The recent election of the new pope was greeted with great fanfare from around the world, as Catholics around the world waited to see who would replace the first pope to not leave the Vatican in a coffin in nearly 500 years. The announcement was received with great praise with millions celebrating Pope Francis’ poverty, humility and openness; a very different manner than that of the traditional and reserved Ratzinger of the previous eight years.

However, while millions clamor to attest to the personable qualities of the new Bishop of Rome, it is important to remember that the Pope is inheriting a church in turmoil which is in serious need of reform to rescue it from itself. The increasing disenfranchisement between Vatican dogma and popular culture is striking and has led to a phenomenon which I have observed increasingly in those around me and even in myself: so called “cultural Catholicism.” Millions of modern Catholics use contraception, support LGBT rights, in-vitro fertilization, abortion, and find the thought of child molestation horrifying yet millions still flock to church, sit at the pews, and put money in the collection bin; the simple reason being that they were raised Catholic.

Enthusiasm for the new Bishop of Rome has been perhaps most forthcoming from the millions of Latin Americans in the West who looked forward to the papal reign of the first Latin American Pope in the history of the Church. Having been raised in a Mexican-American Catholic household I understand the importance of the Catholic faith to the culture of many Latin American cultures and how difficult it is to go against those conventions. From as far back as I can remember I remember being dragged away from the pink skies above my house where I played with my cousins and being plopped down onto a pew. Catholicism was never a choice for me in my family. It was never a choice for my sister. It isn’t a choice for my six year old niece and it certainly wasn’t a choice for my mother. It was just simply the way that things have always been done since Cortes arrived to civilize the New World. Therefore these Sundays were filled with obligatory treks to St. Annes Catholic Church on Maryland Parkway in the center of Las Vegas. However, personal anecdotes aside, it is important to note that any quick survey of Catholicism in Latin America makes clear the fact that faith is overwhelmingly important in the lives of many Latin Americans, and consequently in the lives of the millions of Latin@’s in the United States. However as young members of Latino culture enter into adulthood they must make their own informed choices about religion and follow their own beliefs, not merely blindly following those handed down to them from their ancestors. If they don’t square up then something must be done.

For instance, if one was born into a family that were longtime members of a country club that supported denying rights to LGBT peoples, opposed a woman’s right to choose, spoke out vehemently against condoms, and covered up its members’ abuses of children around the world then it is logical to conclude that when they came of age, if they opposed all these things, they would leave that institution in heartbeat. However, when theology and familial pressure is introduced it becomes very different and the same people who would undoubtedly leave another identical institution instead choose to disavow themselves from what they do not like in the doctrine and continue on as semi-active members, battling a cognitive dissonance between their beliefs and their church.

There is a certain naiveté in simply saying one does not condone certain aspects of the church, yet continuing to show up on Sundays to that very church. This pacifism becomes ironic when one realizes that thousands of people who firmly support LGBT rights no doubt offered up money to an institution that wrote an open letter against California’s Proposition 8.  As every day passes these age-old Catholic doctrines seem increasingly backwards and it seems clearer that Catholics now only have two choices.

The first option is simply to leave. They can practice their faith independently from Vatican doctrine or can join another denomination that better suits their beliefs. The second option, the one that this author recommends and urges, is to stay. However, not just staying and sitting in the pews listening to the gospel; they must stay, make their voices heard, and demand change.

It is perhaps because of the theological underpinnings of the institution that this second course of action is less easily approachable. Rebelling against your faith is not easy and this author realizes it. However, if this institution is truly here to aide us and guide us through life then we must approach it the same way that we approach our democracy which is also there to serve and protect us. We must criticize it. In the same way that the worst sin in democracy is not participating, if we simply sit back and do not fight for what we wish to change in our religious institutions, we are not supporting it but undermining it. The best thing one can do is criticize. Criticize and make known that which unnerves us, Only then can we truly claim to be true Catholics.

The world is changing and faith-based institutions must adapt themselves accordingly. What is no longer a possibility is pacifist cultural Catholicism where members thoughtlessly go through the motions of faith simply because that is what they have always done. Blindly drinking the wine is no longer an option. Regardless of whether your action as Catholic is walking out of the door or standing by and fighting for change, what is necessary is action.

To the Catholics of the world I suggest these actions: Analyze, Critique, Speak, and Stand.

Dignum et iustum est.

Daniel is an undergraduate student pursuing a degree in Comparative Literature, focusing on Modernist literature from the early 20th century. He was born and raised in Las Vegas, NV and writes on topics of art, religion, the place of Latin@’s in society. He also writes creatively.

That is why I am excited to learn more about this crucial struggle at the Stanford Democrats’ upcoming event, “Is Marriage Equality Constitutional?”  There will be a balanced and intellectual discussion from two experts, Fellow William Baude and Professor Jane Schacter who really know about the subject.  Hopefully we will all leave understanding in greater detail how this struggle, one that I consider to be the civil rights movement of our generation, is interacting with our nation’s highest court.  Please comment below to tell us why you are planning on coming to our event, or if you have any questions you would like the panelists to address.

David is a freshman at Stanford involved in the Stanford Democrats and the Stanford Wind Ensemble. He is currently deciding between a major in political science and public policy.

What percentage gay/straight are you?

I was asked this question earlier today on a form I had to fill out for the iO Tillett Wright photo shoot this afternoon at Terra. I had initially wanted to get my photo taken for the same reasons as probably many of the other people who got their picture taken: it’s a national campaign, it’s making waves and iO Tillett Wright had a great TEDx talk about her project and sexual orientation.

But that question bothered me. It bothered me a lot. I ended up writing “me/me%- I don’t conform to bs dichotomies.” And I took my picture, and as much as I wanted to, I didn’t challenger her. But I kind of wish I had. Here’s why:

The most apparent concern is its treatment of bisexual/pansexual/non-gay/straight/fluid identities. As someone who is attracted to people of multiple genders, I don’t think of myself as part straight and part gay. I think of myself as someone who is attracted to multiple genders in very different ways. Furthermore, my attraction to those different genders (if you will, the degree of my attractions to these broad categories of people) has varied significantly over my life. There will be days when I wake up and all I can think about is feminine, female role people. And I might wake up the next day and only think about masculine, male role people. I want to respect the fact that my attractions vary, not write down the “percentage” of that day.

There is also a lot of trans* erasure in the question. First off, I’m always suspicious of gay spacious that inherently are not necessarily accessible to trans* people. By framing eligibility for the photo shoot as “being less than 100% straight,” Tillett Wright is essentially saying that straight trans* and genderqueer people cannot be a part of the photo shoot. (It’s worth mentioning that her project is funded largely by the HRC —  if you want to know why HRC isn’t great, read all of these articles)

I wouldn’t be so peeved about its exclusivity, if it weren’t for the fact that in her TEDx Talk, Tillett Wright discusses how the many inequalities LGB Americans face led her to create her campaign, “Self-Evident Truths.” Yet all the statistics that she cites are much graver for trans* Americans. I do not want to play oppression Olympics, but I do want to point out that if her goal is to raise visibility for marginalized communities, she might have also considered opening her project up to the trans* community as well.

But more importantly, by framing sexual orientation in terms of straightness (attraction to people of the opposite gender) and gayness (attraction to people of the same gender), there is inherent erasure of people who are attracted to genders outside of the traditional Western two-gender, cis-male/cis-female dichotomy. In her TEDx Talk, she discusses how she doesn’t want to place boxes on people, and yet this question reinforces an unfortunate and oppressive box society places on people in its assumption that people’s sexual attraction will fall within the traditional Western sexual dichotomy of gay straight. Granted, she’s allowing for more nuance than simply asking if you’re gay or straight, but what about those of us who are or have been attracted to people of genders besides male or female? Do we not count as queer (or, by your metric, 100% straight)?

Now, probably the most controversial of my criticisms is of her use of the term “gay” and the implications of that term. In her TEDx Talk, she extends the belief that “we [gays] have always been here,” a popular belief among nearly every gay organization to spew. But the fact of the matter is that gay people have not been here since the inception of the human race. The gay identity is a recent Western invention of the last 100 or so years.

In many cultures across the history of time, there has been not just tolerance but social acceptance of same-gender attraction without confining people to a specific identity based on that same-gender attraction. Furthermore, across time, there have been societies that socially accept and encourage relationships among people of any number of genders besides those that correspond nicely to the Western male/female equivalent.

Across time, attraction hasn’t been a function of a person’s identity as it is often seen today. And when we use terms like “gay” to broadly refer to people who aren’t “straight”, we reinforce the oppressive nature of our current social identification structure, which the gay movement of the 1900s largely solidified.

In our Western society, it makes sense that the understanding of sexual orientation as a function of our identity developed in the 1900s, because it’s easier for people to understand who we are if there is a tangible term to describe and understand us by. But the consequence of that paradigm shift is that now we must come out as an identity, generally gay, and from that identity people understand how our attraction functions. And by reducing the nuance of our attractions to a monolithic identity-gayness or bisexuality or pansexuality or whatever- we strip ourselves of our agency in determining our attractions. We are a function of that identity.

I want to be clear. I’m not challenging the personal use of the words gay or straight or bisexual or pansexual or anything else like that. But instead, I want to challenge the very notion of identification in the first place. Instead of focusing on creating a world that is more accepting of people who can easily identify with Western sexual identities and dichotomies, we should instead be focusing on liberating all of us from this system of identification and the systematic assumptions made that peoples sexualities will function a certain way, whether that be being attracted to men, women, white people, rich people, people with penises or vaginas or any other assumption that could be made about someone’s sexual attraction.

And if iO Tillett Wright were so keen on not boxing people in as she says she is in her TEDx Talk, then she wouldn’t ask people to conform to some identity. She would take their picture and add it to her collection of pictures of people whose sexual attractions do not conform to what society deems is appropriate.

So in short, I’m happy that I got my picture taken. I’m glad that a project like this exists. I wish however that instead of being focused on improving the equality of gay people, her collection was focused more broadly on dismantling the oppressive nature of our current understanding of sexuality, so that people had more freedom to explode and more freedom to allow their attractions to exist harmoniously with society and the world.

Erika is a feminine of center organism who loves to frolic in fields and promote vegetarianism and non-Western types of love.

The recent flurry of articles and subsequent commentary on this and other sites about Stanford and South Asia, India and Israel, casteism and nationalism, disrespect and denigration, have made me think about the relationship of these conversations to my own social location as a scholar in the field of religious studies. In one sense, these debates fall along the spectrum of a thematic which we might call “Hinduism and its Culture Wars,” to invoke the title of a recent online essay (and to which I have responded elsewhere). In another sense, they raise larger issues of political commitment, moral self-criticism, and religious sentiment. I want to take a step back and consider these issues with reference to M.K. Gandhi, whose voluminous writings reveal a nexus between religion, politics, and public discourse that frequently confounds the ways we have been conditioned to think about them. I don’t mean to distance myself from the debates themselves, even though, to adopt a crude dichotomy, it is for the activist to criticize, the advocate to counter-revolutionize, and the academic to contextualize. That does not assign to me, however, the power of moral arbitration, or consign me to the politics of neutrality; I can only claim the slight privilege of the historical long-view. For the record, my broad political sympathies are with Janani and their vocal opposition to the legacies of brutalization with which states and citizens are complicit. But I also understand from where the sentiments of the respondent emerge; I come from a similar place, though I have learned to distinguish between pride in and gratitude for the traditions I inherit. I will return to that later: my main concern here is not to comment further on these presentist debates, but rather to consider how the methods by which we come to and through which we express our moral, religious, and political convictions are as important as the convictions themselves. And here, I think, is where Gandhi presents a problem to both sets of articles, for both use the language of self-assertion, self-respect, self-actualization. Of course, the playing field is unequal; self-determination, political and otherwise, should be the prerogative of the historically oppressed and marginalized, and not of the privileged. But this is not a new axiom. The debates of the past were often more radical than the debates of the present, and how we engage with that past may bear directly on the activism of the future.

Gandhi has become the darling of the academy in recent years, especially among philosophers and political theorists, as the selected bibliography at the end of this essay indicates. Of particular interest is the way Gandhi reconciled the tension between moral relativism—his ability to acknowledge religious and moral truth as matters of personal conviction—and the impulse to universalize his own convictions, to insist on their importance in social life, and to create a public individual (the satyagrahi) who could demonstrate them. For Akeel Bilgrami (2011: 99), the key is Gandhi’s move from doctrine to moral exemplarity: “It is in the nature of principles that when someone fails to live up to them…he or she becomes subject to criticism. That is why principles should not be an essential part of religion and morals…[O]ne’s own moral and religious choices should really be seen only as matters of one’s conscience and experience, not as issuing from or generating principles and doctrines.” Gandhi sought not to export his morality, but to actualize it; to rephrase an existentialist maxim: “When I choose for myself, I do not generate a principle for others to follow, but set an example for everyone” (Bilgrami 2011: 100-1). Underlying this shift is a peculiar Gandhian concept of violence, which he attributes to his religious readings of Buddhist, Jain, and Hindu ascetic traditions—that is, the notion that violence owes to something seemingly remote from it, something deep-seated in the self that seeks its own affirmation. “There is no other way to understand his insistence,” Bilgrami writes elsewhere (2003: 4162), “that the satyagrahi has not eschewed violence until he has removed criticism from his lips and heart and mind.”

What does this mean, to remove criticism from lips and heart and mind, and why is nonviolence contingent upon it? The answer may lie in Gandhi’s concept of a self outside the boundaries of the modern political subject. Swa-raj, self-rule, was “rule-of-the-self” in both subjective and objective senses of the genitive. Gandhi maintained that religious vows and virtues–silence, fasting, spinning, patience, sexual restraint–were political acts, in the sense that they refused to turn the human being into a moral and political abstraction. “What troubled [Gandhi] about modernity,” writes Uday Singh Mehta (2011: 421), “was less its ideals, such as freedom, equality, or the hope to relieve exploitation, than the way that those ideals had become indifferent to the integrity of the self in the conduct of everyday life.” That integrity, however, was not that of the liberal-democratic self: a rights-bearing, constitutionally determined, civically engaged individual. Instead, Gandhian self-knowledge was achieved through renunciation and withdrawal, as his comments on voluntary poverty demonstrate: “[T]hose who have actually followed out this vow…testify that, when you dispossess yourself of everything you have, you really possess all the treasures of the world” (Speech at the Guild Hall, London, Sept. 27, 1931). Freedom and liberation for Gandhi were, paradoxically, the effect of self-disavowal. One could not achieve political liberation without attending simultaneously to the iniquities of the self: avarice, acquisition, attachment. Hence Gandhi’s insistence on criticism with compassion, activism with ahimsa. The morality of the satyagrahi—to resist actively ideological self-righteousness, unjust dynamics of power, and the violent exploitation of humans and resources—could be actualized, rather than exported, because it was predicated on self-suffering, self-sacrifice, and self-discipline.

Of course, Gandhi was not above criticism himself, either in terms of dishing it or receiving it. As far as the latter is concerned, we have to read Gandhi together with his most incisive political opponent and spiritual conscience, B.R. Ambedkar. In a brilliant essay titled “Self-Purification vs. Self-Respect,” the late great D.R. Nagaraj tried to reconcile the Gandhian and Ambedkarite heritages of the modern Dalit movement. For Gandhi, eradicating untouchability was a spiritual act of self-purification, a burden on the upper-caste self to purge Hinduism of its sins; it was incumbent upon the Gandhian to see God in the oppressed (daridra-nārāyaṇa), and therefore to abase himself before the “Harijan,” paradoxically elevating his own saintly stature. For Ambedkar, the Dalit was not the recipient of charity but the agent of justice, working in this world for social, economic, and political equality. It was not enough to change hearts and minds (the discourse of duty); one had to expose the structural violence and inequities of caste society and change them through secular, political means (the discourse of rights).

True, Gandhi could be shockingly insensitive to the paternalizing effects of his reformist approach, to the point of fasting unto death to prevent the creation of separate electorates for untouchables, resulting in the Poona Pact of 1932 and a legacy of embitterment among radicals. Ambedkar, for his part, could be virulently dismissive of Hinduism as inherently incapable of redemption, and lacked historical nuance when it came to what Aishwary Kumar (2010: 392) calls his “insurgent and heterogeneous response to the unitary power of tradition to frame meaning.” Yet each moved closer to the other’s position late in life: Gandhi recognized more astutely the underlying economic causes for the disenfranchisement of untouchables, and Ambedkar found in a radically re-envisioned Buddhism (Navayana) a spiritual home for a dispossessed people. One might think analogously of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X: where Martin began to see the struggle for black liberation through the eyes of the urban poor in the ghettos of Chicago and New York, Malcolm realized the power of political and spiritual solidarity with civil rights leaders. (James Cone’s Martin & Malcolm & America: A Dream or a Nightmare remains to me the most compelling narrative about the two).

Even if Gandhi could be profoundly myopic when it came to the problem of Dalit (and feminist) political self-determination, should his broader language of moral self-criticism be sidelined? There isn’t much of Gandhi from either side of the present debate, beyond the perfunctory mention of his internationalist legacy in Rao’s response. This is where the bourgeois diaspora prefers to keep him: sanitized and romanticized; they are ready to link Gandhi and King, and to forget Ambedkar and DuBois, Phule and Paine. But the questions remain for the present audience: What can the world’s most famous pacifist teach us about the rhetoric of activism? Does critique without contrition become hypostatized and ineffectual? That is, how should we articulate our moral and political convictions in public fashion: with spite and derision or in a spirit of offering? Is Gandhi’s language of self-emptying (kenosis), self-disowning, a mere product of false consciousness? Do the Hindu traditions of bhakti from which Gandhi drew inspiration–a religious movement which proclaimed spiritual (though not always social) equality among the servants of God, and which valorized the lowly and humble–simply constitute an “ideology of subordination par excellence” (à la Ranajit Guha)? Or is there something radical in renunciation, something which questions not only the ethics of self-righteousness, but also the ideology of desire (by recognizing that desires are already part of the hegemonic realm of capitalism), and the troubling ontological link between desire and violence?

For Gandhi, the measure of his identity was the extent to which he could connect with the suffering of a people beyond his borders and outside his tribe, however much that meant apparent cruelty to his own self (not to mention his wife and children). The hard work of satyagraha was not in non-cooperation with a foreign evil; it was in resisting the temptation to selfhood. At his anti-imperialist best, Gandhi wrote a global history of suffering, violence, and marginality which had the moral power to anticipate the unraveling of the world. Politics to him was useful only insofar as it could help create the circumstances by which people could choose to become free from the universal human propensity to exploit others. Gandhi was careful to distance himself from those political forms he saw as complicit with facilitating the inner violence of humans to become legally sanctioned: be it the postcolonial nation-state, liberal democracy, or our modern plutocracies. Moreover, the existence of this skepticism was due to and not in spite of his religious sensibilities. Gandhi’s deeply religious pessimism about “the inherent corruptibility of our moral psyches” (Bilgrami 2003: 4165) is precisely what led him to experiment with creative social contracts.

If part of the activist mission is to persuade through rhetoric and to broaden the circles of solidarity, then it may be worth extending the Gandhian critique of violence to the linguistic practices we employ—without ceding the stage of action, of course, to the largest perpetrators of violence. In my view, we do not overcome traditions by going around them or at them, but by going through them; that is, we master and outmaneuver traditional discourses of inequality through their diligent and patient study, and not by outright rejection or name-calling. (Walter Benjamin’s famous dictum that there is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism is almost too apropos to repeat here). As Vijay Prashad (2012: 161) notes, Gandhi recognized this when he wrote, in a powerful essay against compulsory widow-segregration, “It is good to swim in the waters of tradition, but to sink in them is suicide.” Gandhi’s loyalty to tradition may have blinded him to certain disturbing features of orthodoxy, but at times it seems that he simply wanted what Simona Sawhney (2009: 116) calls “a less violent and less dismissive relation to the past.” It would take another essay entirely to discuss the ways in which Gandhi maintained a depth of engagement with the past without being constrained to revere it. My only suggestion here is that to take Gandhi seriously, and to cultivate nonviolence in “lips and heart and mind,” is not to remain silent in the face of injustice, but to train the voice to sing.

Anand Venkatkrishnan is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Religion at Columbia University. He received his MA and MPhil in South Asian Religions from Columbia (2012) and graduated from Stanford University (2010) with a BA in Classics (Philology). His interests include Sanskrit scriptural hermeneutics, early modern South Asia, and Indian intellectual history more broadly.

Further Reading
Bilgrami, Akeel. 2003. “Gandhi the Philosopher.” Economic and Political Weekly 38-39: 4159-4165.
———. 2011. “Gandhi’s religion and its relation to his politics,” in The Cambridge Companion to Gandhi, edited by Judith Brown and Anthony Parel, 93-116. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Kumar, Aishwary. 2010. “Ambedkar’s Inheritances.” Modern Intellectual History 7.2: 391-415.
Mehta, Uday Singh. 2010. “Gandhi on Democracy, Politics, and the Ethics of Everyday Life.” Modern Intellectual History 7.2: 355-371.
———. 2011. “Patience, Inwardness, and Self-knowledge in Gandhi’s Hind Swaraj.” Public Culture 23.2: 417-429.
Nagaraj, D.R. 2010. “Self-Purification vs. Self-Respect: On the Roots of the Dalit Movement,” in The Flaming Feet and Other Essays, 21-60. Calcutta: Seagull Books.
Nandy, Ashis. 2002. Time Warps: Silent and Evasive Pasts in Indian Politics and Religion. London: Hurst & Company.
Prashad, Vijay. 2012. Uncle Swami: South Asians in America Today. New York: New Press.
Sawhney, Simona. 2009. “Allegory and Violence: Gandhi’s Reading of the Bhagavad Gītā,” in The Modernity of Sanskrit, 86-124. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Skaria, Ajay. 2002. “Gandhi’s Politics: Liberalism and the Question of the Ashram.” The South Atlantic Quarterly 101.4: 955-986.
Sorabji, Richard. 2012. Gandhi and the Stoics: Modern Experiments on Ancient Values. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

I am tired of discourse that divides brown from white, the oppressed from the oppressors, students of color from white students, and the underprivileged from the privileged. Tracing and retracing these lines prevents us from creating identities that are much more complex, often in the spaces where these lines blur.

In her recent STATIC article, Holly Fetter ended with a powerful statement that resonated with me: “unless we confront our fears and make active changes to educate ourselves about the perspectives and experiences of those in other communities, we’ll never be able to see past the illusion of isolation”. To me, the recent mixer held between Sanskriti, the South Asian student organization, and the Stanford Israel Alliance represents just that. I did not attend the mixer, but I have been a part of similar events at Stanford, and I can honestly say that experiences which have pushed me to interact with individuals from outside my community have been some of the most valuable.

I do not mean to say that I don’t hold opinions; I do and I hold on to them very strongly. However, if I engage in conversation with individuals with whom I do not agree, that does not mean I am complying with their philosophies. I am a staff member at the Women’s Community Center, and I organized an event last quarter about the history of the legalization of abortion, focused on the health risks faced by women when abortion was illegal. This Thursday, I intend to attend an event by Stanford Students for Life about how to prevent abortion by providing practical resources. When I walk into the room this week, I will most likely feel uncomfortable. I will be defensive of my pro-choice values. However, I will use this discomfort to engage in critical conversations and dialogue that extends beyond that space and time, rather than to assimilate with viewpoints that I do not fundamentally agree with.

As a daughter of immigrants to the United States, a country with a history that has fluctuated within a century from tolerating Jim Crow laws to the election of a biracial President to discrimination against Muslim-Americans following the Boston terror attack, I have learned to never accept symbols at their face value. The American flag to me does not solely represent freedom and diversity, just as it does not solely represent racism or xenophobia. Similarly, the symbol of Stanford University simultaneously represents to me its history of discrimination against women and minorities, as well as the open-mindedness that it fosters among its students today. This is why I was disappointed when I read the recent response to the Sanskriti-Stanford Israel Alliance mixer by Janani Balasubramanian in which they stated that the “Israeli state (and its associated flag) represents the colonization and mass violence enacted by Israel against Palestinian people”, with no mention of its other connotations.

I entirely agree with Janani in their follow-up article that as immigrants, we have a “strange privilege as diasporic people speaking for a country whose conditions we do not operate under”. However, just as you can’t operate under the conditions of a foreign country, you can’t selectively operate under parts of history. We are also a part of the diaspora of time. There is no historical privilege that should allow one complex historical event, the colonization of India by the British for example, to be viewed from a more or less important lens than the complex history that led to the creation of Israel. The privileged have often been without privilege, and the oppressed have often been the oppressors. For instance, my grandfather and his siblings were oppressed by British colonial rule as adolescents in India, but this ironic link between the two countries allowed him to complete his postgraduate studies in England once India achieved independence. Only a few generations later, I benefit from the privilege of his education. This is why I feel it is important to talk about both my privilege and the historic oppression of my people, but also why I cannot label my entire history as “anti-colonial”.

If an event should not occur due to the histories of the people involved, when are going to move past that to create a new history? We might not solve a problem by facilitating a meeting of people, but we definitely will not solve the problem by preventing the meeting from occurring. By choosing not to have conversations, we might preserve the integrity of certain ethical lines, but we will prevent other vestigial, restrictive walls from coming down.  If there is any place these unconventional, intersecting or controversial conversations can begin, it is here on a college campus. It is here at Stanford.

It is time we stopped viewing bodies in isolation by their color, history or politics. It is time we create solidarities based on intellectual curiosity, ethics and open-mindedness that do not align with these simplistic divisions. It is time we blurred the lines a little.

I am responding to Amrita Rao’s op-ed in the Daily responding to my recent piece in Static.  Back-and-forth internet arguments are rarely my thing, but this particular piece was full of enough casteist and Indian nationalist propaganda to warrant a reply.  I want to note first that because we’re operating in a global North context, both Rao’s words and mine have the very real danger of being taken as ‘native informant’ insight on this homogenous far away place called ‘India’.  This is our strange privilege as diasporic people speaking for a country whose conditions we do not operate under.  I hope you will be suspicious of both our positions when we speak about India.  I hope you will seek out some of the sources I have named here, and more, especially by activists and scholars located in the global South.

I found two major structural problems throughout Rao’s piece:

1. Rao frequently (and uncritically) separates culture, politics, and religion.  As I noted in the original piece, neither culture nor religion can be taken at face value without their political contexts.  These forces are constantly influencing and shaping one another.  Rao indicates I was trying to ‘put down’ Indian and Hindu culture.  My aim is the opposite.  I love my peoples and culture enough not to want them used in the service of colonial and other violences.  I want to talk about our problems and injustices rather than participate in continued silence (silence that is enabled by my class, caste, and geographic positions).
2. Rao collapses peoples and states.  This is an act of erasure, in the sense that the politics of a state rarely (if ever) reflect the politics of the marginalized populations they contain. Most marginalized peoples are instead engaged in actively resisting state violence against their communities.  Rao repeatedly claims the Indian state protects minorities with ‘rights’ and ‘extra rights’.  I’d ask that she learn more about the conditions of Muslims, Sikhs, Dalits, and Adivasi peoples in India.  As people located in the global North, we are able to learn ‘India’ as aesthetics and culture without marking the ways we do not experience Indian state violence.

The remainder of the article I will read, passage by passage.

A recent article published in STATIC, “On ‘Tel Aviv Meets Bombay’ and South Asian Assimilation” by Janani Balasubramanian ‘12, disparaged Sanskriti, Stanford’s South Asian cultural organization, for hosting a mixer with the Stanford Israel Alliance on May 3. This event had no political purpose, nor any intention other than to bring together a few dozen students from both communities to sit on FloMo field and engage socially over falafel and samosas.

We did not “celebrate the colonial Israeli state” or even talk about it. We did, however, marvel over the presence of the hamsa (swan) as a symbol in both cultures, an example of the many principles they share. Janani took this event as an opportunity to put down not just Sanskriti but Indian, and specifically Hindu, culture as a whole. I write this response not as a Sanskriti representative but as a Hindu and an Indian-American concerned about the derisive and incorrect image of my heritage propagated by this article, and the threat it presents to the atmosphere of mutual respect desired in the Stanford community.

The flier depicted the flags of both nations.  Israel marked itself as a colonial state by colonizing Palestinian land.  The event is also political because we are students with a lot of privilege and power; many of us will go on to acquire more of the same.  Culture and politics are not separable constructs.  I am happy to discuss the beautiful elements of our cultures; those beautiful elements are even more so when they are used in the service of marginalized peoples’ movements, and in opposition to colonial violence.

For an online source on Israeli apartheid, see http://electronicintifada.net/

First of all, the Indian education system does not favor upper-caste Hindus. The caste system as a social practice does still exist on some level but has no intrinsic roots in Hindu scripture. The reality in India today, especially in the state of Tamil Nadu, sees upper-caste Brahmins actively discriminated against for both education and jobs, with reservation quotas of more than 70 percent for backward and scheduled castes in private and public sectors and additional quotas for minority religions.

This paragraph is particularly troublesome because of its claims to reverse discrimination.  It is roughly equivalent to an Abigail Fisher move.  The affirmative action system Rao describes is in place to remedy a small piece of legacies of casteism (which has existed long before India was named ‘India’ following British colonial rule).  Yes, the affirmative action system should be accompanied by much broader material redistribution and upending of cultural discrimination.

The following blog catalogs a few experiences of caste-based discrimination of Dalit and Adivasi students in the Indian education system: http://thedeathofmeritinindia.wordpress.com/. Another site contains materialist analyses of caste systems throughout South Asia: http://www.anti-caste.org/

Indians of our parents’ generation immigrated to the United States as skilled professionals in high demand. Perhaps they did not face the same level of discrimination as other communities, partly because the first wave of immigration happened after the passage of the 1968 Civil Rights Act.

Still, one cannot simply ignore the violent hate crimes of the “Dotbusters” in New Jersey in the 1980s, named with reference to the red dots called bindis that Hindus wear on their foreheads. More recently, one cannot forget the mass shooting at a Sikh gurudwara in Wisconsin just last year.

Janani’s claim that “it was often safer [for Indians] to collaborate with the British colonial government than to challenge its White supremacy” should raise red flags for anyone with any knowledge of the anti-colonial Indian freedom movement. Mahatma Gandhi’s philosophy of nonviolent protest inspired both the leaders of the South African Anti-Apartheid movement and the American Civil Rights movement. To call a nation that gained its independence through nonviolent means, a nation that today has a Sikh Prime Minister and a Muslim Vice President, a cause of “Hindu-nationalist duress” reveals deep ignorance.

This passage is troubling because it is complicit in collapsing peoples and states, and also in ignoring root causes of violence.   We were also not brought here in mass on slave ships.  This is not the land that was genocidally stolen from us.  This land does not carry our original anti-colonial struggle.  As Rao mentions, Indians of our parents’ generation were largely protected by class and educational privilege.  This is not a mere function of the Civil Rights Act—it is the history of our race in the United States.  It is not my intention to ignore hate crimes against my own community.  We are also targeted for racist violence.  But state-administered and other racist violence against us is not our regular reality in the way it is for other communities of color, save, as I said in the original piece, post-9/11 Islamophobic violence.

Though the Gandhi story in India is one about nonviolence and turning cheeks, but independence was hardly a nonviolent process.  The Partition (between India and Pakistan) following the end of British colonial rule in particular resulted in unknown hundreds of thousands of deaths through religiously motivated violence.  What’s more, I am disappointed that Rao is equating government representation with peoples’ justice.  For an easy analogy, the US has a mixed-race president sending drones to attack brown and black bodies abroad, and torturing, deporting, and  incarcerating the same domestically.  Yes, it is possible for nationalist violence to occur with a ‘diverse’ cast of politicians.  An explanation of what Hindu nationalism is and how it operates would take up too much space here—an online search will yield all sorts of texts, have at it.

And if India truly did embrace Hindu principles, what would that look like? Like Janani, I too studied classical music and dance growing up, and attended weekly classes at Arsha Vidya Gurukulam, an institute for the study of Hindu advaita Vedanta philosophy and other classical disciplines. The gurukulam gave me a learning environment in which there were no wrong questions. I learned the value of ahimsa, causing the least possible harm. I learned responsibility for both the direct and indirect effects of one’s actions, karma. I learned about dharma, a framework for moral behavior that places one in harmony with the universal order. I learned the importance of pluralism and mutual respect among religions rather than mere tolerance. Hinduism bases itself on understanding rather than belief, and one need not be a follower of the religion to attain enlightenment.

Great, I learned about all these words too.  I would love for the Indian state to embrace them. We can start by ending our arms trade with Israel perhaps?  Or the pulling out of the occupation of Kashmir?  Or addressing the absurd levels of violence against women?

I do not understand Janani’s repeated reference to “Hindu patriarchy,” since Hindu tradition personifies divine energy in feminine form as Shakti and has a history replete with female religious leaders. My thorough immersion in Hindu tradition through the gurukulam has given me a strong sense of religious and cultural identity, and I am comfortable, no, proud to identify as a Hindu, as an Indian and as a woman.

I have a hard time understanding Hindu patriarchy as well.  I am sheltered from the worst of it.  There was an excellent lecture by Professor Ilina Sen hosted by the Center for South Asia at Stanford last week on women’s movements in India.  She focused on people’s movements and working women’s struggles, before and after Indian state formation.  Sen also told stories of violence I have heard many times before: how practices like bride burning and acid throwing are serviced by post-colonial Hindu marriage systems.  These are stories I hear about; they are not my story.  I will not understand the depths of Hindu patriarchy because I am protected by my class, caste, and geographic position.

Further, Rao is participating in the erasure of volumes of global South feminism that argue clearly that female goddess worship and elimination of patriarchy on the ground are not equivalent. Shakti is a great philosophical touchstone, and will remain as such as long as we are silent about sexual and gender-based violence in our communities.

Furthermore, I take issue with Janani’s endorsement of the term “South Asian” rather than Indian. The term works for an umbrella organization like Sanskriti that seeks to involve as many people as possible in cultural and social events, but it proves problematic in most other contexts. India, Pakistan and Bangladesh differ greatly on issues of religion, politics and human rights. Of the three, only India identifies as secular and as a democracy and supports equal (or extra) rights for minorities.

The three countries have different goals and needs, and, in the international arena, no foreign policy could be framed to deal with “South Asia” categorically. Identifying as “South Asian” individually means embracing an inherently fractured, contradictory self-image. In a collective context the term serves a purpose of inclusion but on the individual level only leads to cultural confusion.

Right, all these states differ.  The term South Asian for me represents a disidentification with the Indian state towards a solidarity with peoples of South Asia.

 Now to come to the actual event and what it represents. India and Israel have a rich, mutually beneficial relationship that stems from the similar challenges they face. In addition, the Hindu and Jewish traditions share many values of practice and lifestyle confidently recognized by religious leaders of both faiths. In an American context, Indian-Americans have followed in the footsteps of the American Jewish community to enjoy success in academia, business and culture, and they look to members of the Jewish community as role models for a strong political voice.

Sounds like both countries have in common largely economically privileged diasporas who are able to speak about their cultures and religions in narrow ways from their enfranchised positions.  Vijay Prasad’s The Karma of Brown Folk is a useful text on the particular rise of the ‘model minority’ South Asian image and its assimilationist tendencies.

Both India and Israel are democracies in locations of instability and face aggression from their neighbors. Unlike these other nations, they both offer citizenship and equal rights to their large populations of minority religions, with members of these communities serving in political office. India has developed a strong relationship with Israel not only through defense and security, but also through technology. Israeli techniques for soil management in desert climates have helped states like Rajasthan grow exportable crops. Irrigation techniques have changed the face of Indian agriculture, the means of subsistence for a majority of the population. The two democracies that represent the world’s two oldest religious traditions have much to share with each other.

 In terms of religion, Hinduism and Judaism are both non-aggressive in practice and propagation. Neither religion actively proselytizes, and both experience dwindling numbers in the face of other religions that doactively convert through a variety of means. Since 2007, the most prominent Hindu and Jewish leaders from the Chief Rabbinate of Israel and the Hindu Dharma Acharya Sabha have engaged in dialogue to promote mutual respect through three Hindu-Jewish Leadership Summits organized by the World Council of Religious Leaders. I was fortunate enough to tag along to the third Summit in New York and Washingon D.C. with my father, the Executive Director of the Forum for Religious Freedom, and I attribute my continuing passion for mutual respect among religious communities and for Hindu-American advocacy to such opportunities.

At a basic level, culture, religion, and the state are not all the same.  Not all Israelis are Jewish, not all Indians are Hindu, and so on.  But there is a much broader erasure here of the ways that both Hinduism and Judaism are used in the service of state violence.  Even if at their root both these traditions promote nonviolence and nonaggression, they are being employed by people in power to maintain hegemony.

I agree with you, Janani, that students at schools like Stanford will probably go on to have significant social and political influence, but I find that all the more reason to stimulate intercultural and interfaith dialogue in our community with the intention of fostering mutual respect. Mutual respect means respect for all communities, including those with which one might not agree.

The SIA-Sanskriti mixer created new friendships across the two organizations, friendships that will further the discovery of abundant similarities between the two countries, religions and cultures, giving us the chance to support each other and learn from each other’s successes past and successes to come.

To say that I ‘might not agree’ with Israeli state’s colonization of Palestine and the ways ‘Israeli-ness’ and Judaism is used to service the rhetoric thereof is like saying the Israel ‘might not be’ a colonizer.  The same is true for the ways in which ‘Indian-ness’ is used to mask violence by the Indian state, or the complicity of the Indian diaspora in this violence.  In 2006-2007, Sanskriti also hosted a conversation around South Asia and Israel.  It looked very different; in fact, it was a panel on South Asian solidarity against Israeli apartheid.  Think about it  — we can gather over shared conversations on the linkages between our cultures, histories, and religions, and also how those linkages can be mobilized to support anti-colonial struggle, to resist violence.

Janani is a South Asian electron spinning around the Bay Area making scholarship and art.  They like thinking about apocalypse, decolonizing the food system, and making space for quantum queers everywhere.  They’re Assistant Editor over at blackgirldangerous.org, an online forum for queer and trans* people of color.  They’re also one half of the spoken word duo DarkMatter.  You can read more of Janani’s work at queerdarkenergy.sqsp.com.

“FYP Week was my favorite week on campus all year! More please!”

“It began on this traditionally tricky, sticky topic in an open, welcoming manner.”

These were some of the many positive responses to the second annual “FLIP Your Perspective Week.” For the second year in a row, Stanford’s First-Generation, Low-Income Partnership (FLIP) hosted “FLIP Your Perspective Week,” a week’s worth of events aimed at fostering cross-class conversation and empowering the first-generation, low-income community and its allies. FLIP Your Perspective week took place from April 8th to April 12th  and consisted of eight different events, each addressing different topics related to class. FLIP partnered with various student organizations to host a variety of unique events. Some notable events were “Race and Class at Stanford, Challenging Classism: A Workshop for Allies,” and “Classing the Line” (based on the “Crossing the Line” activity implemented in many Stanford residences). “FLIP Your Perspective Week” was well-attended by a diverse group of students: first-generation students, low-income students, allies, grads, undergrads, professors, admissions officers, and other special guests. The attendees’ feedback* was overwhelmingly positive.

One of the greatest groups in attendance at “FLIP Your Perspective Week” were allies; that is, students who don’t necessarily identify as first-generation or low-income but support what FLIP does and want to be a part of cross-class dialogue at Stanford. Of the students that responded to our feedback form, 65% did not identify as first-generation or low-income. This could be an indicator that the students who were most moved to give feedback were in fact allies. Many students found that their perspective about class shifted after attending. One ally became more comfortable talking about class and their own class identity: “I got more comfortable identifying myself as upper class, saw how me speaking about it challenges others with experiences similar to mine to consider naming those experiences as ‘upper class.’” Others learned tools to be better allies. Another ally responded, “I understood what allies can do and what roles they can take in helping advance FLI (first-generation, low-income) perspectives. I felt as though the event created a sense that dialogue about FLI issues is possible on campus.”

First-generation, low-income students appreciated the sense of empowerment and community “FLIP Your Perspective Week” nurtured. An event entitled “FLI Celebration” highlighted the strengths that first-generation and/or low-income students bring to Stanford. Students reported feeling empowered after “FLIP Your Perspective Week.” “I learned that being low-income/first-gen is not shameful. I learned that while I may have grown up with many hardships because of these identities, there were still good things and unique perspectives that came out of my experiences too.” FLI students also learned that class issues exist on every end of the class spectrum. Another FLI student responded that, “ I didn’t realize the difficulties that upper class people went through. I feel like I understand it better now.” It’s clear that people of all class identities had a lot to gain from “FLIP Your Perspective Week.”

Many attendees thanked FLIP for creating the safe and open space to discuss class that many believed is lacking in other parts of campus. One student said that “FLIP Your Perspective Week” “allowed me an opportunity to talk about and think about my class and educational privilege and to gain hope that Stanford students are willing and able to talk about these issues.” Other students echoed this belief that there needs to be conversation about class at Stanford: “I’d like to see more of Stanford get involved in this because it’s an important discussion that isn’t brought up enough all over campus.” Part of what made “FLIP Your Perspective Week” such a safe space was the incorporation of perspectives from all backgrounds. Another respondent noted,“I was so happy to see people from all backgrounds coming together to discuss class visibility.” This welcoming atmosphere made it easier for allies to come together. “I really liked that I was able to go to this even though I’m not first generation or low income,” remarked one ally.

FLIP hoped to start a dialogue that could continue outside of “FLIP Your Perspective Week.” For one attendee, this was a success. “I liked how the events were a learning experience for everyone and allowed you to extend the conversation of classism to many aspects of life.” Attendees were also grateful for the incorporation of multiple perspectives on a traditionally touchy topic and hoped to see this conversation continue. “The way that FLIP incorporated perspectives from allies, faculty, and staff in addition to FLIP student perspectives was the most wonderful and community-building aspect of the program. I hope that FLIP will continue to do that in the future.”

For more about FLIP and how to get involved, check at our Facebook page.

Destiny is a Frosh Intern on the FLIP Core leadership team.

*Quotes and feedback come from a feedback form sent out following FLIP Your Perspective Week. Out of 31 respondents, 35% identified as first generation and/or low-income while 65% did not identify as first generation and/or low-income. 68% of respondents had never attended a FLIP event before while 32% had attended a FLIP event before.

I’m used to hearing various iterations of the question “What are you going to do with that?” It’s not annoying, it’s a totally reasonable response given my academic choices. I’m an International Relations major with a shockingly broad concentration (“Comparative Culture and Society”) and a Studio Art minor. I’ve spent summers volunteering abroad, summers doing research, and summers holed up the darkroom working on myriad analogue photography projects. As of late, I’m also a Journalism co-term. Given that the title of this degree is also the title of a professional field, I’ve been getting the “What are you going to do with that?” question less.

But: I really don’t know yet if I want to be just a journalist.

So if I’m not in a talkative mood, I’ll answer That Question in a sort of, “Yeah man, I don’t know, LOL!” kind of way. But if I’m feeling more expansive, you’ll hear all about how genuinely exciting I think the intersection of art, culture, and international affairs is. I’ll muse about journalism as an art form. Potentially talk about how using both photography and journalism to tell unbiased stories has made me feel more productive in addressing issues of social justice than any other experience in my life.

Hence my latest answer to That Question is that maybe I want to be a multimedia journalist. It is a field that is both artistic and objective. Through imagery the multimedia journalist reveals truths in order to inform the public at large. This all sounds really grand, it’s just that there are a lot of fairly trivial stories out there. So… really I want to be a multimedia journalist that only covers issues that I care about. Understandably, the real world doesn’t let students do this. Thus, when I heard about a new group that would allow me to act as the hybrid Journalist-Artist-Activist that I dream of becoming, I jumped at the opportunity to get involved.

The Creative Activist Network (CAN), is a new initiative of the nonprofit organization Students of the World, which has worked since 1999 to get students involved in addressing issues of social justice through multimedia production. CAN provides students with video, photo, and audio equipment to rent free of charge, as well as distribution opportunities through Participant Media’s affiliated social action network, TakePart.com. It lets me be a Journalist-Artist-Activist, but that’s certainly not what you have to be. You can be a Programmer-Activist, a Documentarian-Journalist, a Writer-Photographer-Revolutionary, etc. With the Creative Activist Network, you can muster any inclination towards creativity and artistic expression that you have and combine it with more traditional academic disciplines (or not!) to create something artistic, informative, relevant and powerful.

Concrete examples may be needed at this point. Students involved are currently working to produce content that revolves around the issue of hunger. Then, the highest quality projects are featured on TakePart.com. One student is doing a photography project on homeless people in the Bay Area. Another is working to create a video that compares rates of malnutrition throughout the world. And another is writing an article based on her friend’s experience with poverty and hunger growing up. Some members have experience as writers, some have experience with various art forms, and some have no experience with any of it. The point is ultimately to provide an outlet for anyone and everyone to combine their various interests in a practical way, whether or not they’ve done anything like that before.

The extensive support network that the Creative Activist Network provides truly makes it possible for students from all backgrounds to create a quality project in the span of a single quarter. Throughout the production process, members have one-on-one meetings with the Creative Activist Network’s student leaders (currently myself and fellow senior Andrew Baek), who are experienced with various forms of multimedia. All members then come together for weekly meetings, where we share ideas and provide advice on each other’s projects. Finally, near the end of the production process, Students of the World staff members provide feedback on drafts of student work. In this way, students of all experience levels are able to learn from both each other as well as media professionals.

Prior to joining this group, I considered myself to be “bad at activism”, at least in the way in which I used to define it. That is, I often found myself questioning the impact that one more outraged picket sign could have to change people’s minds. I’ve wondered whether impassionedly preaching about a cause turns as many people off as it brings on board. But I’ve learned that activism doesn’t have to be so blatant. I’ve learned that at least for me, what feels the most impactful is being the person that publishes a picture of the angry picket signs or writes an article about the protest. I want to be the one that captures a moment, informs others that it happened, and why it happened. The Creative Activist Network lets me do this. Students can make their work a call to action or an objective analysis, but first and foremost the work we create aims to inform.

Ultimately, on a campus where I’ve seen many students let go of their artistic side as their schedules fill up, I’m excited that an opportunity like The Creative Activist Network exists. It is interdisciplinary initiatives like this that make art a practical endeavor for students with too much on their plates already. So talk to me! Let’s ponder how journalism can make a difference, how art can make a difference, and how whatever you’re majoring in can make a difference. Moreover, let’s figure out how you can combine all of these things (I bet that you can!) to potentially make an even bigger difference.

Katie is a senior interested in all of the things she just talked about and a co-leader of the Creative Activist Network. She also likes concerts, camping, sarcasm, and hats. If you’re interested in getting involved with the Creative Activist Network and/or talking about life, you can reach her at katieb1 at stanford dot edu. 

My migration story looks and feels like the migration story of many South Asian immigrants in the late 20^th century.  My parents were upper-caste Hindus, who, through a combination of a casteist education system and enough money to attend school, became skilled in computer science and math.  We landed first in Ohio, where they both secured IT jobs, and began their relatively short ascent into the American middle class.  We moved from our formerly colonized country to become settlers on this other occupied land.  Our brown bodies and the professional income they would eventually carry were also gentrifying neighborhoods.

Unlike many Black, Latino, and Native communities, my community did not face disproportionate levels of police brutality, incarceration, etc.  Indeed, until 9/11, when folks from across the South Asian diaspora were persecuted as possible Muslim terrorists, I did not consider myself a target for racist state violence.  My assimilation was easy.  I was becoming a White lie packaged in a brown body.  The expectation in my household was also clear: that I would get good grades, attend a good school, continue my family’s class ascent, and not challenge or question the racist attitudes of this nation.

 This strategy of assimilation has its roots partly in colonization: it was often safer to collaborate with the British colonial government than to challenge its White supremacy.  India is more palatable to the West as a place for henna, Bollywood, yoga, and saffron.  Growing up, this the India I became skilled at narrating to my White peers.  At home, I learned Indian classical music and dance, with no mention of the political position (often both patriarchal and casteist) of these art forms.  In Hindu Sunday school, I was given Mohandas Gandhi.  I was given Indira Gandhi.  I was given Jawarhalal Nehru.  I am grateful for my queer body, because it forced me to begin questioning these ideologies, which have deep roots in both colonization and Hindu patriarchy.

It took me coming to Stanford University, and to the Bay Area—to have the privilege of classes in critical race studies and time to organize—to do my diasporic political education.  It was here that I started unlearning India as chai and saris, and started remapping it with meanings of anti-colonial and other struggle.  It was here that I got schooled in Dalit (lower-caste) feminism, in South Asian people’s movements, in the resistance of gender and sexual minorities.  It was here that I started identifying as ‘South Asian’ rather than ‘Indian’ to build solidarity with those countries, which, following British rule of the Indian subcontinent, are under military and financial duress from the Hindu-nationalist Indian government.  It was here that I started politicizing South Asian-ness, and ceased viewing it with a White gaze that renders the subcontinent as purely aesthetic.

This week I saw the flier for the ‘Tel Aviv meets Bombay Mixer’, an event co-sponsored by the Stanford Israel Alliance and Sanskriti.  The flier depicts pictures of the shores of India and Israel respectively, along with both nations’ flags.  For me the Israeli state (and its associated flag) represents the colonization and mass violence enacted by Israel against Palestinian people.  It represents the forced sterilization of Ethiopian Jews within its borders.  It represents segregated bus lines and other public services.  It represents racist values enacted as apartheid.  The collusion of Sanskriti and SIA for me spurs great sadness—the complicity of Stanford’s most prominent South Asian cultural organization in the celebration of the colonial Israeli state.

For those who would pass this off as ‘just’ a cultural event, I offer that culture must be contextualized in its political context.  This is particularly relevant in the case of Zionism (Israeli nationalism).  Indeed, the initiative to mark Israel as a site of cultural and progressive vibrancy—and thereby erase its colonial occupation of Palestine—is literally called ‘Brand Israel’.

For those who would pass this event off as ‘just’ a student mixer, I posit that this event has broader global context—India and Israel’s military trade is around $9 billion, and as a whole India has more pro-Israel politicians than much of the world.  What’s more, because Stanford students will go on to accumulate much more wealth and political power, it is a dangerous game to reinforce the attitude on our campus that Israel is a great party theme, rather than an enactor of apartheid.

Mostly, the event is symbolic for me of the assimilation of much of the South Asian diaspora.  We come from different class, caste, and regional backgrounds, to be sure, but our overall cultural and economic position in this country tends towards safety and assimilation into whiteness.  It says something that Stanford’s most prominent South Asian cultural organization is hosting an event that endorses Israel with no mention of its colonial occupation of Palestine. It represents erosion of a possible global brown solidarity, the forgetting of our anti-colonial histories.  It represents our complicity.

Janani is a South Asian electron spinning around the Bay Area making scholarship and art.  They like thinking about apocalypse, decolonizing the food system, and making space for quantum queers everywhere.  They’re Assistant Editor over at blackgirldangerous.org, an online forum for queer and trans* people of color.  They’re also one half of the spoken word duo DarkMatter.  You can read more of Janani’s work at queerdarkenergy.sqsp.com.

What is queer? and what does queer want? were two questions asked over the course of the class “Introduction to Queer Studies” (FEMST 120). Questions about what queer “means” are important to me because, as both a queer-identified individual and as a member of the campus group Stanford Students for Queer Liberation, parts of my identity are implicated in use of the word. The  meanings of queer can be a scholarly pursuit. However, the placement of queer in the title of a student group committed to “social change” makes its meanings relevant to the entire Stanford community, regardless of academic focus.

Described as a “discursive horizon” (Queer Theory 1), queer is fluid; a site of connotation rather than denotation. As a result, writings about queer — “Queer Theory” — are sometimes contradictory. The goal in reading, however, is not to produce a consistent worldview but to challenge entrenched ideas. For example, Annamarie Jagose suggests that 0ne use of queer is as an umbrella term for non-normative identities, serving as a contraction of “LGBTQIA.” Another writer, Cathy J. Cohen, suggests that queer has a more “radical potential” through its inclusivity not just of non-normative sexuality, but of differences in race, class, physical ability, and more (Punks 11-16).

The “radical social change” that is the underpinning of both Cohen’s argument and SSQL’s mission statement can only be achieved through substantive efforts to educate and mobilize both group members and members of the community at large. The book LGBT Campus Organizing recommends breaking an organization’s vision — say, “challenging social norms” — into manageable goals (101-102).  For example, members of SSQL plan and organize the annual Trans* Awareness Week, which features film screenings and guest speakers on trans* issues ranging from the prison system to art and music. Trans* Awareness Week — and other “queer” events on the Stanford campus that seek to educate as well as mobilize — seems to fall in an area between “service” and “activism,” two concepts that are often debated at Stanford.

In his op-ed for the Stanford Daily, “My Problem With Activism,” undergraduate Chris Herries makes a sharp distinction between “service” and “activism.” Service, he writes, involves meaningful action that is guided by long-term principles, whereas activism is reactionary. It is “angrily shouting about how the world is unfair, pretending you know how the world works.” This sentiment is not uncommon among Stanford students. In an informal, anonymous survey that I created recently, two individuals expressed disagreement with activism at Stanford. “True dialogue is true activism,” wrote one student, criticizing Stanford activists for “shooting down other people.” Another student wrote that they would feel expected to agree with all activists on campus if they become involved in one activist group.

While I cannot speak for other activists at Stanford, nor the mission statements of the groups in which they participate, it has been my experience that the work of campus organizations, or VSOs, is not uniformly politically charged. Rather, activism seems to fall somewhere along a spectrum between service work — for example, a clothing drive — and advocacy for a cause, such as circulating a petition. The distinction between the two is not always clear (not necessarily a bad thing). Another Stanford Daily article, published last year, situates the discomfort students may feel in the “rhetoric of revolution” that the Editorial Board felt was present in activist groups (“Not Just Apathy”). Despite this perception, the mission statements of Stanford Students for Queer Liberation and Stanford’s own Haas Center for Public Service are not too unalike.

Under “Staff Values” the Haas Center lists, among other things, these statements:

• We value and respect each person, both as an individual and as an integral part of this and other communities.

• We believe in the importance and complexity of honoring and learning from diversity.

• We hope to nurture individual and organizational growth that is rooted in experience, intentional reflection and multiple ways of knowing. (Mission, Values, and Principles)

SSQL’s mission statement affirms this message of diversity: “we affirm that the right to be different is a fundamental human right…” It also includes a statement similar to the Haas Center’s concept of “multiple ways of knowing”: “[we] organize around the fact that our liberation is not contingent on adapting to the status quo…we envision a world where all people can manifest their identities with integrity and security” (“About SSQL”). The Haas Center’s statement even includes a toned-down variation of SSQL’s call for “radical social change”: not only is the Center committed to the realization of a “just and sustainable world,” they believe that in order to accomplish this staff must display a “willingness to take risks.”

By this comparison, I am not suggesting that the Haas Center is an advocate of the radical politics of SSQL. I am not suggesting that campus activist groups have much in common with the institutions of Stanford, or even that such an association would benefit anyone. In fact, the institutions of the university are often obstacles to justice and free expression. Access to White Memorial Plaza, which is a specifically designated “free speech area” on campus, is contingent upon prior approval from the Office of Student Activities and Leadership (Student Affairs). Students are strongly discouraged from causing disturbances in the area. The university is also infringing upon formerly student-run areas of campus such as Chi Theta Chi and Suites dining.

My intention in the previous comparison is to note that the “rhetoric of revolution” may not be what is alienating students from activism. It is also worth asking, however, which revolution? There are many activist groups at Stanford, each with a different focus. Thirty-five percent of respondents to the anonymous survey were members of an activist group, a number undoubtedly affected by the title of the survey (“Survey About Activism at Stanford”) and the audience that it reached. Despite this limitation, respondents were remarkably diverse in their engagement with activism. Groups included SSQL, Las Hermanas de Stanford, the Asian-American Activist Committee, The Society of Chicano/Latino Engineers and Scientists, the Spoken Word Collective, Students for Reproductive Justice, First-Generation Low-Income Partnership, and more.

Despite all being categorized as “activist groups” by survey respondents, these groups offer a wide variety of programming at Stanford: circulation of petitions, politically-engaged poetry, leadership training, and community solidarity.What does this say about activism? Does the wide variety of programming categorized by students as activism reduce it to a “platitudinous buzzword” or a “vague category of d0-goodership,” as one journalist wrote (“Banished Words”)? In a class discussion for FEMST 120, several ideas were proposed for what activism might “be.” Ultimately, the only conclusion that was reached was that any wide, sweeping approach to activism would require a sweeping generalization about what activism is. Because there are so many disparate groups at Stanford, perhaps discussions about activism are approaching this concept with the wrong mindset.

As a commonly-used word — at least on college campuses — that encompasses a great deal, queer has something in common with activism on the level of language. As a term of personal identification, queer has the ability to sustain and connect multiple identities. As an umbrella term, it can be said to incorporate “culturally marginalized sexual self-identifications” (Jagose 1). However, queer is not aligned with a single form of identification, giving it the potential to be used in a variety of contexts (examples from Stanford might include last year’s event “Queering the Undocumented Narrative.”). Similarly, the term “activism” is not limited to a single activity or idea.

One of the goals of queer’s intentional fluidity is to be “anticipatory,” writes Annamarie Jagose (1). This means that the questioning of commonly-held notions is done with the hope of creating a world in which none of the lived experiences from which these notions rise are marginalized. This sounds similar to visions of political advocacy. Again, on the level of language the meaning of queer has something in common with activism. Both words have the potential to be claimed,  to have ideas incorporated within their fluidity. They also interact on a substantive level: in my survey, thirty-seven percent of respondents self-identified as queer. Sixty-five percent identified as a member of an activist group or interested in activist work. While these results are not necessarily representative of campus at large, they do show an overlap between queerness and activism.

When asked to describe what activism meant to them, respondents listed passion and a desire for political change as some qualities of an activist. This passion was expected to be translated into tangible acts: generally defined as changing society or the “status quo” through political advocacy and cooperation. Respondents seemed to consider activism to be a result of a larger mindset. For many, that mindset involved “intentional” living: a realization of the consequences of one’s actions. For some, however, this mindset also meant being less willing to acknowledge the viewpoints of others. Interestingly, one respondent described activism as involving a “queer” mindset.

Sixty-eight percent of respondents indicated that they were familiar with the term “queer,” and over half indicated that they considered the identity to be political in some way. Text responses indicated that while “queer” had the connotation “not straight,” it was not necessarily a replacement for “LGBT” – instead, respondents used words like “resistance,” “challenging,” and “questioning” to further describe the term. Some individuals specifically stated that queer involves more than just sexual orientation. Like Jagose, they said that the fluidity of the term incorporates other marginalized identities, the liberation of which is crucial to the politics of queer. Several individuals responded to the question “please identify any other identities you feel are important,” listing such things as first-generation, low-income, able-queer, neurodivergent, and trans*.

Individuals at Stanford have multiple, intersecting identities – such as “first-generation/middle-class/queer” – and may be part of multiple marginalized groups. This further suggests that a sweeping approach to activism would not be inclusive. As a result, programming by activist groups at Stanford is organized through coalition-building: events such as Trans* Awareness Week and the recent Class Confessions workshop are build on the acknowledgement of intersecting identities- an inclusivity whose necessity seems strongly supported by the results of this survey. However, these instances of coalition-building among activist groups seemed to be viewed by the wider community as closing ranks: a retreat into an “echo chamber” in which participants must all agree with one another (O’Byrne).

As the members of FEMST 120 discussed, a uniform approach to activism would be both limited and marginalizing — as would a generalization of what activism means. Activist programming at Stanford seldom attracts an identical audience each time due to the multitude of campus organizations, and the fact their activities do blur the perceived binary between “service” and “activism” delineated in Chris Herries’ article. After reading the results of my survey, I suggest that much of the debate on activism at Stanford occurs at the level of language. The false universal that the word activist — and, moreover, the word queer — is seen to represent only motivates critique of it. Just as queer is an intentionally fluid term meant to be inclusive of many perspectives, so activism can — and must —  be inclusive of contradiction and complexity.

This is not to say that activism is above criticism. It is important to make activist spaces inclusive to those who are interested in becoming involved. Inclusivity means ensuring physical access as well as creating spaces that are inclusive to all identities. Cathy J. Cohen notes that differentials in power exist within all identity categories, even marginalized groups (“Punks”). Daily Editor Brendan O’Byrne’s commentary that activists could “focus our energy closer to home” is also worth considering: for example, the Stanford Hospitals and Clinics have laid off hospital staff and are planning to outsource further labor to a subcontractor (“Stop Layoffs and Managerial Abuse”).

However, coalition-building between diverse activist groups at Stanford should not be taken as a sign of uniformity of opinion, any more than “queer” should be considered a synonym for “LGBT.” To do so represents a generalization of activist work. Speaking as a queer woman involved with activist groups, my queer identity – as well as my other identities – has shaped my politics, at the same time that my exposure to activism has undoubtedly shaped my identity. Ultimately, attending a university should be challenging, even if that means encountering ideas that challenge a previously-held worldview. We could all, as a survey respondent suggested, afford to be a little more “queer-minded.”

Lina Schmidt is a sophomore from Bainbridge Island, Washington. Currently undeclared, she enjoys writing and is a member of SSQL. She is an Outreach Coordinator for STATIC. She can be reached at lina93 at stanford dot edu.

A Note on this Article:
In writing this paper, I utilized several articles from the Stanford Daily. Readers may feel that the opinions in these articles do not match with their own. I have attempted to acknowledge this while still trying to find ways to address the nebulous — but important! — issue of attitudes about activism. Additionally, contributions to student publications do “matter,” though I’ve had conversations in which people say otherwise: if what is being said does not match your point of view, consider submitting something to a student publication such as Stanford STATIC.

References:
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Editorial Board. “Not Just Apathy – Activists Undermine Participation.” Stanford Daily. Stanford, 18 May 2012. Web. <http://www.stanforddaily.com/2012/05/18/not-just-apathy-activists-undermine-participation/&gt;.
Herries, Chris. “My Problem With Activism.” Stanford Daily. N.p., 4 Dec. 2012. Web.
Jagose, Annamarie. Queer Theory: An Introduction. New York: New York UP, 1996. Print.
“Mission, Values, and Principles.” Haas Center for Public Service. Stanford University, n.d. Web. <http://studentaffairs.stanford.edu/haas/about/mission&gt;.
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