On September 29th, Students Allied for Freedom and Equality (SAFE) erected a 36-foot-long wall made of foam boards on the Diag. Covered with murals and slogans, the makeshift wall symbolized the concrete barriers that confine the West Bank and Gaza’s five million Palestinians. Hundreds of students gathered around the wall, as members of SAFE relayed the stories of Palestinians killed or abused by Israeli occupation forces and settlers. The demonstration, which was first held in 2003, serves to express solidarity with Palestinians living under occupation and to demand the University of Michigan to divest from companies operating in occupied Palestinian territories.

When asked why SAFE chooses to spread awareness through a makeshift wall, a member of the organization who requested anonymity due to Zionists’ blacklisting of Palestinian activists said that “we build mock walls to bring attention to the illegal barricades and inhumane living conditions endured by Palestinians living under apartheid… We find it necessary to protest through live simulations that resensitize our community to the everyday experiences of those facing occupation.” 

Continuing on from the previous question, the anonymous student expressed that “the combination of resistance art and resistance speech constructed within the mock wall draws attention to the (Palestinian) cause and amplifies (SAFE’s) demands to the University to discontinue its compliance and immoral contributions to the settler-colonial state and to ultimately establish a free Palestine.”

In response to SAFE’s demonstration demanding the University to end its complicity in apartheid—as the Zionist system has been deemed by notable organizations such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch—a group of students arrived at the Diag with Israeli flags. Antagonizing the demonstration’s participants, these students shouted at speakers and sang the Israeli national anthem. Later, some claimed that they felt “threatened” by SAFE’s messaging and accused the organization of inciting division because of its refusal to engage in dialogue with them. Claiming to feel threatened and discriminated against is a common tactic Zionists use to undermine Palestinian resistance and activism, especially at universities where administrators align with the pro-Israel lobby. 

The influence of the pro-Israel lobby has resulted in Palestinian students and allies facing ostracism and vilification for their activism across university campuses, including at the University of Michigan. These student are often dismissed, as they are deliberately mischaracterized as anti-Semites and terrorist sympathizers to prevent university administrators from addressing their demands. This is the main reason why SAFE and other organizations refuse to engage in dialogue with Zionists, as doing so has historically resulted in the defamation and blacklisting of Palestinian student activists and allies.

Clear examples of the targeting of Palestinian students and allies at the University include the intimidation and harassment of Central Student Government (CSG) members last year. Amid the May 2021 crisis in which Israeli airstrikes killed 261 Palestinians and displaced over 72,000, CSG released a statement recognizing the violence and censorship Palestinians have faced. Members who signed onto the letter were met with threatening emails and posts, the content of which ranged from calling for their removal to celebrating the death of Palestinians in Gaza. Along with pushing for divestment, SAFE called on the University to condemn and combat anti-Palestinian sentiments and targetting on campus. Yet, even these demands went ignored by the U-M administrators, as they neither released statements nor took action against anti-Palestinian discrimination.

In the past, Zionist organizations have argued that SAFE’s activism and calls for divestment are divisive, asserting that they pit two communities on campus against each other. However, this argument fails to consider the dynamic at hand, as well as the severity of the Palestinian struggle. The reality is that Zionist organizations are the ones politicizing identities by claiming that divestment sidelines Jewish students. Opposing apartheid is not a question of valuing one community over another — it is a question of the University’s commitment to opposing the restriction of people’s freedom, along with ensuring the safety and inclusion of its students, including Palestinians.

SAFE’s demands for divestment are not the only time U-M administrators have been pressured to denounce oppressive systems and acts. In 1988, after years of protests by anti-apartheid activists, the Board of Regents fully divested from South Africa, removing a total of $50 million of holdings from the entity. More recently, the University was swift to rightfully condemn Russia’s attack on Ukraine, in addition to aiding in investigating war crimes in the country. 

In contrast, U-M presidents, the Board of Regents and other administrators have never taken a stance on condemning the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians that has continued relentlessly for the past 75 years. It took 15 years of protesting by SAFE to pressure the CSG to simply pass a resolution calling for the University to investigate affiliated companies accused of committing human rights abuses against Palestinians. This stark contrast exhibits the University’s lack of concern for its Palestinian students, as well as for Palestinian life and liberation. Instead, the public image of an apartheid state receives precedency.

Under University President Santa J. Ono, the trend of ostracizing Palestinian student activists and allies has continued thus far. While Ono met with other student groups, he has neglected meeting with SAFE. The organization has heard no response after it released a letter to him and the Board of Regents in August 2022, calling on them to make SAFE’s demand for divestment a priority. This is of no surprise, considering that Ono, while serving as president of the University of British Columbia, refused to divest from nine companies operating in occupied Palestinian territories in the West Bank. His actions also follow a trip sponsored by a pro-Israel lobby to illegal settlements in the occupied West Bank and Golan Heights in 2014, midway through his tenure as University of Cincinnati President.

As the University of Michigan claims to be committed to equity and inclusion, Palestinian students appear to be excluded from this mission. Instead, it chooses to disregard its Palestinian students, while contributing to their group’s oppression. For a more inclusive and equitable campus to exist for Palestinian students, the University must put an end to its cowardice, starting with addressing the long-neglected demands of SAFE and dozens of allied student organizations. Regrettably, there seem to be no signs of the University currently taking action towards ending its contributions to apartheid and the silencing of Palestinian students.

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In recent weeks, Iranians have taken to the streets in large numbers to protest the death of Jina (Mahsa) Amini, a Kurdish-Iranian woman who died at the hands of Iran’s morality police. Protestors are honoring the lives lost to state brutality forces and challenging socio-political systems that enable the violent enforcement of laws that no longer serve the interests of Iranian citizens. Iranian police forces have responded violently to Iranian women on the front line of protests who are chanting: “Zan. Zindigi. Azadi” — the Farsi version of a Kurdish motto that translates to “Women, Life, Freedom.” For the last month, their protests have been met with physical brutality, mass imprisonment and unjust surveillance that suppress their revolutionary efforts. Despite the ever-present threat of imprisonment and violence at the hands of the state, Iranians are continuing to protest. Workers are striking, children aren’t showing up for school and women across the nation are relentlessly chanting “Zan. Zindigi. Azadi” — knowing that those may be the last words they ever utter. 

Zan. Zindigi. Azadi.

Iranian women have been denied these seemingly simple demands for life and freedom for nearly a century. The desire to live freely and uphold bodily autonomy has persisted across generations of Iranian women who have lived under various socio-political systems that enforce violent control on their citizens. In the past 70 years, Iranians have been controlled by several regimes that have utilized state-sanctioned violence to monopolize every aspect of their citizens’ lives. Through American intervention efforts, the reign of the Pahlavi dynasty and the current rule of the Islamic Republic, a century of Iranians have experienced regime after regime of state brutality promising to somehow correct the state brutality that preceded it.

The American role in the current state of Iranian affairs dates back to 1953, when a CIA coup overthrew Iran’s democratically elected leader, Mohammed Mosaddegh. This coup was part of an American effort to reinstate the monarchy in Iran; by seating Shah Reza Pahlavi on the throne, Iranians fell under the rule of a U.S.-backed royal dictatorship. Under the influence of American puppeteers, the Pahlavis measured success through a western lens, putting great emphasis on urbanizing the nation. Urbanization efforts were hailed as signs of progress and economic recovery, but the failures of these efforts were transparent. Under the Shah, a large portion of Iranians living in rural areas lacked access to education and health care. This was a consequence of the Shah’s repression of rural lifestyles that accompanied his censure of many traditional aspects of Iranian culture. In an effort to suppress opposition to modernization efforts, traditional symbols of Islam were criminalized — particularly hijab. Kashfe Hijab was the movement to ban women in Iran from being veiled, and it encompassed the broader efforts of the Shah to control women under the guise of liberating them. It is clear that Iranian women have long been familiar with the administration of oppressive forces dictating their right to choose. 

After a long period of civil unrest under the Pahlavi dynasty, Iranians began to revolt. Critics of the Pahlavi regime — including veiled women, inhabitants of rural Iran, Shiite Iranians and Marxist groups like Iran’s Tudeh Party — sought to conquer the oppressive rule of the Pahlavi dynasty, and its unwavering allegiance to the West. Unsurprisingly, protestors were met with brutal forces that imprisoned revolutionaries, restricted efforts for liberation and committed violence against civilians — all repressive tactics that have been maintained by the current regime. 

Despite efforts to suppress opposition, insurgence under the Shah continued to increase. This was made possible by the mass mobilization of Shiite Iranians, inspired by the work of Ayatollah Khomeini. Khomeini, who had been exiled by the Pahlavis, became the catalyst for the Islamic revolution upon his return to the country in 1979. After the Shah was overthrown, he became the supreme leader of the newly founded Islamic Republic. 

Khomeini’s victory restored hope for many Iranians — who viewed the Islamic revolution as a means for liberation — while prompting many others to flee the country. Alas, it wasn’t long before the promises made to the 1979 revolutionaries were broken. The Shah’s implementation of state brutality was quickly reconstructed to serve the Islamic Republic’s vision for the homogenization of Iran. In either direction of homogenization, women have been disproportionately scrutinized and subjected to violent law enforcement. 

The fall of the Pahlavi Dynasty only momentarily silenced cries for liberation. Iranians quickly became governed by authoritarian forces under a new guise. In many ways, the Islamic Republic established a socio-political system that would mimic the Shah’s efforts to homogenize the nation, while directly opposing the Shah’s vision for homogenization. This is epitomized by the republic’s hijab mandate, which prompted people to assemble in protest, chanting the slogan: “In the dawn of freedom there is an absence of freedom.” These women, advocating for the right to choose, were echoing the same cries of veiled women living under the Pahlavi dynasty’s 1936 Kashfe Hijab mandate. The newly formed republic began to target the autonomy of Iranian women in a new, but familiar, way. 

Unsurprisingly, Iranians currently protesting the death of Jina Amini are being met with the same violent forces that killed her. Protestors are being subjected to heavy surveillance, police violence and unfair imprisonment. Current and past political protestors are being held in Evin Prison, which was founded toward the end of the Pahlavi era and maintained under the Islamic Republic. As the goals of each government seemingly changed, Evin Prison serves as a tangible symbol for the longstanding and remaining state brutality and tyrannical justice system that has been present since the Pahlavi era. 

The Shah set the precedent for using Evin Prison to unjustly imprison political prisoners and subject them to torturous, inhumane living conditions. Ironically, Evin Prison became occupied by those who were involved with the Pahlavi regime after 1979, but the prison population soon broadened to include anyone opposing the Islamic Republic. 

Recent protests against the morality police have resulted in mass imprisonment, making Evin Prison even more crowded than it already was. With the capacity for imprisonment being exceeded, the needs and safety of prisoners are being further neglected, and prison guards are becoming strangers to accountability. On Oct. 15, fires broke out at Evin Prison, and prisoners were left helpless in overfilled cells with fumes circulating around them. Authorities reported eight prisoners dead, and 61 injured. The protestors storming the area to demand help for their loved ones were met with no sympathy from the government. And the perpetrators of the state brutality that has enabled prisoners to be subjected to these conditions were met with no accountability. 

This incident at Evin Prison exemplifies how severely isolated Iranians are. The past century of political unrest in Iran has proven that state brutality cannot conquer itself in new forms. In order to defeat this cycle, power has to be returned to the people, which cannot happen as long as the government is restricting people’s expression.

In order to start developing a holistic response to the cries for life and freedom, we must consider the role that United States sanctions have played in escalating these cries and enabling the government to exercise absolute monopoly over its citizens. For decades, economic inflation — due to sanctions — has made it difficult for people to access food, water, shelter and health care. In a vicious cycle of sorts, these conditions have furthered how severely isolated Iranians are from the world, and how susceptible they are to authoritarian control. A long-term solution to these issues remains unclear, but lessons from history should teach us what hasn’t worked, and what isn’t in the interest of the Iranian people — particularly sanctions and military intervention. We must recognize that the consequences of actions that are currently being advocated for have been seen, and have not brought about any semblance of liberation.

Women essentially serve as a litmus test of sorts for Iranian liberation. As regimes have come and gone, the rights given to women have been molded to fit various narratives of homogenization, be it that women are veiled or unveiled. The past century of injustice and violent law enforcement in Iran has made one thing abundantly clear: we cannot envision a free Iran without autonomy for its women. 

MiC Columnist Maryam Shafie-Khorassani can be reached at mshafie@umich.edu.

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On Tuesday night, posters reading “Care about Black students?” were thrown onto the concrete throughout the University of Michigan’s Central Campus. Mere hours after an emotionally powerful and unifying gathering of Black U-M students in support of radically challenging the University’s policies and handling of the Black experience, the Black student body is reminded of the University’s true disposition: one of disregard, disrespect and outright rejection. That an anonymous member of the community felt it an appropriate representation of the campus to vandalize protest material suggests a campus-wide tacit approval of systemic silencing.

On Nov. 1, the Black Student Union at the University of Michigan published their list of urgent demands for the University of Michigan President and Board of Regents. Titled “More Than Four,” the document outlines the organization’s current political platform, which is focused on unilaterally improving the status of Black students at the University. The BSU also organized a public address at which the demands were read to the student body on the steps of the Hatcher Graduate Library. The posting of the platform on social media was met with a positive response, and the address drew a crowd of BSU members and allies alike.

“More Than Four” details a four-point platform tasking the University and its administration with actionable items to combat issues faced by the Black student body. The platform identifies the following issues for the University to address:

1. Increasing Black Student Enrollment

2. Explicitly Combating Anti-Blackness

3. Rectifying the structural flaws of DEI that systemically neglect Black students

4. The University’s Social Responsibility to Invest in the Public Good Through K-12

Education

The BSU cites statistics from University studies in order to make their case, such as the stagnation of Black enrollment around 4.2% for the last decade (the administration having reneged on their half-century-old promise of 10% enrollment), and that Black students reported having the worst campus experience among all social identities in 2017.

“For me, (the platform) means increasing equity and advancing social causes. Overall what we’re seeking is greater equity, not only within the walls of this institution but outside (as well),” Public Policy senior and BSU Speaker Kayla Tate (she/her) said. “The fourth tenet addresses that, and aims to cultivate a broader talent pool of competitive applicants who can attend this University.” 

Expanding upon that, LSA senior and BSU Programming co-chair Russell McIntosh (he/him) stated that the platform represents “an expectation of the University to confront its complicity in certain systems that have made (education) inequitable for Black students.” 

The address was prefaced by an hour of community discussion at the Trotter Multicultural Center, where members of the BSU executive board briefed students in attendance of the platform and then held an open dialogue. Students mentioned grievances that resonated with many in the room: the inadequacy of pre-college programs (Wolverine Pathways, for example) in terms of funding and securing enrollment, the lack of recruitment of diverse students or initiatives that increase the University’s exposure to underserved communities and an erasure of Black culture and activism on campus, to name a few. Students also reflected that Ann Arbor as a whole similarly does not reflect the state of Michigan’s racial demographics, further ostracizing Black students and creating additional barriers for them to find community: whereas the state population is 14.1% Black, Ann Arbor is half of that at 7%. The BSU e-board stressed that, while the platform does provide some general recommendations for improving the campus climate, the onus of improvement lies squarely on the University and that it shoulders the responsibility of living up to its own expectations and policies.

This is far from the first instance of the University being critiqued on its DEI programs and initiatives. After nearly two decades of Supreme Court challenges and a reversal of Michigan’s affirmative action policies, the University continues to struggle in cultivating a diverse campus through race-blind efforts alone. Citing difficulty in increasing the Black student population through metrics such as socioeconomic status, Michigan continues to hide behind the banning of affirmative action as the primary reason for a decrease in minority enrollment. Students, faculty and scholars alike however have resisted defenses of the University’s failed attempts to diversify its student body and subsequently support the students who do land here. In his book “Undermining Racial Justice: How One University Embraced Inclusion and Inequality,” Dr. Matthew Johnson discusses the University’s historic struggle with affirmative action and how it acted inadequately in resulting diversity initiatives. In the introduction, he offers this insight:

“In the eyes of (B)lack students, though, U-M has never represented a model of racial inclusion. Black students’ share of the student body has never matched (B)lacks’ share of the state or national population, and the majority of (B)lack students have never reported satisfaction with the university’s racial climate. Nevertheless, (B)lack students’ critiques never stopped U-M leaders from claiming that racial inclusion was one of the University’s core values … I argue that institutional leaders incorporated (B)lack student dissent selectively into the University of Michigan’s policies, practices, and values, while preventing activism from disrupting the institutional priorities that campus leaders deemed more important than racial justice…University leaders [also] wanted to preserve their goal of creating a model multiracial community on campus … the way administrators tried to engineer this multiracial community led to social alienation and high attrition rates for (B)lack students.”

I strongly encourage the reader to read the original text, but this excerpt captures in full the sentiment Johnson espouses in “Undermining Racial Justice.” This year’s BSU, in parallel with student activists of the past 50 years, seeks to address this fundamental “co-optation” (as Johnson calls it) of Black voices in modern DEI initiatives that fail to tangibly realize any of the desired outcomes of said initiatives. Many Black students would corroborate this perspective; much of the reason why I decided to transfer to Michigan was its advertised commitment to DEI through buzzwords, new administrative positions like the overstaffed Office of Equity, Diversity and Inclusion and promises of inclusive campus spaces. As an outsider, the University perfectly crafted the image of the model DEI school that Johnson references, fooling me into blindly believing that my perspectives, identity and ideas would be valued here. This elaborate performance, orchestrated by a collaboration of media presence, legacy and manufactured concern for social justice is arguably one of the University’s strongest selling points to conscientious students of privilege; it allows the University to continue pushing false narratives of the campus climate while actively suppressing both potential Black enrollment and dissent among Black students who are already enrolled.

Let me be exceptionally clear in echoing the BSU, campus activists over the past decades and Johnson in this critique of this institution: the University of Michigan is intentionally complicit in this suppression of Black student enrollment and success. The University — steered by those responsible for its administration — claims to offer a safe and supportive campus while simultaneously refusing to acknowledge the concerns students have publicly voiced for over half a century. The University’s standard excuse of being bound by anti-affirmative action rulings is in no way a proper justification for the proliferation of policy decisions that continue to negatively impact the status of Black students. There will never be enough DEI “open discussions,” feedback forms or well-paid administrative positions that can right the wrongs of the University as an institution. Tangible, measurable change in the form of implementing actionable policy rooted in input by Black students is the only way that the University may begin to rectify the outright lies and broken promises made to the campus community over the last 50 years.

MiC Columnist Cedric McCoy can be reached at cedmccoy@umich.edu.

The post <strong>In Solidarity with the Black Student Union: “More Than Four” and the fight for Equity</strong> appeared first on The Michigan Daily.

In 1983, poet and civil rights activist Audre Lorde wrote, “Within the lesbian community I am Black, and within the Black community I am a lesbian … There is no hierarchy of oppression. I cannot afford the luxury of fighting one form of oppression only. I cannot afford to believe that freedom from intolerance is the right of only one particular group.”

Lorde’s commentary reveals an oft-ignored truth in the LGBTQ+ community: being a Queer person of Color comes with the inability to be just Queer or just a person of Color and with the responsibility to always be a person of Color within Queer spaces and vice versa. Neither aspect of personhood is allowed the ample space to develop on its own, within its own terms. Queer people of Color, particularly those who have additional marginalized identities (whether that be socioeconomic status, ability, etc.), experience inferior treatment from multiple angles as well as face unique forms of marginalization at the intersection of their identities. These overlapping societal pressures and expectations undermine autonomy and the path to self-discovery. Though nothing is in a vacuum and everything is subjected to outside influences, it seems as though the self-development of Queer people of Color is particularly impacted by the intersecting aspects of their identity leading to a stunted or — at the very least — inorganic path to personhood.

Queerness comes with a set of extremely established traditions, at least in the eyes of western society. Arguably the most universally well-known tradition is the practice of “coming out.” Put plainly, coming out is when someone makes the decision to explicitly share their Queer identity. Framed as an inevitable rite of passage, coming out is depicted as the pinnacle of Queer self-acceptance. To “stay in the closet” signals some kind of oppression, due to a lack of safety, community or just general discomfort. Coming out is not framed as something you can do, but something you will do the second you feel safe and comfortable enough. There are two states of Queer being: “out” and “in the closet.” This dichotomy is flawed in its own right. There are many degrees of being “out,” whether that’s being ‘out’ to certain people in specific environments or simply living a discreet life, particularly for those who naturally prefer privacy over vocality. There are nuances when it comes to living “outside the closet,” but for the sake of this piece the focus will be on this oversimplified (and sensationalized) black-and-white dichotomy.

The public importance placed upon coming out is rooted in the fact that, historically, visibility was crucial in the struggle for equal rights and recognition. Refinery29’s Sadhbh O’Sullivan writes, “In order to fight for liberation, gay people would own their identity with pride by publicly owning their gay identity. The more gay people came out, so the thinking went, the more normalized gayness would become.” As societal attitudes towards non-heteronormativity have progressed, the concept of coming out has unfortunately not kept pace. Within current socio-cultural contexts, the perceived necessity of coming out remains rooted in western heteronormativity. For one, it rests on the assumption that everyone is cisgender and heterosexual unless they say otherwise. No one is ever expected to come out as straight. As a practice, the pressured anticipation of an inevitable “coming out” announcement removes agency from the actual person committing the act of coming out and places all the power in the expectant hands of society. It isn’t a question of if someone will decide to come out but when they will, even in cases in which coming out holds no benefits for them. Additionally, coming out creates a set of implications that further limit a formerly “closeted” person’s ability to influence how they’re perceived by others:

1. That the person coming out was previously lying about their identity.
2. That outside approval and/or acknowledgment is needed to validate their identity.
3. That, before choosing to disclose their identity to others, they were deliberately hiding their “true selves.”

Musa Shadeedi sums up how the phenomenon of the presumed “coming out” is rooted in western society succinctly when he wonders “if the LGBTQI community in Iraq knows the meaning of the term ‘closet’ in the first place.” In societies with different values, perhaps where privacy is held over visibility or other deviations from the West, the “closet” does not exist because coming out is not an inevitable event. This isn’t to say that the general idea behind “coming out,” i.e., divulging information regarding one’s sexuality and/or gender, is a western concept, but rather the culture and context surrounding it is. “Coming out” versus being “in the closet” is a false dichotomy pushed as reality for everyone, especially those who participate in cultures that don’t align with the thought behind the action. 

When speaking to a Queer immigrant, I found that they regarded the entire idea of “coming out” and being in “the closet” as ridiculous. For one, they thought coming out was pointless because it isn’t a one-and-done thing. “You don’t just make one big announcement and suddenly have the whole world be aware you’re a homosexual,” they said. The pressure surrounding something that is, in reality, a constant process is almost counterproductive when considering the fact that there will always be new friends, coworkers and acquaintances to come out to. In the words of Asiel Adan Sanchez, “Mainstream narratives of coming out imply a white subjectivity, one that forgets the influence of culture, family and heritage. For many Queer people of colour, coming out is a much more nuanced process than a single moment of verbal disclosure.” The current notion of coming out is simply too flat, lacking the nuance required to encompass the wide array of people it applies to. An extremely black-and-white attitude is attached to it, one that doesn’t allow for the grays (or beiges, browns, tans) in between. To put it plainly, coming-out culture is a very white American thing. 

To my interviewee, the practice of having to reveal their identity framed their sexuality and gender as something “more, like, if I have to disclose it, it must be the biggest part of me, like I can’t just exist and be gay. I have to exist gayly.” This same perspective came up even when interviewing Queer Americans who prefer private lifestyles. Many of the people I interviewed, including both white people and people of Color, believed that a Queer identity is like a food allergy — that, while important, it shouldn’t be regarded as something that must be disclosed to those who really have nothing to do with it. According to Rensselaer Polytechnic humanities professor Jen Bacon, we exist “within a cultural context that emphatically marginalizes everything ‘Queer.’” The implications surrounding coming-out culture suggest that Queer identity is considered an alien characteristic by the general public.

An added amount of pressure is felt by those who choose between their family and their Queer identity. After making the momentous decision to leave their ethnic, racial, religious or cultural communities to live openly, they have to make it “worth it,” to “be Queer” in every way imaginable and more, and fit into their new community or else risk having to lose their family and community for nothing. Sanchez expounds that for many who fall outside of the white American standard, “when the closet is portrayed as a place of self-hatred, pride becomes an insidious reminder that, in order to be part of the Queer community, you have to be visible, out, and open. We are so often made to choose between our self and our safety.” Coming out is a sacrifice and sacrifices have to be worth it.

For many Queer people of Color — especially those who are first- or second-generation Americans — there is a dissonance that exists between their attitude towards coming out compared to that of the society they inhabit. Many are also met with the pressure to come out despite having family dynamics that lack the space to do so. This, along with the aforementioned dissonance, adds on yet another confusing layer to the process of working through their sexuality and/or gender identity. This confusion is exacerbated for many young people of Color who lack access to Queer communities of their own. With only limited western (and often very white) portrayals of the Queer experience available in media, it’s hard to realize other experiences are possible. In fact, it is hard to realize they even exist when media and societal portrayals are so overwhelmingly white. All of this feeds into a system that exacerbates the issue of lacking diverse portrayals. Queer people of Color who turn to media portrayals for direction on navigating their LGBTQ+ identity are met with a sea of homogeneity. Those lacking alternative guidance see one uniform experience and try to model it, and miss out on the opportunity to craft an experience of their own to add to society’s repertoire of Queer narratives. Along with qualitative evidence, research has provided quantitative proof of how the lack of diverse Queer portrayals in media hinder the self-discovery journey, with quantified results referenced in Sanchez’s article showing how white gay men observably benefit from verbally coming out while others do not. Stephen DiDomenico, a professor at West Chester University, interviewed a panel of young Queer people and found that they felt significant pressure to conform to white conventional narratives. From the very beginning of their Queer experience, Queer people of Color lack access to relevant portrayals of lives they could be living, resulting in them not having the mental and emotional space to properly make sense of their identity, let alone disclose it.

Along with the framing of coming out, another distinguishing marker of Queer communities is “looking” or “sounding” “gay.” Queerness comes with a history of flamboyance, exaggerated “campy” behavior and clothing. People who claim to have “gaydar” rely on distinct visual, audible and kinesthetic markers to determine whether or not someone is a part of the LGBTQ+ community. While many of these markers were created and established by people of Color (with a particularly sizeable contribution made by Black trans women), a significant amount of them have been taken out of their context, appropriated and morphed to fit into a white mold (some timely examples being the appropriation of vogueing and Black Queer vernacular). These markers are, of course, still immediately recognizable within Queer communities of Color. However, in the eyes of the general public, “gay culture” is ultimately just white gay culture being applied to the entire Queer community. According to Buzzfeed, naming your dog “Finn” is gay. Like. Okay?

The experiences of many people of Color echo that of TikTok user Ivy in that nonwhite people are often automatically presumed straight. Even Queer people of Color living openly and outwardly expressing their Queerness every day aren’t given the privilege of visibility because the only recognizable Queer aesthetic is one that comes with the prerequisite of needing to be able to pass the paper bag test. An experience shared by many was echoed in a roundtable on Queer visbility: “I don’t know that white folks know what Queerness looks like in and for people of color. Because they’re not looking for us to begin with.” They’re straight until proven otherwise.

Interestingly enough, TikTok provides compelling first-hand accounts of how Queer culture is framed around the structures of western society and whiteness specifically. A video made by TikTok user Caden @slurpyprincess perfectly captures how white gay culture takes the place of the “Queer experience” umbrella. Captioned “wish y’all would put yt (white) before Queer when y’all make vids like this,” Caden dueted another tiktok made by a white Queer person implying all Queer young adults experienced a fascination with a certain song. This is just one example of many of how white Queer culture is generalized to apply to the entire community. This experience was echoed in my interviews, with Queer people of Color recounting feeling pressure to portray themselves within the boundaries of white gay culture. Many of them recounted adopting and exaggerating stereotypically “gay” characteristics all for the sake of being accepted within their respective Queer communities. For my white interviewees, coming out broke the barriers that clouded their visibility. While they also had their own individual struggles and challenges, they felt life before and after coming out was observably improved, contrasting the narratives of racially marginalized people. They said they were able to live openly and be recognized for who they are without needing to overcompensate and “act more gay.” Even after publicly coming out, Queer people of Color are met with a more intense challenge of proving their Queerness than their white counterparts because they often don’t adhere to societal markers of “Queerness” that are formed around white gay culture.

The Queer identity of people of Color is sometimes treated as something conditional, especially when political and international events are considered. “Pinkwashing,” a term describing how Queer-related issues can be weaponized to shift the conversation surrounding organizations or countries, contributes to this. This issue was brought up with a Palestinian interviewee, who felt their Queerness was erased by people advocating for Zionism and the occupation of Palestine by attempting to villainize Palestine. Said villainization efforts often included heavy implications that Queer people are not being harmed by the Israeli occupation and, instead, are being harmed solely by Palestine. The interviewee felt like “Schrodinger’s Queer,” as if they were only gay when it benefitted a political argument. 

Along with external factors affecting their access to self-exploration, self-expression and self-esteem in general, people of Color also deal with the psychological challenges of existing within a time where the third-person voyeur phenomenon is having a more marked effect on the population than ever. People of Color already experience higher levels of scrutiny because their marginalized identities come with the responsibility of having to represent their ethnic communities within spaces where they have little representation. Though many can find non-white-majority spaces with less scrutiny, most people of Color living in western society find themselves in white environments in some capacity or another. 

While Queer online communities can be an invaluable part of the Queer of Color experience, they don’t come without downsides. Psychologist Sophie Wallace-Hadrill claims that the rise of social media heightens the feeling of being watched, leading to negative self-talk and even self-doubt, especially for younger demographics, as “self-conscious emotions are linked to inferences about how others may perceive and evaluate the self.” Existing becomes a constant performance with no room for error. While the rising rates of social voyeurism apply to everyone, they are just one of many challenges Queer people of Color face in their path to simply live their lives, especially compounding on to pre-existing feelings of being overly scrutinized in their daily lives.

For people who inhabit marginalized intersectional identities, every step of the Queer journey comes with a roadblock. Only upon decentering white western culture can Queer people of Color enter a space where they have the ability to fully explore their identity and finally be able to exist without having to navigate challenges that should not be synonymous with the Queer of Color experience. Then, finally, they will be able to both live their truth and rest in it, too.

MiC Columnist Huda Shulaiba can be reached at hudashu@umich.edu.

The post Coloring outside the lines appeared first on The Michigan Daily.

CW: Racism, Transphobia

Disclaimer: The author of this piece was a representative on CSG’s 11th Assembly. They were not affiliated with The Daily while holding that role and they no longer have an affiliation with CSG since joining The Daily.

Blind Spots 

“Currently in progress! Protest march against the Hinduphobic conference Dismantling Global Hindutva!” My phone chimed cheerily at the latest message in the University of Michigan Central Student Government (CSG) GroupMe. Accompanying the message was a picture of several Indian students gathered in the Diag holding handmade protest signs. “Stop Anti-Hindu Hatred,” one read. “Stop bigotry against Hindus,” read another. Suspicious of the sender’s intentions, I switched into my browser, typing “dismantling hindutva conference” into the search bar. I scrolled through the results with a sinking feeling in my stomach. As it turned out, Dismantling Global Hindutva (DGH) was an academic conference aimed at critiquing Hindutva, or Hindu nationalism, a right-wing fascist ideology held by the current ruling party in India, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). A series of articles detailed how Hindu right activists were attempting to shut down the conference, engaging in a wide array of actions from pressuring universities to withdraw their support of the conference to sending death threats to DGH organizers. The search results confirmed my initial suspicions; the students on the Diag were Hindu nationalists who were displeased that the University was endorsing a conference that would generate awareness and scrutiny of their activities. Utilizing slogans such as “U-M vilifies Hinduism,” and banking on the fact that most people were ill-informed about their ideology, the protesters were blatantly appropriating concepts of inherent criminality, typically used to deconstruct prejudices such as Islamophobia and Anti-Black racism, in an entirely cynical attempt to evoke the traumas of systematic persecution. Their rhetoric was made all the more sickening given the decades-long history of persecution against Black people and Muslims by Hindutva-inspired organizations.

And, somehow, their tactics were working! By the time I navigated back to GroupMe, my phone had chimed two more times. 

Holy crap, how could U-M sponsor such a thing?!

Very upsetting to hear U-M push this hate. I will gladly co-sponsor a resolution condemning the Department of South Asian Studies for engaging in this xenophobia.

Fuck. Two messages of support from two otherwise staunchly progressive representatives who clearly had no idea what the DGH conference, or for that matter Hindutva, was. Going into damage control mode, I quickly typed out several messages attempting to explain that there was a clear distinction between Hinduism and Hindutva — the former referring to a wide range of religious practices while the latter was an ethnonationalist project that aimed to reformulate India into a Hindu majoritarian state. As such, I tried to argue, anti-Hindutva movements — such as the DGH conference — were not inherently anti-Hindu. The Hindu nationalist representative who sent the original text matched me message for message, at one point claiming that Hindus were being subjected to the same dehumanization tactics used against Jews in Nazi Germany. He was extremely persistent and our back and forth continued for almost an hour before I gave up. Turning my phone off, I threw it across the room.

My frustration with the whole situation was only heightened by the fact that, in the days following the GroupMe exchange, there was not even the slightest concern within CSG that one of their representatives had promoted and participated in a Hindu nationalist demonstration on the Diag. Hoping to find some support for my cause outside of CSG, I turned to some of my Indian American friends to vent. I was sorely disappointed, however, when, after I had recounted the DGH argument, they did not throw their hands up in anger and enthusiastically condemn the Hindutva protesters as well as the ambivalence of CSG. Though my friends were aware of what Hindutva represented and opposed the bigotry it spread, their dissent was passive, a private opposition that manifested in ambivalence rather than action. Many second generation upper-caste Indian Americans, myself included, had family members who were involved with the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), a paramilitary Hindutva organization founded in 1925 with the stated goal of consolidating a Hindu society along the lines of European style fascism through “a military regeneration of the Hindus.” Revelations of such history can be quite jarring; I still remember my disbelief when my mother told me that my uncle had attended one of the infamous RSS training camps in his youth. One friend explained to me that, faced with such family history, they had a hard time outright condemning the Hindu right as it felt akin to marking their loved ones as hateful and bigoted. I was further disappointed to find that a small minority went to even greater lengths in order to avoid cognitive dissonance; they saw little to no problem with Hindutva ideology, spoke in support of the demonstration on the Diag and argued that any anti-Hindutva activism — the DGH conference included — was inherently Hinduphobic.

The debacle of the DGH conference took place in early September of 2021 and, thankfully, the Hindu nationalists did not organize any further. Though many of the DGH organizers continued to be harassed by Hindutva activists, the conference went on as planned and CSG did not release a resolution condemning the University for promoting it. Yet almost a year later, despite the fact that no real harm was done, these events still leave a bad taste in my mouth. I can’t shake the feeling that the Hindu nationalists could easily have achieved a lot more if they wanted to. Aside from the, let’s face it, inconsequential argument in the CSG GroupMe, there was no real public pressure on them to stop organizing.

At the University, and, to a greater extent, in the United States, the Hindu right lives in a blind spot. Young caste privileged Indian Americans with a history of family involvement with the Hindu right are loath to engage in a multi-faceted and sustained critique of the Hindutva movement. Those outside of the South Asian community remain ignorant of Hindutva and inadvertently endorse it when it presents a liberal aesthetic. With the BJP extra-judicially bulldozing Muslim neighborhoods in India, the current ignorance and ambivalence towards Hindutva is simply untenable. For the sake of cultivating an active and sustained resistance, it is high time that Indian Americans begin to examine the methods through which the Hindu right seeks to embed itself into our identities.

The Hindu Right And Your Identity Crisis

Identity crisis seems to be a centerpiece of the immigrant experience. As far back as I can remember, nobody has been quite certain about what to make of my brownness, least of all myself. Faced with the question mark of my complexity, people have assumed I am Mexican, African American, Arab and Chinese. The one thing that everyone was certain of (and eager to make sure that I was certain of it as well) was that I was definitely not American. At school, birthday parties, grocery stores and, once, a Subway in downtown Chicago, people demanded to know where I was from. If I told someone I was from metro Detroit they would sigh and huff back, “but no, I mean like, where are your parents from,” smiling contently while I begrudgingly muttered back, “my parents are Indian.” Once, in an effort to avoid the dreaded “but where are you really from?” question, I told someone my parents were American too. They blinked at me, confused, but then quickly recovered, asking with a smile, “noo, I mean, like, where are your grandparents from?” Not to be outdone, I quickly responded, “America!” Another blink, pause and an even bigger smile. “Noooo, I mean, like great-grandparents?” We continued like this for several “greats,” me forging my entire family tree while they added progressively more o’s onto their “no” until, finally, I relented, hinting that my great-great-great-great-grandfather might have been Indian, at which point they responded, “Oh cool! Dot or feather?” Needless to say, I fucking hate Christopher Columbus.  

It is within the context of identity crisis that labels begin to take on a life of their own. The ways in which one defines themself become contradictory and frustrating, and one finds themself constantly reconstructing their identity from top to bottom. No longer just seemingly mundane categorizations, labels become political statements, an expression of ideology. These expressions are hazy and ambiguous, sure, but the fact remains that identifying as Indian American carries a different connotation than, say, identifying as solely Indian, or more generally as South Asian or Asian American. It becomes tempting to think that if one can find just the right words put in the right order, just the right label to describe themselves, then they will finally be allowed to assert their identity in white America or, at the very least, have something to rally behind when faced with racism.

It is within this ekphrastic identity construction that the Hindu right finds its foothold. Touting their own label of “Hindu American,” the Hindu right promises disillusioned, homesick diaspora Indians an avenue through which they can reassert their customs, traditions and history (and thereby dignity) in an environment that more often than not seeks to ridicule and marginalize their identities. However, as we will soon see, this reconstruction of identity from “Indian American” to “Hindu American” has the exact opposite effect on the non-Hindu religious minorities of India, actively erasing their customs, traditions and histories.

Who is a Hindu?

One would think that “Hindu American” refers to people who live in America and are Hindus. In certain contexts this might be the case, but the label Hindu American cannot be separated from the organizations that have developed it and applied it in their work. In other words, to understand what being Hindu American means, we have to look at what self-styled Hindu American organizations wish to achieve.

To begin with, organizations with explicit ties to the Hindu right such as the Hindu Swayamsevak Sangh (HSS, a sister organization of the RSS) the Vishwa Hindu Parishad of America (VHPA, another organization connected to the RSS) the Hindu American Foundation (HAF, a political advocacy group founded by former members of the VHPA) and The Hindu Students Council (HSC, a group of college organizations formerly connected to the VHPA) directly state their mission in terms of organizing or developing a Hindu American society. The widespread use of the term Hindu American on the part of these organizations, whose basic function is to generate support for Hindu nationalism within the diaspora community, suggests that the label identifies more closely with Hindutva politics than the Hindu religion itself. At the very least, there is a worrying aesthetic connection between Hindu American identity and Hindu right organizations.

Diving deeper, we ask: What is a Hindu American society? Again, we cannot take the term at face value, and must look at how it is being used by these organizations. Quite helpfully, the VHPA has a section on their website called Who is a Hindu? According to the VHPA:

Hindus are all those who believe, practice, or respect the spiritual and religious principles and practices having roots in Bharat. Thus Hindu includes Jains, Buddhas, Sikhs and Dharmic people, worldwide, of many different sects within the Hindu ethos. The word Hindu is a civilizational term expressed as Hindu culture or “Sanskriti.” And the word Dharma includes religious practices only as a subset. The parishad welcomes and respects people of non-Indian origin who consider themselves Hindus as defined above.

This definition inaccurately claims that “Hindu” refers to people who practice and/or respect religious principles and practices founded in India (referred to here by its Sanskrit name Bharat). Consequently, for the VHPA, Jains, Buddhists and Sikhs are all Hindus. While Jainism, Buddhism and Sikhism do have origins in Hinduism, it would be inaccurate (and I’d venture to say very offensive) to reduce them to “sects within the Hindu ethos.” Personally, I find it quite interesting that the VHPA considers Sikhs part of the Hindu ethos, but not Muslims. Yes, Islam was founded in the Middle East, but is it really accurate to claim that Islam is somehow not rooted in India when Muslims were present on the subcontinent during the lifetime of the Prophet Muhammad himself? Surely after more than a thousand years of presence, Islam has become embedded into the very fabric of Indian society and culture. How does it make sense then to say that Sikhism (a much younger religion that draws influence from Islam) is rooted in Bharat but Islam is not?  

The VHPA goes on to claim that the word Hindu is a civilizational term directly tied to the Sanskrit language. This is also an inaccurate and ahistorical claim that attempts to portray Indian history in periods of religious conquest and empire. For one, the word “Hindu” itself is Old Persian, rooted in the Sanskrit word “sindhu,” meaning river. Second, it is impossible, in the modern-day, to conceive of Hindus as any sort of civilization. This is because Hinduism has spread all over the world and in each place it has taken on a unique characteristic informed by the diverse cultures it has encountered. To portray Hindus as a cohesive civilization, one would have to conflate the East African Hindus of Mauritius with the Cham Hindus of Vietnam with the South American Hindus of Suriname, thereby homogenizing and erasing all three cultures into some bland whole. Even in India, the claims of a “Hindu civilization” fall short. While there have been kingdoms with Hindu rulers, there has never been a Hindu kingdom — the subcontinent was far too religiously diverse to consolidate power in such a way. As learned last semester from my history professor in the course I took on Modern India and South Asia, the political reality at the time meant that if a ruler, Hindu or Muslim, ever tried to impose their religion onto the population, they would not be able to keep themselves in power. Indeed, as historian Richard M. Eaton notes in his article “The Two Languages That Shaped the History of India,” a secular conception of government, including the separation of church and state, was being implemented by 11th- and 12th-century intellectuals in Iran long before their European counterparts. When these ideas reached India, Hindu elite, such as Marappa of Vijayanagara, actively embraced the Arabic term of “sultan” as it bypassed religion, fully cementing their power over their ethnically and religiously diverse kingdoms.  

A much more accurate model of Indian history, Eaton argues — and the one subscribed to by historians — is that of Sanskrit and Persian cosmopolis. According to Eaton, cosmopolis is a cultural formation that, in contrast to empire, is expanded through cultural emulation as opposed to violence and thus does not have any distinct governing centers or fortified frontiers. Transregional in nature, a cosmopolis is characterized by a widespread subscription to the prestige of a language along with other cultural elements such as architecture, cuisine, art, drama and literature. In Eaton’s estimation, Indian history has been shaped by two major cosmopolises: a Sanskrit one from 300–1300 C.E. and a Persian one from 1000–1800 C.E. with a prolonged period of interaction between both worlds.

The VHPA’s conception of Hindu society, specifically its aforementioned claim to an exclusively Sanskrit heritage, directly repudiates the idea of cosmopolis, instead playing into the false colonial notion that Indian history can be divided into three distinct periods: a Hindu “Renaissance” period, a Muslim invasion followed by a period of decline and a British colonial period. Such a view of history is actively propagated by the Hindu right in order to revitalize an oriental notion of “pure Hindu identity,” untouched by the supposedly foreign, invading and destructive force of Islam. Unsurprisingly, the Islamophobia propagated by this false historical narrative quickly makes its way into contemporary notions of Hindu American identity. As Biju Mathew and Vijay Prashad note in their article, “The Protean Forms of Yankee Hindutva”:

All these organizations attempt to constitute something called a ‘Hindu American’ with an identity distinct from all others who come from the South Asian subcontinent. While it recognizes that there are ‘Muslims of Indian origin’, organizations such as the VHPA argue that for them ‘their Muslim identity is more important than their Indian identity’. For this reason, one leader of the VHPA urges the term ‘Hindu American’ so that the disparate Hindus can act under one sign and distinguish themselves from others, not in terms of national patriotism but of religious assertion. Identity, the VHPA claims, is not a nominal feature, but it must be constituted through organizational forms. Therefore, the Hindu Swayamsevak Sangh [HSS] aims to draw ‘all Hindus into one large united society’, to draw certain Indians together and rearticulate their self-designation into that of ‘Hindu American’.

In other words, the Hindu American label is used to distinguish Indian Hindus as separate and above their Muslim counterparts; a crucial step in achieving an oriental Hindu identity free from the supposedly unpatriotic and traitorous influences of Islam. Since the Hindu right does not view identity as a nominal feature, the revitalization of an oriental Hindu identity also necessitates the construction of a Hindu society. As Mathew and Prashad discuss in their work, in the eyes of the Hindu right, one is not truly a Hindu unless they actively participate in the consolidation of the Hindu “rashtra,” or nation. As such, many of the organizations mentioned previously who purportedly support a diverse and inclusive Hinduism actually operate by centralizing Hinduism behind a narrow and chauvinistic religious nationalism. It is only a short leap then to the blood and soil argument of V.D. Savarkar (one of Hindutva’s foundational thinkers) that a Hindu is one who is descended of Hindu parents and recognizes the area stretching from the Indus to Ganges as the Fatherland. In the long run, this practice of excluding “non-birthright” Hindus harms Hinduism’s syncretic belief system by stifling an influx of new perspectives and philosophies. Such an oriental, racialized Hinduism is a Hinduism frozen in time; it can neither challenge its problematic aspects nor can it find new ways of understanding and relating to a rapidly evolving world. Relegated to such a mummified state, Hinduism would surely wither away.

The Hindu Students Council

It is with this analysis in mind that I now wish to directly address the Hindu Students Council (HSC) both on our campus and at large. This is because, as young Indian Americans at the University, the HSC is the Hindu right organization most present in our lives. With the stated mission of promoting an “integrated Hindu personality,” the activities of the council provide an insight into how young people are recruited into the Hindu American identity.

The first HSC chapter was founded by Hindutva activists in 1987 at Northeastern University. Since then, the organization has only grown, boasting over 60 chapters across both universities and high schools. As Raja Swamy, a professor of anthropology at University of Tennessee, Knoxville notes, from its very first days the HSC has been tied to organizations on the Hindu right — many of its early leaders were either involved with, or went on to become involved with, organizations such as the VHPA and RSS. According to Prashad and Mathews in “Yankee Hindutva,” in terms of organizational structure, the HSC chapter is typically organized and run by “an immigrant graduate male student who has connections to the Hindu Right in India” or by “second-generation male or female students who may have immediate family connections in the VHPA.” 

However, to the casual observer, the HSC’s proximity to the Hindu right is not readily apparent. Take, for example, the Instagram page of the University’s HSC chapter. The most recent post advertises an end-of-year ice cream social, preceded by a post about the chapter’s visit to a temple in Novi. And previous to that post is a whole string of pictures showcasing the chapter’s annual Holi celebration. Indeed, the bulk of the chapter’s outreach and events are dedicated to social gatherings. Looking at the University’s HSC Instagram page, the notion that the organization is promoting right wing ideology seems downright ridiculous. Swamy sums up the sentiment as follows:

This sort of social space has been very attractive for a lot of young people. For them it is a chance to hang out with friends, to meet (potential romantic interests), to engage in what many American youth engage with in different contexts, like going to a party. I think that the kids who are in there are not going in thinking they’re learning to hate, they’re going because it is a fun thing to do, play games, hang out, which kid will say no to that?

This was certainly my first impression of the HSC. I went to their Holi celebration this year and, to put it simply, it was a lot of fun. It was extremely cathartic to celebrate a Hindu festival in a predominantly South Asian space. But such innocuous social events like the Holi celebration can’t be separated from the parties that organize them. Certainly, after I left the Holi event, I had a greatly improved image of the HSC, and was eager to go to any future events they had planned. Obviously I no longer have such a favorable view, but my opinions towards the HSC only changed after I spent a considerable amount of time looking into the organization. Most people, however, don’t research political organizations for fun (it turns out most people actually have a life … who knew?!) and will probably leave a social event with a rose-tinted view of the council. This is not to say that the organizers of such events are actively manipulating participants into becoming Hindu nationalists — far from it. Rather, the presence of the HSC in social spaces promotes Hindutva in more subtle ways, like introducing nationalistic symbols at religious events or framing cultural expression within a worldview that Hindus are under attack and must defend themselves.

In addition to fronting its activities with social events, the national HSC further obscures its Hindu nationalism by couching its views in liberal rhetoric. The council purports to provide a safe space for Hindu students; perhaps the idea is that if an organization uses the term “safe space” it cannot possibly be right-wing. Building upon this, the HSC paints its Hindu nationalist goals as fighting against bigotry; one of its biggest national initiatives is hosting its annual Understanding Hinduphobia Conference. This rhetorical approach works to maximize the council’s appeal with its target audience: young, mostly liberal, South Asians attending university.

However, a deeper look at the HSC’s activism shows that the organization has no interest in fighting against very real forms of discrimination that South Asians or Hindus face in the West. Take, for example, HSC’s 2021 Understanding Hinduphobia Conference. One portion of this conference was a half-hour discussion between a member of Rutgers HSC, Prasiddha Sudhakar, and an Oxford University graduate student, Rashmi Samant. The basic premise of this conversation was that Samant, the first Indian Hindu female president to be elected to the Oxford Student Union, had been the target of a hate campaign that harassed her so much that, within just one week of her election, she was forced to resign from her presidency. Samant further claimed that the hate campaign was Hinduphobic and had specifically targeted her Hindu identity. 

This would have been a great discussion about Hinduphobia, if not for the slightly inconvenient fact that Samant and Sudhakar’s version of events differed from what was reported in various articles to follow. As reported by The Print, calls for Samant’s resignation revolved around several of her social media posts that were accused of being racist and transphobic:

In one post, she had captioned a photo from Malaysia, “Ching Chang.” In another photo of her posing outside a Berlin Holocaust Memorial, the caption was perceived to be a pun on the Holocaust. It read: “The memorial *CASTS* a *HOLLOW* dream of the past atrocities and deeds.” Samant was also accused of separating “women” and “transwomen” in the caption of a post uploaded before the election, which was perceived as transphobic.

Oxford University’s Campaign for Racial Equality and Awareness echoed similar sentiments in their call for Samant’s resignation, stating “not only did (Samant) post racially insensitive captions on social media, but she has also proceeded to deny the harm caused by her actions when questioned.” The accusations of Hinduphobia ring even more hollow when one notes that the Oxford University Hindu Society was one of the parties actively condemning Samant, stating that “her hateful posturing towards other minority groups” was what prompted calls for her resignation, “not the fact that she is Indian or Hindu.”

Clearly there were very justified reasons for Samant to be removed from her presidency, reasons that had nothing to do with her religion or ethnicity. So, in other words, the HSC decided that the best way to bring awareness to Hinduphobia was to platform a racist transphobe and then actively help said racist transphobe rehabilitate her image by using false claims of Hinduphobia to portray herself as the victim, thereby covering up her bigotry. Yes, it makes my head hurt too. 

Leaving aside Samant’s personal bigotry, is this not an odd decision on the part of the HSC? If Hinduphobia is as widespread and concerning as they claim it to be, surely they could find someone who has actually experienced it. Just as Jussie Smollet was used by conservatives to smear Black Lives Matter, it would seem that purporting false experiences of racism and bigotry would severely undercut HSC’s message about fighting Hinduphobia.

The truth of the matter is that, for the HSC at least, Hinduphobia is nothing but a fear mongering technique to convince young South Asians to embrace a Hindu American identity. It doesn’t matter if it exists or not, it doesn’t matter if people are being hurt by it, all that matters is that it sounds scary. This fear-mongering can be seen coming full circle in Samant and Sudhakar’s conversation when Sudhakar makes the following comment:

There’s kind of this in-between gap that you’re stuck in which is what we call Desi. And a lot of people don’t really step outside of that Desi box. It’s more so ‘oh I’m a Desi because I’m in this middle’ but they don’t really feel proud of their Indian identity and they don’t feel proud of their American one either. So it’s always kind of this confused middle ground and it’s really hard to then be like I’m a Desi but I’m also a proud Hindu. 

The ploy is simple; Samant and Sudhakar’s broader discussion about discrimination serves to stoke a very real sense of fear, oppression and insecurity within their Hindu audience. The Hindu viewer hears Samant’s story and cannot help but place themselves in her situation, imagining the attacks against her as attacks against themselves. In this distressed state, the viewer is also told that it is not possible to identify oneself as Desi (or an equivalent composite identity such as Indian American or South Asian) and also be a “proud Hindu.” The Hindu viewer is in shambles at this point, the victim of a double-sided attack. On one side is the West, using Hinduphobia to oppress them through their religious identity. On the other side is their very own community, pushing upon them broad composite identities that erode the very thing that Western bigotry is attacking: their Hinduism. Thankfully, the HSC swoops in to save the day. “Leave behind your old notions of Indian American and Desi,” they say. “These are all weak and complicated and contradictory. Come with us instead, look back at your great heritage, become a proud Hindu American.” And the cycle continues.

A Better Way

As much as I despise what the Hindu right stands for, I can’t help but be impressed by how effectively they have recruited new adherents to their ideology. The fact of the matter is that Hindu right organizations intimately understand the challenges of the immigrant experience and have exploited those challenges for their own political gains. Unlike Indian American leftists, who in my experience tend to focus on academia and issue-based political activism, Hindu nationalists have engaged directly with the Indian American community. I do believe that organizations such as the HSC have contributed something positive to the Indian American community by creating spaces and networks for us to connect with each other and celebrate our culture.

Such praise, however, should be taken extremely carefully given that the theoretical discussions around the flaws and merits of Hindu right organizations is taking place in the context of the very real and violent reality Hindutva creates for India’s underprivileged communities. In recent years, Indian Muslims have been subjected to a wave of state–sanctioned targeted attacks from Hindu nationalists, including calls for genocide. Much of the same violence has also been directed toward Indian Christians. Adivasis, or tribal communities, have been subjected to mass evictions ordered by India’s Supreme Court as well as legislative attempts to reinstitute the colonial-era Indian Forest Act, which, among other injustices, would allow forest guards to shoot tribal people with virtual impunity. Members of the Dalit, or caste-oppressed, community have been attacked by Hindutva supporters for both political and religious reasons. Though diaspora Hindutva supporters are, for the most part, non-violent, they most certainly aid and abet in the crimes of their Indian counterparts through financial donations and political denials of the atrocities committed in their name.

The task left to us then is to cut off this diaspora support by convincing the community that our important cultural and religious spaces can exist outside the hateful politics of Hindutva. Under the current influence of Hindu nationalists, our cultural spaces are ill-equipped to deal with the consequences of increasingly reactionary American politics, such as the current attack on women’s and LGBTQ+ rights. In order to support our most marginalized members, it is imperative that, as a community, we root out Hindutva influences from our spaces. After all, doing so will only make our cultural spaces more diverse, vibrant and rewarding.

The good news is that there are already a number of South Asian activists at the University doing this important work:

• Founded in response to Modi’s repeal of Article 370 from India’s constitution and the subsequent wave of Islamaphobia, The Indian Muslim Student Association (IMSA) was created in order to raise awareness of the discrimination faced by Muslims in India as well as bring together the Indian Muslim community at the University. By hosting a mix of social, cultural and political events, IMSA creates a space where Indian Muslims can safely reassert their identities and fight back against Islamophobic Hindutva narratives that Muslims are not true Indians.
• The South Asian Awareness Network (SAAN) is a community of South Asian activists who strive to promote social justice through a diverse and inclusive South Asian lens. By emphasizing a multi-ethnic, multi-religious and composite South Asian identity rather than any one national identity of the subcontinent, SAAN offers an anti-nationalist, anti-state conception of South Asian identity, a sharp contrast to the fervent Indian nationalism of the Hindutva movement. 
• With a focus on supporting the mental health needs of the South Asian community, Dil Se provides an environment in which South Asians can safely explore the challenges, contradictions and nuances of their identity. In Dil Se, unlike the HSC, mental health challenges associated with identity, racism and trauma are not weaponized for the purpose of fear-mongering. Instead, participants are treated with compassion and empathy and work together to build community and resilience. 

However, in the process of removing Hindutva influence from our communities, we must be wary of the all too common urge to completely secularize our spaces. At the end of the day Hindu American is just a label. Though it has been defined by Hindutva activists in destructive ways, it is more than possible to reclaim a Hindu identity for more constructive purposes. Such work is also in progress through organizations such as Sadhana and Hindus for Human Rights (HHR), which aim to cultivate a progressive Hindu identity centered in values of social justice. Not only do these organizations chip away at diaspora support for organizations like the RSS, but their lens of social justice and intersectionality also spawn new interpretations of Hinduism relevant to struggles we face here and now. For example, just last week, I came across an article by the advocacy director of HHR that utilized a sex worker’s interpretation of Shiva to conceptualize a world in which women’s bodies were not policed and autonomy and dignity were afforded to people of all genders. This large body of current activism, along with the growing awareness of the pitfalls of Hindutva ideology among the Indian-American community, gives me a lot of hope that we may be able to cut off the Hindu right from its lifeline of diaspora support.

Hope I Don’t Fall Off This Soapbox

There is a lot more to say about the Hindutva movement in America and the Hindu American identity it propagates. One could probably spend an entire lifetime analyzing the complicated ways in which Hindu American identity intersects with debilitating prejudices such as Anti-Blackness, misogyny and homophobia. But one thing is for sure: in its current form, Hindu American identity is predicated on not solving, but exploiting the very real fear, anxiety and oppression that immigrants face in America.

Perhaps you, the reader, have been a victim of this bigotry. Maybe in the school cafeteria people would try and throw chicken nuggets into your food because they knew you were vegetarian. Maybe people never sat next to you on the bus if there was an open seat next to a white person. Maybe you have faced immense struggles with the immigration system and have constant anxiety over whether you will receive your citizenship or not. Maybe you, or someone you know, have been deported. Maybe you’ve been stopped by the police or stopped in an airport because you were profiled as a “terrorist.” Maybe people have mocked you and your beliefs when you tell them you are a Hindu. Maybe people have tried to convert you to “better beliefs” at every opportunity they get. Maybe people have told you that you are going to hell because you are a Hindu. 

These experiences are terrible, and they have happened to many of us. But if we want to end this bigotry, we cannot respond with more bigotry. We must remind ourselves that the strength of South Asia lies in its diversity. We must remind ourselves that Hinduism would be a shell of itself if not for the influences of other world religions. We must recognize that the racism we face is not isolated and that drawing back into our community will never get rid of the problems of white supremacy. A world free of prejudice is possible, but ultimately, the current form of Hindu American identity will not lead us to that future.   

MiC Columnist Ashvin Pai can be reached at avpai@umich.edu.

The post A critique of Hindu American identity appeared first on The Michigan Daily.

Roughly four years ago, I emailed a request for a need-based fee waiver for Ross School of Business’s external transfer application, expecting no response. Now, as I near the end of my college career as a working-class first-generation Latino Bachelor of Business Administration (BBA) student, to say that my time at the Ross School of Business has been transformational is an understatement. 

Usually, when a fellow Wolverine asks me what my major is, they are startled to learn that I am a Business major and even more surprised that I didn’t simply respond with an irksome singular syllable: “Ross.” Apparently, I give off sociology-public-policy-or-humanities major vibes. 

Ross is an abbreviation for the Stephen M. Ross School of Business and serves as a casual umbrella term for the program. Whenever people ask me about my experience in Ross, I always preface my elaboration by explicitly mentioning that in my analysis of Ross, I decouple the institution itself — which encompasses faculty, staff and resources — from the culture among the student body, specifically the undergraduate cohorts of BBAs. The rigorous academic experience offered by the institution is truly deserving of its world-class distinction and numerous accolades. The culture created within the BBA student body … is a bit more complicated.

My first interaction with Ross BBAs actually occurred a few months before setting foot onto the University of Michigan’s campus. During a multi-day diversity conference hosted by a large bank, I met two Ross BBAs that I bonded with as we roamed around New York City with a large group. These two BBAs were gregarious and down-to-earth, and I thought that they were representative of the greater Ross culture. Little did I know, I was completely wrong. 

Shortly after the conference, I received an email that I had been accepted into Ross. With only a week to accept, I had to make the most consequential decision of my life up to that point. Ross releases decisions for external transfer applications in late June, which is considerably later than the typical early-to-mid May admissions date from other schools. At the time of the conference, I had already established in my mind that I would be transferring to Boston College’s Carroll School of Management in the upcoming fall. I was stunned by the surrealness of my decision, but my parents were even more perplexed than me. Given that I am the first in my family to go to college, conveying to my parents the gravitas of choosing between two schools in terms of prestige, geographical distance and financial aid was difficult. Ultimately, it’s pretty clear which business school I ended up attending.

At the BBA sophomore orientation held shortly after the academic year started, I kept my eye out for the two BBAs I had met months prior. They were ecstatic but equally confused to see me before I explained to them the life-altering development that occurred shortly after we had met at the conference. Soon, I too would be flummoxed, except my shock would be caused by the prevalent opulence found throughout the halls of the University.

Culture

Now let’s talk about the BBA student body culture. You know, the Rossholes. The smug BBAs that brandish the infuriating “YeAh I’m In RoSs” phrase. These instances reinforce the Rosshole stereotype that BBAs will attempt to shoehorn their association with Ross into any conversation. Consequently, everyone loves to dunk on Ross, which occurs on a spectrum of valid critiques from vehement anti-capitalist rhetoric to light-hearted jabs. Even BBAs themselves engage in self-denigration for the sake of friendly banter. 

The BBA culture is like a vast ocean. BBAs can choose to remain on the periphery by treading in the safer waist-high shallow areas, but inevitably, everyone is forced to get soaked and swim through the turbulent waters at some junctures. The currents of the BBA grading distribution — a.k.a. the notorious Ross curve — ebb and flow with the tidal ranges of exam season. The midterms and finals are like the moon and sun, exerting a gravitational pull made most apparent when hundreds of BBAs huddle outside of classrooms as they wait to be funneled in by proctors. The whirlpools of on-campus recruiting (OCR) appear in the fall and suck upperclassmen BBAs into the abyss known as LinkedIn. At times, a BBA student like myself can feel like a fish out of water, floundering for help. It feels as if you bleed even an ounce of vulnerability and weakness, BBAs will devour and shred your confidence to bits like frenzied sharks. For example, there is a general uneasiness that arises from Ross’s inherent spirit of competition and capitalism that others are out to get you when clamoring for class participation points.

Student organizations

Investment banking and strategy consulting are what most Canada Goose-adjacent BBAs in Ross-affiliated pre-professional student organizations flock toward. Why are roles in the two aforementioned industries so coveted? The reasons generally boil down to money, prestige and career advancement. These entry-level positions are often described as client-facing or revenue-generating roles and feed into lucrative positions of seniority. Moreover, these roles provide managerial and functional skills as well as operational, financial and technical experience. The skills, experience and pedigree are all pivotal for professionals seeking to climb up the ladder into the upper echelons of business.

These aforementioned pre-professional student organizations consist of finance clubs, consulting clubs and business fraternities. After attending several informational sessions and presentations, interested applicants must submit extensive applications. If their application advances, they will go through a rigorous and grueling process that consists of club coffee chats (yuck) and several rounds of interviews to squeeze out their remaining innocence. The senior members of these clubs exert power over applicants, seeking to emulate the same rigorous process they underwent. For example, candidates must feign interest in those who, not so long ago, were also satiating the egos of other senior members; thus, they impose the same sadistic expectations — if their unfettered influence over helpless applicants is not enough to satisfy them.

One focal point in the slide decks shown during these pre-professional clubs’ informational sessions is the “Placements” slide. These slides — which feature a multitude of corporate logos indicating the firms where current and past members have worked — are displayed in a manner that resembles the menus plastered onto the side of an idyllic ice cream truck. In some sense, the presenters might as well be ice cream truck vendors enticing their mesmerized, prospective customers. “Care to try two scoops of our classically-caustic-consulting-caramel ice cream? Would you like a bitter-banana-boutique-investment-bank popsicle? How about the faithlessly-fruity-finance sorbeto? Apply to our org, and you might get a taste of these scrumptious flavors … IF you get in!”

These pre-professional student clubs seek to recruit cookie-cutter candidates that will ossify their clubs’ gatekeeper statuses and top placements. BBA corporate zealots then frequently broadcast their involvement in these clubs by strewing their club acronyms into their conversations.

Although the recruitment process for these pre-professional STUDENT clubs is agonizing for everyone involved, there is one unsatisfying, yet sound, reason for the insanity. A graduating executive board can be the death knell for a student organization, losing its momentum and fervor once the founders leave. This is one reason why student clubs come and go: many of them live and die by the state of their current and future leaders. I have witnessed at least two first-gen clubs form, exist for less than two years and unfortunately fizzle out.

In recognition of this, Ross’s pre-professional student clubs structure themselves in a way that makes them more resilient. The numerous “director” and “vice president” positions are not just for résumé padding, but are also intended to sustain a high degree of internal involvement and engagement. The ample junior-level leadership spots serve as robust succession pipelines that hedge against disarray and ensure the clubs’ longevity. 

Diversity

However, this concrete structure also foments a rigid club culture, ultimately inspiring the same internal affinity biases that plague the corporate world’s Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) efforts. The informal networks that are siloed within these clubs parallel the informal networks that exist in the corporate world — which are also predominantly white, upper-class and elite — serving as obstacles for candidates of underrepresented identities and nontraditional backgrounds from reaching the upper echelons of business. 

As a result, it can be more difficult and intimidating for students from underrepresented backgrounds to compete against upper-class peers who have known about target schools, case interviews and the investment-banking-to-private-equity career trajectory since high school. All but a few are rejected, and future prospective applicants, noticing the near lack of representation, may be deterred from applying. The structure and biases, general exclusivity and sparse membership of students from underrepresented backgrounds all play a role in a vicious self-fulfilling cycle. 

Members of these pre-professional student clubs are poised to become the next set of board of directors, C-Suite executives and senior-level management across various business sectors and firms. These future industry leaders are also likely to be involved with think tanks, foundations and other influential institutions. Will they be stewards of systemic stasis or catalysts for commendable change? 

The latter is unlikely, but nevertheless, in order for them to work toward progress, these club members and the broader BBA student body must engage in substantive DEI discussions that are infused with candor. Without these authentic insights, their bubbles might never burst. These organizations are a core part of the Ross landscape and therefore have considerable influence on the BBA culture and experience. Currently, these clubs’ affinity biases and toxic culture trickle out and permeate into the rest of the BBA student body, ultimately playing a part in the surface-level DEI discussions and climate at Ross.

Generally speaking, DEI can be a thorny topic about which it can feel verboten to speak candidly. The DEI discussions that the majority of BBAs do engage in are mandatory ones that are brief and shoehorned into courses. Students bloviate with lofty pleasantries and platitudes to score participation points. Their insight demonstrates a lack of personal initiative to inquire about DEI-adjacent matters outside of the classroom since they don’t contribute to their individualistic and professional personal agendas. Their unfettered profit-maximization mindset would lead them to disregard those of lower socioeconomic status within the social pecking order — like Mr. Krabs sending Spongebob to Davy Jones Locker in the pursuit of a marginal gain of 62 cents. The state of DEI in the context of BBA culture is the DEI conundrum of Ross.

Social class dissonances

I always aim to get in and out of Ross as quickly as possible. Ross is not a space where I feel like I can linger or have a sense of belonging or presence in the building complex. The exhaustion of code-switching drains me of energy and siphons off mental bandwidth. At times, Ross feels more like the stomping grounds of finance-and-consulting-club BBAs — outfitted in their club-branded Patagonia Better Sweater fleece vests and quarter-zips that emit a repugnant aura of haughtiness — than a place for idealistic business novices.

But with graduation looming around the corner, I recently entered Ross a few days into the dead of winter that was supposedly spring break. The typical mid-day bustling scene of the Winter Garden was barren. The building was vacant of the chatter and BBA-lexicon-dense enunciations of “recruiting,” “investment banking” and “consulting” that typically ricochet within the terra cotta edifice. I felt most existent in this space amid the solitude, as memories of the highs and lows of my unorthodox journey resurfaced all at once.

I recently overheard some BBA sophomores near the Winter Garden yammering about matters related to pre-professional student clubs and recruiting. A mixture of commentary about which bank applications had opened, which brother they knew in a pre-professional business fraternity that could snag them a coffee chat and which firm’s diversity events were still on the table that they could leverage to secure an offer in the context of an already accelerated recruiting timeline. This meticulous devotion toward elite career optimization isn’t what I thought students with positive business values — a concept espoused by Ross as being its core, defining principle — would look like.

Shortly thereafter, I burst into tears in the Ross basement but was comforted by my Michigan in Color friends. This time, I was not alone as I wept, unlike the numerous past instances when I tried to expunge the incessant feelings of inferiority and navigate my way out of the dark catacombs embedded in my mind that I had meandered into and lost myself in.

This Rosshole conversation reminded me of the first few brutal months of my time at the University of Michigan and Ross. I was initially flummoxed by the “Latinx” term. It is frequently used in upper-class spaces like academia, but it is absent among the overwhelming majority of working-class and primarily Spanish-speaking communities like my hometown. In terms of the professional emphasis, I first heard about investment banking through some firm diversity recruitment events intended for freshmen minorities and about consulting from casual conversations with peers. But I had a hazy understanding that was nowhere near the level of my fellow BBAs. I couldn’t help but feel these clubs’ DEI efforts were a farce when one “top” club held a diversity event where the panelists only varied in gender identity and none of them had underrepresented identities. My BBA peers seemed to be able to hit the ground running as I was rejected by all but one of these clubs. I felt too uncouth and unkempt to fit in. How could I thrive in an environment known for having sharp elbows if mine were covered in the working-class grime that was my relative unpolishedness?

Ultimately, the Winter Garden conversation I overheard made me reflect on my scrappy upbringing and the social-class dissonances I’ve encountered in Ross. My mom and dad have worked, respectively, as a fast food crew member and landscaper for the past two decades. Throughout my upbringing, the combined amount of their total wages still fell under the free-and-reduced lunch qualifying thresholds. Their industriousness and love have been crucial and formative toward my character development and success. My mom wore several hats — branded with a different “M” — so that I could wear one with the University’s signature block M.

Based on reported data, the average base salary of the most recent BBA graduating cohort was $84,000, an amount that eclipses my working-class family’s income and my FAFSA need-based aid package. The three most popular industries that BBAs enter post-graduation are financial services, consulting and tech. Roughly half of BBAs enter financial services, with most vying for investment banking. The detailed breakdown by industry, region and function displays median and mean incomes that are all roughly double my father’s and triple my mother’s respective take-home pay.    

These jarring statistics illustrate that Ross truly does open doors to any industry and professional opportunity, including the competitive ones outlined earlier. This contrasts the slim job prospects available for those in the working-class town I’m from, especially the predominantly Spanish-speaking Latino community — some of whom are undocumented. 

The exclusivity of these clubs. The starting salaries. The upper-class upbringing required to facilitate extensive preparation. All of these juxtapositions, paired with my hyperawareness of social class, can be agonizing to reconcile at times. Maybe my experience is not entirely unique in Ross, but with the stereotypes associated with Ross, you would assume I was the only one. 

Sometimes it can seem like all BBAs are Rossholes. Despite the cutthroat nature of the BBA culture that I’ve described, BBAs are not monolithic.

Yes, there are BBAs that benefit from generational wealth, extensive family networks and nepotism to secure highly sought-after roles without much friction. But there are also BBAs who might have to factor in high compensation when deciding which career to pursue for the sake of feasibly repaying their exorbitant student loans.

Yes, there are BBAs who are only immersed in selective Ross-affiliated clubs. But there are also BBAs involved in Ross clubs with open membership (no applications!) along with a mix of University-wide clubs centered around advocacy, philanthropy and other interests.

Yes, there are BBAs who blow off DEI and put in barely-satisfactory effort into Identity and Diversity in Organization (IDO) milestones.But there are also BBAs committed to fostering an inclusive atmosphere within Ross that embraces a diverse wealth of lived experiences.

Yes, there are BBAs who embody the Rosshole stereotype. But there are also BBAs who are gregarious and capable of eschewing positivity.

Yes, there are BBAs who come from posh backgrounds, take themselves too seriously and are out of touch with the lived experiences of people outside of their bubbles — the pure Rossholes. But there are other BBAs who are first-gen and/or low-income who exhibit humility and have taken the initiative to interact with others outside of their organic sphere.

Sometimes it can seem like all BBAs are Rossholes. Fortunately, the overwhelming majority of BBAs are actually pretty chill. But it seems that when we are aggregated together, the culture brings out the worst in us. I bet some people have even perceived me to be a Rosshole at times within the setting of the Business School. Nearly everything I’ve described about the BBA culture is an open secret that isn’t captured in glossy Poets&Quants articles. It is universally agreed upon among BBAs that the culture sucks. So why do we continue to let the pernicious elements from this small faction dominate and dictate the BBA culture, as though they are supreme arbiters?

Final reflections

In the Corporate Strategy course (STR 390) — part of the BBA core curriculum — we briefly covered one profound concept, derived from Josiah Wedgwood’s industrialization of pottery, expressed in similar terms by another scholar: “All organizations are perfectly designed to get the results they get.” In other words, organizations will deliver tomorrow exactly what they deliver today. Akin to predetermination, without drastic internal changes an organization might be doomed to repeat the same outcomes within the same cycle.

Is the University of Michigan perfectly designed to attract and coddle DEI-disinterested upper-class students? Is the University of Michigan perfectly designed to stifle the voices of underrepresented students? Is the University of Michigan perfectly designed to consistently mishandle consequential matters and execute a series of blunders? Is the Ross BBA culture perfectly designed to extinguish empathy? Are Ross-affiliated pre-professional student clubs perfectly designed to exclude most, if not all, candidates who don’t fit the mold of their self-selection?

Some might argue, “why ask these raucous questions?” Not questioning the status quo, assuming the bull-market music will never end and suspending disbelief only leads to complacency and impropriety, breeding the WeWorks, Nikolas, Theranoses and Enrons of the world. Investigative journalists, whistleblowers and inquisitors are the antidotes to delusion and inertia. But it takes courage to stand up to the charming influence of nefarious Svengalis, charlatans and hucksters. Challenging the status quo and speaking critically can be an arduous and daunting endeavor. I choose to share a part of my story because stories can serve as an impetus for inspiration and change.

I’ve never been great at divulging much about myself, especially in a saccharine manner. But through the confidence I’ve gained from writing, I have shared more about myself to others within the past year than I have with even some of my closest friends prior to joining MiC. 

But despite this, I have not proactively mentioned my work with any non-first-gen and non-MiC BBAs, that is, up until recently. After much deliberation, I shared my most recent visceral piece to two of my peers. I had worked with them in different group projects before and felt they were chill, but nonetheless I was still worried they’d eviscerate me or give lukewarm, insincere responses.

To my surprise, they gave some of the most granular appraisal I’ve received thus far. They praised the writing style, the underrepresented content and the courage to put myself out there. In each instance after reading their detailed messages, I burst into tears wondering what would have happened if I had been more open about myself sooner. 

This recent development reinforced one simple but profound realization: stories matter. Much like how investment banking analysts and junior-level consultants utilize Excel and PowerPoint to create visually-appealing deliverables for clients, writers employ a repertoire of literary techniques to illustrate their experiences and convey their arguments. David Friedberg, a co-host of the unfiltered All-In Podcast, succinctly stated in a recent interview that a compelling narrative attracts employees, capital and customers toward a business. Somewhere buried in the bevy of numbers and words of a firm’s financial and legal documents — such as the articles of corporation and 10-Ks — are the woven threads of a narrative. A narrative that includes the reasons why the founder(s) took a leap of faith. The blood, sweat and tears of an organization’s people eventually evaporate, but their essence is imbued throughout all aspects of the firm, tangible and intangible. 

I am on my way out, but there will undoubtedly be more BBAs in the future that are first-gen and/or low-income. Will the child of a gig economy worker feel like they fit in at Ross and the University? Despite all the turmoil, I think they will. There are BBAs, Wolverines and spaces that will embrace them with maize-and-blue warmth. 

My time at Ross and the University was more than I could have ever envisioned four, six and even 10 years ago. First-gens have much to be proud of, and fortunately the first-gen identity is seen as noble due to the rugged-individualist qualities that are lionized in American culture. But I’ve recognized that I must also own the “less glamorous” parts of being a trailblazer, such as the mental health struggles associated with upward mobility and assimilation. I have been nourished by the Maize & Blue Cupboard, outfitted with professional attire via the U-M Career Center’s Clothes Closet and financially assisted by COVID-19 Emergency Funds. 

Once I graduate, I will not miss routinely passing by the shops and restaurants I could never frequent in a financially feasible manner. I will not miss encountering the endless glaring daily reminders at the University that my working-class upbringing and that of most of America are not reflected here — granted, these differences will persist post-graduation, but at least they won’t be clusters of obnoxious Canada Goose jackets.

On the other hand, I will miss the times I felt seen by others — especially when others saw value in me during the times I couldn’t see it in myself. I will miss the friends and allies who helped dissipate some of my worst insecurities. I will miss the ephemerality of traversing this physical campus, whose grandeur and beauty never ceases to amaze me. Most of all, I will miss the privilege of simply being here.

I have no clue what the future holds, but this precariousness has always been a facet of my life. Maybe I will eventually become another casualty of the classist carnage of capitalism. But at least I will have reclaimed myself through my words. Whether it is in writing, music, illustrations, verbal dialogue or any other medium, I hope that anyone reading this will find the courage and energy to share their story.

MiC Columnist Gustavo Sacramento can be contacted at gsacrame@umich.edu.

The post Why Michigan Ross is not as bad as it seems: a Latino FGLI senior reflects on BBA culture appeared first on The Michigan Daily.

Special thanks to Karla Bell, Seba (Historian) for the Black Student Union.

The William Trotter Multicultural Center recently celebrated its 50th anniversary in February and with each passing milestone, there comes an even greater need to preserve the history and purpose of this building so we do not lose sight of the communities Trotter is supposed to serve. To learn more about Trotter’s history and its significance to Black students at the University of Michigan, I had the opportunity to sit down with Business senior Karla Bell, who serves as the Seba (Historian) on the Black Student Union 2021-2022 Executive Board. 

Trotter was originally called Trotter House and was colloquially known as the “Black House” amongst Black students. Directly resulting from the actions of the first (of three) Black Action Movements, Trotter House was built in 1971 as a Black Student Cultural Center to meet the needs of Black students on campus. When talking about the early beginnings of Trotter, Bell said, “Black students really only had Trotter, and it was neither in a safe location on campus nor well funded. Trotter was funded and built at the hands of student labor.” 

Trotter House was the host building for events for Black students, but they had to risk their safety to be able to use the space. Bell said, “At the time, Black people on campus were susceptible to violence and danger because (Trotter House) was off-campus in a poorly lit area. Yet still, they risked their wellbeing to be there.” In 1972, the original Trotter House burned down in a kitchen fire so the University bought a building on Washtenaw Avenue to house the student center. By 1981, Trotter House would expand its scope to become a multicultural student center. As the Trotter House expanded to include programming for students of all racial minorities on campus, Black Student Union executive board members tried to appeal for increased funding from the University to expand their efforts in promoting equity on campus.

In 2013, undergraduate and graduate students began “A New Trotter Initiative,” a plan to have a new multicultural center be built at the center of campus. After three years of advocating to the University of Michigan administration for a new building, a $10 million budget was finally approved in 2016 for the building of The William Trotter Multicultural Center. By 2019, Trotter had officially found a new home on South State Street and was open for student use. 

Currently, less than 4% of the U-M undergraduate population is Black, making it easy to feel like an outsider in most spaces on campus. Because of this, Trotter is an essential space for Black students. It exists as our place to congregate; it’s one of the only buildings on campus that feels as though it belongs to Black students — a home base of sorts where we can build fellowship, work together and exist in the comfort of our own community. This is why Trotter is frequently used by organizations like BSU and HEADS (Here Earning A Destiny through Honesty, Eagerness, And Determination of Self) to hold their meetings. Students of Color, and specifically Black students, commonly frequent the multicultural center, which speaks to its necessity in the community. 

For me personally, I find myself in Trotter after a day of classes more often than not. I always know I’ll run into at least a few of my friends every time I step into the building. Between homework assignments, I’ll usually take a break from my work to make conversation with them and joke around. If I’m not doing homework or hanging out with friends, then usually I’m somehow finding my way into the activities that might be going on in Trotter that day, like a game night or a cultural event. There is such an intrinsic sense of community in Trotter, which makes it unlike any other building on campus. 

“If you’re coming into Trotter, learn the history of the space and respect the effort that it took to have this,” Bell said. “(Black) students lost their scholarships for this and faced consequences to have Trotter as a space.” Everyone who comes into Trotter, whether it be for personal use or for an organization, should be mindful that such a space came directly from Black activism. There is a rich history behind how Trotter has transformed into the multicultural center that we know it as today and this history is intertwined with the Black Action Movements.

I’m grateful to the Black students who fought to have a building like Trotter on campus and as we use the space to build fellowship amongst underrepresented groups on campus, it’s imperative that we continue to pass down the history as well. 

MiC Columnist Udoka Nwansi can be reached at udoka@umich.edu.

The post What Trotter means to us appeared first on The Michigan Daily.

For as long as I can remember, my dad had one goal: to live longer than his dad did. 

I never met my grandfather — or as we call him in Tamil: Appappa. He died of a heart attack when he was 56: before seeing his two sons become doctors, before his family escaped a civil war and left Sri Lanka and before meeting his seven grandchildren.

On my dad’s 56th birthday, he blew out the candles on a $15 Walmart chocolate cake. We sang an out-of-tune birthday song to him and my family spoke about my grandfather. It was joyful, uncut by the unspoken breadth of this eerie loss. 

The majority of deaths in my family can be traced back to heart disease. By the time I was 10, all of my grandparents had died, three from heart disease-related complications.

My family isn’t unique in this regard. Like many South Asians, we have experienced multiple direct losses due to heart disease. In fact, South Asians disproportionally face higher rates of heart disease than the general population, making up 60% of global cardiovascular patients, despite only being 25% of the world’s population.

Even more jarring, one in three South Asians will die of heart disease before the age of 65.

My Appappa’s death shook every aspect of my dad’s family. They no longer had a stable income, so as a result, my grandmother had to sell her jewelry to keep their family afloat for a few months. The economic strain and emotional toll made my father so angry that he stopped believing in God.

It is hard to fathom that so many families in the South Asian community have to cope with these constant premature losses due to a health disparity that is not widely known and researched. Many may find it easy to dismiss this glaring disparity by blaming the affected community. Some, like Dr. Namratha Kandula, even go as far to say South Asians focus too much on their material success, not on their health. Another misconception is that this disparity is caused solely by South Asian cuisines’ excess ghee, bread and white rice. 

However, blaming the community is reductive. Personal health choices are directly limited to the options available to us within our immediate environments. To adequately examine community health, it is more equitable and practical to study social, cultural and economic influences. 

When analyzing the societal influence on health trends within the South Asian community, there is a glaring historical period that is often overlooked: British colonization and the famines it intensified. 

Under the British Raj — the period of British rule over the Indian subcontinent — there were 31 famines across 120 years. These famines originated from uneven rainfall, but were exacerbated by exploitative, apathetic British economic and administrative policies.

Contrary to popular belief, famines were not due to a lack of food growth, but instead inequitable food distribution. Prior to British colonization, the government had measures in place to mitigate famines, such as distributing foods and funding relief projects. However, the British abandoned these efforts based on the flawed reasoning that famines were natural occurrences that, to their Malthusian benefit, reduced the population of colonized subjects. Consequently, they only provided a small section of the population with food rations, leaving many who could not afford the price of grain to starve. Not only did they leave vulnerable populations to starve based on their inability to pay, but the British government continued to raise taxes on the Indian people and increased exports of grains that could have been used to provide famine relief. This prioritization of economic gain was rooted in the British government seeing the Indian subcontinent as a cash cow — ignoring those who were suffering.

While the British government no longer occupies South Asia, their tepid response to the South Asian people during long periods of famine had a tangible impact on our health today. Many of the long-term health effects can be explained through the Thrifty Gene Hypothesis, which suggests that carriers of ‘thrifty genes’ were able to better survive famine due to their increased capacity for fat storage. Today, populations who adapted to carry these genes, which would aid their survival during periods of famine, are more likely to experience obesity, type 2 diabetes and heart disease.

Because of this genetic phenomenon, the grandchildren of a survivor of a single famine have an almost tripled risk of suffering from cardiovascular disease. To put this heightened risk into perspective, South Asians have survived 31 famines in the past 200 years. 

While health disparities are often multifaceted and are not solely tied to genetics, it is undeniably clear that the lasting impact of the Thrifty Gene Hypothesis in South Asian communities can be directly tied back to the British Raj and its hand in the famines. 

Rather than acknowledging their role in the mass starvation of millions of innocent people, the British reduce their colonization to ‘some good bits and some bad bits”. However, their role in the famines still affects us today, shortening the projected lifespans of us and our loved ones. Like my dad, so many have lost their own parents to heart disease prematurely. 

Despite facing these constant reminders of colonization in my own life, I was forced to uplift colonization throughout my education.

Living in a white suburb in America, colonization was often celebrated. From as early as the 4th grade, my textbooks and curriculum glorified those who colonized Black and Brown people, calling them explorers and heroes. 

My textbooks often applauded colonization for its role in spreading new technologies, education and religion. They seemed to gloss over the exploitation of natural resources, the introduction of new diseases and the destruction of existing political and economic structures.

It was degrading to write reports celebrating colonization, while my family has continued to suffer from this time period. 

On top of the health consequences of colonization, both of my parents were displaced due to The Sri Lankan Civil War, which spurred from an ethnic conflict that resulted from British colonization. Their houses were bombed, they were forced to leave their home country and they had to start from scratch, culturally and financially, in a foreign country.

In many ways, my life has been and continues to be altered by the effects of the British Colonization. From my education, to my health, to the very country that I live in, I am constantly reminded of how British negligence affects my community and loved ones today. 

Despite these significant genetic obstacles, my community has worked to challenge the effects of colonization. One recent example of this step in the right direction was when State Rep. Pramila Jayapal, D-Washington, passed the South Asian Heart Health Awareness and Research Act of 2020 to increase awareness and funding for heart disease in the South Asian Community. It’s empowering to see South Asians, who were once oppressed by British legislation, use policy as a tool to directly address health disparities. We, as a community, are making strides to raise awareness and expose the inhumane consequences of colonization.

Clearly, health effects are only some of the many consequences of colonization. Beyond advocacy within the South Asian community, we must continue to reckon with the impacts of colonization when evaluating and teaching it. Since so many of us are directly affected by the negative consequences of colonization today, let’s call it what it is: dehumanizing.

MiC Columnist Maya Kogulan can be reached at ukogulan@umich.

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Content Warning: mentions of racially motivated crimes against Asian people, sexual violence

Bright Sheng, a University of Michigan School of Music, Theatre & Dance professor,  temporarily stepped down from teaching after he played the 1965 version of “Othello,” in which the actor Laurence Olivier wore Blackface, without an advance content warning. While students expressed rightful concerns regarding Sheng’s normalization of racism in what they had perceived to be a safe space, outlets and spokespeople rushed to Sheng’s defense. They (as well as Sheng himself) cited his survival of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, comparing the wave of campus “cancel culture” to a decade-long sociopolitical movement that resulted in the deaths, suicides and everlasting trauma that haunts generations. This was not the first time the Cultural Revolution has been exploited by mainstream American media as of recent years. In a viral video from June 2021, Xi Van Fleet, a Chinese woman “who survived Maoist purges,” stands before a Virginia school board and dubs the introduction of anti-racist pedagogies (in her words, “Critical Race Theory”) as “the American version of the Chinese Cultural Revolution.” After her brief speech, the predominantly white hall bursts into cheers and applause. Fleet was later interviewed on “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” and the speech was propagated by conservative media and viewed by millions.

The Cultural Revolution was a failed movement launched to reassert Mao’s political control over the Chinese Communist Party, which is vastly incomparable to progressives’ attempts today to advocate for a more inclusive, accurate curriculum for American history. Nevertheless, these comparisons reveal, more importantly, the inadequacies of a U.S./Euro-centric history and its deeply ingrained anti-China biases. In these rhetorics, Chinese suffering is trivialized, tokenized and exploited to defend American exceptionalism. As Fleet opened up about her childhood in 1960s China, her voice relegated the spectacle of violence and death to a distant, timeless “orient.” As scholar Yang Yang Cheng wrote in her column, The Grieving and the Grievable, “The safety of distance maintains (the American audiences’) innocence. When they feel genuine sorrow or outrage for the (Chinese victims of political oppression), the emotional response absolves them of further obligations or the need for self-reflection.” Gasping and pointing at these horrific histories, white Americans bask in their own freedom and liberties while sitting on land stolen from Indigenous communities, cultivated by Black people. 

The propagation of sinophobia isn’t exclusive to conservative spaces. Many Americans fail to understand that sinophobia is not limited to blatantly racist remarks or acts of violence against East/Southeast Asian Americans and Chinese people. More commonly, it manifests itself through a socially constructed ignorance about China and Chinese people, reproduced by all segments of society. 

The Page Act of 1875 prohibited immigrants from “China, Japan, or any Oriental country” from entering the United States for “immoral purposes.” This act targeted specifically Chinese women, who were widely profiled as “prostitutes” and considered “lewd and debauched.” Rhetorics that depict East and Southeast Asian women (or any woman who racially presents as “Chinese”) as provocative yet submissive persisted through the 20th Century. As the United States established military bases in South Korea, Vietnam, the Philippines, Japan (namely Okinawa) and other Asian countries, women from poverty-stricken and war-ridden families were forced into sex work to serve the sexual needs of occupying American troops. U.S.-led military violence in Asia thus contributed to the fetishization and hypersexualization of East/Southeast Asian women within the United States, rendering their bodies subjects of white male gaze, sexual violence and mockery. The ways in which Asians in the United States are racialized are inseparable from American foreign policy, and during a time when politicians are advocating for increasingly aggressive policies towards China, East/Southeast Asian Americans are targeted as a result of rhetoric that instigates violence.

Mainstream “liberal” media is also responsible for perpetuating the racial paranoia surrounding East/Southeast Asian Americans and Chinese people in the United States. Reporting on China is often over-politicized to serve a sinophobic political agenda, rather than depicting Chinese society in a nuanced manner. The coverage of the recent Beijing 2022 Winter Olympics by Western media outlets exemplifies such prejudiced reporting. Eileen Gu is a Chinese American athlete who has been called an ungrateful traitor to her country for representing China in the Winter Olympics. Despite the at least 15 other American athletes who represented non-U.S. countries for the Winter Olympics, Gu was the only one who endured intense scrutiny for her decision. Tucker Carlson commented on Gu’s action, saying “young people do dumb things” and called for a “collective revulsion” of her choice to compete for China. The Economist published an article about Gu titled “Cold Warrior,” paired with a now-deleted graphic of chopsticks lifting the skier into the air.

In addition, Western media has also rushed to draw attention away from the game and hyperfocus on political issues, specifically regarding the mass detention and cultural genocide of Uyghurs. While some activists expressed rightful concerns, most critics attempted to frame this issue of political repression as uniquely Chinese. Uyghur suffering thus becomes a spectacle for Americans to decry oppression in non-Western countries as they dismiss the human rights violations committed by the United States and its allies. Furthermore, those who call for political intervention by the United States must interrogate the sense of American exceptionalism that belies their demand. “The leader of the free world” is not free from its own problems — rather, Americans ought to ask themselves what they can do for the marginalized people in their own community before redirecting their unwanted saviorism toward other parts of the globe. Supporting these media narratives contribute to anti-China biases (which extend beyond people of Chinese origin) that will ultimately harm East/Southeast Asian people in America. 

A year ago in Atlanta, a white man purchased a gun and drove to three Asian-owned spas, where he killed eight people, six of whom were women of Asian descent. Their names were Delaina Ashley Yaun, Paul Andre Michels, Xiaojie Tan and Hyun Jung Grant. Three other victims’ families requested for their deceased loved ones’ names to remain private. During a press conference on the shootings, the sheriff’s captain attributed the shooter’s motive to him having “a really bad day.” Later, it was discovered that the captain also allegedly shared an image of t-shirts via Facebook with the slogan “Covid 19 imported virus from Chy-na” printed on them. 

I write this one year later as the first anniversary of the 2021 Atlanta spa shootings approaches. In the past year, anti-Asian hate crimes have increased by 339% nationwide (even though they are often underreported). In the past two months, Yao Pan Ma, who lost his job as a restaurant worker due to the pandemic, was attacked while pushing a grocery cart of bottles and cans and later passed away in a coma due to his injuries from April 2021; GuiYing Ma, remembered as “outgoing, friendly and kind,” passed away after spending three months in the hospital for getting struck in the head when sweeping a sidewalk; Michelle Alyssa Go just celebrated her 40th birthday the month before she was shoved onto the subway tracks in New York City, an attack which law enforcement officials are claiming to have no underlying racial motivation; Christina Yuna Lee, who “radiated positivity, joy, and love,” was followed to her apartment in Chinatown after her night out with friends and fatally stabbed over 40 times.

Ever since the sharp increase in racially motivated crimes against East/Southeast Asians, I have become more aware of asking my femme-presenting friends of Color to text me when they get home or FaceTime when walking late at night. And as a diasporic Chinese woman who currently resides in the United States, I have been ruminating on how my body is perceived in this country. To be a Chinese woman in the United States is to simultaneously embody a culture, a racial identity, a sexualized fantasy, a threat to be exterminated and a helpless victim to be saved. But when, can we be viewed as humans?

Correction: A previous version of this piece was published without final edits from the Editor-in-Chief. 

MiC Columnist Lola Yang can be reached at lolayang@umich.edu.

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In the fabled “Assassin’s Creed” video game franchise, various protagonists utilize a machine called the Animus to access the memories of their ancestors — assassins from past eras — in a sandbox-like simulation. The Animus proves to be of paramount importance in the plot, enabling users to acquire experience-based skills and knowledge of the past in a truncated time frame. However, prolonged exposure afflicts users with the Bleeding Effect disorder, a debilitating condition that induces the blurring of a user’s consciousness between modern-day reality and the historical repertoire of memories they “re-lived,” which includes hallucinations and psychosis in extreme instances.

Aside from the grim foreshadowings of the metaverse, the Animus’s capabilities encapsulates the intense transformation that first-generation low-income (FGLI) students undergo over the course of obtaining their baccalaureate degree. For FGLI students, a myriad of upper-class experiences — which usually takes an entirety of pre-adulthood timeframe and includes tutors, long-distance trips and abundance of supplies — are attempted to be truncated over the span of their undergraduate years. The college experience might not be as state-of-the-art as the Animus, but it serves as a potent device that catapults FGLI students eons ahead.

No amount of preparation can fully onboard FGLI students. At the onset of college, continuing-generation students are able to hit the ground running with seemingly relative ease, whereas FGLI students have to effectively become sponges that must absorb superfluous amounts of information. The collective set of mannerisms, knowledge and institutional-level awareness related to effectively navigating college — which FGLI students are not fully bequeathed with before stepping foot on campus — is aptly referred to as the Hidden Curriculum. The Hidden Curriculum encompasses content that serves as a guide for continuing-gens that they’re able to comfortably acquire from their robust networks. 

From a place of paucity, it can be overwhelming to be thrust into a plush-upper-class environment where a plethora of resources renders rationing and frugal consumption unnecessary. In the dining halls, dishes of full serving size portions are dumped onto the conveyor belts. Even students with meal plans frequently partake in Michigan’s takeout culture. It can be unsettling to spot hordes of students across campus with a Starbucks drink in hand — as though they were a video game avatar equipped with an infinite amount of Starbucks from their inventory — especially if one grew up on Folgers instant coffee every morning. This general bewilderment with abundance can foment survivor’s guilt in FGLI students, since we are in a lavish environment while our families are stretching every penny back home.

After some passage of time with trial and error, we adapt. Initiating conversations with professors and some peers becomes more fluid, pursuing extracurricular and career opportunities becomes less daunting and navigating the broader college experience becomes more manageable. But the influence of our scrappy upbringings never fully dissipates. As a result, FGLI students frequently express feeling perpetually trapped in a gray area. Too uppity to fit in back home, but too “unpolished” to fit in some college social circles. Dinner talk back home is rudimentary in comparison to discussions on campus, where topics like current events, politics, academia and contemporary culture might initially be esoteric and nebulous.

And so, we must code switch seamlessly as we frequently traverse across spaces between different social classes. The vast spectrum of variations — such as how people conduct themselves and the physical aesthetics of environments — can instill a sense of surrealness that feels as though we have access to endless portals to other dimensions. But much like afflicted Bleeding Effect Animus users, FGLI students will find it hard to compartmentalize and struggle with making sense of their many realities. Much like how the body’s immune system can identify an organ transplant as “foreign” and reject it, our mind attacks and attempts to purge that which does not make sense as we struggle to reconcile the differences between both worlds. 

Internal strife between our different selves begins to brew as our partitions crumble under stress. If one talks too much about seemingly highbrow topics and interests, people back home may think they’re a pompous snob! If one talks too much about professional excursions and pursuits, progressive-left peers may think they’re an evil capitalist! If one talks too much about their scrappy upbringing, snobby peers may think they’re poor! If one talks too much about social justice and activism, conservative-leaning family members may think they’re a socialist! If one talks too much about their unique trips and excursions, modest peers may think they’re a phony hobnobber! In conjunction with other challenges, this feeling of being stuck between multiple worlds is a downward spiral, fostering imposter syndrome and a gradual decline in mental health with cascading effects.

These initial fissures of cultural dissonance can expand into chasms that begin to wreak havoc on the foundation of one’s outlook of the world. A healthy dose of skepticism morphs into cynicism, pessimism and eventually nihilism. Exuberance turns to indifference, passionate demeanor turns into a deadpan attitude. As one’s mental health deteriorates, we desperately try to salvage and preserve it through brute force to the extent that we can still adequately pump out rough problem sets and mediocre essays. Coming from a household with a meager or absent financial portfolio, it can feel as though our most valuable asset is what is between the ears. We’ve been through the worst of the worst, we tell ourselves, to get here. Surely we can rely solely on our self-sufficiency like in times past. We have to: there is no safety net.

One often hears terms like imposter syndrome and survivor’s guilt thrown around in lofty, boilerplate discussions about mental health, but what do these actually entail? Seldom do you hear them enumerated in vivid detail. 

Here’s my attempt: at times, I feel like an aberration, a mutant with a hodgepodge of experiences and perspectives that when put together — at personal first glance — don’t seem to be cohesive in any meaningful way. It can be difficult to convey these struggles. I’m not sure sometimes if I’ve adequately captured some of them in my previous articles. 

There are times when a visceral sense of despair envelops me. Depression accentuates everything in sight with shades of melancholy and etches of sorrow, thereby obfuscating my view of reality no matter how pristine the lenses of my glasses are. I uncontrollably shed tears with no end in sight, desperately hoping to expunge the incessant feelings of inferiority. 

There are times when I feel despondent, unworthy and incapable of absorbing and reciprocating any forms of affection directed my way. While I am seen by others as a prodigious, burgeoning sapling, a severe drought evaporates my creeks of energy, tributaries of passion and pools of motivation — leaving behind a parched mental biosphere. The aridity inhibits and squanders the growth of new memories and connections.

There are times where I feel like a fading rose, plucked away from a lush garden. The petals have shriveled, the leaves have fallen off the stem and vibrant colors and water have since been siphoned off, but the prickly thorns remain. These thorns of obfuscation and self-sabotage materialize in the form of ghosting and shunning those who offer help, shoving away potential deep relationships and giving up on attempts to explain my circumstances to others. Simply put, it feels as though it’s not worth sharing anything.

There are times when my inner voice berates me with unreasonable amounts of scathing self-critiques. I drench myself in layers of viscous self-contempt sludge that promptly hardens, serving as a bulwark that deflects incoming forms of support. I loathe myself for not being able to maintain the self-sufficient generalist, rugged individualist and industrious bootstrapper qualities that American society universally applauds.

There are times where anxiety incapacitates my mind. Much like how Google Chrome is notorious for using a large portion of a computer’s RAM, extraneous thoughts generated by anxiety can occupy considerable chunks of my mental bandwidth. I am hyperware of the disparities across the spaces I am a part of. My mind feels like it is in overdrive, frequently overthinking. Rumination causes thoughts to incessantly bounce inside my head as though they were pinballs. 

There are times when I just become numb to these excruciating thought loops. I trudge forward in a trance-like, autopilot state — wounded, exhausted and malnourished. Hopelessness creeps in along with perturbations of withering away alone in an esoteric, posh environment — barren of anything that resembles my scrappy upbringing. 

What does this misery unfolding look like? Surreptitiously sobbing in irregular bursts, out of sight in a corner at the library, during the wee hours of the morning. Overcome with emotion, my primary method to retain information are attempts to inefficiently pummel content from assigned readings into my head. Feeling like a prole when I am too ashamed to share much about my background, family and story. Self-editing and self-censoring my words to the point that I become numb and silent in social gatherings. I stare at the wall while lying in bed for hours, overwhelmed by intense rumination and feeling as though there are endless unsolvable quandaries.

Apart from my seemingly fractured essence, everything can feel perpetually disjointed as I fall further into the galactic abyss, void of any glimmers of hope. 

The greatest fear — the suffering and sacrifices I made were for naught.

Hopes, a repository of memories, a cumulative set of skills and experiences, the suffering — was it all in vain? What does the distant future hold for FGLI students like myself?

Will I morph into a curmudgeon who adopts a Monroe-Doctrine-esque framework that only entrusts exalted elites with the powers of intervention and authority? Will I transform into a virtue-signaling Nimby who actively boxes out outsiders, who are not reflective of themselves, from their community and purview? Will I indulge and engage in credentialism, schadenfreude and other beliefs rooted in classism, the very same ideals that made me feel inferior and that I detested in my youth? Will I assume various gatekeeper roles, consciously or subconsciously? 

The latter will inevitably occur when I have children who will likely pursue college and inevitably be pitted against other competitive candidates, including future FGLI students. “We may be the first, but we won’t be the last” forebodingly resonates with me. Among the many famous first-generation college graduates, Bill Clinton is perhaps the most prominent. At which point did people designate him as an elite and part of the establishment? As an insider and no longer an outsider? Even for non-politicians, this observation provides some insight for the unique trajectories and positions we will assume, and how others’ perceptions of us will evolve over our lifetimes.

Over the past few years, I have sporadically struggled in having a sense of ownership over my thoughts. Is this really me? It feels as though that with every WSJ article I read, every academic discussion I’ve been in and every professional interaction I’ve partaken in, my working class provenance diminishes and becomes less apparent, both internally and externally. Sometimes I gaslight myself and brush off these individual granular differences as nothing to fret over, but these details in aggregate make social class dissonances too conspicuous to ignore. 

Will I forsake myself and my past?

The answer is an absolute no. As noted earlier, the influence of a FGLI student’s upbringing — from biological incipiency to adulthood — cannot be eradicated since our lived experience is meaningful. In recognition of this, I’m trying to be easier on myself.

There is no one-size-fits-all approach toward mental health maintenance. Perfunctory aphorisms alone are far from sufficient. Improving mental health is an ongoing effort where the liminality between happiness and depression isn’t always apparent. 

Given that taking care of one’s mental health is an ongoing endeavor, an activity I have incorporated into my toolkit, aside from writing, is listening to Rezz and fknsyd, both of whom are EDM producers. Rezz is known for her idiosyncratic discography that is often described as hypnotic and ominous with a mildly sinister vibe, and fknsyd’s ethereal vocals poignantly convey somberness in her music. Their unorthodox, distinct sounds taught me to embrace and appreciate the beauty of darkness. For me, this holistic recognition of darkness helped convert moments of desolation into stepping stones towards moments of greatness and jubilance.  

On this note, FGLI students like myself must each make an assessment on the state of our individual mental health. I have found this task to be cumbersome whenever I am in a rut, but I’ve realized it takes courage to summon the strength to acknowledge poor mental health and subsequently take action — such as seeking professional help, confiding in others, and utilizing other resources — in order to ameliorate ourselves. It is especially important to acknowledge the difficulties that fellow FGLI students encounter — such as the financial costs, societal stigma and lack of support system —  and the mental health tribulations they have greater difficulty in addressing.   

Much like how the protagonists in “Assassin’s Creed” perform leaps of faith, I encourage other FGLI students to cross an additional boundary and to share their FGLI status and slivers of their story toward others they’re comfortable with. In the instances where I have done so, waves of positive reinforcement from others have been euphoric and formative in nature. They have rekindled the warmth and vitality inside me that I thought I lost long ago.

Upward mobility is an outlier outcome, not the norm. We have embarked on a perilous journey, always cognizant of the gravitas associated with upward mobility. As we inevitably assimilate to a social class that is higher than the one we were born into, it is of paramount importance to be kind to yourself and take pride in how far you have come.



MiC Columnist Gustavo Sacramento can be contacted at gsacrame@umich.edu.

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