Spring 2018 Issue 2

TUFTS OBSERVER VOL. CXXXVI

ISSUE 2

miseducation

table of contents (Mis)education: (Mis)education is not confined to the classroom—it never has been. Before teachers, we had dolls, we had mirrors, we had soundtracks.

Who taught you how to move through the world? Did you listen?

And were they right?

A BAND-AID SOLUTION

3 - feature

By Sarah Gargaro

VOICES

ARTS & CULTURE

NEWS

6 - An Unwritten Identity

8 - REMEMBERING LORRAINE

10 - DISAGGREGATING DATA

By Patricia Mei Nagaoka Toyotoshi

By Morgan Freeman

By Lily Hartzell

POETRY & PROSE

INSET

POETRY & PROSE

12 - Passing Lane

13 - NEVER BEEN DONE BEFORE

17 - FROM AFAR

By Hannah Nahar

By Anonymous

OPINION

NEWS

campus

18 - Educating Otherwise

20 - the fallacy of mentoring

22 - Zooming In

By Fe Sayao

By Leann Beard

By Alexandra Strong

ARTS & CULTURE

OPINION

CAMPUS

24 - AN ART HISTORY

26 - TO WRESTLE WITH

28 - THE UNDOCU-HUSTLE

By Henry Hintermeister

By Maddie Oliff

By Alex Kowalick-Allen

FEBRUARY 20,2018 Volume CXXXVI, Issue 2 Tufts observer, since 1895 Tufts’ student magazine CONTRIBUTORS Maddie Oliff / Leann Beard / Lily Hartzell / Fe Sayao / Alex Kowalick-Allen / Sara Pizarro Jaramillo / Amy Tong / Madeline Lee / Lauren Ballini Sarah Gargaro / Henry Hintermeister / Patricia Mei Nagaoka Toyotoshi / Morgan Freeman / Hannah Nahar / Judy Chen / Claire Pinkham

STAFF EDITOR IN CHIEF: Carissa Fleury MANAGING EDITOR: Emmett Pinsky CREATIVE DIRECTOR: Kyle Scott PRODUCTION MANAGER: Chase Conley FEATURES: Jordan Lauf / NEWS: Sonya Bhatia, Vivian Tam / OPINION: Britt, Gabriela Bonfiglio / ARTS & CULTURE: Henry Jani, Chris Paulino / CAMPUS: Riva Dhamala, Lena Novins-Montague / POETRY & PROSE: Merissa Jaye, Priyanka Padidam / VOICES: Alexandra Strong, Juliana Vega / COLUMNS: Myisha Majumder, Sivi Satchi / COLUMNISTS: Trina Sanyal, Georgia Oldham, Rachel Wahlert / PHOTO DIRECTOR: Abigail Barton / PHOTO: Roxanne Zhang / LEAD PHOTOGRAPHER: Jordan Delawder / ART DIRECTOR: Annie Roome / LEAD ARTIST: Nicole Cohen / MULTIMEDIA DIRECTOR: Kayden Mimmack / MULTIMEDIA TEAM: Deanna Baris, Dennis Kim, Peter Lam, Emily Lin, Hans Tercek / VIDEO DIRECTOR: Aaron Watts / VIDEO: Emai Lai / PODCAST DIRECTOR: Izzy Rosenbaum / PODCAST TEAM: Daniella Faura, Malaika Gabra / PUBLICITY DIRECTORS: Alyssa Bourne-Peters, Ashley Miller / PUBLICITY TEAM: Ellie Mcintosh, Sarah Park, Amy Tong, Nasrin Lin / STAFF WRITERS: Ben Kesslen, Jonathan Innocent, Issay Matsumoto / DESIGNERS: Kareal Amenumey, Niamh Doyle, Daniel Jelcic, Kira Lauring, Erica Levy, Zahra Morgan, Priya Skelly LEAD COPY EDITOR: Owen Cheung / COPY EDITORS: Jesse Ryan, Jennifer Han, Ruthie Block, Anita Lam, Ryan Albanesi, Brittany Regas

Feature

a band-aid solution

WHY TEACH FOR AMERICA WON’T FIX AMERICA’S SCHOOLS

By Sarah Gargaro 2 Tufts Observer February 20, 2018

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A

s graduation looms, many Tufts seniors find themselves scrambling for post-grad plans. Where will Jumbos go after commencement? Certainly some will move to San Francisco, having landed a position at Google. Others will flock to consulting jobs and fellowships in DC, and others still will happily accept whatever entry-level position can pay their rent. And, if tradition holds, a sizeable number of Tufts graduates will join Teach for America.

Teach for America (TFA) is a national education non-profit that places high-achieving college graduates in public school classrooms across the country.

TFA corps members undergo a five to eight week intensive summer training program. Tufts alum and first year TFA teacher Elyssa Harris described TFA’s summer institute as so packed full that it was like “trying to drink from a fire hose.”

After summer training, TFA members are hired by a TFA partner school and enter a two-year contract. TFA partners with schools all over the country, working in rural and urban districts and intentionally placing corps members at high need schools with large low-income student populations. TFA corps members are full-time classroom teachers and are compensated accordingly, earning a salary comparable to certified teachers in their school.

TFA recruits actively on college campuses, identifying candidates for the pro-

ART BY DANIEL JELČIĆ

gram and reaching out directly to them.

Harris first considered TFA after being directly contacted by a TFA recruiter. She said that conversations with recruiters while still at Tufts reassured her that there was space for students like her in the program, space for college graduates who were not really considering becoming teachers, but were interested in education. Knowing that TFA was not looking for committed teachers, but for “people who care, who are interested, and who want to help” made Harris more excited to apply.

But TFA is not without critics. Tufts Professor of Education Steve Cohen centers his critique of TFA on the teachers’ lack of preparation. “What saddens me about going the TFA route is that if you are entering it with a hope of someday teaching, you are entering into very adverse circumstances with very little understanding of the craft of teaching,” he says. After all, the TFA model suggests that a recent college graduate with no qualifications beyond enthusiasm and the completion of a seven week summer training is ready and able to provide the same education to a child as a certified professional teacher.

This, Cohen argues, can lead to discouragement on the part of the teachers and a disservice to students in great need of strong teachers.

Cohen’s sentiment is reiterated by Annie Kolle, a Tufts graduate who taught through TFA for a year before quitting due to an unrelated medical problem. Kolle de-

February 20, 2018 Tufts Observer 3

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TFA chooses to address inequities in education by placing idealistic, enthusiastic, and deeply inexperienced teachers into some of the most challenged classrooms in the country.

4 Tufts Observer February 20, 2018

scribed her year in the classroom as “really, really tough” and said that it was “emotionally draining to be so totally unprepared.”

When asked if she felt prepared for her first day in the classroom after her summer training, Kolle laughed, saying “[teaching] is a really hard job…no one could feasibly be prepared to do it in two months.”

Kolle went into TFA considering becoming a teacher, though she has since found employment in another field. She said that her plans to teach are currently “on hold,” adding that she was unsure “if that was due to Teach for America.”

There is an indisputable body of literature demonstrating that schools with larger numbers of low-income students struggle to produce high academic outcomes—not because poor students are less intelligent than their wealthy peers, but because schools that are in high poverty areas receive less funding than schools in middle or upper-class areas. While TFA suggests that the high level of need in low-income communities is precisely why the organization serves where they do, Cohen argues that this can actually set up a “mismatch.”

On one hand, he explains, you have students who “because of the schools that TFA works in, are the kids who need the most” and on the other you have teachers who “for the most part, aren’t who those kids need.” Cohen’s argument is, essentially, that TFA matches the students at the highest risk of being failed by the school system with teachers who have little experience and little training.

Just as Cohen suggests that TFA does a disservice to students, Gary Rubinstein, Tufts alum, TFA alum, and current high school math teacher, claims that TFA does damage to teachers. On his education blog, “Gary Rubenstein’s Blog,” Rubenstein writes that “TFA survives on the perpetuation of the stereotype of the uncaring, average teacher.” This stereotype, Rubinstein argues, tidily pins the low academic achievement of poor kids on teachers’ low expectations of their students and suggests instead that TFA teachers who hold their students to higher expectations will produce better results.

TFA is not as explicit in this teacher-blame as Rubinstein’s blog would suggest—the organization’s website is

careful to use language of institutional failure and “inequitable systems” rather than simply claim that the TFA training method is more effective than the traditional certification process. And yet, Rubinstein is correct to point out that TFA’s identified method of addressing the failures of the American education system is not focused on political or institutional change, nor does it attempt to address the country’s teacher shortage by, say, setting up a scholarship fund for high achieving college students hoping to enter teacher certification programs. TFA chooses to address inequities in education by placing idealistic, enthusiastic, and deeply inexperienced teachers into some of the most challenged classrooms in the country.

That this is their solution does suggest a belief that school systems can be “fixed” at the teacher level, a belief that tangentially blames failing schools on teachers.

Tess Ross-Callahan, a Tufts senior who recently accepted admission to a Masters of Education and teaching apprenticeship program at Lesley University, spoke about an informational interview she had with TFA that left her feeling unsettled.

Ross-Callahan walked away from the interaction feeling that the organization was less interested in developing the next generation of committed teachers and more that “it frames teaching as a thru-way to greatness, but to your greatness, not the greatness of your students, who are, it seems to me, supposed to be grateful that someone as smart as you is there.”

Ross-Callahan’s categorization of TFA as a thru-way to accomplishment is, in some ways, reflected in the recruitment language on the organization’s website. TFA advertises its strong alumni network and informs applicants that “Teach For America can connect you to high-impact opportunities to continue your influence and accelerate your leadership trajectory.” Cohen explained that this branding, with an emphasis more on leadership development than teacher training, has made it easier for TFA to be considered as a gap year or a pit stop for college graduates on their way to a completely different career path.

Cohen, not unlike Rubinstein, claims that this model relies on an understand-

Feature

ing of “teaching as talking—that if you know something you can teach it.” This understanding disregards the professionalism of teachers and devalues the work that they do. After all, Cohen quipped during our interview, “You don’t see Doctors for America or Dentists for America.”

While Cohen spoke in irony, his point stands: our culture holds some careers as “serious” and others as worthwhile, but nonetheless teachable within a seven week crash course.

For all of this critique, it is impossible to deny that TFA addresses a serious crisis in our education system: according to CNN, 48 states report shortages in qualified math teachers, 46 states report struggling to find qualified special education teachers and 43 states are without science teachers. These shortages are most acutely felt in urban and rural districts. And declining enrollment in teaching programs, dropping 35 percent between 2009 and 2014, has only served to exacerbate the problem. This gap is part of what motivated Kolle to join TFA after graduation. While she admitted off the bat that she did not believe “Teach for America is or should be a long-term solution and honestly can be pretty problematic,” she also felt that, “in certain areas, especially really rural areas, it helps fill that gap that otherwise wouldn’t be filled.” Where the traditional pipeline is failing to produce teachers, TFA continues to produce thousands each year, even if they are underprepared and guaranteed to be temporary.

Why is it that TFA is able to recruit so successfully while teacher certification programs across the country report falling rates of applicants? For starters, TFA reduces barriers for young people hopeful to get into the classroom by offering an access point to schools that leapfrogs over expensive and time-consuming certification programs and graduate school.

While completing TFA does not give someone eligibility to teach in a public school like a traditional certification program, TFA gives young people access to classrooms to test out their interest and gain experience, all while being paid a teacher’s salary. For Cohen, the financial incentive is hard to ignore when discussing TFA. “The $80,000 difference between

learning to teach through TFA versus a program like Tufts, that’s not nothing. In many ways, that’s an indictment of the way we have decided to educate teachers and the cost of graduate school.”

From this perspective, TFA is not the cause of the devaluation of teachers, but a symptom of this cultural problem.

That bright-eyed college kids are filling the classrooms left vacant by a teacher shortage is not an indictment of wellmeaning millennials, but rather of a system that makes it hard to want to teach in the first place.

Those who can afford graduate school and get traditionally certified find themselves entering a profession with low and stagnant pay. Professional teachers have a high burnout rate and often report low job satisfaction. A study from the University of Pennsylvania reported that nearly half of teachers will leave the profession before their fifth year in the classroom and in 2013 the Metlife Survery of the American teacher reported that only 39 percent of teachers reported high levels of professional satisfaction, an all-time low. Increasing pressure to teach to standardized tests robs teachers of their professional autonomy. Teachers in high-need schools face ballooning classroom sizes and rarely have enough prep time and professional support. But, if TFA claims that the school system can be fixed at the teacher level, it does little to support the professionals already occupying that space.

Cohen describes TFA’s model as a Band-Aid solution, at best. “These teachers haven’t become part of the solution, they have become a temporary fix that will simply be replaced by the next temporary fix,” he says. “And that’s just not great for kids.” There is plenty of work to be done in the development of an education system that makes teacher training accessible, supports teachers at risk of burnout, and serves low income children well, and plenty of space for idealistic college graduates in that work. If Teach for America is the best access point for that reform effort, however, is another question.

February 20, 2018 Tufts Observer 5

VOICES

世 三 : y it

t n e d i n e t t i r w n u AN shi t o y a To k o a Nag i e ia M c i r t a

By P

The smell of the charred red meat grilling on the parrilla permeates through the humid air as my family streams into my house with Sopa Paraguaya, Mbeju, and a bowl of fresh salad in their arms. My grandmother walks into the house, delicately taking her shoes off before she enters. Her purse falls between her arms; she waits hesitantly before approaching me. As our eyes meet, she smiles at me and advances with a subtle elegance. She gently places her hands upon my shoulders to give me a light kiss on each cheek. She grins as she says, “Hola Mei. Tanto tiempo, メイちゃん、大きくなりましたね.” I smile and nod in agreement, responding back, “¡Sí! Tanto tiempo,” completely ignoring the second part of her statement I did not understand. As I finish my sentence, my mom pulls me away to help place the food on the table, and my grandmother is left standing there, grinning. As I leave the conversation, her stance stays strong, but her grin turns into sadness. A sad understanding, realization, and acceptance that we will never be able to communicate.

We will never be able to understand each other. We are pulled apart by cultural differences that have shaped us.

6 Tufts Observer February 20, 2018

I am a sansei: a third-generation Japanese who was born in Asunción, Paraguay. By blood, I am fully Japanese, yet in the eyes of those in Japan, I am a foreigner.

My grandparents on both sides immigrated to Paraguay in the mid-1900s. My parents, my brothers, and I were born and raised in Paraguay. Optically, my nuclear family is representative of the Japanese lineage that goes back through centuries of Japanese history. Nevertheless, the language we speak and the culture we express tell a different story. The language of our ancestors is lost in translation. My family and I represent the generations of Japanese people who immigrated to Paraguay and other parts of South American decades ago.

However, my identity became more complicated as my sense of home splintered. Like my parents, I was born in the humid Paraguayan landscape on the rich, red, sunbaked soil. However, the kidnappings and violence that terrorized the small country pushed us to move towards safety, towards a haven up north. I moved to a suburban Canadian neighborhood when I was five.

I was a small, Japanese-Paraguayan girl who spoke little to no English, forced to coexist with little kids who had lived there their whole lives. I quickly made Canada my home, and I lived there for eight years before my grandfather passed away unexpectedly due to an untreated ART BY NICOLE COHEN

voices

世 三 illness. I was only 12 at the time. During this period, my father needed to return to Paraguay to take care of the farm my grandfather had left behind. I was forced to make a choice between staying in Canada with my mother for the next four years of high school or return to Paraguay alongside my father. I made the choice to move to Paraguay, a country I had slowly become dissociated from.

During those four years back in Paraguay, I quickly became more interested in my family’s history, but my new life as a college student in the US has brought up questions about my identity I hadn’t thought to ask.

As an Asian, I seem to be breaking society’s boxes of where Asians are supposed to be from, when in fact I’m one of thousands of other Asians in South America. I am an Asian Latina who re-envisions what Latinos are “supposed” to look like. As my identity began to mold into the racial system upon which the United States was founded, my idea of who I am began to shift. I never had the urge to seek out my family history until I left for the United States. I wanted to validate my identity as a Japanese Latina, hoping that the stories my family had withheld would provide context to my self-perception.

Finding the right questions to ask was difficult, but the right questions led to the right stories. I learned my grandfather on my father’s side was born in Yamaguchi, Japan in 1936. At the age of 20, he became an orphan.

His mother passed away feeding her children while malnutrition ate at her until her dying breath. His father passed away shortly after due to illness. At 21 years old, he sought passage out of Japan, the dilapidated, postwar society he had previously called “home” for his entire life. In order to have a better chance of moving to Paraguay through the Japanese emigration program, he and his best friend decided to marry each other’s sisters

in order to seem like more desirable candidates, since Japan wanted the West to perceive Japanese people as respectful, dignified, and family-oriented. By 1957 he was off to Paraguay in search of opportunity. My grandmother, on the other hand, moved to Paraguay with her whole family in 1959 when she was 13 years old. Her family cultivated the rich, red land with soy.

A few years later, she met my grandfather and they got married. Both my grandmother and my grandfather on my father’s side came to Paraguay during the second wave of immigrants and were immigrated through the Japanese government program.

While these stories belong to my family, they are not singular experiences. They are part of a past that is not often acknowledged. The Japanese migration to Paraguay is hidden between the cracks of history.

When my grandfather passed away and I made the choice to move back to Paraguay, I had a deep-seated regret that still continues today. Every day, I regret not saying goodbye. I regret not asking him what it was like to move to a completely new country. I regret not hearing his funny anecdotes. I regret not being able to embrace him one last time before his passing. I regret not seeing him throughout the last few years of his life. I have held this heavy burden of regret since his death. But I have come to terms with the fact I will never be able to speak to him or hold him ever again. I have come to terms with the fact that there are parts of his stories that are now forgotten, whisked away with his life. And with this understanding came a determination. I do not want to have this similar burden with my other grandparents and with my parents. I do not want their stories to be forgotten as my grandfather’s stories are. I want their legacy to live beyond them.

They are the roots that make me who I am. Their stories make up the identity of an ethnic group that is still extremely present in Paraguay. As I look at my grandfather’s life told through my father, I have come to realize these are the stories that matter. Their stories must not be forgotten.

February 20, 2018 Tufts Observer 7

arts & culture

One cannot live with sighted eyes and feeling heart and not know or react to the miseries which afflict this world. —Lorraine Hansberry

REMEMBERING LORRAINE

By Morgan Freeman

8 Tufts Observer February 20, 2018

arts & culture

O

n January 29, Sighted Eyes / Feeling Heart: Lorraine Hansberry returned home to where it was originally produced in Cambridge for a showing at the Brattle Theatre. The film made its debut at the Toronto International Film Festival back in September and has since been added to PBS’s American Master Series. It was introduced by Ja’Tovia Gary’s mesmerizing short film on faith and transcendence, An Ecstatic Experience (2015). I had watched the piece a few months earlier at the Whitney Museum of American Art, but to see it positioned next to Lorraine’s voice convinced me that it was a brilliant pairing.

The short features clips of sermons, with Black churchgoers sweating in pews set to the sounds of Alice Coltrane’s “Journey in Satchidananda”. The track cuts out and we see Ruby Dee reciting a slave narrative; I suddenly felt hot in the cool theatre. Admittedly, I was apprehensive sitting in the packed audience, the majority of which was White. In settings like this I sometimes feel witness to a sort of collective misunderstanding, like when a Black woman on screen speaks passionately and laughter fills the room. In the case of the Brattle, the crowd was filled with longterm supporters of Sighted Eyes who had been passionately awaiting its completion.

I had moments of discomfort, but they were tempered by gratitude for the existence of this work.

The documentary has been 14 years in the making—director Tracy Heather Strain started collecting research for the project back in 2004. She credits the inspiration of this film to her grandmother bringing her to see a production of Hansberry’s Young, Gifted and Black back when she was 17 years old. As a young adult, she heard Spike Lee’s call to Black directors to create Black films and felt there was a hole where the story of Lorraine Hansberry should be.

Proof of the power of the archive, Sighted Eyes makes use of an incredible collection of Hansberry’s own journaling, interviews, and home videos. English Professor Christina Sharpe says, of Hansberry’s impact, “[She] was so clear-sighted, so committed to imagining Black freedom, so prescient and present, that her death at the age of thirty-four was an almost unimaginable loss.” The documentary creates a space for its audience to both mourn and celebrate

the iconic writer and playwright, who passed away in 1965. She shares her May 19 birthday with Malcolm X—and myself.

Today, she would have been 88 years old.

Best known for her 1959 breakout play A Raisin in the Sun, Hansberry became the first Black woman to have a show produced on Broadway. The play—later adapted as a film in 1961—is often regarded as a pivotal point in the potential of widely produced Black dramas with its depiction of a multidimensional Black family, internal conflicts of masculinity, and what it means to desire freedom.

The documentary features a brief interview with renowned writer Amiri Baraka (formerly LeRoi Jones) who passed away in 2014. We see him give praise to Hansberry and reconsider his initial belittling comments regarding Raisin. In his youth, Baraka felt the work was one that catered to the comfort of White audiences and the falsity of the American dream. In his reflection, he remembered the work as one that dealt with the real economic concerns Black families in America were facing in the mid-19th century. Other contemporaries interviewed include Lloyd Richards, Ruby Dee, Sidney Poitier, and Harry Belafonte. We also get to hear from Lorraine’s older sister, Mamie Hansberry, who called Lorraine “the little sponge” for her ability to soak up information as a child. These interviews contextualize Hansberry as a visionary who deeply influenced her peers.

Beyond commemorating her most popular work, Sighted Eyes shares with its audience what Hansberry imagined freedom to be. Rejecting the deeply racialized class structures that the United States depended (and still depends) on, Lorraine Hansberry joined the Communist Party and subsequently its Labor Youth League after moving to New York City. She found herself surrounded by a community of Pan-Africanists like herself while writing for the Freedom paper; this activity eventually led her to be heavily surveilled by the FBI. Sharpe says, on the film’s shortcomings, “I wish that the documentary had done more in relation to her commitments to the left.” Sharpe recalls the blacklisting of Freedom’s founder, Paul Robeson, by the US government for his ties to Communism and anti-Imperialism. In response to the confiscation of Robeson’s passport,

PORTRAIT BY ANNIE ROOME , BACKGROUND BY ERICA LEVY

Hansberry travelled to report for the paper when he could not. Lorraine’s father Carl Hansberry, a Chicagoan who fought against racist, restrictive housing covenants, could not find reason to remain in a nation that refused his humanity. He relocated to Mexico where he died, a man exiled from his country. In her writing, it is obvious Lorraine carried the legacy of his life and death with her through her own.

Watching Sighted Eyes, it feels like a privilege to hear Hansberry’s life and legacy reflected back to me. I worried her queerness would be neglected altogether, but I was delighted with the way Strain and her team dedicated attention to Hansberry’s sexuality. We watch as, amidst the success of Raisin, she worked to conceal her lesbianism. Throughout her career, Hansberry recorded her “homosexuality,” which led to the publishing of a number of letters under a pseudonym in the lesbian magazine The Ladder. Her husband at the time, Robert Nemiroff, worked to help her conceal this part of herself. Listening to Hansberry write about herself as a queer Black woman who was selective in the community she chose to share her sexuality with, I found myself imagining how she might love in the world today. In a note dated April 1, 1960, Hansberry documents her satisfactions and frustrations in list form. Under “I Like,” she writes “my homosexuality.”

Under “I Hate,” she writes “my homosexuality.” Today, would Hansberry find community that was all-encompassing?

The arrival of Lorraine Hansberry’s life into the realm of documentary was long overdue, and the lasting memory of her work attests to that. Hansberry sought truth concerning the human condition in all that she did, and she ferociously worked towards liberation. One of my favorite scenes in the documentary is a home video that shows Lorraine seated at the steering wheel of a car, a red scarf tied around her head that matches the color of the red leather seats. She turns to the camera and smiles. Here, she looks free.

February 20, 2018 Tufts Observer 9

Feature

i “I

promise you you’ve never seen this many people from Asian ethnicities at the statehouse ever.”

Representative Tackey Chan, a Democrat from Quincy, pointed this out in his testimony in support of House Bill 3361 on January 30. The auditorium behind him was packed and there was an hours-long line out the door. Members of many Asian American communities had come from as far as New York to give their opinions on a bill that would disaggregate data collected on people of Asian and Pacific Islander descent.

“Our Asian American population is extremely diverse and represents different life experiences, health, and educational needs. I believe the state needs better data on our residents so that we may accurately allocate our limited resources to the people who need them the most,” said Director of Organizing at the Massachusetts Immigrant and Refugee Advocacy Coalition Liza Ryan. “We need H.3361 to raise the level of care in our commonwealth.”

The bill would require all state and local agencies to break down data collected about Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders into the five largest ethnic groups in the United States—Chinese, Indian, Filipino, Vietnamese, and Korean. Federal census data is already disaggregated by ethnicity, but this bill would greatly increase the amount of information available about the Asian/Pacific Islander community.

When Chan introduced the bill, no one anticipated that it would become such a contentious issue. His intent was to im-

10 Tufts Observer February 20, 2018

“Accurate and disaggregated data is vital for addressing the inequities in opportunity and access, advancing civil rights, promoting civic engagement, increasing multilingual education, and allocating resources to bring change where there is need.” prove policies and services that affect Asian communities.

“Accurate and disaggregated data is vital for addressing the inequities in opportunity and access, advancing civil rights, promoting civic engagement, increasing multilingual education, and allocating resources to bring change where there is need,” said Vatsady Sivongxay from the Asian American Lawyers Association.

Currently, aggregated statistics on Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders imply that as a group, they are a “model minority.” According to the 2010 census, the median income for Asian households in Massachusetts is $76,000, the highest of any racial group. Additionally, 56.85

percent of Asians have college degrees, far surpassing other groups. However, when the data is disaggregated by ethnicity, it paints a very different picture. According to the American Community Survey, the median household income for Vietnamese families in Massachusetts in 2014 was $56,895. In the same survey, only 14.9 percent of Cambodians reported having a bachelor’s degree.

Analysis of the ACS shows that in 2015, 13 percent of Asians did not have health insurance. When broken down by sub-group, however, 22 percent of Nepalese and 20 percent of Koreans were uninsured. Pakistani, Burmese, Thai, and Malaysians all stood at 19 percent. Having that kind of information helps service providers know which languages to translate materials into and which communities in a city as ethnically diverse as Boston to target for insurance enrollment. Health insurance is just one of countless examples.

Research shows that in the US, Indians are significantly more likely to die from heart disease compared to those who are Vietnamese, which is vital information for public health officials.

These disparities in the data, and the fact that few statistics are available that provide the same level of detail as the ACS, make it very difficult for providers to target their services. At the bill’s hearing, Dawn Sauma, Co-Executive Director of Asian Task Force Against Domestic Violence, cited difficulties in hiring staff with the appropriate language skills as well as creating culturally-sensitive prevention and

ART BY ANNIE ROOME

Feature

ing Data

Passing the state house bill

By Lily Hartzell

intervention programs. This is because there is little reliable information on the size of ethnic groups in Massachusetts and their specific needs. Additionally, grant applications often require data broken down by ethnicity, something the bill is designed to help provide.

Opponents of the bill, however, claim that the bill would give Asian Americans “perpetual foreigner status” by highlighting their ancestry rather than their American identity. Zhengwei Qu called this racial discrimination, asking in his testimony, “Can you imanine if President Obama’s children, grandchildren, greatgrandchildren need to fill out a form as Kenyan? Can you imagine that President Trump’s children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren need to fill out a form as German? This is totally unacceptable and absolutely absurd.”

Some who oppose the bill have gone as far as to compare the data collection to the registration of Jews in Germany in the 1930s or Japanese internment in the US during World War II. Bethany Li from Greater Boston Legal Services’ (GBLS) Asian Outreach Unit pointed out that not only is data on ethnicity already collected by the federal government, but Title XIII and similar state laws protect the privacy of those who provide their data. Additionally, self-identifying ethnicity on government forms is optional. Massachusetts’ effort to disaggregate data is certainly not unique; California, Washington, Rhode Island, and Minnesota have all passed similar bills.

Regardless of prior legislation, there remain individuals who are fierce in their stance against the bill. Many of those present at

the hearing on January 30 testifying against the bill are relatively new Chinese immigrants who have organized over the popular messaging app WeChat. They have organized protests calling H.3361 the “racism bill” and resorted to coughing loudly during the hearing to express their disagreement with supporters.

In her testimony, Li called the opposition’s tactics fearmongering. “I would invite the opponents of this bill to stand with us then, when there truly is an issue of racism and discrimination that harms people of color. But they should not be raising red herrings to distract from the very real issues we at GBLS see in our communities today. They shouldn’t waste our time by creating falsehoods about the impact this bill will have. And they should not claim to speak for the aggregate when they alone are not representative of this community,” Li said.

A prominent argument against the bill is that it unfairly targets Asian Americans. To address this, the Joint Committee on State Administration and Regulatory Oversight referred the bill, originally designed as a placeholder, to a commission to revise it to include provisions to disaggregate data for all racial groups in the Commonwealth. From the beginning, the bill’s supporters have worked with the Black and Latino Legislative Caucuses to ensure their support.

With collaboration between these groups and support from local community organizations, the special commission hopes to expand and finalize the current bill by the year’s end.

February 19, 2018 Tufts Observer 11

poetry

Can’t find it, and on a dirt road the wheels hiccup clichés, spill city kid lonely looking up, a too clear sky.

Well, the wet morning wants its twilight back, its promise of neck strain and light pollution, some potential orbits.

When holding my breath in the window, the sun may read the spots behind my eyes as a kind of carbonation, brain bubbling up, and to where?

Places in the middle are not places to rush through, we read in english at the end of the essay.

Insufficient transliteration, all this in black and white.

It seems even Van Gogh knew color couldn't save anyone, and if he ate yellow paint as commonly suggested, it was just a form of self harm, not any pursuit to internalize sunshine or joy.

Agreeing, I’ll still fingerpaint on docks, make the meteor shower from thumbprints and pond at the neck of a spiritual detour.

If I vibrate with vibrations other than yours, must you conclude that my flesh is insensitive?

Jewishqueerfreak Nazi-fighter Claude Cahun repeated words because they were important.

Oh the buzz of insensitive flesh.

At the neck of a spiritual detour, I repeat me.

To pass requires a kind of imitation I never seemed capable of with my big mouth, being busy and all staring at the ceiling's mold constellations and stamping into leaf piles thick as concrete.

Tried to learn once and the driving instructor said to hold the wheel like holding a boy, not to squeeze so tight.

We’re very sensitive, me and all my selves, and never went back, startled as we were to discover ourselves mythical.

What’s the tincture for homesickness at home?

I want to move through marked doorways with ease.

To feel the spooling of white stripes of road, forthcoming and back and out, though someone else seems to be doing the spinning.

12 Tufts Observer February 20, 2018

ART BY LAURA WOLFE

PHOTOS BY JUDY CHEN

February 19, 2018 Tufts Observer 13

14 Tufts Observer February 19, 2018

PHOTOS BY JORDAN DELAWDER (TOP) AND CLAIRE PINKHAM (BOTTOM)

PHOTOS BY KAREAL AMENUMEY, ROXANNE ZHANG, AND LAUREN BALLINI (CLOCKWISE)

February 19, 2018 Tufts Observer 15

16 Tufts Observer February 19, 2018

PHOTOS BY MUNA MOHAMED

poetry

from Afar Anonymous

In Adda Da’ar the sun extracts sweat from a group of reddening archaeologists who are unearthing ancestral bones in Ethiopia the end of one day brings the discovery of a fractured forearm and then a femur The end of another scattered shards of a spine, ribs, and jaw At first, they call it AL 288-1 Later they call it her They celebrate by blasting Beatles songs Then they deem her Lucy and “all of a sudden, she became a person”

Lucy, lights like sky like a diamond they call her our first, first mother a primordial eve Australopithecus afarensis In Ethiopia They call her Dinknesh It means

…You are marvelous…

And they will never know because they Turned your heritage into dust Threw it into the air and Made it too easy to wipe away ripped your thick, black hair from your scalp unrooted you and then asked you, from where you came as if they didn’t scrub you bone white call you her drown the elelele with pop rock and from there called it, history.

ART BY MADELINE LEE

February 20, 2018 Tufts Observer 17

opinion

Educating Otherwise A CALL FOR INNOVATIVE Schools

By Fe Sayao

T

he first final exam in math I ever took was in tenth grade. It was a disaster.

On the last day of school, my teacher handed me my exam with “43%” written at the top of the front page in red ink. To say that I felt devastated is an understatement.

When my mom picked me up from school that day, I slammed the car door behind me and before she had time to ask what happened, I burst into tears. I couldn’t contain my pain and despair. I screamed so loud I lost my voice. My mother kept her calm and asked me to take deep breaths. I wasn’t crying because I was afraid of disappointing my parents—they have always supported me no matter the circumstance.

I was crying because I disappointed myself. I have always been driven by my own intrinsic motivation at school. I felt downright stupid—a failure, just like my grade.

That day I came to two conclusions: first, I suck at math, and second, I hate math. Eventually, however, I deconstructed those faulty beliefs. In class, my teacher would publicly humiliate and sometimes even exclude students who didn’t complete the homework. This felt threatening and belittling—no wonder I had so much anxiety in that class. My grade on the final exam was not a reflection of my learning, but rather of the stress and lack of motivation I felt in class.

Although it’s easier to say that math was simply not my “calling,” I see myself as a victim of a system that failed me. My schooling years showed me that learning does not happen in a vacuum. Learning is

18 Tufts Observer February 20, 2018

a social experience that relies on a safe and nurturing environment. Several studies show that students are more likely to take risks and persevere, think critically and creatively, and engage in extra-curricular and service opportunities when they have a sense of belonging and purpose, which is only possible in a supportive and stimulating environment.

Within the Western model of education, where the teacher stands in front of the classroom and delivers information to be memorized, learning is treated as a very independent and individualistic endeavor.

Students are responsible and expected to do their work on their own, with little to no collaboration. Some forms of collaboration, such as on tests, take home assignments, and papers, are harshly penalized or considered “cheating.” This contradicts the purpose of school, which, strictly speaking, is to promote learning. How should students be expected to fully learn anything if they are limited to their individual knowledge and what is written in their textbooks?

We know that an effective one-sizefits-all model of education does not exist because students have different needs and thrive under different conditions. This is why “it depends” is a phrase we hear a lot from educators. The need for innovative educational models is more pressing than ever. The 21st century has revolutionized the way we now interact with information and others. The internet allows us easy and instant access to information, thereby de-

valuing the importance of rote memorization. The focus of schools should no longer be placed solely on content knowledge, but also on procedural knowledge and skills.

Innovation can take many different forms; I looked into three examples that stretch what we think of as a “good” education. In the case of High Tech High (HTH) schools in San Diego, innovation is explicit in nearly all aspects. The four guiding principles of HTH are equity, personalization, authentic work, and collaborative design. Classes start with what is called an “entry activity” to engage students and prepare them for the day ahead. Entry activities can involve writing, drawing, answering problem-solving questions, or playing community building games. Teachers facilitate structured conversations using methods such as Socratic seminars, literature circles, and debates. These methods encourage active participation and listening skills.

In addition, HTH students conduct critiques on drafts, early iterations of projects, preliminary sketches, project proposals, and more. The class uses critique to collectively design a rubric for students’ final products. To ensure that students make use of their time wisely, they complete a daily plan outlining each person’s responsibilities. Teachers use informal assessment techniques throughout class to check for students’ understanding and prompt reflection. Each semester concludes with an exhibition open to the public, which adds a sense of accountability and authenticity.

Numbers show that 87 percent of HTH

ART BY AMY TONG

OPinion

students go on to a university or two-year college, and 35 percent of these are the first generation of their family to do so.

Along with innovative schools in the US, I am especially interested in similar educational settings in my home country, Brazil. The Lumiar Institute is well known for its methodology, which was awarded one of the 12 most innovative pedagogic proposals in the world by Stanford University, Microsoft, and UNESCO. Lumiar founded three schools. One is statefunded and offers free education to all of its students; it is the highest performing state school in its municipality. The other two schools are privately funded, but approximately 50 percent of students receive financial support with 25 percent receiving full scholarships—directly addressing the accessibility issues that quickly arise among innovative schools.

Lumiar schools hold “the learners’ interests, needs, and passions at the center of learning.” Students are grouped with students of different ages, giving them the opportunity to learn how to socialize as they would in the real world and allowing their development and exchange of experiences to unfold in a mutual and natural way.

Like HTH, Lumiar uses a project-based approach to learning and uses integrative assessments instead of traditional exams.

The “pedagogical staff ” work as advisors, mentors, and coaches. Lumiar schools hold weekly school-wide assemblies known as “The Circle” attended by all school staff, students, and parents. They use this time to discuss proposals for new projects and disciplinary issues, as well as to allow students to showcase their achievements.

Besides its ability to take on different forms, another characteristic of innovation is that it is relative, meaning it depends on the context and target public of a school. For example, the Maranyundo Girls School, located in Rwanda, a country that is still recovering from genocide and European colonialism, is innovative compared to other schools in the area.

Linda Beardsley, Senior Lecturer at Tufts and Chair of Maranyundo Initiative Education Committee, expressed that one of the greatest questions she faced was understanding what education meant and

looked like to the community and later redefining it in order to provide a culturally appropriate education.

This last example raises important questions of what it means to define “innovation” across cultures, or to impose certain ideals of schooling onto colonized countries. Beardsley mentioned that education, particularly for girls, was previously not as valued and stressed finding a balance between making generalizations about a culture and seeing a systemic reality within it. Beardsley spoke about the frequency of girls dropping out in middle school because it was not safe for them, considering the sociopolitical context and the aftermath of genocide. Generally speaking, Maranyundo holds the expectation that these girls will become leaders in the country. The school offers plenty of resources, including laptops, Kindles, and tablets. In addition, they implemented a STEM high school to support and empower girls who desire to pursue that track. According to the Maranyundo website, “Tufts…plays an important role in evaluating the teaching practices and consulting on teaching and learning methodologies in STEM education for girls”—this is another example of a complex relationship between Western institutions and previously colonized countries, raising questions of power differentials.

Learning about these and other innovative schools made me want to be a student all over again. The future of education is exciting and filled with possibilities, but also filled with concerns: proper funding; teacher training; resources availability; effective measurements of academic, social-emotional, and civic development; and student accessibility regardless of race, class, gender, and disability, to name a few.

A step beyond creating these innovative models will be making sure that all students, and especially marginalized students, have access to them, so these models can fulfill their mission

to flip educational traditions. The only thing I know for certain is that education cannot stay where it is now. Rather than blaming the student, I blame the system. I hope future generations will never suffer from a panic attack because of a big, red number.

The Only Thing I know for certain is that education cannot stay where it is now.

February 20, 2018 Tufts Observer 19

NEWS

The fallacy of Mentorship

By Leann Beard

“O

ur job as mentors is to build a relationship with our mentees—but we can’t really build those relationships to their best capacity without at least engaging with and learning more about the factors that influence their lives,” reflects senior Priyanka Kumar, the current co-president of the Tufts chapter of Strong Women, Strong Girls.

Various mentoring groups exist at Tufts where undergraduate mentors teach specific topics to youth in neighboring communities. Through these programs, mentors meet with their mentees once a week during lunch and recess time to hang out. The linchpin of many of these mentoring groups is spending uninterrupted time together weekly to build a relationship between mentors and mentees.

While mentors feel that they are doing a public service by giving time to these groups, it is important to question the impact of their work and the power dynamics between Tufts students and the students they mentor. Part of the premise behind these men-

20 Tufts Observer February 20, 2018

toring groups is that Tufts students are seen as role models for students in Medford/Somerville due to their affiliation with Tufts, an elite private university.

When thinking about what makes a good role model, having shared identities with mentees is essential. However, many Tufts students do not have similar racial, ethnic, or class identities as their mentees. Per the New York Times report published last year, Tufts students are more likely to belong to the top 1 percent than the bottom 60 percent income bracket, and 56.6 percent of Tufts undergraduate students are White. The majority of students in Somerville public schools are of color, and 39.4 percent are economically disadvantaged.

So often, these White, wealthy Tufts students enter communities of color without understanding their extremely privileged identities in a society steeped in racial and socioeconomic disparities. The lack of awareness around structures in these spaces

NEWS

perpetuates disparities and inequality, frequently leading to acts of microaggression in the affected communities.

DREAM, a mentoring group that partners with low-income housing communities, is one of many programs on campus that has struggled to confront issues of race and class. Senior Suzannah Blass recalls her first semester of mentoring with DREAM: “Looking back, I had very easily fallen into the trope of the White savior and expected these kids to revere me as their ‘mentor.’ I didn’t realize the ramifications of my attitude or the many microaggressions that, looking back, I am sure I delivered when I was working with these kids.”

Similar to Blass’s experience, without a critical understanding of their racial identity, mentorship between White Tufts students and their mentees can easily become a case of White saviorism.

This looks like White Tufts students entering communities of col-

“My mentees and I could talk about how they were disciplined at home and their thoughts on that, without the fear of being judged. We talked about our skin and how beautiful it was.”

p

or, without any training or understanding of their mentees’ experiences, and expecting to “change their lives”, as the Big Brothers and Big Sisters program implies on their website. But Big Brothers and Big Sisters are not the only groups who normalize this attitude—this belief is prevalent across different programs.

Nihaarika Sharma, a senior, is a mentor for Strong Women, Strong Girls, and notes the way the organization does not address race and racism, given “how race evasive the curriculum is and how they have no concern for the fact that the majority of Boston mentors are White women.” Sharma adds, “Strong Women, Strong Girls choosing not to pay attention to race tells me that they don’t care about steering away from being White saviors... they aren’t being critical enough in their own impact and the power dynamics they bring to the work they are doing.”

Kumar also noticed the same trend of receiving curricula and direction from an organization that fails to acknowledge White privilege and the power White mentors wield. In response, Kumar has worked to bring an “anti-racist” approach to the local Tufts chapter.

Kumar says, “As I understand it, the difference lies between being active and passive. Being actively anti-racist means going after having the hard conversations, it means doing the readings that provide new perspectives and lenses through which to understand the current racial situation, it means being critical about what your racial presence means in present-day United States.”

Kumar adds that this kind of active anti-racism inherently involves “taking on the responsibility of learning.”

For mentors who do share identities and experiences with their mentees, mentorship can flourish. Black Tufts alum Maia Raynor, (A’16), says, “My mentees and I could talk about how they were disciplined at home and their thoughts on that, without the fear of being judged. We talked about our skin and how beautiful it was.”

At its core, mentorship is about the needs of the mentee, and Raynor’s story highlights how mentor relationships between mentors and mentees who share identities can be spaces of care and healing. Ultimately, there is no way that same experience could occur between mentors who do not share the same racial identity, like Raynor and her mentees.

HeeJae An, (A’16), says, “For complete strangers, the easiest shared experience we can have is our ethnic identity... I know for a fact if I were paired with a Korean kid, there would’ve been another level of connection between us.”

What An and Raynor describe is this: race and ethnicity are important and salient in mentoring relationships. Children have a wide range of thoughts, needs, and feelings; it is shared identities between mentors and mentees that allow an emotionally supportive and trusting relationship. This is made difficult when mentees of color are paired with White mentors.

Blass reflects, “DREAM taught me a lot about working with populations that have faced structural oppression but I continue to wonder at whose expense. I had to learn with the kids by making mistakes and slowly unlearning some of my biases. I think the kids in DREAM deserved better than that.”

She advises, “the best of intentions don’t really matter if the impact is only feeding into the structural oppressive systems in place... It’s the job of Tufts students to educate themselves if they actually care about these kids.”

February 20, 2018 Tufts Observer 21

campus

Zooming in:

A preview of tufts’ newest docu-series

C

loaked by the painted red walls of Renee’s Cafe in Teele Square, Rachel Sobel and Amanda Rose were sitting across from each other in deep conversation about the proper size of a pancake when they shifted gears and began to brainstorm a new way to lift up Tufts’ student narratives: The Athena Project. A filmed docu-series that focuses on sharing the stories of those with marginalized gender identities within the Tufts community, the two envisioned The Athena Project as a platform for narratives that are too often left untold. Sobel, a sophomore, and Rose, a junior, have based the style of The Athena Project off of the popular docu-series Humans of New York. Each episode will be themed and will tell the personal experiences of multiple interviewees as people first and Tufts students second. Rose ex-

22 Tufts Observer February 20, 2018

plained their motivation for taking on the project: “We are both passionate about storytelling, feminism, and opening up intersectional platforms for people to tell their stories. [We] wanted to create something... to illuminate the lives of people of marginalized genders at Tufts.”

As co-creative directors, Sobel and Rose wanted to include as many different narratives as possible, so they reached out to various clubs and organizations on campus and asked people to help circulate their Google Form. Since the inception of the project in December, they have gathered 70 submissions and are now gearing up to start shooting interviews. Sobel commented on the kinds of narratives the Athena Project will showcase: “[These are] completely human stories that everyone faces, but that aren’t told enough because

By Alexandra Strong so often stories of people with marginalized genders are replaced with the stories of White cis male individuals.”

Sobel and Rose are conscious of the vulnerability required of the interviewees and have been intentional in the framing of the interviews. “We recognize that a lot of the themes that are going to be discussed are going to be very personal…so having people choose the space where they are going to be filmed is one way that we enhance the comfort of the interviewee,” Sobel explained. Aside from this, Sobel and Rose have also set up various ways to ensure that interviewees feel as comfortable and supported as possible throughout every step of the Project. “We’ve opened up the pool of interviewers to the general public, and we’ve gotten a big amount of interest,” Sobel said. She reiterated the importance

campus

of involving different types of people in all aspects of the Project, saying it was yet another way for them to incorporate multiple perspectives. Anyone interested in participating as an interviewer or crew member underwent a day of training during which they brainstormed interviewing questions and learned how to film an interview.

Senior Ray Bernoff is one of the coproducers, and speaks of his motivation to join the project: “As far as I know, TUTV hasn’t done anything like this before…and doing a project specifically about marginalized gender was interesting to me.” Given that projects about gender led by cis people run the risk of either misrepresenting or ignoring trans experiences, Bernoff added that he felt strongly that he should join the team: “I definitely also felt some responsibility to do it because I knew it was unlikely that a lot of other trans people were going to volunteer for it”.

Part of the reason why The Athena Project has gained so much traction in such little time is because the Project’s team makes an active effort to connect with everyone getting involved. First-year

ART BY NICOLE COHEN

Hayden Wolff felt a bit unsure as to whether The Athena Project was something he wanted to contribute to, but after he spoke to Sobel, he immediately felt better. “She just went about it in a really good way that made me feel like my story was going to be told in an interesting way and not just focus on my identity as a trans person, but me as an entire person,” he said.

Ty Nguyen, a junior, echoes these sentiments, saying that friendship and personal connection played a large part in her deciding to join The Athena Project as an interviewee. She explained, “I didn’t think I’d be a person who’d be fit for the project, but then [my friend] Charlotte, who is on staff for The Athena Project, convinced me.” When asked why she wanted to be involved with The Athena Project, an anonymous first-year felt that the sharing of more stories from people on the gender spectrum would serve as a sense of encouragement. “[It will] encourage others to come forward and share their stories, and that will allow for a much more inclusive environment for all people on the gender spectrum,” she pointed out.

Regardless of their level of involvement, many hope that The Athena Project will act as a catalyst to increase visibility for all marginalized gender identities. Wolff explained his initial interest in the project, saying, “I felt like this would be a good way to get myself out there and get people more comfortable with my identity...just to say ‘yes, we exist, and there’s nothing wrong with us.’” Bernoff expressed similar goals for the project, saying, “I’m hoping it’ll be a resource for folks who don’t feel like they know that much about what kinds of experiences there are on this campus and how different people on campus experience gender.”

While The Athena Project came into existence in part due to the challenges people with marginalized gender identities are forced to deal with every day, it will also document their stories and lives beyond their gender identities. Rose explained that The Athena Project is just as much about creating visibility for these struggles as it is about “the humans that live here, and the joys and experiences of their lives.”

February 20, 2018 Tufts Observer 23

ARTS & CULTURE

an art history

By Henry Hintermeister

“T

his would be a national treasure if it were still in Japan,” explained Ikumi Kaminishi, Associate Professor of Buddhist art at Tufts University, to her Asian Art survey class a year ago.

On the projector screen, Miroku, the Bodhisattva of the Future, stares out at the students from behind crystalline eyes, his expression regal, his face unfurrowed. Carved from Japanese Cypress and overlaid with gold, Miroku stands upon an unfolding lotus flower. His robes fall in exquisite detail as he extends his palm to the earth in a gesture of charity.

This 12th century statue can be found in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts’ Japanese Buddhist Gallery. One might wonder, as I did then in the lecture hall: if the statue is Japan’s national treasure, what is it doing in Boston? Was it stolen? Smuggled?

Excavated illegally? The truth is: it’s complicated. In fact, with museum acquisitions, it usually is.

The Miroku statue is world class. Miroku’s sculptor, the 12th century Master Kaikei, reinvented Buddhist sculpture along with his brother Unkei, she said. Their superb figures brought a Buddhist revival to Nara, the cultural center where their workshop was located. “Kaikei is like half of Michelangelo,” said Kaminishi. “The other half is his brother.” *** Western museums touting the artifacts and artwork of non-Western peoples and countries, in many cases the ex-colonies of Europe, are criticized as being tools of colonialism and domination. This is especially true of older European museums like the Louvre, Berlin’s Museum of Natural History, and the British Museum, explains Andrew McClellan, a Tufts professor of Museum Studies. .

“Museums are tools of empire,” said Joseph Walser, a professor of religion at Tufts University.

24 Tufts Observer February 20, 2018

ARTS & CULTURE

“They make statements of power... It’s saying ‘you have to come here to see your treasures.’” McClellan agrees: “[Museums] are tools of civic pride and power, and they always have been.”

A museum speaks on behalf of its country.

“Museums are now the necessary ornaments of any nation state,” said McClellan. “One of the first things you see, if you look at the founding of new nations, is a move to create national museums, and [museums] become a kind of reflection of civilization that all nations aspire to.”

To provide stewardship for the world’s treasures suggests that the patron’s commitment to preserving global heritage underscores their ability to foster such care, and denotes their dedication to a pedagogical mission.

For the last two centuries, museums have gathered up artwork around the world by claiming what McClellan calls “The Salvage Paradigm.” The argument runs thus: “if we don’t step in to save this, it will be destroyed.”

The Salvage Paradigm can lead to questionable acquisitions. In 1924, the explorer Langdon Warner (1881-1955) removed twelve murals from China’s Dunhuang caves and transferred them to Harvard’s Fogg Museum for preservation, said The Crimson. The Dunhuang Museum now accuses the Fogg of theft.

The Salvage Paradigm is what allows the British Museum to hang onto the Parthenon marbles, which once decorated the Parthenon at Athens, explained McClellan. Between 1801 and 1805, Lord Elgin bought half of the remaining Parthenon Marbles from the Ottoman government, which then controlled the region, says the British Museum’s website. Elgin sold them to the British Museum for £35,000 in 1816.

Since Greece formed as a nation in the 1830s, it has been trying to get the marbles back. The Acropolis Museum in Athens stands waiting to receive them. “Greece is saying to the world,” said McClellan, “‘the argument that Britain has used for decades and centuries that we can’t look after our own stuff is palpably false. Now that we have a state of the art museum that’s equal to any in the world, why doesn’t Britain return these things?’” However, museums and their proponents have a different point of view.

“A museum’s purpose is to display and protect artifacts for the proliferation of knowledge and the enlightenment of humanity,” said McClellan. Their common goal, he says, is to give a complete picture of the broad sweep of human history and world art with the mission of educating their visitors. This makes them acquisitive.

The Salvage Paradigm is a tool of power, but also a real sentiment for the preservation of the world’s treasures. “It’s without question,” said McClellan, “that had the Parthenon marbles been left on the building for another hundred years, they would have deteriorated greatly, they would have been neglected certainly, and possibly destroyed.”

Had the British Museum not acquired them when they did, the marbles might not have survived at all.

ART BY ANNIE ROOME

*** Okakura Kakuzo (1862-1913), a Japanese collector and curator at the MFA, purchased Miroku in 1906 from Kofuku-Ji temple in Nara for his private collection, explains Kaminishi. A year earlier he had purchased fourteen Buddhist images from Japanese sites for $7,500 on behalf of the MFA, she said. Okakura’s estate sold Miroku to the MFA in 1920, seven years after Okakura’s death, reports the MFA’s website.

At the turn of the twentieth century, Japanese Buddhist temples were selling statues left and right, explained Kaminishi. During the Meiji period (18681912), when the shogunate gave way to the imperial government, the Buddhism of the samurai was persecuted in favor of the Emperor’s Shinto. “Statues were burned, they were destroyed. They were taken apart, if it’s bronze, melted down,” said Kaminishi. “So, there was great danger of losing all of these.”

In the meantime, new state legislation restricted temples’ sources of revenue, explained Walser and Kaminishi. Temples were forced to sell their lands, and their artifacts, to stay afloat. Okakura and Earnest Fenollosa, a Harvard professor teaching ethics in Japan, surveyed temples for the most precious Buddhist treasures, saving all that they could.

An ocean away, the United States was on what McClellan refers to as “a vast shopping and hoarding spree” to catch up with European museums. “It was too late to march into countries and take their stuff,” said McClellan. “[The United States] would have played that game if it could have, but it couldn’t.” Instead, he said, U.S. museums were buying in large volume. Because the U.S. was eager to accumulate as much art and wealth as possible, the ethicality of these purchases fell to the wayside.

The MFA bought heavily from Japan, says McClellan, though mostly through private, legal avenues, like Okakura. Presumably, when Okakura’s estate offered Miroku to the MFA, the museum was happy to buy and the estate was happy to see the statue preserved.

But, Buddhism is no longer violently persecuted in Japan. So, where does Miroku belong now?

It’s not so clear. Though the requirements for preserving a national treasure are rigorous, Kaminishi explains Kofuku-Ji is Japan’s largest Buddhist repository of national treasures. They could both care for Miroku and showcase the piece in its original context. On the other hand, she says, a museum exhibit in the MFA offers the chance for a wider audience. A Japanese museum could host Miroku, but Kaminishi, a Japanese citizen, has not felt any public support for the piece’s return.

For any piece in the MFA, or any museum, there is a history. Some works are stolen, acquired unethically, and belong rightfully to their home countries. Others are saved, purchased fairly, and shared. Many fall into impossible grey areas. What is clear, however, is that each piece must be evaluated in context, case by case.

February 20, 2018 Tufts Observer 25

opinion

To Wrestle With

By Maddie Oliff

“L

earn it! Live it! Love it!” This slogan guided my summer abroad in 2014 as a student at Alexander Muss High School in Hod HaSharon, Israel. The content of our course of study spanned from the Jewish roots in the biblical era through the global diaspora and into modern Israeli history. Our formal learning was accompanied by classroom discussions about historical sites followed by field trips to experience those sites firsthand. This model allowed us to engage with over 4,000 years of history. Seemingly, there was no limit, timeline, or boundary to our learning.

At the beginning of class three weeks into the program, a loud noise erupted. It was not until a silence swept over the room that I realized it was a siren. Quickly, we shuffled out of the classroom and into a bomb shelter.

For the subsequent three weeks, our field trips were replaced with trips to this shelter. The four concrete walls—once used only for sound-proofing the music room—became tools to protect us from missiles and mortar shells. This was the first instance in which our learning was confined, yet our teachers still capitalized on this time. With the help of prayer, connections to the past camouflaged our present fear: hymns of “how good and how pleasant it is when brothers and sisters dwell together in unity,” aided by guitar, echoed loudly.

Every visit to the shelter lent to our realization of just how complicated the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was, particularly this phase which would become known as Operation Protective Edge.

We soon learned that after the kidnapping and eventual death of three Israeli teenagers on June 12, 2014 by a member of Hamas, Jewish extremists kidnapped and burned alive a Palestinian teen on July 2—the day the three killed Israelis were buried. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu tweeted that “Hamas will pay a heavy price...” for the Israeli lives taken. As a result, Op-

19, 2018 26 Tufts Observer February 20, 2018

eration Brother’s Keeper deployed the Israeli Defense Force into an investigation of the abduction. This Operation morphed into “Protective Edge” in early July, as Israel began conducting air strikes aimed at stopping rocket fire originating in Hamas facilities in the Gaza Strip. The next stage was characterized by the ushering in of Israeli soldiers into the Gaza Strip for ground invasion.

By the end of the Operation on August 26, over 2,200 Palestinians and 65 Israelis had lost their lives.

A couple weeks into the conflict, I spent Shabbat with David Raz, a family friend I’d met on a previous trip to Israel. He welcomed me into his home in a fervent state; two of his three sons were called up from reserves of the Israeli Defense Forces and preparing for service when I arrived. The fractured phrases I could catch of the informal family discussion over dinner preparations clued me into the realities on the ground, including mentions of the Gaza Strip as Raz’s son’s destination and the concrete tunnels as the Defense Force’s target. As I was merely a guest, I detected an intentional distancing from the son—the intel he had was not for me to hear.

As the Operation progressed, our trips to the shelter transitioned from surprise to routine, and distanced us from the lives of people represented by these numbers and figures. We could not quite understand the alterations of everyday life of Israelis and Palestinians that was happening beyond our walls. Yet, as foreign students, we understood that the disproportionate Palestinian death toll was due to Israel’s massive advantage in financial and military resources, particularly of the Iron Dome air defense system.

During every bus ride on our field trips, our teacher read the newspaper to inform us of the happenings of the State. And as our ability to travel safely around the country dwindled, I looked forward to these bursts of information as they shed light onto the

PHOTOS BY MADDIE OLIFF

opinion

political situation unfolding before us. After arriving back to campus from a trip in the thick of the Operation, my mom called with a list of possible flights home; she said that she did not want me in a “war zone.” The difference between her vision of the danger around me and my own experience only widened as she continued to be fed ideas from American media that disproportionately represented one side of this struggle.

I was thinking through my mother’s perceptions of my surroundings based on the conservative narratives of Israeli media.

For the first time in my 16 years of Jewish education, I realized the void in this learning: my miseducation manifested in the information purposefully concealed from me. The dissonance between my lived experience and the media portrayal of this situation evidenced the impact that media has on perception, and therefore, action. While I had the privilege of leaving, this violence has been, is, and will continue to be the reality for Israelis and Palestinians, and to go home meant to take advantage of the safety in distance.

Traveling and experiential learning programs are exhaustive of both time and money. As a White American woman, I rarely rely on a set of concrete walls to ease worries of personal safety. At the same time, this experience provided me with the opportunity to search for truth and begin to question my location in navigating the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

I requested that Palestinian voices be brought into our classroom. Why couldn’t we, as Jewish American students, access Palestinian media sources as well to contextualize the lives being lost at the expense of this war? These perspectives existed all along, but the Palestinian narratives remained suppressed.

In choosing to stay, I committed to learning more of the truth and felt the obligation to do so. The partial picture reported to Americans, and even embedded in Israeli and Palestinian textbooks, perpetuates divisiveness. The invisibility of other narratives allows Israel to justify the subordination of Palestinians and warrants Palestinians to retaliate against the occupation and settlement of their land. Therefore, the cycle of discord sustains itself in the region.

ART BY KAREAL AMENUMEY

Curriculum is intentional, and what isn’t included in it is even more so. Part of navigating education is recognizing and acting on those gaps, and it shouldn’t take a siren or a shelter to see the slanted qualities in presented facts and figures.

That summer continues to sit with me, nearly five years later.

It informs my continued ties to Israel based on identity and my obligation to lift up the voices of Palestinians. My Jewish education now roots itself in formulating questions out of answers, and from that identity, my questions will persist. My critical analysis will escalate. My inherent commitment to the stability and justice of both Israel and Palestine will too. Just as the translation of the word Israel implies, I have and will continue “to wrestle with” Israel—and proudly so.

a period of reflectiob...

get out of our bubble

February 20, 2018 Tufts Observer 27

campus

“I

’d like to ask you to introduce yourselves. Tell us something you wish the world knew about you.” Adriana Zavala, professor in the Department of Art and Art History, said as she turned to the three guest panelists sitting in the armchairs to her left.

The event, “Immigrant Entrepreneurship – A Conversation,” which took place on February 3, was organized by the Tufts Latino Center in light of the upcoming DACA decision. DACA was established in 2012 by the Obama administration and allowed undocumented immigrants who are minors to receive a renewable twoyear deferred action from deportation, as well as a work-permit. In September 2017, Trump rescinded DACA and is now planning to revise immigration laws in order to end “chain-migration,” which is the visa sponsorship of family members by existing visa holders. This coming week, more proposals aimed at replacing DACA will be presented in the senate. But if the government does not agree on a new policy and pass it, young people formerly protected under DACA could be at risk of deportation, and many will immediately lose the provisions under DACA that allowed them things such as licenses, health care, and educational financial aid. Some of those who would be affected are part of the Tufts community.

The Latino Center’s goal for the event was to prove that even without DACA, undocumented immigrants can still survive and thrive. The guest panelists were all undocumented immigrants who grew up without DACA. Through entrepreneurship, they forged their own paths to success.

Neo Sandja, one of the panelists, introduced himself by saying, “Hello, my name is Neo Sandja. I am from the Democratic Republic of the Congo. I am African, I am Black, I am a vegetarian, I am transgender.” Sandja initially came to the US on a student visa. However, after coming out as transgender to his father, his family revoked their financial support. He was unable to cover the costs of his education and was forced to drop out, causing him to lose his student visa and, therefore, become undocumented. Fortunately, he still had a temporary social security number, and was able to find work. He set aside a portion of his income to start hormone therapy. This caused him to rapidly gain weight, so he began going to the gym regularly and later started a blog about his transition and his fitness goals. Soon, he had garnered an online following of other trans men interested in his story.

Sandja thinks about entrepreneurship as a way to help communities, saying, “At first entrepreneurship was just about surviving for me, surviving and making

money. But what’s going to take you out of [that mindset] is remembering it’s not about you. It’s about a service that people need.” Soon after his blog took off, Sandja founded his own company dedicated to empowering the trans community in all aspects of their lives called FTM Fitness World. He also organized the first bodybuilding competition for trans men.

For New Latthivongskorn, entrepreneurship was also a way in which he found success as an undocumented immigrant.

Latthivongskorn emigrated from Thailand to the US with his parents when he was nine years old on a tourist visa. As a child and teenager, he spent his summers and weekends working for his parents in their Thai restaurant. He would always ask his parents what he could do to help them, and “they would say ‘do your job,’ which was to focus on education; they thought education was the key to success.” But for Latthivongskorn, it wasn’t that simple. He said, “being undocumented, one of the things you find out fairly quickly that just doing well in classes won’t always get you to where you want to go.”

Latthivongskorn was overjoyed when he received a nearly full scholarship to UC Davis. But two months before he was due to start school, the school reached out to him and inquired about his status, “and I told them that I didn’t have a green card,

undocuhustle

By Alex Kowalick-Allen

28 Tufts Observer February 20, 2018

CAMPUS

and that I was undocumented, and they said ‘Sorry, you can’t have this scholarship, tell us when your status changes.”

In the end, Latthivongskorn attended UC Berkeley, which also did not offer him any financial aid because of his undocumented status. He paid for school by holding a part-time job at a restaurant near campus and eventually, he was awarded a scholarship through E4FC, Educators for Fair Consideration, a nonprofit that supports immigrant students. After graduating, he went onto became the first undocumented medical student at UC San Francisco and is now working towards a master’s in public health at Harvard, where he is a part of the Undocumented Student Support effort.

The other panelist, Illiana Perez, has also devoted her work to help undocumented people succeed. Perez received both her bachelor’s and master’s degree in California and is currently completing a Ph.D. in Education Policy, Evaluation and Reform at Claremont Graduate School. In 2012, Perez published “Life After College: A Guide for Undocumented Students,” a free online guide about finding employment after college as an undocumented person. “I’ve come up with a term for my trajectory,” Perez said in the panel discussion, “I call it the UndocuHustle—I think that as undocumented individuals, the path was never the same as anybody [else].”

Perez currently works at Immigrants Rising where she encourages immigrants to thrive as entrepreneurs, regardless of their legal status. Perez said, “We [have] to bring back the idea that individuals can still do so much, even without work authorization.

Because even if we do get the clean Dream act, even if we do get immigration reform, immigration is so complex that one policy won’t fit the whole picture, and individuals will always get left out.”

“I call it the undocuhustle--i think that as undocumented individuals, the path was never the same as anybody [else].”

ing, “I feel like this. I feel like I’ve found people like me who aren’t documented, and it feels really warm to know people like me here.” Ana Manriquez, a Tufts student and intern at the Latino Center, mused, “I think more events like this that are intentionally for undocumented students and also address the other intersections that come with being undocumented should be organized on campus.”

Jesus Ramirez, a sophomore at Tufts who attended the event, said, “It was fascinating to me to see that their initiatives helped others, other people who are also navigating their predicaments…It’s amazing how this community is able to thrive.”

Ramirez hopes that events like this continue to happen on campus, creating an environment where immigrants are supported and inspired to be hopeful about the future. He explained, “With the greater oppression will come a greater resistance.”

Mariana, an event attendee from Medford High School who emigrated from Brazil to the US almost three years ago, connected with Perez’s message about the importance of recognizing the solidarity between undocumented immigrants, say-

From left to right; Julián Cancino, Director of Tufts Latino Center; Iliana Perez; New Latthivongskorn; Professor Adriana Zavala; Neo Sandja

ART BY RIVA DHAMALA

February 20, 2018 Tufts Observer 29

And to think they said there was no beauty in science.