DOWN Magazine’s Freshman Issue
Table of Contents
The Burden of Opinion \ 3 “The Outsiders”: Navigating Directed Studies as Person of Color \ 4 Snatching Headdresses: Confronting Cultural Appropriation at Yale \ 5 Ethnic Studies at Yale \ 6 For the First Generation Students of Color \ 7 On Being Black and Queer (and out) at Yale \ 8 The Small Wins \ 9 Subject: You’ve got this… \ 10 Weekend Survival Guide \ 12
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The Burden of Opinion As you probably already know, there is a lot of pressure at Yale to be on your shit. With everything. You should be able to give a full, articulate answer about everything: from the upcoming presidential election to the name of Calhoun College to why it’s literally impossible to use your white roommate’s comb. As a person of color, this expectation is amplified because not only do you have to give your opinion, but that of “The Blacks” or “The Asians” or “The Hispanics” (here’s looking at you Trump). Even among people of your own community, you’ll find a similar, but subtler pressure—to have a fully formed passionate position on every issue facing that group. Bruh. Pause. Remember, you are not the face of your race/gender/sexuality. You are not MLK/Angela Davis/Carla Trujillo reincarnated (yet). You are here to learn and grow into the individual you are destined to be. Billy from Vermont can’t explain to you why most white people can’t dance or obsessively love to create or buy into systems that oppress every living creature around them, so why should you have to give the official statement for your community to him? We can’t talk shit about misinformed bigots if we ourselves can’t back up our own claims. Believe it or not, there will be the occasional dude who will ask “Why?” you think the way you do. “Uhh…fuck the patriarchy?” isn’t going to cut it. Don’t pretend to be really passionate about an issue only because your friends or your community is. It’s okay to say, “I haven’t formed an opinion on that yet.” But don’t stay ignorant or passive. Get informed, then give your honest opinion about the subject, not necessarily what would be expected from a member of your community. Then once you’ve got the facts solidly in hand, you can speak as a happy-go-lucky, shade-slinging activist who actually knows what they’re talking about. By Treston Codrington !
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“The Outsiders”: Navigating Directed Studies as Person of Color Don’t be nervous. I know this seems entirely irrational and impossible, but I mean it. Don’t be scared. Every single one of the seemingly “qualified” and “well-read” adolescents around you is just as freaked out as you are. Some of them will try to compensate – acting like their first word was “modernity” – but they are just as new to all of this as you. Do engage the material. I’m not gonna sugarcoat it; you’re gonna have to put in work. That being said, work smarter and not harder. When asked in my superunofficial, but entirely statistically accurate poll, the majority of my peers in DS admitted to only doing about 60-70% of the reading on the syllabus. Use your precious and limited time wisely. Focus on big ideas, themes being discussed in your sections. These will most likely become paper and final essay topics. Being able to recite every word to Pericles’ Funeral Oration might make for a neat party trick in some circles, but your time could certainly be better spent. Don’t feel a need to compete. You’re in college to educate yourself, not to validate someone else’s baseless need to one-up everyone they meet. Ain’t nobody got time for that nonsense. Do speak up! Raise your hand! Make yourself heard. The very thing that you might be considering your greatest weakness – your racial background- is actually your greatest asset! You are bringing a perspective that no one else can. Never feel that your voice doesn’t matter. Also, it is your God-given right to be “section asshole” during W.E.B. Dubois week. Own that shit! Do find a happy medium. Directed Studies is a fantastic program, but it is not the “end all, be all” of academia. You will only be exposed to a small sliver of what there is to learn at Yale. Balance your academic experience by looking outside the Western canon. Shop an African-American studies class, Poke around WGSS and Ethnicity, Race and Migration. Do as the Delphic oracle said and “Know thyself.” by Julianna Simms !
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Snatching Headdresses: Confronting Cultural Appropriation at Yale There are many ways to measure a year at Yale. In tests and P-sets, in parties and hook-ups, in friends gained and friends lost, and if you’re a student of color, in the number of culturally appropriative outfits that you have to confront. I spent the morning of my freshman year Spring Fling frat-hopping with my friends. On our way out of the last fraternity house we spotted a 6-foot tall white “brother” sporting a headdress made of plastic feathers. My friend of barely 5 feet sprinted by and hopped up high into the air to pluck a feather. It’s called chicken pickin.’ For context, the two friends I was with are both Native American and I am Native Hawaiian. At first we loved the rush of finally confronting appropriation we’d seen too many times, and not just the headdress thing. We felt like we were fighting back against all of the ignorance that we see in the world around us. In that moment the feather held an incredible weight. “If you wanted a feather, you could’ve just asked.” The boy didn’t care to listen to our reasons for why he was wrong to wear the headdress. The feather became weightless when we started to believe that we could not escape a long history of fighting losing battles. How do I explain to the brothers of Sigma Chi fraternity that a “lūʻau” is not a party in a tropical setting with fruity alcoholic drinks, but a feast of Hawaiian food with concrete cultural significance? How do I tell them that skimpy clothing and “lei’d in Hawaiʻi” jokes promote a fetishization and exoticism of Hawaiian women? We’ll see how my meeting with them goes. People of color shouldn’t have to bear the responsibility of educating others on the lasting effects of colonialism and the subtleties of white privilege whenever we go out to have a good time. While it is important to have these conversations, we can’t waste our time, energy and emotional wellbeing on people who are choosing ignorance in the age of information. Pick your chickens, but also pick your battles. by Haylee Kushi !
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Ethnic Studies at Yale That hardest person to tell that I wanted to be an African American Studies major was my black mother. She didn’t see how it would help me get a job, or how it would be a good use of my time at an institution like Yale University. I came into Yale wanting to be a Global Affairs major, but I took a freshman seminar on African American poetry that changed the direction of my life and introduced me to some of the best people I’ve met at Yale. The best piece of advice that I can give to you as a freshman is to take ethnic studies courses. It is imperative to know where you come from. It is imperative to know that your predecessors are so much more than the footnotes and stock characters of history. We live in a culture where whiteness is the default for assumptions of humanity. I constantly find myself doing things like assuming a character in a book is white until told otherwise or making racialized assumptions about other people of color around me. Staying woke is a process, and I have found that the best way to use my time and tuition and Yale is to engage academically with my own humanity and the humanity of people of color, who make up most of our world’s population. Expect people to react with uninformed judgment when they find out that you are taking an ethnic studies course or that you want to do an ethnic studies major. Know that Yale has a history of denying tenure to ethnic studies professors, and that the people who most need to learn about ethnic studies often never take the classes. Take the classes anyway. Reach out to the professors for advising and mentorship. Trust me, it will be one of the best decisions of your freshman year. by Elizabeth Spenst
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For the First Generation Students of Color One of the most frustrating things about freshman year was talking to my parents about Yale. It frustrated them too, because as proud parents of a first generation Yale student of color, they were always anxious to hear every detail about what I was experiencing. But it’s just not that easy. What am I supposed to talk to them about? How I felt shunned in section by some white guy? Or about how the freedom of college allowed me to explore different aspects of my sexuality? Being first generation is probably one of the most isolating aspects of my personal identity at Yale. And sadly, it’s even more isolating when I go back home because I’m always carrying the weight of the self-inflicted debt that I feel I owe to my family. Guilt, isolation, and uneasiness always arise when my thoughts about home and Yale intersect, and I wish it didn’t have to be like this. So, to all the first generation freshmen reading this, I strongly advise that you reach out to the first generation community at Yale. Although I’m sure most of you have the emotional support of the family back home, navigating Yale is going to take more than that. Especially when the majority of students have someone at home that has been through the whole college experience themselves. Most of all, make sure you don’t shy away from exploring aspects about your personal identity that make you “different.” Yale may be a very difficult place at times, but at least it can allow you to become your own person. by Oscar Garcia-Ruiz
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On Being Black and Queer (and out) at Yale
One of the best things I did as a black freshman was to jump headfirst into the black community at Yale. I found almost all the support Yale advertises to new freshman that I didn’t feel in other spaces – close friends, rewarding extracurriculars, a social scene where I fit in, and upperclassmen willing to take time out of their days to show me the ropes. But I was unprepared for the discomforts that would come along with being a queer black Yalie in these spaces. Dating culture is often where heteronormative assumptions become most obvious. There’s a story I tell all the time to illustrate this dynamic. My freshman year the Black Men’s Union and the Yale Black Women’s Coalition held a speed-dating event. As I walked up to the AFAM House for an unrelated event, I ran into an older black guy coming out of speed dating. “Eshe, why didn’t you come?” Y’all. It wasn’t that he didn’t know I wasn’t straight. Further conversation revealed that. It was that despite that, he perceived a speed-dating event set up for straight people as having all-inclusive appeal. That’s only one story – I could tell you twenty more just like it. And so even as someone who thought they were fairly comfortable in their queer identity before coming to Yale, the whiteness of the queer community and the heteronormativity of the black spaces were still a culture shock. Things have changed since then. Even though it is still complicated to be black and queer on this campus, an incredibly active and dope squad of queer students have been and are pushing the spaces that alienated me as a freshman into more inclusive environments for all kinds of Yalies of Color. So if you’re here, and queer, it’ll definitely be a transition to be out and of color and at Yale but there’s an entire community of people here for you – waiting to take you in.
A good place to start, even if you’re not a black, is BSAY’s queer caucus! Definitely join the BSAY panlist and be on the lookout for the opportunity to chill with out queer Yalies of Color. by Eshe Sherley !
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The Small Wins Yale is a place that will always carry vestiges of my internal fray, woven between the stains of a fraught past unaccounted for: today, it is no green pasture, nor a warm bed that lovingly awaits me – rather, it feels overwhelming in its arrogance and my complicity. How do you grapple with living inside cathedrals built on the bones of blood money? How do you cope with shadows that demand resilience, and then squeeze your pockets dry? How do you resist when you agreed to smile for the camera on graduation day? Your hand will shake the dean’s in exchange for the ticket that your family trusts will open doors to worlds inaccessible otherwise – you worked for this, you broke your bones for this, but your sweat does not a just education make. To gesture towards these questions will invite calls to assert your ingratitude and your entitlement – fundamentally, your inability to understand the workings of a ‘real world’ beyond the one you’ve chosen to blind yourself with. But you know that you are here because you must hold more than your own – with a mother whose hundreds of job applications have left her with a heart swollen by rejection, an elderly father whose social security benefits are the only reason you can still count on having food on the table – and you would be lying if you said it was solely for them that you made this choice. This is what it means for you to attend a university that did not admit women until 1969, a university that touts your low-income status as a publicity stunt, a university that gives you far more than you could have ever imagined and denies you just as much. This is what it means for you to know this, and to return. It is hard. It is hard. It is hard. And I am counting the small wins. When I overcome the burden inherent to disconnect. When I spend nights with yellow and brown faces like mine – with others wearing the weight of resistance in their open mouths, their fists, the clothes on their backs. Perhaps this is what lets me breathe comfortably, even when I can feel whiteness impatiently tug at my seams. Perhaps this is what allows me to rest. Perhaps this is what gives me the energy to keep on. by Yuni Chang !
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Subject: You’ve got this… I used to be someone who took pride in concealing my emotions. That’s not to say that I walked around with a blank face and spoke without any inflection. Rather, by “concealing my emotions,” I mean to say that if I were ever feeling angry or sad or stressed or one of the many other emotions that qualify me as human, I would do my best to pack these feelings away, which more often than not resulted in some heavy emotional baggage. I’d go as far as to diminish my own accomplishments because I didn’t want to seem too proud, or I’d pretend not to be excited about things that in reality made me want to scale Harkness Tower and perform my own rendition of Kool & the Gang’s “Celebration.” This tendency of mine may be attributed to a deeprooted need to be in control, or more superficially, a desire to be cool. Regardless of the reasons, which will probably require a few sessions of therapy to properly discern, I found that being at Yale intensified this impulse to constantly appear calm and collected. As a low-income woman of color, I was accustomed to not feeling like I had a right to many things in this world, one of them being feelings at all. If something made me mad, even rightfully so, I didn’t want to come off as the angry black lady. If an accomplishment made me proud, I didn’t want my excitement to reaffirm that any sort of achievement is essentially foreign to the black community. As a low-income woman of color on a scholarship at a prestigious university, this absence of selfentitlement grew to encompass emotion altogether. I mean, who was I to be angry about a borderline racist comment made in a seminar I was lucky enough to get into? Who was I to be sad about being rejected by one of Yale’s many groups on campus when I was lucky to even have had the opportunity to apply in the first place? And who was I to be angry at Yale’s financial aid department for sending me a sizeable bill at the beginning of the semester even though I was told I’d be on full financial aid? I guess I didn’t want to seem greedy when I was fortunate enough to be getting any aid at all. It didn’t help that whenever I took a moment to glance around at the people around me, they all seemed to be gliding by while I was working very hard to stay afloat. In fact, this made me think that I was doing something wrong, amplifying that nagging voice in my head that insisted I was in some way inadequate, a voice I believe is similarly heard by anyone remotely marginalized. Then one night, all of the !
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stress, induced by feelings of discomfort and unsettlement and insecurity, caused the baggage I had been carrying to bust at its seams. One evening during second semester, I found myself standing in an elevator on my way to a section with an upperclassmen (also in my section), who I really didn’t know. Noticing me in the elevator, he looked over and politely asked me how I was doing. Despite being well aware of the question’s formality and my obligation to say “well thanks, and you?” something provoked me to go off script. I looked at him and said “you know, not too well.” He was clearly taken aback, even more so when I burst into tears. It was my turn to be taken aback when this guy, whose name I didn’t even know, responded by pulling me into a long hug. This moment spanned precisely two floors and the delay of the elevator doors opening, and when they finally did open, I wiped my face and we walked into section as if nothing happened. Later that evening, however, I found a message from him waiting for me in my inbox, the subject line reading “You’ve got this…” Without making any assumptions about my narrative, he took the time to share his own. It is the last line of his email I’d like to share: “You're not, and never will be, alone here. Reach out without hindrance.” It took me almost a year to realize it, but it’s perfectly okay not to be perfectly okay, even at a place as magnificent as Yale. Because believe it or not, there is quite a fair amount of Yalies who appear to be cruising through their time here, but are in actuality desperately treading water beneath the surface. And small as it may be, there are certainly communities of us here that don’t fit the traditional profile of a Yale student and anyone who walks into one will be embraced. Visit one of Yale’s cultural houses, for example, and you’ll see what I mean. For the record, I still don’t feel entirely empowered in my identity as a low-income student of color. I still feel slightly unsure of my role here, but the difference is, I’m no longer hiding my feelings about it.
by Nina Mesfin
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DOWN Magazine presents the...
WEEKEND SURVIVAL GUIDE
for freshmen of color at Yale
To get anywhere at Yale, you have to meet people; you have to get close with people; you have to go out and have fun gate as a person of color, especially as Yale’s multicultural façade erodes by the river of booze that unfortunately sets the course of many Yalies’ party boats, whether or not they choose to drink. Some nights will be epic, some nights will be dampened by ignorance or stupidity. With this guide, we hope to impart some practical advice that will help you deal with both. Trust us, we’ve been there.
WEDNESDAY
‘hump day’ - the move: woad’s
• Don’t forget Thursday classes are still a thing, no matter how drunk you are. • Don’t be mistaken— when you hear the intro to Bon Jovi’s “Living on a Prayer,” Woads becomes a circle jerk of white joy, and then immediately a throbbing mess of sweaty • Don’t overthink it. Fuck the clutch. all you need is your Yale ID, drunchies money, and • Do stay woke. They might be rich but they will take your shit if you leave it out. • Do look hot; do stay warm. Stock up on cute (or cropped) sweaters. • Don’t feel obligated to drink. If you can talk to people or dance or chill comfortably without a drink in your hand, that makes you pretty dope.
THURSDAY ‘almost there’ - the move: late night
• Do have a pair of frat shoes: a step above Toad’s shoes, a step below anything else. • Don’t feel down if no one hits on you at SAE (a.k.a. Sketchy And Extra) because you’re not white. Do remember you’re the baddest bitch in there. Conversely... • black girl before? Funny, I’ve never hooked up with a racist before. • Don’t be afraid to walk away. Or snatch a wig. • Do remember that the side-eye is half the fun. Do throw shade where shade is due. • switch or listen to white boys rap the ‘n’ word.
read the full freshman issue at downatyale.com
now for the actual weekend (over)
FRIDAY •
‘finish line’ - the move: campus kickback
• Don’t knock Waka; Flock to the Flame. Friday shows at Toad’s have big headlines and surprisingly low prices. • Do support your friends at poetry jams, dance shows, and other performances. Do be prepared for a hell of an afterparty. • Don’t subject yourself to bad music. Do bump DOWN Magazine’s weekly Top Twenty on Soundcloud (search DOWNmag music on Soundcloud). • Do realize that socializing is the seed of revolution. Don’t be afraid to get intellectual. The ideas and perspectives you bounce around at a party will inspire unity and coali-
SATURDAY ‘turn up’ - the move: follow your heart • Do go to parties thrown by cultural groups (shout out to the Caribbean Society and La Casa). Do reach out to the other cultural centers—you’ll be surprised how accepting everyone is. •
• Do go to Popeye’s. Don’t feel obligated to go to Zeta Late Night. • Don’t allow your friends to become dependent on you every time you go out. Sooner or later they’ll have to learn. But… • Don’t let drunk friends walk home alone. If you do have to take care of someone every time you go out, call them out. You deserve to have fun, too. • Don’t be afraid to ask for help—your FroCo is an invaluable resource and you will miss them. Sometimes Gatorade and a granola bar isn’t enough. Sometimes it is.
SUNDAY
‘hangover and homework’
• Don’t listen to your grandma. God still loves you, even if you don’t make it to the 9 a.m. service. • Don’t miss brunch. The Wenzel you gobbled down last night is nothing compared morning. Nothing. • Do know your work will get done, even if you had a slow morning. If it doesn’t, life goes on. Panic only paralyzes you. • Don’t forget: the weekend is only two days away.
READ THE DOWN XXL
FRESHMAN ISSUE
ethnic studies, New Haven, first-generation solidarity, etc...
the struggle at Yale. downatyale.com
To be continued‌
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