The last time that I talked with William Upski Wimsatt, he had convinced me to hold a chair over my head. And I liked it.
Upski, a hip-hop activist from Hyde Park and author of “Bomb the Suburbs” and “No More Prisons,” is coming to Northwestern on Thursday with a speech entitled “Why Northwestern Students are our Best Hope in the 21st Century.”
His speech will be something to which everyone should be receptive.
Saying that Upski is an energetic person is as understated as saying that Al Gore lacks charisma. At the time, in May 2000, I had a chair raised over my head, he was in the process of making a very direct point. The chair was being lofted, as if part of some bizarre World’s Strongest Man competition, to help me understand what it was like to be disenfranchised in our society.
Earlier, I had been standing on a chair, and he told me and the other students gathered to hear him speak at the University of Chicago that this is the position we inhabit in our society — one of power.
By the time he finished talking, my arms were hurting from holding up one of the leather-upholstered monsters that grace the U. of C. student lounge (that’s right NU, leather chairs for students), and I had grasped the message.
All the while, Upski was running around without socks on, a hip-hop version of Richard Simmons, getting the whole room psyched about activism and politics and changing our world. More than anyone I’ve seen, he can get a crowd excited, and not just because of the potential for exercise.
“Politics is very corrupt in a very specific way,” Upski told me yesterday. “Rich people and corporations can control the system. The way to change the game is to learn the art of playing it.”
Upski had dedicated most of his life to giving people this kind of power, to “finding the dopest people with money and hooking them up.” It’s already worked in Chicago, with the Chi-Town Lowdown, a bilingual paper that one of Upski’s foundations has helped fund.
Upski is always talking about how we can live together, that it is a creative act to bring two different groups together.
“If you had a dinner party and let folks kick it, and feel like they participated, then you would have something,” Upski said. Unfortunately, most kids at Northwestern haven’t had that experience. “We’re trying to make that experience, of meeting different people, a common one instead of an uncommon one,” he said.
What is the moral of this column, you may ask, other then a plug for one of my favorite authors? I think Upski is going to make a point on Thursday that everyone should hear. His talks and activities all focus on getting one specific message across: You have power.
He isn’t some crass motivational speaker, only someone that is genuinely gifted at relating to people. Everybody at this school has heard the typical dry guidance counselor drone about how you can accomplish anything, or the stale high-school principal truism that kids can do anything they put their minds to.
Upski isn’t going to talk to you like that because he has some real stories and experiences of making things work. NU should be listening.
