Wensdy Ferur 5,214/ Th Stteen -iT A w / Weneda, ebuay ,- 01 / Te taemn the writer's notebook: Rethinking Harry Potter by max radwin The University offers a class through the Residential College called "The Trials and Tribulations of Harry Potter." Each fall, its high demand makes the first-year semi- nar one of the hardest to get into. But would you expect any less? After all, it's Harry Potter we're talking about. Like every other kid, I read all seven books in J.K. Rowling's series - and with a surge of passion as I did so. New ones came out in the summer, right around my birthday, so it was always a magical stretch of anticipation and counting down. And when I would finally get my hands onthelatestone, I always read it at a freakishly fast pace. Out of everything I've read, completing "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hollows" is still one of the most strangely vivid memories I panyyouth have of any book. I finished it in my that dawn: backyard on a lawn chair, and when readingbo my eyes ran down to the last page, I who lived: stared at it with a hole in my heart, untouchab thinking, it's actually over. I'll never it a good re get to experience this again. I felt Definitely. 7 +( 1 P1 S p , ' 4 ti J Personal Statement: Naming our dual society by Alex Winnick ILLUSTRATION BY MEGAN MULHOLLAND 7700 hink it does - a realization ed on me as I continued oks beyond that of theboy Harry Potter is not some ly magnificentcreation. Is ad? Sure. Is it a fun read? But I want something nm ewor- sou qps o i 1 Je nenemspoTtinarsp ur *Data co/ected from Business/Insider:. p 0 We like funny things.----^ L ET'S L.OL TOG ET HER,-., F LOW Uas if I was saying goodbye to old friends. It was heartbreaking. And in that moment, like a lot of other read- 4thestatementmag - ers, I thought Harry Potter was one of the best things ever written. That it was the book - or series of books - of our generation. But I was also a dumb kid. COVER BY ALICIA KOVALCHECK & AMY MACKENS Yes, Harry Potter has its place on history's bookshelf, but it does not occupy the space or share the com- more out of the books I crack open and, more generally, from the art I choose to intake. But most readers don't, seem- ingly. Fun is enough for most, which is why books like Harry Potter can transcend their adolescent target audience and reach a large adult readership. Books are like TV now: a distraction, an escape, a place to let your mind go numb at the expense of quality or depth. In that sense, Harry Potter is mind-numbingly good. That's why the series still feels relevant seven years after the publication of. "Deathly Hollows." It's got longev- ity - not that popularity over time implies true excellence (see also: Paris Hilton, or Pitbull, or the soap opera "Days of Our Lives"). The plot is well crafted. It's a complex, mul- tifaceted, generally tidy plot. But there's more to a piece of writing TRATIONS BY MEGAN MULHOLLAND than plot. Rowling doesn't know how to write a good sentence - not just stylistically, but grammatically. Many of her sentences get tangled in themselves and, if you take the time to really look at their construction, don't make much sense. Not to men- tion that they're filled with (unnec- essary) adverbs, the part of speech she should have learned to avoid after completing the first story she ever wrote. But this isn't a critical essay in a literary journal. I can't go through and close-read passages from all seven books to reappraise them in your eyes - plenty of journals have done that already. The larger point stands: If Harry Potter got an entire generation to love reading, what kind of reading did it teach them to love? Did it lower their expectations? Or, let's phrase the question another way: Did it influence kids at this University to enroll in a col- lege-level English class about books geared toward 11-year-olds, but which will be read as if they were for adults? Clearly, it did. There are some questions to which I hope I'll always answer no: "Should we go to Ohio this week- end?" "Do you want these old Creed CDs?" "Have you ever seen a grown man twerk for a dollar?" After walking along South Uni- versity Avenue on a windy and bit- terly cold night last semester, I can now only honestly negate the first two. My answer to the final ques- tion is now yes. Yes, I have wit- nessed a group of cargo-pantsed, Timberland booted, puffy-jacketed boys crowding nearby a homeless man around midnight. Yes, I saw them gleefully pull out their cell phones to record the man as he rest- ed his palms on the freezing side- walk and hoisted his legs against the wall. Yes, I watched them cheer and laugh and applaud the man, hand him a single bill and stampede down the street. Yes, I stood by motionless, stuck in the middle of the crosswalk. I don't know the details of the videotaping - who suggested it, how and why they found it amus- ing or what they did with the video afterward. I don't know who the boys were, or how and why they decided to publicly humili- ate a homeless man. I do know the grown man, a street vendor who works for Groundcover News, a local non-profit. Groundcover employs members of the homeless community to sell its self-published monthly newspaper. It is a smart organization that offers its employ- ees the opportunity to take owner- ship of their efforts to find stable employment and functional hous- ing. This man's primary occupa- tion is to sell newspapers at a dollar apiece and he relies on his fellow community members to invest in his product. I don't know if these boys were familiar with Ground- cover and what it stands for. I do know that this man was Black, and I do know that the videotaping boys were not. In Paulo Freire's book Pedagogy of the Oppressed, he argues that in order to address our problems, we must first acknowledge and understand them - that to name the world is to change the world. In a recent lecture at Harvard, The Atlantic's Ta-Nehisi Coates has done just that. He has named our world as a dual society, one in which Black Americans are - systemically and purposefully - economically, socially and physically segregated from white Americans. Coates uses the phrase "a second society" to describe the ways in which the two worlds are kept deliberately sepa- rate: Black America underneath White America. This, I believe, is the sentiment toward which count- less recent Michigan Daily editori- als and articles have been reaching. This, I believe, explains Theta Xi's World Star party, and the appall- ing racial statistics that define our student body. This, I believe, fosters an environment in which boys find it socially acceptable, and emotion- ally profitable, to degrade a home- less man. Recognizing a dual soci- ety requires us to do more than acknowledgingsystemic racism. Accepting Coates' diagno- sis means truly examining every aspect of our society and deter- mining the ways in which we have created a second society. It means identifying how, when and where You ravaged it for a 30-second video this second society manifests in our and some laughs. daily lives. For instance, I recognize This behavior cannot be tolerated that only in a dual society could a any longer. We are stuck in a cycle group of college students possibly of offenses and warnings, without justify their decision to culturally ever taking action to eradicate the and socially demean an impover- underlying insensitive impetuses, ished Black man. I recognize the or unravel the dual society. The ways in which my failure to inter- deaths of Jordan Davis, Jonathan vene helped perpetuate and exacer- Ferrell and Trayvon Martin attest bate this dual society. to this pattern. On our campus, No matter what sort of mob-men- Theta Xi's party and the Da'Quan tality, peer-pressured concoction videos remind us there are no effec- of rationale justified their actions, tive consequences to racist conduct, what that group of boys did is inex- even when it mocks and insults the cusable. Even though the vendor already underrepresented minori- obliged their request - even if he, in ties of ourstudent body. We will con- fact, proposed it - what they did is tinue to exist in this dual society, in inexcusable. this cycle, until we realize each one As I walked away from that of us implicated. You are responsible crosswalk, stunned, guilty and and I am responsible. I failed when angry, I gravitated toward this sim- : did not intervene the other night. ple idea. Their actions were simply We all fail when we tolerate any rac- wrong. They were degrading, juve- ist, sexist, homophobic or otherwise nile, repulsive, insulting, racist and discriminatory treatment. humiliating and they were wrong. It becomes a matter of communi- Above all, it was not in the least ty. Somewhere along the lines these bit funny. Yet all of the boys were boys discovered that their com- laughing. munity was built on a dual society. I walked away with words of They found out that there are no anger towards the unfamiliar boys: penalties for racist behavior - that Neither you nor I know what it is cultural exploitation is encouraged, like to be homeless. Neither you nor even socially rewarded. If we want I know what it is like to be Black in to dismantle the dual society, we America. But if you can find a spare need to modify our community. We moment between your debasement need to ensure that our community of the homeless, I hope you consider does not value this type of conduct. the idea that this man may have We need to identify and elimi- slept outside in the cold 20 degree sate the ways in which we create a weather that night. Consider that iwo-tiered society, and in the daily he spends most waking hours on the removal of these norms, in the con- sidewalks advertising a newspaper tinuous reflection and the constant that might be his one shot at social modification, learn to merge into mobility. Consider that you took one even society. this modest, humble, simple motion It begins with moments of inac- toward equality and you abused it. tion and moments of action. It begins with recognizing the more nuanced aspects of our lives that lead to the creation of separate soci- eties, and taking action to reverse the trends. It begins with naming the world. For me and other white students at the University, understanding and supporting the #BBUM move- ment is only the first step. Next comes identifying the dual society-.ow and disagreeing with it, saying, "I don't want to exist in two societ- ies, especially if I'm unfairly and disproportionally benefiting from it." It means examining my place in America's primary society to see if and how I am implicated in creat- ing the circumstances rendering #BBUM. necessary. Asking myself questions over and over. Why have I never felt the way these students do? In what ways have I benefited from being a white American at this school? How can I ensure equal treatment for every student? It would be a lie to say that the University acts as a pioneer in this endeavor. Until we modifyour com- munity, until we serve as a model for naming our injustices and act- ing in ways to rightthem, we are not leaders and we are not the best. We are not victors. Until then, our com- munity is behind. Comedian Aziz Ansari has a joke he tells about how Coldstone employees have to sing every time they receive a tip. He's astonished at how degradingthisis, and argues that not even a bum on the street would stoop so low as to sing for a nickel. Apparently in Ann Arbor, we'll ask them to twerk for a dollar. Alex Winnick is anLSA junior.