“No, you can’t touch my hair.”
Last month, a page on the social networking and blogging site Tumblr featuring pictures of black Harvard students holding whiteboards exploded in national media outlets. The page, a project of the “I, Too, Am Harvard” campaign, cast in stark relief some of the off-hand, often unintentional, racialized remarks and behaviors black students encounter on Harvard’s campus. From assertions that a black man’s Harvard application included merely a picture of his face to unwelcome attempts to “pet” a black woman’s hair “like an animal,” the experiences these photos recounted brought to light ways that the combination of skin color, physical features, and heritage that is race operates today, even on this liberal campus.
In many ways, the media campaign and accompanying student-written play succeeded. Later that month, for instance, Harvard College Interim Dean Donald Pfister and Incoming Dean Rakesh Khurana penned an email to the undergraduate community that referenced the play and promised to “continue the conversation” through events such as a town hall next semester. “I, Too, Am Harvard” brought issues of race, identity, and belonging to the fore of campus discussion in no small way. More broadly, however, it illustrated an under appreciated aspect of politics: the politics of the human body.
When we talk about politics—the realm of peaceful, orderly discourse meant to substitute for humanity’s brutish state of nature—we often confine ourselves to the intellectual as distinct from the physical. What we miss, then, is the reciprocal relationship between physical experience and political existence. In the case of “I, Too, Am Harvard,” students were responding to criticisms of affirmative action that associate physical appearance with academic or professional unworthiness. But just this semester at Harvard has seen other issues fraught with complex ties between the physical and the political.
Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s selection as commencement speaker, for example, brought student criticism on account of the “stop-and-frisk” policing tactic he oversaw and defended in New York City, a policy found to unconstitutionally employ racial profiling. And perhaps no Harvard student went the first week of April without reading a student’s anonymous account of sexual assault and the administration’s shameful response. Indeed, what once seemed to some of us at the Harvard Political Review an esoteric lens through which to view politics, the body has since become the site of central debates.
In “Body Politic,” the HPR expands its inquiry beyond Harvard to critically assess the politics of the human body in the United States, around the world, and in personal experience. Pooja Podugu takes us to the camps of Syrian refugees, where organ trafficking and rape thrive amidst political limbo. Abigail Gabrieli investigates the practice of genital mutilation of American intersex newborns, which remains legal despite human rights concerns. Drawing from historical lessons, Matt Shuham examines the American pornography industry’s contemporary moral debates. And an anonymous writer reflects on the popular political conceptions of anorexia in the context of her own experience.
Through an examination of the physical as political—alongside the articles in our Humor, Campus, United States, World, and Books & Arts sections—this issue exemplifies the HPR’s dedication to thorough, thought-provoking, and unique analysis of today’s issues. I encourage you to visit our website, www.harvardpolitics.com, for more of our latest work.
Daniel Backman
President
Image credit: “I, Too, Am Harvard”