with a group of Youth leaders during the summer of 2016.

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It is important to remind ourselves why projects such as Brown in Chicago wants to explore notions of race, identity, decolonization, and power structures. These are the social constructions our society is informed by and how we navigate throughout our communities. This art installation reminds us that our history and engagement with Policing and Prison Industrial Complex is perpetuated are sustained by racism and violence. What we can do to not continue to engage within these structures is to truly take time to reflect within ourselves what privileges we benefit from and may take for granted. While challenging how to hold ourselves accountable to not be a bystander to inequalities that are as subtle as a micro-aggression’s or inequity within institutionalized spaces.