Jordan Mahr graduated from Columbia University in Theatre last year, in 2020. He was born in New Jersey and studied Drama and Performance with a Concentration in Acting at Columbia University and trained at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. His website can be found here.
Jordan Mahr told me one thing I won't forget. But I can't tell you now. First, let me briefly walk you through our conversation. We scaled through the weeks of protests that have forced America to grapple with its own flaws, the pandemic that left the nation's college graduates reeling in its wake, with job prospects shot to null. We walked through the Morningside Campus of Columbia University, in relative calm compared to the change-wielding protests galvanizing the country. Our conversation on the death of George Perry Floyd began with an unusual question, however.
There is one question on the American mind now: What's more important -- buildings or people?
REFATH BARI
People are more important than buildings.
JORDAN MAHR
Buildings you can rebuild, but can you bring back the dead? They're just gone.
JORDAN MAHR
We invest so much into a single person. Buildings are just the marks of history. People make history. George Floyd certainly did.
JORDAN MAHR
Cost of Raising a Child from Birth to 18 Years in US
It's true. It costs more than quarter of a million dollars to rear just one child in the United States (and that's a conservative estimate -- high-income families spend even more, up to $400,000 on average). "But what about the poorest of the poor?" I proposed, and Jordan rightfully piped that Even the poorest of the poor receive so much through State Social Services. From a financial perspective alone, it's clear that we have a deeper investment in the people than institutional monuments or buildings. We turned to the man, the myth, and now a legend in the Civil Rights movement: George Floyd.
George Perry Floyd died on May 25, 2020 in the middle of a pandemic. But the man did not die of a biological virus. He died of a systemic one: racism. Officer Derek Chauvin, former Minneapolis Police Officer, pressed his knee against Floyd's neck for more than seven minutes, halting his pulse before EMTs could even arrive. When I asked Jordan about Floyd's death, he championed the need for police reform in the United States: "You learn about the Civil Rights Movement, Martin was good; Malcolm was bad; and at the end of the day, you come away thinking that the last racist was the one who assisinated MLK. Education of the Civil Rights Movement, Racism, and Slavery in America needs to change. And that change begins with the protests."
I proposed two roads for reform: education and protest. Jordan showed me I need not choose -- indeed, the roads are far from mutually exclusive: "They feed into one another. The protests help reform the education. Without the protests, there can be no change". I became skeptical of the power of this bottom-up change that Jordan was invested in, but I realized my misconception upon Jordan's answer: "Bottom-up change is the only change that can create true reform;". I need only look to Columbia University, the historical institution whose very ground I was standing on -- to find the effects of bottom-up reform. It was because of consistent protests and student pleas for reform that Columbia ultimately succumbed and in doing so, became the last Ivy League to go co-ed in 1987. The same is true for the #BLM movement: consistent protests and educational success may indeed result in true change and reform.
To conclude, I asked Jordan about the condition of the human burden: "You have a dual burden: a social one of not infecting your loved ones by a pandemic, and a moral one of protesting for social reform. Do you think that's too heavy of a burden?".
"Is it too heavy a burden? No -- it's selfish to reject that responsibility. Society already makes things considerably easy for us. Just a thousand years ago, we had to fight for food; we've got it good now. No burden is too heavy."
Jordan Mahr
Rashidul Bari and Shaheda Bari contributed to reporting.
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