OPINION | CAMPUS VOICES
If I have learned anything at Duke, I have learned to love
By Victoria Priester | April 26, 2021If you have love, perfection is overrated anyways.
Victoria Priester is a Trinity first-year. Her column, "on the run from mediocrity," runs on alternate Fridays.
If you have love, perfection is overrated anyways.
Being an English major shouldn’t just mean we know how to read Shakespeare—we should be equipped with a deep understanding of the diverse set of human experiences through memoirs, be able to see flaws in our own communities and thought patterns through satire and fictional dystopia.
Take a look at any Duke admissions pamphlet, or Duke’s website. Any prospective student has probably read class demographic numbers like 25 percent Asian, Asian American, Pacific Islander; 13 percent Black/African American; 14 percent Hispanic/Latino.
If you’ve never experienced palpable stress, try going into an organic chemistry help room at 4 p.m. the day before the first midterm of the semester.
In the music video for Chris Brown’s “Freaky Friday,” the white rapper Lil Dicky wakes up in Chris Brown’s body. Now, just because he’s black, he can throw the “n-word” around as much as he wants. If you want, watch the clip here (fast forward to 2:19).
At a place like Duke, where students pride themselves on their acceptance of all people regardless of religion or ethnicity, it seems backward that it’s still acceptable to mock God and Christianity in front of people who incorporate religion into their lives.
White people didn’t do anything to earn racial privilege, but along a similar vein, dependents of upper or middle class families didn’t do anything to earn the economic privilege we were born into as infants.
In most superhero movies, the world is endangered by the newest imaginary monster or power that would never exist in real life. But in Black Panther, the root of the villainy is systematic oppression and unequal allocation of resources—both in the U.S., and in wealthier Western nations that believe they have no responsibility to help nations with so little.
I can’t count how many times I’ve been with one of my parents in the car when a song comes on, and they’ve immediately started dancing and singing along to it. Then they look at me, incredulous that the song we’re both listening to didn’t evoke the same reaction in me. That song transports them back to a happy moment in their life that I wasn’t there to witness.
I came to Duke with a bucket list of things I wanted to do while I was here. But the more time I spend here, meeting new people and becoming acquainted with activities I hadn’t known about before, the longer and more demanding my bucket list becomes.