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U.I. Dialogue narratives |
RetireTheChief
The following is the transcript of a Foellinger balcony narrative from April 14, 2000. It is an unedited excerpt from the original Chief dialogue document.
MS. LORI KINGERY: My name is Lori Kingery. I don't know what to say and speaking makes me kind of nervous, I have props here. I am an alumni of the University, that is something at this point I am not proud of. You know, I would like to be proud of that. I know that I wouldn't give any money to the University of Illinois while they had Illiniwek in place. He is not a chief. That's absurd. That is like saying he is the president of the US or something. It's frightening to me that the Board of Trustees would put racism ahead, even if you call it tradition, you know, there are a lot of traditions in this country we are not yet proud of. And it's frightening to me that they would put racism ahead of people.Some of the things I have been noticing recently are the Employees Credit Union had a symbol that was chief oriented, you can't see it here, but they used to have it on all their little stuff. They have changed it. They have gotten with the program, sort of.
This is not very long ago, sometime this year, I believe, there was an ad for a local restaurant that is using chief logos or whatever. The U of I says this stuff doesn't happen, we respect him, whatever.
But the most distressing one for me was yesterday's DI. Pro-Chief, anti-Chief, what is in the sports section "Illini Chop Sycamores." It doesn't happen in our community? Yes, it does. And it hurts our community and it hurts our respect of the University of Illinois and it hurts other communities when we go there to play sports and act like idiots like this.
And there is a lot more that could be said and I am sure that other people are saying it. But I also think that it's strange that there is a big huge event on campus that has been planned for like two years that happens to be today, so you will see there are no women here pretty much because they are all in the Assembly Hall. And all the women from the University and local businesses are crowding in the Assembly Hall for a women's conference that's been planned for a really long time. This has been planned for a short amount of time. And of course it's on the same day. If you see the parking for this event, which is right across the street from that, there are like five cars there. It's not seven in the morning, it's ten or something.
I got a letter saying that I could send e-mail about this thing. It didn't mention the event whatever. I don't think this is really a democratic process. I think it's a farce. Thank you.
See the U.I. Dialogue on Chief Illiniwek page for more transcripts and information.