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Wednesday, April 7, 2021
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ANN ARBOR
Hash Bash marks 50 years of progress with both virtual, in-person events
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U-M students, faculty participate in mock renaming of Weiser Hall
Festival hosts live-streamed variety show, “smoke-in” on Diag Newly-formed group NoRon calls on ‘U’ to rename buildings with Weiser’s name NAVYA GUPTA
Daily Staff Reporter
JARETT ORR/Daily Though some organizers encouraged Hash Bash participants to tune in virtually from their homes, hundreds came to the Diag for an in-person smoke-in.
EVAN DELORENZO, MEGHANA LODHAVIA & CHAVA MAKMAN-LEVINSON Daily Staff Reporters &
For The Daily
In light of the ongoing COVID19 pandemic, the annual Hash Bash festival — now in its 50th consecutive year — hosted a livestreamed variety show featuring key political figures, athletes, musicians, business owners and other prominent voices in the pro-cannabis movement. In accordance with public health guidelines, the organizers of Hash Bash encouraged participants to celebrate the festival from the comfort of their own homes. Despite these efforts, some enthusiasts took the initiative to host an in-person smoke-in on the Diag, Hash Bash’s birthplace.
For any other pre-pandemic year, thousands of marijuana activists, protesters and enthusiasts from across the globe travel to Ann Arbor to light a joint while advocating for marijuana legislation and celebrating cannabis culture. Last year’s rally was held completely online after the COVID-19 pandemic shut down in-person activity. In Nov. 2018, the state of Michigan passed Proposal I, making it legal for those 21 and older to possess up to 2.5 ounces of recreational marijuana. Michigan was the first state in the Midwest to legalize recreational marijuana, following other states like California, Arizona, Maine, Massachusetts and Nevada. Both the in-person and virtual events commemorated the cannabis movement’s achievements while advocating for progressive marijuana
legislation on the federal level. The festival first began in 1972, four months after a freedom rally in protest of the conviction of longtime activist and poet John Sinclair, whom the Michigan Supreme Court sentenced to 9.5 to 10 years for the possession of two marijuana joints in 1971. Sinclair organized the first Hash Bash in protest of the Controlled Substances Act. Since then, Hash Bash has transformed into a large-scale festival drawing in social activists and cannabis enthusiasts from all across the state and country. In an interview with The Michigan Daily prior to the event, Adam Rosenberg, University of Michigan Business School alum and founder of Green Wolverine — an organization dedicated to exploring the cannabis industry — echoed the importance of federal decriminalization and
legalization. When discussing his expectations for the event, Rosenberg said he hoped policymakers in attendance would promote further access to cannabis research and support for the SAFE Banking Act, which would allow cannabis companies to receive the same financial services and public listings as non-cannabis companies. “Most importantly, there needs to be an elimination of the contradiction between state law and federal law through federal decriminalization, which would eliminate the current law that essentially equates cannabis with heroin at the federal level,” Rosenberg said. “This conversation needs to come from our federal leadership.”
The Network for the Ongoing Reconsideration of Our Nomenclature (NoRon), a newly formed group of University of Michigan community members, hosted a “Satirical Creative Intervention” at Weiser Center April 3. At the event, NoRon members chalked and posted a sign in front of the Weiser Hall sign reading “Weiser Center for Voter Suppression, Political Assassination and Witch Burning.” The event was in response to Regent Ron Weiser’s (R) referral of three of Michigan’s Democratic leaders — presumably Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson and Attorney General Dana Nessel — as the “three witches” at a meeting at the North Oakland Republican Club on March 25. Weiser also referenced the assassination attempt on Whitmer when answering a question about how the Republican party voting out the “witches” Weiser previously referred to. The NoRon event came one day after an emergency Regents
meeting on April 2 where regents voted 5-0-2 to censure Weiser for his misogynistic remarks. The group assembled in front of the Weiser Hall at 3 p.m. with free-standing signs and staged a “mock inauguration” by cutting an inaugural ribbon and covering up the “Weiser Hall” sign with a sign reading “Weiser Center for Voter Suppression, Political Assassination and Witch Burning.” Assemblers included members of the Graduate Employees’ Organization, Lecturers’ Employee Organization, Public Health junior Nithya Arun and Engineering junior Carla Voigt — the newly elected Central Student Government president and vice president — and numerous students, faculty and staff. In a press release, NoRon wrote Weiser’s comments were misogynistic, violent and antidemocratic. The group further emphasized that though they support the calls for Weiser’s resignation, the University needs to begin renaming buildings associated with his name.
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DOMINICK SOKOTOFF/Daily Students and faculty from the University host a mock inauguration to rename Weiser Hall on April 3 in response to Regent Ron Weiser’s (R) recent statements.
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Regents vote to censure Michigan residents 16 and older Weiser, call for resignation became eligible for the vaccine
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VACCINE
The 5-0-2 vote, a first in the board’s history, condemns MI GOP leader for violent and misogynistic remarks
Monday. Some U-M students have already been vaccinated
ARJUN THAKKAR & DOMINIC COLETTI Daily Staff Reporters
The Board of Regents voted 5-0-2 April 2 to censure Regent Ron Weiser (R) for misogynistic and hateful remarks he made to the North Oakland Republic Club on March 25. Chairwoman Denise Ilitch (D) also removed Weiser from his committee assignments at the meeting. Weiser came under fire for calling the state’s top Democrats — presumably Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, Attorney General Dana Nessel and Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson — “witches” and referencing assassination when talking about two Michigan Republican Congressmen who voted to impeach former President Donald Trump. Though he at first repeatedly downplayed his comments, after a steady stream of officials criticized his remarks or called for his resignation, Weiser apologized in a March 27 statement in which he committed to being “part of a respectful political dialogue going forward.” Regent Katherine White (D) was not at the meeting due to her service in the National Guard and did not vote. All other Regents,
including Weiser, were present at the meeting, but Weiser and Regent Sarah Hubbard (R) abstained from voting. Ilitch put forth a resolution “condemn(ing) in the strongest possible language the behavior of Regent Weiser, his language, and the actions taken therein, and call(ing) on Regent Weiser to resign from the Board of Regents forthwith.” After Ilitch introduced the resolution, Weiser commented on it, apologizing for his comments while rejecting calls to resign. “I take full responsibility for what I said,” Weiser said. “I agree with part of this resolution, but I will not resign… I will not be canceled.” In his remarks, Regent Jordan Acker (D), vice chair of the Board, gave a statement in which he echoed earlier concerns lambasting Weiser’s conduct. “I believe in forgiveness for you and anyone else,” Acker said. “But there is no room on this Board for those who advocate violence. Make no mistake: That is precisely what you did. You have forced this Board to take this painful and permanent step, to condemn one of our own.” Weiser’s conduct has sparked multiple controversies during the
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winter semester. After Weiser declined to condemn thenPresident Donald Trump for inciting the Jan. 6 insurrection, members of the U-M community launched a petition calling for Weiser’s resignation. In response, Weiser emailed his fellow regents for support, imploring them to “Remember Germany in the 1930’s.” Though some U-M students and faculty have called for Weiser’s resignation since January, the last week of March marked the first time some Regents and University President Mark Schlissel have publicly criticized Weiser. Prior to the April 2 meeting, Regents Acker, Mark Bernstein (D), Mike Behm (D) and Paul Brown (D) have previously urged Weiser to resign. Other members of the board, including Ilitch and Schlissel, were highly critical of Weiser’s remarks but stopped short of calling for his resignation. Eight former Regents called on Weiser to resign in a statement released April 1. In a prepared statement to the board, Acker repeated his belief that Weiser should no longer serve as a regent.
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Undergraduates find various ways to obtain COVID-19 shot JARED DOUGALL Daily Staff Reporter
Gov. Gretchen Whitmer announced March 12 that vaccine eligibility in Michigan will expand to those ages 16 and older beginning on April 5, shortly after President Joe Biden announced on March 11 that all U.S. adults will be eligible for a vaccine starting May 1. Many University of Michigan students, however, have been able to get vaccinated earlier, because some were eligible to receive the shot, some clinics offered spare doses and since many slipped through eligibility requirements. Risk of severe illness, hospitalization and death from COVID-19 increases with age, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Protecting those at the highest risk is a top priority, according to the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services vaccine prioritization guidance. As of April 2, according to the Washtenaw County Health Department website, 80.2% of residents ages 65 and older in the
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county have received at least one dose of vaccine. Before April 5, the only people who were not eligible to receive a vaccine were those under the age of 49 who are not essential/ frontline workers, do not have underlying medical conditions or disabilities or are not caregiver family members or guardians to someone who has medical conditions or disabilities. Yet, some U-M students found available doses before April 5 eligibility, similar to situations reported at other college campuses, such as Purdue University. According to the MDHHS vaccine prioritization guidance, those 50 and older with underlying health or medical conditions as well as caregivers 16 and older became eligible for the vaccine on March 8, while anyone 50 or older as well as those 16 to 49 with underlying health conditions became eligible March 22. LSA junior Lauren Thom said she received the Pfizer vaccine on March 25 at Ford Field in Detroit. Thom works at Beyond Juicery and Eatery in Ann Arbor, where she prepares food for customers. “My friend, he was out of
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town at the time, texted me and said, ‘Would you be able to get a vaccine on this day?’ and I was like ‘Yeah, of course,’” Thom said. “He wasn’t able to use his vaccine appointment because he was out of town.” MDHHS vaccine prioritization guidelines state that by March 1, areas in Michigan that had vaccines available were able to begin vaccinating frontline essential workers in the food service and agricultural industries. Thom, who had no reaction to being vaccinated, said getting vaccinated was the “safe and smart thing to do” so that everyone can return to a more normal lifestyle and be able to see friends and family again. “My behavior hasn’t really changed yet just because I know I’m not fully vaccinated,” Thom said. “I’m not at the point where I have the best chance of not getting (COVID-19). So my behavior hasn’t changed, but I do feel a bit safer going into the grocery store or for those other essential outings.”
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ANNA FUDER/Daily The famous murals along West Hubbard Street in Chicago’s West Loop neighborhood remind me of the famous graffiti alley on East Liberty Street, and both feel like home.
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ANN ARBOR
Take Back the Night rally seeks to raise awareness of sexual violence, calls for action Event returned in-person for 43rd annual protest on behalf of survivors NINA MOLINA & NIRALI PATEL
Daily Staff Reporters
On an unseasonably brisk Thursday night, Take Back the Night Ann Arbor — an organization dedicated to advocating for survivors of sexual violence — hosted its 43rd annual rally April 2 to educate community members on sexual violence and to encourage action. About 50 student volunteers and community members donning purple “Take Back the Night” sweatshirts and bundled up scarves and mittens formed a loose semicircle before the steps of Hatcher Graduate Library to begin the rally. A Youtube live stream of the event was also made available to allow visibility for those unable to attend due to COVID-19 restrictions. Pam Swider, Take Back the Night Ann Arbor community leader, told the crowd that this year marks her 13th year running the annual rally and march. As a survivor of sexual violence herself, Swider is also the founder and executive director of Standing Tough Against Rape Society. Swider works directly with University Students Against Rape, an organization on campus aimed at raising awareness of sexual assault and violence through rallies, marches and prevention events. She was also involved in acquiring a city permit to march Thursday evening amid the pandemic and ensured COVID-19 safety precautions were followed by volunteers and attendees. “I started becoming so concerned because I knew how it was affecting survivors, especially those who have to spend the pandemic with their perpetrators, or around people who have no idea how to support them,” Swider said in an interview with The Michigan Daily before the event. According to a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report, one in five women and one in 38 men experience
completed or attempted rape in their lifetime in the United States. The report also found that one in three women and one in four men experience at least one incident of some form of sexual violence in their lives. 26.4% of undergraduate women experience rape or sexual assault, according to the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network. Swider said marginalized groups, such as people of color — in particular Black women — and the LGBTQ+ community need allies and supporters in the fight against sexual violence. “We need to use the privileges that we have to speak when they can’t,” Swider said. “We need to let them know that they are not alone.” Because of the intensification of sexual and domestic violence against women during the pandemic, Swider said she found it incredibly important to try to make this an in-person event after last year’s virtual rally. Considering how quarantine and physical isolation have had a negative impact on domestic violence in the past year due to individuals being forced to stay home with their abusers, Swider said Take Back the Night Ann Arbor decided on the theme “take action” for this year. Recent University alum Emma Wellman was a student leader who helped organize this event, ensure distancing guidelines were followed and raise funding for the speakers’ equipment. Though adjusting to the pandemic was a challenge, Wellman said she was proud of the adaptability and progress she made alongside her team members throughout the past year to successfully put together a safe in-person rally. ”What I’m most proud of is everybody really came together,” Wellman said. “My biggest hope is just that people feel really empowered.” USAR student leader Kaitlyn Colyer, LSA junior, said adjusting to a virtual environment and in-person restrictions this year required a lot of planning on how to still
Courtesy of Nirali Patel
make the event impactful. “This issue very much still matters,” Coyler said. “We’re seeing it in the news today that sexual violence is something that happens to everyone, and it doesn’t matter your identity. So it’s important to us that we’re uplifting survivor voices and also making them stand against what’s going on.” Nicole Denson, event MC and MOSAIC Collective Consulting, LLC founder, spoke to the crowd about how Take Back the Night has become a global movement to raise awareness around the prevalence of sexual violence while also providing a forum for survivors of sexual violence. Denson said she still remembers her first Take Back the Night when she was a student at Michigan State University, which helped launch her passion for activism. “I saw people being brave and speaking their truth,” Denson said. “And from where I came, that was something that I could only dream about. And that was the start of my activism.” Ann Arbor Mayor Christopher Taylor also spoke at the event, saying that the city plans to declare a proclamation that says April will now be Sexual Assault Awareness Month in Ann Arbor. “We support survivors everywhere,” Taylor said. “We (want to) ensure that those who choose to come forward are treated with seriousness and compassion. Sexual harassment and violence by men burdens and devastates the lives of women and girls and children every single day.” Karasten Birge, also on the STARS board of directors, explained how her own experiences as a survivor inspired her to help create the new program “Sweaters for Survivors,” which donates comfortable clothes and other personal care items that will then be provided to examiners to give to survivors to wear home. Birge shared that after she was sexually assaulted, she was brought to the hospital and asked to provide her statement multiple times, making her uncomfortable. “I was given disposable scratchy hospital scrubs,” Birge said. “I had no bra or underwear. It would be nice for a hospital to be able to give survivors something warm to put on like a sweatshirt, sweatpants, new undergarments and a care package with soap, toothbrush or toothpaste. Those are the little things that are big things after going through something so awful.” STARS is partnering with St. Joseph Mercy Ann Arbor in Washtenaw County and Avalon
Healing Center in Wayne County to create “Sweatshirts for Survivors.” “This will give them back some dignity and grace they so desperately deserve after making that brave choice to just get justice for the violence that was committed against them,” Swider said. The rally’s keynote speaker was feminist author Jaclyn Friedman, who shared a prerecorded Zoom message about her experiences with advocacy and gave advice to the audience on authentic leadership and activism for survivors. “We want to be really, really clear about something (about) being a survivor,” Friedman said. “It doesn’t obligate you to anything. So, you don’t have to do or be any kind of way to be a valid, important survivor who is worthy of love and justice and care.” Friedman also said there are many ways to help uplift sexual violence survivors, specifically finding a smaller sub-issue that is more feasible to tackle. She gave advice on how to effectively take care of mental health concerns that come with a sensitive topic like sexual violence. “It’s so important for all of us to make time to rest for healing for self-care, yes, but also community care when we take care of each other,” Friedman said. “We all grow stronger together, rest and heal and take care of each other and ourselves.” Armed with bucket drums, megaphones and homemade signs, students and community members first marched west on South University Avenue towards State Street. Police in cars and motorcycles bookended the protestors, f lashing blue and red lights. Students took turns leading chants, such as “What do we want? Safe streets! When do we want it? Now!” As the crowd began turning north on State St., another chant rang out: “However we dress, wherever we go, yes means yes, No means no!” When the march reached Williams St., the crowd held a moment of silence for victims of sexual assault. Afterward, the protestors resumed chanting ”2,4,6,8 No more violence, no more hate!” When addressing the crowd, Swider discussed what she hopes participants take away from the rally. “We hope that we can educate you and inspire you, empower you,” Swider said. “And for those of you who are survivors, let you know that healing is possible and that you are never alone.” Daily Staff Reporters Nina Molina and Nirali Patel can be reached at nimolina@umich. edu and nirpat@umich.edu.
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Wednesday, April 7, 2021 — 3
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Calls mount for Ron Weiser to resign after violent, sexist comments at Republican Club meeting
The Michigan Daily compiled a list of all groups and public officials that have criticized the regent or called on him to step down EMMA RUBERG & MARTHA LEWAND Daily Staff Reporters
On March 31, the University of Michigan Board of Regents scheduled a special meeting for April 2 to vote on whether to censure one of their own, Regent Ron Weiser (R). Though a censure would signal that the Board condemns Weiser’s actions and deems him unfit for office, it is largely a symbolic move. No public commenters will be allowed at the meeting. Ahead of this unusual meeting, The Michigan Daily explains how the administration has reached this point by recapping various controversies Weiser has been embroiled in throughout the semester, as well as listing those who have criticized or called for Weiser’s resignation as of April 1. What has happened over the past few months? Friday, Jan. 8: University community members called for Weiser’s resignation in a petition and open letter, due to his failure to specifically denounce former President Donald Trump for inciting the Jan. 6 Capitol riots in an interview with Bridge Michigan. Wednesday, Feb. 3: The Daily reported that Weiser sent emails to fellow regents comparing their silence amid calls for his resignation to “Germany in the 1930s,” describing graduate student protesters as “hired union hacks” and sending a message with only a picture of a bikini-clad woman. Thursday, Feb. 4: Weiser was accused by former Michigan GOP Chair Laura Cox of making undisclosed payments of $200,000 to a former candidate for secretary of state in hopes he would withdraw his candidacy. Weiser has denied these accusations. Saturday, Feb. 6: For a third non-consecutive term, Weiser was elected chair of the Michigan Republican Party despite Cox’s accusations. He won more than 66% of the vote during the 2021 virtual MI GOP convention. Thursday, March 25: At a meeting of the North Oakland Republican Club, Weiser referred to presumably Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel and Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson as “the three witches” and made a comment about burning them at the stake. He also referenced “assassination” when discussing the reelection of two Michigan Republican Congressmen who voted to impeach Trump in January. For more information on past controversies surrounding Weiser, read The Michigan Daily’s fact or fiction analysis from February.
What has Weiser’s response been? In response to the criticism of his response to the Jan. 6 Capitol riots, Weiser told Bridge Michigan on January 7 he had undergone oral surgery earlier in the day and so was not aware of the situation in the Capitol when he was first contacted by the media. Weiser has made no public statements about his inappropriate emails to other regents. When accused of making undisclosed payments, Weiser denied the claims and said he did not violate any law. “Laura Cox’s baseless allegations are a desperate attempt to smear my name, based on a longstanding political grudge, and her inability to hold onto the job of party chair that she could not keep on her own merits,” Weiser wrote. “I’m disappointed by Laura’s shameful attempt to destroy our party with unfounded and reckless conspiracy theories so that she can get back in the chair’s race and save her paycheck.” While initially defending his comments about Whitmer, Nessel, Benson and Reps. Fred Upton (R) and Peter Meijer (R), Weiser said they were taken “out of context.” He later released a more apologetic statement on March 27 saying he would be “part of a respectful political dialogue going forward.” Weiser deleted his personal Twitter account last week, and his email was removed from the University Board of Regents website. What’s could happen moving forward? Because Weiser is an elected official, in order for him to be recalled from office, Benson would have to file an official petition. No later than 25 days following the filing of the petition, Benson would then have to declare if the petition has enough signatures for a recall or not. To trigger a recall election, the number of signatures on the petition needs to equal 25% of votes cast by Michigan residents in the 2020 general election. As of April 1, who has called for Weiser’s resignation? • Four University Regents Regents Jordan Acker (D), Mark Bernstein (D), Michael Behm (D) and Paul Brown (D) have all issued statements urging Weiser to resign. Despite criticism from the University community of Weiser for months, Weiser’s fellow regents had not previously criticized him publicly. “So, particularly at this moment in our history when such extreme rhetoric from too many political leaders has sewn deep division in society, hurt individuals, and threatened our democracy, I can
only come to the conclusion that any official, including Regent Weiser, who would unrepentantly engage in such speech should not remain in public office, especially at an institution like the University of Michigan, which so values upholding gender equality and protection of women’s rights,” Brown wrote in his statement. • The Lecturers’ Employee Organization LEO, a union representing lecturers who work at the University’s three campuses, demanded Weiser resign from the Board of Regents in a public statement issued March 31. The group expressed concern over Weiser’s history of controversial behavior but said his most recent comments at the North Oakland Republican Club meeting were particularly problematic. “The threats of violence towards five democratically elected officials are particularly abhorrent and have no place in a university dedicated to the open pursuit of ideas,” LEO said in their statement. “In addition, Mr. Weiser’s misogynistic statements about the top three elected officials of Michigan directly violate the University’s core commitments to diversity, equity, and inclusion.” If Weiser refuses to resign, LEO requests that the University remove Weiser from all Regent activities and remove his name from any University buildings — he is currently the namesake of the Weiser Center for Emerging Democracies, housed in Weiser Hall, due to his numerous donations to the University. • The Graduate Employees’ Organization GEO first called for Weiser to resign in their Michigan Daily op-ed from February 1, which said Weiser should step down “due to his fundamental conflicts of interest and immoral conduct regarding the Capitol riot.” GEO criticized Weiser’s recent comments in a tweet on March 26. “Bad look Regent Weiser!” GEO said in a retweet of the breaking news about Weiser’s misogynistic and violent comments. • Political opponents and public officials The Michigan Democratic Party released a statement demanding Weiser resign as regent in a March 26 tweet. Whitmer, Nessel and Benson — all of whom were assumed to be referenced in Weiser’s most recent comments — tweeted or released statements in response. State Rep. Donna Lasinski, D-Novi, Michigan House Democratic leader, called on Weiser to resign from the University Board of Regents in a letter to regents March 31. Five other state representatives and one additional state senator — including State Rep. Yousef Rabhi, D-Ann Arbor, and state Sen. Jeff Irwin, D-Ann Arbor — signed the letter, which was
written on behalf of all Democratic legislators in the Michigan House of Representatives. “Ron Weiser’s sexist and markedly dangerous comments are not only terribly inappropriate, they also serve to damage the reputation of the University of Michigan. His choice of words and actions have betrayed the trust that was given to him when he was elected to the University of Michigan Board of Regents,” the letter reads. “As a collective body of elected officials, we officially call on Ron Weiser to resign immediately from the University of Michigan Board of Regents.” • The Senate Advisory Committee on University Affairs SACUA released a statement March 29 criticizing Weiser’s use of sexist and violent language, calling his comments “a betrayal of the trust our community — students, faculty and staff — places on Regent Weiser.” While the statement does not explicitly call for Weiser to resign, it implies it by questioning his role as a leader on campus. “SACUA believes strongly and without any hesitation that Regent Weiser cannot be an effective leader in our community,” the statement reads. • Central Student Government In a statement released March 29, former Central Student Government President and Vice President Amanda Kaplan and Saveri Nandigama, alongside current President and Vice President Nithya Arun and Carla Voigt, called on the rest of the regents to denounce Weiser’s actions and call for his resignation. “We stand with the six women deans, and their allies, who released a statement yesterday condemning Regent Weiser’s actions,” the statement reads. “We urge the remaining members of the Board of Regents to also condemn his remarks and join their peers in calling for his resignation. We deserve better.” CSG first called for Weiser’s resignation following the attempted insurrection at the Capitol with a resolution introduced Feb. 3 and passed Feb. 17. • Student-created petition U-M community members created a petition following the Jan. 6 Capitol riots calling for Weiser’s resignation, which has garnered over 6,300 signatures as of April 1. The petition was updated on March 26 with Weiser’s recent comments. “This sexist, violent rhetoric has no place at the University of Michigan or amongst its leadership,” the petition says. “We loudly reaffirm our demand that he resign, and we expect President Schlissel to condemn this threat to all students of color on campus.” • Faculty open letter Hundreds of faculty signed an open letter released in early January that asked Weiser to resign due to
his involvement in the Michigan GOP and initial failure to respond to the Jan. 6 Capitol riots. The letter states that Weiser’s role as GOP chair is directly at odds with his duties as regent. “In sum, the MI-GOP’s current political program depends on empowering factions and candidates that seek to impede or even overturn basic democratic principles, that seek to exclude Black, Indigenous, and other non-white residents from political participation, and that pursue their political goals without regard to truth, honesty, or integrity,” the letter reads. “You have to choose between supporting the University of Michigan and supporting the darkest factions of US political life. You cannot do both.” • Eight former regents Eight former regents signed a letter April 1 calling on Weiser to resign, saying they were “appalled to hear” that Weiser had advocated for violence and used misogynistic language when referring to Whitmer, Nessel and Benson. The letter, a copy of which was obtained by The Daily, states that while the First Amendment guarantees right to freedom of speech, it does not excuse violent language. “That doesn’t mean that if he believes that he is free to denigrate women with whom he disagrees by calling them ‘witches’ and if he encourages assassination as a way to deal with honorable men of his own party with whom he disagrees he should retain the privilege of remaining a fiduciary for a great university,” the letter reads. “That is why we are joining many others in calling for his resignation.” Who has condemned Weiser’s statements but stopped short of calling for resignation? • Regent Denise Ilitch (D) In an email to The Daily, Regent Denise Ilitch (D) expressed disappointment over Weiser’s recent statements but did not call for his resignation. “Despite any differences among its eight members elected by the State’s voters, we have worked constructively on advancing the institution without destructive politics getting in the way,” Ilitch said. “That is why it is so disturbing to learn of the repugnant language used by a member of our Board when addressing a political group. His use of violent imagery crosses a line that is inconsistent with what should be our shared values. There should be no place for physical threats by elected or political leaders on our Board or in our State.” • University President Mark Schlissel Schlissel issued a statement April 27 condemning Weiser’s remarks, though he did not call for his resignation. Schlissel has not previously criticized Weiser’s
controversial actions. “Such words are particularly abhorrent in a climate where so recently the use of language has engendered violence and attempted violence directed at elected officials, our democratic institutions, and the individuals who guard them,” Schlissel’s statement said. “It is never appropriate to raise the specter of assassination or perpetuate misogynistic stereotypes against anyone in any setting. Elected officials must adhere to a higher standard regardless of the context of their remarks.” In an interview with The Daily Jan. 20, when asked about the faculty letter and Weiser’s initial response to the events of Jan. 6, Schlissel referenced his own statement on behalf of the University condemning the violence and emphasized that all regents are elected by a statewide vote. Schlissel did not then criticize Weiser, either implicitly or explicitly. “I’ve known Regent Weiser practically since I arrived here,” Schlissel said. “He has lived locally, and he’s a major donor to the University. I know for sure that his affections for the University run deep… So, I think that the many faculty and students in the community and others that have objections are raising those objections, they’re getting lots of coverage in the media, and those fall into the political process. It’ll have to be worked out, but I can say that the University itself, as well as all the regents, unambiguously condemn the violence and those that incited the violence. That’s not a matter of question.” • Six U-M Women Deans All six U-M deans who are women wrote a letter on March 28 condemning Weiser’s comments. The letter was signed by LSA Dean Anne Curzan, School of Nursing Dean Patricia Hurn, School of Dentistry Dean Laurie McCauley, School of Education Dean Elizabeth Birr Moje, School of Kinesiology Dean Lori Ploutz-Snyder and School of Social Work Dean Lynn Videka. All 13 additional deans signed the letter in solidarity. “We feel strongly that your comments do not support the university’s and our units’ values of diversity, equity, inclusion, and justice,” the letter reads. “Nor do your comments support robust civil debate and democratic engagement. The latter point is particularly saddening and ironic because you have been a champion of democratic values through institutions you have supported on our campus.” • Washtenaw County Prosecutor Eli Savit Savit called Weiser’s comments “misogynistic and violent” in a tweet on March 26. Daily News Editor Emma Ruberg and Daily Staff Reporter Martha Lewand can be reached at eruberg@umich.
ANN ARBOR
City Council approves resolution for unarmed safety response team Councilmembers also talk U-M President’s Commission on Carbon Neutrality recommendations, rental period ordinance, anti-Asian hate
LILLIAN GOODING & SHANNON STOCKING Daily Staff Reporters
Ann Arbor City Council convened virtually April 5 to discuss the development of an unarmed safety response team, support for the University of Michigan’s President’s Commission on Carbon Neutrality, an amendment to the housing rental period and a resolution to condemn anti-Asian hate crimes. The council discussed DC-3, a resolution that would task the city administrator with investigating different pathways for developing an unarmed first responder program for mental health crises within the Ann Arbor community. According to the proposal, police officers are currently responding in situations that would be better handled by trained mental health, public health and human services professionals. “We ask our police to do too much in our community that they are called upon to do things where they do not have expertise,” Mayor Christopher Taylor said. “And yet, there are subject matter experts among us — that is to say there are
mental health experts and staff among us, there are human services experts among us, public health experts among us.” Ann Arbor resident Paul Fleming spoke in support of the resolution, saying it is a decision supported by evidence and is a step in the right direction toward supporting those going through mental health crises. “Rethinking how we approach public safety so we don’t rely on police is in-line with evidence based public health best practices,” Fleming said. “Current policing practices have spillover effects on entire communities, particularly communities of color, making people who live in areas that are aggressively policed more likely to suffer mental health issues and have physical health ailments.” Many other councilmembers also expressed their enthusiasm for the resolution, citing examples around the country where unarmed first responders could have prevented a deadly outcome and instances of police brutality. “This program is far overdue and it has serious needs and consequences,” Councilmember Ali Ramlawi, D-Ward 5, said. “A call
to the police should not be the last call you make when you’re calling for help. And unfortunately, for a lot of people it is—with mental illness or struggling with something they could easily be helped with.” The council also noted specifics not addressed within the resolution, including lack of knowledge about where funding would come from. At a March 16 meeting, City Council had voted to use revenue from recreational marijuana excise taxes to fund social equity programs that support individuals impacted by the “War on Drugs.” Leading up to Monday’s vote, many community members, including the Washtenaw Countybased advocacy group Liberate Don’t Incarcerate, expressed concerns that the program could be tied to the police department despite the fact that it would serve as an alternative to policing and had asked for the resolution to be delayed. City Administrator Tom Crawford said the process of exploring options would entail a more thorough investigation into where to get funding. Councilmembers also stressed to Crawford the importance of
community engagement in this process. “I think this is a huge effort that we’re undertaking and we need to be thinking about what those costs are right now, and that there should be something in our budget that we’re adopting if we’re serious about this,” Councilmember Erica Briggs, D-Ward 5, said. One of Liberate Don’t Incarcerate’s reasons for wanting the resolution tabled was that they felt there had not been “meaningful participation” with community-led groups. The council unanimously voted to pass the DC-3 resolution. The council also discussed another resolution, DC-2, that supports the PCCN’s recommendations to reach carbon neutrality for direct emissions across all three campuses by 2025, though with the controversial use of carbon offsets. In 2019, University President Mark Schlissel announced the creation of the PCCN with the goal of reducing carbon emissions put out by the University and ultimately achieving carbon neutrality. The announcement came in response
to sustained community activism that put pressure on the University to commit to achieving carbon neutrality. After the PCCN was created, student activists continued to protest for greater transparency, leading 10 students to be arrested for trespassing. In December 2020, the PCCN proposed a series of actions and recommendations for public review and commentary. This public review concluded in February 2021 when the commission finalized their recommendations and submitted it to Schlissel and the Board of Regents for approval. At a March 25 Board of Regents meeting, the University voted to disinvest in fossil fuel companies and committed to a net-zero investment portfolio by 2050, again after years of activism from campus groups. According to Melissa Stults, Ann Arbor’s sustainability and innovations manager as well as a PCCN member, the city’s goal to reach carbon neutrality by 2030 uses carbon offsets and indirect carbon emissions because Ann Arbor does not have the resources to make a complete change in infrastructure. “The city doesn’t have all of
the levers in our disposal to be able to do things like, remove all gas stations or all natural gas connections that exist within homes or within businesses,” Stults said. “And so offsets became part of the conversation from a more rational interpreting role.” Stults said the city is attempting to achieve as close to carbon neutrality as possible, but offsets will still be part of the equation. Councilmember Jeff Hayner, D Ward-1, raised concerns about how supporting the PCCN’s proposals correlates with Ann Arbor’s goals as a city. Hayner said members of Washtenaw350, an environmental organization, have reached out asking for the council to not support this bill in protest, saying the PCCN’s proposal is not enough to truly address climate change. “(Washtenaw350) folks have been reaching out to me saying, ‘Please don’t say yes to this because we don’t feel it’s strong enough, and we don’t know enough about their solutions,’” Hayner said.
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Michigan in Color The “diversity” question Seeing through myself
4 — Wednesday, April 7, 2021
The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com
The first time I became aware of my body, I was 12 years old at an outdoor water park. I sat in an inflated tube, swaying back and forth in an obnoxiously loud wave pool with my sister and friends. It was a perfect day until it wasn’t. At one moment, my sister and friends had been taken elsewhere by the manufactured tide and I sat swaying along, enjoying the blazing sun on my face and the cool of the water on my feet. I was then approached by two white teenage boys, who I first thought were mistaking me for someone else. One of them looks at me, stifles a chuckle and eloquently slurs: “Hey, I just wanted to let you know my boy over here thinks you’re hot.”
desirable stemmed from myself and was uninfluenced by external factors and opinions. To an extent, women do perform these things for themselves. It is a form of self-preservation to take care of oneself, to put meticulous care and effort into carefully coordinated outfits, perfectly manicured nails, curled and coated eyelashes. But I couldn’t help but wonder if at some point, for some women, did this desire stop being a form of self-preservation and become a manifestation of social expectations? Some time in high school I was introduced to white feminism, which at the time I thought was just feminism, not thinking about the ways it often excluded women who looked like me. Feminism told me I should wear what I want, date who I want, do what I want and I loved it. I championed the agenda to my Arab and Muslim family, who told me not to
The boys erupted into a fit of laughter and swam away, likely never to think of that moment again. They were to move on in the world, unaware of the effect of their words on the women they encounter, unaware of its effects on me. But I sat there, suddenly aware of the layers of extra fabric clinging to my skin, embarrassed and choked by the polyester hijab that circled my face; suddenly aware of how ridiculous I must have looked for two white boys to approach me and jokingly tell me they thought I looked “hot.” In that moment, what was a perfect day turned into a demarcation of when I first became uncomfortable being a visibly Muslim woman in a country that valued women based on their appearance. I didn’t tell anyone about this — not my sisters, not my friends. I just wanted to shrivel up like my pruned feet in that wave pool, never to be seen again by anyone. Since then, I’ve always known my body, a woman’s body, a Muslim woman’s body, to be a complicated thing. And I don’t mean that in a feminist, body-positive way, though I am both of those things. What I mean is, a woman’s body sometimes feels like a free-for-all, a legislated playground that starts to feel like less of a body and more of a foreign object that does not feel in line with the rest of one’s being. After that moment, I tried to minimize the parts of me that made me visibly Muslim. I no longer prayed in public and sometimes opted for a hoodie instead of a hijab. When I was in high school, I became obsessed with makeup because it was the only part of my appearance that I could control. Every paycheck that I got from my cashier job at the dreaded local supermarket went straight to Ulta and Sephora. I would watch tutorials and wake up two hours early for school just to cover my face in extravagant paints and powders, to look like someone I wanted to present to the world. When my mom criticized my makeup addiction and questioned who I was putting in all that extra effort for, I shot back with the quintessential response: “I’m doing it for me.” And like many women, I think I started to believe it. I started to believe that my desire to make myself more
be like those Godless Amerkaan who showed their bodies and slept around and didn’t care about their family’s reputation. Feminism told me all women were equal and that our choices were only ours to make. It talked about freeing the nipple and empowering women to strip down, but did nothing to empower women who chose to cover up. It talked about free access to abortion in America, but not about forced sterilizations and sexual assault in refugee camps. It talked down on women I knew and loved, women like my mother and my aunts and my grandmother who chose to stay at home and raise children, raise villages, which was a world of work in itself. It told me to make my own choices, but didn’t tell me what to make of the women who did not have access to the same choices. It didn’t tell me how to balance expressing my individuality and owning my body while remaining respectful to my culture and true to my faith. Becoming comfortable in my skin is a process. For Muslim women, expectations of what one should be are drastically different for women who choose to wear the hijab versus those who don’t. In the Muslim faith, hijab is a commandment of God when a girl comes of age, as are praying, fasting, giving to charity, etc. However, like everything else in life and religion, every choice is a personal one and everyone’s journey is different. Nonetheless, by putting themselves on display, women who choose to wear the hijab are exposing themselves to the unwarranted and relentless ideals imposed on them by two competing sides — Western society and the Muslim community. On one end, we are being told by Western society: You are oppressed, and in order to liberate yourself, you must reject the restrictive notions imposed upon you by your community. But this liberation comes at a price: We will set you free, but at the same time, we will make you want to change everything about yourself that makes you “other.” Your Arab nose, your thick curly hair. We will eat up the parts of your culture we deem worthy. Your delicious food, your exotic dancing. We will don hijabs on scantily clad
MAYA MOKH
MiC Contributor
Design by Ahmad Kady
models on runways but scoff in pity when it’s a part of your everyday life. Almost every Arab woman I know has either gotten or talked about getting plastic surgery. Nose jobs and face lifts, keratin hair treatments, thinned and tattooed eyebrows. And the discourse surrounding these treatments is mostly positive and uplifting. It is a woman’s choice what to do with her body. Yes, but to what extent is it really that woman’s choice when notions of what she should look like are ingrained into her from the moment she is old enough to switch on the television? On the other end, our body is an openended discussion for Muslim and Arab men, who drown out the sound of their own shortcomings with the sound of us messing up. They tell us our clothes are not modest enough and simultaneously shame us for not being “open-minded enough” and willing to bend our rules for their own pleasure. Elder women look at you in disgust in the grocery line because the strands falling out of your loosened silk hijab tell them I am American before I am Muslim, before I am Arab, before I am anything. I’ll give you an example. Last summer, after returning from my study abroad program, I was working at a small Yemeni restaurant near my house. One day, I was serving a table of older men, dressed in abayas and turbans who looked at me a little too long when I brought them their appetizers. I ignored the feeling I got — that pit-in-the-bottomof-your-stomach feeling that makes you feel like you are on display, that sudden awareness of body — and continued doing my job, even when I saw the men stop my coworker to whisper something in her ear as she walked by. Later on that night, my sister, who is closer friends with my coworker, told me what those men said: They wanted my coworker to tell me that my shirt was too short, that a hijabi like me should dress better in a place like this where men come and are free to look. She was too shy to tell me in the restaurant and I’m glad she didn’t. When I first put on my hijab at 9 years old, I was not thinking about these things. I was not thinking about my physical appearance or how I would go on to be perceived in the world. I wasn’t thinking about how the deliberate covering of my body would lead to an undeliberate uncovering of my identity in every room I walked through — that I would be judged as Muslim first, human second. I didn’t think about the humiliation I would feel at that waterpark and how subsequently, swimming — something I used to love and enjoy— would become something I dreaded and avoided. I was thinking: My mom and my sister wear it. I love my mom and my sister. I love God, and he wants me to wear it. And I never regretted it, never saw it as anything other than an extension of my identity, a testament to my faith in God, until that day at the waterpark. After that, it became something that clearly announced me as “other,” something boys would never find attractive, something my American peers would never understand or accept. I worried they would think I was somehow less educated, somehow less American than them, somehow more docile and less assertive and more passive. I don’t remember my first experience with discrimination in America; at this point theseinstanceshaveblendedintoamyriad of little moments, microaggressions and blatant remarks, but I can tell you about the first time I became aware that my body was not always something that would feel like mine.
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political science majors waiting on an acceptance to the Public Policy School. Most of us are politically MiC Columnist active and involved in related organizations on campus, and some of us naively believe we can As a person of color, any type of application, become president one day. Due to this, I knew the whether it be college, job or internship applications one place I could truly stand out would be in the are always equipped with stress, self-doubt and application essays. It felt like the three 300- to 400insecurity. I feel alone in academic and social word essays would determine my future. After filling out basic demographic information in settings at the University of Michigan, with about 55% of the student population being white and the the early part of the online application, it was finally median family income being a staggering $154,000 time to view the essay prompts. Unsurprisingly, the for the Fall 2020 undergraduate population. I, as a first one was the staple “diversity essay.” This year’s prompt started out by informing minority student who does not have the privilege of wealth nor whiteness, have had to endure a the applicants about how research has shown college experience overrun by feelings of imposter that diverse work groups are better at solving syndrome. Here at the University, I constantly feel problems. They noted, however, that working in the pressure of social and economic factors like race such groups can present considerable challenges and social class that lead me to lose belief in myself to students who struggle to work with others from academically and professionally. I dream to go to law different backgrounds. The question then asked the school and become a lawyer, which I know will force applicants to write about an experience working in a me to exist within more intimidating environments diverse setting and specifically asked that the essay of professionalism, whiteness and years of enhanced be focused around the challenges of working with differences. The final part of the prompt questioned feelings of being an imposter. Interacting with students in my sociology, the applicants to discuss in what ways one could political science and public policy classes has improve on how productive and respectful they resulted in very interesting yet uncomfortable were to others of a different background. Though I was expecting at least one essay to conversations. It seems like almost every student has been interning for their local congressman prompt me about my background, this question was since high school and have parents who own their the most difficult one to write, taking me weeks of own law firm. Comparing my background and constant drafting and editing. I think it’s important experiences to others, the overwhelming sense of for admissions committees to ask questions which competition makes me anxious and worried about allow students to vulnerably talk about their my future at the University and beyond due to my identities, but when it comes to this specific question, lack of experience compared to my peers. When it it seemed that the committee was only trying to comes to discussions surrounding internships or any see how white students have been able to interact other professional opportunity, the number of white in diverse settings. Instead of just asking about an students who seem to have been handed positions experience in working in a diverse community, they because of their family’s privilege is honestly asked about how the environment was challenging. After rereading the prompt over and over, I began astounding. This past January, I started my application to the to get angry. In what environment at the University Ford School of Public Policy. Even before the start of have I had the opportunity to even work in a diverse my freshman year, I already knew I wanted to apply setting? To me, this question asked, “How, as a to this program come the winter of my sophomore person of color, have you faced challenges working in year, and I worked my ass off both academically a diverse environment despite never being in one?” and professionally to try to secure an acceptance. I I’m almost always one of about three Latinx students completed the prerequisites courses early, pursued in 300-person lectures, the only person of color in discussion sections and internships that aligned one of four brown students with my political interests crossing the entire Diag, and became an involved A challenge I have to the center of the University. student at the University to In all of my group projects solidify that public policy constantly deal with is not and breakout rooms, I was my passion while being valued as a thinker often find myself having to proving to admissions that settle without having my I was a dedicated student. and student within the ideas appreciated, being I thought what I was doing classroom. It’s not my talked over and feeling would be enough and that stupid. I wish I had the I would stand out among duty to respectfully and opportunity to work in hundreds of applicants productively work with a diverse group setting all competing for a spot so that I could finally be in the 70- to 80-person students who can’t see past listened to, not doubted or cohort. But when talking my skin color. ignored, but that is simply to other students who not the reality here at the had the same dream of University. attending the Public Policy I reflected on the final part of the aforementioned School, it seemed that their experiences, grades and accomplishments were much more prestigious than prompt: “Are there things you wish you had done mine. And when it was time to start my application, I differently or might do differently in the future needed to think of something that made me different to work more respectfully and productively with from the rest of the applicants. There was an easy people who differ from you?” No, but this question conclusion: my ethnicity. I am a Latino student at caters to white students who trample the minority the University; I am a part of the mere 6.98% of the students at this school, creating a welcoming prompt for them to ease their way into. When undergraduate population that is Latinx. Diversity has been proven to be beneficial in the talking to older friends in the Public Policy School classroom. Whether it’s ethnicity, socioeconomic who helped edit my essay, we all agreed that this class or religion that sets individual students apart, prompt seemed to be purposefully phrased so learning in diverse environments improves students’ that admissions would be able to see which white cognitive skills and critical thinking. By boosting students were “woke” in appreciating diversity an individual’s abilities and intellect, diverse and understanding its importance. These students classrooms nurture further academic success and are obviously necessary for a holistically diverse innovation. More diverse classrooms not only make environment, but the ease of being able to discuss me feel more comfortable, but they also create an working with people of different backgrounds open space for dialogue regarding important issues provides advantages to white applicants over affecting various cultures and ethnicities. I knew my actual students who would contribute to a diverse ethnicity would benefit the Public Policy School’s cohort. I am a person of color who has solely been cohort, but I did not want to wonder if I had only in majority-white environments, I could not think been accepted for the sake of the school’s diversity of a time where I faced a challenge working across numbers. My imposter syndrome made me feel that differences, because I have rarely been presented my experiences and grades would not be enough with differences in my work environments. A for the acceptance email that I’ve been dreaming of challenge I have to constantly deal with is not being valued as a thinker and student within the since I learned about the Public Policy School. I had to come to accept that a majority of the classroom. It’s not my duty to respectfully and students applying, on paper, most likely appeared to productively work with students who can’t see past admissions as identical. So many of us are pre-law, my skin color. HUGO QUINTANA
When do identity politics get harmful? UDOKA NWANSI MiC Columnist
To most, identity politics are known as a garnering of support for a political figure or platform that represents specific demographics, whether that be race, religion, gender, etc. In recent years, the relevancy of identity politics has increased as diversity in government has become much more important now than ever before. For example, the pool of 2020 Democratic presidential nominees was the most diverse the party has ever had. We have gotten to a point where identity markers have started to be seen as a form of virtue signaling. More often than not, someone is assumed to be a good person just because they belong to one or more marginalized groups. This strips the nuances of an individual and automatically assigns them a certain amount of morality based upon a few characteristics. While uplifting members of minority groups in politics is beneficial for representation, it can be harmful when it’s done without knowing a politician’s background and platform. Representation alone
isn’t enough if a politician’s policies are harmful to their constituents. Take Lori Lightfoot, mayor of Chicago, for example. Her campaign was groundbreaking because she was a frontrunner to be the first gay, Black mayor of Chicago. However, while she was making headlines and gaining popularity because of this, many overlooked her background as a federal prosecutor and voted for her solely because of the facets of her identity, rather than the specific policies that she stands for. Consequently, her missteps as mayor have not been condemned nearly enough. In the
most recent poll taken of her approval rating by Wirepoints last October, her approval still stands at over 60%. In February 2021, she spent $281.5 million in federal COVID-19 relief funds on the Chicago Police Department payroll, even though she had proposed a reduction in their budget back in 2020. In addition to this, she also refused to reduce the funding of the police force within Chicago Public Schools despite calls for her to disinvest in the CPD. While Lightfoot continues to maintain that she is only trying to do what is best for Chicagoans, her actions do anything but. After violent
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clashes between the police and Black Lives Matter protesters last summer in Chicago, it seemed to me and others that a positive step towards reconciling the tension between civilians and the police force would be to reduce their ability to inflict harm on citizens by defunding their operations and reallocating funds to social services and community programs. Instead, Lightfoot put even more money into the CPD, enabling them to continue their aggressive tactics. Another example of the harms of identity politics is current Vice President Kamala Harris. While it may be groundbreaking that she is our first female, Black and South Asian Vice President, her faults in her past as a “tough-on-crime” prosecutor are often ignored. In 2010, she sponsored a state truancy law as a part of her Truancy Project, which was designed to promote consistent attendance for young people in grade school. While the intent to reduce truancy in schools may have been well placed, the execution in the form of criminalization was extremely harmful. The implementation of this law led to the arrests of several parents, most of
them being Black mothers, because their children were consistently absent from school due to outside circumstances like lack of access to food, resources or safe housing. Rather than focusing on combating the factors that may contribute to a lack of attendance in school, Harris resorted to unnecessarily severe punishment. Parents were unjustly arrested with little to no consideration for their domestic situations. Approximately two in five children ages two years and older whose parents have been arrested endure significant emotional and behavioral problems, which is roughly twice the rate when compared to children in the general population. From announcing her campaign for presidency on Martin Luther King Jr. Day to playing Tupac at her book signings, Harris seemed to publicly align herself with her Blackness through not-so-subtle cultural cues all throughout her presidential campaign. This comes across as highly performative because of her past in facilitating mass incarceration within Black communities. Despite her obvious pandering, Harris still garnered support from Black
Americans after joining Biden’s campaign as the vice presidential nominee, which surely helped in their election in Nov. 2020. Even as vice president, she is still inflicting harm on entire communities. Since Inauguration Day in January, the Biden-Harris administration has been issuing drone strikes in Syria, physically harming countless civilians. It is important to not assume such high morality of politicians — or anyone for that matter — just because of the marginalized groups that they fall into. On a personal level, I had to take a step back and figure out when heavily relying on identity politics was clouding my political alliances. I, like many others, would love to have more representation in government from people who look like me, especially considering that the abilities of highly competent politicians like Stacey Abrams are often overlooked because they belong to minority identities. However, we have to keep reminding ourselves that not all representation is good representation and that research into a politician’s platform and background should always be done before giving them our full support.
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Michigan in Color
Winter wonderland ANDY NAKAMURA MiC Columnist
As I traveled from the Detroit Metropolitan Airport back to campus in January, I peered out the window of my cab with utter amazement. The sapphire sky and soft glow of the afternoon sun looked exactly as I had remembered it, but this time, the world was coated with snow. I come from a tropical climate, so the idea of a cold winter was totally foreign to me. The world cloaked in white looked so beautiful, just as I had imagined it in my head. I had spent years fantasizing about building a snowman and getting into snowball fights, so the brightness of the snow as it fell from the sky made me look forward to those new experiences that lay before me. This winter semester would finally allow me the opportunity to see and touch real snow for the very first time. Even though all of my classes were online and many of my friends had moved back home, I was determined to remain optimistic about this coming semester. After all, it’s college. I had spent years imagining late night adventures, striking up conversations with complete strangers and shouting the lyrics to trashy pop songs into the void of the night. Here, I could do anything I ever wanted, right? Snow gently wafted in the calm breeze sweeping through campus when I stepped out of my cab in front of East Quad Residence Hall building. I reached my hands out to catch the delicately hovering snowflakes, but their frigid tendrils stung my hands. Over the next several weeks, the sky lost its vibrance. The uniformly gray clouds filled the sky with their emptiness. The days blended
together as the winter nights devoured the afternoon sun. The dreariness of winter seeped through my window. My empty cans of energy drinks, all neatly stacked like legos in my overflowing recycling bin, were the most vibrant decor I owned. Even when I consumed 600mg of caffeine a day (halfway to risking seizures according to the Food and Drug Administration), I still couldn’t bring myself to make the arduous trek down the hall to the trash closet. The mess in my room held little importance since I was my only company anyway. I barely had the energy to walk downstairs to the dining hall, never mind my dreams of exploring the city around me. On a particularly gloomy morning, desperate to rediscover the warmth I felt when I saw snow outside of my cab window for the first time, I ventured out into the cold. I circled the campus aimlessly as if I was waiting for some divine inspiration to strike me. I stared up into the colorless sky, waiting for fresh snow to fall and posing for what I imagined to be a beautiful cinematic shot in the imaginary movie of my life. Meanwhile, my feet trudged along the earth. The grime of the sidewalk fused with the slush of the trodden snow left behind a brown, misshapen depression in the wake of each step. It felt as though I was sinking into the ground itself. With each step my feet felt heavier and heavier. Eventually I dragged myself over the empty Diag, dusted off a snow-covered bench and let myself slouch over in my seat. In high school, I used to dream of escaping my mundane yet stressful life. I wanted to build a snowman, get into snowball fights and skate on the surface of a frozen lake. Yet between the cold, my coursework and
COVID-19, I still had little control. The fantasy world I built was toppling down before my eyes, and I just had to accept it. The life I had imagined was not one that I could live. A cold anger ran through my veins. What use are dreams if they never materialize? Frustration mounted inside me, but I didn’t drink enough caffeine that morning to have the energy to be upset. My eyes drifted from the gray sky to the uneven frost-covered ground, while I just sat frozen in place. Then I noticed the footprints left by each passerby filled the whole sidewalk. Who were they? Where were they going? Why? I could never know the answers to these questions, and I realized that I didn’t need to know. I had spent so much time constructing intricate fantasies about my future that I couldn’t be satisfied with just not knowing something. Every raindrop, every snowflake, every dust particle had to be a metaphor. I had to be in control. Each time reality didn’t serve me, it felt as though the entire world was collapsing. But, my lack of control was relieving. I couldn’t control the weather or predict the future, and I realized that I could be just fine with that. Instead of hiding from anything that threatened my fantasy worldview, I chose to embrace the unpredictable and the unknown. I pushed myself back up from the bench and balanced on my own two feet again. Who am I? Where was I going? Why? It was all up for me to decide. I chose to walk away from my past idealizations and learn how to accept my lack of agency. I looked neither up at the sky nor down at the ground but forward. I set my sights on the horizon and started walking back to my residence hall, letting the stray snowflakes fall on my face.
Wednesday, April 7, 2021 — 5
A walk around Ann Arbor MARINA SUN MiC Columnist
Lately, I’ve been finding it hard to identify the line where work stops and rest begins. Before this year, I was able to segment my days with commutes through hallways or greetings to new classmates, but as the COVID-19 pandemic continues to impact traditional schooling structures, I can’t help but feel like my days have blurred into an indiscernible cycle where Zoom polls and Instagram stories don’t seem much different. Unfortunately, I can’t bring about the conclusion of a pandemic or dispel online classes for the rest of the semester, so on days when another glance at my computer screen is sure to induce extreme frustration, I take a walk around Ann Arbor. Sure, bustling classes have evolved into painfully silent breakout rooms, and even the most enthusiastic of professors have their mood dampened when forgetting to “share screen,” but one thing that never fails to excite me is the diverse atmosphere of campus. Here are three of my favorite Ann Arbor spots to visit on my daily walk. The Law Quadrangle: This is the perfect place to pass through, especially as the weather becomes warmer. Walking off State Street and through the opening arches feels like entering a new world (Harry Potter vibes, anyone?), and there’s a sense of calmness floating through the air. Bonus points if you go later in the evening when the multitude of street lamps shine a warm light on the intricate architecture. Even on the busiest days, I know that spending a couple minutes navigating the peaceful walkways in the Law Quad is sure
to reinvigorate me with the conviction that everything is as it’s meant to be. Thompson Parking Structure Rooftop: A must-visit spot for optimal sunset viewing. Plus, there’s something about looking over Ann Arbor from way up above that gives me a sense of newfound perspective and power in mydaily accomplishments. If you’re an avid people watcher, this is the perfect spot to observe passersby on Thompson Street, from new couples walking tightly together to groups of friends debating over which bubble tea store to frequent. At around 7PM, the air gets a little crisper, and that stinging feeling of the breeze hitting my face coupled with an indescribable blend of sunset colors is the perfect conclusion to any overwhelming day. The Ross (School of Business’s) Courtyard: I definitely never thought I’d say this, but somehow the words “Ross” and “peaceful” have become correlated in my mind. No thanks to internship culture but all thanks to the Ross Courtyard, which provides a moment of serenity among the seemingly never-ending movement of school and club work. The multitude of glass and terracotta creates an earthy environment, and the traffic from nearby roads never gets the opportunity to enter through the courtyard wind tunnel. There’s an underground study area, lots of trees and an overall stillness that is a rare treat for students traveling along the busy sidewalk of Tappan Avenue. If you’ve been feeling like me lately, overwhelmed and desperate to escape from the grasp of a computer screen, talk a walk around Ann Arbor (or wherever you may be!) and discover the hidden locations and ideal lookout points that can recenter your day.
Sinophobia as an immigrant ZOE ZHANG MiC Columnist
My phone alerted me that I had a new message request on Instagram. Upon opening the message, I froze. “You’re way too ugly for that Chinese virus.” I had received that message on Instagram exactly a year ago, at the beginning of the pandemic. It was a reply to one of my Instagram story highlights, a basic selfie of me posing and smiling in front of the backdrop of a wall. The account was anonymous, of course — I suspect that the user did not want to suffer the consequences of spewing racist hatred if they were to be exposed. Though I was stunned at the pure bigotry in the sentence, that message was far from the only time I have experienced anti-Asian racism. I am Chinese, both ethnically and nationally. I was born in Shanghai and raised in Beijing. I had an unassuming childhood until one Friday night when I was 13. With my hair still wet after having gone to the community pool, my parents sat me down on the couch. Our conversation that night was exhilarating: They told me that we were emigrating to the United States of America. I leaped from the couch up and down in elation. America was sugar, spice and everything nice to naïve, 13-year-old me. I took pride in excelling in my English classes, which were taught by American teachers who wore trendy clothes and perfume, unlike their Chinese counterparts. My favorite movie, “The Avengers,” which had just came out in 2013, had a predominantly white cast: I envied the characters’ beauty, especially their pale skin, and admired the luxurious and futuristic lifestyle they led.
The following year was almost unbearable as I counted the days until we would actually move overseas. During the final months, I even made my own grid paper with dates to help me count down the days. I kept it in my pencil case so that I could color it in like a scantron with eagerness and excitement every morning in my homeroom. I did so very obnoxiously so that my classmates around me would notice. I wanted them to be jealous of me because, just as I did, the other students understood the perks of being American. Little did I know that being an immigrant in America came with many burdens. The whirlwind change in my life came at a price: I had a hard time fitting in at my new high school. I did not speak English fluently like my peers. While my entire high school was ecstatic about the whip and nae nae dance, I responded to my dancing classmates with awkward laughter, as I didn’t know the routine nor where it originated from. Fitting in was a particularly impossible feat for me, considering I was an awkward foreign girl who was new to the town and the school system. I was being tutored on grammar every study block when I had English class, much to my embarrassment. I sat with my English teacher at her desk breaking down grammar structures while my peers snacked, laughed and chatted in their seats. It was difficult making friends and my loneliness took a toll on me. Being an immigrant was uncomfortable beyond a personal level as well. I soon began to realize that China, my home country, had nowhere near a positive image here in the United States, even pre-COVID-19. Sinophobia was all over the news and the media. I became hyper-aware of it. Everywhere I looked, my home country was being overwhelmingly
portrayed as filthy, corrupt and authoritarian, without a single mention of our traditions, humility or culture. It was unsettling that the latter had always been my focus when perceiving my home country, but to some, the Chinese Communist Party’s perceived wrongdoings are all they knew about the nation. Anytime I saw China on the news, it was an alarming report on either pollution, CCP censorship and mass surveillance or its propaganda. Does China have its own issues? Yes, but often it feels like these issues are only reported by western media to demonize China as a whole and not out of genuine concern for its citizens. The news reports are not a call for change nor action — they are sweeping generalizations that can lead to real-world consequences. Sinophobia was embedded in entertainment as well in the form of stereotypes. While white characters with, for example, European or Australian accents are portrayed as mysterious and attractive, Chinese accents are foreign and the butt of the joke in many Hollywood movies. I started becoming ashamed of my roots and began to downplay my identity — as much as I hate to admit it, I didn’t want to be associated with neither the “corrupt” Chinese government nor the offensive stereotypes. When I first moved as a child, I often announced with pride to the class that I was from Beijing whenever my teacher asked if there was a new kid present. As time went on, I no longer mentioned my home country and adjusted my accent to be more palatable and assimilate with my peers. The internal struggle was constant, though. While I considered myself American, I was still enraged any time anybody insulted my home country and my people. Once, one of my first American friends had pulled on the ends of her eyes as a
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joke. Though I laughed along and put on a front out of cowardice, I was fuming internally. Fast forward a few years, you could not tell me apart from an Asian American who was born and raised here in the U.S. Over time, I had gradually lost my accent and even started to forget my mother tongue. This did not bother me as much, since fitting in and not being viewed as an anomaly meant everything to me then. I learned to forget and ignore the culture that raised me for fourteen years, but my experiences with racism in the COVID-19 era, such as the aforementioned direct message, ushered in new painful realizations for me regarding my identity as a Chinese American. A year ago, the internet watched and sneered at the clips of Wuhan, China, where residents were dragged out of their homes into quarantine facilities during their city-wide shutdown. On the other side of the world, we enjoyed our temporary “freedom” and “normalcy.” It was an “aha” moment for a lot of Americans who have bought into sinophobia in the media — a moment where this sinophobia was justified in their minds. This is what some
western media outlets do to its audiences: They have and continue to successfully equate the Chinese people to its government. On the other hand, Chinese people’s real suffering does not receive the much deserved attention due to mainstream media’s hyperfocus on the Chinese government’s corruption. As I expected, practically nobody extended their sympathy towards the people of Wuhan; instead social media watched these videos of the city amused, as if they were some sort of dystopian trauma porn. Help was never the topic of discussion. On top of that, former President Donald Trump quickly assigned blame for COVID19, which emboldened individuals to commit vengeful acts of hatred, racism and violence towards Asian Americans. After the “kung flu” rhetoric, the “Chinese virus” controversy and the countless Asian hate crimes, I am truly exhausted as a young, Chinese immigrant woman living in the United States of America.
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U-M professors, Michigan public officials discuss roots of anti-Asian racism, but suggestions for what to do in the face of hate fall short ANCHAL MALH MiC Columnist
Disclaimer: The author and Michigan in Color as a whole do not condone involvement of the carceral state or any perpetuation of criminalization. The solutions covered in this event are not solutions the author is advocating for, but rather solutions offered at the event that Michigan in Color remain in search of alternatives to. Please see resources the author has provided related to bystander intervention training at the end of this article for more possibilities. The Michigan Asian Pacific American Affairs Commission held a compelling town hall over Zoom Friday to combat the rise in anti-Asian hate and teach viewers how they can be allies to the Asian American community. The goal of the event was to take a look at the racism Asian Americans have faced in the past, policies created to discriminate against Asian Americans and the rise in racemotivated violence against Asian Americans during the COVID-19 pandemic. However, when it came to offering Asian Americans resources to turn to, public officials only presented options involving law enforcement — which is a harmful perpetuation of oppressive systems. The list of speakers included Roland Hwang, lecturer in the Asian/Pacific Islander American Studies Department at the University of Michigan; Melissa May
Borja, assistant professor at the University’s Department of American Culture; Sunita Doddamani, Michigan assistant attorney general and head of the hate crimes unit; Attorney General Dana Nessel and Anthony Lewis, director of the Michigan Department of Civil Rights. The event started with a few words from Governor Gretchen Whitmer. She offered her condolences to the Asian community and condemned the recent acts of violence against them, particularly the mass shootings at several Asian-owned spas in Atlanta. “I want to make our values very clear, hate has no home in Michigan,” Whitmer said. Then, Borja presented a powerful slideshow containing information on how racism against Asian Americans began in America and how this violence has spread due to the COVID-19 pandemic. “This idea, this fear of Asian people, is known as the yellow peril,” Borja said. She then recalled historical events like the Chinese Exclusion Act and conveyed how Chinese, Korean and Japanese individuals were discriminated against at the American border in the late 19th century and throughout the 20th century. Seeing Borja acknowledge America’s racist past was impressive because she reminded attendees of the discrimination Asians have always faced in America. When society does not acknowledge these past hardships, it perpetuates the model minority myth. The model minority myth is the stereotype that all
Asian Americans are academically successful and come from prestigious families. Failure to reflect on America’s racist history excludes Asian Americans of lower socioeconomic statuses, along with those victim to unequal policy and those seeking refuge from Americainitiated wars. Throughout American history, Asians have had to leave their country in order to come to America because of American military influence in their country. It does not bring awareness to the fact that the majority of Asians were blamed for bringing illnesses and diseases to America in the late 1800s when the transcontinental railroad was built. The model minority myth diminishes and invalidates the increase in violence rooted in racism that Asian Americans have been experiencing in America ever since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. It enforces the idea that Asian Americans do not struggle. Borja also discussed how increasing antiAsian violence can be tied to political rhetoric surrounding the pandemic, most notably by former President Donald Trump. “Researchers based at Berkeley did a study and they found that in the 10 years leading up to 2020, there was actually a downward decline or downward trend in anti-Asian bias,” Borja said. “But that downward trend was reversed the first week of March when politicians and conservative media began to use terms like ‘China virus.’” According to Stop AAPI Hate, there have been a total of 3,792 reports of anti-Asian hate incidents from March 2020 to March 2021.
Incident reports have come from all over the country, ranging from verbal harassment to physical assault directed towards Asian Americans in public, Borja said. Additionally, Borja attacked some myths that have been spreading on social media during her presentation. According to Borja, there is a common belief that the hate Asian Americans are experiencing is only targeted towards the elderly population. However, Borja stated that there has also been an increase in bullying reported by Asian American children. Children are more likely to experience verbal harassment, but elders are more likely to experience physical harassment, Borja said. In addition, she noted 68% of attacks have been against women, showing that they are specifically targeted because of America’s violent history against Asian women. I can list numerous examples from my own self-education: for example, a notable policy that discriminates against Asian women is the The Page Act of 1875. It was enacted because Chinese women were hypersexualized and feared to be engaging in prostitution in the United States. This notion is not true, as many women traveled to America to prosper economically and to be reunited with their spouses. During World War II, the Korean War and in Vietnam, there was an increase in demand for Asian sex workers because of America’s military influence. In today’s world Asian women recall street harassment, unsolicited sexual comments from coworkers and have been subjected to men projecting
their fetishes onto them. With the recent shootings in Atlanta it is evident how men have gone to the extreme to project their sexual fantasies on Asian women when the suspect claims he had a “sexual addiction” and saw the spa as “a temptation he needed to eliminate.” Asian women have never been safe as a result of over 100 years of being subjected to sexual objectification. Towards the end of her presentation, Borja discussed ways non-Asian individuals can be allies to the Asian community at this time. The methods she discussed are summarized below: 1) Reach out to your Asian American friends. However, do not reach out to your Asian friends just because they are Asian. Reach out to them because you see their hurt, not to relieve your guilt. 2) Discuss microaggressions and what they may look like in public, so you know when to intervene. 3) Refrain from using harmful expressions when talking about the COVID-19 pandemic. 4) Encourage victims to report hatred to organizations like Stop AAPI Hate. 5) Take part in a Hollaback bystander intervention training to learn how to intervene when you see violence rooted in racism. Finally, Borja addressed the narrative of the divide between the Black and Asian communities. She said the increased levels of harassment experienced by the Asian community is rooted in white supremacy.
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Arts
6 — Wednesday, April 7, 2021
The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com
The culture of complicity must end SAMMY SUSSMAN Daily Arts Contributor
A little over a week ago, news broke of the death of former Metropolitan Opera conductor James Levine. Reporters and critics across the classical music and opera worlds wrote long obituaries that interrogated Levine’s complicated legacy. The first item that most obituaries touched upon was Levine’s critical success as the conductor of the Met. He led the institution for four decades, turning a noted opera company into the biggest classical music organization in America. (Levine also spent some time as conductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra and the Munich Philharmonic, though neither of these posts received as much critical attention.) Following this explanation of Levine’s performance career, most obituaries mentioned the years of sexual misconduct allegations that led to Levine’s unceremonious dismissal from the Metropolitan Opera last year. Numerous young men have accused Levine of abusing his power as a
conductor to sexually assault them; in at least one instance, an alleged assault was reported to police. Many critics, performers and composers have taken Levine’s death as an opportunity to question the conductor worship that gave Levine so much power in the industry. Perhaps Levine’s alleged abuse would have been addressed sooner had he not held hundreds of careers in his hands. While I agree with this critique, I fear that this singular focus on Levine distracts from the larger issue at hand: Numerous individuals in positions of authority over the course of Levine’s career failed to address his alleged abuse. With some combination of feigned ignorance and deliberate silence, these individuals allowed Levine’s alleged predation to continue unchecked. The first known allegation of sexual assault against Levine, for example, comes from 1968, three years before he garnered critical acclaim as a conductor. Levine was nothing more than a 25-year-old faculty member at a Michigan music school at the time — it was the inherent power of his teaching position that aided in his alleged
perpetration of abuse. Had any other faculty members in this program learned of this alleged abuse, they could presumably have taken steps to address the abuse without facing significant professional repercussions. Levine did not yet hold the keys to hundreds of artists’ careers. Though I can’t speak to the whisper network that presumably surrounded Levine throughout his professional career, I can write about the whisper network that long surrounded Stephen Shipps, former University of Michigan music school professor. (In 2018, I helped report four decades of previously undisclosed sexual harassment and misconduct allegations against Shipps; he was indicted on two sex crime charges in October and faces a postpandemic criminal trial.) In The Daily’s first article on this case, we reported that Shipps’s alleged abuse was reported to a music school professor in the summer after Shipps’s hiring was announced and before he started teaching. This was in 1989 — Shipps had not yet accumulated institutional power as a department chair, associate dean and youth program director. It remains unclear if
the music school professor reported this allegation. It similarly is unknown if the University launched any investigation before granting Shipps tenure. A few months ago, I obtained a statement that was sent to the prosecutors working on Shipps’s criminal case. The statement came from a former North Carolina School of the Arts violin student. In it, he spoke of the administrative indifference that he believes the school’s dean demonstrated toward allegations against Shipps. “(The school’s then-dean) perpetuated Shipps’ inappropriate sexual conduct,” the former student wrote, “and allowed it to continue for 30 more years at the University of Michigan … This could have all ended in 1986 if (he) had taken the appropriate actions.” I remember when I first learned about this former dean while interviewing a survivor that later went on the record. She mentioned that this dean was still teaching at the collegiate level. Unlike many of the other authority figures she believed ignored her allegations of abuse, he could still be held accountable for his actions.
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When I reached him by email, he told me that he could not remember much of his time as the dean of the North Carolina School of the Arts. “I was at NCSA from 1986-90,” he wrote. “It was long ago, and I have done so many things since then. I am not sure I could be of much help.” He did not respond to multiple emails providing him with more details about the alleged sexual misconduct that took place during his time as dean. It remains unclear if prosecutors have sought to interview him based on the information they received. It took tremendous bravery for nine survivors to speak to The Daily about the alleged sexual harassment and
misconduct they experienced, and it took significant bravery for numerous friends and former colleagues of these survivors to corroborate specific aspects of their accounts. It would have taken comparatively little bravery for a professor or a dean to address allegations of sexual misconduct that had been raised against their colleague — I would hope that it is within a dean’s basic job description that they actively address allegations of sexual misconduct that leave some of their students feeling unsafe.
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Ann Arbor Film Festival 2021: Observing the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in ‘The Viewing Booth’ ROSS LONDON Daily Arts Writer
Ra’anan Alexandrowicz’s (“The Law in These Parts”) “The Viewing Booth” is perhaps the most stimulating and perspective-altering documentary that I have ever seen. A film with two subjects, the Israeli occupation of Palestine and an analysis of documentary filmmaking itself, “The Viewing Booth” is thoughtful and selfcritical as it explores the manner in which we observe. In short, the viewer of the film watches the watcher. A young woman, Maia Levy, enters a booth and sits before a computer screen and camera. Forty YouTube videos have been preselected by the filmmaker:
half represent the perspective of Palestinians living under occupation, the other half presents the points of view of the Israeli settlers’ and soldiers’. Levy watches these at her own pace and is asked to speak her thoughts aloud as she reacts to the footage. Levy is familiar with the IsraeliPalestinian conflict: Her parents are Israeli, and she recently traveled to Hebron. She knows of the humanrights group, B’Tselem — which produced or uploaded many of the Palestinian-perspective videos — and has seen a few of the clips before. As she clicks from video to video, pausing occasionally to think and respond, the viewer watches her face lit by the blue glow of a screen. On one level, this film is about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Despite
Levy’s even-handed deliverance of skepticism (there is much talk of events being “staged” — both clips of altruism and brutality by the Israeli military are given this label), she makes her own beliefs clear: Israel is acting morally, and there must be some justification for this mistreatment of Palestinians. Her honesty is surprising, and her occasional racist commentary is embarrassing: “They lie a lot,” she says, referring to Arabs. She watches the videos with a confusing mix of open-mindedness and disbelief, acknowledging that these videos depict real events, but searching for the missing piece, the Arab instigation. At one point, Levy asks: “Why would I believe this?” In other words, if she believes the Israeli army to be
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the act of viewership. The film ends with a follow-up interview, in which Levy watches the recording of herself watching the films. The audience is three degrees removed from the footage, and the film begins to focus more pointedly on the process and psychology of watching. Earlier in the film, Alexandrowicz states that these war videos “transform the viewer into a witness.” There is perhaps more responsibility coded into the latter term, as viewership is passive while witnessing is implicative. Alexandrowicz probes Levy’s desire to find fault and place blame on the Palestinians as an active resistance to this sort of implication, but Levy attributes the behavior to bias. She recognizes her filtered perspective,
informed by her identity as the Jewish child of Israelis and muddled by fictional portrayals of the conflict. In a mildly hypocritical defense, Levy rejects these videos as possibly truthful because they do not show the entire picture. The videographer’s choices cannot be trusted, according to Levy, though she seems to have no problem with her own selective criticism of the clips. Levy’s desire for an objective perspective illustrates the underlying challenge for a filmmaker like Alexandrowicz. Objectivity is impossible in documentary filmmaking, as the videographer is always making choices.
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April 7,31, 2021 Release Date: Wednesday, March 2021
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Los Angeles Times Daily Crossword Puzzle
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Edited by Rich Norris and Joyce Nichols Lewis
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acting morally, why take this seriously? Alexandrowicz has made more conventional films about the Israeli occupation, and this film offers a step back. His decision to make this film, to reframe the conversation around the viewer and observer of the situation in Palestine, becomes the film’s true subject by its conclusion. Through voice-over, he explains to the viewer and to Levy that the reason he focuses the film entirely on her, despite interviewing other students, is because she represents the intended viewer of his past films. Levy’s steadfast skepticism is of interest to Alexandrowicz because it presents him with a frightening possibility: His films might do no more than preach to the choir. In this sense, “The Viewing Booth” is about
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WHISPER WHISPER “I have the emotional fragility of a pinecone”
“Hi Mom!”
This image is taken from the official music video for “Chemtrails Over The Country Club” by Lana Del Rey.
Lana Del Rey’s ‘Chemtrails Over The Country Club’ is good, but not great MADELEINE VIRGINIA GANNON
Daily Arts Writer
Lana Del Rey’s latest album Chemtrails Over The Country Club will please longtime fans but feel lackluster for everyone else. The album has all the right ingredients for a trademark bombshellhit with Del Rey’s deep serenade, evocative lyrical writing and tonguein-cheek references. Yet, Chemtrails stops short of the sharp and powerful sociopolitical commentary of its predecessor, Norman Fucking Rockwell!, and the emotional introspection feels underwhelming after Lana Del Rey’s recent gut-punch in her spoken word poetry release, Violets Bending Over Backwards. What’s left is an album that’s good but not exciting. The title itself perhaps dooms the album to mediocrity — “Chemtrails” recalls the popular conspiracy theory that argues the visible lines of condensation an aircraft expels in the sky are actually filled with chemicals intended to harm the public. In a time when the truth is constantly under attack from wolf-cries of “fake news” and the recent rise of QAnon, Chemtrails Over The Country Club sets the stage for yet another pointed evaluation of American culture. The album title manages to capture the extremes of American life — from the wild conspiracy theories of “Q” to the idyllic mundanity of suburban life and class privilege — yet fails to build upon it. The “wrapping paper” of the album is in some respects far more thrilling than the contents of the package itself. Instead, Del Rey focuses on the trials and tribulations of fame. The song “Chemtrails Over The Country Club” celebrates the freedom of daily life, capturing that familiar, obligation-
free serenity of hot summers in childhood, where the only thing to do was wait for time to pass. Notably, the official music video features Del Rey’s infamous bedazzled mask, which is where we last saw Del Rey on the pages of The Michigan Daily. “Dark But Just a Game” explores the hefty price of stardom, describing artists as chameleons who are forced to change until they eventually lose themselves — Del Rey vows to stay the same, to preserve herself. “Not All Who Wander Are Lost” strikes at the heart of the album’s core theme: It’s all about perspective. Where fame may seem a blessing, it is also a burden; when one may appear lost, perhaps it’s merely “wanderlust.” Beneath the dramatics of chemtrails and conspiracies, maybe there lies a hidden blessing in celebrating the boring, the normal, the straight-andnarrow condensation trails. As a storyteller and songwriter, Del Rey excels as always. A mediocre album for a powerhouse like Del Rey is a far better album than another’s best work. Yet, while Chemtrails Over The Country Club offers a handful of tracks that build some engaging commentary, it lacks the drive of Del Rey’s previous works. Del Rey may have set the bar too high for herself — a feat which speaks only to her talent and celebrated career thus far. What holds the album back is the lack of stylistic experimentation or any fresh, noteworthy material. Chemtrails is a shoo-in Lana Del Rey album — a blessing and a curse. Those who love Del Rey will continue to love her, but anyone still not convinced will find little here to sway them.
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Arts
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Wednesday, April 7, 2021 — 7
‘Tell Me Why’ understands the fickle nature of memory M. DEITZ
Digital Culture Beat Editor
I have this one memory that I’m not sure is even real. I can vividly see my infant self gazing up at our green marble countertop, struggling and struggling to reach some Flintstones vitamins my mom left out. My chubby little hands barely reach the wood beneath the stone, and then suddenly I morph into a bigger (but still quite little) four-year-old. Taller and smarter, I rise up on my tippytoes, swipe up Fred and Barney and chomp. As ridiculous as it sounds, I feel like that actually happened, and this has often led me to question the true nature of our relationship with memory. How much of what we go through is real, especially as children? What if what we think we remember is simply an illusion, a mirage, a false memory planted by our malleable young minds? For something to truly stick, you’d think it would have to be important or jarring or memorable. That said, Dontnod Entertainment’s
2020 narrative adventure game “Tell Me Why” argues that our pasts are much less certain than we have been led to believe. “Tell Me Why” follows Alyson and Tyler Ronan as they attempt to sell their childhood house 10 years after their mother attempted to kill them there. By confronting their past, they learn everything is not as they remember and must dig into the mystery behind why Mary-Ann Ronan wanted to kill her kids. The Ronan siblings possess a telekinetic bond that allows them to wordlessly communicate with one another and replay ancient memories in an effort to learn more about their tragedy. Over the course of the game’s three chapters, the siblings will remember an event in two very different ways, forcing players to decide which events actually occurred. Maybe you will trust Tyler, a transgender youth sent off to Fireweed Residential Center after stabbing his “deranged” mother out of self-defense. Or maybe you will pick Alyson, who grew up under the protective eye of the town sheriff and
was branded “murder house girl” for her entire childhood. Since Tyler is a member of the LGBTQ+ community, the question of memory becomes doubly important. Can he trace back the memories to when he first began to feel dysphoric? What about the memories of when he realized he was gay? Which came first: the gender or the sexual orientation? In my personal experience, the arduous process of self-identification began without any build-up, yet after accepting my truth, I found hints scattered throughout my childhood. Old memories that once passed by without a second glance transformed into small windows gazing directly at something within me that I had no words to express. Where once stood an arid desert of disconnected repression, a newfound flowing river of memory ran freely. When examined, these hints make it intensely clear how inevitable and natural my current identity is — I was just remembering things wrong. I was always meant to find myself and
live this truth; it simply took 20 years of experience for me to realize it. For those in the LGBTQ+ community, the issue becomes not only trusting but identifying with the past versions of ourselves — someone who feels miles away from who we are now, but we know at one point we stood there, in their shoes, living their “normal” experience. Tyler faces this dilemma constantly: He is not the same person he was 10 years ago, yet he must unearth the causes of what happened in order to finally let go. In the end, it doesn’t matter which memories you choose in a particular playthrough of “Tell Me Why.” Sure it will impact Alyson and Tyler, but each playthrough acts as our own memory of the game; each person’s journey will be different and personal with distinctly hard to recall details. What “Tell Me Why” wants players to understand is that the past is the past, and that “the second you walk away from something, that’s it.” The past is what we want it to be right now. Where once stood Ollie Ronan — an earlier assumed name, the
This image is from the official website for “Tell Me Why” by Dontnod Entertainment.
game thankfully never deadnames Tyler — the sister who felt more like a brother, now stands Tyler Ronan, all bearded out and confident in his masculinity. We cannot change what happened in the past, just as we cannot stop ourselves from remembering a certain way. So, unless your version of events will harm someone, it’s okay to pick something as truth. Even if it didn’t happen, I choose to believe that I had a sudden growth spurt and aged a few years, and that’s my first memory. It’s weird
and stupid and makes zero sense, so it’s absolutely perfect for me to identify with. I’m sure that years from now, I’ll look back at my time here at the University of Michigan and my writing for The Daily and see things that are different from how I remember them. And that’s okay. The important things right now may fade into the background to make room for something smaller and more personal, something that means more to me in the future. I look forward to understanding what that is.
Ann Arbor Film Festival 2021: ‘The Quoddy Fold’ makes art of erasure MARY ELIZABETH JOHNSON Daily Arts Writer
Directed by Paulette Phillips (“The Directed Lie”), “The Quoddy Fold” first feels like an adaptation of a Mary Oliver poem. The film, showcased in this year’s Ann Arbor Film Festival, takes a “Koyaanisqatsi”-esque approach to documentary filmmaking; the director films herself over the course of the year as she tears down a 19th-century home — that she bought for this specific purpose — in rural Nova Scotia, Canada. The only dialogue heard is from quiet
eavesdropping of the director’s phone conversations or a moment when she reads the title of a book to herself, there is no musical score or soundtrack at all. Early on in the film, it felt like a thoughtful ode to the nature of decay. “The Quoddy Fold” also features some beautiful cinematography juxtaposing the rotten wood of the house with the lush fields of cattails and wildflowers. The director seems to want the viewer to pay attention: to watch closely and let us make the story for ourselves rather than have it explained to us. In the post-screening Q&A moderated by Amanda Krugliak,
Still from “The Quoddy Fold,” Paulette Phillips.
assistant director of the University of Michigan’s Institute for the Humanities, Phillips explained that she actively exercised restraint in introducing any sentimentality — or any narrative at all — into the home. At times, the film feels incredibly meditative. Watching these shots of birds, snails, dogs and insects, I got the feeling that animals seem to understand life in a way we don’t: live, work, eat, multiply, die. Anything else is simply excess. Don’t get caught up in the small stuff. When Phillips and her two dogs walk through a field, she layers the two frames of them walking toward the house and away from the house on top of one another, giving the figures this translucent ghost effect of walking past one another. Krugliak observed that it seems to symbolize a sense of the “past blurring into the present.” Phillips agreed that our experience of time and “what it means to dwell” were major components of the “story” during production. Unfortunately, creative intentions and thoughtful sound bites can’t save a film. I felt myself getting increasingly bored — not just because there wasn’t any dialogue, but because the film didn’t seem to know what it wanted to say.
PISCES
ARIES We start this week in quite a feel-good, cooperative mood, with a helpful Venus-Mars sextile on Tuesday which encourages good personal interactions and a friendly, sociable vibe across society.
It would’ve been fantastic as a short film, or maybe even a traditional documentary that included more exploration of the families behind the home. Phillips adamantly rejected this “typical anthropomorphizing” of the home, declaring, “I did not want to make a movie about that family,” but she doesn’t really explain why. I understand her inclination to explore what she calls the “kinesthetic experience” we have with material objects — meaning the way that our sense of touch influences our attachment to our possessions — but as a Black woman watching a white woman tear down this house with so much history, I couldn’t help but feel frustrated. There’s a moment about twothirds of the way through the film when Phillips finds a copy of the book “The Great War on White Slavery.” She reads the title aloud to herself in a whisper before throwing it into the furnace to burn. Of course, I understand the rejection of something hateful, but from white hands, it felt like erasure. It was clearly a very old copy of the book, with authentic photographs that would have been useful in a museum rather than destroyed. Trying to erase records of colonization and white
YOUR WEEKLY
This is not an easy week for getting much done, which is frustrating – you had plans, and you have deadlines, and your self-confidence is riding on creating a success this week. Hang on in there. Just do what you can, step by step.
supremacy feels cowardly. People don’t study “Birth of a Nation” because we think it’s a great or morally sound film, because it’s clearly neither; we study it because it’s a part of history, and the racism that lived in history lives on today. I felt the same way about the house. There were clearly rotted and moldy portions of the home, but there also appeared to be healthy portions of the foundation that she just tore down. Phillips herself said that there were times that she thought, “Maybe I can save (the house),” admitting that “it would’ve stayed standing for an awful long time,” if she had not intervened. Her intentions then feel rotten. She clearly shows knowledge of the land there, explaining the indigenous meaning of the word “quoddy” (an excess of fish) and the image of folding in on the landscape. She explained this “postcolonial notion … that the settler house is the house of the past, we’re actually on a positive way towards a new horizon,” and to a better relationship with the land. I think Phillips felt that tearing down a building where some white supremacist had lived would be a way of honoring Indigenous people who had been displaced from that land, but I couldn’t help but think:
‘Look at me’: The rise and fall of SoundCloud rap KAI BARTOL
Daily Arts Writer
TAURUS
Friendships could be difficult this week, Taurus, particularly if there is a large gap in money or social status between you. Someone may feel left out, or as if you are not bothering with them, despite your best intentions.
AQUARIUS
WHISPER
Your stubborn nature is highlighted this week and it seems that you are determined to do things your way or not at all. The influence of Friday’s Mars-Neptune square pervades the week, and for you, this is all about risk-taking versus security, especially with money and material matters.
“Happy April!”
GEMINI The problem with goals this week is that they keep shifting, Gemini. Your priorities are changing, and your objectives are changing too, so it’s very tricky for you to know whether you’re on the right track or not.
CAPRICORN
“There are too many bagels in my kitchen.”
CANCER Your dreams have a lot to teach you this week, Cancer. It’s an excellent time to start a dream journal or to look into dream imagery. What is your subconscious trying to tell you? Synchronicity may play a large part in your week too, so look out for odd coincidences.
LEO In love, you may be lulled into a false sense of security early in the week. Any issues of jealousy or infidelity have not gone away, despite the smiles.
At work, there’s an elusive, vague vibe that hinders you from getting much done. Despite your best efforts, details go astray, deadlines are missed, and people just don’t seem to be pulling their weight.
SAGITTARIUS The focus is definitely on your home and family life this week, although what starts as a gentle enough vibe could very well prove more stressful as the week progresses.
“I am allergic to cats. I want one more than anything.”
VIRGO There’s conflict and tension this week between your working life and your home life, and in particular your love life. You may feel upset or taken for granted if your partner complains about your work ethic – but are you really doing all that you can to create a better work-life balance?
LIBRA You’re more prone than most to falling into this week’s lazy, somewhat stubborn vibe, Libra, so it may be hard for you to get up to speed. Friday’s Mars-Neptune square highlights how your idealistic goals suffer when you can’t get the day to day details right.
SCORPIO Are you sure that you’re telling the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth? There’s a deceptive vibe going on this week, particularly around your closest relationship.
Read your weekly horoscopes from astrology.tv
“Someone else could have lived in that house.” It could’ve been repurposed or given to Indigenous people in need, not just torn down for an art project. Phillips said she found over 38 diaries in the home when she acquired it in 2015. The photographs shown near the climax of the film as the house is pulled to the ground are the most intriguing section of the film. Delving into the lives of all of the people in the photographs from the turn of the century might have seemed cliché to Phillips, but it would’ve made for a better film. It seemed as if Phillips was looking for a creative challenge in removing the sentimental aspect of the home, rather than respecting what it meant to people. Getting rid of that narrative felt like erasure. It seemed that Phillips didn’t want the film to over-explain itself. There’s a saying that explaining a joke, story or symbol is like dissecting a frog: It helps you understand it better, but you kill it in the process. In “The Quoddy Fold,” she smashes the frog with a hammer, turns to the camera, then says, “What do you think?” Ultimately, the film looks beautiful, but it’s shallow. Honestly, she should have just let the frog live.
What first comes to mind when you hear the term SoundCloud rap? Perhaps you envision an immature group of teens with colorfully-dyed hair and face tattoos, rapping about prescription drugs. Maybe the term connotes a sense of rebelliousness that brings to mind exciting, unfiltered discoveries found on the internet. It could remind you of your own blunders and self-produced lo-fi beats you wish will never see the light of day. Regardless of your relationship to the genre, it seems that this simple twoword phrase elicits strong reactions from every Gen Z, tech-savvy music listener. However, though mentions of the genre are a staple in music discourse, defining the short-lived moment of SoundCloud rap (often derogatorily referred to as mumble rap) is a task ranging from arduous to impossible. During the last decade, the audience for the music streaming service SoundCloud exploded into the hundreds of millions. With a utopian vision of accessible music creation for the people, SoundCloud became a champion for any up-and-coming artist. New musicians, without ever having to leave their bedroom, gained stratospheric stardom, circumventing the conventional methods of going to professional studios and working with record labels. SoundCloud’s design is more aligned with social media websites than streaming services, which lowers the barrier between artist and audience. This gave a massive advantage to musicians who interacted with their fans online. Behind the scenes, SoundCloud’s unprecedented success shook the music industry to its core. What we think of as SoundCloud rap is emblematic of the platform
it spawned from. With harsh, raw instrumentals, SoundCloud rap embodies the DIY nature of its platform. Songs like XXXTentacion’s “Look at Me” (which currently has over 189 million plays on SoundCloud) contain blown-out vocals and very minimal mixing. Lil Pump’s “Gucci Gang” (which peaked at number three on Billboard’s Hot 100) trades songwriting for the repetition of the phrase “Gucci gang” 53 times. For outsiders of the genre, this style of production may make SoundCloud rappers seem lazy and their music seem inaccessible, but for fans, this amateur aesthetic only heightens the listening experience. These rappers, boasting ostentatious personalities, mindnumbing music and underground origins may elicit strong parallels to the punk movement of the late ’70s and early ’80s. Rather ironically, most SoundCloud rappers have ditched the platform of their namesake and got snatched up by large record labels, leaving SoundCloud rap to embody the spirit of the early punk scene. Where punk was a stripped-down, aggressive and often nihilistic response to the maximalism of mainstream rock, SoundCloud rap responded similarly to the excess of mainstream hip-hop with hostile, anti-authoritarian attitudes. SoundCloud rappers are much more likely to write songs about taking drugs than dealing them, and the content of their songs is centered around depression and selfdestruction, unlike mainstream rap’s obsession with ego inflation. Similar to punk, SoundCloud rappers are overwhelmingly young. Many SoundCloud rappers, such as Tekashi69, Lil Peep and Ski Mask the Slump God, all gained tremendous fame before their 18th birthdays.
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Arts
8 — Wednesday, April 7, 2021
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Porch jazz sessions bring dancing to Kerrytown ROSA SOFIA KAMINSKI Daily Arts Writer
Ann Arbor is never entirely quiet. But of the many sounds you hear drifting through the city, those of a band with a bossa nova feel often aren’t among them. And yet, on a slightly chilly Saturday afternoon, a group of around 40 people and I found ourselves masked up and spread out, sprawled all over Lawrence Street as a jazz/rock band played on the porch of a yellow house. Perching on curbs, leaning against buildings, standing on porches and roofs, audience members lounged and danced and tapped their feet, clapping along. Most were dressed in the colorful, artsy way typical of the creatives of Kerrytown. Someone with pink hair danced loosely and expressively, and the musicians joked with the audience. There was a communal atmosphere, the feeling that everyone gathered there were friends or friends of friends.
It is the musicians who reside in this house who came up with the idea of sharing their music with their neighbors and whoever else feels inclined to come. Their porch concerts have been occurring weekly — Saturdays at 2 p.m. — on their porch at the corner of State Street and Lawrence Street. Members who live in this house are in the band Kektus, a funk band made up of School of Music, Theatre & Dance jazz students. However, each week they bring a guest from the local scene to jam with them, or some of their own friends to sit in, and share a wider variety of music. It is a mindset typical of the jazz community, which is all about learning from other musicians by playing and hanging with them. The band of five — a mix of household members and friends — stuck close together on their makeshift stage, communicating steadily with nods, calls and twists of expression. Ann Arbor locals Mei Semones and Reggie Pearl (both on guitar, alternating
lead vocals) led the band, taking turns singing a mix of each of their originals and covers that the crowd sang along with. Supporting them were Music, Theatre & Dance sophomores Ben Wood (on bass) and Sam Uribe (various percussive instruments). Addie Vogt — who currently lives in Ann Arbor but attends The New School in New York — plays drums. The singers, although clearly close and very good at combining creatively, had distinct styles. Semones sang in tones classically described as “silvery.” Her voice seemed to float and skip where it pleased, with the breeze sometimes carrying it past the ears of the eager listeners. Her original songs carried a gentle bossa nova to them and worked their way into the in-between feeling that comes early in a partially cloudy afternoon. Meanwhile, Pearl’s music took on the anger of punk with the education of a jazz musician. The snake-like fluidity of her voice recalled Australian musician
Jaala, while her yowls and yelps evoked American singersongwriter, Angel Olsen, at her most fearsome. When asked about her music writing process, Pearl replied, laughing, “I feel like it’s just like, life happens and then I sit in my room and write about it.” To hear such a powerful voice switch to a light, laid-back tone is a shock that always comes when hearing creatives speak about their everyday selves. And yet, even with such separate music emerging from their writing process, the two clicked deeply and musically. Olsen and Pearl met at Berklee School of Music in Boston. They were able to fasten onto each other and combine their voices without ever overpowering the other. Semones’s bleached pixie cut, both of their chain jewelry all serve to set them apart from typical jazz musicians. The other players, two University of Michigan students and another Ann Arbor local, found their groove in the band too, having fun and performing in a way that came
Fia Kaminski
naturally. This was music played for the love of music, and the love of sharing it. “What are you hoping people get out of this?” I asked, and immediately, Vogt cried out, “Happiness!” She went on to explain the sudden influx of audience members that occurred halfway through the first song, as people were drawn to the tunes from all over the neighborhood. Since there weren’t any other gigs to be had, Wood said they figured they’d play on their porch and see who came. “And people
ended up coming,” he shrugged with a modest laugh. As the concert ended, friends called up to the porch, shouting hello and finding joy in reconnecting after a long winter spent in quarantine. “Live music is amazing!” they all passionately agreed in their last statements. “Every Saturday at 2 (p.m.) at the corner of Lawrence and State!” Listen for drums, guitars, possibly a horn. You can’t miss it. In the meantime, you can find music by Mei Semones and Reggie Pearl on all streaming platforms.
In conversation with Anjali Enjeti, author of Partition fiction novel ‘The Parted Earth’ TRINA PAL
Daily Arts Writer
The India-Pakistan Partition of 1947 was one of the deadliest religious genocides of modern history. The conflict left upwards of one million people dead and more than 15 million as refugees. Many Partition stories have been passed down through word of mouth, but others have disappeared entirely after more than 60 years. Consequently, despite the decades-long violence, very few people outside of the Indian subcontinent know about the lingering trauma that Partition has left on generations of South Asians. Author Anjali Enjeti hopes to change that with her upcoming fiction release “The Parted Earth.” The novel, set to be released on May 4, rescues the dying and forgotten stories of Partition. “What happens when we lose so many stories from a significant
world event? We lose so much when we lose our family histories, when we lose our stories, when we don’t know the struggles of our ancestors,” Enjeti said in an interview with The Michigan Daily. The Partition occurred in 1947. India had just won independence from the British Empire, its colonizers of 200 years. Before they retreated, the British Empire drew boundary lines separating Hindu-majority India and Muslim-majority Pakistan. The subsequent religious genocide was brutal. Muslims fled to West Pakistan (present-day Pakistan) and East Pakistan (present-day Bangladesh), while Hindus fled to the Indian states of Punjab and West Bengal. Animosity and tension grew between Hindus and Muslims, leading to widespread riots and targeted violence. This persecution continued for decades. “The Parted Earth” follows multiple characters who have all felt the effects of Partition: Deepa,
Elizabeth Yoon
a high school girl who leaves her home of New Delhi for London in 1947; Shan, a lawyer with a broken marriage and a deep desire to know her displacement-riddled roots; Chandani, an elderly woman whose husband, also a victim of the Partition, recently committed suicide. The novel is a gripping, multi-generational story of families who must come to terms with their displacement. “Partition is not just an event that just happened in the subcontinent,” Enjeti said. “These survivors, their children, their grandchildren, migrated to other continents and countries. They set up their lives elsewhere. These stories go with them.” My family, with generational roots in West Bengal, has its own Partition stories. My grandfather crossed the border from Bangladesh to India in 1957 when he was just 18 years old, to avoid persecution as a Hindu. He arrived at a safe house in Kolkata where he met my grandmother, who had also fled from Bangladesh to India when she was six years old. Her father had been a doctor in Bangladesh, but left with his family in 1950 after hearing rumors that neighborhood mobs were planning to murder his family that night. My grandparents married and have lived in Kolkata ever since. I consider myself especially lucky to have heard my grandfather’s story before he passed away last November. Yet, what happens to the stories that are hidden and never told? *** Enjeti’s fascination with the Partition started in the ’90s. At the time, she was a lawyer and
a mother. After encountering Salman Rushdie’s 1981 Booker Prize winner “Midnight’s Children,” Enjeti read anything and everything she could about Partition. “I just started voraciously reading every book I could get my hands on,” Enjeti said. When the internet became a household commodity in the mid-’90s, some of Enjeti’s first searches were about the Partition. She wasn’t getting far until she discovered the 1947 Partition Archive years later, one of the first widespread initiatives to make Partition stories accessible. Yet, the 1947 Partition Archive was founded in 2011, more than 60 years after the actual event. “What really got me was that it had been so long, so much time had passed, and so many survivors would have passed away,” Enjeti said. “I wanted to emphasize not just Partition, but the legacy of Partition and how it affects the generations of people that follow.” Enjeti’s perspective on the Partition is rich and hardhitting. In choosing a fictional approach, she puts a human face on the turbulence and trauma of Partition while remaining historically accurate. Enjeti doesn’t skirt around the violence of those long decades, but she does handle the devastation with a grace that enhances the plot. Readers are compelled to understand Partition from the eyes of a child and a middle-aged woman. “A river of apprehension flowed between homes not even one meter apart,” Enjeti writes. Even a child can understand that level of hostility.
Enjeti’s novel has a nonlinear timescale, jumping between the past and present, from continent to continent. This model has been echoed by contemporary writers such as Khaled Hosseini, Jhumpa Lahiri, Jess Walter and Tatiana de Rosnay, all of whom influenced Enjeti’s writing. Enjeti, however, stands out in her graceful and digestible writing style. “The Parted Earth” is a much easier read than Hosseini’s “The Kite Runner,” for example, but still manages to explore themes of death and destruction with comparable depth. But “The Parted Earth” isn’t just about the Partition. It’s also about family roots, ancestry and reclaiming a lost culture. This theme is personal for Enjeti. She grew up with an Indian father and a half-Puerto Rican, half-Austrian mother. With only half of her family in India, Enjeti felt distant from the Indian subcontinent, especially when she stopped visiting regularly after college. All of her relatives moved out of India when Enjeti was in her 20s, and she returned only years later for her cousin’s wedding. “We were attending the wedding as tourists,” Enjeti said. “That was a jarring experience for me, to return to India and have virtually no family left there.” Enjeti felt she’d truly lost her connection with the Indian side of her family when her grandmother passed away. “I didn’t make the effort to know her stories and know her better while she was alive,” Enjeti said. “That regret, that guilt of her not getting to meet her great-grandkids before
she passed, just really sat so heavy on me. Part of the book came out of that feeling.” Reclaiming one’s culture, discovering lost stories, reckoning with generational displacement — these concepts are hard to come to terms with. For anyone looking to delve deeper into their familial roots, Enjeti recommends starting with women in your family. “In most cultures, it is the matriarchs who hold the stories of their communities. They are the keepers of the stories, the archivists,” Enjeti said. Personally, when I think back to my own grandma, who showers me with Bengali clothes and jewelry when she visits Michigan, I find that Enjeti’s words ring true. Fittingly, nearly all the narrators in “The Parted Earth” are women. Enjeti weaves together her own story with those of powerful female characters who have lost or become estranged from the men in their lives. “The women are our histories. They are the most authentic histories,” Enjeti said. “The Parted Earth” is a powerful story about the Partition, but it’s also much more than that. Enjeti intertwines themes of displacement, heritage and reclamation to show us the power of family ties in less than 250 pages. The novel makes me want to preserve my own family’s Partition stories: to savor them, write them down or tell my children about them someday. “The Parted Earth” carries the strength of generations on its shoulders. It isn’t a light read, but it’s an important one.
The protean condition of the self: Poet Kathleen Graber joins the Zell Visiting Writers Series CECILIA DURAN Daily Arts Writer
Ever since being in a room with more than six people and human contact were substituted by life through a screen, culture has sought ways to continue blooming despite the circumstances. The Zell Visiting Writers Series has found a way to keep literature alive by switching real-life interactions between writers and readers to remote Q&As with authors from the University of Michigan community and beyond. This past Thursday, the program hosted author Kathleen Graber, whose last poetry collection, The Eternal City, was a finalist for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Graber came to talk about her 2019 book, The River Twice, a collection of poems described as “lyric philosophy, and a supreme consolation” by Pulitzer Prize winner Tracy K. Smith. While she sat in front of her bookshelf (a very nice bookshelf, by the way), I sat on my balcony with a cup of Rooibos tea in my hand, as I’ve been doing ever since Ann Arbor started teasing us with warmer weather. The event began with University of Michigan graduate student and Poetry MFA candidate Sara
Afshar, who softly set the scene by introducing the author and her writings: a river, America and the flux of all things. As a poetry lover myself, I was hooked from the beginning. The tea tasted sweet on my tongue as I was brought back to a topic from my favorite philosophy class in high school: the pre-Socratics. These ancient Greek philosophers thought that changelessness is the nature of all reality and that all can be explained within the realm of rationality and the physical world. After that prelude, Graber began reading off of her latest collection of poems, which takes on the ancient philosopher Heraclitus’s protean notion of change in the title and the opening epigraphs: “No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river, and he’s not the same man.” According to him, change isn’t a part of life: It is life itself. Her first poem placed the listener in a Richmond, Va., thrift store where everything costs a dollar, except on Mondays and Fridays, when everything costs only 50 cents. She talks about an interaction between a mother and a child in one of the aisles, about unemployment and about the melting ice caps, or, in her own words, “a harmony of tensions.” She then picked up The Eternal City, her 2010 book inspired by yet
another historical figure: Marcus Aurelius. I found these selections especially delightful as the vivid storytelling transported me to every curtain she rose. I loved the simplicity in some of her lines, which I have always preferred to a pretentious concatenation of words, deluged with the author’s hopeless hyperbolizing. You hated that last bit, right? My point exactly. “After my mother died, I expected to die myself,” “We were not written to be saved,” “How slowly time seems to pass when you are waiting.” These are some of the lines that I noted to savor after the webinar ended. I was surprised to find out that Graber had only embarked on her journey of publishing poetry twenty years ago, at the age of forty. She recalls having low expectations for herself, thinking she was likely to fail. But it was precisely this that allowed her words to flow unrestrained, like a liberation. Graber also mentioned the familiar feeling that you are writing the same thing repeatedly, but it was Heraclitus’s notion that salvaged her unease: The topic may be the same, but the context and yourself have undergone some sort of change since the last instance. In other words, it will never intrinsically be the same. This made me smile and simultaneously served as a
reassurance. I like to write songs, but lately, I had been getting stuck in the conviction that what I was writing wasn’t any different, or any better, from what I (and others) had written before. Heraclitus came back into my life when I needed him most, and I have Kathleen Graber to thank for that. The webinar turned to a Q&A with the audience, orchestrated by MFA candidate Julia McDaniel, who began with some questions of
her own. These questions revealed more about what went into the process of writing The River Twice and served as an insight into the more intimate aspects of Graber’s life and psyche, like the enduring “love” for Heraclitus she’s had since she was a teenager, for his illuminating Buddhist overtones and for leaving her with things to write about. Attending the Zell Writers Series was a nice way to break from the mundanity of my
academic routine. From my small Ann Arbor apartment, in between my last class of the day and the gym appointment I booked days in advance, I was able to indulge in the witty words of Kathleen Graber, a poet I was unfamiliar with but one I look forward to discovering more about. I took away many thing, but most importantly, solace for my lingering solipsistic thoughts. As Graber said, “the self is a nebulous, shifty thing.”
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Wednesday, April 7, 2021 — 9
The University and the digital transformation: past, present and future
BY ALEXANDER SATOLA, STATEMENT CORRESPONDENT
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ike so many other universities around the world, the University of Michigan relied on its existing technological resources to design a distanced education for the COVID-19 era. The pandemic certainly came as a surprise, though ultimately a widespread familiarity with the basic tools of email, course websites and video conferencing helped students and teachers adapt to a new normal. Online education in general, however, is not a new phenomenon, nor is it likely to disappear with the return of in-person instruction. In fact, the prevailing narrative is that the pandemic has catalyzed an inevitable shift to online learning. The World Economic Forum called the pandemic a “paradigm shift” for colleges and universities that has “accelerated the transformation of higher education.” Similarly, Byeongwoo Kang of the Institute of Innovation Research, Hitotsubashi University, Tokyo, wrote in an article published by the National Center for Biotechnology Innovation that, although the expansion of distance learning was advancing steadily in Japan, “COVID-19 has accelerated digital transformation in the education sector.” Lots of people are saying that changes to higher education are accelerating, but what is higher education accelerating towards? Online education is the present reality for most residential students, but for many others, it has represented and continues to represent a viable avenue for expanding access to higher education. While thinking ahead about the future of education in general, I began to wonder: How will the University contribute to the expansion of opportunities to learn and seek a degree in the post-pandemic era? *** ehind the hype around online education are the researchers, designers and engineers who are making it happen. Here at the University, the Center for Academic Innovation is one organization dedicated to the design of educational technologies and to supporting faculty who want to integrate digital components into their classrooms. Recently, Sarah Dysart, the center’s director of hybrid and online programs, and Lauren Atkins Budde, director of open learning initiatives, filled me in on the workings of the center and how it has been pursuing its mission of designing the education of the future. During our Zoom conversation, Dysart explained how the initiative to found a dedicated office for academic innovation formed in response to popular demand for online learning opportunities. In 2012, the online learning platform Coursera began to offer its first batch of massive online open courses, available to anyone with a browser and an internet connection. The University was one of Coursera’s first partner institutions and helped co-create some of its first MOOCs, including “Python for Everybody,” which is consistently one of the most popular courses on the platform. This collaboration served as the impetus for the creation of the Office of Digital Education and Innovation in 2014, the institutional ancestor of what is now CAI. Today, the center has the dual role of supporting the University’s non-credit and credit-bearing online programs. Some of the not-for-credit learning programs include MOOCs, specializations, Teach-outs, podcasts and other forms of widely available educational content. “We have, I think, almost 15 million enrollments from learners of over 200 different countries that engage with our learning experiences,”’ Budde said. Dysart, on the other hand, manages the programs that are eligible for U-M credits or have a pathway to earning them. This includes several online master’s degrees programs, as well as programs that learners can begin as open experiences and then convert to credit later on. “Anytime somebody is convert-
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ILLUSTRATION BY MAGGIE WIEBE
ing an open learning experience into a for-credit initiative,” Dysart explained. “Like taking content from a MOOC course and then applying it to a residential course, that’s often a time when I’d be pulled in.” Along with an array of software developed for U-M students, the center has been instrumental in helping different schools at the University develop online courses and master’s programs that can reach a broader audience of worldwide learners. The School of Information, for example, offers a “Master of Applied Data Science” online on Coursera. The online curriculum is designed to be flexible and accommodate learners who have to balance school with other major responsibilities. While the residential Master of Science in Information program requires students enroll in a minimum of nine credits to be a full-time student, the courses in the MADS program are one-credit each, and students take an average of one asynchronous credit per month. The workload, therefore, is more spread out over time, even though students can still expect to finish the degree in an average of two years. One of the major challenges of online programs is fostering a sense of community. For MOOCs, online discussion forums provide the bulk of interactions between learners and U-M faculty. “You’ve probably experienced for large classes on campus how hard it is for a professor to really connect with, say, the 500 students they might have in their CHEM 125 section,” Budde said. “Imagine if that instructor had 10,000 students every semester: That’s the scale that you’re looking at for those sorts of online courses.” To support online learners, an internal team at CAI helps out with the Coursera courses. Additionally, though, some faculty members have made special efforts to connect with their students; Budde even told me about a few professors who in pre-COVID-19 times held pop-up office hours in local coffee shops while they were traveling around the world. While online learning at-first-glance seems to be all about the technology, there is clearly a human component that is crucial to the success of any online venture, whether it’s a course or a full degree. *** esigning the future, then, is not about designing the perfect tools, but about ensuring that lots of different aspects of the learning experience are taken into account. So, along with engineers, it is the job of educational researchers to think about how these digital tools can be applied to academic contexts.
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To learn more about the work of an academic researcher, I talked with Juan D. Pinto, an alum of the center’s Learning Experience and Design Graduate Certificate program. Pinto earned his master’s in education studies from the School of Education in 2020 and completed the certificate program as part of his degree. He is currently pursuing a doctorate in the Digital Environments for Learning, Teaching & Agency program at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and is especially interested in the applications of artificial intelligence to educational technologies. As one might expect, Pinto is no pessimist about the possibility for technology to make a positive impact in the lives of learners. However, he admitted to me during our conversation that his field had lost its way when it comes to the successful integration of educational technology. “I’ll be honest with you,” Pinto said during our phone call. “I think educational technology as a whole has failed. The more I learn about it, the more I study it, the more I feel like we are failing.” Part of the reason for this failure, Pinto explained, has to do with the overhype and profit motive of the technology industry. However, he also made clear that his own field of educational research needs to make more concerted efforts to reach out to the communities they are trying to support with their work. “It’s much more than just, ‘I study how people learn in a lab, and then I design a technology that I think will be beneficial,” Pinto clarified about the goal of his research. “There has to be so much more that goes into it and actually implementing it in context, so that it makes sense for a specific school, specific classrooms, and specific students to use. And we have to make sure that we’re not leaving people behind because right now we are, we definitely are.” Pinto pointed out, for example, that the accelerated adoption of technologies during the pandemic has reinforced existing structural inequalities in access to education. While technological innovation is often framed in terms of broadening access, digital technology just won’t have this effect as long as there are significant deficits in reliable access to the Internet and computers. Because of the ambiguous relationship between technologies and educational outcomes, Pinto advocates the fostering of a critical approach toward the design and implementation of new educational technologies. One component of this critical approach is the examination of algorithms and their relationships with human
subjects. Most technology companies, however, do not disclose information related to proprietary algorithms, constituting a major obstacle to an open and equitable digital future. “The problem with proprietary software or proprietary algorithms is that essentially they can do anything,” Pinto said on the issue of algorithmic transparency. “And because the technology has developed so quickly over recent years, the government, legislators, and policymakers just can’t keep up.” The algorithms used in AI, for example — are susceptible to reproducing biases due to their design or the data on which the algorithms train. For example, a report from The Brookings Institution showed how the use of AI in schools threatens to reproduce racial discrimination associated with standardized testing. Thus, if schools contract with companies that protect their algorithms as trade secrets, then it might be costly to hold these companies accountable in the event that their products cause harm. The future of online education, then, is ideally rooted in accountability, transparency and active engagement with local communities. However, in the absence of close regulatory scrutiny, it is up to public and private institutions to exercise proper care when considering the introduction of a new dimension of their online educational infrastructure. *** o, as the University continues to hurtle into the future, its administrators, researchers and faculty must also continue to think critically about the relationship between technological change and equal access to higher education. The future is not set in stone, and what we do now, in large part, forms the kind of people and the kind of university we will be. The stakes are high, too, because the university is still dealing with an identity crisis that technology alone cannot solve, but in which technology will indeed play an outsized role. This identity crisis stems from the tension between the University’s contemporary self-presentation as an elite university on the international stage, and roots as a public university, for which a major goal is to serve the people of the state that bears its name. The 17th Edition of the Michigan Almanac, published in March 2021, reports that, based on data from Fall 2018, 53% of incoming first-years were from in-state, 43% were from out-of-state and 4% were international students. The University enrolls a lower percentage of in-state students than most other public schools, but the University provides an explanation: “In large part this is because U-M’s primary competitors
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for these students are selective private universities.” To be sure, the University’s international reputation helps attract young professionals and growing businesses to the state. The expansion of U-M-sponsored online education can therefore continue to play a role in brightening the University’s brand in an increasingly competitive landscape. As an out-of-state student, though, the above statistic and its subsequent justification have never sat well with me. In my view, their combined implication does not reflect well on the University as an institution of public service, even if at-first-blush it seems like a badge of honor to declare yourself a “competitor” of Harvard University, Stanford University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of Chicago and the other universities that tend to follow. At least from a fiscal perspective, the public character of the University has decreased dramatically since the 1960s: in 1960, state funding accounted for 78% of the U-M Ann Arbor General Fund budget, whereas in 2020 state funding accounted for only 14% of the General Fund. (In FY 2020, the General Fund accounted for around 24% of the total budget). All in all, state funding, therefore, accounts for around 3-4% of the total budget. The trend of declining state funding has been associated with increasing tuition, as well as efforts to find alternative revenue streams such as online learning. Nevertheless, even if the University does not have strong financial ties to the state, it does have strong cultural and historical ones. These are written into the word-order of the University’s mission“to serve the people of Michigan and the world through preeminence in creating, communicating, preserving and applying knowledge, art, and academic values, and in developing leaders and citizens who will challenge the present and enrich the future.” I think a good example of this publicspiritedness is encoded in “Python for Everybody,” the Coursera course taught by Information professor Dr. Charles Severance. One of Severance’s goals in developing the course has been to make sure the course materials are accessible to the widest range of learners possible. When he says, “Python for Everybody,” he means it. His courses are accessible to people with vision problems, for example, because he takes care to integrate storytelling as a part of his lectures, turning visual aids such as graphs, charts and diagrams into rich verbal descriptions. His most basic Python course, too, does not have a calculus or trigonometry prerequisite, a common requirement to pursue a computer science education that he says filters out a lot of potential students who would have otherwise learned a valuable skill. “If you’ve taken calculus and you’ve taken programming, it will be very clear to you, very rapidly, that programming has nothing to do with calculus,” Severance explained. The computer science programs at the University have these requirements, he argued, as a harsh filtering mechanism. Students in “Python for Everybody,” by contrast, can stop taking a course, leave it alone for a while, and come back with their previous progress saved. The rapid pace of semester-based education in college teaches students how to learn quickly and efficiently, though, in Severance’s experience, the best learning takes place in a nonlinear fashion across long stretches of time. In his view, this is a more forgiving method of learning and actually ends up making knowledge stick a little better than if one were learning the same material while cramming for an exam or burning through a coding project within the span of a few days or less.
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ILLUSTRATION BY KATHERINE LEE
Love everlasting: the relationships that color my identity
BY MELANIE TAYLOR, STATEMENT CORRESPONDENT
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hen I left home for college, my Bubbie — the Yiddish term for grandmother — gifted me with a thin red bracelet to protect me from the harm of the evil eye. The tradition is rooted in the spiritual Jewish practice called Kabbalah, though the reasoning behind it is widely debated. Some believe that a single woman should wear the red string around her wrist until it falls off naturally, indicating that she will soon be married. Others suggest that the red symbolizes fertility or protection against the bloodshed of war. All my Bubbie told me was that her mother had done the same for her and that the bracelet would be a talisman of good luck as I entered this next stage of my life. My family is Jewish, but we’re not that Jewish. We belong to a reform congregation, and at least for me, my Jewish identity is more about heritage than religion. I wasn’t surprised that my Bubbie chose to evoke this Jewish tradition when I was preparing to leave home; just a few years earlier I received a slew of Jewish jewelry for my bat mitzvah celebration. But I had my suspicions that Bubbie’s gift had more to do with the color than the superstition. My Bubbie has always been a bright red woman. She regards ladybugs as a symbol of hope and taught me from a young age that if some accessory or article of clothing is red and sparkly, we have to buy it. This affinity for red tracks with Bubbie’s overall personality: She is a formidable presence with a compassionate soul, loud and loyal with a social circle that extends across the world. That being said, Bubbie’s love for red is certainly directed, at least in part, by her superstitious nature. Bubbie will be the first one to knock on wood if someone jinxes themselves. Instead of saying “bless you,” she will proclaim that your sneeze was an omen of truth, confirming the last thing you said in conversation. When I talked to her for this story, Bubbie shared with me a number of other superstitions that her family
and friends adhered to over the years — if your nose itches, you’re about to kiss a fool. If you drop something, someone is talking about you. “Hope it’s good,” her mother would say in reply. Now, I can’t confirm the empirical basis of these superstitions. I can’t even tell you that I really believe they’re true. What I can tell you is that every time someone jinxes themselves in conversation, a little piece of my Bubbie appears in the back of my mind and possesses me to knock on the nearest wood. If there’s no wood around, I’ll knock on my head. Desperate times call for desperate measures. Earlier this year, I bought my first car: a firetruck-red Fiat 500. Did I choose the color because of Bubbie? Not consciously. Did I think about Bubbie as I was making the purchase? Of course. I had to call her the minute I drove off the lot and relay the good news. I’ve spent so much time with my Bubbie over the course of my life that I’ve borrowed these little pieces of her identity and woven them into mine. It’s a blessing to be reminded of her at every possible opportunity, and the frequency with which it occurs is a testament to the strength and value of our relationship. *** ’ve been a perfectionist since I was just a little kid, especially when it came to school — a quality which I likely learned from my genius mother. However, this perfectionism did not always serve me well. For example, one day my fourthgrade class was informed that we would be quizzed on the 50 states and their respective capitals. I’ve never been very good at geography, so I was frustrated when I couldn’t seem to commit the elusive pairings to memory. Time was ticking, so I needed to get out the big guns — I had to ask my parents for help. To this day, I maintain that this was a written test, so there was no need for me to know the pronunciation of each city. However, my nine-year-old self was positively certain that Tope-
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kah, Kan., was pronounced “toe-peckah” (while it’s actually pronounced “toe-pee-kah”). After arguing with my father for what felt like forever, he finally Googled it. I was devastated. I stormed off in true nine-year-old fashion and didn’t even finish studying for the quiz. Now, whenever my parents and I quibble over some unimportant, indisputable fact, we cry out “toe-peckah” as a shorthand of saying, “I know I’m right, and I’ll prove it.” Sometimes I call “toe-peck-ah” on myself when I find that I’m digging my heels in too deep on something rather irrelevant. It’s a reminder of that lesson I learned from my parents over a decade ago: just calm down and Google it. Perhaps the only reason I needed to learn this laissez-faire attitude from my parents is that they also taught me to be logical, precise and firm. Those traits again derive from my mother’s side of the family. Her father, my Grandpa, is always pointing out grammatical errors. He hates when people swap the noun “invitation” out for the verb “invite” and insists that everyone around him understands that you stand behind a lectern but upon a podium. One Thanksgiving, that entire side of the family had a debate over dinner regarding whether or not a girl’s hair must be braided for her to technically be wearing “pig-tails.” Eventually, we brought out the dictionary, and yes, the braids are a linguistic prerequisite. Thinking through all of these experiences, it becomes increasingly clear that almost all of my niche interests and habits can be traced back to the interests and habits of the people I love. It’s nice to know that I carry those pieces of them with me wherever I go and that they crop up when I least expect it. *** here are also the habits I picked up from all the people who are no longer in my life — that advice I got from my camp counselors in 2013, that phrase my friend
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group could not stop saying our senior year of high school, that sweater I bought because it fit with my freshman year roommate’s aesthetic. Each and every part of me was inspired by the world I choose to live in, even if only for a moment. Maybe it’s because I’m a Gemini, or maybe it’s just because I’m human, but I am constantly taking inspiration from the people around me. With every new adaptation, I am constructing my own personal culture. After two decades of curation, it has become a beautiful amalgamation of all my favorite experiences to date. The general concept of culture exists on a gradient, meaning that there will be overlapping cultures within a town, a region, a country, etc. Just as how large communities develop a culture over time, our little worlds will effectively develop a culture of their own. We pull from and adapt to what’s around us, forging a new and unique identity as a mosaic of all our experiences. Lots of things in life follow this template. Internet trends ebb and flow, emulating and influencing larger cultural shifts. Even within a single classroom, a culture can develop over the course of the semester which leads to the development of certain tendencies and inside jokes, distinctive to that group of 20 to 30 people who knew each other for just six short months. Each insular culture in which an individual participates has the propensity to stick with them for their whole lifetime. For me, that manifests through my participation in many overlapping cultures: that of my hometown, my workplace, The Daily, my house. Each of those environments offers unique opportunities for identity-shaping which I take in stride each and every day. It’s comforting to know that all my past relationships live on as a sliver of who I am. Even ephemeral experiences are commemorated. Even seemingly insignificant experiences create their own meaning. And when combined together, they all create me.
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The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com
Wednesday, April 7, 2021 — 11
Chasing sunsets and rabbit holes BY LILLY DICKMAN, STATEMENT COLUMNIST
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brainstorm new topics for Michigan Daily articles, like this one, from my bed in the apartment I moved into when the freshmen residence halls closed. I rest my computer on my lap, blank document open and waiting, and I lean back into the silence. Across from my bed is a window, and through it, as I write or ponder, I see the yellow house next door. On clear evenings like tonight, the sunset compliments the friendly yellow house and the pink quilt on my bed. The light casts a warm hue over my room and brings the tapestry of the sky and twinkly lights on the wall next to me to life. It’s a zen, quiet, picturesque moment, arguably my favorite of the week. I’ve had the privilege of this simple yet mesmerizing view for three months now. And for three months, while I sit looking at the yellow house and my quilt in the sun’s rays, I continuously have the same thought: What would my younger self, perhaps my year-ago self, think if she saw me here? What would she make of the yellow house? Of my bedroom? The fact that I’m clearly not in a residence hall? Without explanation, she’d be shocked and confused, to say the least. I think it’s a crazy phenomenon — that I, a year ago today, would have never conceived of this image, my life and my circumstances right now. A phenomenon not unlike Alice in Wonderland falling down the rabbit hole: one moment she was walking, the next moment she was in an unrecognizable, alternate reality with all sense of normality flipped on its head. I never imagined that I’d be living in an apartment in Ann Arbor, making my own meals, attending online classes or wearing a mask every time I was in public.
ILLUSTRATION BY EILEEN KELLY
We have the pandemic to thank for shaking things up; for throwing us down rabbit holes and making almost all of our present realities completely different from what our year-ago selves would have predicted them to be. And I know that COVID-19 moving plans around and making lives harder is not a novel concept. But I think there is something deeper that we need to dig out and find value in before we completely move on. This pandemic has brought suffering, loneliness, deaths of loved ones — for my family, my dad’s father — and cancellations of opportunities that were heartbreaking. I’m thrilled to leave such a devastating period behind. But, as the weather gets warmer, as vaccines become widely accessible and as the news channels begin to spend air time on other issues, I can feel the pandemic era fleeting. And though this sounds strange or even twisted, I do feel a sense of nostalgia. On the day-to-day level, the pandemic turned my life from fairly predictable to wildly abnormal, and I found a little thrill in that. At the very beginning, I thought I’d have two weeks of senior spring break instead of one. Naive to what was coming, I was overjoyed with the school’s calendar change and the prospect of having extra time off — the world, or at least the extended spring break, was my oyster. I then spent months on end at home, but upon my arrival at college, I spent no more than three weeks in a single location. I moved quickly from my new residence hall room; to quarantine with people I barely knew; to a room alone, sick with chest pains, fever and brain fog. Now here I am on this pink quilt in an apartment.
It’s felt like the Adventures of Me in Wonderland. The unknown. The unpredictable. The discomfort. The unexpected encounters. The possibility. There were new opportunities and experiences that wouldn’t have been on the menu had businessper-usual been at play. I also recognize that I was lucky enough to be in a position with more privileged circumstances to view uncertainty in this way. I was forced to bounce around, but as a result, I tried more things and experienced many more versions of life and of myself. Instead of having one roommate throughout my first semester, I experienced four. I met an adult side of me that hadn’t previously been so required. I also uncovered a relaxed version of myself, content and not so bothered by my new nomadic lifestyle. Not only was this exciting, but to me, the idea of normal routines being broken, that the day-to-day humdrum of life was completely disrupted, felt a bit liberating. Expectations were on hold. I had no impressive job or fancy internship over the summer, and relaxed in the dog days knowing barely anyone else did either. Even once I got to school in August, there was no guarantee that I’d be staying due to positive tests or campus rules. Again, while terrifying, this lack of predictability was also freeing, as I wasn’t beholden to anyone or any permanent circumstances. Everything was subject to change and predominantly out of my control. I’m a high-strung person, I’m intent on making the right decisions and I have a proclivity for perfectionism that probably needs curbing. While a lot of my energy usually goes towards manning the chessboard that’s my life, moving pieces and planning ahead, I had to step
down, surrender and let COVID-19 play my game. I’ve never experienced so many redirects and pivots in my plans in such a short amount of time. Between the amount of COVID-19 scares and tests I had to take and the frequency at which my circumstances were constantly changing, I was essentially forced to adopt the “do one thing every day that scares you” regime. I was not complacent with my expectations of any certain schedule or way of life. I was here, I was there, the future was unclear and I was forced to ride the wave of the present. oday, I’m on a job and internship search for my summer, weighing options and choices, sending emails and scheduling calls, deciding where I’ll find the best experience. I know whatever I choose and wherever I’ll go, that’s where I’ll be planted and that’s the schedule that I’ll follow. I notice that “no expectation” mentality, previously mandated by my pandemic circumstances, running away. As society goes back to normal, I wonder if we’ll all return to the scheduled and routine way of life. Never before has my generation, at least, experienced such an elongated shattering of regular life, and it’s unclear whether the effects will be everlasting. Will we go back to creating plans and going through the motions of what and where society says we’re supposed to be? After some time, will I regress to operating on a one-track mind, unable to see non-obvious opportunities or life-course excursions? Perhaps I’ll see them, but expectations will stop me from pursuing them. I fear that I’ll never again observe a scene in my life and wonder what the hell my yearago self would make of it.
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And so, while I’m eager to never hear the word “corona” again, I do have to think about how I can extract what was good and instructive from the rubble and keep it in my pocket moving forward. What I can gather is that there’s something to be said for spontaneity. For operating under lower expectations. I don’t need to drop out of college or move to Switzerland as soon as I graduate. But I do think I have to make a conscious effort to remind myself to “shake things up.” It’s on me to remember not to worry so much about the shoulds or deadlines or expected courses of action because, hopefully, a global pandemic will never again make that decision for me. As I sit here, watching the sunset over the yellow house, I think I’ve come up with a good rule of thumb: to sometimes opt for the choice that perhaps my year-ago self wouldn’t have been able to envision. To choose to tumble down the rabbit hole. After all, the sun still sets and the sun still rises. From wherever I’ve been quarantined, from wherever I’ve logged on to Zoom, from whatever car rides I was taking, job I was doing, puzzle I was piecing, the sun still did her thing above me. No matter how jumbled my own schedule was, the sun still followed hers in the sky. Always did, always will. I think knowing this is security enough to make spontaneous decisions or veer away from the humdrum here and there. Tonight, the sun sets on the yellow house, pink quilt and my last Daily piece of the year. It sets on winter, on the near-end of the pandemic and near-end of expectations obligatorily being set at the wayside. I wonder where I’ll be a year from now when it rises. I hope that I’m surprised.
Opinion
12 — Wednesday, April 7, 2021
The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com
MRINALINI IYER | COLUMNIST
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ANDREW GERACE | OPINION SENIOR EDITOR
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accines. The epitome of short-term pain, longterm gain. A scientific achievement and feat of human accomplishment that can be received in a grocery store pharmacy. A quick pinch in the arm gives people more hope than they’ve felt in a year. The vaccine is nothing short of a miracle and likely what will usher us out of the current pandemic. While it seems like campus is abuzz about the vaccine, especially with Gov. Gretchen Whitmer’s, D-Mich., statement about vaccine availability for all adults aged 16 and older on April 5, I am deeply concerned by a pattern of behavior that has emerged: lying about one’s situation expressly for the purpose of getting a vaccine. I’ve heard a number of strategies or ways to “game the system” being passed around among students looking to jump in line. Things like claiming a non-visible disability or illness, claiming employment in the childcare or healthcare industries while not working in either field or crossing state lines and faking residency. Driving to Ohio, while claiming to be working in childcare in the state, may seem like a harmless strategy for getting vaccinated quicker when in reality it is wrong, dangerous and immoral. From a purely ethical standpoint, lying for personal gain is wrong. From a health perspective, taking a
Wait your turn vaccine out of the hands of someone within a category that needs it more is detrimental to the long-term public health initiative of vaccination. From a community standpoint, taking a vaccine appointment from someone who is at greater risk and therefore in greater need is shameful. The tiered system for receiving vaccines was designed in many ways to prioritize the needs of front-line workers, people with disabilities and chronic illnesses, areas with less robust hospital systems and healthcare and childcare workers. The plans were designed to limit the spread of COVID-19, especially amongst our most vulnerable populations and those working with them, at the forefront. With demand significantly higher than supply at this point in the pandemic, this tiered system is a necessary facet of vaccine distribution to ensure the best possible public health outcome. While the tiered system certainly has its flaws in verification, that does not give people permission to take advantage of those that need the system to get vaccinated due to their employment or health situation. Although locations may not check identities, employment records, disability statuses, places of residence or other features that would demonstrate valid reasons for vaccination at this point, that does not grant permission to abuse the system.
This behavior is not to be confused with perfectly legitimate means of obtaining a vaccine early. No-waste lists are a great way to get a vaccine early without stealing an appointment from someone who needs it more. No-waste lists allow hospitals or vaccination clinics to reach out when there are leftover vaccines that would go to waste or expire if they aren’t used. Volunteering at vaccine clinics is also a noble and encouraged way to get a vaccine earlier. Helping organize or staff a vaccine clinic allows the gears of public health to turn and usually includes the perk of receiving a vaccine in exchange for one’s service. The additional risk of working at a clinic — potentially exposing oneself to many people — is grounds for receiving a vaccination if one is available. I want to make it clear that I recognize the fear of COVID-19 is incredibly real, almost paralyzing for many of us. Many of us, myself included, have directly lost family members, friends, teachers, classmates or colleagues to the virus or its accompanying medical complications. However, this fear cannot be an excuse for leaving integrity behind.
Read more at MichiganDaily.com Andrew Gerace is a Senior Opinion Editor and can be reached at agerace@umich.edu.
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Make activism nuanced again
This is not to imply that anti-Asian All this damn activism is just reached beyond its limits. Most social issues are difficult to racism is somehow easier to solve or performative!” This of course, is not true. understand for a reason: They are less ingrained in American culture However, in my irritation over this complex, nuanced and cannot be than anti-Black racism, but they are week’s shameless recycling of the understood in 10 slides or fewer. Anti- different. While both require a severe examination of our own implicit activism seen on social media during Asian racism is one such issue. For years, Asian people have biases and of society’s rhetoric, previous movements, I yelled this statement at my boyfriend followed been held up next to Black and it is important to remember that Hispanic people as the “model an Instagram infographic cannot by several profanities. This week, my social media feed, minority” in America. This do that for us. They can be useful like many others, has been filled stereotype provides more than tools for provoking the internal with colorful slideshows advocating just a wedge to drive minorities dialogue necessary to conduct such for awareness of anti-Asian racism. seeking racial justice apart — it’s an evaluation, but these graphics With the recent rise of this issue also an opportunity for people alone do not lead to enough of the and the subsequent mass shooting to claim that Asian people are conversations required around the in Atlanta, Ga., came the inevitable privileged, and therefore, that proverbial dinner tables. In fact, rise of Instagram infographics. Posts anti-Asian racism doesn’t exist many lead people the opposite way, about local Asian-owned businesses in the United States. After all, if allowing us to memorize statistics and links to GoFundMe pages began so many Asian-American people and harden pre-existing beliefs circulating, and it soon became clear attend top universities and have without critically thinking about the that this was largely a repurposing of successful careers where they are issues or our role in them. It is easy to show a performative paid as much or even more than this summer’s calls to action. Infographic culture arose over the their white counterparts, how bad amount of allyship when it takes three clicks to repost an infographic summer as a form of activism that can racism really be? onto your Instagram story. didn’t require leaving the house This kind of “infographic during a pandemic. Twitter activism” places the problem threads with GoFundMe links and its blame squarely onto to the families of victims and The problem with recycling one’s followers, as opposed to Black Lives Matter carrds being a tool for critical analysis popped up on every app these themes is, of course, of one’s own prejudices. and honestly, it was a good that not all racism is I can’t pretend I have thing. Maybe it was slightly never engaged in this easy, performative, but it was nice to the same. ... Without mindless form of activism. see a focus on self-education. addressing the difference, It’s simple, comfortable and Black history and systemic socially acceptable. It is much oppression were common it is impossible to fix more difficult to actively seek themes of my social media feed. either issue or to have a out alternative resources, However, social media over the examine your own biases and past few weeks has contained meaningful discourse about understand the complexities of suspiciously similar rhetoric. them. the situation. Regardless, just The problem with recycling like anti-Black racism, antithese themes is, of course, that Asian sentiment cannot be not all racism is the same. Antieasily fixed through protests, Asian racism, while horrible This simple-minded rhetoric fails donations or shopping at Asian-owned and particularly acute at this moment, is born in xenophobia. Anti-Black to acknowledge the struggles of many businesses — though these are all good racism, on the other hand, is more Asian people in America, particularly ways to show solidarity with the Asian institutionalized and comes from an immigrant workers such as those community. Anti-Asian racism is insidious 400-year history of slavery that were murdered in Atlanta often subtle and can slip through the and oppression in the United States. last week. Anti-Asian sentiments cracks in society’s perception of what Without addressing the difference, it that were exacerbated during the is considered “racist.” Social media’s simple breakdown is impossible to fix either issue or to COVID-19 pandemic and the ones have a meaningful discourse about held by the Atlanta shooter stem from of complex social issues in ten slides them. And these Instagram posts, xenophobia and a fear of outsiders. or less glosses over the ways in well-intentioned as they may be, are Fears that Asian immigrants are which people can help in the real proving to be less than useful in truly going to steal American jobs are as world. Allyship is difficult work. It old as Asian-American history itself. takes constant revision, apologies breaking down these distinctions. I appreciate Instagram activism In addition, media tropes that hyper- and compassion. Nuance is a key — education is a valuable tool for sexualize Asian women, paint Asian component in being a good ally, and self-growth, and these slideshows men as feminine or weak and force honestly, Instagram infographics just distill difficult information in an Asian-American actors to put on aren’t cutting it anymore. easily digestible format, making it heavy, fake accents further influence easy to be passed along. However, American perception of Asian people, Mrinalini Iyer can be reached at infographic culture attempts particularly Asian immigrants. iyermili@umich.edu.
HEERYUNG CHOI, JANE IM, CINDY LIN AND YIXIN ZOU | OP-ED CONTRIBUTORS
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e acknowledge that the University of Michigan sits on the ancestral, traditional and contemporary lands of the Anishinaabeg — the Three Fires Confederacy of Ojibwe, Odawa and Potawatomi peoples. By offering this acknowledgment, we want to affirm Indigenous sovereignty and advocate for the sovereignty of Michigan’s 12 federally-recognized Indian nations, for historic Indigenous communities in Michigan, for Indigenous individuals and communities who continue to live among us and for those who were forcibly removed from their Homelands. Honoring Indigenous communities, both past and present, as well as future generations, we would like to speak about the issue of anti-Asian racism and violence in the United States. Dear University of Michigan leadership, We, as Asians, Asian Americans and allies in the School of Information doctoral student community, are deeply saddened and enraged by the brutal shootings in Atlanta on March 16. Six victims were women of Asian descent (according to an announcement from Stop AAPI Hate, some families of the victims have asked for their names not to be shared). An interview with a surviving witness in a widely read Korean media outlet revealed that the suspect vowed to “kill all Asians _____” right before the shooting. Yet, in the wake of the Atlanta shootings, the Office of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion released a statement that did not directly regard the shooting as racially motivated, instead saying “the suspect has stated that race was not a motivating factor in their acts.” The Office of the President’s statement emphasizes the University’s long-held ties with many students and colleagues of Asian descent, saying, “As a university community that welcomed our first Chinese students almost 130 years ago, we cherish the intellectual and social contributions of our students, faculty and staff of Asian descent.” However, highlighting how the University benefits from or contributes to Asian and Asian American communities does not directly address the root cause of antiAsian racism: white supremacy. We expect the leadership to publicly denounce white supremacy — the key ideology that perpetuates racial injustice. The same statement from the leadership also encouraged faculty, staff and students to seek out resources they have provided. However, a list of resources will not suffice for understanding the deep anti-Asian sentiments that have plagued the United States for centuries and surged over the past few years.
An open letter to the U-M community
While reminding Asians and Asian Americans of resources to address anti-Asian racism is a step forward, it can also be read as delegating the responsibility to communities of Asian descent to deal with systematic inequalities and anti-Asian racism. More than 12% of students (which doesn’t include non-resident students) at the University of Michigan are from Asian countries or are Asian descendants. Despite this fact, we note that leadership and faculty members in several schools and departments have been late to acknowledge that the surge in anti-Asian hate crimes, including but not limited to the Atlanta shooting, is not only due to the COVID-19 pandemic. These acts are also deeply related to how Asians and Asian Americans have been historically subjected to exclusionary immigration, labor policies and episodic violence for more than a century. This includes a litany of U.S. foreign policy episodes against Asian countries and against communities of Asian descent within the United States. In the People v. Hall case in 1854, the Supreme Court of California reversed the murder conviction of George W. Hall against Chinese immigrant Ling Sing because three prosecution witnesses were Chinese. This case allowed white Americans to avoid punishment for anti-Asian violence. The Page Act of 1875, thereafter, was the first restrictive immigration law in the U.S., which banned Chinese women from entering the U.S. by classifying them all as sex workers and “immoral.” This was followed by the creation of the Asiatic Barred Zone through the Immigration Actof1917,whichaimedtolimitimmigrantsfrom Asian countries. Not long after, the government of the United States built internment camps to enclose communities of Japanese Americans who they believed were potentially spying against the nation-state during World War II, while the U.S. fought against Japan in Southeast Asia. Southeast Asian migrants continued to experience border violence after U.S. occupation in the Philippines, Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam since the late 19th century. The calls to wage “war on terror” in Asia, the Middle East and Africa have led to the ongoing policing and surveillance of Brown populations from Central and South Asia, especially after 9/11. Islamophobia has dire consequences on other religious communities in the United States: A neo-Nazi killed six Sikh people during a Sunday service at the Sikh Temple of Wisconsin in Oak Creek, Wis., in 2012, driven by what the Sikh community believed was anti-Muslim hate.
The University of Michigan itself is complicit in racism and colonialism against Asia and Asians. James Burrill Angell, the University’s longest-serving president, served as U.S. Minister to China from 1880 to 1881 and was the primary American negotiator of the Angell Treaty of 1880. The treaty permitted restrictions on Chinese immigration and laid the foundation for the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882. The University of Michigan also hosts a large collection of cultural artifacts from U.S. colonies and marginalized groups. For instance, the U.S. has a long colonial history in the Philippines, including the occupation of the Philippines (1898-1946), the Philippine-American War (1899-1902) and the operation of U.S. bases in the islands (1899-1992). The opportunity to study and explore a newly acquired territory, combined with the paternalistic mission to civilize and democratize the islands and its peoples, prompted U-M faculty, students and alumni to go to the Philippines to teach, conduct field research, establish business ventures and occupy prominent colonial administrative posts. This makes the University one of the largest collectors of Philippine items in North America. Anti-Asian racism, then, builds and extends from the key forms of racism in the United States: chattel slavery and anti-Black violence, settler colonialism and U.S. imperialism. Because of the specific historical experiences of Asians and Asian Americans and the recent surge in anti-Asian racism such as calling COVID-19 “China virus,” we find it crucial to develop our own voice in matters of anti-Asian racism. In academia, we are typically perceived as receiving an honorary white status, and American media and political discourse have portrayed Asians and Asian Americans as “model minorities.” Nonetheless, we are subjected to white supremacy and our voices are often silenced, neglected or misconstrued. The University portrays itself as a safe haven for students of color. But being a student does not protect us from the risk and anxiety of being insulted, accused, harassed or assaulted in daily life as we pursue our educational goals. Even within universities, we have witnessed repeated incidents of sexual harassment, abuse, racial aggression and discrimination not being fully addressed, such as allegations of sexual misconduct by professors Jason Mars and Peter Chen, and racist fliers on campus targeting multiple communities of color. Simply saying that the University of Michigan has supported
students through education is not enough to address anti-Asian racism. Importantly, many of the people who have been harmed in anti-Asian hate crimes are sexual and gender minorities (e.g. women, genderqueer, femme-presenting people, nonbinary, transgender, bisexual, lesbian). The research from the Stop AAPI Hate Reporting Center revealed that 68% of anti-Asian hate crimes targeted Asian women. We ask that the U-M leadership, faculty members and staff recognize that this is a crime at the intersection of anti-Asian racism, heteropatriarchy and misogynistic violence. Asian sexual and gender minorities experience various forms of violence, ranging from microaggressions such as namecalling to forced physical and sexual abuse — knowing and recognizing this is fundamental in showing solidarity to students of Asian descent. We are inspired by the ongoing efforts developed by Black, Indigenous and persons of color activist groups in and outside of the University because we believe that solidarity relies on building ties and organizing for the voices of other communities of color. The core issue here is white supremacy. We continue to learn from these groups and speak out against these deadly issues alongside them. We would like to end with some tangible action items for U-M leadership, faculty and staff. * Offer to listen when checking in with Asian and Asian American students instead of waiting for them to reach out if you haven’t done so yet. We have heard from students around us about the lack of faculty members’ attention about anti-Asian hate crimes, which indicates the lack of understanding about racism that Asians and Asian Americans experience or perhaps, more importantly, their lack of effort to educate themselves about it. When you check in with Asian and Asian American students, don’t use vague language like “mass shooting” or “bad things happened.” Use precise words such as “anti-Asian” or “racism” to name the issue. The Atlanta shooting is an issue committed against some of the most vulnerable populations in the U.S. that intersect across class, race, gender, sexuality and ability. The complexity of the issue is not a sufficient excuse to resist naming the incident as such. * There are a lot of white-Asian, supervisorsupervisee relationships due to the high percentage of white academics. If you are a white supervisor, recognize that Asian and Asian American students have been frequently subjected to microaggressions in such
relationships. Create a culture against it. * Educate yourself about anti-Asian racism and encourage other non-Asian people to do so. Do not ask Asians and Asian Americans you know to teach you about anti-Asian racism — especially not during these moments when we’re busy healing ourselves. Some pointers we suggest are: Violence Against Asian-Americans Isn’t New, but It Is Growing | The Amber Ruffin Show; Coping with & Contextualizing Anti-Asian Racism & Pandemics; Anti-Asian Violence Resources; Asian American Feminism Resources; Excluding Asians as a minority group ignores decades of hardship. * Learn to pronounce our names correctly and distinguish our faces. Research has shown that the mispronouncing of names in schools can negatively impact students’ self-perceptions and worldviews and can even lead students to shy away from their own cultures or families. * Please consider donating to organizations that are committed to fighting against antiAsian racism or directly donating to the people harmed by the hate crimes: Asian Americans Advancing Justice-Atlanta is a nonprofit legal advocacy organization dedicated to protecting the civil rights of Asian Americans, Native Hawaiians and Pacific Islanders (AANHPI) in Georgia and the Southeast.; Asian American Advocacy Fund is a grassroots organization dedicated to building a progressive Asian American base in Georgia.; Red Canary Song is a grassroots collective of Asian and migrant sex workers.; Jean Yang, a former professor at Carnegie Mellon University, created a document with various GoFundMe campaigns aiming to cover medical expenses and recovery after racist attacks on Asian-Americans and Asian-owned businesses. * Do not impose your views on what immigrants need to know or how to behave — for example, stop telling Asian students to “practice English” outside of work by giving up their primary language; stop telling Asian students to “fit in” or “find an English name.” Immigrants bring their own perspective that contributes and actively adds to U.S. culture, which should be acknowledged and celebrated. The op-ed is adapted from an open letter initiated and co-written by Cindy Lin, Heeryung Choi, Jane Im and Yixin Zou, co-edited and signed by 69 other doctoral students, all from the University of Michigan’s School of Information. We thank Associate Professor Ricky Punzalan and Faculty-Staff Members of the Asian Pacific Islander Desi/American (APID/A) Staff Association for their valuable input and feedback on the early draft.
Opinion
The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com
ALEX NOBEL | COLUMNIST
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The price of clean air
n a basic level, humans need four things to survive: food, water, shelter and air. Three of these have already been commodified, leaving only air untouched. Human beings take an average of 22,000 breaths per day. Whether someone is exercising, sick or breathing polluted air, breathing is something that isn’t noticed until it’s difficult to do. Between the COVID-19 pandemic, the West Coast wildfires and an increase in global pollution, clean air is becoming more and more of a luxury. Air cannot become commercialized like food, shelter and water already have; this would put the lives of millions of people in danger. COVID-19 has taught us many things about the way our society functions, but one major takeaway is that even basic tasks like breathing can become disrupted by unexpected phenomena. As elementary, middle and high schools move to reopen, they have faced the question of how to fit hundreds of students into hot, poorly ventilated classrooms. At first glance, schools should be hotbeds for viral spread. Infections are 18.7 times more likely to occur indoors, where virus particles remain in the air for up to three hours. However, schools have invested heavily in high-efficiency particulate air filters that work to prevent molecules from being transported by air. While these are not perfect, they have done a solid job in classrooms that have invested properly in the air filtration systems. But what happens when a school district cannot afford the ventilation systems that satisfy Centers for Disease Control and Prevention guidelines? A federal watchdog service found that 41% of grade schools needed to update or completely overhaul their air filtration systems prior to COVID19. These schools often faced tight budgets and had to opt for the cheapest filtration systems. New York City’s public schools have bought over 30,000 new air filtration systems since the pandemic started, but teachers, concerned they will not be enough to ensure students’ safety, crowdfunded an additional $159,000 to purchase more. Schools in poorer neighborhoods need to upgrade their current systems just to reach the pre-pandemic filtration level of those in schools in rich neighborhoods. Unfortunately, this problem extends beyond classrooms. Due to cheap construction materials and techniques, the air in our homes can be up to five times dirtier than outdoors. As people are spending more time indoors because of the pandemic, they are spending more time breathing dirty — albeit, COVID-19 free — air. Dozens of health issues have been linked to unclean indoor air, such as asthma, allergies, depression and sleep apnea.
Yet, outdoor air can be just as dangerous. Data from the World Health Organization shows that nine in every 10 people globally breathe air that exceeds WHO standards for pollutant levels. That same data found that seven million people die every year from air pollution, and air pollution is responsible for roughly one out of every eight deaths worldwide. The United Nations estimates that air pollution costs all nations combined around $5 trillion every year in prevention and mitigation efforts. In the United States, the Clean Air Act has helped lower lead air pollution by 92% since 1980, but globally, half of all people are experiencing worsening air quality. Last fall, California, Oregon and Washington experienced unprecedented wildfires. The fires were not only unprecedented in their severity, but also in their effect on the nation’s air quality. As a result of the fires, one in seven Americans experienced dangerous levels of pollutants in their air. The fires impacted air quality in nearby areas such as Portland, Ore., which had the world’s worst air quality, but their impact was also felt across the world, including in Europe. As climate change increases the frequency of forest fires, they will only continue to harm global air quality. Urban centers generally have the worst air quality, and as more people continue to move to cities around the world, they give us a good place to start improving air quality. One basic step that cities can take is creating more green spaces. Whether by planting trees, creating roof gardens or expanding public parks, creating these green spaces reduces air pollution and provides residents with cleaner, cooler air, along with many other health benefits. Another major step that can be taken is transitioning toward electric buses and trains and encouraging biking and walking through safer trails and sidewalks. Motor vehicles in Philadelphia contribute to about 60% of the city’s total air pollution, demonstrating how switching to green transportation could significantly lower emissions. Like all aspects of climate change, air quality issues harm vulnerable populations the most and compound existing inequities. Solutions must take this into account or risk worsening inequalities. Air quality isn’t about preserving the planet or environment for generations to come. Rather, it is about improving public health right now and averting preventable diseases, health problems and premature deaths. Alex Nobel is an Opinion Columnist and can be reached at anobel@umich.edu.
SHUBHUM GIROTI | COLUMNIST
Enough is enough — we must defend the Uighurs
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n Monday, March 22, the United States, the United Kingdom and Canada coordinated with the European Union in sanctioning China over their treatment of Uighur Muslims in their country. This move begs the question: why did this policy take so long to be enacted? The Uighurs are a minority TurkicMuslim population located mainly in northwestern China who have recently become the target of Chinese monitoring and detention. Starting in 2016, the Chinese government was found to have been creating “re-education camps,” or facilities in which they captured and imprisoned the Uighurs. China spent a long time denying that their camps were actually being used for malice. Instead, China asserts that the prisoners were simply being re-educated because some had become “extremists,” although no such evidence exists. In 2018, the Chinese government finally acknowledged that these places existed and were not for re-education. They said they were imprisoning individuals for low-level crimes and vocational training. However, anecdotal accounts completely reject this notion. In 2019, U.N. representatives sent a letter to the U.N. High Commissioner explaining their concern with the large number of Uighurs being imprisoned, and the fact that the Chinese government was violating human rights laws. During former President Donald Trump’s administration in September 2019, the U.S. finally spoke up and condemned China’s actions on an international scale. Critically, former President Trump himself said in the summer of 2020 that he had been holding off on sanctioning China over their treatment of the Uighurs for the past year to preserve trade talks. This leads us to the question of where we should morally draw a line between our economic prosperity and human rights abuses happening in other countries. It is no secret that economics and global politics play a massive role in domestic politics, but this issue highlights how far will some countries, specifically the U.S., will go to protect trade talks and economic negotiations when human rights abuses
are transpiring every day. The protection of human life and preservation of human rights must be the utmost priority. One major goal of the Biden administration must be to build back the U.S.’s image on the international stage after world leaders both literally and figuratively laughed at Trump and the country. From Trump criticizing NATO to taking the U.S. out of the U.N. Human Rights Council, our international reputation has taken a hit. While President Joe Biden did return the U.S. to the United Nations Human Rights Council, this is not enough. Taking a firm stance on human rights would set the ball in motion for the U.S. to come back as a key player in the international community. Joining in on these sanctions is a step in the right direction, but it would be even better if the U.S. decided to stop doing business with companies associated with Uighur labor, such as Nike, Amazon, Gap, Adidas and many more. Biden should call on the U.S. Senate to fast-track and pass H.R.6210, the Uighur Forced Labor Prevention Act. This act, which passed the House of Representatives on a bipartisan 406-3 vote, ended up stalling in the Senate committees. If Biden is truly committed to ensuring Uighurs in China are treated fairly and better protected, he must use the bully pulpit of the presidency and place a magnifying glass on this issue for the world. The time to favor economic benefits over the internment of hundreds of thousands of individuals and human rights abuses is over. We as a society need to recognize that our economy and individual monetary success pales in comparison to the livelihood of individuals we may not personally know. It is imperative that as we continue to pressure the Biden administration about the human rights of people of color in this country, we do not forget that his influence goes far beyond just these 50 states. If Biden takes a firm stance on defending the Uighurs, we can finally say our president is working for everyone. Shubhum Giroti is an Opinion Columnist and can be reached at sgiroti@umich.edu.
Wednesday, April 7, 2021 — 13
LYDIA STORELLA | COLUMNIST
Michigan’s sex-ed hurts students’ sexual health
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accines. The epitome of shortterm pain, long-term gain. A scientific achievement and feat of human accomplishment that can be received in a grocery store pharmacy. A quick pinch in the arm gives people more hope than they’ve felt in a year. The vaccine is nothing short of a miracle and likely what will usher us out of the current pandemic. While it seems like campus is abuzz about the vaccine, especially with Gov. Gretchen Whitmer’s, D-Mich., statement about vaccine availability for all adults aged 16 and older on April 5, I am deeply concerned by a pattern of behavior that has emerged: lying about one’s situation expressly for the purpose of getting a vaccine. Like all education in the United States, individual states set their own standards for sex education. Many states need to reform these standards. Only 39 states and Washington, D.C., require sex ed and/or HIV education, and it only gets worse from there. A mere 17 states require that the information provided be medically accurate — five of which don’t even require sex education in classrooms. Additionally, five states require only providing negative information about homosexuality, and 19 states require that sex ed must teach that it is important to wait until marriage to have sex. The last time the state of Michigan updated its sex-ed standards was 2004, nearly 20 years ago. It includes relics of the past, such as forbidding teaching that abortion is reproductive health and requiring “stressing abstinence from sex.” While Michigan requires HIV/AIDS education, it, along with 19 other states, does not require sex education. Family planning drugs or devices (e.g. condoms) cannot be handed out to students. In fact, much of the content about contraceptives (labeled “risk reduction” in the summary) is left to the discretion of the school districts, which means that many Michigan students do not receive education about birth control options, leaving them vulnerable to sexually transmitted diseases and teen pregnancy. Sex education has positive effects on the health of students. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention assesses that the benefits of providing quality sex ed to students include delaying sex, having fewer experiences with unprotected sex and avoiding sexually transmitted diseases and unintended pregnancy. The CDC provides sex ed standards for fifth, eighth and 10th graders, which culminates in the 10th grade with discussions about contraceptive options (which includes condoms as well as abstinence), consensual sex and sexual health.
Design by Sharon Kwan
Leaving so much important information to the judgment of individual school districts means that the quality of sex ed varies widely across the state of Michigan. The required emphasis on the importance of abstinence and forbidding discussions of abortion as reproductive health in all Michigan public schools only works to limit the knowledge of Michigan students about birth control, which impacts their sexual health and safety going forward. The sex education standards also make no mention of content regarding LGBTQ+ issues or sexual orientation in general. Considering that the percentage of Americans who identify as LGBTQ+ is growing, especially among the younger generations, it is imperative that such information be taught in Michigan’s public schools, which have over 1.5 million students. While Republicans tend to prefer including abstinence and Democrats were more likely to prefer including discussions about birth control, consent and sexual orientation, both Republicans and Democrats want some form of sex ed to be taught in the classrooms. But it’s difficult to get state lawmakers to be proactive in fighting for sex education due to the topic’s controversial nature. Even in progressive states, it can be difficult to implement sex ed reform; in California, comprehensive sex ed wasn’t required until 2016. In states with a Republican-controlled branch of government, like Michigan, implementing sex education reform can be even more difficult. Fifty-nine percent of Republicans think that premarital sex is morally unacceptable, compared to 27% of Democrats, leading many to oppose material that could be seen as encouraging students to have sex. Not only does comprehensive sex education help to reduce rates of teen pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases, but preaching
abstinence doesn’t even help to reduce the rates of teenagers having sex. Studies have shown that abstinence-only education does not delay sex, but instead leaves students unsafe and at risk for pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases. But few topics are as important to the Republican Party as abortion, which is the second-most important issue for Republicans when deciding which presidential candidate to vote for. States that emphasize abstinence in sex education have the highest rates of teen pregnancy and teen birth. Thirty-one percent of teenagers who get pregnant have an abortion; access to birth control dramatically reduces pregnancy and abortion among teenagers. While free and accessible birth control is a separate issue from sex education, it is possible that teen abortion rates would decrease if all states included a judgment-free discussion of contraceptives in their sex education and diminished the importance placed on abstinence. This could help to reduce abortion rates, something that Republicans certainly support. Michigan sex education needs to be updated. Stressing abstinence and making discussion of contraceptives discretionary only makes Michigan students unprepared for sex whenever they choose to have it. Considering that sex is a natural and vital human function, it is ignorant to assume that abstinence is a helpful way of teaching teenagers about sex, especially since it has been proven that comprehensive sex education reduces rates of unintended pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases. Michigan, along with the rest of the country, must update its sex education standards in order to educate its students on safe sexual health and experiences. Lydia Storella is an Opinion Columnist and can be reached at storella@umich.edu.
JULIAN BARNARD | COLUMNIST
No comment: the value of restraint in the digital age
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his past week, there was a little drama in the race for New Mexico’s 1st Congressional District. Sheridan Lund, the precinct chair of the Democratic Party of Bernalillo County and candidate for the congressional seat, tweeted a now-deleted attack on one of the candidates. The charge being leveled was that Victor Reyes, a former top aide to New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham and one of the candidates for the congressional seat, was only pretending to be a person of color. Reyes is a second-generation Mexican-American. Many of the other candidates running for Congress in this district released statements condemning the attack. What interested me is that at the time that the offending tweet was deleted, it only had about two likes and two negative quote tweets. My recent tweet about Fortnite skins got more likes than these poorly thought-out musings on colorism. By responding to Lund’s message, every candidate in the race was able to accrue some political capital and establish themselves as the candidate of racial justice. But they shouldn’t have responded. This falls in with a trend with which I’ve taken issue recently: treating certain social media posts as much more influential than they actually are. Media literacy is important and constantly evolving. Today I am offering an additional digital rule of thumb: Don’t engage with posts that don’t have traction (likes, shares, etc.). If a post doesn’t have engagement, that is the internet’s way of telling you that no one really found the post to be compelling, so you won’t actually be swaying any opinions by condemning it. Actors on the digital landscape, no matter how large or small the audience, have a responsibility to only respond to a piece of media they disagree with if it has an actual audience. Otherwise, they aren’t countering the sway of the original idea. On the contrary, they are amplifying it to their audience who wouldn’t have been exposed to it in the first place. Those who devote themselves to criticizing irrelevant posts that gained no traction on the merits of the idea presented are distorting the narrative — and doing a disservice to themselves and their audience in the process. Highlighting the fringe is how many figures of the online political influencer class make their livings. Ben Shapiro, probably the most influential conservative online pundit, recently released a YouTube video entitled “Leftists OUTRAGED Over Bill Burr Jokes at 2021 Grammys.” The premise of the video is that
there are currently swathes of rabid Democrats who want to take your comedy away from you, a premise engineered to infuriate his audience. This simply wasn’t true. If you looked on Twitter, where the outrage was allegedly coming from, a couple of negative posts had gained a few hundred likes. But it seemed for every negative tweet about Bill Burr with five or ten likes, there were scores of people absolutely indignant that people could be so sensitive, all producing the same ten offending Tweets as evidence for a larger cultural sickness. So what should people respond to on the internet? I would offer a couple of criteria for a post to be considered worthy of a response. First, how much traction did this idea actually get? If Joe Schmoe posts on Facebook that we should put the Social Security Trust Fund into Bitcoin, and the post receives two likes and one “Interesting!” comment from his secondgrade teacher, I am confident that the national narrative would not benefit from a prominent account screenshotting it, posting to their thousands of followers, and doing the 21st century equivalent of eviscerating the person on a daytime talk show. However, if Joe Schmoe’s post somehow manages to gain traction, then it might be worth engaging. On the other hand, if Ezra Klein, a New York Times columnist, tweets that we should put the Social Security Trust Fund into Bitcoin, regardless of how much or how little engagement the post gets, this thought is relevant and merits a response. Overall, you should respond if the thinker is prominent or if the reach of their thought was large. These criteria apply less and less the closer the person is to you. I still want to empower you to get into Facebook arguments with your cousins about what time of year is best for seeing geese, because that person actually has a huge audience relative to your life — you and everyone close to you are the intended audiences. In a lot of ways, the internet is not necessarily a public forum. It is the Diag. You aren’t there to speak about and listen to a specific topic, you are there to do your own thing. If someone is shouting at the top of their lungs from one of those benches in front of Hatcher Graduate Library, you and everyone else would probably walk right by them. But if you see a crowd of a thousand listening to some weirdo’s ideas about the Federal Reserve, you have much more of a desire to comment.
On the internet, we perceive things to be much more oriented at us than we do in real life. The phenomenon I am talking about is based much more on remoteness. If Facebook arguments with relatives are hand-to-hand combat, I am preaching against snipers: rummaging through the internet for the sole purpose of becoming enraged, finding the worst articulation of the offending concept, and pulling the trigger. Let’s circle back to the tweet that caused all my strife in the NM-1 congressional race. What should the candidates have done? I don’t want to sound too much like a kindergarten teacher, but ignoring it is often the best policy. Platforming the fringe is a poor decision. If an idea isn’t held by a significant number of people, it isn’t important enough to bring to the attention of your audience, or even worth your time. I know it’s almost all I write about these days, but this phenomenon contributes to political polarization. Picking the least articulate, least important post which was unable to gain any traction on the merits of its ideas, and magnifying it — responding to it as if it’s something greater — causes audiences to perceive society as a split between themselves and those who formulated the odd ideas in question. And that is rarely an accurate map of the populace. There is a genre of accounts that will find a post with not much traction, expressing the least developed version of an idea, and compile it with thousands of others with the goal of proving how much better X or Y ideology is than the other. Ignoring fringe posts won’t solve much. It won’t dismantle polarization, bigotry or online rudeness, but it will avoid unnecessarily elevating an idea no one listened to in the first place. It’s also a way to practice some selfrespect. Often the only way we can interpret social media is as a direct message to us, and one which needs a response. Thinking of the internet as the Diag instead of a conversation or a forum can help you escape this mindset. People aren’t talking to you, they’re preaching into the air. It isn’t your responsibility to counter every silly thing someone says from their digital soapbox, but if other people start engaging with the idea, then you have the right to add your own commentary about the original post. With these criteria for social media nonconfrontation, you can become a beacon of restraint in the digital age. Julian Barnard is an Opinion Columnist and can be reached at jcbarn@umich.edu.
Opinion
14 — Wednesday, April 7, 2021
KEITH JOHNSTONE | COLUMNIST
Dr. Doofenshmirtz taught me how to be a real man
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mid the recent onslaught of mass shootings, financial market instability and attacks on our democracy, I have increasingly found myself retreating to the comfort of my television for an escape. As events have worsened, my show selection has circled the drain from “Normal People” and “Master of None” down to the depths of “Big Mouth” and “Glee” (say what you will, but Marley and Jake made season four watchable). However, things began looking up a couple of weeks ago, when I accidentally stumbled upon a work of genius that I never adequately appreciated in my youth: “Phineas and Ferb.” I, like many others born between 1998 and 2002, saw the show’s campy first few episodes and quickly aged out of the target demographic, leaving it behind for teen shows like “iCarly” and “Victorious.” Sadly, that left me with a bad taste in my mouth, having viewed it as boring and formulaic. However, when I revisited the show as an adult, I finally saw its true vision. Even though they get a lot of screen time, I saw that the titular Phineas and Ferb really aren’t the main characters. See, they are both too “good” in the boring Captain America sense, whereas both Candace and Dr. Doofenshmirtz provide the show with conflict, compromise, excitement, tragedy and — through their human flaws — relatability. While I could go on for pages about the genius of Candace’s character, I will save that for a future column. Instead, I want to talk about Dr. Heinz Doofenshmirtz, a comically inept villain on first look. I mean, his corporation is literally called “Doofenshmirtz Evil Inc.,” so he has to be the bad guy, right? Not necessarily. While he inexplicably wants to rule the Tri-State Area — despite never showing an inclination to run for public office — his only real goal is to make his daughter happy. I mean, it’s kind of incredible to have a character who spends his tragic childhood abandoned and isolated, yet when he becomes a parent himself, and despite a divorce, he is not only a caring father but a truly good man. He never kills and rarely seeks to harm anyone, besides Perry the Platypus, who, in all honesty, kind of has it coming. He shows no resentment toward his ex-wife. He even befriends his mortal enemy at the end of the series and begins fighting for the “good” guys. Doofenshmirtz does this because he wears his heart on his sleeve and broadcasts his emotions,
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Keith Johnstone is an Opinion Columnist and can be reached at keithja@umich.edu.
JESSIE MITCHELL | COLUMNIST
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No sweaters in my oven
hen my parents were dating during the 90s in New York City, my mom kept her sweaters in their oven. My mom said the kitchen was too small and gross and they needed the storage space. They used to tell that story from time to time when I was growing up, often when my dad commented on my mom’s cooking (which frequently utilized an oven during my childhood). He seemed to be saying, “Look how far she’s come.” Recently, I’ve been thinking about the sweaters in the oven. Our poor oven, which is lucky if it gets lunch off from roasting chickpeas or brussels sprouts, would be thrilled to have a couple of days protecting some sweaters, I’m sure. This semester, my pandemic fatigue has taken the form of meal-time existential dread, and every time I start to chop my silly little brussels sprouts, I try to imagine myself with the kind of life where the oven is most useful as a dresser. I can’t. Perhaps, if the pandemic had not made it so that I was less than five steps from my oven 23 hours per day, I would feel differently. In the alternate pandemic-free reality, I’d probably have a small meal plan. I’d go to events with food advertised, order out occasionally and throw something quick together if I could stop at home between 5-9 p.m. Instead, I cook all but one meal a week, ordering takeout on whichever night it is that Soylent or starvation doesn’t feel like a reasonable alternative to food preparation. The sweaters, which I’ve been thinking about lately when I go to roast my veggies, are a symbol to me of the small ways that the pandemic has changed me. Cooking nearly every meal, while both necessary
and mundane most of the time, feels like a significant step toward something resembling adulthood. But as someone who grew up hearing about the “20s in New York” lifestyle, it also sometimes feels like a regression from modernity. My mental image of young adulthood failed to include meals requiring multiple pans and 45 minutes of oven time.
that I don’t have time to make my sprouts. To me, the pandemic has been one long “deserted island” question. When shit really hits the fan, who do you want to be stuck with — physically or emotionally? For now, for who knows how long, surrounding myself with people I would want to be stuck with on an island is my driving force.
Design by Yassmine El-Rewini
The pandemic has forced a type of domesticity on us all, but for me, it has also rewired my priorities. I no longer want the most competitive, prestigious career at any cost. I no longer want the type of job that forces you to eat takeout six nights per week. I want to be able to cultivate my relationships in the slow, careful way that I cook my food and I want a job that allows me to do that. I think it’s likely that we will see a sort of “roaring 20s” as people are finally able to safely let loose. My prevailing feeling, however, is a desire to stay close to the familiar. I’m not itching to travel the world or to take a big job in a place away from friends or family. I’m not excited to become so busy flitting from one thing to the next
I’m not really sure what I want to do after I graduate, but in the past few weeks, I’ve watched so many talented writers lose their jobs. I’m watching my own talented friends across many different fields struggle to get paid employment of any kind. I’ve watched the incredible dearth of support given to working mothers throughout the pandemic. I’m feeling my ambition shrivel behind a computer screen as I fail to see examples of hard work paying off. For today — in a way that feels very not-21 of me — it’s the vision of the people that I love around the dinner table that is keeping me going. The oven will need to remain sweater-free. Jessie Mitchell is an Opinion Columnist and can be reached at jessiemi@umich.edu.
My beef with the vegan community
NYLA BOORAS | COLUMNIST f you’ve clicked on this article, you’ve likely done so for one of three reasons: You’re a proud omnivore who gets ticked off by the preachings of vegans; you’re a dedicated vegan, or aspiring to be, who is likely already a bit irritated by the title; or you love a good debate and are simply curious as to how this goes. To clear the air right away, I am not here to egg on those meat and dairy-loving people who continue to patronize veganism and roll their eyes when vegans boast of all the benefits of their way of eating (I’m talking to all my Ron Swansons out there). I’m also not going to engage in the typical points of opposition to veganism. I won’t go on and on about how you can’t get enough protein on a vegan diet or that it’s not sustainable or filling enough. Where I do take issue is with the religious fanaticism that can be found in the vegan community: when staunch supporters of the philosophy believe this way of eating is best for everyone. The unspoken (or outright spoken) idea that those who eat animal products are less than in some capacity is ignorant and all too quickly dismisses one very real and important truth: Veganism isn’t suitable for, nor does it benefit, everybody. There are going to be people who cannot and should not adopt a vegan diet, because for them, it is likely to do
which is an almost-Herculean feat for such a fundamentally stunted man. He is precisely the kind of complex, flawed and three-dimensional character that our culture has come to appreciate in recent years. However, he subverts the antihero archetype by having a comedic moral gray area as opposed to the objective darkness embodied by Walter White of “Breaking Bad” and Rick Sanchez of “Rick and Morty,” two of the most ubiquitous fictional characters of the last decade. In the #MeToo era, many have falsely claimed that men are under attack, but that isn’t really accurate. Instead, this era presents a unique opportunity for us to redefine manhood from the outdated toxic definition that uplifts the likes of Brett Kavanaugh, Harvey Weinstein and every Brad and Chad on Greek Row. It is a horrific culture that leads women to cover their drinks, never walk home alone and feel unsafe in their own communities. That kind of environment was created, cultivated and perpetuated by men, and we cannot allow the inherent sexism within that predatory culture to exist. Instead, we need to replace our heroes with paragons of non-toxic masculinity like Anthony Mackie, Harry Styles and, yes, Heinz Doofenshmirtz who embrace their emotions and express their individuality, displaying courage in the face of potential societal backlash. These men inspire me to improve myself every day and to be an ally to the women and LGBTQ+ people who face unspeakable injustices. Together, we as men can follow in their footsteps by being allies and extending a helping hand to get informed about what we can do. That yearning for understanding coupled with an embrace of facts that might be uncomfortable for us to face is exactly what a real man does. A real man fights for the downtrodden; he doesn’t trample. A real man expresses emotion; he doesn’t hide beneath alcohol and anger. A real man is proud of being a man, but he doesn’t demean those who aren’t. Generation Z has the opportunity to walk away from toxic masculinity and embrace a gentler, friendlier and more Doofenshmirtz-ian form of manhood. That is our greatest challenge — and my most ardent hope.
The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com
more harm than good to their mental and/or physical health. Veganism will very rarely be suitable to people who have had restrictive eating disorders. Moreover, “vegan eating disorder recovery” is a dangerous game and there will be very few who can successfully recover while being vegan because the idea of vegan eating disorder recovery is a self-contradictory statement. Think about it: What would recovery from a restrictive eating disorder entail? It would mean dropping all restrictions and challenging long-held food rules and beliefs in an attempt to rewire established neural pathways. To do this, one would have to actively stimulate this fear response by facing those foods they forbid until the presence of that food or thought of consuming it is no longer interpreted as a threat. Since a central component to veganism is the avoidance of animal products, one’s recovery, if attempted vegan, would not allow them to address these foods they are also restricting. Of course, the reason for restricting animal products can be more nuanced here. Maybe they are not afraid, per se, of those foods veganism requires they cut out. But they are most certainly deterred from them. Each person will have to get at the reason
why that is. Is it solely out of respect and honor for animal rights? If so, then yes, there is no reason to encourage one to eat animal products if it crosses an ethical boundary they intentionally maintain. But, I would also add, you can always return to veganism because of your ethical values in the future. It may be worth at least taking a break from veganism if and when you are feeling too restrictive and like you may be slipping into the terrain of an eating disorder. This might look like heightened fear and anxiety around the thought of consuming anything animal-based. For the wing of veganism that truly engages in it as a philosophy rooted in animal rights, I commend you for having such a noble intention. However, I believe there are many who, caught up in our diet and thin-obsessed society (now being obscured under the banner of “health”), choose to become vegan in an attempt to finally frame this restriction as “right” or “healthy.” Is your dedication to veganism rooted in your belief that it is environmentally friendly? Even this is being debated in recent discourse. Ecologist Allan Savory put forth his compelling argument for “holistic management and planned grazing” in his Ted Talk and his method calls for the use of more
livestock to re-green the Earth’s arid lands and significantly reduce atmospheric carbon. The Savory method is undoubtedly in need of more studies to prove if the theory is applicable across different contexts, but my main point is, would you be willing to leave complete veganism if it didn’t do the wonders for the environment you believed it did? If your dedication to veganism is neither rooted in environmental and or ethical beliefs, I am led to believe you may be clinging to it out of fear and a belief that it is inherently the healthiest way to eat. And if you have rigid food rules forbidding all animal products because you believe they are harmful to your health, I’d encourage you to read more into the diagnostic criteria of orthorexia. In fact, the line separating veganism and orthorexia can be easily blurred and one might go back and forth between the two terrains unknowingly. A study on this connection between restrained eating behaviors and veganism and vegetarianism found that vegans and vegetarians exhibited more orthorexic eating behaviors than those who eat red meat. A 2018 article from The Independent also highlights numerous lived experiences where people hide their eating disorders behind veganism. In short, that is why recovery from a
restrictive eating disorder will have to have zero restraints on any food groups (allergies and intolerances aside). More often than not, allowing restriction to continue in any capacity during recovery attempts, such as by continuing to keep animal products off-limits, will result in the eating disorder voice living on, albeit a bit quieter. Even when one is post-recovery and feels far-removed from their eating disorder, any restrictive way of eating could be triggering and slowly send them back down a dangerous path. Because it is hard to realize you’re back on that path when already on it, you’re better off not embarking on it in the first place. Those who have recovered from a restrictive eating disorder, are in the process of doing so or who more generally have a tendency to engage in disordered eating behaviors, are the perfect example of a population who should not be engaging in fully-fledged veganism. Moving forward, let’s collectively be mindful of the fact that, for some, veganism can be a gateway into an eating disorder and it should not be hailed as the all-curing, omnipotent way of eating it currently is. Nyla Booras is an Opinion Columnist and can be reached at nbooras@umich.edu.
JOHN TUMPOWSKY | COLUMNIST
Student debt is at ridiculous levels — we need help now
Informing Blacks and Whites about the Racial Wealth Gap
VINCENT HUTCHINGS Hanes Walton Jr. Collegiate Professor of Political Science and Afroamerican and African Studies
An online lecture. For more information, visit events.umich.edu/event/81873 or call 734.615.6667
Online Event: Wednesday, March 31st, 202 1 | 4:00 p.m.
IF THEY ONLY KNEW
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his past summer, while many students had just wrapped up a difficult transition to virtual education during their second semester of the academic year, the University of Michigan’s Board of Regents decided to approve a tuition increase of 1.9% for the upcoming year. For many, that increase — however small it may have been — was a kick to the face. An increase in our financial burden was an unnecessary edition to the agenda during an already stressful pandemic. As we are approaching the one year mark since the Board approved that change, and because on March 18, the U.S. Department of Education announced they will forgive $1 billion in student loan debt, let’s consider the implications for the students — both at the University and elsewhere — who have been struggling with tuition costs and subsequent loans. It is important to note that said announcement is a bit deceiving — debt relief will be given to 72,000 students who attended institutions that closed abruptly or were involved in cases of fraud, but not to students at most reputable universities. For those of us who are not in that category, a proposal is in the works for $10,000 in student debt to be universally forgiven. Student loan debt has skyrocketed in recent years and we should be happy, to a certain extent, that President Joe Biden is aware of the problem. U.S. student loan debt is currently estimated to be around $1.7 trillion dollars, distributed among a collective of 45 million borrowers in 2021. It is now considered “the secondhighest consumer debt category,” according to Forbes. So where has the problem come from? Demand for college is higher than ever before, but instead of figuring out ways to make college more affordable for students, our country has adopted a rather prodigal loan policy that simply lends money to students to make that desired education affordable — even if it isn’t.
This mindset is the crux of the multi-billion dollar crisis we are in. It is an economic injustice of sorts — the government is distributing loans to fund the belief that the investment of higher education will eventually be worthwhile, while for millions of Americans the only reality is simply debt. This reality is why the University’s recent tuition hike should not be unexpected. Theoretically, there are no limits on what schools can charge. While this culture of ever-increasing tuition is certainly frustrating for the average student, at the moment, it seems that this trend is only going to continue. In the meantime, tangible solutions to forgiving studentloan debt need to be pushed. Thus, we need to be thinking critically about our representatives’ currently proposed plans, as Biden’s isn’t the only one up for debate. The current plans are as follows: Biden’s $10,000 plan, a differing Democratic plan to cancel $50,000 per borrower and the rather radical plan to cancel all debt, as pushed by progressive legislators, including Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt. Biden’s current stance is that the $50,000 will not happen, and thus neither will Sanders’s. After the President’s short and to-the-point statement that he would not consider such a plan, he followed it up with some more explanation. He cited the private versus public institutional difference in student-loan debt that made a $50,000 minimum unjust for those not attending Ivy League-like universities. But, it seems as though some of Biden’s arguments may be unfounded and congressional members, seeking to push the $50,000, do not seem to be willing to concede as a result. Regardless, if we do not act swiftly, the severe economic and racial disparities that have resulted from student loan debt are only going to be
exacerbated . Due to already existing inequities, Black families in the United States tend to take on student loan debt at both higher rates and in riskier forms compared to their white counterparts. Essentially, debt is pushing Black borrowers into greater financial risk. At this rate, various economists predict student loan debt will total as much as $3 trillion by the end of the next decade. That figure is guaranteed to be riddled with significant racial and socioeconomic inequities. Thus, the argument I hope to make clear to both legislators and university officials is two-fold. First, for legislators: While short-term solutions such as various degrees of debt-relief plans are definitely going to make some impact, our thoughts need to be oriented toward long-term action. The crisis is not going to be halted by a $10,000 proposal or even a $50,000 one; think critically about the problems we face and how to redirect our current model. Second, to the universities: Acknowledge the tuition crisis and how our loan structure is only serving to increase the problem. Start working on ways to decrease tuition and make the investment in higher education one that everyone can afford. Neither task is an easy one to pursue, but economists have warned us of the disaster on our hands and the long-term implications of it. It seems, at the moment, there is no perfect solution, but that does not mean there is no solution at all. We must work alongside legislators and fix the crisis permanently, not just for the short-term. As a first step, tuition hikes during the middle of a pandemic are likely not a strategic solution to addressing this dilemma. This summer, let’s avoid those. John Tumpowsky is an Opinion Columnist and can be reached at jgtump@umich.edu.
Sports
The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com
Wolverines ride mid-game stretch in win over Johns Hopkins MARK PATRICK For The Daily
Throughout the Michigan men’s lacrosse team’s season, the Wolverines have often relied on only a few players for scoring. Sunday told a different story. Eight different players reached the back of the net, including hat tricks from sophomore attackman Josh Zawada and sophomore midfielder Jake Bonomi, making it an allaround team effort, as Michigan (2-5 Big Ten) used strong second and third quarters to propel it to a 13-10 road victory over Johns Hopkins (2-5). The first quarter was evenly matched with both teams finding chances. Scoring came in spurts, including one 15-second stretch during which the Wolverines and Blue Jays combined for three goals. The game looked to be a back and forth scoring affair after a 3-2 Blue Jays first quarter lead.
The first five minutes of the second quarter followed the same script, with each team scoring two goals. But Michigan took over the remainder of the quarter by scoring the next two goals while junior goaltender John Kiracofe made five of his 16 saves in the quarter. “I give John a lot of credit, he’s really grown into that role,” Michigan coach Kevin Conry said. “We always knew John had the talent and the intangibles. His leadership is why we went with him in the first place. And now you are starting to see the confidence kind of come out. He has worked incredibly hard to put himself in a position to be a high caliber goaltender, and he showed it today.” Going into halftime, Michigan led the Blue Jays 6-5. But with 14 turnovers in the first half, the Wolverines wanted to reinforce their game slightly. “I give a lot of credit to Johns Hopkins as they were doing some
ALLISON ENGKVIST/Daily
Michigan junior goaltender John Kiracoffe protected the net in its win.
nice things that they were able to get to our hands,” Conry said. Michigan’s halftime adjustments worked as it was very effective with the ball, committing just six turnovers in the second half as well as converting on all nine of its clearing attempts. In the third quarter, the Wolverines added three more goals to make for a 6-0 scoring run, resulting in a 9-5 Michigan lead. “The guys played not to lose, but to win,” Conry said. “When you start playing to win you just kind of feel the mojo. You snap the ball a little bit more and you run to space and so it was just more efficient.” Johns Hopkins settled in, going on a 5-2 scoring run to cut the Michigan lead to just one with four minutes left. But Michigan regained the momentum, scoring the final two goals to secure the victory. “(Junior attackman Bryce Clay) didn’t really show up in the stat sheet that much, but his ability to move off the ball was a big reason why Jake Bonomi gets open or (grad student midfielder Avery Meyers) gets a shot,” Conry said.“It is more about our unselfish play and how hard we work. I think at the first meeting, we felt offensively we were very stagnant, and I give (assistant coach Justin Turri) a lot of credit for getting these young kids to good spots where they are moving effectively.” Michigan hopes to learn from this win as it goes up against Maryland next weekend and looks to establish a winning streak. “The biggest thing is to learn from a win,” Conry said. “I think this young team’s handling of success is something that we haven’t been great at. Learn from a win.”
Wednesday, April 7, 2021 — 15
Late equalizer leads to doubleovertime draws against Rutgers MATTHEW CHANG Daily Sports Writer
With a one-goal lead and two minutes left on the clock, the Michigan women’s soccer team prepared to defend a corner. Rutgers lined up in the box, leaving only one player forward, and the Wolverines assembled to protect their precious lead. The ball fluttered into the near post and bodies flew toward it. In the middle of the scrum, Scarlet Knights forward Nneka Moneme headed the ball into the back of the net. Tie game. Neither team scored in overtime and the end result was a 1-1 tie between Michigan (5-3-3 Big Ten) and No. 24 Rutgers (6-2-3) after double overtime. The Wolverines’ offense operated smoothly during a scoreless first half. They easily passed through the Scarlet Knights’ press, especially from the back. The defensive line maintained their composure and found the passes needed to move the ball up the field. After passes from the defenders broke Rutgers’s first line of defense, the Michigan midfielders had plenty of space to turn and find the next pass, creating several scoring opportunities. The Wolverines’ best chance came in the 17th minute after a throw-in combination between sophomore forward Danielle Wolfe and senior midfielder Nicki Hernandez gave the latter time for a shot that hit the far post. A few minutes later, Hernandez drove down the left flank and set up Wolfe with a chance just in front of goal, but a frantic block from Rutgers
kept the score level at zero. In the second half, the Wolverines had more difficulty breaking down the Scarlet Knights’ defense. Rutgers marked players more closely, making it harder for Michigan to find space with the ball. However, in the 60th minute, after giving the ball away with poor first touch at the top of the box, Hernandez quickly won it back, spun to her left and scored. “I figured out where the defenders were, and since they were both on one side, I could just do one move,” Hernandez said. “With the goal being wide open, I always love going far post, and luckily that worked.” With a strong defensive effort through the first 60 minutes, Michigan looked likely to hold onto that lead. In addition to helping Michigan build out of the back, senior defender Alia Martin was crucial to keeping Rutgers contained with multiple clearances and tackles, constantly communicating to help
the team keep their shape. “We’re continuing to try and improve on our defensive organization to make sure that we make it difficult for other teams and predictable for ourselves,” Michigan coach Jennifer Klein said. “We want to find our opportunities to regain the ball.” But the defense started to show some cracks after the Wolverines took the lead, with senior goalkeeper Hillary Beall needing to make seven saves. Effective crosses from the Scarlet Knights threatened the back line, and in the end, Michigan conceded the tying goal off a corner with two minutes remaining. The game remained deadlocked in overtime, and after a dominant firsthalf and an early second-half goal, Michigan had to settle for a tie in its last game of the regular season. “Unfortunate to give up a goal in the last little bit,” Klein said. “Hopefully it will be a learning experience for us now going into the postseason.”
ALLISON ENGKVIST/Daily
Michigan senior midfielder Nicki Hernandez scored in the 60th minute.
‘Last year wasn’t good enough’: Josh Ross return to Michigan to win DANIEL DASH Daily Sports Editor
The Michigan football team’s underwhelming 2020 season didn’t sit well with senior linebacker Josh Ross. Since arriving in Ann Arbor in 2017, Ross helped establish a winning program under coach Jim Harbaugh. He was an All-Big Ten selection when Michigan came within a game of the College Football Playoff in 2018, and he made three starts in 2019 before an injury sidelined him until the Wolverines’ New Year’s Six bowl appearance. Then came the disastrous 2020 season. Ross was a senior captain on last fall’s 2-4 team that lost as a three-touchdown favorite against Michigan State, fell to Indiana for the first time in three decades, suffered its worst halftime deficit in Michigan Stadium history against Wisconsin and lost to an 0-5
Penn State team by double digits. Before last year, the Wolverines had never finished a full season without a home win. That changed, too. Ross wasn’t going to let his career end on that note. “My decision on coming back, it was unfinished business. That was pretty obvious,” Ross told reports via Zoom on Thursday. “Last year was not good enough for myself, not good enough for our team. I felt I had to come back. I had to come back, and we had to prove something and have a chip on our shoulder and go get it. That was my main reason. “I didn’t know what coaches we were getting yet. Before all that, of course it was a blessing to get the guys we have in the staff now, but at the same time, for me, coming back was about proving myself and proving ourselves as a team and getting better, just building our football knowledge and building everything cause last year wasn’t good enough.” Ross is returning for a fifth year to try to prove that Michigan
is better than its 2020 record. But after Harbaugh hired an almost entirely new defensive staff during the offseason, Ross now finds himself at the center of a schematic overhaul. Gone are the days of former defensive coordinator Don Brown’s blitz-happy aggression. Harbaugh brought in Mike Macdonald from the Baltimore Ravens and Mo Linguist from the Dallas Cowboys as co-coordinators to replace Brown, signaling a shift toward an NFL-style defense. To Ross, that change offers the chance to immediately improve a unit that allowed the third-most points in the Big Ten last season. It also presents an opportunity to build on a career that has seen him rack up 136 tackles across 35 appearances. “As far as myself, I feel like I haven’t really shown everything I can do yet,” Ross said. “But more so not about myself — as a team we haven’t shown what we can really do yet. This year is gonna be big for us.”
ALLISON ENGKVIST/Daily
Michigan senior linebacker Josh Ross’s return to Ann Arbor was for one reason: winning.
There’s no guarantee he’ll return to his 2018 All-Big Ten form after a dropoff in 2020, but Ross could become a centerpiece of the Wolverines’ defense this
fall. Whether that translates to winning will ultimately determine if Ross is happy with his decision to return for a fifth year.
“Last year wasn’t good enough as a team,” Ross said. “It wasn’t. I felt that for myself a lot, so I had to come back. There was no option, to be honest, for me.”
SportsWednesday: Livers’s injury epitomizes need for NIL reform In four years at Michigan, Isaiah Livers has scored 987 points, collected 453 rebounds and assisted 110 baskets. In the process, he’s won 94 games, each one helping to earn the University hundreds of thousands of THEO dollars from ticket sales, MACKIE advertising revenue and TV deals. None of it has gone to Livers. “I just feel like I’m being used a lot,” Livers, who wore a shirt with the hashtag #NotNCAAProperty throughout the NCAA Tournament, said in an interview with ESPN’s Rece Davis on March 24. “I feel like a university or the NCAA or a conference can make so much money off of one name, and the guy who’s putting all the work in to get to that point gets nothing out of it.” That much has been true for the last four years with Livers and of college athletes for decades. Even if Livers goes on to a successful NBA career and makes millions of dollars playing the sport professionally, he’ll still have been prevented from
making the money he earned for four years. That’s bad enough in its own right. This week’s news made it even worse. On Friday, Michigan announced that Livers underwent successful surgery on his right foot after a stress fracture caused him to miss the entire NCAA Tournament. Buried in the press release was Livers’s timetable: “Recovery is expected to be a minimum of six months,” the statement said. For four years, Livers — unlike thousands of other college athletes — had a money-making light at the end of the tunnel. As an athletic forward with a 41.2% career 3-point shooting percentage, Livers was widely projected to be a secondround NBA Draft pick a month ago. Now, few mock drafts predict Livers will be selected at all. One NBA executive said via text that Livers’s draft expectation was “all over the second round” before his injury. Now, according to the same executive, Livers is less likely to be drafted because of how long he’ll be out, though, it was added that Livers going “late second round (is) still in play.” Before the season, Livers said that the primary feedback he got from NBA teams in the pre-draft process last summer was to stay
healthy. More important than any improvements in his play, he did exactly that for four months. Then, on the morning of Michigan’s Big Ten Tournament semifinal against Ohio State, it was announced that Livers had suffered a stress fracture, sidelining him indefinitely. If that had been the extent of Livers’s injury, it would’ve been sad enough — a senior, in his final college season, losing the event
he’s worked toward for four seasons. With surgery required, Livers will now miss pre-draft workouts and the NBA Combine. He’ll also miss the Summer League and potentially the beginning of the regular season, reducing the likelihood he’ll find a Duncan Robinson path into making millions of dollars if he goes undrafted. The fragility of sports careers isn’t exclusive to college athletes.
MADELINE HINKLEY/Daily
Senior forward Isaiah Livers injured his foot during the Big Ten Tournament.
Every year, dozens of professional players have their careers derailed by injury. But at least they were able to make money while they were playing. Livers couldn’t. Right now, the Supreme Court is debating the legality of college players being unpaid by their schools. In Congress, Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., introduced The College Athlete Economic Freedom Act earlier this year. If passed, it would allow players to profit off their name, image and likeness — a move the NCAA could also make on its own. Either solution would change college sports forever. A player like Livers would no longer spend four years unable to profit off the financial value that he provides to his school and to the NCAA. As a beloved athlete in a sports-crazed college town, Livers would have had no shortage of sponsorship opportunities. The same goes for his teammates, many of whom will never play in the NBA. Junior guard Adrien Nunez, for example, played just 3.2 minutes per game this year. But with over a million TikTok followers, he would probably have a chance to make more money than any other Wolverine.
“It doesn’t even have to be about how good of a player you are compared to this other player and you’re getting paid just because you average 20 points a game,” Livers told ESPN. “Now, guys could focus on art, music, selling clothes. … We’re not just basketball players, we’re human beings too.” None of this is to say that there isn’t value in college sports. Livers needed his four years at Michigan to develop into an NBA prospect. But even a player like Gonzaga’s Jalen Suggs, who has used this season to jump from a low-lottery prospect to a consensus top-five pick, is being exploited by the NCAA. Against UCLA on Saturday, Suggs hit a shot that the NCAA will use in advertising campaigns for generations. On CBS, 12 million people watched along. If the NCAA would allow him to, Suggs could go back to Spokane on Tuesday morning and sign an advertising deal with every business in town. Fortunately for Suggs, though, his multi-million-dollar payday is only a few months away. Thanks to an unfortunately-timed stress fracture, Isaiah Livers isn’t so lucky. With one rule change, it wouldn’t have to be this way.
Sports
16 — Wednesday, April 7, 2021
Michigan goes 2-2 against Maryland, Northwestern JACK WHITTEN Daily Sports Writer
Brandon Lawrence had waited two years for his first college at-bat, and the freshman infielder got it in the top of the ninth inning against Maryland on Monday night. With his family in the stands, he homered to deep right field. It’s a moment Michigan coach Erik Bakich thinks Lawrence will never forget, but one of few things the rest of the Wolverines will remember — at least positively. The solo home run pulled the No. 25 Michigan baseball team (13-6 Big Ten) back within 10 runs of the Terrapins, capping off a 17-7 loss and a 2-2 weekend series split against Maryland (9-10 Big Ten) and Northwestern (10-8). Monday’s loss was an outlier compared to the first three games of the weekend, when Michigan rode its biggest strengths — pitching, defense and timely hitting, according to Bakich — to two wins. Redshirt sophomore left-hander Steven Hajjar earned another quality start on Friday night, allowing only two runs and three hits in 6.2 innings, but a strong start by the Wildcats’ Tyler Uberstine kept the score tied at two before the seventhinning stretch. Redshirt junior outfielder Danny Zimmerman led off the bottom of the seventh with a pinch-hit walk, and fifth-year catcher Christian Molfetta singled. Fifth-year transfer catcher Griffin Mazur topped off the rally with a first-pitch home run, giving the Wolverines a three-run lead they’d hold. Redshirt junior left-hander Ben Dragani took the ball for the second game against Northwestern, and like the other starters who succeeded Hajjar this weekend, Dragani couldn’t record even close to a quality start. His four innings and three runs did keep Michigan within shouting distance of the Wildcats, but outs on the basepaths cut rallies in the first and seventh innings short. Down 4-1 in the ninth, the Wolverines quickly loaded the bases on a walk and a pair of singles. But not even the red-hot redshirt sophomore outfielder Jordon Rogers or Zimmerman, who was summoned to pinch-hit once again, could clear the table.
“We had put a good amount of quality at-bats together and just made some hard outs,” Zimmerman said. “We started that inning by loading the bases. We can’t wait around to the ninth inning. We can’t always win in the ninth; we’ve got to do it earlier.” Michigan didn’t heed that advice in the second game of Sunday’s doubleheader. Sophomore righthander Cameron Weston went four innings and allowed four runs, but a grand slam by sophomore catcher Jimmy Obertop neutralized Maryland’s early offensive damage. Michigan scratched out a run on a squeeze play in the seventh inning to take a 5-4 lead. “The wind was blowing in, and we felt good about (fifth-year transfer shortstop) Benjamin Sems getting a squeeze down,” Bakich said. “He executed it perfectly. There have been a couple of times when we’ve left runners on base. It was a tie game, and we usually like to play for the big inning, but this particular case of where we were in the game and the time of the game and how the game was going, it just seemed like trying to play for a run was the way to go.” The Terrapins responded with a game-tying single in their half of the seventh, and with the game still knotted at five in the ninth, Bakich called on Zimmerman to pinch-hit once again. Although he faced mid to upper-90s velocity from Maryland reliever David Falco, Zimmerman was looking to hit a fastball. He did just that, belting a solo home run that gave Michigan a 6-5 lead that held. Then came Monday’s game, during which Maryland turned the basepaths into a carousel for 3.5 hours. Senior right-hander Blake Beers allowed four runs in 3.1 innings, and the trail of relievers that followed him let in 13 additional runs. “Our bullpen has been really good for the first 18 games of the year, so I’m not going to put too much stock into what happened today,” Bakich said. “We just couldn’t stop the hot-hitting Maryland team today; they were on fire.” Pitching and defensive struggles eliminated Michigan well before the final pitch had been thrown. In light of that, Bakich emptied the bench and gave Brandon Lawrence the opportunity to give the team a silver lining.
The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com
Baserunning costs Michigan outs and runs STEEL HURLEY Daily Sports Writer
Graduate transfer infielder Benjamin Sems laid down the bunt to perfection in the seventh inning of Sunday’s game against Maryland, sending the ball rolling past the pitcher to the third baseman. Sems was so close to first base by the time the ball had been collected that the Maryland third baseman didn’t even bother with a throw. Instead, he turned to see sophomore outfielder Clark Elliott sprinting around third base in an attempt to score two runs on the squeeze play. Since Sems was already safe at first base, the third baseman calmly turned and ran at Elliott, who was caught in a rundown and tagged out. The next batter, sophomore outfielder Tito Flores, hit a fly ball that would have been a sacrifice fly and would likely have scored Elliott if the Wolverines had just played it safe. This sort of baserunning mistake was a recurring issue throughout the weekend series against the Terrapins and Northwestern, both of which Michigan split, as extremely aggressive baserunning turned into costly outs that limited runs. “We made a couple of mistakes,” Michigan coach Erik Bakich said. “Just getting out on the bases, things come up that just need to be corrected, whether it be shortening a lead or extending a lead or getting a better jump.” The Wolverines have run into several other outs in recent games, too. Redshirt sophomore outfielder Jordon Rogers was picked off of first base after getting a very aggressive lead during the loss to Northwestern on Sunday. He took several skips away from the base to disrupt the Wildcat left-hander staring him down from the mound but was made to pay for it when the pitcher
threw over to first base. Rogers also ran into another out in a later game against Maryland on Monday when he was thrown out trying to steal third. “There’s a lot that goes into base running, and we spend an extraordinary amount of time on it,” Bakich said. “It’s certainly created a lot of scoring opportunities for us over the years so it’s something we take a lot of pride in and try to use it and deploy it to our advantage. Some of the most successful teams we’ve had have been guys that have had
Elliott also was thrown out trying to score on a ground ball to shortstop in the Wolverines’ first game against Maryland. Elliott’s hesitation, like Flores’s, was costly as he waited a split second before aggressively trying to score on a softly-hit ground ball. He was caught in a rundown coming home and eventually tagged out. “I think it was just unlucky,” sophomore catcher Jimmy Obertop said. “We’re always trying to be aggressive, it’s better to be in an aggressive state than a passive one.”
LUKE HALES/Daily Sophomore Clark Elliott’s baserunning error was one of many for Michigan during the start of this season.
that combination of speed and power throughout the lineup. Where there’s multiple ways to score, those seem to be the best offenses.” Later in Sunday’s loss against Northwestern, Flores hesitated for a moment to advance on a pitch in the dirt, but decided to break for second base and was gunned down by the Wildcat catcher. As if on cue, the batter at the plate, redshirt junior outfielder Danny Zimmerman, smoked a double off the wall that likely would’ve scored Flores from first base had he not run into an out.
Bakich’s teams are known for being aggressive on the bases, and they have forced other teams into many errors this season. The mistakes this weekend may have cost the team several runs, but Bakich is not worried about his team’s aggressiveness on the bases in the long term: “We want to be aggressive up to a calculated risk,” Bakich said. “The thing that we talked about is trying to be about 50% successful in stealing bases. If we feel like we can steal the base with 80% success, then it’s worth taking the risk.”
Late defensive lapses cost Michigan against Wisconsin HAYDEN F. GRIJNSZTEIN Daily Sports Writer
ALLISON ENGKVIST/Daily Michigan advanced to the National Championships with a team score that tied the program record this weekend.
Michigan advances to National Championships with record tie SAMI RUUD
Daily Sports Writer
Standing on the edge of the floor before her routine, junior Natalie Wojcik watched as her teammate’s score came in at a 9.950, securing the win for Michigan and advancing it to the NCAA Gymnastics Championships. However, Wojcik still saluted the judges, stepped out on the floor and performed a strong routine that allowed the No. 4 Wolverines (20-2) to tie their program record team score at the NCAA Regionals over the weekend. The Wolverines showed some nerves on the first day of competition in the Regional Semifinals, but the team ultimately placed first and advanced. Michigan’s biggest errors in its first day of competition came on beam, the team’s first event of the day. None of the gymnasts fell off the beam, but there were many large balance checks that left the team with an uncharacteristically low score of 48.925 to start the meet. Instead of letting its first rotation set the tone for the rest of the meet though, the Wolverines bounced back in the rest of the events, ending the meet in first place with a 197.650 and advancing to the Regional Finals. No. 13 UCLA also qualified for the next day of competition, trailing Michigan by 0.600 points with a team score of 197.050. On Saturday, the Wolverines needed to place in the top two out of the four teams in their Regional Finals to qualify for the National Championships. Facing No. 5 University of California, Berkeley, the Bruins
and Ohio State, Michigan excelled on the competition floor yet again, placing first to secure its National Championship spot. “I feel like people are paying attention to us and hopefully giving us the credit we deserve for being … in contention for winning that national championship,” Michigan coach Bev Plocki said. “It’s not a fluke when you (score over 198) three times in the same year, so I hope people are paying attention to the University of Michigan.” The Wolverines began the day with a strong vault rotation, one of the team’s best events, to have an immediate lead in the meet. Junior Abby Heiskell started with a low score, but the rest of her team made up for it, led by two 9.950 vaults from senior Sierra Brooks and freshman Naomi Morrison. Using the energy from the first rotation, the Wolverines moved to bars, where they broke a program record score with their performance. “Abby Heiskell put us on a great note, hitting her first routine,” Brooks said. “It was beautiful, the dismount dropped right in, and right when that happens we just get extremely excited, and we’re not worried about making little mistakes that usually get to us.” Heiskell started the rotation with a 9.950, which was matched by sophomore Gabby Wilson and Brooks. Wojcik anchored the rotation with a stuck landing on her dismount, winning the event title with a 9.975. The high scoring performances kept Michigan in the lead with second place Golden Bears trailing by 0.375 points.
Despite the Wolverine’s beam performance in the previous day’s competition, the team was able to stay consistent. Brooks posted a huge 9.950 score, and Heiskell finished out the rotation with a solid 9.900 to keep the team’s lead going into its last rotation on the floor. The Wolverines kept their momentum on floor, with four gymnasts earning scores of 9.900, and Wilson topping the rotation with a 9.950. Wojcik finished the rotation with a 9.900, even though the team had already won the meet before her performance even began. “It’s great to have five solid routines before going into that anchor spot, because it definitely takes some of that pressure off,” Wojcik said. “You know that everyone else has done their job, and it sets you up to really just do your best and be carefree but also be able to hit and add another solid routine to the mix.” Although Wojcik’s stellar routine wasn’t necessary in securing Michigan’s win, it pushed the team to tie its program record and give the Wolverines necessary confidence as they move into the National Championships. Michigan also posted the second highest score of any team in the country this weekend, only falling short to No. 1 Oklahoma. “We are just hoping to continue building on this meet and have more meets like this at Nationals,” Wojcik said. “We’re in contention for a national title, and we know we’re capable of doing that, so we’re going to use our energy to get our goal accomplished.”
In the 83rd minute, Wisconsin midfielder Murat Calkap placed the ball next to the corner flag, ready to deliver the corner kick. With a short run up and a swing of the leg, the midfielder sent a looping cross into the middle of the goal box, linking up with the powerful strike on the forehead of Badger forward Henri Tophoven. With ample force, the ball went flying past the Wolverines’ sophomore goalkeeper, Owen Finnerty. The corner served as the winning goal for Wisconsin (2-7-1 Big Ten), as they upset No. 11 Michigan (5-3-1 Big Ten) by a score of 3-2. “When we got to the first (crosses) we didn’t clear them well, so that’s something we do habitually,” Michigan coach Chaka Daley said. “I just think we got some unlucky bounces today. That’s not something we’ve ever really (dealt with). We haven’t conceded a set piece goal all year.” Spectators were not deprived of exciting scoring opportunities during the first twenty minutes of the game. In the third minute, a deflected corner kick left a loose ball in the box for Wisconsin defender Moritz Kappelsberger. The defender put a close-ranged shot on net, but Finnerty dropped to a knee to stop the shot. Six minutes later, the Wolverines got a chance of their own, as sophomore midfielder Iñaki Rodriguez sent a header hurtling into the net, but Wisconsin goalkeeper Carter Abbott made the save with ease. In the 17th minute, Badgers forward Noah Melick had an excellent opportunity to score on a breakaway, but Finnerty rushed off his line to sweep up the ball. Three minutes later, a foul in the Wisconsin penalty box sent senior midfielder
Marc Ybarra to the penalty spot. He sent Abbott diving in the wrong direction and netted the penalty kick, giving Michigan an early 1-0 lead. The next ten minutes were filled with offensive opportunities for the Wolverines, but they weren’t able to convert. Wisconsin eventually scored an equalizer in the 39th minute, as Badger defender Zach Klancnik zipped the ball into the corner of the goal. The score remained at 1-1 to conclude the first half. In the 60th minute, junior forward Derick Broche picked up the ball at the midfield line and carried the ball up the right side of the pitch with pace, trailed by a chasing Wisconsin defender. Broche displayed a series of high stepovers to swerve past one defender and used a heavy left-footed touch to gain space from a second. In a close-ranged one-on-one situation, Broche chipped the ball over the right shoulder of Abbott, concluding his brilliant solo run with clinical finesse. The Wolverines would carry their one goal lead up until the 74th minute, when Finnerty’s attempted corner kick clearance was unsuccessful, leaving the ball sitting in front of the net, providing an easy rebound finish for Melick. Tophoven’s 83rd-minute header put the Badgers up 3-2, and the score concluded that way. All three of the Wisconsin goals came off of setpiece long passes. The final two were especially heartbreaking for Michigan, as the players watched their lead slip into a deficit during the final 15 minutes of play. “To be hard done by deflections is difficult, but we also didn’t do enough to extend that lead or defend a little bit better on the first balls,” Daley said. “All of those (goals) are off of second balls and deflections. It was nothing creative or to carve us apart or to outplay us.”
LUKE HALES/Daily
In an April men’s soccer game against Wisconsin, the Wolverines were not able to convert on offensive opportunities, leading to an upset.