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What Happened When Evanston Became America’s First City to Promise Reparations Bloomberg 11 hrs ago Susan Berfield and Jordyn Holman
(Bloomberg Businessweek) Lucious Sutton disconnected the water line, the gas line, and the sewer line for the home he’d built on Bauer Place on the northwestern edge of Evanston. He and his brothers removed the appliances and the furniture. They secured the windows. Then he watched as men he didn’t know maybe they worked for the city, maybe for a property developer jacked up the wooden house, set it onto a truck, and drove it a mile-and-a-half to the neighborhood the city had deemed more suitable for Black families. A sheriff stood by.
Casting call from Wirtz raises questions on racism in theatre
On April 28, the Wirtz Center for the Performing Arts sent out a casting call to their email list. The call listed 15 available roles, but only one, at the very bottom, was for a woman of color who the call noted had to be “sensual.”
This casting call is neither atypical for the theatre industry as a whole, nor at Northwestern. The Wirtz Center sends out casting calls for both theatrical and outside films or projects nearly every other week.
When Communication senior Alessandra Hernández received the April 28 call, she said she scanned the email for a role she could fill when she saw the listing for any woman of color who is “fiery.” For Hernández, the casting call suggested Wirtz didn’t care whether she was Black or Latinx, because they just needed their “token person of color.”.
Evanston Township High School students are continuing to educate the Evanston community and press on racial equity in the city, even as they say the momentum behind last summer’s wave of antiracism action has fizzled.
Since the police killing of George Floyd last spring, ETHS senior Mika Parisien has been working as a board member of both Students Organized Against Racism and Evanston Fight for Black Lives.
Through these organizations, Parisien is leading equity workshops to discuss antiracism, at her school and at other Evanston schools. EFBL has also met with City Council, organized protests and redistributed donations through a mutual aid fund.
December 22, 2020
Second Ward resident Regina SantâAnna has helped her elderly neighbor carry hundreds of boxes of bottled water from her car to her home. Living on the border of the historically Black 5th Ward, SantâAnna has noticed that some residents are concerned about their water quality.
âAt times in underserved communities of color, brown or Black, you have a lot of people investing in (bottled) water,â SantâAnna said. âYou have to put in your budget plastic bottled water, because you do not trust the water systems.â
SantâAnnaâs neighbor is one of many Evanston residents concerned about their drinking water. Home to Evanstonâs only waste transfer station, the 5th Ward specifically has suffered from discriminatory environmental policies that impact residentsâ air quality and health. While the reasons for distrust may vary, the 2014 Flint, Mich. water crisis renewed city-wide concern for lead in water.