The College Hill Independent Vol. 34 Issue 1

THE

COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT01 A BROWN / RISD WEEKLY

FEB 03 2017

34

THE

COVER

INDY

This Lil Piggy Nicole Cochary

NEWS 02

Week in Interperative Resistance Jamie Packs, Pia Mileaf-Patel, and Sam Samore

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Executors of Our Will Roksana Borzouei

METRO

A BROWN / RISD WEEKLY VOLUME 34 / ISSUE 01 FEB 03 2017

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Extra Credit Piper French

09

General Hospital Saanya Jain

ARTS

FROM THE EDITORS

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Borders (What's Up With That?)

Josh Kurtz

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Piss Christ Ryan Rosenberg and Will Weatherly

Hi there. Welcome back. Hope you’re staying warm.

We here at the Indy, 65 staffers strong, like to term ourselves an alternative weekly, or alt-weekly for short. This format has a long, proud history, and we feel good about being part of that.

Some of us enjoy alternative rock; alternatively, some of us boogie to alternative dance. What we don’t jibe with are the ‘alternative facts’ being peddled by the so-called alt-right.

As you flip through, expect no misinformation. Find something?

Give us a ring. Or send us a letter. We'll keep our phone lines free!

—WKD

FEATURES 08

January, February, ...

Julia Tompkins and Roksana Borzouei

13

Flying the Co-op Erin West

SCIENCE 15

Pass that Gas Fatima Husain

OCCULT 16

Veg-head Lance Gloss

METABOLICS 12

Who's on First?

Colin Kent-Daggett

LITERARY 11

Red Sox Rule Julia Horwitz

EPHEMERA 13

The Question Ring Cycle Anna Bonesteel

X 18

MANAGING EDITORS Will Tavlin Kelton Ellis Dolma Ombadykow

ARTS Ryan Rosenberg Will Weatherly Saanya Jain

NEWS Piper French Hannah Maier-Katkin Roksana Borzouei

FEATURES Julia Tompkins Erin West Andrew Deck

WEEK IN REVIEW Sam Samore

METABOLICS Dominique Pariso Elias Bresnick

METRO Shane Potts Jane Argodale Camila Ruiz Segovia Jack Brook

SCIENCE Fatima Husain Liz Cory

TECH Jonah Max Malcolm Drenttel

X Liby Hays Nichole Cochary

OCCULT Lance Gloss Robbie Manley

LIST Lisa Borst

INTERVIEWS Patrick McMenamin LITERARY Stefania Gomez Isabelle Doyle EPHEMERA Anna Bonesteel

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

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

Complimentary Gift Liby Hays

ILLUSTRATIONS EDITOR Gabriel Matesanz

DESIGN EDITOR Chelsea Alexander

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

DESIGN & LAYOUT Celeste Matsui Meryl Charleston Andrew Linder Ruby Stenhouse Mark Benz

COPY EDITOR Miles Taylor

WEB MANAGERS Charlie Windolf Alberta Devor BUSINESS MANAGER Lance Gloss

SOCIAL MEDIA Jane Argodale Signe Swanson SENIOR EDITORS Alec Mapes-Frances Sophie Kasakove Lisa Borst Jamie Packs MVP Roksana Borzouei THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT — 69 BROWN ST PO BOX 1930 PROVIDENCE, RI 02912

THEINDY.ORG / @THEINDY_TWEETS

WEEK IN INTERPRETIVE RESISTANCE Sam Samore, Pia Mileaf-Patel, and Jamie Packs ILLUSTRATION BY Gabriel Matesanz BY

FISHY BUSINESS Ever wondered what an open-faced sandwich would look like if Mitt Romney’s face were carved into a slice of ham atop mustard and rye? Or felt that Putin’s face belonged in a bowl of spaghetti puttanesca, to be titled “Putinesca?”

Lauren Garfinkel—who runs the website Edible Government—did, and so she made it happen. Garfinkel’s Twitter bio describes her work as “A culinary exploration of the people and events that shape American politics, and a nod to the old adage, ‘You are what you eat.’” Among her sculpture portraits are Squid Christie (based on New Jersey Governor Chris Christie) and Squid Gingrich (based Newt Gingrich whose countenance I contend resembles pudding); Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders, and Jim Webb carved into raw mushrooms; and most notably, a portrait of Donald Trump made entirely of fish filets titled “Something Fishy.”

With tilapia hair and salmon skin, the president’s very orange portrait was mistakenly reported last week by a BuzzFeed post as a Russian-made Trump tribute to celebrate his inauguration. On Tuesday, the newsish source issued a correction and an apology, but not before Garfinkel’s caricature had been retweeted and spread around the web without credit to her. “Easily the most elaborate Russian Trump tribute yet,” tweeted Max Seddon, a Moscow-based correspondent for the Financial Times (perhaps forgetting that most elaborate Russian tribute of all, the 2016 general election). Garfinkel wrote to the food face hijackers and had the portrait re-defined as her artistic protest of Trump’s refusal to release his tax returns last summer.

In fact, Garfinkel has been working on the Edible Government project since the primary season, when the Atlantic published an (apparently underread) profile of her work. She has worked frequently with Trump’s image; besides “Something Fishy,” portraits include blini Trump, circus peanut Trump, baby carrot Trump, pig in a blanket Trump, candy Trump, and fondant Trump. Fondant is disgusting, by the way. In the profile, Garfinkel is quoted describing her work as “just thinking about how we are all connected to our individual choices that have this great impact, and we have to have ownership of our choices.”

In any case, as the current administration continues to shock the world with the sheer volume of its assaults on civil liberties, one coping mechanism is to imagine Trump at the bottom of the sea.

-PM-P

PUNCH A NAZI, TAZE A COP? There may be many occasions in the coming four years where it seems fitting to describe tazing a cop as “awesome.” As police power looks likely to increase under the current administration, as reports roll in of Homeland Security officers refusing to obey stays issued by federal judges regarding Trump’s immigration ban, and as the likely new Attorney General has “joked” about being associated with the KKK, tazing a cop looks pretty awesome indeed (but hasn’t it always?).

“Awesome” is what Alyssa Elkins, an Ohio teenager, said of the experience. Elkins, who has battled leukemia for two years, recently decided to forgo treatment after her cancer returned, and has since been working through a list of dreams that she would like to accomplish during her life. Some of these wishes seemed fairly standard, including getting the opportunity to pet a miniature pig and visiting Disney World. One of her wishes, however, did not fit with the rest on the list. Elkins’ wish was to taze a cop.

Her uncle is a police officer, and after seeing a video of him getting tazed during his training when she was younger, Elkin became fascinated with the idea. In particular, the look on his face as he was tazed stuck with her. Eventually, word of Elkins’ wish got around to Sergeant Doug Bline. Her wish was granted. Afterwards, Elkins reportedly said, “Awesome.”

There seems to be no information available about Elkins’ politics. That is, it may be difficult to interpret her intentions around the symbolism of tazing a cop. I am not going to attempt to speak for her regarding the possible layers of meanings. From Sgt. Bline’s perspective, the event may seem to make him look good and charitable. I can’t help but wonder, though, whether there might be something else going on—something sneaky and rad. A rogue young Ohioan who saw an opportunity to make a cop look...dumb. Consider, at least for a moment, the facts: a teen tazed a cop; it was awesome.

-SS

FEAR THE SMEAR Hours before protestors across the country began resisting the inauguration of a new presidential regime, a Florida woman snuck into Donald Trump’s Mara-Lago resort to perform her own unique act of civil disobedience. And it’s one that this reporter finds rather apeeling.

Once inside of Trump’s Palm Beach property, Kelly Weidman, a postal worker from Clearwater, FL, slathered bananas on cars parked outside of the resort.

“She smeared bananas on cars,” says WPBF News.

The Conservative Tribune reports that Weidman “smeared bananas all over vehicles in the parking lot.”

Chiming in on the conversation, the Huffington Post writes, “she smeared bananas on cars.” CBSMiami, adding their own spin to the issue, reports, “Kelly Weidman, 48, is accused of smearing bananas on cars.”

Talk about a smear campaign!!

In addition to her smear-based activities, Weidman also moved balloons from inside of the resort into the surrounding bushes, left a message on a computer screen that read “FuckUTrumpB,” and then made like a banana and split. Notably, this is not the first instance in which a protein-packed snack was used to protest the current administration. In October of this year, a Wisconsin woman was charged with disorderly conduct after being caught smearing peanut butter on 30 cars that she believed belonged to Trump supporters. I just wish that the women had coordinated their protests better because I, for one, love peanut butter and banana sandwiches.

Weidman has yet to release a statement about her decision to use bananas as the medium for her act of dissent, so all we can do for the moment is speculate.

Perhaps she elected the fruit to signal the destruction of phallocentric patriarchy. Or maybe she chose the banana for its symbolic connection to the United States’ shameful history of exploitative neocolonial practices in Central America. More likely, I think, is that Weidman chose the banana for its famously high levels of potassium, which, according to lifehack.org, is an effective means of combating high blood pressure and stress. I think we could all use a little more potassium right about now.

-JP

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

NEWS

02

A NATION, DIVIDED

On executing Trump’s unconstitutional immigration ban BY

Roksana Borzouei

Nisrin Elamin, a Ph.D. student at Stanford University and a Sudanese citizen who holds a green card, boarded a plane back to the U.S. soon after news of the executive order was leaked by various sources. But Elamin missed her connecting flight. By the time she landed last Friday, Trump’s executive order banning the entry of nationals from seven Muslim majority countries was already implemented, and she was detained at New York’s John F. Kennedy airport for five hours.

The swift implementation of the executive order left thousands of visitors with valid visas and legal permanent residents—people who hold green cards—like Elamin stranded in airports around the world. Some were pulled off of flights before they arrived in the US. Many were traveling for work, on vacation, or for family emergencies. No one expected such a xenophobic and racist policy. Or, at least, not with such speed. +++ The ban created chaos from inception to implementation. Benjamin Wittes, editor-in-chief of the Lawfare Blog, wrote, “the malevolence of President Trump’s executive order on visas and refugees is mitigated chiefly—and perhaps only—by the astonishing incompetence of its drafting and construction.”

Reports have so far shown that the Departments of Homeland Security (DHS), Justice, and State, in addition to the Office of Legal Counsel, received neither a briefing nor the opportunity to provide input.

Instead, the offices were informed of the order only after details had been finalized. Refusing standard protocol, the administration also prevented National Security Council (NSC) lawyers from evaluating the legality of the order.

One of the major oversights in the order is the lack of coordination with the officials who were tasked with the work of enforcing it. Tens of thousands of Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) agents received no instructions for implementing such a major shift in immigration policy. Originally, DHS ruled before the order was released that green card holders should be exempt, but various news outlets reported that Trump and his two close advisors, Steve Bannon and Stephen Miller, ignored this ruling. Rather, they chose to grant CBP agents the power to allow entry for green card holders at their own discretion. Agents detained people or began deporting them without even the semblance of due process. What ensued was a flood of personal narratives in the media of people detained in handcuffs, families that were separated, and privacy rights that were violated. +++ In an interview on January 30, Elamin told Democracy Now! she experienced “a very uncomfortable pat-down. I was touched in my chest and groin area.

And then I was handcuffed briefly.” Dr. Trita Parsi, president of the National Iranian American Council (NIAC), stated in an interview with MSNBC’s JoyAnn Reid that those who were detained “explained for instance, they were interrogated, handcuffed, asked to show their Twitter feeds, their Instagram, their social media. They were also asked questions about what they think about Donald Trump.” Many of the detainees did not know their rights when providing sensitive information, while others had limited English skills. How long people were kept and in what way, how thoroughly they were questioned or whether they were immediately deported, showed no clear pattern of detainment and no clear orders to agents. Elamin said that agents removed her handcuffs only after realizing

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that the Iranian green card holder detained in the same room was not handcuffed.

Speaking to, Democracy Now! explained, “I do think that the Somalis and Sudanese, people of African descent who are going to be affected by this, you know, I think they’re going to be treated differently, frankly.”

Elamin’s interview points out what has been made clear so far in the immigration ban, that it, like many other of Trump’s policies, operates off several oppressive systems, particularly xenophobia and racism. Recognizing that her status as a Stanford Ph.D. candidate and Harvard graduate complicated the nature of her detainment in comparison to other Sudanese detainees. Elamin said “I was probably treated much better than other people, partly because of my affiliation with Stanford.” In contrast, a Sudanese man in his seventies was kept for 30 hours, compared to Elamin’s five.

Resistance to these detainments, however, was swift. Organizers created Google forms asking for volunteer immigration lawyers as well as Arabic and Persian interpreters; the forms were filled to capacity in just a few hours. Images of immigration lawyers swamped with laptops, coffee, and drafts of habeas corpus petitions flooded social media feeds. Protests erupted at JFK’s Terminal 4, where authorities detained travelers, and at other airports including California’s LAX and SFO. Late Saturday, the ACLU won a temporary injunction against the deportation of anyone detained in an airport.

Not even children have been spared from the abuses of Trump’s order. In an interview with AM Joy, Senator Chris Van Hollen (D-MD) told the story of a five-year-old American citizen detained for more than 4 hours at Washington-Dulles airport with his aunt, a legal permanent resident who obtained asylum from Iran years ago. Van Hollen’s office had alerted authorities hours before the two landed, but the two were still held in custody upon arrival.

Meanwhile, tragedy stemming from the xenophobic policy has occurred in the lives of Rhode Islanders with backgrounds targeted by Trump. A physician at Rhode Island Hospital, who asked to remain anonymous, told the Independent she has to cancel plans to travel back to Sweden in March for Iranian New Year and her father’s surgery. She moved with her family to Sweden from Iran when she was three years old. Now, her parents cannot travel to the U.S. either, and she remains uncertain of when they will be able to reunite.

Brown University, told the Independent, “I’m not in a good situation, but I can imagine there are thousands of students and non-students affected by this ban.”

While academics can often lean on the support of their institutions, others are left at the mercy of Customs and Border Patrol.

Uncertainty is rife. No one is sure how long this ban will be extended beyond its allotted 90 days.

Highlighting the difference of institutional support, Kadivar told the Independent, “it is very unclear what is going to happen to “students’ PhD’s. They may just lose their chance to continue and finish their [degree].”

Kadivar has already cancelled attending two academic conferences, and is unsure whether he will be able to continue his field work in Tunisia. But he recognizes the privileges of the academy and that “there are people in more pain, they are suffering more, and they are getting hurt even worse.”

The extent of human suffering cannot be quantified or compared in this situation. The trauma of arrest, however temporary, may stay with someone for a long time. And the uncertainty of a visa’s arrival, which can take a decade, has expanded indefinitely. Payesteh told the Independent, “we definitely have to channel that action into encouraging congress to undo the ban.” A Congressional bill to overturn the executive order will need Republican support to pass, which seems unlikely.

The Republicans in Congress are overwhelmingly silent. To Payesteh, the silver lining is “everyone comes out and they’re ready to work.”

ROKSANA BORZOUEI B’17 wonders when she’ll be able to see her grandparents next.

+++ Larger political conflicts complicated the treatment of some foreign nationals. As days went on, the response to the illegal detainment of some gathered more support than of others.

Iranians in particular have a long history as immigrants in the United States, comprising a large and mostly successful diaspora community. Recent immigrants, on the other hand, are usually dissidents fleeing political and religious persecution, and even more seeking refugee resettlement from war-torn countries.

On MSNBC’s AM Joy, terrorism analyst Malcolm Nance stated that “most people from those nations that would be flying to the United States would be green card holders or wealthy people who have been vetted for a long time to get passports, particularly Iraqis.”

A large portion of those affected by the ban are people connected to American academic institutions.

Iranians, according to a 2015 State Department report, make up 48 percent of visas, while Iranians also compose the largest portion of foreign academics. Having the academy’s support changes how you’re treated.

Mohammad Ali Kadivar, a post-doctoral fellow at

FEBRUARY 03, 2017

RISE UP Providence responds to the Inauguration BY

Piper French

On January 21, just after 1 PM, residents from across Rhode Island gathered in front of the State Capitol in response to Trump’s inauguration the previous day.

Providence Chief of Police put crowd estimates at around 7,000 people. Meanwhile, Mayor Elorza, along with a sizeable contingent of Rhode Islanders, chose to march in Washington, D.C. It was sunny enough that people in the crowd were taking off their jackets. The surprising beauty and warmth of the day lent itself well to symbolism.

“It was raining yesterday!” organizer Shanna Wells told the crowd. Early in the event, Rhode Island Governor Gina Raimondo took the stage, telling the crowd, many of whom wore hand-knitted pussy hats, “You look great in pink!” She linked the Women’s Solidarity March to Martin Luther King Jr. Day, a week earlier.

Her voice echoed off the train station and apartment buildings behind the crowd and creating the strange impression of being in a gigantic fishbowl. A number of speakers that day quoted or paraphrased Dr. King.

Raimondo’s husband, Andy Moffit, spoke next, referring to himself as the “first gentleman” several times.

Food trucks parked on Gaspee St. beyond the crowds regularly honked their support.

Though it was technically an offshoot of the Women’s March on Washington, D.C., another rhetorical reference to Dr. King, the event was completely static, a march in name only. It was also “not a protest,” but “a demonstration of unity,” according to Wells. The organizers of the event stressed the importance of nonviolence, urging the crowd not to “engage” with counter-protesters—perhaps in an attempt to distance themselves from the protests in D.C. the previous day, which resulted in a number of arrests, or to fit into a broader liberal discourse which sanctifies non-violent resistance in the imagined style of Gandhi or Dr. King at the expense of any form of resistance deemed too ‘antagonistic.’

The only people who could remotely fit into the category of ‘counter-protester’ at the march were two people with makeshift “All lives matter” signs hanging around their necks whom I noticed walking across the street from the mall as I was leaving the march. There were hardly any police officers, either; several hung around the perimeter of the crowd, looking bored.

The mood on the right flank, where I had joined the crowd, was positive and noticeably relaxed, mostly white families with children running around.

A minority of signs referenced specific and more radical causes: Black Lives Matter, prison abolition, the rights of sex workers and trans people. Most, however, were fairly conciliatory: “This is going to suck,” one hand-drawn sign declared. A small girl wore a red cape with the words, “the future is female,” printed on the back; a man held aloft a bag of Cheetos on a pole.

That said, the speakers on the docket belonged to a wide range of causes, including: a representative from the Nurses’ Union, the director of the local Planned Parenthood, the head of the Rhode Island Committee on Human Rights, State Rep. Aaron Regunberg, the actress/singer/activist Rose Weaver, and Nellie Gorbea, the first Latinx person elected to statewide office in New England. Several high school students spoke and performed, including Laiza Jimenez, a sophomore at Classical who said they were “appalled and despondent” at Trump’s election, and Isabel Arango, who sang Alicia Key’s “Brand New Girl.”

The middle of the crowd at the Women’s Solidarity March was both denser, noticeably younger, and more racially diverse; high school and college students stood shoulder to shoulder. Booths for the ACLU and White Noise Collective RI, among others, lined the walkway. I spoke to a young person named Kai, who had a cardboard sign that read: “My president is

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

black / your president is wack.” They said they had gotten more active in protesting since the beginning of the Black Lives Matter movement and that they were there today in support of “all the people—especially the women—who feel like this administration is a threat to their safety.” Another protester, Nino Jungels, was there with their siblings; the family runs an after-school program for the performing arts together. Jungels studies biology and was worried about Trump’s refusal to acknowledge the reality of climate change. “We have knowledge and we refuse to use it,” they said.

Rep. David Cicilline had just flown in from Washington, D.C. to attend the event and was standing on the side of the capitol steps with an aide. “There’s a lot of alarm” surrounding this administration, he said, lauding both the values underlying the event and the impressive turnout. I asked him about the student walkout the day before, which he hadn’t been able to attend but praised in general terms, stressing the importance of young people’s voices. “I think the superintendent handled it well,” he said before being ushered away. +++ A day earlier, Providence High School students had staged a walkout in order to protest Trump’s inauguration. Organized by Youth in Action (YIA) and the Providence Student Union (PSU), the walkout began at 11:08 AM, a reference to the ill-fated date of the election. Over a thousand high school students flooded out of their classrooms and into the streets, marching to the capitol and congregating on its steps. There were fewer pink hats to be seen, and more pointed, substantive signs: “Racism/Sexism/Homophobia is not normal,” “Refugees welcome,” “White silence equals white violence,” “We demand police accountability,” “FIX OUR FUTURE.” After some milling around, the Classical High School contingent made its entrance, accompanied by What Cheer! Brigade, and a number of students spoke and performed.

A week after the walkout, I spoke to two student representatives from PSU: Jayleen Salcedo, Student Leader of Fundraising and a senior at Classical High School, and Tatiana Hall, a senior at Central High, who does media and jokingly referred to herself as the “hype man.” Salcedo and Hall both played an active role in organizing the walkout, which included getting the word out through social media and targeting calls to those high schools without representatives at either YIA or PSU. They also coordinated with adult allies, who were assigned to specific high schools and tasked with safeguarding the protesters on their march to the capitol. The Providence Public Schools superintendent, Chris Maher, had been aware of the walkout beforehand and had promised that no one would be penalized beyond receiving an unexcused absence, but explicitly did not endorse the walkout. He kept his promise, but Salcedo and Hall told me that there have been reports of individual teachers failing students for the day or using the walkout as an excuse to assign extra essays; there has also been significant backlash from some Providence residents, with a number of angry and hateful comments online.

There was a visible police presence at the student walkout, with some officers on horseback. “They were there, they were grumpy, but they just had to put up with it,” said Hall, who thought their presence was a bit redundant given that the role of the adult allies was to keep the students safe. Still, the event went smoothly. “It was shocking to actually see it all come together at the State House,” said Hall, “it was really powerful to see that we could organize like that.” Salcedo echoed her words, reiterating: “It was the most

powerful leadership experience that I ever had.” Salcedo wasn’t able to make it to the Women’s Solidarity March the following day; Hall attended a portion of the event which she thought seemed “awesome.”

Along with PSU, their next steps are figuring out how to continue to engage and mobilize those students who may have had their first experience with activism and organizing at the walkout. +++ The Trump administration’s decisions will wide-ranging in who they effect, but they will be specific—and deeply personal—in the precise shape they take on in our communities. Undocumented residents from Guatemala and the Dominican Republic will live in increased fear of deportation, potentially without the protection of Rhode Island’s current designation as a sanctuary state. International college students from targeted nations could lose their visas to study in the U.S. or be barred from leaving the country until graduation. The 106 Syrian refugees resettled here through the Dorcas International Institute of Rhode Island since last February will have little hope of being reunited with family members still trapped in Syria or in limbo in Europe. One 22-year-old Syrian man meant to arrive in Rhode Island this past Friday has already had his arrival indefinitely postponed, as has a family from Somalia. Families across the city and state will lose their health insurance and face prohibitively high costs for medical care. Rhode Island Public Radio might fold; the Planned Parenthood down on Point St., could lose its funding too.

Student activists like Salcedo and Hall who organized and participated in the walkout could see their schools undermined by an administration hostile to the very concept of public education. Though the students didn’t organize the walkout with the specific aim of protesting Trump’s nomination of Betsy DeVos for Secretary of Education, her confirmation stands to have significant impact on funding opportunities in the Providence public school system. Moreover, DeVos doesn’t believe in the federal enforcement of special education requirements for public schools mandated by the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), and she refused to state in her confirmation hearings whether she supports the Office of Civil Right’s investigation of harassment and discrimination at school—signals that she would almost certainly contribute to a more hostile school environment for vulnerable groups of students.

These degradations, large and small, of everyday life, are what every student and resident who protested the inauguration were marching against. Though they chose to express their rejection of the new administration in different ways, the student activists and the organizers of the Women’s Solidarity March have the same basic task in the days and weeks ahead: to extend the resistance beyond a single event, to bring to the fold those protestors who saw the protests as a first call to action, to keep others active and vocal about their dissent.

PIPER FRENCH B’17 stands with students.

METRO

04

ELECTRONIC D AT THE BORDE The aestheticization of immigrant rights

BY Joshua

Kurtz

ILLUSTRATION BY

Gabriel Matesanz

Last week, President Trump signed several executive orders that significantly expanded the authority of immigrations officers, banned Muslim immigrants and refugees from 7 predominantly Muslim countries from entering the United States, and ordered the construction of a 1,900-mile wall on the US-Mexico border. Protests immediately erupted across the country, and organizers mobilized to resist Trump’s policies and support communities whose safety had come under increased threat. Following the election, artists and writers have grappled with developing new practices to fight back.

What does it mean to be a writer, artist, and performer in the age of Trump? This past week, novelist Edwidge Danticat, writing for the New Yorker, reaffirmed Audre Lorde’s assertion that “poetry is not a luxury.

It is a vital necessity of our existence.” Danticat writes that since the election, she has looked toward the work of contemporary and historical poets to guide and inspire her as she navigates this new political reality.

The work of the Electronic Disturbance Theater (EDT), a group of artists, cyber activists, and academics, has endeavored to demonstrate this capacity for poetry to serve as a form of nourishment while simultaneously engaging with new media in order to develop original and radical modes of resistance. By gesturing toward both the limits and possibilities of art-based activism, the EDT’s projects and installations provide a useful model for art’s intervention against state violence. +++ On April 10, 1998, the EDT successfully hacked the website of former Mexican President Ernesto Zedillo. Using a URL-based software called Flood Net 1.0 which overloads a website with page requests until the server crashes, the collective blocked access to President Zedillo’s official website to protest the assassination of 45 Tzotzil Mayan men and women by a federally supported paramilitary group. Although the EDT was originally organized to develop virtual sit-in technologies, like Flood Net 1.0, the collective’s work has expanded in recent years to include demonstrations against the United States Department of Defense, the World Trade Organization, and former President Bill Clinton. As Ricardo Dominguez, the co-founder of the collective, told Hyperallergic, the group’s commitment to thwarting structures of violence and injustice “anchor their being and becoming as artists and every gesture that we make as an aesthetic gesture.” The EDT defines itself as both a political and artistic community, whose projects are designed to both develop new forms of digital media and push the boundaries of conceptual art.

In 2007, the EDT began developing the Transborder Immigrant Tool (TBT), a mobile phone application that used GPS data to assist immigrants crossing the United States-Mexico border.

The app was designed to help users to locate and access water stations installed by organizations such as Water Station Inc. and Border Angels. Funded in part by the University of California San Diego, the recycled

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cell phones were to be distributed to immigrants on both sides of the border. Though the EDT spent several years developing the program, the project was ultimately never realized. In an email interview with the Independent, Ricardo Dominguez explained that “the use of TBT

by Transborder communities never ultimately functioned, not because of US-based policies and racial scripts of hate.” Instead, he emphasized “that narco-wars [the ongoing war between the Mexican government and drug traffickers] just made the use by immigrants and refugees crossing the border with TBT impossible—it would [have] put them in great danger.”

Helping users locate water stations, however, was not the only objective of the TBT. The cell phones were additionally programmed to recite poetry to individuals walking across the border. The poems were written by Amy Sara Carroll, a poet and scholar who teaches at the University of Michigan. Carroll wrote two collections of poems: one set of experimental poetry and one set of twenty-four poems written to assist users in surviving the desert. In an introduction to the series, published online in 2016, Carroll explains, “beneath the unforgiving glare of the landscape’s daytime sun, beneath the luminosity of its nighttime stars, I thought, ‘What would I absolutely need to know if I were on my way to one of TBT’s way-stations?’ I turned to texts about desert survival: handbooks, military manuals, a guide for border-crossings briefly distributed by the Mexican government.” The twenty-four poems that resulted from this research include instructions for withstanding inclement weather, surviving rattlesnake bites, and finding the North Star.

Carroll notes that she wanted to write poetry that would serve as a “tool of sustenance,” rather than functioning merely in institutional contexts.

Moreover, she acknowledged “the hubris of the poetics attached to TBT,” an endeavoring to create texts that would be accessible to, and hopefully useful for, immigrants crossing the border. Though the TBT was designed, in part, to break away from the limitations of academic art, the project was exhibited at several art institutions around the world, including the 2010 California Biennial and the Toronto Free Gallery, demonstrating that the project was intended to be both a political and cultural object—a humanitarian tool and a work of conceptual art. +++ The TBT was immediately criticized by conservative lawmakers, who argued that the project was a misguided, illegal, and immoral use of taxpayer money. This criticism prompted investigations into the TBT, the EDT, and Ricardo Dominguez’s work by the University of California and the United States Congress. This was not the first time that the EDT faced backlash. At around the same time that the TBT was developed, Dominguez came under investigation by the University of California and the FBI Office of Cybercrimes for a virtual sit-in he organized to protest the University’s tuition fees and California’s broader education policies. Dominguez states in his interview with Hyperallergic, “[the investigators] were all seeking to find a way to stop TBT and to de-tenure me for doing the very work I was hired to do and tenured for…UCSD dropped its actions to de-tenure me and instead gave me merit for my research.” Additionally, the conservative pundit Glenn

FEBRUARY 03, 2017

DISTURBANCE ER Beck, who worried that the tool would encourage undocumented immigration and weaken the border between the US and Mexico, devoted an entire segment of his Fox News program to condemning the application. Though members of the EDT received dozens of threatening emails, Beck’s tirade effectively introduced the TBT into mainstream political discourse.

Dominguez told Hyperallergic, “Beck, on his website and old Fox New shows, insisted that TBT’s poetry would ‘dissolve’ the nation!

Which I believe is indeed the power of poetry.” The poetic feature of the TBT attempted to accomplish just this: dissolve, or at least disrupt, the borders of the United States and the rhetoric with which politicians valorize them.

Dominguez told the Independent that “the [TBT] became a disturbance of U.S. border policies and its long history of using the border as a site for the administration of fear-based politics and long term economic exploitation of immigrants and refugees.” By emphasizing the physical and spiritual needs of its users, the TBT attempted to disrupt the common definition of the border as an essential and inviolable guard of the nation by subverting the normative conception of the ‘illegal immigrant.’ In other words, the EDT strove to re-frame immigration discourse as a social justice issue, rather than an issue of national security. By drawing attention to the number of people who die crossing the border, the EDT aimed to shift national discourse away from the question, ‘What should the United States government do to prevent illegal immigration?’ to one of, ‘What policies must the U.S. implement in order to ensure the safety of immigrants crossing the border?’

Though the TBT was never distributed to migrants, its efforts to disrupt and reframe immigration rhetoric in the United States are critical, especially given President Trump’s extensive use of aesthetic and symbolic gestures in his attempts to garner support and exercise power.

In his interview with the Independent, Dominguez reinforced this point: “the [TBT] creates the possibility of un-grounding the utilitarian structuring of political language, wall-building speech-forms, or…fear driven Trumpism.” In other words, the TBT attempts to transform the border from a site of economic exploitation, state-sponsored violence, and claims to national security to the site of a new, disruptive framework for immigrant rights, and racial justice. “We live in a world,” Dominguez told the Independent, “where only goods and services have rights to cross borders.” In disrupting notions of legal vs. illegal immigration, the TBT asserts the right for individuals to cross borders safely and justly. To replace the Geographic Positioning Systems (GPS) that have driven global politics and markets, the EDT envisions a Geographic Poetic System “that can move off screen space and drift back to the embodied world.”

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+++ In his condemnation of the TBT, Beck was particularly critical of the tool’s poetic feature, mocking the EDT’s belief that poetry can help transform the rhetoric around immigration policy in the United States. Beck alluded to Dominguez’s statement, in an interview with California Public Radio, that the TBT can be understood “like the Statue of Liberty that one carries as he walks.” Beck reduced the project into a series of sound clips in order to assert what he believed to be the danger of allowing immigrants to enter the country, appealing to his conservative viewers by railing against the ‘liberal propaganda’ that allowed for the development of the project.

If understood strictly as a work of conceptual art, the TBT’s poetic recitations aestheticize, even reduce, the experiences of immigrants crossing the border. Moreover, aesthetic disturbance are in no way sufficient modes of resistance in the age of Trump. Though the TBT was partially designed to immediately help, even save, its users, its cellphones ended up in art institutions around the world—not in the hands of those who might have needed them.

However, Dominguez’s equation of the TBT with the Statue of Liberty was intended to reclaim a symbol—the Statue of Liberty’s hope for a welcoming, safe America—that has been employed for centuries to erase the narratives and experiences of marginalized peoples. Dominguez emphasized that the TBT is “a gesture in the process of becoming,” a tool that is continuously “shape shifting and performing itself into potential spaces of use and poetics.” In other words, the TBT offers artists, cyber activists, and academics a new, radical method of resistance that has the potential to shift national discourse in the age of Trump. The TBT, however insufficient in resisting and altering immigration policy, can be employed effectively in addition to various forms of direct action and community organizing. The project provides an essential framework for which we may envision the role that art and poetry can play in efforts to advocate for a more just and ethical national immigration policy. As Audre Lorde once wrote, “[Poetry] forms the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action.”

JOSHUA KURTZ B’17 is out of bounds.

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BACK IN THE CULTURE WARS On the potential defunding of the National Endowment for the Arts Ryan Rosenberg and Will Weatherly ILLUSTRATION BY Claire Schlaikjer BY

Less than 24 hours before Inauguration Day, an unnamed source told The Hill that Donald Trump’s transition team had already been busy drafting a budget proposal with slashes to federal discretionary spending in line with Trump’s aggressively conservative policy priorities. In addition to eliminating programs in the Departments of Energy, Commerce, and Justice, the proposal called for the elimination of the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA). A former staffer at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank that helped the Trump team draft the proposal, told the Hill that “targeting waste like the National Endowment for the Arts and National Endowment for the Humanities would be a good first step in showing that the Trump Administration is serious about radically reforming the federal budget.”

Despite the foundation’s assertion, cuts to arts programs would not demonstrate much reformation of the total amount of federal spending. In 2015, the NEA received $148 million in federal funding, a fraction of a percent of the $3.899 trillion federal budget. The value of American arts programming transcends its proven economic returns. Additionally, critiques of the NEA have often focused on discounting the organization’s nonmonetary merit. The foundation’s justification for the NEA’s elimination is based more in an evaluation of its cultural value as ‘waste’ rather than any demonstrated evidence of wasteful spending. In 1997, Heritage published “Ten Good Reasons” to defund the organization, citing the NEA’s donations to “multimillion-dollar arts organizations,” which already draw large amounts of private fundraising. This selectively discounts the fact that 40 percent of the NEA’s budget goes to state and regional arts councils for the funding of smaller, local projects. The Foundation argued that the NEA “will continue to fund pornography” due to its support of sexually explicit work, but that the agency simultaneously “promotes politically correct art” due to the organization’s priority of highlighting multiculturalism.

It is difficult to determine whether Trump shares these critiques in full; he was rumored to have been eyeing Sylvester Stallone for leadership of the NEA late last year, a prospect which the former Rocky star declined. In adopting the Foundation’s budget proposal, however, Trump is using the gains of a political project that for decades has developed an approach parallel to his own: reactionaries publicly discrediting those artists who rely on the NEA, or who those artists truly are. +++ The National Endowment for the Arts was established by the United States Congress and president Lyndon B. Johnson in 1965. As the organization grew, projects like the Laboratory Theater Project, which intended to support drama programs in high schools and allow professional theater companies to perform, were developed. In 1967, Providence was one of the program’s pilot cities. The NEA, however, was scrutinized by members of Congress who questioned the quality of the artforms funded by the organization. Representative John M. Ashbrook (R-OH) worried in 1968 that the NEA would “reward the avant-garde artists and discourage the traditional artists.”

Outrage ensued over a $750 grant awarded to the 199th issue of American Literary Anthology, in which editor George Plimpton featured a piece by concrete poet Aram

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Saroyan, which read, “lighght.” At around the same time, Senator Claiborne Pell of Rhode Island, once a big proponent of the NEA, expressed concern over the abstract art favored by the organization, wondering whether it consisted merely “of doodles and swirls.”

In the ’80s, similar doubts about the NEA’s role surfaced as Ronald Reagan attempted, and failed, to eradicate it. Two controversial projects funded by the NEA again put the organization under conservative scrutiny, christening the polarization that would become known as the ‘Culture Wars’ of the late ’80s and early ’90s. One such project was a photograph titled Piss-Christ by Andres Serrano, depicting a plastic crucifix submerged in the artist’s urine.

Serrano received death threats and hate mail as a result of the image, as did museum and gallery curators who showed the piece. Donald Wildmon of the American Family Association called the piece “anti-Christian Bigotry.” Similarly, a retrospective of Robert Mapplethorpe’s photographs titled The Perfect Moment received severe backlash. Just a few months after Mapplethorpe’s death from complications of AIDS, the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. refused to display the homoerotic exhibit, prompting protests in D.C. In 1990, four performance artists, John Fleck, Tim Miller, Holly Hughes, and Karen Finley, applied for NEA grants that were vetoed due to the subject matter of the proposed projects. The artists sued the NEA in the Supreme Court case National Endowment for the Arts v. Finley.

The artists, who became known as the NEA Four, won the case and were awarded the original amount of money for which they applied. Congressional backlash against the settlement pushed the passage of a mandate barring the NEA from funding individual artists, fundamentally altering the agency’s relationship to the material it supported.

Today, the Old Post Office Pavilion in D.C., which once housed the NEA’s headquarters, has been re-developed into a Trump International Hotel. +++ The NEA Four case firmly put to rest any possibility for the organization to function like conservative critics’ pornographic, elitist straw man. Jane Alexander, former president Clinton’s appointee to lead the NEA, pushed the organization from funding individual artists to prioritizing funds for nonprofits, with the aim of “extend[ing] the arts to underserved populations—those whose opportunities to experience the arts are limited by geography, ethnicity, economics, or disability,” as the mission statement for its Arts Works grant program outlines. It works to do this through a number of internal mechanisms: it requires state and regional arts councils to assess the needs of its region according to categories set by the NEA, and it provides federal support for these councils through block grants with the stipulation that a proportion of the funds be targeted towards art education and arts programs in marginalized communities.

Randall Rosenbaum, executive director at the Rhode Island State Council of the Arts (RISCA), told the Independent that NEA funds were often central to his organization’s efforts to support those priorities with methods based on the specific needs of Rhode Islanders. The NEA serves as a model for RISCA’s peer-review process, which determines the allocation of grants directly to programs

run by local nonprofit agencies. “Those direct grants are a great opportunity for local arts organizations to identify themselves what they can do to serve the needs of their community,” he said. Rosenbaum highlighted the NEA’s encouragement of local arts education programs like New Urban Arts in Providence and the Pawtucket Urban Music Project as landmarks of the NEA’s ability to have a local impact; arts education programs in Rhode Island have received more awards from Michelle Obama’s National Youth Arts and Humanities Program than those in any other state.

Providence arts initiative AS220 has repeatedly received NEA funding for AS220 Youth, a free-of-charge after school arts education program for local at-risk youth and incarcerated teenagers at the Rhode Island Training School. AS220 communications director David Dvorchak told the Independent that his organization aims to make these programs self-sustaining models, and that AS220 Youth is central to its mission of serving local young people of color, so that AS220 has both the means and the drive to continue its programming with or without federal funding. But, he said, “AS220 can’t do it all. It’s incredible that Providence has such a good number of youth arts programs in addition to our youth program. [AS220 Youth] operates at a max capacity all the time; there’s a waiting list to get in. These other organizations being able to operate and being supported by the NEA is a major benefit to the city and to the state.”

Patricia C. Phillips, a curator and critic who writes about contemporary art, architecture, and design, was the Interim Associate Provost at RISD when the NEA awarded Providence an “Our Town” grant in 2011. Phillips helped facilitate a RISD course in which students developed public art project proposals funded by the grant in an effort to revitalize Kennedy Plaza. While the grant’s mission was controversial, gentrifying downtown Providence and problematizing questions of how it would actually serve people who rely on public transportation, Phillips told the Independent that the project helped “animate and activate a public space, and engage people in a dialogue about what public life means and what public space represents.”

Visit neafunded.us, and a list of hundreds of similar programs across the country will fall across your screen; designed by environmental engineer Tega Brain following the Hill’s report, the website shows users the sheer multitude and variety of arts programming the NEA funded last year alone. The site serves as an accurate demonstration of what the NEA has come to represent: an agency which strives to serve every state, and which attempts to make access to art more egalitarian and unifying.

According to a retrospective of the NEA published on their website, former President Richard Nixon favored this harmonizing quality by supporting the organization during the politically divisive Vietnam War. “The president wanted for his own an issue that would not divide his audience into sympathetic hawks and hostile doves,” the NEA wrote. By relying on decades-old polarized rhetoric, the 45th president has already lost that potential for unity.

RYAN ROSENBERG B’17 and WILL WEATHERLY B’19 wish our elected officials would see the lighght.

FEBRUARY 03, 2017

MARCHING TOWARD INCLUSIVITY Can we have a Women’s March for everyone?

Roksana Borzouei and Julia Tompkins ILLUSTRATION BY Anzia Anderson BY

“We stand together, recognizing that defending the most marginalized among us is defending all of us,” reads the Mission Statement for the Women’s March on Washington. The march, held in Washington D.C. and in cities around the United States on January 21, appeared to be about just that—standing together. The language of the march swelled, moving towards a position intended to promote inclusivity. It was intended for those who were scared by the Trump presidency, for those who had been scared their whole lives, for those angry and fed up. For those in desperation. Yet women of color and trans women felt that white women implicitly or explicitly urged them to leave their divisive issues at the door for the sake of consensus.

According to the signage, though, reproductive rights were at the fore. “Pussy Grabs Back,” along with “My Body My Decision”—even “The Elephant in the Womb.” The high prevalence of the color pink reinforced the narrow reproductive rights bent. Even the parking lot signs at RFK Stadium were sponsored

by Planned Parenthood, guiding a myriad of buses in the signature Planned Parenthood color. The subject of both scrutiny and celebration, pink Pussy Hats dotted the crowds, to the extent that images of the march from above capture the pink mass, winding through the Mall, stretching down Independence Avenue towards the Washington Memorial.

Images of the march from far off lose sight of the individual signs. One of the goals of the march was to address intersectionality, a term coined by the Black feminist scholar and activist Kimberlé Crenshaw to denote the study of overlapping systems of oppression like race, class, gender, and sexual orientation. But the hats branded the march as an event where individual identities disappeared. Despite this, many of the protestors have a singular reason for being there. Xhep, a 21 year old from Maryland, told the Independent, “I have women in the family, I went to an all girls school.

I love women, women are so important. They are the creators and birthers of all people. Therefore we should respect all women, no matter how they are or appear to be. Protect trans women, that’s really what brings me here, trans women’s rights.” They recommended getting involved with Showing Up for Racial Justice (SURJ), an activist network organizing white people for racial justice.

Though the leaders of the march worked toward a message of inclusivity, there were limitations to this effort. For example, they responded to critiques of their all-white leadership by adding three women of color to their organizing team. Yet the sweeping goals of the march attracted crowds—largely white and female— that pushed marginalized identities to, well, the margins. Socio-economic barriers determined who could and could not participate in the march. As inclusive as the march tried to be, there were those who felt underrepresented, or willfully ignored. Disenchantment with the march’s broad-stroke activism and white-feminist undertones kept others, like educator and activist Brittany T. Oliver or LeRhonda S. Manigault-Bryant, an associate professor of Africana Studies at Williams College, away from the march. As Oliver wrote on her blog, explaining her opposition to the march: “Racism may not have been real to people who have had the privilege of not dealing with it, which ultimately means these people have been ignoring what Black people have been saying since our very existence.”

The sea of messages at the march suggested an inclusive whole, as though 1 “Pussy Grabs Back ” + 1 “Don’t forget white women voted for Trump” + 1 “Black Lives Matter” + 1 image of a woman wearing an American flag hijab might make for an intersectional Women’s March. So why did the march feel so

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one-note? Each sign named a discrete goal. A life-sized puppet inscribed with the words of scholar and activist bell hooks stood next to a sign which read “If you’re not afraid, you’re not paying attention.” Together, the two signs marched only a few rows in front of “No person is illegal.”

Representation at the march, predominantly attended by white women, raises the question of how a ‘majority’ could work to support marginalized voices.

Or, perhaps, whether the majority is even committed to dismantling a system of violence built on whiteness.

The critique that followed the march touched on an important distinction between what it means to own vaginas as a political claim to power and to essentialize Reproductive Justice as having a vagina. Consider the 1976 Hyde Amendment, passed three years after Roe v. Wade was decided. The amendment, which prohibits the use of public funds for abortions, effectively denies poor women—by-and-large women of color— their right to a legal abortion.

Comparatively, women’s rights activist Loretta Ross defines Reproductive Justice as encompassing “the complete physical, mental, spiritual, political, social, and economic well-being of women and girls.”

In response to these amendments and decades of Reproductive Justice work, many forms of birth control are currently offered under the Affordable Care Act for a $0 co-pay. That said, trans women and girls with biologically male sex organs would need to pay $500 to freeze sperm and an additional $50 per month to keep sperm frozen if they would like the option to have biological children later, since hormone replacement therapy causes infertility. A Reproductive Justice framework for women of color and trans women recog-

nizes the historical struggle of the right for the option to conceive children, but also the right to raise those children autonomously and comfortably.

At the start of the march, a corridor of “pro-life feminists” stretched down Independence Avenue.

A discrete march within the march, these women marched for the rights of unborn children, an issue they felt was underrepresented that day. Noticeably, many were from Catholic organizations or schools that had bussed their students into D.C. These equally-pinkclad demonstrators signaled the extent of differences between marchers. These women felt comfortable enough to march for pro-life policies in this space, while many women of color and trans women did not feel comfortable showing up at all. That pro-lifers felt they had a place under the march’s umbrella of inclusivity and solidarity—not to mention felt safe enough to attend—points to the failed attempt at intersectionality that the march ultimately represented.

The lack of intentionality and solidarity added another layer of violence to the event. The sexually violent nature of some posters signaled a lack of care about who the march was aimed to protect the most. A poster that read, “Grab Trump by the balls and exorcise without consent,” normalized, even encouraged, sexual assault. A sexually explicit inflatable doll made up to look like Trump with blonde hair and makeup also endorsed sexual assault. Even if their ostensible target was a person accused by multiple people of sexual assault, these signs disregarded the fact that the majority of attendees are people who are disproportionately at risk of sexual violence, and that this was especially true for trans women and women of color.

These signs violated the sense of safety and solidarity intended for a march with such aims, adding another layer of violence and marginalization to what was supposed to be an inclusive event. Compared to the militarized security presence at protests against racialized violence, the police at the march took selfies with demonstrators, sometimes donning their Pussy Hats for the photo-op.

Some attendees still chose to focus on the day’s more positive aspects. Shawna, a marcher who came with her children, told the Independent, “Even though we were in uncomfortable circumstances, nobody got pissy. Everybody was on the same page. So it’s really encouraging to see people from all different walks of life, all different faiths, all different identities outraged but encouraged and ready to make changes.” To her, solidarity looked like how “five hundred thousand people can come together, and everybody’s in a good mood, even though we’ve been standing for like seven hours in the cold with no food, and really no potty situation, very close to each other.”

In her article, “The Radical Uses of Anger: All White Women Aren’t the Enemy, but White Supremacy Always Is,” Kirsten West Savali outlines the violence in silencing anger in order to protect certain people from discomfort. Women of color and trans women did attend. Some sacrificed their own comfort and safety to protest the Trump administration or to support issues close to them. Others worked hard to ensure the march did not stop at goodwill and pushed progressive policies to the forefront of a national movement. Still, others attended, but had their voices drowned by the pink, yonic drone of don’t divide us with your differences.

ROKSANA BORZOUEI B’17 and JULIA TOMPKINS B’18 think Black, Latinx, Muslim and Brown women save the world.

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FINDING REFUGE A new model delivers healthcare and perhaps more

BY Saanya

Jain Gabriel Matesanz

ILLUSTRATION BY

Omar Bah ran through the Gambian night. Echoes of soldiers shouting and dogs barking came from every direction. The memory of every kick and bruise that his battered body had sustained over the last months pulsed through him, pushing him onwards. He had dared to write about corruption in his government and now he was fleeing his country permanently.

After an arduous journey, Omar arrived in Rhode Island in 2007. He was tested for hepatitis B at Rhode Island hospital. Omar had been tested for the potentially life-threatening liver infection twice before, and both times, the results had been negative. He knew that he was at risk of exposure; 15-20 percent of Gambians are hepatitis B positive according to the U.S. National Center of Biotechnology Information. In the United States, that percentage is somewhere between two and six percent, according to the CDC. Omar tested positive. It was two weeks until his next doctor’s appointment. He spent that entire time alone, much of it weeping in his apartment. He would close his eyes to sleep but wake up screaming. “[The doctor] immensely traumatized me because at that time I was also battling PTSD,” he told me. “I was isolated because I was the only refugee from Gambia. I didn’t know anybody.”

A positive hepatitis B test indicates one of two things: that Omar had already been inoculated against the virus, or that he was infected. The doctor was unable to tell him definitively which of the two were true since Omar had no medical records. Despite the foreignness of his surroundings, Omar could not accept the diagnosis. He asked to speak to the doctor’s supervisor.

“Imagine this happening to people who don’t even read or write English,” he says. “People who are not empowered to speak for themselves.”

Recalling the experience, and other past trauma, Omar tells me he would have benefitted from being with somebody during his initial medical visits, “Things would have been different,” he says, recalling the experience. “I would never have been with a doctor unfamiliar with treating refugees.” He would have been able to talk to somebody who could have advocated for him. +++ President Donald Trump signed an order this past Friday suspending entry of all refugees to the United States for 120 days, barring Syrian refugees indefinitely, and blocking entry into the United States for 90 days for citizens of seven predominantly Muslim countries: Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen.

“In the current U.S. political climate,” Omar told me, “refugee equates to terrorism. Refugee equals illegal.

Refugee means everything that is bad. This is wrong.”

Trump’s policy is not only endangering thousands of the most vulnerable populations by not allowing them to immigrate to the US, but also affecting the health of those already within Rhode Island and beyond. Although, one program is trying to alleviate this health burden.

The room in Dorcas International Institute of Rhode Island is one of many occupied classrooms arranged in a maze of corridors. One day last May, Fadya, a family doctor, led a session on family planning with a nurse practitioner. In attendance were three recent refugees training to become Community Health Workers (CHWs). One man named Burqan, a refugee from Iraq, was being trained along with the others in a pilot program organized by The Rhode Island Department of

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Health, Dorcas, and the Refugee Clinic at Hasbro Children’s Hospital. These organizations are collaborating to train leaders within refugee communities to become CHWs who can advocate for and guide other refugees through the healthcare system. This program will be the first of its kind in Rhode Island.

The pilot focuses on the three main languages spoken by refugees in Rhode Island: Arabic, Somali and Swahili. This training was the third in a series. Burqan and his colleagues had already completed a 30-hour course in topics ranging from mental health, to interpreting skills, to ethics. The three have now graduated, along with ten others to date.

Burqan says he wants to become a CHW having navigated the healthcare system on his own. In an interview with the Independent, Burqan noted, “we noticed that the new refugees [were] facing issues mainly with medical appointments, such as how to deal with the medical provider.” Burqan is hopeful that if CHWs like him can help in this aspect of refugees’ lives, “they can deal better than us before.” But now refugees are under even more stress, particularly since the divisive election cycle. Dr. Carol Lewis, director of the Refugee Clinic at Hasbro, told the Independent this is especially a problem for children. “I worry about the Syrian kids, many of who arrived with anxiety issues, and who are now telling us that they are scared," stated Dr. Lewis. "They hear that they are not welcome here. I can’t imagine what that does to a child’s sense of who they are in the world.”

She worries about bullying, as well: “Anecdotally, I can tell you that there has been an uptick in bullying incidents, and not just toward Arabic-speakers. I worry also about those who were waiting for family members to arrive. Now, who knows when they will come?”

Omar also emphasizes that being separated from family members is highly traumatizing for refugees, something that he knows about from personal experience. He described the case of one Somali refugee who arrived in Providence a few months ago. Omar helped him fill out the paperwork to petition to bring his wife and son to the US from South Africa. They were supposed to join him sometime this week. After the announcement of the ban, the man asked Omar, “Now they are stuck there, what is the point of me being here?”

Noting the potential repeal of the Affordable Care Act, Dr. Lewis says it is not yet clear what will happen to refugees' access to healthcare. Refugee children and their parents will still be insured through Rite Care, Rhode Island’s Medicaid program. Adult refugees who don’t have a job that provides access to health insurance stand to be the most impacted.

On the recent ban, Dr. Lewis says, “I am very, very sad. But also hopeful that this is a blip. But for that to happen, it takes people to speak out." The CHWs are doing that and more. +++ The CHW program could help address many of the issues that interpreters, another group of healthcare professionals—largely composed of former refugees— face through formalized training and reimbursement.

Currently, interpreters are paid only for the time they spend in a doctor’s office. As we sat in the waiting room of Hasbro, Marie, an interpreter from Congo, described the work she had done for a patient sitting next to us.

She was a refugee in Uganda for eight years, where she learned eight other languages. “It’s just a talent,” she

says. “In my family we are six. But it’s only me who speaks all these languages.”

Marie was waiting with a patient at the Refugee Clinic in Hasbro to interpret their appointment. But her work day began before the doctor's appointment.

She had picked the patient up from their home. After the visit, she would go to the pharmacy to interpret and pick up their medication. She would take the patient home. But the clinic only compensated Marie for the time she spent in the doctor’s office. The rest was all as a volunteer; work through which she found purpose but that also put stress on her financial situation. As she explained, “Whatever I do, I do by compassion, by love.

No one is forcing me. And I know I’m doing it correctly because those are the languages I love. So I feel happy.”

CHWs will hopefully help interpreters, since they are responsible for much of the work for which interpreters are not compensated. To this end, the Department of Health is working with the Rhode Island Certification Board to create a CHW certification so that Medicaid can recognize and appropriately compensate the work being done by CHWs. Already, Dr. Lewis says that the data coming back shows that the program is having an impact on refugee health. Over the past six months, the absences for routine healthcare visits, such as vaccines, dropped from an average of 24 percent to 9 percent.

But its future is uncertain. It is also unclear how the repeal of ACA will affect the possible reimbursement for CHWs, which was planned to be structured through Medicaid. According to Baha Sadr, the Director of Refugee Resettlement and Case Management at Dorcas, there are nine refugee cases for granting residency in Rhode Island that are now suspended because of the ban. “We are one community after all," Sadr says, "and though we may have difference in opinion, we have to be supportive of all of humanity. We, too, want this to be a safe community. Refugees promote safety because they love and cherish the freedom that this country offers them.”

FEBRUARY 03, 2017

+++ After the initial assessment which revealed his hepatitis B diagnosis, Omar eventually requested a second opinion. He was tested again, but this doctor took the time to sit with him. She didn’t ask for medical records. She told him, “I will explain it to you as simply as possible.

To start with, you don’t have Hepatitis B.” Omar was elated. The doctor explained that he had likely been vaccinated against Hepatitis B as a child, but had no record or memory of it.

Teddi Jallow, Omar's wife, joined him two years after he arrived in the United States. Together they founded the Refugee Dream Center in 2015, a post-resettlement agency. Omar described his work at the Refugee Dream Center as similar to the work of Dorcas, including referrals, skill development programs, and cultural orientations. Government support through resettlement agencies ends three to six months after a refugee’s arrival. Although clinics work to provide ongoing primary care, refugees face many barriers when it comes to healthcare access and literacy. Obtaining a driver’s license or using the postal system are difficult tasks. Teddi explained, “[The refugees] are left alone. I went through the same thing too. We just pull what we went through to help others.”

A typical day at the center might have Teddi organizing a clothing drive or preparing for an adult English and health promotion class in the afternoon. Omar has also became certified in trauma-based therapy by the

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Harvard Program in Refugee Trauma, a multidisciplinary program originally founded at the Harvard School of Public Health. His therapy, his organization, and his consultations with healthcare professionals are inspired by his own experience. He sees the community health workers program in a similar light. “I wish that when I going through all of this, I could also have had someone with experience with me,” he told me.

Teddi says that many refugees’ dreams are broken when they first arrive in America. Many cannot speak English, they struggle to find jobs, and must adapt to potentially dangerous living conditions. These difficulties will only get worse in the current political climate.

Healthcare is a good place to start helping refugees. The CHW program, she hopes, will offer the support new refugees need to support themselves.

CHWs, Teddi, Omar, everyone at the Refugee Clinic are working to make sure that remains possible.

“Maybe we will get there someday,” Teddi finishes, smiling.

SAANYA JAIN B’19 urges you to help Omar, Teddi and their partners in all the work they do by donating your time to the Refugee Dream Center by calling 401300-0544.

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FEBRUARY 03, 2017

THE PEOPLE’S CHAMPION An interview with Dave Zirin

Colin Kent-Daggett ILLUSTRATION BY Matthew Lancaster BY

Dave Zirin is a sportswriter at the Nation, whose work can also be found at the blog Edge of Sports. He covers the intersection of sports, politics, and social justice.

In 2016, Zirin provided extensive, critical coverage of corruption by Olympic and Brazilian officials and forced displacements at the Rio Olympics, locker room rape culture, and the legacy of Muhammad Ali following the legend’s death. Additionally, he followed NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick’s national anthem protest and owner as well as coach endorsements of Donald Trump. His work on the politics of sports has been awarded and recognized by the New York Press Club, Northeastern University’s School of Journalism, the NAACP, and PEN America, among others. Recently, the Independent spoke with Zirin over the phone about Kaepernick, compensation for college athletes, and the role of the Ivy League in college sports. +++

anti-gentrification movements and affordable housing movements to ensure that those areas are maintained.

You know the phrase ‘you can’t be just a little bit pregnant’? That’s not the case here—there really is such a thing as greater or lesser evil stadium construction deals, and you can sand away the worst effects of them. It comes down to public officials basically blackmailing owners—saying, ‘you can’t build unless you build affordable housing, make equal investments in infrastructure,’ et cetera. Because it’s not an investment in urban infrastructure, it’s a replacement for it.

Or you can end up like Atlanta—the Braves have a relatively new stadium and they move to the suburbs.

There are too many stadiums. It’s highly racialized in Atlanta: it’s a majority-Black city, and you’re moving the stadium to the suburbs. There’s just a chance for free, cheap money over there. It’s the same with the Georgia Dome, even in a city that needs infrastructure spending and doesn’t have a real history of supporting the football team.

The College Hill Independent: As you detailed in your article “2016 in Sports: Joy and Resistance While the World Burned,” there was really a wide range of protests from athletes this year. But the most notable was Colin Kaepernick. Why do you think his protests lost steam throughout the year? Certainly many people, myself included, learned the third verse of the national anthem, but what did his protests accomplish?

The Indy: On a bit of a different topic, you’ve also written about stadium construction and public funding. The new Rams stadium in LA and the Warriors’ new stadium in San Francisco are both privately funded, which seems like an improvement. Does private property and funding solve some of the issues of stadium placement and renovation? How can we protect low-income communities of color from such destruction and displacement?

DZ: Even if it is privatized there are all sorts of tax breaks. When owners say ‘oh, it’s privately funded,’ it’s actually heavily subsidized through tax breaks and the like—the Warriors are getting real estate in San Francisco, you might as well hand them a suitcase full of platinum. So a lot of that is spin. There are these strategic hamlets of gentrification, so it will take

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

The Indy: I think the Ivy League provides an interesting example because they don’t have formal athletic scholarships; instead, they give often need-blind financial aid that everyone pretends isn’t for athletics.

And that gives athletes some agency because they can quit the team and keep their money and their place at the school, but it also glosses over the fact that athletics is really the primary job of some people at these schools. What do you think of the Ivy League’s approach?

DZ: With the Ivy League, there’s such a small minority of students who are able to juggle high academic and high sporting ability, and the Ivy League gets to pluck them.

It’s really an unrealistic sample size about the amount of time, energy, and luxury that it takes to play those sports. We’re way past the days of seeing a kid playing on the street and saying, ‘give that kid a scholarship.’ It takes so much money to play high school sports and be in that pipeline. So it would be interesting to look at the class of Ivy League athletes and see where they’re coming from—it takes a tremendous support system to be able to achieve as a teenager.

Dave Zirin: It didn’t lose steam, it just got swallowed by the election and its aftermath.

It didn’t fade because fewer people participated but because it was overwhelmed by other things. Kaepernick spread the protest to high schools, middle schools, and more, but the media is like a cat on a laser pointer. The election took all the oxygen out of the room and moved the discussion away from police accountability to how we can survive a Trump presidency; Colin and the people around him and other athletes didn’t stop.

In terms of accomplishments, it started conversations that needed to happen and it promoted discussions in spaces that otherwise have the luxury of removing themselves from the discussion of whether the police represent a threat or a safe space. It was electrifying because he took a side—he wasn’t trying to build a bridge. It inspired others who felt the same way, but who weren’t connecting with the ESPY awards ‘build a bridge’ arguments [made by Dwyane Wade, Carmelo Anthony, Chris Paul, and Lebron James]. The question ‘what did it accomplish’ comes from a misreading of the history of athletic protest—the history of sports and struggle is how athletics feeds into and accelerates broader struggles.

Some people have a magic wand theory about college sports. If I could wave a magic wand I would turn athletic sports participation at schools into a graduation requirement, make it as least ‘jock’ as possible.

Many people see physical fitness and teamwork as good values! There are schools that make them a compulsory part of education, as when radical athletic director Jack Scott at Oberlin was in charge. I would change college basketball and football from being minor leagues, from being multi-billion dollar systems of indentured servitude that are heavily reliant on Black labor—the same two sports with the highest proportion of Black athletes.

The Indy: You’ve also been writing recently about paying college athletes and in particular college football players. Will we ever see paid college athletes? What needs to happen in the government or the NCAA for us to get to that point? I know there was the recent court case [O’Bannon v. NCAA] about athletes being paid for the use of their image.

DZ: It won’t happen with these courts. But I’m a big believer that the center will not hold. Dabo Swinney [head coach of Clemson football] just made $6 million! The last time they won a title the coach made $50,000. That tells you that there’s a profound economic change at the base of the sport. It’s absurd.

There’s been a mild shift for the athletes with the new stipend [at major sports programs for laundry, snacks, and other small costs], but that’s a drop in the bucket. It was clearly meant by the NCAA to avoid an instance such as Northwestern [whose football team tried to unionize]. Piecemeal reforms will come, and players at the top have the most capacity to drive change. But all the players are talking about payment and that’s a huge change, people are speaking out about it, and it’s in the public consciousness.

The Indy: This past semester also saw several Ivy League schools suspend various sports teams, such as Harvard men’s soccer, Columbia wrestling, and Princeton men’s swimming and diving for racist, misogynistic, and homophobic behavior. But in the scheme of college sports scandals, these aren’t nearly the most extreme—this year we saw [Oklahoma football player] Joe Mixon continue to play football after the release of a video of him physically assaulting a woman, and worse behavior is routinely unpunished. Why has the Ivy League cracked down on these teams? Is it to preserve their image and powerful cultural influence? Will other schools follow suit?

DZ: You have to ask, why are schools taking this public stand? I’m not an Obama apologist—I’m quite the critic. But one of the things that the Obama administration did was expand Title IX’s capacity to prevent violence against women on college campuses.

And that has scared administrators around the country because it’s made them liable. It’s a pocketbook issue. [University of Oklahoma football coach] Bob Stoops said as much about Joe Mixon and why he is doing something now. It was one of the more morally craven press conferences I’ve ever seen, but I appreciated his honesty. He said, ‘it’s not opportunism, it’s a very different world now than it was 2 years ago.’ The effects of Trump on Title IX will be interesting—laws are only as strong as they’re enforced. Has there been enough change in campus codes and consciousness to maintain this level? Or will schools just say ‘fuck it, the Department of Justice and Secretary of Education aren’t enforcing it, so why should we give a shit?’

METABOLICS

12

GET TING CLOSER Changing Feminisms on a Virginia 'Commune'

BY Erin ILLUSTRATION BY

It’s 9:00 AM in Virginia. The sun has just started to dry the dewy fields of Twin Oaks, an income-sharing intentional community home to roughly 100 people. Rosie, 31, drops her three-year old, Sylvia, off at the community childcare along her morning commute, a 15-minute stroll through the woods. She’ll spend the day gathering and splitting wood for fires. It will be cold soon, and her 100-person family needs to stay warm by burning wood in lieu of gas or electrical heating. +++ Built in 1967, this income-sharing community in Louisa, Virginia, is the longest standing of its kind in the United States. Based on the utopia described in the behavioralist B.F. Skinner’s Walden Two, Twin Oaks cites equity, cooperation, nonviolence, and ecology as its foundational principles. Due to the centrality of their social values, Twin Oaks uses “intentional community,” not “commune” to describe its system. The community’s bylaws state that it also strives to “eliminate the attitudes and results of sexism, racism, ageism, and competitiveness.”

Sexism, placed first in this list of oppressions, is often given the most attention and has been combatted most directly. Twin Oaks' egalitarian policies—resource distribution, decentralized leadership, and equality of labor— function as daily resistance to gendered oppression.

“If I weren’t at Twin Oaks,” says Rosie at daycare that morning, “I don’t know what I would have done.”

As she spoke, Rosie’s eyes began to tear. Parenthood didn’t feel accessible to Rosie when she was living in Morgantown, West Virginia. Thankfully, the policies of her resource-sharing community removed many barriers—financial and otherwise—to having her daughter.

Part of what gave Rosie access to her reproductive choice is the egalitarian labor system at Twin Oaks.

There, every hour of labor equals one work credit—no matter what type of labor. This means that Sunya, a member for three years who leads activities for Sylvia and the rest of the children at daycare, receives exactly one labor credit per hour worked—the exact same which Rosie will get chopping wood and which Keenan, a member for 30 years, will get for his work fixing a roof.

Every community member, regardless of age, gender, skill, or seniority, is expected to log 42 hours a week (unless other arrangements are needed). Typical tasks include harvesting, maintaining the property, or working for one of the income-generating businesses, such as hammock weaving.

Twin Oaks’ radical choice to value all labor disrupts traditional categories of gendered work. Childcare, traditionally undervalued and designated to women, is compensated at Twin Oaks. In their system, each child gets a generous amount of creditable care hours over a year, which parents can portion out to other community members. Rosie can either claim labor credit for taking care of Sylvia outside of daycare hours or give credit to another member for taking care of her child. This stable, shared parenting structure also allowed Rosie to continue participating in Sylvia’s life after she and her girlfriend, who carried Sylvia to term, split up. Both parents still live in the community and continue to play equal roles in Sylvia’s childhood.

Twin Oaks has designed its policies specifically so

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FEATURES

West Anzia Anderson

that its members’ relationship status does not affect their security; every member receives the same resources and is assigned to a separate room regardless of relationship status. In addition, if couples apply for membership together, each applicant is considered individually. Brittany, who is 33, says that these policies add up to Twin Oaks “not giving a shit about your relationship status.”

A proudly self-identified feminist, Brittany says that disrupting the nuclear family may be Twin Oaks’ most significant attempt to combat gender oppression. “Heterosexual marriage has historically been a significant site of women’s oppression in the US,” she writes in an email to the Independent, “Physical isolation, financial dependence, and societal expectations…keep the nuclear family together despite abuse.” At Twin Oaks, however, “because all material needs are granted as a basic right, a woman's security and well-being do not hinge on a single relationship with one man.”

Like for Rosie and her partner, these feminist policies have allowed for greater autonomy in non-heterosexual relationships as well. At Twin Oaks, homosexual, queer, polyamorous, and otherwise “non-standard” relationships make up the majority. (One night over dinner, Twin Oaks members chuckled when they realized no one could think of more than one heterosexual, monogamous relationship on the farm). Valerie, who has been at Twin Oaks for 25 years and enjoys letting her natural facial hair grow out, says “it’s not a coincidence that we have a feminist culture and people can choose these relationships.” +++ While Twin Oaks’ feminist culture opens up space for queer relationships, some members have found Twin Oaks' feminism less accepting of queer gender identities.

Rachel, a 32-year old with a fine arts degree, thinks, “gender at Twin Oaks gets a ‘C.’” Rachel identifies as genderqueer (neither strictly male nor female), and believes that, “structurally, we create more gender equality,” but admits, “we are still growing our understanding of queer and trans genders, and what that means for being in community.”

Feminism at Twin Oaks is often recognizable by “second wave” metrics: women in traditionally male-dominated work areas, serving in decision-making positions, and having access to reproductive health care.

While recognizing that these long-standing goals have yet to be adequately achieved, Rachel and other members advocate for a feminist framework that incorporates a more nuanced understanding of gender. At a recent group discussion about cis-sexism (the assumption that all people identify with the gender assigned at birth), Rachel told the group that despite not identifying fully as female, “I find it easier here to round up to female pronouns.” Many attendees at the meeting commented that most Twin Oaks members, just like the majority of mainstream society, are still caught in a binary definition of men and women, male and female. At the meeting, some members discussed the complexity of a recent posting tacked up on the communications board stating, “Only 2 out of the 8 people who signed up to be planners are women, can we have some more representation, please?” One of the 6 members mentioned included

Stephen, a genderqueer trans guy who was leading the discussion group on cis-sexism.

Cel, who recently moved to Twin Oaks from another community, Baltimore Free Farm, is also working to navigate the farm as a non-binary member. Cel is transmasculine and uses ‘co’—a gender-neutral pronoun that Twin Oaks created in its founding policy documents in order to avoid referencing a man or woman. On a symbolic level, Cel has created space for co’s non-binary identity within Twin Oak’s 1960’s feminist language.

Though ‘co’ is familiar to members, Cel’s pronouns are sometimes an area of challenge (Cel also uses he/his pronouns at Twin Oaks). Additionally, Cel notes that co will sometimes receive comments from members that indirectly amount to: “you’re just expressing your masculine side” or “you’re just wearing men’s clothes,” and these can feel dismissive of co’s identity. On the whole, however, Cel feels positive about Twin Oaks members’ attitudes toward gender expression and is encouraged that “most people are trying,” which is “still 110% better than the outside world.”

Despite hurdles, Rachel similarly feels encouraged about gender at Twin Oaks and states confidently, “I think we’re on a trajectory of getting better.” It took them three years after moving to the community, but Rachel recently posted a card on the communications board announcing their use of they/them/theirs pronouns. So far, in-person reactions have all been positive.

When asked why, during those previous three years, they didn’t leave Twin Oaks because of their inability to fully express their gender identity, Rachel said, “there’s so much good that goes on here and so much that took to build it. Among my friends, there’s definitely the feeling that this is our home and we are going to make it the best we can.” +++ One way genderqueer members have been advocating for more complex understandings of gender is in the language surrounding Twin Oaks’ women-only spaces.

Since the eighties, one level of a residential building has been reserved specifically for women residents, and women-only massage times or sauna sessions are common. In recent years, the language used for these spaces has occasionally been challenged, but issues involving how members understand gender coalesce most intensely around Twin Oaks’ annual Women’s Gathering. Every summer, Twin Oaks hosts a three-day festival that is officially “open to all of us who are female-born and/ or woman-identified.” Members who organize the event say that arriving at this specific language took countless revisions and meetings that were often contentious, personal, and emotional. When discussions around feminism and gender were most explosive, several members were left feeling estranged from each other. Valerie was involved in these discussions and became so upset by them that she decided, “I don’t want to do this anymore; I want to talk to this person as a human being.” Valerie did so, and invested in one-on-one conversations with a member who thought differently than she. Valerie was able to repair her relationship and reach an understanding with this member, in large part because they were friends who had a solid foundation after years of living

FEBRUARY 03, 2017

and working together.

What does it mean to disagree with someone about feminism online, write a comment, then shut the computer, versus disagreeing with someone about feminism and then seeing them in the garden, taking care of their child, and sitting down with them at dinner, all in one day? Valerie says even if she strongly disagrees with a member at Twin Oaks, she’s unable to demonize anyone, “because we are so incredibly intertwined. You can’t compartmentalize, and that is part of the connection.” She attributes this to the fact that “we share income and share resources.” Interpersonal conflict is a consistent challenge that the community faces. When everything is shared amongst the same 100 people (space, food, work, decisions, romantic partners), there is bound to be friction. Twin Oaks has built-in strategies for dealing with these struggles: scheduled (and labor creditable) mediations between individuals, open community feedback meetings on a member’s behavior, and a culture of ‘telling it like it is.’ More than these specific strategies, however, conflicts that arise at Twin Oaks are most effectively mediated by nature of living in community with others.

“It’s hard to live so closely together without stepping on someone’s toes,” Valerie admits, “so we have to find skillful ways to figure out what happens after you step on someone’s toes. The same thing goes for differences in perception and experiences of the world. I do believe that we’re making progress and we’re stumbling as we make that progress. And then we pick ourselves up again. And I think we’re not going to stop stumbling.

I think we are going to keep trying to move forward.”

This may be the most invisible, yet most radical, aspect

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

of the community: the massive possibility for friction and concurrent growth that comes with such involved interaction. +++ Everything considered, Cel feels largely positive about co’s treatment at Twin Oaks: “my biggest worry here is people not understanding my experience, [rather than] having people look at me and want to kill me. If that’s my biggest worry, that’s pretty good.”

Rachel agrees that Twin Oaks “is the safest feeling place that I’ve been” and feels encouraged by the fact that they’ve “seen members very, very slowly change their mind over their years here.” As of now, Twin Oaks offers a relatively safer space for women, for queer relationships, and increasingly for genderqueer and trans folks. However, this community has room to grow in becoming safer for many other targeted identities. Notably, Twin Oaks is overwhelmingly white—a fact that members are quick to acknowledge. If Twin Oaks and other intentional communities commit to growing their diversity, what might these spaces have to offer?

Kami, a Black member of Twin Oaks, wears his dreads proudly and says that an important part of living on the farm is rarely interacting with police enforcement.

Later this year, Twin Oaks may be giving a portion of their land to two Black Lives Matter organizers who want to start a separate sanctuary community for Black women activists. Additionally, as a policy, Twin Oaks does not ask members about their documentation status.

Unfortunately, not everyone who feels threatened will find moving to a commune accessible or practical.

However, the conversations occurring at Twin Oaks surrounding diversity and inclusion do have relevance to groups fighting for justice elsewhere. A reoccurring attitude at Twin Oaks and elsewhere is pushback from those who say radical movements are asking for too much, too fast. At Twin Oaks, Brittany is frustrated by what she calls an “overly simplistic” understanding of feminism, and describes how some members will point to women using power tools or holding managerial positions and say, “we’ve done enough.” Brittany gets the sense that many members (especially men) on the farm see their work in fighting for justice as complete because they’ve already made the huge step of moving to a commune.

Complacency frustrates those agitating for change at this income-sharing community: what can you ask of people who are already doing revolutionary work, every day, by simply existing as they are?

As many members at Twin Oaks believe, you can ask for more—a lot more. While feminists nationally and internationally are grappling with challenges to become more intersectional, the voices of those at the margins, demanding for more, are fighting to be heard. Progressive spaces and movements always have room to grow, but will they listen? Many members like to repeat, only half-jokingly, “It’s not the revolution, but you can see it from here.”

ERIN WEST B’18.5 doesn’t give a fuck about your relationship status.

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FEATURES

SKELETONS I N T H E W AT E R The health of Earth’s oceans Fatima Husain ILLUSTRATION BY Iris Lei BY

Earth’s oceans are much like human bodies. In the quest to maintain homeostasis, our bodies and oceans strive to resolve any perturbations and restore healthy, natural conditions. Rising atmospheric carbon dioxide levels are currently pushing our oceans further away from those natural conditions. Although we can reasonably predict how our bodies will respond to illnesses like the flu, though, we cannot fully grasp the extent to which oceans will respond to rising anthropogenic carbon dioxide levels. It’s completely unprecedented, and we’re diving into the deep end.

Though humans have only been around for the most recent 0.1 percent of the planet’s history, we have profoundly modified the Earth to meet our needs. Land use change, agriculture, damming, fossil fuel burning, and cement paving in cities have caused and continue to cause large amounts of carbon dioxide to be released into the atmosphere. As a result, current atmospheric carbon dioxide levels are the highest they’ve been in human history, and they show no sign of slowing down. Preliminary data released by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), a part of the U.S. Department of Commerce, indicate that current atmospheric carbon dioxide levels are around 404.48 parts per million, and continuing to rise.

Though alarming, atmospheric carbon dioxide measurements don’t tell the whole story—only a fraction. In a 2004 study on the oceanic sinks for anthropogenic carbon, Christopher Sabine of the Pacific Environmental Marine Laboratory and colleagues found that about 34 percent of carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere by fossil fuel burning, cement production, and land-use change gets stored in the oceans, leaving the rest to get stored in the atmosphere and terrestrial biosphere. In fact, the oceans are the largest active carbon sink on Earth, holding more of Earth’s carbon than terrestrial biomass and the atmosphere combined. If the 34 percent of carbon dioxide produced by human activities didn’t dissolve into the oceans, Earth would be much warmer due to carbon dioxide’s affinity for trapping heat. This heat-trapping quality of certain atmospheric gases is known as the greenhouse effect. As anthropogenic emissions rise, a greater amount of carbon dioxide is dissolved into the oceans.

Many of us have encountered dissolved carbon dioxide before in the form of carbonated drinks.

However, unlike a can of soda, the uncapped oceans instead transform carbon dioxide into aqueous chemical compounds. The dominant carbon varieties produced by carbon dioxide and water increase the relative acidity of the ocean. For most of the oceans, the pH range is tight—pH scale ranging from zero to 14, most ocean waters fall only between 7.6 and 8.5. High anthropogenic carbon dioxide production threatens this delicate range. The increased acidity greatly threatens marine organisms with calcium carbonate and aragonite shells such as clams, oysters, quahogs, scallops, conches, and corals. Under acidic conditions, it requires more energy of these organisms to build their shells and skeletons because the acidic waters can actively dissolve them.

If it’s not energetically efficient for these organisms

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SCIENCE

to build their shells or skeletons, then they’ll stop.

This threatens vast marine species populations.

Rising ocean acidity isn’t new. During the last ice age, the significant loss of plant life freed up a large amount of carbon, which, like 34 percent of anthropogenic carbon dioxide today, found its way into the ocean. The resulting acidification affected living marine organisms at the time, literally dissolving them alive. But it didn’t stop there. It extended deeper, and greatly disturbed the graveyards of marine organisms below the surface.

When heavy marine organisms die, they sink into the depths of the ocean slowly. The water strips the bodies of all nutrients leaving only their skeletons and shells behind. This process occurs again and again, and the remnants accumulate on shallow marine shelves and deep ocean surfaces over time.

However, when the oceans become acidic as they did during the last ice age, the accumulated skeletons of marine organisms begin to dissolve, and this dissolution ultimately restores ocean water back to its previous pH range. Unlike a recovery from a cold or flu which takes days or weeks, the recovery from ocean acidification takes between 5,000 and 10,000 years. As long as enough skeletons are present, the oceans can dissolve them during acidic periods and maintain a pH which supports extant marine life.

Following the restoration

of ocean pH during the last ice age, calcium carbonate and aragonite began to accumulate on shallow and deep oceanic surfaces because acidic conditions no longer prevailed. With anthropogenic carbon dioxide levels rising nearly each month, Earth’s oceans are losing their ability to build and store calcium carbonate and aragonite as fast as they need to prepare for an acid apocalypse. If all of the calcium carbonate and aragonite stories in the oceans are exhausted, then the oceans can no longer dissolve carbon dioxide, forcibly redistributing the 34 percent of carbon dioxide that usually finds its home in the oceans among the atmosphere and terrestrial biosphere. Ultimately, this process warms the Earth further. Even worse, warm waters absorb carbon dioxide less efficiently than colder waters, potentially affecting surface ocean photosynthesis and other biochemical processes that rely on carbon dioxide.

Due to the unprecedented nature of anthropogenic carbon dioxide production, Earth and environmental scientists can’t refer to history textbooks to determine the exact effects of human-induced ocean acidification. Instead, they must refer to ocean modeling. Using mathematical modeling to incorporate the major feedbacks and processes that dictate oceanic carbon dioxide dissolution, ocean modeling predicts how they will respond to rising carbon dioxide levels in the future. According to the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory/Princeton coupled climate model, the rate of oceanic uptake of carbon dioxide may begin to slow as soon as 2025 in some scenarios. +++ It can be tempting to think that the end is nigh considering all of this information. But, geologic change acts on long, long timescales—far longer than our lifetimes. The oceans will respond to changes in ocean acidity over the next thousands of years, and we’ll observe and monitor it to further our own knowledge about how the ocean works. Maybe by then humanity will have found a way to sequester or end anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions altogether.

It’s equally tempting to feel hopeless about our oceans in the face of climate change. But the only way to cope is by taking action, no matter how small the effort may seem. Anyone can take simple steps to reduce our collective carbon footprint. Donating a dollar or two to research that tracks Earth geological systems is an easy contribution for anyone who’s financially able to do so. Non-scientists and scientists alike must work together to make sure that climate change denial has no stage by addressing falsehoods about climate when we see them. And in an era where falsehood thrives, messaging is key.

We can make sure to share our support of sustainable environmental policies at the local, state, and federal levels. There is no easy, catch-all solution to our climate and ocean woes—but our only redemption is the willingness to try something.

FATIMA HUSAIN B’17 is ready to dive in.

FEBRUARY 03, 2017

STRAPS Outcroppings from the botanical margin

BY

Lance Gloss

ILLUSTRATION BY Frans

van Hoek

Ashes to ashes—all dead in there?

I’m at the Brown University Herbarium. Working.

Looking at some specimens—dead plants, really. One hundred thousand dead ones. Each individual is meticulously strapped to oversize paper sheets. Pasted in the lower corner of each is a small card—a toe tag—containing the essential information: a species name, a date, and a locality.

For hourly pay, I transpose all this data and the accompanying bodies into an online database.

Ranunculus oblongifolis, wet ground at Houston, 1872 Carex coulteri, under dwarf oaks, Santa Fe, 1895 Aspidium angulare, Yorkshire, 1846 What’s it like to be strapped to a piece of paper?

Standard size, regardless of how big or little you are. To be kept huddled amongst your distant relatives, but separated from the them by walls of paper? To be classified by type, figured in terms of your morphological features, and left in cabinets for 150 years? All of this, after being plucked toward death from your home (Tahiti? Siberia? Syria?

Sonora?) by a paid collector of beings more or less like you.

What is lost in these cabinets? What is kept? One inquires into the contents of life itself. +++ “In a restricted sense... protoplasm is immortal: its vital activities have been continuous, without interruption from the beginning of life upon the planet.”

-H.H. Wilder, The History of the Human Body (1909) +++ All new organisms on Earth are produced through two processes. Some cells pursue meiosis, or sexual reproduction, while others reproduce exclusively through asexual mitosis. By these two means, cells have perpetuated the entirety of the Earth’s genetic content through the millennia—but it was never only information being passed on.

Metaphysically speaking, it is also the torch of life. Scientifically, it is the protoplasm—a vital substance endowed in the cell’s creation, and extinguished at its destruction.

Between lies what we call a lifetime.

A herbarium assistant is an organism, too—an organism free to speculate, but generally busy with work. Here, it is to sort, type, and click. Stay pasting barcodes at the LCD aft of this faintly-refrigerated botanical crypt. Incidental that I, faced with the stream of remains, succumb to wanderlust.

Ribes cereum, Big Hole, Montana, 14 May 1900 Hakea rugosa, New South Wales, 1914 Krameria parvifolia, Sonora, 1886 Keith Basso, an anthropologist, records a story about an Apache man who ties barbed wire for work. He chews tobacco, and as he spits and wraps the wire, he lists off some names of places around his country. If you ask him what he is doing, he tells you, “I ride that way in my mind.”

I find myself riding, in my swivel chair, slipping across the surfaces of ink that pin the date to each. Each fragment of tribe, space, and time settles into a three-dimensioned frame. Some of the species I have seen living; some of the

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places I have visited in person. I take a particular pleasure in these familiar locales. But most of these places have arrived in my mental map as transfers from other crypts— atlases, texts, tongues. This one is a cyborg landscape, half encyclopedia, but anchored by the concrete proof of a body, labelled and strapped down.

Lilium alba, cult. from seed, 15 June 1872 Bauhinia natalensis, Natal, alt. 4000!

Sharardia arvensis, Beirût, April 1846 Information about the lives of the plants themselves— and on those watered them, knew them, needed them—is lost to a century’s indifference. Information is less scarce on the collectors. Searching the web yields a stream of stilted obituaries, lists of achievements, and a flurry of black and white photos. With an alchemy of dry air and noxious chemicals, western academics mummified plants in past centuries as part of an enlightened crusade to complete a taxonomy of living things. Collectors went out in the field.

They stalked and re-staked the bounds of the living globe.

It is by their handiwork that a herbarium assistant may ride through deceased pastures.

Whatever distance separates these two landscapes— the field, the crypt—lies in the hunt that transferred specimens from one to the other. The process was modest: a trained man boarded a train or a wagon or a ship. He wandered a land, selecting with an eye to stem and leaf from the vegetable matter that covers this planet’s brown skin.

With sharp blades he cut them out and spread them across the sheaf; he bound them, and sent them here.

Alas, the vague profile of the prey makes for the harvester’s ambiguous moral standing. To take a rock is theft.

To take a life is murder. But a plant? +++ “In this way all animal and plant forms have been produced, each being but the temporary dress of a proliferating mass of protoplasm; a detached mass of tissue which feeds, breathes, and often moves and perceives, for the better support and protection of the continuous living protoplasm.” +++ Regarding theft: what, really, is the difference between this mausoleum and the produce aisle? In both, the life has left the living. Fruits that might have seeded are plucked.

Long limbs are hacked, and leaves stripped. The difference is in the fate of the material. Plant-parts perched along the produce aisle will be consumed and incorporated into new living forms. Here in the Herbarium, the cycle of life is ever deferred. Bodies remain suspended an inch above the reeking mass of abiota, strapped to the paper, just short of death.

The air is parched. Some proud ancient has snatched them into limbo.

Regarding murder: I don’t expect anyone to believe that killing a plant is tantamount to killing a human. Maybe not even an animal. Still, I expect none to deny that a plant lives. If it didn’t, there would be no grain, no produce aisle, no life cycle. Each and every one of the grasses, herbs, and trees in the Herbarium has lived. They may have lived on.

Those sharing tight quarters behind beige metal doors may have bloomed and seeded, brightening the same bog or cliff for a hundred and fifty springs and winters. The stuff

of their selves would have scattered by the season to all corners. Their contents would have unspooled, following the seasonal switchbacks of rebirth to form a rippling spoor across space and time. Instead kept strapped to the paper is a dried flower.

And today, a Herbarium assistant withdraw that flower from the shelf, and places it… where? In a folder, right beside the door.

Cornus canadense, straits of Cape Breton, 24 July 1854 Anenome narcissiflora, Colorado, 30 Nov. 1867 Juniperus mexicana, Tehuacan, 21 Dec. 1895 Of course, no specimens slither off. But, sorting hundreds of specimens at a time, a Herbarium assistant is liable to cause small amounts of damage to their spines and extremities. I watch little fragments splinter away—a shriveled hawthorn berry skitters across the matte black table; gold leaf like dust from the maple descends—and find their way to the floor. A fleck sticks to the bottom of my shoe as I exit the building—a wisp, stealing out from the coffin’s cracked lip. +++ “Even its death is an adaptation, for by this means new and perfect somata are constantly taking place of those whose usefulness as guardians of the protoplasm has become impaired by the inevitable injury to which organisms are constantly exposed.” +++ I have resisted the urge to smash the LCD monitor, rip the barcodes and toe tags and straps in twos and threes and send them scattering across the plaza, among the ankles of passing children. I have resisted the urge to steal whole specimens and bury them in the soft soil beside the street, six inches deep where the bugs and bacteria promise swift liberation.

I hesitate to plunder the thieves’ den. Willing to part with the odd twig, I cannot stomach the thought of losing full segments of this landscape carved in limbo. Its contours and its rhythms are familiar. There are distances and déjà vus, short-cuts and traverses. There is vitality in these bundles, these snapshots, these outcroppings. They exist as momentary extracts from the teeming mass of life, ever organized, fractured, and reorganized.

And still, the years will out-wait these cabinets. Piece by piece, all of this will re-enter the soil, and stretch anew toward the sky. Birth, rebirth, and the gap between. This gap is the map of concern.

LANCE GLOSS B’18 requires sunlight to grow.

OCCULT

16

SOCK DANCE BY

Julia Horwitz

ILLUSTRATION BY Kela

Johnson

It sneaks through the back door when you stop waiting up for it opens the fridge slow and drinks milk right from the carton peels off its muddy tights to wash with pine soap in the sink it passes out on the couch under a thick, plaid blanket

so you barely see it when you wake up this time and stumble into the kitchen it is smaller than you expected and when you swish it around your mouth you think: this is so quiet but this is it the thing I couldn’t quite make myself you crouch like a mother at its cheek and don’t know where to begin maybe: I know I begged for you to come but I wish you had called ahead of time so I could put on that red dress or at least some music.

17

LITERARY

FEBRUARY 03, 2017

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

X

18

THE

FRIDAY 2.3 An Evening of Poetry Featuring Rhode Island’s Poet Laureate / Books on the Square / 7pm tbh if you’re trying to buy a book in Wayland Square I think you should give your money to the good folks at Paper Nautilus, but RI Poet Laureate Tina Cane seems very cool and this event appears to be free!

SATURDAY 2.4 The Mark Baumer Celebration of Life / Granoff Center @Brown / 2pm Mark Baumer was a really incredible PVDbased poet, activist, and organizer who passed away recently while walking across the country to raise $$ for the FANG Collective. You can read about his life and work anywhere from the New Yorker to Roxane Gay’s twitter. Mark’s friends and family invite everyone to join them in remembering him.

Protest: Poverty Isn’t a Crime / Cranston City Hall / 10am Cranston representative Charlene Lima (D (for “deadbeat”)) recently proposed a bill that would criminalize panhandling. Come out & show your opposition!

SUNDAY 2.5 I Am Not Your Negro with post-film panel / Coolidge Corner Theatre (Brookline, MA) / 2pm Happy Black History Month (not that every month shouldn’t be Black History Month in this day and age!)! This just-released adaptation of James Baldwin’s unfinished novel about Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr. sounds amazing and I can’t wait to see it. Baldwin’s official biographer will be here. Even if you don’t go, you should read Giovanni’s Room.

25th Annual Super Sunday Hoagie Sale / Mount Hollis Lodge, Holliston, MA / all day If you’re still in Massachusetts after the film screening, grab a hoagie from what appears to be a Freemasons lodge. They do this for every super bowl apparently. According to their facebook event, one hoagie costs $9 and feeds 4 people--a real national treasure!

MONDAY 2.6 RI Concealed Carry Permit Class / Pine Ridge Indoor Shooting Range (Exeter, RI) / 10:30am I used to think guns were 100% bad but now I feel like maybe we could use a citizens militia?? idk there’s a literal $100 cover charge for this and I don’t really want to give a gun to anyone who would pay that much to learn to use it.

Donate your money to a chill direct action org instead.

TUESDAY 2.7 National Black HIV/AIDS Awareness Day / 9 Pleasant St. / 12-7pm In observance of the day, AIDS Project Rhode Island is running expanded testing hours for HIV, Hep C and syphilis. This is a great organization that recently lost some funding; add it to your list of projects to give to in these tumultuous days, if you can.

Earned Sick Days Campaign (hosted by RI Working Families Party) / RI State House / 3pm 40% of Rhode Islanders are denied the ability to take a single sick day; join community groups and public health advocates rallying behind the idea that sick days are siiiiiick.

WEDNESDAY 2.8 Beverly Tender, Alyssa Kai, Lady Queen Paradise, death.exe / AS220 / 9pm / $6 My gf lives with one of the members of Beverly Tender and they’re a really sweet person who loves eggnog! <3 Sure to be a siiiiick show.

THURSDAY 2.9 Academics United Against Trump - No Visa and Immigration Ban / Brown University / 12pm In conjunction with other college students and faculty around the country, Brown students and community members will gather to show solidarity and support for citizens and refugees of the seven countries affected by the latest executive order (see page 3). Attendees are asked to wear white.

om fr e ct iv fa at e n iv er at alt rn e y te it kl al vor ee y kl fa w ee ur w yo

In the Wake: On Blackness and Being / Pembroke Center @Brown / 5:30 Brown’s Pembroke Center talks are always really cool and accessible to the public. This one is by Christina Sharpe, professor of English at Tufts, who will be talking about her new book.