medical-racism

I did not watch “Lady Bird” until the end of my senior year of high school, months after it came out. I distinctly remember talking about it during lunch with some of my classmates. Many of them said the plot of the movie felt true to our senior year experiences (I definitely related to the strained relationship between Lady Bird and her mom). Overall, it was a pretty “OK” movie - a solid three star rating on Letterboxd, maybe 3.5 if you’re feeling particularly emotional when you watch it.

Your point of view on society’s race issue can dictate the harm of your privilege. In this nation, attempts of self-representation by Black people are met with counter-narratives that silence or smother their testimonies.

Messages between members of the Columbia chapter of the Phi Gamma Delta fraternity, nicknamed Fiji, have circulated over the past week, implicating several students in racist comments targeting a Black woman photographed in The Denver Post after being tear-gassed by police. One fraternity member’s concerns were dismissed when he expressed disgust with a joke that compared the tear gas—a toxin linked to chronic respiratory diseases and miscarriages that has been used as a weapon against protests—to semen.

Amid all the chaos, confusion, and grief brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic, the students in Columbia College and School of Engineering and Applied Science remaining on campus received a chilling email last Tuesday from Dean Cristen Kromm, writing that on two separate occasions during the prior week, someone had drawn a swastika on the wall of the 16th-floor hallway in East Campus. The notion that someone is repeatedly targeting Jewish students with a symbol of hatred, especially during a time when we should be banding together to love and support one another, is painful to come to terms with. It is disturbing, isolating, infuriating, saddening, and as Kromm mentioned, “deeply concerning.” But it is certainly not surprising.