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NEWS
The observer | MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 20, 2021 | ndsmcobserver.com
SMC Office for the Common Good rebranded By CRYSTAL RAMIRES Associate News Editor
This semester, the Office for the Common Good (OCG) is back with community-based and civically engaging campus initiatives, but with a new name. The office, formally known as the Office for Social and Civic Engagement, is a unique resource center, which exists for the Saint Mary’s College community, including students faculty and staff. OCG works specifically on service and advocacy both on campus and within the South Bend community. The office has led annual initiatives such as SMC Votes, which aims at increasing voter turnout and engaging young Americans. OCG director Rebekah Go said this is not the first time the office has seen a name change. This is the fourth time the office
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of California voter approval but wasn’t implemented due to an unconstitutional ruling. Jacobson pinpoints Proposition 187 as “a turning point in racial politics” because it became a “code for a certain racialized form of anti-immigrant lawmaking.” Jacobson’s interviews with supporters of Proposition 187 show that nativists “easily move back and forth between
has “rebranded,” she said. The office was founded in 1991, and it was officially started as a student organization, with no professional staffing at all. Go noted that it was not until later that the office became staffed and officially made the Office for Social and Civic Engagement. Now, 20 years later, the office is facing another change. Rebekah spoke to the purpose and meaning behind the name change in addition to what she hopes this rebranding will bring to the office. “One of the major contributing ideas to sort of why we are rebranding, is because of the lack of clarity of what our office does to both students and other campus partners, like faculty and staff and as well to the community,” Go said. Go elaborated more on the lack of clarity between the office and those it serves in addition to the process of rebranding.
“People weren’t clear about what we did, and so Kris [assistant director of the Office for the Common Good] and myself met with our Interim VP Molly Gower starting in February of the spring 2021 to talk about clarifying our mission and vision,” Go said. “And as a result of those conversations, we decided to rebrand the whole office. A lot of what we decided wasn’t changing actually the programming aspects of what we do, not a lot from the student [side] of things will change. It is just a name change, but it does help us to know where our primary focus is versus what other offices on campus are doing… through that clarification,” she said. In further discussion of the name change, Go discussed the language behind the common good — how it is specifically Catholic but also how it is understood by people who are
not Catholic. “Know that what we do is [that] we are working towards promoting things that benefit all people… so it is kind of this idea of all ships rising, but that means that we are always working on things that will benefit all people… so we aren’t just doing it for some but it is because we believe what is good in this world should be enjoyed by all in this world,” Go said. The office rebranding has been in effect since the start of the fall semester, and Go said she has found the rebranding to be received well and has served the purpose she hoped it would. While the office is undergoing a name change, their initiatives have not changed much, with a couple of new programs and initiatives kicking off this fall, one of which is the Faith in the Vaccine movement. “We have lots of stuff going on,… Faith in the Vaccine is a specific
initiative [within] the community with faith leaders to promote vaccine access and encourage people who may be vaccine-hesitant to get the vaccine,” Go said. “It actually started in the summer. We received a grant to run the program and we really quickly had to hire eight vaccine ambassadors. So we were really fortunate to get a lot of applications for the ambassador positions… and we ended up being able to sort of narrow it down to Saint Mary’s students and one recent grad,” Go said. The office is working on many more initiatives this semester. Go said the OCG is hopeful this rebranding helps students better understand the mission of the office and engage with other office initiatives, programs, and opportunities.
‘undocumented immigrants’, ‘Latino’, and ‘Mexican’. “They’re interchangeable terms,” she said. “[They] can’t possibly know a person’s documentation status. All they see is brown skin and hear Spanish.” This aspect, Jacobson argues, is what makes Proposition 187 and other anti-immigration laws racialized issues. As immigration has become an increasingly polarized issue, the use of racialized language has become more aggressive. Jacobson discusses “dog whistles” which she
uses to describe “implicit racial appeals - ones that could be made with plausible deniability to talking about race.” This covert “color-blind conservatism” has now shifted into overt racism. Durham mentions a woman’s comment from Jacobson’s book, which discussed the implications of racism. “She said in response to her own defense of Proposition 187, ‘If this makes me a racist, fine. I don’t care. I’m here to defend my country,’” the book said. Jacobson attributes this shift
from covert to overt racism — from the dog whistle to the whistle — to the intensifying political polarization in the United States and the work of activists and scholars in “naming implicit racism.” Students pointed out that during COVID-19, they perceived “a shift in the way that we talk about and think about immigrants.” Durham says students “felt this was a moment in which there was still anti-immigrant sentiment and it was pretty explicit, but that we found new groups to be angry with and new groups to target with bias.” Jacobson claims that “the racial dynamics are pretty similar,” between nativists and their targets,
regardless of if they are Latino or Asian. This changing target of anti-immigration sentiment towards Asian Americans and Asian immigrants may suggest that that anti-immigration is more of a racial issue than a documentation issue. If students, faculty, alumni or Notre Dame fans are interested in hearing more from upcoming speakers at the “Building an Anti-Racist Vocabulary” lecture series, they can register online at https://klau.nd.edu/initiatives/ building-an-anti-racist-vocabulary/.
Thomas
Court does] anything other than our job.” Another student asked whether Thomas believed more “regular” Americans should read court opinions. Thomas explained the primary audience is his “fellow citizens,” and clerks work to make the opinions more readable. He recalled one instance that touched him when a man ran up to him and asked him to sign one of Thomas’ court opinions. Throughout the lecture, Thomas emphasized the importance of always seeing the best of people and being careful with assumptions. “We just seem like we keep dividing stuff into subcategories of differences and emphasizing those differences. So, I think you look for the good in the people around you, even if others around you don’t do things properly, you still try to do it,” Thomas said. To close off the lecture, Thomas shared words of wisdom for any student interested in the legal world. “Do not lose sight of what’s good and good people,” Thomas said. “We’ve gotten to a point in society where we’re really good at finding something that separates us from others.”
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progress of the nation. “There are many more of us that, I think, feel that America is not so broken, as it is adrift at sea,” he said. While Thomas was speaking, two audience members protested by standing up in the auditorium with signs that said, “I stand with Anita Hill.” Hill was a former employee of Thomas who accused him of sexual harassment during his 1991 confirmation hearing. The protestors were removed from the room shortly after standing up with their signs for half of the lecture. After the protestors were escorted out, Thomas took audience questions during a moderated Q&A. One student asked if there were times Thomas has had conflicting interests between his Catholic faith and the legal cases he was required to resolve, which Thomas said was difficult to navigate. “There are some things that conflicted very strongly with my personal opinion, my policy preference, and that was very, very hard, particularly early on,” he said. “I don’t think a single person will ever tell you that [the Supreme
Contact Crystal Ramires at cramires01@saintmarys.edu
Contact Claire Lyons at clyons3@nd.edu
Contact Helina Kassa at hkassa@nd.edu
