YDN Magazine March 2016

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DAILY NEWS

MAGAZINE

THE NAME GAME Who Gets to Play?

INSIDE: The Fossil Fuel Feud

Coming Home After Women’s Prison

MFC% OC@@@ @JJL< ) D8I:? )'(-

by Rohan Naik

Who Is Stephen Schwarzman?

Editors’ Note Dear Wunderkinds, So you’ve picked up the March issue of the Yale Daily News Magazine.

Perhaps you have some questions.

What’s this magazine got, in the vastly proliferating world of Yale publications? Why are there dice on the cover? Why did the Magazine just happen to have dice lying around? Is the Yale Daily News secretly a front for a vast gambling ring? What else could they be doing in that mysterious building with the lights on until the wee hours of the morning?

Those are some difficult questions, for sure. But we can wholeheartedly answer at least one of them. In this issue, Rohan Naik explores “The Name Game,” nationally and at Yale. Should the University rename

TABLE OF CONTENTS Calhoun College? And if they do, who should be honored? What about Yale’s new residential colleges?

Alumni and students have tried to sway the decision-making process, often on opposite sides, but both frustrated by the fact that ultimately, neither group will make the final choice.

Also in this issue, Isabelle Taft tells the story of Sharlice, a New Haven woman who must navigate the ambiguous world of re-entry for women after prison. Finnegan Schick follows the two very different approaches in use now by student groups advocating for fossil fuel divestment. And Gabriella Borter draws back the curtain on discussions about race in the world of Yale student theater.

Oh, and Graham Ambrose asked a bunch of Yale students eating lunch whether they could correctly identify Stephen Schwarzman’s face.

We’re thrilled that you’ve picked up this issue, another exploration of the topics and people that make up the mythical “Yale Experience.” We hope you enjoy the articles mentioned above, and much more, from personal essays to poetry to photography.

(And other sections that don’t begin with the letter “P.”) And if you want to find out how to contribute to the Mag (conducting vaguely unscientific polls since 1972!), come find us at the actually pretty unmysterious YDN building. We’ll be here, draining the coffee supply.

Abigail and Liz

table of contents

4

6

photo essay

Shanghai to Henan IRENE JIANG

11

fiction

INVEST BY THE BOOK, DIVEST BY THE BOOK?

Forty-Four Seconds KATIE STOOPS

14

Feature by Finnegan Schick

poem

the smooth scar on her shoulder when the water chilled EDWARD COLUMBIA

15

personal essay

Word Map LUCY FLEMING

17

12 WHO IS SHE?

poem

Art by Alice Oh

Notes from the Valley of a Hundred Fires STEFANIE FERNADEZ

18

personal essay

There is a pain — so utter DANIEL JUDT

39

19 EXCEPTIONS TO THE RULE

bits and pieces

Feature by Gabriella Borter DAILY NEWS

MAGAZINE Magazine Editors in Chief Abigail Bessler Elizabeth Miles Managing Editors Hayley Byrnes Lillie Lainoff

Design Editors Mert Dilek Eleanor Handler Tresa Joseph Samuel Wang Photography Editor Elinor Hills Kaifeng Wu

Associate Editors Gabriella Borter Brady Currey Frani O’Toole

Illustrations Editor Ashlyn Oakes

Magazine Design Editors Emily Hsee Amanda Mei

Editor in Chief Stephanie Addenbrooke

Cover photo by Kaifeng Wu

Copy Editor Martin Lim

Publisher Joanna Jin

STAFF: Graham Ambrose, Charlotte Brannon, Teresa Chen, Edward Columbia, Elena Conde, Ahmed Elbenni, Abigail Halpern, Emily Hsee, Eve Houghton, Madeline Kaplan, Emma Keyes, William Nixon, Aaron Orbey, Tsedenya Simmie, Eve Sneider, Oriana Tang, Claudia Zamora DESIGN ASSISTANTS: Miranda Escobar, Jacob Middlekauff, Lisa Qian, Avital Smotrich-Barr, Ben Wong, Rebecca Yan, Julia Zou BUSINESS LIAISON: Diane Jiang

24

AFTER ORANGE Feature by Isabelle Taft

32 THE NAME GAME Cover by Rohan Naik

Yale Daily News Magazine | 3

photo essay

SHANGHAI TO HENAN

by Irene Jiang

4 | March 2016

D

espite Chinaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s global reputation as a rapidly rising superpower, the everyday reality is a little rougher around the edges. In the bustling cities of Shanghai and Beijing, children romp in plazas while laborers rest in ancient alleyways. And in the vast countryside, Chinese Muslim shopkeepers in Xiâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;anâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Muslim Quarter tend to their storefronts and elderly farmers in rural Henan tend to their sheep. The diversity of their days is reflected in these pictures.

Yale Daily News Magazine | 5

feature

INVEST by the BOOK,

by Finnegan Schick photos by Finnegan Schick graphic by Lisa Qian

6 | March 2016

feature

DIVEST by the BOOK? A

few dozen students sit in a lecture hall at the Yale Law School on a Tuesday afternoon. They are dressed casually, their backpacks bedecked with orange felt squares bearing the letter “Y.” Their furrowed brows mask a mild excitement, and they whisper amongst themselves across the rows of desks. It’s two weeks into the second week of their spring semester, and the undergraduates of Fossil Free Yale are full of energy.

And it is energy that brings them here.

Part of Yale’s $25.6 billion endowment is invested in the fossil fuel industry, and for the past four years, students in FFY have been calling for divestment.

Polluted seas, smoky skies, rising tides — FFY argues that Yale has a moral obligation to pull investments from the industry held largely responsible for destroying the planet and changing the climate.

A line of students in the center row of the hall raise six orange posters, one letter per student: “D-I-V-E-S-T.” Silence falls as members of Yale’s Advisory Committee on Investor Responsibility (ACIR) file into the hall.

Yale Law professor and chair of the ACIR Jonathan Macey stands to speak. Yale University is a not-for-profit organization, he says, and its governing body is the Yale Corporation. Macey describes the ACIR — composed of two

members of the faculty, two staff members, two alumni and two students — as “a kind of conduit … between the Yale community and the [Corporation].”

Macey exhibits a mixture of neutrality and caution while discussing Yale’s investments. FFY sits silently and waits for him to finish: his message is familiar, and they have heard it before.

When Macey ends his speech, FFY Communications Director Chelsea Watson ’17 steps to the stage to present FFY’s third revised divestment proposal.

“We are serious, yet Yale does not take us seriously,” she says. “We have given you our all, and we now leave it up to you, the ACIR, to decide what you will do with it.”

Fossil Free Yale has been the public face of divestment on campus for the past four years. Mobilizing undergraduates, the group has fought, without success, for Yale to remove its investments from the fossil fuel industry.

Recently, though, another group has started advocating for divestment.

Behind the front-and-center FFY crowd sit four members of the Dwight Hall Socially Responsible Investment Fund, an undergraduate group founded in 2007 with 20 members, a $100,000 endowment and an entirely different approach.

They watch Watson’s speech from the back row, all wearing suits.

L

ike so many battles in human history, the divestment debate at Yale centers on a book. The Ethical Investor — a 150-page text written in 1971 by a Yale Law School professor and a Yale theology professor — has guided the University’s investment decisions for over four decades.

Every tricky moral question about Yale’s endowment in the past 40 years has been addressed, in some way or another, by consulting the book.

University Provost Benjamin Polak has described The Ethical Investor as a “touchstone” for Yale’s investment policies, a “simple and transparent” standard to keep the endowment in line with the University’s mission. Since it was published, Yale has divested from companies in apartheid South Africa and oil companies in Sudan in accordance with the book. The Yale Corporation Committee on Investor Responsibility (CCIR), which takes advice from the ACIR, said in a 2014 statement that those divestment choices were based “on a well-identified set of injurious actors,” companies which were assisting oppressive regimes that violated international human rights and freedoms.

The CCIR has already contended that climate change and oppressive regimes are vastly different problems.

In their 2014 statement, the CCIR said that The Ethical Investor’s premise is that Yale’s endowment should prioritize the University’s teaching and scholarly work Yale Daily News Magazine | 7

feature over non-economic ethical issues. And one of the book’s authors, Jon Gunnemann GRD ’75, agreed in a Yale Daily News article last year, saying the endowment should support the educational goals of the University and “not be used as a social weapon.”

“The solution to [climate change] cannot be identified with a specific set of companies or even companies alone,” the CCIR wrote in 2014. “Sensible and sound governmental policies are essential to reduce the threat of climate change.”

Instead of appealing to ethics, though, the new Dwight Hall SRI Fund is using a specific passage in the book to push for divestment.

The passage reads: “The university will not exercise its shareholder rights, but will instead sell the securities in question, if a finding is made that: it is unlikely that, within a reasonable period of time, the exercise of shareholder rights by the university will succeed in modifying the company’s activities sufficiently to eliminate at least that aspect of social injury which is grave in character.”

In plain language, this means that if the University cannot get a company to improve by engaging with that company — a right that Yale has as a shareholder — Yale must divest from that company.

Could Yale be trapped by its own rules, forced by its own book to divest from fossil fuels? If Yale plays by the book, divestment from fossil fuels could become a real possibility in the near future.

A

fter Watson finishes presenting Fossil Free Yale’s case to the ACIR, the FFY members rise en masse and march from the room. Only the ACIR, the four members of the SRI Fund and a few nonaffiliated students remain.

A calmer tone sweeps the space. The ACIR members, who had sat solemnly during the FFY presentation, turn in their seats and begin chatting. A certain professional friendliness comes over the audience, and the SRI Fund takes the stage.

In 2014, the SRI Fund purchased around $2,000 of ExxonMobil stock. And in December 2015 they filed — alongside 8 | March 2016

other shareholders, including a Swedish pension fund and United Steelworkers — the first shareholder resolution by a student-led fund in the country.

The resolution asks ExxonMobil, the largest oil and gas company in the nation, to report all of its undisclosed lobbying expenditures. ExxonMobil’s expenditures have come under scrutiny after investigative reporting from major news organizations revealed that the company has funded groups like the American Petroleum Institute and the National Association of Manufacturers, which have helped obstruct evidence of climate change. Climate activists have also called out ExxonMobil for lobbying against scientific research in order to downplay the threat of global warming.

A shareholder resolution is a request made by investors in a company to vote on the direction of that company. The resolution is only the first step in a long process that usually, in the case of large companies like ExxonMobil, never comes to a vote. The company can table the resolution, and if it ever does come to a vote, it rarely gets majority support from other shareholders.

This is precisely how the SRI Fund hopes to corner Yale into divesting from fossil fuels: by showing that big companies like ExxonMobil do not listen to their shareholders. By filing a resolution that ExxonMobil is unlikely to green-light, the Fund could force Yale — another shareholder in ExxonMobil — to vote.

And signs show that Yale would vote in favor of the SRI Fund’s resolution.

Macey said the ACIR is committed to voting in favor of resolutions that are consistent with the reality of climate change, citing this as reasoning for encouraging the ACIR to support the SRI Fund’s resolution. Such clear support contrasts starkly with the taciturn response the ACIR has given to FFY’s petitions in the past.

Russell Heller ’19, a member of the SRI Fund, said the plan could prove more effective than the direct-action approach favored by FFY. Heller said the SRI Fund prefers legislative methods and

going through bureaucracy over making demands of the University.

“We’re taking a different route,” he said.

I

n FFY’s view, The Ethical Investor is an outdated guide with little to add to the present climate debate.

“The Ethical Investor is limited because it was written four-and-a-half decades ago,” Nathan Lobel ’17 told the ACIR at the Law School. In his presentation, Lobel said the book was an inadequate text, and would not help FFY convince the Corporation to divest.

Another FFY organizer, Elias Estabrook ’16, said the book needed an addendum because the scale of the climate change issue was almost incomprehensible for the authors who wrote it in the 1970s.

FFY argues that The Ethical Investor’s recommendations fall short in the face of the modern fossil fuel industry. They also believe the book downplays the efficacy of social movements and political action to create change. Given Yale’s prestige as an elite educational institution, FFY argues that divestment could signal to the global community a heightened awareness of the dangers of fossil fuels.

“By divesting, Yale would contribute to a consciousness shift within its community and beyond,” one FFY report reads.

For FFY, the lack of shareholder engagement in the fossil fuel industry is old news. Even though the group has not presented a test case like the SRI Fund’s, they have cited instances where large fossil fuel companies, including ExxonMobil, have not listened to their shareholders.

“Within the modern context, shareholder engagement has failed,” FFY member Griffin Walsh ’19 said.

Fossil fuel companies, FFY’s argument goes, cannot stay in business without extracting oil from the Earth. A fossil fuel company cannot, without destroying its business model, listen to shareholder or consumer calls for greener energy alternatives. And even if a shareholder resolution like the one proposed by the SRI Fund passes, no lobbying disclosure form could prevent ExxonMobil from staying in the oil and gas business.

feature “A fossil fuel company can’t leave reserves in the ground and remain in business,” Watson said at the ACIR meeting. “They are invested in the status quo. Shareholder resolutions will not work.”

that fossil fuel divestment is a bad idea,” stagnant, signaling to some investors that wrote lead author Daniel Fischel in the oil profits may be on the decline. study. “These costs have real financial “If you were an oil and gas exploration impacts on the returns generated by an firm,” said William Jarvis ’77, director of investment portfolio, and therefore, real the Commonfund Institute, an investment impacts on the ability of an educational firm, “you’re close to out of business.” ven as these student groups stand institution to achieve its goals.” waist-deep in procedures and Although lawyers, endowment FY is at a crossroads now. In their protests, the divestment debate specialists and economic professors view, the ACIR is an ineffectual is ultimately about the purpose of the agreed with the report’s findings, FFY organization, and the administration University’s endowment. members pushed back and said Compass remains silent. The biggest issue they have, The financial cost of divestment, Lexecon’s report was biased, since it was beyond climate change, is the University’s some argue, could outweigh any social financed in part by a petroleum company. power structure. Estabrook said Yale capital Yale might gain. As Yale seeks Furthermore, investing in oil and gas may moves at a snail’s pace, and thinks it to continually grow its endowment, the not be as lucrative in the future as it has impedes necessary and timely change.

Corporation may choose to ignore the been, according to Brett Fleishman, senior In 2013, one year after the group’s moral culpability of fossil fuel investment. analyst from the pro-divestment group formation, FFY was told to show how But can Yale strike a balance between fiscal 350.org. As oil prices plummet worldwide, much student support it had through a prudence and ethical leadership? companies in the U.S. oil industry like referendum. Collaborating with the Yale School of Public Health professor ExxonMobil have found their returns College Council, FFY got 52 percent Robert Dubrow, who attended the ACIR discussion, urged the committee to “take moral leadership and make a public recommendation in favor of divestment.”

The Ethical Investor written 1971 While administrators have mostly given radio silence on the topic of divestment and fossil fuel companies, Yale’s Chief Investment Officer David Swensen recently recommended that Yale’s outside investment managers take climate change into account when investing Yale’s money.

Dwight Hall SRI Fund founded Swensen wrote that they should “assess 2007 the greenhouse gas footprint” of certain companies and try to make “investments with small greenhouse gas footprints.”

Speaking with the ACIR at the Law School, Dubrow asked why, if Yale is already attempting a kind of behind2012 Fossil Free Yale founded the-scenes, gradual divestment, the University has not made any kind of public Around 2,900 undergraduates (43 percent of Yale College) commitment to divest. He said divestment vote in favor of divestment should be treated primarily as an ethical 2013 issue, not a financial one.

Some professors and students disagree, Dwight Hall SRI Fund files shareholder resolution with taking a purely economic view of the ExxonMobil to report all undisDecember endowment. closed lobbying expenditures A February 2015 study from economic 2015 consulting firm Compass Lexecon found a “highly likely and substantial” potential FFY presents third revised January that divestment could decrease an divestment proposal to the ACIR 2016 endowment’s investment returns. No big oil, no big returns.

“The economic evidence demonstrates

E

TIMELINE ETHICAL INVESTING AT YALE

F

Yale Daily News Magazine | 9

feature

of the undergraduate student body to respond to questions about divestment. Of those who responded, 83 percent voted in support of divestment, which totals to around 43 percent of all undergraduates, or around 2,900 people.

In the spring following the referendum, several FFY members were given two hours’ notice to come to a meeting with the CCIR. They skipped class, hurriedly prepared an information packet, and made a presentation. But after the meeting, Yale gave FFY the cold shoulder.

“It was basically a slap in the face.

We did everything we were told to do,” Watson said.

FFY did not turn the other cheek.

Shifting their tactics, they began to stage protests and demonstrations, their megaphones pointed at Woodbridge Hall.

When FFY members staged a sit-in inside President Salovey’s office, Yale Police wrote 19 students citations for trespassing and asked them to leave the building.

Yale pushed back on divestment in a way no University had before. With the sit-in, Yale became the first school to use police action against divestment protests.

Harvard climate activists blockaded Harvard Yard for a week, Swarthmore students held a monthlong sit in; both protests were uninhibited by the schools’ administrations.

“It did hurt to be arrested by your University, rather than have a door open,” Estabrook said.

The sit-in was designed to force Yale to make a decision, to come face-to-face with FFY and give an answer. Watson said the sit-in answered a big question for FFY: If 10 | March 2016

Yale finally listened to students, would it change its policies? The answer, Watson said, was a resounding no.

“They were listening and they didn’t care,” she said.

succeed. Often, even shareholder resolutions that get fewer than 5 percent support are enacted voluntarily by the company a few years later. This is about getting marginal, incremental change in a company, he said. lthough the University has kept “The fair measure of the success of one silent on the topic of divestment, of these campaigns is whether they do it Yale may soon be forced to make voluntarily,” Macey said. a definitive decision. If the SRI Fund’s shareholder resolution is supported early a month after their meeting

by Yale and then voted down, as SRI with the ACIR, on a chilly members expect it will be, the University winter afternoon, FFY holds a will be presented with a dilemma. Can “speak-out” on Beinecke Plaza. Fortythe University comply with its own five students circle four suited, headless rulebook while remaining invested in a mannequins representing members of company with a clear case of shareholder the Yale Corporation. Taking turns, the disengagement? Although the Dwight students share their frustrations with Hall group and FFY claim to be working Yale’s unwillingness to change. independently, a victory for the SRI Fund “We need to critically question if would undoubtedly give ammunition to this power structure is a legitimate and FFY against the University. appropriate governing structure for Yale,” “If Yale votes its shares and then the says Alina Aksiyote ’16. “We shouldn’t be measure fails, that … kind of proves okay with the fact that Yale runs without [Yale] wrong and gives weight to the student opinion.” divestment argument,” Heller said. “[Yale While the speeches focus largely on is] going to have to revisit their entire divestment, at times, they blur into more ethical guidelines.” general condemnations of everything The resolution was filed in December students see wrong with the University, 2015, though first unveiled at the ACIR from the name of Calhoun College to a meeting on Jan. 26, 2016. Dwight Hall lack of diversity among the faculty. will meet in the coming months with “We should have more of a say,” ExxonMobil representatives. Heller said Aksiyote says. “The more we build with he expects ExxonMobil to table the each other across grades, and really keep a resolution. Until then, the SRI Fund is presence here, that will be really powerful. standing firm, watching and waiting.

I feel like things are really changing.”

Macey is optimistic, not that the Nobody uses a megaphone. Nobody is resolution will win a majority of arrested. The speak-out lasts an hour, and shareholder votes, but that the mission then 45 undergraduates hug, pack up and of getting lobbying disclosures might walk away.

A

N

fiction

“Then the Lord rained down burning sulfur on Sodom and Gomorrah — from the Lord out of the heavens. Thus he overthrew those cities and the entire plain, including all those living in the cities — and also the vegetation in the land.”

- Genesis 19:24–25

I

can’t forget to tell Andrea that I want to be cremated. No matter how much morphine they give me, I have to remember to tell Andrea. I’ll tell her when she comes to see me. If I’m awake, I’ll tell her. I don’t care where they spread me — maybe over an ocean somewhere. It doesn’t matter where they put me, as long as I am ash. My mind keeps flickering in and out, but I can’t forget to tell her. I have to be ash.

“I can’t forget to tell Andrea.”

“Tell her what, General Tibbets?” says my nurse.

M

y heart monitor beeps, slow and hypnotic. I grab the railing of my hospital bed and try to ground myself but in a moment I’m twelve and I’m with my mother at the Hialeah race track in Miami and I am disappointed.

None of the things I expected to see at a carnival are here. Where are the men on stilts breathing fire? Where is the robed magician making bouquets of flowers disappear and saying “Now you see it.

Now you don’t?”

Through the crowd, we see a biplane and my mother pays the barnstormer a dollar so I can fly. This is my first flight.

I look down. The crowd is a cluster of moving specks and I am a giant in comparison.

“It only cost a dollar.”

“What did, General Tibbets?”

I

’m a young man now — an old thirty.

My crew and I have been flying all night in the Enola Gay, the plane I named after my mother. Beneath me, I see the tops of buildings and outlines of roadways, and I try to ignore the black specks that make the city move. When I spot the bridge, the T-shaped target in the middle of the city, I give the order.

“Bombs away!” Then I hold my breath as the Little Boy falls. In my head, I count to forty-two. The cold sweat tickles my back before it soaks into my uniform as my count reaches forty-three. Fortyfour. There’s a bright flash of light and my body relaxes because I know that my mission is successful.

“It used to take a thousand planes to do this, but all it took was two words from one little boy.”

When I look down, there’s a cloud and when it clears, there is a sea of fire where the city used to be. And I don’t have to ignore the specks anymore. They are gone. This is not what I imagined it would be. It used to take a thousand planes to do this, but all it took was two words from one little boy. I look back at the pillar of smoke that will never leave my memory as we fly safely away.

“They gave me the Distinguished Service Cross. Right when I landed. I got off the plane and they pinned it on me.”

“I know, General Tibbets.”

M

y skin is wrinkled now and the historians still call me to talk about that day. The History Channel is making a documentary — another one, filled with images of that pillar of smoke and burned skin and the shadows of people who disappeared in an instant. They can’t believe that I have no regrets.

I saved so many lives, avoiding an invasion. That’s what I tell myself, so that’s what I tell them. When they call and ask for an interview, I agree because I have to remind them about the lives I saved. I have to remind myself.

“I saved lives.”

“Yes, you did, General Tibbets.”

“But they don’t remember. They only remember Hiroshima.”

I

turn my head on the rough industrial linen of my pillowcase and listen for the sound of Andrea’s voice in the hallway. She must know that I have to be ash.

Any day now, it will happen. I expect that I’ll go out just like the sixty thousand did that day, with a flash of white-hot light.

And I am not afraid, because I know that if I face God, I will be facing a Man who, like me, destroys cities to save lives.

Yale Daily News Magazine | 11

art

12 | March 2016

art

by Alice Oh Yale Daily News Magazine | 13

poem

by Edward Columbia illustration by Caroline Tisdale a shower two bulbs she washes me doesn’t let me touch the water turns drains through strands of hair

bled out in a cold,

breath invisible ink

gentle alley broken chairs a question hanging in mist trickles and bursts along corrugated slats of roof

into the moss sprouting along the

, tiles made waaaaaaaaaa

passage into … the one crossing birth flesh ripples

of earth

i press my thumbs into the two bulbs

i don’t think my finger will go any deeper. it does. she curls i graze the tiny petal to a moan

water

she coughs on

an emptiness then, faucet snaps a taut stream

puddle wobbles on a broken chair she wraps the only towel around herself and leaves.

14 | March 2016

personal essay

WORD MAP

by Lucy Fleming illustration by Sonia Ruiz

O

n the wall of my dorm room hangs a map. Months after move-in, it refuses to lie flat against the plaster, despite the battalion of Command strips clinging to its laminated corners.

The majority of the map is light-blue ocean, with two major landmasses and a smattering of islands. Colors — orange, green, brown — denote nation-states, close-packed in some areas, sprawling in others. The densest conglomerations crowd around snaking inland seas. To the bottom-left, a massive southern kingdom stretches nearly halfway across the wall, extending fingers left and right and claiming islands with its distinctive orange splash. It’s labeled “Russia.” In the northwest, a fat crescent moon, “Australia.”

Opposite, in the northeast, a fist-shaped continent stretching a single finger towards my ceiling. Chile.

The map’s called “What’s Up, South!” and my parents got it for me and my brother Teo when we moved to the Southern

Hemisphere. It was meant, I suppose, to Stretch Our Minds, to show that “North” is a social construct and real countries aren’t above or beneath each other. Of course, it’s simply a world map, upside down. It hung above my brother’s bed for the years we spent in Gaborone, Botswana, at the edge of the Kalahari, in our embassy-approved, electric-fenced house. I remember staring up at it from where I lay on my brother’s bed, a long-legged 10-year-old, giggling because all of the place-names were rightside up, even though the Cape of Good Hope pointed toward the ceiling. On long weekend afternoons, waiting for my parents to get home so we could leave the compound, we’d find cities in Tajikistan or Latvia, each trying to stump the other.

We sang shrieking songs about places that were as far from each other as possible — Ul’yanovsk! Qogir Feng! Florianópolis!

Prague! Our dog, Fudge, lay next to us and thumped his half-deformed tail, a relic of a puppyhood fight, against the rug.

Eventually my parents would get home, and Fudge would sprint out to meet them at the compound gate as it slowly rumbled to the side and our 4x4 pulled up to the house. From what I remember, Teo would run to play with Fudge, or with his plastic army men, and I would return to whatever book I’d been reading before. I read on the floor of my room, or with my feet dipped in the pool, or curled on the porch, staring every so often at the electrified wires atop the nine-foot wall that ran around our house. It didn’t matter so much that I couldn’t walk Fudge on his leash outside the fence, or even walk by myself anywhere in the city, because I was off to Narnia or Tortall or Cittágazze and they were more real than Gaborone, Botswana would ever be.

I

n all those years of compulsive bookworm escapism, I never read The Lord of the Rings. I eagerly kept up with Pantalaimon and Mia Thermopolis,

Yale Daily News Magazine | 15

personal essay but for whatever reason I always passed over the thick Tolkien paperbacks that my dad kept in a special-edition carton from his own youth. I spent more than enough time at Camp Half-Blood and Hogwarts, while my gangly limbs carted me from school to our house, to the stables, to track practice, where we ran barefoot because our South African coach believed it made us faster. There’s one photo of me sitting in the back of a 4x4, deep in the bush; 20 feet away, under a tree, lounge a pair of male lions, their manes gold-edged in the late-afternoon light. My eyes are firmly directed downward at The Princess Diaries.

I can't really explain why, considering all the universes I frequented, I avoided Middle-earth. It’s true that I always harbored a certain residual feeling that I was the kind of person who should like J. R. R. Tolkien, and perhaps also know the Elvish alphabet, etc. Yet I resisted this feeling, indignant that the mere existence of an unexplored fantasy universe would be enough to lure me in.

At one point I made a valiant attempt at The Fellowship of the Ring, and had nearly reached the end when it occurred to me that I liked saying the words better than thinking about the characters. In the end, I spent more time staring at the tiny crooked mountains on the map of Middleearth than wondering about whether this Ring — whose power was frustratingly vague — would make it to the mountain.

But the words Tolkien made are delicious.

Who could deny that a Nazgûl would be some kind of slithery yet powerful malevolent being? Or that Gondor is the land of strength while Mordor houses the seat of evil? And Elbereth and Galadriel and Barad-dûr … these are ancient things, there can be no doubt of it. It’s language instruction by immersion. You are not learning the grammar at all. You are plunged straight into the Shire, and the Anduin and Minas Tirith, without really knowing what any of these things are, but somehow you figure it out.

I promptly closed the book with a

feeling of relief. If Tolkien could do it, so could I. I just needed some delicious words to write down in fancy script. When we see Minas Tirith as a dot on that map, we accept it, not as a dot, or as a word, but as an embodiment: merchant-carts, squares, buildings, porticos, bustle, horses whinnying and dirt stains on cracked tiles. People live and work and play and eat and walk in that dot — in that word.

We understand that it is greater than itself.

Perfectly content, I began to draw maps, roll words of my own out of my mouth.

One afternoon the kingdom of Barbaine came into being, where my Barbie dolls were aristocracy; next I embarked on the genealogies and historiographies and portraits and floor plans. When we’d visit our relatives in the U.S., they’d always ooh and ahh at how much “global travel” we were doing, Teo and I, and at such a young age. They had no idea. The substantial travel of those years wasn’t to Mozambique, or to Cape Town. To a 10-year-old, the beauties of the Kalahari were fine; giraffes got boring after a little while. But I spent decades, centuries, in maps and charts and diagrams, all the while lying on the floor of my room. I didn’t really notice growing lonely.

W

hen we moved back to the States, the upside-down map came with us. How many times had I imagined coming back, being with all of my friends again? My classmates asked if I’d had lions in my backyard.

New Jersey became a place where I didn’t belong, either.

The map stayed rolled up in its plastic cylinder for a couple of years, propped in the closet next to two cardboard boxes of Barbies, which I stored naked so that I wouldn’t have to decide on a given outfit for each doll. Looking back, it was probably a sly technique to persuade myself that I’d be back soon, that my friends wouldn’t be naked for long.

Teo took my room when I left for college. When I go to New Jersey for winter break, I stay in the small room, Teo’s old room, which once had yellow walls but now has white, because apparently plain

16 | March 2016

personal essay white walls make a house easier to rent out when you’re moving to Southern Africa for an unknown number of years.

I was allowed to keep one bookshelf ’s worth of books. The books on that bookshelf have colorful spines. They’re children’s books. Not picture books — mostly — but the children’s books where the hero and heroine are almost always 12 years old and there are vague swirls of magic or mystery. The Divide. The Westing Game. Mandy. Nancy Drew. Angel Isle.

A slew of Eva Ibbotson; some Tamora Pierce, E. L. Konigsburg; a little Garth Nix and yes, some Meg Cabot here and there. Harry Potter takes the place of honor on the top shelf — six American editions, two British. I waited for 13 hours at the Gaborone mall for Deathly Hallows to make it across the South African border, where it had been held up until a bribe could be arranged.

I’d waited out my time in Botswana wishing I could leave, throwing myself into other worlds and, when that wasn’t enough, making my own. I’d hated the long bush drives, the chilly mornings in Mosetlha or Madikwe game reserves; the way my classmates teased me about George W. Bush and obese American tourists; being trapped inside my fence with my books and Teo and Fudge for company. All I wanted was to leave. Back in New Jersey, walking home from school, feet crunching on the autumn leaves I’d missed so much, all I wanted was to go back to the bush. With a book. And a pen.

I

finally unrolled the upside-down map last summer. It felt like it was time. It was my last summer in New Jersey. Teo had moved out of the house; my parents were separating. It’d been five years since Fudge, no longer a guard dog but not quite at home in America, attacked a neighbor and had to be put down.

This fall, I brought the upside-down map with me to college. It’s the first thing I see when I wake up. My eyes follow the tail of South America as it spikes toward the ceiling.

When I find myself in a bookstore, without fail I wander to the children’s

Notes from the Valley of a Hundred Fires

by Stefanie Fernandez

If I forget you, Israel, let my right hand be severed with un machetazo. In the old world a chicken bone fell like rain — they say you can find them even here if you look hard enough. When the man comes we fill our chests with rain. Dirt, too, smells like rain before the reaping. The cartography of loss is condensed milk on a tile floor sticking in the grout and it is entirely too hot here, but when our uncle tried to leave the valley of a hundred fires they put him in the prison sí, la cárcel, and if Andy García can’t convince you as much then let me tell you what!

There was a road there not too far from Alabama where in the brush were the letters of Paul written in sweet black juice. I plucked the berries from Paul’s field thinking yes I might die here but at least I will bear the stain of good on my fingers, if only the angel of death would look back from Montgomery and sigh on me before dinner.

Later I poured dad’s whiskey in paper cups on the dirt and cupped the earth in my palms. For a moment it was the earth and not the clouds moving, an island of water like salt eroding borders and moving further from me. I shoved fistfuls of cotton in my mouth so I could be an ageless woman too like the earth rooted in blue water and the wind’s reverberation from Galilee to Islamorada to Cienfuegos, so I would have time, you see.

You once said that words were the red clay in August growing upward in wisps when the earth opened its mouth and yawned. You could crack an egg over Jerusalem and it would burn. The mirage was the thing, only it was outside of you, and I walked with the Gentiles in their Birkenstocks and where were you?

When the man came we wept into the dust at the rotten fruit all eaten by flies, we all in white before the head of the offering, uncalved, in the burning valley below.

section. Habit? Perhaps. My eyes slide fondly over familiar titles, and some unfamiliar ones, and the inevitable sequels I’ve never heard of before, and the new editions, and the old editions, and the ones I know I once owned, or still own. I trail a finger over their uncracked spines.

I don't really read these books anymore.

But they’re here. The Golden Compass holds inside it the table by the acacia in the courtyard where I devoured it; Percy Jackson is the porch above the flooded delta where the warthogs stared up at me, the skinny white girl clutching the paperback. Their colorful spines remind me that there was a time when I was 12 years old and thought I was invincible. They helped me escape, but they help me go back, too.

One day perhaps I will visit Ul’yanovsk, take an escalator out of the train station and suddenly find myself in the center of the thing we call Ul’yanovsk, the collection of air that sits over a certain spot on the globe.

Behind my electric fence at age 10, I know I wanted nothing more than to take a highway exit marked Gondor. I liked the feel of the word, the earthy roundness of Gon and the throaty epic of Dor. I wanted to say, “I’m from Gondor,” instead of “I’m of New Jersey,” or, at my international school, “I’m from America.” In a way I still wish I could. But the real world is made of words, too, and now I live in a word called Nuheiven that dings off the front of the tongue.

Yale Daily News Magazine | 17

byDanielJudt

I

n 2010, my dad died of ALS and I found a new favorite poem. The two are connected, I see that now. Back then, the link was hazier. I found the poem a few months after death found dad. Flipping through a collection of Dickinson, I stopped, perhaps by chance, on number 599.

There is a pain — so utter — It swallows substance up — And covers the Abyss with Trance So Memory can step Around — across — upon it — As one within a Swoon — Goes safely — where an open eye — Would drop Him — Bone by Bone — A poem about pain. A black hole of pain, pain so vicious that it concealed itself from the mind. This confused me. Surely the mind concealed the pain. Why would pain ever black itself out — make itself less painful? Why did it not invite Memory to fall ceaselessly into the Abyss? Pain harms most when it is most present; that was how I saw it. And here, Dickinson was telling me that I had it all wrong. That the worst pain of all harms not with its presence, but by cloaking itself. By refusing its subject the ability — the right — to hurt.

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he death was August 6. I was an ocean away, in England for a wedding of some extended family. I had taken

18 | March 2016

the trip on my own and was there as a sort of an envoy. Representing the Judt family, even as our numbers dwindled.

When my mom called, I was at the bride’s pre-wedding dinner. I excused myself from conversation with an old British bloke I never saw again and picked up my phone as I walked out of the living room. I had already heard from her earlier that day. Dad was worse, she had said — he could barely breathe, and I needed to come back. ALS had gnawed away at him for two years.

I knew what a second call meant.

Hi, I said. It came out an octave higher than usual, which I regretted.

Sweetie, can you find somewhere quiet?

Mom’s voice was calm, but I heard wet echoes of tears. There is a pain so utter.

I walked upstairs to the second floor. I remember the carpeting on the stairs was white and plush. It would curl up around your toes if you were barefoot. But I was not, so instead my shoes left fleeting molds on each passing stair. Carpeting isn’t a detail that deserves remembering. But for some reason I can summon that feeling with sharpness. It swallows substance up, and covers the Abyss with Trance.

Ok, I’m upstairs, I said.

She inhaled and her chest rattled. Her voice, though, was surprisingly firm.

Sweetheart, your dad is dead.

I knew I wasn’t supposed to be fine, but there it was. I stood at the landing and nothing happened. I waited. I willed myself to seize up, to crumple into a melodramatic heap, to at the very least

sense some quaking rupture in my mind.

So Memory can step around, across, upon it.

Nothing. The carpet, I noted, was still plush.

F

or the rest of the night I avoided smiling, even when someone gave a funny speech during dinner. I felt obligated to satisfy everyone’s expectations, and then to go even further. I had to appear more shattered, in more pain than they could fathom.

“However you feel is right, hun,” said a British woman through a smile full of goopy gums and ancient cavities. I think her name was Marjorie, but I may have made that up. She was at my table, which was round and small, so everyone heard her. We all mumbled agreement. I deemed it appropriate to give one weak smile.

Everyone smiled back, which felt good.

I was wearing a nice white button-down shirt and tight black skinny jeans and for that moment I felt Bondlike, suave and secret. They did not know I was playing them, that my insides were hollow. As one within a Swoon, goes safely.

Before I went to bed, my best friend called from New Hampshire. He had heard the news and was sobbing uncontrollably, barely had enough breath to choke out words. There in bed, no button-down cloaked my shame. When I responded in dry, level notes, I felt like a failed son.

Where an open eye would drop Him. Bone by bone.

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EXCEPTIONS TO THE RULE

When productions highlighting people of color are an exception — not the rule — the Yale theater community grapples with addressing a racial gap.

BY GABRIELLA BORTER PHOTOS BY ALEX ZHANG COVER PHOTO COURTESY OF DAVE HARRIS

Yale Daily News Magazine | 19

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“for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf,” directed by Nailah Harper-Malveaux, went up Nov. 12, 2015.

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n Nov. 5, 2015, seven black students took the stage for the premier of “Exception to the Rule,” the first play at Yale with a cast and crew entirely composed of people of color.

That same week, students’ demands for racial equality came to a head. On Cross Campus, students of color publicly denounced the discriminatory environment they had experienced at Yale, telling their stories as Yale College Dean Jonathan Holloway listened in silence. After that day, many Yale students declared their commitment to pursue change.

And the opening of the anomalous “Exception to the Rule” amidst this resurgence of activism called attention to one area of Yale’s campus where students of color have had an unequal voice — the theater scene.

As the 2016 Oscar nominations — which sparked the hashtag #OscarsSoWhite — can attest,the world of drama is far from diverse.Yale’s theater program is no exception. Undergraduate productions frequently receive criticism for featuring predominately white narratives in their scripts and white students in their casts and crews. Compared to the percentage of students of color in the student body, disproportionately 20 | March 2016

few students of color participate in the theater community. The archives of the Yale Dramatic Association (Dramat) since 1991 indicate that the organization has only put up one show by a black playwright before this year, “From Okra to Greens” by Ntozake Shange in 1995.

A cursory glance at the Dramat’s past several seasons reveals plays by Shakespeare and Oscar Wilde, but far fewer written by non-white, nonmale playwrights.

The 2015–16 productions of Yale shows, both affiliated and not affiliated with the Dramat, has included a more diverse array of playwrights and roles than in previous years.

In April, the Dramat’s Spring Experimental production will be “White History,” written and directed by Dave Harris ’16, the black playwright who also wrote “Exception to the Rule.” But riding on the momentum of Next Yale, students in the theater community are still grappling with how to address the problem of underrepresentation.

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arris has played a crucial part in recent efforts to address the racial gap in theater at Yale. He says he became disillusioned with the theater community and the white roles he was assigned to play after working on Dramat productions in his freshman and sophomore years. His perception of the Dramat as an exclusively white production company informed his decision to put up his first playwriting project at Yale, “Exception to the Rule,” without the help of the organization.

“We intentionally did not go through the Dramat because they would almost never do a show with a black cast,” he said.

“We wanted to create our own family and space here with this show, and prize it as our own space like the Dramat is prized as a white space.”

Gineiris Garcia ’16, who directed José Rivera’s “Marisol” as her senior project this year, concurred that students of color often perceive the Dramat negatively, particularly actors who are turned down for roles because the director wanted to honor the playwright’s intention that the roles be played by white actors. “The Dramat is a well-established, elite, privately funded organization,” she said, “and a lot of us [students of color] have had experience or know people who have had the experience where we have felt outcast.”

Out of the dozens of shows that Yale undergraduate students put up each semester, the Dramat only produces three.

But the Dramat gives students access to the campus’ largest theater venues, namely the University Theatre and the Yale Repertory Theatre, and hires professional directors for the Fall and Spring Mainstages. These spaces, combined with the Dramat’s funding, mean Dramat shows are some of the most large-scale, sold-out productions on campus.

Jill Carrera ’17, the producer of the 2016 Fall Mainstage, and a member of the nine-person Dramat Executive Board, said she was “not surprised” that students of color have felt outcast, remarking that “the Dramat of the past did very little to try and be an inclusive space for all students of color.”

Hannah Worscheh ’17, the current president of the Dramat, seconded Carrera and added that the Dramat would likely not have produced a show like Harris’ “Exception to the Rule” in the past.

“We used to think we didn’t have enough people in the Yale community to support that type of production, but now we know that is not an assumption we should have been making,” she said.

The Dramat’s selection of “White History” for the Spring Ex indicates progress, leaving those assumptions behind. The show is described on the Dramat’s website as examining “the pressure of America’s foundation and how we do and don’t talk about race today.”

Harris puts it another way: “I don’t want people to walk away and not be haunted by this play.”

In spite of having felt alienated by the organization, Harris decided to give the Dramat another try when he submitted “White History” for consideration. The decision was last-minute, he says, and he never thought the Dramat would choose it. But he made up his mind to submit it because he believes the show delivers an important message in its bold confrontation of racial tension.

“I have one semester left to be as loud as possible on this issue,” Harris explained.

T

he lack of diversity in plays has historically been attributed to the absence of students of color from the audition pool. And in some cases, directors can verify this issue. Alcindor Leadon ’17, who was directing August Wilson’s “Fences” and “Radio Golf ” this spring as his third non-Dramat production, remarked that he has had to reach out to people individually to ask them to play roles because of the “depressing scarcity of black actors.”

But according to Harris, new productions like “Exception to the Rule” have opened the stage to a number of theatrically inclined students of color who may have not previously seen a place for their talent because of the lack of racially diverse roles and casting.

Thirty students auditioned for six

roles in “Exception to the Rule.” “White History” saw similarly high interest, competing with the Dramat’s Spring Mainstage “Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike” for acting talent. Nailah Harper-Malveaux ’16 said she had to turn away several impressive students of color who auditioned for her senior project production, Ntozake Shange’s “for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf,” which went up Nov. 12, 2015.

The higher numbers of students of color auditioning may indicate that the choice of shows, especially ones written by non-white playwrights or featuring empowering roles for students of color can have a big influence on whether students of color try out.

Michaela Johnson ’16, who has directed a show each semester since her sophomore year, has never put up a show with the Dramat, because she prefers the freedom of putting up any show she chooses without going through the Dramat’s rigorous selection process.

“The Dramat has no restrictions on who you cast, but the kind of roles available are dependent on the shows the Dramat chooses,” Johnson said. She cited her 2015 production of “Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992” as an example of a show that she thought the Dramat would “never do” because of its many race-specific roles, which she personally sought out black actors to play.

Jae Shin ’17, one of few Asian actors active in the Yale theater community, also believes the selection of Dramat shows can deter students from trying out.

“The Dramat’s plays and musicals are often pieces about Caucasians written by Caucasians for Caucasians,” he said. “I think Asian and Asian-American actors are discouraged and pushed away from the acting scene because most directors are wary, either consciously or subconsciously, of putting an Asian actor on stage for the sake of ‘sound dramaturgy.’”

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art of the problem, students say, has been the Dramat’s method for choosing shows.

Yale Daily News Magazine | 21

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“It’s not okay to just show up knocking on the door of the cultural houses and say ‘Now we need you,’ and not provide opportunities in shows on a regular basis.”

In the past, only Dramat board members could suggest shows for consideration for the Mainstage productions. They would compile a list of around 100 suggestions, then narrow it down to 10 shows after several rounds of voting. Finally, the Dramat Executive Board would pick the show from that list of 10.

In response to the demand for a more inclusive slate of shows, though, the Dramat announced in January that it would open up the selection process for the 2016 Fall Mainstage so that the entire student body could submit proposals for a show.

When the window for submitting suggestions closed this year, Worscheh and Carrera led a town hall-style meeting on Jan. 26 where student submitters could come and speak for their proposals.

Around 25 students attended the meeting, many of whom were familiar faces to the Yale theater scene.

Before going through the long list of proposals, Worscheh and Carrera polled the audience to see what qualities people were looking for in the Fall Mainstage selection. Some criteria that attendees named as being important were a show that positively portrayed characters of ethnic diversity, had strong female characters who are not simply the love interests for male leads, and was not written by a white man.

At this last suggestion, the room broke into applause.

Attendees cast their votes at the end of the meeting, and the list was shortened to 50 titles. This new list was publicized to the undergraduate community for further review and shortening. Forty-one Dramat 22 | March 2016

members and 97 nonmembers voted on it, and the surviving 10 show titles received 70 percent of the total votes collectively.

The Dramat Executive Board has since selected “The Wild Party” by Andrew Lippa as the 2016 Fall Mainstage, after soliciting another round of feedback from the student body through a Google form.

Carrera clarified that the new Mainstage selection process is “an effort to make upcoming seasons more inclusive and represent more voices.” She believes “The Wild Party” satisfies much of the criteria laid out by students who attended the town hall, saying the show has “extremely strong female leads and psychologically complex roles for people of color.”

As for her own experience in the Dramat as a woman of color, Carrera said the progress she has seen with the organization’s increased focus on changing its culture has convinced her to stay and hold a position on the executive board.

“I wouldn’t be a part of this organization if I thought it couldn’t change,” she said. “I feel so strongly about making the Dramat a more welcoming space for people of color that I would not and could not be one of the leaders of it without thinking we could change it or make a difference.”

I

n spite of the potential that a show like “The Wild Party” creates for a more diverse cast and crew, shows like it may not be enough to change the demographic of students who participate.

The 2016 Freshman Show “She Kills Monsters,” which was written by Vietnamese-American playwright Qui

Nguyen, attests to the fact that a non-white playwright does not suffice to encourage students from minority groups to work on the production. Freshman Show Director Nina Goodheart ’19 acknowledged that it “does not have the most diverse cast and production staff,” saying, “We need to do better.”

Harper-Malveaux believes that the Dramat needs to engage more directly with the students they seek to include if Dramat productions are to become more diverse. “I don’t know if the Dramat is really making the effort to ask students of color what would be the best way to get a more diverse audition pool,” she said.

“Show selection is a necessary first step, but I think the problem really does lie in lack of outreach from the very beginning.”

Goodheart noted that since she only had two days between learning that the Dramat had accepted her show proposal and starting auditions, there was little time to spread the word about the play’s Vietnamese-American writer and the availability of race-blind roles. Moreover, she said the Dramat cautioned her against suddenly reaching out specifically to students of color to encourage them to be part of the show.

“I think they were afraid of offending people. It’s not okay to just show up knocking on the door of the cultural houses and say ‘Now we need you,’ and not provide opportunities in shows on a regular basis,” Goodheart said.

W

hile Worscheh and Carrera are both excited about the selection of “The Wild Party” as the 2016 Fall Mainstage, they are under no illusion that the new show-selection process will be enough to make the theater community more inclusive.

“Issues of underrepresentation on and off the stage have plagued the theater industry for years,” Worscheh said. “We [the Dramat Executive Board] realize we have been and are a part of this systemic problem, and we hope to work with the entire Yale community on improving inclusivity in theater. Problems that affect the entire industry cannot be solved

feature overnight, but we are excited to have taken a step in the right direction and to continue to evaluate our organization and the ways in which it can change and progress.”

But the Dramat, albeit the largest, is not the only theater group at Yale, and is not the only factor defining campus theater culture.

The Afro-American Cultural Center and La Casa Cultural have tried to cater to their theatrically inclined members through their respective student-run theater groups, Heritage and ¡Teatro!.

Heritage is comprised of 10 core members, hosting workshops on subjects ranging from acting to playwriting. HarperMalveaux, who is a co-president of the Heritage theater ensemble, described the group’s mission as “embracing black theater and empowering that on campus.”

While a few members of Heritage have also worked on Dramat shows during their time at Yale, Harper-Malveaux noted that the group has not focused on aligning its efforts with the Dramat’s efforts to foster participation in theater within the black community. “We are adding a much needed voice to the mix, but we don’t feel it’s our job to unite the whole theater community,” she said.

Gineiris Garcia, one of the last remaining members of La Casa’s ¡Teatro!, reiterated the importance of having these cultural-house-specific groups as “spaces for people of color who want to do theater on campus.” She too does not think the cultural-house theater groups should assume responsibility for solving the issue of underrepresentation in the theater community as a whole — they are under enough pressure to maintain their own membership.

Garcia expressed frustration that the onus currently falls on students of color to create and sustain these cultural-house groups. With a lack of funding and a strain on students to commit their time, groups like ¡Teatro! may cease to exist if the students leading the initiative graduate and no one assumes responsibility. “It all comes down to the fact that the cultural centers are under-resourced,” she said. “If we want this group to happen, we [Yale

students affiliated with La Casa] have to do it ourselves.”

Garcia added that she would like to see some of the increased funding for the cultural houses — which University President Peter Salovey announced in response to the list of demands set forth by Next Yale — go toward theater programs.

Michaela Johnson, the newly elected president of the Yale Drama Coalition, views it as the Coalition’s responsibility to address the problem of inclusivity that exists in the theater culture. She said she plans to reach out to every undergraduate theater organization, including the cultural-house groups, and seek advice on how the Coalition can best represent and support them to the rest of the theater community. Johnson also intends to hold town hall-style meetings throughout the semester which are open to the entire undergraduate community, and mandatory meetings between her, Coalition Vice President Aviva Abusch ’18 and the directors and producers of shows for each season before the casting cycle.

Admitting her own fault in selecting an all-white cast for this year’s production of “Twelfth Night,” Johnson highlighted the importance of “giving directors and producers a sense of responsibility for their casting,” since their casting decisions ultimately either preclude or invite students of color to the stage.

No single organization or theater group — not even the Yale Drama Coalition, the umbrella organization for Yale undergraduate theater — can take sole accountability and effectively alter a pervasive and persistent culture.

As Hollywood and the theater industry at large face this same problem of underrepresentation, the solution to changing a historically exclusionary community remains unclear.

To start at Yale, Carrera said, “I would argue it’s all of our jobs, from the Yale Drama Coalition, to the Dramat to all other theater organizations on campus, to make sure we all take an initiative to work together in fostering a sense of community and acceptance.”

Yale Daily News Magazine | 23

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After Orange: Women and Reentry in New Haven

By Isabelle Taft

AFTER ORANGE:

24 | March 2016

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I

t was 6 a.m. on an unseasonably warm, humid November day as I waited for the white van I knew was due to arrive sometime before 7:30 a.m. I stood outside New Haven’s police headquarters, across the street from the train station at the corner of West Water Street and Union Avenue. The van was coming from York Correctional Institution in Niantic, Connecticut, a prison 45 minutes away. Inside the van there would be women who, when not in prison, live in the New Haven area. Other than that, I knew nothing about them. So I stood outside the police station, a brutalist, brown brick structure that takes up an entire block, and waited, passing time by marching up and down the section of West Water Street where I had been told the van would unload. A few people walked by, heading toward the train station, and police officers pulled into the parking lot across the street, reporting for work. Some of them eyed me suspiciously through their windows, but apparently decided that a 20-something Yale student, a white woman with a JanSport and a notebook, did not pose a threat. I could hear seagulls and the occasional train whistle. They sounded like they belonged to a different, more vivid landscape.

Just before 6:30 a.m., a big white vehicle came trundling around the bend that links State Street to Union Avenue. It turned onto West Water Street and stopped outside the police headquarters, about half a block from the corner. The vehicle had no windows, and it was bigger than I had expected, more like a high-security school bus than a van. For a few moments, nothing happened. Two officers, a man and a woman in grey uniforms, came out of the police station to my left and walked into the van. A second man got off the van and carried what looked like a plastic bag filled with trash into the building. A few more moments passed. Then a woman walked into view on the side of the truck opposite the prison — without hand restraints, and with two full plastic bags. She was short, maybe a little over five feet tall, bending sideways under the weight and volume of her bags. Her skin was light brown and her reddish-brown hair was straight and pinned up on her head in no particular style. She wore grey sweatpants, a grey long-sleeved shirt, a white T-shirt and laceless white sneakers. She walked toward Union Avenue, toward me, in the middle of the street.

WOMEN AND RE-ENTRY IN N E W H AV E N B Y I S A B E L L E TA F T PHOTOS BY ELINOR HILLS GRAPHICS BY BEN WONG

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week earlier I had stood at the same spot, and instead of watching a single woman walk towards me, I had watched 12 women march from the white van to the jail — no one was going home. I had never witnessed anything like it: the state exerting its power over so many bodies that roughly resembled my own.

The scene plays out every single morning, except for weekends and holidays, at just this spot, in just this way, though the number of prisoners varies. It is one tiny window into the vast, shadowy world that is the American criminal justice system, a world that has expanded to grotesque proportions in the last 30 years. In 1980, well under 400,000 Americans were incarcerated. In 2013, 1.5 million Americans were in state or federal prison, and an Yale Daily News Magazine | 25

feature additional 700,000 were in local jails. The number of Americans in prison is greater than the populations of 14 states.

But beyond those numbers, there’s one I found most startling: From 1980 to 2010, the number of women in prison increased by 646 percent, a rate 1.5 times higher than the increase in the number of men in prison. The number of women in prison is still much smaller than the number of men; in Connecticut, women comprise only about 8 percent of the prison population. But from 1990 to 2014, the number of women incarcerated in the state increased some 87 percent to 1,084, while the number of men rose 66 percent to 14,941. The 12 women in the van were members of a metastasizing sorority.

When I used to conjure a prison in my mind, it was filled with men, a stereotype that is supported by the actual numbers and enforced by pop culture depictions of crime and criminality on television and in movies (with the obvious exception of “Orange is the New Black”). “The bad guy” is almost always just that: a bad guy. And while I knew enough about the racial and socioeconomic injustices of the criminal justice system to know that “the bad guy”

26 | March 2016

is not always, or even usually, “bad,” I had not overcome the tendency to assume incarceration was a male story.

After the women disappeared into the building, I went to the public entrance of the police headquarters and asked the officer on duty where they were going.

He told me that later that day, transport vehicles would arrive to take them to courthouses all over New Haven County.

There they would wait, sometimes all day, to find out if their sentences might be reduced or lightened to parole, or if they might be sent to a different facility. At the end of the day, they would return to the Union Avenue jail, and then get back on the white truck with no windows for the drive back to York.

Someday, though, maybe in three weeks or maybe in 15 years, each of the women would leave the white truck and step onto West Water Street, without hand restraints and with two plastic bags filled with her possessions, unless family or friends could make the drive up to Niantic to pick her up there. Someday, the women would return home to New Haven, to a world transformed by the passage of time and the harsh reality of

their criminal record.

T

he woman didn’t look back at the van to watch the other women make their way into the jail.

“Oh, my god,” she said to no one in particular. She was craning her neck toward the parking lot, searching desperately for someone or something. It looked like she might have started running if not for the bags she had to carry.

I got the feeling I was witnessing one of the most profound and disorienting moments in the woman’s life. She had been in prison for however long and now, suddenly, here she was — free. But freedom must have been disappointing: an unremarkable city block, with traffic picking up, nowhere to sit and no restaurants or other potential shelter visible. I wanted to talk to her, partly because I had the urge to offer her help, and partly because I was consumed by a voyeuristic curiosity, which made me uneasy. I thought that if I were she I would want to be left alone. But then we had made eye contact, and I heard myself saying hello, and I heard her say hi, and then I was introducing myself and asking

NUMBER OF PRISONERS

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how she was doing.

“Fine,” she said, still looking around.

I asked if she’d be interested in talking about how she was feeling.

“Uh, confused,” she said. “I’m looking for my ride. Could you just walk with me?

I don’t know where he’s at.”

Together we walked to the corner and looked out towards the train tracks across Union Avenue. She asked me what time it was.

“6:39.”

“Oh, he’s not here then. He’s not coming until 7. So I guess we can talk right here.”

I was painfully aware that I had no idea how it felt to be her. I asked her what her name was — she told me Sharlice — and then what she was hoping to do that morning.

“I just had a baby,” she said. “So I’m just waiting to see him right now. I’m gonna see him, hopefully hug him and kiss him and cuddle him.”

Seeing my look of confusion, she explained further. She had been pregnant when she went in eight months earlier and she spent almost the entire pregnancy at York. When her son was born in September, her family drove up to be with her at the hospital but were not allowed by her side during the delivery. She spent two days with her newborn. Then the baby went home to New Haven with his father, her boyfriend James, and she went back to prison.

Sharlice told almost no one she was going to prison. She told everyone she was on a long vacation in Florida, where she has some family. Her best friend even bolstered the story, posting things on her Facebook wall like, “How’s Florida going?”

Prison is embarrassing, and she didn’t want anyone to know she was there.

And it wasn’t her fault she was there, exactly, she said. She told me she had been arrested a few times for gangrelated crimes and sentenced in 2013 to 18 months on probation. In the fall of 2014, while she was on probation, she was visiting a friend when they got into an argument. He locked himself in a room

0

AGE GROUP

with her cell phone, and she couldn’t leave CHART RECIDIVISM RATESShe kicked without getting her phone.

WITHIN TWO YEARS OF the door in, grabbed her RELEASE phone and was 57% but then FEMALE: 47% about MALE: to leave, she realized that her friend was having an asthma attack.

She called 911, and when the ambulance arrived, her friend, delirious, told the first responders about someone “breaking and entering.” They called the police. When the dust had settled it was clear that she was not, in fact, a would-be thief, but was in violation of the terms of her probation.

She told me that when she got arrested for the false “breaking and entering” charge, that counted as an automatic violation and got her jail time.

I didn’t understand how probation worked, exactly, so I asked her: Couldn’t your friend have told the police you weren’t really breaking and entering? She said he didn’t, or if he did, it didn’t do any good.

(Later, still puzzled, I called the New Haven Public Defender’s Office to ask about automatic violations of probation.

An attorney named David Forsythe looked up Sharlice’s complete criminal record:

charges all over the state since 2005, for things like threatening and breach of peace and assault, a year of jail for one offense, two years for another, 60 days for another. The recent prison sentence came after her fourth violation of the same probation. The court had previously issued a protective order to prevent her from PRISON contacting the friend whoTOTAL hadCTan asthma POPULATION attack, so simply being at hisTotal: home 15,813 was a 1,134 told violation of her probation. Women: Forsythe me a story about an intern he once worked with, who asked a client how many DUI offenses he had. The client said one, and the intern didn’t realize she had been lied to until she stood up in court and gave the judge demonstrably false information.

“She said, ‘He lied to me! He lied to me!’”

Forsythe chuckled. “I said, ‘Well, get used to it.’ Dishonesty among our clients is not terribly unusual.” I didn’t mind that Sharlice didn’t tell me everything. She didn’t owe me anything.)

Regardless, after the probation violation, Sharlice went back to York.

“Unfortunately, a part of me kind of 7.17%

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regrets calling the ambulance for him,” she said. “My mom said it was the right thing to do, call the ambulance, because if he had died, I would have felt bad. But I said I never would have went to jail if I hadn’t been there.”

Sharlice, who is 27, grew up in New Haven and attended Wilbur Cross High School. Telling me this, she realized the risk of seeing someone she knew was not exactly small — a high school classmate or childhood friend could walk by on their way to the train station. The location, her outfit and the two bags of jumbled belongings made it obvious where she’d been. She asked to borrow my phone to call James, who was supposed to come pick her up. I handed her the phone, but she asked me to dial because it’d been months and she couldn’t remember how to use the touch screen.

She smiled when she heard his voice, but as the conversation went on, her face fell. I couldn’t hear James, but from what I could make out, he said the Connecticut Department of Correction told him she wouldn’t be in the city until 8:30 a.m., and he was busy getting the children ready for 28 | March 2016

school and daycare. He said give him 20 minutes.

She handed the phone back. She said she could hear her son, Jamari, crying in the background.

“I feel so uncomfortable standing here,” she said. “I feel like a prostitute or something.”

Besides that, it was cold, and she didn’t have a coat. (When it gets really cold, officers at the Union Avenue building told me, the women will get dropped off and then haul their stuff around to the front of the building, where there is a door that leads to a small public waiting area in which they can make phone calls. The waiting area is about the size of a public restroom stall, but with no right angles.

The tile floor is dirty and the space is claustrophobic. There are no chairs.)

Sharlice didn’t have any other clothes in her two bags. They were filled with a pillow, a breast pump she used to feed her son while she couldn’t be with him, pictures, she thought maybe a little bit of coffee, and she hoped her glasses, which might have gotten lost or broken as she packed up to leave York. She left her winter

coat at her mom’s house. About every five minutes, Sharlice asked me if it had been 20 minutes yet.

When it had been, she called her boyfriend back and discovered he hadn’t yet left the house. He had asked a friend who lived nearby to come pick her up. Sharlice asked how the friend was supposed to recognize her.

“You would say pretty,” she said, smiling.

“Well I’m not the only pretty girl outside of Union. I’m using the girl’s phone.”

Sharlice hung up again and we decided to walk farther down Union Avenue to the main entrance of the police headquarters, where she’d have a better chance of being seen. We looked through the windshield of every car that passed by, trying to find a driver who seemed to be trying to find us. And then she appeared, driving a beat-up silver Nissan with a big dent that looked like the result of a recent accident.

She honked the horn a few times, short and staccato, and got out of the car. She was a very tall, very thin woman with shoulder-length straight hair and a big smile, wearing pajama bottoms and a tank top. She apologized for the way she was

feature dressed — she was getting her son ready for school when she got the call and had to rush out as fast as possible, because she knew Sharlice must be anxious. She whisked Sharlice’s things into the backseat and Sharlice climbed in the front. I waved as the Nissan pulled away.

I was alone again, and the latest of the roughly eight women who return to New Haven from prison every month had gone home.

H

ome, as in the city of New Haven and the United States of America, is a place that does not quite know what to do with Sharlice, both because our society is only in the early stages of figuring out that a criminal record should not mean a life sentence of stigma, and because she is a woman who has done time in a world of re-entry services geared towards men. Where re-entry resources do exist, they’re limited — so limited that the Department of Correction did not put Sharlice in touch with a social worker or re-entry service provider, even though she had been in trouble with the law before and would seem to be a potential reoffender. When I asked her, she said she hadn’t received a list of nonprofits she could visit for assistance buying food and clothes, updating her resume and getting a free check-up. I was surprised to hear that, because I had accessed such a list online — the city’s “Reentry Resource Guide,” last updated in 2012 and thus imperfect, but certainly useful for finding essential services.

I assumed the Department of Correction would print a copy for each person returning to New Haven.

I was also surprised that Sharlice had no contact at all with any re-entry counselors or social workers, because I knew that now, relative to the past, is a pretty good time to come home to New Haven from prison. The city’s re-entry assistance program, Project Fresh Start, just received a $1 million Second Chance Act demonstration grant from the federal Department of Justice and is aiming to cut recidivism in half among offenders aged 18 to 24. Project Fresh Start’s work is strongly supported by Mayor Toni Harp, who made re-entry a priority early on during her tenure. She renamed the “New Haven Prison Reentry Initiative” to the brighter-sounding Fresh Start, and moved the organization’s office from the second floor of City Hall to the first, a small change that makes a difference. When new clients walk in for the first time, the office

they’re looking for is just a few steps to the right, not a frustrating walk through an imposing and unfamiliar building owned by the government they know best as the force that took away their autonomy. But Sharlice had never heard of Project Fresh Start.

In addition to Project Fresh Start, the city boasts a strong network of nonprofits that work with the re-entry population, from shelters to food banks to advocacy groups. Three of these organizations — Project MORE, Easter Seals Goodwill Industries and Community Action Agency — are community services that provide case-management programs, helping ex-offenders navigate their first 60 days to find housing and a job and plan for the future. These organizations are on the frontlines of the reentry battle. Their caseworkers often pick people up at prisons or at the drop-off points in the city (Union Avenue for women, Whalley Jail for men), help move them into temporary housing and coach them through job interviews. They keep their phones on all night in case a client calls with a crisis.

An ex-offender can only access the potentially life-changing resources these organizations provide if he or she is referred to them by the Department of Correction. And that depends on a number of factors beyond the ex-offender’s control, such as whether their release date aligns with an opening for a new client at one of the programs, or whether they serve their entire sentence in prison or get released early on probation. According to Chance Bentley-Jackson, project manager at Project Fresh Start, the majority of people referred by the Department of Correction to the case-management programs are on probation because they were released early from prison for good behavior. The state can make completion of a re-entry program part of the requirements of the probation. But if someone serves their entire sentence in prison, like Sharlice, they are much less likely to get referred to a social worker because the state can’t require them to do anything. Bentley-Jackson called this a “broken system” because it allows so many people to slip through the cracks. But he added that if a prisoner actively pursues re-entry planning and spends time and energy finding out what resources are available, they can usually get some kind of help.

“In prison, I don’t feel like they expose

HOME, AS IN THE CITY OF NEW HAVEN AND THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, IS A PLACE THAT DOES NOT QUITE KNOW WHAT TO DO WITH SHARLICE.

Yale Daily News Magazine | 29

feature everything to you,” Bentley-Jackson said.

“Like if you want the information, you gotta go get it.”

Carlah Esdaile-Bragg, the director of community re-entry services at Easter Seals, said the unique problem women face is that there are so few of them that practically no services are dedicated to them alone. For example, BentleyJackson said approximately 60 percent of returning ex-offenders stay at a halfway house when they first come home to New Haven, regardless of whether they have been referred to a program. But there is no halfway house — not one — for women in the Elm City. They can choose between going to a house elsewhere in the state, or going right back home with little opportunity to think through the challenges they might encounter there.

York offers child care classes, but little information about how to wage a legal fight for custody of one’s children after leaving jail. And Esdaile-Bragg said Easter Seals started its women’s support group only recently, and is still in the process of crafting the curriculum and making it well known in the community.

IT SEEMS TO ME THAT THE PEOPLE LEAST LIKELY TO SEEK RE-ENTRY ASSISTANCE ARE THE MOST LIKELY TO NEED IT. There are also smaller problems that underscore the degree to which re-entry is largely a man’s world — the hygiene supply closet at Family ReEntry, Inc., an agency that offers services for people who are out on parole, has men’s undershirts and socks, Axe deodorant and men’s razors clients can pick up when they come in for appointments with social workers. But caseworker Christie Huntley, who works 30 | March 2016

with about 30 women a year (a tiny portion of the agency’s 650 clients) said the closet never has brands of soap and shampoo targeted to women, nor bras, tampons or pads.

The need everywhere is so enormous, Esdaile-Bragg said, that the re-entry service community has essentially practiced triage, focusing on the group most in need, which, in terms of size, is men.

If the status quo persists, the rising numbers of women returning to New Haven from prison will find themselves treated as an afterthought, thrust into programs that may have the resources to accommodate them but were not designed for them. For Sharlice, however, the gender sensitivity of re-entry resources is beside the point — New Haven’s programs might as well be in a different state. As BentleyJackson explained, this may be in part the result of Sharlice’s lack of initiative in prison. But it seems to me that the people least likely to seek re-entry assistance are the most likely to need it.

I

had left Union Avenue feeling surprised about the difficulty and anxiety of even Sharlice’s very first moments back in New Haven. And part of that anxiety seemed inflected by gender: a man standing on the same street corner would likely feel less concerned about being mistaken for a prostitute, and would probably be less physically vulnerable if he decided to walk home on his own, heavy bags in tow. But there were other issues she faced right after stepping out of the white bus — somehow, her family had been told they didn’t need to pick her up until 8:30 a.m., even though the bus from Niantic always arrives before 7. And other than the street corner or a tiny, dirty room, there was no place for women to wait for their families.

Sharlice’s 45 minutes waiting on Union Avenue seemed to typify the reentry experience for women writ large: It’s hard, and made harder by the reality that the system is not designed to think of ex-offenders as people who might have different needs based on their backgrounds, including gender. What might that mean

for Sharlice as she continues the process of re-entry over the next few weeks, months and years? In some ways, her situation seemed positive: She had family in the area and a partner who has no criminal record — Esdaile-Bragg said relationships with men who have been incarcerated often contribute to women’s recidivism. And Sharlice had a high school diploma, which would help with the job search, and she would not need to fight to regain custody of her children from the state Department of Children and Families, which would save time and emotional energy. But I felt angry at the injustice that she had not been paired with a re-entry counselor or social worker in New Haven while she was still at York. As soon as she left the white truck, the Department of Correction was officially done with her, unless she got in trouble again.

S

harlice had been home for three weeks when I saw her next. We met at a Burger King in West Haven, down the street from the house she had just moved into with her boyfriend and kids. She wore red Minnie Mouse pajama bottoms, a white t-shirt and a grey hoodie.

She carried a thermos of coffee and a plate of two biscuits with bacon and eggs — her sister had made breakfast. She showed me pictures of her children: her three-year-old daughter in a princess outfit at her birthday party last week; her son, now three months old, in a bib that reads “I have the coolest grandma!”

She was applying for jobs, so many she’d lost track. Her best friend was texting her job openings, and her boyfriend was pushing her to follow through with applications, which she found motivating but also overwhelming. She had interviews coming up at Walmart, McDonald’s and, tomorrow, Dunkin’ Donuts.

“Listen to this and tell me what you think,” she said, leaning forward across the table. Dunkin’ had asked her to come in at 7 a.m., and to bring her Social Security card and ID. “Do you think they’re going to hire me? My first thought is the reason they asked me to come that early is they

feature wanted me to start the first shift.”

I didn’t know, but thought that sounded plausible. I asked her if her criminal record has made her job search harder. She said no — through the Work Opportunity Tax Credit, employers get a tax break for hiring ex-felons, so she’s found it fairly easy to get interviews. Still, the job search always takes time, and if she couldn’t get a job soon, she wouldn’t have money to buy her kids Christmas presents. That day, she was going to the West Haven Public Library right across the street to sign up for Toys for Tots.

She said the hardest part of coming home had been readjusting to taking care of her kids, all day, everyday. Her threemonth-old was still waking up often throughout the night, and since she was in prison for the first eight weeks of his life, she needed time to get used to that. And he needed time to get used to her.

“He watches me when I go to the door,” she said. “I think I’m gaining his trust, that I’m not leaving him again. Once I left him in the hospital the first time, they’re like ‘You gotta re-bond and stuff. He knows you but he knows that you left, too.’

Which, I didn’t leave. I was in jail. I had to give birth to him and go right back.”

When I told my own mom about Sharlice’s pregnancy, she winced, as if it hurt just to contemplate the experience of being separated from your newborn child within 48 hours. But Sharlice’s pregnancy and delivery are not that unusual. In 2004, a survey by the Bureau of Justice Statistics found that 4 percent of women are pregnant when they arrive at state prisons. Enough women were pregnant at York while Sharlice was there that there was a special group for them. They read books about childcare and talked about their “situations,” as Sharlice calls it. That’s where she found out she was actually “a lucky one” because her son went home with his father, and he could visit her while she was at York. Many children were not picked up by relatives but were instead taken directly into state custody, and might never be seen by their mothers again.

When this happened, Sharlice said, the

women turned to self-mutilation.

Separation so soon after birth is traumatic for mothers and infants alike.

In response to this reality, 10 states have established a prison nursery program,where women can live with their infants behind bars for a year or two. Connecticut, with its single women’s prison, would seem to be an ideal location for a nursery program: One facility could dramatically alter the status quo in which women are removed from their children, and infants are taken from their mothers into the custody of the state or relatives who might be less dedicated caretakers. In 2014, “An Act Establishing a Child Nursery Facility at the Connecticut Correctional Institution, Niantic” passed the Connecticut House Judiciary Committee with support from the Office of the Public Defender, the Department of Correction and a host of nonprofits, academics and city officials.

But the bill never came up for a floor vote, and it hasn’t been brought up in the 2015 session.

I asked Sharlice the question I had been pondering for weeks: Had being a woman changed her re-entry experience?

A biological male could not give birth in prison, and so in at least one sense the generic male re-entry experience would differ from Sharlice’s, right? No, she said.

“I think we’re all the same when we get out,” she said. “People have good intentions of coming home and doing the right thing, but make bad choices.”

Sharlice distills the re-entry experience to its most universal terms: the hope of doing well, clouded by the ever-present possibility of heading down the wrong path. That does transcend gender. But in its particulars, it seems to me, re-entry in New Haven is not the same for men and women, from the first moments of freedom, to navigating the challenges and expectations of home life, to the risk of recidivism.

For her part, Sharlice has no expectation that any nonprofit or government service will come to her aid. So now she is trying on her own to stay away from old friends and out of jail. She spends most of her

time with her kids and her boyfriend.

While we talked at the Burger King, he was Facebook messaging her. She showed me pieces of their conversation from earlier on her phone: cute sayings like “I like when you smile but I love it when I am the reason,” and a long series of little figures doing dance moves, a few from her and then a few from him, over and over.

Sometimes, Sharlice said, they sit in the same room and text each other.

But sometimes she gets tired of him.

After an hour or so at the Burger King, he started asking if she was really with a woman doing an interview. Sharlice got irritated, saying we had to go stand on her porch so we can show her boyfriend she wasn’t lying.

We went outside and she lit a cigarette.

It was a block or so to their house, on a street with boxy wooden homes that have front porches and two stories.

We went up the steps to their porch and she called her boyfriend. Apparently he could see us through the windows. I turned around and gave a little wave, not quite sure what to do. “Ha, did you just say, ‘I’m gonna watch you gals?’” she laughed into the phone. Then: “Yeah, that’s why she’s doing the study, she never had the perspective of girls in prison … ok, I’ll be in in a minute.”

She hung up and took another drag on her cigarette. We were looking out across the street, to the train tracks behind the houses on the other side. The MetroNorth train comes through here dozens of times every day. Just a few more miles and the tracks run along Union Avenue and pass the police headquarters where we met three weeks earlier. A whistle blew, and a train passed.

“It’s really nice when you’re sitting in the dark and the train goes by like that,” she said. I nodded. I said good luck on the job interview tomorrow, goodbye, have a nice day. Sharlice went into her house, back to her life and the hope of living it long enough and well enough to make prison a place that doesn’t matter, like a Florida beach she visited a long time ago, or a place she’s never been.

Yale Daily News Magazine | 31

cover

As debates over naming grow more contentious at Yale, alumni pick sides and fight to be heard.

by Rohan Naik photos by Elinor Hills

THE NAME G A

ugie Rivera ’84 spent the summer of 1980 — his last summer before college — relaxing in his hometown of Driscoll, Texas. He spent time with family, worked a summer job in construction and savored the blazing summer temperatures of the Texas Gulf. He thought little of Yale, where he would attend in the fall, until a friend from South Texas who was a Yale freshman at the time began to wax poetic about Calhoun College and the community it contained. Convinced of its superiority, Rivera wrote to Yale that summer and requested placement in Calhoun. Four years later, he graduated from Calhoun College. This May,

32 | March 2016

his daughter Carolina Rivera ’16 will follow in his footsteps as a Calhoun graduate.

Today, though, both Riveras insist on the end of “Calhoun College” as it is currently known. Instead, they want a college that, in their opinion, better reflects the current state of Yale — an amalgamation of students of different races, ideologies and aspirations.

“The time has come for Yale, as a community, to acknowledge that it was a mistake to name John C. Calhoun College in 1933,” Augie Rivera said. “And it remains a mistake today.”

Whether or not Calhoun should be renamed

cover

E GAME Yale Daily News Magazine | 33

cover isn’t the only name-related controversy Wilson center around the men’s views facing Yale this year. As the construction on race. Calhoun, the seventh vice of two yet-unnamed residential colleges president of the United States, was an nears completion, and as students ardent advocate of slavery. He argued advocate for a University that better that slavery was not a necessary evil but a embraces diversity, the question is: Who “positive good,” and campaigned for the gets to play the Name Game, and where Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, which would do alumni fall? force free states to return escaped slaves.

In the House of Representatives, he once hat’s the big deal in a proudly declared slavery to be “the most name?” Lee Kaplan Jr., safe and stable basis for free institutions Princeton ’73, asked over in the world.” At the same time, he the phone. At universities across the is regarded by historians as a brilliant country this year, the issue of naming statesman, one of three senators known has attracted unprecedented national as the “Great Triumvirate” — Calhoun, attention. Students at Yale, Princeton, Henry Clay and Daniel Webster.

Amherst, Stanford and countless other The case regarding Wilson, the schools have condemned long-standing country’s 28th president, is perhaps more names of buildings, from residential halls complex. He too was a proud racist. His to graduate schools, all on racial grounds. five-volume series History of the American For Bruce Wexler, professor of People reads glowingly of the Ku Klux psychiatry at the Yale School of Klan, he re-segregated the federal Medicine, the question is easy to answer. government and he saw interracial He believes the names of buildings form marriage as possessing the potential to part of a “symbolic space,” the larger “degrade the white nations.” environment in which we live. According Wilson, however, was much more tied to Wexler, people function and feel better to Princeton than Calhoun was to Yale. in environments that resonate with their Both were alumni of their respective sense of self, so the names that help institutions, but Wilson served first create those environments can be of as a professor and then as Princeton’s utmost importance. president. He helped its expansion into Wexler believes students today may a full-scale university, created academic feel an intense contradiction between majors and introduced small-group the names of their school’s buildings — classes. many of which honor men who would For alumni, the trouble has been abhor today’s diverse student bodies — how to address this complex history. In and their universities’ professed values. other words, are these names merely They advocate for new names that better part of a complex history of American reflect current demographics. On the slaveholding and racism, or do they other hand, many alumni see the existing unjustly honor some of its worst names as an integral part of their identity participants? and college experience.

At both Yale and Princeton, oday, when Calhoun student Eli communities remain largely divided Ceballo-Countryman ’18 speaks over questions of renaming. At Yale, with alumni of the college, they ask the controversy surrounds Calhoun her why she doesn’t love it. Her response College, named for John C. Calhoun, startles them. class of 1804; at Princeton it’s focused “I do love it. It has the best courtyard, on the Woodrow Wilson School of community and people,” she says International & Public Affairs, named earnestly in response. “The name should for Woodrow Wilson. still change, though.”

Both the debates on Calhoun and For Ceballo-Countryman, moving

“W

T

34 | March 2016

from Old Campus to Calhoun after her freshman year was a transformative experience. She said when she arrived at Yale, as a black Latina woman, the idea that Calhoun would have despised her presence on campus served only to motivate her. After moving to Calhoun this year, though, her opinion has changed.

“There hasn’t been a day this year that I don’t think about John C. Calhoun. My attitude worked well when I lived [on Old Campus], but it wasn’t sustainable,” she said. “This would be an interesting argument if we were discussing a dining hall or lecture room, but this is supposed to be a home for black students.”

On Sept. 25, 1933, when the first seven residential colleges — Branford, Calhoun, Davenport, Jonathan Edwards, Pierson, Saybrook and Trumbull — opened their doors for the first time, racial diversity was not on the Yale administration’s list of priorities. In the decade prior to the new colleges’ construction, dining hall arrangements were in disarray and almost half of Yale freshmen had to live offcampus due to overcrowding. It was not until a generous $20 million dollar gift from philanthropist Edward Harkness, class of 1897 — a donation worth over $360 million in today’s dollars — that the college system was created.

James Angell, Yale’s president at that time, wanted to name some of the new colleges to honor famous Yale alumni, but he admitted a fear of an “acute controversial atmosphere.” He hoped to avoid controversy by choosing names of famous historical figures rather than living individuals who could still tarnish their names. A special “nomenclature committee” deliberated for more than a year in deciding who to honor.

In the end, from more than 200 years of alumni, Yale chose to honor just two: John C. Calhoun, class of 1804, and Jonathan Edwards, class of 1720.

Edwards was seen as Yale’s foremost graduate in the field of theology; Calhoun in statecraft. At the time, the committee also considered William

cover

“Students don’t get to enforce a fiat on the history of those whose shoulders they stand on.”

Taft, class of 1878, the only man to have served as both a U.S. president and a Supreme Court justice. But because he had just died in 1930, the committee concluded he did not have enough time to be judged by history.

So, they went for what they believed to be safer choice, and Calhoun College was born.

N

the naming decisions, the Corporation has also conducted listening sessions, where members of the Yale community, including alumni, can express their views.

Malcolm Ashley ’81, a black alumnus who has been vocal against changing the name of Calhoun, thinks alumni input should take precedence in concerns over naming.

“Students don’t get to enforce a fiat on the history of those whose shoulders they stand on,” Ashley said over the phone.

“Every African-American at Calhoun is standing on my shoulders and every black before them. The young don’t get to change the history of the old.”

“Guess what?” he continued, “None of them met a Klansman. They haven’t been shot at or spit on, or met Martin Luther King Jr.” Some students see alumni views as much less relevant. As alumni do not live on campus or currently attend Yale, they believe alumni should have less of a say in deciding the fate of issues pertinent to campus climate.

“As valuable as their opinion is, they’re out of touch with current campus climate,” Carolina Rivera said. “I think that without being here this year, they don’t have the right to make a decision.”

But in spite of students like Rivera vocalizing that opinion, alumni — in both the Calhoun and new college naming debates — are claiming their spot in the Name Game.

ow, instead of a “nomenclature committee,” the decisions of whether to rename Calhoun College and what to name the new residential colleges are up to one body: the Yale Corporation. Composed of 19 members, the Corporation — which acts as the governing board and policymaking body for Yale — includes the president of the University, 10 successor trustees who serve up to two six-year terms, six alumni fellows who are elected by the alumni for staggered six-year terms, and the governor and lieutenant governor of the State of Connecticut.

The Corporation met in February to discuss issues of naming but, due to institutional by-laws, cannot come to a decision on any given issue until discussing it at two or more meetings.

University President Peter Salovey told the Yale Daily News that he expects a decision by the end of the academic year.

The Yale Corporation might have the final say, but that hasn’t stopped both students and alumni from being active in the debate over the past several months.

And alumni voices have been amongst the uring the last 10 minutes of loudest in the debates so far. Seventeen of breakfast on the morning of Jan. the 19 members on the Corporation are 25, 2016, technicians from the Yale alumni, so the alumni community Yale University Art Gallery removed the is necessarily involved in any decision- portrait of John C. Calhoun from the making process at Yale. In preparation for back wall of the Calhoun College dining

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hall, where it had hung undisturbed for around 80 years.

The act elicited applause from the few students present in the dining hall. None threw tantrums, accosted the handymen or angrily questioned Calhoun Master Julia Adams. From the viewpoint of a casual observer, students seemed pleased.

Those that weren’t hid it well.

In the debate over whether or not to rename Calhoun, many alumni are choosing to not to hide their views. In fact, they’re doing the opposite. The “Calhoun Listserv,” a forum which was first established as a way for members of the Calhoun classes of 1976 through 1982 to stay in touch, has become a gathering place for alumni seeking to share their thoughts on the campus discussion. From Aug. 30, 2015 to Dec. 9, 2015, approximately 350 messages from 100 alumni were exchanged on the private server.

The majority of messages in the server during that time frame — which were forwarded in their entirety to the News — are against changing the name of Calhoun, with justifications ranging from a fear of revisionist history, the need for Yale students to understand the inherent unfairness of life and the concern that changing one name will only lead to future name changes.

“As an alumni group, we were very concerned by the vocal minority of current Yale students who demand these as rights, while belittling those who do not agree they are entitled to them,” Mark Richards ’79 said.

Richards added that he believes students are unfit to make naming decisions, citing lack of real-world experience. “Wanting to change the Yale Daily News Magazine | 35

cover world for the better is admirable,” he said. “But those with little real-world experience will always fail to improve upon it.”

For Amalia Halikias ’15, renaming Calhoun sets a dangerous precedent.

She noted that from her experience at Yale, she believes Yale students are often wrong and student opinions are not always relevant.

“It’s not that I think that Yale should dismiss any argument because it comes from students. They should check to see that each argument is valid in its own right,” she said. “They should not assume that a certain number of students believing something automatically legitimizes that view.”

Numerous students interviewed, though, said that if viewpoints like Halikias’ influence the decision this year, the issue will only resurface again. They noted that while Yale as an institution moves slowly, student protests on issues relating to racial justice have yielded what they consider positive results.

Following protests by the Black Student Alliance at Yale in 1980, Pierson’s courtyard was renamed “Lower Court” from “Pierson Slave Quarters.” And 12 years later, in response to a student complaint, Calhoun College removed a panel from the stained-glass windows

36 | March 2016

in the common room that depicted a shackled slave kneeling at Calhoun’s feet.

“We have to learn that adhering to tradition and blindly holding on is a detriment to progress,” said Isaiah Genece ’17. “Yale is creating students to change the world and take things that were old and make them new.”

W

hile the YUAG technicians were working to remove the portrait of Calhoun, half a mile away, on the corner of Canal and Prospect streets, another slightly larger construction project was taking place.

The construction of Yale’s two new residential colleges, announced in 2008 and begun in 2014, has advanced slowly but prompted many questions. While the colleges are slated to be completed in the fall of 2017, their names have not yet been chosen. The ultimate responsibility for naming them lies, once again, with the Yale Corporation.

In October 2014, with construction moving forward, President Salovey invited all alumni to suggest names. Over 2,500 responses flowed in.

Two of the respondents were Jeania Ree Moore ’12 and Ivy Onyeador ’11. For them, and other alumni of color, Salovey’s offer was an opportunity to challenge the long-standing, stagnant narrative of

college names and institutional memory.

Their letter, addressed to the President’s Office and the Yale Corporation and published in The Huffington Post, advocated for Yale’s diverse history to be taken into account when deciding names. In the letter, they suggested four names — two African-Americans, one Native American and one white woman — saying such names would continue the tradition of naming colleges after notable Yalies while changing the current narrative. They also noted that eight of the 12 existing residential colleges are named after white Protestant men who either supported slavery as slaveholders or were apologists for the institution of slavery. Over 3,300 alumni have signed on to the letter.

“The naming of new colleges is an unprecedented opportunity to remember figures in Yale’s past that diversify the history remembered in residential college names,” the letter reads, adding that the new names could “claim that Yale’s past speaks to its present and future identity.”

On April 6, 2015, Christopher Lapinig ’07 LAW ’13 and Kaozouapa Elizabeth Lee ’11 co-created the website “New Yale Colleges,” which showcases the names from the letter and further advocates four more options. Among the names suggested are Mary Goodman,

cover the first donor of color to Yale College; Yung Wing, class of 1854, Yale’s first Asian graduate; and Henry Roe Cloud, class of 1910, the first Native American graduate of Yale College.

Lapinig noted that the website serves primarily as a clearinghouse for potential college names, but it is not exhaustive, and he does not expect all communities to be represented by the final two names chosen.

“We didn’t want it to be an oppression Olympics or a zero-sum game where different alumni groups were trying to pitch different alumni to name colleges after,” Lee said. “We were of the opinion that we shouldn’t be advocating for a certain type of college, but rather saying we need to frame the discussion about diversifying names and incorporating all communities of color.”

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any alums, however, have pushed back against demands for diverse new college names.

They expressed a worry of “diversity for diversity’s sake.”

Michael Knowles ’12 said he worried of a “melanin test” with regards to the naming of the new colleges. He noted that as there are countless impressive Yale alumni of a variety of intellectual stripes and physical appearances, he thinks it would be “very shallow and patronizing” to select someone for the color of their skin.

“Naming a college after the first African-American, Native American or woman to do something … it seems a stark perversion to Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream that a man should not be judged the color of their skin, but by the content of their character,” he said.

In an interview with the Yale Herald in 2012, Jonathan Holloway, then Dean of Calhoun College, said that what he would not want to see was “to have these two colleges — that already seem to Yale students so far away — to have one of them be named after an African-American alum, and the other to be named after, say, a white woman …

Because then you have a situation where

there might be some kind of a weird culture coming out of [students saying], ‘Oh you’re in one of ‘those colleges.’”

Holloway did not respond to requests for comment on his current opinion.

In December 2014, Holloway announced that he formed two groups to advise him on practical questions relating to the opening of the new colleges. The first group, a steering committee, includes students, faculty, staff and recent alumni.

Its job is to articulate the questions that need answers before the opening of the colleges. The second one, a smaller working group made up of only staff, will investigate potential answers to those questions.

All four alumni chosen for the steering committee are in close proximity to Yale: two are staff members, one is enrolled in the Law School and the other teaches at a private day school not far from Yale.

The teacher, Alex Werrell ’13, said that while he was unable to characterize the group’s discussions, he felt that suggesting names for colleges as an alumnus was the perfect way to influence an alma mater.

Even with four local alumni named to the steering committee and Salovey’s 2014 email soliciting input, the process — and the amount of input and power actually wielded by the alumni community — is far from clear.

Lapinig, one of the alumni behind the “New Yale Colleges” website, noted that he had not heard about the task force that Holloway established, and added that he hoped the administration would seek the opinions of alumni not in the New Haven area.

“Overall there is frustration about the process from the alumni perspective,” Lapinig said. “There has long been appetite for alumni to be more plugged in than just one stray survey from the President’s Office, after which many of us didn’t hear anything. The process has been fairly opaque and less collaborative with alumni than many of us would hope.”

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t Georgetown, unlike at Yale or Princeton, students have managed to rename buildings

on racial grounds. After a large student sit-in in November, the university agreed to rename Mulledy Hall and McSherry Hall, residence halls named for Georgetown Presidents Thomas Mulledy and William McSherry — men who sold 272 slaves, in part to eliminate the university’s debt. Today, the buildings have the provisional names of “Freedom Hall” and “Independence Hall,” while their permanent names are under debate.

What was most remarkable in the Georgetown case was the speed at which the administration responded to students’ demands: the day after the sit-in began, President John J. DeGioia announced the university would change the names of the buildings.

Candace Milner, Georgetown ’16, who was involved with the student protests, said while she was pleased the names were revoked, she feels the university only acted when it felt its reputation was at stake. She noted that “it took students getting publicity for [the university] to move at the urgency it should have been moving in the first place.”

But Rev. David Collins, a professor at Georgetown who chairs the group tasked with making recommendations for renaming buildings, attributes the speed of the decision not only to the students, but also to the willingness of key constituencies to agree to the change, citing the long-standing Jesuit community.

“Maybe they’re putting up more of a fight at Yale,” he said.

Collins’ guess is not wrong. And at Yale, concerns are not just coming from alumni.

Jay Gitlin ’71 MUS ’74 GRD ’02, a scholar of American cultural history who teaches the popular course “Yale and America,” noted that as a historian, he is generally averse to name changes.

Gitlin said although he doesn’t think his opinion should count more than others’ opinions, there lies potential danger in a name change.

“There’s much frustration about race relations in this country, and I think a lot of young people are very frustrated and Yale Daily News Magazine | 37

cover that’s the primary reason we’re seeing this,” he said. “As a historian, my impulse and every inclination is to be opposed to the idea of erasing history. I don’t think that’s a good idea; I think that has poor consequences.”

O

ne of the first people Augie Rivera met at Yale when he finally arrived in the fall of 1980 was his roommate, Roosevelt Thompson ’84. The two would be roommates for the next three years.

During that time, Thompson — a black student who graduated from Little Rock Central High School in Arkansas — reached great heights at Yale. He was not only a Rhodes Scholar but also a Truman Scholar, a first-round pick to Phi Beta Kappa, a freshman counselor, a member of the JV football team, chairman of the Calhoun College Council, a chairman in the Yale Senior Class Council, winner of the Hart Lyman Prize, secretary of Black Athletes at Yale and an intern for then-Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton LAW ’73.

Thompson never graduated from Yale.

During spring break of his senior year, he died in a car accident.

In a later documentary, Hillary Clinton LAW ’73 said he was “truly one of the most remarkable human beings I have ever, ever known.”

The cause to rename Calhoun College for Roosevelt Thompson gained traction after Alex Zhang ’18 published an op-ed on the subject in the Yale Daily News. In the piece, Zhang, a fellow alum of Little Rock Central High School, argues that Yale should show it values its students while they are students, not just when they are famous alums. In essence, supporters for Roosevelt Thompson College challenge the dominant framework that post-graduation merit should be evaluated.

“I’m of the opinion that the Yale degree is valuable not primarily for how it helps you gain prestige or money or power, but rather for how it opens doors for you and fills students’ lives with a sense of possibility,” Zhang said. “It just 38 | March 2016

seems like when we talk about Yale we kind of forget why we’re here. It’s to have a great four years and to make something really beautiful in those four years, to give yourself to a cause, to become a great scholars, to serve your community.”

In the wake of the op-ed, students and alumni have rallied to support the cause of Roosevelt Thompson. Students, as well as friends of Thompson’s during his time at Yale, have written to the News and shared posts on social media.

During listening sessions to discuss the potential renaming of Calhoun College and the naming of the two new residential colleges, Thompson’s name was a pervasive presence.

Zhang said that based on the responses he has received from students and alumni to his op-ed, Roosevelt Thompson College has proved largely unifying.

Slade Mead ’84, the producer of the Roosevelt Thompson documentary Looking for Rosey, visited Yale and spent time with Calhoun students. Mead, an old friend of Thompson’s, said, “I would always ask myself, ‘What would Rosey do?’ When I interviewed people [for the documentary], I found out other people had the same feeling. There’s something really special there.”

For Ceballo-Countryman, excitement around Roosevelt Thompson runs in the family; her mother had Thompson as a freshman counselor. While in favor of changing the name of Calhoun College to Roosevelt Thompson College, she is aware of the need to preserve the history of the name though another method.

“We can have a relation to history without honoring people,” she said.

“There’s a difference between having Calhoun on our archways versus putting him on a plaque or historical exhibit in a basement.”

Ceballo-Countryman said that if the name is not changed now, she believes the issue will only continue to resurface in the future.

She asked: “How much more time and energy does Yale want to spend on the question?”

photo courtesy of Augie Rivera

bits and pieces

Percent of students who thought the pictured individual was Stephen Schwarzman (left to right): 19%; 25%; 9%; 17%; 15%; 15%.

(From left to right: Stephen Schwarzman ’69; Jim Walton of Walmart; business magnate George Soros; media mogul Rupert Murdoch; Hank Paulson, former U.S. Treasury Secretary; and former Yale President Rick Levin)

Yale Students Eating in the Schwarzman Center Cannot Correctly Identify the Face of Stephen Schwarzman

by Graham Ambrose

Petrarch Scrolls Through Tinder to Find Laura 700 Years Later

by Monica Hannush

O Laura! Would that you’d swipe right on me — That I might read that blessed “It’s a Match!”

And on seeing my likeness, your heart catch Fire, such that you’d draw me close to thee.

My radius is set: one hundred miles, One hundred sighs for every mile between My heart and yours, my fair beloved queen.

Poor Sisyphus would cower at this trial!

I’d feast mine eyes upon your doctored pics, I’d memorize your short biography, I’d ne’er dare ask for pictures of your tits, I’d message first, for that is classic me!

Your swiping left wouldst slay my yearning soul — Swipe right, my Tinder goddess … make me whole!

I

magine the Schwarzman Center. But first, imagine the man.

Despite a $150 million donation to the University in May 2015, a shocking new poll has found that Stephen Schwarzman ’69 remains personally unknown on campus — even in the building now bearing his name.

When we put his face in a lineup with other elderly white men of influence — from Washington to Wall Street, and even to Woodbridge Hall — Schwarzman was correctly identified only marginally more often than random chance. Dining hall workers in Commons admitted to having no knowledge of the man who endowed their workspace. And an astounding 15 percent of Yalies eating lunch misidentified former Yale President Rick Levin as Schwarzman.

Despite Facebook statuses and strongly worded Yale Daily News op-eds suggesting otherwise, Yalies seem to know little about the man who has financed, in the words of one respondent, “the creation of a glorified bar where I’ll hopefully drink a lot senior year.”

Lunchgoers who could identify Schwarzman associated him with one thing, and one thing only: money.

“Schwarzman is irrelevant other than that he’s some crusty old rich white guy,” said a

freshman in Calhoun.

In fact, only 1 in every 10 students surveyed had a positive impression of the chairman and CEO of The Blackstone Group, a private equity firm based in Manhattan. Nearly 40 percent of respondents admitted feeling somewhat or very negative about Schwarzman.

Yet a majority of Yalies polled professed no knowledge whatsoever of Schwarzman, his life or the origins of his wealth.

To most, he’s about as enigmatic as Skull and Bones, a society that Schwarzman happens to be a member of. Over 70 percent of students polled confessed to knowing nothing at all.

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n a 2008 profile by The New Yorker, in which the Yale alum was dubbed “private equity’s designated villain,” Schwarzman responded to recurring negative press by saying, “How does it feel? Unattractive. No thinking person wants to be reduced to a caricature.”

It seems that over 50 years after being rejected by Harvard College — a rebuff that the magnate claims inspired his landmark gift — this unattractive-feeling thinking person continues to confront something even worse than caricaturization. For, after all, how can Yalies caricature him, if they can’t even recognize him?

Maybe they’ll just have to imagine.

Yale Daily News Magazine | 39

the stanley j. arffa lecture series

Constructing Jewish Gender Moshe Rosman Professor of Jewish History Bar Ilan University

Moshe Rosman was born in Chicago, USA and studied at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America and Columbia University. He has lived in

Israel since 1979 where he teaches in the Koschitzky Department of Jewish History at Bar Ilan University. In 2010 he served as the Horace Goldsmith Visiting Professor at Yale. Rosman specializes in the history of the Jews in the early modern period in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. His books include: The Lords’ Jews: Magnate-Jewish Relations in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth; Founder of Hasidism: A Quest for the Historical Ba’al Shem Tov; and How Jewish Is Jewish History?

5:00 pm March 2

•

Comparative Literature Library, Bingham Hall, 300 College St., 8th Floor

A Protofeminist’s Challenge to Gender Order: Leah Horowitz’s Tekhino Imohos Reception to follow

March 8

Gender Under Construction: From Genesis To Hasidism Reception to follow

March 10

Reconstructing Gender: Market, Literature, Halakhah, Synagogue Reception to follow

ydnmag@gmail.com yaledailynews.com/blog/category/mag

For information, please contact Renee Reed at (203) 432-0843 or renee.reed@yale.edu sponsored by the judaic studies program at yale university