In my four years at Duke, I have noticed changes in our University’s co-curricular world. Our Women’s Center, Center for Muslim Life and Center for LGBT Life, for example, have all created safe spaces, increased visibility and fostered a stronger culture of acceptance.
Developments like these make me proud to be a Duke student because they affirm our community’s willingness to engage in cross-experiential exchange.
Some things haven’t changed, though. In this past year alone, certain emails, PowerPoints and conversations have damaged my optimism. With just seven weeks left before I graduate, I am unsure of what I can do to affect things at Duke. I wonder if my ability to make a structural impact on our community is limited because our undergraduate population changes every year.
So in my last weeks here, I am challenging myself to reject those helpless sentiments.
This past weekend, I facilitated dialogue on the Common Ground retreat, an intensive weekend-long conversation on race, gender, sexuality and socioeconomic status. This was my second time attending Common Ground; I had gone as a participant last Spring. Just like last year, I left the retreat on Sunday feeling overwhelmed with emotion and energized for the last few weeks of the semester.
One of the cornerstones of the retreat is personal reflection. Last year, and again this past weekend, I was constantly asked to place my feelings under a microscope. Why do I feel the way I do about race? How do my actions and language reflect, and not reflect, my views on gender and sexuality? What can I do on a personal level to change my world if I want to?
Introspection is a powerful tool, but I don’t know if we use it often enough to understand our communities and ourselves. And it’s incredible how our language facilitates or inhibits introspective thought.
“I-statements” are sentences that speak to one’s own personal experience rather than generalizations about others—for example, saying, “I believe...” rather than “Indians believe...” or even “I think that Indians believe....” Forcing myself to use them has begun to affect the way that I think. I-statements force me to confront my own experience, preventing me from clouding my process of reflection with impersonal, generalized language and thought.
Indeed, who am I to speak for other people, anyway? When I use generalizations like “Women at Duke act...,” I risk alienating others by invalidating their experience. When I speak on behalf of other individuals, I could be ignoring the richness of their lives, the complexity of their beliefs and the strength of their own agency. And when I speak authoritatively on behalf of others without their permission, I may foster silence. If I believe open dialogue is important for mutual understanding, then I owe others the right to speak for themselves. I owe myself the right of speaking about my own thoughts, too.
I don’t want to be impractical about this. Impersonal statements are often more grammatically expedient. Sometimes we need to exchange measured introspection for efficiency, especially in academic contexts where big-picture observation is prized. Generalizations can be useful when they are qualified. And it’s difficult to constantly frame thoughts with the words “I,” “me” and “my.”
But I find strength in that difficulty. In challenging myself to confront myself, I also challenge myself to understand my world. And if, in turn, I find myself wanting that world to change, I hope that I can act with self-aware conviction.
Linguists argue about the circular relationship between language and thought. Linguistic relativity is the controversial idea that our language determines how we think, popularly represented by Newspeak in George Orwell’s “1984.” Indeed, some analyses have noted that idiosyncrasies in our language may force us to think about certain things and vice versa. Just like gendered languages (French, for example) force me to reveal the sex of my dinner companion and even conceive of certain words as masculine or feminine, I trust that my measured I-statements force me to confront my conceptions of the world.
In Ayn Rand’s novella “Anthem,” society has destroyed the concept of “I.” When the protagonist rediscovers the word “I,” it gives him, for the first time, the powerful possibility of personal expression, reflection and agency. Our world is no collectivist dystopia, but I do often forget about the weight “I” carries.
If I develop a habit of introspection as a result of using I-statements, I would be proud. If I lead others to introspect because I frame my dialogues with them in terms of personal experience, I would be humbled. I don’t have much more time here. There are many ways I can leave my mark on the Duke community, but maybe the most meaningful is an open challenge to myself and to others to purposefully change our language and reflect.
Sandeep Prasanna is a Trinity senior and a Program II major examining the dynamics of language. His column usually runs every other Thursday.
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