While the world awaits the fuller story of Aunt Becky and her kids with the bad grades, there’s a substantive protest happening at Sarah Lawrence College, led by students who have earned the right to demand more.
First, the news. Actor Lori Loughlin, who played “Aunt Becky” on the hit show “Full House,” has been indicted along with scores of other wealthy parents for participating in a college admissions bribery scheme, which included cheating on standardized tests and bribing coaches to accept fabricated athletic credentials to better gain acceptance at elite schools.
Other people involved are William E. McGlashan Jr., founder and managing partner of TPG Growth, a Silicon Valley investment fund, wine baron Agustin Huneeus, Robert Zangrillo, CEO of venture firm Dragon Global, Gordon Caplan, co-chairman of the law firm Willkie, Farr & Gallagher, Elisabeth Kimmel, owner of Midwest Television, former Pimco CEO Doug Hodge, and actor Felicity Huffman.
But a lesser-covered story that’s unfolding now at Sarah Lawrence College appears emblematic of an equal and opposite issue.
Yesterday morning, a group of students calling themselves the Diaspora Coalition, entered an administrative and residential building called Westlands, for a 24-hour action to demand the college do better on diversity, better support students of color who are operating in a “worsening social climate,” and stop taking money from conservative donors like Charles Koch.
You can read their entire list of demands here, and I think you should. They’re detailed and specific, and yes, I expect to see similar versions at other colleges, soon.
From their statement:
We, the Diaspora Coalition, are a group of students who can speak to the injustices imposed on people of color by this institution on a daily basis. The Diaspora Coalition was established this fall in order to address the pain of marginalized students as well as to advise the administration on how to best address this pain. Each of us has seen this administration repeatedly diminish the hard work of student activists who merely want a quality education and the personalized curriculum that SLC promises. We extend solidarity to all people of color in the Sarah Lawrence Community, including international students, graduate students, faculty, and staff.
On March 11, 2019, the Diaspora Coalition, along with our allied peers, will occupy Westlands, make calls to the board, and present demands that describe not only our ideal vision for the school but also what we see as the only acceptable terms by which Sarah Lawrence can remain for the students and against hate.
Among other things, the students are lamenting the loss of their Chief Diversity Officer, Director of Diversity and Campus Engagement, and Assistant Director of Diversity and Campus Engagement. “We blame the administration’s lack of tangible commitment to diversity for these losses,” they write. They’re asking for the addition of tenured faculty of color to build up the college’s diaspora studies offerings, and therapists of color.
Many of the demands are designed to address the legacy of systemic inequality that makes college life difficult for many students of color, which includes a need-based food plan and free shelter for when the campus is closed. “A commitment that no student goes hungry includes graduate students and students that live off-campus,” they write. They’re also asking for a special office designed to meet the unique needs of first-generation and low-income students.
All of this is gradual-level inclusion work, by the way.
The sit-in has been using the hashtag #50YearsOfShame, a nod to a similarly themed 10-day 1969 protest at Sarah Lawrence.
“[Fifty] years later, we are left perplexed and frustrated with the administration’s choice to invisibilize the demands for racial justice at our institution for over five decades,” Coalition members wrote in a statement published by Popular Resistance. They report over 140 students who are occupying the building, and fifty alumni who have signed on in support.
The anger is not limited to colleges.
Not far from Sarah Lawrence, some high school students of color and their allies at the elite Ethical Culture Fieldston School in the Bronx, New York, erupted into their own occupation yesterday, frustrated by the administration’s alleged inattention to a disturbing student-made racist video and other ongoing tensions.
The students call themselves Students of Color Matter, and they want the video released publicly and apologies from each of the students involved. According to the New York Daily News, the video shows white students repeating the phrase, “crack n—-r.”
While a madcap scheme to get otherwise unqualified but wealthy students into prestigious schools may sound like late-night jokester material at first, the laughs die away when compared with reality – underfunded students of color going hungry or winding up homeless on school vacations, feeling unsafe on campuses, unable to learn their own history, or worse, not there at all.
On Point
Tucker Carlson facing calls for advertiser boycotts after ugly remarks surface They’re truly ugly remarks, too, delivered with a casual cruelty. The Fox News host’s conversation partner was radio shock jock Bubba The Love Sponge, and was delivered over a period between 2006 and 2011. He makes racist comments about the Obamas, Afghanistan, and Iraqis; in earlier revelations, Carlson was heard making misogynistic comments about Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan and making dismissive comments on child rape, child marriage, rape shield laws, and using homophobic slurs. Carlson opened his show yesterday with a full-throated defense against the digital mob. “The great American outrage machine is a remarkable thing,” he said.
Washington Post
Trans patients in Iowa can fund their transition-related surgeries through Medicaid The Supreme Court of Iowa ruled on Friday that Medicaid funds can now be used for all transition-related medical needs, including surgery, reversing an earlier decision that had designated them “cosmetic” and not “medically necessary.” The decision was unanimous. Iowa now joins a handful of states that explicitly covers such surgeries, although in some cases, there are limitations. Iowa, you alright.
Out Magazine
Affluent white communities to blame for creating the air pollution that black and brown communities inhale A new study published yesterday in the journal PNAS took a novel approach in addressing the long-acknowledged disparity in air quality between white communities and black and Hispanic ones. Air pollution is disproportionately caused by white Americans' consumption of goods and services, they found, but as NPR so eloquently put is, “but disproportionately inhaled by black and Hispanic Americans.” Anjum Hajat, an epidemiologist at the University of Washington, was impressed. "Inequity in exposure to air pollution is well documented, but this study brings in the consumption angle." Exposure to pollution may be the cause of disparities in health outcomes, as well.
NPR
On Background
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before Laugh and the world laughs with you, as the saying goes, unless you’re a woman, of course. This is the finding from new research from four industrial-organizational psychologists who studied 300 workers in a variety of work settings and performed two controlled experiments to isolate the effects of gender and humor. Yadda yadda yadda, they found that when men added humor to their presentations they were seen as more capable leaders; when women added the same humor to the same presentation, they were seen as less capable leaders. Ladies, ladies, ladies... whaddaya gonna do? Stay funny, stay sane, and point out the bias to others. Maybe print it on a whoopee cushion, just to be sure.
HBR
Inclusion matters: Scientists identify a gene that can help combat PTSD New research from Columbia finds that a type of protein called a prion, then encoded by a gene called TIA1, helps control the fearful memories that are the hallmark of post-traumatic stress disorder. The studies were conducted using male and female mice, which was both unusual and which led to the breakthrough. “The inclusion of female mice in scientific studies is a recent phenomenon; researchers once reasoned that cyclical hormone changes in females would complicate study results,” said one of the study authors. “But including female mice in our study proved transformational. We would never have discovered the importance of TIA1 had we not examined the female brain.” PTSD is twice as common in women as in men.
Zuckerman Institute
When tragedies occur, who gets erased? Hannah Giorgis takes on the media’s coverage of the recent crash of the Ethiopian Airlines jetliner, which killed all 157 people on board. She ticks through a compelling list of coverage that fell into familiar tropes; some, casting suspicion on the quality of Ethiopian Airlines, others eliminating the impact of the crash on Africans, and focusing more on the Western victims. “For many African readers, and other black people across the diaspora, it is perhaps unsurprising that Western media outlets would fail to report on a tragedy as devastating as the Ethiopian Airlines crash as—first and foremost—an African tragedy,” she says. The history of anti-blackness should be our guide, she says. “Racist myths challenge the basic tenets of human compassion, even and especially in death. If black people are innately violent, if Africans live on an inherently backwards continent with fundamentally shoddy airlines, then their deaths are not tragedies… They are facts, not stories.”
The Atlantic
