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

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The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com
4A — Wednesday, September 14, 2016

BRETT
GRAHAM

The politics of diagnosis

W

ith Pavlovian rhythm, 
my phone buzzed and 
I 
diverted 
attention 

from my Sunday 
homework 
routine 
to 

check the CNN 
notification that 
flashed 
across 

my 
screen. 
It 

read: 
“Hillary 

Clinton 
was 

diagnosed with 
pneumonia 
on Friday, her 
doctor says. The 
doctor revealed 
the condition hours after Clinton 
stumbled while leaving a 9/11 
event.” So, like any political junkie 
worth his salt, I minimized Canvas 
and put Google to work on the 
handful of questions I now had. If 
she was diagnosed on Friday, why 
are we finding out two days later? 
What exactly does stumbling look 
like? How serious is this?

As someone whose knowledge 

of medicine begins and ends with 
episodes of “Scrubs,” I was hoping 
for a straightforward response. It 
seemed to me that there would be 
little room for interpretation with 
something as straightforward as 
pneumonia — either the incident was 
cause for concern from a medical 
standpoint or it was not. But, as with 
any news story that drifts within 
the orbit of Trump Tower or the 
so-called Clinton World, facts are 
secondary to spin. My eye naturally 
combed through the feed, I learned 
the facts of the story and I returned 
to my homework.

Here are the facts of the story 

that I learned: The Democratic 
frontrunner 
for 
president 
has 

been campaigning through illness 
for several days now and became 
overheated while toughing it out 
through a 9/11 commemoration 
service. As Bloomberg Politics 
correspondent 
Jennifer 
Epstein 

tweeted on the day she was 
diagnosed, 
“...She 
appeared 
at 

2 fundraisers, ran a 2-hour natl 
security mtg, sat for CNN intvu.” 
What a champion! Hours later, 
I saw a video of her walking out 
of daughter Chelsea’s New York 

apartment, smiling and claiming 
to be “feeling great.” I saw the 
statistic that more than 1.1 million 
Americans 
are 
admitted 
to 

hospitals for pneumonia every year. 
Things were more or less the same 
as I expected. And I moved on.

Here are the facts of the story I 

could have learned if I had different 
political leanings: After two days 
of covering up a serious illness, 
Hillary Clinton fainted and had 
to be dragged into a waiting van. 
While her campaign is claiming 
that the cause is pneumonia (which 
can be fatal in its own right), 
doctors are questioning whether 
this incident, and the cough she 
has tried to hide for weeks, may 
be representative of something 
more serious, like Parkinson’s. At 
68 years old, she clearly lacks the 
stamina to assume the office of 
the president. If I hated Hillary 
Clinton, things were more or less 
the same as I would have expected. 
And I would have moved on.

For better or worse, the health 

of our presidential candidates has 
become an important issue during 
this campaign. Rather than seeking 
impartial diagnosis, however, or 
getting second opinions as one 
would for themselves or a loved 
one, the American voter in 2016 
seeks whatever bill of health makes 
them comfortable — whether that 
be the absurd and over-the-top 
letter from Trump’s doctor Harold 
Bornstein claiming that his patient 
would be “the healthiest individual 
ever elected to the presidency,” 
or the note from Clinton’s doctor 
Lisa Bardack, who brushed off the 
episode as caused by dehydration 
and assured the Democratic faithful 
that their champion was “recovering 
nicely.” Alternatively, the voter 
could tumble down the wormhole 
of internet diagnoses, into the world 
where the difference between the 
common cold and typhoid is just 
three clicks. Or, as was seen with 
this most recent incident, there 
can be diagnosis by committee, 
constituted 
of 
nonmedical 

professionals posting on Twitter 
or Facebook what their thoroughly 
(un)informed opinion may be. At 
no point was the consideration 

made that the health of both major 
party presidential candidates could 
be reported objectively, without 
partisanship or agenda.

Of 
course, 
presidential 

candidates are human, and an 
exam in September by no means 
guarantees a clean bill of health 
for the next four years. And, in 
retrospect, 
many 
Americans 

have learned just how human 
presidents can be — from John 
F. Kennedy’s Addison’s disease 
to 
Woodrow 
Wilson’s 
stroke, 

from Abraham Lincoln’s battle 
with depression and the state of 
Ronald Reagan’s mental faculties 
toward the end of his second 
term. Learning about these after 
the fact — only once these people 
are already out of office — the 
American people turned a blind 
eye, refusing to allow the disease 
to stain the legacy of the man. 
But would JFK have been elected 
if Americans had seen his weight 
loss and frailty, when he was 
feverish and struggling to get 
through a day on the campaign 
trail? Absolutely not; presidential 
candidates should show vigor, 
stamina, strength and energy.

Unfortunately, 
the 
odds 
of 

finding a candidate that fits the bill 
this year are slim. On election day, 
the major party candidates will 
have a combined age of 139. One is 
currently battling a lung infection 
and the other has a reputation of 
eating too much fast food while 
operating on an irregular sleep 
schedule. Neither is the spitting 
image of health. So if the American 
people have decided that the 
physical health of the president is 
an issue in this campaign, fine. But 
let it be an issue like tax returns 
or reports of donations to the 
Federal Election Commission — 
concrete, factual and indisputable. 
Otherwise, the reports out of 
each camp from personal doctors 
should be recognized to be just as 
partisan, biased and predisposed 
as 
statements 
from 
campaign 

surrogates in the spin room after 
a debate.

—Brett Graham can be reached 

at btgraham@umich.edu. 

Incarceration won’t stop assault

I 

was 7 years old when I had my first attack. 
The accusations swarmed my head: “Stop 
pretending,” “you just want attention,” 

“you’re being over dramatic.” I head for my 
school’s office. My back hurts more than any 
pain I have ever experienced. My eyes are 
flooding, but I break through the tears and 
manage to ask to call home. My mom’s panic 
beamed through the phone. “Just try to relax, 
hold it in if you can.” My dad drives past 
our home and pulls the car up to the Detroit 
Medical Center’s emergency drop-off zone. 
There they got the nurses to assess my pain. 
“Can you rank your pain from one to 10? One is 
OK and 10 is bad.” “It’s an 11!” As if ambivalent 
to my response, they place an I.V. in me and take 
some blood from me. Then I was stuck waiting 
for the results.

Three hours later … The doctors brought 

proof of the pain they now believed I had 
because they saw it in my blood tests. “She has 
sickle cell anemia. Her hemoglobin is lower 
than average, and her white blood cell count is 
high. It’s a chronic disorder,” again acting as if I 
were not there. I feel I am no longer a 7-year-old 
girl but rather an object— like a computer my 
parents brought in for repair, only to find out I 
was permanently damaged. Then I am trapped.

So I walk around the hospital with the 

I.V. in my arm and push the machine that is 
connected to it. Several doctors consult with 
me. A psychologist interviews me to make sure 
I am “handling my chronic illness.” A physical 
therapist helps me move around after my pain 
becomes “manageable.” A physician checks in 
on me periodically and asks how my pain is. 
There are also several nurses on rotation. They 
come in, write their names for me, sometimes 
give me more medicine, but always move on 
to the next patient. It all feels like an assembly 
line. I am just another part in line for a repair 
that is only going to fix me temporarily.

After the doctors do all they can to make my 

pain “manageable,” I am finally released. Yet 
the sickle cell attacks come back sporadically. 
One minute I feel fine and the next I scream 
with pain. “Be strong,” my parents say, “so we 
don’t have to take you back to the hospital.” I 
tried with all my might to “hold it in” and avoid 
confinement. But the pain is stronger than I am. 
There is a red, angry wave pulsing through my 
body. It forces itself through the channels meant 
only for my blood without care or hesitation. It 
is a bully. It pushes itself through my veins, and 
wherever it passes, the pain follows.

The house shakes with my pain. It tears my 

family apart and wreaks havoc wherever I am. 
It is not biased. It does not discriminate. It does 
not care that I am “just a little Muslim girl from 
Nigeria,” as my parents would say. It does not 
care if I am well-mannered or if I misbehave. It 
does not care if I am at school, a friend’s house 
or at home. It frightens my parents and fills 
them with worry. Yet, no one can understand 
how I feel. They want me to stop expressing my 
pain. But I cannot stop. It is a force out of my 
control. I try to explain to them but I have lost 
my biggest means of communication.

I open my mouth to attempt to form words 

but the pain chokes them. My larynx is gone 
and in its place is a broken tape recorder. “My 

dearest daughter, please stop screaming, the 
neighbors will hear you and think something 
bad is happening.” I wonder why expressing 
my pain is such a “bad” thing. At school, I was 
given the chance to express myself through art. 
So I took a piece of cardboard and used a black 
sharpie to highlight its imperfections. My art 
teacher looked at it with confusion but did not 
question my creation. I looked at it with awe. I 
felt that I had just created something beautiful 
out of the cardboard’s pain and hoped I could 
do the same with my own.

I struggle to feel good when I am in pain, 

however. I try to cry and kick the pain out of 
me, but those actions do nothing. My parents 
tell me to “just pray,” and that “Allah does not 
give someone what they cannot handle.” But I 
feel that God has forsaken me; that my pain was 
His way of punishing me; that for some reason 
unknown to me, God was upset with me. I find 
it hard to pray in so much pain. Even when I did 
pray, the pain came back. Even while praying, 
the pain persisted. Even after praying, the pain 
did not disappear.

However, I managed to stay out of the hospital 

for a while; seven years, to be exact. But I was 
not pain free. I just stayed at home. I sometimes 
missed school because the pain was too much. 
My mom did her best to soothe me, but there was 
only so much she could do. I had to learn how to 
manage my pain. Over the years, it became more 
tolerable. I realized what I would have called an 
11 back when I was 7 years old was now an eight. I 
got better at suppressing my pain and muting my 
screams. No one knew I had a “chronic disorder” 
unless I told them. I only conveyed that fact when 
I was in pain. 

I was 14 years old the second time I was 

admitted to the hospital. I was doing so well in 
school. It was nearing the end of my freshmen 
year, and so far I had straight A’s. I suppose the 
stress of finals was getting to me. The doctors 
told me stress could cause “sickle cell attacks.” 
Well I guess my back really felt the stress. While 
in the hospital, I was restless. I could not help but 
feel surrounded and restricted by the machines. I 
wanted nothing more than to be released as soon 
as possible so I could return to school. I thought 
it was normal to desire to be back in school, so I 
was surprised to find out that the girl in the next 
room was begging to stay in the hospital. I could 
not imagine why she did not want to go back to 
school. My nurse told me I was special and that 
most of the other sickle cell patients prefer to stay 
in the hospital than return to school. No one had 
ever referred to my pain as special. Until then I 
thought I was the only one who had to deal with 
such pain. I felt fortunate to be so motivated in 
school and thought that maybe God had not 
forsaken me after all. I became proud of my pain 
and my ability to not let it define who I am, even 
though the pain still came back.

P

eople seem to think we can 
fix rape culture and sexual 
assault by putting rapists 

in prison for a 
long time. Take 
for 
example 

the 
response 

to 
the 
Brock 

Turner 
case: 

people 
yelling 

for him to be imprisoned for way 
longer, people outraged at his early 
release, a mobilization to recall the 
judge who sentenced him to six 
months, as well as the passage of a 
mandatory minimum sentence law 
for specific types of sexual assault 
by the California legislature.

This reaction is understandable; 

people aren’t wrong for wanting 
rapists to go to prison since we’ve 
been given no avenue other than 
incarceration 
as 
a 
suggestion 

for how we might resolve the 
harms done to individuals and 
to communities through sexual 
assault and rape. But to me, there 
seems to be something faulty 
with this line of thinking which 
assumes that we can fix something 
as dehumanizing, violating and 
oppressive as sexual assault with 
something 
as 
dehumanizing, 

violating and oppressive as prison.

If Brock Turner, or anyone for 

that matter, rapes someone again, 
which likely will be the case given 
the rate of serial rapists, it won’t 
be because we didn’t lock him up 
for long enough. It’ll be because 
of his unaddressed sexism, sexual 
entitlement and toxic masculinity 
(among 
other 
problematic 

behavioral traits); it’ll be because 
he was never truly rehabilitated; 
and it’ll be because, I think, the 
structure of our criminal justice 
system 
is 
incompatible 
with 

achieving real justice for sexual 
assault victims and survivors.

In order to prevent rape, you 

need to know why it happens, and 
it doesn’t happen because we’re not 
sending people to prison for 14 years. 
It happens because our society is 
full of patriarchy and sexism and 
problematic power relationships. 
The prison environment reinforces 
and 
amplifies 
harmful 
power 

dynamics 
that 
feminists 
and 

anti-rape advocates are trying to 
eradicate. Prison is not the place 
to 
rehabilitate 
rapists 
because 

it 
replicates 
the 
dynamics, 

hierarchies and aggressive hyper-
masculine culture that are all at 

least partially responsible for the 
normalization, 
acceptance 
and 

proliferation of sexual assault.

In addition to the issue of using 

an oppressive environment to 
correct an oppressive behavior, our 
justice system also seems to be ill 
set up to prosecute sexual assault 
cases and ultimately incapable 
of really achieving justice for 
survivors and victims of sexual 
assault. Often, the reason people 
report their assault is because 
they want their assailant to take 
responsibility for the harm they 
inflicted. In other words — and 
this is very basic — many survivors 
and victims want their rapists to 
acknowledge and recognize the 
pain they inflicted: they want an 
apology. Take the viral victim 
impact statement from the Brock 
Turner case, where she writes: “I 
also told the probation officer that 
what I truly wanted was for Brock 
to get it, to understand and admit 
to his wrongdoing.”

Our system is not set up for 

this. It actively disincentives any 
admission of responsibility, what 
it calls being ‘guilty,’ through 
its threat of severe punishment, 
i.e. prison. People charged with 
felonies 
are 
understandably 

afraid to admit guilt because 
that likely would mean going to 
prison. Because our system is 
punitive instead of restorative, it 
incentivizes selfishness and self-
preservation 
over 
compassion, 

dialogue and true resolution.

Also, 
the 
established 
way 

guilt is decided in the courts 
is through the jurors. Socially, 
we’re to understand jurors as 
people 
who 
provide 
outside, 

objective 
evaluations 
of 
the 

evidence in order to arrive at a 
fair assessment of the defendant’s 
guilt or innocence. But it’s mostly 
impossible for jurors to do this 
because 1. There’s hardly ever 
any concrete evidence for jurors 
to review in rape cases and 2. 
Jurors exist in the same world we 
do, and by that I mean jurors are 
ensconced in all the same rape-
culture bullshit the rest of us are 
and are thus likely to be swayed by 
sexist tropes and victim-blaming 
myths in the deliberation process.

What ought to be the guiding 

principle of handling sexual assault 
and rape cases is that a person — the 
survivor/victim — feels like they 
were violated and so they were. We 

must accept this truth and create 
alternative models of restorative 
justice to rectify this harm. This 
means the creation of survivor/
victim-centered spaces for resolving 
rape and sexual assault, spaces that 
are radically divergent from the 
current ones we have, whether that 
be the college sexual-assault panel 
or the official court room trial. In 
these spaces the question isn’t if 
this person was violated, but rather 
accepting that this person was 
violated and that we as a community 
need to do something about it with 
the survivor/victim as the leader of 
the process.

This 
might 
seem 
really 

outrageous and unachievable, but 
we already do accept and practice 
this principle in other aspects of 
our lives. There’s an episode of 
Louie that talks about it: Louie 
tells his friend that he, the friend, 
Lenny, hurt him when he hit him. 
Lenny says he didn’t hurt him, and 
then Louie says “I’m telling you 
that it hurt and you don’t get to 
deny that. When a person tells you 
that you hurt them you don’t get to 
decide that you didn’t.”

In this process of resolving 

sexual assault and rape not the 
perpetrator, nor anyone else, gets 
to decide against or argue about 
the survivor/victim’s account of 
the assault. They don’t get to decide 
that they didn’t assault them. The 
perpetrator’s opinion and anyone 
else’s opinion of the perpetrators 
guilt/innocence is irrelevant. The 
only account of what happened that 
can hold any weight is that of the 
person who was assaulted.

Collectively, we’re responsible 

for cultivating an environment 
where the survivor/victim is able 
to heal, where the perpetrator 
recognizes what harm they caused 
and is required and desires to do 
something to resolve the harm. 
This 
represents 
a 
major 
and 

necessary 
departure 
from 
our 

established principles of justice 
by removing the threat of severe 
punishment (i.e. prison). We deter 
the rampant selfishness and self-
preservation that exists in our 
current justice system through 
this paradigm shift — by moving 
towards a model that prioritizes 
honesty, healing, compassion and 
humane reparations.

—Clarissa Donnelly-DeRoven can 

be reached at cedon@umich.edu. 

Reconsructing cultural norms of pain

MICHELLE SHENG 
 email michelle at shengmi@umich.edu

Carolyn Ayaub, Claire Bryan, 

Regan Detwiler, Caitlin Heenan, 

Jeremy Kaplan, Ben Keller, Minsoo Kim, 

Payton Luokkala, Kit Maher, 

Madeline Nowicki, Anna Polumbo-Levy, 

Jason Rowland, Kevin Sweitzer, 

Rebecca Tarnopol,Ashley Tjhung, 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Stephanie Trierweiler

EDITORIAL BOARD MEMBERS

HALIMAT OLANIYAN | MICHIGAN IN COLOR

CLARISSA

DONNELLY-

DEROVEN

 

—Michigan in Color is the Daily’s designated 

space for and by students of color at the University of 

Michigan. To contribute your voice or find out more 

about MiC, e-mail michiganincolor@umich.edu.

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