The Political You

As a peer advisor for my concentration, I recently had the rare privilege of re-visiting the chaos of advising fortnight and concentration panels. If you’re well rounded, you’re stressed because marketable skills and Marx sound equally appetizing. If you’re less well rounded like I was, you’re stressed because you’re having trouble deciding between government, history, sociology, anthropology, economics and social studies.

So there I sat in the corner of the room during the social sciences panel, for the second time in my life. Most things were the same: Bad questions, fidgety kids, and it was definitely too long. The only difference was that this time around, I walked in with a slightly better understanding of what the words “discipline” and “multidisciplinary” mean, more or less.

And this is why what the History department representative said in her introduction to the audience struck me. Her opening line was something along these lines: “History is everything. The discipline is designed to be empathetic. That means putting yourself in somebody else’s shoes and ask why they did what they did.”

This is true. History in the broadest sense of the word is everything. It’s all people, all places, all actions, and all perspectives at all moments. That last period that I typed in that sentence you just read, that’s history in the broadest, non-capital-H sense of the word.

But capital-H History, the discipline History, is a bit different. Not all people, all places, all actions, and all perspectives at all moments are recorded. Sometimes, even if things are recorded, no one knows that the record exists or people don’t care that it exists. In the global circuit of power, some understandings of the world are faxed, copied, and distributed at the world’s best institutions to become what is “normal.” Others, meanwhile, are cast to the side as “political” understandings of this mainstream worldview.

At this point, we’ve all learned that our history classes in elementary school, no matter where you grew up, were at least a little bit screwed up. Columbus Day was my favorite day in the fifth grade because I had no idea that Christopher had played dirty with the people who were here before him. But this was what was conditioned to be normal, so when the class smarty in high school decided to “do Indigenous People’s Day” instead, people called him insightful, brave, and “standing up for what’s right.” An advocate.

Of course, in college, things thankfully aren’t so simplistic. But here at Harvard too, we seem to have concentrations that are considered “normal” and perhaps even “objective,” and those we consider to be the haven of the advocates. If you study sociology, government, anthropology, history, or economics, you’re a budding social scientist.

Meanwhile, it’s hard to tell whether people would grant the same privilege of normalcy to those who are in ethnic studies, African-American Studies, or Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality. If you’re in one of those concentrations, you must really feel for the people you’re studying, right? These classrooms are silently understood to be a bit more political, political because you’re not reading the normal canon of dead European guys.

When we take a break from privileging some socially normalized ways of thinking and knowing over others, we see that all classrooms are political. The foundation of Sociology as we are introduced to it is formed by the works of Emile Durkheim, Karl Marx, and Max Weber. All three of these people come from approximately the same centimeter on the toy globe. Take a scroll through the History department’s course offerings. Isn’t it weird that we have a department called “the” History department when East Asian history and Near Eastern history are offered as subsets of other departments? The more we get used to the “normalcy” of our “normal” concentrations, the more political we are becoming.

The same rhetoric of “political” or “militant” has recently been applied to stigmatize some on-campus student movements like Divest’s Heat Week and Renegade Magazine. But these students, whether they are typing away the sorrows of micro aggressions or in front of University Hall with bandannas around their heads, are no more political than the very people who call them political.

Just like a concentration whose lineage traces back to a limited part of the globe produces inherently political classrooms, the “normal” or “general” magazine with a more or less homogenous staff publishes political material. At the end of the day, all of these things are privileging and propagating a certain opinion, no matter how well that opinion blends into the background.

This article isn’t about where you should stand on these issues. I don’t really care about that. I myself am a member of a concentration that dedicates a full year of study to Durkheim, Marx, Weber, and all of their friends and frenemies, and I am heavily involved with neither Divest nor Renegade. But wherever you stand and whether you like it or not, you too, like the orange-shirted people in the Yard and the black-and-white posters everywhere, are being political.

Jenny J. Choi ’16, is a social studies concentrator in Winthrop House. Her column appears on alternate Thursdays.