Opinion

SHOHAM GEVA
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CLAIRE BRYAN 

AND REGAN DETWILER 
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MANAGING EDITOR

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The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com
4A — Wednesday, January 6, 2016

Claire Bryan, Regan Detwiler, Caitlin Heenan, Ben Keller, Minsoo Kim, 

Payton Luokkala, Aarica Marsh, Anna Polumbo-Levy, Jason Rowland, Lauren 
Schandevel, Melissa Scholke, Rebecca Tarnopol, Ashley Tjhung, Stephanie 

Trierweiler, Mary Kate Winn, Derek Wolfe

EDITORIAL BOARD MEMBERS

W

hen she was 10 or so, my little 
sister received some of the worst 
advice of her life. It was written 

in the comments section 
of her fifth-grade report 
card underneath the part 
that graded her behavior 
in class. I can’t remember 
exactly what the grade 
was grading — probably 
something 
meaningless 

like hyperactivity — but 
I do remember that she 
had received her first “N” 
for “needs work,” with 
the suggestion that she 
“ask fewer questions.” I 
remember her sitting in our kitchen sobbing 
to our parents about, for the first time ever, 
getting something less than straight “Os” (for 
outstanding). She was miserable. And now, on 
behalf of my little sister almost 11 years later, 
I want to take a moment to call out you, Mrs. 
Michnick, for giving utterly terrible advice to a 
young learner. 

Though I never received this damning cri-

tique myself, it very well could have been writ-
ten on my report card, too. Just like my little 
sister, I love asking questions, and in elemen-
tary school, I never had any shame about it. 
Looking back, I can see now how my enthu-
siasm could have come across as borderline 
obnoxious — I also received an “N” from Mrs. 
Michnick with a similar suggestion to calm 
down. It’s true that in class, I would bounce in 
my seat with my small legs tucked underneath 
me, almost like a bird perched on a branch so 
my hand would reach slightly higher than my 
classmates’ and be more visible to the teacher. I 
knew I was over-eager, but in my mind, staying 
quiet simply didn’t make sense. Not because I 
liked to hear my own voice or because I wanted 
to prove that I was smarter than my peers. I just 
knew I loved to learn and asking questions was 
a sure way to do so. 

As I got older, I (thankfully) got a better grasp 

on the etiquette of asking questions in the class-
room. I understood that simply raising a hand 
wasn’t quite as unobtrusive as I had thought 
and that not all questions should be asked in 
front of the class. But perhaps most important-
ly, I gained a newfound sense of urgency and 
assertiveness in my inquiries. I began to ask 
questions that pushed beyond clarification. I 
became more skeptical, stopped blindly accept-
ing all the material taught to me as unequivo-
cally true, and began directly addressing 
material I found troubling or inconsistent. In 
my unapologetic quest for knowledge, I eventu-
ally found that the subject in which I had the 
most questions — compelling ones that would 
follow me outside the classroom and stay with 
me, gnawing until I could begin to search for 
some semblance of an answer — was history.

I understood that lobbying too many critical 

questions in front of the class could be seen as 
an affront to my teacher’s credibility, so I saved 
my bravest questions for outside the classroom. 
Throughout middle school, I would visit my 
favorite history teachers during my lunch 

period to ask more exploratory questions that I 
had jotted down in my notebook earlier in class. 
In seventh-grade world history, I asked about 
the Incans’ ability to develop a complex society 
without the wheel. In eighth-grade U.S. history, 
I questioned Thomas Jefferson’s inconsistency 
as a slave owner who supposedly believed “all 
men are created equal.” By the end of middle 
school, I realized that studying history does not 
mean memorizing a rigid linear narrative com-
posed of names, numbers and dates. Instead, I 
realized studying history means asking ques-
tions — particularly thoughtful criticisms of the 
past — and then devouring as many sources as 
possible to weave together a plausible answer. 
By the time I graduated middle school, I knew 
I would study history in college because it 
allowed me to ask as many questions as I wanted. 

But after I entered high school, something 

changed. To be sure, I still asked questions 
— just not as many as I used to, and the fierce 
unapologetic nature in which I used to inquire 
had faded. Maybe it was part of growing up, 
of becoming more self-conscious and insecure 
of my nerdy status in the eyes of my peers. 
Whatever it was, it fundamentally affected 
my confidence in the classroom, and I began 
to apologize. I apologized because I felt like I 
was interrupting and drawing unnecessary 
attention to myself. I apologized because my 
voice was too quiet or too loud, or because I 
thought my question was stupid. Sometimes, I 
would even start a question with, “I know this 
is dumb, but…”

I know I’m not the only woman who does 

it, and this tick, though innocuous on the sur-
face, reflects deeper feminine insecurities and 
feelings of inferiority. An unnecessary apology 
before a question immediately undermines the 
validity of the question before it has even been 
asked and surely impacts young women’s abili-
ties to be assertive both inside and outside the 
classroom.

I knew that apologizing before asking ques-

tions was not a natural behavior for me, but a 
learned one. However, I continued to apologize 
my way out of the classroom until one of my 
favorite history professors abruptly drew my 
attention to the habit this past semester. On the 
first day of school, after raising my hand and 
inevitably beginning with “Sorry,” she sharp-
ly cut me off in front of the whole class and 
demanded that I ask the question again — this 
time, sans apology. My face burned, but I knew 
she was completely right.

As I enter my last semester at Michigan, I’m 

pledging to try as hard as I can to stop apolo-
gizing before asking a question and to work on 
rebuilding my confidence in the classroom to 
what it was before I hit puberty. After all, ask-
ing questions is the best (and only) way to learn.

Before I walk into the first day of class, I’ll 

remind myself of a piece of good advice doled 
out by Mr. Melendez, the other fifth-grade 
teacher who taught alongside Mrs. Michnick: 
“There are no stupid questions. Just stupid peo-
ple who don’t ask questions.”

— Anne Katz can be reached 

at amkatz@umich.edu.

Keep asking questions

Reading to read

F

all semester of sophomore 
year, I was feeling pretty 
good about how things were 

going. I had finally finished my first 
round of required art studios, and 
had moved on to elective academics 
on 
Central 

Campus, a totally 
new world. I was 
both 
enthused 

and unsure about 
the 
workload, 

but ready to roll 
with it.

Then, 
at 
a 

mass 
meeting 

sometime in the 
first or second 
week of classes, 
I mentioned all 
the reading I had been assigned to 
a girl just starting her junior year. 
“It’s so interesting,” I told her, 
and meant it. She responded in 
kind, and then said in an off-hand 
way how she skimmed those very 
reading assignments I was just 
learning to love.

I tried not to show it, but I was 

both shocked and disappointed 
by 
her 
words. 
To 
hear 
an 

upperclassman, a student with 
a whole year more experience 
than me, dismissing her assigned 
reading so easily — it stung, 
especially since I’d made my mind 
up well before that conversation to 
read everything that was set before 
me, at least to the best of my ability. 
It hadn’t been a decision so much 
as it was a lifestyle choice — simply 
who I am. Reading — anything and 
everything — is just something I do. 
From the backs of snack packages 
to the copyright pages of books, I 
linger. I look. I do more than flip 
past the words to take in a general 
sense of their message. So when I 
walked away from that conversation 
sophomore year, I took it as a sort of 

dare. Skim, me? Hardly. I was going 
to ready everything I was given, 
word for word.

In a 2013 USA Today College 

article, 
Princeton 
undergrad 

Prianka Misra shares a similar 
stance toward reading. “I struggled 
with the idea of reading insincerely,” 
she says in the interview. “I actually 
want to be able to understand … 
but when you’re skimming you 
can’t really do that. You’re really 
just looking at the core points of 
an article and not really taking a 
greater in-depth look.”

To be fair, the workload of a 

200-level course at Princeton is 
probably a bit different than what 
I’ve 
experienced 
in 
200-level 

courses here at Michigan. I’m not 
sure I could read 200 pages for a 
class each week, word-for-word 
and diagram-for-diagram, the way 
Misra does. And even she admits 
that after a couple of years, the 
novelty she found in that kind of 
work ethic has started wearing 
off. “I can’t really afford to try to 
analyze a point if we’re not going 
to spend more than 10 minutes on 
it [in class],” she says. However, 
in favor of doing a full read, she 
believes “there is value to being 
able to summarize something, but 
there is also value to nitpicking and 
finding the small points you really 
take issue with or keenly going over 
each and every part of something 
for 
a 
more 
comprehensive 

understanding.”

Now a junior myself, I’m of 

the same mindset I was in at the 
beginning 
of 
sophomore 
year, 

but with a few more semesters of 
reading all the readings behind me. 
A couple of times, I even went so far 
as to continue reading from a book 
outside of class, simply because it 
was too interesting to put down 
until I reached the end. I’m not 

the kind of person who highlights 
passages or pauses to write out 
chapter summaries once I’m done 
with them and, unlike Misra, I 
don’t try to analyze the text as I 
go. But for the most part, I enjoy 
the process of reading, and what I 
can’t understand is when people 
simply don’t read. Not for classes, 
not for pleasure — among my 
friends and peers, many shirk the 
effort it takes to open the pages of 
a book and fall into the world held 
in place between them. This, to me, 
is crazy. For me, reading is what 
makes life interesting, and it never 
ends — there’s no shortage of new 
bestsellers, books made famous by 
their movie adaptations, and, oh 
yeah, assigned academic texts to 
lose myself in.

I’ll be the first to admit that 

sometimes doing the reading can be 
a little long-winded — sometimes 
it drags. Once in a while, other 
tasks call my name just a little too 
loudly to be ignored in favor of the 
reading I’ve been given. But what I 
love about reading these assigned 
pieces is that the time I spend on 
the task never feels wasted. Sure, 
sometimes I disagree with what an 
author’s saying, but isn’t that also a 
part of college — for our eyes to be 
opened up to new opinions? If so, 
this is one of the places I find it — 
chipping away at my reading in big 
chunks or little-by-little, on the 
bus, over meals, between classes. 
There’s nothing quite as satisfying 
as checking off each assigned 
chapter on my syllabus. And there’s 
no feeling quite like curling up 
with a good book — assigned or 
otherwise.

— Susan LaMoreaux can be 

reached at susanpl@umich.edu.

SUSAN 

LAMOREAUX

ANNE 
KATZ

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Monetizing Detroit’s culture

T

he day after Christmas, I 
took a trip with a couple 
of 
friends 
to 
Midtown 

in Detroit. We spent an hour at 
the 
Detroit 

Historical 
Museum 
— 

worth a visit, I 
should 
add 
— 

and 
when 
we 

finished walking 
through the late 
19th 
century 

replica town on 
the 
basement 

floor, we drove 
over to Traffic 
Jam and Snug for 
lunch.

Located on Second and Canfield 

streets in Cass Corridor, Traf-
fic Jam and Snug sits next to sev-
eral new stores and across from a 
crowded parking lot. These stores 
include Shinola, the Detroit-based 
watch and leather company, and 
Third Man Records, the Jack 
White-owned record store that 
opened in November.

In all respects, both Shinola and 

Third Man Records are destination 
stores; the carefully designed dis-
plays, good music and overall cool 
vibe makes them worth the 45-min-
ute drive from home. But it wasn’t 
only the physical products (which 
at Shinola were well out of my bud-
get) and the smell of incense waft-
ing through Third Man Records 
that struck me as special or unique, 
though they are. It’s that both stores, 
aside from being saturated with an 
overwhelmingly white clientele — a 
topic for a different, serious conver-
sation — appear committed to local 
manufacturing. That’s something 
you don’t see every day.

Shinola is in the middle of build-

ing a watch-dial factory, which 
when finished, will be visible to 
shoppers through a transparent 
window as they walk from the mid-
dle to the back of the store.

Tucked in the back of Third 

Man, shoppers will soon look 
onto a 10,000-square-foot vinyl 
record press which will manufac-
ture records 24/7 for artists and 

bands signed with the label as well 
as other local acts. Right now, the 
space is effectively empty, but ide-
ally by the middle of this year, eight 
presses imported from Germany 
will be operating and, according to 
Third Man co-founder Ben Black-
well, teaching the public — or at 
least those who walk through the 
building — that “all this stuff is alive 
and well.” This stuff meaning vinyl.

Of course, this isn’t the perfect 

story of homegrown, authentic 
Detroit manufacturing. Shinola was 
recently questioned by the Federal 
Trade Commission for the “Built in 
Detroit” mark on its watches. Why? 
Because even though it is accurate 
the watches are assembled with-
in the city limits of Detroit, none 
of the parts are manufactured in 
America. Because they come from 
Switzerland, Thailand and China, 
Shinola could be violating the FTC 
requirement saying “all or virtually 
all” parts must be manufactured 
in the United States in order for 
retailers to claim their products are 
“Made in U.S.A.” As of now, Shinola 
maintains it’s not being misleading 
because it’s open about where its 
parts are from. That’s certainly up 
for debate.

Also, Shinola was founded by 

Bedrock Manufacturing, an invest-
ment firm based in Texas owned by 
Tom Kartsotis, a co-founder of Fos-
sil — another watchmaking com-
pany! And the name Shinola comes 
from a half-century defunct shoe 
polish company — from New York.

As for Third Man, while no one 

should criticize Jack White for this, 
the company is based in Nashville. 
Furthermore, White hasn’t always 
had a strong relationship with 
Detroit, saying he left the city early 
in his career because it was chal-
lenging to live and create there. 
However, it’s worth noting that he 
did pay off the Masonic Temple’s 
$142,000 in back taxes in 2013 to 
keep the building from foreclosing.

From all of this, it’s easy to see 

how what these companies are 
doing can be perceived as merely 
opportunistic, 
taking 
advantage 

of Detroit’s gritty reputation and 

history of manufacturing to profit. 
Especially in the case of Shinola, 
where none of its founders are even 
from Detroit, it’s using this image 
of the city to sell madly expensive 
luxury items, products the average 
person cannot possibly afford or 
justify paying for.

For me, that’s uncomfortable and 

feels a bit like a farce. At the same 
time, though, I’m asking myself, 
“So what?”

No matter where these people 

come from or where the company 
is based, there is an immense value 
in bringing the value of manufac-
turing and hand-crafted goods to 
the forefront. For the people who 
will shop at these places (and again, 
there’s an entire conversation on the 
astounding and concerning lack of 
racial diversity at the stores), they’re 
going to be exposed to the creation 
of physical goods. They’ll see the 
records being pressed and the bevy 
of parts being carefully assembled 
into a wearable timepiece.

In a time when everything seems 

to be moving up to the cloud and it 
is way too easy to order whatever I 
want from Amazon, Shinola is saying 
timekeeping is an art not to be taken 
for granted. Third Man is musing 
that music shouldn’t just travel on 
circuit boards and servers. And both 
of those reasons make critiquing 
these companies extremely difficult.

I’m not quite sure how to balance 

this point with the questionable 
authenticity of these companies. 
Maybe it’s just a matter of trying to 
be a more informed consumer.

That said, there’s no doubt that 

as Detroit continues to progress 
economically, this balancing act 
won’t be going away. The people and 
leadership of the city need to ask 
themselves soon whether outsiders 
coming in should be given the abso-
lute right to monetize its culture. 
The answer will define what kind of 
city Detroit is going to be.

The clock is ticking.

— Derek Wolfe can be reached 

at dewolfe@umich.edu.

DEREK 
WOLFE

E-mail JoE at Jiovino@umich.Edu
JOE IOVINO

