Issue 4 Fall 2018

Reality.

Vol CXXVII. Issue 4.

tufts observer

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S TA F F EDITOR IN CHIEF: Emmett Pinsky MANAGING EDITOR: Alexandra Benjamin CREATIVE DIRECTOR: Erica Levy FEATURES EDITOR: Julia Press NEWS EDITORS: Cris Paulino Sasha Hulkower ARTS & CULTURE EDITORS: Sonya Bhatia Owen Cheung OPINION EDITORS: Lena Novins-Montague Wilson Wong CAMPUS EDITORS: Myisha Majumder Anita Lam POETRY & PROSE EDITOR: Ruthie Block VOICES EDITOR: Kira Lauring WEB EDITOR: Juliana Vega del Castillo PHOTO DIRECTORS: Britt Abigail Barton ART DIRECTOR: Riva Dhamala MULTIMEDIA DIRECTOR: Evie Bellew Izzy Rosenbaum VIDEO DIRECTOR: Emai Lai

Is this even real? Are we even here?

Wait, really?

2 6 8

hidden in smoke

FEATURE

By Tara Kola

misguided representation

OPINION By Annie Bricker, Shaan Merchant, Camille Carlisle, Julia Press, and Sajani Clerk VOICES

a morning ritual Anonymous

10

NEWS

risking to report

By Myisha Majumder

12 18

POETRY & PROSE

ARTS & CULTURE

cession

By Cris Paulino

the virgin bachelor

By Sonia Groeneveld

20 22 25 28 OPINION

NEWS

CAMPUS

VOICES

13 17 PHOTO INSET

realities

PODCAST TEAM: Kareal Amenumey Malaika Gabra PUBLICITY DIRECTORS: Nasrin Lin Daniel Jelčić

POETRY & PROSE

W8BEN or shit to receive money

By Nesi Altaras

building a better reality

By MJ Griego

fake news at face value

By Lena Novins-Montague

being femme in public

By Wilson Wong

STAFF WRITERS: Trina Sanyal Eman Naseer Jonathan Innocent Muna Mohamed DESIGNERS: Zahra Morgan Tyler Whitaker Richard Nakatsuka Helen Xie Yishu Huang Nick Golin Brigid Cawley LEAD COPY EDITOR: Jesse Ryan COPY EDITORS: Brittany Regas Rosy Triggs Ryan Albanesi Josie Wagner Sara Barkouli Aidan Schaffert EDITOR EMERITUS: Carissa Fleury CONTRIBUTORS: Quinn Tucker Amy Tong Mollie Leibowitz Rabin Emma Youcha

COVERS AND TOC

BY ERICA LEVY BACK COVER PHOTO

BY ABIGAIL BARTON

On Living & Mourning

By Cris Paulino and Emma Youcha

Feature

Hidden in Smoke A Forgotten History of Opium, Opioids, and Tufts

By Tara Kola

2 Tufts Observer November 13, 2018

Feature

O

n June 20, 1946, the last empress of China died in a prison cell alone, lying in a pool of her own bodily fluids.

Outside, an audience of civilians and soldiers gathered to mock Empress Wanrong ( ) as she shrieked for opium, convulsing in withdrawal with fever, nausea, diarrhea, and hallucinations. Her captors, a group of Mao Zedong’s Communist forces, had turned her into “a grotesque tourist attraction,” “an object lesson in the evils of opium addiction,” and a symbol of “Imperial decadence,” according to the book The Opium Wars. The death of Empress Wanrong is a refraction of the violence the British Empire’s global drug trade wrought on the Indian bodies coerced to produce opium, and the Chinese bodies coerced to consume it across lines of class, gender, and geography. By the end of the 19th century, 90 million people—30 percent of China’s population—were addicted to opium. The UN Office on Drugs and Crimes has called the Chinese opium epidemic “the largest substance abuse problem the world has ever faced.” And Tufts University is a beneficiary of this faraway epidemic—a story sealed in the silent mortar of Cabot Intercultural Center.

In the past year, Tufts has been associated with a more recent epidemic: the American opioid crisis. The Tufts Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences is named after the Sacklers, owners of Purdue Pharma L.P., which created the opioid-based drug OxyContin. The Sacklers are credited with developing the aggressive marketing strategies that eventually encouraged the overprescription of OxyContin. According to the National Institute on Drug Abuse, around 8 to 12 percent of patients prescribed an opioid for chronic pain develop an opioid abuse disorder, and 80 percent of people who use heroin first misused a prescription opioid. The casualties and costs of over-prescription are high: the Center for Disease Control estimates that 115 people die per day from opioid overdose in the United States, and a study suggests that the country’s annual cost of prescription opioid misuse is $78.5 billion.

In light of the Sacklers’ implication in the opioid crisis, the Tufts Daily published

an editorial in November 2017 suggesting that “Tufts should change the name of its biomedical school to better reflect the mission of the institution.” In April 2018, an article in the Observer made a similar suggestion, asking, “What will be the legacy of the Sackler School, and of Tufts, if they continue to uplift this name?” Yet a historical investigation into the connections between Tufts and the Chinese opium epidemic reveals that the Sackler drug empire is not the first to receive nomenclatural sanctuary at this University, raising new

questions about names throughout campus, including the Cabot Center.

The Cabot Center was completed in 1981, and named in recognition of a $1 million donation from American career diplomat, John Moors Cabot. Two years after Empress Wanrong’s death, John Moors Cabot arrived in Shanghai as U.S. Counsel General. China would be a seemingly unimportant blip in Cabot’s illustrious career as an ambassador to Sweden, Columbia, Brazil, and Poland, as an Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs appointed by President Eisenhower, and a lecturer in the hallowed halls of the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy. But China was hardly insignificant for Cabot, whose family wealth was derived from a

ART BY NICK GOLIN, PHOTOS FROM TUFTS ARCHIVE AND WIKIPEDIA

number of exploitative sources, including the Chinese opium epidemic.

John Moors Cabot hailed from the legendary Cabot family, members of an insular, aristocratic clan of old Boston money known as the “Boston Brahmins.”

Apart from the Cabots, the Boston Brahmins consisted of prominent names such as Lowell (like the city), Coolidge (like the corner), and Winthrop (like the street).

During the 18th and 19th centuries, the Brahmins consolidated their financial and cultural power. They sent their children to Harvard College. They funded institutions like the Museum of Fine Arts, Massachusetts General Hospital, and Boston Symphony Orchestra. And they funded these institutions by engaging together in multinational businesses like the transatlantic slave trade and the Chinese opium trade. After the abolition of slavery in Massachusetts in 1836, opium became the most profitable commodity for Boston merchants, who joined the British opium trade. In his book, Imperial Cruise: A Secret History of Empire and War, James Bradley described the Cabots as central to the creation of Boston’s opium empire, and as one of the most influential families amongst the Brahmins. This notion is captured in a poem by John Collins Bossidy, titled “A Boston Toast”: “This is good old Boston, the land of the bean and the cod, Where the Lowells talk to the Cabots, and the Cabots talk only to God.” The Cabots and other Brahmins have constructed their image as God-talking Bostonians in part by keeping their wealth and name discreet, even as they made massive donations to the city’s institutions. The Cabot name at Tufts, then, is a rare sighting of the opium heritage that permeates familiar spaces across Boston.

Jingya Guo (MA’18), who studied Chinese history at Tufts, reflected on this connection, saying, “I walked by the Cabot Center everyday, but I never knew its opium history.” Menglan Chen (A’16), a Masters student in East Asian Studies at Harvard University, added that she often

November 13, 2018 Tufts Observer 3

Feature

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Cabots arrived, But China and opioid was hardly abuse had insignificant hit America for Cabot, before whose the Sacklers familycreated wealthOxyContin was derived (the from druga numberfor heroin, of instance, exploitative wassources, first marketed including as athenon-addictive, Chinese opiumover-the-counter epidemic. pharmaceutical).

John hailed Yet from both the thelegendary Cabots and Cabot the family, members Sacklers participated of inancreating insular,and aristosupcratic clan plying large-scale of old Boston marketsmoney of addiction, known as the and then “Boston donated Brahmins. their earnings ” Aparttofrom instituthe Cabots, tions likethe Tufts.

Boston Brahmins consisted of prominent Priyanka names Padidam such as(A’18), Lowellwho (like cothe city), Coolidge wrote the April(like Observer the corner), article andonWinthe throp (like Sackler School, the street). discussed During thethe importance 18th and 19th of interrogating centuries, the names Brahmins such as consolidated Cabot and their financial Sackler for initiating and cultural difficult power. conversaThey sent their tions on campus. children In an toemail Harvard interview College. she They funded wrote, “The question institutions of changing like the the Museum name of Fine Arts, necessarily leads Massachusetts to bigger questions Generalabout Hospital, and where money Boston comesSymphony from and goes Orchestra. within Anduniversity, the they funded andthese whatinstitutions and who benefits by engagingthe from together university’s in multinational money.” businesses like Butthelittle transatlantic concreteslave action trade has andbeen the Chinese taken around opiumchanging trade. After the Sackler the abolition name of slavery since the family’s in Massachusetts involvement in 1836, in the opium opibecame oid crisisthe wasmost discussed profitable in Esquire, commodity the New for Boston merchants, Yorker, the Tufts Daily, who and joined thethe Observer.

British opium members Some trade. In his ofbook, the University Imperial Cruise: have A Secret been involved History with of Empire cross-University and War, James petiBradleysuch tions, describes as thethe “Anti-Sackler Cabots as central Medical to the creation and Biomedical of Boston’s Petition,opium ” currently empire signed This notion by 28 is members capturedofin the a poem TuftsbyUniversity John Collins Bossidy, School of Medicine titled “A(TUSM).

Boston Toast”: Shreya Bhatia (A’17) is a second-year student “This at is TUSM, good old where Boston, she attends classes such theas land “Addiction of the bean Medicine” and theincod, a building named WhereSackler. the Lowells “Ironically, talk to”the sheCabots, said, “a lot ofand thethe care Cabots we are talkgiving only tois God. to people ” who have opioid dependence that is connected ThetoCabots the Sacklers. and other ” ButBrahmins Bhatia is skephave constructed tical about what theirchanging image astheGod-talking name will Bostonians inunless accomplish part byTufts keeping “both their officially wealth and name unofficially discreet, acknowledges even as they made this issue” massiveraising by donations awareness to the about city’s institutions. the University’s The 4 Tufts 4 Tufts Observer Observer November April13, 23,2018 2018

connections to the opium trade and crisis.

“If some first-year medical student comes to this building and it has a new name, but they don’t know that the money for it came from the Sacklers, what is the point?”

Ayesha Jalal, a Professor of History at Tufts, also voiced concern that changing names could allow the University to erase, instead of raise awareness about its entanglement with histories of imperial capitalism. “Why do we have to disguise the awkward truth?” she asked.

Renaming spaces would also require judging the past by the moral standards of the present, which Art History Professor Andrew McClellan called “tricky business.” He noted, “If we start going down

“I am not surprised that the Cabots were involved with the opium trade, but i am surprised by how we have forgotten that history”

that road, we have to go down it completely. We can’t cherry-pick which moral issues we care about, because that creates a kind of myopia that doesn’t serve us in the end.”

If we wish to change the Sackler or Cabot name, he argued, then we must investigate history systematically, and change the name of the very land on which Tufts sits to honor that it was stolen from the Wampanoag people.

Other faculty and students interviewed unanimously agreed that renaming individual cases such as Sackler or Cabot has important symbolic value, but by itself this would never be enough. Professor of History Kris Manjapra argued that names such as Sackler and Cabot are only symptoms of “the troubling ways in which the

familiar is steeped in historical forms of domination, dispossession, structural racism, and inequality.”

“If the problem is a social problem, how should our solution be a social solution?” he asked. “Renaming must have social transformation below it.” Senior Ria Mazumdar, a member of the Left Unity Project (LUP) and South Asian Perspectives and Conversations (SAPAC), suggested that this “social transformation” requires educating and re-educating the campus about its history, its implications for the present, and “communicating to students the gravity of the issue at hand.”

Engaging with the “gravity of the issue” reveals the disturbing depth of institutional amnesia. Through the 18th and 19th centuries, the Chinese government tried desperately to enforce legal measures to curb the opium epidemic. Yet the trade was too profitable, both for the Chinese middlemen who evaded the law, and for the foreign traders who continued to sell opium in the name of “free trade.” As Jalal said, “Capitalism has always been disguised through the civilizational mission.”

The liberal ideology of “free trade” propounded by East India Company servants, like John Stuart Mill, justified the opium trade as a sort of economic civilizational mission that brought Adam Smith’s “hand of God” to the “Orient.” If it is ironic that a biomedical school is named after a family imbricated in a national health crisis, it is also ironic that a school of law and diplomacy is housed in a building named after a family that blatantly disregarded the sovereignty of the 19th-century Chinese state.

Even for the purposes of historical reeducation, institutional introspection, and redressing violent pasts and presents, the University is unlikely to change the Sackler or Cabot name. Patrick Collins, Executive Director of Public Relations at Tufts, justified the University’s decision by noting that the Sackler gifts were given “more than a decade before OxyContin was introduced to the marketplace.” Just as the Sackler gift to Tufts cannot be linked directly to OxyContin, the Cabot gift cannot be linked directly to the opium money made more than a century earlier.

Still, temporal arguments are not the institution’s primary reason for keeping

Feature

the name. Collins noted that the Sackler School’s name, in fact, can never be contractually changed, as “naming opportunities can be and often are governed by a legal agreement… [that] can require that a name be retained in perpetuity, as in this case.” Collins also declined my request to see the total size of Cabot donations to Tufts “out of respect for donors’ privacy, and in accordance with our donor and alumni privacy policies.” Tufts’ capacity to protect the Sackler and Cabot names, even in the face of the community’s desire to interrogate them, raises a more difficult question: is the problem the individual names that universities contain, and the sources of wealth they represent, or is it the structure of universities themselves?

Though the University is supposed to teach its students to approach the world analytically, the institution itself is rarely the subject of this critical inquiry. Jalal said, “We are the privileged who have been put into this space, and we don’t question that privilege. We take it as a given and whitewash it, even though we are the ones who are supposed to question the world.”

Junior Desmond Fonseca, who is major-

ing in History and Africana Studies, said, “I think the first step of organizing is always education, but that education cannot come solely from the University, which is invested not in knowledge production to overthrow capitalism, but to sustain it.”

Professor Manjapra also noted the importance of investigating history for campus activism that seeks to reform the University’s structural entanglement with imperial capitalism, drawing attention to the unified project of activism and scholarship. “Activism and study are both part of the pursuit we all share—which is to make the social a just place, to address the injustice that structures it, and sometimes, to completely reimagine what social relations can be,” he said. “It is not a choice to be an activist or a scholar.”

Despite the University’s imbrication in the structures it claims to deconstruct, there are a number of resources at Tufts to support students who wish to investigate the University’s history on their own terms. Pamela Hopkins, the Public Services and Outreach Archivist at the Tufts Archives, located in the ground floor of Tisch Library, said that “people who are working

on specific issues or concerns, either on campus or locally, are likely to find things in the archives that could help them take a new approach, that might provide lessons learned to strategize with community leaders, or allow them to show documentation of structures in the past.” History Professor Virginia Drachman, who teaches a course titled “Tufts in American History” added that “Tufts is not immune to history... Students who brought their values and expectations to campus sometimes clashed with administrators who had different goals.”

She encourages students to investigate those intersections. “There is so much to find out hidden away in the archives—accessible to anyone with a curiosity.”

As a brief historical examination of the Cabot Intercultural Center reveals, Tufts can never be two centuries removed from the opium trade, nor 7,000 miles from the prison cell in which Empress Wanrong descended through withdrawal into death. We are intimately tied to seemingly distant places and pasts through our accepted names, constructed façades, concealed realities, hidden histories, and stories waiting to be found and acted upon.

NOVEMBER 13, 2018 Tufts Observer 5

OPINION

Misguided representation

By Annie Bricker, Shaan Merchant, Camille Carlisle, Julia Press, and Sajani Clerk

W

e are a group of Tufts tour guides who love talking to prospective students and parents about our experiences at this school. We know that the tours we give are crucial to the Office of Admissions’ success, and we work hard to accurately and fairly depict what college life at Tufts is like.

But we are frustrated with the inequity, misrepresentation, and deception of the tour guide program at Tufts. We alone cannot speak to the multitude of experiences that Tufts students have, and the tour guide program administration actively limits the ability of all voices to be heard by prospective students.

We are unpaid volunteers. Our commitment to the program requires that we give at least 7 tours a semester, during class blocks, weekends, and holidays. If we fail to give both the appropriate number of tours and attend regularly scheduled group meetings, we are removed from the program. Outside 6 Tufts Observer november 13, 2018

of the occasional complimentary donut and a discount at the campus bookstore, we receive very little recognition and compensation for our contributions.

By not paying tour guides, the program systematically ignores the financial barriers that prevent many students from devoting unpaid time and energy to the tour guide program.

In the 2016-2017 school year, over 35 percent of the Tufts undergraduate student body received financial aid, which often includes a work-study component. Some university programs, such as Tisch Scholars and Tufts Literacy Corps, allow students to devote their time to these programs and receive payment through work-study in return. However, the tour guide program does not offer this option. Many students cannot afford the time commitment expected of guides if it does not count towards their work study, which leaves low-income students

OPINION

underrepresented in the group of guides. The program’s inaccessibility to students on financial aid sends the message to both current and prospective students that these voices are not valued.

Financial diversity is not the only element of the tour guide program that is lacking. Its executive board is also made up entirely of White students. When approached with the idea of adding a diversity-chair position to the board, the leaders of the program acknowledged the lack of representation, but made no efforts to create such a position.

The lack of diversity among tour guides specifically creates an issue in the case of special interest tours. Tufts offers these special interest tours to groups who are low-income, first generation college students, and people of color. Unfortunately, the tour guide program fails to take identity into account when assigning guides to these groups. Consequently, guides who cannot speak to these groups’ experiences end up leading these tours. A White student cannot describe the realities of being a student of color at Tufts. If the tour guide program itself cannot convey the experiences of students who are not White and wealthy, it cannot succeed in presenting the Tufts experience fairly and in its entirety.

The voices of tour guides are essential to this school and should accurately reflect its student body. Without tour guides, the admissions office couldn’t attract incoming students, and Tufts wouldn’t remain competitive as an institution. The Tufts Undergraduate Admissions website states, “Tour guides are the most cited reason about why a student chooses to apply.” To Tufts, we are a key component of a campus visit experience; to us, tour guiding is an additional extracurricular activity in an already busy weekly schedule. We are by no means dependent on our role as tour guides in the same way that Tufts is dependent on us. There is an imbalance in the way in which we are valued, and that is evidenced in our lack of compensation.

ART BY WILL MUELLER

Some may argue that Tufts does not have the funds to pay its student guides. However, compared to its peer institutions with comparable financial capabilities, Tufts is nearly singular in its failure to pay its tour guides. Other than Tufts and Middlebury, all schools in the NESCAC pay their tour guides, and the time commitment asked of Middlebury guides is much less than that expected of Tufts students.

In addition to our lack of compensation and representation, we have also been treated poorly by the Office of Admissions. Though we are volunteers, we are held accountable to our commitment as if it is a paid job. Throughout the week, we constantly receive a barrage of messages asking for help on severely understaffed tours in tones ranging from pleading, to desperate, to hostile. We are regularly threatened to be removed from the program if we do not give enough tours. When grievances such as these are posed to the program leadership, we often receive curt responses, which shut down any kind of discussion. The work conditions are alarming considering the contribution that we provide to the Office of Admissions.

The voices of tour guides are essential to this school and should accurately reflect its student body.

So why do we still give tours? We have a genuine love for the work that we do. Giving a good tour is an incredible feeling; it can remind us of our favorite experiences at Tufts and allow us to share some excitement about college with prospective students.

But for all of the students who remain a part of the tour guide program, there are countless others who have quit. Some are fed up with the problems in the system and are choosing to prioritize other parts of their lives; others have left because they need a paying job. Our choice to continue to give tours does not minimize the faults that exist in this program.

We have raised these concerns with leadership figures many times before. Individuals have spoken up on behalf of the misrepresentation and inequities that the tour guide program has allowed to continue. We have asked for payment, fair representation, and appropriate treatment, but have been regularly dismissed, without even a conversation. It is time, not only to begin a discussion that acknowledges these faults, but to take the action against the hypocrisy of the tour guide program. We are asking for a more equitable and representative tour guide program so that we, as campus guides, can continue to share a genuine love for the distinct and dynamic experiences of all Tufts students.

november 13, 2018 Tufts Observer 7

FEATURE

VOICES

A morning ritual that you HAD never planned or wanted Anonymous You wake up with the groggy weight of just having had a bad dream. In between sleep and consciousness, you try to remember what was so bad about it. It might be less than half a second, but it holds you for an eternity. What happened? And then it all comes rushing back. A cloud washes over you, everything looks more gray than before, and your head feels so heavy your neck could break—why won’t it just break?

Ten years.

Is it an affair if it’s ten years long?

It began when I was six.

To learn that my father had another life for most of the time that our family had been a family is an experience that I still cannot articulate well. Someone who I trusted, admired, loved, and thought I knew.

Someone who I thought I knew.

What followed was both clarity and confusion.

Clarity in that everything before was a dream, and that this nightmare was the reality. Confusion that the real-

8 Tufts Observer november 12, 2018

ity was this. I’m fine I’m fine I’m fine I’m fine I’m fine. If you say it fast, it sounds like I’m fighting I’m fighting I’m fighting I’m fighting I’m fighting.

A redeeming quality of tragedy: people come together to share the weight of it. But the pressure blew my family apart. We became islands. The silence screamed as the fear of breaking and burdening each other became oceans between us.

It felt even more like an absurd drama, or some alternate reality light years away, when the woman evolved from a mere concept into a person. She found me on every virtual media platform: email, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Skype, MySpace (!!!). She fervently reached across the Pacific, posted photos of me, contacted my friends, echoed in my head as she told me They’ll all know— I will get him fired.

I was more exasperated than anything.

Haven’t you done enough? I wondered.

I confided in no one. To friends who asked me about these odd messages from a woman who claimed to know me, I’d laugh it off, insist it was spam or a hacked account. I thought that the moment my truthful

ART BY MADELINE LEE

FEATURE

VOICES

words entered some-one else’s ears, all of it would become real. Slither out of the realm of imagination and into the tangible world.

As if it wasn’t real already, as if I would be safer if I kept it trapped in my mind. Despite my attempts to isolate that part of my life from the rest of my life, all it did was fuck with me more than if I had said something… anything.

For a while, I felt like I was floating in interactions with people, as if my consciousness was confused as to where it should be. Not in my own body, because even that was foreign to me as I emptily went through the motions of what felt like a previous life. I hovered by my own shoulder, cautiously watching my every interaction, worried that someone would call me out on my lousy imitation of myself. This was my futile attempt to control my reality as much as I could, but it ended up feeling more real than anything in this world.

What followed was the tainting of memories, the reconfiguring of what had felt real in my past. I was sifting through everything and seeing every grain in a different light. How did no one know for an entire decade? He’s the same person… but not at all? How much money was going toward his other life?

Combing through my past, I ask, what do my memories mean if they feel so different now? In what ways am I subconsciously altering my own reality? One by one, each memory falls away into oblivion, but not before shattering into shards of glass, the fragments searing through my eyes.

Summer. The beautiful white tissueflowers that my brother loves are in full bloom. I know he loves them because one time they were cut down and he cried. The tissue-flowers line the pool. I’m small. I’m swimming with my father. I get on his back and we dive down. I feel like 浦島太郎 on his adventure-friend the turtle, about to discover the underwater kingdom of dancing ladies in floaty garments and endless fish to eat. I feel like I’m soar-ing, effortlessly passing through the water, hanging on to my father’s shoulders. We glide from the shallow end to the deep end. I feel the pressure

building in my ears, but I don’t care. We’re headed to the kingdom.

I questioned the legitimacy of every memory I have. I can’t help but see this moment, and every moment, as less sunny, less soaring. But if I close my eyes, I can still smell the flowers, feel the gliding of water and skin. It feels as fantastical as the fairy tale that I imagined I was in. As I powerlessly watch the unraveling and rewriting of my own history I wonder: does it matter what really happened?

Sifting through memories now, I hold each one tightly. It does matter—every memory is nuanced, complicated, and foundational to our very being. They are fluid in nature. I’ve come to understand that how you live your memory now is the most important. Our memories are very much governed by the present—re-made, re-thought by the present you. Understood in different ways with the experiences that come afterward. So why do we say that the past is “behind” us—why claim that we live experiences linearly—when it is in us, all around us, changing with us?

As I powerlessly watch the unraveling and rewriting of my own history, does it matter what really happened?

november 12, 2018 Tufts Observer 9

FEATURE

News

Istanbul

Risking to Report The impact of Jamal Khashoggi’s Death

By Myisha Majumder

T

he United States prides itself on protecting its citizens’ constitutional liberties. Recently, the country has shown a reinvigorated fervor for protecting free speech in the name of patriotic loyalty. In contrast, other countries continue to increase censorship and limit freedom of expression, often employing violence to do so. But what happens when one of our key allies acts inherently against our moral code?

Enter into the political theater Jamal Khashoggi, a Washington Post journalist, self-exiled from Saudi Arabia, walking into the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, Turkey on October 2, never to come out again. Khashoggi gained prominence in the world of Saudi journalism in the 1980s, rising through the ranks of a variety of Saudi news organizations. Due to the close relationship between news and government in the country, Khashoggi soon found himself in the inner circle of the royal family. He remained there for decades until the family turned on him due to his criticisms of President Trump, imposing restrictions on his public appearances and writing. Following self-exile to the United States in 2017, Khashoggi wrote a monthly opinion column for the Washington Post tackling issues that criticized the Saudi government.

Prior to his October 2 visit, Khashoggi had visited the Saudi Arabian consulate on September 28 and was told by officials to

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Tufts Observer

November 13, 2018

Riyadh

return later for documents verifying his divorce so he could legally wed his Turkish fiancée. Khashoggi entered the Saudi Consulate at 1:34pm on October 2, while his fiancée waited outside.

She continued to wait for 10 hours before leaving and returning in the morning, still with no sign of Khashoggi.

The Saudi government denied having any information about Khashoggi’s disappearance for two weeks. In fact, Prince Mo-

FEATURE

News

hammed stated in Bloomberg News that Khashoggi had left the consulate “after a few minutes or one hour.” Further, the Saudi ambassador to the U.S. stated that all reports about Khashoggi’s disappearance or death were “completely false and baseless.”

Eighteen days after his disappearance, Saudi state television directly contradicted earlier statements when they reported that Khashoggi had died in the consulate as the result of a fight. An official described in detail to Reuters that the journalist died “in a chokehold after resisting attempts to return him to Saudi Arabia,” going on to describe a detailed account of the cover-up.

Following this report, 18 Saudi citizens were arrested in connection to Khashoggi’s death, along with the Saudi Deputy Intelligence Chief and an aide to Prince Mohammed. Throughout this time, the Turkish government offered conflicting reports and evidence. On October 9, Turkish officials told the New York Times that they were certain Khashoggi had been killed “on orders from the highest levels” of the Saudi government. In contrast, on October 10, an adviser to President Erdogan claimed that the Saudi state could not be blamed for Khashoggi’s disappearance. On October 11, the Washington Post reported that the Turkish government told U.S. officials it had recordings that inferred that Saudis had “interrogated, tortured, and then murdered” Khashoggi.

Meanwhile, throughout the two-week gray period, President Trump swayed between defending the Saudi government and sharing in skepticism. A bipartisan group of senators demanded President Trump thoroughly investigate Khashoggi’s disappearance. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo responded by traveling to Saudi Arabia on October 16. On the same day, the United States received a $100 million payment from Saudi Arabia—which the State Department claimed had no connection to the mounting tension. President Trump continued his inconsistent positions, claiming to believe the explanation that Khashoggi had died because of a fight in the consulate on October 20, then three days later describing it as “one of the worst cover-ups in history.”

According to The Committee to Protect Journalists, between 1992 and 2018, 1,324 journalists have been killed on the job—849 of them were murdered. Foreign correspondents are especially at risk due to the complications that often come with reporting from countries with censorship.

Edward Schumacher-Matos, a prize-winning journalist and Director of the Fletcher School’s Edward R. Murrow Center for a Digital World, spoke to the importance of foreign correspondents. “[Foreign correspondents] play a crucial role of reporting the facts about incidents like these and trying to figure out just what happened and why, and reporting on what other governments are doing about it, if anything,” he said.

Foreign correspondents bring an outside lens into societies where free speech is limited. For journalists like Khashoggi, citizen-

ART BY RICHARD NAKATSUKA

ship and personal ties to the country in question can amplify the risks they face. In an interview with the Columbia Journalism Review six months prior to his disappearance, Khashoggi explained that his reasoning behind leaving Saudi Arabia was driven by fear for his own safety. “I felt that whatever space I had was getting narrower and I decided to leave,” he said. “We never had freedom of the press in Saudi Arabia, it’s true… I was under the risk of either being banned from travel, which would be suffocating, or being physically arrested, just like many of my colleagues.”

Khashoggi’s continued and intensified political criticisms after his self-exile provided a glimpse into failures in the Saudi government that would have remained otherwise unpublicized. Beyond that, the nature of consistent reporting around Khashoggi’s death is an homage to what he died for—it continues to expose injustices and inconsistencies in the Saudi government. Schumacher-Matos noted that “if you see the reporting, we continue to get more and more details about what happened… The more you get this kind of reporting, the more you understand the Saudi government in general, and what’s happening inside that government. It’s not so easy to report on Saudi Arabia. It’s a very controlled society.”

When a journalist is killed simply for criticizing a government, fear heightens. Khashoggi’s criticisms of the Saudi Arabian government, no matter how valid, factually based, and protected under the United States Constitution, led to his death. This murder committed by the Saudi government sets a dangerous precedent and raises questions about the extent to which elites will go to hinder free thought in order to maintain their power.

In those journalists who have passed, but also those who continue to risk their lives to report, we can see Khashoggi’s legacy. In Khashoggi’s honor, I wrote this piece detailing the importance of journalists like him who challenge institutions that are otherwise accepted, despite the repercussions. I published this piece anonymously online because I found myself fearful of what repercussions my parents might face, as they travel to Saudi Arabia in December to meet with members of the Saudi Arabian government. The aftermath of Khashoggi’s death can be felt in communities as small as ours at Tufts University. Despite the fact that I am a United States citizen and have the right to be critical, I still fear what may happen if my name is attached to these words.

Before his disappearance, Khashoggi sent in a column titled: What the Arab world needs most is free expression. The piece detailed the intense need for integrity in journalism and diversity of thought in order to further individual growth. In it, he writes that “Arab governments have been given free rein to continue silencing the media at an increasing rate.” These efforts of censorship and control cannot succeed. Journalists like Khashoggi and the 1,324 other journalists killed in the last 20 years cannot die in vain.

November 13, 2018

Tufts Observer

11

POETRY

Cession

by Cris Paulino

in dreams, you don’t see, but you know. you don’t dream about the flight, you know you took the flight. the experience is always retroactive after, things became fractured i know where i am and what im doing but somehow dont know that im doing it memory leaking out of me sometimes that is good sometimes it is what i need if i see it all at once the tides swell around me levees break over and over and i cant breathe what does it mean to not know how to be what does it mean to but sometimes not be real sometimes when i cannot see in the eyes of the law, i still cannot breathe or of the state, and then i or of yourself forget how to step forward to not know to wake up in the morning yourself it hurts to go through my day scared and it hurts to go to sleep scared and tired of feeling scared and ready (not ready) to wake up scared it hurts to watch your fears be realized to watch your fears encroach upon your territory, all of your territory, the little of it that you have left the little of it you ever had the little of it you carved out for yourself when you had none 12 Tufts Observer november 13, 2018

ART BY MOLLIE LEIBOWITZ RABIN

realities apart

@abigail barton

@quinn tucker

@myisha majumder

reality’s a part

@erica levy

by Nesi Altaras

Certificate: alien, it is certificated that I,

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foreign status holder not effectively

individual or corporation, my place connected to any

of birth US or otherwise

or incorporation – my mailing persons (check)

address

if different from above broker transactions barter exchanges special rates (like chai teas

of incarceration naan breads with the meaning of obesity the la brea tar pits

life suicide

man serial homicide

the Quran bankruptcies caused by medical

the Iliad

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personal debts of the income wrenched from the dying

hands of the worker / disburses taxes for foreigners tax treaty (individual or corporation) performing for you all my service between me and my lover of kebabs/ of my telling of the coup

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W8BEN – or shit to receive money

poetry

ART BY RUTHIE BLOCK

november 13, 2018 Tufts Observer 17

FEATURE

Arts & Culture

The Virgin T

hose of you who aren’t active members of “Bachelor Nation” may not be up to speed on the hype surrounding ABC’s new lead of The Bachelor, 26-year-old Colton Underwood. As the fourth-place finisher on Becca Kufrin’s season of The Bachelorette, Underwood was a fan favorite throughout the season with his professional football playerturned philanthropist career and charming good looks. In interviews, Kufrin especially praised Underwood for his sex appeal—much of his screen time with Kufrin featured heavy makeouts and lots of physical chemistry.

So, it came as a shock to both Kufrin and viewers when late in the season Underwood admitted on a one-onone date that he is, in fact, a virgin.

The show’s producers immediately capitalized on this revelation. In the weeks leading up to it, advertisements of “Colton’s big confession” and clips of a distraught Kufrin were rampant in promotions.

During the airing of the “huge reveal,” Underwood told Kufrin that although he had previously been in love and was not waiting until marriage, he wanted his first time to be special. He explained how his virginity has been difficult for him, especially as a football player, in which his teammates often perpetuated narratives of sex as a “conquest” necessary to prove one’s masculinity. Immediately following Colton’s confession, Kufrin excused herself from the dinner table and was filmed standing in deep thought, leaving Underwood alone. She appeared shocked, considering Underwood’s virginity a potential deal breaker for the relationship. She even-

18

Tufts Observer

November 13, 2018

tually returned to the table and thanked him for sharing; their date continued, but how this new information would impact her decisions about Underwood going forward was still unclear.

Eventually, Underwood was sent home as the fourth-place finisher, a week before the “fantasy suite” episode, where contestants are invited to a private hotel room and are typically assumed to have sex.

Kufrin mentioned none of this in her parting

with Underwood, rather contending that her other connections with the remaining men were stronger. Underwood left heartbroken.

Following a brief stint on the spinoff show Bachelor in Paradise, ABC announced on September 4 that Colton Underwood would be the next Bachelor. Fans on social media immediately began labeling him the “virgin bachelor,” and members of Bachelor Nation deliberated how Underwood would handle aspects of being the Bachelor, including the fantasy suites

and whether or not he would find a girl he felt he could lose his virginity to.

All of this discussion surrounding one man’s virginity raises the question: why is so much weight placed on whether or not someone has had sex? The Bachelor production plays right into the societal expectation that someone’s first sexual experience carries an innate importance.

During After the Final Rose, a show where the recently eliminated men of The Bachelorette rehash old drama on live television, several contestants made fun of Colton for never having had sex. A fellow cast-off shouted at Underwood, “Colton, you’re acting like a pussy but you’ve never been inside one.” The Bachelor production allowed for the shaming of Underwood because virginity is a topic that modernday society sees as intriguing, and thus increases viewership.

“Production definitely used Colton’s virginity in order to manipulate viewers’ opinions of him. It made him come off as more intriguing,” The Bachelor fan Ailie Orzak, a sophomore, agreed.

Although Underwood was shamed for his inexperience, he also was made out to be a good guy because of his virginity. This is similar to former Bachelor Sean Lowe’s reputation as “the good guy” because of his “born-again virgin” status. For both of these men, their statuses as virgins were simultaneously ridiculed and used as promotion for their “moral purity.” Whether

FEATURE

Arts & Culture

Bachelor

By Sonia Groeneveld

for better or worse, The Bachelor exploited individuals’ sex lives as false indicators of their characters.

“The Bachelor, however, houses virginity as a measure of moral worthiness.

Somehow Colton and Sean are good guys because they are virgins,” sophomore Bennett Fleming-Wood said. “For a show risked by past controversies like racist candidates and contestants accused of assault

why is so much weight placed on whether or not someone has had sex?

and misconduct, picking a virgin to be the Bachelor is treating Colton’s inexperience with vaginal sex as criteria for being a good guy.”

The truth is, The Bachelor production knows that viewers love to gossip about other people’s sex lives. “It’s kind of ridiculous that they dramatized it so much when it’s such a personal decision. It wasn’t fair to Colton for people to judge him for not playing into the social stereotypes of being an attractive male athlete,” said sophomore Deeksha Bathini. These labels produce a societal discourse that feeds into an individual’s insecurity surrounding their sex life.

In addition, virginity as a measure of judgement, according to Fleming-Wood, is worthy of questioning, because, “In reality, virginity is a social construct—it’s

totally made up.” She continued, “Sex is rarely just a penis inside of a vagina, but society has decided that it is important to measure whether someone has had sex, and that this is an adequate way of doing so.” In the old-fashioned sense, the status of being a virgin was often used to differentiate the “pure” from the “un-pure.” Nowadays, the term virgin has become one side of a double-edged sword. Virginity is often looked down upon as something to get rid of, yet at the same time, calling someone a slut is considered an insult. The two labels compose opposite ends of a binary, each carrying its own distinct labels and connotations. The dominant expectation is that young adults are sexually active enough to be considered “experienced,” but not to the point of being “trashy” or “slutty.” Despite these expectations, the lines between these labels are not well-defined. This leaves many struggling to toe these undefined lines. Labeling those at the extremes of this spectrum produces a security for those who fall more in between.

Most people will admit that reality TV is nowhere close to real life; however, what we consume as viewers does inevitably influence how we think and live out our daily lives. With The Bachelor’s undue emphasis on virginity, production is manipulating viewers to believe that virginity is not

only a big deal, but that it can be a defining aspect of an individual’s character.

In essence, Underwood’s virginity is being used for the purpose of pure entertainment. Virginity is a socially constructed label that modern-day discourse has manipulated to shame people for their choices regarding sex if they stray from the preconceived norm. I am sure that during Underwood’s season, his virginity will be a prevalent topic, because production knows that #BachelorNation will eat it up. I will certainly watch his story unfold along with the rest of The Bachelor fans, but will try do so through the lens of understanding that when production uses Underwood’s virginity as a defining label for who he is, it in effect promotes a culture that is not sex-positive.

ART BY AMY TONG

November 13, 2018

Tufts Observer

19

opinion

Building A Better Reality improving the lives of students begins with teachers

By MJ Griego Content warnings: mention of suicidality, mental illness, ableist interactions

T

his is about the time in the semester when all my friends start having mental breakdowns—midterm season, group projects, and starting work on final papers. This is not to mention the constant news cycle of hate crimes, sexual assault hearings that lead to no accountability, and the Earth literally falling apart as climate change rapidly increases. In this stressful University and global environment, teachers’ attitudes have a tremendous amount of influence on students. They can fuel the support and success of their students, or they can fuel fear and exhaustion.

Last semester, I started throwing up daily because of a new medication that I was taking for bipolar disorder.

I stopped taking the medication due to these side effects, and once I was off of it, the withdrawal effects made me suicidal. At the time, I was in a high-demand class that allotted no time for breaks. I emailed the professor anyway, as this was obviously a time to ask for an exception.

I was vague and said that withdrawal from a medication was making me sick. Her response was, “There are no ex-

20 Tufts Observer november 13, 2018

tensions for this class.” She then proceeded to say I could simply turn my assignments in late and accept that I would get docked points. She did not ask how I was doing. I felt especially hurt, as this professor was my advisor and knew about my general mental health struggles. I also didn’t feel comfortable expressing that I was suicidal, even though it was a withdrawal symptom. Despite this, I responded to her email and clarified the extent of my condition. She offered me an extension a week later.

Over the course of my sophomore year, many other professors saw me miss over half my classes, but did not think to ask if I was okay. This lack of concern wore on me because it was a time in which I really could have used connection or support. My Calculus 1 professor didn’t contact me at all, despite the fact there were only 25 students in that particular class. If I was too low-functioning to make it to class, it is unreasonable that my professors would expect me to come to office hours to explain my situation and ask for help.

I was hurt by the fact that neither these professors nor Tufts Mental Health Services ever told me that there were other options available to me, such as withdrawing from classes or asking for incompletes. I was even more hurt that the option of taking a mental health leave of absence was never suggested. Even after failing two classes and receiving a D in another, no teachers or deans thought to check in on me. Even when I finally advocated for myself and received time off and treatment, I had to jump through multiple hoops to return to my studies. Even now, every semester is incredibly taxing for me, and getting to this point has come at huge costs to both my mental and physical health.

Countless professors have misgendered me multiple times, so much so that I have come to expect it. If I am already struggling with my mental health, dragging myself

opinion

to class only to be misgendered can feel like the last straw.

When it goes uncorrected, it feels even more defeating.

I have also experienced consistent emotional strain from the lack of trigger warnings offered in classes and assignments. I am someone who has experienced sexual violence and other traumas in my life and have been marginalized in multiple ways. I have had to read stories about rape with no warning, and I have been in classes that showed visuals about eugenics with no warning. There have been many times when I have been the only person to speak up about needing warnings or about the potentially harmful nature of certain content. Especially during a time in which marginalized people are constantly faced with traumatic pain in our communities, giving warnings and small accommodations for those who are affected can be a huge relief.

I am not the only Tufts student who has been harmed by the actions of teachers. A student who asked to remain anonymous cited a few instances of having their mental illness misunderstood and discredited. They stated that one professor “made me cry during freshman orientation, before I’d even started his class, by questioning the legitimacy of my mental illness [and] requiring accommodations, despite my having approval papers from Student Accessibility Services.”

Sometimes classes directly focused on marginalized people and identities can be places where marginalized folks are especially subject to others’ ignorance. The same student responded that the professor of an Abnormal Psychology class “had in her notes that people with OCD can’t have healthy relationships… because [people with OCD are] too self-centered by following [their] compulsions to be there for anyone… I haven’t been the same since. I have OCD and have always worried it would make me unlovable.” Marginalized people should not feel targeted in studies about their own oppression. Teachers should be seeking to subvert dynamics of oppression in their own classrooms, not perpetuating them.

These examples of how teachers’ policies and attitudes have affected me, and others like me, do not mean that teachers are not taking actions to help their students. I was recently able to leave a class early and avoid a discussion about sexual assault. Last week, the same professor whose

ART BY MJ GRIEGO

actions hurt me when I was suicidal cancelled class because eight students emailed her saying how stressed they were about their course loads. In an Ex-College class last year, that was taught by multiply-marginalized and disabled Professor Lydia X. Z. Brown, students were allowed to sit or lay on the floor in class and use fidget toys while they listened to lectures. We were encouraged to take space for ourselves if we were feeling triggered, and we were given warnings in class and on assignments that could be potentially triggering. Professor Brown was also the only professor I have ever had who was trans like me, and who was also upfront about being disabled and anti-racist. It was incredibly therapeutic to see so many pieces of myself represented in a professor.

The reason I share these experiences is because I’m hoping professors will see just how much their policies matter. I expect the administration to belittle or ignore me, but I expect more from professors. I know that the administration is also devaluing teachers’ work at this University, and I want more solidarity between professors and marginalized students who are the most affected by strict policies. Professors can help alleviate mental strain on students by explicitly stating content warnings ahead of time, ranging from sexual assault to racial violence and generational trauma. They can trust the word of students who are ill and ask how they can support them. Finally, they can value the pain and fatigue that all students, but especially marginalized students, are continuously affected by. A student’s health should always come first, even if some rules get bent in the process.

NOVEMBER 13, 2018 TUFTS OBSERVER 21

NEWS

FAKE NEWS A T T

wo years ago, Donald Trump was elected president of the United States. What has followed has been a mad dash to understand precisely why this happened. The American media, both an enemy and an ally of Trump’s, has since turned inward to reflect on its role in the tumult of the past two years.

Katherine Tully-McManus, a Tufts alumna who works as a staff writer at Roll Call, a newspaper that reports on the U.S. Congress, believes that the role of journalism in the 2016 election was mixed. “In many ways, political reporters did an incredible job of dissecting President Trump during the 2016 campaign. But there were definitely shortcomings in infrastructure within newsrooms [regarding] how to report on things that were proven to be untrue,” she explained. “If you’re standing in the press pen at a Trump rally, you’re live tweeting. But in that medium, there’s not necessarily the space to fact-check.”

Fact-checking presented itself as a unique challenge in the 2016 election, as Trump repeatedly Tweeted and stated falsehoods, such as his claim that $6 billion went missing from the State Department while under the direction of his Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton. Tully-McManus pointed to the dilemma that the media faced in these scenarios. “How do you address false claims without amplifying the false claim? The media has had to reevaluate how they approach political journalism,” she said.

This problem has persisted throughout the duration of Trump’s presidency, as he has continued to state falsehoods as facts. For example, he recently claimed that a caravan of Central Amer22 Tufts Observer NOVEMBER 13, 2018

ican migrants who are traveling toward the Mexico-US border were invited to do so by the Democratic party. This claim, along with many others made by Trump and his administration about the caravan, has been widely debunked. Nevertheless, they continue to dominate headlines.

Tasha Oren, a professor in the Film and Media Studies Department at Tufts, points to a greater strategy behind Trump’s attack on the truth. “What he’s done is really genius. By beginning to state things that are absolutely, provably false and refusing to acknowledge that, you’re training people to stop thinking of evidence as truth. Separating fact from truth is an incredibly powerful political tool. So now you can say the caravan is coming for your job, and it becomes truth. It’s fact or not, who cares? Because it feels true. And that’s extremely dangerous.”

Different media outlets have repeatedly called Trump out for his false statements. In response, Trump has labeled many of these outlets “fake news.” By Trump’s standards, “fake news” is not simply news that contains false information, but also news that he disagrees with.

He has repeatedly used the term to refer to news outlets that criticize him, such as CNN and his tweet that referred to “the Fake News Media, the true Enemy of the People.” The term, and its two different meanings, have since become a part of the American lexicon.

The popularization of the term “fake news” has also coincided with recordbreaking levels of distrust in the media.

A Gallup poll released in September of 2016, just months before election day, found that Republicans’ trust in the media was at its lowest rate in 20 years: just

A T FACE VALUE

NEWS

Truth in A Changing MEDIA Landscape

By Lena Novins-Montague 14 percent. Comparatively, in 2015, 32 percent of Republicans said they trusted the media. The report noted that while trust in the media has gradually eroded over time, Republicans’ feeling that the media unfairly targeted Trump, as well as Trump’s own attacks on the media, likely caused this particularly sharp decline.

However, negative election coverage was not focused solely on Trump. Clinton made headlines after she was discovered to have used a private email server while she was Secretary of State. This scandal became a major focus of election coverage, as Tufts political science professor Jeffrey Berry, pointed out. “It [was] probably not journalism’s finest hour... It’s clear that they gave far too much coverage to the Hillary Clinton email scandal. She was at fault, but it [was] not something of central consequence to the function of the American government.”

The Clinton email scandal was also a common subject of truly fake news—stories that deliberately reported false information. Many of these falsified stories were created by Russian bots and spread on social media, and their proliferation has been widely criticized as unfairly influencing the election. But hoax sites and hyper-partisan blogs are not the only potentially culpable media outlets. An analysis conducted by The Columbia Journalism Review argued that fake news played a less significant role in the election than has been suggested, while the impact of the mainstream media has been underreported on.

The authors argue that mainstream media outlets made critical mistakes while reporting on the election by focusing “much more on ‘dramatic’ issues…[such as] personal scandals, than on substantive policy issues.” The articles notes that in the

" how do you ADDRESS FALSE CLAIMS WITHOUT AMPLIFyING THE FALSE CLAIM? "

span of six days leading up to the election, the New York Times ran 10 stories about Clinton’s emails, the same number of stories they published about Trump and Clinton’s proposed policies combined in the 69 days leading up to the election. The article claims that this “[affected] Clinton’s approval rating among undecided voters [and] could very well have tipped the election.”

The media also focused, and continues to focus, much of its attention on Trump’s personality. A New York Times article published March of 2016, in the midst of the primaries, reported that Trump had spent only $10 million on presidential advertising, which paled in comparison to the $82 million spent by Jeb Bush and the approximately $28 million spent by both Bernie Sanders and Clinton. However, what Trump did not expend on advertising, he made up for in free media, as various news outlets took to reporting and providing commentary on his campaign. In March, Trump had received $2 billion worth of free media, a value quantified by computing a dollar value based on advertisement rates. This figure is more than double than what every other candidate in the primaries received.

The disproportionate amount of media attention Trump received is tied to a shifting media landscape. The rise of the Internet has moved much of news consumption from print to digital. Newspapers, which had previously depended on revenue from advertisers, contended with shrinking budgets because digital advertising cannot produce the same revenue as print. News outlets have scrambled to find new revenue sources, and increasingly, this has meant targeting their readers. Many have focused on gaining subscribers by NOVEMBER 13, 2018 Tufts Observer 23

NEWS

creating attention-grabbing content. TullyMcManus acknowledged the impact this shifting media model has had on Roll Call and other outlets. “I think it has definitely shaped how we produce some things...

I’m sure that in other newsrooms, there’s a huge push on clicks and metrics. That definitely is a factor in our newsroom, but I would not say that it drives coverage,” she said.

Oren pointed out that a similar issue is plaguing television media. “With the proliferation of cable, there’s a lot more competition for the same amount of eyeballs.

So news has to become entertainment.

And when news becomes entertainment and when what you report on and how you report on it is about ratings, news becomes something else,” she explained.

Berry and Oren both linked the emphasis on audiences and ratings to the over-coverage of Trump. “He creates storylines that are like catnip. It was once [reported] that during the campaign, if his press coverage slipped, he would respond by creating a new story that pushed him back up. He was very conscious of the degree to which he was being paid attention to,” Berry said. Oren concurred. “He’s a television star,” she said. “He did stuff that was entertaining and said outrageous things. He’s very good at manipulating media; he’s been doing it for years.”

Anthony Rudel, a visiting professor at Tufts who teaches the course Media & Moral Responsibility, criticized the media’s coverage of Trump. “The reason the media [over-reports on Trump] is that it gets great ratings. But they need to step back and say, ‘We’re not covering news here,’” he said. “I argue that if we stopped covering him, he wouldn’t know how to deal with it. He only knows how to deal with media coverage. I would go to media un-coverage and see what happens.”

Rudel’s idea complements that of Jay Rosen, a media critic and profes-

24 Tufts Observer NOVEMBER 13, 2018

sor of journalism at New York University. In a blog post, Rosen wrote that because the president’s statements are intentionally misleading and provably false, journalists should suspend normal relations with Trump.

Rosen went so far as to suggest that CNN should never report live from a Trump event, because doing so inevitably leads to the broadcast of lies.

Oren, however, feels that this breakage of normal media relations could have harmful effects. “Journalists reporting on the White House is how our country should be run. If we are in a moment of craziness that we all are hoping to get out of, what journalists should not do is cede their place in what a normal democracy looks like.” Instead, she suggested, “Journalists should report on what is said, but also what happens. I think we are spending a lot more time talking about what is said.”

The question of how precisely to go about this is complicated. Nan Levinson, a journalist and English professor at Tufts, suggested, “The press could dial back, I think that’s not at any great loss to democracy. [Journalists should] not respond to every tweet as if its news, because it isn’t.” Levinson also emphasized

the importance of supplementing fact checking with context. “I think you do correct lies, you simply say, ‘this is not true.’ [But] context is also really important.”

Tully-McManus explained that the reporting Roll Call does on Trump is framed to give such context. “In our newsroom, our White House reporter does report on Trump’s statements, but it’s never a standalone story, like Trump said X. [They take] the time to write a longer piece that does include qualifications and fact checks, and [goes] back into Trump’s own history,” she explained.

Levinson believes that reporting effectively and ethically on the Trump administration hinges on finding a balance. “It’s not if you report on it, but how you report on it… Simply giving it a microphone, being a mouthpiece for it, is not a good idea. So you have to find some place in between. It’s important that you report on the underlying issues, not just on the fight,” she said.

Tully-McManus added that the reevaluation of journalistic practices is ongoing. “Newsrooms are taking different approaches, and we’re still in the middle of it. We’re still waiting to see what the results of the different approaches are.”

ART BY YISHU HUANG

FEATURE

campus

BEING IN PUBLIC ALOK VAID-MENON

By Wilson Wong

A

lok Vaid-Menon is a gender nonconforming artist, writer, and educator. Their eclectic sense of style, political comedy, and poetic challenge to the gender binary have been internationally renowned. On November 10, they visited campus and gave their performance, Femme in Public, based on their chapbook of the same title.

On October 21, the New York Times reported that the Department of Health and Human Services is spearheading an effort to legally define sex as solely biological under Title IX, the federal law that prohibits gender discrimination. In the Department’s memo, it states that the government defines sex “on a biological basis that is clear, grounded in science, objective and administrable.” This move effectively reduces legal gender to either male or female, determined by one’s genitalia at birth, and any individual dispute to this requires genetic testing.

Last week, the Tufts Observer spoke with Alok about Trump’s new memo and its effect on trans, non-binary, and intersex people.

November 13, 2018 Tufts Observer 25

FEATURE

campus

Wilson Wong: Laws play a huge role in establishing the conditions we must live and organize under. What are the ramifications of this definition of sex?

Alok Vaid-Menon: The ramifications of this announcement are major because… some of the biggest issues facing trans or gender nonconforming people is the denial of services and the denial of economic opportunity on the basis of our gender presentation. Without these protections, this gives permission to employers and other social service providers to deny services and opportunities to trans and gender-nonconforming people... This is an endorsement at the highest level, which gives the O.K. to police and attack femme people. Even though it’s being justified and couched under science, it’s really important to understand that the government has shifted their definition of sex as a way to exclude femme people. The government used to define sex by birth certificate… then they moved to genitalia… and then they moved from genitalia to genetic testing. They always try to move it as a way to exclude trans people. So, in this way, I reject the premise that it’s based off of science, and I think it’s actually based on transphobia and intersex erasure.

WW: That speaks to the fact that this isn’t something that came out of the blue. I feel like I’ve seen many progressives or radical leftists speaking out about this issue as something ‘novel,’ but I think it’s very typical of mainstream media.

AVM: Yes, and I think about this a lot because it’s a really awkward moment when progressives are like, ‘Wow, the Trump administration is so transphobic!’ and I’m like, ‘You’re not? What?’ [Laughs].

WW: [Laughs] Right, can you talk about how progressives actually normalize the very conditions that enable people like Trump to perpetuate transphobia?

26 Tufts Observer November 13, 2018

AVM: It frustrates me because no ideology has a party affiliation. Like, transphobia has no party affiliation in the same way that white supremacy has no party affiliation.

And we have to do a deep revision to think through the very terms and logic that we’re using to define gender and sex, which are rooted in foundationally racist and transphobic ideas.

It’s really important to talk about transphobia and its connection to racism

“when they saY often times, they just mean

because the current binary separation between gender and sex has a history of colonial construction. Indigenous peoples throughout the world have always had different parameters to define gender and sex than what we’ve come to view as normal and biological. The presumption that there is such a thing as the gender binary is already doing the work of coloniality, and that’s completely normalized within mainstream feminist culture today... So much of progressive politics is actually about stabilizing the gender binary versus recognizing what I believe a project of truly intersectional feminism should be about, which is constantly challenging the gender binary. It’s not about making it so that people have to be a man or woman in

ART BY RIVA DHAMALA

FEATURE

campus

order to be real, in order to be legitimate, and in order to be beautiful.

There have been times in the past week where, instead of taking a serious reckoning, many LGBT, or better put, ‘LGB’, folks are not actually taking the opportunity to rethink their own understanding or definition of gender and sex. The truth is that mainstream feminists and gay movements have mobilized a transphobic understanding of cis, gender, and sex. It’s also important to acknowledge, here, the erasure of intersex people.

WW: You talked about mainstream gay movements perpetuating transphobia through our reductive understandings of gender and sex. What are some specific examples?

AVM: One of the things I talk a lot about is that the term ‘gay’ didn’t actually just used to be specific to sexual preference. Gay was mobilized as a political identity… about challenging a heteronormative project, including the gender binary. When we look back at people like Sylvia Rivera and Marsha P. Johnson, they weren’t actually using the vocabulary of transgender to describe themselves, but were using the vocabulary of “We, a Gay,” and these were political signifiers to challenge the respectable, normative gendered categories of tradition.

But then, the gay movement made a very strategic political play to make ‘gay’ about the arts and [sexual] relationships versus gender difference. From there, we saw the creation of sexual limitation that made distinct gender identity.

WW: And what about mainstream feminist movements?

AVM: In the 70s, we saw the emergence of the Third World and Black Feminist movements that were challenging the idea that there’s a universal experience of woman-

hood—basically saying it’s a very different thing to be a woman of color, a Black woman, than it means to be a White woman…

There are multiple womanhoods that are dependent on race, class, and gender. And part of the subtle ways transmisogyny operates is that when they say women’s rights, often times they just mean white ciswomen’s rights; they might say intersectional feminism, but they’re not actually thinking about what it means to center the lived experiences of Black women, women of color, Indigenous women, and trans people. What I want feminism to understand is that you have to take seriously histories of racism.

And when we understand that the imposition of the gender and sex binary is an act of racism, the priorities around feminism become very different.

WW: What are concrete action items that anyone in support of trans and gender non-conforming people should acknowledge or do, particularly for feminists or progressives?

AVM: The first thing is to stop talking about trans people as a distinct and separate monolith because I think all of us have the potential to be gender non-conforming or trans. What I reject is allyship that’s based off of, ‘It’s ok if you do that, but I would never.’ You actually have to see yourself as part of the struggle because you could one day change your gender, and that’s alright.

Secondly, I ask of people, especially for students, to ask your professors to incorporate in their curriculum a deep and thorough investigation of colonialism. Because when we actually learn about colonialism, the world that has become naturalized to us will reveal itself as a recent historical construction. So much of violence against trans people is allocated under the idea that there is a natural way to be a body, natural sex,

or natural gender, and that’s not historically stable. The more we actually learn about our histories, especially as racialized people, the more we understand the stakes of what’s going on. I see trans issues as part of a bigger continuum of racial justice.

WW: What do you hope to do with your art and more specifically, with your performance, Femme in Public?

AVM: At every level, we are taught to de-sensitize ourselves to the normalized machinery of violence, and I want to create moments where we can actually feel it and think about what healing from it looks like… What I’m trying to do with my work is not just create spaces that ‘talk about mental health,’ but also to be real about mental health, be real about all the ugly parts of society that we’re not willing to talk about or embrace, and also talk about our own love and loneliness and condition and diaspora.

WW: Those are all the questions I had, is there anything else I didn’t ask that you wanted to add?

AVM: We really need to learn how to be interdependent and one of the things that’s really upset me in the past few weeks is how we base what we have to show up for each other is still through foregrounding our separation. So, it’ll be like, ‘As a cisperson, I support trans people and trans rights.’

And I don’t think that’s what I’m actually asking for [Laughs]. What I’m asking for is, ‘As a person, I support people,’ and I don’t mean that in a post-gender moment way. I mean that we need to recognize that we’re all deeply implicated in each other, and we all actually need each other in order to be free. Show up as much for yourself as you are for other people and recognize those at faults in arbitrary separations. O

November 13, 2018 Tufts Observer 27

content warning for both pieces: discussions of violence, racism, and antisemitism

On Living

By Cris Paulino My first memory is from around 1998—I would have been two—and it is of a neighbor screaming at my father for parking in front of her house. Something in me says it was because he is Black. Something in me says she screamed the N word. I do not know if those are hard facts or truths I learned of the world as I got older. Perhaps she was merely protective of her so-called property. But it is still in me. And when I tell this story to others, I do so with no allowances for what may or may not have happened, because even if some details were impressed upon me by time, they have shaped me and my understanding of my father, my family, and myself. There is truth in that.

My second memory is of 9/11, watching the second plane hit the second tower on the news. I understood where that was; I’m from Queens and visited my grandmother in the Smith projects on the Lower East Side frequently. I understood it was real. The rest of it—the deaths, war, islamophobia—I understood less. My mother packed me into the car that day and drove me to school for registration. They said go home, didn’t she hear there was a terrorist attack? She said, but this is the last day I was told we could register. They said, there was a terrorist attack. It will be fine. Come back later. My mother had taken the day off work for registration. She would have otherwise been next door to the World Trade Center.

Fall of 2013, senior year of high school, I took African American Literature. We watched Marlon Riggs’ Ethnic Notions and I realized that there is intent and strategy behind hatred. That it can be theorized, studied, and even, in one way or another, understood. And I decided I would do so.

These last four years at Tufts have been some of my hardest. Mike Brown was murdered the month before I began, Darren Wilson was acquitted that November, Tamir Rice was shot on November 22nd and died on the 23rd. On the 24th I posted on Facebook “to my family, to my friends, to mike brown, to tamir rice, to countless others: i love you, i love you, i love you, i carry you with me always, i love you.” I remember spending that night crying on my bedroom floor in Harleston and calling my family while hearing people laughing just outside my doorway. I remember flyers bearing Mike Brown’s face being put up on campus, but more strikingly, littering the streets, being trampled on and driven over. I remember only one of my professors taking the time to acknowledge that anything had happened at all. I remember being devastated, and angry, and deeply, deeply, frightened. But I was no longer confused.

Majoring in American Studies has done a lot for me. But there is only so much that theory and intellectualization can do. And what I haven’t been able to do for the last four years, or even before then, is process my sorrow and resentment and fear.

The past few weeks have been both unbearable and ceaseless. Trump’s gender policy and plans to end birthright citizenship. An activist’s son was lynched on October 17th. Two Black people were murdered in a Kroger in Kentucky on October 24th. Eleven Jews were murdered in their place of worship during a time of blessing on October 27th. A high schooler was murdered in North Carolina on the morning of October 29th. The loss in the air is palpable and I do not have the time, between classes, work, extracurriculars, eating, and sleeping, to breathe it in.

The morning of October 28th, I had a few hours to myself for the first time in a week. I read the names of the victims of the Tree of Life shooting and wept bitterly. I have spent a lot of time crying since.

There is nothing about this that is apolitical, but for once, I am looking to give myself time to feel rather than politicize. I can—and will—do both, but I want to do them separately, because only in doing them separately can I truly do them right and do right by myself. I have spent the last twenty years of my life steeped in constant terror and a vigilance that lives in me like an instinct, studying and analyzing my trauma, while shutting myself off to it in order to proceed. I refuse to do so any longer.

I have, even when it seemed impossible, found hope in my life. I am going to plan for a future for the world, and a future for myself. I am going to care for and love my family and friends deeply and endlessly. I am going to vote to protect myself and communities as best as I can within the system. I am going to organize and I am going to fight to do the same outside of the system. And I am going to feel. I can no longer afford not to.

Thank you to anyone who has held me, made space for me, cried with me over the past weeks. There are no limits to my gratitude. I owe my future to what you have given to me. For those of you whose lives and existences, like mine, are implicated in a hundred different ways by every headline and executive policy: we are not alone in our fear, rage, or tears. And we are not alone in the joy and hope that we build, against all odds, into our lives. We contain these multitudes and so, so much more.

28 Tufts Observer November 12, 2018

& Mourning

voices

By Emma June Youcha

journal fragments

just found out that there was a shooting this morning at a conservative synagogue in pittsburgh. at least 8 people are dead. i just called poppa [my grandfather] and i'm crying a lot. “they may kill us but they will never defeat us,” he said. he told me to tell my friends to stand tall. i feel really overwhelmed by this news and by the love he has and is sharing with me. i'm thinking about the pulse shooting and that feeling where i could be killed for going to the club for being queer (though obviously that was targeted at latinx queers). but I know that in the US, people have been killed for being queer forever. i guess i've been taught that in the US, even structural antisemitism is not life-threatening. but 8 people just died because they went to services this morning. so i think... antisemitism is clearly and fully life-threatening. poppa said it too-- we've survived. we have survived this for thousands of years and we will keep surviving. It's just so scary. and so upsetting. and terrifyingly affirming that antisemitism is structural, real, NEEDS TO BE TAKEN SERIOUSLY. trump also tweeted the worst thing about it and its like... we're already watching such CLASSIC and HORRIBLE things that are PART OF ANTISEMITISM where they are encouraging synagogues to hire more cops and right wing jews are like “this is why we need israel” and i'm like-- NO!! this is why we need solidarity! stop putting us in this position where jews dying! DYING!!!! places us in opposition to other marginalized people. UGH. being jewish and genderqueer this week is so hard. it's scary how much we are being asked to hold. and how many types of people are holding this in different ways all the time. i don't feel like i'm using my potential to fight. i'm not sure i feel confident about how to fight. and i need to.

“I WAS MADE OUT OF ALL THAT IS, THEREFORE, I MUST HAVE BEEN IN THE WORLD BEFORE”MICAH BAZANT i feel sad. and having to go to work and interact with so many non-jews and try to seem even kind of okay. so hard. my chest actually hurts with the sadness and anxiety. i can't stop burping. i just want to scream. do you know how many centuries of pain we are feeling right now? how many thousands of years? i feel like i could cry forever and i can't cry at all all at once. i'm stuck in this sadness. it's aching. i'm as scared that it will go away as i am that it won't.

MY TEARS ARE THOUSANDS OF YEARS OLD THERE ARE THOUSANDS OF YEARS OF TEARS IN MY EYES RIGHT NOW how could i possibly capture the ways that i've felt seen and held and also destroyed and alone this week? i feel like i'm grieving something so much that I don't even know how to feel it anymore. except i keep crying and it's like i'm not even in my body. i went to services last night and this morning, a week after 11 jews were murdered at tree of life and 2 black people murdered at a kroger in kentucky. and then i learned that there were fires in 7 different synagogues and jewish centers in brooklyn the other day. and that also this week in cambridge, a 66 year old woman was assaulted, with her attacker yelling antisemitic slurs and threats at her. so any delusions that antisemitism isn't real or that it's not here are truly delusions. i'm obviously scared of white nationalists. but i'm also scared that jews will keep believing that this system is here to save us when its clearly not. and i'm scared that my gentile leftists don't understand how antisemitism works, how its used as a tool to divide us and scapegoat jews as the cause of capitalism (and also the cause of communism? confusing af but they believe it). if the left doesn't fight antisemitism as part of collective liberation then we are never gonna win. and if jews don't see ourselves as part of the left, don't align ourselves with marginalized people everywhere and fight for them just as hard as ourselves, we're never gonna win. i've been taught to be so distrustful and it makes me sad. i already feel like we've lost. but we can't. we won't. poppa knows. so many jews across so many generations knew and know. gotta stay grounded in all the people that came before me and have fought so hard. just a reminder how much i love jews and my community.

ART BY EMMA YOUCHA

november 12, 2018 Tufts Observer 29

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