Valarie Kaur’s Baccalaureate Address to the Class of 2013

by Valarie Kaur, ’03

On June 15th, 2013, alumna Valarie Kaur, gave the Baccalaureate Address to the Stanford Class of 2013. Kaur is an award-winning filmmaker, civil rights advocate and interfaith organizer, and this is what she had to say:

President Hennessy, Dean McLennan, professors and staff, family and friends, and the Class of 2013, it is a profound gift for me to return to Stanford to address you. Ten years ago, when I stood in this spot to deliver the student address, I believed what they always tell us on graduation day – that your Stanford education empowers to change the world, that we are the ones we have been waiting for. But what they don’t tell us in college is just how dangerous the journey might be and what that courage might cost.

So I could tell you the story of how I found my passion in a classroom in the Main Quad right over there, or how I snuck a raft onto Lake Lag in the middle of the night, or how I survived SLE [Stanford’s Structured Liberal Education program].

But the story I must tell you today begins in crisis.

Trapped by the Security State

by Lewis Marshall, PhD Candidate in Chemical Engineering

In January 2005, a graduate of Construction Engineering and Management at Stanford attempted to board a plane at SFO. She was told that her name was on the No-Fly list. She was detained for two hours, and then informed that her name had been cleared.

The next day, she attempted to fly out again, and was again told that her name was on the No-Fly list. This time, however, she was allowed to board the plane and fly to Malaysia. Not long after, her student visa was revoked. She has not been allowed to return to the United States since.

Rahinah Ibrahim is one of approximately 400,000 people on the US No-Fly list, a list established in the months after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. I say approximately because the number of names on the list is a secret. (The TSA released approximate figures on their blog four years ago in response to ACLU estimates.) The identities of the people on the list are also a secret, not only from the general public, but the from the individuals themselves. There is no website you can check, no phone number to call. As the ACLU says, the only way to know whether you are on the list is to book a trip. “If you are ultimately allowed onto a plane, this means you are not on the No Fly List.”

God Bless America: Or Being Brown in a Post 9/11 World

by Alok Vaid-Menon, ’13

after 9/11 your hindu temple
– that one in small town texas where you
grew up believing in america
and god
and other things bigger than yourself –
made new t-shirts:
american flag printed on the back
“we will never forget 9/11. god bless america”

and you wore that shirt to school the next day, made sure it fit just right
like the english on your tongue,
like the bible in your hand,
like the sunscreen behind your ears
and you hoped that its crisp
(white) would distract your classmates from
the terrorist threat of your skin
– that day you woke up
and found that you were
afraid of yourself –

and at lunch your (white) classmate asks you
“why your people did this to us”

The Danger of a Good Example: US Involvement in 9/11 1973

by Victor Verdejo, ’15

September 11 immediately triggers a deep emotional response within most people in the United States.  It is seen, justifiably, as a terrible tragedy and a horrendous crime.  But as Chomsky writes:

“It is useful to bear in mind that the crimes could have been even worse.  Suppose, for example, that the attack had gone as far as bombing the White House, killing the President, imposing a brutal military dictatorship that killed thousands and tortured tens of thousands while establishing an international terror center that helped impose similar torture-and-terror states elsewhere and carried out an international assassination campaign; and as an extra fillip, brought in a team of economists – call them ‘the Kandahar boys’ — who quickly drove the economy into one of the worst depressions in its history.  That, plainly, would have been a lot worse than 9/11.

Unfortunately, it is not a thought experiment.  It happened.  The only inaccuracy in this brief account is that the numbers should be multiplied by 25 to yield per capita equivalents, the appropriate measure.  I am, of course, referring to what in Latin America is often called ‘the first 9/11’: September 11 1973, when the US succeeded in its intensive efforts to overthrow the democratic government of Salvador Allende in Chile with a military coup that placed General Pinochet’s brutal regime in office.”[1]

In order to understand the nature of the involvement of the United States in the military coup of 1973 in Chile, and the 17-year military dictatorship that ensued, one must look at two different contexts:  the socio-economic and political context in Chile in the late 1960s and early 1970s on one hand, and Chile as a pawn within the global framework of the Cold War on the other.