To the Expecting Mother on the Bus,

My grandmother always told me that some people are special. They just have it. No matter where they are, no matter what they’re doing, you can’t help but to notice them. They just have an aura about them that stops you in your tracks and screams “Look here! I have something to say!”

That was my first thought when the doors of the bus opened and you climbed aboard, the heat from the sun’s rays rushing in and making it unbearable to do anything, but complain. I, myself, fanned my face frantically with my hands, cursing myself for getting on a bus without air conditioning. If only I hadn’t missed the bus before this or better yet, I should have just stayed home where a nice glass of sweet tea with extra ice would surely await me.

But you patiently took your seat and settled in amongst the heavy sighs, shouts of “drive faster!”, and the holding of cold soda cans to foreheads. The entire ride, one hand gently cradled your swollen stomach, while the other held open a large, white book, the spine beginning to tear, several of the pages visibly folded over several times, ready to be returned to again perhaps on your next ride. 40 Ways to Prepare For Your Bundle of Joy!

Slowly the bus dragged from stop to stop, but your head remained bent over the pages, a soft smile appearing as you highlighted a new section. Until finally, your stop approached. You gently closed the book and climbed down the steps, a gleam in your eyes as more people pushed impatiently past you to escape the heat.

A few stops later, I too, emerged back into the heat, though in less of a happy mood. I trudged the three blocks from the bus stop to my grandmother’s house, where the usual group of children, with their colorful clothes and sticky hands from the popsicles their mothers thrusted into their hands, greeted me.

Something, besides the heat, was bothering me. I couldn’t quite understand it, but I knew that a worry had taken over me. As rumbling occurred outside, warning of a thunderstorm soon to come, I pondered my mood. Why was I so perturbed by this young, vibrant, excited mother-to-be? It was almost as if I felt haunted by your presence, but I didn’t know why. I sat on the porch swing, safe from the downpour, but near enough to watch the duration of the storm as I thought this over.

And then it hit me. Fragments of information came back to me from the psychology class I’d taken a few months ago. You were more likely to have severe complications after birth. Your post-natal concerns were more likely to be dismissed. You were more likely to die from these complications.

I felt uneasy as I remembered the excitement on your face. Is your nursery already set up? I bet it is. You’ve probably pored over every magazine looking for the right shade of paint, researched the safest crib, and picked out the best name. But would you make it back to this room…intact? What are the odds of you sitting in your rocking chair, healing normally, preparing for the journey ahead with your baby? Or would you never make it beyond the operating table? Would the nurses listen to your concerns or would they brush you off? Would they send you home to die?

I now know that what bothers me is that to be a black mother in America doesn’t mean that we get the liberty of being only happy. To be an expecting black mother in America means being forced to have this conversation. To think of what if. To worry if the swelling of your feet is more than a standard symptom of pregnancy. To worry if the pain in your chest after birth is normal or a hint of a complication to come. To worry if you are leaving the hospital knowing that you received the best care.

So I write to you to say: black mother, advocate for yourself. Trust yourself. Trust your body. Know that you are valued. Know that you deserve happiness. Know that you deserve the best care, not only for your baby, but for yourself.

Rewrite: Lecture to Doctors and Nurses

Yes, she is happy, but she is also scared. Maybe this is her first child. Maybe, it’s not. But she wants to leave this hospital with her worries assured. Listen to her. Do not make her feel crazy. When she tells you she feels a pain in her chest, do not write it off. You can save her life. You can change the outcome of her baby’s life.

She has a nursery set up back home. Did you know that it took her weeks to decide on the perfect shade of blue? Did you know that she read 40 Ways to Prepare for Your Bundle of Joy so many times that the pages are worn and the spine is beginning to fall apart? Do you see the joy in her eyes as she looks at her baby? The life that she envisions?

Do not rob of her of that. Order the test. Write down her symptoms. Explore all of the options. She deserves it. Do not let her become another statistic.

How many women come back through the Emergency Room with post-natal complications? And how many of them are black? Ask yourself, what could have been done better? What can be improved? How can you ensure that this disparity disappears?

When you dismiss her, it is her voice that you may deprive her child. Her embrace that they may never feel. Her laugh that they may never hear.

Your profession is noble. You save lives. You make a difference. Your work matters, but can we not do better? Do black women not deserve better?

***Writer’s Notes: After reading both pieces, I realized that the letter was easier for me to write. It comes more from a place of sadness, while the lecture comes more from a place of anger. I do realize that because of this, I don’t know if my lecture would be effective at causing change. It comes off as too accusatory, in my opinion. Baldwin, in contrast, is very aware of his audience and doesn’t come across as 100% angry, which I think would be something for me to work on when revising the lecture. I also struggled with ending both. Should I sign off on the letter? I ultimately decided not to because I don’t think it would be a letter that would be sent. It’s more so a reflection piece for the main character.

Dearest friend,

I write to you as I stare into my own eyes which stare back at me from set deep within my phone. The dark screen, which soon will grow darker from disuse, reflects my furrowed brow back at me, as if to say, “and what will you do about it?” The simple and mildly confrontational intimation of skepticism asks of me, as well, “why do you care?”

The simple answer is, I do not know. I don’t fully comprehend why the outright shunning of reason I see before me makes me want to abandon the thing I love. Because, dear friend, as you know, I, in words I’d hoped I’d never utter, love politics. I grew up in the nation’s capital, with parents whose working lives revolved around the decisions of people elected by lands I and they would never visit. “To hell with Tocqueville,” I would have said had I known his name, “let’s let my mom, Obama, and Jon Stewart make all the decisions forever, ‘Democracy’ be damned.” 

In the ninth grade I suppose I first brushed with politics, printing 60-odd t-shirts emblazoned with the words “I CAN’T BREATHE” to sell at school and raise money for the family of Eric Garner. I received payment for less than half, and, with my parents picking up the balance, I raised zero dollars and zero cents. Perhaps consequently, through the eleventh grade I dreamed of being a physicist, about as far as possible from the worlds of policy, politics, and people I now seek out.

The next year, on the day a student killed ten at Santa Fe High School, plastic cuffs left a serial number imprinted in the flesh of my wrist, after I broke the law against obstructing the halls (literally) of Congress. My new friend James, whom I had never met before that day and have never seen in person since, posed a question as we threw my unlaced shoe back and forth across the concrete cell to pass the time. “So, what made you want to do this?”

I do not remember what I said that day, but I know now what the honest answer would have been: “because I can.” While this may come off the the boisterous response of someone justifying his actions, I mean this quite differently. I was able to take this step because, for me, it was not a big deal. I was far less likely than many of my peers to be seen as “resisting arrest” by the Capitol Police for shifting my shoulder from an uncomfortable position. I’d called my mom and received her blessing and support, which even James had failed to procure before entering the Longworth House Office Building. I was of an age where this would not go on my record, and am of a class where it would not have mattered even if it had. Thus, I did it, simply put, because I could.

When I walked out of “jail,” as my parents now generously refer to it (it was three cells in the back of the DC police’s Sixth District Station), I was not instantaneously a politico. But, as my views developed, as I volunteered for and worked on campaigns, as I was exposed to the people at this school and elsewhere who have shaped my political ideals, I developed a true love for what I believe politics can be.

I, in my seemingly endless gullibility, open Twitter or turn on the news everyday, hoping beyond hope to see whatever idealized version of politics I’ve propped up in my mind as ideal, a combination of direct action (see above for my one claim to authority on this subject) and good faith, evidence-based discourse (I’d assume from my upbringing as the child of two lawyers, sent to the rather discourse-heavy University of Chicago).

The beauty of a mirror is that what you see is not actually the mirror itself, but the light you project towards it. The beauty of my darkened phone screen is that it shows me what I myself project towards the dimmed Twitter feed or CNN home page: an expectation of a combination of nuance, civilization, and passion I know I know won’t come.

It pains me to admit this, but I do not know what to do about this. I do not foresee the problem getting better anytime soon, and I hope my expectations of what we can be never lessen.

As we inch forward through 2020, I wish you luck, my friend. Perhaps you see it differently than I do? If you do, I beg of you, please advise me of your techniques.

Sincerely yours,

Daniel Green

I need to do better. I begin this way to demonstrate that I know the fallibility of my own viewpoints and origins thereof on this issue, but I contend that regardless of these problems, it is an issue well worth examining. The issue I wish to raise today is that of nuance. Now, my rather cautious and, some might say, nuanced, introduction of this issue may seem ironic, but it is for good reason that I bring it up in this manner – the issue of nuance is nuanced.

This needs explanation, and perhaps some more background. I base this lecture not on a single incident of, as someone on Twitter put it, “a single BernieBro was mean to me online and now I’ve changed my entire political beliefs.” Rather, I sat down to write this because of the modern atmosphere that has ruined a thing I love. For reasons inexplicable in a lecture of this length, I went from caring about individual issues but rather apathetic about electoral politics to a Politico newsletter subscriber in about 18 months. Simply put, I love politics because of what it can be. 

I will not sully my reputation by saying that politics is or should be just polite, civilized discourse; far from it. I developed my love for politics through passionate direct action – organizing and attending rallies and marches outside the Capitol, which sits mere miles from my childhood home, being arrested in House office buildings… Even before I turned 4, my parents took me to the March for Women’s Lives. Passion, dedication, and critique are the key building blocks of politics, along with nuance.

Here lies the problem. In early 2017, the Washington Post ran reports that Fireball sales had spiked in the DC area with the arrival of Trump staffers. As ridiculous as this may seem, I don’t doubt it. A cheap, easily-consumed way of getting drunk fast? To me, that sounds like a drink of choice for young Republicans just moving to town, as well as for the overwhelmingly Democratic population of DC, drinking to forget their woes. Since the election of 2016, we have seen, I’m sure you’ll agree, a total breakdown of nuanced political conversation in the Democratic Party, in the country at large, and in our own communities, accelerated by the Fireball craving-inducing time in which we live. 

As I’ve mentioned. I believe in the necessity of passion and pointed critique for effective politics. These things convince people. But, when strangers, friends, or even family members routinely dismiss one another as “communists,” “imperialists,” “anti-semites,” “BernieBros,” or, my favorite pejorative, “dividers,” we get nowhere. 

I know that I’m coming from a place of privilege – my race, gender, health, and religion mean that my political goals are not as urgent as others’. “Can’t we all just get along” isn’t the right question to pose, because the answer is no; some of these answers are truly life or death. But I know one thing. Name calling doesn’t work, and it may only serve to dissuade otherwise passionate allies from enthusiastically joining your cause.

Process Notes:

I think for the duration of this class, I’ve felt slightly self-conscious about my selected topic. My classmates have picked specific, tangible problems, while mine is far less impactful on everyday life. Thus, I wrote these pieces to explain, I guess, why I actually care about this. I set out to write this not knowing what would come out, and the letter above is a lightly edited stream-of-consciousness piece that I believe resembles what an actual letter (or email or text) I would write on this topic would look like. I wrote the letter first and the lecture second, which is the opposite order from the order in which I did the readings for this week, which made the process of transforming slightly different, but I focused on two things. First was tone and style. In the lecture, I made an effort to both transform the informal tone into a slightly more formal and intellectual one, while maintaining enough of a natural flow that it could be read aloud. Second was my rhetorical techniques. Rather than leaning on the anecdotal reasoning I have for caring in the letter, in the lecture I stick to more universal claims, with one more universally understandable anecdote thrown in in order to keep the audience’s attention. Finally, I attempt to end each with a sort of call to action, discouraged as I may be: in the letter I ask for advice on how to deal with this phenomenon (under the assumption that this was actually a letter, it additionally fulfills the suggestion of leaving a question to which the recipient can respond to continue conversation), and in the lecture I appeal to the public’s better nature, do eschew this brand of name-calling politics.

Open letter:

Dear Mr. [],

You started off every year of math class by counting the number of girls in the room. When we outnumbered the boys, you would cheer because when you started teaching at our school, your higher-level classes math classes were comprised of predominantly boys. After forty years of watching your classroom, a tiny microcosm of the world around us, progress, you were so happy to finally see the day when there were more girls than boys sitting in those metal chairs, eagerly awaiting your instruction. I’m writing to you because I’m not sure if that cheer can really be called a reaction to progress, or if it was simply a reaction to change. 

Every year, the second the boys in the room heard that cheer, there was a target placed on our backs. Students daunted by the idea of taking multivariable calculus with a teacher who was none other than a pillar, a “legend,” a rite of passage in our community were told “Oh, you’re a girl so you’ll be fine.” The hours of preparation that preceded my A’s on tests were reduced to a product of my so-called flattery in class or my decision to greet you with a smile when I walked in everyday. 

“It’s honestly creepy.” Those words haunted me, the words of your “other favorite student.” Wasn’t the existence of that label tied to his name enough evidence that I could work hard for my A’s and he could too? No, maybe it is creepy. What did it mean when you called me “sweetheart” in class? What did it mean when you called him “bud”?

All of our successes were met with “It’s because he loves you” and all of our failures were met with “Don’t worry, he loves you.” You were so happy to see that the world was finally catching up, that your classroom was becoming a space that recognized us. But what you didn’t know was that by expressing that happiness, all three years of my experiences in that same space were colored murky by the very problem you thought we had overcome. And it wasn’t even your fault.

Sincerely,

Ketaki

Lecture:

To look around at our schools and to marvel at how far we’ve come, to rejoice at the presence of girls in STEM classes and stop there, to pat ourselves on the back for having a girls’ affinity group and stop there, to celebrate that there is one girl on the co-ed water polo team and stop there, is a facade. 

Recognize that the girls in your classes are quieter. Notice how we only ever raise our hands halfway, how we mouth an answer and wait for you to see and understand and nod in approval before we fully respond to you out loud. These actions are products of the history that people love to claim we’ve overcome. They prevail because we celebrate our victories and stop there.

You may be wondering what exactly can be done, or rather, what exactly you can do. I suppose the grim reality is that to consider the problem fully rectified is to erase centuries of historical oppression towards women. To consider the problem solved is to celebrate and stop there. But this doesn’t mean we should do nothing.

Make an effort to see and call on the girl with her hand half-raised rather than gravitating towards boys who will shoot their fingers up with confidence. When your student weakens her responses by hesitatingly saying “Um” or prefaces her arguments with “This could be wrong but,” reassure her. Make your classroom a space where she isn’t afraid to make mistakes, where she doesn’t feel intimidated or silenced by the louder voices, where her accomplishments and victories are celebrated for what they are rather than why they are.

If you’re feeling skeptical as to the impact these actions can really have, you’d be right to feel that way. Neither you nor I alone can instantaneously correct the harmful behaviors that stem from the conditions in which we were all raised. But let us recognize that our inaction is harmful, and let us do what we can.

Process notes:

Similar to my experience reading Baldwin’s work, I found the process of writing the open letter to be a lot more intimate and personal than that of the lecture. Since I was drawing directly from my own experiences, I felt more comfortable tackling the problem in an emotional and potentially subjective way. When writing the lecture, I tried to shift my tone and the nature of my examples towards occurrences that I think are more common across many/most classrooms so as not to lose credibility or the trust of my audience. I took inspiration from the structure of Baldwin’s “A Talk to Teachers,” seeing that I found his strategy of “painting a picture of oppression,” as Professor Scappettone said, and then laying out tangible calls-to-action to be effective. I wanted to first establish the landscape and cultural moment that I’m asking educators to respond to, and then suggest how they might respond to it. I also tried to be measured in my language in some of the ways I noticed Baldwin doing by suggesting that my solutions are not instantaneous and that this problem is not easy to tackle. I also tried to refrain from placing blame.

To my future child, before she learns to drive, 

One of the first things my mom taught me was never to drive behind — or even next to — a truck. Our lessons began after the peak in my teenage resentment and sass; I hadn’t needed to drive until graduating high school, as I’d been in boarding school before. Yet, they didn’t lack the shouting or frustration you’d imagine there to be, when a mother tells her teenager how to drive. With the trucks though, I never questioned my mother or attempted to push the boundaries of the instruction. Even now, when driving, I feel a sense of danger when I spend too long close to a truck. They obstruct my view when in front of me. They could vere sideways into me if I cruise next to them. They could even fall over into me, crushing my hybrid easily. In fact, when I first learned to drive, my parents made me drive our pickup truck. It was much harder to maneuver, much bulkier. But that way, if I collided with a truck, it wouldn’t crush me so easily. 

I don’t think any of us can really be blamed for the anger trucks might conjure up upon encountering them in your morning commute. They’re terrible for the environment — much worse than our fuel-efficient hybrids. They’re a symbol of pernicious capitalism: inconveniencing drivers, hurting the environment, all to ensure our amazon prime packages are delivered in one business day. 

It seems universally accepted — by drivers and local police alike — that when one drives too close to a truck, it’s fine to speed in order to get away from them. No one would blame you for tailgating a car if it was forcing you to drive next to a truck. The car would realize, and it would speed up so you could escape the truck. 

I never find myself looking at the people who drive trucks. Their heads are not on the same plane as those of the other drivers on the roads. More than that, I don’t like imagining what it must be like, to drive a truck for work.

I rarely see my uncle Greg. I once was in his trailer when he came back from a long stint driving truck. Since then, my mom’s insisted we don’t go back there. They can come to us — family, that is — if they want to celebrate holidays. When I saw Greg, I thought he’d died. I screamed. All 300 lbs of him laid collapsed under the trailer’s dining room table, where we’d each entered with our own box of pizza for dinner. Donna, the mother of my cousins, assured me he was fine. He almost always collapsed on the floor of exhaustion before he could reach his bed upon arriving home. She woke him up and he let out a warm, santa-clause esque laugh, grabbed a pizza, and went to his room. 

I tell you this, about my uncle Greg and trucks on the road, because I think the road, in a way, reflects something larger that happens between the rest of us commuters and those who drive trucks for a living. It’s easy, almost innate, to feel anger towards them, to do everything in our power to avoid close contact. We’re taught to from a young age. It’s easy, almost innate, to feel better than them, to resent how they hurt our beautiful, dying world, and to forget how we hurt it, too. It’s easy not to look at their faces as we speed by.

Lawrenceville Teachers: 

I imagine you very rarely think about trucks. Teaching at a boarding school, why would you? But I wonder if you can conjure up memories of your experience driving our there in the world beyond our little home. Maybe you can even remember learning to drive. Maybe you’ve even taught your kids how to drive. For one reason or another, being who you are, I’m sure you know to avoid trucks. It’s unsafe to drive behind them or next to them for too long. They obstruct your view; they spew grey gas clouds in your direction. It is universally accepted that, when we are confronted with a truck on the road, we can speed to get away from them. A certain level of anger and frustration upon experiencing too many gas-guzzling trucks on our morning commute is also universal. It’s natural to wish the trucks weren’t there. What I’m interested in, is how we think of — or rather, don’t think of — the people driving these vehicles. 

Lawrenceville is not somewhere people who have much experience being around truck drivers come to study. This is mostly due to money. But even with a large proportion of our students on full financial aid, those students who identify with the truck drivers of America would not, well, fit in here. We wouldn’t want them, with their loud laughs and limited vocabulary and disinterest in the pros and cons of the socratic seminar versus the harkness discussion. 

As Baldwin says, “it is your responsibility to change society if you think of yourself as an educated person.” Here we embrace this sentiment. I guess I wonder, then, where do the truck drivers and their kin fit into the equation? Is it also their responsibility to change society? Can they, in a different way, see themselves as educated people? Educated in different things, perhaps, but harboring knowledge we don’t have, surely. Is progress a matter of welcoming them into a community like ours, or is it something different? That is, could it be an expansion of the concept of education, a disentanglement of what our responsibility and merit is as the elite. A valuing of acts beyond the mind, and a rethinking — ironic, I know — of how these different educations set one up to contribute to the changing of our society. 

But what if we know they’re wrong. “They,” here, refers to the truck drivers and their kin. They, it seems blatantly obvious, are the people responsible for Trump, right? But Trump is not of the truck-driver and kin. In fact, he went to a co-ed boarding school focussed on intellectual and character development, before heading to Wharton, a place we send at least two handfuls of students each year. I guess I just wonder how this information all fits together, how we, as thinkers, can make sense of it. Beyond this, I wonder what we can and should do? Is it a matter of simply inviting more truck drivers and their kin to participate in the intellectual inquiry that occurs here? I tend to think they wouldn’t leave still being truck drivers and their kin. Something about them would be fundamentally changed. They would be educated. But what does that mean, exactly? If we were to educate everyone in this way, would that be the solution? The thing is — at least for now — the functioning of our society still relies on truck drivers and their kin. 

This lecture is a brain-dump of sorts, the type we’ve been taught to do before organizing ideas into an outline for an essay. I imagine that more minds, thoughtful and nuanced minds like your own, coming together to think on this, could lead to more substantive, well, thoughts. Part of the problem, I think, is that we so rarely bring our minds to truck drivers and their kin. They are, at least to me, depressing. I wonder, though, if you could think to ask your students some of the questions I’ve posed above. 

Process Notes

I’m realizing, upon reading others’ work, that I misunderstood the assignment. I wrote the second letter as, well, a letter rather than a microlecture. But I imagine it could still be given as a sort of speech or talk, as I based it on the type of transition Baldwin made between writing to his nephew and to teachers more generally. The two letters definitely came out quite differently. I realized, after writing the first one, that I hadn’t really explicitly spoken about the actual issue I was tackling. But given that I saw the audience as my —very hypothetical — future child, I wanted mostly to just open up room for her to think about these things, and to learn more about her extended family. I’m not sure whether the “not seeing” truck drivers in any way linked explicitly to systems of education in the first letter, though, although I did purposefully mention my experience in boarding school. Additionally, the first letter was, like one of my other pieces, mostly me just recounting true facts/stories about my family. I didn’t mention my uncle in the second letter. It could be interesting to bring him in if I made the piece longer. I’d say I’m least happy with the tone of my second letter/talk. It feels almost ironic or exaggerated, which I didn’t really intend. I wanted to make a clear tone shift, but the thing is, I was so close with my teachers at Lawrenceville that I don’t think a letter/lecture to them would really require a shift in tone that strayed too much from the tone of the first letter. That being said, I wanted to craft a tone that was more reminiscent of the way a graduated student might, more generally, speak to an educator. 

(warning: contains information about digital sexual assault)

Letter:

Dear Mom,

I hope you were not surprised when I sent you a petition link from the National Assembly since I don’t often do that. I was feeling a bit anxious because it was a month before the petition closed, and it needed 50,000 more signatures to make the National Assembly respond to it. And I couldn’t sign it myself because I needed to verify my Korean phone number, which I can’t do over here. Mom, I miss ranting with you about stuff on my mind and I hope I can talk about this with you in person, but I guess it’s too disturbing to be talked over via Skype.

You might have heard about the “Nth room” in the news before. Basically, they are Telegram rooms made to sexually exploit women. The “masters” of each room gather personal information about women through hacking their social media accounts and/or impersonating police officers, and threaten to expose them unless they act as “slaves” for a given period. This way, the “masters” make the women take exploitative photographs or films of themselves and distribute them to the users through Telegram rooms marked 1 to 8, which is why they are called the “Nth rooms.” Therefore it is hard for the victims to step forward- they do not fit in the “innocent victim” frame, which makes them more vulnerable. The images distributed through the “Nth rooms” also include “insulting acquaintances”- users photoshopping images of women they know to sexually harass them. It is estimated that at least 260,000 people are in these chatrooms.

One reason this crime proliferated the way it did is because users could easily evade punishment- Telegram is not a Korean app, and the police did not react properly to people reporting the incident. There is even one case where a man who reported the “Nth room” but did not get any response except “contact the Cyber Crime Unit” ended up becoming a “master” and making the Telegram rooms himself.

I remember you telling me it would be better if I become a prosecutor and do something with the justice system. I still don’t think that’s my calling or anything but these days I feel like you were right. What would my studying English literature ever change? What’s the worth of all the money I spend, all the books I read and all the essays I write if I can’t change a thing?

Anyways, to make this long story short, the petition is to be reviewed by the National Assembly because it reached 100,000 people in the course of a few weeks. We don’t know if this will change a lot, but I want to believe that we are doing what we can to make some progress. And I hope this also applies for me.

With love,

Nayun.

Lecture:

The “Nth room,” first exposed by an article from “The Hankyoreh” last November, are secret Telegram rooms where sexually exploitative images or videos of women are distributed. The “masters” of each room force women to act as “slaves” for a given period by threatening to expose their personal information. The method for gathering the victims’ personal information vary- one of them include sending a fake link that leads to a fake Twitter login page to women who post photos of their bodies without any personal information. When the victim logs in, the masters take hold of her ID and password, and gleans more personal information. Fearing exposure of their personal information, the victims are forced to comply to inhumane demands of the “masters.” The footages are then distributed to the “users” through rooms numbered from 1 to 8, which is why they are called the “Nth rooms.” Combining all the people in the Telegram chatrooms, it is estimated that at least 260,000 people are in these chatrooms.

It is difficult for the victim to step forward because people might blame the victim for not fitting in the “innocent victim” frame and attack them for uploading pictures of themselves in the first place. Nonetheless, the victims of the “Nth rooms” are not only victims whose social media accounts are directly hacked. Users also send pictures of women they personally know and their personal information such as their name and age, and ask people to photoshop them in a certain way or sexually harass them. This method of sexually harassing women are called “insulting acquaintances.”

The prospect of easily evading punishment made the crime proliferate this way, especially among young men in their teens or their twenties. As Telegram is not a Korean app, it is hard for the Korean police to track down the perpetrators. Moreover, the users of the Telegram chatrooms simply delete a chatroom and make another one when they sense that they are being watched. The police’s initial reaction did not help either- according to an article from “The Hankyoreh,” a 25-year-old who saw the “Nth room” and reported it did not get any response except “contact the Cyber Crime Unit,” and ended up becoming a “master” and making the Telegram rooms himself.

In order to take action against this proliferation of sexual exploitation, punishment for the “masters” and the “users” must be assured. International cooperation should be accompanied with tracking down the members of the Telegram chatrooms. The punishment for digital sexual assault must be strengthened, and every person should be aware that clicking the Telegram chatrooms and watching the videos is a crime in itself. Moreover, the “innocent victim frame” should be discarded. People who did not post photographs of their bodies online could a victim of digital sexual assault. However, even if the victims did, it does not change the fact that they were threatened and coerced.

Working notes:

My mom likes to talk about social issues or politics with me, and we often educate each other on parts we don’t know well about, which is why I chose to write to my mother. I’m worried that the letter contained too much of my personal feelings than the actual description of what is happening. In the lecture, I tried hard not to simply translate what is said on news articles or petitions and add my own opinion about how to solve this problem. I purposefully withheld what exactly the “masters” demand from the victims because it was too disturbing, but I wonder if they should be included to convey information about the crime.

This is an explanation of the “Nth room” in English that I think explained the situation better, if anyone wants to know more:

https://m.blog.naver.com/nomorenthroom/221782222359

I was struck by the seeming intimacy present in Ruskin’s open letter, which became more apparent when contrasting it with his lecture. When using the form of the open letter, Ruskin immediately creates a community from his audience and establishes an intimate connection with them by using the address “My Friends,” and through his use of “we.” In the open letter, Ruskin also includes specific calls-to-action by using the second person. An example of this occurs on page 340, when Ruskin says, “I want you therefore, first, to consider how it happens that cursing seems at present the most effectual means for encouraging human work.” I found this method to be more engaging and personal, and I see how it gives the reader a sense of purpose in relation to the social issue at hand (an interesting technique to consider when thinking about the power/limitations of writing to actually engender change). However, I shared in Lucy’s sentiment that these direct calls-to-action sometimes came off as preachy or condescending, especially through Ruskin’s use of language such as “I want you to…”

Echoing the sentiments of Nayun and Lucy, Baldwin’s letter to his nephew was so personal and so deeply attached to his own experiences and those of his loved ones that it was difficult for his argument not to resonate with a reader. In terms of rhetoric, even though Baldwin’s sentiments and message were not things that all readers could relate to, he drew upon language of love, family, and humanity that made his words poignant for a wider audience. For example, he wrote “For here you were, big James, named for me… here you were: to be loved… And now you must survive because we love you, and for the sake of your children and your children’s children” (6-7). Additionally, Baldwin is measured in his language so as not to be accusatory or isolate certain audience members; he remains sensitive to the fact that everyone in his audience would benefit from truly hearing his social critique and could be agents for change. He does this through including lines like “But remember most of mankind is not all of mankind” (5) so as not to be heavy-handed in placing blame, and “Take no one’s word for anything, including mine” (8) so as not to elevate himself above the audience, something I thought was prevalent in Ruskin’s work. 

When addressing educators in “A Talk to Teachers,” I noticed that Baldwin altered his rhetoric by transitioning away from the very emotional language he used to write to his nephew in favor of specific real-life examples and a clear argument and several tangible calls-to-action. He says, “If, for example, one managed to change the curriculum in all the schools so that Negroes learned more about themselves and their real contributions to this culture you would be liberating not only Negroes, you’d be liberating white people who know nothing about their own history” (683). It was clear to me that Baldwin was sensitive to his audience in framing a piece that would appeal to educators. He also defined education and its purpose in a positive light before entering his critique of the system, which I thought was effective and displayed an awareness of his audience.