Yes Queen
Truth and Change
I opened my email earlier this week to see an email from Dean Khurana, explaining that Harvard's House masters would be changing their title due to concerns about the title’s implications. I anticipated the backlash.
As expected, my Facebook newsfeed flooded with sarcastic comments and impassioned posts about the change: Why do we have to change this title when it doesn’t even come from slave-holding histories? Why is the social justice language police coming down on us again, restricting our speech? What will those lefties do next—come after our Master’s degrees? Such a slippery slope!
Will We Ever Be Royals?
I’m tired.
At the beginning of the year, coming back to campus after a semester away seemed simultaneously exciting and daunting. Perhaps as a coping mechanism, I started jokingly referring to myself as a Tired Old Queen, and I laughed as the term caught on among my first-year mentees in FUP.
Open Up
Earlier this year I wrote a piece about final clubs with my roommate. In the months following, backlash ensued, most vocally from final club alumni.
I’m not sorry for writing the piece. The piece was intended to provoke conversation and action, and I believe it did. Later that semester, a list of final club members was released, disrupting the frustrating secrecy surrounding current club membership. Everyone assumed that my roommate and I had somehow infiltrated the clubs to get their membership lists, but I can assure you that we don’t have the connections to make that happen. Yes, the op-ed and lists were met with backlash, but this re-ignited a public conversation that has needed to happen since I arrived on campus three years ago. However, due to the clubs’ lack of transparency and no-press policies, the public discourse surrounding the clubs remains incomplete and one-sided.
Interrupt Away
My mom loves to tell the story about what she has labeled my “first protest.” I was a toddler, and I had just learned how to write my letters in the correct direction. I was a very serious kid. One night, my brother and my mom were playing on our kitchen floor and I was too tired for fun like that. My mother tells me that in a quiet rage, I snatched a sheet of paper that I had been using to practice my writing. I wrote “BED” on it, marching solemnly and silently around the room. I don’t doubt it. What a radical feminist origin story.
She laughed as she retold this story to me last summer. “I just remember you marching in, with this little stern face, interrupting our fun like you were the parent or something, Bri!” Maybe I understood that to voice my interests, I needed to interrupt those who were oblivious to them.
This Must Be the Place
The streetlights on Mount Auburn popped on underneath a cloudy sunset sky on Monday night. I stopped on the sidewalk and took out an earbud, hoping that by devoting all of my senses to the pastel pinks above me, I could later remember what this felt like. I felt some sense of ownership over it all, a strange feeling of home.
I’ve been listening to the song “This Must Be The Place” by Talking Heads on repeat. In an attempt to be a cooler version of myself, I got into '80s music last semester. I hoped that the synths and big hair would somehow transmit into a more chill, skinny-jeaned Brianna.