The College Hill Independent Vol. 39 Issue 9

INSIDE: BROWN DOESN’T PAY ITS TAXES, THE LEGACY OF GORHAM SILVER, AND A SERIES OF OBJECT BIOGRAPHIES

A Brown/RISD Weekly / November 22, 2019 / Volume 39, Issue 09

the

Indy Contents

From the Editors

Cover Balanced Flower Colin Harvey

Have you ever picked the peanut pieces out of chunky peanut butter with chopsticks? Meticulously, delicately, carefully, assuredly. The obsession with this act often begins with a knife, then a fork, until, ever wiser in the art of peanut-picking, you find the perfect tool to sift, flip, and prod: the chopstick. Or to be specific, two.

An inexplicable pleasure is derived from a clumpy pile of five or six peanut pieces on the sticks. There is something about the act of diving those stiff pointy stick ends into a large beckoning tub of soft butter, churning it in swirls, flipping and folding and pressing clumps into each other as I search underneath, prowling around for the area of highest chunk to cream ratio.

Week in Review 02 Week in Climate Apocalypse Gabby Bianco & Dana Kurniawan Metro 03 What Brown Could Pay Hal Triedman & Sara Van Horn

You’re welcome.

-M & M

07 Archiving Activism Kion You Arts 05 Scrutinizing the Self Anabelle Johnston 11 In the Making Bilal Memon Literary 06 Two Stories Emma Kofman & Pia Mileaf-Patel X 09 Outtakes from Dad’s High School Photo Class Alex Westfall 10 Stereo Seth Israel Science + Tech 13 Current Location Alan Dean

Mission Statement 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.

Features: Object Biographies 15 Fitbits Dana Schneider 16 Doc Martens Finch Collins

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.

17 Ruby Slippers Evan Lincoln 18 Ephemera Passing Clouds Joey Han

Week in Review Gemma Sack News Jacob Alabab-Moser Izzi Olive Metro Victoria Caruso Alina Kulman Sara Van Horn Arts Zach Barnes Seamus Hubbard Flynn Features Mara Dolan Mia Pattillo Science + Tech Miles Guggenheim Matt Ishimaru

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Literary Catherine Habgood Isabelle Rea Ephemera Eve O’Shea Sindura Sriram X Jorge Palacios Alex Westfall List Ella Comberg Ella Rosenblatt Tiara Sharma Staff Writers Roxanne Barnes Alan Dean Muskaan Garg Ricardo Gomez Anabelle Johnston Jennifer Katz Sophie Khomtchenko

VOL 39 ISSUE 09

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.

Emma Kofman Dana Kurniawan Deb Marini Bilal Memon Kanha Prasad Nickolas Roblee-Strauss Emily Rust Issra Said Peder Schaefer Star Su Kion You Copy Editors Grace Berg Sarah Goldman Marina Hunt Christine Huynh Cherilyn Tan Design Editors Ella Rosenblatt Christie Zhong Designers Anna Brinkuis

Kathryn Li Daniel Navratil Katherine Sang Illustration Editor Pia Mileaf-Patel Ilustrators Alana Baer Natasha Brennan Bella Carlos Fatou Diallo Halle Krieger Katya Labowe-Stoll Eliza Macneal Sophia Meng Sandra Moore Rémy Poisson Owen Rival Charlotte Silverman Mariel Solomon Miranda Villanueva Stephanie Wu

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Managing Editors Ben Bienstock Tara Sharma Cate Turner MVP Seamus Hubbard Flynn *** The College Hill Independent is printed

by TCI Press in Seekonk, Massachusetts.

Alumni+Fundraising Chris Packs Senior Editors Ella Comberg Olivia Kan-Sperling Chris Packs Tiara Sharma Wen Zhuang

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week week in in climate climate apocalypse apocalypse ANT-EAT-ANT WORLD The scene is set: a Soviet nuclear bunker. The land is desolate. A few radioactive tumbleweeds are the only sign of movement. But suddenly, there is a sound.

The raucous battle cry of one million ants. They are no ordinary ants, though. Oh no, these are cannibal ants, forced into the worst of circumstances by their poisoned environment. They come charging out of the bunker, ready to take over the rest of the world. (That is until the Ant Man himself, played by Paul Rudd, stops them.) And the craziest part is that only some of this scene is fictional.

It was recently reported that about one million cannibal ants escaped from an abandoned, Soviet nuclear bunker. A group of Polish scientists came across the colony in 2013 when they were studying a group of bats inhabiting the same space. The ants appeared to have become trapped in the bunker when they fell from an original nest through a ventilation pipe and could not climb back out. The colony was composed of only worker ants, making it impossible for them to reproduce, since only a Queen ant can lay eggs. Despite this, the size of the colony grew not because of reproduction, but due to the number of ants that continued to fall into the bunker. The ants created a social structure and way to survive despite having no light, heat, or food source, or so they thought.

Upon further investigation, scientists found that the ants had been surviving by consuming the corpses of dead companions. In 2016, the scientists, who clearly have a death wish, created a path for the ants to escape.

When they returned a year later, the bunker was almost completely empty, which begs the terrifying question: where did they go? While these cannibal ants are unlikely to threaten any picnic or human, the very idea is still absolutely horrifying. What happens when there aren’t any more ants for them to eat? Is this how the ants will finally take revenge on humans for stepping on them for centuries? As the old nursery rhyme goes, the cannibal ants go marching one by one hurrah, hurrah...

Other than inspiring the Independent’s nightmares for the foreseeable future, the story of these worker ants points to nature’s incredible resilience.

Ants have been known to build nests in other inhospitable locations, but the bunker proves particularly dangerous given its lack of resources. When faced with the seemingly unlivable circumstances that the man made bunker created, the ants were able to adapt and create systems that resembled their normal behaviors of assuming tasks and finding a food source, no matter how extreme the measures were. For contrast, this Indy writer’s family once moved because the vibes weren’t right.

These wood ants represent only one of many examples of animals adapting and surviving in harmful situations created by humans. With the growing threat of climate change, many animals have begun evolving to better survive under these circumstances. For example, an article in Smithsonian Magazine mentions the increase of brown as opposed to grey tawny owls in Finland. The melting of snow in the country since the 1970s has made it increasingly advantageous for the brown tawny owls to camouflage, and the animals have adapted over the course of just a few decades.

In comparison, humans are evolving staggeringly slowly. For example, a story in NPR notes that the first

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genetic mutation that allowed for adult humans to digest milk emerged 7,500 years ago. Yet even after thousands of years of evolutionary development, two thirds of the world’s population is still rendered helpless by ice cream. At this rate, there isn’t enough oat milk in the world to save us. An article in Scientific American states that researchers believe climate change is responsible for approximately 150,000 deaths each year around the world each year, and they fear that the number will not decrease, but rather double by 2030.

These cannibal ants provide further evidence that animals and nature will likely continue to survive and thrive long after the human race has wiped itself out.

While Paul Rudd, or surely Leonardo DiCaprio, can still save us from this fate, they had better act quickly.

Until then, though, the Indy is bracing itself for actual flying pigs, elephants with super speed, and some sort of mutant egg-laying, aquatic, beaver-duck hybrid.

Actually, it turns out that last one really exists.

—GB BABY OF THE HOUSE ADDRESSES BOOMERS In a speech supporting New Zealand’s “Zero Carbon” bill on the floor of Parliament on November 5, 25-year-old New Zealand lawmaker (and “Baby of the House”) Chlöe Swarbrick added: “In the year 2050, I will be 56 years old. Yet, right now, the average age of this 52nd parliament is 49 years old.”

No sooner had she said this than a member of parliament for the National Party heckled her, and, without missing a beat, Swarbrick shot back, “OK, boomer,” and marched straight through the rest of her speech.

Swarbrick’s throwaway line became a two-word comeback that rocked the internet, but was picked up by absolute silence in Parliament.

Even though the captions on Parliament TV transcribed Swarbrick’s comment as “Ok, Berma,” the internet picked up this delectable quip and it went viral.

Not only was it a well-timed remark, but a certain echo of the current zeitgeist reverberated in this sassy political comeback. Invoking the intolerance and exhaustion of her millennial generation towards the previous one, Swarbrick’s quick and authoritative intonation delivers a piercingly good burn. “OK, boomer” was not delivered bombastically; Swarbrick acknowledged the lack of millenial representation and promptly moved on, wasting no time and speaking with urgency. More than any other movement, the climate movement has an existentially looming timeline, and the longer we wait, the harder problems become to solve. Swarbrick is calling out the fact that her millennial generation will disproportionately be saddled with the catastrophes of climate change.

Lucky for us, Swarbrick adds a culturally poignant breath of fresh air into the dead space of parliamentary chambers, critiquing the boomers who have allowed this existential crisis to go unaddressed. A cheeky meme that first made its rounds on TikTok, “OK, boomer” was a young person's deadpan response to an older white man chiding “today’s young people” for not realizing their “utopia” is not “real life.” There

are a few things to unpack here. Even though boomers span a wide age range on a shifting political spectrum, young people have an image that boomers represent a certain race, power, and positionality. When Swarbrick speaks truth to power, she is also speaking truth to those who have obstructed or slowed action due to their privilege and ability to ignore it. The conflation of baby boomers and white men is arguably part of the fuel that set off the phrase “OK, boomer.”

In a Guardian piece written about the one-liner, Swarbrick elaborated, “My ‘OK boomer’ comment in parliament was off-the-cuff, albeit symbolic of the collective exhaustion of multiple generations set to inherit ever-amplifying problems in an ever-diminishing window of time.” Expanding on the association of “OK, boomer” with white men, Swarbrick clarifies it is a frame of mind, rather than a literal generational divide, that characterizes this frustration.

Boomers should perhaps take a look at Jay Inslee, the governor of Washington and the first Democratic presidential candidate to release a climate plan before dropping out of the race. In a rallying call to fellow boomers, Inslee says, “I’m a Boomer and it’s time for our generation to do our part to defeat climate change.

OK, Boomers?” For Inslee to use this phrase as a white man underscores that this supposedly generational frustration masks deeply-seated ideological and class concerns. Depending on people’s positionality, the devastation of the climate crisis will impact people differently. As a boomer that identifies with the supposed insult, Inslee reclaims it, and in a clever turn of phrase, Inslee poses a larger question also echoing the current zeitgeist: Boomers, will you join us?

—DK

BY Gabby Bianco & Dana Kurniawan ILLUSTRATION Eliza Macneal & Charlotte Silverman DESIGN Ella Rosenblatt

WEEK IN REVIEW

02

WHAT BROWN COULD PAY

BY Hal Triedman & Sara Van Horn ILLUSTRATION Pia Mileaf-Patel, Hal Triedman,

Sara Van Horn, & Ben Bienstock DESIGN Daniel Navratil

“How is it that a city—a small city—can continue to have public schools that fail repeatedly?” In an interview with the College Hill Independent, Marco McWilliams was insistent. A former organizer for Direct Action for Rights and Equality, graduate student at Brown University, and program coordinator at Brown’s Swearer Center, he noted that, “someone benefits from that. This is not an accident.”

Scattered across the Jewelry District, College Hill, and Downtown, the plethora of property owned

by Brown University is valued at $1.1 billion. Despite an endowment of $3.8 billion, the University does not pay federal, state, or local taxes on the vast majority of its real-estate holdings. Meanwhile, the Providence Public School District is in the midst of a financial crisis, as revealed by a devastating report released by researchers at Johns Hopkins University this past June.

Following the report, university president Christina Paxson avowed the University’s ongoing commitment to Providence public schools, asserting that the University would “develop plans to support local schools in Providence.”

If Brown University paid taxes on all of its 193 properties, the city of Providence would receive over $38 million annually, Inside Higher Ed reported in 2012.

Instead, Brown makes $6.7 million worth of voluntary payments to the city each year. The amount of these Payments In Lieu of Taxes (PILOT) has fluctuated historically, depending on the severity of the city’s financial situation and the willingness of various mayors to put political pressure on the University.

The question of property taxes is often framed by university administrators as a foregone legal conclusion. Because private universities are classified as nonprofit organizations, they have historically found themselves exempt from paying taxes on their property. Although this tax-exemption is longstanding, there is growing concern over the legal underpinnings of private university wealth, reflected in the New Haven community campaign to “Tax Yale”; the 2016 lawsuit filed against Princeton by Princeton residents contesting its tax-exemption (settled out of court for $18 million; and the city legislation, proposed in Providence in 2017, to tax Brown’s non-mission essential properties. One model for this legislation like this is a 1977 New Hampshire Supreme Court ruling that required Dartmouth College to pay taxes on its dormitories, dining halls, and kitchens.

The most important questions in the debate over taxation, however, are not legal ones. Instead, they are more fundamental questions about not only the ways in which university goals are prioritized over the needs of students, but also the history of elite institutions in relation to the cities in which they are located. “What are our responsibilities to those local communities as an institution?” asked Mathew Johnson, executive director of Brown’s Swearer Center, in an interview with the Independent. And what should working-class cities with mostly residents of color like Providence demand of rich, mostly white institutions like Brown?

Implicit in McWilliams’ original question is the fact that current educational inequities are tied to Brown’s historic relationship to the city of Providence.

In letter to parents and faculty this past August,

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President Paxson cited Brown’s historical ties to the transatlantic slave trade, including the Brown family’s direct involvement, as grounding for Brown’s responsibility to the city’s public schools, writing that “Brown has a longstanding commitment to K-12 education, as noted in the 2007 Report of the Steering Committee on Slavery and Justice.” This report, commissioned to investigate the University’s historical relationship to the transatlantic slave trade and provide recommendations on how best to address this legacy, is unequivocal about the centrality of education to the project of reparations. “If a single theme runs through this report,” the document reads, “it is education. This focus reflects not only Brown’s nature as an educational institution but also the nature of slavery.” The report describes both how, in many states, it was once a criminal offense to teach free and enslaved Black people to read and how many Americans during the age of abolition “recognized education as essential to repairing the legacy of slavery and equipping the formerly enslaved for the full enjoyment of their rights as free people.”

Because of the central importance of education within the history of American slavery—a history to which Brown is intimately tied—the Report explicitly recommends that Brown “use the resources of the University to help ensure a quality education for the children of Rhode Island.” Yet as both the University’s extraordinary wealth, which is due in large part to its tax-exempt status, and the harsh reality of the Providence Public School District make damningly clear, Brown has fundamentally failed to honor this recommendation. “You got the slave monument on campus,” McWilliams emphasized to the Independent.

“I believe I can make the moral argument—the ethical argument—that Brown has a responsibility to be doing something given its history.” +++ As students, parents, and activists have known for decades, Providence is a city in the midst of an ongoing educational crisis. This past summer, however, its public school district garnered long-deserved and widespread media attention after the release of the devastating report on school quality in Providence.

According to “We’re Not Gonna Take It,” published earlier this year by the Independent, the report documents the alarming state of school facilities, widespread teacher absenteeism, physical violence, and a culture of low expectations. Within a district that is 87 percent economically disadvantaged, 64.6 percent Hispanic, 16.6 percent Black, and nine percent white, these alarming descriptions provide context an extremely segregated educational environment where, across grade levels and especially among students of color, only 14 percent of students are proficient in English Language Arts and only 10 percent are proficient in math.

Although underemphasized by the report—which was funded the Partnership for Rhode Island, a nonprofit made up of the CEOs of major Rhode Island employers like Brown University—the centrality of the city’s finances to the challenges of its public schools

cannot be overstated. Buried in the report, in a section entitled “Academic Outcomes,” financial constraints are listed as one of many factors hindering student success: “Almost everyone [on the school board] said that money is a problem, or even that it is the number one problem.”

According to Tom Sgouros, tax policy expert and former advisor to the Rhode Island general treasurer, Providence is being financially squeezed by both the state legislature and the city’s small property tax base.

In the context of this fiscal strain, Brown’s presence is often justified as an important economic driver. In an interview with the Independent, however, Sgouros noted that while Brown generates income and sales that are both subject to state taxes, this money does not go to Providence. “Brown is generating a tremendous amount of economic activity,” Sgouros emphasized, “but the city doesn’t actually benefit from it.

The city could benefit from it if the state would share, but the state mostly treats Providence as a wayward child, not as a partner.”

In an interview with the Independent, former Mayor of Providence Angel Taveras highlighted the ostensibly non-financial aspects of the educational crisis. “I think we need to change the culture of education,” he argued. “I think we need to change the expectations we have for our kids. There may be some money associated with that, but I don’t think it’s simply a money problem.” As even a quickk perusal of the Johns Hopkins report reveals, there are fundamental structural problems—failing welfare programs, a lack of language and racial representation of students among their teachers, and profound segregation—that impact the ability of local schools to educate their students. For Brown University, however, the question at hand is the underemphasized financial impact of accumulated wealth on the functioning of public schools. “Money is a factor,” Boston Globe reporter Dan McGowan emphasized to the Independent.

“There’s no question about that.” Sgouros similarly cautioned against overlooking the importance of financial relationships. “The fundamental issues, in my opinion, almost always come down to the dollars and cents,” Sgouros told the Independent. “You know the rule: when people say, ‘It’s not about the money,’ it’s about the money.” +++ Despite their tax-exempt status, nonprofits constitute an important source of city funding through their voluntary PILOT payments. These transactions, according to McGowan, are all “negotiated, optional payments” and the result of hard-fought political battles between university presidents and the various mayors of Providence. “There’s always this game of tug-of-war,” McGowan told the Independent, “between the city and all the nonprofits, but Brown in particular.”

This financial tug-of-war is currently dictated by two legal documents: a 2003 Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) and a 2012 Memorandum of Agreement (MOA), signed during moments of fiscal crisis, which establish a minimum floor of University

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contributions of about $3.5 million per year.

Following the Great Recession, Providence was on the brink of financial catastrophe. Yet Mayor Angel Taveras successfully struck a deal with Brown, increasing yearly voluntary payments until 2023 in return for giving the University ownership over several city streets and 250 parking spots, which the University charges its faculty and staff to use. In spite of their difficulties negotiating, the relationship between Brown and Providence, according to Taveras, is “codependent. We need Brown and Brown needs us.” Yet this analysis is not necessarily reflective of the ongoing conflict between city government and the Brown administration. As McGowan succinctly summarizes, “Every person that has ever run for mayor has fought with Brown.”

In part, the University is reluctant to pay more because of the lingering perception of corruption in city government. “There’s a hesitation to write a blank check to the city of Providence,” McGowan explained to the Independent. “What nonprofit leaders, Brown included, think of Providence government is that it’s some combination of corrupt and inept.” Yet the frequent citation of corruption seems to impede both the state government and nonprofits from contributing to meaningful conversations about their financial responsibilities to the city. Additionally, according to Sgouros, the gesture by majority-white institutions toward corruption as a primary rationalization for denying funding to a city with predominantly residents of color is grounded in racist funding priorities: “There’s this idea in the legislature that city councils are drunken sailors, and that we can’t trust them with anything. The issues of race are rarely far behind.” +++

overperformed similar schools in the district.

While Brown dedicates significant financial and human resources to the city of Providence, its priorities are reflected in its fundraising successes—and failures. In 2017, Brown embarked on a three billion dollar capital fundraising campaign BrownTogether.

Brown has since raised over two billion dollars in under two years, generating funds for new facilities, renovations, and dozens of endowed professorships.

In 2007, Brown promised to raise 10 million dollars for Providence public schools following recommendations in the Slavery and Justice Report. Yet, as the Boston Globe reports, the “Fund for the Education of the Children of Providence” raised just one-fifth of its professed 10 million dollar goal. In McGowan’s eyes, “the value of the PR far outweighed the money that was actually raised. That’s a shame.”

Brown frequently gestures to these services as evidence of its committed, reciprocal relationship to the city. “Brown, and all the other nonprofits, have talented lobbyists and a legitimate case to make about what would Providence be without Brown University,” McGowan told the Independent. “It would be a lot less without Brown. That’s always the Brown argument. We do a lot. We are helping in the schools.” As evidenced by the multiplicity of tutoring programs and grants, there is no doubt that Brown does provide services to the city. The question, according to McGowan, becomes: “Is it enough?” +++ “If you look at the history of our relationship with the city, it goes all the way back to our founding,” Dahlberg told the Independent. “There have always been issues between Providence and Brown University.” As the Report of the Brown University Steering Committee on Slavery and Justice makes evidently clear, Brown owes its wealth to American slavery: “There is no question that many of the assets that underwrote the University’s creation and growth derived, directly and indirectly, from slavery and the slave trade.” This history continues to shape its relationships, especially since in the nineteenth century Providence served a northern hub of the Atlantic slave trade. As McWilliams notes, “We live with these legacies today.

Brown can’t escape its own history.”

For McWilliams, this history, as well as the racial-economic structures it created, is reflected in

relationships between the University and Providence perpetuating racial inequity cannot be reduced to Brown lining its pockets. “If Brown invests a ton of money in the [Providence Public School District] and if, when those students graduate, they still can’t apply to go to school here, I’m gonna be curious about that,” McWilliams said. “Because when we say elite institution, we don’t just mean money.” To illustrate his point, McWilliams gestured in a sweeping arc around the conference room in the Swearer Center. “This room is intended to do something,” he asserted, glancing at the ornately gilded mirror on the wall behind him; at the glittering chandelier above his head; at the large mahogany table at which he sat. “It’s intended to convey power.”

For some, this elitism prevents the University from meaningfully addressing the city’s challenges.

“You would think that a center for education would be actively pushing and working super hard to end poverty,” Dicupe told the Independent. “But that’s not what we see from universities like Brown. These institutions have forgotten what they’re there for. You’re not there to make money, you’re there to educate. And you’re supposed to be the best of the best.”

Because Brown is first and foremost an educational institution, many see education—and the Providence Public School District specifically—as the most appropriate sphere within which Brown can make reparative change. The Slavery and Justice Report, for example, believes the University’s response “should reflect Brown’s specific nature as an educational institution.”

Because Brown is best at learning and teaching, the report reads, education is the area “in which Brown can most appropriately and effectively make amends.”

McWilliams agrees: “Brown is a university. They issue college degrees. That’s what they do. They don’t build bridges and skyscrapers. They aren’t in landscaping.

They do education.”

The demand that Brown pay property taxes presents a similar financial challenge to the demands from student organizers that Brown divest from companies perpetrating human rights abuses in Palestine and that Brown refuse monetary gifts acquired through profit from the sale of so-called “non-lethal” crowd control weapons. Honoring each demand would require the University to reevaluate its current priorities; it would require decentering endowment growth as the University’s governing ideology and prioritizing the wellbeing of students—down the hill and across the world—as well as the importance of fulfilling the University’s promises in light of its foundational connection to American slavery.

Because of how private donors sustain elite universities, however, interrupting the movement of capital into these institutions—as well as questioning its accumulation—might very well mean changing what private universities look like and seek to do.

For Johnson, one of the fundamental questions is whether the issue of property taxes can “be solved in the context of a system that places cities and universities in their financial reality.” Instead, he argued, “the question is really about a system that essentially ends up pitting the city and the University against each other in an artificially scarce resource environment.” Within the context of growing national demand for government funded, tuition-free, public higher education, it may also be time to question the necessity for private higher education. As McWilliams argues, “We gotta make a space where everybody can come at the table to eat.” Perhaps, he argues, we have to build a bigger table. Or perhaps we have to get rid of the table and have everyone sit on the floor. Either way, the moral imperative is clear. “Everybody gotta eat. If we believe in the Constitution, in these rights, in this democracy, everybody gotta eat. And if we can’t, I gotta call this thing a sham.”

In lieu of property taxes, Providence receives both voluntary payments and a variety of services from Brown University. According to a 2015 independent review of nonprofit payments to the city of Providence by the Rhode Island Internal Auditor, Brown owns 193 properties in the city of Providence. Of these properties, 158 are classified as tax-exempt.

Included in the tax-exempt properties—usually specified, in the case of universities, as buildings used for educational purposes—is the $2.24 million residence of the University president, currently occupied

by Christina Paxson. If taxed like a normal residence, this property alone would generate over $40,000 per year for the city. According to the National Education “Honoring community demands Association, the median starting salary of a teacher in would require decentering Rhode Island for the 2017-18 school year was $41,689.

Albert Dahlberg, assistant vice president for governendowment growth as Brown's ment and community relations at Brown, told the governing ideology. It would Independent that the University paid $6.7 million in require prioritizing the wellbeing voluntary payments to the city in the fiscal year (FY) of students—down the hill and 2017. This $6.7 million payment in FY 2017 can be broken down into four separate revenue columns: across the world—and fulfilling the commercial property taxes, properties bought by University's promises in light of its Brown transitioning off of normal property taxes, connection to American slavery.” payments specified by the 2003 MOU and the 2012 MOA, and other payments. “There are a variety of reasons we make those payments,” Dahlberg said, “But it’s mostly to be a good neighbor.”

As Kinverly Dicupe, a former community orga- the way in which the failures of the Providence Public nizer for Fuerza Laboral, explained to the Independent, School District leave Black students behind. “Black however well-intentioned those payments may be, labor has always been positioned to fit in a particular “none of that money is actually felt by the people who place in the capitalist marketplace: as a low-wage, live in Providence” because these contributions are perpetually exploitable group,” McWilliams empharelatively small compared to the city budget. sized, attributing the failing public education system The University also contributes to the public to the assumption that “students that come out of the school district more directly. According to Paxson, “In schools aren’t expected to compete in the marketplace. recent years, Brown has spent more than $800,000 They’re not expected to come to Brown.” annually on direct support to Providence school chilThe culture of low expectations for students rings dren in the form of after-school programs, summer true for Dicupe as well. “Most of the people who go education experiences on campus, college scholar- to Brown come out of state, so it’s not an experience ships, and more.” For example, the Swearer Center that people from Rhode Island really have,” Dicupe SARA VAN HORN B’21 , HAL TRIEDMAN B’20.5, connects Brown students with local schools to told the Independent. “We’re asked to be proud about and $1.4 BILLION OF BROWN UNIVERSITY’S provide various kinds of programming, including Brown when most of us are never going to get to Brown. ENDOWMENT FY’19 are currently enjoying the sun Rhode Island Urban Debate League and Brown We can’t afford it, and it’s not really a possibility for and sand of the Cayman Islands.

Elementary Afterschool Mentoring (BEAM) at the many of us.”

William D’Abate Elementary School, which has vastly Brown’s inaccessibility illustrates how

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METRO

04

TWO STORIES Tongues

From What I Can Remember

“Do you want to touch tongues?” Ella asked me.

We sat underneath one of the fold-out plastic tables boasting boxes of frosted Dunkin Donuts, instant coffee and hot chocolate packets, and plastic cutlery.

She had powdered sugar around her mouth and it was getting stuck in white clumps in her flavored Lipsmackers lip gloss. I had a pink-frosted plain donut with sprinkles in my hand, the standard, bland-butpretty choice of a nine-year-old who’d snuck out of her Sunday School class to “use the bathroom.” We were on our second round of donuts for the morning.

Ella and I could get away with ditching catechism every other week at most, and preferred swinging on the banister of the wheelchair-accessible ramp near the bathrooms. Our hands clamped around its blue chipping paint, leaving sticky, sweaty marks on the cool metal as we treated it like a set of monkey bars.

I’d been able to hang from my knees since I was little, letting my pink-frosted fingertips brush against the grimy linoleum floor.

Saint Peter’s Church basement was the combination of sterile and dirty that only a church basement could be. It looked like a hospital corridor and smelled like a soup kitchen, with fluorescent beams tanning us paler, and consistent hair and lint balls in every corner along with mouse droppings and the occasional lost earring, which Ella and I would collect when we ditched class and hide inside one of the bibles that lived in a cabinet off to the side.

I bit my donut. I didn’t want to touch tongues. In fact, I wanted to touch tongues with Adam, the only boy in our level. Although I only saw him once a week, sometimes less if my family went upstate to visit my grandpa, I spent every second during Father John’s homily staring at the back of his head. His family sat two rows in front of us, on the other side of the aisle, where I had a clear view of his dirty-blonde curls brushing against his neck, and could see the shadow his lashes cast on his cheekbone. I looked forward to this all week, and even brushed my hair on Sundays, in case he ever looked back.

Although he was eleven, he was in the same catechism class as Ella and me. It was a small, downtown Catholic Church, with few parents that made their children listen to the Lord’s word as lectured by volunteer mothers who were passionate about Jesuit philosophy. So, we were all grouped together. After mass, sitting in the basement classrooms all of our Sunday School peers were trapped in, I’d stare across the table at Adam’s mouth, trying to get a glance of the purple rubber bands on his braces. I wanted to ask him about them. Why purple? What will your teeth look like when it’s over? Sometimes, bits of donut (or if it was bagels that day) bagel would get stuck in the braces and I felt like I knew a secret about him that even he didn’t know.

I swallowed my bite of donut. The underside of the table above our heads was dotted with chewing gum and metal bars crisscrossed, allowing it to be folded up and stacked in a corner after we all went home, or out to Sunday brunch with our families. “Ok,” I said.

“Ok?” repeated Ella. “Should we touch tongues?”

“Yeah,” I said, curious. She put her half-eaten donut down on the bare floor and I was disgusted, but ignored it as we scooted toward each other. I held my donut out to the side, protecting it from contamination, and followed Ella’s lead as she extended her tongue.

With our eyes open, our tongues met for a second. I’d expected it to be warm, because people are warm, but it felt like wet nothing. I didn’t taste either, as we both tasted of the same donuts. It just felt. I pulled away.

“Eww,” I said, and giggled.

“Yeah eww,” she said.

We went to the Cloisters—took the train up as far as it would go. I watched her point to different pieces of art, watched her hands more than what they were gesturing towards. Her wrists were so small I got distracted thinking about fitting them perfectly inside binder rings—opening and closing a three-inch metal jaw around them again and again. She was like a cartoon character had figured out what a flesh wrist looked like and from there had built a body. She was anything but.

She was magnetism, the things in your room that you never open.

BY Pia Mileaf-Patel and Emma Kofman ILLUSTRATION Pia Mileaf-Patel DESIGN Katherine Sang

In fourth grade, there were three gardens in the front of the schoolyard: one for herbs, for vegetables, for fruits.

We buried the two class fish one at a time, months apart, in the herb garden. The first one among the seeds, the second underneath the broad parsley leaves.

Our teacher procured two white stones for us to write their names on and use as tombstones. What she had overlooked was the number of times she’d bribed us with the honor of naming the fish, so one of them had at least four, the other six, names in contention for the spots on the stones. On my suggestion, we wrote down the dates of their deaths in silver sharpie instead.

I woke up to a man sitting on the edge of my bed and taking my picture, but when I opened my eyes it was just some lightning. I let its fingers put me back to sleep.

I have never known what to do with a sick relative (take the body, wrap it in canvas). My cousins who never seem to grow any older held a funeral for their dog, I think. Or some sort of reptile. They wrote a speech in wobbly print, dropped a few all-encompassing tears on the lined and torn paper, dug a hole under their tree with the toxic white flowers opening down like mouths, then washed the dirt out from under their nails. They put the tank on the curb, so I guess it was a reptile after all. I appreciated this mature token of theirs. Either they were giving up on ever getting a new lizard, or refusing to overwrite the old sacred spaces with new memories and creatures. I took the heat lamp with me after the dreaded affair, plugged it into an outlet by the foot of my bed and turned it on during the winter to warm my feet.

A man in a wheelchair lived across the street from me. They were renovating the house next to his. Each morning, he rolled himself down his ramp, and sometimes I was there to see it. He made his way to the lawn of the house next door, and sat there until dusk watching the construction men work. Occasionally they let him glue a pipe or hammer in a nail.

I was stabbed in the shoulder by a man who was after my purse. I told him I would give him everything. But as I was handing it over, my purse with its rosettes lining the lips, he jumped forward. He was so gentle, though, that the three inch blade only made it a quarter inch in. The emergency room doctor wasn’t even sure he wanted to use stitches. It was less of an event, I told him as he grudgingly placed a few threads in me, than the time I’d broken a glass in my hand. I’d been making iced tea and the temperature change made the glass shatter in on itself.

-EK

-PMP

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

LITERARY

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ACTIVISM On the afternoon of Saturday, October 26, a group of educators, students, activists, and community members gathered in a basement room of the Blessed Sacrament Church, a towering red brick structure situated between the Mt. Pleasant and Olneyville neighborhoods. The occasion was celebratory, and the gathering honored two lifelong community organizers: Father Raymond Tetrault, a pastor working with Providence’s Latinx parishes for over 50 years, and Juan Garcia, who had been organizing the immigrant population for around 25.

The event was put together by the George Wiley Center (GWC), a community organization fighting for utility rights, and its Popular Praxis arm, which archives the stories of people like Juan and Father Ray. Longtime parishioners spoke about their appreciation for Father Ray’s and Juan’s work fighting for immigrant rights, community organizing, and economic justice.

The GWC played documentary footage of, in part, Juan Garcia's life: Onscreen, Garcia talked about growing up in Guatemala City in the 1950s, and as an inconspicuous fourth grader, helping run messages for university students demonstrating against the United Fruit Company. He came to Texas in 1977, and eventually made his way to Providence. Garcia mentioned in the video that his phone, to this day, constantly rings with people asking, “Don Juan, look, I'm locked up,” or “Don Juan, I need help,” which eventually led him to quit his day job as a welder and become a fulltime activist and social worker. Garcia's life story not only details an individual’s dedication to community engagement, but also paints a larger picture of resilience exemplified by Latin American immigrants who

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have made their way to Providence.

During the gathering, Father Ray constantly emphasized that these oral histories could both teach and equip Providence's younger generation in their present struggle for social justice. Brad Duncan, an archivist who runs the extensive radical_archive, an Instagram account documenting printed materials of the radical Left, echoed Father Ray’s sentiments and emphasized their urgency: “There are so many people in their twenties and teens who are thinking about socialism, protest politics, white supremacy right now,” he said. “There is such a hunger for information to organize and know what people fought for in the ’60s and ’70s.”

In both a local and national climate of public charge, cuts to immigrant welfare, and constant threats of ICE raids, it almost seems antithetical to slow down and parse through archives, to engage in quiet reflection. However, the wisdom of local activists like Father Ray and Juan, as well as others throughout Providence, proves to be necessary because it helps us reckon with not only how much it takes to enact social change, but also that it is a tenable, worthwhile enterprise. +++

“How do we get ahead of the funeral and create a culture of resistance and solidarity?” Camilo Viveiros asked the College Hill Independent, explaining why the GWC decided to devote time and resources to recording the stories of Garcia and Tetrault. In 35 years of activism, Viveiros had seen enough elegiac

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BY Kion You DESIGN Katherine Sang & Kathryn Li

Creating a collective memory of radicalism in Providence praise and reflection after activists had passed away.

He wanted to encourage mutual reflection between generations and strengthen the “movement muscles” needed in the intergenerational fight for social justice.

“There isn't a network of grassroots organizations that have the resources to preserve stories,” said Viveiros, and as a result, the GWC launched their own efforts to establish a “horizontal model” of community archiving in Providence around five years ago, in which stories are recorded by community members, for community members. For example, the idea to archive the lives of Father Ray and Juan arose organically from Viveiros’s past organizing with the two. The GWC then consulted them to determine what they wanted to speak on, as well as how they would engage their stories with the context of the Olneyville community. Today, the GWC is working on around a dozen oral histories of activists around Providence.

Communities have been building “horizontal,” collective memories since the beginning of time, but with the dizzying pace and proliferation of contemporary social movements, especially on social media platforms, archiving efforts must not only take advantage of new recording technologies, but also slow down the pace of online information flow by tapping into historical precedents. Brad Duncan, with his 2,000 photos and 6,500 Instagram followers, can be seen as retrofitting the endlessness of social media into a new, online horizontal model of archiving. Moreover, Duncan has also created public-facing projects in community centers, bookstores, and art spaces that “bring new life to the material.” His ultimate goal is to resuscitate and resituate the radicalness of the 1960s into the contemporary landscape of activism, and has created an egalitarian community that can now access these previously unavailable forms of knowledge.

The term “radical archives,” both as the username of Duncan's Instagram account and as an academic field, seems ironic, given that the basic job of an archive is to preserve, and “radicalism” connotes a sense of drastic or violent change. But “radical,” in its Latin roots, also means fundamental, and thus encompasses a sense of fixedness and singular devotion in addition to one of forceful action. Duncan’s steadfast commitment to displaying revolutionary material, and the GWC’s capturing of community memories through oral history, can thus be seen as radical in this sense of fixedness, and may even empower community members to fight against narratives that have falsely represented or erased them. +++ Viveiros pointed out to the Independent the Providence activists whose lifelong labor has been forgotten and erased by dominant discourse and whose lives the GWC has been striving to archive. He praised Paul McNeil (about whom I could find absolutely nothing online) saying that McNeil had been known as the “mayor of Thayer Street” and spent his life advocating for LGBTQ issues, founding a movement called “Pride at Work.”

Viveiros also highlighted the GWC’s oral history of

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

Annette Gagne, the only time Gagne, who passed away last year, shared her story of activism to be recorded.

Gagne, who worked as a postal worker and joined the Socialist Workers Party in the ’70s, was a crucial member of Providence's first Pride March in 1976.

Viveiros also praised Pauline Perkins-Moye, who is currently the director of Resident Services for the Newport Housing Authority, and a longtime advocate for Newport food security. Without archiving and talking about the work of Perkins-Moye, who offers a counterpoint to the popular portrait of Newport as home to only jazz, mansions, and Gilded Age affluence, Perkins-Moye’s activism—her lawsuits against public housing discrimination and her advocacy for food stamp programs—would be much more obscured. And contemporary movements like the local Black Lives Matter movement, Viveiros explains, could be better contextualized within the lineage of activism of Black activism in Rhode Island and people like Perkins-Moye.

The documentary of Juan Garcia also offered insights into not just about activists across generations, but also across nationalities, specifically around anti-colonial and Third World liberation. Duncan continually emphasized the importance of international solidarity, and said, “one of the biggest throughlines in the archive is the way in which class struggle and national liberation bled together.” Because this is not the way that social movements are taught in public education, Duncan said, the work of the archive becomes that much more critical in providing counternarratives and points of comparison, and Garcia’s life thus offers crucial teaching points. +++

it to benefit the lives of the community members through “popular education,” in which knowledge is shared among the community.

Historian Howard Zinn, in his “Secrecy, Archives, and the Public Interest,” writes “that the existence, preservation, and availability of archives, documents, records in our society are very much determined by the distribution of wealth and power.” Should institutions do anything at all, if their subsuming of community archives constitutes a form of Marxist class dissolution, a superstructure absorbing the radical base into itself and sanitizing it?

Yet, there have always been radical archival efforts within institutions, such as the University of California Berkeley’s Emma Goldman Papers Project, after the anarchist political activist Emma Goldman, and Duncan states that university libraries have recently been creating special collections to include more radical materials. Nevertheless, “They remain institutions that do not share the politics of radical activists," Duncan said. “None of them have shown a long term commitment to it.” +++ Putting aside the role of institutions, both Duncan and Viveiros hope to use their archives to empower newer activists. Viveiros’ long-term vision for the GWC's storytelling project is expanding into working class neighborhoods throughout Providence to give young people the tools and the resources to interview the activists around them. He hopes these developments will help local students glean what it takes to successfully agitate for social change.

This is why recording the lives of organizers like Juan Garcia is so important. Garcia, in his oral history, continually pointed back to watershed years in Providence's own history of activism: 1986, when the federal government granted amnesty to undocumented immigrants; 2000, when they did it again; 2006, when Garcia helped get 30,000 allies marching on the streets; 2008, when he mobilized the Providence immigrant community against then-Governor Don Carcieri’s anti-immigrant executive order; today, when he is still advocating for driver's licenses for undocumented immigrants. Proper archival work thus can help encourage, sustain, and historicize today's social movements, such as the current sustained protests against the Wyatt Detention Center and its holding of ICE detainees.

Garcia, while talking about the current, hardfought campaign to allow undocumented immigrants to get driver's licenses, said, “If one day we accomplish getting the license for immigrants, it's because we fought for it, not because they gave it to us… It's because of us.” Archives, thus, concretize our recognition of the fact that our contemporary struggle is one that reaches back, that activism has been alive, is currently alive, and will stay alive.

The greatest hindrance to the GWC’s archiving efforts is a lack of manpower and funding, as organizations like the GWC have more urgent services to provide, such as helping low income families maintain access to indoor heating throughout the winter. Presumably, the arduous task of archiving could be alleviated

by Providence’s wealthy, prestigious institutions like Brown and RISD, which are uniquely slated to build archival knowledge with their extensive library systems. Brown University’s special collections alone contains 250 discrete collections of archival material.

Within the university, the question of institutional involvement in local city needs is one constantly asked, especially due to their tax exempt, nonprofit status. So what, if anything, are Providence’s universities to do in regards to radical archival practice?

Both Duncan and Viveiros are hesitant to employ, or recommend, institutions in aiding such work.

“Obviously we don’t expect institutions to push back against the interests that they serve,” Duncan said, in regards to the pushback universities have expressed against radical student movements and demands.

Viveiros said that the GWC welcomes interns and help from college students, specifically in doing this work around oral history, but states that “We specifically put our energy into folks outside the ivory tower.” This is in KION YOU B’20 wants you to get involved with the part why Popular Praxis was founded, he said, to take George Wiley Center's archiving efforts! radical academic theory out of elite circles and utilize

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Exploring implicit bias through Self, Made

SCRUTINIZING THE SELF

BY Anabelle Johnston DESIGN Katherine Sang

The dark walls of "Self, Made" crept upward until they became indistinguishable from the ceiling, the disorienting scene complete with exposed industrial bars and canary yellow paneling describing each installation. There was no apparent organization to the exhibit, housed in San Francisco’s Exploratorium from May to September of this year. Instead, the idiosyncratic collection served as a cacophonous paean to “the self” and the forces that mold identity, both welcome and unwanted.

A short history of drag complimented a black box projector that allowed guests to view themselves in outfits curated by artist Charlene Eldon, demonstrating the relationship between the inner conception and outward projection of one’s self. As I peered at my reflection behind a projection of a neon jumpsuit, I couldn’t help but imagine an alter-ego as a suburban 80s villain. I hadn’t seriously considered what my own checkered pants and blue t-shirt said about me, but as I stared at a version of myself someone else had fashioned, I was acutely aware of the subjective nature of existing in someone else’s view.

I held a burlap sack of identity-labeled bean bags, weighing a stranger’s self-identification before spilling “female,” “Christian,” and “Spanish” on the table. I thought about the person who unwittingly but immediately came to mind, wondering if she was bilingual, if she came with a family. I wanted to associate her with other people and place her in a larger setting, imagining a life for her that was beyond her control. In participating, I was constructing an image of someone in my mind, and actively confronting where that image came from. Was it a result of culture, how I had seen those abstract labels commonly represented? Was even imagining her inherently wrong? I wondered how I would be viewed as I left behind my own collection of titles for another to find. When pared down to a few words, could anyone construct a version of me that remotely resembled how I saw myself?

Wandering through the exhibit, I paused to look at work by Kehinde Wiley, Esmaa Mohamoud, and Melissa Cody, reading blurbs about their respective work and how the artists express their individual and collective identities through their art. As I examined the isolation of aspects of the self into historical, familial, and educational influences, I was forced to consider what makes me me. More pointedly, am I just a product of the world around me?

After watching a short film about the “hive mind,” I sat at a table among a collection of activities tucked away in the corner and read the bolded instructions to a seemingly simple two-player sorting game. Both partners were given the same set of magnetic words to sort into a combination of two categories: male/female and professional/domestic. One partner divided their magnets into the traditional “working man” and “homemaking woman,” while the other divided their terms into the avant-garde “business woman” and “stay-at-home-male.” The task: sort terms ranging from "Barbara" to "promotion" to "washing dishes" to "Jack" faster than the other person. As a proud and self-proclaimed feminist, I was undaunted by the challenge and felt prepared to debunk gender stereotyping by combining traditionally masculine names with domestic tasks. And yet, I found myself momentarily paralyzed as I let the words “salary raise” hover over the table when faced with the decision between male and professional. Salary raises exist within the working realm and yet, I (among others) unwittingly associated advancement with men. Although I understood that was the purpose of the exercise, I was stunned by

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the stomach-churning sensation I felt when forced to confront bias I didn’t know I possessed.

In retrospect, I’m not sure what I expected. It was only natural that I had internalized the norms of that structure despite my conscious attempts to actively reject it. That is the disheartening crux of implicit bias; though I am an individual, I exist within a larger structure, so I will always carry strains of that structure within me. +++ Intentionally or not, we constantly stereotype the world around us: noticing patterns, making generalizations, drawing (unfair) conclusions. How one dresses, what language one speaks, what religion—if any—one aligns themselves with are all interpretable statements about the self can easily be distilled into compact stereotypes that inform our perceptions of each other. I, like many others, have tried to condition myself to ignore or deny the presence of these internalized judgements, believing it better to imagine that I could somehow exist outside of the societal constructs of us and them. The purpose of the "Self, Made" exercise—and of the original Implicit Association Test (IAT)—is to acknowledge differing implicit associations and explicit attitudes, and expose bias that was not previously registered. The IAT measures the strength of association between concepts, stereotypes, and positive/negative evaluations through categorization response time, much like the "Self, Made" activity.

How quickly a respondent is able to connect the evaluative term “good” with different weights, religions, races, sexualities, disabilities, and skin-tones is said to “scientifically measure prejudice” and has been utilized by Harvard’s Project Implicit since 1995.

Although the presence of implicit bias doesn’t necessarily correlate with individual acts of discrimination, even subconscious generalizations about a group can have dire consequences in the micro and macroscales. If a company executive implicitly associates men with salary raises, they may be more likely to raise the pay of men who work under them. If enough company executives act upon it, the median pay for women in the United States as measured by the 2018 US Census bureau will be 82% of median male pay.

Compounded by bias against women of color, the pay gap only increases for Black women, Native Hawaiian or Pacific Islander women, Native American women, and Hispanic Women. In that light, implicit bias no longer becomes a game for me to play on a summer afternoon in San Francisco, but rather a series of harmful internalized beliefs with grave consequences.

Once implicit bias is registered, the more pressing question then becomes whether it is possible to “treat” it. Abstractly thinking about implicit bias can only do so much; individual-based strategies are rendered ineffective in the face of biased (and worse—actively racist, classist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, ableist) established systems that impose these beliefs in the first place. Project Implicit recommends fighting bias by actively suppressing, offering few suggestions beyond exposure to different groups and volunteering at nursing homes to increase positive associations with the elderly (advice that is as useful as recommending collective classical conditioning.) Ohio State University provides online modules that structure conversation about implicit associations, outlining factors that make an individual more susceptible to possessing bias in a way that comforts the audience without challenging the biased system itself. I don’t

believe that suggesting mindfulness practice on an organizational scale can undo centuries of institutionalized racism and the reconciliation of that history in the modern day. Sugarcoating implicit bias comforts the beneficiaries—those who receive the pay raises and are in the place to give them—at the expense of everyone else. By not challenging the unequal systems in which people are operating and attributing prejudice solely to the individual, the problem of “implicit bias” lends itself to superficial solutions.

However, recognition that compounded bias as a result of cultural norms only serves to reinforce these structures, and creating art that challenges that closed loop could act as a starting point for change.

Angélica Dass’s “Humanæ” project housed at "Self, Made" aimed to stimulate conversation about race through a collection of Pantone swatches based off of skin tones and bust cut portraits of the subject. This visual representation of the distilled ways we see each other sparks conversation about racial profiling and colorism inflicted upon the individual. Dass stated that the purpose of her project is to prove that “race is a social construction,” drawing attention to the limited ways we see and think about each other within these narrow structures, and asking the collective to break free of them. +++ As a collection, "Self, Made" served to demonstrate how the individual is inextricably intertwined with others, and the impossibility of separating oneself from the values of the society one lives in. From this perspective, any implicit bias harbored by the individual is a fault of miseducation, overt stereotyping, and repeated poor representation of others (and oneself). As a facet of the larger fight against implicit bias—and the weighted systems it is tied to—"Self, Made" suggests changing the media that perpetuates stereotypes entirely.

The exhibit housed a collection of graphic novels that described disabilities as superpowers, actively changing representation and the traditional image of what it means and looks like to be a hero. This installation was completed by Chad Allen’s audio comic book Unseen, described to be “written by a blind person, with a blind heroine, for blind (and sighted) audiences.”

Although a collection of comic books alone cannot change an ableist culture, it does have the capacity to encourage many to rethink heroism and strength. The diversification of heroes on the big screen through movies like Black Panther expand this audience and actively combat the singular narrative of one role model, as stated in the display of T’Challa and Shuri’s costumes in "Self, Made."

The existence of this art alone cannot fix or undo society’s ills, but it is a start to understanding how we think about each other, and what causes us to think that way. "Self, Made" forced me to acknowledge that the boundary between the self and culture is not so clearly defined—potentially the first step to actively undoing my unwanted implicit associations. I have control over what I create and consume, and am working to understand that art (though not always overtly) reflects societal values that I internalize for better or for worse.

The self may be made, but I hope to be primary creator.

ANABELLE JOHNSTON B’23 wonders what you imagine her to be.

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IN THE A silver spoon the size of a Great Dane immediately confronts anyone exiting the elevator on the third floor of the RISD (Rhode Island School of Design) Museum.

It's mounted upright next to a sign announcing the title of the exhibit of which it is a part, Gorham Silver: Designing Brilliance 1850-1970. Before table settings became ubiquitous around 1700, pre-modern Europeans carried around their own spoons (forks were not popularized in Europe, outside of Italy, until the 18th century). To distinguish themselves from serfs, the land-owning classes used silver spoons. The spoon was not merely a functional object, but also a cultural marker indicating refined taste and aesthetics.

Also on the wall of the RISD exhibit is a black-andwhite photograph of a baby resting inside the ladle of the giant spoon. The idiom “born with a silver spoon in one’s mouth,” which refers to inherited wealth, takes on grotesque proportions if one follows the (perhaps unintentional) visual pun. The photo marks a natural evolution in the significance of the silver spoon: It moves beyond any pretense of functionality, now an uninterrupted symbol of wealth and excess. +++ The spoon and the photograph were both created by the Gorham Manufacturing Company, the subject of Designing Brilliance. The exhibit, which runs from May 3 to December 1, showcases the work of Gorham, once the largest silver company in the world. Founded in Providence in 1831, Gorham operated in the area for the next 150 years. Gorham’s history crucially intersects with the history of the United States in the 19th and 20th centuries. Its craftspeople sculpted some of the most iconic monuments of their time, including the statue of George Washington in the DC Capitol’s Rotunda and the Theodore Roosevelt that guards the Museum of Natural History in New York. Meanwhile, Gorham’s ornate silverware sets, the company’s bread and butter, both reflected and informed the evolving tastes of the country’s wealthy, continuing silver’s long affair with privilege and power. As a bellwether of American culture, Gorham continues to incite admiration and controversy centuries after its formation.

For Elizabeth Williams, the head curator of decorative arts at the RISD Museum, Gorham is deeply personal. Not only did she write her PhD dissertation on Gorham, but some of Gorham silver’s artifacts are family heirlooms. Soon after her 2013 arrival at RISD, where the largest public collection of Gorham silver is housed, Ms. Williams began planning the Gorham exhibit. The years of preparation are evident in the exhibit’s stunning collection of Gorham’s most impressive work, brought together from museums and private collections across the country. The 816-piece Furber service, a tableware set commissioned for the wealthy Furber family, epitomizes Gorham’s artistic and technical powers. For instance, the Furber epergne, or decorative centerpiece, displays Columbia, the personification of America, in a delicate silver gown.

She stands atop a globe and holds a gilded wreath.

Continuing the Neoclassical motif, a Greek Parthenon frieze wraps around the centerpiece’s base. The Furber service is just one of many pieces in the exhibit that highlight the beauty and detail of Gorham’s work.

Drawing from vast archives of photographs and ledgers in Brown’s John Hay Library and RISD’s Fleet Library, Designing Brilliance reconstructs the silversmiths’ original techniques. Displaying silver-making

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tools and projecting videos of how workers used them, the exhibit highlights the immense labor necessary to make even a simple object. Viewers are compelled to contrast the artisanship on display with the modern standardized, mechanized production process and nostalgically mourn for a mythologized bygone era. +++ But how much is there to be nostalgic for? In an attempt to uncover the unsavory history of Gorham, Providence artists Holly Ewald and Becci Davis organized a response exhibit, Unpolished Legacies, at UPP Arts. Self-serving class interests, environmental degradation, and monuments to slavery and imperialism are some of the issues prominently featured. Running from September 27 to October 8, the exhibit consisted of public conversations, performances, and an art gallery Downtown that complicated the romantic history of Gorham as presented by the RISD Museum.

The Museum itself supplements Designing Brilliance with an audio tour that addresses Gorham’s controversial socio-political effects, but without physical presence in the exhibit, the recorded conversations, despite their insightful commentary, are but footnotes to the dominant narrative of the exhibited material.

Unpolished Legacies makes the case that in glorifying Gorham’s aesthetic and technical accomplishments, Designing Brilliance de-historicizes Gorham, removing art from its essential context.

Decorative silver has a history of weaponizing aesthetics for political ends—namely, in the service of class interests. The beautiful pieces on display in Designing Brilliance fall neatly into this legacy by reinforcing class divisions. Like the silver spoons of feudal Europe, Gorham’s sterling silver products (sterling silver is an alloy containing 92.5% silver by weight) allowed the wealthy to conspicuously project their status. A digital illustration of a serving of nachos superimposed onto an ornate silver dish, displayed in Unpolished Legacies, makes viewers feel uneasy because it defies expectations. Silver is fancy, while nachos are unrefined. The juxtaposition of the nachos and silver exposes the elitist posturing that enabled Gorham’s rise. In this light, to eat off of what remains a monetary standard seems as obscene as Scrooge McDuck blowing his nose into a twenty-dollar bill.

In an attempt to associate themselves with the rich, and distance themselves from the working class, middle-class Americans also purchased silver.

Gorham did not become the world’s largest silver manufacturer by selling sterling silver, but by making silver plate. Silver plate is a pedestrian metal coated with a fine layer of silver, which is much cheaper than sterling silver. Gorham leveraged class division in order to produce its masterpieces. +++ The wave of industrialization that propelled the Western world out of feudalism and into the modern capitalist order has left irrevocable environmental damage, much of which is only now being reckoned with. In 1897 Gorham relocated from downtown Providence, a few blocks from the RISD Museum, to Elmwood, a neighborhood on Providence’s south side. The sprawling new factory sat on the edge of Mashapaug Pond, the city’s largest natural body of water. For almost a century, Gorham disposed of

harmful chemicals in the pond. Cleaners, solvents, and heavy metals polluted the air, water, and soil in the neighborhood. Local officials were quick to voice their worries. In 1905, city park commissioners cautioned the Rhode Island General Assembly, “It is essential to the health of the neighborhood that they be not polluted by dumping or the crowding of buildings on [Mashapaug’s] shores.” Despite such concerns, Gorham continued to pollute until the ratification of the Clean Water Act of 1972, which prohibited the dumping of industrial waste directly into waterways.

The Gorham factory devastated wildlife and endangered locals. Al Campbell, interviewed for the Reservoir Triangle oral history project in 2011, lived in the neighborhood for the first 25 years of his life. He recalls, “We knew that Gorham Manufacturing was putting some of the chemicals out [in the pond]. Word was you just don’t go swimming out there and you don’t drink the water.” Whenever one of his friends acted strangely, they used to joke that it was because they drank the Mashapaug Pond water.

Textron, an industrial conglomerate based in Providence, purchased Gorham in 1967. Soon after, volatile silver prices and declining demand for luxury silverware forced Gorham to shut down much of its operation. By the 1990s, the Elmwood factory closed.

While Gorham’s physical presence vanished, its toxic legacy remains. Despite awareness of environmental dangers, the city of Providence opened the Dr. Jorge Alvarez High School on the former Gorham site in 2006.

Even with an air filtration system, students at Alvarez High, who are predominantly low-income students of color, continue to bear the brunt of Gorham’s mismanagement. Land around the school is so contaminated with heavy metals that athletes at Alvarez must bus to Mount Pleasant High School for practice.

Since ten thousand years before Alvarez High or the Gorham factory were built, the Mashapaug Nahaganset tribe have lived in the areas surrounding the Mashapaug Pond. During King Philip’s War, from 1675 to 1676, the Mashapaug Nahaganset people were massacred and their population was decimated. For centuries afterward, members of the tribe resided in West Elmwood, one of the first racially integrated areas of the city—until ‘urban renewal’ came, the city bulldozed the area, and communities of color, including Indigenous people, were forced to leave, again.

Mashapaug Pond is a sacred space for the Mashapaug Nahaganset. The tribe continues to conduct ceremonies around the pond. Indigenous peoples have been at the vanguard of calling for the pond's protection. In an act of public protest, the Mashapaug Nahaganset tribe sued the state of Rhode Island, the city of Providence, and the city of Cranston in international court for environmental racism based on mismanagement of the pond.

The recent efforts of Indigenous people paralleled work of local artists and community organizers to clean up Mashapaug Pond. Over a decade ago, the State Council for the Arts commissioned Holley Ewald, the same one who organized Unpolished Legacies, to design signs around the pond to prevent residents from fishing. Ewald transformed the project into an exercise in community building by going into local schools and asking students to design their own signage, provoking broader conversations on environmental protection. Inspired to expand the dialogue, Ewald founded the Urban Pond Procession (UPP), an annual parade to celebrate Mashapaug Pond featuring

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MAKING

Examining the legacies of the Gorham Manufacturing Company

brass bands, life-size puppets, costumes, and plenty of signs. Alongside the increased community activism and awareness, efforts were underway to clean the pond. Textron was left holding the bag, so to speak, for Gorham’s negligence, and funded ground remediation and dredging of the most contaminated areas of the pond. Through combined corporate, governmental, and community partnership, Mashapaug Pond is slowly being restored.

Unpolished Legacies, unlike Designing Brilliance, brings to the fore Gorham’s troubling environmental impact. Particularly notable were a set of video projections of paper made from cornstarch dissolving into Mashapaug Pond. The papers contained quotations from promotional material from Designing Brilliance, such as “Placing silver before the public.” In small print on the bottom were a list of chemicals dumped into the pond. In Unpolished Legacies’ most explicit critique, Designing Brilliance stood charged with complicity in whitewashing Gorham’s destructive history. +++ Although corporations like Gorham often bill themselves as morally neutral historical actors—providing a good for a cost, uninterested in politics and ideology— throughout the 19th and 20th centuries Gorham became highly implicated in debates on the legacies of slavery and American imperialism.

On April 26, 2019, Georgia state governor Brian Kemp signed into law a bill strengthening existing protections for Confederate statues. The law prevents local communities from removing monuments at their discretion. State senator Jeff Mullis, who wrote the bill, was born and raised in Chickamauga, Georgia, in the shadow of four Gorham-made monuments memorializing the four divisions of the Confederate military. One can only speculate on the influence of those statues from Mullis’ childhood on his political development and latter sympathies for the so-called ‘lost cause’.

In an interview with the College Hill Independent, Becci Davis, also from Georgia, argued that monuments are “an investment with a community for their future selves.” In erecting a monument, Davis continues, the present tells the future “this is what we believe in, this is important enough to remember, and we charge you with remembering it and holding those values close.” Regardless of their artistic merit, public monuments are inherently political, dense with meaning and reverberating with echoes from the past.

As part of its bronze division, Gorham commissioned numerous statues for the Confederate cause.

Davis’ artwork in Unpolished Legacies, including a zine on the Chickamauga statues, draws from her experience in Georgia to criticize Gorham’s complicity in the project of valorizing the Confederacy for a new generation of Southerners. Some argue that Gorham should not be retroactively punished using contemporary standards for behavior that was normal for the time; not only did many other prominent metalworking firms construct similar statues, but Gorham, in addition to their Confederate statues, also produced just as many works commemorating Union troops. In response to such positions, Davis first made it clear that “just because you stand on both sides doesn’t mean you are neutral. You’re still choosing to support both sides rather than choosing to support no sides.”

Furthermore, Davis clarified that the purpose of her

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artwork is not to vainly grandstand. No one can change the past, she admits. Instead, she views her art as an educational tool. She wants to provoke her audience into asking: “What can we learn from this particular situation with Gorham that can help us create bigger, better, strong community and culture moving forward?”

The Confederate monuments are not the only controversial statues produced by Gorham. Locally, the statue of Christopher Columbus in Columbus Square on Elmwood Avenue has elicited strong reactions from the community. The monument is a bronze cast of a sterling silver statue created by Gorham for the 1892 World’s Columbian Exhibition in Chicago, an international celebration of the 400th anniversary of Columbus’ arrival in the ‘New World’. The statue was designed by none other than Auguste Bartholdi, the sculptor of the Statue of Liberty. Since the fair, public opinion of Columbus has turned sour as more of the American public, albeit much too late, has begun to reckon with Columbus’ murderous legacy as a harbinger of European settler-colonialism and Native American genocide. In 2010 the statue was vandalized, covered in red paint to represent the bloodshed that followed Columbus’ wake. Since then, the statue has been desecrated in four similar acts of vandalism— the most recent occurred this past October on Indigenous Peoples’ Day. This ritualized act of resistance transforms the public’s relationship with the statue. Through repetition, the onlooker’s association between Columbus and massacre grows, whether the statue is currently covered in red paint or not.

Gorham’s ties to imperialism extend past the retrospective glorification of Columbus and into contemporaneous American politics. At the turn of the century—coinciding with Gorham’s heyday—the United States significantly increased its overseas footprint. The Spanish-American War of 1898 marks a turning point in American foreign policy. The war actualized the previously unrealized implication of the Monroe Doctrine: the Western Hemisphere is a sphere of American influence. While the US entered into war ostensibly to assist the Cuban movement for independence from Spain, it ended the war as an imperial power with overseas colonies. The US victory over Spain resulted in temporary control over Cuba and ownership of the former Spanish colonies of Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippine Islands. Subsequently, the US put down revolts in the Philippines in the Philippine-American War. Riding the wave of patriotism and American exceptionalism, Gorham took commissions to create monuments commemorating soldiers who fought in the Spanish-American and Philippine-American Wars—wars of American colonialism. One such statue is prominently featured in Providence’s Kennedy Plaza. Below the bronze cast of a soldier is an insignia featuring a woman presenting herself to two soldiers. Around the image are names of the territories captured during the war. Prominently displayed in broad daylight, though hardly noticed, stands an artifact to America’s rape of its neighbors, a startling unification of imperialism and the patriarchy.

Though a detailed history lesson in American colonialism lies beyond the scope of Designing Brilliance, the exhibit should provide context if it is to present monuments of that lineage. It does not. Among the most prominent pieces in the exhibit is a trophy to Admiral George Dewey, the celebrated Navy officer who led American victory at the Battle of Manila

during the Spanish-American War. The placard next to the trophy recalls an astounding instance of the general public’s collaboration in American colonialism: At the behest of the New York Journal, readers sent 70,000 dimes to Gorham, which were then melted down to make the trophy. Instead of offering a critical perspective, the exhibit applauds the concerted effort, perpetuating a dangerous blind patriotism that dooms us to repeat our mistakes. +++ At risk of sounding grandiose, the story of Gorham represents the best and worst of American industrialism. There is no dispute that the objects produced by Gorham are wonders to behold, beautifully designed and expertly executed. Nor should one discount the hundreds of hours of love and attention that workers poured into their wares. Nevertheless, to ignore the negative aspects of Gorham—elitism, pollution, monuments to oppression—is to be complicit in them. With growing awareness of the United States’ often brutal history, art museums across the country must enter a new minefield of questions: Is a purely aesthetic focus careless? Is there an obligation to offer political context and commentary alongside the art? What, in the first place, is the relationship between the ‘aesthetic’ and ‘political’? I hesitate to offer solutions to any of these questions. I can only caution readers to be constantly vigilant for the Unpolished Legacies that hide all around us, demanding to be uncovered.

BILAL MEMON B’22 is on the 19th-century industrial beat.

ARTS

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CURRENT LOCATION One cloudy Friday evening in October, I’m on a bus from Providence to New York, looking out as the endless gray strip that is I-95 cuts through the endless gray strip that is coastal Connecticut. I have a book with me to pass the time, but unlike the train, reading on the bus has a tendency to make me carsick.

Unfortunately, peace of stomach is not worth paying Amtrak’s unaffordable ticket prices for such a relatively short journey, and so, tired of the pages in front of me, I close the book. Unlike printed words, I can rely on my otherwise quite unreliable iPhone 7 to leave my body more or less undisturbed, so I reach down to wiggle it out of my pocket.

Of course, by this point in the ride I’ve already scrolled up and down my Twitter feed, through Instagram (posts and stories), and responded to every text and message I care to. I catch myself before I open the same apps again, moving my finger to the Google Maps app. As I tap it open, I’m greeted by that familiar blue dot with a thin white outline: me. It’s me in Old Saybrook, to be specific, slowly cruising down the Connecticut Turnpike, past the small blue and white Old Saybrook train station icon, past the orange knife and fork that is Mystic Market South, and past the gray dot that is From You Flowers. While it's heartening to see what a wide variety of shopping options I’d have here in Old Saybrook if I weren't trapped on a moving bus, I’m also harshly reminded that the basic problem, the reason I opened this map in the first place remains unchanged: I’m still more than two hours away from New York, and though I can see in the form of little red strips on my blue-colored route exactly which crashes are responsible for this, even with Google Maps in my hand I’m powerless to do anything about it. Though I

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SCIENCE + TECH

already knew just what the answer would be, what I’m told by the little graphic stand-in of the Connecticut landscape leaves me feeling much more dissatisfied than I was before. The fact that the dissonance between the digital representation of space sitting in my hand and the actual space out there all around me could send me on such an emotional mental journey hints at something revealing about the power of the map, or perhaps more accurately, the powerlessness of that little blue dot centering the map, me. Situating myself or my graphic icon in relation to this map, however, requires situating the map itself in a larger context.

A common (and irritating) truism people often repeat about the digital, globalized world we find ourselves living in today is that “the world has become a lot smaller.” At the same time, it is stated just as often that “the world has become a lot bigger.” The essence of this shift can really be found in the way in which these two apparently contradictory metaphors of size are both used to describe a phenomenon that is really about something else entirely: The world, in fact, has become much more interconnected, from digital communications to interstate highways to multinational tech oligopolies like Google. As all the millions and billions of personal spaces, places, and locations around earth slowly collide into and twist around each other, so too does our understanding of space in a truly global world made up of network societies (which seem to be quickly becoming one single, world-spanning network society). This sense of emplacement we carry has shifted from us thinking of our location as the space we physically embody here and now, to thinking of it as the position this space occupies within the wider

BY Alan Dean ILLUSTRATION Alana Baer DESIGN Kathryn Li

network of everything else (whether that be material, digital, financial, etc.). This shift, despite being fundamentally tied up with massively complex economic, social, and political processes that extend far beyond the scope of a bus ride from Providence to New York, is quite clearly distilled into one of the most basic tools of everyday human living: the map. +++ The map, whether digital or analog, is such a ubiquitous and necessary everyday tool that it is quite easy to let its social and political implications slip beneath the radar, an effect that has only become more pronounced in an age where the majority of adult Americans have an online, location-based, customized map system resting in their front pocket. While past maps existed for explicit, often singular purposes, from plotting out subway lines to streets and highways to international borders, the contemporary digital map, available on practically every smartphone, aims not only to carry out all of these functions at once, but also to do so through an interface custom-built for each individual user. The more omnipresent and banal the map becomes, the easier it is to miss the fact that it is not merely an unthinking instrument giving us a direct, albeit two-dimensional view of the space around us, but a deliberately crafted representation of this space.

While the map is a tool, it is perhaps more useful to also define it as an interface, not just showing us the world but reproducing it, and visually communicating our surroundings to us in whichever way is most effective for its intended purpose: general navigation. Maps are thus inherently structured around the mapmaker’s ideas and biases of what must be seen, where they are going, and where they hope to avoid. While many standard elements of maps today function mostly as convention, they are born from economic and imperial imperatives, such as the focus given to the Northern hemisphere at the expense of the Global South by the orientation of the cardinal directions (NorthSouth-East-West) or Mercator projection’s distortion of size (Google Maps itself used Mercator Projection until 2018, when it switched its default setting to a 3D globe). There is one especially important shift in map construction today, the widespread dissemination of what 40 or so years ago was an exclusively military technology: Global Positioning System, more commonly referred to as GPS. GPS, a navigation system based on 24 satellites launched into orbit in the 1980s and run by the US Department of Defense, has become commonplace in the era of location-equipped smartphones, becoming fully integrated into a wide range of applications beyond just Maps, such as Uber, Grubhub, or even YikYak. GPS, as well, causes these maps to take on quite different characteristics from the sketched, hand-drawn, or even printed maps of the past; while every Google Maps application is tailored to and wholly centers you, the user, these maps are by no means separate. On the contrary, Google Maps is one massive, totalizing map system, which each of us approaches from the perspective of our own personalized application—when I open my map in Providence the top suggestion is usually my house, but to every other user in Providence, this address likely doesn’t even possess an icon of its own and fades into the gray background of the city’s unmarked space. An assumption that follows from the GPS’s totalizing effect is that this map, while filtered through clean and pleasant graphics, shows us the world as it is with no artistic error or

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Mapping in perspective representational liberties, and thus that this map is not an ideological work such as a 19th century map of the British Empire or an Ancient Greek world map centering the peninsula. This, of course, couldn’t be further from the truth; while GPS allows for a degree of connectivity and interactivity that was unimaginable a few decades ago, it is hardly disconnected from its social context, that of network society, even as network society becomes increasingly naturalized, normalized, and hidden in plain sight. +++ While the cultural understanding of space may be changing, thankfully several hours later my physical location does too, when the bus pulls into a smelly backlot behind Hudson Yards and I, set free at last, once more turn to my phone to guide me to where I need to go. Once again I see myself, the blue dot with a white outline, now projected on a very different graywhite-yellow background. Compared to clean and uncluttered mapspace that was Old Saybrook, where each icon demanded a pinching of the fingers to zoom in close enough to read just what it was, Midtown Manhattan is a visual barrage of gridded streets, brightly colored commuter train and subway lines, and hundreds of icons and labels, multiplying several times over with every little bit of zoom. This vast assortment of possibilities, all that commercial capitalism in the modern American city and its digital gatekeepers can offer is, to me, completely irrelevant; I know where I’m going. I even have the Brooklyn address marked with a little blue flag.

The only question, which I already vaguely know the answer to but nonetheless delegate to the machine, is how. Google Map’s first suggestion, unsurprisingly, is already wrong—I don’t want to take the A train, because, though it might not fit within the protocols of the app, I know full well that the shorter walk from the station that 2 or 3 Trains stop at on the other end will compensate for the extra block or two now. It’s not long before I descend into the station and Google Maps disappoints once again, first promising me a 2 Train that never appears, then leaving me with an assortment times and numbers that have almost nothing in common with the timetable on the platform. It seems that down here in the tunnels I am left to my own devices, first by the app’s helplessness to predict the next train (to be fair, a task beyond any of us, the MTA

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

included), and then quite literally when my train finally arrives and we slide off into the tunnel, losing cell service and severing my connection to the GPS. Google Maps, despite its striving towards totality, is ultimately a deeply flawed representation of the world, thoroughly unprepared for the reality of a place like New York—recognizing this does not, however, seem to have done much to stop people like me from using it. Though we recognize how clunky these applications are, how they erase the nuances of moving through the cityscape, we integrate them into our routines anyways, often to the point of dependence.

There is an obvious, practical tradition out of which this has emerged; after all, navigating the city in the pre-digital era was hardly carried out entirely from memory. The subway maps, street signs, and even the large 2003 Washington, DC mapbook in the back of my grandparents’ car can attest to this. A significant force behind the map’s naturalization is the way in which it has been used as an extension of our own minds and memories, whether guiding us through a place that isn’t home (like myself in New York), or correcting the faulty assumptions our brains sometimes make about which turn to take.

What’s truly new about the computerized map, beyond the refined aesthetics and the interactive, hyper-detailed interface (scaled by importance—as determined by Google’s algorithm, of course), is that this map is ours, or at least carries the appearance of being made for us. Much like the rest of the personal data economy, the digital map centers the individual as a means of commodity production, learning from each user until it can provide specific, custom-made content—in this case, learning what parts of the city you frequent, what kinds of shops or restaurants you tend to like, or the usual route you take to get home.

The GPS-based map, from the perspective of the user, begins with, extends from, caters to, and exists entirely for that little blue dot with the white outline: you or I. +++ These digital, customized map-interfaces, now common, everyday, and thoroughly unimpressive around the world, however flawed their representation of that same world may be, do, however have more unsettling characteristics than just their imperfections, or the ease with which our society has assimilated them.

Our relationship to Google Maps as users is much more

of a two-way street than we may usually think, or care to admit, going far beyond the subtextual implications Maps shares with its analog predecessors, that of what the edges and highlights of the map tell us to think. As mentioned, Google Maps’ algorithm strives to perfect itself in the process of providing its navigation service, and to do so integrates the metadata of every drive to the store or subway ride home into a more and more reliable system of prediction and calculation. This data collection is not, however, merely contained within the system of Google Maps—our movements, travel times, preferred locations, and any other forms of metadata offered up to Google become integrated into a totalizing computational system that is itself integrated with many other interlinked systems, such as Google Ads, Google Street View, Google Calendar, and so on. This mass of information stored within the corporation’s internal network is then linked with outside advertisers, governments, and other manners of authorities with which Google does business or through whose purview the lines of its data web cross and twist. Cliché fears of futuristic-techno dystopia aside, in the here and now Google Maps embodies the modern city in a network society, working as the digital interface for the total and continuous transformation of cityscape into market, and every space, journey, and person inside it into a commodity.

Put in the context of these wider historical movements, I find myself feeling quite differently about the cracks that do still exist in this system. Considering the processes that they illuminate through their sabotage of smooth functionality, there is something to appreciate about the little bits of chaos and uncontrollability that companies like Google can’t account for. The illogical and inconsistent planning, confusing architecture, pointless rules, and unexpected interactions that make up the essence of life in a city—a train delay, loss of phone signal, or simply a wrong turn—gently (or not so gently) shake us out of the monotony of an automatic, GPS-guided trip from one point to the next.

ALAN DEAN B’21 has a good sense of direction.

SCIENCE + TECH

14

measuring the small animal of my body

BY Dana Schneider DESIGN Ella Rosenblatt

Weight loss in the era of Fitbits

content warning: body image When I was in the third grade, everyone got pedometers from our teacher. They were small and red, like a plum-sized cherry. I wanted to eat mine. Instead, we spent the rest of the day shaking them in our hands in a competition to see who could rack up the most "steps" by the end of the day. By the time we got on the buses, I was wearing mine proudly on my belt loop, happy to be a part of this game we were playing. Happy to have spent the day shaking a little rattling pedometer, counting steps that I was faking. I didn’t really understand why we were doing it, but I thought playing the game was more fun than watching it happen.

In the third grade, I was also diagnosed as obese.

The pediatrician said the word “obese” to my mom as if I wasn't able to hear him. For him, it seemed as long as he wasn't looking at me, I wasn't in the room. To my mother, he suggested less sugar and more exercise.

My mom stopped buying the chocolate muffins that we liked and I started running to the top of the street and back. My street was a cul-de-sac, with a sewer punctuating the loop at the end. I lived in the loop, so I would start on the rusty sewer lid. Then I would jog up the street, my child body angling forward.

It was my first attempt at losing weight.

Family lore said that the girls of my family had chubby childhoods that melted away during puberty.

Regardless of that prophecy, my family seemed ashamed of my body for the time being. Like a fat child is a problem to fix. Like a fat child is someone— something—to wish away by adulthood. In my child's mind, I knew that they were wishing away the fatness.

I worried if I did not lose weight, they would soon wish me away too. Before I could become the skinny person everyone wished me into being.

I remember standing in the shower, watching rivulets of water run over my stomach, hoping for it to erode me away. Fatphobic comments, perpetuated with varying degrees of willingness by family, friends, and media, had me wishing myself away. +++ One of the leading logics of American weight loss culture is that you should burn more calories than you consume in a given day. This mentality is generally preoccupied with Eurocentric body standards and conceptions of beauty, including whiteness, thinness, wealth, and ability. Those profiting off weight loss products have spent years contributing to these Eurocentric standards, targeting consumer demographics most likely to buy into those ideals while isolating the rest.

Now they are responding to established weightloss culture with new technological “innovation.” One such tech product is the Fitbit.

In 2017 alone, Fitbit shipped approximately 15.4 million units worldwide, according to Statista. The Fitbit is a piece of wearable technology that retails for about $150 and is typically worn on a wristband, functioning as a calorie tracker and pedometer. These data points that it collects—those of movement and caloric burn—contribute to an American fitness culture centered on weight loss and thinness. Meanwhile, the company is profiting.

With recent technological strides, “bodyhacking,” or infusing the body with technology to wield heightened control over it, has become increasingly enticing as a practice and as a place of study. In her essay “Bodyhackers are all around you, they’re called women,” tech writer Rose Eveleth notes, “The rise of grinders—hackers who open up their bodies and insert things like chips, magnets, sensors and more” has been steady within the past decade. Bodyhacking has been traditionally presented as based on implantable and wearable tech, like the Fitbit. Eveleth was curious to understand why her Intrauterine Device (IUD) wasn’t considered a form of bodyhacking among the bodyhacking community. She argues that the male

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dominated community does not consider her birth control to be a technology, and wrongly so.

The argument that birth control is bodyhacking opens up a whole new consideration of the ways we use technology to regulate and control our bodily processes. Including birth control in this category is useful because it represents an example of bodyhacking that puts the user in control of their body. It says: I chose this. I’m a cyborg, not a lamb surrounded by robots.

The Fitbit, on the other hand, represents bodyhacking that aims to shape the body into a societally idealized form. The watch becomes an (almost) permanent extension of the body, even while it clinically tracks the user’s body. Users become cyborgs motivated to make themselves smaller. Weight loss can easily become obsessive and destructive, especially when it gives the individual a sense of control.

Additionally, the ability to pursue weight loss ideals often requires class privilege, whether it’s having the disposable income to have leisure time to workout, afford access to a gym and weight loss oriented food, or be able to afford gadgets like the Fitbit itself. The sleek, pricey little piece of metal is akin to Airpods in saying: Hey, I can afford this.

I am not judgmental of people who wear Fitbits.

But I am unsettled by a culture that normalizes weight loss as a constant ideal. I am concerned about technology quantifying the movement and location of our bodies. Consumer data in the fitness market is often explicitly about the body of the consumer. I am worried about the information Fitbits are gathering about us, but I am also worried about what they’re teaching us. Fitbits give us information about our bodies that enables us to make our bodies smaller and over-exert ourselves. That is to say, Fitbits can train the cyborg user to self-destruct.

Most users set a daily goal of total steps made, with the arbitrary ideal goal being 10,000 steps. The Fitbit distances users from their bodies by creating external incentives, even as they micromanage their bodies. When users reach their daily step goals, the Fitbit dings. According to a study on dopamine by The Journal of Mental Disorders and Treatment, “There are four major pathways for the dopaminergic system in the brain,” one of which being the pathway for “pleasure and reward seeking behaviors.” Tech companies, like Fitbit, create rewards as simple as pings and vibrations to incentivize frequent use from their users.

I imagine myself in the third grade, running up and down my short street, going nowhere and feeling awful. I wasn’t exercising to feel connected to my body or release stress. I wasn’t running to catch a friend in a game of tag. I was running because I was told that I was sick and would get sicker if I didn’t lose weight. The task of doing so felt impossible and scary. I would have listened to a little watch beeping at me if I had one at the time.

I can understand why people wear Fitbits.The Fitbit gives users a sense of control. For many, their first awareness of their own body comes in an awareness of their urge to change it.

Weight loss culture did not begin with the Fitbit. In 2015, a study by Common Sense Media found that “one in four children has engaged in some type of dieting behavior by age seven and that 80% of ten-year-old American girls have been on a diet.” The Fitbit is not to blame for the conflation of weight loss with health; however, it has perfected the use of tech to incentivize our behavior around weight loss.

but it can also mean of the earth. The Greek root pais means small animal. Meter, meaning to measure, meaning to measure the small animal of our body. Our bodies grow into adulthood, if we are lucky, but we do not easily forget the things we learn as small animals.

We do not shed our memories as easily as we lose a little red plastic toy.

Fitbit has a new model called the Ace, intended for children ages eight and up. The Ace is a small component that can be worn as a child's watch. It tracks movement and heart rate, and can be synced to mobile apps on which kids can “set fitness goals, compete with friends and family members on leaderboards, and unlock digital badges for certain milestones.” As we know, children are already taught to worry about their weight. Now they are being targeted by Fitbit to track their bodies in new ways, presumably creating a new generation of consumers for the brand.

I am trying to unlearn the attitudes that I have learned around weight growing up. I wish I could say that I’m not treated differently as a thin person than I was as a fat person, but that would be a lie. As a thin, white woman, I benefit from the body ideals that make weight loss culture and Fitbits so marketable. When I hate my body, it is because I feel I’ve failed to meet an ideal rather than being excluded from that ideal altogether.

When white women prioritize thinness as a tenet of their power, they exacerbate pre-existing Eurocentric ideals of beauty. When they chase these ideals, and vocalize their failure to meet them, they normalize the idea that anyone can be “too fat.” In my traumatic encounters with medical professionals and dangerous weight loss behavior during adolescence, I coped by disparaging my body. For a time, nitpicking my body was a way of coping. I do not blame myself for coping in that way; it was the only way I knew. But I know now what I couldn’t see then: I know now that my coping strategies have consequences for those around me.

The way I talk about my body affects not only myself, but those who hear me. When I say I hate my body, who will hear that as a condemnation of their own body?

When we say any body is bad, whose are we saying are good?

Unlearning weight loss culture will be an imperfect, life long process for me. My body will grow into adulthood, if I’m lucky, but there are things that are hard to forget. I reach back through time and hug who I was, counting nothing, just exhaling and hearing where the breath overlaps. I bite into the plum-sized cherry pedometer, and it tastes sweet.

DANA SCHNEIDER B’20 is an adult who buys her own damn chocolate muffins.

+++ I can’t stop thinking about the the red pedometers we got in third grade. Where did everyone’s end up? In the bottom of an underwear drawer? In the garbage?

Pedometer: In American English, pedo means child,

22 NOV 2019

QUEER CALLOUSES I got my favorite pair of Docs my sophomore year of high school—Pascals with portions of Hieronymus Bosch’s triptych The Garden of Earthly Delights printed on them. The design depicts the turn-of-the15th-century Netherlandish idea of hell. Contorted nude figures strewn across the bleak terrain as a city burns in the background. A man decaying like a tree, arms twisted and chest hollow, looks out from the side of the boot, a bulbous musical instrument on his head.

Above sits a blade with a pair of ears. On the inside of the foot, the city burns. A rabbit plays the violin on the toe—except you can’t see much of the violin now. On the top of the toe, most of the design is scuffed off. The same with the inside ankle, where the medial malleolus sticks out and forces the leather of one boot to rub against the other, fading the dark scene to white and then tan.

At the end of my freshman year of college, I sat down at my desk every morning to do the laces. I used to tighten the laces slowly, drawing the stiff sides of the shoe together and feeling the new leather against my foot. By my third pair of black shoelaces, I didn’t even have to look. The aglets began to fall away. One had been replaced with a rolled piece of clear tape. Still, putting on my boots was an act of reverence, a prayer.

Lacing them is a ritual, opening space for me to pause and consider my day and appreciate the small things, like the feeling of frayed laces pulling soft leather closed around my foot. +++ Traditional subcultural analysis of Dr. Martens boots focuses on how the boot signals group belonging. Their lineage of subcultural usage traces from working-class British skinheads to a wide variety of modern-day queer subcultures. In short, subcultures, usually non-conformist in relation to broader society, use Dr. Martens to consciously perform their difference from the norm—or so goes the traditional argument. This argument emphasizes appearance: the need to look different in order to set your subculture apart from the norm. But I wanted to focus on something broader: queer masculinity. The subcultural lens is so focused on appearance and grouping that it doesn’t consider how objects like Dr. Martens might interact with people beyond the visual.

To be clear, a large part of the appeal of Dr. Martens is their appearance and the queer masculinity they have the potential to signal. But queer masculinity isn’t just a look, an outward-facing sign. It’s about how the way I look reflects how I feel (or want to feel). It’s about how the way I present myself can’t be separated from the broader context in which I write myself into being.

Because, at the end of the day, these shoes are manufactured by a large corporation, a corporation that is happy to exploit queerness in its advertising while participating in all the harm of capitalism.

Scholar Cath Davies, analyzing the company’s 2011/12 advertising campaign, found that the brand stresses self-expression and heritage apolitically, invoking an anti-conformist stance abstractly in a manner removed from political context, rebellion safely contained in a language of individuality and creativity. This brand strategy extends to their relationship with queerness.

When I consider my own queer masculinity in relation to my Docs, the study of my own experience with the shoes becomes an overlapping collage of presentation, self-realization, marketing, and leather. And so I asked: How do the boots make me, and how do I make the boots? +++ I started by drawing from Michel Foucault, whose technologies of self spoke directly to my experience with Dr. Martens. For Foucault, technologies of self are specific, conscious practices by which subjects constitute themselves through regulating their bodies, thoughts, and behaviors. The goal is transformation. But technologies of self only work to help people

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

transform themselves if that transformation makes sense to the broader society. Through technologies of self, individuals are able to represent themselves in ways that match their self-understandings in relation to society. Through modification of objects, people modify themselves. As a preteen, I craved a training bra because our society associates bras with womanhood. Wearing a training bra would make me a woman, would transform me into the teenage girl I saw on the TV, would shape my changing body into something legible as “woman.”

In that same logic, I wanted to wear Dr. Martens boots because the people I saw wearing them, in person and online, maybe didn’t feel like they had to wear a training bra to be a woman correctly. In my eyes, the people that wore Dr. Martens were unafraid to be themselves, especially when that fearlessness meant accessing a masculinity I’d not yet seen as a suburban-dwelling preteen. I hadn’t quite made the connection between being unafraid to dress and behave the way I wanted and being trans. When I thought of men, I thought of pop stars and football players and preteen boys who hadn’t learned what deodorant was. I didn’t want that! But I saw people presenting their own takes on masculinity, their butchness and their transness and their Docs, and I was enthralled.

These boots aren’t only masculine by marketing and association. They’re work boots by design and heritage. They’re heavy and imposing. As theater theorist Eleanor Margolies writes, masculine and feminine footwear not only look different but pattern behavior differently. Men’s shoes produce heavy walks, surer steps, loud footfalls. Gender has a rhythm.

Judith Butler is one of the gender theorists I find most useful when thinking through my own transness.

For Butler, different contexts and systems, including gender and sex, determine how the body is understood: “bodies only appear, only endure, only live within the productive constraints of certain highly gendered regulatory schemes.” Both social gender and biological sex are constructed, and the process of assigning a sex brings the object into being. For Butler, sex is projected through the manipulation of physical signs like secondary sex characteristics. There is no way to distinguish between what is materially true and what is culturally contingent, and the body only becomes legible through these signs. Gender is a question of doing, a process that must be repeated over the course of the subject’s life. Queerness and transness cannot be reduced to a clear subcultural analysis that just sees appearance. Everyone is always doing gender, cis or trans, whether they realize it or not.

Gender has a rhythm, one I’m still learning how to manipulate. When I first put on my Docs, they were an instrument I had not yet learned how to play, fumbling through the scales of my budding masculinity. Today, almost five years later, I’ve begun to play the songs I want to hear from myself without the effort they once required. I’m always constructing my own masculinity through footfalls and collared shirts. Gender as a process. Rhythms, repeated. +++

BY Finch Collins ILLUSTRATION Sophia Meng DESIGN Ella Rosenblatt

working within the system to achieve acceptance. The title of the campaign invokes the “born different” idea about LGBT identity, wherein queerness is something innate and should be acceptable because it cannot be changed. At stake is the growing acceptance of certain queer people into the dominant capitalist society while other queer people, especially those holding multiple marginalized identities, remain subjects of violent exclusion.

I no longer think that the shoes are the endpoint of my coming into queerness. My usage of them remains in tension with their brand identity of LGBT acceptance, their apolitical respectability. I’d like to believe the wearer shapes the boot as much as the manufacturer, and the boot in turn shapes the person. I chose to be trans once I realized that womanhood was an ill-fitting suit and modified myself with Dr. Martens— the Butlerian notion of gender as negotiated and constructed through repeated action. Dr. Martens have allowed for my self-exploration and self-realization, shaping not just my outward presentation but my concept of self. My queer masculinity is not innate but continually realized and affirmed.

Everyone uses their clothing to construct their own gender, and I’ve long been using Dr. Martens to construct mine. The repeat lacing of my boots, the way the boots have shaped to my feet and my feet to the boots, is an uncanny parallel to my coming into masculinity. I’ve long absorbed various images of what masculinity does, can, or could look like, but the act of embodying that masculinity in myself is always a process of reshaping, of taking stiff leather gender roles and softening them around my body, lacing them tight so they don’t fall off. +++ I’m a junior now, and the shoes have been retired into work boots. The leather is soft and folded in on itself, the traction nearly gone. The toes are speckled with paint and wood stain, traces of theater sets built over the last two years. Still, putting on my boots is a prayer.

I do not think, but do, letting the motion begin my day as I pull the worn sides tight. The wrinkles are permanent and shaped around my foot. The leather has caved in on itself around my ankles as I pull it in to fit, and the tongue cannot be unwrinkled. The sole has worn smooth on the ball of the foot. Reaching into the inside of the shoe, my fingers brush over the craters left by my toes, the depression of the ball, and the ridges in between. By now, the wear pattern reinforces my poor walking habits, and I have to consciously work to roll my foot correctly; the boot yearns to push my foot back into high school.

Here’s where my boot and I disagree—I don’t want to go back to high school. The end of sophomore year was when I came out for good, cut my long hair off, and started making people listen when I told them I wasn’t a girl, not anymore. It was not just the Docs—despite how important they were (and still are) to me. But Docs stand out, especially Docs with tree-men and flutebirds and sinners all in Hell. Docs made my steps sure and my stride wide. I may not have passed as a man yet, but at least I had an awesome pair of boots.

But rhythms can be appropriated, crystallized, made into marketable identities. The Dr. Martens brand FINCH COLLINS ’21 has his Docs-clad feet up on the has promoted their connection to the LGBT commu- radiator in the Rock. nity through more openly in the last few years, culminating in the 2017 release of a collection of rainbow boots with proceeds going to the Trevor Project. Their advertising video "#worndifferent" presents images of rebellion and subculture, without specificity or radical politics. This is directed at the LGBT community, not the queer community—rainbow capitalism, not liberation. #worndifferent presents the Dr. Martens shoes as enabling a generic resistance to cultural norms but remains acceptably revolutionary.

The brand’s timely acknowledgment of queer people's usage of Dr. Martens matches this image of acceptable revolution. By 2017, same-sex marriage had been proclaimed a victory of equality under the state, of

FEATURES: OBJECT BIOS

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THERES NO PLACE LIKE THE FUTURE

BY Evan Lincoln ILLUSTRATION Eve O'Shea DESIGN Ella Rosenblatt

Dorothy’s ruby slippers and queer utopia

Every New Year’s Eve in Key West, the drag queen Sushi perches comfortably inside a glistening ruby high heel, so giant that it nearly engulfs her body. The massive wood-carved shoe is hollowed so that Sushi can rest her body against the insole, nestling her upper back into the curved edge where the foot’s heel would go, extending her feet into the toe-box. The exterior of the shoe is painted a deep red, sprinkled with silver glitter, competing for attention with the interior lining’s metallic gold. Every year, Sushi flaunts a glamorous new glamorous look, from lime green sequin-covered fishtail dresses to dark smoky eyes to wide-brimmed hot pink chin-strapped hats. Nevertheless, her iconic high heel seat remains essential to her performance, the same exact shoe returning each New Year’s Eve. As the shoe is suspended by two ropes several stories above the ground, Sushi showcases herself to the massive crowd below her, which is getting drunker by the minute, filled with white-bearded elderly gay men and young married straight couples hoping for a televised kiss. Central to Sushi’s campy excess is her invocation of the ruby slippers famously worn by Dorothy, played by quintessential gay icon Judy Garland, in the original film version of The Wizard of Oz. In the beginning of the film, Dorothy sings “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” in response to her Aunt Em’s urging for her to find a place where she “wouldn’t get into any trouble.” The lyrics of the song point to a faraway land in which Dorothy can experience freedom in totality. Within the film’s narrative, it is a foreshadowing of her subsequent arrival in Oz. But on a conceptual level, Dorothy’s yearnings are an ode to a possible future, a place of utopia.

The present can be pervasively toxic, especially for queer people that remain trapped within the rigid dullness of understandings of gender and sexuality.

For theorist José Muñoz, looking towards the future presents a solution to the restrictiveness of the present for queer people. Muñoz celebrates the realm of the future as a mode to anticipate a liberated world; in this conception, queerness becomes an ideal to strive towards, a pathway to freedom, or as he puts it, a ‘horizon.’ In simpler terms, Muñoz’s theories establish a queer politics that allow us to look forward to a future of widespread LGBTQ+ freedom. Whereas utopias are often dismissed as naïve pipe dreams, a future-focused queer politics reclaims utopia as a space to imagine the possibilities of liberation for queer people.

Back in her Kansas farm, alongside bales of hay and farming equipment, Dorothy sings of a place where “dreams that you dare to dream really do come true” and “troubles melt like lemon drops.” Her lyrics epitomize an optimistic longing for a utopic world, and in this way, a queer one. Notably, Dorothy does not yet have the ruby slippers; they exist in the hopeful future she imagines. +++ Soon after Dorothy completes her wishful ballad, a ravaging twister approaches the farm. Dorothy runs back inside, lying in bed and falling asleep as the arriving tornado lifts away her house, transporting it to the “somewhere over the rainbow.” The film dramatically shifts from the bleak sepia-toned Kansas to the vibrant technicolor world of Oz, and an awakened Dorothy steps outside, wide-eyed. Her house falls directly on the Wicked Witch of the East, killing the witch and leaving her ruby slipper-adorned feet

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FEATURES: OBJECT BIOS

hanging out. In response, the now-freed citizens of Munchkinland, along with Glinda the Good Witch of the North, perform an extravagant celebration of gratitude. As the Wicked Witch of the West arrives, attempting to recover the slippers, Glinda magically transports them to Dorothy’s feet. The technicolor dramatizes the slippers—doused in deep red sequins, the shoes glisten in the movie lights, strikingly contrasting Dorothy’s run-of-the-mill countryside garments. Dorothy has reclaimed the sparkling shoes from a figure of power, re-contextualizing a oncewicked object into a glamorous accessory. Importantly, The Wicked Witch of the West covets the slippers for their magical abilities. But when she tries to obtain what were previously her sister’s slippers, she gets shocked when she attempts to even touch them. The power of shocking evil asserts a vision of a magic that is politically characterized—the slippers can be thought of as untouchable by normalizing forces of power. Just as the rule of the Wicked Witch forced the Munchkins into hiding, leaving them with no choice but to conceal their colorfully eccentric culture, queer people are often forced to assimilate into mainstream culture. The slippers’ reclamation as a tool to repel wicked normativity presents a queerness that cannot be touched by heteronormativity. This may be an ultimate queer utopic dream: a queerness that thrives and cannot be undone, where expressions of gender, nonnormative sex, and queer cultural forms exist freely and invulnerably. In this world, homophobia and transphobia get immediately zapped in their path.

Nonetheless, the shoes’ most notable function is their ability to return Dorothy to Kansas. Not to be forgotten—Dorothy’s entire journey in Oz is driven by her desire to return home. In the end, she gets her wish: Glinda reveals that if Dorothy closes her eyes and clicks her heels three times, all while repeating “there is no place like home,” she will be transported back. Dorothy does so, though it is bittersweet, as she must say goodbye to her newly-formed friendships.

When she arrives in Kansas, she awakes abruptly, as to signal that the entire experience was a dream. Notably, Dorothy’s slippers possess the power to send anyone to where they feel the most at home. This would be an invaluable tool for queer people—their given homes are often abusive or unaccepting, forcing them to find different ones and negotiate new structures of kinship.

Thus, the slippers allow for a too often unreachable sense of belonging, serving as the medium between the present and a queer utopic future of newfound family.

However, this sense of belonging often transcends families and interpersonal relationships—the new cultures that queer people construct offer artistic and aesthetic dimensions of belonging. Heteronormative culture was not made for queer people, failing to imagine the alternative forms of romance, kinship, gender expressions, and sex that characterize their lives; in turn, queer people create their own. In her journey throughout Oz, Dorothy is met with an entirely new world, where she must construct new ways of living and relating to others in order to exist amongst its oddities. Her ruby slippers are central to the strange utopia of Oz, and her journey’s success depends on the learned navigation of their abilities.

They are noticeably flamboyant, sequin-covered, and constantly shimmering—even possessing magical powers. These qualities mark the shoes as a camp object, especially when paired with cultural critic

Susan Sontag’s comment that “Camp is the attempt to do something extraordinary. But extraordinary in the sense, often, of being special, glamorous.” The shoes achieve camp through contrast—their gleaming red deviates from Dorothy’s quotidian nature, and they demand attention within every setting throughout the film, establishing their “spirit of extravagance,” which Sontag calls “the hallmark of camp.” Camp has been historically significant for queer people, serving as an aesthetic language within art and culture—from the New York City ball scene to John Waters films—created for and only legible to other queer people. In this way, camp’s collective construction allows for a unifying function: camp becomes a new home for the aesthetically-attuned queer. As the ruby slippers transport to utopia, they do so with a sparkling wink. +++ In the moments before midnight, Sushi’s high heel drops into the crowd beneath her, which counts down each successive second. As the clock strikes midnight, Sushi screams “Happy New Year!” and pops a bottle of champagne while confetti canons douse her in a rainbow snowfall. As she steps out of the slipper onto a stage, she is met with a celebratory audience, kissing and hugging one another, all excitedly anticipating the future year. Sushi’s performance allows for a queer world to be made, mobilizing the colossal ruby slippers into a futuric gesture of queer joy.

EVAN LINCOLN B’21 is actually a good friend of Dorothy’s.

22 NOV 2019

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

EPHEMERA

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THE LIST Fri 11.22

Sat 11.23

New Work by Tom Deininger with SUSS POP (Emporium of Popular Culture); 219 W Park St. 7-11PM

Andre Perry with Lucas Mann Twenty Stories; 107 Ives St. 7-8:30PM

I can’t find a photo of Tom Deininger anywhere but I feel like he’d be hot? He’s like an artist who collects trash and collages it to make sculptures? Anyway, he’ll be showing his new work and a self-proclaimed “ambient country band” of old white geezers called SUSS will be performing on the side. In a recent interview, Deininger said: “It's a love-hate relationship with the materials themselves. I'm inspired by them, and I'm kind of repulsed by them in a certain capacity.”

Okay, so confirmed hot.

Sun 11.24 Made on Honor Market It’s that time of year when “makers markets” start popping up all over the place. This one differentiates itself, though, by being sponsored by Gansett.

Vendors will include all the big names (What Cheer? Records & Vintage, New Harvest Coffee Roasters, Symposium Books) among other smaller, some might say “up and coming” names. Get sloshed at the mahket!

Mon 11.25 Girls Night Out Fete Music Hall; 103 Dike St. 8-10:30PM ATTN: BUFF MEN COMING TO PVD. Some of them have chest tattoos, others have medallion necklaces, but they all share one unmistakeable trait: totally and completely cut abs!

Thurs 11.28 November is Native American Heritage Month. Save yourself the embarrassment and vulgarity of celebrating th*nksg*ving in any way and instead donate to organizations led by, and for, indigenous communities. Some of the ones you should check out are: Honor the Earth, Alaska Rising Tide, Native Hope, Indigenous Environmental Network, Indigenous Peoples Power Project, and Native Womens Wilderness.

There are many more incredible coalitions out there, so do your research and donate generously. I promise you your mom’s turkey is disgusting and anyway.

Andre Perry is an incredible new essayist who’ll be reading from his new book Some of Us Are Very Hungry Now. His essays travel from Washington DC to Iowa City to Hong Kong, ruminating on music, love, racism, alcohol, and the pressures to write and create consistently.

Perry will be in conversation with Lucas Mann, who published a book called Captive Audience: On Love and Reality Television.

A Q&A and book signing will follow, so come on through!

Modern Sounds Presents Tea in Sahara; 69 Governor St. 8-11PM If quietly rotting in Tea in Sahara is already a part of your routine, allow me to add a lil bonus: on the last Sunday of each month, T in S hosts an original and improvised music series featuring underground acts. This Saturday, a band called astronomy etc. will be playing. I simply do not know what kind of music they play, but there WILL be music. And it WILL be modern.

Tues 11.26 Tuesday Night Trivia Ogie’s Trailer Park 8-11PM A few Indy staffers, past and present, made a good showing at Ogie’s last week.

We were the only team to know what object was stolen from Winston Churchill’s birthplace in September. See the bottom of this page for the answer, or go to this week’s session for a stumper of your own. Winner gets tots.