Opinion

JENNIFER CALFAS

EDITOR IN CHIEF

AARICA MARSH 

and DEREK WOLFE 

EDITORIAL PAGE EDITORS

LEV FACHER

MANAGING EDITOR

420 Maynard St. 

Ann Arbor, MI 48109

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The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com
4 — Friday, April 17, 2015

Claire Bryan, Regan Detwiler, Rabab Jafri, Ben Keller, Payton Luokkala, 

Aarica Marsh, Victoria Noble, Michael Paul, Anna Polumbo-Levy, 

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

Stephanie Trierweiler, Mary Kate Winn, Jenny Wang, Derek Wolfe

EDITORIAL BOARD MEMBERS

O

n April 11, New York Times 
columnist 
David 
Brooks 

wrote a piece called “The 

Moral 
Bucket 

List.” In it, he 
alludes 
to 
the 

unfulfilling 
nature of exter-
nal achievement. 
In other words, 
career 
success, 

recognition 
and 

money 
have 

afforded him little 
depth 
of 
spirit. 

The timing of this 
piece feels oddly perfect in that, as a 
senior embarking upon who knows 
what, I find myself incapable of defin-
ing what I want success to mean. Suc-
cess is subjective, but as we know it, 
it is defined by environment. And I 
can say, having been in a university 
environment for four years, that suc-
cess in this environment is defined in 
terms of external achievement.

I believe that in order to achieve 

personal success, a success defined 
by you and only you, you must dis-
tance yourself from preconceptions, 
from the notion that to be happy is 
to be the best. What I’ll pose now 
is a distillation of life advice I’ve 
absorbed from friends, family, teach-
ers, books and from myself in times 
of needed self-assurance. Hopefully, 
what this compilation of both gener-
ic and what I believe to be original 
advice will do, is remind you that the 
formation of a good and honest self is 
what will aid you in your definition 
of success. And that success, the kind 
that comes from the inside, as Brooks 
suggests, is the kind that makes you 
happy. Maybe not happy as we know 
it, but happy in deeper terms. Happy 
to be living. Worthy of our lives.

1) You are not special.
I have to say, I don’t like this 

one. I’m sure you have heard it 
before and have decided that it 
doesn’t apply to you because you 
are, in fact, special. Well, that’s 
just the point. You are special, 
and so am I, and so is your neigh-
bor, and so is your super annoying 
classmate. We’re all special in our 
own rights, and therefore none of 
us are. Our grandparents’ genera-
tion was taught to think that they 
were just cogs in a machine, and 
we, unlike that generation, have 
been taught to think that sunshine 
comes out of our asses. In the crud-
est of terms, you have to make the 

sunshine spill out of your ass. Spe-
cialness isn’t inherent. Talent can 
be, intelligence certainly is, but it 
doesn’t make one special. Special 
implies that you’re more deserv-
ing, which you aren’t. It’s because 
we have opportunity and live in an 
insulated bubble that we think of 
ourselves as special. But I can say 
from the experience I have had vol-
unteering within prisons, a forgot-
ten place, that the people inside are 
truly special. They are as special as 
my friends, my family — maybe not 
to me but to their own families and 
to themselves.

2) As flies to wanton boys are 

we to th’ gods. They kill us for 
their sport.

Thanks to John Rubadeau for 

introducing me to this quote and to 
William Shakespeare for writing it. 
Its meaning — that life happens for 
no other reason than that it does — 
is something I sit with often. Shitty 
things will happen to us in our lives. 
Shitty things have happened to us. 
But to dwell on those things, to con-
stantly terrorize ourselves over the 
whys, is to miss out on time. All we 
can do is accept our stories, have our 
traumas become parts of our identi-
ties and move on without question-
ing our pasts, rather letting them 
shape us in ways we wouldn’t have 
necessarily imagined for ourselves.

3) Stop feeling guilt over your 

privilege.

This advice is intended for my 

peers in the social justice world who 
so badly want to be good that they in 
fact put themselves and others down 
in the process. Privilege is a buzz-
word of the time, but for good reason 
— it has prompted severe racial and 
social inequalities universally. How-
ever, we have made privilege mean 
something bad, when it by definition 
means advantage. It’s not that we 
should wish to be disadvantaged, but 
rather wish advantages for everyone. 
We therefore don’t need to feel guilt 
about our own situations of privilege, 
constantly putting ourselves and oth-
ers down due to our class and race 
based situations. Rather, we should 
fight for those who don’t have those 
same privileges, so that race and 
class no longer harbor such extreme 
weight. If you are white, you’re 
white. If you come from wealth, you 
did. You can’t relinquish your past or 
your identity because you’re embar-
rassed or guilty. However, you can 
work toward a world in which those 

identities don’t create unjust barriers 
for others.

4) Be alone.
Don’t jump into relationships just 

because. Don’t constantly seek out 
company because you don’t want to 
sit with your own thoughts. Those 
thoughts will be the ones that make 
you understand what you need from 
a partner or a friend. If you don’t 
know yourself before being with 
someone, you’ll never know your-
self. And settling right now is no 
option at all. It’s like the Michigan 
winter causing you to appreciate the 
summer so much more. Being alone, 
at least for some time, will make you 
appreciate the benefits of real love, 
like a beautiful, perfect summer that 
needs waiting for.

5) Don’t define yourself or 

anyone else by the worst thing 
you’ve ever done or the worst 
thing about you. 

Recently, when discussing incar-

ceration with a group of thoughtful, 
kind people, one woman said about 
incarcerated people: “Why are they 
defined by the worst thing they’ve 
ever done? We aren’t.” It was reve-
latory. I have been working with 
incarcerated populations for over 
two years, and I hadn’t been able 
to articulate that thought so suc-
cinctly. It’s revelatory because no 
one should be defined by the worst 
thing they’ve done, and this is 
because we don’t measure ourselves 
by that same standard. We naturally 
define ourselves by our best quali-
ties. But to define others by their 
worst qualities, sometimes a natural 
inclination, is to make the playing 
field uneven. You can’t judge some-
one by their worst qualities and by 
the worst things they’ve ever done 
while judging yourself by your best 
qualities and the best things you’ve 
ever done. Instead, we should define 
ourselves and everyone around us 
by our goodness.

I hope that one of these points 

speaks to just one of you, even if just 
for a moment. These abstract, life-
style choices won’t make you a living 
or find you a passion. But perhaps if 
you follow one of these guidelines, 
intended to quiet the self, you’ll 
start to understand what you define 
as success. And that will give you 
peace, I believe. As it goes, I’m still 
waiting for it, but it’s coming.

— Abby Taskier can be reached 

at ataskier@umich.edu.

Advice on defining your own 
success and quieting the self

ABBY 
TASKIER

“Would you still want to travel to that coun-

try if you could not take your camera with you?”

— a question of appropriation, Nayyirah 

Waheed

You have seen the images and heard the 

stories. You may have liked these posts or 
posted a few statuses of your own. Unbe-
knownst to you, you’re supporting a dehu-
manizing production — the exploitation of 
human narratives, the perpetuation of suf-
fering, the continuation of neo-colonialism — 
the white-savior industrial complex.

I entered a community that was not my 

own without invitation. I “helped” myself to 
the people — bought more kente cloth than 
my bag could hold, ate more jollof than I 
could actually stomach and cried for every 
child I deemed neglected, impoverished or 
underprivileged. I was the unconscious and 
yet unconscionable oppressor; ignorant to the 
way I imposed my beliefs on the community I 
desired to help. I had honest intentions, truly, 
but I didn’t fully understand the history of 
humanitarian aid and development like I do 
now. I am now beginning to see the correla-
tion and resulting parallels between histori-
cal Western aid programs in the Global South 
and my own summer trip.

The staging of voluntourism images is 

reminiscent of colonial photography. Melanie 
Tanielian, a human rights scholar, discussed 
the dangers of colonial images and their 
attempt to convey “the scope of humanitar-
ian activity on the ground.” She argued that 
human aid has turned abstract bodies into 
a nameless source and only particular indi-
viduals have the privilege of being named. 
The same framework is present in images 
uploaded by volunteers. How many uploaded 
photos include the names of all photo partici-
pants? Think of the children who go nameless 
— leaving only their eyes to speak. Why must 
they continue to go unacknowledged? Just 
as Tanielian demonstrated colonial photog-
raphy was no more than a way to “show the 
scope of humanitarian activity, provide facts 
and figures, and fulfill the body count,” the 
voluntourism pictures are harmful, demoral-
izing and full of misplaced sympathies.

There’s a great and urgent need for mil-

lennials to understand the perpetuation 
of damaging and dangerous depictions of 
“African life.” Playing the savior destroys 
the agency and autonomy of those you are 

attempting to help. Carrie Kahn’s NPR 
article, “As Voluntourism Explodes, Who Is 
It Helping Most?” presents an alternative 
perspective. She mentions, “More and more 
Americans are no longer taking a few weeks 
off to suntan and sightsee abroad. Instead 
they’re working in orphanages, building 
schools and teaching English.”

She cites an estimated 1.6 million volunteer 

tourists are spending about $2 billion dollars 
on this new traveling trend. For recent gradu-
ates, the voluntourism industry is great for 
establishing a foundation in aid organiza-
tions and obtaining relevant work experience 
to add to graduate applications and resumes. 
However, servicing a community has to go 
further than temporary fixes and shallow 
promises. Ask yourself, is a five-day, 10-day 
or 14-day trip creating self-sustaining mod-
els of development that can be implemented 
in multiple settings? Furthermore, consider 
the space you occupy and the power you have 
within your assigned tasks. For example, 
when you impose your language on a non-
native speaker or train locals to adminis-
ter medical treatment in a way influenced 
by Western-centric ideals, you’re being an 
aggressor. You are inflating your self-worth 
while simultaneously conflating many of the 
complex problems faced by African nations 
into one singular, problematic image. This 
behavior must stop.

To those who fail to see the voluntourism 

industry’s dangerous connection to neo-colo-
nialism, I offer you this: I was once someone 
who didn’t understand the politics of speech, 
imagery and power in this setting. I was 
naïve — looking to do good, not exactly know-
ing how. Yet, I now adhere to the old saying, 
“Leave something better than you found it.” 
Ron Krabill, author of “American Sentimen-
talism and the Production of Global Citizens”, 
clarifies that, “The White Savior Industrial 
Complex is not about justice. It is about hav-
ing a big emotional experience that validates 
privilege.” Use your privilege to inform oth-
ers of all the joys of Africa, a beautiful con-
tinent of 54 diverse nations, each with a rich 
history and culture. Tell your friends of the 
scenery, weather, music and food. Educate 
them on culture, community and the kind-
ness of strangers. But please, in all that you 
do, leave your camera at home.

Jayla Johnson is an LSA senior. 

JAYLA JOHNSON | VIEWPOINT

Africa isn’t a spectator sport

SAM MYERS | VIEWPOINT

Michael Brown. Eric Garner. Now Walter 

Scott. With yet another instance in which a 
white police officer has killed an unarmed 
Black man, and amid growing concerns about 
racial tensions between citizens and police and 
the Department of Justice’s report that found 
the Ferguson Police Department to be guilty 
of sustaining systemic racism, it is safe to say 
that we have reached a crisis in our country. 
Simply put, on average, we have overwhelm-
ingly white police departments in charge of 
protecting communities of color. But they don’t 
seem to be doing much protecting.

As an undergraduate here, I took courses in 

American history and Black studies primar-
ily. My thesis was on the 1967 Detroit “riot.” 
I put quotation marks around “riot,” because 
my research concluded that the civil unrest 
and violence in 1967 transpired because of 
police agitation and abuse, and longstand-
ing racial divides and hostility between the 
95 percent white department and the more 
than 50 percent Black citizenry. This is a view 
shared by many in the fields of Black studies 
and American (especially Detroit) history. In 
fact, Illinois Gov. Otto Kerner and the other 
10 members of the investigative commission, 
whom President Lyndon Johnson charged 
with understanding the bloody conflict in 
Detroit, initially forwarded this view in 1967. 
The racial divide in Detroit, between the 
white police officers with guns and the Black 
citizens generally without them, was potent 
enough to cause a conflict that resulted in tens 
of deaths and millions of dollars in damage.

The police department in Ferguson is dis-

proportionately white. According to The New 
York Times, the police department in North 
Charleston is 80 percent white while the 
population there is 47 percent Black. Histori-
cally speaking, it is not all that surprising that 
there are instances of extreme violence in 
these places. The fact that this has continued, 
more than 50 years after the Kerner Commis-
sion pointed out this problem, is incredibly 
difficult to stomach.

What are we to do? First, it is probably 

best to have this discussion and to point 
out the consistencies in these police-caused 
conflicts. Hopefully, that can bring about an 
effort to construct police departments that 

more accurately reflect the constituencies 
that they’re intended to protect. Police need 
to be familiar with and respectful of their 
communities — not afraid, like Eric Garner’s 
killers admitted to being. There must be more 
of an emphasis on community policing. But 
second, and because that first movement will 
take a long time to implement (assuming peo-
ple are on board), it is important that we learn 
to assess, criticize and hold accountable our 
police departments.

Evident in the endless acquittals and not-

guilty verdicts in Garner and Brown’s cases 
— don’t forget that George Zimmerman was 
found not guilty — the police simply have too 
much power with too little oversight. And 
really, who can hold the police accountable? 
I’ve had interactions with police, and during 
them all I’ve felt totally powerless and at the 
mercy of someone who clearly felt superior 
and like he had total authority over me. I can 
only imagine what it must be like to be a Black 
man interacting with a white police officer. 
Not only do the police assume authority and 
superiority over Black people — especially 
men — but they assume legal use of lethal 
force with impunity. Walter Scott’s case, for 
which the police officer is charged with mur-
der, is an exception for now — we shall see 
what verdict comes — but there is too much 
evidence on the other hand.

And people continually and unequivocally 

come to the defense of police departments in 
this country, as if they, the ones with guns, 
are the people in danger, and not the people, 
overwhelmingly Black, who are shot and 
killed daily it now seems. Police do take great 
risks in their jobs, but it increasingly seems 
that they are not more at risk than people. 
There are no police for the police, only we, 
the people. If we do not speak up against 
police misdeeds — which are often criminal 
misdeeds — and wrest some of the power that 
they hold, then instances like these will con-
tinue. If they continue, it will not only be a 
blemish in the history of the United States, 
but it will be a piece of evidence in the argu-
ment that our great nation is descending into 
the likes of a police state.

Sam Myers is an LSA senior.

Don’t be afraid to criticize the police

I

lost my last good pair of head-
phones the other day.

I don’t really know where 

they went. At one 
point they were 
in my ears, and 
then in my pocket 
along 
with 
my 

phone and then 
at a later moment 
in neither place. I 
might have kicked 
them under my 
bed accidentally. 
Maybe left them 
somewhere on a table in the Law 
Library. If you’re currently reading 
this while listening to music through 
some black Klipsch earbuds, then 
they are mine and you should prob-
ably give them back to me.

I didn’t even notice I had lost 

them until I stepped outside to walk 
to class, went to go plug the invis-
ible headphones into my phone in 
my sleepless stupor and then real-
ized that my hands were grasping 
at nothing and I should probably 
go to bed before three in the morn-
ing. I had another pair lying around 
somewhere, but they went through 
the wash sometime in the past and 
I wasn’t really in the mood to listen 
to music playing into only my left 
ear. So I embarked on the journey 
to class without anything in my 
ears, and immediately noticed the 
unnerving silence.

I’ve grown up with portable music 

players as a normal part of my life. The 
iPod was released when I was in ele-

mentary school, and I still remember 
standing at my safety guard post at 
the street corner before school listen-
ing in awe on my friend’s new iPod to 
the entire album of Songs About Jane 
as my friend endlessly showed off how 
cool this thing called the click wheel 
was. Ever since then, whenever there 
was some time to be spent traveling 
between two places, or really any time 
spent not directly talking to someone 
else, the space was filled with some 
unnatural soundtrack.

Walking outside without the nor-

mal buffer of headphones is imme-
diately unusual. The sounds are 
different. The entire scene feels dif-
ferent. There’s nothing between me 
and the outside world, no playlist to 
absorb myself into during the trek. I 
watch squirrels scamper around and 
up and down trees as a means to dis-
tract myself, becoming not so differ-
ent from the squirrels themselves.

I get a few blocks before my 

phone vibrates; someone else has 
announced they’re running for presi-
dent. So I pull up the news story 
and walk with my head down while 
crossing a few streets because this is 
Ann Arbor and as a pedestrian I am 
untouchable. And at this moment, 
any type of diversion from the quiet 
walk is better than being forced to 
actually acknowledge the silence.

Silence can be uncomfortable. 

Because on that walk to class with-
out headphones, there is nothing left 
to do but to think. To think of mean-
ingless things like what sandwich 
I’ll order at Jimmy John’s when I get 

sidetracked on my walk to class. Of 
slightly more important things like 
the exam I have later that night I’m 
not sure if I had enough time to study 
for. Of the looming prospects of pre-
paring for whatever life after gradu-
ation might look like. The 15-minute 
walk usually accompanied by explo-
rations of the New Releases section 
of Spotify was quickly replaced with 
more introspective explorations.

The Digital Age, or whatever cli-

ché term is being used to describe it, 
brings with it the consequence that 
such moments are rare. The math stu-
dent in me likens it to statistical noise, 
the random variations that get in the 
way of what is trying to be measured. 
Such is the noise that we have thrown 
into our world, in media and in other 
forms, which prevents us from the 
moments we just get to think. Some-
thing else had to get in the way of the 
usual routine, that being losing my 
headphones, just to find this out.

I never ended up getting a new 

pair of headphones. I never needed 
to. I learned to enjoy the moments, 
the walks, the only time in days not 
filled with studying and meetings 
and occasionally sleep. The space 
in my pocket once used for head-
phones replaced with a rosary, lyrics 
replaced with time of serenity, any-
thing to enjoy the fleeting moments 
of calmness in the life of a college 
student. The silence that was once 
unsettling is no longer so.

— David Harris can be reached 

at daharr@umich.edu.

Silence

DAVID 
HARRIS

Love giving your perspective to others? Want to complement your summer 

internship with something that’s actually cool? Apply to be a summer opinion 

columnist! For more information, e-mail Melissa Scholke at melikaye@umich.edu.

