The College Hill Independent Vol. 35 Issue 3 by College Hill Independent

THE

A BROWN / RISD WEEKLY SEPT 29 2017

COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

THE

COVER

INDY

Olympic Swimmers Minsoo Thigpen

NEWS 02 11

Week in Review Mara Dolan, Julia Rock, Mariela Pichardo DREAMs Deferred Neidin Hernandez

METRO

A BROWN / RISD WEEKLY VOLUME 35 / ISSUE 03 SEPT 29 2017

FROM THE EDITORS This morning I rode a motorcycle for the first time. Rode, not drove—less empowering, still liberating, thanks to the way fast wind feels on skin. The late night motor gangs parading down Thayer may have hurt the vehicle’s cred around here, but if you ignore toxic masculinity, something euphoric persists: adrenaline, speed, open air. A thrilling dilemma: wear a cyborg-like helmet or face the possibility of death.

Eat More Kale Cashen Conroy

Resilient RI Harry August

ARTS 09

Motorcycles may deserve more than a rubbernecker’s glance, but meanwhile other forms of transportation made headlines this week. The Mayor of London banned Uber—a beacon of hope that governments can hold corporations accountable for their flouting of regulations and degradation of labor. Saudi Arabia reversed its ban on women driving—a beacon of hope for women whose position as passenger has long stymied their salary and independence.

The Ken Burns Effect Will Weatherly Soft as Steel Odette Blaisdell

FEATURES

In our own Rhode Island, RIPTA and the Rhode Island Division of Planning partnered to launch a series of public workshops this week on “long-term transportation strategies”—in particular, investment in selfdriving cars by 2040. Personally, I’d prefer to look like a cyborg than be driven by one. Rev up, comrades. —ID

Pretty in Peroxide Olivia Kan-Sperling

PDA (Pretty Dope Advice!) Lisa Borst, Will Tavlin, Erin West

TECH

Who Loves the Sun? Liam Carpenter-Urquhart

LITERARY

MISSION STATEMENT

EPHEMERA

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.

Myths n’ Stuff Ava Zeichner

Signs and Symbols Maya Bjornson

X 18

Different Destinies for a Mixed Paper Doll Andres Prince

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. Fall 2017

MANAGING EDITORS

ARTS

TECH

LIST

STAFF ILLUSTRATORS

DESIGN EDITOR

Jane Argodale Will Weatherly Robin Manley

Maya Brauer Ruby Gerber Jack Manoogian

Liam Carpenter-Urquhart Jonah Max

Lisa Borst Fadwa Ahmed

Eliza Chen

OCCULT

STAFF WRITERS

Maya Bjornson

Mara Dolan Soraya Ferdman Nora Gosselin Neidin Hernandez Anna Hundert Mariela Pichardo Paula Pacheco Soto Marly Toledano Kion You

Anzia Anderson Julie Benbassat Alexandra Hanesworth Frans van Hoek Kela Johnson Teri Minogue Pia Mileaf-Patel Isabelle Rea Ivan Ríos-Fetchko Claire Schlaikjer Kelly Wang Dorothy Windham Sophia Meng

ILLUSTRATIONS EDITOR

COPY EDITOR

SOCIAL MEDIA

Gabriel Matesanz

Miles Taylor

Fadwa Ahmed

Sheena Raza Faisal Signe Swanson

NEWS

FEATURES

Jack Brook Isabel DeBre Chris Packs

Zack Kligler Gabriela Naigeborin Julia Tompkins

WEEK IN REVIEW

METABOLICS

Fadwa Ahmed Isabelle Doyle

Eve Zelickson

Dominique Pariso Erin West

EPHEMERA

METRO

Saanya Jain Katrina Northrop

LITERARY

DESIGNERS

Amos Jackson Ashley Min Theia Flynn Grace Attanasio WEB MANAGER

Alyssa McGillvery BUSINESS MANAGER

Maria Gonzalez

SCIENCE

Liz Cory Paige Parsons

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

Liby Hays

SENIOR EDITORS

Lisa Borst Kelton Ellis Sophie Kasakove Will Tavlin MVP

Amos Jackson THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT — 69 BROWN ST PO BOX 1930 PROVIDENCE, RI 02912

THEINDY.ORG — @THEINDY_TWEETS

WEEK IN BAD PROGRESS BY Mara Dolan, Julia Rock, & Mariela Pichardo ILLUSTRATION BY Gabriel Matesanz DESIGN BY Amos Jackson

Chronicles of Nambia It was a busy week of making peace, making deals, and making enemies. With a flourish of a #NoKo tweet (pundits spent the late-night slot debating the reference: Kim Jongun’s country or an unscrupulous plug for a new district to put a Trump Tower?), the annual United Nations week of cocktail sipping and finger wagging came to an end. Notable moments include: the Russian Foreign Minister staring in disbelief at his watch as Trump approached the 41-minute mark of his welcome speech (perhaps his memo informed him it was a monologue? stream of consciousness? brainstorming session?). Trump also took inspiration from Elton John when he nicknamed the North Korean dictator “Rocket Man” (it should be noted he paid no heed to the song’s lyric, “and all this science I don’t understand,” when climate change was mentioned). The most shocking moment of all, however, came when the US became the first UN member state to politically recognize the country of “Nambia.” In the ensuing Google searches, few confused listeners found answers. Google’s response was less than useful: “Did you mean: Namibia?” Did we? Did he? Trump seemed sure of himself. In fact, he was sure enough to say it twice. No hesitation, no second glances, no frantic “did I just read that right?” eye contact with his speechwriter. In less than even one year in office, Trump’s foreign policy strategy has propelled from dangerously ignorant to literally fictitious. What used to be a foreign policy strategy full of misspellings—“China steals US Navy research … in unpresidented act” (tweeted in December)—and objective untruths—“[Putin] is not going into Ukraine, ok, just so you understand. He’s not gonna go into Ukraine, all right?” (two years after Putin went into Ukraine)—is now a policy strategy anew. Fake facts have given way to make-believe. One well-read jokester proposed a link to a classic novel: “Sorry Trump haters, but the country Nambia DOES exist. You just need to sneak into your uncle’s old wardrobe and crawl through.” Climb out of the wardrobe; it is still near impossible to wrap your head around the impudence. In a speech to the leaders of Africa, Trump literally made up a fake country in Africa. And with an African foreign policy strategy characterized by aid cuts, ending assistance to peacekeeping missions, and weakening foreign investment accountability, Trump’s Nambia blunder leaves him with one role in Africa: the butt of the joke. Many of us are wondering if the President of the US could know any less about the world. Most of the world is probably wondering the same. And some are just wondering when the White House will buy a map. —MD Fifteen Percent Off Explosives with a Prime Membership This week, a British television station discovered that Amazon, the company known for introducing “buy with one-click” into the American social fabric, was prompting users to buy combinations of ingredients used to make bombs. The (in)famous Amazon Algorithm,

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

which generated the suggestions, was designed to suggest combinations of products to users based on their purchase history and the shopping patterns of other users. For example, after Amazon determines through the Algorithm that you are Russian, it will suggest you buy Facebook ads. Or, if you buy the book What Happened, it will probably suggest that you buy many more Facebook ads. The New York Times conducted its own investigation, and found that an Amazon search for magnesium ribbon “yielded a suggestion for two powders that explode when mixed together in the right proportions and then ignited.” We anticipate a future Amazon slogan along the lines of “detonate with two clicks.” The discovery really shouldn’t come as a surprise. Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon, is notorious for his ‘love of the customer’ and his desire to lower the price of avocados and kombucha. He once told Forbes, “No customer ever asked Amazon to create the Prime membership program, but it sure turns out they wanted it.” Perhaps Amazon customers didn’t know they wanted to build homemade explosives, but when given the option, they realized there was nothing they’d rather have delivered to their doorsteps by drone. Moreover, we all know that Bezos was feeling jealous this week after the news that Facebook and Twitter enabled foreign interference in the 2016 US presidential election. Mark Zuckerberg and Jack Dorsey took a page from Bezos’ ebook, So You Want to Change the World? Think ‘Markets’, and successfully sold enough anti-immigration ads and promoted enough fake news to win Donald Trump a seat in the White House. Of course, the Indy doesn’t want to imply that we should question our devotion to Big Tech. Amazon has promised to “review” its “website” to ensure that future “users” won’t be advised to build bombs. It seems as though most people have already forgotten about the algorithm snafu: most major cities in the United States have already announced plans to submit bids to be the location of the Amazon’s second headquarters (“second headquarters” is notably an oxymoron, but that’s just one more thing we can add to the list of Amazon Blunders to Forget About).

below, the audience held weathered #Imwithher posters over their heads. All signage aired for what many in the Democratic Party hope will be the last time. The tour consists of moderated conversations with Clinton, which explore her book and her motivations for writing it. While the book has been therapeutic for fans, some Democrats have described her latest project as selfish. Released in the midst of the party’s desperate attempt at rebranding, many feel the book exacerbates tension between factions in the Democratic Party. In her memoir, Clinton attributes her loss of the presidential election to the Democratic Party and her former opponent for the party’s nomination, Bernie Sanders. In What Happened, the Chicago native questions Sanders’ position in the party based on his self-identification as an independent. The party fears Clinton’s words will alienate Sanders supporters along with others who see themselves as left of center. Despite the Party’s qualms with What Happened, Clinton supporters are voraciously buying it. “I took out my life savings to see Hillary,” says a beaming Elizabeth Clark, the proud owner of the event’s most expensive seat, which she purchased for $500,000. “This new world we’re living in, it’s not my America. I needed to see [Clinton]—I needed to know what happened.” While the Indy suspects Clark was fed that line by Clinton’s publisher, she was quite convincing. Gesturing to her shirt, which features the Clinton campaign logo she added, “I’ll always be with Her.” The room erupted into ear-splitting screams and whistles as Clinton took the stage donning, in her usual fashion, a pantsuit. Tear-streaked faces looked up in disbelief at the former Secretary of State as she smiled broadly back at them. If it feels like you have seen this movie before, it’s because you have. While some say this may be the farewell tour, the final bow, the closing curtain, others are not so sure. Philip Devoe, who waited five hours to watch Clinton sign a book, described the experience in an article for the National Review: “This hollow charade was more than enough to temporarily dull the pain of a Clintonless world. But how long, I wonder, will it stay dulled?” —MP

—JR XO Tour Life Last Week, former Democratic Party presidential nominee Hillary Rodham Clinton kicked off her What Happened book tour in Washington, DC. The first of seven sold out events in her 15 city run, Clinton’s September 18 visit was at Warner Theatre. The event marked the return of pit-stained “Nasty Woman” shirts and tattered pink pussyhats. As fans waited for their president to take the stage Monday night, they pulled the droopy hats on one by one, turning the Warner Theater into a sea of pink. They chattered excitedly with one another, sharing promises to faint, pee, and defecate on themselves upon seeing Clinton. Those in the nosebleeds practiced attempting to get Clinton’s attention by violently waving cutouts of her and dangling them over the balconies. In the crowd

WEEK IN REVIEW

A COMMUNITY BLOSSOMS IN FOX POINT Providence garden offers members food and friendship BY Cashen Conroy ILLUSTRATION BY Julie Benbassat DESIGN BY Amos Jackson

At the entrance of the Fox Point Community Garden in Providence, a painted sign greets guests: “Welcome visitors! You can pick your friends, you can pick your nose, but please don’t pick our veggies.” Inside, gardeners Anastasia Azure and Michael Soucy kneel over plot 75 of 127, brandishing clippers against tall winter rye grass. Azure and Soucy are two of about 100 members of the Fox Point Community Garden (FPCG), and they consider themselves lucky. “There’s a pretty big waitlist,” says Azure. FPCG was established in 2006 on Providence city property with bond money from Ward 1 City Councilman David Segal. The bond initiative aimed to create a community space where city gardeners could come together, grow fresh food, and share knowledge. Members pay a yearly fee of $25 per plot and can grow whatever they choose—food, flowers, or both—as long as they avoid using chemicals and pesticides. FPCG offers Providence residents more than just vegetables; it provides an opportunity to form a community around the site. The FPCG website emphasizes this: “We believe that community gardens not only serve to green the urban landscape but build strong, vibrant, and socially aware communities by putting community members back into dialogue with their neighbors and their environment.” FPCG enacts this belief during several

METRO

events throughout the year; in the spring, the group has potlucks where members gather around picnic tables and eat food they grew in their plots. They also hold an annual Harvest Party at the Portuguese-American Social Club, an organization that has supported the FPCG throughout the years. There, the gardeners enjoy music and raffles, and a chosen few are recognized for their hard work. Keri Marion, the garden manager, believes that increased interest and participation in the garden, evidenced by the long wait list, could reflect a national pattern. “There’s been a growing movement over the last 10 years with people getting involved in where their food is coming from,” she told the Independent. According to a report by the National Gardening Association, two million more households participated in community gardening in 2013 than in 2008, a 200 percent increase in five years. According to urban experimentalist and author Charles Montgomery, the benefits of such community involvement could have significant impacts beyond those related to food. In his essay titled “Building Happiness,” Montgomery highlights how people report being happiest in cities with the highest levels of trust for their neighbors. “There is no more crucial ingredient for human happiness than strong, positive social connections,” he writes. “Connected communities are happier, more resilient

in hard times, and better equipped to handle economic challenges.” Fox Point exemplifies this type of connected community; it’s clear that the more time the gardeners spend together, the more they look out for one another. Marion describes how she often checks on an older gardener as she passes her house on her way home. “It’s not a big deal,” she says. “People know their neighbors.” +++ Keri Marion, the manager of FPCG, has been a member of the garden since 2009 or 2010—“a long time ago,” she says with a laugh. She has been gardening for even longer; she maintained a plot in a community garden in Pawtucket before she moved to Providence. After two years as a member of the FPCG, she applied to be the garden manager, a volunteer position, and got the job. Marion sees her role as being a point of communication between the members of the garden and the board, which meets four times a year to discuss the needs of the garden. The day I visit her, however, her main job is collecting names and money from new and returning participants. “We don’t make any money,” says Marion from her seat on a small set of metal bleachers overlooking

SEPTEMBER 29, 2017

the soccer field adjacent to the garden. It’s a deliberate decision, as she and the board members realize that the gardeners don’t necessarily have much extra money to spend. “A lot of people are here who really can’t afford to live here,” says Marion. This has been an issue since Fox Point began gentrifying in the latter part of the 20th century, as a result of the establishment of historic districts, the expansion of Brown University, and re-investment in infrastructure. “The disparity between [the East Side of Providence] and the rest of the city has widened markedly during the last 40 years,” wrote Steve Triedman, City Editor of the East Side Monthly in 2015. “Some property values have increased between 300 to 800 percent since 1976…taxes have only gone up.” Fox Point’s gentrification raises the question of whether community gardens are beneficial for lower-income residents living in gentrifying communities, or whether they actually speed up the process of gentrification. As Josh Singer, executive director of Wangari Gardens in Washington, DC pointed out to Civil Eats, “I’ve seen a lot of maps where it looks like we’re increasing food access [in DC], when we’re actually just pushing poor people out...Say you have a neighborhood that is a food desert. All of a sudden that garden is just full of people who recently moved to the neighborhood, who are all good people, but who aren’t really food insecure.” Not all of FPCG’s gardeners rely on the garden for food—some joined the garden for the sense of community, and only grow flowers. However, FPCG is conscious of the food insecurity issues within Providence. The garden collaborates with the Camp St. Ministries, a local food pantry, to donate their members’ extra crops every Thursday. Marion also tries to ensure that participation in the garden remains affordable. Low dues are possible in large part due to contributions from outside organizations and the fact that maintenance issues are generally solved by the gardeners themselves. Perhaps because of the affordability, however, the demand for garden plots is higher than the supply. “How’s the waitlist this year?” one gardener asks as he hands Marion $25 in cash. “It’s thick,” replies Marion. “It’s always thick but it’s close to 90 this year.” One couple describes how they’re used to a big garden, and there’s not enough room for squash and

zucchini in their small plot; they have to limit what they grow. Like many members, they’re trying to get another plot, but you can only get a second (for $30) if the wait list is exhausted—and that looks unlikely to happen anytime soon. +++ Currently Providence is home to 23 community gardens, according to Farm Fresh Rhode Island, a nonprofit aimed at growing the local food system. That number is likely to increase in the future, due to plans by the Providence Urban Agriculture Policy Task Force. The Task Force was initiated in 2004 by the Southside Community Land Trust, an organization that manages 18 gardens in Providence and Pawtucket and provides agricultural resources, training, and support to other gardens in the Providence Community Garden Network. The Southside Community Land Trust’s mission is to provide access to land, education, and other resources so people in Rhode Island can grow food in environmentally sustainable ways and create community food systems where locally produced, affordable, and healthy food is available to all. According to the USDA, 12 percent of Rhode Islanders, 51,000 households, are food insecure, meaning they are often unsure where their next meal will come from due to lack of resources. In Providence's West End neighborhood, only three miles from FPCG, nearly a third of residents qualify as having low food access, according to the USDA’s Food Environment Atlas. In the next 10 years, the Providence Urban Agriculture Policy Task Force aims to double the amount of food being grown in and around Providence, according to its website. The Task Force intends to reach this goal by increasing the number of home gardeners, community gardeners, community gardens, commercial community agriculture projects, and urban agriculture businesses in the area. +++ Thirty minutes after I started talking to Azure and Soucy, they are almost finished cutting the winter rye. Now they can address their other goal for the day:

planting snow peas. They also grow cucumbers—a special variety that’s good for making pickles—kale, and strawberries. “We try different things every year,” says Azure. “One year we had failed brussel sprouts, another year we had failed eggplants,” she says, laughing. “Peppers usually turn out well though.” Soucy lifts the watering can and pours it over the newly planted pea seeds, careful to avoid watering the remaining winter rye that has been cut nearly to the soil but hasn’t been fully uprooted. “I read you’re supposed to use a really sharp hoe,” Azure says. “We need to do more research,” she confesses. With a laugh, she adds, “we’re not professionals.” This is true of many of the gardeners with plots at FPCG. Some have lots of gardening experience, but others are amateurs who have learned from other members since they started. Standing with one foot on the wooden edge of her plot, Azure looks down at her garden. “I guess that’s kind of the fun of it, you don’t know how it’s going to turn out.” She grins. “Each year we learn a little bit more.”

CASHEN CONROY B’19 wants to grow a patch of cashews.

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

METRO

THE ROAD TO RESILIENCE Raimondo's new plan to protect Providence BY Harry August ILLUSTRATION BY Pia Mileaf-Patel DESIGN BY Ashley Min

Three days after Hurricane Harvey made landfall in Houston and two days before Hurricane Irma hit South Florida, Shell Oil Company was forced to consider the disastrous results of a future hurricane on coastal Providence. The Conservation Law Foundation (CLF) sued Shell, in part for its Providence Terminal’s dangerous vulnerability to extreme weather and the impending risk of toxic chemical releases. The suit spares no subtlety: “The Providence Terminal will be inundated, in whole or in part, by storm surge associated with a Category 1, 2, 3, or 4 storm event.” The terminal—which stores, processes, and distributes petroleum products received from oil tankers—is located in the Port of Providence, near the neighborhoods of South Providence and Washington Park. This area of Providence, a majority non-white and low income community, suffers from a multitude of environmental injustices. Unlike in predominantly white and affluent parts of Providence—such as the East Side and Blackstone neighborhoods which have beautiful and open waterfront access—the South Providence shoreline is zoned for industrial use. The communities of South Providence have no access to their shoreline, and must live alongside the Shell Terminal as well as facilities such as a large chemical processing plant, ethanol and natural gas storage tanks, and a sewage treatment plant. As a result, a 2016 Environmental Justice League of RI (EJLRI) report described the neighborhood as a “corporate sacrifice zone,” one where these hazardous industries can operate with little regard to how they impact the health of local communities. Shell’s terminal is no exception to the Port’s general disregard for health and environmental impacts. Even when operating in the absence of extreme weather, CLF’s press secretary Joshua Block told the Independent, the terminal discharges toxic chemicals, including oil, into the harbor in excess of the legal limit. The risks associated with this type of infrastructure are only multiplied by the impacts of climate change, as seen by recent explosions and mass releases of toxic chemicals from industrial plants in Houston hit by Hurricane Harvey. Even a Category 1 hurricane, which is now expected to hit Providence approximately once every 20 years, would inundate parts of the terminal. Additionally, EJLRI reported, because the port hosts so many hazards in such close proximity, an incident at one facility could trigger further hazardous impacts at any of the other sites. The effects of such inundation would devastate local industry and health in the South Providence community, which has repeatedly suffered from environmental injustices. In fact, the area has some of the highest rates of toxic chemical exposures, asthma hospitalizations, and unemployment in Rhode Island. If the terminal is inundated by a major storm, the release of industrial waste would flood the local communities with dangerous levels of toxic chemicals. And because of the existing inequalities, these neighborhoods would have the fewest resources available to prepare for the floods, evacuate in time, or receive proper medical treatment. As a result, a hurricane would hit the South Side of Providence the hardest, endangering the lives and health of an already vulnerable community.

METRO

+++ In a September 15 event attended by Rhode Island’s entire Congressional delegation and numerous environmental activists, Governor Gina Raimondo appointed the state’s first Chief Resilience Officer and tasked him with developing a “comprehensive climate preparedness strategy.” The announcement—which came only a few weeks after Hurricanes Harvey and Irma ravaged parts of the Southern US and Caribbean—centered around Rhode Island’s high vulnerability to climate change as a coastal state. “Twenty-one of 39 Rhode Island Communities are coastal, so as the Ocean State, with 400 miles of coastline, we are uniquely vulnerable to the challenges of climate change,” Governor Raimondo said at the event. ‘Resilience,’ when used in the the context of climate change, generally refers to the ability of a community to survive, adapt, and grow in the presence of the impacts of a warmer planet, such as floods, major storms, and heat waves. This includes planning and preparation at community and state levels, like educating individuals about storm preparation, revising zoning laws to avoid building on floodplains, and building protective infrastructure projects like Providence’s hurricane barrier at the mouth of the Providence River. Resilience planning is a developing field. While the concept of resilience is common across many contexts and disciplines, its application to climate change has only become prominent over the past decade or so. This hightened visibility has been spurred on by the increasingly frequent and devastating hurricanes that have battered American cities, such as Hurricanes Katrina, Sandy, and Irene. Climate disasters affect communities in vastly different ways, disrupting local economies, people’s health, and coastal ecosystems according to the particular vulnerabilities of each region. As a result, most resilience planning has taken place on the city level, such as Boston’s “Resilience and Racial Equity Office” or New York City’s “Office of Recovery and Resilience.” Rhode Island appears to be one of the first states to create a statewide officer exclusively dedicated to resilience planning. Climate resilience planning can take many shapes and many forms. The Boston office, for example, maintains “a unique focus on social and economic resilience in a City affected by historic and persistent divisions of race and class.” Other plans include a focus on coastal ecosystems or environmental awareness. Governor Raimondo’s announcement, however, approached this issue with an emphasis on the resiliency movement’s importance to the Rhode Island economy: climate change was framed as primarily a threat to Rhode Island’s economy and natural resources, leaving vulnerable populations out of the conversation. For example, Raimondo recalled during the speech how she joked with visiting governors who complimented Narragansett Bay during the recent governor’s conference in Rhode Island that she “immediately followed up with ‘Do you want to move here and start a business?’” While light hearted, the comment stresses that Governor Raimondo primarily views the impacts of climate change as a threat to what attracts economic growth to Rhode Island. This strategy falls in line with

Governor Raimondo’s background as a venture capitalist and Rhode Island State Treasurer, as well as her generally business-focused governance strategy that has prioritized eliminating the lingering effects of the 2008 economic recession. With these goals in mind, the Governor selected an infrastructure investment expert, the Rhode Island Infrastructure Bank’s Director of Stormwater and Resiliency Shaun O’Rourke, as the first resilience officer. In O’Rourke’s acceptance speech for the new position, he listed the resilience plan’s two major goals as “boosting our economy and protecting our environment,” clearly prioritizing economic growth and natural resources over equity and vulnerability. Furthermore, he stressed his experience working at the Infrastructure Bank securing financing for new projects and his goal of “developing a strategy that accelerates investments that will allow us to adapt to climate change.” State Treasurer Seth Magaziner’s presence also emphasized the fiscal benefits of planning for climate resiliency. In his speech, he emphasized that failing to adapt to our changing climate, with the massive costs of emergency response and repairing infrastructure, is expensive. “Every person here has a selfish financial reason to make sure that we are doing everything we can to be resilient in the face of climate change.” That said, if Rhode Island only focuses on ‘selfish financial reasons’ to build resilience, the most at-risk populations, like those in South Providence who live near Shell’s terminal, will never be protected. +++ When asked by the Independent after the conference whether she had considered placing race and inequality at the forefront of the state’s planning, similar to Boston’s office, Governor Raimondo seemed surprised and responded that, no, she hadn’t considered that. And yet, to many, the two issues are interconnected and inseparable. “You can’t talk about resilience without talking about environmental justice,” said CLF’s Josh Block. All of the speakers at the event, including Rhode Island’s four congressmen, Treasurer Magaziner, Governor Raimondo, and O’Rourke, however, did exactly that, failing to even mention any discussion of socioeconomic inequalities, vulnerable populations, or environmental justice communities throughout the hour long event. Climate resilience and environmental justice are inextricably connected. “Anytime there is a natural disaster it exacerbates existing inequalities,” said Amelia Rose, executive director of Groundwork Rhode Island, a local environmental organization that works to build resiliency in the state’s urban communities. As seen in South Providence, structural inequalities force low-income urban populations to disproportionately bear the impacts of climate disasters. Beyond just being sited in the most at-risk and least politically powerful neighborhoods, toxic and vulnerable infrastructure often drives those with financial ability out of these underserved neighborhoods, leaving only the most vulnerable behind. As a result, climate disasters act as a threat multiplier,

SEPTEMBER 29, 2017

compounding the many existing racial, economic, and health inequalities. Many cities explicitly recognize this connection and shape their resilience plans around them. New Orleans' resiliency plan, for example, includes creating emergency savings account programs, raising the minimum wage, and community health improvement plans—all action items that address not just climate resiliency but existing structural inequalities. Similarly, Boston’s resilience plan includes ensuring “safe, affordable, and stable housing for all” as well as “equitable education opportunities.” Urban resilience is not just building higher walls around our rivers—it’s about strengthening the capacity of each individual and community to bounce back from disasters. These urban resilience challenges are especially prominent in Rhode Island, where all major urban centers are in flood prone areas, Rose told the Independent. As described in a 2012 report by the Environmental Council of Rhode Island, the state’s urban communities have far fewer resources to adapt and protect themselves from heat emergencies and extreme weather. Additionally, flooding and heat waves often have the strongest impact in urban settings, where most of the land is paved over, preventing water from seeping back into the ground during floods and making cities especially hot during heat waves. As a result, the report concludes, explicitly addressing the unique challenges and unequal burden of urban communities is critical to fully engage these communities in the planning process. It is thus surprising that the Governor’s announcement made no mention of the disproportionate burden climate change will have on the State’s urban communities. When asked by the Independent after the conference what role these considerations will have in the State’s plan, O’Rourke did acknowledge that “equity will be a theme throughout the the entire strategy.” By omitting any discussion of equity from the press conference, however, O’Rourke risks narrowing the scope of the resilience planning process to solely infrastructure and economic considerations before the planning process has even truly begun. Proper resilience planning, however, must remain broad in scope to be effective, said Pam Rubinoff, organizer of the University of Rhode Island’s resilience education and planning initiative called “PREP-RI.” Rubinoff stressed to the Independent the importance of avoiding “siloed thinking” and instead incorporating a wide range of actors, including state officials working on transportation, housing, and emergency management, as well as local communities and even individuals. This challenge of avoiding ‘siloed thinking’ is one of the key challenges of resilience planning, wrote Curt Spaulding, former regional administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency in New England and former director of Save the Bay, in the Providence Journal last week: “It requires resetting how we think in almost everything we do to sustain communities.” As a result, the Governor’s office risks the success of the program by not explicitly and promptly engaging with, or prioritizing, the environmental justice communities of the State. And by omitting such an obvious element of resilience planning, the event suggested

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

that no substantial discussion or planning has actually begun with regard to the actual goals or needs of Rhode Island’s vulnerable populations. “All resilience planning must recognize the disparate risk of an unequal society,” Spaulding told the Independent. That said, the State’s resilience planning process is still in its early stages, giving O’Rourke and the Governor’s office ample opportunity to correct its path and prioritize the equity and environmental justice considerations at the heart of climate resilience. In fact, O’Rourke said during the announcement that “this strategy and its priorities will be based on a robust, statewide outreach process,” including many community roundtables. While O’Rourke did not specify the topics of these roundtables during the event, he has announced privately that his three core priorities for the upcoming roundtable discussions would be “Critical Infrastructure and the

Environment,” “Health and Equity,” and “Economic Development,” according to Elizabeth Stone, who works at the Department of Environmental Management and helped review the executive order. But by leaving the issue of equity to the community roundtables, as opposed to addressing it explicitly during the press conference, the Governor’s office burdens low income residents and politically marginalized communities with having the task of advocating for themselves. Instead, Raimondo and O’Rourke need to serve as the champion for underserved communities as they struggle to combat the ever-increasing challenges of environmental damage.

HARRY AUGUST B’19 wishes Providence’s resilience planning was more like his hometown, Boston.

METRO

TWUZ DARK

WRITING & ILLUSTRATION BY Ava Zeichner DESIGN BY Robin Manley

As the soon-to-be hero grows older it ventures further from the peasant village. The peasants fear for it a little. They tell it that it should not go and do these things because it’s dangerous out there. But the peasants secretly hope it will venture out anyway, because the peasants love the hero and believe in it. When the hero at first fails, they take it back and heal it. They keep it in a warm cottage and wrap its head and chest with white bandages. The hero sleeps for three long months. It thinks only of the fountain bubbling outside. Finally, healed, the hero sets off again, and this time succeeds. A little girl with a loud voice eventually conquers the hero. Before then, though, when she is still young, the wise elf calls her to the elf’s kingdom up in the trees. The kingdom is serene and green. The elf closes her eyes and puts her fingers to her temple; ribbons of flowers grow around her. Suddenly she stands up straight. “By the earthly wind!” She whispers. “What?” says the girl. “Hush, little one,” she says. The elf listens. A breath grows around the trees. “’Tis time for you to courtelay,” she says, and she rushes the little girl out. The girl dreams about it that night. Äl-magæ. The elf, lithe and white, velvety soft, and flowing burnished tresses. Peers out into the wonderland. “I don’t like the look of this,” she says. The little girl grows older and cuts off her hair. One morning, on a walk, she comes upon an earthworm drying up on the ground. Remembering the empathy that betook her as a child, she brings it to the grass. She turns to leave. “Little one,” says the earthworm. “Um.” “Thank you for returning me to the soil. You have saved my life.” “No prob,” says the girl. “Please, allow me to extend my blessing, as a gesture of gratitude. What do you wish for?” “I don’t know. Do I have to?” says the girl. “Very well,” says the earthworm. And with that he was gone. “Wait!” says the girl. The worm’s head rises out of the dirt. “Yes?” “I’m sorry. I don’t know—I don’t know what to wish for,” she says. “Can I hold back on it?” “Very well,” says the earthworm, its patience of a kind that must belong to nature itself. He turns to leave. “Little one,” he says. “Yes?” she says. “You can’t wait forever. Someday you will have to decide.” (the voice was quiet and clear) And with that he was gone.

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

+++ A maiden with big boobs gets kidnapped by pirates. She is tied to a pole. The pirates harass her and tell her to walk the plank. “Damn pirates!” She snarls. “S’not the last you’ll see of me.” The maiden walks the plank, hands tied behind her back, prodded at by hooks and daggers. The pirates are saying, “A beautiful day up there in the crow’s nest. Aye, Johnny Lye said so.” Somewhere latent below the deck a clock ticks. Unfortunately nobody shows up to save the poor maiden and she dies. Too bad; she was quietly remarkable. +++ One hundred years later, a tall girl, great-granddaughter of the maiden, rushes by on a ship. Hair borne aloft by the wind, waving, curling, long; determined look on her face, she has set out to kill all the remaining pirates. All these girls and their moms and eventual husbands and kiddos kiss their fingers and hold them up to the sky. Mwah! +++ A flock of medieval teenagers, thin and sylphy and tawny, hold hands and cavort around fawnlike among the trees. They play dancing games with daisy chains. They sing and strum the lyre. One afternoon, they set out into the woods, a little braver than usual. They go where the trees grow thick. Eventually they come upon a cottage, built in the old way. Innocently mischievous, they sneak in through the cracked door. “Who goes there!” they hear in the darkness. The teenagers freeze like rabbits. The light falls upon an old woman sitting in a rocking chair. She is gray and lined like a tree, big and wide and fat fat fat. She sits still. Little flowers sprout in the cracks of her house, the teenagers now see. “I can smell you,” says the old woman. “You smell kind.” The teenagers stay for tea. She is their granny. +++ A hero girl has the arrogance/selflessness to save her homeland, which is ravaged by war and disease. The princess: snuck off, she did, with her suitor’s knight armor and weapons from the armory of the King, great prig. The hero is a little peasant brat. She knows the slang of 15 tongues and is a friend to animals. Before she can set off on her journey (to save her homeland), she needs an efficient form of transportation. She sneaks into the royal stables at dawn. There she sweet-talks the princess’s white horse out beyond the gate, and runs off with him. The brat and the horse become dear friends. They communicate quietly. It’s a long journey. They are each other’s only companions.

Eventually the brat comes upon a book that has the power to heal. She turns around toward the kingdom to recover the words of the book. But as they grow close, they are spotted by the king’s men. They want White Horse. He couldn’t hide in the forest, shining white thing. The brat rides the horse run for their lives. They won’t make it. The men are fast and strong, horses supple with feed. White Horse falls among the feet surrounded. Leg broken and thus worthless, it’s shot in the head. The peasant brat rips her heart out and cries. She’ll remember that day. Ugly and brown and rolling and rumbly. If you want to get it done, do it yourself, the brat would whisper beside White Horse on the long and lonely stretches, ’till it was worked into her heartbeat. She didn’t know that cherubial little spirits watched over her all along. Their faces rested on crossed hands. They offered her gifts she thought she had procured herself. The brat eventually saves her homeland with the book of healing. And so the homeland pleasantly chugs along for another couple centuries, waste-spewing but with a little more knowledge and sensitivity. Despite the brat’s great accomplishment, she suffers. She thinks how nice it would be to be called beautiful, just simply beautiful, like by a shipdeck wartime sailor wrenched tragically apart—O! Please, great, kindly, awesome, amazing, and perfect God!—but it’s not her fate. The brat makes many friends along the way. They say, take what’s here in front of you, you, us, the weeds is enough, the trees, the big blue healthy sky, the blueness of which is like a homegrown everyday spirituality, something that everybody can have. The earth yawns with empty space sometimes and not enough wishes get granted. She’ll fucking kill all the bad guys though hahaha. The brat always had a childhood friend. He was an apprentice to the lighthouse, i.e. faraway but shows the ships to home. When the brat last saw him he told her she was smart and strong and brave. She does not see him again until she’s old and figures it out. Figures what out? Figures something out. Or else the brat finds an angel boy caught in a chainlink fence outside the church, blonde, white, pale in a loincloth, and half-dead. As he sinks into the roses on tangled coiling vines she grabs him and wrests him from them. He is stuck with heart-shaped poison arrows, and wordlessly she gets to work unstucking the arrows and sucking the blood out. +++ A hero girl runs to the fore of an exodus probably thousands strong as it crosses a mountain. The mountain is obliterated underneath them. At its peak she sticks out her arm and shouts “THIS WAY!” They’re going the wrong way. And she cries, because the mass of people coalesces, antlike, into a giant pig-shaped mass bearing down on her. She holds them back with both arms straining, legs deep in water, wet with fluid, blood, sweat. Eventually the bombed-out world regrows. The end.

LITERARY

THE VIETNAM SYNDROME Losing the middle ground in Ken Burns’ The Vietnam War

cw: war, police violence, racism The speaker speaks and the truth still leaks where even Richard Nixon has got soul... Neil Young, “Campaigner,” 1976. The above line is from a track off of Neil Young’s Hitchhiker, released earlier this month as a part of a series of recent archival works from Young’s long career. The album was recorded over the course of one night on August 11, 1976, but because the songs were so spare, mumbled, and incomplete (even Young, in his second memoir Special Deluxe, admits that he was “pretty stony on it”), the recordings remained buried for 41 years. The circumstances surrounding the album help cement it as an emotional and historical time capsule: one night in 1976, when the question of Richard Nixon’s conscience would have resonated alongside Young’s guitar with deep ambiguity. Young has a knack for writing characters who channel his singular, mournful perspective; on Hitchhiker’s “Captain Kennedy,” he sings as “a young mariner headed to war… thinkin' 'bout my family and what it was for.” The questions evoked by “Campaigner,” however, feel far more charged, even decades after the former President’s disgraced exit from office. To muse about the humanity of that President was just as much a provocation as it was an expression of empathy. It was an imagined relationship between Young and the man who willfully deceived the entire country during the Watergate scandal, and who had overseen the last four years of one of the most divisive and inhumane conflicts in American history, the Vietnam War. This month, another major return to the figures and circumstances surrounding that war, Ken Burns and Lynn Novick’s PBS documentary The Vietnam War, can be characterized by the same provocation. Near the very beginning of the series, narrator Peter Coyote proclaims, “America’s involvement in Vietnam began in secrecy. It ended 30 years later in failure, witnessed by the entire world. It was begun in good faith by decent people out of fateful misunderstandings, American overconfidence, and Cold War miscalculation, and it was prolonged because it seemed easier to muddle through than to admit that it had been caused by tragic decisions made by five American presidents belonging to both political parties.” The series’ ad slogan reads: “There is no single truth in war.” Over the 18 hours of footage that follow, Burns and

ARTS

Novick pursue that truism to harrowing ends. The documentary includes around 80 interviews conducted over the last 11 years, ranging from battle narratives from North Vietnamese soldiers, to CIA advisors discussing the lead-up to conflict, to American veterans recounting their return home. Burns and Novick weave these often conflicting perspectives into their own chronological account of the war, aiming to “stop fighting over how the war should be remembered and focus instead on... courage, patriotism, resilience, forgiveness and, ultimately, reconciliation,” as the two filmmakers wrote in the New York Times. Yet if The Vietnam War asks us to let go of our country’s one-sided memories and focus on forgiveness instead, it is also quietly proposing its own kind of remembering: one in which mass killing can follow from “good faith,” and one in which American officials were simultaneously manipulative and tragic. Burns and Novick offer multiple truths in hopes that they can finally coexist. But the disturbing document they have made often produces something far more akin to “Campaigner”—a question of who deserves forgiveness, faithfully preserved from decades ago, and never answered. +++ On May 27, 1964, then-president Lyndon B. Johnson called his national security advisor McGeorge Bundy to discuss his strategy for the conflict Johnson had inherited after John F. Kennedy’s assassination. There is a recording of the call in The Vietnam War. “What the hell is Vietnam worth to me?” Johnson asked, “What is it worth to this country? ...It’s damn easy to get in a war, but it’s going to be awfully hard to ever extricate yourself if you get in.” What he would come to realize, as The Vietnam War makes clear, is that the US was already fully embroiled in the question of Vietnam’s self-governance. Much of the controversy surrounding the war and its depiction can be traced back to the question of when it became too late to retreat, or if it ever was. The explanation touted by American officials in the late ’50s and early ’60s was that Vietnam’s civil war— between communist North Vietnam, led by the National Liberation Front revolutionary Ho Chi Minh, and the US-backed regime in the South—was a dangerous next step in the Soviet Union’s global expansion. At the height of the Cold War, in the years immediately following the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, Americans’ concern with

the spread of communism was phrased as a matter of national security as much as it was proclaimed as integral to our foreign policy. President Truman called upon this mentality, the protection of “our survival,” in his speech on America’s entrance into the Korean War in 1950. Yet by that year, the US was also pouring $336 million into France’s war to retain control of its colonial holdings in Vietnam, and the first episode of The Vietnam War is devoted to telling this longer history. France had held the territory it called Indochina since 1859, and Ho Chi Minh’s revolutionary efforts started with the Viet Minh liberation movement against French colonial rule in 1945. Vietnam’s revolution provides Burns and Novick an early opportunity to demonstrate American deception: Ho Chi Minh initially hoped for American support of Vietnam’s liberation, due to President Wilson and Roosevelt’s public claims of support for colonies’ self-determination following the two World Wars. But with the increasing power of both China and the USSR looming, President Truman instead decided to back France’s attempt to restore violent colonial control. When the French army was defeated in 1954 and Vietnam was split between the North and South, the US supported the corrupt Prime Minister Ngo Dinh Diem on the promise that he would establish ‘democracy’ in South Vietnam. In telling this history, The Vietnam War’s approach is often to show multiple narratives of the persecution that caused and followed this decision. It features Vietnamese citizens from both the North and the South, displaced from their homes during the split of the country. It shows the Diem regime (a Catholic minority in a country with a Buddhist majority) cutting the phone lines of US ambassadors and rounding up monks under the cover of night. One of the documentary’s most damning portraits is of JFK, who clung fiercely to Vietnam as “a piece of territory” in the Cold War in order to ensure his reelection. Faced with a popular uprising against the South Vietmanese regime in 1963, Kennedy unwittingly supported a coup against Diem, the US’ strongest ally in the country. When Vietnamese Buddhists wanted to take Diem’s assassination as an opportunity for a more representative government, the US instead encouraged more military coups. For all of Burns and Novick’s seemingly frank reportage of American hypocrisy in the lead-up to the war, they are reticent to probe many of these more insidious deceptions of the era. Their account is so deliberate

SEPTEMBER 29, 2017

BY Will Weatherly ILLUSTRATION BY Ivan Ríos-Fetchko DESIGN BY Eliza Chen

and expansive in its detail that American intervention in Vietnam comes to seem more like the product of a ricocheting series of errors than the US’ fundamentally flawed vision of its position in the world. Adding up the sum of US errors in the documentary, one could deduce that the US’s Cold War interventionism, and its faux-democratic vision for Vietnam, was a continuation of France and Britain’s colonial interests in the region, rather than a path towards the democracy it promised the South Vietnamese, but never helped to build. The documentary never argues this outright, lost instead in the individual dramas of those politicians scrambling to fight communism in “good faith,” mixed with on-the-ground footage of soldiers from both sides fighting for their lives. One of these individual dramas was Kennedy’s visit to Saigon in 1951, when the revolution against the French was still raging and Kennedy was still just a congressman. Burns and Novick tell us that, even then, Kennedy saw the US supporting an unpopular and fading regime. “Unless the US can persuade the Vietnamese that it is as opposed to injustice and inequality as it is to communism,” Kennedy told his constituents, “the current effort will result in foredoomed failure.” The next episode of the series begins with Kennedy at his inauguration a decade later, calling communism “a far more iron tyranny” than colonialism. In the documentary, this feels like mere hypocrisy, but the connection is clearer than a description of the events allows. The US couldn’t persuade the Vietnamese that it was opposed to injustice, because the US was not opposed to oppression at all. +++ When the documentary finally begins to cover Johnson’s escalation of the war in 1963, Burns and Novick trace a now-familiar narrative about the US military’s momentum becoming too large for any one actor to stop. Because American troops were essentially fighting two wars at once—among revolutionary fighters in the South and invading troops from the North—the US found itself in a conflict where it could never permanently gain or lose territory. General William Westmoreland, commander of US forces, devised a new strategy to gauge his troops’ success: he was fighting for the “crossover point,” when US and South Vietnamese troops could kill more North Vietnamese troops than they could replace. Soldiers were ordered to maximize their body count, encouraging the

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

widespread and indiscriminate killing of civilians to be included in the sum. Officials were left with an evermounting count of casualties, and their only desperate hope was that they would add up to victory. At the heart of this strategy lies the US officials’ essential devaluation of Vietnamese lives, but without a clear critique of the US' motivations for fighting, Burns and Novick chronicle the war’s sense of desperation without pointing to opportunities for it to end. They describe the careless bombing of North Vietnamese cities during Operation Rolling Thunder, but only as one more ‘unfortunate’ development in the war’s spiralling chaos. Both filmmakers had the opportunity to counter the logic (or lack thereof) behind US escalation. Instead, they use their documentary to repeat it. Without this analysis, it’s unclear what the documentary’s main purpose is, and who, exactly, needs Burns and Novick’s version of “reconciliation” in 2017. Unlike Burns’ previous work with The Civil War, much of the footage and photography he includes has already entered our visual vocabulary for the Vietnam War. By 1963, 91.3 percent of American households owned a television, and the Vietnam War was the first widely broadcasted conflict in American history. Journalists faced much less military regulation than during World War II, the Korean War, or the Gulf War that followed. These two factors meant that brutal, violent images from the war, and the media critiques that followed, were widely accessible to a growing antiwar movement enraged at the inhumanity of the US’ war of attrition. This opposition movement provides Burns and Novick with the most straightforward opportunity to name US militarism as cruelty. Yet in practice, the two are at their most hesitant when showing footage of the protests. They acknowledge the antiwar movement’s connection to the Civil Rights movement; Black men were drafted, and killed, at highly disproportionate rates to white troops, and Black activists, including Stokely Carmichael and Muhammad Ali, decried the idea of fighting for a country that only imposed more violence at home, and that only promoted more colonial violence abroad. Alongside these narratives, the documentary gives just as much space to perspectives delegitimizing the movement on opposing terms. In the fourth episode, one interviewee chalks antiwar activists up as “privileged, spoiled kids,” liberal byproducts of white postwar

prosperity. In 1966, when the draft expanded beyond its early targets of Black and low-income men to include the middle-class and college-educated, one interviewee claims that the movement “shifted from a moral movement to a self-interested movement, driven by people who didn’t want to go to war.” The comment presents more questions than it answers— especially the odd distinction between morality and valuing one’s life enough to resist being killed. Burns and Novick keep these contradictions intact, which results in one of their strangest depictions: the violence of police and National Guardsmen against protestors at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago. It is one of the documentary’s rare sequences without music; the only sound is a sea of voices shouting over long shots of merciless police beatings. The first interview to break the violence is of a man who was a junior in college at the time, watching the protest unfold on television. “It looked like we were devolving into madness,” he says. “I couldn’t tell—was it the protestors, or the police, or was everybody insane?” It feels as if we are being prompted to ask the same question to our TV screens—as if, after all this time, the question should still be rhetorical.

WILL WEATHERLY B’19 is thinkin’ ’bout his family and what it was for.

ARTS

DACA HAS NEVER BEEN ENOUGH

Supporting justice for all undocumented people BY Neidin Hernandez ILLUSTRATION & DESIGN BY Amos Jackson On September 18, over 70 undocumented students disrupted House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi’s news conference in San Francisco. They were protesting a recent series of closed-door talks between Democrats and President Trump, which aimed to bolster border security in exchange for preserving DACA. The students eventually shut down the conference, with chants calling for the inclusion of all 11 million undocumented immigrants in new legislation: “We undocumented youth demand a clean bill…We undocumented youth demand that you do not sell out our community and our values…We undocumented youth will not be a bargaining chip for Trump.” Established in 2012 by President Obama, Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) allows for a select group of undocumented immigrants—those who were brought to the United States as minors—to apply for a two-year reprieve from deportation, along with a temporary work permit. The 800,000 undocumented immigrants presently protected under DACA woke up on September 5 to news that Trump had rescinded the program, with six months for Congress to reinstate DACA with new legislation before it expires in 2018. DACA has always been an inadequate solution. Despite the mainstream media panic, for those who understood the program, its dissolution came as no surprise. As Barack Obama himself admitted, his administration created the program as a “temporary stop-gap measure” until Congress could come up with legislation that allowed those eligible for DACA to remain in the country. In the years since Obama’s declaration, no such piece of legislation ever made it to the Congress floor. Now DACA faces termination under Trump, and its only hope for salvation is a deal that jeopardizes those 10.2 million who are ineligible for the program. In a bid to save DACA, Senator Chuck Schumer and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi met with Donald Trump over a White House dinner to discuss a deal that would preserve DACA in exchange for measures strengthening border security. In a joint statement released the next morning, Schumer and Pelosi announced that they had “agreed to enshrine the protections of DACA into law quickly, and to work out a package of border security, excluding the wall, that’s acceptable to both sides.” A tweet from White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee denied that funding for the wall had been left off the negotiating table. Should the deal go through, undocumented minors would retain their protected status—but only at the expense of the safety of their parents and communities. Strengthening border security would likely mean increasing funding for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the agency responsible for the arrest and deportation of undocumented immigrants. According to the Department of Homeland Security, the number of undocumented immigrants arrested by ICE has increased by 40 percent under the Trump administration. Due to the wreckage wrought by Hurricanes Irma and Harvey, a large-scale deportation raid scheduled for mid-September called Operation Mega—set to target 8,400 undocumented immigrants nationwide—has been postponed indefinitely. Increased funding for ICE, which any political compromise would likely include, would facilitate the execution of such raids, and help Trump

NEWS

make good on his campaign promises to crack down on illegal immigration. Popular rhetoric identifies DACA recipients as some of the “best and brightest,” to use words from Obama’s September 5 Facebook post in response to President Trump’s decision on DACA. DACA recipients, often called DREAMers (in reference to DACA’s precursor, the DREAM Act), are considered separate from the immigrant community—an exceptional subset deserving different privileges and protections. “Does anybody really want to throw out good, educated, and accomplished young people who have jobs,” tweeted Donald Trump. “They have been in our country for many years through no fault of their own—brought in by parents at young age [sic].” DREAMers are framed as blameless because their parents brought them to the United States illegally. While it’s true that DREAMers had no say in the matter, to position them as blameless is to imply that there is blame to be placed for crossing into the United States as an undocumented immigrant, ignoring the political and economic factors that drive people from their homes. The notion, however, of DREAMers as faultless places them in opposition to their parents and guardians, the very people who brought them into this country. Parents of dreamers are thus criminalized for their decisions to bring their families into the country, and marked as undeserving of the same protections granted to their children. Since its inception, politicians have used DACA to create a dichotomy between the deserving and the undeserving immigrant. In his 2012 announcement of the policy, President Obama described DREAMers as those who “have done everything right [their] entire [lives] – studied hard, worked hard, maybe even graduated at the top of [their] class.” He wasn’t exaggerating. There is little room for error for a DREAMer, since the eligibility requirements for DACA are stringent. Candidates must have a spotless criminal record and a high school diploma or GED. Exceptions are made only for those who are still currently enrolled in school or have been honorably discharged from the armed services. Further restrictions limit the number of people eligible for DACA based on age, date of arrival into the country, and length of continuous residency. Gloria Montiel, a DACA recipient and current an adjunct professor at Claremont Graduate University, was initially wary of the program, and held off applying until a year after its induction. “I was opposed to the idea that so many people were left out, including some people that were very close to me like my parents,” she told the Independent. “This program didn’t really capture enough people, and it was treating this group of people [DREAMers] as a commodity.” DREAMers are touted as the quintessential embodiment of the American dream—proof that with hard work and tenacity one can bootstrap one’s way to markers of respectability such as a job and a college education even in the face of seemingly insurmountable odds. According to the Migration Policy Institute, 71 percent of all undocumented immigrants come from Mexico or Central America and roughly a third live at or below the poverty line. Despite the fact that low-income people of color are less likely than their peers to graduate high school and

more likely to have run-ins with the law, DACA recipients have necessarily managed to both finish school and maintain a clean criminal record. Politicians and business leaders who frame DREAMers’ worth in terms of economic contributions to the country estimate that if DACA recipients were deported, “our economy would lose $460.3 billion from the national GDP and $24.6 billion in Social Security and Medicare tax contributions,” according to an open letter circulated by Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. They are often held up as examples of American exceptionalism, the immigrant portion of the population that makes this country great. This allows for politicians to use DREAMers as a tool to leverage new policies like the current backdoor deal being worked out between between Pelosi, Schumer, and Trump. “I knew it was going to come,” DACA recipient Alejandra Gonzalez told the Independent about the deal. “I’m used to them using DREAMers as a chess piece,” said Gonzalez. DACA passed into law because of the massive pressure immigrant rights movements put on President Obama and his administration. These activists organized sit-ins, hunger strikes, and rallies outside national and local democratic campaign offices. Such protests in advance of Obama’s reelection garnered widespread media attention and helped bring immigration reform to the forefront of national political discourse. On election night, three months after he announced the roll-out of DACA, Obama received 67 percent of the Latinx vote, helping him win key battleground states including Nevada and Colorado. Luis Serrano-Taha, a DACA recipient and community organizer with the California Immigrant Youth Justice Alliance, argues that the passage of DACA in 2012 under Obama mollified the immigrant rights movement while leaving a vast majority of the undocumented population vulnerable to deportation. “DACA didn’t really empower a lot of folks. It actually made a lot of folks complacent,” Serrano-Taha told the Independent. Gloria Montiel told the Independent that her parents “are very cautious, law-abiding, tax-paying citizens… but even in their case that is not enough and for me that is both a cause of anger and anguish.” While she is protected by DACA until 2019, she says she still worries about people in her community “who never qualified [for DACA, and] are still living in fear. Unlike me, they have never had a day of rest in the past five years, and so it is for them that we need a solution that is truly not based on how much [we] can give to [our] community but on the fact that we are human and no one deserves to be confined to the shadows.” Alejandra Gonzalez, a DACA recipient and current student at Alverno College, told the Independent that although it is easy to fight for the rights of DREAMers, the immigrant rights movement must strive to adopt more inclusive strategies and narratives that support all undocumented immigrants. “Dreamers are the most sympathetic group of undocumented immigrants, but I wouldn’t be who I am if it wasn’t for my parents,” said Gonzalez. “My parents were the original dreamers.” NEIDIN HERNANDEZ B’19 stands with all immigrants.

SEPTEMBER 29, 2017

SOLARPUNK

BY Liam Carpenter-Urquhart ILLUSTRATION BY Carly Ann Paul DESIGN BY Robin Manley

On the aesthetics of optimism

In 1984, William Gibson published his seminal cyberpunk novel, Neuromancer. The novel was a transformative event, and not only because it introduced the word ‘cyberspace’ and a whole host of prescient thoughts about what form the Internet would eventually take. The technological predictions were innovative, but the subversive elements of Gibson’s cultural critique were those that approached the human side of the information-driven world. “It seemed to me,” Gibson would tell the Paris Review two decades later, “that mid-century mainstream American science fiction had often been triumphant and militaristic, a sort of folk propaganda for American exceptionalism. I was tired of America-as-the-future, the world of white monoculture, the protagonist as a good guy from the middle class or above.” Neuromancer resisted that tendency. Its treatment of technology was central to that subversion. Gibson considered technology to be the driving force of social change, not always positively. With his desire to “crank up the resolution” on what the information age would do to modern societies, he showed us the stories that would have been erased by a sleeker, more mainstream treatment of his world. Gibson “wanted to see the dirt in the corners.” So he showed us people sleeping in coffin-sized apartments in order to access their digital worlds, sprawling urban structures devouring the Earth’s surface, an ultra-rich class relocated to off-world cities, a virtual landscape dominated by corporations rather than countries. Reading it now feels just as much of a fever dream as it must have 30 years ago, but it also feels like he saw the heart of our world. As the Guardian wrote in 2014, “We’re living in a future ... instantly recognisable as [the Gibson future’s] less stylish, less romantic cousin.” +++ As the world careened towards the 21st century, Snow Crash, Ghost in the Shell, and The Matrix pumped new blood into the subgenre. At the same time, steampunk and dieselpunk grew out of cyberpunk’s trunk, creating alternate histories in which the domination of technologies, including coal and diesel combustion, drove the world to perverted social arrangements. The advent of genetic engineering gestated the growth of biopunk. Gibson himself turned his eye towards the present with the Bigend Cycle, which can be read as a cyberpunk treatment of the young 2000s. In August of this year, Brazilian speculative fiction author Gerson Lodi-Ribeiro described the connection: “The ‘punk’ suffix in any X-punk genre...means the gathering of elements of counterculture as an anti-establishment cultural phenomenon.” The suffix refers to the subgenres’ subversion of unbridled optimism of mainstream science fiction; the characters’ drive to push against the oppressive institutions in their imagined worlds; or, in Neuromancer, characters being driven by their self-loathing to release a potentially deadly artificial intelligence into the world. These narratives have insinuated themselves—as science fiction tends to—into contemporary politics in surprising ways; Snowden’s anti-authoritarian whistleblowing mirrors Gibson’s model of data-stealing hackers.

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

All the while, mainstream science fiction subsumed the influence of punk genres, accepting the technological apprehension and anti-establishment sentiment, but leaving out the meditations on human oppression. The result is an odd, toothless kind of pessimism, which produced the adolescent dystopias that have dominated this decade’s media futures. Aimless negativity is mostly unable to motivate change (who, besides Veronica Roth, has been inspired by The Hunger Games?), but its pervading of contemporary media still grinds against a faith in the world’s future. “What I find far more ominous,” Gibson told Vulture in a conversation about the rise of dystopian narratives, “is how seldom, today, we see the phrase ‘the 22nd century.’ Almost never.” And, of course, there’s still terrifying pessimism with real teeth, coming in forms like the Dark Mountain Project and Allison Cobb’s After We All Died. The mounting alarm of science-fiction doomsayers is elaborated by the Dark Mountain Project’s self-description: “We see that the world is entering an age of ecological collapse, material contraction, and social and political unravelling, and we want our cultural responses to reflect this reality rather than denying it.” +++ From this desperate position, a subset of writers have started to assert that the only direction to turn is utopia. According to Phoebe Wagner, co-editor of the first English-language collection of ‘solarpunk’ fiction, the next move for countercultural science fiction is “hopefulness, joy, new ways of resistance, community... Let’s imagine change and inspire people to create solutions.” The characteristic stance of solarpunk is to have the audacity to gaze at the curve of the future and stay optimistic. Solarpunk, in several ways, completes the cycle that cyberpunk began. While cyberpunk treats technology as its own environment and, in many cases, all but ignores the actual environment, solarpunk keeps its eye on the interface between material technology and the material world. While cyberpunk imagines technological progress as the driving force of social change, solarpunk imagines socially liberatory ways to drive technological

progress. Cyberpunk focuses on what new technologies will do to the world, and solarpunk recontextualizes what the world can do with technology. Solarpunk narratives do their best to represent hope for dying worlds. When those stories show the boundaries of what that hope can accomplish, solarpunk characters find ways to survive together and stand against the systems responsible. The genre’s title was most likely coined in 2008 by the blog Republic of the Bees, in celebration of the maiden voyage of the world’s first hybrid cargo ship. The MS Beluga SkySails supplemented its engines with a massive computer-controlled kite rig. Cargo ships, having pushed through wind with engine power for two centuries, once again had the capability to take advantage of all the energy flying around them. In this model, technological innovations are often combined with antiquated mediums to produce unique hybrids. That fusion is a critical part of solarpunk’s aesthetic, which places solar panels in conversation with stained glass windows, builds community gardens in generation ships, and gives humans the capacity for photosynthesis (which could be considered the oldest technological practice of them all). In opposition to cyberpunk, solarpunk appeared as an aesthetic before being consolidated into a genre. For years, the movement didn’t exist beyond a series of descriptions and conversations on Tumblr and other forums. In a final subversion of the “America-as-thefuture” structure that Gibson railed against, the first self-identified solarpunk literature emerged from Brazil. Solarpunk, an anthology of short fiction compiled by Lodi-Ribeiro was published in 2012. (A Kickstarter campaign to translate that anthology into English was funded earlier this month). In 2012, concurrently with the original release of the Solarpunk anthology, Kim Stanley Robinson’s 2312 told the story of a world that continues living after the devastation of climate change. As written in “On the Need for New Futures,” a recent manifesto on the Solarpunk Tumblr site, solarpunk writers “are starved for visions of the future that will sustain us, and give us something to hope for.” The 21st century’s failure to resolve the problems of the 20th shows us that inertia could eventually exceed our control. In order to arrive into a habitable future, one has to do more than move away from unsustainability. It’s necessary to decide which potential worlds we want to create. Imagination is a critical part of that process, and speculative fiction is powerful because it demonstrates that nothing is inevitable.

LIAM CARPENTER-URQUHART B’19 cares a lot about science fiction.

TECH

BLEACH What does it mean when East Asians go blonde? BY Olivia Kan-Sperling ILLUSTRATION BY Dorothy Windham DESIGN BY Ashley Min

cw: racism, suicide A couple of weeks ago, Kim Kardashian bleached her hair blonde—again. The first time was back in March of 2015, and it caused a much bigger sensation—as news outlets proclaimed at the time, she “broke the internet.” Since then, we’ve seen a slew of celebrities take peroxide to their hair. Most recently Katy Perry, but also both Jenner sisters, Taylor Swift, Jennifer Lawrence, Kristen Stewart, Zayn Malik, and Justin Bieber. In fact, what used to be reserved for only the most adventurous of spiky-haired soccer players now adorns the heads of college kids, Tumblr users, and many others—as long as they can afford the many hours and dollars at the salon. Most of these platinum blonde celebrities are white. However, an article in W magazine from 2016 by Jane Lankworthy entitled “The New Platinum Hair Color Trend is Here” interviewed a colorist who cited a different source as the originator of the fad: famously blonde Korean model Soo Joo Park. Her story, and hair, provide an interesting lens through which to understand how East Asian-Americans must present themselves to succeed in the face of cultural and social marginalization. +++ Marilyn and Madonna, Barbie and Barbarella, bombshell blondes and Hitchcock blondes and Blonde Ambition: blondeness is revered. Some might say that the special cultural status afforded to women with blonde hair is due to the color’s scarcity. This argument, however, obscures the ongoing impact of racism and eurocentrism not only on standards of beauty, but cultural production generally. While the color does occur naturally among certain populations native to North Africa, Asia, and Australia, it is found most commonly in northern Europe. The color’s association with whiteness explains why, while most white women may be brunette, blondes represent white femininity and desirability. No doubt because of this, there is a long history of artificial blondeness— usually in pursuit of a natural look. While many may still desire this effect, today, intentionally artificial-looking hair color has become a widespread phenomenon. This is easily observed in the case of everyone's favorite middle school pink and teal streaks, the ombré of a couple years ago, or the “I Tried GALAXY HAIR and This Is What Happened” stories served up by the Cosmopolitan Snapchat story. But the desire for a bleach blonde style is just as much a reach for the artificial. One inheritor of the latter trend is an aesthetic sported by many a fashion-forward art kid on college campuses today. Probably, no one is bleaching their locks with the intention of looking like Scarlett Johansson— the resulting color rarely looks little like anything that might grow “naturally.” Kim Kardashian didn’t bleach her brows, and neither do most people with this hair. It is a visually striking look precisely because naturalness is clearly not the desired effect. This complicates the racial dynamics of dyed blonde hair, but does not erase them. For lighter-skinned East Asian women that go blonde, the implications of this aesthetic choice are enmeshed with anti-East Asian racism. Most East Asians who bleach their hair are not trying to ‘look white,’ or are ‘ashamed of their identity,’ as

FEATURES

women in online forums like Quora and GirlsAskGuys are accused of. Few would mistake a Korean with bleached hair for Caucasian; racial markers are more numerous than simply hair color. Writer and fashion designer Mari Santos, writing for Marie Claire, argues that her decision to go blonde had nothing to do with whiteness; she was inspired by East Asian models and K-Pop stars. While it is a mistake to ignore East Asia’s own pop culture industry, in an American context, the wealth of cultural signifiers around blondeness means that lightening your hair makes you not only blonde, but a blonde. Tellingly, most articles discussing even the least ‘natural’ of blondes incorporate stereotypes like ‘gentlemen prefer blondes,’ and invoke the trend’s debt to icons of blonde femininity like Marilyn Monroe. Thus, while bleaching hair can be done without the intention of looking white, it still plays into aesthetic sensibilities and cultural traditions that privilege white femininity. +++ One of the women Santos cites as an inspiration is Soo Joo Park. In an interview for The Cut titled “Soo Joo Park Doesn’t Want to Be Typecast as an Asian Model”, she says, “after I bleached my hair, more people understood that I have a personality and I’m more than just a face.” Park moved from Seoul to Anaheim, California when she was 10, and doesn’t remember much about Korea. Her parents initially discouraged her interest in modelling; they preferred that she focus on academics. She went to Berkeley and then worked for a San Francisco startup. Up until her discovery by a modelling agency, hers is a common narrative of East Asian immigrant ‘model minority’ success, and that with which America is most comfortable. Park’s backstory is familiar to me: it is my father’s, and uncle’s, and cousins’. I know Anaheim pretty well, too—it’s where that part of my family lives. In fact, in seventh grade, I, like Soo Joo Park, moved to Southern California. I’d grown up in a mostly white town; when my mom picked me up from school, she’d just look for the only black pigtails among the ashy blonde. At my new middle school, this was no longer possible. For the first time, I met other East Asian kids, in significant numbers—girls like my Orange County cousins, who, unlike me, went to Chinese Sunday School and church. I was lost at the frequent dinners with my relatives, in which I, with my rudimentary grasp of Mandarin and family politics, couldn't wholly participate. My mother is European and white, and, when people eyed my long black braids and asked where I was from, I enjoyed saying “Germany” and pretending not to understand their confusion. Now, suddenly seen as an ‘Asian kid,’ I felt a sharp disconnect between my newfound Chinese-American ‘identity’ and my self, or what I perceived of it. I used to love my black hair, but that year I decided I wanted to bleach it blonde. +++ It is crucial to examine the ways in which anti-Asian racism operates in order to understand the implications of East Asians going blonde. Many Chinese, Japanese, and Korean immigrants enjoy economic success in

America—according to Pew, Asian-Americans are the “highest-income, best-educated, and fastest-growing racial group in the United States.” Nevertheless, they are far from white people’s social equals. Racism relies on an imposition of homogeneity on the oppressed group, and this is especially relevant when applied to East Asians. First off, it is worth noting that the term “East Asian” itself can be misleading and homogenizing; differences in racialization based on skin color mean that sometimes a light-skinned Southeast Asian may be better described in this discussion than a darker-skinned Chinese person. Moreover, not only do we ‘all look the same,’ but conformity and anti-individualism are said to be key parts of ‘Asian culture.’ This undertone is evident in conversations ranging from those on communism in China to strong East Asian-American family structures to South Korean plastic surgery. In a 2015 essay in the New Yorker, “About Face,” writer Patricia Marx argues that in the West, nose jobs are about looking the best. In Korea, they’re about looking better for society as a whole. To be sure, there is a real tradition of collectivism in East and Southeast Asia. In the 1990s, for example, there was a movement advocating for the creation of a Pan-Asian identity based on Confucian values: filial piety, work ethic, and collective well-being over personal freedom. However, such traditions are often invoked less in the form of a nuanced investigation of another culture and more as an unspecific, essentializing stereotype. Such generalizations are especially troubling when applied to individuals. East Asian(-Americans) are seen as docile, and emotion- and personality-less—as little more than the machines they are brought to Silicon Valley to invent or left in Taiwan to manufacture. These qualities are often used to explain East Asians’ ‘model minority’ status. This myth is a key tool used to justify anti-Blackness; Asian-Americans are held up as the perfect example of non-whites that have assimilated ‘easily’ in order to falsely depict Black Americans as ‘failing’ due to their own faults rather than the US’s structural inequalities. Moreover, this myth also plays on tropes that dehumanize Asian-Americans themselves by stressing attributes like ‘work ethic,’ and implicitly, ‘obedience,’ while denying Asian-Americans personality, imagination, sexuality, or any other quality that doesn’t directly contribute to being a productive member of the workforce. The press often described basketball player Jeremy Lin not as ‘talented,’ but as ‘hard-working’ and ‘humble’—the classic Chinese Harvard grad, praised by one nameless internet commenter for being “too respectful” to call out racism, respectfulness being a quality he valued in Asians. Moreover, there are just so many of us! In the popular imaginary—from news media outlets to fetishistic shots of ‘teeming’ Tokyo in films—a major image of East Asians is of the hordes: China’s booming populations, endless streams of factory workers, robotic overachievers flooding your Ivy League schools, the streets of East Asian cities filled with always-moving business suits. One often hears jokes about East Asian tourists on vacation swarming out of their buses and following their guide’s umbrella in some sort of hive behavior. This trope of the ‘unending tide’ combines with that of quiet industriousness to render East Asians unseen faces in a sea of (uniformly black-haired) similarity. In an article on Asian-Americans in Hollywood, sociologist Nancy Wu is

SEPTEMBER 29, 2017

quoted as saying, “I feel we are invisible in society. We are nondescript and in a way dehumanized by not existing in scenes or even having speaking roles. We are just part of the backdrop.” The ‘yellow peril’ is one of identical multitude. +++ Soo Joo Park, meanwhile, is now L’Oréal’s first Asian ambassador. She is neither invisible nor a ‘model minority,’ but a supermodel. When she opened for Just Cavalli’s FW ’13 “Asian Fusion” show (in which she and Ming Xi were the only non-white models), she was one of the designer’s inspirational photos. Park says she is often compared to Daul Kim, the ‘Korean Kate Moss,’ who, before committing suicide at age 20, also reached the height of her fame after dying her hair bleach blonde. Park’s story is a singular one. Although the number of

East Asian models is slowly increasing, very few reach celebrity status (and still, her fame does not approach that of natural blondes like Cara Delevingne). She is an exception in a time when East Asians—not to speak of Asians in general—are drastically underrepresented across the entertainment and arts industries. In almost every profile of Park, her success is attributed to the color of her hair. In an interview with makeup brand Glossier, she admits, “I know that I get perceived as a different person. People think that I’m more eccentric, open, or adventurous, but it’s really just the hair.” In the face of oppression that forces East Asians into an existence of invisibility through sameness, hair dye is a potent option to distinguish themselves. It enables them not only to appear physically dissimilar from other East Asians—to stand out from those masses—but to flaunt an expectation of nondescript-ness in favor of a bold aesthetic. Dying one’s hair an ‘unnatural’ color—like

getting piercings or tattoos––smacks of rebellion, and rebel is exactly what a model minority is not supposed to do. The choice of blonde is not accidental. For me, at least, rainbow colors like blue, pink, or purple were out of the question. I didn't want to ‘look anime’—I’d had enough exotifying encounters with white lovers of Japanese culture even without cartoon-color hair. There are also hair trends more or less exclusively popular in East Asia I could have chosen to mimic, such as the reddish-brown color pioneered by trendsetting Japanese women in the late ’90s, and which today can be seen on many a K-Pop star. If I had been simply bored of my hair color and feeling like teen rebellion, I could have chosen such a color, but it would have tied me more strongly to East Asian culture—exactly what I was trying to escape. +++ In the same interview for the Cut, Soo Joo Park says, “I don't see myself as an Asian model. I think part of the reason I bleached my hair was that I didn't want to be typecast as an Asian model, I wanted to be me.” I’m not chastising East Asians who bleach their hair; in the face of marginalization, people make choices in order to thrive (socially, and, in Park’s case, economically) and express themselves in a way that feels exciting and authentic. People have the right to do what they wish with their bodies. But I am wary of the brand of liberal politics that encourages consumption (of makeup, clothes, hair dye) without any consideration of the context in which so-called ‘self-expression’ takes place, and its consequences. It's an oversimplified understanding of ‘choice’ that appeals to the fashion industry and that should not be taken up uncritically. Especially when racialization encourages distinct modes of perception through appearance, aesthetic choices are not made in a vacuum. Of course, the totality and complexity of individual decisions can never be described by generalizations or a single factor. Still, in a racialized world, hair is never just hair, and blonde is never just a color.

OLIVIA KAN-SPERLING B’20 is dreaming less bleach blonde, more Blake Lively golden waves.

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

FEATURES

TO MELT

The politics of soft steel

BY Odette Blaisdell ILLUSTRATION BY Gabriel Matesanz DESIGN BY Robin Manley

Steel is about leaning on an edge. Whether bending, shaping, cutting, or welding, I must always wait for the metal to fall, to melt at the perfect moment. Steelwork is a conversation of equal parts patience and reaction—in a split second the metal gets red-hot, and then glows wetly orange. Steel becomes hard and brittle if cooled immediately; it is softer and more pliable when the heat is eased down. Steelwork is often associated with the material’s hardness and strength, but its response to heat, the way it can be coaxed into melting, flattening, or flowering out depends on both the softness of the metal and the hand working it. Sometimes I have to ease off the heat for just one moment and then flash it back on to get it to bend exactly the way I want it to. Learning to speak with steel in this specifically persuasive, almost flirtatious way tests the rules of the built environment. When steel feels familiar, the ceiling’s I-beams, a slick doorknob and the links of a fence all seem like common vocabulary. Metal is a language you can write poetry with. For many people, fluency in steel is limited to a few basic images of big machines, workers coated in oily dust, or the girl from Flashdance in a welding helmet. The outside world is built from steel, but it also has a direct relation to the gooey world of bodies. Steel is made by controlling the amount of carbon in molten iron to a specific level that makes the metal harder and more versatile than pure iron. These elements that construct our rigid world are also critical to biological life. Carbon is a basic building unit in all organic molecules, and can compose both one of the hardest materials, diamond, and one quite soft, graphite. Iron is a vehicle for oxygen transport through plant and animal circulatory systems. Its tendency to oxidize in the presence of water should be no surprise given its affinity for oxygen in the body. Reimagining steel’s materiality as a counterpart to our own bodies yields a more nuanced understanding of our built environment and its impact on larger ecosystems. The archaeological record reveals that human-manipulated metals are just one part part of a cycle of extraction of the Earth’s raw materials and eventual deposition back into the earth as waste. Buildings and highways are not permanent terrains, but fallible material systems, subject to change and deterioration. Steel is fleshy. If buildings are colossal bodies, steel frames are the bones that need support and care and sometimes replacement. The ease with which steel changes physical states is what makes it so readily recyclable (it is the most recycled material in the world), but this same chemical fluidity makes it susceptible to rust if built or left in wet conditions. Water, especially salt water, is a catalyst for the oxidation of iron into rust because it forms acids that expose more and more of the metal to oxygen. This process begins on the surface of the material, but given enough time and exposure, the entire mass will disintegrate into an unstable composition, powdery and no longer strong. Whenever steel objects are neglected, they rust. +++ ‘The Rust Belt’ is the name ascribed to the upper Midwest since its economic downturn due to industrial automation and outsourcing in the 1960s. While the metaphor of ‘rust’ is very evocative, it is possible to reimagine the metaphor in a more hopeful and complex way that accounts for the ways that rust can be combated. The metal underneath rusted areas can be salvaged with water-displacing chemicals, or something as simple as a wire brush. In a miraculous collaboration with the human body, steel will never rust if it is touched often enough. The oils in our hands form a barrier against invading oxidation. The hydrophobic technology of all common

ARTS

sealants like paints and waxes was based on the work our hands do perfectly. The Rust Belt might look different if we also decided to rid it of rust, through the same care and attention that can salvage salt-sprayed bridges or thousands-year-old artifacts. Change for workers in the Rust Belt and beyond would follow naturally from new methods of care for the material because care requires different kinds of labor than production does. Care for steel might mean designing objects that require frequent touch when used, as many tools, like scalpels and screwdrivers, already are. Constant touch could also become a larger strategy for investing in the maintenance of public infrastructure, a disparaged trade that requires contact and attention, rather than innovation. Changing labor practices might require changing laborers. Although gender representation in a variety of formerly male-dominated professions in the U.S. has been creeping closer to being equally proportionate, women are most underrepresented in industries of building and materials, from wood to stone to metal. In industries related to steel, women account for under 5 percent each of welders, machinists, and structural steel workers, according to a 2014 survey by the Department of Labor. So although the conversation about steel need not begin or end the politics of gender, steelwork in the US has long rested on the fiction that men are best suited to build the material world. Given this disparity, our president’s constant appeals to disenfranchised steelworkers in campaign speeches and in his current discussion of trade are necessarily appeals to working-class men. The mythical American past where everything was ‘great’ is a past where women had an even smaller place in industry and the workforce in general. In addition to the inequity that supporting traditional steel manufacturing perpetuates, Trump’s promise relies on a misunderstanding of how industry in a global economy works today. Most steel industry in this country involves buying and manufacturing steel for production of finished products rather than smelting the metal. Furthermore, automation—not China’s low export prices, as Trump says—is to blame for much job loss. More than just bad policy, the propagation of traditional labor techniques relies on the false assumption that labor can only be done by a certain population, using the material in only one type of way. The promise to bring steel back to the Rust Belt is an attempt to solidify and reavow an outdated marriage of steel and masculinity. ‘Feminist steelwork’ therefore functions as a critique of and an alternative to the status quo of the steel industry and the political implications of its labor. Feminism is at its best when it rewrites exclusionary histories into inclusive futures, and the history of steel is long and rife with gender inequity. Breaking out of a binary approach that focuses simply on gender parity in industry, feminist steelwork can be about more than just who labors in strenuous, sometimes dangerous trades. Feminist steelwork is equally interested in the labor of making a stainless steel pan and of cooking with it; it is equally invested in steel as an industrial and an artistic material. Feminist steelwork is a discourse around steel written in poetic terms. This could take the form of a love letter: slow and small-scale, written in a sensual hand. Whether the metal curves and bubbles organically, or is sharp enough to cut flesh, feminist steelwork is about taking texture seriously, about touching and being intimate with the materiality of the world. Materials are always meaningful and often political, and so their conceptual framing—mostly by the terms of a globalized economy, and here by feminism—is critical. In addition to and often in spite of its source and production,

material takes on symbolic, cultural meaning. Diamond, to return to carbon, has become a symbol of committed love in this country; steel, the material of guns, knives and towering buildings, is both a symbol of and manifestation of power and violence. Like other objects, its materiality affects lives well beyond aesthetics. It follows that conceiving of steel and those who work it as softer, more fluid entities, is in turn a social, political project. Understanding the symbolism of the material naturally leads back to the close entanglement of steel and our country’s patriarchal past and present. The built environment reflects who creates it, which is why it is critical to ask what the material world will look like if more kinds of bodies are involved in building it. Cars, buildings, utensils, medical devices, public sculpture, even nails and screws might look and act differently if built with a sensitivity for all the things steel can be: soft, rigid, flexible, brittle, massive, tiny, ephemeral, loose, thin, melty, sharp. Chairs might flex to fit more kinds of bodies; buildings could be more energy efficient; art could be seen as a public necessity rather than a frivolity of the elite. This is not a plea for a new kind of design, but a new kind of relationship— between human bodies, and with this incredible material. For now, steel may still seem hard and not worth exploring. But to imagine that we understand everything about the material is a form of hubris at best. No matter how well engineered a steel structure is, it can still be crushed, bent, or toppled in the right circumstances. Natural disasters and murderous humans have toppled buildings, bridges, dams, cranes, even whole cities, with ease. One of the most chilling examples of steel’s fallibility is the artifact now in the National 9/11 Memorial and Museum of a bent steel beam, torn, and wrapped back upon itself like the loop of a ribbon or a quarter note on a musical staff. In its gravity-defying ability to support huge weight on tiny footprints, steel encourages this illusion of invincibility: steel imparts a deluded sense of control over the completely uncontrollable. The material is seductive, coyly asking for gentle taps, unfurling, and folding rather than displays of strength. No matter what kind of body acts on this impulse to tend to, there is glowing potential in rejecting historic attitudes toward steel and instead opening up to the full range of words and gestures that steel can make. I myself am still just starting to learn its language. Going on three years of working with steel has made my muscles sore and my hands dun with carbon dust. But when firescale coats my fingertips, everything I touch turns to steel, as if it were no less valuable than gold. ODETTE BLAISDELL RISD’18 is a little rusty.

SEPTEMBER 29, 2017

DEAR INDY... BY Lisa Borst, Will Tavlin, & Erin West ILLUSTRATION BY Sophia Meng DESIGN BY Tiffany Bushka Dear Indy, Thoughts on PDA? LB: Despite long being an object of public scrutiny, regulation, judgment, and fantasy, the thing about sexual intimacy is that, for most of us, it finds its most overt expressions in relative private. In bed, in the backseat of a car, in rose-petal-strewn hotel rooms: these are the spaces where normative sex happens, or is imagined to happen. At the same time, a very fun part of being attracted to or in love with someone (at least for me) is that occasional upswelling of affection that surfaces at odd moments, when you feel you just must make out this instant—even if you’re in a public place. But public displays of affection can easily morph into their nasty counterpart: public displays of exclusion. And this distinction, to me, totally depends on what kind of “public” you’re in. My current partner and I are both women, and we tend to regulate the ways we touch each other in direct relation to our surroundings. There are plenty of places where we more or less have at it—for example, at Dyke Night at Aurora (RIP). But if we’re hanging out in smaller-scale settings with our single friends who we know are fundamentally lonely? Maybe we tone it down for the sake of not excluding the people around us. Ditto for places where we know we’ll be subject to uncomfortable, unproductive questions or interpellations—like at the clock repair shop in North Providence, where the elderly owner once told us, after an unwise bit of PDA, that he’d had a lifelong fascination with scissoring. (Reader, I suggest you take your clock-repair business elsewhere.) The aggression, discomfort, or judgment that can surface in response to PDA of all sorts is, I’d argue, a result of the same kind of exclusion that your lonely friend might feel if you and your bae start hooking up in front of them: regardless of whether an onlooker specifically wants to make out with you, there is still something unnerving about a private thing erupting in public, a reminder that two people know each other more intimately than other members of the public can know them. But sometimes certain situations all but demand subjecting onlookers to exclusion and discomfort, and sometimes a little bit of public romance is exactly what’s needed to disrupt our sanitized understandings of what public space is for. The uncomfortable fact at the core of PDA, of course, is sex, and the uncomfortable fact at the core of sex is that—as Lauren Berlant, that better, wiser LB, reminds us—it is the means by which we most readily forfeit our own sovereignty. And the metonym of this forfeiture that is PDA has, in many cases, enormous political power: I’m thinking of AIDS-era kiss-ins, for example, which forced people in public to confront queer sexualities at a moment at which they were feared and reviled. If we take as a given the idea that PDA is, in most cases, fundamentally about communicating care, then I think it’s generally helpful to ask yourself: is my communication of care occurring at the discomfort of someone else? If so, what utility might that discomfort have? If you don’t have a great answer to that second question, I’d suggest you get a room. I’m looking for help with a friendship that feels really unbalanced. I feel like I spend a lot of time listening to my friend’s concerns, romantic troubles, daily problems, and small annoyances, but I never feel like that interest is fully reciprocated when I take the time to talk about my life apart from my friendship. Their reaction is usually, “Stop worrying so much!” which is a course of action I generally believe in, but also feels reductive and doesn’t leave me space to talk about the complications of any one situation. I’ve tried communicating this to my friend, and being more assertive when I try to make space for myself,

FEATURES

but I’ve found that it often leads to a weirdly transactional “You can only talk about yourself if I talk about me first” relationship, which ends up leaving me more bitter than heard. How do I break out of the cycle and build a relationship where both of us feel less possessive of our feelings? Or should I just stop hoping for that from my friend, and look elsewhere? WT: You say that you “both” feel “possessive” of your feelings, but it sounds like your friend is the lone offender here. It is your friend who—in telling you not to worry about your problems—refuses to engage with your problems, with the intensity of your emotions, the possibility of being close to you. Friends are incredible people. And the ones who changed my life let me wail with them when I needed to, empty my lungs, little spoon in their beds. They didn’t go above and beyond; they were simply there when I asked. In a torrential bad mood, I once apologized to a friend for subjecting them to my unshakeable wrath. “That’s okay,” they responded. “You can be angry.” Being yourself is sometimes as simple as hearing that that horrible day you had was horrible, or that thing someone said was shitty and bad. Your friends have different capacities for understanding and care (this is a good thing; no two personal dilemmas are alike and our care for each other should reflect this fact). But it’s important that you trust your emotions with friends who are actually capable handling—receiving, validating, responding to—them. You know who they are. It’s not a matter of skill, but of knowing you’re enough, of loving you dearly. It feels like all my friends are in relationships or at least having fun fling-situations, but it has been so long since I’ve met someone I’ve felt something for. When oh when will I find love??? WT: I know your position well, dear advice-seeker. I’ve watched countless friends leave parties together and end up in long-term, loving relationships. We (single people) are amazed by this phenomenon. ‘How did they do it?’ we wonder. Like, how did they literally do it? What conversations, dinners, and dates produced this bond? What kind of intimacy consummated this trust? You might find yourself amazed, wondering when this Providence might shine its divine light on your person. I propose an intervention: let’s suspend the idea that we merely “find love,” as if love were a faith that could rapture us from worldly despair. It can—no doubt true love can feel otherworldly. But remember that your loving friends likely worked hard to make themselves vulnerable to the possibility of love. They had desires, attractions, and insecurities, and acted upon them. They made plans, sent text messages, drank coffee together, made out! We desire falling in love, or finding love, because the narrative absolves our responsibility to produce the conditions under which love can occur. Last week, I found a rock on the beach, and then I fell into a giant hole in the sand. Lovers aren’t rocks! And love is not a sand pit! My suggestion: join Tinder and Bumble. Anything helps.

I have a close friend who I think is going through a hard time, and I am as well, and all I want is for us to have some sort of mutual cathartic release about being low (like crying together in a park, say), but that is really not my friend’s style, and it’s making me feel irrationally hurt. What should I do? EW: First, there’s no such thing as an irrational feeling. Yes, we can talk back to your feeling and offer some context or counter-points (i.e. how much your friend opens up to you doesn’t directly correlate with how close they feel to you) but your hurt is coming from a real place—and that’s worth paying attention to. I would encourage you to exercise some self-compassion (hard to do, actually). You say you’re going through a hard time. I am so sorry to hear that. Does it feel like waking up and not being able to get out of bed? Or like your days are so anxious that your heart seems to run at twice its usual speed? However you’re experiencing this time, I want to recognize and validate your pain. Is someone saying this enough to you? I want to ask if you’re getting the support you need right now. If not, what would full support look like for you? I hear you on wanting to cry with your friend. I <3 crying (I’m crying’s biggest fan, crying is one of my favorite activities) and crying with someone has always been powerful for me. (I’ve proposed to friends, multiple times, my idea for a national holiday in which everyone cathartically cries together…hah, silly but I think it has some radical potential…). My guess for you though, is that the moment isn’t about the physical act of crying, but rather would feel helpful primarily as a symbolic moment of mutual recognition, a moment in which you both fully acknowledge each other’s pain and are able to communicate to each other just how big/severe/significant/present that pain is for you. We all want to be seen as our authentic selves—especially by those we love. How can we make this happen for you? If your friend wouldn’t feel comfortable crying together, is there another moment you can share in which you feel your friend can really see your pain? (And you can see theirs?) What if you wrote a letter to them that lets them know how you’re feeling and reiterates the importance of your friendship? More sneakily, could you suggest watching a movie together that happens to be a tear-jerker? Hah. And hey, when I roll out this crying holiday situation, you’ll be on the top of my invite list.

SEPTEMBER 29, 2017

THE FRIDAY 9 ∫ 29

HARVEST FESTIVAL AND TRACTOR SHOW

247 Valley Street 1PM — The City of Providence is launching a planning and visioning process for the Woonasquatucket River Corridor, which includes portions of the City’s Smith Hill, Olneyville, and Valley neighborhoods along the Woonasquatucket River. To participate in the process, community members are invited to attend a community picnic to share

WOONASQUATUCKET VISION PLAN COMMUNITY PICNIC

Metcalf–Franklin Farm Cumberland, RI 10PM–4PM — Free admission, $2 parking There will be hayrides! You ever think about hayrides? I think my happiest childhood moments happened on hayrides…

Rhode Island Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (RISPCA) raise money for the animals at the shelter. Activities include a canine costume contest, dog/owner look-a-like contest, and canine agility demonstration. You can also microchip your dog for just $25!

LIST!

CENTRAL FALLS SALSA NIGHT

Roosevelt Avenue Bridge 8PM — One of Central Falls’ greatest attractions. Come enjoy a rotating lineup of food trucks, beer and wine from a local brewery, a photo station, and more! There will be free salsa lessons by Mambo Pa Ti from 8–9PM. JAKE MCKELVIE & THE COUNTER TOPS / LADY QUEEN PARADISE / SWEETPEA PUMPKIN

Psychic Readings 7PM $6 — Lady Queen Paradise describe themselves as operatic slumber rock. One time I gave my old desk to them and I hope they wrote some songs on it.

SATURDAY 9 ∫ 30 15TH ANNUAL PAWS IN THE PARK DOG WALK

Rose Larisa Park 701 Bullocks Point Ave, Riverside, Rhode Island 10AM–2PM — Bark! Bark! Check out these agile canines to help the

their ideas about the future of these neighborhoods.

SUNDAY 10 ∫ 01 MARCH FOR RACIAL JUSTICE

India Point Park 3PM — From FB The March for Racial Justice is a multi-community movement led by a coalition united in our demands for civil and human rights. According to the march organizers: “We march because as long as U.S. laws, policies and practices remain steeped in racism and white supremacy, basic human rights and civil rights for all, will never be fully realized. We march to strengthen local and nationwide efforts for racial equity and justice.” BLACK & PINK VOLUNTEER MAIL PROCESSING

PrYSM 669 Elmwood Ave 6PM — Black & Pink is an open family of LGBTQ prisoners and “free world” allies who support each other. New and returning members and allies are welcome to show up for a bi-monthly mail processing hangout—stop

by to hang out, learn more about Black and Pink, find and write to a pen pal, or help process mail received at Black & Pink’s national HQ from its incarcerated membership. Bring a laptop if you have one.

MONDAY 10 ∫ 02 ABOLITION AND TRANS JUSTICE: A TALK WITH MONICA JAMES

Barus and Holley Room 168 Brown University 12PM — Monica James is a black trans woman who, through her work as a collective member of Transformative Justice Law Project and a national organizer with Black & Pink, has worked towards the advancement of trans justice, transformative justice, and prison abolition. A small reception will follow her talk.

TUESDAY 10 ∫ 03 A CONVERSATION WITH GINA RAIMONDO

Friedman Auditorium Brown University 4:30PM — Gina Raimondo is one of only six female

governors currently in office nationwide! That is crazy. She’ll be discussing her “journey into politics” and some of her current initiatives. The Indy encourages you to ask her challenging and critical questions.

BSR COMMUNITY INVOLVEMENT MEETING

Faunce Rm. 337 Brown University 6:30PM — After many years as a streaming-only operation (during which time no one ever listened to the shows I guest-hosted—thanks for nothing, everybody), Brown Student & Community Radio is moving to FM! This event is open to anyone who’s interested in getting involved, not just Brown students.

WEDNESDAY 10 ∫ 04

OCTOBER WOMEN, TRANS, AND FEMME (WTF) OPEN SHOP

Recycle-a-Bike 6PM — I love Recycle-a-Bike, but if you go on a normal day (or check out their fall bike sale this Saturday!) you might find yourself facing the plague of all bike shops,

even the rad ones: everyone is a fucking dude and they are all excited to mansplain derailleurs or whatever to you! WTF nights are openshop spaces “available to people who identify as a female, transgender, femme, genderqueer, trans-masculine, transfeminine, or feels that their socialization or treatment as a woman/trans person/ femme has impeded their participation in bicycle mechanics.” If you don’t identify with one of these identities, you’re kindly asked not to attend during this time.

THURSDAY 10 ∫ 05

RISD ILLUSTRATION DEPARTMENTAL EXHIBITION OPENING RECEPTION

Woods-Gerry Gallery 6PM — Featuring many of the Indy’s own staff illustrators! We love their work! Show your support!

HURRICANES AND CLIMATE JUSTICE WORKSHOP

Lower Salomon Hall Brown University 7PM — Join the RI Student Climate Coalition and several guest speakers for a teach-in on the disproportionate

impacts of hurricanes (and other extreme weather events) on marginalized communities both within the U.S. and abroad. They will be discussing the connection between climate change and social/environmental justice by focusing on recent storms.

Horoscope - Scorpio

Oops! Your shit is showing! Mercury is moving through Libra and the House of the Hidden, so everything you’ve been hiding from your therapist…you should probably tell your therapist.

On top of that, Jupiter and Uranus are doing freaky, scary shit this week. Try not to enable your already freaky, scary self by picking apples at an RI orchard and baking some apple pie (or making hard cider...whatever does the job).