24 | January | 2025 | Plaid Line + PRIZM + Scottie News

By: Siri David

As a sophomore at Highland all students are required to take critical ethnic studies. There is a semester project we do where we have to find a topic with local significance and share our knowledge about the topic and an action plan of how we’re going to get the information out into our community.

For my project, I wrote a poem about being multiracial and how society sets up these stereotypes that create insecurities and mental health issues for multiracial people all over the United States. This is a topic that is really important to me because I am multiracial and for the longest time this was something I was insecure about, so I wanted to bring more light to the topic.

Over the whole semester I have been researching the history of multiracial people. Multiracial people first came to be when European settlers would take Native women as companions, and once settlement increased, marriages and unions between European settlers and Natives became more common. For a long time multiracial marriages were illegal in the United States though. In 1967, the bill Loving V. Virginia was passed which allowed interracial marriage all over the nation.

Along with learning about history I also learned about the current issues that multiracial people struggle with. There are many stereotypes and issues set around multiracial people and these cause a lot of mental health issues. A lot of people imply the idea that multiracial people don’t belong anywhere since they aren’t 100% of a specific racial group. This leads multiracial people to struggle with their identity a lot. The mental illness that is related to this is called imposter syndrome. This is just one example of the effects from the negative ideas people create around multiracial people.

For my poem, I chose to write it about the current issues and not the history of the topic. I wanted to really show how multiracial people feel and the raw emotions that come with it. I also wanted to show how these ideas and ideas around putting people into “groups” start when we are so young. In my poem I don’t state that I am talking about multiracial people because I wanted people to have to think about it. I want them to think about who they think is affected in our society like this. After they read the poem there is context behind it that is shared. For example this article.

By: Munira Ahmadad

*Warning: This book contains graphic descriptions of violence, includes depictions of sexual assault, and contains characters that may be considered to represent anti-semitic stereotypes.

‘Tender is the Flesh’ is a horror novel by Agustina Bazterrica. The story takes place in a dystopian society where a disease causes humans to be unable to consume animal products or flesh anymore. Not that long after the event, the human population turned to cannibalism for an industrialized replacement of animal meat. This is referred to as “the Transition”.

Humans are bred for consumption identical to how animals were and are referred to as “heads”. The majority of the human product in first world countries is advertised as “special meat”, and the Transition is easier on those who have the privilege to not have to think about where and how they got their meat.

The protagonist is a man named Marcos who works directly in the industry who struggles with his relationship with his wife after the death of their baby. At his job, Marcos was given a first generation pure female head as a gift.

The novel aims to comment on the bleakness of real life society with how the Transition impacted marginalized groups first and the hardest. The message wasn’t that eating meat is bad, but it prompts the readers to consider their own internal ethical conflict and how we oftentimes think around discomforting knowledge and try to disregard it.

The story parallels the real life horrendous aspects in the meat processing industry. Not only do slaughterhouse workers operate in physically dangerous environments, the mental toll of having to constantly disconnect with what they are doing leads to emotional dissonance, and the abusive workplace causes slaughterhouse workers to often turn to maladaptive coping mechanisms according to the National Library of Medicine. The majority of slaughterhouse workers are people of color both in the book and in real life. Slaughterhouse employees are mostly migrants in real life, making up 70% of the workforce in the UK.

I recommend Bazterrica’s novel to anyone who enjoys splatterpunk horror in particular, but I would say that it’s relatively grotesque with its descriptions, and some readers might find it excessive enough for the book to be put down.