"At worst, justifiably killed, and at best, a thug."

Oops:

17-year-old [Michael Moroz], a senior at Central High School, recently wrote an opinion piece for the school’s newspaper criticizing protests by student racial-justice activists at the University of Missouri. It ran alongside a piece that applauded the demonstrations.
Moroz pulled no punches, calling Michael Brown, the black teenager killed by a white police officer in Ferguson, Mo., “a delinquent” who was “at worst, justifiably killed, and at best, a thug.” Moroz dismissed Missouri students’ demands as “nonsensical,” and blasted protesters who went on a hunger strike.Things blew up once the story hit the Centralizer’s Facebook page shortly after Philadelphia schools let out for winter break. On social media, there were calls to “deal with” Moroz and “shoot” him, and he was decried as a racist. Fearing for his safety, Moroz did not attend school Monday.

So, quick responses:

1. Nobody deserves to be sent death threats over exercised free speech, certainly not over a newspaper editorial.

2. Even if said newspaper editorial was garbage.

3. I do not look forward to all of the ammunition this is going to give concern trolls who will point to this as examples of liberals gone wild, instead of high school students being swept up in a moment of anger on the Internet, as high school students (and grown adults on both ends of the political spectrum) are wont to do.

4. On the question of censorship and free speech, opinions differ. Moroz argues that the school shouldn't have pulled the editorial; the school points out that they didn't take it offline or collect print editions of the paper (the article is easily found with a well-directed search). Given the primary need to protect students, my instinct is to sympathize with the school's position in all of this, although the student body differs in their opinion. Several students note both the article's inflammatory language and their wish for more open dialogue and acknowledgement of the pain this incident may have caused students:

“He can have a different viewpoint,” said Gaillard, 17. “But he didn’t have to be crass and disrespectful in the way he expressed it. That was unacceptable.” 

Ana Deluca-Mayne, another Central senior, said she wished the story had not been published — not because of its view but because of its “extremely inflammatory language” and its seeming dismissal of the Black Lives Matter movement. She said she was disappointed it wasn’t used to spur a larger conversation.
“A lot of the people who were upset with the article were upset that it was taken down,” [Ann] Deluca-Mayne said. “We want to have discussions about race, about differing opinions about movements like Black Lives Matter.”
She and others said any threat to Moroz was unacceptable. 

“Disgust” was how Central senior Tiffany Coles described her reaction to the story...but she also takes issue with the administration’s response.
“So many students were upset, and hurt, and felt personally attacked by this article,” Coles said. “That should have been addressed. That shouldn’t have been swept under the rug.”

Yeah, nobody comes out looking very good in all of this, but from the perspective of an observer, it hurts to think of what lessons the students are taking away from all of this.

"But for Mirabai, the point wasn’t just her devotion to Krishna. It was about the poetry she created because of it."

Yeah, going to drop this off here.

Among the many interesting things to think about:

1. The way these Internet boyfriends - hand-selected in the aggregate by thousands of Tumblr users screaming in collective agony - become what Sulagna Misra calls "[paragons] of enlightened masculinity." Works both across fiction and real-life: part of why Oscar Isaac's Poe Dameron resonates so deeply with me (more than any male protagonist since Hannibal's Will Graham, played by Hugh Dancy with a compassionate sensitivity) is that he's the rare model of manhood that isn't built on the fundamental insecurity of constantly needing to prove it. This essay on how The Force Awakens may be setting up Poe as Star Wars' first queer protagonist says it better than I can:

In the best possible way, [Poe] has nothing to prove, and it makes for a very refreshing change. He’s an action hero without a chip on his shoulder. Poe is fearless, but not reckless. He’s compassionate, he doesn’t feel the need to pretend he doesn’t have feelings, even about his little droid. When he’s not whooping in delight while flying, he speaks softly and kindly. He’s confident about his abilities — “I can fly anything,” — but it never transgresses into cockiness, and he admits when he’s challenged. Rather than swagger, he moves with an old-Hollywood grace: in the moment where he climbs out of his X-Wing at the rebel base after the battle on Takodana, he looks like an aviator from the 1920s — all he needed was the silk scarf. He’s respected as a commander and beloved as a friend. He doesn’t have to be convinced to believe in things, or in people — there is nothing bitter or hardened about him, but there’s also nothing naive.

A few months ago, a friend and I got to see Alicia Garza, the founder of #blacklivesmatter, speak; in the Q&A panel following her speech, she had a charged but productive discussion with a young man. To his question about why "she didn't talk at all to the men in the room," she encouraged him to be critical about how his manhood could serve him. I think a lot about how Garza framed it: she wasn't asking men to deny their identity as men but to reconstruct it, to be thoughtful and intentional about how it serves you, serves other people, serves what you believe to be just and true. The Internet boyfriend, similarly, is the corollary to the (much-deserved) flak men get on the Internet. Idealized? Probably. Powerful? Undeniably.

2. On the other hand, it seems that the power of the fantasy is delegitimized, particularly for women (or, speaking from personal experience, queer men). This is nothing new, obviously, and goes back to probably The Beatles, and before them Elvis. That this happens in a context where, I mean, women or queer people* don't have a lot of models for healthy, happy relationships is troubling. But whatever: we're just as entitled to our private experiences of love as anybody else, even if ours don't happen to be media-sanctioned, and I think it speaks to the potential that our ideals of love and romance have for political transformation. It's no mistake that Misra in conclusion refers to Hindu poet Mirabai's writing about memetic Hindu sex god Krishna, likening the experience to an act of faith.

3. I also appreciate that Misra's piece centers itself on the creative activity that comes out of our crushes; I mean, given that a good 35% of the Western literary canon is men waxing poetic about their beloved's apple-red lips and heaving bosoms, it only seems fair to acknowledge that love makes for great art.

That's about all I have for today. In closing, we take our relational cues from the media more than we would like to admit, but we have power in creating art that derives from and builds on the art that inspires us--and in doing so we also reconstruct what it means to be female, male, queer, single, dating, etc. Also, Oscar Isaac has a really cute face and the voice of an angel, and I dream of waking up to him in that really twee suit singing the Star Wars theme song. Speaking of which:

BYE

Notes on bullshit, trauma, privilege, elites, and...well.

If anyone was able to discover something "hidden" within the curriculum at St. Paul's it was Carla; she was able to understand the unwritten rules of the school, translate her own understanding of things into these rules, and excel. Carla's experience at the school tells us that this is not enough. To her, the mere act of learning the hidden curriculum feels forced; her resistance to the school's lessons is apparent to the faculty and influences her interpersonal relationships. Because she did not believe the curriculum was legitimate - but just a different form of bullshit - she was unable to interact in ways that made the organization of the school, and her success within it, seem natural.

Won't speak for the entire book until I've finished it, but three chapters in, Shamus Khan's Privilege is hitting very close to home, one of the most nuanced yet biting deconstructions of new elite ideology and what it means to attend an elite institution I've ever had the privilege (hah) of reading. On the other hand, there's this piece from Harvard alum Due Quach on being poor and traumatized at the wealthiest, seemingly most well-adjusted undergraduate institution in the nation:

To me, Harvard was a place where people put on a politically correct face. It wasn’t normal to be real or to be vulnerable. Even if you didn’t feel like an overachiever, you still had to fake it because everyone expected you to be one. I learned that if you didn’t fit in, it was up to you to change to adapt to Harvard. Otherwise, the options available to you were to take a year off to think things through, to self-medicate your way through to graduation, or to have a shrink prescribe anti-depressants to numb your disgruntlement.

Quach's experience both mirrors and deepens what Carla (and Khan's interpretation of her words) says: that elite institutions have a persnickety way of making their small world feel like the truest iteration of the world there is, that resisting the conventions and expectations of that world is a numbers game against a population disproportionately inclined towards it, that self-medication is often the only option most have. She also offers some great perspective on the ways in which these institutions fail traumatized students, and perhaps fail to honor the experience of trauma as well:

The most frustrating thing is that the people who treated me didn’t focus on helping me learn effective methods to handle the circumstances causing my high stress: that my family still lived with extreme financial hardship, that I didn’t want to be a burden on them, that I felt responsible for helping them and guilty for not being there to help them, and that going to Harvard did not directly translate into putting me in a better position to financially support them.
What I needed was mentorship and coaching to build the life skills I didn’t learn at home, to address my trigger-defense mechanisms that were locking me in negative spirals, and to become financially secure. Since there was no way that Harvard was going to hand these things to me, I realized I needed to figure out how to do these things on my own.

As somebody who's often heard about how Harvard University Health Services is centered more around helping patients function in the short-term than on the long-term project of healing and reclaiming one's life, Quach's words resonate. I myself realize the tension I feel when imagining my near future. I'm worried about food, housing, and employment, things I can take for granted as a student on full financial aid but need to consider in the next two years. Those questions have no easy answers, but they are not questions anybody - especially not in an educational community - should have to face alone.

To add onto all of this, there's another issue here: the way that the underlying assumptions of the elite institution (and, more broadly speaking, neoliberal capitalism's conception of human worth) depoliticizes the question of trauma, centers all human experience through the lens of productivity, and isolates individuals who need support the most.

I'm trying to argue this in straightforward terms, but...well, look, here's the pithiest way to put it. Somebody at my school just made a potentially game-changing discovery in the cure for cancer (which even Chip here on my shoulder would concur is a fantastic, important thing completely worth celebrating). I know this because there were articles about it. ON THE INTERNET. "Harvard kid makes breakthrough in cancer treatment" is a headline for the ages. "Harvard kid manages to wake up without crying despite recurring nightmares about parents literally slitting his throat upon his coming out" is the title of a poem I needed to write, like, yesterday. (Hilariously, combining the two - Atlas-sized accomplishment meets past personal tragedy - makes for even better neoliberal inspiration porn, porn with titles like "Harvard Prospect Zach Hodges Overcomes His Painful Past," as if one's economic and cultural success was the end-all of one's trauma*.)

For me, there's a more fundamental frustration at the way in which people are talked about - and valued - within the context of meritocracy. The classmates I've met in college are almost always identified by their best accomplishments (note how Quach, too, centers the overachiever as a hegemonic Harvardian identity): the Olympic-level figure skater, the published author, the mathematics whiz. Even when personality traits come into the picture, they feel positioned in a way suggesting that they are only valuable in relation to aforementioned accomplishments**. (As in: "I can't believe she has a 4.0 and still manages to be so nice!") There is no room for trauma here, unless we're talking about an ~inspirational story~, a story about overcoming great personal hardship against the odds to make it.

Look, I've met some of the most purely good, noble, and respectable people of my entire life at Harvard, only their goodness and nobleness and respectability has jackshit to do with what their GPA is, how many courses they're taking, how much their start-up idea sold for, or how many Forbes' "20 Under 20" lists they've been featured in. It has to do with the way in which they navigate the world with a grace I search for in my own life, a grace that is open to injustice and pain without hardening. If anything, I respect them all the more for the thoughtfulness I see in their approach to school, work, and life: that is not something that comes without a lot of effort, self-awareness, and willpower in being good to others. Many of these people have experienced pain and loss that I cannot fathom the depth of, yet they endure, they survive, they continue to move through the world and fill it with their presence.

But on the whole, I still struggle to reconcile meritocracy and trauma/healing, especially when the former too often refuses space to the latter. Quach, on her end, has founded a business venture to increase access to educational resources and training for traumatized students (and good on her for thinking about socioeconomic inequity in all of this, too). I haven't yet figured out how to work through my own trauma, but I think I need to think first about what all of this means to me. It's a tightrope, being critical about what isn't working without lapsing into bitterness or futility; I am still grateful to be where I am, and I still want to make sure that I leave my school with its arms a little wider than when I entered it. 

Concluding thoughts for today:
1. Trauma prevents people from access to economic opportunities that subsequently connect to systematic power. This is true at elite institutions and probably also true outside elite institutions, too.

2. Yet it's this same trauma that is either denied space to exist - even at the level of helping people function, much less heal - even as it gets fetishized in New York Times rags-to-riches stories and Lifetime movies on the human will to endure (to make lots and lots of money!)

3. One, it's obviously important that people in a just economic system are given equal opportunity to participate, and that equality extends into the ways in which people are and aren't functioning due to their trauma. More importantly, though, trauma survivors are worth more than their salaries, just like all of us; I speak only for myself, but I think there is more worth living for than succeeding in the eyes of my classmates, and I think that those who opt out of a destructive economic system do not deserve to have their political and economic power stripped by the elite, and I think that it is okay that all of us think critically about those things and feel comfortable about asking for what we deserve.

NOTES:
*While I hope I expressed myself clearly there, I'll note that this argument is not about either my classmate or Zach Hodges; their achievements are valuable things. I'm making an argument about seeing humans through the lens of their achievements, especially when it intersects with the experience of trauma in ways that don't quite ring true.

**Worse is when all of this work (not always done by the student but by their wealthy and, ahem, invested parents) that goes into making the perfectly affable, intelligent and interesting wunderkid looks effortless, that this is just the way that these people are - that they were born with a copy of The Economist in their perfect jazz hands and a dream of bringing clean water to Africa, supposedly the biggest country in the world or something. To paraphrase Khan's argument in Privilege, the underlying premise of an elite institution is that where you come from doesn't matter; it's what you do within the ivory walls that make you somebody. Unfortunately, within this framework, "Your past doesn't define you" becomes a trap of sorts (I hear "your abuse doesn't define you" a lot, much to my consternation); noble in intent and expression, it denies the material and psychological inequalities that differentiate people's choices and options from birth. When all that matters is what you do, what has happened to you, shaping you for worse or better, is never acknowledged or honored.

And when, subsequently, our elite end up looking very similar to the elite of 40 years ago, they have been legitimized in a way that the old elite was not. The old elite protected their status through entitlement and exclusionary culture, both things that are rightly pooh-poohed today; the new elite just kind of collected in Harvard Yard like a big slithering mob of snake people and naturally came to be, and if there aren't a lot of women, queer folk, or people of color (tying this back to the first half of this essay, people with traumatic experiences) there, well, they just must not have worked hard enough to deserve power.

Lastly, I acknowledge that I'm mad about all of this, by the way, and that's fine, too. I try not to let it cloud my judgment, at least not any more than these ideologies cloud other people's.

Bruce Perry's The Boy Who Was Raised As A Dog

Really, really good book that I can't say enough nice things about. Perry has some of the most helpful, clear scientific writing I've ever read - I loved seeing how all of the theory on developmental theory and the adolescent brain came together with each case study of each kid. The crux of the book, I think, is a strong argument for stronger support networks for all children, better child-rearing literacy for adults (not just parents - every adult has a stake in this), and a relationship-centered approach to the healing process. There's also a ton of great insight on what the healing process may look like for children who have experienced trauma, abuse, or maltreatment: a few later come back around to heal other children, while others move into different fields. Sometimes the process involves working through personal experiences, while in other instances it may be centered more on building functional skills and moving on from traumatic memories. All of these processes are legitimate, and Perry writes about how and why they work with a lot of nuance.

As somebody who's grappling with my own childhood experiences of abuse and trauma, here's one quote from the book that shook me for quite some time:

"The nature and timing of our developmental experiences shape us. Like people who learn a foreign language late in life, Virginia and Laura will never speak the language of love without an accent."

I wonder sometimes how my childhood impacted my ability to form relationships: developmentally, it feels like I'm in a very different place from many of my peers here. Many of them seem not to think about things I spend days thinking through; many of them also have had the privilege of not growing up in a dysfunctional family environment. I wonder if this is a valuable thing to broach with them, or with anybody, really. Again, the healing process looks so different for everybody that I'm not sure whether there's a concrete blueprint I can follow or anything. Maybe that's on me to make for myself, or to find the people who have survived what I am trying to survive so that I have more to work off of.

On the other hand, there are plenty of classmates whom I suspect are dealing with these same issues, and I wonder why it is that there is so much silence around them here, in an educational community that purports to be open on so many other issues. Is there value in a community centered around healing from trauma? What would that look like? And more importantly, what does my future look like - one where I've exorcised my past, one where I've reconciled it, or something else? How do I get there?

Perry writes a lot about the value of strong relationships in his work (albeit not so much on how said relationships are colored by race, gender, sexuality, or class solidarity and understanding); I think back to the time my third-grade teacher Mrs. Robinson complimented me on my "good personality," the first time I can ever remember being told that; meeting Ryan in fifth-grade and feeling for the first time like I was part of the class; the many people along the way who were able to see the good in me that I wasn't able to see in myself; the many people along the way who moved me towards the person I try to be today. I spent a lot of time in the last year thinking about all of the things that went wrong: the beatings, the heartbreak, the recurring moments of self-doubt. I want to move towards thinking about all that went right: the friendships, the rare moments of clarity, the shreds of hope I've built into a home. I will not run from my past, but I will not let it be the end of my life. I want it to be my beginning.

Cooking For One, An Update

So, since my last post on cooking for myself over winter break, I've bought about $50 more in groceries, including a ton of splurge buys, but I've also made porridge whilst overcooking chicken soup with rice, honed a pasta recipe I'm really proud of, and eaten my body weight in Jello.

Uh, yeah. Cooking is a fun thing that I am not good at, and I think I want to keep doing it. The dining halls finally open tomorrow, but hopefully this will remain a recurring event.

"We know the what and the how, and we can see systemic problems, but it's rare to have a poor person actually explain it on their own behalf."

There is not much to say here that the article doesn't say better (and I think that's important too, not speaking over marginalized communities and people in the rare occasions when they are given much-needed space), so instead I will just link to Linda Tirado's fantastic piece on her experience being poor. A few quotes below the cut.

Things I Bought at Star Market Today (Or, Exercise in Adulting #1)

A rotisserie chicken ($10.00)

A bag of chicken tenders ($5.00)

Five bags of frozen veggies ($5.00)

A jug of Ragu pasta sauce ($4.00)

A bottle of mango daiquiri mixer ($3.50)

A two-quart bottle of juice ($3.00)

A bag of white rice ($3.00)

A large can of fruit cocktail ($2.70)

A 10-pack box of instant oatmeal ($2.00)

A bag of tortilla chips ($2.00)

A bag of dried cranberries ($1.60)

Two boxes of Jello ($1.60)

A bag of black beans ($1.50)

A quart of chicken broth ($1.50)

A quart of vegetable broth ($1.50)

A box of rigatoni ($1.00)

Small bottle of hot sauce ($1.00)

Small packet of cilantro ($1.00)

A packet of instant mashed potatoes ($0.90)

Total: $51.80

So I'm thinking of using my two weeks of relative isolation (without access to Harvard dining services) as a sort of pilot run for independent adulthood, insofar as shoving tortilla chips into my mouth qualifies as independence. (Hey, I didn't say that I'd have to do a good job!) Putting together a budgeted grocery list for ten days was a fun challenge: I think the key is figuring out what your bodily needs are and finding ingredients that are versatile enough to meet them while not forcing you to live off of canned tuna every day. Googling BudgetBytes and Good and Cheap helps, too.

Things I found? Frozen veggies are cheap, healthy, and really easy to throw into anything. I just dumped an entire bag of stew vegetables and a quart of vegetable broth into my slow cooker (yes) to improvise a quick base for veggie soup. Throw in some shredded chicken - this was how I justified buying a $10 rotisserie to myself (the bones of which make great broth/stock, or so I've heard) - and that's basically lunch for the next three or four days! In fact, I'd say that I almost regret buying the premade broths, just because it seems like that money would have been better spent on more frozen vegetables and meat, but at $1.50 a quart it wasn't a total wash.

Other things I'm trying to think about: how does not having access to spices limit my options? I could make, like, so many things interesting if I just had cinnamon, pepper, and a few other things to flavor with. Had I had the option of throwing things into my oatmeal, I could have gotten the raw stuff ($1.50 for 13 servings) instead of the instant packets ($2.00 for 10 packets), and that's a small difference, but I imagine there are situations in which that would be super helpful. Lucky for me that my dorm kitchen has a few things included; part of how I justified buying the tortilla chips was the unopened jar of salsa waiting for me in the fridge. I do think that I did a good job of covering basics/staples, but I do wonder if in a week I'm going to be sick of chicken tenders. 

(I also made room for a few treats, like the Jello, the mashed pertaters, and the daiquiri mixer, which I possibly can't imagine any use for...)

Things to remember for next time: try and think about what's already in the pantry and work with that; try and buy ingredients that'll allow for a range of cooking techniques (slow-cooking, frying, baking, broiling...); flavors are very important, so figure out how to diversify your flavor palette! On the bright side, I covered breakfast pretty well, I'm going to have a ton of protein and fiber in my system, and I managed somehow to make this happen for just over $5 a day. I also lugged all of this home in the rain, carrying three bags in each hand, and it was the most painful, sweat-inducing physical activity I have experienced since 2013, so...yay?

Things I want to try making next time: chili, jambalaya, gumbo. Baked fish would be realllly good if I just had the vegetables to go with them (plus some lemon). ALSO this is totally a spontaneous late-night idea, but it would be fun to try and do weekly dinners next semester, both to stretch my culinary skillz and to make more social space for people. I don't know, man. I don't know.