Fall 2017 Issue 3

TUFTS OBSERVER VOL. CXxxV ISSUE 3

#LABOR

STAFF

Table of Contents

EDITOR IN CHIEF Ben Kesslen MANAGING EDITOR Carissa Fleury CREATIVE DIRECTOR Kyle Scott PRODUCTION MANAGER Chase Conley FEATURES Henry Jani NEWS Ale Benjamin Vivian Tam OPINION Emmett Pinsky Merissa Jaye

‘LABOR’

This week we're thinking about labor in its many forms. What is emotional labor, and who does it? What do the expectations of work look like on different bodies? How do we fully hold ourselves—and our changing labors of pain, of love, of hurt, of joy—with integrity and care? These are the questions we are posing. We cannot provide answers, or ultimate truths, but we hope to offer space to reflect, to challenge, to disagree, and to grow, together.

ARTS & CULTURE Lena Novins-Montague Jordan Lauf CAMPUS Wilson Wong Julia Press POETRY & PROSE NienYin (Nasrin) Lin Alexandra Strong VOICES Gabby Bonfiglio STAFF CARTOONIST Ben Rutberg WEB EDITOR Sasha Hulkower COLUMNS Sivi Satchithanandan COLUMNISTS Myisha Majumder Riva Dhamala Britt PHOTO DIRECTOR Abigail Barton PHOTO TEAM Priyanka Padidam Roxanne Zhang

OCTOBER 23, 2017 Volume CXxxv, Issue 3 Tufts observer, since 1895 Tufts’ student magazine

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FEATURE BRIDGING MENTAL HEALTH & DISABILITY

by Wilson Wong & Rosy Fitzgerald

NEWS DELIVERING JUSTICE

by Evie Bellew & Priyanka Padidam

OPINION

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white out

Putting in the work

ARTS & CULTURE

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LEAD PHOTOGRAPHER Jordan Delawder ART DIRECTORS Annie Roome Nina Hofkosh-Hulbert

by Melissa Dong

OFF-WHITE

by Nasrin Lin

LEAD ARTISTS Jake Rochford Nicole Cohen MULTIMEDIA DIRECTOR Kayden Mimmack VIDEO DIRECTOR Aaron Watts

By Emmett Pinsky & Emma Youcha

PODCAST DIRECTOR Evie Bellew PUBLICITY DIRECTORS Alyssa Bourne-Peters Ashley Miller

COVER BY BEN RUTBERG

poetry

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MULTIMEDIA TEAM Deanna Baris Peter Lam

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START FROM SCRATCH

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g

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n

y

INSET

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opinion hardly normal

by Issay Matsumoto

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VIDEO TEAM Daniel Jelčić Dylan Kelly Emai Lai

ARTS & CULTURE REDRAWING BOSTON

by Merissa Jaye

voices A THANK YOU FOR STAYING

by Lauren Weinstock

PROSE BEFORE ROOMS

by Emmett Pinsky

poetry

by Myisha Majumder

PUBLICITY TEAM Owen Cheung Grant Gebetsberger Ellie McIntosh Sarah Park Amy Tong STAFF WRITERS Kyle Lui Jonathan Innocent Rosy Fitzgerald DESIGNERS Nicole Cohen Erica Levy Anna Stroe Dennis Kim Muna Mohammed LEAD COPY EDITOR Chris Paulino COPY EDITORS Owen Cheung Erin Berja Anita Lam Sonya Bhatia Juliana Vega Niamh Doyle

CONTRIBUTORS

BLOOD IN THE SANDS

Belinda Xian Elizabeth Brooke Melissa Dong Stella Marie Naomi Smith Amy Tong Emma Youcha Lauren Weinstock Jordan Anthony Elijah Barnes

by Jordan Anthony Elijah Barnes

column

three steps

PODCAST TEAM Han Lee Issay Matsumoto Sara Bass Max Battle Megan Mooney Izzy Rosenbaum

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BEHIND THE COVER The cover, by our staff cartoonist, is part of the larger project of this issue—to challenge the idea of what labor is. Labor can be getting out of bed in the morning, putting on clothes, performing your gender, making yourself visible, finding means of affirmation. Labor is multiplicitous.

FEATURE

Feature

By Wilson Wong & Rosy Fitzgerald

BRIDGING DISABILITY AND Mental Illness

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isablity Studies lecturer Lydia X. Z. Brown, otherwise known as Autistic Hoya, defines ableism as the “oppression, prejudice, stereotyping, or discrimination against Disabled people,” in addition to the belief that non-Disabled people’s lives are superior, have a better quality of life, or have lives that are more valuable than Disabled peoples’.

While many community members recognize Tufts as a physically inaccessible campus, the effects of other types of institutional ableism remain more difficult to distinguish. The policies of Tufts’ support services stem from the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA).

First introduced in 1990, the ADA was the first major civil rights legislation to prohibit ableist discrimination against individuals with Disabilities. The ADA defines Disability as “a physical or mental impairment that substantially limits one or more major life activities,” including, but not limited to, activities such as

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learning, communicating, and working. Tufts Student Accessibility Services (SAS) adheres to the same definition and provides support to students at Tufts with documented disabilities.

Tufts Counseling and Mental Health Services (CMHS) also provides support for students with mental illnesses like depression, bipolar disorders, and anxiety disorders, some of which overlap with psychiatric disabilities. A quick glance at CMHS’s website, however, reveals that CMHS does not explicitly name disability as a category of service. This gap in definition suggests a larger disconnect between mental illness and disability and points to the many challenges Disabled students face.

Dr. Julie Jampel, a Staff Psychologist and Director of Training at CMHS, serves as the office liaison to SAS. She and Kirsten Behling, Director of SAS, said in a joint statement, “CMHS and SAS work very closely together.

We introduce students to each other’s services

ART BY BELINDA XIAN

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when appropriate and work to make sure each student receives help depending on their individual needs.” They added, “An important distinction is that the two offices serve students differently. SAS facilitates accommodations for students with disabilities in any area of their Tufts experience.”

CMHS also provides services like short-term therapy, group therapy, and consultation, among other clinical services.

Jampel’s role in connecting these offices helps bridge the gap between disability and mental health, but the categorical distance remains pervasive and powerful. According to Brown, dividing mental illness from disability is an ableist way of discounting the real lived experiences of people with mental illness. Brown said, “Mental illness is considered separate from a ‘real’ disability for 80 million different ableist reasons–one being that ‘disability is only physical, and it’s only something I can see.’”

MJ Griego, a junior, is one student who lives the experience of this disconnect. Griego deals with “anxiety, depression and a trauma-based illness.”

Currently figuring out whether they have a physical disability as well, Griego is also still recovering from recent surgery. “The biggest challenge I had,” they said, “was the semester I was depressed with suicidal intentions, when CMHS kept telling me to use ‘tips and tricks’ for mental health.” Although mental illness is a disability and warrants certain accommodations, Griego was never directed to SAS for these supportive services. Griego said, “[CMHS] never mentioned any resources for getting academic accommodations or for taking a medical leave. I didn’t know about any of it, and I failed two classes.

I’m still trying to get [these classes] off my record due to CMHS mistreating me, three years later.”

A Tufts senior, who asked to remain anonymous, deals with clinical PTSD with post-traumatic panic attacks. In her opinion, “Many spaces, such as Tufts, reperpetuate stigma towards…Disabled or mentally ill people by invalidating the seriousness or legitimacy of their disability or mental illness and only considering physical disabilities to be legitimate.” She still struggles to determine whether her mental illness qualifies as a disability, and the reproduction of ableist ideas on this campus and societally only exacerbates that difficulty.

Jampel and Behling explained that “only a subset of students with mental health conditions are considered to have a disability.” It’s part of their job to discern the varying needs of a student who

might be “upset” or “having roommate conflicts,” versus a student whose mental health warrants disability accommodations.

Sometimes, though, ableist conceptions about mental health can lead to counselors underestimating the seriousness of students’ concerns, leaving them abandoned and underserved. Asia Acevedo, who faced many academic challenges because of her mental illness, had never considered academic accommodations for her mental health, despite seeing a rotation of CMHS clinicians since her freshman year and reporting that she had not gone to some classes as a result. She said, “Having to work on top of going to class and maintaining a decent GPA really takes a toll on my sleep schedule, which in turn triggers a lot of stress and anxiety that often manifests in completely unproductive dissociative and/or depressive episodes. It’s really, really difficult to balance my mental illnesses on top of normal college concerns.”

Referencing a time when they had reached out to their professors about their physical ailment and mental disability, Griego echoed similar sentiments. They said, “When I sent out an email about surgery recovery and depression to all my professors this semester, most people only responded about surgery. Tufts professors need to be better about people not being in class.”

For those students who pursue disability accommodations from SAS, proper documentation is required. Providing documentation to prove the legitimacy of one’s disability can be challenging, and the requirements often pose a major barrier to lowincome students in particular who would otherwise benefit from SAS resources.

Senior Ray Bernoff deals with mental health concerns and a mobility disability that “makes walking, bending, and standing painful.” He explained that, “the process of gathering the necessary documentation from all my doctors and specialists is such a labor, especially without frequent, easy, [or] affordable access to a car.”

Additionally, even if students can produce proper documentation, there is no guarantee of services. According to the SAS handbook, “a diagnosis of a disability does not, in and of itself, meet the definition of a disability necessitating reasonable accommodations under the applicable law.”

Still, when students do choose to pursue the potential for disability accommodations, the process of acquiring and communicating those accom-

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FEATURE

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modations can be confusing and ultimately harmful. For instance, the previously mentioned anonymous senior recounted the time she sought academic accommodations through CMHS for severe mental health issues. “I suddenly could not leave my room, eat in the dining hall, go to class, or remember fully what had happened to me,” she said. Her CMHS therapist assured her that he had communicated to her academic dean about the accommodations she needed for midterms week, but for reasons unknown, her dean failed to let her professors know of the situation, while she continued to constantly panic.

She said, “[My dean] insinuated that I was irresponsible when I told her I needed support and extensions for all my classes instead of just one, never mind that I was unable to leave my room or eat. My experience with CMHS connecting to my dean made me feel as though I had made something up or lied, as if I was ‘crazy,’ ‘insane,’ ‘hysterical,’ ‘imagining things,’ or ‘weak.’”

When talking about mental illness treatment, Brown said, “No matter what, psych[ologically] Disabled people get screwed over. We are just told constantly that who we are in the world, how we’re perceived in the world, even what we know about ourselves is fake, that it’s not real, that you’re making it up, you’re faking it.”

Bernoff said, “Tufts is not designed for Disabled students of any kind. SAS is doing its best to ameliorate the effects of an institution that was never intended for anyone like me and other Disabled students, and its best is far from being enough.”

At this point, Bernoff has not received any meaningful or sustainable support from SAS nor CMHS. “I just suck it up,” he says, “periodically do physical therapy and courses of steroids, and wait to graduate.”

“We are just told constantly that who we are in the world, how we’re perceived in the world, even what we know about ourselves is fake, that it’s not real, that you’re making it up, you’re faking it.”

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FEATURE

NeWS

deLIVeRING JUSTICe

A Modern resurgence of midwifery

By Evie Bellew & Priyanka Padidam

October 23, 2017

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FEATURE

NeWS

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n the early 20th century, traditional midwives in the United States were under attack. Certified physicians were in the midst of a campaign that aimed to turn public opinion against midwifery—painting the providers as ignorant and dangerous. One newspaper ran an ad depicting a “typical” Italian immigrant midwife with the caption: “They bring with them their filthy customs and practices.”

As obstetrics pioneered by male physicians became the norm in the United States, midwifery quickly faded into obscurity. By 1935, midwives attended less than 15 percent of all births. Anthropologist Robbie Davis-Floyd describes this process as the rise of “technocratic birth,” in which birthing bodies are viewed as machines undergoing an anomalous process, and birth as something that should be manipulated and medicalized.

This misogynistic history of obstetrics was also deeply entangled with racism. Between 1845 and 1849, “the father of modern gynecology” J. Marion Sims conducted violent and unethical procedures on several enslaved Black women without anesthesia, then blamed infant deaths on the ignorance of the Black midwives who cared for them.

While many think of incidents like these as barbaric and archaic, the legacy of this violence lives on. In the United States, Black women are three times more likely to die in childbirth than White women. The Kaiser Family Foundation reports that the infant mortality rate, measured in number of deaths per 1,000 live births, is reported to be 11.3 percent among Non-Hispanic Blacks, and 8.2 percent among American Indians/Alaskan Natives. The stress of experiencing racism manifests in physical trauma and impedes health outcomes for people of color from birth. Multiple studies have reported a strong

statistical tie between experiences of racism and discrimination and the increased risk of infant mortality, low birth-weight, and pre-term birth.

This has significance for expectant parents who hold marginalized identities.

The revitalized practice of midwifery is actively re-conceptualizing birth experiences in light of this systemic discrimination. According to the American Medical Association, women account for 85 percent of OB/GYN residents today. Concurrently, more people are opting for out-of-hospital births that rely on midwives and doulas. Midwives are attending more highrisk births, and can also be licensed to practice in hospitals. Doulas work alongside midwives, providing continuous support to the birthing person during pregnancy, birth, and the postpartum period.

Tashiana Dew, a doula studying to become a midwife at North Shore Community College, says that doulas are invaluable, especially for those who might feel alone and unsupported during their pregnancy. “The doula is someone who is there for you throughout your whole pregnancy, coaching you, grieving with you. It’s like a sister. They’re feeling your pain and they’re right there to help you through it.”

Leila Zainab, an Atlanta-based freelance doula, says that their work allows them to fulfill their commitment to serving low-income, immigrant people of color.

“The way I see doula work is advocacy and sister support. I’m also a childbirth educator, so I am able to educate my clients about what will happen to their bodies physiologically, biologically, emotionally, spiritually,” they said. Both Dew and Zainab spoke to the importance of supporting and empowering the birthing person to make informed decisions at every step of the process.

“As somebody who’s witnessed so many births, I’ve seen the strength of the human body.”

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As a queer South Asian immigrant, Zainab knows intimately the importance of valuing peoples’ autonomy and human rights within the birthing space.

“I understand what it means to have the experience of being marginalized in institutions,” they said. “I had to educate myself on how to maneuver and combat institutional violence, how to understand legal jargon and medical jargon so that I can advocate for folks. In my opinion, a lot of [jargon] is used to manipulate and coerce people into making decisions [that] aren’t based on informed consent. It’s meant to silence and brutalize people with birthing bodies and marginalized identities.”

Maia Raynor, a Black Tufts alumnus, says that birth work connects her with family members who may not have had the same opportunities she has.

“There’s such a long history of Black women doing birth work—that’s such a powerful connection to my heritage,” she said. “I have the privilege and the ability to move in all these different spheres and worlds that my ancestors weren’t able to.” Reflecting on her family’s experiences also places importance on “the ability for a person to be able to make choices for their own body.”

Many local organizations in Boston are taking up the charge as well. At Boston Medical Center, the Birth Sisters program is a “multi-cultural doula service” that aims to serve at-risk parents in their community and connect them to needed resources.

The Boston Abortion Support Collective (BASC), formerly the Boston Doula Project, is a POC-led collective that provides compassionate abortion support in the Boston metro area. In the summer of 2016, Raynor sought out doula training with BASC. She now works with clients who are terminating their pregnancies or have experienced the loss of a pregnancy, attending to them in their own homes.

She manages physical symptoms, debunks misconceptions, and provides aromatherapy, massage, and spiritual support.

Midwifery can also be a space to rethink the gender binary. Max Farber, a queer fifth-year at Tufts who plans to become a midwife, expressed that maternity care “still has a context about being for women, by women. It’s very much an idea of ‘womanhood.’” The perception that maternal

ART BY JAKE ROCHFORD

care is only for cisgender women has led to severe discrimination against trans folks who want to give birth. A 2014 study found that trans people seeking maternal care in mainstream maternity spaces reported being consistently disrespected, misgendered, and denied care.

Farber views midwifery as an opportunity to counter these injustices. While examining his own position as a male-identifying midwife, Farber thinks that “we can use midwifery to support women and also engage actively in the conversation about gender and try to break down gender barriers.” However, Farber is also cautious of his position. “I don’t want to enter into it and be a patriarchal force of masculine power in a space that has historically been masculinized and therefore detrimental to clients. My role as a midwife will be to support and empower and never to remove the autonomy of the client,” he said. While racialized and gendered violence is still embedded in birthing spaces, many midwives are transforming them to be affirming and radical spaces for all bodies.

In a time when reproductive justice is viewed as political battle ground, it is easy to lose hope. Every month since President Donald Trump’s inauguration, headlines speak of threats to bodily autonomy—from forbidding foreign NGOs with US funding from even speaking about abortion, to blocking patients who have public insurance from accessing care at Planned Parenthood, to repealing the contraceptive coverage mandate under which more than 55 million Americans have received birth control.

Midwives, doulas, and other reproductive support specialists are using their knowledge and expertise to fight back against these policies.

More than that, Zainab says she finds strength in the act of birth itself. “As somebody who’s witnessed so many births, I’ve seen the strength of the human body. Even when they feel like their body is ripping in half, their body knows how to do this.

This is their strength, this is their power.” Zainab describes this experience as “hope-giving.” They assert that “in this administration, we are told this [strength] doesn’t exist. We are made to feel agency-less, powerless, ill-informed. But we have everything we need. We are resilient, we are strong, we are powerful beyond our own understanding.”

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FEATURE

OPINION

PUTTING IN THE WORK T

By Emmett Pinsky and Emma Youcha

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he headline reads: “Woman Decides It’s Too Much Labor to Describe the Concept of Emotional Labor.” This is from Reductress, a feminist satire news site. It’s not a serious article, but it’s funny because we’ve heard people say this and mean it— people we respect, love, and value deeply.

Every once and awhile, an article gets passed around our Facebook newsfeeds called “Emotional Labor: What It Is and How to Do It.” Published on a blogging platform called “The Orbit,” the piece was written by a person named Miri.1 The article goes through examples of emotional labor—what it is, how people do it, what kinds of people often take on more emotional labor than others, etc. Specifically, the author focuses on cis women doing a disproportionate amount of emotional labor for cis men, especially in the context of straight romantic relationships. The

article asks readers to consider questions like, “Am I checking in with my partner to see if they had a rough day?” “Do I pause to observe the context (my partner’s body language or current activity…) before I involve my partner in something me-focused?”

These are everyday considerations that Miri argues become relevant to power imbalances along the axis of gender.2 The language of emotional labor has been embraced in conversations around power imbalances more generally. In many cases, emotional labor is used synonymously with explaining one’s marginalized identity to someone who holds the corresponding dominant identity. For example, a person of color explaining why reverse racism isn’t real to a White person.

Or, a trans person explaining the singular “they” pronoun to a cis person. These moments of explanation constitute emotion-

al labor; people are not merely explaining ideas, but are living in and reliving trauma in order to have those conversations.

We hear the phrase emotional labor a lot these days. Back in June, a friend sent us a text that read: “can y’all explain the ‘cracking a cold one with the boys’ phenomenon to me like what it is and then a slight analysis. #emotionallabor.” How did the phrase “emotional labor” become so colloquial that it infiltrates our texts, our headlines, and even our memes?

The answer to this lies in our shifting conception of the word “labor” itself.

In 1983, Arlie Hochschild was one of the first people to use the phrase “emotional labor” in the way we understand it now.

In her book, The Managed Heart, Hochschild analyzed the emotional labor of service jobs in which workers are expected to maintain outward positivity and hap-

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and gender non conforming people who are neither women nor femmes, and includes us into a framework that categorizes us as“women or femmes.”Centering the discussion of emotional labor around solely the axis of gender also invisibilizes the emotional labor put disproportionately on people of color.

Miri has redacted her last name from her articles after receiving rape and death threats.

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Often, emotional labor is talked about through the lens of binary gender. Recently, many have begun to say “women and femmes” when referring to gendered labor in order to include transfemmes in the discussion ofemotional labor. This phrase simultaneously erases the emotional labor of transmasculine

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OPINION

piness—service with a smile! In Hochschild’s analysis, she focuses on the fact that the people in these professions are largely women, creating a whole category of feminized labor that is unrecognized and uncompensated.

The explicit naming of this work is a move to validate the types of labor that don’t fit neatly into traditional conceptions of what labor looks like. Labor organizing often centers around physical labor—think: factory labor, agricultural labor—that is conceptualized as men’s work. So, creating a rhetoric that makes space for emotional work expands the definition of work itself. In leftist politics today, “emotional labor” is not only relevant to the emotional expenditure of service jobs, but also is put into interpersonal relationships, teaching, and activism.

So, while the origins of “emotional labor” as a named concept in leftist politics are fairly specific, the way that the phrase is used now—see: text about cold ones meme—gestures toward a popularization of the phrase. What has the hypervisibility of emotional labor done to its meaning?

To the way that we interact with our identities, our relationships, and our activism?

Although the term was originally intended to give credit to unrecognized labor, we believe that the overuse of “emotional labor” in negative contexts both flattens its meaning and demonizes the act itself.

The ways that we hear the phrase “emotional labor” usually sound something like this: “Don’t ask that person to do so much emotional labor for you…”

“He made me do so much emotional labor,” and “I’m sorry to ask so much emotional labor from you, but…” To be clear, there are absolutely situations in which these things are valid feelings that accurately describe a situation of power imbalance. However, if the only way we talk about emotional labor is to ask others not to do it or to say how bad it feels, we are ignoring the value of that labor and missing a key aspect of community-making and collective learning.

Emotional labor, often the work of marginalized and multiply-marginalized people, is valuable and important work.

To simplify this concept is to leave the valuable and life-giving parts of it unrecognized and underutilized. For example,

as White Jews having conversations with non-Jews about Zionism and antisemitism’s systemic connections with White Supremacy, we have both experienced conversations in which we expend a lot of emotional energy and leave the conversation feeling validated, seen, and clarified in our own understandings of those systems.

At a Shabbat dinner a few weeks ago, we were talking about the history of Jewish organizing at Tufts, about the role of Hillel, and the ways politics cannot be extracted from our religious practices. One person had a lot of questions about this topic and asked them. A group of us responded as best we could. It felt like we were able to hold a complex array of feelings in that conversation as well as bring someone into a new understanding of the history of this campus. Later, one of us got a text from that person that read: “I am realizing that I was asking a lot from folks to explain things to me tonight so also thanks for being generous in that way.”

That show of gratitude was appreciated, but felt funny because we ourselves gained energy and momentum in that conversation. A text of this sort seemed unnecessary, and spoke to the assumption that asking people to explain something to you is work they shouldn’t have to do. However, it was not a drain, rather a moment of compassion, learning, and growth for all of us.

We have also at times expended that energy only to have it poorly received and taken advantage of. We have at times been the ones to ask for emotional labor without recognition, without cognizance of the systemic power we hold. The key here is to remember that “emotional labor” does not have inherent connotation; it is not good or bad in and of itself. Rather, the systems that characterize it (namely: racial capitalism, the system that exploits the workers Hochschild writes about in 1983) have co-opted the idea in order to preclude its community-building potential. Ideally, we would get to choose when to do emotional labor, but seeing emotional labor as wholly negative precludes its possible positive outcomes. Emotional labor can be a sign of care and an act of solidarity that forms the basis of our collective movements.

However, the language we use to talk about emotional labor often does not align with the anti-capitalist ideals of labor and leftist movements. Rather, it has taken on the language of capitalism itself. “I’m really investing a lot of emotional labor in this person.” “I spent so much time talking him through his break-up.” “I just did so much emotional labor, that was so taxing.”

The feminist use of “emotional labor” as a concept attempts to subvert capitalism by expanding our conception of “labor” to include work done by those most disenfranchised by capitalist society. In this way, speaking of emotional labor in the rhetoric of capitalism completely misunderstands and undermines the goal of naming this phenomenon.

We do not want this article to read as putting down anyone who speaks about the difficulty of emotional labor or anyone who refuses to perform that labor.

This is not a call for the kind of “open dialogue” that asks those most marginalized to do work for their/our oppressors.

Rather, this is a push to say that emotional labor is important, that it can give life and not just drain it, and that it can exist outside of a capitalistic framework.

We need emotional labor to foster friendships, build solidarity, destroy capitalism, and envision a new future.

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Arts & Culture

WHITE out LACK OF RACIAL DIVERSITY IN WRITERS’ ROOMS

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t’s 2003: Friends is approaching its end, One Tree Hill and The O.C. are competing for the hearts of teenagers nationwide, and major characters of color are still a rare sight. Fast-forward to today, and more shows than ever are bringing people of color front and center: Master of None, Jane the Virgin, and Empire are just some of the examples that are critically acclaimed and feature diverse casts. So when you think back to the age of all-White casts, it’s easy to think that we’ve come so far. But as we pat ourselves on the back for celebrating the diverse characters in Orange is the New Black, our complacency keeps us from looking deeper at a much larger problem. One quick Google search gives a look behind the scenes, revealing a room of White writers crafting the stories of people of color. A few more Google searches in, and you will find a discerning gap in what we see and what is told, which leads to the question: where are all the writers of color?

In a 2015 report from the Writers Guild of America West of the 2013-2014 television season, overall staff writer em10

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ployment of racial minorities has decreased since a previous 2013 study.

While Latinx and Asian employment saw increases, Black writers saw a decrease in employment, and of the 292 TV shows across 36 networks airing during the 20132014 season, only two writers self-identified as Native American. More than a third of the TV shows had zero minority staff members, and only three networks met the proportionate representation of racial diversity: Black Entertainment Television, El Rey, and weTV. Minority writers continue to be underrepresented by a factor of nearly three to one, and those that are employed continue to be paid less than their white co-workers, earning 80 cents for every dollar. In fact, this earnings gap has widened since 2011, when it reached its closest point at 91 cents to the dollar.

These statistics are cold numbers to consider and difficult to fully comprehend when we see and praise the diverse casts on television today. More importantly, it becomes clear that while visible representation is important, it is merely a Band-Aid

By Melissa Dong solution for the lack of diversity in not just television, but all forms of media. Diversity is more than just what the eye can see; it is about experience, identity, and the feeling of accurate representation. Tasha Oren, a visiting professor in Tufts’ Drama and Dance department, argues that diversity has even broader implications. “The stakes in diversity are not about a single show or a character but the pictures from a higher vantage point, the cultural landscape in general,” Oren says. And just like every other institutional problem that has been “fixed” with an image makeover, deeper problems lie within that are slowly being revealed.

To first address this issue, it is necessary to find out why little has changed since 2015. Regardless of the good intention to hire diverse writers, it only works if the necessary effort is put in to make a difference. Several networks and studios have launched diversity fellowships, like NBC’s Diverse Staff Writing Initiative or the Disney-ABC Writing Program, that mean well but create a new set of problems. In an in-depth Slate article written by Aisha PHOTO COURTESY OF NBC

FEATURE

Arts & Culture

Harris, several of writers of color describe the process of bouncing from one initiative to another as, “fighting every diversity person, of any ethnic diversity, for one spot.”

Even if they get that one spot, it doesn’t typically lead to a staff position; it just means they are filling the token diversity position for that team of writers. The many who don’t find their job through diversity programs are often left relying on supportive mentors willing to fight for them. And even when writers of color make it to the writers’ room—regardless of how they got there—they are often the only representative of their race at the table. This has been a burden for all people of color, as they face the challenge of having to represent their race. However, one individual is not a representation of an entire racial experience.

Their personal identity is just one story of many, and to ask them to be the voice of an entire race is an immense amount of pressure. Without getting that first staff position, it becomes difficult to become executive producers and showrunners who are the ones who can incite greater change and bring in more minority writers to reduce the burden. But as of 2015, not only have less minority writers been employed, but also less executive producers. As a result, the cycle continues.

Certain areas of TV have done better than others addressing this minority gap.

Shonda Rhimes is famously known for her diverse casts and writers in hit shows like Scandal and Grey’s Anatomy. Meanwhile, late night television is notoriously run by White men and is the least diverse sector of television. According to the 2015 WGA report, only 3.5 percent of the staff writers for late night, talk, and game shows were minorities, and only 18 percent were women.

However, steady attempts at reform have been made. A recent New York Magazine interview with Samantha Bee, host of Full Frontal with Samantha Bee, revealed her show’s extensive “blind application process,” which resulted in a 50 percent female, 30 percent minority, and diversely experienced staff; one writer they hired was previously working at the DMV. In addition, they specifically hired an experienced playwright to launch a mentorship program to draw in more writers that aren’t in the standard applicant pool. This type of hiring takes effort,

not just a quick addition of one non-White writer for a year.

Late Night with Seth Meyers uses another concept to start the conversation, bringing some of the show’s writers to the stage to tell their own jokes. Oren says, “since most authors do write from their own experience—and hire writers who have similar life experiences to help them in the writers’ room—we end up with too many stories from a certain point of view and not enough from others.” To combat this sentiment, host Seth Meyers, a White

significantly for shows on cable television with writing staffs that were less than 10 percent minority, which were the vast majority of the shows in the analysis. Similarly, broadcast shows that had more diverse writing staffs (21-30 percent minority) had the highest ratings. With consistent results demonstrating the benefits of diversity in the writers’ room, it becomes clear that this is a structural issue, not a “fear” that audiences would not enjoy such a change behind the scenes.

All this evidence reveals that achiev-

“THE STAKES IN DIVERSITY ARE NOT ABOUT A SINGLE SHOW OR A CHARACTER BUT THE PICTURES FROM A HIGHER VANATGE POINT, THE CULTURAL LANDSCAPE IN GENERAL.” man, brings two female writers, Amber Ruffin, who is Black, and Jenny Hagel, who is queer, to tell jokes about their own identities in a segment called “Jokes Seth Can’t Tell.” On television, the words spoken by a person of color are too often not their own but those written by a White person. And as Meyers introduces in the segment, “Every night I deliver a monologue comprised of jokes written by a diverse team of writers. As a result, a lot of jokes come across my desk that due to my being a straight, white male would be difficult for me to deliver. But we don’t think that should stop you from enjoying them.”

Not only do the women get to present their own jokes to the audience, but also the diverse audience is not deprived of hearing fresh jokes that they can relate to their own experiences.

With more diverse writers, more stories can be told, and more audience members can feel accurately represented on television. Audiences today are certainly becoming more and more diverse and prefer diverse storytelling. In a 2013 study done by the Bunche Center at UCLA, more viewers were drawn to shows with ethnically diverse leads and writers. While it is understandable to prefer diverse casts, the diversity of writers also affected ratings, even without audiences knowing who the writers were. Television ratings dropped

ing representative diversity is hard work.

Reports continue to be published every few years, and though a steady improvement was observed between 2008 and 2014, an updated 2016 WGA study found no progress whatsoever: minority writer employment has remained at a low 13 percent since 2014. It is not that networks and shows do not want more diversity nor that audiences would dislike it, but that diversity is not made a priority when it should be.

While change requires more than an attitude check and a quick visual test, it needs to be made easier.

Harris suggests incentivizing unionstaffed writers’ rooms and holding studios accountable. The WGA-East submitted an amendment in 2016 to reallocate just less than 1 percent of the $420 million credit for film and TV productions to be used to hire qualified women and people of color as writers and directors. It certainly is possible to have a representative writers’ room, given the praised examples that have succeeded. Just how onscreen minority roles turned from praiseworthy to the standard, writers, executive producers, and showrunners of color need to become the norm. “It’s not a simple story of progress,” says Oren, “It slowly gets better, then worse, then better again, and often it takes viewers to protest and make noise for that to happen.”

October 23, 2017

Tufts Observer

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FEATURE

poetry

y a s l n h i g e n n g

the rice in his plastic lunchbox, he ate it all. seasoned by overnight soy sauce, the off-putting burnt white marked him like the typhoon mud on hand-me-downs as he walked along

rice paddies,

coins in his pockets, worn.

He wished he had pork, actual slices, you know.

years later,

by the temple he saw the hazy white from the incense,

believed to spread the words of the village sage

and Buddha, MahÄ yÄ na is the way: Until death there is nothing enough,

the temple-goers would say,

but he is a temple-goer of a different breed: He will live even if he dies trying. so he lives his truth, in literature against the white backdrop and in print, in formulas: his white coat with a name badge: Yang Sheng Lin.

By Nien Yin (Nasrin) Lin

12 12

Tufts Tufts Observer Observer

April 25, 23, 2017 october 2017

a s o m e b o d y

ART BY NINA HOFKOSH-HULBERT

FEATURE

BEN KESSLEN

FEATURE

i was just trying to show my mom

how to make a grilled cheese

ROXANNE ZHANG

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i was just trying to

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start

BEN KESSLEN

from scratch

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OPINION

HARDLY Why First-Years Could Be Tufts’ Best Worst Enemy

By Issay Matsumoto

I

’d opened too many webpages congratulating me on being the 1000th visitor, telling me I was entitled to a free laptop or a $500 Amazon gift card, alerting me of hot singles in my area, to not be at first skeptical. But when I received this message in March, 2017, notions of web-safety fell to the wayside: “Congratulations! I am honored to offer you undergraduate admission to Tufts University and invite you to begin study with our faculty in the School of Arts & Sciences next September as a member of the Class of 2021.”

My heart fluttered. Years of intellectual and extracurricular pursuit had finally been recognized. I was the special “1000th visitor,”—all I had to do was claim my prize. Sure, “Kayla, 26, Hot Single in Belmont,” wanted me. But now I had “Tufts University, 164, Premier Research University in Medford.” Tufts and I would explore the world together, learn from each other, and maybe have a bit of fun too. But as wishful thinkers who accept either Kayla’s or Tufts’ request know, things don’t usually pan out as expected.

While characterizing Tufts as a really fucking expensive internet scam might be unfair, and maybe not all that productive, such an extreme comparison perhaps sheds a light on the university system’s intrinsic transactionality. Most understand that student and university are parties in a contract. Unfortunately, most times only one of those parties knows the absolute terms of that contract: the university.

For this year’s class of 2021, while learning this contract’s terms remains an important source of growth, navigating them can be taxing, dangerous, and sometimes fatal. But it is because of this very precariousness that first-years hold virtually unlimited

October 23, 2017

Tufts Observer

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FEATURE

OPINION

potential to positively change this campus. Hardened veteran students and first-years alike must hold Tufts University accountable to the supposed values propagated by their fundraisers, administration, admissions officers, and global outreach networks.

For this year’s class of 2021, while learning this contract’s terms remains an important source of growth, navigating them can be taxing, dangerous, and sometimes fatal. But it is because of this very precariousness that first-years hold virtually unlimited potential to positively change this campus. Hardened veteran students and first-years alike must hold Tufts University accountable to the supposed values propagated by their fundraisers, administration, admissions officers, and global outreach networks.

Research on these supposed values brought me to the Tufts Admissions website. Clicking through some of the stylish prose on admissions.tufts.edu, I found myself feeling the same idealism I carried during the college process a whole one year ago. “Wow, I’d love to go there!” I thought.

Then I realized that I do go there. Take a look for yourself at the “Life at Tufts” section of the Tufts Admissions Website. Is this the school you go to?: “When students come to Tufts, they trade bathtubs, living rooms, and backyards for communal showers, common rooms, and residential quads.” And then trade back communal showers, common rooms, and residential quads for bathtubs, living rooms, and backyards in the Medford-Somerville 18

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October 23, 2017

area, raising housing prices to unsustainable levels for local residents.

“Their campus is a new, evolving home: populated with ideas, Frisbee games, and late-night conversations in the dorm hallway.” Here’s an idea to populate my new, evolving home: take a shot for every reference of “frisbee” on this website.

“A university is more than just a collection of buildings where you attend your classes.”

Indeed, it’s much more. It’s a collection of multimillion dollar renovated glass-covered STEM buildings where you attend your classes.

“The average student at Tufts spends 15 hours a week in class, which leaves 153 hours for joking with friends in the dining hall, going back for seconds (and thirds), seeing concerts in Boston, performing research with professors, reading on the Prez Lawn, sleeping, and—yes—getting their homework done.” And—no—not having to Uber to class because of a transportation system across campuses that regularly fails Museum of Fine Arts and New England Conservatory students. And— no—not having to call Tufts Emergency Medical Services at 2:00am because your roommate just puked in his sleep.

“Life at Tufts is shaped not only by the campus you live on, but by the people who live here with you.” I didn’t know that the people I would inhabit this campus with would be a combination of sleepless, hungover students who complain about 10:30 morning classes, a conceal-carried university legal team, and administrators who

encourage part-time faculty to meet with students less often to remedy mediocre pay. I guess that is one kind of diversity.

“The pages to the left will give you an idea of some of the opportunities students have, both on and off campus. Our student blogs do a great job of that, too! And if you want to throw a Frisbee yourself? You can always visit us.” *shot* Tufts Admissions does not necessarily prey on high-achieving, intellectually stimulated high school students who want to create themselves in an academic utopia, and turn them into zombies of the state. To the contrary, some of these students are lacrosse players as well. When something as simple as an admissions website can make me feel good about myself, how can I resist the pervasive signals that reinforce and normalize this institution’s problems? We are taught to critically engage with problem sets and texts, but how can one critically engage with our campus? In other words, how can we begin to understand our campus ills; and how can we come up with methods to fix them?

Not an easy question. Critical engagement is hard, nearly impossible work.

Most don’t do the work; some “choose” to engage while others are forced to. The truth is that there are many on this campus who must work to fix campus-wide issues because they face these monsters every day. But whether or not one does the work, when high school seniors arrive at Tufts University, they literally buy into a package of normalized institutional problems so gracefully omitted in admissions materials and administrative rhetoric, yet wholly pervasive and unavoidable. For idealistic high schoolers who jump head-first into college, these omissions reveal themselves rapidly and unapologetically.

Whether it be Tufts’ fucking sheer amount of acapella groups, its unstimulating large lectures, its lack of racial and socioeconomic diversity, its pervasive drinking culture, its chronic mistreatment of workers, or its active role as a gentrifying giant, these omissions (and the many other issues neglected in this crude attempt at an opinion piece) have undoubtedly sedimented themselves as sacred ritual. These rituals are not just unsettling; in fact, many are terrifying.

FEATURE

Opinion

when high school seniors arrive at Tufts University, they literally buy into a package of normalized institutional problems gracefully omitted in admissions materials.

But one ritual remains a powerful source of courage for students: the work done by older classmates to guide younger students towards engaging critically with campus norms.

For senior Joseph Tsuboi, these norms showed themselves during his first year in his academic life: “It was so interesting freshman year to see how many people just went into the stereotype of Tufts. Everyone wanted to do econ and IR.” But when an orientation leader advised him to take the Asian America special topics class taught

by Prof. Wu, Tsuboi took this advice in stride: “It ended up being the case that I took a class that was super transformative.

I wouldn’t have taken it [otherwise].”

For first-year Nina Chukwura, Tufts’ lack of diversity proved especially jarring: “I didn’t know just how there’s such a severe lack of people of color here, especially African-Americans. As an African-American…Tufts was maybe the least diverse school that I applied to, but seeing it on campus, it was a lot.”

However, Chukwura was not only struck by Tufts’ lack of diversity. For Chukwura, the student-activist presence on campus was also a surprise: “There’s a lot of pushback against administration. I didn’t know people were concerned with the tuition raises… that’s all stuff that I was not aware of while applying.”

For Chukwura, the people with which she surrounds herself remain a powerful source of encouragement and knowledge: “The upperclassmen I’ve talked to have been concerned with issues.” Chukwura has found support in speaking to peers of color, “who have to be concerned because it matters to them…[they’re] political people…and they care.”

This kind of empowerment on the mass level has powerful consequence for Tufts. Whether challenging the university’s

often politically-regressive curriculum, or the university’s lack of racial diversity, normalcy can be uprooted. But as long as we are students at this university, taking its classes, eating its food, drinking its water, breathing its air, resistance on the individual level is nearly impossible. Critical engagement is definitely not as simple as completing a problem set, or looking for tensions within (or poking fun at) a text. And while you don’t have to be a special kind of student to realize that, it takes a mass of unrelenting energy and unjaded optimism to take action on that realization.

First-years: as naive, unadjusted, fragile, and uncomfortable as we are, we hold a surprising amount potential in this respect. We don’t yet know what is “normal.”

We don’t know how to hold our liquor, navigate the party scene, or throw a frisbee. We don’t know how it feels to tweak out on un-prescribed Adderall in Tisch.

But should we? Have those things ever felt comfortable, natural, or are they just rituals that we consent to when we go to college? When we see a group of students with megaphones and cardboard signs shouting

outside our classrooms, do we ask ourselves, “Now what in God’s name are those people doing out there?” or do we write it off as “one of those Tufts things”? Tufts isn’t normal yet for Tufts first-years because Tufts isn’t normal. It never has been.

Let’s celebrate that naivety. Let’s guide it, nurture it, and cultivate it for a better normal, that maybe is a little less like freeipadauction64xcn.net, and more like admissions.tufts.edu—with less frisbee. Let’s create more rituals that encourage all students, especially first-years, to critically engage with this campus’s conceptions of normalcy.

October 23, 2017

Tufts Observer

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FEATURE

COLUMN

Three Steps

By Myisha Majumder

Doing something you love that will benefit from your labor comes in three steps.

Step 1: Find Your Fuel The ability to be silent in the face of injustice is a privilege.

When I was a sophomore in high school, Ferguson made raging headlines and I was forced to confront my privilege in an urgent manner. My school was clearly divided: Us (the White majority) and Them (the Black minority).

Non-Black people of color, such as myself, were thrown somewhere in the middle, forced to choose between sides.

More often than not, my other Asian friends chose to blend into the White mass, blind to the privilege we had to be able to chameleon ourselves this way. For me, it was a way to avoid seeming different. I hated drawing attention to myself and the fact that my skin was full of melanin compared to my peers. As a child, whenever my mom packed a traditional Bengali meal, with chicken full of spice and fragrant, I would

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OCTOBER 23, 2017

keep it locked away in my backpack and skipped the meal. I was inhibited by the fact that someone would make fun of me, and I would lose all my friends.

My parents had accumulated enough wealth comparable to most of my White peers’ parents, and that alone was enough to gain me a prized position at the pedestal of “One of Us.” I had grown up in a predominantly White and wealthy town almost my entire life. But no amount of money would be enough to change my identity.

Being comfortable using my voice only came with being comfortable with my identity. I spent much of my growing years running away from my race but, at the end of the day, I would face systematic oppression—yet I also had privilege over many others.

Sitting back and being silent was what was expected of me, but with my further exploration of police brutality, a buried anger suddenly came full force: I couldn’t stay silent.

I participated in the Ferguson sit-in at my school and could not see a single White face in the crowd. Feelings of con-

ART BY NICOLE COHEN

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Column

fusion overwhelmed me as I recalled conversations with some of my closest friends: why weren’t they here? If they disagreed so much with police brutality, and they weren’t the primary victims, why weren’t they standing up for the main targets?

I looked up at the stairs and saw these friends watching warily as the chants of “no justice, no peace, no racist police” grew louder, and pencils were thrown at our faces from a large group of White teenage boys.

The cry had been buried deep in me for far too long and I joined in on the screams: “no justice, no peace, no racist police.”

It took me months to reconcile why my White friends had chosen not to participate in the sit-in. Then I realized, they were silent for the same reason I had been before, but to a much greater extent: it was uncomfortable to realize our privilege and the responsibilities that came with it.

Unfortunately, the problem with silence is that, often times, it is equated with compliance. The cost of silence is being associated with views that may be completely against your moral code, but you are too afraid to speak up and vocally disagree with them.

This ability to choose to be silent when you are in a position of advantage is a privilege in itself—it means the issue doesn’t affect you in the first place.

The voices of the oppressed can only be heard if the allies who are silent also speak up, otherwise, justice can never be found.

Step 2: Recognize The Way it Manifests I am the child of Bengali immigrants— a model minority. Going to college was never an if for me—it was an always.

When I entered my first year of high school, three of my older cousins from Bangladesh joined me. The summer before was spent with three families living under one roof, daily trips to the Boston immigration center, and countless hours of paperwork that went hand in hand with large

checks. My parents took their responsibilities as sponsors seriously and allowed me to help them carry their weight.

The fluorescent room filled with raggedy chairs, words from different languages mixing together into a symphony, and the dead look of the office workers as they yelled out the next number in line is forever committed to memory. More than that, I can remember standing in line for a number with my aunt, uncle, and cousin, and listening to a security guard blatantly disregard their humanity as we spoke in our native tongue: “God, some of these people are so effin’ stupid man, why are we even letting them in?”

I remember being frozen, all of the words of retort suddenly escaping me.

How long would my immigrant family be subject to such treatment despite how hard they worked to get here?

Much of my father’s family that lives in the Boston area currently works grueling minimum wage jobs despite having college degrees and high paying jobs waiting for them back at home. I watch them struggle every day, all because they believe that America will provide their children with better opportunities—a better chance to succeed.

I look around me and I question: is this the America that can live up to their expectations?

Where, on a family trip to Portland, Oregon, my father unknowingly lightly tapped the door of a rental car against a truck two times and was met with the booming voice of, “are you fucking kidding me? Seriously?” and panic immediately struck my bones.

Where, when I woke up in the middle of the night to read about the tragedy in Las Vegas, tears streamed down my face in sadness but also in anxiety as I shakily prayed that the shooter wasn’t Muslim—“oh God, please make sure he’s not Muslim.”

Are we a country where the American Dream is possible?

Step 3: Understand The Ways You Can Help Words can be powerful. They can hurt, they can heal.

But words cannot be powerful just on their own.

Action must follow.

Labor must follow.

With raising awareness and attempting to foster understanding of the vast injustices inherent in our country, we must offer solutions as well. For those of us in places of privilege and advantage, we have a responsibility to be effective and understanding allies.

One way I’ve decided to help is by using my quantitative background as someone who’s planning on studying Civil Engineering. With these skills I can understand institutionalized issues such as gerrymandering.

Generally speaking, you should find what you’re good at and use that in some regard to benefit your cause. If you’re really good at community organizing, you could hold a rally in conjunction with other experts from all fields to raise awareness and to help others create actionable game plans.

Just as we can not stay silent, we can’t not act either.

It is important to note that in being an ally, one should not expect to be constantly congratulated for their “noble acts.” In using our privilege to help those at a disadvantage, just because other people do not do the same does not make us entitled to being special. We help others in any way we can. It doesn’t need constant affirmation. While we should make sure that what we’re doing is actually benefiting the people we are trying to help, we should not expect constant gratitude.

The world is scary, but in order to make change, we must use our words and our skills to act on them. While we may lack certain privileges, there are often times other privileges we can use to our advantage to help others.

october 23, 2017

Tufts Observer

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Arts & Culture

redrawing PHOTO BY PRIYANKA PADIDAM

how public art illuminates erased histories

boston

By Merissa Jaye

A

mazon’s job listing website describes Boston as, “One of the oldest cities in the US…an international center of education, medicine, and technology. The city is also known for its devoted sports fans and award-winning news publications.” This is a standard characterization of Boston. There is nothing unique about describing Boston as old, as tech-focused, as Revolutionary War nostalgic, as elite universities, as fiery Red Sox fans. But Boston is also Chinese immigrant communities, a history of Apartheid activism, and Puerto Rican organizers. It’s the home of Malcolm X and Bobby Brown. It’s Cape Verdean churches, queer nightlife, and Jewish delis. And many of Boston’s works of public art depict this erased history.

Dr. Adriana Zavala, a professor of Art History at Tufts, named some factors that go into creating the popular understanding of Boston’s history, which often leaves out the diverse lived experiences of the city’s residents. “You have the walking tours of Boston, the duck boat tours, the founding fathers, and that whole US colonial narrative,” Zavala says. “Part of what interests me is how certain historical narratives are privileged over others.” In Boston, the history of the Revolutionary War takes center stage. Popular tourist attractions like the

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PHOTO BY ABIGAIL BARTON

FEATURE

Arts & Culture

Freedom Trail narrate the nation’s origin story, and take up much of the space dedicated to public memory. As a result, the history of immigrants, the working class, and people of color in the city frequently go erased or unremembered. Public Art like “Roxbury Love” by Richard Gomez and Thomas Burns, “Betances Mural”

by Lilli Annkillen, and “Home Town” by Wen-ti Tsen makes that history visible.

On the corner of Warren Avenue and Clifford Street in Roxbury, a neighborhood in Boston, stretches the 100 foot “Roxbury Love” mural. The wall, which was painted

by Richard Gomez and Thomas Burns in 2014, is emblazoned with the face of Nelson Mandela. The mural celebrates Roxbury’s history, culture, and people. Mandela’s face is both a nod to his visit to the neighborhood in the 1990s, but is also a reminder of a piece of Boston’s history that is not often mentioned—ballot question #5, a 1986 Boston referendum.

This historical vote proposed the question of whether the neighborhoods of Roxbury, Dorchester, and Mattapan should secede from the city of Greater Boston to form an autonomous, and non-White majority city, which they would name Mandela. The grassroots organizing that lead up to the ballot question stemmed from what activist Andrew Jones describes to The Bay State Banner as a “colonial relationship with the city of Boston.” Jones says, “we feel that the city of Boston has treated us like second-class citizens and we’re fighting for basic rights of citizenship.” The

PHOTO COURTESY OF JOE DIFAZIO AT WBUR

proposal was eventually defeated. But the image of Mandela in “Roxbury Love” continues to viewers of the call for neighborhood autonomy and community control in the age of gentrification.

In “Home Town,” artist Wen-ti Tsen created bright, life-sized cut out images of Chinese immigrants and placed them in Chinatown to bring the community’s history into a public space.

Chinatown has been a home base of Asian-Americans for hundreds of years, and “Home Town” invites viewers to remember and honor Chinatown as home.

“Home Town” is currently on display in the Remis Sculpture Court on the Tufts Medford/Somerville campus. At Tufts, these statues take on a new role as visual reminders of students’ connections to Chinatown. The presence of the Tufts Medical School functions as part of the forces gentrification related to the displacement of the Chinatown community.

Dr. Lisa Lowe, a professor in the consortium for Race, Colonialism, and Diaspora and director of the Center for the Humanities at Tufts, spoke about why these departments chose to bring “Home Town” and Wen-ti Tsen to Tufts as an Artist-in-Residence. “I think public art is really important to memory,” says Lowe, “not just in making us remember particular events and things, and people and processes, but also in making us think and imagine differently.” When artists like Wen-ti Tsen, Richard Gomez, and Thomas Burns create physical and mate-

rial markers of their communities in their neighborhood, they are asserting a relationship between community and place that goes beyond property ownership.

Challenging forces of gentrification and creating new forms of land ownership may seem impossible or utopian, but artist Lilli Ann Killen builds the reality of community land ownership into the city of Boston. Her colorful, tactile “Betances Mural” documents the history of the South End’s Puerto Rican community. This community, organizing under the title “Inquilinos Boricuas en Acción,” fought gentrification in 1968 and won. Through this organizing, community members were able to keep their homes, secured over 500 units of affordable housing, and developed centers for artistic and other forms of family-oriented programing. The “Betances Mural” illustrates this history and this story of the Puerto Rican diaspora at large.

Written onto the mural is the phrase “sepamos combatir por nuestro honor nuestra libertad” or, “we knew how to fight for our honor, our freedom.”

Collectively, these public works of art illuminate a history that too often goes unacknowledged. Boston Historian and Tufts Professor, Dr. Kerri Greenidge, speaks to the power of this art in a Boston context.

“People are putting a stake in the land and saying, we are here. We exist,” she says.

“There may be a big multibillion dollar building put up across the street, but this place is actually more complex, and has a complete history behind it.”

OCTOBER 23, 2017

Tufts Observer

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FEATURE

voices

A Thank You for Staying content warning: suicide Headlights bloom and fade, and salty tears glisten against my cheeks. As each light passes, I stare it down, hoping it’s the end of my tunnel. But on this warm summer night, the cars continue to flee. As I sit on the damp grass beside the road, I can feel her hand methodically stroking my back, hear his soft breathing as he drifts in and out of sleep. She whispers sweet nothings in a soothing tone, but it’s not enough to placate my thoughts. While the presence of these two good friends alone is more than I could’ve asked for, no other being is a match for my own subconscious.

Run, my head demands.

No, my heart protests. It’s not a fair fight. A hand clenches my forearm, pulling me back down to a seated position. Sadness encapsulates me, sloshing around in what feels to be a hollow core, with an occasional glimpse of terrified breaking through the surface–the

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By Lauren Weinstock only indication that this is not who I am, that the lack of serotonin in my brain is manipulating my mind.

“Where do you think you’re going?” Her voice is kind.

Away, I think.

Over the next six months, the fall semester of my sophomore year, Leaving became more of a certainty.

Trying to not be constantly exhausted by my depression was what the vast majority of my emotional energy was, and still is, committed to. It was, and remains to be, the most difficult part of being me. However, my personal experience with depression is riddled with entrapping comfort, in which suddenly the dark cloud constantly hovering above is my friend, and if I don’t have that, what do I have? And so some days I don’t fight the urge to lay wrapped in the security of my blankets all day.

Some days, I let my sadness spill from my heart willingly, submerging both myself and any hope of conventional productivity for the day. Other days, I fight. With anchors around my ankles, I sprint towards the elusive

PHOTO BY PRIYANKA PADIDMAM

FEATURE

voices

feeling of happiness that I know lies just beyond my cloud. Occasionally, I succeed. For a little, that is.

Over time my depression has evolved, and I have grown with it—sometimes in ways that allow me to manage it better and sometimes not. But during this period of my life it was new, and despite my weekly therapy visits and daily medication, my mind was constantly clouded by this haze that twisted my perception of reality. I couldn’t fathom a situation in which I would be happy, and therefore I couldn’t fathom a life in which I wouldn’t end up taking my own.

This wasn’t necessarily a scary thought until the nights it would become an imminent possibility. Usually, it was just a fact that I carried with me, hidden beneath my blank stares. I knew that I was already a liability to my friends (when I could remember that I had any, a side effect that continues to only be solved by keeping a list on my phone naming them all) on the nights that were bad, and I couldn’t possibly justify forcing them to carry that knowledge with them as well. So in my somewhat deluded mental state, I did what I believed any rational person who thinks they’re going to die does: I wrote a will. Several wills to be exact, sprinkled throughout my journals, each of them apologizing to the people I care about and leaving them a piece of memorabilia that I hoped would ease their grief. What I didn’t realize was that these gifts are insignificant in comparison to my continued existence.

The beginning of sophomore spring my depression came to another climax. I was in the same physical location as before with the same two people, but this time I had run. In overalls and a flannel, I wandered along the shoulders of snowy roads, thinking about how much I did not want to remain on this Earth, how much relief I would feel, and most pressingly, how much relief others would feel if I was gone. It’s amazing how isolated the chemicals in my brain can make me feel, how lonely I imagine I am despite knowing that the two people I love the most will undoubtedly remain by my side.

The return to my friends went, in my perspective, poorly.

“You know what it makes us think when you disappear like that.” Her words were sharp and angry but her voice was cracking. He was silent. I was taken aback, hurt. But there we were, all of us nearly suffocating under the weight of my mental health. There we were, all trying to keep me afloat and stay afloat in the process. There we were.

I later discussed the first warm summer night with her. She told me that when I finally calmed down and we were all going to bed, he whispered “good job” to her. It stung, hearing those words, imaging this alternative version of events in which my narrative was not

PHOTO BY ELIZABETH BROOKE

the most pressing. But it’s true, in a situation in which my life was forced upon their realm of responsibility, they did a good job.

I will never fully understand the sacrifices those close to me have made for my mental health. They are the unsung heroes that embarked on this journey of trying to navigate my mental health with me, and their steadfast support is the reason I’m able to share my experiences and their important role in them. My depression has pulled on our friendship and accumulated baggage in ways that have made our relationship difficult at times and are often hard to acknowledge. I am not a burden, but there is significant effort being put forth by those close to me that needs to be recognized, because at the end of the day, no one has my back, arms, toes, lungs, heart, head, soul like they do.

A year goes by, and we’re back in the same location. I’m doing surprisingly okay for being in a place that has held my lowest lows. But he’s not. He shares that he’s been having similar experiences to me, that he’s also thought about Leaving. I feel immense sadness that someone who has helped me cope with my mental illness now has to live through it himself. I feel grateful that I can be there for him, but I also know how hard it is to help someone who may not want it.

Though other peoples’ battles will not be the same as my own, my experiences have made me calmer when trying to help others. Perhaps I see too much of myself in them. But I think it’s that I’ve made peace with mental health and the effects it has on people. I can see past the stigmatization of mental illness and see their fear, their pain. I understand the loneliness, the isolation that some of us can’t seem to claw away.

I recognize the desire for support, but know that often someone else’s presence doesn’t really change anything. I’ve been there. It’s okay if you’re there too.

Ever yday is work.

We lug around weights as we fight demons. Sometimes, if we take care of ourselves, the weight lessens a little. Sometimes, people who love us help us carry the weight. Sometimes, we take on a little extra weight to help someone we care about. There is no shortage of weights to be carried or battles to be won, only a shortage of empathy for those who do the carrying.

october 23, 2017

Tufts Observer

25

FEATURE

Feature

before there were rooms there was no Here or There no spatial frame of referent to section off all of the places we could not go ONE BIG SPACE!!! it is almost too much to consider

(consider it, though, I am interested in space and words and words in space and the spatiality of words even though often it feels like the walls I draw beg me not to look at them

(shame, shame, shame for constituting structure) a center was found, or created, or both to be the first person in the first room must have been scary

(sometimes it is still scary to be in rooms, especially the ones we call bodies) <â&#x20AC;&#x201D; (too much?)

I want to ask my dad if heâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s ever kissed a man usually, Touch is an Excess that fails to keep itself from flowing over SUBMERGED

smoking while swimming makes (poetic) logical sense nothing untouched by the swirling water structure always undoing itself by design.

Stepping out of narrative floating beneath a bright and warm center (outside of the structure, this time) And there is a reason we write about water when we write about love.

Submerged.

Nothing left untouched.

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Tufts Observer

October 23, 2017

ART BY EMMETT PINSKY

FEATURE

Feature

called my dad and he told me that everything important to say won’t ever stop being important and that i shouldn’t rush things. wait, he says. he says i know we are impatient assholes and we want the Good Feelings and we want them Now but sometimes the best thing to do is shut up and know that the really truly Good things?—they don’t happen or not happen because of anything you could do in an instant. so wait. wait it out even though we want the good Feelings and we want them Now. i ask my dad if he has ever read anne carson.

-who?

-never mind I do not trust cathedrals too easy to look through clean windows and believe you are looking at sky (glass, actually) is it too much to write about touch and rooms

and words at once?

those three might be the same, i think and even if they weren’t, i am doing my best lately not to shy away from excess.

April 25, 2017

Tufts Observer

19

FEATURE

Poetry

Blood in

the sands

By Jordan Anthony Elijah Barnes surprise! there is more blood in the sands. reds burned out from a verdant greed

the skies are spitting fire there will be no escape.

blink notâ&#x20AC;&#x201C;this is a common death how many bullets must torment to turn this iron taste sour?

the Earth is now gagging, retching on our refuse

we have choked the land of its luster ruptured rumbling rivers in the name of avarice-writ-chromium

our words lay prone on ocean floors,

drowned: torch-sans-sconce

we end worlds as a kind of joke smug chuckles at distant flames, raging ever closer

we revel in this tragic ignominy, too bloated by our gluttonous appetite

saccharine guilt is our sole interjection. bitten many times over on our back sides, sapped by the scope of this sin

this is our daily plague. haunted, we smile, goading fate

we lie inside ourselves, true things coiled into fictionsâ&#x20AC;&#x201C; doomsday clock resets, and ticks on

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Tufts Observer

October 23, 2017

until the ubiquitous surprise: there is more blood in the sands.

ART BY AMY TONG

FEATURE

Feature

october 9, 2017

Tufts Observer

31

TUFTS OBSERVER Since 1895

This magazine was produced on occupied Massachusett territory.