Michigan in Color
6 — Wednesday, February 8, 2023

From the joint desk of Michigan in Color and Groundcover News

One might think that a com-
munity street newspaper like 
Groundcover News is entirely 
different from Michigan in Color 
at The Michigan Daily, the long-
standing student-run newspaper 
of the University of Michigan. 
But these two publications that 
seem disparate from the outside 
have more in common than one 
might think.
Groundcover News was found-
ed in 2010 with the purpose of 
empowering low- to no-income 
people of Washtenaw County 
to transition from “homeless 
to housed, and from jobless to 
employed.” Groundcover News 
is grounded in several principles, 
including the beliefs that “all 
people have the right to dignity,” 
“poverty is political—systemic 
change is necessary,” “building 
community is essential to social 

change” and “solutions to pov-
erty must involve people who 
are directly affected.” As a street 
paper, Groundcover is sold by 
people experiencing poverty or 
homelessness as an immediate 
and dignified means of obtain-
ing income — all while wielding 
journalism and advocacy to fight 
poverty from its roots.
Michigan in Color was found-
ed by three women of Color in 
2014 as a safe and brave space 
for people of Color at the Uni-
versity of Michigan to express 
themselves and their urgent 
needs. Since its founding, MiC 
has remained committed to its 
mission of liberation for people of 
Color, especially in intersection 
with other marginalized identi-
ties — liberation which neces-
sitates an abolition of oppressive 
forces like imperialism, capital-
ism, 
colonialism, 
occupation, 
apartheid and white supremacy, 
which mutually reinforce one 
another.
Here at Groundcover News 
and Michigan in Color, we believe 
our missions are intertwined. 

The fight for abolition cannot be 
separated from the realities of 
racism and the stark “pileup of 
inequities” experienced by work-
ing class and oppressed peoples. 
We are committed to publishing 
work that challenges traditional 
ways of knowing — and no, that 
doesn’t just mean we identify as 
“alternative” media. 
For these reasons, Ground-
cover and MiC stand in solidar-
ity with each other and proudly 
present this special collaborative 
edition. Our intentions for this 
issue are twofold: first, we want 
to build connections between 
the U-M community and the 
unhoused community of Washt-
enaw County. Make no mistake: 
the University of Michigan is a 
wealthy institution attended by 
thousands of students of finan-
cially privileged backgrounds. 
The students and faculty of the 
U-M community hold social 
privilege that cannot be under-
stated — but this truth can also 
muddle the simultaneous real-
ity that there are many working 
class students who often struggle 

with feeling alone and invisible 
in their experiences, FGLI stu-
dents who don’t enjoy the same 
privileges as their peers, students 
who have experienced homeless-
ness themselves, students whose 
dire needs are seldom met by the 
University. 
Our second intention is to raise 
awareness of the Washtenaw 
unhoused community’s circum-
stances, in their own words, and 
of the ethical responsibilities 
U-M students, from their posi-
tions of immeasurable relative 
privilege, then have to those 
unhoused around them — wheth-
er it be mutual aid, a Groundcover 
News purchase, a simple conver-
sation or even just eye contact 
and a smile.
In 2020, 274 people in Washt-
enaw County were homeless on 
any given night. The Washtenaw 
Housing Alliance reports that 
same year, almost 2,800 people 
were literally homeless; among 
those literally homeless, 38% 
comprised families with young 
children and 20% experienced 
chronic homelessness: long-term 

homelessness 
in 
conjunction 
with a disability. Unfortunately, 
Washtenaw 
County 
numbers 
among the most expensive hous-
ing markets in Michigan. The 
standard monthly rate of a two-
bedroom apartment in Washt-
enaw is more expensive than 
98% of the state. The National 
Low-Income Housing Coalition 
reports that in order to afford 
a two-bedroom apartment in 
Washtenaw, a person earning 
minimum 
wage 
($9.87/hour) 
would need to work approximate-
ly 98 hours per week, or more 
than two full-time positions.
The greater knowledge com-
munity members have of Ground-
cover News, the better their street 
paper model works. Groundcover 
vendors are up against the Uni-
versity’s 
population 
turnover 
constantly, especially because 
they are not allowed to sell on 
campus. Each year, relationships 
are made, people move away and 
are replaced by 7,000—10,000 
new residents who have no clue 
what Groundcover News is — 
unless, perhaps, they come from 

another city with a street paper. 
In sharing print space with 
each other, we hope to expose 
future customers and readers to 
Groundcover News early, and 
amplify their support of its work, 
operations and mission.
We hope that this collabora-
tion will inspire the U-M commu-
nity to develop relationships with 
unhoused people, carry physical 
dollar bills on your persons to 
provide financial aid to those in 
need and to purchase — and read 
— Groundcover News as often as 
you can. We hope you will inter-
act with Groundcover News ven-
dors on the streets, because even 
when you lack the means to lend 
them help monetarily, a smile or 
a conversation can bring them 
comfort and emotional support. 
And we hope you will learn some-
thing about the topics covered in 
this collaboration — anti-home-
less infrastructure, the Trotter 
Multicultural Center and the 
Ann Arbor public school system, 
to name a few — and think about 
them, and the lenses through 
which our staff views them.

JESSICA KWON & 
LINDSAY CALKA
Previous MiC Managing 
Editor & Groundcover News 
Managing Director

Agniva Bhaumik/MiC

The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com

Movie night

I don’t wish I had never been 
homeless. How else would I 
have discovered my impeccable 
Scottish accent? Or how to make 
cheese and off-brand Ritz crack-
ers feel gourmet? Or that the back 
door in the local library never 
got locked so you could sneak in 
to use Wi-Fi even in the dead of 
winter?
That being said, waking up the 
morning of your 16th birthday to 
put on a wrinkled, hand-washed 
AP 
Environmental 
Science 
t-shirt you got for free is not 
ideal. Neither is the cold.
“Pirates of the Caribbean: At 
World’s End” is why I have such a 
good Scottish accent, by the way. 
I snuck back to my house (not my 
house) after school one day and 
squatted in the backyard with the 
clunky old laptop I had borrowed 
from an uncle. I connected to the 
Wi-Fi and held the Dell out of 
the snow for the 23 minutes and 
16 seconds it took to download 
the movie. That night, I told my 
younger siblings, “Now we have a 
movie we can watch without the 
internet, how fun!*”
In “Pirates of the Caribbean: 
At World’s End,” the squid-faced 
pirate (Davy Jones, apparently) 
spoke in a Scottish accent. I bra-
zenly mimicked that same inflec-
tion to make my family laugh. 
Every time we’d watch the scene 
with the hordes of crabs running 
around every which way, I’d take 
in a deep breath and, channel-
ing every single one of my Scot-
tish ancestors (of which there are 
none), yell out accented, impro-
vised dialogue. I’d shout, “What 
have you done to my brethren!” 
as they scuttled about my warped 
screen, rolling my r’s like any 
self-respecting Scotsman. My 
siblings would collapse in heaps 
of giggles, sprawled out in glee. 
I’d pull the shared blanket back 
over them to conserve heat. I 
cannot count how many times 
I’ve seen that movie.

I was homeless and it’s fine 
because it happened but also it’s 
not fine because what did we do 
to deserve that? Why did that 
have to happen to us? Why does 
that have to happen to anyone? In 
what world is that an acceptable 
reality?
After some time, your brain 
starts to warp your perception 
of reality to reconcile the cogni-
tive dissonance brought on by 
the whole situation. The human 
brain is made deeply uncomfort-
able by conflicting information. 
“I was homeless,” you reason, 
“because I deserved to be. I must 
be a truly terrible person deep 
down inside. I believe I have 
good intentions but that must be 
my deceptive evil subconscious, 
so evil that it lies even to me. I 
must be a bad person and that is 
my explanation and now I move 
on with my life knowing I am, at 
the end of the day, no good at all. 
It all makes sense.” 
If you believe you are a bad 
person for long enough, you 
become one. There is no use in 
not stealing, telling the truth 
or sharing a smile because you 
are constantly told that you are 
fundamentally bad and will be 
treated as such. Engaging in bad 
behavior is not just a possibility 
but an eventuality. So of course 
you stole that pen. You are bad 
and that is what bad people do. 
It’s what you always would have 
done even if you want to be good 
because, at the end of the day, 
your true nature will always win 
out. A bad person has no business 
trying to be good because they 
will always be bad. Being good is 
a fruitless effort. You will always 
be bad because it’s the only thing 
that makes sense. Such is the 
nature of self-fulfilling prophecy.
I was never able to fully con-
vince myself of my badness. 
My intentions are good and my 
actions minimize harm and I 
would rather not hand all my 
agency to a self-fulfilling proph-
ecy like that. 

ANONYMOUS
MiC Contributor

Examining Ann Arbor’s 
hostile and hospitality 
architecture

My struggle with 
education

If you’ve ever taken a long 
walk through Ann Arbor, you 
might note that for a rela-
tively walkable city, benches 
are somewhat rare. They’re a 
bit more common at bus stops, 
but there’s usually something 
a bit odd about them. A bar is 
affixed — usually welded on so 
removal is impossible — to the 
bench, dividing it into sections. 
It’s often cylindrical, making 
it difficult to use as an arm-
rest. Smaller benches are made 
impossible to sit in for plus-
size individuals and the overall 
lack of benches makes it harder 
for those with chronic pain or 
fatigue to traverse the city on 
foot. So the question arises: Why 
are they built this way?
This bench division is a long-
standing 
practice 
of 
hostile 
architecture, which makes cit-
ies less hospitable for those 
mentioned above, but that very 
hostility is intended toward one 
of the most vulnerable popula-
tions — the unhoused. Bars that 
divvy up benches make it more 
difficult for unhoused people 
to potentially use them to sleep. 

Hostile architecture to prevent 
the rest of the unhoused mani-
fests itself in many other ways 
all over the world: Several sharp 
stones placed inside structures, 
spikes on the ground under the 
pretense of modern art, benches 
that are fixed to tilt forward, 
the lack of access to public 
bathrooms, loud noise blaring 
through the speakers of local 
businesses — Ann Arbor being 
especially complicit in those last 
few. 
If you’ve ever taken a walk 
through downtown — espe-
cially in the winter — you might 
notice that many restaurants 
have built small huts, igloos and 
heated patios for diners to eat 
in. This hospitality architecture 
originally started during the 
COVID-19 pandemic, when res-
taurateurs had to figure out how 
to serve patrons under quaran-
tine regulations in the cold of 
winter, even under risk of fire to 
their building. Even after things 
warmed up and patrons began 
getting vaccinated, local busi-
nesses kept this practice for the 
sheer novelty of the customer 
experience. And isn’t that just a 
little odd? 

Throughout my life, I struggled 
with school. I got my education 
through the Ann Arbor School 
District. I attended Bach Ele-
mentary School, Slauson Middle 
School and Pioneer High School.
As a young lad, I first attended 
Mack Elementary School. Mack 
Elementary had a predominantly 
Black student body; it was where 
all my neighborhood friends went 
to school. One week into the start 
of my schooling, the AAPS relo-
cated me to Bach Elementary 
because I lived on Ashley Street 
between Kingsley Street and 
Miller Avenue. I was outside the 
district and had to attend Bach 
Elementary, which had predomi-
nantly white students. 
Every 
year 
in 
elementary 
school, at the end of the school 
year, I would have a one-on-one 
talk with the teacher about my 
disruptive behavior. I was simply 
moving to the next grade because 
I was too big, he explained, and 
was not going to let me disrupt 
next year’s class.
In the fifth or sixth grade the 
principal of Bach Elementary, my 
teacher and my grandmother had 
an IEP meeting concerning my 
disruptive behavior. In that meet-

ing they decided to put me in spe-
cial education for the emotionally 
impaired. I was sent to Thurston 
Elementary School. 
Mr. Lee was the teacher and 
Judy was the assistant teacher. 
In special education class they 
required two teachers per class-
room. Besides Mr. Lee, in special 
ed., the teachers were called by 
their first names. The first thing 
I noticed was that the educational 
curriculum was more reflective of 
third-grade education. I noticed 
this throughout the special edu-
cation system as a whole — even 
in middle school and high school 
the educational material was kept 
at a third- to fourth-grade level.
They tended to deal with 
behavioral issues more than 
actually educating the students. 
For example, every day in school, 
the teacher, the assistant and the 
students would have two group 
meetings per day to discuss 
behavioral issues. The teacher 
and the assistant would basically 
engage in conversation with the 
students that would end with a 
student (or students) being put 
on timeout where the student 
would sit in a corner in a study 
carrel. If the disruptive behav-
ior continued, then the student 
would be sent to the blue room.

SAARTHAK JOHRI
MiC Columnist

SHANTY WOBAGEGE ALI 
(MIKE JONES)
Groundcover Vendor No. 113

Maya Sheth/MiC
Read more at MichiganDaily.com

Read more at MichiganDaily.com

Read more at MichiganDaily.com

Courtesy of Shanty Wobagege Ali (Mike Jones)

