The Georgetown Voice, April 18

APRIL 18, 2022

DONORS, DEANS, AND DIVERSITY: BEHIND THE SCENES OF AN EVOLVING SFS CURRICULUM

VISIONS 2022 MARKS 25 YEARS OF CELEBRATING BLACK GEORGETOWN

By Sarah Watson

By Max Zhang

YES, I KNOW WHERE THE MASJID IS

By Aminah Malik

Contents

April 18, 2022 Volume 54 | Issue 14

4

Editor-In-Chief Sarah Watson Managing Editor Max Zhang

editorial

Georgetown's "global perspective" shouldn't end at Europe

internal resources Editor for RDI Darren Jian Editor for Sexual Sophie Tafazzoli Violence Coverage Service Chair Annemarie Cuccia Social Chair Alice Gao

EDITORIAL BOARD

5

news

Gaps in South Asia curriculum elicit student petition NORA SCULLY

6

features

Donors, Deans, and Diversity: Behind the scenes of an evolving SFS curriculum SARAH WATSON

8

news

After two years, half of Georgetown students receive bystander training online—and say it isn't effective

Executive Editor Features Editor News Editor Assistant News Editors

10

features

MAX ZHANG

15

16

Rex Orange County's WHO CARES? puts an optimistic spin on feeling aimless

Horse races, Heated Stares, and Happy Endings: Bridgerton season two deals in heavyhandedness

After decades of silence, Georgetown's music program revives Margaret Bonds' music

MAANASI CHINTAMANI

18

leisure

features

halftime leisure

MAYA KOMINSKY

on the cover

leisure Executive Editor John Woolley Leisure Editor Lucy Cook Assistant Editors Pierson Cohen, Maya Kominsky, Alexandra Lenehan Halftime Editor Chetan Dokku Assistant Halftime Editors Adora Adeyemi, Ajani Jones, Gokul Sivakumar sports Executive Editor Tim Tan Sports Editor Hayley Salvatore Assistant Editors Andrew Arnold, Lucie Peyrebrune, Thomas Fischbeck Halftime Editor Carlos Rueda Assistant Halftime Editors Langston Lee, Natalia Porras, Dylan Vasan

JUPITER HUANG

sports

Georgetown rugby is winning like hell. Where's their school support?

ANNABELLA HOGE

12

Executive Editor Spread Editors Cover Editor Assistant Design Editors

HAYLEY SALVATORE

Yes, I know where the masjid is

sports

Out of the Park, but Under the Radar: Georgetown baseball defies expectations

AMINAH MALIK

13

leisure

Jujutsu Kaisen 0 explores the tricky relationship between love and grief

“visions”

LUCIE PEYREBRUNE AND CARLOS RUEDA

design Allison DeRose Alex Giorno, Connor Martin Deborah Han Insha Momin, Sabrina Shaffer, Dane Tedder, Sean Ye

copy Copy Chief Maya Knepp Assistant Copy Editors Kenny Boggess, Maanasi Chintamani, Julia Rahimzadeh Editors Donovan Barnes, Christopher Boose, Jennifer Guo, Ian Tracy, Anna Vernacchio

19

voices

AJANI JONES

opinion Executive Editor Annette Hasnas Voices Editor Sarah Craig Assistant Voices Editors James Garrow, Kulsum Gulamhusein, Lou Jacquin Editorial Board Chair Advait Arun Editorial Board Annemarie Cuccia, William Hammond, Annabella Hoge, Jupiter Huang, Paul James, Darren Jian, Allison O’Donnell, Sarah Watson, Alec Weiker, John Woolley, Max Zhang

Visions 2022 marks 25 years of celebrating Black Georgetown

14

news Nora Scully Annabella Hoge Paul James Margaret Hartigan, Jupiter Huang, Graham Krewinghaus

multimedia Executive Editor John Woolley Podcast Editor Jillian Seitz Assistant Podcast Editor Alexes Merritt Photo Editor Annemarie Cuccia online Website Editor Tyler Salensky Social Media Editor Emma Chuck Assistant Social Media Editor Franzi Wild

DEBORAH HAN

“There is always going to be a way in which we find community with one another.”

PG. 10

business General Manager Megan O’Malley Assistant Manager of Akshadha Lagisetti Accounts & Sales Assistant Manager of Abby Smith Alumni Outreach support Contributing Editors Sarina Dev, Ethan Greer, Caroline Hamilton,

Josh Klein, Roman Peregrino, Orly Salik, Sophie Tafazzoli, Abby Webster

Staff Contributors Nathan Barber, Nicholas Budler, Cecilia Cassidy,

contact us

editor@georgetownvoice.com Leavey 424 Box 571066 Georgetown University 3700 O St. NW Washington, DC 20057

2

The opinions expressed in The Georgetown Voice do not necessarily represent the views of the administration, faculty, or students of Georgetown University, unless specifically stated.

Columns, advertisements, cartoons, and opinion pieces do not necessarily reflect the views of the Editorial Board or the General Board of The Georgetown Voice. The university subscribes to the principle of responsible freedom of expression of its student editors. All materials copyright The Georgetown Voice, unless otherwise indicated.

THE GEORGETOWN VOICE

photo courtesy of lauren smith

Natalie Chaudhuri, Romita Chattaraj, Erin Ducharme, Panna Gattyan, Andrea Ho, Christine Ji, Julia Kelly, Steven Kingkiner, Lily Kissinger, Ashley Kulberg, David McDaniels, Amelia Myre, Anna Sofia Neil, Owen Posnett, Omar Rahim, Brett Rauch, Nicholas Riccio, Caroline Samoluk, Ryan Samway, Michelle Serban, Isabel Shepherd, Amelia Shotwell, Jo Stephens, Isabelle Stratta, Francesca Theofilou, Diego Ventero, Amelia Wanamaker, Hailey Wharram, Jina Zhao

Page 3 Songs to cry to but you can pretend it's because of your seasonal allergies

husein,

mmond, g, Paul Donnell, hn

y,

okul

amani,

, Anna

Hamilton, Salik, Sophie

ia Cassidy, Erin o, Christine Kissinger, elia Myre, Rahim, e Samoluk, l Shepherd, e Stratta, Amelia Woodhouse,

butterflies by allison derose; rat with a pearl earring by dane tedder; fire graphic by nora scully

une,

Dane

→ GOSSIP RAT

→ PLAYLIST

ang,

Dylan

An eclectic collection of jokes, puns, doodles, playlists, and news clips from the collective mind of the Voice staff.

1. Love is a Losing Game Amy Winehouse 2. my tears ricochet Taylor Swift 3. Two Slow Dancers Mitski 4. Iris The Goo Goo Dolls 5. Wait M83 6. And So It Goes Billy Joel 7. Manhattan Sara Bareilles 8. Wish You Were Here Pink Floyd 9. Past Life Maggie Rogers 10. When We're Older James Blake 11. Liability Lorde 12. Slack Jaw Sylvan Esso

Everything has gone to shit.

Ever since that fox bit nine people on April 6, including a congressman, campus has been stricken with bad luck.

You all should’ve known the bad vibes that small furry animals bring. My theory? All the recent problems on campus can be attributed to that fox’s rampage.

Slept through course registration? The fox’s fault. A JesRes 3:00 am fire alarm with no fire in sight? The fox is on the move. That 10 page paper due after break? The professor who assigned it is actually the fox.

I would say I’m offended at the fox’s attempt to encroach on my territory, terrorizing Georgetown students, but, I can’t help but respect the fox’s methods. The extent of the fox’s influence … I see it everywhere.

I stare into my crystal ball and see that the reign of the fox has not ended. I fear for my Hoyas, my delicious, soon-to-be-devoured Hoyas. Let’s see how long the biting lasts. xoxo, Gossip Rat

→ WATSON AND ALLISON'S FIRESIDE CHAT

“It’s time to stop caring so much. Wear your pajamas across campus.

Growl in frustration.

Hiss at strangers. Let it all out.”

→ OVERHEARD AT GEORGETOWN

“I got out of the Uber last night and the driver called out, ‘Ma’am, you forgot your spoon!’”

→ ALLISON'S ANIMAL DOODLES

APRIL 18, 2022

3

EDITORIALS

Georgetown’s “global perspective” shouldn’t end at Europe

BY THE EDITORIAL BOARD

J

ust eight hours after the Russian military began its invasion of Ukraine, the SFS hosted a town hall on the crisis. Statements of solidarity with Ukraine from top university officials followed. The hundreds of students and faculty gathered in the ICC Galleria that afternoon testified to the university’s commitment in engaging global challenges. The university mobilized its faculty and programming resources when the moment demanded it. In supporting campus-wide engagement with the tragedy, Georgetown did the right thing.

We only wish that happened more often.

The world is rife with crises, and for Georgetown to call its campus community truly engaged with global affairs—as it does in admissions brochures—it should organize event programming and mobilize the community to engage with conflicts that, as of now, the administration has left largely unaddressed: the Tigray War, Israeli airstrikes in Gaza, and Saudi Arabia’s bombing of thousands of Yemeni civilians, among others.

Students are eager to participate in dialogue about these subjects, whose humanitarian tolls are just as heartbreaking and unthinkable as the Russo-Ukrainian War. To live up to its commitment of a “global perspective,” the administration should consistently highlight and fund campus efforts to engage with these events.

Let Georgetown’s ongoing response to Ukraine guide its future engagement with world affairs, no matter the region or race of the affected.

Whether the culprit is misallocation of campus resources or unwillingness to engage politically, the university engages with global conflicts inconsistently. Consider, for instance, the war in Tigray that began in 2020: There were half a million deaths, over two million displaced, and some nine million Tigraians malnourished before last month’s humanitarian truce was struck. Georgetown’s most recent programming was a series of three Berkley Center articles published over eight months ago. Surely the university could have offered more opportunities for education and advocacy once students returned to campus last fall.

When posters advertising Israeli Apartheid Week were recently torn down in Red Square, the school’s official response consisted of nothing more than a mass email commenting briefly on Georgetown’s commitment to free speech, with no explicit reference to the posters’ subject.

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THE GEORGETOWN VOICE

While the school’s condemnation of tearing down the flyers, especially in a designated free speech zone, is laudable, its failure to even mention the occupation of Palestine— the very topic being silenced—is glaring. Last May, when Israel launched airstrikes, students received no official university communication acknowledging the escalation’s impact on Georgetown community members, most especially Palestinian, Israeli, Jewish, and Muslim students. Any campus effort to support Palestine and Palestinians comes primarily from students and faculty, without institutional support for awareness through education.

We cannot know for sure why the university has decided to not engage with some conflicts.

It seems possible that Georgetown’s notable supporters and donors influence its politics; the university may not want to step on the toes of those who fund its many chairships, programs, and scholarships by financially or organizationally engaging with some student activism. Then again, maybe Georgetown’s administration simply isn’t that invested in engagement surrounding Palestine, Tigray, or Yemen.

Both undue donor influence and a lack of care are inexcusable at a school committed to giving its students a “global perspective.” To mitigate those issues, the administration should invite students and faculty to deliberate and decide on a transparent set of engagement guidelines that would empower the university to support events and issue official statements for global issues the way it did for Ukraine. Official statements are inherently politicized—but it would be categorically better for everyone to know that those statements were guided by studentand faculty-mediated guidelines rather than suspicions that the university chooses to care more about Ukraine than elsewhere.

Still, administrators have a school to run and students to serve, goals which are more important than commenting on and helping organize events responding to every conflict; Georgetown’s administration cannot realistically address every global injustice equitably. But faculty could: Improving resource distribution across programs and departments would give faculty a much better shot at giving the Georgetown community better opportunities to engage with international issues, each calling for our attention and their expertise, with or without the administration.

Recent student-led curriculum change movements—for South Asian Studies, Asian American Studies, Indigenous Studies, and Latinx Studies—demonstrate that students are eager to better engage with historically marginalized issues. (The implementation of diversity requirements took years to succeed.) Their petitions highlight how Gergetown’s existing curriculum, determined by the Deans’ Office and filtered through what Prof. Jacques Berlinerblau called a “rigid, secretive, top-down” selection system, fails to reflect many topics students consider important.

Map of the Modern World, for instance, fails to include any content on the issues of racial and gender inequality within its “Beyond Borders” lecture. Other core classes such as International Relations and Comparative Political Systems are known for inconsistencies in syllabi between sections. One GOVT-060 International Relations section, for example, spends 3 class periods on global terrorism, and another on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, without once citing an article by a non-white or Muslim scholar. Students are often taught skewed takes on world affairs that fit within models of neoliberal international thought that neither give students adequate context nor push the boundaries of political thought toward a greater focus on global justice. Unsurprisingly, these fundamental flaws and oversights in our curriculum limit the student body’s ability to critically engage with global issues.

Not only should Georgetown set up transparent mechanisms to create spaces for public engagement, it should also better fund and bureaucratically support efforts to foster dialogue.

It should create courses around issues that are obstructed by Eurocentric understandings of what conflicts are worth our attention. Material support will only fall short if Georgetown cannot fundamentally reframe how students receive the “global perspective” they were promised.

Making these structural changes will take time. But students have already spent too much of their time and effort these past few years highlighting marginalized international issues and petitioning for a less Eurocentric curriculum without substantial help. It’s the administration’s turn to work with students and faculty to make Georgetown into the global education environment it should and can someday be. G

graphic by elin choe; layout by lou jacquin

NEWS

Gaps in South Asia curriculum elicit student petition

BY NORA SCULLY

G

eorgetown University has only one professor teaching Hindi, a language spoken by more than half a billion people worldwide.

Last year, Dr. C. Christine Fair, an associate professor in the SFS, taught seven classes in a semester—more than a tenured faculty member would be expected to teach for the entire academic year. This fall, she will teach a double workload of two Hindi classes and three security studies classes.

The SFS retains only a handful of South Asian professors in faculty ranks, offers only one formalized South Asian curriculum for undergraduate students, and provides minimal South Asian language instruction and structured academic tracks. In response, members of Georgetown’s South Asian community created a working group and drafted a petition calling for the university to hire more South Asian professors and offer more courses related to South Asia and South Asian languages. The petition has 261 signatures at the time of publication.

“That a subcontinent of two billion people with a history that stretches back to the first civilizations, every single world religion, and might I say, a very strong geopolitical presence in the region—it is a shame that Georgetown has little to nothing on this region,” Nikash Harapanahalli (SFS ’24), one of the petition’s three authors and vice president of the South Asian Society, said.

Harapanahalli, Suhani Garg (SFS ’23), and Shevani Tewari (SFS ’24) launched the petition this spring. “People know that this is important and they see it as missing at Georgetown. The problem is bringing people together to work on it,” Garg said.

The only formalized South Asian curriculum for undergraduate students is the India Initiative, which focuses on research and teachings around India.

The initiative, however, has a non-inclusive and politicized history on campus.

First, the initiative limits its focus to India— meaning much of South Asia is not represented.

“South Asia is a mosaic, not a monolith. And any program that covers it must reflect that,” Harapanahalli said.

According to faculty, the India Initiative has also been riddled with leadership problems. The former director of the initiative, Dr. Irfan Nooruddin, is on leave from the posting but remains a professor of Indian politics at Georgetown. His replacement, Dr. Cecilia Van Hollen, is a non-tenured professor and not of South Asian descent.

Pictured above, left to right: Suhani Garg, Shevani Tewari, and Nikash Harapanahalli.

“For too long at Georgetown, the study of India has been organized by people with no connection to India—no lived experience and no academic training,” Dr. Shareen Joshi, professor of development and economics, said.

“Imagine if the study of the United States boiled down to one person, in London. It would be laughable,” Joshi added. Fair similarly pointed out the implications of how the initiative has been structured. “I think it’s tone-deaf, really tone-deaf,” she said.

Decisions about the India Initiative curriculum were limited to a handful of professors and included no opportunities for student input, according to Garg. “We know that the process for creating initiatives related to South Asia have not been inclusive, not inclusive of the faculty and by extension, not inclusive of the students,” Garg said.

Some professors have noted this problem is reflective of institutional issues within the SFS. “I have signed countless petitions from justifiably irate students about the state of India and South Asian studies at the SFS,” Dr. Jacques Berlinerblau, professor of Jewish civilization, wrote in an opinion piece for the Voice. “The irony is that we do have a few top-flight scholars of India on our faculty, often left out of the curriculum decisionmaking processes. Shouldn’t they be the ones tasked by the SFS to build a coherent program of study geared to this area? And shouldn’t they work as a collective?”

Joshi stressed the importance of having tenured professors—who, in theory, have published more research and enjoy greater academic freedom and protection from termination—in any curriculum-changing working group. “That’s how [the University of] Chicago did it. It’s how all campuses that are serious about a region do it,” Joshi said, emphasizing that bringing together experts with a long-term future at the university contributes to the sustainability of proposed changes.

In the meantime, professors like Fair are overburdened. “I need someone to negotiate a reasonable teaching load from me,” Fair said in an interview with the Voice. “I don’t know how to do it. I can’t do it myself and the people that I’ve asked have not taken it on board.”

To broaden the scope of South Asian programming at Georgetown, students like

Harapanahalli believe Georgetown must expand the languages it offers to students.

The Hindi program at Georgetown has been inconsistent in its scheduling and often poorly advertised to students.

Harapanahalli wanted to take Hindi, but was unaware of its availability. As a result, they made the decision to study Persian instead. “That altered my track, the next four years of my life.”

Fair is working to expand the language offerings at Georgetown. She has been searching for adjunct language instructors for different programs, including Bangla, Urdu, and Tamil.

She noted that university finances play a factor in why certain languages are offered, while others are not. “Without some significant confidence that students would enroll in those classes, it’s a big risk, it’s a big gamble the university is taking,” she said.

But according to Garg, informal petitions released by the South Asian Society to gauge interest in Hindi and Urdu classes noted that more than 40 students would take one of the two courses should they be offered, perhaps proving the demonstrated commitment Georgetown requires to make economically shrewd choices.

“We were able to show the administration that students are interested in taking South Asian courses because that was a common excuse,” Garg said.

Garg and Harapanahalli have been in conversation with Dean Joel Hellman and Vice Dean Mark Giordano, who works on the faculty committee of the India Initiative. According to Garg, Hellman agreed to call a faculty meeting with students present to discuss tangible steps the administration can take to meet the demands of the petition.

“It is the beginning of a conversation the university must have with its students,” Fair said.

Beyond administrators, Harapanahalli called on Hoyas to go beyond simply signing the petition and educate themselves on the region and its diversity.

“What we would want from the community isn’t just to sign this or to push for this but to be aware that there are unique cultures and histories and languages and futures in this group of people,” Harapanahalli said.

“I deserve the same resources to critically analyze my heritage.” G

photos courtesy of suhani garg, shevani tewari, and nikash harapanahalli; layout by alex giorno

APRIL 18, 2022

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FEATURES

Donors, Deans, and Diversity: Behind the scenes of an evolving SFS curriculum

BY SARAH WATSON

I

f you registered for classes this week, you might have selected the English Department’s “Witches, Bitches, Bimbos” or the Anthropology Department’s “Cupcakes/Pies/Power.” You could be planning to study one of Georgetown’s 20 languages, from Korean to Farsi, or the current geopolitical crises in Ukraine.

In 2022, however, you cannot study classic Georgetown courses like “Steamship Classification & Construction” or “Ports & Terminals.” Nowhere on MyAccess will you find “Wharf Management,” “Marine Insurance,” or “Physical Training and Hygiene.” Over the decades, Georgetown’s academic focuses have adapted alongside new demands (and a decreased interest in the ins and outs of naval stewardship).

Today, student efforts around academics have shifted to establishing more diverse curricula, deepening regional studies, rethinking diversity requirements, and hiring faculty of color. That progress, however, hinges on donor interest and the machinations of curriculum building.

Georgetown’s curricular focuses have always correlated with geopolitics. “There’s no doubt, course offerings are highly responsive for what is going on in the world,” Anthony Arend (SFS ’80, MSFS ’82, PhD ’85), Government professor and former MSFS director, said. During World War I, Georgetown’s curriculum shifted from traditional liberal arts towards an emphasis on international business and language. “There was a sense in which the world had undergone fundamental change,” Arend said.

World War II and the Cold War sparked academic regional focuses in Russia and Eastern Europe; after 9/11, class offerings analyzing terrorism grew like never before.

Interest in climate change and global health led to the 1982 addition of the Science, Technology, and International Affairs major.

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THE GEORGETOWN VOICE

Asian and African Studies also joined the academy in the 1980s, following increased awareness of postcolonial impacts.

But students don’t think this evolution is complete. Lucy Doyle (COL ’22), co-president of the College Academic Council (CAC), hopes to see new programs built around student requests for regional and ethnic studies, referencing petitions for South Asian, African, Indigenous, and Asian American and Pacific Islander studies.

“I would like to see more institutional support given to the programs that are popular amongst students and culturally relevant but hindered by funding and staffing issues,” Doyle offered.

CAC isn’t the only academic group that wants change. Felipe Lobo Koerich (SFS ’21, LAS ’22), former president of the SFS Academic Council (SFSAC), identified large worldview gaps within the SFS curriculum. “We still focus far too much on the United States when exploring IR [International Relations] and diplomacy,” he argued. “Most of what we learn is from the U.S. perspective almost exclusively and then tends to focus on Europe or to a lesser extent China/ East Asia and the Middle East. Africa is glaringly ignored unless you go out of your way to study it.”

Georgetown’s curriculum has long been rooted in a western bias. When the SFS was founded in 1919, its initial purpose was to produce businessmen and merchants in collaboration with the Department of Commerce, not State, as the U.S. began to emerge from isolationism.

Foreign policy only extended to America’s economic interests in Latin America and Western Europe. A 1924 comparative politics class only covered European states and commonwealth governments, only going as eastward as Turkey in the syllabus.

According to Arend, Georgetown’s strategic plans for its curriculum are determined by faculty

and deans in each school, in conversation with student representatives from elected academic councils. But Georgetown’s curriculum does not respond to student requests without another powerful variable: donors.

Students pursue majors within institutionalized departments, like Government, while programs, like Asian or African Studies, are a collection of courses students can sample at their pleasure or achieve minors and certificates in. New programs are created when there is adequate funding to hire an endowed chair who can develop the curriculum and recruit faculty.

According to Arend, this funding comes mostly from donors. He pointed to the Prisons and Justice Initiative directed by Marc Howard and the Center for Security and Emerging Technology.

“How do we get to do more? We connect with donors who can support various aspects of that program,” he said.

Lobo Koerich confirmed that donations are critical for curricular development. “Funding and staffing consistently came up as barriers, often closely intertwined as the university expressed concerns that it did not have the faculty with the expertise,” he said of his time as SFSAC president.

While donors influence the development or creation of new programs and departments, Arend argued new curricula must also line up with a school’s goals. “The academic goals of the university are driving what we want to do with the fundraising, it's not that the fundraising is driving the academic goals,” he said.

Still, bureaucracy and lethargy associated with curriculum evolution cause further snags, according to Lobo Koerich.

As it stands, professors are often stretched thin between semi-developed programs.

Programs offer academic flexibility to students because professors from multiple disciplines

design by leon cheung; layout by josh klein

can teach courses, but they also lack the funding and faculty of departments. “Professors whose academic home is in a program need to have a dual focus, in a program and a department,” Doyle explained, describing split priorities.

With professors’ attention divided, a program’s offerings change with adjunct lecturers and further curriculum waits on donors to fund chairships. “These bureaucratic obstacles limit professors and ultimately affect students,” Doyle added.

Donors are critical to the growth of programs like Asian Studies by paving the way for additional faculty. Alongside Michael Green and Evan Medeiros’ appointments to director and Penner Family chair positions respectively, 16 adjuncts fill in the non-endowed teaching positions. Most are professors of color and take on the bulk of the instructional load, despite being paid less than tenured or assistant professors. With limited resources, the program covers Asia broadly, with little specification into South or Central Asia, or Pacific Islander and Asian American identities.

Georgetown’s African Studies program is directed by Lahra Smith, but the study does not have its own department. The program is supported by 14 faculty, only three of whom are officially titled as African Studies professors.

African Studies relies on 10 adjuncts as well as faculty from other fields.

Arend explained that Georgetown has had Asian and African studies since he was an undergraduate, pointing to a track record of expanding curriculum, even if there is opportunity to improve. “We need to do more in Asia, we’ve seen strengthening of those programs,” he said. “I’ve seen a trajectory which is dramatically increasing in that area, the same with African Studies.”

Doyle believes the university should be more transparent about its academic plans. She acknowledged hiring new faculty is not a quick process. “But they could be more communicative of what subject matters they are hiring for so students had a better idea of their future priorities,” she added.

But creating new programs for specific regions is just one step in improving the diversity of curriculum. Lobo Koerich and current SFSAC president Satya Adabala (SFS ’22) argue that a comprehensive, anti-racist review of existing courses is essential for future curricular growth.

In the past, SFSAC proposed expediting the hire of diverse professors to instruct both regional and entry-level courses, like “International Relations” (IR) and “Comparative Political Systems” (CPS). The goal was to diversify the identities and perspectives of the professors who guide each class with examples from their areas of expertise and lived experiences. “Having professors from diverse regions that specialize in regions outside of just U.S. foreign policy, Europe, or China/East Asia could introduce the same effect,” Lobo Koerich explained. “Imagine learning CPS from an Africanist that uses the region for examples and literature.”

According to Adabala, the SFSAC is actively working with the administration on proposals to center core SFS classes around authors of color, women, and academics from nonwestern regions. “The idea is to get more voices into the syllabus,” she said. “It shouldn't just be that we study white male authors then tack on five authors of color at the end, but rather that you are engaging meaning with different sources and perspectives throughout,” she said.

SFSAC has a proposal to restructure required introductory courses like “Political and Social Thought” (PST), IR, CPS, and SFS history offerings to contextualize theories around race and society and recognize the racism of many historic thinkers. Adabala explained that philosophy courses could still include readings from syllabus mainstays like Locke and Rousseau, but should also discuss how their philosophies were published within a European-centric, white society and conditioned how elite Europeans viewed—and treated—non-white people.

“How much do their philosophies only apply to certain people? And are they applying to the wider groups of people that existed in society?” she asked. “What were their attitudes and opinions towards race and towards women?”

“Maybe there is a new way of teaching PST,” Adabala said.

The SFSAC’s work is reflective of a much bigger effort to diversify the core curriculum: an entirely revamped diversity requirement.

Before graduation, all undergraduates must fulfill two “engaging diversity” courses: one international, one domestic. Adabala said while she’s glad the current diversity requirement exists, its current review provides an opportunity to invite students to reflect on diversity and race in a more meaningful way.

In the summer of 2020, Amanda Yen (COL ’23) and Natalia Lopez (SFS ’22) surveyed student interest in changing the diversity requirement. They were recruited to research with the Hub for Equity and Innovation, which led a 2021 project to get a better understanding of the state of the diversity requirement.

According to Adabala, findings showed that the current requirement applies to dozens of courses with vague relevance to meaningful discussions on race and racism.

The research identified one student, who after taking 40 courses, found that more than 30 of them filled the diversity requirement.

“The language is too vague,” Yen wrote in an email to the Voice. “It seems to be centered more on recognizing diversity of experiences than on structures of power; in fact, the word ‘diversity’ is open to really broad interpretation.”

“It requires more thinking about which courses are being flagged as ‘diversity,’” Adabala said of the current requirement.

“How effective is it? Is it fulfilling the purpose of what it is trying to do?”

After the report, Rohan Williamson, vice president of education, asked Yen to cochair the Diversity Requirement Committee.

Alongside Alisa Colon (COL ’23), Yen offers student input into the design of a new diversity requirement, which is proposed to the Main Campus Core Curriculum Committee with upper-level administration.

“I believe an updated and expanded requirement should include discussion about systems of power, privilege, and oppression,” Yen suggested. Instead of the current diversity tag that applies to a wide range of classes, Yen believes students could benefit from an overarching background course, just like how all SFS students take “Map of the Modern World” for a crashcourse in geopolitics.

Yen explained it is important that an updated diversity requirement does not just reference marginalized groups within the curriculum but centers discussions on race and racism. According to Yen, the original group of students who helped establish the diversity requirement imagined just that.

They pitched a “Problem of Race” course to discuss racial identities, Georgetown’s history of racism, and lived experiences of current people who hold marginalized identities on campus.

She thinks a university-wide required class would help foster necessary, but underprioritized, discussions. “I think a small course that introduces every student to social identities, the cycle of socialization, and structures of power would help our campus have less polarizing conversations about identity.”

Such a course would benefit student discussions about race, Yen believes, with properly-trained faculty facilitators who could ensure conversations center the viewpoints of students of color without placing unnecessary burden on those with marginalized identities.

But there are also opportunities for those discussions to go beyond an introductory course. Yen agrees—bringing professors of color to Georgetown and building out ethnic studies are crucial next steps. “The most transformative classes I've taken are those that have specifically focused on the experiences of marginalized peoples, like ‘Asian American Lit’ or ‘Race and Politics,’” Yen said, also calling for emphasis on Indigenous Studies in the curriculum.

Moving forward, Doyle emphasizes that student voices are key to effective, anti-racist curricular development. Her advice to the administration: “[Listen] to what groups of students have repeatedly called for over the years.”

Adabala hopes that diversity and antiracism efforts become inherent to every class’ development. “Hopefully it gets to the point you don’t even need a diversity requirement because it is naturally and seamlessly integrated into every course,” Adabala said.

“Diversity is a part of your curriculum.” G APRIL 18, 2022

7

after two years, half of georgetown students receive bystander training online—and say it isn’t effective by annabella hoge Content warning: This article discusses sexual assault and violence.

O

ver two years ago, the class of 2023 sat in multipurpose rooms around campus for a half-day Bystander Intervention Training session for sexual assault prevention in the first weeks of their freshman year. Over the past few weeks, current first-years, sophomores, and transfer students sat in front of their laptops and completed “U Got This!”, a virtual bystander training module that became available in mid-March. Until recently, more than half of the student body lacked any university-run training on how to intervene in situations of assault, harassment, and other issues related to sexual and interpersonal violence.

Students were required to complete the online course by Apr. 11 to avoid a hold on their registration for fall 2022 classes. While some students welcomed the return of some form of bystander training, others feel the online programming is not sufficient in either providing new knowledge on intervention or addressing the larger sexual health climate of Georgetown’s student body.

“It was lacking in the way that they presented the material, the way they tested you on the material and made sure you retained the information, and also the way the student body responded to it,” Sarah Pino (NHS ’24) said of the training.

“Bystander intervention education is a proven public health strategy for empowering and equipping students to prevent, intervene in and respond to sexual assault,” an email sent to students on Mar. 17 read. The message, from Dean of Students Jeanne Lord and Title IX Coordinator and Director of Title IX Compliance Samantha Berner, cited COVID-19 restrictions as reason for the training being moved online.

Upperclassmen student leaders voiced concerns about the online training and the impact it will have on the safety of Georgetown students.

“Online learning is not very engaging, no matter how interactive these modules claim to be,” Lauryn Ping (COL ’23), organizing director for H*yas for Choice (HFC) said. HFC is a student-run club on campus that, among other things, provides Hoyas with contraceptives and information on healthy sexual behavior. “Being in-person and really talking about these issues with other people—I just feel like

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THE GEORGETOWN VOICE

that’s the best method of really coming to terms with the gravity of sexual violence.”

Bystander Intervention Training has been mandatory for all first-year and transfer students since 2017. This move was in part a response to a 2016 survey showing an eight-point increase in the percentage of female students at Georgetown who self-reported sexual assault relative to averages from the Association of American Universities. The university introduced a series of initiatives to address these concerns and a lack of peer intervention in suspected assault or harassment, though a 2019 survey found little change in self-reported assaults. The second survey did, however, report an increase in bystander interventions by students.

The former five-hour “Bringing in the Bystander” (BITB) training was normally run through Health Education Services (HES), but the virtual curriculum offered to students this semester, “U Got This!”, is delivered through Catharsis Productions, according to HES Director Carol Day. Georgetown offered no mandatory bystander training of any form in fall 2020, and the initial promise to deploy a fall 2021 training never materialized. While some members of the class of 2024 and transfer students who participated in the Summer Hilltop Immersion Program (SHIP) participated in optional bystander workshops, the majority of Hoyas arriving on campus for the first time this past fall had not been trained to provide support or safely intervene in instances of sexual assault, causing concern for student safety.

HES staffing cuts during the pandemic contributed to the pause in programming, including the vacancy left by Erin Hill, the former interpersonal violence training and education specialist, in September 2020. The role was not filled until March 2022, with the hiring of Hannah Gray. “We had capacity issues for one. We had just hired the person whose job it is to implement this program,” Day said.

While the university aimed to revive the training in-person, according to Day, the logistical strain made it impossible for HES to implement. Roughly 3,500 undergraduate students required training, but room capacity limits and COVID-19 distancing measures limited the understaffed office’s ability to cover every untrained student. “If we couldn't do

it, to get everybody from this year's freshman class and the sophomore class through the program, we really should pause and not try to do it halfway or partway,” Day said.

HES hires and trains bystander facilitators— both students and staff—to run BITB sessions hosting 20 to 40 students. “We'd have to find and hire these people for bystander facilitators, we'd have to train them. They would have to put together logistics for an in-person or even a virtual program at a massive scale. We don't have the capacity to do that at all,” Day said.

Even hiring a new staff member for the education position was too little, too late. “Certainly we were never happy that two classes of students hadn't had this training because we really think it's really important and vital,” she added.

In a January 2022 Voice interview with University President John DeGioia, he reaffirmed the administration’s commitment to holding these trainings for students and admitted the university’s responsibility for the lengthy absence. He cited the public health crisis for the disruption to this commitment. “It’s not an excuse, it’s on us, we should have figured out how to get it done, but we will,” he said at the time.

Despite the planned training being pushed back once more, DeGioia promised it would be administered before the end of the spring semester. “We will either do it virtually, or we will do it hybrid, or we will do it in person, but we will do it, and it will happen this spring,” he said.

Two months later, the university finally delivered on its promise with the online course.

“Hopefully, fingers crossed, everybody takes it seriously and hits the deadline for completion or at least gets through it this semester, because then we will have people educated at some same baseline level that we can get back to,” Day said.

“U Got This!” is organized into three modules: “U Against the World,” “U Gotta Know When It’s Wrong,” and “U Gotta Be an Upstander.” Each takes between 15 and 20 minutes. The course begins and ends with a survey asking students to respond to a series of questions about sex, relationships, toxic culture, and domestic and physical violence by indicating whether they strongly disagree, disagree, neutral, agree, or strongly agree with provided statements.

design by insha momin

The training, however, is far more limited than the previous five-hour, interactive course that called on students to seriously ponder strategies for safe intervention. “There was no real assessment of skills,” Pino said. “So I just found that a bit counterintuitive.”

The first module followed the initial survey with an animated video series featuring lessons defining keywords like “interpersonal violence” and “normalizing” as a way to introduce bystander culture. Interactive activities included determining whether words like “screwing” and “pounding” were indicative of sex, violence, or both, and indicating whether specific images that depicted sex or sexualized people were “cool” or “not so cool.”

“It seemed often very tacky, like it was catering to the wrong audience with the way everything was portrayed and all these attention-grabbing statements and phrases,” Pino said. She added that the training was not effective in teaching her new information.

The second module discussed consent, sexual assault, and abuse, and included an interactive element where students had the option to classify a given example as abuse.

Based on what Pino heard about the previous BITB program, she thinks a return to the in-person format is the ideal next step in making these trainings their most effective. “In-person training is really important just because it holds people accountable and keeps them reliable,” she said.

According to Day, the process has already begun to train people for in-person programming as soon as this summer, and definitely by the fall.

“I think everybody wants to be in-person, and that's our preference,” Day said.

For some juniors and seniors who participated in bystander training during their first year at Georgetown, however, even the in-person programming could be improved.

“It wasn't a particularly survivor-centric position. A lot of it was also kind of outdated and how it framed stuff,” Leah Miller (COL ’23), who organizes with the Black Survivors Coalition (BSC), which has been at the forefront of student activism around sexual assault, said. “You could feel that it was like a mandated thing, and it wasn't something where it felt like you were actually engaging in creating a better campus culture.”

According to Miller, the one-time training model, even in person, does not fully equip students

to intervene in situations of sexual violence.

“There's conflicting evidence about the utility of bystander training as a one-and-done kind of thing, which is the model that Georgetown has been using since at least I was a freshman,” they said.

Additionally, students have criticized the former in-person training for focusing almost solely on being a bystander to sexual assault, rather than safe sexual behavior. “We also need to start thinking about how to prevent people from getting sexually violent in the first place and how to build healthy relationships,” Ping said.

With a general lack of sexual health education on Georgetown’s campus, the onus has fallen on student-led groups, like HFC, to fill that gap for their peers.

HFC has addressed these long-standing shortcomings by passing out condoms, delivering Plan B, and hosting open conversations about sex and relationships, among other things. In the absence of bystander training, Sexual Assault Peer Educators (SAPE), student-led and run through HES, has run training sessions for individual clubs.

Student leaders can request trainings from SAPE and in the past were required to participate in “HoyUS: Leadership Bystander Training.” Outside of those options, there exist few additional routes to educate club members and protect students from assault. According to Tara Ravishankar (COL ’22), house mother for Haus of Hoya and president of South Asian Society (SAS), the only way an individual can be removed from a schoolsanctioned club due to sexual assault allegations is through an official Title IX investigation. And when students don’t feel comfortable with the institutional reporting process, student leaders have to step in however they can, even without proper training.

“It falls on club leaders to deal with it, and club leaders are unequipped and are literally prohibited from doing the necessary work, but they end up being the ones who have to do that work, who have to be supporting survivors, who have to be holding back abusers, who have to be teaching this prevention stuff,” Ravishankar said.

The nature and risk of sexual assault at Georgetown’s campus vary across student demographics, experiences, and identities.

“Different cultural groups have different relationships with sex, and when you look at the data of sexual violence on campus, there are

definitely differing rates of sexual violence and different forms of sexual violence that are more prevalent in different communities,” Ping said.

According to the 2016 survey, 85.7 percent of students who identified as “transgender, genderqueer 0r non-conforming” experienced sexual harassment at Georgetown. Throughout the online modules, the course acknowledged how presented norms and conceptions of assault and abuse are different and perceived to be different socially for queer couples.

According to Ravishankar, campus organizations that bring together minority identities, such as Haus of Hoya, have a particular need for bystander training and sexual assault prevention programming. Haus of Hoya provides a space for queer, trans students of color at Georgetown.

“You’re going to face more marginalization based on how many intersecting oppressive identities you have, so yeah, queer students, queer students of color, queer femmes, are going to be the ones who are the most vulnerable,” they said.

Ravishankar would like to see bystander training that goes beyond prevention and intervention and doesn’t assume that sexual assault is inevitable. According to her, the current reaction-centric training and the nature of resources at Georgetown puts the burden primarily on vulnerable populations to seek out resources. “What does that do for all the people out there who are doing the assaulting? Prevention is not just bystander training,” they said.

According to Day, HES is open to new types of programming that address these concerns and works to support student leaders more. “We've been really limited by our capacity. And I hope that we will be able to expand and do more,” Day said. “I'd love to have more capacity to do things like that, and I think it's truly necessary. We shouldn't just be crisis-oriented.”

And hopefully, with more staffing and as changing COVID-19 conditions allow for in-person training, the focus can shift to listening to students and improving the programming across the board.

According to Miller, it’s critical that if these trainings are done at all, they should be done right.

“In the end, if it's bystander training not done properly,” they said, “it's not going to create or show any meaningful change.” G APRIL 18, 2022

9

VISIoNS 2022 FEATURES

marks 25 YEARS of CELEBRATING

BLACK GEoRGEToWN

BY MAX ZHANG

B

obby Nishimwe (COL ’22) is ready to get back on the dance floor.

He’ll get the opportunity soon: Georgetown’s Black Student Alliance (BSA) is hosting its first in-person Visions of Excellence Ball since the pandemic began, heading to the Mayflower Hotel on May 1 for a night of celebration. This year’s masquerade marks the 25th anniversary of BSA’s hallmark event, a milestone that testifies to the resilience of Georgeown’s Black community and its reach towards restoring the joys of prepandemic life.

“At some point 25 years ago, there was a group of Black students who believed that there needed to be some sort of event to celebrate each other,” Nishimwe, who attended the 2019 Ball and will attend its 2022 iteration, said. “The fact that 25 years later, it’s still going on, it’s still taking place, it also showcases how much this is a staple event in the Black community here at Georgetown and how important it is to us.”

Visions is more than just a dance party; it’s the only gala-type event all year that explicitly celebrates Black students and other Hoyas who have contributed in extraordinary ways to the oncampus Black community. It brings much of Black Georgetown and its non-Black allies under one roof to finally pay tribute to meaningful work often unrecognized by the rest of the university.

At each year’s Visions, its Planning Committee—chosen via an application to BSA— confers awards to winning male and female nominees in roughly 14 categories, spanning Athletic Achievement to Fine Arts to Community Service. Black seniors and other seniors of color are mostly honored, but the committee also gives awards to exemplary faculty, alumni, and underclassmen. Nominations are democratically sourced from the broader community, giving the trophies a collective legitimacy.

“Visions is different [from other galas] because it specifically encapsulates leaders and impacts done by and for the Black community, which sometimes isn’t really recognized by the university as a whole,” Lauren Smith (COL ’18, LAW ’24), BSA President from 2017-2018 and 2018 Campus Leadership Award winner, said.

Urban legends trace Visions’ origin story to a group of Black Hoyas disgruntled by informally

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THE GEORGETOWN VOICE

segregationist attitudes threaded into the social norms of Georgetown’s other formal parties.

The SFS’ Diplomatic Ball, advertised as a blacktie event to convene Georgetown students, alumni, and foreign dignitaries, has long been an elitist campus symbol, attendance indicative of wealth and status. Whether that environment has been equally accessible to students of color is questionable: The first “Dip Ball” was in 1925, 30 years before Georgetown admitted its first Black undergraduate student.

Clubs’ private galas, of varying levels of accessibility, are rarely planned by and for Black students and students of color. Visions thus stands in stark contrast to a gala culture where even basic norms—like having city police officers serve as event security in spite of long-standing anti-Blackness in law enforcement—can make marginalized students feel unwelcome. “[Visions] is an act of saying that for whatever reason we don’t feel welcome or fully appreciated or able to fully be ourselves in other spaces, so we’re just going to create our own,” Smith said.

Often Visions becomes a ceremony of “giving flowers”—as Jazmin Pruitt (COL ’19), BSA President in 2018-2019 and the 2019 Campus Impact Award winner, put it—to those who traditionally fly under the radar. “Visions is a reminder to Black students as well as students of color that they matter, which I don't think is often something promoted or said aloud,” she said, pointing out that labor done by Black students rarely gets rewarded, monetarily or otherwise. Be it mentoring peers, leading activist work, or organizing events, Black Hoyas are often bettering each other and the larger Georgetown community. According to Pruitt, Visions is a way to finally honor those (often voluntary) efforts.

Smith noted the realities of uncompensated and unrecognized Black student labor at Georgetown.

“Between all the diversity committees and the protests, and these other things that by nature the university is not going to recognize, because it would be them acknowledging using our uncompensated labor,” she said. “They’re kind of silent in that regard, but at something like Visions, we can do that. We see the things that don’t get university recognition but that's valuable, important work.”

Indeed, Visions honors those who serve in deeply meaningful capacities without running the

gamut of formal leadership titles. It also recognizes those who lead quietly. Smith cited the Campus Ministry award, which honors a student others feel spiritually inspired by and comfortable to turn to, as a particularly good example: “That’s someone who might have slipped through the cracks in other decision-making processes.”

Minnie Quartey Annan (COL ’05, M.A. ’06, PhD ’22) received the Community Service award in 2005. As an RA, she turned a compassionate potluck Thanksgiving dinner for one of her Harbin residents who couldn’t go home into a yearly community tradition and a catering group, and she still remembers it clear as day.

“I just remember that moment being so amazing and feeling so honored because you know my peers had really seen me cooking this meal and giving food as not just like, hey come eat, but as a labor of love and a way to build community,” Quartey Annan said, recalling the gala. “When I think about Visions, I think about that. I think about a sense of community.”

VIS ION S '18 Cultivating community at Visions often transcends the subgroups of Black Georgetown, Nile Blass (COL ’22), current BSA President and Visions Planning Committee member, said. Structural barriers like schedules that might stop, say, Black football players from being able to attend BSA general body meetings, vanish for the ball, Blass noted.

Niches merge.

“Visions is very unique in that there are a lot of Black communities—because there are lots of subcommunities within Blackness—and Black people that are meeting and interacting in these spaces that aren’t typically,” she said. “The way I see a lot of Black people at Georgetown engaging with Visions is separate from the standard separations.”

Building relationships across years and subcommunities is a rallying point of Visions, where seniors are predominantly honored but underclassmen are welcome. That’s especially true during COVID-19, where opportunities to build cross-year relationships have been dampened.

“There’s sort of a generational gap there,” Nishimwe said. “I believe Visions is at least going to help, give us an opportunity to convene together and for the different classes to be able to reconnect, get to know each other.”

To Blass, the intergenerational audience is important to cultivate political consciousness, too.

Each year, Visions is themed: Mask Off for 2018, Our Ancestors’ Wildest Dreams for 2019, and the 2022 ball centers W.E.B. Du Bois’ concept of “double consciousness.” A term crafted in Du Bois’ The Souls of Black Folk, double consciousness refers to Black Americans’ experience of having their identity split into two—Black and American—by racist structures and attitudes. At Georgetown, many students of color often find their racial and Hoya identities forced to be at odds with one another—where to fit in as a Hoya, race must be muted.

“It can be conflicting to be a Hoya and to be marginalized. And there are oftentimes environments where it is requested of you— whether explicitly or implicitly—to separate those identities and to operate in a different framework,” Blass said, criticizing an environment that sets Blackness at odds with what is professional, appropriate, or acceptable.

A Tanzanian immigrant who moved to Iowa when he was eight, Nishimwe also found the theme especially resonant. “The theme of double consciousness is very true of what my entire experience in this country has been, and even to some extent, at Georgetown,” he said.

“On campus, I feel like I have certain spaces, right, where I’m just me and I don’t really care what anybody thinks. And there are other spaces where—I don’t want to say I put on

a layer—but I have to be a little more reserved in terms of how much of myself I reveal or showcase.”

The masquerade format of this year’s Visions helps reframe double consciousness as dynamic, not immutable. It’s a frame shift useful for both underclassmen learning to navigate the predominantly white Georgetown as well as seniors moving onto professional or graduate environments that might invoke new forms of dual identity, according to Blass.

“You can take [masquerade] masks off,” Blass said. “Even if that is the socialization standard of Georgetown, it’s not a permanent frame of existence, nor should it be one that we have to take onto other spaces. This is what it is, but you have the ability to merge consciousnesses—you can do both.”

Theme aside, Dajourn Anuku (COL ’22)—who co-hosted Visions in 2019, performed during its online virtual iteration in 2021, and now is gearing up to attend in 2022—saw the ceremony through the lens of care ethics. “[Visions] was eye-opening to the aspect of just us having fun and taking up space in such a moment with all of us looking good. And all of us just dancing and singing, telling jokes and storytelling—all of that itself is a form of resistance,” he said, referring to writer Audre Lorde’s conception of self care as resistive. “Imagine a ball being a form of resistance.”

This is not to say Visions simply glorifies making Blackness a site of resilience; it’s also a testament to the ability of Black leaders on campus to always create safe, joyous spaces in the face of difficulty.

“There is always going to be a way in which we find community with one another,” Anuku said, reflecting on the return of in-person Visions in a pandemic-addled world. “It’s also really fun to just see how we can exist out of all the madness and chaos of trying to survive at Georgetown.”

When it comes to putting Visions together, funding is precarious, with the ball’s price tag running in the tens of thousands for venue, security, catering, and more. Yearlong planning is requisite, and this year’s committee, according to Blass, began its preparations in October, pursuing grants, donors, and corporate sponsors.

V IS IO N S '0 0

:)

VISI ON S '0 5?

Support for Visions from the rest of the campus community has been historically complicated. In 2014, the

Corp’s philanthropy arm denied Visions funding for the third year in a row on the grounds that it did not represent the Corp’s mission of “students serving students.” Though The Hoya reported an informal boycott occurred, the 2013-2014 BSA Executive Board put out a statement dispelling rumors it had endorsed any sort of collective action against a fellow student-run organization. Still, debate ensued regarding what “serving students” really meant— questioning whether mainline institutions like the Corp were adequately supporting marginalized communities on campus. (In 2022, the Corp did provide the requested sum of money to Visions, Blass mentioned.)

As former BSA VP of Programming, Pruitt hopes future Visions Planning Committees have more formalized support from Georgetown staff to ensure Visions happens annually. Though the Center of Student Engagement has previously helped ease some logistical burden and SAC contributes funding, Pruitt recalled an inordinate amount of pressure on full-time students to make the dots connect. One solution, Quartey Annan suggested, is to create an endowment to stabilize event fundraising “Maybe it’s a fund where specifically the money goes to Visions and to host this event, year after year after year,” Quartey Annan said. “We have some very high profile alum of color who, I think, would really back this, and so maybe trying to find some that— maybe even in the first couple of years—could get some seed money.”

As an alumna now, Smith is enthusiastic about contributing to Visions down the line. “Even being almost five years out, it’s something I remember so fondly, and as soon as I am able to contribute more financially to the university, it’s going to be one of the first things I want to contribute to,” she said.

Rebuilding the legacy of Visions for the three classes of students who hadn’t experienced a Visions Ball—the last one was in Spring 2019, before the current junior class matriculated— is among the main priorities of the current Planning Committee. Turning Visions 2022 into a document of working generational memory for future BSA boards is a reason bringing it back post-quarantine is so important.

With the ball approaching in two weeks, the end of the year marks one page in Black Georgetown’s memory turning to the next. “[Visions] was a time for us to reflect back on what we had accomplished that year, and also to give us hope in marching order for the next year,” Quartey Annan said. “It puts the exclamation point on the year, but it also kind of opens the next chapter for us. It started to write that story.”

That narrative will be written to the rhythm of go-go and the warmth of honor, even if well overdue. Stamped with an image of a crowd of people that make Georgetown beautiful, dancing until the lights come on. G Tickets to Visions can be purchased on CampusGroups.

All communities welcome.

photos courtesy of lauren smith, ye doomesday booke, minnie quartey annan; spread by max zhang

APRIL 18, 2022

11

VOICES

Yes, I know where the masjid is

BY AMINAH MALIK

B

y the end of my first semester, I could already count a handful of times a stranger had stopped me on the sidewalk, asking for directions to the campus mosque. I’m a hijabi, so asking me makes sense—who else passing

by Reiss could answer? People who stop me hold certain expectations about what I should know—and in cases like this, I’m able to not only meet but surpass those expectations. I could give you directions to the masjid from pretty much any spot on campus. I know it has a one-way staircase leading to the VCW patio. I know it’s home to a Quran with a sticker reading “property of GW MSA, do not remove.” I know three dried-up date seeds have been sitting on the back shelf of its storage closet for who knows how long.

But this question forces me to wonder what people expect of me solely because of the way I present myself—their assumptions about what I know and how I think.

Wearing hijab is a conscious decision that allows people to know my religion at first glance.

Hijabis are like the lighthouses of Muslims: We’re easy to see and people gravitate towards us when they have an Islam-related question.

Being a recognizable representative of my religion is a responsibility that I know comes with wearing hijab, but its implications aren’t necessarily negative. It pushes me to learn more about my faith while exerting positive pressure to strengthen my spirituality. But in the end, the only thing that will truly make me more religious is my own desire. Eventually, these pressures outlast their usefulness, and the continuously high expectations for hijabis become unattainable and discouraging— unbearable, even.

And these expectations are everywhere.

They can manifest as anything from simple questions about directions to complex grillings about the history of Islamic empires. They’re an English tutor, a hijabi herself, expecting me to understand the nuances of Arabic (which I do not speak). But hijabis are not walking textbooks. We don’t know every detail about our religion and we don’t all speak Arabic. When people equate wearing hijab to knowing everything about Islam, I want to meet their expectation even if it’s impossible. And when I can’t, I feel—at least a little bit—like a failure. I feel like a bad Muslim and chide myself for not knowing the answer to every possible question.

The root of this issue is the idea that hijabis are somehow bottomless sources of information.

People seem to think that if someone is committed enough to wear hijab, they must also have the education and experience that generates expert knowledge. And here we encounter a second problem: Expecting hijabis

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THE GEORGETOWN VOICE

to know more goes hand-in-hand with expecting non-hijabis to know less.

Pitting Muslim women against each other in a spiritual hierarchy is one of my biggest pet peeves. Just because a woman wears hijab doesn’t mean she is automatically more religious, or a “better Muslim,” than one who doesn’t.

While unrealistic expectations for hijabis put unreasonable pressure on them, it also invalidates other Muslim women. It reinforces the idea that non-hijabis are somehow less practicing, less knowledgeable, less informed— less Muslim. This mentality is harmful for all Muslim women, depressing their innate drive to foster their spirituality while simulatenously invalidating their identity as Muslims. Hijabis feel discouraged when expectations for them are too high and subsequent feelings of incompetence undermine their confidence in their faith, while non-hijabis feel discouraged and ignored as Muslims when expectations for them are too low.

But while many presumptions focus on what hijabis know, others concern what and how we think. These are a bit harder to pinpoint because they manifest in smaller, almost invisible, moments. It’s couples normally comfortable with PDA dropping each other’s hands when I come by. It’s close friends excluding me from conversations about their love lives as we sit at the same lunch table. It’s a well-meaning friend beginning a story about deer hunting with, “I don’t mean to offend you because of your religion, but…” (To this day, I do not understand how this would be offensive, but I digress).

People assume that hijabis live in a separate universe—our physical expression of faith is interpreted as an indicator that we are fundamentally incompatible with the time period we live in. It seems people’s schemas of Muslims, and hijabis, are built around what they’ve read in world history textbooks and are not representative of the modern diverse community. They assume hijabis are immune to the typical college-student struggles. Or that we’d be offended by the way others choose to live their lives. It’s as if we somehow exist in the 17th century: We have no understanding of pop culture or the realities of college life, and we of course couldn’t possibly have a Tik Tok dance memorized. We are expected to know everything about our religion yet nothing about anything else. This helps label hijabis as “others” and enables our exclusion from our broader community of peers.

These assumptions are exasperating. I’m a 19-year-old college student, but my classmates see me as a conservative grandma who has no interest in the shenanigans of young people

these days. I automatically feel unwelcome in social spaces, making me hesitant to enter them or meet new people.

And this matters: Assumptions about hijabis have more weight than you imagine. It’s unfair to expect us to know everything and it’s unfair to expect us to know nothing. Interacting with us the same way you would interact with anybody else allows us to simply exist. It frees us up to set our own religious expectations for ourselves and fights against the invalidation of non-hijabi Muslim women.

So if there’s a hijabi in your Intro to Islam class, don’t expect her to get the best grade.

Don’t make her be the spokesperson for two billion Muslims she’s never met. If you have a burning question about Islam, maybe think twice before springing it on an unsuspecting hijabi. Interreligious understanding and education is important—it makes us all feel valued in a diverse community while respecting our differences, but individual members of the Muslim community should not be responsible for providing this education to you. While we appreciate you trying to learn more about our faith, we also appreciate you saving your questions for a more appropriate time, place, and person (like a qualified religious leader). Or even better, start by trying to find the answer yourself. And if you can’t find a good starting point for your search, that’s one thing you can ask me. I know where the masjid is. G

design by cecilia cassidy

LEISURE

Jujutsu Kaisen 0 explores the tricky relationship between love and grief

BY AJANI JONES

M

onstrous and menacing, the imposing form of the Queen of Curses creeps out of the shadows, claws bared and ready to defend the love of her life. Eerie notes ring out as her distorted voice, dripping with malice, calls out for her friend’s safety. She symbolizes love and grief bathed in a bloody ocean of regret.

Based on Volume 0 of Gege Akutami’s beloved manga and anime series, Jujutsu Kaisen 0 (2021) is a dark fantasy film that expertly navigates the tricky web of pain and guilt that sits under the shadow of unreconciled grief. At its core, JJK0 explores the transcendent nature of love and friendship alongside the overwhelming pain of mourning a loved one.

JJK0 wastes no time establishing a complex narrative tone. Yuta Okkotsu’s (Megumi Ogata) world shatters when he loses his best friend Rika Orimoto (Kana Hanazawa) to a car accident minutes after they pledged an eternal commitment to each other. Spread-eagled on the pavement, Rika’s mangled body warps into the grisly Queen of Curses—a chilling scene punctuated by Yuta’s hollow and heartbroken pleas for Rika’s return.

Five years later, Rika is a horrifying guardian angel to Yuta, pursuing violent ends to protect him from any potential harm. However, this protection inadvertently causes Yuta to isolate himself out of guilt for the pain and damage he has caused.

As an adaptation of the beloved manga prequel and a continuation of the overarching lore of the Jujutsu Kaisen series, JJK0 strikes the perfect balance for both newcomers and series veterans. For existing fans, especially of the manga volume, JJK0 was a rather faithful translation of Akutami’s work.

Even scenes that were exclusively written for the film were seamlessly integrated in such a way that only enhanced existing canon.

On the other hand, JJK0 is able to stand alone from the rest of the series. Unlike most anime movies that tend to require familiarity with the series to fully appreciate the film, JJK0 is inclusive to novice viewers. The film’s accessibility, paired with the clear care put into its production, is a pleasant introduction for series newcomers.

These themes are captured through the portrayal of Yuta and Rika’s relationship. From start to finish, the pair is emotionally and physically inseparable.

Even after she is transformed into the monstrous Queen of Curses, Yuta never breaks his promise to stay with Rika and always cherishes her despite his fear of the danger her power holds. This is especially poignant as their love for one another is symbolized through both the ring Rika gave to Yuta as well as the sword he later uses to channel her cursed energy,

simultaneously capturing the unbreakable nature and sheer strength of their bond.

Following a particularly gruesome incident where Rika came to his defense against some bullies, Yuta is taken in by the Tokyo Prefectural Jujutsu High School. He begins training to master Jujutsu sorcery and hone his control over Rika’s curse under the watchful eye of the infamously powerful Satoru Gojo (Yūichi Nakamura). While training, Yuta befriends Maki Zen’in (Mikako Komatsu), Toge Inumaki (Koki Uchiyama), and Panda (Tomokazu Seki), fellow first-year students at Jujutsu High.

With the help of Gojo and friends, Yuta makes tremendous progress in his training all while Suguru Geto (Takahiro Sakurai), a defected sorcerer, grows ever closer to his goal of taking Rika’s curse as his own and annihilating non-sorcerer society.

From their childhood promise to Rika’s death, the pair’s genuine love and care are always on display, allowing viewers to become fully invested in their story. Yuta’s love for Rika is shown directly through her transformation into a curse (later revealed as an unforeseen sideeffect of Yuta’s refusal to accept her death) and eventual freedom as he finally comes to accept her death. Their relationship is strengthened as it is juxtaposed against the tragic bond between Yuta’s mentor Gojo and the antagonist Geto: While once equally inseparable, their relationship is marred by betrayal and opposing ideals about the role of sorcerers in their society. Though mostly conveyed through subtle dialogue and wordless flashbacks, their bond still holds immense narrative power.

While these two relationships claim the film’s primary focus, the other main characters are equally compelling and well-written. Maki, Panda, and Toge, core characters in the first season of the anime series, are extremely charismatic. The trio helps underscore the film’s heavier moments through vibrancy and joy. However, they also add emotional weight to the film. As the audience is given a brief glimpse into Maki’s tragic motivation to become a sorcerer, the film establishes the wonderfully complex nature of these characters as their own beings. Even Gojo, a rather divisive character amongst the fanbase, is written as a mentor and guardian to Yuta and shares some of the nuanced writing with the other characters beyond the glimpses into his backstory with Geto.

A large part of the film’s appeal then comes from witnessing the characters’ bonds. While each stands strong alone, when they come together,

graphic by ella petreski; layout by allison derose

they are even more endearing. In their interactions with Yuta, especially with Maki and Toge, the characters bond over their shared concerns and shortcomings. Realizing their many similarities, Yuta and Toge fight together against a cursed spirit, their chemistry on full display as they compliment each other with fluid movements. The cast supports each other at every turn—successfully avoiding cloying sweetness for real, genuine love.

The portrayal of these characters is boosted by the film’s excellent voice actors, who capture every interaction with raw emotion and intent.

Breathtaking animation amplifies the film’s narrative strength. JJK0’s production was led by MAPPA Co., which is highly praised for its work on other beloved series such as Attack on Titan: The Final Season and Yuri!!! On Ice. MAPPA smoothly translates manga panels to the silver screen, resulting in a highly praised visually captivating masterpiece. The visual effects of Jujutsu sorcery were colorful and visually distinct. Fight scenes were fluidly choreographed and vibrant. MAPPA expertly sets the tone of every scene as somber reds and dark shadows contrast with brilliant lights and brighter hues.

While energetic guitar riffs add to moments of rising tension and conflict, the music of JJK0 shines brightest when it takes time to ponder a scene’s emotional weight. The official soundtrack was composed by Hiroaki Tsutsumi, Yoshimasa Terui, and Alisa Okehazama and features vocal performances by Toft Willingham, Chez, and Jessica Gelinas. After finally being freed from her curse, Rika’s farewell is backed by a bright but heart-wrenching melody that perfectly pairs with her final moments at Yuta’s side.

Her smile holds nothing but warmth as she begins to dissolve into colorful bubbles of light.

After six years by Yuta’s side, there is no malice nor regret, just genuine love for their time shared together. A sweet piano melody fills the air as she fades away with one final, tearful goodbye. It’s a perfect close to the heartfelt adventure that is JJK0 and an excellent segue back into the world of Jujutsu sorcery for the anime’s second season to come in 2023. G APRIL 18, 2022

13

LEISURE

Rex Orange County’s WHO CARES? puts an optimistic spin on feeling aimless

BY MAYA KOMINSKY

W

hen Rex Orange County entered the mainstream music scene five years ago, he was dubbed music’s “new favorite sad boy.” But in his latest album, a change from his defeatist music, the bedroom pop artist does the unexpected: He acknowledges his insecurities and the negative judgment that his music may be subject to, but still finds the courage to ask, WHO CARES? While the title may seem fatalistic, Rex (Alex O’Connor) puts a cheerful twist on the question with his fourth album. It’s easy to be bogged down by others’ opinions, but Rex casts them aside to recognize that he does, in fact, know who cares about him. He traverses feelings of self-doubt and insecurity in a lighthearted way, giving the album an upbeat and empowering tone. Meanwhile, he explores the promise of a budding relationship, lending a sense of promise for a brighter future.

Emotional vulnerability backed by a unique combination of traditional and synthy instrumentation is distinctively Rex’s style, but with an increased emphasis on strings and vocals, WHO CARES? amplifies his musical strengths of blending unexpected sounds. From the encouraging words of the opening track and lead single, “KEEP IT UP,” to the uncertainty of “7AM,” Rex questions the ability to be loved, or even relevant, to those around you. By the titular ending track, Rex is determined to not let his own

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fears stand in the way of happiness, and expresses that his loved ones will help along the way.

The emphasis on self-improvement and a disregard of external opinions contrasts with Rex’s previous album, Pony, which focused on devotion to a relationship. Though he also explores romance on WHO CARES?, it is in a much more playful way as he describes being head over heels for his crush.

The overwhelmingly triumphant tone of WHO CARES? reflects a pandemic-driven resolve to write music as if no one else would hear it.

“That kind of sparked the experimentation and the feeling of ‘who cares?’” Rex told Dazed.

“Basically, how would my music sound if I didn’t think about it coming out?” For listeners who may also experience aimlessness or fear of judgment emerging from the pandemic, Rex is leading by example in overcoming these feelings.

In almost every song, Rex battles peoplepleasing instincts. “KEEP IT UP” opens the album with swelling strings until the drums and lyrics pick up the pace: “Every time I open my mouth / I have regrets in my mind / Every time.”

Although lyrically pessimistic as he explores feelings of hopelessness and depression, the upbeat rhythm and airy vocal performance lend humor to the track, almost making light of his insecurities. By the chorus, the strings share the spotlight with Rex’s vocals to remind listeners, “You’re only holding out for what you want / You no longer owe the strangers.” Vagueness aside, Rex sounds uncharacteristically confident in his newfound ability to prioritize his own desires— musically and personally.

Rex takes after his friend and mentor Tyler, the Creator with his “ignore the haters” attitude.

The Grammy-winning rapper is the only feature on WHO CARES? In 2017, when Rex only had 500 followers on SoundCloud, Tyler flew him into Los Angeles to be featured on his album Flower Boy. Their 2017 collaboration “Boredom,” true to both artists’ styles, blends strings and guitar with distorted synth. Focused on feelings of loneliness and, you guessed it, boredom, it was also a preview of their latest collaboration, “OPEN A WINDOW,” the second track and third single from WHO CARES? “I was having a tough time making music freely, and [Tyler] gave me a lot of great advice,” Rex told Vulture. “It’s amazing that we have a relationship.”

Between the deep bass and soft, synthesized melodies, Tyler’s influence is quickly recognizable.

On “OPEN A WINDOW,” the two blend styles

seamlessly. Raspy vocals and sound distortion help make it a standout track on WHO CARES? The track is a bit more lighthearted than most of Tyler’s music, but he adds his own edge as the two express the claustrophobia created by the weighty expectations of others. Though his verse is maybe shorter than desired, Tyler gets his frustration across with his characteristic play on words: “Open door, but you can't, try to run, but you pant / Out of breath, you can't vent, 'cause the AC actin' up.”

In a thematic shift from songs rejecting criticism, like “OPEN A WINDOW” and “WORTH IT,” many of the album’s highlights are Rex’s giddy, lovestruck moments trying to show a girl how much he likes her—a feeling that anyone who's had a crush knows all too well. In these songs, his vocals are heartfelt, and the strings swell alongside his emotions.

On “ONE IN A MILLION,” he takes joy in the simple pleasures of being around his girl. On the next track, “IF YOU WANT IT,” he picks up the pace and creates a fun and joyful tone, leaving the door open for his crush to walk through: “I'm acting a fool, come back and just give me a call / I can't wait at all, let me be your boy / If you want it.” Rex again uses a play on words in “THE SHADE”—he’d do anything to make his significant other happy, like closing the blinds so she can sleep or painting the walls with different shades of color.

Rex’s carefree outlook also shaped his writing process with the help of longtime collaborator Benny Sings, who is featured on Rex’s 2017 hit “LOVING IS EASY.” The two produced Who Cares? in two weeks while Rex was visiting the Dutch artist in Amsterdam—a stark contrast to the year-and-a-half long production of Pony.

Benny, a prolific artist, writes four or five songs a day—a creative process that encouraged Rex to just let his music flow without concern for the final product.

Rex told Dazed, “I think it took like three albums and four or five years of doing this to finally be like, I’ve earned the right to say whatever [I want], and not have to explain myself, and just feel a little bit freer in music and in real life as well.”

Feelings of pointlessness or isolation generated during the pandemic aren’t unique to “sad-boy” Rex alone, but he certainly harnessed them in a positive way. It was that blasé attitude that allowed him to follow his instincts and ultimately find his purpose: prioritizing those who care. G Voice’s Choices: “OPEN A WINDOW,” “THE SHADE,” “KEEP IT UP”

illustration by ryan samway; layout by graham krewinghaus; photo courtesy of sony

HALTIME LEISURE

Horse races, heated stares, and happy endings: Bridgerton season two deals in heavy-handedness

BY MAANASI CHINTAMANI

I

love the tension of a good slow-burn, enemies-tolovers romance. The thrill of the little moments when two characters begin to realize their true feelings for one another is electrifying. There are no words to describe the sensation of, say, watching Darcy (Matthew Macfadyen) clench his hand after helping Elizabeth (Keira Knightley) get into a carriage in Pride and Prejudice (2005). These split-seconds make the ultimate resolution (when Darcy and Elizabeth finally get over their pride and prejudice, respectively) that much more meaningful, because we have witnessed their relationship gradually evolve over time.

Yet in its second season, Bridgerton, which ostensibly continues Pride and Prejudice’s Regencyera legacy, fails to deliver this satisfying progression.

Rather than offering viewers subtle glimpses of chemistry between protagonists Anthony Bridgerton (Jonathan Bailey) and Kathani “Kate” Sharma (Simone Ashley), the show stumbles through an overly drawn-out, clumsily-executed romance. This lack of subtlety pervades the season: Besides successfully incorporating Indian culture, the show’s commentary on social issues is equally heavy-handed. Bridgerton spread itself too thin, focusing on too many storylines at once and ultimately failing to do any of them justice.

This season, the show centers around Anthony—the eldest Bridgerton—and his quest to find a wife. When the Sharma family moves to Mayfair and enters the ruthless marriage market, the queen grants the younger sister, Edwina Sharma (Charithra Chandran), the coveted title of “diamond of the season.” Anthony, meanwhile, takes a methodical approach to identifying a perfect future viscountess based on a rigid list of criteria; thus, it is no surprise that he sets his sights on Edwina. But it is also no surprise that he ends up developing feelings for Edwina’s feisty and protective older sister Kate, leading to a messy love triangle that takes forever to untangle.

In the meantime, we are treated to cringey scenes of Anthony using as many of his physical senses as possible to get closer to Kate, including smelling her anytime she is in his vicinity, making painfully conspicuous eye contact with her, and touching her at every socially acceptable (and occasionally, unacceptable) opportunity. Sometimes

design by alex giorno

the show does incorporate seemingly subtler, Pride and Prejudice-esque moments, like when the camera focuses on Kate and Anthony nearly brushing hands.

Yet instead of building tension and developing their clearly forbidden relationship, these exchanges feel overdone and repetitive, particularly because the arc takes at least seven of the season’s eight episodes to reach any semblance of resolution.

There is no will-they-or-won’t-they dynamic— the show makes it so clear that Kate and Anthony will somehow end up together that the specific situations that bring them together and then keep them apart feel contrived, like when they miraculously trip and get stuck in the mud on top of one another while playing a lawn game. For much of the season, Kate and Anthony’s relationship feels formulaic: They have a random interaction, then spend scene after scene discussing how they actually can’t act on their feelings due to the obstacle of Edwina, all the while showcasing neither emotional development nor plot progression.

Despite this poorly executed romance, the addition of the Sharma family this season is a welcome one on the whole. Kate, Edwina, and their mother, Lady Mary (Shelley Conn), move to Mayfair from India, and the show successfully celebrates their background without making it a focal point.

Their dresses and signature gold jewelry allude to Indian fabrics and fashion. We watch Kate make a traditional elaichi tea and later give a coconut oil hair massage to Edwina, who calls Kate didi—Hindi for “older sister.” The soundtrack even includes an instrumental cover of the Bollywood song “Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham.” These instances subtly showcase the Sharmas’ Indian culture without falling prey to the exoticization and overemphasis that have befallen other shows.

However, the show also follows nearly half a dozen other storylines, and none of them are developed with the same finesse. Bridgerton insists on addressing issues of gender and opportunity in this semi-fictitious 19th century society, but has no faith in the viewer’s ability to connect the dots and arrive at its desired (and relatively straightforward) conclusions. For instance, as suspicion mounts around Penelope Featherington (Nicola Coughlan), who writes the anonymous gossip column Lady Whistledown, she joins forces with dressmaker

Madame Delacroix (Kathryn Drysdale). This collaboration is clearly unique in a world where few women run enterprises, yet the show feels the need to fully lay out this dynamic through unnecessarily overt dialogue.

Penelope’s mother, Lady Featherington (Polly Walker), has a #girlboss moment in the final episode when she defends her daughters and walks away from the crooked, scheming Lord Featherington (Rupert Young), but her explicit articulation of her duties as a mother in her society takes away from the magnitude of the situation by shoving it in our faces.

Meanwhile, Eloise Bridgerton (Claudia Jessie), who really wants you to know that she is Not Like Other Girls, spends the whole season feeling trapped by restrictive social norms.

While Eloise actually had potential for an interesting story arc through her discovery of the underground world of radical feminism, the character is inadequately developed and largely uncompelling.

Bridgerton follows the series of books by Julia Quinn, meaning that each season centers around the journey of a different Bridgerton sibling. With this structure, the show feels the need to keep each character warm until their season arrives, and that translates to a lot of directionless, vague background storylines in the meantime. Colin (Luke Newton) and Benedict (Luke Thompson) Bridgerton take up valuable airtime with various side plots that don’t amount to anything significant by the end of the season, while Daphne (Phoebe Dynevor), the star of season one, flits in and out as a one-dimensional plot device to clue viewers into the already patently obvious tension between Kate and Anthony. Season two’s lack of focus limits the airtime given to each plot, necessitating heavy-handed storytelling to keep the narrative progressing. Ultimately, Bridgerton dropped the ball on this juggling act. Its overemphasis on the adventures of side characters took away from the central story of Kate and Anthony, failing to lead to particularly interesting outcomes for anyone involved.

With two Bridgerton siblings happily married off and six to go, the show’s next season will shift its focus to Benedict. One can only hope that his inevitable slow burn won’t fizzle out. G APRIL 18, 2022

15

FEATURES

Georgetown's music program revives the music of Margaret Bonds after decades of silence

BY JUPITER HUANG

50

years. That’s how long it took for the music of Margaret Bonds, one of the 20th century’s most important American composers, to be performed before an audience again as originally intended. On April 2, Gaston Hall erupted with the sound of over 80 student musicians performing the remarkable work of this Black female composer.

“The Music and Activism of Margaret Bonds,” hosted by the GU Concert Choir and GU Orchestra, was monumental: It was the first time that selections from Bonds’ cantata “Simon Who Bore the Cross,” Montgomery Variations, or complete Credo had been performed, with full orchestra and choir together, since her death in 1973. The fact that Bonds’ work was largely forgotten until now is a testament to pervasive sexism and racism in classical music.

“It’s quite a tragic story, that’s why we call it systemic racism. It’s hard-wired into our DNA,” said Michael Cooper, a Southwestern University professor who has spent the past few years working on producing the first full-length biography of Bonds.

The soloists, Christian Simmons and Katerina Burton, both young Black performers accustomed to serenading crowds at the Kennedy Center, instead performed for an audience on Georgetown’s campus—a moment not lost on those gathered.

“Georgetown University, like D.C., and this nation, was built with the labor of enslaved Black Americans,” Cooper said. “There's also real poetry to the fact that Margaret Bonds’ music, which was mostly committed to challenging that enslavement and racial injustice, is now being revived in this space that was built by it.”

“There’s real beauty that there’s a revived interest in the very music that so forcefully and eloquently challenges that history,” he added.

Margaret Bonds was born in 1913 as the only child of Estella C. Bonds, a professional musician, and Monroe Alphus Majors, a physician and political activist. She blazed a trail within an industry—classical music—deeply hostile to her identity as a Black woman. Systemic structures of racial and sexist discrimination plagued the world of classical composing, a discipline often seen as exclusive to white men even today. Only four percent of classical musicians in the 1960s were Black; today, that number has dropped to less than two percent.

Bonds enrolled at Northwestern University at the age of 16 and emerged with a bachelor’s

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and master’s in music and a slew of awards as a pianist. In 1933, she was the first African American to perform as a soloist for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. Already recognized as a piano virtuoso, Bonds ventured into writing songs and orchestral pieces with success.

“She was a person who believed throughout her life that one of the purposes of art was to work for societal betterment to make life better for others,” Cooper said. “There is no 20thcentury classical composer and there are few popular composers, with the possible exception of Nina Simone, who have a social justice portfolio as long-lasting, as persuasive and as eloquent as Bonds’.”

Georgetown announced the acquisition of a large collection of Bonds’ personal papers in 2013, including a huge quantity of correspondences and hundreds of rare manuscripts. Contained in 18 Hollinger storage boxes, the collections housed in the Lauinger Library Special Collections archives constituted a crucial opportunity for music scholars to revive a critical missing piece of American classical music.

“It’s a gold mine,” said Benjamin Harbert, the interim director of Georgetown’s music program. “The music program faculty are a mix of music practitioners and scholars who do historical and ethnographic work, so in all of our capacities, the library is a very important and connected part of our program.”

The process of acquiring Bonds’ work proved fortuitous. According to Prof. Frederick Binkholder, the director of vocal music at Georgetown, the university’s current collection of Bonds’ paper was very nearly thrown away.

The collection’s 18 archive boxes hold the remnants of an extraordinary life. According to Cooper, Bonds composed her first work at the age of five, though it has since been lost. Bonds’ first published composition was a political campaign song written at the age of 15.

By 1941, Bonds had reached significant heights of fame despite extreme prejudice—while at Northwestern, she was not permitted to live on campus. She faced a further setback at Julliard when Nadia Boulanger, a renowned French composer, turned her down for mentorship.

Bonds founded the Allied Arts Academy in Chicago after college and began a fruitful friendship with Langston Hughes, who convinced her

to move to Harlem where they wrote songs to support troops on the frontlines of World War II. Bonds’ fruitful cooperation with Hughes produced its own professional difficulties due to the music industry’s sexism. Out of 47 musical textbooks written before 1987, only 0.2 percent of the music sampled were written by women.

“I think it was in the Columbia University student newspaper, they said Langston Hughes’ cantata The Ballad of the Brown King and didn't mention Margaret Bonds,” Cooper said. “She sent a clipping of that to him, circled it, and wrote: ‘hmm that's funny I didn't know Langston composed music.’”

Bonds produced over 500 known compositions, many of which are set to poems written by Hughes.

“Knowing that Margaret Bonds worked with Langston Hughes and was able to create these cantatas, there's the rhythmic energy of the words but also the meaning of the words and how they perfectly came together,” Binkholder said. “It was like the perfect fit.”

Despite her achievements and impact on the music world, none of the student performers interviewed by the Voice had heard of Bonds before working with her music.

design by dane tedder

Katie Woodhouse (COL ’22) was amazed by Bonds’ mastery in composing lyrical music and its impact on her own performance. “I definitely grew as a singer with Margaret Bonds, and something that really kept me going was the story behind it and how powerful the words were,” she said. “There were multiple times a friend and I stood next to each other in the classroom and where I’d sing a line and I’d turn to her and thought: Damn. Wow.” Binkholder praised Bonds’ ability as an orchestrator—utilizing her mastery of piano music—but also ability to write for the singing voice and employ a vast range of styles. “She has a wonderful background of what we would call ‘traditional Western music,’ Bach, Mozart, etc.

However, she also has the music of the church: gospel music and spirituals,” he said. “Genius is the only way that I could describe it.”

The pieces performed at Georgetown contained obvious religious undertones. Ian Franza (COL ’25) was especially struck by how Bonds’ music centered the Black experience within spirituality. Franza, who grew up attending a Brazilian Pentecostal church, remarked on how well Bonds’ work resonates across a diverse range of Black spiritual music. Singing the “Simon Bore the Cross” section of “The Crucifixion,” Franza felt a unique connection to the music.

“That song kind of forced me to put myself in almost like a different space. I had never felt an experience that specific with music. I was also kind of just letting myself be in my mind and my heart, and to just be moved by the music,” Franza said.

T h e feeling Bonds’ music evoked in Franza is characteristic of her larger body of work. “The main theme from Montgomery Variations is very haunting, it stays with you,” Adrian Kalaw (COL ’23), a french horn player in the Orchestra, said.

The piece was composed during the civil rights

image courtesy of new york public library

movement when Bonds was becoming more renowned. Kalaw explained how the music matches the evolution of the movement in tone, moving from joyous melodies to confusion, and then a lament in Bonds’ musical portrayal of the 1963 bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, AL. Despite her accomplishments, and the quality of Bonds’ music, one systemic roadblock crippled her opportunity to secure her own legacy. Classical composers of the 1960s relied heavily on publishing to disseminate their works and allow their music to become part of the popular repertoire. Cooper noted that publishers refused to print works by African Americans and women, fearing that their works wouldn't sell, perpetuating a systemically racist and sexist gap in the field. As such, almost all of Bonds’ music remained in manuscript form until her death, severely limiting its accessibility.

“Margaret Bonds was written out of history and suppressed from the publishing life,” Cooper said.

Though a few Bonds pieces were recorded, accessing more of her work proved almost impossible for scholars and musicians. Helen Walker Hill, a musicologist at the University of Colorado Boulder who undertook a groundbreaking project in the 1990s to highlight the contributions of Black women composers, faced significant difficulty finding any of Bonds’ work in libraries across the country.

Georgetown’s music program faced its own challenges in bringing Bonds’ work to life.

Originally slated for performance in the spring of 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic brought the program’s ambitions to a halt. Current seniors who were in the program since 2019 have sat with Bonds’ music for three years, performing virtually over the past two semesters, though the experience differed from in-person performances as the choir had to record their parts individually.

With few contemporary recordings of Bonds’ music published, and virtually none for any of the pieces played for the concert, student performers faced immense difficulties just figuring out the intended sound of Bonds’ work.

“We were essentially making the character of the pieces ourselves, guided by scholars,” Kalaw said. “They were re-transcribed by Dr. Cooper to be readable for an orchestra. In the process, there are some typos, and sometimes where the chords didn’t make any sense.”

He added that even a single, lastminute change to a note transformed the character of the entire piece.

The demographics of the performance groups also mattered, as Georgetown’s Concert Choir and Orchestra grappled with a predominantly non-Black group singing from the voice of a Black artist.

“The Georgetown orchestra, and orchestras in general, are not very diverse. It’s

mostly dominated by white and Asian students.

Only a small minority of GU Orchestra members are Black,” Kalaw said, noting that systemic wealth disparities exacerbate the problem.

“There’s certainly a barrier to entry. You have to get an instrument—my french horn, for instance, costs thousands of dollars. To play at a higher level, you also need to have a teacher, who can be quite expensive. Sometimes, youth orchestras also have entrance fees.”

Playing Bonds’ music invited many student musicians at Georgetown to reflect on the demographics of their groups and the privilege that they brought into performing her work.

“There were a lot of specific lines in [the Credo] that just made me reflect on the fact that it is such a white-dominant choir. Like, are we the best people to put this on?” Woodhouse said.

Franza highlighted the importance of bringing Bonds’ work into white spaces. “It's really important that we bring a lot of this dialogue to heavily white spaces because I think the messages she was writing in her music are really important for not just people of color to hear, but also for white people here, especially Georgetown students given the university’s history with racism.”

“I think what kind of helped me was recognizing that, even though I was a performer of this piece, I was not the speaker, I'm not the teacher. I am an audience of these ideas,” Emily Krok (COL ’22), a Concert Choir member since 2019, added. “It is my job to learn from her.”

Students and faculty alike hope that Bonds’ work becomes a part of the common repertoire of choir and orchestra music. Binkholder cautioned other conductors against shying away from performing Bonds’ music, though he noted that specific programming choices need to be made to do the work justice, such as the intentional decision to give the solos in the Georgetown performance to young, Black artists.

“This music is too powerful to not be done,” Binkholder said. “But if you read the text of those movements, it would be beneficial to have a person of color to sing those roles. You do need to be mindful of that component.”

For Krok, the performance of Bonds’ work leaves her reflecting on the impact of systemic marginalization in the music community.

Bonds had the tenacity to weather through overt discrimination within the classical music industry, all the while investing herself in the civil rights movement. She also had the prudence to maintain and compile her life’s work in hope that it’s one day given justice. Yet still, Krok noted, her legacy depended on luck.

“Her music almost got thrown out. It just got lucky, it got preserved, people decided to put it on display. There are all kinds of other composers who probably didn’t have the same luck,” Krok said. “How many Margaret Bonds are we missing, how many will we miss even today?” G Disclaimer: Katie Woodhouse was formerly a Voice staff writer.

APRIL 18, 2022

17

SPORTS

BY HAYLEY SALVATORE

O

n game day, members of the Georgetown men’s club rugby team pile into teammate JP Mancini’s (COL ’22) large Chevy Suburban for a road trip to their off-campus match.

While other teams receive transportation from the university, the rugby guys don’t have that option. Despite their position at the top of the Division II Mid-Atlantic Rugby Conference (MARC) and a bid to the Collegiate Rugby Championship in New Orleans next month, they lack resources.

Now captain emeritus, Ali Taha Brown (SFS ’22) has been a part of the Georgetown men’s club rugby team since his first year. But despite the program’s 55-year history, he has noticed a lack of institutional support for the team.

Now, Taha Brown feels it is time to put the team on the university’s radar.

In August, Taha Brown contacted the Film and Media Studies newsletter to find someone interested in documenting the men’s club rugby team’s quest for a national championship.

Aiyana Langa (COL ’22) answered the call. Now, the documentary is set for release next month.

“This is kind of my opportunity to have a team who is actually excited for me to do something like this,” Langa said. Taha Brown and his teammates hope both the documentary and their performance in Louisiana next month will make all the tribulations they've endured worth it.

This April, the Hoyas trounced all five of their opponents at the MARC 7’s Series in New Jersey. Not only did they continue their 18-game win streak—they also captured the tournament title against rugby powerhouses Villanova and Drexel. But the hardest part was actually getting to New Jersey to play.

Georgetown is known for its support of varsity sports; the school provides transportation for athletes and free buses for fans to make the trek to Capital One Arena for men’s basketball, or even down to Cary, NC for the men’s soccer team in the Division I NCAA Semifinals. Club sports like rugby, however, are not given the same resources.

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The team relies primarily on Mancini for transportation, because they either aren’t provided with adequate funding for enough vans to fit the entire team or aren’t given van access in the first place. For the MARC Tournament this past weekend, Mancini drove his teammates three hours, started all five games, and then drove everyone back—all in one day.

“Legit every match we had, there was a crisis about it not happening, so the fact we even played a full season is impressive, and then just doing well is the cherry on the top,” Taha Brown said.

In the fall semester, the team traveled significantly because club sports were not allowed to host games on Cooper Field. On top of that, Georgetown did not help the team find alternative facilities to host, leaving Taha Brown to handle logistics. The teammates lined makeshift pitches with paint themselves.

The team holds 90-minute practice sessions twice a week, led by volunteer head coach Arno Van Der Spek. They run drills resembling a professional rugby team and have even sent Georgetown players to Old Glory D.C., the local professional rugby league. Despite their success, school support has not materialized.

“We see this as something that could be an opportunity for the school and they see it as a burden and they treat us like a burden,” incoming captain Mark Kearney (SFS ’23) said.

Although club sports are now allowed to host games on Cooper Field, the rugby team was denied field space because the times they requested interfered with varsity sports’ pre-season camps.

Thus, the rugby team hasn’t played a home game in over two years, and student attendance is low at their off-campus matches.

“We don’t really have that many people who come out and watch,” Kearney said. “If this is something that we want to take up to a new level, then getting school and student engagement is pretty important.”

The club plays two forms of rugby with 15 players on the field in the fall and seven in the spring. When the team made the quarterfinals of the national 15s tournament last November, Taha Brown took it upon himself to book hotels

as close to the pitch as possible. But when the university found out, they asked Taha Brown to cancel his reservations and book it through their travel agents instead.

The team was delighted to finally get some university assistance, but soon discovered the hotels the travel agents booked were over an hour away from the pitch, meaning the team had to get up at six in the morning. A wellintentioned but poorly managed Georgetown intervention added stress to the team that now had to wake up before dawn.

Now, Taha Brown will likely have to spend most of his final semester planning the team’s trip to New Orleans for the national championship.

“It’s a constant theme: We get super frustrated with Georgetown’s administration and bureaucracy,” Taha Brown said. “We feel that what happens on the men’s rugby team is what I would want to promote the hell out of.”

Luckily, Langa has commemorated the team’s numerous triumphs and tribulations this year through film. Langa has been embedded with the team all season, even making the November trek to Pennsylvania to film the team’s eventual fall in the quarterfinals. “This has been easily one of the highlights—probably the highlight of my senior year—meeting this group of random dudes and being pretty good friends with them,” Langa said. “I feel like the main goal is to get the university to give them more money and to support them.”

With Langa’s documentary debuting in early May at the Rugby Ball, both Taha Brown and Kearney hope it changes the school’s treatment of club sports. “Even though we are a club sport, we are the Georgetown Rugby team,” Taha Brown said.

Taha Brown is proud to be so invested in the Rugby team, but hopes that in the future, it can pose less of a burden on student leaders.

“We’ve had such a great season this season, but what we have been trying to do off the field is trying to make that sustainable,” he said. “We care about Georgetown, we sacrifice our bodies for Georgetown. It’s just tough to square that with Georgetown not helping us and obstructing us.” G

design by connor martin

SPORTS

Out of the park, but under the radar: Georgetown baseball defies expectations

BY LUCIE PEYREBRUNE AND CARLOS RUEDA

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oach Edwin Thompson and the Georgetown Hoyas baseball team are changing the culture of the 150-year-old program right under our noses. After a history of losses, this team was not supposed to be special by any preseason metric—yet it is currently fourth in NCAA Division I in total home runs.

Baseball is Georgetown’s oldest sports team, playing their first recorded game in 1866 and officially sanctioned in 1870. However, the team’s history has been a story of struggle: Georgetown’s last winning season was in 1986 when the Hoyas posted a 23-22 record. Since 1998, when they started keeping track, the Hoyas have only managed a positive run differential twice (once in 1998 and again in 2012). Combined with the fact that the Hoyas’ home venue has been 12 miles away in the Shirley Povich Field in Rockville, MD since the GU Baseball Diamond was replaced by the Rafik B. Hariri Building in 2000, it’s not hard to see why the program has had difficulty generating excitement.

Thompson joined the Hoyas’ program in fall of 2020, after posting a five-year record of 122123 at Eastern Kentucky. Over the same stretch, the Hoyas went 84-130. In his final season with EKU, Thompson’s team won 16 conference games—the most since 2013. His arrival to the Hilltop was a welcome change for a seriously struggling team. However, in his first season with Georgetown, the Hoyas once again posted dismal results with an overall record of 6-25.

Fast forward just one year, and the Hoyas are sitting with a 20-13 overall record, a vast improvement from last year’s season, shortened due to COVID-19.

That translates into individual feats, too. Graduate first baseman and outfielder Ubaldo Lopez leads the way with 14 home runs, including a historic four-home run game on April 5 against a tough Maryland Eastern Shore team, putting him at fifth in the NCAA home run rankings. Not far behind, first base and outfield sophomore sensation Jake Hyde adds 13. In addition, both players—along with junior Andrew Ciufo—are posting batting averages over .300.

For the first time in a very, very long time, Hoya baseball is finally getting a small share of the national spotlight. College baseball pundits and experts are seeing Georgetown’s success come out of left field and are all left with the same question: What changed?

Hyde attributes part of the Hoyas’ success to a change in the team’s confidence. “We show up to series this year and we expect to win,” Hyde said. “Compared to last year, where it felt like we all kinda knew we didn’t have a great shot to win some games.”

The biggest difference Hyde sees, however, is the team’s work ethic. “Monday is our day off every week, and no matter if we sweep a series or get swept, you go in the next Monday, and everyone is in the cages getting extra work in,” Hyde said.

He also noted that graduate players, like Lopez, have contributed immensely to the team’s changed mentality and have served as role models for the younger team members as an example of how much work they need to put in to see improvements.

Zooming out, this baseball team is well assembled, and, despite the struggles which have characterized the program for decades, believes in itself. The team is continuing to learn from their successes and shortcomings—and it’s paying off. The electrifying, high-scoring games they’re playing—racking up wins and battling local powerhouses like Maryland to close losses—are testimony enough.

Looking ahead, the Hoyas still have a long way to go. There are still 21 regular season games to play, the majority of which are Big East conference games, meaning there is no room to get complacent. The team has played six of their 23 scheduled conference games thus far, getting off to a slow 2-4 start, which included getting swept in Omaha against Creighton.

“We’re a good team, but we’re not good enough to just show up to games and win. We have to be laser-focused, especially against a good team like Creighton,” Lopez explained.

“Going into that weekend, we probably weren't as focused as we could’ve been, but that's a good

lesson to have and I’d rather that come earlier in conference play than later.”

Coach Thompson and the Hoyas will look to improve upon the in-conference play, but they have something special brewing: a potential Big East tournament run.

“We’ve said it since the fall: We’re going to Prasco [Park], that’s where our championship conference tournament is, that’s our number one goal,” Lopez said.

Once they’re at the tournament, the Hoyas will take things the same way they have been for the rest of the season: one game at a time.

“Baseball is a funny game. You don’t have to be the best team to win the game, you have to be the best team that day to win the game. And so for us, it’s just getting our foot in the door and seeing what happens from there,” Lopez added.

This is not to say we should expect championships immediately, but for the first time in decades, it looks like the Georgetown baseball program is genuinely building towards something other than complacent mediocrity, and it’s worth being excited about. Hoya fans can enjoy the preliminary success of the team, which has already tripled its wins from last season, and share in the joy of a brighter future.

“Maybe in five years, ten years, Georgetown is nationally recognized. I can say ‘I was a part of that,’” Lopez said, proud of his investment in the Hoyas team. “Fostering that environment is what sold me that this could be a chance to build something special.”

While the days of playing games at the old GU Baseball Diamond, where the Hariri and Regents Buildings now stand, are long gone, students can still get excited. The team hopes that their ongoing success brings fans out to games. In the meantime, Coach Thompson and the Hoyas will keep reshaping the culture of the program by believing in themselves, proving the doubters wrong on the diamond, and winning games.

“Everyone wants to change the narrative around Georgetown baseball and what the program’s been in the past,” Hyde added. “We’re doing that through hard work.” G

graphic by nicholas riccio; layout by connor martin; photos courtesy of georgetown athletics

APRIL 18, 2022

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