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

Art Director Claire Schlaikjer Business Somerset Gall Emily Teng Web Ashley Kim Social Media Ben Bienstock Muskaan Garg Pia Mileaf-Patel

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 genetic mutation that allowed for adult humans to are a few things to unpack here. Even though boomers desolate. A few radioactive tumbleweeds are the only digest milk emerged 7,500 years ago. Yet even after span a wide age range on a shifting political spectrum, sign of movement. But suddenly, there is a sound. thousands of years of evolutionary development, two young people have an image that boomers represent a The raucous battle cry of one million ants. They are thirds of the world’s population is still rendered help- certain race, power, and positionality. When Swarbrick no ordinary ants, though. Oh no, these are cannibal less by ice cream. At this rate, there isn’t enough oat speaks truth to power, she is also speaking truth to ants, forced into the worst of circumstances by their milk in the world to save us. An article in Scientific those who have obstructed or slowed action due to poisoned environment. They come charging out of the American states that researchers believe climate their privilege and ability to ignore it. The conflation bunker, ready to take over the rest of the world. (That is change is responsible for approximately 150,000 of baby boomers and white men is arguably part of the until the Ant Man himself, played by Paul Rudd, stops deaths each year around the world each year, and fuel that set off the phrase “OK, boomer.” them.) And the craziest part is that only some of this they fear that the number will not decrease, but rather In a Guardian piece written about the one-liner, scene is fictional. double by 2030. Swarbrick elaborated, “My ‘OK boomer’ comment It was recently reported that about one million These cannibal ants provide further evidence that in parliament was off-the-cuff, albeit symbolic of the cannibal ants escaped from an abandoned, Soviet animals and nature will likely continue to survive and collective exhaustion of multiple generations set to nuclear bunker. A group of Polish scientists came thrive long after the human race has wiped itself out. inherit ever-amplifying problems in an ever-diminacross the colony in 2013 when they were studying While Paul Rudd, or surely Leonardo DiCaprio, can ishing window of time.” Expanding on the association a group of bats inhabiting the same space. The ants still save us from this fate, they had better act quickly. of “OK, boomer” with white men, Swarbrick clarifies appeared to have become trapped in the bunker when Until then, though, the Indy is bracing itself for actual it is a frame of mind, rather than a literal generational they fell from an original nest through a ventilation flying pigs, elephants with super speed, and some sort divide, that characterizes this frustration. pipe and could not climb back out. The colony was of mutant egg-laying, aquatic, beaver-duck hybrid. Boomers should perhaps take a look at Jay Inslee, composed of only worker ants, making it impossible Actually, it turns out that last one really exists. the governor of Washington and the first Democratic for them to reproduce, since only a Queen ant can presidential candidate to release a climate plan before lay eggs. Despite this, the size of the colony grew not —GB dropping out of the race. In a rallying call to fellow because of reproduction, but due to the number of ants boomers, Inslee says, “I’m a Boomer and it’s time for that continued to fall into the bunker. The ants created our generation to do our part to defeat climate change. a social structure and way to survive despite having no BABY OF THE HOUSE ADDRESSES OK, Boomers?” For Inslee to use this phrase as a light, heat, or food source, or so they thought. BOOMERS white man underscores that this supposedly generaUpon further investigation, scientists found that tional frustration masks deeply-seated ideological the ants had been surviving by consuming the corpses In a speech supporting New Zealand’s “Zero and class concerns. Depending on people’s positionof dead companions. In 2016, the scientists, who clearly Carbon” bill on the floor of Parliament on November ality, the devastation of the climate crisis will impact have a death wish, created a path for the ants to escape. 5, 25-year-old New Zealand lawmaker (and “Baby people differently. As a boomer that identifies with the When they returned a year later, the bunker was of the House”) Chlöe Swarbrick added: “In the supposed insult, Inslee reclaims it, and in a clever turn almost completely empty, which begs the terrifying year 2050, I will be 56 years old. Yet, right now, the of phrase, Inslee poses a larger question also echoing question: where did they go? While these cannibal ants average age of this 52nd parliament is 49 years old.” the current zeitgeist: are unlikely to threaten any picnic or human, the very No sooner had she said this than a member of parliaBoomers, will you join us? idea is still absolutely horrifying. What happens when ment for the National Party heckled her, and, without there aren’t any more ants for them to eat? Is this how missing a beat, Swarbrick shot back, “OK, boomer,” —DK the ants will finally take revenge on humans for step- and marched straight through the rest of her speech. ping on them for centuries? As the old nursery rhyme Swarbrick’s throwaway line became a two-word comegoes, the cannibal ants go marching one by one hurrah, back that rocked the internet, but was picked up by hurrah... absolute silence in Parliament. Other than inspiring the Independent’s nightEven though the captions on Parliament TV tranmares for the foreseeable future, the story of these scribed Swarbrick’s comment as “Ok, Berma,” the worker ants points to nature’s incredible resilience. internet picked up this delectable quip and it went viral. Ants have been known to build nests in other inhos- Not only was it a well-timed remark, but a certain echo pitable locations, but the bunker proves particularly of the current zeitgeist reverberated in this sassy politdangerous given its lack of resources. When faced with ical comeback. Invoking the intolerance and exhausthe seemingly unlivable circumstances that the man tion of her millennial generation towards the previous made bunker created, the ants were able to adapt and one, Swarbrick’s quick and authoritative intonation create systems that resembled their normal behav- delivers a piercingly good burn. “OK, boomer” was not iors of assuming tasks and finding a food source, no delivered bombastically; Swarbrick acknowledged the matter how extreme the measures were. For contrast, lack of millenial representation and promptly moved this Indy writer’s family once moved because the vibes on, wasting no time and speaking with urgency. More weren’t right. than any other movement, the climate movement has These wood ants represent only one of many exam- an existentially looming timeline, and the longer we ples of animals adapting and surviving in harmful situ- wait, the harder problems become to solve. Swarbrick ations created by humans. With the growing threat of is calling out the fact that her millennial generation climate change, many animals have begun evolving will disproportionately be saddled with the catastroto better survive under these circumstances. For phes of climate change. example, an article in Smithsonian Magazine mentions Lucky for us, Swarbrick adds a culturally poignant the increase of brown as opposed to grey tawny owls breath of fresh air into the dead space of parliamenin Finland. The melting of snow in the country since tary chambers, critiquing the boomers who have the 1970s has made it increasingly advantageous for allowed this existential crisis to go unaddressed. A the brown tawny owls to camouflage, and the animals cheeky meme that first made its rounds on TikTok, have adapted over the course of just a few decades. “OK, boomer” was a young person's deadpan response BY Gabby Bianco & Dana Kurniawan In comparison, humans are evolving staggeringly to an older white man chiding “today’s young people” ILLUSTRATION Eliza Macneal & Charlotte Silverman slowly. For example, a story in NPR notes that the first for not realizing their “utopia” is not “real life.” There DESIGN Ella Rosenblatt

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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 President Paxson cited Brown’s historical ties to the cannot be overstated. Buried in the report, in a section public schools that fail repeatedly?” In an interview transatlantic slave trade, including the Brown family’s entitled “Academic Outcomes,” financial constraints with the College Hill Independent, Marco McWilliams direct involvement, as grounding for Brown’s respon- are listed as one of many factors hindering student was insistent. A former organizer for Direct Action sibility to the city’s public schools, writing that “Brown success: “Almost everyone [on the school board] said for Rights and Equality, graduate student at Brown has a longstanding commitment to K-12 education, as that money is a problem, or even that it is the number University, and program coordinator at Brown’s noted in the 2007 Report of the Steering Committee one problem.” Swearer Center, he noted that, “someone benefits on Slavery and Justice.” This report, commissioned to According to Tom Sgouros, tax policy expert and from that. This is not an accident.” investigate the University’s historical relationship to former advisor to the Rhode Island general treasurer, Scattered across the Jewelry District, College the transatlantic slave trade and provide recommen- Providence is being financially squeezed by both the Hill, and Downtown, the plethora of property owned dations on how best to address this legacy, is unequiv- state legislature and the city’s small property tax base. by Brown University is valued at $1.1 billion. Despite ocal about the centrality of education to the project In the context of this fiscal strain, Brown’s presence an endowment of $3.8 billion, the University does not of reparations. “If a single theme runs through this is often justified as an important economic driver. In pay federal, state, or local taxes on the vast majority of report,” the document reads, “it is education. This an interview with the Independent, however, Sgouros its real-estate holdings. Meanwhile, the Providence focus reflects not only Brown’s nature as an educa- noted that while Brown generates income and sales Public School District is in the midst of a financial tional institution but also the nature of slavery.” The that are both subject to state taxes, this money does crisis, as revealed by a devastating report released by report describes both how, in many states, it was once not go to Providence. “Brown is generating a tremenresearchers at Johns Hopkins University this past June. a criminal offense to teach free and enslaved Black dous amount of economic activity,” Sgouros emphaFollowing the report, university president Christina people to read and how many Americans during the sized, “but the city doesn’t actually benefit from it. Paxson avowed the University’s ongoing commit- age of abolition “recognized education as essential The city could benefit from it if the state would share, ment to Providence public schools, asserting that to repairing the legacy of slavery and equipping the but the state mostly treats Providence as a wayward the University would “develop plans to support local formerly enslaved for the full enjoyment of their rights child, not as a partner.” schools in Providence.” as free people.” In an interview with the Independent, former If Brown University paid taxes on all of its 193 Because of the central importance of education Mayor of Providence Angel Taveras highlighted the properties, the city of Providence would receive over within the history of American slavery—a history to ostensibly non-financial aspects of the educational $38 million annually, Inside Higher Ed reported in 2012. which Brown is intimately tied—the Report explicitly crisis. “I think we need to change the culture of educaInstead, Brown makes $6.7 million worth of voluntary recommends that Brown “use the resources of the tion,” he argued. “I think we need to change the payments to the city each year. The amount of these University to help ensure a quality education for the expectations we have for our kids. There may be some Payments In Lieu of Taxes (PILOT) has fluctuated children of Rhode Island.” Yet as both the University’s money associated with that, but I don’t think it’s simply historically, depending on the severity of the city’s extraordinary wealth, which is due in large part to a money problem.” As even a quickk perusal of the financial situation and the willingness of various its tax-exempt status, and the harsh reality of the Johns Hopkins report reveals, there are fundamental mayors to put political pressure on the University. Providence Public School District make damningly structural problems—failing welfare programs, a The question of property taxes is often framed by clear, Brown has fundamentally failed to honor this lack of language and racial representation of students university administrators as a foregone legal conclu- recommendation. “You got the slave monument on among their teachers, and profound segregation—that sion. Because private universities are classified as campus,” McWilliams emphasized to the Independent. impact the ability of local schools to educate their nonprofit organizations, they have historically found “I believe I can make the moral argument—the ethical students. For Brown University, however, the questhemselves exempt from paying taxes on their prop- argument—that Brown has a responsibility to be doing tion at hand is the underemphasized financial impact erty. Although this tax-exemption is longstanding, something given its history.” of accumulated wealth on the functioning of public there is growing concern over the legal underpinnings schools. “Money is a factor,” Boston Globe reporter of private university wealth, reflected in the New +++ Dan McGowan emphasized to the Independent. Haven community campaign to “Tax Yale”; the 2016 “There’s no question about that.” Sgouros similarly lawsuit filed against Princeton by Princeton residents As students, parents, and activists have known for cautioned against overlooking the importance of contesting its tax-exemption (settled out of court decades, Providence is a city in the midst of an ongoing financial relationships. “The fundamental issues, in for $18 million; and the city legislation, proposed in educational crisis. This past summer, however, its my opinion, almost always come down to the dollars Providence in 2017, to tax Brown’s non-mission essen- public school district garnered long-deserved and and cents,” Sgouros told the Independent. “You know tial properties. One model for this legislation like this widespread media attention after the release of the the rule: when people say, ‘It’s not about the money,’ is a 1977 New Hampshire Supreme Court ruling that devastating report on school quality in Providence. it’s about the money.” required Dartmouth College to pay taxes on its dormi- According to “We’re Not Gonna Take It,” published tories, dining halls, and kitchens. earlier this year by the Independent, the report docu+++ The most important questions in the debate over ments the alarming state of school facilities, widetaxation, however, are not legal ones. Instead, they are spread teacher absenteeism, physical violence, and Despite their tax-exempt status, nonprofits constimore fundamental questions about not only the ways a culture of low expectations. Within a district that tute an important source of city funding through in which university goals are prioritized over the needs is 87 percent economically disadvantaged, 64.6 their voluntary PILOT payments. These transacof students, but also the history of elite institutions in percent Hispanic, 16.6 percent Black, and nine percent tions, according to McGowan, are all “negotiated, relation to the cities in which they are located. “What white, these alarming descriptions provide context optional payments” and the result of hard-fought are our responsibilities to those local communities an extremely segregated educational environment political battles between university presidents and the as an institution?” asked Mathew Johnson, executive where, across grade levels and especially among various mayors of Providence. “There’s always this director of Brown’s Swearer Center, in an interview students of color, only 14 percent of students are profi- game of tug-of-war,” McGowan told the Independent, with the Independent. And what should working-class cient in English Language Arts and only 10 percent are “between the city and all the nonprofits, but Brown in cities with mostly residents of color like Providence proficient in math. particular.” demand of rich, mostly white institutions like Brown? Although underemphasized by the report—which This financial tug-of-war is currently dictated Implicit in McWilliams’ original question is the fact was funded the Partnership for Rhode Island, a by two legal documents: a 2003 Memorandum of that current educational inequities are tied to Brown’s nonprofit made up of the CEOs of major Rhode Island Understanding (MOU) and a 2012 Memorandum of historic relationship to the city of Providence. employers like Brown University—the centrality of the Agreement (MOA), signed during moments of fiscal In letter to parents and faculty this past August, city’s finances to the challenges of its public schools crisis, which establish a minimum floor of University

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contributions of about $3.5 million per year. overperformed similar schools in the district. relationships between the University and Providence Following the Great Recession, Providence was While Brown dedicates significant financial and perpetuating racial inequity cannot be reduced to on the brink of financial catastrophe. Yet Mayor human resources to the city of Providence, its prior- Brown lining its pockets. “If Brown invests a ton of Angel Taveras successfully struck a deal with Brown, ities are reflected in its fundraising successes—and money in the [Providence Public School District] and increasing yearly voluntary payments until 2023 failures. In 2017, Brown embarked on a three billion if, when those students graduate, they still can’t apply in return for giving the University ownership over dollar capital fundraising campaign BrownTogether. to go to school here, I’m gonna be curious about that,” several city streets and 250 parking spots, which Brown has since raised over two billion dollars in McWilliams said. “Because when we say elite instituthe University charges its faculty and staff to use. In under two years, generating funds for new facilities, tion, we don’t just mean money.” To illustrate his point, spite of their difficulties negotiating, the relationship renovations, and dozens of endowed professorships. McWilliams gestured in a sweeping arc around the between Brown and Providence, according to Taveras, In 2007, Brown promised to raise 10 million dollars conference room in the Swearer Center. “This room is “codependent. We need Brown and Brown needs for Providence public schools following recommen- is intended to do something,” he asserted, glancing at us.” Yet this analysis is not necessarily reflective of dations in the Slavery and Justice Report. Yet, as the the ornately gilded mirror on the wall behind him; at the ongoing conflict between city government and Boston Globe reports, the “Fund for the Education of the glittering chandelier above his head; at the large the Brown administration. As McGowan succinctly the Children of Providence” raised just one-fifth of its mahogany table at which he sat. “It’s intended to summarizes, “Every person that has ever run for professed 10 million dollar goal. In McGowan’s eyes, convey power.” mayor has fought with Brown.” “the value of the PR far outweighed the money that was For some, this elitism prevents the University In part, the University is reluctant to pay more actually raised. That’s a shame.” from meaningfully addressing the city’s challenges. because of the lingering perception of corruption in Brown frequently gestures to these services as “You would think that a center for education would city government. “There’s a hesitation to write a blank evidence of its committed, reciprocal relationship to be actively pushing and working super hard to end check to the city of Providence,” McGowan explained the city. “Brown, and all the other nonprofits, have poverty,” Dicupe told the Independent. “But that’s not to the Independent. “What nonprofit leaders, Brown talented lobbyists and a legitimate case to make about what we see from universities like Brown. These instiincluded, think of Providence government is that what would Providence be without Brown University,” tutions have forgotten what they’re there for. You’re it’s some combination of corrupt and inept.” Yet the McGowan told the Independent. “It would be a lot not there to make money, you’re there to educate. And frequent citation of corruption seems to impede both less without Brown. That’s always the Brown argu- you’re supposed to be the best of the best.” the state government and nonprofits from contrib- ment. We do a lot. We are helping in the schools.” As Because Brown is first and foremost an educational uting to meaningful conversations about their finan- evidenced by the multiplicity of tutoring programs institution, many see education—and the Providence cial responsibilities to the city. Additionally, according and grants, there is no doubt that Brown does provide Public School District specifically—as the most approto Sgouros, the gesture by majority-white institutions services to the city. The question, according to priate sphere within which Brown can make reparative toward corruption as a primary rationalization for McGowan, becomes: “Is it enough?” change. The Slavery and Justice Report, for example, denying funding to a city with predominantly resibelieves the University’s response “should reflect dents of color is grounded in racist funding priorities: +++ Brown’s specific nature as an educational institution.” “There’s this idea in the legislature that city councils Because Brown is best at learning and teaching, the are drunken sailors, and that we can’t trust them with “If you look at the history of our relationship with the report reads, education is the area “in which Brown anything. The issues of race are rarely far behind.” city, it goes all the way back to our founding,” Dahlberg can most appropriately and effectively make amends.” told the Independent. “There have always been issues McWilliams agrees: “Brown is a university. They issue +++ between Providence and Brown University.” As the college degrees. That’s what they do. They don’t build Report of the Brown University Steering Committee bridges and skyscrapers. They aren’t in landscaping. In lieu of property taxes, Providence receives both on Slavery and Justice makes evidently clear, Brown They do education.” voluntary payments and a variety of services from owes its wealth to American slavery: “There is no The demand that Brown pay property taxes presBrown University. According to a 2015 independent question that many of the assets that underwrote the ents a similar financial challenge to the demands from review of nonprofit payments to the city of Providence University’s creation and growth derived, directly student organizers that Brown divest from companies by the Rhode Island Internal Auditor, Brown owns 193 and indirectly, from slavery and the slave trade.” This perpetrating human rights abuses in Palestine and properties in the city of Providence. Of these proper- history continues to shape its relationships, espe- that Brown refuse monetary gifts acquired through ties, 158 are classified as tax-exempt. cially since in the nineteenth century Providence profit from the sale of so-called “non-lethal” crowd Included in the tax-exempt properties—usually served a northern hub of the Atlantic slave trade. As control weapons. Honoring each demand would specified, in the case of universities, as buildings used McWilliams notes, “We live with these legacies today. require the University to reevaluate its current priorifor educational purposes—is the $2.24 million resi- Brown can’t escape its own history.” ties; it would require decentering endowment growth dence of the University president, currently occupied For McWilliams, this history, as well as the as the University’s governing ideology and prioritizing by Christina Paxson. If taxed like a normal residence, racial-economic structures it created, is reflected in the wellbeing of students—down the hill and across this property alone would generate over $40,000 per the world—as well as the importance of fulfilling year for the city. According to the National Education the University’s promises in light of its foundational “Honoring community demands Association, the median starting salary of a teacher in connection to American slavery. would require decentering Rhode Island for the 2017-18 school year was $41,689. Because of how private donors sustain elite Albert Dahlberg, assistant vice president for governuniversities, however, interrupting the movement of endowment growth as Brown's ment and community relations at Brown, told the capital into these institutions—as well as questioning governing ideology. It would Independent that the University paid $6.7 million in its accumulation—might very well mean changing require prioritizing the wellbeing voluntary payments to the city in the fiscal year (FY) what private universities look like and seek to do. of students—down the hill and 2017. This $6.7 million payment in FY 2017 can be For Johnson, one of the fundamental questions is broken down into four separate revenue columns: whether the issue of property taxes can “be solved in across the world—and fulfilling the commercial property taxes, properties bought by the context of a system that places cities and univerUniversity's promises in light of its Brown transitioning off of normal property taxes, sities in their financial reality.” Instead, he argued, connection to American slavery.” payments specified by the 2003 MOU and the 2012 “the question is really about a system that essentially MOA, and other payments. “There are a variety of ends up pitting the city and the University against reasons we make those payments,” Dahlberg said, each other in an artificially scarce resource envi“But it’s mostly to be a good neighbor.” ronment.” Within the context of growing national As Kinverly Dicupe, a former community orga- the way in which the failures of the Providence Public demand for government funded, tuition-free, public nizer for Fuerza Laboral, explained to the Independent, School District leave Black students behind. “Black higher education, it may also be time to question the however well-intentioned those payments may be, labor has always been positioned to fit in a particular necessity for private higher education. As McWilliams “none of that money is actually felt by the people who place in the capitalist marketplace: as a low-wage, argues, “We gotta make a space where everybody can live in Providence” because these contributions are perpetually exploitable group,” McWilliams empha- come at the table to eat.” Perhaps, he argues, we have relatively small compared to the city budget. sized, attributing the failing public education system to build a bigger table. Or perhaps we have to get rid The University also contributes to the public to the assumption that “students that come out of the of the table and have everyone sit on the floor. Either school district more directly. According to Paxson, “In schools aren’t expected to compete in the marketplace. way, the moral imperative is clear. “Everybody gotta recent years, Brown has spent more than $800,000 They’re not expected to come to Brown.” eat. If we believe in the Constitution, in these rights, in annually on direct support to Providence school chilThe culture of low expectations for students rings this democracy, everybody gotta eat. And if we can’t, I dren in the form of after-school programs, summer true for Dicupe as well. “Most of the people who go gotta call this thing a sham.” 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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TWO STORIES Tongues

From What I Can Remember

“Do you want to touch tongues?” Ella asked me. We went to the Cloisters—took the train up as far as it We sat underneath one of the fold-out plastic tables would go. I watched her point to different pieces of art, boasting boxes of frosted Dunkin Donuts, instant watched her hands more than what they were gesturing coffee and hot chocolate packets, and plastic cutlery. towards. Her wrists were so small I got distracted She had powdered sugar around her mouth and it thinking about fitting them perfectly inside binder was getting stuck in white clumps in her flavored rings—opening and closing a three-inch metal jaw Lipsmackers lip gloss. I had a pink-frosted plain donut around them again and again. She was like a cartoon with sprinkles in my hand, the standard, bland-but- character had figured out what a flesh wrist looked like pretty choice of a nine-year-old who’d snuck out of her and from there had built a body. She was anything but. Sunday School class to “use the bathroom.” We were She was magnetism, the things in your room that you on our second round of donuts for the morning. never open. Ella and I could get away with ditching catechism every other week at most, and preferred swinging on In fourth grade, there were three gardens in the front of the banister of the wheelchair-accessible ramp near the schoolyard: one for herbs, for vegetables, for fruits. the bathrooms. Our hands clamped around its blue We buried the two class fish one at a time, months chipping paint, leaving sticky, sweaty marks on the apart, in the herb garden. The first one among the cool metal as we treated it like a set of monkey bars. seeds, the second underneath the broad parsley leaves. I’d been able to hang from my knees since I was little, Our teacher procured two white stones for us to write letting my pink-frosted fingertips brush against the their names on and use as tombstones. What she had grimy linoleum floor. overlooked was the number of times she’d bribed us Saint Peter’s Church basement was the combina- with the honor of naming the fish, so one of them had tion of sterile and dirty that only a church basement at least four, the other six, names in contention for the could be. It looked like a hospital corridor and smelled spots on the stones. On my suggestion, we wrote down like a soup kitchen, with fluorescent beams tanning the dates of their deaths in silver sharpie instead. us paler, and consistent hair and lint balls in every corner along with mouse droppings and the occasional I woke up to a man sitting on the edge of my bed and lost earring, which Ella and I would collect when we taking my picture, but when I opened my eyes it was ditched class and hide inside one of the bibles that lived just some lightning. I let its fingers put me back to sleep. in a cabinet off to the side. I bit my donut. I didn’t want to touch tongues. In I have never known what to do with a sick relative (take fact, I wanted to touch tongues with Adam, the only the body, wrap it in canvas). My cousins who never boy in our level. Although I only saw him once a week, seem to grow any older held a funeral for their dog, I sometimes less if my family went upstate to visit my think. Or some sort of reptile. They wrote a speech in grandpa, I spent every second during Father John’s wobbly print, dropped a few all-encompassing tears homily staring at the back of his head. His family sat on the lined and torn paper, dug a hole under their tree two rows in front of us, on the other side of the aisle, with the toxic white flowers opening down like mouths, where I had a clear view of his dirty-blonde curls then washed the dirt out from under their nails. They brushing against his neck, and could see the shadow put the tank on the curb, so I guess it was a reptile after his lashes cast on his cheekbone. I looked forward to all. I appreciated this mature token of theirs. Either this all week, and even brushed my hair on Sundays, in they were giving up on ever getting a new lizard, or case he ever looked back. refusing to overwrite the old sacred spaces with new Although he was eleven, he was in the same cate- memories and creatures. I took the heat lamp with me chism class as Ella and me. It was a small, downtown after the dreaded affair, plugged it into an outlet by the Catholic Church, with few parents that made their foot of my bed and turned it on during the winter to children listen to the Lord’s word as lectured by volun- warm my feet. teer mothers who were passionate about Jesuit philosophy. So, we were all grouped together. After mass, A man in a wheelchair lived across the street from sitting in the basement classrooms all of our Sunday me. They were renovating the house next to his. Each School peers were trapped in, I’d stare across the table morning, he rolled himself down his ramp, and someat Adam’s mouth, trying to get a glance of the purple times I was there to see it. He made his way to the rubber bands on his braces. I wanted to ask him about lawn of the house next door, and sat there until dusk them. Why purple? What will your teeth look like when watching the construction men work. Occasionally it’s over? Sometimes, bits of donut (or if it was bagels they let him glue a pipe or hammer in a nail. 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 was stabbed in the shoulder by a man who was after I swallowed my bite of donut. The underside of the my purse. I told him I would give him everything. But table above our heads was dotted with chewing gum as I was handing it over, my purse with its rosettes and metal bars crisscrossed, allowing it to be folded up lining the lips, he jumped forward. He was so gentle, and stacked in a corner after we all went home, or out though, that the three inch blade only made it a quarter to Sunday brunch with our families. “Ok,” I said. inch in. The emergency room doctor wasn’t even sure “Ok?” repeated Ella. “Should we touch tongues?” he wanted to use stitches. It was less of an event, I “Yeah,” I said, curious. She put her half-eaten told him as he grudgingly placed a few threads in me, donut down on the bare floor and I was disgusted, but than the time I’d broken a glass in my hand. I’d been ignored it as we scooted toward each other. I held my making iced tea and the temperature change made the donut out to the side, protecting it from contamination, glass shatter in on itself. and followed Ella’s lead as she extended her tongue. With our eyes open, our tongues met for a second. I’d -EK 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.

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

-PMP

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

LITERARY

06

ACTIVISM

On the afternoon of Saturday, October 26, a group have made their way to Providence. of educators, students, activists, and community During the gathering, Father Ray constantly members gathered in a basement room of the Blessed emphasized that these oral histories could both teach Sacrament Church, a towering red brick structure and equip Providence's younger generation in their situated between the Mt. Pleasant and Olneyville present struggle for social justice. Brad Duncan, an neighborhoods. The occasion was celebratory, and archivist who runs the extensive radical_archive, an the gathering honored two lifelong community orga- Instagram account documenting printed materials of nizers: Father Raymond Tetrault, a pastor working the radical Left, echoed Father Ray’s sentiments and with Providence’s Latinx parishes for over 50 years, emphasized their urgency: “There are so many people and Juan Garcia, who had been organizing the immi- in their twenties and teens who are thinking about grant population for around 25. socialism, protest politics, white supremacy right now,” The event was put together by the George Wiley he said. “There is such a hunger for information to Center (GWC), a community organization fighting organize and know what people fought for in the ’60s for utility rights, and its Popular Praxis arm, which and ’70s.” archives the stories of people like Juan and Father Ray. In both a local and national climate of public Longtime parishioners spoke about their appreciation charge, cuts to immigrant welfare, and constant for Father Ray’s and Juan’s work fighting for immigrant threats of ICE raids, it almost seems antithetical to rights, community organizing, and economic justice. slow down and parse through archives, to engage in The GWC played documentary footage of, in quiet reflection. However, the wisdom of local activists part, Juan Garcia's life: Onscreen, Garcia talked about like Father Ray and Juan, as well as others throughout growing up in Guatemala City in the 1950s, and as an Providence, proves to be necessary because it helps inconspicuous fourth grader, helping run messages for us reckon with not only how much it takes to enact university students demonstrating against the United social change, but also that it is a tenable, worthwhile Fruit Company. He came to Texas in 1977, and even- enterprise. tually 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 “How do we get ahead of the funeral and create a him to quit his day job as a welder and become a full- culture of resistance and solidarity?” Camilo Viveiros time activist and social worker. Garcia's life story not asked the College Hill Independent, explaining why only details an individual’s dedication to community the GWC decided to devote time and resources to engagement, but also paints a larger picture of resil- recording the stories of Garcia and Tetrault. In 35 ience exemplified by Latin American immigrants who years of activism, Viveiros had seen enough elegiac

07

METRO

22 NOV 2019

BY Kion You DESIGN Katherine Sang & Kathryn Li

Creating a collective memory of radicalism in Providence praise and reflection after activists had passed away. Annette Gagne, the only time Gagne, who passed away it to benefit the lives of the community members He wanted to encourage mutual reflection between last year, shared her story of activism to be recorded. through “popular education,” in which knowledge is generations and strengthen the “movement muscles” Gagne, who worked as a postal worker and joined shared among the community. needed in the intergenerational fight for social justice. the Socialist Workers Party in the ’70s, was a crucial Historian Howard Zinn, in his “Secrecy, Archives, “There isn't a network of grassroots organiza- member of Providence's first Pride March in 1976. and the Public Interest,” writes “that the existence, tions that have the resources to preserve stories,” said Viveiros also praised Pauline Perkins-Moye, who preservation, and availability of archives, documents, Viveiros, and as a result, the GWC launched their own is currently the director of Resident Services for the records in our society are very much determined by the efforts to establish a “horizontal model” of commu- Newport Housing Authority, and a longtime advo- distribution of wealth and power.” Should institutions nity archiving in Providence around five years ago, in cate for Newport food security. Without archiving and do anything at all, if their subsuming of community which stories are recorded by community members, talking about the work of Perkins-Moye, who offers archives constitutes a form of Marxist class dissolution, for community members. For example, the idea to a counterpoint to the popular portrait of Newport as a superstructure absorbing the radical base into itself archive the lives of Father Ray and Juan arose organi- home to only jazz, mansions, and Gilded Age affluence, and sanitizing it? cally from Viveiros’s past organizing with the two. The Perkins-Moye’s activism—her lawsuits against public Yet, there have always been radical archival efforts GWC then consulted them to determine what they housing discrimination and her advocacy for food within institutions, such as the University of California wanted to speak on, as well as how they would engage stamp programs—would be much more obscured. And Berkeley’s Emma Goldman Papers Project, after their stories with the context of the Olneyville commu- contemporary movements like the local Black Lives the anarchist political activist Emma Goldman, and nity. Today, the GWC is working on around a dozen Matter movement, Viveiros explains, could be better Duncan states that university libraries have recently oral histories of activists around Providence. contextualized within the lineage of activism of Black been creating special collections to include more Communities have been building “horizontal,” activism in Rhode Island and people like Perkins-Moye. radical materials. Nevertheless, “They remain institucollective memories since the beginning of time, but The documentary of Juan Garcia also offered tions that do not share the politics of radical activists," with the dizzying pace and proliferation of contempo- insights into not just about activists across genera- Duncan said. “None of them have shown a long term rary social movements, especially on social media plat- tions, but also across nationalities, specifically around commitment to it.” forms, archiving efforts must not only take advantage anti-colonial and Third World liberation. Duncan of new recording technologies, but also slow down the continually emphasized the importance of interna+++ pace of online information flow by tapping into histor- tional solidarity, and said, “one of the biggest throughical precedents. Brad Duncan, with his 2,000 photos lines in the archive is the way in which class struggle Putting aside the role of institutions, both Duncan and and 6,500 Instagram followers, can be seen as retrofit- and national liberation bled together.” Because this Viveiros hope to use their archives to empower newer ting the endlessness of social media into a new, online is not the way that social movements are taught in activists. Viveiros’ long-term vision for the GWC's horizontal model of archiving. Moreover, Duncan public education, Duncan said, the work of the archive storytelling project is expanding into working class has also created public-facing projects in community becomes that much more critical in providing counter- neighborhoods throughout Providence to give young centers, bookstores, and art spaces that “bring new narratives and points of comparison, and Garcia’s life people the tools and the resources to interview the life to the material.” His ultimate goal is to resusci- thus offers crucial teaching points. activists around them. He hopes these developments tate and resituate the radicalness of the 1960s into the will help local students glean what it takes to successcontemporary landscape of activism, and has created +++ fully agitate for social change. an egalitarian community that can now access these This is why recording the lives of organizers previously unavailable forms of knowledge. The greatest hindrance to the GWC’s archiving efforts like Juan Garcia is so important. Garcia, in his oral The term “radical archives,” both as the username is a lack of manpower and funding, as organizations history, continually pointed back to watershed of Duncan's Instagram account and as an academic like the GWC have more urgent services to provide, years in Providence's own history of activism: 1986, field, seems ironic, given that the basic job of an such as helping low income families maintain access when the federal government granted amnesty to archive is to preserve, and “radicalism” connotes a to indoor heating throughout the winter. Presumably, undocumented immigrants; 2000, when they did it sense of drastic or violent change. But “radical,” in its the arduous task of archiving could be alleviated again; 2006, when Garcia helped get 30,000 allies Latin roots, also means fundamental, and thus encom- by Providence’s wealthy, prestigious institutions marching on the streets; 2008, when he mobilized the passes a sense of fixedness and singular devotion in like Brown and RISD, which are uniquely slated to Providence immigrant community against then-Govaddition to one of forceful action. Duncan’s steadfast build archival knowledge with their extensive library ernor Don Carcieri’s anti-immigrant executive order; commitment to displaying revolutionary material, systems. Brown University’s special collections alone today, when he is still advocating for driver's licenses and the GWC’s capturing of community memories contains 250 discrete collections of archival material. for undocumented immigrants. Proper archival through oral history, can thus be seen as radical in this Within the university, the question of institutional work thus can help encourage, sustain, and historisense of fixedness, and may even empower community involvement in local city needs is one constantly asked, cize today's social movements, such as the current members to fight against narratives that have falsely especially due to their tax exempt, nonprofit status. So sustained protests against the Wyatt Detention Center represented or erased them. what, if anything, are Providence’s universities to do in and its holding of ICE detainees. regards to radical archival practice? Garcia, while talking about the current, hard+++ Both Duncan and Viveiros are hesitant to employ, fought campaign to allow undocumented immigrants or recommend, institutions in aiding such work. to get driver's licenses, said, “If one day we accomViveiros pointed out to the Independent the Providence “Obviously we don’t expect institutions to push back plish getting the license for immigrants, it's because activists whose lifelong labor has been forgotten and against the interests that they serve,” Duncan said, in we fought for it, not because they gave it to us… It's erased by dominant discourse and whose lives the regards to the pushback universities have expressed because of us.” Archives, thus, concretize our recogGWC has been striving to archive. He praised Paul against radical student movements and demands. nition of the fact that our contemporary struggle is McNeil (about whom I could find absolutely nothing Viveiros said that the GWC welcomes interns and help one that reaches back, that activism has been alive, is online) saying that McNeil had been known as the from college students, specifically in doing this work currently alive, and will stay alive. “mayor of Thayer Street” and spent his life advocating around oral history, but states that “We specifically put for LGBTQ issues, founding a movement called “Pride our energy into folks outside the ivory tower.” This is in KION YOU B’20 wants you to get involved with the at Work.” part why Popular Praxis was founded, he said, to take George Wiley Center's archiving efforts! Viveiros also highlighted the GWC’s oral history of radical academic theory out of elite circles and utilize

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

METRO

08

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 the stomach-churning sensation I felt when forced to believe that suggesting mindfulness practice on an became indistinguishable from the ceiling, the disori- confront bias I didn’t know I possessed. organizational scale can undo centuries of institutionenting scene complete with exposed industrial bars In retrospect, I’m not sure what I expected. It was alized racism and the reconciliation of that history in and canary yellow paneling describing each installa- only natural that I had internalized the norms of that the modern day. Sugarcoating implicit bias comforts tion. There was no apparent organization to the exhibit, structure despite my conscious attempts to actively the beneficiaries—those who receive the pay raises housed in San Francisco’s Exploratorium from May reject it. That is the disheartening crux of implicit bias; and are in the place to give them—at the expense of to September of this year. Instead, the idiosyncratic though I am an individual, I exist within a larger struc- everyone else. By not challenging the unequal systems collection served as a cacophonous paean to “the self” ture, so I will always carry strains of that structure in which people are operating and attributing prejuand the forces that mold identity, both welcome and within me. dice solely to the individual, the problem of “implicit unwanted. bias” lends itself to superficial solutions. A short history of drag complimented a black However, recognition that compounded bias as +++ box projector that allowed guests to view themselves a result of cultural norms only serves to reinforce in outfits curated by artist Charlene Eldon, demon- Intentionally or not, we constantly stereotype the these structures, and creating art that challenges that strating the relationship between the inner conception world around us: noticing patterns, making gener- closed loop could act as a starting point for change. and outward projection of one’s self. As I peered at my alizations, drawing (unfair) conclusions. How one Angélica Dass’s “Humanæ” project housed at "Self, reflection behind a projection of a neon jumpsuit, I dresses, what language one speaks, what religion—if Made" aimed to stimulate conversation about race couldn’t help but imagine an alter-ego as a suburban any—one aligns themselves with are all interpretable through a collection of Pantone swatches based off of 80s villain. I hadn’t seriously considered what my own statements about the self can easily be distilled into skin tones and bust cut portraits of the subject. This checkered pants and blue t-shirt said about me, but as compact stereotypes that inform our perceptions of visual representation of the distilled ways we see each I stared at a version of myself someone else had fash- each other. I, like many others, have tried to condition other sparks conversation about racial profiling and ioned, I was acutely aware of the subjective nature of myself to ignore or deny the presence of these internal- colorism inflicted upon the individual. Dass stated existing in someone else’s view. ized judgements, believing it better to imagine that I that the purpose of her project is to prove that “race is a I held a burlap sack of identity-labeled bean could somehow exist outside of the societal constructs social construction,” drawing attention to the limited bags, weighing a stranger’s self-identification before of us and them. The purpose of the "Self, Made" exer- ways we see and think about each other within these spilling “female,” “Christian,” and “Spanish” on the cise—and of the original Implicit Association Test narrow structures, and asking the collective to break table. I thought about the person who unwittingly but (IAT)—is to acknowledge differing implicit associ- free of them. immediately came to mind, wondering if she was bilin- ations and explicit attitudes, and expose bias that gual, if she came with a family. I wanted to associate was not previously registered. The IAT measures the +++ her with other people and place her in a larger setting, strength of association between concepts, stereotypes, imagining a life for her that was beyond her control. In and positive/negative evaluations through categoriza- As a collection, "Self, Made" served to demonstrate participating, I was constructing an image of someone tion response time, much like the "Self, Made" activity. how the individual is inextricably intertwined with in my mind, and actively confronting where that image How quickly a respondent is able to connect the eval- others, and the impossibility of separating oneself came from. Was it a result of culture, how I had seen uative term “good” with different weights, religions, from the values of the society one lives in. From this those abstract labels commonly represented? Was races, sexualities, disabilities, and skin-tones is said perspective, any implicit bias harbored by the indieven imagining her inherently wrong? I wondered how to “scientifically measure prejudice” and has been vidual is a fault of miseducation, overt stereotyping, I would be viewed as I left behind my own collection utilized by Harvard’s Project Implicit since 1995. and repeated poor representation of others (and of titles for another to find. When pared down to a few Although the presence of implicit bias doesn’t oneself). As a facet of the larger fight against implicit words, could anyone construct a version of me that necessarily correlate with individual acts of discrim- bias—and the weighted systems it is tied to—"Self, remotely resembled how I saw myself? ination, even subconscious generalizations about a Made" suggests changing the media that perpetuates Wandering through the exhibit, I paused to look group can have dire consequences in the micro and stereotypes entirely. at work by Kehinde Wiley, Esmaa Mohamoud, and macroscales. If a company executive implicitly associThe exhibit housed a collection of graphic novels Melissa Cody, reading blurbs about their respective ates men with salary raises, they may be more likely to that described disabilities as superpowers, actively work and how the artists express their individual raise the pay of men who work under them. If enough changing representation and the traditional image of and collective identities through their art. As I exam- company executives act upon it, the median pay for what it means and looks like to be a hero. This installained the isolation of aspects of the self into historical, women in the United States as measured by the 2018 tion was completed by Chad Allen’s audio comic book familial, and educational influences, I was forced to US Census bureau will be 82% of median male pay. Unseen, described to be “written by a blind person, consider what makes me me. More pointedly, am I just Compounded by bias against women of color, the pay with a blind heroine, for blind (and sighted) audiences.” a product of the world around me? gap only increases for Black women, Native Hawaiian Although a collection of comic books alone cannot After watching a short film about the “hive mind,” or Pacific Islander women, Native American women, change an ableist culture, it does have the capacity to I sat at a table among a collection of activities tucked and Hispanic Women. In that light, implicit bias no encourage many to rethink heroism and strength. The away in the corner and read the bolded instructions longer becomes a game for me to play on a summer diversification of heroes on the big screen through to a seemingly simple two-player sorting game. Both afternoon in San Francisco, but rather a series of movies like Black Panther expand this audience and partners were given the same set of magnetic words to harmful internalized beliefs with grave consequences. actively combat the singular narrative of one role sort into a combination of two categories: male/female Once implicit bias is registered, the more pressing model, as stated in the display of T’Challa and Shuri’s and professional/domestic. One partner divided their question then becomes whether it is possible to “treat” costumes in "Self, Made." magnets into the traditional “working man” and it. Abstractly thinking about implicit bias can only do The existence of this art alone cannot fix or undo “homemaking woman,” while the other divided their so much; individual-based strategies are rendered society’s ills, but it is a start to understanding how we terms into the avant-garde “business woman” and ineffective in the face of biased (and worse—actively think about each other, and what causes us to think that “stay-at-home-male.” The task: sort terms ranging racist, classist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, way. "Self, Made" forced me to acknowledge that the from "Barbara" to "promotion" to "washing dishes" ableist) established systems that impose these beliefs boundary between the self and culture is not so clearly to "Jack" faster than the other person. As a proud and in the first place. Project Implicit recommends fighting defined—potentially the first step to actively undoing self-proclaimed feminist, I was undaunted by the chal- bias by actively suppressing, offering few suggestions my unwanted implicit associations. I have control over lenge and felt prepared to debunk gender stereotyping beyond exposure to different groups and volunteering what I create and consume, and am working to underby combining traditionally masculine names with at nursing homes to increase positive associations stand that art (though not always overtly) reflects socidomestic tasks. And yet, I found myself momentarily with the elderly (advice that is as useful as recom- etal values that I internalize for better or for worse. paralyzed as I let the words “salary raise” hover over mending collective classical conditioning.) Ohio State The self may be made, but I hope to be primary the table when faced with the decision between male University provides online modules that structure creator. and professional. Salary raises exist within the working conversation about implicit associations, outlining realm and yet, I (among others) unwittingly associ- factors that make an individual more susceptible to ANABELLE JOHNSTON B’23 wonders what you ated advancement with men. Although I understood possessing bias in a way that comforts the audience imagine her to be. that was the purpose of the exercise, I was stunned by without challenging the biased system itself. I don’t

05

ARTS

22 NOV 2019

09

X

22 NOV 2019

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

X

10

IN THE A silver spoon the size of a Great Dane immediately tools and projecting videos of how workers used them, harmful chemicals in the pond. Cleaners, solvents, confronts anyone exiting the elevator on the third floor the exhibit highlights the immense labor necessary to and heavy metals polluted the air, water, and soil of the RISD (Rhode Island School of Design) Museum. make even a simple object. Viewers are compelled to in the neighborhood. Local officials were quick to It's mounted upright next to a sign announcing the contrast the artisanship on display with the modern voice their worries. In 1905, city park commissioners title of the exhibit of which it is a part, Gorham Silver: standardized, mechanized production process and cautioned the Rhode Island General Assembly, “It is Designing Brilliance 1850-1970. Before table settings nostalgically mourn for a mythologized bygone era. essential to the health of the neighborhood that they became ubiquitous around 1700, pre-modern be not polluted by dumping or the crowding of buildEuropeans carried around their own spoons (forks ings on [Mashapaug’s] shores.” Despite such concerns, +++ were not popularized in Europe, outside of Italy, until Gorham continued to pollute until the ratification the 18th century). To distinguish themselves from But how much is there to be nostalgic for? In an of the Clean Water Act of 1972, which prohibited the serfs, the land-owning classes used silver spoons. The attempt to uncover the unsavory history of Gorham, dumping of industrial waste directly into waterways. spoon was not merely a functional object, but also a Providence artists Holly Ewald and Becci Davis orgaThe Gorham factory devastated wildlife and cultural marker indicating refined taste and aesthetics. nized a response exhibit, Unpolished Legacies, at UPP endangered locals. Al Campbell, interviewed for the Also on the wall of the RISD exhibit is a black-and- Arts. Self-serving class interests, environmental degra- Reservoir Triangle oral history project in 2011, lived white photograph of a baby resting inside the ladle of dation, and monuments to slavery and imperialism in the neighborhood for the first 25 years of his life. He the giant spoon. The idiom “born with a silver spoon in are some of the issues prominently featured. Running recalls, “We knew that Gorham Manufacturing was one’s mouth,” which refers to inherited wealth, takes from September 27 to October 8, the exhibit consisted putting some of the chemicals out [in the pond]. Word on grotesque proportions if one follows the (perhaps of public conversations, performances, and an art was you just don’t go swimming out there and you don’t unintentional) visual pun. The photo marks a natural gallery Downtown that complicated the romantic drink the water.” Whenever one of his friends acted evolution in the significance of the silver spoon: It history of Gorham as presented by the RISD Museum. strangely, they used to joke that it was because they moves beyond any pretense of functionality, now an The Museum itself supplements Designing Brilliance drank the Mashapaug Pond water. uninterrupted symbol of wealth and excess. Textron, an industrial conglomerate based in with an audio tour that addresses Gorham’s controversial socio-political effects, but without physical Providence, purchased Gorham in 1967. Soon after, +++ presence in the exhibit, the recorded conversations, volatile silver prices and declining demand for luxury despite their insightful commentary, are but footnotes silverware forced Gorham to shut down much of its The spoon and the photograph were both created by to the dominant narrative of the exhibited material. operation. By the 1990s, the Elmwood factory closed. the Gorham Manufacturing Company, the subject Unpolished Legacies makes the case that in glorifying While Gorham’s physical presence vanished, its toxic of Designing Brilliance. The exhibit, which runs from Gorham’s aesthetic and technical accomplishments, legacy remains. Despite awareness of environmental May 3 to December 1, showcases the work of Gorham, Designing Brilliance de-historicizes Gorham, removing dangers, the city of Providence opened the Dr. Jorge once the largest silver company in the world. Founded art from its essential context. Alvarez High School on the former Gorham site in 2006. in Providence in 1831, Gorham operated in the area for Decorative silver has a history of weaponizing Even with an air filtration system, students at Alvarez the next 150 years. Gorham’s history crucially inter- aesthetics for political ends—namely, in the service High, who are predominantly low-income students of sects with the history of the United States in the 19th of class interests. The beautiful pieces on display in color, continue to bear the brunt of Gorham’s mismanand 20th centuries. Its craftspeople sculpted some of Designing Brilliance fall neatly into this legacy by rein- agement. Land around the school is so contaminated the most iconic monuments of their time, including forcing class divisions. Like the silver spoons of feudal with heavy metals that athletes at Alvarez must bus to the statue of George Washington in the DC Capitol’s Europe, Gorham’s sterling silver products (sterling Mount Pleasant High School for practice. Rotunda and the Theodore Roosevelt that guards the silver is an alloy containing 92.5% silver by weight) Since ten thousand years before Alvarez High Museum of Natural History in New York. Meanwhile, allowed the wealthy to conspicuously project their or the Gorham factory were built, the Mashapaug Gorham’s ornate silverware sets, the company’s bread status. A digital illustration of a serving of nachos Nahaganset tribe have lived in the areas surrounding and butter, both reflected and informed the evolving superimposed onto an ornate silver dish, displayed the Mashapaug Pond. During King Philip’s War, from tastes of the country’s wealthy, continuing silver’s in Unpolished Legacies, makes viewers feel uneasy 1675 to 1676, the Mashapaug Nahaganset people were long affair with privilege and power. As a bellwether of because it defies expectations. Silver is fancy, while massacred and their population was decimated. For American culture, Gorham continues to incite admira- nachos are unrefined. The juxtaposition of the nachos centuries afterward, members of the tribe resided in tion and controversy centuries after its formation. and silver exposes the elitist posturing that enabled West Elmwood, one of the first racially integrated areas For Elizabeth Williams, the head curator of deco- Gorham’s rise. In this light, to eat off of what remains of the city—until ‘urban renewal’ came, the city bullrative arts at the RISD Museum, Gorham is deeply a monetary standard seems as obscene as Scrooge dozed the area, and communities of color, including personal. Not only did she write her PhD dissertation McDuck blowing his nose into a twenty-dollar bill. Indigenous people, were forced to leave, again. on Gorham, but some of Gorham silver’s artifacts are In an attempt to associate themselves with the Mashapaug Pond is a sacred space for the Mashapaug family heirlooms. Soon after her 2013 arrival at RISD, rich, and distance themselves from the working Nahaganset. The tribe continues to conduct ceremowhere the largest public collection of Gorham silver class, middle-class Americans also purchased silver. nies around the pond. Indigenous peoples have been at is housed, Ms. Williams began planning the Gorham Gorham did not become the world’s largest silver the vanguard of calling for the pond's protection. In an exhibit. The years of preparation are evident in the manufacturer by selling sterling silver, but by making act of public protest, the Mashapaug Nahaganset tribe exhibit’s stunning collection of Gorham’s most impres- silver plate. Silver plate is a pedestrian metal coated sued the state of Rhode Island, the city of Providence, sive work, brought together from museums and private with a fine layer of silver, which is much cheaper than and the city of Cranston in international court for envicollections across the country. The 816-piece Furber sterling silver. Gorham leveraged class division in ronmental racism based on mismanagement of the service, a tableware set commissioned for the wealthy order to produce its masterpieces. pond. Furber family, epitomizes Gorham’s artistic and The recent efforts of Indigenous people paraltechnical powers. For instance, the Furber epergne, leled work of local artists and community organizers +++ or decorative centerpiece, displays Columbia, the to clean up Mashapaug Pond. Over a decade ago, the personification of America, in a delicate silver gown. The wave of industrialization that propelled the State Council for the Arts commissioned Holley Ewald, She stands atop a globe and holds a gilded wreath. Western world out of feudalism and into the modern the same one who organized Unpolished Legacies, to Continuing the Neoclassical motif, a Greek Parthenon capitalist order has left irrevocable environmental design signs around the pond to prevent residents frieze wraps around the centerpiece’s base. The Furber damage, much of which is only now being reckoned from fishing. Ewald transformed the project into an service is just one of many pieces in the exhibit that with. In 1897 Gorham relocated from downtown exercise in community building by going into local highlight the beauty and detail of Gorham’s work. Providence, a few blocks from the RISD Museum, to schools and asking students to design their own Drawing from vast archives of photographs and Elmwood, a neighborhood on Providence’s south signage, provoking broader conversations on environledgers in Brown’s John Hay Library and RISD’s Fleet side. The sprawling new factory sat on the edge of mental protection. Inspired to expand the dialogue, Library, Designing Brilliance reconstructs the silver- Mashapaug Pond, the city’s largest natural body of Ewald founded the Urban Pond Procession (UPP), an smiths’ original techniques. Displaying silver-making water. For almost a century, Gorham disposed of annual parade to celebrate Mashapaug Pond featuring

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22 NOV 2019

BY Bilal Memon DESIGN Christie Zhong

MAKING

Examining the legacies of the Gorham Manufacturing Company

brass bands, life-size puppets, costumes, and plenty of artwork is not to vainly grandstand. No one can change during the Spanish-American War. The placard next signs. Alongside the increased community activism the past, she admits. Instead, she views her art as an to the trophy recalls an astounding instance of the and awareness, efforts were underway to clean the educational tool. She wants to provoke her audience general public’s collaboration in American colopond. Textron was left holding the bag, so to speak, for into asking: “What can we learn from this partic- nialism: At the behest of the New York Journal, readers Gorham’s negligence, and funded ground remediation ular situation with Gorham that can help us create sent 70,000 dimes to Gorham, which were then and dredging of the most contaminated areas of the bigger, better, strong community and culture moving melted down to make the trophy. Instead of offering a pond. Through combined corporate, governmental, forward?” critical perspective, the exhibit applauds the concerted and community partnership, Mashapaug Pond is The Confederate monuments are not the only effort, perpetuating a dangerous blind patriotism that slowly being restored. controversial statues produced by Gorham. Locally, dooms us to repeat our mistakes. Unpolished Legacies, unlike Designing Brilliance, the statue of Christopher Columbus in Columbus brings to the fore Gorham’s troubling environmental Square on Elmwood Avenue has elicited strong reac+++ impact. Particularly notable were a set of video projec- tions from the community. The monument is a bronze tions of paper made from cornstarch dissolving into cast of a sterling silver statue created by Gorham for At risk of sounding grandiose, the story of Gorham Mashapaug Pond. The papers contained quotations the 1892 World’s Columbian Exhibition in Chicago, an represents the best and worst of American industrifrom promotional material from Designing Brilliance, international celebration of the 400th anniversary of alism. There is no dispute that the objects produced by such as “Placing silver before the public.” In small print Columbus’ arrival in the ‘New World’. The statue was Gorham are wonders to behold, beautifully designed on the bottom were a list of chemicals dumped into the designed by none other than Auguste Bartholdi, the and expertly executed. Nor should one discount the pond. In Unpolished Legacies’ most explicit critique, sculptor of the Statue of Liberty. Since the fair, public hundreds of hours of love and attention that workers Designing Brilliance stood charged with complicity in opinion of Columbus has turned sour as more of the poured into their wares. Nevertheless, to ignore the whitewashing Gorham’s destructive history. American public, albeit much too late, has begun negative aspects of Gorham—elitism, pollution, monuto reckon with Columbus’ murderous legacy as a ments to oppression—is to be complicit in them. With +++ harbinger of European settler-colonialism and Native growing awareness of the United States’ often brutal American genocide. In 2010 the statue was vandal- history, art museums across the country must enter a Although corporations like Gorham often bill them- ized, covered in red paint to represent the bloodshed new minefield of questions: Is a purely aesthetic focus selves as morally neutral historical actors—providing a that followed Columbus’ wake. Since then, the statue careless? Is there an obligation to offer political context good for a cost, uninterested in politics and ideology— has been desecrated in four similar acts of vandalism— and commentary alongside the art? What, in the first throughout the 19th and 20th centuries Gorham the most recent occurred this past October on place, is the relationship between the ‘aesthetic’ and became highly implicated in debates on the legacies of Indigenous Peoples’ Day. This ritualized act of resis- ‘political’? I hesitate to offer solutions to any of these slavery and American imperialism. tance transforms the public’s relationship with the questions. I can only caution readers to be constantly On April 26, 2019, Georgia state governor Brian statue. Through repetition, the onlooker’s association vigilant for the Unpolished Legacies that hide all around Kemp signed into law a bill strengthening existing between Columbus and massacre grows, whether the us, demanding to be uncovered. protections for Confederate statues. The law prevents statue is currently covered in red paint or not. local communities from removing monuments at their Gorham’s ties to imperialism extend past the BILAL MEMON B’22 is on the 19th-century industrial discretion. State senator Jeff Mullis, who wrote the bill, retrospective glorification of Columbus and into beat. was born and raised in Chickamauga, Georgia, in the contemporaneous American politics. At the turn of shadow of four Gorham-made monuments memo- the century—coinciding with Gorham’s heyday—the rializing the four divisions of the Confederate mili- United States significantly increased its overseas tary. One can only speculate on the influence of those footprint. The Spanish-American War of 1898 marks statues from Mullis’ childhood on his political devel- a turning point in American foreign policy. The war opment and latter sympathies for the so-called ‘lost actualized the previously unrealized implication of cause’. the Monroe Doctrine: the Western Hemisphere is a In an interview with the College Hill Independent, sphere of American influence. While the US entered Becci Davis, also from Georgia, argued that monu- into war ostensibly to assist the Cuban movement for ments are “an investment with a community for independence from Spain, it ended the war as an impetheir future selves.” In erecting a monument, Davis rial power with overseas colonies. The US victory over continues, the present tells the future “this is what Spain resulted in temporary control over Cuba and we believe in, this is important enough to remember, ownership of the former Spanish colonies of Puerto and we charge you with remembering it and holding Rico, Guam, and the Philippine Islands. Subsequently, those values close.” Regardless of their artistic merit, the US put down revolts in the Philippines in the public monuments are inherently political, dense with Philippine-American War. Riding the wave of patrimeaning and reverberating with echoes from the past. otism and American exceptionalism, Gorham took As part of its bronze division, Gorham commis- commissions to create monuments commemorating sioned numerous statues for the Confederate cause. soldiers who fought in the Spanish-American and Davis’ artwork in Unpolished Legacies, including a zine Philippine-American Wars—wars of American coloon the Chickamauga statues, draws from her expe- nialism. One such statue is prominently featured in rience in Georgia to criticize Gorham’s complicity in Providence’s Kennedy Plaza. Below the bronze cast of the project of valorizing the Confederacy for a new a soldier is an insignia featuring a woman presenting generation of Southerners. Some argue that Gorham herself to two soldiers. Around the image are names of should not be retroactively punished using contem- the territories captured during the war. Prominently porary standards for behavior that was normal for displayed in broad daylight, though hardly noticed, the time; not only did many other prominent metal- stands an artifact to America’s rape of its neighbors, a working firms construct similar statues, but Gorham, startling unification of imperialism and the patriarchy. in addition to their Confederate statues, also produced Though a detailed history lesson in American colojust as many works commemorating Union troops. In nialism lies beyond the scope of Designing Brilliance, response to such positions, Davis first made it clear the exhibit should provide context if it is to present that “just because you stand on both sides doesn’t monuments of that lineage. It does not. Among the mean you are neutral. You’re still choosing to support most prominent pieces in the exhibit is a trophy to both sides rather than choosing to support no sides.” Admiral George Dewey, the celebrated Navy officer Furthermore, Davis clarified that the purpose of her who led American victory at the Battle of Manila

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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 BY Alan Dean told by the little graphic stand-in of the Connecticut ILLUSTRATION Alana Baer landscape leaves me feeling much more dissatisDESIGN Kathryn Li fied 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 network of everything else (whether that be material, context. digital, financial, etc.). This shift, despite being fundaA common (and irritating) truism people often mentally tied up with massively complex economic, repeat about the digital, globalized world we find social, and political processes that extend far beyond ourselves living in today is that “the world has become the scope of a bus ride from Providence to New York, is a lot smaller.” At the same time, it is stated just as often quite clearly distilled into one of the most basic tools of that “the world has become a lot bigger.” The essence everyday human living: the map. 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 The map, whether digital or analog, is such a ubiquibecome much more interconnected, from digital tous and necessary everyday tool that it is quite easy to communications to interstate highways to multina- let its social and political implications slip beneath the tional tech oligopolies like Google. As all the millions radar, an effect that has only become more pronounced and billions of personal spaces, places, and locations in an age where the majority of adult Americans have around earth slowly collide into and twist around each an online, location-based, customized map system other, so too does our understanding of space in a truly resting in their front pocket. While past maps existed global world made up of network societies (which seem for explicit, often singular purposes, from plotting to be quickly becoming one single, world-spanning out subway lines to streets and highways to internanetwork society). This sense of emplacement we carry tional borders, the contemporary digital map, availhas shifted from us thinking of our location as the able on practically every smartphone, aims not only space we physically embody here and now, to thinking to carry out all of these functions at once, but also to of it as the position this space occupies within the wider 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

22 NOV 2019

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.

included), and then quite literally when my train finally of a two-way street than we may usually think, or care arrives and we slide off into the tunnel, losing cell to admit, going far beyond the subtextual implications service and severing my connection to the GPS. Maps shares with its analog predecessors, that of what Google Maps, despite its striving towards totality, the edges and highlights of the map tell us to think. As is ultimately a deeply flawed representation of the mentioned, Google Maps’ algorithm strives to perfect world, thoroughly unprepared for the reality of a place itself in the process of providing its navigation service, like New York—recognizing this does not, however, and to do so integrates the metadata of every drive to seem to have done much to stop people like me from the store or subway ride home into a more and more using it. Though we recognize how clunky these appli- reliable system of prediction and calculation. This cations are, how they erase the nuances of moving data collection is not, however, merely contained through the cityscape, we integrate them into our within the system of Google Maps—our movements, +++ routines anyways, often to the point of dependence. travel times, preferred locations, and any other forms There is an obvious, practical tradition out of which of metadata offered up to Google become integrated While the cultural understanding of space may be this has emerged; after all, navigating the city in the into a totalizing computational system that is itself changing, thankfully several hours later my physical pre-digital era was hardly carried out entirely from integrated with many other interlinked systems, such location does too, when the bus pulls into a smelly memory. The subway maps, street signs, and even the as Google Ads, Google Street View, Google Calendar, backlot behind Hudson Yards and I, set free at last, large 2003 Washington, DC mapbook in the back of my and so on. This mass of information stored within once more turn to my phone to guide me to where I grandparents’ car can attest to this. A significant force the corporation’s internal network is then linked with need to go. Once again I see myself, the blue dot with behind the map’s naturalization is the way in which it outside advertisers, governments, and other manners a white outline, now projected on a very different gray- has been used as an extension of our own minds and of authorities with which Google does business or white-yellow background. Compared to clean and memories, whether guiding us through a place that through whose purview the lines of its data web cross uncluttered mapspace that was Old Saybrook, where isn’t home (like myself in New York), or correcting the and twist. Cliché fears of futuristic-techno dystopia each icon demanded a pinching of the fingers to zoom faulty assumptions our brains sometimes make about aside, in the here and now Google Maps embodies the in close enough to read just what it was, Midtown which turn to take. modern city in a network society, working as the digital Manhattan is a visual barrage of gridded streets, What’s truly new about the computerized map, interface for the total and continuous transformation brightly colored commuter train and subway lines, and beyond the refined aesthetics and the interactive, of cityscape into market, and every space, journey, and hundreds of icons and labels, multiplying several times hyper-detailed interface (scaled by importance—as person inside it into a commodity. over with every little bit of zoom. This vast assortment determined by Google’s algorithm, of course), is that Put in the context of these wider historical moveof possibilities, all that commercial capitalism in the this map is ours, or at least carries the appearance of ments, I find myself feeling quite differently about the modern American city and its digital gatekeepers can being made for us. Much like the rest of the personal cracks that do still exist in this system. Considering the offer is, to me, completely irrelevant; I know where I’m data economy, the digital map centers the individual processes that they illuminate through their sabotage going. I even have the Brooklyn address marked with a as a means of commodity production, learning from of smooth functionality, there is something to apprelittle blue flag. each user until it can provide specific, custom-made ciate about the little bits of chaos and uncontrollability The only question, which I already vaguely know content—in this case, learning what parts of the city that companies like Google can’t account for. The the answer to but nonetheless delegate to the machine, you frequent, what kinds of shops or restaurants you illogical and inconsistent planning, confusing archiis how. Google Map’s first suggestion, unsurprisingly, tend to like, or the usual route you take to get home. tecture, pointless rules, and unexpected interactions is already wrong—I don’t want to take the A train, The GPS-based map, from the perspective of the user, that make up the essence of life in a city—a train delay, because, though it might not fit within the protocols begins with, extends from, caters to, and exists entirely loss of phone signal, or simply a wrong turn—gently (or of the app, I know full well that the shorter walk from for that little blue dot with the white outline: you or I. not so gently) shake us out of the monotony of an autothe station that 2 or 3 Trains stop at on the other end matic, GPS-guided trip from one point to the next. will compensate for the extra block or two now. It’s not +++ long before I descend into the station and Google Maps ALAN DEAN B’21 has a good sense of direction. disappoints once again, first promising me a 2 Train These digital, customized map-interfaces, now that never appears, then leaving me with an assort- common, everyday, and thoroughly unimpressive ment times and numbers that have almost nothing in around the world, however flawed their representacommon with the timetable on the platform. It seems tion of that same world may be, do, however have more that down here in the tunnels I am left to my own unsettling characteristics than just their imperfections, devices, first by the app’s helplessness to predict the or the ease with which our society has assimilated them. next train (to be fair, a task beyond any of us, the MTA Our relationship to Google Maps as users is much more

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

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 pedome- dominated community does not consider her birth but it can also mean of the earth. The Greek root pais ters from our teacher. They were small and red, like a control to be a technology, and wrongly so. means small animal. Meter, meaning to measure, plum-sized cherry. I wanted to eat mine. Instead, we The argument that birth control is bodyhacking meaning to measure the small animal of our body. Our spent the rest of the day shaking them in our hands in opens up a whole new consideration of the ways we bodies grow into adulthood, if we are lucky, but we do a competition to see who could rack up the most "steps" use technology to regulate and control our bodily not easily forget the things we learn as small animals. by the end of the day. By the time we got on the buses, processes. Including birth control in this category We do not shed our memories as easily as we lose a I was wearing mine proudly on my belt loop, happy is useful because it represents an example of body- little red plastic toy. to be a part of this game we were playing. Happy to hacking that puts the user in control of their body. It Fitbit has a new model called the Ace, intended for have spent the day shaking a little rattling pedometer, says: I chose this. I’m a cyborg, not a lamb surrounded children ages eight and up. The Ace is a small compocounting steps that I was faking. I didn’t really under- by robots. nent that can be worn as a child's watch. It tracks movestand why we were doing it, but I thought playing the The Fitbit, on the other hand, represents body- ment and heart rate, and can be synced to mobile apps game was more fun than watching it happen. hacking that aims to shape the body into a societally on which kids can “set fitness goals, compete with In the third grade, I was also diagnosed as obese. idealized form. The watch becomes an (almost) friends and family members on leaderboards, and The pediatrician said the word “obese” to my mom as permanent extension of the body, even while it clin- unlock digital badges for certain milestones.” As we if I wasn't able to hear him. For him, it seemed as long ically tracks the user’s body. Users become cyborgs know, children are already taught to worry about their as he wasn't looking at me, I wasn't in the room. To my motivated to make themselves smaller. Weight loss weight. Now they are being targeted by Fitbit to track mother, he suggested less sugar and more exercise. can easily become obsessive and destructive, espe- their bodies in new ways, presumably creating a new My mom stopped buying the chocolate muffins cially when it gives the individual a sense of control. generation of consumers for the brand. that we liked and I started running to the top of the Additionally, the ability to pursue weight loss I am trying to unlearn the attitudes that I have street and back. My street was a cul-de-sac, with a ideals often requires class privilege, whether it’s having learned around weight growing up. I wish I could say sewer punctuating the loop at the end. I lived in the the disposable income to have leisure time to workout, that I’m not treated differently as a thin person than I loop, so I would start on the rusty sewer lid. Then I afford access to a gym and weight loss oriented food, or was as a fat person, but that would be a lie. As a thin, would jog up the street, my child body angling forward. be able to afford gadgets like the Fitbit itself. The sleek, white woman, I benefit from the body ideals that make It was my first attempt at losing weight. pricey little piece of metal is akin to Airpods in saying: weight loss culture and Fitbits so marketable. When Family lore said that the girls of my family had Hey, I can afford this. I hate my body, it is because I feel I’ve failed to meet chubby childhoods that melted away during puberty. I am not judgmental of people who wear Fitbits. an ideal rather than being excluded from that ideal Regardless of that prophecy, my family seemed But I am unsettled by a culture that normalizes weight altogether. ashamed of my body for the time being. Like a fat loss as a constant ideal. I am concerned about techWhen white women prioritize thinness as a tenet of child is a problem to fix. Like a fat child is someone— nology quantifying the movement and location of our their power, they exacerbate pre-existing Eurocentric something—to wish away by adulthood. In my child's bodies. Consumer data in the fitness market is often ideals of beauty. When they chase these ideals, and mind, I knew that they were wishing away the fatness. explicitly about the body of the consumer. I am worried vocalize their failure to meet them, they normalize I worried if I did not lose weight, they would soon wish about the information Fitbits are gathering about the idea that anyone can be “too fat.” In my traumatic me away too. Before I could become the skinny person us, but I am also worried about what they’re teaching encounters with medical professionals and dangerous everyone wished me into being. us. Fitbits give us information about our bodies that weight loss behavior during adolescence, I coped by I remember standing in the shower, watching rivu- enables us to make our bodies smaller and over-exert disparaging my body. For a time, nitpicking my body lets of water run over my stomach, hoping for it to ourselves. That is to say, Fitbits can train the cyborg was a way of coping. I do not blame myself for coping erode me away. Fatphobic comments, perpetuated user to self-destruct. in that way; it was the only way I knew. But I know now with varying degrees of willingness by family, friends, Most users set a daily goal of total steps made, what I couldn’t see then: I know now that my coping and media, had me wishing myself away. with the arbitrary ideal goal being 10,000 steps. The strategies have consequences for those around me. Fitbit distances users from their bodies by creating The way I talk about my body affects not only myself, +++ external incentives, even as they micromanage their but those who hear me. When I say I hate my body, who bodies. When users reach their daily step goals, the will hear that as a condemnation of their own body? One of the leading logics of American weight loss Fitbit dings. According to a study on dopamine by The When we say any body is bad, whose are we saying are culture is that you should burn more calories than you Journal of Mental Disorders and Treatment, “There are good? consume in a given day. This mentality is generally four major pathways for the dopaminergic system in Unlearning weight loss culture will be an imperpreoccupied with Eurocentric body standards and the brain,” one of which being the pathway for “plea- fect, life long process for me. My body will grow into conceptions of beauty, including whiteness, thinness, sure and reward seeking behaviors.” Tech companies, adulthood, if I’m lucky, but there are things that are wealth, and ability. Those profiting off weight loss prod- like Fitbit, create rewards as simple as pings and vibra- hard to forget. I reach back through time and hug who ucts have spent years contributing to these Eurocentric tions to incentivize frequent use from their users. I was, counting nothing, just exhaling and hearing standards, targeting consumer demographics most I imagine myself in the third grade, running up where the breath overlaps. I bite into the plum-sized likely to buy into those ideals while isolating the rest. and down my short street, going nowhere and feeling cherry pedometer, and it tastes sweet. Now they are responding to established weightloss awful. I wasn’t exercising to feel connected to my body culture with new technological “innovation.” One or release stress. I wasn’t running to catch a friend in a DANA SCHNEIDER B’20 is an adult who buys her own such tech product is the Fitbit. game of tag. I was running because I was told that I was damn chocolate muffins. In 2017 alone, Fitbit shipped approximately 15.4 sick and would get sicker if I didn’t lose weight. The million units worldwide, according to Statista. The task of doing so felt impossible and scary. I would have Fitbit is a piece of wearable technology that retails for listened to a little watch beeping at me if I had one at about $150 and is typically worn on a wristband, func- the time. tioning as a calorie tracker and pedometer. These data I can understand why people wear Fitbits.The points that it collects—those of movement and caloric Fitbit gives users a sense of control. For many, their burn—contribute to an American fitness culture first awareness of their own body comes in an awarecentered on weight loss and thinness. Meanwhile, the ness of their urge to change it. company is profiting. Weight loss culture did not begin with the Fitbit. In With recent technological strides, “bodyhacking,” 2015, a study by Common Sense Media found that “one or infusing the body with technology to wield in four children has engaged in some type of dieting heightened control over it, has become increasingly behavior by age seven and that 80% of ten-year-old enticing as a practice and as a place of study. In her American girls have been on a diet.” The Fitbit is not essay “Bodyhackers are all around you, they’re called to blame for the conflation of weight loss with health; women,” tech writer Rose Eveleth notes, “The rise of however, it has perfected the use of tech to incentivize grinders—hackers who open up their bodies and insert our behavior around weight loss. 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 I can’t stop thinking about the the red pedometers we to understand why her Intrauterine Device (IUD) got in third grade. Where did everyone’s end up? In wasn’t considered a form of bodyhacking among the the bottom of an underwear drawer? In the garbage? bodyhacking community. She argues that the male Pedometer: In American English, pedo means child,

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FEATURES: OBJECT BIOS

22 NOV 2019

QUEER CALLOUSES

BY Finch Collins ILLUSTRATION Sophia Meng DESIGN Ella Rosenblatt

I got my favorite pair of Docs my sophomore year of transform themselves if that transformation makes working within the system to achieve acceptance. The high school—Pascals with portions of Hieronymus sense to the broader society. Through technologies title of the campaign invokes the “born different” idea Bosch’s triptych The Garden of Earthly Delights of self, individuals are able to represent themselves in about LGBT identity, wherein queerness is something printed on them. The design depicts the turn-of-the- ways that match their self-understandings in relation innate and should be acceptable because it cannot be 15th-century Netherlandish idea of hell. Contorted to society. Through modification of objects, people changed. At stake is the growing acceptance of certain nude figures strewn across the bleak terrain as a city modify themselves. As a preteen, I craved a training queer people into the dominant capitalist society while burns in the background. A man decaying like a tree, bra because our society associates bras with woman- other queer people, especially those holding multiple arms twisted and chest hollow, looks out from the side hood. Wearing a training bra would make me a woman, marginalized identities, remain subjects of violent of the boot, a bulbous musical instrument on his head. would transform me into the teenage girl I saw on the exclusion. Above sits a blade with a pair of ears. On the inside of TV, would shape my changing body into something I no longer think that the shoes are the endpoint of the foot, the city burns. A rabbit plays the violin on the legible as “woman.” my coming into queerness. My usage of them remains toe—except you can’t see much of the violin now. On In that same logic, I wanted to wear Dr. Martens in tension with their brand identity of LGBT accepthe top of the toe, most of the design is scuffed off. The boots because the people I saw wearing them, in tance, their apolitical respectability. I’d like to believe same with the inside ankle, where the medial malle- person and online, maybe didn’t feel like they had to the wearer shapes the boot as much as the manufacolus sticks out and forces the leather of one boot to rub wear a training bra to be a woman correctly. In my eyes, turer, and the boot in turn shapes the person. I chose against the other, fading the dark scene to white and the people that wore Dr. Martens were unafraid to be to be trans once I realized that womanhood was an then tan. themselves, especially when that fearlessness meant ill-fitting suit and modified myself with Dr. Martens— At the end of my freshman year of college, I sat accessing a masculinity I’d not yet seen as a subur- the Butlerian notion of gender as negotiated and down at my desk every morning to do the laces. I used ban-dwelling preteen. I hadn’t quite made the connec- constructed through repeated action. Dr. Martens to tighten the laces slowly, drawing the stiff sides of tion between being unafraid to dress and behave the have allowed for my self-exploration and self-realizathe shoe together and feeling the new leather against way I wanted and being trans. When I thought of men, tion, shaping not just my outward presentation but my my foot. By my third pair of black shoelaces, I didn’t I thought of pop stars and football players and preteen concept of self. My queer masculinity is not innate but even have to look. The aglets began to fall away. One boys who hadn’t learned what deodorant was. I didn’t continually realized and affirmed. had been replaced with a rolled piece of clear tape. Still, want that! But I saw people presenting their own takes Everyone uses their clothing to construct their putting on my boots was an act of reverence, a prayer. on masculinity, their butchness and their transness own gender, and I’ve long been using Dr. Martens to Lacing them is a ritual, opening space for me to pause and their Docs, and I was enthralled. construct mine. The repeat lacing of my boots, the and consider my day and appreciate the small things, These boots aren’t only masculine by marketing way the boots have shaped to my feet and my feet to like the feeling of frayed laces pulling soft leather and association. They’re work boots by design and the boots, is an uncanny parallel to my coming into closed around my foot. heritage. They’re heavy and imposing. As theater theo- masculinity. I’ve long absorbed various images of rist Eleanor Margolies writes, masculine and feminine what masculinity does, can, or could look like, but the +++ footwear not only look different but pattern behavior act of embodying that masculinity in myself is always differently. Men’s shoes produce heavy walks, surer a process of reshaping, of taking stiff leather gender Traditional subcultural analysis of Dr. Martens boots steps, loud footfalls. Gender has a rhythm. roles and softening them around my body, lacing them focuses on how the boot signals group belonging. Their Judith Butler is one of the gender theorists I find tight so they don’t fall off. lineage of subcultural usage traces from working-class most useful when thinking through my own transness. British skinheads to a wide variety of modern-day For Butler, different contexts and systems, including +++ queer subcultures. In short, subcultures, usually gender and sex, determine how the body is undernon-conformist in relation to broader society, use Dr. stood: “bodies only appear, only endure, only live I’m a junior now, and the shoes have been retired into Martens to consciously perform their difference from within the productive constraints of certain highly work boots. The leather is soft and folded in on itself, the norm—or so goes the traditional argument. This gendered regulatory schemes.” Both social gender the traction nearly gone. The toes are speckled with argument emphasizes appearance: the need to look and biological sex are constructed, and the process of paint and wood stain, traces of theater sets built over different in order to set your subculture apart from the assigning a sex brings the object into being. For Butler, the last two years. Still, putting on my boots is a prayer. norm. But I wanted to focus on something broader: sex is projected through the manipulation of physical I do not think, but do, letting the motion begin my day queer masculinity. The subcultural lens is so focused signs like secondary sex characteristics. There is no as I pull the worn sides tight. The wrinkles are permaon appearance and grouping that it doesn’t consider way to distinguish between what is materially true nent and shaped around my foot. The leather has caved how objects like Dr. Martens might interact with and what is culturally contingent, and the body only in on itself around my ankles as I pull it in to fit, and people beyond the visual. becomes legible through these signs. Gender is a ques- the tongue cannot be unwrinkled. The sole has worn To be clear, a large part of the appeal of Dr. Martens tion of doing, a process that must be repeated over the smooth on the ball of the foot. Reaching into the inside is their appearance and the queer masculinity they course of the subject’s life. Queerness and transness of the shoe, my fingers brush over the craters left by have the potential to signal. But queer masculinity isn’t cannot be reduced to a clear subcultural analysis that my toes, the depression of the ball, and the ridges in just a look, an outward-facing sign. It’s about how the just sees appearance. Everyone is always doing gender, between. By now, the wear pattern reinforces my poor way I look reflects how I feel (or want to feel). It’s about cis or trans, whether they realize it or not. walking habits, and I have to consciously work to roll how the way I present myself can’t be separated from Gender has a rhythm, one I’m still learning how to my foot correctly; the boot yearns to push my foot back the broader context in which I write myself into being. manipulate. When I first put on my Docs, they were an into high school. Because, at the end of the day, these shoes are instrument I had not yet learned how to play, fumbling Here’s where my boot and I disagree—I don’t want manufactured by a large corporation, a corporation through the scales of my budding masculinity. Today, to go back to high school. The end of sophomore year that is happy to exploit queerness in its advertising almost five years later, I’ve begun to play the songs I was when I came out for good, cut my long hair off, and while participating in all the harm of capitalism. want to hear from myself without the effort they once started making people listen when I told them I wasn’t Scholar Cath Davies, analyzing the company’s 2011/12 required. I’m always constructing my own mascu- a girl, not anymore. It was not just the Docs—despite advertising campaign, found that the brand stresses linity through footfalls and collared shirts. Gender as a how important they were (and still are) to me. But Docs self-expression and heritage apolitically, invoking an process. Rhythms, repeated. stand out, especially Docs with tree-men and fluteanti-conformist stance abstractly in a manner removed birds and sinners all in Hell. Docs made my steps sure from political context, rebellion safely contained in a +++ and my stride wide. I may not have passed as a man yet, language of individuality and creativity. This brand but at least I had an awesome pair of boots. strategy extends to their relationship with queerness. But rhythms can be appropriated, crystallized, made When I consider my own queer masculinity in rela- into marketable identities. The Dr. Martens brand FINCH COLLINS ’21 has his Docs-clad feet up on the tion to my Docs, the study of my own experience with has promoted their connection to the LGBT commu- radiator in the Rock. the shoes becomes an overlapping collage of presenta- nity through more openly in the last few years, culmition, self-realization, marketing, and leather. And so I nating in the 2017 release of a collection of rainbow asked: How do the boots make me, and how do I make boots with proceeds going to the Trevor Project. Their the boots? 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 liberI started by drawing from Michel Foucault, whose ation. #worndifferent presents the Dr. Martens shoes technologies of self spoke directly to my experience as enabling a generic resistance to cultural norms but with Dr. Martens. For Foucault, technologies of self remains acceptably revolutionary. are specific, conscious practices by which subjects The brand’s timely acknowledgment of queer constitute themselves through regulating their bodies, people's usage of Dr. Martens matches this image of thoughts, and behaviors. The goal is transforma- acceptable revolution. By 2017, same-sex marriage had tion. But technologies of self only work to help people been proclaimed a victory of equality under the state, of

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FEATURES: OBJECT BIOS

16

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 hanging out. In response, the now-freed citizens of Susan Sontag’s comment that “Camp is the attempt to perches comfortably inside a glistening ruby high heel, Munchkinland, along with Glinda the Good Witch do something extraordinary. But extraordinary in the so giant that it nearly engulfs her body. The massive of the North, perform an extravagant celebration of sense, often, of being special, glamorous.” The shoes wood-carved shoe is hollowed so that Sushi can rest gratitude. As the Wicked Witch of the West arrives, achieve camp through contrast—their gleaming red her body against the insole, nestling her upper back attempting to recover the slippers, Glinda magically deviates from Dorothy’s quotidian nature, and they into the curved edge where the foot’s heel would go, transports them to Dorothy’s feet. The technicolor demand attention within every setting throughout the extending her feet into the toe-box. The exterior of the dramatizes the slippers—doused in deep red sequins, film, establishing their “spirit of extravagance,” which shoe is painted a deep red, sprinkled with silver glitter, the shoes glisten in the movie lights, strikingly Sontag calls “the hallmark of camp.” Camp has been competing for attention with the interior lining’s contrasting Dorothy’s run-of-the-mill countryside historically significant for queer people, serving as an metallic gold. Every year, Sushi flaunts a glamorous garments. Dorothy has reclaimed the sparkling shoes aesthetic language within art and culture—from the new glamorous look, from lime green sequin-covered from a figure of power, re-contextualizing a once- New York City ball scene to John Waters films—created fishtail dresses to dark smoky eyes to wide-brimmed wicked object into a glamorous accessory. Importantly, for and only legible to other queer people. In this way, hot pink chin-strapped hats. Nevertheless, her iconic The Wicked Witch of the West covets the slippers for camp’s collective construction allows for a unifying high heel seat remains essential to her performance, their magical abilities. But when she tries to obtain function: camp becomes a new home for the aesthetthe same exact shoe returning each New Year’s Eve. what were previously her sister’s slippers, she gets ically-attuned queer. As the ruby slippers transport to As the shoe is suspended by two ropes several stories shocked when she attempts to even touch them. The utopia, they do so with a sparkling wink. above the ground, Sushi showcases herself to the power of shocking evil asserts a vision of a magic massive crowd below her, which is getting drunker by that is politically characterized—the slippers can be +++ the minute, filled with white-bearded elderly gay men thought of as untouchable by normalizing forces of and young married straight couples hoping for a tele- power. Just as the rule of the Wicked Witch forced the In the moments before midnight, Sushi’s high heel vised kiss. Central to Sushi’s campy excess is her invo- Munchkins into hiding, leaving them with no choice drops into the crowd beneath her, which counts down cation of the ruby slippers famously worn by Dorothy, but to conceal their colorfully eccentric culture, queer each successive second. As the clock strikes midnight, played by quintessential gay icon Judy Garland, in the people are often forced to assimilate into mainstream Sushi screams “Happy New Year!” and pops a bottle original film version of The Wizard of Oz. culture. The slippers’ reclamation as a tool to repel of champagne while confetti canons douse her in a In the beginning of the film, Dorothy sings wicked normativity presents a queerness that cannot rainbow snowfall. As she steps out of the slipper onto “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” in response to her be touched by heteronormativity. This may be an ulti- a stage, she is met with a celebratory audience, kissing Aunt Em’s urging for her to find a place where she mate queer utopic dream: a queerness that thrives and hugging one another, all excitedly anticipating “wouldn’t get into any trouble.” The lyrics of the song and cannot be undone, where expressions of gender, the future year. Sushi’s performance allows for a queer point to a faraway land in which Dorothy can experi- nonnormative sex, and queer cultural forms exist world to be made, mobilizing the colossal ruby slippers ence freedom in totality. Within the film’s narrative, it freely and invulnerably. In this world, homophobia into a futuric gesture of queer joy. is a foreshadowing of her subsequent arrival in Oz. But and transphobia get immediately zapped in their path. on a conceptual level, Dorothy’s yearnings are an ode Nonetheless, the shoes’ most notable function EVAN LINCOLN B’21 is actually a good friend of to a possible future, a place of utopia. is their ability to return Dorothy to Kansas. Not to be Dorothy’s. The present can be pervasively toxic, especially forgotten—Dorothy’s entire journey in Oz is driven for queer people that remain trapped within the rigid by her desire to return home. In the end, she gets her dullness of understandings of gender and sexuality. wish: Glinda reveals that if Dorothy closes her eyes For theorist José Muñoz, looking towards the future and clicks her heels three times, all while repeating presents a solution to the restrictiveness of the present “there is no place like home,” she will be transported for queer people. Muñoz celebrates the realm of the back. Dorothy does so, though it is bittersweet, as she future as a mode to anticipate a liberated world; in must say goodbye to her newly-formed friendships. this conception, queerness becomes an ideal to strive When she arrives in Kansas, she awakes abruptly, as to towards, a pathway to freedom, or as he puts it, a signal that the entire experience was a dream. Notably, ‘horizon.’ In simpler terms, Muñoz’s theories establish Dorothy’s slippers possess the power to send anyone a queer politics that allow us to look forward to a future to where they feel the most at home. This would be an of widespread LGBTQ+ freedom. Whereas utopias are invaluable tool for queer people—their given homes often dismissed as naïve pipe dreams, a future-focused are often abusive or unaccepting, forcing them to find queer politics reclaims utopia as a space to imagine the different ones and negotiate new structures of kinship. possibilities of liberation for queer people. Thus, the slippers allow for a too often unreachable Back in her Kansas farm, alongside bales of hay sense of belonging, serving as the medium between and farming equipment, Dorothy sings of a place the present and a queer utopic future of newfound where “dreams that you dare to dream really do come family. true” and “troubles melt like lemon drops.” Her lyrics However, this sense of belonging often transcends epitomize an optimistic longing for a utopic world, and families and interpersonal relationships—the new in this way, a queer one. Notably, Dorothy does not yet cultures that queer people construct offer artistic and have the ruby slippers; they exist in the hopeful future aesthetic dimensions of belonging. Heteronormative she imagines. 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 Soon after Dorothy completes her wishful ballad, a journey throughout Oz, Dorothy is met with an ravaging twister approaches the farm. Dorothy runs entirely new world, where she must construct new back inside, lying in bed and falling asleep as the ways of living and relating to others in order to exist arriving tornado lifts away her house, transporting amongst its oddities. Her ruby slippers are central to it to the “somewhere over the rainbow.” The film the strange utopia of Oz, and her journey’s success dramatically shifts from the bleak sepia-toned Kansas depends on the learned navigation of their abilities. to the vibrant technicolor world of Oz, and an awak- They are noticeably flamboyant, sequin-covered, and ened Dorothy steps outside, wide-eyed. Her house constantly shimmering—even possessing magical falls directly on the Wicked Witch of the East, killing powers. These qualities mark the shoes as a camp the witch and leaving her ruby slipper-adorned feet object, especially when paired with cultural critic

17

FEATURES: OBJECT BIOS

22 NOV 2019

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

EPHEMERA

18

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.