A rave review

By Allison Dube

Editor, the Gauntlet

I thought I recognized your name from one of my classes a couple years ago (Poli 201), so I read your article in the current Gauntlet. Just wanted to take a second to let you know (whether my memory is working right or not) that I thought it was excellent!

I don’t listen to rap music, but every illustration you use you made so clear this didn’t really matter. I feel you’ve tapped into an aspect of our society that’s so huge: the problem that what often “seems” like acceptance or even a worship of some group goes so hand in hand with the control and “use” of that group. My interests in looking at this sort of thing partly based on de Beauvoir – the way she describes men finding the exotic “other” in women and controlling it. You also point out what your friend is, in a sense, doing with Terrell; and largely on Hannah Arendt and her account of the “seeming” acceptance of Jews in society in the 1930s. As it became all too clear as Europe moved through to the ’30s, this was in fact a bad, not a good omen of things to come.

These are such huge issues that the fact is it’s hard to get a handle on where to start! I thought (for whatever that’s worth!) you did a great job on saying something really important that many aren’t even thinking about!