The Georgetown Voice, August 28, 2020

Au g u s t 28 , 20 20

Obstructions of Justice / Across the country, police unions protect violent officers from accountability. Can reform happen while they still exist? / By Sarah Watson

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HONORING JOHN LEWIS AND 80 YEARS OF “GOOD TROUBLE” Photos by Nathan Posner GEORGETOWN EXPLAINED: THE GU272

by Caroline Hamilton

Contents 4

August 28, 2020 Volume 53 | Issue 1

editorials

Editor-In-Chief Katherine Randolph Managing Editor Roman Peregrino

Dear Freshmen A mandatory class on the GU272 is a moral necessity

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news Executive Editor Sarah Watson Features Editor Caroline Hamilton News Editor Annemarie Cuccia Assistant News Editors Annabella Hoge, Darren Jian, Isaac Solly

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opinion Executive Editor Amanda Chu Voices Editor Max Zhang Assistant Voices Editor Sarina Dev, Annette Hasnas Editorial Board Chair Delaney Corcoran Editorial Board Delaney Corcoran, Annemarie Cuccia, Darren Jian, Katherine Randolph, Sarah Watson

feature

carrying on

What COVID-19 taught me about class and my classmates KATHERINE RANDOLPH

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Honoring John Lewis and 80 years of “good trouble” NATHAN POSNER

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Georgetown Explained: The GU272

A Disturbance in the Force

Holey Moley: How I learned to stop worrying and love mini-golf

feature

voices

How to grow your own digital best friend MAX ZHANG

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voices

Learning what it means to be alone

sports

NATHAN CHEN

CAROLINE HAMILTON

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halftime sports

leisure

A Quick Guide to D.C. Sports

Irresistible Offers Political Commentary for 2019, in 2020

SPORTS STAFF

ORLY SALIK

SARINA DEV

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leisure Executive Editor John Woolley Leisure Editor Abby Webster Assistant Editors Lucy Cook, Olivia Martin, Anna Pogrebivsky Halftime Editor Samantha Tritt Assistant Halftime Editors Chetan Dokku, Orly Salik, Anna Savo-Matthews

leisure

ANNABELLA HOGE

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feature

Georgetown’s fall online, from the other side of the screen JOHN WOOLLEY

cover story

How police unions are the hidden barricade in the fight against police brutality

“So much was being asked of us at the exact time when it felt we had the least to give.”

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THE GEORGETOWN VOICE

copy Copy Chief Maya Knepp Assistant Copy Editors Emma Chuck, Alene Hanson Editors Christopher Boose, Jennifer Kret, Stephanie Leow, Maya Tenzer, Kristen Turner multimedia Photo Editor Nathan Posner Podcast Editor Anna Sofia Neil online Executive Editor Ethan Cantrell Website Editor Zev Burton Social Media Editor Skyler Coffey Assistant Social Media Editor Eli Lefcowitz

support Contributing Editors Panna Gattyan, Leina Hsu, Paul James, Cade Shore, Juliana Vaccaro de Souza Staff Writers Nathan Barber, Maya Cassady, Jason Cuomo, Blythe Dujardin, Ethan Greer, Steven Kingkiner, Lily Kissinger, Bella McGlone, Ryan Remmel, Will Shanahan, Katie Woodhouse

SARAH WATSON contact us editor@georgetownvoice.com Leavey 424 Box 571066 Georgetown University 3700 O St. NW Washington, DC 20057

design Executive Editor Olivia Stevens Spread Editors Tim Adami, Insha Momin Cover Editor Jacob Bilich Assistant Design Editors Alex Giorno, Neha Malik, Allsion DeRose, Deborah Han Staff Designers Josh Klein

business General Manager Alice Gao Assistant Manager of Ryan Remmel Alumni Outreach

PG. 19

The opinions expressed in The Georgetown Voice do not necessarily represent the views of the administration, faculty, or students of Georgetown University, unless specifically stated. Columns, advertisements, cartoons, and opinion pieces do not necessarily reflect the views of the Editorial Board or the General Board of The Georgetown Voice. The university subscribes to the principle of responsible freedom of expression of its student editors. All materials copyright The Georgetown Voice, unless otherwise indicated.

sports Executive Editor Tristan Lee Sports Editor Nathan Chen Assistant Editors Adam Ginsburg, Jakob Levin Halftime Editor Arshan Goudarzi Assistant Halftime Editors Alex Brady, Anuj Dutta

“Justice?”

JACOB BILICH

Page 3

An eclectic collection of jokes, puns, doodles, playlists, and news clips from the collective mind of the Voice staff.

→ → TIM AND LIV'S QUIZ

→ → DEBORAH’S COVID CARTOON

Which section of the Voice should you join?

1.Which teacher did you form an unhealthy attachment to in high school? a. Gym b. English c. Band d. History e. Psychology

3. What’s your high school stereotype? a. Jock b. Emo anarchist with homoerotic undertones c. Drop out theatre kid d. Preppy teacher’s pet e. Granola activist

2. Which cartoon character was your sexual awakening? a. Danny Phantom b. Zuko c. Shego d. Flynn Rider e. Elastigirl

4. Pick the most influential Disney channel show in your life: a. Suite Life of Zack and Cody b. Wizards of Waverly Place c. Hannah Montana d. Good Luck Charlie e. That’s So Raven Check your results at the bottom of this page!

→ → KATIE’S ANIMAL DOODLE

→ → GOSSIP RAT Gossip Rat is back, dumping abject garbage journalism on a page for your enjoyment.

Speaking of rats, we all know that Georgetown University’s residential rodents are not to be trifled with. The real inhabitants of campus, who oh-so-graciously allow us to come back each year, have apparently been “up to no good.”

Our former source went quiet in March, when we lost all contact. We feared the worst, until suddenly, this week, they reached out once again. If their intel is to be believed, the Georgetown rats have been dabbling in biowarfare, capturing drunk Georgetown freshmen on their walk back from Epi as test subjects for experimentation. Apparently, one of these experiments led to the creation of the virus we now know as COVID-19. One would think they learned their lesson from the bubonic plague disaster, but that’s neither here nor there. Whether it was intentional to remove the pesky student body from campus, or a glitch in the system is unknown. What is known however, is the fact that rats are using this time to expand their territory, a troubling development for Georgetown’s human population.

Stay golden → → OVERHEARD AT GEORGETOWN

“If the whole doctor thing doesn’t work out, I’d be comfortable as a stripper”

xoxo, Gossip Rat

→ → PLAYLIST

Halftime’s (Not) Back 2 School 1. Lost Dermot Kennedy 2. When the Party’s Over Billie Eilish 3. The Last Great American Dynasty Taylor Swift 4. All Nighter OVERSTREET 5. Suburbia Troye Sivan 6. Freaking Out ARIZONA 7. Over My Head The Fray 8. Soon Angie McMahon 9. WAP Cardi B feat. Megan Thee Stallion 10. Take Me Home Country Roads John Denver

AUGUST 28, 2020 Mostly a’s: Sports; mostly b’s: Design (hehe); mostly c’s: Leisure or Multimedia; mostly d’s: News or Copy; mostly e’s: Opinion

veggie cartoon by deborah han; puppy by katherine randolph; lacroix rats by timmy adami; ear by olivia stevens

Tim and Liv have returned intact from their Milanese adventures and are ready to be hurt again! Even though we’re *devastated* we can’t sardine ourselves into the Voice office and guzzle copious amounts of La Croix this semester, we’re still looking to recruit new agents of chaos to carry on our legacy after graduation. Read on to discover which section of the Voice you should join! (Literally any of them are 8000% better than The Hoya).

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EDITORIALS

A letter to the newest members of our community Dear incoming students, Welcome to Georgetown! Though this community may feel far away, both physically and emotionally, from where you sit reading this, know we are thinking of you as the year begins.

You are starting this semester in unprecedented times—and we know you are tired of hearing that. Your senior year was drastically different than you expected, and your first year at Georgetown is starting in a way no one predicted. You are entering into the community of Hoyas unlike anyone before you. As students who have been with this community at its best and worst, we would like to offer guidance on making the best of this first semester as a Georgetown student.

This semester will be hard. We know you are scared about making friends, meeting people, and finding your place here. To ensure you find a place in our community, we ask you to commit to making interpersonal connections in any way you can. The students who come to Georgetown are some of the most warmhearted, passionate, and driven people we have ever met. You may be meeting those people through screens, Zooms, and chats, but we implore you to reach out and connect with them. Push yourself to find spaces for you in the Georgetown community. Joining a new club will be a challenge from your bedroom, but it could be the most rewarding choice of your first semester.

Keep in mind that the community you are joining is not just the school. As Georgetown students, you are now also a part of the D.C. community and represent Georgetown wherever you may be. And now you have an obligation to them. If you decide to come to the District, make sure you make safe choices, continue to social distance, and do not contribute to the spread of the virus, which has disproportionately affected communities of color, especially in D.C. Do the same in your own hometowns. You now represent this school and you have a responsibility to act with the values of Georgetown in mind; so, be a person for others and follow all COVID-19-related guidelines.

Additionally, recognize the privilege that comes with the identifier of “Georgetown student.” When you come back to D.C., whether it be this fall or next year, acknowledge the role our school and community play in the gentrification and continued racism in this city. Let anti-racism guide your studies and on-campus presence, and use whatever privilege you may have to lift up others around you.

Part of loving this community is also feeling deeply frustrated when it fails, but continuing to fight for it to improve, even when your voice feels unheard.

You have already seen how the Georgetown community, specifically the administration, can be profoundly inconsiderate. They have consistently failed to support the most vulnerable students on campus, and that failure has been exacerbated by the ever-changing nature of the coronavirus pandemic. The responsibility of ensuring no one is left behind and practicing mutual care has fallen on the student body. This is not necessarily a bad thing.

Students know what students need the best—if you have the ability to support and advocate for your peers, you must do so, always keeping in mind your own privileges and the 4

THE GEORGETOWN VOICE

situation of students without those same privileges. In our time on the Hilltop, or even from our devices at home, we have pushed the school to improve. We invite you to join us and take up the mantle of a Hoya by working to make the school and community a better place for every member.

The toll this summer has taken on so many members of our community cannot be overstated. This is not the usual cheery message the Voice sends to incoming students.

However, we know you have the tenacity and empathy to meet this moment—otherwise you wouldn’t be a Hoya.

This will be your first semester as a Georgetown student, and although you won’t be on the Hilltop, you will be just as much a part of our community. This community has done so much for each of us, even in its far-from-perfect state, and we know it can provide overwhelming support and love in the coming months. Join us in striving to make our community a better, kinder, and more inclusive space for your peers and all of the Georgetown students that will come after. See you soon.

Much love, The Georgetown Voice Editorial BoardG

A mandatory class on the GU272 is a moral necessity

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eorgetown has a responsibility not just to teach its students about the world and their chosen field of study, but to educate its students about the institution which they call home.

In 1838, 272 people enslaved by the Jesuits of Maryland were sold to keep Georgetown University financially afloat. These 272 individuals represented just a fraction of the people enslaved by these Jesuits—at one point in the early 19th century, an estimated 10 percent of people on Georgetown’s campus were enslaved.

Georgetown did not publicly acknowledge this intimate history with slavery until April 2016, when the New York Times published an article revealing the sale of the GU272 to the public. Since then, the university has consistently mishandled its response to this history, especially with its refusal to instate a student-mandated reconciliation contribution for the descendants of the 272.

We at the Voice have called for the instatement of this fee, but as the students who led the push for greater recognition of the 272 graduate, we also find ourselves in need of something more—a mandatory class dedicated to educating Georgetown students about the tightly-wound histories of slavery and the university.

A monetary reconciliation on its own, if it does come to fruition, is not enough to adequately address the fact that Georgetown University’s existence is the result of the enslavement of hundreds of individuals who were forced

to work, without autonomy or pay, to build and operate the institution. The legacy of oppression is so pervasive on this campus it must be openly discussed by students who benefit from the trauma of those enslaved people two centuries before.

This discussion cannot be optional—no student should be able to leave the Hilltop without having grappled with the explicit participation of their alma mater in one of the most despicable practices in human history. In order to ensure all students engage in this conversation, the class on the 272 should be a mandatory one-credit class. Ideally to be taken in a student’s freshman year, the class would educate students on the 272 and Georgetown’s history with slavery and force them to consider how they have benefitted from the practice.

The need for this class is especially crucial as new students enroll at the university. These new students will not have been at Georgetown for the education initiatives provided by the GU272 advocacy team during the referendum vote, and may be unfamiliar with the 272 and the university’s history of slavery. This is unacceptable.

This mandatory one-credit class could, if necessary, replace the current domestic diversity requirement, which often fails to provide students with a look at real instances of racial oppression and injustice in this country.

Luckily, a class similar to this already exists—a course entitled “Facing Georgetown’s History” has been housed in the American Studies program since 2016, and includes a curriculum that exposes students to the Georgetown Slavery Archives and the Jesuit’s history with slavery. Past students of the class have described it as essential and suggested some version of it be offered to all students. One descendant of the GU272 who took the class told the Voice last semester, “Our hope is that over the course of four years, every school and curriculum will incorporate this history into their curriculum.”

While we recognize it might take a few semesters for a class of this nature to be crafted and staffed (though the existing curriculum should streamline the process), this should not prevent the university from mandating education around the 272. In the interim, the university should implement a mandatory one-day training, similar to bystander intervention training currently required, for all incoming freshmen. This training could be run by qualified faculty, so as not to place further burdens on students who have already educated and advocated for the 272.

Comparable trainings exist in the Center for Social Justice, which asks all its student employees to participate in “Start Talking About Race,” faculty-led biweekly conversations that have students reflect critically on the role race plays in their daily lives, education, and careers.

Though there is no excuse for Georgetown not to implement programs similar to the ones outlined above, until they do, students both new and old should do what they can to educate themselves on Georgetown’s history of slavery. The Voice’s explainer piece, seen later in this issue, is a good way to start. Campus and national media outlets have covered the issue, and Georgetown’s working groups have produced historical reports, which can be accessed on the Slavery, Memory, and Reconciliation website.

Especially as Georgetown continues to fail to listen to the will of the students, it is crucial that students are educated about the GU272. Students must create it for themselves, until the university begins to provide this education.G

VOICES CARRYING ON: VOICE STAFFERS SPEAK

What COVID-19 taught me about class and my classmates KATHERINE RANDOLPH Around junior high, I began to play an exhausting game of hide-and-seek. It started with figuring out how to style my dress code-approved polos underneath cardigans and sweatshirts so my classmates wouldn’t see that they were from Walmart or Target and not the form-fitting Aeropostale shirts that were so trendy at the time.

It evolved to insisting on being dropped off near the band hall in the back of the school, where fewer people would see my parents’ broken-down car. I learned to tell my teachers I’d forgotten my field trip money rather than explain that my parents needed a few extra days to get the cash together. In this game of hide-and-seek, instead of waiting for someone to count to ten and call “ready or not!”, I was hiding my family’s financial situation from everyone I knew.

I got better at the hide-and-seek once I started high school and got my first job. I never wanted anyone to think that I was rich; just average was good enough—not wealthy enough to be snooty, but not poor enough to be trashy. I was white and made good grades—exactly the kind of person my small town expected a nice, middle-class American girl to be. When I was accepted to Georgetown, everyone congratulated me on receiving a scholarship.

I didn’t correct them when they assumed that my need-based financial aid was a merit award. I looked forward to starting college, where everyone would live in the same shitty dorms and eat the same bad food, and where, finally, off-brand clothes and chipped paint jobs wouldn’t betray me.

For five semesters, I used my hide-andseek strategy to my advantage, thinking I could successfully hide my income status even as I was surrounded by the wealthiest population I’d ever encountered in my life. Though I never totally felt like I belonged among the students who wore Golden Goose sneakers to class, I found a group of friends in similar situations to mine and staff members I knew I could count on for support.

But this year’s coronavirus crisis threw back the curtains, and I realized that the game I’d played all this time hadn’t made the differences between me and my classmates disappear. With nowhere left to hide, I had to reckon with the realities of being a low-income student at an elite university.

According to The New York Times, 21 percent of Georgetown students are in the top 1 percent, and the median family income at Georgetown is $229,100 per year, the highest among its peers in the Big East. In my hometown, the median family income is $58,502 per year. Even there, I nearly always found myself at the bottom of the wealth pyramid among my friends. Public schooling pioneer Horace Mann was wrong when he called

Katherine Randolph is a senior in the College and the editor-in-chief of the Voice. She hopes to retire somewhere near the beach and domesticate a raccoon after graduation.

education the “great equalizer of the conditions of man.” Now entering my senior year at Georgetown, I am no closer to being in an even comparable financial position to my peers. Under our current economic system, there is no equalizing the top 10 percent in America and the bottom 20 percent.

The widespread economic breakdown caused by coronavirus has only made this more obvious.

When COVID-19 shut down the country, my father—our primary breadwinner—had already been out of work for months after being laid off on my 21st birthday in December. After the preschool my mom worked at shut down, my family was being solely supported by her second part time job, where she made $15 an hour—less than what I made at my work-study position on campus. At the same time, I moved back home into a three-bedroom house I shared with six family members. I didn’t have a bed, so my parents set up a folding cot from Big Lots in the room I shared with my two sisters.

When I logged onto my first Zoom class and our professor had each class member check in and update the rest on how they were doing, the differences between me and my peers became uncomfortably evident. Multiple classmates described hunkering down at their second homes to wait out the pandemic. Another casually pointed out her father’s prestigious award on the shelf behind her. I tried to keep up with everyone else’s spiel, but it didn’t really matter. My WiFi was struggling to maintain a connection, and the call kept cutting out.

Those first few weeks of virtual classes made it even more apparent how ludicrous the game I’d been playing was. While I’d been worried about affording a flight home to Texas, my classmates had been petitioning for grading policy changes and tuition reimbursement. Both of these dramatically affect student life, but were nowhere near as important to me as the immediate panic of finding myself stranded during a pandemic with no place to live and no way home. When you’re

illustration by katherine randolph

poor, surviving the next two days or two weeks feels much more vital than the big picture of GPA or tuition payments.

I don’t blame my peers for having different priorities than I do. It’s all part of coming from extremely different backgrounds and learning in an environment that has done little to close the gap. Despite need-blind admissions and a promise to meet every student’s financial need, being a low-income student at Georgetown still feels like being a zebra in a field of Kentucky Derby champions. Everything about the school—from the million-dollar houses outside the front gates to the obsessive club culture that favors students who don’t need to work 30 hours a week—is designed around the wealthiest among us rather than the poorest. The stallions are always going to win a race built for them.

It would be a mistake to assume that COVID-19 has created these gaps in educational access. All it’s done is bring them to light. I’ve watched for three years as classmates blew their money on expensive parties and high-class restaurants, or told me that they chose not to work to focus on school as I skipped social events to make it to my job. I’ve missed readings because I couldn’t afford expensive textbooks, and, on more than one occasion, I’ve relied on the Women’s Center because I couldn’t afford tampons. I’ve learned to avoid visiting the Hoya Hub when my colleagues at the Voice might be in our office down the hall, so no one would know that their editor-in-chief didn’t have grocery money. All the club dues or the Venmo requests for an Uber because the bus would take too long add up. For most of my education, I’ve pretended the massive wealth inequality at Georgetown didn’t bother me, hiding the fact that I’m a low-income student as if it were shameful or dirty. It’s time to stop pretending that there’s something wrong with me or my family and recognize that it’s the system we live in that’s flawed.

I am extraordinarily grateful to Georgetown for giving me the financial aid to receive a worldclass education I could never have afforded on my own. But when Georgetown announced a 10 percent tuition decrease in July, I knew it wasn’t meant to help students like me. When I graduate this spring, I won’t have paid anywhere near 10 percent of one semester of tuition in my four years combined. The tuition cut was a move calculated to appeal to the wealthy students who could afford to attend Georgetown regardless of the price tag for one semester, in stride with a university model that has always catered to those whose parents shell out the most money.

I was wrong to think that walking through Georgetown’s front gates would make the social inequality I’ve felt all my life disappear. If anything, it seems to have been exacerbated. But I hope that one day, when I send my children to school, no one will feel like they have to play hide-and-seek. In that version of collegiate America, quality higher education will be a reality for every student who wants to pursue it. G

AUGUST 28, 2020

5

VOICES

How to grow your own digital best friend MAX ZHANG

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wenty-seven months after we first spoke, I finally met my best friend—in person.

When we finally did, it was under the guise of a college tour at Harvard where he was a sophomore. I scheduled a weekend visit during senior year of high school, planning to crash in his dorm. Some risk was involved: Digital personas are not always faithful to reality. Text messages and video conferencing rarely replicate the rhythm of moments in physical space—I knew as much as I boarded the cheapest red-eye flight I could find from Chicago to Boston, with a nervous anxiety pulsing on my chest. Would he like the clumsy, awkward, and at times too-serious version of me that existed off-screen? Without the delay in delivery, would I be as funny—as sharp— as instantly vulnerable?

The months preceding are a completely digital history, full of dad jokes, audio messages, and shared playlists. The genesis of it all occurred in the Facebook comment section: Ajay and I were in the same high school political debate club, and some snarky comment I made as a precocious freshman caught his eye, though he was in Houston and I in suburban Chicago. Though he was two years older and so far away, we somehow started talking.

Quickly, he became a central fixture of my digital social life—I recall very few days that year without blue text message exchanges with him. I had been having trouble feeling genuinely connected to my high school class, and the chats I shared with him felt real and thoughtful in a way I failed to find elsewhere.

It felt strange to open up to someone a thousand miles away. And I was so young at the start of our friendship: Looking back, it’s impossible to not cringe at the (literally) sophomoric person I was—my earliest messages are spunky, cutesy, and naïve. And yet our relationship thrummed colorfully because I was unwaveringly enthusiastic about initiating. Daily, I would start new conversations about internal organizational politics, or standardized testing anxiety, or the emergent chance (and reality) of a Trump presidency. With time, our conversations grew denser and more meaningful. By the time Ajay shipped off to Harvard for his freshman year, 15 months after our first Messenger exchange, I considered him nothing short of a best friend.

Our conversations also grew to include the mundane. Web friendships may mean hiding the 6

THE GEORGETOWN VOICE

boring rhythm of life behind more spectacular things; unintentionally, digital relationships can easily turn into texted highlight reels. Often, this subtractive form of communication makes things feel artificial. Yet Ajay and I tried to embrace talking about life’s simplest things: dinners eaten, errands run, jogs around the block taken. Sweet stories about his girlfriend and honeyed ones about the color of the sky. When your friend is a world away, a fair bit of universe creation needs to happen: for complete cinematographic composition, minute details are as critical as dominant plot arcs. To recap the small stuff was to quietly assert a fierce sense of investment in each other’s lives—to prove each other boringly but wonderfully human.

This is not to say the heavy stuff didn’t matter—quite the contrary. Ajay and I have only lasted this long because we are unafraid to talk about the heady things. We often traffic in deeply philosophical and personal questions; we debate existentialism and career fears and abolitionism.

We swap confessions and secrets and wonder if it’s all going to be okay in the end.

Unerasable is the “messiness” that characterizes healthy in-person relationships: While text relationships are prone to feeling sanitized, ours has never been particularly afraid of delivering raw emotion. Scrolling through backlogs of messages, I find dozens upon dozens of conversations where the words drip with the same anger, terror, confusion, sadness, ecstasy, and joy of all friendships. Indeed, Ajay has walked me through crisis after crisis. On many of my lowest nights in the last four years, I have found myself on my laptop spilling my guts to him, letting him gently talk me off the brink.

Emoting on a digital interface is complicated—one needs a good deal of nuance in syntax, punctuation, and delivery to correctly communicate tone. Not to mention the heightened vulnerability of divulging your thoughts over text—when trust and privacy are easily violable—that can preclude it from even taking place. Despite it, we continue to take the plunge, unblinking and resolute. The rewards—of consolation, of authenticity, of friendship— feel worth the risk, and we have done it enough to develop an unfazed trust.

When we finally met in person, it turned out my worries from the plane ride were relatively moot. True to my high school self, I was a stuttering, blushing mess when he picked me up at Logan airport. And some things did differ—we had to quickly figure out boundaries for physical intimacy (I am a hugger; he, less so); the energy of conversation felt calmer and more balanced; I hesitated, at first, to ask questions with the same degree of unabashed confidence I exuded online.

But any awkward inertia quickly neutralized as we leaned into the trust we had built over two years.

The hours passed by dreamily. He manually blew up an air mattress for me when he discovered the pump was missing. At midnight, he pulled me around campus aimlessly as we shared a set of earbuds, listening to Noname’s Room 25 together as it debuted. Over the next couple of days, we

Max Zhang is a sophomore in the SFS studying Business and Global Affairs. He says “I love you” way too much—in fact, he’s probably saying it right now. I love you.

design by deborah han

had Belgian waffles for breakfast and windowshopped at the Curious George store. We sat on park benches and watched the rowing team have morning practice as we traded thoughts on the upcoming midterm elections. It all felt natural and rhythmic and correct; we took to each other so easily I swore we’d met in a past life. On my way back towards the airport, I shed some quiet tears on the T station platform, unsure if we’d ever see each other again.

Nowadays, Ajay and I don’t talk nearly as frequently as we did when I was still in high school; college is greedy with attention, and talking every single day is hard. But it doesn’t seem to matter: Every time we pick up the phone or the keyboard, the magic glitters easily. That’s because the groundwork has been laid—the authenticity of our interactions in our relationship’s generative months set the groundwork for years to come.

Two years since our first meeting, I am prone to texting him “i love you” in the dead of night, an insomniac’s lifeline for connection. Nine times out of ten it comes back shortly after: “love you too, buddy.” Then, we share stories of our dreams and our fears; we celebrate and mourn and theorize.

The recipe for good digital friendship is not unique to Ajay and I. Outside of him, I’ve slowly built an ever-expanding net of largely digital friends— there is Adam, and Paola, and Evan, and now nearly all of my relationships due to COVID-19.

The dominant ingredients for meaningful digital connection are all the same: fearless initiation, vulnerable substance, tolerance of the mundane, a bit of humor, and simple willingness. With careful adjustment, I’ve sewn tapestry after tapestry of healthy digital relationships, and it works (almost) every time.

The efficacy of this template convinces me that Ajay and I will survive the protracted quarantine and the miles between us. I am even confident we will see each other again. Soon. Until then, I will continue opening my heart onto a blue text message bubble, knowing the love we share is enough to evaporate distance. When I told him I was writing this piece, he was adamant: “This better not be a love letter.” Too bad. After all, it’s the thousands of little love letters we’ve sent each other—the greetings, the vulnerabilities, the lamentations, the good mornings and goodnights—that have made us so strong. This is just one more. G

VOICES

Learning what it means to be alone

BY SARINA DEV To overcome my loneliness at Georgetown, I had to learn how to be comfortable being alone.

As a freshman, I was afraid that as soon as I was by myself, I would be overcome with loneliness and homesickness. In the first few weeks, when everyone around me was a stranger, learning to take time for myself rather than avoiding time alone allowed me to feel at home on campus.

When I first arrived on campus, I was convinced surrounding myself with others and making connections would help wash away the feelings of homesickness, impostor syndrome, and FOMO that I felt lurking in the back of my mind.

To me, this strategy made sense; I came to campus with no connections and was unfamiliar enough with the feeling of loneliness that I assumed the only way to get past the feeling was to find people to rely on.

So I made plans all the time. Whether it was exploring town with my new roommate, planning meals with new friends, or working in the HFSC or Lau with new classmates, I made plans on plans.

However, the more overstimulated and crammed my days were, the more lonely and restless I found myself in the inevitable and unavoidable moments when I was alone: the hours when my roommate was in class, nights being the last one in the library, and walks back from class at the end of the day. I

Sarina Dev is a sophomore in the college and spends her alone time reading The New Yorker.

found myself mentally exhausted, suffering from insomnia, and with an unshakeable feeling of weariness. Still, my loneliness felt insignificant enough that bothering friends and family seemed unnecessary, especially when all my home friends were busy navigating their own college campuses.

Eventually, after I realized how overtired and easily aggravated I had become, I was able to isolate what specifically about my life at Georgetown was preventing me from settling in and feeling like I belonged in D.C. Aside from the novelty of it all, I realized that, in moving from the suburbs of Minneapolis to a dorm in Washington, I had completely lost all of the alone time that was so ingrained in my day to day rhythm at home.

A naturally extroverted person, I didn’t realize how much I depended on moments of solitude in my daily routine back in Minnesota to recharge and deal with stress: the drive to school at sunrise, reading a book in an oversized chair, or even just having the choice to answer a call without headphones on. These voluntary moments of isolation were pivotal to my mental health. Recognizing them and then learning how to purposefully be alone on campus in the way that I needed—taking walks to the monuments along the waterfront, stopping for Saxby’s on the way to class while listening to a podcast, or discovering new coffee shops in town—helped me get over all my negative emotions almost instantly.

It was naive of me to assume that I could avoid being alone on campus forever, and now, preparing for completely virtual classes, I’ve had to reflect on how I will deal with loneliness this semester.

This kind of loneliness is much more difficult to manage. It’s easier to be alone when it is a choice— working at a new coffee shop, people-watching along the Potomac, or observing the sunset on the

illustration by delaney corcoran

National Mall—and I know that I have friends, a roommate, and classmates to return to.

While I definitely overcrowded my schedule on campus, forming those connections and relationships was still vital to helping me become adjusted to college life. Regardless of how time spent alone boosted my mental health, without the relationships I formed at Georgetown, I would’ve been completely lost. Undoubtedly, losing many of the natural opportunities to form connections on campus will add to the isolation that will accompany this semester for many students, especially for the incoming freshmen. Making small talk before class starts, running into someone at the line at Leo’s, and talking to club members on the walk out of meetings are all small moments of time that everyone will lose out on.

For so many of us, the claustrophobia of our childhood bedrooms (or wherever we are residing for the next four months) is clearly less than ideal. We will have to put in the extra work to make friends in a completely novel way—emailing classmates instead of being able to ask for their contact information and starting conversations over Zoom are only a few examples.

However, it is our natural tendency as humans to form connections. I’m certain that, though the methods may look new and feel untraditional, we will all be able to make friends through virtual learning, and when we eventually return to campus, these online relationships will easily adjust to being face-to-face.

But, as I work from home, I will be mindful to take intentional time for myself even if I seem to be spending the whole day alone. While attending classes and doing homework do count as time spent alone, they are mentally draining and exhausting. Without the kind of support we normally receive from in-person relationships on campus, it is especially important now that we carve out time for ourselves. This semester will force all of us to find sustainable ways to boost our mental health without relying on others.

I plan to take the time to do something physical outside every day as an outlet to relieve stress. I also hope to limit my time on social media in order to resist feeling sorry for myself when I see photos of friends attending colleges that have reopened. I intend on being open about how I am feeling with the people around me to keep these normal feelings from becoming overbearing and unhealthy. Being aware that we will spend a lot of time alone may seem daunting, but being able to find comfort in solitude and leaning into uncertainty will help us get through the semester. It may even help you find friends and clubs within the Georgetown community you may have otherwise not discovered. Like the Voice!G AUGUST 28, 2020

7

Obstructions of Justice: How Police Unions are the Hidden Barricade in the Fight Against Police Brutality

BY SARAH WATSON

Content warning: This article discusses racism and police violence.

The officers who murdered Breonna Taylor on March 13 have still not been arrested. No charges were filed against the officer who killed Eric Garner. A grand jury chose not to indict the officer who killed Michael Brown in 2014. The officer who knelt on the neck of George Floyd was arrested four days after the murder, which is comparatively quick in the history of prosecution for police brutality against Black Americans.

Throughout the Black Lives Matter protests, protesters have called for widespread institutional change to the criminal justice system and operations of police departments across the nation. But change has not come quickly, nor easily.

One of the main blockades to law enforcement reform: police unions.

Police unions negotiate with cities over pay and the protection of their officers. Though police unions were banned until 1838 due to concerns about armed government agents organizing, today they act as one of the most powerful lobbying groups in the nation.

Police unions allow departments to strong-arm negotiations with city governments and steamroll legislative policies with unchecked lobbying. And they protect their own repeatedly.

Between 900 to 1,000 people are shot and killed by police in the United States every year. Since 2005, 98 nonfederal officers have been arrested for on-duty shootings; as of 2019, only 35 have been convicted. Those convicted are rarely found guilty of murder, but of lesser indictments like manslaughter, which carry lighter sentences.

Black and Hispanic individuals bear the biggest brunt of police killings—disproportionately so. Black Americans make up less than 13 percent of the U.S. population, but are killed by police at double the rate of white Americans.

Moreover, deaths of Latinx and Native American

individuals are systemically underreported when people are placed under the ‘white,’ ‘black,’ or ‘other’ category.

Even with inaccurate reporting, these communities are disproportionately killed in police shootings.

Before he knelt on Floyd’s neck, Officer Derek Chauvin was the subject of 18 complaints in his 19 years in the police force. He was reprimanded twice—both times for incidents involving shooting civilians. Chauvin has shot three people in his time on the force, killing one. Police unions use their negotiating power to appeal judicial rulings and city policies that would see officers like Chauvin reprimanded, fired, or arrested. Under the Minneapolis Police Departments collective bargaining contract, any disciplinary records that did not result in punishment must be removed from an officer’s file. Officers who are fired for misconduct are still entitled to an appeals process that often results in reinstatement.

There are real, violent implications to the barriers they raise: a 2018 study by the University of Oxford found a direct positive correlation between police violence and misconduct in U.S. cities and the “robustness of protections afforded to police through union mechanisms.” A 2019 study by the University of Chicago discovered a 40 percent increase in cases of police violence in Florida following an expansion of collective-bargaining rights to police departments.

Calling for the arrest and proper punishment of individual officers after every incident of brutality is an exhausting process that will only lead to temporary justice.

The reform and eventual dismantling of national police unions is the only way to remove major barriers to the institutional change policing in America requires.

According to Christine Lopez, a professor at Georgetown Law School and the leader of the Department of Justice investigation of the Ferguson Police Department commissioned by President Barack Obama, police unions

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THE GEORGETOWN VOICE

across the nation bargain for excessive protections for officers accused of misconduct. While most labor unions negotiate benefits that benefit its entire membership, such as a pay raise or healthcare provisions, police unions often forgo monetary benefits as a bargaining chip to protect officers involved in disciplinary proceedings.

“For example, they will say ‘no, that’s fine. You don’t need to give us the five percent wage increase we initially asked for, just make sure you give us the opportunity to not have to be interviewed for 48 hours after a critical incident happens,’” Lopez said.

Unions can also negotiate for cities to remove complaints from personnel files after one year. At the time union contracts are negotiated, Lopez explained, the opportunity to save on pay raises in exchange for unpublished complaints is an attractive deal for the city. “It only comes back to bite you if and when you get sued,” she said.

The long term cost of such a deal, however, is transparency. And more deaths of innocent Americans.

Allowing police departments to remove or conceal misconduct records makes it challenging for officials to discover patterns of harmful employee history or handle so-called “bad apples.” Many officers who are tried for police brutality have long histories of violence filed away from public view—so when their use of force results in civilian death, it seems inexcusable they were not disciplined long before.

The problem to Lopez is not collective bargaining itself, but rather the outsized acquiescences cities make to police unions.

“I do think there’s a need for workers to sort of use their collective strength to ensure that their rights are being respected and they get the best deal they can from their employers,” she said.

Greggory Pemberton, the chairman of the D.C. Police Union, which represents 3,600 members of the Metropolitan Police Department (MPD), also defends the role of police unions in protecting employees. He argues that, like unions for teachers or firefighters, collective bargaining ultimately protects workers from unfair treatment or discrimination.

“Unions make sure that the disciplinary system is actually carried out with some fairness and some integrity,” Pemberton said. “So if there’s an allegation against them, it has to be investigated. That investigation has to be based on facts and merit.”

Pemberton maintains police unions ensure equality and prevent racist or sexist treatment within the force, as an officer can only be fired for just cause. According to Pemberton, the union protects minority officers from discrimination or over-disciplining.

Lopez and Pemberton are right. Every body of workers should be able to advocate for employee rights, and protections should exist within police departments to prevent the unfair termination of workers based on gender, race, sexuality, ethnicity, or religion.

But police unions and teachers unions are not analogous. Teachers do not have the legal ability to kill as a part of their job. Some teachers may deserve judicial proceedings for misconduct, yet numbers of teachers with formal complaints pale in comparison to the incidents of violence initiated by police officers each year.

Teachers, janitors, and truck drivers unionizing to ensure fair compensation and conditions is one thing.

Using the power of a union to intimidate politicians and torment communities of color is another.

Police unions across the U.S. spend millions of dollars lobbying for politicians who pledge to fund police departments. Unlike their equivalents in Canada and the U.K., American police unions are not impeded from endorsing candidates and donating to campaigns.

According to Maplight data, police unions have spent at least $47.3 million in federal elections since the 2008 cycle, and leverage substantial influence in local elections. These dollars often go towards politicians considered “tough on crime” who dismiss calls to reform police or reduce department funding.

Pemberton defended police unions in these scenarios, claiming that their purpose was to prevent the very increases in misconduct they seem to allow.

“Nobody hates bad cops more than police unions. Set aside for a moment, just the ethical and integrity issues that come with working next to somebody that is doing their job in a malicious manner,” he said. “It does not help police unions, to advocate for bad cops, it doesn’t help our ability to collect a bargain. It doesn’t help our public relations.”

Following a complaint, police unions provide members with an attorney to ensure a fair trial and that minority officers are not unfairly terminated, according to Pemberton. The case is heard before a panel to determine if the officer can keep their job. Even if the panel agreed that the officer should be terminated, the union can still appeal the decision to an arbitrator to settle the dispute.

While police unions may hate bad cops nominally, they still protect them through the system of defense they have created.

Everyday citizens rely on the justice system as it is to make judgements, yet police unions go beyond basic legal protection of their employees—they retain additional

defenses and loopholes for self-preservation. These same defenses are not afforded to civilians subject to police brutality and a flawed criminal justice system. Our current judicial system needs reform, but as long as everyday Americans go through it, our police should too.

Police violence in 2020 has included not only the direct murders of Taylor, Floyd, Tony McDade, and David McAtee, but widespread violence against protesters participating in marches across the country. Reports from Portland tell of protesters beaten unconscious in the street, and in New York, officers drove a police vehicle into a Brooklyn crowd, knocking protesters to the ground.

On July 22 of this year, D.C. Mayor Bowser signed emergency legislation prohibiting D.C. police from using pepper spray, tear gas, stun grenades, or rubber bullets against a crowd of protesters. The reform bill also required the swifter release of body camera footage and the reduced role of police unions in officer disciplinary proceedings.

According to Pemberton, the new reforms do little to restrict officers’ use of force—while the bill forbids the use of rubber bullets, pepper spray, stun grenades, and tear gas at First Amendment assemblies, officers were already forbidden from doing so under Title 22 in D.C. code.

According to Pemberton, once a protest results in $5,000 of damage, the protest is classified as a “riot” and police can use previously restricted force.

The concept that police force can be turned on or off at the arbitrary and subjective line of $5,000 in damage is concerning. Any area of arbitrary legal policy disadvantages the public and benefits police unions who can use uncertainty to settle disputes in favor of their members.

The only way to end the terror of police brutality is to pursue more radical forms of reform, such as reducing the authority and of departments and their contact with communities, but police unions remain the loudest critic of even minor improvements.

A June 25 decision by D.C.’s Committee on the Judiciary and Public Safety approved a $15 million cut from the MPD budget. Pemberton protested proposed funding cuts to the MPD, arguing budget cuts might result in a reduction of 264 officers in the next year.

“That’s an entire police district when you’re talking about,” Pemberton said. “That is really going to affect our ability to service communities at the rate that we would like.”

However, many protesters advocate for a “divest and invest” model, using funds typically earmarked for police departments for alternate programs would also serve the community and address mental illness, domestic violence, or neighborhood disagreements that do not require police presence.

Alternative programs to policing have been growing across the country with success, such as Crisis Assistance Helping Out On The Streets (CAHOOTS) based out of Eugene, Oregon. A mental health intervention organization that aims to remove police from mental health-related 911 situations, the program estimates it can handle 17 percent of public safety calls, reducing contact between the police and individuals with mental illnesses. Considering that 22 percent of violent deaths by police are related to mental illness, organizations like CAHOOTS can help prevent unnecessary murders.

Reducing contact between police and communities in exchange for alternative systems of public safety support will also help reduce over-policing people of color. America’s imprisonment rate is the highest in

the world, with Black individuals incarcerated at a rate over five percent greater than that of white individuals.

While police departments have their place in regards to violent crime, their authority has grown and with it, the excess use of force. The 911 call that led to Floyd’s death was about a potentially counterfeit bill—a minor offense, if an offense at all. Police were not necessary in the first place, and an alternate facilitator could have resolved the situation without violence. Instead, Floyd, an unarmed civilian, was murdered.

Pemberton believes that alternative policing won’t reduce police workload to the extent advocates believe, leaving departments stretched thin, an argument commonly offered by police advocates.

“Other community services, they might be better at handling some of the things, but you can’t tell me that police officers are going to have less work to do on any given day,” he said. “The problem is generally when you reduce police budgets in the first place, as the money comes out of manpower and training.”

Pemberton argued that the police have been taking on the responsibilities of alternative organizations that aimed to handle mental illness and domestic abuse calls for years, placing more burden on officers.

“The original agencies that were designed to do this have failed,” he said.

Addressing rebuttals by police unions toward reform policies, Lopez advised questioning past arguments by the police unions that have granted them their power at the expense of other civilians.

“We have to be really skeptical when anyone comes back and says, ‘Well you know, you’re going to risk the lives of officers, the tear-gassing works, what was the behavior of the protesters,’” Lopez said. “We have to ask ourselves, is this a meaningfully protective measure, or is it just something that has been abused? You have to look at the evidence and the facts.”

While Pemberton articulated the union’s arguments against aggressive police reform, past incremental legislation has failed to reduce police brutality in this country. There is no perfect solution—but with every death at the hands of police comes the necessity for radical reform to policing in America.

Far too many Black Americans have died at the hands of police. The ability of the police force as a whole to surveil and target communities of color will continue to cost the lives of Black Americans.

Body cameras have resulted in no statistical change in police behavior or increased termination for officers who use excessive force. Increased training did not prevent the deaths of Eric Garner, Freddie Gray, or Philando Castile.

The only way to reduce police violence in America is to limit the interaction between police and public. Reduction of the police itself, long feared due to violent and often racist conceptions of police power, is the sole method that can end the patterns of prejudice that continue to cost lives today.

Alternative policing programs can, and do, work. In the meantime, as broader reforms are sought, police unions must first be dismantled. So long as police unions—and the problematic, deadly barriers they erect—exist, officers will continue not to face real accountability for acts of violence. Reform is possible. We just have to be brave enough to pursue it. G

August 28, 2020

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Honoring John Lewis and 80 years of “good trouble” PHOTO ESSAY BY NATHAN POSNER

Hundreds march and carry signs remembering Lewis

Two girls watch Lewis’s casket on its way to lie in state in the Alabama state capitol building in Montgomery on July 26.

A flag flies at half-mast as Lewis’s casket enters the Georgia state capitol in Atlanta on July 29.

People gather to pay their respects at the John Lewis mural in Atlanta on July 18.

On July 26, Lewis’s casket crosses the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, where he was beaten by state troopers on March 7, 1965.

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A mourner wears a mask honoring Lewis as he lies in state in Atlanta on July 29.

photos by nathan posner

A crowd remembers Lewis at a July 19 vigil in Atlanta with posters sporting his iconic phrase.

Mourners raise their fists in respect in front of the mural in Atlanta on July 18.

Civil rights icon and Georgia Congressman John Lewis passed away at the age of 80 on July 17. Lewis, who was born outside of Troy, Alabama, on Feb. 21, 1940, was one of the 13 original Freedom Riders in 1961 and served as a keynote speaker at the 1963 March on Washington when he was only 23 years old. On March 7, 1965, Lewis was beaten by state troopers as he led 600 protestors advocating for equal voting rights over the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, on what is now known as “Bloody Sunday.” In 1986, Lewis was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives as a Democrat representing Georgia’s 5th Congressional district. He was reelected to the position 16 times and served until his death. In the pictures below, Americans mourn Lewis’s death and celebrate his tireless efforts to protect civil rights and his lifelong service to the state.

Georgia politician Stacey Abrams attends Lewis’s funeral on July 30 in Atlanta.

A woman pays her respects to Lewis as he lies in state in the Georgia state capitol on July 29 in Atlanta.

Hundreds of mourners hold up candles at a July 19 vigil in Atlanta.

AUGUST 28, 2020

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THE GU 272: EXPLAINED

BY CAROLINE HAMILTON

S

ince Georgetown University’s long history with slavery re-entered public view five years ago, faculty, administrators, student activists, and descendants of those enslaved by the Jesuits have grappled with the significance and trauma of this history and its implications for the university today.

A landmark referendum to pay reparations to the descendants of 272 enslaved people sold by the university in 1838 is the most prominent effort to reckon with the legacy of slavery on Georgetown’s campus. However, after it was passed by the student body, the effort effectively stalled with the university Board of Directors.

The Georgetown Slavery, Memory, and Reconciliation Project is still uncovering ways in which Georgetown perputated and upheld the instituion of slavery, and student activists, faculty, and independent researchers continue to advocate for reparative justice.

is likely that some wealthy families who donated to the school were themselves enslavers.

As national tensions over the continued existence of slavery grew throughout the 1800s, the Georgetown community overwhelmingly advocated for its preservation.

Eighty percent of Georgetown College alumni who ended up fighting in the Civil War fought for the Confederacy.

“The general attitude of Jesuit faculty and students favored slavery as at least a necessary evil,” the Working Group’s 2016 report reads.

In the early 19th century, an estimated 10 percent of people on campus were enslaved, many of them taken from the bustling slave port of Georgetown. Enslaved people are believed to have built all of Georgetown’s oldest buildings, including the ones now called Isaac Hawkins Hall and Anne Marie Becraft Hall.

Georgetown’s History with Slavery According to the Working Group on Slavery, Memory, and Reconciliation commissioned by University President John DeGioia in 2015, “Georgetown University’s origins and growth, and successes and failures, can be linked to America’s slave-holding economy and culture.”

The Jesuits of Maryland, who ran Georgetown in its first decades, owned and operated plantations throughout Maryland that ran on enslaved labor.

Profits from these plantations were funnelled into the university, and given the region’s agricultural profile, it

The GU272 The most notorious incident of Georgetown’s history with slavery is the sale of 272 enslaved people, known today as the GU272, by the Jesuits of Maryland in 1838. To keep the university financially viable, two of Georgetown’s early presidents sold these men, women, and children for a total of $115,000—roughly $3.3 million in today’s money.

Shepard Thomas (COL ’20), a descendant of the 272, asks the Georgetown community to consider the sale’s implications for the university today.

“I feel that we as people cannot overlook the fact that there would be no Georgetown University without the involuntary sale of these people,” he wrote in an email to the Voice.

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The story of the 272 doesn’t end in 1838. After being sold to Louisiana enslavers in the South, many were separated from their families and sent to other plantations.

Independent genealogists, and Georgetown faculty, and students picked up the trail in 2015 after student protests over two campus buildings named after the Jesuits who organized the 1838 sale. After five years of searching, around 9,000 living descendants have since been identified, many of whom still live in Louisiana.

A 2016 New York Times article thrust their search into the national spotlight, detailing the 1838 sale and asking what Georgetown owes to the 272’s descendants. The flurry of publicity surrounding the article added urgency to Georgetown’s internal reckoning.

On-campus Legacy When Georgetown renovated the then-called Mulledy and McSherry Halls in 2015 to create space for more student housing, it prompted a new investigation of their namesakes. The pair, Rev. Thomas F. Mulledy, S.J. and Rev. William McSherry, S.J., orchestrated the 1838 sale and both served as university president during their lives.

In response to the new scrutiny, DeGioia convened the Working Group on Slavery, Memory, and Reconciliation to investigate Georgetown’s history with slavery and make recommendations about how to acknowledge and memorialize it.

History professor Fr. David Collins, S.J., chair of the group, described it as an opportunity to account for Georgetown’s past.

“It’s a way in which we can all be drawn into a conversation where we have to use the first person,” he said. “We have to talk about: this is what we did. This is about our history. What are we going to do about it?”

Following student protests, a sit-in, and the Working Group’s recommendation, DeGioia announced in November 2015 that the buildings would be temporarily renamed Freedom and Remembrance Halls.

In 2017, the halls were renamed Isaac Hawkins Hall and Anne Marie Becraft Hall to honor the first enslaved man listed on the 1838 bill of sale and a nun who founded one of Washington D.C.’s first schools for Black girls, respectively.

Around the same time, GUSA senators and student activists began pressing the university to follow through on the Working Group’s recommendation of building a memorial to the 272. Despite their efforts, no such memorial has yet been built.

The GU272 Referendum Over the next few years, the university community continued to investigate Georgetown’s history with slavery.

After the university formally apologized and offered preferential admissions status to descendants similar to that given to legacy students, the topic of monetary reconciliation arose.

The Isaac Hawkins Legacy Group, composed of Hawkins’ direct descendants, called on Georgetown in February 2018 to repay them for their enslaved ancestors’ labor. “They have asked for something tangible to help them deal with those needs that arise from their connection to Georgetown’s involvement in the slave trade,” wrote a spokesperson for the group in an email to the Voice.

Over the summer of 2018, a group of students visited Maringouin, Louisiana, near one of the plantations where the 272 were sold. Through conversations with descendants, many of whom still live in communities in and around Maringouin, they were inspired to bring the question of reparations to the student body.

When the students returned to campus that fall, they founded the GU272 advocacy team, which strives to represent and elevate descendants in university education, memorialization, and reconciliation efforts. Their efforts gained traction in January 2019, when then-GUSA Senator Sam Appel (COL ’20) introduced a resolution based on their activism before the GUSA Ways and Means Committee.

Also sponsored by the GU272 advocacy team, the resolution called for a referendum on the creation of a reconciliation contribution to benefit the descendants of the 272. The contribution was to be similar to the student activities fee, collected once a semester in students’ tuition bills. It would start at $27.20 to honor the number of enslaved people the university sold and would rise according to inflation.

The money would then be used to benefit identified descendants through funding causes and proposals aimed to especially help descendants who continue to reside in underserved communities.

“As students at an elite institution, we recognize the great privileges we have been given, and wish to at least partially repay our debts to those families whose involuntary sacrifices made these privileges possible,” the resolution reads.

Advocacy team members Hannah Michael (SFS ’21) and descendant Mélisande Short-Colomb (COL ’21) were the first non-GUSA senators to sponsor a resolution in the

governing body’s history. On Jan. 23, the resolution passed the Ways and Means Committee unanimously.

With the addition of an amendment to create a GU272 Reconciliation Board of Trustees composed of both students and descendants to oversee and allocate the fund, the resolution was put to the full Senate. Debate there also proved contentious, as some senators argued that today’s Georgetown students are not responsible for the university’s actions nearly 200 years ago.

Sen. Samantha Moreland (COL ’21), who took up the bill after Appel resigned for unrelated reasons, countered with the fact that the resolution’s passage would not create the fund, only pose the question of its creation to the student body.

Moreland closed the final GUSA debate on the bill by expressing her concern that if the resolution did not pass, the student body’s opportunity to address the 1838 sale would be lost. “If I leave this meeting and this doesn’t pass, I’m going to have a different perspective on this school, this Senate,” she said.

The resolution, which required a two-thirds majority of all senators, passed 20-4 in the GUSA Senate’s Feb. 3 meeting.

In the two months between the vote in GUSA and the vote on the referendum itself, critics and advocates of the fund both launched fierce campaigns for their side, posting flyers across campus and plastering social media feeds with their arguments.

When the referendum results rolled in early on April 12, a clear majority of students supported the reconciliation fund. Sixty-six percent of voters were in favor, a victory margin of more than 1,200 votes, with a record voter turnout of 57.9 percent.

After a brief constitutional scuffle—Rowan Saydlowski (COL ’21) and Chris Castaldi-Moller (SFS ’21) filed a suit alleging improper conduct by Sen. Dylan Hughes (COL ’19) and the GUSA Election Commission and challenging the constitutionality of a non-amendment referendum—the Senate upheld the referendum results in April 2019.

GUSA executives Norman Francis, Jr. (COL ’20) and Aleida Olvera (COL ’20) celebrated the passage as a meaningful step towards addressing the trauma Georgetown inflicted upon the 272 and their descendants.

“If implemented by University officials, the measures advanced in this referendum would put Georgetown on the right side of history and constitute the first reparations policy in the nation,” their statement read.

“Despite our excitement at this outcome, it is important to emphasize that the results of this vote (as with any student referendum) are non-binding, and the GU272 proposal will require approval by the Georgetown Board of Directors before becoming policy.”

Stalled Out Since the referendum results were referred to the Board of Directors in April 2019, little concrete action has been taken.

Board members met with student leaders in June 2019 to discuss the referendum and its objectives. “The Board plans to engage in follow-up discussions with student leaders,” the university stated after the meeting.

By October 2019, Georgetown had not announced a plan of action, despite the looming deadline to fund projects for the 2020–2021 academic year. Student activists protested the Board’s October meeting, holding signs that read “Implement the Referendum” and “Respect Our 2541 Votes.”

Weeks later, DeGioia outlined the next steps for the Slavery, Memory, and Reconciliation Project. In lieu of the $27.20 reconciliation contribution from all students, he proposed a fundraising effort to support projects benefiting descendants, promising it would meet or exceed the funds collected from the mandatory contribution.

“We embrace the spirit of this student proposal and will work with our Georgetown community to create an initiative that will support community-based projects with Descendant communities,” DeGioia wrote. “The university will ensure that the initiative has resources commensurate with, or exceeding, the amount that would have been raised annually through the student fee proposed in the Referendum, with opportunities for every member of our community to contribute.”

The proposal was swiftly met with criticism by descendants and advocacy team members, who claimed that the university was attempting to replace reparative justice with philanthropy. “Reconciliation is simply not charity,” Students for GU272 wrote in a Facebook post.

“The GU272 referendum is the vehicle through which 2,541 students have committed to engage in reconciliation,” they wrote. “And Georgetown University is actively denying our voices.”

The university has not provided details on how the plan will be implemented or how much it has raised, though projects benefiting descendants are supposed to be funded beginning in the 2020-2021 academic year.

In the meantime, the Georgetown Slavery Archive, part of the Slavery, Memory, and Reconciliation Project, has continued to unearth more of Georgetown’s history with slavery.

Faculty and student researchers have rediscovered and compiled information on the 1838 sale, archival materials from the Maryland Jesuits and early Georgetown administrators, and interviews with descendants, all of which can be found on their website.

Criticism over university inaction was renewed over the summer of 2020, when the disparate impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic and nationwide protests over the police killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and countless other Black Americans underscored deep racial injustice in the United States.

To prepare for another semester of pressuring administrators, the advocacy team updated their demands this June: implement the GU272 referendum, create a commission to study and develop plans for financial reparations, and cut Georgetown’s ties with the Metropolitan Police Department (MPD).

“The university’s relationship with the MPD points to the continued violence experienced by Black students at this school,” the advocacy team wrote, arguing that MPD’s presence on and around campus creates an unsafe environment for students of color.

While the university’s current contract with MPD is not publicly available, GUPD’s website states that it “enjoys a close professional relationship with the D.C. Metropolitan Police Department.”

Descendants and student activists also took to social media to renew their demands for action. “As a soon to be graduate and a direct descendant of the GU272+, it is disgraceful that the board has not honored the vote that took place in April of 2019,” Thomas wrote on Facebook.

“In the end, the student body and I will be on the right side of history. It’s time for Georgetown University to choose their position.”

AUGUST 28, 2020

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HALFTIME SPORTS

By Alex Brady, Ethan Cantrell, Anuj Dutta, Arshan Goudarzi, and Roman Peregrino

A Quick Guide to D.C. Sports A

n important part of settling into a new place is familiarizing yourself with the local sports teams. Washington D.C. has a rich professional sports environment, with teams from the MLB, NFL, NBA, WNBA, and NHL. As the “City of Champions,” D.C. fans have been fortunate to live through recent championships by the NHL’s Capitals (2018), MLB’s Nationals (2019), and WNBA’s Washington Mystics (2019).

In a short form no longer than your first college paper, the Voice’s Halftime Sports section has brought together an overview of each of the five professional teams.

Washington Nationals (MLB): After earning the World Series crown last year, the Nationals team that emerged from the offseason did not pack the same punch. Though the Nationals lost star Anthony Rendon in free agency, they were able to retain pitcher Stephen Strasburg to keep their powerful starting rotation intact.

The COVID-19 pandemic has drastically reshaped the 2020 season, and for the Nationals that meant 15-year Washington veteran Ryan Zimmerman opted out for the year. Fortunately, Juan Soto is and will continue to be a centerpiece of the team’s appearance moving forward.

This year’s Nationals team has not been able to replicate last year’s winning equation when it comes to staging incredible comebacks. As of Aug. 25, the Nationals currently sit at last place in the National League East with a record of 1116. Not all hope is lost, considering how close the teams in the NL East are in the standings. Soto has shown that he is one of the best hitters in MLB, bursting with power (8 HR in 84 PA) while maintaining discipline at the plate (.475 OBP). However, both Strasburg and veteran infielder Starlin Castro will miss the rest of the regular season with wrist injuries. Overall, while the starting rotation has underperformed, the bullpen has made major strides over their performance in 2019. In particular, Tanner Rainey has been a revelation, striking out nearly 13 batters per 9 innings while cutting his walk rate in half. Starting pitching is 14

THE GEORGETOWN VOICE

what built the Nationals, and their struggles this unorthodox season have been difficult to overcome.

Washington Football Team (NFL): The Washington Football Team, formerly known as the Washington Redskins, have had an eventful offseason for all the wrong reasons. After years of pressure to change the team’s derogatory slogan and logo, numerous team sponsors began to pull out from the organization, ultimately convincing management to finally update the team’s brand. Incredibly, no new slogan was chosen to replace the Redskins tag, and the team announced they would temporarily be called the Washington Football Team.

Along with the name change, numerous sexual harassment accusations from female employees and former cheerleaders have come to light, with more coming out by the day. To top it all off, recent reports state minority owners of the Football Team are trying to sell their stakes. If there is any consolation for Washington, who finished last in the NFC East at 3-13 last season and haven’t made the playoffs since 2015, there isn’t much lower that the franchise can go.

New head coach Ron Rivera will look to right the ship in Washington with some new defensive pieces, including second overall pick DE Chase Young and free agent CB Kendall Fuller. This season, the team will look to develop a young core to build around for the future. Young will be a key player along with second-year QB Dwayne Haskins, wideout Terry McLaurin, and defensive youngsters Montez Sweat and Jonathan Allen. Rivera, new OC Scott Turner, and new DC Jack Del Rio will look to bring out the most of Washington’s younger pieces in hopes of becoming a respectable franchise rather than one others see as an easy-win.

Washington Wizards (NBA): To put it bluntly, the Wizards are in a bad spot right now. The team is heavily skewed towards its offense, which is run almost single-handedly by Bradley Beal (bless his soul) as its defense has been nonexistent for the past couple seasons.

In the NBA bubble, the sorry state of the team was made painfully clear. The Wizards traveled to the bubble without Beal and ended up being the team with the worst bubble record of 1-7, only winning against a Celtics team who rested their starting lineup. The losses in the bubble dropped their position in the overall standings behind the Charlotte Hornets, who did not even travel to Orlando.

There is some hope for this team next season, however. Star PG John Wall is returning after being injured for nearly 2 years, and Beal has signed an extension through 2023. Additionally, Ian Mahinmi’s bloated $64 million contract expired, leaving more salary cap space for future signings or bigger contracts to young players such as Rui Hachimura or Thomas Bryant, who have both played well for the Wizards. The bubble trip also gave rookies like Troy Brown Jr. valuable experience to explore different positions and develop further. However, it remains to be seen if Wall can live up to his max contract. He’ll be 30 years old by the time next season starts and has relied heavily on his athleticism in the past. His age and Achilles injury will no doubt tear into his playstyle, and how he adapts will be key to the team’s success.

Even if Wall comes back as an offensive monster, Coach Scott Brooks will need to shore up the defense if the Wizards want to win a playoffs series in the near future.

Mystics (WNBA): Led by WNBA MVP Elena Delle Donne, the Mystics ran through the competition in 2019, resulting in a title when they defeated the Connecticut Sun in five games. Delle Donne was undeniably the squad’s star, battling through back spasms in the WNBA Finals to cap off a stellar regular season. She was supported by a host of role players who helped create a high octane offensive attack.

Over the offseason, they lost Guard Kristi Toliver to free agency, but traded for former MVP Tina Charles, and were expected to contend once more. Unfortunately, due to COVID-19 concerns, Delle Donne, Natasha Cloud, and LaToya Sanders all opted out of

the 2020 WNBA season, which is currently taking place in a Bradenton, Florida bubble.

Expectations quickly tempered.

Led by Ariel Atkins, Aerial Powers and Emma Meesseman, the ‘Stics started the season with three consecutive wins. Then the bottom fell out. Powers badly injured her hamstring, and the team is currently sitting on a 4-9 record after a seven game losing streak. Head coach Mike Thibault has begun to focus on player development, knowing that the team will have a chance to contend once more next season. The team has also spent its time supporting pertinent social justice issues, at a level incomparable to other District teams. Sometimes the world is more important than basketball, and the Mystics have been on the forefront for a long time.

Washington Capitals (NHL): This season has definitely been disappointing for Caps fans. With first round exits in the past two years, the Capitals need to reevaluate their gameplan.

On August 23rd, the Capitals fired head coach Todd Reirden, who coached the team for two seasons. Now, the Capitals need someone who can get the job done. As Ovi, Backstrom, Oshie and Carlson all get older, the window of opportunity is closing.

Luckily, there are a few solid coaches available, including Gerard Gallant and Peter Laviolette, and hopefully the Caps can find a coach who can make the most of a powerful but aging squad. On the ice, the Caps took a big hit between the pipes. With goaltender Braden Holtby’s contract ending after this season, it may be the end of his tenure in Washington, especially when the team doesn’t have the cap space to offer him this contract, so it is very likely that Holtby’s time in Washington is over.

The Capitals have been Stanley Cup contenders for a while, and as long as Ovi has gas in the tank, I don’t see them missing the playoffs in the near future. However, teams like the Rangers and Devils are on the rise, and with the draft and offseason coming up, the Metro could get very interesting. G

SPORTS

A Disturbance in the Force It’s a G Thing By Nathan Chen This article is part of “It’s A G Thing”, a 4-part series about the history of the Georgetown men’s basketball team both on and off the court.

“T

hompson the n----- flop must go.”

Forty-five years ago, those words were sprayed on a bed sheet at McDonough Arena during a six-game losing streak. To this day, we still do not know who hung the banner. The cowards ran off when the sheet fell to the ground, but the message infuriated the team. That day, the Georgetown men’s basketball team took out its frustrations on Dickinson College, winning 102-60 en route to their first NCAA tournament appearance in 32 years. After three seasons of relative mediocrity and being attacked by fans for the color of his skin, an ordinary coach might’ve folded under the pressure.

John Thompson, Jr. was no ordinary coach.

Known by his friends and enemies as Big John, he was a disturbance in the Force.

Standing tall at 6’10”, he was much more than just an intimidating courtside presence.

For nearly fifty years, Coach Thompson has defined the Georgetown men’s basketball program. He took a program that won three of 26 games the year before he arrived and oversaw a nine-win turnaround. He saw his program through, winning a national championship in 1984 and catapulting the Big East into the top tier of basketball conferences. All the while, he fought racial adversity and spoke loudly where there was injustice, but also where there was progress.

“With the discrimination that’s gone on in sports, to have a Black coach who’s come from those poor areas that’s able to translate and articulate the way Coach Thompson was able to in a time when he was winning, he was a trendsetter in launching and helping to build up a new conference called the Big East,” said forward Jerome Williams (COL ’96).

Georgetown’s teams in the 1980s were molded in Coach Thompson’s image: brash, physical, and dominant. They were a disruptive force for college basketball in that time period, which was defined by Power 5 schools in small college towns. Most teams would do their best to play the game and not ruffle any feathers. The Hoyas took a different approach.

“Our bench used to talk so much shit to the other team! People hated coming down

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in front of our bench,” recalled guard Gene Smith (COL ’84), the scrappy defensive stopper for the national championship team.

“We were always up on the bench applauding and talking, and that was part of the culture.”

They did a lot of winning, too, and they let you know about it. In the 1979-80 season, the first season Georgetown played as a member of the Big East, the Hoyas pulled off one of their most memorable victories, arguably setting the program on the course towards a championship. Led by senior guard John “Bay-Bay” Duren and senior forward Craig “Big Sky” Shelton, they marched into Syracuse’s Manley Field House to decide the regular-season Big East champion, a venue where the Orangemen had not lost in 57 tries. This was to be a coronation, a glorious last game at the beloved arena before the team moved into the spacious Carrier Dome.

Syracuse held a 14-point lead at halftime and led most of the way, but the Hoyas proved to have late life. Spurred by a 15-5 run, Georgetown tied the game at 50. Unwisely, the Orangemen fouled sophomore guard Eric “Sleepy” Floyd with five seconds remaining, and he sank both free throws to win the game, 52-50. It was a monumental upset, and Coach Thompson knew it. “Manley Field House is officially closed!” Thompson thundered in the postgame press conference.

“Big John is a formidable person, and he’s loud and he’s articulate,” said Smith.

“That was like saying, ‘Go fuck yourself!’”

Thompson never minced words off the court, and his team backed him up on the court. “Part of the country loved us,” said center Patrick Ewing (COL ‘85), who is the team’s head coach today. “Our physical style, our aggressive, in-your-face style.”

Georgetown’s take-no-prisoners style of play caused a young Williams to take notice during his childhood and into the recruiting process. Born at Georgetown University Hospital during Coach Thompson’s first year, Williams grew up in nearby Bethesda just as the Hoyas were rising to national prominence.

“I remember being a kid looking at Georgetown and seeing Virginia when they

had Ralph Sampson and basically cheering for Georgetown because it’s the home school,” recalled Williams.

With the eyes of Black America watching, the Hoyas always used their prominent platform to bring social issues to light. This was a time where many urban communities, including D.C., were ravaged by the crack epidemic, mass incarceration, and homicide. At the height of his cocaine empire between 1986 and 1989, kingpin Rayful Edmond sold an estimated 1,700 pounds of cocaine a month, and the neighborhood he operated in was nearly 95 percent Black. D.C.’s Metropolitan Police Department made an estimated 800-900 arrests on weekends. The number of homicides in the city shot up as crack cocaine infiltrated the city, peaking at 482 deaths in 1991.

At the same time, young Black people did not have the same educational opportunities as their white counterparts in suburban areas, and thus had an extremely difficult time exiting this trap. In 1990, just 9.6 percent of undergraduate students enrolled in degree-granting institutions were Black, compared with their white peers making up 77.5 percent of this population. Coach Thompson was determined to provide as many kids with an education as possible in addition to his masterful use of his platform to make the public aware of racial inequities.

This rang especially true on January 14, 1989, when Coach Thompson walked out of the game against Boston College to protest the NCAA’s Proposition 42, which would have required freshmen to have a gradepoint average above 2.0 and a minimum score of 700 on the SAT or 15 on the ACT. This rule, centered around racially biased standardized tests still plagued by such problems today, would have eliminated scholarships for 1,800 prospective athletes at the time. Coach Thompson feared that athletes from disadvantaged backgrounds would be disproportionately affected by the rule, and he used his platform to send a powerful and clear message.

Coach Thompson again threatened to pull his team off the floor on January 22, 1995, in a road game against Villanova. Star

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guard Allen Iverson had been convicted of a felony in his hometown of Hampton, Va., but was granted clemency by Virginia Governor L. Douglas Wilder. Several Villanova fans sensed an opportunity to demonize the young Iverson, so they dressed in prison garb and held signs that said “Convict U”.

“I mean, that’s just horrible, but that shows the systemic racism at its core, and how he dealt with that,” said Williams.

“He was getting blasted and put to be made fun of and never saying a word.

Never complaining. Never lashing out. It’s a testament to Allen Iverson. I’m glad he was my teammate. I’m so happy he became a league MVP, and even happier that he became a Hall of Famer after being the first person picked in the draft of 1996.”

Georgetown exerted its power in refusing to play opponents that disrespected them for the color of their skin. Actions that defied the status quo evolved into Hoya Paranoia, which was the memorable brand of Coach Thompson’s teams. They were projected by a mostly white media as the villains of college basketball, similar to the Oakland Raiders in the NFL. They derived their strength by embracing this title, endearing themselves to the substantial Black community in DC. Coach Thompson orchestrated it all, spreading the message any way he could.

“To have Georgetown as being one of those main events, whenever people would tune into the Big East, was just wonderful for the black community, because all those other colleges didn’t have all-Black teams,” said Williams. *** “Thompson the n----- flop must go.”

Forty-five years ago, those words hung off a bed sheet at McDonough Arena, during a six-game losing streak.

Today, a statue of Coach Thompson replaces that sign, in the Athletic Center that bears his name. It represents the disruptive nature of the program’s history, and it is a call to action for the program to be a disruptor today. G AUGUST 28, 2020

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LEISURE

Irresistible Offers Political Commentary for 2019, in 2020

BY ORLY SALIK

A

s the 2020 election draws closer, ads humanizing wealthy politicians start to fill television screens once more.

Inboxes are cluttered with donation requests, and campaign speeches hitting just the right number of buzzwords prey on the biases of their target audience with increasing frequency. Irresistible (2020), directed by Jon Stewart, tells us that our political system is only out to increase the money and power of those already in charge. Leaders should be looking to the needs of their people rather than to their own agendas—an important, grounding message during the frenzy of a normal election year. But during 2020’s election cycle, this isn’t what we need to be reminded of.

Irresistible follows the story of Gary Zimmer (Steve Carell), a political consultant for the Democratic Party, as he travels to the small town of Deerlaken, Wisconsin, in an attempt to elect party candidate Jack Hastings (Chris Cooper) to the mayorship of a Republican town.

The campaign catches the eye of Gary’s nemesis, Faith Brewster (Rose Byrne), a political consultant for the Republican Party, who immediately pours money into the conservative incumbent’s campaign.

What ensues is a media circus that no one from the town is particularly engaged in—the residents are used as puppets to further a fruitless rivalry between two eerily similar establishments.

Disillusionment with the political system is an unsurprising message for a film written and directed by Stewart, who has made his career by criticizing the ineptitude and hypocrisy of American 16

THE GEORGETOWN VOICE

politicians. Honestly, the movie feels like Stewart’s way of expressing his bottled-up thoughts on the state of politics since he retired from The Daily Show in 2015. The commentary on the alienation of ordinary Americans from the political system and the overinflated influence of money in campaigns is apt and necessary, but for a film that clearly thinks itself topical, it sorely misses the mark.

This, of course, is no one’s fault; the filmmakers could not have predicted the drastic turn our lives have taken since they started filming in 2019. However, the film’s narrative sequence banks on its message being apropos, as it subverts the typical storytelling structure to showcase how empty political rhetoric can be. Its premise cannot work if the commentary feels dated and out-of-touch with the current moment, and unfortunately, it does.

The film’s parody of conventional cinema is its real downfall. The climax of the movie intentionally does not deliver, and the political battle progresses forward aimlessly, linking jokes without a clear narrative. Hypothetically, the viewer is supposed to walk out of the film questioning if anything of substance happened; after all, this is reflective of our own government.

But the attempt to formulate a movie whose sequencing sends a message about our political climate frankly just results in a boring, unsatisfying film—a collection of sketches, rather than a cohesive movie. A slew of clever one-liners cannot redeem a doomed premise.

All this to say, certain storytelling choices work exactly in the satirical measure they are meant to for this film. If

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the message is that political institutions are a spectacle and that politicians are out of touch with their constituents, the film’s stylistic choices encapsulate that perfectly.

From the music to the setting, everything about the atmosphere the film creates is a picture of the most brutal stereotypes of a region, whether that be New York, rural Wisconsin, or Washington, D.C. When Gary arrives in Deerlaken, trading his freshly ironed suit for a flannel and oversized vest, the music playing in the background is reminiscent of what is heard walking down the streets of Frontierland in Disney World. When Gary and Jack fly to New York, jazz elevator music is heard beneath the drab conversations of wealthy white donors.

The shining moments of the film are those when Stewart allows his particular brand of political satire to come through.

The Republican-esque gun-toting campaign ads meant to appeal to middle America voters are truly hilarious, and the movie’s middle stretch when Gary’s campaign team begins forming super PACs lands almost as well as a segment on The Daily Show. The speech where Jack rails against the very elite Gary is forcing him to solicit money from, only for his Democratic donors to eat it up and pad his pockets, marks the film’s most memorable commentary on political emptiness.

Still, many of the movie’s less inherently political bits stretch about five lines too long, ruining the moments where there could have been a genuine laugh. When Gary descends on Deerlaken, ordering a “burger and a Bud” to seem like one of the guys, the uppity D.C. political consultant cannot figure out how to open the bottle; the other men in the bar take notice, engaging in rather awkward dialogue about whether or not he needs help. Had this not gone on for over a minute, perhaps it would have been funny, but the sheer length of the scene ruins it. The film knows exactly where to cut the political jokes for maximum laughs; with the apolitical humor, it flounders.

More than any cycle in recent history, the outcome of this year’s election feels like life or death. As the coronavirus continues to close businesses, cancel schools, and endanger lives, and as the country engages in a nuanced and well overdue conversation about systemic racial injustice, the stakes of the political issues at hand are deeply personal. Reducing the emotional weight of these ballot issues by drowning them in discouraging, cynical political satire just doesn’t feel right in our current moment, and it simply drags down the movie-watching experience.

Perhaps the biggest problem with the film’s messaging is that it insists on demonizing the Republican and Democratic Parties equally, in a world where Republican leadership has failed our country’s citizens so deeply that a change in authority seems like the only way to restore any semblance of normalcy. What was meant to serve as a reminder of the flaws in a semi-typical election cycle just seems too simplistic for a country experiencing the uprooting of everything it knows. In 2019, Irresistible could have been introspective, if slow and sometimes pedantic. Today, it is preaching the wrong message from its soapbox. G

LEISURE

Holey Moley: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Mini-Golf

BY ANNABELLA HOGE

I

am a terrible golfer. Granted, I’ve only ever been golfing one time and gave up halfway through, but rest assured, I was awful. Then mini-golf entered my life—a game that is fun, easy, and stress-free for the whole family. Its combination of fantastical contraptions and the indisputable athletic mettle that it requires is the perfect remedy for living through the coronavirus pandemic. There’s only one problem—how do you enjoy the wonders of mini-golf while remaining safely indoors?

Let me introduce you to Holey Moley, ABC’s mini-golf reality sports competition television show. My family and I have been watching this show all summer, and it has been my most reliable source of fascinating, albeit wacky, entertainment.

The show recently finished airing its second season, dubbed Holey Moley II: The Sequel, and is essentially Wipeout meets American Ninja Warrior meets your basic mini-golf course. Holey Moley is truly one of the most absurd feats of television I’ve ever seen, and it is exactly the kind of weird that the world needs right now.

Holey Moley’s gameplay is rather simple, but that doesn’t stop the show from being absolutely insane. In each episode, eight contestants—all selfproclaimed mini-golf pros—are paired off and compete on the mini-golf obstacle course before them. That pool of eight is eliminated over time until two contestants remain to play for the final hole of the episode. The winner of each episode then receives “The Golden Putter” trophy, a “Holey Moley” green plaid jacket, and a spot in the season finale, where they’ll compete for a chance to win $250,000.

Stephen Curry, executive producer and resident golf pro, has made appearances across both seasons, assisting contestants out on the course, and occasionally appearing as an animated cartoon character. Actor Rob Riggle and

ESPN sportscaster Joe Tessitore serve as the commentating host duo, with Tessitore often attempting to stay on track while Riggle provides his comedic takes on the mini-golf action. The most wonderful thing about their narration is that Riggle and Tessitore are hosting a ridiculous competition with the utmost sincerity and respect for the game. They know it’s absurd, but they are fully committed to the bit.

A staple of the show is, of course, the supersized, themed mini-golf holes and the obstacles on the course. The second season had 18 holes, each one more outrageous than the last. At “Dragon’s Breath,” contestants wear fireproof armor while they try to putt the ball under a drawbridge. As they try to sink one in, they are literally set on fire by the firebreathing “dragons.” It’s quite a spectacle: grown adults in knight-like armor, on fire, playing mini-golf.

Another beloved hole is modeled and named after the planet Uranus.

Contestants must putt their ball around the ring of “Uranus” to the green on the other side. This inevitably leads to quips from Riggle like, “I’ve never seen this much pressure around Uranus,” and, “Did it get stuck in Uranus?” Through the tears of frankly childish laughter, you could be forgiven for forgetting that you are watching a show about mini-golf.

The chaos doesn’t stop there.

Contestants zipline across pools of water to a totem pole, run through windmills over water, and cling onto giant rotating hot dogs just to achieve victory. And better yet, the contestants are as colorful and quirky as the courses. One episode from the second season, “It’s Apple Sauce Time!”, was named for James Aguilar, a contestant with a particular fondness for applesauce. To celebrate, Aguilar gets a gallon of it dumped on him at the end of a winning putt.

The show isn’t absent of celebrity appearances either. In a special romance-

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themed episode, host of The Bachelor Chris Harrison adds to the lovely commentary as single contestants compete for a date at one of the holes. Actor Jon Lovitz dresses up as a pirate for the hole “Putt the Plank.”

The accomplished Olympic gold medalist diver Greg Louganis is a judge for the “Diving Range,” where contestants, who are not professional divers in the slightest, jump off a diving board doing a “dive” of their choice for a score to advance. This frankly bizarre collection of celebrities would seem out of place in any other show, but on Holey Moley it just adds to the fun.

Holey Moley is truly the most otherworldly form of entertainment I have ever consumed.. But maybe that’s the exact reason why Holey Moley is the perfect show for right now. Sports fans across the nation have been overjoyed as baseball and basketball have returned to our screens during these confusing and uncertain times. But while everyone else was suffering from a severe sportsdrought, I was doing just fine. I’ve been getting my sports fix since my dad stumbled across the show in May. However untraditional it may be, Holey Moley has been a way to bring sports back into my life and into my family. Every week the four of us sit down to watch this ridiculous show, and it has been a fantastic, though very unique, way to relieve stress. When the TV is normally on, it’s the local news reminding us that COVID-19 cases have gone up in our city, yet again, and for the fifth day in a row.

But every so often, for just 40 minutes, the four of us can sit down on the couch and pretend that the most important thing in our lives is whether or not Mei Brennan, the young golfer from Salt Lake City, will get the hole in one on “Uranus” (spoiler alert: she did).

This past summer, it’s been very difficult to enjoy myself and my time with my family. The uncertainty of the

fall semester, the finance troubles an ongoing pandemic brings, the health of the people I care for, and the complete uprooting of my very new life at college were all enough to keep me feeling so overwhelmed that I felt a little numb.

When everything feels so difficult and more unsettling than it ever has been, just the simple act of letting yourself have fun for a bit can feel impossible. It was a struggle for me this summer and, honestly, continues to be.

As ludicrous as it sounds, Holey Moley, a show about mini-golf, helped bring something really positive into my life. I got to connect with my family in a way that I was unable to while away at school. I was able to indulge in the wacky wonderland of a minigolf competition, finding the silly in all this serious, and good absurdity in a time where headlines seem outrageous in the worst ways possible. It’s hard to find things that are fun and take your mind off the stresses of the world around you. Laughing at and with Holey Moley achieved that for me.

I don’t know the next time I’ll be able to actually go mini-golfing. I don’t even remember the last time I did. But I know the last time I watched Holey Moley with my family and got to tune life out for a little while. It was last week: we watched an old recorded episode, laughed, and cheered, for just under an hour. I find a bit of solace in the fact that something so funny and brilliantly ridiculous can exist in a time that’s been marked by such darkness. And I find a bit of happiness in knowing that when everything seems like just a little too much, I can sit down with people I care about and watch a mini-golf reality sports competition show—fun, easy, and stress-free. G

AUGUST 28, 2020

17

Georgetown’s fall online, from the other side of the screen

By John Woolley

“W

e had to go into survival mode.”

That’s how Mark Fisher, an assistant professor of government, described shifting to virtual instruction following the university’s coronavirus-spurred move online in March. He, like the rest of Georgetown’s instructors, faced an unprecedented challenge—to adapt their courses to be entirely virtual, halfway through a semester, during the largest public health crisis in nearly a century.

That task is still underway. Following Georgetown’s decision to extend online learning through the fall semester, the university’s teaching faculty has been forced to rethink how it connects with its students long-term; not only by incorporating new technologies, but also by balancing academics with the tumultuous and ever-present anxieties of living in America during a global pandemic.

As students are deciding whether or not to move forward with an entirely virtual semester, instructors like Fisher are trying to build an experience more valuable than last semester’s final months could provide.

“I know on my side, the hardest part was seeing how inadequate the response was on my behalf. Knowing that I was employing really suboptimal pedagogical strategies, giving lectures I didn’t feel good about, and sort of watching myself stumble through it and knowing that there was little more that I could do,” Fisher said of the last few months of the spring semester. “It’s hard to do something in a mediocre way when you really want to do well.”

It’s common knowledge that classes in the latter half of the spring did not meet the traditional expectations of students—nor could they ever have, given the circumstances. Still, the shift has caused many to reconsider their attendance this fall. Nationally, leaves of absence doubled this past spring, and studies suggest that some universities could expect an enrollment drop as high as 20 percent this coming semester. For Hoyas frustrated by lowered financial aid packages, a leave of absence could be the most appealing decision.

The chaos of last semester, while suboptimal for all involved, was part of a nationwide move to terminate inperson classes and protect university communities’ health as the threat of the virus loomed large over campuses.

For Michelle Hardy, a doctoral student and instructor in the German Department, the administration’s decision to suspend in-person instruction in March, though logistically and financially difficult across the board, was a reassuring signal of support for the health and safety of her and her colleagues.

“I have several chronic illnesses and a physical disability. The threat of the virus is really huge for me, and I’m considered super high-risk. And so I was very happy that the university and everywhere else seemed to be taking it seriously and made it so I could stay home,” Hardy said.

While the shutdown protected faculty members’ physical health, the decision to press on with instruction in

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the spring still took a mental toll. Though they expressed appreciation for the support of the administration as classes transitioned, both Fisher and Hardy emphasized just how emotionally taxing continuing to teach was in the immediate aftermath of the shutdown.

It wasn’t just the challenges of Zoom and virtual discussions that weighed on instructors’ minds. They were facing the same concerns as students—quarantine, travel restrictions, and a world that had been reduced to, in many cases, just one or two rooms.

“I was not allowed to leave my apartment for almost eight weeks, and I live in a studio. So dealing with the mental health effect of that while also just trying to balance both my roles as a grad student and as an instructor of record was really difficult,” Hardy said.

Those heightened stress levels, when combined with concerns over students’ rapidly changing circumstances and personal health, hit hard for much of Georgetown’s faculty.

“The amount of stress and anxiety people were feeling made it really hard to have that extra mental space, that kind of bandwidth and emotional energy, to throw yourself into this professional project that really did require a pretty extraordinary effort,” Fisher said. “So much was being asked of us at the exact time when it felt we had the least to give.”

For Alisa Carse, an associate professor and director of graduate studies for Georgetown’s Philosophy Department,

one antidote for that stress came from observing her students’ efforts to continue engaging. A philosophy seminar she taught last semester included students from Singapore, China, Ghana, Brazil, Saudi Arabia, and Spain.

The shutdown caused it to fracture across the globe.

“I was deeply moved by the way my students—and many students at Georgetown—stepped up and really played ball.

I had one student from Ghana who had to feed a meter to get internet access. And I had several students who had to do the whole class on their phone because they didn’t have bandwidth or, in one case, electricity,” she explained.

Despite the extraordinary circumstances, and partially because of them, Carse observed the students in her seminar grow closer as they overcame barriers to attend.

That solidarity made her feel more personally connected to her class, even from thousands of miles away. “I felt like in some ways I entered my students’ lives in a different way because of the communications that were necessary, practically speaking. I learned about some of the challenges that they were dealing with in ways that I might not learn about challenges under ordinary circumstances.”

Even with that newfound sense of community, many instructors struggled to adapt their teaching strategies to a virtual space. Carse remarked that using Zoom was difficult at times because of how it stunted her ability to process momentto-moment student responses and adjust accordingly.

“One of the hardest things for me honestly was after almost 30 years of teaching in the classroom, realizing I had developed many ways of reading my students—are they lost, are they confused, are they feeling shy—and all of a sudden I’m on screen and it’s much harder,” Carse said. “There’s much less data, and I haven’t developed the skills for reading my students: their moods, their levels of engagement, whether they’re feeling marginalized.”

Similarly, Hardy felt the environment of a Zoom call was ill-suited to natural discussion. In language learning seminars like the German courses she taught, those hindrances could be devastating.

“There’s that extra weird thing of navigating who gets to talk. In person, you can kind of see when someone’s gonna talk, you don’t even need to raise hands. Online, sometimes you can’t even see if someone’s raising their hands,” she said.

For Marissa Fond, an assistant teaching professor in the Linguistics Department, Zoom presented yet another challenge—it was exhausting.“What I didn’t anticipate was how physically tiring it was. There were many times where, after teaching three classes on Zoom in a row, I would feel physically depleted—which was odd because I was, of course, sitting,” she said.

These disruptions, the awkwardness and the exhaustion, collided in the spring to produce an environment which instructors knew was undesirable yet inevitable.

“I think the most difficult thing was knowing that we were going to be making a lot of mistakes and doing a lot of things suboptimally,” Fisher said. “We were feeling like we had to build the ship at sea, in a way that left little room for error but made error a necessary part of the process.”

Following the rocky end of the spring semester, it’s no wonder that many Georgetown students have reconsidered their attendance in the fall. Apart from their own turbulent spring experience, the university itself has also signaled its devaluing of the coming academic period—lowering tuition in recognition of inaccessible campus services and benefits.

To combat those low expectations, instructors have spent the summer course correcting for the coming academic year.

Fond remains optimistic about the ways technology can be incorporated into this fall’s instruction. She urged students to focus on the ways that online platforms could improve courses compared to their in-person counterparts.

“In a way, we have bought into the idea that virtual learning is inferior,” Fond said. “And honestly I think there are ways in which we can adjust our classes to be even better with some of this technology.”

Instructors gave much of the credit for these new strategies to the Center for New Designs in Learning and Scholarship (CNDLS), which has provided resources and online training to university instructors since the campus shutdown began. Many of CNDLS’s seminars are centered around one main strategic shift: forgoing the traditional.

To achieve this, professors have looked to new online platforms like Slack and Hypothesis, a collaborative annotation tool, to build an online experience more robust than the spring’s. For Fisher, CNDLS’s guidance in learning about these new tools has been vital.

“I think a lot of faculty members typically see their summer as somewhat sacred,” he said. “It’s this time to recharge, step away, do some other work. The CNDLS folks have really dedicated themselves and given their summer to training faculty in a really thoughtful, encouraging, inspiring way.”

“So much was being asked of us at the exact time when it felt we had the least to give.”

Despite common caricatures of technologically inept professors, Fisher feels optimistic that environmental constraints could give rise to instructional innovation.

“It has forced us to really stop and rethink our pedagogy,” Fisher explained. “It’s easy to fall into certain patterns and keep doing what you’ve done in the past and not return to the fundamentals of what you’re trying to achieve in the classroom and how to do that best. I think in this sort of radical shift, we had to go back.”

Even with that optimism, however, concerns about inclusivity and accessibility still remain on instructors’ minds. Factors like disability and varying internet access, which affect student communities under normal circumstances, have only been exacerbated by the ongoing pandemic.

“I think this entire experience—that we’re all going through out of necessity—has been very illuminating in a lot of ways,” Fond said. “We’ve seen how inequities in higher ed—that have always been there—kind of percolated to a more visible surface.”

These inequities take many forms. Students with resource disadvantages—those without the opportunity to attend well-funded secondary schools, afford out-of-school tutoring, or acquire high-end devices—already faced a disproportionately uphill climb in their academic careers.

For students with disabilities, imperfect accommodations

were an additional discriminatory barrier to success on campus. The effects of these disparities grow even more apparent when learning remotely from home—assuming a student even has one to which they can safely return.

While instructors are aware of these inequities and hope to address them, they’re not sure they can properly tackle the issue without more administrative support.

“I went to a town hall about academic accommodations for the fall, they said faculty are being told to make things accessible,” Hardy said. “But what I would love to see is training, a webinar or something, where faculty could learn some of that.”

Every instructor interviewed placed a primacy on how the coronavirus pandemic disrupted student life. For many faculty members, their greatest concerns lie outside of the classroom.

“I’m much less worried about having meaningful academic experiences for students online—my students did such fantastic work, and I can tell you that as a whole, more students did excellent work in my spring classes than is usually my experience,” Carse said. “But college is so much more than what you did in class.”

For both first-years and returning students, the coronavirus put the brakes on one of the most formative social periods of their lives so far. While instructors have been working to mitigate the academic deficit caused by the pandemic, the challenge of building community could be even greater.

“What’s gonna be lost are those informal moments of conversation. The five minutes when you get to class and you’re just meeting the person sitting next to you, talking about whatever. And I think that’s especially disappointing for freshmen, because that’s a lot of the way you meet your friends and find your people,” Fisher said.

While Fisher and others plan on trying to replicate those small, casual moments for students this fall, much of that social experience will be lost in the months to come.

Perhaps the greatest losses are the ones of which students will never be aware.

“I’ve had students meet each other, fall in love in my classes, and then marry later. Those are opportunities we can’t know about,” Carse admitted. “I have such a deep appreciation for what we’re missing that I will carry that appreciation with me after this period.”

Even without those moments, instructors are trying to pull together an experience worth engaging with, no matter the distance. To make that happen, they’re asking their students to be as communicative and as understanding as possible.

“I know on our side we’re trying as hard as possible to be charitable to students. To the extent possible, we just ask for the same courtesy back. That doesn’t mean to not offer constructive criticism if it’s warranted, but to offer it from a place assuming we’re trying really hard and doing the best we can,” Fisher said.

Perhaps most importantly, instructors want students to resist the despair that comes with navigating rocky and uncertain times. Though they are isolated for the moment, students will be able to see their community flourish again soon. In the meantime, they need only keep in touch with each other and trust that, through every step of the process, their instructors will work with them.

“There’s so much happening, it’s more than just switching to online,” Hardy said. “There’s so much going on that makes learning hard right now—but it also makes learning important. Having it might give us structure, make us think more critically about things. No matter what, nothing’s going to be perfect right now, but I feel like we can make a lot of positive come out of this.” G AUGUST 28, 2020

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