Kitsch Magazine: Fall 2015

vol. 14 no. 1

pop culture, politics, college, etc.

BINARIES

INSIDE:

STEM or Humanities, Women Can’t Win Inside Ithaca’s Planned Parenthood

The Museum of the American Other The Politics of Black Hair

MEET THE EDITORS KATIE O’BRIEN

NATHANIEL CODERRE

YANA MAKUWA

editor in chief

managing editor

editor in chief

THELONIA SAUNDERS

YANA LYSENKO

MICHELLE SAVRAN

art editor

watch & listen editor

art editor

TIA LEWIS

NATHAN POWELL

MAURA THOMAS

bite size/copy editor

design editor

copy editor

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in this issue 4 5 6 7 9

11 15 17 19 21

Inside Ithaca’s Planned Parenthood Dependence: Coffee in College Compulsively Joining Clubs in College STEM or Humanities, Women Can’t Win A Meditation on Double Majoring

23 27 30 33 35 37 39 41 43 45 47 49 51 53

Letter from the Editors On the Plaza Connoisseurs: Beer or Wine?

VHS vs DVD: The Face Off Office Space: Mukoma Wa Ngugi

Dear White People with Dreads The Museum of the American Other Photography of Agony and the Western Gaze Lawrence Lessig: A New Kind of Candidate Twitter: The New Nest of Campaign Donations French Girl Syndrome

Tavi Gevinson and New Creativity The False Dichotomy of Disney’s Female Characters Mulder and Scully: Meant to Be The Cathartic Absurdity of Mel Brooks The Olivia Popes & Jess Days of TV Feminism 101 with Nicki Minaj The Lingering Era of the Male Talk Show Host “Post-Colonial” Punk with The Kominas

55 56 57 58 59

From Breath to Brain Erosion: Part 1 & Part 2 Hell Is Real, Fake Leather That Was My Name Judgment Day

kitsch magazine, an independent student organization located at Cornell University and Ithaca College, produced and is responsible for the content of this publication. This publication was not reviewed or approved by, nor does it necessarily express or reflect the policies or opinions of Cornell University, Ithaca College, or their designated representatives.

LETTER FROM THE EDITORS There’s a theory in philosophical circles that says if you only consider two sides of an argument you’re committing a fallacy. The False Dilemma fallacy lurks behind dichotomies between man and woman, white and black, East and West, gay and straight. These are all categories that we ascribe assuming they are based on inherent traits rather than arbitrary social constructions. Underlying many of the tensions in today’s pop culture and political debates is the tendency to oversimplify issues into these long-established, false dichotomies. Many fields of modern critical thinking, like third-wave feminism, postcolonial studies, and critical race theory, work to deconstruct these cultural binaries. This semester, kitsch sought to do the same.

Complicating the narrative around common feminist issues, several writers address different ways women are pigeonholed into particular roles. Zoe Ferguson argues that the push for women to enter STEM fields is not enough— we have to also address the sexism that devalues their work in the humanities.

Susie Plotkin examines how the media positions Nicki Minaj as a villain, while white pop queens ignore other spheres of privilege at play in favor of the easy men vs. women division. Maura Thomas profiles Tavi Gevinson, writer, fashion entrepreneur, and champion of the under-estimated teenage girl, showing what women and girls can achieve when they reject society’s rigid expectations.

Many of our writers were concerned with the dangers of an “us” vs. “them” mentality when it comes to “The West” and the rest of the world. Yana Lysenko pulls back the curtain on the imperialist implications of America’s obsession with white French fashion. Jael Goldfine and Kira Roybal examine the role of museums and photojournalism in creating a cultural “other,” and the importance of questioning these institutions. Jagravi Dave introduces The Kominas, a punk band that rejects the idea that “muslim” and “punk” are mutually exclusive, and explores questions of identity in America.

Other high profile dichotomies come from America’s two-party political system. Nate Coderre details the life-cycle of a politician who attempted to transcend the Republican/Democrat divide to battle the corrupting influence of big money in politics, while Sarah Chekfa critiques Twitter’s new feature that encourages users to rashly donate to campaigns, prioritizing emotion over reason.

And seeking expertise beyond our kitsch writers staff, we spoke with Mukoma Wa Ngugi about the dangers of perceiving a stable binary between Africans and African-Americans, and the staff at our local Planned Parenthood about the effects of the single- and narrow-minded agenda to defund the organization.

In the end, we all have a predisposition to conflate complicated issues with simplified dichotomies. Can we help from living in a world of analog vs. digital, beer vs. wine, caffeinated vs. decaf, audience vs. writer? But when this inclination to over-simplify and divide carries over from the mundane into the elusive complexities of identity and society, it becomes crucial to critically examine these binaries.

Yana Makuwa

Katie O’Brien

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On the Plaza

Who would you like to see run for president in 2020?

“I want Donald Trump to run forever”

“Elizabeth Warren” ­—Jagravi D., ‘15

“Noam Chomsky”

­—Conner P., ‘17

­—Thomas K., Law Student

“Not Kanye” (x3) “Kanye” ­ Maitland Jr., ‘18 — ­ Nate C., ‘16 —

“An anarchist revolutionary” ­—Nathalie L., ‘15

“Hilary....Duff” “I’m more focused on Rand Paul 2016” ­—Karann P., ‘16

“Casper the Friendly Ghost”

­—Christine A., ‘17

“Clay Aiken ran for Congress, I see no reason why Matt Damon wouldn’t run for President”

“That would be Hillary Clinton’s second term”

“Michael Luzmore”

“Bernie Sanders’ second term!”

­—Emma L., ‘16 Some registered voters preferred to remain anonymous

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CONNOISSEURS wine or beer, you’re probably still a douchebag

by Thelonia Saunders art by Thelonia Saunders

You may meet one at a party, standing around, looking deeply into their glass as if to absorb the oh-so-alluring alcohol percentage through eye contact alone. Your heart may begin to beat faster, and you may begin to mumble low threats of bodily harm as they tell you about the “bouquet” or the “body” of whatever fills their glass, calling it “cheeky” or “robust,” and inevitably, disgustingly, gargling it in front of you for what feels like decades. In this way, the connoisseur is a special breed.

But how might the substance in their glass change how you think of them?

The wine drinkers, you presume, would be the artsy people in black turtlenecks, speaking French or Italian, or simply maintaining a silent yet profoundly disdainful stare in the corner of the room. They are lounging on the couch with a wine glass in one hand and a cigarette in the other. One may sigh and shake their head as another espouses the virtues and shortcomings of the newest 12-hour experimental film.

The beer drinkers, on the other hand, would be by the organic fair trade dips, comparing the relative authenticity of their own local micro-brews, wearing near-identical slouchy beanies and flannels. Eventually one might pull out a ukulele and play an ironic cover of a rap song, as the others chortle into their glasses and laugh at anyone who could be seen drinking a Bud Light.

These people embody the beer-versus-wine debate.

It is one of time immemorial, dating back centuries, from the Roman Empire to the Middle Ages, when beer was a common everyday beverage and wine was reserved for special occasions (especially for Catholics—transubstantiation had to start somewhere). Both beverages go back about 7,000 years, so there’s no “first,” just as there is no clear “best.” And yet, because

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of these age-old differences in the style of their consumption, the two alcohols themselves seem to have vastly different reputations. Wine is classy, beer is casual. Wine is exotic, beer is local. Wine is expensive, beer is cheap.

However, these reputation discrepancies seem to be based more on surrounding culture than actual scientific fact. Wine is seen as more expensive, and while this can be true, expensive wines are only more common than expensive beers, and there is a wide price range for both. Perhaps the other differences come from the longstanding tradition of a US/Europe dichotomy, in which we are a country of frat boys chugging beer and TPing the dean’s house, and they are a continent of artists, constantly smoking, drinking, and maybe eating some cheese. Combined with the relative age of beer—most being very “young” at the time of consumption— versus the “aging like fine wine” phenomenon, you have two beverages that are quite literally the alcoholic version of “blue bloods” and “nouveau riche.” (Which means that there is a possibility that someone could write a version of Marx’s Das Kapital with beer and wine as stand-ins for the bourgeoisie and aristocrats... Would that make the proletariat moonshine?

Get on it, academia.)

To make (what has the potential to be) a long story short: this beer vs. wine debate holds its roots in a classism that dates back to the Roman Empire, and it is not going away any time soon. So while you may roll your eyes at the wine snobs and think that the beer enthusiasts are just way too invested in hops to be anywhere close to normal, I think we can all agree that connoisseurs of both beer and wine can be equally annoying when you are just trying to get alcohol in your body at a party.

They tell you about the ‘bouquet’ or the ‘body’ of whatever fills their glass, calling it ‘cheeky’ or ‘robust’, and inevitably, disgustingly, gargling it in front of you for what feels like decades 6

VHS

versus

which is the greatest obsolete viewing experience??

by Yana Makuwa

Price:

At their prime, VHSs were a very reasonably priced product. You could buy a blockbuster film and have it in the comfort of your home for a mere $15-$20 (Nate’s Dad, 2015).

And now with a particularly good quality and rare first edition VHS, you have an anthropological artifact worth TENS of dollars!

Availability:

While DVDs may surpass VHS tapes in availability in stores, the trusty analog antecedent has a leg up when it comes to availability of content. During the years when VHS was the only (or most popular) distribution method for home video, Hollywood produced such gems as the first Star Wars trilogy and The Shining (which actually did better in VHS sales and rentals than at the box office). VHS gave people access to the best of the best in the comfort of their home. And now it both provides us with a piece of our cultural history, and holds the responsibility of being the final format for many great films that were never transferred (see Listverse.com’s article “Top 15 Movies You Can’t Find on DVD” for more!).

Video Quality: This may be an instance where one would

expect the VHS to fall short. The image quality that comes from the process of magnetic tape recording is simply incapable of the aggressively crisp high definition that we get from our newest video technology. However, there is something to be said for the texture and ethereal quality that comes from the rich grain of an analog video experience. Being able to see Richard Gere’s pores and eye-wrinkles on a digitally remastered HD version of Pretty Woman cannot compare to the angelic glow that the slightly blurred image gives his face on VHS. The Middle Earth of The Return of The King on DVD practically shouts fake CGI and set-design when compared with the dreamlike quality of a distantly magical memory that it has in The Fellowship of the Ring on VHS (The Lord of the Rings series straddles the years when DVD overtook VHS, which explains why I have the first on VHS and the last on DVD).

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“

Being able to see Richard Gere’s pores and eye-wrinkles on a digitally remastered HD version of Pretty Woman cannot compare to the angelic glow that the slightly blurred image gives his face on VHS.

User Interface:

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The popularization of DVD ruined and cast into the realm of memory the true home-video viewing experience. Watching a VHS tape is a physical experience with an incredibly satisfying arc. First, there’s the gratifying click when you open the case (or swoosh if you have the cheaper, cardboard version). As you slide the tape into the player the machinery accepts it like a gift, and whirs to life to bring you the film you hand-picked. Where DVDs have cold and distant digital dings and jarring bright blue menu screens, VHSs have warm colors and comforting static. And at the end of your movie, when all is said and done, you get up and hit the rewind button—a magical moment of returning everything to the way it was before. (BONUS: You get to watch the movie twice! Once going forward, and then again in reverse!)

DVD: the face-off

by Nathaniel Coderre

Price(LESS):

Only $1 for Kelly Clarkson: Behind Blue Eyes, Beverly Hillbillies, or Best of Luke’s Peep Show Season 1 at your local video store!!! Have a cousin with more modern tastes???

You could get her critically acclaimed Netflix show Orange is the New Black for only $11! DVD really has convenience and versatility unmatched by any other video watching experience.

Availability: Let me drop some choice DVDs on you: X-Men:

The Last Stand, V for Vendetta and The Dark Knight. The DVD era was the Golden Age of comic book movies! Besides, since I wasn’t really allowed to see movies with nonsexual uses of the F word and middling amounts of violence, PG-13 movies were where it was at. Sure, my brother scratched the hell out of my copy of The Dark Knight TWO WEEKS after I got it, but getting DVDs for Christmas was AWESOME way back when. Midaughts nostalgia is a thing guys! I know for a fact that the majority of your movie-watching days have been in the DVD era (beginning June 2003, if you were curious).

90s era Disney was amazing, no doubt. I’m just willing to bet that a lot of you have DVD re-releases.

In fact, let’s make an actual bet. If more than half of our childhood homes still have VCRs, I will only watch VHS tapes for the rest of my life.

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Let’s make an actual bet. If more than half of our childhood homes still have VCRs, I will only watch VHS tapes for the rest of my life.

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loved watching The Lion King on VHS with my siblings as much as the next guy, but that doesn’t mean I’d prefer that over the digitally remastered version.

User Interface: The PS3 that I used to watch DVDs back in

2006 was sleek as hell. They also had that cool thing where you could turn on the video game system from your controller!

So as long as you already had the remote, the controller, and the DVD remote (maybe? I can’t remember), you wouldn’t even have to get up off of the couch. And DVD menus are the best!

Rotating pictures, the trailer (so convenient), scene selections, and DVD extras. Let’s not forget about the DVD extras! Best example: the over 3 minutes of Uncle Joey impressions on the Season 3 Full House DVD. You’d have to watch the entire season to figure out which episode he does his Joe Pesci impression in if you were watching the VHS.

Video Quality: Are you kidding

me? Shiny laser-optical discs beat whatever the hell cassettes are every day of the week. People who reminisce about VHS quality are conflating their current viewing experience with childhood nostalgia. I

Who’s the WINNER?? It’s up to you! Email kitschmag.eds@gmail.com to vote!

art by Michelle Savran 8

OFFICE SPACE:

mukoma wa ngugi

by Yana Makuwa

the african literature english professor talks books and binaries kitsch: So I was wondering if you could start by introducing yourself—what you teach, and what you study.

MwN: My name is Mukoma Wa Ngugi. I’m an assistant professor of English at Cornell University, the co-director of the Cornell Global South Project, and also co-founder of the Mabati-Cornell Kiswahili Prize for African Literature. kitsch: Could you describe what it’s like balancing being a successful fiction writer and a full-time professor?

MwN: Well, they complement each other. For example I’m very interested in the question of Africans and African-Americans, questions of identity, questions of race and class, and so on and so forth. And part of my research is on that. But then my novels end up being on the same topics. For example, Nairobi Heat is about an African-American detective who’s investigating a murder case that takes him all the way to Kenya. So he becomes an African-American in Africa, right?

And so all sorts of questions of identity will arise from that.

Even my next book Mrs. Shaw takes place half in the US and half in Kenya as well. It’s about an exiled pro-democracy activist. So in that one it’s more an exploration of nationalism, of how nations, countries like Kenya, use nationalism to hide the real history. And some of the post-independent betrayals of workers and so on and so forth—the betrayal of the dream of independence.

But that’s something I also explore in other [non-fiction] writing. So I’m saying eventually they complement each other. Even where it doesn’t seem for that to be the case— for example I just finished a novel on the tizita, which is a form of Ethiopian music. It’s all about music but it’s also an exploration of how people relate to each other. So I don’t know, I would say eventually then it’s all interrelated.” kitsch: Our theme for this issue is binaries. Could you talk about some of your favorite binaries to think about, maybe particularly the African/African-American binary, and how that shapes or doesn’t shape your work?

MwN: I mean, myself, I’m very wary and scared of binaries.

So, for example, if you take Africans and African-Americans, certainly there are ways in which their relationship is formed by racism. In an article called “Somewhere between African and Black” on The Guardian, I talk about how both groups 9

see each other through the eyes of racism, to the extent that Africans grow up seeing very negative images of AfricanAmericans, and African-Americans also grow up seeing very very negative images of Africa, you know we have war and so forth.

But at the same time there has been a lot of solidarity between the two. For example you have Nelson Mandela, who said that it would have taken longer for South Africa to free itself of apartheid if it hadn’t been for the involvement of AfricanAmericans. And you have people like W.E.B. DuBois who is credited as one of the originators of the concept of PanAfricanism, who ends up dying in Ghana. You have Malcom X and his tour. You have African-American organizations like Africa Action and TransAfrica Forum that agitate for African issues. And one of my favorite examples is Martin Luther King being one of the first people to call for sanctions against South Africa. And vice-versa, you have Black Panthers that ended up in exile in Tanzania and Algeria. So there has been that solidarity.

So there is the angst, because we’re seeing each other through the veil of racism. But at the same time there is great solidarity. But behind that—and this is where the question of binaries becomes important—if you just look at the two

of them then you end up with this stable either solidarity or tension between the two. There’s this recent book called Disintegration by Eugene Robinson, and it’s interesting to the extent that it shows essentially the many black Americas in the US. And it also talks about what he calls the imagined blackness, which is mostly bi-racial and first generation Africans. So if you’re just thinking about African-Americans you end up with this stable view of blackness in the US, but to the contrary it’s very very complicated. And the same thing on the African side. You have, well first, different levels of blackness. You certainly have thousands of cultures, thousands of languages, 54 countries. So again, to speak of Africans and African-Americans as a binary, then you’re missing all those complexities that end up influencing how the two relate. kitsch: Now for some lighter questions: if you could take one course here at Cornell what would it be?

MwN: Well now this is where ego is very dangerous. I really would love to take one of my own classes. No, no. Certainly I would love to take a poetry class from Ishion Hutchinson who is my colleague here. I would like to take some fiction classes.

I would love to take theory classes from Jonathan Culler, who is a senior colleague, and a major literary theorist. Certainly I would take a bunch of courses at Africana. I would like to take one on current African politics, for example. I would like to take a course on Africans and African-Americans, or the black diaspora for example. Yeah... And physics. I would love to take a physics course.

kitsch: Could you pick out one object that’s your favorite object here in your office?

MwN: Umm, hm.

Well I guess it’s [he gestures to a photograph of his daughter behind him] sort of cheesy but… and I guess it’s not really an object. Let me think of a book that I really… Ah! There’s a book called The Black Count. Oh, or maybe the carvings. They come from a house where I grew up in Kenya. And I grew up seeing them, and they’re of the Mau Mau freedom fighters. They were given to my dad but I stole them when I went back. It’s about Kenyan history and its history of struggle against British colonialism.

Read his fiction and find out more about him at mukomawangugi.com

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INSIDE ITHACA’S

PLANNED PARENTHOOD an interview with local activists maureen kelly and liz gipson

by Katie O’Brien

This summer, anti-abortion group The Center For Medical Progress released videos that were deceptively edited and spliced to make it appear as if a Planned Parenthoodaffiliated social worker was facilitating the illegal sale of fetal tissue. The full videos, available online, show that the context of the conversation actually had nothing to do with fetal tissue sale, but fetal tissue donation for medical research, and the social worker’s list of prices was in reference to 11

transportation costs. Despite the videos being obviously and verifiably fake, the Republicans in Congress have used them to fuel their extreme agenda to defund Planned Parenthood and systematically remove women’s access to essential, legal health services.

In accordance with the Hyde Amendment, a provision of Roe vs. Wade, Planned Parenthood’s federal funding does not even go toward paying for abortions. Instead, the approximately

$530 million in funds that the nonprofit receives annually provides millions of women with birth control, STI screenings, pap smears, breast exams, sexuality education, and general healthcare.

Ithaca’s Planned Parenthood clinic is an affiliate of Planned Parenthood of the Southern Finger Lakes (PPSFL), which serves four upstate New York counties with healthcare, and ten with advocacy. There are health centers in Ithaca, Watkins Glen, Elmira, Corning, and Hornell. To find out more about the importance of Planned Parenthood in our own community, as well as on a national scale, kitsch interviewed two women who work at Ithaca’s Planned Parenthood.

“We’re Never Quite Off-Duty”

Maureen Kelly, VP of Education & Communications, has worked at our local Planned Parenthood for the past 21 years. She first became passionate about reproductive rights when she failed a women’s health class at her Catholic, allgirls high school for attempting to give a presentation about contraception. “That was a pretty formative moment for me as a young activist. I remember thinking ‘wait...what? You don’t get to pick what I get to know. These are my parts!’” She has since dedicated her life to educating youth about sexual health and sexuality, working first at Planned Parenthood’s front desk, then as an educator, and now managing the education program. “I come from the philosophical approach that we have to talk about this stuff, we have to eradicate shame, we have to eradicate secrecy and that sense of embarrassment, whether it’s an abortion story or a need for birth control or a concern about an STD,” she said.

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part of people’s communication or their prevention behaviors.”

But they also have to have their guard up a bit more when talking about their work, because they never quite know how someone is going to react. “I think it takes a very specific type of person to work at Planned Parenthood, because you do have to deal occasionally with people saying terrible things when they find out where you work,” said Gipson. “And so it has to be something that you’re passionate about and that you’re willing to really fight for, whether you’re anything from an educator to a billing associate. It’s something you have to be willing to talk to people about constantly.”

“We Serve Our Community As It Exists”

PPSFL annually provides healthcare to 11,000 and education to 16,000 people of all genders, ages, and socioeconomic backgrounds. However, the majority of patients are under 25, low income, and people of color, due to the prejudices and barriers that make it more difficult for these groups to access healthcare. “It’s such an intersectional approach to how we do healthcare, which is, being a young, African-American girl in the city of Ithaca, you’re dealing with a different circle of stuff that’s going to make accessing healthcare harder,” said Kelly. Despite the efforts of the Affordable Care Act, there were still over 32 million uninsured Americans in 2014. Forty-eight percent of those individuals said they were uninsured due to the cost of insurance, according to the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation. “In terms of age, race, socioeconomic status and background, we really do serve our community as it exists. Our job is to see you and whatever experience you bring and to honor that, and to care for you—period, non-negotiable,

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Our job is to see you and whatever experience you bring and to honor that, and to care for you—period, non-negotiable, what do you need?

Liz Gipson, Director of Public Affairs, says she first became involved with Planned Parenthood as a patient herself. Then, after she graduated college, she began work for a political reproductive rights organization, and volunteered at a Manhattan health center as an abortion doula, supporting women as they went through the procedure. In July, she began work in Ithaca. “I’m really lucky to be one of the few people that’s gotten to see Planned Parenthood from three different sides,” she said.

Kelly and Gipson agreed that one of the things that makes them proudest to be part of Planned Parenthood is the way people open up to them. “We tend to be people that hold people’s stories,” said Kelly. They both said that patients, strangers, and friends often confide in and consult them. “You get friends that contact you because their kid’s having their period, and they don’t know how to talk to them. So we’re never quite off-duty. I have picked up countless packs of birth control pills and emergency contraception; you become a more integral

what do you need?” said Kelly.

Due to its position in New York, a liberal state, PPSFL faces fewer limitations and restrictions on their ability to provide care for patients than many other states do. “New York State is one of the 14 states that uses state funds to fund abortions which is fantastic, and we’re one of the few states that actually opted to do it, was not sued into doing it, which is something that I’m really proud of as a New Yorker,” said Gipson. This means that they can help more people pay for their procedure that would not otherwise have coverage— “people traveling from Pennsylvania, people whose insurance won’t cover it, people who can’t get Medicaid or make just over the Medicaid cutoff.” Planned Parenthoods in New York are uniquely positioned politically as well, because they can push more progressive legislation that other states “could never dream of.”

However, PPSFL’s position in a rural community can bring challenges. The decreased visibility of upstate New York

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as compared to New York City means that state funding is often allocated downstate, leading to strains in resources. And a major difficulty for patients in accessing Planned Parenthood’s health services is the availability and cost of transportation in upstate New York—there is no abundance of buses and trains like there is downstate. If someone cannot get transportation or time off work, they could have to delay their appointment by weeks. “For many people, we’re the only doctor that they see that they can have access to, and we’re one of the only Medicaid providers in the area,” said Gipson. Being in a rural community also affects the education work they do. New York State does not require schools to teach sex ed, so there is “a massive inconsistency” in what students learn. “Often our education and outreach staff are really the only informed, expert resource they’ll come in contact with about the actual facts,” said Kelly. “We’re dedicated to combating the myths, making sure that young people, in particular, know that they actually have a lot of rights, being a New Yorker. If they were living in Pennsylvania, it’d be a really different story—they don’t have the same kind of access.”

“All the Restrictions and the Barriers”

In the 21 years since Kelly began work at Planned Parenthood, limitations on reproductive rights have only become stricter and stricter. “When you look at all the restrictions and the barriers and just the sheer volume of votes

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have is based on the idea that ‘if we don’t tell young people, they won’t do it,’ which is just the opposite of everything we know,” Kelly said. She cited the Netherlands as a place where they start sexual education much earlier, in much more detail than the US does, and the average age of becoming sexually active is two years later than it is here. Similarly, the states with the highest teen pregnancy rates are New Mexico, Mississippi, Texas, Arkansas, Louisiana, and Oklahoma—all states with abstinence-only education. Meanwhile, states with comprehensive sexual education have the lowest rates.

Kelly said that in the future, one of her dreams is to have a drop-in, after-school sex ed program, where students can feel comfortable asking any questions they have about sex and relationships and all the things they don’t talk about in school. “We want to make sure there are many more ways for people to access information and support and resources to have full, healthy sexual lives as people, instead of relegating that to one semester, one class,” she said. “When you ask a group of college students in their freshman year, ‘how many people got a really accurate, adequate, and complete sex education?’ people are like... ‘yeah no.’ And so there’s gaps.”

Planned Parenthood also works with campus advocacy groups to do many dorm education programs at area colleges. “The demographics we serve overlap with college students, we serve a ton of students. So making sure we are engaging

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The recent attacks on Planned Parenthood have not affected operations in that we have not been closed a single day because of them.

But we are seeing an uptick in protests.

we’re fighting against, it has definitely been sliding backwards,” she said. When Kelly started her job, many of the doctors she worked with were able to recall the time when abortion was illegal, and all of the medical consequences that came along with it. “They had a really different, intimate orientation to seeing what that looked like—the sepsis, and the loss of fertility, and the infections—they saw that,” said Kelly. And due to all the increasing restrictions on abortion on both the state and federal level, America has slowly, scarily, been returning to this time: “I went to a national Planned Parenthood Conference a few years ago, and a really brilliant CEO got up in front of everyone and said: ‘We live in post-Roe America; it’s now.” In other words, we no longer have to imagine what it would be like if the 1973 court case that legalized abortion were overturned—there are now so many restrictions on abortion, that for many people, it effectively is illegal.

And restrictions have not just been tightening when it comes to abortion, but also when it comes to sex ed. Kelly noted that in 1994, she could teach much more in middle schools than her education staff can now, thanks to the federal push for “abstinence-only” education that began in 1998.

According to Advocates for Youth, none of these programs have been shown to have any success in delaying sexual activity or reducing teen pregnancy, and often contribute to the spread of misinformation about the effectiveness of contraception.

“Unfortunately, a lot of the ways that information gets tinted by some of the shame and assumptions and hopes that people

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students we are providing services for and helping them feel empowered can empower us all,” said Gipson, who oversees the campus organizing program.

“An Uptick in Protests”

“The recent attacks on Planned Parenthood have not affected operations in that we have not been closed a single day because of them. But we are seeing an uptick in protests,” said Kelly. The Ithaca health center sees regular protesters who stand across the street with signs, but do not bother patients and staff. The health center in Corning sometimes gets “more aggressive” protesters. And ever since the fraudulent videos were released, PPSFL’s Hornell center, one of the smallest clinics, has been seeing up to 40 protesters show up at a time, harassing patients as they try to enter the building. The staff discovered that the protesters are not local, and are being bussed in from outside of the communities they serve. “Our first thought is always ‘how can we make our patients feel safe?’” said Gipson. “Having escorts to walk you from your car to the health center makes a huge difference for patients.”

The fallout from the attacks has also forced them to keep an even closer eye on what is happening in Congress.

“Politically, we’ve been paying attention to our elected officials and how they’re voting. Tom Reed just voted to defund Planned Parenthood for the second time. We are grateful that Obama is in office because he is going to veto that bill, but it is something that we are constantly thinking about and looking at,” said Gipson. While PPSFL does not have to worry about

losing funding on a state level, if Planned Parenthoods in Pennsylvania and Ohio lose funding, PPSFL will be affected because many of those patients will have to come to upstate New York.

However, there has also been a silver lining to the most recent efforts to discredit the organization—many supporters and former patients have been speaking out in support of Planned Parenthood. The online campaign #IStandWithPP was trending on Twitter, with people circulating reasons why Planned Parenthood is important. And those who participated in the campaign #ShoutYourAbortion fought to decrease stigma around the procedure by sharing real stories. “In the future, I would love for Planned Parenthood to have a whole army of advocates that are former patients of ours. One thing Planned Parenthood has not been great at in the past is being able to empower our patients to become advocates,” said Gipson. “We’re realizing the importance and the desire from our patients to learn about what’s happening, and how they can support Planned Parenthood.”

“Make Them Listen To You”

On January 25th, Planned Parenthood staff and supporters will travel to Albany for the annual Day of Action, where they will lobby New York State’s elected officials. “It’s a fantastic opportunity for students, we pay for the whole thing, transportation, food, training on how to lobby, so if you are anyone even mildly interested in activism and political organization, this is a great thing to do because it teaches you the skills you need to talk to elected officials and make them listen to you,” said Gipson. For 2016, Planned Parenthood will be lobbying for the passage of three bills. One is the

Comprehensive Contraception Coverage Act, which would mandate that health insurance companies follow the Affordable Care Act’s requirement that they cover contraception. “If you’re on birth control you should not have to pay for it legally; when you go to the pharmacy to pick it up it should be free. But that is not happening, people are having to pay co-pays, and that’s illegal,” said Gipson. The second bill they are pushing is the Paid Family Leave Bill. “We see that as integral to the work we do because if you can’t take off time because you’re sick or your child is sick, that affects your health, and we also see people canceling their appointments because they can’t get time off.” And the third bill would prohibit solitary confinement for pregnant women—an important justice issue especially for upstate New York, which has a high prison population.

The work that Planned Parenthood does is clearly integral to the communities it serves. Especially while the United States does not provide universal access to healthcare, and school systems provide woefully inadequate sexual education (or none at all), Planned Parenthood is absolutely essential for women and youth to be able to take control over their own reproductive health. And defunding Planned Parenthood only takes away access to essential health services for lower income women, while those who have adequate money or coverage for the procedure still have access to it—accomplishing nothing but increasing inequality in this country even more. We are lucky to have such strong, passionate advocates for our reproductive rights at our Planned Parenthood here in Ithaca.

Photo courtesy of Vox: Voices for Planned Parenthood

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DEPENDENCE a college student’s complicated relationship with coffee

by Zoe Ferguson

The collective relationship Americans have with caffeine is a kind of polymorphous perversion. Though caffeine is a drug, and people overdose on it just like any other drug, coffee has saturated our collective consciousness to such a degree that to dislike coffee is almost akin to being unAmerican.

What does it mean to be a coffee drinker? First, let’s consider what it means to not be a coffee drinker. If I don’t drink at least one cup a day, I can never live up to the ideals of my biggest role models. Most notably, the four role models who raised me: my mother, my father, and Lorelai and Rory Gilmore have a passion for coffee at all times of the day and night that seemed to fuel their ability to pull off weird outfits and hilarious quips. When I was 12 years old, my dad noticed my increasing inability to get up in time for school and decided I was probably “a coffee person.” This characterization made me feel validated, like I had been initiated into a way of life, or a very unsociable fraternity. Now that I drank coffee to get things done, I could be just like Mom and Dad, who slept at odd hours and caffeinated all day and in the middle of the night. Having coffee in the morning became an act of selfvalidation: if I drank this, I was officially in The Adult Club. It set me apart from my younger siblings and my seventh-grade classmates. When I couldn’t focus on a test in geometry class, I remember thinking, That’s the last time I skip coffee in the morning. In the spring of seventh grade, I had to give it up for a mandatory three-day class camping trip, and I experienced withdrawal headaches and sickness.

In high school, I didn’t caffeinate as much. I found more energy (and solace) in food, so I got high—and crashed—on carbs and sugar. It all went downhill in college. While it’s true that coming to Cornell was a great move for many reasons— friends, learning, gorges, etc.—in other ways, it doomed me to an existence of wavering dependence on and a strange existential attachment to the drink. I place part of the blame on Cornell’s coffee card program, which allows you to get a

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art by Julia Pearson free drink after 10 cups, but Collegetown’s plethora of coffee shops doesn’t exactly help either. What’s a girl to do when she passes Starbucks, Collegetown Bagels, and now Dunkin’ Donuts on the way to class?

The whole university system seems to be enabling caffeine dependence. It prioritizes independent individuals. Yes, it’s cool to have friends, but what’s really cool is being a selfmade person in America. That’s what this country is all about.

But for many, being a student at a highly competitive university also means being dependent on something—and if it’s not drugs or alcohol, it’s probably caffeine. Being a caffeine addict is part of the canonical life of the college student. Staying up all night in the library stacks is even easier with Libe Café serving coffee until midnight every weeknight. Independence is a function of how much energy you can muster up every day, and that energy is facilitated by a daily caffeine dose. In an environment where everything else is shifting—friends and relationships come and go, jobs and classes are fluid, even living situations are often in limbo—coffee becomes the friend

we didn’t know we had.

At some point though, we develop a tolerance for caffeine, just as we do—to an extent—for the rain and hills of Ithaca. We drink it for the routine, to keep ourselves on a schedule and plan a no-fuss date at Stella’s, but it doesn’t give us the high anymore. We don’t feel the effects until we’ve drunk three cups in a row and start to get the shakes.

For a bunch of intellectually curious people, it’s odd that we don’t think more about the physical effects of the caffeine we consume so habitually.

As much as it pains me to say this, coffee stunts your growth, dehydrates you, and dims your teeth. The English still insist on drinking tea, which has one-third the caffeine of coffee, and they seem to be doing all right. But coffee remains a super-giant, $30 billion industry in America. Thanks largely to the development of K-Cups—nine billion of which were sold in 2014 alone—Keurig Green Mountain made $4.7 billion in 2014.

As James Hamblin argued in The Atlantic, Keurig machines are relatively cheap compared to most espresso machines, “but once you have one, it has you, too.” Both mainstream and artsy coffee brewers are seeing enormous profits as well: according to market research firm Mintel, cold brew coffee grew in the U.S. by 115 percent in 2014 and made $7.9 million.

Starbucks’s profits also climbed by 22 percent from 2014 to 2015, bringing their profits up to $626.7 million, according to The New York Times. This fall, West Coast-based Peet’s Coffee bought Portland’s pet coffee company, Stumptown, eliminating competition and raking in profits.

The branding efforts for coffee are also insane. Not only has the annual release of Starbucks’s PSL—pumpkin spice latte, for those who live under a rock—become basically a national holiday, but smaller brewers are getting smart, too.

In September, Stumptown partnered with The Late Show with Stephen Colbert to give out 10,000 bottles of “Col’ Brew” (get it?

Colbert? Col’ Brew?) on the streets of New York City, to promote Colbert’s new position on the show. This is a step ahead of branding ice cream with celebrities’ names. (Colbert has his own Ben & Jerry’s flavor, too: Stephen Colbert’s Americone Dream.) Emblazoning his face on a bottle of artisan cold brew coffee seems different, but truly, the appeal of coffee is just as universal nowadays as that of ice cream.

The pull of coffee, like the pull of ice cream, isn’t one with an aim. Much like in Freud’s admittedly weird theory of the sexual aim, the consumption aim (a term I just made up) is actually perverse in almost everyone. Freud says that “perverse” isn’t a pejorative term. Instead, it just means that we’re attracted to people for reasons other than procreation.

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Such is coffee. It’s not exactly a practical drive that steers us towards caffeine. Though it might have the temporary effect of getting us through a few more hours of studying, coffee is really a fix, a stopper for an emotional life that goes wild once we start abandoning our routines. Most people would probably be fine without coffee, and I’ll bet that a large percentage of self-proclaimed “coffee addicts” wouldn’t know the difference if they were served decaf. That’s how strong the placebo effect can be. Of course, ice cream also serves an emotional purpose, but we’re vocal about it. When you get dumped, you get a pint of Americone Dream. But we don’t talk, as a society, about the emotional void coffee is filling. This is the void that makes us feel like we are “less than.” Without coffee, we may feel useless, anchorless, and friendless. Drinking coffee even becomes a moral value when you look at it this way. What does it mean if I give up coffee? Does it make me a quitter—have I given up on the relentless ambition that I promised to follow when I accepted my spot at Cornell? Does it mean I’m somehow doing it wrong, showing weakness, if I add lots of milk and sugar?

Clearly, I don’t know the answer to these questions, because I am the person who spends a ton of money on coffee, takes one sip, and then holds onto the full cup for the rest of the day, hoping that carrying it around will somehow validate my spending and make me cool and motivated by osmosis. All I can say is that the emotional side of coffee drinking is real. Any quiz that purports to tell you what kind of person you are by what coffee drink you prefer is a waste of time. What you really need to ask yourself is why you’re drinking it in the first place.

When you figure it out, let me know.

While it’s true that coming to Cornell was a great move for many reasons—friends, learning, gorges, etc.—in other ways, it doomed me to an existence of wavering dependence on and a strange existential attachment to the drink.

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GOING CLUBBING why we compulsively join clubs in college

by Melvin Li

During the 2014-2015 academic year there were over a thousand student organizations at this university—almost one club for every kid at my high school. Download the 25page Orgsync PDF and count them if you like. These clubs include the Film Club, the Adult Film Club, the Surf Club, Take Back the Tap, the Teszia Belly Dance Troupe, the Pokemon League, and societies for a host of different countries around the world (except for Kyrgyzstan). Walk-on clubs like Rainy Day are always happy to take in new members at any time, while more competitive clubs such as the Whistling Shrimp, Cornell Bhangra, and Yamatai actively encourage all who are interested to come to their auditions. And to the great relief of our parents, mentors, club recruiters, and even ourselves, many of us here at Cornell eventually find our paths in the organizations we join.

Stepping onto Cornell’s campus for the first time, my biggest concerns were being away from home and not being able to make friends among the 3,222 other freshmen who enrolled that fall as the class of 2017. I was sure I would end up spending the whole year hiding in my room. Instead, as I walked around campus the following day, I was quite literally swept into the Big Red Marching Band, one of the first Cornell student organizations to begin recruiting in the fall. To make a long story short, I spent the remainder of freshman year going to class and going to band, where most of my friends were, and that was perfectly alright with me.

The Bank of Mom and Dad, however, wasn’t as pleased with my progress. That summer, I was fed a double cocktail of advice that countless knowledgeable adults tell college students every year: “You need to be more active on campus” and “You need to network and form connections.” As an English major I had to get to know other English majors and people who shared my interest in writing, and I figured the easiest way to do 17

that was to join writing clubs on campus. So come sophomore year I pulled a stunt common among students who had never been to Club Fest before. I headed down to Barton Hall and signed up for three clubs that fit my interests: The Cornell Daily Sun (The Princeton Review’s favorite college newspaper), Rainy Day (Cornell’s undergraduate literary magazine), and of course the lovely little magazine you’re reading right now. I knew I was wading into a lot of commitments, but I wanted to devote a lot of my free time to extracurriculars after having almost none freshman year.

What I did not expect was that I would end up spending most or almost all of my free time with clubs and the people in them. Now in my case this might be because I suck at time management, but many college students who devote themselves to extracurriculars do so for reasons ranging from passion about the club’s function, to a desire to spend time with the people in their clubs or pad their resumes. Don’t get me wrong—I love parading around at football games, covering events on campus, reading literary submissions, and writing articles like these. But I, like all students here, also have classes, exams, papers, and other important things that I’m supposed to worry about. My parents sent me to Cornell first and foremost to get an education, and so for me tomorrow’s classes take priority over today’s clubs. But getting a good education and dedicating oneself to clubs don’t have to be mutually exclusive.

With their most immediate goals fulfilled (attending stimulating classes at an elite university on their way to a lucrative job), students would be expected to attend fewer clubs after getting into college, but actually the opposite has been observed. Students at Cornell and most universities in the United States participate in many times more student organizations than the typical high school student. So what about extracurricular activities keeps students involved

around their campuses throughout their university years?

Many college students attend clubs not only regularly but eagerly and passionately, managing their time and schedules to accommodate what have become integral parts of their lives.

Why do we often become so passionate about the clubs we join that we desperately look forward to afternoon rehearsal or evening practice, and bond more closely with our co-club members than the people with whom we attend class or live?

And why does this happen when these clubs aren’t always related to the fields we plan to find careers in?

One reason is that college clubs are often continuations and intensifications of our high school interests and passions.

I certainly followed this track: I’d been in my high school marching band since ninth grade and written for my schools’ newspapers since seventh, and I had no intention of letting either of these passions die upon entering college. This pattern applies especially to students who join club sports in college without plans to pursue careers in sports. Peter Li, a freshman in the College of Arts and Sciences, arrived at Cornell fully intent on joining Club Swimming because he had spent nine years as a member of a swimming club back home and two years on his high school’s varsity swimming team. Although he plans on going into statistics and finance, he refuses to give up a sport he enjoys. “I swam club before and the feeling of being part of a team and doing something I’m okay at was something I hoped to relive in college,” says Li. Although Li eventually left the club because its heavy time commitments conflicted with his schoolwork, he has taken up lifeguarding as a much more flexible way of remaining close to the pool.

Whether or not you join with a social goal, socializing is an undeniable appeal of many clubs in college. Even the

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because they made me join, and I joined Gourmet because I’m a food science major.” Leong first joined Wushu after being introduced to it by a friend and stayed in the club because he enjoys the personal discipline, rigorous exercise, and cooking opportunities it provides him. Being a part of so many clubs does take a toll, so excellent time management skills are a must if one wishes to get good grades and still be an active extracurricular member. “Think about it like this,” Leong said of fitting all his clubs into his schedule, “how often do you think I socialize during the day?” Spending every night at practice or socializing with clubmates means that, like other heavily involved students, he is often very busy catching up with work during the day.

Unlike undergraduate admissions officers, graduate schools and employers look more at experience in your chosen field instead of simple well-roundedness, so joining tons of different clubs is not necessarily the greatest job-hunting strategy. That being said, some clubs and student associations do provide college students with career opportunities while requiring very little effort and dedication in return. For Niranjin Ravi, a sophomore computer science major in the College of Engineering, something as simple as reaching out to a professionally-oriented club helped expose him to internship openings. “I’m in ACSU, the Association for Computer Science Undergraduates,” Ravi said. “I don’t go to any of the meetings but I’m part of the list-serv. It’s really to help people get jobs and there’s a lot of information on internship opportunities.”

As Alexandra de Leon mentions on the AfterCollege blog, professionally motivated clubs can also be highly beneficial beyond the listserv. She recalled how an astronomy major friend attended an Engineers Without Borders event for free

Stepping onto Cornell’s campus for the first time, my biggest concerns were being away from home and not being able to make friends among the 3,222 other freshmen who enrolled that fall as the class of 2017

Cornell Project Teams website states that perhaps the most important incentive to joining a team is the opportunity to “have fun while working on projects that you are passionate about.” Taking time off of schoolwork or other obligations for the sake of being together is a powerful sign of attachment no matter how you look at it, and so inevitably members of a club who meet regularly will bond even if they come from different backgrounds and fields. We’re not talking about the casual, once-a-week gigs in high school either—some of the more intense student organizations in college require multiple meetings a week.

Ethyn Leong, a sophomore in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, is in marching band, Hawaiian Club, JapanUnited States Association (JUSA), Cornell Wushu, Food Science Club, and Cornell Gourmet Club. He said that while he joined the Food Science Club and Gourmet Club because he is a food science major, he joined his other clubs mostly for non-academic reasons and now spends a significant portion of his time on pastimes not related to his field of study. “I joined marching band and JUSA just cause,” Leong said, “I joined Hawaiian Club

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pizza and ended up realizing that civil engineering was actually the right major for her. De Leon said that joining clubs “gives you the option of exploring a career without fully committing,” pointing out that professional organizations for students usually invite employees in the field to share their insights at speaking events, provide their members with internship opportunities, and even help members develop hard skills.

It’s clear that we cannot simply discredit clubs as a waste of valuable time and tuition money. There are many perfectly valid reasons why college students might choose to adjust their daily schedules to attend clubs and other associations. Furthermore, clubs are voluntary, which means that one of the primary things keeping members coming back is their own devotion to each other and shared interests. Here at Cornell and in my experience, clubs are spaces to form deep friendships, pursue long-lasting passions, and perhaps advance a career network all at once. While joining too many clubs may carry more burden than benefit, college students will continue to set aside time for activities other than class and work, and will continue to enrich their lives long into the future. photo by Connor Smith

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DAMNEDIF YOU READ DAMNED

IF YOU CODE

stem or humanities, women can’t win

by Zoe Ferguson In America, there is a rampant version of sexism directed towards women who, in one way or another, try to break the boundary between their prescribed academic interests and the evolving—and profitable—world of digital technology. Though male leaders like President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden encourage women to pursue scientific fields through the Office of Science and Technology Policy and the White House Council on Women and Girls, the environment is both overtly and covertly hostile.

Take, for example, the Gamergate fiasco, in which thousands of men online converged to attack and threaten a few feminist gamers and women in tech, like Brianna Wu and Anita Sarkeesian. The problem, as one student from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas wrote in the college’s online publication The Rebel Yell, is the perception that “men are from STEM [science, technology, engineering, mathematics], women are from humanities.”

According to Ben Schmidt, associate professor of history at Northeastern, almost half of bachelor degrees granted to women in liberal arts fields were in the humanities in 1965. That number has decreased to about 25 percent. But the women who have left the humanities are not entering tech: instead, more and more are studying social sciences like psychology, economics, and political science. And a huge number of women are earning pre-professional degrees— more than half of these degrees are conferred to women.

Why are the humanities dwindling in popularity? New York Times op-ed columnist David Brooks writes that there is a simple economic explanation: “Accounting majors get jobs.

Lit majors don’t.” But there is more to it than that, he says: the humanities are less popular because they just seem irrelevant.

It’s true that students are pursuing “practical” majors to be employed after the Great Recession. But this pattern is older than the 2008 economic crisis, so we have to ask: to

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what extent is the perceived irrelevance of the humanities predicated on the field’s association with women?

As the American Association of University Women (AAUW) wrote in a 2013 report, “Most people associate science and math fields with ‘male,’ and humanities and arts fields with ‘female.’” This wasn’t always the case: back in the Renaissance, a man who was an expert in all fields, especially the humanities, prevailed. When novels first came on the scene with Daniel Defoe’s 1719 work Robinson Crusoe and Samuel Richardson’s Pamela, they were hailed as original works of genius.

But by the time Mary Ann Evans—who went by the male pen name George Eliot—wrote The Mill on the Floss in 1860, novels were considered an inferior literary form because women, who did not have day jobs, liked to read them and had even begun to write them. “Silly novels by Lady Novelists are a genus with many species, determined by the particular quality of silliness that predominates in them,” Evans wrote in a mocking 1856 essay entitled “Silly Novels by Lady Novelists.”

Since then, the trend has stayed the same. Even as men dominate the literary world, “silly novels by lady novelists” have become “chick lit.” What makes the pursuit of literary knowledge a feminine one, even today, while computer science has become the hot field for men? What accounts for the lack of a female presence in computer science, when every other scientific field has seen an increase in women enrolled?

The AAUW’s research shows that while the percentage of bachelor’s degrees earned by women in the life sciences and even physics and engineering have risen dramatically in the last 50 years, the percentage of women in computer science is barely greater than it was in 1965 and has dropped significantly in the last 30 years. Last spring, here at Cornell, the college of engineering had 107 women computer science majors, compared to 311 men. That means almost 75 percent of Cornell’s CS majors are still men. So, what gives?

The AAUW attributes the disparity to implicit bias— bias that we might not even recognize in ourselves. Both women and men can have implicit bias towards women, which silently reinforces ideas that women can’t or shouldn’t do certain things. In the context of computer science, the impact of implicit bias is strong: while women may have an interest in the field, they may also have an internalized notion that CS just isn’t something women do.

And not only do people hold stereotypes about what’s masculine and feminine, but they don’t allow for crossover either. As a woman, there is no way to “win”: if you study English, you are assumed to be doing so because it’s a typical feminine major. If you want to cross over and study computer science, you will likely be perceived as incompetent and unlikable.

What worries me is how serious the enforcement of the line is—this thick black American line between men and women that bleeds over into academia. You can either be a woman in humanities or a woman in STEM, or you can be a man in STEM or a man in humanities, if you’re an especially rare breed. There is absolutely no room to blur that line by being interested in both computer science and humanities.

This is why women in STEM—encouraged by numerous government initiatives, programs, scholarship funds, and schools from pre-K to graduate school—seem like such a

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big deal. They represent a switch, a crossing-over from one side to the other. But what they do not represent is an actual tearing down of boundaries or a blurring of the line.

The celebration of “Women In STEM,” while worthy and important, must be seen as something that is progressive but not the final step. When we have people of all genders integrated into various fields of study based on what they feel interested in, rather than what they are told is the most valuable, then we will have real equality.

This equality may never come—more scholarships and programs encouraging girls in CS pop up each day, while nothing of the sort is happening in the humanities—but it’s worth considering. If the aim of programs encouraging women to pursue science is really to emancipate women from barriers that may stop them from doing what they want to do, it is important that we not simultaneously glorify technology at the expense of the humanities. Along with many of my classmates, I have been asked countless times what the “point” is of spending so much money on higher education if I’m going to “waste it” on a degree in literature. As long as we continue to devalue and even degrade the study of arts, there can be no progress in either gender equality or elitist social attitudes that think less of people for what paths they choose.

What worries me is how serious the enforcement of the line is—this thick black American line between men and women that bleeds over into academia.

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art by Jin Yoo 20

SEEING DOUBLE a meditation on double majoring at Cornell

by Alejandra Alvarez

With my junior year well underway, thoughts concerning the impending reality of my life after Cornell and what I will do with it now occupy nearly ever corner of my mind. As a double major in English and Psychology, I have had to begin asking myself what I intend to do with these two degrees once the cap and gown have been shed and the fanfare of graduation has subsided. How will I apply the knowledge I have gleaned from these two degrees to my navigation of the professional world?

I’ve reached far back into the mind I possessed as a freshman to remind myself why I chose to study these two disciplines in the first place. The resulting process of soulsearching has been a tumultuous one. Surrounded by some of the most brilliant and motivated minds in this world, I have had days where I have criticized myself for being too passive in my quest to land a position in graduate school or a job. Instead I have spent a disproportionate amount of time pondering how best to synthesize my two degrees. I believe this is a plight many a double major has faced.

According to the U.S. Department of Education, the percentage of undergraduates choosing to double major increased by 96% between the years 2000 and 2008. Though the overall representation of double majors in the American collegiate body remains small (about 5.5 percent as of 2013) at some institutions upwards of 40 percent of students pursue multiple majors. Why the sudden and widespread urge to expand one’s academic horizons?

Selecting a discipline to major in proves to be a complex decision for most undergraduates in the United States. Some enter as freshmen secure in their undecided status, content to spend their first few semesters taking a variety of courses in the hopes that one will nudge them in the professional direction that is right for them. Others check the box next to a specific major while filling out their Common Application and hit the ground running, taking the associated curriculum and seeing this academic path through to graduation. The decision to double major, however, entails a bit more than either of the two aforementioned categories.

It requires a justification to oneself as well as to society and one’s family, a dedication to both subjects, and a vision of a future in either of the disciplines. But more importantly, it involves envisioning a future that ideally combines these disciplines.

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This is the beauty of the double major, a beauty that makes the occasional doubt from others as well as from yourself endurable. Nobody double majors for no reason—the decision to take on multiple majors is a thoughtful, well-constructed one that is more often than not in line with the true interests of a student. And for some students, two majors isn’t enough: Neil C. ‘17 is a triple major in Biology, French, and Government: “I was—and still am—extremely interested in microbiology, and felt that the Biology major was the best avenue for pursuing that. I chose the French major because my mother has a doctorate in French, and instilled a deep appreciation for the French language and culture within me. I have always been pretty interested in foreign policy, so I started the International Relations minor. Then I realized it might actually be easier to major in Government, so I am currently pursuing that as well.”

For Neil, his decision to triple major was a confluence of personal affinity, interest, and practicality as he went on to tell me about his dreams of becoming either a member of the Armed Forces or a doctor. “If I become a doctor, then the humanities classes I have taken would encourage me to treat my patients as something greater than a collection of parts that require repair. I truly believe they would make me more conscientious and empathetic as a physician. If I were sent to war in some capacity, then I would have a better sense of the moral and historical ramifications of any actions I may have to take,” he said.

The College of Arts and Sciences houses the most double majors I know at Cornell. I do not think this is a coincidence—the humanities lend themselves to double and triple majoring more than any other discipline here at Cornell, as well as in academia in general. As Neil’s experience and so many others’ may confirm, the A&S curriculum, due to its flexibility and its broad selection of humanities and STEM courses, very much fosters interdisciplinary study, or the application of certain concepts acquired in one discipline to those acquired in another.

I myself have detected traces of some of the concepts in my Psychology courses in the content of my literary studies, and vice versa. Nothing that you learn in an English class is irrelevant or unconnected to something you discuss in an art history course; nothing you learn in a mathematics course can’t be traced along the arc of history or found in the archives of scientific discovery; no language you learn to speak will

not influence your understanding of human cognition or perception.

In a similar vein, Jesse G. ‘17 illuminated for me one of the most fulfilling aspects of his double major in English and Spanish: “the courses I take for my Spanish major usually encompass literature that I want to read but is not offered in translation in the English department.” As a lover of literature and as an individual of Hispanic descent, this is very important to him. “On a personal level, to go from a kid with a debilitating speech impediment to majoring in two separate languages just feels like an accomplishment in and of itself. On a cultural level, to study the language that my Abuela spoke, and was probably discriminated against for speaking when she moved to the US, feels like a massive affirmation of our Latinidad. And on a very selfish level, I just love reading and writing, so to be able to turn that into my life and livelihood is the dream, really.”

The humanities are constantly spilling into one another, which means that regardless of which humanities discipline you study, you will most likely emerge well-educated and confident in numerous intellectual skills. As Roya S. ‘16, who is pursuing a dual degree in Urban and Regional Studies and English, says, “The skills I have developed in my two majors— among them writing; critical reading; cultural analysis; urban design; community, administrative, and city planning; and verse writing—will equip me to view the problems I encounter in my vocation creatively. This is the value of an interdisciplinary education. It teaches you how to think in an interdisciplinary way. Arguably, in no field is this more important than urban design. Due to my studies at Cornell, I will not be restricted by disciplinary thinking in designing solutions for serious and recurring urban and regional problems.”

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employers tend to value experience over candidates’ majors.

The article maintains that students pursuing a double major have less time to devote to internships as they have heavier course loads and may need to take classes over the summer in order to graduate on time.

“I had considered a double major briefly my freshman year, but had written it off as being too much work,” Jesse G. informed me in reference to his early years at Cornell. For many, a double major does connote more time spent on completing the additional set of graduation requirements. Jesse went on to say, however, in taking the courses he enjoyed, many of which were courses in the Romance Studies department, he realized he had not only enough credits to minor in Spanish, but enough to major in the language. “It didn’t make sense not to double,” he said.

For those double majors content with their academic trajectory, studying in this capacity has not detracted from the time they spend on extracurricular activities or from pursuing internships during breaks—if anything, the skills they accrue from a double major enhance both of these experiences.

Thus, the USA Today article and others like it are misguided in their conclusions about the effects of heavy coursework and potential underachievement in the double major experience. It does not have to be that way. With a reliable team of advisors, genuine interest in your fields of study, and commitment to the course load, pursuing degrees in multiple fields is more than just feasible…it is enriching and enjoyable.

There was a point in time when I thought I would have to give up one of my interests for the other in order to make the most of my professional life. But one day while I was discussing post-graduation career options with my English

The humanities are constantly spilling into one another, which means that regardless of which humanities discipline you study, you will most likely emerge well-educated and confident in numerous intellectual skills.

From a professional standpoint, you would think that since most employers appreciate and hold these skills in high regard, they would see a double major’s degrees and think their skills doubly impressive. I honestly thought that would be the case once I squared away my double major decision— way to diversify your résumé, self! However, based on some sobering Internet searches (most of which have consisted of, “is my double major worth it? Is my double major in the humanities worth it??”), I have learned that many employers are not necessarily impressed by multiple majors.

A 2011 USA Today article cites three reasons why employers may be underwhelmed by a double degree: first, employers will often consider “any major” for a position, affording them the opportunity to “cast a broader net and locate the most talented candidates for their positions.” Second, some of our single-major peers may collect skills otherwise acquired from a double major via their extracurricular activities, minors, or concentrations—in other words, rather than devoting all of their time to studying a second major, these students have diversified their time and, by extension, their portfolios. Third,

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advisor, Professor Ishion Hutchinson, he told me something I will never forget. It has become my new mantra: I don’t ever have to sacrifice one aspect of myself or my interests in order to make the others work.

The humanities have emerged, out of all the diverse and complex disciplines that comprise them, as a cohesive area of study that attracts thousands of students to its classrooms year in and year out. And if that isn’t going to change anytime soon, why should I? So for all you undergrads out there thinking of adding another major to the mix, do it because you enjoy the material. Do it, not because it is going to diversify your job application, but because it is going to diversify your personal experience, because it will enrich your discussions and give you more to think about, because it will help you see the interconnectedness between disciplines and people. I am a firm believer that in this world there can exist a single outlet of expression for all of a person’s interests. And if it does not already exist for you, nothing should stop you from creating it yourself.

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DEAR WHITE PEOPL musings on the politics of black hair

by Yana Makuwa

When I was growing up, I wanted a sheet of long black hair. I wanted it to fall down to the center of my back like a waterfall, gracefully cover my face with polite strands when the wind blew, and reflect light like a still dark lake.

Essentially, I wanted to be Pocahontas. I cannot describe to you how frustrated I was that the soft curly poof on my head would stay wherever I put it instead of swishing back and forth behind me, and that when I tied it back my ponytail looked more like a rabbit’s tail. I was convinced that my hair was the only thing holding me back from reaching my true potential as a beautiful, popular, and successful human being.

As I entered the early stages of pubescence I did everything I could to wrestle my hair out of spirals and into the straight strands that I desired (although it’s never been quite long enough). I was thrilled when I finally convinced my mother to let me chemically straighten my hair. I felt adult, powerful, and most importantly, on my way to pretty. What I didn’t realize then was that I was making a choice based on skewed and exclusionary conceptions of beauty, and that this placed me squarely in a fraught historical and political context that I would eventually have to face.

To get to the real roots of this issue would require an analytical knowledge of history that my hodge-podge of an education simply didn’t provide. First, this dialogue is situated heavily in an American context. Even if my naïve 12-year-oldself had wanted to think more carefully about the ramifications of what I was doing to my hair, I could never have anticipated the extent that it would matter because the significance is simply not the same in Harare, Zimbabwe. While the country, and consequently its beauty standards, are of course affected by a traumatic colonial history, the absence of a racial legacy of slavery and Jim Crow changes and reduces the weight placed on hair. So in looking to the past for some insight on how I ended up spending vast amounts of time and money thinking about and changing my hair, in the interest of writing what

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I know this article will focus on the particularly American and particularly female.

Keeping in mind that we are skipping over the hundreds of years of slavery that left a considerable mark on the AfricanAmerican psyche (how could a collective consciousness not be changed by being completely removed from a cultural context and placed in a world where your identity is prescribed for you and then instantly dehumanized?), we could begin tracing the identity politics of hair in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

The turn of the previous century was the moment when altering black hair became not only crucial for admittance into an economic sphere, but also became an industry in and of itself.

After slavery, there was a new burden on the black population to participate in an economy that structurally had no place for them. It was crucial for them to present an unthreatening, assimilationist image; they had to bring the house-slave aesthetic with them into freedom in order to make a living wage. In an entry titled “Black Hair Care and Culture, A History” on the website of non-profit organization The African American Registry, Ben Arogundade writes, “Many blacks argue that imitating European standards of beauty and grooming was necessary for blacks to be accepted by white culture, especially by potential white masters and employers.”

In a serendipitous turn of events, this drive to imitate white beauty not only allowed

LE WITH DREADS black people to enter the economic sphere, but also created the impetus for the first highly successful entrepreneurial venture run by an African-American woman. Madame C.J. Walker, born Sarah Walker in 1867, founded and produced an entire line of products designed to transform the experience of straightening black hair from an arduous, long-lasting, and frequently dangerous ordeal, into a pampering and, at the very least, comfortable experience. As Cornell Professor Noliwe Rooks writes in her book Hair Raising, Madame C.J. Walker’s business not only placed her prominently in a public and economic space that used to and continues to exclude women of color, but also created an industry where other women could begin making a life for themselves. She left a legacy of black women running hair salons where other black women could go to feel safe, taken care of, and nurtured.

The economic importance of hair in black communities continues to this day, with small hair companies like Carols’ Daughter being one of (if not the only) black owned hair-care companies retailed by Sephora, and hair salons being a primary business option for many women of color, and particularly immigrants. There are YouTube channels dedicated to hair, and women establishing what Rooks calls in an interview with ITYC Radio “cottage industries [of] hundreds of little Madame C.J. Walkers who have YouTube videos and websites.” Hair salons are still central to black female communities, and have provided a space for intellectuals like Rooks to examine what it means to be black in America.

On the political side of things, seven decades after Madame C.J. Walker’s game-changing innovation, the social importance of hair had only become more present in the collective African-American mindset. As the Civil Rights Movement moved forward into the 70s, one of the definitive images of the Black Power and Black is Beautiful movements was the afro. In “The Impact of the ‘Fro in the Civil Rights Movement,” Chime Edwards proclaims that “the afro is more

art by Thelonia Saunders 24

than just a hairstyle, it was an incredibly powerful symbol of the civil rights movement.” It is radical in its rejection of the idea that “‘nappy’ hair [is] unattractive and undesirable” and that “possessing nappy hair was negative and shameful.” This article identifies the extent to which wearing your hair in this

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And as I was realizing this, certain hairstyles on certain women began piquing my interest— women with long blonde hair, but worn in dreadlocks; my gut reaction was a mix of envy, proprietary anger, and disdain

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style was a marker of political affiliation—many women who had afros did so in imitation of civil rights activist Angela Davis: “a black person wearing a ‘fro was dubbed as militant and threatening.” The politicization of black hair was something you could not escape in the 70s, and as much as wearing a ‘fro was a symbol of participating in the movement, not wearing one was by default not participating.

The political nature of black hair didn’t leave us in the 70s. In the same article, Edwards later comments that the movement towards natural hair in our own time, a period of renewed interest in the need for social change around race issues in America, is parallel to the natural hair movement of the 1970s. In a similar (though perhaps less intense) way, wearing your hair natural today makes a statement that you believe that aesthetic to have as much, if not more worth than the “European standards,” and carry a subtle but implicit rejection of those standards. With her light condemning of “abrasive methods” to “alter who [she] was naturally” and hope that “it’s not just a style” for her readers, she clearly points to the unavoidable political affiliations that black women make with their hair.

This brings us back to the present, to a younger me thrust into the realization that in America (the magnified and intensified college-campus version), the way I wear my hair carries a very particular and very heavy weight. The ten cornrows my mother learned how to plait across my head are from a centuries-old African tradition that used to express kinship, status, religion—a tradition that then moved through American history, picking up traces of devaluation, critique, and eventually empowerment. My relaxed hair wasn’t just something I decided to do when I was 12, it was me participating in one of the first industries led by and for a marginalized and excluded social group.

In my new collegiate context I started to work through all of this new information. I had to come to terms with the history of women of color in America. I had to learn what new codes applied to me now that I occupied a new social space. I realized that I could no longer be blissfully ignorant of the fact 25

that even if I do my hair based on a whim, it will always carry the history of people with hair like mine.

And as I was realizing this, certain hairstyles on certain women began piquing my interest—women with long blonde hair, but worn in dreadlocks; women braiding thin cornrows into their straight dark hair, fixing them with beads. Every time I saw them, my gut reaction was a mix of envy, proprietary anger, and disdain. At first I tried to quash my negative kneejerk response to these hairstyles, telling myself that judging other women for their hair choices was participating in the practice that I fell victim to. Maybe they weren’t thoughtlessly following what they assumed was a fad, or callously assuming wearing their hair that way gave them cultural capital. Perhaps they know more about the importance of the hairstyle than I; who am I to judge a prominent scholar or devout Rastafarian based only on the color of their skin or texture of their hair?

But try as I might I couldn’t wrangle the anger into a generous benefit of the doubt.

I existed in this limbo for ages, feeling anxious about how my hair was perceived, about how it was and wasn’t what I wanted it to be, and anxious about what I thought was irrational anger. I spent my time resenting that anxiety, and searching for a way to tame my mane while in Ithaca (my daunting experience of trying to find a place to get my hair done as a freshmen in this town is a story for another time). And then I started hearing grumbles from corners of the Internet that I stumbled upon during my hair research. I read about Bo Derek, a white actress, who is famed for popularizing cornrows in 1979 when Cicely Tyson had been wearing them on screen in the early 70s. I read about how Madonna wore an afro in the 90s as one of her many “out there” looks, and how Lady Gaga did the same with dreadlocks in 2013. I read about magazines like Elle and Marie Claire touting Gwen Stefani and Katy Perry as trendsetters of styles like bantu knots and babyhairs which had been black hairstyles without fanfare for ages.

And it all came to a head with the outrage surrounding Kylie Jenner’s cornrows in July of this year.

I read about all this and I decided that I was right to be angry. Something within me was reacting to what I knew was fundamentally unfair. I realized that the reason I wanted to look like Pocahontas so badly that I was willing to sacrifice

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This language, taken directly from the US Army’s regulations on black hair which also refers to dreads and twists as “faddish” and “exaggerated,” reveals white America’s deeply rooted misunderstanding, devaluation, and exoticization of black hair. It is attitudes like these that lie beneath E! News senior reporter Giuliana Rancic’s description of Zendaya’s dreadlocks as smelling “like patchouli oil. Or weed.” Her later apology for sliding into offensive and damaging “clichés and stereotypes” does not change the fact that even amidst a time of reclamation of natural black hair’s beauty and value, it remains charged with real and tangible negative connotations.

It is ridiculous that white celebrities continue to be congratulated for adopting styles that are deemed inappropriate and low when worn by the people who conceived of them— styles that decades ago were worn in protest of the aesthetic ideals that those white celebrities embody. It is ridiculous that people should rise to the defense of any public figure who irresponsibly misuses their position in the spotlight and lacks the sensitivity to acknowledge criticism from a member of the appropriated culture.

What it boils down to is this: lying behind the style, convenience, or comfort that motivates each individual black woman’s choice about how to wear her hair is the pervasive message, overt and covert, that white hair is more beautiful than black hair. There is the need to adjust hairstyles to overcome a barrier to entry to the white economic sphere. There is the knowledge that how you wear your hair announces you, and carries a certain politic and a cultural weight to both a white and black gaze, whether you intend it to or not. And unless you are white you do not have the luxury of wearing these styles in ignorance of all this.

There is the knowledge that how you wear your hair announces you, and carries a certain politic and a cultural weight to both a white and black gaze, whether you intend it to or not.

the length and health of my hair was because she was the only princess who looked even remotely like me. Meanwhile, these women grew up with a wealth of princesses to choose from (Cinderella, Belle, Snow White, ad infinitum), and now they were casually choosing hairstyles that I had to fight against society and myself to accept.

I am angry because in addition to the media-abetted whitewashing and fetishization of this intensely personal and political aspect of my life, society still manages to punish black women for how they wear their hair. In 2013, a Florida school threatened to expel 12-year-old Vanessa VanDyke for wearing her hair natural. Describing it as a “distraction” and in violation of dress codes, the school asserted that students must conform to a white norm, regardless of the effects that may have on the health of the student’s hair or psyche. In September of the same year, a school in Tulsa, Oklahoma sent home a sevenyear-old because in their policy, “hairstyles such as dreadlocks, afros, mohawks, and other faddish styles are unacceptable.”

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Black women did and do their hair to participate in an economy that wouldn’t make room for them beyond keeping houses that weren’t their own. Black women did and do their hair to take ownership of their beauty and identity in a media context that doesn’t represent them. Black women think and talk about their hair to build a community that helps them process issues both complex and mundane.

What makes me riled, what underlies the perhaps disproportionate rage that overcomes me when I see white women with dreadlocks, is the knowledge that those people who comfortably sit on America’s narrow pedestal of privilege can blithely adopt the hairstyles of those who have always been kept off the top.

Nothing can change the fact that they get to choose whether or not their hair defines their politics and aesthetics, and I do not.

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THE MUSEUM OF

THE AMERICAN OTHER do ethnic-specific museums remedy exclusion or perpetuate it?

by Jael Goldfine

Museums, to me, have always been supremely pleasant and benign places—the marble-columned, high-ceilinged destinations of family vacations and elementary school field trips. Even as a kid, I could already sense something essentially, ontologically good about museums. This is perhaps a result of the powerful rhetorical ethos that surrounds them. Museums impulsively evoke big shiny ideas about scholarship, public good, education, community, and of course, diversity. What could be more benevolent, if not downright noble, than the discovery and dissemination of knowledge? Than the preservation of heritage and history? Than missions of education, outreach, and scholarship? The answers to these questions seemed selfevident to me for a long time as, on a level detectable even to children, museums occupy a sainted and sacred position in the public mind.

At this point, please don’t jump to the conclusion that I am attempting to expose some sort of nasty underbelly of the museum world. This rhetoric may not be unmerited, or even necessarily misleading, however, it is perhaps distracting from critical conversation. It was not until recently that I began to recognize that, like all institutions involved in the projects of telling and representation of human experiences, museums are deeply political spaces. And when museums become marked by ethnicity and culture, the more political they become.

This past summer, like an obedient Washington D.C. intern, armed with wide-eyed trust in the city’s greatest notso-natural resource and dreamy visions of myself hanging in galleries after work, I visited a great number of museums. On a visit to the National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI), 27

I first confronted the politic of the ethnic museum and thus, of the museum itself.

This confrontation was as simple as a tour guide explaining to me that the very existence of the NMAI was fraught with controversy, both public and internal. The cognitive dissonance of this possibility struck me. What could be wrong with a museum dedicated to Native Americans?

My trusty 12-plus years of 21st century public education had done its job—instilling in me an impulsive validation complex of anything having to do with diversity, or the appreciation and understanding of “other” cultures—a practice I was taught was important, without being taught why.

I didn’t then understand why I might visit a museum like the NMAI either with confidence, or with skepticism.

Ethnic-specific museums arose sometime in the 70s, out of an anti-racist activist, academic, and political response to museums’ lack of cultural diversity and sensitivity. This movement demanded remedy to the misrepresentation, if not total erasure, of non-white and non-Western experiences in the museum world. As Cliff Pereira, former chair of the Black and Asian Studies Association indicts, museums’ “imperialistic terms have not moved on into the 21st century. In fact, they haven’t moved to the post-colonial.” In this sense, ethnic museums have become a force in the decolonization of the museum.

For a long time, the art, artifacts, and history of indigenous and minority groups were apt to be found in natural history museums, displayed among fossils, dinosaur skeletons, and gemstones. Non-Western people were considered

primitive—a facet of natural rather than human history, the objects of anthropological study, as passive as rocks and skeletons, and as frozen in time as fossils. This is, of course, consistent with the racist and ethnocentric ideologies that were internalized in the disciplines of history and anthropology themselves.

This ideology limited the relevance of these groups to the American public. If they were included in (human) history museums, it was only within a narrative of their interaction with the Western world. Until the late 1970s, the National Museum of American History (NMAH) exhibited all its Native American objects within exhibits about the colonization of the Americas: representing Native Americans exclusively within a narrative of conquest, and subsequent disappearance.

And a racist interpretation was, of course, if such groups were represented at all. In many cases, mainstream museums simply neglected to collect and study objects and artifacts associated with these groups, to tell even the broadest of stories about them. When the National Museum of History and Technology opened in 1964, it scarcely mentioned AfricanAmericans, and its collections included no African-American or indigenous artifacts.

In addition, the un-shocking exclusion of cultural and ethnic minorities on museum staffs—from researchers and curators, to boards and councils, to administrative jobs— certainly played a role in the uninterrupted dominant historical narrative presented in museums.

So, ethnic and culturally specific museums seem like the perfect reparations for this exclusion and abuse. Identityspecific museums have become a powerful and prolific part of the museum world. National Museums of the American Indian

art by Daniel Toretsky

exist both in D.C. and New York, Michigan is home to the Arab American National Museum, LA has the Contemporary Jewish Museum, the Chinese American Museum, and the Japanese American National Museum, and there is the National Women’s History Museum in Virginia—to name a few of the hundreds of ethnic and identity-specific museums that have sprung up across the country over the past 40 years. The Smithsonian Museum of African-American History and Culture is set to open on the mall in 2016, and a proposed D.C. National Latino Museum is currently in hot debate.

This intuitively seems like a positive trend—consistent with all the shiny rhetoric that, in my mind, left me complacently uncritical of museums for most of my life.

But what does it mean to take the stories of people of certain cultures and ethnicities, and put them in separate buildings from the museum called the National Museum of American History? Does this kind of division ghettoize nonwhite histories in the museum world, and within history itself?

Does this place them even further outside of the American experience?

What stories will be deemed as too specific—those of Latina/o artists, black politicians, Asian-American activists, Native American leaders, Arab-American authors—for museum visitors interested in American history? Where do the paintings of Diego Rivera, scrapbooks from Japanese internment camps, naturalization certificates of Jewish immigrants from Ellis Island, the Treaty of Canandaigua, or an FBI “wanted” poster of Black Panther, Angela Davis, belong?

Surely such artifacts are imperative pieces of American history, critical for all American museumgoers wishing to learn about the nation’s history to see. And if we recognize

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the museum as a part of a project of national identity, as Fath Davis Ruffins, a curator at NMAH, suggests, could an AfricanAmerican museum actually serve to “take African-American history and culture out of American history and culture?”

This line of questioning is only one that might complicate the neat and tidy solution to the colonial museum.

Another may ask: if ethnic museums play a role in the construction and expression of ethnic identities, will these specific museums reduce fluid and complex identities to essentialized narratives? There are 562 federally recognized indigenous tribes in America. African, African-American, AfroLatino, and West Indian people living in America all have unique experiences and histories. The very word “Latina/o”

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exoticization, essentialization, or erasure.

Discussing, paying attention to, and deeming racial difference as important is not the same as segregation, and does not essentially undermine human commonality— particularly when the traditional American approach to difference has been to ignore or subjugate it.

As Lonnie Bunch, director of the National Museum of African American History and Culture, says, “Let’s take AfricanAmerican culture and use it as a lens to understand what it means to be an American, the mainstream story of America shaped by race. A museum that’s separate really allows us to illuminate America in a way we couldn’t if we had a gallery and a half in the Museum of American History.” The stories of

What stories will be deemed too specific—those of Latina/o artists, black politicians, Asian-American activists, Native American leaders, Arab-American authors—for museum visitors interested in American history?

as the chosen title for a museum brings into question whose stories it will tell. What of Americans who identify as Hispanic or Chicana/o? What of biracial Americans? Many critics are skeptical that ethnic-specific museums can fully embrace diversity within their own communities.

Essentially, the debate comes down to the question of whether or not ethnic-specific museums reproduce the very systems that they are trying to break down.

I believe they can do this, or they cannot. If their existence precluded “general” history museums from being inclusive, or enabled a loophole for museums to continue excluding and misrepresenting non-white Americans, then the reaffirmation of traditional hegemonies, which some consider likely, would indeed be the case.

However, they simply do not offer such a loophole— the same movement that produced ethnic museums also demands that American history must tell an inclusive story. And if a “general” museum fails to do this, it should be recognized as marked—and as ethnically specific as other museums—as White-American or European-American museums. For haven’t we always had ethnic-specific museums, that have simply gone unqualified due to the perpetual American confusion that “white” is not a race?

Some have said that we should simply demand that existing “mainstream” museums become equitable and inclusive rather than erecting freestanding museums to represent marginalized cultures. Proponents of this schematic have said that this solution will underscore the commonality and interconnectedness of all people.

Camille Akeju, Director of the Anacostia Community Museum, has said, “I don’t think we do ourselves justice by having a standalone identity. It will always make you vulnerable.” However, it seems that marginalized identities have historically been made most vulnerable when they are contained within white and western institutions: in the context of a museum, vulnerable to misunderstanding, tokenization, 29

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specific ethnic groups are too big to be contained in existing museum spaces, both logistically and theoretically.

Perhaps we have trouble swallowing the idea that something called a museum (quite literally, an institution) can be radical—remember those benign marble-columned, high-ceilinged field trip destinations I mentioned? However, radical identity politics gave birth to ethnic-specific museums, and they have the potential to be a part of change, more radical and visionary than adding in a few more info panels about Native or Asian or Jewish-Americans in a Museum of American History—which still largely tells a single American story, through the lens of a dominant identity. I believe these museums are crucial because they are an opportunity to pursue a depth and breadth in stories of specific groups; allowing for a level of true recognition and valorization of specificity, that would be impossible in larger museums. These museums return the agency of self-representation and selfdetermination to cultural and ethnic groups—a privilege dominant identities have always had. Most importantly, they, in conversation with each other and with the public, create a forum for conversation about the plurality of experiences in America—one that demands participation.

However, these museums need to do more than just exist. Each museum—and those who fill it with objects, art, and history—will have to answer enormous questions about, as David Schneer, a professor of Jewish studies at University of Colorado, sums up, empowerment versus commoditization, critical self-reflection versus cheerleading, insider versus outsider audiences, and plurality versus essentialism.

So, this was not the summer that I realized museums are corrupt with racist and imperialistic politics, but rather when I began to see museums as the product of human decisions and human mistakes. Go on and attend your field trips and indulge in your after-work fantasies—but do so critically, and with recognition that you are participating in the forum of the museum.

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NO SE PUEDE MIRAR

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photography of agony and the western gaze

by Kira Roybal

On September 2nd of this year, images of Alan Kurdi, the young boy whose body was found washed up on the shore of Bodrum in Turkey, began to circulate. Journalists from across the news media, as well as politicians and human rights group leaders, tweeted and retweeted the photograph, captured by Doğan News Agency’s Nilufer Demir, which shows the threeyear-old lying face down in the sand and salty foam of the beach.

Hugh Pinney, the Vice President of Getty Images, commented in TIME that “the reason we’re talking about it after it’s been published is because it breaks a social taboo that has been in place in the press for decades: a picture of a dead child is one of the golden rules of what you never published.”

That’s not to say that Alan Kurdi was the first published child casualty. In 2014 New York Times photographer Tyler Hicks published his account of the attack on Gaza along with the photographs he captured—including those of four Palestinian youths killed on the beach. Photographs of children in agony also have a relatively long history: Nick Ut’s photograph of a young Vietnamese girl running away from a napalm bombing; Kevin Carter’s of a vulture watching a starving, emaciated child in Sudan; and James Nachtwey’s of children struggling in Romanian orphanages.

What all the photographs of violence inflicted upon the human body – whether that be through war, famine, social and economic upheaval—have in common is, in the words of art critic and writer John Berger, that “as we look at them, the moment of the other’s suffering engulfs us.” In other words, such images are “arresting” (italics mine). They demand that we

pause, stop, freeze; for a period of time, we are disconnected from our own realities and overwhelmed by the immense pain and suffering of others.

What are we—the viewers—to make of such photographs? How are we to respond? The media certainly knew how. Nicholas Jimenez of Le Monde stated, “I’m convinced that until you’ve shown this photograph, you haven’t shown the reality of the crisis.” Max Fisher of Vox, on the other hand, tweeted “I don’t say this to be scoldy or self-righteous or whatever, but I’m pretty uncomfortable with people tweeting photos of dead migrant kids.” Peter Bouckaert of Human Rights Watch noted, “I think for a lot of the public, their first reaction is: ‘This could have been my child.’” But could it really have been? Parents in Western nations may imagine the horror of such agony inflicted upon their own children, but they can rest assured knowing that this will most likely never happen.

The discontinuity between the viewer and the subject of the photograph is not erased by sympathy, pity, or sadness.

Going back to the question I posed in the previous paragraph: what are we supposed to make of such photographs?

Are they meant to be instructive? (“Look at what’s going on with the rest of the world!”) Are they meant to be moralizing? (“This is the photograph that’s going to end the war!”) Are they meant to call us into action, or leave us paralyzed, knowing that change is often a slow and bitter process so why even bother doing anything? How are we to help those living thousands of miles away from us, unaware of our gazing at their suffering?

There is a story of Socrates’ in Plato’s Republic that tells of a young man’s inner struggle between disgust and 30

art by Jin Yoo

fascination at the sight of battered human bodies: Leontius, the son of Aglaion, was going up from the Piraeus along the outside of the North Wall when he saw some corpses lying at the executioner’s feet. He had an appetite to look at them but at the same time he was disgusted and turned away. For a time he struggled with himself and covered his face, but, finally overpowered by the appetite, he pushed his eyes wide open and rushed towards the corpses, saying, “Look for yourselves, you evil wretches, take your fill of the beautiful sight[!]”

Certainly there’s something that provokes—invites— us to look, some sense of mystery or discovery of a scene never before seen. The first time I had heard of Ernst Friedrich’s Kreig dem Kreige! (War Against War!), while reading Susan Sontag’s Regarding the Pain of Others, I knew that I had to see at least a few of the photographs from the book for myself. This is an album of photographs compiled from German military and medical archives that depicts the visual story of the First World War, or as Sontag puts it, “an excruciating photo-tour of four years of ruin, slaughter, and degradation.” I believe I could only glance at about five photographs, and I only looked at one from the “Face of War” section, which shows close-ups of soldiers’ facial wounds. I know not what instrument of war, what poison could have caused skin and tissue to form like that on a wounded 31

young man’s face. I stopped my little investigation after that.

There is something voyeuristic and invasive about passively viewing photographs of this type. In her essay “In Plato’s Cave,” Sontag claims that “to photograph people is to violate them, by seeing them as they never see themselves, by having knowledge of them they can never have,” which implies that taking a photograph transfers power to the photographer. The subject overwhelmed by war, illness, or economic oppression, opens up, either reluctantly or eagerly, to the power of the camera, as if to say, “This is my story, and if someone doesn’t tell it then no one will ever hear it.” As viewers, in order to prevent baseless voyeurism, we must have a heightened sensitivity to the context surrounding the photographer’s decision to capture the subject and the realities of the circumstance thrown upon them, and a will to help ease the suffering—or at least a will to break the boundaries that prevent us from easing the suffering.

Francisco Goya, the nineteenth century Spanish artist most popularly known for his painting The Third of May, created a series of etchings called The Disasters of War, which documented the atrocities committed by both the French and the Spanish during and after the Napoleonic Wars. The inscriptions he adds to each etching is what truly makes the collection eye-opening, anti-heroic, and modern; this series

could be considered a precursor to war photography. One etching states “Yo lo vi” (“I saw this”); another “No se puede mirar” (“One cannot look”); another “Esto es malo” (“This is bad”); and another “Esto es lo peor!” (“That is the worst of it!”).

Images, by their very nature and use in society, invite us to look.

However, Goya’s etchings and their respective inscriptions lead the viewer to question their voyeurism—to feel a sense of guilt in looking at severed limbs, murder, rape, and torture. This series, like the wide and varied collection of photographs of bodies in agony, is not simply documentation; these images resonate too closely with the moral standards of many people to not be considered a pity, a tragedy, an event to be remembered, or the catalyst for a course of action. To this, Sontag states, “Let the atrocious images haunt us…The images say: This is what human beings are capable of doing—may volunteer to do, enthusiastically, self-righteously. Don’t forget.”

In December of 1971, Bangladesh won its war of independence from Pakistan, and thus began the punishment of Bengalis suspected of collaborating with Pakistani militiamen.

On December 18, Mukti Bahiti (the Liberation Army) bayoneted and publicly executed four men accused of murder, rape, and looting. Horst Faas and Michael Laurent of the Associated Press were among the few photojournalists to document the event; they compiled their photographs of the “Death in Dacca”

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Earlier this semester, I attended the Caochangdi Work Station Performance at the Schwartz Center, which centered around interview footage of the elderly survivors of China’s Great Famine. Very few times had I cried so much in my life.

People ate tree bark; mothers were forced to let their children starve to death; millions died in their homes. And I could do nothing about it—this all happened in the past. I experienced a great sense of discontinuity in my life afterwards; I couldn’t completely return to my role as a university student whose worries were grades, social activities, and the Bursar Office—not death by starvation. Perhaps I was simply meant to remember the event, to keep it from evaporating into the back corners of history. Why did I even feel that I needed to do anything?

It’s quite difficult to let “victims” die without recognition, without some sort of honor for the time they spent living on Earth. I could not change the past, but at the very least I could understand the survivors’ struggles.

The power that is taken from the subjects—the one that evades the viewers—is often passed onto our world leaders. Upon seeing the photographs of the execution in Dacca, Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi ordered the Indian soldiers aiding the Bengal liberation to prevent such events from occurring again. Once the photograph of Alan Kurdi surfaced, German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s tone about the

To us, the viewers living in wealthy and powerful countries, such images do not instill fear or a sense of awe within us—as they may have within our ancestors living in ancient towns and villages. Rather, we are overcome with pity and the desire to find a remedy; we as benevolent outsides want to “fix” the place and the people overrun by violence. (now Dhaka) and won the World Press Photo award and the Pulitzer Prize.

Many photojournalists believed the execution would not have occurred if photographers were not present. Magnum Photos’ Marc Riboud and United Press International’s Peter Skingley, for instance, refused to attend. Others, like Faas and Laurent, believed it necessary to stay and capture the story.

Does the camera, perhaps ironically, encourage violence and suffering? Does it provoke the winner to show off his triumph, knowing that it will make headlines?

To us, the viewers living in wealthy and powerful countries, such images do not instill fear or a sense of awe within us—as they may have within our ancestors living in ancient towns and villages. Rather, we are overcome with pity and the desire to find a remedy; we as benevolent outsiders want to “fix” the place and the people overrun by violence.

Perhaps to photograph someone is not only to violate them, but also to take power and autonomy away from them. The subject becomes a victim in need of rescue, the photographer becomes messenger, and the viewers become…well, we just remain as viewers and attempt to make sense of where we, as individuals, fit into the Dhaka executions or the current refugee crisis.

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refugee situation changed from “We can’t economically sustain this influx of people” to “Refugees are welcome here!”

As for the ordinary, not-politically-powerful person viewing a photograph of agony, John Berger notes: Confrontation with a photographed moment of agony can mask a far more extensive and urgent confrontation.

Usually the wars which we are shown are being fought directly or indirectly in “our” name. What we are shown horrifies us. The next step should be for us to confront our own lack of political freedom. In the political systems as they exist we have no legal opportunity of effectively influencing the conduct of wars waged in our name.

In our age of great and widespread violence, we must ask what our government—the government that represents us—is doing to ease the suffering and stop the violence. If we are not satisfied, then why should we allow our government to keep functioning in the same manner that it currently is?

Photojournalists and their subjects are asking us to look and to be aware and to do something, so let’s do just that—something, in our own names, that neither Merkel nor Obama nor any other leader would be capable of achieving.

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EXIT LAWRENCE

LESSIG

a lost battle in the war of campaign finance reform

by Nathaniel Coderre

art courtesy of Politico Magazine

I’d been having debates with friends about why Colbert wasn’t the same on The Late Show for two months until the reason crystalized perfectly for me with one segment on November 5th. It was an installment of his “Hungry for Power Games” segment, which he uses every time someone drops out of the 2016 Presidential race. What was really frustrating to watch (although perhaps not shocking), was that the segment was completely devoid of his informative, satirical wit, and instead consisted of lame barbs about how few people had heard of Lawrence Lessig. His attempted demolition really struck me because I had taken a great interest in this candidate.

To some degree, Colbert’s jokes about how he’d never heard of Lessig make sense, because he is a Harvard Law Professor with little political experience and no name recognition. But the segment seems disingenuous when you learn that he actually interviewed Lessig on his old program in 2009. They were mostly talking about copyright law then, but they eventually drifted towards talking about how ineffectual Congress was.

Colbert’s character ends the discussion by saying “The system is working for me, so welcome to the mouth of madness”.

Colbert’s efforts once were directed towards revealing the depths of this madness, but since coming to The Late Show, his comedic gaze doesn’t reach quite so far. When Colbert didn’t tear into Donald Trump on September 23rd, it set a new precedent of compromises on his new show. But it was

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incredibly disappointing when he discarded Lessig. Lawrence Lessig may never have emerged as a viable Democratic nominee, but he was a voice speaking out against systemic misuse of power.

Who is Lawrence Lessig? And why am I making such a huge deal about him? For a long time, Lessig has parlayed his role as a Harvard Law professor into political activism, all of which led up to his late run for the Democratic nomination this summer. He didn’t have as much of a public profile as many of the other candidates, but he did receive an initial burst of media coverage for his unique campaign. He styled himself as a referendum candidate, someone who wanted to be elected to deal with a single issue, campaign finance reform, and then voluntarily resign. He was an unforeseen commodity spouting ideas that would never come from a known, reliable candidate.

The ambitious plan frightened the Democratic Party so much that his campaign was doomed from the start. I don’t think they ever knew what to do about a candidate who said he would willingly give up his office. This kind of chaos is actually what originally attracted me to Lessig. Could you imagine what would happen if he won the nomination? Who would he select to be his Vice President (and inevitably succeed him in the presidency)? Would he have been unelectable in the general election? Could he have tapped into some sort of populist groundswell of support no one expected? Being more realistic, what would have happened if he had gotten into one of the debates? I imagine that he would have shifted a lot more of the national attention towards campaign finance, but we’ll never know.

Advocates for campaign finance reform worry that the influence corporations have in political campaigns is turning our country into a plutocracy. They would argue that our national politicians speak for the wealthy instead of their constituency. The 2010 Citizens United decision underscored the corruptive influence of money in politics for Lessig (and many others), exponentially increasing the calls for new reform. This Supreme Court decision removed the ban that prevented corporations from giving unlimited money to support or oppose individual candidates. While this (and a subsequent decision called SpeechNow.Org vs. FEC) doesn’t allow for direct contributions to political campaigns, it does allow the creation of super PACs (political action committees), which are groups that can spend unlimited money supporting or attacking campaigns. There is a nominal restriction that says that super PACs and politicians cannot coordinate, but candidates have already blatantly circumvented that rule.

Actually, it was Colbert himself who first brought these loopholes to the public’s attention. He showed that super PACs could hire candidate’s lawyers, consult with former members of their staff, or simply watch their candidates say their strategy on TV. This influx of money is undoubtedly detrimental to our political system. Well-supported studies estimate that most members of Congress spend 25 to 50 percent of their time in office fundraising for themselves or their party. The money that candidates solicit gives the wealthiest a platform to control candidates’ public policy that almost no other Americans have.

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Lawrence Lessig is the rare presidential candidate whose final words are not merely attempts to save face.

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For example, “In one [email] exchange, McDonnell [a former Governor of Virginia] e-mailed Williams [a donor with interests in tobacco] to ask about a fifty-thousand-dollar loan and, six minutes later, e-mailed an aide to check on scientific studies that Williams wanted conducted on his product at public universities.” Given that the strength of the tobacco industry rests (at least somewhat) on studies concerning the product’s health risks, this is an example of a politician potentially using the influence he has in his role as an elected official to disproportionately benefit one of his patrons. The Citizens United decision flooded the election season with money, fundamentally altering campaign strategies for both parties.

The election cycle after it (2012) raised more than $2 billion more than the season that preceded it (2008). The super PACs alone spent $1 billion, 73 percent of which came from 100 people.

As a modern political party whose sole objective is to find and nominate the most electable candidate, the Democratic Party has a vested interest in protecting Hillary Clinton, the person with the most realistic path to the White House, as well as the image of the party as a whole. The emergence of a radical, unconventional candidate who speaks out against their electoral system is a nuisance to it. Lessig (and many others) provide a very credible case that the Democratic Party intentionally and knowingly worked to prevent him from getting into the debates. As a latecomer (his campaign only began in September) without name recognition, he desperately needed to get into the October 13th debate for his campaign to have a chance. He hit every benchmark that the party set up. He raised more money than half of the other candidates did, and he hit one percent in three polls, more than half of the other candidates. Jim Webb and Lincoln Chafee were both given podiums at the first debate, despite polling closer to .7 percent in many polls. Chafee actually needed the prodding of Conan O’Brien’s joking pleas to his fan base to hit one percent and both candidates were laughed out of the election after the first debate. Several major polls didn’t even include his name

on the ballot, despite including Joe Biden, someone who had repeatedly denied having an interest in running. Of course, one percent almost seems like too low of a bar for candidates to hit to reach the debates, but there was no harm in trying to keep a larger pool of candidates for early debates.

After he failed to get into the first debate, his campaign limped on through the end of October, Lessig ended his campaign on November 2nd after it became obvious that he wasn’t going to be admitted to the second one either. The real shame in his exclusion, beyond squashing his fledgling campaign, is that he had a real opportunity to shift the discourse of the discussion. Both Sanders and Clinton have expressed interest in campaign reforms, but neither have underscored it as their fundamental issue. In Lessig’s view, solving the other issues they discuss is not possible until we make radical changes to our electoral system. Just as Sanders’ relative rise has forced Clinton to back more left-wing policies, Lessig would have forced them both to address campaign finance reform more comprehensively. Of course, the very issue he is fighting against made it impossible for him to be elected. A genuinely outside candidate would have to defeat an avalanche of money to win, an almost impossible task.

It would certainly be appropriate to draw a dire conclusion—the ambitious outsider soundly defeated by the political establishment—but Lawrence Lessig is the rare presidential candidate whose final words are not merely attempts to save face. Lessig intends to remain an activist against political corruption, working with groups like Wolf PAC to organize communities. Wolf PAC’s goal is to pass an amendment that ends corporate personhood, provides publicly funded campaigns, and restricts large monetary donations— all measures that attempt to decrease the influence of money in politics. Interestingly enough, they don’t necessarily need a political champion to galvanize a corrupt Congress.

Amendments can also be passed through a constitutional convention, something that hasn’t been done since the first one in 1787. While it’s certainly possible, they would need 34 states (two-thirds) to submit an application, and they only have four so far. Sounds far-fetched? Of course it is. But six more states have passed it in one house, and people are actively working all around the country to increase public support.

Interestingly, many political pundits have drawn comparisons between Lessig and the big story on the Republican side, Donald Trump. They argue that both candidates are trying to tap into the same emotions on opposite ends of the political spectrum: dissatisfaction with the promises and the clichés of “Washington insiders.” Supporters for both of them imagine a populist hero changing the political landscape. Even Lessig himself has expressed some solidarity with Trump (hear him out!). “He did an enormous service to the debate by opening the issue up on the Republican debate stage by calling out the other candidates as not independent of their funders,” he says. Of course, Trump’s bravado comes from being a selfobsessed billionaire, but he nevertheless repeatedly accuses his opponents of being beholden to special interests. Trump’s line of criticism will obviously prove as fruitless as Lessig’s, but it further illustrates an important point. There is a mounting disgust for the corruption in our political system, and political activists like Lawrence Lessig will continue to fight until we see radical campaign reform.

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THE NEW NEST OF

CAMPAIGN DONATIONS twitter forces its way into the political funding game

by Sarah Chekfa

This past September, Twitter took a decisive step towards politicizing its platform, introducing a function that allows users to directly donate money to candidates’ political campaigns with a solitary tweet. Before I begin criticizing Twitter for its subliminal destruction of the rationalistic foundations of our political donation system, surely you’re wondering—how does this new-fangled technological Twitterian trippiness operate?

Well, it’s pretty simple, as far as politics go. A campaign signs up for a Square Cash account and is assigned a distinct “cashtag,” which can then be shared on Twitter. A donate button will appear on the campaign’s Twitter account and, through that, users will be able to donate with a debit card, preserving their information forever in the digital cosmos to allow for future simple (near-mindless!) one-click donations.

Cringingly capitalistic connotations of the phrase “cashtag” aside, at first glance, this modernization seems like an acutely obvious move for a platform like Twitter. Twitter has succeeded Facebook as ruler of the realm of existential status updates, providing us with notifications ranging from irrelevant blurbs about that avocado turkey panini your ex had for lunch, to headstrong pronouncements of resounding political statements that you don’t necessarily agree with. So this update comes to us as nearly endearing, an almost cute way to meld two seemingly opposite spheres of operation— technology and politics—into one unified product of Teamwork.

It’s beautifully intended to further democratize our already very democratic political system by “making it easier for Twitter users to actively support candidates and causes.”

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While its intention was clearly well-meaning, this move by Twitter has been subjected to the inevitable law of unintended consequences. Twitter likely never meant to spark a conversation about the arguably deteriorating nature of our political support when it released this revamp, but it has. And we must take this opportunity for what it has become: a wakeup call on the nature of our political personas.

This summer, Calvin Harris asked us all how deep our love was. Perhaps we can revise his noteworthy query for the fall season: how strong is our support? Let’s be dangerously real here—it is unbelievably easy to open up a new tab, head to a candidate’s website, and donate to them directly from there.

Yes, it might not necessarily be as convenient as sending a tweet, and it might take away five more precious minutes of your time on Earth, but it’s worth it. Right? Because this is a candidate you care about, genuinely—someone you desperately want to see emerge victorious in the Game of Thrones-esque battle that is the American political campaign. Surely you could spare them these five minutes, in addition to your monetary support.

The internet has already made the act of political donation accessible to the civic newbie: we can donate with the literal click of a button. In this sense, the added step of accessing the candidate’s website directly is like a test of loyalty, signaling a determined commitment to the cause. It could even be perceived as an obstacle between us and unwise political spending. In seemingly direct opposition to this idea, a Twitter representative actually went so far as to say that this modernization is the perfect tool “to allow people who are feeling passionate at [an] exact moment in time to donate

right then and there.” Implicit in this statement is the idea that it’s okay—no, that it’s preferable even—to make financial decisions when we are at our most excited, most angry, most emotional.

I’m not suggesting that we should let platitudes guide our journey through life, but isn’t it a common truth that we shouldn’t act on our impulses when we’re feeling most passionate? This kind of visceral reaction is what demagogues like Donald Trump (let’s save him for another time) aim to incite—this is what they manipulate in their despotic clambering for political leadership. Rational thought sets emotion aside from fact, and allows us to deal with the situation in a steady, clearheaded manner. Political donation should begin and end in evidence-based, near-scientific, meditated thought processes—and the dangerous ease of donation through Twitter is a threat to logic-based political support. The flames of sensation have no place in the political

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realm, no matter how desperately certain political figures might try to push you into their embers.

So slowly retreat from the embers—no, flee from them! Yes, I admit: these heuristic flames can be tantalizing in their fervent, gilded incomplexity—it would be so easy to just fall in, submit to their eager simplicity—but I challenge you to defy that Freudian death drive. Freud won’t be disappointed.

He’s dead. But another death is at stake here—that of the sincerity of your political support. Will you let it perish? Or will you transcend this possibility, and reclaim your rightful political integrity?

Perhaps it’s better we assume the temperament of a reasoned owl when considering political donation, instead of that of a sing-songy, naïve, lightheaded Twitter bird.

Implicit in this statement is the idea that it’s okay—no, that it’s preferable even—to make financial decisions when we are at our most excited, most angry, most emotional.

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FRENCH GIRL SYNDROME the subconscious imperialism of the american wannabe

by Yana Lysenko

art by Riley Henderson In France, to be a French girl is to have been born in France. In America, to be a French girl is to fit the American framework of how a French girl should look: obviously skinny, cigarette in mouth, wearing sunglasses, and running her hands through her beautiful messy hair. She doesn’t wear makeup because her skin is already flawless, she never blow-dries, and her jeans are 3 years old but still look new because they’re high-quality and cost half her month’s rent. The French girl should also, perhaps, speak French.

Young Americans—specifically girls—are obsessed with the idea of looking and acting French. It’s an aspiration that stems from the 1960s, when Jean-Luc Godard and other new French directors entered the world’s cinematic scene with their DIY-produced, angst-ridden New Wave films. Drawing on

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Put these pictures next to each other, and they all feature the same thing: a blue and white striped marinière t-shirt, a trench coat, and ballet flats. Anything else featured will inevitably include basic garments in varying shades of black, gray, and white. And stripes—Americans think the French love stripes.

All of these ideas point to a perception of style that, according to tourists and Francophiles, comprise the entire wardrobe of a homogenous Gallic French society. Of course, the French know that is not the case. Sit on the Parisian métro and you will see as much diversity in clothing, body types, and skin colors as you would in the New York subway. Even for the non-French observer who has been exposed to French culture beyond the “French Style” headlines of Vogue, and has seen more of France than the Eiffel Tower quickly realizes how unrealistic it is to

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Anything else featured will inevitably include basic garments in varying shades of black, gray, and white.

And stripes—Americans think the French love stripes.

American film noir, but with younger actors, a fondness for pop, and a stereotypically French preoccupation with sex, the New Wave solidified an image of French-ness that has lasted to the present day. To be French in American culture is to look and act cool—in the whitest way possible. The qualities that Americans deem fundamental to French culture are so generalized and flawed that they create France and its people as the society it was perhaps 50 years ago: a whitewashed bourgeois culture that has since disappeared, but still exists in the mind of the idealistic Anglo-Saxon Francophile.

The most obvious example of this idealistic generalization is Pinterest, where the idea of “stereotype” is conceptualized into pictures titled “French Girl Style,” “What to Wear in Paris: A 7-Day Outfit Guide,” and “Dressing Parisian Chic.”

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aspire to be French when there is no such thing as the typical French man or French woman.

Generalization is the offspring of ignorance. In this case, it’s not a complete lack of knowledge, but a selective one.

American references to French culture and style immediately point to one of the best-known French films across Western culture, Godard’s Breathless. The likely reason for the obsession with this 1960 film is the fact that Jean Seberg, the main female character, is an American in Paris who never drops her American accent, but lives the American girl’s dream: she finds herself multiple Parisian lovers and perfects the gamine French-American style we have now deemed classically French.

The film is a conglomerate of black-and-white shots of Paris in all of its glory, along with the typical French shots of smoking

cigarettes and drinking coffee in cafes. The characters are all white, and Jean Seberg is of course wearing stripes, sunglasses, and a cute feminine skirt under her trench coat. This image has engrained itself not into the French cultural identity, but into American perceptions of the culture it worships and aspires to become.

The France we imagine is something from decades ago—a time of political turmoil as France struggled with its ruptured imperialism and attempted to maintain its stronghold on the indigenous peoples of Africa and Southeast Asia. Many young French men and women accept that New Wave cinema and all of its various elements are essential to the cultural and political history of French art, but that it no longer represents an accurate picture of French society or the struggles they face today. And yet, when we look at American online articles on the youth culture of France and how to become more French, they still boast the beauties of French culture. Beyond that, they exalt a white fashion that ignores the millions of immigrants across all of France, many of whom face alienation and discrimination. These immigrants are in a constant battle to prove their own unique Frenchness in a society that quietly segregates between “true French” and “new French.”

Obviously, commercial fashion is still a largely white enterprise, but when it is supported by cultural assumptions of a homogenously white society, we start to address a subconscious racist nostalgia for the time when Europe was all white. A public American image of France through novels like French Women Don’t Get Fat and How to be Parisian Wherever You Are—both written by French authors in English for an American audience—assumes that all French women simply have the time and resources to spend all their days in cafés, their nights sleeping with multiple lovers, and their money on Saint Laurent, Guerlain, and foie gras. In America, we look at books that feature generalized American bourgeois values with disdain and skepticism, because they ignore the social stratification we work so hard to overcome. An Amazon review typical of our attitude complains that “It’s just another white rich woman telling people how to live as extravagantly and tastefully as she does,” in response to a book’s expression of American bourgeois culture. Yet when it comes to other cultures that represent a sexy rich white dream, we just assume it’s all true. A society stuck on the days when whites ruled the world wants to believe such places still exist. No wonder Paris is the number one tourist spot in the world.

It’s all clickbait, of course. Pointing out the inadequacies of our own culture and fashion in a society constantly struggling with insecurity prompts the aspiration to become a part of a

different society—in this case, one we deem cooler and more chic. French fashion blogger and photographer Garance Doré, quoted in an article with The Guardian, explained that our perceptions of the French are entirely mythologized, created out of a desire for a cooler culture and society around us. The article, written by American fashion blogger Jess Cartner-

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In a way, a society stuck on when whites ruled the word wants to believe such places still exist. No wonder Paris is the number one tourist spot in the world

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Morley, states, “Actual real-life French people are completely bemused by the concept of High French-ness as portrayed in listicles entitled, ‘28 Shoes French Women Would Never Wear.’

To be fair to the French, they don’t write these; we do.” We have created a fictionalized society of basic clothing staples and a café culture that ignores the brewing turmoil of this society that equals our own.

It becomes increasingly clear that Paris and France are not simply the land of croissants, coffee, and Christian Dior, but one of forceful homogenization and shushed oppression.

To go to Paris expecting a to find a perfect white rich haven and to dress like a Parisian is wishful thinking that isn’t introspective enough to realize the harmful ignorance that comes with it. The real France is a country of culture, fashion, beauty, and marginalized ethnic groups trying to earn the title of “French” in a much deeper way than our facile attempts. To truly understand the society we deem better than our own, we can’t simplify it to statements like the “high-watermark of chic.”

But are we really trying to understand it anyway?

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PLAYING THE ROOKIE tavi gevinson and new creativity

by Maura Thomas

Tavi Gevinson, 19-year-old artist, actor, and writer, has alternately described herself as an elf and a feminist. In both respects, she’s perfectly serious: it’s possibly her combination of intelligence and self-awareness that has gotten her so far, so fast. Tavi started a blog, Style Rookie, at age 11, and her popular website for teenage girls, Rookie, at 14. She later spoke at TEDxTeen, lectured at the Sydney Opera House, and most recently starred in a Broadway run of This is Our Youth.

But wait: she’s also guest-edited an issue of Poetry Magazine, written articles for Elle, interviewed the likes of Lorde and Adrian Tomine, and been on the covers of New York and Nylon.

What’s more impressive than this list of accomplishments is the fact that thousands of girls like me watch her interviews, anticipate her monthly editor’s letters on rookiemag.com, and scroll longingly through her Instagram feed. In short, we pay very close attention to what she’s doing.

She started Rookie through an impulse to treat teenage girls as a multifaceted, thoughtful group “still figuring it out,” feeling under no obligation to accept the kind of top-down, deductive, or restrictive representations of girls in magazines like Seventeen. She began to write in her bedroom in Oak Park, Illinois. Her solution was to launch a website that is horizontal—overwhelmingly, the contributors are young and female, too—informal, and invitingly visual. It’s written, y’know, like THIS. A recent post explains “How to Talk About Yourself (Without Feeling Gross).” The digital pages look like, and in fact often are, glittery or decorative journal or diary entries. The categories range from “Fiction” to “Eye Candy” to “Sex + Love.”

The content is emphatic and easy to read, which often betrays its weight and complexity.

I’m stating the obvious, but I want to give a sense of Tavi’s character, or what I’ve constructed of her character through what she writes and how she presents herself. She’s what the avant-garde artist Kenneth Goldsmith might call an “uncreative writer” or artist, frequently citing other artists’ work in her own. She doesn’t appropriate anything directly,

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but she references influences constantly, citing the validation and direction they provide her life. For example, she ends one of her talks by telling the crowd to “be Stevie Nicks.” She has talked at length about how movies and shows including Ghost World, The Virgin Suicides, and Freaks and Greeks have informed her sense of the way she would like to live. In “Tavi’s Big Big World,” she confesses, “Part of what worries me is the fact that all of my references are traceable: everything I do or say could be tracked down or exposed as being heavily influenced by a book I’ve written about before. I’ll never seem like Bjork… who came out of nowhere with impeccable taste, and a neverending set of skills, and incredible artistic ability, and no one to credit for any of it.”

Instead of cursing her supposed “Lack of Originality,” or its equally discouraging cousin, “It’s All Been Done Before,” she’s skilled at mapping influences and resources into an evergrowing web of self-definition. The Internet has provided her with the platform for her career—first with her fashion blog, which featured a clever 13-year-old in avant-garde outfits, and then later with Rookie. She’s become a master parser and analyst of pop culture, music, fashion, movies, and art, which has garnered her the friendships of Taylor Swift, Hilton Als, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, and other people of whom you’d be equally jealous.

We were talking about what it means to be creative in my poetry class, with little success. Tavi is so successful as a creative because she’s a filter—Rookie has formed a kind of constellation on the Internet where people congregate to discover and share new influences, celebratory of both the alternative and the mainstream. Maybe the new creative is the person who can take an enormity of information and make it accessible. In much of her work this is a main focus, not just a technique peripheral to the “original artwork” of other artists.

It’s one of the reasons she’s so popular—she’s affirming that as a young woman, you don’t have to be a solitary genius to be creative or successful.

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The digital pages look like, and in fact often are, glittery or decorative journal or diary entries.

It’s this notion of an “uncreative genius,” of a person who makes meaning out of the meaning of others, that is rightly gaining currency in the digital age. In “The Creative Apocalypse that Wasn’t,” The New York Times confirmed that “writers, performers, directors, and even musicians report their economic fortunes to be similar to those of their counterparts 15 years ago, and in many cases they have improved.” The cost of producing culture has also dropped. The pond is basically infinite, but there are far more niche outlets through which you can be paid for making or offering content, if you’re well aware of the relentlessly evolving landscape.

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My sister and I go back and forth on the merits of Instagram as a creative platform—for what reason (and usually, for whom) do we share things really? On social media, you’re both an editor and a consumer. So I’m following Tavi (@ tavitulle), for example, and she’s posting pictures of books she’s reading (Speedboat by Renata Adler and Babe by photographer and friend Petra Collins), of outfits she’s wearing (pom-pom earrings, Rachel Antonoff dresses, gold skirts), and of various Rookie readers and friends. In a recent post, she’s pictured addressing an audience onstage in a long white shift dress, with the caption “Brainwashing the youth into keeping diaries and talking about their feelings.” Essentially, an Instagram account is a visual attempt to brainwash others into understanding or sharing your point of view. It’s about trying to take what’s “original” about your life and market it in a way that is both intimate and collectively enviable.

That Tavi knows exactly how to balance her presence as a professional and a 19-year-old means she feels like both a leader and a peer. This is one of the great features of social media in general: whether you’re Taylor Swift, Tavi Gevinson or anyone else, everyone works under more or less the same creative restrictions within a given platform. From this mass of essentially “uncreative” output comes inventories of personal choice, influence, and transition: exactly the stuff of Tavi’s appeal and success.

When Jonathan Safran Foer visited Cornell in September, he talked about the project of writing novels as the process of simply figuring out your preferences—he said, “We really don’t know what we like.” If we’re active on social media, it’s usually because we’re trying to achieve and broadcast some sense of a stable self. Tavi started a publication that is steadily ingraining in a new generation of young women a sense of agency to figure themselves out in the midst of transition, while affirming that pursuit as a creative project. For that, I am grateful a certain woman came out of nowhere with impeccable taste. art by Maura Thomas

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SHARPAY WEARS

SHORT SKIRTS;

GABRIELLA WEARS

T- S H I RT S

the false dichotomy of disney’s female characters

by Simi Best

The first time we see High School Musical’s Sharpay Evans, she’s dressed head to toe in pink, strutting through the halls of East High, texting on her pink flip phone as the crowd parts around her. Even before Zeke calls her the “ice princess” and proceeds to high five his laughing bros, we already know all we need to about Sharpay: she’s The Bitch. Aspiring star Sharpay loves shopping with Daddy’s credit card, wearing short skirts, cozying up to Troy Bolton, and trying to manipulate anyone and everyone who might stand in her way—like, for instance, Gabriella. Gabriella is different. She has brown hair and she reads books…for fun.

And so we have our opposites. In what is familiar territory for the Disney Channel, we’re tipped off to the fact that we’re supposed to identify with Gabriella not just because she’s the sympathetic antithesis to Sharpay’s “ice princess,” but also because she’s modest and quietly intellectual. We’re conditioned to hate one and identify with another very specific type of girl, and by creating this opposition Disney pits us against girls with certain characteristics and encourages the same bias we see on TV in our own lives.

Character pairs are all over Disney Channel. Camp Rock’s Tess Tyler (resident Camp Bitch) bears a striking resemblance to Sharpay—blonde, rich, fashion-obsessed, boy-obsessed, and in possession of a temper and a drive to make it to the top.

But Mitchie is different. She comes from a modest family: her dad owns a hardware store and her mom is a cook. She’s got brown hair to match the earth tones of her casual outfits and a shy, unpretentious personality despite her beautiful voice. Of course, Tess is the sequined villainess pitted against our down41

to-earth heroine. Take, too, Lizzie McGuire’s ex-best friend and later enemy, cheerleading captain and evil queen bee Kate Sanders—Kate came back from summer camp one year with a bra and consequently, a new attitude. In addition to displaying her unfortunate personality, our antagonist tends to check her hair in the mirror and refuses to eat carbs. And of course, it follows that we hate her.

According to Disney Channel, cool girls are allowed to be beautiful, smart, and talented, but they can’t be boy-crazy, wear pink, shop at the mall, care about dieting, or, apparently, require a bra. Why does Disney Channel consistently use stereotypes of popular-girl femininity as shorthand for “bad”? This isn’t just lazy TV and film writing—it is part of impressionable childhoods. Content like this makes kids think that “girly” interests are an invitation for mockery. We grow up knowing that we’re meant to identify with modest, casual Gabriella and not sparkly, over-the-top Sharpay, because Gabriella is good and Sharpay is evil. To anyone watching those characters, girly is equated with mean.

The concept of “girly” as shorthand for “mean” is more lazy than vindictive. Maybe the intent is to give credit to the girls who don’t fit the stereotypical teenage popularity norm, so that while caring about appearances is equated with vanity, girls who don’t feel like they fit the beautiful, popular girl image (read: pretty much all girls) can feel proud of their own diffidence. Instead of encouraging self-esteem, all Disney Channel does with these stock characters is reinforce the notion that we should be proud of our assumed superiority over Sharpay’s vilified characteristics. It feels good to feel superior

to the cool girl, and Disney feeds that. No one identifies with the villain—we’re all underdogs in real life, we all want to identify with the protagonist, and therefore, that protagonist can’t be the untouchable cool girl.

It’s true that, of the two, Gabriella is the High School Musical character to which we should aspire. She’s genuinely presented as a generally cool gal, while Sharpay is still a probable sociopath. Even if Disney Channel isn’t aiming to blame Sharpay’s horrible personality on her pink feather boas, it’s still enforcing that pink boa as a symbol, implying that because she’s attractive, rich, and well dressed, she’s probably also vapid, narcissistic, and cruel. If all of our role models look and act like Gabriella, that’s not great encouragement from Disney Channel to tell girls that you can look and act as “girly” as Sharpay but still be, you know, not sociopaths.

What’s even more troubling is that not just the audience is meant to swoon over the nerdy girl and reject the prom queen; because the nerdy girl is so different, she’s always the one to get The Boy. Sometimes the nerdy-but-secretly-cool girl is the protagonist, but other times she and her evil foil character exist only to teach The Boy a lesson about nice girls—the lesson being, according to Disney Channel, that they can be found hiding behind brown hair and glasses but never in the body of a cheerleader, prom queen, or aspiring celebrity. Gwen, the most popular and beautiful girl at Sky High, literally turns out to be a supervillain, the reveal of which finally pushes Will to realize that he should maybe just be into girl-next-door Layla instead. Even Max Keeble learns that pretty, blonde Jenna isn’t worth his time, seeing as he’s got girl-next-door Megan to keep him occupied.

Disney Channel is telling girls that this is what you should want to be. This is how boys want you to be. You should be

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secretly, modestly gorgeous and cool, but super casual and uninterested in anything stereotypically feminine. Basically, be one of the boys, but hotter. It’s yet another botched attempt at a positive message—Disney wants to tell its viewers to go for substance over surface, but of course it’s a lot simpler to tell that story if the gap between those two qualities stays wide open and the character remains concerned with only one or the other.

Telling us over and over again that we shouldn’t want to look like the hot, popular cheerleader is fundamentally about attacking and tearing down other girls. Disney Channel makes it seem like for every Gabriella in the world, there’s a Sharpay waiting to attack. This sad dichotomy grooms young viewers to scoff at pink boas, cheerleading uniforms, lipstick, and anything else “feminine,” and aspire to be more like reserved, low-key Disney Channel heroines. There’s nothing wrong with either type of girl—but the two shouldn’t be pitted against each other, or even portrayed as opposites. Sharpay, Kate, Tess, and all the other blonde Disney antagonists based on a ridiculous stereotype are part of a lazy generalization, teaching us intentionally or not that judging people by their appearances equates to judging them by their actions. If in the Disney universe the girl in the pink dress is always the villain, what does that say about spotting villains in real life? Sooner or later Disney Channel is going to have to face the fact that finding the source of all evil is not as easy as locating the head cheerleader.

It feels good to feel superior to the cool girl, and Disney feeds that. No one identifies with the villain...

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art by Julia Pearson 42

MULDER & SCULLY: MEANT TO BE

even if the writers don’t think so byTia Lewis & Thelonia Saunders

Even those who cringe at the acronym “OTP” (ourselves included) can’t deny it—the romance between FBI Agents Fox Mulder (David Duchovny) and Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson) in The X-Files harnesses an impressive chemistry. It goes beyond character, dialogue, and the actors themselves to become the very foundation of what makes the show great and, well, believable. For many who revel in the age of mid-90s sci-fi television trash, The X-Files has always been a tasty mix of the classic TV crime drama and science fiction-fantasy. A successful executive gamble, The X-Files has tackled its circuitous plot with gusto, covering perhaps every urban legend and mythology on earth, and has still found the time to fill an extraterrestrial storyline with Snowden-level government conspiracy theories.

Despite its complexity, the dedication to the bizarre, and the nod to the American people’s distrust for their government, it’s Mulder and Scully’s ever-evolving relationship that undeniably holds the show together. But what happens when the beloved show is revived, and its writer does not know where else to go with the (spoiler alert) captivating romance he has created?

Well, he splits them up, of course!

In case you’ve been living in a different galaxy, here’s a little background. The X-Files is a franchise that began as a TV show on the Fox Network and ran from 1993 to 2001 with nine seasons, 202 episodes, and two movies. It has been revived for a six-episode miniseries due to air next year, much to the unexpected bewilderment of many longtime fans. To add to that bewilderment was Fox’s announcement that in the revival, Mulder and Scully will have split up and essentially become estranged, despite the fact that they appeared happily and romantically involved in the 2008 film, The X-Files: I Want to Believe. It seems that the long will-they-won’t-they plot line was just too good for Carter to give up—or maybe, he just does not know how to continue writing an interesting, secure relationship between two characters. Of course, he isn’t the first writer to take back the obvious conclusion he’d so slowly 43

built up. TV shows do this all the time, splitting up clearly “end game” couples to regain tension: take Nick and Jess in New Girl, or Blaine and Kurt in Glee. However, some shows commit to the relationships they create, and choose to advance them instead, like Leslie and Ben in Parks and Recreation and Mindy and Danny in The Mindy Project. So what’s your excuse, Chris Carter? When the majority of your fan base and even the actors on your show are rooting for the romance you’ve created, why tear apart the world’s most lovable alien-hunting FBI agents?

Perhaps he doesn’t need to explain.

Maybe it’s just who he is.

Despite being the creator and frequent writer for the show, Carter has a longstanding history of being at odds with its fans. He has even inspired the trope of the “The Chris Carter effect,” which TV Tropes states is when “the fans decide that the writing team will never resolve its plots, [and] then... will probably stop following the work.” While some creators of popular shows, like Carter, love throwing in

twists and turns to keep their viewers on edge, there is a fine line between being interactive with an audience and just plain pissing them off. Pretty Little Liars is a great example of this— the show is full of unexpected cliffhangers and plot twists, but fans’ comments on the show’s Facebook page and throughout social media make it clear that they see the show as trying too hard to be complicated, at the expense of it actually being good. (But we digress.)

“The Chris Carter effect” obviously has not stopped the fans—one need only check the fan reaction to the short previews of the revival—but there is definitely an underlying animosity between the fans and Chris Carter, which existed long before he split up Mulder and Scully. For that, we can see two reasons.

For one, there is the overly complicated, incredibly convoluted “government conspiracy plot” that made much of the mythos of The X-Files seem to keep building and building with little to no payoff. In fact, most of the answers given along this plotline only served to raise more questions. In the name of a “plot twist” they would sometimes straight-up contradict earlier revelations so the viewers’ whiplash would prevent them from questioning the narrative gaslighting. While the theme of a government conspiracy plot is intriguing, Carter’s execution of it turned a potentially poignant and relevant discussion into an inconsistent mess. Secondly, Carter seems morally contracted to hold out on any resolution of that aforementioned will-theywon’t-they tension between the two main leads, making sure as little actual finality as possible is achieved canonically. This is an uncreative trend Carter has continued to push into the revival with his decision to break up the two, for reasons that likely revolve around a need to add tension. As noted previously, plenty of other shows prove that a plot can continue to move and develop with the main couple together and advancing through life in a positive romantic relationship. Just because Carter can’t write it doesn’t mean it’s impossible.

W h a t ’ s really interesting about Carter’s clumsy destruction of a relationship he (perhaps accidentally) did a great job building is how absolutely no one seems to agree with him about it.

Both the actors involved and the fans themselves have decided that certain romantic milestones between Mulder and Scully must have occurred at some point off-screen, because Carter refuses to give them the simple moments they deserve. If anything, Carter is a perfect example of why readers, viewers,

and media consumers should not worry about the intent of the author, because it is the actual, created effect of a work that portrays its real truth.

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art by Thelonia Saunders

Carter is a perfect example of why readers, viewers, and media consumers should not worry about the intent of the author, because it is the actual, created effect of a work that portrays its real truth.

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Take the New York Comic Con X-Files interviews from pinnacle of journalism, BuzzFeed. When asked to guess when Mulder and Scully first fell in love, Carter answered that he “didn’t believe it was love at first sight.”

“He accused her of being sent to spy on him, so I don’t think he fell for her exactly at that [first] moment,” Carter said. “I think he fell in love with her through the course of the beginning of the show.”

Unsurprisingly, the other interviewees disagreed.

Kumail Nanjiani, a comedian and X-Files super fan who will be featured in the revival, said with certainty, “Their chemistry in the first scene is so undeniable. It’s a love affair from the beginning.”

Actor Mitch Pileggi, who plays FBI Assistant Director Skinner on the show, had a similar answer, saying simply, “The first time he looked into that face.”

It’s not that it’s impossible to have a harmonious relationship between creators and fan bases—the weird, if family-like, atmosphere achieved between the Hannibal fans and production team is a testament to that. It’s that The X-Files has felt for so long to be the actors (and, by extension, their characters) versus Chris Carter. The chemistry between Mulder and Scully—with more credit to actors Duchovny and Anderson than to Carter—has always been the main driving force for what makes the show work. Their genuine relationship, whether it be as friends or as a couple, has consistently pulled the ridiculous alien, conspiracy, and urban legend plots into a sphere of tolerability, so it seems foolish for Carter to fiddle with the one thing that keeps viewers and fans hooked—especially after he built it up for years with little reward. Because let’s face it: if you’ve ever watched an episode of the show, you know that as fun as a monster mystery episode is to watch, it’s not Sasquatch that has us glued to the screen. It’s how Mulder and Scully deal with Sasquatch.

Heading into 2016 and the return of The X-Files, we must remember that no matter what goes down, whether the two are married, divorced, or ultimately end up separated, it’s all going to be okay.

And whatever happens, remember, there is always fan fiction.

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art by Michelle Savran

srsly, he’s pretty funny

THE CATHARTIC ABSUR In today’s media, where there are so many outlets for comedy and so many funny people, I still always find myself returning to Mel Brooks. His brand of silliness is critically acclaimed (he is in the elite EGOT club), and I often regard him as a safe choice for a favorite comedian. Brooks’ lowbrow vulgarity drives movies such as History of the World Part 1 (1981) and Robin Hood: Men in Tights (1993). While these are hysterical movies, he is most remembered for the films Blazing Saddles (1974) and The Producers (1967), which have stood the comedic test of time and include some of the most famous scenes in comedy history. Who knew that cowboys farting over and over again could be so funny?

This clearly philistine humor coincides with Brooks’ efforts to push material boundaries. The Producers and Blazing Saddles were met with criticism regarding insensitivities toward race and religion, but the fact that the same two films eventually became celebrated by critics illustrates how movies can successfully tackle controversy if the material is enough of a spoof and still tells an honest human story.

The controversy surrounding The Producers stems

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from issues of anti-Semitism and the film’s portrayal of Nazis. Max Bialystok and Leo Bloom, two Broadway theatre producers, enter into a get-rich-quick scheme when they realize they can make more money with a flop show than with a hit. They attempt to produce the worst show ever written by the worst director who ever lived, and decide on a little production called “Springtime for Hitler: A Gay Romp with Eva and Adolf at Berchtesgaden.” It is penned by Franz Liebkind, an ex-Nazi, and directed by Roger De Bris, a flamboyantly gay man. Naturally, controversy ensued with this plot.

Released just 23 years after the end of World War II, the film was criticized for its insensitive ethnic humor. Renata Adler of The New York Times wrote in 1968 that many parts of the film are “shoddy and gross and cruel.” The film was thought to be crude, with many scenes in bad taste. While the uproar from critics was not unfounded, the film works because of its ridiculous, over-the-top nature. A few Nazi jokes sprinkled throughout a plot may cause concern, but a full-on Nazi musical production containing Nazi showgirls dancing around in the shape of a swastika? I beg you to try not to laugh. The

absurd humor in this movie is necessary for tackling such heavy subjects in a comedic manner. Franz Liebkind is an undeniably delusional Nazi, and the movie makes this clear when Bialystock and Bloom go to his house to get his permission to produce his play. He screams in excitement to his pet pigeons about the prospect of getting his show produced, and proceeds to make Bialystock and Bloom take the Siegfried Oath pledging their loyalty to Hitler. Liebkind’s goal to restore Hitler’s reputation through “Springtime for Hitler” is emblematic of the fallacy of his Nazi perspective. Similarly, his diatribe against Winston Churchill ultimately portrays him as insane. Depicting the Nazi character as the most ridiculous fosters the satirical and hilarious tone of the picture. The all-out nature of the scene and the film overall makes laughter the only rational way to respond.

As mentioned previously, the highlight of the movie is the actual production of “Springtime for Hitler.”

The audience gets to see a small sample of the show, and Brooks goes for all-out shock. In the span of three minutes, the audience experiences every German stereotype, including showgirls dressed as pretzels and beer. The dancers are dressed in Nazi uniforms and their dances incorporate the Hitler salute and a swastika formation. This performance makes a statement about Hitler’s status, and Brooks creates a demeaning depiction through his choreography. One officer sings, “don’t be stupid, be a smarty, come and join the Nazi party,” as shots fire. The lyrics further display the absurdity

suggests that Liebkind kill the actors because they are the ones actually ruining Hitler’s reputation. This inane and illogical problem-solution sequence imitates the fundamental lack of sense that is embedded in historical reality. These mad

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His outrageous spoof doesn’t eliminate the tragedy of history but points out and allows us to process its insanity.

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suggestions serve not just to make the viewer laugh but also to expose the true irrationality and disconnect of the past.

If The Producers was met with controversy, Blazing Saddles pushed it to a whole new level. This film, released seven years later, is Brooks’ first Western parody. In it, he channels the traditional racism and sexism that appear throughout the genre, and through the ridiculous plot, he points out the inherent idiocy of those tropes. The main story arc involves an evil railroad builder attempting to drive the citizens of the western town Rock Ridge out by appointing a black sheriff. The first scene, in which white railroad workers demand a working

by Felicia Kuhnreich

RDITY OF MEL BROOKS and stupidity of their horrifying organization. Of course, in retrospect not a single “smarty” would ever consider joining, but stating the opposite of what the audience truly feels or believes makes it all the more poignantly ridiculous.

Brooks uses his lowbrow humor and silliness as a tool to demean the evil forces in the world. His outrageous spoof doesn’t eliminate the tragedy of history but points out and allows us to process its insanity. It is not just ridiculous in its exuberance, but also in its lack of rationality. Liebkind is extremely angry in the second act after “Springtime for Hitler” becomes a success. His solution is to shoot himself, and the ensuing minute sequence lacks any semblance of logic.

He mocks people who cling to life “like baby butterflies” and tries to die like a man, but as he screams that he will soon join his idols and pulls the trigger, it jams. He then throws the gun away in anger and mutters, “when things go wrong,” upset about not dying, but not determined enough to doublecheck the gun and give it another try. Liebkind’s decisionmaking displayed in this chain of events is entertainingly illogical. Reason further escapes the situation when Bialystock

song from black railroad workers, illustrates racial tensions, and as the story unfolds it continues to explore race relations.

Co-written by Richard Pryor, his and Brooks’ social commentary on race shines through the silly gags. Brooks creates a synergy between the absurdity of racism and the movie’s innate madness. The townspeople are portrayed as so ignorant that it’s funny. If their stupidity goes over your head, Brooks breaks the fourth wall—in signature style—to call the racist townspeople idiots, making his criticism both humorously exaggerated and impossible to miss. Blazing Saddles’ success can be attributed to the inherent truth found through the craziness.

Racism in America and Nazism are not light subjects.

But Mel Brooks’ comedic and cinematic style takes these uncomfortable and horrible truths and puts them in a comedic context. By making us laugh at things that are simply not funny, Brooks shows us that some of the most horrifying aspects of humanity are based on an inhuman ridiculousness. This allows us to experience and contemplate events that might have been too sensitive to discuss and find some closure and catharsis in laughter.

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OLIVIA POPES & JESS DAYS OF TV THE

typecasting television’s favorite female leads

by Riley Henderson

Many people may argue that Shonda Rhimes is the boss of all things dramatic. She has become a TV Drama phenomenon in less than a decade, each one of her shows being more popular than the last. With series such as Scandal, How to Get Away with Murder, Private Practice, and Grey’s Anatomy (now in its eleventh season) under her belt, it seems that more often than not her audience eats up every last second of her 40-minute episodes, gripping the edges of their seats. However, once you sift through all the twists and turns of her shows, the murders, the affairs, and the infinite number of blow-out screaming matches between main characters, each show shares one important factor: a take-no-bullshit, I-do-what-I-want, insanely successful female lead. Is this the quintessential key to her show’s popularity? Most likely, yes.

When you count up the jobs that each female lead character has had in Rhimes’ shows, you get the following: two doctors, one criminal defense attorney, and one miracle worker or “fixer” with infinite wads of cash, the source of which is unknown. It is safe to say that Rhimes creates strong, successful women who tend to be independent to an almost outrageous level. Whether it is Meredith Grey, Olivia Pope, Addison Montgomery, or Annalise Keating, each woman seems to have

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quite the accomplished life. They control people, and often find powerful men fighting over them. However, the unanswerable question is whether all of this female empowerment is simply good TV, or whether it intentionally and effectively creates aspirational characters for viewers to look up to. The “punch” of each show is what keeps the audience interested, but the takeaway hits a much more serious note.

Although Rhimes’ shows are arguably much less about identifying with the female leads than other TV shows, the actresses who partake in the given roles definitely can inspire the audience in a positive light. Stripping away the absurdity of each TV drama—which includes the characters fixing unsolvable problems within seconds, hiding murder scenes on a daily basis, and always looking spectacular and well dressed while doing so—there lies a perhaps more indepth and refined message. Finding an understanding of the female characters in terms of their personalities and achieved successes allows the doors of aspiration and even imitation to open. These doors encourage viewers to admire who they are watching every Thursday night.

Rhimes’ perhaps less realistic, but highly aspirational characters are strikingly different than the relatable, quirky

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Jess Day, or the ladies of Broad City for example, are equally independent and prime looking-up-to material, and the Olivias and Merediths can be relatable in their twisted familial issues. art by Julie Pearson

characters of Comedy Central or Fox, for example, where the likes of Amy Schumer and Zooey Deschanel parade across our screens. The popular genre of shows surrounding the eccentric (and sometimes silly) lives of city girls attests to not only the extent of variation in TV genres, but also in TV’s female leads.

New Girl’s Jess Day is goofy and out of the box to say the least. She sings what she says more than just saying it, and her desire to wear bows on her outfits and striped or polkadotted anything fits her personality flawlessly. While the Olivia Popes under Rhimes’s reign are off burying bodies and having seductive and juicy affairs, the Jess Days are crafting middle school plays and living in the quaint but odd dynamic of an LA loft with three male thirty-somethings. Nevertheless, it is hard to argue whether one show is better than the other in sending creating role models for the audience.

The character that Jess Day conveys to viewers—that being yourself is ideal and what should matter and her quirk or spunk if you will—is what makes her who she is. Olivia Pope, however, puts out the message that being a powerhouse in any industry is an attainable and striking trait, even if it is in a corrupted or absurd context.

One person might relate to Jess Day in all her weird

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glory, while another might feel he or she can look up to Olivia Pope’s powerful independence. However, that’s not to say there is no overlap. Jess Day, or the ladies of Broad City for example, are equally independent and prime looking-up-to material, and the Olivias and Merediths can be relatable in their twisted familial issues. I suppose there is no real answer for which kind of character is more impactful, except to acknowledge that both types are widely diverse and complex. Perhaps we don’t have to choose to associate with one or the other, but can instead connect with both. And that’s why we come back and watch week after week.

There is an entire spectrum of women in the real world who range from sharing the internal turmoil of Olivia Pope’s psyche, to the day-to-day duties in Jess Day’s world. We may want to consider adopting the qualities of both sides of the scale into our lives because, in my opinion, a polka dotwearing, President-dating, badass woman who crafts children’s plays while solving murders would be pretty fantastic. Either show may simply be good TV, but I like to believe there can be more than just ratings behind these sometimes spunky, sometimes terrifying TV marvels.

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FEMINISM 101

WITH NICKI MINAJ calling out white feminist hypocrisy

by Susie Plotkin

“And now back to this bitch that had a lot to say about me the other day in the press—Miley, what’s good?”

This line, which Nicki Minaj delivered during her acceptance speech for Best Hip-Hop Video, is the standout memory from the 2015 MTV Video Music Awards. People will forget who hosted the show, they’ll forget who won which awards, they’ll forget the guest performances, but they won’t forget that Nicki Minaj called Miley Cyrus a bitch, because that’s all that matters. They will forget, too, the reason Minaj called out Cyrus and the context of Cyrus’ even more outrageous statements about Minaj. In the end, Nicki said that Miley was a bitch on stage, and that’s much more important.

The media seemed to understand that this line was the takeaway from the VMAs. Following Minaj’s acceptance speech, the Internet exploded with headlines about the exchange. The Guardian recapped the VMAs with an article titled, “VMAs 2015: Nicki Minaj calls Miley Cyrus ‘bitch’ on stage at MTV awards.” Other news outlets decided to steer away from the traditional route of simply explaining what happened, and focused instead on the Cyrus family’s reaction to what Minaj said. Entertainment Tonight, via their online forum, featured an article titled, “Watch the Cyrus Family’s Stunned Reactions to Nicki Minaj Calling Out Miley at the VMAs,” including a series of photos of Cyrus’ parents and siblings in the audience, wideeyed, hands over their mouths, shocked. The Daily Mail similarly headlined an article, “Stunned! Miley Cyrus’ family can barely contain shock as they watch singer branded b**** by Nicki Minaj at MTV VMA’s.” Bitch—a word so foul it can only be expressed in asterisks. We are supposed to read these headlines and, like Cyrus’ family did, understand that Nicki was rude, crass, and wrong, and Miley was taken off-guard, a victim, and poised.

Most of these articles, of course, would eventually include Miley’s response later that night: “We are all in this industry, we all do interviews, and we all know how they manipulate shit. Nicki, congratu-fucking-lations”. Oddly enough, there were no headlines reading, “Ouch! Miley Cyrus says ‘Congratuf***inglations’ to Nicki Minaj when she won Best Hip-Hop Video Award.” Miley’s response (which was just as crass) and what she did to instigate Nicki’s original attack were not important enough to flood headlines.

This all started when Minaj’s video for “Anaconda,” which broke Vevo’s then-record for most views in the first 24 49

hours, was not nominated for Video of the Year. Minaj tweeted, “If your video celebrates women with very slim bodies, you will be nominated for vid of the year,” calling out the music industry’s obvious preferred acceptance of certain body types (read: white and super thin) over others (read: not white and not super thin). Minaj’s tweet wasn’t controversial, raunchy, or crass; she was frustrated that her highly successful video wasn’t nominated in a category she thought it deserved to be in. She recognized that the women featured in her video have very different body types than the music industry prefers, and called it out for that. Minaj did not mention any specific artists or videos that were nominated in her tweet, and only protested the general trends of the music industry for women, but still Taylor Swift took it personally.

Swift tweeted, “@NICKIMINAJ I’ve done nothing but love & support you. It’s unlike you to pit women against

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It is the responsibility of so-called feminists like Taylor Swift and Miley Cyrus to not silence the voices of women who are hurt by the social systems they benefit from

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each other. Maybe one of the men took your slot.” Clearly Swift missed the point of Minaj’s tweet and wasn’t able to comprehend that Minaj could simultaneously A) be a woman and B) make a comment about racism in the music industry without “[pitting] women against each other.” Minaj’s tweet came from her perspective as not just a woman in the music industry, but as a woman of color. Swift doesn’t need to think about how her race plays into her success because she’s white, just like any person born into a majority group doesn’t need to consider what part of their identity put them in the majority.

This is to say that while Swift might experience sexism in the music industry, she will never experience sexism in the same way that Minaj does. When she redirected the message

of Minaj’s tweet, which was a critique that stemmed from a place of intersectionality, to an accusation against her in the name of “one-size-fits-all” feminism, she actively silenced and ignored the entire problem Minaj was referencing in the first place. In Swift’s world of White Feminism, sexism exists in a gender vacuum, ignoring all other personal identities that inherently accompany it—race, sexual orientation, etc.—which is why her suggestion that “maybe one of the men” took Minaj’s nomination is so predictable; she dismissed the possibility that race could play any factor in this by focusing solely on gender, thereby implying that white women and women of color face the same kinds of oppression.

Minaj was clearly taken aback and confused by Swift’s tweet, replying, “Huh? U must not be reading my tweets. Didn’t say a word about u. I love u just as much. But u should speak on this @taylorswift13.” The remarkable thing here is that Minaj must have been frustrated with Swift’s tweet, but she still responded without any malice. She even went so far as to tell Swift she loved her too, and invited her to “speak on” Minaj’s initial tweet. Although she must have recognized the implications of Swift’s tweet, she still asked her for her support on the issue. But Swift didn’t take that opportunity to redeem herself, and instead tweeted, “@NICKIMINAJ If I win, please come up with me!! You’re invited to any stage I’m ever on,” which is condescending at best.

The next morning, Swift finally apologized, tweeting, “I thought I was being called out. I missed the point, I misunderstood, then misspoke. I’m sorry, Nicki. @NICKIMINAJ,” and Nicki tweeted back, thanking her for her apology, which should have put the issue to rest. However, then Miley Cyrus decided to add in her two cents about the exchange in an interview with The New York Times before the VMAs, despite the fact that she admitted to not having followed it closely enough to know the specifics. Cyrus disapproved of Minaj’s role in the fight, saying, “If you do things with an open heart and you come at things with love, you would be heard and I would respect your statement. But I don’t respect your statement because of the anger that came with it.” This tone policing is classic among members of majority groups, Taylor Swift included, that suppress the messages of minority groups, refocusing the message of what someone is saying from its content to the anger behind it.

Who cares what Minaj had to say if she wasn’t being polite? If she had been less angry, Cyrus would have “respected her statement”—which is confusing for a few reasons. Primarily, Minaj’s initial tweet was not anger ridden; it was constructive and honest. Moreover, Cyrus has never criticized an activist on her side for being too angry in their remarks (for example, a sexually liberated white woman). Cyrus herself is known for risqué remarks, like the time she said in an interview

with W Magazine in 2014, “I’m trying to tell girls, like, ‘Fuck that.

You don’t need to wear makeup. You don’t have to have long blonde hair and big titties. That’s not what it’s about.’” It’s not entirely clear to me how that statement, or any of the other number of similar statements she’s made, is more open-hearted and less angry than Minaj’s tweet. Not to mention the fact that here, when Cyrus spoke about feminism and empowering women, she was clearly targeting a white audience, as having long blonde hair isn’t often a societal beauty expectation for women who are anything but white.

Both Swift and Cyrus have commented on how sexism in the music industry has affected them many times in the past.

In reference to people who didn’t believe that she had written her own music, Swift told Billboard in December of 2014, “They may have to deal with their own sexist issues, because if I were a guy and you were to look at my catalog and my lyrics, you would not wonder if I was the person behind it.” Similarly, when she was on the cover of Marie Claire’s September issue, Cyrus said about the music industry, “There is so much sexism, ageism, you name it... Kendrick Lamar sings about LSD and he’s cool. I do it and I’m a whore.” Neither of them sugarcoated their statements. They both acknowledged and spoke out against the sexism that they face in the industry. Yet, when Minaj spoke out against the oppression she faces, both women dismissed her statement and attacked her. It seems that Swift’s emphasis on empowering other women is limited to her girl gang of white models, and that Miley’s assertion in an interview with BBC in 2013 that she’s “one of the biggest feminists in the world” is only true if you ignore every woman who doesn’t face the same obstacles as her. Feminism means equality of the sexes, but this can’t be achieved by ignoring and disregarding the types of oppression that women of color (or gay women or lowincome women or trans women) face. It is the responsibility of socalled feminists like Taylor Swift and Miley Cyrus to not silence the voices of women who are hurt by the social systems that they benefit from (whether they realize it or not).

If Miley was going to criticize Nicki for being “not too nice” when she made a constructive statement, then at the awards show that Miley was hosting, Nicki damn well would be “not too nice.” And regardless of how the white-lauding press decided to handle it, I think the stand-out memory from the VMAs came after Nicki called her a bitch, when the camera panned to Miley to show her reaction: standing in her fake dreadlocks, jaw-dropped, speechless.

Although just temporarily, their roles were reversed: Nicki managed to silence Miley.

art by Thelonia Saunders 50

THE LINGERING ERA OF THE

MALE

TALK SHOW HOST

seeking female faces on our screens

by Barbara Esuoso

The lights in a large theatre are dimmed for a nightly ambiance, while the studio erupts with the noise of an enthusiastic crowd anticipating the appearance of the iconic 6-foot-4 redhead. Conan O’ Brien confidently makes his way to center stage under the weight of unceasing applause.

Experience exudes his persona as he makes goofy hand gestures at the nighttime crowd, eventually getting them to quiet down. He smoothly begins to talk about national news (read: Donald Trump), generously sprinkling in some rudely humorous comments with the help of his announcer.

One remote flick to channel 4, and an infectious theme song begins blasting, with the spotlight now on a blue-lit stage and a woman with a blond pixie cut and a tailored suit.

The audience is a sea of women with high-pitched screams for their beloved daytime host, Ellen DeGeneres, well-known stand-up comedian and talk show host. She starts off the show with a comedy bit, leading into an exercise that somehow has the crowd laughing for 20 minutes.

What’s the difference between Conan O’Brien and Ellen DeGeneres? They’re both funny, a subjective statement nonetheless proven by their immense success. Like most talk shows, both follow a similar format: celebrity guests, top musical performances, comedic banter, etc. And yet TV is full of so many more Conans than Ellens.

Aside from the vulgar Chelsea Handler on E!, whose show is now off-air, and programs like The View that are created for and primarily watched by bored housewives, most television talk show hosts are male. We have veterans and icons like Jay Leno, David Letterman, Larry King, and those that are still on the air: Bill Maher, Stephen Colbert, Conan O’ Brien, Carson Daly, the Jimmys (Fallon and Kimmel). On the other hand, there is a questionably low amount of female talk show hosts. The icon and legend, Oprah Winfrey, cannot be forgotten, but once she retired, female presence in the talk show world 51

quickly waned. Women like Suze Orman, Ellen DeGeneres, Kelly Ripa, and Wendy Williams were left to hold down the fort, while the male-dominated talk show landscape soldiered on.

A recent issue of Vanity Fair put a spotlight on late night television, and the photo accompanying the article featured all men. The article described the insider business of passing on “late nights” and “daily shows” from host to host, man to man. Jay Leno gave The Tonight Show to Jimmy Fallon,

“

Do these high expectations mean that people in the media industry do not find women as capable of success?

”

who gave Late Night to Seth Meyers. Meanwhile, successful female entertainers like Margaret Cho or Kathy Griffin weren’t being considered for these positions.

Of even further importance is the disparity between daytime and late night shows. Late night, or primetime, generally generates more viewers, as adults and students are home from work and school to tune in and keep up ratings. On the other hand, daytime television can only cater to a smaller audience. In recent years, Chelsea Handler’s Chelsea Lately was the only late night show with a female host, and even then she was on E! rather than a mainstream public broadcasting channel such as ABC or CBS. In a CNN article, Breeanna Hare seeks out the reason for the lack of female presence, especially in late night television, and finds the issue to be, of course, society’s power imbalance. Hare quotes James Poniewozik of TIME: “When late night shows began, male-dominated

Leno Letterman King O’Brien Daly Fallon Philbin Harvey Kimmel Stewart Maher Carson Cooper Povich Hall Meyers

comedy reflected society’s power balance. Now guy humor is an increasingly isolated preserve of omega-male movies and geek-aggressive TV shows piped into man caves…it may hold out longer than business or law, but culture can change too.”

As movements for gender equality progress and permeate into law and business, let’s hope that they make a direct difference in culture as well.

Clearly, the media has been, historically, a maledominated industry.The history of male-dominated professional fields runs far back to the early years of gender structures and roles in America. As these roles become less strictly defined, especially as gender equality resurges as a prominent national issue, women are filling larger roles in industries, including media. The question is, why haven’t they filled these new roles in a substantial way in the talk show business? In the same article, CNN interviews the legendary late Joan Rivers, who says: “It’s a very special art, a very special talent, and you [a female] have to be very strong. You have to be a great talker, a great listener and you have to be a fan. And they just haven’t found the woman with all that yet. But she’s out there.”

The bar is raised high for women in the industry, given that, in the past, they haven’t had an established network or foundation. Do these high expectations mean that people in the media industry do not find women as capable of success?

This can’t be true, especially considering female comedian powerhouses such as Tina Fey and Amy Poehler, who have generated millions of fans, hosted several wellknown award ceremonies, and acted as the leading ladies of

their respective television shows. Women like them are clearly capable of succeeding at late night hosting—they just haven’t been given the chance to prove it in the talk-show world, with its long legacy of white-male-behind-a-desk entertainment.

Regardless, optimism for the emergence of a leading lady prevails.

I do believe that there is hope, based on the past phenomenon of the long-standing empire built by The Oprah Winfrey Show. Winfrey, through her tear-jerking, evocative, and entertaining talk show, generated millions of viewers for over twenty years—and it was daytime. She created a new realm of talk show presence by prefacing legends like Dr. Phil and Suze Orman. If Oprah is capable of creating a media movement, aren’t other women capable of hosting a talk show?

In short, the media industry has had an infrastructure that supports a certain host type—usually men—in the spotlight. Bringing women into the spotlight would mean a challenge to this infrastructure, a new era of talk show media, and, as Joan Rivers said, a risky step that must be taken by the right female host. That’s why today we are only able to look at memes of Family Feud’s Steve Harvey and the beautifully non-aging Anderson Cooper. It’s why we’ve had legends like Dr. Phil and Maury Povich to fix our seriously messed-up problems, and Regis Philbin to deceive us with the false hope that we could be as rich as him. We can all be grateful for this, while simultaneously demanding that their female equivalents not pass by undetected.

photo by Sam Jones

Leno Letterman King O’Brien Daly Fallon Philbin Harvey Kimmel Stewart Maher Carson Cooper Povich Hall Meyers 52

THE KOMINAS ARE PUNKS synthesizing cultures with a new brand of punk music

by Jagravi Dave

photo courtesy of Eddie Austin

HipMama, there is much evidence that the independent music scene is largely homogenously white, to the point of an almost overt exclusion of other races. The whiteness of popular, punk, rock, and indie music artists in the U.S. is a gross misrepresentation of the racial makeup of the country and the listeners of this music.

The last few years have seen a small rise in racially diverse punk bands. In defiance of labeling, Just About Music (JAM) Program House on Cornell’s North Campus decided to put on a show with music “from people who don’t subscribe to boxes.” The headliner was a punk band from Massachusetts called The Kominas. The Kominas, along with other minority artists such as Mitski and Awkwafina, are slowly filling this gap in the racial makeup of independent music.

With an Urdu name that roughly translates to “scumbags” (punks?), The Kominas have received media attention for their open discussion of Islam and audacious song names such as “Suicide Bomb The GAP” and “No One’s Gonna Honor Kill My Baby.” They are simultaneously provocative, hilarious, ironic, and completely serious. “I am an Islamist/I am the Antichrist” sings Basim Usmani (also the bassist) in their most popular song, “Sharia Law in the USA,” which mirrors both

“

Punk music has always been about rebellion. It is a vehicle for artists to engage with issues that are emotional and difficult to talk about—issues that are often ignored, or affect people who have historically been silenced. One of the most iconic punk bands, The Clash, used their music to raise awareness of the problems faced by the working class and black people in the UK The feminist movement took to punk music in the form of Riot grrrl, a style in defiance of patriarchal norms that addresses issues of domestic abuse, rape, and sexuality. Punk music is fiercely independent, epitomizing a do-it-yourself attitude that allows artists to remain free from the confines of what is appropriate or inoffensive. This independence creates within punk a space for pure selfexpression and self-definition.

However, punk music has also historically been white, a fact for which it has more recently come under much criticism.

Punk has been used as an instrument of movements for racial equality as well as white supremacy, but in both cases it has been used exclusively by white people. There have not been, nor do there exist today, many prominent punk musicians of color. From Sarah Sahim’s article in Pitchfork, “The Unbearable Whiteness of Indie,” to the personal experience Tasha Fierce details in “Black Invisibility and Racism in Punk Rock” for

53

In their loudness and rebellion, they are giving a voice to issues of Islamophobia and religious conservatism that are not addressed in mainstream culture

”

in lyrics and title “I am an Antichrist/I am an anarchist” from “Anarchy in the UK” by the Sex Pistols. They are paying homage to the band to whom they owe the roots of their particular brand of in-your-face political raucousness. The Kominas stay true to the loud uncomplicated drumming and straightforward catchy riffs of punk music. In the DIY spirit of punk, their sound is raw, unpolished, un-infiltrated; Usmani’s voice and words are

the focus.

The Kominas are using the ethos of punk to do in present day America what punk was always meant to: subvert the mainstream and vocalize problems facing a cultural subsection that has been neglected. In their loudness and rebellion, they are giving a voice to issues of Islamophobia and religious conservatism that are not addressed in mainstream culture. In their music, all the anger, frustration, confusion, rebellion is allowed to explode. Yet what they do is not as simple as just making music. “What we do is sociopolitical first,” said Usmani in an interview with Colorlines. In some ways, The Kominas are making a sociopolitical statement simply by existing. They are not entirely Muslim or Islamic: one member identifies as atheist. They are not entirely Pakistani: all of them were born in the U.S., and one of them has Indian parents. “We have a lot of intersectional elements going on and identify in a lot of ways,” said Usmani to Paper. Most journalists are so confused by them that they have to rely on their simplistic labeling systems to understand them. They have been called “Islamic punk,” “Muslim punk,” and “Pakistani-Americans,” but none of these can really encompass the breadth of experience that The Kominas represent. “We’ve been describing ourselves as a ‘Post-Colonial punk band’ lately,” said the drummer Karna Ray in the same interview, highlighting the importance of self-identification in the rejection of expected categorization.

The term “Post-Colonial” is especially important here in that it refers to the racially-charged history of the cultures The Kominas come from, while also acknowledging the racism resulting from this colonial history that persists today.

Another aspect of their contradictory and complex existence is their rejection of the idea that punk and religion, perhaps particularly Islam, are incompatible.“The main problem we have is with anti-religious punks who cannot see any value in a religious heritage,” said Usmani in an interview with The Guardian. Religion is an important aspect of self-identity and the music of The Kominas is another vehicle through which they explore what religion means to them, and how to reconcile this meaning with the society in which they grew up. “I don’t think Islam is ever going to go away, I’m just trying to see how it best fits in my life,” said Usmani in an interview with CNN. Some experts, including Mark LeVine, a professor of Middle Eastern History at the University of California, Irvine, who is also a musician and the author of Heavy Metal Islam, have suggested that it “makes sense why punk has been the music of choice for young, politically active Muslims... The straight edge movement in punk, which was about no drugs, no alcohol, was clean yet very intense and political. It’s a way for them to rebel against their families in some extreme ways, yet still be ritualistically, ‘good Muslims.’” The Kominas’s brand of punk music allows for this reconciliation.

The need for this reconciliation is strongly felt in the subculture of Asian-Americans that The Kominas themselves are a part of. The increased immigration of families from South Asian countries to the United States in recent decades has created this subculture that faces a crisis of self-identification.

This new generation of young Asian-Americans deals with the double pressure of retaining the cultural roots it has been distanced from while attempting to belong to the American society in which it has grown up. The Kominas are speaking for and to this generation. An important part of what they do is

break down the stereotypes about Asian-Americans that are so prevalent, due in large part to the very limited representation of Asian-Americans in media and popular culture. Children of immigrants feel a great societal pressure to conform to the “model minority” status and become an academic, or a doctor, or an engineer. The Kominas defy this stereotype. For someone like me—a young adult of Indian heritage who spent her formative years in the U.S., who doesn’t fit the model minority myth, who has perhaps always been more comfortable in alternative culture—they represent the possibility of existing beyond this label. The Clash were to England’s white working class what The Kominas are to us: by showing that AsianAmericans can and do form punk bands, they are giving voice to our often-neglected experiences and frustrations.

“The Kominas are an American band... We could not have happened anywhere else,” said Usmani to The Guardian, raising an important point that all members of the band are Americans, born in the United States. They have various cultural heritages, but so do all other Americans. By using punk music, something they and others have called “white man’s music,” they are laying claim to their American heritage. By singing in Punjabi and Urdu, by addressing issues such as Islamophobia, they are declaring their South Asian heritage. The result is a culturally synthesized music that South Asian-Americans can relate to. This cultural mixing combined with the subversive defiance of punk is raucous and inflammatory. As the guitarist Shahjehan Khan said to Colorlines, “We are a product of 2015 America and we express what we express unapologetically.

Our identities—both personal and as a group—cannot help but find themselves in the material that we have produced. We are doing our best to be as authentic as we can about how we feel as artists, and that certainly can and should make people uncomfortable.”

art by Maura Thomas 54

From Breath to Brain Puffy cotton grows underneath my eyelids The sheets are deep blue, sticky from last night’s sweat He reassures me it’s not smoke, so sink further into the mattress and look around.

Thumbtack holes in the walls Galaxy mobile dangling, our solar system in the breeze Then it starts with a tingle.

Cotton swabs swell Then E. No, G…? G….? G sharp?

“Catch me I’m falling.”

The floor vibrates with each pitch little kernels of electric popcorn.

My fingers brush notes in the air Swaths of turquoise and white Bounce off the corners Hitting the edges of Pluto Splintering against nebula grits.

The harmonies pile on as the notes spark more movement He blows the vapor into animated air nauseated at the gray dribbling off his chin my stomach rolls over in leftover strawberry acid the notes pounce and land on the top of the furniture Catch me I’m falling— He wraps me in, tucking the corners to make sure I don’t spill out.

What do you see?

I open my mouth but B flat. A sharp. Key to my lock, my soul is Kiii Eleichaa.

55

He laughs but I don’t understand.

poems by Ariella Reidenberg

Erosion: Part 1 What cities are destroyed

when grains erode from beneath my toes?

How many colonies and civilizations in one granule?

And how many times do we play god

making sand castles out of stars?

An hourglass on my desk, plucked from beaches to be a servant of time. Screams a sound only Horton could hear, forced to tumble through a tiny hole emptying dead ruins into the vacuumed bowl below, falling thousands of— there is no measurement to scale the size—

Yet,

Catastrophic.

but believe me it is they rebuild and settle only to be turned again.

Erosion: Part 2 My friends ask me why I care so much about sand My father asks why I do not analyze my theories under a microscope My mother says, “You think that’s big…

…wait ‘til you look at tide pools!”

I ask myself, why the incoming waves are genocidal

But dumping a block of sodium into the gorge and watching the walls crumble is fun.

Like a pencil to a wooden desk, the graphite of my mind smears dark streaks onto walls painted over until it’s graffiti to me.

I hold a bead of sand between my thumb and forefinger

rolling gently, wondering if it can get any smaller tiny enough to clog a pore and large enough to taste between your teeth it plays its part anonymously.

Yet, back on the beach, I feel the ocean kidnapping each grit beneath my feet

and I hear screaming.

56

hell is real hell is a fog hell is dissonance and confusion I am a fisherman but am no fisher of men I was fished out of the sea and I was not deposited on land again or sea the fog is in the insidious stares of your loved ones in the barbed circumlocution of your priest rabbi bishop in the calculated confusion of the papers papers papers and forms it is formed by your mind “hell is real” the billboard that chilled you on the warm summer day as you drove into the sunset highlighter orange (middle school trivia mitochondria and Marbury v Madison dancing in Technicolor) pop trash singing its seductive mindless numbing (anesthetic bread and circus feeding you prepping you for combat waged against your own) windows (and defenses) down breeze running gentle fingers through your hair (tangling here disentangling there caressing singing whipping more alive and vibrant vivid vivacious vicious than you can ever hope to be) is not real the shiver down your spine is real the misting of your breath on the glass is real the paper cut is real (the scar is not) the memory of the ache is real (the ache is not) the fog is real

fake leather fake leather and cigarette smoke caught in my hair as I sat on the curb outside 7-Eleven

sepia slow motion laugh tracks childhoods caught behind loud lyrics taste like cinnamon and cyanide I thought myself a god but remain a sheep in wolves’ clothing artlessly sharpened teeth catching in the soft pink of my lips

throw a line in hope to find something concrete stone to build your house upon but you are not on land or sea you find for the foundation of your construction only sand the sand is not real 57

poems by Naroé

that was my name

They say the devil’s in the details or maybe it was god or maybe I just hate detail oriented people. I’m not too sure and I’m not too sure I care either. If the Buddhists are right and god is in everything or if the Catholics are right and I’m going to straight to hell (I stole candy from a blind man once haven’t we all) well , there’s not much to it either way. I can see myself meeting the devil. Don’t be sad for me. I see you there sighing under your breath.

You. Are. Projecting. Sympathizing. Sympathizing as if that were even possible in this godforsaken world. This godforsaken world. This godforsaken.

Godforsaken.

God. Forsaken.

Where are You anymore? God? On the corner of first and Amistad? Hah see that fucking pop culture reference when I should be looking for You. I can’t see the details I can’t see the trees for the forest and it is so beautiful. You are not here. Or maybe You just aren’t. Maybe You are just a hole that was left in my chest by, I don’t know , by the fuckin’ commies. Heaven knows this country’s always blaming everything on them (and what am I but a product of my surroundings).

I never wanted to feel sad. But there is a certain exquisiteness. There are small sharp pinpricks that caress, that linger, that fade into the sting behind your eyes. And , you know , your body always accepts it more easily than you do. You hold your breath fighting that saltiness but eventually the sweet sweet H2fuckingO spills down your face and all you can feel is the slickness on your cheeks. And your body heaves its long awaited rasping breath your lungs can’t get enough oxygen.

I mean , yes ,

happiness is nice too (yes , the happiness that comes from our commercially driven drivel , our McDonalds playgrounds littered with happy meals , our Southern Silk need to be touched and touched and sexed) but there is nothing like the deep soul crushing feel-it-in-your-bones heaviness that comes with sadness.

Real sadness I mean.

I forget to run from it I feed it sometimes. And boy , doesn’t it feel good.

My eyesight’s not 20/20 I’ve never been good at sweating the small stuff , man. I never wanted to be (that’s what I tell myself anyways). I wanted the foolish fucking prince to slay the fucking dragon I wanted my departure from mortality immortalized I wanted to duel the damned firstborn for the desperate peasants I wanted to lead deadly armies I wanted to revive the dead that didn’t deserve to die.

I wanted to look at You.

I wanted to look upon Your countenance delight

in Your presence.

I would have cowered before You! You said Your kingdom was at hand but I can only see the multitude of trees.

I can only see the forest and whether You are god or the devil I can’t see you.

58

Judgement Day

by Spencer Holm

Ralph is a reason to keep hand sanitizer on hand.

I was so green it’s not even funny. No laundry machine, no dishwasher, I didn’t even have a fridge.

-Not even a fridge?

No way man. I didn’t need one. My liquor store had a walk-in beer cave, and I was so green I would get a six-pack there and drink it before it got warm. Oh and God-damn, the number of bottles I returned! What do you think, four thousand? A million? I don’t even know…

-Five cents apiece right? Oh and cans too, those count. Yeah, I used to see you walking up State Street with a grocery cart overflowing.

Say, what are you writing there? Ralph grabbed the arm-rests of his chair but his elbows shook too much to lift him up.

-Oh nothing to worry about, just paperwork I do for everyone.

What kind of paperwork?

-Uh, tallies and yes or no questions. It helps me see trends at the end of each year, or trends in age or race. Like here’s a question you just answered: “Candidate demonstrates appreciation for environment.” You got a five out of five on that one! I haven’t looked at your carbon footprint report, but I’m sure you scored well above the mean. Let’s see, on a scale of one to five, how many times does the candidate exercise per week?

Ralph started to relax in his arm-chair, a simple chrome-painted plastic frame with worn blue pads beneath his butt and behind his back. The rigid frame held his craned neck uncomfortable enough to keep him awake. There was no way he would fall asleep with the blindingly florescent ceiling above him.

So workouts on the weekends don’t count?

-No, no it includes the whole week.

But it’s on a scale of one to five. It would make more sense if it were on a scale of one to seven. What about the workouts on the weekends?

-The weekend workouts count.

Then I’d give myself a seven.

-But it’s on a scale of one to five.

So I should get extra credit? I never took a day off for twenty years.

-Never took a day off of what?

The grocery cart! I pushed that thing from sunrise ‘till…

-But, but that’s not what I mean by working out. I’m talking about going for a run, or playing pick-up basketball.

Pick-up basketball? Are you kidding?

-That’s just an example. I guess, well I’ve never really thought about a grocery cart as a mode of exercise. But go ahead Ralph, tell me about it.

Ralph returned to his semi-relaxed position, his neck draped over the backrest’s chrome-painted plastic frame. Well, I got that cart at a junkyard. By the way, give me a five for theft. I know that question’s in there. But I never stole anything, I swear. Or would you give me a zero for theft? Because I stole zero things in my life. That cart was gonna get scrapped, and fifty others too.

They were left over when Wegmans bought Acme. And Wegmans wanted black shopping carts that didn’t get dirty, or look dirty, I guess. So they bought all those new black carts. Man they were slick. They never rusted, and those smooth rolling wheels, dual-pivots in the front. Man, I wanted one of those, but I’m not a thief. I just waited by the junkyard and when

59

those silver Acme carts rolled out, I picked out the smoothest roller. Yea she squeaked, but she was with me for twenty years. Betty had a way about her. I swear sometimes it was me who was getting pushed by her!

-Betty is your cart?

Yea man! Don’t judge me, I just, I mean we had a lot of time together. Oh and I was saying that we exercised a lot of endurance. On Thursdays, we walked all the way out to Varna. You should mark that down as a workout. Me and the owner of a restaurant there had a deal that I could take all his empty champagne bottles if I picked up all the cigarette butts outside his bar. Those champagne bottles man, they’re extra thick so they don’t explode. The glass is so thick that all the pressure from the bubbles in those bottles, all that pressure pops out the cork. You know, the path of least resistance and all. I got a buck a bottle for ‘em when I recycled down at Wegmans.

-Wait, what did you say about picking up cigarette butts?

Oh yea, that’s what I did for the champagne bottles. But hell, I would’ve done it for free because sometimes the butts were half-full. I call them shorties. Like people took a drag or two and realized how drunk they were. Then they toss those short cigarettes into the parking lot, and as long as it wasn’t raining, I found a handful of half-smoked cigarettes every time.

Man I made out like a bandit with a cart full of champagne bottles, smoking shorties all the way to Wegmans.

-Ohhh, that explains it.

Ralph watched as his interviewer scribbled frantically in-between glances to a computer screen. Say, man what are you talking about?

-Yeah, hold on one second. I just got your carbon footprint report. While it was loading I noticed a discrepancy. Here, look at this. God turned his computer towards Ralph, who now sat at the edge of his plastic chair. The green spots on the map are all of the cans and bottles you picked up. Oh, those dark green ones look like litter you picked up on the sidewalk. You see, that’s great, that’s what it takes to get into Heaven. Fifty thousand Flower Power bottles, that’s a record! But those red dots, you see, all the way from that restaurant in Varna to downtown by Wegmans. Yeah, those are the cigarette butts you dropped, no you LITTERED, after you smoked them. Once a cigarette it smoked, it becomes property of the smoker. Unfortunately, even though you picked up those butts, you ended up tossing them, LITTERING them. If we zoom in, we can see the quantity. Yea, over six thousand smoked and littered by you, Ralph, in the restaurant’s parking lot. Damn, three-hundred fifty dropped down the road within a fifty-foot perimeter of Belle Sherman Elementary School. This is not good, Ralph.

But that’s right on the way! How was I supposed to know I shouldn’t put them there?

-Because it’s an elementary school Ralph! Damn, you were doing so well until this popped up. All these infractions in a school zone are multiplied by one hundred, and oh no… it looks like twenty times in your life, school-children at recess saw you smoking. Do you know what kind of effect that has on a child’s brain development? And even worse, two of those times they saw you drinking out of a paper bag! Ralph, come on man! Those are multiplied by five thousand!

But what about all my cans and bottles? Don’t those cancel out?

-Yeah, about that. That’s not how the math works on Earth is it? I mean, you get five cents for a bottle, but in New York State a cigarette costs almost a dollar apiece! I wish I could help you out, but that’s just how the math works. At the end of the day, your life just doesn’t add up. But hey, you’re not the one to blame, Ralph. I’ll give you another shot down on Earth. Let me see… Oh perfect, my computer’s telling me a Mrs. Julie Scott is about to give birth any minute. She was sneaking shots and tossing shorties all throughout her pregnancy. Good luck Ralph, I mean, little baby Scott!

60

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