The College Hill Independent Vol. 36 Issue 7

THE COLLEGE HILL A BROWN / RISD WEEKLY INDEPENDENT

36 • 07 23 MAR 2018

THE

INDY COVER

A BROWN / RISD WEEKLY VOLUME 36 / ISSUE 07 MAR 23 2018

Drawing 39 Kevin Dong

NEWS 02

Week in Review: Messy Politics Julia Rock, Will Weatherly & Julia Petrini

03

Not Again Mia Pattillo

SCIENCE

13 METABOLICS 15

METRO 05

Selective Preservations Kerrick Edwards, Ilan Desai-Geller

17

09

In Utero Tatiana Dubin

EPHEMERA

Missing Faculties Eliza Chen

08

FEATURES 07

March Madness The Indy Staff

LITERARY

ARTS 11

Let's Get Dirty Sam Fredericks

Frank's Prank Maya Bjornson & Ava Zeichner

X

The Land Before Time Miranda Van-Boswell

18

Memorial Boulevard Jeremy Lee Wolin

The Mystery Rocks of Dead Fish Creek Zak Ziebell

MISSION STATEMENT

FROM THE EDITORS: On the night of March 18, a self driving car struck and killed Elaine Herzberg in Tempe, Arizona. Uber’s human safety driver failed to override the automated sensing system that was supposed to recognize the crossing pedestrian. Over the past few years, Arizona has allowed Uber to test its new technology unregulated on the state’s roads.

What is unclear to us is why anyone, besides Uber executives themselves, want self-driving cars at all? Does anyone stand to benefit from a more precarious working class? What was once a gimmick is now a threat.

If we are to be test subjects in Uber’s grand design, we ask for some compensation.

-JKS

The College Hill Independent is a Providence-based publication written, illustrated, designed, and edited by students from Brown and RISD. We are committed to publishing politically engaged and accessible work. While the Indy is financed by Brown University, we hold ourselves accountable to our readers across the Providence community.

The Indy rejects content that explicitly or implicitly perpetuates racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, xenophobia, ableism and/or classism.

Though this list is not exhaustive, the Indy strives to address these systems of oppression by centering the voices, opinions, and efforts of marginalized people in Providence and beyond.

The Indy is constantly evolving: we are always working to make our staff and content more inclusive. Though our editing process provides an internal structure for accountability, we always welcome letters to the editor.

SPRING 2018

WEEK IN REVIEW Julia Rock NEWS Isabel DeBre Chris Packs METRO Harry August Erin West ARTS Nora Gosselin Cate Turner Isabelle Rea METABOLICS Dominique Pariso Eve Zelickson

FEATURES Ruby Aiyo Gerber Paula Pacheco Soto Wen Zhuang SCIENCE Liz Cory Tara Sharma TECH Paige Parsons Olivia Kan-Sperling OCCULT Zack Kligler Gabriela Naigeborin EPHEMERA Maya Bjornson

The Independent is printed by TCI Press in Seekonk, MA.

LITERARY Isabelle Doyle Fadwa Ahmed LIST Jane Argodale Alexis Gordon Fadwa Ahmed STAFF WRITERS Galadriel Brady Mica Chau Ella Comberg Mara Dolan Soraya Ferdman Liby Hays Anna Hundert Lillian Kirby Lucas Smolcic Larson Mariela Pichardo Ivy Scott

Marly Toledano Sara Van Horn Kayli Wren Kion You COPY EDITORS Shuchi Agrawal Grace Berg Benjamin Bienstock Seamus Flynn Sasha Raman Caiya Sanchez-Strauss ILLUSTRATION EDITORS Eve O’Shea Claire Schlaikjer

STAFF ILLUSTRATORS Julie Benbassat Alexandra Hanesworth Kela Johnson Halle Krieger Sophia Meng Pia Mileaf-Patel Ivan Rios-Fetchko Ella Rosenblatt Kelly Wang Dorothy Windham Katya Labowe-Stoll Rémy Poisson DESIGNERS Bethany Hung Amos Jackson Laura Kenney Katherine Sang Mariel Solomon Ella Rosenblatt

DESIGN EDITOR Eliza Chen X Zak Ziebell SENIOR EDITORS Jane Argodale Kelton Ellis Robin Manley Gabriel Matesanz Will Weatherly BUSINESS MANAGER Maria Gonzalez

SOCIAL MEDIA Fadwa Ahmed Pia Mileaf-Patel ALUMNI RELATIONS Julia Tompkins MANAGING EDITORS Jonah Max Katrina Northrop Signe Swanson MVP Wen Zhuang

WEB MANAGER Alyssa McGillvery

THEINDY.ORG — @THEINDY_TWEETS

WEEK IN MESSY POLITICS

Revolutionary Criminals People who work for the government in Rhode Island aren’t the best at playing by the rules. In the past week, those responsible for upholding the law have once again chosen not to follow it themselves, a trend that suggests that the People are becoming increasingly unwilling to live by the book.

Last week, ex-Providence Police officer Jesse Ferrell was arrested for using a city-issued Mobil Speedpass credit card to fill his car with gas. Ferrell used the card 238 times between April 2016, when he was suspended from his job as a police officer, and February 2018. After the Providence Police Department realized that Ferrell had been using the Speedpass––a credit card given to cops to fill up their police vehicles––detectives attached a GPS device to Ferrell’s truck in order to “track his use of the pass” and catch him in the act. Draining the funds for the city’s police apparatus? The Independent spots a revolution brewing.

Not only has Ferrell resisted the use of public dollars to fund the police state, but also he is a firm believer in the value of a free and independent press. In April 2016, Ferrell was suspended from his position as a cop because he broke into the Providence Journal’s distribution center to steal newspapers. Although the police reported that Ferrell was stealing the papers for the coupon fliers inside, the Indy remains convinced that Ferrell loves to read the Journal in print but wasn’t willing to pay for it.

Across the city, another public employee committed a crime last week which the Indy suspects was also committed in an act of protest against the Rhode Island’s capitalist class. On March 10, Iris RodriguezJones was arrested for trying to use a counterfeit $20 bill to cover her charges at the Dark Lady nightclub (according to Dark Lady’s instagram account, it was #3DSaturday). Apparently, the security officer at the club asked Rodriguez-Jones to use “real money,” to which Rodriguez-Jones responded by suggesting the officer call the police. “So they did,” the Providence Journal reported, and Rodriguez-Jones was arrested for the felony of passing a counterfeit bill. Rodriguez-Jones has been serving the state as a correctional officer for the past 27 years.

It seems as though Rodriguez-Jones, like her predecessor Karl Marx, finds money to be a peculiar object which hides the systems of labor exploitation that produce it. Rodriquez-Jones opposes the exploitation of the working masses, and thus couldn’t bear to use government-printed specie.

Those from the inside have begun to resist, which means it’s only a matter of time before the People of Rhode Island rise up.

-JR

BY Julia Rock, Julia Petrini & Will Weatherly ILLUSTRATION AND DESIGN BY Gabriel Matesanz

Educate Yourself Disappointed, but not surprised. Betsy DeVos’ interview with Lesley Stahl on 60 Minutes was like watching that annoying kid in the seventh grade give a presentation on a book they clearly did not read, except that this time it was harder to laugh. In just 15 minutes, DeVos managed to demonstrate her complete lack of understanding regarding a wide range of issues relating to education.

First, she misconstrued the goals of the Parkland survivors and organizers of March For Our Lives. DeVos asserted, “They want a variety of things. They want solutions,” and went on to suggest that arming teachers was a viable one. In an apparent effort to avoid taking a solid stance herself, she suggested that individual communities were best suited to determine a solution.

“See there are a lot of states that are addressing these issues in very cohesive and coherent ways.” This very good and very nice response has set all concerned citizens at ease. Great work, Betsy!

The next question was one she must have known was coming but was still a toughie. After she argued that school choice increases performance at all schools, Stahl asked, “Now, has that happened in Michigan?” “Oh shit,” DeVos thought. She glanced quickly at her palm for the answer but the sweat had smudged it beyond recognition. “Michi—Yes, well, there’s lots of great options and choices for students here.” Phew. “Have the public schools in Michigan gotten better?” Come on, you can’t ask the same question twice! “I don’t know. Overall, I—I can’t say overall that they have all gotten better.” Even partial credit looks like a long shot at this point.

Later in the interview, DeVos admitted to being the most hated Cabinet Secretary, which is quite an accomplishment if you consider her competition. She implied that this hatred stems from the left’s resistance to change. In that case, the interview may have been used to persuade school choice opponents that increasing choice increases quality of education, but she failed to make any convincing argument.

Whether she chooses to acknowledge it or not, her lack of qualifications and ignorance are shocking.

DeVos has been given over a year since her tumultuous confirmation hearing to educate herself about American education policies and practices, but evidently she has not. This interview was an opportunity to garner support for her platform and to restore her image. She failed on both counts.

The only positive thing about this interview seems to be the negative coverage of it. DeVos has been widely criticized by the press, leading to much concern in the White House, and we all know how low that bar is.

As comedian Hari Kondabolu succinctly put it, “Betsy DeVos sounds like someone who was educated in a public school that was underfunded by Betsy DeVos.” -JP

DEER CITIZENS, UNITE! Early in March, The Hill reported that Ana Lisa Garza, a candidate for a state House seat in South Texas, had listed $51,000 worth of deer semen as making up about half of the total in-kind donations given to her campaign. The semen, stored in small frozen containers identified as “straws,” but which one certainly hopes no one is drinking, had been collected from Texan deer breeders by the political action committee (PAC) called the Texas Deer Association. Since 2006, the group has donated around $885,000 in deer semen straws to political campaigns around the state. The straws have been valued by Garza’s campaign at $1,000 each, and the Garza’s listing of individual donors includes names such as “Mabo Thicket, Tack Hammer and Strike Force,” according to HuffPost.

At first glance, one might be inclined to roll their eyes at this overly literal metaphor for the perverse forms of contemporary campaign finance. That US politics has been largely determined by PACs’ gross (in both size and, regarding the semen, quality) amounts of donations in the wake of the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United decision has become clear. So too has it become widely evident that we live in a world which increasingly trades in forms of seemingly imaginary money with more than a whiff of bro-y musk—real cryptocurrencies like Unobtanium, Coinye, Dogecoin and their ilk (or should we say, elk?). Gathering all this and bottling it in 51 frozen straws of deer semen feels like a contrivance along the lines of a Taco Bell Doritos Locos Taco Supreme— while the semen is all too real, their absurdity feels like a pile-on of non sequiturs, faking an innovative way to sell the same old thing.

We here at the Independent, however, believe in articulating a perspective which imagines an alternative world, and we believe that deer semen might be an integral part of this political project. Consider the following: if PACs generally use campaign donations to endorse candidates which align with their own political aims, what goals does the Texas Deer Association purport to endorse with their bendy, smelly straws? Their website cites a “common bond” between its 7,245 members of values such as “commitment to private property rights, a passion for white-tailed deer, and a deep appreciation of hunting in Texas.” But a closer look reveals a far more lucrative endeavor hidden under its collection and sale of frozen deer semen: making deer antlers very, very, large. In a “hedonic” 2016 survey of “white-tailed deer semen auction data,” Texas researchers found that genes which produced bigger antlers (often sought by hunters to display as trophies) “significantly and positively influenced price per straw of semen.”

While genetic modification for the sole purpose of trophy hunting seems to be, somehow, a less comforting use of proto-deer than even campaign finance, we see a silver lining around this dark truth: that there remains the utopian potential that these deers’ antlers might grow too large for any of us to stop them. Holding this in our hearts, we retain the distant hope that from a frozen receptacle of half of a deer’s genes, a revolution might be born.

-WW

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

WEEK IN REVIEW

02

WHO IS DEEMED WORTHY On February 20, nearly a week after the Parkland High School shooting, 100 students from the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School stepped off a bus in Tallahassee with sleeping bags, snacks, backpacks, and blankets. They had just traveled six and a half miles to reach the Florida Capitol and were preparing to wake up the next morning to pressure lawmakers and other state leaders to approve stricter gun control laws, including a ban on the sale of military-style semi-automatic firearms such as the AR-15 used by the gunman at their school. Many stayed up past 3 AM on their green cots in the Tallahassee Civic Center, researching state policies, identifying amenable lawmakers, and editing speeches on their laptops to testify.

In the aftermath of the Parkland massacre, the high school students channeled their rage over Florida’s previous legislative paralysis on gun control toward activism—all while wrestling with their grief and trauma.

They banded with peers across the country to push state and federal leaders to enact stricter gun control policies by publishing op-eds, giving speeches, organizing rallies, and meeting with politicians. Capitalizing on the power of social media to propagate their message, the leaders prompted a trending national discussion through the hashtag #NeverAgain. They exposed the hypocrisy of pro-gun politicians: in response to Donald Trump’s “prayers and condolences,” a student named Sarah tweeted, “I don't want your condolences, you fucking piece of shit, my friends and teachers were shot… Prayers won’t fix this. But gun control will stop this from happening.” They raised over $3.7 million for future events with the help of contributions from moguls such as Steven Spielberg, George Clooney, and Oprah

Winfrey. They organized two major nationwide events: the National School Walkout on March 14 and the March for Our Lives on March 24 as part tribute to their classmates and part protest of the government’s failure to prioritize gun violence as an issue. The media coverage for Parkland within the first two weeks produced some 8,000 stories online, nearly twice that of the already highly-covered Las Vegas and San Bernardino shootings.

Indeed, no shooting in our country’s recent history has so successfully captured public attention and mobilized gun-control focused protests. Three hours north of the affluent, predominantly white enclave of Parkland lies Sanford, the site of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin’s fatal shooting in 2012. In response to the shooting, the Dream Defenders, a group of student activists who aimed to end police brutality, slept outside of the Florida Capitol for 31 days to demand a repeal of the “Stand Your Ground” self-defense law. This law grants the right for defendants to protect themselves without retreating and was used to acquit Martin’s killer. Governor Rick Scott declined to speak with the activists, and when House Speaker Will Weatherford agreed to call for a legislative panel to review the law, no progress was made. In fact, state legislators have only pushed to expand the law over subsequent years.

When the 100 students of Parkland traveled to Tallahassee to demand policy change this February, they were welcomed in the doors of the Capitol the next morning to meet with nearly 70 lawmakers and state leaders, assured that their concerns were being received. Two days later, Scott, who only five years ago had declined to address “Stand Your Ground,” backed student demands with a new proposal to restrict gun ownership by raising the minimum age to buy a gun.

The outpouring of support for Parkland thus begs the question: Why has America so readily embraced this youth activist movement while failing to support Black youth-led activist movements? The answer may not lie any deeper than the racist ideology at work in this country. In a Tampa Bay Times investigation conducted on Florida police shootings between 2009 to 2014, the majority of victims were Black, even though white people in Florida outnumbered Black people three-to-one. Gun violence has been proven to disproportionately affect communities of color, but the racial makeup of Parkland High School centers the issue of gun violence around a predominantly white community, thus de-racializing the movement.

The media, however, has claimed that the difference in the Parkland case is predicated on a novel form of student activism, seemingly forgetting the work of Black youths who have been actively fighting against unlawful gun violence for years through groups such as the Newark Anti-Violence Coalition, Project Orange Tee, and the Crown Heights Community Mediation Center. “Why the Parkland kids might be different,” heads one Washington Post article. “I have covered most mass shootings in America in some capacity, and I have never seen anything like these Parkland kids,” writes a Politico reporter. Even when the media does acknowledge the work of young Black activists, it is often in a negative light. A study conducted in 2014 by Joy Leopold, a graduate student at University of Miami School of Communication, and Myrtle Bell, Professor of Management at the University of Texas at Arlington, called the presence and racialization of the protest paradigm “a pattern of news coverage that expresses

BY Mia Pattillo ILLUSTRATION BY Katya Labowe-Stoll DESIGN BY Ella Rosenblatt

03

NEWS

MARCH 23, 2018

How America has delegitimized Black youth activism disapproval toward protests and dissent,” and other marginalizing techniques in media coverage of Black Lives Matter. Media outlets and politicians have referred to Black youth activists as “terrorists” and “thugs,” dog-whistles which would likely never be directed against the largely white Parkland students.

At the heart of the matter, this discrepancy between the flood of popular support for Parkland and explicit backlash against the Movement for Black Lives reveals which communities America has deemed worthy of empowerment and safety. Youth leaders of both Parkland and Black Lives Matter employ the same peaceful approaches in tackling unjust gun violence: talking with politicians, planning marches, speaking in front of crowds, writing opinion pieces. However, when these methods are used to confront anti-gun violence in the context of race, mainstream political discourse marginalizes Black Lives Matter as unacceptably radical while embracing the supposedly race-blind #NeverAgain as revolutionary. In reality, the student leaders of Parkland activism do not represent an unprecedented emergence of youth activism, but rather a present example of how this country champions white-washed, mainstream narratives while continuing to systematically delegitimize homologous and long standing efforts of Black activism.

teenagers already had connections and experiences that made it easier to spread their message: student David Hogg was training in journalism, and student Jaclyn Corin had created a 50-page project about gun control for her AP composition and rhetoric class. In Rhode Island, Brother Gary points out that most Black families have to work and do not have the time for activism.

“Organizing is really tough in Rhode Island for minority groups of people, period, because you have the class that has money, and you have the class that doesn’t have money. It’s terrible here,” Brother Gary says. Indeed, the type of activism that involves travelling to state houses costs money, and having the freedom and time to dedicate toward building campaigns rather than watching over children or siblings comes with privilege.

And yet beyond class and social differences, it cannot be denied that there is a fundamental and marked distinction between the white feminist youth leaders and the Black Lives Matter leaders. “With some of these white feminist groups, it’s really aggravating, because imagine the Black women that tried to organize [Blackcentered movements] in the state of Rhode Island.

Where are they?” Brother Gary said. It is not only the proportionally low number of Black voices and dominating white voices that make it so challenging to gather clout, but also the failure of the media and political legislation to amplify or even address their issues at all.

+++ +++ Brother Gary Dantzler, an activist for Black Lives Matter and Pawtucket resident, was first propelled into activism after the police-involved shooting of his unarmed friend, James Wilcox, in 2006. He has since been protesting and talking to government officials about issues such as gun violence and human rights across Rhode Island, New York, Massachusetts, Baltimore, and elsewhere.

Following the absence of charges in the 2014 shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, Dantzler led a crowd of people onto Route 95 in Rhode Island. “The goal was to get your attention… to say, Hey, listen, you need to pay attention to these shootings across the nation,” he said.

But Brother Gary told the Independent that getting this attention, especially in Rhode Island, has been extremely challenging. “I get mostly backlash from the white media,” he says, explaining how, for example, he tried to get a radio show in Rhode Island through WPRO, but they refused to even look at a contract or consider him. Over his more than ten years of activism, an award from the Black Heritage Society of Rhode Island has been one of the only forms of recognition that he has received throughout the state.

Brother Gary argues that the voices of Black Lives Matter have also been stifled by the predominantly white feminist groups in Rhode Island. “I’m proud of these white feminist groups, but when [our movement] has around 500 people, how can I compete with an organization of 5,000 white people?” he says, pushing for the need for a stronger Black base in this state, where Black people make up only 5.43 percent of the population.

Brother Gary echoes the rising sentiment of being bothered by seeing white-centered movements receive clout and support while garnering comparatively little support for his race-centered activism. “What really bothers me is that I’ve been doing this for a long time,” he told the Indy. “This is very overwhelming and depressing because it shouldn’t be happening today. We’re a part of society, but we’ve been overshadowed.”

The lack of recognition for both Brother Gary’s local movements and more national Black activism can be partially attributed to the fact that, unlike Parkland, where the median annual income is an affluent $128,000, many lower-income communities of color are denied the economic resources to engage with elite news media or hire lobbyists. In the case of Parkland, many of the

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

For decades, Black youth have been on the front lines of the fight for equality, safety, and justice, yet they continue to be suppressed and receive backlash for their activism.

On February 1, 1960, four Black college students made the radical gesture of sitting down at Woolworth’s “whites only” lunch counter and ordering coffee, which sparked a larger wave of grassroots activism and led directly to the conception of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). But government organizations of this period did not hesitate to break the law in waging an overt and covert war against young leaders and movements committed to freedom for Black people. Agents of COINTELPRO, the infamous FBI counterintelligence program of the postwar period that was created to neutralize the activities of threatening movements, targeted Black activism in particular, ultimately infiltrating and suppressing the young voices of SNCC. More recently, shootings have sparked the conception of various Black youth-led organizations that specifically fight against gun violence. The 2009 shooting of Nakisha Allen in Newark led to the Newark AntiViolence Coalition, Project Orange Tee resulted from the killing of 15-year-old Hadiya Pendleton in 2013, and only last June, seventh graders from Launch Expeditionary Learning Charter School in Crown Heights, Brooklyn walked out of school to push for an end to the frequent gun violence in their area. These organizations only represent a few examples of a massive anti-gun violence network led by Black youth that scarcely gets noticed by mainstream media, politicians, and scholars.

Oprah Winfrey’s $500,000 donation to the March for Our Lives gun control rally was accompanied by a tweet: “These inspiring young people remind me of the Freedom Riders of the ’60s, who also said we’ve had ENOUGH and our voices will be heard.” This reaction stands as a stark contrast to her 2015 comments on #BlackLivesMatter, when she accused the movement of “lacking leadership” and “clear objectives,” insinuating that it failed to champion for Black rights through an appropriate and effective method. But the Black Lives Matter movement used pointed and well-organized political action that aligned with the actions of Parkland students. Black Lives Matter activists met multiple times with President Obama, the Millions March protest of

2014 against police killings drew the largest post-Ferguson crowd to New York City, and four teenage girls organized a 1,000-person silent sit-in in Chicago’s Millennium Park in response to two police shootings.

Despite being analogous to Parkland in their tactics, their reception differed immensely. In fact, as the Movement for Black Lives, which represents a collaboration of organizations including the Dream Defenders, Black Lives Matter, and the Black Youth Project 100, grew, so did the backlash.

“All Lives Matter” and “Blue Lives Matter” stand as two well-known examples of erasure of movements for racial equality, calling for colorblindness or implying that there is a war on cops. But even beyond erasure, targeting from the government that echoes COINTELPRO’s war on Black activists continues. Last October, a new category created by the FBI’s counterterrorism division designated “Black Identity Extremists” went public. The 12-page leaked internal FBI report states that “It is very likely that Black Identity Extremist (B.I.E.) perception of police brutality against African-Americans spurred an increase in premeditated, retaliatory lethal violence against law enforcement and will very likely serve as justification for such violence.” Though this serves as an overt example of the current FBI’s targeting of Black activists, the report has garnered little of mainstream America’s attention. According to reports from Foreign Policy, the FBI has already prosecuted one individual suspected of being a B.I.E.: Christopher Daniels, who was arrested in Dallas, Texas last December for unlawful possession of a firearm. Prior to his arrest, Daniels had been monitored by the FBI unknowingly for two years because of his anti-police rhetoric on social media and at rallies. Even today, peaceful Black activists fear for their civil liberties if they are deemed part of B.I.E. under an already threatening and blatantly racist administration.

In response to Oprah’s tweet, Charlene Carruthers, national director of Black Youth Project 100, one of the groups that was conceived in 2014 after the shooting of teenager Michael Brown, expressed her frustration at the difference in reception between Parkland and Black youth led movements. “I'm happy for these young people.

I just know how so many young people have put their lives on the line over the past five years,” she tweeted.

“We're rarely compared to Freedom Riders and recipients of such public support. I shouldn't be bothered, but I am.” +++ As stories from Parkland continue to dominate airwaves, Josh Williams, one of the youngest and most involved Ferguson activists protesting the police shooting of Michael Brown, is still serving eight years in prison for his activism while Brown’s shooter Darren Wilson remains free. As harmful and unfounded narratives of violence and criminality surround Black activist movements, the Parkland students have found a ready advocate in mainstream media. Counterintelligence programs that indicate fearful hostility toward Black populations and more covert methods of suppression only contribute to keeping Black populations poor and disenfranchised, while political attention continues to works in favor of those who fit mainstream definitions of an American.

The country’s recent rush to support Parkland students exemplifies what every youth movement deserves. But it also provides irrefutable evidence of the consistent and violent denial of attention to Black narratives. People only support a movement when they believe in what it stands for, and today, much of America has sided with a white community against gun violence while it still has failed to do so for a Black one.

MIA PATTILLO B’20 thinks enough is enough.

NEWS

04

TO THE BENEFIT OF FEW The histories of the Providence Preservation Society

BY Kerrick Edwards & Ilan Desai-Geller ILLUSTRATION BY Halle Krieger DESIGN BY Mariel Solomon The Gershom Jones-John Howland House, 102 Benfit Street, is built on land that was first developed by Abraham Whipple, a captain in the American Revolutionary Navy.

Whipple later became a partner of John and Moses Brown, two of the founders of Brown University and prominent Rhode Island merchants. The Brown brothers were engaged in the trade of enslaved people throughout their careers as merchants, and, upon becoming textile manufacturers, relied on the labor of enslaved people in the American South to produce cotton. Although the historical record is imprecise about the exact role that Whipple played in the Brown brothers’ early trade, his voyages to and from the West Indies make it evident that he was deeply involved in the Atlantic Triangular Trade.

The house itself features a plaque from the Providence Preservation Society (PPS), which notes the building’s antiquity, but does not report on this history, or the capital that paid for its construction. Nor is there a historical marker indicating that this land was a gathering point for the Narragansett, Wampanoag, Massachusett, and Nipmuc tribes to trade the fish, eels, lobsters, crabs, clams, quahogs, and oysters that were then abundant in what is now called the Providence River. All of these houses were touched by the intersecting histories of slavery and colonialism.

According to its website, the PPS’s historical marker program seeks to identify buildings “of historical and architectural significance” to promote greater community awareness of and care for “buildings and neighborhoods.”

Although the plaques do invoke historical associations and provide the date of construction and names of original inhabitants, they offer no information on the people or context in which these homes were built. That all the plaques are designed identically suggests a continuity and homogeneity of the houses that is misleading. In fact, these houses were built across three centuries, in many architectural styles and multiple geographic locations— several of the houses currently located on Benefit Street were originally built elsewhere in Providence. The effect of this demarcation on Benefit Street is to privilege the visual and aesthetic markers over the actual history that produced these structures, and which the plaque program is meant to communicate. History is scrubbed in order to create an ambience of past-ness, a past that is entirely white.

What exists today on Benefit Street is a highly curated colonial and Victorian landscape that suggests to the casual passerby what the street might have looked like in the years following Providence’s settlement by early American colonists. What emerges is a nostalgia, sometimes inadvertent and other times overt, for a violent

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history that persists into the present. What happens when this history is aestheticized? What can we do to re-historicize it?

almost universally multi-family, and many were tenant houses, with as many as five or six people living in one room: “[Benefit Street] was such a slum then. It was a dangerous area and people were afraid to walk down it.

The houses were all covered with siding and it looked perfectly dreadful.” The concern was not with the people who could not afford better housing—and who would be displaced if Brown were to continue to expand in that direction—but with other people who felt it was dangerous, and with the houses themselves, that were sadly covered with ugly siding.

Providence, like most other Northern cities in the postwar period, was experiencing an influx of European immigrants and Black migrants from the South; meanwhile, non-immigrant whites were steadily leaving the city for nearby suburbs. In the eyes of Downing and her supporters, Benefit Street, the original site of colonial settlement in Rhode Island, had become become a “slum.”

Surveying the demolished remains of the buildings that The protection of the historic houses became a way for Brown knocked down to make room for Keeney Quadrangle.

Downing and her compatriots to hold fast to a colonial The effort to stop that demolition gave birth to the heritage against the tide of changing demographics.

Providence Preservation Society.” (Greenfield, courtesy of White elites across the US, in response to these The University Archive) immigration trends, moved to solidify their cultural

hegemony by forming preservation and historical soci +++ eties. Historian Barbara Howe writes that “late nineteenth-century, middle-class, white Americans searched Another history of displacement, dispossession, and for their roots by establishing historic sites that legitiviolence emerges when one digs into the history of the mized the nation's relatively short history. As individuals, Historic District. As preservation scholar Brian Greenfield many sought Mayflower immigrants or Revolutionary writes, between 1951 and 1955 Brown University razed War soldiers as ancestors, hoping to distinguish themapproximately 66 houses on the East Side of Providence to selves from the new Eastern European immigrant.” This make room for campus expansions, including the Keeney preservation movement that rose in the wake of this early Quadrangle dormitory complex. In response, a group of wave continued through the ensuing decades with the white residents of the East Side, headed by Antoinette same preoccupation of protecting the white settler-coloDowning, took up arms—in defense not of the occu- nial heritage of the nation. pants displaced by the University’s developments, but The first project of the PPS, an organization situated of the houses themselves. Downing and her supporters squarely in this tradition of preservation, was to reclaim were outraged by the destruction, arguing that many of Providence’s white heritage. Its first initiative, funded the demolished structures were historic. Downing was by a federal grant in 1959, was to write a comprehensimilarly worried about nearby Benefit Street, which was sive proposal for the preservation of Benefit Street’s dotted with structures that dated as far back as the early historic homes. This effort culminated in “College Hill: A 18th century. With the goal of protecting these struc- Demonstration Study for Urban Area Renewal,” which tures tied to the very first European settlements in Rhode became an influential document in the national historic Island, she founded the Providence Preservation Society preservation and urban renewal movements. in 1956.

The PPS immediately put their plans for Benefit By this point in the 1950s, Benefit Street had Street into action. Interestingly, it called not for the become a lower-income, mixed-race community of removal of these homes from the housing market, as is college students and Eastern European immigrants that often the case in historic preservation, but for their renodid not resemble the wealthy, white merchant class vation and revaluation. The first step in this plan, then, that had built it. In a 1985 New York Times interview, was not for them to be declared historic monuments Downing describes with disgust how the homes were but for them to be purchased by the supporters of the

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preservation plan, often under the aegis of for-profit preservation companies founded by members of the PPS. One of the first and largest companies was Beatrice Chace’s Burnside Company. The company employed Roger Brassard and Robert Prescott Hall, two real estate brokers, to facilitate the purchase and renovation of the Benefit Street houses, a process that involved the displacement of their current residents. As scholar Matthew Jerzyk reports, the preservationists’ methods of displacement included “dup[ing] [renters] into believing that if they agreed to move out, they could return after the renovation effort was completed, [though] those promises were never fulfilled.” He continues: “Virginia Williams recalled the developer Roger Brassard banging on homeowners’ doors and yelling over their fences to get them to sell their homes in the name of neighborhood restoration. Others chimed in that they remembered being badgered or hearing tales of other Blacks being badgered

by Brassard to sell their homes.”

After renovation, Burnside Company sold these properties at the original cost plus renovation charges, often tripling the price of the home. Greenfield notes that a house purchased by the company for $5,000 to $10,000 in the 1950s might sell for $45,000 in 1960s, after restoration. These companies also profited from a 20 percent federal income tax credit, born out of the Tax Reform Act of 1976, which incentivized preservation as a method of urban renewal. The families that purchased these homes from Burnside after their renovation also profited as the values of their new homes continued to appreciate throughout the decades that followed. Moreover, the city government profited from tax base increases and a new site for tourism. This accumulation of capital by the city, for-profit preservation groups, and largely white homeowners was predicated on the displacement of the Benefit Street community.

Similar mechanisms for compounding inequality were at work in the contemporaneous redevelopment of the nearby Lippitt Hill neighborhood. The land, directly north of Brown’s campus, between North Main, Olney, and Camp streets, was a part of the original Brown estate.

Moses later sold this land to a former slave, Noah Brown, who became the area’s first occupant. By the 1950s, Lippitt Hill had become a thriving, mixed-race, mixed-income

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neighborhood, at some points Providence’s largest Black neighborhood. Despite this history, and the ties Lippitt Hill had to the Brown family—whose other houses were preserved where they stood across College Hill—the neighborhood was condemned by the Providence City council in 1959 and demolished to make way for the University Heights development. Antoinette Downing was a member of the board of University Heights, Inc. Urban renewal and neighborhood community projects have received much critical attention in scholarship of recent decades for exactly these reasons. Scholar of African American history Kwame Holmes, for example, details the way that projects of neighborhood improvement create housing insecurity and expose displaced Black families to attack “from white supremacists, ill-health, street crime, and police harassment.” The preservation of homes on Benefit Street follows the same pattern: after being displaced, Black renters and homeowners alike faced legalized discrimination in the housing market and were excluded from most neighborhoods on the East Side. The historic restoration of Benefit Street, then, was premised on the differential valuation of Black and white communities; the creation of this white imagined past, and the subsequent gentrification, was predicated on the removal of its Black residents. +++ These are parts of the story that are not apparent in a walk down Benefit Street. These are the histories certain understandings of historic preservation seek to occlude.

But how can we move beyond a critique of historic preservation into a more generative conversation? How can preservation function beyond the romanticization of the white past?

The contemporary PPS is already invested in such projects. The Historic Marker program now exists well beyond Benefit Street and College Hill, and the Society is developing more programs that preserve architecture in a more diverse range of Providence neighborhoods.

In doing so, they hope to tell more faithful stories about Providence’s built environment. The Independent spoke on this matter to Rachel Robinson, the PPS’s Director of Preservation: “We want to tell a broader story and

include more people who weren’t included in the early days of preservation.”

One of the PPS’s current advocacy priorities is the opposition to the reconstruction of the controversial and badly decayed Route 6/10 Connector—an elevated, limited-access highway that cuts across the Olneyville, West End, Federal Hill, Silver Lake, Hartford, and Valley neighborhoods of Providence in order to to connect areas west of the city to I-95 downtown. As is often the case with the construction of limited access highways, the 6/10 Connector cuts through poor neighborhoods of color, severing them from the other side of the highway and exposing the residents to harmful noise and atmospheric pollution. The PPS joined neighborhood associations in calling for the complete rebuilding of this highway in order to restore connectivity between these neighborhoods and create more community space. This suggests a model of preservation that is restorative rather than merely preservational, and, incidentally, one which seeks to ameliorate some of the harms caused by the same white flight that initially emptied Benefit Street.

Unfortunately, however, advocacy by the PPS, the city of Providence, and neighborhood coalitions was only partially heeded by the State. On January 8 of this year, construction began on a plan that leaves the highway intact and mostly above ground.

In taking a public stance on such issues, perhaps the preservation movement is moving beyond the narrow valuation of white American heritage to a broader and more inclusive project, as Robinson suggests. One that seeks to preserve not just beautiful houses decontextualized from the violence that underwrote their construction, but rather toward a notion of preservation with and not against history. Toward preservation that is not predicated on the displacement of residents, but instead one that advances a deeper understanding of the ways history continues to reverberate today.

ILAN DESAI-GELLER AND KERRICK EDWARDS B’18 admit to seeing beauty in Benefit Street's houses.

METRO

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DINOSAUR WORDS

BY Miranda Van-Boswell DESIGN BY Eliza Chen

cuando1 despertó, 1

My friend says we’re like the dinosaurs, Only we are doing ourselves in Much faster than they ever did— We don’t need an asteroid, We are the apocalypse.

el dinosaurio2

2

Shoddily classified a reptile, it has been confirmed that dinosaurs were in fact not cold blooded. Rather, they were somewhere in the middle, an intermediate of ectotherm and endotherm: mesotherm. Amphibians (“two lives”) are mixed people, at once A and B and yet neither A nor B. Half–breed/–baked/–cast.

Mutt, chonkey, rice cracker, two tone, terrible lizard.

todavía3 estaba 3

Really, the dinosaur was unqualified for the race but kept at it. It was starting to feel like the mission was impossible, like it had bad luck, like wouldn’t it be nice to catch a freight train and just ride on down the line.

allí.4 4

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A line is an open formation. If you leave a line you can still come back to it. But a circle closes in on itself—if you go away from it, there’s no way back. It is not by chance that the planets move in circles, and that a rock coming loose from one of them goes inexorably away, carried off by force. Like a meteorite broken off from a planet, I left the circle and have not yet stopped falling.

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THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

EPHEMERA

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SET IN STONE Examining the stakes of transnational monuments TEXT AND DIAGRAMS BY Jeremy Lee Wolin DESIGN BY Bethany Hung

In 2016, the National Park Service, the National Capital Planning Commission, and the Van Alen Institute launched “Memorials for the Future,” an open call that asked designers, artists, and social scientists to “reimagine how we think about, feel, and experience memorials.”

The winning entry, Climate Chronograph, by Californiabased landscape architecture studio Azimuth Landcraft, took on climate change as its prompt. Capitalizing on the cultural and civic value of the District of Columbia’s cherry trees, Azimuth proposed the reshaping of Hains Point, a sliver of land at the meeting point of the Potomac and Anacostia Rivers where tourists travel to view cherry blossoms each spring.

Noting Hains Point’s low elevation, Jensen and Sunter proposed planting rows of cherry trees on a slope leading down to the river. As sea levels rise, rows of trees die one at a time, creating a visual record of the damage of climate change. Fast forward a century and a half and the slope is gone, and black branches are poking out of the water. The proposal also used the location of the “Memorials for the Future” to its advantage; by placing the memorial at the doorstep of the Capitol, the pair targeted the policymakers whose decisions have a global impact.

Climate Chronograph heralds a dark future, which is also deeply grounded in the past. Azimuth co-opts Washington’s cherry trees, the symbolic gift from Japan to the United States that arose out of late 19th century American fascination with the pink blooms. The gift symbolized diplomatic friendship and continued to represent United States–Japanese relations as time progressed.

Now an annual celebration, the National Cherry Blossom Festival brings over a million visitors each spring to the District to watch performances and photograph the

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flowers.

As the blossoms have long served to represent a world in diplomatic harmony, Azimuth’s flooding structure now mobilizes these very same trees to illustrate the stakes of a global threat such as climate change. The site offers the trees as an analog for the sort of networks that will buckle under a heated planet, the loss that we can already foresee.

Of course, unlike the tides of less curated environments, the water in Climate Chronograph is designed to rise aesthetically, evenly, and predictably. In this site, the harmful effects of climate change are portrayed as being felt equivalently across many contexts. Yet as the Azimuth structure fails to recognize, global exchange is hardly ever equal.

Exchanges made across borders are seldom innocent. Gifts—memorials included—are wrapped up in calculated diplomatic strategy, in expectation of future cooperation, and in the desire to put a soft marble face on complex global problems. When American Commodore Matthew Perry sailed into Tokyo Bay in 1853, he brought guns, liquor, a telegraph machine and a camera, among other Western products. In return, however, he negotiated treaties that restricted Japan’s economy for decades into the future. While memorials to this voyage, placed everywhere from Newport to the shores of Tokyo Bay, may look heroic at face value, their supersized scales obscure the global inequalities that Perry’s mission helped to produce.

In few places is this global inequality of memory more present than in the extant public memorials dedicated to the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park sits in the center of the city, on a peninsula formed by the

confluence of two rivers. In one long, graceful, axial plan, its memorial museum lines up with a cenotaph—a monument for those whose remains are buried elsewhere—and the restored Genbaku Dome, a ghostly relic of the lone building that remained standing after the atomic blast.

Surrounding this central axis sit a children’s memorial, a library, an auditorium, a conference space, and dozens of smaller monuments added in the years since the original construction. The entire park is landscaped, with a mix of footpaths and plazas.

The Peace Park has become a meeting point for annual remembrance, reflection, and anti-nuclear protest.

Unlike Azimuth’s Climate Chronograph, loss here requires neither simulation nor prediction. Rather, it comes as an object to live alongside, to live with—something that has always already happened. Markers of the devastation persist, in the skeletal structure of the Genbaku Dome and in the memory of loss kept alive by the continuous return of mourners to the site.

The United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) added the Genbaku Dome, known as the Hiroshima Peace Memorial, to its World Heritage List in 1996. Underscoring its importance to not only Japan but to the global public, the 1996 Advisory Body Evaluation described the site as a “universal monument for all mankind, symbolizing the hope for perpetual peace and the ultimate elimination of all nuclear weapons on earth.” This designation reiterates the importance of peace after atomic warfare, and Japan’s role in this advocacy work.

While the Peace Park serves as a highly visible architectural reminder of atomic warfare, the United States bears no physical monument that fully reconciles its role in the devastation. Rather, its atomic past is hidden away

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in heavily guarded facilities and on isolated islands, out of view from the American public.

In 2001, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists’ put out a call for the design of a “Plutonium Memorial,” a structure that rather than hiding radioactive material in a secure facility would put this toxic waste on display as a symbol of the danger of nuclear war. American landscape architect Michael Simonian proposed the winning monument entitled 24110 that, like Climate Chronograph, was too far-fetched to ever be constructed. The piece would serve as both a warning of the dangers of atomic war, as well as a secure storage facility for the “almost 200 metric tons of plutonium piles awaiting disposal around the world.”

Simonian proposed to place this deposit on the National Mall, surrounded by the federal agencies, NGOs, and lobbyists of transnational energy corporations to act as a warning for those most responsible for the future of nuclear policy. The memorial would consist of a large disc surrounded by a ring of 241 steel clock totems, gradually inserted into the ground around the memorial once every century to signify the gradual passing of the plutonium’s half life. This context precludes the memorial from ever being built—no federal construction project has ever been built with an intended life of 24,000 years.

While this use of discursive design allows Simonian’s proposal a degree of gravity that would be impossible were physical construction a necessity, the memorial’s solely theoretical state enables the gradual forgetting of its message over time. The written plans may be distributed globally, but the absence of a material instantiation forgoes a key feature of the monument—its ability to gather those around it, to foster community and catalyze political response.

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On a more feasible scale, the National Japanese American Memorial to Patriotism, constructed in 2000— after years of advocacy by Japanese-American community organizations—is the closest example of a national memorial that admits American abuses during World War II. The project sits on a formerly unused, triangular plot not far from the National Mall and consists of a plaza designed by architect Davis Buckley and a bronze sculpture created by sculptor Nina Akamu, whose grandather was interned in the '40s. The memorial recognizes the thousands of Japanese-Americans who were incarcerated in camps throughout the western United States for much of World War II, and highlights those who still served in the military while their families and communities were jailed in the desert.

However, in foregrounding patriotism, the memorial garnered harsh critique for its lack of attention to acts of resistance by Japanese-Americans during wartime.

Encircling the shaded plaza, a spiraling granite wall bears the name of the ten incarceration camps in solemn, blocky characters. Akamu’s crane is emotive and well-rendered, but nowhere are the names of the over 100,000 people held against their will. No mention is made to Fred Korematsu, who brought internment all the way to the Supreme Court. Nowhere are the “No-No” boys, the few hundred Japanese-Americans who answered “no” when asked if they would swear allegiance to the United States and serve in the war effort, often at great personal expense.

By the time the memorial opened in mid-summer 2001, the cherry trees that encircle its central plaza had long dropped their blossoms. Instead, their bright green boughs served as a backdrop to speeches by Senator Daniel Inouye, Transportation Secretary Norman

Mineta, Representative Robert Matsui, and a taiko performance, which opened the memorial with gracious calls to unity.

Despite its intended message, the forty-minute ceremony, recorded by C-Span for posterity, feels inadequate—a too-perfect stamp of closure on a legacy of active resistance, community organizing, and governmental hesitance to admit wrongdoing that doesn’t fit neatly between orderly stone walls and cherry trees. +++ When the National Cherry Blossom Festival opens once again this week in Washington, tourists will crowd along the banks of the Tidal Basin to take photographs under the sprays of pale pink blooms. The Potomac will lap against the low concrete embankments, mere feet from the roots of the fragile trees. The marble and granite memorials to Jefferson, King, and Roosevelt will glow softly in the March sun, their facades bracketed by the boughs of flowering trees referred to by the Festival’s website as a sign of “lasting friendship.”

And as the trees begin to lose their flowers in mid-April, maintenance workers will sweep away their petals to ensure that the narrative this space conveys remains spotless.

JEREMY LEE WOLIN B/RISD '19 still loves the DC metro.

FEATURES

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LOOKING LIKE YOU TEXT & DESIGN BY Eliza Chen ILLUSTRATION BY Michelle Devlin

A review of the 2018 RISD Faculty Exhibition One time, during the bizarre event that is my primary studio course at RISD, we spent two hours thinking hard, in groups, about the nature of our discipline. The question was: What is graphic design? It reminds me of other profoundly vague questions I have been asked to consider in the past, such as: What is literature? Or: What is translation? But this time, when my group and I went on to collaboratively read the text of a diagram we’d created to answer the question at hand, our teacher remarked that many of our responses circled around permission. Who permits whom to do what? What kinds of work do the conventionally accepted parameters of our discipline permit us to make? Are you permitted to fight your boss, your teacher, or your superior when you think they’re fundamentally wrong? The 2018 RISD Faculty Exhibition at the RISD Museum asks, to me, similar questions of what disciplines are and how we enforce them.

This show is the latest installment in a long-running series that used to be called the RISD Faculty Biennial, though the last time it was held was in 2015. All active RISD faculty are invited to submit their work, done either individually or in collaboration, either previously finished or specially-made for this exhibition.

And here’s what it comes down to: the Faculty Show strikes me not as bad, but as weird and untimely, which together might amount to the same thing as being bad. I admit to being very uncharitable with this assessment. A significant qualifier, probably the primary reason for the incoherency of the exhibition, is that the Faculty Show is unjuried, meaning space is made for any piece a current faculty member submits. The work that made it into the gallery now stands in curious arrangements. Hung on one wall is a pristine, transcendently crafted wooden rake, directly across from a seemingly unrelated textile filled with large, dark blocks. There is a massive painting of a white cat whose eyes have seen every sin you have ever committed, rendered by Illustration faculty Jamie Murphy Hlynsky. The god-cat is in approximately the same space as what looks like a large net encrusted with

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salt crystals hanging from a frame, a piece you later learn was 3D printed by Foundations teacher Kai Franz. In the gallery downstairs there is a fluttering, abstract graphite animation by Amy Kravitz, and diagonally behind the gallery monitor’s desk there is a sculpture by Tanya Crane titled User Friendly Black.

I sat in the monitor’s desk one afternoon, a Friday span of four hours, during which sixty-two people passed through the gallery. I was there to cover the shift of another student gallery worker, one of many such monitors on the work-study payroll at RISD. Sitting in the Faculty Show that afternoon, I was very close to User Friendly Black as visitors had what was presumably their first encounter with the sculpture. It depicts what appears to be a Black person’s buttocks covered in powdery white handprints.

“Look at this! How funny,” said one visitor in Chinese, taking a picture of the sculpture mounted to the wall.

I did not say anything to this visitor, and my complicity could be called violence. This visitor’s passive antiblackness was representative of the general spirit of bemused, racist confusion apparent in some visitors’ interactions with User Friendly Black. Another example: two elderly, well-dressed white men walked by, and they stopped in front the piece for a long time.

“She likes big butts and she cannot lie,” one said, contemplatively.

“What a strange window,” said the other, in an apparently non-sequitur response, looking completely past me through the window next to the monitor’s desk.

They then moved to the next piece, a very smooth mahogany cabinet by furniture faculty member George Gordon. After regarding it with conspicuous curiosity for about a minute, one of them turned to me, allowing his eyes to focus on my person, and asked: “Excuse me, sir, could you open this for us?”

“I’m very sorry, I’m afraid the sign says ‘Do Not Touch’” I replied, in my best tone of official, ingratiating apology.

“Ah, okay. Also, please excuse me for calling you

sir,” he said, sounding slightly displeased but intensely apologetic.

Let us pause here for a moment and return to my review of this exhibition as such. I am not here to toll a massive bell of gloom and yell “Is this what we have come to?” when I know that we have been here, were here, and that any surprise I may have felt was not at all constructive. Specifically, I am not trying to express surprise that other marginalized people would out themselves as harboring antiblackness. I am also not writing this review to solicit empathy for myself and this bizarre experience that I had; I am writing it to say that the structure of this exhibition does not do any favors for the few pieces on display that attempt to engage critically with the museum-going public.

When work is arranged to literally fit in the space and not for topical coherency, what suffers most are the pieces that attempt to enact critique. The positioning of Tanya Crane’s sculpture next to a cabinet exhibiting Shaker levels of visual utilitarianism is to make both objects seem foreign to the space. Furthermore, it shunts Crane’s sculpture further into the dusty corner reserved for “political work”. User Friendly Black is an object that seeks to critique and make physical the right that white and other non-Black people feel to interacting, often nonconsensually, with Black people who make their bodies visible in the public realm. User Friendly Black is certainly a well-crafted object, but it utilizes its craftsmanship to such a different end than a functional mahogany cabinet. One approach is not necessarily better than the other, but it to reduces both to put them literally—and more or less randomly—adjacent to one another.

To look at the pieces that were submitted, one might think that to have recognizable opinions were a quality foreign to artwork. One would think that most art, a solid half of the exhibition, existed mainly as evidence of the artist’s particular process. Without any critical apparatus, any coherent take, the very few pieces in this show that present any sort of opinion are unmoored from

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the possibility of interpretation. In this show, the visitor moves haphazardly between media and subjects, apparently at random. And while the advent of new, interdisciplinary curatorial practices in other museums has potential to revitalize gallery exhibitions, such is not the case here.

The mood of general disparagement I saw directed at User Friendly Black in a single afternoon indicates to me that people do not really view it as art. To the casual viewer, the large cylinder made of re-forged glass dust is recognizable as an art object and thus not to be mocked, but the sculpture that implicates its viewer is to be derided as explicit and confrontational. The conceptual atmosphere of the show is one of overwhelming silence; or rather, of solitary muttering so intense that it amounts to an unintelligible, atmospheric hum.

Walking through the galleries, the overwhelming feeling one gets is that there is just a lot going on at RISD. That there are a lot of people doing a lot of things down here at the art school. The takeaway from the show is as simple and vague as that, and as a collection it does not seem to illustrate an approach or represent a style. It is work that was pulled together from a group of professional artists who all spend some amount of their time teaching at the same institution, and that truly is the end of the concept. You thought it might be cooler or deeper than that, but it really isn’t. What’s more, to further disparage the show’s vague thesis, it is not even a lot of

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

different people doing different things: the show is barely at gender parity, and very few faculty of color seem to have submitted to the show as well. Either that or, as is the case in the Graphic Design department, there are only two faculty members of color in the whole department. What one understands is that most RISD faculty remain dedicated to the workshop, to the manifesto of process as a practice, but that all this rumination on working ultimately breaks apart into disparate and fragmentary musings.

This is not, however, a wholehearted takedown of the entire show. If I have not already overreached whatever right I have to an opinion, total dismissal would also be totally out of line for a student like me. In my day-to-day experience of being in school, I find that most teachers are deeply invested in advancing the concerns of their students, and that teaching and learning are processes of exchange. I have had many fortifying and generous experiences, and I find that a more thorough look at the work of individual teachers often yields a more complex and compelling portrait of the artist and their concerns. And, if you can recover from conceptual whiplash quickly enough to look, there is a visible proportion of work in the Faculty Show that is engaging and meaningful— there is some work about something. The organization of the show is such that the work with opinions are situated in the same space—in dissonant visual chorus with—work that is about nothing at all. The idea of just

“showing what we have” and the organizing principle of “just trying to fit every piece into the available space”— these two requirements are unflattering concepts around which to organize a show representing the concerns of current RISD faculty.

But here, let’s finish the story. A white man had just called me “sir.”

“No problem, don’t worry about it,” I cooed in my most generous and conspiratorial voice.

The pair of white men proceeded around the exhibit, in and out of my sight. After a very thorough look at everything on display, they came by my desk again on the way out.

“Again, I’m so sorry,” one of them whispered to me before he left the gallery.

This weekend marks the final two days of the 2018 RISD Faculty Exhibition.

ELIZA CHEN B/RISD’19 still recommends you see the show, if only to have your soul exposed before the painting titled Snowball.

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A THREATENING ISOLATION An evolution of attitudes toward bacteria in research and medicine

Alone in an agar dish, an E. coli bacterium lives just as it would in the bowels of a dog or the Pope. Swaying flagella propel the organism through solute like a ship through ice floes. A few carbon atoms separate sustenance from excrement. A handful of chemical interactions comprise its biography—its family history. Awareness extends no further than the pores of its membrane, so it thrives without concern for consequence. Poison or panacea, it cannot perceive the role it plays in any greater system.

The Western psyche places humanity in a similar isolation. In 1967, Lynn White Jr., a founder and president of the Society of History and Technology claimed that the Judeo-Christian worldview of Europeans and Americans places Westerners apart from nature, and was therefore responsible for the ecological crisis that arose in the 20th century. White points to the creation myth for making a strong distinction between man, formed in God’s image, and the rest of creation, which lacks a soul.

According to White, this attitude still pervades modern worldviews that claim to be uninformed by Christianity.

Starting with the Industrial Revolution, it has caused Western countries to unforgivingly exploit natural resources and ignore the biological or environmental costs of technological applications. To White, humans see themsleves as an entity separate from the rest of the natural world, not a functioning cog within it.

Western scientists tend to regard their practice as objective and distant from religion. However, they would be wrong to claim that the Judeo-Christian conception of human ascendancy has not influenced their discipline. According to modern neuroscience and philosophy of mind, humans have a unique neural complexity that

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inexplicably gives rise to consciousness and self-awareness. This complexity is exactly what E. coli lacks by virtue of being a single-celled organism, and what dogs (owners hope) possess to some degree. Consciousness is often the basis for determining the value of a life, featuring heavily in moral discussions on abortion, animal cruelty, and maintenance of those in persistent vegetative states.

These debates presume that lives with higher degrees of consciousness have more value. By extension, human life should be treated with the utmost respect and care while low-minded organisms, such as bacteria, require little consideration.

This anthropocentrism is evident in the history of bacterial medicine, which has been more a struggle for dominance than an attempt to explore the possibility of symbiosis. In the second half of the twentieth century, doctors worldwide abhorrently misused and over-prescribed antibiotics to patients. As a result, our ingrained response to microorganisms tends toward cruelty—antibiotics disrupt their capsular membranes, unzipping their skin. Their exposed insides quickly perish in the environment they’ve learned to thrive in.

The Human Microbiome Project, launched in 2008, aimed to uncover the potentially positive relationship between us and our microbiome, the 100 trillion bacteria that live in our bodies. This was a pioneer study tasked with classifying one hundred trillion organisms and the relationships they have with each other and with their host. The best tool available to researchers was broad gene sequencing. This mission was comparable to identifying every inhabitant of New York City, how they know each other, and what their jobs are just by looking

at a list of their genetic markers. The project was able to uncover a lot about what is alive in our bodies, but almost nothing about why it’s there. The variations in these bacterial populations between individuals also pose a challenge to understanding: the two most distant people on earth are still 99.9 percent genetically similar, but two relatives only share about about 20 to 30 percent of their gut bacteria. Our microbiome is a dynamic community.

We are initially seeded at birth with the bacteria in the vaginal canal or amniotic sac. After that, our bacterial content is determined by our diet, and our interaction with our habitat, and the people surrounding us. Our limited understanding of the microbiome inhibits our ability to manipulate it in a meaningful way.

Our understanding of the microbiome would be more complete if a probiotic research agenda had been encouraged in the past. Theodor Escherich started microbiome research in the 1880s by studying the bacteria living in the intestines of children. Escherich discovered Escherichia coli and numerous other bacterial species living inside both healthy children and children suffering from intestinal disease. This finding was puzzling. At the time, bacteria were almost exclusively known to cause disease. White’s hypothesis suggests that to Westerners, their presence in healthy bodies challenged the notion that these bacteria were wrongfully encroaching on human endeavors. Investigating this peculiarity wasn’t perceived as favorable for Europeans and Americans at the time. In addition to complicating ideology, bacteria posed a tangible threat to humanity.

Industrialization in the West had caused unprecedented crowding, promoting infectious disease, especially among

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BY Sam Fredericks ILLUSTRATION BY Ella Rosenblatt DESIGN BY Bethany Hung

working class populations. Roughly one fifth of children born in American households in 1850 did not live to 1860. Their mothers fared only slightly better. Nuanced work like Escherich’s wasn’t prioritized, and bacteriological research adopted an agenda focused on learning how to kill bacteria.

Projects that sought to remove bacteria were immensely successful, positively reinforcing the perceived need to separate them from humans. The first major public health victory for this antibacterial cause came in the 1850s. Louis Pasteur developed heating methods to kill the microbes that putrefied milk and wine. His success encouraged others to pursue antibacterial research. The scientific history of the remaining century is largely populated by characterizations of bacteria-borne illnesses, earning those involved the highest scientific honors in Europe. The success of this project continued into the 20th century, with the implementation of Penicillin in World War II, which healed battlefield infections and treated pneumonia, ultimately giving Allied troops a distinct advantage later in the war.

There was no reason to explore the symbiotic relationships suggested by Escherich’s work. This mentality bled into the medical community. Antibiotics weren’t widely available to the public until after the war, but doctors and patients alike welcomed them with open arms. Ever since, antibiotic overuse has been a major trend in American healthcare. As recently as 2016, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that one third of antibiotic prescriptions are unnecessary.

Today, we know that our self-enforced biological isolation was not without consequence. Accelerated antibiotic resistance is currently one of the largest threats to global health and development. The industrialized world faces a new breed of allergies, autoimmune disorders, and inflammatory diseases unknown before the antibiotic era.

With research into the microbiome now picking up where Escherich left off after 120 years, it appears that this new threat has engendered a paradigm shift in bacteriological research objectives. While previous campaigns to remove bacteria may have been informed by a notion of human singularity and autonomy, the modern probiotic agenda acknowledges our symbiotic evolutionary history with bacteria. Bacteria are several billion years older than multicellular life, and the microbiome has likely coevolved alongside its hosts for hundreds of millions of years, a miracle of biological fine-tuning.

The Endosymbiont Theory claims that mitochondria and chloroplasts, the parts of the cell responsible for respiration and photosynthesis, are primitive bacteria.

They infected our ancestors, but were a disease vital to our proliferation. There was never a moment in plant or animal life that wasn’t touched by our predecessors. As far as biology is concerned, bacteria are the closest thing we have to a benevolent shepherd.

Although microbiologists today barely understand the profound impact the microbiome has on health, it is not too late to explore medical applications that integrate bacteria rather than separate them. Certain microbe manipulations have demonstrated enhancements in metabolism, immunity, endocrine signaling, neurologic signaling, and even cancer resistance. Though these mechanisms remain nebulous, a number of conditions

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previously deemed genetic are now known to be related to changes in microbial populations. A recent study at Yale University found that mice who were genetically predisposed to Inflammatory Bowel Disease (IBD) developed a different gut microbe population than control mice, causing colon inflammation. When these flora were transferred to the intestines of healthy mice, they developed IBD symptoms. Since these symptoms are tied to measurable changes in gut bacteria, artificially altering the microbiome may curb symptoms.

However, our limited understanding of the roles of these various bacteria hinders our ability to artificially manipulate the microbiome. We cannot yet inject specific bacteria to achieve a desired effect like we can with genes.

Instead, we have to replace the entire microbiome with another one that doesn’t cause symptoms. This roughhewn method is called Fecal Microbiota Transplantation (FMT). FMT requires transplanting the fecal matter from a healthy individual’s colon, which contains a large sample of their body’s native bacteria, into that of an unhealthy individual. Prior to transplantation, the recipient needs to take a round of antibiotics to eliminate all previously residing bacteria. The fecal matter in question needs to be screened for disease before it is mixed with water and placed orally or rectally.

FMT is a crude method, but it is the first major revelation resulting from the new probiotic agenda, and the first significant application of the work started by Escherich. Due to its lack of specificity, it is currently only approved by the Federal Drug Administration (FDA) to treat one condition—recurrent Clostridium difficile Infection (rCDI). In the case of rCDI, FMT is an antidote to the pitfalls of antibiotic misuse. When hospitals prescribe general antibiotics to patients unnecessarily or incorrectly, which the CDC reports may occur in 30–50 percent of cases, the bacteria that protect the gut against infection from Clostridium difficile are suppressed, allowing C. diff to take hold of the patient’s intestines.

Once infected, antibiotics usually cannot uproot C. diff while it wreaks havoc on the digestive system. Roughly half a million Americans are infected with C. diff every year, and about 30,000 die. Luckily, FMT is a fast and effective way to replenish the flora that keep the pathogenic bacteria at bay. Ninety percent of FMT recipients experience remission of rCDI symptoms after their first treatment. Across half a million cases, implementing FMT instead of prescribing vancomycin could be saving the healthcare system over a billion dollars per year.

Although FMT is highly effective against C. diff and has been approved as a treatment option, it is not as widely available to patients as it should be. Physicians still hesitate to use such an invasive and unusual method when there are always more antibiotics to prescribe.

Many people suffering from C. diff have to take their lives into their own hands and perform FMT on themselves, using a friend or relative’s poop and methods they gleaned from a Youtube video. The Fecal Transplant Foundation is an organization that hopes to eliminate the need for this risky procedure. They help point people seeking FMT towards appropriate resources. They also educate physicians on the procedure, hoping to make them more comfortable with it, and therefore, willing to provide it to patients. OpenBiome is another such organization that

focuses on the safety of the fecal sample. By making safe fecal samples more widely available, they decrease the cost of sample acquisition and increase the number of providers who can perform FMT. Given overwhelming supporting evidence, FMT may become the go-to treatment for C. diff within twenty years. However, with millions of Americans suffering from inflammatory bowel diseases and obesity, this one small victory is unsatisfying. In 2016, a woman named Hanna spoke on Only Human, a podcast produced by WNYC, about her experience living with ulcerative colitis. Hanna lives in constant discomfort and fear of intestinal bleeding or not making it to a toilet. She can’t speak to her friends about her condition because they’ve reacted to it with disgust. She had to move home to Oregon, away from her husband in Brazil, in order to manage her health.

Her condition isolates her, and exerts control over her life in addition to her body. Hanna decided to try FMT on herself after exhausting all other options, after which she experienced complete remission. Feeling as though she was once again in command, she decided to move back with her husband. About a week later, she relapsed, and though she attempted the same procedure over and over again, she has yet to experience remission. Hanna still suffers, but now with a taste of relief lingering on her tongue.

The drive to unnecessarily eliminate pathogenic bacteria in the past was motivated by the immediate health concerns and ideologies prevalent after industrialization. This practice held back the development of probiotic perspectives, which recognize the evolutionary import of bacteria and the dangers of their elimination.

Bacteriology has finally begun to utilize a two-pronged approach. FMT, a new antithesis to antibiotic treatment, has salvaged the grace of our biological chaperones that was lost in an era of overenthusiastic antagonism.

But FMT has not realized its potential, and neither has microbiome research. Clinical trials of FMT on various inflammatory bowel diseases show promise, but their efficacy and implementation are limited. Funding dictates the amount of detail that research can uncover, and regulatory agencies such as the FDA decide whether people will find care in hospitals or in their own bathrooms. But progress in both research and clinical applications hinges on how readily this new conception of our relationship to bacteria is adopted. A select few have found solace, but many more wait hopefully, praying for relief.

SAM FREDERICKS B’19 doesn't mind a bit of dirt under his nails.

SCIENCE

14

Edible Arrangements

MARCH

Oedipal Arrangements

BY The Indy Staff

by Chloe

by Katie Roiphe

Soy Boys

Neutral Milk Hotel

The White Gays

The White Gaze

Crown Jewels

Boy Who Juuls

2006 The Amanda Show

2018 SNL

Bon Jovi

Bon Iver

Cambridge Analytica

Grassroots Organizing in PA

15

METABOLICS

MARCH 23, 2018

MADNESS

Female Body Inspector

The Thot Police

Lena Dunham's Hysterectomy

Adult East Egg Hunt

Backseat Driver

Armchair Intellectual

Last-minute Extension

Last-minute xxxtentacion

The Sacklers

The Goldbergs

Elon Musk

The Trolley Problem

Double D's

My Brother's D&D Group

Cat Person

Barbara Streisand's Second Cloned Dog

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

METABOLICS

16

LET’S RUN TO THE WOMB AND BACK

the small explosion did it, skyward

BY Tatiana Dubin

two months later, skill will swaddle its skirt of early fortune

ILLUSTRATION BY Rémy Poisson

and we will be grooming the slopes, grooming the children,

DESIGN BY Mariel Solomon

grooming the sick back to brightness

you tumbled too. chapped limbs smacking sunrays good morning. shoulders of honeycrisp apples, the bitten lip and hives. neither of us do well with mountains or tumors: tenacity usually reserved for philosophizing, not this sanitized endurance.

& she’ll dash like light to a Tuscan sun.

we just can’t see the neck of the mountain from here. the sun licks our face and says: it is lonely at the top, and this is my excuse to shut the eyes and clip my wings. i shudder and you drink my misgivings and are not yet sick. you, sturdy as bone, graze my courage and dare to scrape my brain, fat with fruit pulp and hype. i lay you on your side and scrape my voice down your throat and unbutton my spine for you and offer everything in me as sorry and you never get sick. crying in that cavity above my lungs, what do I flee when I dive into phonemes? this

17

LITERARY

MARCH 23, 2018

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

X

18

HEY QT, HERE’S THE LIST.

Friday 3/23 Adult Easter Egg Hunt

6–10PM, Shriners RI (1 Rhodes Place, Cranston) Hosted by the weird old men who wear fezzes and drive tiny cars at random parades all across America! Seems fun!! $30 includes a beverage ticket at the cash bar and “light pub fare.”

Saturday 3/24 Womxn’s Night at Colosseum 9PM, Womxn

Colosseum only, no

(182 folx

Pine Street) allowed. $10

Sunday 3/25 Providence Flea

10AM–4PM, Hope High School (324 Hope Street) Tons of vendors + food. Free to look, more to take.

Monday 3/26 Validating the Afterlife with Roland Comtois 6–8PM, lery (999 Perhaps you’ll of validation...

Candita Clayton GalMain Street #105, Pawtucket) learn that the dead person in need was you all along. But also it’s $70.

Tuesday 3/27 The Resonance

Six course prix-fixe dinner @ 6PM & performance @ 9PM, North (122 Fountain Street) Food, art, and tunes. Tickets $12.50 for just the performance, $65.00 for a fancy ass dinner too~

Wednesday 3/28 Feminist & Queer Happy Hour PVD

5:30–8:30PM, The District (54 South Street) The second of a series of these events in PVD! Free admission.

Thursday 3/29 Whose Streets? Racism, Police Brutality, and Rebellion in Ferguson, MO

6PM, Rhode Island College Unity Center room 110 (600 Mount Pleasant Avenue) Film screening followed by panel discussion.

Details and free registration on Eventbrite.

ASTROLOGICAL WEATHER

You’re going to hate me for saying this, but you probably hate me already. Mercury is in retrograde in Aries, baby! I mean ‘baby’ not in the endearing way I usually do—look at yourself in the mirror. You are a literal fucking baby, red in the face and tears in the eyes. Fuck you, too. Good luck finding fucking eggs at the “Adult” Easter Egg Hunt—you’ll suck at it but you’ll suck at anything else so much more.