AREA Chicago

So our goal is always—no matter what we’re doing—it’s to educate people. Always. We had our last forum and we say we don’t need to know the politicians. You meet one politician, you’ve met them all. They need to know who we are. So when we have a forum, it’s about you knowing me, not me knowing you. You’re one of a billion. But now you need to know who I am. Because I’m not one of the zillion and even if I am, it’s a zillion of me you need to know…

When I hear folks in healthcare concerned about young people adhering to the regiment of a medication like PrEP, I don’t often hear them talking about the structural oppressions that make adherence difficult to impossible: lack of safe storage; the bureaucracy around Medicaid that makes it so easy to lose care; being denied services based on gender markers, or a new name that doesn’t match medical records; not having state ID, a social security number, or other documentation; lack of bus fare to pick up or refill prescriptions; the criminalization of survival crimes and/or quality of life crimes; limited access to a consistent phone number or email; the lack of youth-only spaces.

We need to build a mass political movement, which will relentlessly dismantle oppressive systems from multiple angles—through social justice unionism, de-privatizing and wholly subsidizing public services, universal health coverage for everyone without exception, and ultimately removing the most toxic poison to public health: capitalism itself. True healing will require an end to what is killing us, and the creation of a future where our systems enable collective well-being, prevent violence and disease, and protect us from exploitation and oppression.

2008 – 2009                Standish Willis calls for “Reparations” for the Chicago Police torture survivors. He is the first to frame the need for significant and expansive redress using the language of reparations. Oct 16, 2008               Jon Burge is indicted for perjury and obstruction of justice for falsely denying he and detectives at Area 2 Police […]

Following are transcripts of three of the testimonies offered during the City Hall Finance Committee Hearing from April 14, 2015 that discussed the proposed reparations ordinance for survivors of Chicago Police torture ordered by ex-CPD chief John Burge. AREA Chicago strove to transcribe every word and remain faithful to the testimonies as they were given. […]

Black Youth Project 100 (BYP100), Assata’s Daughters, We Charge Genocide, #Not1More and Organized Communities Against Deportations (OCAD) are taking action today to shut-down the International Association of Chiefs of Police (IACP) Conference in Chicago to demonstrate the urgency for a fundamental shift in the way this country invests in our most valuable resources – our people. Together, we’re organized to demand that our lives, our communities and our futures be made a priority. The police chiefs who belong to the IACP, and their local departments have a debt to pay for the lives and the resources they’ve stolen and we’re here to collect.

When we talk about how African people or Black people built America, this exhibit will show you how deep: not only that we built the structures, early structures in America physically, but the capital produced financed the entire expansion of this country. And you’ll see in some of this research it also financed England’s industrial revolution. It definitely financed this industrial revolution here in America. There’s nowhere in any large city that you can’t go and visually see our ancestors’ labor that was stolen from us…

­Kamm Howard shared a long and in-depth interview about the fight for reparations for peoples of African descent globally, within the Caribbean, nationally and in Chicago, drawing upon international law and his work with the National Coalition of Blacks for Reparations in America (N’COBRA). Following is a short version of the transcript of this interview. […]

I think that when children are exposed to such violence and the presence of death, their thought process is so much deeper than the normal teenager. They actually have to think deeper because at an early age you must first learn how to survive and then if possible entertain the idea of “living.”

Panzy Edwards called for an evening protest on Mother’s Day, Saturday May 9, 2015 at 6PM at the intersection of E 67th St and S Indiana Ave. This is the site where Panzy’s 15 year old son, Dakota Bright, was executed by the Chicago Police Department. The demands of the march included: Dismantle the Chicago Police Department—No Cop Zones in our communities; reparations for all victims of state sponsored police violence; a Civilian Police Accountability Council— can we fight to dismantle the entire Chicago Police Department while at the same time push for civilian oversight of Police Districts?

Chicagoiguala is not just a drug corridor. Chicagoiguala is where we live, an integrated global supply-chain linking captive labor, extraction, assembly plants, finished commodities, planning processes and financial flows. It is how logistics firms and consultants “restructure” the state, channeling public moneys and migrant remittances into infrastructure projects that open up new territories for transnational extraction. It is how Mexican economic and political elites are organized in the US as Latino politics, whose function is to de-indigenize and manage the mass migration. Chicagoiguala is a border zone where our struggles for liberation are disarticulated by “immigration reform” politics and the electoral spectacle.

It could be that the part of us that most needs healing is the exact same part of us that has capacity to work for liberation. This is the part of us that is both oppressed and defiant. What do we do with the urgency to abolish genocide that also feeds us? Why is it that the terms of freedom and sustainability are defined as self/community preservation, but all too often point toward self-destruction? How could it be that we are tasked with both resisting within and without?

“Chi” means big in Ojibwe but also it’s short for Chicago and we come from many nations – so we are Chi-Nations. This text is based on a recording of a group conversation among CNYC members on October 4, 2015. Participants: Naomi Harvey-Turner (Lakota), Co-President CNYC; Adrien (AJ) Pochel (Cree/Lakota), Chicago-Citywide American Indian Education Council (CAIEC) Youth Ambassador; Anthony Tamez (Cree/Lakota), Co-President CNYC; Janie Pochel (Cree/Lakota), CNYC adviser; Raven Roberts (Potawatomi, MiqMaq, Oneida) adviser.

A story about how the death of John Vietnam spurred a movement of hungry young artists, seeking to reimagine a better world though hip-hop.

Produced by Francesco De Salvatore
Music by Mo Beats, John Vietnam, Elephant Rebellion, and Francesco De Salvatore