Opinion
SHOHAM GEVA
EDITOR IN CHIEF
CLAIRE BRYAN
AND REGAN DETWILER
EDITORIAL PAGE EDITORS
LAURA SCHINAGLE
MANAGING EDITOR
420 Maynard St.
Ann Arbor, MI 48109
tothedaily@michigandaily.com
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the University of Michigan since 1890.
Unsigned editorials reflect the official position of the Daily’s editorial board.
All other signed articles and illustrations represent solely the views of their authors.
The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com
4A — Monday, April 18, 2016
LILLIAN GAINES | OP-ED
Dear Colleagues:
Thank you for writing to share your
condemnation of the repugnant chalkings on the
Diag. These messages are hurtful to members
of the University of Michigan community,
inconsistent with the values to which we aspire
and antithetical to the intellectual life of our
campus.
We agree that all Arab, Muslim and MENA
(Middle Eastern and North African) students,
faculty, staff and visitors should feel welcome
and have an equal opportunity to thrive at the
University. Their presence makes our campus
better in every way.
University leadership has had frequent,
ongoing discussions with Arab, Muslim and
MENA students about the campus climate for
several months. This includes a Jan. 11 meeting
at the president’s house with students from
these groups and the Jan. 25 “Sharing Stories,
Building Allyhood: Student Voices Against
Islamophobia” event on campus.
Leaders from Student Life and the College of
Literature, Science and the Arts have worked
closely with the Islamophobia Working Group,
including incorporating the group’s feedback into
the college’s Diversity, Equity and Inclusion
plan. E. Royster Harper, vice president for
student life and Dean of Students Laura Blake
Jones met with student leaders Wednesday.
Senior
University
leaders,
including
the
president, participated alongside students
representing racial, ethnic, religious and
LGBTQ groups in a listening session Wednesday
organized by the U.S. Attorney’s Office.
We have also worked to communicate our values
of respect, civility and equality. The president’s
speech at Winter 2015 commencement addressed
the challenging balance between constitutional
rights and a sense of safety, specifically referencing
Islamophobia. Remarks at the University’s Martin
Luther King Jr. Symposium in January discussed
the hostility and hateful messages the students
had experienced in the context of our work to do
better as a university.
After learning of the offensive chalk messages,
the University reaffirmed our values in our initial
statement. This was followed by a March 31 post on
the president’s website titled “We Stand Together
Against Hate,” which was linked to his Twitter
account. On April 7, the president published an
essay on The Huffington Post discussing the
degrading of our discourse through disrespect,
hate, bigotry and targeted attacks.
Last Friday, former CSG President Cooper
Charlton and President Schlissel sent an e-mail
to all students on our Ann Arbor campus calling
the messages “repugnant and hurtful to members
of our community.” Correspondence with the
American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee’s
Michigan Regional Office resulted in a message of
support earlier this week.
We have been very impressed by the members
of our community who have taken a stance against
the anti-Islam messages. In addition to you and
those you mentioned, we have seen students
reaching out to one another and offering support.
We all agree that racism and discrimination
have no place at the University of Michigan.
—Mark Schlissel is the University
president, Martha Pollack is provost and
vice president of student affairs, and
Andrew Martin is the dean of LSA.
In response to faculty letter
P
ublic policy in the United States has
propagated social trauma for centuries.
In Black communities especially, the
government has betrayed
its pledge to protect the
human rights of life, liberty
and the pursuit of happiness
written in the Declaration
of
Independence.
This
historical record excluded
Black
people,
setting
precedent for the systemic
violence that has created
oppressive
conditions
—
mental,
social,
physical,
economic and legal — still
reinforced today.
Public trust in the federal government
has been declining since 1958. According
to the Center for Michigan’s Community
Conversation Issue Guide Book, “public trust
in (Michigan) state government is (also) low,
and dropping.” Currently, the Center for
Michigan is conducting a series of Community
Conversations around the state surveying public
trust in Michigan’s government. The most
recent conversation took place in Ann Arbor at
the Ford School of Public Policy. The attendees
comprised mainly white men and women over
the age of 40 and only a few undergraduate
and graduate students. In all of the survey
questions asked, the results were consistently
low: The participants in the room did not trust
the state’s ability to oversee K-12 education or
public higher education, the state’s ability to
protect public health or the environment, or
the state’s ability to provide services for low-
income residents or foster economic growth
and representative government.
It’s a general sentiment that the political
environment in Michigan is grossly inept to
meet the needs of all of its public constituents.
The recent actions, or lack thereof, of the state of
Michigan reflect the structural violence that has
put Black people in harm’s way and has injured
their economic, social, political, collective and
spiritual wellbeing. The oversight of the Flint
water crisis, the installment of emergency
managers in predominately Black cities and
the bystander approach toward refinancing
Detroit Public Schools reinforce the idea that
government institutions don’t view themselves
accountable to Black people. The state’s passive
policy approaches to these blatant fractures
of human rights and political sovereignty are
appalling and should incite outrage.
In some cases, outrage has occurred.
Historically, when Black people express their
discontentment with the government, they are
silenced with legislation or imprisonment. As
James Baldwin stated in one of his interviews:
“It is one thing to demand justice in literature,
and another thing to face the price that one has
got to pay for it in life.” The risks Blacks face
strongly asserting their political rights feel
too dangerous, as proven in the incarceration
of Black political prisoners during the 1960s
to 1980s. Our trauma from political violence
is so deeply rooted and continuously present
that it feels as though Black Michiganders have
become emotionally numb to this structural and
systematic violence. It has become the status
quo and part and parcel of our history and lived
experiences.
Black people were never allowed to heal
from the trauma handed down from generation
to generation and permeating our social
consciousness. Black people are understandably
exhausted from navigating spaces not designed
to include them, fighting against structural
exclusion, while simultaneously rehabilitating
their communities from decades of political
destruction.
Black Americans were never granted a truth
and reconciliation commission forcing the
government to acknowledge its past wrongs
and allowing Blacks a healing space from the
historical injustices we’ve endured, nor were we
offered any reparations. Thus, our “recovery”
from these historical traumas has been a violent
one — one that perpetuates the systemic violence
embedded in our social structures and kills
people slowly by preventing them from meeting
their basic needs.
How can Blacks be expected to trust a
government that was never meant to serve us?
A government that historically never viewed
us as fully human? The government counted
Blacks as three-fifths of a person, permitted life-
threatening medical experimentation, implanted
racial inferiority that has since been internalized
and physically removed us from our homes
via incarceration, to name just a few. The
continuity of systemic violence has wounded
Black spirits, which has made the challenge to
reverse the social ills of oppression that much
more overbearing.
Black citizens cannot become tolerant
of, or complacent in, the discrimination
administered by our state government. We
cannot become numb to the destruction that
specific policies invoke. Violence is an urgent
matter to address; it requires immediate
attention and action to prevent further
damage. A critical systems thinking approach
to overhaul the political system is required
for transformational change. This approach
encourages restorative accountability in the
political sphere, an important component to
restoring public trust.
Dr. Miriam Ticktin wisely remarked, “While
politics is a set of practices by which order is
created and maintained; the political refers to the
disruption of an established order.” The personal
will always be political, and the trauma Blacks
face is embedded within political institutions.
Black citizens must realize the fight for our
political, social and economic rights means, in
the long term, dismantling political institutional
frameworks at their core. In the interim, Blacks
should engage in the community restorative
spaces afforded to us, such as community
gardens, meditation spaces and trauma-informed
community centers. There is a compelling and
critical need for restorative policy practices that
acknowledge institutional neglect but ultimately
provide a pathway for social peace.
— Alexis Farmer can be reached
at akfarmer@umich.edu.
Reocurring trauma
MARK SCHLISSEL, MARTHA POLLACK, ANDREW MARTIN | OP-ED
Sororities have been criticized for
many things in the past few years,
including
female
objectification,
racist exclusion and classism. Each
organization’s constitution is unique in
its approach to addressing these issues.
What unites them all is a foundational
promise and contractual pledge to
promote female empowerment — a
commitment that is increasingly being
called into question.
The New York Times recently
published a front-page story titled
“When a Feminist Pledges a Sorority,”
a report on Ivy League sororities
that is both troubling and, in the end,
overly optimistic: The author, Jessica
Bennett, interviews women who feel
they are making real progress in trying
to turn what have been historically
sexist and elitist houses into centers of
feminist fervor.
As I read the article, I could not
help wondering if sorority members
at universities like ours, which are far
more representative of national Greek
life culture than the Ivy Leagues,
feel the same way. In other words,
do sororities actually empower their
members, and if not, why?
While sororities can operate in
social, academic and philanthropic
spheres, for the most part, the
primary motivation to “Go Greek”
is the planned social schedule.
These events promote ideas that
plainly run contrary to female
empowerment. To investigate these
phenomena, I sat down with sorority
members, past and present, both in
and outside our University, so they
could share their experiences with
their respective organizations.
A senior at the University of
Virginia and former member of Alpha
Phi, Olivia Dillingham said Greek
social
regulations
promote
male
dominance and, in turn, actually
constrain women in the larger system.
“While
Greek
life
supposedly
promotes a space for women to
interact, it imposes rules on them
that aren’t imposed on the men in the
university, which,” she said, “allow
men to completely dominate the
social scene … (giving) women
reason
to
want
to
objectify
themselves in order to get invited to
parties and fit in socially.”
Not only do fraternities host all
the parties, but they also provide all
the alcohol at these events. These
rules are attributed to the National
Panhellenic
Conference’s
policy,
which states, “College Panhellenics
shall not spend Panhellenic funds
to purchase alcoholic beverages for
any purpose.” Fraternities, free from
these restrictions, maintain control
of all the social capital, with free
reign to choose party themes such as:
Workout Bros and Yoga Hos, CEOs
and Corporate Hos, and King Tuts
and Egyptian Sluts. Younger members
consequently feel pressured to dress
in provocative clothing in order to
continue having parties with the
fraternity, fill the social calendar and
attract new members. This attempt to
emphasize female desirability invokes
traditional, patriarchal gender roles.
“The whole idea of having gender-
segregated
houses
and
parties
with sexist themes … and guys
having power over who they let
into their house, it’s pretty sexist in
its nature,” Ariela Levy, a member
of Alpha Delta Pi at UC Berkeley,
said of these regulations governing
sorority social life.
In October 2015, University of
Michigan
Panhellenic
sought
to
create a new partnership program
between sororities and the Sexual
Assault Prevention and Awareness
Center. LSA sophomore Anna Bauer
is one of SAPAC’s Peer Educators
and an active member of Pi Beta Phi.
Anna recognizes that even within
this progressive group in the Greek
community, female empowerment is
minimal.
“(We) ironically only talk about
our relationships with fraternity
men,” she said, “and how basically
everything that we do, think and act
is influenced by how they think about
us.” She consistently highlighted
that this habit of female students
viewing themselves through a male
lens is perpetuated through Greek
life’s gender norms.
This power dynamic between
sororities and fraternities is deeply
rooted in National Greek policies. A
columnist for The Michigan Daily,
Alison Schalop, recently published
an article titled “Expectations and
Regulations in Greek Life” comparing
her sorority’s handbook, Alpha Chi
Omega, with an unnamed fraternity’s
handbook. She contrasted the laws
governing guests stating, “No men
are permitted in the Alpha Chi Omega
household between the hours of 2 a.m.
and 7 a.m.” In regard to the fraternity’s
manual, she states she found “nothing
related to having guests sleep over.”
This regulation, coupled with
Nationals’ mandate that women must
live in the sorority house for one
year, effectively strips heterosexual
women of any agency to decide
where they want to be sexually
active. In addition, since this rule is
implemented to avoid instances of
sexual assault, this regulation also
invokes heteronormative assumptions
that only men can be the perpetrators
of sexual violence, as it does nothing to
restrict female entry.
“I got in trouble with my sorority
because I spoke out against some of
their rules, many of which,” Schalop
told me, “buy into a double standard of
the expectations of men and women.
I was immediately told to take my
opinion down. My sorority, which
boasts women empowerment and
growth, wanted to silence my voice.”
—Lillian Gaines is an
LSA sophomore.
Y
ou know how when you say a
word so many times it starts to
lose its meaning? Well appar-
ently that’s called
semantic
satia-
tion.
That
fact
has nothing to do
with this column,
but
psychology
really does have
terminology
for
everything.
Anyway,
I’ve
been living in Ann
Arbor for close
to
four
years
now, and the oft-
repeated word I’m thinking about is
“dialogue.”
“We need to have a dialogue,” they
said when the Boycott, Divest and
Sanctions movement was dominating
the campus conversation during spring
2014 and 2015.
“We need to have a dialogue,” they
said about mental health on campus.
“We need to have a dialogue,” they
said about sexual assault on campus.
“We need to have a dialogue,” they
said about diversity on campus.
And most recently, “We need to have
a dialogue,” they said in response to the
Islamophobic chalkings on the Diag.
Dialogue is “an exchange of ideas
or opinions on a particular issue, espe-
cially a political or religious issue, with
a view to reaching an amicable agree-
ment or settlement.”
Reaching an agreement or an
“agree to disagree” situation on
whatever topic is the ideal result and
generally leaves people on both sides
of an issue satisfied, or at least content.
This probably explains why calls for
dialogue have become the most pre-
dictable response to anything remote-
ly controversial on campus.
But when you really think about
it, what does dialogue really mean
in the context it gets used in on cam-
pus? After four years of working at
the Daily, I’ve concluded it means so
much and so little at the same time.
In some cases, establishing places to
have a dialogue — real, honest con-
versation — has allowed students to
safely discuss the issues that matter
to them and seems to ensure that
people are actually listening.
Take the topic of sexual assault, for
example. The University of Michigan
hosted several roundtable discussions
about the sexual misconduct policy
this past fall, which resulted in a much
more comprehensive policy. It felt like
people’s views were heard. This, in
addition to the Speak Outs that the
Sexual Assault Prevention and Aware-
ness Center has hosted, shows how far
campus has come in trying to make a
difference on this issue.
Since I came to campus in 2012,
mental health has also become a much
less taboo topic thanks to dialogue. The
Daily has published countless articles
about mental health and the need for
more resources on campus. There have
been all kinds of events about it on
campus, too. And perhaps as a result of
these efforts, though it’s far from per-
fect, Counseling and Psychological
Services has worked to improve its
intake time. And University Presi-
dent Mark Schlissel recently said
the University is working on plans to
establish a new mental health clinic
on campus. That’s a big deal, and
it’s happening because students are
coming out and saying, “Enough is
enough. We need better.”
In other instances, calls for dia-
logue have been little more than empty
words. Though the word was tossed
around, the debate over whether Cen-
tral Student Government should have
passed a resolution to divest from com-
panies engaged in business in Israel
was objectively anything but dialogue.
There were two sides entrenched in
their beliefs. One side said their piece,
the other said theirs, and there was no
attempt to really listen to one another.
And just a couple of weeks ago,
after the anti-Islam chalking incident,
Schlissel said this as part of a longer
statement: “I am convinced that we
have the ability to come together to
engage in meaningful dialogue on dif-
ficult topics that is enabled by our deep
commitment to respect for all.”
“We stand together against hate.
We must work together toward deeper
understanding.” Of course, I agree with
the sentiment. The University is a bas-
tion of intelligent human beings. But
what exactly does he mean by mean-
ingful dialogue?
The same strategies that may have
worked to develop a better sexual
misconduct policy can’t be expected
to work when talking about race and
religion. We know we need to combat
Islamophobia on campus. We know
people of color are marginalized. But
if it’s sitting around a table for an hour
and talking about our experiences that
he’s proposing with this statement,
then I’m not convinced progress will be
made. That won’t help us reach a deep-
er understanding of one another.
Part of what makes the conversa-
tion about race and religion so differ-
ent than others is that it takes a certain
degree of courage to think past our pre-
conceived beliefs. There’s a reason why
we often gravitate toward people like
ourselves — as much as we may claim
otherwise, we don’t like our beliefs and
potential biases being challenged.
Because of this difference, calls for
dialogue about race and religion must
be treated differently as well. If the
University really wants to do some-
thing, then it has to do everything in its
power to get people from all different
walks of life — races, religions, ethnici-
ties, socioeconomic statuses, etc. — liv-
ing and working together.
The University needs to work on the
smallest details, such as who lives with
whom in the dorms. It needs to think
about the homogeneity in Greek life and
its implications. It needs to think about
who studies where in each library and
who lives where off campus. It needs
to think about why “safe spaces” need
to be created in the first place. It needs
to keep finding ways to make coming to
this school more affordable and make it
appealing to people of all backgrounds.
Only with an understanding of all these
things — how students live their lives
— can the University make an earnest
effort to change the status quo.
Dialogue has the potential to mean
something all the time. I am so con-
vinced that students aren’t that dif-
ferent from one another, but we (me
included) and the University don’t do
enough to put ourselves in the position
to recognize that. Hosting and attend-
ing events like “Muffins with Mus-
lims,” which happened last Friday, is
only the beginning of what has to hap-
pen to bring ourselves together in ways
beyond short conversations and writ-
ing articles of solidarity.
So now this is the end of my final
column, and I guess all I’m trying to say
in this article and all the previous ones
I’ve written is for some reason, I believe
in the human spirit. I know we can see
the humanity in each other.
We just have to try harder and turn
our words into action.
—Derek Wolfe can be reached
at dewolfe@umich.edu.
More than a dialogue
DEREK
WOLFE
Claire Bryan, Regan Detwiler, Caitlin Heenan,
Jeremy Kaplan, Ben Keller, Minsoo Kim,
Payton Luokkala, Kit Maher, Madeline Nowicki,
Anna Polumbo-Levy, Jason Rowland, Lauren Schandevel,
Melissa Scholke, Kevin Sweitzer, Rebecca Tarnopol,
Ashley Tjhung, Stephanie Trierweiler, Hunter Zhao
EDITORIAL BOARD MEMBERS
RE: When a feminist pledges a sorority
ALEXIS
FARMER
Read more at MichiganDaily.com