by Ishrat Mannan and Didem Kaya “It is Palestine. Not a dream, but a people. Not a refugee camp, but a country alive in its people’s hearts.” – Vijay Prashad “We are not myths of the past, ruins in the jungle, or zoos. We are people and we want to be respected, not to be…
by Javier Cienfuegos This week’s Democratic Presidential Debate spurred a heated conversation online about who actually “won” the debate. According to CNN it was the frontrunner, former Secretary of State Hilary Clinton. Various online polls have the not-so-junior junior Senator from Vermont, Bernie Sanders as the victor. Pretty much everyone agrees that former Rhode Island…
by Hawa Adula Jess X Chen and Will Giles, two Asian American spoken word poets, performed at the Calhoun Cabaret Monday night and gave all audience members a lesson in intersectionality. The poems covered a range of topics including colonialism, queer love, womanhood, and identity. Chen and Giles’s pieces on colonialism felt particularly riveting in…
by David Rico No longer able to defend Christopher Columbus’s moral character, students at Yale and our peer institutions have challenged the idea of Indigenous Peoples’ Day by pointing to the positive aspects of the Columbian Exchange: corn for beef, squash for wheat, etc. As if any technological advancement or new crop were worth the…
by Alexis Payne This past Monday, Deray McKesson, a leader in the Black Lives Matter movement (BLM), took over Yale’s Afro-American Cultural Center with an idea: “You are enough to start a movement. That is the story of Ferguson.” His audience was 200 potential movement-builders: Yale undergraduates, grad students, professors, and community members. McKesson’s organizing…