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February 2004

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THE NEW JouRNAL

TheNewJournal

Volume 36, Number 3 February 2004

FEATURES

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Scanners A Yale School ofMedicine program revolutionizes the art ofdiagnosis.

by David Zax

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After the Gold rush Who stands to lose when a New Haven bank goes public.

by Flora Lichtman

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Strangers Among Us The Yale Police Department wrestles with allegations ofracial profiling.

by Paige Austin

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The Road Less Traveled Helping the mentally ill survive a biased justice system.

by Romy Drucker

o=XIl..:::

STANDARDS .

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Editon' Note

5 Points of Departure 12

Shots in the Dade Kids in the Mall by Alexandra Bevan

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Essay: Dancer in the Dark by Emily Coatts

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The Critical Angle: East, West by Rachel Khong

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Endnote: Swing Set by Sarah Laskow

Tttt Nw JoutNAL is published ~rimes during the academic: year by Tttt NEW }OUilNAI. at Yak, Inc., P.O. Box J4J1 Yale Station, New Haven. CT o6s>o. Office address: 19-4S Broadway. Phont: (10J) 4J1· '9S7· Email: mj~e.edu. All contena copyright 100} by Tm NEW }OUilNAI. at Yale, Inc. All Righa Rcserwd. Reproduction either in whole or in pan without wrirren permission of abe publish« and editor in chief u prohibited. While this magazine is publuhed by Yale College students, Yale Univu.iay u noc responsible for ia contents. ~n thousand five hundred copies of each issue a~ distributed free to members of the Yale and New Haven community. Subscriptions a~ available to those ouaide the area. Rates: One )UI', sa8. Two yan. $JL Ttt& NEW JouRNAL is printed by Turley Publications, Palm<r, MA; bookkeeping and billing servias are provided by Colman Bookkeeping of New Haven. Ttu NEW JouRNAL encourages kttea to the editor and comments on Yale and New Haven issues. Write ro Editori:ols, }431 Yale Starion, New Haven, CT o6s>o. All lettea for publication mwt indude addras and signarure. We reserve the right to edit all letters for publication.

In the post-September 11 era, the kinds of stories we tend to herald as good news so often s~em cursory treatments of the same, tired topics: victory abroad, stability at home, the growth of the economy, the absence of upartisan bickering" from the halls of Congress. They are not so much news as a rehashing of what has already come to pass.

This issue of The New journal attempts¡ to take an unconventional approach to journalism. Our writers have sought out stories still very much unresolved and uncertain: The potential boycott of a city's last community-owned bank, racial profiling in the Yale Police Department, the plight of the mentally ill in the American justice system. The aim of these articles has been not simply to uncover aspects of society typically ignored, but to cast fresh, critical light on so-called "old news." They raise questions not so much with the goal of providing answers, but of catalyzing debate and challenging entrenched assumptions.

None of this is to say that news cannot be optimistic. As these pages have tried to show, we believe the lenses of struggle and conflict reveal the potential for a future far more inspiring than an easy contentment with the status quo.

-The Editors

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THE NEW JouRNAL

Hide and Seek I SWING OPEN THE HEAVY DOOR to Bingham's eighth floor library and find myself in a pitch dark room. A boy in thick glasses emerges, his eyes squinting at the sudden break of light. "What are you doing here?" he demands, pulling back his black hood. The boy looks at me as if I am an intruder and explains that he is about to hold a secret meeting. If I want to stay, I wiU have to hide. I squirm behind a mahogany shelf that sags under the weight of neglected antique books. Suddenly, the lights flicker on and, through a crack in the woodwork, I see a somber procession of students. They grab chairs and plop into leather couches, all the while murmuring in hushed voices. They stare expectandy at a boy in a snappy suit. He clears his throat and surveys the room.

"Welcome,• he booms, "to the first meeting of the Yale Society for the Exploration of Campus Secrets, or YSECS." He introduces himself co the expectant recruits as James•, the club's CEO or Chief Exploration Officer, and goes on co present the YSECS elite with a sweep of his arm: the cheery girl to his right is his Chief Investigative Accomplice; at her side sits the Chief Information Officer; last comes the obligatory Foreign Minister, an enthusiastic southerner named Jed.• YSECS, which James founded in October of 2.003, is a club seemingly like any other, dean-approved and registered with the Undergraduate Funding Committee. In acruality, the society is a highly organiud coalition of"elite Campus Explorers," who embark on expeditions in groups of two to four seeking to uncover the secrets of Yale's labyrinthine campus.

The society convenes bi-weekly at the group's home base, a "temple• discovered

FEBRUARY 2.004

by the group just weeks after the meeting I witnessed. It is here that YSECS houses its "tome," a book which contains a chronological .record of their findings, complete with digital photographs and explanations

ment of Silliman, if you go past the high voltage door there's this wall that's way older than the rest of Silliman, and then there's this door." Members do not seem put off by such strange modes of entry. For

of how to reach each "secret" location.

Access to this vast wealth of knowledge is by far the greatest perk to being a society member. Of course, membership is restricted. Every inductee must be approved by the board and, most importandy, by the CEO--which basically means that James gets co decide who is in and who is out.

Once he bestows his approval, the inductee must then "go through a brief rirual., of being "blindfolded and led co a secret location."

In addition to their temple, YSECS has discovered recessing bookshelves, overlooked alcoves, hidden chapels, and covert passageways. Explorations have yielded both a crawl space in the $illiman basement that accesses almost every entry way and a secret staircase in the green room of Sterling that leads to an alcove. A curious librarian abetted the discovery of the staircase, while the Silliman Tunnel was discovered through shadier methods. An exmember describes the route: "In the base-

example, to enter the Bingham library that first night, the boy in glasses had ingeniously duct-taped a condom to the doorframe to keep ic from locking. Although James officially denies it, ex-members claim that the club was once interested in lockpicking. Jed, now the former foreign minister, reports that the club once discussed buying a fifty dollar "lock-picking machine." The board, according to Jed, even wenc so far as to post pictures of campus doors whose locks they encouraged their members to pick. Jack*, another exmember, says morale has falJen since he left. He was the only one who could pick locks. Whenever they needed to be somewhere they shouldn't be, they would ask him. According to Jack, the members ignored their own official policy to follow Yale's regulations. "If we needed to get in there, we'd get in. Just don't get caught, they said.· While the prospect of lock-picking and duet-taping may deter some freshmen

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from joining, YSECS members should rest assured that the society is nothing if not prepared. Induction night isn't the only prerequisite to membership; inductees must also sign a release of liability waiver.

The club is overwhelmingly bureaucratic, and most of the dropouts were disappointed with the business-savvy formality of a club they felt should have focused on the thrill of exploring. But James does not seem put off by the steep dropout rate; he says it has allowed a "solid core" to emerge.

Jack, eschewing this core, dropped out because "it was really boring," while Jed, the smiley former Foreign Minister, withdrew because of "board meetings that were an hour and a half every week, where we just talked about different places to explore without going out and exploring." It turns out that James' self-appointed title of Chief Exploration Officer is more literal than one might think. During that first meeting, while his cohorts remained seated, James appeared to be acting out some business school fantasy. Brian,* a bitter Bingham resident, describes James as a fascist bureaucrat: "I see [the group] line up single file outside Bingham, wearing black.

Uames] yells at them all the time to get straighter, to get in a straighter line. And they're all wearing all black and he's carrying a briefcase."

Ex-members reduce the group to simply the "secret society for freshmen," a mixture of Harry Potter, Hardy Boys, and Star Wars paranoia. (The group's website www.yale.edu/ysecs bears the phrase "Explore, Padawan. ") When I asked James why he loves exploring, he answered, "I am constantly amazed by the cool factor ... There's a satisfaction to finding something cool."

Though YSECS may be struggling to hold on to its members, it has managed to captivate more onlookers than it has inductees. At the same time that James is revealing secrets, he is constructing his own. As much as he decries the exclusivity at Yale, his project is its greatest embodiment. The rest of us may not want to sit thiough tedious board meetings, but we're

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not above hankering after the website password or the secret tome, if only to assure ourselves that we're not missing anything.

-Adriane Quinlan *all names have been changed

Un-Sweet Sensation You MAY HAVE SEEN IT at Durfee's: the bottle with the block-lettered "T" wirhin which hides a symbol, design, or character.

The more saccharine varieties showcase labels that read "A Tad Sweer." Turn the bottle, and on the back of the label, you will find a caffeine comparison to coffee.

Where you might exp~ct to find an ingredients list, there is instead a paragraph describing the tea's complex brewing process and the source of its rare leaves. You might read about chamomile tea leaves, &om a Guatemalan farming co-operative or Haarlem Honeybrush leaves &om a subsistence farming community in South A&ica. Above the nutritional facts is a postscript, which varies according to the kind of tea. For example, if you happen across "First Nation Peppermint," a bottle with a picture of Medicine Crow within the "T," the postscript will describe him as an Indian chief &om the late 19th century and go on to praise peppermint's healing properties.

And, in keeping with their honest image, the company donates a portion of the sales to the Crow Community.

Honest Tea is more than a slightly sweetened drink. Not only is it the first Fair Trade bottled tea, it represents an "innovative approach to ensuring integrity in the global market." Its creators, Seth Goldman (soM '95) and Barry Nalebuff, Professor at Yale School of Management, built Honest Tea with a strong awareness of both the treatment of its employees and the communities it affects. They seek honesty in all aspects of their business. All the tea is organic, and the company strives to assist economically troubled communities, often at the expense of the almighty dollar.

But Honest Tea was not started to save the world: Rather, Nalebuff founded the organization in part to satiate his own picky palate. According to Nalebuff, a major flaw in the beverage industry is that while it offers a wide variety of flavors, it provides almost no variation in sweetness.

A little sugar can vastly improve the taste of a drink, but too much sugar or artificial sweetener can ruin it. "It's like salt," Nalebuff says. ''A little salt is great. A little more is okay. [Add] too much, and the food becomes inedible."

Nalebuff first mentioned this dissatisfaction with the beverage industry nine years ago, during a SOM class discussion on a Coke versus Pepsi case study.

He soon realized he was not alone in his frustration. One student, Seth Goldman, wholeheartedly agreed. Three years later, the rwo founded Honest Tea, which has grown into a nationwide business phenomenon that sold approximately 10 million bottles of tea in 2003 for a net profit of $5.5 million. Nor too bad for a company that tries to put the world before its bank account.

In fact, during that first discussion, neither knew any more about tea than the Average Joe, and for the time: being their frustration stayed in the classroom. After

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graduation, Goldman got a job in Bethesda, Maryland, and Nalebuff continued to teach business students. The conversation about un-sweetened beverages seemed fleeting and forgotten until Goldman called Nalebuff in 1997 with a proposal for Honest Tea, an organic, naturally sweetened tea that is not too sweet.

Conveniently, Nalebuff had just returned from a research trip jn India, where he had been studying the tea industry. Nalebuff liked the idea, and the following year, the duo started Honest Tea in Bethesda. Once Honest Tea got on its feet, Goldman and Nalebuff began using Fair Trade tea leaves and collaborating with small tea growers around the world.

In India, Nalebuff drank a lot of very good tea, and realized the tea Americans drink is very bad. American tea companies purchase cheap, low-quality dust and fannings what is left over after the quality tea has been produced.

Furthermore, most Americans, in Nalebuff's opinion, don't even know what good tea tastes like. .

Honest Tea, on the other hand, is the good stuff, made only with whole leaf tea. His drink, Nalebuff explains, is as sophisticated as wine. "Wine tasters can drink white wine, red wine, or pink wine," he explains. Then there are choices between Merlot, Pinot Noir, and other varieties of wine that depend on the kind of grape in the vineyard. Wine changes from year to year, from locale to locale, and from season to season. Tea is no different. It has an equally broad spectrum, with a range of choices from green to black, from oolong to brick, from white to scented. Within each of the major classifications, a number of factors distinguish tastes: the type of leaf, the season or "flush" in which the tea is picked, the temperature of water in which the tea is steeped, and even the source of

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the water.

Despite his trip to India, and ·his impeccable taste, Nalebuff insists that he does not enjoy tea any more than the next beverage drinker. Honest Tea simply complements his daily activities. Nalebuff has taped a large Honest Tea poster onto the crammed bookshelf in his office. The closet is full of Honest Tea bottles of all flavors, and the small fridge is packed with more bottles. Next to the fridge is a large cardboard display stand for Honest. Tea bags. Nalebuff only spent one chapter on Honest Tea in his recently published book Why Not?. He usually discusses his company in one lecture of each semester-long class, but otherwise does not announce his involvement with Honest Tea to his students.

Nalebuff and Goldman have happily settled into their place as tea manufacturers. The trick, Nalebuff stresses, is knowing what you can and cannot do. Retail is not for these two; they manufacture and sell tea wholesale, but they have no interest in becoming the Starbucks of good tea. ·Nalebuff knows that not all good ideas are good businesses. Honest Tea just happened to work. And as Nalebuff bluntly puts it, "Honest Tea just tastes good."

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EVERY · FRIDAY, before the sun rises, Dawood Ya-Sin leads one of the five required daily prayers for 250 Muslims at Masjid Al-ls]am, a mosque on George Street. Aside from the prayer itself, he delivers a message which addresses current events and an individual's obligation in today's complex world. He then recites the

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FEBRUARY 2004

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Koran aloud while his congregants listen in bowed meditation.

In post 9-11 America, the word "Islam" has become linked with "terrorism." Ya-Sin believes this may be in part due to the media, which promotes the view that although "nor every terrorist is a Muslim, every Muslim is a terrorist or a potential one." Ya-Sin challenges this stereotype.

When he's not fulfilling his duties as imam of the George Street mosque, he is a teaching assistant for Yale's first-year Arabic class, an Islamic chaplain at Yale-New Haven Hospital and advisor to the Muslim Students Association. He also runs an online Muslim clothing store.

Thirteen years ago, a modeling agent discovered Ya-Sin m Nantucket, Massachusetts and urged him co attend a model search in New York City. His portfolio consisted of two Polaroids taken at the agency. He was competing with a pool of professional actors and models, but still he managed to land a contract with Wilhelmina Models, one of the largest model management companies in the business. At the time, he says, it was abnormal to see an African American in a fashion advertisement. "When I came to New York, it wasn't like how we see it now," he recalled. "I didn't let social barriers or racial barriers or whatever hold me back."

During his five years on the modeling circuit, Ya-Sin learned to embrace different cultures, which he says is difficult for most Americans when they first encounter Islam.

During his five-year modeling career, Ya-Sin traveled to large cities and answered questions for teeny-bopper magazines like, "What's your idea of a perfect date?" "It was great," he recalls. "You could Ay to the Bahamas for three days and be paid great money to work our for an hour at the gym and shoot a couple of hours." But soon, he began to grapple with some of his own questions, questions whose answers would never appear in the pages of a teen magazine: "Where is the underlying spirituality in my life?" "What is there after twenty photo shoots?" Ya-Sin decided to leave his modeling career as quickly as he had

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entered it. While in South Africa, Ya-Sin began practicing Islam, in hopes of filling a void in his life.

It was the simplicity and modesty of Islam that first piqued Ya-Sin's interest.

"God is God and everything else is creation underneath it. There is no intermediary between you and your Creator," he said.

During his conversion, Ya-Sin found it difficult to pray five times daily and simultaneously satisfy the demands of modeling.

"We were doing a commercial in South Africa and this one cake we did like fifty times and the time was coming that I had ro pray and [prayer] cakes precedence over that," he said. "The makeup artist is upset; the lighting person is upset at you. There was all of that going on and I was like, you know what? It's not worth it." So in 1996, after five years in the business, Ya-Sin traded in his beauty entourage, designer clothing, and half-fare plane tickets, to come home, and join a mosque in Providence, Rhode Island. The following year he made a hajj, or pilgrimage, with a group from this mosque. Upon their return, the group offered to sponsor his study of Arabic and Islamic sciences for eight years¡ in Syria.

Keeping to his "if I like something I'll do it" attitude, he decided ro go.

While in Syria, Ya-Sin studied language and theology for as many as 16 hours a day. At the school where he studied, he also met his wife, a fellow Muslim American, who was also earning her degree in the Islamic Sciences. Dawood's studies, though, were cut short by the terrorist attacks on September n, 2001. Although he had completed only four and a half years of study, his family asked that he return back to the States. But the transition back to American life was not easy. Towing his stack of Modern Arabic textbooks and with a cell phone earpiece dangling from his ear as he works out clothing orders, he does not let the differences slow him down. Yet he is aware of the stereotypes nor only from newspaper headlines but also from his daily experiences. He has been the target of obscene gestures and shouts of, "Go back to your country." These are ironic words

for Ya-Sin, who has returned to his country only to find that the discrimination he once encountered because of his skin color is now based on his wardrobe.

With his traditional kufi cap and beard, Ya-Sin often feels that he looks mysterious and even dangerous to stereotyping Americans. He realius his students may also be influenced by his appearance, so he often tells the story of his modeling career, world travels and conversion to Islam.

"Sometimes I feel char, you know, you kind of walk in with a beard, with your head covered and you're only in [class] couple of days a week. You're kind of a shady figure," he says. Meshing his two primary occupations, he has worked to change the image of an unapproachable Western Muslim"shady figure"-to a respected and revered religious one. In 2001, he, his wife, and five others opened an online marker called Shukr, or "gratitude" in Arabic, that sells contemporary Islamic clothing . The website addressed a need Ya-Sin himself felt: "You know I don't want my wife co wear a burkha (a headpiece covering everything but the area around one's eyes). And I don't want to wear traditional clothing for someone from Ko Racha.

I'm not from Ko Racha. I'm from Nantucket, Massachusetts, but I'm a Muslim," he said.

Even as he cries to break out of the unflattering mold in which many Americans place Muslims, Ya-Sin is grounded by Islam and his daily prayers.

His efforts are focused not on single-handedly reversing stereotypes but on his daily commitments. He keeps the same jovial, optimistic attitude char he had when he was once swept away with the excitement of a modeling career. Although Ya-Sin now answers more questions about verb-tense than about perfect dates, he finds this life more worthwhile: "It's not like rea-eational volleyball...like if you don't show up it's not important. I'll be missed."

-Concha Mendoza

THE NEW JouRNAL

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a resident poked his head into the room,. where the patienr .was waiting \~'ith her friend, and asked 1f she had any qucsnons. The paucnt fiddled with her hair and meekly answered, "No." Rushing our of the room, the resident mechanically reassured her, "Everything will be fine," already in the hallway before he got out the lasr word.

Linda Friedlaender, the patient's friend and the current Curator of Education at the Yale Cencer for British An, was incensed by the residenr's failure to notice ht:r friend's obvious nervousness and reservation. That night she complained to her husband, a doctor, "If rhar resident had just rakcn a minute, he could have actually addressed her needs. Someone needs to teach these rc~idcm~ how co be berrcr observers."

EFORE THE OPERATION,

FrnRliARY 2.004

in 1997, Dr. Irwin Braverman, a and an insrrucror at the Yale School of Medâ&#x20AC;˘cme for nearly forty years, was coming to his own conclusions about his students' limited observational skills. While a signi~cant part of being a good diagnostician is the ability to recogniu parterns you have been taught, the best kind of doctor should not only be able to recognize known patterns, but begin to detect new ones. A mediocre diagnostician simply scans a patient for the kinds of symptoms that would indicate a certain known disease. The great diagnositician must be, in Dr. Braverman's words, "more like Sherlock Holmes." That is, he must investigate the body, like a detective, observing the slightest details and the subtlest aberrations. But in Dr. Braverman's experience, dermarology residents are

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der~a~ologist

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rarely this observant, they rely on patterns they have memorized instead of being on the lookout for new ones.

But despite residents' initial tendencies to overlook the uncommon (or, in Friedlaender's case, the seemingly obvious), Dr. Braverman observes, "After they're on their own for about five years-they suddenly get how to see things on their own." The observation that young doctors eventually developed sophisticated observational skills on their own indicated a curricular gap. Medical schools have always acknowledged the importance of visual observation, says Dr. Braverman, but they never knew how to teach it. "They just assumed you could do it if you were smart, and no one did any formal instruction on visual observation," he says. But visual observation could be learned, and was being learned by doctors independent of their medical school training.

"So the question for me then was: how can they get the skill ¡ sooner?"

began to see concrete results: "The first-year studentS were doing better than the second-year studentS." To the veteran professor, it seemed that a new method of medical school training had been discovered.

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hree years after the auspicious beginnings of Dr. Braverman's program, Linda Friedlaender leads me on a tour of the paintings that can teach doctors to be sleuths. Our first stop is a large portrait of a woman arranging some flowers in vases, "Mrs. James Guthrie" by Frederic, Lord Leighton. "I only use Victorian narrative paintings, filled with details. They're meant to read like a novel in paint," Friedlaender explains.

"I didn't want to use an abstract painting with a blue canvas and an orange dot."

Friedlaender tells the students to study a painting without reading the explanatory panel that accompanies it. This allows students to mentally catalogue every feahe idea that medical stuture in the painting. After 15 dents might improve minutes, the students recontheir observational skills vene to discuss their findings.

"I actually had one stuby studying paintings dent describe this painting occurred, as overdue ideas and say nothing about the sometimes do, to two people at flowers. I said, 'Would you more or less the same time. In like to say anything about this case it also occurred to two what's in her hand?' "The tenpeople in the same place. Over dency of the students is to skip Thanksgiving of 1997, the step of observation and Braverman struck upon the leap straight to analysis, and it idea that maybe if he showed is Ms. Friedlaender's task to the studentS " a foreign object," slow them down.

"Someone they could practice their skills will say, 'She's removing the on it. "And actually 'painting' flower because it' s dead,' and was the first thing that popped I'll say, 'That's a judgment. I into my head," he adds with a want details.' Then they'll say, chuckle, "because I thought ~ight, well it looks wrinkled, that might be the most foreign and it's brown.' B;:i"t then object a medical student might ever encounter." someone might point out that Dr. Braverman took a few she might be adding the residentS to the Yale Center for flower to give variety to the Mrs. jamH Guthri~ by Frederic, Lord Leighton bouquet. First we get the British Axt and made them study the minute details of narrative paintings. Within a few weeks, details, then we generate all possibilities of what they mean." the residentS already seemed to be better at diagnosing skin rashes.

Not all patterns or details have a significant meanil\g. just as a He met with Friedlaender, already an acquaintance of his, and they patient's symptoms aren't all necessarily indicative of a particular shared their thoughtS. Dr. Braverman began leading regular groups disease. "Unless one day we turn the painting over and see that Lord of volunteer first-year medical studentS on tours of the museum.

Leighton wrote, 'In this painting Mrs. Guthrie is removing dead The volunteers seemed to enjoy the visitS, and again Dr. Braverman flowers,' we'll never really know. And the bottom line, in this case,"

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she adds, lowering her voice, "is that the artist probably just wanted to give her something to do."

The program is about disciplining oneself to recognize all a painting' s features--not to show off how one can spin these features into a fanciful diagnosis. The skills a resident learns in the museum will benefit both doctors and patients back in the examining room.

On Friedlaender's desk is a small decorative sign reading, "When you hear hoof beats, don't look for zebras." She looks amused and says, " I take that to mean, when something's obvious, don't read more into it."

The Yale School of Medicine gave Dr. Braverman and Ms. Friedlaender's fine arts program informal approval in 1998. A year later, a dermatology student named Jacqueline Dolev, who was working on her thesis project, asked its â&#x20AC;˘ â&#x20AC;˘ founders if she could run a scientific study of the program's efficacy.

Together, the three developed a system of pre- and post-testing, wherein students examined photographs of skin diseases immediately prior to and just after the museum visits.

The team collected data for two years, and in September of

Friedlaender. (Yale, for instance, runs an optional lecture series on the humanities in medicine with such tides as "The Muses: Health and Illness" and " Artists Paint the Black Plague." ) "Some schools are doing this as a way to humanize the medical system, to help doctors become more empathetic. What we do has nothing to do with that." The artwork she and Dr. Braverman use is selected not for its artistic value but for its visual detail-hence the heavy reliance on narrative painting.

As Friedlaender is quick to point out, the fine art program is not about "rounding out" the medical student or putting the student in touch with his artistic side. This is a program solely about the art of dose observation, about enhancing the capacity to compute visual details. In short, it is about brainwork.

But, as Dr. Braverman explained, the program is meant to do more than improve powers of analysis. It is also about putting the doctor-in-training in touch with a more human side of the doctor-patient relationship. He adds that although it may not heighten their artistic appreciation, it will help doctors attend to their patients in a more personal way.

His voice takes on a tone of urgency as he explains, "If you just spend the time examining the patient... the patients know when you are paying attention to themwe' re talking about visual observation now, but also listening, touching, this applies to all rnculties of observation-the patients then know you are concerned about them, and they will trUSt you. And they' ll actually do what you prescribe them to do--and they' U get better! As opposed to those who won't trust a doctor, won' t take the medicine, shop around... And I think that this develops a wonderful patient-physician bond."

In the eyes of Ms. Friedlaender and Dr. Braverman, observing patients with an eye for detail is not just the sign of a competent doctor, but a doctor who cares. As Dr. Braverman puts it, "There's looking at and there's seeing. Anyone can look, but how many can actually see?"

The skills a resident learns in the museum will benefit both doctors and patients in the examtntng room.

2001, Th~

Journal of th~ Ammcan

M~dical

Association published the study. The students involved in the fine arts program showed an improvement of ten percent in their observational skills--a statistically significant increase. Today, Yale requires its first year medical students to take the course. "We got reams of publicity," says Friedlaender. "We were on TV in Washington, it went over the AP, we got all kinds of calls, there was a big article in the Nnu l'Ork Ttm~s. Someone said he would get us on 'Good Morning America.'"

Though Friedlaender and Braverman never did go on morning television, their program has spread across the country. Today, Dr. Braverman triumphandy exclaims, "Other schools have adopted the program, in whole or in part: Brown, Stanford, Tulane, University of California Irvine, Duke, Cornell ... ".

Many of the medical schools that incorporated the program into their curricula have acted with the intention of making medical students more well-rounded, not just better observers. Some schools speculate that exposure to art will nurture a young doctorro-be's heart as well as his mind.

"There has been a real proliferation of courses in medical schools dealing with medicine and the humanities,â&#x20AC;˘ says FuauARY 2004

David Zax, a sophomo" in SiUiman Co/kg~. is on tiN staffof TNJ.

II

AFTER THE

By Flora Lichtman FTER SIX MONTHS OF HEATED CONTROVERSY, New Haven's last local lender fmally won City Hall's approval to go public.

Since New Haven Savings Bank (NHSB) first announced its plan in July to acquire two other area banks and to become a publicly held company, protest from the community has dragged the bank into a battle over depositors' rights, personal greed, and discriminatory lending practices. Leading the charge against the merger was Mayor John DeStefano who until a few weeks ago claimed it would compromise the bank's ability to serve local customers.

Then, on January 26, events took a surprising turn. DeStefano greeted a crowd of bank supporters and press cameras in the lobby of the bank's main branch on Church Street to announce a compromise that would permit the merger-but only if New Haven were cut in on the deal.

City Hall's blessing did not come cheap. As part of the agreement, New Haven Savings Bank will contribute $40 million from the conversion to its own charitable fund, $25 million of which will go to the Independent Foundation, a fund that will be "focused on New Haven" and administered by a combination of city, bank, and community representatives. In the event that NewAllianq: {the bank's post-conversion moniker) fails to maintain its commitment to the local community, the Independent Foundation board can use the money to found a new mutual savings bank. The bank has also committed $27.5 million to a program dubbed "NewAlliance for Neighborhoods." Intended to serve the interests of working class families and inner-city neighborhoods, it will allocate an additional $6 million for loans to low and moderate-income borrowers at less than 2 percent interest. According to bank chairman, president, and CEO Peyton Patterson, NewAlliance for Neighborhoods is intended to demonstrate the bank's "unwavering support for home ownership in greater New Haven, specifically working-class citizens and small, independent businesses."

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Considering that as a private institution, NHSB does not legally need approval from the city or the community to proceed with the conversion, it is certainly shelling out a lot of money just to silence City Hall. {DeStefano's part of the bargain includes a five-year gag order, during which time he cannot speak out against NHSB, provided it upholds its half of the agreement.) After all, the bank already has the approval of Connecticut Banking Commissioner John Burke, and thus needs only federal approval to proceed with the conversion at the end of March. And though City Hall is now willing to hold its tongue, many community groups are not, meaning NewAlliance Bank might need to do more than throw money around to keep its customers happy.

OR ANYONE UNFAMILIAR WITH THE NHSB controversy, the bank's plan to acquire Connecticut Bankshares Inc. and Alliance Bancorp of New England (the holding companies for two other area banks, Savings Bank of Manchester and Tolland) might seem shrewd, though not entirely unexpected. After all, 18 other hometown banks have been bought out in the last 20 years.

Every other local mutual bank has been converted, and 75 percent of those converted banks have been bought out by publit:ly owned conglomerates (think Walmart-style franchise banking). From a business standpoint, it does not seem unreasonable that the Board of Directors and President of NHSB might follow suit.

New Haven Savings Bank chairman, president, and CEO Peyton Patterson has repeatedly cited NHSB's weak position relative to other banks in the market as the reason for the proposed acc;luisition and conversion. "New Ha~en Savings Bank assets have grown 50 percent less than other banks in Connecticut, in the last four years.. ¡ ¡

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Who stands to lose when a New Haven bank goes public T his is not a viable long term strategy." In fact, in recent years NHSB has grown only 2.77 percent compared to an average of eight percent growth at other banks. Wachovia, with over rwice as much money in deposits as NHSB, has the top market share in New Haven with 36 percent of all deposits, including the city of New Haven's money, despite the fact that NHSB has nearly three times as many branches in the area. "To have a competitive advantage that is sustainable, to have a competitive advantage. that is 1ong term, we knew we had to m ake a change," Patterson insisted to a group of stony-faced protesters at a public hearing at the Hamden Memorial Complex in December. When the conversion is complete, the new bank will boast 73 branches, up from 36, and $5.3 billion in assets, up from $2.4 billion. Statewide it will be the second largest savings bank and fifth largest bank overall, holding the ftft:h largest share of the market. And all this before the bank even puts its stock up for sale.

The acquisition is slated to cost $677 million, approximately 250 percent above book value. But the conversion to a publicly held company will more than cover the cost of the acquisition. In addition to $33 million in break up fees from the other banks, the bank will be sold for $10 a share and is expected to generate $86o million in revenue. The depositors, employees, and board members will have the first op portunity to b uy stock in the bank in descending order. After that the public will be allowed to buy in. There is a clear incentive for investors to buy the shares, because, more often than not, a mom-and-pop bank that goes public is quickly bought out

fÂŁBRUARY 2004

by a Bank of America or Wachovia, and the stock skyrockets in value.

But this incentive failed to bring the bank's depositors much joy, probably because they were denied a vote in the process. Because the depositors are, by defin ition, the owners of a mutual savings bank, some account holders argue that they should be given the right to vote on the conversion and proposed acquisition. Others worry that the proposed conversion is driven by greed, not necessity, as it has been billed by Patterson. According to some critics, the biggest strike against the bank was that New H aven Savings Bank was designed to be a community lender and this change would inevitably mean a deviation from its original mission. In the bank's conversion plan, the only assurance that it will maintain a local focus is Patterson's word and a five-year anti-takeover stipulation.

The bank is safeguarded against being bought out until 2008, at which rime the protection expires. "N o one is foolish enough not to expect a takeover,"State Representative Cameron Staples said. And even if the bank were n ot taken over, like 75 percent of its predecessors, there is no assurance that the bank will remain invested in New Haven.

The backlash has been more intense than the bank's execu tives could have foreseen. With DeStefano at the helm, and several local activist groups on board, including Connecticut Cen ter for a New Economy (CCNE), Elm City Congregations O rganized (Ecco) and

I)

edeemer-many New Haveners were rallied out of apathy. "There has been a bank robbery," DeStefano said dramatically, opening one of several press conferences on the front steps of the bank. The Mayor even appropriated city dollars to fund a telephone drive, calling the people to action with a phone message designed to make New Haveners' blood boil: "For 165 years greater New Haven working class families have put their hard earned savings into New Haven Savings Bank. Now insiders want a deal that will make them millions and leave everyone else out in the cold." To some extent, the crusade has been successful.

Letters decrying the bank's proposal have flooded the newspapers. Nearly all of the members of Board of Aldermen publicly opposed the conversion, and over 300 people, many bearing placards with dollar signs printed on them, gathered at public hearings in Hamden on cold winter days-first on December 5 and again on January 5-to show their disapproval.

The argument that depositors, as owners, deserve some say in the process, through a vote or public forum, may be ethically mandated, but it is not necessarily required by law. In fact, the Connecticut State Banking Commission does not even recognize a depositor vote. Under state law, for a mutual bank to undergo a conversion, the Board of Directors must appoint a Board of Corporators co represent the depositors and approve the decision, which

16

explains why appointed such a Board just a few months before the conversion was proposed. The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) requires that the bank apply for a waiver of a vote by depositors (even though Connecticut won't recognize a depositor vote). But to obtain the waiver, the FDIC must determine chat the Board of Corporators is "sufficiently independent from the Board of Directors." On November 17, the FDIC approved the waiver.

But despite federal approval, some New Haveners cried larceny. DeStefano argued that the FDtc's standards for evaluating the Board's composition were simply too low.

Incidentally, NHSB appointed ten members of the Board of Directors to the Board of Corporators and another eleven connected to New Haven Hospital Qoseph A. Zaccagnino, President of New Haven Hospital is on the Board of Directors). And because there have been so many calls to the state banking commission about this case (nearly ninety opposing the conversion and only four in favor), the chairman decided co hold a public hearing in order to NHSB

give the bank, elected officials, and especially the depositors a chance to testify on the matter. At the meeting, State Representative Toni Walker argued that not only are the corporators far from independent, they are also not representative of the depositors--the other prerequisite stipulated by law. "Twelve percent of depositors are low income, 16 percent are of moderate incomo--this is not accurately represented," she said to Commissioner Burke. But when the FDIC granted the bank the waiver, this argument had the wind knocked out of its sails---effectively becoming little more than a moral qualm.

UT THE OPPOSITION has additional complaints: This is not just theft-it is greed. The Board of Directors and President claim that the acquisition and conversion are necessary for the bank to remain competitive. The opposition has dubbed this market-made-me-do-it argument as nothing more than a cover-up for the real motivator: personal enrichment.

It is undeniable that the Board of Directors and Patterson stand to profit as a result of this conversion. Originally, 14 percent of the stock proceeds were to be earmarked for incentive programs for directors and managers and an additional four percent of the proceeds from the conversion were co be distributed to management for overseeing the conversion. The proposed $10 a share stock offer is expected to add up to $86o million, providing $120-4 million for management incentives as well as an additional $34.4 millio~ in bonuses

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for overseeing the ·conversion. "With a senior management team where five of the six senior officers have been there less than two .years, it is impossible to comprehend this level of generosity," Paul Johnson of Guilford wrote in a December letter to the N~w Hav~n R~gist~r. Now, thanks to DeStefano and Patterson's deal, bank managers, officers, and employees will reap less personal gain and the city will get a piece of the profit. Though the bank originally earmarked $30 million from the conversion to go to its own charitable foundation, community dissent prompted the bank to rise to the agreed-upon $40 million In spite of Mayor DeStefano's wrangling, many people in the community are dissatisfi~~ with the way New Haven Savings Bank has done business in the past and fear that the situation will only worsen after the merger.

Last September, CCNE examined NHSB's lending record in its "A Ve.r:y Red Line" Report. For a bank that supposedly serves the inner-city New Haven community and boasts 31 branches in 20 towns and communities in the New Haven area, the results were damning.

According to CCNE, in 2002 NHSB granted mortgage loans to 25 whites, five African Americans and two Latinos in the city of New Haven, despite the fact that .

AfriC:an Americans and Latinos constitute the majority of residents in the city.

Between . 1998 and 2002, NHSB ~de 15 times the number ofloans to whites than to •

blacks or Latinos. Between 1998 and 2002, NHSB consistently made more conventional mortgage loans to upper-income neighbor~ hoods than low and moderate income neighborhoods.· combined. A recent study by the National Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now ranked Greater New Haven seventh highest in ~e nation for the rejection of upper-income minorities applying for conventional home mortgages.

Ironically, to block die merger legally the opposition must sully the hank's name while maintaining that the proposed changes would damage the community even further. According to FDIC rules, if it can be proven that NHSB is not fairly serving ·its existing community through unfair lending practices, for exampleethen it will not be • allowed to acqutre other banks.

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the other hand,· it is difficult to argue for that is already the independence of a bank . . doing such a poor job. A bigger bank, supporters of the conversion argue, would do better. The CCNE report suggests that NHSB is well below average for its lending to low income and minority communities, indicating that most conglomerate banks are better shooting a hole through the argument that a local lender makes it easier for the working class to get loans. From a practical perspective, underserved c~mrnunities would stand to profit if the bank could acquire more capital or were even bought out by a bank with a better lending record.

For example, Wachovia a bank that runs the length of the east coast, and that bought out First Union Bank in New Haven has the capital to invest and serve the communitY" in a way ~at First Union and New Haven Savings Bank never could.

In 2002, 39 percent of Wachovia's conventionaltnortgage lending ($1.2 billion) went to low and moderate income

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This means that if the bank is lending disproportionately to rich whites, the FDIC is well within its rights to stop its practices from spreading. On

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PROUD TO BE OF SERVICE TO THE YALE COMMUNITY

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depositors: NHSB gave 28 percent of its $308.8 million mortgage dollars . to lowand moderate-income depositors.

Wachovia has invested $734 million in community development in Connecticut alone, and $325 million of Wachovia's ·Connecticut community investment goes to "affordable housing initiatives"compared . with $27 million proposed by NHSB if the conversion goes through. Wachovia, not even a full-fledged Wal-Mart of the banking world, has the means to give more to ·New Haven and the region than a New Haven Savings Bank, ·· or even a NewAlliance, ever could.

Some supporters of the conversion have touted regionalism as a possible way to save cities like New Haven with faltering capital and a green ring of wealthy surrounding suburbs. The proposal to acquire banks in Manchester and Tolland could ·conceivably strengthen the region by building a coalition of investors from the rich suburbs. While regionalism is usually associat. ed with redistribution ·of funds from the suburbs to the city, this proposal is an odd · example of regionalism flowing in the other direction. This acquisition would involve taking New Haven city capital (93·3 percent of its deposits are from the New Haven metropolitan area} and investing it into the homes and businesses of the suburbs. Ideally, this will pull suburban resources into the city's financial assets.

This reverse in cash flow has also inverted the usual supporters and opposition to regional plans. At the town meeting in December, for example, DeStefano criti- cized the bank for "turning the wealth made by New Haven to a program that is regional in nature." This might strike some as an odd critique, coming as it does from the Chairman of the Blue Ribbon Commi5sion on Property Tax Burdens and Smart Growth Incentives-the same man who has recommended the "sharing, on a regional basis, of a portion of the state sales •

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UNMATCHED CUSTOMER SE RVICE Ca ll Peter H oward 800.824.6548 24 Water Street, Palmer, MA 01069 •

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tax generated in each municipality'' and "the sharing of any other additional revenues on a regional basis." The idea of capital flowing in the other direction does seem counter-intuitive, but if the feeling of shared identity with surrounding towns existed, perhaps this conversion would be a little more palatable to community-oriented groups like the ECCO, CCNE, and the AFLCIO Greater New Haven Central Labor Council.

Despite the city's multi-million dollar windfall, many fear that this money, while certainly welcome, will not solve the real problem: the bank's discriminatory lending practices and wavering commitment to its working class clientele. CCNE President Andrea Cole sees the NewAlliance for Neighborhoods fund as a "nice gesture," but fears that the $6 million dollars alone will not alter NHSB's policies. Despite CCNE's report, the bank has yet to respond to its alleged red-lining, and does not seem likely to change its policy anytime soon.

Indeed, having placated the city officials, and won state approval, bank executives may believe that the worst is over. But beyond the walls, some customers and community organizations realize a boycott will take far more than 300 angry protesters at a public hearing to motivate change, and they have bigger plans in mind.

On February 5, Greater New Haven Central Labor Council Leader and Local35 head Robert Proto decided to "stay the course" and boycott NHSB by continuing to urge its customers to withdraw their money from the bank if it goes public. The boycott, also backed by ccNE and_ Ecco, is des~gned to cripple the bank into backing out of the conversion or, more realistically, shock it into devoting more resources to its Greater New Haven depositors. Already ECCO is planning to mobilize its denominational members in a massive letter-writing campaign aimed at congregations in the Manchester and Tolland areas. ECCO •

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'Branford ~ster's Tea spokesman Pat Spears sees the conversion as a failure of the city's civic elite to put New Haven's needs before their own pockets. He hopes the boycott will prompt the bank to "atone for its lending record," both by publicly addressing the accusations of red-lining and by instituting practices such as bilingual hiring and post-mortgage counseling for first-time homeowners.

CCNE's Cole agrees that if the boycott cannot halt the merger, it will hopefully force NewAlliance into offering the community "a real plan and accountability."

If successful, the boycott may not ultimately keep NHSB from going public, but it might be enough to keep the bank local. As New Haven's last mutual savings bank and one of a dwindling number of small-town businesses in today's incorporated America, New Haven Savings Bank has a certain symbolic currency, but also a real social obligation to its depositors. Two funds approaching $30 million each for the city and its residents is no mean sum, but New Haven is a city that knows that throwing money at a problem seldom solves it. Be it New Haven Savings Bank or NewAlliance, if the bank does not stand up for its community, the community will continue to stand up to it.

an

Branford Master's House 74 High Street

February 26th 4:00PM

Flora Lichtman, a junior in Davmport College, is Asssociau Editor for TNJ.

FEBRUARY 2004

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â&#x20AC;˘

The Yale Police Department wrestles with allegations of racial profiling

By Paige Austin AST DECEMBER. A NEW HAVEN woMAN was driving home to Fair Haven from her job cleaning house on Mansfield Street. As she turned onto Prospect Street, Marta* noticed a Yale Police car in her rearview mirror. She continued driving for three of four blocks, more carefully now, all the while growing more nervous, since for several other illegal immigrants she knows, encounters with the police have meant harassment, large fines, and even deportation.

At a stop sign several blocks down Prospect Street, the Yale patrol car finally pulled her over. The reason, she later learned, was that her license plate was inside her back window instead of attached to her bumper. In Marta's neighborhood, near the intersection of Grand Avenue and Ferry Street, it is routine for residents to keep their license plates inside the car to prevent them from being stolen. No New Haven police officer had ever stopped her for it before.

The Yale officer asked to see Marta's license and registration.

Marta, who immigrated to Connecticut illegally from her native Mexico three years ago, told him she did not have a license. Instead, Marta gave the officer her Mexican consular identification cardher only form of 10. With the officer now holding her name, address, and photograph, Marta's fears intensified: She worried that he would follow her home or, worse, arrest her on the spot.

Instead, the officer asked her where she worked and then, noticing her hesitant response, asked if she spoke English. " I said

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'No I don't, but I'm going to school.' And he said to me, 'You have to learn English,"' she later recounted.

The officer's comment heightened Marta's usual fear <;>f police.

"They always make me afraid," she explained. "They are able to deport us and so they make me afraid, because it was very difficult for me ro get here, and I have my son here." So she did not say anything when the officer returned to his car, carrying Marta's consular ID card with hi!_ll. She was relieved just to roll up her window and head towards home. The patrol car followed her for several more blocks, fading from view only when she reached Elm Street and turned left towards Fair Haven-and away from Yale.

HE MISSION OF THE YALE PoUCE DEPARTMENT, posted on their website, is simple and straightforward: " Building on a century of service and achievement, we are dedicated to reducing and prevepting crime, and serving our community in partnership with the city of New Haven." As sworn police officers, imbued with the same authority as members of any other Connecticut police force, the Yale police respond to calls, give tickets, and make arrests anywhere in the city of New Haven. In practice, though, the department focuses on the Yale campus and Yale-owned buildings, which span the area from the Yale Bowl to the newly acquired physical plant on James Street-with Yale-New Haven Hospital, Science Hill, central campus, and a hefty swath of commercial and residential New Haven in berween. Recently, the YPD has expanded in other directions as well. According to the New Haven Police

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Department, a new YPD sub-station recently opened near Yale-New Haven Hospital in what is technically the Hill neighborhood, and construction is slated to begin this spring at the department's new headquarters on Lock Street in the Dixwell neighborhood.

Still, the YPD officer-to-resident ratio is considerably higher than that of the New Haven Police, who have about 400 sworn officers spread out across a city of 123,000.

The YPD, therefore, often responds to crimes that the New Haven police may not 'have time to cover. A typical YPD weekly log, printed in the Yale Bulletin, reads like a lirany of the state's most minor offenses: "breach of the peace," "drug possession," "trespassing." According to Administrative

22

Lieutenant Michael Patten, motor vehicle violations like the one for which Marta was stopped are a lower priority, but still a regular part of a patrol officer's duty.

Even so, YPD arrests assert the department's presence in the community. Crime in New Haven, particularly in the vicinity of Yale, has fallen considerably in the last decade, reducing¡ New Haven's reputation as an unsafe place for students to live. But the lower crime rate has come at a cost. A growing number of students and community members complain that the increase in law enforcement has diminished New Haven residentS' sense of comfort on campus. The YPD, its critics contend, srands out among other urban police departmentS for itS chronic racial-profiling, disrespect for

the people it detains or questions, and most frequently, for its disparate treatment of those who are affiliated with Yale and those who are not. In the eyes of the Yale Police, says one student, a Yale 10 card is "like a free pass."

Last year, members of the Student Legal Action Movement (sLAM) were so outraged by charges of Yale bias that they began monitoring the YPD police log and collecting anecdotes of mistreatment at the hands ofYale police officers. Their co!'ldusion, according to current SLAM member Ikponmwosa Ekunwe SY 'o6, was that the arrestS appeared to be a thinly veiled pretense for forcing city residents .off campus.

"I even saw someone arrested for littering," Ekunwe recalled recently. "These are just

THE NEW JouRNAL

obvious so rts of intimidation tactics, intim~ idating people from coming to campus."

Yale students guilty of the same petty offenses, she added, are almost always ignored by the department.

Given the starkly different racial compositions of the university comm unity and the city-only 12.5 percent ofYale students identify themselves as black or Hispanic compared to over half of the city's population-the charge of non-Yale bias among Yale police officers frequently translates into an accusation of racial bias as well.

In researching the relationship between Yale police and Yale undergrad uates for her senior thesis in sociology, Jessica Price JÂŁ'04 has found that students of color, on average, have a drastically lower opinion of the Yale Police than white studentseven accounting for differences in socio-economic background and previous experiences with law enforcement. T he sense of personal affront is not unfounded. Among Price's respondents, black and Hispanic students are more likely to have had a serious and negative interaction with the Yale Police than other students. For most of these students, the interrogation ended as soon as they produced a Yale ID. In the case of one black student whom Price interviewed, the Yale Police stopped him as he entered a residential college, and when he didn't have an ID to support his claim that he was a student visiting a friend, they escorted him to his friend's room and made the friend identify him as a fellow Yale student.

One Yale professor, who prefers not to be named, recalls when Yale police officers thtew a former student against a wall because they were looking for someone fitting his description- a Hispanic male. As with the other incidents, t1Us one was

resolved when the student showed the officer his Yale 10. Encounters like this, the professor says, have led some minority students and even faculty at Yale to don Yale paraphernalia and wear their 10 cards around their necks in an attempt to stave off potential harassment.

The Yale Police, fo r their part, deny any accusations of bias. In a recent email, Chief of Pol~ce James Perrotti wrote, "The idea that we practice selective enforcement is n ot true. Our services are provided co both affiliated and non-affiliated persons ...

Treating non-affiliated persons with a dif-

"If you're in a residential college and you don't belong there-you're not a member of the community-you're liable to come to our attention." H e rejects the charge that University affiliation would be determined by race, since the YPD officially opposes racial profiling as both unethical and ineffective. Still, in a moment of candor, he did agree that students are less likely to commit crimes than other people in the city.

"There's a big screening process they go through to get in here," he explained.

Chief Perrotti points our, though, that the YPD will investigate charges of m isconduct brought by anyone in the community-not just Yale students. Yet when it comes to disagreeing with the law, there may be no such thing as an even playing field.

arta was not the first person in her neighborhood to lose her consular ID card to a pol\ce officer. She knows four others who have had theirs taken as well, by police in New Haven and elsewhere ¡ m Connecticut. Losing a consular ID is a big deal. "A Consular ID is the only credential that we have," she explained. "I registered my car with it; I opened my bank account with it. And now I don't have any form of identification. " Without it, Marta cannot wire money from her bank account, nor prove her identity should she be stopped again.

Replacing the 10 will require upwards of six weeks, a trip to the Mexican Consulate in New York City, and an original Mexican birth certificate. Because she has only a photocopy of her birth certificate here, Marta must wait for her family in Mexico to mail her the original before she can make the trek co New York.

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"Anybody who looks Hke they don't belong on the Yale campus is going to be subject to some level of harrassment." ferent standard would be a violation of our values." Lieutenant Parten put it more succinctly: "It's behavior; that's what differentiates whether a police officer is going to approach you. It's what you're doing, not who you are." In the case of trespassing, Lieutenant Parten says that no one is stopped just for being in public spaces such as the University's libraries. But, he added,

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Despite the difficulty of obtaining a new ID, Marta agreed with her neighbors that the alternative-asking the police to return her old one--was not worth the risk. But one of her employers had an idea that might help. Marta could take her complaint to Junta, a non-profit agency on Grand Avenue that serves New Haven's Hispanic community. Marta took the advice, and to good effect: the Executive Director of Junta, Kica Matos, took Marta's.complaim vety seriously, calling it part of a larger trend of Yale police mistrcatmmt that is obscured by immigrants' typical ret.icence when it comes to challenging law enforcement.

"The number of complaints against the Yale Police has risen in the last few months," Matos said in a recent interview.

The explanation is unclear: it could be simply that as word spreads that Junta can help, more people are bringing their complaints to the organization's attention.

Their experience with police in their home countries and their fear of deportation, Matos says, can keep immigrants from questioning police authority and even from putting faith in the Junta staff.

But Matos suspects the rise in complaints may also reflect a larger pattern of Yale police officers' prejudice against people from outside the Yale community. In her view, "Anybody who looks like they don't belong [on the Yale campus] is going to be subject to some level of harassment."

In an effort to address the rise in complaints-and hopefuUy secure the return of Marta's 11>-Matos requested a meeting with a YPD officer. In January, Lt. Patten went to the Junta office to discuss Marta's case. The meeting went better than Matos had expected. Lt. Patten explained that although the YPD did not have Marta's 10, he would be happy to write a letter to the Mexican Consulate on Mana's behalf to try to expedite the replacement process. H e abo ofkred to share the information that Maros provided about consular ro cards with the rest of the Yale Police Department.

Later, L t Pa tte n said the meeting was not unusual: "We try to resolve issues as they come up so everything that happens doesn't necessarily go through a formal complaint process. We try to work things out ... The whole idea is for people get along."

But according to SLAM members and other critics of the YPD, there is no substitute for a strong, formal complaint process.

According to Captain Bonnie Winchester, Public Information Officer for the New Haven Police, the NHPD, like most urban police departments, has officers on staff who sole job is to review complaints. In the Yale department, there are too few officers to accommodate such a disjuncture.

Ekunwe from SLAM points out that this under-staffing means that complaintants could find themselves in the uncomfortable position of having to file their grievances with the supervisor of the offending officer, or with another officer with whom they have had an encounter on the street. It is an imperfect system, one for which easy remedies do not exist. n filet, the remedy, like the problem, may not lie with the ¡YPD at all. According to Lt. Patten, when a Yale police officer

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a approaches "suspicious person" it is often at the behest of a Yale stude nt or faculty member.

Patten is not alone in his thinkingeven those most mistrustful of the ypd recognize the role Yale community members play in keeping racial bias alive. Ekunwe and slam both report instances when a feUow student or, in one case, a college master called the Yale police to report the presence of a suspicious black male. Each time, when the ypd showed up, the black male in question turned out to be a student.

Anecdotal accounts of racist encounters also support the idea that any racist action taken by the police parallels exclusion within the Yale community. One Hispanic professor recalls a time when he tried to enter a residential college behind a student who turned to him once inside the gate and asked, "Can I help you?" The professor responded angrily, "No. Can I help you?" Another student of his, an AfroCuban living in Timothy Dwight college, was once approached by a Yalie who wanted to know what he was doing in the laundry room, as if his laundry hamper and dirty clothes did not suffice as an explanation. Stories like this support Matos's contention that racial and university-centric bias on the part of the Yale Police may simply reflect a larger pattern of prejudice in the University community. As the Yale professor put it: "It is a fact that th~e are not many Hispanic people here and there is a perception that the ones that are here are only cleaning toilets and floors."

Whatever the reason for the prejudice, many members ofYale's activist and cultural communities worry that the perception of mistreatment by Yale Poliee officers is building a wall around the University with

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an "Outsiders Not Welcome" sign above the gate. Activist Stephen Osserman oc' 02, Mus'o3 claims that several New Haven high school students have told him that they avoid the downtown and Broadway areas for fear of harassment from the Yale police.

In Osserman's opinion, the only way to improve the situation is to revoke the ypo's policing authority altogether: "I think that the Yale Police have no business arresting people in the community... Unless the safety of a stud~nt is directly involved there's no reason that [they] should be there unless the New Haven police call for back-up."

Osserman's solution would likely strike Lt. Patten as a whole-sale breach of duty. In his view, ignoring crime is really not an· option. "We are sworn police officers, so when we see violations we have an obligation to act," he said.

The New Haven police seem to share this view. For them, the presence of the Yale Police in the campus vicinity allows more time for the NHPD to focus on serious crimes in the rest of the city. When it comes to police officers on duty in New Haven, says Captain Winchester, "The more the merrier." But while the NHPD is grateful for the company, when Yale students are stumbling drunkenly around the campus, possibly committing some of the same crimes that earn New Haven residents an anonymous mention in the Yale Bulletin police log, it's a different matter. As Captain Winchester chuckles, "We'll let them handle that." It's a deferral of authority that, for better or worse, Marta could not expect.

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the mentally ill survive biased justice system

DEPOT IN ATLANTA, GEORGIA, police arrest a woman for trespassing. They take her down the station, along with all of her worldly belongings, carned in a few tattered shopping bags. She spends seven months in jail, one month longer than the maximum state sentence for trespassing. In the early morning hours, she leaves the prison, located in an industrial area of Atlanta, in the same prcdicunent in which she began-alone and with nowhere to spend the night. That morning, she is picked up by men who rape her repeatedly. Today, she is HIV positive.

"You really only needed to spend one minute with her to know what was wrong with her, â&#x20AC;˘ rccalled Stephen Bright of the Southern Center for Human Rights at a Davenport College Master' s tea earlier this month. Bright deplores the system that arrests people whose problem is not criminal deviance.

Currendy, the largest mental health institution in the United States is our prison system. According to a report published less than a year ago by the University of Massachusetts at Boston, mental illness is five times more prevalent in prison than in society. One in six inmates is mentally ill. Many advocates think these statistics may signal a disturbing trend: the criminalization of mental illness.

Instead of committing individuals to mental health facilities, state correctional officials are incarcerating potential patients. In 2001, the Connecticut Department of Correction reported that the number of inmates with mental health problems rose from 5.2 percent to 12.3 percent.

New Haven is no exception. According to sources at the Connecticut Mental Health Center, the New Haven Police Department handles the arrests of people who suffer from mental illness are handled no differently from arrests of unaffiicted individuals. A man who pulls up a chair at a Chapel Street lunch counter may be arrested if he becomes agitated and confused after he discovers that he cannot pay. A disoriented wanderer who floats into the Yale School of Management to use the lavatory for a shower may be convicted of trespassing. Many petty crimes like these are committed by people who are confused if not completely oblivious to their actions--even while they stand for their mug shot and press a finger ¡onto an ink-pad. These innocents unknowingly project the ¡ image of a prototypical "deranged" criminal. There is a wide range of conditions-schiwphrenia, manic depression, and even mental retardation-manifested in any number of non-violent misdemeanors. But one doctor in New Haven has started a program ro reverse the trend, employing not just her expertise, but also a few of the people who understand the problem best.

TH.E DIMLY LIT, STERILE MONOLITH of the Connecticut Mental Health Center on Park Street, Dr. Baranoski, who is so an Assistant Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at Yale, takes phone calls &om her small office lined with binders, folders and a few holiday memories. As the director of jail diversion in New Haven, Dr. Baranoski i$ at the forefront of a movement to keep the mentally ill out of jails. The files that line the walls of her office are the sealed cases of mentally ill offenders removed from the criminal justice system. These files are testaments to the progra.nM success.

"The number of [mentally ill] people in jail in Connecticut is down for the first time in years," she says. The prototype has been replaced with a new model for criminal justice, facilitating the successful diversion of the mentally ill. The program combines the expertise of medical and legal professionals with the personal experiences of peer mentors who have gone through the process themselves.

New Haven was one of three initial test sites for jail diversion, which was extended four years ago to include all Connecticut courts. The test sites helped enable the program's current success.

Jail diversion programs provide on-site services to mentally ill

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defendants by placing mental health clinicians in the courts. These clinicians act as liaisons. With the permission of the attorney, clinicians notify defendants of alternatives to jail. According to a report issued to the Connecticut legislature, regular meetings, attended by the defense, prosecution, judicial staff, and mental health and correctional facility administrators allow for a resolution that "reduces jail [time], number of court appearances and related court costs, hospital days, and costs associated with arrests." Diversion has nothing to do with the way charges are resolved and does not affect the outcome of a case.

These programs also have the potential to ameliorate the problem of dangerously overcrowded jails. Currently, Connecticut sends its overflow prisoners to Virginia, providing a controversial and expensive solution to the prison jam. A 2001 study by the Connecticut Center for Economic Analysis at University of Connecticut found that legislation to divert first and second time nonviolent drug offenders to treatment would save taxpayers $5,000 per nonviolent offender in crime savings, $7,300 in reduced arrest and prosecution costs, and $4,800 in health care costs.

"Incarceration for people who are not criminals will not deter them from further problems," argues Dr. Baranoski. Consequently, the gravest proble.Ql associated with the incarceration of mentally ill people is a sky-high recidivism rate. Whether rehabilitation occurs, in America' s jails is debatable, but it is clear that mentally ill people are not reaping any benefits. Diversion programs create an atmosphere in which criminals can be directly connected to the health care system.

According to Dr. Baranoski, jail diversion in New Haven is effective because it is staffed by former offenders who understand what it means to be relegated to the margins of society. A woman with a severe mental illness created the curriculum. Nancy, an author and former teacher at Quinnipiac University's Public Health Department, built the curriculum of the Citizenship Program and oversees the peer mentor training sessions which are based on "patience, persistence, and creativity." The program strives to give its clients a foothold in the community by networking them with social services and connecting them to peer mentors, who have been through the justice system. Having dealt with some of the manifestations of mental illnesses, including drug and alcohol abuse, poverty, and criminal behavior, peer mentors can counsel with anecdotal therapy. Dr. Baranoski turns to her file cabinet, unlocks it, and lays open her folders.

She pauses over the cases of Devan and Robert, two ex-criminals with mental illnesses who have served extended jail time, dealt •

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dangerous part of the city. There, Dev~ found the lost man. Devan does not.only look out for others, he has someone who looks after him and builds up his confidence, his ·own peer mentor, Robert: "When I look at Rob, I say I can' t quit."

"Peer mentors give people confidence to see that they are not hopeless or worthless," Robert explains. There is a distance between these positive words · and the stone-faced man who absorbs himself in the paperwork that floods his desk. But Rob is emotionally involved in his work, recounting the story of a man suffering from borderline disorder who stepped into a store and was accused of shoplifting.

"The people in the store didn' t like him there," says Robert,. "They called the police, said he was shoplifting, but he had all his receipts and the stuff was from another store .... " The man knew objecting would most likely land him back in jail, at least temporarily, so he remained quiet. He later told Robert, "the reason I di4n' t fight was because I knew you"d go to court with me, Robert." Robert' s story intimates the tension between mentally ill people and the law when an intermediary is not present.

Robert shuffles through the pile of homemade · but official looking business cards of other peer mentors. Papers concerning housing options and ways to obtain food stamps litter his desk. These guys know the type of resources needed to connect the mentally ill to the city. "To connect people with housing I have to know different criteria for housing. When I go to class, I ask people, 'Who needs food vouchers?' I don't take phone-calls after 8:00 PM but I give people my number if they need me," he· says. Like Devan, he takes pride in being an advocate, a resource, who can implement change.

Through the peer-mentoring system, the

with drug abuse and homelessness, and are now peer mentors. Though in their pasts, they have had drug problems and many nights when they had no place to sleep, on a recent afternoon the two men sat chatting in Baranoski' s office. Devan, a small but commanding man who looks like he might be an extra in a 198o's rap video, wore a colorful Coogi sweater. Robert, a big man with broad shoulders, sat across the table in an elevated wheelchair. .

Devan currently earns $Io an hour working at the Connecticut Mental Health Center in the Citizenship Program that the center offers as part of its jail diversion treatment. Though Devan is paid, he spends most hours as a volunteer, working overtime with · the people who need him.

The program allows mentally ill people to give back to their community, creating a cycle by which mentally ill people help their peers live with hope, instead of being consumed by feelings of isolation and alienation. "I never had access to give," he says. "And I love the karma of it all. All this was accidental." . _As a public advocate, Devan is eager to share his story with his mentees. "My strategy is to be honest. I do with you, not for you, and if you' re willing to work, I'll help you," he says wisely. Though he seems a bit aloof, sketching a face in detail in a cluttered conference room, Devan is sharp and one of the Center's most successful peer mentors. "I know the con-artists from the bullshitters," he says pointedly, as he continues with his portrait.

When one of the members of the group disappeared, and no one at the center could find him, Devan knew where to look. He imagined what was going on in the lost man' s mind. He remembered the feelings of vulnerability he used to suffer, and he searched in the most remote and

Citizenship Program provides stability for the unstable, and Robert and Devan can find consistency and routine in their new ability to give.

Although jail diversion programs are new, the logic behind them is not. Jail diversion takes issue with the failed criminal justice system and asks lawmakers to assess failures in the context of specific problems. It is not the ideal panacea, but instead deals with a widespread problem through practical meat:ts. Dr. Baranoski has even started advocating police tutorials and · other pre-emptive approaches dealing with mentally-ill criminals. "The New Haven Police have been very resourceful and sensitive to mental health issues," Dr. Baranoski says. She lauds their sincerity and efforts to learn more about how to observe mental illness and deal with it accordingly.

At the heart of this attempt to reform the criminal justice system are the people who won' t give up looking for and finding those who have lost their way.

Tonight, Devan and' Robert may be working overtime. And the light in Dr. Baranoski's office is still on.

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Romy Drucker, a foshman in Davmport Co!kg~, is on th~ staffofTNJ.

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WAS NOT A DEVOUT STUDENT. During my first movement lesson at the age of four at the Women's Club in Brussels, Belgium, I walked across the floor and the teacher announced in French, "She's got talent." Yet every week, my mother had to collect me from underneath the classroom piano, where I stubbornly crawled halfway through class. She would rake me to the dining room with floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking a deep forest, where we devoured thick, melted Belgian chocolate poured over French vanilla ice cream with salty pecans. Early on, I enumerated my dancer's Bill of Rights: the right to choose how much or how little I wanted to participate, the right to retreat under the piano in the happy womb of the music, and the right to a hot fudge sundae at the end of it all. If any of these rules had been breached I might never have become a dancer, or learned what it means to dedicate oneself to an art form.

After a 12-year professional dance career, I now teach teenagers how to dance in pointe shoes at the New Haven Ballet. I took the job to earn income and stay involved in dance while I finish my undergraduate degree at Yale. The studio has a high ceiling and tall windows and in a far corner, the pianist" dutifully pounds out walcr.es. Watching the students in my class hobble around to the music, I try to recall how I learned to dance. I have performed as a ballet dancer with the New York City Ballet, and as a modern dancer with White Oak Dance Project and Twyla Tharp Dance.

Even so, I feel a slight sense of panic trying to explain the most basic steps. I simply can't remember what it feels like not to know how to dance. After all these years, ballet has become a character in my life. I have loved it, internalized it, imagined it as my life-blood, wrestled with it, argued with it, and gotten sick of it. Like a spouse, it has both returned my love and tortured me. And when it push-

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es me to my limit, I abide by my early rules-! take a break, rejuvenate, and then go back to it.

The fact that I now teach a pointe class is ironic. I have an unusual history with pointe shoes. During one rehearsal period with City Ballet, I was learning one of the solo Fairy variations in Skeping B~auty and at the same time, I was working with a guest choreographer named Angelin Preljocaj. I spent the first half of the day in a studio with fifty dancers. The ballet mistress straightened out lines and made sure everyone had their arms in the same position. I worked almost militantly to perfect my Fairy variation.

Then I crossed the hall to rehearse with Angelin and his assistant.

He had chosen only eight dancers. We wore ballet slippers that gave me a greater range of movement than the restrictive pointe shoes.

The choreography was mostly contemporary; it required classical technique as a foundation, but the movement was more organic to the body than ballet. I decided then to become a modern dancer; I felt more at home dancing without stiff satin pointe shoes tied on my feet.

Yet every Tuesday evening since September, I have tried to teach 14-year-olds how to pirouette on their pointed roes. I stick with a handful of technical corrections, expressed in simple language. "Straighten your knees!" I shout. That's the absolute first thing to remember. Dancing bent-kneed on pointe is bad ballet. It's poor technically and can lead to injury. "Roll through your foot!â&#x20AC;˘ I yell over the music. Gracefulness arises from control, and in pointe shoes you establish control by using every m~cle in the foot to cushion the ascent and descent. Thumping down off pointe appears awkward. One student processes this information, and executes the step well. "Good, very nice," I tell her, and she smiles.

Another student, taller and longer-legged than the others, is daneTHE NEW JouRNAL

ing underneath hersel£ "Move! You can move more than that!

This step travels across the floor." She takes off down the diagonal.

"Straighten the knees, roll through the foot, move." This is the language I use most when teaching pointe work.

I began to learn this language in my first ballet class, at a storefront studio outside of Pittsburgh. The school was owned by two women, a grandmother of six and a soon-to-be airplane mechanic, and was named, somewhat exotically, "Ecole de Ballet." Neither Sandra Elsaser, a calm white-haired woman, nor Laura Fry, who loved flying planes as much as teaching ballet, had ever danced professionally. The school was a hobby for them much as it was a business. Every day after school, I would change into my leotard in the car on the way there, down a pack of raisins for energy, then jump out and run down the broken asphalt alleyway in my slippers to the back door of the school, just in time to start class. Ecole de Ballet was unusual in that it taught a classical British technique. Classes were structured around the Royal Academy of Dance syllabus. In the spring of every year, a stern-faced examiner arrived from .

London to test the ballet steps that we had learned over the winter.

The atmosphere at Ecole de Ballet was relaxed. I remember learning how to partner the Saturday that Mrs. Fry declared "Boyfriend Day." Every student had to show up with a boy usually an awkward adolescent reluctantly dragged in from among our seventh . grade classmates. For two hours, Mrs. Fry forced our unwilling men to haul us around the studio to T chaikovsky's Serenade for Strings in C It was fun,_ and we laughed the entire time. I was almost too comfortable at the school, however: I staged my first act of rebellion against the rigidity of ballet etiquette during my sixth grade spring exam by showing up unprepared wearing electric blue Wonder Woman "underoos." The colorful speckling

of fluorescent yellow stars gleamed through the sheer fabric of my dress. I went into the exam anyway, and danced around under the examiner's upturned nose for fifteen minutes the time it took for another student's mother to arrive with extra pink briefs.

I have been wrestling with ballet since those Royal Academy of Dance days. A teacher can convey useful information, but at some point the student must make a commitment to figuring out how to apply the technique with her own head, arms, legs, toes. The challenges of ballet are not those that marty people commonly face.

First, you have to figure out how to fit your body into a technique that demands superhuman physical precision. Few people have ninety-degree turnout, or aerobatic flexibility, or gorgeously higharched feet, even those with bodies that are well suited for ballet.

The task is to come as close as possible to the perf~ct position within your own physical limitations, without injury. Second, you have to figure out how to incorporate fluid movement between the basic positions. It's easy to "connect the dots" and forget that ballet needs to be danced, not placed. Everyone, save the exceptional few, must cheat to accomplish these tasks the best ballet dancers take shortcuts, such as sacrificing perfect form for bolder movement. "When wondering whether a ballet dancer is good, you ~}ave to ask: How ingenious are these shortcuts? How interesting is that• particular way of solving the problem?

During the Sleeping Beauty rehearsal period, I realized that pointe shoes and classical ballet were far too restricting to my natural way of moving and to my personality. They did not offer what I wanted out of dance. I started to feel like I didn't fit in at City Ballet anymore. I joined the company certain that I was every ounce the ballerina, and came out six years later thinking, "I know that I'm a dancer, but maybe the tutu and the tiara don't interest me

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so much ... : It was a revelation. It had taken me over a year to decide to quit my job at City Ballet and explore modem dance. But when I finally left, I didn't want to look back. I was convinced I had taken my pointe shoes off for good; to me, they now represented the artificiality of the technique, and the conformity of a huge ballet company.

I decided to become a "modern dancer" partly because I no longer wanted to subject myself to the strict and uniform environment that surrounds ballet. I love the elegance of classical dance, and the way my body feels executing the steps. But I do not agree with the way large ballet institutions are run. Initially, dancers show up at work every day because they love the art form. But then that joy of dancing gets trampled under weight pressure, petty political games, and demeaning treatment. At City Ballet, we were rarely commended for our work. The only feedback was advice for those teetering above the prescribed weight limit: "Get thin or don't dance." The ballet masters and mistresses have been through the system themselves and perpetuate the subtle mind games and humiliating casting and coaching they have learned.

While I experienced a handful of career highs there, most of my energy was focused on just trying to survive. We danced underweight, exhausted, and m entally broken down much of the time; and yet we were admonished for not "looking like we were trying... Ar the point that I left it just didn't seem worth it anymore, to fight that hard for my selfesreem---cven for the privilege of dancing gorgeous George Balanchine and Jerome Robbins ballets. Leaving City Baller was an act of self-salvation; I dove under my imaginary piano to get away from the psychological abuse a ballet company imposes on its dancers.

After City Ballet I worked for four years with Mikhail Baryshnikov's modern

dance company, White Oak Dance Project, and then joined Twyfa T harp Dance in 2002. Twyla's choreography consists of a pastiche of movement. Baller, Graham, jitterbug, yoga, and basketball, are just a few

these shoes represent repression to me .... " I simply starred working in them again.

The challenge of returning to a skill I had once mastered appealed to me. I performed the duet and surprisingly really enjoyed it. After learning that dance could be liberating, the shoes no longer bore the stigma that I had attached ro them. They were just shoes.

I realized in the middle of teaching my New Haven pointe class this past September that there is one thing I don't know how to convey to my students: the idea of anarchy. Learn the rules, but then make them your own, push them to an extreme, even break them.

Anarchy in art does not mean free-form self-expression, or outpouring. Anarchy is the tension between the individuality of the artist and the artist's firm understanding of the rules. Ballet is a highly technical art form, and striving for perfection is a necessary aspect of the ballet medium. But at the same time, perfect technique can be boring.

Often, it is the dancer's idiosyncrasies or weaknesses that resonate. By these, I mean the individual's choices as ro what she willingly does or d oes not choose ro accept regarding the rules. A dancer is more interesting to me when she_hasn't had all of her choices groomed out of her.

I give one last combination before the pointe class ends for the evening-walks on pointe from the back of the room to the front. You have to cross each fifth position as you move forward on pointe, and delicately set, not slam, one toe in front of the other. I give them the option to choose the port tk bras, the positions and arrangement of their arms. The music starts, and they

At the point that I left It Just didn't seem worth It anymore-even for the privilege of danclnQ. of the random styles that end up in her pieces. My dancing experience with White Oak was more intellectually than physically challenging; ir fdt good to return to ballet, this time through Twyla's hybrid choreography. I was still certain, however, that I would never wear pointe shoes again. But Twyla is a persuasive woman. When she said, "Okay, so you're going to learn this duet. You have all that classical Balanchine technique. You have to use it," I decided not to sit down with her, as if she were a therapist, and explain: "You see Twyla,

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hop up on their blocks. Staring at themselves in the mirror, they forget to port de bras gracefully. One student's fingers jut out stiffly. I mention that she might want to think about the way she's holding her arms in second, the next time around. She nods. Another student is dancing well, so I tell her, "Excellent, good." I can see when they aren't focusing, and I can see when they really apply their minds to the corrections.

And then I can see when they've forgotten everything except the feeling of dancing. This doesn't happen often in an intermediate ballet class, but when it does, it's beautiful to observe. They stop processing my ideas, and start coming up with their own. I shout, "The floor is YOURS -CREATE something out of this exercise!" in hopes of seeing that kind of hunger, that willful desire to make a personal impact on a staid, centuries-old art form. A few of them perk up and throw themselves into the steps with more energy. But there are others in the back of the studio just hanging out, not paying attention. My words float in the air. They are too busy mastering the basics to consider a revolt.

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175 Wooster St. New Haven

Emily Coates is a junior in jonathan Edwards College.

The New Journal Office {located above J.Crew in the student organiution center; entrance is along the walkway in front of Morse and Stiles)

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N:EwYoRK, 25:.year-oldJenny Shimada has beenrelibe "no," and he writes that "Chineseness seems an irrelevance: an . . gio~sly following news reports of a kidnapping ~n Berkeley, inert container, just one among many, for holding the memories of . C~if~r~ia. Th~re, a · w~althy girl has been taken . c~ptive hy ._ a shared experience .... It is the liquid of memory, not the cup we cadre of revolutionaries wh~ are prote~ting a.r:nong ot_h er things;---'drink it from, that gives our lives content and reveals our humanithe 19-year-qld's status as ~ember of the weal~hiest family iri Sat:t · ty."

Both Liu's Accidental Asian and Choi's American WOman sueFrancisco. The cadre reminds Jenny of ol~ times, b~ck., when they used to sha~c; · fai -left:swinging egalitarian v~ews , ~ith her Berkel~y ceed, ultimately, in relaying their distinct but overlapping messages frie. r ids the w~ymost people share toothpaste or _ c igarettes.

She h;15 _ because each refuses to be bound by the relatively new genre if . since fled California after helping to bomb a government building you can call it that of Asian American-authored literary works. In and.started a , new life. When she's asked by an old friend to harbor breaking out of this mold, both works ultimately surpass those of the revolutionary kidn~ppers, Jenny initially _hesJtates. For: ~he · their predecessors. Each has created a book ·that is effective rather momen't , - sh~'d rather remain the aliased Iris Chan alone arid than contrived. ' ' 1 unfound "ihan deal with the. ghosts of her radical. past.

In spite · o f · Choi's novels, for instance, are more in the vein of Joan Didion . ' . . . ·-.s,_ ..

• herself, .she, eventually takes ~members of the cadre toir an old .aban.than o_f Amy Tan, or even those of the generally likeable, often comdo ned farmhouse 'to regroup. Jenny's struggle to reconcile her past mendable Harvard graduate Gish Jen. Choi's novel is more about with he~ present · i_s at the core of Susan ChoYs novel Ame1icfZn politics than it is about anti-racism or Americanized daughters and ·\'%-man.· Based ·loosely on the Symbionese Liberation ·Army's kidtheir East-minded parents. Jenny Shimada is simply the book's pronapping_o f Patty Hearst, this po,werful second novel is more than a tagonist not its heroine or a savior to the world of Asian American mere reworking of an historical event; it is a·moving political statehouseholds. She is one of the novel's three minority characters, but . me~t that ~xposes the -ever-present tension of class and race. her Japanese background is not by any means the novel's central - . -Choi, who graduated from Yale in 1990, is one of many Asian · focus. As the title suggests, Jenny Shimada is the novel's American Yal~ -graduates to address concerns about their communiAmerican not Asian American woman. Much like Liu's underty's. ideiuity -iri contemporary America. Eric Liu,_ another class of standing of his Chineseness as "an inert container" and the "cup we 1990 · graduate, chronicled his own experiences as a Chinese drink ... from," Jenny's Japaneseness does not dictate the whole of . ' . A.nierican in his book 'The Accidental.. Asian: Notes _ of a Native her actions.

It is, indeed, who she is "vestigially," as Liu puts it, and . ' . . ~- ._ _ Spea~er. In it, Liu writes candidly about his childhood, adolescence, this is precisely what renders the novel effective and simultaneously · and yoi.irig adulthood, ruminating on topics ranging from believable. As the tide suggests, Jenny Shimada is the novel's Chinatown to Tiger Woods to the Jewish -community. Examining American not "Asian American" woman. the ways~hich Jews have assimilated into and even defined · Choi does not, however, completely downplay the issue of race.

American culture~ he wonders whether the Asian American comIn several instances, she directly addresses it effectively. Jenny's father long ago estranged from his daughter still remains in the munity can do the same, helping to define American culture in ways that aren't strictly beef and broccoli. background, struggling to come to terms with his unjust intern. In terms of content and style, Liu's Accidental Asian could not ment at Manzanar. A father-daughter reconciliation brings the be ~ore different from Choi's novel. Ame,.ican WOman subtly brings novel to its fulfilling and necessary close.

Tensions also run high between Jenny and the -revolutionaries. the still pressing issues of societal and racial rigidity to the forefront.

Accident~! Asian speculates on what costs ~e incurred by the culAt one point, a member of the cadre tells Jenny, "Your skin is a privtural evolution to "whiteness" that has come to be virtually synonyilege. Your Third World perspective's a privilege," to which Jenny mous with assimilation. What links the two works, however, and replies, "All I'm saying is, stop saying I'm from the Third World perhaps the Asian American experience as a whole, is the idea tha~ when I'm from California." being Asian American may be no less than being simply American.

Choi refuses to be falsely optimistic. After emerging from When issues of race are not being explicitly addresse4 in tlie novels, prison, for example, Jenny muses that "the world hadn't healed itself you _tend to forget that Jenny is Japanese-American, because she in the meantime." She comes to the sad realization that "it was just i9 like her second-generation counterparts more "American" the same fatal world as always, with -its staggering inequities, which than anything else. Liu echoes this sentiment as he wistfully asks she realized now weren't exceptions to be excised but the rules of the where his "Chineseness" lies. "In my looks, surely," he writes. "In game, the very engine that kept the thing running." This realism is my culture, vestigially. In my behavior, too?" His answer seems to one of the reasons the novel succeeds .

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Accidental Asian, at times a personal memoir and at others a social commentary, works in a different, but equally effective way.

Liu's approach from the onset is to challenge the norm. He remembers wanting to defy stereotypes that typified all Asians as "indelibly foreign, exotic, math and science geeks, numbers people rather than people people, followers and not leaders, physically frail but devious and sneaky, unknowable and potentially treacherous." Liu rose above these stereotypes to become, what he felt, was an" atypical" Asian. He majored in history, refused to be " pigeonholed" (as he believed it to be then) by joining any of the numerous Asian organizations, and married a redhead. Still, Liu realizes now, in his extreme desire to be different he managed to "turn the very key that lock[ed] [him] inside," rather than extricate himself from a stereotype. In Accidental Asian, however, Liu reconcile these two desires: While he admits to rebelling against the prescribed social norms, he studied history because he enjoyed it, married his white wife because he loved her, and wrote this book not to berate Asian America, but to convey a sense of his past and his subsequent hopes for the future.

In one of the book's most moving passages, Liu recalls finding Hank Williams lyrics in his father's shirt pocket a year after his death from kidney failure. Scrawled in his "familiar penmanship," the lyrics read, "I'm so lonesome I could cry." And while Liu's depiction of this side of his father is essential to the book, it's crucial that Liu doesn't dwell on this sad, often lonely transition from East to West. Liu chooses to focus not on past difficulties, but on the here and now. For instance, he emphasizes his father's affable nature how he scaled the corporate ladder, his boisterous way of joking with his non-Mandarin speaking friends, his general likeability, and refusal to be held back or put down. Liu is quick to emphasize that, save for a few instances in junior high, he has really never been downright oppressed solely on the basis of his race, and " was sometimes uncomfortable, but never really alienated."

Aside from his diminutive height, and his inability to feather his hair look like the " closed wings of angels," he'd never truly felt alienated, which is probably true of many of today's Asian Americans. Liu recalls arriving at Yale feeling like an outsider, not simply because he was a " small Chinese boy standing at a giant WASP temple," but because of both " color and class ... twisted together in a double helix of felt inadequacy." Liu eventually dealt with his intimidation by banding together with others of his kind ("fellow marginal public school grads" ) . Ultimately, however, he stresses that his feelings of inadequacy did not derive from his race alone, but from class as well.

Liu believes he was able to achieve acceptance because of an "honorary whiteness." He wistfully writes of" the familiar idiom

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of progress the steady sense of climbing, and climbing higher; .o f forgetting, and forgetting more., He wears Docker's khakis, shopS at Crate & Barrel, and has an affinity for predilections he considers inescapably " white." Liu . that this assimilation is inevitable, and from a " half-full" perspec' tive is an enrichment, rather than a dilution.

• The point isn't that Asians and other minorities are generally accepted in America today. " The meaning of '" Liu writes, " has undergone a revolution in the twenry-nine years I have been alive, a revolution of color, class, and _culture." He recogn,izes that this is an advancement in itsel£ Nevertheless, he argues that to call yourself a minority is to " sustain the dichotomy,, and ~n spite of this perpetual movement towards an integrated America, " the vocabulary of 'assimilation' has remained ftxed all this time: in whiteness, which is still our metonym for power; and fixed in shame, which is what the colored are expected to feel for e~bracing the power." Why, Liu asks, does assimilation have to entail ing out the marks of a darker, dirtier past?" ''Asian American" is a relatively new term, having come into use only within the past thirty years. While Liu believes for many, bigotry,, he a community constitutes a "bulwark help but dislike the phrase. He finds it "contrived and, in a more profound way, unnecessary."

It's a one-size-fits-all existence, brought into being by a group of vocal collegiate California "Orientals." Prior to the Asian American, there was the Chinese American, the Japanese American, the Korean American, and others all of which have been "thrown . . . into the same great bubbling cauldron" to create the Asian . never mind the lack of cultural ties. -"The creators of Asian America that racial nationalism is the most meaningful way ofclaiming . life," Liu writes. He finds this idea both exciting and frightening. While the Asian American community has delineated America's potential to be a synthesis of cultures, in doing so, it may be guilty of "defer[ring] the greater task of confronting life." He hopes it is " something useful, something to outgrow." · Through Amnican ~man's fictional Jenny Shimada, through the flesh-and-bone Eric Liu in all his unobtrusive second~rieration glory, and through these unique renderings of the · American as more than a target of prej~ce, these works with which the reader can easily identify, believable not in spite of their refi•sal to play up prejudice, but precisely ~ of it, and their · · · to address it '

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" T ; e first thing I'm going to say is that Ellen and Rob are not our real names," says Ellen Kay, of herself and her husband.

"No one knows about this ... the only people who know are other swingers. Most of our friends don't even know."

Ellen and Rob's "Total Eclipse" website, a guide to being sexually adventurous in Connecticut, defines swingers as "people who, usually as a couple, enjoy the sexual company of others couples in the bedroom." But a definition cannot nearly capture the essence of the swinger lifestyle. Swingers' sex lives proudly extend into realms and positions most people risk only in their minds. They act out the fantasies, or nightmares, of the rest of us: These people do have threesomes and do enjoy it. And if Ellen and Rob's dream does come true, there may be a club for swingers right here in New Haven.

The point of swinging, according to Ellen, is "sexual enhancement, like a sex toy or a porno that is real." Those who participate are generally in their thirties, secure in their marriages, but looking for a way to branch out. Total Eclipse warns potential swingers that sexual partners most likely will not become close friends. As Rob bluntly purs it, "It's unpretentious. Most swingers just want to fuck. They don't want best friends or golfing buddies." Swingers have outSide lives, including kids, regular jobs, and non-swinging friends.

The swap from daily life to swinging involves more than just stripping and jumping into bed. Ellen likes to meet and talk to other couples before the clothes hit the floor-it makes her feel more comfortable. Ellen and Rob also have one couple with whom they regularly partner swap. Through Total Eclipse, they now arrange parties, first screening the participantS, through onllne profiles, pictures, and information that party-goers send in advance. Their next parry, scheduled for the end of February, is already booked. Who got rejected? "Well ... when you're married and all you want is a fantastic sexual experience with [a person], you don't want them to be 300 pounds," Ellen admitS. "I am very, very fussy-I don't want anyone who's crazy, old, ugly.... " Essentially, Ellen would like to swing with people like her.

She and Rob fumbled through unremarkable upbringings in the same Connecticut town. They were vaguely aware of each other as members of mutually prominent families, meeting occasionally at church functions and local political eventS. When Ellen came home from college, they crept into each other's lives. Despite an eleven year age difference, their friendship soon led to dating which became serious dating. Five months ago they married. And now they are starting to fool around with plans to start their own business and to have children. They began, in many ways, as a typical

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couple, preparing for a quiet life. Since they started swinging, however, this humdrum existence has fallen by the wayside.

Now, the excitement of their lifestyle is underlined by the risk of exposure. The couple fears that if people in Rob's hometown found out about his swinging, his family's business could suffer. The possibility "certainly worries us-there's always the risk, but, if we meet anyone we know at a club, they don't have anything on us that we don't have on them," says Ellen. If anyone from their public life ever found out, they would just "deal with it and move on."

"We're not ashamed of what we do," Ellen said, "but others don't understand, and we can't make them more open-minded."

Most swingers confine their activities to the privacy of the bedroom, but some, like Ellen and Rob, have found a way to mix business with pleasure. Their entrepreneurial goals have transformed them from people who experiment privately to people who run ads sandwiched between strip dubs and sex videos in the giggle-worthy back pages of the New Haven Advocau and who now have even larger aspirations: a "nice, dean dub" for swingers.

While Ellen and Rob are excited about the success of their first parties, they are even more thrilled at the prospect 路 of opening their dub in New Haven or another nearby city.

They envision a multi-floor.,...enue--one level with a dance floor, a OJ, and quieter rooms with tables and chairs for hanging out and talking, while upstairs, patrons will find "rooms in which to swing." Some clubs for swingers already exist, but Total Eclipse is taking a new approach: "Mostly swinging is for couples, but we're trying to get路 singles involved," Ellen explained.

Organizers of swinging discriminate heavily against single men, while courting single, especially bi-sexual women. The supply of the first radically outstrips the latter, but Ellen and Rob would like to find ways to integrate both. "We want to give single men a place to go," said Ellen. Part of their drive to bring those on the outskirts to the swinger community comes from "one of our little fantasies"-a 路 threesome of Rob, Ellen, and another man. With their own dub, they could invite the people they want to get to know.

If their dub does open in New Haven, would they consider hosting a party for college students? "It's definitely a& option ... although Rob and I might sit that one out ... " Perhaps someday soon Total Eclipse will mount some competition for Toad's, giving new meaning to the term "booty cam."

Until then, the rest of us can only finger the edges of what goes on in Ellen and Rob' s bedroom.

Sarah Las/tow, a sophomo" in Davenport Collegt. is on tht staffofTNJ路

THE NEW JouRNAL

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