The College Hill Independent Vol. 37 Issue 1

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14 SEP 2018 VOL 37 ISSUE 01 A BROWN / RISD WEEKLY

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FROM THE EDITORS

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Week in Review: Failed Busyness Ben Bienstock, Sara Van Horn

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Seeking Asylum Erin West METRO

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BK2PVD Wen Zhuang

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Animal House Harry August & Ella Comberg ARTS

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White Voices Marianne Verrone FEATURES

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Beyond Yes Tiara Sharma SCIENCE & TECH

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Hot Wheels, Free Bird Lucas Smolcic Larson BODY

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Freudian Slipping Cate Turner

On a serious note, building on the dedicated work of past Managing Editors, the Indy has instituted a number of paid positions for low-income staff members, received funding for 16 color pages, and finally cleaned its damn room. This is our model for change; equal parts corporate and benevolent, our starting point for an alternative(?) future, week-byweek.

CEO

LITERARY 13

Elected on a platform of Taylorism, democracy, and radical centrism, we somehow stumbled into this imperfect, impassioned project on College Hill. All politics are local, after all, and perhaps this ‘blue wave’ all our parents have been talking about has already arrived, closer to home than we ever expected. Seismic shifts have rocked the Indy community by corporate decree: the prohibition of ‘gansetts, juul-free zones in conmag, and a reinvigorated understanding our our relationship with the body.

MISSION STATEMENT

Dog Island Miles Guggenheim

The College Hill Independent is a Providence-based publication written, illustrated, designed, and edited by students from Brown and RISD. We are committed to publishing politically engaged and accessible work. While the Indy is financed by Brown University, we hold ourselves accountable to our readers across the Providence community. The Indy rejects content that explicitly or implicitly perpetuates racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, xenophobia, ableism and/or classism.

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[ACTION REQUIRED] Nicole Cochary & Claire Schlaikjer

Though this list is not exhaustive, the Indy strives to address these systems of oppression by centering the voices, opinions, and efforts of marginalized people in Providence and beyond.

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Back2School Gerdy-Björn

WEEK IN REVIEW Sara van Horn NEWS Mara Dolan Lucas Smolcic Larson Paula Pacheco Soto METRO Jacob Alabab-Moser Harry August Ella Comberg FEATURES Ruby Aiyo Gerber Tiara Sharma Wen Zhuang

The Indy is constantly evolving: we are always working to make our staff and content more inclusive. Though our editing process provides an internal structure for accountability, we always welcome letters to the editor.

ARTS Nora Gosselin Isabelle Rea Marianne Verrone

LIST Alexis Gordon Signe Swanson Will Weatherly

SCIENCE & TECH Mia Pattillo Julia Rock Eve Zelickson

WRITERS Ben Bienstock Mica Chau Jessica Dai Eduardo Gutierrez-Peña Liby Hays Jorge Palacios Giacomo Sartorelli Ivy Scott Alex Westfall Claribel Wu Kayli Wren

LITERARY Shuchi Agrawal Emma Kofman EPHEMERA Nicole Cochary Claire Schlaikjer

BODY Pia Mileaf-Patel Cate Turner

X Maya Bjornson Maria Gerdyman

VOL 37 ISSUE 01

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COPY EDITORS Grace Berg Seamus Flynn Miles Guggenheim Matt Ishimaru Hannah Ngo Sasha Ramen ILLUSTRATORS Natasha Brennan Natasha Boyko Julia Illana Jeff Katz Halle Krieger Katya Labowe-Stroll Sophia Meng Sandra Moore Rémy Poisson Mariel Solomon Ella Rosenblatt Miranda Villanueva

ILLUSTRATION EDITORS Alex Hanesworth Eve O'Shea DESIGNERS Pablo Herraiz Garcia de Guadiana Bethany Hung Amos Jackson Katherine Sang Ella Rosenblatt DESIGN EDITOR Jack Halten Fahnestock BUSINESS Maria Gonzalez

SENIOR EDITORS Eliza Chen Katrina Northrop Signe Swanson Will Weatherly MANAGING EDITORS Olivia Kan-Sperling Chris Packs Erin West

The College Hill Independent is printed

by TCI Press in Seekonk, Massachusetts.

WEB Ashley Kim

THEINDY.ORG

@THEINDY_TWEETS

WEEK IN FAILED

BUSINESSES

BY Ben Bienstock, Sara van Horn ILLUSTRATION Eve O’Shea DESIGN Pablo Herraiz Garcia de Guadiana

BLUE AT ONE TIME, GREEN AT ANOTHER This past week, more than 11,000 tourists visited Walden Pond in Concord, Massachusetts, home to the idyllic lakeside cabin that inspired the transcendentalist musings of Henry David Thoreau. Although this nineteenth-century naturalist built his home on Walden Pond in an attempt to live closely with nature, for the pond’s many tourists Thoreau’s writings inspire perhaps too intimate a connection. According to a scientific study published in the journal PLoS One and released last spring, high levels of cultural eutrophication—too many nutrients from too many humans— have been damaging the pond’s fragile ecosystems for the past century. When translated from scientific jargon into the PR campaigns of concerned conservationists, the cause of this damage becomes (paradoxically) clear: Too many people have been peeing in Thoreau’s pond.

Walden would’ve looked—and smelled—quite differently in 1845. For two years, two months, and two days, Thoreau lived with Spartan simplicity on Walden Pond, striving to capture in his journaling the sublimity and spiritual wisdom of his natural surroundings. In the time spent between entertaining his visitors and handing his mother his dirty laundry, Thoreau sought to convey what was as “intangible and indescribable as the tints of morning or evening” and to document the life that “emits a fragrance like flowers and sweetscented herbs.” The conclusion of these reverent writings was part memoir, part instruction manual, and part spiritual guide: Walden, or, Life in the Woods is praised as an American classic and continues to be taught as an exemplar of cushioned asceticism and escapist naturalism in high school English classrooms across the country.

Yet, as the report concerningly shows, his writings seem to have too deeply impressed upon the American public the importance of living in nature. According to the PLoS One swimmer exposé, more than half of the summer phosphorus found in Walden Pond can be attributed to human urine. In addition to the growth of certain freshwater algae, the consequences of this repeated swimming indulgence include the declining water clarity of a pond previously described by Thoreau as “blue at one time and green at another” and “[partaking] the color of both [earth and the heavens].”

In describing Walden’s growing algae populations and decaying animal life, the study emphasizes the difference between the pond of our present-day and the one Thoreau eulogized. “I went to the woods,” Thoreau famously wrote, “in an effort to live deliberately.” Too many tourists, the report implies, went in the pond without any similar purpose or concern.

Anxious tour operators and environmentalists alike have taken steps to clean up a pond that many credit with the birth of the Conservation Movement. Even before it became obvious that the mass of men lead lives of quiet urination, Walden Pond State Reservation upgraded its septic facilities, closed town dumps, and reinforced shorelines in an attempt to stop the pond’s contamination. Similarly, the Friends of Walden Pond, a local conservation organization, has dedicated itself to clean-up efforts since 1990. Yet this National Historic Landmark continues to receive thousands of visitors per week. One can only wonder at Thoreau’s hypothetical commentary if he could see his pond now, contaminated by the beauty of his writing. Professor

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

Curt Stager, co-author of the study, believes Thoreau’s feelings (like the current colors of his pond) would’ve been mixed. “I think he would have been sorry,” Stager said, “to see his pond teetering on the brink of being loved to death.”

-SVH

MOVIE ON, MOVIE PASS For everything there is a season, and it now seems as if MoviePass too shall pass away. Since the company’s rise in 2017, online snark-jocks and explainer videos have tried to suss out whether the service—which, in the halcyon days before July, loaded subscribers’ debit cards with the price of admission to one movie per day in exchange for $9.95 a month and users’ personal data—is “too good to be true.” But following the company’s disastrous summer, online commentators no longer ask if MoviePass will fail, but instead lust over its now imminent demise. (It’s unclear why supposedly objective ‘journalistic’ enterprises so plainly have it out for a service that literally pays subscribers to go to the movies, but the hit pieces keep on coming.)

Hints of MoviePass’s trouble emerged this past April, when the company announced that it was limiting new customers to four tickets per month and preventing users from attending repeat viewings. The e-rags came out for blood, eagerly employing biting metaphors of curtains closing and credits rolling to report the impending death of the company. Yet within a week, the original ten-dollar-per-month one-movie per-day plan was back. Foiled in their attempts to besmirch the company’s name, these web-narcs moved on to obsessing over MoviePass’s introduction of peakhour pricing on blockbusters and the debacle of its foray into film distribution: the universally panned

John Travolta scowl vehicle, Gotti. Although both surge pricing and Gotti were embarrassing public failures, the narrow-minded trendmongers who laughed and spelled doom for the company failed to see that these new policies did not change the fact that MoviePass was still a service that literally pays subscribers to go to the movies.

But now over a month has passed since the fateful July day when MoviePass borrowed $5 million after its app stopped working (because the company ran out of money), and even here at the Indy, with our rigorous commitment to journalistic objectivity, we must admit the writing is on the wall. With prices raised and ticketing limited to three movies per month, MoviePass is no longer the swaggering upstart with an obviously unsustainable business model, but rather the battered embodiment of philanthropic hubris. (And yet, the service still literally pays subscribers to go to the movies.) As the neo-Thatcherite YouTube commenter some call me tim reminds us, “Sooner or later you run out of other people’s money...”

Perhaps some call me tim is right and MoviePass—a multibillion-dollar corporation—was actually creeping socialism all along. Either way, we now find it necessary to remove the shroud of objectivity: Although it is hard to sympathize with a company that tries to turn a profit on leveraging subscribers’ data (including their locations, spending habits, and restaurant preferences) through its app, the Indy deeply admires the inherent anti-corporate verve of a service that loses money every time its users swipe their red cards. The magic of MoviePass lies in the power of the customer to reverse the scam the company thought it was pulling; we hold the cards, and as long as we keep swiping, MoviePass can’t survive.

-BB

WEEK IN REVIEW

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“PRIVATE” VIOLENCE, PUBLIC CONCERN

Jeff Sessions’ Disregard for Decades of Women’s and Migrants’ Rights Activism “Generally, claims by aliens pertaining to domestic violence or gang violence perpetrated by non-governmental actors will not qualify for asylum.” In one line, US Attorney General Jeff Sessions swiftly ended asylum protections for survivors of domestic violence this June—reversing over 15 years of legal precedent and decades more of immigration and feminist activism.

The June 11 ruling on an asylum case named “Matter of A-B” outraged activists, politicians, and legal officials alike. Among many others, it drew criticism from the Southern Poverty Law Center, Minority Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, and 15 former immigration judges who signed a joint statement condemning Sessions’ move. On August 10, the American Civil Liberties Union announced it would bring a lawsuit against Sessions on behalf of several asylum seekers with cases pertaining to domestic violence. One client represented in the lawsuit is a woman who, after escaping two decades of abuse from her partner in El Salvador, was deported back to her home while her case was still being argued in court. It is unclear whether the ACLU and others challenging Sessions will be successful in reversing the ruling, and until then, the elimination of this provision is already dramatically impacting thousands of women and others seeking protection from violence.

The Texas-based immigration legal advocacy organization Dilley Pro Bono Project represents many clients seeking asylum protections from the threat of domestic and gang violence in their home countries.

After Session’s decision, legal advocates saw their clients denied by the courts in staggering numbers. A June dispatch from Dilley stated “Since Session’s decision in Matter of A-B on June 11th, we have received 25 negative decisions. As a comparison, we had received 59 negatives in 2018 before the decision, meaning the percentage of negative decisions more than tripled.”

Ana Flores was on the legal team at Dilley this past summer and told the College Hill Independent that while domestic violence-based asylum cases were almost always granted in the past, she now sees clients who had death threats against them denied and lined up for deportation.

In the upcoming battle over this asylum protection, the fate of thousands of asylum seekers fleeing violence hangs upon complex legal arguments in the courts over such minutia as the definition of terms like “particular social group.” Hidden behind the impenetrability of immigration law, however, is a long legacy of feminist and immigration advocates bringing domestic violence into the public eye and demanding legal protection.

And after numerous hard-fought campaigns to qualify domestic violence survivors for asylum, Sessions’ June ruling flies in the face of this legal and political history, breaking from decades of US immigration policy in order to further conservative anti-immigrant politics at the expense of those fleeing life-threatening conditions. ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Sessions’ full statement includes over 30 pages of detailed legal argumentation, but the crux of his decision lies in an attempt to define domestic violence as “private violence,” which he argues does not meet

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requirements for asylum allowances. It is true that asylum law is designed to address violence in the form of broad-based social persecution conducted in the public sphere by government actors. However, after decades of international women’s rights activism (concentrated in late 20th century Europe but extending beyond), gender-based violence has become internationally recognized not as private but as a public issue of systemic oppression—therefore qualifying it as a basis for asylum claims. This means that according to international standards, states have an equal onus to protect those fleeing religious persecution, for instance, as those escaping domestic violence or other gender-related discrimination. In denying asylum to abuse survivors, Sessions disregards this important recognition of gender-based violence as a public issue and revives an outdated ideology that excuses gender-based violence as a “private” matter.

The long line of legal precedents, policies, and activism that led to asylum allowance for domestic violence extends far back into the 20th century. The devastation of World War II sparked international efforts to safeguard rights of refugees and other displaced persons (mostly in Europe), culminating in the United Nations 1951 Refugee Convention. While this convention produced internationally recognized standards for asylum, the US did not adopt asylum law until its own Refugee Act decades later in 1980. Even then, this act did not arise from concern over refugee rights as much as an interest in promoting US foreign policy interests. In alignment with US Cold War politics, the Refugee Act primarily protected immigrants from communist countries. At that time, the language of the law mirrored UN definitions of a refugee as “someone who is unable or unwilling to return to their country of origin owing to a well-founded fear of being persecuted

for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group, or political opinion.”

Notably absent from the list of grounds for asylum-protected prosecution is gender. Consequently, advocates for women’s human rights in the 1990s sought to expand internationally recognized claims for refugee status to include gender-based violence. This activity built on a moment of broad international concern over violence against women in the 90s, during which time many countries developed laws condemning domestic violence for the first time. In 1993, the UN published Strategies for Confronting Domestic Violence: A Resource Manual, and concurrently, the Declaration on the Elimination of Violence Against Women.

These significant national and international policies were successful due to the preceding two decades of feminist campaigns, advocating for an end to violence against women. A popular slogan during these and other late 20th-century feminist efforts was “the personal is political.” This line represented broader efforts of the movement to bring matters traditionally labeled “private” into the public sphere. In drawing attention to the broad social and institutional groundings for systemic violence against women, feminist advocates challenged conservative opinions of domestic violence as a “family matter”—hidden

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behind the literal and metaphorical closed doors of the nuclear family. Although couched in legal definition, Attorney General Sessions’ label of domestic violence as “private” mirrors such outdated ideology, excusing abuse. Sessions’ faulty logic is evident in statements such as, “The mere fact that a country may have problems effectively policing certain crimes—such as domestic violence or gang violence—or that certain populations are more likely to be victims of crime, cannot itself establish an asylum claim.” In Sessions’ attempts to sideline domestic abuse as a particular crime only applicable to “certain” populations, he sidesteps some of the most important contributions of women’s rights history: that gender-based violence is a widespread issue of public concern and requires public redress in the form of legal protections. ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Sessions’ end to asylum provisions for survivors of abuse is not only informed by anti-feminist ideology but is also infused with strong anti-immigrant sentiment—specifically, racially-charged fears of increases in immigration from Central and South America.

However, xenophobic politics of a secure border and hesitation around asylum allowances existed long before his instatement in 2016. Due to rhetorical fears of increased immigration, victories in granting asylum on the basis of domestic violence have always been precarious.

In the US, feminist efforts to address domestic violence resulted in the 1994 Violence Against Women Act. The Act included pathways to legal status for immigrants who experienced abuse from their American citizen spouses. This legislation was significant in that it provided precedent for other immigration allowances on the basis of spousal abuse. One year later, the US Immigration and Naturalization Services (now USCIS) adopted “Asylum Gender Guidelines” instructing immigration officials how to evaluate asylum cases that deal with gender-based violence, including domestic abuse and sexual assault. Due to these new provisions, in December of that year a woman from Togo became the first refugee to apply for and eventually be granted asylum in the US due to her experience of genderbased violence.

Although the 1995 Gender Guidelines helped prop the door open for such asylum claims, already present in the documents was a hesitancy to expand the pool of asylum applicants too widely. In order to assuage fears that changing definitions of acceptable refugees would open a flood of applications, the guidelines specified that in abuse-based asylum claims, “The domestic violence cannot be purely ‘personal’. It must relate to one of the grounds enumerated in the statute” (“grounds” here being the basis for persecution in the Refugee Act such as religion, political opinion, etc.).

Besides the faulty logic that domestic violence is ever purely “personal” (as in “particular,” “private”), this language also reveals an anxiety about gender-based claims to immigration relief opening the doors too wide, affording too many asylum seekers entry. This attempt to maintain tight restrictions on immigration allowances is not overtly stated; rather, it hides behind

BY Erin West ILLUSTRATION Pia Mileaf-Patel DESIGN Pablo Herraiz García de Guadiana, Jack Halten Fahnestock

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

legal language and definition. As a result of this (baseless) anxiety about increased immigration, the battle for legal recognition of gender-based persecution rests on tenuous legal delineations.

Sessions’ ability to end domestic violence-based asylum claims is a direct consequence of this legal precariousness. After the 1995 Guidelines, the right to asylum on the basis of gender identity was never written explicitly into law. Instead, lawyers were able to maneuver gender-based claims of persecution into the category of “particular social group,” an accepted ground for asylum listed alongside race, religion, nationality, and political opinion. The argument was essentially that women could be classified within such a category since their gender is an immutable characteristic that is widely socially recognized as a basis for discrimination. This particular argument was debated in asylum courts until a Guatemalan woman successfully won her case in 2014 on the basis of her membership of the particular social group, “married women in Guatemala who are unable to leave their relationship.”

Since 2014, the decision served as precedent for estimated thousands of other domestic violence survivors seeking asylum in the US. This is the case that Sessions reversed in June. His decision on her case recalls decades-old fears of an expanding asylum pool, saying, “The [former] opinion has caused confusion because it recognized an expansive new category of particular social groups based on private violence.” Sessions justifies his efforts to restrict immigration in this decision with falty conceptions of gender-based violence, claiming that, “there is significant room for doubt that Guatemalan society views these women, as horrible as their personal circumstances may be, as members of a distinct group in society, rather than each as a victim of a particular abuser in highly individualized circumstances” [emphasis added]. Sessions’ comments are as revealing as they are upsetting; his opinion exemplifies the nexus of anti-feminist and anti-immigrant politics that fuel today’s neo-conservatism.

2014). Stories of immigrant deportees facing abuse or death once sent back to their home countries have been well documented in the past several years.

Flores from Dilley told the Independent that in considering these cases, it is important to recognize the “intersection of state violence and the domestic realm.”

Her recent research on sexual violence in conflict areas has shown that, “in areas where state violence is most prevalent, sexual violence increases.” There is a relationship between the environment of militarization as well as other threats of violence outside the home and violence within a domestic relationship, Flores explained. Here lies the terrible irony in Sessions’ insistence that domestic violence is a private matter from which the US has no responsibility to provide protection: much of the current violence and instability in Central and South American countries—which women ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ are fleeing either directly or indirectly through its influence on their partnerships—can be traced back With little legitimate grounds for Sessions’ decision to to histories of US military intervention and economic end asylum for domestic violence survivors, his deci- imperialism. sion becomes emblematic of the dog-whistle politics increasingly used in—but not limited to—Trumpian ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ conservatism. In an address to immigration officials about his intended changes to asylum policy, Sessions The history and current politics around gender-based declared that, “The asylum system is being abused to violence claims to asylum reveal a tenuous legal the detriment of the rule of law, sound public policy battle, one that ultimately exposes the failure of immiand public safety.” Sessions also claimed that increased gration law to cement dependable protection from numbers of asylum applications had the potential to violence and freedom of movement. While debates overwhelm the legal system. will continue in the courts this fall, immigration activSessions’ comments reflect a broader conservative ists are not waiting for judges to define particular legal rhetoric of immigration “flooding” the United States. language. Just after Sessions’ June ruling, protests Such hyperbolic claims of increased border crossings against child separation and deportation led to some of and fraudulent use of the system are purposefully the largest demonstrations of political dissent we have intended to justify xenophobic policies of restricting seen during the current administration. As immigraimmigration allowances. In large part, this rhetoric has tion activists demonstrate, true victories for women, been disproven. Although asylum applications rose migrants, and anyone seeking reprieve from violence sharply in the past 4 years, there is no evidence that this may be best won not in the courts, but in the streets. has led to increased “abuse” of the system. According In May, a caravan of nearly 200 Central American to Department of Justice statistics, the rate at which asylum-seekers arrived at the California border and cases are granted asylum has remained consistent set up an encampment, staging demonstrations and despite the uptick in applications, hovering around 20 garnering media attention throughout the summer. percent. Although this means there is an increase in The caravan drew comment from the Attorney General asylum applications granted, the numbers seen today himself, who called their action “a deliberate attempt are still much lower than they have been in earlier to undermine our laws and overwhelm our system.” years. USCIS indicates an increase of refugee arrivals The representative group Pueblos Sin Fronteras linked from nearly 60,000 in 2012 to nearly 85,000 in 2016, concerns of violence against women to appeals for but these numbers are much smaller than the over immigrant justice on the caravan’s list of demands, 100,000 asylum cases granted per year in the early 90s addressed to their home countries and the US governand the staggering 207,000 cases granted in 1980, the ment. Calls to “end failures of justice for victims of first year asylum applications were opened. domestic violence” stood alongside demands to “open Even if Sessions’ concerns about the functioning of the borders” and make “the conventions on refugee the asylum process were founded, his move to end allow- rights not be empty rhetoric.” Many immigration activances for domestic violence survivors will not reduce ists like Pueblos Sin Fronteras recognize the precarious the numbers of people seeking protection at the border. nature of most immigration allowances and instead of Emily Gogolak, an investigative reporter on immigra- advocating for any individual immigration pathway to tion at the US-Mexico border, told the Independent, remain open, are developing broad-based critiques of “Deterrents, when one is fleeing violence, don’t work. the US immigration system. Ultimately, they call for People are going to keep coming, it will just be in a an open border to all, not just the few who fit particmore clandestine manner.” Gogolak emphasized the ular definitions of worthiness. After all, even if asylum extreme violence that many asylum applicants hope to protections for victims of domestic violence were escape. Applications from Central America’s Northern reinstated, that allowance would only cover a fraction Triangle make up the majority of asylum cases due to of the immigrants seeking to cross the border—all of increased political instability and organized crime in whom are owed the right to stay. the countries of Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras (which had the highest homicide rate in the world in ERIN WEST B'18.5 might apply to law school.

NEWS

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BOOK CLUB Cultural echo-chambers and an independent bookstore in Olneyville

BY Wen Zhuang ILLUSTRATION Miranda Villanueva

Providence, originally nicknamed the “Beehive of Industry” as it was one of the first cities to industrialize, has since been dubbed the “Creative Capital,” representative of its myriad of educational institutions and historic arts community. With any lofty title comes the weight of expectation, and Providence seems to have felt this pressure, reacting with steadfast upward mobility and strict adherence to cultural and societal trends. For a city that has always been a conduit for the weirder kinds of businesses, one cannot help but notice its eccentricity transforming into what is often asked of a “creative capital” rather than what the people of Providence have always brought together.

Experimental galleries showcasing artists now inhabit the spaces underground artists’ collectives like Fort Thunder once did.

Olneyville, a neighborhood on the West Side, stands as a clear example of this phenomenon. Its recent ‘renaissance’ has led local papers like Providence Monthly to place on it an equally enticing label: the “New-New Olneyville.” This is a direct result of people being forced out of other cities due to rising cost of living, as well as the “up-and-coming” allure attributed to Providence.

On the surface, it seems as though Providence has not let the influx of hungry young creatives hinder its historically quirky aesthetic. When The Plant, a mixed-use development located in a renovated historic mill complex—something of a a real-estate favorite across the West Side (Pearl, US Rubber Lofts)—opened its new-old doors in 2006, local writer David Brussat was quick to admire the “smokestack as a civic virtue.”

Praising the decision for artists working with areas like The Plant to preserve this symbol of power, he writes, “the smokestack says: the community will rise again, and the people will flourish.” The excitement for Olneyville’s rejuvenation comes from well-to-do community members who have recently poured in from all over, all with sincere intentions and lofty goals. Newcomers’ ability to revitalize a city whose history they are ignorant of is thrown into question as Olneyville remains one of the poorest areas of town.

Surely, we cannot leave regions that have undergone economic reversal to suffer, and debates around the gentrification of communities like Olneyville have never been in support of non-intervention. That notwithstanding, issues have begun to brew past the lure of the iconic smokestack and within the brick walls

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of these abandoned mills. They do not pertain to the lack of space, but rather to what we are allowing these spaces to become. Reinhabiting a space has always been ridden with complicated politics that are as deceptive as they are enticing. +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ The Plant wears its red-brick jacket proudly, and most mill aspects have not changed. This specific aesthetic decision, as with the preservation of the smokestack, is one that has become exceedingly popular among similar establishments. The smokestacks, which claim to pay tribute to a building’s industrialist past, are rarely repurposed as innocent design details. Again, the question returns to: for whom are these spaces and their content are intended, and why they are taking up space in this given area? Businesses in The Plant also bring up comparable questions of whether these aesthetic sensibilities are inspired by a desire for this district to be restored to its former glory, or whether they are co-opted simply to embrace a certain trend.

One Plant business, Grin Gallery, opened in 2013 as a “white-cube” gallery space which has been quoted

by Providence Monthly as wanting “people to know that there’s something outside of Providence in order for [Providence] to sustain itself.” Nearby, Hungry Ghost Press, started in 2016, was initially an instagram-famous creative venture selling custom t-shirts and various paraphernalia. Both seem to arbitrarily align with the historic look of the Plant, priding their company for being located within a once-abandoned mill.

Riffraff, a bookstore and bar that opened its doors last December, hails from the same tradition. When the College Hill Independent sat down with owners Tom Roberge and Emma Ramadan, they said they didn’t see their unconventional, open-till-10 combo establishment existing anywhere but here. “Because the cost here is less than New York, you can be a little bit more experimental. People know that so they’re forgiving of the process of “let’s see if we can make this work,” says Roberge. According to him, the low costs of starting a business in the city and a community of young, likeminded people secured Providence as the only place that this was possible. “I see people all the time saying that they’ve just opened this company or they’re quitting their jobs to pursue their dreams. It’s cheaper here

and there’s just that spirit” echoes Ramadan. They felt the name Riffraff—a derogatory term used for Greek leftists protesting austerity measures during the 2008 economic crisis—fit their political agenda. Speaking to the American Booksellers Association last June, Roberge talked in length about there being a need, especially on the West Side, for a place to do something that wasn’t just a bookstore or a bar, but was an optimal marriage of two seemingly different enterprises. “We wanted a name that would work for both a bookstore and a bar without really labeling us as one or the other,” he said.

Both Roberge and Ramadan have climbed the rungs of the insular New York City literary world.

Roberge and Ramadan left New York feeling disillusioned. “When we were in New York, everybody we knew was doing a shitty job that they hated. I mean it's a playground for the rich,” says Ramadan, while Roberge echoed the beauty of being able to be in a place where things happen on such a “personal, micro level.” They approached the idea of Riffraff with a level of disdain about the lack of “authenticity” of similar independent bookstores in the city. Roberge worked as a bookseller at McNally Jackson, one of the superstars of its kind. Regardless, Ramadan asserts the inspirational nature of the bookstore’s community: it“has changed the books that [they] buy and how [they] see the book world and what a bookstore can be.” +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Audiences and creative aspirations aside, it is unclear what people the Riffraff community is intended for.

Who are these obscure book-lovers to whom the booksellers continuously refer? And exactly how wide is this circle of people—those who have influenced them and become some of their most regular customers? Roberge described the usual crowd Riffraff attracts as “people like us. Young people trying to do their own thing. Live somewhere affordable but somewhere cool at the same time.” Few-to-none long-time residents, for example, frequent the store. In terms of local engagement, there is a need for a symbiotic relationship. According to Roberge, “You know, we do things with people in the community whose ideals match ours.”

Though in recent years the median household income of Providence has increased to $35,234,

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compared to $19,046 in the 2000s, nearly one in four Olneyville families receive some sort of public assistance. In addition, 70 percent of its population have received either no or only some high school and college education. It goes without saying that Providence, even with its miniature size, presents disparaging inequalities just across a highway. It’s not a surprise, therefore, that Riffraff, with its emphasis on odd books of translation and essays of political and cultural criticism, is not trying to assimilate to the Olneyville community at all, but instead markets itself towards a group of young, college-educated intellectual consumers. +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

seen a rise among “the retail apocalypse.” “What you begin to see is a bifurcation of the industry where the indies represent this high experience, a chance for the consumer to engage on a set of very personal dimensions,” answered Raffaelli, including that “real estate developers are actually willing to give deals to some of the independent bookstores because the independent bookstore is a mark of authenticity.”

This ‘mark of authenticity’ of independent boutique shops extends further than just the indie bookstore, and public officials like Raimondo are quickly capitalizing on it. It’s difficult to feel the need for book clubs like “Capitalism + the Individual”—which is Riffraff ’s first book club—when Providence's school infrastructure is widely underfunded. Olneyville, and various other neighborhoods, have become conduits for a free, no-frills business plan. But have business owners ever been in favor of building up from what already exists?

Perhaps they are merely importing echo-chambers— ones that have been pushed out of bigger cities due to overconsumption.

Governor Gina Raimondo held a press conference at Riffraff last January, announcing “a comprehensive package of reforms designed to make Rhode Island friendlier to small businesses.” According to RI.gov, “Raimondo also touted an additional $500,000 in her budget for the 2019 fiscal year to double the number of small business loans awarded by the end of this year.”

Following the consumer public’s continuing preference for Amazon over bookstores, National Public Radio hosted a conversation between Paddy Hirsch of Planet Money and Ryan Raffaelli, a Harvard Business School professor and author of an upcoming study on the independent bookstore business. “The thing is, it's not easy to start or operate an independent bookshop.

The margins on books are razor thin, and it's hard to find +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ a location in the kind of community that will support a store where rents are affordable” Hirsch explained. He Roberge and Ramadan are aware of the striking differwondered how the independent bookstore business has ences of engagement in the literary world here and their old post in the City. Ramadan, specifically, spoke in length to the Independent about one of their biggest learning curves: “Since December, we’ve been making sure we're not only skewed towards what we think is important, but what people come in here and ask for. So we've been learning, since December, what the people who come in here want and it hasn't always matched up with what we expected.” She specifically mentioned

that an initial desire of theirs was to sell mainly books by writers of color or women—though both Roberge and Ramadan did not indicate that Riffraff attracts a diverse set of identities. However, books that coincide with the “hot-themes” of the literary Twitter world— such as books on motherhood or political engagements with the body—have not found a sustained audience. In this sense, Riffraff inhabits an entirely different space from its audience, clinging to its insular New York City background rather than finding a new model for independent, implicitly radical bookstores. +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ This December will mark the couple’s third year living on the West Side. One can only hope that businesses similar to Riffraff, especially those moving into low-income communities of color in Providence, rethink their position in their new home to advance their self-awareness and social understanding. The support from officials like Governor Raimondo for small businesses might only benefit the city if they are taken not as a call to displace and replace low-income areas, but as a chance to reconsider who exactly we are thinking of when we set out to solve long-time issues and advance social equity in a holistic manner.

WEN ZHUANG RISD ‘19 definitely needs a coffee, but really needs a drink.

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

METRO

06

WHEN YES MEANS NO On the violence waged despite of, and through, consent

BYTiara Sharma ILLUSTRATION Alex Hanesworth DESIGN Ella Rosenblatt content warning: sexual assault Four years ago, institutions of higher education across the country began switching out “No Means No” for a “Yes Means Yes” paradigm for consent. This was a strategic move to shift the emphasis of campus policies towards a particular type of affirmative consent, one in which the absence of a “no” during any sexual act cannot legally indicate a “yes.” New York and California were the first to legally adopt this model for affirmative consent and catalyzed a nationwide conversation about the politics of consent, both on and off college campuses.

Brown University’s own Title IX office understands consent as an “affirmative and willing agreement to engage in specific forms of sexual contact with another person.” The office further states that “an essential element of consent is that it be freely given” and that it “cannot be obtained through the use of coercion or force.” But who, may we ask, has the authority to give consent, and who has the authority to ask for it? And is consent ever really freely given?

Many self-identified third-wave feminists have voiced, and continue to voice, their support for this policy and the larger, student-driven campaigns that sprung from it. Activist Gloria Steinem and feminist sociologist Michael Kimmel penned an op-ed in the New York Times called “‘Yes’ Is Better Than ‘No,’” in which they praise California’s Senate Bill 967 and, furthermore, call ‘yes’ “perhaps the most erotic word in the English language.” Sexy though it may be, “yes” continues to be a word that carries and conceals an entire host of complex feelings one may have towards a sexual act, along with the identities and personal histories that always inform consent. Of course, affirmative consent is a higher and safer standard of healthy sex.

But it also conflates healthy, good sex with contractual and consensual sex, the latter of which cannot ensure the safety of all parties involved.

In this way, “Yes Means Yes” obscures the ways in which consensual sex, too, can be initiated and performed through intimidation and pressure. It renders irrelevant the important, underlying questions behind every sexual interaction: what pressures underpin a “yes?” How do both partners’ levels of sexual experience, genders, sexualities, ages, racial identities, and class factor into who initiates—or, rather, who can initiate—sex? Whose pleasure is prioritized and whose complicity is accepted?

These are questions that white, cis-het feminist discourses (of, for example, the likes of Gloria Steinem) fail to acknowledge in their unrelenting and often reductive politics of sexual liberation and sex-positivity. Cis-heteropatriarchy and other relationships of dominance can, and do, thrive within consensual sex.

In fact, consent can often become the vehicle for such gendered, racialized, and classed power structures— the very means of coercion and violence. +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Before my assault, I thought I had seen enough presentations and skits on consent—and, well, had enough sex—to understand what forms sexual violation could come in. Those of us who have never been sexually assaulted think we know what it means—what it’s supposed to look like—to trespass lines of consent But had I been taught to know it when I feel it? Have any of us?

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Even if educational workshops, bystander trainings, and the very media we consume emphasize the variability of how assault can manifest, their scripted presentations of abusive behavior further solidify normative definitions of what sexual assault looks like. In turn, those who aren’t survivors can compartmentalize and theorize what it’s supposed to feel like to be assaulted and abstract it from their own sexual experiences according to a whole anthology of visual and textual images they have internalized about what sexual violence means—thus placing survivors in a separate category altogether. As dominance feminist Catharine Mackinnon writes in Feminism Unmodified, “We continue to stigmatize [those] who claim rape as having experienced a deviant violation and allow the rest of us to go through life feeling violated but thinking we’ve never been [assaulted], when there were a great many times when we, too, have had sex and didn’t want it.”

Before reading Mackinnon, I used to equate sexual assault to an anomaly: what happened when sex went terribly wrong. But what I overlooked here was the sheer violence inflicted upon me through ‘ordinary’ sex, the sex I consented to—and, yes, even the sex I might’ve found pleasurable. From the night of my assault onwards, however, I began to reflect on this idea of invisibilization and its relevance to even the consensual sex I had had in the past. I realized that there were situations in which I had consented to sex—but only to speed up, and get over with, the act itself.

Rena Gattuso writes in Feministing: “A lot of sex feels like this. Sex where we don’t matter. Where we may as well not be there. Sex where we don’t say no, because we don’t want to say no, sex where we say yes even, where we’re even into it, but where we fear — some little voice in us fears — that if we did say no, if we don’t like the pressure on our necks or the way they touch us, it wouldn’t matter.” In the moment of the assault, I was embarrassed and scared to yell or physically retaliate not because I didn’t want to draw attention to myself or upset him—but because I was afraid he would disregard what I would say and continue to do what he wanted. In this way, it wasn’t so much the physical violation that horrified me; it was the possibility that it wouldn’t matter either way, that in spite of my retaliation, I would be rendered doubly invisible.

In an article titled “The Game is Rigged,” Rebecca Traister of New York Magazine writes, “Young feminists have adopted an exuberant, raunchy, confident, righteously unapologetic... ideology that sees sex — as long as it’s consensual — as an expression of feminist liberation. The result is a neatly halved sexual universe, in which there is either assault or there is sex positivity.”

This kind of consent discourse bifurcates sex into two categories: ‘regular’ sex (the sex conducted after consent is obtained) and sexual assault; using this framework, we begin to understand virtually any kind of consensual sex as ‘okay’ and any kind of nonconsensual sex as avowedly ‘not-okay.’

But, after weeks of processing my own assault, I realized that it, too, was sex—or at least a type of sex. To call it assault became, for me, a misnaming of what I experienced, a misidentification of the ways in which 'normal' sex, too, can become the means through which individuals are coerced and abused.

To not acknowledge what happened to me as a form of sex transformed, in my mind, into an evasion of the

violence of “everyday” sex and the forms it can take.

In Mackinnon’s words, “we fail to criticize what has been made of sex, what has been done to us through sex because we leave the line between [assault and sex] right where it is.”

Mackinnon’s words are applicable even to the sex we call bad or unenjoyable. Under the current paradigm of consent, one’s abilities to prioritize one’s sexual partners’ desires, preferences, and comfort is irrelevant to whether or not sex is consensual. Our current discourse surrounding ‘healthy’ sex authorizes those who have sex to disregard the safety and pleasure of their partners, so long as they perform the expectations of obtaining consent. +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ My own experience of assault changed how I could experience sex from that point onwards and how I understood what safe and healthy sex meant for my own body. I started thinking more and more about consent and its implications—more specifically the question of how much safety, and, perhaps equally as important, how much pleasure my consent could afford me.

Without a radical transformation of sex and the violent power dynamics inherent to it, conversations limited to affirmative consent will continue to ignore deeper questions of who is allowed to claim sexual agency, pleasure, and the privilege of healthy sex. We will fail to account for the dangerous interactions in which both enthusiasm and consent are expected and performed.

This is not to say that I believe all sex is assault, nor to take agency from those who find sex empowering.

This is also not to encourage all who engage in sex to claim the experience of survivorship, nor to banish consent entirely from our discourse surrounding sex.

My focus is, instead, on dismantling the glorification of consent as the standard that we endorse for healthy sexual interactions. Our communities should be accountable for envisioning and generating discourse surrounding sex that transcends the language of consent and delves into the language of power and implicit coercion. We must name the ways in which sex can be both consensual and traumatic, and we must begin an honest conversation about the violence that even the most enthusiastic ‘yes’ can conceal.

As Steinem and Kimmel write, and as most other contemporary feminist discourses suggest, “‘Yes’ Is Better Than No.’” But it is far from good enough.

Consent has proven itself, time and time again, as an inadequate benchmark for understanding the politics of sexual intimacy and the questions of agency that accompany it. It is our responsibility to no longer understand consent as a localized practice but as a politicized, historicized means of asserting agency and pleasure.

TIARA SHARMA B'20 thinks “nuance” means “nuance”

14 SEP 2018

THE HOUSE ON KEENE STREET

College Hill reads the zoning code

BY Harry August and Ella Comberg ILLUSTRATION Rémy Poisson DESIGN Pablo Herraiz García de Guadiana

Along College Hill’s Keene Street, identical teal blue signs placed in nearly every yard point to a street united. Unlike other neighborhoods in Providence, this group of residents does not rally against natural gas terminals, Immigrant and Customs Enforcement, or the threat of eminent domain. Their concern, touted by the signs that read “Save Neighborhoods: Enforce Zoning Laws,” is overcrowded student apartments.

“This neighborhood is pretty much under assault right now,” Deborah Simmons* told the College Hill Independent, standing in front of her Keene Street home. A block to the south, Simmons’ neighbor on Lloyd Avenue echoed her concerns. “We’re always fighting this battle of more people stuffed in smaller places. It becomes an Animal House situation,” he told the Independent, pointing towards the pile of trash sitting outside of a student house—a smelly blemish on the otherwise litter-free block. +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

At the heart of these conflicts, as the yard signs allude, are two contentious parts of the Providence zoning ordinances that can be applied to restrict student apartments. One rule explicitly prohibits more than three “college students” from living together in singlefamily homes on blocks zoned as single family residential neighborhoods, as Keene is. While originally intended to limit the encroachment of student housing into a single family area near Providence College, Bob Azar, Deputy Director of the Providence Planning and Development, told the Independent that this section does not in fact apply to Bronard’s properties on Keene Street. While those houses have been used as owner-occupied single-family homes “for generations,” as Nina Markov, who lives across the street from 77 Keene Street, wrote in an email to the Independent, they’re officially considered two-family homes. The two properties, according to Markov, have “in-law apartments” in the attic, and thus were grandfathered into the current zoning code as two family homes.

But the Keene Street houses in question are still subject to the more general rule, sneakily nestled within the definition of a “household,” that bans more than three “unrelated persons” from living together in a single unit, in any type of dwellings across the city.

So, if 13 students had actually moved into Bronhard’s two-unit home, they would have been in violation of the zoning code. But before this became an issue, according to Markov, the landlord terminated the lease, moving the students to another property. So, why all the yard signs if the two houses are currently unoccupied and not in violation of the law? By choosing not to enforce the “unrelated persons” rule anywhere in any neighborhood, Markov alleges, the city gives permission to developers to flip these homes into student housing, against the spirit of the law: “If this rule were being enforced, Bronard would not have bothered to buy 85 and 77 Keene.”

Figuring out why the city might not actually enforce the law, however, becomes more complicated and relies on recent state court decisions. In an effort to protect students’ rights, the Rhode Island chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union has challenged both the “unrelated persons” and “college student” types of laws, arguing that they violate the the equal protection clause of the Rhode Island constitution. The City of Providence, under current Mayor Jorge Elorza, successfully defended the “college students” ordinance in Superior Court just this year, convincing the court that college students are not a “protected class,” like race, ethnicity, or national origin.

However, the ACLU’s challenge to overturn a similar “unrelated persons” law in Narragansett was, in fact, successful, which helps explain why the current Providence administration is hesitant to enforce these rules, as Markov alleges. The case relied on a 1994 Superior Court decision that clearly stated that the rule is in violation of the state’s equal protection rights and is thus unconstitutional: “The town cannot, in effect, set aside its residential zones for use only by people who have the good fortune to be related by blood.”

On Keene Street, the epicenters of neighborhood concern are numbers 77 and 85, two elegant clapboard houses owned by Walter Bronhard, a landlord who made Providence headlines when he bought, neglected, and threatened to demolish the Welcome Arnold House, a historic property off of Benefit Street.

Keene Street’s anxieties, though, are only in part due to the question of historic preservation. “We’d like the character of the neighborhood to be preserved,” another resident told the Indy.

That vague notion of “neighborhood character” accounts for many of the Keene Street neighbors’ ruffled feathers. On this block, houses that proudly adorn Providence Preservation Society placards above Munroe Dairy boxes consistently sell for $500,000800,000. And although residents are clear that the proximity of their homes to Brown University drew them to the neighborhood (Deborah Simmons, for one, invokes the classic college town rejoinder: we love going to lectures!), the proposition of this notorious landlord setting up shop on their block was too close for comfort.

Existing concerns about noise, trash, parking, and public safety only intensified when neighbors obtained a copy of the 77 Keene Street lease and learned that Bronhard planned to rent the six-bedroom property out to thirteen students. To justify their concerns, many Keene Street residents referenced one night in particular when a student house on their street threw a raucous party. People spilled into the street, Simmons told the Independent, rolling kegs down the street and partying well past midnight: “It was the worst party ever.” This moment has since integrated itself in the cultural memory of Keene Street, now known simply as “the hockey party.”

With that sleepless night fresh in their memory, the neighbors began their crusade in December of 2017, and by the spring of this year, they had organized neighborhood meetings, printed yard signs, testified in front of the city council, pooled their money for a private lawyer, and started an online petition in the name of restricting excessive student housing. The +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ petition, which has garnered 141 signatures at the time of writing, invokes a slippery slope: “If [Bronhard] can The City of Providence has good reason look the other move 13 students into a 6-bedroom house, why not 20?” way while students fill up College Hill apartments: a legal precedent that backs the idea that enforcing this +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ law would be discriminatory. It adds up, then, that City

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Council has yet to adopt an altered ordinance. Says Bob Azar of the Planning Department, “we’re hoping to have some proposals for changes to our zoning ordinance within the next couple of months that we will present to the council.” Still, residents of Keene Street feel they’re being wrongfully neglected by the city.

When Deborah Simmons runs into Mayor Elorza at the farmer’s market (as she has on occasion), and he rattles off a list of other problems he’s trying to solve, she’s indignant that her cause always seems to land at the bottom of the list. “The city does not enforce anything!” she says. “They do nothing. A whole bunch of us called, saying ‘is this a violation?’ and they said maybe they would send somebody.”

City Councilperson Seth Yurdin of Ward 1—an area that includes the Fox Point neighborhood and, in turn, many student apartments—might have an explanation for the neglect that Keene Street residents are feeling.

He opposes ordinances that would further restrict student apartments because unruly student houses “are the exception and not the rule.” “If there are specific problem properties,” he told the Independent, “there are ways for the City to look at those,” such as enforcing rules against noise or piles of trash. Yurdin gestures, it seems, towards the idea that neighbors can solve some problems amongst themselves, and, if needed, call the City for help. Perhaps a meaningful solution to these problems, then, is bolstering city enforcement of specific nuisances since, according to Councilman Yurdin, the City struggles to staff sufficient enforcement officials. If the City works towards adequately addressing problems as they come up, they can leave the vast majority of quiet students alone.

While Councilman Yurdin suggests that neighbors take up student-related issues with each other (and with City enforcement when needed), Keene Streeters are adamant that their problem will only be solved with zoning-based change. Given the demographics of Keene Street, it seems that this group of neighbors has taken such a systematic approach to problem-solving simply because it can. Unlike so many low-income communities being actively displaced, the Keene Street residents have ample tools to engage City government and apprehend a neighborhood in flux—even if it’s a very different kind of flux. As multiple College Hill residents admitted, they spent hours on the phone with public officials or testifying to city council members.

Perhaps most revelatory of the resources at Keene Street’s fingertips is their private lawyer. They have time and money and bright blue signs, but in practice, these resources do more to draw attention away from Providence’s fundamental housing deficiency than they do to create reasonable solutions to the city’s most pressing issues. Indeed, at the same time homeowning College Hill residents worry about the potential for their neighborhood’s ‘character’ to change, renters on the South Side, West End, and Olneyville are being priced out with little interference from the City.

And while the Keene Street tale of a hockey house party a few years back is enough to warrant a headache, in the scheme of Providence’s housing woes, it’s small potatoes.

ELLA COMBERG B’20 and HARRY AUGUST B’19 maybe broke up a source’s 30-year-long marriage while writing this story. *Name has been changed.

METRO

08

URBAN BIRDING Do e-scooters herald an electrified micro-mobility revolution?

BY Lucas Smolcic Larson ILLUSTRATION Katya Labowe-Stoll DESIGN Ella Rosenblatt On March 27, 2018, Travis VanderZanden, founder and CEO of Bird Rides Inc., released an open letter to the CEOs of four of his competitors: Lime, Ofo, Mobike, and Jump. “We’re witnessing the biggest revolution in transportation since the dawn of the Jet Age,” he wrote, a movement that will “transform the cities in which we live.” If VanderZanden, a Silicon Valley veteran, is to be believed, this revolution is being televised, backed by venture capitalists, and just zipped by on two eightinch wheels.

Bird’s insurgency came through the placement of electric scooters throughout American cities and making them rentable through an app. The company launched a year ago in Santa Monica, California, and in Providence on July 20. The e-scooters, in futuristic black and red, just need two kicks to get moving, after which an electric motor propels riders along at a maximum of about 15 miles per hour. When riders (VanderZanden calls them his “flock”) reach their destination, they leave the scooters on the sidewalk, to be unlocked by the smartphone of the next user.

E-scooters’ viral popularity made quick converts of urbanites, fueled by word-of-mouth and breathless reporting by local outlets. The Providence Journal released a video shot from the point of view of reporter Kevin Andrade cautiously doing laps of downtown (Andrade: “I was nervous at first but, you know what, this ain’t half bad!”). The New York Times quoted curmudgeons (the scooters were “a symbol of entitlement and arrogance” and a “plot of the young people to kill all us old farts so they can have our rent-controlled apartments” said retired reporter Fran Taylor).

The scooters provoked hand-wringing by critics concerned about their safety, impact on urban aesthetics, and Bird’s ‘ask for forgiveness, not permission’ approach to city regulators. But the most pressing questions about the e-scooter takeover remain unanswered. Whom do the e-scooters benefit? How should cities regulate them? Are they here to stay? And, if they are as revolutionary as VanderZanden suggests, who is being overthrown? Digging into these uncertainties, e-scooters become a window into the future of city life—its logistics and inequities—as well as the movement toward a post-carbon world. +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ As e-scooters spread from city to city, reporters cast local governments as the embattled establishment standing in the way of the e-scooter “revolution.” Some city governments, like those in Cambridge, Mass. and San Francisco issued outright bans after Bird and other e-scooter companies set up shop. The unannounced arrival of another sharing economy startup promising radical urban transformation had many cities immediately wary. Local officials had reason to be suspicious of Bird and VanderZanden, a former executive of both Lyft and Uber—two companies famous for disregarding local regulations (Uber used a software tool called Greyball for years to systematically deceive

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police and city officials across the world, reported the New York Times in 2017.) But Uber, Lyft, and Airbnb have also grown from scrappy ‘disruptors’ into billiondollar household names that partner with and are regulated by city governments. The unannounced arrival of Bird scooters in Providence over the summer—and its regulatory fallout—gives a rare glimpse inside this process.

Emails between Providence city officials and Bird representatives, obtained through public records requests by the College Hill Independent, show a city wrestling for control of its streets. “Permissions are required,” stated Providence Deputy Chief Engineer Chris Hochman in an email to Raymond Sullivan, a lobbyist representing Bird, on the morning of Bird’s launch in the city on July 20. “While we aren’t opposed to systems like this, we must ensure that things are done correctly.”

Other officials encouraged Bird to remove the scooters promptly and cited violations of city ordinances governing the placement of vehicles in the public right-of-way. Despite the emails containing discussion of confiscating the scooters, they stayed on the streets. Sullivan responded on July 23 that Bird attorneys believed the company was in violation of no law. Bird’s “goal is to continue providing the community with a valuable service,” he wrote.

On August 10, Bird’s scooters disappeared from the streets of Providence, removed by the company.

That day, the Department of Public Works released five pages of regulations “governing the placement and operation of electric scooters on a [one-year] pilot basis in the City of Providence.” These stipulate that companies must apply for a permit to operate in the city, pay fees, maintain liability insurance, and produce an equity plan for access to their scooters. The regulations affect would-be operators over the course of the next year, after which the rules will be revaluated.

The approach of one of Bird’s competitors, Lime, to the Providence city government was less brazen, the Independent found by obtaining emails between officials and Scott Mullen, Lime’s director of expansion for the Northeast. “Sounds like you woke up to the same surprise I did,” wrote Mullen to Martina Haggerty, Associate Director of Special Projects for Providence’s Planning Department on July 24, “an unsanctioned launch of Bird electric scooters.” Mullen continues, “Lime also operates e-scooters, but we take a much more proactive and collaborative approach to our municipal partners.” Mullen sent officials “draft regulations that we share with cities before we come in to operate” (Bird’s representative did the same, although its model regulations were less detailed).

Finally, after meeting with officials, Mullen submitted an application for Lime to operate in Providence on August 17, in accordance with the city’s newly-released regulations. The application documents state that Lime hopes to operate 300 scooters, the maximum allowed by the city. Victor Morente, Providence Mayor Jorge Elorza’s press secretary, told

the Independent that as of September 4, only Lime had submitted an application. None had been granted, he said. Bird previously told the Providence Journal that it intends to return to the city. +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Providence joins many other US cities, such as Santa Monica and Washington DC, in proposing a pilot program to allow for long-term evaluation of e-scooters’ impact. Morente reports that Providence used regulations issued by other cities in drafting its own. They are in line with what Populus, a private data analytics start-up, lists as the primary goals of local government in approaching e-scooters in its July 2018 report “The Micro-Mobility Revolution: The Introduction and Adoption of Electric Scooters in the United Sates.”

These include ensuring rider safety, promoting equitable access to services, and evaluating the scooters’ impact on sustainability and transportation goals.

Safety tops this list because critics cast e-scooters as threats to their riders. Bird provides helmets to riders, but users must order them online and pay shipping. Consequently, e-scooter accidents have become major press events, notably so after a driver struck and critically injured two women riding e-scooters in Nashville. But, as Christopher Cherry, Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Tennessee and a scholar of non-motorized transit systems, told the Independent, “The car driver imposes greater risk on pedestrians, cyclists, and Bird scooter riders than Bird scooter riders impose on the rest of the system, and yet there’s this fixation on new emerging technologies because they’re easy to point at.” In contrast to electric bikes and scooters, cars kill between 30,000 and 40,000 people each year in the US— without receiving hyperbolic media coverage labelling automotive technology as inherently dangerous.

Providence's scooter regulations focus on equitable access is also well-founded, given the profit motive of emerging scooter start-ups. In May, Bird became the fastest start-up ever to reach “unicorn” status (a valuation of over $1 billion), taking just six months and beating the previous record holder by more than a year.

Some observers credit the flood of venture capital Bird received to investors’ fear of missing out on the next Uber or Lyft, each of which have recently acquired their own electric bike and scooter companies, Jump and Motivate, respectively. In contrast to ride-sharing apps, Bird buys scooters and pays people to collect and charge them. Skeptics say that e-scooter operators profit margins per-scooter are slim, but proof of this has yet to emerge.

In the meantime, city officials observing the scooter investment craze in Providence moved quickly to ensure that e-scooter operators served all parts of the city. Regulations stipulate that the scooters be distribuited equally throughout different zones each night. The city’s ordinance also requires companies to include low-income and cash payment options in

14 SEP 2018

an equity plan they must submit with their application to operate. Bird and Lime each have existing plans for users who are eligible for any state or federally-run assistance program offering steeply discounted fares.

Bird waves its $1 per ride fee, charging just its 15 cent per minute rate. Lime’s program cuts its unlock fee to 50 cents and charges 7 cents a minute, as well as offering the option to deposit cash into a user’s account and operate the service via SMS text (eliminating the need for a smartphone and bank account).

The Populus study (conducted via an online survey with a representative sample of 7,000 people across the country, according to an email from Populus CEO Regina Clewlow) found that public support for e-scooters is about 10 percent higher among low-income groups. Further, a 2015 Harvard study of upward social mobility singled out access to transportation as the strongest factor in the odds of escaping poverty.

E-scooters are pitched as a solution to the “last/firstmile problem” of public transit systems—the distance between transit nodes and users’ final destinations or origin. Plausibly, they could fill holes in public transit systems at very low cost to the public. If they complement public transit infrastructure—at this point still an uncertainty—their effects may ease social urban inequity. +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Perhaps more certain is e-scooters’ potential to decrease carbon emissions. Cherry, who has studied personal electric vehicles in Chinese cities where they are ubiquitous, explained that with e-scooters, “most of the energy is devoted to moving the person rather than the vehicle.” This doesn’t seem radical until you consider that “when we drive around in our personal car by ourselves almost all the energy is just moving the metal around and that’s not the purpose of transportation.” According to the US Department of Energy, in 2017 60 percent of all car vehicle trips were less than six miles, meaning e-scooters have the potential to disrupt car usage.

Low-emission electric scooters and bicycles are

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

decades-old technology, said Cherry. Bird and other scooter companies’ innovation is the pairing of this tech with smartphones and data networks to create a system where people can rent, rather than own, the scooters. Although his research hasn’t focused specifically on scooters, Cherry has found that use of electric bike shares (like the JUMP bikes recently launched in Providence) replaces car trips at a higher rate than conventional bicycles—a finding that bolsters e-scooter advocates sustainability claims.

But e-scooters skeptics say that the vehicles don’t necessarily replace car trips to the extent that advocates suggest. In June, Matt Chester, a Washintgon DC-based energy policy analyst, published “The Electric Scooter Fallacy,” a back-of-the-envelope analysis of e-scooter sustainability claims, on his personal energy blog. In an email to the Independent, Chester said that the lack of data proving e-scooter companies’ claims, namely that the scooters were a (revolutionary) green form of transit that solved the last/first mile problem, prompted his post. In his article, Chester factored in the emissions generated by charging scooters and by the cars that are used to collect them each night. These figures vary by city and distance the scooter is driven, but in Chester’s least-efficient scenario if less than 27 percent of scooter trips replace car trips then e-scooters are generating more emissions than the cars would otherwise. Chester’s work is a far cry from a comprehensive study but helps to contextualize electric vehicles within a supply chain that still relies on fossil fuels.

Cherry said that the sheer efficiency of electric scooters and bikes means that they will most likely reduce emissions, even if they only pull from car traffic at very low rates. Having the vehicles operated by one provider also allows for mass recycling and disposal of the lithium-ion batteries that power e-scooters.

“Shared mobility generally has a tendency to at least concentrate the externalities,” in this case the generation of batteries, said Cherry. “Presumably if it’s a responsible corporation they can handle it in a better way.”

Concerns about the responsibility of e-scooter companies have also focused on the data they collect

from users’ ride history. One of the most comprehensive sections of Providence’s regulations restricts what data companies can access from riders, forbidding companies from requiring that customers consent to sharing their data with third parties to use scooters. Scooter operators must also share ride data with Providence.

Morente reports that it will “be used to determine routes that users choose to travel on to potentially inform future decisions about safety improvements to city streets.”

Such information could guide the implementation of sustainable micro-mobility transportation infrastructure. For e-scooters to displace car traffic, the urban environment must allow for their safe use.

Providence allows e-scooter traffic on roads and sidewalks. When asked if fees collected from future e-scooter operators in Providence would be channeled towards investments in micro-mobility infrastructure, Morente said that the e-scooter pilot was in its early stages. “Funds have not been allocated or dedicated to any program or investment in particular at this time.” +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ “When you ride a Bird, it reminds you of being free,” says Travis VanderZanden in an April 2018 New York Times profile. This author and thousands of others who have zipped through their streets on an e-scooter know that he’s, well, not wrong. Will they dethrone the automobile, while providing a low-cost and efficient means of connecting transportation system dots in a way that is accessible to people of all incomes and backgrounds?

No technological innovation will accomplish all of this at once, especially one fueled by venture capital and led by Silicon Valley businessmen. Micro-mobility proponents’ claims of revolution have yet to bear fruit.

But e-scooters have tested the capacity of city government to regulate new modes of transit and offered the possibility of greater equity in access to mobility—all while giving us a glimpse into a car-free, electrified urban future.

LUCAS SMOLCIC LARSON B’19 is a veteran of the admittedly short-lived Providence underground Bird racing circuit.

SCIENCE & TECH

10

VOCALIZING WHITENESS Reversing minstrelsy in Sorry To Bother You and BlacKkKlansman

BY Marianne Verrone ILLUSTRATION Justin Han DESIGN Ella Rosenblatt

Within a week of Spike Lee’s autobiographical drama BlacKkKlansman being released, Boots Riley, director of absurdist dark comedy Sorry to Bother You, posted a three-page criticism of the film on Twitter. In his post, Riley condemns BlacKkKlansman as police propaganda and outlines the ways in which Lee’s adaptation deviates from the true story of Ron Stallworth, the first Black police officer and detective of the Colorado Springs Police Department, who infiltrated the KKK in the late 1970s. Riley comments on the cop antiracism inserted into the plot to give the police force a more positive image, such as a fictional scene in which a police officer is recorded and subsequently arrested

by Stallworth and coworkers for admitting that he is fine with shooting Black people. Additionally, Ron Stallworth’s significant contributions to the FBI’s infamous Counterintelligence Program (which was established to disrupt Black radical organizations and led to the arrest and assassination of a number of prominent activists) are erased. Finally, the files from the investigation were destroyed, meaning that our knowledge of these events is solely informed by Stallworth’s autobiographical perspective. Riley also pointed out that Lee was recently paid over $200k by the NYPD for an ad campaign intended to improve relations with minority communities, commenting, “Whether it actually is or not, BlacKkKlansman feels like an extension of that ad campaign.” Lee’s response was defensive: “Look at my films,” he said in an interview with UK publication the Times, “They’ve been very critical of the police, but on the other hand I’m never going to say all police are corrupt, that all police hate people of color. I’m not going to say that… I mean, we need police.” +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Although at first glance the public disagreement between the directors of the summer’s two most talked about films may suggest entirely opposing artistic visions, the films coincidentally share a significant plot device: ‘ white voice’. White voice is not a new phenomenon. The performance of whiteface is a tradition that extends hundreds of years back to gatherings in which enslaved and free Black people would participate in dramatized appropriations of white-identified gestures, vocabulary, and dress. Reversals of minstrelsy moved from 19th century vaudeville to the 20th century theatrical works of Adrienne Kennedy and Douglas Turner Ward to countless stand-up routines from comedy legends like Richard Pryor, Whoopi Goldberg, Eddie Murphy, and Dave Chapelle. Full-faced makeup is found applied on the Wayans Brothers in the genderbending White Chicks, Tyler the Creator in music videos and in concert, and even Snoop Dogg posting on Instagram as his white alter-ego, Todd.

The caricatured adoption of white vocal intonation

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ARTS

and mannerisms by Black performers functions as a form of comedic shock value with intrinsic social critique—making a spectacle of white culture in order to comment on its simultaneous fetishization and repulsion of Black people. Although whiteface and white voice are not new or shocking, given such an extensive and expansive history, the potential for a potent critique of whiteness nevertheless remains. In Sorry to Bother You and BlacKkKlansman, the deployment of white voice is a deliberate attempt to address a plethora of issues: the public resurgence of white supremacist groups in the wake of Donald Trump’s election, increasing rates of gentrification and displaced low-income people of color, revelations of workers’ rights violations from tech-giants like Amazon, among others. +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Set in a surreal alternative version of present-day Oakland, Sorry to Bother You tells the story of Cassius Green (Lakeith Stanfield), a young Black man hired to an entry-level position at a telemarketing firm.

When Cassius initially struggles to make sales, older coworker Langston (Danny Glover) advises him to use his “white voice” while he reads his script. The white voice Langston refers to is not a symbolic act of codeswitching or adhering to respectability politics, nor is it an imitation of certain vocal inflections or vernacular: “It’s what they wish they sounded like,” he says, “what they think they’re supposed to sound like.” White voice represents the fantasy of whiteness: a sense of confidence, entitlement, and carefree affluence. The fantastical quality of white voice is achieved by dubbing over Cassius’s lines with ultra-chipper vocals from white actor David Cross. The disembodiment of Cassius’s white voice in the form of exaggerated dubbing, as opposed to actor Stanfield simply imitating a white person, gives the voice a mythical dimension. By literally using a white person’s voice, Cassius’s white voice is an impossibility, representative of an unattainable illusion.

The filmic choice to dub also has a deliberately off-putting effect: while at first comedic, the voice becomes increasingly disturbing to Cassius’s girlfriend and friends as he unconsciously slips into it even when outside the office. Additionally, Cassius is called upon to perform racist tropes of Blackness; while at a lavish party thrown by megalomaniacal CEO, Steve Lift (Armie Hammer), he is pressured into freestyling for the other partygoers. He begins with an embarrassingly weak and mumbled flow but, sensing the inadequacy of his rapping, starts repeating the phrase “n*gga sh*t” to the uproarious delight of his non-Black audience. The caricature of white voice acts as a foil to racist tropes of Blackness: in the universe of Sorry to Bother You, only extremes of racial performance by Black people

are accepted. Either become the racist stereotype, or conceal your Blackness altogether.

BlacKkKlansman, on the other hand, depicts white voice performed with intentional seamlessness and embodiment. Early in the film, Ron Stallworth (John David Washington) cold calls the local chapter of the KKK and proceeds to utter a stream of anti-Black, anti-Semitic, white nationalist sentiments which elicit gaping-mouthed disbelief from the rest of the police department. Unlike the dubbing in Sorry to Bother You, Ron Stallworth’s white voice is not presented as a separate entity. Faithful to the tactics of the actual Stallworth, actor Washington does not alter his voice while on the phone except for the flourish of an over-emphasized h (“I love hwhite America,”) as a comedic device. Maintaining the same vocal intonation is intended to indicate that differences between Black and white people are mere fictions. When the chief police officer points out the ludicrousy of Stallworth’s proposed plan, suggesting that the KKK will be able to discern his voice as Black, Stallworth replies, “How does a Black man speak?” Stallworth’s response here and the proceeding undercover investigation are meant to dispel socially constructed, essentialized notions of race. While Ron Stallworth continues to speak to the KKK over the phone, pretending to be a white man, his Jewish coworker is recruited to act as him in person in order to meet KKK members. A fluid character of Ron Stallworth is created, extending from a Black man, to a Black man performing as a white man, to a white man acting as the simulacrum of what the audience knows to be a Black man. Not only is Stallworth breaking barriers as the first Black person to join the police force, the inability to distinguish between Stallworth’s performed white voice and regular speech speaks to a larger defiance of racial categorization. +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ While both films attempt to tackle the concept of race as performance, they offer conflicting strategies for contending with current political and social dynamics through their distinct uses of white voice. Speaking with his magical white voice, Cassius becomes one of the telemarketing firm’s top sellers and is promoted to the elusive, luxurious position of “Power Caller.” As Cassius climbs the corporate ladder, leaving his friends behind as underpaid staffers, he learns the disturbing truth that the firm sells weaponry and human labor through WorryFree, a dystopian late-stage capitalist corporation exploiting legalized slavery. Cassius must grapple with his betrayal of his race and class, ultimately becoming disillusioned with the white voice, protesting WorryFree, and reuniting with his girlfriend to live in their tiny garage-apartment. Ron Stallworth, however, maintains his performance of white voice

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for the entirety of the KKK investigation and is celebrated by the police department for successfully impeding a planned bombing. The penultimate image of BlacKkKlansman depicts Stallworth and Patrice (his one-dimensional, Angela Davis-type girlfriend) standing side by side prepared to take on the burning cross of the KKK in the distance. Lee frames cop and radical standing in solidarity, united in the fight against racism.

Using a white voice over the phone, both characters consent to partially obscuring their Blackness in order to achieve success; however, for Cassius, this is an act of fantastical disembodiment, whereas for Stallworth it arrives out of an extension of self. The difference in form and function of white voice encapsulates the underlying political perspectives of the films. Cassius and Stallworth both engage with white institutions and social structures, but Sorry to Bother You presents the deeply menacing and harmful consequences to this assimilation whereas BlacKkKlansman positions it as a viable option for achieving liberation from oppression. The racial complexities and critique of economic injustice developed through Cassius’s journey point

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

towards the danger and destructiveness of whiteness and capitalism. In contrast, Ron Stallworth’s fusions of Blackness and whiteness, as well as his failure to acknowledge how his position as a police officer undeniably implicates him in systemic anti-Black violence, unfortunately present him as a perpetrator of white supremacy.

Although the films take place decades apart, they were produced in the era of Black Lives Matter, where Black people continue to be harassed and killed by police, and Black communities ravaged by wage and wealth disparity, job and housing discrimination, limited access to healthcare, environmental racism, general neglect and numerous other quality-of-life issues. To see a film like BlacKkKlansman, in which a Black cop is made a protagonist in fighting racist oppression, feels extremely disappointing if not outright offensive. Lee’s ham-handed parallels between the 1970s Klu Klux Klan and last year’s Charlottesville riots meant to emphasize the persistence of white supremacy miss the mark, given that he refuses to critique the brutal violence and control enacted on Black people by police throughout U.S. history. Rather than the criticism of

time-transcending racism Lee sets out to accomplish, the realism of BlacKkKlansman’s white voice ultimately results in an endorsement of assimilation. But, as James Baldwin famously asks, “Do I really want to be integrated into a burning house?”

The apocalyptic ending of Sorry to Bother You gives us a fiery glimpse of this burning house and what can potentially arise from its ruins. Riley dares to tear apart our current reality, producing ruptures which although chaotic, open up possibility for futures not limited by structural oppression­—beyond futures in which “we need police.” It seems then that white voice is best left to the realm of satire and comedy, rather than actual strategic application. There is a twisted power in appropriating the language of the oppressor in order to make fun. In ridiculing the sanctity of the white voice— laughing at its fantasy, its myth, and its authority­— perhaps the entire system of white supremacy can be destabilized and subsequently toppled.

MARIANNE VERRONE B’19 highly recommends following Snoop Dog on Instagram.

ARTS

12

I used to have eggs and toast for breakfast. That was great because I’d go to bed each night thinking about what I could do differently with eggs. There were variables back then. Now it’s just Cheerios, and the only thing I can really manage in terms of Cheerios is the level of sogginess. So much is changing. Even my coffee. The coffee machine has this new function now where the grinder goes off as my alarm clock each morning, and it just scares the hell out of me. I have this recurring dream where I’m on the Titanic sitting in my soft-lit, second-class room, and then boom we hit the iceberg and that’s the coffee starting. It sounds bad but I feel like having it this way might be necessary; otherwise, the weight of my day just sorta straps me under the covers and I lay there hitting the snooze like a morphine drip. Somehow, this year, mornings got really tough, and I think it’s because of Nick. I miss him. +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ He wasn't getting out, or, I wasn't taking him out and you know the way Dachshunds are, with their fragile backs. So I cut his meals down. I even had him eating this expensive Salmon mix called Atlantic Grounds. I don't know how he got so heavy, he just did. His body became like this depressed bridge.

DAVID

The day I saw his penis dragging across the carpet, well, I talked to a few families. I found this mom, Cindy. Cindy drove a minivan with automatic doors.

She smelled like wheatgrass and took me out to coffee.

She charmed me. She assured me dogs like this are easy to handle.

Feeling pain is like any sport, Dad used to say. He said the same thing about socializing, eating, and drinking alcohol. In fourth grade when I threw up on the basketball court, he asked me in the bathroom who my hero was. I think he wanted me to say it was him, but I said Joan of Arc, and drumming his fingers on the stall door, he told me that Joan of Arc used to feel just as nervous before uh– and I said, a battle? And he said, Yeah a battle. Back then, I found that connection between sports and pain comforting. You knew, whatever hurt, the rules to overcome it would always be the same. in broken English, she told us that all fascists smelled like gasoline. She said language was the rule book to a Now I’m twenty-seven, and I'm not sure if he’s right. game of conquest. After the speech came her last years.

I don’t think Joan of Arc experienced the feeling of We were never close, but towards the end she would loss the way I do now. In her time people died often. sometimes wink at me across the kitchen table. I think They lost everything. Villages were burned and family it was her way of reaching out. I could never really give members were carried off. I don’t think people even anything substantial back to her, but sometimes we named their dogs back then. Back then, they probably would just make eye contact and smile together across addressed dogs like, “hey!” and if one got overweight the food. The day they finished the Etherdome, she they’d feast on the abundance. died watching PBS with a pot of coffee brewing in the kitchen.

My first dog, the family dog, was named Scoop. Scoop had a seizure and went blind around the time our It took me a while to get that there wasn't a real dome, house was renovated. Every night, when the family that the name was just a metaphor that inspired a had dinner, we would hear him bumping softly against feeling of protection. The first few days with the immorthe furniture as he tried his best to follow the chimes of tality field sure were great. Boxing without gloves in the colliding silverware. parking lot after work was awesome. The ramped-up violence in football got everyone’s attention. That was Nobody enjoyed their last two years with Scoop. all fine.

Grandmammie considered killing Scoop a service. Not asking for her son’s permission was part of the service, But—and this is an unpopular thing to say—everyand so was burying him in an unmarked grave. When I thing since those slingshots has been over the top. To was fifteen, I eventually asked her how she did it. What be honest, I forget who made them, or even when they dog, she said. started getting distributed. I just remember that first feeling of getting my jaw cracked on the train home for Grandammie came to America after surviving some Thanksgiving. Long time no see! shouted Halley. She bad happenings in Belorussia. When I was in third grade had shot from the other end of the train car. I guess she she visited my school for Veterans Day and delivered was headed North to see her family too. For a moment a speech on the importance of family ritual. Shouting she kept her distance as if she was expecting me to return fire. I maintained the space for a few seconds to let my anger settle. Through and through, it wasn’t a bad encounter. I breathed and walked over. We sat together the last thirty minutes of the ride and talked about the roller rink they were tearing down in Nyack.

BY Miles Guggenheim ILLUSTRATION Eve O'Shea DESIGN Jack Halten Fahnestock

13

LITERARY

IN THE

things were better now. She said that when she was a kid, she and her brothers would light mice on fire. That was the first night she forgot to run the dishwasher.

With the crossbows things got more complicated because it just became harder to tell where the shooting was coming from. I stopped going to the park on my lunch break. Some of the more lawless marksmen would aim at your coffee cups. The Etherdome had a hard time reconfiguring plastics and paper.

The harpoon guns were more annoying because of the steel cables which restructured movement in the city.

In the office I worked at, every cubicle had six lines of cable shot through it; every bathroom looked like a spider war. All through the working day, people tripped over their shots and did gymnastics to get from one place to the other. For a week, we didn’t know where our IT guy was until maintenance found him curled up in the corner of the trash room listening to the vibration of a single chord.

Primitive guns hit the free market soon after. Every night across the city, small bursts of light asserted themselves in the dark. We saw them from up high in our skyscrapers. Each was the flash of a muzzle, the That night, my younger brother Peter showed up to final, ferocious breath of a dying star. dinner with a slingshot and new girlfriend. Dad asked, was it for attention? Dad asked, was it for Fun? Peter What puzzled me every night was the lack of barking took a piece of sea glass from his pocket. He and his girl- dogs. Despite the noise outside, the silence within my friend had found it walking along the river together. He close-quartered building was always pristine. Often, shot her with it from close range and they ran upstairs I feared for Nick who annually lost his mind on the without clearing the table.

Fourth of July. But somehow the dogs in the city had remained calm. I hoped Nick was among them. I hoped I washed Peter’s plate with the water jet set very high. he had adapted to what I couldn’t.

Mom, Dad, and I sat around the fire. Dad said when he was a kid the whole neighborhood would get together Of course, when they introduced horse-drawn cannons, and play capture the flag with a pair of socks. Mom said even Mom wanted one. I said it was a bad idea, but

14 SEP 2018

Dad capitulated and she unwrapped a falconet for Christmas. Bundled up, we trudged out into the yard to watch her try it out. She couldn’t make it through the instruction manual—she just read the first sentence of the section for French speakers ten times: “l’interface de chargement…l'interface de chargement…” until Dad inhaled sharply through his nose, and I took him inside to cry on my shoulder. I remember looking down at the snow we’d tracked onto the rug, hearing Peter loading and firing outside, the aspen trees snapping in half, and Mom screaming, happy.

The day we moved her into memory care she asked me if she could borrow my flintlock rifle. I told her I still didn't own anything like that, and as we walked through the garden toward my car, she reminded me to feed Nick. I told her Nick was fine. I called Cindy later on the highway and found out he had a new home about four hours outside the city. When I got back to my apartment I tried breaking a mug on the counter to see if I’d cry.

That next Christmas, Dad played the oral history he made for Mom, and Peter’s new girlfriend sobbed through most of it. It was tough. At some points, I had to turn away or look down at the hospital floor. In the end, Mom was more interested in the AR-15 Dad got her. Peter offered to give weekly marksmanship lessons. That was sweet. I got a postcard from Nick, or from the expensive dog resort they’d sent him too. It

said Happy Holidays from Dog Forest in cursive print above a generic snapshot of a Shorthaired Dachshund bounding up a hill.

We didn't even need surface-to-air missiles. We didn’t.

They were terrible for the infrastructure and the air quality and the hummingbirds that nested in the park.

Above the simple incovneincincies they polluted the night sky, which had a lot of people in the suburbs stand I used to get curly fries from as a kid. Electric complaining. cattle wire ran far out from either side of the building, through a misty thicket, and beyond. There were no And then came the awful prank. That put the humming- dogs, just the smell and sound of pine needles. Inside birds into perspective. You see, it was only shut off for there were ten printers. They hummed and shook, and a minute, the Etherdome. Like really just a minute. No the desks beneath them creaked. A man with tight gray one knows how or why it happened. My friends think t-shirt and no shoes was replacing the ink. foreigners did it through a wire. Dad has a theory about it being one of the subordinate physicists. In any case, I’m here for Nick, I said.

I’m just glad my family was at home and out of the city when it happened. It was awful dragging person after Visiting? he replied. You’d be our first visitor. person toward the ambulances. Some of the paramedics had never seen blood before but, in the end, Yeah, I said, is he here? many people rose to the occasion. The news said the individual heroism kept the toll under ten thousand.

We weren't expecting anyone, said the man. A German Shepard with a rabbit between its teeth slid The good thing was, whatever happened, we saved the out onto the printing tray. economy. Dad made a point of driving into the city and wheeling Mom through the mall with Peter and me.

Is he getting in shape? I asked. Is he eating well?

The president thanked us all a few days later. I guess a few paramedics remembered my name from that Sure, said the man. day, because I got a medal of valor shipped to me in the mail, which was nice.

Can I see him?

The medal is a good thing to have. Sometimes I catch Sure, he said. He handed me a shotgun and a dog Jeb, my roommate, staring at it when I come home. Jeb whistle. We walked outside, where it was suddenly says he knows a guy who also has a medal and the guy humid. gets dates with it: no bullets no arrows, no cupid’s bow, he just sits down at a coffee shop with it pinned to his If they give you trouble, don't hesitate. hoodie and girls sit down.

You mean shooting them, I said.

Was it traumatic, they finally ask?

Yes. Yes, Jeb says he says. And they go home together.

Sometimes at night, I think about taking my medal out Really, I said. Are they feral? of the case and wearing it to a skating rink. Someone cute might slip on the ice and I could glide over and They could be, he said. help them up. Then they would see it. But I don’t know why I have that fantasy. I’m not an elegant skater.

Jeez. +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

FOREST

Yeah.

One day, I think it was a long weekend, I decided to Well are they cooperative, you know, like are they drive out to Dog Forest. There is always something nice living some sort of romantic ideal? about seeing uncomplicated stretches of land roll by. I don't particularly like country music, but it came on the What do you mean? radio and I let it play most of the way. A few rockets flew over the car on their way to the city, but they were easy Uncivilized, but I guess free and sorta pure for that enough to ignore. I kept my speed 60 mph because of reason. stories I’d heard of people still dying in car crashes out in rural parts of the States.

You mean, like, are these dogs cultured?

Dog Forest looked a lot better on the postcard. The front office reminded me of the little league snack

Uh, well.

Hippies?

No, no, definitely not that.

The man handed me six rounds of buckshot.

You’re hesitant, he said.

Yes, I said.

A big howl rose up out from the tree line, and it thundered on for a while as more and more dogs joined in. I had to fire the shotgun into the sky.

Nice, said the man, good to assert your confidence like that.

He handed me a big knife.

Is that necessary, I said.

Yes, he said.

It’s kinda heavy, I said It’s not heavy it’s just unfamiliar, he replied.

I don't need this, I said.

You do. You only have five shots left.

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

LITERARY

14

SLIPS content warnings: weight and eating issues

The first piece of clothing I ever really loved was a calflength dress I would now call slip-inspired. It didn't look much like a slip, though, as I was seven years old at the time and wore nothing but pastel knits. Its drape was different, the fabric heavy and cool. This dress was striped with white and a soft color I called periwinkle (more of a sky, really, I think now). It hit the middle of my calf and swayed when I walked. It made me feel pretty. It made me feel something I identified then, and identify now, as glamour.

Sociologist Beverly Skeggs calls glamour “the opportunity to appear as something different from the mundane... an escape route.” She says that it gives agency to the women who perform it, that it is “about a performance of femininity with strength.” But I’m not sure that she gets at what glamour meant to me, an elementary-schooler in a dress that made me feel powerful.

Glamour, to me, is deciding to enjoy feminine appearance-projection on your own terms. It is finding some place to live there. It is appearing both constructed by gazes other than your own and at ease with your own gaze, okay from all angles. It is rare.

My own relationship to glamour has oscillated wildly in the twelve years between that striped dress and the clothes I wear now. I’ve spent years of my life in Target men’s section corduroys and button-ups, clothes that get me looked at quizzically by children—is he a

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girl? Is she a boy? That ambiguity has never bothered me, but turning fully away from the world of swaying skirts has always struck me with a different sense of loss. I’ve found joy in those baggy corduroys, but I’ve never found a glamour to call my own there. So I’ve returned part-time to slip dresses, my first love.

But, while these dresses hold the hopeful kernel of glamour, they also carry the burden of prettiness. In them, feminine appearance-projection becomes mine, on my own terms or otherwise. Some clothes seem to offer wearers the chance to forfeit their mission to be a correct woman, or, at least, a correctly-styled one.

A slip dress enters its wearer’s name into the running, whether or not they choose it. I’m not certain what the rules of this game are, but I know a fundamental precept is that my body is much more important than anything else about me—mind, soul, what have you.

Over the years, I’ve taken it upon myself to consult the rulebooks. One, Glamour Magazine, does not seem to believe that glamour is such an unusual commodity, as it comes out with a new issue every month. I have been reading Glamour and magazines like it—Vogue, Elle, their girl-children’s editions—almost since I first put on that dress. And I have loved them for as long.

Every criticism I have ever seen of women’s interest magazines holds water. They’re vapid, propagate self-hatred, propagate self-starvation—I don’t disagree with any of these claims. I’ve seen some of

Getting dressed with glamour

those warnings put into practice: I’ve seen self-hating women and self-starved women, women terrified of being called vapid and cowering in fear of the cruelty of others. Besides, the number of women whose interest in these magazines’ content could ever actually be put into practice is vanishingly small. Overall, the clothes displayed are both too expensive and too small for almost anyone to wear them.

But these common criticisms tend to miss something important about these magazines. They miss it because it is a secret, passed between we women’s-interested. Our secret is that there is something inexorably appealing in inhabiting a woman who is not a person but a bodily ideal, in banishing ourselves from ourselves. That is what so many critics of fashion magazines forget or ignore: When flesh is all you have ever been given claim to, you damn well want to claim it back. You want to believe that a perfect woman’s body would make the horrible situation of being cut down to meat more bearable. It’s nothing so clear or interpersonal as, “I want to modify myself towards this ideal so other people will reward me for reaching it.” Reaching it is its own reward, because, were that goal of feminine perfection attainable, all our suffering would be worth it. It would prove that there was—as Skeggs says—an escape route, from this body-obsessive, body-hating paradigm.

14 SEP 2018

BY Cate Turner DESIGN Ella Rosenblatt

In reality, though, physical perfection is the most asymptotic kind of perfection there is. I have never spoken to anyone who felt they had reached it. And I’ve spoken to women who’ve passed through tanning beds, started pack-a-day habits for the express purpose of having something to keep hunger at bay, nearly cried in ballet class because of some very nuanced (and incorrect) curvature of arm fat, eaten only smoothies, eaten only mints, eaten lunch at the same time every day because it seemed like that magical ritual might do something, shaved faces and arms and backs, felt faint in compression tights and push-up bras. I have been many of these women, even, and none of us have managed to become the ideal our bodies are supposed to be.

But I’ve seen the artist's renderings of feminine perfection, and they look like 1993 Kate Moss in a see-through slip.

When slip dresses are in style, women’s bodies are in style. Not abstracted women’s bodies, not corseted and molded women’s bodies: women’s actual flesh.

For a woman wearing a slip dress, the appearance of authenticity is as important as the appearance of beauty. The slip dress says: this is my body, and I don’t even need to be ashamed of it. There isn’t a thing I have to do to make this thing perfect. Perfect is a property it holds within itself.

There are, for whatever awful reason, precise numbers on Moss’s weight and height when she wore this dress, though I’ve tried as best I can to scrub them from my memory and refuse to replicate them here.

But the point of those numbers is to put a value on the asymptote. An asymptote you know, after all, seems so much more achievable than a random variable.

It names Moss’s thinness not as image, but as goal.

When I first saw this dress, long after it had been worn but still too early for me, I thought I was being given a measuring stick, clear as day: here is what you are supposed to look like. Most clothes obscure or stylize; the slip dress’s style is the style of flesh, and it presents a standard for the flesh of its wearer and viewer both.

But there are ways to use the slip dress to different ends. The first is presented by a 1997 Comme des Garçons garment. This dress, slip-inspired in structure, demolishes the form’s insistence on the body by demolishing the viewer’s conception of body as beautiful. There is something sickly and terrible in the form this dress creates, and that is why I love it: it liberates wearer and viewer both by removing the expectation that a feminine ideal is all women's fashion can worship. Maybe there is beauty in rejecting this ideal, too in rejecting all presumptions about what a body is meant to look like.

I see the second in a piece from Maison Margiela’s Fall 1995 collection. Here, the form of the standard ’90s slip is followed neatly, in close-draping fabric that reveals all of the body’s contours. The primary difference between this dress and Moss’s is that this one is opaque. The primary difference between this outfit and Moss’s, outside of the Margiela design’s detached sleeves, is the cloth covering the Margiela model’s face.

Margiela’s disruption of the form is less obvious than CDG’s—and, in some respects, more disturbing.

Where CDG has a sense of inward strangeness trying

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

to make its way out, Margiela highlights an outward violence imposed. One feels that this outfit is trapping its wearer, scrubbing out her individuality and making her just a body, in every way possible. This design choice is unsettling, even cruel, especially in the supremely objectifying context of a fashion show. But when I look at this outfit, I’m made forcibly aware of the ways that the obsessive focus on women’s bodies maims and scars.

Finally, a truly joyful slip dress. In 2014, Rihanna wore a translucent crystal-studded slip to the Council of Fashion Design’s Awards. The dress is similar in cut to Moss’s, but the differences in reception between them were many.

Moss’s dress is still lauded as a fashion icon, because her bare body on a runway represented an ideal of thin, white femininity. She had been given the key to that mythic escape route: a body so ‘correct’ that it no longer required her maintenance, her hatred, even her attention. Her body in this dress was perceived as a static art object, not a bleeding, feeling burden.

Her clothes were part of the art. As such, they were permitted to ‘push boundaries’ without pushing her with them.

On the other hand, many responses to Rihanna’s dress treated it as a disgrace to her celebrity character.

She was lambasted, sometimes to her face, for wearing something revealing. ‘Revealing’ is never a comment on a garment so much as a comment on what the garment reveals. The issue at hand was not Rihanna's clothing, but her body beneath it. Sexuality, rooted in the body, is projected onto Black women in such a way that the escape route from feminine ideals that seems available to thin white women is blocked off.

Rihanna’s response has been to find another way out. When one white reporter criticized her outfit, Rihanna replied, famously: “Do my tits bother you?

They’re covered in Swarovski crystals, girl.” This criticism required Rihanna to defend not her fashion choices, but herself, and she rose to the challenge. With her response, she refuses to engage the ‘scandal’ of her body, instead addressing the choices she has made in styling it.

Rihanna is, in my opinion, one of the most truly glamorous—glamorous by my definition, not Glamour’s—women in the public eye today. This is because she wears the feminine ideals she chooses without ever renouncing herself in the process. When her body is seen, it is on her terms. She treats fashion as an ally, not an enemy, to her body.

CATE TURNER B'21 is wearing a slip dress as she writes this.

BODY

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FRIDAY 9.14

Rhode Island Music & Arts Festival Friday 2-10PM, Saturday 10AM-10PM

India Point Park (263 India Street) $25 Fri / $35 Sat

India Point Park events ranked from most to least fun: 1. Cape Verdean Festival 2. Rhode Island Seafood

Festival 3. The Fourth of July 4. Drinking warm beer alone 5. Rhode Island Music & Arts Festival.

Food Truck Friday Carousel Village 5-8:30PM

Roger Williams Park Zoo & Carousel Village (1000 Elmwood Avenue)

Give it a whirl! One of the weirdest musicals of all time, CAROUSEL by

Rodgers and Hammerstein, includes the particularly rousing number “That

was a Real Nice Clambake.” If that dynamic duo was still around, maybe

they’d write an ode to eating at a greasy spoon on wheels at a park in the name of Rhode Island’s founder.

SATURDAY 9.15

More Cowbell 5k 9AM

Attleboro Farmers Market (201 County Street, Attleboro MA) This list writer (LW) doesn’t quite understand why the early 2000s era Saturday Night Live skit “More Cowbell” is still relevant enough in 2018 to be the theme of this 5k race. Would personally much prefer this event if it were themed after the partner org it’s designed to sponsor—“Running from Anxiety.” If I wear my Asics, do you think I can escape my innermost demons? All participants receive a free cowbell.

31st Annual Apple Festival 10AM-5PM

Johnston Memorial Park (1583 Hartford Avenue, Johnston) These days, “an apple a day keeps the doctor away” sounds like an anti-single-payer screed! How are you going to bite into one of these bad boys if you lack dental coverage, LW included? In any case, we’ll take a trip to Johnston and a blender for making applesauce any day of the week.

SUNDAY 9.16 The Hurricane of 1938: 80th Anniversary Walking Tour 12-1:30PM Al Forno (577 South Water Street) $12-15 One time, your dear LW encountered an older man who said that he met his wife during this very hurricane.

“We went to the arcade, and when we came out the streets were like Venice!” he said, with a twinkle of romance in his eye. Perhaps similar reminiscences will help lend Al Forno some unexpected ambiance. Salute!

MONDAY 9.17

Nanette’s Flames of Hope $20

Elks Lodge (60 Clyde Street, West Warwick) 6:30-10:30PM “Hannah Gadsby’s ‘Nanette’ is simply a more evolved form of humor,” say senile critics in New York who work at places like the New Yorker and the New York Times. Reader, don’t expect Netflix’s favorite Australian person to show up at West Warwick’s Elks Lodge this Monday... but feel free to come out for a more local comedy show to benefit the Gloria Gemma Breast Cancer Resource Foundation. Pub menu available.

TUESDAY 9.18

Governor Sprague’s 188th Birthday Celebration Buffet $18 Governor William Sprague Mansion (1351 Cranston Street, Cranston) 6PM Normally, paying money to grovel at the feet of history’s upper crust would not be advisable. But according to Sprague’s Wikipedia page, the former governor claimed to have discovered the “two tendencies of money,” which basically meant that wealth distribution leads to progress. So if you’re able, go and take a doggy bag to distribute this culinary tribute to a dead person.

WEDNESDAY 9.19

Art Days at the Imagination Center

Burnside Park 11AM-2PM What’s the pointilism of this event? Like impressionism itself, if you squint, that’s a good joke. Anyway, go take a break and make some “dot-art” downtown. Perhaps the Imagination Center will endow you with more creativity than this LW. THURSDAY 9.20

Cocktails and Conversations: Intersectionality in Feminism

Southside Cultural Center (393 Broad Street) 6-8PM This panel (including poet, activist, and former candidate for City Council Ward 1 Justice Gaines!) aims to discuss methods of feminist organizing across race, ethnicity, sexuality and class.

A hefty convo to have over a drink, but if there’s any place in Providence to get it right, it’s the Southside Cultural Center.