Parallax Spring 2019

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PARALLAX

Letter from the Editors Another year has gone by!

In our last issue of Parallax, we reflected on APAA’s trajectory since 2015 leading up to Spring 2018. More than half of our members have graduated since then, which meant that those of us who remained had to continue building on what we’d already established while getting on the same page with new members who joined the group. In Fall 2018, we read Grace Lee Boggs’s autobiography Living for Change again, which culminated in our second Grace Lee Boggs Month in November. Over winter break, several of us read W.E.B. Du Bois’s Darkwater: Voices from Within the Veil. This Spring 2019 semester, we have been reading Huey P. Newton’s autobiography Revolutionary Suicide along with works by James Baldwin. In March, we held an event titled (Our Cornell) Education: Is This It? The education event built on many of the core ideas we discussed during Our Inescapable Responsibility, the reading pop-up we held in Spring 2018. More importantly, we decided to host the event in response to what we have been directly observing on campus. Members of other social justice organizations have expressed burnout and disillusionment with the old ways of campaigning, letter-dropping, and focusing on the administration. These strategies have not worked. We realized we had a responsibility to other students to create a space for people to question what they’re being taught at Cornell and provide an alternative framework for thinking about the purpose of education and the role of students at the university.

We have included the framework for the education event in this issue of Parallax, with the hope that others will read it and reflect on what we collectively stated in a public space. A need for reflection has become clearer — reflection not just in terms of how to succeed at a campaign, but why you are doing anything. For us, reading has never just been for the sake of reading, or enjoyment, but in order to understand reality and to act. (And writing is the other end of that!)

It can be hard to keep growing as a group in this place, when old members are constantly graduating and new people are hopefully coming in. It can be hard to develop or maintain any kind of consistency, for us to collectively be on the same page from semester to semester.

How can we remember what’s been done already, and why we did it? How can we not lose the conclusions that we’ve drawn? We found some answers to the questions we’d been asking about the world in our readings of history, through Huey, Grace, Du Bois, and Baldwin.

Basically, we felt that we should write what we were thinking, so here it is. It will make more sense if you read the other issues. We hope it’s good!

– Nuri & Jeremiah

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APAA Spring 2019

Table of Contents Letter from the Editors

Nuri Yi & Jeremiah Kim

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Table of Contents

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(Our Cornell) Education: Is This It?

Framework from event on March 12, 2018

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Back to Purpose: Reflections on APAA

Nuri Yi & Henri Clarke

8-9

What We Know, As We Leave

Brian Byun, Jeremiah Kim, Michelle Zhao, Edy Barraza

10-18

Letter to My Sister

Sherry Xie

19-20

Forward From Fear

Naomi Li

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About the Contributors

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PARALLAX (Our Cornell) Education: Is This It? Framework from event on March 12th, 2019 Who is APAA? We are a group of young people and students who care about fighting for a relevant education in order to address the biggest problems in society today. We’ve spent the last two years reading and discussing works by thinkers like W.E.B. Du Bois, Grace Lee Boggs, Huey P. Newton, Martin Luther King Jr, and James Baldwin. Over this time period, we’ve developed a deeper understanding of what it means to take responsibility for society based on the ideas and revolutionary lives modeled by these thinkers.

-- So why did we host this event?

After lots of personal reflection and conversation with others, we’ve come to the conclusion that there is a lot of confusion on this campus. When we first came to this university, we arrived young, open, and hopeful. Since Cornell is an elite institution, we expected a transformative educational experience — one befitting the best sort of education money can buy, the best that human civilization has ever produced (some might say).

It’s true that when we arrive, we also come with certain perceptions of success via career and wealth, and with pressure to achieve those narrow visions of success.

So maybe we focus, by default, on grades, internships, jobs, success, money, and applause. But this overwhelming treadmill never ends; it never brings you happiness or peace. And it never will — because there’s always more things to be had: more projects, more skills, more resources, more clout.

If and when we realize that these things are not fulfilling, it’s usually incidental — the university does not sit you down during O-Week to tell you it’s going to make you feel empty inside. Instead of being Page 3

encouraged to question broadly about society and its existing institutions, we are discouraged; these lines of inquiry are framed as preemptively cynical rather than genuinely curious or searching. So many people end up questioning only out of necessity — out of existential crisis. But it is clear that given enough time, we students begin to wonder: “Is this really it?”

Students here struggle with anxiety, depression, constant stress, angst, isolation, and alienation. These issues are symptomatic of a deeper contradiction between what we are told here and what is actually happening around us — on campus, in Ithaca, and in the world. To frame this contradiction, which turns into crisis when unaddressed and left to grow, we will focus on three issues which we believe are clear signs of the miseducation we receive here at Cornell: identity politics, the evasion of responsibility, and war.

What is identity politics? Broadly speaking, we define identity politics as the idea that an individual can embody the needs and struggles of a certain historically marginalized group. Individuals are consequently singled out to represent their group in different powerful institutions — a tactic that was once maybe meant to be a practical and straightforward solution to historical oppression, but which quickly and easily becomes the end-all, be-all goal of progress, with terrible effects.

Identity politics creates the illusion that “diversity” (just having diverse faces and bodies) is the solution to oppression and inequality, without addressing the need to more deeply interrogate or transform the structures that brought about these inequalities in the first place. Therefore diversity initiatives in tech or finance, like the

APAA Spring 2019 “JPMorgan Diversity + Inclusion” Event that happened on Tuesday, are seen as liberal and progressive agendas — but these endeavors distract from the real question, which is: Why do some people make hundreds of thousands of dollars for moving fake numbers around in the first place, regardless of their race, class background, gender, or sexual orientation?

Achieving diversity in exploitation is not any better. It does not solve the problems of your ‘community,’ but exacerbates them.

Young people from marginalized groups are selected to represent their communities at elite institutions like Cornell.

Administrators and other people in power then select potential student leaders and shower them with praise, awards, and a “seat at the table,” which these so-called leaders happily accept. Perhaps because they crave the recognition and validation from the university — to increase their own value, and possibly the value of the other members of their ‘community’ too, eventually. This kind of leadership does not come from an actual community, but is rather structured by a topdown approach in which students are taught to better themselves within the existing frameworks and institutions offered by the university.

Weaponized in this manner, identity politics teaches people to individualize the pain and injustice within their communities.

By encouraging a self-centered way of understanding injustice, identity politics offers people no sense of hope to take responsibility for building a better world.

And a self-centered way of understanding the world denies a humanity-centered way of understanding the world. This is why even the most well-intentioned students from marginalized communities end up being tempted away by high-paying jobs and individual success — and justify this by saying that they have no choice but to get the furthest they can in life, rather than

understanding the deep problems of the world and then addressing them.

People are searching for clarity, purpose, and fulfillment, and so they end up listening to and following whoever has the loudest microphone. At Cornell, this means we accept what faculty and administrators tell us, and we follow student leaders and social justice orgs who are, in many cases, confused themselves — because they get their ideas from faculty and administrators.

We are also told that the way to get ahead is by having your own best interests at heart; your own, and then maybe that of your community. But not society as a whole. And so maybe you listen and faithfully follow all of the supposed solutions or paths that you’re presented with — recycling, community service, extracurriculars, being involved, all of these things — but you still feel vaguely empty, uneasy, or anxious inside if you ever stop to actually listen to your inner voice of conscience.

And that is because all of these solutions fail to fill the void, or to actually address the problems.

This is why we question the form of leadership that is taught at Cornell — because it misguides people into centering themselves first. We also question whether these student leaders are really leaders, in the true sense of the word: leaders who are clear and principled, who think about what people really need and are committed to trying to change society according to those needs. By misguiding people who are clearly searching for meaning, Cornell’s ‘leaders’ evade their own responsibility to help people think critically about their own relationship to society.

Public-facing diversity initiatives are one example of this. A few days ago, a group of student orgs came together to host a summit called “The Things We Never Knew.” The event aimed to “elevate issues Page 4

PARALLAX that are not prioritized, recognized, or respected by Cornell University or society as a whole.” However, the discussion of these issues was sanctioned by Cornell through the participation of recognized student leaders and representatives from the administration. The university publicly sanctions the misleadership of ‘marginalized’ student groups in order to teach people to leverage their identities to get further and further ahead in today’s world and grow increasingly distant from actual communities and humanity.

Secret societies are another prime example of this. We all know! — or at least, if you stick around long enough, you eventually know. We know about secret societies, and we know that all or most of the prominent organizations on campus have lineages in secret societies, in Sphinx Head and Quill & Dagger, and that secret societies always tap the rising ‘student leaders’ — to recognize them, and then embrace them. The question of whether you are doing good, or important, or meaningful work is determined by whether or not you get tapped… and the administration is invested in these societies.

Martha Pollack has given a fireside chat to Quill & Dagger, and secret society members network with the board of trustees, the chairman of which is also a member of Q&D.1 And this is supposed to be where real collaboration or communication between organizations occur. That’s what people say is valuable about Mortar Board beyond putting it on your resume, or using the networking connections to get a job. It is basically a public stepping stone to the secret version of the honor society. We deeply question this relationship — we reject the idea that the most significant or meaningful relationships, the ones that affect the most change — are the ones that happen between individuals wielding power, irresponsibly, behind closed

doors.

The people who ‘lead’ diversity initiatives and secret societies sustain themselves in order to protect and increase their own power and comfort. If they aren’t directly involved with the administration, they at least funnel their members into the ruling class. This is bad because these people clearly have power, and everyone else is really searching for someone or something to place their trust in. Without the trust and support of the people, no person could make themselves a leader. And if the supposed leaders of today’s society only care about themselves and their own interests — if they only care about power and profits — then the rest of humanity is compelled to place its trust in a group of individuals who don’t care about them at all. But this is the reality of the world we live in: leaders who wield other people’s trust without responsibility because their sole concern is gaining power and profit.

Nowhere is this evasion of responsibility more stark or indefensible than on the problem of war.

Wars happen when a few individuals decide to value profit and power over humanity. In order to justify war, we are taught that war is inevitable when it’s really not; peace is always an option. However, if people collectively decide they no longer want war — that they actually want peace, then peace becomes a real possibility. But people first have to think seriously about what peace actually means, and then they have to decide from there.

War is a problem for all humankind, but it is a problem that strikes deep at the heart of the contradictions of our Cornell education. Cornell actively participates in the military-industrial complex and war industry.

This university not only trains members of the U.S. army, but receives tremendous amounts of money from the Department of

Robert Harrison, current Chairman of the Board of Trustees, was a 1976 member of Quill & Dagger (The Cornellian, 1976, p. 424) https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=coo.31924055195717;view=1up;seq=422 1

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APAA Spring 2019 Defense and other government agencies to fund STEM research that is used to create better, more advanced methods of killing and surveilling human beings.2 Cornell produces corporate executives who profit from war, in addition to politicians, news pundits, and think tank analysts who are paid to sell the world on war. Beyond those directly involved in military training, defense research, or war profiteering, most people here assume that wars — in particular, America’s wars and military interventions — are inevitable or even necessary. Students, admin, and faculty accept that war is a part of Cornell without question.

To quote from Du Bois, we believe that war is murder. We believe that the cause of war is preparation for war. And if Cornell helps the United States to prepare for war, then Cornell helps the United States to commit murder.

What would it mean if we were to question war? What would Cornell be like if we decided to pursue peace?

If we chose to center humanity first, what kinds of questions would we ask? Would we ask about our relationship with Cornell’s workers? Would we ask about Cornell’s relationship with the Ithaca community?

Would we recognize the imperative to rethink these relationships?

The evasion of responsibility is one great cause of Cornell students’ anxiety and depression. We avoid thinking critically about what we learn and how we relate to other people. If we accept our mutual responsibility and come together, then we will know peace — both as a society, and within our own selves. This is the only way.

We don’t blame people for joining a secret society, and we don’t blame people for buying into identity politics, because overwhelmingly, that’s what we’re told to do. We don’t blame anybody. And we’re

not here to talk about blame, which doesn’t go anywhere — we are here to talk about responsibility, for the present and for the future. And we believe that we each have a responsibility to society as a whole, as human beings who participate in society and have been raised and shaped in many ways by this same society.

This society is not perfect; it is far from that — there are so many problems, many of which we did not create. But we are responsible for changing it — all of us, because we are human beings with the capacity for thought, and are people who will move in this world. If this work — which is big, yes — if this work cannot be completed in our generation, we must do the best we can and sacrifice for the next generation, for whom perhaps it will be a little better, and who will carry on this work for the generations that come after them.

The deepest problems lie in how we relate to one another and to society, and how we fail to consider our responsibility in this time and place. So we think that we should start with that. People are confused, and people are frustrated, because the things we are being presented with, and the authorities we are supposed to trust — don’t seem to be working. There are many contradictions between what we are being told, and what is actually happening — what we can see happening in front of us. There are gaping differences between what we are told to do to find fulfillment, and how we actually feel.

Differences between what we’re told to do to make the world a better place, and what those actions ultimately amount to.

So we held this event to try to address these confusions and frustrations, in a fruitful way. To talk — not just about how people are evading responsibility, but hopefully to start moving forward and discuss what taking responsibility then actually looks like, and

For the 2016-2017 fiscal year, the Department of Defense gave $34.5 million for research at Cornell https://research.cornell.edu/content/stats-highlights-2017 2

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PARALLAX how we might be able to transform society in deeper and truer ways, as individuals and as groups and communities.

We are young, and so maybe we’re only just beginning to really try to understand the world that we live in. A lot of us came to this university thinking that we’d be able to start trying to understand the world here.

Because that’s an important part of what being a student is — to try to understand the world — not only gaining certain skills to become employable. It’s pretty easy to forget what it truly means to be a student — which is not just to take classes for credit, do readings and talk for participation points, or die on the prelim grind — but to think, and to question. Because we are responsible for the future of society. We think that we should seriously reflect on what that really means, in ideas and then in action.

So the questions we’ve considered, through the passages we’ve read, are pretty basic. But we believe these questions are fundamental even if they are simple. These questions are: What are we being taught, and for what ends?

What is this university responsible for?

What are we, as students at this university, responsible for?

Our education should teach us how to take responsibility for society — what is responsibility?

How can we take responsibility?

How is our education serving or not serving us?

How is our education preparing us to serve or not serve others?

What can we do in this university and in our lives?

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APAA Spring 2019 Back to Purpose: Reflections on APAA

By Nuri Yi & Henri Clarke

By name, Asian Pacific Americans for Action seems like it is meant to be the “political action” group representing the Asian Pacific American (now APIDA, formerly Asian American) ‘community.’ While this was probably APAA’s self-perception for much of its existence, the current form of APAA has evolved away from this notion.

We are no longer an Asian Pacific American space, because we are, first of all, not all Asian Pacific American. Even if we are, that’s not what brings us to APAA anymore, and that’s not how we primarily see ourselves. We are not organized on the basis of shared identity or circumstance or lived experience, as might be assumed, but rather a shared humanity and commitment to that humanity.

Our change in direction followed years of fighting for ethnic studies, culminating in the Save Our Programs campaign for ethnic studies, gender studies, and sexuality studies.

After our (and others’) demands were unheard despite dedicated and sustained efforts, we grew disillusioned with achieving meaningful change through the university and thus began to question whether we needed to reevaluate our purpose. (If you’re interested, you should read last year’s edition of Parallax to learn more about what we were thinking then!) Essentially, we realized that instead of trying to fight for or find humanity within the confines of the institution, we wanted to see ourselves first and foremost as human beings learning from other human beings in order to better humanity.

We embrace our history. Our hearts were invested in what we were fighting for, and we felt that our efforts followed a legacy of students and activists before us. From the ethnic studies campaigns, we learned a lot about how student activism functions within

the institution. But Cornell’s evident moral hypocrisy and cowardice necessarily means that we can’t trust it to teach us how to live our lives responsibly — so why would we want to limit our energy, effort, and hopes of a greater world to the university alone?

That’s why we began reading group.

By reading and discussing the works of the revolutionaries who did commit their whole lives to humanity, we’ve found moral guidance our classes could never fully give us. In classes, the point of reading and discussion is to develop and demonstrate your own knowledge of a topic or idea — knowledge for knowledge’s (or, far more often, the exam’s) sake. Often people are talking because they feel the need to make the most intelligent-sounding contribution to discussion.

The purpose of APAA reading group is not to revel in individual knowledge and intelligence, or to feel good about yourself.

When we come to reading group, we expect an openness of each other — not eagerness to actively or constantly challenge or oppose others to try to enlighten them to think like you, but rather a willingness to be challenged, because we have to work through our internal contradictions in the open in order to grow together. Our shared purpose is to come to a clearer understanding of reality and history in order to make the world a better place. Grace Lee Boggs wrote: “To make a revolution, people must not only struggle against existing institutions. They must make a philosophical and spiritual leap and become more human human beings. In order to change and transform the world, they must change and transform themselves.”

Self-transformation means many Page 8

PARALLAX things, but in terms of APAA, it means moving from a “me vs. the world” mentality to seeing yourself as part of the world. We can’t have any hope of changing a world much larger than ourselves if we can’t even take the responsibility of transforming ourselves. It can be jarring to break out of individualistic thinking in order to accept challenging ourselves to think more clearly about the world, but it is absolutely necessary. We’re taught to think self-centeredly from a young age, and as we grow we also learn not to trust or listen to others — because we assume they, too, are thinking only in their own self-interest. But self-centeredness isolates people, makes selfishness inevitable, and blinds you to reality. In order to grow in our understanding, then, we must be able to let go of self-centredness in order to dedicate ourselves to humanity.

We’re still figuring out what our commitment should look like in practice throughout our lives, but our trust in one another allows us to get further, as long as we always remember our fundamental purpose as a group, and of our lives: to better understand the world in order to change it. We still feel doubt; we still have more questions than answers. But we can be honest with each other, and as a result see each other and ourselves more clearly.

As comrades, we must take responsibility for each other and spend our time not just enjoying each other’s company, but challenging each other to constantly grow, even if it can feel uncomfortable at times. We have to hold ourselves to higher standards of how we spend our time, because it reflects what we actually value.

Now, the question is: where does APAA go from here? We know that we must start from what we know to be true: the importance of reading, growing, and challenging ourselves in what a human being can do and become. As such, we want to keep thinking about ways of being human Page 9

independent of being students by thinking more about Ithaca beyond Cornell and talking to more people who live in the world. As new people join APAA, the personality of the group will change; this is to be expected and welcome, as long as we never lose sight of our purpose. Saying goodbye to our oldest members every year makes us pretty sad about change and loss, but we also have so much hope in people’s desire to better the world and our ability to build our lives anew around it. It’s hard, but we know it’s possible, and we’re excited to keep growing together!

APAA Spring 2019 What We Know, As We Leave

By Brian Byun, Jeremiah Kim, Michelle Zhao, Edy Barraza

Starting a new chapter of your life can be a scary time, but also an exciting one – an opportunity to grow and learn more about the world and yourself. For those of us in APAA who are leaving Cornell/Ithaca this semester, the upcoming months and years ahead present a whole new set of challenges as we figure out how to continue striving for clarity in environments different from the ones we’ve become accustomed to during our time here. In order to get a sense of what we need to focus on after we leave, we decided to come together and figure out what we’ve learned so far through reading and growing with others.

Based on our discussion, we have synthesized a collective statement of “Things We Know” (below). This statement is followed by individual reflections that tell the (abridged) story of how each of us arrived at these conclusions in the context of our own lives. The reflections are followed by several guiding questions, which we hope will provide some direction both for us and for others – whether they’re leaving college or staying here for a few more years.

Things We Know •We know that our careers should not be the basis of our identity.

one’s going to pay you to fix the root of the problem.

•We know that we shouldn’t be taking on jobs or obligations that are going to require us to make sacrifices so that we won’t be able to commit to anything deeper. > We all have an example of committing to something that robbed us of our time and energy to meaningfully relate to other people. We don’t have to pursue these things again.

•We know that family financial security/ parental pressure is often an excuse people make to justify 6-figure salaries or abdicating their responsibility to humanity.

•We know that we have agency in choosing who we want to be.

•We know that staying in a place is important.

We know that deciding to root yourself in a community is not simple or easy. > For instance, Grace Lee Boggs chose to root herself in the Black working class community of Detroit because she recognized that joining the Black struggle was the right thing to do at that particular moment in history.

•We know that certain people/groups might present us with answers or causes to society’s •We know that we won’t find fulfillment in our woes, but they probably won’t be asking the right questions. jobs. > We don’t presume to know all right the questions, but we have seen how people – •We know that most jobs are not evil, but at a prestigious intellectual institution like even “good” or “neutral” jobs are not the Cornell – can often fail to engage in the answer to society’s problems. critical process of thinking and reflection which is necessary to name the burning •We know that people might pay you to questions of today. address the symptoms of the problem, but no Page 10

PARALLAX •We know that there are few models in our lives of people who’ve made a deeper commitment to humanity.

•We know that, despite that, we do have a few models of people who’ve committed themselves to humanity. > Examples: Grace Lee Boggs & Jimmy Boggs, W.E.B. Du Bois, James Baldwin, Martin Luther King Jr, Huey P. Newton & the Black Panther Party •We know that we want to commit ourselves to humanity.

Individual Reflections Brian

I’m writing and reflecting because I want to articulate that as I leave Cornell, I am committing myself to humanity and to continue to seek to relate to others differently and deeply.

I know that the ways in which people relate to each other have changed throughout history. I know that with the global changes that I’ve read about, the emergence of a global economy and global supply chain reflects how people have come to relate to each other in inhuman ways via the free market. Farmers, for example, are growing food not to feed their surrounding communities, but to export commodities overseas.

Even identities have come to be commodified. We sell our identity, our marginalization. In my short lifetime, American society seems to have developed a fixation on identity, be it our ethnicity, religion, class, gender. It’s about conflating our “identities” with an inherent sense of value or idea or belief. Identity becomes a commodity itself, an object that we cling to give ourselves meaning. Ultimately, identity Page 11

has come to hinder our capacity to build deeper ideas or beliefs about the world.

It hinders our capacity to relate to others based on the understanding of our shared humanity, in acknowledging and relating to each other as human beings.

I don’t mean to invalidate and deny that the United States has a deep history of racism and discrimination of African Americans, women, queer people, people in poverty, religious minorities. The articulating of such discrimination and history is important! But history is not important because it shows how a particular identity has an inherent meaning or value. Rather, history shows me strength and fortitude among certain people in the face of adversity.

“I am proud of these people not because of their color but because of their intelligence and their spiritual beauty,” writes James Baldwin about African Americans.

People have come before me and, in the face of dehumanization, been able to envision and move towards an idea of freedom and love that includes everyone.

History shows me that people can relate to each other in deeper ways that allow for agency and dignity. I know it because of Grace Lee Boggs, Jimmy Boggs, James Baldwin, Huey Newton, Martin Luther King, Jr. I know that Grace and Jimmy had done it in Detroit, and I know that Huey had done it in Oakland with the Black Panthers.

Only recently have I begun to let go of my “identity” and have seen myself as a human being with a responsibility to myself and others. Emily, who graduated last year, talked a lot about this, and so did Grace in Living for Change.

As I look to graduation and leaving this place, I know that I won’t find fulfillment in my (soon-to-be-found) job because I won’t be paid to address society’s problems at their root. I’ll be mitigating symptoms of this crisis of dehumanization, at best. My job won’t define me as a human being, but

APAA Spring 2019

I do need a job to pay the bills and I plan on getting one. I plan to be discerning, and choose a job that will actually allow me the time and energy to commit to deeper things.

But my commitment to seeking to relate to people in a deeper, more meaningful way isn’t something that I plan to uphold during just my 9-5 or just during the weekend. It’s a commitment and principle that I plan to uphold in all of my life, for the rest of my life.

It’s also a commitment that I plan to share with others because I can’t change society by myself.

Jeremiah

For the past year or so, I’ve been conducting an informal, unscientific survey among some of the Cornell students I know.

The survey consists of a single question: Do your parents have friends?

The overwhelming majority of participants have answered no to this question. These no’s are typically preceded by long pauses, head-scratching, and looks of rueful realization: Hmmm… yes—wait no… do they? No… I don’t think so. Not really.

These hesitant no’s also seem to stretch across different cultures and demographics: from working class families in big cities to middle class families in isolated suburbs, from first-generation immigrants to multigenerational inhabitants of North America.

What about the small minority of yes answers? If people’s parents do have friends, these friendships are typically determined by the institutions their parents have inhabited: the workplace, a particular industry, college, or a place of worship. And they may spend time with these friends in a social setting once a month, or perhaps even once a week if they go to church regularly.

So, with few exceptions, the general consensus is that our parents don’t really have friends and spend most of their time divided between their jobs and raising their kids. If our parents are empty nesters, their jobs have taken up an even larger share of their time and the remainder is spent exploring new hobbies or recovering from work-induced exhaustion/stress at home.

The point of me discussing this survey is not to raise a finger of blame or disrespect at the people who raised us. And the point isn’t even really about adult friendships, per se. I think the real questions which these responses raise have something to do with the difference between friendship (a relationship based on mutual interests and affection) and comradeship (a relationship based on shared convictions and commitments), and with the kinds of lives we envision for ourselves as we prepare to leave Cornell.

How should we relate to others? Are our relationships and lives based on a shared commitment to humanity? If they aren’t, why can’t they be?

Once upon a time not so long ago (i.e., last year), I was entertaining the notion of becoming an academic. I envisioned myself pursuing Asian American Studies because that was the field with which I was most Page 12

PARALLAX familiar. The path forward was clear: study for the GRE, take the GRE (at some point), apply for relevant grad programs, attend whatever grad school would accept me, get a PhD, enter the academic job market and hope for the best. This path gratified my desire to seek validation and recognition through my achievements and smartness (a desire I’m still working on getting over). It also reassured not only me, but my mom – who, to her credit, has been on-board with most of the haphazard, hazy career plans I’ve articulated in the past couple years.

As the months slipped by, however, I found myself not even going through with the first step.

Was it laziness? It’s a likely possibility.

Initially, I told myself I was simply putting off the GRE until after graduation, when I would have more time to study. But I think there was a deeper shift happening in my head and my heart.

It had something to do with watching and listening to my primary models – actual academics at Cornell – more closely, and comparing what I saw and heard with the ideas and relationships we were developing in reading group. One thing I’ve noticed is that certain academics often gesture to the “academic community” when they talk about the significance of their work. Something about these statements has always struck me as somewhat odd: for one thing, I’ve never seen evidence that such a community actually exists.

What is a community? Is it just some group you belong to, or does it involve people taking responsibility for each other in a particular place and time?

Yes, academics get together at academic conferences so they can talk about their research and go out for drinks on their school’s budget – but that’s networking (with colleagues), not community-building (with comrades). More importantly, participation Page 13

in an academic community (if it exists) does not really entail any sort of meaningful connection to a community that’s tied to a particular place. And if I learned anything from reading Grace Lee Boggs with APAA, it’s that rooting yourself in a community might be the only way to maintain some sense of reality and hope for the long run.

When I reflect on my relationships with faculty here at Cornell, it’s difficult to say that any professor has seen me as anything but a student. They might see me as a bright pupil with academic potential, but that’s about it. No faculty has given me evidence to believe they see me as a human being with the potential to become a better person. I’ve realized that this has more to do with their own sense of reality and frame of reference than it has anything to do with me.

When you live and breathe academia long enough, you begin to base your identity on being an academic. And when you base your identity on being an academic, everything in life begins to look academic – abtract, conceptual, clinical – to you. Speaking as a young person, it becomes almost impossible to respect an older person (whom you have no desire not to trust initially) whose own identity and perception is based on their position within an institution so cold and so far removed from reality.

When I reflect on my relationships with people in APAA, on the other hand, I can say without hesitation that my relationships with certain people in reading group (people like Emily and Nuri) have genuinely challenged me to become a better human being. I know that these people deeply love and care about me because they have told me exactly what I needed to hear: what my weaknesses are, where my contradictions lie, and that I can grow to overcome them.

The measure of deep love and care between people is not the extent to which they can make each other feel better (about

APAA Spring 2019 being smart, or promising, or unique) or become affectionate, but the capacity to truly challenge each other and tell the truth even when it hurts. When someone tells you the truth about yourself, it feels like a fish hook has snagged your guts and pulled them relentlessly across the ocean. It’s an awful feeling and you can run from it however long you want – I certainly did, to my detriment – but it means you have to listen to it and listen to them – because it means they might know something about you that you may only dimly suspect or acknowledge about yourself.

Taking all of this to heart, I’ve come to the conclusion that I shouldn’t place my hopes for meaningful relationships within my career. I’m still going to find a job to sustain myself, but I’m going to try to direct as much of my energy towards building relationships with other people on the basis of a shared commitment to humanity. If that means I have to avoid certain careers that I know will totally consume my time, energy, and sense of reality – and I see academia as a case in point – then so be it.

I know that people are capable of developing deeper comradeships with each other that go beyond friendship or any other kind of shallow, commodified relationship. I know this because I have read about people like Grace Lee Boggs and Jimmy Boggs, or Huey P. Newton and the Black Panther Party, and I know this because I have seen it happen in our reading group. I know this because I have been continually challenged to participate in these comradeships despite my own misgivings, insecurities, self-centeredness, and mistakes. It is my responsibility to continue this legacy by challenging others to question and reflect seriously on who they think they are and what they value, and I hope others will challenge me on the same basis.

When people commit themselves fully to a struggle, they begin to recognize that

their relationships with each other are not really about them – that they’re about the future of humanity. Proceeding from there, they can begin to redefine each other and become who they’re meant to be.

Michelle

My upbringing was middle-class and fortunate: I was born and raised on Long Island and one of nine students from my high school class to attend Cornell. My sense of worldliness was measured by the capital cities I memorized and the landmark Supreme Court cases I could tick off, but not by a truer understanding of what it means to be a human being in this world, or to be part of humanity as a whole. History (social studies) was my favorite subject in school, but I saw myself as after it rather than a part of it. After graduating, I realized: I had trivia, but I didn’t have truth.

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PARALLAX

I knew this because my sense of intelligence, and thus worth, had been tenuously tethered to external achievements.

At age 18 and against all better judgement, I fully believed that failure to get into a “good college” would be the end of my life. When I got into Cornell, I felt salvation. I know that sounds utterly ridiculous and laden with privilege, 18-year-old me did too – but that was where I was at and where I had to grow from coming into here. I never wanted to feel that brittle again, so I resolved to live beyond my own self-interest. I just wasn’t sure how to best do that.

I joined APAA in 2017, lost and looking for deeper moral guidance on how to be a “good person” (I acknowledge this was still born out of self-interest) outside of the usual suburban niceties I had practiced all my life. Saying “thank you” to everyone who held the door open for me or bringing a gift to every new house I visited felt nice, but insubstantial. I was polite, but apolitical with limited historical knowledge on the values I claimed to stand behind. I mean ask yourself - what even is liberalism? I could get behind feminism and immigrant rights, but it bothered me that I didn’t fully understand how those movements came into existence and what they were planning for the future.

I positioned myself as a supporter from the sidelines. And at the same time, I wondered if I was shaping my life around the right values.

Arriving at “What We Know” was not a straightforward process. I would love to say that once the ideas of Grace, DuBois, and fellow reading group members entered my head, they never left. That they appeared in my everyday actions without fail (ultimate praxis!). That I understood the gravity of their words with clarity and saw myself as capable of carrying out the responsibility of being a more human human being. But that wasn’t the case; a lot of the times, I was hesitant, insecure, and afraid. I respected the Page 15

ideas I was learning about for the first time, but couldn’t yet connect them to the reality around me.

I would ask myself, “Isn’t truth objective? Isn’t philosophy subjective? How does anyone even know what they think is right?” I’m not ashamed of having these doubts because working through confusion is a necessary step to clear understanding.

At the same time I was thinking more existentially about being a person and an American than I ever had before, I was also piling on extracurriculars that filled my day with new people and longer to-do lists. What we were reading in APAA at the time, Living for Change by Grace Lee Boggs, felt urgent and important, but so did my duties as president of CSA and assignments for Alternative Breaks. I was beginning to feel unsettling pangs of contradiction. The majority of my non-class time was being spent on running a student org and event planning to the point of near complete burnout. This ultimately did not reflect what I knew deep down to be a good use of my energy. But I had already committed, so what more could I do but ride it out until the end?

I don’t regret sticking it out with CSA and the 2018 ECAASU Conference and what have you. I had ambitions, acted on them, and learned a tremendous lot about myself my limitations, my habitual ways of relating to people, my flaws and my strengths. I won’t do that much again though.

“We know that we shouldn’t be taking on jobs or obligations that are going to require us to make sacrifices so that we won’t be able to commit to anything deeper.”

Throughout the busyness of junior year, I failed to prioritize APAA in a consistent way and that hurt me. I went to most reading groups each Sunday, but I wasn’t always as present as I could have been. I told myself

APAA Spring 2019

the readings were too difficult to talk about with everyone else unless I had sat down and read them closely beforehand. I told myself I had nothing worthwhile to contribute because there was still so much I didn’t know or understand about history, humanity, and everything in between. I told myself those things, not anybody else. I was depressed and lost again, but I had people and reading to guide me back towards the light right in front of me.

“It is only in relationship to other bodies, and many somebodies, that anybody is somebody.”

- Jimmy Boggs

I spent last summer healing, reading, eating, and learning how to drive (literally) and be happy again. I spent this last year of school trying not to forget how to heal, to varying degrees of success. I know I can still fall into old traps, spend my time in the wrong places, and be indulgent with myself when I need disciplined love -- thank goodness I know that about myself. But now that I know I am capable of working through confusion and mess, how am I going to make sure that the next few weeks and months (summer, again!) are aligned with the values I have developed in thinking with APAA? “What’s the point of reading history if we aren’t going to actually learn from it? How can we learn from the mistakes that we have each made? How can we learn from the mistakes that others have made?”

The thinking I have done together with these wonderful human beings I call my friends and comrades has dredged up deep vulnerability and strength from inside of me. Looking at what lies immediately ahead in time, I plan to read, spend time with people I love and who love me, graduate, go home, start working in a new place, and re-read “What We Know” often. When I’m working 9 to 5, I do not plan to get lost in the job, although it may take up the majority of my time, because I know it is my responsibility to make room in my head for thinking critically about the state of society. I plan to understand the community I move to and understand how and why others have rooted themselves in it. I hope to root myself too.

Edy

For a good portion of my time at Cornell, I felt I had to sacrifice so much to graduate and learn physics/math/cs/etc. If I sacrificed for just a little longer to grind and produce what was expected of me, then I could receive some job security in these competitive fields and really start living.

When I was going through these 2-3 allnighters a week, I was able to keep going because I wasn’t alone. However, unlike many of my peers, I really wasn’t very good at what I was studying. I was consistently on the brink of failing, and so my friends had to drag my corpse through these classes at the end of every semester. I wasn’t receiving too many fruits of my labor, so I was forced to Page 16

PARALLAX ask myself what I was working towards and why.

Over time it became clear that I – or any other student – wasn’t supposed to be asking these kinds of questions. I wasn’t supposed to question the fact that keeping up with my college education was supposed to prevent me from doing any critical self reflection, or to consider the system and accompanying values I was subscribing to by doing what I was expected to do as a student. I saw how the university was leading me to see myself as a student working towards tryna turn in tomorrow morning’s problem set and pass next week’s prelim, how I was supposed to be a student striving to make it to grad school or employment so I could make some bread for myself and my family instead of seeing myself in a greater context as a human being contributing toward the world.

I became aware that my exhaustion was growing within me – a dejected attitude towards the world – and that this was was widespread amongst my peers. At most, the problems we were facing as students and the larger crises in the world were being addressed by sarcastic memes. It became apparent that the university knew where they were leading students, and decided to tend to a few of the symptoms with some self-care workshops sprinkled throughout deadline seasons, while shifting the root of our problems to a lack of self-care instead of the university and society.

I did not have this clarity at the time, but I knew something was wrong and that I couldn’t keep going on like this forever. So, I shifted from physics to computer science and started reading with APAA. Doing computer science made me feel the same as physics, but reading Huey P. Newton helped me reach these conclusions and exposed me to a meaningful way to grow and work towards a better world with others.

Page 17

After graduating in December and getting a fellowship this semester, I thought I could actually start living, but I found myself with the same damn pressures as before, just a different form from exams and psets. It was clear to me that there is always pressure; there are always expectations for me to sacrifice my humanity to learn and produce more at every step of my “career”.

At this point I had read Huey and had reached the above conclusions, so I knew that living like this – doing all of this work – was doing something bad to me, that I was supposed to kill a little bit of myself inside in exchange for a fatty stack. This job was leading me to chase relief after work and on the weekends, not to think about others. It was unmistakable that I would march myself towards spiritual death if I didn’t dedicate time to being human instead of expecting that time to fall into my lap. I knew that this was the truth.

When confronted with the truth, I don’t know how reasonable it is to face it, and then shelve it to the side for a later, more convenient time. I feel I have to make changes with this new discovery. If I don’t, I am lying to myself. Whether I believe something or not does not change the fact that it is the truth. I will still feel the implications of this truth.

It was in my rational self-interest to graduate and get a job, but after that no

APAA Spring 2019 degree, job, or accomplishment is going to are only reading to make ourselves feel truly fulfill me. My heart will be from the better, then we shouldn’t be reading people I love, from understanding myself together at all. If you take what we read and how I relate to others, from growing seriously, it cannot stop there. my consciousness with others by learning about the historical context of the world we •For younger members of reading group: How live in and what others did to work towards can you learn from what older members have humanity, so that together we can live in a experienced and learned? better world. > There might come a time when external

Knowing the pressures I will find at circumstances or people will ask you certain jobs or another degree, the way I will to commit to a certain cause. Is it the face these truths I have realized is by not right thing to do? Read over what past putting myself in circumstances where I will members have said (in this issue of have to make the sacrifices I have made in the Parallax and previous ones) to help you past at Cornell. decide!

Guiding Questions

Based on what we know, we are faced with the challenge of figuring out where to go from here. Here are some questions to hold in our heads as we move into the upcoming weeks, months, and years of our lives.

•What am I spending the majority of my time doing and thinking about?

•Where is my energy going?

•How can I grow together with other people?

How can we relate to each other in a deeper way? > We can’t work towards a better world on our own; we need to do it together. We need to grow a collective consciousness and develop ideological clarity with others so we can understand the world around us, and so we can effectively address the root of society’s problems and build something new that is fair and works for all of us.

•Am I doing this – whatever it is – because it will make me more comfortable or secure? Am I making excuses for myself?

•How can I prevent myself from becoming dependent on the system I want to change?

•For ourselves and reading group: What’s the point of reading history if we aren’t going to actually learn from it? How can we learn from the mistakes that we have each made? How can we learn from the mistakes that others have made? > If we are not reading history to actually learn and apply it to our lives, and if we Page 18

PARALLAX Letter to My Sister

no patience to sustain relationships, and no energy to pursue interests. Fear, and its companions anxiety and withdrawal, became

By Sherry Xie my defining characteristics; my long list of exDear Jessica, friends can attest to this.

Jess – are you afraid? It’s normal – even

I have no doubt you hear this enough intended – that you should feel fear. After from your teachers, but you are at an all, this society imposes a lot of intentions incredibly pivotal stage in your life. You are on you, one of which is, as James Baldwin finally in high school, and because high school once said in an interview, “that you should is attached to some arbitrary designation of be frightened of what you do. As long as you maturity, you now have the opportunities feel guilty about it, the State can rule you.” to engage with more forms of knowledge This is a truth which I have just begun to both in and out of class, a step up from the discover for myself, and also a driving force watered-down histories you have learned for the writing of this letter, because another until now. You will begin to see America’s truth is that we have a lot more in common ugliness in more detail than before, and than either of us would like to admit. I know you will have to decide what you would like Mom always tells us that we were born with to stand for. In fact, people have probably hearts too soft and delicate for this world, started asking you questions that you have and that we should be careful not to let only barely begun to process, such as “Who ourselves be trampled over by the rest of are you?” and “What do you want to do with the world. She says this because she loves your life?” and you may have realized that us, and because she is also afraid, because underlying those questions are their ideas of “loving anybody and being loved by anybody who they think you are and what they want is a tremendous danger, a tremendous you to do. I imagine that, as a consequence, responsibility,” to again quote Baldwin. What the future has already begun to take on a Mom understands, and fears, is that your – terrifying, menacing quality. our – love for other humans is also a potent

I remember being afraid at age 14, force of self-destruction. It’s likely what every too, in a way I had never before experienced. revolutionary’s parent has, at some point or And in the following years, as some nameless another, understood, and feared. sense of urgency – exacerbated by college

But you should be proud of your soft, applications and career preparation and the easily-stirred heart, because it is both the general side effects of puberty – increasingly hallmark and last defense of humanity. In pressed against my spine, there would be the field of evolutionary biology, scientists days when I was immobilized and wholly have theorized that altruism may be one consumed by fear: the fear of being left trait which sets humans apart from apes, behind by my peers, of living in perpetual and as much as the rest of our species would mediocrity, of never being understood and like to prove them wrong, you were born thus doomed to fading out of existence. In to prove them right. To work towards the fact, I feared so much, and so extremely, advancement of the human race may never that for the longest time -- even now, to a be defined as economically relevant or degree -- I could never commit to anything, evolutionarily favorable, but it is work that because I could guarantee nothing. I let is critical to our collective survival, and can fear overwhelm me, to the point that I had only be achieved within the greater context Page 19

APAA Spring 2019 of love, for as long as people cannot learn to love each other, they will continue to enslave, oppress, and kill each other. To love is to humanize, and to humanize is to make progress. So I want to ask you to lean into this love you have for humanity, to nourish it and act on it throughout your life. And it is especially during this time in your life, when you are feeling most afraid of the future, and most suffocated by the pressure to conform, that you should most tightly hold onto what you know is right. Fear is real, but it is also a purposeful byproduct of the society in which we live, a manufactured state of being designed to isolate. Do not give in so easily, and fall into the same rabbithole as I did, because I can assure you there is nothing to be gained, and many things to be lost, from approaching relationships with distrust and detachment. It is easy to become lost in your own ideals, as well as the frustration you feel when others do not recognize those ideals, but it is much harder to swallow your ego and reach out to others. Because that is what love is: not the responsibility of shouldering the burden of society’s problems alone, but the responsibility of “[forcing] our brothers to see themselves as they are, to cease fleeing from reality and begin to change it,” as Baldwin wrote. Revolution will not come from the will of a select few, no matter how strong; it must, by definition, be driven by the wills of the broader population. As such, we must demand more and expect better from each other, because we can all be better.

That is when it becomes important that you choose love over fear, compassion over bitterness. The ability to make that choice is greater than any achievement which an institution – your school, the government, the greater part of society – would ever recognize or encourage in you.

We are six years apart in age. On the clock of the world, that is nothing; certainly not enough that we will live in substantially

different realities. And yet, as your older sister, and as someone who loves you endlessly, I feel responsible to create a better future for you, so that you will face not a black hole, but the open sea. W.E.B. Du Bois asks, “Is there anything we would accomplish with human beings? Do it with the immortal child, with a stretch of endless time for doing it and with infinite possibilities to work on.”

For me, you are an immortal child, in that I would like to see the world treat you better than it currently does. In the same way that I ask you to choose love instead of fear, in spite of fear, I ask the same of myself, and I ask you to demand that of me, to hold me accountable.

I can’t make any promises about the future, and I can’t help with dodging teachers’ nosy questions, although part of me wishes I could. But we both know that what’s more important is the present: what can we – as in you and I, and every other individual in this world – do to end human suffering now? Your capacity for love, and your ability to care for other people, are invaluable traits that society desperately needs in order to answer that question. As both your sister and a fellow human being, I hope you will cherish those aspects of yourself, and grow into someone whose contributions to the world will surpass anything I could ever dream of doing. As Baldwin said: “You have to go the way your blood beats. If you don’t live the only life you have, you won’t live any life at all.” Have faith in the way your blood beats; I do.

Your sister, Sherry

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PARALLAX Forward From Fear

parts of my identity, and being in danger.

I have also learned to understand the falsehoods that allowed these fears to

By Naomi Li exist. I realized that I had wrongly conflated certain attributes (work ethic, dedication, and

For the first two years of college (and intelligence) with identifying as a Cornell student. several years before that), I looked to the future But the question of safety and danger was a with fear – worrying that if there was one small much more difficult process – I was afraid to step out of line, then everything would come commit because I was afraid of losing safety. But crumbling down. If I stopped believing that in the world of American imperialism and racism, my academics defined me, then I would fail peace is only possible here if war and violence my classes, and if I failed all my classes, then I occurs elsewhere. We live in a world that holds us would never be employable, and then somehow hostage, only handing us the means of securing I would die starving. Writing it out, this train of safety if we decide to capitulate and work within thought seems ridiculous, but the past year has its unjust ways. The terrifying reality is that safety been a crucial process of understanding three is a lie. Even if you are able to secure material things: first, learning what I am actually afraid comforts for your loved ones alone, that safety of; second, coming to terms with that fear; and comes at the necessary endangerment of other finally, moving forward. people’s lives – and if that is the case, then what

First, I have had to learn what I am is your safety worth? This terrifying reality is also actually afraid of. When writing to his nephew its own kind of freedom; once you know that about white Americans, James Baldwin says: safety is an illusion, you are free to act. If we,

“Many of them, indeed, know better, but, who are committed to building a better world, as you will discover, people find it very difficult to act on what they know. To act is to be committed, decide not to act, then we simply flee the reality and to be committed is to be in danger. In this case, that we are surrounded by danger, or live in this the danger, in the minds of most white Americans, world based on the endangerment of others.

Yet even once we know these things, is the loss of their identity.” action still feels foreboding, because we cannot

The fear of losing one’s identity is not be absolutely certain if what we do is guaranteed exclusive to white Americans – we are all taught by this society to base our identity on something to be right. Again we can turn to Baldwin:

“If you think it’s right, then you’ve got to that keeps the system running; whether it is do it. If you think it’s wrong, then you mustn’t our jobs, our alma mater, our racial identity, do it…the whole nature of life is so terrible that our income bracket, or something else. One somebody’s right is always somebody else’s wrong. of the most painful parts of learning what we And these are the terrible choices one has always fear is discovering that some of our fears are got to make.” predicated on false promises. For me, it was

This is where I have arrived at, after a learning that going to Cornell did not actually year of reflection, reading, and thinking. I would say anything about my strength of character be lying if I said that I don’t still feel afraid of nor my capabilities. Baldwin also says that “to things – but I have learned that the only way to be committed is to be in danger”. Many people, move forward is to act. I used to fall into spirals myself included, fear danger. We understand of fear because I was running away from trying danger as the absence of safety. We believe to understand it – but once you turn around and that if we just keep our heads down, get our decide to confront and understand what you degrees, and work within the status quo, then fear, your fear can be overcome. It is true that my we can guarantee safety – a state of material right will always be someone else’s wrong – but and emotional comfort for our loved ones and I am no longer afraid to commit to what I believe ourselves. As I dug through the cyclical train of thought I would spiral into whenever I felt afraid, in, and start to move forward bravely.

I discovered I was afraid of two things: losing Page 21

APAA Spring 2019

Eunnuri Yi is a junior in the College of Arts & Sciences. She joined APAA spring of her freshman year, and has been living more and more ever since. Her feelings of uncertainty, ambivalence, and grimness from a year and a half ago have now mostly transitioned now into excitement and determination to struggle.

Henri Clarke is a junior studying Electrical & Computer Engineering and really likes plants.

They joined the fall of their freshman fall year and are proud of the seeds APAA has sown together.

Jeremiah Kim is a senior and leaving Cornell very soon. He will miss spending time with the people in APAA very much but he looks forward to seeing how the group continues to grow and change in the future.

Michelle Zhao is a senior graduating from the School of Industrial and Labor Relations. She started searching for substantial life purpose and a truth she could put her trust in sophomore year, and through good people and good fortune, arrived at APAA (and Grace, Jimmy, DuBois, MLK Jr., Baldwin, and Huey). Without her friends, her understanding of love would be monochromatic.

Regional Studies. APAA has been the most important part of his time in Ithaca.

Naomi Li is a junior studying Economics and Sociology. She has 40 succulents sitting on her windowsills and loves them all very much. She joined APAA in the spring of her junior year, and would not be the person she is without the incredible people in it and the incredible people they have read.

Edy Barraza studied physics and feels that reading with APAA has helped him grow as a person.

Raven Schwam-Curtis is a junior studying FGSS & Asian Studies.

Kathie Jiang is a junior studying Art History.

Joy Chen is a freshman studying Computer Science.

Jenny Xie is a junior studying English.

Sherry Xie is a junior double majoring in Anthropology and Computer Science. She joined APAA this year and as a result is currently going through a process of reevaluating her entire life (in a good way). Please keep her in your thoughts.

Brian Byun is a senior majoring in Urban and Page 22