Thread by @chowleen

The past few times I’ve spoken on immigration, I simply walk to the front of the room and start to deliver my lecture...in Chinese. (I’ve done this speaking on other topics too-incl to 200 1st years in the @DukeEnvironments masters program)

Students: 🤔😦😅
bemused, alarmed

1/

I wait to see who is willing to interrupt me, to suggest that I’m in the wrong classroom, or that I got a different memo about the lecture topic. Students who understand the language are usually beaming; I ask them if they’d be willing to interpret. Others are tuning out.
2/

I do this to make my audience think about how language informs but also discomfits, how we always have differentiated access - and how reluctant we are to challenge existing power structures (here, the prof in front of the class)-

And, how migrants feel every single day.
3/

And how we assume people who don’t speak our language must be...lesser than.

Or are worthy of suspicion, derision, in need of ‘guidance’ (as Tom Brokaw and Megan Neely both apparently felt).

Unless they have power over you.

[Shaun Tan’s brilliant, wordless ‘The Arrival’]
4/

When we are able to experience even a little bit of the vertiginous sense of immigrant arrival -what it feels like to be judged by your access to a language - then that might be a *starting point* for a conversation about migrant policy, xenophobia, ethics. 5/5

[Agha Shahid Ali]