Lily Zheng – The Stanford Daily https://stanforddaily.com Breaking news from the Farm since 1892 Thu, 22 Jun 2017 00:06:34 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.4.3 https://stanforddaily.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/cropped-DailyIcon-CardinalRed.png?w=32 Lily Zheng – The Stanford Daily https://stanforddaily.com 32 32 204779320 A letter to Stanford https://stanforddaily.com/2017/06/21/a-letter-to-stanford/ https://stanforddaily.com/2017/06/21/a-letter-to-stanford/#respond Thu, 22 Jun 2017 00:06:34 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1129174 Dear Stanford, So here I am thinking my last column was a week ago and I’ve wrapped it up nicely when the Daily offers me a chance to write a senior reflection piece. Great, I think. Sentimental part two. But I say yes, as I do too often, and so find myself sitting at a […]

The post A letter to Stanford appeared first on The Stanford Daily.

]]>
Dear Stanford,

So here I am thinking my last column was a week ago and I’ve wrapped it up nicely when the Daily offers me a chance to write a senior reflection piece. Great, I think. Sentimental part two. But I say yes, as I do too often, and so find myself sitting at a table and staring at a blank Google doc, scraping the bottom of the metaphorical barrel for more parting words.

I’ve written a pretty hefty number of columns during my time here (82 columns, for a total of roughly 64,000 words – not counting this one). I started off writing about kink, sexuality and consent, then repurposed my column into a radical activist’s repository during my sophomore year. Junior year saw the tone of my columns shift toward a more tentative audience, as activism began to be broadly accessible to the entire student body; senior year saw this tone shift gears once more, in response to administrative changes at Stanford and in the nation.

I’ve been told that the shift in my writing has been surprising – my blunter friends tell me that it feels like my allegiances have changed. How and why would a person write about opposing administrators one year and working with them two years later? I think there’s some truth to that argument. Being an op-eds writer for four years doesn’t make one immune from the fact that opinions tend to change over time. I don’t deny that throughout my time here, my opinions have changed quite a bit, and visibly too.

When my perception of Stanford as a paradise changed in my frosh year, so too did my opinions of it. When my perception of administrators as all-knowing and good changed in my sophomore year, so too did my opinions of them. When my understanding of activism deepened, and my experience with change efforts on this campus grew, and my relationships with staff members developed, my opinions on all these things changed.

Stanford itself as changed so much in the last four years. In August 2014, I wrote with the sort of grave frankness that accompanies rhetorical bombshells that “we have privilege. All of us.” I can’t help but laugh at the melodrama of that piece, until I look at the comments section and see “stop being a fat feminist,” “the majority is supposed to be more privileged” and “no wonder you chose the ‘victim’ gender.” Different times call for different columns, I guess. The things that I wrote and the conversations which were happening in 2013 don’t have a place on campus any more, because by 2017 we’ve moved past those conversations (I would hope). I think that’s amazing.

This is around the part of the column where I say something wise, but I’m not sure if I should be calling this sort of thing “wisdom.” In my four years here, I’ve spent less time being a good student and more time getting into administrators’ business, reading through archives and signing onto the Stanford Visitor wifi from obscure corners of campus. Do a little hunting around here and you’ll stumble across extensive online archives (do you know how much work it took to find that link?) and inter-staff/faculty politics that really only affect students once the dust has long since settled. I alternate frequently between thinking that students are the hidden power of this university and thinking that we are often the most powerless, clueless and ineffective players on a chessboard that’s bigger than we think. Maybe both are true.

To reiterate: I love Stanford. I hate Stanford. Stanford has hurt me irreparably. Stanford has healed me irreversibly. I’m thrilled to wake up from this fever dream, but I’d be lying if I said I wouldn’t miss the waffle fries.

If there’s anything I want to leave behind in this last column, it’s the kind of annoying stubbornness that gets students into rooms with decision-makers and empowers our communities to fight for what we deserve. In that vein, here’s a parting checklist to close out the quarter. How do we as students move into the future?

1. Get entitled. We deserve a world-class education and communities that give us safety, allow us to thrive and teach us to grow into our best selves.
2. Get indignant about injustice. Set the bar high, and hold the world to it.
3. Learn about the process. Who makes the decisions? When? How?
4. Find your contextual power and plan personal tactics accordingly. Do you belong on the inside or not?
5. Situate yourself in time and space. Find out who else has done this before. Find out who else is doing this now.
6. Organize. Find friends, strategize, and hit hard. Hydrate. Breathe.
7. Archive, reflect and sustain. What worked and what didn’t? Who will take up the torch?
8. Repeat.

It’s been good, y’all. Lily out.

Contact Lily Zheng at lilyzheng ‘at’ stanford.edu.

The post A letter to Stanford appeared first on The Stanford Daily.

]]>
https://stanforddaily.com/2017/06/21/a-letter-to-stanford/feed/ 0 1129174
Gravitas https://stanforddaily.com/2017/06/01/gravitas/ https://stanforddaily.com/2017/06/01/gravitas/#respond Thu, 01 Jun 2017 07:47:05 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1128744 I wonder why it is that we acclimate to change so quickly. The presidential election, suspension of the Stanford Band, CAPS drama and justice ad infinitum became facts of our social fabric as quickly as they happened, and the quarter system is merciless as always in its impartiality to the world around us.

The post Gravitas appeared first on The Stanford Daily.

]]>
As a frosh, I remember thinking to myself how surreal it was to be a student here.

Ten-week quarters, research labs, solo cups and soul-searching were figments of what felt like an endless fever dream, thrilling in an uncanny valley sort of way that makes you wonder just when things will start going wrong.

As a sophomore, I remember thinking to myself, “things are going wrong.”

Stanford was a leaf swept up in a national storm. Words like “justice,” “equity,” “liberation” and “transformation” found a home on campus where they live to this day. Fever dream became fever nightmare, and as the Stanford bubble popped, we took deep breaths of alien air, aware that something had changed, perhaps forever.

Junior year, the fire that we had lit at Stanford had grown too bright to ignore, and by the light of these flames, the rusty gears of the university jerked to life.

The initial attempts at institutional change were clumsy, heavy-handed and misguided, and we made sure to tell it as much. We want better, we demanded, we deserve better. We burned bright, burned out and kept burning anyways in pursuit of a better campus — in pursuit of a better world.

Senior year began, and now it’s ending.

I wonder why it is that we acclimate to change so quickly. The presidential election, suspension of the Stanford Band, CAPS drama and justice ad infinitum became facts of our social fabric as quickly as they happened, and the quarter system is merciless as always in its impartiality to the world around us.

I say these things not out of a need to make new arguments, but rather to recast and retell a particular story. I recognize that this story of mine — of activism, community, intransigence and change — is neither perfect nor timeless. It’s humbling, and honestly a little scary, to think that the last four years of my life will overlap in the most minimal of ways with next year’s incoming frosh. Those things that I and people in the Class of 2017 have worked so hard on over our time here will become the status quo, taken for granted in the same way we took everything for granted four years ago when we arrived on this campus.

But everything here changes with time. Every resource, staff member, cultural norm, name, event, office and organization at Stanford is the result of the tireless work of staff, alumni, faculty and administration, driven by overlapping four-year cycles (shorter for master’s students and longer for Ph.D. students) of student initiative. An institution like Stanford is both the source and product of the countless stories and histories of those who pass through it; it is made of all of us and bigger than any of us.

What does the combined history of Stanford care if I never turned in that p-set on time? If that email I said I’d answer from sophomore year is still starred and unanswered in my inbox? If the problems and injustices we desperately tried to fix remain even as we prepare to graduate? As the quarter comes to a close and the world outside of Stanford looms in front of me, I can’t help but regret that I couldn’t have done more here.

But the work will get done long after we’ve said goodbye to Stanford, and we can be sure of that because it’s going on right now. Students will pick up the work we’ve left behind and take it in directions we could have never dreamed of, just as we’ve done the same for the students who came before us. The Class of 2017 has done so much. The Class of 2018 will do so much. The Class of 2019 and 2020 and every class after that will do so much. That gives me hope.

As an opinions columnist for the Daily I’ve worked hard for the last four years to tell the truth — not capital “T” “Truth,” but my personal truth and my personal story. It’s been a great privilege to have had the opportunity to write for so long and to have the space to be vulnerable in such a public way.

My writing, like my opinions and my identities, has changed often over these four years (and because The Daily archives well, you can embarrass me all you like with my older columns). I hope that everyone who has read my columns found them at very least to be thought-provoking, engaging or otherwise entertaining. I might write a few more columns before my very last, but at least formally, I’d like to wrap it all up on a good note.

Thank you for reading.  

 

Contact Lily Zheng at lilyz8 ‘at’ stanford.edu.

The post Gravitas appeared first on The Stanford Daily.

]]>
https://stanforddaily.com/2017/06/01/gravitas/feed/ 0 1128744
A love letter to the unfinished https://stanforddaily.com/2017/05/25/a-love-letter-to-the-unfinished/ https://stanforddaily.com/2017/05/25/a-love-letter-to-the-unfinished/#respond Thu, 25 May 2017 07:30:19 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1128008 That ethnography will likely never happen, and I know that as the months pass it becomes less and less relevant and less and less needed. But I can’t work up the courage to delete the file.

The post A love letter to the unfinished appeared first on The Stanford Daily.

]]>
I still think, sometimes, about that first small grant application. It would have been for an exploratory, ethnographic study looking into kink communities in the Bay Area in the hopes of documenting important and novel information about a stigmatized and invisible community. “Promising project,” noted a reviewer. “We would be more than happy to meet with you personally to talk about the areas in which your proposal could be strengthened.” The email was a gentle dose of reality meant to bring an excited frosh back down to earth, so that the project, when undertaken, would succeed.

I thanked my faculty advisor for their time before withdrawing my IRB protocol for the study. “I look forward to working with you again in the future when I pick this project back up!” I wrote in an email.

I never emailed her back. The proposal still sits in a Google Drive folder awaiting edits, marked up in red font that shows its last edit from July 4, 2014. That ethnography will likely never happen, and I know that as the months pass, it becomes less and less relevant and less and less needed. But I can’t work up the courage to delete the file.

Sophomore summer felt promising. Chappell Lougee Scholarship in hand, I set out to write the novel that I had always wanted to write about my experience growing up as an Asian-American transgender youth. I wandered Chinatown and tapped out pages on the Caltrain, laptop balanced precariously on one crossed leg; during the evenings, I posted snippets to Facebook and read memoirs late into the night. That fall quarter, I enrolled in an independent study to hammer out another chapter, and that winter, I continued the trend. Then, exhausted by the weight of the world, by the trauma I had dug up from my own story and from the looming threat of not graduating on time (creative writing was neither my major nor minor), I stopped.

One hundred forty-two pages, 59,418 words. The working draft sits in my Dropbox folder, and as I open it, the Microsoft Word cursor blinks innocently up at me from the start of a new chapter. I’m tempted, briefly, to stop writing this column mid-sentence and dive back into that novel. But no, the urge passes; maybe another time, I think.

I wonder why every project I have left unfinished at Stanford feels so much like failure — every dropped proposal a sign of weakness, every abandoned collaboration a failure of commitment, every half-hearted “let’s get coffee!” a failure to recognize that not every door stays open forever. Some part of me wants to offer a reframing: “not a failure; just a potential-in-progress.” But my ambitious plans for teaching a student-initiated course during sophomore year drew on a wellspring of excitement that no longer exists. My plans to informally collect the experiences of graduating activists after junior year demanded a time and coordination among students that never materialized. I’ve lost track of the number of papers professors have told me to pursue further that have fallen by the wayside, pulled away by the riptides of a quarter system that promises novelty and creation more than continuity and sustenance.

I wonder, as I like yet another Facebook status celebrating a successful thesis submission, how many of my friends’ unfinished projects rest in email chains, Word documents and dusty storage boxes. It’s refreshing to think about the time, love and passion that we put into these potentials-in-progress and closed doors: not enough for them to happen nor enough for them to fail, but enough to convince us that someday, if the stars align just right, we might pick them back up again.

I’m writing this now because it’s around that time of the year where many of us start to reflect. We think about how we’ve changed, the people we’ve met and the things we’ve done — the successes and failures of another year as students, staff or faculty. This, I think, is all important. But in addition to these successes and failures, I think we ought to leave a little more room for the almosts, the should’ves, could’ves and would’ves, the if-onlys, maybe-laters and eventuallys. Not because these are marks of failure, but because these are parts of our stories too.

At least today, try to make some space to acknowledge the unfinished in your life. Or if not today, well, eventually.

 

Contact Lily Zheng at lilzy8 ‘at’ stanford.edu.

The post A love letter to the unfinished appeared first on The Stanford Daily.

]]>
https://stanforddaily.com/2017/05/25/a-love-letter-to-the-unfinished/feed/ 0 1128008
Kardinal Kink, reprise https://stanforddaily.com/2017/05/18/kardinal-kink-reprise/ https://stanforddaily.com/2017/05/18/kardinal-kink-reprise/#respond Thu, 18 May 2017 07:45:15 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1127667 We’re nearing the end of the 2016-2017 academic year, and I’ve been thinking about Kardinal Kink again recently. Part of it is a selfish sort of nostalgia - I’ve been co-president for just about three years now and am getting ready to graduate - but a larger reason for writing about Kardinal Kink is because I’m genuinely proud of the work we’ve been able to do at Stanford since our founding late in the 2012-2013 academic year.

The post Kardinal Kink, reprise appeared first on The Stanford Daily.

]]>
Kardinal Kink meets in an unmarked room in Kimball Hall. The group, which recently had its petition to become recognized as a student group by the University rejected by Student Activities and Leadership (SAL), serves as a support and advocacy group for the kink community at Stanford and draws anywhere from eight to 30 attendees at their meetings.”

So begins an article in the Stanford Daily published on March 12th, 2014, on the group of students calling itself Kardinal Kink. At the time, the group’s request for Voluntary Student Organization status had just been denied, and the article’s visibility in the Daily set off whispers across campus. From Yik Yak posts (back when Yik Yak was still relevant, I guess), it was obvious that kink jokes were quickly becoming all the rage. Our mailing list that year received a consistent influx of new members, but a few embarrassed emails later revealed that many of these “new members” had been subscribed by their friends as pranks.

Still, our informal list of members grew past 50 and then past 100. As a group, the way we nurtured a culture that explicitly and intentionally centered active consent, communication and trust in our intimacy and relationships was a powerful draw. Students across campus, most of them with little to no prior experience with polyamory, BDSM or kink, joined to learn more, explore their sexual boundaries and find a welcoming community.

When Kardinal Kink became an official VSO in late May of that year, we made it our mission to expand our community, push back against misconceptions and create positive change for Stanford University. In 2015, we tabled for the first time at the New Student Orientation Fall Activities Fair (I still remember standing on a table and waving a huge BDSM Pride flag at the tourists and getting awkward leather harness tan lines). That year, we began offering informal workshops for dorms and houses around campus with titles like “How to Get Laid: Practical Consent” and partnered with the Sexual Health Peer Resource Center to put on multiple events for Sex Week. We hosted all-campus parties with explicit consent norms, started complex conversations about consent in co-ops across campus and organized teach-ins on topics ranging from feminist kink to critiques of Fifty Shades of Grey.

We’re nearing the end of the 2016-2017 academic year, and I’ve been thinking about Kardinal Kink again recently. Part of it is a selfish sort of nostalgia — I’ve been co-president for just about three years now and am getting ready to graduate — but a larger reason for writing about Kardinal Kink is because I’m genuinely proud of the work we’ve been able to do at Stanford since our founding late in the 2012-2013 academic year.

Over the past four years, Kardinal Kink has not only created spaces and a community for Stanford students interested in kink but also in many ways changed the conversations happening everywhere on campus. The model of consent we sought to import from the Bay Area kink community — one of negotiation, open communication and self-awareness — has informed larger trainings on campus through conversations with organizations like the SHPRC and the SARA Office. Our constant presence at Activity Fairs, public events and meetups has helped to normalize our existence here as an organization (albeit one that causes ProFros to double-take), and has created a unique environment at Stanford. Where else in the country are college students able to attend more-or-less public bondage workshops, learn safety practices for dominant/submissive relationships and seek peer advice on non-monogamy — and have these resources so normalized as to not bat an eye at them?  

I am proud of the community we have created, of the enthusiasm and engagement from students diverse in race, gender, class, religion, sexuality and nationality linked by a shared interest in learning about and connecting around kink and healthy sexuality. The mutual respect our members have for each other and the openness of the spaces we create give me hope, not just as a fellow community member but as an organizer and activist as well. Kardinal Kink feels one of a kind, not just relative to Stanford University, but also relative to many other kink organizations — many of which are often overwhelmingly white, led by men and class-restrictive. Given that this is likely the very last time I write about kink in the Daily, can you blame me for being a little sentimental?

When I think about what we’ve done at Stanford, I think about a video posted by the Stanford Daily during Admit Weekend 2017 in which Daily staffers asked ProFros true/false questions about Stanford.“Kardinal Kink!” one ProFro exclaimed. “What do they do?” asked another. The first smiles wide. “Talk about … kink!”

And so we do.

 

Contact Lily Zheng at lilyz8 ‘at’ stanford.edu.

The post Kardinal Kink, reprise appeared first on The Stanford Daily.

]]>
https://stanforddaily.com/2017/05/18/kardinal-kink-reprise/feed/ 0 1127667
Resilience is a process, not a state https://stanforddaily.com/2017/05/11/resilience-is-a-process-not-a-state/ https://stanforddaily.com/2017/05/11/resilience-is-a-process-not-a-state/#respond Thu, 11 May 2017 08:20:32 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1127338 In activist communities, resilience of this sort seems rare. Rather than hear stories of activists who failed and recovered, we’re far more likely to hear stories of others who failed while interacting with activists and how devastating their failures must have been to them.

The post Resilience is a process, not a state appeared first on The Stanford Daily.

]]>
What does “resilience” mean at Stanford?

When I think of the word “resilience,” my thoughts first go to “The Resilience Project,” a multi-year initiative started back in 2010 with the aim of helping students get help with, withstand and reframe experiences of failure. I think next of “Stanford, I Screwed Up!,” an annual event marked by performances through song, dance, poetry and prose to acknowledge and celebrate “epic failures” in all of our lives.

Resilience, it seems, is an internal virtue that we can cultivate, an insurance of sorts to protect us from the rare — but potentially devastating — experiences of failure in our lives.

In activist communities, resilience of this sort seems rare. Rather than hear stories of activists who failed and recovered, we’re far more likely to hear stories of others who failed while interacting with activists and how devastating their failures must have been to them.

Stories of this sort are bread and butter among activist communities. As topics like race, gender, class, religion and sexuality have become more commonplace in classrooms, residences and other facets of student life, so, too, have unspoken norms arisen to govern how those topics are discussed. In almost every space where I have seen these discussions occur, informal divisions pop up between “those who ‘get it’” and “those who don’t,” whether or not these divisions reflect actual people in the room.

I recall a class that I took on race in America: Students with activist experiences — myself included — banded together, adopted a high-minded superiority and scoffed at the students in the class whom we believed knew less. In my efforts to appear already knowledgeable, I downplayed any experience of actually learning from that class, acting instead like anything the professor said was simply a fact that I had known all along.

I recall a conversation I had during my frosh year: A few acquaintances and I derided activists and activism. We agreed loudly and conspiratorially that “the activists” just didn’t get it, and that we frosh, of course, did. 

I can think of a dozen more examples, but the point I’m trying to get across is this: In conversations about social justice and activism, I believe we have increasingly derided the ignorance of others, oversold the appearance of group consensus and overperformed our own knowledge or “wokeness.” In doing so, we protect ourselves, blend into the group and minimize the chances that we will ever find ourselves on the wrong end of so-called “epic failures.”

Individuals looking to learn more about social justice and activism, in this climate, will face high barriers to entry. They will see only those people who “get it” and those people who “don’t,” with nothing in between. They will hear, however, the constant sea of gossip we share about Activist A who acted woke but wasn’t, or Activist B who said a transphobic thing, and I told you they weren’t a good activist, and so on and so forth.

When activists make mistakes — especially if they are visible activists, and they make big mistakes — we put them down, and by doing so, raise those who remain up a little bit more.

What is learning supposed to be like for newcomers? Should we expect them to join our groups, keep their heads down and wait it out until they can act like the rest of us? Or, as I’ve seen in the past, should we wait for their inevitable first mistake and shame them for it until they leave of their own accord?

I don’t think this framework of student activism — as done by communities of students who “get it” and get it right — is how it ought to be. Rather, we should work to create communities of students who “want to get it” and frequently get it wrong in their learning process. We should prioritize, celebrate and acknowledge the learning that happens among people of all experience levels, and to make room for the experiential learning that comes, yes, from failure.

An ideal community to me is one that keeps its eye on its vision of justice and provides the support, love and collective strength to move its members toward that vision, even if the path is nonlinear, and backward steps happen as often as forward ones.

Sure, the burden for this work falls in part on existing activist communities, but it’s also indicative of something bigger at Stanford: our failure to recognize that resilience itself is not reserved for “epic failure” failures, but is, in fact, a far more important skill for dealing with the everyday failures that come from being a learner in a complex world. We ought to embrace these sorts of everyday slip-ups and faux pas as signs that we are engaging with the world, rather than as status markers that signify our belonging in a social group.

 

Contact Lily Zheng at lilyz8 ‘at’ stanford.edu.

The post Resilience is a process, not a state appeared first on The Stanford Daily.

]]>
https://stanforddaily.com/2017/05/11/resilience-is-a-process-not-a-state/feed/ 0 1127338
Inside-outside game https://stanforddaily.com/2017/05/04/inside-outside-game/ https://stanforddaily.com/2017/05/04/inside-outside-game/#respond Thu, 04 May 2017 07:48:41 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1126981 I’ve been meaning for the past two years to write a column on Inside-Outside strategy, or more colloquially, the general philosophy or strategy of organizing that prioritizes both those activists/advocates embedded inside political structures, and those based outside of them.

The post Inside-outside game appeared first on The Stanford Daily.

]]>
Six weeks left in my undergraduate career at Stanford, and I’m finally beginning to feel like I’ve almost written enough Daily columns on activism. But not yet! You’ll only have to bear with me for a little longer.

For the past two years, I’ve been meaning to write a column on Inside-Outside strategy, or more colloquially, the general philosophy or strategy of organizing that prioritizes both those activists/advocates embedded inside political structures, and those based outside of them. I first heard the term “inside-outside” casually used by a staff member earlier this year, but the idea isn’t unfamiliar among student activists.

Understandably, feelings about this approach are mixed among both activist communities and the larger Stanford community. Some of us see it as an unacceptable compromise of our values to even interact with oppressive structures; others take the opposite approach and find extra-organizational tactics like direct action and civil disobedience to be the unacceptable compromises. Those who approve of the tactic may see it as a necessary-but-undesirable means to an end, or consider it instead a useful and valuable strategy in its own right.

Two years ago, I would have told you that the idea that change could occur from the “inside” was an oxymoron. This was at a time when campus activists clashed loudly and frequently with other students, staff, faculty and administrators on campus, and around the time during which I wrote that “[w]e have become used to the idea that no matter how many emails we send people in power, they will not listen.” It was a time of heavy tension, constant stress and the type of ongoing crisis that encouraged an us-them ingroup-outgroup enmity to form between “activists” on one hand and “everyone else” on the other. Suspicion ran rampant, mental health plummeted and collaboration and mutual problem-solving became first a distant dream, then a bitter joke.

I think, looking back on it, that we could have done things a little better.

I maintain, firstly, that many administrators with whom we talked seemed completely unequipped to communicate with us. We had our own language and vocabulary and they had theirs, and in the alarming political climate of the times, we saw any administrative slip-up or faux pas as evidence of ignorance at best, and malice at worst. Our error was, in my opinion, concluding from these administrative mistakes that an inside-outside strategy was useless. What resulted then was perhaps the biggest string of social movement organizing at Stanford in more than a decade, which I’ve written about to death in previous columns. We disavowed the institution, organized under our own power, and shook things up. That’s the mythos, at least.

I’ve learned over the last year that this is not what happened. At every point during the campus social movements of 2014, 2015 and 2016, assistance from the “inside” played a major role. Staff members helped convey to students a realistic assessment of the risks involved in direct action. Faculty devoted significant chunks of class time to the social movements growing on campus and across the country. Administrators worked, perhaps frantically and in a disorganized fashion, to understand what was going on and be receptive to campus movements (I maintain that, again, many did not do a very good job). Activists didn’t talk about these stories for two major reasons: firstly, because they did not fit into our philosophical paradigm that privileged our own bottom-up people power; and secondly, because we simply didn’t know that they had happened.

The first point is understandable, but the second point is what I believe is the single biggest obstacle to a successful inside-outside strategy at Stanford. What good is a strategy of collaboration and coalition-building when we only hear silence and horror stories from other parties? What other alternatives do we have besides direct action when the potential for inside institutional help appears so disappointingly dim? At the heart of the problem lies a glaring injustice: Students have no information on what staff, faculty and administrators can do and are doing, and are thus cut off from meaningful change attempts that utilize an inside-outside framework.

The central argument of any inside-outside strategy is that the inside work within the organization (transformation) synergizes with the outside work outside the organization (pressure). For Stanford to be a place where this can happen, we need to put our time and energy into strengthening the link between inside and outside (I have high hopes for this weekend’s Institutional Change at Stanford event to start this work, but it is far from enough). We are a campus with significant activist experience and high political awareness undergoing a once-in-a-decade leadership transition. If there’s any time to get things done, it’s now.

 

Contact Lily Zheng at lilyz8 ‘at’ stanford.edu.

The post Inside-outside game appeared first on The Stanford Daily.

]]>
https://stanforddaily.com/2017/05/04/inside-outside-game/feed/ 0 1126981
The Stanford that profros don’t see https://stanforddaily.com/2017/04/27/the-stanford-profros-dont-see/ https://stanforddaily.com/2017/04/27/the-stanford-profros-dont-see/#respond Thu, 27 Apr 2017 08:00:46 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1126603 Arguing that “Stanford shows only good things, and hides the bad things” seems at this point to be a drastic oversimplification of how this university works.

The post The Stanford that profros don’t see appeared first on The Stanford Daily.

]]>
Admit Weekend 2017! I’m excited as always for the flood of prospective frosh (hereafter, profros) tentatively trying to navigate the morning swarm of bikers and conversing seriously about their many very impressive other college acceptances.

Dining hall food gets a major upgrade, student groups step up their game for Activities Fair and other event programming and Stanford puts on its Sunday best to wow and woo over what could be its Class of 2021. At no other time is Stanford ever as manicured, sleek and picture-perfect as when it creates a utopia once a year for prospective students, just as I am sure all universities do.

I still remember the exhilaration I felt as a profro sitting on the grass of Wilbur Field and looking toward a Hoover Tower silhouetted against a cloudless blue sky, my thoughts a blur as I processed the reality that I was here. I was at Stanford.

As profros, we grow giddy from the sheer magnitude of the place and the promise that, yes, (for 12 easy installments of $15,777!) this can be home someday.

We imagine ourselves sitting in Bing Concert Hall, meandering through the Cantor Arts Center or cheering from the stands of Stanford Stadium. Full Moon on the Quad, fountain hopping, Band Run and Primal Scream join the ranks of mythical traditions that make Stanford the academically vibrant, fiercely individualistic and irreverently bizarre place that created such figures as Elon Musk, John F. Kennedy, Sally Ride and Larry Page.

But this is, at best, a distorted image of what Stanford really is.

There are other sides to this university that go unadvertised during Admit Weekend, perhaps because many realities about this campus are unsavory. On the academic level, only 22 percent of tenured faculty at Stanford are women, and a meager 7 percent are Black, Latinx and/or Native. Inequities in the classroom and lab, maintained by cultural insensitivity, prejudice, political apathy and discrimination, further restrict the academic experience for marginalized students.

On the activism level, separate movements calling for divestment from fossil fuels, the private prison industry and the occupation of Palestine, as well as the adoption of Sanctuary City status have all resulted in impasses between activists and University representatives. Activist movements themselves struggle with movement-building, coalition-building, institutional memory and sustainability.

Lastly, the student experience at Stanford is in many ways negatively impacted by the high level of decentralization and siloization, the lack of transparency around resources, mentors and information and the lack of effective channels of communication beyond email lists, student groups and small dorm communities.

This is far from positive news. That said, arguing that “Stanford shows only good things, and hides the bad things” seems at this point to be a drastic oversimplification of how this university works.

What other things go unadvertised?

The Admit Weekend brochure doesn’t show the 4 a.m. conversations with RAs that change the way we think about the world, or the feeling of triumph as that take-home final is finished at sunrise. It doesn’t show the tireless work of staff behind the scenes to empower and enable students to survive and thrive, or the efforts of TAs, lecturers and professors who go above and beyond to maintain or rekindle students’ love of learning. The messy breakups that teach us about ourselves, the experiences of failure that help us learn why we keep going, and the friendships that hurt, help and heal us are all parts of the Stanford experience that can never be conveyed through a brochure.

It almost goes without saying that the Stanford that exists during Admit Weekend is somewhat of a fever dream, a Mirror of Erised sort of experience seen through cardinal red-tinted goggles. Upon actually coming to campus, frosh discover a different-but-not-different Stanford waiting for them, one that’s at times as shiny as the paradise advertised, and at times as grim as the apocalypse many students depict.

At the risk of ruining the illusion, I’ll go ahead and say that most of our peer institutions are the same: complex places with complex histories and complex students, staff and faculty that act as enablers, challengers and mediators all at once.

I think it’s crucial to keep in mind that when we think about Stanford (and by “we,” I mean everyone, not just profros), there is always a side we cannot see. Maybe it’s for the best that Admit Weekend continues to portray paradise and activists continue to portray apocalypse, because the reality of this campus is both and neither and something in the middle, too.

Regardless of the “truth” of the matter, there is and will always be a Stanford that profros do not and cannot see.

I guess you’ll just have to accept your admission offer if you ever want to find out.

 

Contact Lily Zheng at lilyz8 ‘at’ stanford.edu.

The post The Stanford that profros don’t see appeared first on The Stanford Daily.

]]>
https://stanforddaily.com/2017/04/27/the-stanford-profros-dont-see/feed/ 0 1126603
Social justice codeswitch https://stanforddaily.com/2017/04/20/social-justice-codeswitch/ https://stanforddaily.com/2017/04/20/social-justice-codeswitch/#respond Thu, 20 Apr 2017 07:36:12 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1126213 Two years have passed since 2015, and activism has changed. Many frosh come pre-politicized, and a campus-wide movement is notably absent, swapped out for an endless number of smaller projects, initiatives and events.

The post Social justice codeswitch appeared first on The Stanford Daily.

]]>
Sometime during sophomore year, for the first time, a friend told me that I was “woke.”

“Thanks,” I said, as I tried to look unsurprised, like there had been a sticker on my head for a few months that had only gotten noticed now. I was, of course, thrilled.

2015 was my year of politicization, when the events that took place on campus and in the world forced me and many others to take action. The sense of urgency in the air drove us to attend events, devour online educational guides and self-educate so that we could understand police brutality, systemic racism and other modern-day forms of historical injustice from which no person was immune.

We picked up, among other things, a vocabulary that allowed us to communicate about these concepts. We learned about the many privileges afforded to us by historically-based inequity, the ways we remain complicit in maintaining these inequities, the ways in which this inequity manifested in the active oppression of marginalized groups and the injustice of this entire arrangement.

We learned about the powerful tools of intersectionality, and the dream we could achieve of collective liberation, a world in which inequity did not exist, oppressive systems had been dismantled and people could realize self-determination and self-actualization. We learned, perhaps implicitly, that silence is violence, that remaining passive or neutral in the face of injustice made us a part of that injustice ourselves.

And there were always more ideas. Regarding gender equity and trans liberation, we learned about toxic masculinity, passing politics, cisheteronormativity. Regarding militarism and imperialism, we learned about proxy wars, occupation, pinkwashing. Regarding race and racism, we learned about the school-to-prison pipeline, colorism, colonization. Every injustice had a name and a mechanism, and as there were many injustices, so, too, were there many names and many mechanisms.

This was — and to a large extent, still is — a different type of learning than the type we did in the classroom. The literary canon we drew from was shared through mass emails and Facebook posts and discussed in community centers and student group gatherings. It was learning that empowered us to give words to our experiences, and to strikingly indict the world around us — our dorms, our classrooms, our university. For students who hadn’t felt like they had a voice here, it was a poignant reminder of our power.

Two years have passed since, and activism has changed. Many frosh come pre-politicized, and a campus-wide movement is notably absent, swapped out for an endless number of smaller projects, initiatives and events. The words “intersectionality,” “justice,” “privilege” and “liberation” can now be found on flyers and promotional materials for the many academic departments, labs and research centers on campus. A student says “oppression” during class, and we all nod understandingly, perhaps even boredly (whereas during sophomore year, this act of bravery would cause time to stop as we collectively held our breath, expecting carnage as activist and professor duked it out).

Happy ending? Of course not.

Many of the systems, processes and ideas we indicted two years ago are still around, and institutionalization of activist lingo notwithstanding, this university continues to be riddled with injustices and inequities. As activists, we can either see the university’s usage of “our” language as one of two things. We can interpret it as cooptation and find new words and ideas for our movements that have not been coopted (in the same way we abandoned “diversity” and “equality”). Or, we can use this as an opportunity to really figure out what we want — what changes we want to see and how we can get there — and leverage our shared language to put change in motion.

This necessitates, as the title of this piece suggests, a social justice codeswitch. While the language of indictment (“this class is a transphobic mess that silences trans students”) is a powerful rallying tool for awareness-building and social pressure, it is not a language that can sustain the work of problem-solving, negotiation and institutional change. (“Is there a way we can hold a best practices training for this department? Is a best practices training even the right idea? Is there a way we can influence what’s taught in the curriculum of this class? How?) To do this, as activists, we either need to practice our translation skills or do better at identifying institutional liaisons who already know them.

Our actions and words become powerful when we can use them like tactics, and we can only call these things “tactics” when we have more than one at our disposal. If activism at Stanford is here to stay — and I suspect it is — then we have a responsibility as activists to do it well.

 

Contact Lily Zheng at lilyz8 ‘at’ stanford.edu.

The post Social justice codeswitch appeared first on The Stanford Daily.

]]>
https://stanforddaily.com/2017/04/20/social-justice-codeswitch/feed/ 0 1126213
Should activist student groups disband? https://stanforddaily.com/2017/04/13/should-activist-student-groups-disband/ https://stanforddaily.com/2017/04/13/should-activist-student-groups-disband/#respond Thu, 13 Apr 2017 07:56:32 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1125824 The rapid creation of new student groups over the past few years has taken the core of activist mobilization, split it into a hundred pieces and scattered them across campus.

The post Should activist student groups disband? appeared first on The Stanford Daily.

]]>
If its admissions site is any indication, Stanford likes bragging about how many student groups it has. Our 600 student groups, Stanford claims, “enrich the social, cultural and educational experiences of Stanford students, influence the larger University community and enhance the overall diversity found at Stanford.”

“Diversity” and “enrich[ment]” aside, it seems increasingly clear that the recent explosion of interest in activism and social justice has created a strong contingent of new student groups.

Of our 600 student groups at Stanford, 50 relate to community service, 46 to cultural identity, 32 to social awareness, 18 to media, 11 to health and wellness and eight to politics. Many additional student groups and non-VSO student communities join these in creating a campus culture that increasingly seems aware of, if not actively engaged in, activism.

The realm of what could be called “social justice work” is no longer characterized by a small number of vocal students and student groups pushing back against an indifferent campus; maybe now, our problem is oversaturation. Everyone is interested in activism (and in reframing what they already do as activism) — in finding the ways in which their interests relate to a bigger picture of social justice and address some of the many issues and inequities in society.

It’s with all this in mind that I wonder if all this interest is making activism harder, not easier.

When activism was the sole purview of a dedicated core of activists (and I could count the major student groups and movements involved on my hands), a large focus was placed on mobilization, resource creation and campus-wide change. Burnout was common and intersectionality was rare, but communities were tight-knit and supportive.

The rapid creation of new student groups over the past few years has taken the core of activist mobilization, split it into a hundred pieces and scattered them across campus. Paradoxically, Stanford now has more events, more speakers, more projects and more interest around social justice and activism even as it has less collaboration, less coordination, less event attendance and less movement-building. Burnout is still common (though now it’s intersectional burnout), and our communities, organizing and work have become as scattered as our student groups.

The work of institutional memory and learning today is a tediously individual labor. Due to the small size of or lack of social movements, “learning from the past” looks less like movement-to-movement learning and more like movement-to-individual learning reliant on oral histories spread from person to person. When we consider that Stanford students are bringing an increasing desire to do activism into this environment where activist history is so tenuously intangible, we get well-intentioned activism that repeats the work (and mistakes) of the past without tangibly building on that work, all over campus with every topic imaginable.

I’ve talked about this problem before, and my suggestions then were to create a public repository of knowledge and prioritize coalition-building among our different organizations and movements. While I still believe in the necessity of these initiatives, I’m less convinced now that they will succeed without significant changes to student life. The problem with archiving and coalition-building is that both activities take time that we don’t have, and create results that we don’t benefit from immediately. Coalition-building additionally requires long-term planning (rather than short-term action), schedule coordination, time management and reliable leadership transition — all of which I can safely say Stanford students struggle with.

I am wondering now if a more politically effective student body would be one with fewer student groups, fewer events and more informal organizing.

With less focus on formal structures and procedures that encourage transactional interactions and elevate the Event as the fundamental unit of student life, activism would lose some of its structure and scriptedness, but possibly regain some of the flexibility that is needed to truly dream, strategize and work toward a collective future. Rather than the fast-paced, chaotic environment we have today where activist events happen every hour, we could have fewer but longer events, with more continuity in terms of both content and attendance. We could make movements that create their own leadership pipelines, advocate for long-term institutional change over more than four years at a time and hold their own institutional memory. Perhaps most importantly, we could bring the “collective” back into “collective action,” and come back together as a community of activists.  

I know that it’s hard to resist the desire to do something in response to our current political climate, especially as many of us juggle school, jobs and/or family responsibilities, and especially for the frosh and sophomores looking to get plugged into the larger activist community. Stanford provides an enormous amount of support for student groups, and I wouldn’t want any different, nor would I tell people not to form them. However, student group participation and movement-building, at least in today’s Stanford, are competing demands. As campus interest in activism continues to grow, more and more of us will have to make a choice.

 

Contact Lily Zheng at lilyz8 ‘at’ stanford.edu.

The post Should activist student groups disband? appeared first on The Stanford Daily.

]]>
https://stanforddaily.com/2017/04/13/should-activist-student-groups-disband/feed/ 0 1125824
What we lose with trans visibility https://stanforddaily.com/2017/04/06/what-we-lose-with-trans-visibility/ https://stanforddaily.com/2017/04/06/what-we-lose-with-trans-visibility/#respond Thu, 06 Apr 2017 07:13:23 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1125387 I believe that this trend is the result of a more complicated story, a story in which visibility and inclusion mirror violence and exclusion, involving two increasingly fractured transgender camps.

The post What we lose with trans visibility appeared first on The Stanford Daily.

]]>
Almost three years have now passed from the day when Time Magazine published “The Transgender Tipping Point.” In this article, Katy Steinmetz made the case for the ascendence of the “transgender revolution,” with actress and celebrity Laverne Cox as the centerpiece holding it all together.

Trans people, argued Steinmetz and Cox, “are emerging from the margins” to “live visibly” and “demystify difference.” The trans movement was framed as an uphill battle that was just beginning to crest, and Steinmetz wrote eloquently and optimistically of a future filled with better days for trans people. The article was a powerful and uplifting thing, and Laverne Cox’s regal, poised look on Time’s front cover would be etched into my mind for years afterwards.

Three years later, many of Steinmetz’s predictions have come true. Now, in addition to the two trans celebrities I grew up idolizing, Janet Mock and Laverne Cox, we have Caitlyn Jenner, Lana and Lilly Wachowski and Andreja Pejić, among many others. The public face of the transgender community has grown to include a large contingent of famous transgender youth, including Jazz Jennings, Gavin Grimm, Arin Andrews & Katie Hill, and stories about young transgender children embraced by loving and supportive parents only continue to increase.  

Has this uptick in visibility had any meaningful effect on trans people’s rights — the “civil rights frontier” that Steinmetz wrote about? When we take into account the new DSM-V changing “gender identity disorder” to the more trans-friendly “gender dysphoria,” the Boy Scouts changing their rules to allow transgender members, or the Alpha Chi Omega sorority opening its doors to transgender women, the answer to this question seems to be “yes.”

And yet, something seems off.

In 2014, the National Coalition of Anti-Violence Programs found that while overall anti-LGBT hate crimes decreased between 2013 and 2014, hate-motivated violence against transgender people increased during this period. In 2015, the Human Rights Campaign and the Trans People of Color Coalition released a sobering 42-page report on anti-transgender violence, and the U.S. Transgender Survey documented pervasive, sweeping and omnipresent discrimination, harassment and violence against trans people in all facets of life. 2016 was the deadliest year on record for transgender murders in the United States.

Steinmetz (and perhaps Laverne Cox) might understand this inconsistency through an optimistic lens of social lag. Perhaps, they might say, the increasing visibility of trans people will lead to a better world all on its own; it’s just a matter of time.

But I believe that this trend is the result of a more complicated story, a story in which visibility and inclusion mirror violence and exclusion, involving two increasingly fractured transgender camps.

The “transgender movement” today is defined more and more by dissonance. The mostly wealthy, white, respectable and above-all unthreatening transgender community slowly moves toward inclusion, while the working-class, non-passing, unrespectable and threatening transgender community increasingly pays for transgender visibility with their bodies, careers, health and lives.

In the same way that the wealthy, mostly-white, respectable gay and lesbian community supplanted drag queens, poor queers and trans women as the face of the gay rights movement, the contemporary trans movement is rapidly expanding, normalizing and sanitizing as a result of its newfound visibility.

It’s this very normalization of trans identity that allowed me to write about my trans identity in my college applications and be admitted to Stanford University as “diversity.” It’s what lets me write for The Stanford Daily and not be mocked out of my own column simply for being trans, and what allows my pronouns and name to be respected on campus. My class background, appearance, mannerisms and educational privilege make me a respectable enough trans person to belong at Stanford, as I suspect it may do for many other trans people in higher education.

What does it mean, then, that the future of the trans movement is increasingly steered by those trans people who are most visible: bright-eyed transgender children who come out at six, affluent celebrities and college-educated transgender young adults fluent in the language of academia? What does it mean when our “transgender visibility” not only leaves out those who do not look, behave, speak or interact like the “right” kind of transgender person, but actively makes these trans people’s lives worse? What does it mean when the transgender movement is narrowly defined as “trans rights,” which are narrowly interpreted to mean legal protections and equality of access?

Regardless of the political climate of the day, we should not advocate for a future in which the “success” of the transgender movement is measured by how many social elites it creates. For the time being, “transgender” remains a dirty word, and we remain in the margins of society. If our movement intends itself to be an uplifting one, then we must fight not only for bathroom use and nondiscrimination law, but also for affordable and accessible housing, education and health care, reproductive justice and alternatives to incarceration.

If our visibility instead makes it harder rather than easier to advocate for these policies, then we cannot say that visibility is an unambiguous step forward. And if visibility is instead a more complex phenomenon where trans communities both win some and lose some, we must ask ourselves who those winners and losers are, and if this is the future we want to create.

 

Contact Lily Zheng at lilyz8 ‘at’ stanford.edu.

The post What we lose with trans visibility appeared first on The Stanford Daily.

]]>
https://stanforddaily.com/2017/04/06/what-we-lose-with-trans-visibility/feed/ 0 1125387
Sustainability through coalitions or not at all https://stanforddaily.com/2017/03/09/sustainability-through-coalitions-or-not-at-all/ https://stanforddaily.com/2017/03/09/sustainability-through-coalitions-or-not-at-all/#respond Thu, 09 Mar 2017 08:18:22 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1124608 Fascism 2,800 miles away is a different beast from fascism right here on the farm, and having a persistent and open conflict on campus would necessarily galvanize a drawn-out activist movement.

The post Sustainability through coalitions or not at all appeared first on The Stanford Daily.

]]>
I was tempted to title this Op-Ed, “Why Stanford needs neo-Nazis.”

We all remember the flood of opinion pieces after the election and the strangely empowered fear that drove many of us to pledge to resist this new administration. We told ourselves that we would unite, come together and rally behind our collective power to oppose and defeat the forces of fascism, racism, corruption and incompetence, all of which were now surely pouring forth from the doors of Capitol Hill and the White House as we spoke. It was all rhetoric for sure, but something about its hyperbole was soothing.

Fast forward a few months, and our alarm has given way to passivity. For those of us whose day-to-day routines have continued unchanged, the new administration’s actions have become the likes of reality TV gossip. “He did what?” and unspoken sighs are our ways of acknowledging and responding to sweeping executive orders, conflicts of interest, Russian spy dramas and the like.

It’s not that people don’t care – rather, it’s because people care too much. Until now, “resisting” a presidential administration has been a matter of reaction, waiting until something goes wrong before rising up in arms. Now, the stunning normalization of “something goes wrong” is revealing the limits of reactionary praxis and leaving a deep anomie in its wake. What do we protest? Anything? Everything? How effective is it to rally in outrage if the events we are protesting become irrelevant in under a week, if every day opens with disbelief and ends with dejection?

How can we bring people together towards longterm, sustainable activism?  

The snarky throwaway answer here would be “bring a neo-Nazi movement to campus and see what happens.” Fascism 2,800 miles away is a different beast from fascism right here on the Farm, and having a persistent and open conflict on campus would necessarily galvanize a drawn-out activist movement. However, this year’s conflict at Stanford has been remarkably apolitical, and political conflict has emerged through politely lobbed Op-Eds, not molotovs. The subdued nature of campus conflict contributes to the academic apathy I wrote about last week, but also to the concerning disconnect among the student body. For example,the 17 hate crime vandalisms that took place in a one-month period early this quarter were almost completely overlooked by the student body (compare this to the massive national outcry when similar hate crimes occurred during the hyper-politicized campus climate of Spring 2015).

This lack of open conflict puts us in a situation where we need to find new ways forward, but simultaneously gives us a chance to develop organizing strategies that aren’t solely reactionary protest. If the upcoming Civic Action Fair this Friday is any indication, we’re moving toward coalitions and collective organizing as effective activism.

When I wrote about the need for coalitions back in December, I focused on the pressing need for any successful coalition “to engage in the work of community education and to bring the important work of organizations scattered across campus and beyond into collaboration with each other.” Friday’s fair fits the bill, but it’s about more than that. Unlike many student-driven events on campus, this event isn’t a one-time coming-together of student groups in response to some external threat. Rather, the Civic Action Fair is the brainchild of a collection of undergraduate and graduate student groups, staff, postdocs and others organized as the Stanford Solidarity Network. This means that even after this action fair is done, the ongoing work of coalition-building will allow the Solidarity Network to continually organize, mobilize, build resources and sustain a broad range of different student groups and initiatives.

I was initially disappointed that this coalition wasn’t as flashy as I had hoped. Where were the marches, the rallies, the signs and protests that I had so poignantly associated with organized resistance? But I forgot that these protest tactics are only so ingrained in our collective consciousness because the movements thatutilized them – civil rights, desegregation, labor, anti-war – were able to succeed. The success of these movements, in turn, depended on a plethora of unglamorous tactics, strategies, movement-building and organizing, the hard and messy work of activism needed to transform ideology into substantial social change.

If there is one thing we should learn from the past, it’s that activism is a skill, not an inclination. How do we build the coalitions we need to sustain our movement? Practice, practice, practice (and come to Friday’s event).
Contact Lily Zheng at lilyz8 ‘at’ stanford.edu.

The post Sustainability through coalitions or not at all appeared first on The Stanford Daily.

]]>
https://stanforddaily.com/2017/03/09/sustainability-through-coalitions-or-not-at-all/feed/ 0 1124608
Sleeping giants and sustainable activism: Where are our professors? https://stanforddaily.com/2017/03/02/sleeping-giants-and-sustainable-activism-where-are-our-professors/ https://stanforddaily.com/2017/03/02/sleeping-giants-and-sustainable-activism-where-are-our-professors/#respond Thu, 02 Mar 2017 08:24:50 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1124216 At Stanford, what’s rarer than a snow day, more political than a rally and more powerful than a speech? Answer: A professor acknowledging local, national or global crisis in the classroom.

The post Sleeping giants and sustainable activism: Where are our professors? appeared first on The Stanford Daily.

]]>
At Stanford, what’s rarer than a snow day, more political than a rally and more powerful than a speech?

Answer: A professor acknowledging local, national or global crisis in the classroom.

Stanford University is one of those few elite schools around the world where the name brand means more than the degree. It’s widely accepted that at Stanford, students receive a world-class education in the subject(s) of their choosing and gain the skills and knowledge to be leaders, innovators and change-makers in the world. We have some of the most prominent and distinguished researchers, businesspeople, scientists and scholars in the world, facilities and resources that would put other universities to shame and an endowment larger than the GDP of many countries.  (I’m beginning to sound like a brochure, so I’ll stop.)

To achieve all this, Stanford has had to create, maintain and protect a way of functioning that has persisted for 130+ years. At its core, Stanford is a multi-billion dollar apparatus that collects and processes people, knowledge and talent. Lecturers become assistant professors become tenured professors (or leave); labs, think-tanks and on-campus organizations fight for funding in the hopes of a widely-publicized breakthrough; students arrive, receive an education, graduate and – if Stanford plays its cards right – donate.

Stanford is a remarkably unyielding institution. Though in many ways the finer details of its character are modified by the people who go through it (Tessier-Lavigne-era Stanford is ever so minutely different from Hennessy-era Stanford), Stanford will be Stanford so long as its campus and prestige remain intact. What this means, though, is that, for the most part, this university is buffered against sociopolitical events happening in the larger world.

This is something that many students intuitively know. What reason would a cognitive science professor have to talk about fascism? Why would a CS class talk about police brutality or systemic anti-Blackness? Even in classes studying concepts more relevant to current events or national-level controversies, conflicts and tensions involving millions of people go either unmentioned or appear only briefly in half-hearted attempts to relate course material to real life. Though of course exceptions exist, most classes on this campus could go on “business as usual,” barring apocalypse or natural disaster. (Manmade disasters of the sort unfolding in America today seem to be more easily ignored.)

This is great if we’re concerned with the survival of the university, but damning if we’re thinking about the sustainability of student activism. As I wrote in my first column of this year, the cognitive dissonance between our intimate connection to social justice issues and the stonewalling we receive from our academic and campus life contributes to a pervasive sense of disconnect at Stanford. Is our nation wracked by conflict? Perhaps, but it doesn’t feel like that here. Are communities back home in a state of emergency? Perhaps, but it doesn’t feel like that here.

If student activism is a fire and global crisis is its fuel, the pervasive failure of higher education to provide much-needed oxygen means that we are fighting a losing battle, suffocating slowly on our own fumes. This is one reason why in my time here, no student movement has survived more than one academic year without bleeding out most of its momentum and power. Institutional silence is one of the biggest culprits behind the ever-looming threat of student activist burnout. So long as the institutional arms of the university do not see themselves as threatened by the state of the world, Stanford will remain” business as usual.” And, so long as Stanford remains business as usual, student activists will use tactics of disruption, hypervisibility and resistance, putting their bodies on the line to create artificial threat and force Stanford’s hand.

If we as a campus are seriously working toward building unity to take us forward, we must acknowledge collectively that it isn’t students that are apathetic, but professors. Our everyday classes, in which professors remain silent on issues that are actively affecting the student body and the world, are incubators of campus tension. These classes exacerbate the fundamental disconnect between professors – especially tenured professors who have been at this university for decades – and students who are constantly connected to the outside world and its conflicts. This is a problem now as it’s been a problem in the past, but it isn’t inevitable.

Aren’t tenured professors supposed to be the sleeping giants of Stanford? Aren’t tenured professors able to do almost anything on campus, be leaders and inspirations and otherwise do the work of creating global and civic-minded citizens – not just read from lecture slides? Department affiliation and area of study should not come before professors’ identity as a member of the Stanford community, and a member of the larger society we are all embedded in.  

I’ve written already about the need for student communities to come together and take care of each other to sustain student movements. I’ve written already about the responsibility of administrators to support students and vice versa.

Now I’m calling on professors to do their part, too.  

 

Contact Lily Zheng at lilyz8 ‘at’ stanford.edu.

The post Sleeping giants and sustainable activism: Where are our professors? appeared first on The Stanford Daily.

]]>
https://stanforddaily.com/2017/03/02/sleeping-giants-and-sustainable-activism-where-are-our-professors/feed/ 0 1124216
Pay no attention to the ex-Provost behind the curtain https://stanforddaily.com/2017/02/23/pay-no-attention-to-the-ex-provost-behind-the-curtain/ https://stanforddaily.com/2017/02/23/pay-no-attention-to-the-ex-provost-behind-the-curtain/#respond Thu, 23 Feb 2017 08:35:13 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1123522 A real problem was framed in terms that indicted students and not underlying structural problems.

The post Pay no attention to the ex-Provost behind the curtain appeared first on The Stanford Daily.

]]>
Many of us at Stanford have long since understood that echo chambers exist on campus. We can find them in our nearest political group or activist community, our nearest conservative VSO or campus tabloid. For most of us, we need look no further than our Facebook timelines to find a group of individuals who share social and political views similar to our own.

These echo chambers are places where the open sharing and discussion of differing ideas is suppressed. Some of them self-select for individuals who already share the same ideas, while others have strong norms that privilege certain ideologies over others. There are many such spaces at Stanford, just as there are many in every institution of learning around the world, and students differ on whether we view them as desirable safe spaces, regrettable necessities, unwanted nuisances or some more nuanced mix of the three.

Enter JOHN ETCHEMENDY, stage left.

In a speech recently delivered to the Board of Trustees, former Provost John Etchemendy discussed what he views as upcoming challenges for the institution of higher education. The speech, titled “The threat from within,” envisions universities as timeless, apolitical, objective entities under attack from an increasingly politicized staff, faculty and student body.

This politicization, Etchemendy argues, manifests itself in echo chambers that are proxies for a sinister “intellectual intolerance” and “intellectual blindness.” He warns that the growing divide between ideological camps heralds the death of “rational argument” and puts the entire university in jeopardy. As reminiscent as Etchemendy’s alarmist rhetoric is to Ronald Reagan’s 1983 “A Nation at Risk,” I’m reminded more clearly of similar statements Etchemendy made in April 2015 – spring quarter of my sophomore year.

ASSU election season was in full swing, and tensions around Black Lives Matter and divestment from the Israeli occupation of Palestine shook every corner of campus. At the time, then-Provost Etchemendy delivered an unambiguous rebuke to the process of student group endorsements, complaining that these endorsements compromised “a senate composed of thoughtful, open-minded students representing the full range of student opinion” for “a senate preselected to represent a filtered set of beliefs.”

In this instance, too, Etchemendy responded to the presence of political influence – in arguably the most political regularly-occurring event at Stanford – with distrust and displeasure. A real problem (lack of representativeness in the ASSU of the entire student body) was framed in terms that indicted students and not underlying structural problems. The resulting fallout and uproar completely overshadowed his original (reasonable) concerns, and contributed to an animosity between “administrators” and “students” that persists to this day.

Today, we’re seeing it happen all over again – and John Etchemendy isn’t even Provost. While he is right to critique the ad hominem attacks that characterize many conversations on campus, identifying “politicization” as the culprit is as spurious as arguments go. Yes, Stanford is more obviously tense today than it was 17 years ago when Etchemendy became Provost; so too is the world. The problems we see today on campus stem from the political climate in the United States, the increasing civic awareness and engagement of students, staff and faculty alike and the glaring lack of social infrastructure on this campus to facilitate the conversations that must happen. Can “dialogue” happen when most of our communication to begin with happens over public email threads? When we’re too tied down by units and mental health to go to even those events with which we agree, let alone those with which we don’t?

Etchemendy plays a dangerous game when he tells the Board of Trustees that “what requires real courage is resisting [political stands]” and warns that politicization “violates a core mission.” If Stanford admitting women at its founding, creating community centers and divesting from apartheid South Africa all violated a core mission, then this is no university I want to call home.  Exhorting the Board to retreat into an apolitical bunker ensures that future student movements will act against it, rather than with it.

I do not believe that John Etchemendy is either stupid or ignorant. I believe him when he talks of watching “a growing intolerance” within higher education over his 17 years as Provost. What I am disappointed about, is that in all these years of watching, Etchemendy took little time to listen. A Provost’s responsibility is to ensure the health of the university into the long-term future; students are not disposable pieces in this larger vision. Had Etchemendy listened more closely during his time here, he might have seen the growing political engagement among all members of this community, the hopes and dreams of student organizers with visions bigger than graduation and the tireless work put in by staff to keep students going.

Politicization hasn’t jeopardized any of this; it’s enhanced it. What we’ve watched as students is the return of a thriving political climate and a renewal of the community bonds that hold us together. If Etchemendy could not see any of this, then perhaps it is for the best that his time as Provost has ended.

 

Contact Lily Zheng at lilyz8 ‘at’ stanford.edu.

The post Pay no attention to the ex-Provost behind the curtain appeared first on The Stanford Daily.

]]>
https://stanforddaily.com/2017/02/23/pay-no-attention-to-the-ex-provost-behind-the-curtain/feed/ 0 1123522
What it takes to trust Stanford https://stanforddaily.com/2017/02/16/what-it-takes-to-trust-stanford/ https://stanforddaily.com/2017/02/16/what-it-takes-to-trust-stanford/#respond Thu, 16 Feb 2017 10:09:01 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1123147 The problem now is that the reputation given by activists to the collective “administration” has stuck, even though the “Stanford” that activists fought against in 2014 is in many ways not the “Stanford” that we turn our sights to today.

The post What it takes to trust Stanford appeared first on The Stanford Daily.

]]>
I’ve written for the last month or so about the nationwide mobilization against our new presidential administration, but it seems pertinent now to turn our attention back to home. Stanford has lacked a healthy student/administrator relationship for years now, and at this point, it’s causing serious breakdowns in our ability as a campus to address and resolve problems.                   

It comes down to a lack of trust. In January, I wrote briefly about the recent history responsible for our current student wariness, but highlighting key events only tells half the story – the deeper trends undergirding this student-administrative distrust go back further.

While activism has always existed at Stanford, today’s explosion of student activism was preceded by a decade of diminished civic participation and dampened activism on campus following the anti-Iraq war protests in 2003. I doubt that administrators working in this vacuum of student action built much expertise in communicating with activists, because this kind of communication was, in large part,  unlikely to be salient in the first place. Activism, when it did exist, was more tied to humanitarian service than direct action. The student/administrator relationship was good in the sense that a plywood wall is good: It holds up a roof well, but in a thoroughly unremarkable, taken-for-granted way.

While we talk often about how Black Lives Matter impacted student life and activism during 2014-2015, we don’t think much about how this paradigm shift hit administrators. Suddenly, students were demanding from their peers, faculty, staff and administrators a level of communication, coordination and collective action that hadn’t been seen at Stanford in years. Administrators, hesitantly interacting with the young inferno of new student activism, reacted with tone-deafness, inflexibility and helplessness. (I’m reminded of a relative of mine who upgraded from Windows XP to Windows 10 and got so overwhelmed with the personalization settings that he refused to use his PC for a week.)

In the two years since, the administrative side of Stanford has worked to catch up to a rapidly changing and rapidly moving student body. Though representatives of the institution (administrators) by definition change slower than the individuals who move through it (students), Stanford’s administration has in large part cheated its way around this slow change through Marc Tessier-Lavigne, Persis Drell and a host of new administrative appointments that I don’t have space to name here.

The problem now is that the reputation given by activists to the collective “administration” has stuck, even though the “Stanford” that activists fought against in 2014 is in many ways not the “Stanford” that we turn our sights to today. Phrases like “Stanford doesn’t care,” “administrators prioritize the Stanford brand over students” and “administrators don’t listen” have become colloquialisms among many students, and are used today as go-to responses to any campus controversy or conflict. This is precisely what’s happening now with regards to the controversy over the firing of former Title IX attorney Crystal Riggins, what happened a few months ago with the suspension of the Stanford Band and what happened earlier this year with the alleged bribery of sexual assault victims.

In each of these recent cases, Stanford students have had to decide on a moral opinion given limited information and little context. In every case, students have unified not in support of a “student” per se, but rather in opposition to the “administration.” Popular outrage against the perceived wrongs of “administrators” (even if the specific administrators many activists had problems with have already left Stanford) is a convenient and effective way to mobilize today’s student body.

When we do this, however, I am worried that we are prioritizing reactivity over actually addressing real issues. For example, each of the three controversial issues above have provoked official responses that have provided a hitherto unheard of degree of transparency on issues Stanford has historically kept in the dark. And yet, I hear casual mention of these controversies as if Stanford had never responded, and as if the original student accusations had all been given the fact-checked stamp of approval.

I get the feeling now that we as a student body are using a myth of unified administrative incompetence and neglect as a tool to bring together the student body. From the perspective of effectiveness, this tactic is likely to sacrifice the organizing capacity and student/administration relationship of students who come after us by convincing administrators – who will most definitely outlast us here at Stanford – that student activists and student activism are more concerned with the performance of justice than they are of the complexities of institutional change. If this is the price we pay, then I don’t think it’s worth it.

This is not a call urging students to unthinkingly throw their trust behind Stanford the institution. There have always been, and still remain, large institutional problems in structure, routines, norms, personnel and culture at Stanford that must be pulled into the open to be critiqued. What I am saying here is that we cannot assume perpetual and unwavering guilt of this institution, as real as the harm it perpetuates feels to us. At best, we sabotage the change we’re trying to make in the world. At worst, our cynicism creates vicious cycles in which administrators truly become the enemies we make them out to be.

 

Contact Lily Zheng at lilyz8 ‘at’ stanford.edu.

The post What it takes to trust Stanford appeared first on The Stanford Daily.

]]>
https://stanforddaily.com/2017/02/16/what-it-takes-to-trust-stanford/feed/ 0 1123147
No movement survives on self-care alone https://stanforddaily.com/2017/02/09/no-movement-survives-on-self-care-alone/ https://stanforddaily.com/2017/02/09/no-movement-survives-on-self-care-alone/#respond Thu, 09 Feb 2017 10:15:22 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1122682 In hindsight, it doesn’t seem all too surprising that the concept of “self-care” caught on the way it did.

The post No movement survives on self-care alone appeared first on The Stanford Daily.

]]>
In hindsight, it doesn’t seem all too surprising that the concept of “self-care” caught on the way it did.

The draw lies most likely in its ambiguity – self-care refers broadly to any activity or practice an individual can do that benefits their physical, mental, emotional and/or spiritual health. Said practices can range between suggestions to “goof around for a bit” or “get rid of your news app” to “cooking a pot of beans.” The idea’s been spotlighted in TEDtalks, espoused in The New York Times, and, of course, taken over and monetized by the capitalistic powers that be.

At Stanford, self-care is prescribed as a solution to almost all of our problems. Too many units? Self-care. Tough breakup? Self-care. Not sure if that impulse buy from Amazon is a good idea with $13.57 left in your bank account? Go for it, it’s self-care. Snark aside, self-care is generally prescribed with good intentions. We remind our friends to take their meds, go to class, get out of bed, eat breakfast and try their best to get a reasonable amount of sleep. In activist circles, self-care takes on an additional mythos (spurred, no doubt, by an oft-repeated quote by Audre Lorde): Self-care means survival, survival means resistance and resistance – someday – means liberation.

The activism/self-care relationship is not without conflict. Activism – particularly activism contextualized within organized movements and campaigns – requires constant, sustained effort. Activism takes enormous concentration, effort, time and energy; it is often draining to build coalitions, plan direct actions, generate resources and otherwise do the hard work of impacting social change, especially as students. Self-care, given this paradigm, often looks like disengagement. Self-care in the movement is about doing less activism: taking breaks, stepping back or stepping out. “Take care of yourselves first,” we say. “The movement comes second.”

In November of 2015, around the time of the Paris attacks, Planned Parenthood shooting and Transgender Day of Remembrance, I called for “intentional cycles of rest and action” as a necessary step for activist sustainability. The idea at the time was that there would always be a consistent, well-defined activist body we could unplug from and replug into when needed, and that we could each find our own balance between activism and self-care.

With this balance in mind I told myself at the beginning of senior year that this year would be my “break” from activism. I loaded up on units, backed out of student activist groups and set myself up to have a relatively activism-free quarter. (Look what happened instead.) The world is unpredictable: Crisis happens, and before we know it we’re a part of a public movement to oppose our Cheeto-in-Chief. Many of us now feel like a certain degree of self-care – the ability to disengage – has been taken away from us. The movement calls, and the penalty for self-care in the face of crisis is guilt.

I want to propose an amendment to our concept of “self-care” on campus. For too long we have relied on self-care as an extension of our society’s overwhelming individuality and self-sufficiency and pushed a message of self-care as individual health, individual well-being and individual reliance.

Why can’t we take care of each other, too?

A paradigm shift from self-care to community-care means that we need to re-envision the way we interact, whether or not we call ourselves activists. The questions change from “how can I take care of myself?” and “how are other people taking care of themselves?” to “how can the community take care of me?” and “how can I help take care of others?” This forces us to rethink too the work we do: Can activism look like group prayer, massages, sleepovers or movie nights? Can organizational work look like free food, sleeping space and 24/7 building access?
If the work of organizing, advocacy and activism is to become more caring, the first step must of course be to validate people’s self-care. But what comes after this bare minimum is the harder work of creating community infrastructure (outside of Facebook and email listservs) that support communities and allow community members to support each other. We need to encourage community norms of not just asking for help but also offering help ourselves. We need to encourage community trust and open communication that allows people to be vulnerable with each other. And lastly, we need to expand our idea of what “community” means beyond narrow identities, beyond physical houses, beyond our departments or campaigns or even Stanford itself, to something bigger. No movement survives on self-care alone.

 

Contact Lily Zheng at lilyz8 ‘at’ stanford.edu. 

The post No movement survives on self-care alone appeared first on The Stanford Daily.

]]>
https://stanforddaily.com/2017/02/09/no-movement-survives-on-self-care-alone/feed/ 0 1122682
How we sabotage our own community education work (and how that ends) https://stanforddaily.com/2017/02/02/how-we-sabotage-our-own-community-education-work-and-how-that-ends/ https://stanforddaily.com/2017/02/02/how-we-sabotage-our-own-community-education-work-and-how-that-ends/#respond Thu, 02 Feb 2017 09:28:01 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1122310 We’ve got our movement; we know what we are resisting against; we know we’re in it for the long haul. But we don’t really yet have a way to act on our own terms - a way to win the slow burn of bad news attrition. It’s scarcely been a week, and I’m tired. Many of us are.

The post How we sabotage our own community education work (and how that ends) appeared first on The Stanford Daily.

]]>
If social justice movements had a life cycle, we’d be somewhere in the formative childhood years of one right now at Stanford. We’ve got our movement; we know what we are resisting against; we know we’re in it for the long haul. But we don’t really yet have a way to act on our own terms — a way to win the slow burn of bad news attrition. It’s scarcely been a week, and I’m tired. Many of us are.

It’s not just the content of the news — it’s what to do in the arid silences between headlines when we have nothing but the anxiety of wondering which basic tenet of our taken-for-granted lives will be sledgehammered down next. Op-ed writers around the globe are having a field day with this new administration; there’s always something new to write about, whether that be trial coups, flashy betrayals or rogue National Park Rangers. And yet, these stories do little to expand our capacity as a social movement while taking what free time we have and making us feel like we are doing something by reading an article or two a day.

This doesn’t change the fundamental powerlessness of our burgeoning social movement, and it’s taking physical, emotional and spiritual tolls on us all. We are activists, not a militia — if we remain a reactionary movement, our actions will burn brightly but fade swiftly. To survive, we need wood (or maybe solar panels), not oil.

Many activists know that part of the answer lies in education. By encouraging members of our social movements to learn about large and complex issues of power, privilege, identity, history and change, we create more effective change-makers, empower new leaders and contribute to the sustainability of our work. Many of us at Stanford believe and often reiterate the idea that “education is the great equalizer” and vigorously work to improve the educational systems and resources around us to be ever more inclusive, representative and relevant.

If these are truly our goals, then as activists, we need to stop shooting ourselves in the foot.

Activist-led community education at Stanford is incredibly ineffective. The massive over-saturation of campus event programming each day, fueled by 600+ student groups encompassing every topic under the sun, buries individual events under an avalanche of speakers, mixers, parties, screenings and advertisements. The huge collection of Stanford activist or social issue-related student groups fight to have their events stand out to compete for time from students who are already stretched too thin. Lack of any coherent partnerships or real collaborations (last-minute “co-sponsorships” don’t count) reflects the radio silence between different social issue networks and the difficulty in inter-VSO coordination. On top of this, each year, graduating leadership deals devastating blows to the experience, knowledge and overall functional capacity of these student groups.

The result is an environment where disorganized and far-flung student groups individually expend huge amounts of time, energy and resources to create the same set of perpetually under-attended events each year, while the students who could most benefit from this community education work rarely show up. Paradoxically, activists often exacerbate this disparity by restricting access to social issue networks and activist communities to only those who already possess a certain degree of knowledge. “Go learn for yourself and come back when you get it,” we say, then unironically celebrate the mountains of leftover pizza after our events.

Together, this combination of factors hurts our broadly defined movement. The lack of institutional memory leads to organizers endlessly recreating the wheel, the lack of formal resources impedes onboarding and learning for otherwise motivated individuals, and the lack of coordination between different student organizations prevents true collective action from occurring.

The Stanford Organizing/Archiving Resource (SOAR) project aims to address a number of these problems. As a project led by students and supported by staff from a range of community centers and offices, SOAR aims to collect and archive the educational resources created and recreated each year for use by the entire Stanford community. Our goal is to create a repository of accumulating educational material that can reflect the organizing and community-building work of student organizations and provide an accessible history for future generations of students and staff alike. Our first community meeting is today at 9 p.m. in the Women’s Community Center.

Personal plug aside, SOAR won’t address all the problems above. In particular, Stanford students still desperately require a means to communicate and coordinate outside of email threads and Facebook groups. We still need to strategize and come up with plans of action for effective change in the coming months and years — what SOAR aims to do, though, is to expand the notion of “we” to make this organizing work accessible for any person at Stanford. This is the ultimate goal of community education, in my opinion: leveraging the experience and wisdom of student leaders to empower an entire community.

 

Contact Lily Zheng at lilyz8 ‘at’ stanford.edu.

The post How we sabotage our own community education work (and how that ends) appeared first on The Stanford Daily.

]]>
https://stanforddaily.com/2017/02/02/how-we-sabotage-our-own-community-education-work-and-how-that-ends/feed/ 0 1122310
Why our rallying cry needs to be ‘resistance,’ not ‘intersectionality’ https://stanforddaily.com/2017/01/26/why-our-rallying-cry-needs-to-be-resistance-not-intersectionality/ https://stanforddaily.com/2017/01/26/why-our-rallying-cry-needs-to-be-resistance-not-intersectionality/#respond Thu, 26 Jan 2017 10:24:38 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1121935 In practice, anyone who has done social justice work is immediately confronted by the overwhelming variation in ideology, experience and intentions among those who want to make a difference.

The post Why our rallying cry needs to be ‘resistance,’ not ‘intersectionality’ appeared first on The Stanford Daily.

]]>
The sun is out, life goes on and the reality of our new president is beginning to sink in.

On Tuesday, he signed executive orders to advance the Keystone XL and Dakota Access pipelines; on Wednesday, he authorized funds to build the Mexico border wall and froze admission of refugees from some majority-Muslim nations. Across a number of federal agencies including the Environmental Protection Agency and the Agricultural Research Service, employees are barred from making public statements or communicating to the press, even via Twitter. This gag order is in place to “make sure nothing happens they don’t want to have happen,” according to Myron Ebell, Trump’s pick to oversee the EPA transition.

As we move forward from the hundreds of massive Women’s Marches held around the world on January 21, millions of people find themselves nervous, apprehensive and yet committed to taking action against the new administration and its supporters. Past this fundamental sentiment, we are divided. The spectacle of the Women’s March and its many regional iterations was an easy target for criticism. A now-viral image shows Angela Peoples, co-director of LGBTQ organization GetEqual, holding a sign reading “White Women Voted for TRUMP” while three white women in pink pussy hats stand prominently behind her. Many pointed out the cis-normative equating of womanhood to genitalia present in the signs many protesters held, calling on cis-gender women to do better. The bulk of critique, however, framed itself around the biting question: “Would this many (white) women show up to a Black Lives Matter protest, a #NoDAPL rally or any other social justice issue?”

I’m no stranger to these kinds of arguments; the template is easy. Action X purports to serve all X, but fails to serve those X who are also Y or Z, and the answer to the problem is always intersectionality. There are always more ways in which our actions can include more people of all races, genders, ages, abilities, nationalities, classes, religions, etc. — it is an ideology with an infinitely high bar, a source of motivation to drive activists to always, always do better.

That’s how it works in theory, at least. In practice, anyone who has done social justice work is immediately confronted by the overwhelming variation in ideology, experience and intentions among those who want to make a difference. “This isn’t intersectional at all,” activists say. “Men need to shut up and listen to women.” “This isn’t intersectional at all,” other activists say, “white women need to shut up and listen to black women.” And so on and so forth, ad infinitum, until at the end of the day, we care only about who gets to talk and not about what work gets done.

The problem happens when we try and transform intersectionality-as-theory into intersectionality-as-tactic, when we superimpose a highly ideological, rigid framework onto an inherently messy, complex sociopolitical environment. This has always been a problem for activists and activism, but today we find ourselves at a watershed moment as millions of Americans — many of them problematic, sexist, racist, transphobic, Islamophobic, for sure — rally behind #NotTrump.

As organizers, this is the opportunity of a generation to direct a movement towards those intersectional issues we’ve learned about and rallied behind in the past. #NotTrump means #NoDAPL, means #NoMuslimRegistry, means #NotOneMore. Resisting Trump means fighting for Planned Parenthood and freedom of the press and trans-inclusive bathrooms; it means disability justice and healthcare access, not just because our academic ideology informs our activism, but because this is about resistance, and its success depends on power, not purity.

Tactics of coalition-formation and goal-centered activism are almost always painful: Will I be able to link hands with someone who invalidates my gender, or trivializes my race, or demeans my womanhood? If it means that doing so gives us the immediate means to actualize effective resistance, then yes. We must be willing to work with the racists, sexists, classists, transmisogynists and bigots among us because they are us, our coworkers, classmates, neighbors, families. I would rather we steer an inherently-problematic but functional coalition than insist on a “woke” framework that in practice leaves vulnerable communities scattered and disempowered.

This doesn’t mean that activists should throw intersectionality to the wind and let the movement drive itself. Rather, as the Women’s March did, we must actualize intersectionality through our leadership and vision and arrange strategically chosen demands behind a rallying cry that brings together a broad coalition of individuals and communities. If we can successfully fight and win battles of resistance on the local, professional, organizational and state levels, all the while encouraging growth and education from our complex coalitions, we have a narrow path forward.

 

Contact Lily Zheng at lilyz8 ‘at’ stanford.edu.

The post Why our rallying cry needs to be ‘resistance,’ not ‘intersectionality’ appeared first on The Stanford Daily.

]]>
https://stanforddaily.com/2017/01/26/why-our-rallying-cry-needs-to-be-resistance-not-intersectionality/feed/ 0 1121935
Taking the lid off CAPS https://stanforddaily.com/2017/01/19/taking-the-lid-off-caps/ https://stanforddaily.com/2017/01/19/taking-the-lid-off-caps/#respond Thu, 19 Jan 2017 09:17:49 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1121604 Now, as campus nervously awaits the inauguration of our president-elect and prepares to double down on social justice issues, it’s almost a given that CAPS is about to receive an influx in student demand. And yet, perhaps because the plethora of issues outside our campus have shifted our attention away, we’re not talking much about CAPS these days.

The post Taking the lid off CAPS appeared first on The Stanford Daily.

]]>
Ah, CAPS. Over the last three years, I’m not sure if any other organization at Stanford has received more scrutiny. In 2015, “mental health” was the buzzword on campus. Students responding to more national or global events overwhelmed the services CAPS could provide, and in the discontent that followed, a movement started on campus.

During a town hall with CAPS director Ron Albucher in Feb. 2015, students expressed a wide range of different concerns and negative experiences with CAPS. Many took issue with the triage process, unhelpful counselors and long wait times, leading to the admission from Albucher that CAPS at the time was both understaffed and underfunded. For the remainder of that academic year, CAPS continued to be the object of heavy scrutiny, culminating in the publishing of the ASSU’s Mental Health Survey, which collected responses from over 1600 Stanford students.

This survey showed that many students had positive experiences with the mental health services they had received, though more than 40 percent of the respondents indicated that they would be unlikely to go to CAPS, and nearly 20 percent were unaware of mental health resources on campus. Yet, public outrage about mental health faded soon afterwards, leaving behind a plethora of new student groups and marking a tentative end to one of our many cycles of campus activism.

Now, as campus nervously awaits the inauguration of our president-elect and prepares to double down on social justice issues, it’s almost a given that CAPS is about to receive an influx in student demand. And yet, perhaps because the plethora of issues outside our campus has shifted our attention away, we’re not talking much about CAPS these days. Rather than take this as a sign that everything is working as it should, I want to use this as an opportunity to explore what our relationship with CAPS is now and how that has changed over the years.

I get the sense today that many Stanford students — especially those from marginalized communities, activists or both — are less likely to trust CAPS than are other students. Why? Students may distrust CAPS due to leftover sentiment from the 2015 mental health movement on campus in which CAPS was perpetually (and at times, rightly) portrayed as inefficient, incompetent and under-resourced. Students may distrust CAPS due to their own individual negative experiences or the negative experiences of their friends and communities. Or, students may distrust CAPS due to its unreliable degree of transparency and the disconnect student communities see between the services they receive and the public relations communications of the organization.

To give CAPS some credit, students at Stanford rarely perceive CAPS as an organization — we are more likely to view it through the singular lens of a service we are entitled to. As such, the usual organizational problems (communication errors, bureaucracy, paperwork, decentralization, budgeting and dependency, hiring and pay, turnover rate) are invisible to us. Ron Albucher said as much, albeit vaguely, in his open letter published in the Daily last year. If all students see are a set of outcomes — bad individual experiences, low numbers of specialists knowledgeable about queer/trans issues, race and class — with no information to give them context, we fill in the gaps ourselves. We assume that the organization is populated by a host of incompetent, untrained and otherwise uncaring therapists that do not take students seriously, conclude “fuck CAPS” and look elsewhere for organizations that can treat us better. Distrust breeds distrust, and before we know it, 40 percent of our student body refuses to use a resource that many of us desperately need.

To clarify, I still believe that Stanford’s mental health services are lacking. Marginalized students continue to be underrepresented and under-serviced, and students living with mental illnesses receive varying levels of support from the institutions that ought to do more. Yet, high levels of distrust mask the fact that CAPS is continually making changes when it can and is constrained by factors outside of its control. For example, lack of funding for clinicians heavily influences the high turnover rate and the hiring of new therapists, especially the specialists our communities need. The prohibitive cost of living in the Bay Area, coupled with the potential gain of starting private practices, means that many therapists take their services elsewhere. This drying-up of the hiring pool then forces temporary hires that help alleviate long wait times but leave marginalized students hurting, even as CAPS casts its net as widely as it can to fill these crucial gaps in its staff.

Does this completely vindicate CAPS? No — the failure to transparently communicate these deeper problems in favor of presenting a positive image leaves much to be desired, and CAPS has a ways to go with cultural competence training for all its clinicians. However, it may be that some of our student distrust of these services is unwarranted. Given the times ahead, I’ll risk sounding cliché to tell you: Please go to CAPS.

 

Contact Lily Zheng at lilyz8 ‘at’ stanford.edu.

The post Taking the lid off CAPS appeared first on The Stanford Daily.

]]>
https://stanforddaily.com/2017/01/19/taking-the-lid-off-caps/feed/ 0 1121604
Our activist frameworks don’t always work here (and that’s okay) https://stanforddaily.com/2017/01/12/our-activist-frameworks-dont-always-work-here-and-thats-okay/ https://stanforddaily.com/2017/01/12/our-activist-frameworks-dont-always-work-here-and-thats-okay/#respond Thu, 12 Jan 2017 09:38:47 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1121323 As organizational theorists would argue, Stanford University, like many other modern universities, is less a cohesive institution and more an “organized anarchy.” An institution organized in this way is difficult to understand, let alone organize against.

The post Our activist frameworks don’t always work here (and that’s okay) appeared first on The Stanford Daily.

]]>
When did we first learn that Stanford was the enemy?

Maybe it was in 2014, with the #StandWithLeah protests against Stanford’s handling of sexual assault, or in 2015, when Provost Etchemendy responded to campus tensions caused by police brutality and racism with a call for a “two-way street” of “dialogue.” Maybe it was in 2016, as fossil fuel divestment failed and mental health resources remained absent, or in the fledgling weeks of 2017, over fresh accusations of sexual assault mishandling and the suspension of the Stanford Band.

“Stanford doesn’t care about people like me,” we conclude, thinking about all the negative experiences we and our friends have had on campus. “Stanford doesn’t want to care about people like me.”

What students allude to with these statements is almost always some variation of a structural argument: We argue that some fundamental flaw, prejudice or inequity permeates every level of Stanford’s institutional structure, from the most powerful decision-makers to Stanford’s many institutes, departments and offices to everyday conversation. From our perspective, this flaw not only permeates Stanford but also poisons it, compromising the integrity of the entire system. With any given flaw (“Stanford cares about its reputation more than its students,” for example), we use a current issue as a springboard to argue that said flaw, snowballing through multiple poisoned levels of Stanford’s hierarchical structure, eventually causes the negative outcome we see.

I and many other students who have applied this framework to interpreting campus life are putting into practice a type of analysis often used by activists and movements across the country to identify and critique such things as the prison-industrial complex, institutionalized racism and neoliberalism.

We’re also often wrong in trying to apply this approach to Stanford.

When we look at Stanford University’s massive size and scope, we often draw parallels to an organizational form we’re familiar with: the bureaucracy. We imagine a huge machine of red tape, inefficiency and corruption branching out from a few powerful individuals and see ourselves as students struggling against an all-encompassing and hostile force. Everywhere we can see evidence of wrongdoing, and it becomes easy to piece it all together as the result of an evil institution’s malicious collusion or willful neglect. This is an excellent framework to employ if we’re trying to start a campaign or build student solidarity, but it’s frankly inaccurate.

As organizational theorists would argue, Stanford University, like many other modern universities, is less a cohesive institution and more an “organized anarchy.” We are an extremely decentralized institution made of bubbles within bubbles. The CS department knows next to nothing about the sociology department, which knows next to nothing about the GSB; SLAC and the MLK Jr. Research and Education Institute may as well exist across the country from each other. “Administrator,” while a functional category and status-heavy title, belies the reality that administrators are spread across campus, perform vastly different tasks and very rarely coordinate their efforts toward a particular goal. In this environment, decision-making is less a directive issued from above and more an organic process driven by the interests of the right people who happen to be in the right meeting, at the right time.

An institution organized in this way is difficult to understand, let alone organize against — it’s not surprising, then, that activists do what we do. It feels far more satisfying to say “Stanford University doesn’t care about people of my race” than it does to say “I was hurt by the racism in this specific policy created a decade ago and in the interactions I had with a staff member of this organization.” This latter version isn’t easy to come by. As activists, reaching a functional level of specificity concerning flaws in the system requires a degree of investigation beyond simply indicting the entire institution — a sentiment that, though powerful, lacks meaning when applied to a place like Stanford.

It’s imperative that as students who want to hold our university accountable, we emphasize effectiveness and understanding over reactivity. Some of that means waiting to get all sides of the story (and acknowledging that institutional actors can have a side without it being inherently evil) to identify problems requiring action, rather than leaping onto stories and rumors that match our confirmation bias. Stanford University is a more complex and contradictory organization than any of us give it credit for. While that makes any issue deserving activism fundamentally nuanced, this by no means changes the end goal of student activists.

 

Contact Lily Zheng lilyz8 ‘at’ stanford.edu. 

The post Our activist frameworks don’t always work here (and that’s okay) appeared first on The Stanford Daily.

]]>
https://stanforddaily.com/2017/01/12/our-activist-frameworks-dont-always-work-here-and-thats-okay/feed/ 0 1121323
Seeing the forest, missing the trees: An honest look at identity politics https://stanforddaily.com/2016/12/07/seeing-the-forest-missing-the-trees-an-honest-look-at-identity-politics/ https://stanforddaily.com/2016/12/07/seeing-the-forest-missing-the-trees-an-honest-look-at-identity-politics/#respond Wed, 07 Dec 2016 16:53:03 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1120774 This is usually the trend: misinformed criticism of leftist activism or culture result in high-profile strawman arguments in popular media, which activists take great glee in tearing down. Real issues go unsolved, and both left and right further cement themselves into ironclad camps.

The post Seeing the forest, missing the trees: An honest look at identity politics appeared first on The Stanford Daily.

]]>
Well, we had to have this conversation eventually.

In the weeks since the election, it seems like just about everyone has an explanation for the outcome. Third party voters, a white working-class rebellion against a liberal elite, fake news, racist white women, Russia – the list goes on and on, and will probably continue to grow over the next few months. This article will not be about the election, but it will be about one ideology that has been hotly debated in the election’s aftermath: identity politics.

Identity politics are, simply put, an ideology that constructs a political framework around an individual’s identity or identities. It argues that characteristics like race/ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation and class contribute to different life experiences and that these differences vary based on every combination of these characteristics (a related concept: intersectionality). Queer, transgender, South Asian working-class men, then, will have different experiences compared to straight, cisgender, White middle-class women, and so on and so forth. The politic part of identity politics typically involves evoking these identities in the context of campaigns, outreach, decision-making and any other situation in which power, prestige, status or the like are at stake. (This is to say, in most situations.)

So far, most online critiques I have read about identity politics have been unimpressive at best and incoherent at worst. Mark Lilla’s New York Times opinion piece buried a half-cogent exploration of identity politics under a tired “All Lives Matter”-esque rhetoric. John Judis’s Washington Post op-ed seemed to conflate the Clinton campaign’s strategic successes and failures with the successes and failures of a greater “identity politics,” which he never quite defines. In response to pieces like these, defenders of identity politics have published retaliatory op-eds saying, essentially: “the right uses them too!” This is usually the trend: Misinformed criticism of leftist activism or culture result in high-profile straw man arguments in popular media that activists take great glee in tearing down. (I’m quite guilty of this myself.) Real issues go unsolved, and both left and right further cement themselves into ironclad camps.

The reality of this debate is that identity politics – like most ideologies – are more complex than either the critics or the proponents want to admit. Take, for example, common statements like “all ‘X’ should have voted against ‘Y.’” We assume by making these statements that:

  1. All “X” share the same interest in voting against “Y.”
  2. All “X” think of themselves as “X,” or have that identity salient when voting.
  3. All “X” vote primarily to oppose “Y.”

Because we’ve made these assumptions, we are primed to interpret the results of the election accordingly. We might write op-eds titled “If You Are LGBTQ and You Vote for Trump, You are a Traitor to Your Community, Plain. Simple. Truth,” perhaps not understanding that by enforcing this myth of community purity, we are further isolating individuals and furthering the conditions under which people vote against their “identity interests,” or not at all.

This is the larger problem that we in progressive, Leftist and/or activist communities currently face: We see the forest and miss the trees. While we apply our analyses and academic knowledge to arrive at policies we think will “benefit all people of color” or “benefit the working class,” we apply the same homogenizing lens onto actual people in actual communities without taking the effort to see the people and not the theories we use to explain them. I don’t care if we’re “correct;” what good does that do if we’re too out of touch with our communities to make any positive change happen? This applies to identity politics as much as it applies to “political correctness” and the policing of language – it’s not about whether or not we’re right. It’s about the way we treat people who don’t talk or think like us, whether we choose to emphasize the purity of our movements or welcome the messy reality of the world outside them.

This is not to say that we should abandon identity politics; quite the opposite. If we see the vision of identity politics (all women and femmes working toward an end to patriarchy, all people of color working toward an end to white supremacy, etc.) as a goal for the future, we can work towards that reality. The danger lies when we believe this vision already exists, as the Clinton campaign did, or try and create it through ideological exclusion and movement policing, as activists do. Identity politics can be a path to actual equity and justice only so far as it centers the hard work of organizing, coalition-building, empathy and education.

I understand that holding fast to our ideologies is a natural response to crisis; identity politics are a second language to many of us. What we need to do, though, is find a more sustainable, empathetic and restorative approach to our organizing work that keeps us accountable to a better world and yet keeps us able to understand people who are in process. We need our identity politics to evolve – and if the argument isn’t convincing enough on its own, know that it came from a queer, transgender activist woman of color.

 

Contact Lily Zheng at lilyz8 ‘at’ stanford.edu.

The post Seeing the forest, missing the trees: An honest look at identity politics appeared first on The Stanford Daily.

]]>
https://stanforddaily.com/2016/12/07/seeing-the-forest-missing-the-trees-an-honest-look-at-identity-politics/feed/ 0 1120774
Toward a new coalition https://stanforddaily.com/2016/12/01/toward-a-new-coalition/ https://stanforddaily.com/2016/12/01/toward-a-new-coalition/#respond Thu, 01 Dec 2016 09:28:08 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1120569 On Tuesday night, a hundred people gathered at Pigott Hall to begin organizing a unified coalition against oppression, hate and intolerance in the wake of the 2016 Presidential Election. In the audience were undergraduate and graduate students alike, as well as faculty and staff and non-Stanford-affiliated community members looking to contribute to the discussion. This meeting was an effort to bring together people - some of whom had never organized before - to strategize, organize and create a comprehensive coalition against hate and in support of marginalized and targeted communities.

The post Toward a new coalition appeared first on The Stanford Daily.

]]>
On Tuesday night, a hundred people gathered at Pigott Hall to begin organizing a unified coalition against oppression, hate and intolerance in the wake of the 2016 presidential election. In the audience were undergraduate and graduate students alike, as well as faculty and staff and non-Stanford-affiliated community members looking to contribute to the discussion. This meeting was an effort to bring together people — some of whom had never organized before — to strategize, organize and create a comprehensive coalition against hate and in support of marginalized and targeted communities.

During spring quarter last year, after the 2016 Activist Open House held during Admit Weekend, I wrote an op-ed expressing hope for the future. At that point in time, the student-led Who’s Teaching Us? (WTU) coalition galvanized broad student support for more diverse faculty, more inclusive academic and campus spaces and more broadly, social justice at Stanford and beyond. In the op-ed, I wrote that “the seeds for change laid long ago by a history of student activism … perhaps [are] beginning to shift.” The unprecedented level of political and social awareness of Stanford students, staff and faculty had organizers and activists poised on the edge of something big. We felt like a new generation of activists would lead Stanford into a new era of social change. To make this into a reality, I argued last year that “we need to find ways to share and pool our collective knowledge — to reach past our identities and organizational borders to find the common truths in our work … to contextualize our work in the world beyond Campus Drive.”

During the mass meeting on Tuesday night, we created several working groups to tackle a plethora of issues we believed to all be interconnected. One group connected people to Stanford Sanctuary Now, the effort to make Stanford University a sanctuary for undocumented people. Another sought to form a collective of individuals working to unify individuals, departments, institutions and businesses against hatred and prejudice. Still others worked to create physical coalitions of different activist initiatives supported by digital resource networks, planned potential direct action in support of off-campus efforts, and discussed ways to make activism and organizing more accessible.

I was impressed. Not because the working groups themselves developed novel ideas, but because the ethos of the space itself and the people in it suggested a more sustainable coalition with a membership diverse in not only identities but also skills, knowledge and expertise. I felt that rather than simply creating another issue-based organization at Stanford for a stretched-thin activist community, what we witnessed in that space was the creation of a coalition that could bring together existing organizations to organize together and bring in members from different backgrounds to collaborate. I was humbled by the input of non-Stanford community members who contributed to the space, staff who pledged resources and faculty who pledged support. I was inspired by frosh leadership and thankful for the activists in that space who shared their experience and organizing work.

That being said, hope that a coalition can succeed is only the barest of starts to the work that must be done. I think of the energy of the Who’s Teaching Us? movement last year, the power of the Black Lives Matter protests and the divestment campaign two years ago, the work of community centers to support their students for decades. Is it possible to bring all of this together? To bring together those fighting for worker’s rights, fossil fuel divestment, queer and trans liberation, reproductive justice, immigration, prison divestment, anti-racist work, decolonization, peace, representation and everything else? What does it mean for activists who have dedicated years to disparate issues to coordinate a coalition that connects all this work and more?

We have the people, but not the answers just yet. The work of coalition-building is unglamorous and difficult, but that’s all the reason why we need to take this work seriously. What we need to do now is to bring everyone with positive intentions to make a difference into a larger coalition, to engage in the work of community education and to bring the important work of organizations scattered across campus and beyond into collaboration with each other. Op-eds like these cannot move beyond the realm of visibility politics unless they genuinely connect people to the work that needs to be done. In this spirit, I’ll end by providing contact information to get involved:

Community Action Meeting Planning Group: sucommunityaction ‘at’ gmail.com
Stanford Sanctuary Now: stanfordsanctuarynow ‘at’ gmail.com
Against Hate: suagainsthate ‘at’ gmail.com
Digital/Physical Resource Network: lilyz8 ‘at’ stanford.edu
Direct Action: laurensn ‘at’ stanford.edu
Showing Up for Racial Justice: surj.peninsula ‘at’ gmail.com
Who’s Teaching Us?: whosteachingus ‘at’ lists.stanford.edu
Breaking the Bubble: sageis ‘at’ stanford.edu,  cspears ‘at’ stanford.edu      
Student and Labor Alliance: stanfordsala ‘at’ gmail.com

 

Contact Lily Zheng at lilyz8 ‘at’ stanford.edu. 

The post Toward a new coalition appeared first on The Stanford Daily.

]]>
https://stanforddaily.com/2016/12/01/toward-a-new-coalition/feed/ 0 1120569
Concrete action in support of trans lives https://stanforddaily.com/2016/11/16/concrete-action-in-support-of-trans-lives/ https://stanforddaily.com/2016/11/16/concrete-action-in-support-of-trans-lives/#respond Thu, 17 Nov 2016 00:42:22 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1120022 2016 has been one of the worst years in recent memory for trans communities around the world. The 295 murders worldwide and 24 murders in the United States alone broke the previous record (271 and 22, in 2015), despite the increasing visibility of transgender, gender-variant and intersex people in society. As I wrote for 2015’s Trans Day of Remembrance, “never before have trans people been so visible in media and popular culture, and never before have trans people been so violently under threat.”

The post Concrete action in support of trans lives appeared first on The Stanford Daily.

]]>
Content warning: graphic descriptions of violence, murder, suicide, transphobia

I was awake at 1 a.m. on Tuesday night reading about death. “Miscilene, a person of color, was found on a wasteland with head injuries and a bloody piece of wood.” “Teresa died of asphyxiation by strangulation. Her body was dragged through the street and left there.” The Transgender Murder Monitoring Project had 295 such descriptions on its Trans Day of Remembrance 2016 list.

2016 has been one of the worst years in recent memory for trans communities around the world. The 295 murders worldwide and 24 murders in the United States alone broke the previous record (271 and 22, in 2015), despite the increasing visibility of transgender, gender-variant and intersex people in society. As I wrote for 2015’s Trans Day of Remembrance, “never before have trans people been so visible in media and popular culture, and never before have trans people been so violently under threat.”

During my four years at Stanford, at least 1030 trans people have been murdered around the world. In other words, at least one trans person has been killed every 34 hours for the last four years. The true number of deaths – taking into account suicides, unresolved cases and media misgendering – is likely many times higher than the confirmed number. 86 percent of trans people murdered in the last eight years were under the age of 40. Those murdered in the United States have been overwhelmingly Black or Latina trans women and femmes – a grim reminder that violence along lines of race, class and gender often combines with fatal results.

In March of 2015, I called on cisgender people to pass anti-discrimination legislation in housing and employment, introduce gender-neutral or gender-inclusive spaces and expand access to medical care, education and academia. In 2016, as we move forward from a presidential election that has caused calls to queer and trans suicide hotlines to more than double, it is clear that we need tangible goals more than ever. It’s not enough for writers like me to call for “an end to transphobia” or make other statements that make readers nod gravely in response, but never act. The time has come for concrete action in support of trans lives.

  1. We must engage our communities at Stanford, in the workplace and back home on topics of transphobia, gender and trans liberation. Having the empathy to engage people from a place of understanding and love requires dedication and persistence to meet people where they are and have difficult but necessary conversations. If transphobia and violence comes from hate and that hate comes from fear, how can we make our classmates, family members and coworkers less afraid?
  2. We must call our local and state representatives and hold them accountable to trans communities. Many trans communities depend critically on the availability of local resources and services – housing shelters, social safety nets and community services. Pro-LGBTQ+ policies are a crucial and necessary start, but they are just that: a start. The wellbeing of trans people cannot be separated from the well-being of other marginalized groups. To truly support trans people, especially multiply marginalized trans people, we must implore our representatives to pursue pro-immigration, pro-worker, pro-sex work, anti-prison and anti-racist policies, in the recognition that these policies are all interconnected.
  3. We must support local and national trans organizations, advocacy groups and support networks with our time, energy and/or wallets, to empower trans organizers to create change. Whether we act by inviting nonprofits to campus, volunteering to write letters to incarcerated trans people or helping organize community events and fundraisers, we must support those people working directly with trans communities. Too often, marginalized communities are forced to resolve crises on their own as society looks the other way. Supporting local and national trans groups helps ensure that resources exist for those who are most at risk and for those who are most abandoned by social safety nets that many of us take for granted.
  4. We must leverage our influence within organizations and institutions to create welcoming spaces for trans people, and to advocate for trans justice and gender equity on a societal scale. As organizers, leaders, faculty and/or administrators, we can use our visibility to uplift the work of trans organizations, and our power and reputation to call on other organizations to do the same. If Stanford truly supports higher learning, then it has the responsibility to support other institutions on behalf of all trans students, trans researchers, trans academics and trans staff. As future leaders, we all must learn how we as individuals can best utilize our networks and organizations to support trans justice.
  5. We must love and respect trans people in the ways that they ask for. We cannot fight on behalf of the trans community if we do not love and respect trans people. Ask yourself if you would ever date a trans person. Ask yourself if you would hire a trans person, or leave your child with a trans person. Transgender, gender-variant and intersex people are told by a transphobic society that we are unwanted, unlovable and undeserving of dignity. This is the easiest and most basic action to take, and yet we so often forget to do it.

The work will be hard – all important work is. This is all the more reason why we should do that work together, no matter who we are, what we do or where we do it. To close with a rally chant:

When trans people are under attack, what do we do?

RISE UP, fight back!

 

Contact Lily Zheng at lilyz8 ‘at’ stanford.edu. 

The post Concrete action in support of trans lives appeared first on The Stanford Daily.

]]>
https://stanforddaily.com/2016/11/16/concrete-action-in-support-of-trans-lives/feed/ 0 1120022
What we do now https://stanforddaily.com/2016/11/09/what-we-do-now/ https://stanforddaily.com/2016/11/09/what-we-do-now/#respond Wed, 09 Nov 2016 19:52:40 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1119574 Right now, I’m scrolling past reblogged suicide hotlines and an endless stream of Facebook posts reacting to the news. I have to remind myself that the stages of grief include denial, anger, bargaining and depression, and the reactions of our generation are mourning perhaps the single biggest death of our lifetimes so far: the death of the status quo on an unimaginable scale.

The post What we do now appeared first on The Stanford Daily.

]]>
On Tuesday night, many of us stayed up late to watch the end of an era broadcast on live TV.

Our generation grew up with arguably one of the most charismatic presidents of all time. Barack Obama’s election in 2008 promised that for many of us who were just perhaps coming into our own identities, things would change for the better, and even as we grew older and struggled to maintain that belief, Obama was there. We heard from him words and reassurances that things would be okay, watched him go gray, laughed at his mic drops and dad jokes and settled in. Obama was the one thing in my life that stayed constant from middle school through high school through college.

At Stanford, becoming disillusioned with Obama was just another byproduct of politicization. The death toll from his drone strikes and the millions of families torn apart by deportation under his presidency couldn’t be ignored — and so we gave up on Obama as he meandered towards the end of his second term. We taught ourselves about race in America, how mass incarceration and policing became the new face of racism and how colorblind language replaced explicit prejudice as the new coat of paint on a centuries-old system of disenfranchisement, suppression and oppression. We learned about colonialism, imperialism, Islamophobia, warmongering and the surveillance state, coming to terms with the reality that oppression hid behind smiling faces and well-intentioned policy-making, every level of the state apparatus built by and for the most powerful in America, even as it would maintain appearances of fairness.

And then the election happened.

Right now, I’m scrolling past reblogged suicide hotlines and an endless stream of Facebook posts reacting to the news. I have to remind myself that the stages of grief include denial, anger, bargaining and depression, and the reactions of our generation are mourning perhaps the single biggest death of our lifetimes so far: the death of the status quo on an unimaginable scale. We will probably still be grieving as we talk to our loved ones, find support in our communities and try to think about academics, work, policy change — anything but the choice the country we live in has made. We’re scared, angry, apathetic, numb and falling apart, and yet Stanford is still here, the beer bottles are where we left them, our homework still sits undone. They are the unsettling reminders of a world before Trump, and their presence now is the phantom limb syndrome of our political consciousness.

But the status quo that we lost on Tuesday was not a world where marginalization and violence did not happen — it was a world where we could turn a blind eye to it. If Hillary Clinton had won, I would have implored us to look past her victory towards the oppressive systems she would have assumed leadership over. Trump winning brings to the fore our own fears — not because we believe that Trump has the power to singlehandedly destroy a pristine America, but because we are frightened of the sheer honesty of today’s voting demographic in identifying America’s failures. We are realizing that Trump rose to power on the backs of voters disillusioned with the neoliberal elite and traditional politics whose anger has been channeled into hatred and white supremacy, and this channeling has been happening for a long time. We no longer have an excuse to ignore the influence of the systems and institutions that created this. We no longer have an excuse to look away.

What happens now and in the next four years is the tsunami after the earthquake. What I can’t and won’t predict right now is the kind of policy change that will come from this administration, or the global change that will likely develop in preparation of and in reaction to it. (In an omen of things to come, however, stock prices for America’s largest private prison contractors sharply climbed after Trump’s victory.) After Brexit, when Britain voted to leave the EU after being incited by xenophobia, Islamophobia and hatred, hate crimes rose — and stayed high. In America, communities of color, queer and trans people, undocumented Americans, refugees and Muslim Americans will likely face heightened violence, harassment and discrimination in the coming years from their neighbors, community members, peers and coworkers.

As we move forward from today, we need to love and support each other — to make sure that our uniting against a common enemy does not lower the standards for how our friends should treat us, and that we clearly identify what that enemy is (white supremacy, neoliberal elitism, class inequity and patriarchy, not the Trump supporters who are the accomplices and victims of those systems). We need to be intentional about the work we do, the goals and objectives of our work, the flaws and shortcomings of every movement. We need, more than ever, to use the right tactics in the right ways at the right time, with the right people, to organize and movement-build, to sustain our advocacy and fight across as many different spaces we can. In short, we need a mindful, critical, loving and powerful activism.

I am glad that this, at least, has not changed.  

 

Contact Lily Zheng at lilyz8 ‘at’ stanford.edu.

The post What we do now appeared first on The Stanford Daily.

]]>
https://stanforddaily.com/2016/11/09/what-we-do-now/feed/ 0 1119574
Bathroom battlegrounds: Incrementalism and the fracturing LGBTQ+ coalition https://stanforddaily.com/2016/11/03/bathroom-battlegrounds-incrementalism-and-the-fracturing-lgbtq-coalition/ https://stanforddaily.com/2016/11/03/bathroom-battlegrounds-incrementalism-and-the-fracturing-lgbtq-coalition/#respond Thu, 03 Nov 2016 08:15:55 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1119118 Over the last year, advocates for LGBTQ+ nondiscrimination legislation campaigned tirelessly in the wake of gay marriage victories in 2015. A broad coalition of organizations and advocacy groups fought to ensure protections for queer and trans people on a state level, working with state legislatures around the country to create statutory protections in employment, housing and public accommodations. As 2016 nears its end, however, that coalition shows signs of falling apart.

The post Bathroom battlegrounds: Incrementalism and the fracturing LGBTQ+ coalition appeared first on The Stanford Daily.

]]>
I wanted to have a strong opinion on this issue.

Over the last year, advocates for LGBTQ+ nondiscrimination legislation campaigned tirelessly in the wake of gay marriage victories in 2015. A broad coalition of organizations and advocacy groups fought to ensure protections for queer and trans people on a state level, working with state legislatures around the country to create statutory protections in employment, housing and public accommodations. As 2016 nears its end, however, that coalition shows signs of falling apart.

Trans people (as always) are the point of contention. Heightened visibility for transgender, gender-variant and intersex people has reignited the trans bathroom debate, which has become a hotly-contested battleground of trans rights today – so much so that opposition to trans people over bathrooms almost single-handedly threatens to sink attempts at passing nondiscrimination legislature. Organized opposition camps composing of right-wing evangelists, trans-exclusionary radical feminists (TERFs) and a hodgepodge of others prove a powerful lobbying force against the campaigns working towards statewide nondiscrimination laws.

It is in this environment that internal struggles within the LGBTQ+ movement run rampant. In one camp, the Gill Foundation, the National Center for Transgender Equality, Equality Pennsylvania and other groups argue that the most effective tactic today is partial protection legislation – campaigning for protections for LGBTQ+ people in employment and housing, but not public accommodations. This strategy, they claim, dodges the trans bathroom debate and the powerful opposition behind it – allowing for legislation that would otherwise be completely shut down to instead pass in a partial form.

In the other camp, the ACLU, the Human Rights Campaign, Lambda Legal and many queer and trans activists argue that such incremental legislation is a death sentence for trans rights in the future. This strategy, they argue, abandons trans people in public spaces at the time when they perhaps need support most and may be read as a victory by opposition groups – potentially inviting an even stronger backlash when the issue of public accommodations protections resurfaces in the future. Perhaps most troubling, this compromise may have long-term effects on movement momentum: Will those LGBTQ+ leaders who champion this compromise now still care enough to fight for trans people’s usage of public facilities later?

This issue is complicated further by recent events: The Gill Foundation is a funder that writes grants totaling over $6.5 million each year and a powerhouse behind incremental compromise legislature. This summer, Pennsylvania’s version of this compromise bill advanced in the Senate, only for the ACLU to campaign against it. As a result of this fallout, the Gill Foundation refused to renew the ACLU’s funding.

This is more context than I usually provide for an opinions piece, but the context is especially important to understand in this case. I am resisting the temptation to frame this as an issue of vicious LGB leaders turning on their trans community members or as an issue of trans activists simply unwilling to compromise – this conflict is, at its core, a struggle with tactical differences, policy- vs. community-centered advocacy and symbolism in the face of outside attack. It is a conflict that splits communities and coalitions in messy ways, and not one that I can simply wander into and naively critique. There are difficult questions brought up by these events that I will pose here:

Should we give up – even temporarily – the issue of public accommodation protection for queer and trans people if we can successfully pass legislation protecting queer and trans people in housing accommodations and against workplace discrimination?

If we dedicate ourselves to advocating for complete LGBTQ+ nondiscrimination bills in all states and nothing less, what are the obstacles in our way? How long are we willing to campaign and what critical factors in the policy arena will affect our success?

How will the trans bathroom debate look in one year? Two? Five? How powerful is the opposition movement likely to be, and how might that opposition respond or react to our efforts to create legislative change using the tactics we’ve chosen?

After much thought, I’m finding myself reluctantly on the side of incrementalism – I don’t believe that as a community we have the leisure to withhold necessary protections for trans people in housing and employment for an all-or-nothing ideology’s sake. The resurgence of opposition to the trans bathroom debate is a strange one (it was virtually nonexistent two years ago), but there is no denying the real influence it has over current policymaking efforts. If we wait – and yes, I am aware that marginalized communities are infuriatingly and always told to wait – we may find ourselves in a political climate where public accommodations for queer and trans people will pass more easily. That being said, withdrawing the ACLU’s funding is a disappointing escalation from the Gill Foundation that only further fractures our movement. There are better ways to resolve contentious community issues than haughtily stripping a key organization of the resources it needs to advocate.

On the other hand, perhaps this is all irrelevant. If all goes well with Gavin Grimm’s Supreme Court case in 2017, then the issue of public facilities for trans people will be solved then and there. Our fracturing coalition can stay on its feet, and we can keep figuring out how to move forward in these troubling times.

 

Contact Lily Zheng at lilyz8 ‘at’ stanford.edu.

The post Bathroom battlegrounds: Incrementalism and the fracturing LGBTQ+ coalition appeared first on The Stanford Daily.

]]>
https://stanforddaily.com/2016/11/03/bathroom-battlegrounds-incrementalism-and-the-fracturing-lgbtq-coalition/feed/ 0 1119118
Life after structural oppression https://stanforddaily.com/2016/10/27/life-after-structural-oppression/ https://stanforddaily.com/2016/10/27/life-after-structural-oppression/#respond Thu, 27 Oct 2016 07:30:33 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1118687 The world kinda sucks, and coming to terms with that has been a large focus of this column over the last three years. It’s afterwards, though, as we attempt to reconcile our knowledge of the world’s injustices with the demands of being a student and adult in society, where the true difficulties lie.

The post Life after structural oppression appeared first on The Stanford Daily.

]]>
The school-to-prison pipeline and the War on Drugs continue to make America the incarceration capital of the world, jailing countless Black and brown bodies over the past few decades. Class inequity, failing infrastructure and low investment in under-resourced communities keep the rich rich and the poor poor. The confluence of cisnormativity, heteronormativity and patriarchy (amalgamated as cisheteropatriarchy) subordinate women under men, queer people under straight people and trans people under cisgender people. Muslims are harassed; the disabled and/or neurodivergent are mocked; survivors of rape, war, colonialism and imperialism live with intergenerational trauma.

I’ve written similar words in The Daily before, and every time I’ve had to sit back for a moment and come to terms with the weight of these realities. The world kinda sucks, and coming to terms with that has been a large focus of this column over the last three years. It’s afterwards, though, as we attempt to reconcile our knowledge of the world’s injustices with the demands of being a student and adult in society, where the true difficulties lie.

How do we apply for jobs knowing that white men with criminal records are more likely to get hired than Black men without? How do we take care of our loved ones knowing that women and femmes exhaust themselves with emotional labor that is neither paid nor acknowledged? How can we go to class, do our laundry and finish our take-home finals knowing that our identities will affect how useful our degrees will be after we graduate?

Some people might contend that the arguments of structural oppression are exaggerated, and that inequities are born primarily out of the laziness or perhaps even inherent inferiority of certain peoples. This perspective typically accompanies a strong respect for the individualistic self-made entrepreneur, that hero who pulls themselves up by their bootstraps into greatness, despite their disadvantaged, underdog background. I am reminded of the first Pokemon movie, in which Mewtwo delivers the poetic line, “the circumstances of one’s birth are irrelevant; it is what you do with the gift of life that determines who you are.”

Mewtwo clearly has never lived in America, because the perspective he espouses does not match the realities of living in this society. The circumstances of an individual’s birth — the family they are born into — as well as that person’s later gender, sexual or religious identities, among many other factors, dictate the relative advantages or disadvantages they will experience for much of their entire life. By denying the reach of structural oppression, people fail to support marginalized members of their communities at best and actively exacerbate this marginalization at worst.

Taking the other ideological extreme, some people may argue that the collection of injustices experienced by marginalized peoples in society determines practically every aspect of their lives, public and private and everything in between. This perspective typically accompanies a strong respect for the revolutionary, that hero who burns down the racism, transphobia, misogyny and classism of the current social order and builds a utopia from its ashes.

This view has its flaws as well; it minimizes the variability and diversity of people beyond a surface level of identity (one queer trans woman of color is not equivalent to another queer trans woman of color) and the agency of marginalized people to act independently in their own lives. By taking this deterministic stance towards marginalization, additionally, people may give up on taking care of themselves and their communities in the ways they need. I joke sometimes, for example, that a Stanford activist co-op could never succeed: Everyone would be too busy planning the revolution to wash their dishes.

So far I’ve avoided using the words “Conservatives” and “Progressives,” “Reactionaries” and “Radicals” — the lines between the perspectives I talk about are blurrier than these, and the critiques, I hope, less partisan. Most people on this campus find themselves on the spectrum between these two extremes, trying to figure out their own relationships to academics, advocacy, activism and student life in light of the increasingly apparent inequities revealed to us by current events in the world.

My own two cents is that there is a happy medium we can arrive at, one that acknowledges the scope and complexity of structural oppression without taking a fatalistic approach to its power over us. By learning more about the histories, nuances and workings of inequity in our society, we can learn how much wiggle room we have in our daily lives and take pride in living our lives in the ways we want, whenever we can. And all the while, as we do this, we must work towards influencing, chipping away at or otherwise dismantling these oppressive structures — so that we can reduce the power that oppression has over us, and have more agency over our own lives.

 

Contact Lily Zheng at lilyz8 ‘at’ stanford.edu.

The post Life after structural oppression appeared first on The Stanford Daily.

]]>
https://stanforddaily.com/2016/10/27/life-after-structural-oppression/feed/ 0 1118687
Gender desegregation and transphobia: Unlikely bedfellows in the New York Times https://stanforddaily.com/2016/10/20/gender-desegregation-and-transphobia-unlikely-bedfellows-in-the-new-york-times/ https://stanforddaily.com/2016/10/20/gender-desegregation-and-transphobia-unlikely-bedfellows-in-the-new-york-times/#respond Thu, 20 Oct 2016 07:20:06 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1118259 What I find myself fixated on concerning this piece, however, is one of Shulevitz’s proposed solutions to what she calls “the conflict between transgender rights and privacy interests” - “Stop teaching the sexes to hide their bodies from each other...perhaps it’s time to retire the notion of two sexes.”

The post Gender desegregation and transphobia: Unlikely bedfellows in the New York Times appeared first on The Stanford Daily.

]]>
I first saw the article on my Facebook wall Monday morning. “The New York Times just provided a massive platform for transphobia,” the ThinkProgress headline read, with a saturated picture of opinion writer Judith Shulevitz attached. I am no fan of Shulevitz. Two academic years ago, I wrote a Daily article critiquing her takedown of college safe spaces, and now, it seemed like her next target was the trans community. I shared the article to my Facebook wall, captioned it  “Disappointing,” and moved on with my day. I figured that I could easily write a short response later, tear into the easy target of Shulevitz’s obvious transphobia and have my Daily article for the week. Piece of cake.

Having read her article, “Is It Time to Desegregate the Sexes?,” I find myself more contemplative than angry. Shulevitz begins by describing a familiar hypothetical scene: a transgender girl is changing next to a cisgender girl in a locker room. The trans girl does not want to be forced to hide her identity; the cis girl does not want to be forced to change next to someone she is uncomfortable with. One must retreat to a changing stall, but who?

As Shulevitz describes, “sex” is now being defined by Title IX as an internal sense of gender, not an anatomical reality — to the chagrin of groups ranging from radical feminists to Christian evangelists. Lawsuits upon lawsuits, many of which pit transgender rights (a trans student should be able to use the facilities corresponding to the binary gender they identify as) against religious freedoms (a student must be allowed to exercise their religious beliefs of modesty around the “opposite sex”) flood courts around the nation.

Objections to this framing of the bathroom conflict are easy to find in progressive spaces, and the loudest one is that “trans women are women and trans men are men.” Thus, trans women are the “same sex” as cisgender women and trans men are the same sex as cisgender men, and all have the right to use the appropriate facilities. All objections to this claim are labeled as transphobic on principle, and thus the conversation ends there. Indeed, that Shulevitz even entertains the idea of religious freedom as a realistic concern prompted the critical ThinkProgress article to claim that “reading between the lines is not really required to see the transphobia here.”

What I find myself fixated on concerning this piece, however, is one of Shulevitz’s proposed solutions to what she calls “the conflict between transgender rights and privacy interests.”

“Stop teaching the sexes to hide their bodies from each other… perhaps it’s time to retire the notion of two sexes.”

From an early age, every child in American society is taught simultaneously of their own binary gender and of the unspoken rule of gender segregation in society. Men here, women there; pink for girls and blue for boys; long hair, dresses, breasts and curves vs. short hair, tuxedos, chests and muscle. These rules are as autocratic as they are impossible. Yet, the gender binary is institutionalized around us in the form of bathrooms and locker rooms and reified in the form of patriarchy, toxic masculinity and transphobia. With her article, Shulevitz makes an argument I never expected her to make: By federally mandating that trans girls use only girls’ facilities and trans boys use boys’, are we in fact simply strengthening the idea that a gender binary is necessary in the first place?

When I consider this argument, I think about the genderqueer, genderfluid and/or nonbinary people who have no access to gendered facilities in the first place and use these resources at their own risk. I think about those people who present themselves in nonconforming ways and are made unwelcome in gendered facilities, like the many cis women kicked out of women’s bathrooms for looking too masculine. I think about those students who, gender notwithstanding, just feel uncomfortable undressing in front of people.

Perhaps in our search for better policies, we can be more creative. I can imagine segregated facilities, not by gender, but by privacy — one room could be only lockers, and another room could be only private stalls. Thus, regardless of race, gender, appearance or identity, all people can use the spaces they are most comfortable in. Such an argument, of course, has endless financial, social, cultural and legal implications that deserve their own article — but at least it’s the start of an answer to today’s bathroom debates.

I must acknowledge that Shulevitz’s article is chock-full of gaffe after gaffe that should rightfully frustrate trans advocates. She describes trans girls as “born with a boy’s [body]” and as “girls-born-boys.” She minimizes the violence, prejudice and transphobia that often accompanies evangelist opposition to trans people in communal spaces and gives credence to the idea that cis women and trans women are of “the opposite sex.” I remain strongly critical of Shulevitz’s language usage (as well as her past articles), yet she makes a powerful point about gender and how societal institutions reinforce it. While activists can and should critique her execution, we cannot ignore Shulevitz’s insight.

Contact Lily Zheng at lilyz8 ‘at’ stanford.edu.

The post Gender desegregation and transphobia: Unlikely bedfellows in the New York Times appeared first on The Stanford Daily.

]]>
https://stanforddaily.com/2016/10/20/gender-desegregation-and-transphobia-unlikely-bedfellows-in-the-new-york-times/feed/ 0 1118259
The slow demystification of Stanford https://stanforddaily.com/2016/10/13/me-mg-the-slow-demystification-of-stanford/ https://stanforddaily.com/2016/10/13/me-mg-the-slow-demystification-of-stanford/#respond Thu, 13 Oct 2016 07:10:29 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1117915 As frosh, so many of us see Stanford as the paradise we want it to be. We go into our classes ready to learn, make new friends in our residences and student groups and revel in the social and academic opportunities that seem delivered into our waiting hands. We don’t need to think about the vast Stanford bureaucratic machine because all the cogs are turning quietly in our favor (Stanford really does value their frosh), and if they aren’t, our gratitude for being on this campus threatens to overwhelm any feeling of unease or discomfort here. Stanford starts out as a black box: through some magic we cannot see, the time and energy we put into campus life comes back out as thrill, excitement, satisfaction, and achievement.

The post The slow demystification of Stanford appeared first on The Stanford Daily.

]]>
It’s Fall 2013 and the U-lock takes its sweet time opening before I can lock my bike to the rack. I rush into a room in the Geology corner, tuck my helmet under an arm and try my best to look nonchalant in front of my peers. Today our intro seminar is discussing Durkheim, the father of sociology, and I am intimidated. One hour and 50 minutes later, we wrap up our side conversation on Sweden and welfare (I had nothing to contribute other than knowing Sweden has something to do with welfare) and spill out into the throng of bikes and chatter crowding Escondido Mall. Keys in hand and books nestled safely in my backpack, I breathe in Stanford and the now-familiar magic of finally being a student here, of spending each and every day learning more about myself and the world. It feels good.

In my sophomore year, I tell a professor that their lecture slides use harmful stereotypes of transgender people as crossdressers and see their face fold in confusion as they fumble for a response. I tell another professor that the decades-old framework of gender and sexuality they teach in class is inadequate — they tell me that if I worded things more politely, they might consider what I say. Black Lives Matter and divestment movements turn campus into a firestorm of anger, tension and fear, and every week a new crisis sweeps the world, Stanford, or both. We harden ourselves to critique, split ourselves into camps and fight ferociously over our ideologies, swapping verbal abuse and threats of violence. The mustard gas of our trench warfare collects in our classrooms, student groups and events. No one leaves that year unscathed.

Junior year feels weary. Student activists, especially those arrested for blocking the San Mateo Bridge on MLK Jr. Day weekend, lay low and prioritize recovering from burnout. I start skipping lectures regularly, especially when the professors are racist and the lecture slides are posted online. There are better uses of my time, and the classroom is no longer my focus. I join a social psychology lab. A friend and I offer teach-ins on social justice topics from the back porch of a co-op. When the student movement Who’s Teaching Us draws a new wave of activists, I help out when I can, and thankfully it feels healthier that way.

In retrospect, I wish I could’ve held onto my frosh experience for a little longer.

As frosh, so many of us see Stanford as the paradise we want it to be. We go into our classes ready to learn, make new friends in our residences and student groups and revel in the social and academic opportunities that seem delivered into our waiting hands. We don’t need to think about the vast Stanford bureaucratic machine because all the cogs are turning quietly in our favor (Stanford really does value its frosh), and if they aren’t, our gratitude for being on this campus threatens to overwhelm any feeling of unease or discomfort here. Stanford starts out as a black box: Through some magic we cannot see, the time and energy we put into campus life comes back out as thrill, excitement, satisfaction and achievement.

At some point over the next few years, that begins to change. Graduation requirements start to feel more oppressive and less easy to fulfill; we fall behind on our ambitious four-year plans; the professor who we want as an advisor is too busy or isn’t interested in helping. We feel less surprised when we get bad professors or take bad classes; circumstances force us into gap years, or maybe we choose to leave of our own accord. In our inevitable hunt for resources, we learn quickly that some are more reliable than others and that faculty and staff are no exception to this rule.

Over time we realize that Stanford is not magic — it is an institution, governed by the same complexities and nuances that all institutions are. Some of the truths that come with that realization:

  • Stanford is as much a business as it is a place of higher learning, and brand management is a real priority.
  • Many departments are world-renowned for their research, not their teaching ability.
  • “Changing Stanford as an institution” means changing each and every one of the many and decentralized organizations, offices and departments that constitute it.
  • The people working to make Stanford better are swallowed up within a sprawling bureaucracy, juggling their survival at Stanford, desire to support students and their personal beliefs of what Stanford should be.

I used to describe these truths as painful or depressing — they challenge the ideas we hold about what universities should be, and the assumptions we make about our own ability to change them. But learning how our campus truly works is fundamentally empowering, because it lets us open the black box. What we lose in giving up Stanford’s magic we gain in finding tools to make this campus better.

 

Contact Lily Zheng at lilyz8 ‘at’ stanford.edu.

The post The slow demystification of Stanford appeared first on The Stanford Daily.

]]>
https://stanforddaily.com/2016/10/13/me-mg-the-slow-demystification-of-stanford/feed/ 0 1117915
What we should have had: Reflections on frosh sex ed https://stanforddaily.com/2016/10/06/what-we-should-have-had-reflections-on-frosh-sex-ed/ https://stanforddaily.com/2016/10/06/what-we-should-have-had-reflections-on-frosh-sex-ed/#respond Thu, 06 Oct 2016 08:18:54 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1117663 Content warning: sexual assault Today is the last day of Beyond Sex Ed: Consent and Sexuality at Stanford. This 90-minute program, repeated over three days for the entire class of frosh and transfers, features personal stories from 12 Stanford students speaking on topics ranging from sexual assault to self-discovery to self-empowerment, all bound in a critical […]

The post What we should have had: Reflections on frosh sex ed appeared first on The Stanford Daily.

]]>
Content warning: sexual assault

Today is the last day of Beyond Sex Ed: Consent and Sexuality at Stanford. This 90-minute program, repeated over three days for the entire class of frosh and transfers, features personal stories from 12 Stanford students speaking on topics ranging from sexual assault to self-discovery to self-empowerment, all bound in a critical and insightful framework for understanding sexuality, intimacy and campus culture.

I am one of those speakers, and it is because of my experience working with Beyond Sex Ed over the last year that I can say this with conviction:

This is the frosh sex ed program I wish we all could have had.

It’s a running joke among many students that Stanford’s sex ed is and has always been notoriously bad. We point fingers at the endless flood of trainings, talks and programs we completed that seemed more likely to inspire fear than excitement, more likely to see sex as a liability than an exploration. “Don’t rape,” Stanford says, “or else.”

The vacuum left behind by such a cold mandate leaves little wiggle space for students who want sex and intimacy at Stanford. We know, vaguely, that aggressive and violent acts of sexual assault are not tolerated on this campus — but we aren’t given healthy and realistic models for what to do instead. We aren’t taught how to negotiate a hookup when alcohol is involved, how to communicate our boundaries and set expectations within relationships, how to make up and break up, how to be intimate. We aren’t given the tools we need to be good partners, to have fulfilling intimate relationships that meet our emotional, mental and spiritual needs, to explore ourselves and our histories with empowerment in mind.

Maybe this is why, as a community, we continue to struggle with sexual assault as it relates to racism, toxic masculinity, drinking culture, normalized non-consent and academic overwork. Why we find it so difficult to match our actions to our words, why after years of campaigning and advocacy work we’ve made so little progress on campus. We’ve got a culture problem, and it runs deep.

I am hopeful, as I prepare for the last run of Beyond Sex Ed tonight, that this is a problem that we are remedying. Beyond Sex Ed is powerful not just because of the student narratives embedded within it but because of the comprehensive, eye-opening and growth-oriented approach it adopts. Never before have I seen a sex ed or consent program at Stanford so steadfast in its belief in student growth and exploration, so optimistic and even enamored in the idea of a consent culture and health sexuality at Stanford, so passionate about the potential of an incoming class to shape this campus. I find myself both proud to be a part of this program and yet jealous that I could not have experienced it myself as a frosh.

Cultural change is in some way inevitable with enough tinkering and enough time; eventually enough incoming classes will have experienced Beyond Sex Ed that no more students on this campus will remember having seen anything else. But I’m not patient enough to wait three years for today’s frosh to become seniors — isn’t it sad, too, to think of the sophomores, juniors and seniors today as remnants of an older culture characterized by non-consent, unhealthy intimate practices and poor communication that time will eventually remove from campus? We can do better than that.

To all those upperclassmen and grads on this campus: The responsibility falls on us now to play catch-up. We cannot fail frosh and transfers as mentors by pressuring them to drink when they do not want to or by remaining silent about our own wants and needs as romantic and intimate partners. We cannot fail them by turning a blind eye to racism and transmisogyny, or by shaming each other about our bodies, desires or intimate lives. It’s on us to teach ourselves what Beyond Sex Ed is teaching them, to start among ourselves those same critical conversations about intimacy, communication, boundaries and exploration.

This takes humility; it is hard for even the best of us to admit that our beliefs and practices around sexuality and intimacy might be unhealthy. By now, many of us have acclimated to the Stanford we learned to navigate when we were frosh or new transfer students. It is our responsibility, however, not to grow complacent with simply replicating this culture as upperclassmen. We must examine and redesign the organizations we lead, the sections we teach and the residences we live in with cultural change in mind, so that we can work with frosh- not impede them — as we create a better Stanford.

To all those frosh and transfers still feeling out this campus and all its complexities: Thank you for being here and having these crucial conversations. It is my hope that those here who have not had a chance to go beyond sex ed can follow your lead in creating a better campus culture for all of us.

 

Contact Lily Zheng at lilyz8 ‘at’ stanford.edu.

The post What we should have had: Reflections on frosh sex ed appeared first on The Stanford Daily.

]]>
https://stanforddaily.com/2016/10/06/what-we-should-have-had-reflections-on-frosh-sex-ed/feed/ 0 1117663
Once more, the double life https://stanforddaily.com/2016/09/28/once-more-the-double-life/ https://stanforddaily.com/2016/09/28/once-more-the-double-life/#respond Thu, 29 Sep 2016 06:38:59 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1117367 It’s a little hard being at Stanford when the world is falling apart.

This summer, we watched as thousands upon thousands of Indigenous people and communities gathered to oppose the Dakota Access Pipeline. We mourned the seemingly endless deaths of Black and brown people executed by police across the nation, grieved for the queer Latinx people killed in the Orlando, Florida shooting, raged at trans whistleblower Chelsea Manning’s solitary confinement sentence after her suicide attempt.

The post Once more, the double life appeared first on The Stanford Daily.

]]>
It’s a little hard being at Stanford when the world is falling apart.

This summer, we watched as thousands upon thousands of Indigenous people and communities gathered to oppose the Dakota Access Pipeline. We mourned the seemingly endless deaths of Black and brown people executed by police across the nation, grieved for the queer Latinx people killed in the Orlando, Florida shooting, raged at trans whistleblower Chelsea Manning’s solitary confinement sentence after her suicide attempt.

But Stanford is still Stanford. Frosh bike through White Plaza without signaling; FloMo still has ice cream; the bookstore line might as well be for a concert. As we settle into our classes and familiarize ourselves with our roommates, we might cautiously, excitedly, wearily call this campus “home” again – or, perhaps, for the first time.

There’s so much to do here. Outside of the endless seminars, labs, lectures and workshops, we’ve got hundreds of student groups vying for our attention with performances, food and community, at every hour of every day. And when we come home to our houses and dorms, we can count on theme programming, dinner events, parties and our friends to keep us awake way later than we ought to be.

Is it surprising, then, that so many of us effortlessly transition into life at Stanford without a thought of the world outside the bubble? With so much to keep us occupied, headlines become nothing more than annoying distractions about things that are far away, things that we can’t do anything about. After all, what are we undergraduates supposed to do about Syria? What are we supposed to do about Flint, Michigan? What are we supposed to do about the gentrification and displacement occurring in East Palo Alto, just a 10-minute drive from campus?

The world is falling apart far away and just next door because of systems, institutions and histories that some of us study for years and only begin to understand. What are we supposed to do? What can we do? Faced with an overwhelming and never-ending stream of bad news and tragedy, it can feel tempting to bury it under 20-unit quarters and event organizing and rehearsals and campus social life. Many of us do just that, tell ourselves that our education is more important than our empathy and tune out the world.

Many of us can’t. For those students who see themselves in the people killed by police, for those students struggling with mental health amid a dearth of available resources, for those students who worry about their sick or disabled family members or their families’ financial situations back home, being at Stanford can feel like living a double life. When our communities are constantly in a state of emergency but our professors, housemates and friends on campus carry on like nothing is wrong, we are left with nothing but that wrenching feeling in our stomachs to remind us that we are fish out of water, imposter-syndrome addicts in paradise.

Why are you at Stanford?

What is it you came here to do?

Who is it you came here to become?

So many of us start out at Stanford too busy thinking of what we are running away from and not what we are moving towards. Frosh, transfers, staff – even administrators. At some point or another, all of us must come to terms with our place on this campus and our place in this world; this troubled, complex, painful world.

As the quarter and year progresses, I am certain that this campus will heat up as it always does. Global tragedy, student activism, the presidential election, campus scandal and everything in between will punctuate our classes and late-night study groups, loom over our finals and leak into our discussion groups. We will ask ourselves how the world could have gotten like this, and  what we’re supposed to do about it.

But we can do something about it. That’s why we’re here, right? That’s why we’re getting our degrees and innovating and thinking and growing and healing here, why we work long hours to take care of our residents, our students and our communities, right? I want a world where none of us must live a double life on this campus, where we can grieve and grow and fight all in the same breath. I want a Stanford that makes all of us into the people we need to be, to do the work that we want to do, to do the work that needs to be done.

That’s why we’re here, right?

 

Contact Lily Zheng at lilyz8@stanford.edu.  

The post Once more, the double life appeared first on The Stanford Daily.

]]>
https://stanforddaily.com/2016/09/28/once-more-the-double-life/feed/ 0 1117367
Life after finals: Nurturing a sustainable activism https://stanforddaily.com/2016/05/30/life-after-finals-nurturing-a-sustainable-activism/ https://stanforddaily.com/2016/05/30/life-after-finals-nurturing-a-sustainable-activism/#comments Tue, 31 May 2016 06:59:56 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1115926 I still remember the way my middle school teachers always spent the last week of school warning of the perils of summer. “You’ll forget everything!” they threatened, and we students always nodded gravely until the final bell rang, nothing but our hard-earned freedom on our minds. Of course, our teachers ended up having a point […]

The post Life after finals: Nurturing a sustainable activism appeared first on The Stanford Daily.

]]>
I still remember the way my middle school teachers always spent the last week of school warning of the perils of summer. “You’ll forget everything!” they threatened, and we students always nodded gravely until the final bell rang, nothing but our hard-earned freedom on our minds. Of course, our teachers ended up having a point — summer learning loss is a real phenomenon whereby students, especially those who are working-class, lose around two months’ worth of math and/or reading skills over each summer break. Teachers in the fall then must spend roughly a month reteaching the lost material, putting added stress onto teachers to make up for the loss of valuable teaching time.

It reminds me somewhat of what happens with student activism every fall: Emaciated student groups dust off their Google documents and agendas, take note of their remaining members and turn their collective eye towards recruiting new frosh. And once numbers are back up, it gets even harder. Continually teaching well-intentioned but inexperienced, or poorly-informed, students a praxis that is effective, knowledgeable and intentional is one of the hardest tasks most student activist organizations must deal with. And it isn’t made any easier by the fact that the seniors who led and inspired the organization in the past have now graduated, and new leaders must take their place.

What all of this ends up meaning is that the bulk of fall quarter is dedicated to maintenance — organizations scale down their external outreach and advocacy in favor of much-needed internal redevelopment. Leaders test out their new roles, members struggle to learn the knowledge they need to advocate well, and any momentum formerly held by the organization stops dead in its tracks. It’s hard to sustain movements when the organizations pushing them forward stop moving, and by the time student activists are ready to reinvigorate their advocacy, the student body and campus climate have moved on.   

This problem of multi-year sustainability might be the reason why campus activism is far more likely to grow throughout the school year than between school years: during the summer, activists — like students on summer break — lose touch with their work. As a result, activist organizations or movements are less able to create incremental change from the work of previous years, make use of expertise or resources developed over the group’s history or mobilize the student body towards sustained action.    

What are some things we can do as activists to answer these problems?


ONE: Document knowledge and strategy. Leaders of advocacy or activist groups can begin archiving essential educational materials, tips and tactics for organizing strategies and other important knowledge for the organization. Archiving and cataloguing brings important information (what is the Prison-Industrial Complex and prison abolition as praxis? What are the best ways to get funding for events?) from word-of-mouth education into a more accessible and durable medium. It allows new members to onboard more rapidly, existing members to refresh and update their knowledge, and most importantly, for the repository of resources created and compiled by any organization to organically grow.


TWO: Reflect on lessons learned. Summer is one of the best times of the year for consolidation, reflection and strategy. Student activist organizations and groups should ask themselves: What worked over the last year and what didn’t? What were the institutional, organizational and situational reasons why some initiatives worked and some didn’t? What lessons can be learned, and how can next year’s leadership act with that knowledge in mind? If summer is treated as a time for intentional action, then even a minimum number of meetings can sustain the organization’s momentum.


THREE: Start off strong. Beginning the year with thoughtful, well-organized events can set campus expectations for the entire year, and reinvigorate the momentum that (hopefully) remains from the previous year. Student groups can send the message early on that Stanford students not only care about but act against rape culture, occupation, white supremacy, transmisogyny, wealth inequity and structural oppression of all forms. For incoming frosh in particular, a strong first impression of campus activism can shape their expectations for the rest of their time here.

FOUR: Come together. The paradox of student organizing on campus is that we all call for “solidarity” and “intersectionality” and yet lack the knowledge to turn that intent into reality. The truth of things is that we are all far, far away from that idyllic place where we would like to be. It is too often the case that only disability justice activists actively oppose ableism, racial justice activists actively oppose white supremacy, class activists actively oppose wealth inequity.


Some part of it is just plain lack of communication: not every organization has knowledge of or access to the resources they need; organizations created around identity politics rarely share resources with each other. But the bulk of it is a harder problem to fix: oftentimes the work cannot be intersectional by default. Can an anti-sexual assault praxis using the threat of incarceration or state punishment coexist with racial justice via prison abolition? Can a queer or racial politic promising the “American dream” of monetary gain coexist with economic justice via wealth redistribution and anti-capitalism? These are the types of hard questions we need to answer if we value true solidarity, and given the recent salience of student coalitions over this past year, solidarity has never been more important.

Campus activism is hard. Activist and advocacy groups must balance their single-issue advocacy with ideological intersectionality, maintain relationships with the student body and administration and sustain critical knowledge and experience over the long-term. One summer of reflection can’t give us all the answers, but I have faith in the students who do this work, and faith in the potential of our future organizing. We’ve accomplished so much this year, and I want to hope that finals week won’t mark the end of that.

Let’s thank and celebrate those graduating for the amazing work they’ve done — it’s up to us to keep their fire alive.  

Contact Lily Zheng at lilyz8 ‘at’ stanford.edu.

The post Life after finals: Nurturing a sustainable activism appeared first on The Stanford Daily.

]]>
https://stanforddaily.com/2016/05/30/life-after-finals-nurturing-a-sustainable-activism/feed/ 1 1115926
Embracing the contradictions of change from within https://stanforddaily.com/2016/05/23/embracing-the-contradictions-of-change-from-within/ https://stanforddaily.com/2016/05/23/embracing-the-contradictions-of-change-from-within/#comments Tue, 24 May 2016 06:59:47 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1115590 I headed into the keynote address at the Graduate School of Education’s SWAYWO conference this past weekend fully expecting a non-controversial, vaguely inspirational talk on the importance of education and educators. So I was surprised to see Uma Jayakumar, an associate professor at the University of San Francisco, speak candidly and incisively on affirmative action, […]

The post Embracing the contradictions of change from within appeared first on The Stanford Daily.

]]>
I headed into the keynote address at the Graduate School of Education’s SWAYWO conference this past weekend fully expecting a non-controversial, vaguely inspirational talk on the importance of education and educators. So I was surprised to see Uma Jayakumar, an associate professor at the University of San Francisco, speak candidly and incisively on affirmative action, racial justice and institutional change, using terms like “critical race praxis” and “global oppression” to make her points to a stunned audience.  

Professor Jayakumar’s keynote address, I later found, was strongly modeled off a paper she coauthored in 2015, “Towards a Critical Race Praxis for Educational Research: Lessons from Affirmative Action and Social Science Advocacy.” In both the paper and her keynote, Jayakumar chastised the “divide” between grassroots activists and institutional practitioners over the priorities of racial justice work. This disunity, she claimed, hinders the development of “partial solutions” to issues of race and racial injustice — partial solutions like, for example, framing diversity as beneficial to white students as a strategy for helping students of color.

Professor Jayakumar carried this theme of division throughout her keynote, using it to frame the age-old question of change: Change oppressive systems from within, or tear them down from the outside? Those working from within, Jayakumar argued, need the help of student activists and community leaders from the outside. These outside agents provide the fire and theory to fuel a “critical praxis” of incremental change from the inside, slowly moving organizations to be more just and equitable. As educators embedded in systems, she said, keeping an eye on justice and a dialogue open with outside actors is praxis to strive towards.

When I think about “working within the system,” I think immediately of the faculty members and administrators here at Stanford University. It’s not easy work: Working within organizations and institutions means working within hierarchy and bureaucracy and memorizing seemingly infinite explicit and implicit rules. Social justice-minded people in organizations must juggle their individual goals with the goals of the organization, working towards justice without getting fired in the process. Life inside an institution is extraordinarily restricted, and Stanford is no exception.

That being said, it is often tempting for those working within institutions to take student and community labor for granted. If only activists knew how hard it was being in an organization! If only activists could spend their time making demands that are more realistic for my institution to meet! I’ve lost count of the number of well-meaning faculty members and administrators at Stanford who have taken it upon themselves to prescribe tactics and strategies for movements they’ve never participated in, or lecture me in patronizing tones on how communities on the ground have no idea what they’re doing.

When the Stanford 68 were forced to take a First Amendment class as part of a plea deal after our MLK Day action, a law school professor told us there to “engage with issues of race” in our own lives. We were baffled — we had literally all been arrested for “engaging with issues of race,” and yet the professor seemed unable to understand that any advocacy or action beyond the concept he held in his head for racial justice was valid. He seemed, if anything, exasperated at our actions — as if we were unruly children who only needed to be set on the right path; the right path, of course, being his.

Bridging this divide takes not “dialogue” but respect. When we respect the knowledge and wisdom generated among marginalized communities outside of academia and the organizing strategies of grassroots activists and community leaders, only then can we come together to strategize towards change. When we respect the real tensions and damaged relationships between marginalized people and the institutions that have historically held them down, only then can we understand why calls for the marginalized to support those same institutions are so blatantly ignored.

For those who are currently in or someday planning to be in institutions, to “change things from within the system,” it’s imperative to constantly think of our relationships with the communities we are trying to help. If we reach a point in our work where marginalized communities are “just ignorant” and activists are “nuisances,” that’s when we need to stop and ask ourselves: Have we lost sight of the work? Have we been co-opted by the systems we are trying to change from within?

Professor Jayakumar urged us in her talk to “embrace the contradictions” in our work, and so I’ll go ahead and pass on that message. Can we work for organizations and institutions that contribute to local, national or global inequity? Is our work towards “incremental change” within uncritical or harmful institutions doing enough? We need to be prepared for the answer to be “no,” for the day when protesters are outside our doors, for the day when we are put in the impossible bind of choosing between our jobs and the communities we care about. I know for a fact that faculty at Stanford struggle with this on a daily basis. As students, as we start making our way into these institutional settings now and after Stanford, these contradictions should become something to keep in mind.

 

Contact Lily Zheng at lilyz8 ‘at’ stanford.edu.

The post Embracing the contradictions of change from within appeared first on The Stanford Daily.

]]>
https://stanforddaily.com/2016/05/23/embracing-the-contradictions-of-change-from-within/feed/ 2 1115590
Why your brave space sucks https://stanforddaily.com/2016/05/15/why-your-brave-space-sucks/ https://stanforddaily.com/2016/05/15/why-your-brave-space-sucks/#comments Mon, 16 May 2016 06:59:34 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1115115 I can’t recall how long it’s been since I’ve heard the term “safe space,” but it’s clear to me that it has fallen out of favor among educators and academics. I remember when I started interacting with the idea in my frosh year, when I learned that a safe space was a place where individuals […]

The post Why your brave space sucks appeared first on The Stanford Daily.

]]>
I can’t recall how long it’s been since I’ve heard the term “safe space,” but it’s clear to me that it has fallen out of favor among educators and academics. I remember when I started interacting with the idea in my frosh year, when I learned that a safe space was a place where individuals could take a needed break from the endless efforts to educate, debate and advocate on behalf of a marginalized group or identity. I hesitantly sought out so-called “safe spaces” on campus, and found that in many I would not be judged for being queer. I would not be judged for being a woman. In the handful of years I had grappled with issues of identity and social justice, this was a mind-blowing first – a public space where I could feel as safe as I did in private.

Then, last year, the idea of safe spaces on college campuses came under renewed attack. In an explosively-shared piece published in The New York Times, Judith Shulevitz wrote strongly against safe spaces, trigger warnings and “censorship” on college campuses, blaming today’s “self-infantilizing” activists, “sexual paranoia” and “over-programmed children.” These arguments are nothing new, and I’ve had reiterations and variations of these ideas lobbed at me since I’ve started writing for The Daily – activists are too sensitive; marginalized people should learn to better deal with their oppression; oh God, where is this country going given this new generation of pathetic children unable to take a joke?

In the three years I’ve been on campus, this rhetoric has only grown stronger; the rhetoric of “safe spaces,” on the other hand, has slowly faded into obscurity. Taking their place was a new phrase, a new idea and a new kind of space: brave spaces.

In 2013, Arao and Clemens published a book entitled, “The art of effective facilitation: Reflections from social justice educators.” Chapter eight of that book, “From Safe Spaces to Brave Spaces,” asserts that students accustomed to safe spaces conflate “safety with comfort,” and may be afflicted with a tendency to “discount, deflect or retreat from a challenge.”

Bullshit.

The power of safe spaces was this: Marginalized students could express, interpret and connect over shared experiences of marginalization and struggle as a community without fear of repercussion. A safe space is a space where I can sink into a sofa and vent my frustration with that one teacher who misgenders me in class without passersby interrogating me on what the “transgender experience” is on campus, what gender is, why pronouns are important, why Caitlyn Jenner isn’t all she’s hyped up to be, ad infinitum. What brave spaces do is take this exact interaction and formalize it within an educational setting. The “dialogue” becomes a one-sided stream of narratives, trauma, critical theory and lived experiences going from the marginalized to the not-marginalized, a “brave” space for privileged people to challenge their own preconceptions – and a miserable space for the marginalized people forced to do that labor of education.

Arao and Clemens suggest that “brave spaces” have a set of common rules: controversy with civility, where different “opinions” are acknowledged and respected; owning intentions and impacts, where participants are encouraged to communicate with each other when they have been harmed; challenge by choice, where participants can choose to challenge themselves or not; and respect, where all parties respect each other.

It’s a set of ideas that plays into some of the most tempting misconceptions about social justice that we can hold: that we are all coming from different but equal points, that we are all as likely to hurt and be hurt by each other and that, simply put, historical inequities and power dynamics are irrelevant.

Why would I respect a cisgender man who crudely assumes that my womanhood is tied to my genitalia? Why should a person of color be forced to acknowledge an opinion from a white person that people of their race tend to be “thugs” or “rapists”? Why should a woman be forced to engage in any dialogue with a man who says she dresses like a slut, is asking for sexual assault or is obligated to provide sex on demand?

Expecting marginalized peoples to perform the labor of education is not social justice; it’s exploitation.

Every single space in which we exist as trans people, indigenous people, Black and brown peoples, disabled people, women and femmes, queer people and/or working class people is a “brave space.” Those of us willing to spend even more time being “brave” to educate unaware audiences are doing them an immeasurable favor, filling in the gaping holes left by an education system that erases indigenous and people of color’s histories, a media that demonizes women and femmes and innumerable other institutions in society that reinforce a cornucopia of inequities.

To all those who interact with brave spaces, if the importance of this labor isn’t acknowledged, then your brave space sucks. If privileged people are gaining knowledge at the expense of marginalized peoples’ well-being, then your brave space sucks. And if your brave space absolutely, necessarily requires marginalized people to be doing the teaching – then you damn better be paying them a living wage for their work. Or your brave space will suck.

 

 

Contact Lily Zheng at lilyz8@stanford.edu.

The post Why your brave space sucks appeared first on The Stanford Daily.

]]>
https://stanforddaily.com/2016/05/15/why-your-brave-space-sucks/feed/ 27 1115115
The endless (vicious) cycle of awareness campaigns https://stanforddaily.com/2016/05/08/the-endless-vicious-cycles-of-awareness-campaigns/ https://stanforddaily.com/2016/05/08/the-endless-vicious-cycles-of-awareness-campaigns/#comments Mon, 09 May 2016 06:59:04 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1114774 Awareness campaigns – efforts to inform an audience on the existence or complexity of an issue or demographic – are student activism’s bread and butter. For every issue, it seems, we students have run or are running a campaign to “raise awareness,” “promote conversation” or “encourage dialogue.” Back in December, the No More campaign aimed […]

The post The endless (vicious) cycle of awareness campaigns appeared first on The Stanford Daily.

]]>
Awareness campaigns – efforts to inform an audience on the existence or complexity of an issue or demographic – are student activism’s bread and butter. For every issue, it seems, we students have run or are running a campaign to “raise awareness,” “promote conversation” or “encourage dialogue.” Back in December, the No More campaign aimed to “bring awareness to the issue [of sexual assault in Greek life].” In April, the Women’s Coalition hosted a workshop to “foster dialogue” between student groups fighting against sexual assault in general. The second annual Out of the Darkness campus walk aimed to create “awareness for suicide prevention”; Syrian Refugee Week aimed to show solidarity by “raising awareness of the [refugee crisis]”; Transgender Awareness Week aimed to use awareness to “precipitate action.” Practically every major effort to organize students on campus has relied on awareness as the foundation and building block of activism – and that’s where we, as activists, have gotten it wrong.   

I have nothing against awareness campaigns on principle. I’ve organized and participated in more than I can remember, and plenty have left me inspired and ready to do more. Awareness campaigns are effective in spreading a particular message or idea in a short period of time – simple but memorable ideas like “have consensual interactions,” “respect trans people” or “end white supremacy.” Yet, that’s all they do. Awareness campaigns only raise awareness; they do not create change; they do not end injustice. To do these things, awareness campaigns must guide people towards action – towards donations, letter-writing, sit-ins, lobbying and other forms of active work. But at Stanford, so many would-be movements begin and end with awareness campaigns, brief one-shot actions rich in inspiration and crucially lacking in anything more.

Stanford’s student body is more aware than activists give it credit for. Students know that mental health is a big deal, that trans people have it bad, that racism and police brutality are terrible; we just don’t do anything about it. It isn’t because we don’t care – it’s because we do care but don’t know where to start.  We are saturated with events and information, dragged down by assignments and papers – it’s all we can do to go to events, if that. Organizers and student leaders shouldn’t be surprised when our awareness campaigns are unsuccessful if all they do is tell people about more things that are wrong, and fail to give them any clear way to make them better.

Unfortunately, the easy answer (give students clear ways to act after awareness campaigns) is, at best, an incomplete one. The reality of Stanford is that, as long as students are constantly cycling in and out of this university, activists will never be able to move past awareness campaigns.

Those of us who have organized events or run campaigns know that it is a thankless task. There are always more ignorant people, more uninformed audiences, more well-intentioned allies who have no idea what they’re doing. There is and always will be a need for more awareness campaigns, every year, on every issue. Student groups find themselves stuck in an endless cycle of the same basic 101 of advocacy, struggling between educating the student body, recruiting and educating new members and maintaining organizational efficacy as key leaders graduate and leave the organization.

Does this mean awareness campaigns are useless? Just the opposite – awareness campaigns are key, but they must follow demands for change, not precede them. This forces us, as activists, to reframe our goals from “what do we want?” to “how will we get it?” It forces us to learn tactics and strategy, to make strong and beneficial coalitions between our different movements and to take seriously the power of the student body, the average person uninvolved in our organizing but who nonetheless cares about the same issues.

What we don’t have time for, as a campus, are awareness campaigns that amount to little more than self-congratulatory back-patting and only symbolic support for the communities we claim to help. We have hard work to do, and organizing is a skill for which positive intent alone cannot compensate.

 

Contact Lily Zheng at lilyz8@stanford.edu.

The post The endless (vicious) cycle of awareness campaigns appeared first on The Stanford Daily.

]]>
https://stanforddaily.com/2016/05/08/the-endless-vicious-cycles-of-awareness-campaigns/feed/ 4 1114774
Activism and Admit Weekend: Reflections on the future https://stanforddaily.com/2016/05/01/activism-and-admit-weekend-reflections-on-the-future/ https://stanforddaily.com/2016/05/01/activism-and-admit-weekend-reflections-on-the-future/#respond Mon, 02 May 2016 06:59:18 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1114521 April 23, 2015. It’s midnight and I am chalking the words “#BlackLivesMatter” in block letters in front of Florence Moore hall. There are many of us — a coalition of activists from every corner of campus who have come together many times this year and who are coming together again. Admit Weekend begins in a […]

The post Activism and Admit Weekend: Reflections on the future appeared first on The Stanford Daily.

]]>
April 23, 2015.

It’s midnight and I am chalking the words “#BlackLivesMatter” in block letters in front of Florence Moore hall. There are many of us — a coalition of activists from every corner of campus who have come together many times this year and who are coming together again. Admit Weekend begins in a number of hours, and we want to make sure that prospective frosh see the results of our year of activism, the other side of the manicured, quirky-yet-academic paradise being sold to them. A few lanyard-wearing ProFros wander past us, presumably on some kind of nighttime adventure before Admit Weekend begins. One of them pauses to read our chalked messages, laughs quietly and walks away.

Our chalking does not go unopposed. Overnight, Yik Yak buzzes with students furious at our actions, many whom are outraged by the image of Stanford we are revealing to ProFros. Unsympathetic students rally their dorms (in an admittedly impressive burst of on-the-fly student organizing) to wash away our messages; in the morning, students across campus receive bizarre emails reprimanding the usage of chalk as a waste of water — a thinly-veiled but targeted message, given that only chalked messages critical of Stanford were washed away the previous night.

Some of our messages survive the night, however, and so during the following day, The Stanford Review hastily publishes an article assuring ProFros that activists are not to be listened to. ProFros, wanting to decide for themselves, fill the room of our student-organized Activist Open House.


April 28, 2016.

It’s midnight and I am chalking the words “#BlackTransLivesMatter” in block letters in White Plaza. Admit Weekend begins in a number of hours, and this year, like last year, a coalition of activists has come together to make the activist legacy of Stanford known and to expose the issues and injustices still prevalent on campus.

A few ProFros walk past us, craning their heads to look at the phrases we are chalking — “73% White, 73% Cisgender men;” “End Incarceration #NotMySchool.”

“Thank you for all your hard work!” one of them tells us.

“This is really important,” another agrees. We smile and keep chalking.

This year’s Activist Open House is packed. The event, put on by the student coalition Who’s Teaching Us? and featuring student groups like Students for Alternatives to Militarism (SAM), Stanford Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), Student And Labor Alliance (SALA), Fossil Free Stanford and Stanford Students for Queer Liberation (SSQL) — among many others — is so noisy that my voice grows hoarse explaining trans activism, structural oppression and the prison-industrial complex to curious ProFros.

After an hour and a half, the event reorganizes into a teach-in with Cindy Ng of the A3C, Dereca Blackmon of the DGEN office and lecturer Stephen Murphy-Shigematsu as panelists. Stanford students and ProFros alike listen intently as the panelists share stories of their time at Stanford — stories about the ’89 takeover of the Stanford President’s office, the student fight for community centers and their funding and the experience of existing at Stanford as a perpetual other. As the teach-in ends after several rounds of of applause, many ProFros remain in the room to thank the speakers, ask more questions and express their excitement at coming to Stanford. I leave the event feeling exhausted but more satisfied than I’ve been in a long time.

It was, simply put, one of the most energizing events I’ve seen at Stanford.

I tell this story because I believe after this weekend that there is hope moving forward, that things on this campus can change and indeed are changing already. The seeds for change were laid long ago by a history of student activism and stirred from dormancy by the whirlwind of last year; they were watered diligently by a dedicated core of activists and communities and perhaps now something is beginning to shift. If Stanford’s bureaucracy is a glacier, then student organizing is the river that cuts through it.

That’s the optimistic viewpoint, at least.

Stanford’s activism still has much further to go. We need to find ways to share and pool our collective knowledge — to reach past our identities and organizational borders to find the common truths in our work. We need to create change that builds on past work, to center community healing and growth, to put our words and intentions into actions and impacts. Most importantly, we need to contextualize our work in the context of the world beyond Campus Drive.

Administrators; faculty — so much of this is up to you. As the student body increasingly begins to care about and act against larger issues of injustice at Stanford and in the world, we will look to you to teach, to transform knowledge into skills into praxis. With our campus climate as charged as it is, how many of us can continue to have the luxury of remaining apolitical? With our world as tumultuous as it is, how many of us can pretend not to have a stake in the future?

This is where we’re at right now, Stanford. We’re at a point where the chance to act towards a better future is right in front of us, at a place that future activists will know as either a turning point or a missed opportunity in Stanford’s fight towards justice in society. It’s really up to us to pick which legacy we want to leave.

 

Contact Lily Zheng at lilyz8 ‘at’ stanford.edu.

The post Activism and Admit Weekend: Reflections on the future appeared first on The Stanford Daily.

]]>
https://stanforddaily.com/2016/05/01/activism-and-admit-weekend-reflections-on-the-future/feed/ 0 1114521
Frankly, on suicide awareness https://stanforddaily.com/2016/04/24/frankly-on-suicide-awareness/ https://stanforddaily.com/2016/04/24/frankly-on-suicide-awareness/#comments Mon, 25 Apr 2016 06:59:34 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1114079 Content warning: suicide, self-harm I know I have the reputation of always seeing the glass as half-empty. In the three years I’ve written for the Stanford Daily, that’s been the hallmark of my writing – critical, indignant and biting. I write about campus issues, in particular, to combat the pristine image of this university that […]

The post Frankly, on suicide awareness appeared first on The Stanford Daily.

]]>
Content warning: suicide, self-harm

I know I have the reputation of always seeing the glass as half-empty. In the three years I’ve written for the Stanford Daily, that’s been the hallmark of my writing – critical, indignant and biting. I write about campus issues, in particular, to combat the pristine image of this university that Stanford tries to paper over the real issues facing students here; I think it’s necessary, but often wish I didn’t have to do it.

I attended the second annual Out of the Darkness campus walk on Sunday, April 24, and hoped that I would end up having few critiques of the event. Even I want to write a positive column once in awhile. The weather was perfect – at the event, I was greeted with enthusiastic volunteers and several tables overflowing with pastries and coffee, Gatorade and fruit and granola bars. It was clear that a tremendous and impressive amount of energy had gone into planning and organizing the event. I was pleasantly hopeful.

I’m sitting in CoHo writing this column, and frustrated at how frustrated I am right now.

Suicide is not an easy topic to broach. As somebody who has survived years of suicidal ideation, I respect all those who experience and persevere through it, through the manageable moments and the terrifying lows, the loneliness and isolation. I respect the strength and resilience of those who rely on self-harm or other coping mechanisms society deems unhelpful, those with identities and experiences that aren’t pleasant or respectable in the eyes of would-be allies and saviors.

I was stunned, accordingly, to see an event centered on the experiences of survivors – not of suicide, but of suicide loss, the experience of losing a friend or loved one to suicide. Speaker after speaker spoke about resilience and support for those affected by another’s suicide, to enthusiastic nods from the crowd, while I shifted uncomfortably in my seat.

Suicide loss is, without a doubt, important. On average, a completed suicide affects at least six others, leading to feelings of anger, loss, disappointment, self-blame and bewilderment that may linger for years. The mental health difficulties associated with this are real and substantial, and because of the stigma in our society against talking openly about mental health, many survivors of suicide loss lack support or resources to heal. All of this is, without a doubt, important.

Yet, in an event about suicide awareness, I was disappointed to see so little space, energy or time devoted to understanding why people attempt suicide. I thought about the mental health crisis in Native and indigenous communities in North America and around the world, on the terrifying day just a few weeks ago when 11 members of a First Nations community all attempted suicide. I thought about trans teens, 13 times more likely to attempt suicide if rejected by their parents, and the trans population as a whole, with 41 percent attempting suicide at least once in their lifetimes.

Marginalized communities are in a state of emergency, and suicide rates are in no small way linked to the larger environmental factors of marginalization and oppression. Factors that put people at increased risk for suicidal ideation include poverty, drug abuse, family rejection, discrimination, physical abuse and incarceration. Is it surprising, then, that Black and brown peoples, gender and sexual minorities and otherwise stigmatized and oppressed communities are at particular risk for suicide?

Suicide is one of the many, many indications of the state of emergency facing our communities – but we fixate on it because it’s visible, because it affects others besides the individual, because its ripple effects shake our faith in ourselves and the institutions we believe in. We are less concerned, publicly, with mental health issues, with minority stress and depression, anxiety and trauma – even though the same factors that lead to suicide attempts also affect mental health. Thus, it’s not enough for suicide awareness to just be about the isolated issue of suicide. Raising awareness means diagnosing our society’s broken and failing support systems, under-resourced communities and malicious and predatory structures that combine to create and maintain health disparities for marginalized people over their entire lives.

But there was none of that at the Out of the Darkness event. Instead, I was told, as a survivor, to prioritize “self-care” and make sure to “reach out when I need it and accept help when offered.” (Unless, of course, that suggestion was intended for allies and survivors of suicide loss and not me.) I got the sense that suicide was a terrible issue that came down hardest on friends and family; I got the sense that, for those struggling from or survivors of suicide attempts themselves, their issues were relatively homogenous.

I left the event before the march took place.

I’m still frustrated with how strongly I reacted. I know how passionately many of the organizers and volunteers feel about destigmatizing mental illness and conversations about mental health, and raising awareness about suicide. I recognize that the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention (AFSP), the nonprofit that helped put on the event, sincerely cares about these issues and does what it can to aid in prevention, interventions, education and advocacy. But single-issue politics of this sort, that don’t acknowledge the complex ways in which society’s shortcomings all intersect, don’t work. There is nothing that exists on its own in this society, and suicide is no exception. We cannot raise awareness about mental health or suicide without being explicit and intentional about who we want to help, and why they are hurting. If there’s anything we need to bring Out of the Darkness, it’s that idea.  

 

Contact Lily Zheng at lilyz8@stanford.edu.

The post Frankly, on suicide awareness appeared first on The Stanford Daily.

]]>
https://stanforddaily.com/2016/04/24/frankly-on-suicide-awareness/feed/ 2 1114079
Free speech is not a free pass https://stanforddaily.com/2016/04/21/me-ay-free-speech-is-not-a-free-pass/ https://stanforddaily.com/2016/04/21/me-ay-free-speech-is-not-a-free-pass/#comments Fri, 22 Apr 2016 06:59:41 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1114010 I don’t even know why we’re still talking about free speech. There are so many things going on right now at Stanford: poor mental health resources, inadequately-paid PHEs, a lack of faculty diversity and poor conditions for workers on campus, to name just a few. Our campus is a complex and chaotic mix of student […]

The post Free speech is not a free pass appeared first on The Stanford Daily.

]]>
I don’t even know why we’re still talking about free speech.

There are so many things going on right now at Stanford: poor mental health resources, inadequately-paid PHEs, a lack of faculty diversity and poor conditions for workers on campus, to name just a few. Our campus is a complex and chaotic mix of student organizing, glacial reforms and decentralized departments, programs and organizations all figuring out their own way through this institution. Of course, you get a different picture of campus issues depending on where you get your media from – if you read The Stanford Review, for example, you might be more concerned about free speech and the “antidemocratic cabal of activists” seeking to silence and destroy “those who want to give Stanford freedom.” Or, perhaps, you might interact with leftists, progressives or activists in such a terrifying way that you would liken the political climate of our campus to “any military regime in Latin America [where] those who threatened the military disappeared.”

The free speech debate these days is our modern-day domino theory, in which the rise of “political correctness” harkens the death of free speech, the complete destruction of meaningful conversation and dialogue and the end of intellectual vitality as we know it.

For reference, the definition of free speech as stated by the First Amendment is as follows:

“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”

It would be easy to see where the doom and gloom comes from if this constitutional right were indeed being denied to people. But this definition isn’t what most people mean when they talk about the attack on free speech. They’re not thinking of police raids or tracking devices or a surveillance state – instead, they recall commencement speakers deciding not to speak after student protests and anti-LGBTQ conferences having their funding requests denied. They blame liberals, activists, progressives or the radical left for infringing on our rights. It is our right, they might say, to say whatever we like and have it be listened to.  

But the right to free speech does not give us the right to automatically have the respect of others, or immunity from the consequences of our actions. On some level, we know that – we crave that freedom, but shrink from the possible repercussions. Isn’t that the exact reason why we use Yik Yak?

There’s another major argument that I haven’t addressed yet, and that’s the issue of certain kinds of statements being shut down or dismissed by default – which many see as having a negative effect on conversation, communication, dialogue or debate. It’s not up for debate whether or not it happens; it does. Hell, I do it all the time. Dismissing (or censoring) speech is seen by some as indicative of a liberal intolerance, where arbitrary ideas are attacked for no reason other than a difference in normative opinion.

But here’s an alternate explanation: Maybe some ideas or opinions just aren’t valuable.

Many of us learn at a young age the importance of our opinions, the inviolability of that mantra, “we are taught how to think, not what to think.” We learn that “controversial” topics have no clear answers and debate them at length in every stage of our education – maybe slavery was a good thing. Maybe the death penalty is optimal. Maybe LGBTQ+ people are unnatural and immoral. The sweeping impartiality with which we regard the issues of our past and present gives us the illusion that our opinions are valuable only to the extent in which we can rationally argue them. We learn to play devil’s advocate and that “pathos” is a dirty way to argue, that invoking suffering and sadness is a strategy only used by those who have no “substantial” argument to make and that nothing is off-limits – not even our basic humanity.

The free speech debate, for me, boils down to the recognition that not all opinions are equal.  When intense and complex discussions on identity politics, collective liberation, institutional change, decolonization and other critical praxes are taking place, there is a minimum requirement to get on the ride.  We need to understand how multilayered systems shaped by history affect the people, organizations and institutions we have today.  We need to understand the ways in which our decisions have micro- and macro- effects on our sociopolitical environments. Are activists censoring people they disagree with to stifle intellectual vitality? Hardly. If I had to pick a reason, it’d be that we’ve finally taken enough shit to be tired of it.

 

Contact Lily Zheng at lilyz8@stanford.edu.

 

The post Free speech is not a free pass appeared first on The Stanford Daily.

]]>
https://stanforddaily.com/2016/04/21/me-ay-free-speech-is-not-a-free-pass/feed/ 7 1114010
How Stanford forgot about its mental health crisis https://stanforddaily.com/2016/04/17/how-stanford-forgot-about-its-mental-health-crisis/ https://stanforddaily.com/2016/04/17/how-stanford-forgot-about-its-mental-health-crisis/#comments Mon, 18 Apr 2016 06:59:33 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1113703 Content warning: suicide If you were reading the Stanford Daily around this time last year, you might have thought our campus was in a state of emergency regarding students’ mental health. That January, the death of Jalen Paukan sent shock waves through the Native community at Stanford and beyond, leaving behind grief that remains to […]

The post How Stanford forgot about its mental health crisis appeared first on The Stanford Daily.

]]>
Content warning: suicide


If you were reading the Stanford Daily around this time last year, you might have thought our campus was in a state of emergency regarding students’ mental health. That January, the death of Jalen Paukan sent shock waves through the Native community at Stanford and beyond, leaving behind grief that remains to this day. As the ASSU elections approached in April, mental health took front and center – during a debate hosted by editors-in-chief of the Stanford Daily and the Stanford Review, those running for ASSU Exec unanimously agreed that “mental health [was] the most important issue.” The Daily’s own Editorial Board stated bluntly that “Stanford’s mental health infrastructure can no longer fully meet demand” and that “Stanford must also build a broader culture of self-care.” Articles highlighted the efforts student groups took to support students on campus, the inability of Stanford’s culture to acknowledge and talk about failure, and even compared the crisis of mental health to the Vietnam War.

So where did it all go?

It’s not like this academic year saw our concern for mental health suddenly vanish. The Daily ran an article on stimulants and study drugs; students started a new student group (CS + Mental Health) to connect mental health projects with “the technology-savvy students they need.” And CAPS, the target of so much attention and criticism last year, reported progress in hiring new staff – though much is still left to be desired. But the outrage, the focused attention, the strength with which students across campus prioritized mental health as a campus issue is gone, placated by a handful of institutional reforms moving at the speed of bureaucracy and the occasional acknowledgement that mental health is, in fact, an important concern. The student alarm that followed the traumatic deaths of two of our own last year peaked and crashed, and now, it seems, our campus has moved on.

It frustrates me. Our campus culture feels no different from how it did last year and the year before that; whether we call it duck syndrome or institutional neglect or systemic oppression, things are still the same on campus. Our workloads are too high. Our students are stressed out. Activism takes a toll on already marginalized communities; students struggling with family problems, depression or other mental health difficulties are ignored and isolated from the Stanford community. What progress has been made? A student group, more counselors at CAPS and a smattering of events year-round to promote mental health? How did these changes affect struggling students, or was that assessment criteria even considered at all?

It’s nowhere near enough, Stanford, for us to make cosmetic changes to our institution and sit back in our seats, convinced that we’ve done enough. Last year we were traumatized by the deaths of two students into pushing for more reform, but the reality is that there have been and still are countless students at Stanford making it one day at a time who we often don’t hear. This school that we so often prop up for empowering and educating its students to thrive and succeed in the world can just as easily suppress, neglect and hurt its student population in a number of ways:

ONE: CAPS’s referral process continues to be unwieldy, stressful and traumatic.

TWO: High unit loads mandated by graduation requirements and encouraged by our campus culture force students to choose between academic success, social/community life and physical/mental health.

THREE: Unpaid labor done by activists and advocates to better the experiences of marginalized students on campus – organizing events, infinite meetings with faculty, galvanizing the student body – is exhausting and often goes unrecognized.

FOUR: Microaggressions and everyday instances that remind marginalized students of their marginalization – even in small ways – cause what some scholars have called “death by a thousand (paper) cuts,” and place an addition burden on struggling students.

FIVE: A culture where students know that “mental health” should be acknowledged, yet lack the skills, training and/or resources to support their peers and residents exacerbates the institutional failures of this campus.

By all accounts, Stanford is still in a mental health crisis – it’s just been masked by surface attempts to do better, well-intentioned efforts that nevertheless fail to address larger critiques and shortcomings of our education system and campus culture. It’s on us as students to do what we can with the resources at our disposal: student groups already formed with a mandate to advocate for mental health need to focus their efforts on the root causes of these problems. Activists and event organizers of all types need to realize that students need to be supported, whether or not they come to our events or rallies. And as a campus, we need to one-up a so-called “culture of self-care” and move beyond taking care of ourselves to taking care of each other, as communities, dorms, houses and organizations.

There’s much more to be done, and much of it needs to be done by the administration. But in the interim, we are still in a crisis. As students, we need to remember how important it is to take care of each other, and how much power we have in doing so.

 

Contact Lily Zheng at lilyz8@stanford.edu.

The post How Stanford forgot about its mental health crisis appeared first on The Stanford Daily.

]]>
https://stanforddaily.com/2016/04/17/how-stanford-forgot-about-its-mental-health-crisis/feed/ 2 1113703
From diversity to justice https://stanforddaily.com/2016/04/10/me-ay-from-diversity-to-justice/ https://stanforddaily.com/2016/04/10/me-ay-from-diversity-to-justice/#comments Mon, 11 Apr 2016 06:59:30 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1113402 I was going to write this week’s column on diversity before I realized that I had unfortunately already written that piece back in January (I knew there had to be a reason why it was so easy to think of a title, for once). In that article, I talked about how the vagueness of the term […]

The post From diversity to justice appeared first on The Stanford Daily.

]]>
I was going to write this week’s column on diversity before I realized that I had unfortunately already written that piece back in January (I knew there had to be a reason why it was so easy to think of a title, for once). In that article, I talked about how the vagueness of the term “diversity,” when divorced from real, concrete efforts for change, was often a promise devoid of meaning. I talked about how uncritical understandings of diversity’s “benefits” play into centuries-old dynamics of the privileged many becoming “enriched” through the experiences, labor and knowledge held by the marginalized few, with little heed paid to the bigger picture: racial justice, queer liberation, an end to class/wealth inequity and state violence.

At the time of its writing, that column wasn’t particularly relevant to any current events on campus. Now, given the massive show of student support for the student coalition Who’s Teaching Us and the accompanying ingredients to make a campus issue a big deal (a controversial piece in the Reviewadministrative responsestudent rallies and the special sauce: media coverage), diversity is most definitely in the spotlight.

We talk often about what diversity is, and what diversity looks like. But the tough questions are elsewhere — namely, why diversity? And how can we get there?

If it were January again, I would have said that many people on campus — and perhaps in organizations and institutions across the country — would answer the first question by arguing for diversity for diversity’s sake. How many times have we heard administrators and leaders saying that they are committed to more diverse schools, more diverse teachers, more diverse everything… yet provide little to no explanations as to why? Once in awhile, scientists find some sort of “benefit” to diversity so that they can make neoliberal arguments for its value: diversity makes teams more productive, for example, lowers prejudice or even “makes us smarter,” perhaps skimming over the fact that our institutions do not naturally reflect our diverse population for historical reasons ranging from slavery to genocide to war and imperialism, and the ripple effects caused by these historical injustices.

And then President Hennessy, in a letter to the Who’s Teaching Us Coalition, pointed straight at “racial and socioeconomic justice” as reasons for diversity and I had to hold my tongue for a bit.

Of course, there is much, much more than “racial and socioeconomic justice” to fight for and I expect to be long graduated before I hear a university president say anything like “collective liberation.” Nevertheless, it is no small feat to have the “why” of diversity be something that student activists and administrators virtually agree on. The “how” of diversity, the specific tactics and strategies Stanford as an organization can use to arrive at the future we want, is thus the crux of the topic at hand.

When I think of an ideal Stanford, I think of a place where hardworking and passionate students, regardless of their backgrounds, identities or experiences can come to gain the skills and knowledge to better the world. I doubt this is a particularly contentious ideal. From it comes a relatively simplistic line of analysis that points to inadequate funding for community centers, a lack of representative faculty and other shortcomings at Stanford that suggest starting points for improvement. I doubt that this, either, is a controversial set of suggestions.

But this goal was framed wrongly from the start — it is not an ideal Stanford we want, it is — in President Hennessy’s words — racial and socioeconomic justice (and justice for all marginalized groups; thus, collective liberation). There are clear and obvious things we can do to make Stanford as an institution the best it can be for its students, and I have no doubt that the administration is already taking steps to move towards this goal. But, as I said on Transgender Day of Remembrance, and will say again,

It is not enough for Stanford to be the eye in a global storm.

It is for this reason that I support Who’s Teaching Us as a coalition and a movement — not simply because it fights for “diversity,” but because it recognizes the key necessity of looking outside the Stanford bubble, past the ivory tower, to the larger set of systems that must be fought. This is why, in the Who’s Teaching Us demands, calls for faculty diversity accompany calls for “divestment from violence against marginalized communities” — because Stanford has this key power to influence the world towards a just and equitable society, and diversity on campus is only the tip of that iceberg.

As the Stanford Review so curtly pointed out, “If WTU really cared about who was teaching us, perhaps they would show the restraint to restrict their discussion to [the issue of diversity], rather than sixteen others.” And in a sense, they have a point — because Who’s Teaching Us has long been about more than just diversity statistics and representation — it is a nuanced and critical movement seeking to link the injustices that students face on campus to larger injustices in the world. It is a movement, borne by many students and communities towards a better future, which I feel lucky to see in my time as a student.     

 

Contact Lily Zheng at lilyz8 ‘at’ stanford.edu.

The post From diversity to justice appeared first on The Stanford Daily.

]]>
https://stanforddaily.com/2016/04/10/me-ay-from-diversity-to-justice/feed/ 4 1113402
When oppression is the punchline: A response to The Stanford Review https://stanforddaily.com/2016/04/03/when-oppression-is-the-punchline-a-response-to-the-stanford-review/ https://stanforddaily.com/2016/04/03/when-oppression-is-the-punchline-a-response-to-the-stanford-review/#comments Mon, 04 Apr 2016 06:59:25 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1112898 Okay, I’ll bite. On March 31, The Stanford Review published an article that mocked demands made by Who’s Teaching Us (WTU), a student coalition formed around issues of faculty diversity and support for marginalized students on campus. It was the cusp of April Fools’ Day, and the ambiguity of the timing lent itself to a number of conclusions. […]

The post When oppression is the punchline: A response to The Stanford Review appeared first on The Stanford Daily.

]]>
Okay, I’ll bite.

On March 31, The Stanford Review published an article that mocked demands made by Who’s Teaching Us (WTU), a student coalition formed around issues of faculty diversity and support for marginalized students on campus. It was the cusp of April Fools’ Day, and the ambiguity of the timing lent itself to a number of conclusions. Was it a coincidence, a straight-up attempt to belittle WTU in response to the week of campaigning after WTU demands were released on the 27th? Was the article itself an April Fools’ joke, a poorly-executed display of ignorance that was intended to reflect actual feelings of ambivalence or perhaps even support towards WTU? Or maybe it was some combination of both, an honest attack on activists, activism and social justice shielded by ehe flimsy excuse of “April Fools, we didn’t really mean it!” just in case any repercussions come their way.

The actual attack on (an outdated, leaked working draft of) the Who’s Teaching Us demands already took place: Elliot Kaufman and Harry Elliott concluded, after calling the demands “the list of a child who used his first wish from a genie on ‘unlimited wishes,’” that “WTU cannot be taken seriously.” This sort of piece, a staple of The Review’s writings on activism, draws on a set of core tenets that shows up again and again.

One: Activists are fragile and easily hurt (“offended”). Two: Activists are quick to attack, restrict and punish language/actions/behaviors they deem offensive, i.e. microaggressions (“PC culture”). Three: Microaggressions cannot be defined, are not important or may not even exist. And four: Activists demand change that is unreasonable (which is true by definition, since people opposed to much of student activism are the ones who do the reasoning).

But, aside from the aggressive reference to Donald Trump’s repeated claims to “build a wall” at the US-Mexico border (using El Centro as a target of the “joke,” which, satire or not, is blatantly inappropriate), it’s the satire piece that’s more interesting. The list of fifteen demands, clearly meant to parody those made by WTU, is a bizarre hodgepodge of misunderstandings, ignorance and humor that borders, strangely, on being self-aware.

“4. We DEMAND that Stanford recognizes that half-lives matter…”

Review translation: It’s funny because it’s a reference to Black Lives Matter (BLM), and by suggesting that this iteration is ridiculous, we suggest that BLM is as well!  

“6. We DEMAND that swimming pools be abolished at Stanford, since their blueness shows implicit support for the Israeli flag…”

Review translation: It’s funny because a random aspect of a random thing is described as representative of a real global issue, which is what we think student activism does!

“8. We DEMAND that Stanford’s Applied Quantitative Reasoning requirement not be fulfilled by cis-linear algebra…”

Review translation: It’s funny because having “cis” in a name has nothing to do with the actual problems of cisnormativity and transphobia!

The funny thing is that I – and many other activists – often make this last type of joke. We make them occasionally to draw the boundaries of our activism, to recognize that yes, cisnormativity and transphobia are real problems but no, those problems have no causal relationship to the usage of “cis” in STEM contexts. Yet, when The Review and other conservative organizations make these jokes, it is almost always to suggest that our activism has no boundaries – that we are unable to recognize, for example, that ageism exists without wildly attacking the “ageism” of calling Old Union “old.”

Simply put, conservative organizations consistently create a straw man of activists as petty, privileged and helpless students who see problems where no problems exist. The activists that I know are no strangers to nuance, however surprising that may be to The Review – in fact, activists constantly seek to define and redefine the boundaries of our activism, to establish which issues are important and why, to understand the historical and social causality behind existing inequalities and how differing actions can lead to differing realizations of the outcomes we want to see.

Why attack this straw man so heavily? One commenter on The Stanford Review’s Facebook post on this satire piece remarked, “the regressive left is in charge of US college campuses;” another wrote, “the radical left has now taken over all of the colleges.”

And that’s really it. Recent pushes towards racial justice, consent culture, diversity, decolonization and divestment on college campuses, especially over the last few years, have put issues of social justice into the spotlight. For people who benefited enough from the old status quo to not care about it, this constitutes an alarming threat; as administrators have begun taking heed, people privileged by the existing state of affairs find themselves on increasingly shaky ground.

This is not a ringing endorsement of every action radical activists or activism have taken on campus – rather, it’s a call to have the hard conversations about identity politics, punitive justice, policy and implementation, intentions and impacts that need to happen in response to existing injustices. The society we live in perpetuates inequity and harm through myths that oppression does not exist. The Stanford Review must decide whether or wants to be part of that problem or help solve it.

Contact Lily Zheng at lilyz8 ‘at’ stanford.edu.

 

The post When oppression is the punchline: A response to The Stanford Review appeared first on The Stanford Daily.

]]>
https://stanforddaily.com/2016/04/03/when-oppression-is-the-punchline-a-response-to-the-stanford-review/feed/ 14 1112898
Trans bodies, cis panic: More than just bathrooms https://stanforddaily.com/2016/03/28/me-ay-trans-bodies-cis-panic-more-than-just-bathrooms/ https://stanforddaily.com/2016/03/28/me-ay-trans-bodies-cis-panic-more-than-just-bathrooms/#comments Tue, 29 Mar 2016 06:59:17 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1112599 I still remember what my high school principal told me in 11th grade when I asked to use the girls’ bathrooms. “We’re concerned,” he said, dropping his eyes, “that some girls worried about sexual assault might be traumatized by people with your, uh, kind of body.” I stared at him. Seventeen-year-old me, too embarrassed to […]

The post Trans bodies, cis panic: More than just bathrooms appeared first on The Stanford Daily.

]]>
I still remember what my high school principal told me in 11th grade when I asked to use the girls’ bathrooms.

“We’re concerned,” he said, dropping his eyes, “that some girls worried about sexual assault might be traumatized by people with your, uh, kind of body.”

I stared at him. Seventeen-year-old me, too embarrassed to use the bathrooms unless they were completely empty, who felt every pair of eyes on her like a test she was always failing, a menace to the girls at my school? That’s what my principal was telling me – that I made people so uncomfortable that I needed to be separated from them for the greater good.

I was told to use the bathroom in the nurse’s office and no other bathroom in campus, or else. That was the end of it. I had no idea what my rights were, or even if I had them in the first place. And even if I had known I could sue, I didn’t have the support to do so. My fight to use the women’s bathrooms was never a fight to begin with, and for the last two years of high school I nursed that humiliation, the only out trans person on campus — a danger to my classmates.

I recall that story now because the last few weeks have made it impossible to forget.

Earlier this month, Kansas lawmakers proposed a bill allowing students who catch trans people in “wrong” bathrooms to sue their schools for $2,500, citing trans students as sources of “embarrassment, shame, and psychological injury” to others. A bill in Illinois, proposed in January, states that “no member of the female sex may use a pupil restroom or changing room that has been designated by the school board for the exclusive use of the male sex and no member of the male sex may use a pupil restroom or changing room that has been designated by the school board for the exclusive use of the female sex.” In Indiana, a proposed bill would make it so trans people using bathrooms and facilities not corresponding to the binary sex category designated on their birth certificates could be charged with misdemeanors and fined up to $5,000.

And these are not the only bills of their kind: similar legislation targeting trans people has cropped up over the last few years in Texas, Kentucky, Florida, Nevada, Minnesota, and Tennessee, among other states. Just last week, a bill of this type was signed into law by the governor of North Carolina – putting North Carolina at risk of losing its Title IX funding.

It goes without saying that this sort of legislation is deeply hurtful to trans communities; in particular, it singles out trans and gender-nonconforming students, low-income trans people and other members of the trans community already disenfranchised by society. I, and I’m sure many of you reading this, unequivocally condemn the string of discriminatory trans bathroom bills proliferating across the country.

But there’s something more than just hate or bigotry or prejudice driving it all— a more complex set of forces driving these bills than is easily written off with one-word answers. Why is it that so many of these bills use similar rhetoric, painting (cisgender) children as defenseless and transgender children as predatory? Why is it that it’s always the trans girls that are demonized, misgendered as “men” and seen as dangerous threats to a fragile femininity?  That transgender people are never referred to explicitly but nonetheless targeted through coded words like “biological sex” and “sex at birth?”

I think of my high school principal, convinced of the dangerous nature of my body; I think of the many students I’ve met at Stanford who have asked me about, of all things, my chromosomes — as if hidden somewhere there is a secret about my identity that they do not trust my words to convey. And it becomes clear that we are all implicated in the same societal transphobia and cisnormativity that drives these bills.

Where did we learn about cisgender women’s fragility and cisgender men’s compulsion to “protect” them at all costs? Where did we learn our compulsory heterosexuality, and how did that sprout our fear of imaginary peeping toms and “naturally” predatory men? How did we learn that the penises of cisgender men are powerful, the vaginas of cisgender women at once dirty, pure, repulsive and desirable; the genitalia of trans people monstrous, inhuman and repugnant?

Transphobia and cisnormativity, like so many other things in our society, are learned.

We cannot think about “bigotry” without contextualizing it within the mechanisms that have created it, and we cannot think about these mechanisms without shedding our belief in our own immunity. Don’t get me wrong; this piece began as one critical of transgender bathroom bills and these bills can, should and will be stopped. But if there’s some sort of moral to this story, it’s that there’s something much bigger than a few pieces of legislation. Rather than setting ourselves apart from these lawmakers, it is our job to ask ourselves how and why we are more like them than we think, and how we can change that reality.

Contact Lily Zheng at lilyz8 ‘at’ stanford.edu.

The post Trans bodies, cis panic: More than just bathrooms appeared first on The Stanford Daily.

]]>
https://stanforddaily.com/2016/03/28/me-ay-trans-bodies-cis-panic-more-than-just-bathrooms/feed/ 8 1112599