Spring 2021 Issue

April Preyar ’96, a criminal defense lawyer in private practice in Chicago, was exhausted from helping one client at a time, arguing before a judge and jury, recognizing that 49 percent of Black males and 44 percent of Hispanic males will have been arrested by the time they’re twenty-three.

ANIMALS AND MICROBES

Emasculated and neutered or evil and calculating? Domineering dragon lady or helpless concubine? In twentieth-century Hollywood, the choices for Asian-American actors were few and far between. Often, the roles available were reductive and one-dimensional—stereotypes come to life.

Several years ago, I came upon striking photographic negatives of Duke students… boxing? Was that a real thing? A little research in the University Archives revealed a short but remarkable athletic program—one worth remembering.

When she was growing up, Sima Sistani’s parents limited her TV time. One of the shows Sistani ’01 relished as a child was the sitcom Perfect Strangers, about a happy-go-lucky immigrant with an unbridled enthusiasm for all things American.

MARTHA ZEIGLER ’74 hadn’t attended a Duke Alumni Association event since the early 1980s. The retired certified public accountant and single mother had been raising her children. “My life was too full,” she says.

The algorithm had been designed to predict famine. If famines were spotted before they started, more aid could be routed to the affected country, more people could be saved. Or so the thinking went.

WE ASKED Theodore D. Segal ’77, a lawyer, Center for Documentary Studies board member, and author of Point of Reckoning: The Fight for Racial Justice at Duke University (Duke University Press), about his deep dive into the university’s history. On finishing a project that started as a master’s thesis, after a forty-year pause

It was going to be a strange season anyhow. A roster full of freshman talent that wasn’t instantly finding its way; some surprising early losses; and the sudden midseason decision by freshman Jalen Johnson to opt out of the remainder of his Duke basketball career and prepare for the NBA draft.

A COMBINATION of the shared distance of our current experience and the shadows of the past came together in December, when the Trent Center for Bioethics, Humanities & the History of Medicine held a panel discussion as part of its Boyarsky Series on Race & Health. Called “Remembering a 1979 Moral Moment: Medical Activists, Racial Justice, and Confronting the KKK,” the presentation looked back at the Greensboro Massacre, the infamous November 3, 1979, attack by the Ku Klux Klan and the American Nazi Party on a peaceful labor rally in Greensboro.

The Nasher Museum of Art staff were facing COVID reality last summer. Their Ebony Patterson exhibit, “...while the dew is still on the roses…,” a rich, complex installation with art, video, patterned walls, and more than 12,000 individually placed flowers throughout the gallery, had to come down after having been open only ten days. It was impossible to predict when the doors would reopen. “We were devastated,” says Wendy Hower, director of engagement and marketing. “The building looks like it’s asleep.”

ADAM STANALAND’s study was designed to threaten the masculinity of its participants. Predictably, some of them got angry. Of those, and even after a debriefing reiterating that there is no right or wrong way to be a man, a few issued threats or used violent language in their post-study comments. Yet some comments were poignant and sad. “We got feedback that was like, ‘Oh, this confirms what my parents always thought about me,’ or, ‘This confirms what I think of myself,’ ” Stanaland says.