Indices, 2021-2022

 

Index by Topic

Place, Culture, and History

del Campo, “Opening Our Eyes to History”
Exum, “The Next Exit”
Khan, “Journeys to Belonging”
Kupillas, “Beatitudes”
Nguyen, “Taking Up Space”
Vasa, “The War on People”

Race, Ethnicity, and Identity

Chen, “The ‘I’ in Tribe is Silent”
del Campo, “Opening Our Eyes to History”
Exum, “The Next Exit”
Nguyen, “Taking Up Space”
Wayans, “Those Who Silence Us”

Media, Entertainment, and Technology

Lee, “The Importance of Uncertainty . . .”
Li, “Productivity or What We Will”
Moran, “Severing the String”
Sabirin, “Pinterest: Inspiration or Manipulation?”
Yoon, “The Rules of the Game”
Whitley, “Stay Woke”

Art, Culture, and Politics

Huang, “Art Versus Artist”
Jacobs, “Pussy Kayaks and Peach Pits”
Maxfield, “Sadism, Sontag, and Snuff”
Webb, “And All the Men Merely Players”

Gender and Sexuality

Huang, “Art Versus Artist”
Jacobs, “Pussy Kayaks and Peach Pits”
Lee, “The Importance of Uncertainty . . .”
Webb, “And All the Men Merely Players”

Language, Culture, and Identity

Feng, “Orwell, Trump, and Twitter”
Nguyen, “Taking Up Space”

Index by EWP Vocabulary and Key Aspects of Essays

1. Problem: A Puzzle or Question that Sets in Motion an Essay

Sabirin, “Pinterest”: We claim physical things as evidence to preserve the identities we carefully construct over the course of a lifetime. Pinterest allows for this preservation in digital space. But how much of the self can we preserve online before it collapses under the influence of other outside forces, from advertising to algorithms?

Jacobs, “Pussy Kayaks and Peach Pits”: Agha brings tremendous vulnerability to her filmmaking, touching on the many ways patriarchy conditions women to suffer in silence, denying them an autonomous relationship with their bodies. The film raises an important question: how does film as a visual language situate itself between the internal, often physical experiences of individuals and the external identities of the audience, and how does this positioning relate to visibility and representation? 

2. Representation: A Substantive Rendering of Evidence from a Source

Wayans, “Those Who Silence Us” (1:51-2:51): This question of Black ownership and mutability amongst Black individuals rings in my head as I view Barry Jenkins’ Moonlight—a film that illustrates Black pain and internal struggle through the story of a young Black boy, Chiron, nicknamed “Little,” coming to terms with his sexuality throughout adulthood. There’s a moment in the film that strikes me in particular, where mutability and discomfort in one’s body correlate. The strings to an intense classical instrumental fade in as we move into a wide shot of Little eyeing his mad, drug-consumed mother, backlit by the neon pink lights from the next door room. Stillness fills the deep space between them. We move in closer to see Little, this time more clearly: his face is pained by the looks of his decaying mother. The instrumentals grow louder now, vocalizing Little’s internal desperation that is screaming for help, but is unable to do so. Motionless, Little views his mother before being met with an inaudible “Don’t look at me!” Without breaking a gaze with Little, his mother backs up into the door behind her, consumed by the neon pink lights.

Kupillas, “Beatitudes”: . . . Grace Church is my own ‘certain building’: I can’t qualify its pull or justify my interest, but I am haunted, certainly, and must follow my ghosts.

I go to an evening prayer session on an icy Wednesday evening. The sun has set and I can hear the bells ringing out down the street long before I see the building; it’s a sound that claims the sky. The dark, thick wooden doors at the front of the church are propped open; I step through them towards another set of doors, held open for me with a gentle word of welcome. I hold the brief, fanciful thought that I may burst into flames if I walk any further. I remind myself that I’m neither so evil nor so significant as that.

[ . . . ]

He says something about “ineffable joys,” which God has prepared for those who truly love Him, or Her, or Them. “We are God’s children now,” he intones, “We know not what we may be.” I don’t know if that snippet of wisdom, containing an allusion to Ophelia’s line from Hamlet, was meant to inspire hope or fear, but the phrase sticks with me—even as the service comes to an end, even as I step back out into the cold blue night. As I exit, the city comes rushing back like a thrashing wave. I’d almost forgotten where I was.

I go to bed. I think and think and think.

Yoon, “The Rules of the Game”: “Finish him,” a deep voice booms, and Mileena lunges at her opponent with razor-sharp fingers as she pulls his neck close to the crooked, skinless jaw of her mutated visage. Her gaze sharpens into feral focus as she caresses her victim’s cheek with a long, spindly tongue, silently drinking in his fear and pain. With a faint metallic whisper, her iron-tipped claws spring out, cleaving through skin and bone as she carves a gaping hole in her adversary’s stomach. A symphony of blood, skin, and bits; the wet sound of intestines slipping and slithering from their places. Fingers splayed, Mileena draws her bloodied hand back, then rams it up her victim’s ribcage, pushing upwards past the fleshy tunnel of their throat and into his mouth. With a blood-curdling shriek, her fingers punch through her adversary’s forehead from the inside, and the crunching of bones echoes as she crumples their face like a used napkin. With a swift, brutal tug, she wrests the gruesome trophy free, and the screen hones in on the mutilated mass of flesh clutched in her bloody talons. “Mileena wins,” the deep voice declares. A single, ominous word looms in the foreground, painted a deep, bloody red: FATALITY. 

The battle had been too much for me—the blood, the gore, and the unequivocally remorseless eyes of Mileena as she butchered my opponent on-screen. I knew that I wanted nothing more to do with what I’d just seen, so I shut down the game and haven’t touched Mortal Kombat 11 again. 

3. Analysis and Argument: Examining, Questioning, and Synthesizing Evidence

a. Close Analysis

Huang, “Art Versus the Artist”: One central text from this rigorous debate is the essay “The Death of the Author” by French theorist Roland Barthes. First published in 1967, “The Death of the Author” is an analysis of the issues of authorial intent and the relationship between authors and their works. It argues for the complete disregard of the author’s intent and biographical context when reading a text. Barthes criticizes the tendency for literary critics to assign “greatest importance to the ‘person’ of the author,” because to “give a text an Author is to impose a limit on that text, to furnish it with a final signified, to close the writing” (157). It is here that we must unpack Barthes’s use of the term “Author.” If, as Barthes suggests, it is the readers who “give a text an Author,” the position of ‘Author’ cannot simply refer to the writer of that text. Rather, the ‘Author’ is a conceptual thing—a figure through which we view a work. The author writes a text, but they are also thought to “nourish the book, which is to say that he exists before it, thinks, suffers, lives for it, is in the same relation of antecedence to his work as a father to his child” (155). Barthes argues that the presence of the Author is therefore a manifestation of the cultural fallacy of conflating the writer, “his person, his life, his tastes, his passions,” with his work (153). In doing so, the work itself becomes an allegory for the author’s own life, thereby containing some ultimate secret meaning for the reader to find. This limits the reader by reducing the purpose of reading into searching for that given meaning. Barthes encourages his audience to separate the author from their work because “Once the Author is removed, the claim to decipher a text becomes quite futile” (155). Freed from the Author, the language is allowed to speak for itself. The emphasis of literature must then shift to the reader, who is the “destination” of the text. In fact, Barthes argues that “the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author” (158). In order for a reader to fully contend with a text, to discover its multitude of meanings, the Author must be killed and buried. 

b. Connecting/Extending (Forwarding)

Chen, “The ‘I’ in Tribe is Silent”: Julius’s interaction with the cab driver urges an investigation into what happens when different perceptions of our identity come into conflict. Karla Cornejo Villavicencio provides a possible answer in her book, The Undocumented Americans, which documents the trauma 9/11 inflicted upon the undocumented immigrants who were employed as cleanup workers at Ground Zero. To clear the two hundred thousand pounds of debris, “the city hired contractors — Americans, Anglo, white” (32). In turn, those contractors hired subcontractors, “many of them bilingual Latinx people with the golden ticket of American citizenship who could present themselves as friendly faces to other immigrants”  (32). Assuming they had a shared Latinx identity, many undocumented workers believed that the subcontractors who hired them would look out for their best interests, while in reality, Villavicencio notes, “melanin and accents are ineffective binding substances” (36). The white contractors relied upon what Villavicencio labels “a plantation model . . . exploiting whatever sense of community that might exist among Latinx people” (36). Under this model, the subcontractors provided the workers with inadequate protection, and most workers fell ill after the cleanup as a result. These subcontractors thus formed troubling alliances based on two competing facets of their identities: one based on ethnicity, which secured the trust of the undocumented workers; the other stemming from American citizenship, which granted them access to a greater level of security and power than their undocumented counterparts.

The hierarchies that exist within minority groups, as demonstrated by the power relations between the subcontractors and the undocumented laborers, also divide Julius and the cab driver. Julius is a highly-educated, soon-to-be psychiatrist, a person of much higher socioeconomic rank than the cab driver, who, quite tellingly, Cole leaves unnamed.”

Moran, “Severing the String”: Like Tolentino, Renner sees hypervisibility as a dangerous force. The tendency of the web to “scale up mistakes to monumental proportions” that Renner identifies is only possible because the Internet places “personal identity as the center of the universe,” as noted by Tolentino (Renner; Tolentino 14). While Tolentino criticizes  the effects of an ever-present online audience, the greater issue, to Renner, is the loss of agency over the presentation of our identities. Renner’s line of thinking extends Tolentino’s metaphor of performance. The ability “to move laterally, as an individual, into a new body or personality” has less to do with visibility than it does with concealment (Renner 3). For those who decide to shift their performance, a cognitive dissonance arises, as it becomes more difficult to conceal outdated or unfavorable aspects of our identity. Seeing as “there’s essentially no backstage on the internet,” there is nowhere to change costumes (Tolentino 15). Without the power to eradicate our past selves, we are forced to compete with the hypervisibility of our own digital ghosts. As a result, even the most authentic of online performances can never perfectly match our offline selves. What gets lost in translation as our performances shift between mediums? 

c. Connecting/Questioning (Countering)

Whitley, “Stay Woke” (:48-1:40): In Kylie Holman’s essay, “Can You Come Back from Being Cancelled?” she explores the #MeToo movement as a distinct cultural moment. Holman shares that a #MeToo tweet provided legitimacy to claims and gave voice to those looking to share their stories, effectively giving power to the people to cause real change where the government has failed. Cancel culture was born out of “cancelling” of the acceptance of sexual assault during the #MeToo movement. Holman states that cancelling someone can be viewed as a sort of “citizen justice,” or “norm enforcement tool.” This all sounds nice on paper and to some extent can be helpful in the most extreme cases. However, cancel culture has devolved into a culture plagued by fear of making a mistake in a world where what’s ‘politically correct’ is constantly changing, a culture plagued by performative activism and ‘wokeness.’ And most importantly, a culture that isn’t even close to bringing us towards the change everyone desires. 

Maxfield, “Sadism, Sontag, and Snuff”: The film has garnered criticism for being ‘snuff,’ a film that has scenes of actual death in it. After the film took home a BAFTA for Best Documentary, Nick Fraser, a journalist and documentary producer, wrote in The Guardian that a film that enlisted perpetrators to tell the story of genocide should not take home the Oscar for Best Documentary Feature, the ceremony set to happen a week after the article was published. Fraser likens Oppenheimer going to Indonesia to give a platform to these perpetrators of genocide to visiting Argentina in the 1950s to let Nazis in exile tell their story of the Holocaust. Fraser contends that The Act of Killing does not enhance our knowledge of the genocide: “Instead of an investigation, or indeed a genuine recreation,” he claims, “we’ve ended somewhere else—in a high-minded snuff movie.” There is one technicality, though—no one actually dies during The Act of Killing. . . .

Huang, “Art Versus the Artist”: If we are to adopt Barthes’s ideology, then we can completely remove all association between Rowling and her work. A reader of Harry Potter may then choose to read the work through whatever lens they see fit. For example, Jackson Bird recalls being a young child and internalizing the characters’ own journeys to self-acceptance as a way to quell his own gender dysphoria. Yet Bird still describes the recent revelation of Rowling’s transphobia as being a “punch in the gut,” now wondering “if [he’ll] be able to separate the author from the text, if and when I decide to read the books again—a decision [he’s] yet to come to a conclusion on.” It’s a stark juxtaposition: a book that was once a source of comfort to Bird is now one that he may decide not to read again. However, there is a counterpoint to consider: why is Rowling’s transphobia even relevant if the Harry Potter books have nothing to do with trans issues? After all, a reader unaware of Rowling’s Twitter statements might not pick up on any transphobia within the text itself. This is a familiar conundrum in such controversies. Bird himself repeats the mantra of trying to “separate the author from the text,” but what exactly can we classify as author and text, respectively? 

d. Synthesis

Moran, “Severing the String”: Hypervisibility, then, is an even bigger problem than Tolentino suggests. Tolentino overlooks the fact that, in addition to being exploited, our identities are increasingly fabricated by forces beyond our control. More than lacking the agency to accurately represent our identities online, as Renner and Lanier suggest, we lose our agency over the construction of our identities by design. The rabbit hole Chaslot describes forces us to fit within a prefabricated identity, meaning that much of our online performances are planned out for us before we even begin. Rather than actors on an inescapable stage, we have become semi-sentient marionettes, aware that we are performing without seeing the strings guiding us. 

Jacobs, “Pussy Kayaks and Peach Pits”: While some identities are external and easily perceived, others are not. There is a difference, then, between immediately recognizable representations and those that require further explanation and deeper understanding. Appiah examines representation through a lens trained on clearly identifiable identities, whereas Agha’s film explores a different kind of representation—making the internal external. Mental and physical illness are critically underrepresented in visual media because they are often internal conditions; their representation requires more than putting a person in front of a camera. Agha could record herself living her day-to-day life and you would never know that she had endometriosis unless she told you. Agha communicates these internal experiences poignantly through visual metaphors—uterine pain is a crumpled red tissue paper, anxiety is a can of soup, and an IUD is a tampon stabbed by two Q-Tips. These mundane items become powerful visual tools: metaphors externalizing internal experiences through the stories they help her to tell. By giving physicality to an issue so commonly ignored and hidden away, Agha’s film bridges Woolf and Appiah’s viewpoints; she creates a new form of representation for an identity otherwise difficult to represent, and, in doing so, brings to light internalized struggles that often go unacknowledged when people are unable to communicate openly about them. Metaphor makes the immaterial material, and film is a tremendous tool for accomplishing this task. 

Film also evokes empathy, allowing a general audience to relate to nuanced and complex problems through its visual symbolism and language. When Woolf lectures on the internal and invisible struggles that she and others like her face, she focuses on how women are conditioned to be silent about their true feelings—to accommodate, to placate, and to prioritize the feelings and experiences of others over their own. On the other hand, when Appiah talks about similar issues of representation, his conversation shifts to external signifiers: the immediate recognition of someone portrayed in visual media to whom you can relate. These concepts are not so dissimilar—we are all just looking to be seen and to see ourselves in others. Agha thus cements a connection between Appiah and Woolf: she takes the ideas about the internal that Woolf was so passionate about and represents them in the visual, external, and accessible way Appiah elaborates.

4. Structure 

a. Beginnings 

Vasa, “The War on People”: Calvin Bryant was a star high school football player from Edgehill Housing Projects in Nashville, Tennessee. Teachers praised his independence and intelligence and peers described him as “loyal, friendly, and generous” (“Calvin”). At age 22, Bryant would be sentenced to 17 years in a state prison, 15 of which would be without parole. A sentence this large parallels the convictions of rapists, murderers, and kidnappers, yet what put Bryant behind bars was nowhere near as extreme: a first-time offense for possession of MDMA, more commonly known as ecstasy (“Calvin”).

Bryant’s story is not unique. Ever since President Nixon named drug use “public enemy number one” at a press conference in June 1971, the US has waged a ‘war on drugs,’ seeking to eradicate them from society. This war arose from a kind of mass hysterical reaction to  widespread drug use in the US during the 1960s countercultural movement. [ . . . ]

To say that the war on drugs has failed would be an understatement. With continued drug-related violence, millions incarcerated, drug epidemics, and rising overdose deaths, it seems clear that this iron-fisted campaign has been futile. However, the state of Oregon has recently proposed a controversial solution to ending the war on drugs: decriminalization. Under Ballot Measure 110, Oregon voted to terminate criminal penalties for possession of small amounts of drugs, including heroin and cocaine, and even opted to legalize therapeutic use of psilocybin, a psychoactive compound from magic mushrooms (“America’s War”). Such a departure from the status quo has spurred a heated debate regarding not only the legality of drugs, but also how we perceive those who are addicted to them. This controversy inevitably raises the question: Should the United States push for nationwide decriminalization?

Jacobs, “Pussy Kayaks and Peach Pits”: My uterus is the pit of a white peach. It sits on a pink table, and as filmmaker Sindha Agha talks to me about hysterectomies, I watch a gloved hand holding a pair of tweezers pull the pit from view. Cut. She begins telling me about her medically-induced menopause, and suddenly, I am a rotting pomegranate. For a moment, I see my mother in the seeds, riding the waves of an experience that awaits me far in the future. I had never thought of us as a peach and a pomegranate until now. 

[ . . . ]

Birth Control Your Own Adventure is well-situated to explore the internalized oppression experienced by many individuals with uteruses who have confronted patriarchal expectations for complacency in their lives. The film uses a striking visual style and an honest narrative approach to represent both the internal and the external elements of women’s relationship with their bodies. Agha brings tremendous vulnerability to her filmmaking, touching on the many ways patriarchy conditions women to suffer in silence, denying them an autonomous relationship with their bodies. The film raises an important question: how does film as a visual language situate itself between the internal, often physical experiences of individuals and the external identities of the audience, and how does this positioning relate to visibility and representation?

Feng, “Orwell, Trump, and Twitter”: In 1946, George Orwell declared that the English language was declining. His six rules for writing have persisted over the decades, encouraging students like me to write concisely and sincerely. With the advancement of modern science and technology, politics, communication, and the English language have all undergone a series of revolutionary changes. Social media platforms like Twitter play an increasingly important role in daily life. Some political leaders, most notably Donald Trump, have used Twitter to communicate with masses of people. Does the rise of Twitter call Orwell’s arguments about the connection between politics and the English language into question?

b. Signposting/Transitioning/Developing a Series of Claims

Exum, “The Next Exit”: I’ve witnessed firsthand the way the American justice system kills the Black spirit—traps it in a plastic bag and suffocates it. The great American novelist and activist James Baldwin witnessed similar attacks on the soul of the Black American, a journey documented in Raoul Peck’s 2016 film I Am Not Your Negro.

Vasa, “The War on People”: While the arguments of both the proponents and opponents of drug decriminalization have merits of their own, seeing this controversy solely through the lens of public health provides an incomplete picture. In fact, this recent shift towards decriminalization may affect those who are addicted as much as the drugs to which they are addicted. Hence, we might also consider the nature of addiction and how decriminalization impacts those suffering from it.

c. Recursion

Kupillas, “Beautitudes”:

Exum, “The Next Exit”: 

d. Endings

Nguyen, “Taking Up Space”: Representing the “messy lived realities in which racial groups overlap” calls for more than narratives catered to white consumption or the branding of racial experiences as homogenous commodities (Hong). Hong’s resolution to “speak nearby” poses a challenge to contemporary writers by asking them to waive absolute authority over their narratives, but it also offers them the chance to replace divisiveness with cultural mixing and inclusivity. Making inclusive art means inviting others to speak about experiences with which you are unfamiliar and, more importantly, it demands listening to them. When it comes to “bad English,” Hong posits, “If you want to truly understand someone’s accented English, you have to slow down and listen with your body. You have to train your ears and offer them your full attention.” For me, this is an opportunity to be understood not as an exotic outsider with an inconvenient name or a white-adjacent poster child from America’s outer circle, but rather as an American who has been shaped by more than solely the customs of the country where my parents came from or the unbalanced social social contract of the country where I grew up. It may be too ambitious to hope that, after generations of making ourselves invisible for the sake of fitting in, our differences will be embraced with open arms. At the very least, perhaps more nuanced representations of Asian Americans as part of our country’s narrative will offer—even as we are scapegoated, targeted, and ostracized—a much-needed reminder that we don’t have to earn the right to take up space in our own home.

Vasa, “The War on People”: Decriminalizing drugs will undoubtedly create issues of its own. In addition, it is unlikely that removing the criminality of drug use will end systemic racism or addiction stigma. But decriminalization has never been a silver bullet. Instead, it is part of a departure from the antiquated and oppressive thinking that has been the foundation of public policy and societal standards. Decriminalization is not about accepting drugs as a normative facet of society. Instead, it’s about rejecting the stigma that has dehumanized minorities and drug addicts for decades, resulting in violence, bigotry, and discrimination. It is about disarming those in authority from this powerful and dangerous weapon, and instead, replacing it with values that emphasize human rights and dignity, regardless of an individual’s history of drug use. The “war on drugs” was never about controlling illicit substances; it was about controlling marginalized communities and demonizing minorities. Thus, the value of decriminalization arises from our deep need to acknowledge the deeply troubling nature of current policies, to redress the harms of ineffective and intolerant drug policy, and to put an end to this war. The longer we continue to turn a blind eye to the racist and narrow-minded sentiments behind current drug policy, the longer this futile war will wage on. While those in power will claim that drugs are the enemy, in reality, it will be everyday citizens like Calvin Bryant with a target on their backs.

Lee, “The Importance of Uncertainty”: If excluding nuance from our conversations increases polarization and emphasizing it hinders progress, how, exactly, can we solve any problem? On one hand, discriminatory or violent acts towards any group or individual are, without question, unjust. On the other hand, life “exists in the mostly unobjectionable middle”; it is more complicated, ambiguous, and nuanced than our precise, definite point of view (212). Nuance is not required to determine whether sexual assault is wrong. But in the cases of sexual assault we encounter in real life, there is often more than one side to the story. However, when we leap to defend our passionate belief, we refuse to acknowledge uncertainty and avoid conflicting thoughts or circumstances. Uncertainty is uncomfortable. It elicits the terrifying feeling that we are wrong. Yet in order to draw fair conclusions, perhaps we, like Daum, must be able to dwell in it, enduring confusion, facing contradictions, and immersing ourselves in discussion to attain further clarity. Initially, Daum’s audacious claims might provoke outrage. Following the reflexive shock, however, come our questions. And perhaps embracing this skepticism, however intimidating, is a key to solving the problem. After all, the rage, passion, and conviction essential to achieving progress cannot emerge without the courage to challenge an accepted belief—without the willingness to accept uncertainty.

5. Voice: Presence, Orientation, and Awareness of Audience Expectations 

Exum, “The Next Exit”: As a kid, I didn’t understand why—I couldn’t grasp why my father didn’t deserve beautiful things, why his life began and ended with gray walls and iron. So I sat at our dining room table and tried to scrub away all the glitter, the gold flakes dancing down to the floor before settling, defeated, on the tile. I peeled the stickers off, tearing the little cats into pieces and leaving blank spaces on the lined paper, but I still couldn’t send it. I couldn’t erase the crayon, so I had to throw it away. It made me sick, really. I sat and thought about a police officer opening my letter and deciding my father didn’t deserve to see it. Even then, I somehow knew that he wouldn’t get better—like his father, he was to be sidelined and degraded as another ghost in a Black body. There was no next exit. This was it.

Nguyen, “Taking Up Space”: Many first generation immigrants adopt a code of quiet amiability to protect themselves—better to say nothing than the wrong thing. Phillips makes it clear that the primary goal of many first-generation West Indian migrants, including his father, was not to become “insiders” in their new country, but to simply be tolerated in public until they could “find some relief from [the] anxieties of belonging” at home or among other immigrants (12). He goes on to explain that successfully assimilating often means drifting away from their homeland community: “With the [better] job comes a salary increase and perhaps a move to a new neighborhood where there are less of you and more of them” (13). In an op-ed for the Washington Post following the murders of six Asian Americans in Georgia, actor Cecilia Kim reflects on her similar experiences in the predominantly white Southern neighborhood where she lived with her first-generation Korean American parents. Like Phillips’s father, her demeanor was meek and tolerant. She refrained from complaining even when their property was vandalized with toilet paper and baked beans by neighbors who “saw to it that we were not welcome” (Kim). When they were ‘ding-dong ditched’ and found a bag of feces on their doorstep, Kim’s mother insisted on going door to door to find the culprit and demand an apology. But Kim “pleaded for her to calm down . . . to stay silent. I didn’t want to be known as the kid whose mother threw a tantrum in an otherwise ‘peaceful’ neighborhood.” When the hazing and harassment continued, Kim maintained her passive approach, hiding behind the blinds during one prank as four young children jeered “Chinese fire drill!” She recognized that “[her] neighborhood had made it clear that it wasn’t okay to be [herself]” and she “[tried her] best to disappear”—a strategy many Asian Americans know well. I too changed my first name so pronouncing it would stop delaying roll call, and my parents would drive to Vietnamese-owned grocery stores in the next town over rather than irritate a white cashier with their accented English. Although it hurts to keep your head down through every racist snipe, to get used to a new name, or to pay for extra gas every week, the fear of being met with a condescending smile or dismissive chiding makes it preferable to comply with our marginalization instead of asserting our presence and asking for cooperation.

Chen, “The ‘I’ in Tribe is Silent”: Later, in our conversation on WeChat, my new friend seemed dissatisfied that most of her classmates were not Chinese. I started typing: “Non-Chinese friends are fun too! You shouldn’t —.” Pause. Seized by a feeling of guilt, I deleted the draft, watching the cursor swallow up my unsent words. 

Index by Genre Category or Assignment Type

Shorter Interpretive Essays/Assignments (1-3 sources) 

Chen, “The ‘I’ in Tribe is Silent”
Exum, “The Next Exit”
Wayans, “Those Who Silence Us”

Conversation/Controversy Essays/Assignments 

del Campo, “Opening Our Eyes to History”
Huang, “Art Versus Artist”
Lee, “The Importance of Uncertainty . . .”
Moran, “Severing the String”
Nguyen, “Taking Up Space”
Vasa, “The War on People”
Webb, “And All the Men Merely Players”
Whitley, “Stay Woke”

Research or Inquiry-based Essays/Assignments (Objects/Places in Context)

Feng, “Orwell, Trump, and Twitter”
Jacobs, “Pussy Kayaks and Peach Pits”
Kupillas, “Beatitudes”
Khan, “Journeys to Belonging”
Li, “Productivity or What We Will”
Maxfield, “Sadism, Sontag, and Snuff”
Sabirin, “Pinterest: Inspiration or Manipulation?”
Yoon, “The Rules of the Game”

Video or Multimodal Essays

Wayans, “Those Who Silence Us”
Whitley, “Stay Woke”