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A Question of Cow Consumption Sparks Religious Violence in India

Last week in India, police arrested eight people suspected of beating two men in their village of Bisara. After a local temple announced that one of the Muslim families in the village had been storing beef in their home, a mob of over 60 Hindus took matters into their own hands. After learning of this accusation, the mob pulled a man and his son out of their house to beat them. The father died as a result of the beatings, and the son is still hospitalized due to serious injury. Relatives of the men have claimed that the family does not eat meat and have been wrongly accused. They claim that the meat in question was actually goat, which is commonly eaten during Eid al-Adha, a recent Muslim festival. Police have sent in samples of the meat for testing. Relatives of the father and son blame a hard line Hindu group for the incident.

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Resilience, an ideal that hurts more than it helps

Resilience–the ability to bounce back after trauma or crisis–is an ideal that is increasingly central to our culture. “Bouncing back” can mean breaking even, but generally people think resilience is the ability to come out ahead of where you started, the ability to, as Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel put it, never let a crisis go to waste.

Resilience is thought to be the most valuable capacity individuals, populations, and states can possess. For example, British education policy leaders think resilience ought to be taught in schools because it is key to social mobility. Resilience is also a commonly-used term and oft-cited ideal in ecological thought and environmental science, as well as both clinical and popular psychology. The American Psychological Association website features a guide to cultivating personal resilience, and there are countless stories about disabled people who overcome their supposed limitations and achieve above-average feats.

Resilience sounds like a straightforwardly positive thing: the ability to recuperate from loss and injury is essential to human life, after all. However, as Mark Neocleous has argued, when resilience becomes a norm or expectation, it does more damage than good. There are many ways to work through and recover from trauma, and though resilience looks like one on the outside, deeper down it isn’t. Resilience discourse uses therapeutic practices and methods as engines of social and economic production. As a practice or method, resilience has three steps: (1) perform damage so that others can see, feel, and understand it; (2) recycle or overcome that damage, so that you come out ahead of where you were even before the damage hit; (3) pay that surplus value–that value added by recycling–to some hegemonic institution, like white supremacist patriarchy, or capital, or the State, something like that. What Autumn Whitefileld-Madrano calls the “therapeutic body image narrative” is an example of this logic. As she argues, the way we expect women to feel about their bodies has changed. Traditionally, women are pressured to conform to an unattainable ideal (thin, blonde, etc.) and to feel guilty and inadequate when they do not meet this norm. However, nowadays we expect women to love their bodies: everything from the beauty industry (Dove’s “Real Beauty” campaign) to the pop music industry (Meghan Trainor’s “All About That Bass”) tells women that they shouldn’t hate their bodies, but love them. But this love isn’t supposed to be straightforward; rather, it must be the outcome of a struggle with negative body image. As Whitefield-Madrano explains:

“The narrative of body image—with its triumphant tale of overcoming obstacles such as self-loathing, mass media, and the collateral damage of girlhood—is inscribed upon us, particularly among consumers of women’s media, to the point where we forget other bodily narratives may exist.”

The overcoming narrative doesn’t replace the original narrative, but builds on it. So, the original source of harm isn’t eliminated, but becomes a prerequisite. If the ability to overcome trauma and crisis is something everyone is required to demonstrate, then this means everyone ought to undergo some trauma or crisis: you can overcome only if you’ve first been set back. Instead of preventing trauma and crisis, resilience discourse makes it a prerequisite that everyone must experience in order to demonstrate that they are healthy and normal. Resilience discourse treats trauma and crisis as compulsory experiences. In turn, this lets society off the hook for systematic problems like poverty, climate change, and sexism. Resilience discourse outsources the work of addressing, surviving, and coping with the harms of systemic, institutionalized inequality to private individuals. If you still feel the negative effects of, say, sexism, it’s your fault because you’re just not resilient enough. Society doesn’t have to spend any resources solving or alleviating harm, nor does it have to put any more effort into reproducing the relations of inequity that cause these harms. If everyone has to experience some loss and damage, the people who began with more resources and more access to privilege will always have an easier route to recovery–and often a more successful outcome–than those without.

The main thing that distinguishes resilience from other forms of coping is that resilience ultimately benefits hegemonic institutions more than it benefits you. Just as wage labor generates profits for employers, resilience is a type of laboring on the self that generates literal and/or ideological profits for someone else, often at your expense. This isn’t just coping–it’s a very specific form of coping designed to get individuals to perform the superficial trappings of recovery from deep, systemic and institutional issues, all the while reinforcing and intensifying the very systemic issues it claims to solve.

Next month I’ll talk more about resilience, gender, and women.

Defund Planned Parenthood: Decent or Deception?

Last Friday, the House of Representatives, largely led by Republicans, passed a bill that would defund Planned Parenthood. This means that Planned Parenthood would no longer be able to receive funding from the government. Though the bill is expected to die in the Senate, house Republicans are considering forcing a government shutdown over the issue.

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A Hazing Death at Baruch, 2 Years Later

Charges have finally been brought against 37 members of the Pi Delta Psi fraternity at Baruch College (as well as the national organization), in relation to the death of 19 year old freshman pledge Chun Hsien “Michael” Deng back in 2013. Five members face murder charges, while the others face various charges of assault, conspiracy and hindering investigation.

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A Collegiate Fear of Discomfort

College, particularly at a liberal arts institution, is a time for young adults to gain exposure to a wealth of new ideas and perspectives – typically, in order to become more open-minded and responsible members of society. A certain amount of discomfort is guaranteed to come with this notion. Having one’s beliefs and previous notions challenged can be difficult to process at times. However, today’s generation of college students are increasingly becoming less willing to participate in this discourse in the name of offensiveness and mental health. Additionally, on some campuses, “trigger warnings” have become a normal preface to any topic that could potentially be considered sensitive to someone, and the quantity of topics included in this range only continues to grow.
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In Defense of the Unpalatable: Protection of Hate Speech

On Wednesday, a group of fundamentalist Christians picketed the DePauw University campus, holding signs decrying the sins of “masturbators”, “feminists”, “pot-heads”, and “baby-killers”, while shouting at pedestrian women to “stop being whores” and to accept that “your sins are your fault, not your boyfriends.”

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Who is to Blame for the Hajj Stampede?

Criticism against Saudi Arabia has grown since the deadly stampede at the Hajj last Thursday, when 717 pilgrims died, and 863 were injured in the tragedy. The deadly crush was not the result of a conflict, but rather the meeting of two groups of pilgrims at an intersection on their way to Jamarat to participate in a symbolic stoning of the Devil at the spot in Mecca where he was said to have tempted Abraham.  It was a very hot day and pilgrims were rushing to reach their destination.

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What We’re Reading: October 1, 2015

Skin Feeling (New Inquiry)
by Sofia Samatar
“What it is to be encountered as a surface, to be constantly exposed as something you are not.”

Fact Check: Your Demand for Statistical Proof is Racist (The Society Pages)
by Candice Lanuis
“This past December, most major American news outlets ran a story about police shooting statistics and race. No matter where they were situated on the political spectrum, journalists, pundits, and researchers tried to answer the question: Are American police disproportionately targeting and killing black people? The answers were universally supported by data, statistics, claims of objectivity, and a rhetoric of uncomfortable truths. Their conclusions, however, were all over the map.”

Give Poor People Cash (Atlantic)
by Charles Kenney
“And the good news is that growing evidence around the world suggests there’s a simple design for a safety-net system that may not create dependency—and may help lift people up and out of poverty: Give poor people cash without conditions attached, and it turns out they use it to buy goods and services that improve their lives and increase their future earnings potential.”

Report Questions Free Community College (Inside Higher Ed)
“A new report from the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research — a conservative think tank — argues that community colleges aren’t ready for the consequences of providing “free” tuition until they provide intensive counseling and “emulate” the for-profit college sector with relevant course work and internships.”

Are Peter Singer’s Ideas Too Dangerous to Hear? (The Star)
by Peter Kavanagh
“If you are an animal, Peter Singer might be the closest thing you have to Moses. If you are a severely disabled human baby — or a disability activist — he’s more akin to the Angel of Death.”

Race and Class Collide in a Plan for Two Brooklyn Schools (New York Times)
by Kate Taylor
“To the city, the solution for the overcrowding at P.S. 8 seemed obvious: move those two neighborhoods from P.S. 8’s zone and into that of P.S. 307, which is nearby and has room to spare. The proposal, however, has drawn intense opposition, and not only from the families who would be rezoned from the predominantly white P.S. 8 to the mostly black P.S. 307. Some residents of the housing project served by P.S. 307 also oppose the rezoning, worried about how an influx of wealthy, mostly white families could change their school.”