wedding vendor shout-outs

Recently I got married! It was dope! Finding vendors was a lot of work, especially vendors who were people of color and/or seemed like they were accustomed to working with people of color. Judging by some folks’ websites, you would have thought I was the first black woman in the history of Chicago to get married. Not cool. But we worked really hard and found amazing people who were professional, delightful to work with, and delivered great results. In case it saves someone else some time or trouble, here they are.

Our food was from Irazu Costa Rican Restaurant.

Our coordinator was La Toya Keys of Elle Kay Events, and her team was phenomenal. They took a lot of stress off of us and we were really in good hands. 

Our flowers came from Zenia Ruiz at Flor del Monte, who was a dream and made designs that truly fit our event and our personalities. 

Our honey favors came from Bike A Bee, from south side hives cared for by urban farmer Jana Kinsman. 

Makeup by j. st. jaimes, who is also a brilliant stylist. Hair by Jae Hudson, who specializes as a consultant for natural hair health. 

Eve's earrings and bracelets were handmade in Brooklyn by Alicia Goodwin. Damon and Kwame's bowties were custom-made in Chicago by Peter Gaona. Our photographer was Sarah Yoder of Laurel + Prairie and our videographer was Ivan Gomez of Modern Wedding Films. Eve’s dresses were tailored by Silver Moon. 

some myths & facts about European ethnic neighborhoods of the early 20th century

“Migration and industrial development also segregated the ‘new’ European immigrant groups, of course, but recent studies have made it clear that immigrant enclaves in the early twentieth century were in no way comparable to the black ghetto that formed in most northern cities by 1940. To be sure, certain neighborhoods could be identified as ‘Italian,’ ‘Polish,’ or ‘Jewish’; but these ethnic enclaves differed from black ghettos in three fundamental ways.

First, unlike black ghettos, immigrant enclaves were never homogeneous and always contained a wide variety of nationalities, even if they were publicly associated with a particular national origin group. In Chicago’s ‘Magyar district’ of 1901, for example, twenty-two different ethnic groups were present and only 37% of all family heads were Magyar (26% were Polish). Similarly, an 1893 color-coded block map of Chicago’s West Side prepared by the U.S. Department of Labor showed the location of European ethnic groups using eighteen separate colors. The result was a huge rainbow in which no block contained a single color. The average number of colors per block was eight, and four out of five lots within blocks were mixed. In none of the ‘Little Italys’ identified on the map was there an all-Italian block.

The myth of the immigrant ghetto was perpetuated by Ernest Burgess, a founder of the ‘Chicago School’ of urban sociology. In 1933 he published a well-known map showing the spatial location [of] Chicago’s various immigrant groups. On it, he identified specific German, Irish, Italian, Russian, Polish, Swedish, and Czech ‘ghettos.’ A closer examination of these data by Thomas Philpott, however, revealed that Burgess’s immigrant ‘ghettos’ were more fictive than real. The average number of nationalities per ghetto was twenty-two, ranging from twenty in ostensibly Italian and Czech neighborhoods to twenty-five in areas that were theoretically Irish, German, and Swedish. In none of these ‘ghettos’ did the ghettoized group constitute even a bare majority of the population, with the sole exception of Poles, who comprised 54% of their enclave. In areas that Burgess identified as being part of the black ghetto, however, blacks comprised 82% of the population.

A second crucial distinction is that most European ethnics did not live in immigrant ‘ghettos,’ as ethnically diluted as they were. Burgess’s Irish ghetto contained only 3% of Chicago’s Irish population, and only 50% of the city’s Italian[s] lived in the ‘Little Italys’ he identified. Only among Poles did a majority, 61%, live in neighborhoods that were identified as being part of the Polish enclave. In contrast, 93% of Chicago’s black population lived within the black ghetto....

The last difference between immigrant enclaves and black ghettos is that whereas ghettos became a permanent fixture of black residential life, ethnic enclaves proved to be a fleeting, transitory stage in the process of immigrant assimilation. The degree of segregation and spatial isolation among European ethnic groups fell steadily after 1910, as native-born children of immigrants experienced less segregation than their parents and as spatial isolation decreased progressively with socioeconomic advancement. For European immigrants, enclaves were places of absorption, adaptation, and adjustment to American society. They served as springboards for broader mobility in society, whereas blacks were trapped behind an increasingly impermeable color line.” - from American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass by Douglas S. Massey and Nancy A. Denton

FAQs, Tips, and Resources

Last updated February 14, 2017.. In this space, I am going to make an attempt to compile some of the questions I am asked most often. I hope it is helpful. 

I’m applying to graduate school. What do I need to know?  Begin by reading the Twitter Q&A that Clint Smith and I hosted in September 2015. (Thanks to the Mellon Mays Professional Network for making a Storify of it.)

How do I write a personal statement for graduate school? Read my tips here. I have been assigned to read the poem “to the notebook kid” at school. What is the poem about? How do I read it correctly? Can you send me a recording of yourself reading it so that I know how to do it? Thank you so much for reading my work. I appreciate it mightily. The poem is an ode from me as a teacher to all of the writing students I have ever had, as well as to myself as a young writer in my teen years. I have no particular recommendations about how to present it, because I read it my way and you will have your own way of reading it. That’s part of what’s great about art: it lives and re-lives and is always recast and reborn not only in the work of the artist, but in interaction between the artist and the audience (that’s you!). You’ll read it in a way that I never could and that will be its own kind of event. Do you best, take your time, and say it like you mean it.

Any tips for someone who wants to brush up on their writing skills? One of my favorite books about writing is Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott. There is a little excerpt here that you might find helpful. For academic writing specifically, there are lots of wonderful guides on the OWL website. But my general tips are as follows:

1) Try to write as clearly as you can and don't worry about what you think it is "supposed to sound like." The best writing is the clearest writing; the way people begin to fall into a hole of bad writing is when they start adding overly flowery touches that end up obfuscating what you want to say. 2) Read, read, read, read, read a lot. When you read something that you think is good, try to notice one thing that that writer did that made it good. How did they structure an argument? What kinds of images did they use? How was the piece organized? Where did it surprise you? Read every day and read lots of different things. 3) Find friends who can edit your work, and humble yourself enough to ask them for help. If you think they are good writers, then be open to what they have to tell you. There is no need to be defensive when people give you feedback or suggestions-- just consider what they have to say with an open mind, and you are free to take it or leave it. If you find that you consistently want to "leave it," you may need a new editor friend.

4) Keep someplace where you can write down your ideas in progress. A notebook, a Google Doc, whatever can be handy when you need it.

Can I send you my writing and get some feedback? I would love this! However, I’m afraid my schedule makes it impossible. Besides, you don’t want my feedback. You want to take the time to cultivate a relationship with other writers in your social circle, who can offer a two-way exchange of support over time. You can also try an online writing community like Critique Circle or Scribophile. And Skillshare is a great website where you can take writing workshops online and there is a community forum embedded in the class where you can share with other people for feedback. Some amazing writers like Daniel José Older and Ashley Ford have classes on there. 

"I think of too many of my white graduate students at Harvard who somehow feel perfectly comfortable calling me by my first name, but feel reluctant to refer to my white male colleagues-- even those junior to me-- in the same way. And I think about how my black students almost always refer to me as 'Professor Lawrence-Lightfoot' even when I have known them a long time and urge them to be less formal. The title indicates their respect for me, but also their own feelings of self-respect, that part of them that gets mirrored in my eyes. And besides, if their mothers or grandmothers heard them call me by my first name, they would be embarrassed; they would think that they had not raised their children right. So I completely understand when one of them says to me (n response to my request that he call me Sara after we have worked together for years), 'I'm sorry, that is not in my repertoire, Professor Lawrence-Lightfoot.’

  These private daily encounters with white and black students are punctuated by public moments-- too numerous to recall-- when the humiliation of being called by my first name seems to demand an explicit response; when I feel I must react to the assault not only for my own self-protection, but also in order to teach a lesson on respectful behavior. I regard these public encounters as 'teachable moments.' I make a choice to respond to them; a choice that I know will both help to shield me and render me more vulnerable.

A few years ago I was asked to speak at a conference at the University of Chicago, a meeting for social scientists and their graduate students about race, class, gender, and school achievement. The other speaker was Professor James Coleman, a distinguished sociologist, a white man several years my senior who was well known and highly regarded for his large-scale statistical studies on educational achievement. Both of us came to the conference well prepared and eager to convey our work to fellow scholars. The language of the occasion was full of the current rhetoric of our disciplines; focused, serious, sometimes esoteric and opaque. I say all this to indicate that there was nothing playful or casual about either of our presentations. Neither of us said anything that suggested informality or frivolity. 

When we had finished speaking, the moderator opened the floor for questions, and several hands shot up in the air. The first to speak was a middle-aged white man who identified himself as an advanced graduate student finishing his training at another prestigious university. He began, ‘I would like to address my question to both Professor Coleman and Sara...’ I could feel my heart racing, then my mind go blank. In fact, I could not even hear his question after he delivered the opening phrase. I saw there having a conversation with myself, feeling the same rage that my parents must have felt sixty years earlier in Jackson, Mississippi. How can this be? How can this guy call him ‘Professor’ and me ‘Sara’? And he has no clue about what he has done, how he has injured me. I’m not even sure that the others in the audience have heard what he just said; whether they’ve recognized the asymmetry, the assault. Somehow, I must have indicated to Jim Coleman (we were friends and colleagues) that I wanted to respond first. He must have seen the panic in my eyes and my shivering body. I heard my voice say very slowly, very clearly, ‘Because of the strange way you addressed both of us, “Professor Coleman and Sara,” I am not able to respond to your question. As a matter of fact,’ I say, leaning into the microphone, holding onto it for dear life, ‘I couldn’t even hear your question.’ The room was absolutely still. I was not sure that there were any people out there who had any idea how I was feeling, any idea that I was on fire. But my voice must have conveyed my pain, even if the cause was obscure to them. ‘Would you please repeat your question?’ I asked the man, who had by now slid halfway down his seat, and whose face revealed a mixture of pain and defiance. ‘And this time, would you ask it in a way that I will be able to hear it.’ ...My ancestors were speaking, reminding me of my responsibility to teach this lesson of respect; reminding me that I deserved to be respected.” - Prof. Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot, Respect: An Exploration, Chapter 2

how to write a personal statement for graduate school

I originally posted this on Facebook but I thought putting it here would make it easier to find. I also highly recommend reading the tweets from the Q&A Clint Smith and I hosted in fall 2015 about how to apply for grad school.  Alright, y'all. Every year people send me their personal statements to apply for doctoral programs and every year I give the same advice. Trying to make this advice more public so that more people can find it helpful. (And to save myself time, lol.) Feel free to share.

The personal statement is a slightly misleading title for this document. It is not primarily about you holistically in the way your college personal statement was. It serves ONE MAJOR PURPOSE: to demonstrate to a department that you understand how to formulate and pursue a research question, and that there is a good fit between your question and the department.

Your personal statement (for the humanities and social sciences) should follow roughly this outline. (Colleagues-- if you think this is bad advice or have anything to add please feel free to comment.)

- Open with a story, anecdote, or scene that draws the reader in and helps us understand who you are and how your present research interest emerged. (In my personal statement, I talked about a scene in my classroom that helped me realize something about black adolescent girls and literature. In Clint Smith's for example, he talked about being displaced by Katrina and experiencing a huge difference in educational quality.) Close this paragraph by explicitly stating an OBSERVATION, INSIGHT, or QUESTION that you took from this experience, that has guided you since then. So this is not just a random story. It should be a parable or fable explaining something crucial about you and your work.

- Now that we know who you are and what guides you, take us into your past work that has prepared you for grad school. Talk about professional experiences, classes, service opportunities, and so on. These should reflect your observation/insight/question. Close this paragraph with a key PUZZLE or CONUNDRUM or LINGERING QUESTION that emerged from this work. Something along the lines of "through this work I learned ___.... but I began to notice _____... which led me to wonder ____." Something that keeps you up at night. Something that seems like it's missing from the field currently.

- Demonstrate that you have made an informed effort to address this puzzle by doing some reading and research. What have other scholars said or done in attempts to get at this puzzle? What research articles and books have been written in this general area? (Google Scholar is your friend here.) Show that you are knowledgable about this topic. Close by making clear WHAT IS STILL MISSING FROM CURRENT RESEARCH. This, of course, is where you are going to direct your talents once you get into the program of your choice.

- Now you explain how this current program will help you answer these extant questions. Think of the program like an item in a video game or a secret weapon-- it helps you level up from what you are currently able to do based on your already-impressive professional expertise. What resources does the department have that appeal to you? What faculty do you want to work with and how is their work related to yours? (Name two or three.) How is the program a good fit? (Not the university, not the field, not "graduate school," but this department or program specifically. So yes, you need to modify this section for every school you apply to.) Reciprocally, what do you think you can add to the department and your peers? What are you bringing with you in terms of knowledge and expertise that makes you feel like this time is going to be really fruitful? THIS SECTION NEEDS TO MAKE SENSE. There needs to be a clear fit between the questions you have and the resources the department has. If not, take this school off your list.

- Now that we understand who you are, what your questions are, how you have approached them so far, and how you are going to approach them wielding the powers of the department, close by saying what you want to do with the degree. Briefly discuss your goals for after the program, then end with something profound (ideally, something that ties back to your opening anecdote or story).

Dassit.

*** Important addendum: if your interests change once you get to grad school and you do not do this exact thing, that is okay. In fact, it will almost certainly happen. (After all, hopefully you are meeting people and learning interesting things in classes that evolve your ideas. Otherwise what are you doing, lol) No one is going to come after you and say "you said here you would do xyz..." The purpose of this exercise is to provide an existence proof that you know how to develop a question, even if you end up pursuing a different question.

“I vaguely remembered an essay titled ‘The Creative Process' by James Baldwin, from an undergraduate course years ago. After re-reading this essay, I was inspired and reminded of my role as a scholar as it relates to social change. Baldwin, in his eloquent and relentless precision for which his writing is known, gives us a blueprint for the role of an artist. He says, ‘The precise role of the artist, then, is to illuminate that darkness, blaze roads through the vast forest, so that we will not, in all our doing, lose sight of its purpose, which is after all, to make the world a more human dwelling place’ (Baldwin, 1985).... I am becoming more convinced that the role of a scholar should be more closely aligned with Baldwin's conceptualization of an artist. That is, our role should be not only to inform, but also to inspire and to foster a collective imagination about how to make the world a more human dwelling place.” - Shawn Ginwright, “Collective Radical Imagination”

“Slavery had established a measure of man and a ranking of life and worth that has yet to be undone. If slavery persists as an issue in the political life of black America, it is not because of an antiquarian obsession with bygone days or the burden of a too-long memory, but because black lives are still imperiled and devalued by a racial calculus and a political arithmetic that were entrenched centuries ago. This is the afterlife of slavery-- skewed life chances, limited access to health and education, premature death, incarceration, and impoverishment. I, too, am the afterlife of slavery.” 

- Saidiya Hartman, Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route