Chicago Students Grappling With the Reality of a Trump Presidency

By Jocelynn Carrillo and Sarah J. Wotaszak

As now-President-elect Trump’s electoral college vote crept closer to 270 with shocking brevity while Hillary Clinton’s total stagnated dozens of digits below the magic number, the world watched the remarkable upset in an unprecedentedly visceral way.

“Chinga Tu Pelo” poster in University Village. 

In the days following the election, passionate anti-Trump posts on social media and protests in the Loop showed that, overwhelmingly, Chicago’s students were angry, disappointed, scared, but above all, energized about civic engagement.

Plot Twist: Donald Trump’s Rhetoric Is Actually Indicative of Social Progress

For many, Donald Trump’s disgraceful language suggests the onset of a political Armageddon in the United States, but for others, the showman’s brutal honesty is what’s going to “Make America Great Again.” 

As students, nonstudents, Chicagoans, and folks from throughout the surrounding suburbs hastily filled the Quad at the University of Illinois at Chicago’s (UIC) campus, the goals of the united protestors were made clear to any of those who may still be unsure: stop Donald J. Trump from speaking at all costs.

UIC’s Writing for Digital and New Media Class

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: April 14, 2016

UIC’s First Writing for Digital and New Media Class

The first course of its kind offered at UIC debuted during the Spring 2016 semester with an inaugural class of 18 students.

Chicago, IL, April 14, 2016 – The University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) is currently offering its students a course entitled English 383: Writing Digital and New Media.  The university’s course catalogue describes the course as a lesson in the rhetorical, practical and ethical aspects of digital writing. The class prepares students for a writing career during the 21^st century, a time during which most professional writing is being streamlined for online consumption.

O’Shea Jackson Jr. on “Fuck Tha Police” and Changing the Police Brutality Conversation

Image by Todd MacMillan.

Last month, O’Shea Jackson Jr., the star of the critically acclaimed 2015 film Straight Outta Compton, spoke to the 30 students enrolled in the English 160 course, Lose Yourself: The Transformative Power of Music at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC). The class, taught by Dr. Margena A. Christian, was writing an argumentative essay on N.W.A. and how the group and its members altered the course of free speech with their controversial song, “Fuck Tha Police.” O’Shea arranged to Skype the excited students (many of whom had never interviewed anyone, much less the lead actor of a box-office smash) so that they could ask him about his personal thoughts on the movie, the music, and the repercussions that all of N.W.A.’s actions had on free and uncensored speech in popular music.

Not So Black & White

University of Illinois (UIC) Junior Bernadine Williams‘ mixed racial identity profoundly influences the ways in which she uses her own everyday experiences as the daughter of a black father and white mother to create a wide variety of narratives in preparation for a career in filmmaking and screenwriting.

Born Bernadine Julia, junior to her father Bernadi Julius, Williams was raised in what she described as “a small, wrecked Michigan town,” where she lived until the age of 10. At this juncture where she was no longer a young child but not quite a teenager yet, her family moved to a predominantly white suburb of Chicago.