As a spin off of Jimmy Kimmel’s “Mean Tweets” series, where celebrities go on camera to read tweets posted about them by users online, the Canadian Safe School Network has been getting media attention recently though its campaign “Kids Read Mean Tweets,” which reminds everyone that cyber bullying isn’t a joke.
Similarly, the lesser criticized “O’Hell” article in the April Fools’ edition of The Cavalier Daily is filled with insults that, if read by the Rwandan, Iranian, Afghan and Burmese refugees among others working behind closed doors at University dining halls, would strike us all as egregious. Though the creation of such a video would likely be impossible, most of these employees spend the entirety of their one-hour break working with student volunteers from the VISAS program to practice their English.
Relegating these employees to “contracted employee” status alleviates the University of the imperative to offer them any employee benefits, and Aramark can pay them as low as the national minimum wage. For long hours they work amidst the halls of cold, stainless steel, mixing those “strange combination of spices” the author of the “O’Hell” article says fell “just shy of flavorful and [erred] on the side of painful and disastrous.” Without formal training, and lacking proficient knowledge in English, these workers are doing the best they can, and many inevitably infuse their knowledge of spices from home with the cafeteria’s staple dishes. Maybe there isn’t curry powder in Mac & Cheese. But there also isn’t Mac & Cheese in Rwanda, and I bet if the author had taken a minute to sit with them as they mixed the dish, listening to their stories of life in a genocide, the taste of an out-of-place spice would not have been so bothersome.
While it should be noted that the author was writing under the pseudonym “Gordon Ramsay” and was trying to take on the brusque tone of the famous “Hell’s Kitchen” chef, the article was again a failed attempt to wield satire as it did nothing to spark a productive conversation. After a series of misplaced insults, the conclusion of the article is only that dining hall food is bad and that “Kelly the Sandwich Lady” makes the cafeteria a “sad excuse for a dining establishment.” The article underscores an empathy gap between University staff and students who too often complain about amenities without considering the humanity of the workers serving them. This creates an othering effect — an “us” vs. “them” divide between factions of what is ultimately one University community — and results in the exclusion of staff from a majority of campus-wide dialogues and events.
Aside from VISAS and Hoos for Refugees volunteers, the refugee community is largely invisible to University students, despite its booming population. With the location of an International Rescue Committee office in Charlottesville, the city has seen the introduction of thousands of refugees over the past few years. According to C-Ville Weekly, the IRC is responsible for resettling roughly 12 percent of all the refugees entering the United States each year, stating, “Groups like the UN Refugee Agency and the International Organization for Migration work directly with families in refugee camps and help them begin the long process of interviews, medical screenings, background and security checks, and connect them with the IRC to begin their new lives.”
Charlottesville has seen an influx of refugees in recent years, with thousands being relocated to the city suburbs, yet these people remain some of the most marginalized in the city due to lack of citizenship, lack of employment opportunities, lack of adequate housing and lack of access to education and healthcare for children and families. In the current discussions on race at the University and in Charlottesville as a whole, these communities are continually left out of the conversation. Not only do they lack a presence in dialogues or a voice on panels, they lack representation in the policy debates on minority rights.
The fact that few students at the University, as well as citizens of Charlottesville, are aware of these refugee communities is indicative of the empathy gap between different socioeconomic subsections of the city. All marginalized communities in Charlottesville, both in and out of the University community, deserve allies to amplify their voices and advocate for both policy changes and cultural shifts. However, for students to consider that there is simply a divide between “white” and “black” communities in Charlottesville is flagrantly reductive. The microaggressions committed against black students at the University are different than the discrimination Patrick Bagaza, a refugee who fled the aftermath of the Rwandan genocide, and many like him feel as they struggle to support their families and become fluent in English. To group the entire black community together and attempt to have dialogues on discrimination in Charlottesville is yet another example of the over-culture’s lack of empathy for the nuance within a community they continue to group together as the “other.”
Lauren Jackson is an Opinion columnist for The Cavalier Daily. She can be reached at l.jackson@cavalierdaily.com.
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