Opinion
SHOHAM GEVA
EDITOR IN CHIEF
CLAIRE BRYAN
AND REGAN DETWILER
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4A — Monday, February 8, 2016
E-mail DaniEl at Dancp@umich.EDu
DAN PARK
Claire Bryan, Regan Detwiler, Caitlin Heenan, Jeremy Kaplan,
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, Hunter Zhao
EDITORIAL BOARD MEMBERS
Ideology of higher education
T
here’s a difference between
being
Black
and
being
mixed.
Even
when
you’re
mixed,
people see your
skin as a shade of
brown, which is
associated
with
being Black. It’s
nearly impossible
to make a distinc-
tion that you’re
part white, and
there’s
nothing
wrong with that.
But even when
people do know you’re mixed, the
Black half can trump the white one
in how often it is mentioned and used
to explain stereotypes.
Barack Obama wasn’t the first
Black president. He was the first
mixed president. Yes, he was the
first president of African-Ameri-
can descent (his father was from
Kenya), but his mother is a white
woman. He has had to deal with
blatant racism all of his life.
As for me, I am fortunate to not
have dealt with the systematic rac-
ism that many Black and mixed
people have faced in the past and
face in the present. I haven’t been
kept out of places because of my
race and haven’t faced hate speech
or lived in fear every day like some
have and still do. But the subtle rac-
ism and racist jokes that have been
directed toward me have made me
realize that my racial identity has
been defined by others in terms of
my Black half or my “Blackness.”
One of my nicknames in high
school was “Two Percent.” It didn’t
have to do with my preference for
2-percent milk, but for the percent-
age of Black I seemed to act like. I’ve
been told that I’m not Black enough
and that I “talk white,” and I’ve been
called both degrading and meant-to-
be-endearing — yet in-poor-taste —
versions of the n-word.
The weird part of it is that,
depending on the situation, I either
went along with it, shrugged it off
or got visibly angry.
I went along with “Two Percent,”
just taking it as a joke. But it made me
ponder what that really meant. What
does being Black mean? I think in
that sense, my speech, politeness and
intelligence were taken into account.
Those who called me “Two Percent,”
albeit not maliciously, referenced
being Black as uneducated, impolite
and less sophisticated.
And what does “not being Black
enough” mean? Yes, I know I’m only
halfway there as far as ancestry, but
not every Black person has to act the
same. In times when “not being Black
enough” was said, Black was used as
a stand-in for words like thug, crimi-
nal or rebel. I was not that, and a
majority of Black people aren’t. With
media perception and stereotypes,
Black people are often viewed in that
light and discriminated against by
way of racist projections.
When I was told I talked white, it
was implied that Black people have
a less sophisticated vocabulary with
a vernacular that is similar to that
of the slave, Jim, in Mark Twain’s
“The Adventures of Huckleberry
Finn.” How a person speaks should
not be analyzed in relation to his or
her race. Speech, like other aspects of
the individual, cannot be used as an
overarching comparison to a race or
any other identity as a whole.
It’s similar to how everyone
doesn’t respond the same way to
different types of humor. Yes, my
friends, I know you think this Black
joke is funny. I myself have made
some in my past. But for now, it rubs
me the wrong way, and I’d rather
you not say it. Don’t say, “Oh, it’s just
words” or “Sticks and stones may
break my bones, but words will never
hurt me.”
Drake, who is mixed like me,
describes in a few bars some of what
it can be like to have your personal-
ity compared to that of a stereotypi-
cal Black person in another’s eyes in
his song, “You & The 6.”
“I used to get teased for being
Black
And now I’m here and I’m not
Black enough
‘Cause I’m not acting tough
Or making stories up ‘bout where
I’m actually from.”
Someone who is white and Black
(and in Drake’s case, Jewish) is both
discriminated against for his or her
perceived Blackness and for also not
being what he or she was expected
to be like as a Black person. People
who are mixed are not only criti-
cized for acting Black and for being
mixed, but also for not acting Black
or not acting mixed.
My racial identity has always been
something confusing to me. I am
Black. I am white. Neither race is
monolithic or has certain values or
rules to abide by. Each person is an
individual, following the direction of
how our parents, other people impor-
tant to our lives and society raised us.
A friend asked me last summer what
the differences between my two cul-
tures of white and Black are like. I
couldn’t pin down an answer because
I can’t pin down my culture. There
are certain things I take from each
of my parents — some fit stereotypes
and some do not.
It’s not that I am ashamed to be
seen as just Black because of my
skin color. Like I said, it’s hard to
tell unless I mention that I have a
Black father and a white mother.
It’s just that categorizing me as
Black doesn’t take into account a
whole other part of me.
This kind of covert racism may be
what Black people face every day. But
I don’t know for sure because I’m not
just Black. I can’t speak for what the
Black experience may be like from
my individual perspective because
I’m not a Black man.
It’s like the Old El Paso commer-
cial in which a little girl is given the
decision of hard or soft taco shells
after her family is arguing over which
one is better to use for the meal. I’m
Black. I’m white. Why not both?
Chris Crowder can be reached
at ccrowd@umich.edu.
Not Black, but mixed
ZAK
WITUS
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A
re you happy with your college educa-
tion? Do you feel you’re paying a fair
price for it?
I’ve
graduated
with
degrees
in
both
the
humanities (Arts & Ideas
in the Humanities) and
the
sciences
(cognitive
science) and I, for one, feel
majorly ripped off.
Don’t get me wrong: I
loved many of my courses,
especially the ones in the
Residential College with
Cindy Sowers and all my
great English classes. But
reflecting on my experience
— the work I did, the work my teachers and fel-
low students did, the other services provided by
the University, etc. — I don’t see how one justi-
fies the outrageous cost of tuition. How can the
University and the state, understanding the
immense societal benefits of education, limit
people’s access to it and enslave them with huge
debt if they seek it? Upon reflection, I see that if
we want to reform higher education so it serves
us best as a state and society, then we must start
by examining and reforming the ways many of us
are currently thinking about higher education.
In our day-to-day lives, we
students tend not to experi-
ence studying as real work;
that is, not like the work we
do when we serve tables at a
restaurant, or shelve books in
a library. Even though every-
one involved in higher educa-
tion would agree (if explicitly
asked) that education is real
work, we behave as if it’s not.
The ideology of higher
education today functions
primarily
through
our
actions, not our thinking about our actions.
We act as if reading books, listening to lec-
turers and participating in classroom discus-
sions are luxuries (non-essentials) that we
buy for ourselves, like seeing a movie or stay-
ing at a hotel. We pay $100,000-plus for these
academic activities. And yet, when we think
about it, many of us don’t recognize student
life as truly worth personally paying exorbi-
tant amounts of money.
Even though much of the real work of
learning is collaborative, and hence neces-
sarily communal, economically speaking,
we behave as if it’s individualistic — as if we
were buying a really expensive service for
ourselves instead of working for the benefit
of the community. We’ve been conditioned to
experience studying as fundamentally differ-
ent from other kinds of work — both physi-
cal and intellectual — and thus we’ve become
psychologically alienated from our labor.
Other workers receive compensation in
exchange for their work. It’s presumed that the
products they make or the services they provide
aren’t for themselves, but for others. And so we
think the formula of exchange makes sense.
The only way we wouldn’t apply this same
formula to higher education is if we conceived
of higher ed as a service we receive, or else
as work we do mostly for selfish benefit. But
the services of our university — specifically
the teaching faculty — demand we recipro-
cate their work with our own. Unfortunately,
education can’t be so easily commodified, and
so it doesn’t work well for our predominantly
commercial economy.
I think those of us involved in higher educa-
tion would do well to revisit some of the essays
written by some of the early advocates of
public education. For example, Jean-Jacques
Rousseau, an early European advocate of pub-
lic childhood education, argued based on the
principle that higher education ought serve
the common good. Since in Rousseau’s phi-
losophy, the socialist-democratic state enacted
the will of the people, he thought the state, and
not the individual family, ought be in charge of
the children’s education. As Rousseau saw it,
“Families dissolve but the State remains.”
Rousseau argued this in the face of a bour-
geois society that generally preferred to edu-
cate its children privately, for the benefit of
their individual families. Ironically, one argu-
ing for public higher education today faces a
similar dilemma. Today, the country’s upper
class sends its children to college primarily
for private familial benefits (ensuring a high
socioeconomic position for the family mov-
ing forward, etc.). Consequently, people of the
lower classes also conceive of higher education
in this bourgeois, egotistic way. By mistaking
the ruling class’s selfish use
of higher education as the
only use of higher education,
we prevent ourselves from
conceiving of higher educa-
tion in all its great pro-social
(ahem, socialist) potential
— that is, higher education
as serving not just the indi-
vidual student but also his/
her community, city, state,
society — the common good.
When you’re uneducated
(i.e., ignorant), you’re often
a liability to those around you (much like the
GOP’s denial of climate change makes them a
hazard to the rest of the planet —literally). But,
when you’re educated, you’re not only not a
liability, you’re also positively helpful. It dou-
bly benefits those forced to interact with you
for you to know things, like how to form an
intelligent opinion about something, or that
our country was founded on slave labor, and so
on. Really, if higher education is for all, then all
ought to be sponsoring you — the individual —
and your individual education as a way of say-
ing: “Thank you for learning things! Keep up
the good work! We appreciate you!”
The working class, if it were to understand
itself as such, would realize that the work of
studying is basically the same as the other work
it does, and thus it would not tolerate paying to
do the work of higher education. We should rec-
ognize how our current ideology of education
enables us to pay such exuberant amounts of
money for work that we really do for one anoth-
er. If we’re unwilling to revolt against our eco-
nomic system in general — as perhaps we ought
to — then we might instead reasonably demand
free intellectual training prior to entering into
wage slavery (i.e. professional life). It seems
that should be among our minimum demands
from our own government.
Zak Witus can be reached at
zakwitus@umich.edu.
W
ednesday night, CNN
hosted a town hall for
Democratic
presiden-
tial
candidates
Bernie
Sanders
and Hillary Clin-
ton. At this point,
I’ve
watched
both Sanders and
Clinton speak so
many times —
both on TV and
in person — that
I pretty much
have their stump
speeches memo-
rized. Here’s a
radical idea: We’re going to create
an economy that works for all of us,
not just for the millionaires and bil-
lionaires.
That said, there were a couple
of moments last Wednesday that I
found truly compelling, and both
were related to faith. To no end, the
Republican candidates boast about
their religious beliefs, but on the
Democratic side, we’ve only seen
glimpses into how faith affects the
candidates’ motivations and values.
That changed Wednesday. In one
form or another, both Sanders and
Clinton were asked about their reli-
gion and spirituality. And based on
what I heard, their answers should
end the conversation that religious
observance and belief in God are
necessary to be a leader of this
country. In fact, as a Jew who wres-
tles with the existence of a higher
power, I find their views on religion
inspiring and necessary.
Anderson Cooper, the modera-
tor of the town hall, asked, “What
do you say to a voter out there who
sees faith as a guiding principle in
their lives and wants it to be a guid-
ing principle for this country?”
Sanders went first.
“It’s a guiding principle in my
life,” he responded. “Absolutely it
is. You know, everybody practices
religion in a different way. To me, I
would not be here tonight, I would
not be running for president of
the United States, if I did not have
very strong religious and spiritual
feelings. I believe that as a human
being, the pain that one person feels
… if we have children who are hun-
gry in America, if we have elderly
people who can’t afford their pre-
scription drugs, you know what,
that impacts you, that impacts me.
“And I worry very much about
a society where some people spiri-
tually say, ‘That doesn’t matter to
me, I got it. I don’t care about other
people.’ So my spirituality is that
we are all in this together.”
If you didn’t catch it, there was
no mention of God or Jesus or
scripture. And this isn’t to say there
is anything wrong with discuss-
ing those things (Clinton did), but
whether you agree with Sanders’
views or not, is there anything we
should want more than a president
who strongly values the commu-
nity and its power? Isn’t that what
America should be about?
I found that Clinton’s religious
views resonated with me, too.
Toward the end of answering a
question from a rabbi about how
she finds the ego to run for presi-
dent and have humility, she spoke
of gratitude.
“Everybody knows I have lived a
very public life for the last 25 or so
years, and so, I’ve had to be in pub-
lic dealing with some very difficult
issues — personal issues, political,
public issues,” she said. “And I read a
treatment of the prodigal son parable
by the Jesuit Henri Nouwen, who I
think is a magnificent writer of spiri-
tual and theological concerns. And
I read that parable, and there was a
line in it that became just a lifeline
for me. And it basically is practice the
discipline of gratitude.
“So regardless of how hard the
days are, how difficult the decisions
are, be grateful. Be grateful for being
a human being, being part of the
universe. Be grateful for your limita-
tions. Know that you have to reach
out to have more people be with you,
to support you, to advise you. Listen
to your critics. Answer the questions.
But at the end, be grateful. Practice
the discipline of gratitude and that
has helped me enormously.”
This answer is incredibly impor-
tant because, again, it did not
invoke God. Yes, Clinton has been
open about her belief in God in the
past, but it’s telling that when she
was talking about what her “life-
line” is, she chose to talk about the
very human act of practicing grati-
tude — not prayer or other religious
acts. I find that commendable.
I thought maybe I was preach-
ing to the choir on this issue (pun
intended). But according a recent
Pew survey, 51 percent of Ameri-
cans would be less likely to support
a candidate who is an atheist. For
context, that is a greater percentage
than people less likely to support a
candidate who has used marijuana,
or is Muslim, or is gay or lesbian, or
has had an extramarital affair. This
may be an obvious thing to say, but
as far as we’ve come in regard to
LGBTQ rights, women’s rights, civil
rights, there is still a large amount
of religious (or nonreligious) intol-
erance in this country. To be fair,
that 51 percent number is 12-per-
cent less than it was in 2007. But I
still don’t get why a definite belief
in God should be mandatory to
receive someone’s vote.
Gratitude, humility and commit-
ment to community: These are the
values that should be of importance
when picking our next president, at
least in my opinion.
It shouldn’t matter whether Sand-
ers or Clinton believe in God or not,
because it shouldn’t matter how
they’ve arrived at those values.
What matters is they have them.
Derek Wolfe can be reached
at dewolfe@umich.edu.
Bernie, Hillary and spirituality
DEREK
WOLFE
CHRIS
CROWDER
Really, if higher
education is for all,
then all ought to be
sponsoring you.
Categorizing me as
Black doesn’t take
into account a whole
other part of me.