Blog

Not My Type

November 2, 2020 - By Ward Schumaker

In 2016, after a woman accused him of putting his hand up her skirt while on an airplane, Trump told supporters at a campaign event, “Believe me, she would not be my first choice, that I can tell you.”

The crowd laughed. 

More than two dozen women have accused the president of sexual misconduct and one, E. Jean Carroll, has taken him to court. Carroll alleges that in the mid-nineties Trump threw her up against a wall in a fitting room in Bergdorf Goodman and raped her....

Conversation Theory

November 1, 2020 - By Jim Hicks

Hello, Michiganders. It’s been almost four years now since I last checked in, though I’ve often wondered how you’re doing. I do come back for visits, once in a blue moon, but that’s no excuse for not calling or writing. Given everything that’s happened this year, and with the election just days away, I suspect that most of you aren’t sleeping all that well. I know I’m not. The way I see it, it could still go either way, and I’m not talking about the election. I’m thinking about the country.

So, here’s my two cents. There are some things we can do, and other things we should remember, if we don’t want a total meltdown. First off, can...

10 Questions for Ryler Dustin

October 30, 2020 - By Edward Clifford

In Edinburgh I could not understand
   what the cabdriver said as he drove me
           to the restaurant, and inside the only person
   who would speak to me was a Lithuanian
                  with pink hair, who leaned
      above her wine and whispered,
                                              nothing is familiar.
—from "...

What We Can Learn from History

October 29, 2020 - By Richard T. Chu

Richard Chu

The anti-Asian xenophobia we are experiencing today is not the first instance of anti-Asian discrimination. We have seen in history several cases of such xenophobia: the exclusion of the Chinese in 1882; race riots against Filipino farm workers in the 1920s; the barring of Japanese, Korean, and other Asian immigrants under the Immigration Act of 1924; the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II; the crackdown against the Chinese suspected of being communists in the 1950s; the rise in anti-Japanese sentiment in the 1970s due to the economic slowdown in the U.S. automotive industry; the unjust deportations of refugees from Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam; the racial profiling of Indians and...

How Would an Inclusive Community Talk about China?

October 29, 2020 - By Sigrid Schmalzer

Today I want to ask us to consider how discourse on university campuses—both highly visible statements at the center of social media storms and far more routine communications—reinforces the enduring prejudice in the US that sees China as fundamentally alien and disconnected from “us.”

And I want to ask, how would a truly inclusive community talk about China?

In January 2019, the director of graduate studies in the Biostatistics department at Duke University sent a warning email to graduate students. Faculty members in the program had asked her to help them identify students who had been speaking Chinese “very loudly...