T his Thanksgiving, I was upgraded from my perennial seat teetering awkwardly in between the kids’ table and adults’ table; I was given permission to officially enter a more sophisticated environment. Eat your hearts out, younger siblings and cousins. It was not long before I realized that the prospect of a table with candles and a centerpiece had made me too optimistic. The topic discussed in the big leagues this evening: college campuses and free speech — hardly the lighthearted conversation I wanted to have after gorging myself with food. As far as I imagine political conversations at Thanksgiving dinner tables across the country typically go, however, the one at mine happened to be quite tame. There was little shouting, frequent laughter and not once did I think that anyone was having second thoughts about foregoing politically- affiliated assigned seating. But there was one thing in the debate over the campus free speech conundrum I found unsettling. It was something equally as unsettling at the Thanksgiving table as it had been when it arose at the University of Michigan Board of Regents’ table two days prior and then at The New York Times’ news desk the next week. Free speech on college campuses was exposing the larger normalization of neo-Nazism in today’s politics, and liberals had become unwitting contributors to this. Like the rest of the country, I had expected at least some degree of normalcy when a champion of white nationalists ascended to the Oval Office. Still, the throning of a Mexican-denigrating, both-sides shaming and Pocahontas name- calling demagogue exceeded expectations. The once-dormant Stephen Millers and Steve Bannons of the world were allowed to enter mainstream politics, bringing the “fringe” beliefs shared by their loyal acolytes with them. Neo-Nazis have enough powerful allies as it stands today. The left — or anyone, frankly, who believes in fairness and equality irrespective of race, religion or creed — should not feel compelled to be one of them or sympathize with them. Articles like the softening profile of Tony Hovater, an Ohio-based neo-Nazi whose “Midwestern manners would please anyone’s mother,” that The New York Times published last Saturday do just that. Though these self-serving pieces most assuredly cause liberals to rejoice in their supposed show of tolerance, a shortcoming that conservatives have loved to attack, any victory is shallow and short-lived. Sympathizing with Nazi sympathizers is antithetical to ostracizing their brand of baseless bigotry. Liberals need not pat themselves on the back for legitimizing an outsider voice; when that outsider espouses white supremacy or Nazism, then anything short of rebuke merely continues to lazily promote the narrative in which unadulterated hatred is falsely equated with “political belief.” Though this may be the reality of our current political landscape, the kicking-the-can-down-the- road attitude that humanizes, rather than ostracizes, America’s neo-Nazis, must be curbed at once. Outlets like The New York Times hardly owe anyone a platform on their powerful pages, much less white supremacists and Nazis whose beliefs have as great a factual foundation as fake news. While the media may indulge itself in propagating hate under the guise of tolerance, the University of Michigan should not. That’s why the Board of Regents’ and University President Mark Schlissel’s decision on Tuesday that moved Richard Spencer one step closer to speaking on campus was so disheartening. In not allowing Richard Spencer to speak on campus, we would not, as University Regent Mark Bernstein (D) eulogized, be failing in our mission to promote free expression. Nor would we “provide even more attention to the speaker,” as University President Mark Schlissel wrote in a campus-wide email, if the University were to reject Spencer, as schools including Michigan State University, Ohio State University, Pennsylvania State University, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Auburn University have done. These institutions have courageously challenged the new normal. What we are doing is embracing it. We are overcorrecting for our past transgressions in which our student body wrongly denied far less odious figures the right to free speech by choosing the nuclear option. Richard Spencer gets a platform at the University. Tony Hovater has a spread in The Times. I discuss the merits of Nazi speech at the Thanksgiving table. It is true that many students on campus need to realize that not all conservative speakers on campus are the devil incarnate. Heeding Elie Wiesel’s famous words that, “The opposite of love is not hate, it’s indifference,” would be an effective approach to combating this provocative strain of evil, because we cannot be complacent. But I am hesitant to use Spencer as the example for this re-education. When hate is as uniquely sinister and as far-reaching as Spencer’s is, we ought to be happy, not dismayed, that there is pushback from students and faculty on campus. For the administration, it is hard to say the same. At what point do we draw the line? When men with even more hateful views and actual political power than Spencer inevitably request to speak at the University, will the University let them speak too? Or will we continue to treat our adherence to the Constitution as a suicide pact until regrettable repeats of history emerge? I certainly hope not, but I am not holding my breath. There’s a reason why Dictionary.com chose “complicit” as its word of the year for 2017. When Spencer and his gang of swastika- wielding, violent criminals roll into town, that reason will quickly become apparent. L et him come. Bring it on. I want Richard Spencer. I’m not the other that he fixates on. Sure, I’m one of the snowflakes who voted for Hillary Clinton, and I’m Middle Eastern. But I’m not Muslim. I’m not Jewish, either, nor am I Black. All of this is to say I am not the one who deserves the final say in this matter. I am not explicitly threatened by his toxicity the way my friends and classmates are. Still, I want him. I want his ignoble crusade to make a stop on our campus. Yes, his ideology is capable of inflicting great suffering, some of which we’ve already seen. But I’ve watched him take a punch; I’ve seen his followers try to peacock as something more menacing than the scared and threatened lot they are. I’m not afraid of him. I’m more afraid of not knowing his supporters, especially the ones so close to us. Come out. Own your violence and your hatred. I want to know who you are, even though you see a subhuman any time you don’t see a white human. I don’t think Richard Spencer wants to speak here. It serves his purposes more to be blocked from speaking, so that he can cast himself as the victim of an unruly and restless liberal youth that needs to be disciplined and educated in the realm of what’s “mature.” What he doesn’t realize is that we are far more mature than what his corrupted, compromised, feeble brain is capable of. At its best, this campus is not a safe haven for his ilk. At its worst, it has enough dynamics to elicit conflict from a controversy like this. There is racism on this campus because there are racists on this campus. As there have been. This is not news. Unfortunately we don’t know how many, but we know that they are currently the silent, scared minority. Richard Spencer is more afraid of us than we are of him. At the end of the day, his fears of a more just, diverse and equitable world are coming true. Yes, this is delayed all the time, and in the news we see that it is possible not just to delay it but also to reverse it. But only in moments, not in totality. It’s easy for me to feel like the world’s never been worse. I’ve only been alive for a moment, and in this moment there seems to be sexual violence everywhere, racial injustice everywhere, human rights abuses everywhere. It seems that way because it is so — this evil is here, in great force. What I do well to remember is that this evil has been around since the beginning, in quantities far more overwhelming. Ask any marginalized person; they can point to a time when their people were more persecuted, more degraded, more threatened, more isolated than they are now. The difference is our awareness of such evil. While excruciatingly painful, we better address our worst demons when we can see them. And so, we are at a junction. This is part of the fight for the direction of our country. We can shrink away from it and feel safer. We can drown out the voices we hate, block that Twitter account that causes us duress and turn off the channels that propagate lies and deception to our neighbors. Or, we can listen. We can allow Richard Spencer to speak to those that are interested. Where they supply violence, we’ll provide self-defense. Wouldn’t it be nice to know your classmate thinks you’re inferior? Isn’t it better to know if that professor you might have next semester thinks you’re subhuman? So, please, if an on-campus site doesn’t work out, stop by my apartment, Mr. Spencer, and bring your compatriots. I’ll make you some coffee, which you are free to throw out because it was made by somebody several skin tones darker than you. You can make your own cup after; I know you live a life of fear. I can’t relate. Opinion The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com 4 — Friday, December 1, 2017 REBECCA LERNER Managing Editor 420 Maynard St. Ann Arbor, MI 48109 tothedaily@michigandaily.com Edited and managed by students at the University of Michigan since 1890. EMMA KINERY Editor in Chief ANNA POLUMBO-LEVY and REBECCA TARNOPOL Editorial Page Editors 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. EDITORIAL BOARD MEMBERS I want Richard Spencer ANDREW MEKHAIL | OP-ED Carolyn Ayaub Megan Burns Samantha Goldstein Emily Huhman Jeremy Kaplan Sarah Khan Max Lubell Lucas Maiman Madeline Nowicki Anna Polumbo-Levy Jason Rowland Anu Roy-Chaudhury Ali Safawi Sarah Salman Kevin Sweitzer Rebecca Tarnopol Stephanie Trierweiler Ashley Zhang Andrew Mekhail is an LSA sophomore. The new normal Draupadi’s sari SARAH NEFF | SARAH NEFF CAN BE REACHED AT SANE@UMICH.EDU. Editors note: The name of the author has been omitted to protect their identity. Trigger warning: description of sexual assault I n the Hindu epic “Mahabharata,” a prominent turning point occurs when the princess Draupadi is inadvertently gambled away by her husband to his evil cousins. She is dragged in front of the entire kingdom and disrobed to be assaulted. Though she yells at her husband in anger, she doesn’t fight back against her assailant. Instead, she prays to the Lord Krishna, who blesses her with infinitely long cloth for her sari, so she cannot be fully disrobed. *** I was the type of girl whose reputation preceded her. In the Indian-American community at the University of Michigan, I was the girl who partied too hard, who’d hooked up with too many guys. We met at a party my freshman year and I already knew who you were. You were the type of guy whose reputation preceded him, too. In the Indian-American community, people called you an asshole. I always liked the bad boys. And you were the worst. Over the next few weeks, we would sneak away to talk alone at parties and make out in the corner. You told me I was different. You told me I was “so much better than all these other Indian girls, so much less of a prude.” You attempted to uplift me by putting down countless other women in our community. I laughed along. You took me back to your fraternity house after a party on Halloween. I had gone as a Disney princess and you didn’t have a costume. It was late, and it was dark, and I didn’t know that part of town very well. Your roommates were smoking weed and blasting Lil’ Wayne. You led me into your room, to your bed and I followed. You reminded me that I was pretty for a brown girl, carefree for a brown girl, chill for a brown girl. I accepted these as compliments. We began to fool around a bit. In a few minutes, you easily unpinned the costume that I had taken an hour to assemble. No one had ever taken as keen an interest in my body before, and I was flattered. I was content to just let you look at me. I was 17, and you made me feel, for the first time in my life, beautiful. But I was 17, and I barely knew you. You looked at me, all of me, and your eyes told me you wanted more. I had never done more than this. I had received enough of your approval tonight. I wanted to stop here, while I was still comfortable, while I was still happy. South Quad was 30 minutes away, and I didn’t want to make that journey alone. I asked you to walk me home. You asked me to have sex with you instead. I said no, and started gathering my costume strewn across the floor. You asked again. I said no, but I didn’t want to come off too forceful. I didn’t want you to suddenly think I wasn’t “carefree” or “chill.” You asked again. I said no, and I asked you to please take me home. This was before the days of Uber and Lyft, and I couldn’t trust my tipsy freshman self to find my way home on my own. You asked again. I said no, but this time you cut me off. You said you would take me home, but only after we had sex. You asked again. I said no, but this time you reminded me that I didn’t really have a choice. You said if I wanted to get home safe, we had to have sex first. You hovered closely over me, giving me no room to escape. You asked again. I said yes, and I have chosen to forget the rest. *** You and I had bonded earlier that night over a shared interest in Hinduism. But Lord Krishna didn’t bring me more cloth that night, like he did for Draupadi. Prayer isn’t always practical advice, and our faith ultimately gave us little guidance on notions of consent and assault. The secular aspects of our culture didn’t help either. The Indian- and Hindu-American communities are notoriously conservative when it comes to sex and gender roles. My parents never gave me “the talk,” and maybe yours didn’t either. In my family, the men make all the decisions, and maybe it’s the same in yours too. Even Draupadi was treated as just an object to be gambled away, and it seems not much has changed in the millennia since. My family doesn’t think I should date someone unless I’m going to marry them. My mom still thinks I’m a virgin. Any conversation that began to border on sex was immediately shrouded in judgment. Where was the room to talk about sexual assault? And though so many of our peers claimed to be far more liberal than their parents, they have often still inherited the same judgment and exercised it on people like you and me, people who in their view partied or hooked up too much. At the University, being part of the Indian-American community meant navigating constant judgment and moral double standards. Having sex was rebellious; talking about it was taboo and would inevitably lead to slut-shaming. Sexual assault was something we opposed in theory, but wouldn’t dare acknowledge in our community. Our parents had so many rules for us growing up, and our peers in college weren’t much better. By breaking their rules, I thought I was rebelling against our community. You probably thought you were rebelling too, but you broke me instead. *** I walked home after sunrise wearing your T-shirt, the Greek letters displayed proudly across my chest. I kept that T-shirt, perhaps in denial, in the back of my closet for the better part of a decade. If a friend ever saw it, I’d tell them about how I’d stolen it from some random frat guy freshman year. I finally threw your T-shirt away last year. Cloth may have been a physical barrier for Draupadi, but it wasn’t going to keep hiding my experience. Our community cannot keep wrapping up sexual assault with infinite cloth, pretending it doesn’t exist. ANONYMOUS The author is a College of Engineering alum. This is the seventh piece in the Survivors Speak series, which seeks to share the varied, first-person experiences of survivors of sexual assault. LUCAS MAIMAN | COLUMN Lucas Maiman can be reached at lmaiman@umich.edu. LUCAS MAIMAN I want Spencer’s ignoble crusade to make a stop on our campus