Dima Ali, an Oak Park resident and a Muslim, said she doesn’t normally wear her hijab, but she chose to don the head scarf during a march Thursday night in which about 200 Oak Park community members gathered in solidarity against hateful rhetoric.
The event was inspired by the election of Donald J. Trump, who made numerous controversial statements during his presidential campaign, including a promise to halt Muslim immigration to the United States.
Ali, 40, said she emigrated to the U.S. from Iraq 16 years ago to escape the same sort of cultural divisiveness she said is not apparent in the U.S. Though she’s been nervous to leave her home since Trump won the election, she said she wore her hijab to make a statement that she will not be cowed by fear and she stands with her fellow Muslims against Islamophobia.
“I’m worried about the hate that is all of a sudden out in the open,” she said. Ali said the rhetoric she’s heard from the Trump campaign and some of his supporters has her alarmed and she’s scared for the country’s future. She said the election is, for her, a “traumatic” reminder of the country she left behind and what she hoped America never would be. Her concerns about which direction the U.S. would head under a Trump were shared by many of the residents who participated in Thursday night’s demonstration.
Attendees chanted “Love Trumps Hate” as they marched in a several block radius around Buzz Cafe on South Lombard Avenue while many held real and faux candles. The group that gathered was predominantly white, and participants ranged in age from infants to senior citizens.
The peaceful event was organized by Oak Park residents Nell McNamara and Emma Arnold and was intended as a political demonstration and a show of solidarity against “Trump’s bigotry, xenophobia, Islamophobia and misogyny,” said McNamara, 35.
At the end of the march, McNamara’s husband, Cameron McLaughlin, 36, hopped onto a sidewalk bench across the street from Buzz Cafe with his 2-year-old son wrapped around his abdomen.
While his son clung to him, McLaughlin assured the crowd that more action would follow Thursday night’s demonstration. He said a Facebook group would be created and more demonstrations would be planned.
“As a white man born in America, able-bodied, straight, I feel afraid for what has happened this week, and I can’t imagine how the rest of you feel,” he told the crowd.
Like so many of the marchers gathered, Oak Park residents Pam Steigman, 47, and Ardith Zucker, 47, said Donald Trump’s win shocked them.
“From the beginning, we never really took him seriously, ” Steigman said.
Trump’s election, however, “affects our family a lot,” said Zucker. As same-sex partners and as Jews with a 2-year-old African American daughter, who they brought with them to the march, the couple said they’re afraid for what a Donald Trump presidency will mean for their family.
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“The fact that so many women voted for him — that fact is incomprehensible,” Steigman said. A decade-old recording of the president-elect using vulgar language to describe how he sexually assaulted women surfaced about a month before voters went to the polls. Trump apologized for the remarks.
Looking ahead, Zucker said her top priority will be to “protect our family.”
Sixteen-year-old Oak Park River Forest High School student Henry Wolff, who also attended Thursday’s march, said he’s worried about the “potential for social regression under Trump and (Vice President-elect) Mike Pence.”
Wolff said many of his peers at OPRF were similarly shocked by and concerned about Trump’s victory. He said most of the high school students he’s talked to have expressed a great deal of sadness, surprise and some have cried over the outcome of the election.
“It’s like teenage emotions times 100,” Wolff said.
Simone Boutet, 52, who is running for Oak Park village trustee this spring, also took to the sidewalk bench to address the crowd. She urged those in attendance to do more than just participate in a march; she encouraged community members to donate to local nonprofit organizations, to causes they support, to work the polls and called upon artists to continue creating.
“Keep yourselves involved in democracy,” she said.
Lee V. Gaines is a freelance reporter for Pioneer Press.