NBN Magazine Fall 2017

THIS IS JUST WHAT HAPPENS AT FRATERNITIES

HOW DO YOU ESCAPE PARTY CONVERSATIONS? I workshop ideas for my flowchart.

(See pg. 62)

NORTH BY NORTHWESTERN managing editor Nicolás Rivero creative director Emma Kumer photo directors Ying Dai, Emma Danbury senior features editors Daniel Fernandez, Sam Spengler senior section editors Claire Bugos Emily Karl, Meg Pisarczyk I check associate editors Paola de Varona, Mia Zanzucchi my email. senior designers Savannah Christensen, Sarah Zhang designers Amanda Gordon, Rachel Hawley Jakob Lazzaro, Audrey Valbuena assistant photo director Charlotte Hu, Cassie Majewski photographers Ying Dai, Emma Danbury, Michael del Rosario, Ayesha Goswamy, Elissa Gray, Cassie Majewski, Virginia Nowakowski, Rahul Parikh, Mia Zanzucchi contributors Gabrielle Bienasz, Andy Brown, Claire Bugos, Justin Curto, Paola de Varona, Natalie Escobar, Will Fischer, Priyanka Godbole, Amanda Gordon, David Guirgis, Elizabeth Guthrie, Maggie Harden, Mila Jasper, Emma Kumer, Virginia Nowakowski, Nicolás Rivero, Morgan Smith, Sam Spengler, Audrey Valbuena, Mia Zanzucchi, Jono Zarrilli, Laura Zornosa web liaisons Emma Kumer, Maxine Whitely, Mia Zanzucchi

NORTHBYNORTHWESTERN.COM

I talk about obscure alternative music.

editor-in-chief Libby Berry executive editor Lila Reynolds managing editors Justin Curto, Rachel Frazin, Isabella Jiao assistant managing editors Maggie Harden, Morgan Smith news editors Rachel Hawley, Yoonjie Park features editors Jamie Hwang, Laura Zornosa life & style editors Danielle Cohen, Elizabeth Guthrie entertainment editor Victoria Alfred-Levow sports editor Trevor Lystad politics editor Priyanka Godbole writing editor Elissa Gray opinion editor David Guirgis assistant opinion editor Courtney Lewis science and tech editor Audrey Valbuena You know the photo editor Charlotte Hu movie He’s Just video editor Helen Lee Not That Into interactive editor Audrey DeBruine You? I’m him. audio editor Jakob Lazzaro identities editor Audrey Valbuena

NORTH BY NORTHWESTERN, NFP

board of directors

I dance.

president Libby Berry executive vice president Lila Reynolds vice president Nicolás Rivero treasurer Leo Ji

corporate

director of business operations Leo Ji social media coordinators Milan Polk, Travis Wolf director of development Rachel Wolfe development liaison Rachel Frazin directors of talent Austin Siegel, Mia Zanzucchi wellness chairs Maggie Harden, Virginia Nowakowski creative director Savannah Christensen director of marketing Missy Chen webmaster Maxine Whitely

“Excuse me, I have to go pet that dog.”

Stop, drop and roll.

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COVER DESIGN EMMA KUMER // COVER PHOTO ELISSA GRAY

PRE GAME

CON TENTS

PAGE 5

LIFE ADVICE Life advice from Professor Nitasha Sharma MILA JASPER

DANCE FLOOR PAGE 13

LIFT UP YOUR HANDS Hedwig and the Angry Inch makes a space in student theater for transgender and nonbinary voices JUSTIN CURTO

LONELY

BY DESIGN

PAGE 34

FEAT URES

Exploring the history behind Plex’s isolation SAM SPENGLER

BRUSHED ASIDE

Students and administrators struggle to find common ground on alcohol reform MAGGIE HARDEN

WHAT DO WE DO ABOUT FRATERNITIES? The Northwestern community struggles to address sexual assault in Greek life WILL FISCHER

LEFT OF THE DIAL How WNUR’s Streetbeat amplified Chicago house music AMANDA GORDON

WE’RE JUST NOT YOUR TYPE

Northwestern women of color speak out about being fetishized on campus PAOLA DE VARONA

HANG OVER PAGE 58

I’M TOO OLD FOR THIS SHIT NBN’s resident dad relives the freshman year he never had ANDY BROWN

PREGAME LIFE ADVICE FROM A PROFESSOR Get to know Professor Nitasha Sharma MILA JASPER

A BRIEF HISTORY OF WATER BASKETBALL 8

Northwestern’s short-lived dominance in a sport it made up JONO ZARRILLI

HACK THE HALL

Get the most out of your $13 meal swipe with these five tips ELIZABETH GUTHRIE

THE LINES LESS TRAVELED NBN’s guide to seeing Chicago on the ‘L’ EMMA KUMER

A DAMNBN GOOD WAY TO START THE PARTY PHOTO ELISSA GRAY

DADDY NORBUCKS

A peek at the finances of NU’s biggest donors PRIYANKA GODBOLE

FALL 2017 // 5

LIFE ADVICE FROM

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W

hat do race relations, hip-hop and indigeneity in the Pacific have in common?

They’re all research passions of Nitasha Sharma, professor of African American Studies, Asian American Studies and Performance Studies. Winner of the Charles Deering McCormick Professor of Teaching Excellence Award from 2013 to 2016, Sharma isn’t a stuffy academic, but is charismatic, open and more than happy to remind students that self-worth is not derived from how many meetings they attend.

NBN caught up with her to discuss nothing less than finding meaning in life.

How were you able to incorporate your interests into your research?

I loved hip-hop in the ‘90s; it was really, really formative. I knew that it was not just music, but it really brought communities together, so I wanted to go to graduate school and study hip-hop. I’m also really convinced that if we look at people who cross particular racial boundaries, they’re going to tell us something about race more broadly.

It’s not just that I’m interested in mixed race identity because I have a mixed race background – it’s really about how we can understand race differently when we look outside of the continental U.S., when we look outside of a white context and when we look outside of a monoracial context.

How can students use their budding curiosities at Northwestern to drive their paths going forward?

It’s really about tapping into what makes sense for you. My lane is academics and teaching. I could do the same kind of work of anti-racism and understanding race as an artist, or an academic, or as a diversity worker in a corporation, but I like the academic lifestyle. I found the kind of occupation that aligns with my values and my lifestyle desires, then I found the questions that I’m interested in and then I found the methods that I’m interested in.

You really have to be conscientious about who you are in the world and not just be like, “I want to make a lot of money.” A lot of people do that, and the University pushes students towards that. But will you be super passionate about it? Maybe some people will, but a lot of people are not motivated to take that job because it’s not exactly what they want to do.

I’m really lucky because my husband and I always say that we get paid to do the things we love, and that really accounts for a lot of our happiness.

How does Northwestern’s institutional culture affect students’ ability to be conscientious about crafting their futures?

If you feel comfortable at Northwestern, there’s something a little wrong with you.

It’s making you very accustomed to overscheduling, working hard and playing hard. Students should not value busyness and self importance as being defined in certain ways.

You guys should be a little more like slackers and chill. What are you guys doing? You’re not running the country. Why do you have to meet every month? You have to value just being.

Editor’s note: This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

WHERE YOU MIGHT HAVE SEEN HER: Quotes from Northwestern CTECs

Asian and Black Historical Relations in the U.S.

“ “ “

amazing class, every day I walked out feeling changed, and prof. sharma is so great you won’t find another prof like her.”

The Mixed Race Experience

This is such an important class, and Professor Sharma is honestly the realest teacher.”

Diversity and Inequality at Northwestern University Hands down the best class I’ve ever taken. This class will simply change the way you view the world. It doesn’t mean that I’ve changed my opinions about a lot of things but it does mean that I question things more often before accepting them as “normal” or true. Sharma is a MUST-TAKE at Northwestern.”

Race and Indigeneity in the Pacific This course is in its first quarter and has no CTECs, but it is an interdisciplinary class examining how race and indigeneity are constructed within the Pacific. The course began with a research trip to Honolulu.

NITASHA STORY MILA JASPER DESIGN SARAH ZHANG PHOTO RAHUL PARIKH

SHARMA

PREGAME // 7

STORY JONO ZARRILLI // DESIGN JAKOB LAZZARO PHOTOS NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY ARCHIVES

A brief history of

water basketball

Northwestern’s short-lived dominance in a sport it made up

T

he year is 1921, and Northwestern has emerged victorious in a match The Daily Northwestern called “the greatest ever played in a conference pool.” In a fiercely defensive battle against the University of Illinois where “every man was covered instantly” and “every toss was reflected,” the game went scoreless into triple overtime until “the Purple team” made two shots to put the game out of reach. Northwestern’s unique ability to “combine wrestling and swimming” left them undefeated that season. Welcome to water basketball: the most successful Northwestern sport you’ve never heard of.

Swim coach Tom Robinson invented the sport while working at the Evanston YMCA in 1907. During his early years on campus, water basketball spread from Chicagoland throughout the Midwest and eventually across the country. Chicago athletic clubs were

Tom Robinson’s swimming dynasty

BY THE NUMBERS

6 National NCAA titles won by Northwestern 10 Big Ten championships 35 Years Tom Robinson coached the NU swim team 11 Northwestern swimmers who made it to the Olympics 6 Swimmers who medaled 50,000+ People Robinson taught to swim through his volunteer work at the Evanston YMCA

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among the first to officially adopt the sport. Meanwhile, Robinson began to stage water basketball “curtain-raisers,” or athletic opening acts, prior to Big Ten swimming events in Patten’s new state-of-the-art pool, exposing other schools to the new game. By 1913, the Big Ten Conference dropped water polo and made water basketball an official event at men’s swim meets in 1914.

The rules eliminated the underwater action and violence of water polo while retaining the fast pace and excitement of the game. Unlike in water polo, players could swim underwater, enabling trick plays and keeping defenders on edge.

Each team had three defenders and three forwards trying to score baskets into hoops suspended above the water. Every basket earned one point, and games were quick, consisting of two 10-minute halves with a five-minute halftime.

According to a November 1912 Daily article, water basketball was, “on the whole, far cleaner” than water polo since only two players could battle for possession as opposed to the large scrums that develop in water polo. Players who didn’t have the ball could not be tackled.

However, this “clean” characterization didn’t always hold true: the 1926 yearbook described the season finale between Northwestern and Iowa as “a first class dog fight... four Northwestern men were stripped of their shirts during the fracas while two Iowa men were taken out of the game because of injuries, one having to be taken to the city hospital.”

From 1914 to 1918, the NU water basketball squad outscored its opponents

166-55. In 1924, the only year that water basketball was a component of the NCAA’s intercollegiate swimming championship, Northwestern won. The next year, the Big Ten reinstated water polo and ended its 12-year water basketball experiment. Although popular among college students, water basketball did not catch on in high schools, nor was it recognized by the Olympic Committee, so conference officials decided that the international sport of water polo had a better chance at longterm success. Robinson supported the move and expressed the hope that “once developed... it will rank as great a place as water basketball has occupied in the conference in the past.”

The Patten pool is long gone, and so is the sport of water basketball. Now, all we can do is imagine the excitement of a self-created Northwestern sports dynasty. What water basketball lacked in longevity, it made up for in inventiveness and popularity on campus. And, let’s be honest: the real victory is that the Big Ten implemented the “rough, hilarious” sport at all. As Dr. Seuss would say, “don’t cry because it’s over, smile because it happened.”

Don’t be afraid to mix ingredients from different dishes, and get crazy with it.

Nutella makes everything better: toast, cookies, waffles. Maybe even french fries? Go for it. Add some crunch to your ice cream with sugary cereal or put some soft-serve in that stale coffee.

Take advantage of seasonings and sauces and mix them in a bland dish.

It’s a buffet for a reason!

Remember that you can compost almost everything, so don’t throw anything away. Leave your napkins on your plate as you return your dirty dishes, and it will make it to the compost pile instead of the landfill.

Get the most out of your $13 meal swipe with these five tips STORY ELIZABETH GUTHRIE // DESIGN SAVANNAH CHRISTENSEN // PHOTOS YING DAI

B

efore starting college, you may have been dreading the prospect of eating bland dining hall food day after day. But then you arrived and realized the unlimited soft serve ice cream almost makes up for it. Soon enough, you’re happily slurping up ice cream after your main dish of french fries for every meal. You love it, but you regret it. As much time as you’ve spent building this love/hate relationship with the dining hall, it can still be a little messy. You’re in this romance for better or for worse, so here are a few tips on how to make it a long and loving one.

Although the dining halls have their drawbacks, having access to an all-you-can-eat buffet for every meal is not one of them. But it’s also easy to walk away balancing six different dishes you don’t really need. Relax – it’s not your job to single-handedly clean out the dining hall. Northwestern’s Campus Kitchen gathers extra food from the dining halls and donates the meals to needy Evanston residents.

Instead of taking too much and wasting food, start small and go back for seconds if you’re still hungry.

When all else fails, ask for grilled chicken.

If your friends are busy and you have to eat alone, there’s no need to be lonely. You have your reliable friend Netflix. Grab a corner table and your laptop and catch up on the latest episode of Scandal. You’ll look smart and studious to everyone else as you pig out to your favorite show.

PREGAME // 9

ConservatoryCentral Park Drive GREEN LINE 8 0 M I N AWAY

COME HERE IF

SKIP IT IF

WHAT TO SEE

WHERE TO EAT

you feel like stepping into a tropical forest to avoid the tundra that is Chiberia.

you’re not a stopand-smellthe-roses type.

The Garfield Park Conservatory. It’s a two-acre public greenhouse open 365 days a year. The best part? It’s always free!

Inspiration Kitchens, only a block away.

The Lines

STORY and DESIGN EMMA KUMER PHOTOS JUSTIN CURTO, ELISSA GRAY, EMMA KUMER, VIRGINIA NOWAKOWSKI

Okay, admit it: You don’t go to Chicago as much as you’d like… And when you do, you often find yourself taking the Red Line to Grand and State only to hop off and walk the Mag Mile until you reach the Bean. Don’t worry – we’ve all been there. In fact, we’ve been there too many times.

With the whole city only one Ventra scan away, take this as your opportunity to enjoy some of Chicago’s lesser-known haunts and hot spots.

NBN’s guide to the best ‘L’s you’ve never taken

Less Traveled

Belmont R E D / B ROW N / P U R P L E L I N E 3 7 M I N AWAY

COME HERE IF

SKIP IT IF

WHAT TO SEE

WHERE TO EAT

you need a fun n’ flirty (yet eccentric) costume for your buddy’s crush party.

you’ve always been a name-brand devotee.

Belmont’s Army, the massive multilevel thrift/shoe/military supply store carrying some of Chicago’s rarest fashion finds.

BopNGrill… Just because Guy Fieri’s been to one of the locations.

Western B LU E L I N E 8 1 M I N AWAY

18th Street PINK LINE 6 3 M I N AWAY

COME HERE IF

SKIP IT IF

WHAT TO SEE

WHERE TO EAT

you’re getting really sick of Andy’s.

you’re lactose intolerant, hate waiting or both.

Take a walk on The 606, an elevated walkway that can’t decide if it’s a bridge, park or track.

You can pick up the trail at the intersection of Bloomingdale and Western.

The original location of Margie’s Candies, a Chi-town sweet tooth destination.

For sundaes the size of your face, Margie’s is the place.

COME HERE IF

SKIP IT IF

WHAT TO SEE

WHERE TO EAT

you haven’t been to Pilsen, one of Chicago’s prominent Mexican neighborhoods.

you love gentrification. (*wrinkles nose* Millennial!)

Pilsen Vintage, an old shop stuffed with more vinyl records than a trendy EP apartment.

Casa del Pueblo Taqueria, the kind of place you can’t go to if your chosen salsa heat level is “mild.”

Clark/Lake B LU E / G R E E N / P I N K / O R A N G E / B ROW N / P U R P L E L I N E 5 4 M I N AWAY

COME HERE IF

WHAT TO SEE

you’re trying to avoid the pre-Christmas Old Orchard hordes.

Block 37, a subterranean shopping mall.

SKIP IT IF

you enjoy shivering your way through outdoor malls.

WHERE TO EAT

There’s an underground food court beneath the James R. Thompson Center that will make you feel like you’ve truly explored every nook and cranny of the city.

Montrose B LU E L I N E 7 7 M I N AWAY

COME HERE IF

you’re horrible at singing.

SKIP IT IF

you’re uncomfortable with the fact that you’re horrible at singing.

WHAT TO SEE

Sidekicks Karaoke and Darts, best on a Friday or Saturday night.

WHERE TO EAT

Old Irving Brewing Co. (It’s even got cornhole for the kids – or the kids at heart.)

PREGAME // 11

DADDY

A peek at the finances of NU’s biggest donors

NORBUCKS STORY PRIYANKA GODBOLE // DESIGN SARAH ZHANG

Have you ever found yourself strolling down Sheridan Road, wondering if one day you’ll be one of those absurdly affluent alumni so revered by the University that you’ll have a building named after you? Same.

As of 2016, Northwestern’s endowment was $9.65 billion, making it the eighth largest in the country. This hefty sum is, in part, the result of generous donations from alumni, parents and friends who have given back to the school since its founding. Naturally, some donate more than the average Wildcat and subsequently have buildings on campus named after them. Get to know a few of these moneybags and their bourgeois backgrounds:

WHO

HOW THEY GOT THEIR MONEY

the RYANS the PRITZKERS

Pat Ryan established himself as a giant in the insurance industry as the founder of Aon.

$

J.B. Pritzker is a managing partner and co-founder at the Pritzker Group, a private investment firm. In addition, he is one of the heirs to the Hyatt Hotel fortune, a chain co-founded by his uncle Jay Pritzker in 1957.

Patrick Ryan - Kellogg ‘59; Shirley Ryan - Weinberg ‘61

J.B. Pritzker - Law ‘93

the McCORMICKS SEBASTIAN KRESGE the CROWNS Robert R. McCormick - Law 1907

The McCormick family rose to prominence in the 1830s when Cyrus McCormick invented the grain reaper, which revolutionized farming. Decades later, his descendant, Robert R. McCormick, would become president of the Tribune Company, a media empire he created and grew from the Chicago Tribune. Robert’s maternal grandfather was Tribune editor and former Chicago mayor Joseph Medill.

Kresge built the retail empire Kmart off of an initial investment of $8,000.

Lester Crown - McCormick ‘46

Lester’s dad, Henry, helped found a building supplies company that later merged with aerospace and defense company General Dynamics. Henry also owned the Empire State Building for 10 years in the ‘50s.

NAMESAKES

TOTAL $ DONATED (AT LEAST)

The S.S. Bienen Ryan Fieldhouse Welsh-Ryan Arena

The Rebecca Crown Center The Crown Family Center for Jewish Studies

Renée and Departments Lester Crown of Theatre and Speaker Series Donald Pritzker Performance Henry Crown (J.B.’s dad) Studies Sports Pavilion Entrepreneurial Administrative School of Law The Crown offices of the NU Pritzker Family School of Kresge School of Law Centennial Hall Communication Internship

Kresge The Pritzkers Foundation

The Ryans

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331.5 MILLION

Robert R. McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science

The McCormicks

Foundation

McCormick Foundation Center

$30 million

$1.5 million

Robert McCormick Hall

The The Crowns McCormicks

The Ryans $200 million

Kresge

The Crowns

The Pritzkers $100 million

LIFT UP YOUR HANDS

Hedwig and the Angry Inch brings nonbinary voices to the stage JUSTIN CURTO

WHO RUN THE WORLD? 16

Meet the students behind a directory for woman-owned businesses GABRIELLE BIENAZ

18

BIG MIKE

How veteran Michael Itter inspires budding Evanston boxers MORGAN SMITH

HOME SWEET (GREEN) HOME 20

Northwestern team builds the smart home of the future VIRGINIA NOWAKOWSKI

22

THE BIG CUT

With fading funds, Studio 22 looks to reinvent itself MIA ZANZUCCHI

RETHINKING THE “LATINA” CARD 24

A reflection affirmative action NATALIE ESCOBAR

26

FACES BEHIND THE FLASH

Going behind the scenes with your favorite campus photographers

PHOTO MIA ZANZUCCHI

14

NBN PHOTO TEAM

28

HELLO, WISCONSIN!

Enjoy brats, brie and the Black River on a road trip to Milwaukee AUDREY VALBUENA and LAURA ZORNOSA

30

LENS TO THE PAST

Re-discovering Northwestern through the photography of James Roberts CLAIRE BUGOS

LONELY

BY DESIGN 32

Exploring the history behind Plex’s isolating architechture SAM SPENGLER

DANCE FLOOR

TIME TO MIX AND MINGLE

FALL 2017 // 13

ww

Lift up your hands Hedwig and the Angry Inch makes a space in student theater for transgender and nonbinary voices STORY JUSTIN CURTO // DESIGN AUDREY VALBUENA // PHOTOS YING DAI

S

tepping into Shanley Pavilion during the weekend of Hedwig and the Angry Inch, you’d notice the graffiti immediately.

Green and blue spray-painted designs and phrases cover the walls – the word “fuck” is prominently displayed. In one corner of the room, the three-pronged transgender symbol rests between the words “Trans Justice.”

Standing 6-foot-8 in high-heeled boots and wearing glam rockinspired blue eyeshadow, Connor MacMillen dances past that symbol throughout the show as they perform as Hedwig, its titular rock star. To them, it’s not just graffiti: It represents the “weight of responsibility” of the show, the first Student Theatre Coalition performance in recent memory by and about transgender people.

“It’s just so important that this show is happening and that we tell it right,” MacMillen says.

From the start, producer Lindsey Weiss and director Adam Orme knew that they wanted to put on a show dealing with gender.

They chose Hedwig, a musical by Northwestern alumni John Cameron Mitchell (Speech ‘85) and Stephen Trask that centers on a genderqueer performer who was designated male at birth and experiences a botched sex reassignment surgery. As Hedwig performs a rock concert, she tells the audience her life’s story, accompanied on backup vocals by her husband, Yitzhak. Their relationship is contentious from the start: Hedwig continually abuses and forces Yitzhak to repress his passion for drag performance.

To Weiss, the show doesn’t present “a neat trans narrative” – and that made it all the more appealing for the team. Orme adds that Hedwig “defies definition.”

“That’s what it does both about gender, and also in a broader sense about who we are supposed to be in society and in our relationships,” Orme says. “It is not so easy to slap a label on ourselves, especially for genderqueer people.”

Spectrum Theatre Company, a StuCo board focused on socially and politically important theater, put on the show Oct. 19–21. The board wanted its fall slot to amplify unheard stories – like it did last year with it’s winter mainstage, Water by the Spoonful, written by Latina playwright Quiara Alegría Hudes and starring Latinx actors.

But Hedwig’s unrepresented, transgender-focused storyline almost didn’t happen. Last spring, Weiss and the team intensely pursued the rights to Hedwig, but didn’t hear back because the show was on its national tour. The team didn’t give up that easily, though. It extended its deadline until the last possible minute, noon on the first day of callbacks. In the meantime, Orme had prepared a callback list for a backup play, Where We’re Born, which did not focus on gender identity or feature explicitly transgender characters.

On the day of the deadline, after a morning of phone tag with Hedwig’s licensing company and the tour’s production company, when they found out the national tour would not be extended, Weiss received a call. It was the licensing company’s head of nonprofessional licensing, Craig Pospisil: “Lindsey, guess what, it’s 11:59, they called us back and you got the rights.”

Weiss doesn’t remember going to class after that. They just laid on the floor in shock.

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w

The show’s confirmation was great news for Rachel Stamler-Jonas, a senior in the School of Communication. It gave her the opportunity to put on a Croatian accent and five o’clock shadow makeup to play Yitzhak, her dream role ever since she saw the Broadway revival a few years ago. She even tried to get the rights for her own production. Since that fell through, Stamler-Jonas knew she had to be involved with Spectrum’s performance.

“I saw Yitzhak find himself in a way that felt really important to me,” Stamler-Jonas says. “It just feels like I’m watching something that I need to be [on stage].”

Throughout the rehearsal process, StamlerJonas and MacMillen worked to remake roles that already had their own histories. StamlerJonas felt that Yitzhak needed to be more than a character that “just kind of exists,” as in popular productions; MacMillen wanted to reclaim a genderqueer character known for being played by cisgender men like Mitchell (the playwright) and Neil Patrick Harris. And both actors, who’ve been friends since the first day of freshman year, found their mutual trust invaluable in acting out and understanding the characters’ abusive relationship.

“Rachel and I were talking about how this show is never going to exist again because this Hedwig and this Yitzhak are so uniquely creations of ourselves, more so than almost every other theatrical production I’ve been in,” MacMillen says. “These were our stories we were telling.”

All productions of Hedwig occur in the present day. For the Spectrum production, this meant Hedwig’s concert took place at Northwestern’s “historic” Shanley Pavilion in 2017. The script cleverly referenced Northwestern and current politics throughout the whole show. For the actors, this broke down a wall that exists in many other shows – instead of performing Hedwig, they were living in its world and bringing the audience in, too.

“Obviously there were facts about this character that don’t apply to me, but the person that was up on stage was me the whole time, and

“THESE WERE OUR STORIES WE WERE TELLING.” —CONNOR MACMILLEN

that character was freeing in a way that I didn’t expect,” Stamler-Jonas says. “This show, I think, has greater meaning in a larger sense, and also very personal meaning in a very minute sense.”

Beyond addressing issues of representation, Weiss says political art like Hedwig creates “healing and community wellness.” They find that especially important given the absence of an explicitly transgender community at Northwestern.

“This is StuCo’s first shot as getting trans representation right,” Weiss said a few days before Hedwig opened. “Never, as far as I know in StuCo, have trans characters been played by openly trans actors and has that artistic leadership been forefronted by trans people.”

Now, after Hedwig’s five-show run, the team wants its impact to continue. As a junior, Weiss wants to continue promoting transgender and nonbinary representation in theater through their work as co-chair of activism for Lipstick Theatre, a StuCo board focusing on feminist theatre. And this winter, Stamler-Jonas will independently direct a self-written transgender retelling of The Little Mermaid, called The Little Merperson. Together, the team hopes that the show left some thinking about gender identity differently, and others feeling less lost in their own gender identity.

MacMillen performed as Hedwig during the show in front of two of the first people they ever came out to. They sang and cracked jokes, first in Hedwig’s denim dress and fishnets and later in her shimmering evening gown and flowing blond wig.

As Hedwig came to terms with herself at the end of the show, MacMillen stood vulnerable at the edge of the stage. They had ripped off Hedwig’s dress, smudged her makeup and given her wig to Yitzhak.

In a pair of black booty shorts and some leftover eyeshadow, MacMillen kneeled in front of the audience of friends, peers and strangers as they sang the show’s final song, “Midnight Radio.”

When they stood back up, Stamler-Jonas returned to the stage wearing the wig and flowers as Yitzhak in full drag. Together, the two – channeling their own experiences – preached self-discovery to everyone, singing the show’s final request: “Lift up your hands!”

DANCE FLOOR // 15

Students create a directory of women-owned businesses in Chicago STORY GABRIELLE BIENASZ DESIGN and ILLUSTRATIONS AUDREY VALBUENA

THEY KNEW WHAT FEMALE BUSINESS OWNERS STRUGGLED WITH: FOR EVERY $1 A WOMAN RECEIVES IN SMALL BUSINESS LOANS, A MAN RECEIVES $23.

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NORTHBYNORTHWESTERN.COM

I

n July of 2017, Isabel Benatar and Sam Letscher sat in Evanston’s NorthShore hospital, tapping away on their devices.

Benatar was perched on a chair next to the bed where Letscher reclined, foot bundled in white gauze. Letscher’s toe was throbbing, but there was an even more intense pressure in the room: the impending launch of BOSSY, a directory of women-owned businesses in the Chicago area.

Earlier that day, Letscher had pulled a glass door directly onto her big toenail.

But the Northwestern seniors wanted to release the directory within the next 24 hours before leaving town for vacations to Colorado and California. Benatar grabbed a sandwich for Letscher and sat in a waiting room chair to finish inputting the last few businesses into the directory. The next day, BOSSY Chicago went online and Chicagoland residents gained the ability to look up women-owned businesses in their area on BossyChicago.com.

Benatar and Letscher put the directory together in just three days during Wildfire, a summer program at the Northwestern Garage that pushes NU students to develop and launch a startup in 10 weeks with $10,000. From the start, Benatar and Letscher knew they wanted to support ethical spending in light of the 2016 election, but they weren’t sure how. “This

was around the time when everybody was boycotting Uber and boycotting companies that sold Trump products, and there was a lot of discussion about where we’re putting our money,” Letscher says. “But there seemed like there could be something more.”

During the first three weeks of Wildfire, Benatar and Letscher continued what they had been doing since spring quarter: interviewing women-owned businesses from Andersonville to Evanston and all the ‘L’ stops in between.

They knew what female business owners struggled with: for every $1 a woman receives in small business loans, a man receives $23.

This initial discrimination in capital means their businesses will, on average, be smaller than male-owned businesses. Female business owners are often overcharged by repairmen, who assume they don’t understand the physical structure of their shop. Customers frequently mistake younger, male employees for the owner.

Back in the Garage, they cycled through ideas to bring customers to woman-owned businesses — should they start a magazine?

A blog of their interviews and a newsletter?

Potential project ideas swirled around them, scrawled in red Expo marker on whiteboardplastered walls. “I was wishing there was a clear right answer, or someone could just swoop in and be like, ‘that’s the right choice,” Benatar says.

On Monday of week four, Letscher and Benatar went in for their weekly meeting with their mentors Neal Sales-Griffin and Billy Banks. They discussed the idea of the directory, and the advisors gave them their favorite piece of advice: just start. They launched BOSSY that Thursday.

Friday morning, the Women and Children First bookstore shared the directory on their Facebook page. BOSSY exploded. The Chicago Reader reached out for an interview; consumers commented on the local bookstore’s post and recommended women-owned businesses; users messaged BOSSY with statements of support. Letscher woke up that morning in Colorado under an avalanche of social media buzz. Alone, toe throbbing, with her family off hiking in the Rockies, Letscher replied to comments and furiously added businesses to the directory.

BOSSY Chicago has evolved since the hectic week of the directory launch. Benatar and Letscher are now building their team and recruiting social media directors and writers. The founders hope new members will allow them to focus on BOSSY’s other challenges: creating a more navigable directory, building a sustainable revenue model and highlighting the difficulties women face at the intersection of various identities.

“If they’re truly dedicated to supporting women’s businesses,” says Zoe Johnson, a Medill sophomore, “and really spend time advertising the work of trans women, women of color, women of all socioeconomic classes, queer women, disabled women – they will be providing an amazing resource for the Chicago community.”

Sydney Monroe, another user, says she connected with BOSSY’s name. “It reminds me of when I was young and people would call me or other girls who were louder or took initiative [bossy],” she says.

The directory serves the Chicago area, but Benatar and Letscher think it has the potential to go nationwide as the next TripAdvisor or Yelp for women-owned businesses. At the end of Wildfire, the team presented to the Garage community at “Demo Day.” The team showed a graphic of a map with hundreds of pins that represent potential cites to feature on the BOSSY website, and with it, the opportunity to promote thousands of women-owned businesses. “[The presentation] just encapsulated the point of like, ‘We’re nowhere near the end,’” Banks says. “‘We are just beginning and are going to really have impact and an impact at a big scale.’”

DANCE FLOOR // 17

M

ichael Itter, more commonly known as “Big Mike”, weaves his way through the maze of heavy, plastic boxing bags hanging from the ceiling of TITLE Boxing Club.

As Evanston locals and Northwestern students swing their sweaty, limp fists at the targets, he jumps from bag to bag, yelling encouragements and dancing.

“Welcome to the best 45 minutes of your day!” he shouts. “Aren’t you glad you get to spend it with me?”

Big Mike lives up to his nickname.

He’s sturdy, with 185 pounds of lean muscle spread over his 5’8 frame. On

his tan face, a set of intense, blue eyes sit above a set of huge, bleached white teeth. He has a permanent five-o’clock shadow that he scratches when he’s pensive. You’ll likely find Mike strolling around wearing a snapback and an allblack tracksuit, even off the clock.

When Lil Wayne’s “Lollipop” starts booming through the loudspeaker, Mike casually drops that he first heard the song on a bootlegged CD during his first tour in Afghanistan. He enlisted in the military after 9/11 when he was 17. During his two tours in Iraq and two tours in Afghanistan, he served in the

infantry, front line and ranger battalion, leading over 500 patrols overseas.

When Mike was 15, he was placed in the state foster care system in Aurora, Illinois. Among the “angsty bullies” in the group homes and foster homes where he stayed, Mike learned how to fight.

He recalls his first fistfight with a local kid from high school, someone who was supposed to be this “real tough guy, but he was obviously just running his mouth,” Mike says. He thought he ended the fight with a knockout punch, but not quite. “The kid came to, grabbed a log from his front yard, and hit me

B!GM !

How veteran Michael Itter inspires budding Evanston boxers

K E

STORY MORGAN SMITH // DESIGN RACHEL HAWLEY PHOTO MIA ZANZUCCHI // ILLUSTRATION SAVANNAH CHRISTENSEN

in the forehead so hard I passed out.”

When Mike woke up, he says, “my face was legit fucking destroyed. My buddy just laughed when he saw me and said ‘dude, your nose is crooked!’” But he credits the loss to the log – not the bully.

“It would take a real bad motherfucker to whoop my ass just with their hands,” Mike says.

For Mike, fighting was a way to survive in the foster care system, but he also came to appreciate the shuffle as an art. One of his foster care fathers owned old black-and-white tapes of Muhammad Ali, and would ask Mike to commentate Ali’s fights with him while knocking back beers in a plaid Lazy Boy. “Watching such a phenomenal fighter with someone who was so enthusiastic about it… boxing just soaked into my mind,” Mike remembers.

“

The kid came to, grabbed a log from his front yard, and hit me in the forehead so hard I passed out.”

Mike started to incorporate formal boxing training into his personal workouts, and joined the army boxing team after he enlisted. He was a renowned fighter on the team, known for his knockout punch, and earned an award during his second tour for master fitness in the military, a progressive fitness award that recognizes soldiers who are “overly, exertedly [sic] fit,” Mike smirks. He was personally asked by his commanding officer to train outof-shape soldiers so they would pass their fitness tests. Through his work, he discovered the joy of personal training.

Joseph Fitter became friends with Mike during their first tour in Iraq.

Along with other soldiers in their unit, the two men put together a makeshift gym at their base with donated exercise equipment. “Mike was still a dedicated, hard-working dude, but he was about half the person he is now [literally] – he was 145 pounds,” Fitter recalls.

Mike began his winding fitness career as a strength and conditioning coach for high school athletes after completing his second tour in Iraq. He met his current fiancée, Diana Lilliebridge, when he worked at Pro Gym in Oswego, Illinois five years ago. In a unique version of a fairytale gym romance, Mike was a personal trainer and Diana worked at the front desk. He played it cool at first, abrasively handing Diana a piece of paper for her to write her number down and then tucking it in his back pocket. But his soft side came out very quickly.

“When we began dating, he would do all my work chores for me – take out the garbage, leave small presents like flowers with a card in the breakroom or balloons with stuffed animals on the car,” Diana says. Soon, Mike moved up to manage different fitness gyms across Chicago, including XSports Fitness and Club Pilates. Each move, Diana came with him.

Mike found his way to Evanston last September when he accepted a general manager position at the new TITLE Boxing Club on Davis Street. The gym’s owner, Paige Hopkins fixated on Mike’s application. “Mike’s success factor is his personality and passion for what he’s doing,” Hopkins says.

“He’s got that magnetic personality that everyone likes being around - I’m touched by his commitment to the people who come to TITLE.” His 8 a.m. and noon boxing classes are almost always full. They usually start a couple minutes late because Mike is busy wrapping new members’ hands, queuing up the rap playlist that dominates his classes and making sure everyone has water. Attendees line up at his desk after class, asking questions about technique, wanting to see photos

of his son, Mike Jr., or just chat about their days.

Northwestern junior Lela Johnson worked closely with Mike on TITLE’s PR team when the location first opened, and became a member of the gym soon after. “Mike is by far one of the most energetic and passionate members of the team,” she says. “[He] keeps the energy high, which is crucial for interval workouts.”

“

He’s got that magnetic personality that everyone likes being around.”

Mike learned that passionate technique from his time in the military.

“I think attitude is everything. The military breaded a lower aggression to where it’s more about motivating and inspiring, and that’s where everything comes from,” he says. “Knowing that you’re breeding somebody from the ground up into almost a new individual mindset is what comes from the military and that’s how I coach my classes. It’s all about motivation, inspiration and making people feel better.”

* Editor’s Note: Lela Johnson has previously contributed to North by Northwestern DANCE FLOOR // 19

Y

our grandparents’ house is getting a makeover. At least, that’s the goal for House By Northwestern (HBN).

This team of Northwestern students competed in the University’s first U.S. Department of Energy Solar Decathlon in October, designing and building a sustainable house that homebuyers would actually purchase in today’s market. HBN decided to pitch its design to a slightly unusual demographic for sustainable spaces: Baby Boomers.

“The majority of Baby Boomers want to age in place, but only 1 percent of the U.S. housing market is suitable for aging in place,” says Vivien Ng, the interior design lead for the project. “We really wanted to serve our community and it is an unaddressed issue in Evanston.”

Since 2015, 51 students have worked together to plan and construct a house that Baby Boomers could call home in their later years. Like most undergraduate students at Northwestern, HBN’s members don’t moonlight as construction workers – they had to pick up design, sustainability and product expertise

as they went, which added to the time commitment. Ng estimates she spent at least 10 to 15 hours a week working on the project in the months leading up to the competition.

In early October, students flew to Denver where they assembled the house to present it to the competition juries and the public. The team took first place in market potential and communications and third place in engineering, finishing in sixth place overall.

HBN combined two key words – energized and adaptable – to name their house “Enable.” The final design focused on these attributes to create an energyefficient, attractive house that is also completely ADA accessible. Thanks to more than 100 hours Ng and others spent talking to the target population, the house not only includes sustainable features but also a sense of “home.” With everything from a practically laid-out kitchen with top-notch, energy-efficient appliances to an entertaining area on the porch, chances are your grandparents will feel quite comfortable in their future house.

Home sweet (GREEN) home

House by Northwestern helps Baby Boomers go green with the smart home of the future STORY VIRGINIA NOWAKOWSI DESIGN SARAH ZHANG

MAJOR FEATURES

Even the kitchen countertop is sustainable – and local. All the products for the recycled glass countertop come from the Chicago area including the waste glass – which could have previously been anything from handblown fixtures to oven doors. Finished with epoxy resin, the countertop can withstand any of the typical tasks of preparing a meal.

The house is truly green To make the Rather than purchasing inside and out with special grandparents’ lives typical solar panels “living walls.” Walter a little easier and to sit on top of the Herbst, a professor for healthier, HBN sprayed roof, HBN selected Northwestern’s Master the windows with panels that also of Product Design and PURETi. It prevents served as the roof Development program rain stains and reduces for a sleeker finish. sketched them. The the amount of toxins Plus, thanks to the greenery puffs out in the indoor air. panels, the house will from the wall, drawing Cigarette smoke amd eventually generate visitors’ eyes to the paint are blocked by more electricity than house’s flora. “I wanted to agents in PURETi, it needs, according convey a message about which ensures safer to Manasi Kaushik, sustainability, living with air is safer and cleaner a member of HBN’s nature,” Ng says. windows. communications team.

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The dinner table, essential to Thanksgiving festivities and bridge club, is perfectly suited by Ng’s design. “The dining table took me forever to find,” she says. “We were trying to find a dining table that... [could] expand to seat eight people somehow.” A Canadian manufacturer provided the perfect table for around $2,000.

PHOTO COURTESY OF AGATA BOGUCKA

THE PROCESS House by Northwestern’s first step was choosing its audience. Then came a lot of research – students had to scrutinize decathlon requirements for the structure and interview Baby Boomers to make a starting list of criteria, according to Gordan Kucan, lead architect on the project. They looked at building codes and studied successful solar houses and typical Denver and Chicago homes to determine the best interior design.

When they had the inside squared away, the team designed the exterior shape and nailed down details for materials, colors, structures and systems in the house.

Initial construction took place over the summer. “The building of the house all happened in front of me,” says Manasi Kaushik, a member of the communications team who joined HBN in June. ”It was incredible to just see an entire house standing within that period of time.” After finishing, they had to deconstruct the house to ship it to Denver for the competition.

Once onsite, the team reassembled the home. Team members gave tours and showed the sustainable features in a series of contests. Following the decathalon’s conclusion, they disassembled the house once more to send it back to Evanston and Jerry Brennan, its new owner. He has agreed to continue to show the house to the public on select dates.

PHOTO COURTESY OF DENNIS SCHROEDER // U.S. DEPARTMENT OF ENERGY SOLAR DECATHALON

DANCE FLOOR // 21

THE With fading funds, Studio 22 looks to reinvent itself

CHI STORY and PHOTO MIA ZANZUC DESIGN AUDREY VALBUENA

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S

ince its birth in 1979, Studio 22 has taken creative risks on wild ideas and somehow managed to turn them into actual films. Originally filled with early video pioneers looking to push the boundaries of the film industry, the student film production group was known for its short flims.

In 1981, The Love Project was a mockumentary-style musical, chronicling a television station’s quest to create a documentary about love. Decades later, through digital ink and paint animation, Bystander told the story of a single father who moved to New York. Today, undergraduates still consider Studio 22 an outlet where they can experiment with cutting-edge techniques while gaining professional experience. But budget cuts have jeopardized the group’s potential as a place for unrelenting creativity.

During Fall Quarter 2016, Studio 22’s student film grant program was dismantled.

The Radio/TV/Film (RTVF) department’s Media Arts Grant (MAG) program gobbled up its thousands of dollars of funding, undercutting the group’s autonomy.

The MAG program funds student filmmakers for projects that take up almost the whole school year. Before MAG, the Studio 22 executive board of RTVF undergraduates evaluated pitches in the fall, giving students a chance to present their screenplays. Studio 22 then selected around 10 films a year to grant funding, which generally received between $1,000 and $4,000.

Today, Studio 22 picks and funds just two films a year. Each gets a $4,000 grant, backed by an annual $7,500 donation from Northwestern alumnus Bill Bindley (Speech ‘84) and $500 from the RTVF department.

Studio 22 co-President Megan Ballew says there are two main issues with the transition to the MAG system: the new system doesn’t hold students accountable for their projects, and Studio 22 can only

consider projects that MAG already backs when it chooses who to give the rest of its $500 “plus up” mini grants.

After receiving a Bindley grant from Studio 22, senior Erin Gregory spent the 2016-2017 academic year refining the script, thinking about character development and refining technical skills for shooting her original film, The Creature Without a Name. While she had worked on sets for other Studio 22 projects and unsuccessfully pitched in the past, developing her own film made Gregory think more seriously about the logistics and creativity behind filmmaking. She can’t imagine completing the project without Studio 22’s support.

“They’re so involved with it the whole way,” Gregory says. “It’s not just getting a grant – it’s getting a support system that comes with the grant.”

Studio 22’s other co-president, Tyler Gould, says that when Studio 22 takes pitches, it looks at more than just the idea, which is the biggest component of the MAG application process. They want a unique story and a film with high production feasibility, but they also take the student directors’ and producers’ experience into account.

MAG recipients don’t have the same expectations; all students have an adviser, but the projects don’t have deadlines or offer extra resources like the script rewrites and contract advice Studio 22 provides.

Ballew says some past MAG recipients haven’t even completed their projects.

This is likely because the MAG system is not meant to give students support – its purpose is purely financial.

“There’s not that accountability,” she says. “If someone’s not sitting there holding them accountable, [the project] is not going to happen.”

While Studio 22 has lost its funding, the group has found alternative ways

to continue helping student projects. By meeting with potential filmmakers before MAG pitches are due, Studio 22 can pick a group of projects it sees potential in and help each film through the MAG application process – refining scripts, tightening pitches and supporting potential writers, directors and producers.

“The scary thing,” Ballew says, “is that we might get an applicant who pitches to us, we help them with their MAG application, it doesn’t get a MAG and therefore it can’t be made.”

Studio 22 no longer has as much influence over which student films get made, but the group’s reach has expanded on campus. They now host industryspecific speakers and organize panels and script writing contests. Last spring, the group screened La La Land and brought the producer, RTVF alumnus Jordan Horowitz (Comm ‘02), back to campus for a moderated talk following the Best Picture mix up at the Oscars.

As students across campus cram for finals, Studio 22 filmmakers and executive board members prepare for a winter quarter jam-packed with shooting. The five Studio 22 projects – including its two Bindley films Crush and Men of Clay – will make final script tweaks with the Studio 22 script development chairs. The rest of the board will look ahead at bringing an industry speaker during winter quarter, a more general speaker in the spring and producing a film screening premiere at the end of the school year.

“Moving forward, we’re just really trying to focus on how to better support the filmmaking community throughout this transition because it’s hard on all of us,” Gould says. “It’s hard on the department.

It’s hard on the student groups. It’s hard on the students themselves.”

Editor’s Note: Megan Ballew has previously contributed to NBN. DANCE FLOOR // 23

ESSAY NATALIE ESCOBAR DESIGN AUDREY VALBUENA ILLUSTRATION EMMA SARAPPO

One writer reflects on her last name, affirmative action and the myth of meritocracy

Rethinking the “Latina” card W

hen the four smartest white kids in my junior year English class banded together and called themselves the Snow Leopards, I knew that things would get ugly. They formed their unfortunately named group in response to our teacher’s decision to include a unit on race in America. (The Black Panthers would be so disappointed.) They went on the defensive. They argued that Irish immigrants faced racism comparable to Black people. They were dubious about the invisible knapsack of white privilege thing. And they really hated affirmative action.

“It’s just not fair,” one of them said during a particularly dramatic class discussion on racism in the education system. “It’s not my fault that I was born white and now I’ve worked my butt off to go to a good college, but I won’t get in because I’m white.” She was later recruited to one of the best schools in the country for rowing.

I should say that, at this time, the Snow Leopards were my friends. Not my close friends, but the kind of classmates who Facebook messaged me for homework help or contributed to a group study guide for a test. They didn’t hate Black and Brown people, so they didn’t want to be held responsible for white supremacy. They said these things in front of me all the time.

At the time, I wondered what they would say if I reminded them that I would ostensibly benefit from the thing they hated so much. To get the acceptances they didn’t think I deserved.

I had become good at camouflaging; white people say things to me about people of color as if

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I am just like them. The Snow Leopards saw me as white because I went to an Irish Catholic school and didn’t have an accent. But if I reminded them of my last name, I knew the jig would be up. The racism that they thought would be okay to spew in front of me would no longer be okay.

When it was reported in August that the Department of Justice would begin investigating university affirmative action policies, I remembered that Snow Leopards grow up and become politicians. They want to make sure that admissions policies don’t discriminate against white applicants. I remember the Snow Leopards who were afraid of the “reverse racism” that might, for once, not benefit them.

Escobar, I want to scream. Why are you so scared of my name?

My last name is a gift. It’s a clue for people who cannot make sense of the racial patchwork that is my body: my Polish mother’s freckled cheeks, my Salvadoran father’s tanned skin, my aunt’s stick-straight hair, my tias’ thick eyebrows and upper-lip hair. It’s a piece of El Salvador that I get to keep with me, a piece that proves I am my father’s daughter even though I can’t speak his first language.

It’s a ticket, I am told, to the college of my dreams, to the jobs I want, to the awards I might receive for my work.

These are things, white classmates will tell me, that white people cannot get because they are not one-sixteenth Native American and “nothing bad has ever happened to them.” This is supposed to evoke sympathy.

I went to a college preparatory high school, meaning that we were led by guidance counselors who desperately wanted us to reach our full potential. (read: apply to elite, selective schools).

Here, I learn that “Escobar” opens doors for me. (Never mind that future coworkers will unironically ask if I am related to Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar.) “Escobar” means that I can go wherever I want for college. (Never mind that my father, who bequeathed me this name, will not set foot in Evanston until my graduation.)

My teachers’ faces lit up when I told them my test scores. “With those scores and your last name,” one said, “you should be applying to Ivies!” I did not apply to Ivies because none of them had journalism programs. My guidance counselor reminded me to

list “Latina” on all of my applications.

She was well-meaning. In her mind, this would get me into college.

In 2017, we make up 12 percent of Northwestern’s undergraduate student body. In 2000, it was 4 percent, a whopping total of 321 bodies in chairs tasked with the implicit duty of teaching their white classmates about Latinidad by osmosis. This is progress. And still, 48 percent of the student body is white.

Every time I check a box for Latino/a , I think of the Snow Leopards.

I wonder if they thought I mostly got into Northwestern because of my name. I wonder if my teachers think this too, even though they’re the ones who told me to pull out Latina when I needed it. Still, I mark the box because it is true, not because I think it’ll make me a shoe-in. Sometimes, though, I hope it will.

What if the race card really worked like that? Wouldn’t life be so much easier if I got to use “Escobar” the way that someone’s wealthy white father could call in a favor with his old buddy to get his kid a job? What if “Escobar” became a substitute for generational wealth that let me take unpaid internships without a second thought?

What if “Escobar” became white?

Instead, my race card works like this: my mother incredulously asks me why I’ve started calling myself “a woman of color” in college because she’s never considered me a Latina.

Every white guy I’ve ever dated has spoken better Spanish than me. My sixth grade seat partner tells me that he’s going to buy me a razor for my birthday so I can shave off my upper lip hair, the dark mustache I’ve inherited from my Tia Aracely. I write letters to get my cousin out of an immigration detention center.

I got into Northwestern because my Catholic school kindergarten teacher pulled me out of class to read chapter books since I had already learned how to read. I had parents who had the time to read to me before bed, to take me to zoos and museums and sign me up for violin lessons. I had access to a public library within walking distance of my house, where 10-year-old me checked out 10 books a week and read all of them. I went to a Catholic high school where counselors and teachers had the time to mentor me, which gave me a scholarship to attend Medill’s high

school journalism program. I’ve been lucky for reasons that have nothing to do with my name.

And hell, I might have gotten in because of my last name. But why does that matter? I shouldn’t have to prove that I pulled myself up by my own bootstraps to get into an elite institution. I shouldn’t have to prove that I got in on my own merit because meritocracies are bullshit. No one gets into college just because they’re smart. That’s not how it works. They get in because they know how to play the game of test scores, recommendation letters and alumni interviews. They get in because of legacy, because their dad knows a guy, because they were able to play an expensive club sport to get recruited. Sometimes, they get in because of affirmative action.

My mom went to college, so I’m not a first-generation student.

Still, I think of my father. He barely graduated high school. After fleeing El Salvador’s civil war in the 1980s as a teenager, he learned English from watching children’s television. I think of watching PBS documentaries with him and seeing him research the Big Bang on Wikipedia. I think of him naming all the different types of trees when we go north of San Francisco to the Redwoods. I call him after my Latino Studies classes to talk about the theoretical frameworks of migration that match up with his lived experiences of crawling through pipes to get to the U.S. I send him books on California mission architecture that my Latin American art history professor recommends to me; he tells me his father never went to college, either.

I can’t go back in time and get my father a better education, but I’m getting mine now, and my children can, too. I’ve had access to resources my tios and primos never had in El Salvador, and I feel the urge to pay it forward somehow – making their resumes, sharing things I’ve learned in my classes, reporting on the immigration policy that’s determined so much of their lives.

Sometimes, though, thinking about my dad on graduation day is all I need.

“You keep on putting me on the clouds,” he texted me the other day after I sent him a story I had written. “I couldn’t be more proud.”

DANCE FLOOR // 25

Faces

Sam Schumacher http://www.shortlistphoto.com/ PHILOSOPHY “I love every form of

photography that is about people.

When I first started, it was really just about the art, just playing with your cameras. Now I enjoy the social challenge of photography.

Taking a portrait of somebody is an interesting psychological battle – your photo is only as good as how the person likes it. If they don’t like how they look or they were not comfortable, the photos are pointless. It’s fun to make people laugh. It’s fun to make people smile.

MY ADVICE “Don’t buy anything new. Everything I have I bought used. Also don’t be afraid of flash.

People have all kinds of weird conventional wisdom about flash, but it doesn’t have to be super complicated and expensive.”

Sean Su

PHOTO YING DAI PHOTO EMMA DANBURY PHOTO MIA ZANZUCCHI

https://seansuphotography.wixsite.com/

PHILOSOPHY “The most interesting

subject that is available to me are people, so I started to request people give me a few minutes so I can take their photos when I meet some interesting character on the street. I try to make people look as genuinely beautiful as they are and use colors and different techniques to make the image they deserve. You try to understand the people in front of you, and you try best to convey that understanding through the image.

MY ADVICE “Just fail as much as you can, because you only learn from failure. Photography is not a subject you can learn from lectures; it is something you should learn by practice. You will see yourself develop when you fail.

Just try your best, try everything and don’t be afraid of failure.”

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PHOTO EMMA DANBURY

behind the flash Y

ou have have probably seen them at formals, events and football games... and they probably also took your best friend’s profile picture. NBN chatted with four of Northwestern’s most well-known photographers to discuss their philosophies and offer advice for every camera owner.

Editor’s note: These interviews have been edited and condensed for clarity.

Alaura Hernandez http://alaurahernandezphotography.com/ PHILOSOPHY “I believe in every photo. It should capture realities

at the best angle. I really like playing to my subjects’ strengths.

What really gets me excited is particularly vintage stylist shoots.

I am very aesthetically driven; I wouldn’t put my name on something that isn’t what I perceived to be fully gorgeous.

MY ADVICE “Really get your feet wet and try a bunch of different

things. You can’t be shy. You really have to put yourself out there.

Your subjects probably feel more uncomfortable than you do: the more you can loosen up, the more they will loosen up. Be loud, be talkative and get people to talk to you.”

Justin Barbin http://justin-barbin.com/ PHILOSOPHY “I’ve been

photographing at Northwestern since I was a prospie, so it’s been over a decade. For me, it’s not about brand, it’s more about the communities that I’m involved in. There are so many parts of Northwestern that I am so grateful to experience, from the theater department, to Greek life, to the South Asian Student Association and the dance groups. I have friends from the Class of 2008 to 2021 now.

MY ADVICE “It is astounding how

many photographers there are, and it’s incredible to see the community grow. I think they’re doing the right thing in just photographing and keeping up with what they’re loving and following what really inspires them. For me, it was about continuing to do what made me happy and what fulfilled me. And from one project to another, it kind of guided itself in that sense.”

DANCE FLOOR // 27

NBN TRAVELS

Hello, Wisconsin!

Enjoy brats, brie and the Black River on a road trip to Milwaukee STORY AUDREY VALBUENA and LAURA ZORNOSA DESIGN RACHEL HAWLEY // PHOTOS AUDREY VALBUENA

The Mars Cheese Castle Is there anything more Wisconsin?

T

o those from outside the Midwest, Wisconsin is the land of Milwaukee, beer and cheese – nothing more, nothing less. But even Packer country can seem like an oasis when the quarter system gets you down. If you’re in need of a break from the constant midterm cycle, look no further: follow the yellow cheese road to Milwaukee, a city of adventures and comfortable Midwest charm.

Round-trip, this journey takes 10-12 hours. Aside from driving, the day costs about $40, and the car sharing service Turo offers a viable transportation option if you don’t have a car on campus. Sign up online, book your dream affordable minivan and you’re “On the Road Again” (ft. Willie Nelson) for as low as $49 per day,* or even cheaper if you split the cost with a friend. *A round trip to Milwaukee may be a bit over Turo’s 200 mile daily limit, but it’s well worth the additional 35¢ per mile!

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The first stop on the road to Milwaukee is the Mars Cheese Castle. Behind the drawbridge door (yes, a real drawbridge door) rests a single aisle of cheese. Every type of cheese curd lies in wait in this most glorious aisle: jalapeño, pepper jack and even pumpkin.

The castle is full of unnecessary oddities ranging from Packers gear and cheese hats to a full throne room, complete with a reindeer

chandelier. While kitschy at its core, the Mars Cheese Castle is a stop that can’t be missed. It’s free, and there are samples, so as a welcome to Wisconsin, enjoy your first minutes in Dairyland embracing the state’s namesake.

The Mars Cheese Castle is located at 2800 W. Frontage Road in Kenosha, WI. It’s about a 53 minute drive from school, and entry is free.

Kohler Only the sweetest of small towns On a tight college budget, a picnic provides a cheap alternative to dining alongside middle-aged wine connoisseurs.

Arrange your picnic goods carefully on the round stone patio behind Kohler’s Shops at Woodlake, and pour your drinks – definitely not alcoholic beverages of the cheap wine variety – and take in your surroundings. Cheese curds are also in order, hopefully straight out of the Mars Cheese Castle.

If time or transportation don’t allow for packing a picnic, the Shops offer options from Take 5 Café’s $5 sandwiches to the Horse and Plow’s ultimate brat sliders – quintessential Wisconsin. The small town is home to the Kohler Kitchen and Bath company, which

motifs. It still has typical wood and brick walls, but serves everything from tater tots and beer to jicama and kale artichoke dip.

With meals ranging from $10– 23, Benelux’s atmosphere gives a modern twist to what would otherwise be just another beer and brat tavern. The modernity of its menu and healthy options, not usually found in such restaurants, are surprising and delicious.

Benelux is located at 346 N. Broadway, Milwaukee, WI, and is 53 minutes from Kohler-Andrae State Park. It is open from 7 a.m. until midnight.

seems like it’s straight out of an episode of Gilmore Girls.

Enter Woodlake Road into the GPS to find the best place to picnic in Kohler. This stop is about an hour and 20 minutes away from the Mars Cheese Castle.

The park is open year-round from 6 a.m. to 11 p.m., and costs $11 for out-of-state license plate entry.

It’s best in afternoon hours, from 1-5 p.m.

Kohler-Andrae State Park Beauty to behold After lunch, it’s time to hit the road for rugged beauty and unparalleled peace. No other place (within Dairy State borders or elsewhere) shares this park’s geographical smorgasbord. The 2.5 mile-long Black River Trail snakes through open fields of wildflowers while the Marsh Trail winds through wetland flora and fauna for half a mile. Walk the Wes Anderson walk and talk the soul-searching talk implied by “likes: long walks on the beach.”

By the time you crest the top of a dune on your way back into the parking lot, you’ll be cold enough to move on to your next stop, but filled with fuzzy memories of Kohler-Andrae.

Benelux More than beer & brats The end of your journey brings you to Wisconsin’s claim to fame, the largest city in the state. In the middle of Milwaukee’s historic Third Ward, an area known for its artsy and indie boutiques, rests an array of restaurants lined with lights and young folk. Visit Benelux: a modern tavern that is chic, hip and lined with biker

Colectivo The perfect Joe to go Along the waterfront, Colectivo, a Wisconsin brand, calls out to young coffee-lovers. Rife with a Frida-Kahlo-esque aesthetic, Colectivo embraces Latinx heritage right in the middle of Milwaukee. Coffee is sourced from all across Latin America: Colombia, Peru and Bolivia. Pops of color enhance the low lighting of the facility and make you forget it was once a flushing station.

Colectivo’s drinks are reasonably priced, ranging between $3 and $7.

The coffee is of superior quality, and each drink has just the right amount of sweetness. The atmosphere is welcoming and cozy, but if you’re in a hurry, the flashy Colectivo cups make this place perfect for drinks to take on the go.

Colectivo Coffee’s Lakefront Cafe is located at 1701 N. Lincoln Memorial Drive, Milwaukee, WI. It takes about 1 hour and 20 minutes to drive back to campus.

DANCE FLOOR // 29

Lens to the past Re-discovering Northwestern’s era of counterculture, anti-war protests and brutalist architecture through the photography of James Roberts

STORY CLAIRE BUGOS // DESIGN SAVANNAH CHRISTENSEN PHOTOS JAMES ROBERTS (above) courtesy of Northwestern University Archives

A couple embraced on the rocks lining Lake Michigan. Although it is unknown when painting the rocks became a tradition, it is likely that the only tags on them in the early 1970s were warning signs.

The Northwestern football team won the 1970 homecoming game against Purdue. The team finished the season second in the Big 10.

Students stood at the construction site of Norris University Center. Norris was dedicated in January, 1973.

J

ames Roberts’ photos offer a glimpse into an era when University Library was cutting-edge, the Lakefill was muddy and barren, and bootcut jeans ruled student fashion. This year, he donated his collection of over 3,700 negatives portraying Northwestern student life to the University Archives.

They depict the mundane as well as the extraordinary moments in the life of an undergraduate student between 1968 and 1972.

As a photographer and editor for the Syllabus Yearbook, James Roberts (Weinberg ‘72) used his camera to capture students’ interactions, lifestyles and fashion. He learned the art of documentary photography from fellow student photographers and studied the ways in which he could best capture the moments he witnessed in Evanston, Chicago and on a study abroad trip to Mexico.

“The yearbooks were becoming at that time sort of documentary photography annuals. The groups that I got to know ahead of me were increasingly providing a kind of visual social history of the campus and the campus environment,” Roberts says. “It was less focused on some of the traditional campus activities like homecoming and games and fraternities and sororities . . . There was an interest in photography or documentary photography for its own sake.”

University Archives undertook the massive project of digitizing the thousands of images, which are available online. They portray a university charged with political action in the midst of the Vietnam War. Roberts, who is now executive vice provost for Finance and Administration at Duke University, did not continue with a career in documentary photography, but applauds the students he worked with who did.

“I feel that was sort of a historic era,” Roberts says.

“What I had documented . . . was a legacy I didn’t want to just throw in the trash.”

Evanston police were called to anti-war demonstrations only once – to ensure security during a 1970 student raid of the ROTC office in Lunt Hall.

College campuses across the U.S. were hotbeds of politically charged activism during the long ‘60s, as students protested U.S. military presence in Vietnam.

Anti-war demonstrations at Northwestern included student strikes and large gatherings on Deering Meadow, which attracted participants from across Evanston.

Although he was a supporter of the demonstrations, Roberts preferred to remain a “participant observer,” documenting the action without being an active organizer.

“Some pretty big issues were on the table and were being discussed in aways that didn’t seem to have much precedent, so it seemed like a very significant departure in public life,” Roberts says. “And of course when the country is at war and the goals and the possibilities of success were unclear, it certainly mobilized a lot of energy in society on all sides.”

This skiier traversed tracks across the snow on Deering Meadow.

The Daily Northwestern hired campus photographers to shoot advertisements. Roberts enlisted models like this couple for Pepsi ads.

Students gathered in Harris Hall for an anti-war teach-in.

A crowd of students listened to comedian Groucho Marx as he spoke at Northwestern. Roberts documented visits by public figures such as Democratic presidential nominee George McGovern and boxer Muhammad Ali.

DANCE FLOOR // 31

Lonely by design

Exploring the history behind Plex’s isolating architecture.

STORY SAM SPENGLER // DESIGN JAKOB LAZZARO

I

n 1980, students didn’t refer to the Foster-Walker Undergraduate Housing Complex as Plex. They called it Suicide Hall.

Foster-Walker was only a year old when the first residents asked to move out in 1973, complaining of loneliness and isolation.

It was five years old when 20-yearold resident Jane Mitrenga killed herself in her car in the front parking lot of the building.

Plex was six years old when, in response to Mitrenga’s suicide, local PBS journalist Michael Hirsh featured the residence hall in his film College Can Be Killing. In it, he claimed the dorm had a reputation for contributing to students’ emotional problems and depression.

“A [HOUSING LOTTERY] NUMBER CAN KIND OF SCREW YOU OVER FOR AN ENTIRE YEAR. WHO KNOWS HOW MUCH THAT ONE NUMBER WILL CONTRIBUTE TO YOUR DEPRESSION?” –LEXY PRAEGER The building was seven when residents jokingly offered “special suicide rates” to a group of high school seniors visiting Plex on a tour, according to a 1980 Daily Northwestern article.

By 1981, the residence hall had come to “represent all that was grim and cheerless about Northwestern life,” said student Carl Briggs in a 1981 Daily editorial. It wasn’t even 10 years old.

Still, 60 students were on the waitlist for a room in Plex that year. Indeed, the University has never struggled to fill space since Plex’s opening, and while it may be the least desirable housing option for many upperclassmen today, it still 32 // NORTHBYNORTHWESTERN.COM

accommodates about 475 students – 85 percent of its 560-person capacity.

While no longer nicknamed “Suicide Hall,” Plex still has a reputation for exacerbating – and in some cases causing – mental health issues.

The exclusively single-style living, lack of community engagement and architectural structure work together to create, for a small number residents, a truly nightmarish, isolating living experience. For too many students, it is a bleak spot in their time at Northwestern; an experience they just need to get through.

Senior Lexy Praeger and her friends were not happy when they realized their priority numbers landed them in a suite on the third floor in Plex for their sophomore years, rather than in Kemper as they had hoped. They’d heard the rumors: Plex was depressing, filled with antisocial people who didn’t have anywhere else to go.

It helped to spend as much time as possible away from the residence hall, and gather in one of their rooms when they had to be home. But the single rooms still sometimes pulled them into solitude.

“If you get into kind of a bad cycle where if you’re upset or kind of depressed about something, it doesn’t force you to get out of that environment at all,” Praeger says. “It kind of just pushes you farther into it.”

Praeger felt trapped and cheated, especially because her and her friends’ placement in the residence hall was entirely out of their control.

“A number can kind of screw you over for an entire year,” she says. “Who knows how much that one number will contribute to your depression?”

At Plex, suite-style living means around five students share one bathroom, but otherwise have individual

spaces. Each floor shares two lounges in opposite corners of the building. This encourages limited contact with other students, especially when a resident does not live near friends. But Plex was not originally planned this way.

As undergraduate enrollment grew in the early 1960s, the University needed to accommodate a growing demand for on-campus housing. A committee proposed a mid-campus “living-learning environment” with a rich community and diverse housing options from singles to quads. But a high demand for single-occupancy housing prompted the design of a complex with entirely single rooms.

Initial proposals in 1964 planned for the complex to be two quads surrounded by four smaller “houses.” The houses would be separate, connected only on the first floor. The “vertical integration” would promote smaller, more intimate living communities.

A $2 million cost overrun led the University to alter its plans. The proposed nearly-separate houses became connected on every floor. The result – two large structures with 582 single rooms – promoted anonymity, rather than community, even though elements of the eight-house structure were preserved.

Paul Warschauer (Speech ‘76) was one of the first residents to move into the dorm in 1972. He and the other residents were thrilled to have access to all the amenities the ‘70s had to offer. Considered one of the “lucky ones,” Warschauer jumped into the social life of House Three: As secretary treasurer, he created programming that included a cabaret show and house outings to Chicago.

Other houses weren’t so lucky.

After just a year, many students in other houses requested to move to House Three or out of Plex entirely.

Visuals courtesy of Mary Beth Dermody, Paul Weller and Northwestern Facilities Management

“If you were not an A personality you were in trouble,” Warschauer says. “You had to make your own way because the only contact that you had was with somebody else who was sharing your bathroom.”

Today, just as it was in the 1970s, individual experience largely depends on what students make of it – even though Residential Services now works to provide community-building programming. Among residential assistants, it’s understood that those who choose to live in Plex may not be receptive to this type of social activity.

Plex can be the perfect place for people who have established social groups outside the building who don’t necessarily want the space where they live to double as their social space, says Huy Do, a residential assistant in the building for the 2016-17 school year.

For less gregarious students, the lack of community, strictly single-style rooms and shortage of common spaces can pose a problem. The structure of Plex allows students to enter, climb the stairs and walk to their rooms without passing a common area – or even a single person.

Structurally, the University has not significantly altered Plex since it was built 45 years ago, according to Paul Weller, director of planning at Northwestern Facilities Management.

But, per Northwestern’s Housing Master Plan, Plex is scheduled for renovation in 2022-23. While Plex renovation plans are not close to solidified, the University has budgeted $85 million to $90 million for the project, out of the $500 million allotted to the Master Plan as a whole.

Paul Riel, assistant vice president of residential and dining services in the Office of Student Affairs, oversees the Master Plan and its overarching goal of community formation. With “bold ideas,” Riel envisions Plex as a space based entirely around community, similar to what the University created in 560 Lincoln and the Mid-Quads. The building will likely remain single-occupancy, but more common areas on each floor aim to boost social contact.

Renovations may also include adding a fifth floor, enclosing the courtyards and making the first floor an entirely communal space. Riel proposes spaces like multipurpose classrooms, a cafe and a fitness center. These spaces, in addition to Plex’s mid-campus location, could drive more student traffic through the building. “[These renovations] really are about community, and you need to bang into people and bump into people and trip over people in order to make that happen,” Riel says.

Still, changes to Foster-Walker are far from the implementation stage. The University needs to finish planned renovations at 1835 Hinman so that students can move there during Plex’s renovation. For now, Riel says Plex’s facelift is on schedule, but Hinman’s construction has already hit delays.

By 2023, Plex may be one of the best places to live on campus.

But for the last 45 years, it has negatively impacted the experiences of countless students. For those residents, and students living there in the next few years, it stands unchanged, the same structure once dubbed “Suicide Hall.”

At the time of Plex’s construction, new fire codes called for increased points of exit, which forced an entrance and exit structure that deterrs social contact between residents. Residents can enter the building, walk straight up a staircase and into their room, often never seeing another person.

Student Affairs’ ideas for Foster-Walker’s renovations include adding a fifth floor, enclosing the courtyards and making the first floor a communal space.

DANCE FLOOR // 33

Left of the dial

How WNUR’s Streetbeat amplified Chicago house music

STORY and DESIGN AMANDA GORDON

DJs Lee Cross (center), Meredith Johnson (left) and Larry Myers (right). Photo courtesy of Northwestern University Archives.

34 // NORTHBYNORTHWESTERN.COM

Deep within the Romanesque fortress of Annie May Swift Hall, down a flight of stairs and through a set of heavy doors, Tim Harris got on the mic to introduce his mix. It was 1985, and his voice carried over the quiet suburbs and past the skyscrapers of the Loop. “Alright, again, new music on WNUR 89.3 with your own T. Chablis ‘till 3… actually past 3.”

A few record scratches preceded an explosion of bass, cowbells and synth, followed by a grainy sample of MLK’s “I Have A Dream” speech. The crisp snares of the Simmons Digital Clap Trap machine were layered over clave rhythms and congas, building to a swinging tempo which peaked just before Harris mixed in a dance remix of Isaac Hayes’ soulful single, “I Can’t Turn Around.”

Cramped in a basement studio, sandwiched between racks of vinyl and a set of silver Technics 1200 turntables, Harris and a handful of other DJs on WNUR’s Streetbeat introduced much of the North Shore and parts of Chicago to the infectious, soulful stylings of house music. They harnessed the autonomy of the station and their connections from around the city to innovate over the airwaves and catalyze the growth of an entire genre.

WNUR launched the Soul Show in the 1970s. The show, a forerunner of Streetbeat, explored aspects of Black music from African polyrhythms to electric blues. The Soul Show was renamed Streetbeat in 1983 to reflect new developments in dance music. The following year, Jesse Saunders released “On and On,” the first pressed house record, which used the Roland 808 drum machine to take groovy disco samples into unchartered territory.

Lauren Lowery, who joined Streetbeat as a Northwestern student in 1985, says these parallel timelines allowed Streetbeat to become a key incubator for house music.

“Given that there were not that many stations for DJs to play their records, we were the go-to place,” says Lowery. “If they couldn’t get themselves on WBMX, the larger station, then people came to WNUR.” Lowery is now the co-founder and chief archivist of Chicago’s Modern Dance Music Research & Archiving Foundation, where she works to preserve and document the history of house music.

Streetbeat, she says, played host to the genre’s pioneers. Jesse Saunders and

Frankie Knuckles, two of the first DJs signal boost extended WNUR’s reach to produce Chicago house records, were as far north as Glencoe and, if the wind interviewed on the show. blew right, as far south as Hyde Park. With For hip-hop heads, it would be like this sweeping reach, DJs at Streetbeat DJ Kool Herc, Afrika Bambaataa or could disseminate the music coming out The Notorious B.I.G. strolling into the of marginalized communities to listeners studio. Considering the musical feedback across the city. In 1979, the station instituted between New York and Chicago, it isn’t a policy requiring DJs to play at least 50 too much of a stretch. Frankie Knuckles, percent new music, establishing itself as a widely considered the “Godfather of destination for ultra-progressive sound.

House Music,” came to Chicago in 1977 from New York, where he was steeped in the disco scene emanating from Manhattan clubs like Studio 54 and Paradise Garage. It was here where DJ Larry Levan House music started in a Chicago club drew crowds with his unique called The Warehouse where DJ Frankie sound, blending the lush Knuckles mixed old disco hits with instrumentals of Philadelphia 4/4 tempo drum tracks and European Soul with the crisp, synthladen tracks coming out of Italy electropop, extending and reworking the and Germany. rhythm to keep the crowd dancing. Club Taking up a residency at goers began asking record stores for the a Near West Side club called music they heard at The Warehouse, so the The Warehouse, Knuckles captivated crowds with a new stores started labeling crates of these new kind of disco. Spare and harddance tracks “Warehouse Music.” This was edged, it was less about melody eventually shortened to “house music.” and more about a relentless thump, a steady four-on-thefloor rhythm that practically demanded that club-goers “jack,” or move In 1983, Progressive Media Magazine their bodies into a sweaty stupor. named WNUR the best noncommercial radio Chicagoans began looking in record station in the country. Three years later, Steve stores for the music they played at Nidetz, a media columnist for the Chicago The Warehouse, asking around for Tribune called it “radio’s cutting edge.” Nidetz “Warehouse Music.” Eventually, the wrote, “the most progressive radio station in term was shortened to “house music,” Chicago is WNUR-FM (89.3), an oasis of jazz, now coopted by artists whose shows new-wave rock and black-oriented rap and fill stadiums and festival grounds from hip-hop music that makes the rest of the local Amsterdam to Ibiza. broadcast band sound stodgy.”

The genre’s development in and around Streetbeat emerged out of this Chicago was not serendipitous. According alternative programming boom, boasting to David Stovall, a professor of African a new “hotmixing format,” which the American studies and educational policy WNUR programming guide describes as a studies at the University of Illinois at “strictly Chicago craze” involving a DJ who Chicago, house music, like the disco music “mixes a record into another record every that preceded it, began in spaces created one and a half to two minutes.” The most by and for Black and queer communities. popular hotmix format was on WBMX, a Chicago’s social geography and political Chicago station specializing in soul and climate during the late ‘70s and early dance music, where a team of DJs called ‘80s was fertile ground for the musical the Hot Mix 5 played high-energy dance ingenuity that spawned house. mixes on Friday and Saturday nights.

“It may sound counterintuitive, but one of the things that deeply influenced its spread and grounding was the hypersegregation of Chicago,” Stovall says. “It brought folks Tim Harris started at Northwestern from different places – Latino folks, white in the fall of 1981, the same year the Hot folks – into these spaces that were claimed Mix 5 hit the airwaves. He first heard largely by Black queer folks.” House music, live hotmixing at The Warehouse. By Stovall says, was about making space for then, Frankie Knuckles had left and self-affirmation. the venue, which had been renamed WNUR became such a space in 1976, the Music Box, and hired a new DJ, Ron when the station increased its signal Hardy. Hardy played “pure, straight infrom 1,040 watts to 7,200 watts. The your-face house music,”

HOUSE MUSIC

FEATURES // 35

“I’D PULL SOME JAMES BROWN FROM 1960 AND MIX IT WITH SOME IMPORT FROM ITALY. YOU WOULD NEVER HEAR THAT ON WBMX.” —TIM HARRIS Harris says, “this guy would take beat tracks and then pull the bass out, ride it up high on the treble and then bring the bass back in. These speakers were floor to ceiling; the walls would be sweating.”

Hardy took the blueprint of house and subverted it, creating a space that was darker, louder and more rebellious.

He mixed punk with disco and jazz with psychedelic rock – the bass was so heavy you could hear it down the block.

As one of the first on-air personalities for Streetbeat, Harris tried to recreate this experience back in the WNUR studio, taking advantage of the station’s unique freeform format to make his mixes more eclectic. “I’d pull some James Brown from 1960 and mix it in with some import from Italy,” Harris says. “You would never hear that on WBMX.” Harris grew up surrounded by turntables. His father was a blues and jazz DJ, and even manned the decks at Harris’ graduatoin party. As a teenager, Harris attended parties at his high school where he heard Jesse Saunders’ cousin, DJ Kirk Townsend, spin an intoxicating mix of punk and funky electro. People came from all over the city to hear Townsend’s mixes reverberate between the basement and gymnasium of Roseland’s Mendel Catholic Prep High School. Harris says these formative experiences on the South Side immersed him in the same milieu that inspired Frankie Knuckles and countless other DJs and producers.

In the fall of 1983, Harris got his first show on Streetbeat with his friend Lee Cross, who spun under the name DJ Easy Lee. Harris played mostly house music, 36 // NORTHBYNORTHWESTERN.COM

while Cross, who was from New York, brought the hip-hop sound to the studio.

Harris dedicated their first show to his father. “I called my dad and told him to tune in to 89.3 and he started tearing up,” Harris says.

Cross, who eventually became a Streetbeat producer, saw his first set of turntables with his cousin’s friend out on Long Island in 1979, the same year hip-hop broke into the mainstream with the Sugarhill Gang’s illustrious hit “Rapper’s Delight.”

Cross grew up in Queens, where the early hip-hop boom was particularly resonant. There were frequently block parties in his neighborhood, where groups like the Disco Twins and Infinity Machine would set up folding tables and Cerwin-Vega “earthquake” speakers to blast hits like Chic’s “Good Times.”

In high school, Cross managed to get a bootleg tape of Grandmaster Flash from a show he did at a club called Fantasia, which was just six blocks from Cross’s house. He played it nearly a hundred times, teaching himself the mechanics of scratching and mixing.

When Cross came to Northwestern, he brought the East Coast hip-hop sound with him. In Chicago, Cross says, they didn’t even know what scratching was. Cross, who got his first show spring of his freshman year and teamed up for a show with Harris the next fall, was the first to play mixes on air. “We were definitely the architects of the format,” he says.

Cross and Harris tried to create spaces in and around campus where students could experience the sound of the electronic underground, incorporating the same fugitive tactics disco and early house DJs had used when they weren’t welcome in the clubs. In Norris’ Louis Room, they mixed music for a crowd of students until they were kicked out, usually around 1:30 in the morning. Then, they lugged all of their equipment back to the basement of the Foster-Walker Complex, where they set up 16-inch Cerwin-Vega speakers and strobe lights. Harris spun beat tracks, applying reverb to the TR808 drum kicks and crisp snares, until the basement was empty.

Meredith “Sweet MD” Johnson joined Streetbeat in 1984, tapping into his South Side roots to bring an industrial sound to the studio. Johnson went to James E. McDade Classical Elementary School in Chatham with Chip E., an early house

producer who introduced funky basslines and distorted vocals on tracks like “Time to Jack” and “It’s Dub.” Johnson and Harris often went down to Importes, Etc., a West Loop record store where Chip E. worked the counter.

The store was the first to create a section for records played in The Warehouse club, and it was Chip E. who shortened the term to “house.” Johnson worked out a deal with the owner to get discounted exclusives hot off the press, and when he and Harris walked into the store, with its white brick walls, carpeted floors and wooden vinyl shelves, they were treated with respect. “DJs were the best way for them to get their stuff out,” Harris says. “They knew we would basically put them on the map.”

Harris and Johnson leveraged their connections from around the city to keep WNUR on the scene’s pulse. Johnson was able to get a gig at a club called C.O.D. on the North Side, where he ran into Frankie Knuckles. A few weeks later, Johnson interviewed Knuckles on his show. “He didn’t have the same status that he has now, but he definitely was seen as a pioneer,” Johnson says. “It was kind of surreal.”

One Saturday, Harris left in the middle of his Streetbeat set and drove down Lake Shore Drive to pick up Jesse Saunders from his home on 72nd and King Drive, for an interview back in WNUR’s Evanston studio. Harris left his friend Vinny Devine in charge of the mixer and the mic and managed to get back to the studio with an hour left of his show. Playing one of Saunders’ B-side tracks in the background, Harris asked about Saunders’ foray into the music industry and how he started his own label. Listeners called in to ask their own questions, engaging directly with one of the trailblazers of house music.

The expansive network and autonomy of WNUR also made it easier for Streetbeat DJs to introduce new music.

“Usually DJs would have to pay for music subscriptions, but because of our connections and using the leverage of the station, we were able to get the records really at no cost,” Johnson says.

Streetbeat continues to be a destination for listeners looking for something truly left of the dial. From the ‘80s until today, the show has been a platform

for amplifying the music of the marginalized. In the 1990s, Streetbeat expanded its influence as a wellspring of underrepresented electronic music.

The Strictly Jungle Show, hosted by DJ Snuggles, was the first weekly drum ‘n’ bass show in the country, and DJs Mark Farina and Derrick Carter, both Chicago

Jana Rush, a local footwork producer hailed by the Chicago Tribune as a “oneof-a-kind” musician for her dynamic, meticulous style of production.

Williams also facilitated The Rosebud Show on Streetbeat, hosted by Ariel Zetina, a Northwestern alum who regularly spins and curates events

she says. “It translates in the music as well. People who are from marginalized backgrounds feel different, and that comes through in their art.”

Rachel continues to DJ at Streetbeat, and last year, started a music label with a few of her friends from WNUR after taking classes in the music

Rachel Williams in the WNUR studio. PHOTO MICHAEL DEL ROSARIO

community DJs at WNUR, gained international acclaim for their eclectic mixes, which fused the minimalist basslines of house with the improvised polyrhythms of funk and jazz. Streetbeat also hosted musician and producer DJ Rashad, a pioneer of Chicago footwork, a genre designed for dance battles with its hyperspeed halftime rhythms and warped samples.

John Williams, a McCormick junior and Streetbeat’s current producer, tries to keep the show rooted in this artistic environment by bringing in guests for mixes and building a strong roster of DJs from Chicago. He recently hosted

at renowned Chicago venues like Smart Bar and Berlin Nightclub.

Zetina, Williams says, is a ringleader of sorts for a burgeoning music scene largely led by transgender people and people of color. “I think someone with that kind of influence and network is a great fit for the station,” he says.

Rachel Williams, a former Streetbeat producer and 2017 Northwestern graduate, also describes Streetbeat as a home for unconventional music and people. “When I got to WNUR, there were a lot of unique people like me,”

technology program. The label, Retox Records, is now getting submissions from abroad, including a release from an Argentinian techno producer and an upcoming record from a house musician based in Berlin.

Rolling up the sleeves of her Streetbeat jacket, Rachel recalled her first Streetbeat meeting, when Lauren Lowery came to speak to the group about the history of Chicago house. “It’s music that comes from marginalized groups,” Rachel says. “I’m a Black woman, and WNUR showcases that music. It’s something near and dear to my heart.”

FEATURES // 37

W

hen she woke up, the last thing Abby* remembered was a vodka lemonade.

Even though she was safe in her dorm room, Abby struggled to remember the details of the previous night. She grew more and more scared.

She remembered going to an offcampus apartment party near Burger King with her boyfriend. She remembered having two beers, then going up to the bar to get her third drink of the night, the vodka lemonade. She remembered a man hovering behind the bar. He seemed out of place. He poured her a drink. Abby knew she took a few sips of that vodka lemonade. After that, though, her mind was completely blank.

Abby’s boyfriend, who was asleep on her futon, woke up a few minutes later and filled her in: After she ordered her vodka lemonade, Abby began acting out of character. She started slurring her words and falling all over herself, and eventually got so bad that her boyfriend had to carry her back to her dorm on south campus.

Her boyfriend was pretty worried: He knew she hadn’t planned on drinking that much and she was only on her third drink of the night at the time. He also knew how much was too much for Abby. This shouldn’t have been it.

During the walk back, Abby deteriorated to the point where she thought she was back in her hometown – not at Northwestern University in Evanston – and didn’t even recognize her own boyfriend. At this point, Abby’s boyfriend called an ambulance.

But when the police and EMTs arrived, she wouldn’t accept medical service. Finally,

after the emergency responders left, her boyfriend managed to get her home.

The following day, she called the host of the party and learned that nobody was assigned to pour drinks. This knowledge, combined with her boyfriend’s earlier account, led Abby to conclude that she had been roofied or otherwise drugged by the out-of-place man at the bar. It was the only logical explanation. She hadn’t thrown up and didn’t have the throbbing headache that typically accompanied a hangover.

Abby worried that her parents would find out she had been drinking and that she might get in trouble with the University.

Later that week, those fears came true – an email from an administrator landed in her inbox asking her to meet and explain why an ambulance had been called for her.

When Abby met with administrators, they believed her story. But, citing University policy, they still asked her to redo AlcoholEdu since she had been drinking underage at the time she was drugged.

“To be told, ‘well, we would like you to redo AlcoholEDU because you obviously don’t know how to protect yourself or prevent this from happening’ was problematic to me,” Abby says. “I felt I should’ve been treated more as the victim of someone else’s actions and not made to jump through new hoops.”

Abby’s case was one of more than 900 alleged alcohol violations reported

by Northwestern during the 2014-2015 academic year. Since then, the University has launched a pilot program where student groups can register events with alcohol and introduced an amnesty policy aimed at encouraging safer and healthier

drinking. But student leaders like ASG president Nehaarika Mulukutla say that administrators haven’t done enough. The results of a study she recommended this summer suggest that declines in on-campus drinking have been replaced with more drinking off campus. But as alcohol continues to flow to these less regulated spaces, students are pushing administrators to do more to keep students out of harm’s way.

Last spring, 30 or so students gathered in Harris L07 for Northwestern’s first alcohol town hall. Armed with bright pamphlets outlining the goals and mission of Northwestern’s Community Alcohol Coalition (CAC), the students raised their hands, waiting to be called on by Mulukutla to interrogate Fraternity and Sorority Life (FSL) director Travis Martin. As Martin answered one question, another hand popped up in a whack-a-mole fashion.

Mulukutla and Martin came into the meeting armed with two goals: explain the University’s new event registration policy and address student concerns about the policy. Both were members in CAC and had advocated for reforms to mold NU’s previous alcohol policy into one bettersuited for students and administrators.

This goal was complicated, however, by several factors. The first was that this town hall took place around three months after Northwestern’s chapter of Sigma Alpha Epsilon (SAE) was accused of using date rape drugs and sexually assaulting women on campus. As a result, passions ran high as students discussed the link between alcohol and sexual assault.

Brushed aside As student drinking moves off campus, students and administrators struggle to find common ground on alcohol reform STORY MAGGIE HARDEN DESIGN SAVANNAH CHRISTENSEN PHOTO EMMA DANBURY and ALEX FUYURA FEATURES // 39

“Relegating drinking to a maledominated space, and having people feel like the only way they can participate in this culture or have that experience is essentially just at the hands of male members of a Greek system,” Mulukutla says, “is a huge part of just the general safety and feeling of comfort and wellness and health of consumption.”

Another complicating factor was that many students didn’t really understand Northwestern’s alcohol policy – a reality compounded by Mulukutla and her vice president, Weinberg senior Rosalie Gambrah, incorrectly calling Northwestern a dry campus throughout their campaign.

Mulukulta and Gambrah’s rhetoric reflects a common student misconception: More than one in three students still express interest in making Northwestern

Soon after Mulukutla and Gambrah took office this spring, they asked the Institute for Student Business Education to (ISBE) work with Northwestern’s Interfraternity Council to study trends in student drinking. The study indicated that at the same time that alcohol incidents reported at fraternities and sororities have decreased, off-campus incidents have increased at a nearly identical rate. Today, students are as likely to consume alcohol in off-campus spaces as Greek-affiliated ones.

For Abby, the lack of regulation at offcampus parties was a major risk factor.

She was almost certain that the man who drugged her was not a Northwestern student, and because of this, the University wasn’t able to punish him in any way.

residences. Discussions over elements of this proposal and ISBE’s data are ongoing, but even in the early stages students have found the University’s reception lukewarm.

Director of Student Conduct Lucas Christain says that administrators appreciated the students’ effort to draft the proposal and collect data. But he argues that students may have misinterpreted some information. When interviewed, however, Christain did not indicate specific inacuraccies, though he doubted the comparisons made by students to peer institutions, like Stanford, Cornell, Vanderbilt and Notre Dame.

ASG Chief of Staff Lars Benson suggested that administrators may have been hesitant to accept this data because it would require the University to take on greater responsibility in addressing off-

RA’s reported of students surveyed were interested in changing Northwestern to a “wet-campus.” a “wet campus” even though the school’s alcohol policy allows students over 21 to possess and consume alcohol in residence halls. When asked to clarify these earlier remarks, Mulukutla explained that she and Gambrah used that language in a more culture-based sense. She claims that the University’s other alcohol policies remain so harsh that the school may as well be a dry campus, and that these factors push students to drink off-campus.

“People don’t want to be drinking in a place that is punitive and restrictive,” Mulukutla says. “They don’t feel comfortable having these experiences in places like their own residence halls.”

Perhaps that was the most complicating factor of all. The town hall – called to explain the University’s new alcohol event registration policy for fraternities and sororities – may not have even addressed off-campus drinking, the most urgent alcohol-related issue at Northwestern.

40 // NORTHBYNORTHWESTERN.COM

separate alcohol violations during the 2015-16 year. “[The University] was kind of like, ‘Well in that case, there’s not a ton we can do.

You didn’t call the police, you didn’t report this to the police, there’s no way to prove that there was roofies in your system,’” Abby says, “which is why I kind of think the emphasis was put on me learning to drink safer instead of improving the drinking environment.”

These results led ISBE to conclude that current alcohol policy is not making student drinking safer, but merely relegating it to off-campus spaces where there is “significantly less regulation and riskier drinking habits.”

Mulukutla and other students drafted a proposal over the summer to present to the CAC this fall. They wanted the University to revise its policy to better acknowledge and address off-campus drinking, by potentially expanding the event registration policy, now open to fraternities and sororities, to off-campus

campus drinking.

“The University, I think, is frequently very suspicious of data that’s gathered by students, and they’re very reluctant to accept data that is not cultivated by their own institutions,” Benson says, “which is difficult, because you end up in the situation where the University, I believe, tends to only look where it wants to look and tends to only look for the answers it wants to find.”

Weinberg junior Neha Gupta, ISBE’s Director of Analytics, says ISBE’s sample of 242 students was large and varied enough to make their survey representative. ISBE also gathered a hefty amount of aggregate data to compare the effects of NU’s alcohol policies to those at peer institutions.

“I think it is tough, because surveys are not perfect,” Gupta says. “We can’t perfectly make surveys that don’t have those biases inherently in surveys, but ... it does seem pretty evident that the off-

campus [area of alcohol policy] needed a little bit more attention.”

At Northwestern, alcohol hasn’t always been the subject of such controversy. In fact, Norris University Center actually had a bar for nearly a decade in the ‘80s and ‘90s. When it opened in October 1982, Norris official Greg Blaesing told The Daily Northwestern that he hoped the new social hub would be a “mecca for ‘social interaction and responsible drinking.’”

For a few years, students enjoyed music and comedy performances at night while sipping cocktails, including a fan-favorite called “The Screaming Orgasm.”

The party came to a halt, however, when The Bar allegedly served a 19-yearold woman in April 1991 who later that night was involved in a serious car crash.

an off-campus party, as with Abby. Often, it means accepting a drink from a stranger far from campus because students feel like they don’t have a safe place to enjoy alcohol on campus.

Martin says the University is moving toward enacting a new event registration policy for fraternity and sorority events based on what Mulukutla and Martin presented at the town hall last year. The University piloted the program during fall quarter, and Martin says he anticipates it becoming an official policy. However, the policy would only apply to events sponsored by Greek organizations – an unaffiliated student hosting an apartment party would not be able to register.

Mulukutla and other students proposed extending the registration policy to all off-campus events. Under the proposed plan, students would need to fill

After their first year, Northwestern students consume alcohol in significantly heavier and more problematic quantities than the national average.

In January of the next year, Norris Director Bruce Kaiser announced The Bar would close for 10 days to combat “excessive drinking and the use of fake IDs.” The Bar never re-opened, and Kaiser told The Daily in 1992 that “it would have been easier to close the damn thing years ago.”

Nearly 30 years after the days of Screaming Orgasms, administrators and students once again find themselves in a tough spot. Students want change, and administrators are willing to talk – but they argue these changes will take time to discuss and implement.

“Nobody here is shut off in making changes to things,” Christain says. “I think it’s just about doing that in a really wellinformed way, and that’s not always as simple as saying, ‘Here’s a problem and here’s the solution.’”

But while students and administrators talk, dangers persist. Sometimes, it comes in the form of someone drugging a drink at

out a risk management plan and have a certain number of sober monitors present in order to host off-campus events with alcohol. However, the University has rejected this proposal because it infringes on the jurisdiction of the city of Evanston.

This disagreement over event registration risks obscuring more systemic problems around alcohol. Data from an Alcohol Impact Report last year found that more than 30 percent of Northwestern students are heavy or problematic drinkers – a rate much higher than the national average. More than half of students also believe that AlcoholEdu, the online program used to teach students about safer and healthier drinking habits, is ineffective. Even newer practices, like the amnesty program, have conspicuous drawbacks – the current policy requires that the University notify parents about an alcohol-related incident, even when students comply and act responsibly.

Despite shelving the off-campus registration policy, Mulukutla says it is still crucial to find ways to curtail dangerous and unregulated off-campus drinking. She plans on moving forward with a three-peg program: Creating more spaces for non-Greek, non-White students to consume alcohol by allowing buildings like the Women’s Center and Black House to host events with alcohol; clarifying current policies so students better understand where they can legally consume alcohol and the consquences when they participate in underage drinking; and encouraging RAs to promote a safer, healthier drinking culture.

These recommendations will not directly affect the University’s off-campus alcohol policy, but Mulukutla hopes they will lead to cultural change. Neither, she says, are the recommendations a final

of total alcohol violations happen during the fall quarter. solution. That said, Christain emphasized that the University is open to creating new policies, though he says it might take longer than some students would like.

“I think students should be able to be in college and have fun, and to do that in ways that are safe,” Christain says. “I don’t think anyone on our campus should be saying ‘Alcohol is the worst thing’ because it’s the matter of how we help people have healthy relationships with it.”

But Benson argues that unless things change dramatically, the alcohol policy will continue to reflect a state of denial.

“I think that sometimes there is a tendency in the administration to be overly cautious to the point of complete inaction,” Benson says, “to the point where you’re completely ignoring a problem.” *In order to respect her privacy, Abby asked that NBN only use her first name.

FEATURES // 41

Northwestern women of color speak out against fetishization of their race and ethnicity on campus STORY PAOLA DE VARONA // DESIGN SARAH ZHANG // PHOTOS AYESHA GOSWAMY FEATURES // 43

T

hree years later, I still remember the overpowering smell of his drugstore cologne lodged in my throat.

In the reclined passenger seat of my black Nissan, Sayed, a lanky half-Arab halfLatino college student – and my first kiss – eyes me as he speaks in his slow Spanglish with his know-it-all swagger.

I’m a junior in high school, and we’re driving from the nature preserve on Florida International University’s campus on a warm fall night.

“I’ve never dated a Cuban girl, but they have the best thighs,” he says, sliding his left hand up my inner thigh and grabbing a fistful. My foot slams on the brakes as I almost miss the stop sign. The only other sound is the jingle of my rearview mirror chime.

It is our second date.

At the time, I thought the cold sweat dripping down my spine was just nerves and inexperience. Three years

later, I remember his scarring fingers as the first time I was fetishized as a Latina woman.

I had no idea what would be waiting for me in Evanston.

Dating and casually hooking up at Northwestern are luxuries many women of color cannot afford. Something that should be explorative and carefree turns into a game played entirely on the defensive.

Our classmates oversexualize our bodies, personalities and emotions based on the racial and ethnic stereotypes assigned to us, and we can do nothing except restrict our actions and be wary of all of our relationships and interactions.

On alternating Fridays and Sundays during the fall, I gather with six very different women to make sense of our experiences with fetishization. We sit in a circle of desks in a classroom on the ground floor of Annenberg, laughing, commiserating and listening. Group therapy, I like to call it.

Nicole* usually starts us off. The Cleveland-born fashion guru rocks thick frames and runway style, commanding the room with

“I don’t let myself feel anything really.”

her sharp humor. She rattles off stories of Northwestern men uncomfortably fawning over her afro and musing over what it’d be like to wash it, telling her that they’ve never been with a Black woman.

Fiona Asokacitta, a freshman from Indonesia with cascading teal and violet hair, recounts times when a man told her “I’ve never done an Asian,” post-hookup in the bedroom.

Alani Vargas, a senior from Edgewater, sports a jean jacket littered with a women’s march pin and a Selena pin celebrating her Mexican heritage. She remembers all the explicit messages on dating apps her white friends never seem to receive.

Caitlin Somerville, a premed bi-racial student from Michigan with kind eyes, reminds us how she often compartmentalizes all her emotions. “I don’t let myself feel anything really,” she says, afraid of filling the angry, opinionated trope.

Ana Acevedo, a senior in biomedical engineering, unapologetically Latina in her oversized hoops mentions the unusually large volume of unwanted advances she receives during her workouts.

Jeanne Paulino, a FilipinoAmerican, LA native and blunt SPOON writer, is defiantly outspoken, and subverts expectations of

Ana Acevedo

Jeanne Paulino

– CAITLIN SOMERVILLE

submission.But the seven of us find we are more similar than we thought. Fetishization doesn’t discriminate.

Acevedo decided to go out to a Welcome Week party her freshman year with a group of six people from her floor.

Together they followed the stairs of an off-campus frat house down into a cramped basement. She danced with a friend until a six-foot, dirty blonde guy with a backwards cap and frocket joined her.

After a few songs, she decided to take a break from the makeshift dance floor, and he followed.

“So is it true, are all Latina women easy?” he leaned down to ask.

The shock stung Acevedo.

The anger started to settle in, but she didn’t know how to express it in the thick of a party. “Where the fuck did you hear that?” came to mind, but she was too stunned to say it.

He insisted despite her confusion. “Oh, you know, you guys are easy, right?”

Acevedo vowed off frat parties by the end of Welcome Week. “I was really livid,” she says, “but … I didn’t want to be visceral or too aggressive.”

Had she overtly expressed her anger, Acevedo would’ve just been the hot-headed Latina, whose anger is almost always sexual, existing solely to turn on the white man.

Publicly confronted with backhanded comments that pick us apart, we become acutely aware of the feelings we express. We are allowed

Vargas created her first Tinder account during fall of her sophomore year. Messages and matches immediately poured in. “You’re such a sex kitten,” her friends would teasingly say. None of them were receiving the volume of attention she was. It was an ego boost. At first.

“When I couldn’t hold a conversation with a guy without it revolving around sex or my race or trying to speak to me in Spanish or calling me ‘mamacita’ … it started to click,” she says.

The flood of messages heightened Vargas’ anxiety.

By March she had deleted all dating apps from her phone.

Alani Vargas

Fiona Asokacitta to show only a limited range of emotions: deference, submission, desire and calm.

Any sign of rage, fear or passion can and will be twisted to sexualize us.

“I end up just being neutral all the time,” Somerville says. “I never let myself be offended.”

Nicole feels like she doesn’t get the opportunity to explore her emotions. At all times, she must have a controlled response, a ready counterargument. Once she was even called sassy for changing her order at Subway.

It’s exhausting, Vargas says, to bottle up feelings that most people are allowed to reveal. Vargas remembers her friends telling her, “you shouldn’t talk so much because it’s super intimidating.”

“Even to this day I can’t have the notifications on my phone because it just makes me feel ill,” she says.

Receiving sexual attention can often be construed as flattering. Shouldn’t it be validating that someone is sexually attracted to you?

I decided to focus on these women’s romantic and sexual interactions with men, coming from my own experiences as a straight, cisgender woman. And for many of the women I talked to, the avalanche of attention was pleasantly surprising.

Until it wasn’t.

This is how a population makes the bodies of women of color the exotic “other” – desirable because they aren’t white. Vargas and the rest of us are whittled down to a one-dimensional caricature of ourselves – only valuable for one type of sexual attention.

The stereotypes that form the bedrock of fetishization aren’t new. They’ve been embedded in white masculine culture for years, dating back to European colonialism and slavery.

European perceptions of African people in the 1400s before the journey to the New World were of a hypersexual “savage,” especially for women. That laid the groundwork for the exploitation of Black women that would follow

for centuries. But Europe’s obsession with the “other” wasn’t limited to African people. Much of the East was seen through a similar lens, evident in the artistic depictions of harems of nude Arab women.

Once Europeans invaded the Americas, they found a new “other” to ogle. The slavery and sexual exploitation of Native women fueled the accepted truth that nonEuropean women were sexual objects existing for the sole purpose of pleasuring white European men. In the 1600s the enslavement of Africans made way for the raping of African women by their white male slave owners; consequently, white women were the acceptable “wife” and Black slaves were sexual objects for the husband.

Manifestations of these relationship structures exist today. White women are the pinnacle of American society, while women of color remain sexual deviants.

Taking a hard look at ourselves, we can recognize that racial and ethnic groups beyond our own are still

“They had boyfriends and I was just getting casual hookups and two in the morning ‘you up’ texts.”

–JEANNE PAULINO viewed as the other, bleeding into our relationships and interactions.

White men tend to see women of color as exotic and new because they have never had relationships with them. They venture into the unknown by pursuing a hookup, but later retreat to the comfort of the familiar: relationships with white women.

“I compared myself a lot to these white girls on campus,” Paulino says. “They had boyfriends and I was just getting casual hookups and two in the morning ‘you up’ texts.”

When my sister called me during her time at college and told me, “None of the white guys want to date Latinas, they just want to have sex with them,” I didn’t believe her. Fourteen-year-old me naively thought her warning was an exaggeration, even excessive paranoia. But the FEATURES // 45

“I could do something and then they’ll think that’s what Black people do.”

–NICOLE*

truth is no amount of warning can prepare someone for the outright shame some white men on this campus feel when they are seen with a woman of color on their arm.

The same appearances these men revere in private, they shun in public.

“It’s just not a good feeling to think that someone’s embarrassed or doesn’t want to be seen with you because of the way you look,” Paulino says.

Oversaturated with this type of one-dimensional sexual attention, dating can seem hopeless for many of these women. When you’re seen solely as an exotic sexual object, there is little room for casual dating or serious relationships. But for those who prefer a casual hookup scene, it can be just as dangerous. Asian women are expected to be submissive.

Black and Latina women’s bodies are expected to be curvy in “all the right places,” while exerting sass and spice in bed.

There’s always this question: are they actually attracted to me, or are they attracted to what I represent and the box they can then tick off?

It doesn’t always come smoothly packaged in a “I don’t date women of color,” statement. Many of the warning signs emerge in the subtleties and the patterns of past relationships. Men of color are not absolved either.

Why does he say Black women are “his type”? Why does that one friend always brag about sleeping with women of color, but only spends time with white women in public?

Acevedo’s fellow members of Northwestern’s Formula Racing club told her, “You’re a type. People who like you are a certain type of person.”

To this day Acevedo can’t figure out what kind of person her peers were referring to.

But as we try to evaluate

46 // NORTHBYNORTHWESTERN.COM

what makes us that “type,” the kind of woman only a small population on this campus could ever be into, the fear of playing into these stereotypes invades everyday moments. Nicole worries about playing “Black music” while she showers in the dorm bathrooms. Acevedo is acutely aware of the way she dances at parties. I try not to mention Spanish music and phrases when I’m in the talking stages with a new guy, and I stress when I slip up. We shouldn’t have to feel like this.

“I could do something and then they’ll think that’s what Black people do,” Nicole says.

“That’s an opener for them to be racist toward you.”

We often break stereotypical molds. Paulino is outspoken when people want her to be to be quiet and docile. Somerville is calm and collected when she’s expected to be bold and cheeky. The problem with stereotypes is that while we transcend their boundaries, sometimes we fit them. Nicole is open about preferring hookups. Vargas is often opinionated and “feisty.” I have the curves to accompany my last name.

There is fear in being our tropes because that might invite fetishization.

“If you are anything similar to what people think Black women are ... your actions aren’t your own,” Nicole says.

“You feel like you’re hurting the people in your group by being yourself.”

Nicole met with her classmates last year at Norris to complete a class project.

One of the white girls in the group randomly turned to her and said, “It must be easy for you in the dating scene.”

Nicole, caught off guard, responded, “Oh not easy.

Single for life.”

Yet the woman insisted, “I feel like I have to compete with girls like you.”

“What do you mean ‘girls like me?’” Nicole said, apprehensive of what would follow.

“You know, like your hair and the way you dress, just the way you look in general,” she said.

When Nicole says, “White men are not as intimidated by me as white women are,” the entire group gathered in Annenberg explodes in uhhuhs and snaps of approval.

Oversexualization does not just come from the male population. Negative stereotyping towards women of color is entrenched in our daily interactions.

Pop culture is saturated with the objectification of women of color. Submissive, loyal Asian women are portrayed as sidekicks and one-dimensional love interests in most Hollywood movies;

Cho Chang from the Harry Potter franchise is a prime example. Sofia Vergara, with her “sexy” foreign accent and feisty attitude, is the butt of jokes at every award ceremony, fueling the “get you a Latina girl” memes found in all corners of the internet. Reality TV shows like the Real Housewives of Atlanta perpetuate the idea of the angry Black woman, illustrating Black women going through divorce or those who can’t seem to find and keep a man.

White women like Miley Cyrus performing hip-hop inspired music with a stage full of Black women use Black culture and womanhood to prop themselves up to commercial success. When a white Northwestern woman tells me, “Everyone tells me I look Latina. Sometimes I wish I were Latina,” she wears my identity like a costume – the sprinkled in Spanish phrases serving as accessories.

White women capitalize on the exotic nature tied to minority cultures by adopting certain aspects of our cultures in an effort to be different.

Others see us as competition in the dating pool. But while women of color may be getting sexual attention, serious relationships rarely follow suit. That is the reality these white women would rather not face. They want to exoticize and appropriate our culture, without the baggage.

Paulino says, “At the end of the day they can retreat to their whiteness and don’t have to experience systematic oppression.”

We do not exist to be seen by you.

In the shock that follows the comments we’re bombarded with, it’s difficult to question people’s statements. Often, the frustration doesn’t settle in until the conversation is over. I later damn myself in the shower for not sticking up for myself. The women in our group have different approaches. They ask questions. “What do you mean by that?” “Does that sound a little racist to you?” They teach me how to defend myself with their techniques. But the only way we’ll get past having to take preemptive measures, and entering conversations on the defensive is by talking about what’s happening. It’s not enough to turn a blind eye on the real experiences women of color are having at the campus they’re supposed to feel “safe” in. Being honest about our shortcomings is the only way to grow together.

Listening to women of color when they tell you your words have hurt them is step one.

“If you’re uncomfortable,” Vargas says, “then good. It’s working.”

On Halloween weekend at midnight, our group message lights up on my screen in the middle of a basement party. Paulino tells us she didn’t wear pigtails with her Britney Spears costume because as an Asian woman,

she might be infantilized.

Asokacitta says she’s been thinking about whether she’s actually attractive or just a fetish. In that moment, I realize that most people would be surprised to hear these stories.

Had I included the stories of the visceral fear for our lives some of these men place us in, you’d be astonished.

But it is very normal for me to hear these stories.

In between songs at the Halloween party, texting these girls seems like the normal thing to do. I am not shocked. These are our lives.

When Nicole’s family asks whether there are any cute boys she’s interested in, she involuntarily finds herself saying, “I can’t date on this campus.” Asokacitta wonders whether she should just try to use fetishization to her advantage. Paulino worries about being complicit, walking a mile to a fraternity party on Halloween to meet up with a guy. She sends me a text saying, “[I] question why I continuously and tirelessly work to assimilate and acclimate into white spaces that have historically discriminated my people.” That same weekend – at a different party – a white woman will “practice” her

Spanish on me, her quirky party trick. She doesn’t know that for years I was too ashamed to speak it because I thought I had to be more like her.

We shouldn’t have to open up our wounds to make this problem known. We shouldn’t have to police our actions, feel ashamed about our bodies and quell our personalities for your comfort. Sitting in Annenberg, I look around and see six different women.

Some of them nerd out about math, social justice, or writing.

We talk Tinder bios, coffee and Sour Patch Kids. I think of all the things that make us human. I see the anger and frustration flash over our faces as we open ourselves to be seen and examined. I hear our laughs as we take pictures backdropped by a Mariah Carey soundtrack. We are curious. We are loud and goofy. We are Black, bi-racial, Asian and Latina. We do not exist to be seen by you. *In order to respect her privacy, Nicole asked her name be changed.

WHAT DO WE DO ABOUT

FRATERNITIE Editor’s Note: The author is a member of the Sigma Chi fraternity.

STORY WILL FISCHER // DESIGN EMMA KUMER

THE NORTHWESTERN COMMUNITY STRUGGLES TO ADDRESS A CULTURE OF SEXUAL ASSAULT IN GREEK LIFE

I

t was a cold winter morning during Caroline Scott’s sophomore year. She needed to make a phone call. She was still trying to piece together the previous night’s events.

She dialed a friend, who she knew she had been with the night before.

His voice came through. “Oh, you don’t remember?” His nonchalance caught Scott off guard. She replied that she didn’t. “Oh well you know, we had blackout sex.”

Scott was shaken. His response had been so casual, so normal – was she crazy? She didn’t want to overreact, but she felt terrible.

“I felt like a slut,” Scott says. “I felt like I had asked for it. I felt like it was my fault. I felt so violated and so used.”

Unsure of what to do, Scott apologized on the phone, saying she was just trying to figure out what was going on. His response did not console her: “This is just what happens in fraternities.”

PHOTOS ELISSA GRAY

Students don’t only commit sexual assault in fraternities. But Scott’s story is not uncommon. Fraternity members and their institutions have normalized an unsafe sexual culture across campus. “We have this crazy culture where it’s so easy to think these things are okay when they’re not,” Scott says.

Fraternity culture sets the precedent for Northwestern’s social culture.

By dominating the social scene, fraternities exert influence across campus, far beyond their own houses. After high-profile sexual assault allegations at Sigma Alpha Epsilon (SAE), students have ramped up demands for fraternities to create a safer sexual culture. But in the 10 months since these allegations, the Northwestern community has struggled to address the danger posed by fraternities.

ES?

ALLEGATIONS AT SAE Weinberg senior Asha Sawhney, the president of Sexual Health and Assault Peer Educators (SHAPE), has heard countless stories from survivors at Northwestern. While not all of these accounts take place in fraternities, Sawhney says they certainly stand out. But due to their traumatic and confidential nature, most of these stories stay hidden.

“So much of what we hear is stuff that we’re not really authorized to share to the public,” Sawhney says. “A lot of us walk around this campus with the invisible weight of all the things we know are happening in fraternities, but because we are a survivor support group, it’s not our place to publicize that information.”

"WE'RE DONE WITH THIS SHIT AND READY TO TAKE ACTION.'' But on Feb. 6, 2017, some of these stories were revealed. Northwestern’s Chief of Police Bruce Lewis emailed a security alert to every Northwestern student warning that on Jan. 21, four female students had reportedly been given a date-rape drug at an event at the SAE fraternity house,

and two of the students believed they were sexually assaulted. Another student reported being sexually assaulted, possibly involving a date-rape drug, at another unnamed fraternity house.

The news shook campus: national media swarmed Evanston, the Interfraternity Council (IFC) scrambled to respond and SHAPE reacted with a protest to support survivors. But it didn’t surprise Scott.

“This is stuff that I have seen my entire time at Northwestern, especially in Greek life, especially in the sorority community,” Scott says.

“I mean, the number of survivors that I know is absurd. I am a survivor myself and I mean it’s just standard.

So when it came out I wasn’t shocked.

It made total sense.”

"A LOT OF US WALK AROUND THIS CAMPUS WITH THE INVISIBLE WEIGHT OF ALL THE THINGS WE KNOW ARE HAPPENING IN FRATERNITIES.'' On March 30, the University announced it had “concluded its review related to the alleged sexual misconduct” and would take “no disciplinary action or further investigative action” at the time.

A month later, the University suspended SAE for one year – not for sexual assault, but because it violated its disciplinary probation by hosting parties and providing alcohol to minors.

Meanwhile, SAE continued to throw parties off-campus, flouting its suspension. The fraternity still organized bar nights and formals in the spring. Throughout the fall, operating as an unrecognized chapter offcampus, SAE members have continued to recruit freshmen to join their ranks.

In October, IFC announced it would not recognize SAE until 2021, condemning the actions that have “continued to make the Northwestern community less and less safe.” But the University says it will allow SAE back on campus in 2018 as long as it successfully completes its suspension.

Because of this, if SAE does return to campus as an unrecognized chapter, it won’t receive the same regulation, education and programming that IFC chapters do.

Students have spoken out against SAE, including former SAE member Jimmy Wester. In a letter to The Daily Northwestern, Wester wrote, “It is disturbing that SAE prioritizes ‘having fun’ over being introspective and realizing the overwhelming presence of sexual assault on our campus.”

WHAT D O WE D O SAE is not the first fraternity with an unsafe sexual culture, and it won’t be the last. As a member of Sigma Chi, I watched as most fraternity members distanced themselves from the problem of sexual assault after the SAE allegations, claiming “that’s not us.” But the reality is many fraternity members do commit sexual assault, and every fraternity member plays a role although we don’t always realize it. I wanted to know how to upend this culture.

Northwestern’s fraternities have received scrutiny since their inception. Sexual assault, antiquated rituals and harsh hazing traditions — fueled by considerable amounts of alcohol — have consistently endangered students.

But this time, Scott says the sexual assault allegations were a call to arms for the Northwestern community, and especially for sororities in Panhellenic Association (PHA).

“We’re done with this shit and ready to take action,” Scott says.

"WHEN IT CAME OUT I WASN'T SHOCKED. IT MADE TOTAL SENSE.'' Students and administrators are examining the role fraternities play on campus; asking if they should be abolished or reformed, and how to best enact change in these entrenched, obstinate institutions. The University, Greek national organizations and PHA can contribute to reform, but student activists, fraternity leaders and administrators say the fraternities themselves must be committed to change in order to bring about a healthier, safer sexual culture.

ABOLITION Even before the SAE allegations surfaced, many students wanted to get rid of fraternities. Former FEATURES // 49

OF PHA MEMBERS HAVE FELT A FRATERNITY PLACE ITS INTERESTS ABOVE THEIR OWN SAFETY.

Associated Student Government (ASG) Vice President Macs Vinson said in April that these organizations are far more detrimental than students and administrators realize.

“IFC and its constituent organizations have no problem lying to us or reckoning with the danger they present to students on campus,” Vinson says. “We have to understand that students are literally in danger because we have this on campus.”

Administrators around the country are seriously considering Vinson’s point. In November, Ohio State suspended all fraternity activities indefinitely, and Michigan’s IFC suspended its own social activities after multiple chapters at both schools went under investigation for sexual misconduct, alcohol violations and hazing. Florida State, Penn State and Louisiana State all suspended fraternity activities in the past year after fraternity pledge deaths.

But when The Daily asked Northwestern President Morton Schapiro about the possibility of abolishing fraternities in February, he implied that Greek life was here to stay. “I really think it’s pretty unlikely,” Schapiro said. “I think they have 1,000 beds.” With a twoyear campus housing requirement starting this year, Greek life’s living spaces are especially valuable for the University, and the administration hasn’t signaled any interest in eliminating IFC. Further, SHAPE Training Chair Sophie Spears says simply abolishing fraternities wouldn’t create a safer sexual culture.

Sexual assault exists outside of fraternities, and by breaking down these formal structures and moving activities away from campus, there could be even less oversight and accountability.

“I think to just categorically abolish Greek life without doing it in combination with policy review and a new regulatory structure for all student organizations that have social events would be really problematic,” Spears says. “[It] could lead to completely unregulated and unsupervised social situations and it would be even more difficult to address sexual assault.”

OUTSIDE PRESSURE While administrators have shown little interest in abolishing IFC, there are still ways that outside institutions can put more pressure on fraternities to combat sexual assault and the culture surrounding it.

The first is the University.

In 2011, it created the Center for Awareness, Response, and Education (CARE) to provide resources and educate students about Northwestern’s sexual assault policy. CARE’s services include confidential support and advocacy, as well as referrals and educational programming across campus.

"WE HAVE TO UNDERSTAND THAT STUDENTS ARE LITERALLY IN DANGER BECAUSE WE HAVE THIS ON CAMPUS.'' But Sawhney and Spears say CARE is limited in scope and, with longer-term investment from the University, could be even more effective, increasing its reach and contributing to more holistic change.

“We have three people who work in CARE,” Spears says. “Why are we not pouring so many more resources into that? There’s so much work that could be done if we had more people.”

Meanwhile, administrators claim they have limited influence within fraternities. Dean of Students Todd Adams has dealt with several fraternity incidents as head of student conduct. He says Greek life is predicated on selfgovernance, but when fraternities fail to self-govern, the University steps in to hold them accountable.

Students, however, believe the University could do more within fraternities.

“Greek life’s social activities frequently occur on campus,” Spears says. “[That] provides Northwestern with opportunities to regulate those social events in a way that would lead to healthier drinking and sexual culture.”

ASG and Greek life leaders, including ASG president Nehaarika Mulukutla and IFC president Rodney Orr, have pushed the University to be more realistic about underage drinking and work with

THE NUMBER OF SURVIVORS I KNOW IS ABSURD

students to make drinking safer rather than punish students who drink. Alcohol often plays a role in sexual assault, and these students want the University to recognize the prevalence of alcohol and provide constructive oversight.

But Northwestern has been reluctant to condone underage drinking, and therefore unable to effectively monitor and regulate it. “The University can do a bit but they have their hands tied,” Sawhney says. “There’s so much legality around what they can and can’t do. Every decision has to be super airtight.”

Alcohol becomes even more complicated in Greek housing. Adams, a leader on Northwestern’s Community Alcohol Coalition, says while students 21-and-over can drink in dorms, the University doesn’t allow alcohol in fraternities because they don’t have the same live-in staff as residence halls. While most fraternity national organizations allow alcohol, sorority nationals mandate dry houses, and the University can’t change that.

Along with an alcohol ban, Spears says most sorority nationals don’t allow men in their house after a certain time of night, and they are never allowed to host parties.

Most are held at fraternities or off-campus houses, where IFC rounds provide little or no oversight and the power resides entirely with fraternity men.

In both fraternities and sororities, outdated national policies perpetuate an unsafe sexual culture. Greek national organizations are powerful and deeply entrenched in American higher education, and their influence is spread across the country. But realistically, each chapter at each school acts individually, making sweeping changes across chapters nearly impossible.

“The sad thing is that most of the real change would have to be made by a national organization that exists beyond this University,” Sawhney says, “and considering the broad diversity of chapters across the country, there’s not really any cohesive efforts to change things in nationals.”

In the absence of leadership from national organizations, Northwestern’s sororities have banded together at times to push fraternity members – and the University – to combat sexual assault.

In Spring of 2016, after rumors of sexual assault led to the suspension of multiple fraternity members across IFC, PHA launched a sexual assault task force to provide a space for the sorority community to express their feelings and develop plans for action. Juliette Johnson, a SHAPE member and PHA’s vice president of outreach and engagement, says the

task force worked with a new sense of urgency after the SAE allegations surfaced in February.

“I think it mobilized people,” Scott says. “The task force was so beautiful because it was something we’ve all known forever and we’re done and we’re ready to act.”

"THERE'S NOT REALLY ANY COHESIVE EFFORTS TO CHANGE THINGS IN NATIONALS.'' First, the task force surveyed sorority members about their experiences in fraternity spaces. The vast majority shared negative responses.

Out of 182 respondents, 78.6 percent said they have felt uncomfortable at a fraternity event, and 82.2 percent said they have felt a fraternity place its interests above their own safety or comfort.

Next, the task force invited two representatives from each fraternity to a meeting, where Johnson says 60 IFC members discussed the survey results with sorority members.

Most fraternity members don’t realize why or to what extent sorority members feel uncomfortable, Johnson says, and with the survey, fraternity members can make their spaces feel more welcoming.

“I wish, if I could have told that guy, ‘This is how this action affected me,’ I wonder if he would have done it, you know,” Scott says. “What that really feels like and means, and how we can work on it.”

At its next meeting, the task force brought in CARE Assistant Director Erin Clark to brainstorm ideas for more effective educational programming. CARE operates SHAPE and MARS, which give presentations to new fraternity members each winter about consent, sexual assault and the culture of masculinity. But Johnson says it’s hard to change culture with only one presentation.

“A lot of education is put on new members,” Johnson says. “But we think that something as serious and as pervasive in our community as sexual assault should be talked about more than once every four years.”

Johnson says sororities can also use social pressure to push fraternities. She suggested sorority chapters boycott parties or events with fraternities who cultivate a dangerous sexual environment.

PHA’s 12 presidents agreed to do this with SAE in February, but some sorority members still attended SAE events. “It reflects a general apathy that FEATURES // 51

people have toward sexual assault because I think it’s very normalized,” Spears says.

According to Scott, PHA needs to be resilient and unified in applying pressure to change the sexual culture within fraternities.

“These actions are going to take a while, which is hard, and it’s going to be hard keeping up that momentum,” Scott says. “This is going to be a process that’s going to take a lot of time and a lot of work and a lot of failure. But we can’t lose that energy.”

"WHEN YOU SHIFT THE WAY YOU TALK, YOU SHIFT THE WAY YOU THINK ABOUT THINGS.''” Clark, however, stresses that sororities – and others on the outside – should not have to bear the burden of holding fraternities accountable.

“Pressure, support and encouragement from the outside community is vital to pushing for change in masculine spaces,” Clark says in an email. “But ultimately

true accountability needs to come from within.”

campus and placing a high value on brothers over other people,” Ang says in an email.

CHANGE FROM WITHIN Paul Ang, CARE’s former Coordinator of Men’s Engagement, pushed fraternity members to examine their own cultural ideals of sex and masculinity in his two years at Northwestern.

Ang often cites the pyramid of violence, where the physical expressions of violence like sexual assault are narrow at the top, propped up by a sturdy base of unhealthy cultural attitudes. Few people actually commit rape, but by being complicit and condoning harmful language, attitudes and beliefs, many more are active in supporting rape culture. This exists across Northwestern’s campus, but fraternities particularly value certain “manly” qualities, which Ang says perpetuate sexual assault.

“These constructions of masculinity often revolve around sexual conquest, ability to drink alcohol, athletic ability, status on

"BUT ULTIMATELY TRUE ACCOUNTABILITY NEEDS TO COME FROM WITHIN.'' “Components like these lead to sexual aggression and violence, group objectification of women, adherence to rigid traditional gender roles, belief in rape myths and a lack of accountability for perpetrators of a variety of gender-based violence.”

As former IFC president, Phi Delta Theta president and MARS presentations chair, Will Altabef saw this daily. Altabef says in order for fraternity members to create a safer sexual culture, they must confront and talk about harmful language and actions when they crop up in everyday moments. Altabef says he’s been most proud of his fraternity when a member gets called out for saying something “messed up.”

“It can seem trivial,” Ang says, “but when you shift the

way you talk, you shift the way you think about things.”

Cultural change must go deeper than words. Former Zeta Beta Tau President Eli Goldstein believed that by cutting out harmful language, his chapter’s beliefs would shift. But Goldstein says not everyone did the work to understand why it was necessary.

“Policing language only goes so far,” Goldstein says.

“The issue I ran into is that people didn’t speak the way they shouldn’t speak because it was bad, they did it because they didn’t want to get yelled at.”

"THIS IS GOING TO BE A PROCESS THAT'S GOING TO TAKE A LOT OF TIME AND A LOT OF WORK AND A LOT OF FAILURE.'' Apathy can keep fraternity members from understanding their impact. “Even if you don’t consider yourself part of the problem,” Scott says, “or you think you’re a good guy, you still have a responsibility to realize your role in it

"WE THINK THAT SOMETHING AS SERIOUS AND AS PERVASIVE IN OUR COMMUNITY AS SEXUAL ASSAULT SHOULD BE TALKED ABOUT MORE THAN

ONCE EVERY FOUR YEARS.'' 52 // NORTHBYNORTHWESTERN.COM

implicitly, and then do your best to call other people out and truly hold others accountable.”

When fraternity members wind up in Todd Adams’ office for misconduct hearings, he says they often fall back on a textbook defense: “We didn’t do anything.” This inaction, Adams says, is precisely the problem.

“If some things haven’t been managed or if they’ve been mishandled or if they’ve just been left,” Adams says, “Doing nothing is actually a decision point, and there hasn’t always been good recognition that the lack of doing something might be the bigger problem than doing something and not quite hitting the mark.”

After the SAE allegations, IFC suspended all social events for the rest of Winter Quarter in attempt to encourage reflection. But former MARS Outreach Chair Liam White, a Sigma Chi member, says that didn’t stop fraternity men from drinking and going out to bars, and life soon returned to “business as usual.”

“No Greek chapters had any tools in their back pocket to self-examine,” White says.

“It was just kind of left up to them to do so. Most people didn’t do that work.”

Although IFC has worked with SHAPE and MARS to create better educational programming, and the outside perspectives

are necessary, White says fraternity members frequently respond better to people they share a bond with – their fraternity brothers.

"IT COSTS MEN TO ENGAGE WITH MASCULINITY AND HOLD EACH OTHER ACCOUNTABLE. THE EASIEST THING TO DO IS NEVER CHANGE.'' Recognizing this, IFC created a director for safety and accountability this year, with hopes of developing a safety and accountability chair in each chapter. Orr says chapter leaders like these are well positioned to create cultural change within their fraternities.

“When I was chapter president, it was something that I stressed every day,” Orr says. “It was always on my mind: How do we make this place better? I think chapter leaders really need to create that space where people aren’t afraid to talk about these things.”

IFC’s 16 fraternities vary in culture from chapter to chapter and count over 1,000 students among their members. It’s difficult to

measure the effectiveness of these efforts in such a disparate group. Johnson says some of them continue to have conversations about sexual assault while there are others that still “aren’t quite there yet.”

Scott says she has mixed feelings about Greek life and its capacity for reform.

She’s grateful for the support her sorority provided, and says the strong sense of community has immense potential.

But she recognizes the inherent flaws in the Greek system and has experienced the perils of fraternity culture.

“It changed things,” Scott says. “It was something that I had to work through to recover from and it still gets triggered. ... It absolutely affects the way I interact with social spaces that are male dominated and just with guys in general. I was lucky to have so much support and the more I talked about it, the more people came forward and were like, ‘Yeah that happened to me too.’”

The Northwestern community will continue to pressure fraternities to create a safer sexual culture, but it remains to be seen if individual fraternity members are willing to drive change

themselves. It’s difficult and unpopular to challenge the status quo. According to Ang, it’s why fraternity culture is so resistant, even impervious, to change. “It costs men to engage with masculinity and hold each other accountable,” Ang says. “The easiest thing to do is never change.”

Accountability is often dispersed throughout fraternities, so that each fraternity member doesn’t feel like they need to do anything at all. But it’s not on the institution – it’s on each fraternity member to question the culture of the institution, and take it upon himself to create a better one.

"DOING NOTHING IS ACTUALLY A DECISION POINT.'' “It is on individuals,” Scott says. “Even if you’re not someone who has committed sexual assault, it’s still on you to call each other out and help each other actively fix it.”

FEATURES // 53

W

hen was the last time you phoned home?

Where were you? What was the weather like? Was it a short conversation about football and food or a long debate about majors, careers and homesickness?

NBN follows six Northwestern students to capture moments calling home.

54 // NORTHBYNORTHWESTERN.COM

Medill sophomore LATESHA HARRIS on a phone call with her boyfriend in Round Rock, Texas.

FEATURES // 55

Medill sophomore SUMIN WOO calls her mom in Baltimore, Maryland.

CALLING HOME S

ome students call home while walking to class, others squeeze it in before rehearsals and sometimes they converse sitting in their apartments. The calls take different forms: FaceTime and video chat works best for certain families, but for others it’s easiest to drop their loved ones a line the old-fashioned way.

PHOTOS YING DAI, EMMA DANBURY and ELISSA GRAY

Weinberg senior WILL ENGELLENNER calls his parents in Long Island, New York.

56 // NORTHBYNORTHWESTERN.COM

McCormick junior SYDNEY MARCUS talks to her mom in Amsterdam.

Weinberg senior EMILY KUTTNER calls her grandma in Columbia, Missouri.

Weinberg junior ABHISHEK SHAH video calls his friend in Goa, India.

U UP?

NBN’S guide to post-hookup etiquette

MISSED CONNECTIONS

Stories about the one that got away ELIZABETH GUTHRIE

A NORTHWESTERN PARTY CONVERSATION FLOWCHART

PHOTO YING DAI

DAVID GUIRGIS

How will your party conversation end? We can guess NICOLÁS RIVERO

I’M TOO OLD FOR THIS SHIT

NBN’s resident dad relives the freshman year he never had ANDY BROWN

‘TIL THE BITTER END

HANGOVER

58 // FALL 2017

NBN’s guide to post-hookup etiquette STORY DAVID GUIRGIS // DESIGN SAVANNAH CHRISTENSEN

u up?

You’re probably at the point in your Northwestern experience where you’re beginning to understand what it’s like to get messy and deal with the aftereffects of taking someone home. Or, at least, getting really sloppy with them at Burger King.

And there’s a good chance you’re not dying to see them again. Or hey, maybe you are, but you don’t know what to do about it.

So how do you figure this shit out? I gotchu.

Waking up in a Plex single and realizing Waking up in a Plex single that you ~left an impression~ on someone and realizing that you *left an last night

impression* on someone last night

It’s sometime in the morning and you wake up to find that you’re naked in someone’s bed with an ear-ringing headache. And you’re the little spoon.

Now that your head is somewhat clear and you’ve realized that, yes, you did in fact accompany someone home – and ew, they live in Plex – the first thing you need to do is assess the situation. How bad is your hangover? Was the sex good? Did you know them before last night?

Uh, is that your underwear hanging on the lampshade?

From there, grab your shit and run like hell. Or, if they’re cute, cuddle for a little bit before realizing you’re late for a group project meeting in Kresge, and then grab your shit and run like hell.

This general theory applies to anywhere on campus, but let’s be honest: there’s a huge difference between waking up naked in Plex and waking up naked to a lakeside view in 560 Lincoln. There will be no running like hell if you’re waking up in the latter. Enjoy your goddamn privilege.

Actually wanting to text your onenight stand during your Sheridan walk of shame This is a no-brainer. You’ve shared upper lip sweat from making out in an offcampus basement. You’ve seen each other naked. You’ve broken the ice.

Text them. If they text you back, congrats, you’ve at least made a friend (and you know you’re not horrible in bed).

If they don’t, you’re not horrible in bed. I promise. It’s just that they’re not interested, or they’re going through

something, or they’re just not very nice.

Either way, they no longer exist. They never happened, and you’ll survive and thrive.

Somehow finding time during Week 6 to develop feelings This usually happens because you actually texted them back, and then they texted back, and now you’re friends.

Except, you know, friends who hookup a lot and also drunk sext occasionally.

If it doesn’t work out, don’t press it.

Unrequited feelings suck, but being led on while hoping you can change their mind sucks more. You deserve better. Ask them what “this” is, and if the answer isn’t “I’d love to call a spade a spade and label the friendship, deep talking and subsequent foreplay an actual relationship,” it’s not worth pursuing.

Running into someone who says they made out with you the night before and not initially recognizing them because BASEMENTS ARE DARK AS SHIT Oh, honey. You went out on North Campus, didn’t you?

These situations are so incredibly messy that the only thing you can do is laugh it off and change the subject to literally anything else – midterms, papers, that time you got food poisoning at Lisa’s and the doctor at Searle basically told you to suck it up.

Hooking up with your friend (e.g. residential college dormcest) Talk it out as soon as possible. Everyone who has ever, in the history of this world,

said the friends-with-benefits thing won’t be awkward is lying. Talk. Sit them down for a shitty debriefing brunch at Allison (or a great debriefing brunch at Cupitol if you’re rich) and talk about it. Do you want to keep hooking up? Are there feelings involved? Was this just a one-night thing? Ask these questions and answer them honestly, so that way when these questions inevitably surface again, you have something to reference.

Some etiquette rules to consider on top of all this shit (because, you know, more things to worry about) 1. If you’re hosting, you should offer to let them spend the night. A 7 a.m. walk of shame is way more bearable than a 3 a.m. walk of shame.

2. You technically reserve the right to ask them to please get the fuck out. But don’t be an asshole.

3. If you’re just not feeling it, you can ask to cuddle, make out and go to sleep.

You’ll know that they’re nice (and it’ll increase your chances of morning sex, which is the goddamn bomb).

4. Leave your hickies in places that are easily covered so Yiraida from Fran’s doesn’t coyly ask the other person about it a couple of days later. (Hi, Yiraida, I love you.)

5. If they fell asleep on your arm and it gets numb, they’re probably knocked the fuck out anyway so you can pull it out without waking them up. Maybe? If they do wake up, see my note about morning sex.

Bonus: Straight ladies! My fellow gays!

If you really, really, really need water but you’re on the side of the bed facing the wall and he’s boxing you in, just quench your thirst by sucking his dick!

(That was a joke. Hydrate yourself.

With, like, water.)

HANGOVER // 59

Stories about the one that got away

stella

So you know incoming freshmen have all these group chats. I ended up in a group chat with this one guy. We ended up talking a little bit over the summer, and we had a lot of the same interests. Boy’s really cute.

At some point, I was rather intoxicated and let him know that I thought he was very cute. And that turned into a weird summer of hardcore sexting. I remember one night where we were in a group chat, me and him and a couple other people got really into this discussion about environmental racism. So in one chat, we were talking about inequalities within urban areas. In another app, we were sending frisky pictures. He and I were talking a lot, so a few weeks before school started, I just got to Chicago because I was doing a POP [pre-orientation program]. He was doing one too and was like, “Shit, you wanna go out for coffee sometime? I feel like we’d actually really vibe.

You’re cool.” And I was like, “Definitely.”

Then I left for PWild, got back and got sucked up into all the Wildcat Welcome bullshit, and didn’t see him. I was just so busy. Then one night I walk into my common room, and he was there hanging out with some people. We said hi and progressively realized after just seeing each other around that we were just totally not involved in the same social scene whatsoever. I very much considered myself anti-frat, not a North Campus person to say the least. And he’s very much a North Campus person in the social scene, going to frat parties, hanging out with the athletes. We just have totally different vibes even though we have similar interests.

Now it’s super awkward because we never actually hung out. We don’t talk anymore, and I just see him around all the time because we eat in the same dining hall. It’s really weird, and we never know whether to say hi to each other or not. Sometimes we do and sometimes we ignore each other completely. Low-key though, I’d still smash, which is the worst part. ‘Cause again, boy is really, really attractive.”

jake

I went to an AEPi off-campus party with one of my really good friends. I ended up making out with a girl. It was fun. It seemed like a thing and I got her number. I texted her, and just radio silence ever since.

Then I heard she got a kidney stone. But you know, we were all like, wait what’s going on? I asked the same friend I went to the party with that Monday what happened.

He said, “I think that girl you hooked up with is sick.” I was like, “Oh really? Tell me what happened. I hope she’s okay. Is this something I should care about?” Then he told me it was a kidney stone, and that’s just funny ‘cause my house was built on kidney stones – I mean my dad’s a urologist.”

brock

Editor’s note: These interviews have been edited and condensed for clarity.

DESIGN SARAH ZHANG PHOTO YING DAI STORY ELIZABETH GUTHRIE 60 // NORTHBYNORTHWESTERN.COM

I partially discovered my sexuality on PWild and was helped in this discovery by another gay man whom we will term Joseph.

Joseph and I became pretty great friends during PWild. One night we’re all going out to a party, and Joseph had been hooking up with a fellow named Ralph. We were on the way to the party, and I started doing the Wildcat Welcome dance, like spoons not forks, the whole jive. He definitely was very interested in watching me do the Wildcat Welcome dance. Of course he did the dance with me, and there was this building sexual tension around it.

Ralph starts making out with Joseph and immediately apologizes for it, which was weird because I was not even looking at this guy in a sexual context. I’d only kissed one guy in my whole entire life. So he’s apologizing to me, and I’m like what the fuck, maybe I’m interested.

Eventually I just looked at everyone and said, “Can someone take me to the restroom?” As expected, Ralph was like, “Over here, I’ll take you.” We were at Lambda and tried to find a bathroom upstairs. We couldn’t find one. We were kind of pinned against each other in this very dark stairwell, and I asked him what he wanted, and he told me he didn’t necessarily want Joseph. And I said, “Well, what do you want right now?” We violently made out in the stairwell. I ended up on the floor. I decided it would probably look suspicious to Joseph, so I left and told him to stay in the stairwell. The night went on, and Ralph told me before I walked away that he wanted to see me again.

The next night, we all went out for Wildcat Welcome, and I found out that Joseph had found out about me and Ralph. It manifested in this horrible bickering fight of screaming and yelling, and everyone was crying. Then Ralph and Joseph went back downstairs to the party and just started making out and crying and arguing and making out. I was very upset so I went home.

So that was the one that got away.

More specifically, that is the asshole that got away.”

!

E R E H T STAR So, where are you from?

JUST OUTSIDE OF NYC

CHICAGO SUBURBS

Oh, which one?

THE BAY AREA

Oh, sick. Do you know Stephen Harris?

OF COURSE I KNOW STEPHEN HARRIS! KID’S A SCARSDALE LEGEND!

YOU WOULDN’T KNOW IT.

Heh, how do you like winters here?

NO, I DON’T.

...

C’mon, tell me!

SURE IS COLD.

DEERFIELD

JUST KIDDING.

Do you study Econ?

HOW’D YOU KNOW?

NO

Want to crush some problem sets later?

FUCK YEAH

NO

In five years, this person will hook you up with a job at Goldman Sachs.

Do you actually want to be a journalist?

A northwestern party conversation flowchart MEDILL

OH GOD NO

Hahahahaha

COMING OUT OF MY CAGE

AND I’VE BEEN DOING JUST FINE WELL, IT WAS NICE TO MEET...

YES!

You casually decide to leave at the same time as them and don’t accept their Uber fare split.

Oh, that sounds–

Hold on, is that Mr. Brightside?

WHAT?

You didn’t go to New Trier, did you?

Oh! Cool!

MCCORMICK

SESP

YES

A month later, you find your name in a Daily op-ed titled “An Open Letter to the Dick Who Insulted My Profession at a Party.”

DES PLAINES

CHART NICOLÁS RIVERO // DESIGN EMMA KUMER

So, what school are you in?

WINNETKA

GOTTA GOTTA BE DOWN

They stumble away belting out Mr. Brightside lyrics. You will never see this person again.

YOU WOULD NOT BELIEVE HOW MUCH HOMEWORK I HAVE. GUESS. GUESS HOW MUCH HOMEWORK I HAVE.

I...

Well...

A LOT! THE ANSWER IS A LOT!

Congratulations! There’s now one more person you have to decide whether or not to wave to on Sheridan.

I’m too old for this shit

Resident dad Andy Brown relives the freshman year he never had

I

never got to be a freshman. In my first year at Northwestern, I spent most weekends holed up in my room, catching up on readings and other work. When my floormates stumbled in from another night of debauchery, I’d smirk and think to myself: “They’re gonna be drowning in work tomorrow.”

Yeah, so, freshman me was kind of a dick. Whatever.

Anyway, I eventually started doing my fair share of drinking and partying during sophomore year, but I’d missed the boat. So, when NBN asked me to write a story about ‘doing a decidedly freshman thing,’ with just months left until I graduate, I couldn’t pass it up. And I knew there was no better way to rekindle the sparks of my youth than to unironically attend a Wildcat Welcome party.

When you enter, the first thing that hits you is the smell. Then it’s the heat. After bypassing the “bouncers” thanks to my “friend of the frat” status, I ducked my head to enter the small, dark stairway leading to the basement where the Young Party People were standing in close quarters performing vague, offbeat gyrations to the faint beat of the “Get Turnt” playlist on Spotify.

As I descended into this sweaty cesspool, I remembered why I had not returned since my 30-minute appearance at a party.

Honestly, I never regretted skipping stuff like this as a freshman.

I decided the best thing for me to do would be to pretend I was one of them. So I subtly joined a group of kids holding those universal red cups toward the end of a slightly anxious round of name/hometown/major.

“I’m from Schaumburg and I’m a bio major! Wow, crazy that so many of us are from Chicago!”

I jumped in and told them I was from Missouri (false) and in SESP (also false). I weathered a couple of subpar SESP jokes and listened to them rattle off basic stereotypes about their majors before quietly exiting the conversation.

I know you’ve got to start somewhere, but I feel like I’ve aged out of the let’s-make-fake-friends game. As I peered through the

62 // NORTHBYNORTHWESTERN.COM

STORY ANDY BROWN DESIGN AMANDA GORDON ILLUSTRATION EMMA SARAPPO

man-made mist, a figure emerged. His eyes were bloodshot, his shirt was drenched in sweat.

“Anybody down for beer pong? It’s my first time playing, and I need somebody good on my team.” Not deeming myself a worthy ringer, I said nothing. He staggered around, flustered and desperate. I could tell it was really important that he got in this game.

I yawned, found my way to the table labeled “bar” and exchanged some brief small talk with a boy who was disappointed in the “lack of selection.” Given the choice of PBR, rum and Coke, and Sprite and vodka, my new acquaintance chose to stomach a lukewarm can of option one and disappeared into the crowd.

Feeling claustrophobic, wet and frankly a little bored, I fought my way through the throng of wobbling teens to the stairwell, where I made my escape.

This basement was not my scene. Having approved the spelling of my name on my diploma just hours before the party, this was extremely clear to me. Navigating social situations like these requires a certain innocence and naïveté, and I don’t mean that in a derogatory way at all.

It’s just hard to suspend your cynicism when you’ve cycled through enough flimsy first-year-of-college friendships to know you probably won’t meet your future best man in a fraternity basement.

But, as my queen and savior Lorde once said, “parties are a really interesting mental exercise” when you’d otherwise be “sitting at home by [your]self hearing [your] thoughts hit the walls.” While freshman parties are not for everyone, they do serve a purpose. I’m not sure if anyone leaves them fully satisfied, but if you’ve got nothing else to do, I can understand how they’re worthwhile. It pains me to admit it, but I wish I’d given myself a chance to see what it was like three years ago.

It’s also a great chance to get wasted, if you’re into that sort of thing.