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.