THE AMHERST
THE INDEPENDENT NEWSPAPER OF AMHERST COLLEGE SINCE 1868
STUDENT VOLUME CXLVI, ISSUE 2 l WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 14, 2016
Men’s Soccer Earns Two Wins in First Week of Play See Sports, Page 9 AMHERSTSTUDENT.AMHERST.EDU
College Emphasizes Water Conservation During Drought Shawna Chen ’20 Staff Writer
Photo courtesy of Takudzwa Tapfuma ‘17
Ta-Nehisi Coates, an award-winning writer and journalist, spoke to the Amherst community in a talk titled “Race in America” on Tuesday, Sept. 13, in LeFrak Gymnasium.
Ta-Nehisi Coates Speaks at Amherst Jingwen Zhang ’18 Managing News Editor
Acclaimed writer and journalist Ta-Nehisi Coates gave a talk titled “Race in America” in LeFrak Gymnasium on Tuesday, Sept. 13. For an hour, Coates spoke on the history and his own experiences of being black in America, then spent another half hour answering questions from the audience. The talk was open to the public, with seating preference given to members of the Amherst community, and the gymnasium was filled to capacity with nearby overflow locations streaming the talk. Currently a national correspondent for the Atlantic Magazine, Coates has written for several other publications and received a MacArthur Foundation “Genius Grant” in 2015 and the National Book Award in nonfiction for his 2015 book “Between the World and Me.” After President Biddy Martin introduced him, Coates began his talk by reading an excerpt from
“Between the World and Me,” which he used to introduce his experiences of growing up in West Baltimore. “I was born into a certain portion of America where fear was a defining reality,” Coates said. “The kind of existential fear that I felt as a black American wasn’t present [in other parts of America].” That fear, he said, came with an understanding “that your parents are actually afraid, that there are forces … that they cannot protect you from.” Coates said that his realization of the fear and violence experienced by many black Americans also came from watching depictions of white, generally well-to-do American families on television that were unlike the realities of his own life. “Why didn’t I know anything like that? Any families like that?” he said. “It was a story that the country told me about this other world … of the dream … that black Americans did not enjoy at the time.” The “dream,” Coates said, was “of America as being the sort of place where you can put a stake
down and buy a plot of land … that idea was intimately linked to the idea of slavery.” From there, Coates changed his focus to the history of slavery in America and how American policy has shaped ideas of race and racism. “This ‘dream’ haunts even our greatest achievements,” Coates said. He compared slavery to modern-day homeownership and said that at the time, it “created the unity of white identity.” Coates also related discriminatory policies from the Jim Crow era through recent years to current inequality, poverty and unemployment trends. He also criticized the idea of American exceptionalism as a factor in the formation of those policies. To end his talk, Coates spoke about the current U.S. election. Criticisms of President Barack Obama based on questioning his Americanness or birthplace were “subtracting the benefits of citizenship from black people,” he said. Regarding Republican presidential nominee Donald
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After the state of Massachusetts issued a regional drought watch in early July, President Biddy Martin notified students, faculty and staff of the drought’s effects on the college in an email on Aug. 18, calling on the community to aid in the college’s water conservation efforts. The town of Amherst issued mandatory water restrictions that prohibit watering lawns or gardens, washing vehicles non-commercially, washing buildings, sidewalks or patios and filling swimming pools. These restrictions went into effect on Aug. 19 and will stay in place until further notice, according to the town’s website. “It’s the worst drought we’ve seen in 60 years,” Director of Emergency Services Tamara Mahal said. The town government contacted the college in the beginning of August regarding implementation of conservation measures, Mahal said. Since then, the college has taken a number of steps to minimize water use, including delaying plantings around the newly-constructed Greenway dormitories, reducing irrigation of athletic fields and halting car washes for college vehicles. Nate Lane ’18, president of the student-run Green Amherst Project, worked at the Book and Plow Farm over the summer and said that the impact of the drought has become increasingly severe. “On the farm, crops are a lot smaller than usual and the yields are much slower,” Lane said. “For example, you want, in theory, to have more potatoes in weight when you harvest than when you put in by a factor of at least four or five or six. We barely broke even on what we put in. That’s due to low water, which makes the plants more susceptible to disease and makes them grow smaller.” According to Lane, the drought also affected the college’s dining hall. “The apples in the dining hall … are usually local,” he said. “You may have noticed they are very small this year [due to the] impact of the drought.” The drought status in Amherst is not as critical as it is in eastern Massachusetts according to the National Integrated Drought Information
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Mead Art Museum Unveils Renovations and New Exhibits Dan Ahn ’17 Managing News Editor Members of the college community had the opportunity to see six new exhibits at the Mead Art Museum during a reception on Thursday, Sept. 8 celebrating the museum’s renovation. This is the first major renovation to the Mead under director David Little, who arrived at the museum in summer 2015. The last renovation of this scale took place six years ago. “Accumulations: 5,000 Years of Objects, Fictions, and Conversations” examines the process of how a museum’s collection is built by displaying artworks that originated in different centuries and countries. According to Little, who was in charge of curating the exhibit, “Accumulations” is about “the materiality of the various objects that are on view, to remind the viewer that they start with the
object and then have a process of interpretation.” Little also said that the idea of situating audiences in new and different relations to artworks was a focus of the exhibit. “I think we want to empower the audience more,” he said. “It seemed to me that there was an opportunity, with the changing demographics of the college, to try to present exhibitions that opened up the possibility of involving those audiences more.” “Art From Africa: A Selection of Works Given by Amherst Collectors and Scholars” displays works of African art collected by two brothers who are alumni of the college. “The American Collection: Two Centuries of Art at Amherst College” shows American works spanning the college’s history. The Mead was founded in 1949 primarily to house a major influx of donated American works to the college. Vanja
Malloy, the curator of American art at the Mead, organized the exhibit. She said that one objective for the exhibit is to encourage not only conversation but also engagement with narratives, especially those that have been neglected by history. “As a curator, there are a number of objectives,” Malloy said. “One is that you have very important artworks that really should be on display, because they’re historically important and they’re key works in the collection … but you also want to invite the idea of other narratives. One thing I notice, as a woman, is that there are a lot of male artists — where do women come into this discussion?” Malloy made it a point to include a landscape painting by Robert Duncanson, an accomplished black painter associated with the Hudson River School. “Rotherwas Project 1: Amanda Valdez, La-
dies’ Night” is an exhibit of artworks by Amanda Valdez, an artist whose works engage with topics such as feminism and the materiality of fabrics. According to Little, this exhibit will be part of an ongoing series. “From Russia With Love: Selections from the Thomas P. Whitney, Class of 1937, Collection of Russian Art” is the second major exhibition of the museum’s expansive Russian art collection. It was organized by Bettina Jungen, curator of Russian art. Professor of Art History Nicola Courtright, who organized the exhibit “Precious: Finding the Wondrous in the Mead’s European Art Collection,” said the spaces were built to encourage curiosity and fascination among audiences. The exhibit has no numbers or labels on the
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