When I was a little girl, I wanted to name my future child Isis, but as the terrorist group ISIS continues to wipe out the population and rich cultural history of the indigenous Assyrian communities of Northern Iraq, I can’t find a way to make that tasteful anymore.

When I tell people that I am Assyrian, I get the same two questions: first, “Oh, Syrian?” No, not Syrian. Assyrian. Then, “Where is that?” Well, nowhere in particular, for the moment: Assyria fell in 600 B.C.E., but the very same ancient Aramaic-speaking Assyrians continue to survive as a tribal Christian minority in the Middle East and in close-knit immigrant communities around the world.

There are only an estimated 1.5 million-2 million Assyrians living around the world today; according to the U.S. Census Bureau, the United States claims 110,000 self-identified Assyrians, concentrated mostly in Northern Illinois, California and Central Arizona.

Both of my parents came to America in opportune times: My father came just in time for the Kennedy administration and the Beatles, and my mother bought herself a convertible in Chicago after graduating from the University of Baghdad’s medical scho­­ol, which had recently opened its doors to women. The progressive Iraq they had left is no longer recognizable to us now.

I was five-years-old on September 11, 2001. Like any other American child, I witnessed the Iraq War only through teachers and the news, as my parents adopted America as their homeland as well as mine. They did, however, raise me to be proud of my Assyrian identity. I remember once sitting in my mother’s lap and asking if the Assyrians in Iraq were safe, and she told me, “It may be bad in Baghdad, but no one will touch Mosul,” which is the historic heart of the Assyrian motherland and once claimed 1 million Assyrians.

On June 20, 2014, ISIS informed the residents of Mosul that any of the city’s 30,000 Christians who remained in the city by noon the next day would be forced to convert to Islam, pay an intolerable tax or die. By the evening of June 21, there were no Assyrian Christians left in Mosul.

Assyrians are no strangers to persecution. From 1915 to 1923, the Ottoman Empire carried out a systematic killing of the Assyrians and Armenians living in and around its territory, slaughtering an estimated 500,000-750,000 Christians. The jurist who witnessed the Assyrian massacre of 1933 in the newly established state of Iraq went on to coin the word “genocide.”

Since beginning a gradual exodus from the Middle East in the 1980s, Assyrian immigrants have struggled to pass on their Assyrian identity, culture and spirit to their American-born children. Naming practices have shifted from Biblical names to those that recall the glory of ancient Assyria, such as Ashur, alluding to the ruler Ashurbanipal, who established the most extensive library of the ancient world, and Ashtar, the Assyrian goddess of fertility and the source of the word “Easter.”

The Assyrian-American community observes Assyrian Martyr’s Day every year in August to remember those martyred for their identity, but like September 11, it is a date that recalls events I had no witness or recollection of — a predicament generally affecting millennial-generation Assyrians born in America.

My own grandmother fled from what is now modern-day Turkey to Iraq on foot at only 13 years old; her immense will to live produced determination to provide her daughters with the education that she never had.

The Assyrian community outside of Iraq is in a unique predicament: without our own land, we must rely on the diplomatic power of other governments to fight on our behalf, but unfortunately, the suggestion of putting boots on the ground is a political landmine for any major world power. The Assyrian-American community begins to show signs of frustration and discouragement as its appeals to the UN and U.S. government continue to fail in securing international attention; as our Facebook homepages fill with videos of mass beheadings and crucifixions as well as those of DIY Assyrian militias in the homeland, it can seem unfathomable that the world can stand by and watch.

The threat of ISIS is even more desperate than current diplomatic stalemate would suggest. The oppression and relocation that once enriched Assyrian culture may soon bring about its end. Though most of the world may think that the Assyrians are lost to history, I proclaim that we still exist; not only so, but even when plagued by identity crisis and lost hope, we continue to honor where we came from that we may know where we are destined to be.

The post Fighting for Assyrian-American identity appeared first on The Triangle.

It’s interesting when I have debates with my peers on the issue of Lisa McElroy’s suspension due to her accidental email containing anal porn. It’s hard to find fault in her actions. It is difficult to understand how the University can possibly chastise her, mainly because I do not believe any laws have been broken, code of ethics possibly but no laws. Being that McElroy is a law professor, most of her students are probably over the age of 21, allowing for the distribution of said videos to be legal, and since this is not an issue of copyright, I see no fault.

Many will make the argument that it’s an educational establishment and it needs to be addressed as it can hurt the reputation of the University. Although this is true, the story brought a lot of press to Drexel University. “Any press is good press” is cliche but it’s the truth.

Secondly, it’s a college, so most, if not all, students are old enough to have sex and have watched porn before, and if you don’t believe me, stand in the back of an accounting class and watch the laptops.

I think it’s just silly to punish an adult for making an adult mistake, not to mention that she admitted her wrong doing as opposed to hiding and cowering away from her faults.

Even her fellow faculty members have come to her defense. In an article in The Huffington Post, David Lat said that this is not practical as there is little to no reason to ban her on the claim of harassment. The sending of a link to Pornhub shouldn’t be considered harassment seeing as she mistakenly sent it, and I highly doubt that all her students actually opened the link and watched the video or checked their emails for that matter.

McElroy should be in a classroom right now teaching her students as opposed to being on leave. This is not high school, and we should not cower from the thought or even the discussion about sex, especially when said professor has published scholarly work on sex and the inner working of the physical action. Hopefully, this will all blow over because I’m tired of hearing about it, and you probably are also.

The post Teacher should not have been suspended for porn incident appeared first on The Triangle.

Emma Watson’s United Nations speech, Columbia University student Emma Sulkowicz’s sparking a revolution and Steve Santagati being ripped apart on national television for his views on catcalling are only several of the thousands of discussions on femenism circulating around the globe.

Here’s one more for Drexel University.

You often hear terms such as “feminazis” or on the other end of the spectrum “meninists.” being thrown around. But what exactly does this growing discussion consist of? Let’s start with a basic definition.

Feminism is defined as “the advocacy of women’s rights on the grounds of political, social and economic equality to men.” What does this mean? It’s simple; women want to be viewed as equal to men and not have a disadvantage when it comes to competing for something, just because they are women. But to achieve this, it’s important to first understand and accept that men and women are currently not equal.

Often, people believe feminism to be the equivalent of “man-hating.” This is not the case. When we say “women should be respected” it does not imply that men should be disrespected. Feminism isn’t about making women stronger. Women are already strong. It’s about changing the way the world perceives that strength.

But here’s the thing about women and men who consider themselves fememists, it tends to be a selfless act. I’m going to focus exclusively on economic equality. As an 18-year-old college girl that can afford to go to a private institution like Drexel University with a good chance of a future where I will make enough to support myself, there comes a point where making 77 cents for every dollar a male makes is unfair yet doesn’t affect me too much. Making $192,500 for the same job a male counterpart does for $250,000 wouldn’t make as big of a difference compared to if we were talking minimum wage.

Let’s break it down. Federal minimum wage is $7.25. And if a woman is making $7.25 at a hypothetical job, a man would be in theory making $9.41 for the same job. Now, for a woman working full time (40 hours a week) at minimum wage, she would make about $15,080 a year (without taking into consideration days off and taxes).  In the state of Pennsylvania, income tax is around 3.07 percent, meaning that she would pay about 462.96 in taxes. This brings her total income down to $14,617.04 per year (once again, this does not take into consideration federal holidays and sick days). Now, if we calculate the same thing for a man earning $9.41, you would get a total of $19,572.80. And after factoring in tax the annual income of a man with the same job would be $18,971.92. The difference? $4,354.88; about 30 percent of a woman’s paycheck.

But feminism is not just about the women living from paycheck to paycheck, or the woman in Afghanistan who was forced to marry her rapist. It’s the fact that the “Lewinsky” scandal is referred to as “Monicagate” or “Lewinskygate,” even though Bill Clinton was the one in a relationship. It’s being punished for exposed shoulders and having so many restrictions on dress code in order to not distract boys from their studies. It’s glorifying Sam Smith’s approach to writing music about exes while degrading Taylor Swift for the same reasons. As girls, from the day we’re born, our gender is considered synonymous to weakness, incapability and inadequacy. It’s important to keep in mind that “feminism” is not a dirty word and it’s not about just women. It’s about equality.

The post What feminism means in today’s world appeared first on The Triangle.

Spring break is an integral part of American college culture. After spending months and months studying, performing labs and writing exams, students really look forward to a week of relaxation under the sun with a few beers and good friends. But spring break is not all fun and games. For one 19-year-old female, it became her worst nightmare.

The young woman, whose name is not being released, was at Panama City Beach in Florida, where, passed out on the beach in front of a club, she was raped by four men, while a crowd of fellow spring breakers did absolutely nothing about it. According to a CNN news report, the woman went to police, believing she had been drugged and raped. She had no recollection of the rape, the report goes on, but saw the video that is now on YouTube and noted that the tattooed woman being sexually assaulted by four men was in fact herself.

The rape took place sometime between March 10 and 12 behind Spinnaker Beach Club and is now being investigated by authorities from Troy University in Alabama, the woman’s university, as well as authorities at Panama City Beach. The Bay County sheriff, Frank McKeithen, has expressed in an interview how “disgusted” he was by the behaviour of these men and that the beaches need to be more controlled.

The behaviour of the four men who raped the unconscious woman is not the only thing that is “disgusting.” The video, through which the woman identified herself, showed at least a hundred onlookers, who did nothing at all to stop the assault from occurring. Instead, they continued to drink and party and enjoy themselves.

There is something called the bystander effect, which illustrates how people are less likely to help in an emergency when there are more people in the area. This effect stems out of a social contract of politeness, in that we are expected to behave a certain way in public. But nothing excuses blatantly ignoring an unconscious young woman being raped. Nothing. The fact that hundreds of people were around should mean that this sort of thing should not have happened. The fact that it is more socially acceptable to allow a gang rape to continue than it is to call the people out is a problem. The fact that the woman was drugged in the first place is a problem.

Police made two arrests in early April. The two men were identified as Ryan Calhoun and Delonte Martistee, students of Troy University. The university has suspended both students and has disallowed Martistee to participate on the track team. George Davon Kennedy, a third suspect in the gang rape, was arrested about a week later. Kennedy is a student at Middle Tennessee State University.

The post Bystanders do nothing as woman is gang raped appeared first on The Triangle.

A recent photo of Jaden Smith,the 16-year-old actor and rapper has caught much attention. As of late: The son of Will Smith likes to wear girl’s clothing. Dresses and crop tops, in particular, are his most worn pieces. If we’re being honest, Jaden can rock them better than most of us wish we could, but the male teenager has been receiving quite a bit of backlash for his fashion forwardness, with many people questioning his sexuality.

Cross-dressing is not something foreign to our society. An entire performance industry is founded on the very premise of men donning dresses, from the art of Kabuki to RuPaul’s Drag Race. This behavior is often associated with playing or entertainment and with men being considered less masculine. However, androgynous fashion has been catching on as well, with many designers making clothes that are both feminine and masculine or neither. But what Jaden has done is something entirely different.

The caption accompanying one photo on his Instagram states, “Went To TopShop To Buy Some Girl Clothes, I Mean ‘Clothes.’” Jaden went to a female clothing store and bought a notably female dress, but he did not buy the dress because it was a dress; he bought something to wear. His actions force us to examine the way we use clothes to identify gender. Cross-dressing and androgynous clothing, while unique, are nevertheless founded on the premise that there is a distinction between male and female clothing.

Jaden’s fashion choice brings up an important double standard that still exists in our ever-progressing society. The ability for women to wear men’s clothing, such as pants, has become
widely accepted and normalized over the past century, but we hardly ever see the reverse, outside of some sort of special occasion. It’s not the norm. We have managed to almost de-gender the concept of pants, but wearing dresses and skirts and clothing of a feminine nature is socially restricted to those who identify as female. Although pants themselves are considered to be neither masculine nor feminine, they are often individually designed with one gender in mind. Even boundary-pushing styles, such as boyfriend jeans, inherently suggest a gender binary.

Jaden’s dresses don’t just push gender bounds, they blow past them completely. He says that what he wears aren’t “girl clothes”; they’re “clothes.” This way of thinking is precisely what a more accepting and gender-fluid world needs: Instead of men, women, or non-cisgender people wearing men’s, women’s, or androgynous clothing, there should simply be people who wear clothing.

With more and more people identifying themselves outside of the gender binary, it’s somewhat counterintuitive for clothing to still be gendered as male or female. And rather than having 1 million different descriptors for a piece of fabric, we should follow Jaden’s example and wear whatever makes us feel like ourselves.

Kaitlin Thaker is a junior International Area Studies major at Drexel University. She can be contacted at op-ed@thetriangle.org.

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When I was a Drexel student ten years ago, there was a traffic light on Chestnut Street in front of the cafeteria and with it, a crosswalk. That crosswalk was heavily used by students to go between the Quad and MacAllister Hall, the cafeteria, the Creese Student Center, and other places of interest in that area.

When Chestnut Square was being built, that traffic light and crosswalk were removed, but the ghost of that convenient crossing for pedestrians remains today. A sign at the very spot where the old crosswalk existed now urges pedestrians to use the crosswalks on either end of the block but is largely ignored. Many Drexel students and faculty still duck out from between cars there and make a run for it across Chestnut Street every day.

While jaywalking is a part of life in Philadelphia, the massive amount of people crossing illegally at this section of Chestnut Street is particularly hazardous. It’s like a game of Frogger. Some students take the risk and run across as traffic is coming. Others get to the middle lane and then decide to backtrack. The cars parked on the street cannot pull out of their parking spaces when the road is clear without having to yield to the pedestrians darting out behind and in front of their vehicles. And once they do pull out, there’s the inevitable student running across the road a few feet ahead. It is a miracle someone has not been hit by a car yet in this area considering how much traffic comes through this stretch of Chestnut Street every day.

The university should recognize the loss of the crosswalk in the middle of the block between 32nd and 33rd Street as a safety hazard for the Drexel community.There are some pro-active measures the school can take to make crossing Chestnut Street easier. First, it could be more forceful about making sure students cross at the existing (and less convenient) crosswalks on either end of the block.  Second, it could work with the city to put a crosswalk where the original one once existed. At least there would then be a designated place for students to cross in that area instead of the current chaos. Additionally, Drexel could build a bridge over Chestnut Street similar to how the University of Pennsylvania has one over 38th Street. This would probably be expensive, but it would keep both traffic and students moving freely. Finally, the university could do nothing and wait for that inevitable day when someone gets hurt. I hope that Drexel won’t choose the final option.

Lori Becker is an alumni of Drexel University. She can be contacted at op-ed@thetriangle.org.

The post Chestnut Street in a major need of pedestrian crosswalk appeared first on The Triangle.

On Jan. 11, 2015, millions of people, including an array of world leaders such as British Prime Minister David Cameron, German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy marched through Paris in show of solidarity against terrorism and in support of freedom of speech. In response to the terrorist attack on Charlie Hebdo, a French satirical magazine, in which 12 people were murdered, it was an opportunity for the world to come together, and show unity even in the aftermath of terror and grief.

For those who were unable to make it to France, they showed their support with posts on social media. Twitter, Instagram, Facebook and almost every social media site was painted with the hashtag #jesuischarlie, “I am Charlie.” Warm fuzzies were exchanged and goosebumps were had as the largest gathering Paris has ever seen decided that regardless of race, sex, gender, religion or citizenship, in that moment they were all Charlie.

Meanwhile in Baga, Nigeria, an estimated 2,000 bodies lay dead after Boko Haram’s largest attack to date. The extremist group arrived with grenade launchers, guns and plenty of ammunition. Bullets sprayed throughout the villages, and as people tried to run and hide, they were followed by the insurgents and massacred. Some sought safety in their homes but the terrorists burned them down with countless people still inside.

Those who fled tried to swim across Lake Chad to Chad but drowned. In the aftermath, Yanye Grema, a Nigerian fisherman told The Guardian that “for five kilometers (three miles), [he] kept stepping on dead bodies.” So where were the million people marches? Where were the hashtags? Where were the world leaders banding together to let people know that they are not afraid, that Boko Haram would be stopped?

They were in France mourning the 12 lives taken due to another terrorist group’s actions. This past week, 147 people were murdered by Al-Shabaab at Garissa University College in Kenya. Although condolences were sent, the outcry for justice was nowhere near that of France’s Charlie Hebdo attack.

All violent acts of terrorism are tragic and despicable, so why should those in France get far more global and media attention than the 147 massacred in Kenya or the thousands slaughtered in Nigeria? If it came down to purely numbers, then Baga faced far more death than France. If it came down to the gruesomeness and ferocity of the attack, Baga certainly had it worse. If it came down to ideologies, yes France was fighting for freedom of speech but what about fighting for education or freedom of religion in Kenya?

There is no way to know exactly why one attack was given precedence over another but some analysts have said that the conflict in Nigeria may be viewed as a civil war, therefore an attack in a time of war would be seen in a different light than an attack in a place of peace such as Paris.

Currently, Nigeria is unstable. It is divided into the mostly Muslim north and the mostly Christian south. Boko Haram has terrorized the region since about 2009 and with such instability, an attack is almost to be expected, or is at least less of a surprise.

Over the past several years, Kenya has been a pretty stable nation except in regards to Al-Shabaab so even the large scale of this recent attack took many by surprise. France, on the other hand, is a first world nation facing little insecurity. They are not at war nor do they face the daily struggle of insurgents taking over their nation. So an attack such as the one at Charlie Hebdo caught the nation off guard and thus prompted a larger reaction.

While all of these points are valid, they are not sufficient excuses as to the lack of support or even media recognition in Kenya and especially in Nigeria. It’s almost like saying, “We expected you to die, so when you did, it isn’t that big of a deal” — which is truly sad. Were the lives lost in Nigeria or Kenya somehow less valuable, less sad, less warranting of grief simply because the region has faced more suffering in the past than France?

Regardless of peacetime or wartime, lives are lives, humanity is humanity. When so many are massacred due to the terrorism that plagues our world, the same terrorism we claim to unite against in Paris, the same terrorism the U.S. went to war against, and an attack of so many African lives barely gets a headline, it makes me wonder if the world is truly fighting terrorism, or just fighting terrorism from the West. Has the world become desensitized to Africa’s pain and complacent with the turmoil?

If anything, this recent event has just further proved that we live in a Eurocentric society. Please don’t misunderstand me to be unsympathetic to the events in France or unnoticing of the Western aid that has been given to Nigeria and Kenya and various other nations over the years to combat terrorism. Although I am grateful, I can’t help but wonder if it’s too audacious to want more. I, too, mourn for those who died in Paris, but I also mourn for my countrymen who died in Kenya and for those who died in Nigeria.

Terror is abstract. You cannot put a Band-Aid on terror. You cannot pay terror to go away. You cannot send troops to fight terror. Although these things help, they cannot be the only solution. If we are truly fighting terror, we must first give hope, strength, courage and all those cliche things that sound cheesy but make all the difference in a time of chaos and disorder. There is strength in numbers they say. Right now, Kenya is under three days of mourning. How much strength and encouragement would it give them if the world stood together and grieved with them, and said this must come to an end?

In these past couple months we’ve seen #blacklivesmatter and #jesuischarlie take over the Internet and world in great shows of unity. But I think the world can do so much more than that. We are Charlie, we are Nigeria, we are Kenya, we are Syria, we are Yemen and to quote Michael Jackson, we are the world. But as demonstrated by these attacks, the world is far from perfect. And although it is so easy to get lost in our own lives, it is important we share one another’s burdens.

Maya Kamami is the Opinion Editor at The Triangle. She can be contacted at maya.kamami@thetriangle.org

The post The double standard of terrorism appeared first on The Triangle.

I would like to share with you the evolution of what being civically engaged meant to me while volunteering at the soup kitchen held by the Lombard Central Presbyterian Church for my civic engagement class and what I discovered about homelessness. I guess what struck me the most was that most of the people who came to get food lacked medical care to some degree. I had not expected to witness such a clear relationship between lack of income and lack of medical care probably because I assumed that some form of medical care would be provided by hospitals for these types of patients if not by nonprofit organization. This observation highlighted the tangibility of the issue of overpriced health care and poverty in the United States.

That being said, homelessness and lack of medical care is probably not new information. This is why I decided to look for other sources contributing to the increase of homelessness that would help broaden the options of how we could help, as responsible citizens, fight this situation and understand why so many people have to rely on soup kitchens or other nonprofit organizations in order to provide for themselves.

There is a common idea that homelessness results from a certain form of inherited poverty, which fosters a lack of education that perpetuates joblessness and therefore stagnation of the individual’s social status. Overall, there are a lot of speculations of how homelessness comes to be. This makes homeless people stigmas of our society and they are viewed as burdens rather than people who deserve to be acknowledged in order to overcome their plight.

The first assumption that comes to mind is inherited poverty and its consequences. Indeed homelessness and poverty are inextricably linked according to the idea that poor people are frequently unable to pay for housing, food, childcare, health care and education.

Homelessness persists due to stagnant or falling incomes and less secure jobs that offer fewer benefits. For instance, low-wage workers have been particularly left behind as the disparity between rich and poor has increased rapidly. Factors contributing to wage declines include a steep drop in the number and bargaining power of unionized workers, erosion in the value of the minimum wage, and a decline in manufacturing jobs.

Furthermore, a lack of affordable housing and the limited scale of housing assistance programs have contributed to the current housing crisis and to homelessness. According to recent studies, the shortages of affordable housing are most severe the needs of renters with extremely low incomes. Federal support for low-income housing has fallen to 49 percent from 1980 to 2003 and about 200,000 rental-housing units are destroyed annually. The problem is that renting is one of the most viable options for low-income people and if these facilities are being destroyed or taken away, it reduces options for proper housing.

Housing assistance can make the difference between stable housing, precarious housing, or no housing at all. However, the demand for assisted housing clearly exceeds the supply. Only about one-third of poor renter households receive a housing subsidy from the federal, state or local government. The limited level of housing assistance means that most poor families and individuals seeking housing assistance are placed on long waiting lists. This leads to people remaining in shelters or inadequate housing arrangements longer. So homelessness is not just some curse that is passed on from generation to generation but can happen due to exterior economic or social reasons.

Some of these reasons are domestic violence and divorce, mental illness and addiction disorders, and veteran homelessness. People often neglect homelessness as a cause domestic violence. Battered women who live in poverty are often forced to choose between abusive relationships and homelessness. Fifty percent of the cities surveyed by the U.S. Conference of Mayors identified domestic violence as a primary cause of homelessness.

Mental illnesses are also causes of homelessness. Approximately 16 percent of the single adult homeless population suffers from some form of severe and persistent mental illness, which ranges from schizophrenia to bipolar disorder. According to the 2003 U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Report, most homeless persons with mental illness do not need to be institutionalized but can live in the community with the appropriate supportive housing options. However, many mentally ill homeless people are unable to obtain access to supportive housing. This explains how perfectly competent individuals with scholarly degrees affected by an illness can end up homeless.

Addiction disorders also contribute to homelessness. While rates of alcohol and drug abuse are disproportionately high among the homeless population, the increase in homelessness over the past two decades cannot be explained by addiction alone. Addiction does increase the risk of displacement for the precariously housed, but in the absence of appropriate treatment, it may doom one’s chances of getting housing once on the streets.

Veteran homelessness is also a factor in the increasing homeless population. Though research indicates that veterans who served in the late Vietnam and post-Vietnam era are at greatest risk of homelessness, veterans returning from Afghanistan and Iraq will often have severe disabilities, including traumatic brain injuries and post-traumatic stress disorder that are known to be correlated with homelessness. Unfortunately, veterans who devote their life to serve their country end up at the bottom of the social scale once they are considered no longer fit to fight.

Homelessness results from a complex set of circumstances that require people to choose between food, shelter, treatment for their mental illness and other necessities. It is important that a concerted effort to ensure activities within the education system geared towards raising awareness of the different issues regarding homelessness be sustained in order to break away from stereotypes.

Claire Davis is a freshman international area studies major at Drexel University. She can be contacted at op-ed@thetriangle.org

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Earlier last month, the University of Oklahoma Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity was disbanded after a video of some of its members chanting, “There will never be a exploded on the web. This past week, a former member of the fraternity involved in the video apologized for his actions, citing that he did not fully understand the damage his words could cause. His explanation, though feeble at best, highlights a major issue within our generation.

Millennials have lived under an umbrella of post-civil rights activism, where racism is something of the history books, not something of the present. Our whole lives, most of us have been taught about equality and tolerance leading us to be, what is supposedly, the most progressive generation yet.

However, on any given day you can hear racist jokes being shared among friends and the n-word being dropped by middle class white girls who are in love with Lil Wayne and A$AP (but it’s OK because it’s part of a song — oh, and as long as you take care not to drop that hard “R”). People call each other “Oreos” or “coconuts” because black and white are no longer just colors or races, they’re personality types too. And we justify it because to many of us, racism is not that big of an issue anymore therefore we make jokes, almost as proof that we have moved so far beyond it.

This kind of lifestyle is what permits people like those who were part of the fraternity to chant obviously bigoted statements then come out and say, “I think I knew they were wrong, but I never knew why or how they were wrong.” This fake world that we live in, where everything is “equal” and discrimination is not a concern until a black kid gets shot by a white cop, is what consents us to turn a blind eye on a problem that is still very alive within the nation. In the same way you cannot treat an illness you don’t know you have, we cannot treat this cancer of prejudice if we refuse to acknowledge it.

In our cocoon of tolerance, we forget about the constant inequalities that still permeate our lives today through forms of institutionalized racism, the things that don’t always make the news because they are ingrained into the fiber our society. Like the fact that the median white household is worth $91,405 as opposed to the median black household of $6,446 or that even though there are five times as many whites using drugs as African Americans, the latter are sent to prison for drug offenses at 10 times the rate of the former.

To be fair however, when things like Ferguson, Eric Garner or the SAE chant do happen, we get angered and upset even if we are lazy to respond. Our version of combatting it is to send out a tweet or two and an Instagram post either shaming those involved in the incident or with a hashtag of solidarity (sometimes both if we’re feeling really passionate). We then pat ourselves on the back for our role in advancing social justice and then return to our comfortable, “equal” lives.

We are a reactive generation. Not until something big happens do we take action or say anything about inequality. This needs to change and we need become more proactive and intentional about racial justice. We cannot be lazy activists. Sure steps have been made toward fairer lives, but if we remain complacent, as many of us are prone to do, the progression will only just plateau, and we will not eradicate racism rather just live in our own, comfortable versions of it.

The post Millennials are not as progressive as they appear appeared first on The Triangle.

President John A. Fry proudly introduced “Distinguished Visiting Fellow” Joseph Torsella at the National Constitution Center April 1. The center founder’s lecture, attended by board of trustee members, focused on the current political polarization of the United States and how this problem may be solved. He also addressed the important constitutional concept of popular sovereignty, which helped unite the states. While Torsella complemented Drexel’s commitment to political engagement and the Constitution, we, the Editorial Board of The Triangle, think it is questionable whether those commitments really extend to the students.

For one, most Drexel University students do not take classes in government, let alone American government or the Constitution specifically. Engineering students in particular may have only a few free electives they could use for this purpose, and they are hardly encouraged to do so. If Drexel is to be “the most civically engaged university in the United States,” it must offer a reasonable opportunity for civic education. Ideally every student would graduate with at least some college-level schooling in government.

The other side of the coin is that Drexel’s campus is surely one of the least politically active in the country today. Co-op and the 10-week term leave students thoroughly uninterested in political topics. It is bizarre to think that in Philadelphia, a Democratic stronghold, the Drexel Democrats are few and hard to find. The University Republicans are certainly never heard from.

Now is ideally the season to change that. Primary elections for the next mayor of Philadelphia are May 19, and Ted Cruz became first to declare a run in the 2016 presidential election. Certainly there are many important topics being discussed today, including fracking and the death penalty in Pennsylvania, as well as police brutality and a host of foreign affairs issues at the national level.

Therefore we encourage everyone to be politically active this spring term. Register to vote or volunteer for a candidate — the latter, especially if you cannot vote. Write letters to Congress. Protest and hand out flyers. If nothing else, keep up with to the news and discuss the issues with your friends. While being a student can be a burden, everyone has at least some opportunity to participate.

And don’t be afraid to start locally. Drexel’s own student government is gearing up for its elections on May 20.

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