Guest column: Retaliation, biased journalism, & other threats to USUSA equity
Editor’s note: This column was unsolicited by the Statesman and the views expressed by the guest columnist are their own. The Statesman stands behind the reporter of the original article and their adherence to the SPJ Code of Ethics. To see the Statesman’s guest column and letter to the editor guidelines, visit usustatesman.com/opinionpolicy
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I am currently writing a report on Mental Health Week, which I organized this year. As I am doing that I would like to share with you all something I have not shared before – my experience of the USUSA grievances, its media coverage, and their impact on my own mental health back in February. As we enter the month of Ramadan, which is a month of self-reflection, I also urge everyone who was involved in the grievances and its media coverage to, going forward, treat everyone with equal kindness and fairness, irrespective of your relations and alliances.
February 23rd 2022
Video recordings of the USUSA elections grievance hearings are made publicly available. There were a total of five grievances filed against the winning presidential candidate – two from my group, two from a second party, and one from a third party.
Reading a scripted defense from their laptop, at the hearing, the presidential defendant victimizes themself, claims the grievances were a personal attack, claims potential overspending and bribery a miniscule and petty grievance, and claims that my party filed grievances to waste their time on an election day so that they cannot campaign. They make these accusations despite being fully informed that the filing time of our grievances were related to access to the expenditure report which was not published earlier than the day we filed the grievances.
Even though my campaign team filed two out of five grievances, the defendant also insists on record that my team filed all of them. Finally, despite one out of four videos not being reported by the defendant, the grievance board concludes that the defendant did not violate any bylaw regarding expenditure or reporting expenditure.
February 24th 2022
Utah Statesman releases a front-page article accompanied by the clickbait Tweet “Expensive bagels, bad timing and other threats to USUSA democracy…”. Littered with one-sided quotes, the article showcases a public censure of people who initiated the grievance process instead of sharing voices from each side of the story.
The publication suggests that candidates’ strategies this year were to use grievances as a competitive tool, as an effort to “distract another candidate,” and not as a safeguard, which is the false idea that the defendant also alleged in the hearings. The USUSA President makes this defamatory statement as if it was something they were referencing that factually happened and the article pushes this agenda by stating that the President “recognizes” this reality. In addition to being deliberately misleading, the statement is also deceitfully sanctimonious because the current USUSA President’s campaign team filed a shockingly high number of grievances against a competing presidential candidate during last year’s USUSA elections in 2021.
Quoting, again, the current President, the article also presents the perspective that the grievances filed were trivial and petty and that students should not file such grievances. Along with the USUSA President, the only candidate that this article highlights is the presidential defendant that the USUSA President has previously dated, worked closely with on his own campaign, and was providing consultation and strategy to between hearings for hours such that it delayed most hearings and one had to be canceled.
As a result of these conflicts of interest, the USUSA President, at the serious cost of discouraging students from being upstanders and reporting wrongdoing, invalidates and vilifies all grievances against the defendant. This is irresponsible behavior for a Student Body President and for a newspaper journalist to reinforce. It sets a dangerous precedent as it suggests that students should be the judge of which policy violations are minor or not as well as meta-demonstrates that students will be shamed by the press for speaking up against someone with sociopolitical and sociocultural capital.
Finally, the journalist frames the grievances as “unequal” and ends with a quote from the presidential candidate who had grievances filed against them about their experience of the grievances, even though there were other candidates who received many more grievances than them. The journalist had also interviewed a member of my campaign and decided to omit quotes from them as well as the perspective of any representative of the multiple other grieving parties.
Present
Being an upstander during the elections was difficult because I personally knew the defendant and separately also suspected that there would be individual or systemic recrimination, and unfortunately I was right. Despite the reprisal, however, I am grateful for having had the resolution to take this action.
Grievances my team filed were for making elections more financially fair and equal in the future, and for ethical reasons I chose not to campaign during the entirety of the time that the grievance meetings were conducted which set me back by hours. Nevertheless, my campaign team as well as every single other person and campaign who filed a grievance against the presidential defendant were publicly retaliated against and treated unfairly for simply striving for equity.
This is hurtful and it is demoralizing. However, I have been working in student politics and advocacy for 3 years now and these injustices and questionable connections and collusions show me all the more reason that my work, our work, is necessary. I will utilize the retaliation and distress my family, friends, community, and I experienced for following rules and for holding people with power accountable to further motivate myself to create a safe, equitable world for all students.
One thing my therapist at USU shared with me at our session following the grievances and its coverage was that societies tend to convince minoritized individuals that our feelings are negative, invalid, or not as important as someone with familiar, majority identities and encouraged me to share my story and my feelings.
So this is me talking about my feelings and telling my story when different students representing different organizations attempted to actively silence my story and the stories of so many other students.
We are here and we are here to stay. We are here to be loud and to be heard. We are here to unite and thrive.
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Niyonta Chowdhury-Magana is a queer, Muslim-Pantheist artist, activist, and Psychology PhD student at USU. She is from Dhaka, and has lived in New York, California, Bristol, Tokyo, and several other places that have all proved to be formative experiences for her. She has a cat called Kit Cat and she always wants you to know it’s short for Kitten Cat and has nothing to do with the candy Kit Kat.
niyonta@usu.edu
Instagram: @niyonta4usu
Twitter: @niyonta