Spring 2015

HARVARD POLITICAL REVIEW VOLUME XLII NO. 1, SPRING 2015 HARVARDPOLITICS.COM

“IT”: HOW IT FEELS TO BE BLACK

PICKET LINE TO PRISON LINE

INTERVIEW: DR. PHIL MCGRAW

THE HARVARD POLITICAL REVIEW PRESENTS

LANGUAGE AND POWER LITERARY SUPPLEMENT SPRING 2015

HARVARDPOLITICS.COM

CRIMINAL

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“It”: How it Feels to be Black Tomi Adeyemi

13 Picket Line to Prison Line Kevin O’Donnell

10 How to Stop Revolving Prison Doors with Books Alice Hu

16 Selling Nature Camila Victoriano

FUNNY PAGES

WORLD

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27 A Roma Education Minnie Jang

Taylor Swift, Republican Nominee Tess Saperstein

CAMPUS 18 First in the Nation Gram Slattery

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Caught Red Handed Erin Shortell

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Harvard Should Fix Its Gender Gap Vikram Sundar

UNITED STATES 30 Pawns in a Gambit Hannah Hess

20 Black Studies Matters Mark Bode 22 A Party Divided Quinn Mulholland 25 Religious Freedom on Trial Fiona Young

33 Pursuing Equality Farris Peale

BOOKS & ARTS 36 Reconstructing the Enemy Amy Chyao

INTERVIEWS 42 Daryl Davis Jonah Hahn

ENDPAPER 44 Better Angels Matt Shuham

40 Dr. Phil McGraw Gavin Sullivan Email: president@harvardpolitics.com. ISSN 0090-1032. Harvard Political Review. All rights reserved. Image credits: Flickr: Cover- William Warby; 1- Dustin Gaffke; 3- Eva Rinaldi; 4- DonkeyHotey; 6-JJ Losier; 9Fibonacci Blue; 10- [AndreaS]; 13- The All-Nite Images; 16- William Warby; 18- David Wilson; 24- U.S. Department of Education; 30- BIPIN; 36- David Stanley. Wikimedia: 27- J. Idrizi; 33- Danlev; 44- HarvardEthics.

42- Daryl Davis. Photographer: 20- Yale Alumni Magazine; 40- Office of Dr. Phil.

SPRING 2015 HARVARD POLITICAL REVIEW 1

FROM THE PRESIDENT

HARVARD POLITICAL REVIEW

Defining the Criminal

A Nonpartisan Undergraduate Journal of Politics, Est. 1969—Vol. XLII, No. 1

EDITORIAL BOARD PRESIDENT: Priyanka Menon PUBLISHER: Ashley Chen MANAGING EDITOR: Matthew Disler ASSOCIATE MANAGING EDITOR: Rachael Hanna ASSOCIATE MANAGING EDITOR: Emily Wang STAFF DIRECTOR: Harry Hild CAMPUS SENIOR EDITOR: Joe Choe CAMPUS ASSOCIATE EDITOR: Clara McNulty-Finn COVERS SENIOR EDITOR: Pooja Podugu COVERS ASSOCIATE EDITOR: Mark Bode U.S. SENIOR EDITOR: Advik Shreekumar U.S. ASSOCIATE EDITOR: Quinn Mulholland U.S. ASSOCIATE EDITOR: Andrew O’Donahue WORLD SENIOR EDITOR: Sarani Jayawardena WORLD ASSOCIATE EDITOR: Perry Abdulkadir WORLD ASSOCIATE EDITOR: Ali Hakim B&A SENIOR EDITOR: Nancy Ko B&A ASSOCIATE EDITOR: Aisha Bhoori INTERVIEWS EDITOR: Gavin Sullivan HUMOR EDITOR: Julianna Aucoin BUSINESS MANAGER: Angela Yang DESIGN EDITOR: Alec Villalpando ASSOCIATE DESIGN EDITOR: Celena Wang MULTIMEDIA EDITOR: Mattea Mrkusic ASSOCIATE MULTIMEDIA EDITOR: Aizhan Shorman WEBMASTER: Vikram Sundar

SENIOR WRITERS John Acton, Jay Alver, Daniel Backman, Jenny Choi, Colin Criss, Colin Diersing, Avika Dua, Sam Finegold, Holly Flynn, Zeenia Framroze, Brooke Kantor, Krister Koskelo, Johanna Lee, Daniel Lynch, Taonga Leslie, Paul Lisker, Matt Shuham, Ben Shyrock, Tom Silver, Gram Slattery, Kim Soffen, Ross Svenson, Rachel Wong, Olivia Zhu

STAFF Antonia Chan, Derek Choi, Jaime Cobham, Christopher Cruz, Flavia Cuervo, Tim Devine, Aidan Dewar, Henry Dornier, Kate Donahue, David Freed, Samarth Gupta, Jonah Hahn, Averill Healey, Olivia Herrington, Eric Holenberg, Nian Hu, Aliya Itzkowitz, Alicia Juang, Samuel Kaplan, Shahrukh Khan, Gal Koplewitz, Bree Lalor, Jacob Meisel, Vincent Monti, Osaremen Okolo, Valentina Perez, Farris Peale, Samuel Plank, John Pulice, Ellen Robo, Ignacio Sabate, Tess Saperstein, Natasha Sarna, Erin Shortell, Wright Smith, Julia Steigerwald-Schnall, Austin Tymins, Camila Victoriano, Selina Wang, Carolyn Ye

ADVISORY BOARD Jonathan Alter Richard L. Berke Carl Cannon E.J. Dionne, Jr.

Walter Isaacson Whitney Patton Maralee Schwartz

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“Criminal” is a strangely flexible word. It is a label that has been applied to individuals representing the extremes of human character, from murderers and petty thieves to Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. The notion of crime itself mirrors this malleability, with its definition shifting across eras and cultures. While crime has been a constant since the beginning of human society, criminals and their crimes are definite products of their time.

The recent events in Ferguson, Missouri and across the nation have exemplified this conceptual flexibility.

The deaths of unarmed black men and women as well as the subsequent trials of the police officers responsible have demonstrated that in today’s society, the line between the criminal and legal, between the victim and perpetrator, is blurred beyond recognition. As a result, our nation has now been tasked with evaluating the justice of existing laws and their enforcement mechanisms, which will force us to reckon with longstanding histories of racism and violence and characterize our time and generation.

Moving closer to home, Harvard and other colleges have had to confront crime of a radically different nature in students’ calls for reexaminations of existing sexual assault policies. Here too, for better or worse, distinctions are muddied. The student turns into criminal and victim, the administration into judge and jury. And once again, how each of these institutions chooses to move forward with these discussions will shape its image and set the tone for its campus.

In discussions of politics and policy, our understanding of crime must factor in this flexibility. Criminals are not

limited to the outer echelons of society, and crimes do not occur in isolation.

Legislation and government action must reflect as much.

In this issue, the HPR tackles the complexities of this relationship between crime and society. In a powerful personal narrative, Tomi Adeyemi reflects on her experiences as an African American in the United States. Alice Hu turns our attention to the criminal justice system, examining college-in-prison programs and recidivism rates. Kevin O’Donnell investigates the strategy behind the recent #BlackLivesMatter protests, interrogating the connection between the demonstrations and subsequent arrests of the protestors. Camila Victoriano broadens our view to include crimes against nature, bringing to light ongoing issues with international poaching legislation.

These articles—along with those in our United States, World, Campus, Books and Arts, and Humor sections— present some of the most striking content produced by the HPR to date.

In keeping with the tradition of the HPR, they are thoughtful, unique pieces that aim to challenge and excite our readers. They also, however, represent the innovation and dedication of the newly inaugurated Masthead 47 as well as the HPR’s reaffirmed commitment to narrative-driven and investigative content.

Priyanka Menon President

FUNNY PAGES Taylor Swift Front-runner for Republican Nomination in 2016

Tess Saperstein With the 2016 presidential election only two years away, GOP party leaders have begun the search for a formidable Republican candidate. After considering candidates that would have popularity equal to that of likely Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton, the GOP announced its support for Taylor Swift.

“We have the utmost confidence that Ms. Swift will easily gain voters’ support,” RNC chairman Reince Priebus said. “We have been in contact with Ms. Swift since she released [her latest album] 1989. ‘Blank Space’ is my new anthem.”

Though Swift has no experience in politics, she has showed her support for conservative values through her music. 1989 is an obvious ode to the years of Ronald Reagan’s presidency. The song “All You Had To Do Was Stay” mourns the end of the great Reagan era. Nonetheless, the album maintains an upbeat tone due to the anticipation of another Republican presidency. In “Wildest Dreams,” she expresses her excitement over George H. W. Bush’s election, which marked the third consecutive Republican presidency.

Prior to 1989, Swift has repeatedly expressed strong Republican leanings. At age 14, she moved from liberal-dominated Pennsylvania to the conservative hearth of Tennessee, inspiring her to title her 2012 album Red. Many conservative pundits have argued that she released Red in order to send a pro-Romney message to her many younger fans during the 2012 election.

“There is no doubt that ‘I Knew You Were Trouble’ was written about President Obama,” Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said. “Ms. Swift, like many other Americans, wanted to see a Republican president in 2012.”

With a young female nominee such as Swift, the GOP prospects for the 2016 election have never looked better. “I never miss a beat. I’m lightning on my feet,” said Swift at a recent political rally in Times Square on New Years Eve. When asked by pundit Ryan Seacrest for a response to her competitors’ allegations that she was too inexperienced, Swift stated, “I’m just going to shake it off.”

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RED HANDED Political Diversity at Harvard

Erin Shortell

H

arvard College’s mission statement reads: “Harvard strives to create knowledge, to open the minds of students to that knowledge, and to enable students to take best advantage of their educational opportunities. To these ends, the College encourages students to respect ideas and their free expression, and to rejoice in discovery and in critical thought. …”

Many colleges’ mission statements read similarly.

Yet in the spring of 2014, colleges displayed an unambiguous trend of silencing speakers with controversial viewpoints.

At Rutgers University, students protested the announcement of Condoleezza Rice as commencement speaker; referencing Rice’s involvement in the torture of detainees, they equated her invitation to acceptance of “a world that justifies torture and debases humanity.” In light of the protests, Rice declined to speak.

Students at Smith College opposed the selection of Christine Lagarde as commencement speaker because of her leadership in what they deemed a corrupt institution oppressive to women around the world. She, like Rice, withdrew. Robert Birgeneau, the former chancellor of the University of California at Berkeley, withdrew as Haverford College commencement speaker due to protests about his handling of a clash between police and Occupy protestors in 2011.

In his commencement speech at Harvard last year, former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg responded to these recent commencement speaker withdrawals. He challenged Harvard to adhere more closely to its lofty ideals of free expression and debate. On top of the recent silencing of commencement speakers based on their political views, Bloomberg blasted the lack of political diversity among college faculty.

While he agreed with Harvard’s mission statement, Bloomberg argued that tolerance for other people’s ideas and the freedom to express your own “form a sacred trust that holds the basis of our democratic society. ... [But] that trust is perpetually vulnerable to the tyrannical tendencies of monarchs, mobs, and majorities. And lately we’ve seen those tendencies mani-

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fest themselves too often, both on college campuses and in our society.”

As retired Harvard professor Ruth Wisse said, Bloomberg’s speech “was good only because it was so rare.” Indeed, Harvard is an effective representative of the problems surrounding politics on other college campuses. Its lack of political diversity might appear to devalue the education that students of minority political persuasions receive, but the real losers come from the political majority. When students enter college with overwhelmingly similar political leanings and learn from an ideologically homogenous faculty, they graduate without fulfilling Harvard College’s mission statement; they do not develop into critical thinkers with respect for viewpoints other than their own.

THE AYES HAVE IT Among Harvard faculty and students, conservative political groups are remarkably rare. Harvard’s faculty, administration, and students sway heavily to the left.

In the 2012 presidential election, 96 percent of all Ivy League faculty and staff donations supported Obama. A similar disparity characterized the 2004 and 2008 election cycles. Harvard College students demonstrate slightly more diversity, but even among them, liberals comprise an overwhelming majority. This year’s Harvard Crimson freshman survey revealed that Harvard’s Class of 2018, like its faculty, was “decidedly liberal.”

In the survey, only 13.1 percent of incoming freshmen identified as somewhat conservative, and 2.6 percent very conservative. 23.6 percent called themselves moderates. Meanwhile, 60.7 percent of students identified themselves as liberal. These results closely mirror those for the Class of 2017. As Jim McGlone ’15, the former president of Harvard Right to Life, told the HPR, the lopsided breakdown in political opinion on campus creates an environment in which “it’s sort of assumed that everyone’s on the same page.”

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WITH ALL DUE RESPECT

THE REAL EDGE

Since Harvard College leans solidly to the left, conservative viewpoints often face an unwelcoming environment. During the 2008 election cycle, Wisse told the Crimson that “it is not healthy when one side assumes the other is barbaric and writes it off and never listens to it at all.” She later noted that despite her initial reluctance to share her political views in the classroom, she later realized that “students don’t mind if you present your views in class, as long as you present them as your views.

What they do mind very much is when the professor assumes that this is not a political view but that this is politically correct.”

This disguise of views as facts dominates Harvard’s academic climate. Harvard professor Harvey Mansfield estimated that of the 40 or so members of the Government department, three might be non-liberal; of those, he is the most vocal. Some liberal professors create “honest classes” that make students of varying persuasions equally uncomfortable, but as Mansfield asks, “how can you study politics with a faculty that is so one-sided as that?”

He has raised the same issue in the past; six years ago, Mansfield told the Crimson that “the weaknesses in the argument of liberalism are not addressed or not even known. It seems the University fails to appreciate there are two parties in this country.”

In other words, liberal professors reassert the views of a liberal student body.

Parallel fears impact student political minorities. Mansfield stated that conservative students seek him out because he is conservative. Underlying this preference is a profound discomfort with some liberal professors who fail to create open environments for political discussion. This imbalance threatens to transform a student into what Wisse called an “intellectual actor rather than an intellectual thinker”: students worried about their grades might tailor their spoken and written expression to the political opinions of their professors.

Student political minorities face difficulties in their interactions with the administration and other students, as well.

McGlone discussed several instances in which his organization needed to interact with the Office of Student Life or other members of Harvard’s administration. He left these interactions with the impression “that [the Office of Student Life] didn’t really have an appreciation for where we were coming from.” In one of these instances, other students on campus disrespected Harvard Right to Life enough to vandalize its posters in a clearly targeted way. Whether or not one believes that the administration ought to involve itself in situations like this, the vandalism illustrates blatant disrespect of one side of an issue that, though uncontested at Harvard, sparks debate beyond the school’s iron gates.

Some liberals at Harvard—whether faculty, administration officials, or students—simply present some issues as settled.

As someone with a non-liberal viewpoint, McGlone said, “You want to speak up, but there’s an auditorium of people who aren’t taking you seriously” because they believe that the window for debate has closed. Yet, he added, people should subject their political views to constant investigation; many students’ cold reception to other views shows that they instead take their own opinions’ correctness for granted. Mansfield even told the HPR that many people at Harvard behave as if “the other side doesn’t exist or isn’t worth considering, even as a matter of politeness or curiosity.”

As a result of this political environment, the experiences of students in the political minority differ vastly from those among the liberal majority. Despite their previously discussed disadvantages, political minorities enjoy the real edge.

For example, the objectives of right-leaning student groups differ from those of left-leaning groups. While right-leaning groups focus on “shedding new light on an issue,” McGlone speculated that liberal groups work more on “mobilizing people enough to go out and make a difference.” Former president of the Harvard College Democrats Daniel Ki ’15 added, “I think there’s an assumption because Harvard is generally thought of as a liberal campus that people don’t need to be politically involved.” Political minorities, on the other hand, are “more skeptical, more on their guard, more wary, more seeking than other students,” as Mansfield explained.

More importantly, political minorities at Harvard benefit from an education closer to that idealized in Harvard College’s mission statement. McGlone reported that political minorities “on campus are forced to be open-minded. … Liberal students don’t have that feeling as much.”

At the heart of politics at Harvard lies a cold reality: the lack of intellectual diversity harms both political minorities and majorities. On the one hand, it discourages members of political minorities from voicing their opinions during their college years.

On the other hand, the current status quo also deprives political majorities of much of the education in critical thought that colleges like Harvard promise. The implications of this educational shortcoming are evident in Washington, D.C.; as Bloomberg stated, “In politics, as it is on far too many college campuses, people don’t listen to facts that run counter to their ideology; they fear them.”

Even though the lack of political diversity on college campuses hurts all students, few people question it. Non-liberals might remain silent because, as Mansfield put it, “The atmosphere is not hostile but it’s stifling … You’re not being suppressed; you’re just being ignored.” In his commencement speech, Bloomberg took the matter a step farther by calling the lack of political diversity on college campuses across the country “a modern form of McCarthyism.”

Wisse articulated that Bloomberg’s words “should’ve been self-evident.” Democracy requires teaching and re-teaching, learning and re-learning. She told the HPR that students “have never fought back really. They’ve never thought that the university could be theirs to redefine, to demand what they know can be done better.”

In a 2008 interview with the Crimson, Wisse asked, “Where is the backbone of that part of the student body that knows where its responsibilities lie and does not rise to the occasion?”

Since the lack of political diversity at Harvard and the other colleges that Bloomberg mentioned in his speech hurts both political majorities and political minorities, Wisse’s demand should resonate with every student, regardless of ideology.

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Harvard Should Fix Its Gender Gap Vikram Sundar

H

arvard College’s Math 55a is known for being difficult and timeconsuming. Its students must be talented, capable, and willing to put in endless hours per week to complete fiendishly difficult problem sets. This year, they share another trait: they are all male. This is just one sign of a gender balance problem that has long plagued Harvard’s math, computer science, and physics departments.

While these fields have seen a gradual increase in female concentrators, women still only comprise around 25 percent of concentrators. More importantly, the Harvard Undergraduate Math Survey indicates that 54 percent of females in the math department are uncomfortable with this imbalance. There are two major causes of the gender gap at Harvard: cultural factors originating outside of Harvard and structural issues exacerbated by Harvard academics. However, there are solutions that may be implemented without compromising the quality of education in these fields.

CULTURAL FACTORS AND POSSIBLE SOLUTIONS The cultural factors that propagate the gender gap outside of Harvard are well documented. From a very young age, cultural suggestions, such as a lack of female-oriented LEGO sets and other toys associated with early interest in STEM fields, encourage girls to choose non-technical fields.

These effects intensify throughout middle and high school and culminate in a significant gender gap among STEM-interested Harvard students. It is difficult for Harvard to undo the damage done by such cultural factors because they are largely caused by entities outside its influence.

However, the university can take steps to make the culture of its technical fields friendlier to women. For example, the current lack of female tenured professors often leads to women feeling alienated from their department. The Math Survey notes that 45 percent of female concentrators feel uninvolved with the Mathematics department, as opposed to 12 percent of male concentrators. To address this issue, Harvard Physics department chair Howard Georgi told the HPR that “hiring women faculty was the biggest thing” in making the department more friendly to female undergraduates. Similar steps by all technical departments would provide females with better role models in their departments. Unfortunately, this is a catch-22, because more tenured women can only be hired when a greater number of women concentrate in and become experts in technical fields.

Beyond hiring more female professors, Harvard could work to create a stronger community for women in technical fields. Ramya Rangan ’16, president of Harvard’s Women in Computer Science (WiCS), notes that the

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Departments make subtle errors in introductory classes that disproportionately affect students with weaker technical backgrounds.

organization focuses primarily on running community events to help create a computer science support network. Additionally, Meena Boppana ’16, former president of the Harvard Undergraduate Math Association (HUMA) and an author of the Math Survey, noted, “Any sort of initiative to get women to come together is really great.” However, the HUMA events for women in math and physics usually have an attendance of around 20 people. At this size, a society of women in math and physics at Harvard may not be large enough to have a significant impact.

Thus, this possible solution also faces a dilemma: organizations like WiCS can only create a community if there is a larger number of female concentrators.

Technical fields might also attract more female concentrators through targeted recruiting. For example, Harvey Mudd College used recruiting to increase the number of computer science concentrators from under 10 percent to around 40 percent over the past few years. At the end of every computer science course, women are encouraged by faculty to either take another course or pursue another activity related to computer science. These activities, which include open research or field trips to the Grace Hopper conference, encourage enthusiasm about computer science. By the end of freshman year, many women feel more confident about majoring in computer science. Harvey Mudd’s model is an example of effective recruiting; similar recruiting at Harvard could influence females to continue with technical disciplines beyond foundational courses.

ACADEMIC ISSUES The gender gap in middle and high school creates the difference in STEM background between boys and girls entering Harvard. Results from the Math Survey indicate that while a comparable number of boys and girls take math through AP Calculus BC, significantly fewer girls continue beyond that level while in high school. Similarly, Rangan noted that fewer girls receive exposure to computer science in high school than boys.

Obviously, it is harder to concentrate in a technical field without the appropriate background, and Harvard should not lower its requirements. But departments make subtle errors in introductory classes that disproportionately affect students with weaker technical backgrounds.

The Mathematics department’s tendency to advise students to take low-level math courses freshman year prevents many with weaker STEM backgrounds from concentrating in technical fields. Math advising strongly encourages freshmen to choose easy math courses in a variety of ways. For example, the

official math department guidelines overestimate the amount of time required for advanced math courses, as compared with the Q guide, the university-wide course evaluation system . Boppana noted that this problem is compounded with girls, who “tend to underestimate how prepared they are.” This has significant longterm effects: the Math Survey indicates that a student’s choice of freshman year math courses significantly affects whether students concentrate in technical fields. There are two potential solutions to this problem: either professors can advise students to try harder courses with the option of dropping down later, or they can encourage students in Harvard’s introductory math tracks to continue taking math courses, just as Harvey Mudd does in its Computer Science department.

In contrast, the Computer Science and Physics departments provide virtually no choice in freshman year courses. However, Harvard’s introductory course Computer Science 50 (CS 50) could be made more conducive to beginners. Specifically, Harvey Mudd found increased success in recruiting females to the field after splitting its introductory course into one class for beginners and one for non-beginners. Extensive recruiting and the course’s focus on application encouraged the beginners to continue with computer science. Similar changes can be implemented at Harvard to encourage women to take more computer science courses.

The style of instruction in these introductory classes also turns away students with weaker backgrounds. Traditional instruction in technical fields consists of lecture classes followed by problem sets for which students are given little guidance.

Georgi identified this as an issue in his introductory physics courses and thus created Physics Night, a weekly night-long session where students can work together to complete the problem set with the aid of TFs and professors. This system proved successful in attracting students with weaker backgrounds, as it encouraged study groups and greater collaboration between students on problem sets, without compromising the difficulty of the course. Math 55 does not have course-sponsored study sessions, but many students form study groups, and extensive support from the professor is available. But many courses don’t have strong support networks, which discourages the enrollment of students who might struggle with the material due to their weaker technical backgrounds.

It is easy for Harvard administrators, professors, and students to attribute the gender gap in technical fields to factors out of Harvard’s control, and in many ways this is largely true. However, there are simple steps Harvard can take to help reduce this gap, and it is Harvard’s responsibility to take these steps.

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CRIMINAL

“IT” HOW IT FEELS TO BE BLACK Tomi Adeyemi

W

hen I was a kid, it was the small things. My classmates always wanted to play with my hair, and I let them. On Halloween I was told that I couldn’t be Princess Ariel or Belle, so I had to decide between Princess Jasmine and Mulan. Jasmine was a closer match to my skin tone, but Mulan’s costume had face paint. And she saved China.

I was Mulan three years in a row.

In high school, it was the awkward moments. The way people seemed to stare when we read Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

The tight-lipped congratulations I got when college acceptances came out. That time my boyfriend explained that while he wasn’t attracted to black girls, he still liked me. Back then it was the uncomfortable things, the things that made my skin crawl, but were small enough to be pushed into the back of my mind until I could pretend they never happened.

Today it is impossible to pretend. Now it isn’t the small things or the awkward moments, it’s the personal attacks. It’s the

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girl who proudly publishes a school article stating that I and every other minority student don’t deserve to go to Harvard.

It’s the never-ending cycle of news stories detailing the brutal murders of children killed because they happened to be black in the wrong place. It’s the constant disappointment that comes when murderer after murderer walks free, bypassing the justice system that’s supposed to protect us.

Before now, I didn’t know what “it” was. The small things, the awkward moments, the injustices—it all amounted to something, but it was too difficult to figure out what that something was. Now, I understand. “It” is how it feels to be black. *** A year ago, my assessment of race relations would have included a heartfelt attempt to explain that while our current president is black, we are not living in a

post-racial America. It would have had statistics on income disparities, incarceration rates, and discrimination in the media: everything and anything necessary to prove how deep the inequalities still run.

That argument is no longer necessary.

The recent string of highly-publicized stories involving unarmed black people shot or choked to death by unconvicted police officers has pushed race into America’s spotlight. As a nation, we have seen the protests and outrage spread across the country, the days when your online news feed exploded with opinions and outrage regarding the latest unindicted injustice. We have mourned the loss of two innocent policemen, shot in retaliation for Michael Brown and Eric Garner. We have listened as New York police officers have enacted their own form of protest, condemning public officials for encouraging an anti-police sentiment. There is no more hiding; the truth is out, and those who were in denial are finally starting to see how broken this country truly is.

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If you are going to take anything from current events, take the realization that the tragedies of Trayvon Martin, Jordan Brown, Tamir Rice, and Eric Garner are not isolated incidents. They are the status quo. Hundreds of people who suffer the same fate never make the headlines. I could tell you about Amadou Diallo, the West African shot 19 times because four plain-clothed officers thought his wallet was a gun.

Those officers were never convicted.

We could talk about 18-year-old Ramarley Graham, who was shot and killed in his grandmother’s bathroom in 2012. The police didn’t shoot him because they thought that his iPhone was a gun, or that his apple was a grenade, or that the sink he happened to be near was a WMD; they shot and killed him because he was trying to flush a bag of marijuana down the toilet.

I could teach you about Oscar Grant, whose case was initially the most promising of all to receive justice. Oscar was shot by a police officer when he was already lying facedown with his hands behind his back and being subdued by another officer. I could tell you that the man who shot him was convicted of “involuntary” manslaughter and sentenced to two years in prison, but then I would have to explain that they thought the two-year sentence was too long and released him after 11 months.

I could try and list the number of people that have unjustly lost their lives at the hands of the police, but I would fail. In America, two black people die at the hands of white police officers on a weekly basis, according to data compiled by the U.S. Department of Justice between 2005 and 2012. Understand that the stories and atrocities you hear are not the exception. They are the norm.

I used to think that these injustices were reserved exclusively for black men, but then I found out about Rekia Boyd, the 22-year-old girl in Detroit who was shot because the cop thought her cell phone was a gun. I learned about Daniele Watts, a black actress that was arrested because she and her white boyfriend were kissing in public and they thought she was a prostitute.

There is no safety, no belief that everything will be okay in the end.

If you want to understand what it’s like to be black, understand that it is an existence plagued by insecurities and fear. Fear that others will never think you’re good enough, that if you succeed people won’t think you deserve it. The fear is never-ending; even if you battle it, you only need to hear one comment for it to erupt again. But underneath the fear there is a terror. A terror that the next name to make the headlines won’t be a kid from St. Louis or a man in New York, but your brother in L.A. Your father in Chicago. A terror that even if you don’t lose anyone today, your future child will always be threatened, not by her character or virtue or choices, but by the color of skin you pass down. *** Today, institutions like to measure success in diversity. At my freshmen convocation, Harvard congratulated the Class of 2015 (or themselves) for being the most diverse class in history.

Harvard could have highlighted our geographical diversity or our income diversity, but they didn’t. They were focused on race.

Whenever I go to a company presentation, the presenters follow up the stock photo of a black employee on their brochure by stating that diversity is a central focus at their company and that they are working tirelessly to improve it. At some companies,

they genuinely mean it; at others, it is just a line in their sales pitch.

Measuring an institution’s racial diversity is one way to bring us closer to social success. In my four years at Harvard, the growing diversity in the school led to “I, Too, Am Harvard,” an international campaign that gave minorities across the world a platform to speak to colleges about their discriminatory experiences. I’ve seen leaders like President Drew Faust and Dean Rakesh Khurana make a genuine effort to hear our complaints and strive to make Harvard a more accepting place.

I spent one year of my life in a neighborhood that allowed me to be comfortable with my skin because I saw multiple skin tones around me everyday. Back then, I didn’t think twice about whether my friends were black or white because I didn’t need to; we were all just people, and we treated each other as such.

There is power in numbers, but that power does not come from the number itself; when there is enough diversity in a room, there is no more need to count. Individuals stop being classified and separated as black or white or Hispanic or Asian, and start being people.

Unfortunately, I don’t know what statistic needs to be met before black people can just be people. I don’t know when I will be able to trust the justice system as a protector and not as a predator. I don’t think there will ever be a day when the people who hate me and others who look like me will cease to exist.

When there is a seemingly never-ending stream of fear, murder, and injustice, I feel like things will not change.

But that is when I confide in a friend and can see that though he may not share my skin color, he shares my outrage and heartbreak. That is when I stand at a protest, wondering if it will amount to any future change, but feeling so inspired by how many of the people around me look nothing like me. Maybe there are more black people being killed and incarcerated than any other time in America’s history, but there are also more people that care, more people who are willing to stand up for what is right, not because they see injustice happening to a member of their own race, but because they see injustice happening, period.

They see crimes against people, not race, and they are willing to fight against it. I don’t measure success in statistics. I measure it in allies.

In December, Australia suffered from a tragic shooting in Sydney. The shooter displayed an Islamic flag during the crisis, and when one Muslim woman waiting to catch the train found out, she began to remove her hijab in fear of being persecuted and tried to leave. A stranger stopped her, telling her that she could put her hijab back on, telling her she did not have to be afraid. “I’ll ride with you,” he said. This stranger started a movement, as others in Australia banded together to make those that didn’t look like them feel safe in time of tragedy. They were their allies, creating beauty in an otherwise horrifying event.

You do not have to be black to be an ally. It will take a long time before tragedies like those of Trayvon Martin and Eric Garner stop occurring on a weekly basis, but anyone can be that stranger on the train or that face in the protest. Everyone can be a caring friend to those around them. When people of every color come together to cry out against injustice, progress is felt even when it is not clearly seen. How “it” feels to be black today is only bearable when you realize that those who aren’t going through what you are still care and are willing to help.

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HOW TO STOP REVOLVING PRISON DOORS WITH BOOKS Alice Hu

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ducation reduces crime. This connection seems like common sense, and indeed it has been researched, analyzed, and affirmed countless times. According to a 2007 study by researchers at Columbia University, Princeton University, and City University of New York, higher education reduces the crime rates of both juveniles and adults by impacting social behavior and economic stability.

The effect of education on crime reduction is even more dramatic for a certain group within the population: the incarcerated. To many, the idea of convicts receiving a free college education behind bars is confounding and, more often, infuriating.

When New York Governor Andrew Cuomo introduced a plan to publicly finance basic college education programs in state prisons, legislators in Albany called it “a slap in the face” for law-abiding citizens.

While this response is understandable, the arguments themselves neglect the actual effects of college-in-prison programs.

According to the U.S. Department of Education, inmates who participated in education programs had a 43 percent lower chance of returning to prisons than those who did not. By drastically reducing the recidivism rate of former inmates, education in prisons produces a tremendous social benefit for all members of society. Prison education programs not only save an enormous amount of tax dollars spent on prisons annually, but they also have a profound effect on thousands of families and communities. The current resistance to college in prison often rests upon political rhetoric rather than any factual evidence.

Indeed, this type of language is perhaps indicative of a large, troubling trend in education and incarceration.

REVIVAL OF COLLEGE IN PRISON While college-in-prison programs may be a foreign idea to many, there were in fact 350 such programs in the United States in 1990. By 1997, however, only eight programs remained. The drastic cut was a result of the “tough on crime” policies of the 1990s, beginning with the 1994 Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, the largest crime bill in U.S. history. One of the provisions of this legislation overturned the Higher Education Act of 1965 and essentially eliminated all federal aid for higher education in prisons.

With high school dropouts disproportionately represented in prisons, this shift in policy meant that the vast majority of inmates are now released from prison without any post-secondary education. Compounded with a criminal record, this lack of post-secondary education makes it extremely difficult, if not impossible, for an inmate to find employment after his or her release. This is an important contributing factor in the United States’ staggering recidivism rate. According to a five-year study released by the Bureau of Justice Statistics in 2014, about 76 percent of former inmates are arrested within five years of their release. The recidivism rate is even higher for inmates who were 39 years old or younger at the age of the release. These high recidivism rates contributed to a staggering 82 percent increase in the national prison population from 1990 to 2002.

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However, the experiences of inmates, such as George Chochos, indicate a revival in college-in-prison programs. Convicted of robbing five banks in New York, Chochos was sentenced to fourteen years in prison and found himself in the notorious Sing Sing Correctional Facility. Thirteen years later, as reported by the New Haven Register, Chochos is now a student at Yale Divinity School studying philosophy and working towards a master’s degree. Chochos credits the drastic change in his life path to the Bard Prison Initiative, a privately funded program by Bard College that provides college education for inmates.

According to studies of higher education in prisons, many other prisoners have the same experiences as Chochos. In the article “Disentangling the Effects of Correctional Education,” published in the journal Criminality and Criminal Justice in 2005, researchers found that higher education reduced recidivism by up to 62 percent. This conclusion is further corroborated by a fifty-state analysis completed in 2005 by the Institute for Higher Education Policy on behalf of the Department of Justice, which showed that prisoners who participated in college education programs had a 46 percent lower recidivism rate. These extensive studies, spanning several decades, have established and affirmed education’s effect on preventing further crimes.

FAILURE TO SEE THE RIPPLE EFFECT Despite the massive body of evidence that supports college-in-prison programs, the opposition is firm and vocal. One of the most prevalent arguments used by politicians since the 1990s is that inmates do not deserve a free college education. As summarized by George Maziarz, a state senator from western New York, “It should be ‘do the crime, do the time,’ not ‘do the crime, earn a degree.’” What Maziarz seems to forget—and what recidivism rates since 1994 have shown—is that “doing the time” alone has been utterly insufficient in preventing future crime. For the past two decades, this retributive punishment-drive approach has resulted in 43 percent of former inmates getting arrested within only one year of release.

When President Clinton signed the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act in 1994, he expressed his belief that “people who commit crimes should be caught, convicted and punished. This bill puts government on the side of those who abide by the law, not those who break it.” However, the purpose of prisons is not only to punish individuals for their crimes, but also to rehabilitate them—a goal that often goes unaddressed in political debates. What President Clinton and Senator Maziarz failed to acknowledge is that providing inmates with education has never been about rewarding crime or taking the side of the criminals. It is about enacting a rehabilitation method that has proven to be more effective at preventing crime than imprisonment alone. It is about disrupting a vicious cycle of re-incarceration, and turning an inmate like Chochos into a productive and contributing member of society.

In an interview with the HPR, Dara Young, the program manager of Wesleyan University’s Center for Prison Education, said, “It is not just about individual prisoners; we are also talking about the program’s impact on families, on communities,

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If politicians are uninterested in the rehabilitation of inmates, then at least they should consider the financial implications of their opposition.

once the inmates are released. It’s a ripple effect.” While politicians portray college in prison as an undeserved opportunity for the inmates, what they neglect to mention is the impact of having a college-educated mother or neighbor on families and entire communities. In the face of staggering recidivism rates, college in prison is about finally being “smart on crime”—for the sake of everyone.

At the very least, politicians should consider the financial implications of their opposition to these programs. If providing inmates with free education is unfair to law-abiding citizens, then is it any more fair to spend these citizens’ tax dollars on building and maintaining more prisons, which are undoubtedly more expensive? A 2004 study by University of California, Los Angeles School of Public Policy and Social Research found that every $1 spent on inmate education programs returns $2 to the taxpayer, whereas prisons themselves only yield $0.37. This 200 percent return may seem insignificant until one considers that prisons cost taxpayers $39 billion annually. This means that if only one percent of these $39 billion is spent on higher education in prison, it provides a return of $780 million, and saves taxpayers more than $1 billion compared to a solely retributive approach.

MAKING THE RIGHT CONNECTION One topic that often arises in discussing college-in-prison programs is the increasingly high price of college tuition—why should criminals receive a free college education when law-abiding citizens struggle to pay for theirs? In response to Governor Cuomo’s plan, the New York Republican Assembly introduced the “Kids Before Cons” online petition. The original petition presented two contrasting images: one featured students in caps and gowns who “Studied hard. Worked summer jobs. Saved.

Took out loans,” while the opposing image featured orange jumpsuit-donning prisoners—almost all of whom appear to be men of color—who “Stole a car. Robbed a bank. Shot a bystander.

Got a free college education paid by YOU.” This type of imagery, with its political and racial undertones, is little more than colorful rhetoric unsupported by any evidence. The issue of financing college education for American families is a serious issue that needs to be addressed. But, attempts to connect the two issues are political at best and extremely detrimental at worst. Preventing the federal funding of higher education programs in prison will not lower the cost of college tuition. Passing the Kids Before Cons Act will not help families save money, because it continues the current rates

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of recidivism and costly prison expansion. If anything, providing inmates with higher education increases the likelihood of greater government aid for college students through saving billions in public revenue.

Currently, the overwhelming majority of states spend more government money per inmate than per student every year, according to the U.S. Census and the Vera Institute. In New York, the locus of the college-in-prison debate, the state spends more than three times as much on an inmate than on a student. Facing such statistics, it is not difficult to see the state governments’ misplacement of priorities. State legislators refuse to fund college-in-prison programs and proclaim that they are defending students over prisoners. But the programs could save the states millions of dollars—money that could go to their public school systems.

The recent wave of zero tolerance policies has increased in-school arrests and exacerbated the problem, so much so that some have named this system a school-to-prison pipeline.

Heightened police presence in schools disproportionately affects African American and Latino youth, as they account for 70 percent of juvenile arrests despite making up 39 percent of the U.S. juvenile population. Removing students from the education system invariably raises their chances of incarceration, as high school dropouts constitute nearly 80 percent of the inmate population even though they make up less than 20 percent of national population. Those who then leave prisons without a higher education are more likely to return, and so the vicious cycle continues.

College stops the revolving prison doors. It allows inmates the opportunity to reintegrate into society, to work, pay taxes, and contribute to society. It saves the public billions of tax dollars, money that can go toward financial aid for college students rather than prison expansion. The “tough on crime” rhetoric may have helped past politicians—Democrats and Republicans alike—to win elections, but it has done little to help the people inside or outside the prisons. Indeed, the adverse effect of forgoing college programs for inmates cuts across partisan lines and prison bars. Perhaps this is why President Clinton, who was once adamant about being “on the side of those who abide by the law,” has since commended the Bard Prison Initiative as a “good investment in a safer, more productive society.” Politicians can choose to neglect the evidence and paint college-in-prison programs as unfair to law-abiding citizens, but the true injustice lies in the continuation of ineffective and costly practices when a solution—education—is readily available.

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PICKET LINE TO PRISON LINE ARRESTED ACTIVISM POST-FERGUSON Kevin O’Donnell

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he circumstances that landed Princeton professor and author Cornel West and activist-clergyman Osagyefo Sekou in the St. Louis County jail on October 13 could have been avoided. But that would have defeated the point.

West journeyed to Missouri from his teaching post at Union Theological Seminary with the explicit intention of ending up in the fluorescent-lit intake center surrounded by several dozen other protesters. The group had refused to disperse from the Ferguson Police Station, where they were protesting the lack of indictments for officers who killed unarmed black men. In small waves, the protesters were arrested, processed at the county jail, examined by medical professionals, fingerprinted, and released, usually within several hours and usually without a bond. A few weeks after Sekou was released, he penned an open letter to fellow clergy calling on them to show solidarity with the protesters.

Sekou’s letter drew on Martin Luther King, Jr.’s 1963 “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” which had called on clergy to change their deafening silence or racist condescension towards the issue of segregation. King had explained that the goal behind non-violent civil disobedience was “to create a situation so crisis-packed that it will inevitably open the door to negotiation.” Going to jail for civil rights carries a certain romance even among the most straight-laced, at least when the arrestees are safely in the past and have names like King, Mandela, or Gandhi. But in the urgent now, people rightfully hesitate. The retelling of those events often leaves out the painstaking strategizing that went into nonvio-

lent disobedience and the steps that activists needed to take to avoid annihilation. Were it not for teams of lawyers who had bail funds set up in advance, civil rights groups of the 1960s would have languished in jail without recourse.

Being arrested is always a risk of nonviolent civil disobedience. But that does not discourage people from engaging in direct action with Black Lives Matter; instead, protesters are learning to be aware of the risks associated with their advocacy and to formulate a strategy to minimize the harms arrest can have on the movement and its demonstrators.

LED OFF IN ZIP TIES: UNFORESEEN ARRESTS Unlike Sekou and West, the majority of early Ferguson protestors did not plan on going to jail. As Antonio French explains to the HPR, he was arrested before it became popular within the movement. French, the alderman for Ward 21 of the City of St. Louis, documented the early days of unrest in Ferguson, when snipers studded rooftops and police in armored trucks clashed shields with protesters. He tried to keep peace at the demonstrations and made contact with the officers in charge to clarify rules of engagement and avoid provoking them. Neither that nor French’s elected position stopped officers from pulling him out of his car to arrest him while he was videotaping a police line advancing through smoke after the 9 p.m. curfew.

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In the early days before Missouri governor Jay Nixon established the Unified Command to relieve Ferguson police from their peacekeeping duties, the understaffed department took full advantage of their ability to arrest people and hold them for 24 hours without charge. According to French, this became their way of clearing crowds. At the time of his arrest, the arresting officer gave French a blunt explanation of why they had put him in zip ties: “For not listening.”

The police commander on site sets the line between arrest and freedom. Most of the Ferguson protesters on October 13 received misdemeanor charges like disturbing the peace or third degree assault, which can be issued for something as small as brushing against an officer, as per the Missouri Revised Statutes. “There’s a line for the law no matter what,” said Sgt. Brian Schellman, a spokesman for the St. Louis County Police Department (part of the Unified Command) to the HPR. “Police try to use that discretion to let people voice their opinion as much as possible, but at some point when you cross that line the police have to do their jobs as well.”

That line varies from department to department and from city to city. In Cambridge, Massachusetts, police have mostly focused on protecting demonstrators and directing traffic, making no arrests in connection to Black Lives Matter protests. Police elsewhere have taken greater liberties in making arrests when the demonstrations take place on private property. This was the case when the Ohio Student Association (OSA) and others staged a Christmas Eve die-in at a mall near the Wal-Mart where police killed John Crawford last summer. (Crawford was killed while holding a toy gun.)

MarShawn McCarrel started working on the Black Lives Matter demonstrations through the OSA, which had been organizing around the issue of police brutality long before Crawford’s death in Beavercreek, Ohio. As protesters left the mall at the officers’ orders, McCarrel shouted at an officer who pushed a young woman that wasn’t moving fast enough. Then another officer grabbed him and pulled him away from the crowd. McCarrel’s frustration grew as the officer started joking about Crawford’s death and the protest.

“Because at that point, I’m in zip ties; I’m powerless, especially as an African American male. I have no power in that situation. It was really traumatic,” said McCarrel, a resident of West Columbus, to the HPR. “Where I come from, jail is [either] something that you’re going to go to, or you’re terrified of it. I never wanted to go to jail.”

McCarrel and eleven others ended up in the Fairborn jail with Virgil Vaduva, who was documenting the mall demonstration when he was arrested within the police line. He and others were charged with criminal trespassing and obstructing official business, but Vaduva says if he didn’t have two friends documenting his arrest the charges might have been more serious.

“Three guys grabbed me, and they were all pretty much lying about how it happened,” he explained to the HPR, adding that one of the three police reports accused him of resisting arrest and attempting to flee the scene, neither of which he did. A video-streaming app called Bambuser, used repeatedly during

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the Arab Spring, helped defend him against the added charges.

HIGH RISK AND CONSEQUENCE When individuals try to escalate the protest beyond the level of confrontation established by the organizers, they sometimes forget the risks posed to people of color in such situations.

Especially for people with varying immigration status, getting arrested can turn into a nightmare that reaches beyond a few hours in a holding cell. Escalation to that level is a privilege that not all have.

Vaduva is now a naturalized U.S. citizen, but when he was on a student visa, he would have been far more cautious around protests for fear of being deported. “That’s probably the worst visa to be an activist because you have no civil rights whatsoever,” he said. Organizers who escalate a demonstration without looking after their more vulnerable members put them at risk, but ACLU lawyer Carl Williams told the HPR that this shouldn’t deter immigrants from activism. Six months ago, he supported a group that blocked the front entrance to South Bay Correctional Facilities. Two-thirds of the demonstrators were in the United States without documentation, but they were protected because they had a plan, legal support, and knowledge of what to do if arrested. He said they had more extensive formal training in nonviolent direct action than most of the Black Lives Matter demonstrators. Yet training does not diminish the gravity of undocumented youth participating in civil disobedience. Students who pushed lawmakers to pass the DREAM Act in May and July 2010 faced deportation charges after being arrested during sit-ins.

High school students who want to get involved in direct activism also face questions about their futures. The Black Lives Matter movement was the first arena in which Cambridge, Mass. student Gina Geese felt she could be openly angry about the issues facing black people in America. Geese joined her first demonstration after the Michael Brown non-indictment, then teamed up with other youth organizers to stage walkouts from Cambridge Community Charter School, Somerville High School, Cambridge Rindge and Latin School, and Prospect Hill Academy, where she is a junior.

“The risk came to me the day of: the risk of getting in trouble with my mom, getting suspended from school—which didn’t happen. I didn’t think about those things because I was so pumped,” said Geese in an interview with the HPR. She hopes to attend Northeastern University for pre-law, but until her acceptance letter arrives she is hesitant to put herself on the police line again. However, Marlyn McGrath, Harvard’s director of admissions, told the HPR that no formula exists for considering an applicant with an arrest record. Harvard asks to know the details of arrests, including how the related demonstrations fits into the applicant’s interests and other activities.

“We have certainly admitted people who had been involved in various kinds of protests, and often those events have enhanced our positive understanding of the applicant’s interests and his or her commitments,” McGrath said. “By contrast, a

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Going to jail for civil rights carries a certain romance even among the most straight-laced ... But in the urgent now, people rightfully hesitate.

candidate who seemed to have a habit of dropping into every protest event he or she could find, on all sides of every question, managing to be arrested, might well make members of our committee wonder about the significance of that record.”

STRATEGIZING FOR JAIL The Black Lives Matter demonstrations are now more strategic than in the early days after Michael Brown’s death, when scores of protesters were picked up on a weekly basis. These new approaches have been grounded in new infrastructure formed within groups to prepare their protesters for effective civil disobedience and protect them with bail and legal representation when things go awry. Several groups have even set up premeditated and intentional arrests, as in the case of Sekou and West.

McCarrel credits a detailed plan of action with keeping the OSA energized and well-funded. The OSA raised a bail fund through social media, drawing on members and pre-existing partners. When members were arrested, the organization quickly met the $150-per-person bail, and all but one of those jailed were out within five hours, according to Vaduva. A lawyer offered to represent them all pro bono when they go to court in March. In French’s opinion, getting arrested is the worst part, the ensuing legal process is a nuisance, and the jail process is the easiest. The OSA tried to prepare for each.

Geese and her co-organizers incorporated the National Lawyers Guild’s recommended nonviolent direct action guidelines to fit the Cambridge protests. They elected to avoid arrest and adhere to nonviolent principles, then posted the ground rules on their Facebook page. Even when they blocked a major intersection in Boston, no one was arrested. They asked their peers to buddy up with someone to ensure no one got separated and picked up, and they also agreed to not speak with the police unless legally obligated, a strategy Williams says can protect ar-

rested protesters—and anyone else—from self-incrimination.

Williams believes that constant and intentional solidarity among small groups of people is critical for protection. Successful organizers plan for the potential individual costs of civil disobedience by setting standards and procedures beforehand, inviting legal observers who can document police action, creating a bail fund, encouraging people to carry at least $40 in cash if they need to bail themselves out, leaving home anything that can be perceived as a recreational drug or weapon, securing cellphones with passwords (although police cannot legally search them), and carrying a form of state identification for the jail intake process. They also assess the risk for people participating in the demonstration and take their concerns into consideration.

For the civil rights movement of the 1960s, specific laws were far more explicitly unjust than the laws and political structures in place today. That movement gained the moral high ground by virtue of its participants going to jail for breaking such overtly discriminatory laws. Going to jail had symbolic importance, as the public was swayed by the shocking images of young people dragged away on illegitimate charges.

Today, protesters and participants in the Black Lives Matter movement face the struggle of imparting similar symbolic meaning and significance in their civil disobedience. In general, the arrests around the demonstrations have been for acts that have attempted to reclaim public space or overcome police barriers, like during the Boston protests this winter. With some exceptions like the I-93 blockade in January, protesters have not made going to jail an intentional part of the plan. The end goal is not showing how much one is willing to put on the line by getting arrested—what Williams calls a “macho” impulse—but rather, as he says, “challenging systems of oppression and risking arrest while doing it.”

Disclosure: The author has been active in the #BlackLivesMatter protests in the Boston community.

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SELLING NATURE THE PLIGHT OF THE SOUTH AFRICAN RHINOCEROS

Camila Victoriano

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South African rhinoceros, once dead, can travel thousands of miles. Under some circumstances, its horn can trek to places as far away as Vietnam and China. Once there, it transforms into a product for spiritual medicine or a sign of wealth and class. Meanwhile, the rest of its body stays rotting in the grass, and its species inches closer to extinction.

In 2014, poachers killed a record number of the beasts for their horns, according to official numbers published by the South African government’s Department of Environmental Affairs. The number of rhinoceroses that were killed is triple that of four years ago, and the value of their horns by weight is now greater than that of gold. The complex spiritual roots of this illegal market make it difficult to pinpoint the source or perpetuating causes of it; thus, effective solutions increasingly require strong regulations and governmental commitment.

LOOPHOLES IN WILDLIFE LAWS The 1993 Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Flora and Fauna (CITES) represented the first official international legal action taken against poaching and the illegal animal trade. The treaty, which attempts to protect wildlife from threats to its survival, emphasizes that illegal trade

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must be tackled at an international level, because it crosses national borders. Local and federal laws are not enough if there are disparities from country to country.

Grace Gabriel, the Asia regional director of the International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW), tells the HPR, “Since the convention has come into being, no species that has been listed on the treaty has become extinct.” Yet Gabriel points out that some unintentional flaws and loopholes persist. “South Africa allows foreigners to get hunting permits to export rhino horns out of South Africa. These have been exploited by criminal gangs ... to smuggle rhino horn out of the country.” By permitting these loopholes, several of the treaty’s articles actually hinder progress towards solving the poaching issue.

Additionally, CITES has approved certain wildlife trades over others, leading to legal instability and inconsistency. Gabriel gives ivory trade as an example. “In the market … you have legal ivory trade and you have illegal ivory trade. The legal market

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provides cover for illegal trade and creates a gray market. And that gray market is actually more lethal than illegal markets because gray markets will confuse the consumers.” As with the loopholes in the hunting regulations, these exceptions confuse the situation and leave room for criminal action, since the public cannot distinguish between identical legal and illegal items.

THE SINO-VIETNAMESE MARKET For the last 3,000 years, rhino horn has played an integral role in traditional Chinese medicine, and specific practices in this tradition have influenced countries outside of China, like Vietnam. Until recently, the horn was primarily used as fine powder and valued for properties claimed to reduce fever and mitigate the effects of cancer. In an interview with the HPR, Colorado State University professor George Wittemyer credits the beliefs associated with rhino horn for prolonging the illegal trade.

However, rhino horn has lost much of its perceived medicinal value in the recent years. Gabriel mentions that after China joined CITES in 1993, its government banned the use of rhino horn in traditional medicine. “Currently, if you’re talking about China, their demand for rhino horn is not driven by health—it’s completely driven by wealth.”

Yet a few individuals remain that adhere to the belief that rhino horn can substantively improve health. Changing attitudes is extremely difficult, says Wittemyer, “especially when you’re dealing with the desperation around [disease]. For example, cancer patients try normal treatments, but because they’re terminal there’s really no hope for them. Everyone at that point is going to be prone to trying what they can, hoping that maybe it’ll have an impact.” Even though a handful of people still hold these beliefs, most individuals have shifted away from considering rhino horn as medicine. Now, many Asian collectors use rhino horns as a symbol for wealth and economic success.

In a Time article, Hannah Beech writes that Vietnam has experienced a similar shift in demand as the country’s recent economic reforms have enriched both the upper class and the more recently affluent middle class. As wealth overcomes health as the demand driver, Gabriel explains, rhino horns are increasingly made into extravagant carvings for purchase. The era of medicinal use is nearly over.

The rhino horn’s status as a wealth symbol is reinforced when national leaders and diplomats take part in the illegal trade. A recently exposed video documents a member of the Vietnamese embassy in Pretoria, South Africa accepting a delivery of rhino horns. As The Guardian reports, the Vietnamese government rarely enforces bans against such crimes, and diplomats like the one caught on film invoke diplomatic immunity to avoid consequences. This state of affairs represents an additional difficulty, as those entrusted with the power to stop the trade are

complicit in its continued prevalence. As Wittemyer notes, “[The rhino horn] might be one of these things that takes a whole generation before there’s rejection of that product.”

Illegal markets in China and Vietnam are only part of the reason why poaching is so difficult to stop. Another problem is that poaching is often not just limited to small-scale hunters. Rather, as Beech’s article remarks, international criminal organizations frequently run the operations, thereby linking rhino poaching to a wide variety of other criminal activities.

Gabriel spoke with a current wildlife trader and asked him if he would take the opportunity to shift to weapons trafficking instead of wildlife trafficking. He responded, “No, because those types of trafficking are too dangerous. Risk is too high.” For some criminals, the illegal wildlife trade seems harmless in comparison. Gabriel says, “Wildlife crime has become a high-profit, lowrisk endeavor.” It attracts criminal gangs who were previously engaged in other types of more dangerous and less lucrative crimes, and although the crime itself may be less intensive, the criminals involved have a great wealth of experience and can better maneuver around the laws that are currently in place.

SOLVING THE POLICY PROBLEM Rhino poaching and the ivory trade are both international and local issues. They will not be stopped unless countries at every stage of the trade take legal action and stand for the same values. And as an article Gabriel wrote for National Geographic explains, legal bans may be the most effective way to eliminate the rhino horn trade. She writes that after a tip-off from IFAW in 2011, “Chinese wildlife enforcement authorities halted the sale of more than 400 bottles of tiger bone wine and of rhino horn carvings at a high-profile auction in a hotel in Beijing.” The ban that followed had an immediate impact: over the next year, firms canceled auctions of endangered species’ products throughout the country, and the total number of such auctions decreased by 30 to 40 percent—a value of about $322 million.

Certainly, the Chinese government may be one of a handful of countries that hold enough power to make an immediate impact on the market’s supply and demand through these types of bans and laws. Yet this strategy embodies a greater plan to use effective lawmaking to help solve the poaching crisis elsewhere in the world for animals like the South African rhinoceros.

Viral videos, protests, and local movements will not be enough to halt crimes associated with illegal animal trade.

Instead, well-worded and properly executed laws have proven much more effective. Local activist groups would do well to focus their efforts on promoting these policy changes and looking for guidance from the people in power with the ability to draft legislation. These grotesque killings and trades will not stop unless governments take action, or species like the South African rhinoceros will die out entirely.

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FIRST IN THE NATION Letter From Coös County Gram Slattery

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oös County in the frosty, bumpy, northernmost spit of New Hampshire could hardly feel more remote, and yet every four years, for one festive, honky-tonk evening, it finds itself smack-dab in the middle of the political universe.

Thanks to quirks in the Granite State’s voting laws—themselves the product of a unique brand of Yankee pragmatism— certain small towns here are allowed to open the polls at midnight on election day and close them, naturally, when all ballots have been submitted. In effect, this means the first presidential votes are cast, and counted, in a few tiny, snow-crusted mountain hamlets.

Historically, the “first vote” has been of a point of pride, a civic tradition, a draw for national media outlets and even presidential candidates, who see these locales as symbolically important even though they’ve rarely been bellwethers in recent

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times. And for the last 55 years, the center of attention has been a tired, but grand, 215-room hotel called The Balsams that sustains the petite township of Dixville. There, in a tall white-andred clapboard building, hordes of reporters have gathered once every fours years since 1960, amid much pomp and pageantry, to see who will eke out the slightest of early leads.

But due to a string of questionable business decisions and economic shifts, The Balsams has closed, its future is shaky, and Dixville is dying. That’s creating a void that other first-vote towns in New Hampshire’s North Country are eager to fill, a novel happening in a culturally rugged region with a serious libertarian streak.

“It’s a matter of free enterprise, civic free enterprise,” says Jeff Woodburn, the state senator for Coös County. “Whatever small towns can get 100 percent turnout at midnight are wel-

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come to step up. The first question is whether they can round up all their votes, and the second is if they can attract the media.”

Mr. Woodburn, as well as many Granite Staters, hopes that at least one town here can answer both those questions in the affirmative, as a festive first vote has come to be as much a New Hampshire tradition as timbering, shipbuilding, and maple sugaring. The practice started way back in 1948 in Hart’s Location, a town of 41 residents hard up against the White Mountains.

Millsfield, which then had a population of 19, followed in 1952, and Dixville came on to the scene in 1960, shortly after Neil Tillotson, a rubber manufacturing entrepreneur, bought The Balsams.

Soon thereafter, the residents of Hart’s Location lost interest in midnight voting, and national attention shifted to Dixville, as the paparazzi stuffed the hotel’s walnut-paneled, patriot-themed Ballot Room. This continued through 2012, shortly after The Balsams shuttered.

Recent investments have the potential to breathe life back into the place, but its future remains uncertain, and that uncertainty is creating an opportunity for hamlets like Millsfield, three miles south. In that village of 29 persons, where early voting has been the norm since ’52, the townspeople are eager to create a new Balsams experience, even if they won’t admit it. (“We’re not trying to replace Dixville,” Wayne Urso, the sole selectman, told me repeatedly.)

On a January day, I visited that small town on rural, rolling Route 26. To say it’s “out there” would be the severest of understatements. Drive an hour past the Appalachian ridge, into deep, dark, frost-stunted softwood forest on a road that seems carved from permafrost, and you get to the metropolis of Errol (population: 298). Drive several miles further, and Millsfield emerges, but if you blink, you might miss it.

There are several discontinuous structures—a large farm owned by the Swett family, a few sagging clapboard homes and several trailers—tucked into a long, attractive valley, pocked with high camps and the vestiges of heavy logging. The only realtor in the area is called “Northern Edge.” The regional school has 14 pupils in nine grades. To get groceries, you’ll have to drive an hour and a half to Lancaster, N.H., and to choose from a healthy selection of semi-automatic shotguns, you’ll have to drive five minutes, down to L.L. Cote’s emporium.

Just before I arrived at Selectman Urso’s house, the power in town went out, which was a problem as the temperature was -11 degrees Fahrenheit. “Thank god we have a generator,” he said, with a laugh.

After a short pick-up ride across the street and a hundred yards north, we arrived at Log Haven, a blue-collar bar-restaurant that serves snowmobilers and sportsmen, almost exclusively. There, we met its owner, Roland Proulx, a middle-aged man with a smooth, wet, North Woods accent. Come November 2016, this restaurant will host a midnight vote, and, if Millsfield has its way, a sizeable throng of reporters.

Log Haven is large for the North Country—maybe 150 seats— and rustic in a pleasant, simple way. The tables and furniture are stock items. The architecture boasts a few shellacked-pine posts

and beams, and a long, marble-topped bar. Mr. Proulx points across the room to an elevated stage, not more than 10 by 15 feet, backed by a poster for Narragansett Tallboys. That’s where the votes will be cast. On the other side of the restaurant, behind a wooden barrier topped with decorative birdhouses, will be the press.

According to Mr. Urso, there could be as many as 23 voters, significantly more than the 10 Dixville had in 2012. “But I don’t know for sure,” he said. “I say that because we’ve got some people coming and going. Like Joanne’s son, across the street.

Sometimes, he lives with her; sometimes he doesn’t.”

He went on to say that the impetus to create a camera-friendly first vote here came largely from New Hampshire Secretary of State Bill Gardner, who wanted to ensure that a town up north would fill the void created by Dixville’s potential demise. But even with the secretary’s implicit blessing, Urso concedes that Millsfield isn’t the only possible host, even if it is perhaps the most gung-ho.

The towns of Ellsworth and Hart’s Location revived their participation in the first vote in the 1990s, and the latter has even drawn a reporter or two from the Associated Press in recent elections. Ed Butler, the owner of the historic Notchland Inn, which hosted Hart’s Location’s voting until a few years ago, wrote in an e-mail that the town plans to continue their midnight tradition.

Moreover, Dixville itself isn’t necessarily done for. In 2014, a well-known ski resort developer from western Maine named Les Otten bought into The Balsams after a disastrous ownership by two local businessmen. His dream for the place entails a massive ski area with 23 lifts including an aerial tramway and greatly expanded hotel facilities.

Scott Tranchmontagne, Mr. Otten’s spokesperson, said that the project could likely be completed by November 2016, but Urso doubted it given the hotel’s current condition, and Thomas Tillotson, whose father owned the hotel from 1960 to 2001, pointed out that the project isn’t officially scheduled to be completed until later that winter.

Plus, the very concept of putting shovel to dirt is far from a done deal: watershed issues and buffer regulations at a nearby windfarm have created legal problems, and Tillotson put the chance of the permits going through at 60 percent.

So, one way or another, Millsfield could very well get a lively, media-frenzied first vote. If that happens, many reporters could be trading in the elegant rusticity of the Balsam’s Ballot Room for the rough-hewn charm of Log Haven come 2016, and maybe come 2020 and 2024, too.

As for the winner come election night in Millsfield, the town is, in Woodburn’s words, “extremely conservative, more so than Dixville.”

At Log Haven, Proulx similarly described the town as “solidly Republican,” though its residents “try to vote their minds and their hearts.”

To that, Urso added, “What I can say is that that unlike New York or Philadelphia or some of these bigger places, we have no dead people voting here. We know them all.”

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BLACK STUDIES MATTERS The historical roots of modern protests Mark Bode

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ill the Black Lives Matter movement succeed? The entire country waits with bated breath to hear that question answered.

And although pundits and protestors alike have compared Black Lives Matter to the civil rights movement generally in order to evaluate and predict the future of the contemporary demonstrations, a specific branch of that earlier campaign deserves additional attention.

The black studies discipline, born out of such protest, continues to influence modern equality crusades. Today, the discipline plays a part in movements by providing the historical context in which to understand them. Black Lives Matter leaders can use this context of racial progress to set a direction for the movement in order to create and sustain equitable solutions for American communities.

FROM STUDENT TO ACTIVIST After helping win major victories for civil rights on the national level, students of the 1960s began to critically reexamine their own colleges and demand educational opportunities that explicitly addressed racial issues. Protestors in the black studies movement “felt like they did not have a central part in the curriculum, and they felt like black studies would become that part,” Ibram Kendi, a professor at SUNY-Albany and author of The Black Campus Movement, told the HPR. The methodology of those original protests ran in the same vein as the wider civil rights movement. Campus activists employed everything from rallies and sitins to threats of violence as part of their campaign for black studies programs, said Saint Louis University professor Stefan Bradley, the author of Harlem vs.

Columbia University: Black Student Power in the Late 1960s. Direct negotiation with school administrators became one of the most effective tactics. “Students spent a good deal of time meeting with

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Yale student Ralph Dawson protests the jailing of the New Haven Black Panthers in 1970. faculty members and trustees in order to get black studies a unit on the various campuses,” Bradley explained to the HPR. “At the time, it seemed rather spectacular, because people hadn’t really seen that on college campuses before.”

In the late 1960s, many school administrators capitulated to the protests and established black studies programs on their campuses. In researching his book, Kendi found that university presidents across the nation prioritized the prevention of campus disruption over the rejection of black studies curriculum. If schools continued to resist the movement, they risked the ire of a sizable portion of their student bodies and members of surrounding communities. The protest power of these combined groups would have been enough to paralyze campuses.

Black studies departments were therefore established in large part as a way to placate protestors. By the early 1970s, colleges in every region of the country had black studies.

The communities surrounding campuses heavily influenced whether admin-

istrators would establish black studies programs. Kendi observed that leaders of historically white universities near black communities were more likely to create programs in order to avoid violent protest.

Bradley agreed that proximity to strong black movements was a decisive factor: at San Francisco State College—the first school to establish black studies—it was the Black Panthers and other black militant groups; at Columbia, it was the Harlem community; at Yale, it was a nearby trial of Black Panthers in New Haven.

Thus, many black studies programs owe their inceptions to communities’ involvement.

FROM ACTIVISM TO ACADEMIA From the beginning, public opinion of black studies was skeptical: never before had an academic discipline emerged through such controversial means. Some critics claimed that black students only wanted programming so that they would not have to compete against white stu-

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dents, Bradley told the HPR. It was imperative that black studies undergo a transition to gain respect as an academic discipline.

Black studies did succeed in achieving a respected status on many campuses as an equal academic discipline; however, some programs have done so at a cost to their social activist roots. “In a lot of ways, universities create a sort of bubble around themselves,” said Bradley. “African American studies … in some cases, fell victim to that kind of bubble.” Over time, some programs saw their relationships with the surrounding black communities weaken. Kendi sees such programs as “socially irresponsible,” especially given the discipline’s activist origins.

Indiana University professor Fabio Rojas disagrees. “Black studies is an academic thing, so it’s designed for academia,” the author of From Black Power to Black Studies: How a Radical Social Movement Became an Academic Discipline told the HPR. Consequently, he argued, black studies should not be officially involved with campus activism.

Indeed, black studies’ influence on the Black Lives Matter movement has not been through official involvement with protesting groups. Professor Bradley, whose proximity to the Ferguson protests has given him a firsthand perspective on the movement, told the HPR that he was unaware of any black studies program lending support to the protests. Fadhal Moore ’15, the co-chair of the Harvard Black Community Leaders, and Cary Williams ’16, the president of the Association of Black Harvard Women, told the HPR that many individual faculty members from a variety of disciplines have shown solidarity with the protests. However, that interaction has been individual rather than departmental.

Instead, black studies programs exert their primary influence on the protests by contextualizing the current struggle within black history. “I think that by creating the intellectual framework for this kind of criticism, [black studies programs] are providing a valuable service to the rest of society … even if they aren’t running the protests,” Rojas told the HPR. To this, Williams added, “Given the deep historical context of these issues, I’m even more inspired to take action, because it’s not like these things popped up yesterday. They’ve been around for generations.”

NEW MOVEMENT, NEW GOALS Despite the similarities between the black studies movement and Black Lives Matter, the latter faces challenges regarding its future direction. Current leaders would be wise to look to the black studies movement’s clear platform and remarkable persistence as a model to create lasting change.

Meeting with faculty, a revolutionary strategy in the 1960s, has become more commonplace now. For the Black Lives Matter movement at Harvard University, interaction with administration and faculty has become an element of its outreach strategy.

Moore told the HPR that students have been communicating regularly with the administration about events associated with Black Lives Matter. Williams echoed this claim and stated that the administration has “stepped up” in addressing issues of racism on campus. In the weeks following dialogue with student leaders, Harvard’s administration showed support for the movement through an official statement from President Drew Faust, a picture of Faust wearing a Black Lives Matter t-shirt on the university’s Instagram account, and organizational support dur-

ing the controversial Primal Scream protest.

For both the black studies and the Black Lives Matter movements, a national leader has been conspicuously absent. Instead, the demonstrations were—and remain—highly localized, with leaders and participants coming chiefly from the affected communities. Kendi argues that this lack of national leadership helped the black studies activists succeed because it “made it more difficult for their opponents to strike down their leaders and consequently end their protests.” Some critics, he added, “have made the case that those protestors that have had leaders in the past have been more successful. … [However,] that’s not necessarily historically accurate.” Indeed, several movements, such as the Vietnam War protests and the marriage equality movement, have achieved success without a single leader.

But for many current protestors, the lack of defined leadership can be frustrating. Moore acknowledged that although he appreciates the flat structure of the Black Lives Matter movement, it sometimes detracts from the efforts to organize protests and rallies. “Most of our time is spent on [coordinating], as opposed to actual action,” he explained. Additional organization, he reasons, would help focus the movement’s energy.

Professor Rojas agreed with Moore’s sentiment, noting, “Having some structure is highly valuable … [and] you need some sort of organized interaction with the state if you ever want to change things.” That interaction, for Rojas, requires more structured, national leadership from the movement.

Even without an overlying national structure, the black studies movement’s concrete goals enabled protestors to advocate for and attain their objectives. Furthermore, the movement did not necessarily need centralized leadership, as it focused primarily on negotiating with individual colleges. But for the Black Lives Matter protests, creating a similar set of clearly stated objectives has been a challenge. Much of the attention has so far been placed on “shutting this racist system down” rather than advocating for concrete policy proposals. “[Protests now] are usually not as instrumental and not as goal-oriented as they were in the 1960s,” Rojas said. “[Back then,] people had very clear goals in mind. They had built the right tools to achieve those goals, and they were very dogged about it over a period of decades.”

Bradley sees promise in smaller reforms in Ferguson’s municipal government, as well as in the few policy goals—like putting cameras on police officers—that have emerged. McKenzie Morris, a third-year law student and the president of the Harvard Black Law Students Association, expressed hope to the HPR that these policies would take hold. “The police cameras, in my opinion, are the first tangible step through which people are trying to get to the main goal, which is accountability,” she said.

“That is the main policy goal out of all of this: a true checks and balances system that does not currently exist.”

The current movement’s prospects to create lasting changes remain uncertain. Bradley sees promise in what student protestors have been able to accomplish so far. Now that they have “the whole world watching,” he believes more substantial reforms can take place. But for Rojas, such reforms will only come through organization. “That’s my message for the modern movements of today,” he stated. “You can raise consciousness. You can shift the discourse a little bit. But until you start hitting the pocketbook, until you start making people lose elections, until you make people lose customers, there’s not going to be a whole lot of change.”

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A PARTY DIVIDED WHY EDUCATION IS A WEDGE ISSUE FOR DEMOCRATS Quinn Mulholland

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alifornia’s two candidates for state superintendent this past November didn’t agree on much when it came to education. Tom Torlakson, a former teacher, wanted to make school funding more equitable and support teachers.

Marshall Tuck, a former charter school executive, wanted to increase the number of charter schools and tie teacher evaluations to test scores. Torlakson’s campaign was primarily bankrolled by teachers unions. Tuck’s was funded by out-of-state benefactors like Michael Bloomberg and Alice Walton, the daughter of WalMart founder Sam Walton. These outside parties spent a combined $25 million—three times the amount spent on California’s gubernatorial race—filling the airwaves with attack ads. The race had all the hallmarks of the divisive, partisan competitions that were so common in the 2014 midterms. Except for one thing: Torlakson and Tuck are both Democrats.

The California state superintendent election exemplified a nascent divide among Democrats over education that is poised to play a significant role in the Democratic outlook in 2016 and beyond. Although much has been made of the heated debate between left-wing populists and moderate centrists in the party over economic policy, this educational divide, which pits the Obama administration against grassroots Democratic advocates and self-proclaimed education “reformers” against teachers unions, has been largely overlooked. With Congress set to rewrite No Child Left Behind, President George W. Bush’s signature education initiative, the increasingly urgent debate over how to address the racial and socioeconomic achievement gaps in schools is becoming a wedge issue for Democrats.

ORIGINS OF THE DIVIDE The divisions in the Democratic Party over education policy

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can be traced back to the late 1980s, when Polly Williams, a black Democrat representing urban Milwaukee in the Wisconsin State Assembly, sponsored legislation creating a school voucher program that allowed low-income Milwaukee students to use state funding to attend private schools. Williams’s embrace of what was originally a conservative idea prompted many other Democrats, concerned with the state of urban public schools, to follow suit.

This was significant, according to Tom Loveless, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, because it created a rift between two key Democratic constituencies: urban blacks, who wanted better public schools, and teachers unions, who opposed charter schools and school vouchers. “African-Americans, of course, are a very important constituency in the Democratic Party, and yet so are teachers unions,” Loveless told the HPR. “In that particular case, those two important constituencies were diametrically opposed.”

The true emergence of education as a wedge issue for Democrats came in the 2000s, with the entrance of Wall Street and Silicon Valley billionaires into the education policy debate.

Many of them saw education as a business in need of innovation and competition, and they began giving large sums of money to organizations and Democratic candidates that supported charter schools. Some of these donors, like Bill Gates and Eli Broad, had historically given to Democrats, but many were much more conservative, according to Robin Hiller, the executive director of The Network for Public Education, an education advocacy organization.

Hiller explained to the HPR that some of the policies the reform candidates support, like closing schools in low-income areas, may even seem to go against to Democratic principles.

“The only thing that makes sense is that there are people giving

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to candidates in the Democratic Party … that support privatization, that support union-busting, and the attacks on teachers.

And so, if you’re getting all your money from those people, you have to go along with what they say.” Loveless disagreed, arguing that the Democratic reformers aren’t beholden to whims of their donors, but are “acting out of moral outrage, and out of what are traditional impulses in the Democratic party, so they don’t see themselves as privatizers.” However, even if these candidates are acting on principle, they still depend on wealthy donors who expect them to pursue specific policies in return for their support.

Loveless said the emergence of these hedge fund billionaires from both sides of the aisle in educational policy prompted a backlash from teachers, who felt “blamed for the failures of urban education.” Left-wing education activists were outraged that wealthy donors who were newcomers to education policy were pushing ideas that were anathema to their policy priorities.

Harvard Graduate School of Education professor Susan Johnson told the HPR, “The union reformers, who actually have been at work doing a lot of educational change in some places in very far-reaching ways for the last 15 or 20 years, were very angry that people who had really very little experience in education and few credentials and little training were starting to say, ‘Here are the answers for education.’”

PRESIDENT VERSUS PARTY The Obama administration has used federal funding as an incentive for states to adopt policies, such as encouraging the growth of charter schools and tying teacher evaluations to test scores, that are championed by the new reformers but opposed by public education activists. In urban centers like Chicago, Philadelphia, and Newark, strong grassroots movements, consisting primarily of Democratic constituencies, have emerged to oppose these policies, according to Jeff Bryant, a fellow at the Campaign for America’s Future, a liberal advocacy group. “These were supposed to be the communities that were going to be helped in the reform movement, and yet these are the communities where you’re seeing the most vociferous opposition,” Bryant said in an interview with the HPR. “And it’s coming from advocacy groups that are on the ground there.”

According to Johnson, many public education activists were excited when Obama took office. But the President’s appointment of Arne Duncan as Secretary of Education over Linda Darling-Hammond, whom many of these activists preferred, and the subsequent policies that Duncan’s Department of Education implemented quickly alienated teachers unions and their allies.

“The traditional side of the Democratic Party in education was sort of sidestepped,” Johnson said. Many of Obama’s education policies, especially those tying standardized test scores to teacher evaluations, were very similar to those of his predecessor. “A lot of them had come from George Bush, and people said that [Obama’s] Race To The Top was [Bush’s] No Child Left Behind on steroids,” Hiller explained.

However, Obama’s policies are undoubtedly distinct from those of right-wing education reformers. “While the … ObamaDuncan group is staking out a position that’s different from

what the teachers unions would like them to, it’s also a position that’s different from some of the reformers further on the right,” Teachers College, Columbia University professor Jeffrey Henig told the HPR. Indeed, the Department of Education has shifted its rhetoric this past year to emphasize that its policy objectives aren’t all that different from those of the traditional left-wing education activists. For example, in an October op-ed for The Washington Post, Duncan acknowledged a major complaint lodged by teachers and parents, writing that “tests—and preparation for them—dominate the calendar and culture of schools, causing undue stress.”

Still, Obama and Duncan have a ways to go before they win back the favor of teachers unions and other public education activists. At their annual convention this past summer, the National Education Association, the country’s largest teachers union, called on Duncan to resign, thrusting the divide between the teachers union wing of the Democratic Party and the Obama administration into the national spotlight.

TEACHERS UNIONS: OBSTRUCTIONISTS OR SCAPEGOATS? The Democratic reformers often accuse teachers unions of digging in their heels and refusing to accept that the educational issues public schools face require that significant changes be made. “Some Democrats have, over time, come to see the union as overly rigid in defending some of the elements of the current education system, and, as a result, begun to peel away,” Henig said. And they’re not alone; according to a poll by Harvard’s Program on Education Policy, 43 percent of Americans see teachers unions as a negative influence on public schools, up from 31 percent in 2009.

Back at Brookings, Loveless argued that teachers unions had become too extreme. He pointed to teachers unions in New York that refused to back the most recent reelection campaign for Democratic governor Andrew Cuomo, who championed charter schools and supported tying teacher evaluations to standardized test scores. “They’re attacking liberal Democrats who are on the left of the nation’s mainstream politics anyway, and they’re moving even farther to the left of them,” Loveless said.

But other Democrats see teachers unions as scapegoats for deeper issues in education, like student poverty. Because teachers unions are so visible, they are easy to blame for educational issues that might actually be more structural, and the unions are firing back. In an interview with the HPR, Lily Eskelsen García, the president of the National Education Association, said that the reformers want to “make it easy to hire anybody who wants to be a teacher and isn’t trained, … [and] make it really easy to fire teachers.” Randi Weingarten, the president of another teachers union, the American Federation of Teachers, agreed, telling the HPR, “They want to make [teachers] a temporary workforce, and so when they focus on test scores as opposed to really helping [students] grow, they want to fire their way to a teaching force.”

This divide between Democrats who support teachers unions and those who oppose them could play a significant role in the

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2016 Democratic presidential primary, since teachers unions still represent a sizeable Democratic constituency. But Henig argues that it is very unlikely for the teachers unions to support a Republican candidate even if the Democratic nominee isn’t to their liking: “Whoever is the Democratic candidate for president is going to have the unions’ support, because they’re not going to cross over to the other side, and they’re not going to sit on their hands. There’s too much at stake.” Still, teachers unions will be sure to flex as much electoral muscle as possible to nominate a pro-teacher candidate.

THE COURT CASE THAT DEEPENED THE DIVIDE In California, where Tuck and Torlakson fought for the state superintendent’s seat, a recent lawsuit reignited the debate among Democrats over education. It had all the hallmarks of the divide: a wealthy reformer in Silicon Valley entrepreneur David Welch, who brought the lawsuit through his nonprofit organization, Students Matter; a contentious issue for Democrats in teacher tenure, which Welch and fellow reformers aimed to get rid of; and a divide between teachers unions defending the state’s tenure laws and reform-oriented Democrats lining up

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behind Welch to oppose them.

In the case, Vergara v. California, the judge sided with Students Matter, finding that the state’s tenure laws violated the civil rights of poor and minority students by saddling them with ineffective teachers. The ruling effectively struck down job protections for teachers in the state. Many Democrats, including Duncan and Rep. George Miller (D-Calif.), praised the result, while the California teachers unions strongly opposed it. The California Teachers Association, one of these teachers unions, even argued that the lawsuit was “manufactured by a Silicon Valley millionaire and a corporate PR firm to undermine the teaching profession and push their agenda on our schools.”

While Democratic education reformers won the battle in the Vergara case, they lost in the state superintendent race; Tom Torlakson, the candidate supported by California’s teachers unions, was sworn in on January 5. But with Vergara-style lawsuits emerging in other states and the rise of test-based accountability around the country, teachers unions and public education activists continue to face an uphill battle against their deep-pocketed fellow Democrats. As 2016 looms larger, this internal division could have serious consequences for Democratic prospects and national education policy.

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PECAN FARMS, LUNCH COUNTERS, AND WEDDING PHOTOGRAPHY

RELIGIOUS FREEDOM ON TRIAL Fiona Young

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t’s a regular April day in Jackson, Mississippi, but those with a keen eye for detail might notice the bright blue stickers adorning the windows of Campbell’s Bakery, William Wallace Salon, Fat Cat Ceramics, and more than 13 other establishments. Sporting the slogan, “If you’re buying, we’re selling,” these stickers symbolize the efforts of Mitchell Moore— the owner of Campbell’s Bakery—and many other civil rights proponents to speak out against Mississippi’s recent passage of Senate Bill 2681, the Mississippi Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA), which allegedly affords businesses a “license to discriminate” against LGBTQ individuals.

Mississippi’s bill was not unique. Two months before SB 2681 passed, Arizona Governor Jan Brewer vetoed her state’s own version of that bill, SB 1062, in response to both civil and corporate backlash from across the nation. In particular, the National Football League issued a statement threatening business leaders that it would pull Super Bowl XLIX from the state, just as it had relocated Super Bowl XXVII in 1990 after Arizona refused to honor Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. The Arizona bill sparked a nationwide debate about how to satisfy two valued liberties: the freedom of LGBTQ individuals from discrimination and the freedom of religion. Striking the balance between these two freedoms, however, represents a complicated and contentious legal issue. This debate has far-reaching consequences and raises crucial questions, such as whether religious freedom can even exempt people from laws against child labor and whether average citizens can also discriminate against others based on political beliefs.

On the one hand, civil rights advocates stressed the unintended consequences of allowing business owners to deny service to certain groups of people based on religious beliefs. “When we’re dealing with inherent aspects of people’s identity—their sex, their gender, their race, their sexual orientation—there’s cer-

tainly a threat if there are people who see themselves as exempt from laws that prohibit discrimination on those bases,” Steve Kilar, the communications director for the American Civil Liberties Union of Arizona, explained to the HPR. On the other hand, proponents of such religious freedom bills have long argued that they simply serve to protect religious liberty as guaranteed in the First Amendment. And they have had considerable success: 17 states have already adopted their own versions of the federal Religious Freedom Restoration Act (which was passed in 1993) in order to prevent the government from infringing on perceived religious liberties.

Arizona’s SB 1062 would have merely served to amend Section 41-1493 of the Arizona Revised Statutes, which prohibits laws from “substantially burdening a person’s exercise of religion.” However, the bill raised alarm, because it sought to expand the definition of “a person” to include corporations.

Regardless of how small this change may seem, civil rights proponents to see potential for serious overinterpretation and argue that religious freedom bills open a Pandora’s box of problems.

UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES Thus far, opponents of religious freedom bills have focused on how these bills might legalize discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. Many cite the example of a bakery’s refusal to sell a cake to a gay wedding, while others suggest that medical workers could decline to treat gay individuals, even in the event of an emergency.

However, religious freedom bills may have other far-reaching and unintended consequences. The Arizona Small Business Association suggests that SB 1062, if passed, would have allowed employees, not solely business owners, to deny customers on the basis of their own religious preferences. Jerry Bustamante, the

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Arizona Small Business Association’s vice president for public policy, stated that “SB 1062 would have shifted the balance of control from the business owner to employees, who could decide to refuse someone’s business based on their own personal religious beliefs and not those of the business owner.”

Groups like the ACLU fear that businesses and individuals may be able to avoid complying with any law by using the excuse of religious freedom. Eunice Rho, an ACLU advocacy and policy counsel, stated, “[The RFRA] basically opens up a legal challenge to every policy or law on the book unless the law specifically says otherwise.”

Another example of how religious freedom bills can lead to unintended consequences is a case of alleged forced child labor on a pecan farm run by a Mormon sect. Vergel Steed, one of the church’s members, managed to dodge a Department of Labor investigation by claiming that disclosing information about his church would breach religious vows. In September 2014, U.S. District Judge David Sam cited Burwell v. Hobby Lobby to rule in favor of Steed. Yet similarly to SB 1062 and other RFRA bills, Hobby Lobby was initially intended to prevent the state from infringing upon religious freedom. Harvard philosophy and theology professor David Lamberth informed the HPR that “Justice Alito tried to say very clearly in the Hobby Lobby case that this was a very limited decision. But when you combine the ruling with the move to see corporations as having as much scope as they do, it raises questions about how the free exercise of religion might interfere with non-discrimination.”

But RFRA advocates argue that overzealous interpretation of religious freedom legislation is not a threat. Jordan Lorence, a senior counsel for the Alliance Defending Freedom, a conservative organization dedicated to Christian advocacy, stressed to the HPR that the government uses a stringent “four-part filter” to restrict religious freedom legislation: “First, [the proprietor] would have to have a sincere religious belief. Then, the government must substantially burden their free exercise of religion.

Finally, the government can [still] prevail if they show step three, that there is a compelling government interest, and step four, that the policy was done in the least restrictive means.”

Lorence argued that winning religious exemption from the law requires business owners to meet an extremely high threshold. “It isn’t just utter chaos and people excusing themselves from the law,” he said. “Every governmental interest, no matter how trivial, always trumps a request for religious exemption.”

In addition, he claimed that the impact on LGBTQ individuals would be minimal and stated that he had “never heard of a proprietor asserting that they would become ‘unclean’ if they came into contact with a gay or lesbian person.”

Yet even if RFRA proponents suggest that discrimination is rare, it remains a valid concern. For example, Elane Photography, a small business in New Mexico, refused to photograph a wedding ceremony for a lesbian couple in 2006. Lorence, who represented Elane Photography in its discrimination case, argued that “the government simply cannot compel speech, even if it’s a wonderful thought that everyone agrees with.”

To be sure, Elane Photography did not simply refuse service to LGBTQ individuals; rather, the owners did not want to be compelled to photograph an event that contradicted their religious beliefs. Furthermore, Lorence said, “In these photogra-

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pher cases, where there’s probably one out of a hundred photographers who might object to promoting the ideas and concepts of a same-sex wedding ceremony, there are another ninety-nine eager to take the job. This is far cry from the situation in the segregated South, for example, where discrimination was systematized.” Nevertheless, in the end, LGBTQ individuals were denied services based on fundamental characteristics of their personal identities.

THE “RIGHT” KIND OF LIBERTY The situation is further muddied when RFRA proponents accuse civil rights advocates of practicing reverse discrimination. Lorence referenced a hairdresser who used to work for New Mexico Governor Susana Martinez but refused to do her hair once she publicized her opposition to same-sex marriage.

“Waiters and waitresses were motivated by Antonio’s example, claiming that if Susana were to eat a meal at their restaurants, they’d refuse to serve her because of her political views,” Lorence told the HPR. “Now who is operating more like a segregated lunch counter?” It is difficult to determine to what extent civil rights advocates can protest religious freedom bills before their actions become somewhat contradictory. Lorence continued with another anecdote about a photographer who refused to take pictures of the head of the Alliance Defending Freedom and his family, citing disagreements with organization’s values. “To me, this is essentially the same thing that happened with Elane Photography,” Lorence argued.

If individuals insist on refusing service to advocates of religious freedom bills, then these individuals are at risk of being criticized for practicing reverse discrimination. Thus, the religious freedom debate is both dangerous and powerful, because it has the potential to break our nation’s very notion of freedom, discrimination, and religion right down to their cores.

The debate questions the very legitimacy whether citizens in a democratic society are free to hold and act on beliefs inherently hostile to other citizens.

Interestingly enough, in regions of Arizona outside Phoenix, Tucson, and Flagstaff, business owners are already permitted to refuse service to LGBTQ individuals, as Arizona’spublic accommodation laws currently protect individuals against discrimination due to race, national origin, sex, gender, religion, and disability only—sexual orientation is not mentioned. So why the recent fury over religious freedom bills such as SB 1062 and cases like Hobby Lobby, specifically?

Lamberth postulated that perhaps civil rights advocates are more concerned with what recent legislation represents and what direction it could lead the national debate on religion.

Looking forward, the future of the religious freedom debate remains fiercely contested and yet unresolved. “The very claim that Hobby Lobby is a limited decision implies that the bigger question isn’t really settled,” Lamberth explained. “There’s a debate over whether Congress meant in 1993 [with the federal Religious Freedom Restoration Act] to set aside jurisprudence from the free exercise clause, or to clarify it. And the Justices actually disagreed on that. It leaves us in a place where we’re not very well settled.”

A ROMA EDUCATION Can One Decade of Inclusion Reverse History?

Minnie Jang

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hat comes to mind when you hear the word “gypsy?”

Do you picture the beautiful, kind-hearted Esmeralda from Disney’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame or women begging on the streets of Europe whom travelers are told to avoid?

“Gypsy” is a racial slur used to describe the Romani people, an ethnic group dispersed throughout Central and Eastern Europe. The word “gypsy” also carries the negative connotations that Roma are cheaters and thieves—the people responsible when you have been scammed or “gypped.” This kind of wide generalization and stereotype has historically bound the Roma to racism and exclusion from mainstream society.

The years between 2005 and 2015 were deemed “The Decade of Roma Inclusion” by 12 European countries—Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Macedonia, Montenegro, Romania, Serbia, Slovakia, and Spain—that pledged to close the gap between the Roma and the rest of society. In an interview with the HPR, Robert Kushen, the director of the Decade Secretariat, the program’s main facilitation body, stated that by implementing the Decade, “the European Union has, in a very public and political way, acknowledged that this is an issue that demands a concerted political response.”

It is now time to analyze whether this ten-year initiative has had

an impact on the lives of the long-marginalized Romani people.

A PATTERN OF DISCRIMINATION Today, between 10 and 12 million Roma live in Europe, comprising the continent’s largest ethnic minority. Although the Roma are widely dispersed, they face similar social, political, and economic challenges throughout the continent. One in three Roma is unemployed, and 90 percent live below the poverty line, according to the European Union Agency for Fundamental Human Rights. Denied fair and equal access to secure employment, housing, and education, the Roma are caught in a vicious cycle of poverty and social stigmatization that effectively excludes them from mainstream society.

The Decade of Roma Inclusion sought to address these issues with priority areas focusing on health, employment, housing, and education. Justifying his support of education initiatives in particular, Kushen explained, “In the long run, they are probably and arguably the most important thing to do because they are the easiest to do.” With the least amount of legal and political resistance, tackling educational discrimination is the logical first step in fixing the overall problem of Romani exclusion. Moreover, substandard education at a young age restricts Romani

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Substandard education at a young age restricts Romani children from reaching higher education, finding work, and ultimately entering society as full and competent participants.

children from attaining higher education, finding work, and entering society as full participants. Thus, through disparities in education, Roma face early limitations and obstacles to inclusion into society, which impact their lives in the long term.

A SYSTEM OF SEGREGATION Institutional discrimination results in poor educational outcomes for Romani children. UNICEF data shows that in most of Central and Eastern Europe in 2011, only about 20 percent of Roma children enrolled in primary school, a stark difference from the 90 percent of their non-Roma peers that did. Moreover, two out of three Roma children do not complete their primary education, with dropout rates only increasing as they get older and less than one percent attending university. In general, Roma students also perform worse in terms of grade average than their non-Roma peers and take longer to complete their primary education.

Surveys conducted in Romania by the Romani Center for Social Intervention and Studies found that financial burden was the main reason for non-enrollment in kindergarten and high dropout rates. Those who are able to enroll face further discrimination. A report released by the European Commission in 2014 describes how Roma students are segregated: some attend essentially “Roma-only” schools in ghettoized neighborhoods, and some are purposely placed into different “Roma” classes at more heterogeneous schools. In the most alarming scenario, through inaccurate examinations, many Roma children are declared to have learning disabilities. A New York Times article explains that they then disproportionately enter remedial “special schools,” where inferior teaching quality and poor learning objectives ensure a substandard education. Once placed in a special school, there is virtually no way for a student to transfer back into the mainstream education system.

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Margareta Matache, a Roma rights activist and professor at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, told the HPR that Roma children already “come into this world with a heavy baggage of historic inequalities and stigmatization perpetuated by generations of non-Roma all over Europe.” Such stigmatization combined with the efforts of exclusion fosters hostility against Roma children. Constantly reminded of their inferiority through the low academic standards held by their teachers and unaided by their parents who cannot provide assistance to their children due to their own lack of education, Roma children have very limited opportunities. In this way, government school systems strip them of their inalienable right to education, stifling their social mobility and capacity to break out of their cycle of poverty.

A LACK OF IMPACT The Decade of Roma Inclusion attempted to provide a framework that would help member state governments set and meet their goals for Roma integration in education. States drafted National Action Plans that detailed measures such as data collection, support programs, and monitoring systems. The Decade also helped mobilize new resources for the inclusion of Romani people, such as the Roma Education Fund and other projects that focused on desegregation, preschool enrollment, and secondary school scholarships. The incorporation of these policies on a national level helped raise overall awareness about Roma exclusion, which the Decade stated as one of its chief positive impacts in its policy option paper.

However, the Decade’s weak institutional structure and lack of financial backing resulted in insufficient implementation of its policies on a regional level. Zeljko Jovanovic, the director of the Roma Initiatives Office for the Open Society Foundations, explained to the HPR that member states could not deliver on

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the budgetary commitments and strict implementation they intended when they endorsed the Decade in 2003. As years passed and momentum faded, some states lost interest in their commitments. The pledges of the Decade became nothing more than broad promises and soft declarations without mechanisms of real enforcement at the societal level. Kushen also admitted, “The impact on the ground for the majority of Roma has not translated as well. It has translated into a little more money, a little more attention, a little more programming, but it hasn’t had a major impact on the lives of people just yet.”

The lack of comprehensive change for Roma was evidenced in the 2007 landmark case of D.H. and Others v. Czech Republic.

The European Court ruled in favor of 18 Roma students who challenged the Czech Republic for indirectly discriminating against Roma children and placing them into special schools.

Yet eight years on from this decision, some of those 18 students have children of their own, who will unfortunately face the same system of deep-rooted segregation. Nearly 30 percent of Roma children in the Czech Republic still attend special schools, compared to two percent of their non-Roma peers. Similarly weak enforcement persists in other European countries such as Slovakia, where 43 percent of Roma were still enrolled in segregated classes, according to a 2013 report by Amnesty International.

Matache thinks that one reason major gains in legislation have not translated into a greater lasting impact is that “states have missed the opportunity to tackle strong anti-Roma beliefs that have been perpetuated by generations in Roma-related policies.” Such systematic segregation seems out of place in 21st-century Europe, but Jovanovic explained to the HPR that “racism against Roma has elevated to the political level.” He went further, saying that some politicians even fuel anti-Roma attitudes to gain votes, making change seem out of reach no matter how well legislation is enforced. Exclusion of Roma will persist as long as prejudice does.

A HOPE FOR THE FUTURE When asked by the HPR about the importance of resolving discrimination in education, Matache responded, “Roma children need role models, positive Roma stories, and inspiration for success and pride, to prove that it is possible.”

Anna Mirga, a young woman of Polish and Romani descent, is an example of such an inspiration, demonstrating the possibilities for Romani children taught in environments where their differences are celebrated rather than targeted. Now a successful graduate student and a fellow with the Open Society Roma Initiatives Office, Mirga explained in an interview with the Federation of Roma Associations in Catalonia that when she was a child, her classmates in her homogenous Polish community tended to be more curious rather than discriminatory towards her heritage: “It was like a fascination.” Her teachers would encourage her, “‘Tell us about your family and about your culture!’”

Never ashamed of her Roma identity, Mirga greatly benefited from this learning environment, gaining confidence and cultural pride that later helped her to achieve.

Stories like Mirga’s offer hope for a future in which Roma can be integrated as full members of society, a future that is only possible if Europe pushes its efforts past simple legislation. Even as the Decade of Roma Inclusion draws to a disappointing close, Europe must concentrate on stripping away the stereotypes and prejudice that have surrounded Roma for centuries. They have only started the long process of adjusting their understanding of this culture and community, woven into the fabric of European history and so tightly trapped in a system of segregation. Real change will occur when the Roma are no longer compared to Disney characters, dismissed as street beggars, or degraded as “gypsies,” but when they are viewed for what they are: people, who deserve to be treated as such.

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PAWNS IN A GAMBIT FEMALE SUICIDE BOMBERS Hannah Hess

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afa Idris was the first of her kind in modern Palestine.

She was featured on the cover of Time magazine at the young age of 28. Saddam Hussein ordered a memorial erected in her honor in one of Baghdad’s central squares.

Newspapers in Egypt, Jordan, and London praised her courage.

Women named their daughters after her. “Allah willing, we will all become like Wafa Idris,” taught a good-natured sheikh on a Lebanese children’s broadcast. A song was written about her and played on Palestinian Authority Television: Oh blossom who was on Earth and now in Heaven/ Allah Akbar/ Oh Palestine of the Arabs/ Allah Akbar, Oh Wafa!/ But you chose Shahada/ In death you have brought life to aspiration.

The lyrics tell the story well. Idris became a star as a shaheeda—a female martyr—setting a precedent that many would follow.

On January 27, 2002, the beloved daughter, aunt, academic, and ambulance medic set out from her home in the Amari Refugee camp in the Palestinian Authority. She slipped past security checkpoints undetected and a few hours later reached her target: a shopping complex in the center of Jerusalem. An 81-yearold man was killed and more than 100 people were wounded in the ensuing suicide blast.

In the four years following Wafa’s martyrdom, a staggering 67 Palestinian women attempted similar attacks. They were part

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of a global trend of expanded participation in terror by women and children, who became key recruits for organizations like the Taliban, al-Qaeda, Islamic State, Hamas, Fatah, and the Tamil Tigers. To take a recent example, on January 10 Boko Haram deployed a young girl, identified by witnesses as about 10 years old, on a suicide bombing mission that killed 20 shoppers and injured at least 18 others in a crowded market in the Nigerian city of Maiduguri.

Dispatchers, be they Nigerian, Iraqi, or Palestinian, see similar advantages in recruiting females. Women and girls garner significant publicity and convey an image of population-wide participation in a movement. Additionally, females more easily pass through security checkpoints, as it is taboo in some traditional societies for male officers to physically examine women.

Even in more developed countries females are often assumed to be bystanders or victims and thus elude suspicion. Their attacks shock the public and unhinge traditional assumptions about civilians and combatants—everyone suddenly represents a potential threat.

Thus, Idris’s participation was clearly advantageous in several respects to the al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades, the extension of Fatah that employed her. Some claim that her deed also heralded concurrent benefits for Palestinian women. They perceive Idris’s attack and others by Palestinian women as self-empowering acts that demonstrate female leverage and influence in a patriarchal society. But in reality Idris was a victim. Palestinian women

have been increasingly exploited by extremist organizations and a culture of martyrdom that offer them short-lived glory and ersatz equality in exchange for their lives.

EQUALITY FOR ALL? For those like Shefa’a al-Qudsi, the exchange is a rewarding escape from “doing nothing,” as the would-be shaheeda asserted in a media interview. Idris inspired Al-Qudsi to volunteer for a suicide mission of her own in April 2002. “[Until] Wafa, women had just helped [extremist] jihad by making food.” Of course, her claim is only partially accurate. Jihadists Atef Elian and Ahlam Tamimi both planted bombs in Jerusalem prior to Idris’s example—in 1987 and 2001, respectively—so Idris was by no means the first female terrorist in Palestine. Nevertheless, female involvement in Palestinian terrorism spiked notably in 2002 and grew to encompass a multitude of suicide attacks during the Second Intifada, a period of heightened Israeli-Palestinian tension.

This trend contrasts with the First Intifada a decade earlier, during which the highest accolade for a woman was becoming “Mother of a Shaheed” by bearing sons who fought and died for the movement.

In the Muslim world, women’s escalating participation in the conflict raised eyebrows. The dearth of Palestinian women in respected positions of authority in 2002 contributed to their image as weak-willed and incapable. Only 10.4 percent of females

participated in the Palestinian labor force in 2002, compared to 65.5 percent of males. Furthermore, women who did work were concentrated in so-called “caring occupations,” such as teaching, rather than medicine, engineering, or law. These proportions only equalized slightly by 2013. Women also continue to be virtually absent from the public sector, with males comprising 87.2 percent of Palestinian legislators and 95.7 percent of ambassadors as of 2012.

In fact, according to research by the School of Advanced Military Studies, an improved avenue for female political representation and economic participation might have curbed women’s involvement in terror in the first place. Women “increasingly participate in acts of terrorism in patriarchal societies” compared to “Western” ones which offer alternative outlets for self-expression and determination, documents the Journal of International Women’s Studies.

Thus, in an otherwise unequal society, Idris supposedly found a forum for women to take a putatively equal role. “Palestinian women have torn the gender classification out of their birth certificates, declaring that sacrifice for the Palestinian homeland would not be for men alone,” asserted Samiya Sa’ad alDin, a columnist for the Egyptian government daily Al-Akhbar, in 2002. Egypt’s Al-Shaab newspaper painted Idris as a bulwark of Islamic feminism, crediting her with having “exploded all the myths about women’s weakness, submissiveness and enslavement.” Six months later, one in every five Palestinian suicide

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bombers was female. The idolization of Idris and of successive shaheedas rendered involvement in terrorism a culturally acceptable alternative to homemaking and engendered a new place for Palestinian women in the public eye, leading some to suggest Idris’s activism paved the way to “achiev[ing] gender equality.”

This is, however, far from the reality.

SACRIFICIAL LAMBS A closer examination of women’s roles in extremist groups unravels the myth of their empowerment through terrorism. The Canadian Institute of Strategic Studies pronounces that there is no indication of a “fundamental shift in attitudes toward women in radical Islam” versus those who do not participate in extremist organizations. Women have yet to permeate the higher ranks of terrorist organizations, ranks comprised of dispatchers and operatives who coordinate missions. Firsthand accounts indicate that they have little contact with male leaders other than to receive directions on executing attacks.

The abundance of would-be martyrs in Israeli prisons has created an unparalleled opportunity to understand their paths to extremism through interviews with the prospective shaheedas and shaheeds themselves. Dr. Anat Berko of the International Policy Institute for Counter-Terrorism found many instances of domination and intimidation of women by male operatives in her investigation. In one interview a woman recounted how she was summarily slotted for a bombing attack and “begged the older man who was in charge of military affairs to release [her from the operation].” Her pleas were disregarded. The secretive nature of terrorist operations leaves power in the hands of male dispatchers, enabling abuse of female recruits to go undetected and undeterred.

Another interviewer, Yoram Schweitzer, a NATO counterterrorism consultant, believes Palestinian women are no more than “pawns and sacrificial lambs.” The prevalence of females as suicide bombers rather than administrative leaders is itself demonstrative of their exploitation, he says. After all, operational strategists are not encouraged to self-detonate. Recruits for suicide operations therefore occupy society’s outermost rings, often comprising the weak and vulnerable.

A DESPERATE ESCAPE The participation of Palestinian women in suicide bombings serves more as an escape from societal pressure than as an expression of female liberation. Idris is an instructive model.

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Was she really the devoted martyr as eulogized in song, sacrificing her life to fight Israeli occupation? Interviews with family and friends tell another story. Idris lived at home after a failed marriage. Her husband, also her cousin, divorced her eight years into the marriage because of her infertility. At age 28, she looked forward to a bleak future in a society where women’s primary value is the ability to bear offspring.

Studies by the American Psychology Association and the Jamestown Foundation in 2012 and 2005, respectively, indicate that female terrorists have a greater “emphasis on individual emotions” and “personal experiences” as opposed to ideological commitment. Such evidence suggests that women, more so than their male counterparts, engage in terrorism out of personal motivations rather than pursuit of a collective goal. This is just one potential reason women have been known to vacillate midattack and renege on operations.

Many shaheedas seem to deeply desire an escape from the pressures of traditional society. Hanadi al-Malek, for example, was a spinster at 27, but as a suicide bomber in a Haifa restaurant in 2003, she became the “Bride of Haifa” and earned symbolically in death what she could not have in life. Faiza Ahmad chose martyrdom over life as a transsexual after years of degradation and deprecation. She had been nicknamed mutarajilla—manly woman. Ayat al-Ahras and Andleeb Takatka Suleiman were both said to have violated familial honor through illicit sexual behavior before they executed bombings in Jerusalem a month apart from each other.

Martyrdom functions as an acceptable and even glorified form of suicide. A woman on the fringes of society who chooses shahada has the chance of becoming a celebrated hero with her portraits displayed in classrooms, universities, and mosques as examples to all. There are numerous instances of “women who are ostracized … turning to suicide attacks for redemption and social acceptance,” note Lauren Squires and Lindsey Seaver of the Institute of the Study of War in an interview with HPR. Although it might be tempting to depict female terrorism as a liberating, albeit unconventional, path to empowerment in an environment of male dominance, the reality in Palestine is that women are victims rather than beneficiaries. Experts unfortunately concur that in a stagnant social situation, women will continue to be abused for their strategic and tactical advantage.

Perhaps the only remedy for the appalling state of women in terror is increased social and economic opportunity. In a Palestine that shows few signs of improving gender equality, however, the trend may be difficult to reverse.

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Pursuing Equality Western Intervention in Gay Rights Abroad

Farris Peale

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n 2011 Ugandan gay rights activist David Kato was beaten to death after a national newspaper’s cover featured his face above the words “Hang Them.” In the summer of 2013, two gay Russian men were stabbed for their sexuality. That July, Jamaican teenager Dwayne Jones was chopped to death for crossdressing. In August 2014, Bryan Higgins died in San Francisco after he was beaten for being gay.

Death is a common punishment for homosexuality across the world. In some countries, like the United States, those crimes are committed by the vigilante justice of a mob or single individual, who usually face their day in court. Elsewhere, these murders are often state-sanctioned and administered. There are laws against homosexuality in 67 countries across the world; ten of those nations will kill you for being gay.

Last November, Gambian president Yahya Jammeh passed a law making homosexuality punishable by life in prison. The law comes as no surprise; in 2008, he threatened gay people with decapitation. After the law’s passage, the European Union cut $186 million in aid to Gambia, and the United States removed Gambia

from a highly anticipated trade agreement.

Both Gambia’s law and the United States’ willingness to sanction the country derive from a previous law in Uganda. In 2013, Uganda passed the Anti-Homosexuality Act, which called for “known homosexuals” to be put to death. It gained popular approval following a 2009 visit by three American evangelicals who led a massive seminar preaching against “the homosexual agenda.” Perhaps because of the media attention, the United States attempted to prevent the passage of this bill by punishing Uganda with sanctions this past summer after the law was passed. It was later repealed.

Most gay rights organizations and many Westerners generally see the Western intervention in Uganda and Gambia as a positive defense of human rights. That praise, though, is misplaced.

While the United States—and all international bodies—are right to be concerned with gay rights, the improper and haphazard execution of such interventions is highly problematic. American policy towards international gay rights has failed to actually prevent imprisonments or save as many lives as it has claimed to.

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INTERVENTION GONE WRONG This type of intervention was ineffective in the Ugandan case and success is unlikely in Gambia. Last June, the United States cut aid to Uganda and canceled a joint military exercise to express anger over the Anti-Homosexuality Act. The bill imposed life terms for “aggravated” homosexual sex—including sex while being HIV-positive—and also criminalized lesbianism for the first time in the country’s history. The United States’ response relocated national health funding, limited visa rights for those Ugandan officials suspected of human rights violations, and cut money for a community policing program. The World Bank also suspended a $90 million loan intended for Ugandan health services.

However, even after the United States announced the new sanctions, the crusade to toughen laws against homosexuals in Uganda did not abate. By associating homosexuality with a “Western agenda,” the World Bank and United States placed greater pressure on Ugandan politicians to uphold the laws, lest they seem weak to domestic voters seeking independence from Western influence. Indeed, the government’s statement in response to the aid cancellation said exactly that: “Uganda is a sovereign country and can never bow to anybody or be blackmailed by anybody.”

This is not to say that U.S. actions were completely ineffective. In an interview with the HPR, Jessica Stern, the executive director of the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Coalition, spoke of how the United States was partially effective.

By embarrassing Uganda with the cuts and then offering the country a seat at the U.S.-Africa Summit in August, the United States forced the Ugandan government to move up a Supreme Court ruling that ultimately nullified the law. However, Stern also commented that attitudes have not necessarily changed on the ground. This November, politicians re-introduced a new law—re-written so it cannot be annulled by the courts and with harsher punishments attached to homosexuality. When the court struck down the law, many Ugandans saw the decision as victory for the United States, not for their compatriots. Stern commented, “The intentions of well-meaning members of the international community have to be so meticulously put into action, because if you don’t have visible support from Ugandans themselves ... involvement from the international community will backfire.”

The intervention in Gambia has not been any more successful. When the European Union threatened to cut aid, President Jemmah simply cut dialogue with the bloc, refusing to negotiate at all. The foreign minister condemned the cut in aid, but stated defiantly, “We will rather die than be colonized twice.” The Gambian law, too, remains on the books.

Without receiving any guarantees of the law’s retraction, the West gave up too early, losing any leverage that it might have had. Now, Uganda and Gambia can essentially operate without further repercussions. After all, the consequences have already been inflicted. They called the bluff and won.

Additionally, Western focus on these laws alone has detracted focus from the greater realities of discrimination that are imposed elsewhere by the Ugandan government. After the

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Ugandan Supreme Court dismissed its law, the World Bank considered reinstating its loan for healthcare, but without proper safeguards to prevent healthcare discrimination against LGBTQ Ugandans. While it is difficult to catch someone committing the act of “aggravated homosexuality” in the privacy of his or her own home, healthcare discrimination is frequent, constant, and life-threatening. Just this past July, Uganda’s president approved the HIV Prevention and Control Act, which is causing even greater fear of punishment for treating gay patients, who are often associated with the stigmatized disease. Rather than focusing on healthcare—a smaller goal that the World Bank’s funding could have more directly controlled—they chose to address the larger law because it created more attention.

WHY UGANDA? Not just the efficacy of U.S. and Western policies, but also their random and selective application, can have adverse consequences. Uganda and Gambia are not alone in their discrimination against gay people, nor are they alone in codifying their prejudices. Stern confirmed, “Uganda is absolutely not the worst place in the world to be LGBT.” So why has the United States targeted this nation? One reason is that Ugandan activists drew international attention to their country because they believed it would make them safer. “We talk about Uganda today because of a strategic decision by LGBT activists within Uganda,” says Stern. However, that Ugandan activists can speak up actually speaks to the strength of their LGBTQ community. In countries without such active LGBTQ communities, U.S. officials never learn of the struggles faced by LGBTQ individuals, yet these are the places where people need the most help because they have the weakest LGBTQ communities. Stern highlights that “their silence is actually a sign that they need our support.”

Strategic priorities also guide U.S. decisions to focus on Uganda and Gambia. Russia is one of the worst gay rights abusers on record, yet the United States has other strategic priorities there that prevent intervention—from Russian involvement in Syria to their incursions into Ukraine. Yemen, Iraq, Iran, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates sentence homosexuals to death, but U.S. oil interests and counterterrorism partnerships in the region prevent substantial action there. It is far easier to target Uganda. While Uganda may play a role in the fight against al-Shabaab or the Lord’s Resistance Army, its role is more limited, and those goals are seen as less significant than those pursued elsewhere, particularly in the Middle East.

With the U.S.-Saudi relationship crucial both for moderating the influences of radical Islamist groups and procuring oil, Yemen essential for U.S. counter-terrorism efforts, and Iran still at risk of developing a nuclear weapon, the United States’ relationships with these countries are simply far more essential to larger policy. Last January, Nigeria passed a law that would jail people for “promoting” homosexuality. However, Nigeria has oil and significant regional influence, and it leads the fight against Boko Haram. Thus, there was no U.S. response to the Nigerian law beyond a slight scolding from Secretary of State John Kerry.

Nonetheless, it is not surprising that the United States picks where to defend human rights based on its strategic objectives,

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The United States must not only address gay rights in countries with little power or media coverage. It must also go where attention is not being paid and put pressure on countries that are friends or allies.

and it does not inherently devalue the human rights cases that it does choose to take up. The problem, though, is that the U.S. government and media give its citizens an image of the world based around these selections. American media often portrays countries like Uganda and Gambia—poor, African countries—as the main perpetrators of anti-gay injustices. That disproportionality does a disservice to the millions of other oppressed gay people around the world. Moreover, it continues to portray an inaccurate narrative of African societies in comparison to the rest of the world, where such violence and discriminatory laws are also commonplace.

CRAFTING NEW STRATEGY If the United States really wants to protect LGBTQ individuals, it cannot select where, when, and how it addresses discrimination solely based on other geopolitical strategic priorities.

Of course, where relationships are both fragile and essential to national security, gay rights will realistically never be on the table. But there is still much room to work with friends and allies, as well as to address cases through more subtle means. The United States must not only address gay rights in countries with little power or media coverage. It must also go where attention is not being paid and put pressure on countries that are friends or allies.

Indonesia is one such example. In its Aceh province, one can be punished with 100 lashes for committing a homosexual act—a draconian law that is hardly reported on in the United States.

Though this law is particularly harsh, it only applies to the small region of Aech, which is already an outlier as the only part of the country to administer sharia law. The law lacks mass national support, and so would be easier to repeal. Similarly, many of the anti-gay laws that are in place across the world derive from old colonial codes. They were not newly passed or reinvigorated by popular support, as was the case in Uganda.

In India, for instance, there is strong national support for repealing the country’s anti-gay law, even though the Supreme Court upheld it in 2014. And while the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party may not currently support its repeal, the Congress Party’s leadership has stood against the code, speaking to the potential for striking it down. The support is broad enough that international pressure could put the issue back on the table if Western organizations work through more subtle channels than those employed in Uganda or Gambia. Similarly, in Guyana, the last South American country that jails people for homosexuality, the Prime Minister convened a committee in 2012 to explore the possibility of decriminalizing homosexuality. While the committee ultimately did nothing, the government’s previously-demonstrated willingness makes decriminalization a more realistic possibility.

Thus, the United States has room to act as a human rights enforcer, and probably should in cases like Uganda where U.S. citizens are at least partly responsible for discrimination against the LGBTQ community. But it must reevaluate how and when it handles these situations. U.S. strategy for defending LGBTQ human rights must be more cohesive and subtle, targeting places where it can win meaningful battles and using better negotiation tactics in countries like Uganda and Gambia where tensions are high. The American government might also be more effective in places with less dramatic cases than those in Uganda and Gambia—from South Africa to India—and it must fight for those people, too. “We can’t only invest in the so-called ‘worst places on Earth,’” Stern argues. “The United States is capable of being most helpful where the U.S. government record is not hotly contested ... otherwise U.S. involvement can backfire on local communities.” After all, America must remember that its defense of gay rights internationally is not designed solely for the purpose of demonstrating Western commitment to human rights. It must recommit to the one and only valid goal of these missions: saving lives.

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BOOKS & ARTS

RECONSTRUCTING THE ENEMY Amy Chyao

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orth Korean agent Park Mu-young scans the downtown high-rises and bustling crowds of Seoul. His hair is long, his face worn from years of bitterness. In an eerily calm voice, he says into his phone, “Slow down, friend. The first one is on the roof of the Golden Tower. You have exactly thirty minutes.” The screen flashes to South Korean intelligence headquarters, its clean-shaven employees in black suits. South Korean agent Yu Jong-won stands, frozen.

Park continues, “You know the fish named shiri? It’s a Korean aboriginal fish living in crystal streams. Though they’re separated with the country divided, someday they’ll reunite in the same streams.”

The above scene is from the South Korean blockbuster Shiri. Released in 1999, the suspenseful action film follows South Korean intelligence agents’ heroic efforts to stop North Korean terrorists, especially the elusive female sniper Lee Bang-hee.

With over 6.5 million viewers, Shiri sank Titanic’s previous box office record for the most-seen film in the country. Shiri’s success arose from a confluence of factors, including the rise of financial support for cinema from chaebol—South Korean familyled business conglomerates—and the adoption of Hollywood action movie techniques.

Drawing on persistent nationalistic sentiment in South Korea, Shiri directly addresses contemporary political issues facing the two Koreas. These issues—reunification, North Korea’s ballistic missile testing, and the economic disparities between North and South Korea—remain critical to relations between the countries today, and cinema continues to foster public discussion of these divisive topics. Moreover, with the 2014 hacking attacks in response to Sony’s fictional satire The Interview, it is clearer than ever that North Korea’s representation in cinema is redirecting world politics in return.

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BOOKS & ARTS

THE CHANGING POLITICS OF PORTRAYING NORTH KOREA AS THE “OTHER” IN CINEMA

SHIRI SYNDROME Shiri was released just after South Korean cinema broke free from the chains of censorship. Korean cinema censorship dates back to Japanese colonial rule, which banned films that undermined the Japanese empire or its image beginning in 1922.

Restrictions continued after the independence and division of Korea with the 1962 South Korean Motion Picture Law, which instituted compulsory government approval prior to the production or exportation of films. While the law was revised over the following decades with intentions to mitigate the effects of censorship, there was little practical effect. Only in 1996 did the South Korean Constitutional Court finally make its landmark ruling that the existing film pre-deliberation system was unconstitutional. A rating system was instituted through an amendment of the Film Promotion Law, with revisions expanding freedoms continuing until 2001.

With government quotas and censorship of South Korean cinema out of the way, the production of South Korean films burgeoned. Shiri rode the tide of the newfound freedom of expression, and its success led to its elevation to what many considered the pinnacle of South Korean filmmaking at the time.

Scores of blockbusters were produced in the following years, including Joint Security Area (2001), Friend (2001), Silmido (2003), and Taegukgi (2004). Each broke the previous’ record for sales.

This outpouring of films was a result of what has been termed “Shiri syndrome”: the incredibly rapid outflow of blockbusters inspired by Shiri. Shiri syndrome has since spiraled into what is known as Hallyu, or the Korean Wave: the rise of Korean influence in global popular culture, especially in cinema and music.

In addition to its Hollywood-inspired production techniques, Shiri’s manner of addressing political issues inspired and informed the plotlines of many of the South Korean action movies that followed. For example, Joint Security Area also focuses on

military and intelligence conflicts between North and South Korea. But more importantly, Shiri transformed attitudes toward North Korea as the “other” in these works. In the era of South Korean cinema censorship, films typically demonized North Korea by portraying the country as a terrorist force plotting to destroy South Korea without reason.

Residues of this deeply entrenched perspective were clearly visible in Shiri, with North Korea entirely harboring the blame for the deaths that resulted from terrorist acts on South Korea. For instance, when South Korean intelligence officers in the film meet to respond to North Korean terrorist threats on well-known locations throughout Seoul, one officer pipes up with naïve incredulity, “But why would North Korea do that in a time of reconciliation?” South Koreans are portrayed as righteous survivors, unable to even comprehend why North Koreans would make terrorist threats against them. The blame, it seems, is directed wholly at North Korea.

SUNSHINE ON THE 38TH PARALLEL Shiri nevertheless initiated an unprecedented humanization of North Koreans as the “other” in South Korean cinema. In Shiri, the North Korean sniper Lee Bang-hee draws in the male protagonist, a South Korean agent, just as she draws in the audience. While she is a villain who is instrumental in a plot to kill thousands of innocent people, we can’t help but empathize with her all the same. These star-crossed lovers come to represent the countries of North and South Korea, symbolized by kissing gourami fish. “If one of them dies, the other dies, too … they dry up from loneliness.”

In Joint Security Area, the North Korean “other” finally receives a personality. Joint Security Area no longer portrays the deaths of North Korean terrorists as a triumph, and the North Korean soldiers have character traits besides pure ruthlessness.

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BOOKS & ARTS

We learn that solider Oh Kyung-pil has a great sense of humor, a zest for South Korean snacks, and an unwavering loyalty to his friends, even sacrificing his life for a South Korean soldier.

In Shiri, on the other hand, the closest glimpse we get of the personality of a North Korean is of Agent Hee, but even her love for her husband is overwhelmed by her sense of duty to North Korea. These South Korean films humanize the North Korean “other” in order to develop more convincing narratives, but are nevertheless forced by nationalistic incentives to continue antagonizing them as the enemy.

More than expressing a mere willingness to consider the issue of reunification, Shiri hints at a deeper yearning for the nations to reunite. Yet this push towards reconciliation is qualified by an implicit criticism of North Korea’s tactics in attempting to achieve such reconciliation. For instance, North Korean agent Park declares, “This will be the graveyard for the corrupt politicians.” Agent Yu, in turn, counters, “There were people who thought the same as you in 1950. Remember the pain the war caused in this country.” This latter declaration from the film’s hero suggests that, unless North Korea ceases its terrorist threats, there is no hope for the two countries to reconcile. They will instead remain like kissing gourami separated from the waters they once shared.

The attitude toward North Korea portrayed in the films closely aligns with the tenets of the Sunshine Policy instituted in 1998 by South Korean president Kim Dae-jung. It was also remarkably prescient of the issues that would eventually lead to the policy’s end. Under the Sunshine Policy, South Korea maintained a favorable diplomatic stance toward the North for nearly ten years, extending aid and embarking on initiatives such as joint industrial projects and reuniting Koreans separated during the Korean War. Similarly, the South Koreans in Shiri advocate for peace and are, in general, receptive toward the idea of reunification with North Korea. Unfortunately, with the resumption of North Korean nuclear weapons testing in 2006 and

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little reciprocation of the billions of dollars in aid given to the North, South Korea was compelled to end its Sunshine Policy.

Seoul chose to adopt a tougher stance toward North Korea under president Lee Myung-bak, and its cinematic portrayal of North Korea followed suit.

NORTH KOREA RETURNS THE GAZE During Hallyu, South Korean cinema continued to reflect contemporary sociopolitical issues while coming to the forefront of the public gaze. The Korean Wave spurred the production of a flood of South Korean television dramas, or K-dramas, and the gaze on Korean pop culture shifted from national to global.

One recent television drama in particular, IRIS, was written as a spinoff of Shiri and aired from 2009 to 2013. In IRIS, North Korea no longer shoulders the entirety of the blame. Instead, an independent organization operating within both Koreas, IRIS, is the terrorist organization that must be stopped by Korean National Security Service agents.

The presence of an outside organization inflicting terror on both Koreas in IRIS is an important departure from Shiri, but the theme of reunification remains central to the series. In the end, it is IRIS that nearly thwarts the continuation of reunification talks between North and South Korea. This reflects the increasingly global political landscape of the conflict between the two Koreas. For instance, the North Korean threat of nuclear attacks in the 2013 Korean crisis was not limited only to South Korea, but also included threats toward Japan and the United States. Tensions between the United States and North Korea have recently escalated, while North and South Korea edge toward higher-level talks. For the first time in December 2014, the United Nations Security Council moved to examine human rights in North Korea, opposed only by Russia and China. North Korea has become the “other” not just to a South Korean, but a global audience.

BOOKS & ARTS

In humanizing the North Korean “other,” cinema portrayals of North Korea now have the power to offend because of their ability to instantaneously reach a global audience.

The North Korean government is particularly wary of the strong influence that anti-communist nations may exert on its people. North Koreans, especially the younger generation, are curious enough about the outside world to be willing to risk their lives and already-limited freedoms to learn more about it.

Park Yeon-mi, a former North Korean prisoner who escaped in 2007, related to The Guardian that “if you were caught with a Bollywood or Russian movie you were sent to prison for three years, but if it was South Korean or American you were executed.” Despite these harsh consequences, a black market of smuggled movies and television shows exists in North Korea and has been developing rapidly. While the world scrutinizes North Korea, it gazes back. Their intense interest in the outside world reveals a generation of North Koreans who are not single-mindedly vengeful, like they are portrayed in Shiri, but exactly the opposite: curious and eager to explore humanity outside their borders.

AN UNWELCOME INTERVIEW The Interview is among the illicit cinematic works being smuggled into North Korea by outside organizations. The film features a portrayal of North Korea’s supreme leader, Kim Jong-un, that exhibits the same conflicted tendencies shown in Shiri. While The Interview tends toward portraying North Korea as the enemy—its plot is centered on assassinating Kim Jongun—it simultaneously fabricates an Americanized personality that overrides Kim’s cult of personality. Kim Jong-un in The Interview is an uncomfortably relatable caricature who parties lavishly, manipulates ruthlessly, and cries pitifully when he hears Katy Perry songs.

By exposing this side of Kim Jong-un, The Interview’s Dave Skylark (James Franco) dismantles the conception of Kim Jong-un as a deity. He becomes disillusioned with Kim Jongun and with the North Korea carefully presented to him by the

government. In doing so, he highlights North Korea’s flaws. For instance, Skylark goes off on a short rampage about the fake supermarket food he is presented with in Pyongyang, which mirrors the fact that 2.8 million North Koreans faces food shortages, according to a 2012 estimate by Human Rights Watch. The striking truths at the heart of the satire have proved to be dangerous, sparking political response on a global scale, including the hacking attacks on Sony and formal rebukes from North Korean government spokespeople and the government-sponsored media.

Films like The Interview diverge significantly from those that were at the forefront of the Korean Wave. Joint Security Area, for example, exhibited such a positive outlook toward North Korea that South Korean president Roh Moh-hyun presented a DVD copy of the movie to Kim Jong-il in 2007 as a gift. By contrast, cinema portrayals of North Korea today hold the power to forestall peace talks between the two Koreas. No longer simply a reflection of South Korean political attitudes toward North Koreans, the North Korean “other” in cinema today is a global entity.

In humanizing the North Korean “other,” cinema portrayals of North Korea now have the power to offend because of their ability to instantaneously reach a global audience. From its beginnings as a strictly demonized entity within South Korean cinema, the North Korean “other” on film is now being interpreted by North Korea as if it were North Korea itself. And, as North Korea becomes more aware of unceremonious portrayals of its people and leaders in cinema, it takes critiques on film to be attacks in reality. North Korea may think it “didn’t start the fire” because the satire targeted them first. But in reality, North Korea is fighting art with politics. While the newfound power behind cinema portrayals of North Korea carries consequences with it, it also brings a new dimension to the politics of the North Korean “other” in cinema.

SPRING 2015 HARVARD POLITICAL REVIEW 39

INTERVIEWS

INTERVIEW: DR. PHIL MCGRAW with Gavin Sullivan

How would you characterize your role in framing the national conversation surrounding mental health issues and their treatments?

Our goal has always been to take the stigma away from mental health issues, because I think all the way back to the pre-Dorothea Dix era, there has been a stigma around mental illness. Prior to Dorothea Dix, we were chaining these folks up sometimes, and even since then I think we’ve warehoused them and now sometimes put them in chemical straightjackets. It’s long been said that psychology works best for those who need it least.

We’ve tried to make it okay to talk about it by doing it in a public forum. I think I saw the statistic recently that over our 2,000 shows we had 1.4 billion viewers. Certainly we’ve touched a lot of viewers during that time [by] talking about mental health in an open way. People have opened up about it not just because of The Dr. Phil Show, but I like to think that we’ve added to that in at least a small way by making mental health something that’s all right to talk about in polite society.

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INTERVIEWS

Dr. Phil McGraw was a longtime guest of The Oprah Winfrey Show before launching his eponymous series in 2002. He has appeared on over 2,000 hours of national television programming, using his platform to highlight mental health issues.

What do you think has been responsible for your success? Why do you think people are very comfortable talking with you about very private matters?

I think we deliver very commonsensical, usable information to people’s homes everyday for free. If you think about it, we’re talking about things that matter to people who care. When I say things that matter, we’re talking about marriage, family, parenting, emotion, motivation, all of those things that kind of define the human experience. We’re talking about those things everyday to people who care about those things everyday.

And I take very seriously the things that I say. For example, if we’re talking about obsessive compulsive disorder or anxiety disorders or depression, we only talk about evidence-based therapies, and we try to break them down into ways that people understand.

How do you determine which topics or which health issues are going to appear on the show? And how do you account for commercial concerns—attracting viewers and ensuring the show’s success?

Those two things actually are not at odds, fortunately for us.

We let the viewers determine what we’re talking about. In a generation that is much more driven by the Internet than mine was, it’s easy today for us to know what our viewers are interested in.

I’ve got millions of followers on social media platforms and the Dr. Phil message boards, and we choose our stories mostly from messages that we get of people asking for help.

If something is really capturing the attention of the American public, then we know that’s what our viewers are interested in, so we’ll address that. If something is happening on the political landscape, I won’t deal with the topic on a political level, but I might be getting letters from parents asking, “What do we say to our children about this?” When we had that terrible shooting in Newtown, we had so many letters from parents saying, “My children are afraid to go to school. What do I say to them so I make them aware but not afraid?” And so we talked a lot about how to speak to your children about those things. That captured the attention of America, but rather than report on the facts of the story, we went behind the story and talked about how parents dealt with their children—about their fears, about how not to say too much, but to give them enough information to make them feel empowered.

Are there other conversations which you don’t want to host on your own show?

We try to deal with a broad spectrum of human experience, but we place restrictions on ourselves. For example, we don’t book anybody on our show who is currently in therapy unless we’ve contacted that person’s therapist, explained to them what the show’s about, what we intend to do, and we’ve gotten their written permission for their patient to appear on our show. If we don’t have that written permission in hand, we just don’t book that person on the show. And there has not been one exception in 13 years.

We don’t book people who have been institutionalized in any kind of recent past. If somebody’s been in inpatient care in recent past, my theory is they’re probably not the best candidate to put in a highly stimulating public forum—it could put a lot of stress on them. We don’t book people who have any type of active suicidal history or ideation, again because we don’t want to overstimulate them or put them in a situation that might not be in their best interest. We don’t book anybody who’s on any kind of major psychotropic medications because they wouldn’t be on these medications if there wasn’t a good reason. We put those restrictions on ourselves and we adhere to them very stringently.

Are there any new challenges or considerations that your show encounters today that perhaps weren’t in place when you started 13 years ago?

No question about it, we’ve seen things change since we started. Some things have come and gone, and some things have taken a vector and continued to evolve in a particular direction.

When we first went on the air, texting was not a big deal.

There wasn’t any Instagram or Twitter. Now, the interactivity we have with our viewers commenting on our content during the show—they want that interactivity so we’ve had to make that a part of what we do.

We’ve seen viewer patterns change in that their willingness has changed to sit there and passively be fed content for an hour as opposed to selecting what they want to see, interacting with what they want to see. Our research tells us that 80 percent of the time that people are watching my show there’s a second screen up in the room. We’re having to make efforts to control that second screen by having content on our website that is congruent with what they’re seeing on the broadcast screen at the same time.

This interview has been edited and condensed.

SPRING 2015 HARVARD POLITICAL REVIEW 41

INTERVIEWS

INTERVIEW: DARYL DAVIS with Jonah Hahn

Daryl Davis is a race relations expert and author of Klan-Destine Relationships, a nonfiction book which chronicles his outreach efforts to Ku Klux Klan members.

You have a pretty phenomenal story. What motivated you to reach out to the Ku Klux Klan?

It was a combination of things. As a child, I experienced racism and was very surprised by it because I had friends of all kinds of races and colors. My parents were in the U.S. Foreign Service, so I grew up as an American embassy brat and travelled a lot overseas in the 1960s. When I would go to school overseas, my classes were filled with Italians, Nigerians, French, Japanese, Russians.

That was my experience overseas, but whenever I would return to my own country, the United States, the classrooms were either all-black or all-white or black and white, depending on if you went to the segregated schools or the newly integrated schools. One of the times we can home, I was in the fourth grade—1968 we’re talking—and we had moved to Bel-

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mont, Massachusetts. I was one of two black kids in the entire school, so consequently all of my friends were white. My guy friends were members of the Cub Scouts, and they invited me to join.

On a Scout Day Parade, I was accosted by soda pop cans, pebbles, and street debris from a group of white spectators. I was the only black kid on the march, which was from Lexington to Concord. Being naïve and not seeing anything like this before, my first thought was, “Those people over there don’t like the scouts.” I truly did not realize that I was the only scout being hit until my scout leaders came back and huddled over me and escorted me out of the danger.

When I got home, I explained to my parents what had happened, and they sat me down and explained racism to me.

I had never heard the word before. In fact, I did not believe them. It made no sense to me because I knew plenty of white people who did not treat me like that. I refused to believe them.

A few months later, Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated, and everything went into flames. While I did not understand racism, I realized my parents had not lied to me. At a young age, age 10, I formed this question in my mind: “How can you hate me when you don’t even know me?” That would always stay with me.

Throughout my life, I had these various racial incidents.

Moving ahead, I decided to write a book, “Who better to reach out to then somebody who would join an organization whose sole premise is hating those people who do not look like them?” I sought out members of the Ku Klux Klan because I had read just about every book written on the Klan and had never found my answer, so I figured, “Why not confront the source?”

What breeds the hatred of minorities that is so rampant among the individuals who join these groups?

Klansmen or Klanswomen are not standard or cookiecutter. They come from all walks of life, all educational backgrounds, and they have various reasons. Sometimes it’s a family tradition. Other times, it’s a socioeconomic reason.

For example, you find a depressed town where a lot of white people have been laid off, and the Klan will come in and point out that Hispanic people or black people will work for less money.

The Klan will say, “The blacks have the NAACP and the Jews have the Anti-Defamation League, but nobody stands up for the white man but us. Come join the Klan and we’ll get your job back. We’ll put food on your table, clothes on your children’s back.”

INTERVIEWS

Then these people who previously never had a racist bone in their body begin thinking, “You know what, you do have a point there. Let me sign up and see what it is all about.” Then you have people who had some negative incident with a black person, and they cannot separate that individual incident from the entire black population.

Regarding the more educated individuals you interviewed, what tactics did they use to justify their explicitly racist behavior or their association with a group that was so racist?

Some of them truly believed that darker-skin people have smaller brains, and therefore are inferior to whiter-skinned people. [They think,] “People who come from Africa have not developed. People from Europe become thinkers and discoverers.” It’s the master race, neo-Nazi ideology. Highly educated people absolutely believe that.

Then you have some highly educated people who head up these groups, not just Klans, because they know that it is a large population that they can prey upon to make a living, and they start these organizations and recruit uneducated members to pay dues. Then the intelligent person is becoming rich and exploiting their own. Money is a great motivator.

What did you see as some of the biggest misconceptions of you by Klansmen and vice versa?

One of my misperceptions was that I didn’t know they could change. I never sought to convert anybody. I didn’t think they were going to change because you grow up hearing these clichés—a tiger never loses its stripes, you are what you are—so I had no idea that they were going to change or that I would become friends with any of them.

But over time, even when you sit with the worst of your enemies, you can find something in common somewhere. As those things in common build, the things that differ matter less and less. You begin to put a human face together despite whatever you may disagree about. Over time, these people began shedding their racist ideology as they began to know me. That was not expected by me. I was surprised when some of them began quitting and I realized, “Oh my God, I’m on to something here.” So I began collecting their robes and hoods, and I have a vast collection of that kind of stuff. Of course, there will be those with whom I’m in contact who are still in the Klan. There will be those who never change, who’ll go to their graves with hatred.

Your experience suggests that a personal interaction is necessary to overcome racial differences.

Do you believe that there is a particular way the United States can improve interactions among races today?

Absolutely. One of the best ways that we can do that, and that we fail to do, is that we need to keep the lines of communication open. We need to invite our adversaries to the table and talk. When two enemies are talking, they are not fighting.

They may be pounding their fists on the table and screaming, but they are not fighting.

It’s when the talking ceases that the ground becomes fertile for violence. We often do not seek out people who oppose us and invite them to sit down with us to lunch and talk.

That’s what I did and I got wonderful results from it.

Right now, the police and the black community are at odds. The police and the black community have been at odds since the formation of the police department. When the police department in this country was originally formed, it wasn’t for criminals, it was to enforce slavery. Slaves would try to run off the plantation and escape, so there needed to be a body of law enforcement to capture them and keep them in line.

Now, let’s go to New York today. If you want to protest, go to de Blasio’s house, hold a sign, do what you want, but don’t do it at a funeral. I hold the officers that did not turn their backs complicit because they did not correct the actions of their brethren who did turn their backs. I believe that “he who walks in silence hangs the innocent and lets the guilty go free.”

We all know that the police have a culture of the blue wall of silence where they don’t go against each other or tell on each other. They all kind of stick together. Well, we need to get rid of that culture. We need to trust the police. We need the police. But when you see people like that who show that kind of disrespect, those are the same officers who would disrespect the fact that the New York Police Department banned the use of chokeholds, [the maneuver which resulted] in the death of Eric Garner. Those are the same police who would beat up Rodney King. Those are the same police who would pull me over doing DWB, driving while black. We need to get rid of those. We need to work hand in hand with the police, not against them, but it’s hard to do when they blatantly show that they don’t even respect each other or their chief.

This interview has been edited and condensed.

SPRING 2015 HARVARD POLITICAL REVIEW 43

ENDPAPER

BETTER ANGELS Matt Shuham

This school can be a scary, oppressive place. It can be lonely and sad and deflating, and especially so if it’s the first time that you’re feeling those things in any significant way. It can wrestle you to the ground and just keep kicking and kicking until it feels like there isn’t anything left, and then it will leave you there, bruised and gasping for air. It can be cruel like that. It can replace any sense of well-being with deep, dark pits of anxiety or depression or perfectionism or an eating disorder, or, if it wants to, it can do all of those things at once. Just because.

Earlier, maybe mid-January, I was sitting by the river next to Weeks Bridge in the middle of the worst panic attack I’ve ever experienced. It started with a simple thought: I am alone. And, soon enough, like dead leaves circling a storm drain, my own alone-ness blocked out everything else. The thought clogged up my mind and left a thick layer of sweat on my face, which quickly chilled against the winter air. My heart banged up against my ribcage and I couldn’t control my breathing. It was long and scary, and, as I tried to process everything on a cold bench next to a wide river, it seemed obviously and completely true: I am alone. I am alone. I am alone.

I remembered then how, about a month earlier, I had come out to that same bench and noticed a string of police cars and ambulances lined up on the side of the Anderson Memorial Bridge. The officers and medics had their flashlights out and were scanning the nearly frozen water. It was black and glossy and intimidating. The Massachusetts State Police Twitter account told me that a man had jumped into the river. The search for him was “ongoing,” apparently. Their lights danced up against my cheeks and I felt guilty for taking their attention away from scanning the water, even for a second.

The panic attack ended when I finally gathered myself up and went inside, found a thick blanket, curled up on our common room couch, and waited for my roommate to find me. He asked what happened. I took a short breath. I told him everything.

44 HARVARD POLITICAL REVIEW SPRING 2015

Looking back, I have no idea why I was so hesitant then to tell him, or anyone, about the panic attack, or about the anxiety and depression that had hounded me in the previous months.

He listened. He listened! He smiled. He related. He took in the poison that had beaten me to the ground that night, paralyzed on the muddy banks of the Charles River, and he balled it up and threw it away. It was beautiful to watch.

Stubborn as they are, the depression and anxiety have stuck around since that night, but so too have the kindness, grace, and understanding of my peers. This part of the story—in which I slowly open up about what I’ve kept inside for so long—is difficult to convey in writing. A lot has happened.

But suffice it to say: there are angels at this school. And, as it turns out, they’re everywhere. They care about you and they want you to be happy. They’ve been there and they’ve felt that.

They know that on the other side of whatever it is you’re facing, there exists a beautiful, full world, and that it’s waiting for you.

There are angels here. They’re everywhere. One of them is lanky and clear-eyed, and he’ll put his hand on your shoulder and tell you that it’s going to be okay. One of them has beautiful sandy-blonde bangs and wears wool dresses, and she’ll smile and keep talking for hours and hours, if you want. Another drags his flip-flops across your floor and spends his free time listening to podcasts, and he’s been right where you are, and he’ll remind you that he struggled just like you’re struggling, once, but that he still made it. And there are more: with southern roots and dirty fingernails and piercings and gluten allergies and freckles and tote bags sagging with books and ripped jeans and glossy lipstick and poor eyesight and smoking habits and dimples and mismatched socks and scars of their own to brag about.

There are angels here, and they are everywhere. They might look like your friends and classmates, your tutors and professors, your parents and your brothers and sisters. But don’t be fooled.

They are all angels, and they are all here for you. You just have to ask for their help.

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