16 THENEWYORKER, SEPTEMBER 16, 2019
LONDONPOSTCARD
THE ANTI-PERFECT
B
ahia Shehab, a forty-two-year-old
street artist, arrived in London on
a recent afternoon with a suitcase full
of smuggled goods. “The idea of bor-
ders is stupid,” she said. Shehab was born
in Lebanon, lives in Egypt, and has fifty-
six cousins, who represent twelve na-
tionalities. News channels were discuss-
ing the possibility of food and medicine
shortages in the event of a hard Brexit.
The spray paint and the ripe mangoes
in her luggage passed unnoticed.
That evening, Shehab attended a din-
ner party thrown in her honor by Clare
Cumberlidge, a contemporary-art cu-
rator. Shehab was in the middle of sev-
eral art projects around England, in-
cluding a ninety-foot mural that she
would be working on the next morning
in Lincoln, a university town in the East
Midlands that had a sizable pro-Brexit
constituency. The mural featured a quo-
tation from the Palestinian poet Mah-
moud Darwish: “We will not repent our Bahia Shehab
and Asian-American parents who feared
that the expansion would disadvantage
their children, filed a lawsuit to block
it. Asian-American students account
for sixteen per cent of the over-all school
population but sixty-two per cent of
the enrollment at specialized high
schools. Earlier this year, a federal judge
ruled that the expansion could proceed.
The allure of testing lies in its appar-
ent neutrality—its democratic indiffer-
ence to a student’s background and
wealth. But this is not how the current
system functions. Success correlates
closely to socioeconomic advantages and
access to test preparation. Pricey services
offer tutoring to ever younger children.
(There is a niche industry of consultants
who help two-year-olds ace their pre-
school admissions assessments.) Yet
many defenders of testing believe that
more subjective forms of evaluation pres-
ent their own unfairness. As the Stu-
dents for Fair Admissions lawsuit, filed
against Harvard University in 2014, has
demonstrated, Asian-American students
tend to receive lower scores on the most
subjective parts of college admissions
evaluations—often in ways that corre-
spond to personality stereotypes attached
to Asian-Americans.
It’s not clear what the result of the
current debate will be. The Mayor has
not yet eliminated the entrance exam
for any of the specialized high schools,
and, last week, the schools chancellor,
Richard Carranza, indicated that no
changes will be made to the gift-
ed-and-talented programs this year. One
thing, however, is certain: the competi-
tion for slots at New York’s élite schools
is driven, in part, by a lack of faith in
the quality of education in other parts
of the system. Outside the neutral lan-
guage of policy reports, the issue of test-
ing is debated in a context of winners
and losers, of model minorities and prob-
lematic ones. A less primitive view sees
the conflict as being between different
groups fighting for a system in which
their children are the least likely to be
hampered by discrimination. Because
discrimination functions in different
ways across lines of race and ethnicity,
the issue is not simply the fairness of
testing; it’s that people on either side of
the question can reasonably describe
their position as an attempt to fight
against discrimination.
The success of Asian-American stu-
dents, some from low-income families,
doesn’t imply that the system is fair; it
suggests that unfairness can be mitigated
by extraordinary effort. There is a vast
difference between an equal system and
one in which it is possible to succeed.
Rather than commit the tremendous re-
sources, time, and will that would be re-
quired to create a fair education system,
we have settled on one in which success
is possible, in which the obstacles are
sizable but also surmountable, and one
that, provided you don’t look very hard,
passes for actual democracy.
—Jelani Cobb
dreams no matter how often they break.”
“That’s the message these students
should be getting,” Cumberlidge told
her dinner guests. “That you should be
dreaming, despite all the obstacles.”
Shehab and her work came to wide
attention during the Arab Spring; while
her friends were marching in the streets,
she protested by tagging the walls of
Cairo with stencilled variations of لا, the
Arabic word for “no,” and denunciations
of military rule and dictatorship. A
particularly potent piece, inspired by
news footage of a veiled woman getting
stripped to her underwear and kicked
by police, featured a turquoise bra below
the لا, and, farther down, a bootprint
etched with the words “Long live a
peaceful revolution.” Shehab gave a Ted
talk that has been viewed more than a
million times.
Shehab stood up at the dinner table
and announced that she was heading
out after the meal to tag a wall in cen-
tral London. Did anyone wish to join
her? She’d brought special لا stencils,
along with site-specific messages in
Arabic and English: “No to Borders,”
“No to Brexit,” and “No to Boris.” Cum-
berlidge passed. Only two people, Bar-
bara Schwepcke, a publisher and a
co-host of the dinner, and Charlotte
Whiting, an archeologist, volunteered.
Suddenly, it began to rain. Shehab
winced: rain was bad for wet paint. “It’s
just fleeting,” Sukhy Johal, the director
of a cultural center in Lincoln, said, con-
sulting a weather app on his phone.
Shehab, who was dressed in a silk
blouse with a ruffled neck, excused her-
self and returned minutes later wearing
paint-spattered pants, a pink hoodie, and
