Obama Center, Nayland Blake, Danielle Mckinney

The War Against Imagination

An art therapy professor asked her students to imagine a therapeutic treatment plan for a queer Arab woman who feared retaliation under the Trump administration for supporting pro-Palestine protests. For that, the School of the Art Institute in Chicago (SAIC), one of the foremost art schools in the country, placed her on leave. It’s a prime example of the rot authoritarianism introduces into democratic society — something we have to “fight at ev…