Words have power.
Through words, “We have the power to change how someone understands and sees themselves. That’s a huge power,” Aisha El-Amin told the audience at a Homewood-Flossmoor League of Women Voters program March 19 at the Flossmoor village hall.
The program marked Women’s History Month. El-Amin outlined her life journey and how people’s words helped and impacted the way she saw herself.
In her presentation, “The Transformative Power of Words,” El-Amin, the executive associate vice provost for student success and belonging at the University of Illinois at Chicago, said she learned the power of words firsthand.
El-Amin spoke about her time in the military, which was a result of her becoming homeless as a teen while attending Chicago Vocational Career Academy (CVS).
After her boyfriend had a run-in with the law, they moved to Omaha, Nebraska, where she worked at Blockbuster and took the leap when she saw an Army recruitment station.
“I went to CVS because I was never slated to go to college,” El-Amin said. “I was told that ‘College is not really your thing. Let’s get you set up so that you can work and earn a good living.’”
After hearing it so many times from her teachers growing up, El-Amin said she started to believe it.
While in the military, El-Amin was motivated to move up the ranks to have more control over her decisions. She learned taking classes would help, she said.
El-Amin decided to take a class on her military base through the University of Maryland, and to her surprise she did very well.
Motivated to take more, she continued engaging in the classes on her base until an experience in her third class changed her perspective.
Her professor had an emergency and asked El-Amin to finish the explanation on the topic they were teaching and found she was good at helping her fellow students.
“I said, ‘Why did you ask me to do that?’ and (the professor) said, ‘Because you’re brilliant,’” El-Amin said. “‘Because you’re brilliant,’ I had never heard those words before.”
El-Amin said when her professor relied on and spoke words of encouragement to her, she took them with her outside of class and carried them with her.
“Those are the words that have power,” El-Amin said.
Through her job at UIC, El-Amin oversees 12 units, including the African American, Native American, and Asian American academic programs, the TRIO program, and the Amry ROTC program.
She said the words she uses to describe students and their skills matter. They’re the same words that led her to leave the military and continue her educational pursuits.
“That connectivity of those words that were spoken to me led me to be the first in my family to have graduated,” El-Amin said. “But what we know is that we’re interconnected. So, while I was the first, I was not the last.”
El-Amin said not only can words transform people, but they can also have a generational impact, using her experience with her husband, three daughters, and her nephews as examples of people in her life currently still pursuing their education.
“We are locked into what people are telling us,” El-Amin said. “So, what are you telling yourself and what are you telling those around you to affirm that and situate it in the spaces that we deserve to be in?”
She spoke on today’s advertisements, commercials, and how much companies will spend to get their word out.
“If they’re paying millions of dollars for your ear to advertise something to you, then we should realize what that power is,” El-Amin said. “We should use that power to uplift ourselves and affirm ourselves.”
El-Amin spoke on how these words have impacted the students she works with, especially with the Trump administration’s rollback on DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion). She wants to make sure her students maintain their individuality in a safe space. That’s important, she said.
“We have students that are not coming to school. Why? Because they’re undocumented,” El-Amin said. “They’re undocumented and they don’t know what’s going to happen.”
The near elimination of the Department of Education has students concerned about their scholarships and funding for the next school year, she said.
She wonders what these federal changes are going to mean for “our legacies and our ancestors,” El-Amin said. “Where will our children be and what will they say about what happened now?”