I
f someone ever asked me to describe
my experience with sexual assault at
the University of Michigan, I would
tell them being a female student on a college
campus has become a position of anxiety,
fear and emotional distress. I would tell
them that I have seen countless friends’ lives
altered because of sexual assault. I would
tell them I have had strangers grab my hips
and pull me in close at tailgates in broad
daylight. I would tell them that I have seen
intoxicated girls slipped drugs at parties,
and so — even though no one should have
to — I hold myself accountable to not get
drunk. I would tell them I have witnessed
fraternity brothers raise their solo cups in
confirmation that they found a girl drunk
enough to have sex with them. I would tell
them that unless they are currently a female
student on a college campus, they have no
idea just how ingrained sexual misconduct
has become within the college culture.
In the midst of a global pandemic,
Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos has
reversed any success that has been made
combating the long-lasting sexual assault
epidemic. Last month, DeVos fundamen-
tally changed the landscape of Title IX and
tipped the scales in favor of those accused.
The guidance documents issued by the
Obama administration to consider all
investigations of misconduct are long gone.
The finalized Title IX regulations narrow
the definition of sexual harassment, as
well as require live hearings and protect
those accused of campus sexual assault by
allowing them to question evidence and
cross-examine the plaintiff. Live hear-
ings with cross-examination were already
required at the University, however, now
the perpetrator can have their lawyer
cross-examine the victim with meticulous
questioning that has been honed through
years of legal training, making the campus
disciplinary process more like a daunt-
ing courtroom. Chanel Miller, a survivor
at Stanford University whose assault had
multiple witnesses, describes her inter-
rogation by lawyers as being “pummeled
with narrowed, pointed questions that dis-
sected (her) personal life, love life, past life,
family life, inane questions, accumulating
trivial details to try and find an excuse for
this guy who had (her) half naked before
even bothering to ask (her) name.” They
will do everything they can to manipulate
the victim until they prove the case as a
misunderstanding, even when the sexual
assault is blatantly evident.
Economic inequalities will be ampli-
fied since some students will not be able
to afford lawyers. This will unlevel the
playing field during cross-examination
because now there could be an expert
examining one student and someone who
has no experience with the law examining
the other.
Additionally, under the new regulations,
universities can adopt a “clear and convinc-
ing evidence standard,” making sexual
assault cases even harder to prove because
now evidence must be deemed substantially
more probable to be true than not true. This
is more rigorous than the current “prepon-
derance of the evidence standard,” which
requires enough evidence for the judge or
jury to rule that the plaintiff’s claims have
a greater than 50 percent chance of being
true. The only higher burden of proof would
be “beyond reasonable doubt.” It is alarm-
ing that such a strict burden of proof can be
adopted for an offense that commonly hap-
pens in private and is already hard to obtain
concrete physical evidence of.
Under the new definition of sexual
assault and harassment, federally funded
schools are required to only investigate
the most extreme forms of harassment.
Sexual harassment must be determined
by a “reasonable person” to be “so severe,
pervasive and objectively offensive that it
effectively denies a person equal access to
the school’s education program or activ-
ity.” This definition presented by DeVos
is widely subjective and makes it harder
for sexual harassment cases to even go
to a hearing. Victims must have repeated
and escalated levels of sexual harassment
before they can file a claim. Addition-
ally, the definition is much narrower than
the current federal definition of sexual
harassment: “unwelcome sexual advanc-
es, requests for sexual favors, and other
verbal or physical conduct of a sexual
nature constitutes sexual harassment
when submission to or rejection of this
conduct explicitly or implicitly affects an
individual’s employment, unreasonably
interferes with an individual’s work per-
formance or creates an intimidating, hos-
tile or offensive work environment.”
A key issue that has not been addressed
is if someone was intoxicated during the
incident, their case may not be seriously
considered. This is unnerving consider-
ing alcohol is involved in approximately 50
percent of college sexual assaults and 90
percent of sexual assaults perpetrated by an
acquaintance of the victim. Alcohol has long
been a factor that complicates sexual assault
cases because often the victim does not
remember parts of the assault or the assault
as a whole. Unconsciousness has almost
become a loophole for the accused to get
out of college rape investigations with zero
violations. For example, in a recent sexual
assault case regarding students on the Uni-
versity track team, a Washtenaw County
assistant prosecutor said the case could not
be prosecuted, even though the perpetrator
admitted to the assault over text, because
the female victim was asleep and could not
remember the event.
5
DeVos’s anti-survivor ideology
EMILY ULRICH | COLUMNIST
Emily Ulrich can be reached at
emulrich@umich.edu.
EASHETA SHAH | COLUMNIST
“
Injustice anywhere is a threat
to
justice
everywhere.”
- Martin Luther King Jr.
We made it. Our parents immi-
grated from Afghanistan, India,
Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka,
Nepal and countless other Asian
countries to attain a more oppor-
tune life in America. They pushed
us to be the very best. They sacri-
ficed for us. We worked hard, we
got into the country’s top universi-
ties and we achieved the so-called
American dream. And in the midst
of all that, we’ve dangerously given
into what is known as the model
minority myth. As Vijay Prashad
asks in his timely novel “The Karma
of Brown Folk,” “How does it feel
to be a solution?” How does it feel
to be complicit in our success that
serves as a vindication for this coun-
try’s history of discrimination and
oppression? How does it feel to turn
a blind eye to systemic injustices
taking place not only in the United
States, but also to those back home?
Because as Hasan Minhaj reveals
in his Patriot Act digital exclusive,
while the blood of Black lives may not
be directly on our hands, we are quite
literally at the scene of the crime.
The unjust death of George Floyd
felt like the great awakening people
needed to catalyze racial reckonings
across the globe. Our Black commu-
nity has felt this heavy rage for far
too long, and we’ve been indifferent
to their pain. Instead, we seek valida-
tion from white institutions, and we
look down on Black people with racial
resentment: the unfounded feeling
that “blacks violate such traditional
American values as individualism
and self reliance.” We praise Black
excellence, but we criticize Black fail-
ure as laziness, refusing to question
the glaring systemic issues at hand.
After all, how could a system that
we found success in be oppressive?
Writer Frank Chin put it perfectly in
1974: “Whites love (Asian Americans)
because we’re not black.” While our
hard work is valid, it is not the sole
reason for our success. Our success is
rooted in our political silence and eth-
nic assimilation, and it exists because
we are afforded better opportunities
than our Black counterparts.
In accordance with the model
minority myth, it’s easy to believe
we’ve been “bestowed with the
‘right’ work ethic and family bonds
required to succeed in America.” We
have not been historically kidnapped
from our country and stripped of our
heritage to then be forced into slave
labor to build a nation on stolen land
— it’s easy to believe when we ignore
the mass incarceration of Black peo-
ple that separate families daily. We
crudely justify our own anti-Black
sentiments because “we’re minori-
ties too.” But this narrative is not a
scapegoat for our silence because
while we’ve faced various forms of
harsh discrimination in the United
States, we have never endured the
level of extreme systematic dehu-
manization that African Americans
have experienced.
Standing in solidarity with the
Black community does not invalidate
South Asian struggles, and speak-
ing to allyship as such demonstrates
heartbreaking apathy and insensitiv-
ity. Black people should not have to
die for us to do the bare minimum
and demand a more equitable ladder
of success for all people of color. Our
rage for the heinous acts of police vio-
lence should go beyond, if not match,
that of when we are racially profiled
at airport security or when we are
told to “go back to our own country.”
And the truth of the matter is police
brutality and systemic discrimina-
tion aren’t new in South Asian coun-
tries, namely India. Partly as a result
of British colonization, we’ve become
complicit to the cultural norms of
colorism, casteism, Islamophobia
and Hindutva, a modern right-wing
political ideology also known as
Hindu nationalism. Our harmful
compliance towards extreme eco-
nomic inequality and the growing
persecution of Dalits (lower caste
members),
Adivasis
(indigenous
tribes people) and Muslims in India
have only further ingrained these
attitudes within many Desis, and
they contribute to anti-Black senti-
ments brought with us to the States.
Like many non-Black people
of color, our standards of beauty,
worth and status in society have
been defined by our skin’s level of
melanin. We’ve been raised to ideal-
ize Eurocentric beauty and to take
every precaution to obtain the fair-
est skin possible. While the goal of
South Asian solidarity is not to shift
the narrative to colorism, we must
recognize that our anti-Black preju-
dice derives from colorist and cas-
teist attitudes and thus contributes to
daily racial microaggressions. While
we are shamed for any excessive
color, our Black brothers and sis-
ters are systemically and indi-
vidually dehumanized for it; they
are killed for it based on extreme
internalized racism that resides
in the structure of our police
force. And our disdain towards
darker skin only advances racial
intolerance within our communi-
ty. That, in addition to our passive
submission of this country’s white
supremacist ideals and our genera-
tion’s notorious appropriation of Black
culture, makes our silence speak vol-
umes — especially when we owe the
creation of South Asian America to
African-American activists.
The Immigration and Nationality
Act of 1965 forced massive immigra-
tion reforms that got rid of national-
origins quota systems, xenophobic
policies and outright bans for Arab,
Indian and Muslim immigration.
Pressure from the Civil Rights
Movement and Black solidarity
with Asian Americans pushed for
non-discriminatory visa policies
that paved the way for our current
residing status. South Asian and
African-American solidarity, how-
ever, existed far before this act was
passed, and it goes beyond Martin
Luther King Jr.’s use of Gandhian
nonviolence. The parallels between
the Civil Rights Movement and
South Asian liberation movements
like Quit India instilled a historical
alliance between these two com-
munities that we continuously fail
to recognize today as South Asian
presence in the States is vastly over-
looked prior to 1965.
Activists such as Swami Vive-
kananda and Bayard Rustin stood
as allies for each others’ communi-
ty during their respective fight for
human rights and independence.
During the Jim Crow era, Bengali
Muslim migrants were taken in by
working-class African-American
and Puerto Rican neighborhoods
— giving way to Bengali Harlem
— while Indian freedom fighters
like Ram Manohar Lohia taught
activism techniques at historically
Black schools and encouraged
nonviolent civil disobedience. In
the 2014 events of Ferguson, Miss.,
South Asian Americans organized
and spoke out against anti-Black
racism, but our alliance cannot
end there. We need more leaders
like Rahul Dubey, who sheltered
Black Lives Matter protesters in
Washington, D.C., from arrest,
and the Bangladeshi family res-
taurant in Minneapolis that
acted as a staging area for med-
ics and resting place for protest-
ers. In a fight against injustice
that we are all too familiar with,
South Asian acts of solidarity for
Black lives are crucial.
On South Asian solidarity
Easheta Shah can be reached at
shaheash@umich.edu.
Read more at MichiganDaily.com
Read more at MichiganDaily.
OPINION
Thursday, June 25, 2020
The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com