The College Hill Independent Vol. 40 Issue 10

the VOLUME 40 ISSUE 10 1 MAY 2020

EXTRA, EXTRA A deep-dive into Providence’s undergdround newspaper of the 60s

WHEN WE ARE APART WE ARE NOT ALONE A conversation with Fred Moten and Stefano Harney

TOE TAGS A tribute to the staff of Volume 40

Indy

the

News

American-ness, Ever-Elusive Karlos Bautista

09

Features 03

Dear Dear Ben Bienstock

04

On Huikau Jacob Alabab-Moser

05

The Extra! Files The Indy People When We Are Apart, We Are Not Alone Zach Ngin, Alex Westfall, & Sara Van Horn

11

21

Should Poetry Be Everywhere?

Wen Zhuang

Metro

On Track?

Mara Cavallaro

15

From The Editors The SAM that began Volume 40 imagined themselves to be militant, strong, and unbreakable. Stalwart with the force of thirty years of history. An emergent state ready for any state of emergency.

Twelve weeks later, our world has changed. We have held fast to our military metaphors despite their inadequacy, moving all officer communications online, reducing our printing capacity to a tenth of normal production, and operating a subscription service out of our living rooms, each address carefully transcribed in morse code.

We desperately miss the physical spaces that we used to believe defined the Indy.

We thought our paper was Conmag on Wednesday nights: DumDum wrappers and printer cords under harsh fluorescent lights, writers and editors hunched together over one laptop. Because we have known the Indy through physical closeness, negotiating new distances has felt especially difficult.

Yet we’ve learned that the Indy is also eight-hour Zoom calls, handwritten manila envelopes, and the intimacy of editing simultaneously on a Google doc. The weekly rhythms of the Indy will return; with new hands at the reins, new voices through the fog. For now, writing together has never felt more crucial, more sustaining, more necessary. when we are apart, we are not alone

Consider the Lobster Peder Schaefer

17

Ephemera

02

Out with a Bang Sindura Sriram Toe Tags Liana Chaplain

19

Science+Tech Doomed by Design Maya Glicksman

13

Literary Exquisite Corpse The Indy Staff

22

Arts The Urgency of Shame Jacob Alabab-Moser & Evan Lincoln

16

X Providence Eve O’Shea

08

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.

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.

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.

1 MAY 2020

VOL 40 ISSUE 10

STAFF WEEK IN REVIEW Emily Rust | NEWS Anchita Dasgupta Peder Schaefer Tristan Harris | METRO Ricardo Gomez Miles Guggenheim Deb Marini | ARTS Zachary Barnes Eve O’Shea Isabelle Rea | FEATURES Audrey Buhain Mia Pattillo Nick Roblee-Strauss | SCIENCE + TECH Bilal Memon Izzi Olive Andy Rickert | LITERARY Catherine Habgood Star Su | EPHEMERA Liana Chaplainm Sindura Sriram | X Jacob Alabab-Moser Ethan Murakami | LIST Ella Comberg XingXing Shou Cate Turner | STAFF WRITERS Alana Baer Leela Berman Mara Cavallaro Uwa Ede-Osifo Eduardo Gutiérrez Peña Evie Hidysmith Kaela Hines Muram Ibrahim Anabelle Johnston Jennifer Katz Emma Kofman Evan Lincoln Zach Ngin Jorge Palacios Nell Salzman Issra Said Kion You | COPY EDITORS Josephine Bleakley Muskaan Garg Sarah Goldman Marina Hunt Christine Huynh Seth Israel Thomas Patti Ella Spungen | DESIGN EDITORS Daniel Navratil Ella Rosenblatt | DESIGNERS Anna Brinkhuis Amos Jackson Kathryn Li Katherine Sang | ILLUSTRATIONS EDITOR Eliza Macneal ILLUSTRATORS Sylvia Atwood Leslie Benavides Gemma Brand-Wolf Natasha Brennan Bella Carlos Ryn Kang Sophia Meng Sandra Moore Pia Mileaf-Patel Claire Schlaikjer Floria Tsui Veronica Tucker Katrina Wardhanna | BUSINESS Caín Yepez Abby Yuan | WEB Ashley Kim | SOCIAL MEDIA Muskaan Garg | SENIOR EDITORS Ben Bienstock Ella Comberg Olivia Kan-Sperling Chris Packs Tara Sharma Tiara Sharma Cate Turner Wen Zhuang | MANAGING EDITORS Matt Ishimaru Sara Van Horn Alex Westfall | MVP Steve DiCaprio

@THEINDY_TWEETS

WWW.THEINDY.ORG

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

EPHEMERA

02

BY Ben Bienstock ILLUSTRATION Veronica Tucker DESIGN Daniel Navratil

I know my great-great-great-great grandmother’s handwriting well. The stroke of her t comes after the vertical without crossing, leading the eye to her next letter. Her underline emphasizes the middle of her words, as if some secret message were nestled inside “gladly.” Her H is a pair of loops knit together at the center, with curly tails at either end. The people she loves are “dear,” usually “dear dear.”

Eleanor loved dear dear George, and long after they married and had children and she died, and he remarried and lost his eyesight and lost his second wife and died, my grandmother found Eleanor’s letters in a heavy wood box (with George’s initials carved into the top) in some tucked-away corner of her house.

George left Hinsdale, in western New York, in 1862 to join the Marines at the Brooklyn Navy Yard. The letters Eleanor wrote him are, I guess, ‘Civil War letters,’ but they’re nothing like the ones Ken Burns self-seriously inserts into his documentaries: panning over some regiment photograph; “Dearest Abigail, the winter here is harsh.

Not as harsh as last year’s, but harsher than the year’s before. Lee and his men are not far behind us now. Pray for me that I might live, or else die for this Union.” I don’t know if Eleanor kept his letters, but George preserved hers. Her one-sided love letters are full of longing and everyday pleasures and pains. She often wrote that she was afraid that she would never get a response, that a letter or a life would be lost along the way. I don’t want the other side, though. I’m content keeping just Eleanor in focus and letting scenes of the war blur at the periphery.

The paper on which Eleanor wrote is brittle and browning, and the letters now sit safely under Nana’s couch in an archival-grade paper box designed for storing antique baseball cards. Sometimes I worry that if there were another storm like Sandy (we listened to the crank radio in the dark and headed to Nana’s in the morning to spend the week), her floors would flood and wash the letters away. Even as I set about cataloguing, scanning, and transcribing them, I had visions of pages disintegrating in my hands and ink erased by the scanner’s laser. The more I handled the letters to preserve them in a family archive, the more I convinced myself that my work was urgent.

Eleanor was my grandmother’s grandmother’s grandmother. It’s hard for me to comprehend the distant closeness of our relationship. In terms of genealogy, I am as related to her as I am to 63 other people.

Other than George, I know none of those 63 names, and I’ll never read their letters. Most of them lived their lives far from Hinsdale, in shtetls in the Pale of

Settlement and the Austro-Hungarian Empire. I can hardly know what made up their lives. Someday my brother and I will get around to asking the FBI if our great-grandparents really were communists, but if we found a trunk of their subversive letters tomorrow, I wouldn’t even be able to read them. I want to learn Yiddish to hear the voices of my ancestors. But what if I can’t find them? Words and stories fade over centuries, until they are barely a whisper (Oma’s parents switch from Yiddish to Russian so they can speak privately at the

not deserve to be forgiven. Oh! I don’t want to have my own wild way and do everything as I please—and imagined she had nothing to do with these George and Eleanor characters. Or perhaps, like me, she searched her family history to unearth buried lore, but instead discovered Eleanor’s writing.

I’m jealous that Eleanor is a better poet than I am.

Her farewells sing of love and loss, with every moment of parting touched by the divine: Good bye God be with you ever. We are in the hands of One who sees the Sparrows fall—let us trust in Him that we may sometime meet again.

Eleanor One night, exhausted, she begins to run out of space on the page and heads to bed: Good night If you ever get this write very soon. If any one else does, I wish they would let me know where you are. dinner table, but little do they know she’s learned their When she welcomes a vision, her words are warm and language too), until they are lost. light, a promise and a prayer: I found Eleanor—or, Nana did. As did Nana’s grandmother, Blanche, 70 years ago, when she collected the letters and annotated their envelopes.

Perhaps I am the most recent generation in a lineage of archivists: Eleanor, the memoirist; George, the collector and protector; Blanche, the cataloguer; Nana, the preserver; and me, the digitizer. Yet I am also, no doubt, an analyst—I combed the letters, looking for a grain to read against. I wanted revelations that would rouse and scandalize the rest of the family: coded I don’t know how much of myself I should see in Eleanor. subversive sexuality, radical abolitionism, rebellious (Google Images shows me that Eleanor’s daughter feminist theorizing! I think I wanted to find these Ellen looks strikingly similar to my mother Ellen.) It hidden threads of a lost family history less to take pride can be so easy to fall into that old, territorial feeling— in their existence than to have been the one to discover these letters are mine, only I can interpret them. I should them. I wanted to read stories below the surface, ones keep my distance. But I have known that longing, too. that no one had ever tried or been able to decipher—to I want to make sunshine in your home, too. I have felt connect with the true substance of Eleanor’s life that (that I have felt) ties to people and places and sounds undoubtedly could be unveiled with the proper reading. that death itself (Opa had Swiss citizenship, so his family When I read the letters now, I wonder what could escape Vienna) cannot sever.

Blanche made of them in the ’50s. Blanche was born in I wonder if I found my great-grandmother Sylvia’s 1888, nearly a decade after Eleanor died at only 37. Was letters, if I would pour over the intricacies of the lines it painful to read the letters, to meet the grandmother of her Yiddish characters. The things I might learn she never knew? Maybe she allowed herself to get from words I can’t read! The Eleanor that I know—that caught up in the drama—Dewitt my dear brother was I really really know—is mine all mine. I have read her killed the 14th; into being. I recently learned that my fourth cousin Soon we shall meet never never to part, and once removed is selling edited versions of George’s should fortune frown, or adversity come, we shall still military diary for 22.50 plus shipping. I don’t need to possess that mutual love which will bind us together, and know his Eleanor. I don’t mean to be precious; she is we will defy the whole world to sever those silken cords; not mine to hold on to. But there is a part of me that is I never shall get over it till I can ask her, a part of her that is me. One day, I will probably your forgiveness with my own life and hear your answer forget that part of me, and it will grow quiet and fade with my own ears, for I feel so unworthy, as though I do away. But now it is bells and birds and singing.

Dear Dear

Reading ancestors into being

BEN BIENSTOCK B’20 is looking for paid work (including a competitive benefits package) transcribing your ancestors’ secret romance novels.

03

FEATURES

01 MAY 2020

ON HUIKAU Tensions simmering in the melting pot

I have photos that help me recall the day my Aunty and Uncle took me to the summit of Maunakea around seven or eight years ago. We wanted to see the volcano up-close and the view of Hawai`i Island below. As I crouched in the parking lot, inspecting the snow banks in disbelief, my uncle looked at me quizzically. He motioned behind our pickup, towards tourists’ shiny silver and red Ford Focuses. “A`ole, no.” He shook his head, a thunderhead of judgement in his gaze. “These people think this sacred place is their playground.”

My Uncle is ethnically white and “local.” The term denotes belonging to Hawai`i without containing any ethnic connotations—a result of the multicultural society formed by waves of immigration during the plantation era. For people who are not Kanaka Maoli (Native Hawaiians), to be “local” is to be part of an exclusive group—something to be earned through several years of residence or generational ties to the islands, in addition to immersion in Hawai`i’s unique history and culture. Though Hawai`i born and raised, I question whether I am local. For my Uncle, some good indicators of his localness are that he speaks fluent pidgin (Hawaiian Creole English), lives in a majority-Filipino household, and knows all of the Hawaiian place names. But still, being local is distinct from the indigenous sense of protecting and belonging to the land. +++ Last July, 2,000 protestors formed a blockade on the access road that leads up to the site of the proposed Thirty Meter Telescope at the peak of Maunakea, Hawai`i’s tallest volcano. The land at the construction site has already been “ceded” multiple times.

First, it went from the United States federal government in 1893 when it helped American businessmen overthrow the Kingdom of Hawai`i, then later to a state-held trust for the “betterment of the conditions of Native Hawaiians.” And today, an international community of scientists—spearheaded by the University of California and the California Institute of Technology, in tandem with the University of Hawai`i and the Hawai`i state government—want to erect the world’s most powerful telescope. The project’s astronomers claim that of the several sites they have considered around the world, Maunakea, with its pitch-black night sky free of light pollution, offers the most optimal conditions to “revolutionize our understanding of the universe,” as the TMT website proclaims. But for Kanaka Maoli, Maunakea is an integral, sacrosanct part of their universe: the volcano is the home of several sacred deities and the umbilical cord connecting the people to the heavens. Colonial domination continues—of land and resources but also of ideologies; one universe “cedes” to another.

Outside of the makeshift protest camp on the side of a highway, a Hawai`i state flag flew upside-down at half-mast, signifying the distress of the Hawaiian Sovereignty Movement, through which Kanaka Maoli have sought remedies for the overthrow of the Kingdom and their disenfranchisement. Further up the road, seven activists chained themselves to cattle guards to prevent trucks carrying personnel and equipment from reaching the construction site. Videos exposed the reluctance and pain of the police, mostly Kanaka Maoli themselves, as they arrested dozens of Native Hawaiian elders. They walked slowly, guiding the 70- and 80-year-old men into vans that would drive them off the mountain. The local politician and activist Kaniela Ing tweeted, “You don’t have to be Hawaiian to understand the dangerous precedent this sets. Maunakea impacts all of us.” +++ “Want to Be Less Racist? Move to Hawai`i.” I stared at the headline of an op-ed from the New York Times last summer. Dozens of striking black-and-white portraits of racially ambiguous people interspersed the text, each of them anchored by a caption with the subject’s

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

name and ethnic mixture. “We asked people on Oʻahu to give their ethnicity. Many had long answers.” There was “African-American/Italian,” “Hawaiian/Filipino/ Portuguese,” “Hawaiian/Samoan/Filipino/Chinese/ Spanish/German/Caucasian,” among others. Each additional ethnicity and hyphenated name was intended to draw awe from the Times’ catered audience: a white, coastal-city liberal.

The author of the piece, who did not come from Hawai`i, certainly was in awe himself. He opened with research by University of Hawai`i at Mānoa psychologist Kristin Pauker stating that grade-school children from Honolulu “didn’t believe race was biological” or essentialist. According to the census, nearly a quarter of Hawai`i’s population was composed of mixed-race people as of 2018. The article offers the Aloha state as an example, from the U.S. mainland’s own backyard, of how miscegenation could construct racial harmony.

The author asks, “Could Hawai`i show us another way forward?”

Rather than present an innovative idea, the article recycles a trope about Hawai`i that is several decades old. Even before it became a state, the Novewmber 1945 issue of LIFE Magazine declared Hawai`i “the world’s most successful experiment in mixed breeding, a sociologist’s dream of interracial cultures.” Open any in-flight magazine to an ad for a sandtal store, or turn on your hotel room TV to a local commercial about ice cream, and find a smiling white man walking the beach at twilight hand-in-hand with his Asian wife and their multiracial daughters in tow. In paradise, it can be difficult to discern between images real and manufactured, authentic and imported. +++ “Being Hawaiian is ultimately about not wishing to be anything else,” writes Jonathan Osorio, the director of Hawaiian Studies at the University of Hawai`i at Mānoa. It is overcoming huikau (confusion), he argues, that has saved Hawaiians from their neocolonial identity crises and could eventually revive the Kingdom of Hawai`i. Osorio and his fellow activist-scholars would be among those most apt to critique the article in the Times for its half-baked analysis of race in Hawai`i, devoid of understanding the overarching structures of oppression that target Native Hawaiians.

A broad and non-exhaustive list of the contemporary socioeconomic adversities that Kanaka Maoli currently face includes disproportionately high rates of poverty, incarceration, drug use, homelessness and health issues, such as diabetes and heart disease. This is without mentioning ongoing historical issues of intergenerational trauma, cultural genocide, displacement from Indigenous lands, and a lack of self-governance. Many Kanaka Maoli view the United States as having illegally occupied their land since its 1898 annexation of Hawai`i as a territory. Native Hawaiians, monoracial and multiracial alike, do not benefit from living in the paradise that mainlanders imagine when they vacation in Hawai`i or move there permanently.

Rather, the persisting myth of the idyllic melting pot—fueled by the state’s overreliance on tourism and foreign investment—further exacerbates the plight of Kanaka Maoli.

Moreover, the myth obscures a complex history of racial violence, much of which targeted Native Hawaiians. White people are to blame for much of Native Hawaiians’ trauma—from Captain James Cook’s initial contact to the “Big Five” plantation-owning families’ mass theft and degradation of land. Yet non-Indigenous people of color also have occupied space on the settler-colonial hierarchy, even if they themselves have faced racism, particularly during the plantation era. Arguably, Asians, as the majority race in Hawai`i (approximately 57 percent as of 2018) and major actors in government and business, have upheld the status quo that marginalizes Native Hawaiians. +++

BY Jacob Alabab-Moser ILLUSTRATION Eliza Macneal DESIGN Alex Westfall

Beginning in the early 1960s, there has been a burst of new cultural activity and political organizing by Native Hawaiians, deemed the “Hawaiian Renaissance.”

People began once again to dance the hula and sing mele (traditional song). In 1976, a crew successfully navigated a double-hulled canoe, the Hōkūleʻa, from Hawai`i to Tahiti using exclusively ancient Polynesian techniques—the first time it had been done in a century.

These cultural successes, while largely unknown outside of Hawai`i, helped to restore the dignity and pride of Native Hawaiians. Native Hawaiians have come out, unified, for the first time after a century of U.S. occupation to declare that they are not going to surrender to processes of cultural assimilation and, in some cases, political dominion.

Amid the Hawaiian Renaissance’s climate of renewed purpose and resistance, the writer and scholar John Dominis Holt was a black sheep. Though he has often been considered the father of the Hawaiian Renaissance, his privilege within Hawai`i’s racially hierarchical society, as white-passing and a descendent of the landed elite, denied him recognition as a Native Hawaiian. Holt found solace by refusing, in turn, to color by the lines of Hawaiian-ness, proudly stating his various European ancestries, alongside his three-eighths Native Hawaiian blood. He called himself hapa-haole, the Hawaiian term for mixed race.

“I am, in depth, a product of Hawai`i—an American, yes, who is a citizen of the fiftieth State,” he wrote in his 1964 monograph On Being Hawaiian. “I am also a Hawaiian; somewhat by blood, and in large measure by sentiment.”

Like Holt, the majority of Native Hawaiians today are mixed-race, but some of them take issue with such an embrace of hybridity. “I am not American,” writes Osorio, the UH Mānoa Hawaiian Studies director, out of the belief that idealizing hybridity threatens Native Hawaiians’ path to self-determination and, ultimately, self-preservation as a people. “Do we wish to live as Hawaiians, or don’t we?” he writes.

While Osorio calls for Kanaka Maoli to commit themselves to an essential political and cultural identity apart from anything else, there are calls for defining Hawaiian-ness through genealogy. As a means of ensuring that they reverse historical wrongs and contemporary inequalities, some institutions catering to Native Hawaiian require proof of blood quantum or lineal descent for access. In probably the most stringent case, applicants for Hawaiian homesteads must prove at least 50 percent Native Hawaiian blood in order to obtain a lease from the Department of Hawaiian Home Lands (DHHL). The rule ensures that Native Hawaiians, including future generations, have a right to their stolen land. However, those who have less blood than the required amount—or who lack relatives that already lease a homestead—are left out.

Even then, as of late 2018, over 45,000 qualified applicants are on a decades-long waitlist. The DHHL simply doesn’t have enough US Congress-allotted land or state-provisioned funding to go around. Such government shortcomings have led to heated debates about who gets to be Native Hawaiian. +++ For decades before he retired, my Uncle worked on a telescope that sat on Haleakalā, the main volcano on Maui. On weekends, he sat in a plastic lawn chair, while my Aunty tended to her immaculate garden. He “talked story” and guzzled Heineken until sundown.

On clear nights, in the black, I could see the two pearls of light shining from the observatory on the sacred mountain.

JACOB ALABAB-MOSER ‘20 asks other mixed-race Asians without Native Hawaiian blood to stop culturally appropriating the word hapa.

FEATURES

04

THE EXTRA! FILES Volume 40 of the College Hill Independent marks, strangely enough, our 30th anniversary. Thirty years of Metro reporting, 600 Weeks Reviewed, countless copies abandoned on Coffee Exchange tables. Since 1990, students at Brown University and the Rhode Island School of Design have committed themselves to ensuring the existence of the alternative press in Providence. We have been lucky to survive when so many other vital publications—the Phoenix; Spark Mag—haven’t. We aren’t oblivious as to why: our funding from Brown, even as the University threatens to cut student journalism off like clockwork every few years, anchors us to perhaps the city’s least alternative institution. But we also emerged from a lineage of local papers that, to varying degrees of success, have engaged the wider political world of their Providence readership.

This milestone sent us into the archives—not of the Independent, but of our predecessors. In 2018, the Independent looked back at the Rake, the 1980s radical publication founded by Brown students that investigated and exposed cover-ups of police brutality in Providence. We went searching a little farther back and found Extra!

Over the past months, a team of Independent writers, editors, illustrators, copy editors, and designers poured over Extra!, Providence’s radical late-60s underground paper, whose complete archives are held at Special Collections at Brown’s John Hay Library. We read about protests at Hope High School, rallies to free Huey Newton, and the policies that Brown enacted to displace Cape Verdean residents of Fox Point. Our eyes flicked from gaudy, dated ads for stereo equipment to the absurd cartoons of the Mad Peck (one of the so-called “Extra! People,” now famous for his iconic “Rich folks live on Power Street/But the rest of us live off Hope” poster). Some of us spoke over the phone to some of the key Extra! People to bring together generations of progressive young journalists, to hear their stories, and, in some self-centered way, to see how we might learn from them as we look to 30 more years of the Independent.

the time. In 1969, Extra! staffers were among eight activists arrested by Providence police at a Kennedy Plaza rally in support of the Black Panther Party.

(One staff member’s charges: “publicly defiling and casting contempt upon the American flag.”) The stakes in these fights were mirrored in Extra!’s articles; coverage of demonstrations they instigated or supported comprised much of their published content.

Just as Extra! advocated politics of liberation, the paper provided some newfound freedom for Marian and self-proclaimed radical feminist MaryJane Simpson, who had both grown up in small, conservative towns in Michigan. “The only thing I was primed for was to be a wife and a mother,” MaryJane recalled.

“In trying to keep me from taking off, my father would make me read Reader’s Digest stories out loud of girls going to San Francisco, and living on the streets and becoming prostitutes and eating cat food. And I was just like, well, I’m gonna do it a different way.”

Both women still chafed against the confining gender roles they had traveled so far to escape. Within +++ the first year of publication, it became apparent that Extra! began in 1968 with three Brown students and the leftist activist paper was not quite so radical when a 3000 dollar stipend from the Religious Chaplain’s it came to gender relations.

“There was a lot of focus on being a cute hippie office.

“You have to put this whole thing in the context of chick, and that made me a little uncomfortable. I didn’t the times,” Arn Strasser, a Brown Ph.D. candidate who want to just be a pretty girl,” insisted MaryJane. “But would become managing editor of the paper, told the the women’s movement was just getting started. So Independent. “Anti-war, civil rights, there was a stir- I both wanted to be independent, with this chip on ring up of the energy and they needed something to my shoulder. And then I would also go cook dinner siphon away that energy. Dick Dannelfelser, a chaplain because it felt like somebody should, and I knew that I at the time kind of initiated that, so we got some seed could do that.”

As a male-dominated environment in the chauvinmoney.”

The money evaporated within weeks. Arn dropped istic 1960s, Extra! rarely concerned itself with women’s out of college, and the other two Brown students disap- liberation, and despite the paper’s radical politics, there peared. Before he knew it, Arn was in the basement tended to be a clear divide between men and women. of Mouthpiece Coffeeshop on Thayer Street running According to Arn, “We tried to have a communal sense the newest feature of America’s underground press of things,” admitting that “the women were strong, network, getting stoned, and talking politics with some but… it was still more male-oriented.”

Marian agreed: “The women were the people that of the closest friends he would ever make in his life.

“I certainly remember those all-nighters that we typed a lot and the men were the ones that [wrote] the pulled every week, trying to design the paper and lay headlines and wrote most of the important articles.... it out and get it to the printer about six in the morning,” As time went on, I became less shy, and I started doing said Marian Fish, Arn’s girlfriend, who flew out to bolder and braver things on my own, writing a little Providence from Michigan to join him, quickly became more and doing some of my own research. Arn was, a fixture of the group. “It was those all-nighters who in particular, very supportive of my efforts. But I still are fueled by [Coca-Cola] and the most wretched food did all the cooking and cleaning, and I did a shitload of that you could imagine, donuts and all that stuff.…I typing.”

Despite the hierarchical gender roles on staff, think that we worked well together as a group, just MaryJane nevertheless felt she could practice feminist being there, music blaring wherever we were.”

Extra! staff told the Independent that much of the ideals while working at the paper. “We moved to this joy of working for the underground press was joining office, and the guys were building desks, just simple a masthead dominated by activists dedicated to the 2x4 frame desks. And I asked to help, and they let me,” Civil Rights and anti-war movements. Extra!’s radical she remembered. “I saw I could do and learn things activism, though always non-violent, often required that I had been told I couldn’t. I spent my twenties and members to risk arrest or imprisonment in order to part of my thirties doing all these things they said girls fight some of the most pressing political battles of couldn't do.”

05

ARCHIVES

BY Alana Baer, Ben Bienstock, Sarah Goldman, Tara Sharma, Ivy Scott, & Wen Zhuang INTERVIEWS BY Ivy Scott & Kion You TRANSCRIPTIONS BY Leslie Benavides & Ella Spungen DESIGN BY Alex Westfall

As the women’s liberation movement took off in the 1970s, the Extra! men rallied behind that cause as zealously as they had embraced the anti-war and Civil Rights movements. “To their credit, as soon as feminist issues started arising, then they jumped in, they were behind these things,” Marian conceded. “They talked a better line than they expressed in their work.”

As for the men, they remember the women of Extra! acting boldly during the feminist revolution, suddenly unafraid to call them out for even the slightest hint of sexist behavior. “When you went up to them and you said, ‘Oh, sweetie,’ They’d say, ‘Don’t give me any of this ‘sweetie’ shit, go talk to your men friends!’” Arn recalled. “I mean, they were tough. And some of it was maybe a little extreme, but really they were saying, ‘Hey, look, you men, you have to get your own thing together. You can’t always be crying on our shoulder.’”

Ultimately, Extra! was a space where the women involved felt empowered among their male peers, even if the men often left them to take care of making dinner or mopping the floor. “There was a real sense of community, and I wasn’t used to that, and that was wonderful,” said MaryJane. “I come into this strange town, and I connect with this group of people who are good people, trying to do something good. Such a gift.” +++ Extra!’s radical political aspirations were clear to Marc Sarkady, a young writer from West Warwick who was part of the newspaper’s core. “We weren’t just a reporting instrument,” he told the Independent. “We were an instrument of change.”

As with many young radicals in the late ’60s, the central pillar of Extra!’s impassioned activism was their opposition to the Vietnam War. The newspaper sent several reporters to cover the anti-war protests at both the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in 1968 and the Moratorium in Washington D.C. in 1969. The Extra! issue published prior to the historic Moratorium action—at which over a quarter of a million demonstrators protested the war—exhorted readers to “think about coming down to Washington.”

Extra! wanted to bring Providence to the center of the movement to end the war: “Try to get down for part of the time, at least. Confrontations political or physical, foster unity and show the rest of America that despite our myriad differences, we all share the same basic concerns.”

Extra! members also regularly participated in Civil Rights demonstrations and protests. “There were a lot of discussions about racism in the Providence Police Department, and so we actually formed an organization called COBRA (Community on Basic Rights Action),” Marc, who now works as a political consultant, recalled to the Independent. This organization

1 MAY 2020

was designed for its members to go out into Providence and serve as witnesses, ensuring fairness when the police were called to attend to supposedly suspicious activity.

Those working for the paper also marched, protested, and rallied for local causes. Marc recounted Extra!’s response to a ban on rock music that was instituted in Providence, where the staff joined other demonstrators “playing music in the face of the police at City Hall”: “There were probably a good three or four hundred of us who pranced around City Hall, and they banned us. That led to us deciding that we were going to hold a rock concert, even though they told us we couldn’t,” he said. “We went to Roger Williams Park, told everyone we were going to have music there, and attracted thousands of people. We brought a generator to have music, but the police confiscated it. We held this gigantic circle of probably a thousand people reading this poem, an analysis of our society, and the chorus at the end of each verse was ‘Count me out.’”

At another local protest, MaryJane and her peers snuck into a Providence beauty pageant and unveiled banners that said ‘Liberate Women.’ “I was charged with disrupting a public assembly. When we went to court, there was a woman judge who gave us both six months probation, because she believed that there were better ways for a woman to prove that she is competent, which is true,” MaryJane admitted. “The thing that seemed to be so important back then was to get our ideas out to the public, get on the media as much as possible. We didn’t plan on getting arrested, but we wanted to present the idea to people, to present an option.” +++ Useful Folly, a 1970s documentary by fellow Extra! journalist Robert Rose, featured several staff members from the paper, including Marc as an optimistic twenty-something. “It was almost like we were pushing ahead to try to get some reaction. To try to stop the war, to show people that we meant something, that it mattered, through emotionalism,” he said in the film.

“We were still youthful and adolescents and rebelling against our parents, and many of the acts that we committed were like the government was our parents, and we were rebelling against them.”

Thoroughly anti-establishment, Extra!’s writing and production united local high school students, college dropouts, and various community members behind a common goal of political revolution. The radical motivations of the underground press reverberated throughout these various groups, and disrupted “mainstream” Providence, a largely conservative city in the 60s and 70s. Speaking to the Independent, Patricia Bergantini, who became involved with Extra!

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

as a junior in high school, fondly remembered the community that welcomed her so enthusiastically, and the attraction of a project that stirred up so much controversy.

“My uncle said he would spit on the RISD students, and that would give them a bath,” recalled Pat, now a middle school teacher in the Providence Public School District. “A lot of my working-class relatives, which is basically all of them, hated stuff like that.” For Pat, however, Extra! offered a few nights of reprieve from the stuffy atmosphere of her Mount Pleasant High School classroom. “[Extra!] was a place where you felt accepted, and you could go and talk about things,” she said.

Pat’s involvement with the paper also influenced her increased political activity in school, culminating in a day of in-school suspension after she and three female classmates wore pants to class. Looking back on this act of rebellion, Pat is shocked that her shy teenage self had ever dared to be so bold. Even so, she doesn’t consider Extra! to have transformed her life too drastically. “Arn, Marian, a lot of the kids involved were much more daring than I was,” she recalled. “They had left home, quit school, lived in apartments. I never did that; I would sleep over on the weekends but I always went home to my parents.”

Although Extra!’s nonconformist pedagogy upended the myth of the university as the only platform where intellectual, credible, and productive work could be created, it was still rooted in a local and national student movement. “There was the University of Rhode Island, there was Brown and RISD and Pembroke. We found people in those institutions to help us put out the paper, to write, to sell, to keep us going,” Marian remarked to the Independent. “We would sell the paper down in the mall and in other places around town, and I think a lot of different people from a lot of different walks of life picked it up as a curiosity. We developed a readership, Providence knew about us. We were definitely out there. For two years, we hawked this paper on the corner, and I think that it was probably widely known then.” +++ Extra! staffers followed in the tradition of dozens of other underground newspaper communities of the era, convening in café basements with an old record player, a couple of joints, and a stack of publications from across the country. “There were maybe 40, or something like that. We would take all these papers and we’d digest things that were interesting from those papers. We’d be down there with a Selectric typewriter and typing out the article, pasting it with wax on pages.

We’d work all night.”

Once they completed the week’s issue, Extra!

staffers returned to what Arn called “the basics of [the paper’s] politics”—a communal, countercultural lifestyle that consisted of packing a dozen people into a two story house on Federal Hill and subsisting on “a combination of drugs and rock and roll.” Equal parts archive, debate forum and hippie co-op, Extra!’s multiform workshop was ideal for collaboration. Austere living and a lack of boundaries dividing work from play, however, complicated internal power dynamics at times.

“We all contributed everything we had,” remembered Roger Friedman, one of the few students who worked closely with the paper while pursuing his education at Brown. “We all shared, but that was kind of tough sometimes. I remember needing a new pair of shoes once and having to justify that at a meeting.”

Arn echoed this sentiment with his own recollection of the Extra! people wearing nothing but raggedy clothes, hardly ever going shopping, and essentially living off of brown rice for months.

Extra! was part of “a cultural phenomenon,” in staffer and documentarian Robert Rose’s words. “It guided the community, gave them something to rally around.” The paper functioned as the primary platform through which information about anti-war organizing was disseminated around Providence. Extra! faced serious resistance from the Providence police, who in 1970 attempted to arrest Robert and other staff members under an antiquated law requiring anyone selling newspapers obtain a license from the police.

According to the law, “the police could withhold that license based on the moral character of the individual at hand.”

After the arrest, the case was taken up by the ACLU under Strasser vs. Doorley in 1970. Following a ruling in Extra!’s favor, “even the Providence Journal ran a couple of articles about how we had confronted the city and won,” said Robert. Still, the ‘Establishment Press’ held reservations about the overall mission of the underground paper. A 1969 profile of Extra! By C. Fraser Smith in the Journal’s Sunday magazine began: “The trouble with most of the Underground Press may be the same malaise that affects the rest of the press: It is terribly self-righteous, takes itself seriously to the point of tears, has little fine writing, and, of course, has no sense of humor whatsoever.”

Extra! was staffed almost exclusively by “young, white hippies,” Arn told the Independent. He said that diversity on staff didn’t cross his mind, because “we were just too involved, you know, to be that conscious.”

However, like most white radicals of their generation, the era’s Black liberation movements profoundly shaped Extra!’s political consciousness. The paper’s anti-racist politics drove its coverage of Black political movements in Providence and its publication of local Black activist writers. Unlike the Journal, which covered Black political movements in the 1960s and 70s from a skeptical, moderate remove, Extra! took the social and political concerns of Black communities seriously. But as the staff struggled to find the proper role for a white radical paper supporting Black radical activists, it made choices—like striving for revolutionary white heroism—that some members now see as naïve.

“If you would’ve asked, you know, are you committed to the Panthers? We’d say, yeah, because that was the thing,” Arn explained. “They were the Black Panthers and we were going to be the White Panthers, you know? It was very romantic.” Extra! did

ARCHIVES

06

publish pieces by both the Black Panther Party and the White Panther Party, the antiracist Panther-support organization founded by John Sinclair, manager of the legendary radical Detroit garage rock band the MC5. Extra! also wrote crucial beat-by-beat coverage of the 1968 Black student walkout at Pembroke College and Brown University and gave voice to radical Black critics of the city’s War on Poverty agency Progress for Providence—or as the writer called it, “Progress for Poverty.”

But if supporting the Panthers was the thing, actually having Black people on staff was not. Little trust existed between white and Black radicals in Providence in the late ’60s, and though Extra!’s coverage of Black politics was better than the Journal’s, many Black communities in the city published their own papers. In the South Providence Today and Projection Black, the newsletter of the Afro Arts Center, among others, Black Providence residents could read and publish stories that reflected the breadth of radical Black politics in the city more thoroughly than Extra! ever did.

Amidst these difficult social and political circumstances, zealous activism and a romantic but sincere desire to change the world unified the masthead. In later years, however, it also led to tension. As bail payments for jailed staffers became frequent and expensive, members divided over whether they should arm themselves for protection from the police.

“Our battles with the police kind of ended the paper for us because, at that point, some people on the paper were wondering whether or not they had to start arming themselves in self-defense,” Marian said.

“Some people said, no, no, that is just way too dangerous, as soon as you start arming yourself for whatever reason, you’re dead. They have a reason to come in, blasting their guns. Nobody armed themselves, in the end, but there were heated discussions about that because we were all afraid of what was coming down on us. It just looked worse and worse. And that created a rift between the people working on the paper.”

07

ARCHIVES

The dissolution of Extra! in early 1971 was shocking to some, natural to others, but disappointing for all. “I was devastated,” said Pat, a sentiment echoed in one way or another by every Extra! staff member that the Independent contacted. “It was really, really sad.”

Decades later, some members question the longterm efficacy of their three and half years of grassroots work. “It is hard to talk about all this as serious activism, because mostly we were having fun,” admitted MaryJane, a sentiment echoed by several of the other Extra! staff. Marc said that, on the one hand, it’s possible their protesting “did a disservice to the issues they were trying to speak to and change.” Yet in some ways, he contended, their activism “most rapidly represented those same issues.”

The newspaper left behind an unconventional archive of Providence’s anti-war history, a noble exploration into social justice reporting, and a proud tradition as a member of the underground press network.

The Extra! staff wrote themselves into the history books not only through the rallies and demonstrations intended to make (their own) headlines, but also through the infusion of their writing with strong personal conviction, and the revolutionary verve of the 60s youth counterculture.

Fifty-one years ago, even the ‘Establishment Press’ marveled at the organization that could be achieved by a motley crew of passionate and driven college dropouts and their closest friends.

“One is struck by the tension that newspapering brings to young men and women who are not widely-regarded as well-disciplined or industrious,” wrote the Providence Journal. “Extra!’s quest is a combination of community, truth, and revolution, but it also craves a certain professionalism: it wants to be read as a serious publication, and it wants to promote change.”

Although the Independent won’t be converting the vacant backroom of Shiru Café into an underground political commune anytime soon, we share with Extra! a commitment to journalism that furthers local political struggles, human rights, and social justice. At its

core, Extra! was a group of people wholly devoted to disrupting political standards and redefining cultural norms. Far from self-indulgent, they were part of a community much bigger than themselves, and they eagerly surrendered their time, money, and energy to that community.

As we cap off the celebration of 30 years of publication under the most unexpected circumstances, the Indy People are taking this opportunity not just to reflect on three decades of journalism, or recall our finest or darkest hours, but to recommit ourselves to chasing after the stories we believe are worth telling.

We will continue to ground our work in humility and community, knowing that we won’t always get it right.

Thirty years from now, we can only hope to speak about our own writing with the same refreshing criticism as the Extra! staff; the same self-aware nostalgia, and the same unwavering devotion to slaying giants and saving the world.

The Independent would like to express its gratitude to Arn Strasser, Marian Fish, MaryJane Simpson, Pat Bergatini, Marc Sarkady, John Peck, Gloria Derderian, and Robert Rose for providing extensive interviews for this piece.

Our deepest thanks also go to the librarians at Special Collections at the John Hay Library, who rapidly digitized hundreds of pages of Extra! while Brown University services shut down in March.

THE INDY PEOPLE B/RISD ‘20 think that the Independent should go underground.

01 MAY 2020

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

X

08

AMERICAN-NESS, EVER-ELUSIVE What does it mean to be Asian and American in the United States?

As the number of coronavirus infections and deaths increases in the United States, so too do hate crimes against Asians in America. With COVID-19’s reported origin in Wuhan, China, some Americans have started associating the virus with Americans of Chinese and East Asian descent (our President did too, frequently calling the coronavirus the “Chinese virus,” only later taking to Twitter to slightly back down, but not commenting on his use of the phrase: “It is very important that we totally protect our Asian American community in the United States”).

There is a rising sense of fear among Americans of East Asian descent about the way they are perceived by their fellow non-Asian citizens. Some prominent figures have called for action, including former presidential candidate Andrew Yang.

Yang embodies the dream that so many immigrants chase after: acquiring meaningful higher education, financial success, and stability. My parents sought that dream when they immigrated from the Philippines, seeing substantially more opportunity for mobility in the United States. When I was younger, my mom would be sure to remind me (at the time, a very picky eater) of the opportunity afforded to me being in America whenever I didn’t finish the food on my plate that a hungry child in the Philippines would be more than grateful to have. There is nothing more “American” than pursuing economic prosperity through freedom, hard work, and rugged individualism (maybe with the exception of running for the President of the United States).

In a Washington Post op-ed, however, Yang called for the need for Asian Americans to “embrace and show our American-ness in ways we never have before.” Yang’s call suggests something more than showing patriotic pride. Why do we have to, as Yang implies, prove our “American-ness?” Isn’t being “Asian American” enough to show that, in fact, we are American? What does it mean to be “Asian American”?

What does it even mean to be “American”? Should there be a difference between the two? Where do they converge and diverge? How has the “Asian American” identity been forged? How will it change? +++

KARLOS BAUTISTA ILLUSTRATOR Floria Tsui DESIGN Ella Rosenblatt

09

NEWS

It’s December of 1969: More than 300 Asian Americans take to San Francisco’s streets to participate in a peace march on the moratorium of the Vietnam War. These protestors have not been calling themselves “Asian American” for that long—the term was first coined one year prior. In the decades leading up to the first usage of the phrase “Asian American,” White Americans had been content to refer to Asians in America as “Oriental,” bolstering the Western view of Asia that scholar Michael Keevak describes as “seductive, mysterious, full of pleasures and spices and perfumes and fantastic wealth.” This patronizing view of an alluring exoticism gave White Americans justification for othering Asians in America, silencing their voices in any important cultural or political discourse.

The new term had been created as a rejection of that derogatory “Oriental” tag. “Asian-American” was coined in 1968 by Yuji Ichioka, an activist and historian at the University of California, Berkeley and founder of the Asian American Political Alliance. Ichioka also created the term to organize a pan-ethnic, political coalition composed of formerly disparate groups.

These groups included Cambodian Americans, Indian Americans, Japanese Americans, Korean Americans, Laotian Americans, and Vietnamese Americans, among many others. Inspired by the success of the Black Power Movement, Ichioka saw potential in a coalescing of these diverse Asian communities under

shared history and aspirations. These aspirations consisted of advocating for socialist policies, anti-imperialism, the Black Liberation Movement, and the Women’s Liberation movement. While Ichioka and the activists he mobilized hoped that the term “Asian-American” would increase visibility for every American with Asian roots, that hasn’t exactly panned out. Most Americans associate “Asian American” with East Asian. In a study conducted by the National Asian American Survey in 2016, 42% of White Americans polled believed that Indians were “not likely to be” Asian or Asian American; 27% of Asian Americans polled answered the same. Though Ichioka wanted “Asian-American” to be as inclusive as possible, that just hasn’t happened. Even the use of the hyphen in the term has been subject to debate. While grammar experts view the exclusion of the hyphen as improper, community activists have argued that the use of “Asian” as a modifier diminishes their identity, giving the “American” part of the term more importance. In 2019, the Associated Press bid farewell to the hyphen in their stylebook guidelines, giving what proponents of the change describe as equal status for the “Asian” and “American” parts of Asian American identity.

Since the movement in the sixties, the Asian population, composed of people identifying as Chinese, Indian, Filipinx, Vietnamese, Korean, Japanese, Pakistani, Cambodian, Hmong, Thai, Laotian, Bangladeshi, Burmese, Nepalese, Indonesian, Sri Lankan, Malaysian, Bhutanese, and Mongolian, has seen the fastest growth in the United States, according to the US Census Bureau. “Asian American” has been used as a catch-all term to uniformly (mis)characterize this massively diverse and extensive group of people in the United States. The term is meant to encompass a myriad of ethnicities, cultures, and languages, from a swath of different nations on an enormous continent.

There not only exists an inter-diversity among different Asian groups in America, but intra-diversity within those groups. Numerous religions, languages, dialects, income levels, and sexual identities can be found in just one ethnic group. However, the usage of the term rarely captures this mosaic of Asians in America.

While understanding American identity can affect any American of Asian descent, second-generation Americans of Asian descent face unique challenges while assimilating into American culture. The model minority stereotype is one of the historic root causes for these challenges. While the stereotype appears laudatory in portraying Americans of Asian descent as intelligent and well-adjusted, it perpetuates the false notion that this “model minority” is without meaningful problems. This stereotype also creates a pressure to assimilate, painting the “model minority” with a shiny veneer that endorses the perceived benefits of acculturation and the cultural capital that comes with English language proficiency and comfort in greater white society. For second-generation immigrants from East Asia and the Philippines, growing up and forming a sense of self is met not only with the external weight and pressure to succeed, but a dissonance between the collectivist and family-oriented culture belonging to their parents and the liberal, rugged individualist culture that American society demands. This dissonance, this constant in-betweenness, provides ripe opportunity for intergenerational conflict and interior turmoil.

Second-generation immigrants feel the weight of cultural alienation from both their non-Asian and Asian peers. Studies from the University of Florida and the University of Chicago examining second-generation immigrant youth from East Asia and the Philippines have found that Americans of Asian descent experience feelings of social exclusion from

1 MAY 2020

their non-Asian peers. This alienation doesn’t come from non-Asians alone. Among second-generation youth there can exist a derogatory view of Asians who closely associate with their ethnic background as “fresh off the boat.” On the other hand, Asian youth who exhibit more “Americanized” qualities can be perceived as “white-washed.” Despite the negative connotation of the latter tag, second-generation youth seem to develop a preference for America’s liberal and individualist offerings, disparaging those who belong under the former tag as backwards and unequivocally “un-American.” +++ Ingrid Ren, a Brown University student who grew up as a second-generation Asian American in a Bay Area household with Chinese parents, described the inevitable assimilation of second-generation immigrants into American culture. “It’s complicated. If you immigrate anywhere, a certain assimilation will take place.”

While she wouldn’t expect her experience to be true for every person in the Asian community in the Bay Area, she remarked on how the second-generation Asian youth around her felt that a desire to become more American went hand-in-hand with a desire to internalize and externalize whiteness growing up. “They thought, when they were in elementary school, that when they grew up, they would be white. They would start out as a child who is Asian, but they just had the idea that when they were an adult, they would be white,” Ingrid said.

This desire for whiteness isn’t specific to just Chinese and East Asian people in America. Kiara Pornan, a Brown University student who grew up in a Filipino household in San Diego, reflected on how perceived whiteness and “American-ness” impacts the Filipino-American identity. “There’s some fundamentally American part of Filipino identity, and that American part is also fundamentally anti-Filipino, xenophobic in general, based in imperial colonialism,” she said. The lingering presence of American colonialism in the Filipino consciousness makes the distinction between American culture and Filipino culture unclear. The paradox of the Filipino-American identity lies in its desires to submerge itself in favor of valuing American culture, whether it be consuming Western media, the lust for quintessentially American goods, or the purchase of skin-lightening products.

“Part of our culture is being dark and wanting to erase that,” she added. “A lot of Filipino culture is chasing literally whiteness and White American-ness, so to fully accept one will always be a rejection of the other.”

Filipino identity in America becomes especially complicated when considering the long history of Western imperialism and subjugation in the Philippines. After over 300 years of Spanish colonial rule, the Philippines came under American rule in 1898 following the Spanish-American War. Americans viewed the Philippines as “The Pearl of the Orient,” foreseeing the strategically valuable location of the islands for wartime operations and trade with East Asia. America would see its role in the Philippines as a moral one. America viewed itself as a generous benefactor for the ignorant, uncivilized, “barbaric” Filipinos, instilling a Western-centrism that built on the vestiges of Spanish Eurocentrism and racial hierarchy. The United States encouraged “benevolent” assimilation into American culture and values on multiple fronts, ranging from establishing a public education system akin to America’s (that encouraged the erasure of the Filipino language in favor of English, further imposing Western values and education as the ideal) to the maintenance of American

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

economic interests in the Philippines. While America granted the Philippines independence in 1946 after World War II, American-ness pervades the Filipino consciousness. “We don’t have access to our culture before American colonization and Spanish colonization so we don’t even know what is Filipino and what is not,” Kiara reflected. Western colonialism’s influence on the Philippines has produced a culture seeking to erase itself. In viewing the United States and the West as the gold standard, Filipinos value American culture over any non-American aspects that belong to a specifically Filipino sense of identity. The more American or Western you are, the more likely you are to take part in traditional American prosperity. Despite this valuation and the Filipino desire to emulate America and the West, there’s a double-bind at work here—“We still don’t feel completely accepted by America so we can’t feel completely accepted by ourselves,” Kiara added.

Ingrid and Kiara shared bewilderment at the rise of reported hate crimes against Asian Americans during the COVID-19 pandemic. Ingrid shared how those reports felt “surreal” to her. “I really thought we were past this by now,” Kiara said.

While Ingrid and Kiara described the lack of an easy solution to the surge of hate crimes, they weren’t fully sold by Yang’s idea of what Americans of Asian descent should do. Kiara expressed deep criticism for Andrew Yang’s call. “This all read to me very much as, ‘come on guys, we got to show the White people that we’re good, that we’re the good guys.’ I don’t know why that’s my responsibility. Why do I have to show you that I’m American? What does that even mean?

And why don’t you have to show me?” Kiara’s observation here shows that “American” isn’t simply a state of being for non-White Americans, but a status that has to be earned at every turn and can just as easily be taken away. “We have to go out of our way to be fucking American and [White Americans] just are,” she added.

The rise of hate crimes against Americans of Asian descent is far from self-contained and anomalous.

The politicization of the pandemic could create more and more challenges for Americans of Asian descent.

Many communities, families, and individuals will face difficult choices if they continue being perceived as an un-American danger to fellow citizens. +++

or you resist acculturation, not only risking social othering but also untempered vitriol and violence. The continuation of an ongoing acculturation could lead to the further deterioration of Asian identity to appease burgeoning oppressive White nationalism and a painstakingly white vision for the ideal American citizen.

We need to closely interrogate our construction of what it means to be American and assess how fundamentally white it is.

The complexities this pandemic will bring to understanding American identity won’t only be faced

by Americans of Asian descent. Although the coronavirus infects across all class and racial boundaries, Black, Brown, and undocumented populations have been disproportionately impacted by COVID-19, with the coronavirus infecting and killing populations of color at higher rates and undocumented and mixedstatus families being left out of federal stimulus aid (to name just a few injustices and inequalities). The fabrics holding our society together will be fundamentally changed in the coming months and years, and with that comes the potential for reevaluating what it fundamentally means to be American.

My parents are American citizens. They immigrated from the Philippines in search of economic opportunity and a better quality of life. For them, ensuring that I had the best chance to partake in that opportunity and better quality of life meant raising me to be as “American” as possible. They didn’t want to teach me Tagalog or Filipino. My parents were worried that if I had learned to speak their native tongue, I would have picked up their Filipino accents, or even worse, that I would have found it difficult to learn and speak English. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve noticed how distanced I am from my Filipino heritage—but I don’t blame my parents. They were well-intentioned and had more-than-valid concerns. But I wish the America they live in—and love and cherish—didn’t necessitate those concerns in the first place. America prides itself on being a cultural melting pot, but American-ness fits within agonizing and narrow confines. We need to recognize those confines and break them down. To say that this is a tall order would be a gross understatement, but, hopefully, we can come out of this crisis with a more inclusive and diverse vision of what it means to be American.

KARLOS BAUTISTA B’23 has gotten less picky with his Americans of Asian descent may find themselves food. caught in a Catch-22. Either you assimilate and appease,

NEWS

10

WHEN WE ARE APART WE ARE NOT ALONE WHEN WE ARE APART WE ARE NOT ALONE

In the first issue of the semester, we published a reflection on Fred Moten and Stefano Harney’s The Undercommons, a book that holds us close, that insists we unlearn and relearn how to study, and that “more than anything else, offers itself as a social space: where phrases and sounds and citations collide, gathered from the world and given to the world. The book invests its hopes in those collisions, in the touch between people and objects and words that—though fleeting—changes everything.”

In the months that have passed since then, the transformative “touch” has assumed a different, darker meaning. For the final issue of this volume, we reached out to both scholars to ask how they’re reacting to the present moment. They were kind enough to share some thoughts on the distances of the pandemic, the demands of institutions, and their long-standing collaboration. We invite you to enter the stolen time— the groove, the pulse, the swing—of their words.

The Indy: Where are each of you right now? How are you and how are you absorbing and responding to these times? Are you teaching and how are you teaching?

Could you talk a little bit about how the two of you have off your workforce. There never was, and still there is kept conversing and collaborating across time and not. No factory inspector reports will ever change that. space?

We say all that so we can also say this. Universities Moten and Harney: Well, when we are apart we are don't owe communities anything. Universities don't not alone. We are apart but with others, elaborating on owe and they don't have, or participate in, communiour partnership through others and coming together in ties. When has the university ever been anything other different configurations. There's no sociality without than an institution devoted to the nasty innovations coming together because being apart tempts you to we describe above? Universities don't owe, they oblithink you are alone, rather than a part. It is capitalism gate; they don't give, they impose. They're like almost that is social distancing. We want to hold each other, as all of the other institutions where workers go to work. our friend Fumi Okiji says, "without holding each other Going to work in one—whether you are a student or to anything." That's our thing. Capitalism's thing a professor or a janitor or a groundskeeper or a bookis locks and distancing and shortages. We can't lose keeper or a librarian or anyone else trying to live and sight not only of the fact that the healthcare systems eat and study and resist administration and the call to of the world need to collapse, but also that we need to administer—doesn't make you a bad person or a good take back into our embrace not just our health but our person. It makes you part of a workforce with varying ill-health, and hold them until this nefarious distinc- levels of consciousness regarding the duress you're tion is gone. Because that distinction is a product of under. As things stand now, if you don't know, you're the healthcare system, which in turn is just the institu- getting closer to knowing. The university can't owe. It tional fix at work in the artificial divisions of capitalist doesn't know how. It doesn't know how to know that owing is good and owning is bad. We're interested in society. what we owe to ourselves and part of that is bound up You are already collaborating, the three of you, in with all we've had to take from the university as well as a way that revolts against individuation. But watch all we have to take back from the university. what happens as you move up through the institution, whether the university, the hospital, the government, The Indy: We are interested not only in what univerthe NGO, the creative firm. Improvement, advance- sities owe their communities, but also in how we ment, recognition are all individuating tools brought might orient ourselves toward the university so as down on people by their very commitment to improve, to be complicit in, as you say, the “most corrupt way advance, reform, repurpose the institution. That's possible”? To that end, what frameworks do you find one place where the struggle is, to remain within and helpful in thinking through how we might demand of, against, but really against, to be complicit in the most shelter in, or otherwise “steal what we can” from the university? corrupt way possible.

Moten and Harney: Stefano is in Brasilia and Fred is in New York City. It's not unusual for us to be in different cities and usually also different hemispheres and continents. We do spend as much time together and with our other collaborators as possible but for us, being apart changes the balance. When we are together we hang out. We have a good time. When we are separated we write together. So on the one hand these times are not that different. They are also not that different because we both hang out and write and struggle in the general emergency. In that emergency the sirens have not stopped for 500 years. In that emergency you The Indy: Your comments on this distinction between shelter, but together, and not in place, but on the move. health and ill-health are striking, because for weeks now we’ve been receiving emails from our adminisFred is teaching. Stefano was fired from his teaching trators about protecting the “financial health” of this job in Singapore last June. He tried as much as possible institution. This language of health has always been to deserve it. As a result Stefano has not entered further yoked to racial capitalism’s governing logics of safety into online teaching, although this was for a long time and order. Our rapid (re)turn to austerity reminds us, a facet of business school teaching anyway. Fred is too, of your previous work on the mutuality of debt— now in online mode for the first time, participating in a debts that in their endless flight can never be paid reality that has long been in place not only in business back or made good. We’re seeing stories about historic school teaching but also in community colleges and shortfalls and deficits, and hearing calls for deferral for-profit higher education, where students who work and forgiveness. What do universities, in particular, or who have otherwise been excluded from the tradi- owe their communities right now—a time when they tional college experience, with all its amenities and all have (literally) reneged on their promise of shelter? of its structures of abuse, have been trying to get what And how might “owing” as a condition help elaborate they need from, or share their needs in, the university. a world in the aftermath of this (general) emergency?

We have neither advocated for the joys of the classroom, as if they were accessible to all and all good, nor Moten and Harney: At the risk of being too blunt have we abdicated our responsibility to radicalize that about it, what has been the American model? What space for work and play; but neither have we either are its terms of order, as Cedric Robinson would say? simply accepted the imposed protocols of distance The American model is to stay one step ahead, be the learning or rejected them from the position of moral- leaders, the change makers, the disruptors, in one istic hedonism that professors often occupy and from thing and one thing only. America is number one, and which they often do their professing when they have always has been, when it comes to absolute surplus what is generally thought to be a good job at a good value. Why? Because the terms of order have been school. Being on the move and in shelter together we constructed in America to allow the model to work try to work with what we got and with whom we're held, people to death. America pushes the boundaries of against the grain of this new imposition of scarcity but innovation when it comes to working people to death. in enjoyment of the leveling it has induced.

Now of course other parts of the world try this too. But we're number one. Because we have always underThe Indy: In the last section of The Undercommons: stood that if you are going to experiment with working Fugitive Planning and Black Study, you talk about study people to death you have to be able to replace them as “what you do with other people. It’s talking and quickly. And you have to replace them cheaply or the walking around with other people, working, dancing, advantages you got from stretching your workers to suffering, some irreducible convergence of all three.” death will be lost. If you can sustain that, you have There’s a powerful physicality to many of the images in what is called a healthy economy in America. It's as the book, a sense of liveness and shared space, though true in Brazil as in Haiti as in the US or Canada, but we don’t mean to imply that the concept privileges of course the US is always the first mover. New World certain forms of being together over others. But we’re slavery operated that way. The latifundias operated curious about how our practices of study can accom- that way. Oxnard farms operate that way. InstaCart modate the kind of distances between people that feel operates that way. Because in the American model the heightened and involuntary at this moment, whether introduction of relative surplus value regimes serves that’s a matter of time zones or geography or “context,” not to replace absolute surplus value strategies but to whatever that might mean. The two of you met in extend them. Because in the American model there college, and now teach on opposite sides of the world. is nothing wrong with the absolute surplus value as a We're currently writing you from three different cities. strategy, because there is nothing wrong with killing

11

FEATURES

BY Zach Ngin, Alex Westfall, & Sara Van Horn ILLUSTRATION Alex Westfall DESIGN Ella Rosenblatt

Moten and Harney: This is still something we think about all the time, and part of how we think about it is contained in our answer to your compelling next question. But let's start with that phrase 'steal what we can.'

Of course, we've had deans thinking it meant we were going to be taking the copy machine out the back door.

But as we're sure you understood it, the main thing we are talking about stealing in those passages is our time—our groove, our pulse, our swing, what Amiri Baraka calls our boom boom ba boom, and our capacity to shape all that. Of course, we're really talking about stealing it back. And this is not a formulation about overworked professors, though of course the university tries to extract more and more from all its workers.

It is about all the folks who labor under administration—the main workforce, students, the administrative staff, the custodians, cooks, etc. And what will we do with this stolen time, brutally processed into labor and then labor power, when we expropriate it? First, turn labor power back through the individual laboring body and into the work and play of common animated flesh engaged in common practice. The question all this turns on is can we be more than Fanon's outlaw?

Remember how he writes about the colonial outlaw as a hero of the people, not because he or she possesses a revolutionary consciousness, according to Fanon anyway, but because that bandit rejected colonial authority and the rule of colonial law. In other words, how can our rejection of the law of the university be something more than this individual and ultimately symbolic resistance?

Well, it's tempting to say that we can't. It's tempting to say, with a certain well-wrought critical self-loathing, that we have built nothing outside the university, that our work means nothing outside the university, that the way we act implies that we don't need our communities (except to write about them as source material), that we only wish to provide 'policy' to our movements, so that our solidarities beyond the university can be summed up simply—we don't live with or even near our people, and our people make no claim for us, or upon us, for understandable reasons, given how we have behaved. It's tempting to say all that, because it's true and the pandemic is going to prove it. It's tempting to set out on that outlaw, buffalo run with our stolen

01 MAY 2020

E

E

labour, knowing you'll have nowhere to go and no one to go with you, leaving you in a state of constant, lonely, neurotic demand, where you can be your best self or live your best life or at least live the life of the one one who's not bad, not complicit, though all the performance of that goodness ever seems to lead to is a frenzied, serially filed petition to share the governance of the institution that maims you. Yes, it's tempting to say all that, because it's all true. It's just that way more than that is true. We’re trying to learn from those who refuse to let it be completely true. Because the thing is, what we're trying to steal back, what was stolen from us, never belonged to anyone. It's what we share.

The Indy: Much of your work stages a collision (or "complicity," to use your word) between prose and poetry, aesthetics and politics, theory and praxis.

These are fraught distinctions to hold, but we wanted to ask how you conceive of the entanglement of theory and practice right now. Within and against the models of individual authorship that the academy offers us, what makes theoretical work worth doing?

Moten and Harney: We guess we will see what becomes of the university-art world industrial complex as capitalism attempts to consolidate itself in the face of this pandemic. When this complex is humming it has its own version of bringing these things together. It specifically manages to do so on the grounds of content provision, vertical integration, and product innovation. The genius artist and the critic who is supposed to know about him is a favorite combo of distinctly separate entrees. So we try to work differently with our friends who are artists, entering the art practice instead of certifying it. This is something you can see in our friends Arjuna Neumann and Denise Ferreira da Silva. The films they make blur things, even as landscapes are as clear as daydream across the screen. But part of it is that if you are really committed to working collectively you have to give up some of your preciousness around style. You have to experiment, and the

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

A CONVERSATION WITH FRED MOTEN AND STEFANO HARNEY

only thing you know is that acceptable academic style is a machine for individuation and must be roundly rejected. Of course, as you say, we are complicit in this workplace, and so sometimes we have to use some of it and deal with being used and abused by it. But everything from citation, to copyright, to authorship, to giving public lectures is designed to individuate study.

We wanted to study, to be embraced by black study, and sometimes, when we try hard, and in the company of our friends, we find that our practices of gathering, of thinking together, of moving together, of investigating things together, begin to differ from those of the university, even within the university as we try to work our way out of the university, to retire, to go on recess, to find ourselves, and then lose ourselves, in a fundamental antagonism between black study and the university, and between the aesthetics of black study and the museum, that we can share and cultivate.

struggle opened up and were not cut off by the privileging of the job. But we, on the other hand, were in danger of thinking the university was special, our jobs were special, and therefore of cutting ourselves off, not only from other sites and solidarities of struggle but from the work itself, from study. So our early collaborations were a matter of helping each other to shake off the individuating, delusional idea of the lone, critical, subversive intellectual and his or her self-appointed importance. Study is important precisely because it is not special. Academia—which is to say the university as a business, which it has always been, and as an institution that does what Kant calls the regulatory business of the understanding—fosters this being lost in how special the university is, either as especially good or as especially bad, and therefore fosters this sense in academics of how special we are. And this is to say that what is fostered is a particular mode of alienation, the student's estrangement from study. We are lucky to The Indy: We first encountered your collaboration in have each other and a whole league of people who keep the form of The Undercommons, your book from 2013. trying to pull us out of that.

Has your collaboration taken other forms since then?

We’ve heard that you have a forthcoming volume, All ZACH NGIN B’22, ALEX WESTFALL B’20, and SARA Incomplete, and would love it if you could tell us a little VAN HORN B’21 are sheltering together. about that project.

Moten and Harney: Our collaboration is based on 30 years of friendship, though it was only something we ourselves really came to notice through writing together, something that began more like 15 years ago.

At first we wrote just to figure what the university job had done to us—like auto workers might talk about how the job gave them asthma or bad backs. But we had more work to do than auto workers, because we had fallen prey to that strange attachment not just to the job but to the workplace. The great militants of the auto plants like General Baker never had those illusions. They were not attached to General Motors or Ford or to the industry. The job was just where they fought. It was just the site of revolutionary struggle and because it was just, and only, such a site, other sites of

FEATURES

12

DOOMED BY DESIGN MAYA GLICKSMAN ILLUSTRATION Eliza Macneal DESIGN Ella Rosenblatt

Picture the forest from our favorite philosophical thought experiment—if a tree falls in the forest, but no one is around to hear it, does the tree make a sound?

Some believe that, regardless of human presence, we can trust the tree to ‘thud’ when it hits the forest floor.

Others argue that perception is central to the concept of sound, that human experience is key to the way humans define reality.

Now, consider a modern anthropological twist to the riddle: If a powerful hurricane floods a vast swath of land, but no one is around to get hurt, can we still call it a disaster? +++ The devastation caused by Hurricane Katrina in 2005 still looms over the collective American conscience.

The storm and resulting flooding killed over 1,800 people and left millions without proper homes to return to. New Orleans’ geography makes it naturally vulnerable to hurricanes, but harm is unequally distributed along racial lines. The most vulnerable neighborhoods are situated deepest in the low-lying floodplain and are often low income and communities of color. The Lower Ninth Ward experienced flooding up to 20 feet deep, where the residents were 96 percent Black in 2005, although the city as a whole was 59 percent Black.

Further north, though, whiter parts of the city lived on naturally protected hills, leading to shallower flooding and lesser destruction overall. The city was designed to place poorer communities of color on the front lines against powerful storms like Katrina, buffering the impacts for the white folks who lived uptown.

In the aftermath, with New Orleans facing over $160 billion in damage, political disputes hindered decision-making for recovery and relief. Evacuation proved logistically difficult and, again, amplified racial disparities. While the majority of white families fled at the first sign of danger, 60 percent of Black households lacked a personal vehicle to drive out of harm’s way. FEMA, our Federal Emergency Management Agency, didn’t deploy public buses for evacuation until six days after the storm hit New Orleans, slowly transporting car-less families to safety. Still, hundreds of Black flood victims were forced to walk up Highway 90 to the neighboring town of Gretna, where armed police officers and helicopters threatened violence and forced them to turn back.

Slow and too-little-too-late evacuation plans came under such harsh scrutiny that FEMA Director Michael D. Brown was forced to resign. The prolonged suffering following Katrina revealed that our nation was not prepared to recover from disasters of this magnitude, and that marginalized communities bear the brunt of its shortcomings.

In the 15 years since Katrina, Superstorm Sandy and Hurricane Harvey devastated the communities

13

SCIENCE+TECH

they reached. In the fall of 2012, Sandy bombarded the East Coast, killing nearly 170 people and creating at least $70 billion in damage. Densely populated areas in New York and New Jersey were hit hardest, where 14-foot storm surges drowned streets, subway lines, and beloved beaches. In the summer of 2017, Hurricane Harvey flooded a third of Houston, damaging 135,000 homes and leading to 88 deaths. The storm created at least $125 billion in damage, second only to Katrina in American recorded history. Climate change will only increase the frequency and intensity of these storms in the coming decades.

These disasters are connected by more than the erratic forces of nature. In each case, powerful natural phenomena prey upon the vulnerabilities that already exist in the communities they target. They expose the weaknesses in the infrastructure we deem “prepared,” the naïve human impulse to respond rather than prevent, and the environmental racism baked into urban planning. +++ Humans once attributed disasters to acts of God: unforeseeable, unavoidable, and unrelenting in their destruction. Powerful tsunamis, church-crumbling earthquakes, and deadly pathogens terrorized human civilization when they came, and only an almighty God could be responsible for the chaos that ensued.

Despite a general shift toward secularism, this flawed logic remains largely intact today. We see hurricanes and earthquakes as acts of nature, still just as unforeseeable, inescapable, and indiscriminate in their destructive wrath. Humans have developed better technologies to predict and respond when disaster strikes. Yet we still speak as if our communities exist at the whims of the natural phenomena that plague our home planet—as if there is simply nothing that we can do to stop them.

But a growing body of scholarship suggests that’s not true at all. Disasters as we know them are inherently defined by the loss of human lives, valued infrastructure, and community wellbeing. Still, we build cities that put these things at risk. We prioritize human convenience, economic growth, and structural attempts to conquer our environments. In doing so, we create a network of vulnerabilities which make us more susceptible to natural phenomena that can become disasters. Further, we divert the worst impacts to socially vulnerable communities. Disaster is the climactic culmination of our existing systems of oppression, injustice, and hubris.

Disaster, then, stems from a failure to design cities and infrastructure with respect for the environments they occupy. It is a byproduct of modern society’s pace, convenience, and economically driven paradigm for development. It’s a burden our society creates, then

diverts to already marginalized communities.

The storm isn’t the disaster. It’s the preexisting cracks in our infrastructure, our systems of inequality, and our unwillingness to respect our environments that allow hurricanes and infectious diseases to become disasters. +++ The Dutch have embraced this paradigm of humanmade disaster, building resilience into cities for decades. The majority of the Netherlands sits along or below sea level, its geography carved by coast-bound rivers and their many tributaries. These features make the Netherlands particularly vulnerable to flooding, storm surge, and sea level rise. The Dutch government spends over a billion dollars per year on flood infrastructure, paving the global path toward robust adaptation, disaster mitigation, and water management solutions. Today, the face of Dutch water solutions is that of a man named Henk Ovink. A renowned flood expert, special envoy to the United Nations, and world’s only “global water ambassador,” Ovink is an international sensation in the world of water management. He lives by the notion that disaster is humanmade and travels the world to “preach the gospel” of prevention.

The world is watching as Ovink spearheads the movement to build resilience into Dutch cities. First approved and implemented in 2006, his “Room for the River” program aims to create space for the country’s natural river-driven geography to minimize vulnerability to people. The program is an assortment of several development projects and plans for land-use reform, all founded upon the virtue of building with nature. The program designs infrastructure to meet urban societal needs without interfering with natural processes or putting communities at risk of disaster.

First and foremost, the program widened river channels and surrounding floodplains to give stormwater buffer space to fill before spilling out onto the community. The program also subsidized the relocation of farmers and families living in the most vulnerable riverside regions of the floodplain. Of course, relocating communities is a complicated, sensitive, and sometimes unjust process. It took years of tearful negotiation before the floodplain was fully evacuated, but the overarching sentiment among prior residents appears to be one of understanding, fairness, and opportunity.

In addition, the program birthed one massive, $500 million storm surge barrier where the Rhine River meets the sea in Rotterdam to protect the city from the worst of storms. Other modified dyke systems and flood channels were constructed to protect residential areas from water as second-level reinforcements for the widened river. Ultimately, the program

1 MAY 2020

UNNATURAL DISASTERS, FROM KATRINA TO COVID sets a high standard for integrating environmental needs, community safety, and climate adaptation into urban design, acting as a valuable model for cities across the globe.

As the world looks to the Dutch to build our own resilient futures, Ovink reminds us that the Netherlands has not always been immune to flooding disasters. In the winter of 1953, the Netherlands endured their own devastating hurricane. Prior to 1953, the country’s primary defense against flooding was a series of levees and dykes initially built in the 13th and 14th centuries. The Dutch relied on these dated, wall-like structures as their only prevention strategy, heightening and reinforcing them over time. But when the great 1953 storm hit, the levees and dykes collapsed.

Warnings were issued by radio in the middle of the night, but most people were asleep in their beds when the water arrived. Over 1,800 people were killed and 200,000 houses destroyed. To this day, the 1953 flood is remembered as the most destructive disaster in Dutch history.

In the decades that followed, the Dutch learned from the failures of the dyke system and used disaster as an opportunity to rebuild smarter. Just weeks after the flood, a Delta Committee composed of the best Dutch civil engineers was formed to inhibit future large floods. Prevention, proactivity, and resilience came to dominate the country’s attitude toward disaster, laying the groundwork for innovative, disaster-resilient planning.

The country’s commitment to building smarter and working with nature has paid off. In the 67 years since the great 1953 disaster, not a single person in the Netherlands has died due to flood. +++

The US’s approach to disaster is entirely different from the Netherlands’ paradigm of prevention. The American approach favors responding to the aftermath of disaster rather than forward-thinking adaptation, leaving already marginalized communities to bear the weight of existing urban injustice. FEMA is notoriously criticized after any and all disasters in the US, often for inadequate funding, slow response, or the wrong relief measures entirely.

Katrina and the turmoil that followed completely exposed the flaws in FEMA’s priorities while distributing aid.

FEMA allocates funds for disaster-recovering cities to rebuild themselves exactly as they were prior to disaster, replicating vulnerable infrastructure in vulnerable places without adaptation. Homes and infrastructure are not rebuilt stronger, communities are not moved out of floodplains, and the disproportionate burden on low-income communities and communities of color is not lifted. While FEMA should

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

be held accountable for its responsibility to aid recovering communities effectively, the American disaster paradigm places too much responsibility in the hands of post-disaster relief agencies to begin with.

We know that cities like New Orleans are vulnerable to hurricanes and floods. Yet even as disastrous events reveal precisely the cracks, injustices, and mistakes built into our current mitigation strategies, we’ve failed to prepare those cities for future storms. +++ Now, in April 2020, we’re living in the chaos of a different type of storm. The coronavirus has flooded the planet with fever, fear, death, and grief all at once. Over 200,000 people have died of COVID-19, the disease caused by the virus, as the global tally of confirmed cases exceeds 3 million (and counting). Our global economy has effectively shut down as hospitals run out of beds and the masses scramble to protect their health.

The US is now the global epicenter of the virus, and a haze of uncertainty has descended upon marginalized communities as they struggle to avoid infection.

Folks with compromised immune systems and pre-existing respiratory conditions are most vulnerable to the virus, amplifying existing health disparities along racial lines. Low income neighborhoods and neighborhoods of color, already disproportionately affected by poor air quality and asthma due to unjust environmental planning, are more susceptible to the virus.

These folks are more likely to depend on continuous income from in-person work and live in densely populated neighborhoods, making social distancing difficult and increasing the risk of exposure. In Chicago, Black people make up only 30 percent of the population, but nearly 70 percent of the city’s coronavirus deaths.

The case of the current pandemic is different in that infectious disease is not inherently tied to geographic location—some places are more vulnerable than others, but the virus has transcended physical boundaries of all kinds. While we can’t predict when an unseen pathogen will surface and begin to spread, scientists and public health officials knew a pandemic like this was coming. A new infectious disease has emerged somewhere in the world every year for the past three decades (SARS in 2002, H1N1 in 2009, and Ebola in 2014, to name a few). The recent centennial of the 1918 Spanish flu, which wiped out nearly 5 percent of the world’s population, only heightened fears of an impending crisis. Ed Yong of The Atlantic even predicted the disastrous impact of the “next plague,” right down to the scarcity of ventilators and how Trump’s “tendency to tweet rashly, delegitimize legitimate sources of information, and readily buy into conspiracy theories” would be disastrous. Rather than ramping up public health measures and bolstering

existing healthcare facilities given the likelihood of a pandemic, public health programs remained underfunded, underattended, and underprioritized. Supply chains for life-saving medical supplies were fragile, and average hospital preparedness remained a low priority. Like we've failed to protect New Orleans from inevitable hurricanes, we've failed to prepare public health programs and our broader healthcare system for a contagion of this magnitude.

The American attitude and approach to disaster management requires fundamental reform, beginning with the way we understand how our social conditions enable disasters like Katrina and COVID-19. Disasters can no longer be reduced to supreme acts of God or nature.

They are acts of society, and they are not natural at all. +++ Like the Dutch in the aftermath of the 1953 flood, we have reached a crucial moment in choosing our nation’s future. Following their lead, we must use powerful disasters like Katrina, Sandy, Harvey, and COVID-19 to shift our cultural relationship with our environment and promote resilient planning. We can build cities that are resistant to disaster. We can reform our healthcare system to protect us from whatever pathogen comes next. But first, we must look inward at our flawed institutional value systems: our acceptance of environmental racism in city planning, our post-hoc approach to disaster management, and our unwillingness to coexist with the natural ecologies that surround us.

As climate change fuels environmental chaos, we can’t stop the storms from coming. But if we shift how we understand disasters and hold ourselves accountable for their underlying causes, we can learn to coexist with our natural vulnerabilities. In order to promote lasting, robust disaster mitigation efforts in American cities, we must look inward and uproot these structures which make us vulnerable to disasters. In the end, it’s our choice.

MAYA GLICKSMAN B’20 is working on her own resilience.

SCIENCE+TECH

14

On Track?

An increasingly broad body of social science research demonstrates that educational tracking— the separation of students by evaluated academic ability—disproportionately disadvantages low-income students and students of color. In her seminal book Keeping Track, Dr. Jeannie Oakes reports that “poor and minority students are most likely to be placed at the lowest levels of the school’s sorting system.” Education expert Beth Hatt connects tracking to re-segregation: Black students are overrepresented in “low ability” classes as early as preschool, and Black and Latinx students “are only half as likely as white students to be placed in a class for the gifted even though they may be equally gifted.”

Within the Providence Public School District (PPSD), which is 91 percent students of color, the high-ranking test-in magnet Classical High School is disproportionately white. White students comprise 25 percent of its student body—more than any other PPSD high school. Mount Pleasant’s, Hope’s, and Central’s student bodies are six, five, and four percent white, respectively. Classical thus has, proportionately, about three times as many white students as the overall district, and around five times as many white students as Hope, Mount Pleasant, or Central.

Classical is also the PPSD high school with the lowest percentage of economically disadvantaged students, at 59 percent. At Hope, Mount Pleasant, and Central, 86 percent, 87 percent, and 88 percent of students, respectively, are economically disadvantaged, according to the Rhode Island Department of Education (RIDE).

Tracking in the PPSD begins much earlier, however, with a fifth grade standardized test of reading, writing, and math skills used to stratify students into different class levels, or tracks. Fifth graders who score at or above the 85th percentile and/or who obtain a proficiency with distinction score in any subcategory on the New England Common Assessment Program (NECAP) “pre-qualify” for a middle school Advanced Academic Program and receive application packets.

Those who score similarly on the SAT-10, another standardized test, are also invited to apply. All others are not.

It was the fifth-grade NECAP, along with the required application, report card records, teacher recommendation, and parent nomination, that placed Heather Argueta on the ‘gifted’—later renamed the ‘Advanced Academic’—track at Nathanael Greene, one of three PPSD middle schools that offers an accelerated program.

In addition to advanced math, English, science, and social studies classes, the Advanced Academics (AA) program at Greene boasts of “stability of faculty,” specially trained teachers, project-based learning, a Science Olympiad, “enrichment opportunities,” and after-school programs.

Ability grouping was first introduced officially in the 1890s by the then-president of Harvard as a way of making teaching more effective. Defenders of tracking similarly uphold class separation as efficient for teachers and more rewarding for highachieving students. However, in their book on the inequalities driving the achievement gap called Despite the Best Intentions, sociologists Amanda E. Lewis and John B. Diamond cite significant research over the last 30 years that suggests highachieving students in accelerated programs benefit not from classroom separation, but rather from the extra resources (like the after-school programs and ‘stable’ faculty in Greene’s AA Program) they receive once categorized as ‘advanced.’ Different educational opportunities between tracks contribute both to ‘advanced’ students’ success and to a widening achievement gap. Lewis and Diamond note, “The achievement differences between those in high and low tracks grows over time no matter where students begin in terms of test scores.”

There is ample basis to question the equity of standardized test scores. As journalist Mariana Viera put so eloquently, “When we accept the myth that these tests are merit-based, we also accept the idea that race and class gaps in standardized-test results...are due to individual and group shortcomings, not structural ones.” Not all students share the same chances to score well, given the disparities in

15

METRO

BY Mara Cavallaro ILLUSTRATION Jessy Minker DESIGN Daniel Navratil

Advanced Academics and the Pipeline to Classical access to resources, support, and structure both inside and outside of school. Wealthier students have access to test prep and tutoring that others do not. Standardized tests are also often designed with white test-takers in mind. From elementary school to the SAT, standardized exams have been criticized for pervasive racial and socio-economic biases. +++ The brochure for the Advanced Academic Program at Greene Middle School advertises that “upwards of 75 percent of its students” are accepted to Classical High School each year, comprising “a large percentage of the Freshman class” at the test-in public magnet. The flyer—designed for ten-year-olds and their families—highlights the prestigious colleges attended by alumni almost a decade after their acceptances to AA: Brown, Harvard, Tufts, and more.

After having been classified as ‘gifted’ and studying for three years in advanced classes at Greene, Heather Argueta applied and was accepted to Classical. While an exceptionally hardworking student, Argueta also exemplifies the snowball effect of tracking. Students tracked into ‘gifted’ programs for sixth grade are more likely to receive increased academic attention and opportunities, facilitating their entry into Classical and, later, top colleges.

Argueta’s curriculum in middle school better prepared her for Classical’s entrance exam than a ‘regular’ course load would have. The dozens of Advanced Placement (AP) and honors courses offered at Classical exposed her to the rigorous academics of the colleges listed on Greene’s AA Program flyer. At Classical, Argueta was able to take AP classes in history, biology, English, Italian, calculus, and environmental science. She was also on the debate team, performed theater, and played violin.

Argueta knows she was tracked for success.

“The classifications separated us,” she told the Independent. “Kids placed in the ‘gifted’ program were more the ones who applied and got into Classical, and those placed on the ‘regular’ track were more likely to go to Hope, Mount Pleasant, Central.” As Argueta explained, students’ middle school classes, high school experiences, and chances at college were shaped by standardized tests taken at 10 years old. +++ The Rhode Island Department of Education’s (RIDE) data on the PPSD suggests that Classical students receive a higher quality education than their peers at every other Providence high school.

RIDE’s ratings are based on ELA and math achievement and growth, proficiency in English, graduation rate, absenteeism and suspension, postsecondary success, and number of subgroups of “critical communities” that are performing below level.

Subgroups include racial/ethnic groups, students with disabilities, English language learners, and low-income students. The Department’s Technical Report explains that a school’s rating is drawn from its lowest categorical score.

Classical was one of only two PPSD high schools that dodged a brutal one-star out of five ranking—which “identified [schools] for comprehensive support and improvement”—from RIDE

in 2018-19. The other, E-Cubed Academy, a small school offering Summit learning, which includes personal learning plans, received two stars.

Classical received five stars out of five.

Classical offers 24 distinct AP courses. Mount Pleasant offers eight, and both Central and Hope offer only five. Argueta herself took seven AP courses in high school, a feat simply not possible at Central or Hope. Little surprise then, that in 20182019, just 6.8 percent of Mount Pleasant students, 10.9 percent of Central students, and 14.4 percent of Hope students were enrolled in at least one AP course. By contrast, 52.1 percent of their peers at Classical took at least one AP class.

The prevalence of APs at Classical suggests a higher quality of teaching and support at the expense of other students. Stanford researchers detail a trend of more experienced teachers being assigned to advanced classes, while their less experienced peers are assigned to “lower-achieving” students.

Students at Hope, Central, and Mount Pleasant, like all students, deserve the very best education— one that prepares them for top colleges if that’s what they seek to pursue. As I sat in Hope guidance counselor Lynn Harrigan’s office in December, a senior strolled in to ask about the College Board portal.

Harrigan beamed and proudly introduced him as one of her best students, explaining how he made it to the top of his class after immigrating from Cape Verde without his parents and learning English. “If [students] can make it through that, they can make it through Brown,” Harrigan says. “They have so much fortitude. That shows so much more than test scores.”

Yet, while Classical has averaged three to five acceptances to Brown each year for the past ten years according to Louis Toro, the Director of Guidance at Classical, it’s been over a decade since a Hope student has been admitted to Brown. Lynn Harrigan shuffles through a crate of yearbooks in her office to verify—the last Hope student admitted to Brown was Ana Almeida, in 2008. Mount Pleasant hasn’t seen a student accepted since 2003, according to guidance counselor Melissa Lipa. +++ Heather Argueta graduated from Classical in 2016 and was admitted to Brown. She expects to receive her Bachelor’s degree in Health and Human Biology this May. Where would she be had she not aced the NECAP? If she had gone to Hope? All students deserve the same access and opportunities, yet most in the PPSD are told in fifth grade that they are not ‘gifted’—that they, like their classes, are ‘regular.’ They are tracked into support classes, then deprived of the resources and college-access opportunities reserved for their ‘gifted’ peers.

Advanced academics that encourage achievement and enhance educational opportunities should be universal. A National Education Policy Center report states that when enriched curriculum is accessible to all, both high and low achieving students benefit. As long as spaces in these programs are limited, however, we must critically analyze the bases for admission and the role of tracking in reinforcing racial and economic inequality.

MARA CAVALLARO B‘22 wants to be a teacher but doesn’t like apples.

01 MAY 2020

N

ear the beginning of Garth Greenwell's first novel What Belongs to You, the narrator checks into a seedy hotel on the Bulgarian seaside with his travel companion, a charismatic hustler. Rather than allow for any semblance of a vacation, the decrepit resort town backdrops the breakdown of the men’s drainingly transactional relationship. “[A]s I watched the motion of the sea I recuse myself, thinking bitterly oh, what have I done,” the narrator laments. Thereafter, the the work bears witness to his estrangement as both a foreigner adjusting to life in a new country and a gay man grappling with childhood traumas and adult tragedies.

In Cleanness, Greenwell’s newest release, the air is noticeably more buoyant. While the narrator takes a similar romantic excursion into the Bulgarian mountains, this time the vacation is bona fide. The Soviet-era lodgings are still shabby, the internal monologues are still thick and brooding, as his relationship with a boyfriend faces uncertainty. But amid the rolling hills, he is deeply in love—and it’s finally reciprocated. Now, Greenwell seems interested in what’s seemingly a feat in queer romantic life: a relationship in equilibrium.

From his home in Iowa City, where he currently teaches a seminar at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop on Queer Aesthetics, Greenwell graciously spoke to the College Hill Independent about Cleanness, queer literary tradition, and some future projects.

think about.

The Indy: More specifically, your narrator is a gay foreigner living in Bulgaria. How does one build a home in alienation, or what does it mean to build a home as a foreigner or a queer person?

GG: That’s a profound question, and I think that’s the kind of question that makes me want to write or make art—the kind of question I don’t feel like I have the tools to address in argument or logic or reason but I kind of need the weird pressure of art to think about.

Home has always been an incredibly vexed question for me: the possibility of home, the availability of home. There’s a way in which, and I think it’s true for my narrator and I think it becomes evident in the structure of my first book What Belongs to You, the alienation that the narrator feels is a kind of home for him. The alienation that the narrator feels in Bulgaria is very resonant with the memory of the alienation he felt in the places that supposedly were his home in Kentucky.

The question of home comes up in Cleanness a couple of times. When it’s clear that he’s returning

space, or that space of subjectivity is something that interests me. This queer subjectivity that feels newly available—where if someone has rejected the homophobic lessons they were taught and can recognize that queerness is a source of joy, of pleasure, of sociality, of love, of art-making and yet still recognizes the ways they are shaped by lessons that they’ve rejected. That kind of space—a space that is not bound by shame but is not free from shame— and acknowledging that space and trying to explore the complexity of that space is something that feels urgent to me. It feels deeply wrong to me, that pressure that is sometimes put on queer people to deny shame. When a rhetoric of pride becomes coercive, I think it becomes very dangerous.

I’m interested in looking at emotions that are often understood as purely negative—things like shame, or rage, or abjection, or even the desire not to be, which is a desire that characters in Cleanness express. I'm interested in looking at these negative emotions and seeing how, in fact, they can be put to productive use and can be made productive of values, of sociality, of joy, of pleasure, of art, of things that I care about and feel grateful for.

The Indy: You’ve hinted that your next work is going to be a book set in the South—which is very exciting!

As someone who also grew up in the South, it was quite a brutal place to come of age. But I was wondering, what parts of Southern culture and life do you find compelling or even redeeming?

The Urgency of Shame A conversation with Garth Greenwell

The Indy: What are the themes at the core of Cleanness?

BY Jacob Alabab Moser & Evan Lincoln DESIGN Matt Ishimaru

GG: Cleanness explores three or four years in the life of an American teacher living and working in Sofia, Bulgaria. I think about the book really being about intimacy of various kinds. A lot of the discussion of the book has centered on sexual intimacy, but there’s also the intimacy of student/teacher relationships, the intimacy of friendship, and also the weird intimacy of citizenship—what it means to belong to a particular place and the intimacy that creates.

to the United States, one of his students asks the narrator, “Are you excited to be going home?” and the narrator recoils from that and feels like returning home is not what he’s doing, and maybe not an option for him. One of the few times he uses “home” affirmatively he is referring to shame, to a feeling of shame, that affect like a kind of home for him. So I don’t know, I don’t have an answer to that question, but I do think it’s a question I’ve been thinking about in both books I have written.

The Indy: Your narrator is an English teacher in Bulgaria, and he’s also learning to speak Bulgarian and adapt to the culture. Outside of fiction, you also write criticism about books in translation. I was wondering what interests you about issues of translation, language, and communication across cultures? Also, how many languages do you speak?

The Indy: I’ve heard you speak about the impact of queer shame in your work. In your book, the narrator goes on a trip to Venice with his boyfriend.

During that story, he briefly makes reference to Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice. When you write, how do you see your self engaging with other works of queer literature or a canon, if there is one

GG: I studied a lot of languages, in part because I love studying languages, and in part because in college I was studying opera, so studying the major European languages was a part of the curriculum.

I speak Bulgarian, French, and Spanish. Spanish is the language of the household—my partner is Spanish. I can also read in Portuguese, though I don’t speak it anymore. I also studied German and used to speak it fairly well, but now don’t speak German at all.

I love learning languages in part because I love this weird space of consciousness that is created when you’re living in a language that you don’t speak perfectly—that constant transactional space between language opens up an interesting mental space for me, a space that feels fruitful and that interests me to explore. As someone who is, as my narrator is, very invested in a certain mastery of language, or a certain elegance or eloquence of expression, I’m really interested in what happens to someone who is invested in that in those ways when that’s taken away from them, and other ways that communication can happen.

It also seems to me that the kinds of misunderstandings and misprisions that can happen, that do happen, are built into that space of having to communicate in a language that you speak imperfectly. Those misunderstandings and difficulty of communication make visible the endemic difficulties of communication. It’s really hard to understand what we mean, and working in a foreign language just makes that more visible and easier to

GG: Canon is an interesting word, and I’m kind of anti-canon in the sense of canons as being something backed by institutions. I think canonization is a function of various kinds of structures of power.

I’m never interested in canons, but I'm really interested in conversations, and I’m really interested in traditions. A tradition is different from a canon for me. Etymologically, tradition means “handing down,” and I do think of a tradition as something that’s transmitted in a more interior, personal, less institutional way. I think of a tradition as being a conversation among artists across time.

A desire to be part of the conversation of queer literature is really central to my motivation for writing. Giovanni’s Room, Death in Venice, Mrs. Dalloway—these are books that are constantly in my head and that I'm constantly in dialogue with. I’m also aware of the way in which my books are asking similar or the same questions that Giovanni's Room is asking, and yet, I'm also conscious of the ways in which those questions are differently valenced or the answers to those questions are different.

Around the issue of queer shame, David’s experience of queer shame in Giovanni’s Room is bound up with a desire not to be queer and is bound up with a great deal of anxiety about understanding why he’s queer and figuring out whether he might be able to change that. That kind of shame is completely absent from my narrator: never does my narrator want to be straight, never does my narrator really identify shame with the fact of his queerness.

There’s a way in which that psychological

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

GG: I would never have thought that I would write about Kentucky because I left when I was 16. I hardly ever went back. I thought of it very much as a place I escaped, as a place I ran away from. For 20 years, I thought I knew everything I could possibly want to know about Kentucky, that I had nothing to learn about the place. If that’s my attitude towards a place, I can never write about it. That’s an attitude of disdain, knowingness. Any settled feeling prevents me from writing about something.

I went back to Kentucky in 2016 when What Belongs to You came out. I went back largely because my father, whom I’m estranged from, left Kentucky. That made it possible to go back to the city [of Louisville] on the book tour. I spent about 10 days between Louisville and Lexington and the experience that I had was one of amazement at how Louisville had changed and also how it looked different to me in my late thirties. My reaction reminded me of the reaction I had to Sofia…In fact, it was infinitely more mysterious and complicated than I thought at 16.

For this next project, whose completion is still very far in the future, I started spending time in LGBT historical archives in Kentucky. I spent about six weeks going everyday and looking at these materials. What was a revelation to me was just so stupid because of course queer people are everywhere, and therefore, queer history is everywhere. [I found] this incredibly rich queer history of Kentucky that I had no access to when I feel like it could have been key to my survival when I was 13 or 14 or 15. It’s been incredibly moving to me to dive into that and to learn more about this place.

A place like Kentucky never needed to be redeemed. Human places are always complex places; they’re always places of infinite value. I think what needed to change was my ability to feel.

I feel really grateful to the sense I have now that my hometown, and with it, the whole world of my childhood might be things I don’t have to run from. It might not even have to be something that I have to confront in an adversarial way, like how I tried to in the middle section of What Belongs to You. It might be a source of richness and it might be something I’m grateful for. That’s a radically new possibility in my life, and I feel excited by it.

This interview has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.

JACOB ALABAB-MOSER B'20 and EVAN LINCOLN B'21 are now, too, listening to Björk's "Black Lake."

ARTS

16

P

CONSIDER THE LOBSTER (AGAIN)

eter Brodeur was only a few miles away from his home on the Narrow River in Narragansett, a seaside community in southern Rhode Island, when he first smelled oil. He was returning home from a trip to Maine, where he had been checking out a new lobster boat. It was 1996, and the lobster industry was booming in Rhode Island. Lobstermen were catching the red crustaceans at an all-time high, and Peter was making a bet that his boat would pay for itself, as long as his traps stayed full.

At first, he thought the smell was coming from his new diesel truck, but as he sped down toward the water, the stench of oil became stronger. “That southeast breeze brought the smell of that oil spill from that barge all the way up to where I was living,” Peter told the College Hill Independent. “The phone was ringing, I got on the phone. Everyone said there was an accident.”

It was January 19, 1996—a moment of crisis for RI lobsters.

Off the coast of southern Rhode Island, a few hours before Peter smelled oil, the tugboat Scandia was plowing through 20-foot waves and gale force winds.

Behind her, the Scandia pulled a barge, the North Cape, carrying 94,000 barrels of #2 heating oil due for Providence. The winter storm came quickly and unexpectedly out of the south. According to Peter, the wind “took the ocean and turned it into root beer.” The Coast oil spill. For decades, fossil fuels have traveled past Guard broadcast gale warnings up and down the East Moonstone Beach peacefully, to burn in homes, cars, Coast, one level below hurricane. and power plants, emitting greenhouse gases that But for the Scandia and its precious oil cargo, it was have warmed our planet. The spill was only the most too late. visible symptom of an illness that has been impacting At 1:20 PM, a fire began in the engine room of the Rhode Island lobsters for decades: a warming ocean tug, later attributed to lackluster maintenance by the due to human-induced global warming, led by fossil owners. Distress calls went out, and the entire crew fuel companies that have put profits above climate. It’s of the Scandia abandoned ship. Six men dove into the those warming waters—say scientists, government roiling seas and were later saved by a Coast Guard officials, and lobstermen—that have really doomed rescue swimmer, but that left the unmanned barge, Rhode Island lobsters, and the working-class lobster the North Cape, floating helplessly in the vicious winter industry, in the end. storm. Two members of the Scandia’s crew bravely volunteered to go back on the barge, to try and set off +++ the sea anchor that could keep the North Cape from grounding, but the anchor was tied down, and waves Peter Brodeur grew up in the Oakland Beach neighborand fog washed over the deck, making it impossible hood of Warwick, near the now-defunct Rocky Point to release. The men were saved by the Coast Guard, amusement park. “I didn’t particularly care for school,” one jumping onto a rescue ship, the other lifted off the Peter, now 74, told the Independent. “I more or less barge early the next morning by a helicopter. gravitated towards the beach, and I loved to go down At 6:00 PM, the unmanned barge hit Nebraska along the beach and dig clams.” A love of the water, Shoal, a jutting reef only a few miles from Point Judith, born in the muddy tidal flats of the Narragansett Bay, home of the largest fishing port in Rhode Island. Over has shaped Peter throughout his life. the next few days, more than 800,000 gallons of oil A few years after high school, Peter joined the broke free of the North Cape’s ripped hull, dispersed Navy, and after finishing his service in November deep underwater by the crashing waves. Emergency of 1968, he returned home to Rhode Island. He got workers watched helplessly from the beach. The winter married and, after a few years living in Providence, storm was too powerful to mount a containment was soon back out on the water, fishing for lobster. “In operation.

1979 when I started, I bought an old Novi boat, and you The day after the spill Peter went to haul a string could kind of go out, close your eyes, and as long as you of lobster pots he kept inside the harbor refuge at Point didn’t aim the nose of the boat towards the land, you Judith, only a few miles from the accident. Each pot could set your lobster pots and be back in a few days was full to the brim with baby lobsters, much too small and have lobsters,” said Peter. “In fact, back then you to keep. It was weird. Traps don’t catch small lobsters, could catch 1,000 pounds [of lobster] a day.” as release vents on either side are meant to allow the Over the years, Peter bought larger and larger youngsters to escape. “I’ve never seen that before or boats and more and more pots. The going was good. after in my career,” Peter told the Independent. “Those There was little government regulation, he made juvenile lobsters would normally never be in the enough to support his family, and there was a sense of traps.” He went out with a scientist the next day, and, camaraderie and excitement that came with fishing. with a permit from the state, began hauling up all the For Peter, lobstering was a way to leave behind the traps around the oil spill. Every trap was full of baby troubles of the mainland—to make for bluer, cleaner, lobsters. It was inexplicable. “That one barge changed simpler waters, where one could spot whales, jellyfish, lobstering around here dramatically,” Peter told the and schools of fish speeding by the side of the boat. For Independent. “Lobstering was good before that. After, Peter, lobstering wasn’t a job, but a vocation, a way of it was never quite the same.” life.

Over the next few days, as the winter storm In 2020, however, it’s nearly impossible to make continued to pound the beach, the sea lifted lobsters a living fishing only for lobsters in Rhode Island. from the ocean bottom and threw them onto the shore, Narragansett Bay, which was once full of lobsters, is dead, their gills full of oil. Locals were confused why so now mostly empty. “Nowadays, a good day is that you many lobsters—thousands, maybe millions—covered catch 300 pounds,” Peter told the Independent. Many the beach. They had never seen that kind of devasta- lobstermen now set up their traps for other species, like tion before. Scientists later estimated the spill killed crab or whelks, or do other types of fishing during off nine million lobsters, but lobstermen like Peter claim months. Fishermen who fish only lobster find themthe numbers were much higher than that, and that the selves pushed further and further offshore, setting oil companies persuaded the scientists to fudge the traps in deeper and cooler water. Over the course of numbers. one lifetime—within a span of 40 years—a thriving The Providence Journal filled pages and pages with industry has become a struggling one, with a once coverage of the oil spill and its aftermath, but the story lucrative fishery now on the brink of collapse. not being told by the Journal, and most media, was the one lurking under the surface—global warming. The +++ tale of the catastrophic decline of the lobster fishery in Rhode Island doesn’t begin or end with the 1996 “No one knows how long a lobster can live,” said Rick

BY Peder Schaefer ILLUSTRATION Sophia Meng DESIGN Sara Van Horn and Matt Ishimaru

CLIMATE CHANGE PUTS RI LOBSTERS IN HOT WATER

17

METRO

Wahle, a professor in the School of Marine Science at the University of Maine. Wahle has been researching lobsters for decades, including as a postdoc in stints at Brown University and the University of Rhode Island, when he studied lobster populations in Rhode Island.

Since then, he’s come up with techniques to better survey lobster populations, helping to track changes in the fishery up and down the East Coast.

The American Lobster, Homarus americanus, if left undisturbed, can grow up to 25 inches in total length and over 40 pounds. Lobsters begin life, however, much smaller, as one of thousands of tiny eggs on the tail of a female. The fertilized eggs, once they hatch, go through three planktonic larval stages in the water column before finally transitioning into bottom dwellers. Here, among the dark nooks and crannies at the bottom of the ocean is where a young lobster will spend the beginning of its life molting, feeding, and growing—as long as they don’t pick up a disease or find themselves on a dinner plate in Boston or New York.

Lobsters don’t thrive everywhere, however; temperature is important. In waters above 68 degrees Fahrenheit, lobsters begin to struggle: tissue growth slows, the immune system stops working, and the risk of potentially lethal shell disease increases. Shell disease kills lobsters slowly, preventing them from molting, causing secondary infection, and in extreme cases, rotting away the entire shell, leading to death.

“You can think of lobsters having this optimal temperature they want to live at,” Wahle told the Independent.

“You get much above that, and they start to suffer physiologically…Just as the demand for oxygen is increasing, the capacity for water to hold oxygen is decreasing, creating a kind of double-edged sword.” Wahle explained that as the water temperature increases, the metabolic demand for oxygen in lobsters also increases, but at the same time the carrying capacity of water to hold oxygen decreases, putting lobsters in a tough spot.

Water that is too cold also poses problems. Below 50 degrees Fahrenheit, larval development stops.

There’s a “temperature envelope,” between 50 and 65 degrees, that is ideal for lobsters.

“You can think of New England as straddling the two sides of the lobster comfort zone,” said Wahle.

“Southern New England has been on the warmer end of that comfort zone, whereas eastern Maine and the Bay of Fundy have been on the cold side of that comfort zone. As the climate has been warming, the southern end has seen an increasing number of extremely warm summers, and that’s been detrimental, whereas the same warming process in the northern part of the range has had a positive effect, bringing lobsters into that goldilocks zone.”

Rhode Island and Narragansett Bay were once lobster heaven. The 1980s and late 1990s saw some of the highest numbers of lobsters caught in traps on record in Rhode Island, even in the years directly after the North Cape oil spill. But as waters warmed after decades of human-induced climate change, lobsters began to struggle. Recruitment, or the settlement of new baby lobsters, slowed, and lobstermen began to

1 MAY 2020

catch less. +++ To understand the scope of changes to the lobster fishery, it’s important to survey the lobster population. In the 1990s scientists began to develop survey techniques to count the number of young lobsters, a good way to track the future health of the species in a specific area. Lobsters don’t have growth rings, making it almost impossible to calculate the age of a lobster from its size. Instead, the best way to measure the population is by measuring the number of youngof-the-year lobsters—the tiny, cricket-length lobster babies that have fallen to the sea floor after a month of drifting along as larvae in ocean currents.

“We can use that pulse as an early warning system for trends in the fishery,” said Wahle. “It’s sort of like following kindergarteners to eighth grade…The pulse of baby lobsters coming every year is a good signal of the lobster fishery five, six, or seven years later.”

Measuring the numbers of young-of-the-year lobsters, however, is difficult. They’re tiny, the length of half a pinkie finger, with itsy-bitsy little claws. Wahle came up with the idea of doing suction sampling— essentially using a giant underwater vacuum cleaner to suck up all the organisms in a particular section, a quadrat, of the sea floor. Suction sampling is done by divers in shallow waters at the end of the settlement season, sometime in late August in Rhode Island. For deeper waters where divers can’t reach, scientists measure young-of-the-year lobster populations using metal cages filled with cobbles, creating an artificial lobster habitat. They pull up the cages, much like a lobster pot without bait, and measure all the lobsters they find inside. Together, the data allows scientists to paint a picture of how well the lobsters are reproducing and what the population could look like in the future.

In Rhode Island, the future does not look bright. A study done in 2015 by Wahle, DEM scientists, and RI lobstermen compared data on young-of-year lobsters collected in 1990 with data collected in 2011 and 2012.

The results were clear: the number of young-of-year lobsters in Rhode Island is falling, with the remaining juvenile populations found further out to sea, in deeper and cooler waters. The study shows a direct correlation between warmer waters in the upper and middle Narragansett Bay and the fall of baby lobster populations. Temperatures in Narragansett Bay have been rising by half a degree per decade since the 1970s.

Those warmer waters have, over time, pushed lobsters out of the bay.

“Since the late 1990s and 2000s we’ve seen a precipitous decline in the Southern New England lobster stock,” Dr. Conor McManus, a deputy chief and researcher at the Rhode Island Division of Marine Fisheries, told the Independent. The reality that warmer waters are hurting lobsters creates difficulties for sustaining fisheries in Rhode Island. Government regulations can only control the harvest side of the fishery by regulating the number of lobsters that fishermen are catching. It’s tough for little Rhode Island alone to control the slew of environmental

and was mandated by federal law to help restore local fisheries. Eklof spent millions of dollars on a lobster population restoration project that sought to return lobsters numbers to what they were before the oil spill.

Over 300,000 female lobsters that could bear eggs were bought from distributors and thrown back into Rhode Island waters to strengthen the breeding stock.

Lobstermen also worked with the state to develop a v-notching program, a system of marking lobsters caught bearing eggs that allows the breeding stock to grow. V-notching has been practiced for decades in Maine and is often cited as a successful way to continue growing the lobster population.

“But v-notching didn’t seem to help at all,” Peter told the Independent. “There was no uptick in the lobstering after that, even eight years down the line, when the eggs should reach maturity.” Instead, Peter said, the population has continued to diminish, with the remaining concentrations of lobsters far offshore.

Despite the efforts of lobstermen, fisheries managers, and scientists, lobster populations in Rhode Island continue to decline because of warming water caused by emissions of greenhouse gases. “There’s no silver bullet here,” Wahle told the Independent. “You can stave things off for a while, you can capitalize off positive effects, but at the end of the day, the climate is changing and it’s becoming increasingly inhospitable to lobster. We’re not entirely in the driver's seat here from a management perspective.” +++

Lobstermen, scientists, and fisheries managers may not be in the driver’s seat, but the fossil fuel companies that have spent decades polluting our planet certainly are. By pumping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere,

despite being aware of the damage they were causing, companies like ExxonMobil and Shell have created the environmental catastrophe that has hurt working-class folks, like lobstermen, who make a living off the sea. In 1978 James F. Black, a senior scientist at ExxonMobil, made a presentation to corporate management in which he said “there is general scientific agreement that the most likely manner in which mankind is influencing the global climate is through carbon dioxide release from the burning of fossil fuels…

Present thinking holds that man has a time window of five to 10 years before the need for hard decisions regarding changes in energy strategies might become critical.” Similar kinds of internal research were done at Shell. Fossil fuel companies have been aware of the damage their products can cause for decades, yet have chosen to lie, deflect, and bribe to keep their businesses afloat.

The effects of global warming can sometimes feel diffuse and hidden, but less so for those who are directly impacted, like the lobstermen. In the years after the North Cape oil spill, money from the settlement went toward an effort to replenish the lobsters, but the species was already declining because of other, more structural, less easily seen environmental changes.

For lobstermen, global warming is not a matter of climate justice or saving polar bears, it’s a matter of job security. A smart policy to combat global warming and hold fossil fuel companies accountable is not about climate change in the abstract—it’s a way to keep good jobs in Rhode Island.

Peter said if he were a young man today, he wouldn’t want to go into lobstering, but for now he keeps hauling pots, catching lobsters, and selling them to a curious public right off the back of his boat.

“It’s not a real job,” said Peter when asked what lobstering meant to him. “A lot of people say if you like what you do, it doesn’t seem like a job. Well, that’s the way I feel about it, so that’s why I still do it. The bait is dirty, smelly, the job is tedious, but you see an awful lot.

You may see different fish go by, or dolphins may follow you home, jumping around the boat. The whole thing is interesting to me, and if I seem emotional about it, I am. That’s why I do what I do.”

PEDER SCHAEFER ’22 thinks baby lobsters are pretty cute.

changes, principally warming ocean waters, that are dooming the fishery.

The executive order signed

by Governor Gina Raimondo in 2019 mandating that the state move to 100 percent renewable energy by 2030 only goes so far in combating the interconnected, capital-driven, global crisis that is climate change. “We’re tasked with trying to rebuild a species in a situation where commercial harvest is not the driving force,” said McManus. “We can’t drop ice packs in the ocean, and there’s no cure to shell disease that we know…There’s no management tool to battle some of these environmental impacts.”

That’s not to say lobstermen haven't tried management techniques. After the 1996 Cape North oil spill, the company that owned the tug and barge, Eklof Marine Corp., was found liable for the spill in court

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

METRO

18

PM-P She will be sporting one of her two pairs of cow-print boots and knitting her third sweater of the day when she explains the Red Scare drama to your film class with the deadpan delivery that you’ve always aspired for. She is prolific in her work, and in all likelihood, is illustrating a whole Indy issue and churning out some New Yorker comics at the very moment. She

might cook you a three-course dinner when you’re a timid little freshman, or toast you at your first Indy banquet, and she’ll definitely be there when things go wrong and you just can’t manage to finish your illos on time — she was for me

EC Should you ever need directions, look for EC. She’s dressed like a particularly hip early modernist, even though she hates old shit; you can find her at the intersections of art and technology, blonde and redhead, and folk and rock. She knows both where everything is and the scenic route to get there. She can echolocate copies of City of Quartz and ‘90s Helmut Lang garments at a distance of several miles and will pursue both relentlessly. One time, she knew from Find My Friends that this TTW (toe

tag-writer) was late for the Bolt Bus five minutes before they missed it, because, having laid bare the empty fantasy of escape from surveillance capitalism, EC avails herself of the technology at hand. /EC knows where she’s going with so much conviction (and joy, and laughter, and come on! gestures) that you know you have to follow her. Without EC, it’s hard to imagine how anyone at the

LB is an old soul. No, not because of her texting habits or ability to make friends twice her age. With snakes all around her, LB isn’t afraid to mow the whole damn lawn.

But behind that discerning eye, you’ll find a fiercely loyal and warm friend, ready to talk you through a bad week or dance the night away (only if you put on callaíta, though). Maybe we’ll achieve your level of wisdom and generosity someday—or at least realize how lucky we are to have you. In the meantime, I wrote you this story. Maybe it’s a speculative future:

LB shuffles to a nearby duck pond to toss some stale bread onto the lily pads. She sits on a dandelion patch by the bank. Has she been here before? After a few moments, an old friend stops by.

By old friend, I mean bird. The friend is a bird. And it won’t stop squawking. Leave me alone, LB tells it. But it won’t stop. Please don’t squawk so loud. It’s not listening. As LB moves to stand up, the bird goes silent. I guess it’s time to say goodbye. LB meanders down her path home and the bird doesn’t follow. Finally, some fucking peace and quiet.

AJ There are the motifs of our cultural mythology, that exist solely within our shared college ecosystem, and there are those who walk among us working tirelessly to create them. One of these greats is a beloved member of the indy, founder and maintainer of the @sci_li instagram, whose bio reads, in melancholic truth, “I’m not ugly I’m just misunderstood.” Amos, this is a thank you for the dedication to an emblem, for loving something widely hated, for being its beholder.

Conmag during copy is incomplete without an Amos in overalls and a perfectly color-coordinated outfit down to the socks (in the palette of indy cover art) (an aesthetic I can only describe as Clippy-from-MicrosoftWord pastel alternative, does that make any sense?)

TH I’ve had the unusual experience of getting to know TH in his absence. In fact, I’m writing this from his bedroom.

We only met a few months ago, spending most of the semester as acquaintances. Thanks to a chance run-in on the day we were told to leave campus, I’ve spent the last month and a half living in his apartment, literally sleeping in his bed.

of moving into his space, I’ve learned that TH starts every day with a podcast and cup of French press. Hailing from the Sunshine State, he got through New England winters using one of those sun lamps.

Another of his investments was a communal planter for the kitchen, which last week yielded a handful of red cherry tomatoes that starred in a caprese salad we devoured in his honor.

EM When I met EM, she was cool like a camp counselor.

During the first year I knew her, she had, to me, the sort of aura that the SENIORS girl in the opening scene of Dazed and Confused does to the freshmen she terrorizes (booty shorts, organized group activities). It wore off with time, the feeling of being her camper. By the end of freshman year I felt like EM’s sister in a sorority for girls who wrote their Shakespeare papers while smoking a joint with tweezers. And now,

after two years of living with EM in a sun-drenched apartment, tiptoeing by while she meditates (Great posture!), delighting in her fantastical mind (Warrior cats! Moderator possums!), and watching her squint to identify passersby on Williams (She never has her glasses but she can’t fucking see!) we have to say goodbye to Providence, where the only constant over these years has been each other.

EO Eve has the magneticexpressive quality of an old-school Hollywood closeup: a shadow passes over her face, then a ray of light. She arches a brow.

Then grimaces. She looks all around from behind dark eyelashes, and the plot thickens… Her gestures and the things she says are all highly condensed like this. This density makes her inscrutable, and glamorous in the totally naturalistic way of all protagonists played

by movie stars (for example, her clothes are the opposite of costumes in that they fit elegantly, not signifying anything external, just referring back to her). She smiles knowingly, detective-like, picking up clues, noting them down in a secret script…There are many mysteries to solve (:…

Things that are serious, but also very funny… (: … haha!

TH is someone with enviable routines–a generous kind of person who takes care of the people around him, including himself. From his former roommate, one of the best parts

Dear TH, thank you for everything. Forgive me for killing your bonsai.

IR Here she is; there she goes.

She works hard; she plays hard. She’s got it all under control. But then, a rose or a tear blooms on her cheek; it’s all too much; she falls over; she falls asleep… She wakes up! Like an “icon,” her “aura” increases with representations or multiplications. Like in a video game, with the jingling sound of bursting bubbles or golden coins: petals, bandaids, and crumbs are popping off her long clothes and leaving a trail….*Candy wrappers glint in the fluorescent light of the Rock*… She’s a good shopper and a good reader, so she knows how to pick things

out, which is basically what (being) “charming” is. Maybe, you *collect a candy wrapper and pocket it*, hoping it will make your world more charmed, too.

But don’t be fooled: More than a consumer, she is a “produser.”

A laser lights in her gray eye. At the Rock, she stares down the hill, very still. She’s both looking at her reflection and way, way, farther…You can see the many tabs opening and closing in her mind. There’s the faint, tinny sound of guns blaring from her headphones; she can’t hear you.

But then, she turns, very warmly: Do you want to hear a story? Do you want to watch a video?

CS Sometimes I like to imagine a medieval town somewhere in a sad, below-sea-level part of Europe. A town constantly bombarded by marine fog, so small and wooden, it could be easily missed by important people passing by on horseback.

Back then, I imagine people saw God everywhere.

The image of life– from quiet donkeys to wailing babies– came streaming continuously down from a divine conscious, all at once above the world and within it. Inevitably some people took this reality as an opportunity to fear everything.

They separated the saved from the condemned. But others, like this peasant woman, went from one flock of sheep to the next, reveling in the glory of

Here, I think, is where Claire, or rather some kind of transcendental incarnation of Claire, began. And from what I can tell, it starts with a young, cryptic peasant woman, chasing Natterjack toads on the outskirts of civilization.

a countryside, totally, literally, swathed in divine energy.

Centuries passed. God died, though it turns out he never counted much in the first place. Against all the odds, the spirit of this peasant lady remained and became Claire: present, brilliant, selfless, and sensitive to the world. She is polite in her mischief. Warm in her judgment. Hilarious and considerate, God save the Indy when she leaves.

–MG

Amos, since you’ll no longer be designing the indy, would you design my life? And on your way out the door, flash us one last cheeky grin?

Independent will remember how to get there from here, or where “there” is, or why moving can be such a great thing. Before meeting her, this TTW frequently woke up at 4 pm and got lost walking to the milk store.

Now they pay attention to where they’re going, and they pay attention to the route they take to get there.

Buildings, it turns out, can be beautiful! So can weekdays, cannolis, Lucinda Williams songs, and, of course, @PhysicsAndAstr1, or Earth’s Beauty.

SM, illustrative extraordinaire, has made The Indy better; in fact, SM almost certainly knows what you could be doing better, but keeps it to herself, and withholds judgement, because she contains an abundance of wisdom and kindheartedness that is rarely seen on this earth.

SM has fitting initials.

When SM comes at the end of ILY, it’s both soft

CH I write this in a

TextEdit document as an ode to you. In the CIT, before I met you, and in R’s first class, I thought “Who’s that cool girl?”

Little did I know how cool, and talented, and smart (and encouraging, and kind, and). Your sentences (like your magnetic appearances on the main green, or where have you) are little energetic bursts, they are

and firm, like our own SM, who is at once a gentle friend and a driven artist.

Thank you, Sophia, for spreading your lovely colors and elegant shapes, in print and on screen, throughout the universe. <3

the fireworks you write about.

Each sentence rolls like a ball into the hands of the next, make of it what you will this game of catch, this juggling act.

An acrobat, you truly can do it all: edit, code, write, illustrate/paint/draw/ graphic design...and I can’t wait to see what else!

KY kion’s gorgeous writing is like his last name: allencompassing of the reader. sorry for the crappy pun, but it’s true—it is physically impossible to read an article or work by him that does not strike close in a way that judders and shudders in my mind for the rest of the day. he has such sizzling insight on important historical events, and could even make a walk in the park sound fascinating. i count myself extraordinarily lucky that our years overlapped

and our paths crossed so that his writing could make my day a little brighter! best of luck in the future, kion—i fully expect to be leafing through a magazine, or scrolling through some feed when the weather is gray and gloomy and have my day abruptly illuminated by your prose reappearing in my life! looking forward to that day, and wishing you only good fortune.

CP never was there a person more like a gentle summer breeze; when i think of chris, I think inevitably of warm blankets during winter, or a fresh-baked blue room muffin. he’s someone who exudes kindness and comfort to any indy newcomer who finds themselves bewildered or a little lost. Imagine a hotel de la Chris! i, for one, am positive of its hospitality. i imagine that there are towel warmers in every bathroom, and lightly-scented soaps,

and that everyone who passes through emerges anew, refreshed, and ready to fight the injustices of the world.

If he’s cycling around town, he’s spreading joy wherever he goes—if he’s in a seminar, he’s making the most astute observations—if he’s in the indy, he’s at the center of the biggest circle of smiles. miss you already, chris!

MP On a walk the other day, a friend told me that they had just spotted MP on a run. Well, sort of a run. A prance, really.

Like a deer, they said, frolicking through the woods, eyes to the sky, smiling at the Providence spring bloom as if she had just dropped into Wonderland. Only MP can verify this exact tale, but those who know MP know this side of her: fairylike, ethereal— like the southern breeze nudging a ripe pomegranate to the soft earth. Yummmm :o / dancing for hours uninterrupted in an anonymous Providence basement, teaching a new friend

OK-S UGH, the burden of material things! The temptation of adorning her with gadgets, gemstones, furs and felts—an assemblage of stuff that might suggest the richness and the texture of her character. Yet we fear that these material items might weigh her down, and compromise her ability to move through virtual space—after all, any imagining of OKS cannot ignore the contractions and expansions of beats, patterns, and worlds as we hear her speak.

Perhaps we are asking the wrong question, for if you haven’t noticed, she’s already donned her catsuit, and she is already pointing MI Your clothes are torn; your eyes are filled with smoke; you hear the sounds of civilization crumbling in the distance. Just as, despairing, you sink to your knees, a shrouded figure emerges out of the smoke, clutching a homemade knife and a skinned rabbit. No need to worry, he tells you soothingly, everything will be alright. Let’s just find some flint and a bit of steel.

Matt is the type of person you simply assume is good at first aid. He has, after all, explained nuclear physics to you—and InDesign and media theory— and so what could he possibly not know? Yet perhaps this

BB Hello? Hello?….Longtime listener, first-time caller, here. It’s your old pals, and we’re calling with a bucket of memories. Over here, a wornout T shirt, “PAVEMENT” in the shape of the US of A! Looks like we’ve got some fun-size candies kicking around too. And—what’s that?—a concatenated PDF?

how to swing dance like they do it down south. Or diving down bottomless youtube rabbit-holes in search of the perfect soft scramble (or the fabled pink egg...). Or, on a warm day in May, marching defiantly out the rock and planting herself on the quiet green, knowing there are more important things than the test in a few hours. Few people find as much joy in the most unexpected places as MP, and few people bring as much joy to those around them as MP. Simple things, simple people— the way it should be. See you in the sun. x

JA-M It’s quite fitting how our first time together was spent at DC Pride, when we had no other queers to go with. We unsuccessfully chased after people we knew, walking the entire length of the parade from Dupont Circle to 14th&U, but were left with each other. Many failures followed: our feeridden Zipcar misadventure to see Weyes Blood in New Haven, our first gay bar attempt at the dark and lonely Eagle, me never taking you

up on your 50+ invitations to study at Bolt Coffee. I’d like to think we made failure our style, a queer form—for us, failures were never mistakes or unproductive but the building of togetherness against the grain. You’ve taught me the excitement, the joy, the depth of what gay friendship can be.

It’s already been a bit dreary without your tastefully ironic, exquisitely fierce presence.

I wish you much success in Mexico and beyond. But please, save the failures for me.

things out that make us smile in a way that feels new—as if our laughter is an innovation that contributes to a new arrangement of the world that OKS is in the process of testing out. Her hands look so good on the keys over here, the buttons or threads, the pages of the book, or on her lip, as she evaluates problems and solutions, considers daydreams.

They look so good that we wish to see her hands and fingers multiplied, not so much for the aim of optimizing output, but to see, hear, and feel the vibrations and movements of her mind at work. Come play, she says. There’s so many things out there for us to do.

ZB To watch ZB parse through an article sometimes feels like you are experiencing a different kind of profession at work: an orchestra composer who performs a balancing act, or a surgeon executing the crucial cut. ZB has a way of inspiring a writer to solve a problem that exceeds a sense of correction. Neither is it about proving something to him or oneself—instead, he generates a sense of pleasure around making things work, tempting the writer with the satisfaction of working

together to draw together the words and ideas into optimal arrangements.

We can only guess that it is this approach to writing that gives ZB’s sentences their particular elegance and composes them into exemplary pieces of arts writing on this paper. If only we could write with ZB alongside us the entire time, and also borrow just an ounce of his wit while we have the chance.

assumption comes not from Matt’s seemingly inexhaustible knowledge of the world but from the familiar feeling of being gently and firmly rescued by him—from a crushing mood, from a run-on sentence—week after week after week.

AW There was rain here today. Tell me of what the skies look like on your side of the world. For I know wherever you are, I can hear your smile. How it lights up the sky, stretching across the dew-drenched morning, with pink, orange, the softest purple. All warm colored hearts. I wish I could bring you a mug of tea and we could write a love letter addressed to George Saunders. I know you would find the right words, ones that I drink up with ardour

reserved only for my second cup of coffee.

Matt is the type of person you want on the aux at 3am, by your side during the apocalypse, and sitting next to you in literally any class. Yet he is, underneath all these talents, enormously generous and exceedingly kind.

And we are only beginning to understand how much he’s taught us.

engines, foyer lights left on overnight, a pause at Power to finish a sentence, a blur on Thursday into Friday morning, Rock lobby, twenty fresh pages in one elbow nook, yellow raincoat in the other.

Remember our route? The misting main green, orange moon rising, a wave goodbye at Grad, a skip down Charlesfield toward Hope, low-humming

You’re an individual of some achievement now—you talked to Bernie Sanders, got two strikes in a row at Lang’s, and channelled Tina Weymouth before a crowd of millions. But

PPS How apt that your initials look so similar to the life-saving, crucial, everessential PPE. In many ways, you have been mine and many other Indy staffers’ “Personal Protective Equipment” offering thundering, sharp, intellectual thoughts, and social imperatives. You have always expected the best from those you work with, and your faith in the abilities of all those you work with drive all of us to be our best selves, if not for ourselves, for you.

Your iron fist is made of the

most tender, compassionate metal. I am as taken as I was during that first week editing Feats with you than I am now, watching your accomplishments from afar.

Thank you for being one of my first Indy friends. I am not sure of many things, but one thing I am sure of: years after this global pandemic, when numerous PPE’s have been discarded, PPC’s power will prosper.

I wanted to paint your portrait, with all the love of a lady on fire. In truth, you would be a fire of wildflowers—blossoms, surging with love and light we do not deserve. I send you all my love, in the twittering geese, the bulbs that hug the ground. trust that we will emerge again with our hearts whole.

we hope you remember little old us once in a while. We knew you when—when you snapped a portrait of the cutest windup pumpkin in Conmag, when you gave the best edits and made the best jokes, when you commandeered the aux to lift us out of our 3 am lows with the dulcet tones of “I’m Coming Out.” You’re a good one, bb (lowercase for laughs), a real hometown hero.

The bucket list isn’t going anywhere. Loui’s at 5am? We’re SERIOUS this time. You know where to find us.

MG Sneaky tactician! gleefully portioning out strategy with an unbroken gaze to the others crouching with him in the undergrowth. Fleet-footed, he sprinkles fox-seeds so they will come. Waiting patiently. Always sure, hand brushing deep green felt or skimming smooth stone, finding the right moment for everything. Emerging from battle with bloodshot eyes. Fasttwitch switches to idle peace.

Sentinel! watching the bunnies in their secret dance. You might think he hasn’t heard what you said but if you know to wait he will answer, fully, as if no

EK In the end, EK was not struck by lightning. She did not have the baby to whom she is feeding yogurt across the lobby. She did not become a pop star, or a reality-tv-starchef-influencer (with these last two, its more of a yet situation). But even in these untruths, a spunky little dice throw of fate did arrange an anecdote where we find EK right smack in the middle.

Thus it is not surprising that EK can conjure stories as if she’s taken just the right dosage of occult beauty supplements that morn. She can draw a

JK Oh, to be a tune

on one of Jen(n) Katz’ playlists! Some of my sweetest moments here have been spent listening to The Now and Then in my room, but also hiding in your room listening to karaoke from the living room, driving us and making sure I got home safe, and also trying to get your car out from the snow, but it not working, and walking down to

She leaves them there a moment for us to admire.

And then, her sentences: two or three, like a long, slow sip of ice-water, clarity unspooling, leaving you at the edge of a world much like this one, glimmering and vast. Tiara, you changed the Indy’s world. Thank you for the endless glow, for the crystalline words, and when there weren’t any left, for the million knowing looks.

JP “lol wait what if we did like a crossword or wordsearch and the questions were about corrupt organizations/ people at Brown like the granoff dinner and the funders of Safariland and you find their names lol”

institutional critique with, and the master of glass AND astrophysics.

Could there be a cooler combination of the dual-degree sort? A year’s worth of editing together, thankful for it all <3

Oh, Jorge—my favorite person to practice

Only ever doing things with care, like chopping onions until they are extremely small, but with words (if not with grammar). I am shy writing this for him, because he writes thank yous very quickly and very well and is good at making others feel the way they want to using only the truth.

India Point Park instead.

Your nongraduating friends are so blessed to have you close for another year. If this semester hadn’t been cut short, I imagine us finally reading together in the Sarah Doyle. :)

TS There’s a thought somewhere inside of you, but it’s made of ellipses.

You begin—it falls. Flickers, catches in a glimpse, Tiara, glowing, a face full of a million knowing looks, a crystalline pattern. She’ll meet you on the cusp of language, red lightning bolts and iridescent curls.

She’s on the far end of your seminar oval, reading aloud a passage from a novel. She looks up and the words are dancing in the middle of the room, the skirt of a flame.

“but maybe that’s too much hahha”

extra time has elapsed. I don’t know how he pulls people out of thin air like there’s something interesting about anything, but he really does. He must have lapped the pearlescent dewdrops that gather in the downy crook of a sparrow’s neck!

sense of magic into the gardenvariety details of our everyday lives, toying with experience as if it was something lucrative yet malleable, replacing it with words wielded like clay.

Again, we are not surprised as the sweet indulgences of EK’s writing are animated by the real EK, outside the text, through ceramic folds, layers of cake and, what’s that I hear, glorious notes of song? Every encounter with EK is an escape from those parts of everyday life that feel bland, congealed, and predictable. Lucky charm, she is—so lucky us.

RK You spilled stars out of newspaper pulp to create something I never could have imagined. I will continue to admire your art from afar, wherever you go with it.

NB natasha, master of gouache painting and clogs, thank you for being such a strong art presence

There is perhaps no better time for mandatory solitude than right now. We have all become master pretenders, comfortably encased in what French sociologist Jean Baudrillard has deemed a distinct, postmodern “fourth-order simulacra.”

Understood as the last of four Baudrillardian’s theoretical “epochs,” the fourth precession moves from the peculiar societal relationship that humans have to images and icons, where “the image masks the absence of a profound reality,” to a relationship where “the image has no relation to any reality.”

Put in simpler terms, Baudrillard warned against a certain type of extension of our daily lives into a realm which takes the simulated image or icon as our reality. In this realm, living our lives becomes perpetuating certain images and icons. We begin to interpret and approach our most private spaces and personal lives through the lens of media images, and our actions reflect not reality, but a simulation. In other words, we become stuck in a peculiar space between inside and outside; except the boundary that separates the two is increasingly elusive. Decidedly, this is an exaggeration—we adorn our Animal Crossing rooms with pastiche furniture, hold raves for 5,000+ on Club Penguin, share images of bread, and turn our living rooms into yoga studios, but there is still an overall understanding that profound reality is not this. While our actual rooms might be lackluster in comparison, we are still in them, as non-pixel entities. And once this moment concludes, we would very much like to break out of solitude, destroy it, and never return to it.

Enforced social distance (and thus digitized socializing) complicates Baudrillard's delineated epochs by eradicating any sense of order by succession, or removing any barrier between commodified and decommodified life. It becomes distinctly difficult for artists, writers, and anyone who already often finds these two lives in cahoots with each other. Individuals whose “work” is largely defined or inspired by their inner, private lives don’t exactly benefit when the situation is flipped. It is an artist’s private life, one’s “poetic” life, that is now at risk, as many are asked to transform the space of our home into tools for production. The space separating objects (or products) needed to live a life, and objects for which a need is created by commercial images, is compressed. Our bed is our studio is our gym is our office is our dining table.

When art professors around the world task their students with “Make with what you have” or “Imagine what is possible with enforced parameters,” and present these tasks as equivalent to the work done in one’s studio or metal shop, they simultaneously introduce and risk a third realm that is not simulation or reality, but what Wallace Stevens termed “Supreme Fiction”—in other words, imagination. This, I believe, is poetry’s stake in our current reality. It is within the less than innocent task to make art no matter what—especially when this urge masks a larger, bureaucratic failure in art institutions to consider the financial depletion that complete shutdown of facilities and studios has caused—that an artist's private potential for poiesis, or their “act of making,” is hindered. In other words, the poetry inherent in living and responding to a life is coerced

21

THE THE COLLEGE HILL COLLEGE INDEPENDENT HILL INDEPENDENT

for capital gain. This coercion does not exist outside the general interest of imposing a sense of capital security, or function, onto artists for the satisfaction of certain commercialized cultural norms. The specific capital coercion brought upon by mandated digital life, however, penetrates an additional affective layer, one that requires an exposition not only of the public but of the delicate private, too. Artists are asked to transform their homes, which before this was maybe just a place of rest, a house and nothing more, into Pee-wee’s Playhouse mockups, to then be considered and observed through Zoom, under the forced assertion that true artists should have the ability to give everything meaning. This task is concerned not with the autonomously imagined landscapes that we might have for our daily, private, banal spaces, but how we might translate this space and project it outward, for the consideration of the masses. Imagination is awarded, but only if it has a purpose in mind. “Poetry is everywhere” becomes “Poetry must be everywhere.”

I find myself seeking a North Star in the blemished and busy digital universe that has shadowed our homes, and have returned to the most revolutionary set of poems on the domestic space (and arguably on the method of poetry itself): Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons. In these sets of poems (though it’s hard to classify them as only that), Stein attempts to itemize objects in a home, likely hers.

She ultimately forms a taxonomic representation of an inner architecture—what looks at first to be a packing list for a mover or for a grocery shopper.

Some are commonplace: “a box;” others are tinged with artifice: “careless water.” Idling into my second month of quarantine, I have, consciously or otherwise, attempted to imitate this aspect of Tender Buttons, having walked the area of my house more times in one day than I normally would in a week.

I am taking inventory of my house: a loose faucet, an obstructive shelf, a book lost under my bed, and making a list of my own. However, the task in Tender Buttons proves more profound, and perhaps impossible.

Once you get past the initial itemization and arrive at the actual descriptions Stein affords these objects, Stein positions the reader at a loss. The revolution of Tender Buttons is in its withholding of these objects. Even in their plainness and their commodified everyday understanding—or to return to Baudrillard, the objects’ “simulation” in our reality—Stein does not present useful descriptions. An umbrella or a red dress appear on the page as nearly unintelligible ruminations of a slew of abstract ideas, of all that Stein imagines personally through this object. It presents a distinctly private phenomenon—the piano in Tender Buttons is the piano as it exists only in Stein.

A PIANO: If the speed is open, if the color is careless, if the selection of a strong scent is now awkward, if the button holder is held by all the waving color and there is no color, not any color. If there is no dirt in a pin and there can be none scarcely, if there is not then the place is the same as up standing. There is no dark custom and it even is not acted in any such a way that a restraint is not spread. That is spread, it shuts and it lifts and awkwardly not awkwardly the centre is in standing.

WEN ZHUANG B’20 wants to trade her byline for a P.S.—On the topic of spaces that are both public and private, and while discussing instances of elevated expectations for productivity, I would like to offer a counterpoint against my own reservations outlined in this essay. One should, at times, welcome a collapse of space and time, and heightened urgency for “work.” It can prove wonderfully melodious—as is evident in the symphony that is the Indy staff. The friends (more appropriately, mentors) that make up this publication have allowed the cramped room, hidden on the upper outskirts of the outskirts of Faunce, to expand beyond measures. And the nth amount of hours spent stringing along the weekly 20 or so pages have often managed to exist beyond our daily limits—sometimes for the worst, but each hour often feels so vibrant, that it is mostly for the better. I feel distinctly fortunate to have my last contribution to the Indy handled by Sara, Alex, and Matt, who have upheld a capacious, agile, and empathetic place within an institution that often does not lend itself to those characteristics. My sincerest gratitude, much greater than this quiet postscript, to all the people that have cared for my writing and my thoughts.

For the imagination, simulations, collaborations, endless poetry and natural poets, all of it!

FEATURES ARTS

06

ILLUSTRATION Wen Zhuang DESIGN Ella Rosenblatt

IN DEFENSE OF THE HOME, BEING JUST THAT AND NOTHING ELSE.

BY Wen Zhuang

SHOULD POETRY BE EVERYWHERE?

By itemizing her entire house, pantry, and rooms, she has done the remarkable job of never actually exposing them to us. This is perhaps why critics and readers of Stein most naturally opt to consider these as “poems” or attribute her writing to “Steinese,” a unique language unknowable to even poetry. This is also precisely why Tender Buttons toggles the contentious area between the poetry of something as simulacrum and poetry as imagination. “Poetry is everything” becomes tarnished in the realm of the former, but preserved in the latter.

Most of us have, to our privilege, never been mandated to stay within the confines of our home.

The home, moreover, can represent something vastly different for every person; it can appear as the glistening walls of an undiscovered treasure trove or as the bleak, unfamiliar margins of a doctor’s waiting room. The approaches we each take to familiarize ourselves with our sudden close quarters will differ for a multitude of reasons, restrictions, and expectations. And when we’ve done all that, there’s still the responsibility, as artists, to continue to produce—not because we are still enrolled students, or employed in some capacity, but because it is a necessity that yields only to us.

It is a difficult task to resist, or not falter under, the increased expectation of productivity from artists during this time. Our “home videos” can now join the ranks of MoMA’s exhibition “Private Lives, Public Spaces” through a tag on Instagram; our letters to friends and family can be doubled as postcards featured on Printed Matter’s website.

This expectation to transform our inner spaces and internal routines into marketable ‘poetry’ is masked as an attempt to retain a sense of ‘normalcy,’ a continuation of our ‘real lives.’ Ironically, however, this expectation ignores what is actually our reality, and our new normal. My attempt to reframe our relationship to our homes through the lens of poetry, of Tender Buttons, and the exhortations of Baudrillard may only be to remind us of the importance of maintaining our home just for individual, intimate, and solitary living. And, if this proves impossible, of carving out a space that remains untainted by simulation. A place where the leaves of your plant can remind you of a certain pastel color (imagination as poetry), but where the leaves of that plant don’t need to transform into a physical tool to make work (simulacrum as poetry). In other words, it is just as ‘essential’ to refuse the infiltration of work into your home. It is not imperative we prescribe multifaceted function onto our spaces, and not vital that we force digital alternatives to things that refuse that potential.

Poetry, for me (and I’d like to think for Stein, Baudrillard, and most artists), is indeed everywhere.

Most of the time, however, it just exists and nothing more, suspended around me in a kind of limbo, much like the space we find ourselves in today. I’m okay if it stays there, and unbothered if it leaves and never finds its way back. Just as I’m content with poetry to sometimes not hold much meaning, to me, or anyone else.

BY the Indy Staff

ILLUSTRATION Sylvia Atwood

DESIGN Ella Rosenblatt

There are two eggs in the crying pan Sunny-side up, rainy day down, both ways over The indoors inspires quagmires, but outside is a minefield Loneliness, listlessness, a line of fire; I find a white feather stuck to my egg.

The birds outside the window left it for me, I counted them, there were four.

In whose beak did you chew 2 starlets? in one beak or two? did it make a chirp or a crack?

To shatter the sun in one swallow.

The ice spreads quick from edge to edgeâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;heavy creaking still. Listen: Shrieking drips clap to freeze the surface down-clack Rickety snip a bickering fit a flickering candlewick Finger, in the shadow, Of the ring, fire with a terrifying and commanding new light the days bloom, as the waves do like clusters of burst berries we spit and splurt and stain stop to see, then stay for a while, if weâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;re lucky we can be together in this present tense without roses, I will lay down a soft pillow for my desire, for your limbs too.

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

LITERARY

22

UNIVERSITY STUDENTS DEMAND AN EQUITABLE PANDEMIC RESPONSE On April 21, Brown University announced that it will temporarily house healthcare workers who are keeping the Brown and Rhode Island community safe. This decision is a testament to the power that the University has to protect lives and livelihoods during a global crisis. To that end, students continue to remind the institution that the pandemic has only intensified the needs of its most vulnerable community members to which the University owes much of its success and growth. Brown should do more to minimize the damage of this new reality, especially in the areas of healthcare, employment, and housing, considering the fact that Brown provides all three of these things to thousands in our community. It is in this endeavor that students have come together under the banner of Brown University Students for an Equitable Pandemic Response (SEPR). With the endorsement of the Undergraduate Council of Students and a growing number of members in the Brown community, we plan on continuing this work well into the future as long as the needs of our community remain unmet.

And what could be more important during a pandemic than healthcare? We are grateful that Brown’s Student Health Insurance Plan (SHIP) specifically covers COVID-19 testing.

UnitedHealthcare, the parent company of Brown’s Student Health Insurance Plan (SHIP) has eliminated cost-sharing for treatment—but only through May 31. President Paxson claimed on CNN that conditions on a fall campus would not be back to normal in the face of an ongoing pandemic. So why allow for a return to cost-sharing so soon? The bills for treatment of COVID-19 easily run into the tens of thousands in addition to the physical toll it takes on the infected. This is why we call on Brown to fully cover the costs of COVID-19 testing, treatment, and eventual vaccination for all students on SHIP for the duration of the pandemic. Coronavirus will not respectfully yield to an arbitrary cutoff date. Neither should Brown’s care for the health of all students.

Because the coming summer months will not allow for a normal cycle of health insurance renewals, we call on Brown to extend SHIP for graduating seniors beyond the August 15 end-ofcycle. The University has already offered this extension for graduating PhD students and Master's students. For Seniors entering an uncertain job market, an extension on their healthcare plans is the safe and ethical course of action. Given these other University announcements, it has obviously been deemed within reason. The University has tentatively set October 2020 as the earliest possible time for seniors’ much-deserved commencement.

It would be a disgrace to have new alumni celebrate “this important milestone” while also faced with the tremendous burden associated with lacking healthcare coverage.

Recognizing that the United States ridiculously

THE LIST

links healthcare to employment—with tens of millions now losing this lifeline as employers institute mass layoffs—we also identify employment as a fundamental issue that Brown must address. The subcontracting and temporary hiring that Brown practices provides workers with meager wages, less bargaining power, and scant employment protections—vulnerabilities heightened by the pandemic.

Because the University has protected the employment of its full-time staff through June 30, SEPR is calling on our administration to do the same for all workers still employed at Brown, including temporary workers and subcontractors.

But a mere continuation of employment is not enough. Facilities, dining services, and other frontline workers at Brown continue to put their health and safety at risk by coming to work, so it is incumbent on Brown to provide hazard pay of time and a half to these employees. Full-time, temporary, and subcontracted workers must receive hazard pay going forward, and retroactively for all hours worked since March 12, the day of transition to remote learning. We hope that in the long term, the current crisis forces Brown to improve its labor practices at large; in the short term, protecting the livelihoods in our community will literally keep families alive, and a refusal to do so will result in public outrage from a community tired of austerity and huge administrative salaries.

Crucially, SEPR demands that the University pay all student workers for their scheduled hours through the end of the term. This includes those who have already exceeded their on-campus work expectation in wages earned. Many students rely on income from university employment for food, housing and other essentials. The University did give $150 for travel expenses to all students on financial aid, but this provision was for one special circumstance. Whereas an emergency flight from Rhode Island may be a one-time need, housing, food, and supplies are recurring necessities. We fear that, now faced with more than a month of lost wages, student workers are struggling to make ends meet.

Considering the value student workers bring, it only makes sense for Brown to show its commitment to students’ safety and health away from campus.

Beyond the clear needs pertaining to employment and healthcare, we also address the grim reality of learning off campus. Acknowledging that over 2,600 undergraduate students and 65 faculty have endorsed the call for Universal Pass, we join them in calling on Brown to adopt a Universal Pass grading system. Brown values undergraduate learning as a formative time for students’ personal growth. In keeping with this mission, we must recognize that COVID-19 has devastated each one of Brown’s 6,752 undergraduates uniquely. Though the semester may be officially coming to a close, it is not too late for an academic policy that brings as much uniformity as

BY Brown U SEPR DESIGN XingXing Shou

possible to a pandemic and economic collapse.

From an email students received regarding room and board fees, Brown’s refund policy multiplies half of a semester’s total fees “by the percent of parent contribution to the standard cost of attendance.”

This decision to only factor in parental contribution renders financial aid dollars ineligible for refund.

The last time SEPR checked, financial aid is meant to cover precisely what parents cannot contribute!

Assessing the refund in this manner, then, seems to skew the benefits away from families who need them more than ever.

University administrators might respond to these claims by pointing to the Emergency Funds, Curricular & Co-curricular Gap (E-Gap), which allows students to apply for financial support in times of unexpected need. This approach, however, burdens students to request money for each issue that arises. It fails to capture how financial struggle does not lend itself to significant free time. Similar to grading, then, SEPR advocates for a universal solution: an across-the-board refund of 50% of the semester’s room and board costs to all students, regardless of parental contribution.

Finally, we must remember that Brown does not exist in a bubble. According to the University’s website, “the story of Brown is also the story of Providence and Rhode Island.” If this is the ethos, we caution Brown to tamp down its pride when it comes to taxes. Brown’s exemption from Providence property taxes translates to over $30 million less for the city, which is especially biting when budgets for the whole state are running thin. By pledging $10 million to mutual aid efforts in Rhode Island, Brown will justify its belonging in Rhode Island’s story. To this end, we’ve put together a list of local groups that Brown could significantly help. This is simply a starting point to highlight the many facets of our community in desperate need of assistance, and it is incumbent upon Brown to use the power it wields to do good in the worst of times.

Unlike President Paxon, Brown U SEPR is by no means optimistic about a return to normalcy on campus in the fall. Instead, we are focusing on fundamental human needs that do not depend on a calendar: health, employment, and financial wellbeing. We may lack a blueprint for how to successfully overcome a pandemic, but we will not stay quiet at home.

In solidarity, Brown U SEPR You can share a story about how this affects you by emailing us at brownusepr@gmail.com or anonymously share via this form: https://tinyurl.com/ BrownUSEPR-Testimonials An earlier version of this article appeared in the Brown Daily Herald on April 30.

This week, and for the foreseeable future, the Indy will publish community aid funds and other ways you can contribute to coronavirus relief in lieu of our traditional event listings. If you are able, we encourage you to support these efforts to alleviate the financial and health burdens that the coronavirus has taken on communities here in Providence.

General AMOR COVID-19 Community support fund. Donations go to support sanitation equipment for vulnerable populations, as well as direct financial assistance to families in need. Donate here: https://bit.ly/2UmYJXr. To get involved as a volunteer, packaging and distributing mutual aid, visit https://tinyurl.com/ amor-covid-volunteer.

Rhode Island Pride has organized a large food drive, which you can support with a monetary donation. $20 will get food to four people, and $100 will get food to 19 people. More info on their website: https://prideri.org/.

The FANG Collective community bail fund: As jails and prisons become coronavirus hotspots, they present unsafe conditions to those held inside, many of whom haven’t been convicted of a crime and are held because they couldn’t afford bail. Help bail people out from the Bristol County House of Correction and the Ash Street Jail through this fundraiser organized by the FANG Collective: https://www.gofundme.com/f/fangbailfund.

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT