#actually i apologise to the diaspora for having to include her

[metamatar]

Born in Budapest in 1913 to a Jewish mother and an Indian father, Amrita Sher-Gil was their first of two children whom they raised in luxury. [...]

She said of her time there, “Europe belongs to Picasso, Matisse and many others, India belongs only to me.” [....] “I realized my artistic mission then: to interpret the life of Indians and particularly of the poor Indians pictorially, to paint those silent images of infinite submission and patience, to depict their angular brown bodies."

im always fascinated by the token poc passed around as queer icons, people infinitely alienated from working class lives and espousing the comforting orientalism the west likes to hear.

[edwinas]

1, 14 for nhie :)

Thank you for sending this!!

Salty Ask List: 

1. What OTPs in your fandom(s) do you just not get?

Lol B*nvi of course! My tolerance for white boy BS has gotten very low and Ben didn’t make the cut. He’s been incredibly aggressive towards Devi and is the one mostly initiating their fights. I love friendly competition but what they have is just hostile. 

He’s been very hurtful to Devi (still can’t get over the “UN” debacle, calling Devi “David”, not helping her in his own house etc). He never apologised for anything and started being nice to Devi only after starting to have a crush. 

Ben’s only personality trait is being lonely, rich, white and mean. That whole episode where he throws himself a pity party is just agonisingly boring. We get it, you have rich absentee parents, somehow can’t contact your friends even though it’s 2020, actively push away potential friends, throw yourself at people who don’t care for you. 

Devi is not faultless but she recognises when she’s crossed a line and clearly apologises (as she should). What excuse does Ben have? He has unambiguously hurt Devi and yes, she didn’t cry in front of him so he doesn’t know the extent of her pain. But in what world, is calling someone “unfuckable” ok??? I don’t care that he’s “not racist” when “UN” didn’t mean “United Nations”. He’s such a dick, I can’t get over that even when the show does its absolute best to make use sympathise with him. Being lonely is not an excuse to be mean. Nothing is an excuse to be mean. And you can’t undo what you say/do but the least you can do is apologise before trying to get with the girl you’ve consistently demeaned...

14. Unpopular opinion about your fandom?

Gosh I have so many unpopular opinions!

1. Not focusing on Devi when it’s her show/ fixating on the white boy...

I’ve seen posts saying the show should have been about the only white boy in it. Like WHAT. Or singing Ben’s praise and not one word from those same people about Devi. We finally get a wonderful show about a complex Tamil teenage girl from the diaspora who is also seen as romantically lovable. Plus we get diverse side characters, including her best friends and love interest. Danai Gurira said ““ou create a story about black people. You put a white person in it. Everyone focuses on the white person. You create a story about women. You put a dude in it. Everyone focuses on the dude. So how about you just take them all out. Now you have to focus on who I actually want you to focus on.” It’s exactly what happened. Fans made a conscious effort to totally sideline the heroine and all poc. I myself unfortunately spent more time defending Paxton than analysing Devi because he’s treated unfairly which brings me to my next point.

2. Hating on Paxton 

I vividly remember when the show came out, everyone hated Paxton. I was so excited to be part of nhie’s fandom (again show about a Tamil girl!!!), I thought the fandom would be mostly anti-racist and could wax poetry about the Vishwakumars. Lol, no such thing, the Japanese love interest was torn apart and the white boy was put on a pedestal. Paxton’s haters try their hardest to make him a jerk. He’s always nice to Devi and he shut her out in the finale. If you spent five minutes thinking about how he’s seen, his subsequent fears, you would get why he did that. He’s been seen as a stupid hot piece of meat since he was very young and the mother of the girl he crushes on inadvertently plays on that. Plus Nalini was just rude. So yeah, Paxton wrongly takes it out on Devi. Everything he does throughout the series can be rationalised to a certain extent (more details in this post!).

3. Worshipping Ben (See 1. what OTP’s I just don’t get)

4. Giving poc unrealistic standards

Nothing new here, poc are held to different standards compared to white characters in all shows and films, which come down to fans having no compassion, empathy kindness for us. I’ve already touched on Paxton, the Vishwakumars get a harsh treatment too (to different extents). In that horrible podcast, Devi’s described as a girl who manipulated her closest friends using her life-altering trauma... How?? She’s mostly unwilling to acknowledge her loss and is obsessed with boys to distract herself. Or how Nalini is called the worst mom, ignoring how she came to a foreign racist country (to the US after 9/11 and she’s Brown), suffering miscarriages, struggling with raising a child, loosing her husband. She’s neither the kindest nor the most perfect mom but she tries her best. Her mentality is similar to many Indian immigrant parents’, her approach might be misguided but she want the best for her child and that’s crystal clear in the show. She wants Devi to succeed and is terrified that she might not. I could go on and on. Poc in nhie are treated unfairly by fandom because of racism. 

[inbonobo]

Think #freespeech on #campuses is bad?! You don’t know half of it! #academicfreedom #college #higherlearning #bias #protest #partisanship #tribalism #debating

#SamuelAbrams appears to be exactly the kind of conservative professor left-leaning colleges would want. He has degrees from Stanford and Harvard and is a moderate Republican who opposes Donald Trump—not a populist with a penchant for bomb-throwing. Yet he has found himself at the centre of a controversy at Sarah Lawrence College, a selective liberal-arts university near New York City, where a group of students has called for his tenure to be reviewed because they disagree with an opinion piece he wrote for the New York Times.

This is the latest scuffle in a seemingly endless war over free speech on elite college campuses. But what makes the Abrams row notable is the response of the university faculty and administration to a straightforward assault on academic freedom.

Mr Abrams’s troubles began on October 16th 2018, when the Times published his op-ed, entitled “Think professors are liberal? Try school administrators.”  It begins by expressing unease over college administrators at Sarah Lawrence sponsoring “overtly progressive events” without offering a “meaningful ideological alternative”. It then describes the results of a representative survey Mr Abrams made of college administrators nationwide. The survey suggests that liberal staffers outnumber conservatives by a ratio of 12 to 1, which is much more ideologically lopsided than the professoriate or the student body. “This warped ideological distribution,” Mr Abrams concludes, “threatens the free and open exchange of ideas, which is precisely what we need to protect in higher education in these politically polarised times.” That is it. There is no dismissal of trigger-warnings, no descriptions of activist students as coddled or snowflakes or social-justice warriors. Mr Abrams’s article could be reasonably described as anodyne.

Yet what a fracas it created. “The day the article came out was a completely monumental day on Sarah Lawrence because everyone on campus was reading it,” says Kate Bakhtiyarova, the editor of the Sarah Lawrence Phoenix, the student newspaper. “People were devoting their entire classes to the article.” Incensed students arrived at Mr Abrams’s office, which was locked, and ripped pictures off the door—of Mr Abrams with former students and of his newborn son sporting a Sarah Lawrence onesie—and replaced them with crude signs. Among them: “Our right to exist is not ‘idealogical’, asshole”, signed by “a transsexual fag”; repeated demands to apologise and to quit; and an injunction to “Go teach somewhere else you racist asshat (maybe Charlottesville?).” Anonymous social-media posters spread unfounded rumours that Mr Abrams had had sexual relations with students. Mr Abrams says he tried to contact the university president, the provost, deans and security, and received no immediate response.

According to Mr Abrams, when he did finally speak to the president, Cristle Collins Judd, a few days later, “the first thing she said was, ‘Don’t you think you should have cleared your piece with me first?’” In Mr Abrams’s recollection, she also said that he had created a “hostile work environment”. Patricia Goldman, a spokesperson for Sarah Lawrence College, said that Ms Judd could not be reached for an interview because she was travelling. Ms Goldman did not respond to subsequent repeated requests for comment. Ms Judd’s public statements have been tepid: after perfunctorily acknowledging that the “professor has every right, and the full support of the college, to pursue and publish this work,” she said, “the opinion piece made claims that many on our campus understandably found not only controversial, but insulting, and even personally intimidating, for which the proper response is vigorous and informed debate and criticism.”

On March 11th, an anonymous group of students at Sarah Lawrence calling themselves the Diaspora Coalition staged a sit-in occupation of the president’s office, and presented a 10-page list of demands. Some of these demands seemed reasonable enough—like calls to address food and housing insecurity for poor students—while others, like the demand that “all campus laundry rooms are to supply laundry detergent and softener” seemed ripe for satirists of leftie campus culture. But the list also included alarming demands concerning Mr Abrams. Because “the article revealed the anti-Blackness, anti-LGBTQ+ and anti-woman bigotry of Abrams” and “threatens the safety and well-being of marginalised people,” the students demanded that his position “be put up to a tenure review to a panel of the Diaspora Coalition and at least three faculty members of colour”.

Remarkably, this position was adopted by many staff at the university. According to the coalition, 40 faculty members signed the declaration—including the paragraph regarding Mr Abrams’s tenure. By contrast, only 27 signed a declaration, drawn up after the fight first broke out, supporting Mr Abrams’s right to academic freedom. "The fact that my colleagues would not support that—the simple idea that I have a right to publish—is horrifying,” says Mr Abrams.

Before the sit-in, the Diaspora Coalition, which was founded five months ago, had 24 members—a tiny fraction of the student body. Since the Abrams affair it has swelled to more than 100. Sharon, a student with the group who did not want to give her full name, says that the row over Mr Abrams has overshadowed the group’s other demands. When asked how such a seemingly innocuous article could stir such a reaction, she said that Mr Abrams had unfairly criticised the university office of diversity without actually attending any of its events.

Mr Abrams says he does not worry that his tenure will be reviewed or revoked. But he is concerned that his ability to teach will be damaged by administrators’ failure to stand up for academic freedom. His troubles reveal the dynamics that many left-leaning college campuses are struggling with as activists, eager to localise national issues of racial and economic justice, find soft targets and dub them pariahs. Left-leaning staff are either sympathetic or wary of getting sucked into the vortex of campus politics. Senior university officials want to appease a vocal minority of student activists while not scaring off future applicants or upsetting boards of trustees. While some universities, such as the University of Chicago and the University of California, have created policies that affirm the right to free speech and academic freedom, there has been little such progress in other institutions, as Mr Abrams’s troubles show.

via ec

I received a disconcerting email this year from a senior staff member in the Office of Diversity and Campus Engagement at Sarah Lawrence College, where I teach. The email was soliciting ideas from the Sarah Lawrence community for a conference, open to all of us, titled “Our Liberation Summit.” The conference would touch on such progressive topics as liberation spaces on campus, Black Lives Matter and justice for women as well as for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, intersex, asexual and allied people.

As a conservative-leaning professor who has long promoted a diversity of viewpoints among my (very liberal) faculty colleagues and in my classes, I was taken aback by the college’s sponsorship of such a politically lopsided event. The email also piqued my interest in what sorts of other nonacademic events were being organized by the school’s administrative staff members.

I soon learned that the Office of Student Affairs, which oversees a wide array of issues including student diversity and residence life, was organizing many overtly progressive events — programs with names like “Stay Healthy, Stay Woke,” “Microaggressions” and “Understanding White Privilege” — without offering any programming that offered a meaningful ideological alternative. These events were conducted outside the classroom, in the students’ social and recreational spaces.

The problem is not limited to my college. While considerable focus has been placed in recent decades on the impact of the ideological bent of college professors, when it comes to collegiate life — living in dorms, participating in extracurricular organizations — the ever growing ranks of administrators have the biggest influence on students and campus life across the country.

Today, many colleges and universities have moved to a model in which teaching and learning is seen as a 24/7 endeavor. Engagement with students is occurring as much — if not more — in residence halls and student centers as it is in classrooms. Schools have increased their hiring in areas such as residential life and student centers, offices of student life and success, and offices of inclusion and engagement. It’s not surprising that many of the free-speech controversies in the past few years at places like Yale, Stanford and the University of Delaware have concerned events that occurred not in classrooms but in student communal spaces and residence halls.

Intrigued by this phenomenon, I recently surveyed a nationally representative sample of roughly 900 “student-facing” administrators — those whose work concerns the quality and character of a student’s experience on campus. I found that liberal staff members outnumber their conservative counterparts by the astonishing ratio of 12-to-one. Only 6 percent of campus administrators identified as conservative to some degree, while 71 percent classified themselves as liberal or very liberal. It’s no wonder so much of the nonacademic programming on college campuses is politically one-sided.

The 12-to-one ratio of liberal to conservative college administrators makes them the most left-leaning group on campus. In previous research, I found that academic faculty report a six-to-one ratio of liberal to conservative professors. Incoming first-year students, by contrast, reported less than a two-to-one ratio of liberals to conservatives, according to a 2016 finding by the Higher Education Research Institute. It appears that a fairly liberal student body is being taught by a very liberal professoriate — and socialized by an incrediblyliberal group of administrators.

The severity of this trend varies among different types of academic institutions. My research found that two-thirds of administrators at public institutions and schools with religious affiliations self-identified as liberals, which was lower than the three-quarters of administrators at private, secular institutions who did. I found no real differences among school types, such as small, private liberal arts colleges as compared with large research universities. School ranking did make a small difference, with administrators at more selective institutions reporting a higher percentage of liberals than did lower-ranked schools.

The most pronounced difference was regional. New England has the most liberal college administrators in the nation, with a 25-to-one ratio of liberals to conservatives. The West Coast and Southeast have ratios of 16-to-one, whereas the Great Plains, the Rocky Mountains and the Great Lakes all have ratios closer to 10-to-one. The only region with anything close to a balanced ratio is the Southwest, with two-to-one.

This warped ideological distribution among college administrators should give our students and their families pause. To students who are in their first semester at school, I urge you not to accept unthinkingly what your campus administrators are telling you. Their ideological imbalance, coupled with their agenda-setting power, threatens the free and open exchange of ideas, which is precisely what we need to protect in higher education in these politically polarized times.

Samuel J. Abrams is a professor of politics at Sarah Lawrence College and a visiting fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.

via nyt