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

