The designation “Asian American” itself is complex. While Chinese, Korean, and Japanese Americans often occupy positions of privilege in middle- and upper-class America, Asian Americans from countries such as Vietnam and Cambodia are among the most socially and economically disadvantaged in America. When talking about Princeton, I am referring to the former group, which makes up the majority of Asian American students on campus.
.. When I asked Dong about his view on the protests, he highlighted his frustration with the oftentimes-overlooked Asian American perspective during discussions of minority rights. “It seemed like there wasn’t any room in there for any other minority or culture groups to attend these meetings and talk with the administration,” Dong said.
Can German Atonement Teach America to Finally Face Slavery?
I saw the collective, institutional side of this process in the ongoing scrutiny of public statues and street names, the markers at the sites of atrocities, and the brass-plated stones embedded in the sidewalk outside my apartment building that listed all the Holocaust victims who’d once lived there. I saw the individual side of it in the lives of my German friends who’d spent a gap year volunteering at hospitals in Israel, who studied Yiddish in a spirit of preserving the endangered language of a culture their great-grandparents sought to annihilate, or whose relatives read their Stasi files and confronted the neighbors who’d informed on them to the East German police.
.. The longer I lived in Germany, the more steeped I became in this attitude toward the past, and the stranger the scarcity of visible markers of slavery and the genocide of Native Americans seemed on my visits back to the U.S. I understood that the two countries’ histories have different timeframes, different geographies, different varieties of wrongdoing, but some of the broader lessons of Aufarbeitung — that individuals and societies can improve themselves morally by struggling against the human urge to look away from the sins of the past, or that atonement is a process that instills a sense of responsibility for the past rather than an action that starts from that sense — felt strikingly absent in America.
Donald Trump Plays Nice
The problem with his comment on the Alabama protester wasn’t that it wasn’t “nice.” It was that it revealed a belief that the proper response to dissent is physical violence. And the problem with Mr. Trump’s entire campaign isn’t that he’s raw and unfiltered and over-the-top — “a little bit rough,” as he put it — but that he harbors racist and sexist ideas and panders to others with those ideas. For a reminder of what he actually stands for, look no further than an interview on Wednesday, in which he said that to combat terrorists, “you have to take out their families.”
Names in the Ivy League
In the end, Hermann Glaser, Nuremberg’s culture minister at that time, came up with a novel way of responding to the site’s dissonant heritage—a strategy he called Trivialisierung, or trivialization. “What should be done,” Macdonald writes, “was to let the buildings fall into a state of semi-disrepair but not total ruin. They should be allowed to look ugly and uncared-for. And they should be used for banal uses, such as for storage, and leisure activities like tennis and motor-racing.” This “profanation” of the Nuremberg rallying grounds aimed to keep them available to history while denying them the dignity and sacredness that the Nazis had longed to create.
.. In suggesting that “the name of the University itself” was up for grabs, Holloway was referring to the fact that Eli Yale, the university’s founder, was an official of the East India Company and a slave trader.
.. The notion that Calhoun College could remain Calhoun College, and that its name could become, in some sense, an ironic form of critique, suggests just how different universities are from other places.
.. In fact, because Calhoun’s name is protected by South Carolina’s Heritge Act, changing the name of the street is more or less impossible.)
.. The vast Gothic campuses of Princeton and Yale communicate a different idea. Their towers and arches embody a sense of timelessness and power that is profoundly linked to the history of white Europe.