Black students

A history professor who made racially offensive remarks to a Black student at the University of Toronto’s Massey College has submitted his resignation as a senior fellow at the school.

After commenting about the “master” of Massey College to a Black student, Michael Marrus resigned his fellowship Sunday when nearly 200 students and faculty signed a petition demanding that he be removed.

“First, I am so sorry for what I said, in a poor effort at jocular humour at lunch last Tuesday,” Marrus wrote in his resignation letter to college head Hugh Segal.

“What I said was both foolish and, I understood immediately, hurtful, and I want, first and foremost, to convey my deepest regrets to all whom I may have harmed.”

On Tuesday, Marrus was sitting with three junior fellows — graduate students who earned residence at Massey College through academic and extracurricular achievements — when Segal asked to join them. At the time, Segal’s title was “master” of the college.

Marrus allegedly said to a Black graduate student: “You know this is your master, eh? Do you feel the lash?”

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Firestorm over racially charged remark prompts Massey College to drop title of ‘master’ for head of schools

an internationally respected Holocaust scholar, Marrus is retired from U of T. He maintained an office and senior fellowship at Massey College, an affiliated independent college at the university.

The comment, which was widely viewed as a reference to slavery, prompted an open letter to Segal on Wednesday demanding Marrus’s resignation and additional changes to deal with the school’s atmosphere.

Andrew Kaufman, a junior fellow at Massey College and one of the nine original signatories that reported the incident, said that this is not the first incident of racism at the college.

“This was not strictly an indictment of Michael Marrus,” he said on Monday. “It was an indictment of the atmosphere where this statement can be comfortably uttered.”

Months before the incident took place there were discussions regarding the issues with the term “master.” Fact sheets were posted by students on bulletin boards to raise awareness about the problems with the term.

Anthony Briggs, an alumnus of Massey College, said that he had been pushing for the change since 2015 but that his concerns were not taken seriously.

“It felt that this was an inappropriate title in any context and any time,” he said. “Some people do not recognize the influence and impact of the historical background of the term. That term carries a currency that people are not aware of.”

On Friday, Massey College agreed to almost all the demands made in the petition. The college temporarily suspended the title of “master,” promised anti-racism training and apologized for the incident.

Beverly Bain, one of 150 faculty members who signed a letter condemning the racially offensive remark, said that the senior fellow’s comments reflect the wider issues the college is facing with overt and covert racism.

“It’s not just about this individual — it doesn’t end with him and neither did it begin with him,” said Bain. “He is part of the culture that continues to replicate itself in these institutions, allowing him to articulate that sort of thing.”

Segal accepted Marrus’s resignation in a statement Monday morning.

“To say that I regret the event that created the need for your letter would be a serious understatement,” the statement said in response to the resignation. “The presence of distinguished senior scholars such as yourself and others at Massey is of huge value to the mix of generations, disciplines and life skills that enrich the very nature of the Massey experience at its best.”

Marrus could not be reached for comment on Monday evening.

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“A tremble in your heart on the daily.”

That’s how the character Nya in the play “Pipeline” describes sending her Black son out into the world. “You have no idea if they’re safe … it’s frightening.”

It’s an experience director Weyni Mengesha and actor Akosua Amo-Adem understand. Mengesha has two young sons and Amo-Adem has four brothers, “who are darker skinned, who are large in stature, who look like … the stereotypes that are put out there of Black men,” she said.

As they work on the Canadian premiere of “Pipeline,” playing at Soulpepper Theatre through May 8, Mengesha and Amo-Adem are bringing these and other of their experiences to bear. The time when one of Mengesha’s friends got beaten up while they were walking down the street as teenagers. When Amo-Adem and her family moved to Rexdale and watched a police station get built on a corner where a community centre could have been.

“We hold onto these experiences and often have not been believed in the past,” said Mengesha. “You just end up festering and growing into fears that you learn how to live with. And I think (playwright Dominique Morisseau) is saying, actually, no, we don’t have to live with this. We have to share it. We have to release it.”

In the play, Nya (Amo-Adem) is a teacher in an American public school who is overwhelmed with anxiety when her son Omari (Tony Ofori) gets into a fight and is threatened with expulsion from his exclusive boarding academy. While Nya’s protectiveness is understandable, Morisseau also makes clear that it’s not necessarily the best way to help her son. “She’s not able to hear him when he’s saying that the thing that you’re trying to give me is not the thing that I need,” said Amo-Adem. “It speaks to the miscommunication between parents and children sometimes.”

It also speaks to a bigger problem: that educational systems do not treat students of colour fairly. The play’s title refers to the school-to-prison pipeline, that is, the policies and procedures that send a disproportionate number of Black students into disciplinary proceedings in school and toward the criminal justice system.

This is a Canadian as well as an American problem: statistics released by the Black Legal Action Centre reveal that 42 per cent of Black high school students in Ontario have been suspended at least once, are 29 times more likely to experience discriminatory treatment by police at school and seven times more likely to experience discriminatory treatment from teachers.

Nya tries to shelter Omari from these realities, but her attentions risk stifling him. “It’s easier to control your child than it is to control the system,” said Mengesha, “but at what point are we going to ask the system to be accountable so that our child can just be a child?”

As Soulpepper’s artistic director, Mengesha programmed “Pipeline” in 2019, and it’s one of the few shows that the theatre chose to retain from its pre-pandemic schedule. The global racial reckoning in the wake of the murder of George Floyd has changed the context for the play’s reception, said Mengesha.

Disproportionate violence against Black bodies “was something (Black people) always knew,” but when Floyd was murdered, “all of a sudden, the whole world believed,” said Wengesha. “I think plays like this really try to offer people insight into lived experience and how it costs.”

In the heat of an argument, Nya says to Omari that he’s acting like a “king or a god that no one can tame,” and he holds her to account for using that language. “It’s forcing the audience to look at the … moments in which they themselves have likened a Black body to an animal, to something that isn’t human,” said Amo-Adem.

“Sometimes the worst violence comes out of us to each other,” said Mengesha. “We have ingested it, it lives inside of our bodies … everybody was taught to disrespect our bodies, including ourselves.”

The company has taken time out of its rehearsal process to discuss high-profile instances of aggression toward or between Black people: the detention of “Black Panther” director Ryan Coogler after trying to withdraw $12,000 from his own bank account; and actor Will Smith’s slapping of comedian Chris Rock at the Oscars.

“That moment is bigger than the thing that happened between those two men,” said Mengesha of the Smith incident. When she saw the clip of Smith slapping Rock, a line that Nya says about Omari came into her head: “His rage is not his sin. It was never his sin. It is his inheritance.”

“There is no space to express things that we need to express … we can’t do it in the same way that other bodies can,” said Mengesha. “Somebody like Will Smith, who is a particular image for the Black community, he carries a lot, I think. I don’t know him personally, but there is a lot that gets pushed down … ultimately it comes out and unfortunately came out in that way.”

She expressed concern that media attention to what happened between Smith and Rock perpetuates “stereotypes … We’re like, ‘Oh God, we’re working so hard.’ And then we get thrown. It’s a push back. And then at the same time, we have this incredible empathy too. It’s so complicated.”

The characters in “Pipeline” are all flawed and all struggling to cope with fraught situations.

“My dream is that people come and see the show and then they go home and they talk,” said Mengesha. “Mom, dad, brother, sister, everybody, whoever, whatever the family makeup is, that they talk about what it is to be them. And that they make space for each other.”

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Alishia Hicks was home with the flu when she received the call from the Henderson Upper School in Dorchester on May 4.

The nurse’s office was calling about her 17-year-old son D’Andre, she told Newsweek . The 51-year-old mom lives with her three children in Boston, Massachusetts.

“He reported to the nurse that he felt dizzy, he was shaking and numb on the left side,” she said.

The mother’s mind immediately turned to a stroke, a medical emergency that runs in the family. Hicks has experienced three strokes in the past 10 years and continues to live with side effects, including weakness on her left side and reliance on a wheelchair.

But Hicks claimed the nurse told her, “He looks okay to me. Are you going to come pick him up?”

Hicks replied that she was ill and used a wheelchair, so she could not arrive fast enough.

“I said, ‘Please dial 911, he could be stroking,'” Hicks recalled. “She said, ‘I don’t think so, I don’t think it’s that serious, I don’t think I need to dial 911.'”

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, some of the signs a person might be suffering from a stroke include:

• Sudden numbness or weakness in the face, arm, or leg, especially on one side of the body.
• Sudden confusion, trouble speaking, or difficulty understanding speech.
• Sudden trouble seeing in one or both eyes.
• Sudden trouble walking, dizziness, loss of balance, or lack of coordination.
• Sudden severe headache with no known cause.

Hicks continued to argue with the nurse and stress the family’s history of strokes. Increasingly frantic, she hung up and called the school’s front desk. Finally, she said, a staffer at the school called the state Department of Children and Families (DCF), which called her back.

“Now I’m hysterical,” she said. On the phone with DCF, she screamed, “He’s gonna die! They’re gonna let him die!”

In total, at least 45 minutes passed before 911 was dispatched. D’Andre was eventually taken to Tufts Medical Center, where doctors confirmed that he suffered an ischemic stroke and removed the blood clot from his brain.

Hicks is demanding answers from the school, which she said left her son “traumatized.” D’Andre, who also has autism, still experiences weakness on his left side. He has not returned to school in the two weeks since.

“I hate to say it was a racial thing, but it really seems as though if my son was a different race they would have treated him right away,” Hicks said. “My son said he felt like they didn’t take him seriously.”

Eight in 10 Black Americans believe race impacts the quality of their health care, a survey from the Pulse of Black America revealed last month.

Another study in JAMA Network Open determined there was ” deeply rooted anti-Black racism ” in the field of academic medicine. A University of Chicago study from February analyzed 40,000 hospital notes on more than 18,000 patients and found that Black patients were more than twice as likely as their white counterparts to be characterized with “negative descriptors.”

Newsweek reached out to Boston Public Schools for comment.

A new poll shows that young voters want President Joe Biden to cancel student loans for everyone .

Here’s what you need to know.

Student Loans

According to a new tracking poll released Wednesday, a large, bipartisan majority of younger likely voters support student loan cancellation for all student loan borrowers. The Student Borrower Protection Center, a non-profit advocacy organization, and Data for Progress, a progressive think tank and polling firm, polled voters ages 18 to 34. Here’s the data:

• 71% of respondents support wide-scale student loan cancellation;
• 18% oppose wide-scale student loan cancellation;
• 81% with student loans support broad student loan cancellation;
• 66% without student loans support broad student loan relief;
• 56% of Republicans, 66% of independents and 84% of Democrats support partial or total student loan cancellation for all student loan borrowers.

“Younger voters put Joe Biden in the White House on the promise of broad relief from the crushing burden of student debt,” Mike Pierce, executive director of Student Borrower Protection Center, said. “As the country recovers from a devastating pandemic and economic crisis, younger voters across the political spectrum are clear in their expectations for the Biden-Harris administration: building back better means canceling student debt for all borrowers.”

Student loan cancellation: closer than ever

Currently, Biden is considering whether to cancel student loans for millions of student loan borrowers . Progressives in Congress have been lobbying Biden to cancel up to $50,000 of student loans. They have argued that if Biden fails to cancel student loans through executive action, then likely Democratic voters may be less likely to vote in the midterm election in November. As a result, progressives have warned Biden that Democrats could lose control of Congress . Biden has supported wide-scale student loan forgiveness of up to $10,000 since his 2020 presidential campaign. As a candidate, Biden campaigned on student loan forgiveness for all borrowers as well as student loan relief for many student loan borrowers who attended community colleges, Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) and Minority-Serving Institutions (MSIs). A coalition of more than 415 civil, social and professional organizations have urged Biden to act on wide-scale student loan relief. In particular, supporters of student loan cancellation want Biden to implement student loan forgiveness before temporary student loan relief from the Covid-19 pandemic expires on August 31, 2022. ( Student loan forgiveness could mean the end of student loan relief ).

Biden could announce student loan forgiveness within weeks

Biden is potentially weeks away from announcing one of the most important initiatives of his presidency. While there is no guarantee that Biden will cancel student loans, Biden could weigh several factors in reaching a final decision. For example, Biden could weigh public sentiment, student loan forgiveness to date, the state of the economy, disparities in student lending and other factors. While this data only represents one poll and one segment of the population, it could send a message to the president about how at least some young people feel about student loan forgiveness. With the end of temporary student relief from the Covid-19 pandemic approaching, make sure that you understand your best options for student loan repayment. That said, there’s no guarantee that any or all of your student loans will get canceled. Here are some smart ways to save money and get debt-free:

• Student loan refinancing (lower interest rate + lower payment)
• Income-driven repayment (lower payment)
• Student loan forgiveness (federal student loans)

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