Me too

During some hot and sweaty WNS my freshman year, she pushed me into the bar. She spilled her entire drink on me, gave me a look from hell and continued to plow through the crowd. “F*** you,” she said.

I didn’t know her, I mean, not personally. I met her once during recruitment, but she seemed disinterested in me the whole time. I also recognized her from Me Too Monologues the weekend before, where she had performed an emotional piece on the casualties of Duke’s Greek ladder. She evocatively conveyed her pain in feeling “less than” in a culture that lauds the rich, the white and the beautiful. This girl performed it.

Maybe I’m being too harsh. After all, Duke kids are smart. Duke kids are screwed up, just like everyone. Duke kids, like most college kids, hide all sorts of things in order to “fit in,” to be appreciated and to appear to be okay. Yet this girl seemed to have discarded the very ideals that drove her heart wrenching performance in the first place. I questioned the authenticity of her performance. I questioned the legitimacy, in fact, of the whole thing.

As a freshman, I wondered why we Duke students gather around to watch a two-hour performance once a year, to sing kumbayah like we’re at a campfire, and then move on with our lives. It seemed off to me. Duke has a lot of problems, in part precipitated by a heteronormative, sexist and racist hierarchy. The dark side of Duke is everywhere, and yet, for two hours out of my year, I am to pretend like I could relate and connect over these heartbreaking stories that aren’t necessarily my own?

Some white kid from Texas attended Me Too Monologues this past weekend. There, he witnessed an eye-opening piece on what it means to be black on Duke’s campus and what it means to be black in America. That piece was stellar; after all, I saw it too. But I didn’t send the black skinned “ok” emoji from my iPhone like this kid did, a few hours later, when organizing the ubers to his fraternity section. Was he black now? Did he now understand the plight of black people in America, so intimately, that he himself was black? Or maybe he had always used the black skinned emoji because he likes to pregame to A$AP and because black music exists to be fetishized? Did witnessing this Me Too Monologue propel him to use the black skinned emoji because he “gets it” now? Or did witnessing this Me Too Monologue change so little in him that he couldn’t question his actions in the time it took to leave the auditorium and walk home? Do we all possess this same feigned identification so that we appropriate other people’s cultures and problems to the extent that we see fit?

Before you break out the pitchforks, let me say that Me Too Monologues is a really, really good thing. It totally helps to start the conversation, while at the same time making people feel less alone. But if that’s its sole purpose, what do we do beyond that? Just because it’s the status quo, doesn’t mean it doesn’t deserve to be challenged. If the campus-wide effects of Me Too Monologues can’t extend past the two brief hours it takes to hear a story, claim to “get it” and then move on, it’s not enough. Good ideas and sound dialogue should lead to action—the monologues in and of themselves shouldn’t be Duke’s endgame. If we can’t stop spilling drinks on “uncool” freshman girls tomorrow, what’s the point of striving to care about this campus today?

Natalie Carroll is a Trinity junior.