Our second week of the 2019 Fall Festival featured programming throughout South Shore, Hyde Park, and the Loop. Powerhouse presenters included Damon Locks and the Black Monument Ensemble, Eric Foner, Katherine Franke, Vivien Goldman, Suketu Mehta, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Beth Macy, Kwame Onwuachi, and Mo Rocca. This week’s programs inspired us to make some powerful plans for imagining a better future, from writing our own stories to rethinking our nation’s past. Below, find six such action plans from our second week of Festival programs.

1) Powerful Plan: Writing Our Stories

James Beard Award-winning chef Kwame Onwuachi talked about the connection between food and identity, as well as the perks of perceived failure: “When my restaurant closed, my editor called me and said, ‘Kwame, I’m so sorry. But this is gonna make a great book!” What has Onwuachi learned from his journey? “If you think you’re ready to do something, do it. And if you fall, get up and keep working.” Also, “seek out diverse restaurants.”

“Sometimes writing is a form of survival.” —Leslie Jamison

Like Onwuachi, author Leslie Jamison recognizes the power of culinary inspiration: she even got her creative nonfiction students a cake with her favorite writing advice, “get specific,” written on it! Jamison sometimes looks through email archives for old recipes to help her write about a time when she believed relationships could be saved by cooking “inventive dishes with fresh produce.”

Author Salman Rushdie’s latest work, Quichotte, a modern take on Cervantes’s Don Quixote, tells the story of how “an artist’s personal experiences and concerns can be transferred into a work of art.” Rushdie qualifies: “We live in an era where people think novels are disguised autobiographies. Novels can begin from personal experience, but they don’t end there. The imaginative act is that transformation.”

“It’s been a process figuring out my own voice,” confessed Mobituaries author Mo Rocca, “When people ask me, I’m a little unsure.” What he is sure about? The last paragraph of his obituary, which he hopes will read: “Mo Rocca, who made people interested in things they didn’t think they would be interested in, died today. He was 135...And he time traveled to stop the Nazis.”

2) Powerful Plan: Rethinking Our Past

Takeaways from Atlantic columnist Ibram X. Kendi’s conversation with Mother Jones reporter Jamilah King: 1. To be an antiracist is to acknowledge and confess the ways in which we have consumed racist ideas in a racist society. 2. If you know someone who is a racist, don’t enable that worldview: “If you don’t talk to them, who will?” 3. Don’t stay silent in the face of injustice. Own your power to fight against systemic racism every day.

“Every single Black person has the power to resist, just as every single white person has the power to resist, in this case resist racist policies.” —Ibram X. Kendi

In her lecture on reparations, Professor Katherine Franke asked CHF to think about power in relation to two questions regarding reconstruction: 1. What would America look like now if former slaves “had been empowered to shape the form of their freedom?” And 2. “What role could or should have reparations played in making possible a robust form of Black freedom?”

Chicago is very much part of my cultural experience. —Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

Scholar Henry Louis Gates, Jr. visited CHF to discuss Reconstruction and reparations: “All of today’s most pressing issues are a reprise of reconstruction issues that were not resolved in the 19th century,” he said. As for reparations? He supports making “equal the amount of money we spend on every child’s education,” in addition to the continuation of programs like affirmative action.

Named “the king of reconstruction” by Gates, historian Eric Foner offered a critique of the post-Civil War government to help us contextualize today’s civil rights battles: “So long as the legacy of Jim Crow continues to haunt us,” Foner said, “the era after the Civil War can serve as an inspiration for those of us working for a more just country.”

Author Suketu Mehta explored how the current “emergency regarding migration” is traced back to colonization and his belief that in order to repair for this troubling history, migrants should not be turned away from the countries of former colonizers.

3) Powerful Plan: Believe in Something

“Learn your rights and then take proactive steps to confront injustice.” —Sister Helen Prejean

In her career as a spiritual advisor to death row inmates Sister Helen Prejean has come to view religion as a lens for social justice activism. Empowered by her faith, Prejean rejects political rhetoric that paints the death penalty as a form of justice: “The innocence or guilt of a person on death row does not matter,” she said, “No one should be sent to death by the state.”

“Religion is a set of culturally prescribed practices to help people connect to superhuman powers.” —Christian Smith

Like Prejean, sociology professor Christan Smith concluded that the power of religion has not declined with modernization. Why do people still need religion? “Humans are vulnerable, finite,” Smith said.” Religion has the power to fill human needs for identity and belonging.”

Writer Sasha Sagan thinks rituals, like drinks with co-workers or family dinners, have taken the place of religion for many people. But she still thinks the essence of religion is relevant in our lives: “Beneath the specifics of religion or mythology” are “shared human experiences that we should ritualize and celebrate,” like the change of seasons, birth, or death.

4) Powerful Plan: Shape Our Communities

South Shore native Carlo Rotella came to CHF to discuss his new book on Chicago neighborhoods: This book is about “how neighborhoods work, and how they don’t. How we live in neighborhoods, but most importantly, how neighborhoods live in us.”

“Social justice has a geography.” —Liz Ogbu

Urbanist Liz Ogbu defines spatial justice as designing community spaces that empower people “to live their best stories” and privileges the needs of traditionally under-served communities by “allow[ing] us to imagine differently what our world is.”

“What role did power play in the opioid crisis?” journalist Monica Davey asked author Beth Macy. Her answer: the billions of dollars the drug companies spent on lobbying, systematic failures to regulate addictive medication, and a rehab industry exploiting community vulnerability—all in the name of greed.

“Toxic masculinity breeds in silence, it breeds in fear. In a way, men become jailer of each other,” author Jared Yates Sexton discussed his new book about toxic masculinity: “The story of white patriarchal masculinity requires white men to examine their history and behavior, to look in the mirror.”

Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Eli Saslow came to CHF to talk about the threat of white nationalism: “Radical groups are successful when they make people feel part of a community,” he explained. “The core of confronting these racist ideas is confronting what is at the core of America.”

5) Powerful Plan: Reconsider Our Workforce

Senior Researcher at Microsoft, Mary L. Gray defines ghost work as the human labor behind “automated” technologies, which requires the hard work of cognition, creativity, and snap judgement. Gray argued, “We're creating ghost work conditions because we don't know how to value the people coming into this market. It allows companies to sell what they sell as the magic of tech."

Actor John Hodgman reminisced about the difficulties of breaking through the entertainment industry: "I wanted to make and write stuff, but I was afraid to do it. So I took a job [a] was literary adjacent, but it was terrible. The worst job is the one that isn't right for you, but you're afraid to quit it."

“We have this idea of responsibility that involves taking on [college] debt and then finding a job that will pay off that debt. But we have to push back on that logic.” —Caitlin Zaloom

“The data indicates that college degrees are nearly essential,” explained anthropologist Caitlin Zaloom, but that doesn’t mean we should go broke trying to remain competitive in the labor market. Debt doesn’t just hurt students, Zaloom said, but also cripples families’ ability to save, and “compounds already existing [economic and racial] inequality.”

6) Powerful Plan: Create Art

"I think we forget—We say second city—but it was a huge metropolis with a large population of Black people. The way people looked at Chicago was beaming out this Black identity. I think it's something powerful" —Ayana Contreras

“Chicago, Illinois, is the center of everything,” poet Mario Smith told the South Shore during South Side Soul. It’s certainly the center of a powerful Black music scene, “one of the largest communities of Black-owned record companies in the nation” playing “wall-to-wall Black music” on the radio.

The 1970s were defined by punk, at least that’s the opinion of curator John Corbett and music journalist Vivien Goldman. “Music was all we had in the 70s,” Goldman remembered, “which is why so much creativity was poured into punk. Our journey was the narrative aspect of the record.”

“You cannot tell the story of American fashion without talking about the contributions of Black girls and femmes.” —Tanisha C. Ford

Resisting gender and racial stereotypes. Showing creativity. Starting conversations. That’s the power of fashion, said Tanisha C. Ford: “Our fashion in the Black community was always an outgrowth of our politics...The hoodie became a symbol for Black Lives Matter the way the black leather jacket was for the Black Panthers.”

Why is art one of the most powerful mediums to tell the story of climate change? Because “visual language is stirring,” argued artist David Opdyke, “It cuts through. It allows people to literally see the problem. Visual art is a powerful entrance into activism.”