politics

Before speaking to Luis Velasquez, I never knew it was possible to be in Peru, China, Harlem, and on Wall Street all at once.

Henry Williams, a sophomore at Columbia College, is fresh out of the shower, standing in his pajamas with a towel draped over his shoulders, as he welcomes me into the basement lounge of River Hall. There is a lot to talk about, and he does not waste time. He speaks quickly and eloquently—it’s clear that he has told this story many times before. As Williams laments the uninspiring centrism that he believes has plagued leftist politics since the end of the ’60s, a student plays violin across the room. The melancholic crooning is like a funeral march for politics as we know it.

As this semester began, a 17-year-old incoming Harvard University undergraduate was detained by U.S. Customs and Border Protection at Boston Logan International Airport. Nine returning Arizona State University undergraduates from China were denied entry at Los Angeles International Airport. The visas of at least a dozen graduate students from Iran were revoked abruptly, barring them from boarding United States-bound flights.

The Columbia Maison Française hosted dozens of audience members for a debate on navigating the limitations of tolerance and intolerance in an increasingly divided social landscape on Thursday evening.

“To exist on this campus is a revolutionary act” was something that I heard a lot as an underclassman. But as an upperclassman, I can tell you that my existence here isn’t resistance—it’s self-interested complacency. I probably repeated the idea that my existence was revolutionary as much as I heard it as an underclassman. In the tide of emotions following the 2016 election, and the racial injustices of police brutality and systematic oppression, I found myself firm in one thing: that my only solution was to be a revolutionary. I wanted to fight for a more ethical system shrouded under mountains of Marxist theory that I barely read, even when it was required for CC. Revolution to me looked like an end to police brutality and racial discrimination, the attainment of full equality for LGBTQIA+ individuals, and economic equality. So, firm in my belief of revolution but lacking any theoretical or critical framework, I and many of the people around me set out to be ethical—economically and socially in ways that just weren’t allowed in our current economic system. Still, we cursed the University, the city, and the country for not caring enough.

Political science is one of the most common majors at Columbia and Barnard. Encompassing a wide variety of areas that utilize skills applicable to any field, it seems like a pretty solid option.

When Malaysia’s Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad responded to a student’s question about his anti-Semitic comments during his World Leaders Forum appearance yesterday, he said that he was exercising his right to free speech. He then asked, “Why is it that I can’t say something against the Jews when a lot of people say nasty things about me, about Malaysia, and I didn’t protest, I didn’t demonstrate? We have to be willing to listen to views that are not in our favor because of free speech.” Shortly after, he said, “I think I’ve said enough.”

When I first moved to Oklahoma from Beijing in 2012, I was not only shocked by the number of cows and hay bales in the empty fields, but by the difference between how Americans and the Chinese express their political opinions. My fellow Oklahomans often asked me about my opinions on China’s foreign policies and government structure. Their openness and directness caught me off guard, and I didn’t know how I should answer their questions about censorship and such. More importantly, I didn’t know how my answers might further deepen their misconceptions about China—so most of the time, I ended up not answering their questions at all.

In a January 30 op-ed published by Spectator, Coleman Hughes cited his singular experience of racial discrimination on campus as evidence against the conclusion that Columbia is a “vessel for systemic racism.” According to Hughes, this one event was just that—a singular, isolated incident.

As a scholar of both English and women’s, gender, and sexuality studies, I often feel as though I exist in a constant state of cognitive dissonance. I’ll go from reading racist, Enlightenment-period travel logs in my 10:10 a.m. class to deconstructing the violence of the capitalist nation-state in my 2:10 p.m. It’s wild. While I chose to major in English mainly because it is the only way to pursue creative writing at Barnard, I have been nonetheless struck by the fact that most of my readings center on the perspectives of white men.