Concerts

Safe consumption sites (SCS), also known as overdose prevention sites, are places where people can use drugs, safely and without threat of arrest or stigma, in the presence of folks trained to respond in case anyone accidentally overdoses. SCS supply sterile paraphernalia, reducing the risk of infection and disease, and guests can test their drugs for fentanyl before consuming. 

As a harm reduction worker once reminded me, safe consumption sites have existed as long as humans have been doing drugs, with or without permission from the law. Whenever drug users come together to support each other–whether in a private home or public park, watching someone’s back when they nod out, making sure they’re on their side, administering the opioid-overdose reversing medication naloxone if someone needs it–that’s a safe consumption site. But being able to operate in the daylight, without fear of prosecution and with access to funding and social and medical services, would be safer.

In 2022, the number of Chicagoans who died from accidental overdose was higher than the number who died by guns. Also in 2022, Representative La Shawn Ford introduced the Overdose Prevention Pilot Act, calling for state support to open SCS sites in Chicago.

SCS are the opposite of the abstinence-only approach most of us are familiar (and therefore comfortable) with when it comes to reducing drug deaths, but evidence shows that in neighborhoods where they’re allowed to operate, overdose deaths are reduced, the number of ambulance calls for treating overdoses lowers dramatically, and HIV rates decrease. According to the Drug Policy Alliance, “more than 100 evidence-based, peer-reviewed studies” link SCS to outcomes like “increasing entry into substance use disorder treatment” along with other medical and social services, “reducing the amount and frequency that clients use drugs,” and “reducing public drug use and syringe and/or other drug paraphernalia litter.”

It’s not so much my answer has evolved as I have a personal lived experience where, in the neighborhoods in which Black people in particular live, drugs have been a very sore, hurtful, harmful, damaging experience to so many.

On January 30, 2023, WBEZ released their Chicago mayoral candidate questionnaire, which included the question, “Would you support setting up ‘safe consumption sites’ where people use pre-obtained illegal drugs under the supervision of trained health workers?” 

Five of the nine candidates answered yes; Mayor Lori Lightfoot and Representative Chuy Garcia chose “other,” and Commissioner Brandon Johnson and former CPS CEO Paul Vallas replied “no.” 

In his response, Johnson further elaborated: “Given Chicago’s history, these sites would most likely be on the South and West sides, further burdening already struggling neighborhoods. There are other ways to address the drug epidemic and aid those in need, while also protecting our communities.” However, later that morning, when a Twitter user asked Johnson if he does, in fact, support SCS, Johnson replied: “Yes, and it’s not either/or. It’s ‘we need more.’ I’ve lost family to mental illness, addiction, and homelessness. I want to go beyond safe consumption sites to address mental health care and [the] unhoused. I also believe sites should be accessible to those in need throughout our city.”

That afternoon, I asked campaign spokesman Ronnie Reese if Johnson would be up for an on-the-record conversation about where he’s at with SCS. Within 15 minutes, Johnson called my phone: we spoke for about half an hour. Below is our conversation, lightly edited and condensed.

Prout: I’ll start out just by asking you just straight up: Do you support safe consumption sites in Chicago?

Johnson: Yes, I do support safe consumption sites in Chicago, and I also want to make sure that there’s some real equity with these sites. I know I’ve mentioned this before, but my eldest brother died from untreated trauma, addicted and unhoused. I have another brother who is also struggling with addiction.

These individuals who are struggling like my brother—they’re parents. They’re attached to other lives. And so we have to treat the entire family, right? We know those who are struggling with addiction, they do have triggers. And in some cases, those triggers have a profound impact on the other people in their lives. Making sure that there’s childcare services, there’s counseling for families–they’re gonna need it.

With the WBEZ answer, just to be clear, is that an answer you don’t stand by? Did you say no, and then your view has evolved since answering that question? 

It’s a combination, right? Like sometimes these spaces don’t allow for the context that I need to offer up a full answer. When you have multiple siblings who are struggling with addiction–I’m gonna date myself–you come home and your VCR or your class ring is stolen, or your coat is gone. Or you have children who have to figure out who to feed themselves, because, you know, their parents who are struggling with this addiction are not healthy enough to support their family.

Let’s talk about it this way. I have an older brother who died addicted and unhoused. How do I talk to my niece, nephew and his grandchildren about how their father or grandfather may have overdosed, and his brother, me, was trying to figure out a safe way for a drug to be administered? You know what I’m saying? These dynamics are complicated. Drugs have been used as a means to harm neighborhoods, and they’ve become the economic drivers for some individuals who believe that’s the only pathway to survive. So you have neighbors selling drugs to their neighbors in areas where schools are not funded, access to health care not available, transportation, jobs, accessibility–all of that is missing. It’s not so much my answer has evolved as I have a personal lived experience where, in the neighborhoods in which Black people in particular live, drugs have been a very sore, hurtful, harmful, damaging experience to so many. 

And so, it’s not either yes or no. It’s like, well, I support these sites if it’s done in an equitable way, and we’re providing other services to communities that have had to live through the drug market. [Funding a safe use site] in the same community where a neighborhood school was not fully funded–you understand? The contradiction that exists in our society?

Once a week, I go to the Chicago Recovery Alliance in East Garfield Park to pack Narcan kits, sterile crack pipes, and sterile needles. It was counterintuitive at first: I thought, “But if you want to protect people, don’t you want to have them not using? Isn’t it just going to make their addiction worse? Isn’t this going to promote other people using more, or introduce people who haven’t used before?”

But conversations with Black people who live on the west side changed my mind. When one woman was talking about why she carries Narcan, she said, “People are overdosing in my front lawn. I might as well have the ability to bring them back.” 

Now Narcan is becoming more socially acceptable, and is understood as a harm reduction tool. Safe consumption sites are still different. Right now there’s much more caution, more concern.

Yeah, you’ve laid it out well. The first thing I thought about when you were describing the evolution of this approach, is how we’re telling children, “Drugs are bad, say no to them. But we want you to come visit this site so that you can see how people use them safely.” I’m a parent and a teacher, I have family that’s struggled–it’s hard for me. 

A nephew snuck into one of my house parties. I didn’t get a chance to see a lot of [as he grew up] because it was what his mother thought was better: to keep him away from everybody associated with his father, including his uncle and his aunts. Now his uncle is running for mayor. He’s gonna read that his uncle is trying to figure out how to have safe consumption sites for individuals who are struggling with an addiction, and it was that very addiction that kept him from being able to have a father growing up. 

Can you talk a little bit more about what you mean by the “equitable distribution” of safe consumption sites?

We want to make sure that the sites are available in the neighborhoods that the individuals who are suffering from addiction live in. You want to eliminate as many barriers as possible.

Individuals who are struggling with an addiction, maybe they need a safe space where they can engage in that particular substance. But you know, these are individuals who are often already unhoused, right? Or they’re housing insecure, to say the least. So what are we doing to put people on a pathway where they’re not relying on this space? Where they can live, and work, and be part of their families?

My brother who’s still alive, he tells us he doesn’t want to continue to live with this addiction. That’s what he shared, and we always want to believe in that, believe him when he says that.  So what type of support that we surround him with in order to secure the type of life that he desires, one without addiction?

I’m interested in what you said about how families need support. NA and AA groups talk about addiction being a family disease. Some folks I know on Lower Wacker and in the Loop have lost custody of a child as they’ve tried to deal with their own addictions. Can you talk specifically about what support for families that have a loved one who’s addicted might look like, especially when that person is a parent?

That’s powerful. It’s a really powerful question. My brother, he’s got a few children. But his youngest daughter is the person you can really see really struggling. I’m trying to condense this as much as I possibly can, but it’s pretty fresh. 

The woman that my brother has this child with, she passed away. So the only parent she has is my brother now. Because of his addiction, there’s this question around suitability, right? But then there becomes this question, like, “Where? Where does this child go? Does she go with the brothers’ family? Her mother’s family?” How do you have a centered, focused support system for a child who will need adults to help her process losing a parent and having a parent who’s here, but who’s unavailable because of this addiction? 

It’s not just having counseling, though I think that’s going to be important. But whatever place is best for a child to be who has a parent who is addicted, what are the arrangements that can be made that keep and maintain connection and support that is safe for everyone? Because the challenge with my brother is the addiction. He’s a great human being. 

One of my own brothers struggles with addiction, so my heart goes out to you and yours.

Thank you for that. You know how hard it is as a family: I don’t know the extent to which you and your family deal with your brother, but with my brother who’s still living, he has children. It’s placed a great deal of stress on my niece. As a family, we bear the responsibility for being the support system for his children. I want to make sure as a city, we are committed to equity in how we deliver services to the communities hit hardest by disinvestment, which often leads to the type of addiction that we’re seeing explode in these neighborhoods.

I don’t know if I should go off the record for this, but you know, there are some people who, no matter what the situation is, they’re just a jerk. [Laughs] In this case, my brother is not a jerk! People probably will question my thinking on this, but outside of his addiction, he’s not a bad parent. I know that sounds like an oxymoron to some, but it’s not like he doesn’t have the ability to sit down with my youngest niece and work through with her with her homework when she’s getting frustrated or just being a typical little girl. And so, when we talk about support systems, I don’t know if it’s always best for parents to be completely removed and out of the picture entirely as they go through a restorative space, a healing space, even as they work through the addiction. [Groans] I’m sorry! There’s no simple way to put it.

I think that’s a rich answer for a complicated question. 

It’s about equity, and it’s also about seeing it through the lived experience of poor people, of Black people, or brown people, or families that have been ripped apart as a result of addiction and drugs. Thank you for indulging me and giving me the opportunity to express this–the complication of all these decisions, provide context to the nuance, and why “yes or no” is not always the best way to be able to work through something that is dynamic as a safe site.

Read More

When I heard about this new New England psych project, I wondered if the name “Stella Kola” referred to a solo artist, a duo, or a band—or possibly alluded to a soft drink. It turns out that it’s a little from column A and a little from column B. Stella Kola is the collaboration of Beverly Ketch, a poet and vocalist who’s performed in folk-psych bands such as Bunwinkies and Viewer, and guitarist Rob Thomas, a longtime member of fearless experimental ramblers Sunburned Hand of the Man. They’d been writing dark acoustic songs together for some time before deciding on a name. Ketch originally wanted to call their project “Star Soda,” but she settled on “Stella” in tribute to a friend’s grandmother, who’d recently passed away. 

Once Ketch and Thomas had settled on a mutual musical direction, they compiled a wish list of local musicians they wanted to bring aboard to flesh out their fragile tunes. Miraculously, all of them were game. Guitarist, synth player, and fellow SHotM member Jeremy Pisani joined them to form a live trio, and from there the group expanded into a larger ensemble with multi-instrumentalist Wednesday Knudson (Pigeons), bassist Jim Bliss (Wet Tuna), and violist and violinist Jen Gelineau, who’s recorded with Six Organs of Admittance. They began recording Stella Kola in 2020, inviting even more friends to provide additional instrumentation, including guitar wayfarer Willie Lane, Pat Gubler of legendary acid-folk group P.G. Six, and prolific “outsider” musician Gary War. The album isn’t as wild as you might expect, though, despite this star-studded freak-folk lineup: it’s a slice of chamber-folk bliss fueled by Ketch’s hushed but powerful vocals.

Pitched somewhere between Vashti Bunyan’s breathy, quavering delicacy and Judee Sill’s conversational but melancholy clarity, Ketch’s soft sighs weave among aching strings and chiming guitars, and her gentle ruminations on the sparse space shanty “Rosa” haunt my dreams. She can also rise to the occasion of a full-band setting, as she does on the righteous folk-rock anthem “November,” and she multitracks her evocative verses on baroque laments such as “Heart in the Rain” and “Being Is a Beggar’s Blessing,” where her performances recall singer-songwriter greats Margo Guryan and Susan Pillsbury. I know I’ve compared Ketch to four people just in this paragraph, but she’s unique—and she proves it amid the fluttering horns and orchestral flourishes of “First Fret,” when she gently intones “I think of my life / From the beginning to the end / And this time presses so close around / But those times are laid deep in the ground.” Stella Kola transcended their casual beginnings to create something epic with this first album, and I’m excited to see what other trails they’ll blaze.

Stella Kola’s Stella Kola is available through Bandcamp.

Read More

In the summer of 2020, then-Chicago police lieutenant John M. Cannon was attending law school at UIC part time when a Minneapolis police officer murdered George Floyd. As thousands of people gathered downtown to protest, Cannon and most of the police department worked overtime. Cannon worked as a lieutenant in the 18th District, policing some of the city’s wealthiest areas in the Near North Side: the Gold Coast, the Mag Mile, and parts of Lincoln Park. These were also parts of the city that saw some of the most brazen acts by protesters during the uprising and some of the most violent responses from the Chicago Police Department. 

Cannon worked the night shift, 8:30 PM until 5 AM, and in addition to overseeing the lockup and release of protesters at Division and Larabee, he also patrolled the streets. A Tactical Response Report, which officers are required to complete whenever they use force, documents that he pepper-sprayed a group of people who he reported as having been looting a Binny’s Beverage Depot in the early morning hours of May 31. 

A few weeks after the riots subsided, one of the deans of UIC Law (formerly John Marshall Law School) emailed the entire student body to affirm the institution’s anti-racist values, stating the school’s broad support for the nationwide movement against police brutality. It included an attachment titled “Pledge Denouncing Racism,” and it outlined steps the administration would take to steer their students—future attorneys and lawmakers—to be better allies against systemic racism while acknowledging the role the legal system plays in perpetuating racism. 

Cannon wrote back to the dean, “Please immediately remove me from this and any other similar email blasts. I do not have time to respond as I am busy fighting against terrorists and anarchists.”  

Cannon graduated from UIC in August 2021 and soon became the subject of an investigation by the Civilian Office of Police Accountability (COPA) into bigoted social media posts he made since 2018 that disparaged immigrants, women, and queer people. One of the posts depicted Obama in a turban with the text, “Obama is ISIS.” Another post suggested that Minnesota congressperson Ilhan Omar would bring Sharia Law to America. 

An anonymous tipster emailed COPA in late June of 2020. It was at least the sixty-third time a complaint had been filed against Cannon, according to records obtained from the CPD. It was the first time such a complaint was sustained against Cannon. It took COPA nearly a year and a half to complete its investigation. 

One post Cannon wrote read, “Brave young warriors face to face with an urban terrorist and the better trained professional Police Officer won the day. Excellent work by all the new batch of warriors. Love it,” in regards to body cam footage of the police killing of Harith Augustus in 2018. The shooting set off weeks of protests that summer as well as its own investigation. 

COPA’s investigators concluded that Cannon had violated the police department’s social media policy, which prohibits cops, either on or off duty, from posting content that is disparaging to a person or group based on being a member of any legally protected class, or content which “brings discredit upon the Department.” COPA found Cannon was unfit to be a cop and recommended he be fired. 

In the midst of the COPA investigation, Cannon filed a lawsuit against UIC and a former classmate, which is still ongoing. The lawsuit alleges that the university and three of the school’s deans discriminated against him for being white and a cop, violated his civil rights, and defamed his reputation. He also alleged that a former classmate hacked his Facebook, referring to the posts in question. He is seeking more than $50,000 in damages. 

Throughout the COPA investigation, however, Cannon admitted to investigators that by “hack” he meant that someone accessed his social media without permission, took screenshots of things he admitted he posted himself, and shared them on an anonymous, and now suspended, account on Twitter. An attorney for the former classmate said the lawsuit is an attack on free speech and an attempt to silence people for speaking out against white supremacy and violence within policing.

Via a text message, Cannon declined to speak to the Reader for this story.

Cannon’s lawsuit alleges that his reputation was sullied by the COPA investigation. As a result of the investigation, his lawyer wrote, the police department rescinded a job offer for a position supervising cops on desk duty at the city’s “alternate response unit,” or non-emergency 311 call center. “Desk duty” is the colloquial term used when cops are removed from street work and assigned an array of administrative roles while awaiting judgment over alleged misconduct.

Instead of commanding the call center, however, Cannon surrendered his star, shield, and ID card and found himself on desk duty in the Alternate Response Section, Unit 376 for the last seven months of his career. He quit the police department in October 2022, two weeks before COPA released the findings and recommendations from its investigation.

The campaign to kick cops off campus 

According to several past and current UIC law students who spoke with the Reader, uniformed, on-duty beat cops used to use the UIC Law building like a break room.

UIC Law has traditionally been a place for working-class people and police officers to earn a law degree. (The school offers part-time options and evening classes.) On-duty cops using the space became a contentious issue in 2019, when the National Lawyers Guild (NLG) chapter at the school started a campaign to get them off campus. 

The NLG is an association of legal students, attorneys, and volunteers focused on social justice, who use the tagline “Human rights over property interests” on their Facebook page. 

“CPD officers would come in off their beat right there on Jackson on the Red Line,” said Bryan Higgins, an attorney and former UIC NLG. “Come inside, use our restrooms, sit in the student lounge. Some of them would even take naps in the student lounges. They would eat leftover food from student events, and the security guards would just let them come in.”

UIC has a strictly enforced visitor policy, according to Higgins, and whenever a student group such as the NLG wanted to host an event open to the public, they were required to provide security with a full list of attendees the day before. Each attendee was required to provide ID in order to enter the school. 

“Whereas if a CPD officer just wants to come have an on-the-clock nap, they can just be let in,” they said. 

By 2018, they said that the security guards at the school were “almost week by week, enhancing their appearance.” The guards got body armor, new uniforms, handcuffs, and even batons.

The tipping point, Higgins said, was when security guards started wearing large “Blue Lives Matter” pins on their uniforms. “And so we said ‘hey, no, no, no, that’s just way too far,’” they said. “‘And by the way, where’s all this money for body armor, and why are y’all turning into these robocops?’”  

Members of the NLG chapter began to question how the presence of cops affects students who are victims of police brutality, taking into account that many Black, Brown, and working-class students at the law school may have had distressing experiences with cops. 

“The police can really trigger certain responses from [students] and just make it harder for them overall to be able to study and do their work peacefully,” said Antoinette Bolz, the former president of the UIC NLG chapter who now works as a staff attorney at a nonprofit. “I don’t even know what the purpose of them being there was, but it was very common to see two or three officers just walking around the school.” 

The NLG drafted a letter to school administrators in 2019, and eventually two members, Bolz and Micheal Drake, secured a meeting with the deans. They were surprised to find the school’s lawyers were present at the meeting, along with the head of security and the deans.

The meeting was tense, said Drake, who is now a staff attorney at a nonprofit. Not much changed afterward. The school started sending out more emails to students about leftover food from events, he said, and campus groups continued to meet about the issue. Uniformed cops, however, still roamed the campus.

“There really shouldn’t be this mixture of surveillance and policing at the school,” Drake said. “Firefighters aren’t coming into UIC to use the bathroom. It’s just cops.”

Via a text message, Cannon declined to speak to the Reader for this story.

As president of the UIC chapter of the NLG at that time, Townsend sent a collectively drafted demand letter in response to Dean Dickerson’s email—the one Cannon said he was too “busy fighting terrorists and anarchists” to respond to. 

The letter begins, “The John Marshall NLG Chapter actively supports and stands in solidarity with the protests against police brutality in America. We take this opportunity to publicly reaffirm our belief in police and prison abolition as the only true solution to this problem and renew our fight to remove Chicago police from JMLS.” Cannon called the letter “hate speech” in his lawsuit.

The NLG statement also demanded that the administration offer a class on prison abolition for students to learn about viable alternatives to incarceration. And while it emphasized the systemic role that cops play in perpetuating white supremacy, the letter never mentions Cannon or any other cop specifically. 

“None of the authors, I can confidently say this, none of the authors of that letter knew who Cannon was when we wrote it,” said Jacqueline Spreadbury, a current UIC law student and NLG member.  

Townsend is represented by Brad Thomson, an attorney with the People’s Law Office. Thomson filed a motion to correct his client’s name and pronouns—Cannon consistently misgendered and misnamed her throughout his complaint and also falsely labeled her as a professor at the school. 

Thomson also motioned to dismiss the case against his client on November 11, immediately after COPA went public with their recommendation to fire him, on the grounds that it’s frivolous, meritless, and meant solely to silence his defendant’s First Amendment right to free speech. 

“Anyone who’s concerned about free speech principles in this country, specifically about freedom of speech on college campuses, should be concerned by actions like this,” Thomson said. “Anyone who has concerns around police violence and white supremacy within the legal system should be paying attention to situations like this where individual police officers are attempting to use the law to silence their opposition.”

Townsend was one of many students at UIC who spoke out against police brutality and the anti-Black racism endemic in the criminal legal system during 2020 and before. Thomson says that he believes Cannon’s lawsuit is an attack on all students who organize against white supremacy in the legal system and that it is meant to intimidate those who speak out. 

Not only that, but it wastes people’s time, he said. 

“It forces people to have to defend these meritless claims and have to defend themselves when their activity and their actions are protected by the First Amendment [rights] guaranteed by the Constitution,” he said.

Townsend was the co-president of the UIC NLG in 2020. The previous year, she and others in the group drafted a letter asking the administration to get cops off campus. 

In March 2020, this new cohort of NLG students met virtually with one of the school’s deans about the issue. They reached a compromise, according to NLG members, where the administration said that they would tell visiting police that they’re limited to the lobby, the restrooms, and the first-floor cafe.

Then classes went remote indefinitely. 

“And then George Floyd happened, and [the administration] was like, ‘Oh, we’ve got to make so many changes,’” said Jacqueline Spreadbury, a current student at UIC Law and member of the NLG.  

After the uprising in Minneapolis had spread to Chicago and beyond, the NLG chapter drafted a letter urging the administration at UIC to add an elective prison and police abolition course.

“Law students have a duty to the people we will serve to understand the effects of prisons and consider viable alternatives to incarceration,” the letter says. “Having an elective course on mass incarceration . . . is not enough.  We need to have an ongoing, campus-wide conversation that all students can engage in.”

Spreadbury said that while the letter touched on the systemic role that cops play in perpetuating white supremacy, it didn’t name Cannon or any other cop individually. 

The people who wrote the letter had no clue who Cannon was, she said, until weeks later when they saw screenshots of his racist Facebook posts, which COPA deemed racist, on an anonymous Twitter account called @sugaronmitongue. 

“None of the authors of that letter knew who Cannon was when we wrote it,” Spreadbury said. 

The fall 2022 semester was the first time that everyone was back on campus full time since the pandemic began. Spreadbury said she’s seen cops come in and use the restroom on the first floor and leave, and hasn’t seen them go anywhere else, which was the compromise they reached during the meeting in March of 2020. 

“I can’t say if this is an official policy change or it’s because of this letter [or if it’s] because of the meeting or because of the George Floyd movement,” Spreadbury said. “But somewhere along the way, it does seem like something changed.”

There’s now an entire first-year, anti-racist curriculum woven throughout much of the curriculum at JMLS, according to Spreadbury. The material usually consists of brief videos about how certain aspects of the law are rooted in racism, and students are asked to complete a set of questions. 

The administration never directly addressed the NLG’s demands to create an elective police or prison abolition curriculum, Spreadbury said. One of the deans did guide her through the steps to propose a new elective curriculum, however, which she submitted last summer. “And the school’s actually been really receptive to it. They said it’ll likely be a class for fall of [2023].”

Her goal is to make sure that the prison abolition course happens. She says that a course on alternatives to policing and prisons is the next logical step after the gains of the uprising. 

As of publication, the judge presiding over Cannon’s lawsuit has not posted a hearing to dismiss or hear the case. Cannon’s lawyer, Dan Herbert, did not respond to a request for an interview.  

When asked whether he’s ever seen a lawsuit like this, attorney Brad Thomson said no. “The specific facts here are just so unusual and so far afield that I can’t think of any instance where I’ve seen anything quite like this.” 

Lawsuits like Cannon’s may be part of a larger reactionary backlash towards attempts by institutions to implement equity and inclusion policies, said Thomson. 

“But targeting another student for speaking out . . . is particularly egregious,” Thomson said, “because it’s clearly targeting speech and organizing that is constitutionally protected.” 

Read More

When I heard about this new New England psych project, I wondered if the name “Stella Kola” referred to a solo artist, a duo, or a band—or possibly alluded to a soft drink. It turns out that it’s a little from column A and a little from column B. Stella Kola is the collaboration of Beverly Ketch, a poet and vocalist who’s performed in folk-psych bands such as Bunwinkies and Viewer, and guitarist Rob Thomas, a longtime member of fearless experimental ramblers Sunburned Hand of the Man. They’d been writing dark acoustic songs together for some time before deciding on a name. Ketch originally wanted to call their project “Star Soda,” but she settled on “Stella” in tribute to a friend’s grandmother, who’d recently passed away. 

Once Ketch and Thomas had settled on a mutual musical direction, they compiled a wish list of local musicians they wanted to bring aboard to flesh out their fragile tunes. Miraculously, all of them were game. Guitarist, synth player, and fellow SHotM member Jeremy Pisani joined them to form a live trio, and from there the group expanded into a larger ensemble with multi-instrumentalist Wednesday Knudson (Pigeons), bassist Jim Bliss (Wet Tuna), and violist and violinist Jen Gelineau, who’s recorded with Six Organs of Admittance. They began recording Stella Kola in 2020, inviting even more friends to provide additional instrumentation, including guitar wayfarer Willie Lane, Pat Gubler of legendary acid-folk group P.G. Six, and prolific “outsider” musician Gary War. The album isn’t as wild as you might expect, though, despite this star-studded freak-folk lineup: it’s a slice of chamber-folk bliss fueled by Ketch’s hushed but powerful vocals.

Pitched somewhere between Vashti Bunyan’s breathy, quavering delicacy and Judee Sill’s conversational but melancholy clarity, Ketch’s soft sighs weave among aching strings and chiming guitars, and her gentle ruminations on the sparse space shanty “Rosa” haunt my dreams. She can also rise to the occasion of a full-band setting, as she does on the righteous folk-rock anthem “November,” and she multitracks her evocative verses on baroque laments such as “Heart in the Rain” and “Being Is a Beggar’s Blessing,” where her performances recall singer-songwriter greats Margo Guryan and Susan Pillsbury. I know I’ve compared Ketch to four people just in this paragraph, but she’s unique—and she proves it amid the fluttering horns and orchestral flourishes of “First Fret,” when she gently intones “I think of my life / From the beginning to the end / And this time presses so close around / But those times are laid deep in the ground.” Stella Kola transcended their casual beginnings to create something epic with this first album, and I’m excited to see what other trails they’ll blaze.

Stella Kola’s Stella Kola is available through Bandcamp.

Read More

In the summer of 2020, then-Chicago police lieutenant John M. Cannon was attending law school at UIC part time when a Minneapolis police officer murdered George Floyd. As thousands of people gathered downtown to protest, Cannon and most of the police department worked overtime. Cannon worked as a lieutenant in the 18th District, policing some of the city’s wealthiest areas in the Near North Side: the Gold Coast, the Mag Mile, and parts of Lincoln Park. These were also parts of the city that saw some of the most brazen acts by protesters during the uprising and some of the most violent responses from the Chicago Police Department. 

Cannon worked the night shift, 8:30 PM until 5 AM, and in addition to overseeing the lockup and release of protesters at Division and Larabee, he also patrolled the streets. A Tactical Response Report, which officers are required to complete whenever they use force, documents that he pepper-sprayed a group of people who he reported as having been looting a Binny’s Beverage Depot in the early morning hours of May 31. 

A few weeks after the riots subsided, one of the deans of UIC Law (formerly John Marshall Law School) emailed the entire student body to affirm the institution’s anti-racist values, stating the school’s broad support for the nationwide movement against police brutality. It included an attachment titled “Pledge Denouncing Racism,” and it outlined steps the administration would take to steer their students—future attorneys and lawmakers—to be better allies against systemic racism while acknowledging the role the legal system plays in perpetuating racism. 

Cannon wrote back to the dean, “Please immediately remove me from this and any other similar email blasts. I do not have time to respond as I am busy fighting against terrorists and anarchists.”  

Cannon graduated from UIC in August 2021 and soon became the subject of an investigation by the Civilian Office of Police Accountability (COPA) into bigoted social media posts he made since 2018 that disparaged immigrants, women, and queer people. One of the posts depicted Obama in a turban with the text, “Obama is ISIS.” Another post suggested that Minnesota congressperson Ilhan Omar would bring Sharia Law to America. 

An anonymous tipster emailed COPA in late June of 2020. It was at least the sixty-third time a complaint had been filed against Cannon, according to records obtained from the CPD. It was the first time such a complaint was sustained against Cannon. It took COPA nearly a year and a half to complete its investigation. 

One post Cannon wrote read, “Brave young warriors face to face with an urban terrorist and the better trained professional Police Officer won the day. Excellent work by all the new batch of warriors. Love it,” in regards to body cam footage of the police killing of Harith Augustus in 2018. The shooting set off weeks of protests that summer as well as its own investigation. 

COPA’s investigators concluded that Cannon had violated the police department’s social media policy, which prohibits cops, either on or off duty, from posting content that is disparaging to a person or group based on being a member of any legally protected class, or content which “brings discredit upon the Department.” COPA found Cannon was unfit to be a cop and recommended he be fired. 

In the midst of the COPA investigation, Cannon filed a lawsuit against UIC and a former classmate, which is still ongoing. The lawsuit alleges that the university and three of the school’s deans discriminated against him for being white and a cop, violated his civil rights, and defamed his reputation. He also alleged that a former classmate hacked his Facebook, referring to the posts in question. He is seeking more than $50,000 in damages. 

Throughout the COPA investigation, however, Cannon admitted to investigators that by “hack” he meant that someone accessed his social media without permission, took screenshots of things he admitted he posted himself, and shared them on an anonymous, and now suspended, account on Twitter. An attorney for the former classmate said the lawsuit is an attack on free speech and an attempt to silence people for speaking out against white supremacy and violence within policing.

Via a text message, Cannon declined to speak to the Reader for this story.

Cannon’s lawsuit alleges that his reputation was sullied by the COPA investigation. As a result of the investigation, his lawyer wrote, the police department rescinded a job offer for a position supervising cops on desk duty at the city’s “alternate response unit,” or non-emergency 311 call center. “Desk duty” is the colloquial term used when cops are removed from street work and assigned an array of administrative roles while awaiting judgment over alleged misconduct.

Instead of commanding the call center, however, Cannon surrendered his star, shield, and ID card and found himself on desk duty in the Alternate Response Section, Unit 376 for the last seven months of his career. He quit the police department in October 2022, two weeks before COPA released the findings and recommendations from its investigation.

The campaign to kick cops off campus 

According to several past and current UIC law students who spoke with the Reader, uniformed, on-duty beat cops used to use the UIC Law building like a break room.

UIC Law has traditionally been a place for working-class people and police officers to earn a law degree. (The school offers part-time options and evening classes.) On-duty cops using the space became a contentious issue in 2019, when the National Lawyers Guild (NLG) chapter at the school started a campaign to get them off campus. 

The NLG is an association of legal students, attorneys, and volunteers focused on social justice, who use the tagline “Human rights over property interests” on their Facebook page. 

“CPD officers would come in off their beat right there on Jackson on the Red Line,” said Bryan Higgins, an attorney and former UIC NLG. “Come inside, use our restrooms, sit in the student lounge. Some of them would even take naps in the student lounges. They would eat leftover food from student events, and the security guards would just let them come in.”

UIC has a strictly enforced visitor policy, according to Higgins, and whenever a student group such as the NLG wanted to host an event open to the public, they were required to provide security with a full list of attendees the day before. Each attendee was required to provide ID in order to enter the school. 

“Whereas if a CPD officer just wants to come have an on-the-clock nap, they can just be let in,” they said. 

By 2018, they said that the security guards at the school were “almost week by week, enhancing their appearance.” The guards got body armor, new uniforms, handcuffs, and even batons.

The tipping point, Higgins said, was when security guards started wearing large “Blue Lives Matter” pins on their uniforms. “And so we said ‘hey, no, no, no, that’s just way too far,’” they said. “‘And by the way, where’s all this money for body armor, and why are y’all turning into these robocops?’”  

Members of the NLG chapter began to question how the presence of cops affects students who are victims of police brutality, taking into account that many Black, Brown, and working-class students at the law school may have had distressing experiences with cops. 

“The police can really trigger certain responses from [students] and just make it harder for them overall to be able to study and do their work peacefully,” said Antoinette Bolz, the former president of the UIC NLG chapter who now works as a staff attorney at a nonprofit. “I don’t even know what the purpose of them being there was, but it was very common to see two or three officers just walking around the school.” 

The NLG drafted a letter to school administrators in 2019, and eventually two members, Bolz and Micheal Drake, secured a meeting with the deans. They were surprised to find the school’s lawyers were present at the meeting, along with the head of security and the deans.

The meeting was tense, said Drake, who is now a staff attorney at a nonprofit. Not much changed afterward. The school started sending out more emails to students about leftover food from events, he said, and campus groups continued to meet about the issue. Uniformed cops, however, still roamed the campus.

“There really shouldn’t be this mixture of surveillance and policing at the school,” Drake said. “Firefighters aren’t coming into UIC to use the bathroom. It’s just cops.”

Via a text message, Cannon declined to speak to the Reader for this story.

As president of the UIC chapter of the NLG at that time, Townsend sent a collectively drafted demand letter in response to Dean Dickerson’s email—the one Cannon said he was too “busy fighting terrorists and anarchists” to respond to. 

The letter begins, “The John Marshall NLG Chapter actively supports and stands in solidarity with the protests against police brutality in America. We take this opportunity to publicly reaffirm our belief in police and prison abolition as the only true solution to this problem and renew our fight to remove Chicago police from JMLS.” Cannon called the letter “hate speech” in his lawsuit.

The NLG statement also demanded that the administration offer a class on prison abolition for students to learn about viable alternatives to incarceration. And while it emphasized the systemic role that cops play in perpetuating white supremacy, the letter never mentions Cannon or any other cop specifically. 

“None of the authors, I can confidently say this, none of the authors of that letter knew who Cannon was when we wrote it,” said Jacqueline Spreadbury, a current UIC law student and NLG member.  

Townsend is represented by Brad Thomson, an attorney with the People’s Law Office. Thomson filed a motion to correct his client’s name and pronouns—Cannon consistently misgendered and misnamed her throughout his complaint and also falsely labeled her as a professor at the school. 

Thomson also motioned to dismiss the case against his client on November 11, immediately after COPA went public with their recommendation to fire him, on the grounds that it’s frivolous, meritless, and meant solely to silence his defendant’s First Amendment right to free speech. 

“Anyone who’s concerned about free speech principles in this country, specifically about freedom of speech on college campuses, should be concerned by actions like this,” Thomson said. “Anyone who has concerns around police violence and white supremacy within the legal system should be paying attention to situations like this where individual police officers are attempting to use the law to silence their opposition.”

Townsend was one of many students at UIC who spoke out against police brutality and the anti-Black racism endemic in the criminal legal system during 2020 and before. Thomson says that he believes Cannon’s lawsuit is an attack on all students who organize against white supremacy in the legal system and that it is meant to intimidate those who speak out. 

Not only that, but it wastes people’s time, he said. 

“It forces people to have to defend these meritless claims and have to defend themselves when their activity and their actions are protected by the First Amendment [rights] guaranteed by the Constitution,” he said.

Townsend was the co-president of the UIC NLG in 2020. The previous year, she and others in the group drafted a letter asking the administration to get cops off campus. 

In March 2020, this new cohort of NLG students met virtually with one of the school’s deans about the issue. They reached a compromise, according to NLG members, where the administration said that they would tell visiting police that they’re limited to the lobby, the restrooms, and the first-floor cafe.

Then classes went remote indefinitely. 

“And then George Floyd happened, and [the administration] was like, ‘Oh, we’ve got to make so many changes,’” said Jacqueline Spreadbury, a current student at UIC Law and member of the NLG.  

After the uprising in Minneapolis had spread to Chicago and beyond, the NLG chapter drafted a letter urging the administration at UIC to add an elective prison and police abolition course.

“Law students have a duty to the people we will serve to understand the effects of prisons and consider viable alternatives to incarceration,” the letter says. “Having an elective course on mass incarceration . . . is not enough.  We need to have an ongoing, campus-wide conversation that all students can engage in.”

Spreadbury said that while the letter touched on the systemic role that cops play in perpetuating white supremacy, it didn’t name Cannon or any other cop individually. 

The people who wrote the letter had no clue who Cannon was, she said, until weeks later when they saw screenshots of his racist Facebook posts, which COPA deemed racist, on an anonymous Twitter account called @sugaronmitongue. 

“None of the authors of that letter knew who Cannon was when we wrote it,” Spreadbury said. 

The fall 2022 semester was the first time that everyone was back on campus full time since the pandemic began. Spreadbury said she’s seen cops come in and use the restroom on the first floor and leave, and hasn’t seen them go anywhere else, which was the compromise they reached during the meeting in March of 2020. 

“I can’t say if this is an official policy change or it’s because of this letter [or if it’s] because of the meeting or because of the George Floyd movement,” Spreadbury said. “But somewhere along the way, it does seem like something changed.”

There’s now an entire first-year, anti-racist curriculum woven throughout much of the curriculum at JMLS, according to Spreadbury. The material usually consists of brief videos about how certain aspects of the law are rooted in racism, and students are asked to complete a set of questions. 

The administration never directly addressed the NLG’s demands to create an elective police or prison abolition curriculum, Spreadbury said. One of the deans did guide her through the steps to propose a new elective curriculum, however, which she submitted last summer. “And the school’s actually been really receptive to it. They said it’ll likely be a class for fall of [2023].”

Her goal is to make sure that the prison abolition course happens. She says that a course on alternatives to policing and prisons is the next logical step after the gains of the uprising. 

As of publication, the judge presiding over Cannon’s lawsuit has not posted a hearing to dismiss or hear the case. Cannon’s lawyer, Dan Herbert, did not respond to a request for an interview.  

When asked whether he’s ever seen a lawsuit like this, attorney Brad Thomson said no. “The specific facts here are just so unusual and so far afield that I can’t think of any instance where I’ve seen anything quite like this.” 

Lawsuits like Cannon’s may be part of a larger reactionary backlash towards attempts by institutions to implement equity and inclusion policies, said Thomson. 

“But targeting another student for speaking out . . . is particularly egregious,” Thomson said, “because it’s clearly targeting speech and organizing that is constitutionally protected.” 

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When Margaret Pak and her husband Vinod Kalathil visit his hometown in northern Kerala, his mom summons the couple to lunch with the expression “Chorum kariyum kazhikkam,” or “Let’s eat rice and curry,” even if there’s no curry on the table.

“It’s funny,” says Kalathil, “So many people say ‘Oh, we don’t use the word curry in India, but if you go to southern India pretty much everybody says curry—for anything and everything.”

For sure there will be rice and curry on the table on February 6 when Thattu calls you to the table for the next Monday Night Foodball, the Reader’s weekly chef pop up at Ludlow Liquors. Ahead of the delayed opening of their long awaited brick and mortar restaurant, Foodball vets Pak and Kalathil, are popping up with a taste of what’s for lunch and dinner when the juice starts flowing and the city inspectors give the thumbs up on their future 2900-square foot space.

Pak’s showcasing chemmeen and kappa, shrimp curry with coconut broth and mashed yucca, tarted up with sun-dried cambodge, aka Malabar tamarind, a souring agent her mother-in-law typically uses with tiny fish. She’s also reprising her pinquinto bean curry with cuminy jeera rice, a riff on the black chickpea kadala curry—a staple from Thattu’s Politan Row days—here made with heirloom legumes native to her native northern California.

But it ain’t just curry and rice. Her fiery batter-free Kerala fried chicken sandwich is on the menu. Pair that with a side of chaat masala-seasoned tots (chaattertots, of course), and you’ve got a bite of a signature from the brick and mortar’s lunchtime menu. And you’ll find the yogurt-marinated chicken biryani with basmati rice on the future dinner menu. Finish off with sweet cardamom-kissed, deep fried plantains with creme anglaise, and an essential masala biscuit, the cookie that started it all.

Ludlow barkeeps Joel and Grace will be mixing up Thattu’s Lime Sarbath, a citrusy Collins riff with sherry and Indian sarsaparilla syrup.

Come eat rice and curry—and anything and everything else—with Thattu, starting at 6 PM, Monday, February 6, at Ludlow Liquors, 2959 N. California in Avondale. No preorders. Just walk in and place your order with Kalathil, posted up at the turntables at the back of the bar.

Meanwhile, block out your future Mondays by scrolling down for the full Foodball schedule:

Margaret Pak, Vinod Kalathil Credit: Monica Kass RogersRead More

Somebody organized Mueze Bawany’s mom. He doesn’t know who it was — maybe Matt Ginsberg-Jaeckle, a longtime community organizer who had been trying to convince Bawany to run for alderperson of the 50th Ward. 

Bawany and his family immigrated to Chicago’s West Ridge neighborhood from Pakistan when he was three years old. He’s a high school teacher, community organizer, and member of the Chicago Teachers Union. He’s also someone who wasn’t interested in running for alderperson. He prefers being under the radar. So Ginsberg-Jaeckle brought in some help to try to convince Bawany. 

“My friend Nash texted me and I was like, ‘Why are you trying to ruin my life?’ I’ll frame that text if we win, InSha’Allah, on the wall,” Bawany said.  “But once my mom found out, it was game over.”

Bawany’s mom didn’t necessarily know what the role of alderperson entailed, but after he explained to her she was proud that someone was asking her son to do something.“For people who felt really small in this city and in this community and in this country, for them to know that their kids and their grandkids are loved and supported and appreciated, it means the world to them,” he said. 

The election will be “a referendum on how we trust the public sector and how we reinvest in and rebuild it after the pandemic,” Dasgupta said. “This is an opportunity  . . . I can literally imagine the way that we will work together in the council.”

Over a cup of chai at Spinzer, a Pakistani fast-food restaurant on Devon, Bawany said the city’s budget reflects “a lack of moral imagination. So for me personally it doesn’t stop me from imagining what can happen.” 

If elected, Bawany would be the first South Asian alderperson to represent West Ridge, a neighborhood with a large population of immigrants from countries such as India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Afghanistan, Bhutan, and more. 

Bawany’s love for his community is evident the moment you meet him. He arrived at our interview at Spinzer a little bit late. He was helping a neighbor who had just been hit by a car while riding their bike. As he walked in, he ran into an old childhood friend who immediately began making jokes about the campaign. “I love this place because the characters always crack me up,” he said.

Another restaurant he recommends is Pak Sweets, across the street from Spinzer. “The owner there is one of the most ridiculous human beings. Hilarious.” He also loves Anmol, partly because it’s on the non-busy side of Devon and it’s easy to find parking. House of Biryani is also a favorite.

And then he threw a curveball: he loves Levinson’s Bakery, which is located right next to Anmol. “Everybody jokes that this is the future liberals want,” he said.”It’s like, man, you got the Jewish bakery and then some Desi folks making really good meals side by side.”

According to Bawany, regardless of whatever geopolitical tensions might be happening between the various countries whose food can be found on Devon, “we’re all family here.” 

Over a veg thali at Ghareeb Nawaz, Dasgupta said that building solidarity and diverse coalitions has long been a big part of South Asian history and culture. 

Dasgupta’s mother was Catholic, and her father was a Hindu communist who protested the Vietnam war as a student. She recalls growing up with images of Hindu warrior goddesses and how it informs her idea of motherhood. “Being a mother is not being a mom,” she said. “It’s not just about stewarding your own children but stewarding the children of your community. That to me is tied up in the idea of motherhood because I learned that from my own mother who learned it in a communal culture that was one generation off the farm.”

Bawany echoed that sentiment. “I think what the Sikh community, the Muslim community, the Hindu community, there’s so much in our faith-based traditions about service, right?” he said. “Understanding the importance of feeding people, of sheltering people . . . we can fundraise a lot, but imagine wielding the budget of the city of Chicago to address inequity.”

When she first started working as an organizer in Chicago, Patel didn’t see many other South Asians in the progressive movement. She worked for many years as a union organizer with SEIU Local 73 and then later became executive director of Grassroots Collaborative, a coalition of unions and community groups focused on economic and environmental justice.

According to Patel, whose mother was a factory worker in the Chicago suburbs, what feels different now is that many South Asian organizers and activists are rooted in multiracial, working-class communities.

“Any visible South Asians are often positioned as model minorities . . . the reality is there’s a lot of working-class South Asians; they’re just not who people know,” she said. “How do people who come from our communities play a leadership role that not only represents our communities but also does it in a way that has very clear values? It’s definitely exciting with Denali and Mueze to see the possibility of that in their beliefs, their platform, their orientation. Because I think that there’s just tremendous power in building an Asian, Black, Latine, white coalition that is rooted in that context.”

Building solidarity both within and outside the South Asian community is central to the mission of Chicago Desi Youth Rising (CDYR), a collective that works to educate and organize young South Asians across the Chicagoland area in an effort to have youth leadership at the center of larger fights for social, economic, and racial justice in Chicago. 

The group organizes an annual summer leadership retreat where young people examine their own diverse identities and cultural history in conversations that span caste, class, communalism, religion, and hypernationalism within the South Asian diaspora. 

“There are so many ways in which we can understand our connections to other communities by understanding our own experiences,” said Himabindu Poroori, a member of CDYR. 

During the summer of 2020, CDYR members participated in many solidarity actions with the prison and police abolition movement. They organized a virtual workshop with uncles and aunties on anti-Blackness in the South Asian community where they also discussed their own experiences with police. The group also worked with many community organizations on a campaign to get police officers out of Chicago Public Schools (CPS). That same summer they held an event with Pilsen Alliance outside the southwest-side home of Sendhil Revoluri, a member of the CPS board, calling on him to vote to remove police officers from CPS. The festive event featured food, music, and dance. 

“Taking time to cultivate solidarity is very important,” Poroori said.

Both Bawany and Dasgupta draw upon personal experiences that inform both how they connect with the diverse peoples in their communities as well as their policy platforms.

Bawany was six years old the first time his family was evicted from their apartment. The family came home to find all their belongings sprawled out on the lawn. 

“My first reaction was, ‘Are my parents reorganizing?’ My second reaction was this elation that maybe we’re tossing all the shit out and getting new furniture,” Bawany said. 

He then began going through the piles of stuff and pulling out his stuffed animals and other things that he loved.  

“I was like, I don’t want mom throwing this out . . . And then my brother was like, ‘Put it on the ground, it’s not going anywhere.’ I’m like, ‘Where’s it going?’ My brother says ‘Wherever we’re going.’ And I understood,” Bawany recalled.

His family was evicted two more times throughout his childhood. After the third time, Bawany’s two older brothers started working to help the family make ends meet. One brother began selling shirts on the south side. The other was working in IT while their mother sold samosas and pursued catering gigs and their father worked as a taxi driver. 

Years later when Bawany became a teacher in Humboldt Park he had many students who were going through similar struggles with housing instability. 

“I had students who would open up about being unhoused as a means of saying, you know, please cut me some slack,” Bawany said. “‘I know you keep yelling at me, about homework, homework, homework, homework, homework, and all these things, but can I tell you about my living situation?’ And that stuff used to crush me.”

If elected, he says he’ll fight for more affordable housing in the 50th Ward. He also plans to make ward democracy a big priority with initiatives like participatory budgeting, creating a youth council, providing ward services, and translating all materials into the forty-plus languages that are spoken in West Ridge. He hopes to do listening tours of the neighborhood by connecting with schools, religious groups, and local business owners to learn more about what their needs are and how the aldermanic office can support them.

“The story of my father and my mother and their struggles in the ward exists all throughout this neighborhood,” he said.

Dasgupta also wants more affordable housing in her neighborhood. She also supports Treatment Not Trauma, a campaign that would redirect 911 calls for mental health crises from police responders and instead send teams of social workers and paramedics. 

Her support for this comes in part from her own experience with trauma as a survivor of gun violence. 

In 1986 Pan American Flight 73 left from Mumbai to New York with a layover in Karachi. When the flight landed in Karachi it was immediately hijacked by four armed Palestinian men who had dressed as Pakistani security personnel. The men were members of the Abu Nidal Organisation, a militant group that was fighting for the liberation of Palestine from the Israeli occupation.

Members of the cabin crew were able to warn the airplane’s pilots of the hijacking, who then escaped and left the plane grounded. The hijacking, which lasted nearly 16 hours, ended with a mass shooting that killed about 20 people and injured over 100.

Dasgupta and her family were on that plane and were taken hostage. She was three years old. 

“We survived and we came home and we just pretended like nothing happened,” she said. “That was the advice my parents were given. And having grown up to be somebody who studies Child Development Studies, Child Trauma, themes about developmental arcs—it’s utterly wild to me.

“My mom thinks about it all the time. She’s like, ‘I can’t believe that I listened to that.’ But it just felt easier to move forward,” Dasgupta continued.

When her middle son was three years old Dasgupta says she was horrified because she got to see as an adult where he was at developmentally. 

“It feels profoundly unfair that some people get left behind. Because there were moments where that was us,” Dasgupta said. “A trauma to your community, a trauma to your family — it happens to a whole system . . . . We were just really struggling and we didn’t know how to ask for help. And we didn’t know that we needed help. And we didn’t know what we needed. And it was infused into every way that we related to each other and related to the world. That’s what happens.” 

According to Dasgupta, this experience has profoundly shaped how she approaches public safety. She often works with violence interrupters throughout Chicago and is able to easily build rapport with them, even though her experience is very different.

“So when someone comes in and says we’re gonna spray paint your catalytic converter and everything’s gonna be fine—it’s like ‘no,’” Dasgupta said.

According to Pawar, today there is more of a space for the South Asian experience than there ever had been. “It feels less lonely. When you’re the first it’s always that way,” he said.

Patel recalled being a young South Asian organizer in Chicago nearly 30 years ago and having a lot of insecurity about where she fit in the progressive movement, despite coming from a working-class family. “With time that really shifted,” she said. “I just got more grounded and more connected and confident and secure in who I am and the values that I have and the work and the role that I was playing in the movements.”

For Bawany, feeling grounded happens when he speaks with uncles, aunties, and youth in the neighborhood who support his campaign.

“Yesterday I met with a bunch of youth at Centro Romero, and you can picture how much winning this will change their lives,” he said.

One youth who Bawany has already made an impression upon is Dasgupta’s own son.

“My son had a Mueze button on his backpack before he had a Denali For 39th button on,” Dasgupta said with a laugh. “Mueze is their favorite.”

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When Margaret Pak and her husband Vinod Kalathil visit his hometown in northern Kerala, his mom summons the couple to lunch with the expression “Chorum kariyum kazhikkam,” or “Let’s eat rice and curry,” even if there’s no curry on the table.

“It’s funny,” says Kalathil, “So many people say ‘Oh, we don’t use the word curry in India, but if you go to southern India pretty much everybody says curry—for anything and everything.”

For sure there will be rice and curry on the table on February 6 when Thattu calls you to the table for the next Monday Night Foodball, the Reader’s weekly chef pop up at Ludlow Liquors. Ahead of the delayed opening of their long awaited brick and mortar restaurant, Foodball vets Pak and Kalathil, are popping up with a taste of what’s for lunch and dinner when the juice starts flowing and the city inspectors give the thumbs up on their future 2900-square foot space.

Pak’s showcasing chemmeen and kappa, shrimp curry with coconut broth and mashed yucca, tarted up with sun-dried cambodge, aka Malabar tamarind, a souring agent her mother-in-law typically uses with tiny fish. She’s also reprising her pinquinto bean curry with cuminy jeera rice, a riff on the black chickpea kadala curry—a staple from Thattu’s Politan Row days—here made with heirloom legumes native to her native northern California.

But it ain’t just curry and rice. Her fiery batter-free Kerala fried chicken sandwich is on the menu. Pair that with a side of chaat masala-seasoned tots (chaattertots, of course), and you’ve got a bite of a signature from the brick and mortar’s lunchtime menu. And you’ll find the yogurt-marinated chicken biryani with basmati rice on the future dinner menu. Finish off with sweet cardamom-kissed, deep fried plantains with creme anglaise, and an essential masala biscuit, the cookie that started it all.

Ludlow barkeeps Joel and Grace will be mixing up Thattu’s Lime Sarbath, a citrusy Collins riff with sherry and Indian sarsaparilla syrup.

Come eat rice and curry—and anything and everything else—with Thattu, starting at 6 PM, Monday, February 6, at Ludlow Liquors, 2959 N. California in Avondale. No preorders. Just walk in and place your order with Kalathil, posted up at the turntables at the back of the bar.

Meanwhile, block out your future Mondays by scrolling down for the full Foodball schedule:

Margaret Pak, Vinod Kalathil Credit: Monica Kass RogersRead More

Somebody organized Mueze Bawany’s mom. He doesn’t know who it was — maybe Matt Ginsberg-Jaeckle, a longtime community organizer who had been trying to convince Bawany to run for alderperson of the 50th Ward. 

Bawany and his family immigrated to Chicago’s West Ridge neighborhood from Pakistan when he was three years old. He’s a high school teacher, community organizer, and member of the Chicago Teachers Union. He’s also someone who wasn’t interested in running for alderperson. He prefers being under the radar. So Ginsberg-Jaeckle brought in some help to try to convince Bawany. 

“My friend Nash texted me and I was like, ‘Why are you trying to ruin my life?’ I’ll frame that text if we win, InSha’Allah, on the wall,” Bawany said.  “But once my mom found out, it was game over.”

Bawany’s mom didn’t necessarily know what the role of alderperson entailed, but after he explained to her she was proud that someone was asking her son to do something.“For people who felt really small in this city and in this community and in this country, for them to know that their kids and their grandkids are loved and supported and appreciated, it means the world to them,” he said. 

His mom told him the family had been through a lot, observing that making sure other people don’t have to go through the same struggles fuels him. He said she asked him, “‘Can this election help you support people in ways that we wish we would have been supported? If so, it’s more of an obligation on you to try.’’’

Bawany is one of two South Asians running for Chicago City Council in the February 28  election. The other, Denali Dasgupta, is a mother of three, a foster parent, and a policy researcher with a background in data science. She was born and raised in the suburbs of New York City with parents who immigrated from India and is running for alderperson in the 39th ward on the city’s northwest side. 

Their campaigns are indicative of the growing presence and power of South Asian Americans in Chicago’s progressive grassroots movements that take on issues such as immigrant rights, prison and police abolition, and economic justice. 

“I’ve really loved that there are South Asian organizers and artists and people who are visible in different kinds of ways in different parts of the work than there ever was,” said Amisha Patel, who has been an organizer in Chicago for over 30 years. “Having two really progressive lefty candidates for City Council that come from the South Asian community is very exciting.” 

According to the South Asian American Policy & Research Institute, South Asians are one of the fastest-growing ethnic groups in Illinois. The impact South Asians have made in Chicago can be seen, literally, from anywhere in the city. One only has to look up at the skyline and see the Willis and Hancock towers. Both were designed by Fazlur Rahman Khan, an immigrant from Bangladesh. The mile-long strip along Devon Avenue with its countless shops, restaurants, clothing, and jewelry stores has been nicknamed Little India. 

In 2011, Chicago elected Ameya Pawar to City Council; he was the first South Asian to win city or state office in Illinois. 

“After I won I felt a tremendous responsibility to represent the Asian community at large,” Pawar said. “I felt the pressure to be successful because I didn’t want to be the first and last.”

With the February 28 election approaching (early voting started at the Loop supersite in January and will open in all 50 wards on February 13), Chicago is at a unique juncture. Sixteen alderpersons decided not to run for reelection. Across the city, progressive community organizers, activists, and policy makers are running for City Council.

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