Winter 2014 Journal by Stanford STATIC

the journal 3.7.2014 volume 2, issue 1

STATIC an undergraduate publication static.stanford.edu

trigger warning: some pieces in the journal are not suited for all audiences. A red bar on the edge of the page bookmarks sensitive content.

staff executive editor

journal managing editor

Sammie Wills

Leow Hui Min Annabeth

blog content editors Elizabeth S.Q. Goodman Hye Jeong Yoon

outreach coordinators Molly Gerrity Mona Matsumoto-Ryan Jae-Young Son

community liasons Lan Anh Le Lina Schmidt

inancial oficer Althea Solis

webmasters Raven Jiang Joel Kek

staff reporter Jovel Quierolo

frosh interns Mysia Anderson (Writing and Art Team) Emma Hartung (Writing and Art Team) Kevin Martinez (External Team) Sasha Perigo (Blog Team) Alejandra Salazar (Journal Team) Ali Stack (Journal Team) Vicki Tang (Blog Team) Marie Vachovsky (Journal Team) Tina Vachovsky (Writing and Art Team)

this journal was made possible by:

contents Letter from the Editor by Sammie Wills ........................................................................................... 4 Bayanihan by Kathleen Estrella ...................................................................................................... 5 Reimagining Afro-Latinidad by Walter Thompson-Hernandez ....................................................... 6 Literature of Inequality Photojournalism by Thomas Plank ............................................................. 7 Mission and Market Streets by Jae-Young Son ............................................................................ 10 Amateur Cunt Manifesto by Sophie A. Lee ................................................................................... 13 On Wanting: The Politics of Queer Poetry in Singapore by Leow Hui Min Annabeth ................... 15 The Lipstick Trick by Anonymous .................................................................................................. 18 Young Men/Modern Boys by Marie Vachovsky ............................................................................. 20 Racing for Adolescence by Reade Levinson ................................................................................. 21 (BDSM) by Lily Zheng ................................................................................................................... 22 Sex: A Study by Tina Vachovsky ................................................................................................... 24 From the Depths by Siyou Song .................................................................................................... 25 Reality in Artiice: Experiencing Kitchen Table by Anonymous ..................................................... 26 The Güera with the Spanish Tattoo by Oscar Sandoval ............................................................... 30 Unblurring the Lines by April Gregory ........................................................................................... 33 Gay Imperialism and Olympic Oppression by Erika Lynn Abigail Kreeger.................................... 35 7 LGBT Issues that Matter More than Marriage by Holly Fetter..................................................... 40 What is An Asian Musical? by Sunli Kim ....................................................................................... 42

featured pieces on education The Cover Letter I’m Tempted To Submit by Connie McNair ........................................................ 47 From Austen to ArrayLists: My Experience Taking a Computer Science Class by Molly Gerrity ............................................................................................................................. 48 Majors as Status Symbols by Kue Chang .................................................................................... 50 Physician Deicit: The Invisible Problem by Oscar Leyva ............................................................. 53 Black Boys, Black Feminists and American Education: A Double Book Review by Emma Hartung ......................................................................................................................... 56 Concerning Ethnic Theme Dorms in a Post-Racial America by Daniel Dominguez ..................... 58 Why Teach? by Kathy Peng ......................................................................................................... 59 Eugenics at Stanford by Sammie Wills ......................................................................................... 62 “I don’t want to be that kid...” The Road (So Far) to Becoming a Teacher by Van Anh Tran ........ 67 No Such Thing As Social Studies by Mark Flores ........................................................................ 70

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Letter from the Editor by Sammie Wills stat·ic noun 1. the electric sound of young activists disturbing the atmosphere In the summer of 2011 STATIC was founded to provide a space for activists and progressive minded folks to reclaim their voices and tell their stories. Founders Holly Fetter and Jovel Queirolo saw a need to highlight the hard work of campus organizers and create critical dialogue about the events happening on campus. STATIC became a place for people to raise their experiences and connect with other progressive individuals to collaborate and work towards positive social change. When I irst came to campus in the Fall of 2012, I had a lot of unchanneled enthusiasm. Yet, like many other wide-eyed, passionate frosh, I wasn’t sure how to transform my energy into something worthwhile. For myself, “worthwhile” activities led to measurable success, and “success” was always equivocated to “academic success.” Mainstream rhetoric had told me that there was insurmountable value and prestige in my school work—and school work was presumably the reason I was given the chance to attend Stanford in the irst place. The education systems around me, often crumbling and falling due to haphazard budgets and unsupported teachers, told me that the way to get out was through education itself. That is, education as deined by assigned readings, problem sets, expensive textbooks, and temporary relationships with teachers. I joined STATIC as a freshman because it helped me realize that education, or rather, learning, does not have to be limited to classrooms or textbooks or professors. Learning can be fostered through casual blog posts, artistic expressions, and conversations around espresso shots at three in the morning. Learning can be built on supportive, collaborative communities that work to be inclusive and educative. For these reasons, the crew at STATIC wanted to center the journal around the concept of “education.” What is education? How is it deined, what is its use, and what are the conversations surrounding such a contested topic? Submitters gave us many opinions, and even more questions. This journal is a culmination of STATIC’s brief history, and our new direction. Look at the education texts in conversation, view the thoughts on post-grad plans, eugenics, teaching, and learning. Enjoy the non-themed pieces that deal with sex, gender, art, capitalism, and identity. Relect on some of our most popular posts from the past 2.5 years. Consider, how can these all relate back to education, and our development both inside and outside the classroom? Thanks for checking us out, y’all. Continue to create that art, raise those voices, and build that community.

Sammie Wills, Executive Editor of STATIC

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Bayanihan by Kathleen Estrella

Jose Rizal, the Philippines’ national hero stated that, “The youth is the hope of our future,” and with these words I wanted to create an image that focuses the role of youth in creating a better future while also drawing upon the spirit of “Bayanihan.” Bayanihan in Filipino culture is based on the idea of community and coming together. Popular imagery associated with the concept often depicts a group of people all working together to lift and move a house using bamboo poles. In my own image, three left ists are holding up poles [made from the image of the Filipino lag]. These left ists represent the collective action of youth in being able to hold up ideals of community and activism. Within the ists themselves are images of Filipino youth during “First Quarter Storm” in 1970, a national protest against President Ferdinand Marcos and the corruption in the Philippines. It is a nod to past activism efforts and provides a foundation that helps lift the spirit of Bayanihan and youth action. I also incorporated imagery of signiicant Philippine landscape, like the famous Chocolate Hills in Bohol, and rice pattie ields to not only provide a backdrop, but also demonstrate the importance of unity not only within people, but with the environment as well. “Land is Life,” is a saying that rings true for the Filipino people especially, who rely largely on the land for food, housing, and other necessities. So with all of this in mind, the piece hopefully puts together ideas of Pagmamahal (love), Pagkakaisa (unity), Luntian (green/environment), and the spirit of Bayanihan. Kathleen Estrella is a junior at Stanford University.

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Reimagining Afro-Latinidad by Walter Thompson-Hernandez

As an Afro-Chicano and a native of South Los Angeles, California, I have struggled to construct a palpable socio-racial identity which accurately relects the reality of my multi-racial, multi-cultural, and multi-lingual experience. Traditional racial signiiers such as Afro-American and Latina/o have only exacerbated the racial conlicts and divisions existing not only in my community, but more importantly, within myself, and, others who share my background. South Los Angeles (previously known as South Central, Los Angeles), today, lies in a unique disposition. The area has and continues to be largely transformed by a unique interplay of economic, social, and political processes which have forced many South LA residents to reconceptualize their identity amidst a larger U.S context on the personal and collective level. The inlux of Latin@ immigrants into South LA, beginning in the mid 1980s, as a result of diasporic transnationalism, has presented challenges to the traditional conceptualizations of race, identity, and, more importantly - reality, in many historical “communities of color.” The people in these photos are all from South LA. They identify as irst generation Afro-Latin@’s, and have family ties, which traverse Latin American and U.S borders. Their story and their “Afro-Latinidad,” is the guiding premise of this project. My research and current project explores the relationship between transnational immigration from Latin American countries and the effects of immigration policy, on the formation of socio-racial identity in communities like my own, of South Los Angeles. My research questions broadly center around: What is the genesis of inter-ethnic racial tensions in urban spaces like South LA? Do Latin@’s immigrate to this country with preexisting racial attitudes about Afro-Americans? How does a shared urban reality inform the construction of racial identity for Latin@ immigrants? How do circular migratory patterns impact the construction of racialized attitudes for Latin@’s to and from their host country? And lastly, how can we redeine and reimagine “Afro-Latinidad” in a way that accurately relects the social, racial, and political reality of Afro-Americans and Latin@’s in shared urban spaces today? As the Latin@ population continues to increase in size, power, and inluence, it is imperative that we explore the effects of the spatial, linguistic, and cultural amalgamation of our country’s two largest ethnic-minority groups within an urban context. Afro-Latin@’s, not only illuminate the growing number of multi-cultural and multi-racial families in the United States, but they also hold the potential to provide a nexus for constructive communication and cooperation between “black and brown” communities within the larger U.S context. The reconceptualization of “Afro-Latinidad,” then, represents much more than a shift in thinking or identity consciousness. Reimagining Afro-Latinidad, means unraveling and coming to grips with the complex labyrinth of social, political, and economic changes being triggered by the intersection of African-American and Latin@ diaspora in a way that propels our nation forward as we move further into the 21st century.

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Literature of Inequality Photojournalism by Thomas Plank Photographs are mirrors of reality. They can relect life with little to no distortion, preserving memories with honesty. Or, they can bend and refract light to twist reality to the photographer’s wishes. The photographer has immense power when directing their camera lens at the world around them. This power is abused in the publications that meet us in daily life. Professional photographers have the ability to change and contain the world around them in complicated, nuanced ways that bend perspective toward their own viewpoints. This is especially true for those covering social and cultural groups that have little power or political capital. Photographers become voyeurs, and voyeurism is a distinctive problem in any attempt to make statements about these social and cultural groups. Photographers tell stories about these people that can be incorrect, insensitive, or negatively biased because they are on the outside looking in. Avoiding this problem is an exceptionally dificult, as becoming an “insider,” in order to tell the story that the group wishes to be told requires the outsider to create relationships with members of the community. This adds another level of dificulty as the relationships cannot be solely built around the photographer’s project. My project was to grapple with inequality in its very visible form; homelessness. I am a

part of Servant Breakfast, a meal providing service led by Stanford students that collaborates with both the Opportunity Center, a long term housing solution for those without the means to rent or own property in the Palo Alto area and Menlo Park Presbyterian Church, a Protestant church located a few miles off campus. Through this group, I have struck up relationships with many of the men and women that frequent the center out of necessity. As homelessness can be an oft-photographed medium, I decided that a different type of photographer was necessary for this job. Working with Professor Michelle Elam and the Stanford English Department, I was able to procure the funding to provide disposable Kodak cameras for several men and women, of whom three are represented in the photographs to follow. Relinquishing the metaphorical Fig 1 artistic and journalistic high-ground, giving the camera and the looking glass to a group of willing participants that are a part of the underrepresented homeless (those without housing but staying in a speciic area for a long period of time) and transient (a group that stays and works in a place for only a short time) classes was a gamble, but Jerry, Bob, and Paul all provided the photographs that are featured in this article. This group of men was the sole decider of what in their lives was important enough to be documented by the camera. So, instead of taking photos from an outsider’s perspective, this project incorporates the homeless and transient

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“Literature of Inequality Photojournalism” continued... populations’ own artistic opinions and own thoughts as to what is signiicant or what is not in their photographs. The photographs taken by the three modern photographers focused on the essentials of their day, what they see and believe to be key to their existence. Jerry’s photograph of a room has more than a few interesting elements. The cluttered desk below the blank wall of negative space (Fig. 2) has a more natural domestic focus than Riis would incorporate into his photographs. Rather than focus on the people that surround him, Jerry chose to look at the surroundings that he lived in. The vases of dead lowers, the empty water bottles, and other assorted clutter all have the feel of daily wear and tear. This aspect of the photograph releases the viewer from any fear of a pre-set photograph, as Jerry appears to have brought the camera into his room and simply taken photos of his living space. Jerry’s photograph has an honesty to it; the walls are blank, the counters aren’t clean, and the photograph is a bit blurry. Instead of creating a world that would appeal to the viewers of an expose, Jerry’s photograph allows viewers to make their way into a world that many do not know or understand, giving him agency in his decision to take a photograph of his own experience. Riis’s approach would make this intimate picture a voyeuristic intrusion into a home, as the professional photographer would discard the blurred and ill-lit photo for a clearer one. But because Jerry agreed to take photos, the issues of voyeurism dissipate, as the poor

and marginalized are the ones who now have control over what they want documented about their lives. Paul, though transient, has a job parking cars at the Shoreline Theatre. His photograph is of a concert that he watched while on the job. A much different viewpoint from Jerry, Paul took a photograph of what it is like to enjoy himself, with a sunset and music after a day of work. With his camera, Paul was able to photograph what he enjoys doing at his job: watching concerts. Because Paul had the agency to take photos of what he discerns as important to his life, another new dimension of the poor and marginalized comes out. As his photo attests, the lives of the Fig 2 poor and marginalized are not, as Riis would prefer to believe, a constant struggle in society. They do in fact have bright spots of personal enjoyment. Bob’s photograph is also distinctly artistic. The streaking light surrounding the center bench with the man sitting on the end is an impressive artistic achievement. Bob did an excellent job of using light and subject matter to make his photographs the equal of Riis’s. Both have a creative bent and make use of their subject matter to get the best photograph. But unlike Riis, Bob’s photograph has agency behind it. Because Bob is transient, the camera gives him, as it did for both Jerry and Paul, the agency to photograph his world, the world of the poor and marginalized. Unlike Jerry and Paul, Bob was able to photograph a much more artistic world, making his photographs able to compete more closely with Riis’s photography of what he called the “Other Half.” Bob’s photo proves that it is possible for the

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Fig 3 group of the poor and marginalized to create just as much as it is for someone with much larger resources. With just a point and shoot and the agency to take photographs, Bob created art and a record of life. Riis’s attempt to document the “Other Half” was informed for his time. However, he failed to allow those that he documented to create their own photographic narrative. This failure moved the subjects of his project further into the shadows, rather than exposing them to new light because he only showed what was bad and awful about being poor and marginalized in New York. But by giving the camera to the poor and

Fig 4 marginalized, they could take power and agency in taking their own photographs of their lives. Jerry, Paul, and Bob managed to make their own narrative, and do an excellent job of it. These three men gave an honest attempt to give those outside of their group a chance to look at their world through their eyes. With equipment and agency, the vision of the poor and marginalized shifts as they themselves pick and choose what is worthy of being photographed and then seen by others. Thomas is a sophomore at Stanford.

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Mission and Market Streets by Jae-Young Son San Francisco is a city of idealistic contradiction, social paradox, and incredible economic disparity. These photos were all taken on the Fourth of July, 2013, on the parts of Mission Street and Market Street that run parallel to one another. It is horribly poetic that these parallel streets belong to parallel worlds, and it is only itting that the aesthetic of protest should take vastly different forms between those two worlds. All mural work (except for the mural of Che Guevara, artist unknown) was done by Eclair Bandersnatch for the San Francisco Center for Sex and Culture (CSC). Eclair Bandersnatch retains full artistic ownership of these murals. In his now-classic “The Revolutionary Spirit in Modern Art,” Diego Rivera wrote about the futility of divorcing politics from art, as he believed that the purpose of art was essentially to act as an aesthetically potent form of propaganda. Jae is interested in the ways that documentary photography can both conirm and push back against Rivera’s thesis.

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12 “Mission and Market Streets” continued...

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On Wanting: The Politics of Queer Poetry In Singapore by Leow Hui Min Annabeth Undo that gaze. We are no longer allowed to push desire back and forth between glances. — Tania De Rozario, “Un-” in Tender Delirium Desire in Singapore is policed: its manifestations are controlled, its articulations choked to the point of gasps. The state ideology of pragmatism quashes such affect, in a society where applying for public housing jointly constitutes a proposal of heterosexual marriage. Even more thoroughly stripped is queerness in the public consciousness. It is allowed only to be sexual, and then is castigated for its deviant sexuality. Colonial-era sodomy laws prominently foreground queer sexuality, and those laws are in force in modern Singapore through the infamous Section 377A of the Penal Code, which criminalises “any act of gross indecency between men,” private or public, consensual or not. Sodomy laws are notorious for the ambiguity of what is meant by sodomy, evidenced by the phrase “act of gross indecency.” This is also evident in Section 377A’s precursor, Section 377 of the British colonial government’s Indian Penal Code, wherein “carnal intercourse against the order of nature” was interpreted as penile penetration of anything other than a human cunt. In 2007, following a parliamentary review of the Penal Code, the Singaporean legislature voted to keep Section 377A on the books. Singapore’s pride month, IndigNation, has been held every August since 2005, coinciding with National Day on August 9. An annual feature is ContraDiction, a reading of queer Singaporean literature. The public assembly laws that require queer pride events to present themselves for police approval before they can proceed are a

symptom of the state regulation of both public and private spheres that manifests itself in the scope of Section 377A (“in public or private”). Similarly, queer media falls under the purview of the government’s Media Development Authority, which as the self-appointed champion of a “vibrant media sector in Singapore” depends on these artists to earn its keep even as it shies away from queerness as contrary to imagined “community values.” In 1993, the year of my birth, 22-year-old artist Josef Ng performed Brother Cane, in which he publicly snipped his pubic hair as an act of protest against the police entrapment of twelve men for solicitation. During the nineties, it was common for police to frequent cruising spots, posing as willing partners, before arresting those men under sodomy laws. Ng was convicted of committing an obscene act in public and ined $1,000. The National Arts Council condemned him, and he was barred from ever performing publicly again. Industry-wide restrictions were put in place: it would be ten years before the ban on performance art and forum theatre was lifted. The image of Brother Cane lingers in queer public memory. Film director Loo Zihan performed a re-enactment of Brother Cane in 2012; this time, the event received its public entertainment licence on the condition that entry be restricted to those aged above 21. Age restrictions are a common technique used to limit the reach of queer media in Singapore: earlier that year, Singapore-born and Montreal-based artist Elisha Lim saw her claymation ilm Ruby

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“On Wanting” continued... time, queer criticism of Pink Dot has also grown. dropped from an exhibition because organisers On its website’s frequently asked questions could not afford the $10,000 deposit needed to page, the event is described as “[a]s gay as any screen a ilm with its rating. The 52-second short event can get at Hong Lim Park.” It is a response featured a plasticine schoolgirl talking about a teenage crush. The Media Development Authority that sardonically calls attention to the publicassembly restrictions that curtail any movement deemed this lesbian content unsuitable for in Singapore, and yet fails to cement a space viewers below the age of 16. for queer women and trans* people through the Nonetheless, in spite of what are limitations of the word gay. Furthermore, the euphemistically known as “out-of-bounds rhetoric of “born this way” and “freedom to love” markers,” art practice lourishes as a space marks a step away from the 1990s queer slogan for queer expression. Elder statesman Lee of People Like Us, to a more placatory and Kuan Yew’s rejection of poetry as “a luxury we assimilatory strategy of queers being “just like cannot afford” has, ironically enough, made it you.” an acceptable venue for queer politics. In an In their essay “Sex in Public,” Lauren interview with Fikri Alkhatib for Autostraddle, Berlant and Michael Warner write, “Respectable artist Tania De Rozario said: “I suspect that the general consensus is that poetry is safe because gays like to think that they owe nothing to the sexual subculture they most Singaporeans think of as sleazy. But don’t read it. The QUEER SINGAPOREAN POETRY SITS their success, their bulk of censorship in FIRMLY IN THE RADICAL CAMP. ITS way of living, their Singapore, I think, CONFESSIONAL NATURE IS A VEHICLE political rights, and is dedicated to ilm FOR THE TRANSGRESSIVE SEXUALITY their very identities and media, because THAT SHOCKS AND TERRIFIES POLITE would never have these are seen as HETEROSEXUAL SOCIETY. been possible but for mediums that are the existence of the more accessible.” public sexual culture they now despise.” Pink If a public aversion to literature shields poetry from more overt forms of censorship, then Dot is the product of its historical moment: the parliamentary debates on Section 377A brought it also protects queer poets from the need to the issue of state homophobia to the attention pander. of the heterosexual population and opened the At present, the most prominent cultural public conversation. But it is also the successor image associated with Singapore queers is the to the public Nation parties of the early noughties, Pink Dot movement. First held in 2009, Pink which when banned by the police transformed Dot is an annual picnic and concert in Hong into IndigNation. In fact, the very structure of Pink Lim Park, the only place on the island where Dot is a direct response to IndigNation 2008’s public assemblies are allowed to take place aborted “Pink Picnic” event. The insistence of its without police approval. It is easy to see why organisers that Pink Dot is “NOT a protest” belies Pink Dot resonates in the public consciousness. a tension between different segments of the Straight and cis allies are encouraged to attend. Participants gather dressed in pink to form a giant queer community. Queer Singaporean poetry sits irmly in the mass for aerial photography, and the mascot is a radical camp. Its confessional nature is a vehicle fuzzy pink dot available for sale as a plushie. for the transgressive sexuality that shocks and The number of participants forming the terriies polite heterosexual society. Cyril Wong pink dot has grown year by year. At the same

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vol. 2, issue 1, winter 2014 writes, in “I Didn’t Expect To Write About Sex”: Did you know that after I came, I imagined my pelvis had emptied out into a dark cave you could crawl into, lay yourself down and ill my body with your sleep? … He continues, though, with the question “This isn’t really about sex, is it?” No: it is not so much the sex itself, which like sex in any conigurations of bodies can be mundane and messy; it is about what the sex means when it is outlawed, in public or private, subject to ines or imprisonment, against the public interest. The absence of the imperative to present a palatable, uniied image of good homosexuals also affords a platform to discuss fractures in the queer community. Although race is a taboo subject in Singapore, social and institutional racism make evident the racial privilege of the Chinese majority (to which I belong). The 2013 W!LD RICE re-staging of Alian Sa’at’s early play Asian Boys Vol. 1 saw him in the role of a Malay gym bunny who obsessively works out to compensate for sexual rejection on account of his darker skin and his ethnicity. His queer poems such as “Making Love in Army Bunk Beds is Wrong” call attention to military policy that both segregates gay conscripts in separate units, and closes off higher ranks to Malays because their indigenous

17 heritage and Muslim identity are considered suspect. As an undergraduate at the National University of Singapore, Wong was mentored by emeritus professor Edwin Thumboo, whose mid-twentieth-century nationalist works comprise part of the earliest English-language Singaporean poetry. Wong would recall in a 2009 interview: “When I gave him my irst book, he made this very strange statement to me, ‘You know, Cyril, you will not be gay for very long. It’s just a phase, you know, Cyril.’” It strikes me as an old-fashioned sentiment that perhaps inspires pessimism as to the potential of queer activism to meaningfully change Singaporean society. Yet, as long as sodomy laws remain on the books, a queer consciousness is stirred into action that precludes queer art being “just a phase.” Queer art, crystallising around the image of the forbidden erotic, ventures into questions about sex and gender, and makes demands about what race, what class, is given room to be queer in what way. Unlike Pink Dot, this genre of poetry speaks to an audience of people like us, rather than seeks to establish commonality with them. Alian’s “The Code” closes with the line “Whatever happens next, happens to us. And that is our secret”: he concludes the poem’s narrative of seduction by turning away from a voyeuristic gaze, turning inwards into the us and the our.

Leow Hui Min Annabeth is a sophomore from Singapura, with a major in Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity, and a minor in English. She has been voted most likely to live in Casa Zapata all four years (#challengeaccepted). (#shealsolikeshashtags)

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The Lipstick Trick by Anonymous When I irst realized in the eleventh grade that the word “transgender” applied to me, I also realized that I didn’t pass. Gender this image: baggy jeans, tennis shoes, oversized t-shirt, short hair, sullen expression, lat chest. Most likely, the word “male” came to mind long before the physical description of “lat chest;” that was me. And I identiied as female. Progressives these days will angrily decry society’s inability to see past gender, assure my sixteen-year-old self that it’s okay to identify as female without looking like society’s deinition of what a woman should look like. Passing shouldn’t even exist—perhaps society is just too inluential in the lives of young, distressed, trans* people. Personally? I’m not surprised to know that my more liberal-minded friends are uncomfortable with the idea of passing, the idea that we must strive to be a certain way in order to be bestowed the gender pronouns and recognition we want. I’m against it too—and yet, that’s my story. The story of my transition is primarily a story about passing. In the early days after the Apocalypse, clothing was my utmost priority. Shopping in secrecy, alone, was one of the most terrifying things I have ever done. But clothes weren’t enough. I found, a few days later, that even with all my new feminine clothing, I didn’t look like a girl. I looked like a boy in girl’s clothing, emphasis on the word boy. And that was of course because there were too many clues that suggested “male,” and not enough that suggested “female.” And so, perhaps with more purpose than I had ever experienced before in my life, I embarked on a quest for stereotypical femininity, a quest with the holy grail of Passing raised on a pedestal at the road’s end. Ironically, it was a fairly aggressive quest. In one month I had learned how to apply eyeliner, in two I had begun wearing a bra (not because of any

physical need, but simply because it would give the illusion of breasts), and before half a year had elapsed I had drastically altered my speech patterns, handwriting, posture, mannerisms, and even the way I walked (did the right hip sway in conjunction with the left leg taking a step, or did the step happen irst?). The internet taught me how to modulate my voice, how to apply lipstick where facial hair could still be noticed after shaving to counterbalance the blue-gray tint with red, how to apply my eyeliner in different ways so I could feel like I had some sort of control over the crusade my life had become. She, her, she, her, she, her, him. Every day I was on a hair-trigger alert for that hated syllable, that word which hit my conidence like a sledgehammer to a cracker. It didn’t feel any less terrible when people apologized. I smiled more and talked less, used the restroom sitting down, started becoming interested in different things (if only to give me something to talk about with all the cisgender women at my high school.) Through all of this, I was tormented by the notion that this was not enough. The word “woman” seemed to hover just out of my reach: I could paint my nails but never be rid of my large, masculine hands; I could use the restroom sitting down but never be rid of the thing in between my legs. I was never good enough for the pronouns that I wanted. When my school administration told me that I couldn’t use the girl’s restroom, I didn’t raise a fuss. They seemed to be telling me just what I was telling myself: that I wasn’t enough of a woman. When my parents refused to use my name or turned male pronouns into pejoratives against me, I knew it was because I wasn’t female enough for them. Anticlimactically, I eventually got to a point where I passed, where strangers would gender me as female. Technically, I still “pass” now—though I’ve joined most of the people I

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know in abandoning the word. While I would love nothing more than to assign my story to the back shelf of the memory cupboard or pass the whole experience off as a childhood triviality, there is a lot to be learned from my rocky journey towards passing. Cisgender females go through a lot every day in the vein of gender norms and expectations—but many of those are implicit, subtle, covert. Eyeliner is hardly “required” by society, but I still noticed how much more afirming of my gender people were when I used it; no one usually has the gall to tell a cisgender girl her handwriting isn’t feminine, but they told me (“just trying to help you be more like a girl,” they would say); no one would dare tell a cisgender girl her breasts were too high or low on their chest, but plenty of people thought I would welcome the thought. “They’re fake anyways, why don’t you stuff them fuller so you can have bigger tits?” “Oh, taking hormones won’t make your voice higher? That’s too bad, your voice gives it away.” Every day my femininity was stepped on, shaken out, and proclaimed to be “not good enough,” as if my transitioning from male to female was an excuse for others to judge my “success” or “passability” by how much I resembled the image in their head of the perfect female. I could never get there. Stanford, while not perfect, is better; there are those here who are unafraid to call out the ridiculous expectations laid onto women, those who are unafraid to face the system that I obediently transitioned to the beat of. Still, it isn’t like I’ve stopped thinking about passing. What does female mean to us, to our society, to you? What happens to individuals who don’t adhere to those values, and what does that tell people dreading transition of any type, be it female to male or masculine to less masculine? Why do I still, to this day, use the lipstick trick? Illustration by Marie Vachovsky

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Young Men/Modern Boys by Marie Vachovsky

Marie Vachovsky is a freshman who does not yet know what she wants do with her life, and has many an existential crisis because of it. She is from San Diego, and enjoys writing and reading Heart of Darkness on the beach, as well as painting portraiture not on the beach. She feels strongly about the role art plays in activism, and is interested in how to most effectively use art as a springboard to induce positive change. Some of her favorite pastimes include dogs and burritos.

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Racing for Adolescence by Reade Levinson Her daughter shouldn’t need a bra yet, Kristen thought sadly. But the rest of the girls in her eighth grade class launted theirs at every opportunity, bright red straps pulled out from under t-shirt sleeves, and compelling her to propose the trip to Target so her daughter wouldn’t fall behind in the sprint to adolescence. Kristen winced as they found the undergarment section, rows of pink hearts and lace frills. Where did they expect the queer youth to go? George Bush was only making things worse. Ruby glanced around her furtively, wide eyes contradicting her pursed mouth. Kristen almost laughed out loud, but hurried to suppress it. That would have been insensitive. Though slightly sour in its necessity, this trip together was a momentous occasion. Its success, or failure, Kristen worried, would determine the openness of their relationship in the future. Perhaps because of the pink, or her hint of a smile at Ruby’s guilt, or just because of the inevitable mortiication of irst time bra shopping, they found nothing. Kristen was almost afraid to say it. “Should we try Victoria’s Secret? It’s just around the corner.” She had never been, turned off on principle by the window spreads of lawlessly tan girls posing with weakly thin arms. Maybe now was the right time. She was already indulging society’s headless race for adolescence. Why not go one step farther? She didn’t imagine how jealous Ruth would be when she understood that the gleaming, striped gift bag was not for her, and that her wife had spent forty dollars on a bra – on a bra! - for her sullen, lat-chested step-daughter. How could Kristen comprehend how deeply culture had conditioned her strong, self-suficient wife to never spend money on clothes that men wouldn’t see? Reade Levinson is a sophomore majoring in Earth Systems. In addition to writing for STATIC, she is the News Editor at the Stanford Review and a member of the Stanford Rock Climbing Team.

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(BDSM) by Lily Zheng It always interests me to see the change of expression on people’s faces when I inevitably let them know, after some minutes or weeks of knowing them, that I ind sex (or real life in general) that much more entertaining if I were tied down and people were spanking me. A widening of eyes at times, accompanied often by a conspicuous “oh-god-this-girl-is-insane” sort of expression hides behind a pleasant “oh, that’s interesting” –and that reaction is pretty interesting. Kink and the BDSM community that is inevitably associated with it are two things that most people know only in the context of terrible porn or interesting but highly unrealistic porn or some mixture of the two. Growing up, Big Mother does her (its?) best to shield our eyes from unlattering depictions of the world, be that through the insistence on normality or the punishment of deviance. The world, we are taught, is much nicer to you if you blend into the wall. Unfortunately, it’s dificult to engage in the traditional and bizarre practice of marriage and squeeze out bundles of responsibility if people believe you to be a wall; this usually mandates a sparse, squiggly sex education that I remember most fondly as two boys chasing each other down a ifth grade playground, one screaming “I’m the scrotum and you’re the penis!” Apart from a more awkward version of this a few years later, that’s all we get. Sexuality, gender identity and expression, and sexual practices themselves are almost never taught anywhere until college happens or you’re familiar with the shadier sides of the internet. But even then, where is kink? For the sake of children’s easily shattered constructions of morality, they’re not usually taught about the fun things in life like drinking or getting suspended from the ceiling by rope. But where are the classes, the community outreaches, the clubs? Where is the suburban

myth, the pop culture? (Don’t talk to me about Fifty Shades of Inaccurate Depiction, that doesn’t count) College campuses in the US have courses on everything ranging from learning J.R.R. Tolkien’s Elvish language to Beyonce to the phallus. There is a class called The Phallus, but not a single one I have been able to ind on BDSM or kink. People know about it, but they don’t know know about it—and I think that’s both a shame and based on some pretty large misconceptions. I’m willing to bet that you’ve heard from people that seem dead-set on picturing this community as a black hole of weirdos, a gathering of bizarre, repressed, latex wearing, creepy people (if not sociopaths) who commit unspeakable horrors against each other. To quote Disney’s Pocahontas, They’re savages! Savages! Barely even human Savages! Savages! Killers at the core They’re different from us Which means they can’t be trusted We must sound the drums of war! But according to a 2000 study done by a Dr. Gloria Brame PhD, the gender breakdown is just about even. Sexual preference differs largely from “vanilla” society only in the category of “bisexual and pansexual”. At least 57% have some college education, and 20% have postgraduate education—and 83% deine themselves as either middle or upper income. We come from tech ields, the business and corporate sector, and even political and public service jobs, among many others; a solid 20% identify with the Republican Party, with the other 80% representing a smattering of just about everything else. And, what might surprise your moral-idealismtouting neighbors, 48% respondents identify as

vol. 2, issue 1, winter 2014 Christian (with 23% marking “none” and the rest spread out over other religions including Judaism, Paganism, and Islam). In their own homes, 91% of respondents indicate “no domestic violence;” over 80% would never touch drugs--because one of the most ironclad rules in kink communities is no drugs, no alcohol. Informed, sober consent is the ironclad rule that supports all of BDSM and kink. No, the glaring lack of information about the kink community is not due to any disturbing secrets we may be hiding behind all the leather and cute collars. Society’s perception of us is what sinks the boat. So long as those in the BDSM/kink community continue to be seen as dangerous, maladjusted, and different from the “normal” population, censure and erasure of this very real facet of our lives will continue to exist. And that isn’t fun. And so you may wonder exactly how that perception can be changed, what type of education can possibly make a difference, when that education should happen. And I’m taking a big leaf out of the book of sociology and saying: I don’t precisely know. I’m just a tired freshman writing at three in the morning on a weekday, and the answer isn’t mine to ind alone. At the end of the day, however, kink is real. Societal disdain

isn’t enough to silence a group forever (see: queer culture), and enthusiasm, openness, and a willingness to understand just what kink is could do a lot of good, not to mention make the sex incredibly awesome. Stanford students have already taken the initiative (as they are prone to do) with the unoficial Kardinal Kink--the founder of which just wrote an article appearing in The Daily. We educate, discuss, and most importantly, provide a safe space (and anonymity) for anyone interested in any of the other lavors of ice cream (though if vanilla is your favorite, that’s cool too). I’m not saying Kardinal Kink is the solution to the problem; it’s more like the blackboard on which someone can write out what the problem is. But it’s a step. Personally, I can tell you that kink has made me happier than FloMo Dining or beating Cal or even the constant allure of material wealth. It’s given me a new place to connect with like-minded people, a great set of awesome friends, and ugh, the sex is amazing. Isn’t that something worth thinking about? (Kink I mean, not the sex). Lily Zheng is a frosh at Stanford.

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Sex: A Study by Tina Vachovsky

Tina Vachovsky is a freshman from San Diego, CA who misses the planet Pluto and never knows what her art means. She spends her time eating Bulgarian food and considering the white imperialist lens through which America views the world. Her goals in life include breaking gender barriers and owning many dogs.

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From the Depths by Siyou Song This piece exposes the innate fear and fragility of rape, social domination, and abuse. I tried to convey the weakness and frustration most abuse and rape victims would feel during an attack. I hope this piece brings awareness of victimization and rape everywhere, including our campus.

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Reality in Artiice: Experiencing Kitchen Table by Sarika Reddy

“…it has been my contention that my responsibility as an artist is to work, to sing for my supper, to make art, beautiful and powerful, that adds and reveals; to beautify the mess of a messy world, to heal the sick and feed the helpless; to shout bravely from the roof-tops and storm barricaded doors and voice the speciics of our historic moment.” -Carrie Mae Weems Art is artiicial; it is contrived. We look at a piece of art, understanding its artiiciality. And yet, this fakeness is precisely what makes art so truthful. It is the raw depiction of our perception, of our relation to the world through our bodies. Carrie Mae Weems, in her photograph series Kitchen Table, produces a clear staged quality to her pictures. They are performances. Weems has omnipotent control over the content of her photographs (Storr 4). One would think that this not-so-subtle unnaturalism would avert the onlooker, failing to draw the perceiver into the portraits and glean meaning from the work. Truly, Weems actually plays with the viewer, who must understand that he or she is not looking at a documentation of life, but, rather, the artist’s perception of her cultural and life experience. This theatrical quality to Weems’s Kitchen Table Series allows the viewer to delve into Weems’s mind and questions the viewer’s cultural presuppositions. People are indubitably inluenced by their culture. Weems is American, and it is through this American perspective that she creates her art – both to relect and provoke it. It is within the context of a whitedominated, patriarchal culture through which Weems criticizes Western society’s treatment of marginalized groups by her narrative, in the verbal as well as visual sense, in Kitchen Table. In Robert Storr’s view, Weems’s stare at the viewer in her irst photograph, breaking the fourth wall, with a desirable black man embracing her functions to show that “she is Everywoman…”

(Storr 27). Despite the evident performance, Weems makes her position within the series relatable, as she embraces a generic role as any woman. Her role as autonomous authority over the series is deined in Untitled (Woman playing solitaire), because although it seems Weems is playing cards with herself, she is actually playing with the viewer (27). The clear performance in these photographs makes it impossible to simply perceive the events in the pictures, as they are directed towards the onlooker with speciic purpose. Essentially, Storr states that that viewer has no need to suspend disbelief and ill in the gaps in order to understand Weems’s meaning (28). The author is explicit, and so the reader has no doubts. Because Weems is in total control of the content of her series, because it is so artiicial, every piece, every character is crucial to the meaning of the work. Nothing is an accident. Like a quality ilm, every word and every shot is critical to the development of the reader’s perception of the work. Throughout her pictures, Weems dons quite itted, feminine clothing. However, by the last shot, Weems is standing, addressing her audience, wearing a very masculine top and embracing a very masculine physicality that is embodied in her outward turned elbows and slight forward lean. This is the culmination, the demonstration of the found autonomy from releasing herself from the people in her life. The text accompanying the photo states that it was “nobody’s business what she did” (Weems. And

vol. 2, issue 1, winter 2014 so, she is alone. No one is there. The absence of any presence of humanity (and thus, society) in her life is the only way through which Weems may achieve personal power and freedom. The white, patriarchal world conines her. And yet, we know that this is a performance – it is fake. Weems’s empowerment by the end of Kitchen Table Series is a dream, a make believe reality created by her and impossible to achieve in the real world. At the Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts, the distant placement of this inal picture in relation to the other photographs in the series also emphasizes the unattainable nature of absolute female empowerment compared to the real distress as depicted in the previous, connected, easily accessible pictures. Her culture, however, still permeates in this picture as physicality and clothing that is typically considered masculine is the only method through which Weems can show her gained power. The only way to ind strength as a woman in a patriarchal world is to adopt masculinity. And even that is dificult. However, Kitchen Table is not just a contemplation of the role of women. It is a commentary on the interplay between race and gender in American society. It is likely that the viewer of Weems’s work is subject to the inluence of American culture, and as Weems has stated, her purpose in creating her art is to “voice the speciics of our historic moment.” And so, Kitchen Table Series forces the viewer to contemplate his or her own internalized cultural assumptions – speciically, American assumptions. Audre Lorde, in Age, Race, Class, and Sex, asserts that in society, the oppressed have always been forced to educate their oppressors. Weems, a black woman in a patriarchal whitedominated society, takes this task of educating her American viewer as to the humanity of her being and the problems in American culture. Kitchen Table Series speciically focuses on not just being black or being a woman but, rather, both. Weems, through her ictional exploration of being with a black man, having friends, and having a child, reveals the psyche

27 of her protagonist – and thus, herself. Although Weems is playing a character, the realities within her work are a relection of her own experience. For example, Weems writes, in her text within Kitchen Table, of her protagonist’s lack of desire to have children being shrouded by society’s expectation that all women want to be and enjoy being mothers. The text, “He wanted children. She didn’t.” (Weems) shows how male expectations and desires supersede a woman’s. Weems’s protagonist remarks that having children is more like “…punishment for Eve’s sin” (Weems) than something she greatly desires. And so, the woman has a child she does not want. Problems arising from the expectations on women to be mothers, as a result of the patriarchy, are revealed through the character’s experience, even if it is not an actuality in Weems’s life. Weems is a woman, and so it is an expectation she faces. Having children because of societal expectations is a reality portrayed in Weems’s iction. The viewer sees the truth in this cultural norm and is forced to reconcile Weems’s character’s feelings with his or her own internalized expectations for women. People who are “other” from the “mythical norm” (white, heterosexual, middle-class, Christian male) often distort their differences and blame all of their problems on their “otherness.” And so, white feminists often ignore issues of race and class (Lorde 282-283). Weems, however, blends her issues as a double minority. The problems she faces in society, as a black woman, is not limited to simply her race or gender but interplay of both. Weems allows the white feminist and the black male of American society to see and to challenge their views on race and gender. The contemplation of both race and gender expands Weems viewership and ability to penetrate into her viewer’s consciousness, forcing him or her to question cultural assumptions. Beyond white feminists, Weems addresses the black man of American society. Black men and women share the same pitfalls under white oppression, joined by their inherent “otherness” and its associated issues (Lorde 284). In her text in Kitchen Table Series, Weems contemplates

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“Reality in Artiice” continued... becoming the head, himself – the woman lurking getting with a white man, unhappy with her current relationship. The assumption that a white upon him, in the background, and then off to the side. Later, in the text in Kitchen Table, we man would be different from her black signiicant learn that the protagonist’s partner believes she other is crucial to understanding the perception is too domineering and too powerful because of the mythical norm from “other” groups. In she is the breadwinner. Her Black man feels as modern society, the interracial combination of heterosexual couples is usually a black man with though he has lost his power and lost her love and reliance (which appear to be synonymous) a white woman, as black men are perceived as hypermasculine. It is not, however, as common to because he is not the one working. Earlier, the protagonist realizes that she had turned see a black woman with a white man, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. Azealia Banks’s 2012 her back on her friends for her man, and her mother even mentions that she has sided with song Liquorice fetishizes white men as romantic men too long to remember what women even partners for black women – a song considered need. Despite understanding oppression, black highly risqué in the context of rap and American culture still marginalizes its women – placing culture, even today. In the viewer’s eyes, a the male ego as the most important. In the end, black woman vying for a white man is jarring, Weems’s character’s even for black men man leaves her, (perhaps, particularly WEEMS’S EXPLORATION OF FEMALE disgruntled by feeling so). To consider that MARGINALIZATION IN KITCHEN TABLE inadequate, by “…maybe a Black SERIES IS NOT RESTRICTED TO THE feeling as though he man just wasn’t her WHITE PATRIARCHY OF AMERICA; IT IS had nothing because kind” (Weems) is ALIVE EVEN WITHIN HER OWN RACE. his woman becomes provocative within empowered. In 1990, both the black and when Kitchen Table white American Series was published, the standard American communities. Weems stuns us with her culture consisted of whites and black and males character’s ponderings. and females. Weems is addressing this populace, Misogyny and possession are particularly pertinent to her speciic historical moment, by strong in black culture. Violence against women casually forcing them to ponder their ingrained is the norm, and misogyny is normalized in an culture. effort to promote homogeneity for the purpose of Art is not simply an imitation of life, but, unity within the race that faces oppression from its society (Lorde 284-285). Weems’s exploration rather, a world of its own. Carrie Mae Weems’s Kitchen Table Series is clear artiice, specially of female marginalization in Kitchen Table contrived by its author to demonstrate a narrative Series is not restricted to the white patriarchy that highlights society’s embedded issues. We of America; it is alive even within her own race. see Weems’s world in the one that she has This is where Weems’s shock factor transposes beyond the white American viewer and addresses created, forcing us to empathize with the issues she faces as a black woman in today’s American her fellow African-Americans, also testing their society. In her ilmic sequencing of photographs, own internalized oppression. In the beginning of Weems allows the reader to experience her the series, the photographs depict the changing perspective with relative ease. The photographs relationship between Weems’s protagonist are linear and chronological with bouts of text and her partner: the black man switches from occasionally interrupting the pictures to provide embracing the woman at the head of the table to

“

vol. 2, issue 1, winter 2014 details. However, Weems’s inal piece depicting her protagonist inally experiencing liberation is farther away, hanging on a separate wall with no connection to the previous portraits. The separation from the rest of the series is effortful for the viewer to view, emphasizing the dificulty and impossibility of reaching Weems’s inal state of autonomous black womanhood in modern society. “Step on a pin, the pin bends, and that’s the way the story ends” (Weems) – that is the

29 way Weems’s story ends in Kitchen Table Series. And yet, the viewer understands that stepping on a pin only results in pain, the foot injured, and the pin usually unaffected. Society is the pin that probes, but the ictional protagonist impossibly overcomes reality. The viewer is blasted with the truth of their internalized inequality and blown away by the strength of Carrie Mae Weems.

Bibliography Lorde, Audre. “Age, Race, Class, and Sex: Women Redeining Difference.” Out There: Marginalization and Contemporary Culture. Ed. Russell Ferguson, Martha Gever, Trinh T. Minh-ha, Cornel West. New York: New Museum of Contemporary Art, 1990. 281-287. Print. Storr, Robert. “Carrie Mae Weems: Anyway I Want It.” Carrie Mae Weems: Three Decades of Photography and Video. Ed. Kathryn E. Delmez. Nashville: Frist Center for the Visual Arts, 2012. 21-32. Print. United States; Dept. of Commerce; America’s Families and Living Arrangements: 2010; Married Couple Family Groups, by Presence of Own Children in Speciic Age Groups, and Age, Earnings, Education, and Race and Hispanic Origin of Both Spouses: 2010; U.S. Dept. of Commerce; 2010; Web; 17 Nov. 2013; table fg4. Weems, Carrie Mae. Kitchen Table Series. 1990. Photograph and Text. Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts.

Sarika Reddy (’17, hopelessly undeclared) seriously has too many personalities to encompass in a few sentences. It is important to note, however, that in her nonexistent spare time she quite enjoys baltering to Beyonce, reading online articles, and obsessing over aesthetic. She sports anything from cartoon t-shirts with printed pants to Victorian blazers.

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The Güera with the Spanish Tattoo by Oscar Sandoval

Illustration by Marie Vachovsky

Her ingers are fucking freezing. Home girl must have Jack Frost in her family tree to have icicles like these. Guess I can’t bitch about it too much since I’m using the rest of her as a sorority-girl snuggie. I crack my eyes open just enough so that the glow of her alarm clock doesn’t destroy any last hope of sleep. 5:57 Fuck. Only 3 minutes before Frank Ocean breathes life into my phone and croons out his verse from “Sunday” to rouse her from our post-fuck slumber. She’ll probably wonder why I don’t have that one song from Desperado or some other random mariachi shit, but she’ll be too afraid to ask, thank God. Her ingers slowly curl back up the plateau of my chest. I could’ve sworn they weren’t this cold when she dug them into my back earlier. I inch my neck closer to the edge of the bed to see if I can make out where my clothes fell when we pinballed around the room. Chick must have thought my saliva could prevent cancer the way she leeched onto my lips, but I dug it. After a couple blind passes I locate my mismatched socks and a piece of lace that she called

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underwear. A few feet away I notice a crumpled ball that must be my white Oxford, the one that she said brought out my south-of-the-border color and reminded her of the baby sitter Lucía. I glance over at the other side of the room, near the dresser with the little moons for handles, and see a bunch of her balled-up socks all over the loor. The light from the alarm clock makes ‘em look like little constellations. What was her Zodiac sign again? It was either the two pescados or that ancientlookin’ motherfucker who’s always wasting all that water. She lets out a little moan and I feel her legs quiver and tighten around me. She’s probably already dreaming about the apology sex with that novio she had told me about at La Fira earlier. Apparently she had walked in on homeboy snapchatting a picture of his dick to her younger sister, or some other pervy white-boy shit like that. I didn’t know whether to feel sorry for her or laugh my ass off, so I kissed her instead. Apparently heartbreak tastes just like grenadine. She had laughed it off, went back to sipping her girly drink and trying to convince her girls that I looked like Enrique Iglesias. I didn’t mind though. Pops always told me pussy is pussy, but then I’d look at Mami and wonder what the fuck he was talking about. I check the clock again. 5:58 I lean over and brush my lips over hers to let her know I’m still here. t’s scary how the light dances along every curve of her body. The shadows make her right breast disappear and leave her looking like a Picasso painting I once saw in the city. Thing was fucking hideous. She’s a cutie though don’t get me wrong, with a nice face too. Not like the dolled-up mannequins she rolls around with. The same ones who whispered behind homegirl’s back while I tried teaching her how to dance bachata earlier that night. 1,2, hips. 1, 2 …fuck this she won’t even know the difference. 1, 2 hours later when she’s holding on to her bed frame for dear life she’ll lean back and ask me to talk dirty to her in Spanish. I’ll hesitate for a moment and look up at my silhouette staring back at me from her bedside mirror. Vale. I’ll struggle through the lyrics of a song from one of my mom’s old cumbia CD’s, Celia Cruz, I think. Deinitely not a fuck-me-slow-and-something-tender song, but like I said, homegirl won’t know the difference. This is, after all, the same chick who got Aguanta inked across her back after she plugged “Endure” into an online translator. Said she wanted to be cultured or something. After she launted it at the bar I didn’t notice again until she was riding me with her back arched , moaning out to the glow-in-dark stars on her ceiling. I guess my abuelita was right. You really can ind inspiration in the strangest places. She rolls back onto her stomach. I reach down and brush her hair off the tattoo the same way my mom would brush the dirt off my elastic-waistband Dungarees every time my brother knocked me down in the yard. Aguanta.

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“The Güera with the Spanish Tattoo” continued... I look back at the clock. 5:59 She’s got so many Theta’s posted up on around her crib I feel like they’re watchin’ me, waiting for me say something that requires subtitles. For a second I feel like I’m the undercard ighter on an HBO boxing special. Except I don’t need a translator. Plus, the only punch I’ve ever thrown was Hawaiian, and it was at my brother after he saw the red pants I got for Christmas and called me a maricón. If only Alejandro could see me now. Chillin’ next to a girl who looks like she fell straight out of an Abercrombie commercial. A chick whose underwear I could easily tuck into my blazer and use as a pocket square next time I go home. Pops would give me the Wink. My brother would call bullshit. Mami would bust my balls and call me a sucio for the 102nd time. The Californian will read: “Ramón defeats Pussy in the 12th and inal round!” What an upset! Then they’ll shower me with used condoms and overdue child support bills. Maricón my ass. I start counting down the seconds before the 59 turns into two empty zeros and I can disappear. Aguanta. I close my eyes for the last time and glide my ingers down the stillness of her back. I stop when I think of what she said as I unhooked her bra earlier. Be gentle baby, I’ve never been with a Latin guy before. My hands stopped and the room stood still. For an instant I thought about shoving her off the bed and inally getting my ass outta there. But then I remembered my brother and the way the fat in his cheeks jiggled when he laughed at me. I remembered the look in his eyes after I left that big-ass red stain on his shirt. I remembered the sting that rippled across my face after it collided with Papi’s hand, and sighed. I guess a little afirmative action never hurt nobody. Give me ball beach, no molly please. Palm, no marijuana trees. No hickies on my aorta & tattoos you can only see when I’m playing surfboarder, put whiskey in that salt water— “Ramón will you turn that shit off please?” Of course. Anything for you, güera. Oscar is a 3rd year student studying International Relations with a minor in Creative Writing. He’s currently working on a short-story compilation centered around the raw, uncensored nature of manhood, love, and family with hopes of publication by summer. He aims to eventually write screenplays for feature-length ilms, TV series, and even a novel if stays off his lazy ass and keeps writing. When he’s not writing you can catch him on the rugby ield or putting in work with his brothers of Gamma Zeta Alpha Fraternity, Inc.

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Unblurring the Lines by April Gregory A recent onslaught of tits-in-your-face (TIYF) music videos has catalyzed much hullabaloo in the blogosphere. If you haven’t seen Robin Thicke’s “Blurred Lines,” Justin Timberlake’s “Tunnel Vision,” or The-Dream’s “Pussy” (yes, just “Pussy”), you may wish to view them now. On Vevo or Vimeo, though, because they were pulled from YouTube. And not in a place where your supervisor might drop in to give you some Chobani coupons, because they are very, very TIYF. To start, I should make one thing exceedingly clear: for years I was a more or less passive acceptor of the contradictions inherent in my favorite music genres. I love hip hop and R&B. LOVE. I love booming bass and releasing my inner Bey on the d-loor whenever possible. Consequently, I had — and still have — a tendency to ignore the often unsavory lyrics that loat atop said booming bass. “She eyein’ me like her n***a don’t exist / Girl, I know you want this dick,” to name a recent favorite. At Stanford I had the opportunity to learn from and connect with some of the world’s foremost hip hop scholars, who dropped more knowledge on me than I knew what to do with. They encouraged me to engage more critically with the voices in my earbuds, which in turn inspired some original musings about hip hop and feminism. The more I thought about the dissonance between my personal ideologies and the hot misogynist mess that is mainstream hip hop and R&B, the less passive I became. Coming to terms with a genre that, as the fabulous Joan Morgan so aptly wrote, “repeatedly reduces me to tits and ass” has been a long and arduous process. “Sex positivity!” one of my many shoulder devils would tell me. “If the women in the videos are okay with it, then it’s ine!” Sure, but to what extent and on whose watch? Should we assume that video girls are

formally debriefed on the risks and implications of their on-camera exposure? Unlike a Snapchat of my repulsive tailbone bruise, those images won’t disappear into cyberspace. What I feel compelled to investigate, however, is not just the fucked up gender and sexuality politics of the music video industry at large. I am more interested in my personal, visceral reaction to these TIYF videos. I have few to no qualms with nakedness and consider myself quite supportive of women’s sexual freedom. But there is something about the broader context of our contemporary moment that makes these videos exceptional. It’s been a bad year for women. Law after law and soundbite after soundbite, we have been told that we don’t know what’s best for our own bodies. It’s relentless, it’s exhausting and it’s infuriating. I’m still not even close to getting over Todd Akin’s “legitimate rape” fuckery. So perhaps I am not alone in feeling that in a writhing, naked woman superimposed on Justin Timberlake’s face is suficient reason to release my feminist kraken. Roxana Gay’s article in Salon brilliantly exposes the unsettling parallels between Robin Thicke’s treatment of women’s bodies and, say, Rick Perry’s. In one of her many snaps-worthy moments, Gay describes the omnipresence of misogyny in this American life: “It’s hard not to feel humorless as a woman and a feminist, to recognize misogyny in so many forms, some great and some small, and know you’re not imagining things. It’s hard to be told to lighten up because if you lighten up any more, you’re going to loat the fuck away. The problem is not that one of these things is happening, it’s that they are all happening, concurrently and constantly.” So in the same way I feel sick when I hear Texas State Senator Bill Zedler call Wendy Davis and her supporters “terrorists,” I also feel sick

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“Unblurring the Lines” continued... when I watch an extraordinarily beautiful woman prance around in front of big silver balloons that spell out, “Robin Thicke has a big dick.” Naked. I feel sick because the female director of the video tells me it’s “very, very funny and subtly ridiculing,” and I want to believe her so badly. I really do. But no degree of subtlety can lip the pervasive script we witness in the video: objectiication and exploitation of female bodies for male pleasure and proit. Even if she claims the girls in the video “are in the power position” because they’re looking directly at the camera. Even if she says the video is “meta and playful.” I feel sick because I know millions of men (and women) are watching this video, listening to Robin creepily croon, “I know you want it,” and thinking the whole thing is just so awesome. I feel sick because regardless of the director’s intentions, the women in the video will inevitably be perceived as human equivalents of the balloons celebrating Robin’s penis: decorations that exist only to adorn and endorse a man’s sexual prowess. There’s nothing fucking “meta” about that. (For the record, both “Tunnel Vision” and “Pussy” were directed by men.) The women in each of these music videos are not the problem; patriarchy is the problem. To me, the fact that

these videos have proliferated now, in our precise political moment, is no mere coincidence. The unprecedented exploitation of the female body we witness in the videos is symptomatic of a much bigger, much scarier reality. After all, art imitates life. I will not pretend to be blind to the absolute insanity going on around me, because frankly, I just can’t anymore. I will talk about it with my mother, my friends, and all the precious women in my life. I will not entertain the idea that perhaps I am overreacting. And, like Roxana Gay, I will not tolerate being told to “lighten up.” I will also act an absolute fool whenever “Fuckin’ Problems” comes on in the car or at a party. But do not mistake my ability to recite Kendrick’s verse verbatim as an endorsement of its content. I will have it both ways, because men have been having it every which way for quite some time. To me, the lines between agency and exploitation are not as blurry as we pretend they are. Whether it’s rape culture, abortion legislation, or something as seemingly innocuous as a music video, we owe it to ourselves and the women we love to unblur those lines and call bullshit whenever we see it. We deserve better, and we deserve it on our own terms.

This piece was original published on the STATIC blog at http://static.stanford.edu/2013/08/04/unblurring-the-lines/. April Gregory received her B.A. in American Studies less than two months ago. She is moving to New York City in August to teach second grade.

vol. 2, issue 1, winter 2014

Gay Imperialism and Olympic Oppression by Erika Lynn Abigail Kreeger There’s been a huge backlash against Russia within America. Gay personalities famous among the heterosexual and cisgender United States, like Dan Savage and Harvey Fierstein, have written op-eds imploring people to raise their awareness and help gay Russians through boycotts of Russian vodka and the Sochi Olympics in 2014. But the actions and potential steps that Western powers and individuals are being asked to take against Russia—namely a boycott of the Sochi Olympic Games, and potentially the 2018 FIFA World Cup—must be carefully scrutinized. A boycott will do nothing but perpetuate a problem that the we Western powers and individuals helped create in the irst place (when I say we, I mean Western powers and individuals unless otherwise speciied). In the late 1980s and early 1990s, during the transitional period from state socialism to capitalism, the lives and legality of gays and lesbians changed signiicantly.The changes to sodomy laws and the development of Russian LGBT activism during the transitional period would not have happened if it were not for Western inancial assistance and political pressure. In 2006, about 50 activists, many from Western nations, illegally tried to hold the irst Gay Pride parade in Moscow, marching to the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, a memorial commemorating the lives lost in WWII. According to the BBC, the march was a “symbolic protest to equate the struggle for gay rights with the struggle against fascism in World War II.” About 20 religious and nationalists anti-gay protesters showed up and began to violently assault the activists. Riot police came primarily to stop the rally and arrested most of the activists involved.

Some of the protesters quoted by the BBC demonstrate the notion that homosexuality is “other than” Russian, something that the West brought over to them, which in turn heightens its undesirability. One 25-year-old protester yelled, “We are Russians. We are Orthodox. These soldiers died so we could live like Russians, not so these [foreigners] could come here and tell us what to do.” The geopolitics of sexuality in Russia and its predecessors over the last half millennium have nearly always been framed within the context of the West/East divide. For much of the past half-millennium, Russians have fallen on the side of the divide that Westerns frowned upon, whether for tacitly tolerating same-sex sexual acts in the 1500s, or for maintaining their criminalization through the late 1900s. More recently, the modern wave of gay academia, publications, and activism of the 1990s, and later mid-2000s would not have been possible without signiicant inancial and political support and pressure from Western powers. And that help from Western powers, especially having non-Russian marchers present at Pride marches, has further stigmatized both the nascent modern gay activists movement, and LGBT people as a whole in Russia. The political and social division between the West and Russia, and the general sense of entitlement and superiority the West feels over Russia, has signiicantly colored Russian’s perceptions of the West, especially America. These sentiments are very apparent in the realm of LGBT rights, seen largely as a Western, foreign concept. It is important to understand that while people had same-sex sexual and romantic encounters in Russia and its ancestors, the modern Western paradigm of “sexual

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“Gay Imperialism and Olympic Oppression” continued... England, has boldly and proudly proclaimed orientation,” “gayness,” “LGBT,” and “identity” is that he wants to export gay marriage across the very new to Russia, and was made available to Russians through both increased communication world. I challenge the notion that “gayness”and “marriage” are something that can be between the West and Russia, and the West commoditized and “exported” around the world, actively bringing that paradigm over. It is the use irst of all. I would also suggest that if David and exportation of this paradigm to understand Cameron is so hellbent on making the situation and view same-sex sexual and romantic acts, for LGBT persons better, he should start in his and the lack of respect for traditional modes of understanding same-sex sexual encounters, that own back yard, where recently a court made case law a decision which states that by not disclosing has increased anti-LGBT sentiments in many to a sexual partner that you are transgender, countries, in this case Russia. even if you have had gender conirming surgery, We, Western, Americans in particular, you are a sex offender and can go to prison. need to understand our presence in LGBT Recently, President Obama entered the activism in recent decades in Russia has not only public arena on this complicated LGBT issue, using similarly Russians’ situation, imperialist language but has made and HOW WILL A BOYCOTT OF RUSSIAN as Mr. Cameron. continues to make VODKA, OR EVEN THE SOCHI WINTER On August 7th, the it nearly impossible GAMES, DO ANYTHING POSITIVE FOR President appeared for LGBT Russians LGBT RUSSIANS? on the Jay Leno and LGBT Russian Show, where for activists to have a few minutes he rational, safe, discussed with Leno productive national and regional conversations about laws governing Russia, LGBT universal rights, and the Olympics. homosocial and sexual behavior. Whether we are They both said things that were unarguably incorrect and did signiicantly more damage than marching in Pride Parades, or sharing editorials good. or articles condemning Russians’ behavior, or It’s ironic how President Obama feels encouraging our governments to boycott and openly condemn Russia, our actions have overall justiied condemning Russia, when his own front yard is one of the least safe areas for been detrimental to LGBT Russians. And it is the LGBT Russians whom we are trans*women to live, when now half of college trying to help, let us remember. How will a boycott age men will have HIV by the time they are 50 and neither the government nor Gay Inc. is doing of Russian vodka, or even the Sochi Winter Games, do anything positive for LGBT Russians? anything about it, when over 20% of trans*women The West, in particular the imperial US and and nearly 50% of black trans*women have been Britain, have a penchant for foreign interventions, incarcerated, often in men’s prisons, and those woman are 13 times more likely to be sexually and gay rights being the fad social issues of assaulted in prison, just to name a few of the the new century so far, a foreign intervention to many queer injustices we face at home. seemingly bolster gay rights will win the ruling The President makes the argument party, as well as western imperialism, lots of that there are “universal rights” and “basic political brownie points. These gay Western freedoms” for people of all sexual orientations imperial interventions aren’t just happening in that “transcend every country.” Over the past Russia. David Cameron, the Prime Minister of

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vol. 2, issue 1, winter 2014 century, American imperialism has transported across the world American and Western ways of thinking about human rights, that often conlict or differ with local and provincial ways of thinking about what we consider to be “human, universal rights.” Same-sex sexual encounters, attractions and behaviors existed in many different times and locations across the world, including, but not limited to, Russia and its ancestors. But these actions were never understand to function as part of an identity, gayness, before America and the West commoditized it and transported it across the globe. The call for a boycott of the Sochi Winter Games, and larger sanctions of Russia, would be seen as a signiicant US imperial intervention, and would do little more than stoke more anger, hostility and violence towards LGBT Russians. What’s worse, we’d be playing right into Putin’s hand. According to Cieply, “the West’s reaction, every word of condemnation from Western leaders and celebrities, helps to consolidate Putin’s role as a defender of Russian values and national identity.” In his attempt to alienate the left-wing opposition, which admires the West, from the rest of Russians, he has used gay rights as a wedge issue, anticipating that there would be Western reaction against the bill. Putin is using the East/ West divide in Russian sexual politics discussed in Part 1 to solidify himself as the opponent of the West, the upholder of traditional Russian values, and we have fallen into his trap, exacerbating the political divide between the US and Russia, which will ultimately continue to worsen conditions for LGBT Russians. When reporting or commentating on the situation in Russia, Cieply notes that “we need to foreground [LGBT Russian’s] experience rather than our own obsessions, focusing on precedent, individual acts of violence, analyzing the dangers posed and patterns in the implementation of the new laws.” We need to remove ourselves and our preconceptions about politics at home if we’re to truly understand the complex dynamics at play abroad. We can make pathways for LGBT

37 refugees seeking asylum in the US much easier. We can scale back imperial military and political interventions and operations as a irst step to undoing a long history of unwanted and unneeded Western intervention. We can demand that the IOC protect its athletes from Russia’s non-traditional sexual orientation propaganda law. The Olympics needs to repeal its ban on athlete political discourse. Not only do athletes who break the law risk being arrested by Russian authorities, they risk being censured by the IOC and sent back home. Athlete suppression must stop. But most importantly, we should let LGBT Russians and their chosen allies handle the situation on their own time frame and using their own methods. Despite our imperial inclinations to intervene in Russian affairs, if we truly want to help LGBT Russians, we need to listen, learn and most importantly stay out. The call to boycott the Sochi Games is not the irst time there has been a call to boycott the Olympics due to civil rights or social justice abuses. The US boycotted the 1980 Olympics in the SSSR, while the SSSR boycotted the 1984 Olympics in the US, largely due to animosity and suspicion of each other. Before that, though, there was talk amongst black academics and black athletes in America to boycott participating on the US Olympic team in the 1968 Mexico City Games to protest social conditions of blacks at home. While the boycott was never realized, black and allied athletes found other ways to protest, the most famous being the Black Power Salute by Tommie Smith and John Carlos, both African American, after coming in irst and third, respectively, in the 200-meter sprint. And over the past few years, there have been calls in parts of Brazil, namely among the favela residents and the younger generation to not attend the upcoming 2014 World Cup and 2016 Olympics in Rio, where nearly 170,000 people have been forcibly relocated out of the favelas, among other unjust actions. In America, there has been surprisingly little coverage, outside of The New York Times, of the amazing

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“Gay Imperialism and Olympic Oppression” continued... resistance work many of the favela residents have been engaging in to save their houses and communities. Earlier this summer, I talked with Clementine Jacoby, a Stanford student who had spent the past year working in a circus in a favela in Rio de Janeiro. She had this to say about the media coverage and international help: What Brazilians want is to harness the international attention aimed at these mega events and use it to bring light to the inequity and corruption that Brazilians have known about for a long time. They don’t want attention for police violence and colorful protests. They want the international public to use their voices and their dollars thoughtfully. What bothers me most about the calls to boycott the Sochi Winter Games is how signiicantly American and Western reactions differ towards the injustices occurring in the name of the World Cup and the Olympics in Brazil, and the injustices happening in Russia in the name of national and religious identity and sovereignty. Furthermore, the media is only discussing this violence and persecution through the lens of the Olympics, a venue where the application of that law will primarily affect Americans and Westerners, when the real story and the real violence is not the violence committed by the state but the extreme and horriic violence committed by vigilante individuals and groups like Occupy Pedophilia against LGBT Russians. Why do Americans care more about violence and injustice against LGBT individuals than people of color and socioeconomically underprivileged individuals? There could be a number of reasons. Gay groups like the Human Rights Campaign, with the help of the media and entertainment programs, have constructed an intentionally non-threatening and assimilatory picture of “gays” in America, generally white,

able-bodied, middle/upper class, bicoastal men with a love of fashion. In some ways, by co-opting the black civil rights movement’s language and struggle, mainstream gay organizations have also sent the message that the struggle for racial equality, justice and liberation are over and there are new battles to ight, when as recent events have shown us, that could not be farther from the truth. Recall the Supreme Court’s session earlier this summer when the Court seriously harmed Native tribal sovereignty and gutted the Voting Rights Act. Yet when the Court proclaimed that DOMA and Prop 8 were illegal, and Facebook, Twitter and the media erupted in jubilation at how “equality for all” had been won. Not only does this ignore the reality that for the majority of queers, marriage equality does not in any way begin to bring justice to their lives, but it falsely and implicitly argues that everyone else besides gays was, more or less, equal. If we are unable to recognize, empathize with and challenge injustice at home, how can we do so in Brazil, without the injustice at home becoming more apparent, without appearing so hypocritical that we would be forced to confront the legally entrenched white supremacy in our legal codes and justice system at home? By contrast the gay activists movement led by the HRC has had two main issues at the top of their agenda for over a decade now, legalizing gay marriage and repealing Don’t Ask Don’t Tell. Now that mostly both are achieved, equality, in the minds of many Americans, has been won for all gays and lesbians at home. This is clearly false—ask any queer person of color, any economically underprivileged queer, any streetwalking trans* woman, any homeless queer youth, any undocumented queer, etc. But because the American psyche largely feels absolved for the injustice against queer people, Americans can feel safe challenging queer injustice abroad, because no major gay rights group is going to force them to look in the

vol. 2, issue 1, winter 2014 mirror and confront the continuing oppression the majority of non-white, working class, rural, homeless, undocumented queer and trans*people have known for far too long. The difference in American reactions between the injustice in Brazil and the injustice in Russia suggests that gay rights have the potential to be incorporated into American, British and more broadly Western imperial policies, leveraging neo-liberal support at home for gay equality to bolster support for more political, economic, military and social interventions by Western countries whose sexual political and cultural paradigms are very different than ours. The potential for unchecked gay imperialism frightens me. I donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t want my identity

39 commoditized even further to be used as a weapon to continue centuries of Western imperial intervention. As the decade and century continue, I urge you to be critical of any calls to export gay rights, to bring equality for all gays and lesbians across the world. Challenge the imperial nature of these campaigns. Yes, their intentions may be good, but the methods being used fall in line with a terrible tradition of US and Western intervention. Ultimately, these imperial efforts will do nothing but backire and continue to harm the very people they set out to help.

This piece was originally published on the as a four-part series on the STATIC blog at http://static. stanford.edu/2013/08/08/gay-imperialism-and-olympic-oppression-part-1-russian-sexual-politics-andthe-eastwest-divide/ Erika Lynn is a white, feminine of center organism and a rising junior taking a year off to relax and read more. She loves to frolic in ields and splash in the ocean, and enjoys a vegetable sandwich more than anything else for lunch. She looks forward to the day when she can adopt two pot-bellied pigs, three kids and a labradoodle to keep her company.

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7 LGBT Issues That Matter More Than Marriage by Holly Fetter From the death of DOMA to Macklemore’s “Same Love,” it’s been an exciting few months for the mainstream LGBT movement. But what you might not know is that LGBT rights are about more than marriage. LGBT justice should be about empowering all queer people everywhere, which probably won’t happen just because people can legally marry people of the same gender. There are some queer activists who envision a movement for justice that goes beyond marriage. Some folks think we should get rid of marriage altogether, while others think that mainstream LGBT organizations should shift their focus to other issues.Since we all secretly prefer reading about political issues when they’re presented in lists and gifs, here are 7 issues that the mainstream LGBT rights movement should prioritize over marriage equality (in no particular order): 1) Queer and Trans* Youth Homelessness 40% of homeless youth identify as LGBT. 68% of those kids were kicked out of their families and homes because of their sexual orientation and/or gender identity, and 54% reported being survivors of abuse from their families. These experiences leave these young people particularly vulnerable to mental and physical health issues, and lead to unfair criminalization of queer and trans* youth. 2) Violence Against Queer and Trans* People There were 2,000 incidents of anti-LGBT hate violence in 2012. In the past few months, we’ve seen the murder of Islan Nettles (a trans* woman) and the shooting of Mark Carson (a gay man). In May, there were at least 7 anti-LGBT attacks in New York City alone. 3) Racial Justice Many of the issues facing the general LGBT population are even worse for people of color. For example, LGBT people of color are almost twice as likely to experience physical violence, and 73.1% of all anti-LGBTQ homicide victims in 2012 were people of color. Islan Nettles and Mark Carson, the two victims of anti-queer violence this summer, were people of color. Violence is just one issue that is compounded by racial injustice — you can ind racism at the root of every other issue on this list. Racial justice, or “the systematic fair treatment of people of all races, resulting in equal opportunities and outcomes for all,” is not speciic to LGBT people, but true justice for LGBT people can’t be achieved if not all of us are liberated. 4) Immigrant Justice An estimated 2.7% of our nation’s undocumented immigrants identify as LGBT. In fact, undocumented queer youth have been integral to building the immigration movement. Queer folks who are immigrants have multiple layers of experience living between literal and igurative borders, and can help us all dream beyond the current limitations of our immigration system. Additionally, the deportation and detention process for migrants is particularly pernicious for LGBT folks, who are often the subjects of harassment and abuse. A recent report from the National Center for Transgender Equality highlights the issues faced by trans* migrants in particular.

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5) Health There exist signiicant disparities in health between heterosexual and LGBT people. The Center for American Progress identiied 14 health disparities between straight and LGBT adults in 2009. For example, 82% of heterosexual adults had health insurance, while only 77% of LGB adults, and 57% of transgender adults, had health insurance. Similarly, 83% of heterosexual adults reported excellent or very good health, compared to only 77% of LGB adults and 67% of transgender adults. The expansion of access to health care in the U.S. should be a priority of the LGBT movement, beyond accessing a spouse’s medical plan through legalized marriage. 6) Economic Justice Despite the popular images of wealthy LGBT celebrities, many queer and trans* people are lowincome. Employment discrimination, lack of health insurance, homelessness, and other factors make LGBT people particularly vulnerable to the impact of economic inequality. Gay and lesbian families (especially the latter) are signiicantly more likely to be living below the poverty line than heterosexual married families, and children in gay and lesbian households are twice as likely to live in poverty as compared to children in homes with heterosexual parents. And given the legacy of racism in the U.S., the statistics are even worse for LGBT people of color. 7) Trans* Justice Empowerment of trans* people must be central to the movement for LGBT justice. Many trans* people live in extreme poverty, and are almost four times more likely than heterosexual and LGB people to have a household income of less than $10,000 per year. 41% of trans* people have attempted suicide, compared to 1.6% of the general population. Trans* people are consistently abused, discriminated against, harassed, and assaulted. Too often, the “T” gets excluded from LGBT initiatives and campaigns. We have to realize that we can’t have LGBT/queer justice without trans* justice. These are only a few issues that deserve some attention. And it’s important to note that there are already incredible organizations focusing on these issues, such as the TGI Justice Project, Queers for Economic Justice, and Sylvia Rivera Law Project, just to name a few. But most of these organizations are small and underresourced. The most funding for the LGBT movement goes to big groups like the Human Rights Campaign, who have a history of excluding trans* people from their work. It’s time that the organizations and leaders who set the agenda for the mainstream LGBT movement start prioritizing the empowerment of the most marginalized LGBT and queer people, like trans* folks, people of color, and individuals living in the South, Southwest, and Midwest. This piece was originally published on the STATIC blog at http://static.stanford.edu/2013/10/10/7-lgbtissues-that-matter-more-than-marriage/. Holly graduated in June with her B.A. in Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity, and is now pursuing her M.A. in Sociology.

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What Is An Asian Musical? by Sunli Kim

Photo by Frank Chen

The Stanford Savoyards’ production of The Mikado opened on the same day as the Asian American Theatre Project’s My Fair Lady: January 31st, the Lunar New Year, a day celebrated by a good majority of the Stanford Asian American Paciic Islander community. It’s a itting day for a re-imagined musical featuring a majority minority cast. It’s not quite the best day for yellow-face. The Mikado continues a tradition of celebrated orientalism, fetishizing East Asian culture, having garnered inspiration from an 1885 exhibition called the Japanese Village, when Japanese people were put on display in London to show off their supposed traditional

dress and customs. The Japanese Village and The Mikado in turn spurred an era of Japonisme in Britain, inspiring other works like Geisha or Madame Butterly, which in turn would spawn Miss Saigon and other stereotype-perpetuating, misogynistic storylines. Great music maybe, but still problematic. AATP’s My Fair Lady is the irst studentproduced musical to be performed in Bing. Director Ken Savage, ‘14, and costume designer Asia Chiao, ‘14, meticulously researched British Asian immigrant communities in the late 1800s/ early 1900s. They desired to re-contextualize the musical so that it grappled with questions on race, ethnicity, social class, British imperialism,

vol. 2, issue 1, winter 2014 and language. And it has powered through much skepticism and tribulation to become an eagerly anticipated production this school year. As a musician I respect and understand any effort put into a production, so I am certainly not, in any way, criticizing the musical quality of The Mikado and its performances. I’m just a tad peeved it’s being allowed to show on the same day as the Asian-cast My Fair Lady, to run for two weeks, and that there doesn’t seem to have been as much public backlash for the production as did AATP’s My Fair Lady. Why is the quality of a production based on the race of its cast? Why isn’t there much dialogue about the tension that arises from the juxtaposition of the two musical productions? It highlights the question of phenotypical currency: who is allowed to represent whom? The Mikado will be acclaimed as a classic Gilbert and Sullivan, and probably not get very much public attention to the fact that it’s yellowface. People will use “classic” to combat “racist.” The costumes may be accurate, but I’m not so keen on watching white actors and actresses wearing black wigs and putting on an operetta that utilizes an “alien” culture as a tool to satirize British society. With character names like “YumYum,” “Pitti-Sing,” and “Nanki-Poo?” Ouch. When a production of My Fair Lady tries to take light with a majority Asian cast, people will question and have continuously questioned the production’s quality. “People might claim it a disaster after watching it,” Savage said calmly when asked about criticism regarding his project. Criticism is inevitable for any art product. But sometimes, the artistic quality will be weighed on race. At the same time, in a public sphere, the topic of race will also be cautiously sidestepped by the critics. Touchy subject. The production was and will be criticized for tweaking a “British classic,” perhaps for changing “what the story is all about.” (I’m sorry, what is the story all about?) “British classic” becomes synonymous with “white.” Not that “whiteness” is necessarily bad or good. It’s just the blunt fact that in our minds and society, the power dynamic exists. Whiteness

43 provides an allowance to portray what other colors are not allowed to portray, including themselves. I’m curious about the casting process behind Mikado; none of the major characters seem to be of Asian descent, but I may be wrong, so please reach out if that’s the case. This production of My Fair Lady will jolt audience members because people with Asian physiological features will be speaking with a British accent (a professional was hired to teach the cast), and will change how we as audience members will analyze the characters. (Why does speaking with “non-accented” English have to make me feel privileged?) Suddenly, we will evaluate the characters based on Asian stereotypes and expectations, thus insinuating that a white cast holds a privilege of being perceived as the norm. One of the many questions Savage and Chiao encountered when embarking on their project was, “Were there even Asian people in London at that time?” The greatest irony is that The Mikado (1885) was published before Pygmalion (1912) or My Fair Lady (1956). In their research, Chiao and Savage discovered that one of the earliest drafts of My Fair Lady sets the now Covent Garden scene to the Chinatown Limehouse. Victorian literature and narratives are embedded with allusions to trade with Asia and general colonial ventures, from spices and tea to inluenced furniture, porcelain, or silks. In Pygmalion, the play on which My Fair Lady is based, there are multiple lines in which Eliza Doolittle appears in a kimono, is not recognized by her father, and is referred to as a Japanese lady. Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights is probably the son of a Lascar; we forget because visual portrayals ignore the explicit racialization of his character in the novel. So yes. There were East Asian, South Asian, and Southeast Asian people in London, in Britain, and migrating all over the world, actually. The British Empire was then “the empire on which the sun never set.” The Mikado was written

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“What is An Asian Musical?” continued... and irst staged in the Orientalist high created by the Post-Opium War era, when China and Japan have been forced to keep their ports open for trade for Western consumption. Savage and Chiao also discovered there were wealthy expatriates. Interestingly, the wealthier you were, the more inclined and able you were to retain what culture you could. Those in less economically privileged circumstances rushed to assimilate. They had less of a choice. Chiao tried to relect these dynamics in her costume design. How do all of these factors change how we register the narrative of My Fair Lady? Of a girl who must be re-taught a language in order to “elevate herself?” This production will prove that you and I can’t be color-ignorant. I caught myself watching the rehearsal and wondering how the audience might equate Mrs. Higgins to the “tiger mother” phenomenon. How will Henry Higgins’ bachelor state be re-evaluated on the expectations we as

viewers hold for the actor’s racial background? How will the deinition of “fairness” be reevaluated by casting someone of Asian descent in Eliza Doolittle’s role? Do not deny that the racial codes will change how we read or watch the musical. Because even now, we regrettably like to pretend that we can switch colors and everything would remain the same. Many people try to erase or ignore that such a power dynamic exists by claiming color-ignorance as a solution to all. At such an acclaimed educational institute, is it not irresponsible for ourselves to pretend we’ve reached a solution when the problem still persists? Must we only use or await overt violence as a marker for a problem that seeps through multiple levels of our society? Realize that if we think Mikado is okay and an Asian My Fair Lady might not be… we need to igure out why, and see how it’s problematic. Let’s talk about it.

This piece was originally published on the STATIC blog at http://static.stanford.edu/2014/01/29/whatis-an-asian-musical-the-mikado-and-my-fair-lady/. Sunli Kim is currently a junior studying English Literature. She is also a part of the Stanford Asian American Activism Committee, Oceanic Tongues, and an intern at the Stanford Social Innovation Review. Her favorite comfort foods are ramen and spaghetti and she is an experienced passenger of the struggle bus.

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The Cover Letter I’m Tempted To Submit by Connie McNair

Dear likely-soon-to-be-ex potential employer, I ind myself in the ever-more precarious predicament of soon becoming a recent graduate of a liberal arts program. Besides blessing me with the ability to include nearly every verb tense in one sentence, I’m not sure of the plainly applicable skills with which this education has equipped me. Enrich your minds!, our iercely intelligent and somewhat ancient professors told us, Be brave! Inherit the literature and culture of your human ancestors! At the same time, society began to warn us about the B.A. (Because who knew the B.S. is actually more marketable? BS, people. BS!). They expected us to come to the end of our academic careers entirely unprepared for Jobs, and languish in anxiety and fear for our inancial futures. Well aha!, we reply to these naysayers, Had you ever read Sartre, you would know that we get off on anguish! The B.A. position is precarious—not because there’s any truth to exaggerated headlines about the sinking value of humanities degrees (show me documentary footage of wild-haired elite college graduates begging for alms on city streets and I’ll concede the gravity of the situation)— but due to the love of ambiguity and open-mindedness a liberal education cultivates. Instead of an in-depth understanding of international inance models, students of the humanities are equipped with a profound appreciation for absurdity, a nuanced understanding of the Western canon; they’ve worked to sharpen analytical minds and rhetorical skills; they’ve applied their energies to unanswerable questions, proposed imperfect theses, fought unremarkable existence and had a kick-ass time doing so. To clear up the matter, I assure you no one is learning any Job skills in college. I hear Jobs require pressed shirts and punctuality and sobriety, none of which are widely promoted at university campuses. They require pandering, creative oppression and worst of all, inancial reports. To display my utter distaste at the prospect of such a banal future, I regularly quip: Who wants a job anyway? As it turns out, I do. Big ideas and ambitious plans and high ideals also require funding and roofs and clothing (though nudist life isn’t yet totally off the table), not to mention projects into which these energies can be channeled. Thus, it becomes essential to pursue a fulilling and challenging career that allows space for expression, passion and creativity. If humanities majors are, in fact, less employed, could it be because they have standards, and search relentlessly for meaningful, engaging employment that does not suck the life and spirit from their youthful, thoughtful, deeply human souls? Perhaps they would prefer to apply their exercised minds to issues of moral, ethical, artistic or cultural importance. Perhaps they know that settling for less accepts a slow process of dying a little more inside every day. Why are fewer people getting their education in the humanities? People, on the whole, are tired, inspiration-less drones. This isn’t news. Will employers hire these few, brave, dewy-eyed, literarily adept humanities majors? That, my friend, is up to you. With the utmost sincerity, Your B.A. applicant Connie McNair is a reluctant senior studying Italian and Comparative Literature and clinging to the ankles of comfortable Stanford life as they harshly shake her off into the wide world.

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From Austen to ArrayLists: My Experience Taking a Computer Science Class by Molly Gerrity I walked into Hewlett 200 on the irst day of fall quarter with a sizeable pit in my stomach that had nothing to do with the fact that I had narrowly missed hitting a pedestrian with my bike mere moments before. No, these nerves were due to the fact that I had arrived at my very irst computer science class. What the hell was I doing here? Where were the books, the moleskine journals, the chai teas and scarves I was so accustomed to seeing in my English classes? Even the number of students overwhelmed me. The auditorium it 500; 660 had enrolled. They had a freaking overlow room. CS106a is one of the most popular classes at Stanford, and for good reason—it promises to teach the most basic and practical concepts of programming methodology, with the majority of the focus being on writing and implementing Java. In addition to being an introductory course, the class also fulills the Engineering and Applied Sciences GER, making it a popular choice for students hailing from even the “fuzziest” of majors. Assignments are handed out every nine days or so and cover everything from creating a checkerboard pattern to creating a social network. I initially enrolled because I had long been jealous of those elusive types who casually “made apps” in their spare time, typing away at Starbucks or the library with bright lines of code illing up their screens. I come from a family of engineers, and though I discovered early on that I much preferred sonnets to symbolic systems, it was about time that I dabbled in the subjects that made my siblings and parents most happy. The class would ly by, no problem. Right? Wrong. There’s no way around it; I

struggled in that class. The hardest part for me was not the material, but dealing with the fact that everyone seemed to ind it so much easier than I did. Like many college students, I am quite used to taking classes that challenge me, that stretch my thinking to new and mysterious corners, that leave me feeling satisied albeit fatigued when they’re all done. But this class was a whole different league. I perused the textbook until early morning hours, hoping it would leave me with the knowledge and skill that seemed so inherent in my peers. I attended the lectures, sometimes watching parts over again when the recordings became available online. I couldn’t understand what was so dificult for me, until I realized that programming is very much one of those learnby-doing things. I could study the theories all I wanted, but it was much more helpful to dive in head-irst and deal with my mistakes as they came, rather than try to avoid them in the irst place. I’m not going to lie—over the next ten weeks or so, I did not become the next Ada Lovelace. I did not whiz through the assignments with the prowess of a computer prodigy, I did not and still do not speak programming. You deinitely won’t ind me under my blankets at night writing the coffee-and-ramen version of Cooking Mama (a fellow classmate did that for the optional graphics contest; needless to say, I was very impressed). That said, those ten weeks taught me a lot. I learned how to better problem solve and the importance of getting started on assignments early. I now have a new respect for webpages that feature interactive games and graphics.

vol. 2, issue 1, winter 2014 On occasion, I play my version of “Hangman” on my computer. To me, CS106a was one of those classes that you complain about incessantly while you’re taking it, but when it’s all over, it gives you a profound sense of pride and contentment for having inished it. I’m not quite sure what kept me going in that class, but I have a lingering suspicion that it was largely my own stubbornness. I had signed up for one engineering class, damnit, and I was going to inish it with a smile because it wouldn’t kill me and this was what some people did all the time. The knowledge that it was only ten weeks long also sustained me; no matter how dificult or frustrating CS106a was, the end was always in sight. My advice for fuzzies taking the class? Start early. The professor and section leaders

tell you that all the time, and it’s really easy to dismiss them with an eye-roll and blow it off until the night before it’s due, but starting early was probably what saved my entire grade in that class. I actually had time to ask for help and get my obscene number of bugs sorted out. Also, I would advise against comparing yourself to other students taking the class. Unless you’re a computing genius who really shouldn’t be in CS106a, there will always be a classmate who is better, faster, and quicker to learn programming than you are, and the sooner you accept that, the better. At the end of the day, the class is a relection of your understanding, not anyone else’s. So, if someone were to ask me, “Molly, did you enjoy taking CS106a?” I might hesitate, but did I regret taking it? Absolutely not. And if I could do it, so can you.

Molly Gerrity is a sophomore studying English. She enjoys books, coffee, and the rain.

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Majors as Status Symbols by Kue Chang

Illustration by Tina Vachovsky

Aside from year and dorm location, one’s major is one of the deining factors of a student’s identity in college. “What’s your major?” or “What are you studying?” are often the irst questions asked upon meeting another student, and make no mistake, there is a hierarchy of college majors, which is largely enforced by students. Although the majority of Stanford’s humanities and social science programs are nationally top ranking, their science and engineering counterparts receive more respect and prestige. Part of this prestige stems from the type of knowledge that each student acquires, but it largely comes from the occupations they will inhabit upon graduation. My small everyday interactions has led me to believe that there is a general notion that only high income-generating

occupations and majors are valued. When I am meeting new people at campus events, the science and engineering students usually receive more enthusiastic greetings. Lin, a biology student on the pre-med track, often hears from other students: “Ohh, you want to be a doctor?! That’s so cool! Doctors are very important.” Doctors also make a lot of money. Social science and humanities majors receive a more neutral reaction, sometimes even dismissive. I study sociology, and the typical response I get is, “That’s interesting . . . What do you want to do with your major?” The questioner’s reaction, whether less or more excited, is contingent upon my answer. “A teacher,” I used to respond. They’d comment, “Oh that’s cool. You

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First of all, teachers have a considerable must be very passionate about it, because you’re amount of status. The Harrison Poll in deinitely not in it for the money.” 2009 indicates that teachers are in the top Although social science and humanities ive occupations that are most admired and majors are associated with lower paying respected by the respondents, above lawyers occupations, they receive more approval when and engineers. Who are the people not pursuing professions that receive high incomes. giving teachers enough praise that President For example, my friend Denny, who studies economics, receives a neutral response when he Hennessey and Lotan speak of? Considering reveals his major. However, a positive reaction is we are at an elite institution, can it be the elites garnered when he shares that he aspires to be a themselves? Secondly, I ind it troubling that in order lawyer. Lawyers, like doctors, have the potential to make a lot of money. Engineering and science to attract the “brightest” students into the teaching profession, money is the solution. The majors are associated with occupations that pay idea further perpetuates the status quo that well like software engineers; therefore, students studying in those ields generally receive warmer occupations are not worthy unless they are paid very well or have a higher social class standing. reactions. “Bright” elite students Higher hesitate to pursue paying occupations ALREADY SOCIETY TEACHES US TO teaching because of its are celebrated FEEL GUILT AND SHAME FOR OUR economic prospects, and approved of CLASS BACKGROUNDS, AND THE HIand the solution to while lower-paying ERARCHY OF COLLEGE MAJORS AND attract them is to ones are silently DISCUSSION ABOUT OCCUPATIONS IS increase the salary discouraged and ANOTHER MANIFESTATION OF IT. of teachers. If we undermined. increased the salary of The problematic teachers, it would also issue with this elevate their class standing, making teaching notion is it shames and celebrates certain social both more economically and socially desirable. classes. Simply put, we reinforce the idea that At this point, I would like to say that I love being from a higher social class background is teachers. They work tremendously hard, and I good, while being from a lower-middle or lowthink they are extremely deserving of a signiicant income background is bad. Already society pay-raise. However, I struggle with the motive of teaches us to feel guilt and shame for our class backgrounds, and the hierarchy of college majors increasing their wages to attract students from elite institutions because of its perpetuation of and discussion about occupations is another classism. I understand that many teachers can manifestation of it. barely get by with their salary, and I empathize Further perpetuation of this idea can be with them. But when I am confronted with my seen in a panel about the professionalization of childhood reality that my family still struggled teaching. On October 29th, 2013 the Stanford despite the fact that my mom worked two full time Pre Education Society (SPREES) held a jobs and my dad worked too, I begin to question panel about how to attract society’s brightest the fairness of wealth and income in general. (elite) students into careers in education— Considering the fact that the disparity especially teaching. According to President John between the rich, the middle class, and the Hennessey and Rachel Lotan, director of the working class have increased signiicantly in the Stanford Teacher Education Program, giving past decades and is continuously increasing, why teachers more prestige and increasing their aren’t our leaders advocating that we question salaries is the key to attracting our brightest our economic system as a whole? It is not just students.

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“Majors as Status Symbols” continued... teachers who are economically burdened, but also ireighters, bank tellers, fast food workers, assembly line workers, grant writers, and the list continues. The idea of increasing the salary of teachers sounds great to me, but why not advocate for increasing the wages of all classes and occupations who are struggling? Some CEOs earn millions of dollars an hour. How do we even justify their earnings? There are only so many hours one person can work in a given week. A good amount of us grew up with the cliché that “money doesn’t matter,” but in truth, it is inapplicable in this conversation. Income, indirectly social class, is a crucial factor when discussing and considering our majors and professional paths. This subsequently impacts which majors and occupations are more desirable and respected, pressuring and devaluing students who aspire to pursue paths that are less traveled, less economically sound, and less prestigious. We have to face the reality that once we graduate, we will truly become a part of our stratiication system. No longer will our social class be strictly deined by our parents;

we will occupy our own. Some of us will earn more or less than our peers, and some of us may inhabit occupations that are deemed more or less worthy. The (dis)approval that we already experience now through our majors and aspirations perpetuates the classism, shame, privilege, and guilt that awaits us upon graduation throughout the rest of our lives. But it doesn’t have to be that way. While we cannot dismantle or revitalize an economic system, society, or hierarchy overnight, we can start by evaluating and becoming cognizant of the ways we socialize about class. We shouldn’t deem any students’ major or dream career as less valuable based on their earning capacities, because it only reinforces the hierarchy in place. If someone wants to major in feminist studies, become a web developer for a non-proit, or become a teacher they should be able to do so without pressure and (silent) disapproval. A small irst step is challenging our own views about class, holding every occupation and major with respect, and supporting the choices that our peers make concerning their majors and career aspirations.

Kue is a junior studying Sociology. He enjoys thinking and conversing about social hierarchies, power, and identity. When he needs a break from it all, he eats tons of ice cream, reads a book, or sings the soundtrack from Frozen.

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Physician Deicit: The Invisible Problem by Oscar Leyva

The doctor shortage in the United States is not a new issue, yet its signiicance and repercussions are present and are about to get more noticeable. The Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) estimates that by 2025, the US will be short of more than 130,000 physicians. The implementation of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) will let more than thirty million of uninsured and underinsured patients lood the medical system, which puts more pressure on the present situation, and both doctors and patients are growing older. The US already has many problems concerning health care delivery and accessibility, and while the ACA is trying to alleviate some of those issues, there is a looming crisis that has slowly gained more attention, but its solutions are neither clear nor consistent. Bold action is indeed necessary. What to do? The solution lies on an eclectic approach focused on the education and training of more doctors, on a better geographical and professional distribution of physicians, and on the more eficient use of the country’s nonphysician medical personnel in order to deal with and ix the physician deicit in the US. Medical Schools: Open Your Doors Widely The US has enough potential doctors to cover the doctor shortage, yet medical schools illed fewer than 20,000 spots in 2012. Medical schools should extend their enrollment limit. If they continue to accept very few students and reject literally thousands of qualiied applicants, they are not missing the big picture—American healthcare’s gloomy future. According to the Stanford School of Medicine’s vice-chairman for academic affairs, Professor Andrew R. Hoffman, the school does not plan on increasing its enrollment even with a recent increase in both academic and clinical faculty. In a personal interview, senior associate

dean of medical education Charles G. Prober stated that “as a school, we don’t believe that we are going to contribute in numbers too much in terms of the extra physicians needed; our goal is to create leaders to help drive change.” The Stanford School of Medicine receives about 7,000 applications every year, but only accepts about 90 of them. If the Stanford School of Medicine is making leaders for tomorrow to “drive change,” why shouldn’t itself be a leader of today and make a change now concerning the national physician deicit? On the other hand, the University of Nevada School of Medicine—Nevada’s only public medical school—announced in 2007 that it was aiming to double its student body within ten years, in order to serve an aging population in a state that ranked 47th out of 50 states in the number of physicians per 100,000 people. It is a slow and expensive process, but it is feasible. Indeed, one of the main factors needed for increased enrollment is initiative. Medical schools that want to expand their enrollment need and should get funding aid at state and local levels. Complacency is not an option. The increasing severity of the doctor shortage should indeed hasten this process. Also, the schools themselves need to make sacriices to expand: the University of Nevada School of Medicine says that 82 cents of every dollar spent goes to the school’s academic mission. UNV is an example of how enrollment expansion is possible, yet this is only one case. All medical schools in the U.S. should systematically start to accept more students. A 30% increase in medical school intakes nationwide would result in 5,000 more medical students a year. Yet, only expanding medical school enrollment is not enough, especially if the US needs to eliminate the physician deicit on a longterm basis; new medical schools are necessary.

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“Physician Deicit” continued... According to the 2012 AAMC report “A Snapshot of the New and Developing Medical Schools in the U.S. and Canada,” 16 new medical schools are under development, of which only a handful are currently fully accredited. The report states that “if there is one thing that is true about all of the new schools’ experiences it is that they are incredibly busy developing new medical schools, new educational programs, recruiting faculty, responding to accreditation requirements, raising funds, recruiting students, preparing for new students, and ultimately opening a new medical school.” The implementation of a new medical school is indeed a titanic task, yet it is feasible. The major contributors of this solution will most likely be already existing universities. example, Princeton University has the third largest inancial endowment of all national universities, and it does not have a medical school. It could easily open one to aid the doctor shortage. It has been done before. The UC Riverside Medical School opened its doors in 2013 under dean G. Richard Olds, who said, “We have a shortage of every kind of doctor, except for plastic surgeons and dermatologists.” As of 2010, there were only 131 accredited medical schools in the country. New medical schools will be well received by applicants who might have entered other ields such as bioengineering, and can contribute to solve the physician deicit in the U.S. Congress, Residency Funding, and Effectiveness In order for the increase of medical doctors to be effective, Congress needs to lift the cap on the funding for residency programs. The AAMC attributes the solution of the doctor shortage mostly to Congress: Medicare’s support for physician training has been frozen since 1997… Congress must lift the freeze on Medicare-supported residency positions. Because all physicians must complete

three or more years of residency training after they receive an M.D. degree, Medicare must continue paying for its share of training costs by supporting at least a 15 percent increase in GME [(Graduate Medical Education)] positions, allowing teaching hospitals to prepare another 4,000 physicians a year to meet the needs of 2020 and beyond. Physician Richard A. Cooper wrote last year, in The Journal of the American Medical Association: “if residency programs had not been capped in 1997 and annual growth in the number of positions had continued at its preexisting rate, there would be no physician shortages today.” Under the ACA, nearly $168 million will be invested into “residency spots,” which will produce 500 new primary care doctors by 2015— barely a drop in the ocean. If the problem is to be ixed, the US needs Congress to expand funding for residency programs. Now that the country is implementing the ACA, Congress should realize the effects of more than 30 million people, formerly uninsured, entering the health care system. If thousands of recently graduated doctors need to complete their residency, there should be space for them in order to ix the doctor shortage. It is necessary for Congress to lift this cap. Put simply, more residency funding equals more doctors. Non-Physician Personnel: Scopes of Practice and Function Another option is to have non-physician personnel, such as physician assistants and nurse practitioners, do more of the functions that doctors do, so that doctors can focus on what no one else can do. In the interview, the Stanford School of Medicine’s Professor Prober said: “We need to optimize how patients get cared for beyond physicians; it is not optimal.… There are many functions which physicians currently supply the patients that probably could be just as well provided by other kinds of health practitioners who are not physicians.…

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Optimizing the use and distribution of those individuals is another part of the puzzle that needs to be addressed.” Prof. Prober discussed how different health care providers have different “scopes of practice or function.” The optimal eficiency of how America delivers care has to do with the balance between what non-physician health care providers do and what physicians do. This is something that must be promoted and executed by clinics and hospitals. If this is taken a step further—such as in the optimal distribution of nurse practitioners, or registered nurses who have advanced training and can perform many of the same duties as primary care doctors—the doctor shortage will have less of an impact in the following years. There should be a better balance between the roles of physicians and non-physician personnel, to maximize health care eficiency to take care of more patients. Qualiied nurse practitioners should also be allowed to have more independence and freedom to treat patients to the fullest of their scope of practice.

55 For a Better Future From the expansion and creation of medical schools to redistribution of physicians in places like rural and inner-city areas, there is a single aim: but taking care of millions of people in the United States that are looking for a healthcare provider who can answer their questions, prescribe medicine, perform a physical exam, vaccinate, and—in short—save their lives. Behind the problem of the doctor shortage are women, children, men, senior citizens, people with disabilities… We, as a nation, cannot afford inaction. Dr. Cooper writes: “To do nothing ignores powerful economic and demographic trends and leaves future generations to ponder why they and their loved ones must experience illness without access to competent and caring physicians.” And now, let us get to work, let us have conversations with our leaders, and let us ask questions. It is time for a better future in health care today. It is time to ix this “invisible problem.”

Oscar A. Leyva (‘17) wants to major in biology and minor in chemistry and statistics. He wants to become a neurosurgeon and an activist for health access in America. He lived in Ecuador for eight years with his missionary family. He currently volunteers at Arbor Clinic (Cardinal Free Clinics) as a medical interpreter and patient navigator.

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Black Boys, Black Feminism and American Education: A Double Book Review by Emma Hartung The American education system often reinforces societal inequity along the lines of race and class, whether through low teacher expectations, schools’ unresponsiveness to K-12 parent demands, or the dominance of white, upper-class cultural norms in college classrooms. Taken together, bell hooks’s Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom (1994) and Pedro Noguera’s The Trouble with Black Boys… And Other Relections on Race, Equity and the Future of Public Education (2009) provide two different yet complementary perspectives on these inequities and how education can maintain or subvert them. In Trouble with Black Boys, Pedro Noguera, currently a Professor of Education at New York University, focuses on K-12 education and the ways in which it fails—and can be built to better serve—black and Latino youth in general, and black and Latino boys in particular. In Teaching to Transgress, bell hooks, currently Professor of English at City College of New York and a widely acclaimed black feminist writer, presents essays on her journey through intellectual spaces as a black feminist and on ways to value all voices in education, with a focus on the intellectual experience of black women. Both authors, who have written more recent works as well, write clearly on a wide range of subjects, citing and engaging in critical discussion with the ideas of other thinkers in the process, including Noguera’s references to our own Dean Claude Steele and Professor Linda Darling-Hammond. In his writing on the personal and political experiences of black and Latino youth

in U.S. K-12 schools, Noguera raises points ranging from the “hidden curriculum” taught by schools’ low expectations of black and Latino students (12), to the dangers of discipline as social control, to the failure of many schools to adequately respect, engage and respond to lowincome black and Latino parents. The concepts may be familiar to readers from prior reading or their own school experiences, but the most compelling parts of Noguera’s writing are the case studies and anecdotes he provides from schools in the Bay Area and elsewhere. These snapshots range from a heartbreaking quote from a principal who already believed that there was “a prison cell in San Quentin waiting for” an eight-year old student (xxi, and again later— Noguera repeats select passages) to success stories of schools with increased student and community involvement, and they bring the issues to life. Additionally, hopeful anecdotes and repeated examples of research-based strategies that schools and teachers can and do use to provide a welcoming, safe and demanding academic environment for all students—with a focus on involving students, parents and communities in the process—provide a concrete alternative to what Noguera describes as the current “ixation with behavior management and social control that outweighs and overrides all other priorities and goals” (113). While I support most of Noguera’s proposals for addressing this “ixation with behavior management,” I’m wary of one alternative that he cites: the concept of “accountability.” While Noguera’s call for increased accountability to parents and

vol. 2, issue 1, winter 2014 communities is essential, his description of public schools as monopolies that can otherwise “afford to operate without regard for the quality of service [they] provide [their] clientele” (208) provides a limited depiction of schools’ incentives. In practice, tying school quality to “the ability of an organization to continue to operate” (209) often leads to school takeover by turn-around programs or charter schools without providing increased voice for parents or communities. Nonetheless, The Trouble with Black Boys provides a compelling personal and political look at the inequities facing black and Latino youth in public K-12 education. As bell hooks highlights in Teaching to Transgress, that struggle for students—especially women, students of color and students from lowincome backgrounds—to stay engaged continues even after they reach institutions of higher education. Her work, written through the lens of her personal experiences as a student, professor and black feminist, highlights that struggle, as well as ways for teachers and students to build a more inclusive and engaging classroom through engaged pedagogy that draws from anticolonial, critical and feminist practices and views the student as an “active participant, not a passive consumer” (14). She draws heavily on Paulo Freire, the Brazilian theorist who promoted education for critical thinking in his famous work Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Like Noguera, she addresses the challenges posed to students of color by stereotyping and teacher discrimination, recalling from her irst desegregated school experience, “The classroom was no longer a

57 place of pleasure or ecstasy. School was still a political place, since we were always having to counter white racist assumptions that we were genetically inferior, never as capable as white peers, even unable to learn… The university and the classroom began to feel more like a prison, a place of punishment and coninement rather than a place of promise and possibility” (4). She also highlights class in the classroom, noting, “Students are often silenced by the means of class values that teach them to maintain order at all costs” (179). The failure of many college classrooms (including, according to hooks, Stanford classrooms during her undergraduate experience) to provide a space that values all students is a less-publicized issue than the struggles of K-12 public education, and hooks highlights it compellingly while also covering a wide range of other subjects related to her experience as a black feminist intellectual. Teaching to Transgress and The Trouble with Black Boys approach education from very different angles, with hooks focusing on the theory and politics of the individual college classroom and person to person discussions while Noguera covers national K-12 issues. Yet they both provide a political view of how far educational spaces need to progress—and are capable of progressing—in order to provide truly engaging educations for all. Together, the works expose the wide range of fronts on which we must ight to ensure that the educational process engages and values the voices of people of all backgrounds.

Emma Hartung is a freshman from New York City. She spent last year mentoring and tutoring 6th and 7th graders with City Year Chicago, and will happily talk with you about education, middle schoolers or Chicago Public Schools all day long. She doesn’t know what she’s doing with her life yet, but she’s sure she’ll be inspired by the folks at STATIC and other awesome student orgs along the way.

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Concerning Ethnic Theme Dorms in a Post-Racial America by Daniel Dominguez The time for Ethnic Theme Dorms has come and gone. In a post-racial America there is no use for such separatist institutions that partition people of certain communities away from others. In 2014, six years after the election of the nation’s irst African-American president, there is no reason to continue having conversations about race at universities, and especially not in university residences. After all, residences are not a place to learn. Who has ever learned anything by living with other people? By intentionally putting students in situations where they have to explore not only their own identities but also those of other students —something else that no one has ever gained much from—the university is wasting its time by using an outdated and unnecessary pedagogical method. It is the equivalent of teaching students arithmetic when calculators are so readily available. Not only is this approach outdated, but the students that attend Stanford have no use for such programs. Students attending the country’s most selective institution of higher education have no need for self-exploration or questioning their identity. Our freshmen know exactly who they are. They did not get this far by having shifting views of themselves. They do not need their residences to ill their heads with questions about their identities or the cultures of others. Residences should be simple: they are places to reside. A bed, roof, desk and bathroom are all they need. Anything else distracts students from their true purpose on campus: getting a degree

that will secure them a lucrative career for the future. All else is superluous. Until now we have discussed in general terms why Ethnic Theme Dorms are breeding grounds for unnecessary questions and thoughts, without naming speciic programs that are undermining Stanford’s sole agenda of pumping out future multi-million-dollar-a-year donors. I must admit that last year I was tricked by all those who still support this program into applying for and accepting a position in one of these dorms. I was assigned to Casa Zapata as an Ethnic Theme Associate and told that it was my job to develop an environment where all residents would be comfortable discussing all aspects of their identity especially through the channels of Latino (they seem to prefer Latin@ for some reason) culture. This position involved having people from all backgrounds, Latino or not, engaging with the culture because it was seen as beneicial to have a diverse group of people interacting. Deep questions were asked, stereotypes were challenged, discussions were had, engagement with a foreign culture occurred, and people were made uncomfortable. All of it was useless. Stanford is a place to sit in lecture, listen attentively, fulill requirements and learn to make money. Students do not pay tuition to be made uncomfortable or interact with others. The classroom is for learning. The residences are for sleeping. The sooner ResEd learns this, the better.

Daniel Dominguez is an undergraduate student pursuing a degree in Political Science and Comparative Literature focusing on Modernist literature from the early 20th century. He was born and raised in Las Vegas, NV. His writing is an attempt to capture the ephemeral allure of the city and its inhabitants. He is happily employed as an Ethnic Theme Associate in Casa Zapata.

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Why Teach? by Kathy Peng “[T]he facilitation of signiicant learning rests upon certain attitudinal qualities that exist in the personal relationship between the facilitator and the learner. […] Perhaps the most basic of these essential attitudes is realness or genuineness. When the facilitator is a real person, being what she is, entering into a relationship with the learner without presenting a front or a façade, she is much more likely to be effective.” -Carl Rogers (1983, p. 121)

A little over two years ago, Ms. Mitteltstet, my high school American literature teacher, passed away from Creutzfeld-Jacob Disease. The diagnosis came unexpectedly, and the illness took her quickly. When I walked into her living room for a visit in late January of 2012, I was unprepared to ind that the lively, witty Ms. Mittelstet of my memory had faded into the alarmingly thin, bedridden, and nonverbal person lying in front of me. And yet, as I approached her bedside, I thought I caught a glimmer of

recognition behind those green eyes. Did she remember the note I had written for her in that holiday card, the one she thanked me for when school resumed in the new semester? Did she know how much her whipsmart humor, love of literature, and ease of being had made an impression on my 17-year-old self? Was it too late to tell her how much of an impact her one life had made on me and everyone around her? I tried—but failed—to be pleasant

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“Why Teach?” continued... company for the other visitors who were also gathered around, in support of her and of each other. Unable to understand how life could change so quickly, unable to accept the truth that lay before me, I sat by her bed and cried. Less than two weeks after my visit, I received an email announcing that she had passed away. The outpouring of love and support for her and her family in the months leading up to her death and at the memorial was overwhelming, even for me as a bystander, to take in. It was incomprehensible, the breadth and depth of the impact she had made on those who had come through her classroom, who had been graced by her presence, who had been challenged by her to grow as students, learners, readers, writers, and people. What I remember most about Ms. Mittelstet was her disarming realness. She was so completely open, genuine, sincere. Whether she was talking to the whole class or conferencing with us individually, there was no guessing as to what Ms. Mittelstet really thought, what she really felt. We knew who she was, we knew what she expected of us, and we knew and felt how much she cared for each and every one of us. It was in the months following Ms. Mittelstet’s death that I had decided to become a teacher. After college, I had spent several years immersed in neuroscience research and soulsearching. Her death made me reevaluate what it was that gave value to a life, gave worth to a career. Relecting on all the people that she had touched in her single lifetime, I wondered about how I wanted to spend my few short decades on Earth. To what greater causes did I want to contribute? How would I want to be remembered when my day came? “…the love of nurturing and observing growth in others is essential to sustaining a life of teaching.” -- Herbert Kohl (1984, p. 5) Before enrolling in the Stanford Teacher

Education Program, I had a few ideas about what teaching—good teaching—looked like. Above all, I believed, it must be student-centered. Good teachers have their students’ best interests in mind and foster an environment that allows for their students’ natural curiosities to lourish. In these past three months, I have also come to appreciate how good teaching is planful yet playful, directional yet lexible. The teacher makes many decisions in advance--from the arrangement of student desks, to the selection of books in the classroom library, to the learning objectives of a lesson--but she also has the deep understanding of pedagogical content knowledge and a responsiveness to the needs of her students that are required to make decisions in real-time--dwelling on a topic that the class is struggling with or following student interests into unfamiliar intellectual waters--and knowing when to deviate from the original curricular map. An overarching goal for me as a teacher is to facilitate the development of deep conceptual understanding across subject areas and to cultivate productive, prosocial habits of mind, heart, and body. My vision is that, through daily practice of critical thinking and socioemotional skills, my students will equip themselves to live intentional lives of meaning and engagement. When I made the decision to become a teacher, I knew that I was drawn towards nurturing and observing the continual processes of change and growth in people. I wanted to facilitate cognitive, social, and emotional development of whole persons. And in that facilitation, I knew that I would change and be changed as well. More recently, I have also recognized how teaching, in creating communities of learners that enrich and give back to the larger communities in which they are enveloped, can allow my students and me to work towards constructing a more equitable society. The most compelling reason to teach, however, is that it brings me joy. I delight in

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the process of connecting with and developing relationships with students, understanding their inner worlds, reading their writing, hearing their stories, appreciating their questions, being moved by their humanity. I welcome the challenge of being a real, vulnerable, human being across all areas of my life; of leaning into my weaknesses and building upon my strengths; of taking risks, stretching, failing, persevering, and growing alongside my students; and of discovering that which lights the ire inside each individual. Ms. Mittelstet, I just want to say that I was

61 thinking about you this week. Through your ways of being and teaching, you were the irst person to help me identify and verbalize that quality, that realness, that has characterized all of the most inluential teachers in my life. By “entering into a relationship with the learner without presenting a front or a façade,” you facilitated my development as a whole person. What does it mean to live “a life of teaching,” observing and nurturing the growth of people, year after year, always new, always changing? I look forward to living into the answer.

Kathy Peng is a master’s student in the Stanford Teacher Education Program, studying elementary education. Born in China and raised in the Bay Area, Kathy studied neurobiology at Yale and spent the last few years working in various research labs at Stanford, trying to igure out what she wanted to do with her life. She feels fortunate to have come to the decision of teaching, which she sees as a satisfying way of having a direct, positive impact on individuals, communities, and society. She is especially interested in social/emotional development, student-centered teaching, and self-directed learning. In her free time, Kathy enjoys singing, cooking, practicing yoga, and wandering around farmer’s markets (sometimes on rollerblades). She looks forward to having her own classroom for the irst time in the fall, hopefully somewhere in the South Bay/ Peninsula area.

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Eugenics at Stanford by Sammie Wills so rampant that some 60,000 Americans were The modern American Eugenics sterilized, thousands were barred from marriage, movement started in the early 1900’s as a and numbers were further segregated in pseudoscience that aimed to improve and purify “colonies,” subjected to terrible tortures of which the human race for future generations. In real we have not yet found the full details. talk, it was a science that excused racism and Once again, this all seems extreme, even that worked to wipe out those who had dysgenic, if a few scientists used some wack-indings or lawed, non-Nordic traits. Proponents of to back it up. TRU, but those scientists were eugenics attempted to accomplish purity with backed not only by marriage restrictions, theories, but by moneysegregation, and -money speciically forced sterilization. from corporate That seems philanthropists like the like a real extreme Carnegie Institution, the thing to just pop into Rockefeller Foundation, American dialogue and the Harriman though, doesn’t Railroad fortune. The it? The principles Carnegie Institution of Eugenics stem installed a lab at back to scientists Cold Spring Harbor Galton and Pearson, that kept records of who studied the hundreds of ordinary upperclasses of Americans, in order to Europe and deduced give researchers the that the wealthy were afforded their Photo by American Philosophical Society information to plan for the sterilization and social positions due segregation of entire families and bloodlines. to a certain “genetic makeup.” Around this time, The Rockefeller Foundation helped to found and studies of heredity by Gregor Mendel took hold fund the German Eugenics program, and even of the United States, and talks of genomes and assisted in educating and giving further money nature were prevalent in academic settings. to scientists like Josef Mengele. Charities were This science offered a glimmer of hope--a glimmer of progress, during a period of American given space to participate too, thanks to the help of the Harriman Railroaders. Harriman paid local history struck by “social and moral decay.” groups like the New York Bureau of Industries Folks everywhere were struggling with the postand Immigration to seek out Jewish, Italian, and reconstruction class, and aggressive racial other New York immigrants to conine them and conlict was frequent. Galton’s base theories of hold them for sterilization. eugenics were appropriated into repressive and Corporate “philanthropists” also helped racist ideologies used to ight “feeblemindedness” to support new organizations, like the American and prevent the decline of American civilization. Breeders Association. The American Breeders The eugenics movement grew out of fear. Association was put in place to “investigate Ultimately, the eugenics movement ran

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Nazis later quoted this ruling as part of their and report on heredity in the human race, defense in the Nuremberg trials. and emphasize the value of superior blood Further, the ABA speciically created and the menace to society of inferior blood.” a Committee on Eugenics to report on the Organizations like ABA put out reports such as national state of the movement. Within that the “Preliminary Report of the Committee of committee was Alexander Graham Bell, who the Eugenic Section of the American Breeder’s spoke fondly of the goal of Eugenics, stating Association to Study and to Report on the Best that, “The subject you have entrusted to your Practical Means for Cutting Off the Defective Committee on Eugenics is of transcendent Germ-Plasm in the Human Population” (okay, importance to mankind. If it is true that “the lengthy title), which came up with concrete steps proper study of mankind is man,” no higher or to ensure depletion of those deemed “unit.” I’m nobler subject of research can be found.” Bell all about action items and strategic planning, but stood on this committee with other scientists, and this list included ideas such as lethal chambers, more notably, some recognizable names from used to terminate multiple unit people at the Stanford’s history. Stanford has unimaginable ties same time. Sounds eerily familiar. Most people to Eugenics studies and found that too extreme, its practitioners. Let’s take so the committee a walk across campus to decided to focus on the see what we ind. initiatives of sterilization and segregation. 1. David Starr Jordan These initiatives David Starr Jordan were backed by was the irst president powerful individuals: of Stanford University. professors, scientists, In addition to his war veterans, foundational work as politicians, other white president, Jordan was dudes, etc. Academics also a well known peace widely supported Jordan Hall, Main Quad activist. He was the Eugenics as well--by Photo by Stanford Affective Psychophysiology Group president of the World 1928, there were 376 Peace Foundation from university courses 1910 to 1914. He was strongly against wars of that included the beneits of Eugenics, reaching imperialism and he argued war was detrimental over 20,000 students. Even the U.S. Supreme to humans. Awesome! Oh wait. Court endorsed some aspects of the eugenics He argued war was detrimental to the movement. The 1927 Supreme Court case of human species because it killed off the strongest, Buck v. Bell legitimized the forced sterilization most it organisms from the gene pool. War of patients at a Virginia mental clinic. Supreme destroyed our most valuable persons--that’s why Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes is quoted, it was wrong. saying: “It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unit from continuing their kind . . . Three generations of imbeciles are enough.”

“Society must protect itself; as it claims the right to deprive the murderer of his life so it may also annihilate the hideous serpent of hopelessly vicious protoplasm. Here is where appropriate legislation will aid in eugenics and creating a healthier, saner society in the future.” - David Starr Jordan

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“Eugenics at Stanford” continued... prohibit in every State in the Union the marriage Jordan was the Chairman of the Committee of Eugenics. As stated, the committee of the physically, mentally and morally unit. If we take a plant which we recognize as formed as a collaboration between the American poisonous and cross it with another which is Breeders Association and the Immigration not poisonous and thus make the wholesome Restriction League. In 1902, Jordan authored plant evil, so it menaces all who come in contact the book “Blood of the Nation,” in which he with it, this is criminal enough. But supposed declared that human qualities like talent and poverty were passed through blood. He declared we blend together two poisonous plants and make a third even more virulent, and set their that “low ideals in education are developed by evil descendants adrift to multiply over the earth, inferior men.” Although he studied zoology, most are we not distinct foes of his writing was to the race? What, then, not too scientiic or shall we say of two people inaccessible. Instead, of absolutely deined he used storytelling physical impairment who as a means of are allowed to marry providing reasoning for and rear children? It is a eugenicist thinking. crime against the state Just as involved and every individual in as any modern the state. And if these Stanford student, physically degenerate are Jordan was part of also morally degenerate, another organization, the crime becomes all the the Human Betterment Frosh Dorm, Stern Hall more appalling.” - Luther Foundation. The Photo by Residential and Dining Enterprises Burbank HBF was a California based organization He didn’t just write about fruits and founded in 1928 to ensure that compulsory lowers. Burbank constantly worked to reine sterilization laws were known about and being his plants, and he had the same vision in mind completed. David Starr Jordan was on the initial for humans, insisting that when the necessary board of trustees for the HBF. crossing has been done, we must now focus on the work of “elimination” and “reining” until we 2. Luther Burbank get “an ultimate product that should be the inest Another buddy of Jordan was Luther race ever known.” Charming. Burbank. Burbank was also a member of the Committee of Eugenics, and an “honorary 3. Lewis Terman member” of the ABA. Dedicatedly a horticulturist (note: Lewis Terman is the irst Terman. His son and plant breeder, Burbank was acclaimed for Frederick Terman is credited with spurring the his love of daisies, plums, and children. He growth of SIlicon Valley, and is a different man.) made many strides in the ield of botany and he Around the same time that Jordan and published many books, including the 1907 book, Burbank were gallivanting around with their “Training the Human Plant,” in which Burbank Eugenics-based books, Lewis Terman became a said: pioneer in educational psychology. He became a prominent igure at the Graduate School of “It would, if possible, be best absolutely to

vol. 2, issue 1, winter 2014 Education for his revision of the Binet-Simon IQ test and for his studies on gifted children. Terman is widely known as a prominent Eugenicist for these studies, and he even went on to become a member of the Human Betterment Foundation with Jordan. The Binet-Simon test originated in France as a way to detect children with “subnormal mental abilities.” Terman published his own revisions of this test in 1916, and it became known as the “Stanford-Binet Test.” Terman’s aimed to use the revision to not only look for “subnormal” children, but also for highachieving ones. In “The Measurement of Intelligence,” Terman reported some preliminary indings:

65 to colleges. Because of the Stanford-Binet test, large, standardized tests that measured intelligence became popular. Before, it was the IQ test. Now, it’s tests like the SAT and ACT. The SAT was irst administered in 1926, as an attempt to eliminate the test bias of different socio-economic background. Unfortunately, the SAT test drew on a multitude of IQ test principles, and was (and is) still criticized for cultural bias towards the white and wealthy. And these standardized tests are still requirements at many colleges, like Stanford.

4. Ellwood Patterson Cubberley Speaking of the Graduate School of Education and Terman, the person who hired Terman himself was “High-grade or borderEllwood Patterson line deiciency... is Cubberley. Cubberley very, very common was stunningly inluential among Spanish-Indian in the ield of educational and Mexican families administration. He of the Southwest and worked to professionalize also among negroes. Terman Fountain teaching administration, Their dullness seems Photo by Roger Chen - Stanford Daily complete with textbooks to be racial, or at and pedagogical tools and least inherent in the university classes. During his time as an educator family stocks from which they come... Children and as a Dean of the Stanford Graduate School of this group should be segregated into separate of Education, Cubberley saw education as a tool classes... They cannot master abstractions but of “social engineering.” Bringing business values they can often be made into eficient workers... to education, Cubberley wanted to push schools from a eugenic point of view they constitute a to strive to maximize eficiency and product. grave problem because of their unusually proliic Cubberley didn’t see education as a tool of equity breeding.” - Lewis Terman or justice, but rather as a tool to perpetuate the success of the it. According to Cubberley, Terman’s IQ test and subsequent ideas those with “degenerate traits” were not going to worked to discourage people with low IQ scores make it, regardless of education level. Findings from having children and getting access to from friends like Terman, and from bosses and important positions and education. But, the colleagues like Jordan and Burbank, backed up truth of the matter is that these IQ tests were this assertion. not reliable forms of assessment, they were not In 1933, when Cubberley retired as dean, culturally appropriate, and they were based in he gave the Graduate School of Education Eugenics. $367,199 to be used for the new School of The impact of the original IQ tests still Education building. 5 years later, in 1938, the affects Stanford and most-anyone else applying

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“Eugenics at Stanford” continued... campus. With events building was named such as Debra after the man himself. Satz’s Workshop on The Graduate Poverty, Inequality, School of Education, and Education, as well as Jordan and dialogues such Hall, Burbank Hall, as Courageous and Terman Fountain Conversations’ (and probably other Workshop on places), are founded Interracial Dialogue in the beliefs of the and Promoting Racial American Eugenics Equity in Schools, the movement. These Graduate School of buildings are Education is actively named after men that believed that Cubberley, Stanford Graduate School of Education working towards intelligent, strong, Photo by Stanford Graduate School of Education educational access and equity. The folks wealthy people were within the school have taken the institution placed all of those things purely because of (typically Nordic) genetics, and they were inherently better around them and they’ve used its resources, funding, and amazing thinkers to create because of heredity itself. Anyone who didn’t programing and discussions. Workshops on it the image of an ideal person was “unit” and poverty and inequality may not have passed with should not carry on a lineage. Terman and Cubberley, but now they are opening doors for justice and opportunity. When I irst learned about all of these Knowing about Eugenics might make you things, I was outraged. It was infuriating enough angry. I am still angry. But knowing our histories to realize that the American Eugenics movement and knowing our roots can empower us to ensure was never taught to me in high school history that terrible legacies are always stopped but class, but then I had to realize that Stanford’s never forgotten. David Starr Jordan always used strong ties to Eugenics were not immediately storytelling to promote his eugenicist thought. apparent, either. Something so terrible, so inluential, was seemingly hidden from everyone. I want to use storytelling to show images of humanity and advocacy. It made me hella angry. The impacts of eugenics can still be seen But, knowing the history of the institutions in this country, in California, and in this University. around me means that I can reclaim those spaces. Stanford’s Graduate School of Education Can you see the everlasting ties? And if so, how can we further inform and encourage ourselves is a supreme example. Although it was a place and others to not fall into the same traps? established on elitist rhetoric, it is now arguably one of the most outwardly liberal places on Sammie Wills is a sophomore majoring in Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity. She is a queer Hapa, striving to serve the people and crush the patriarchy. She has an uneven, asymmetrical haircut that represents the inequality she ights against. She wants to get you to talk about the intersections of your race, sexuality, gender, and class. She’ll even make you tea or coffee while you tell your story.

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“I don’t want to be that kid…”: The Road (So Far) to Becoming a Teacher by Van Anh Tran When I irst came to Stanford, I fully intended to focus on my academics. I had been admitted to Stanford, after all--a university that touted academic excellence and limitless opportunities. While there was much to be gained from the theory that my classes presented, analyzed, and dissected, I just felt more connected to the events, the people, and the work of the campus community centers. I found fulillment in these on-campus organizations and, through them, eventually ventured off campus into organizations that allowed me to ground my work in the real world. With these organizations, I was able to learn about my community, my history, and my activism against the backdrop of the institutions in which they developed. I explored my identity and learned about the world in ways that I would never have been able to learn from a professor. So, of the many life-changing, pathaltering moments I have experienced outside of the classroom, I never thought that one of the most inluential moments would occur while in one. I was standing before 12 of my peers in a windowless classroom in Wallenberg, some of whom I knew from very different contexts, when I began my current endeavor to enter the teaching profession. I was about to lead the irst session of a ten-week course on Asian American identity and activism in preparation for an Alternative Spring Break trip and I had no idea what I was doing. Before leading the trip, I had felt that I had plateaued in my thinking around my own racial and ethnic identity. Facilitating the course and the subsequent trip demonstrated how raising awareness about particular issues, especially while having community voices as pivotal in the education process, allowed me to participate in a collaborative effort to reshape the frameworks

in which I operated. Without me realizing it, my peers whom I had been “leading” on this trip had given me the opportunity to not only share information, but to rethink the way I was presenting the information and to really relect on why I wanted to share the information in the irst place. After the trip, I saw that not only were the participants able to learn something from the course, but they also felt empowered to act on the knowledge they had gained. I knew, then, that this is what I wanted to do as a career: teach. Determined, inspired, and empowered, I entered a teacher education program hoping to gain the pedagogical tools and experience necessary to prepare me to enter the ield of education. My initial goal in entering the teaching profession was to affect not only how students view themselves and their personal histories, but how they relate these stories to the world around them. In addition to creating a space where all stories are equally valued, I saw teaching as a transformative tool for social change. I saw teaching as a means of addressing equity. And seeing as my racial identity had informed much of my undergraduate career, I had hoped to bring my experiences into graduate school and learn how to integrate what I had learned with the different theory and skills that the program would provide. I soon realized, however, that this process of integration between the knowledge and experiences that I had acquired from undergrad-not to mention the years it had taken to reconcile my various identities--with my new graduate environment would be anything but seamless. I began to see that my identity--particularly my racial one--was all but invisible in the rhetoric of my new classes. In classes that attempted to address equity, I felt that Asian Americans were

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“I don’t want to be that kid...” continued... Jaden Harris is a 9th grader who not acknowledged. In the few times that Asian immediately caught my attention during the irst Americans were mentioned, I saw data that week of school when he mentioned in a passing was not disaggregated representing the model conversation that a teacher from middle school minority myth that I had long ago believed had had treated him differently due to his race. Before been dispelled. Most lumped all Asian American this moment, Jaden had not called very much subgroups together under the banner of “Asian” attention to himself. About a week into the school and indicated that we were doing just ine (even year, I had approached Jaden’s group in History better than most). class as they sifted through a set of primary In short, the identity and awareness that sources. Jaden went on to relate a story about had taken years to develop felt suffocated by how his teacher had stereotype threat in the form of I BEGAN TO RECOGNIZE THAT AS MUCH prevented him from entering the classroom assumptions I felt AS I WANTED TO AND WOULD ADVOuntil he had wiped his others may or may CATE FOR MY STUDENTS, MY GOAL IS shoes on a mat while not have been ALSO TO EMPOWER THEM TO BE AN others in his class did making about me AGENT IN THEIR LIVES AND ADVOCATE not have to do so. I due to my race. was caught off guard I did not care by the situation and did whether my fears not know how to respond. I immediately began were real or imagined; it mattered simply that wondering why Jaden chose to identify race as the feelings existed. But I said nothing. I hated the reason why he may have been mistreated. I, the thought of being the token voice, being seen then, looked up from the group and realized that as the representative of my community. I stayed Jaden was the only Black boy in the class—the silent when someone made an uncomfortable only Black person, in fact. I began to wonder comment about how “Asians were doing so whether Jaden was aware of this as well and well in school” and how “we don’t need to then wondered how he could possibly not be. worry about them.” I bit my tongue every time I began having more conversations someone talked about the needs of “black and brown communities” and how these communities with Jaden, both formally and informally, and learned that he was a very self-aware young continue to suffer systematic oppression man. Jaden’s self-awareness became apparent while completely ignoring the Asian American when he was hesitant to bring up particular demographic. I was so afraid that if I had said issues of race during class. Race is a topic of something, others may have thought, “Well, of particular interest to Jaden and he will bring up course she would bring it up. She’s Asian.” race in relation to whatever topic we are currently I felt this way for quite some time, but working on. He is careful, however, to talk to me found solace in the relationships that I was individually and not in front of the whole class. building with my students while I was teaching. When I had pressed Jaden as to why he My teacher education program gave me the was hesitant to talk about particular racial issues, unique opportunity to teach as well as be a he explained to me that many of the students student in order to apply what we learned in the in our class are white. The co-teacher for the program. I alternate between attending Stanford class is also white and he did not want to offend courses and teaching a 9th grade Modern World anyone by asking about race. Jaden explained History class. And this is where I met Jaden that he did not want the white members of the Harris.

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vol. 2, issue 1, winter 2014 class to feel that he was racist. He hated having conversations in history about leaders and about nations while ignoring entire populations of people. But he still kept silent. “I don’t want them to think that I’m bring it up because I’m Black. I don’t want to be that kid,” Jaden told me. “And what’s wrong with being that kid? What does being that kid mean?” I replied. But I knew exactly what Jaden meant. I felt the same way in my own program. Jaden’s internal struggle so closely mirrored my own that it was almost eerie. In this moment of connection, I realized that as a teacher, my job is to advocate for my students. How could I encourage Jaden to problematize discussions, bring in his own experiences, and speak up, if I was not doing so myself? My initial goal in becoming a teacher,

69 after all, had been to provide a space for my students’ stories to emerge and ensure that their stories are valued equally. I began to recognize that as much as I wanted to and would advocate for my students, my goal is also to empower them to be an agent in their lives and advocate for themselves. If I wanted this for my students, then I should also want it for myself. To this day, what keeps me going as a student and as a teacher is reclaiming the voice to which all are entitled-reclaiming the voice that is rightfully ours. And I think I’ve come to learn that what being “that kid” means is knowing that you are making a valuable contribution; being “that kid” is knowing and trusting that you have something worthwhile to say.

Van Anh Tran is currently a graduate student in the Stanford Teacher Education Program. After joining the Stanford Asian American Activism Committee (SAAAC) and working with inspiring community organizations both in the Bay Area and LA, Van Anh has developed a passion for community building and community organizing within the many communities at Stanford and beyond. She hopes to encourage her students to become involved in their communities and to take action!

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No Such Thing As Social Studies by Mark Flores If you ask me what I learned in school I will tell you I learned math equations I have forgotten and the atoms that make up a person. I will not say that a person is more than carbon or the measure of a man is not found in grams because experience does not register on a scale. I will tell you vision begins at the retina and ends at the optic disk you will tell me that 20/20 is just a number and I am are blind if I see people as carbon

I want to cry “teach me, teach me” with one hand on the S-A-T you show me yours tied in knots handcuffed to policy policy policy I will pretend there was nothing because the only thing I learned in school is that people have blind spots and many ways to forget things they cannot see.

Mark Flores is a sophomore double majoring in English and Human Biology, or in other words, is majoring in “no free time.” He enjoys long walks at night when he can openly talk to himself without being judged too much and spends the majority of his time on Facebook trying to discern the secrets of the terribly interesting lives of his friends (a work forever still in progress). In the future, he’d like to become an author, which he openly admits is a euphemism for “professional liar,” and relishes the opportunity to continue to make things up.

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