Lincoln Hall Project
Jenny Choi (BS ’00, English) tells her best friend, Holly Rushakoff (BS ’98, journalism), how black feminism classes, and lectures by Maya Angelou and Pearl Cleage, influenced her.
On the very surface level, in terms of myself as an activist…since high school I’ve always wanted to be an activist in the context of, I would say, a punk rocker, like Food Not Bombs or veganism or whatever, but I think Champaign was the first time that I understood myself in the political context of being a woman or begin Asian American. Those were new things to me that I didn’t really even explore or become exposed to until I came to Champaign. So that's really shaped a lot of my personal politics today as an adult.
This is gonna kind of sound funny and weird, but the one thing that I really became kind of entrenched in in Champaign was black feminism. Because I went to see Maya Angelou here. And first I went to go see her as an English major, because of I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. I mean I didn’t really know Maya Angelou besides her book, and her story, but seeing her live at Foellinger, I was like, “Wow. She’'s history. She’s like a living, breathing, cultural icon.” So that really opened my eyes to, I would say, the world, in a lot of ways from Glenview, Illinois.
After that, every time I saw a lecture, I became obsessed with the writings of black feminists, and I got the most exposure really delving deeply into that at the U of I. I was taking Black Women's history classes, African American Literature, because we didn’t have an Asian American studies program then. And I went to go see Pearl Cleage, and she was spectacular. These were just good opportunities for me to just really see people that I would never ever, ever have seen.
It’s hard when you live in Chicago or D.C. or a major city or whatever, and you see all these things in the paper, and it’s so oversaturated with different events. And you just never know, or you can’t really prioritize which ones you want to go to. And usually you end up instead seeing Forgetting Sarah Marshall movie instead or something (laughs). But in Champaign I never watched any TV; I never listened to the radio really; I went to these lectures. And I felt like a very humanistic, culturally evolved person that I think I really miss since I left (laughs). Now I’m just hot dogs and potato chips (laughs). And True Blood.
(Length: 2:32)