Whatever I’m going to say in this letter, just keep this in mind before you jump to a conclusion or formulate some kind of impression: I love Wesleyan. Wesleyan is a great place, with awesome professors, smart and open-minded students, a sometimes-less-than-efficient-but-nevertheless-adorable-in-its-own-inefficient-way administration, informative and diverse classes, and a beautiful campus with green fields and trees and gothic buildings and all that. Students are generally so tolerant that if you are white, male, straight, and loaded, you might get stoned to death when you walk across the field in front of Olin. If you get a parking ticket you could always refuse to pay then argue this whole system is classist in nature in the first place anyway. So this is an amazing environment in which to be educated on becoming a useful member of a community, and to learn how to change the world into a better place in general. Really. If you ask me, the money and the four years are totally worth it.
That’s why I became a little confused when I saw the April Awareness Month poster.
This is so unlike any other Wesleyan events I have ever come to know before. Whoever designed the poster, or came with this whole concept of an Asian, Asian American/Arab/Arab American/Queer Awareness Month should really share with the Wesleyan community the logic behind this whole thing because I don’t understand. First of all, why did they put Asians and Arabs together? Is it because we kind of look the same? Then I thought, Wesleyan kids are generally pretty intelligent (even though I was once asked whether Hong Kong is in Japan), there’s no way they could mix Asians and Arabs together. And on top of that, our Dean of Diversity is Japanese!
So wait, why Arabs and queer then? Or Asians and queer? Isn’t that discriminating towards people who are white and queer or Latino and queer? What about black and queer? Oh yeah wait, what about the Europeans and the white Americans? Aren’t they important too? Then I saw the color of the whole poster—why a purple background and red text? Is that a subtle reference to Tinky Winky? And why the bird/phoenix thing? Is that supposed to be the Cardinal or what? It seems to me that this whole event is the single most politically incorrect thing Wesleyan can ever do, so unlike the Wesleyan I know. Is there some kind of conspiracy behind this that I don’t know about? I’m perplexed. Utterly perplexed.
I strongly suggest extending this April Awareness Month to more people we should be aware of, because if this is the time when we keep all the diverse groups of Wesleyan students in mind, there’s nothing more important than including all the people we usually don’t pay attention to in this event. So I hereby propose expanding the April awareness month into:
Asian/Asian American/Arab/Arab American/European/European American/Pacific Islander/Pacific Islander American/Australian/Australian American/Any other race we forgot to mention/Grad and PhD students/the Sexually Impotent/the Overachievers/the Computer Geeks/the Perpetually Drunk or stoned/the White, Male, Straight, and Loaded Awareness Month.
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