The College Hill Independent Vol. 34 Issue 8

THE

COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT A BROWN / RISD WEEKLY

APR 07 2017

34

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COVER

Pipersville Kearney McDonnell

NEWS 02

Week in Review Josh Kurtz, Katrina Northrop, & Sam Samore

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Crikey, Trade!

Hannah Maier-Katkin

METRO A BROWN / RISD WEEKLY VOLUME 34 / ISSUE 08 APRIL 08 2017

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For Better Wages Jack Brook

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Abondon Ship Patrick Orenstein

ARTS

FROM THE EDITORS Last week, I accidentally booked an 11:20PM flight instead one at 11:20AM. But I'm not the only one who's been having airplane trouble this week. Two 15-year-old girls were kicked of a United flight last Friday for wearing leggings (#LeggingGate). More seriously, Qatar Airways started lending laptops to business class passengers following the US and UK's laptop ban on flights from some Middle East airports.

I'm not exactly clear on how moving a potential explosive to the underbelly of a plane solves the problem, but at least some have been able to make light of the new laptop regulations. Royal Jordanian Air recently tweeted: "Every week a new ban Travel to the U.S. since you can We are now poets because of you son No one can ruin our in-flight fun We have good tips for everyone"

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Schutz Her Down Ruby Aiyo Gerber

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Rebel Rebel Lisa Borst

FEATURES Fresh Beef Erin West & Mitchell Johnson

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TECH Say it Don't Spray It Chris Packs

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METABOLICS

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Luckily, I will be keeping my feet on the ground for the foreseeable future.

VBlood Bonds V

V

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Dominique Pariso

LITERARY — SJ

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the girls who will train you Signe Swanson

EPHEMERA 15

Alcohol Ethan East

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Ask An Intellectual P

X 18

MANAGING EDITORS Will Tavlin Kelton Ellis Dolma Ombadykow

ARTS Ryan Rosenberg Will Weatherly Saanya Jain

NEWS Piper French Hannah Maier-Katkin Roksana Borzouei

FEATURES Julia Tompkins Erin West Andrew Deck

WEEK IN REVIEW Sam Samore

METABOLICS Dominique Pariso Elias Bresnick

METRO Shane Potts Jane Argodale Camila Ruiz Segovia Jack Brook

SCIENCE Fatima Husain Liz Cory

TECH Jonah Max Malcolm Drenttel

X Liby Hays Nicole Cochary

OCCULT Lance Gloss Robin Manley

LIST Alex Mapes-Frances

INTERVIEWS Patrick McMenamin LITERARY Stefania Gomez Isabelle Doyle EPHEMERA Anna Bonesteel

Letters to the editor are always welcome. The Independent, a family-run publication, is published weekly during the fall and spring semesters and is printed by TCI Press in Seekonk, MA.

STAFF WRITERS Eve Zelickson Marianna McMurdock Signe Swanson Josh Kurtz Zack Kligler Brionne Frazier Chris Packs Kion You

Something Fishy Nicole Cochary

ILLUSTRATIONS EDITOR Gabriel Matesanz

DESIGN EDITOR Chelsea Alexander

STAFF ILLUSTRATORS Ivan Rios-Fetchko Maria Cano-Flavia Teri Minogue Frans van Hoek Pia Mileaf-Patel Kela Johnson Anzia Anderson Isabelle Rea Claire Schlaikjer

DESIGN & LAYOUT Celeste Matsui Andrew Linder Ruby Stenhouse

COPY EDITOR Miles Taylor

SOCIAL MEDIA Jane Argodale Signe Swanson

WEB MANAGERS Charlie Windolf BUSINESS MANAGER Lance Gloss

SENIOR EDITORS Alec Mapes-Frances Sophie Kasakove Lisa Borst Jamie Packs MVP Chelsea Alexander THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT — 69 BROWN ST PO BOX 1930 PROVIDENCE, RI 02912

THEINDY.ORG / @THEINDY_TWEETS

WEEK IN HIGH SCHOOL Sam Samore, Josh Kurtz, and Brionne Frazier ILLUSTRATION BY Isabelle Rea DESIGN BY Chelsea Alexander BY

LET GRANDMA GO TO PROM

PRINCIPAL BOOSTED

SUSPENDED DEVELOPMENT

Prom is an eternal category, cutting across boundaries of time and space. Prom has no age. Prom is love.

Which makes it ridiculous that Eufala High School has decided not to allow Bryce Maine, a senior at the school, to bring his grandmother as his date to Prom.

The Huffington Post reported that Maine’s grandma, Catherine Maine, who he calls “Nanny,” never had the chance to go to prom. Hoping to introduce her to the beauty of Prom, Maine asked his grandma to the event by painting the word ‘PROM’ on a small piece of canvas, surrounded by his own handprints, also done in the painterly medium. Fortunately for Maine, his grandma accepted his offer. But unfortunately for Maine, his principal did not.

Steven Hawkins, Eufala High School’s principal, has one job. And he does this job well. He is responsible for making sure his students don’t drink at Prom.

Education is a secondary concern in comparison to the imperative to prevent underage alcohol consumption at Prom. Thus, Hawkins banned Grandma “Nanny” Maine for fear that she might bring alcohol. As Maine remembered it in a video posted to YouTube, he asked Hawkins to “Give me one reason why...And he said, ‘Alcohol. In case, she was trying to distribute it to minors.’”

The Maine’s proceeded to take the fight to a higher level: the school board. But again they were only met with disappointment. After all, the School board has their own job: ensuring that Eufala High School doesn’t become a mockery. And so, Maine’s cousin Sarah Catherine described on Facebook how “they think if he takes Nanny to prom then future students will do it as a joke and make the school a mockery!”

Alas, no triumphant victory for the Maines.

Should we be surprised at their bad luck? After all, they’re a family named Maine living in Alabama. But hope remains; Eufala High’s prom isn’t until April 8, and using the hashtags #letnannygotoprom and #letnanniegotoprom, you just might change the administrators’ minds. Let the students drink I say. Let the school be a mockery. Get Grandma to Prom!

A few days ago, Todd Wallack, an investigative reporter for the Boston Globe’s Spotlight team, tweeted a congratulatory message to the staff of the Booster Redux, which is Pittsburgh High School’s student newspaper—located in southeast Kansas. Over the past several days, the Redux has made local headlines after completing an investigation into Dr. Amy Robertson, who was hired as the school’s principal at the beginning of March. The investigation began after students discovered that Corllins University, where Robertson claimed to have received her masters and doctorate degrees, does not in fact exist. A quick Google search for Corllins University—whose motto is “The Place for Effective Learning & Education”—will take you to a ‘pissed consumers’ forum where several other individuals, including students who attempted to enroll in the university, express a similar concern.

The Redux staff, which includes five juniors and one senior, spent weeks investigating the various universities which Robertson claims that she attended.

Connor Balthazor, one of the Redux’s journalists, said to the Washington Post, “At the very beginning it was a little bit exciting. It was like in the movies, a big city journalist chasing down a lead.” Though Robertson maintained that she attended the fake university before it lost its accreditation, she also could not provide a transcript from the University of Tulsa, where she claimed to receive her undergraduate degree. Furthermore, in a conference call with the newspaper, Robertson apparently “presented incomplete answers, conflicting dates and inconsistencies in her response.”

In an article about the controversy, Samantha Schmidt of the Washington Post reported that under Kansas state law, student journalists are protected from administrative censorship, which gave the Redux staff both the freedom to pursue the investigation and, as newspaper advisor Emily Smith commented, a responsibility to “get the story right.” After the Redux’s investigation was released—and after an anonymous letter entitled “Pittsburgh Citizen X” was circulated throughout the town—Robertson resigned on Tuesday night. The Pittsburgh board of education quickly and unanimously accepted her decision. The Redux’s reporting has received praise from both local and national journalists. Having recently watched the film Spotlight, the students were excited to learn that Todd Wallack had tweeted about their endeavor. As for Balthazar, now known to this reporter as ‘Deepthroat,’ he doesn’t know if he wants to pursue a career in journalism. Why pursue a doomed career in investigative journalism when you can win an Academy Award playing a print media dinosaur in a critically acclaimed Hollywood feature?

There are many instances in which strictly enforced rules can result in a great lack of productivity. Police officers forgive some drivers for exceeding the speed limit. It would be unrealistic, though legal, to give a speeding ticket to any driver cruising at 36 MPH on a 35 MPH road. Likewise, suspending every student who skips class in high school would probably result in the suspension of half the school.

However, this was a risk Principal Lisa Love of Harrisburg High School in Pennsylvania was willing to take.

The new principal, who began in January, announced that students who had skipped at least one week’s worth of classes over a period of 45 days were to serve a one day suspension. 500 out of 1,100 students were given suspension notices throughout the last week in March. The school stated that these suspensions were administered as an admonition to at-risk students for whom education was not a priority.

The district holds one of the lowest standardized test scores and graduation rates in the nation, and Love is committed to transforming the students’ attitudes toward their education.

According to the administration, the best punishment for students who do not want to be in class is to give them a day off of class.

The students of Harrisburg had few qualms with the school itself, but rather with sitting through classes. Most of the students who skipped classes remained on campus and socialized in common areas such as the gymnasium, locker rooms, and bathrooms.

Fox 43 news reported that approximately 100 parents met with Love to discuss issues surrounding absences, both excused and unexcused. While some were frustrated and argued that suspensions would be unsuccessful at incentivising class participation, others saw it as an opportunity for better communication with the administration.

Love was hired in order to radically improve the academic standing of the public high school. Whether her hotly debated approach will usher in the intended transformation or not, she contributed to a much needed discussion about the many barriers to student performance—barriers such as not being allowed to go to class. Keeping students in class reduces the amount of time they can “wreak havoc upon the school,” as she told reporters at PennLive.

Imagine the cataclysm that must ensue as a result of students talking in the locker room. Next, students will be skipping the lunch lines in apocalyptic numbers and passing love notes in class, acts of tomfoolery that can certainly disturb the delicate balance of high school. Maybe we’ll see these added to the growing list of suspendable offenses.

-SS

-JK

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

-BF

NEWS

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IN PURSUIT OF A LIVING WAGE When working hard isn't enough

BY Jack

Brook

DESIGN BY Chelsea Alexander

Marcia Ranglin-Vassell knows what it’s like to struggle to provide for herself and her family on a minimum wage salary. A Rhode Island State Representative for Providence County, Ranglin-Vassell (D-5) also understands how difficult upward mobility can be for people whose earnings do not allow them to fully accommodate a basic standard of living.

“I was the mom who had to choose between coats and milk, cereal versus paying rent,” she told a group of Rhode Islanders who convened on March 23 at Jerry’s Salon in downtown Providence, to discuss the future of the state’s minimum wage law. She explained that she believed the ability to earn a living wage should be a human right.

“Many families are going rent-to-rent, paycheck-to-paycheck,” Rep. Ranglin-Vassell said. “I think it is a disgrace that people have to work 80 hours a week and they still live in poverty. That is just unacceptable.”

Ranglin-Vassell, along with Senator Jeanine Calkin (D-30), recently co-sponsored a bill presented before the Rhode Island general assembly designed to increase the state’s minimum wage from $9.60 to $11 starting in 2018.

If approved, an additional dollar would be added yearly until 2022, ultimately yielding a $15 minimum wage across the state.

According to the 2016 Rhode Island Standard of Need—a biannual study produced by the Economic Progress Institute that documents the cost of living in the state—this change is badly needed. The study reports that a minimum wage of $9.60 does not enable Rhode Islanders working forty hours a week year round to meet their basic needs—adequate food, shelter, transportation, and childcare and healthcare. Currently, over a third of single adults in Rhode Island don't have the means to do so. Individuals relying on the minimum wage fall $6000 short of RISN’s projected $25,751 cost of living in the state. For individual adults to actually provide for themselves solely off their salary, the minimum hourly wage would have to be increased to $12.38.

For single-parent families, the numbers only worsen.

Over three-quarters of single parents with two or more children are unable to support their family’s basic needs.

They would have to earn $30 an hour to cover these expenses, even though fewer than a third of jobs in Rhode Island meet this standard, with the average hourly pay across the state around $18.

Meanwhile, as RISN notes, housing and childcare costs have skyrocketed, taking up over half of a typical family’s budget. A survey from the Rhode Island Department of Labor estimates that childcare for a family with two children costs $1,487 monthly, and affordable

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housing averages $972. There isn’t much breathing room for other important expenses, whether healthcare or gas money, let alone the cost of school or extracurricular activities. Even relatively stable two-parent families are struggling to live off a minimum wage in Rhode Island— RISN reports that each parent must work over 64 hours to support their family of four, decreasing the amount of quality time parents can spend with their children. +++ Although Rhode Island has had several minimum wage increases since 2012, when the minimum wage was $7.40, last year the general assembly rejected Governor Raimondo’s proposed 50 cent increase. Many in the house who voted against a 2016 increase felt that too much too soon could cripple small businesses. “Four years in a row is a lot of increases,” House Speaker Nicholas A. Mattiello (D) said at the time. “We need to let the business community absorb it, apply it, and just give them a little bit of a reprieve.”

However, Douglas Hall, Director of Economic Analysis at the Economic Progress Institute of Rhode Island, believes that those who oppose a minimum wage increase are basing their reasons for doing so on stereotypes such as the false assumption that most people working minimum wage jobs are teenagers. Additionally, many believe that increasing the minimum wage would hamper economic growth for small businesses.

“Because of the impact of inflation, any year in which we do not increase the minimum wage, we are effectively giving our lowest paid workers in this state a wage cut,” Hall testified before the RI general assembly in February.

As Hall pointed out, the fear of putting undue stress

on businesses is largely unfounded, since Rhode Island workers are making only one dollar an hour more than they did in 2000, when their wages are adjusted for inflation.

Supporters of a minimum wage increase recognize that in order to pass the bill it is imperative to debunk the myths surrounding minimum wage. As it turns out, the majority of minimum wage earners are full time workers who are over 25 years of age. Additionally, a substantial number of these wage earners are the sole provider of their family. In other words, most people don’t use the minimum to supplement their income— they rely on it to live.

“By living wages, I mean more than a bare subsistence level—I mean the wages of a decent living,” Frank Delano Roosevelt said in 1933, five years before his administration established the first federal minimum wage.

The consequence of having a significant portion of the working population unable to live off their wages means that many end up turning to public assistance programs.

“People use these programs as a subsidy for their low wages and that is a problem,” Michael Araujo, executive director of Rhode Island Jobs with Justice, told the Independent. “That’s because anyone who is working full time should not need to use public assistance. It’s not to say that those people are lesser human beings, but that employers have an obligation to society to pay people the actual value for what they are doing.”

Moreover, while programs like Rhode Island Works and Supplemental Security Income may offer forms of cash assistance, these resources are often not enough to fully support families. For example, despite heightened costs of living, Rhode Island Works has not increased its monthly benefit amount of $554 for a family of three for thirty years.

Other resources, like subsidized childcare, also have the potential to play an important role in alleviating the gap between income and the cost of living. Rhode Island’s Child Care Assistance Program, the RISN report emphasizes, has been tremendously beneficial to low-income parents. However, its availability is limited to those whose incomes are 180 percent above the federal poverty rate, which means that many people who could still benefit from the program fail to qualify. The federal poverty rate—developed in the 1960s—bases its guidelines off what the Economic Progress Institute considers to be obsolete standards, generating a onesize fits all calculation that does not take into account varying costs of living across the state or the increase in housing or childcare costs. The result is that the Rhode Island Standard of Living for both single and two parent families is over two and a half times greater than the federal poverty rate.

Those bearing the brunt of this burden are mainly people of color and women, an economic fact that bodes ill for Rhode Island’s future. By 2040, EPI estimates that workers of color in Rhode Island will have increased by 80 percent from 2010 and will represent nearly 40 percent of the labor force. Although wages across all racial and ethnic groups have been largely stagnant for the past decade, the average household income for whites is double that of Black and Latinx people. Likewise, many of the employment sectors that most employ Black and Latinx workers are concentrated in areas like healthcare,

APRIL 07, 2017

social assistance, and retail, which all pay well below the average state wage. In addition, a disproportionate amount of women and people of color are required to take on informal and unpaid forms of labor like childcare and elder support.

There are many intersecting structural issues that perpetuate these economic disparities along racial and gendered lines—from poorly funded public education to the prison industrial complex. Yet the Economic Progress Institute and politicians like representative Ranglin-Vassell see a livable wage as a fundamental first step to making progress in social justice issues across the board, from matters of education to incarceration. It might not be able to alter the deeply entrenched in the ways intergenerational wealth impact access to housing mortgages and higher education, but advocates insist that it is a necessary reform to level the playing field.

Providence City Council President Luis Aponte says that Rhode Island must continue to place value on minimum wage increases and the public support programs that often go hand-in-hand. Helping low-income families and individuals gain upward mobility through wage increases—particularly in sectors heavily employing people of color—will have long term benefits for the state as a whole.

“Some people look at them as wasteful entitlement programs,” Aponte told the Independent. “But if we are careful in our analysis we can see they are really economic investment strategies that stabilize the workforce and provide incentives that lead to greater economic gains.” +++ Nevertheless, the push to increase the minimum wage has faced stiff resistance from the business sector, with lobbyists expressing skepticism as to whether it would actually achieve the intended results of economic growth.

“We don’t have any information as to what percentage of the federal minimum wage we should stay within,” Elizabeth Suever, a lobbyist for the Greater Providence Chamber of Commerce, testified to the RI assembly on February 7. “We want to know how much higher we should go and not harm small businesses that have to make payroll.” She noted that a correlation of minimum wage increases with economic growth did not necessarily prove causation and called for additional studies to justify moving forward with an increase. Yet, as Araujo counters, studies like the Economic Progress Institute’s biannual report attest to the positive impact that minimum wage increases have on the larger economy.

Other lobbyists, like Lenette Boiselle on behalf of the Rhode Island Chamber of Commerce, argued that employers needed “reliability and consistency” in the wages they were expected to pay and that an increase in wages would mean a ripple effect of increased insurance and workers compensation; essentially, the argument that higher minimum wage hinders businesses.

However, advocates assert that for those living on minimum wage, any increase in disposable income they receive will be put back into the economy, as a comprehensive 2013 study by the Chicago Federal Reserve Bank supports. Focusing solely on cost savings for businesses, advocates contend, merely results in lost economic potential.

Yet some Rhode Island legislators have expressed

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

that an increase in minimum wage will take away jobs from teenagers and have introduced a measure designed to counter this perceived threat. Two representatives— Marc Cote (D-24) and Ryan William Pearson (D-19)— proposed a bill this year for a so-called “opportunity wage” that would allow employers to pay 75 percent of the state minimum wage to workers 18 or younger for their first three months or 680 hours on the job. While their stated rationale for the bill is to allow teenagers and younger workers have access to the labor market, minimum wage advocates says that such a proposal would hurt everyone except for business owners and corporations. For low income teenagers in particular, the total income lost over these three months—$1,632 in total—has a negative impact on their ability to supplement their family’s income or pay for higher education. Meanwhile, it would keep older workers out of the market as employers could cycle through teen workers perpetually, ultimately skirting the requirement to provide a sufficient livable wage.

As state senator Jeanine Calkin noted on her public Facebook page, “The only ‘opportunity’ I see with this bill is the opportunity for business to take advantage of young people in order to make even more profit.”

But above all, supporters of the minimum wage increase ask that legislators view workers first and foremost as human beings. “Employees aren’t widgets so when we use those high school economic metrics that if x goes up y goes up that’s not exactly how it works,” Araujo testified. “Human beings don’t move like products they move like human beings and they have different costs and different needs; very important that when we consider the minimum wage we consider them as people and not as simple balance sheet items.”

small increase in minimum wage could make a tangible difference in their lives. The EPI estimates that just a 50 cent increase for the next year alone would augment wages for 78,000 RI workers (nearly 16 percent of the total workforce) by $26.9 million.

Other legislation in the works that could provide relief for those working minimum wage jobs includes a bill that would grant all Rhode Island workers seven days of paid sick leave.

“A lot of minimum wage jobs don’t come with good benefits like earned sick days,” Abby Godino, director of Working Families Rhode Island, told the Independent.

“If you miss out on work and are not compensated for it, that can be a huge dent in your budget and put you behind on rent.”

At the panel, Shirley Lombard, who works in a nursing home, reminisced about the older days when a factory job could provide sufficient income. “In the mid ’80s to early ’90s I was working in jewelry factory making $13 an hour in the ’90s, why isn’t it possible to make that today?” she said.

Still, with the possibility of an increasing minimum wage, Lombard remained cautiously optimistic about the future.

“It would mean that I don’t have to work two or three jobs and can stick with one and spend time with my children and still support my family.”

JACK BROOK B’19 encourages you to support RI Jobs with Justice or Rhode Island Working Families in any way you can, whether by calling your district’s representative or by donating at rijwj.wordpress.com/donate/ or workingfamilies.org/rhode-island

+++ At last week’s panel discussion, a variety of Rhode Island residents reflected on their difficult experiences living and working on minimum wage.

One panelist, Karen Baldwin, director of care and support staff at Blackstone Valley, a home for developmentally disabled adults, laid out the particulars of her financial situation. She says that she pays $900 a month for rent—utilities excluded—and $100 to fuel her car, a requirement for her job. She only makes $1200 working full time.

“It’s poverty wages,” Baldwin says. “If I don’t work 60-80 hours a week I can’t pay my bills and have money for food.”

But Baldwin and others expressed hope that even a

METRO

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POLITICS DOWN UNDER

Renegotiating Australian-Chinese Partnerships Hannah Maier-Katkin ILLUSTRATION BY Claire Schlaikjer DESIGN BY Dolma Ombadykow BY

On Tuesday, March 28, after weeks of warming relations with The People’s Republic of China, Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull abruptly canceled a parliamentary vote to ratify an extradition treaty for which he had been a staunch advocate. The agreement would allow for Chinese citizens, who had been convicted in China and subsequently fled to Australia for political asylum, to be sent back. China already has signed extradition treaties with Spain and France, and others under negotiation with Canada and New Zealand. Due to a lack of transparency in Chinese legal processes, those sent back to China face returning to the death penalty. China is eager to broker the deal because, according to the South China Post, Australia has become a “haven for fugitives of the Law,” especially individuals connected with “international terrorism, transnational crime…drug trafficking,” and corruption among party officials. Under the treaty, China would need to provide evidence to substantiate charges.

Since January, Australia has attempted to improve relations with China after Donald Trump renounced and formally abandoned the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). President Trump berated Prime Minister Turnbull during a phone call in February, when, according to the Washington Post, he refused to honor a previous agreement to offer asylum to 1,250 refugees who have been temporarily settled in Australia. He then reportedly cited his staggering victory in the Electoral College before brusquely hanging up. While Australia turns, or rather is turned, away from The States, there remains a looming question of what kind of diplomatic relationship will take its place. +++ Citing concerns about China’s human rights record, the Australian Parliament’s refusal to sign the extradition treaty with China last week signals larger ideological roadblocks in their current political relationship.

Initial Australian interest in this agreement was an indication of the government’s desire to collaborate more with China moving forward. The abrupt refusal to introduce the treaty to Parliament—because of the vehement opposition from members all major parties— is most significant as a symbolic marker that, even as the US alienates its support among Australians, many remain apprehensive about Chinese influence.

While Australia has worked to maintain strong diplomatic ties with the United States for military security, China remains Australia’s largest single trade partner. Australia has accordingly worked to retain positive relationships with both of these major global powers while they remain politically at odds. However, the BBC notes, there has been a greater shift toward China in recent years. Stephen FitzGerald, Australia’s first ambassador to China, insisted in his speech to Parliament on March 16, “We are living in a Chinese world,” speaking in favor of bolstering Australia’s political bond with the Chinese government. Economic ties between Australia and China have remained

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NEWS

strong, according to a recent report on China from the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, because of China’s great demand for Australian iron, ore, natural gas, and coal. The Department further details their relationship with China by outlining the growing economic partnerships that have developed since diplomatic relations were first established in 1972. But they’ve worked to keep business and politics separate.

Tony Abbott, former Prime Minister and current member of Parliament from Turnbull’s own Liberal Party, remains outspoken about, and adamantly opposed to, strengthening Sino-Australian relations.

He cites “problems with China’s legal system,” with regards to human rights abuses and lack of transparency, as noted in the Sydney Morning Herald. While Abbott has emerged as the leader of opposition in Parliament, he was notably responsible for negotiating the China-Australia Free Trade Agreement (ChAFTA) as Prime Minister. ChAFTA went into effect in December of 2015. Bolstered through this agreement, trade with China accounts for a third of Australian exports as well the the majority of foreign business investment in Australia.

In a scene fit for reality television, Abbott discredited Turnbull on the Parliament floor by revealing confidential information from his term as Prime Minister that would dissuade fellow members from supporting the extradition agreement. Amnesty International also warned the Australian Parliament not to increase ties with the Chinese government because they “increasingly and routinely [apply] the death penalty and… torture and other ill treatment against criminals and suspects.”

While China’s human rights record is egregious, the United States—the self-appointed leader and policer of the ‘Free World’—is not the moral touchstone it fancies itself to be. As Trump’s government begins flippantly relinquishing certain diplomatic obligations, it is uncertain how powers will shift on the global stage, although Western states remain hesitant to look outside of their cultural value systems for greater political collaboration. +++ The refusal of this extradition treaty comes at time when many wondered whether China would join TPP in place of the US. TPP was at the forefront of Obama’s foreign policy in Asia over the course of his presidency. He looked to strengthen ties with Asian trade partners while purposefully excluding China in order to curb its growing political influence and economic dominance in the region. The New York Times has described TPP as “the largest trade accord in history,” encompassing the US and 11 countries who border the Pacific Ocean: Australia, Brunei, Canada, Chile,

Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Singapore, and Vietnam. This group also accounts for approximately one third of world trade.

TPP has also come to stand as a symbol of, what Noam Chomsky calls “a neoliberal assault”: the deal advances corporate interests by limiting regulations and promoting American economic power across the world.

While this critique of neoliberalism is not present in the American political debate, TPP became a hot-button issue in the 2016 election. The trade deal was disparaged on both sides of the aisle for promoting further outsourcing of manufacturing jobs. On the campaign trail, Bernie Sanders vehemently opposed TPP, calling it a “race to the bottom” that would lower American wages. On his first day in office, Trump fulfilled a campaign promise by dropping out of the TPP. He declared, “We’re going to stop the ridiculous trade deals that have taken everybody out of our country,” a statement which broke from decades of American foreign and economic policy. +++ Both the abandonment of TPP and Trump’s callous handling of his phone conversation with Turnbull can be understood as significant steps backward for America’s relationship with Australia. In November of 2011, the Sydney Morning Herald reported that President Obama—on a diplomatic trip Down Under—referred to the US relationship with Australia as “a great alliance,” one that had been fostered through strong political and military collaboration as well as “billions of dollars in investment and trade.” Much of this partnership has also been tied to TPP, which was signed in 2016 after more than a decade of diplomatic negotiations.

Trump’s foreign policy has thus far entailed consistent antagonization of US allies and government isolationism in favor of private business interests. This paradigm shift may open the possibility of greater Chinese political preeminence across the globe. For the US to now discard TPP is not only a major affront to Asian trade partners but also, at least theoretically, an open door for Chinese interests.

But this narrative—that the Australian government would move to collaborate more significantly with China after unsavory experiences with the new US administration—appears overly simplistic. China has engaged in what the Australian terms a “charm offensive,” marketing itself as a more appealing political partner than Trump’s America. While Prime Minister Turnbull initially noted the greater possibility of incorporating China in TPP, this sentiment stalled once words were put to paper. Hesitance to partner with the Chinese government should leave some officials wondering: perhaps the world doesn’t need a policer after all.

HANNAH MAIER-KATKIN B’18 doesn’t see any high ground.

APRIL 07, 2017

BLACK FACES, WHITE SPACES

Reflections on Dana Schutz’s Open Casket Ruby Aiyo Gerber ILLUSTRATION BY Maria Cano-Flavia BY

content warning: anti-Black violence On a gray and rainy Tuesday, I decided to make the pilgrimage from my home in Brooklyn to the of the Whitney Museum of American Art’s new riverside location for its 2017 Biennial, which opened on March 16. Through social media I had tracked the controversy surrounding a painting called Open Casket, in this particular biennial, and wanted to experience the painting within its context. I arrived at the large modern glass building, a flashy extension of the Manhattan Highline. My first thought concerned the wealth that was contained within the hard, cubicle-like white walls of the museum. Without stepping inside the edifice, I had a sense of what I’d encounter, just from looking at its façade. To no surprise, the crowd was composed of mostly well-dressed white patrons. This is not to say that there were no other people of color visiting— there were indeed a handful wandering the space who stood out amongst a sea of white.

In How Racism Takes Place, a book by Black studies scholar George Lipsitz, he writes that the conception of white spaces “does not emerge simply or directly from the embodied indemnities of people who are white. It is inscribed in the physical contours of the places where we live, work, and play, and it is bolstered by financial rewards for whiteness.” While no sign hangs on the door when you walk into a museum like the Whitney that says ‘no coloreds,’ it is figuratively hung on the walls; where lack of representation in art takes the place of old signs of segregation. Class dynamics, too, add to the problem—unlike other museums in New York, the Whitney charges fixed prices which are rather high, with adult tickets selling for $22, students and senior tickets for $18, narrowing access to the museum’s space.

Upon arriving at the Whitney, I took the elevator up to the 5th floor and made my way to a painting in the back: Dana Schutz’s Open Casket, depicting Emmett Till’s brutalized dead body in a casket, with a white flower resting on his stomach. The painting recalls the severe and abstract style of painter Francis Bacon. Schutz is white, and this is where the controversy begins.

“I am writing to ask you to remove Dana Schutz’s painting Open Casket and with the urgent recommendation that the painting be destroyed and not entered into any market or museum…Although Schutz’s intention may be to present white shame, this shame is not correctly represented as a painting of a dead Black boy by a white artist—those non-Black artists who sincerely wish to highlight the shameful nature of white violence should first of all stop treating Black pain as raw material…The painting must go.”

The open letter, initially shared on Facebook, included the signatures of a number of artists. Responses were divided. Lew and Locks said in a statement, “By exhibiting the painting we wanted to acknowledge the importance of this extremely consequential and solemn image in American and African-American history and the history of race relations in this country.” Many artists of color supported Black’s stance, while a handful of others were more wary. Artist-activist Coco Fusco wrote in Hyperallergic, “I find it alarming and entirely wrongheaded to call for the censorship and destruction of an artwork, no matter what its content is or who made it.” On her Instagram feed, the celebrated African American artist Kara Walker said, “The history of painting is full of graphic violence and narratives that don’t necessarily belong to the artist’s own life... a lot of art often lasts longer than the controversies that greet it. I say this as a shout to every artist and artwork that gives rise to vocal outrage.

Perhaps it too gives rise to deeper inquiries and better art. It can only do this when it is seen.”

+++

Upon seeing the painting myself, it was hard for me to separate the controversy from the work. Before I arrived at the Whitney that day, I knew that I was going to see a depiction of the Black body in art that would challenge me. The painting itself did not align with my own artistic sensibilities. I found it to be derivative and not a huge departure from Schutz’s other work. Nevertheless, the painting’s subject matter made it worthy of further consideration. I had a strong visceral response to the painting.

Was it the conversation swirling around the painting, the presence of a painting of a Black man by a white artist in a white space, or was it the disturbing imagery? I decided that it was irreducibly all three.

If part of the artist’s intent had been to bring about these questions, would the controversy around the paintings be different? In an interview in Artnet Schutz states, “I don’t know what it is like to be Black in America. But I do know what it is like to be a mother. Emmett was Mamie Till’s only son. I thought about the possibility of painting it only after listening to interviews with her. … I made this painting to engage with the loss.” Schutz, by avoiding the racial dimensions of Emmett Till’s death, ignores and devalues Mamie Till’s demands to keep talking about racism and America’s legacy of white-on-Black violence.

Open Casket was painted under the assumption that we live in a post-racial America, in which Schutz can create a work of art about lynching without acknowledging the legacy of white appropriation of the Black voice. She created the work specifically for the Whitney’s audience, and that spectacle is part of the presentation.

Schutz’s quoted in Artnet as saying, “I made this painting in August of 2016 after a summer that felt like a state of emergency ... The photograph of Emmett Till felt analogous to the time: what was hidden was now revealed.” In doing so, she unwittingly opened up a conversation about the way in which the violated Black body has been put on display for public consumption. Ironically, she became guilty of perpetrating the very horror of the events she was critiquing.

I believe the destruction of art can awaken some of our more fascistic impulses. We only need look back to the war conservative politicians waged against the National Endowment for the Arts during the ’80s and ’90s. Black artists such as Dread Scott became targets of white conservative ire for their confrontational work.

Institutions that supported free expression of artists came under siege for work that challenged the status quo. If anything, Open Casket has continued to fuel our conversations around inclusion and censorship, forcing mainstream institutions like the Whitney to respond to the growing demands of multiculturalism in America. Until artists of color have equal access to reflect their realities, the story of America will continue to be told through the white gaze and, as a result, fragmented and incomplete—merely a pure abstraction.

It’s necessary to know the story of Emmett Till before talking about a painting of his body. Emmett Till was not a Southern boy. He was born in Chicago, Illinois in 1941 to mother Mamie Till. He arrived August 21, 1955 in Money, Mississippi, in the Deep South, where he was going to stay with family. On August 24, he and some of his cousins went to a local store for some refreshments. The store was owned by a white couple, Roy and Carolyn Bryant. Emmett went into the store to buy a pack of bubble gum, while the other boys waited out front. Emmett’s 17-year-old cousin Wheeler Parker told Jet, “Somebody said there was ‘a pretty lady’ in the store and Bobo [Emmett Till] said he was going inside to buy some bubble gum. After a while, we went in and got Bobo but he stopped in the doorway and whistled at the lady.” In a recent interview with Professor Timothy B. Tyson of Duke University, Bryant revealed that she had lied about Emmett Till’s whistle. The truth, however, came out decades too late.

At 2AM on August 28, seven days after Emmett had arrived in Money, the vigilantes came. Emmett and his family were asleep when Roy Bryant and his half-brother J.W. Milam broke in and kidnapped Emmett Till from the Wright house. What happened next was truly horrific. The two men, Milam and Bryant, took a still-sleepy Emmett to the bank of Tallahatchie River, where they shot him behind his left ear. For the two white men, this fatal gunshot wound was not sufficient punishment for a child who whistled at a white woman. The two men closed a large metal fan around Emmett’s neck, fastened tight with barbed wire. The fan they used was made for ginning cotton. They threw his unconscious body into the dark water.

On September 2, Mamie Till demanded an open casket for her son’s funeral. She invited the press, because she wanted America to see how racism and white supremacy had grossly deformed her son. From this bold act she had hoped for change. +++ The Whitney is no stranger to controversies. In 2014, writers and educators Eunsong Kim and Maya Isabella Mackrandilal co-authored a piece for the New Inquiry in which they critiqued the Biennial’s half-hearted attempts to make the space inclusive. They wrote, “The insertion of people of color into white space doesn’t make it less colonial or more radical—that’s the rhetoric of imperialistic multiculturalism, a bullshit passé theory. What’s more, the 2014 Whitney Biennial didn’t even bother to insert more people of color.” That year, 32 percent of the artists were women and 7.6 percent were people of color. Responding to this criticism, the arts collective HOWDOYOUSAYYAMINAFRICAN? withdrew from the Biennial. Since then, the Biennial administrators have made a concerted effort to be more inclusive, but continue to draw accusations of tokenism and pandering to broader audiences.

As I looked at Open Casket, a couple behind me discussed the price of putting paint to its canvas. Here was a white couple discussing the cost of a Black boy’s dead, deformed body.

Here were white people commodifying Black suffering—a lynching recurring all over again within the white walls of the Whitney.

London-based Black artist Hannah Black called for the work to be removed, generating angry letters and a firestorm of responses on social media. In her open letter to the Biennial’s curators,Christopher Y. Lew and Mia Locks, Black said,

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+++

RUBY AIYO GERBER B’20 asks you to think about the spaces you occupy.

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FARM TO BARGAINING TABLE The farmworker fight against exploitation by fast food

BY Mitchell

Johnson and Erin West Gabriel Matesanz DESIGN BY Celeste Matsui ILLUSTRATION BY

“Wendy’s, escucha la voz del pueblo porque nosotros somos el pueblo y nosotros he mandamos justicia,” farmworker Lupe Gonzalo announced to a crowd of several hundred people in Columbus, Ohio. Gonzalo is a leader of the Coalition of Imokalee Workers (CIW), one of the largest farm labor organizations in the US. On March 26, the CIW held a march in Columbus to demand attention from Wendy’s, the last major fast-food chain that refuses to meet the coalition’s fair labor demands.

We, along with students from universities across the country, attended the march in support of the CIW. Overhead, the sky threatened rain, ponchos were being distributed. The crowd cheered through the first drops of rain when Gonzalo spoke, and then cheered again as a translator repeated her message in English: “Wendy’s: it’s time to listen to the voice of the people, because we are the people and we demand justice.”

Since 2016, the CIW has been targeting Wendy’s, the last major fast food chain not to join the CIW’s Fair Food Program (FFP). The FFP consists of a contract between CIW and food franchises that pledge to source their ingredients from participating farms with humane labor practices and reasonable wages. Since 2011, the CIW has succeeded in pressuring major corporations including Burger King, McDonalds, Chipotle, and Trader Joe’s into signing the agreement, but Wendy’s has yet to come on board.

The CIW was founded in 1993 by a group of tomato-pickers in Imokalee, Florida—home to the state’s multi-million-dollar tomato growing industry. During its earlier years, the coalition organized community-wide work stoppages and hunger strikes to protest low wages and worker abuse by supervisors on various tomato farms in southern Florida. During the 2000s, the CIW expanded, moving beyond the farms and targeting major corporate buyers, including a nationwide boycott of Taco Bell. Student groups across the United States joined the CIW in the boycott and pushed several universities to cut contracts with Taco Bell. After four years, Taco Bell agreed to extensive demands, which included additional compensation to field workers and a detailed code of conduct that addressed workplace concerns such as sexual assault in the field.

The CIW’s successful campaign garnered national attention and significantly grew the coalition’s membership. It also led to the founding of Student/Farmworker Alliance groups, which became integral to the CIW’s future organizing efforts. Building off the Taco Bell campaign, the CIW pushed for an agreement with the Florida Tomato Growers Exchange to create and implement the Fair Food Program. The Coalition has since won recognition from major governmental bodies including the UN and the White House. The FFP, which has been implemented on 90 percent of southern

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Florida’s tomato farms, was heralded in the New York Times as “the best workplace-monitoring program... in the US.” +++ Despite the CIW’s track record in getting several powerful corporations to comply with worker demands, the coalition’s success has stalled in the recent Wendy’s campaign. In addition to not signing the FFP, the chain stopped purchasing tomatoes from Florida entirely and began sourcing from Mexico. The CIW notes that declining to sign on to the FFP allows Wendy’s to spend less on tomatoes than their fast-food competitors, who have signed the agreement.

In fall 2016, the Wendy’s marketing department published a post on their blog, The Square Deal, directly addressing the CIW campaign: “Why does CIW have a problem with Wendy’s? Because we buy a lot of tomatoes for which they don’t receive any money.” The post reflects prior attempts by Wendy’s to frame the CIW as self-serving and purely financially-motivated.

Wendy’s issue is that the agreement would require them to, in their words, “pay another company’s employees.” The CIW, however, sees buyers like Wendy’s as integrally connected to workers at the bottom of the supply chain—even if growers, not fast-food companies, directly employ farmworkers.

Because large food giants buy in massive quantities, they wield significant influence on the wholesale prices of produce and subsequently, on farmworker wages.

The CIW demands that these same corporations be responsible for supplementing the depressed wages they help create. The reason why the CIW negotiates with corporate buyers instead of their direct employers, growers, is that federal law prohibits agricultural workers from formal unionization. The National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) of 1935 provided protections for workers to form unions but excepted, “any individual employed as an agricultural laborer.” This exemption, which also includes domestic workers, has been criticized on the grounds that these two labor sectors have roots in slavery and are still primarily comprised of workers of color.

In other sectors, the CIW’s grievances would be raised to direct employers. Due to the NLRA restriction, however, the CIW negotiates further up the supply chain. The FFP is a unique solution to the CIW’s position as a labor rights group. The program includes multiple stipulations, the most significant being a onecent-per-pound premium that fast food companies pay on their tomatoes, which, once compounded, results in increased farmworker wages. The New York Times

estimated that this would bring an average farmworker’s wage from $10,000 a year to $17,000 a year—a dramatic increase, yet still well below a livable wage. The FFP also requires that buyers hold growers accountable to fair labor conditions such as providing shade tents, forming a worker-led health and safety committee, and accurately counting workers’ hours.

The work of implementing the FFP is largely done by workers themselves. Among other requirements, farmworkers lead the FFP’s mandated review boards, which ensure that growers abide by the agreement. This reflects the CIW’s larger principle of centering workers’ leadership in their organization, as they believe that “workers are the only actors in the supply chain with a vital and abiding interest in seeing their rights effectively monitored and enforced.” +++ Wendy’s markets itself as socially responsible despite ignoring worker demands. In March 2017, the company released the first of a new video series called, “Profiles in Quality: From Start to Fresh” which highlights their sourcing from small, local growers. “Wendy’s practiced

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the farm-to-table model before the term even existed,” the intro to the video states. However, it focuses only on a select ingredient, lettuce, and one location, distracting from a more complete picture of their vast and varied business practices—both ethical and unethical ones.

Amongst the video’s lush dew-covered lettuce fields (sourced from two overall-clad brothers in California), tomatoes are noticeably absent.

With this pointed ad campaign, Wendy’s joins other major fast food chains in a marketing trend of the past several years: emphasizing food quality, freshness, and selectively-ethical sourcing for specific ingredients—something Slate termed “The Fresh Wars” in 2013. ‘Freshness,’ in these ads, becomes a catch-all word, implying quality food ingredients while conjuring an image of the wholesome, local farm—free from the labor violations of industrial agriculture. These efforts to appear socially-responsible are a shallow cooptation of the work that labor, environmental, and other organizing groups have done for years to combat structural injustice wrought by corporations. As corporations attempt to entice consumers with ‘feel-good’ marketing, they assuage concerns about quality food production while actively masking labor injustices.

The CIW has a different understanding of ethical consumption: “As the women and men who harvest tomatoes for multi-billion dollar corporations like Wendy’s,” they state in a press release, “we believe ‘quality’ is not simply measured by the taste of a piece of fruit by also buy the guarantee of dignity and fundamental human rights for those of us who pick it.”

If “freshness” advertising co-opts messaging from labor-rights groups, “brand busting,” a staple tactic of the CIW, is the opposite: many of their campaigns mobilize an easily-recognizable corporate logo in order to “twist it into a surprising or different form,” says CIW organizer Lucas Benitez in an article for Civil Eats. The Taco Bell boycott featured the company’s ubiquitous bell logo, and adapted the corporation’s most famous slogan into the simple but effective “yo no quiero Taco Bell.” For the Wendy’s campaign, Wendy’s red braids have been repurposed as a logo for the boycott—they are plastered on signs, posters, and hats that read “Boycott Wendy’s.”

One such sign, in the company’s signature font, reads: “Wendy’s: Old-fashioned Exploitation.” +++ During the march, as people were buffeted by rain, an organizer yelled out to the crowd. “Estan mojados?!

Estan cansados?!” Are you wet? Are you tired? “Qué es eso?!” the group responded in unison. What is that?

With the march in Columbus, farmworkers in the CIW made themselves visible, refusing to allow Wendy’s to

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ignore their labor. “For every partner in the Program,” the CIW states on their website, “The FFP is hard work. Workers have spent the past fifteen years tirelessly campaigning with consumers, not to mention designing, building, and enforcing the Program itself, and serve as the frontline monitors to their own rights, day in and day out.” Julia de la Cruz, a worker and organizer with the CIW, told the Independent she’s been doing this for over eight years, attending countless marches, protests, and parades.

Behind public events like the march are other organizing efforts that, while often unrecognized, are integral to the organization’s success and longevity. For two days before the Columbus action, CIW members, supporters, activists, and students gathered in a local church to host workshops, meetings, and share organizing tactics. The purpose of this conference was partly to prepare for the march, but also to strengthen the CIW’s ties outside the organization. To this effect, the weekend emphasized coalition and community building. Workshops topics ranged from a history of capitalist food production, to indigenous land rights, to mass incarceration. The CIW works to ensure that everyone involved in its actions are well-educated on the intersectional nature of workers’ rights. Pamela Escalante, a leader with the Student/ Farmworker Alliance, told the Independent that after the conferences, “you really know why you’re hitting the streets.”

Rubén Castilla Herrera, an immigrant rights organizer with the Columbus-based Ohio Workers Center, led a workshop at the conference about expanding the definition of sanctuary. He stressed the importance of the kind of intersectional organizing embodied by the CIW: “[The CIW] represents a cross-section of [various] communities: women, the queer community, environmental issues, and workers.” He told the Independent that effective coalition-building must be forged in personal connection: “First, we start with ourselves.

How am I a sanctuary space, how are we a sanctuary space? How is my home, my community, and then my city?” Escalante echoed this sentiment as a major reason she got involved with the CIW. “They don’t coalition-build unless its sincere,” she mentioned, explaining that in her personal relationships with members of the CIW, she has always felt welcomed as a queer woman.

Both Herrera and Escalante’s experience with the CIW reflect the organization’s larger philosophy of welcoming allies while nevertheless recognizing difference within coalitions. The organization chooses to intentionally center the voices of the workers most affected by the injustices they fight. “We all know that this struggle is about much more than one person,” said Gonzalo on the day of the march. “All of the change, all of the improvements we have won, have come because

of the involvement of many people, first and foremost the workers of Immokalee.”

The march ended on the Ohio State University campus, after crossing town and briefly pausing to demonstrate in front of a Wendy’s franchise. As the clouds dissipated, people took off their soaked sweatshirts and laid them out to dry in the sun. Soon, the busses of college students and other allies left Columbus, and the CIW moved on to Tampa, Florida, where they concluded this stage of the Wendy’s campaign on March 31. The protest, as well as the weekend of organizing, did not result in a tangible victory, but according to organizers, it was an important step in the continuation of the CIW’s struggle.

“It doesn’t happen overnight. We wish it would,” CIW organizer Iliana Roque Gonzalez told the Independent after the march. She said she felt frustrated the organization was forced to continue expending resources on Wendy’s, rather than worker-centered programs. Until Wendy’s agrees to their terms, however, Iliana and other CIW members will continue to work on this campaign.

“We’re not asking for anything extraordinary. We just want the workers—the hands that pick our food, to be treated fairly.” +++ The CIW has long garnered support by carving out space for joy. Julia de la Cruz told the Independent she first got involved because of how much she enjoyed the Saturday night film screenings the organization hosted at her workplace in Florida. With this practice, the CIW embodies another mode of resistance. It’s their most simple, but perhaps most effective tactic: communal celebration.

The night before the march, CIW workers, families, and allies gathered in the church. This time, not to deliberate tactics or rehearse plans once more, but to dance. That evening, reminiscent of the original work stoppages led by fieldworkers in Florida, CIW leaders declared a break from formal organizing. Groups of children filtered back inside, exhausted from improvised baseball on the church lawn. A guitar ensemble that had been practicing all afternoon rushed to the stage. As plates were cleared from the collective dinner, the band began to strum a mix of traditional Mexican folk and their protest-inspired adaptations.

J-U-S/ J-U-S-T-I-C-E/ is what we want/ Justice in Imokalee!

MITCHELL JOHNSON AND ERIN WEST B’18.5 have beef with Wendy’s.

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Packs

Gabriel Matesanz DESIGN BY Will Tavlin ILLUSTRATION BY

“Rhode Island is a sovereign republic within the United States of America, they can’t just spray stuff in the sky over our heads…I can see trails right over the State House and I’m saying these folks should be able to see this when they’re walking right out the door.”

Tom Loiselle, concerned Rhode Island citizen Last year, amid a historic drought, the Los Angeles County Department of Public Works contracted a Utah-based cloud-seeding company to increase precipitation in Los Angeles County. The company sprayed particles of silver iodide into the atmosphere to kickstart cloud condensation. As a result, the California Department of Water Resources estimates that precipitation increased by four percent. This process of intentionally altering the atmosphere is referred to as geoengineering.

Governments throughout the world have in controlled, well-documented circumstances, funded geoengineering operations. Some climate scientists even propose geoengineering as a solution to climate change. A small group of conspiracy theorists, however, believe that a far more insidious type of geoengineering is occurring right now through the systematic, intentional dispersion of chemicals from airplanes. The most popular strain of geoengineering theories, Solar Radiation Management, proposes spraying sulfates into the atmosphere, a process that would reflect sunlight back to space before being trapped by greenhouse gasses. Geoengineering truthers, as they are called, believe that these current, covert geoengineering projects pose a threat to our bodies, minds, and planet.

Contrails, a portmanteau for ‘condensation trails,’ are the visible traces left by the exhaust of airplanes, an effect caused by a combination of crystallized water vapor at high altitudes and the chemicals in jet fuel exhaust. They are the white, cloud-like streaks that trail airplanes. Alternatively, chemtrails, the truthers believe, look identical to contrails, except they are composed of biological or chemical agents with undisclosed purposes.

As a team of UC Irvine and Stanford Biologists wrote in the journal Environmental Research Letters, “the most commonly inferred goals [of chemtrails truthers] were control over population, food supply, and/or the weather.” Geoengineering truthers believe that atmospheric geoengineering projects are being conducted through these chemtrails.

Mainstream environmentalists typically categorize geoengineering truthers as fringe reactionaries and a misrepresentation of the cause. Yet, even from their fringe position, geoengineering truthers are ideologically dangerous and could delegitimize deep histories of environmental work. Furthermore, the debate between

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geoengineering truthers and their detractors raises into question the scope and meaning of environmentalism—a movement which, in the US, has recently focused its efforts on minimizing pollutants. +++ Introduced by Representative Justin Price (R-39) to the Rhode Island State Legislature on March 1, 2017, HB 5607, “An Act Relating to Health and Safety––Geoengineering,” is a radical piece of legislation emerging from the geoengineering truther movement—ascending from online forums to the realm of public policy. Broadly, it would increases the power of the state to monitor intentional climate manipulations in the Rhode Island airspace. More specifically, HB 5607, now in its fourth iteration at the state level, legally defines atmospheric geoengineering and would increase government oversight. Even outside of Rhode Island, HB 5607 and its predecessors have amassed a wave of online grassroots support from fellow truthers.

Rep. Price, along with former State Rep. Karen MacBeth (D-52), first made a splash in the chemtrail community last February with their introduction of HB 5480, “The Climate Geoengineering Act of 2016.”

This bill, which functions quite similarly to its current counterpart, garnered large support online—particularly on the chemtrail watchdog site GeoengineeringWatch. com. Unsurprisingly, online comments regarding the legislation range in focus and absurdity. For example, ‘Alexandra May Hunter’ on legiscan.com writes that “The people have the right to have any and all ongoing or future geoengineering programs investigated by a neutral unbiased advisory board…[which] must include citizens.” Others, however, like ‘johngraf,’ merely believe that, “It's a whole separate crop dusting operation being allowed to continue as the mainstream news calls it PARTLY CLOUDY.” Back in Rhode Island, enter: Tom Loiselle. White, middle-aged, mustache. With last year’s legislation culminating in a public hearing at the Rhode Island State House, Loiselle testified in front of a slew of eye-rolling elected officials. Referencing Dane Wigington, a chemtrail activist-lawyer who runs ‘Geoengineering Watch,’ Loiselle told the House Committee on Environment and Natural Resources that, “He’s not a global warming climate change skeptic…he’s saying it’s happening but we are also making it much worse by trying to mitigate it, and we’re also destroying our environment and our bodies with the chemicals they're spraying.” As a basis for his assertions, Loiselle co-opts climate science for his own

agenda. Attempting to occupy the activist en talist space, Loiselle and Rep. Price refer to g documents and photos from the past three d tie covert geoengineering projects to climate Unbelievably, the representatives took the b normalized these concepts within a rational d environmental issues and solutions.

Rep. Aaron Regunberg (D-4) contended islators “personally don’t know and haven’t s evidence to see whether geoengineering is h currently, but do know that there are serious having real conversations about trying to do a testament to what a crisis we have gotten a with climate change.”

By allowing these vague contentions int discourse, Rep. Regunberg destabilizes the le of the environmental movement, as unsubsta claims gain political ground. In the current st environmental crisis, the geoengineering mov serves as a reminder that—despite the ability to disaffected conspiracy enthusiasts—maint factual premise of climate science is necessar a unified, concerted movement. +++

Plotting the current geoengineering truther m on the political spectrum is a dizzying task. G neering truthers are both environmentalists a do-scientific—in favor of government interve part of a larger anti-government movement. chemtrail truthers have taken to social media forums, targeting any symbol of political pow blind, single-issue effort. As they see it, the r is towards the politics at large, which preven investigations into the subject. Perhaps the p movement could be captured by the followin the Facebook page ‘Chemtrails Awareness’: man holding beer*) “Cheers to everyone sma to not fall for the political divide & conquer because if they keep us fighting each other, w never focus on who the real enemy is.” This f and sense of suppression represents a larger i common ground between some environment geoengineering truthers. Both look towards p a solution (environmental regulation and HB both ultimately share disdain for government localized, populist solutions. Plant a garden; mask.

It is important, furthermore, to recogniz the merits of the geoengineering truther mov

APRIL 07, 2017

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relation to mainstream environmentalism. As Elizabeth Kolbert states, author of the modern environmental opus The Sixth Extinction and by no means a conspiracy theorist, “we are geoengineering the planet. We are changing the climate, changing all sorts of aspects—geologically altering the earth.” And in this roundabout sense, the truthers have hit on something genuinely true: planes poison the atmosphere, whether or not they are intentionally spraying geoengineering agents. The fastest growing source of global greenhouse gas emissions according to the World Wildlife Fund, air travel accounts for five percent of global greenhouse gas emissions. The EPA has only recently taken steps to reign in the airline industry. According to a senior lawyer at the Center for Biological Diversity, “Airplane carbon pollution is skyrocketing, but the EPA is still dodging responsibility for curbing this climate threat.” Despite this environmental merit of geoengineering truthers, perhaps a more impactful effort would involve interrogating the fossil fuel industry, which is responsible for 30 percent of global emission, according to the EPA. Further, beyond the conspiracy associated with chemtrails, geoengineering signifies the dubious projects of fracking and oil companies that intentionally alter the environment to extract natural resources. Considering this slew of environmental realities that overlap with the theories of geoengineering truthers, it becomes necessary to recognize their position as more complex than that of mere fringe reactionaries. Perhaps geoengineering truthers, often discounted as conspiracy theorists, embody a radical environmentalism—going to the mat for the planet against what might be seen as conservative, incremental environmentalists.

While the truthers certainly co-opt the legitimacy and scientific basis of climate change, they also embody important elements of the movement: activism, public transparency, and tighter environmental regulations.

And despite their widespread derision, geoengineering truthers have forged a niche in the decentralized environmental movement. In Rhode Island, as with many places, this is particularly true at the grassroots level. +++ SLAP: secret large-scale atmospheric program. In the first peer reviewed scholarly analysis of the geoengineering truther movement, a team of UC Irvine and Stanford biologists published “expert consensus against the existence of a secret, large-scale atmospheric spraying program” in the journal Environmental Research Letters in 2016. Decoding the complex and often contradictory

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movement, the study establishes that “Nearly 17% of people in an international survey said they believed the existence of a secret large-scale atmospheric program (SLAP) to be true or partly true.” Conversely, “76 of the 77 scientists (98.7%) that took part in this study said they had not encountered evidence of a SLAP, and that the data cited as evidence could be explained through other factors, including well-understood physics and chemistry associated with aircraft contrails and atmospheric aerosols.” Such a contrast conveys both the prevalence of the belief in covert geoengineering projects and the necessity of not dismissing such a population as backwards or ‘bad environmentalists.’

Methodologically, the study scrutinizes major points of evidence (primarily gathered by community members) from the SLAP websites Geoengineering Watch and Global Sky Watch: “(1) photographs of trails left behind by airplanes and (2) elemental analyses of water, soil, and snow samples.” Taking this rudimentary evidence, the authors then surveyed “(1) atmospheric scientists with expertise in condensation trails and (2) geochemists working on atmospheric deposition of dust and pollution on the Earth’s surface.” Over the course of the study, nearly all experts disagreed with SLAP activists. Longer-lasting, different-looking chemtrails could be explained by new aero technology, while chemical dispositions in new areas could be explained by changes in industrial development.

The chemtrail community has found a voice online, occupying forums, social media, and legislative websites. From Prince to Kylie Jenner, chemtrail truthers have popularized a formerly fringe conspiracy theory by seizing climate change science and claiming legitimacy.

This pushes environmental activists to consider their positionality; what makes a ‘good environmentalist?’

Such a question illustrates the intersection of science and conspiracy in environmentalist discourses—forcing a trade-off between accommodating potential allies and complicity engaging in pseudo-scientific theories.

“It is reasonable that ordinary citizens should want questions answered concerning health, climate change, and pollution,” writes the team of environmental scientists, “But the focus on a secret, large-scale atmospheric spraying program may be taking attention away from real, underlying problems that need addressing.”

CHRIS PACKS B’20 keeps his eyes on the skies.

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RUNNING OUT OF SHORE The future of Providence’s seaport Patrick Orenstein ILLUSTRATION BY Ivan Rios-Fetchko BY

While the presidential election dominated media coverage on November 8, 2016, another item on the ballot in Rhode Island had potential to impact the relationship between the State of Rhode Island and the City of Providence’s industrial harbor. Question 5 asked voters to decide whether the state should issue $70 million in bonds to raise money to improve and expand the commercial seaports of Providence and Davisville. The seemingly simple idea of investing in one of the state’s most enduring economic assets turned out to be anything but, with the vote coming after months of tense debate and political posturing. The case ties together persistent issues in Rhode Island politics, as the state’s economic and cultural identity undergoes tremendous change. The conflict stirred up old feuds between local businesses and fiscal conservatives, tracing its origins back to the beginnings of Providence’s ‘renaissance’ in the 1990s. Nothing is ever simple in Rhode Island when it comes to public money, and the economics of the port is no exception. +++ Providence’s commercial seaport is nearly invisible now to most of the city’s residents as it is confined to a small area on Field’s Point, a short peninsula on the west side of the harbor. Yet, the city has always been a center of commercial shipping. The first permanent dock was built in the late 1600s, soon after the site for the city had been bought from the Narragansett tribe as a refuge for religious exiles from the other colonies. Providence soon became a hub for the horrific industry that James Madison called “the unnatural traffic”—the slave trade.

18th-century Rhode Island, and Providence in particular, was a northern hub of the trans-Atlantic slave trade that transported enslaved Africans to the Caribbean.

Rhode Islanders built, owned, captained, and crewed the ships that made this circuit and returned with accumulated wealth that made the state’s fortunes. By the mid-18th century, 10 percent of the city’s population were slaves.

Building on its dark history of slavery and colonialism, Providence has continued to grow into a hub for domestic and international cargo entering the Northeast. Today its 40-foot-deep ship berths put it nearly on par with the port of Boston in the size of vessels it can accommodate.

In 1994, the city sold the industrial land on Field’s Point to a private investor to be developed into a center of commercial shipping. The deal created a nonprofit entity called ProvPort to hold ownership of the land in order to avoid taxes and serve as a separate entity from City Hall, which did not want to manage the day-today logistics of the port. Although the City of Providence appoints two of the five members of ProvPort’s board, it contracts a for-profit company called Waterson Terminal Services to oversee the port’s daily operations.

It then leases sections of the land at Field’s Point to nine individual import companies for processing and storage.

Currently, six percent of ProvPort’s revenues go to the city and its tenants employ approximately 1700 workers.

However, the port’s growth has exceeded the limits of its current space. Between the piles of salt and coal, the state-of-the-art cranes, and the open area needed for unloading cargo like cars or wind turbine blades, ProvPort says there simply is not enough room on Field’s Point for the port’s current business. Rhode Island Commerce Secretary Stefan Pryor told the Providence Journal in July, “We examined the claim ... that the port is running out of space and found it to be credible.” At the same time, port operators were anxious to improve facilities and increase cargo capacity due to the shift in business expected to take place following the 2016 expansion of the Panama Canal. Since the new canal can now accommodate ships twice as large as before, the arrival of “New Panamax” ships in large East Coast ports like New York are predicted to generate more business for small- to medium-size cargo ships that

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can cheaply distribute that cargo throughout the Northeast. Other smaller commercial ports in the region had already put significant funds into modernization projects with the hopes of what ProvPort’s spokesperson Bill Fischer called “capturing the feeder port market.”

Providence was eager to catch up.

As a result, port management decided that buying more land north of the current ProvPort property was the most plausible option for expansion. At the time, Fischer called the area, roughly bounded by Allens Avenue to the west and Collier Point Park to the north, “a very small scrap operation and a series of dirt patches.” It seemed to fit the requirements perfectly, if only a way could be found to pay for it. The original deal creating ProvPort in 1994 had been sweetened by a loan from the city, funded by municipal bonds, and over the two decades since then bonds had been used to support ProvPort when its finances were in poor shape. ProvPort, on the other hand, was still paying off loans it took out along with federal grant money in 2013 to buy new cranes, meaning its credit was maxed out as far as commercial lenders were concerned. Advocates of the expansion then turned to the only choice left: the State. +++ The original version of the bill in the legislature suggested creating more land by building out into the harbor and extending the ship channel northward in order to allow ships to dock alongside the additional area. However, strong opposition by the Rhode Island environmental advocacy group Save The Bay quickly convinced ProvPort and its allies to abandon that plan.

“We sounded the alarm publicly,” Topher Hamblett, director of advocacy for Save the Bay, told the Independent. “Eight days later ProvPort came out with a clear categorical statement that they will not fill it period.”

Additionally, any expansion of industrial activity brings with it some degree of public health risk, pointed out Frank Carini, founder of the online environmental reporting project ecoRI. “I know the mayor wants to keep an industrialized working waterfront,” he told the Independent. “Regardless of whether they expand or not, it affects the neighborhood.” In the end, it comes down to a question of alternative options. Moving the expansion to the Allens Avenue properties would move port infrastructure closer to Rhode Island Hospital and bring loud and dusty activity to an area that has one of the highest asthma rates in Rhode Island. But City Council President Aponte, who represents the area encompassing ProvPort and the site of the proposed expansion, pointed out that any development would be better than the current situation. “I think a reasonable person could say the activity down there is not the highest and best use on the Providence waterfront,” he told the Journal.

Besides industrial facilities, the area near ProvPort’s current location is home to a handful of retail businesses and restaurants. Jennifer Luxmoore of Sin, a specialty bakery on Allens Avenue, told the Independent she was unaware of the expansion proposal but that “we haven’t had any issues” with the port’s operations.

Before the proposal to issue state bonds could be put before voters in November, it had to be negotiated between the city and the state and passed by both houses of the state legislature. Lawmakers split votes along traditional lines. Representatives of smaller towns and fiscal conservatives opposed the proposal as a gift to big business that would only benefit Providence and Davisville.

Supporters argued that it was a critical investment that only the state could supply. Only in the last week of the General Assembly session this past summer was a compromise reached with the help of the city.

To satisfy critics of bill, Providence Mayor Jorge Elorza agreed

that the land bought with state funds would remain state property instead of being ceded to the city as the plan initially outlined. With the legislature appeased, the only remaining step was to put the bill to a popular vote. Everything came down to the general election. +++ Last November, Rhode Island votes passed Question 5 with more than 60 percent support. Critics argued that the last-minute merger of the ProvPort and Davisville port bonds was done to ensure passage by voters with a greater interest in the economic success of Davisville than Providence. On the media front, a consortium of business interests spent more than $400,000 on a fullscale election campaign in favor of the proposal. With a large budget and an electorate with traditional support for maritime industry, the supporters of the measure had a clear advantage from the beginning.

Almost 4 months later, ProvPort and the Rhode Island Economic Development Corporation are meeting regularly to work through the initial steps of implementation. The underused land parcels in the Allens Avenue area that will be purchased and combined into the new port operations area remains unsettled, and the state has not yet issued the bonds to pay for the acquisitions. ProvPort’s Fischer estimates that the process of buying and preparing the area for business may take around 18 months, with nearly half of the $20 million budget covering the cost of clearing and paving the land.

In the past, the economic benefits of Providence’s port have often come with steep consequences. One of ProvPort’s neighbors, Rhode Island Recycled Metals, has been the subject of multiple legal actions on the part of the state Department of Environmental Management for allowing fuel oil and pieces of scrapped vehicles to enter the harbor. Before that, the plot was the site of an electronics scrapyard which was classified as a toxic waste dump by the EPA. This history of disregard for Rhode Island’s water resources goes back to the mills of the late 1700s, which polluted the Blackstone river upstream from the harbor and began a centuries-long tradition of disregard for the Narragansett Bay’s health.

When Save the Bay strongly objected to building out into the harbor to gain more space and succeeded in altering that part of the project, the organization set a precedent that any new port development must take environmental concerns into account. ProvPort’s Fischer told the Independent that the organization maintains a “long, healthy working relationship with Save The Bay,” but how this will work in practice as the port expands remains to be seen. City Council President Aponte says the city has three goals going forward: “expansion of economic activity, living supporting jobs, and to minimize the negative environmental impacts of maritime uses in and around the port.” Topher Hamblett at Save The Bay is optimistic: “We have a vision for ProvPort and the port of Providence generally to be a ‘green port’...facilities are using renewable energy, controlling stormwater pollution, environmentally friendly to the waters around them.” Hopefully Providence can maintain that balance.

PATRICK ORENSTEIN B’18.5 encourages you to donate to Save The Bay (savebay.org), the Environmental Justice League of Rhode Island (ejlri.org), or ecoRI (ecori.org).

JACK BROOK B’19 contribtued reporting.

APRIL 07, 2017

FANGED Dominique Pariso ILLUSTRATION BY Kela Johnson DESIGN BY Andrew Linder BY

Bram Stoker, the author of Dracula, was an early ecogoth. The erotics of the vampire—of men who stalk virginal women—was buried in Stoker’s Dracula, who was, after all, living in buttoned-up Victorian England at the time. Contemporary critics have since freed the erotics. Vampires are figures of desire, upon which historical anxieties can be placed. Here, Dracula is a stand-in for promiscuous sex. The vampire stalks his victims, seduces them, sucks them dry. The writer Linda Williams once alleged that in the vampire’s face, the woman sees her own mutilation, and entranced, cannot look away. In that sense, Dracula can certainly be read as a metaphor for the sexual assailant. Of course, when Dracula was hangry he was an equal opportunity offender (he bit both men and women). But the violence he enacted against women in particular are what the novel hinges upon. +++ There are female vampires, even in Dracula. Three to be exact. They could be the Count’s brides, or his weird sisters, or his daughters, or his former prey. Vampirism can serve as a kind of kinship network here, at best. As love affair. Harker, the protagonist of the novel, writes of one vampiress, “I seemed somehow to know her face, and to know it in connection with some dreamy fear, but I could not recollect at the moment how or where.” He is attracted to them and repulsed by them in equal measure. But these women, too, cannot escape the novel unscathed. Van Helsing, the vampire hunter, finds them fast asleep, open-eyed, then strikes stakes through their hearts, decapitates them, and fills their mouths with garlic. I wonder if Dracula mourned them.

Consider for a moment Only Lovers Left Alive, directed by Jim Jarmusch. In this dreamscape film there are only Adam and Eve, two soul mates and vampires, who meet up again and again across the centuries.

(Vampirism as old age, vampirism as true love.) All they have is time and each other. They drive around Detroit, reminiscing about their shared history. (Vampirism as nostalgia, vampirism as sorrow.)

At one point, Eve asks Adam, “Mary Shelley— what was she like?” Fondness flits across his face as he responds, “She was delicious.” These are ancient beings. As Zora Neale Hurston once pointed out, “Real gods require blood.” But these ones can’t afford to feast on any regular human anymore. The blood is too contaminated in modern times. They now have to con their way directly to the source: hospitals, blood banks.

Ana Lily Amirpour’s black and white 2014 indie vampire thriller A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night opens with a politician on television instructing women to stay indoors. Later, a girl vampire in a black chador skateboards down the street. She stalks the denizens of Bad City, an Iranian town, biting and killing any men who disrespect women. She kills a pimp with the word SEX tattooed across his throat. She purrs into the ear of a small dingy urchin, “Be a good boy…” The threat is not spoken—it doesn’t have to be. Here is the female as predator, a wanderer who bites as well as observes. (I wish all girls had fangs.)

Eventually, she meets a human boy, who is drunk, fresh from a costume party where he dressed as Dracula. She sees him illuminated under a lamp-post, pauses, does a double take. She brings him home. The two seem to pulsate with longing. They are both romantics at heart. He desires her, she resists his neck. He pierces her ears with stolen diamond studs. It’s a pinprick, a penetration on his part, not hers. But you can’t blame the girl, not really. This particular boy, however human, is cute and she has time to kill.

This is where the vampire stands: in the shadows, where fear meets desire.

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

+++ In Nosferatu, the first (and arguably best) vampire film, the protagonist Hutter accidentally cuts his finger with a bread knife. Count Orlok, a vampire who, with bat’s ears and rat’s teeth is more animal than human, lovingly stares at “his beautiful blood,” and tries to suck the life-giving liquid from his finger. Hutter pulls away. The vampire has long been a figure that was associated with sexual outsiders and erotic “others,” with those whose desires fall outside normative expectations. Here, it can quite clearly be seen as a figure of queer desire.

Richard Dyer points out the long historical use of homoerotic imagery in early vampire fiction in his article, “Children of the Night,” pointing out that “the necessity of secrecy, the persistence of a forbidden passion, and the fear of discovery” created a clear parallel between vampires and queer folks.

The queer vampire film became a 70s B-movie staple. And while they were often exploitative in their portrayal, particularly of queer women, they did move the genre from subtext to full-on camp.

Anne Rice’s The Vampire Chronicles and Whitney Strieber’s The Hunger are examples of the explicitly queer vampiric protagonists that cropped up in the 80s and 90s. More contemporary examples include Let the Right Ones In, directed by Tomas Alfredson. The movie revolves around two desperate twelve year olds, Oskar and Eli. Although, the latter admits, “I’ve been this age for a very long time.” Oskar is a lonely, bullied child of divorced parents. Eli smells vaguely like rotting flesh.

It seems like a classic girl-meets-boy story if not a little supernatural. Curled up in Eli’s bed during a sleepover, Oskar asks, “Will you be my girlfriend?” Eli responds carefully. “Oskar, I’m not a girl.” They kill a bunch of neighborhood bullies and run off together. God, that’s romantic.

In TV land, True Blood, turned its vampire tale into a melodramatic, queer allegory. The show begins two years after vampires have “come out of the coffin” and shows the American Vampire League, a thinly veiled allusion to organizations like GLAAD or HRC, fighting for vampire equal rights. And while the metaphor was heavy handed, it indicated that the show was riffing off the genre by which it was produced. +++ The vampire’s only sustenance is blood. Blood is what they crave, but it is also where there origin myth possibly began. Porphyria, or “Vampire’s Disease,” is a genetic disorder, a kind of hemophilia, that is characterized by the malfunction of hemoglobin production. The

disease presents symptoms similar to those of vampires including extraordinary sensitivity to sunlight, red or purplish urine, an aversion to garlic, and shrunken gums that make the teeth appear more canine-like.

Vampirism, with its connotations of sexuality and contagion, were often linked to other diseases. Anemia, tuberculosis, cholera, the bubonic plague, venereal diseases, were all often misdiagnosed as an unfortunate case of a vampire attack.

Post-1980, the vampire’s thematic association with blood, power, queer erotics, and disease, made the link to HIV/AIDS inevitable. The undead were the perfect figures on which to project all the anxieties and fears of those afflicted with the disease, as well as those who saw HIV+ people as less than human. +++ Here is some of a poem, titled “Le Vampire,” or “The Vampire,” originally written in French by Charles Baudelaire, “You who, like the stab of a knife/Entered my plaintive heart/You who, strong as a herd/Of demons, came, ardent and adorned,…To make your bed and your domain/Of my humiliated mind/—Infamous bitch to whom I’m bound…Like the maggots to the corpse…Fool!—if from her domination/Our efforts could deliver you/Your kisses would resuscitate/the cadaver of your vampire!”

Your kisses would resuscitate the cadaver of your vampire. French scholars have debated, to no end, whether the speaker is the vampire or the prey. It is impossible to tell, though some ambiguity gets lost in translation. The prey and predator blur together, one body not two. It is symbiosis.

Take it from me, there is not much to do in the three-month window between two needle pricks that will tell you whether or not your blood, your body has become infected. But even now, I can’t tell which one of us was the bloodsucker and which one of us the host.

Think of the flea, which circulates blood around the world. Not unlike poetry, not unlike words. Both are viral in nature. The flea is what caused the Black Death. And it was this soil that the Count used to cross the sea from Transylvania to England.

Sylvia Plath once said, “Blood jet is poetry.” Blood sprays out from the veins, into the world, still somehow keeping in time with the heart. Gathered on a page, bound in a coffin. When the spine is cracked, the body that has been encased will be revealed. And maybe, just maybe, it will travel the world in the bodies of fleas as the undead, the living dead, the never dying.

DOMINIQUE PARISO’18 is sharpening her teeth.

METABOLICS

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BENEATH YOUR BOOTSOLES Feeling backward at New York City’s AIDS Memorial

BY Lisa

Borst

Gabriel Matesanz DESIGN BY Ruby Stenhouse ILLUSTRATION BY

content warning: queerphobia

Under the pavement at the corner of Seventh Avenue and 12th Street in Manhattan’s West Village, leading to the former site of St. Vincent’s Hospital, a series of tunnels snake through the ground like a miniature F train.

During the 1980s and ’90s, when St. Vincent’s was the epicenter of New York’s AIDS crisis, dead and dying bodies were transported in and out of the tunnels, a grim cycle recurring beneath the city.

St. Vincent’s closed in 2013, 18 years after the introduction of new medications slowed AIDS-related deaths in the United States. The hospital was replaced by a cluster of luxury condominiums, and the tunnels are filled in now, echoing the strange petrification of the AIDS years throughout the neighborhood. Documentaries and oral histories about the epidemic, and the decade or so preceding it, present the West Village as a true ‘gay neighborhood,’ where young queers flocked to seek sexual liberation. When the AIDS epidemic began in the early ’80s, decimating gay populations in New York and other urban centers, the West Village—home to the Stonewall Inn, a massive LGBTQ community center, and countless queer bars and bookstores—became a seedbed for a growing activist movement that sought to respond to the Reagan administration’s neglect of the crisis.

As AIDS-related illnesses claimed growing numbers of queer and trans people, as well as intravenous drug users, groups like the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP) staged a series of increasingly public campaigns and protests. In a 1988 action led by the artist collective and ACT UP offshoot Gran Fury, activists plastered the city with red handprints and posters declaring that “the government has blood on its hands.”

The following year, activists traveled by the busload to the Food and Drug Administration’s headquarters to demand faster and more inclusive testing for HIV treatment, swarming the building with homemade banners and staging guerilla theatre on live TV. At a moment when ambitious, provocative direct action feels badly needed, it’s difficult not to romanticize the efforts of these AIDS activists. Because despite the death tolls that climbed exponentially through the ’80s and early ’90s, these actions worked: after the action at the FDA headquarters, members of ACT UP were invited to sit in on FDA meetings and to provide input for pharmaceutical companies. Activists testified before congressional committees, sharing their stories and those of the deceased. Protease inhibitors were rolled out in 1995, and AIDS-related deaths in the U.S. slowly plateaued.

brunch restaurants and expensive gyms. Across the street from the former St. Vincent’s footprint, in a small, triangular park formed by the intersection of Seventh Avenue, 12th Street, and Greenwich Avenue, there rests a new memorial to victims of AIDS. Bright white, the NYC AIDS Memorial, which opened in February, glows in winter sunlight among surrounding traffic.

It forms an open-air canopy: three inverted triangles, forged in slatted white steel, rise a story and a half into the air, supporting a fourth triangular roof. Each plane is made up of a series of smaller tetrahedrons, crisscrossing bars of steel whose stripes and vertices let slashes of light fall onto the benches and fountain below. Designed by the Brooklyn-based firm Studio ai, the memorial’s triangular shape echoes the slice of land in which it sits, conjuring a series of Vs: V for virus, V for Vincent, V for victim.

Anyone who was around during the height of the epidemic, or who’s seen documentaries about the era, could tell you where the triangles are lifted from.

In 1987, a group of artists who would later become Gran Fury designed an image in response to Reagan’s ambivalence. Designed to be as publicly confrontational as possible, the image they created was soon adopted by ACT UP as a logo: the now-famous equation “SILENCE=DEATH,” printed in striking capital letters under a pink triangle. The triangle—like the former slurs with which people living in the shadow of AIDS were beginning to identify (“fag,” “dyke,” “queer”)—was a reclamation: in concentration camps during the Holocaust, known homosexuals were forced to wear inverted triangles on their sleeves.

Beneath the triangular steel canopy on its triangular slice of land, granite pavers form a series of concentric rings, spiraling outward from the fountain at the memorial’s center. Carved into the granite are passages from Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself.” The centerpiece of Leaves of Grass, singing in praise of a boundless continuity between living and dead, at first seems an appropriate commemorative text for a cultural crisis whose losses are still deeply felt:

+++

The carvings were conceived by the conceptual artist Jenny Holzer, known for her public text-based installations. More subdued than many of her other works, the Whitman selections, in their circles on the ground, are

Today, the West Village feels like a gentrified museum to ’80s-style queerness, with rainbow flags hanging from

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What do you think has become of the young and old men?

And what do you think has become of the women and children?

They are alive and well somewhere, The smallest sprout shows there is really no death, And if ever there was it led forward life, and does not wait at the end to arrest it, And ceas’d the moment life appear’d.

nonetheless arresting. “It is astounding to see the words of the great bard of New York’s streets carved on the street itself,” writes Alexandra Schwartz in a December 2016 article about the memorial for the New Yorker. “You want to kiss the ground.”

But the choice of Walt Whitman as the memorial’s sole text is a complicated one. Born in 1819, Whitman wrote in an era preceding the formation of a "gay" identity, but his poems hint at an erotic desire for the male body. Another section of Leaves of Grass, “Calamus,” is a celebration of “manly attachment” whose biblically intoned, free-verse accounts of love between men come across now as overtly queer: An athlete is enamored of me, and I of him, But toward him there is something fierce and terrible in me eligible to burst forth, I dare not tell it in words, not even in these songs.

Reincarnations of the Calamus poems and their utopic visions of cruising, of “the attraction of friend to friend,” surface throughout 20th-century poetry. As queerness became more permissible to explicitly articulate, many gay poets positioned themselves as part of a queer poetic genealogy for which Whitman, and “Calamus” in particular, serve as a triumphant homoerotic origin. From Langston Hughes’ short lyric “Old Walt” to Ginsberg’s elegy “A Supermarket in California,” Whitman’s name is recalled again and again, an address across the gulch of his death.

In the 1950s, the gay poet Jack Spicer attempted to sever the Whitmanian genealogy in which he felt trapped. In the prose poem “Some Notes on Walt Whitman for Allen Joyce,” he writes: “Forgive me Walt Whitman, you whose fine mouth has sucked the cock of the heart of the country for 50 years. You did not ever understand cruelty…. Calamus cannot exist in the presence of cruelty.” Spicer’s text, anticipating the critiques we might level against Whitman’s role in the NYC AIDS Memorial, denounces Whitman’s optimistic, masculinist, and nationalistic vision. For Spicer, these ideals could no longer account for a queer experience in pre-Stonewall America, which was marked by homophobic cruelty and state-sanctioned anti-gay violence. In the mid-1980s, Spicer’s pessimism would erupt on an unprecedented scale; by 1986, 25,000 people had died of AIDS-related illnesses, and Ronald Reagan had still never publicly uttered the epidemic’s name.

Why, then, has the icon of all of this loss become Walt Whitman—the bard of Calamus, champion of a “manly attachment” that reads by turns as sexist and imperialistic, and that preceded the AIDS epidemic by a good 90 years?

Perhaps a partial justification can be found somewhere in the lineage in which Spicer participated, even

APRIL 07, 2017

as he repudiated Whitman. As we witness in his continual resurfacing, Whitman’s poems concern themselves with cyclicality, interconnectedness, a human unity between epochs and across death. Leaves of Grass exhibits this in its shifting narrators and habitation of multiple and capacious selves (“I am large; I contain multitudes,” its most famous line asserts). Whitman positions himself as a vehicle for all who have died and have yet to live, channeling the past and longing to be remembered in the future: If you want me again look for me under your boot-soles.

You will hardly know who I am or what I mean…

With these lines inscribed under our boot-soles, I wonder how we might embody them at the AIDS Memorial. Despite his seeming irrelevance to the AIDS crisis, what might Whitman have to tell us about remembering and mourning AIDS not as a relic of a dead past, but as something ongoing? +++ The queer theorist Heather Love, in her 2007 book Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History, advocates for a theoretical project of “approaching the past as something living,” of encountering its losses and failures head-on and excavating within them lessons for the present and future. In resisting the urge to forget, Love writes, “it is the damaging aspects of the past that tend to stay with us, and the desire to forget may itself be a symptom of haunting...the dead can bury the dead all day long and still not be done.” Love’s text raises the question of how we might assume a similar stance in memorializing AIDS—and of how the AIDS Memorial might, indeed, impel us to feel backward.

Since the presidential election, many have invoked the similarities between the Reagan administration’s treatment of the AIDS epidemic and Trump’s widespread attacks on basic social services. A few weeks after the election, Slate published a profile of several former ACT UP members titled “How the AIDS Movement Has Given Birth to the Trump Resistance.” An editorial appearing in the Boston Globe last month suggests: “To counter Trump, act like ACT UP.” In a widely circulated article published on Medium, writer Pippi Kessler offers “plans for fighting Trump” using lessons learned from AIDS activism.

Despite its triangular gestures to ACT UP, the NYC AIDS Memorial seems to leave little room for this kind of learning, this kind of “feeling backward.” Aside from its location, the memorial offers no evidence of the activism that, since the beginnings of the AIDS crisis, helped combat the epidemic and effectively slowed its damage.

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

In a collection of essays about AIDS-era activist art in New York called Rebels Rebel, Loring McAlpin, a founding member of Gran Fury, writes: “If Gran Fury and ACT UP could lay claim to anything, it would be that we drove a wedge into the public discourse to open space for a response to AIDS that came from those who were unwilling to die silently.” The essay's title, “The Social Body Electric,” is also a nod to Whitman, whose poem “I Sing the Body Electric” anticipates the sense of collectivity embodied by something like a protest: I sing the body electric, the armies of those I love engirth me and I engirth them, they will not let me off till I go with them, respond to them…

McAlpin (a board member of an LGBTQ-focused philanthropic organization called the Calamus Foundation; the Whitman allusions run deep) pivots on Whitman’s famous phrase to highlight the importance of bodily presence in moments of action and mourning: “Recent events in Taksim Gezi Park and Tahrir Square remind us that the physical presence of citizens facing down the apparatus of state control does matter, and that the outcomes of those confrontations are never certain.”

It’s the foreclosure of this kind of confrontation, reflected in the apolitical privileging of Whitman over any other voice, that arguably constitutes the memorial’s largest failure: how are we to “face down the apparatus of state control” when legacies of such encounters have been scrubbed from our most prominent AIDS monument? +++ But perhaps the new memorial could still incorporate some of the dynamism and participation of the AIDSera activism and artworks once witnessed, even if it hasn’t yet. The memorial’s open, inviting infrastructure could be mutable, subject to additions or interventions.

In contrast to the sacred, polished quality of memorials like the one at the World Trade Center site two miles south, one might imagine the triangle-studded canopy becoming a scaffolding for further political actions. You could drape the memorial with a banner; you could, Jenny Holzer-style, project a message onto its surface in light. In the spirit of Gran Fury, you could engineer a public disruption of a sort that’s never been seen before, with the memorial as a center. Trump-era activism, of course, will not mandate the physical and ideological centralization that the AIDS crisis fomented, but, as Love argues, looking backward might still suggest our next moves forward. In her New Yorker piece about the memorial, Schwartz writes: “Memory is often passive, but it can be active, too, and there are promising early signs that the AIDS memorial will encourage the latter.

Its tent-like shape, for one thing, complete with benches

and fountain, seems primed for meetings of both the personal and political varieties.”

The strength of AIDS activists was their powerful negotiation of these two poles, the personal and the political. To publicly mourn the dead and to successfully organize on behalf of the living, simultaneously: this is the great achievement of ACT UP, and the enduring legacy that should be memorialized at the former site of St. Vincent’s Hospital. For despite the finality implied by a memorial, the global AIDS crisis is not over. Today, the typical person living with HIV or AIDS no longer looks like the largely white, gay, male artists and activists who are featured in accounts of the ACT UP years.

Indeed, to periodize AIDS as a “gay disease” that has come and gone—as I worry the memorial, along with some of the recent media produced recently about the crisis, might be doing—would be to willfully ignore enormous structural realities; today, AIDS continues to be an international public health issue, with an estimated 37 million people living with HIV/AIDS around the world.

What the new memorial offers, then, is less a site at which to memorialize AIDS as such than a possibility for remembering—and reinscribing—the actions, protests, and public art interventions that accompanied the epidemic at its worst. As Trump’s wide-reaching assaults on civil liberties continue to mirror the governmental violences of the AIDS era, the demand grows for a similar activist base, one broad enough to straddle militancy, creativity, and care.

Part of a memorial’s power to move is its power to render its viewer speechless, silent. But if we turn to the past and take seriously its directive that silence can quite literally equal death, then perhaps we should interrogate the kinds of silences we inhabit, even at a space for mourning. Perhaps at the AIDS memorial, we might take a cue from McAlpin, who recalls the power of a Gran Fury action in his essay for Rebels Rebel: “We were there to correct injustice, to scream for those who were absent or could no longer speak,” he writes. “There are peak moments in history where all layers of experience coincide.”

LISA BORST B’17.5 suggests reading Michael Moon’s 1989 essay “Memorial Rags” for a definitive take on Walt Whitman and AIDS-era mourning practices.

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EPHEMERA

APRIL 07, 2017

DEAR INDY...

BY

P

ILLUSTRATION BY Pia

Mileaf-Patel DESIGN BY Andrew Linder

+++ I am hopelessly in love with a neoliberal. All of my woke friends disapprove... but something inside is telling me that life is about more than politics. Please Indy! How do I love the player but hate the game?

To be honest, this might be the first time I’ve heard someone referred to as “a neoliberal.” Maybe because it’s such a maligned category and something few people would self-identify as (there was even a rule briefly at the Indy that we wouldn’t publish the word “neoliberalism,” since it is such an overused term and vague target) [still a rule –ed]. Plus, when talking about the main players of neoliberalism, most “woke” people would probably use much more demeaning names ‘filthy imperialist,’ ‘greedy capitalist,’ ‘frat boy Reaganite.’ All of which is to say that the game of assigning people labels based on political ideologies and/or complicity in existing political structures is often pretty fraught.

I doubt your potential partner would characterize themself as “a neoliberal” or candidly state that they believe in an economic and political program free of market controls that has led to increasing global wealth disparity and environmental catastrophe. They might very well believe these things, but I really doubt that they would put it in those terms.

A person’s politics can say a lot about their ethical outlook on life and their openness to particular experiences. But if you really want to see what a person’s about, you have to listen to them on their own terms (I don’t think you should do this for everyone—in fact, I think it’s both impossible and a little dangerous to be entirely generous and patient with everyone. Who we are generous to and patient with matters: it’s one of the main ways we sustain intimacy. Though if you’re in love or even deeply infatuated with this person, it probably means you’re already willing to be very patient with them and to listen very closely to how they think of themself). From there it’s up to you to decide whether you feel like this person is a good partner for you.

It’s also important to recognize that, as you said, “life is about more than politics.” Just as political labels have particular uses in particular moments, the ethical impulses and experiences behind the politics and self-descriptions people take up are deeper and more fascinating than whatever surface level descriptors you can attach to them.

People’s politics—as well as people themselves—change.

Choosing to be with someone, whether as a lover or a friend, is a decision to engage with the deeper parts of a person that can be channeled into all sorts of political programs. Being with anyone is largely a project of mutually figuring out what sort of future and present experiences to put your energy into, together—a decision that’s always going to involve politics to a certain degree.

One of the most exciting things about a romance is that it’s an ongoing conversation. If you decide that you really love this person, you’re going to deciding with them how to care for one another and the types of relationships you think people should have with each other. The relationship’s success will follow largely from whether you continue to love and enjoy the ways these negotiations go.

This is all to say that if you really love the player, you’re going to have to start writing the game with them.

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

I’ve been going to therapy for some time now and am just finally starting to make good progress on my depression, anxiety, improving my relationships with loved ones. The downside of my improvement is that I find it difficult to ask my friends for advice without the conversation taking on the form of a therapy session. The overlap between therapy and friendship feels misplaced to me. Shouldn’t those things be compartmentalized to a certain extent? The more pressing question I find myself asking concerns the nature of advice itself. Surely I am not the first person to feel dislodged from the advice-asking practice. Some people say that all solutions to one’s problems must come from oneself. Others say that to ask advice is to exhibit one’s weaknesses. My question to the intelligent, faithful advice columnist: to what ends does advice serve if not self-improvement and weakness (which I’m sure we can all agree are insufficient and inaccurate characterizations)?

First off, glad to hear that you feel like you’re making progress! That’s a rare and exhilarating feeling that should be taken for all it can give you.

And as for the compartmentalization of therapy and friendship, I’m actually not so sure I agree with you. Even bracketing the question of the availability and expense of therapy (a large bracket, I know), I’ve always thought that the trained patience and care of talk therapy could be better provided by intimate (and free) networks of friendship/love. Of course, we don’t live in that world and have to work with what we have at hand: a world in which certain modes of care have been professionalized (sometimes for the better, sometimes less so) and blurry conventions have taken hold as to what feels right in particular contexts. I’d be willing to bet that the tendency you notice for conversations with friends to take on the form of a therapy session comes largely from the awkwardness by which all sorts of social conventions are distributed so that this form feels like one of the only ways they can provide any sort of care.

But again, that’s by no means to say that you should drop out of therapy and suddenly enter some sort of loving paradise of friends who are as well-trained and attuned as a professional talk therapist (they’re not). Rather, it’s to remind you to look to the ways your friends are able to care for you. Once therapy and advice-giving become professional activites, it’s harder to notice the settings in which they occur more naturally (as behavior-modelling, shared goal navigation, mere presence), without the awkward formalities that sometimes accompany us trying to be trained, caring professionals.

Personally, I’ve largely separated the types of care I approach friends and professionals for: I find it more useful to let friends know what is going on without asking for them to provide solutions, saving that type of work for my therapist or loved ones I particularly trust. Instead, I try to appreciate the ways that people deal with this knowledge and do help me (even though this often means asking that they not try to be my therapist, saying that there are other ways they can help me), whether that’s bothering me to make sure I get out of bed or going with me to get ice cream.

As I’m sure you understand, caring for loved ones is difficult, and expressing that care in the right ways, in ways that really help that person in that moment, is nearly impossible. For the most part, all I can recommend is a certain patience, a recognition that your loved ones do really love you and that it will take a bit of work for both you and them to find the modes of care that feel the most natural.

As for advice, I find that it’s most often a kind of performance of wisdom. Or—and especially in a setting like this, decontextualized from the ways that problems actually affect people—fodder to get some writer to fill newspaper pages. [____-ed] The best advice columns have a pretty typical structure: let me tell you about something that seems totally unrelated to the problem you brought to me, then a bit about myself/my place in giving this advice, then something to tell you that you will be OK. What’s notable about the format is exactly the same as what’s meaningful and notable about the way your loved ones actually provide care for you. They talk about something else. For all sorts of reasons, the best and most moving ways we have of caring for each other right now are largely indirect: they are part of the texture of living life with those close to you, things verging on the too ordinary to even notice as care. Learning to recognize these acts as love can be just as much work as learning to enact and reciprocate them.

And when people are direct about concern, love, care, or advice-giving, I’d recommend taking it for what it is: another person trying very hard to reach out to you, ignoring all the rules of an often baroque and unnecessarily difficult game of caring for each other. +++ Sometimes I have the desire to make out with my close friend, but it would be inappropriate for us to make out. What can I do to stop wanting to make out with my friend?

On the surface at least, this doesn’t really seem to be a problem. It seems perfectly natural to have sexual feelings that sometimes get attached to your close friends. I don’t want to be in any sort of position where I’m telling you that you are wrong to have these desires or that they must somehow be silenced.

Yet, at another level, desire can sometimes be very distracting (which is also why it’s so exciting!). All I can really suggest is to try to think about other things. Perhaps zero in on the music and push that erotic energy into your dancing instead of looking for that dfmo [dance floor make-out –ed]. Or take a page from horny teenagers the world over and think about something decidedly unerotic: for whatever reason the example that comes first to my mind is baseball.

Or, if you feel like it’s a very serious distraction and you feel comfortable doing it, maybe let your friend know? I’m sure they’d appreciate the compliment (people tend to like being desired!). And having it on the table may just be what’s needed to keep it from feeling like too much inside of you. Or maybe it’ll be one step toward making it seem less inappropriate. ;)

EPHEMERA

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the girls who will train you Signe Swanson ILLUSTRATION BY Claire Schlaikjer BY

have red nails and paws. have straight hair and red aprons. are getting married. are twenty two. dropped out of beauty school to be their own stepsisters. are dying somewhere italian. it is nineteen hundred and ellis island. teach me i’m dumb as fuck. pull out analog calculator when I cannot count change. teach me my own accent. chitchat real talk vindications of the dumb bitch named the dirt under her fingernails. the girls who will train you, it is hard to man the telephone while your selves live in the kitchen. i am not you so what’s wrong with working for lessons? have they ever smelled an earth lily before a duane reade eu de parfume? have they been who is nor who isn’t: who drinks every sermon on what to say to make it in the new world dog-eatdog macrobiotic takeout place, subsidiary of full throttle culture. no: here it is nineteen hundred and ellis island. they don’t talk to me when i talk. my nails have dirt under them and it’s my first name. it’s really hard when i am a woman too who’s loving a warm dinner and you really made it. i am cold blue and i am new here, six degrees separate from the oven, as you nursed the olive oil into fire: you damn mothers

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LITERARY

APRIL 07, 2017

Fri 7 Sat 8 Sun 9 Mon 10 Tue 11 Wed 12 Thu 13

Fri-Ends’ Welcome To The Neighborhood 65 Washington St., Providence 6 PM – 10 PM Inaugural show @ fri-endly new PVD gallery space. The exhibition showcases 10 young artists, each engaging with the theme of 2: “2 inputs, 2 characters, 2 identities.”

Ann Wilson of Heart at Park Theatre Rhode Island Park Theatre, 848 Park Ave, Cranston 7 PM lmao it’s $55 Wow! I don’t know Ann Wilson’s solo work, but Heart was great. FWYH

(un)bound Graphic Design Commons, RISD 11 AM – 4 PM

Spring Arts Festival Granoff Center for the Creative Arts, Brown U 6 PM – 10 PM

RISD (un)bound is a book fair celebrating artists’ books, zines, and experimental publishing by local artists, designers, and publishers. There will be workshops, exhibits, talks, and sales. I will go and I will tell myself not to buy too many books but I will buy too many books anyway.

Annual exhibition of Brown & RISD student artwork, plus live music, dinner, drinks, & dancing.

The Original Wedding Expo Twin River Casino, 100 Twin River Rd., Lincoln, RI 11 AM – 4 PM $12

2nd Racism & Environmental Justice Community Meeting Elmwood Community Center, 155 Niagara St, Providence 2 PM – 6 PM $12

This is the Original Wedding Expo. For all your wedding needs. “Children under 12 are free.”

Queer/Muslim/Child: An evening with Abdellah Taïa 135 Thayer Street (MCM Building), Brown U Production 2, Room 102 5:30 PM Taïa is one of the only openly gay Moroccan writers and filmmakers working today. His work is autobiographical and is alternately light, funny, angry, despairing. I read one of his books and I liked it a lot.

This event will include a screening and discussion of his latest film.

A meeting to discuss skills, impacts, mapping, and engagement related to racism and environmental justice in RI. Hosted by Rhode Island Jobs for Justice, which organizes local workers, community members, students, etc. for workers’ rights and social justice.

Shit & Shine/ Container/ Finished/ World War/ DJ Mandy Machines With Magnets, 400 Main St., Pawtucket 10 PM $10 Head over to good old MWM to see Shit & Shine, the acclaimed TX-based noise/electronics/rock project of Craig Close. Also, don’t miss Providence’s finest techno act, Container, who was recently endorsed on Instagram by none other than Eric Andre.

AMOK! Escaping Criminal Attacks Seminar 155 Millennium Cir, Lakeville, MA 6 – 8 PM “only $30” “Tom Sotis presents how to use a pen or pointed object to repel a physical assault or weapon attack and create a point of escape. Of course there are no guarantees but delivering pain is the best known way to repel an attack.”

PVD Democratic Socialists of America April General Meeting Rhode Island Working Families Party, 118 Gano Street, Providence 7 PM – 8:30 PM Just another plug for your neighborhood DSA.

Sheer Mag, Downtown Boys, and Hairspray Queen AS220, 115 Empire St., Providence 9 PM – 1 AM $10 advance / $12 door Sheer Mag from Philly, plus always quality, always punk rock locals Downtown Boys and Hairspray Queen.

Ivy Film Festival presents M. Night Shyamalan Salomon Hall, Brown U, Providence 6 PM – 7 PM What will the twist ending to M. Night Shyamalan’s Brown U moderated discussion be? Find out for yourself!