Word: posterize
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...small controversy erupted in Lowell House last week, when house resident Mellody R. Hayes '99 issued a complaint about a poster hanging in the serving area of her dining hall. Hayes and some members of the dining hall staff found the poster, which depicts several black figures carrying watermelon and other fruit above their heads, offensive. "The poster was racist," Hayes said. "It was building on stereotypes of black people enjoying watermelon...
Although the poster in question had been hanging in Lowell House for at least four years, its placement was inconspicuous and the students and tutors I spoke with said they barely ever noticed it. But when people began to complain, the poster was immediately replaced with an innocuous watercolor. As Lowell House Master William H. Bossert '59 explained to me, there was no need to have a poster that offended somebody hanging in the dining hall, especially one without any monetary value...
Lowell House's removal of the poster was certainly a sensitive response, and arguably the right one because, perhaps, the context in which the print was displayed was inappropriate. But it is more difficult to argue, as Hayes and others do, that the poster's content is racist, particularly without considering the identity of the artist...
...poster in Eliot, I cross Mount Auburn Street. Amazingly, the cars stop in line to let me cross. When I reach the Eliot breezeway, a staff worker buzzes it open for me before my hand even reaches for the doorknob...
However, this encouragement often seems superficial. As we watch scores of women and even some of our friends pass by our posters without even a glance, we sense their skepticism about our decision to devote so much time and energy to these crunchy, outdated feminist causes. Many students at Harvard-Radcliffe seem to believe that the women's liberation movement has run its course and that the struggles of women are no longer relevant to their lives. Sometimes, after lengthy budget negotiations, scrambles for room assignments and 8 a.m. poster runs, we even wonder the same thing. There are moments...