Opinion

JENNIFER CALFAS

EDITOR IN CHIEF

AARICA MARSH 

and DEREK WOLFE 

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The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com
4 —Friday, February 13, 2015

Claire Bryan, Regan Detwiler, Aarica Marsh, Victoria Noble, Michael Paul, 

Allison Raeck, Melissa Scholke, Michael Schramm, Matthew Seligman, 

Linh Vu, Mary Kate Winn, Jenny Wang, Derek Wolfe

EDITORIAL BOARD MEMBERS

I

n Cuba, the walls of buildings are often 
only partially painted. There are swaths 
of yellows, pinks and blues before they 

taper off to reveal cold, 
blank chunks of stucco and 
stone. The unfinished aes-
thetic extends far beyond 
the paint jobs. It’s seen in 
the houses that haven’t 
changed since 1959 and 
the holes of the chalk-
boards that lie tilted on 
the walls of a University of 
 

Havana classroom.

Driving 
along 
the 

Malecón, 
the 
oceanside 

promenade that stretches 
along the coast for miles, 
one sees the silhouette of 
tall buildings — spread apart, dark and empty. 
There are no recognizable signs or shimmer-
ing lights along doorframes — just old, faded 
architecture on one side and the ocean erod-
ing a stone barrier on the other. The vision, 
written out, sounds bleak. But it’s beautiful 
for what it is — its hollowness, its singularity, 
its antiquity. It’s free from becoming a string 
of shops that all look the same, sell the same 
things and discontinue a culture dedicated to 
the scarcity of materialism.

My grandmother, originally from Roma-

nia, grew up in Mexico. Escaping the Nazis 
during World War II, she and her family 
moved from Bucharest to Paris to the south 
of France to Mexico City, where she lived 
until her studies brought her to the United 
States. Before she died, she wrote a collection 
of memoirs for her grandchildren — bound 
together in a spiral notebook consisting of 
150 pages.

When she writes about her adolescence 

spent in Mexico, she mentions the colors, 
the warmth, the dogs and cats and birds that 
nested themselves within her home. She writes 
about the city of fishermen, the beautiful, clear 
ocean from which they fished and the small 
group of cliff divers, known only by the locals. 
One would never guess that the city which 
she describes — idyllic and quaint — is in 
fact Acapulco, presently bustling with spring 
breakers, cheap hotels and A-line restaurants.

In her memoir, my grandmother men-

tions that she returned to Mexico City with 
my grandfather 30 years after leaving the 
country, only to be greeted by air thickened 
by fumes, severe economic disparity and the 
disturbing implications of tourism and time. 
She vowed never to go back after that, and 
never did.

When I returned home from Havana in 

May of 2014, after having studied there for 
four months, I had dreams about the embargo 
being lifted. I imagined that during the 2016 
presidential election, Hillary Clinton would 
win, would somehow make Congress lift the 
embargo and I’d go back to Cuba. I thought 
of how my Cuban friends and then-boyfriend, 
Alberto, would fare in a new Cuba — one 
that was no longer avoided by the free world. 
When I lived there, the majority of problems 
plaguing my friends were those associated 
with the economy — shortages, rations, the 
general lack of money — and ironically, the 
reason we were all probably friends in the first 
place. At the time, I hated the embargo, and I 
hated socialism even more, because in order 
to maintain a participatory workforce, it held 
those who I loved on the island captive.

After a formative four months, I came back 

to America and time went by. I went back to 
throwing all of my waste in the trashcan as 
opposed to reusing it, going to the grocery 
store only to let my tomatoes go bad a week 
later, shopping for T-shirts I’d wear three 
times. Back in Cuba, Alberto had two shirts 
and one pair of pants that he washed with a 
bar of soap and a bucket of water every few 
days. When in Cuba, I resented the system 
that made dispensability impossible. But back 
in America, once the small and painful daily 
realities of Cuban life faded away from my 
consciousness, I began to reestablish my faith 
in the functionality of socialism.

In the fall, I took a class on Latin American 

Revolutions, and when we studied the Cuban 
Revolution I thought, Damn. Che and Castro 
accomplished some serious shit. They made 
the country, previously rife with inequality, 
socialist within a matter of years. But my new 
opinions, formulated within an academic 
context, negated ones I’d formed while actu-
ally living amongst socialism — that humans 
are inherently too selfish, too individualistic, 
not to crave economic progress. That aside 

Cuba’s hollow beauty

O

n Feb. 8, Central Student Government President Bobby 
Dishell, a Public Policy senior, announced the creation of a 
task force to develop a student honor code for the University. 

This new code would serve as an addition to the University’s pre-
existing Statement of Student Rights and Responsibilities with 
the goal of addressing academic integrity, individual behavior and 
student rights. While attempting to put the University community’s 
values in writing is a commendable effort, the creation of a new 
honor code is a misguided attempt to influence the behavior of 
students at the University.

Released in 1996, the Statement of Student 

Rights and Responsibilities incorporates 
aspects 
of 
“civility, 
dignity, 
diversity, 

education, equality, freedom, honesty, and 
safety” into its objective. It informs students 
on acceptable behaviors that the University 
values and the actions taken if they are 
violated. The final chapter of the Statement 
also provides sanctions and intervention 
plans for violations of any of its standards

In the press release, Dishell stated, 

“The aim of the task force, and eventually 
the honor code, will be to encourage and 
motivate students to hold ourselves to a 
higher standard.” He added, “Currently, 
there is not one place where students can 
turn to in order to know what our community 
stands for.” Since it is commonplace for 
large institutions to implement a wide-scale 
honor code, something the University is 
lacking, developing this code is worthwhile. 
However, it is naïve to believe a new honor 
code will achieve what Dishell hopes. A brief 
written statement on its own will simply not 
be successful in motivating positive behavior 
across campus.

If CSG is serious about taking steps to 

improve campus behavior, it should focus 
on more tangible initiatives. CSG should 
begin by convening forums throughout 
the year for student organizations that 

receive funding through CSG to facilitate 
open dialogue and discussion on positive 
behaviors. 
Participation 
in 
this 
forum 

should be mandatory, and in order to ensure 
members of the 1,000-plus organizations 
attend, yearly CSG funding totaling more 
than $300,000 should be withheld until 
they actively participate. By doing so, the 
student population that is involved in 
clubs will be directly engaging with the 
goals of the Statement and honor code. The 
generation of open dialogue within clubs 
will increase social pressure and incentivize 
students to abide by and respect the honor 
code and Statement. This plan of action will 
undoubtedly be more effective than having 
another document to read that will ultimately 
be tossed aside. And for those not involved 
in student organizations, the honor code 
should be heavily advertised and promoted 
around campus.

CSG must also address which social factors 

hinder the current ideals of the Statement 
from being integrated into students’ conduct 
on and off campus. By bringing relevancy, 
value and respect to the honor code through 
open dialogue, peer-led discussions and group 
intermediaries, CSG can impact the social 
atmosphere from which these behaviors stem 
and generate positive relationships between 
students and the honor code proactively.

A few weeks after 9/11, I remember 

walking 
down 
the 
playground 

with my best friends, Maureen and 
Kathleen, after a tiring day of first-
grade arithmetic and grammar.

I was a timid, skinny six-year 

old with large brown eyes and silky 
black hair cut to my shoulders; my 
only thoughts must have been about 
what food will be served during 
lunch, the latest episode of Arthur 
and my newborn sister.

As we walked, I remember sens-

ing Maureen and Kathleen being 
standoffish. I remember them walk-
ing a few steps in front of me, whis-
pering to each other and looking 
back at me.

As the three of us convened in 

our usual hangout under the slide 
and behind the monkey bars, I qui-
etly asked what was wrong. The two 
looked at each other, and then Mau-
reen, her usually gentle blue eyes 
glaring at me behind her glasses, 
her usually pale cheeks and ears 
a soft pink in the September chill, 
spat, “Allana, it was your people that 
killed everyone in New York.”

I don’t remember the exact 

events of what followed, but I do 
remember my vision going dark. I 
remember looking around the play-
ground and not seeing colors, only 
seeing the trees and sky in different 
shades of gray.

According to my father and faint 

memories, I cried throughout the 
rest of the day. Unable to articulate 
my shame and fear, and already 
over-sensitive, I took to quietly 
sobbing into my sleeve and sitting 
away from my peers, perhaps fear-
ing retaliation from the rest of the 
class, perhaps scared I would hurt 
one of them, too.

My teacher took me aside during 

class and asked me what was wrong. 
Repeatedly she asked, and I only 
responded with more furious cry-
ing. Exasperated, she sent me to the 
principal’s office and called my dad.

When he arrived, I quickly 

recalled what had happened as the 
tears continued to fall down my 
face. He went to go tell my teacher, 
and they both agreed to devote the 
last 20 minutes of the day explain-
ing to the group of first graders 
how not all Muslims are killers, 
how Islam is not synonymous with 
terror. Maureen apologized to me 
after class.

* * *
Years had gone by. Almost rou-

tinely we would hear stories from 
relatives, 
friends 
of 
relatives, 

friends of friends on their various 
Islamophobic attacks. One eve-
ning, my father told the story of my 
teenage cousins being taunted and 
assaulted by their neighbors while 
playing basketball outside; another 
day, my mother recounted how our 
mosque had been vandalized and 
racial slurs painted on the walls; 
soon after, my grandmother called 
my parents anxiously revealing that 
my uncle had been detained while 
visiting Chicago.

We were coming back from a fam-

ily vacation in Mexico. I aged about 
three years, but remained shy and 
gangly. My sister was now a ram-
bunctious toddler and my brother 
walked hand in hand with my mom.

As my family and I slowly made 

our way through the painfully long 

line in immigration, tired and hun-
gry from being on a plane for six 
hours, we ached to go home. Finally 
our turn had come, and we made 
our way to the singular glass booth 
where a large white man, balding 
and barely squeezing into his baby-
blue TSA button down, meticulously 
watched us approach.

He took our passports and began 

to analyze. We stood in front of the 
booth as three, four, five families 
behind us in line had been approved 
by other officers and went to 
retrieve their luggage. My mother’s 
arms grew tired carrying the weight 
of my sister.

More agents arrived at our cubicle. 

They looked over my father’s pass-
port, scrutinizing the profile of his 
tan skin and black mustache.

Without giving reason, they took 

us aside and said we needed to stay 
here a little bit longer than usual. I’m 
sure they assumed our dark hair and 
complexion, my parents’ accented 
English, and our last name “Akhtar” 
were reason enough for suspicion.

I then watched as my father, the 

top of all of his classes in high school 
and college, the first in our family 
to become a doctor, the owner of a 
thriving private practice devoted to 
treating patients with cancer and 
leukemia, lead away from us to be 
interrogated for suspected terrorism.

I remember my mom trying to 

pacify my agitated siblings while 
waiting patiently to hear back from 
the TSA. We sat on the floor of the 
airport (they did not offer us chairs), 
under the imperious gaze of a self-
proclaimed 
Homeland 
Security 

agent (didn’t he understand that this 
was my homeland, too?).

An officer returned with our lug-

gage. Immediately, he and his friend 
broke the locks and unpacked every 
item inside the bags. I watched a 
strange man pick apart the items 
in our luggage that my mother 
painstakingly organized for days; 
I watched his gloved hands touch 
her undergarments; I watched the 
others at the airport look over at us 
as they walked past, like we were a 
roadside accident or a circus act.

I watched in rage as they laughed 

amongst themselves, ignorant to 
the ostracism and humiliation of 
my family. Their decision to racial 
profile was thoughtless and I’m 
sure they forgot about it soon after, 
yet they will never know the years 
and years of shame and embarrass-
ment this inflicted on me.

Eventually my father returned, 

his search proving null and our lug-
gage of bathing suits and sunscreen 
verified as bomb-free. We returned 
home, my mother made us scram-
bled eggs, and we went to sleep.

* * *
Now I am almost 20 years old, no 

longer as gangly yet still timid.

As I watched stories unfold 

reporting the uptick in anti-Mus-
lim hate crimes after the Charlie 
Hebdo shooting in Paris, the surge 
in online threats upon the release of 
Clint Eastwood’s “American Snip-
er” and, perhaps most haunting, the 
killing of three Muslim-Americans 
in North Carolina, these memories 
of mine resurface and I am forced 
to reconcile the profound and last-
ing effects my exposure to Islamo-
phobia had on me.

Some of my most prized child-

hood memories have to do with my 
Pakistani-Muslim identity: putting 
henna on my palms with my cousin 
on the stairs of her condo for Eid, 
visiting my grandparents’ house in 
Pakistan and making roti with their 
housekeepers, and praying maghrib 
alongside my father every evening 
when he came back from work.

However, after 9/11 and into my 

adolescence, I turned my back on 
these features of my life that I felt 
separated me from everybody else. 
I yearned to escape from the endur-
ing shame after being told “my 
people” killed nearly 3,000 lives. I 
ached to forget the humiliation of 
having to sit on an airport floor for 
four hours because my dad’s skin 
was too brown.

I detested my parents’ strict “no 

dating, no sleepovers, no alcohol” 
policy. I hid the fact I volunteered 
at my mosque every Sunday from 
my peers and soon stopped going 
when I no longer wanted to associ-
ate with religion. I cringed at my 
mother’s thick Pakistani accent 
when she would speak to my teach-
ers, or the clothes she bought me 
that would cover up my legs and 
arms even in the summer.

With these instances of reject-

ing my culture, I blamed Islam for 
my own sense of estrangement in 
school and society. I felt that by 
following the culture of my peers, 
these instances of discrimination 
would cease to exist and that I could 
finally feel accepted. I thought that 
if I could use makeup to lighten my 
skin, wear more revealing clothing 
and party more often, I would stop 
feeling like the only brown girl in 
the room and being seen as such.

And now, with the onset of these 

larger attacks demonstrating the 
existing prejudice people harbor 
against my identity, I continue to 
struggle with trying to reconcile 
with my feelings of self-hate. How 
am I supposed to love my identity 
when people exist who vehemently 
express their rejection of it? How 
can I stop feeling like an “other,” 
like an outsider, when I’m constant-
ly being viewed as one?

The truth is I haven’t yet 

embraced my identity. I still feel 
the need to use an American accent 
when I pronounce my last name and 
disassociate myself from the larger 
Pakistani-Muslim community.

However, I hope that maybe 

through expressing my feelings of 
estrangement, I will one day be able 
to come to terms with the skin and 
heritage I was born with.

For me, the worst part about 

hearing of these racist attacks 
is knowing they will give rise to 
another generation of ashamed 
Muslim boys and girls, who too will 
cry years later at the humiliation of 
being stopped at an airport.

I hope through sharing these 

memories I can reach out to other 
outsiders who suffer similarly from 
Islamophobia. In sharing these 
memories, I hope I can receive 
guidance from others on how to 
fight my persisting shame, or so 
that we may help each other learn 
to stop hating ourselves.

Allana Akhter is an LSA sophomore 

and a Daily Staff Reporter.

An ineffective effort 

New honor code will not alone change student actions

ALLANA AKHTAR | MICHIGAN IN COLOR

“Your people”

from an aesthetic standpoint — 
one that favors a highly primitive, 
untouched visage — business that 
brings money and people and new 
life is needed.

Ironically, I found out that the 

United States would be restoring its 
relationship with Cuba during the 
final exam for my Latin American 
Revolutions course. During the last 
10 minutes, my professor rose up 
out of her seat, smiling, and on the 
chalkboard wrote giddily — “Obama 
has just restored diplomatic relations 
with Cuba.” I read this, scribbled 
down a few concluding sentences to 
an essay question, shoved the exam 
onto her desk, left the room and 
cried. That night I called Alberto on 
the phone — in the moment it was 
worth the million dollars a minute it 
costs to speak overseas to Cuba.

¿Como te sientes sobre todo? “How 

do you feel about all this?” I asked. 
Bien. “Fine,” he answered. “Listen, 
my love. Can you send some money?”

His apathy spoke mountains of 

truth — despite the exciting pros-
pect of dismantling an oppressive 

55-year-long 
blockade, 
Cubans 

aren’t going to see the positive 
implications for a while. The only 
people who’ll be benefitting now 
will be the travelers ooh-ing and 
ah-ing at 1950s-era cars. Until the 
embargo is, in fact, lifted, life for 
Cubans will remain the same — 
stagnant, poor, hopeless. Alberto 
will continue to ask me for money as 
he often does. What the opening up 
of Cuba will do, I fear, is the same 
thing that happens to all cities and 
countries that are overly accepting 
of the tourist’s dollar. Havana, I 
fear, will become to me what Mexi-
co City and Acapulco became to my 
grandmother — unrecognizable.

Scrolling through my Facebook 

newsfeed the other day, I saw 
pictures of a Cuba backdrop, clearly 
intended as a party theme, with a 
girl sitting in a beach chair, drinking 
out of a straw, captioned, “welcome 
to Cuba.” I shut my computer.

As my friend would say, “the hip-

ster reason” for my anxiety about 
Cuba’s future is in part due to the 
fact that everyone will soon be able 

to travel to the place that made me, 
me. For a week, they’ll lounge on 
beach chairs, drink out of coconuts 
and spin on dance floors with Cuban 
swingers at a salsa club. But, as tour-
ists, they won’t necessarily begin to 
understand the deep cultural, politi-
cal and anti-imperialistic history 
that cloaks the small and beautiful 
nation. Then, when more people 
visit for a week, everything — down 
to the coconuts — will get more 
expensive. It will create greater dis-
parity between Cuban citizens and 
tourists; it will convert it into the 
next Dominican Republic.

I drift between different lines of 

thought. This is what Alberto would 
want, I think to myself. This is what 
they need. But this validates that 
perfect socialism isn’t attainable 
there — a concept I’m reluctant to 
admit but finally do. Still, I hope 
that the hollow beauty along the 
Malecón remains the same. But I 
know it won’t.

— Abby Taskier can be reached 

at ataskier@umich.edu.

ABBY 
TASKIER

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