On Yale, Solidarity, & Hope

by alex zhang, art editor & student at yale university

1. Today, I sat before more than 1,000 students and faculty at Yale in a holy place called Battell Chapel, the kind of holy with organ pipes overflowing and everyone all ears to the front. It was a teach-in about women of color, mental health, white and male privilege, and ethnic studies. I felt the breath of a community explode as if we were creating a universe together.

2. The first time I sat in Battell Chapel it was for a funeral. I cried because a girl I knew, who had so much spirit and love to share, killed herself in part because Yale couldn't support her the way she needed. We called it a community gathering.

3. Until 1995, we didn't think there were any other planets in the universe besides the ones in our solar system. Until Copernicus, we thought everything in the universe revolved around us.

4. I have only been to Missouri once—Branson, to be precise. I was 6, maybe, and at the time, I thought I wanted to be a police officer.

5. I borrowed some yearbooks from a library last month—one from 1969, one from 1973, one from 1984—and in my free time, I google people to see where they are now. Sometimes, I email them to talk, and I ask them if things ever change.

6. There was a black student at Yale in the 1980s who returned to his dorm one day to find that his white suitemates had moved his stuff out and hung a noose in his closet. There was no march or rally for him.

7. When people ask me what I love about Yale, I always reply "the people." I am still learning what it means to say that.

8. On the last day of school last year, I sat in my suite with 20 strangers as we sang Bon Iver's "Skinny Love" and Pete Seeger's "Solidarity Forever." I still don't know who half of them are, but I like to think we're friends.

9. Sometimes, when I think about all the people who died on railroads, plantations, and reservations so I could be where I am today, I pretend that in a parallel universe, they would be allowed to have a funeral in a place like Battell Chapel. Maybe a community would gather, maybe they would sing and snap, maybe they would march, maybe they would hope that in hundreds of years, people would sing and snap about them, create an ethnic studies department and teach classes about them, write about them, remember them for the people they were.

10. When I marched with the one-thousand-however-many Yale students and professors on Monday, I kept wondering if the crowd of people had an end. I wondered if this is what Moses felt like as he led an exodus to somewhere with hope. When I opened my computer today, I kept wondering when the train of supportive messages for Missouri students would end.

11. When I think about the universe, anything about space or time, I remember that I'm so lucky to be in the warm pit of it, that there are people across the country uniting and fighting injustice, that we are never alone and we never were.

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To the students of color at Mizzou, Yale, CMC, Ithaca, and elsewhere: we, allies and students of color at Blueshift, stand in solidarity with you. We bear witness to your courage, and we send our love. To those that threaten your safety, the world is watching.

#‎InSolidarity

#alexzhang #misc