Cambridge Common

Cambridge Common will cover labor issues all year, as it is important to know where our money goes. The way Harvard spends our money (as with divestment issues, etc.) is an expression of our collective morality and if we as students allow the people who make our lives possible to live in poverty, we are complicit in their struggles. For now, the important thing to do is read everything you can about this (hopefully the Crimson will continue to do a great job covering the issue) and talk to the people who work around you about their experience. Talk to the people who run your dining halls and guard your houses, who clean your hallways and fix your broken window. Ask them about what they experience, what they are paid, how and if they struggle. Talk to your friends and make it an issue. Make it an issue because the people we rely on to live our lives are relying on us to help them live theirs.

Few things get me angrier than investment bankers. I-banking is the ultimate tool job. Undergrads slice each other's throats to get these positions and are worked to the bone for hours on end. Usually people defend their status as cogs in the wheel of capitalism and global oppression in capitalist terms, "At least they paid me well." Dummy. You're like the dog at the side of the table that is ever thankful for the sloppy, fattening scraps that your master throws to you. No matter how many zeros were at the end of your checks, you were making chump change. You know it and I know it. I say this as a self-identifying public servant who makes even less during my summer's off from school. Nevertheless, I can walk through a community of people of my race such as Mission Hill and not get robbed by my own brothers and sisters. Let me see Goldman Sachs train you on how to stay in touch with the majority of your people. Whoops, only assimilation into greater wealthy White society's taught there. Blackness revoked!

The purpose of I-banking is to increase the ready capital of one's clients and therefore perpetuate the unequal and harmful distribution of wealth currently in existence in the U.S. The overwhelming wealth of America ($12 trillion GDP...over 7.5 times that of the combined GDP of the 54 countries that make up Africa) is sickening at times. Most people at Harvard do not care about these facts because they have little or no personal experience with poverty, racism, or related issues. They have never attended a majority Black public school where you enter with nearly 1,000 peers though graduate with only 350. They have never had to restrain their illiterate grandmother from going outside for a walk around the neighborhood due to excessive violence there. They have never had to wait in large rooms with others on public assistance in the basement of their city hall to receive medical care. Nope. Never.

Whether Blacks in Nigeria or Blacks in Newtowne Courts (one of Cambridge's public housing developments), many are dumbfounded when they hear that Black students attend Harvard University. The combined astonishment, excitement, and inspiration that they feel is remarkable. Just today one of the kids I work with in the aforementioned after school program told me that she wanted to go to Harvard. That's wassup. So many Blacks the world over are depending on individuals such as myself who are Black, from humble beginnings and "down" to show them the way to equality and freedom that it's staggering. Sadly, many of these Blacks the world over falsely feel that all Blacks at Harvard are "down". If they only knew that most Blacks at Harvard are not only complacent in their social and economic positions gained while at (or through) Harvard or innately through parents before coming to this University but many actively seek to enter jobs that will serve to further oppress them, they would cry rivers. Aren't we supposed to be that "Talented Tenth" that Du Bois talked about over a century ago in The Souls of Black Folk? Aren't we supposed to bind with our brothers and sisters at Yale, Princeton, Stanford and the like along with those at Howard, Morehouse, and Hampton and attend to the immense task of the upliftment of our roughly one billion person race? Yeah, but who wants to do this when you can work 80 hours a week for Lehman Brothers (and never make partner), live in Brooklyn Heights (and never have a BBQ), and send your kids to Collegiate (and never place them in an environment where they're remotely accepted)?

Getting back to my original point--my discomfort at Harvard--this discomfort lies in my struggle to find a community I feel fully at home in. The Blacks at Harvard are not like the Blacks that I grew up with in Trenton. These two groups of people have no basis for a present day relationship. Their relationship would be one based on history only ("we've both been categorized as Black"..."we're both derived from Southern slave families"...etc.). At the same time, I'm clearly not comfortable in the greater community at Harvard that is White, grew up with two parents, and from "oh, just twenty minutes outside" some city. For these reasons, I find myself regressing more and more into the social justice community. This community is a rainbow coalition of sorts that draws its members from many different populations on campus, even some previously ridiculed or highlighted in this very blog (paragraph at that). These individuals and I get down on the same issues--the liberation of oppressed groups. Whether this oppressed group be women, homosexuals, the poor, Blacks (oh yeah), or whoever else this is what they ride for. That's why I'm a feminist. That's why you may catch me at a BGLTSA meeting sometime before I graduate (shout out to Mischa). That's why you can catch me in the hood in Mission Hill on a regular chilling with people that, not jokingly, have to work to be considered poor.

I recognize my membership and role in a social and economic group that I MUST work to better. If only more people here did instead of, when soliciting recruiters, bringing I-bankers; financial consultants; and violent, imperialist government-supporting U.S. Department of Defense reps to come and make their PR ratings go up then Harvard and the world would be a much better place for it. I bet you they'll send the Black guy, once again into a social situation at a different institution that he is uncomfortable in. Karma...gotta love it.

Now, to be clear, Cambridge Common has no delusion that it will ever be able to hold the audience that the Crimson has. It's not only impossible, but it is in some ways a bad idea. Having a major newspaper with formal systems of comps and interviews and money and all that jazz is good. What's bad is when half a dozen people decide what the rest of us know and think. What Cambridge Common hopes to do is bug the crap out of them and encourages other people to do the same. A few hundred people read this site last spring before it had any major ambitions. If five hundred read it now, things will start to change: people will start blogs of their own, people will read the Crimson differently, the Crimson will occasionally have to suffer the embarrassment of being incredibly wrong, dishonest and/or stupid. That's why media monopolies are bad: because when the Crimson is wrong, no one is saying so.

And the Crimson is occasionally wrong, biased, dishonest and stupid. They have the dual problems of being disconnected from the politics they're trying to write about (because they rarely have time to do really intense reporting and fact-checking) as well as personally invested in the politics enough to have incredible biases and blind spots (as a result of friends, etc.). Add the fact that there is no building on campus that generates and regenerates the kind of mindless gossip that the Crimson does, and you've got yourself a problem.

For instance, did you know that more than anything, the Crimson Ed Board didn't endorse Senior Gift Plus because it didn't like Matt Mahan? Did you know that it did endorse Ian Nichols in large part because his roommate and best friend was a co-chair who held considerable sway and admitted as much explicitly? Did you know that coverage is increasingly driven by whatever the reporters find interesting because people are so busy and it's hard to motivate them to do real work? Did you know that the Crimson often misses large community events on campus (like ABHW's Celebration of Black Men last year) partially because there aren't that many black people in the building to begin with, so they didn't know it was even happening? Did you know that many staff editorials are essentially written by committee, and that often the last editor who gets their hands on it is able to bias the story in their direction, regardless of how the staff voted? Did you know that often the voting is incredibly contentious divided, but we usually only get one opinion (occassionally they run a dissent). Did you know that often times the Crimson is a major part of the story, i.e. manufacturing news/drama/controversy, but doesn’t write about themselves because they don’t have to. The list goes on, and we hope to document much of it here.

The Crimson is a fundamentally good newspaper. Some of the people I love the most in the world spend a majority of their time there and do great work. The staff of the Crimson works hard, they produce a lot of material in a short period of time, they mostly take their jobs very seriously and hold themselves to a high standard. But not always, and our community deserves to know when that is, why that is, who that is. We deserve more than one opinion and one concept of "news." So, read Cambridge Common. Start your own blog and link up. Comment here on what you think. We don't claim to be the solution, but you've got to start somewhere.

As I sat eating dinner in Kirkland's dining hall about two hours ago the atmosphere was one ripe with both anticipation and confusion. On the anticipatory side, many in the dining hall were there to catch a quick bite to eat before attempting to huddle into Kirkland's JCR and hear from the President of Zambia. A number of people in the dining hall were middle-aged, wore nice clothing and kept their eyes firmly fixed on the door out of the dining hall facing the JCR in between bites of grilled chicken breast (that was great...compliments to the chef). However, on the confusion side, many Kirkland residents seemed taken aback by the large number of Black students and adults that seemed to be scurrying around their dining hall. I was just waiting for someone to come to me and ask if there was a Black student group meeting in here or something. Grrr...

The range of people that I saw waiting to get into the JCR to hear the President also surprised me. Everyone from African graduate school students of law or government to wealthy, White undergraduates from Andover were eager to listen to this powerful, Black man. Before the event happened, some in the Black community were nervous about turnout and feared that few people would come to see the President of a nation that not many could point to on a map come and speak. However, from the fact that the room was already overflowing with people half an hour before the event was scheduled to begin one can assume that many on campus got the word.

The range of people that I saw waiting to get into the JCR to hear the President also made me think of how rare it is for a largely White, privileged student body to hear from the leader of a country whose per capita GDP is about the price of textbooks for an undergraduate year at Harvard. What type of cross-cultural education is happening right now? Whose eyes are being opened wider? The President of Zambia's who is facing a room with a disproportionate amount of Blacks in it relative to the number of Blacks at the college? Or the White students who are seeing a Black, African male with a third-world education possibly dispense wisdom far beyond that which their White, male, Ec professor with a Ph.D from Oxford? More to come...

What was confusing about it for me was that, while the piece did a pretty dance about the processes needed for a secret body to be healthy and reach out to the faculty etc., it said nothing about what actual OPINIONS this individual and body should have. The piece contains no critique of the actual way the Corporation works or the direction it's going. And, for a replacement it outlined this as the ideal candidate:

What the Corporation needs now is not another member who has all the same interests and areas of expertise as the others. It needs a member who can bring wholly new perspectives to old problems, while simultaneously being ready to compromise, acquiesce, and respect the judgment of the majority. He or she must not allow the University's governing body to become complacent.

Does anyone else have no idea what that means? Does this mean that someone who believes that Harvard should conquer Mars, but works well with others and respects majority opinion would fit their ideal candidate? Their point, as in many things, is entirely PROCESS-based. They don't care what happens (or what direction the Corporation steers the school), they just want to make sure that the process works. Blech.

Why not say this: we need someone on the Corporation who believes that a University has more difficult questions to ask itself than "how can we make the most money?" and "how can we keep our reputation and donor-base intact?". In other words, we need an entire Corporation that believes that producing the political, social and economic "elite" of a country and world includes more difficult questions than producing, say, shoes. We need a corporation that believes that Harvard should: 1. be fair with its neighbors, 2. produce students with values that extend beyond making money and having power, 3.treat its workers with the respect they deserve, 4.believe that a university has a leading role in addressing injustice, not just talking about its existence.

I could, and at some point will, go on. But for now can we please have a real discussion about the Corporation and University that goes beyond questions of process?

Who is Mike Jones? Who shot Roger Rabbit? Where is the closest Rita's Water Ice (yeah, Mid-Atlantic)? Let a brother know...

TO DO (Some questions)

What kind of people does Harvard produce? What kind of people does it intend to produce? Is there something wrong with the fact that something like 40% of us go straight into consulting and banking? Is that a reflection of society's values, or values taught/absorbed at Harvard?

What does it mean to be on the left today? Who are our heroes? What do we believe? How does our experience at Harvard affect our beliefs and/or how they are expressed? What is our role in making this country/world a more equal, fair place?

How do issues of class, race, gender and sexuality play out in the context of Harvard? How do they interact? How do the institutions around us (student-run or university-directed) construct how we perceive/address these issues? How can Harvard be a more comfortable/valuable place for people who are not in the position of privilege in these paradigms?

This set of questions is intended to point to my primary interest at understanding/analyzing our role as Harvard students and members of a specific community. As one can tell from reading the blog in the past, all of the contributors will also write on particular issue that interest them outside of the walls of the yard or the specific context of Harvard, whether that be national or international politics or non-political ideas/arguments. What else?