Nou La! (We are Here!)

Someone asked me this week what is motivating me in this moment. I can say that this Haitian Kreyol statement energizes me immensely. In these times, to assert presence, show up for one’s community and declare one’s value can feel like dangerous work. But many of us persist and do it anyway, knowing that what matters most is putting thoughts and words into action, even if we doubt ourselves along the way, and even if others don’t always understand why we do things in particular ways.

Like all UIC’s cultural centers, WLRC is a space for the campus to learn, think about, and engage with ideas old, new, and emerging. We came into being in 1990/1991 because women students, staff and faculty saw the need to have a space on campus that was different from the traditional classroom. Where you could browse a bookshelf filled with materials that you might not have encountered in any of your courses. Where you could be in a conversation about matters considered too risky or too political to discuss openly elsewhere. Where you could begin the work of building community and forging authentic relationships around shared values, knowing that at least one corner of the university would support you in that mission. Where you were able to understand that getting a college education is the beginning, not the end, of a journey towards self-definition and establishing one’s place in the world.

The university has always been a contested space; indeed, the cultural centers exist because of hard-won struggles over which bodies and ideas rightfully belonged on the campus in the first place. When I first arrived on a college campus in 1987, I understood it as a space for asking questions, learning different methodologies for arriving at answers, and working together to understand the implications of the answers that we offered to the problems of the world. A women’s center and women’s studies classes on that campus helped to make the social infrastructure of race, gender, class, and sexuality visible – in the ways that they shaped who was taken seriously, who was subjected to violence, whose presence and intellect were questioned, who was cared for, and who did the work of caring.

Even though women’s and gender equity centers continue to educate campuses about enduring issues – poverty, exploitation of racialized-gendered labor, demonization and scapegoating of immigrants, imperialism and the ravenous war machine, denial of reproductive justice, to name a few – these spaces are now under attack. Across the U.S., these centers are being reorganized, defunded, renamed, shut down, made into shells of their former selves. Through our programs, initiatives, workshops, and collaborative approach, WLRC continues to champion the idea that UIC can be a university where all women and nonbinary persons can thrive, irrespective of identity or background or circumstance. But we also have to do the hard and often misunderstood work to make it so. We also have to come together to defend the spaces that make this university more inclusive, more welcoming, more just – frankly, more of what the wider society fails to be for too many these days. In times of difficulty, the instinct is to hide, to cower, to wait and hope that the ill wind blows past us and doesn’t destroy everything that we have built. But maybe, just maybe, that’s also the time we should collectively proclaim “nou la!” We are here! That’s the time that we need to hear each other – to affirm, to witness, to bear up, to echo, to be reminded of what we value, and why – even when others don’t want to listen to us.

On this Wednesday, October 8 at 4 PM, we join with Little Sparks to welcome UIC’s parenting students to gather, meet each other, learn about the resources that exist to support them on and off campus, and share stories about how they are able to rise and thrive at this institution. Children are welcome! We encourage you to register. If you know parenting students who could benefit from being in community, please let them know. Parking passes are available.

It is Banned Books Week in the U.S. Various universities and organizations around the country bring attention to the books that have been challenged or removed from libraries and schools on account that they question taken-for-granted assumptions about race, gender, sexuality, and how to talk about history. Several of the banned books explore the intersection of Blackness, gender and sexuality including The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot, Hood Feminism by Mikki Kendall, All Boys Aren’t Blue by George Johnson, and Pet by Akwaeze Emezi. Together with the Gender and Sexuality Center, the Black Cultural Center and Student Leadership and Civic Engagement, we are spotlighting Pet during this week. We invite you to read along with us – check out a copy from the UIC Daley Library, or pick up a copy from BCC. We will gather to discuss the text on Wednesday, October 22, 2:30 PM. See you there!

Until next time, take good care of yourselves and each other.