In conversation, Chalay Chalermkraivuth, SY ’20, and Mariah Kreutter, BK ’20, discuss their writing practices. Chalay Chalermkraivuth is a non-fiction writer and editor whose work has been published in The Sacramento Bee and Popula. Mariah works in a variety of genres, including non-fiction, fiction, and comedy. Her work has been published in McSweeney’s, Popula, and The Belladonna.

Chalay Chalermkraivuth: How would you describe your process?

Mariah Kreutter: I think when I’m writing fiction it usually either begins from truth, the details of something that has happened, and I imagine: what if this person who’s experiencing this isn’t me, has a different experience of interiority from me? And sometimes things will start from random images. I wrote a story called “The Church of Astro Chrisitnas,” which totally derived from thinking the phrase “the Church of Astro-Christians.” There’s usually a long incubation period. That’s at least how things start.

CC: That’s fiction — but do you have a notion of non-fiction?

MK: I think with non-fiction I like to start with something that is not myself, which I have some kind of connection to — things I’m curious about or oblique connections. I think I’m going to try to write a piece this semester about the link between exercising and drinking, through the lens of going to Vino and Vinyasa class — I’ll probably have to go to New York to check it out. Non-fiction is harder because you don’t really know what you’re going to have until you find it. What about you? Where do you get your ideas?

CC: I don’t really feel qualified to answer this question at least in terms of non-fiction. Over the summer [as a reporter in Sacramento] I didn’t have to generate my own ideas. Most of [what I did] was interview people, trying to tease out not only what preoccupied them, but also the structural conditions in which and against which they were operating…which I think is pretty standard. Once you are with a person, in communication, that offers a lot of insight into where you should go next, because people all know where stories are, and they all know what’s strange and what’s important. People have a keen sense of what’s underreported. It’s more a matter of transfiguring the story through a Trojan Horse into a news room and smuggle what they mean into the story (which is kind of devastating) — but that’s pretty abstract and it didn’t really involve me at all. I’ve been trying to think about how I can write to people’s needs and serve people’s needs, and that always involves — first and foremost — listening, and being present, and being empathetic, and truly leaving all your pretenses behind and going in as humbly as possible — and asking, what can I do for you?

MK: Is there a way that you tend to start your interviews or go about them that has served you?

CC: Being as informed as you can, while not assuming that you know that much. It’s always better to go in with something, which is standard. And I’m sure most people don’t succumb to this, but there’s always a danger of trying to finish people’s sentences or apprehend their thoughts or ask a convoluted question. Which in turn only puts words in their mouth. I think there’s a really fine line between asking a really convoluted question, which is just putting your thoughts in someone else’s mouth, and asking a really rigorous question that demonstrates what you’re thinking about… while leaving space for them to answer any way they wish. It’s important not to make echo chambers within the conversation… There’s a lot of value in being reflexive and being honest about your intentions. You have to show them what the [Trojan] Horse is so to speak, and you have to see the other person as a teacher and a collaborator. To go back to what you said at the very beginning… I’m wondering if you’ve made a transition from taking your interiority elsewhere to taking other people’s interiority into your situation?

MK: I don’t think anything I write is really that divorced from my interiority. I’ve never tried to write a character that is more or less self-aware than I am. There are certain things that tend to pop up because there are filters that form how I see the world — I at least have not yet found a way away from that, which would still feel honest. But, yeah, there are two different models which I’ve used in the past. I remember saying: to move your interiority elsewhere is a way of getting into fiction as a purely imaginative fun. To try to create a subjectivity that’s really different from yours is really hard (laughs)… I think I often give my characters are the worst aspects of myself, specifically point of view characters — which is something I love doing in fiction, especially quasi-biographical, because when you’re writing fiction you have absolute freedom to be the most abase and interesting version of yourself

CC: (laughs) Do those always go together?

MK: They definitely do not have to, but just in terms of what I’ve been working on most recently.

CC: For me it’s almost the formal converse — I’ve thought a lot about the fact that reporting makes me a better person: when I’m sitting in an interview, I listen more kindly ,more empathetically, and more intently than I ever do outside of that context, which is ridiculous. And that was something that started to permeate my relationships outside of reporting while I was working. It certainly is much less present in my life now, and I regret that. I think that writing in that way makes me more active and more engaged, and I think that’s connected with what I want to do with it; I’m really interested in (though I’ve never achieved or even tried really) writing that makes people cohere, that extends its hand, that is informational.

Writer’s Portrait: Chalay Chalermkraivuth and Mariah Kreutter was originally published in The Yale Herald on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

This week, Arts editors, Harrison Smith, ES ’20, and Matt Reiner, JE ’20, spoke about process and failure, focusing on Reiner’s painting practice and the beginning of his senior thesis project.

Harrison Smith: Maybe we should start by talking about development — both in the sense of longevity and process. Something I think a lot about with your paintings is this sense of their having come out of a set of parameters, which delineate a space for practice. The most obvious parameter is “abstract painting,” but also, the size of the canvas or the material ground you’re using. I wonder how you begin and how you decide you’ve finished, if where you arrive is where you thought you would have.

Matt Reiner: Process is something I’ve been trying to figure out for a long time. Even with a still life it’s difficult to say “okay, I’ll stop here,” because I can always keep adding paint, adding glazes to make the light a bit warmer here or cooler there, or a bit of detail in the flesh of an apple. But at the same time I’m so impatient. If I don’t finish a painting within a couple of days, I’ll get uneasy and obsessive; and if it’s a failure, I’d rather destroy it than put it aside. So to begin is in a sense always to end for me. Not that I have a fixed image of what the thing should look like, but more so that I can’t let the end properly out of sight; I have trouble really risking true and utter failure in a painting. It’s something I’m trying to work on personally and in the studio. Longevity is something I’ve been thinking about this past summer too. Last year I had lost a lot of joy in making anything; the work became very performative and I was trying to outsmart myself for the sake of winning an imaginary game. I realized that it was slowly wearing away at my desire to paint at all. I thought about how to make a practice which can endure because there is meaning outside of the performance or the exhibition or the telling — a kind of private meaning which I would only let escape when I wanted, if I wanted. I journaled a lot, kept notebooks and it helped. I’m trying to keep the studio more private this year. I think that will help, too.

HS: What exactly does it mean for a painting to “fail”?

MR: Yeah (laughs). It’s kind of an ambiguous statement that a lot of painters use to describe a feeling. I have a hard time pinpointing what it means. The best I can do is give an analog: you’re eating a chicken leg and you’ve bitten off a tendon. At this point you have two options — you can either spit out the tendon, or you can chew through and swallow it. A failed painting is kind of like biting off the tendon. Most of the time I spit it out because it’s painful to keep working through. The composition isn’t right or the color is off. Something structural about the way the picture looks just doesn’t quite work. And when you want something to work really badly, sometimes you can try to convince yourself that it does, but there is just a feeling that it’s just not doing it. It’s hard to articulate. It’s a visual sense that doesn’t lend itself to language very well.

HS: I’ve seen some other work of yours that is very technically savvy, where the risk is minimized to a certain extent because the outcome is controlled. Often times these are copies of other artists’ work or observational drawings. I think you would rather call them studies, though. I’m curious what it might mean to flex a certain skill in painting and thereby to “minimize” or “control” the risk in doing it. In a similar vein I’m wondering how you’re going about beginning a thesis project, which is in certain ways predicated on the assumption that you won’t utterly fail, that something will come out of it which can be presented in the gallery at the end of the year.

MR: Making a painting always contains a certain ego trip for me. It’s hard to separate the grand title “Painting” from what I’m doing, which is at best an amateur knock-off of that idea — not to be self-deprecating in any way, but just to point out that that idea of painting isn’t true anymore. That being said, I’m always testing myself to see where I lie within these parameters, like I am testing a kind of validity whose existence isn’t real any longer. At the same time, the only successes I’ve actually felt in making a painting have been when I’ve let this performative testing go — when I’ve actually been able to have privacy and make the work because it felt like what I needed in relation to a “right now.” Of course, it’s difficult to really shun the performative, or the impressive, when you’re working in a class setting and you are being “evaluated” — whatever that might mean in an art context. But I hope that I can get there this year; it’s what the thesis is about in a certain way: to find the private in light of the performative elements in painting. It’s what really good painters execute in such a stunning way — I’m thinking of people like Charline Von Heyl and Jutta Keother, who have found the idiosyncratic within the historical and positioned their skill within matrices of doubt and criticality. I want to be more comfortable with the risk in that idiosyncrasy, or with the private being exposed to vulnerability. It takes a kind of confidence, which I’m developing and which maybe the studies do help to build. I’m not sure.

Artist Portrait: Matt Reiner was originally published in The Yale Herald on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

This past June, Eli Sabin, GH ’22, declared his candidacy for Ward 1 Alder for the New Haven Board of Alders. The position, which represents eight of the 14 residential colleges as well as Old Campus, is often held by a Yale student. If elected, Sabin will succeed Hacibey Catalbasoglu, DC ’19, who has held the position since 2017 — and become the fifth Yale student to serve as Ward 1 Alder since 2007. Sabin, who majors in Political Science, is a native of New Haven, son of History Professor Paul Sabin and journalist Emily Bazelon. This week, Sabin sat down with the Herald to discuss his political aspirations, the difference between politics and public service, his connection to New Haven, and the ways his campaign have affected his life at Yale.

Yale Herald: You declared your candidacy on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter. What was the immediate reaction, and why did you choose social media as the way to publicize?

Eli Sabin: The immediate reaction was overwhelmingly positive. Before I announced my campaign, I talked to a lot of people in the New Haven community — political leaders, activists, people I’ve worked with in the past — and I talked to a bunch of folks on campus, especially people who grew up in New Haven, who I felt had a stake in this race. And then, when I announced, there was a lot of support that I received, and I was really appreciative. A lot of people shared my announcement on social media, which I think was really a strong signal that my campaign was based in grassroots support from people I knew on campus and in the New Haven community, [people] who knew about all the work I’ve done in the city and how much I care about my community.

YH: You grew up in New Haven and have a lot of connections to the New Haven community; but you are also a Yale student with connections to Yale faculty and the Yale community. Do you feel your position as Ward 1 Alder will be from the perspective of a Yale student or a New Haven resident?

ES: A New Haven resident, I think. I was a New Haven resident a long time before I was a Yale student, and I hope to be and plan to be a New Haven resident a long time after I’m a Yale student. I’m really invested in this community, and the reason I’m running for the Board of Alders is because I want to work with and fight for the people I grew up with.

YH: How did you get into politics? Is it something you’ve always been passionate about, or when did you start feeling politically-minded?

ES: I have always wanted to do public service. That’s what I feel is the most important thing. My family talks about politics all the time, so I was aware of what was going on, but my first exposure to politics was in 2016: I knocked on doors for former state representative James Albis, who was running for re-election in East Haven, Connecticut — which is like ten minutes from here — and I spent a lot of time with him, knocking on doors in a really interesting community that actually, from 2012 to 2016, flipped like 17 percent from Obama to Trump. And Albis won his race by, I think, nine votes, after I spent a ton of time knocking doors for him. That was a super gratifying experience, knowing that I could make a difference in local government and in my community by showing up and talking to people. And that’s what I love about local politics. You see all these things going on in DC — and Trump is obviously terrible — but it’s hard for us to feel we are making an impact on the things that happen in DC, whereas my experience in New Haven and on the state level has been overwhelmingly positive, and I’ve had a ton of opportunity to do things that I feel have made an impact and have been super rewarding and really incredible experiences.

YH: Has your background working on political campaigns, as well as Yale Dems, affected the way you run your campaign?

ES: Yeah, I think that having worked on campaigns gives you an advantage. You understand how to do it, what the strategy is, how to register voters, how to canvas, how to make [campaign literature], and run social media — which are all things I’ve done in the past, so obviously that puts me in a good position to do the nuts and bolts of running for office.

YH: How do manage your time, being a full-time student while managing a political campaign?

ES: It’s not really any different from what I was doing last year, because last fall I was the campaign manager for state representative Roland Lemar, so I was spending a lot of time working with him. And then in the spring, I was the director of the Progressive Caucus in the state legislature, so I spent around 15 hours a week going up to Hartford and helping organize the state legislators there. And really, for the last couple years, I’ve tried to devote as much free time as I can to organizing in progressive activism, because that’s what I’m passionate about, and whenever I have time outside of school, I want to be involved in that work, which feels really important.

YH: Do you feel the way you behave on campus has changed since you’ve run for office? Do you feel the way you are seen on campus has changed?

ES: It’s been interesting. I have tried not to change how I act on campus. I think I’m naturally respectful and friendly to everybody, so that has not changed. Obviously, when you’re a politician, you’re supposed to be those things all the time, but I feel I’m naturally those things so I haven’t had to really change that. But it’s definitely a little bit different to be on campus as somebody running for office because you know people through your social circles, and then you’re also sort of interacting with them in a political way, which can make things a little challenging. There are definitely more people on campus who know who I am or recognize me, which is a little weird. I’m not generally an attention seeker, so I’m not always so thrilled about that, but it is what it is.

YH: Sort of shifting gears here, you’ve mentioned the Jewish principle of tikkun olam before in some of your materials. How does that affect your policy, and how does perhaps other Jewish thought affect the way you look at the world?

ES: I’m glad you asked that question. I think that tikkun olam is the idea of repairing the world. It’s sort of a call to service — that’s how I see it — and I was brought up in a social justice tradition. There’s this question that I’ve talked about a little bit in my campaign, which is, if I’m only for myself, who am I? So, [tikkun olam is] about serving others. In the work that I have done, and in my general life, I ask myself, am I doing enough to lift other people up and serve the community? Because I think that that’s what I want to do with my life.

YH: You talked a lot about public service over politics. Where do you think this position will lead you in life? Where do you want to go from here?

ES: I don’t know. I’m focused on this race, and I’m trying to figure out whether I want to be someone who runs for office. Obviously, I’m 19, so I have a lot of time to figure that out. I definitely know that I want to be involved in government, activism — I want to be in the fight. The question for me is whether…being a legislator or an elected official in some capacity is the best way for me to make a difference, or whether maybe being a policy advisor or working on campaigns is the best avenue for me to affect change. I’m still trying to figure that out.

YH: You’ve done work in the state legislature. What was that like, and how does it affect you and your campaign today?

ES: Last January, I was hired to be the director of the Progressive Caucus in the General Assembly. So the Progressive Caucus is a newer organization that the progressive legislators in the General Assembly set up…to try to organize around progressive policy goals. So, last year, I went up to Hartford every Wednesday during the spring semester [for] the legislative session which ran from June to May last year. [I] talked to lots of activists and advocates and legislators and tried to work with them to push a progressive agenda. So we organized press conferences about criminal justice reform and an equitable taxation system. Ultimately, we were pretty successful in helping push the legislature to pass a $15 minimum wage and paid family medical leave, as well as a bunch of other things: a prosecutorial transparency bill and some other great legislation. So it was a really exciting, successful legislative session last year, and I think the Progressive Caucus, which I worked with, had a big impact on that. I’m looking forward to continuing that role this spring as we have another legislative session starting in February.

YH: You’re the only current Yale student who is currently running for office. What do you think separates you from other politically-minded students on campus?

ES: I think, mostly, opportunity. I know that there are many people on campus who are interested in running for office and are equally passionate about public service and government. I think that having grown up in New Haven, and having done a lot of political work and community activism in high school, just put me in a good position to continue that work by running for office and throwing my hat in the political ring. But I’m sure that I will see many more Yalies in the future running for office.

Politically Positioned: An Interview with Eli Sabin was originally published in The Yale Herald on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Artist Portrait: Kevin Hernández Rosa

This week, the Herald interviewed Kevin Hernández Rosa, a sculptor and musician starting his first year in the MFA program. Following the release of his new album, Gorila, we talked about the ways his writing and sculpting relate to one another through their relationships to language.

Yale Herald: I thought it would be interesting if we started by talking about Gorila. I was immediately struck by the quote you sample on the intro track, The Moon, “follow the finger cause you’re gonna miss the heavenly glory… The moon, I’m pointing at the moon, n****. I’m not about to try and describe the moon to you, I’ma just tell you, ‘yo look.’” I couldn’t figure out who the speaker actually is, but there’s a lot going on here in terms of the way language is being treated. As someone who works primarily with readymades, which can be really hard to “read” in any sort of uniform way, it seems like you’re using this quote to connect your music to your sculptures. Was your decision to start Gorila with this quote based along those lines, considering the connection between language (in music) and your sculpture practice?

Kevin Hernández Rosa: The identity of the person who’s saying the quote, a Haitian rapper named Mach Hommy, is pretty important. He runs his own studio, has his own label, but there’s not anyone else on the label; it’s just him. I’ve read a lot of interviews with him, and it seems like he’s the most far removed from what a regular interviewee in the rap world would be. He could give an interview where he sounds like he went through some kind of MFA program (although he hasn’t). He doesn’t perform live, he just prices his stuff to compensate for that, selling music through DMs or Bandcamp, and charging like $100 to $1,000 per release. That business model is so different than your usual 360 record deal, so there’s an emphasis on making sure that the care put into the aesthetic content is also translating into self-love in how the economics are working. I mean, your longevity depends on your ability to live off your work. He’s truly interested in the form of rapping, and there are songs where he’s more of a virtuoso that someone like MF Doom or Black Thought or Kendrick Lamar. It’s just that he’s not as visible. He’s really about as close as you can get to underground now.

And I think what he’s saying is important too. What’s interesting is that he’s just describing this simple idea of creating metaphor, you know. At the end of the day, that’s the essence of what rap is. Giving a specific way to think about an idea, but it’s never just a one-liner or something like that. I do definitely think that’s related to my work. If you present an object instead of a word, you’re opting specifically not so say something. You’re offering something else in place of those words. It still has a readability, but it’s not the same as simply describing with words.

YH: Something I did notice about your album is that there are a lot of tracks with pretty thoughtful and intentional lyrics. As someone who is working often with found objects, do you think that this kind of writing can ever function the same way? How do you think that distinction between writing and objects play out in your practice?

KHR: I have a hard time remembering things. I used to do graffiti, and I think I probably suffer from some brain damage from all the tweaking, or inadvertently huffing the fumes. I also used to smoke too much weed. So there’s this relationship I have with language where it can sometimes be really hard to say simple things. Trying to communicate without speaking in some kind of cliché is really hard for me. So that’s one facet of the issue with language and objects.

I also think objects are more connected to the body than words. And sometimes I have a hard time thinking about the performative aspect of talking, giving a lecture or a presentation. I would often rather someone be able to internalize some distortion of what I’m trying to say by offering them an object.

I can try to make something to say something, but I’m actually not saying anything. And then when someone sees it, they’re probably going to think I’m saying certain things that I’m not saying. And I think that’s true for writing too, but there’s something about the fact that words are being used — the fact that there’s a loss in translation is not as recognized or acknowledged with writing or talking as there is when objects are used instead. People know that they probably don’t get it when presented with an object. With language it’s a different thing. And when I say object, I mean that could be a policy or architecture, too.

[…]

YH: That’s really interesting to me, your use of objects to force a recognition of the viewer’s own misunderstanding. So how do you think that relates to the lyrics in your songs? As a listener, there’s a lot that I read and listened to and was consciously aware of myself not understanding fully. Was that something you were attempting? And how would you place that relationship to words in this network of communication?

KHR: When I was an undergrad student, my professor Ryan Wolfe told me that when you’re writing, you have to always be conscious of your own goals, but also the perspective of the reader you’re writing for. I’m still figuring out how to do that well, but sometimes I’m just writing for myself. Honesty, I’m more interested in how that kind of writing becomes coded and esoteric. And how that then comes across to someone else. I think it’s related to my interest in the more animalistic qualities of a human: when you see something that looks like it was made by a bird, or a gorilla, but you know it was made by a human. Not human, but human. And I think isolating yourself, only communicating with yourself, is a way to get that eccentric quality in you work. It’s a generative process. I try to channel that in my work, get that same feeling.

Interview with Kevin Hernandez Rosa was originally published in The Yale Herald on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Professor, Partner, Parent — An Interview with Woo-Kyoung Ahn

Woo-Kyoung Ahn is a professor of Psychology at Yale College whose work focuses on human thinking and reasoning. She teaches the course PSYC 179: Thinking, which has attracted over 500 students this semester, and she has previously worked as the Direct of Undergraduate Studies (DUS) of the Psychology department. Professor Ahn occupies multiple positions at Yale: she is an esteemed professor, the wife of Dean Chun, and the mother of a Yale student. This week, Professor Ahn spoke with The Herald about her research and its influence on both her lecture style and American society, how she balances her numerous roles within the institution, and her professional interest in the Yale Memes for Special Snowflakes Facebook page. Professor Ahn combines a keen sense of humour with psychological insight and provides a candid glimpse into her experience of race, gender, and pop culture as a Yale professor.

Yale Herald: Your class PSYC 179: Thinking has become wildly popular this semester, drawing in over 500 students. What do you think they’re hoping to find in your work? Do you see the class as something that can impact student’s daily lives?

Woo-Kyoung Ahn: That’s my goal. The word that I use is mental masturbation. That’s what I’m trying to avoid in this psychology course. When I screen which studies to cover, I think about whether this is something they can actually apply to their real life. In the paper assignments, they really have to think about this. All the time, can they detect this [cognitive bias] everywhere in their daily lives? So there are some studies that are done just for the sake of science, but sometimes it feels like, what’s the point of this? I make it really applicable, so that’s one of the main goals of this course.

YH: You play pop songs before lectures start, insert movie clips into your slides and have a teaching style that you’ve termed “PG13.” Have you ever got into trouble for your humorous approach to teaching? What motivates your style choice?

WKA: [Laughs] I haven’t got into trouble yet. Many professors have said to me, “I can’t choose songs for this generation anymore…” so the DJ for this course is actually my daughter! I ask her, “Okay, I’m covering happiness today. Which song should I play?” I’m also a member of the Snowflake meme page, so I get to hear what the culture is like and so on, and I steal from that. I have to really use their examples otherwise it’s psychologically too distant. Here’s what I learned: When I first started as an assistant professor, I was very stressed out about teaching at Yale, and I heard that Peter Salovey’s Intro to Psychology course was the most popular course at Yale. So I went to his class, and he was having migraine headaches, but he was still flawless and so entertaining. I was measuring with my watch, and on average, every six minutes he had either a joke or a demo or an anecdote. Something that would really reset the tension. That was the style I tried to use.

YH: You and Marvin Chun were hired by Yale at the same time. Have you ever worked with Chun? Is working at the same institution as your husband a pro or a con in your estimation?

WKA: There are a lot of pros, of course. When you gossip about your colleagues, you don’t have to explain too much. Your graduate students are basically your research life. It’s almost like being a family… There are ups and downs, of course. Everyone has strengths and weaknesses, but you can’t complain about your graduate family to other professors. They [the grad students] are your family members. But I can do that with my husband because I 100-percent trust that he won’t tell. He’s a great therapist for that. And also of course, career wise, whenever I have any issues… For this course alone, he’s now used to dealing with large courses after going through [Psychology and] the Good Life. Now a master of that, he’s been helpful in many ways like that. I’m learning as we speak.

YH: Your daughter also goes to Yale. What’s it like to have your entire family involved with this institution?

WKA: Yeah, yeah… I don’t know, this is the only family life I’ve ever had. I’ve attended some workshops that ask, Can women have everything, career and family? and I think the best answer I’ve heard is that yes you can — if you have the right husband. Being a mother, wife, and academic is just a ridiculous amount of work… I still have a second child, and I still have to cook and make breakfast for him in the morning and everything. It’s a lot of things to manage, but I think a happy life is a balanced life. I can be really sucked into preparing for the lectures and spending 50 hours a week working on that, but then I have to draw the line and say, OK, now I’m cooking. I love folding laundry. I watch Korean dramas and fold laundry and it’s just a mundane pleasure, very therapeutic. I can control this. My teaching philosophy, this is what I figured out… The teaching secret is you have to love the students. Then everything just follows. When you love someone, you want them to learn, not fail. She [my daughter] actually got into Yale first, before Marvin became the college dean, so we had to ask her permission. I went to university in Korea, and my father was the president of the university, so I had to live in the president’s house on campus. It was like living in an animal zoo.

YH: You went to college in Korea. How did you experience the transition to the American liberal arts system and American culture in general?

WKA: I left Korea because I couldn’t handle the sexism in the Korean culture, and I wanted a bit more individualism. That was not allowed back then. Women were supposed to be a certain way, and when I got my PhD and went back to see my professors, they made it clear to me that they’d just hired a female professor and one was enough in the department. It’s one thing to have sexism, it’s another thing to be able to say that explicitly. That was only 30 years ago. Every society has some sexism. They’re much better now, they have a lot of female professors there. But to me in this country, culture-wise, it’s my taste. Language was the biggest problem of course, and I still have to really practice. I rehearse my entire lecture out loud twice — I still have to do that. But what’s funny is, when I stand up, I say totally different things than what I had prepared anyway. Language is still a barrier, but it can actually work for me. It forces me to prepare. So my philosophy is that everybody’s weakness is their strength. And their strengths are also their weaknesses. It’s the framing effect, right? [Laughs]

YH: You’ve done research on reasoning, causal learning, and judgement. Do you think this type of psychology research can be used to understand political phenomena, such as fake news?

WKA: Yeah, I’m actually going to cover fake news in the course a bit later on… There are now some recent studies coming out on the fake news issue. I actually studied that area over the summer. That’s another motivation for teaching; it forces me to learn new topics. For my own research, one spin that I put in my career is that I decided to go into more applied work. The work I’m doing now is all about causal reasoning and categorization. The causal part is genes. We’re talking a lot about genetic profiling and considering, now that we know our genetic make-up, what’s going to be our concept of ourselves and other people? One study for instance… I manufactured a fake saliva test, and we told half of the subjects that they have the depression gene, and the other half that they don’t have the depression gene. And then we administered the standardized depression scales after they got the feedback. They were randomly assigned subjects, so there should be no difference in how depressed they were, right? But we found significant differences between the two groups. Within five minutes they believed they were more depressed than the other group. Theory wise, it’s very old. It’s the self-fulfilling prophecy, stereotyping, etc., but now with genetic information, it’s going to become more and more prevalent. I have a graduate student who’s interested in genetic counseling, so she’s doing a study that’s the flip side of this. So if you found out that you don’t have the alcoholic gene, are you now going to drink more? Because you feel more invincible? But if it’s something you believe you can do something about it, obesity for instance, then they are more watchful about their food because they know that weight can be controlled. But when it comes to depression, people still don’t understand that you can actually manage your depression. People think it’s their fate so they give in. It’s very controversial.

Professor, Partner, Parent — An Interview with Woo-Kyoung Ahn was originally published in The Yale Herald on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

This timeline was organized by Elliot Wailoo, SY ’21, and Christian Fernandez, BF ’20, with additional research by Seyade Tadele, TD ’21. It uses research and resources gathered by students in Professor Quan Tran’s Fall 2018 seminar, Comparative Ethnic Studies (ER&M 300). Those students are: Emily Almendarez, Vernice Chan, Ann Hui Ching, Shamsa Derrick, Christian Fernandez, Yuki Hayasaka, Supriya Kohli, Ben Levin, Ruhi Manek, Mariah Minigan, Matthew Motylenski, Sophie Neely, Chidera Osuji, Natalia Reyes Becerra, Spencer Shimek, Amanda Taheri, Marisa Vargas-Morawetz, and Jesús Yanez. Their full project can be accessed at https://bit.ly/2Xe4ogH; we encourage you to check it out!

1969

• A year of strikes at SFSU and UC Berkeley lead to the founding of the country’s first Ethnic Studies programs, as well as the first Asian American studies program, the first Black studies program, the first Latinx studies program, and the first Native American Studies program. Ethnic Studies programs begin to pop up around the country, largely concentrated on the West Coast.
• Yale’s African American Studies Program and the Afro-American Cultural Center (then called Afro-America) are created as a result of activism led by the Black Student Alliance at Yale’s (BSAY) co-moderators, Armstead Robinson, Donald Ogilvie, and Glenn DeChabert. This is the first year that Black Studies courses are taught at Yale; BSAY was formed five years earlier, in 1964.
• Asian American Students Association (AASA) is founded.
• Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlán (MEChA) is founded.
• Women are admitted to Yale College to start in the fall of 1969. Women compose 230 of the approximately 1,200 incoming first-years.

1970

• Student leader Don Nakanishi writes a letter to then-President of Yale, Kingman Brewster, advocating for the creation of a program for “Floating Ethnic Counselors.” His idea centers on the hiring of “Third World” students to mentor first-years.

1972

• Yale creates the Ethnic Counselors position, which still exists today in the form of Peer Liaisons.

1973

• MEChA writes a letter to President Brewster, demanding that Yale create a Chicanx Cultural Center.

1974

• La Casa Boricua is founded as a cultural center for Puerto Rican students at Yale.

1980

• Students successfully advocate for the renaming of Pierson’s “slave quarters.”

1981

• Student demands lead to the foundation of a cultural center for Asian Americans, Native Americans, and Chicanx students.

1982

• Students coordinated with the admissions office to organize an admitted students weekend for “Third World Students,” whom they defined as Puerto Ricans, Asians, Chicanos, Blacks, and Native Americans.

1989

• The Association of Native Americans at Yale (ANAAY) is founded.

Throughout the ’90s, Ethnic Studies programs are under assault, suffering frequent cuts or depletions of funding.

1990

• Students protest racist acts, such as a hate letter and racist graffiti, and demand that the administration discontinue its focus on teaching and studying Western civilization.

Mar. 7, 1997

• Ethnicity, Race, and Migration is founded as a program by a unanimous vote, but only as a second major — students must major in another discipline as well.

1999

• “La Casa Cultural” is renamed “La Casa Cultural Julia de Burgos, the Latinx Cultural Center” as the space is expanded to include not only Puerto Rican students, but also Chicanx students and students of other Latinx heritages.

2000

• After 31 years of existing as a program at Yale, African American Studies is elevated to departmental status.

2002

• Students found an anti-racism group which pushes for more sustained dialogue around diversity at Yale, and spearheaded Diversity Training for Freshman Counselors and a Yale Curriculum Review.

2006

• AASA conducts a day of silence to protest anti-Asian racist articles published in two Yale publications, Rumpus and this publication, the Yale Herald.

2007

• In response to incidents of blackface and spray-painted slurs, students demand that Yale implement first-year reading requirements, expand the Ethnic Counselor program, and establish a cultural studies requirement.

2008

• The Ethnic Counselor program is restructured into the current Peer Liaison (PL) structure. The LGBTQ Co-op and the Chaplain’s Office also create PL positions.

2012

• Students are able to major in ER&M as a single major.

2013

• The Native American Cultural Center, previously housed inside the Asian American Cultural Center, receives its own building at 26 High Street and becomes the fourth Cultural Center.

2014

• Students revive the Asian American Studies Task Force to research and protest the lack of Asian American Studies classes offered at Yale.

Nov. 3, 2015

• In a University-wide email, President Peter Salovey and Provost Ben Polak announce Yale’s promise to invest $50 million over the following five years in the improvement of faculty diversity.

Nov. 9, 2015

• More than 1,000 student organizers participate in a March of Resilience and teach-in as a response to a variety of racist events, including racist incidents at fraternities, emails from Associate Master of Silliman College Erika Christakis instructing students to look the other way if they saw a racist or insensitive Halloween costume, and Yale’s refusal to rename Calhoun College, named for pro-slavery advocate John C. Calhoun.

Nov. 12, 2015

• The alliance of students, Next Yale, presents a list of demands to President Peter Salovey, including an Ethnic Studies distributional requirement, increases in the operational budgets of each cultural center, the renaming of Calhoun, and an abolition of the title of “Master.”

Spring 2016

• Yale commits to the creation of the Center for the Study of Race, Indigeneity, and Transnational Migration.
• Yale renames the position of Master as “Head of College.”
• Yale announces it will not rename Calhoun College. In response, students hold a symbolic renaming ceremony.

Feb. 11, 2017

• Yale reverses its decision and announces the renaming of formerly Calhoun College as Grace Hopper College.

Spring 2019:

• MEChA and AASA each celebrate 50th anniversaries.
• The 13 Professors appointed in the program in Ethnicity, Race, and Migration withdraw from the program, citing a lack of administrative support, funding, and hiring power, among other issues.
• The Coalition for Ethnic Studies begins to organize for the advancement of Ethnic Studies and institutional support and departmental status for the program in Ethnicity, Race, and Migration.

50 years: a timeline of organizing and advocacy for students of color at Yale was originally published in The Yale Herald on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The Herald asked five writers to share their personal experiences with ER&M at Yale. Each of their experiences shows us the value and the impact of Ethnic Studies — a field that counters the Western Canon, that gives us the tools to critique our institutions, and that holds all of Yale accountable.

I came to college knowing that I’d probably major in English, but two years later, I still haven’t declared. I think the reason it’s taken me to so long is because when I’ve studied English or literature, I’ve always felt like there’s something missing. Don’t get me wrong, I love the feeling of picking up a book and not putting it down, not even blinking, for fear that I will be missing words that could entirely change how I see the world. And yet, in many of the English classes I’ve taken throughout my life, including at Yale, it has been difficult to place myself in the words of white male writers like William Pope, whose poems critiquing Britain’s 18th century wealthy class could never capture the life I lead everyday as a woman of color. The English major doesn’t cover the people and places I want to learn about. It can’t give me the tools to help brown and black faces like mine after I graduate. But Ethnic Studies has filled that gap, giving me a space to learn about myself, the histories that I come from, and the long line of activists — women, immigrants, Civil Rights leaders, third world students — that have made it possible for my parents to immigrate to the U.S. from the Dominican Republic, and for me to study at a place like Yale. ER&M classes have introduced me to the thinkers and scholars like Audre Lorde, James Baldwin, and Aimé Césaire, who have written my parents and me into history, where English classes have ignored us. It has made me challenge and interrogate institutions like Yale University — their histories, their policies, their very lack of care for issues like this. I thought Yale would be a place where students of color didn’t have to push to be seen, struggle to be heard, and to fight to have their education valued, but everyday I am more disappointed with the way Yale administrators choose silence over facing the demands of ER&M faculty and students. I’ve learned that Ethnic Studies is not a field we should take for granted. It is a department students fought for. And we will continue to fight for it.

—Gianna Baez, TC ’21

The ER&M major has allowed me to pursue my passion in intersectional human rights studies to my heart’s content. From Intro to Critical Refugee Studies to Environmental Justice in South Asia, the flexibility of the interdisciplinary nature of ER&M allowed me to craft an education that I believe is truly pragmatic and important. Furthermore, without the initial guidance from professors Daniel Martinez HoSang, Quan Tran, and Alicia Schmidt Camacho, I would not have been inspired to push for a Tibet studies course–a course that was formed largely from my desire to play a part in decolonizing the Yale curriculum. The ER&M major has helped me perceive the world in a new light and motivates me to be a better citizen each day; ER&M is more than a major — it is a way of life.

—Kelsang Dolma, PC ’19

When I came to Yale two years ago, I didn’t know anything about ER&M. I didn’t know there was any major that consisted of more than learning about the political theories written by different white men, or that there was an academic community that produced the kind of radical scholarship that I wanted to be a part of. I expected that I would be able to take classes related to identity and race, like Race, Class, and Gender in the American City or Third World Studies. But I also found a community at 35 Broadway, where professors contribute to New Haven and go beyond their duties to support students. ER&M has given me the space to be critical of the past and present, but it has also provided me space to imagine a world that is inclusive of all forms of knowledge production.

ER&M has created so many of my most powerful moments at Yale. I heard my classmates read revolutionary pieces of work about topics ranging from U.S. colonization in Puerto Rico to Yale’s transformation of the New Haven landscape in Professor Leah Mirakhor’s Writer/Rioter class. I learned more about my own family’s relationship to the history of adoption in Korea from Mary Lui in Asian American History and about the long struggle for Third World Studies beginning in the 1960s from Gary Okihiro. The circle of students in this major, all of whom are passionate about fostering care for eachother and care for the work that we do together, have impacted me inside and outside of the classroom. I see this passion in class discussions, but it has become most clear to me in this moment: everyone joining together in the Center for Race, Indigeneity, and Transnational Migration to protect our major in crisis. ER&M has made me believe that it is possible to connect academic work to revolutionary praxis, completely invigorating my purpose at Yale.

I want Yale to be a campus that tells students and faculty of color that they have a place in this university, one which views global affairs as true global cooperation, and one which is truly “improving the world today and for future generations through outstanding research and scholarship” — as its mission statement claims. Yale must keep its promise to ER&M.

—Carolyn Sacco, ES ’21

I came to Yale intending to focus solely on my path towards medicine through a rigid study of the sciences. It was the second semester of my junior year when, almost on a whim, I took Introduction to Ethnicity, Race, and Migration, as a way to fulfill one of my humanities distributional requirements. I arrived on the first day of class not knowing that I would eventually fall in love with the course, and with ER&M itself. Whatever tip of the iceberg I had seen while studying health policy, ER&M let me dive deep under the surface. I now understand how decades of racialized laws led to inequitable economic and housing conditions for minorities, creating disparities between the healthcare systems of white communities and communities of color, including the community I grew up in as the child of Vietnamese refugees. For instance, red-lined districts — neighborhoods into which minorities have been segregated — often have poorer healthcare systems, lacking technological resources and experienced clinicians. In addition, implicit bias allows for discrimination in healthcare to continue unchecked as well. As an aspiring doctor hoping to work in communities of color, ER&M has given me the tools to recognize these racial disparities in healthcare. Because of Ethnic Studies, I feel better equipped to address not only the ailments of my future patients, but also the context behind these ailments. In retrospect, I can’t imagine how I would understand the world around me if I hadn’t taken ER&M classes. The major has fundamentally challenged what I thought I knew — about power structures, about socioeconomic disparities, and about my own experiences.

—Sarah Ngo, DC ’20

I did Directed Studies my first year because I wanted to be a writer and I felt gate-kept from conversations about “good books.” I lacked the self-awareness to realize I was only having those conversations among other white people, about white books. In the Spring, I started dating a white ER&M major. Sometimes before bed, I would read the Leviathan or John Locke or whatever in front of them, just to show off. I think they suspected I was being brainwashed before I did and prodded me towards skepticism. In my classes, I started realizing there was a creepy amount of self-reflexivity. We were reading John Locke because he was in the canon, and he was in the canon because we, and others, were studying him. It started feeling so useless that I stopped doing my readings, stopped going to class, even. I spent more time with my partner and had my first fumbling — and serious — conversations about race. They held me, kindly but unyieldingly, to a high standard. In the fall of my sophomore year, I took three Ethnic Studies classes. It was a steep learning curve, and I had professors and peers who helped me learn not to fuck up — or to fuck up in ways that helped me grow and didn’t hurt other people. Eventually I declared my major as ER&M, and Ethnic Studies became the thing that allowed me, a white person without an understanding of white supremacy before college, to clearly see the violence at work behind Yale’s decision to elevate the white canon. Ethnic Studies classes have made me feel the most, learn the most, grow the most. The point is not that Ethnic Studies classes are simply better than those in other departments. The point is that without Ethnic Studies, the academy will have nothing with which to hold itself accountable. Without ER&M, Yale will be morally bankrupt.

—Kellyn Kusyk, SM ’20

ER&M and Me was originally published in The Yale Herald on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

ER&M’s importance reaches far beyond “Ethnic Studies” or even the humanities. The program and discipline provide us with ways of thinking that are directly applicable to science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) fields. Many students at Yale feel strongly about the role of Ethnic Studies within STEM — a few of them sat down for a roundtable discussion about the importance of ER&M within their fields of study.

By Stephen Early, BK ’20, Stephanie Blas-Lizarazo, MC ’20, Ellie Shang, SM ’20, Kenia Hale, SM ’21, and Lane To, MY ’19.

Stephen Early: Firstly, what were some perceptions or associations you had with ER&M at Yale and all of the recent news involving Ethnic Studies at Yale?

SE: You come across people who have the mindset that ER&M is not hard and they only value quantitative and “hard” majors. I can think of a few people in Mechanical Engineering (MechE) specifically who I’ve had conversations with or tried to explain everything that’s been happening to, and they think Yale should put its money into STEM because “we actually create things” and ER&M just “looks at things.” There are a lot of people who have been groomed with the mindset that STEM is the most valuable thing and that creating a solution is more important than understanding all the contexts behind it.

Lane To: I feel like there’s this perception that studying ER&M is easy for People of Color (POC). Like, “Oh you’re taking an Asian American history class, that must be so easy.” But it’s a very emotionally draining thing to be studying all these histories of the oppression of your own people. And there’s definitely a perception that Ethnic Studies is something that comes naturally to POC or is something that’s very easy for them to do, so it’s devalued because it’s not seen as a real academic discipline.

Kenia Hale: [When I came to Yale] I was so excited to finally learn. Because I had taken frickin’ AP World [History], but that doesn’t teach you the stuff that ER&M teaches. And so when I came here — to answer your question — I thought ER&M was so established! I took Intro to ER&M and my initial perception was “Oh my god, I’m finally learning the stuff that I have been wanting to learn.”

SE: Yeah that’s true [for me] too. I didn’t realize until very recently how unstable ER&M was in the eyes of the administration.

Ellie Shang: I think it’s something that the administration likes to talk up or advertise, without actually backing it up in terms of real support or funding. But Yale will still take [credit for] any work that ER&M is doing as its own.

SE: For people who have taken a course or just been around the ER&M department, what were your greatest takeaways as a STEM major?

SE: For example, I took Intro to Latinx Studies and one of my biggest takeaways was the relationship of the faculty to the students. It’s way more caring than anything I had seen in my STEM classes. I think that’s also something that should be considered when we’re talking about the tenure process and the amount of work [the faculty] are putting in — those things aren’t necessarily being put on the record for their evaluations. And [as for] subject matter, I’ve used it in how I think about solutions in interrelated systems, and it’s made me more intelligent in how I look at problems because I’ve learned to ask questions of, or feel sus about, technocratic solutions that people bring to the table without necessarily knowing the people who they’re affecting or anything about the people.

KH: Absolutely. So I’m currently in a class called Race, Gender and Surveillance. I originally came into Yale as a CS major so that was very much applicable. I ended up switching out of CS because I found there to be this culture of, “Oh let’s just go get these internships with these really big corporations without worrying about what they’re actually doing.” I saw this article about Amazon making facial recognition software for ICE…

LT: Amazon was also trying to take over Queens…so…

KH: Exactly, Amazon is awful right? But I have so many friends who were so gung-ho about going into all of these corporations without thinking about anything like that. So that’s why I switched to Computing and the Arts just to get a different focus… I tried to get Race, Gender, and Surveillance to count [towards my major] because this should count as a CS class; you’re learning about how Computer Science interacts with people as opposed to learning algorithms, but they said no. I think ER&M adds something that so many of these STEM majors just don’t have.

SE: In your specific fields, how do you see Ethnic Studies being important?

ES: I think a lot of STEM students are looking to create things and build things and look for solutions to problems, but how are you going to design an effective solution to a problem that you don’t have a full understanding of? How are you even going to know what to address if you don’t have that historical or cultural understanding of how things are affecting people and how your ideas are being influenced by other factors?

SE: I think mainly we have to ask a lot more questions. After the classes that I have taken, I’ve thought a lot more about designing solutions with socio-cultural relationships in mind. Designing solutions with that in mind takes a lot more time to be effective. I think that’s the biggest thing that I’ve gained by slowly immersing myself in ER&M.

Stephanie Blas-Lizarazo: My ultimate pipe dream career goal is to create prosthetics that are mass producible. My parents are from Nicaragua and Venezuela originally, and both of those countries are currently in big socioeconomic political crises. I feel like those [two communities] have been and probably will continue to be overlooked in terms of healthcare, in terms of infrastructure, and things like that. Having that understanding of [the socioeconomic context] you could explore how technology could play a role in solving those types of problems. Again, the reason why I personally wanted to do ER&M is to have a better understanding of the different cultural, social, political dynamics that come to play for problems of infrastructure and technology.

KH: I took this really cool class called Sickness and Health in African American History last semester, and I think it did a good job of challenging the notion that anything can be strictly objective. Normally you hear “STEM” and you think that’s just facts and figures. But the medical history of African American people in the U.S., for example, involved so much forced experimentation; enslaved people were often used for medical experiments. Who has access to the technology that we create, and who is that technology affecting? We don’t know. I have friends who are MechE who are going to work at Shell, and I’m like… Shell? The earth is burning, what are you doing? I don’t think anything [i.e. any science you do] can be objective.

LT: One of the ER&M classes I took was Intro to Third World Studies, and that class really taught me that objectivity is fake. Everyone takes science as fact, but one of the lessons we covered in class was the racist history of science: how doctors experimented on Black people without their consent or knowledge, how environmental conservation and forestry originated as a settler-colonial technique to take over lands from Indigenous people, stuff like that. We all know about scientific racism and phrenology. Science has been used in a lot of ways in the past to justify racism and inequality, and the reality of that has taught me that science can’t always be taken as fact. You can’t trust science any more than you can trust any other academic field. A lot of what we think is objective fact is shaped by existing prejudices. Without taking an ER&M class, I would’ve never known so much about that side of science. Now when I do science, I think more about how to avoid falling into that pattern of scientists exploiting people or ignoring the needs of marginalized groups. For the sake of technology and progress, people will often overlook the importance of culture and tradition, and steamroll over Indigenous peoples and ethnic minorities. I try to be extra conscious of that in the science that I’m studying; if I had never taken an ER&M class I just wouldn’t really have that perspective and wouldn’t be actively thinking about things like that. My senior project is about traditional incense in East and Southeast Asia and how to evaluate and mitigate its effects as an indoor air pollutant. I’m focusing on thinking more about how to make science work with tradition and different [non-Western] cultures. That’s not necessarily a perspective that most people who study science have, and I wouldn’t have thought of all that if I hadn’t been taking ER&M classes.

STEM x ER&M was originally published in The Yale Herald on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

In the aftermath of the resignation of 13 ER&M faculty members, the Asian American Students Alliance hosted a conversation panel on April 6 to discuss the state of Ethnic Studies both on campus and nationally. The panel was titled “50 Years of Organizing for Ethnic Studies” in recognition of the organizing that yielded the creation of the first Ethnic Studies program at San Francisco State University in 1969. The speakers were Inderpal Grewal, Professor of ER&M and WGSS, Gary Okihiro, Visiting Professor of ER&M and American Studies, Quan Tran, Lecturer of ER&M and American Studies, Emily Almendarez, SM ’20, Gabriella Blatt, ES ’21, and Yuni Chang, MC ’18. Professor Daniel HoSang, Associate Professor of ER&M and American Studies, and Janis Jin, GH ’20, moderate.

Daniel HoSang: If we think back to Yale’s founding in the very beginning of the 18th century, Yale, like many other lead institutions was effectively segregated for its first 260 years, by race, gender, class, and religion. Whiteness was very much a prerequisite, an indicator about whether one was capable of participating in what’s often called the life of the mind.

In 1933, when the first eight residential colleges were opened, the University decided to name one after John Calhoun, a prominent white supremacist. As you walk across Old Campus today and see who makes up the first-year cohort, John Calhoun never imagined a Yale like this. And that’s because of the persistent ways that students, communities, [and] many people outside the University have summoned and mobilized an alternative vision for all of us. At the same time, I think there is some sense that Calhoun’s University still lingers. It lingers in the curriculum, it lingers in the structure of the University. It lingers in the University’s relationship to broader structures of power and authority.

So I want to turn to you now, Professor Grewal. Both of us started our academic careers at public institutions on the West Coast, and I wonder if you could talk about how that experience shapes your understanding both of how these programs can be organized, and what Yale’s investment [in Ethnic Studies] is.

Inderpal Grewal: I’ve been here for the last 10 years and it’s been eye-opening to see how the leading universities on the East Coast function and to understand the ways in which American elitism is produced. [There] was a really fluid connection between the [West Coast] community and the [public] University and that is certainly not the case for elite universities [on the East Coast] … We’ve come to understand that the knowledge, research, and teaching done in universities is really important for [the] movement as a whole, because colleges and universities are places of thinking and experimentation, of political speech, of the ability to speak freely. I think it’s important to reclaim Yale as a place where political work can be done and continues to be done.

How do we deal with the ways in which climate change is going to create millions and millions more climate migrants? How do you deal with the [fact that] the U.S. has been at war for a long time, in places that seem really far away?

I think about the problem of decolonization not only in terms of diversifying the faculty but in terms of decolonizing the University. What does it mean to decolonize that curriculum?

Emily Almendarez: I think that the curriculum could very much be broadened. It’s about broadening it, and about diversifying the student body. Global Affairs [has] an entire space designated for it, [but] ER&M — and Ethnic Studies as a whole — is having to plead for itself in institutions of higher learning.

My parents are Central-American and I come from the northern triangle, which is one of the areas that has the most displaced migrants, or the greatest rate, depending on systemic violence. But there is no Central American scholar, there is no scholar here on campus that can do [the region] justice when thinking about environmental justice. I was actually trying to double major in Environmental Studies and ER&M. I came to find that Environmental Studies isn’t interdisciplinary enough and it isn’t intersectional enough. So when I wanted to talk about climate refugees, […] that wasn’t a topic that’s addressed. […] Why is it that if someone wants to study a specific zone because they have a personal tie to it, it’s automatically labeled as “research” rather than something influential that’s broadening academic horizons?

[T]his is a demand and it’s palpable and it’s being ignored.

DH: People often think that the contributions of programs like ER&M are to serve a small subset of self-selected students who are trying to work through identity issues. […] One recurring theme is recruitment, and the contention that Yale simply always attracts the best and the brightest, and if it happens that [students] come from elite backgrounds and are overwhelmingly white, then that is [ostensibly] the effect of the intellectual marketplace. Alumni have insisted that’s not true, and we can see the impact of that work in a changed student body today. And so I want to turn to Gabriella now. Like many students here, you [were a] highly recruited student of color in part because of your eminent research record as a high school student. Yale took efforts to bring you here, to offer you support, but I want to know how you’ve experienced the University.

Gabriella Blatt: One of the things that attracted me to Yale initially was the amount of brochures that came in that made note of diversity pipeline programs. That meant a lot to me as someone who wanted to do research. […] However, every day I question the validity about the diversity pipeline programs when I see that the professor that wrote my recommendation letter was denied tenure because he was told that his research was not suited for the academy, despite his work revolutionizing his field. […] In my Yale acceptance letter, Yale told me I would be able to make an impact anywhere in the world. However, I question if they wanted me to make that impact in my classroom or somewhere on a brochure.

DH: Thank you. Professor Okihiro, maybe to take that very provocative closing Gabriela left us with […] Could you talk to us a little bit about what the history might have for us to think with and from today?

Gary Okihiro: Here in Dwight Chapel, I can hear the sound of waves. And the waves emanate not from the Atlantic but from the Pacific. I’d like to go back farther than 50 years. Here, at Yale College, in 1800 the Dwight family took Opukaha’ia in as an example of missions to convert Hawai’ians, the Native peoples who had been forming societies, histories, cultures, religions, poetry — to teach them civilization. Is Yale still a part of that mission of colonization?

Our field of study is not for a small benighted group of people within the United States. When students in 1968 struck for Third World Liberation, they struck for the peoples of the Third World. It was a global struggle, they knew. And that global struggle involved not just people of color — it involved a cause. And that cause was anti-colonialism, that dominated the world, and anti-racism, the ideology that supported the material relations of dependency.

That was the cause for which this field was founded: it was part of a global struggle that eventually overturned some 400 years of world history. We are not talking about a tiny subject matter for a tiny group of the United States. We are talking about the human condition, and the liberation of all of us, all of us, as oppressed peoples.

Imagine that.

And yet Yale, which aspires to be a global institution understanding world history, ignores this discourse.

In 1900, in London, at the seat of the British Empire, the scholar W.E.B. DuBois declared that the problem of the 20th century was the problem of the color line. And DuBois wasn’t simply talking about color; he was talking about how the white world has colonized through imperialism the rest of the world. He was talking about anti-colonialism and anti-racism, and that was the foundation of study. But beyond that, if we think of ourselves as studying the human condition, we understand the forces of oppression to be multiple, not just around the axis of race, but also importantly around gender, sexuality, class, and nation, what was articulated in the 1960s and 1970s as the interlocking systems of oppression. That’s what we study, because we are determined to understand those forces of oppression in order to liberate ourselves from those forces. That is the aim of this field of study.

It’s beautiful, isn’t it? … Yeah.

DH: I hope you can see why, in spite of the challenges that we faced as ER&M faculty, this is also such an energizing moment with colleagues like this and knowing the intellectual and political commitments that are at stake in our program, students like this alumni that we feel connected to the enormous stakes we feel at this moment.

IG: Last year, I had the privilege of teaching the first South Asians in America course, with an emphasis on gender and sexuality. So as political movements change and evolve during this moment, where trans issues are really critical, how we think of those in relation to race and ethnicity is always an important issue. […]

I have one story of what people can do when they study our fields. [O]ne of my students, Rhiana Gunn-Wright, who was a joint AFAM/WGSS major, is one of the co-writers of the Green New Deal, so it’s incredible to see what people can do if they think about race, class, gender together, and think about how to improve the world […] The Westphalian system of the nation-state is not adequate to the challenges that we face. So worlds have always been plural; they have been mobile; they have always struggled. And in some ways we need to think about both the past in that way and the future in that way. Our struggle has to be ongoing. We have to think about pluralities; we have to think democratically; we have to think about […] animals and the non-human world too. How do we enable all of our flourishing — not just [the flourishing of] a few of us?

EA: I think that generally it’s important to attribute respect and dignity to those fields, as well as to the faculty that help produce that knowledge. But I think that in that power diffusion, it’s also important to understand that these Third World countries are producers of knowledge themselves — not just areas of study, not just digestible consumables.

It’s about taking a step back and understanding that institutions like these aren’t the only producers of knowledge and solutions. I think that it’s about having iterative conversations between those that have been allotted this opportunity to take up these spaces, but also about understanding that it doesn’t end in the classroom, the same way that this fight doesn’t end with the departmentalization of ER&M. That conversation, that drive for a solution, for the betterment of our world and our planet, doesn’t stop as soon as that course or that conversation ends.

50 Years of Organizing for Ethnic Studies was originally published in The Yale Herald on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

This timeline was organized by Elliot Wailoo, SY ’21, and Christian Fernandez, BF ’20, with additional research by Seyade Tadele, TD ’21. It uses research and resources gathered by students in Professor Quan Tran’s Fall 2018 seminar, Comparative Ethnic Studies (ER&M 300). Those students are: Emily Almendarez, Vernice Chan, Ann Hui Ching, Shamsa Derrick, Christian Fernandez, Yuki Hayasaka, Supriya Kohli, Ben Levin, Ruhi Manek, Mariah Minigan, Matthew Motylenski, Sophie Neely, Chidera Osuji, Natalia Reyes Becerra, Spencer Shimek, Amanda Taheri, Marisa Vargas-Morawetz, and Jesús Yanez. Their full project can be accessed at https://bit.ly/2Xe4ogH; we encourage you to check it out!

1969

• A year of strikes at SFSU and UC Berkeley lead to the founding of the country’s first Ethnic Studies programs, as well as the first Asian American studies program, the first Black studies program, the first Latinx studies program, and the first Native American Studies program. Ethnic Studies programs begin to pop up around the country, largely concentrated on the West Coast.
• Yale’s African American Studies Program and the Afro-American Cultural Center (then called Afro-America) are created as a result of activism led by the Black Student Alliance at Yale’s (BSAY) co-moderators, Armstead Robinson, Donald Ogilvie, and Glenn DeChabert. This is the first year that Black Studies courses are taught at Yale; BSAY was formed five years earlier, in 1964.
• Asian American Students Association (AASA) is founded.
• Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlán (MEChA) is founded.
• Women are admitted to Yale College to start in the fall of 1969. Women compose 230 of the approximately 1,200 incoming first-years.

1970

• Student leader Don Nakanishi writes a letter to then-President of Yale, Kingman Brewster, advocating for the creation of a program for “Floating Ethnic Counselors.” His idea centers on the hiring of “Third World” students to mentor first-years.

1972

• Yale creates the Ethnic Counselors position, which still exists today in the form of Peer Liaisons.

1973

• MEChA writes a letter to President Brewster, demanding that Yale create a Chicanx Cultural Center.

1974

• La Casa Boricua is founded as a cultural center for Puerto Rican students at Yale.

1980

• Students successfully advocate for the renaming of Pierson’s “slave quarters.”

1981

• Student demands lead to the foundation of a cultural center for Asian Americans, Native Americans, and Chicanx students.

1982

• Students coordinated with the admissions office to organize an admitted students weekend for “Third World Students,” whom they defined as Puerto Ricans, Asians, Chicanos, Blacks, and Native Americans.

1989

• The Association of Native Americans at Yale (ANAAY) is founded.

Throughout the ’90s, Ethnic Studies programs are under assault, suffering frequent cuts or depletions of funding.

1990

• Students protest racist acts, such as a hate letter and racist graffiti, and demand that the administration discontinue its focus on teaching and studying Western civilization.

Mar. 7, 1997

• Ethnicity, Race, and Migration is founded as a program by a unanimous vote, but only as a second major — students must major in another discipline as well.

1999

• “La Casa Cultural” is renamed “La Casa Cultural Julia de Burgos, the Latinx Cultural Center” as the space is expanded to include not only Puerto Rican students, but also Chicanx students and students of other Latinx heritages.

2000

• After 31 years of existing as a program at Yale, African American Studies is elevated to departmental status.

2002

• Students found an anti-racism group which pushes for more sustained dialogue around diversity at Yale, and spearheaded Diversity Training for Freshman Counselors and a Yale Curriculum Review.

2006

• AASA conducts a day of silence to protest anti-Asian racist articles published in two Yale publications, Rumpus and this publication, the Yale Herald.

2007

• In response to incidents of blackface and spray-painted slurs, students demand that Yale implement first-year reading requirements, expand the Ethnic Counselor program, and establish a cultural studies requirement.

2008

• The Ethnic Counselor program is restructured into the current Peer Liaison (PL) structure. The LGBTQ Co-op and the Chaplain’s Office also create PL positions.

2012

• Students are able to major in ER&M as a single major.

2013

• The Native American Cultural Center, previously housed inside the Asian American Cultural Center, receives its own building at 26 High Street and becomes the fourth Cultural Center.

2014

• Students revive the Asian American Studies Task Force to research and protest the lack of Asian American Studies classes offered at Yale.

Nov. 3, 2015

• In a University-wide email, President Peter Salovey and Provost Ben Polak announce Yale’s promise to invest $50 million over the following five years in the improvement of faculty diversity.

Nov. 9, 2015

• More than 1,000 student organizers participate in a March of Resilience and teach-in as a response to a variety of racist events, including racist incidents at fraternities, emails from Associate Master of Silliman College Erika Christakis instructing students to look the other way if they saw a racist or insensitive Halloween costume, and Yale’s refusal to rename Calhoun College, named for pro-slavery advocate John C. Calhoun.

Nov. 12, 2015

• The alliance of students, Next Yale, presents a list of demands to President Peter Salovey, including an Ethnic Studies distributional requirement, increases in the operational budgets of each cultural center, the renaming of Calhoun, and an abolition of the title of “Master.”

Spring 2016

• Yale commits to the creation of the Center for the Study of Race, Indigeneity, and Transnational Migration.
• Yale renames the position of Master as “Head of College.”
• Yale announces it will not rename Calhoun College. In response, students hold a symbolic renaming ceremony.

Feb. 11, 2017

• Yale reverses its decision and announces the renaming of formerly Calhoun College as Grace Hopper College.

Spring 2019:

• MEChA and AASA each celebrate 50th anniversaries.
• The 13 Professors appointed in the program in Ethnicity, Race, and Migration withdraw from the program, citing a lack of administrative support, funding, and hiring power, among other issues.
• The Coalition for Ethnic Studies begins to organize for the advancement of Ethnic Studies and institutional support and departmental status for the program in Ethnicity, Race, and Migration.

50 years: a timeline of organizing and advocacy for students of color at Yale was originally published in The Yale Herald on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.