Talking to Johari Osayi Idusuyi, the Woman Who Chose Citizen Over Trump

At Jezebel's The Slot, a conversation with the woman behind "the head flip heard ‘round the nation"--she who trumped Trump, showing off Claudia Rankine's searing Citizen at a Springfield, IL, rally last week, less interested in what the Republican presidential candidate had to say than the best-selling book of poems about racial injustice--here's twenty-three year-old Johari Osayi Idusuyi.

How did you end up right behind Trump?

Basically, ask and you shall receive. I asked if anyone was sitting there and I didn’t know it was the VIP section. I just asked one of the volunteers and she said, “No, it’s VIP.” Then a gentleman approached us after I left the the original volunteer and he said, “Would you like to sit in VIP?” and I said, “OK.” I mean, why not? I think we were chosen for obvious reasons. We are minorities and there weren’t a lot of minorities there. He also instructed us to sit in the middle, so we kind of already knew what this was.

Why did you decide to start reading Claudia Rankine’s Citizen in the middle of the rally?

Like I said, we went with an open mind and then it all started. There were some “Dump Trump” protesters. The way the supporters treated the protestors was really unbelievable and that’s what made me mad. All four of us as a collective group, our energy shifted. The way Donald Trump said, “Get them out of here”—when you say those words, that activates your supporters to be able to be the same way. Then there was a man who snatched a lady’s Obama hat. She was one of the protesters and was leaving and her hair just went with the hat. Then he threw it into crowd and everybody cheered. I thought, “That’s bullying. That’s aggressive.” I don’t think Trump handled it with grace. I thought, “Oh, you’re really not empathetic at all.” That’s when the shift happened.

You saw his reaction and you decided to react?

Exactly. And there was also another incident. There was one protester left and the crowd started pointing at her and booing. First of all, she’s a young woman. She doesn’t have her friends anymore. If she’s the only one left, just let her be. There was just a lot of bullying going on and I didn’t like that. And some people were cheering. To hear 10,000 people cheer for something so disrespectful is what made me so mad. And that’s when I was like, I am now genuinely not interested in your speech. I wanted to leave, but I came, I’m in the middle, I’m on camera, so I might as well read because I don’t have anything else to do. I’m not going to waste my time listening to somebody who I can’t respect anymore, so I started to read.

Was it just a coincidence that you had Citizen on you?

I was just reading the book at the time...

Discover more about writer and student Idusuyi here.