The College Hill Independent Volume 41 Issue 10

VOLUME 41 ISSUE 10 DECE MBE R 4 2020

FORCED INTO THE LIGHT How doxxing and technological authoritarianism threaten transformative movements

CRISIS RESPONSE TO CALIFORNIA’S CARCERAL STATE One bill’s attempt to provide alternatives to policing

COMMUNITY AS PEDAGOGY Reimagining higher education and online learning through Black Mountain College

Indy Cover

inventories (#2) Kiara Pornan

Week in Review 02

REASON AND REVOLUTION WE CAN BELIEVE IN Tammuz Frankel ON LATE NIGHTS AND THE MERCIES OF POLYESTER Belinda Hu

Nation + World 03

CRISIS RESPONSE TO CALIFORNIA’S CARCERAL STATE Rose Houglet

Metro 05

FORCED INTO THE LIGHT Jefferson Bernard & Kuno Haimbodi

Features 07

COMMUNITY AS PEDAGOGY Seth Israel

13

CRIMINALIZING CHILDHOOD Morgan Awner

Arts + Culture 09

LOSE CTRL Gaya Gupta

Science + Tech 15

From The Editors The longest year ever might not be over yet, but your Indy Wrapped is finally here. A lot happened on the Indy in 2020. Here are a few highlights from a year to remember (or, you know, forget).

Let’s start you off with a win. You discovered 766 new staff writers this year. Your articles were written in 340 different languages. Even in 2020, you still found ways to grow.

Your top genres were:

1. The Rhode Island Political Cooperative 2.Tik Tok 3.These unprecedented times we are living in

One managerial tactic helped you through it all. Your top

strategy of the year for dealing with a drought of submissions was forcing section editors to contribute.

You’re a pioneer. You interrogated the intersection between art and technology before it hit 5000 publications. Next up: finding the new millennial pink.

Throw it back. Since time wasn’t real this year you revisited some

of your old pieces. Your favorite throwback you published this year was that one personal narrative you wrote in creative nonfiction three semesters ago where a deer gets hit by a car.

Your top author was Ben Lerner. You are in the top 0.05% of

readers. Your favorite moment in 10:04 was when he goes to the writer’s residence in Texas and writes a novel that dissolves into a poem about how the small-scale transformations of the erotic can be harnessed by the political. You spent 723 minutes explaining to your parents why your degree in Modern Culture and Media is worth the price of tuition.

Thank you for spending all 67 months of 2020 with us. Read it.

Share it. Wear it like a badge of honor.

THE PARADOX OF SOCIALLY RESPONSIBLE COMPUTING Jessica Dai

The story of your 2020 with AXIA

Literary 11

INDY HOLIDAY GIFT GUIDE Kate Ok & Bowen Chen

18

AN OLD TELEPHONE SONG Ivy Scott

Ephemera 17

TOE TAGS Izzi Olive and Tara Sharma

X 12

PORTRAIT OF MY WIFE AS A BOAT Ethan Murakami

List 19

Tara Sharma, Sara Van Horn, & Mehek Vohra

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

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

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

04 DECEMBER 2020 VOLUME 41 ISSUE 10

STAFF Week in Review Amelia Anthony Nick Roblee-Strauss | Nation + World Emily Rust Leela Berman Giacomo Sartorelli Anchita Dasgupta | Metro Ricardo Gomez Deborah Marini Peder Schaefer | Arts + Culture Seamus Flynn Alana Baer | Features Alina Kulman Alan Dean Edie Elliott Granger | Science & Tech Gemma Sack Anabelle Johnston Thomas Patti | Literary Kate Ok Bowen Chen | Ephemera Sindura Sriram Anna Kerber | X Maia Chiu Ethan Murakami | List Tara Sharma Sara Van Horn | List Designer Mehek Vohra | Staff Writers Uwa Ede-Osifo Mara Cavallaro Muram Ibrahim Justin Han Izzi Olive Bilal Memon Seth Israel Nell Salzman Victoria Caruso Zach Ngin Evie Hidysmith Kaela Hines Ella Spungen Sarah Goldman Alisa Caira Laila Gamaleldin Drake Rebman Morgan Awner Elana Hausknecht Rhythm Rastogi Nicole Kim Lucas Gelfond Rose Houglet Joss Liao Nicholas Michael Belinda Hu Leo Gordon CJ Gan Vicky Phan Tammuz Frankel Amelia Wyckoff Auria Zhang Olivia Mayeda Justin Scheer Gaya Gupta Eduardo Gutiérrez Peña Marina Hunt Issra Said | Copy Editors Christine Huynh Grace Berg Jacqueline Jia Elaine Chen Sarah Ryan Jasmine Li Nina Fletcher Madison Lease Alyscia Batista | Design Editor Daniel Navratil | Designers Anna Brinkhuis Katherine Sang Isaac McKenna Miya Lohmeier Clara Epstein | Illustration Editor Sylvia Atwood | Illustrators Sandra Moore Katrina Wardhana Floria Tsui Mara Jovanović Hannah Park Jessica Minker Rachelle Shao Yukti Agarwal Sage Jennings Ophelia Duchesne-Malone Joyce Tullis Charlotte Silverman Simone Zhao | Business Isabelle Yang Lauren Brown Evan Lincoln | Web Designer Sindura Sriram | Social Media Christina Ofori | Alumni Relations Jerry Chen | Spanish Translation Felipe Félix Méndez | Senior Editors Tara Sharma Sara Van Horn Cal Turner | Managing Editors Audrey Buhain Andy Rickert Ivy Scott | Managing Designer XingXing Shou *** The College Hill Independent is printed by TCI Press in Seekonk, Massachusetts. @INDYCOLLEGEHILL WWW.THEINDY.ORG

Selling a record-breaking 1.7 million copies in its first week of release, Barack Obama’s A Promised Land is on track to become the most successful publication by a former American president (second perhaps only to Trump’s tweet announcing his COVID-19 diagnosis, which was hearted 1.9 million times). Early reviews extol Obama for his immense precision; the book restages in harrowing detail (dialogue and all) various well-known episodes from Obama’s first few years in office, from the Deepwater Horizon oil spill to the raid that led to the killing of Osama bin Laden. While these moments cover familiar ground for the genre (‘presidential memoir,’ or, ‘political ghostwriting’), the book also offers a more intimate exploration of the president’s college years for the few of us who missed Barry—his development into adulthood, the moments that inspired his career in politics, and, to much excitement, girls.

“Looking back, it’s embarrassing to recognize the degree to which my intellectual curiosity those first two years of college paralleled the interests of various women I was attempting to get to know,” he writes.

Although he cautions that he was ultimately friendzoned (“I found myself in a series of affectionate but chaste friendships”), he nevertheless goes to great lengths to outline the erotic tactics he deployed: “Marx and Marcuse so I had something to say to the longlegged socialist who lived in my dorm; Fanon and Gwendolyn Brooks for the smooth-skinned sociology major who never gave me a second look; Foucault and Woolf for the ethereal bisexual who wore mostly black.”

This may well be the first time that “Foucault” has been described as “ethereal,” or that “Marcuse” and “longlegged” have been used in the same sentence.

If $45 seems too steep of a price to pay for this earth-shattering pick-up-guide, you can consult the other materials Obama has already proffered on the subject. In an interview with David Axelrod in December 2016, for example, he describes skipping nights out with friends, “because I have to, you know, read, you know, Sartre or something” (so random!). Or, a 1982 series of correspondences between Obama and Alexandra McNear (self-professed Derridean and his girlfriend at the time) includes extended reflections on T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land,” with such ~kinky~ lines as, “Facing what he perceives as a choice between ecstatic chaos and lifeless mechanistic order, he accedes to maintaining a separation of asexual purity and brutal sexual reality. And he wears a stoical face before this.”

He effortlessly plays the bad boy, negging her with the seemingly detached, “I haven’t read ‘The Waste Land’ for a year, and I never did bother to check all the footnotes,” while still continuing to make sweeping claims comparing Eliot’s politics against Mussolini’s. He ends by cranking the sexual tension to 11: “You seem surprised at Eliot’s irreconcilable ambivalence; don’t you share this ambivalence yourself, Alex?”

BY Tammuz Frankel and Belinda Hu ILLUSTRATION XingXing Shou DESIGN Daniel Navratil

REASON AND REVOLUTION WE CAN BELIEVE IN

Hot! In an interview with Jeffrey Goldberg, Obama described his ideal audience as “some 25-year-old kid who is starting to be curious about the world and wants to do something that has some meaning.” We at the College Hill Independent read DnG and Butler for the short-armed cybergoth drainer who had tickets to that one 100 gecs concert, Zizek and Didion for the farsighted twee cinephile who used to drink essentia in Leung Family Gallery, and Sally Rooney and Benjamin for the soft-spoken ecofascist with acne who moonlights as a consultant. -TF

week in chasing tails THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

Around 12:30 AM on the first Monday of November, a train carrying one person, the driver, crashed through the railings at the end of its station in Spijkenisse, the Netherlands. 30 feet above a canal, the train hurtled toward an uncertain fate as it departed from the concrete platform of the De Akkers station, the last stop on the train route. According to a safety spokesman, there was “no indication that the driver had done anything wrong.” The safety systems meant to hold the train in place seemed to have just given out. But by the grace of unexpected nautical gods (among others), the train never plummeted, and the driver never perished.

Something miraculous had been underfoot… or perhaps, underfin. The train had been caught by the tail of a whale.

Approximately 20 years ago, Maarten Struijs designed a polyester sculpture of two giant gray whale tails to be placed behind the De Akkers train station known as the “tail station,” or end station of its metro line. The twin whale tails that soar from the canal water to the height of the station platform are a pun gone swimmingly well—and they’re unexpectedly well-positioned to catch stray public transit vehicles. Following the incident, Struijs, now retired, said (in Google-translated Dutch): “It has been there for almost 20 years and then you actually expect the plastic to pulverize a bit, but that is apparently not the case.” Also: “I’ll make sure that I get a few photos.”

Struijs wasn’t alone in his wonder; this great derail to the whale tail hooked the attention of 2.8 million viewers and splashed across newspages from Borneo to Toronto. Severely interrupted traffic, whether it’s wreckages of cars along city streets or trains dangling from towering overpasses, may be one of the greatest spectacles of modern industrial society and its extractions of labor and matter. The ubiquity of these images in all sorts of action movies speaks to the dramatic prowess of such scenes and the ways in which they disrupt certain landscapes and lifeways—it’s no coincidence that new worlds are meant to emerge so poignantly from the smoking ruins of automobiles, buses, and trains at the end of so many superhero movies. Maybe it speaks to an urge to wreak some havoc upon the regulated flows of vehicles many of us spend ass-numbing hours traveling along, from work to non-work and around again, wondering what else might lie beneath the waters of these daily regimens…

What happened in Spijkenisse was not just a monumental destabilization, but also a monumental restabilization, by way of a fortuitously placed fin. The driver was uninjured and immediately detained in a police cell until 4:00 PM of the same day. The train balanced quietly on the whale tail until Tuesday, when workers removed the wrecked carriage from the sculpture and lowered it to the ground, in “an operation that started at dawn and lasted into the darkness of the evening.”

And the tail seems to have survived unscathed.

Soon enough, if they haven’t already, the barriers at the train station might be repaired, the train might be replaced, and this driver might be back on another shift, driving into De Akkers on another very early Monday morning, the whale tails glinting just beyond in the night.—BH

ON LATE NIGHTS AND THE MERCIES OF POLYESTER

WEEK IN REVIEW

02

alternatives to policin e d i v o r pt to p m e t t ll’s a i b e on

E S N O P S E R S I s ’ CRIS a i n r o f i l a E T A to C T S L A R E C R CA

As this summer saw skyrocketing donations to bail funds and widespread uprisings in support of Black liberation, 24-year-old Los Angelean Elizeth “Ellie” Virrueta continued the organizing toward prison and police abolition she had begun years prior. With conversations about divesting from the police and investing in community alternatives proliferating, Virrueta and other organizers experienced a complex set of hopes and challenges. Surges of people were spurred to action, but mainstream portrayals of abolition often misrepresented the transformative objectives of the movement and increased activists’ burden to “clean up the scraps,” as Virrueta explained in an interview with the Independent. Activists advocated for legislation like the CRISES (Community Response Initiative to Strengthen Emergency Systems) Act that would create alternatives to policing, but they grappled with the limitations that accompany state involvement, like regulations around how funding can be used.

Nevertheless, interactions with her community— including the Stop Terrorism & Oppression by Police (STOP) Coalition, a group of families who Virrueta explained “had loved ones killed by law enforcement”—kept her motivated. In particular, Virrueta, whose teenage cousin was killed by law enforcement in 2012, found hope in the expanding imaginations of the “little ones” around her.

“I see five year olds, little kids, talking about how they don’t trust the police—and they understand what that means,” she explained. “Even my own little brother Diego—he’s nine years old—when the pandemic first hit and there were folks who were getting released out of prisons, he heard it on the news.”

Virrueta then narrated the following exchange: I was sitting next to him and he was like, “They’re letting people out of prison?”

And I was like, “Yeah!”

And he said, “That’s so good!”

It caught me off guard, and I asked him, “Why do you think that? Why is that?”

And he was like, “Yeah, I don’t think there should be people in cages,” and going on and on.

And I was like, “Damn—you know? This is a nine year old. Like, woah. That’s my little brother.”

This simple interaction became one of many that Virrueta observed this summer between organizers and their “little ones,” children of all ages who visualized and vocalized alternatives from the systems they saw violently impacting their families.

“They’re growing up in a very different world where law enforcement is not normalized or legitimized,” she said. “We’re paving that road so that they’re able to take 10 steps forward. We shook shit before, but right now the government has realized that communities and the people really do have power and that we will run amuck if we need to.”

A coordinator for the STOP Coalition, organizer with the Youth Justice Coalition, and member of the autonomous space, Community Alternatives to (CAT) 911, Virrueta found herself at the intersection of several critical organizations who coalesced around direct actions and legislative advocacy at the local and state level. In addition to protests and trainings, these

03

NATION + WORLD

groups collaborated on a California-wide bill which to fund and make scalable solutions,” she explained. proposed unprecedented policies at the state level: AB “This is an opportunity to use the state’s dime to fund 2054, or the CRISES Act. groups that are already doing the work.”

An 11-member Advisory Committee—which, +++ according to the bill, must explicitly include members involved in community-based organizations—would First introduced in January 2020, the bill was formally establish grant selection parameters and metrics of authored by California Assembly member Sydney success to select grantees over the three-year period.

Kamlager, a Democrat representing portions of West “If the state is going to be collaborative and fund Los Angeles. After passing unanimously through the community-based organizations, then it should be state legislature, the bill was vetoed by Democratic collaborative, empower, and work with them to help Governor Gavin Newsom. But Kamlager is preparing define the metrics,” she said. Kamlager hopes that to re-introduce the bill, verbatim, in the upcoming the data collected from this pilot program will reveal 2021 legislative session. A self-described abolitionist, cost-savings, improvements in health indicators, and Kamlager emphasized that the bill was drafted and decreases in incarceration and family separation—all co-sponsored by an activist coalition largely led by of which might motivate the state to endorse alternawomen of color—like herself and Virrueta—and made tives as a long-term strategy. up of organizations that center people impacted by According to the bill’s language, community orgathe criminal-legal system, including Virrueta’s STOP nizations offer a space of “deeper knowledge” and and Youth Justice Coalitions, as well as others like the “trusted relationships” that rely on de-escalation techAlliance for Boys and Men of Color and Anti Police- niques rather than punitive measures. These kinds of Terror Project. These groups, Virrueta explained, groups have long been central to visions of abolition, “have already been doing the work,” creating “organic redefining how we conceive safety and working to infrastructures” of care and mutual aid during and undermine our reliance on the carceral system. beyond the pandemic.

“I believe the criminal justice system is doing what The CRISES Act aims to create a three-year it was designed to do. I believe that it crushes so many pilot grant program housed in California’s Office of populations,” Kamlager said. “In that moment, it is the Emergency Services that would expand state funding role of legislators to step in, reconsider what we are to support community-based alternatives to policing. It doing because the status quo is really not helping, and would also mandate that grantees receive a minimum use our ability to appropriate the purse-strings from the award of $250,000 per year. state.”

“We’ve been surviving with scraps, and we’re still surviving,” Virrueta said. “So this bill is really just +++ trying to get folks funding.”

The text of the bill notes “mental health, intimate Two organizations, Virrueta’s CAT 911 and a San Diegopartner violence, community violence, substance based ‘Fight Club,’ provide insight into the diverse abuse, and natural disasters” as areas in which possibilities for violence prevention and community community organizations can respond more safely transformation that this bill would subsidize. and effectively than law enforcement. These commuBased in South-Central Los Angeles, CAT 911 nity organizations can be interpreted loosely but must hopes to “build up an LA County-wide network and incorporate established presence, expertise, and autonomous zone where we are the first responders capacity to address emergencies, Kamlager explained to crisis in our communities,” Virrueta explained. in an interview with the Independent. Social workers Through training, the group builds up de-escalation and nurses, for instance, might respond to crises skills among members of the community to ensure relating to substance abuse. Arts- or exercise-based people feel comfortable turning to each other rather programs may also qualify as preventative or transfor- than the police. mative community tools.

“How are we going to take down prisons,” Virrueta “You shouldn’t solve level two problems with asked, “if we don’t know how to have open conversalevel ten force,” Kamlager asserted. “You don’t want tions with our friends or tell neighbors that their tree someone who is primarily trained to manage violent branch is in our yard? Transformative justice starts emergencies to respond with those kinds of tactics and really small at the individual level, where we all have adrenaline to other issues.” the ability to change the internalized policing mindsets The bill also prioritizes projects in locations with within our own circles as we work toward policy-based historically high levels of police violence as well as or structural change.” communities who face particular harm from the crimIn San Diego, the Jonathon Coronel Fight Club inal-legal system: young people of color, disabled supports “the wellness and empowerment of people people, people who are gender nonconforming, people who have lost a loved one to state violence, particularly with uncertain immigration status, and people who are but not limited to murder by police,” said Rocío Zamora, unhoused or homeless, among others. another member of STOP Coalition, in an interview Kamlager noted the ingenuity of proposing this bill with the Independent. Here, grieving families—who at the state level when most police funding comes from Zamora described as “already fighters”—can mobilize local budgets. “The state is not involved in funding against state violence. More literally, the Fight Club police departments, but we are involved in helping offers a space for boxing, an outlet that Zamora used to

04 DEC 2020

g

cope with the death of her cousin, Coronel, whom the group commemorates.

“I want to sponsor systems-impacted youth to use that as a safer space and way to promote wellness and channel that grief,” Zamora said. She also hopes to subsidize free memberships for families and start a team of de-escalation interventionists.

Right now, Zamora and her fellow organizers rely primarily on GoFundMe campaigns. “You have to pay people for their labor, especially because this project will probably be primarily Black- and brownpeople-led,” Zamora said. “It’s important that work be compensated because we’re already over-extending ourselves, and a lot of us are in poverty.”

She hopes that increased state funding would bolster the reach and attainability of these visions. A secure resource stream would also grant Zamora more space to focus on political education, exercise classes, and intervention workshops rather than on fundraising strategies. With this time, she could collaborate with CAT 911 to bring their model to San Diego. +++ Activists—and even Kamlager herself—expressed reservations over the structural aspects of the pilot program. Permitting this funding stream, some feared, might paint the state as a benevolent actor in ways that ultimately undermine the movement’s vision.

“As an abolitionist, I’m always going to think there are limitations to state intervention,” Virrueta said.

practices,” she stressed.

Disability justice advocates called for careful attention to the bill’s limited focus on “law enforcement” as the defining method of policing. Kamlager acknowledged their fears that the bill might inadvertently push responses to mental health crises away from ‘policing’ without addressing the ways that social workers and emergency services constrict choices and incarcerate people within the walls of psychiatric facilities. Advocates urged the Advisory Council to fund programs like Sacramento’s MH First, which removes punitive models altogether and prioritizes peer support, as opposed to ones like CAHOOTS in Eugene, Oregon, which receives calls through police phone lines and involves medical or crisis work professionals. Similarly, Zamora expressed concern about the failure to analyze the role that immigration systems, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement specifically, play in upholding punitive institutions like jails and detention centers.

“Just because this bill passes wouldn’t mean that all our problems would be solved,” Zamora said. “We need to point out those flaws so that we can organize and fill in the gaps.” +++

Some of these fears came to pass as the bill faced its fate-defining encounter with the Governor’s Office early this fall. Throughout the summer, Kamlager worried that Newsom, whose signature is required to ratify state bills, would restrict funding or veto the “We are working within the system CRISES Act due to the tighter COVID-year budget.

Instead, Kamlager’s communications director, Alina that upholds oppression, so there’s Evans, said that the final negotiations came down to always going to be limitations. It’s much more insidious disagreements. crucial to continue the work on the “The Governor’s office had been reaching out ground because that’s where real shit with various concerns, the primary of which seemed happens, but at the same time we do to be the agency in which the bill was housed,” Evans need funding.” detailed in an interview with the Independent. “They Others worried about the stringent restrictions and wanted the bill to be controlled by the Board of State requirements that would come along with state funding and Community Corrections (SCC).” in contrast with grassroots financial contributions.

For abolitionists like Kamlager and the activists Kamlager anticipated that her who worked on the CRISES Act, this proposal was legislative colleagues might inconceivable. If the purpose of the bill was to detach try to “water down” the bill crisis response from policing structures, why would the or that the governor might pilot program be selected, evaluated, and overseen by restrict funding due to California’s carceral apparatus?

COVID budget tight“It would be antithetical to the intent of the ening. “A symbolic bill,” Evans continued. “What we quickly realized is win means nothing that it wasn’t about the specific agency [the Office if someone else of Emergency Services] not having the capacity to dies because give out the grants, but that the Governor’s office you haven’t wanted this to be controlled by law enforcement.” changed your

BY Rose Houglet ILLUSTRATION XingXing Shou DESIGN Audrey Buhain

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

Kamlager and her office offered to think through housing the bill under “any other agency,” like the Department of Social Services, for instance. Days before the final Senate vote, Newsom’s team presented a stiff response: “Only the SCC,” Evans recalled. This inflexibility cornered Kamlager into a tough choice between modifying the bill’s language before it went to its final Senate vote—which might have caused the bill to go unheard due to tight deadlines—or leaving it unchanged.

Kamlager ultimately stuck with her vision, hoping that broad public support, unanimous legislative approval, and activist pressure might motivate Newsom to sign the bill regardless. The month ahead brought op-eds, public letters, radio shows, rallies, endorsements and still, to the coalition’s surprise, Newsom vetoed the CRISES Act in late September.

“People are tired, upset, and disheartened,” Evans said, referring to the coalition. “We had anticipated the CRISES Act to be the ‘easy’ bill to pass this year, relative to others we were working on.”

Still, the dedication and imagination of advocates like Virrueta and Zamora—who have been intimately committed to this fight for years—persisted. The group is working to re-introduce the bill next year and re-negotiate with the Governor’s office and new legislative director. The number of interested cosponsors and advocates is expanding. On the federal level, US Senator Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) and US Representative Karen Bass (D-Calif.) introduced similar legislation in Congress entitled the “Community-Based Response Act.” Activists are continuing the critical work—one they have long performed outside of state confines and regulations—of spreading abolitionist ideologies within their communities.

“We’ve been conditioned to not believe in ourselves and our abilities to imagine a world without carceral systems,” Virrueta said. “Creativity and imagination have been stripped, and we need to tap into our capacity to think outside the box.”

This bill’s path through the legislative process reveals the mechanisms used by the state to restrict creativity and community agency. Yet, these activists— fighting for the loved ones they lost and the little ones they raise—will clearly not be silenced by Newsom. As they fight “for the state’s dime,” as Kamlager put it, they will not cease to envision and enact change within their communities. Or, as Virrueta said, they will boldly continue “running amuck.”

ROSE HOUGLET B’22 hopes to raise little ones who don’t believe in prison.

NATION + WORLD

04

FORCED INTO THE LIGHT

BY Jefferson Bernard and Kuno Haimbodi ILLUSTRATION Mara Jovanovic DESIGN Daniel Navratil

It’s not uncommon to find commotion on the and security, people rendered marginal by the state turn to portion of I-95 that runs through Providence. one another for survival and mutual aid. Violent tactics of the On the night of October 12, Indigenous Peoples state, like doxxing, disproportionately affect communities Day (IPD), the highway appeared extra lively as that already cannot rely on police for safety and ultimately it became the site of a protest organized by local reinforce existing material inequities. abolitionists to draw attention to Rhode Island’s glorification of Christopher Columbus. Chants of +++ “fuck Columbus” and “free the people, fight the power” clashed with the chorus of horns from cars It did not take long for the actions of the IPD protesters backed up half a mile by the barricade made up of to be met with legislative response. However, instead of a U-Haul truck, personal vehicles, and their owners’ building on their demands, the proposal sought to further bodies. About seven minutes into the demonstration, restrict their organizing. The day after the protest, RI State protesters left the scene in the U-Haul. Before they Senator Lou Raptakis announced a plan to introduce legislacould make it far, the protestors were surrounded tion that would require protesters who block highways to be by police cars and arrested. The next time many of charged with felonies. Organizers noted that the bill reflects them would appear in the public eye, their names, a growing trend of the state weaponizing legal charges to faces, and addresses would accompany them. suppress protesters. “I was arrested for a non-protest related incident and they charged me with a felony,” Toussaint told +++ the Indy, “whereas a typical individual who isn’t actively showing their resistance to the police and the state wouldn’t On October 13, 2020, Rhode Island State Police have been charged with that.” In addition to being given (RISP) published the personal addresses and photos more serious charges at higher rates, Toussaint noted the of six protesters they arrested in the IPD protest on higher risks that Black and brown protesters face when their official Twitter and Instagram accounts. “They forced into the criminal legal system, saying that “once doxxed them… it wasn’t something that was procewe’re in the system it’s hard for us to get out.” The caging of dural,” Brooklyn Toussaint, a local organizer with Black and brown communities is both a tool and outcome abolitionist group Prov X, told the Indy. “Doxxing”’ is of the United States’ movement towards authoritarianism. the process of non-consensually finding and spreading This was not the first time Raptakis had proposed a person’s private information. The impact of being such legislation. In 2015, also in response to protests in doxxed can vary, but for protesters and organizers in RI against racist police violence in Ferguson, Raptakis RI, specifically those seeking accountability for police presented a similar bill. Local organizers identified the violence, doxxing has caused fear, unwanted visidiscrimination in this pattern: “Protests when you’re bility, and has stripped them of their safety. Enabled by white and you’re not clearly against a system that doesn’t police control over legislation and the political right’s work for you are always met with very little police overunchecked access to technology, the power of doxxing sight, let alone violence,” Toussaint told the Indy. “That depends on a white supremacist influence across the bill targets people who have to mobilize more impactful Internet and the real threat of violence from right-wing actions because their regular protests are silenced militants. While harmful in its own right, doxxing is or disregarded. White people don’t have to go above only one tactic within a rising scheme from the right and beyond to make a political statement, BIPOC do.” wing: exploiting surveillance to incite violence against Toussaint underscored the specifically racialized aspects protesters. of protests in 2015 and 2020, and the ways that expresFollowing the doxxing of the protesters by the RISP, sions of rage and pain by Black people in particular are a campaign emerged calling on the police and local newscriminalized and punished by the state. In addition papers that had reposted the information—including to the connection to Ferguson, in an October interthe Providence Journal—to remove it. Organizers of the view Raptakis asserted that “we don’t want Rhode campaign emphasized that the intention behind doxxing Island to become another Portland.” Through advocate sets it apart from standard, publicly-available police this, the Democratic Senator joined an effort of the means records. “If you get arrested, that information is public, but many conservative leaders and media figures, that make doxxing it’s not being put in everyone’s faces, it’s not being shared including Trump, to mobilize white fear and possible. In February, on social media,” KC, an organizer with the Providence hysteria toward present uprisings against racist Representative Arthur chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America who police violence in distant parts of the country.

Corvese introduced H7543, a bill helped organize the anti-doxxing effort, told the Indy.

Raptakis and the 94 percent white suburban which would criminalize protesters “They were specifically sharing that information to make district he represents are entirely removed wearing protective equipment. Echoing the it easier for people to see, whether their intention was from the Black and brown communities racialized sentiments of Raptakis’ legislation, for people’s jobs to provide consequences or they wanted seeking racial justice that this bill would Corvese noted at the bill’s hearing that it was written right-wing supporters of the cops to know.” By selectively impact, yet their racial power and influin response to recent events in Portland. highlighting the arrest of racial justice protesters, the ence led to lasting harms on the material Police interest was core to the formation of this bill. police contribute to the idea that protests against the state, conditions of these communities.

At a bill hearing in March, Deputy Chief of the Providence particularly those by Black people, are inherently criminal.

Police Tom Verdi contended that wearing protective equipEventually the RISP Twitter deleted the tweet, but immedi+++ ment at protests “endangers public safety. Why else wear it, ately created a new post with a link to a separate site with unless you intend or intended to cause violence?” Through this, the same personal information. Additionally, the Instagram The individuals being doxxed Verdi neglected the need for protesters to protect their bodies post and the articles from local news sites continue to be by police and alt-right forces in RI and identities from the consistent violence of non-state rightaccessible. are by no means arbitrary. The wing forces and officers like him who routinely show up in full Najeli Rodiguez, one of the protesters arrested at the IPD victims are all doing work to riot gear to peaceful protests. As Enrique Sanchez, an organizer demonstration, is all too familiar with the material harms actively dismantle the police’s with the Rhode Island Black Lives Matter PAC noted, “We all take of being doxxed. Reflecting on an earlier protest that took power and potential for care of each other. We take care of each other by reminding each place in July, Rodriguez told the Indy, “I was doxxed when I violence, and many come from other we have to cover up our faces… because we never know who’s was arrested. I lost my job because of it … Now people know abolitionist organizations. going to get hit.” Outlawing masks and protective gear takes away the where I stay at, now I have to worry when I sleep at night.”

To preserve this power and necessary practices that organizing communities have created to keep Organizing has played a pivotal role in regaining a feeling ability to control dissent, themselves safe in the face of state violence, especially doxxing, and of security for Rodriguez. When the violence comes directly police and officials ultimately represents the deeply harmful consequences of connections from the police, an institution which claims to provide safety statewide continue to

05

METRO

04 DEC 2020

How doxxing and technological authoritarianism threaten transformative movements the municipal residences of the Department’s officers. According to Steven Brown, Executive Director of the Rhode Island ACLU, the people taking action were interested in how many police officers lived in the community, out of concern that officers who lived in neighboring, wealthier municipalities were draining Pawtucket resources. Pressed by the city’s police interests, the city rejected the request to release the municipalities of the police officers. “They raised privacy concerns,” Brown told the Indy regarding the police’s opposition to the request. “They maintained that police officers had a right to privacy and they were concerned that providing this information would lead to people with bad intentions to track down where police officers lived.” Eventually, the Attorney General’s Office intervened, ruling that the request should be completed. In response, the Fraternal Order of the Police filed a lawsuit against the city that is still pending. The Pawtucket police’s continued refusal of transparency despite their own enthusiasm to disregard the privacy of protesters through doxxing makes clear their strategic intent to subject protesters to violence and fear. +++ “I don’t understand how they’re allowed to do this. These are people’s lives that they’re playing with,” Rodriguez lamented to the Indy. With limited success in their efforts to pressure police forces to remove individual doxxes, organizers emphasize that police and right-wing extremists have no incentive to stop using this powerful weapon because there has been an absence of any form of accountability for doxxing. As KC bluntly told the Indy, “I don’t think there’s any way to stop it if it’s coming from the cops.”

What’s more, most discussions of doxxing today (including this one) only reflect those calls for violence that occur on mainstream media platforms or publicly-available sites. As Ahlquist explained to the Indy, “Incitements to violence are behind the scenes in Facebook posts that I don’t have access to or message boards that I’m not following.” The true scale of the impact of doxxing is likely unknown, but the violence of the tactic is real. So while recently, local governments like Oregon’s have seen new proposals to outlaw doxxing and ban police from posting mugshots of people arrested, such covert practices will likely evade real enforcement. And while movement under the surface continues to brew white supremacist violence, the number of available surveillance tools and the influence of digital platforms continue to grow, giving doxxing ever more power. +++ The future of movement-building will inevitably face the power of doxxing. For organizing work in Providence, Two weeks before local Sanchez told the Indy, the “biggest obstacle is trying to Indigenous and Black activists and keep the momentum up… we lose momentum because community members gathered at the State either some of us are getting arrested, or some of us are House on IPD to hold space for Indigenous sovergetting doxxed.” The safety and unity of movements between eignty and condemn the violence of settler coloagainst state violence will be compromised so long as police interest and nialism, a much more hostile scene played out at the white-supremacist forces like police continue to mainlegislators. site. Confederate flag-wielding trucks and motorcytain power over local governments and are able to At the same hearing, local cles played racist merry-go-round by the State House exploit surveillance technologies. As this country is reporter and founder of Uprise RI as hundreds of white New Englanders stood on its pushed deeper into a state of technological authorSteve Ahlquist noted that, “When people go to steps for a pro-Trump rally. The event’s emcee—a local itarianism, efforts to hold powerful institutions these protests and wear masks, when they’re far-right social media personality—led chants and called accountable and move toward meaningful transconfronting violent extremists on the right…they for violence against the IPD protesters. This individual formation will face more threats than ever. are preventing themselves from being doxxed.” is a frequent doxxer of protesters in RI. Importantly, the In an interview with the Indy, Ahlquist made clear information and publicity generated by doxxers like him not JEFFERSON BERNARD ‘22 and the underlying idea behind such legislation: “If only place protesters at risk of violence from the very people KUNOVENU HAIMBODI ‘22 are really present at the rally, but also assist police in arresting and you’re at a protest, you don’t have a right to privacy trying to figure out who thought it was a good charging them. “They all monitor his website and Facebook or to protect yourself from police violence.” idea to give cops Twitter. page and they enable him… he’s their instrument of recon,” While Verdi and other supporters of the bill Sanchez told the Indy. This same individual has been protected insisted that it was not an attempt to hamper by police at protests and has even been thanked by the Cranston individuals’ right to protest, Ahlquist pointed out that, “I can publish something anonymously Chief of Police for his surveillance footage of a protest. Police capiand that’s constitutionally upheld…but when I talization on right-wing forces’ doxxing reflects the new forms that want to express my political position in person the collaboration and overlap between these two groups have taken in recent years. at a protest, suddenly I have to be unmasked, I While police continue to take advantage of the forced visibility have to be identifiable?” Ultimately, regardless of doxxing victims, they have consistently opposed any form of public of the purported intent of the bill, it results in transparency for police officers. In the fall of 2019, Pawtucket residents stripping protesters’ safety and increasing the filed a public records request with the Pawtucket Police to obtain a list of state’s capacity for surveillance.

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

METRO

06

COMMUNITYAS PEDAGOGY

BY Seth Israel ILLUSTRATION Anna Kerber DESIGN Miya Lohmeier

Reimagining Higher Education and Online Learning Through Black Mountain College

In 1933, a small, inconspicuous community sprung up in the densely wooded southern Appalachians. Its students and visitors would come to include John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Ruth Asawa, Ray Johnson, Cy Twombly, Robert Rauschenberg, Susan Weil, Buckminster Fuller, Willem and Elaine de Kooning, and MC Richards, artists and writers whose innovations helped shape American art in the second half of the 20th century. Black Mountain College was an educational institution and community, an experiment that aimed to reimagine the liberal arts college.

Pioneered by a small group of teachers and students who wished to further explore the creative possibilities of education, as they themselves wrote, Black Mountain College was initially conceived as a refuge. It began as one for John Andrew Rice, a Classics professor at Rollins College who was dismissed for his unconventional teaching habits, which included telling students to “do as they please.” After his dismissal, Rice rounded up like-minded faculty and students who were interested in pedagogical experimentation.

Drawing on the philosophy of John Dewey, which asserted education as a site of democracy—not just a political system of governance, but a way of democratically being—Rice, along with three educational reformers, rented buildings at the YMCA Blue Ridge in Black Mountain, North Carolina and began classes in

07

FEATS

the fall of 1933. Following Dewey, the Black Mountain College community made strides toward living and learning as a democracy.

Fleeing from Nazi-controlled Germany in 1933, former Bauhaus professor, Josef Albers, and his wife, Anni Albers, also an artist, arrived at Black Mountain in December of that year. Rice offered Josef the opportunity to lead the art program and Anni a position as an instructor in weaving. Like the Albers, many of Black Mountain’s students arrived at the college escaping racist, xenophobic, and gendered oppression in the wake of World War I and during World War II. A decade before the Supreme Court ruled on Brown v.

Board of Education, Black Mountain accepted its first Black student, Alma Stone Williams, who attended the 1944 Summer Music Institute. The school’s proximity to integrated bus routes made it a stop-over for civil rights organizations like the Congress of Racial Equality, lending them refuge in a segregated, Jim Crow American south.

Ruth Asawa, a daughter of Japanese immigrants and one of Black Mountain’s most notable students for her innovation in sculpture, was interned during World War II. After being denied a teaching certificate on the basis of race, Asawa took the suggestion of her friends and fellow artists Ray Johnson and Elaine Schmitt, and arrived at Black Mountain in the summer of 1946. She

enrolled in the fall and studied under the mentorship of Josef Albers. At Black Mountain, Asawa was finally afforded the time, space, and support necessary to develop a practice as an artist.

Like Asawa, many students discovered Black Mountain through word-of-mouth. Although Black Mountain didn’t recruit heavily, news of their affairs reached the press; notably, Louis Adamic’s 1936 article “Education on a Mountain: The Story of Black Mountain College” brought recognition to the school’s pedagogy, and many students cite the piece as the way they found Black Mountain. The admissions committee consisted of two students and two faculty members, unlike the larger, more rigorous structures at other colleges.

However, Black Mountain’s unique offerings made for self-selective applicants whose ideologies closely aligned with those of the school, reducing the need for a meticulous evaluation when requesting admission.

Nonetheless, many students who passed the stringent admissions processes of other schools chose to defer their acceptance in order to attend Black Mountain. +++ Black Mountain was indeed, as it is often described, an experiment in education. While it was not specifically an art school, also offering courses in math, science,

4 DEC 2020

literature, music, history, and other liberal arts, Black Mountain was founded on the pedagogical belief in education through art. In the school’s Fall 1934 bulletin, Josef Albers wrote, “Art is a province in which one finds all the problems of life reflected—not only problems of form (e.g. proportion and balance) but also spiritual problems (e.g. of philosophy, of religion, of sociology, of economy).” Black Mountain centered its curriculum around arts, equating art, education, and life: “For this reason art is an important and rich medium for general education and development. If we accept education as life and as preparation for life, we must relate all school work, including work in art, as closely as possible to modern problems. It is not enough to memorize historical interpretations and aesthetic views of the past or merely to encourage a purely individualistic expression.” Black Mountain’s learning environment was rhizomatic, and its lack of rigidity put experience, regardless of context, at the forefront of the curriculum.

One tenet of Alber’s pedagogical philosophy was the distinction between Beschaeftigungstrieb, or employment drive, and Gestaltungstrieb, creative drive.

Albers asserted that most of Black Mountain’s students would not become artists, but through their practice of art, they could become self-disciplined and driven by their own passions and interests, adopting an open worldview that was focused on the future. Centering the curriculum around the arts meant doing away with most of the structures that were conventionally considered imperative to education. There were no grades, just report cards with comments and feedback from professors (Robert Rauschenburg’s 1949 evaluation from Anni Albers: “Erratic worker, sometimes brilliant, sometimes just average”); neither were there class requirements, and students were at liberty to decide when it was time to graduate. Of the 1,200 students that passed through Black Mountain in its 24 years, about 60 formally “graduated,” having to complete a final exam that included questions like a description of the gravel road that led to Black Mountain’s main building.

Alongside Albers’s pedagogical practices in the art department were John Andrew Rice’s beliefs about how a place like Black Mountain was to exist. Even in the early 1930s, questions about the proximity of universities to business and capital were at the forefront of the discussion on higher education. In a piece published in the Dayton Daily News on November 16, 1934, journalist Walter Locke contrasted Black Mountain against the developing terrain of the American university, noting the trend of significant increase in enrollment at large universities across the country. With these increases in size, Locke recognized that there was “ground enough for fear of centralization and regimentation of education,” and that “a college, like a business, came to need a huge capital.” Rice’s position on education was resolutely antithetical to the trends of colleges and universities at the time. If colleges were starting to look like businesses, then Rice would make Black Mountain look like a family. Such was the language Locke used to describe the environment at Black Mountain upon his visit to the campus. +++ This year, students returned to their respective college campuses or took classes remotely. Across the country, they were left in the dark about how or why tuition prices could stay the same with remote learning, despite the changes in access to resources and experiences normally available at campuses. By contrast, the radical reimagining of the university that characterized Black Mountain extended beyond just the classroom, as even the administrative hierarchy was replaced by a democratic system. The faculty controlled all educational policy, and organizational decisions were made by a board of fellows selected by the faculty that included one student. Students were involved in every administrative and financial decision the school made, including the decision to hire and let go of professors.

Student and faculty input into financial decisions was imperative, because they largely funded the school.

Black Mountain had no endowment, and funds were raised each session, with faculty salary reductions (sometimes down to almost nothing) serving as essential to the school’s survival.

More control over the affairs of the school meant tight budgetary restrictions. The school implemented a work program to ensure the needs of the community

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

could be met without becoming financially untenable.

Every student, regardless of financial need or socioeconomic status, contributed to the work program: hauling coal to heat the buildings, harvesting crops to be served in the dining hall, using leftover milk to make paint to cover the walls, and completing most other tasks that universities would typically outsource. In its early years, the school operated out of rented buildings at YMCA Blue Ridge. After being displaced by property development plans, the school raised funds to buy 667 acres of land at Lake Eden, about five miles north of Blue Ridge. For nearly two years, students and faculty would break in the afternoon and travel to the new property. Together, they constructed the Studies Building overlooking Lake Eden by hand, a large but simple structure in a modern style made from wood, stones, and corrugated iron. Once the move was made to Lake Eden, each student had their own private studio in the building, a place for work and quiet reflection.

Otherwise, the students and faculty were in constant community: eating, sleeping, studying, learning, and growing with one another.

In the years following World War II, the utopian vision of Black Mountain as a community and place of education began to diminish. In 1949, the school’s income was dwindling, and both Alberses left the school. The following decade, waves of McCarthyism were swept the nation. Black Mountain’s progressive politics and approach to education made it a subject of suspicion by the FBI, furthering doubt that Black Mountain could continue as a viable institution. After Josef Albers left, modern American poet Charles Olson became the head instructor at Black Mountain, shifting the college’s focus toward literature and writing. In 1954, he drafted a plan for the future operation of the college, maintaining its self-owned status while turning the school towards endeavors in publishing and performance. One afternoon in October 1956, Olson was recruiting a professor over the phone for a position at Black Mountain. The next day, Olson called a meeting of the school and, to the great surprise and disappointment of the community, announced that for financial reasons, Black Mountain College was closing.

Black Mountain lived up to its utopian ideals in many ways, but what enabled its brief but notable 24 years continues to be debated. Financial sacrifice allowed for administrative control, which affected most aspects of life at the school. Size was a considerable part of the equation—Rice was repeatedly asked what would happen to the college when it naturally began to gain popularity and grow bigger, and he repeatedly gave the same answer: “Go over on the other side of the mountain and start a college for yourselves.” A critique of Rice’s commitment to the school’s stunted size is not unwarranted; however, what appeared as exclusivity could alternatively be considered as a mindful approach to community. Despite what may have made it seem exclusionary, Black Mountain’s small, intimate community was vital to the speculative nature of its experiment. Rice and his colleagues had significant advantages in starting a college with the institutional knowledge they brought to Black Mountain, and while institutional knowledge is not negligible, neither is it absolutely necessary to do what Rice did in founding Black Mountain. Black Mountain’s innovations would be more properly attributed to the risks the community took and the sacrifices it made. Now, with the technology of the internet, students and educators have ample space to “build their own school on the other side of the mountain,” so to speak.

Through Dewey’s and Rice’s writings, Professor Jason Miller argued that, of the benefits of Black Mountain’s rationale for an arts-centered pedagogy— intellectual, behavioral, and phenomenological—the latter is the most significant. Miller contended that the lesson of Black Mountain lies in its resistance to conceptions of use value and its questioning of the instrumentality of the “useful” in favor of a processover-product value system, one that is increasingly drowned out as higher education continues to shift from a focus on educational experience to more capitalist priorities. At Black Mountain, learning was not made into production, transaction, or quantification— Gestaltungstrieb rather than Beschaeftigungstrieb.

The productive capacities of the community were limited to the places where productivity was necessary: making food and building spaces to conduct studies.

Learning wasn’t a site of production. Instead, the focus maintained individual improvement towards a better

community, ultimately engendering an environment where pedagogy was community. Students and faculty were not alienated by their educational infrastructure but instead brought closer through it.

Establishing and maintaining a community like Black Mountain illustrates a constant tension between an abandonment of the institutional system it is born from and the necessity of that system. As Vera Williams, a 1948 graduate of Black Mountain said, the college didn’t have the institutional structure that enables institutions to survive. Replicating a place like Black Mountain today seems almost impossible, but with the internet, reimagining community with the ethos of Black Mountain in mind is not.

“The other side of the mountain” can’t exist on large digital platforms that situate the user as simply that—a user—or just a producer working on behalf of the platform. Video-calling services can work as positive tools for connecting online, but rethinking digital interaction is not limited to replicating an in-person experience as closely as possible. The web is great because we don’t have to rigidly conform our non-digital lives to it, and we shouldn’t have to restrict our online interaction to the structures that already exist or the ways we’re used to being online. We have to create the spaces we want, rather than accept the ones we have. That may be as simple as occasionally passing up Zoom and writing a webpage in the basic, free, and accessible language of HTML, like the course website of Laurel Schwulst’s “Writing as Metadata” at Yale University, https:// suddenly.rocks. In the process of scaling our digital interaction back to slower, more mindful technologies, we can question what it means to be productive, in an educational environment or elsewhere.

As a community and an educational institution, the spirit and ideologies of Black Mountain can serve as guiding principles today. Colleges now face the challenge of adapting an experience into a digital context, where concerns of scale and accessibility multiply manifold. Right now, we don’t have much control over being (Zoom) participants in the educational and communal context of a university. The experience of virtual abrasion should be the tipping point, an impetus for a serious reflection on how colleges function in a contemporary socio-political and economic landscape.

Maybe we can look to a place like Black Mountain to shape how we exist, hopefully democratically, mindfully, and in care of one another, online or not.

SETH ISRAEL B’22 is working on his Gestaltungstrieb.

FEATS

08

LOSE

CTRL

BY Gaya Gupta ILLUSTRATION Ophelia Duchesne-Malone DESIGN Clara Epstein

SZA’s exploration of the in-between

I first started listening to SZA in 2018, the year I struggled with selfdoubt and insecurity while trying to develop my own identity. It was my junior year of high school, and aside from my perpetual pursuit to be the “perfect” student––not just smart, but well-rounded, well-liked––I also experienced my first relationship, followed by my first breakup. I turned to Spotify to fill the newfound silence, and eventually, the algorithm directed me towards SZA’s debut album Ctrl.

Ctrl, however, did not attempt to comfort me. I didn’t hear it tell me that I was enough (though I later recognized it on my own), or that men suck. Instead, SZA told me that love hurts. and it’s messy, but there’s no one to blame. She sighed and reminded me how it feels to be in love, but she also didn’t hesitate to point out the bitterness that comes with futile relationships.

Songs often invite the listener to pick a side––in Taylor Swift’s “You Belong With Me,” we’re rooting for her against the cheerleader.

Even Mitski, an artist I adore, often sings about partners who step all over her, like in “Why Didn’t You Stop Me” or “Washing Machine Heart.” But SZA recognizes she has her own faults just as much as her love interest does, helping me understand that it’s okay to be imperfect, and it’s okay to need attention in some situations while wanting independence in others.

The conflicting desires to be independent and to have someone else ebb and flow throughout the album, which made me consider what it means to be happy in and out of a relationship. Can I truly be happy alone, when I’ve felt most acutely joyful while I was in love? Will I spend the rest of my life dependent on someone else to ensure that I don’t feel lonely? I hate feeling dependent, and I’ve found that most of the people I’ve met tend not to want dependence either––but nevertheless, we often spend our life in search of partners, of our “better halves.”

Even though many of SZA’s songs spoke to my sadness throughout the time of 2018, Ctrl isn’t just about a breakup, it’s a coming-of-age album. She let me cry about my flaws, but also revel in my triumphs.

Her lyrics unravel and describe the jumps between self-love and self-deprecation without needing to explain or justify, which is what makes this album so personal, despite her intentions to the contrary.

I felt like someone understood what I was going through without me having to say a word.

And it’s not just me; the album resonates with a whole generation of women of color in its candor. In an episode of NPR’s Code Switch, a podcast dedicated to discussing race, several members of NPR’s team unpack what Ctrl meant to them. One staff member, Sydnee Monday, describes exactly why SZA’s music appealed to so many.

“So often there’s this sentiment that we’re not allowed to share the less-than-publishable parts of ourselves. But this was complex in that young WOC are given the space to have a full range of emotion and agency and not feel as though one is more important than the other,” Monday says.

“That space that she allowed herself to have on this album to be open and honest about ~ feelings ~ and less than perfect romantic situations is really the first step towards healing.”

The music exposes the unattractive, trivial, or otherwise unlikable parts of ourselves without feeling like one insecurity is more important than another. In Ctrl, SZA explores the in-betweens and the contradictions that come with life and love, challenging her listeners to be vulnerable and recognize their own hypocrisy––not to criticize, but rather to point out that we all do this, and it’s part of what makes us human. +++ When Ctrl was released on June 9, 2017, SZA, born Solána Rowe, cried.

But not out of happiness. “I was so embarrassed,” she said in an interview with Time magazine. “I thought no one would like it.”

In other interviews, she’s repeated that she has always felt ashamed. Ashamed of her voice, ashamed of herself, so much that she didn’t even want to hear herself clearly. And in her previous EP, Z, her songs are cluttered with misty reverb, floating, buzzy keyboard chords; her voice is often reduced to hazy whispers.

09

ARTS + CULTURE

But with Ctrl, she decided to let go, contrary to what the title suggests.

Her voice is stronger, and her lyrics are much more literal compared to the layers of metaphors in Z. “When you turn down all the reverb and all the plugins and all the stacks...you’re left with just your voice. And your thoughts. And you kind of have to say something––you don’t have to say anything, but you have to mean it,” she says in an interview with The Breakfast Club, a morning radio show.

The first person in the album we hear is not SZA––perhaps residual self-consciousness about her voice—but her mother. “That is my greatest fear,” her mother says in the recording. “That if, if I lost control, or did not have control, things would just, you know, I would be … fatal.”

A sparse progression of three minor chords then introduces the actual song, “Supermodel.” They sound like how it feels a few days after a breakup: empty, relieved, still. The rest of the song continues carefully, unraveling a new emotion with each line.

In the first few verses, SZA starts by telling her ex that she’s done, suggesting that his new girl can help him do the things that she used to do. But she also concludes those lines with “I don’t want nothing else to do with it.” The line is an eyeroll, a discontented shrug that acts as a defense mechanism to shield others from seeing the real hurt inside.

She leans into the confusion we might feel after a breakup or loss–– wanting so desperately to be over it already, yet still needing to find a place to express the pain, the heartache that comes with it.

About midway through the first verse of “Supermodel,” she offers to tell us a secret: that she cheated with her ex’s best friend. She then asks her ex, “Why you in Vegas all up on Valentine’s Day,” which is the point at which SZA decided to cheat. Just a few lines later, she sings, “Why I can’t stay alone just by myself? Wish I was comfortable just with myself, But I need you, but I need you, but I need you,” a quick turn of heart that goes to show how easy and natural it is for us to live in these contradictions.

Why can’t I be alone, just by myself; SZA rang in my head as I listened to this song on repeat, after the breakup that punctuated the end of my junior year. From a young age, I was told by my parents, my teachers, that I needed to learn how to be independent. As a woman, they said, it was important that I never had to rely on another person, let alone a man, for financial support or fulfillment. I wasn’t to make the same mistake that generations of women before me were forced to, and with that, I grew up with a penchant towards independence. I longed for the days to relinquish dependence from my parents and prided myself on my fearless attitude towards achievements in school. But once I got into a relationship with someone else, I started to lose control of that independence, even more so after it ended. I just wanted to get a grip, and like SZA, I just wanted to be okay by myself.

When I listened to “Supermodel” for the first time, I felt my chest expand, the hurt bubbling up inside me. I hated feeling so affected by a man entering or leaving my life, precisely because it was exactly what I was told to avoid. But with each listen I began to forgive myself and accept all the unknowns and contradictions that I might never understand. It certainly helped me understand that it’s okay to love in ways that eventually hurt. +++ Almost halfway through the album, SZA’s paradigm shifts with “The Weekend.” Unlike all the times she couldn’t bear to be compared with other girls or be without a man, she’s settled into the fact that she’s someone’s side-chick: “My man is her man,” she blithely recognizes.

“You like 9 to 5, I’m the weekend,” she says, addressing a guy’s girlfriend.

The song grapples with the in-between, showing us how easy it is for us to tell ourselves that we want something, yet end up settling for less. So many of those who identify as female, particularly those of color, do this, myself including. We tell ourselves that we’re not good enough for something or don’t deserve love, and then we accept what we get. In both relationships and careers, women are encouraged to settle; women of color, who have for generations lacked the same

04 DEC 2020

privileges as white women, are expected to do so.

But sometimes the most frustrating about this is that the men around us justify their actions by telling us to work harder, or to just speak up for yourself.

Though perhaps well-intentioned, such advice just perpetuates those feelings of inadequacy, that you can’t even do this one thing, advocating for yourself.

In high school, when I first heard this song, but even more so in college, I’ve found it very difficult at times to make myself heard. After being asked in a computer science lab why I was so uptight when I sighed, along with a slew of other gendered comments, it was really difficult for me to muster the courage to tell a TA, just because I didn’t want to aggravate this guy or his career.

I put a stranger’s feelings above my own, and it wasn’t the first time.

In the Code Switch interview with NPR, one woman discusses how exactly SZA approaches the retelling of suffering. “The entire project isn’t about changing the history of trauma that POC have experienced that might contribute to relationship dynamics, and it resists the pull to be like a protest album (even though those are important) that calls out the patriarchal system that we’ve been placed in that may be contributing to these feels,” she says. “It’s an honest re-telling of how things are in her experience.”

SZA speaks from the perspective of a woman to other women; she recognizes this frustration without chastising those who choose to remain there, and simply makes others feel heard. And for now, that is enough. +++

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

When quarantine hit earlier in March, I felt trapped in ways reminiscent of that first breakup, feeling happy to get away from the exhaustion of campus while simultaneously missing it more than anything. I had a lot of time to listen to music by myself during lockdown (as indicated by my Spotify Wrapped chart), and I returned to Ctrl, an old favorite after a few years of putting the album to rest. Listening to it with a fresh perspective, I was struck even more by how Ctrl dances in the in-between, neither here nor there, a feeling that spoke to me directly with the limbo of the pandemic and uncertainty of what might happen next.

With all this time alone, I was once again forced to reckon with all parts of myself. I was reminded how when you’re single, there’s no audience for the random things that occur to you throughout the day. No one to laugh (or even half heartedly chuckle) at your jokes, no one to stand by you at your worst, to be patient with you at your hangriest––it’s all you. And just as SZA sings, experiencing all these for the first time after having someone else for so long is a gutting feeling.

It’s uncomfortable and strange, just being alone. I felt lonely more often than I didn’t. But I know now that even when I’m not riding that euphoric feeling of being in love and instead feel messy and alone, I am just as worthy of love and kindness as I would be in any other state. It’s a nonlinear process, of course, and there are days I feel it more than others, but I’m getting better at letting go of that inward judgement, instead accepting that I won’t always have control and choosing to be free.

GAYA GUPTA, B’23 listened to Ctrl on repeat and now needs some new music recommendations.

ARTS + CULTURE

10

BY Kate Ok & Bowen Chen

holiday season. It is always fun to buy, and if you want to know, the best way to wrap any of these gifts is with a handkerchief. Without further ado, here is The Indy’s 2020 Holiday Wishlist.

Magnanimous Iguana wants a projector, and a copy of Moby Dick by Herman Melville.

never felt a particular compulsion to Anne Carson’s writing, I would be happy

and George Clooney and tell me I’m wrong. Anyways, I’m against space as

to receive and give her book as a gift.

the returning zeitgeist, it reeks a bit too much of SpaceX and the final frontier of resource exploitation. On the other hand I love the poetry chapbooks

B: So I have to be honest, I’ve never actually read Moby Dick in its entirety. I

Milkweed publishes, they all look so cute. If this issue makes it into the hands

remember reading this children’s book series, The Adventures of Wishbone, to different literature classics (sort of like the Magic Treehouse). Each book

Under the Sea. I also remember seeing a lot of Moby Dick in the Bone graphic novel series. The references really are everywhere, it’s eerily a bit of literary indoctrination. I still have this white rubber or silicone figurine of a Beluga whale that I purchased in the Mystic Aquarium’s gift shop over ten years ago, it sits on the top bookshelf in my childhood bedroom. Melville’s whale was a lot bigger and angrier, a sperm whale I believe. You can still go see the Mystic Aquarium’s Beluga whales, they’re located just an hour outside of Providence.

K: Last year in the worst semester ever, I elected to take a Melville class. Don’t get me wrong, Moby Dick was great, but it is not a great look to sport around campus. Don’t go telling all your friends you’re reading Moby Dick, please.

Classic nerd look! Check out a projector from Brown — there is no rental fee.

Poised Saleswoman wants a pair of hair scissors and a copy of The Days of Abandonment by Elena Ferrante.

B: Coming from someone who didn’t step into a barber shop until entering college, I’d say the hair scissors are a necessity. I’ve had my hair cut by many dual-bladed instruments — craft scissors (the Westcott ones), miniscule swiss army knife scissors, and even garden shears. Hair cutting scissors do the best job by far — it’s what they were made for after all. It’s the perfect gift for your DIY college friend who has added professional trims to their list of obsolete

internship (or a job).

in 1979 by Kathy Acker.

K: Is it dirt or sand? What will this editor do with this dirt? Eat it? Mars dirt

B: I found out recently that there are ‘rabbitries’, which seems fairly obvious,

protein shake? Have fun with it, I guess. As well as keeping up with the theme

as there are institutions that breed any sort of domesticated animal, but it was

of “dead” in book titles, Milkweed Editions describes this book as full of “femi-

still a bit shocking to me. While rabbits can’t die of a broken heart, they are

nist swagger.” What other things would Milkweed brand as feminist swag?

one of the only species that can die from loneliness. Many rabbits who lose a

RBG Halloween costumes, Kim Kardashian’s SKIMS Shapewear, a fruit net

bonded mate fall into a deep depression and may suffer from severe illnesses.

bag? I want to know!

Perhaps that is why there is a trope for them being a sink of unconditional love (besides their aesthetically cute attributes). I will say, however, I once toured an apartment that had a designated rabbit room where they housed one rabbit?

Two? Even a litter maybe. But the place smelled horrendous. I cannot empha-

big enough for your laptop but isn’t too fancy for daily use” and a copy

this, but reading a description of the Kathy Acker story, the only thing I can

of Guha and Spivak’s Selected Subaltern Studies.

think of is ‘the Frances Ha Industrial Complex.’

B: What is subaltern? All I can think of is subterranean. Did you ever read the

K: The best bunny is a half-lop bunny because only one ear sticks up because of

Mortal Instruments YA series (the first book was City of Bones)? That took

the lop gene T_T So cute. Like this editor, I really want a sort of unusual animal,

place underground...I think. I’ve gotten back into playing Words With Friends

like a raccoon or an otter. My favorite raccoon is Dongsim (동심) on Instagram

and I cannot help but think that subaltern would be a great word to add to my

— his name means child-like innocence. And I think rabbits, raccoons, and

arsenal. I would guess that the sub- prefix implies a full altern? An even more

otters definitely all have child-like innocence! If not a real animal, though,

versatile word. I still use the black stereolab tote bag that Kate gifted me a year

consider an inanimate replacement of one. For New York City in 1979, it seems

ago. Functionally it is excellent! What’s in my bag? I don’t know, I am a boy, my

like you are better off getting your hands on an epub version. According to this

girlfriend just tells me what to put in it.

Amazon review: “It’s a teeny tiny little chap book. I don’t mind that, but I did’t

K: I relate to this struggle because it is difficult to carry things. Plus, you can do

Know prior to ordering and had I realized, I might have opted for something

a “what’s in my bag” tour of your bag, which is always fun! What’s in my bag?

else instead?” Only buy the book if you like teeny tiny little things.

I have a Meiji mini chocolate bar, my wallet, a pair of earrings, one hundred percent isopropyl alcohol spray, and keys with an Elite Banana Banao charm. I

and overpriced services or your other friend who has decided to start giving

love essay collections and Edward Said is a very good writer, so I have trust in

haircuts (with zero experience) to make a quick buck. I’m unfamiliar with the

this book recommendation as well.

particular title The Days of Abandonment, but I’ve been peripherally interested in Elena Ferrante. For those unfamiliar with the author, their name is a pseudonym, a reference to the great Italian novelist Elsa Morante. Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend series has sold more than 6 million copies worldwide, with zero promotion whatsoever from the author. An amazing feat if you ask me, or

Monkey See Monkey Doo wants a Black Diamond #2 Camalot C4 and a copy of Ignatz by Monica Youn.

K: I don’t know what any of this is.

B: I am not sure how Diurnal Dormouse found out I was writing about Ludwig

K: Hair scissors are important, I concur and recommend. But unlike Bowen which is why I recommend your hair be cut by Shizen Brooklyn’s hair scissors (just get a haircut at Shizen Brooklyn is what I’m saying). I haven’t read The Days of Abandonment but looking at all the relevant search words on Google, “divorce” and “Italian” is there. The canon piece of American divorce media is Baumbach’s Squid and the Whale, so maybe this is the canon Italian one.

Bemelmans’s Madeline, perhaps it is just mere coincidence? People I know Dangerous Outside the Blanket wants Japanese herbal makeup brand

have recently expressed growing paranoia that they are being watched. For

Chidoriya’s “ABSOLUTELY TRANSLUCENT FACE POWDER W/

you who are watching, I find it quite flattering. I can also attest to the Seven

KUDZU” compact and a copy of Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the

Star’s chocolate almond croissants, they are a delectable treat. For those who

Dead by Olga Tokarczuk.

have grown tired of that specific treat, I would also recommend their apple

B: I admit I don’t quite know what Kudzu is or what this product does, but I do

turnovers — I’ve heard good things.

like the instructions chidoriyaworld provides on their website: “Touch puff to powder & shake gently to avoid excess. ➨ Pat puff lightly over

Emphatic Period wants a Mymble’s Mother Mug and a copy of Red Doc> by Anne Carson.

B: Okay, so I had to look this one up. For those of you who are likewise unfamiliar, the Mymble’s Mother is a character in the Moomin series of picture books and comic strips, created by Finnish illustrator and author Tove Jansson.

Moomintroll, the main protagonist is fairly memorable. Him and his family are troll species that resemble white hippopotamuses with round snouts. The Mymble’s Mother mug itself reminded me of a different picture book series, Madeline, created by Ludwig Bemelmans. The Mymble’s Mother, surrounded by her miniature entourage of Marigold high-collared Mymble daughters was highly reminiscent of Madeline and her similarly yellow clad boarding school sisters roaming the streets of Paris. As a self-proclaimed ‘Carsonite,’ I believe Anne Carson’s Autobiography of Red to be one of the greatest contemporary

your cheeks, ➨ then under the eye area to the temples, ➨ from the sides of

day Mr. Heathcliff. To answer Bowen’s question, Madeline is the pre-adolescent feminine model for every girl in the world who likes treats. Consider it a

then from the corners of your mouth to under ears. ➨ Then repeat using just

mirror stage phenomenon!

the puff to whisk away any loose powder & blend it well on the skin.”

Miffy shop, the Moomin shop is full of decor and items that are suitable gifts for mainly women and babies (my favorite demographic crossover). Look at this giant Moomintroll light! A memory game which has a container that could possibly double as a kitschy purse! Anne Carson is also a solid choice, I think.

I’ve read pieces of Autobiography of Red in some classes, and although I have

11

ARTS + CULTURE

️

I’m unfamiliar with Olga Tokarczuk and this novel, but NPR has an excellent review of the book (Yes, I still listen to NPR).

K: By the way, an alternative suggestion this editor proposed was a pair of Rick

Secret to Fishing wants a Big Blue Bug face mask and Anna Burns’

Owens Brown Wool Opera Gloves. I don’t know when they will go on SSENSE’s

Milkman.

sale, but hopefully they will. Anyways, look at the red bird on the Chidoriya

B: The only thing that can rival the Big Blue Bug on the I-95 South freeway is

label! It is so cute. Chidoriya has really nice stuff like “Sake-Kasu Milk Bath”

perhaps the Cardi’s furniture billboards. I swear their graphic designer uses

and “Azuki & Brown Sugar Clarifying Facial Cleanser.” Wow, this editor really

a South Park character generator. Iykyk. Other billboards I’ve seen on that

cares for the finer things in life. Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead

highway include one with only the word ‘Peace’ in sans-serif and what I think

may seem very morbid, but really its title is a reference to a William Blake

is an auto dealer ad that prints ‘Try to skip this ad’, with the familiar ‘Skip Ad’

poem.

button in the lower right hand corner. It pains me to consider an agency (or person) looked at the final product and said, “yup, this is it boys. Advertising at its peak.”

need to be read in tandem or in order) for all lovers of poetry and mixed verse. swipe — so I would say Emphatic Period and I are kindred spirits. Like the

K: I love and need treats, maybe everyone does. It would be interesting to talk to someone who doesn’t like treats, I would find them very unfeeling — modern

your nose bridge to over ears, ➨ from the nostrils to the sides of your ears ➨,

classics, and Red Doc> is a worthy sequel (although they don’t necessarily K: I get Instagram ads for the Mymble’s Mother Mug perhaps every other story

Diurnal Dormouse wants a Seven Stars chocolate almond croissant treat and a copy of Madeline’s Christmas by Ludwig Bemelmans.

anyone really.

I am one who sees hair scissors as both a necessity and a necessary luxury —

Purple Snapping Turtle wants a “leather/faux leather tote bag (that’s

size enough how much the rooms reeked. I also cannot remember who tweeted

K: The Big Blue Bug is quite scary, why would anyone want to wear its daunting Pleasant Stapler wants some dirt from Mars and a copy of Ada Limón’s

visage? But wait! The Big Blue Bug has been outfitted with a face mask, which

Bright Dead Things.

is quite interesting. Would the face mask be of the Big Blue Bug also wearing a

B: Space colonization/exploration seems to have made a resurgence in the

face mask? I also was not aware that Big Blue Bug Pest Solutions exterminates

past decade, from Sandra Bullock in Gravity to Matthew McConaughey in

raccoons, which is so sad. Free raccoons! They are gentle and caring animals

Interstellar to Matt Damon in the Martian. Also, can I say that I just don’t find

with child-like innocence. How can raccoons and silverfish be equivalent in

Matt Damon that attractive? Watch him in Ocean’s Twelve next to Brad Pitt

their classifications as “pest”?

04 DEC 2020

DESIGN XingXing Shou

would give a child-friendly summary of the original cult classic paired with an outrageous pun title - Be a Wolf, Gullfur’s Travels, Twenty Thousand Wags

of any Milkweed employees, please note that this editor is still looking for an Inventing the Wheel wants a baby bunny and a copy of New York City

where Wishbone, a courageous Jack Russell Terrier, would get transported

ILLUSTRATION Kate Ok & Bowen Chen

For the final issue of Vol. 41, Bowen and Kate decided to make the rounds and ask colleagues what single book (re: Literary) and item they wanted most this

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

X

12

CRIMINALIZING CHILDHOOD

BY Morgan Awner ILLUSTRATION Ophelia Duchesne-Malone DESIGN Clara Epstein

content warning: Juvenile detention, anti-Black violence

In May 2020, a Michigan judge sentenced a 15-year-old Black girl named Grace* to juvenile detention. While on probation due to a fight with her mother in November 2019, Grace did not complete her online homework.

Following her hearing, Grace was sent to Oakland County’s Children’s Village, where she was locked in her room for twelve hours a day and escorted around in shackles and handcuffs.

After a ProPublica article detailed her case, Grace’s story caught the attention of thousands, and #freeGrace began trending on Twitter and Instagram.

Resources circulated asking people to call and email Judge Mary Ellen Brennan to demand her release.

Grace’s mother, Charisse, started a GoFundMe on July 17 to raise money for Grace, which to date has collected $27,246. More than 350,000 people signed an online petition for her release.

Two teenage sisters in Michigan, Aliya and Laila Crawley, started an organization called Girls for Grace to fight for her release. Many people, including Aliya and Laila, believed Grace’s detention was racially motivated.

In a video for HereNow, fifteen-year-old Laila said, “She’s a stranger, but she also is our sister. She’s one of us, so we have to make sure that she’s okay.” Her sister Aliya echoed, “We have to let people know that this is not okay, that you can’t keep doing this [locking Black girls up] based off of racial bias.”

Grace was raised by a single mother in a predominantly white community. Her neighbors called the police after a fight between Grace and her mother in which she pulled her mother’s hair and bit her. This resulted in an assault charge. A couple weeks later, Grace received another charge for larceny for taking a student’s phone. After both incidents, Grace and her mother participated in therapy. Grace was placed on probation and stayed out of trouble until she was detained for not completing her homework.

Detention for probation violations, caused by minor infractions such as not completing homework, is not uncommon in the juvenile justice system. Plagued by excessive surveillance, this system disproportionately detains low-income youth of color in the name of rehabilitation. Every day, there are 48,000 children under the age of 18 in secure detention facilities around the United States. While some are there for serious offenses, one in five youth are locked up for nothing more than childlike misbehavior, such as running away, skipping school, or breaking curfew. Girls are more likely to be detained for non-serious offenses than boys.

But why does ‘business as usual’ for the juvenile justice system include detaining a teenager for not completing their homework?

Part of the answer lies in the punitive probation system that makes any small probation violation punishable by detention. For instance, Grace was not afforded any room for mistakes because of her probation status.

While probation is punitive throughout the criminal justice system, the foundation of the American juvenile justice system values the punishment and exclusion of youth of color over rehabilitation and allows for even more bias. Since the 1960s, juvenile courts have enacted reforms mandated by the Supreme Court and state legislation which have granted more rights to youth in the courts while increasing social programs to divert children out of this system. However, these reforms have not fixed the fundamental flaws in the juvenile justice system: relying on ineffective methods of incarceration and probation to rehabilitate youth

13

FEATS

while ignoring systemic inequalities perpetrated by the system, especially to low-income youth of color. The juvenile justice system is based upon a racist and paternalistic philosophy, and the way forward is putting an end to incarceration. +++ Before the juvenile court system, there were juvenile reformatories. In 1824, the first House of Refuge was established in New York, which offered food, shelter, and education to unhoused youth. These shelters spread around the US, first for white children, and later for Black children. However, the experience for Black children was less reformative and more punitive, as they were often assigned to manual labor or locked away in adult prisons when reformatories would not accept them.

At the end of the 19th century, self-proclaimed progressive ‘child-savers’ advocated for the rehabilitation of young criminals with the establishment of the first separate juvenile court in 1899. These ‘childsavers’ were middle-class white women who believed children could be rehabilitated by a benevolent government. However, they created a system of social control and sanctions for ‘troublesome’ youth, especially as the populations of poor, European immigrant children rose in urban centers to meet the demands of industrialization.

At the same time that these women advocated for the rehabilitation of poor white immigrant children, Black youth were subjected to a different approach towards rehabilitation and criminality. While some reformatory programs admitted Black youth, the education and rehabilitation of these young people were seen as a “waste of resources and a debasement of whites,” according to analysts from the Haywood Burns Institute, a Black-led think tank. By the time reformatory ideas reached the South in the 1870s, slavery had ended and convict leasing was rampant.

Little more than legalized slavery, convict leasing was a mechanism that lent out prisoners (mostly Black people) to private parties for labor without payment.

Black minors were overrepresented in convict leasing, making up more than 18 percent of all Black prisoners in the United States by 1890. Many of these youth were arrested for minor infractions and severely injured or worked to death. Black children who were spared from convict leasing were nevertheless still punished in juvenile court. In 1920, a North Carolina juvenile court judge said there was a “widespread feeling…that whipping is the most effective way of handling delinquent Negro boys.”

The right to due process, guaranteed by the Fifth, Sixth and Fourteenth Amendments, establishes certain rights in criminal trials, including the right to an impartial jury, to confront witnesses, and to a speedy and public trial. Separating juvenile justice from criminal justice allowed youth to be tried without these constitutional protections. In 1967, the Supreme Court extended limited rights to juvenile defendants, including the right to an attorney, adequate notice before a hearing, and cross-examination of witnesses.

In an effort to preserve the rehabilitative nature of the juvenile courts and avoid the punishment-driven criminal justice system, the Court refused to extend all constitutional rights given to adults. However, this purported rehabilitative intent of the juvenile justice system was overridden by the punitive approach of the states and ‘tough on crime’ politicians.

In the 1980s and 1990s, the myth of the juvenile ‘superpredator’ entered national consciousness.

This racist idea, coined by Princeton academic John Dilulio, referred to “a young juvenile criminal who is so impulsive, so remorseless, that he can kill, rape, maim, without giving a second thought.” Between 1983 and 1987, four out of every five children in detention centers were children of color. The popularization of tough on crime rhetoric by media and politicians ignited a frenzy of legislation to punish these superpredators. By 1997,

4 DEC 2020

The Problem with the Juvenile Justice System seventeen states had amended their laws to state the goal of juvenile justice as “punishment, public safety, and accountability,” codifying the punishment-driven nature of the juvenile justice system which had existed for non-white youth since its inception. +++ In the last three decades, the juvenile court system has expanded into a vast system of surveillance through probation. Children sentenced to probation face strict rules set by the judge to avoid jail. These rules can include anything from mandatory school attendance and curfews to following a parent or guardian’s rules.

Aside from court-ordered probation, many children receive probation without ever interacting with a judge. These less formal probations occur in pre-court diversion programs as an “intervention strategy that redirects youths away from formal processing in the juvenile justice system, while still holding them accountable for their actions,” according to the US Office of Justice Programs.

Including both court-ordered and informal probations, there are 400,000 youth serving probationary time each year, with standard probations lasting for 12 months.

‘Informal’ probations are yet another way juvenile courts extend paternalistic surveillance in the name of rehabilitation.

While probation and diversion programs vary across the country, these programs are increasingly used as alternatives in communities where juvenile detention recidivism rates remain high. This has led to more therapeutic programming, probation officers, and surveillance (like ankle-monitors), in total costing the United States an estimated $2 billion annually. Additionally, the use of pre-court diversion and probation also exposes disparities in the juvenile justice system. White children convicted of a crime are more likely to be sentenced to probation, while Black children are five times more likely to be committed to juvenile detention. +++ After Grace was sentenced to probation in 2019, she was assigned a probation officer and social worker along with continued therapy for her diagnosed mood disorder and medication for ADHD. In April, at the beginning of the pandemic, Grace missed class and told her caseworker she was feeling anxious and overwhelmed, and had forgotten to set her alarm. Five days later, when Grace slept through class again, her case worker filed a probation violation with plans to suggest detention. In documents submitted to the court, the caseworker alleged Grace “clearly doesn’t want to abide by the rules in the community.”

Although the Michigan Governor restricted all court hearings to “emergency matters only” due to COVID-19, Grace’s hearing took place in person on May 14, 2020. The case worker was called as the only witness, while her attorney participated on Zoom.

Grace testified that she needed time to adjust to virtual school and was overwhelmed by the pandemic. Judge Mary Ellen Brennan was unconvinced, and sentenced Grace to detention.

Grace’s case was not revisited until the ProPublica article was published in July, sparking national pressure from social media, protests, and even a call from six members of US Congress for a civil rights investigation. On July 31, in a Michigan Court of Appeals emergency hearing, the three-judge panel ordered Grace’s immediate release from juvenile detention. The judge released Grace from probation and closed her case in August. In total, Grace spent 78 days in the secure detention facility.

Probation continues to drive mass incarceration. This past month, over a hundred prosecutors and probation leaders called for an end to incarceration stemming from probation violations.

They want a more hopeful system to replace the punitive and overly burdensome status quo.

Grace, who recently turned 16, is now a junior in high school.

She spoke at the Justice for Black Girls Means Every Black Girl Conference 2020 Virtual Conference on October 25. To the group of educators, and social workers, and young Black women, Grace said, “You deserve better than your mistake. You just need to keep your head up, and I know it will be hard some days, but the most important thing is that you get back up the next day and you show them who you really are.” *Name has been changed to preserve anonymity.

MORGAN AWNER B’21 wants you to check out Project NIA [project-nia.org] to learn more about the movement to end the incarceration of children and young adults.

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

FEATS

14

THE PARADOX OF SOCIALLY RESPONSIBLE COMPUTING

As awareness of technology’s destructive power increases—the erosion of democracy, the quantification of individuality, the exacerbation of systemic inequities—attention turns to how computer scientists are trained. It’s now common to decry the fact that most computer science students graduate from college with limited knowledge of the ‘ethical implications’ of their work. Whatever that might mean, the assumption is that perhaps the harms of tech might be explained by the fact that its developers were simply unaware. Many universities/educational institutions have responded by developing ethics curricula for computer science (CS) undergrads. In 2018, the Mozilla Foundation unveiled a grant program funding up to $3.5 million for CS departments to integrate ethics into their undergraduate curricula. Harvard’s EthiCS program, which tripled in size in 2019, is just one of several similar programs at universities across the country. For the most part, these programs have been pushed by both students and professors, reflecting genuine interest and concern from within CS departments.

The Brown University Computer Science department recently joined this wave, rolling out an initiative called the Socially Responsible Computing (SRC) program beginning in the 2019–2020 school year. In its first year, I had the opportunity to be one of the Head TAs for the program; in addition to miscellaneous

15

S+T

administrative tasks, I witnessed first-hand the logistical and ideological challenges of building a robust ethics education program. While my perspective is certainly skewed, my sense—based on course feedback forms, overhearing conversations in the CS building, and reading and grading hundreds of students’ assignments—is that the program has raised questions that many students wouldn’t have otherwise considered, and that for the most part, students are actively engaged and interested in the content we have created.

But all of that being said, when reflecting upon the program at the end of its first year, I don’t know that I can celebrate it as an unqualified success. To commit to teaching ethics is to commit to having hard conversations, and there are several that have yet to be had. +++ The Socially Responsible Computing program is administered under the umbrella of the computer science undergraduate teaching assistant (TA) program, and like most other initiatives in the department, is student-run. Undergrads are hired as Socially Responsible Computing TAs (STAs), and are matched with individual classes in the computer science department. In the months leading up to the semester, these undergrads work with staff members of their respective

courses—the professor and other TAs—to incorporate ethics-related content tailored to the specific course, whether it be lecture components, lab activities, or homework questions and project specifications. For example, in the Deep Learning class (for which I was an STA), my co-STA and I added lecture material about topics like the limits of computer vision models and the carbon footprint of highly complex models, wrote a lab about gender bias in language models, and added reflection questions to project reports. Similarly, the User Interfaces/User Experience course added content related to design while introductory courses raised more surface-level issues through activities like discussion prompts for sections. By the end of the year, we had worked with some of the most popular courses in the department (including Deep Learning, User Interfaces/User Experience, Machine Learning, Security, and Data Science) as well as all of the core intro sequences: 14 courses total, easily reaching the entire undergraduate CS population.

By design, curriculum development is tied as closely to the original course as possible. At Brown, one of the the fundamental philosophies behind the SRC program’s structure is that if students are learning about ethics topics directly related to the courses they are taking, they will be (1) more likely to be open to and actively engaged with the content, and unable to blow it off as

04 DEC 2020

The limits and potential of teaching tech ethics

BY Jessica Dai ILLUSTRATION Floria Tsui DESIGN XingXing Shou

‘optional,’ and (2) encouraged to see direct connections between their work and potential ethical concerns.

While I can only speak to the internal deliberations about Brown’s program, the vast majority of the Mozilla grant recipients are following a similar approach of tying content to specific courses, and several computer science departments have also publicly advocated for this strategy. A paper published by researchers at the University of Colorado argued that ethics components which are “relevant to core course content [show] that ethics and engineering thinking go hand in hand,” while Harvard’s announcement of its 2019 pilot identified three goals met by a course-based approach: “it shows [students] the extent to which ethical issues permeate almost all areas of computer science; it familiarizes them with a variety of concrete ethical issues and problems that arise across the field; and it provides them repeated experiences of reasoning through those issues and communicating their positions effectively.”

However, despite all of these merits, focusing on ethics-related content “in situ,” as the Colorado researchers put it, means that it becomes difficult to discuss bigger-picture topics not immediately connected to each course—even when it’s these same topics which are the most critical for understanding the role that the tech industry plays in society. +++ The natural consequence of a course-focused structure is a tendency to favor content relating to issues with a technical fix, whether it’s algorithmic fairness, privacy-preserving machine learning, or user interface design with modified objectives. After all, it’s a very clean, satisfying story to tell students in the machine learning class about bias in machine learning, then immediately provide a quick explanation of how fairness in machine learning can be measured and achieved. However, the objectives of ‘fairness’ cannot be divorced from the settings in which an algorithm is applied—healthcare, financial services, or criminal justice, for example. These discussions of larger theoretical and historical issues—such as concepts of justice, the racist origins of the American legal and policing system, incarceration, and abolition—are far outside the scope of the machine learning class itself, not to mention the expertise of professors.

Of course, all of this begs the question of what a computer science class is supposed to teach. Notably, the surge in interest around responsible computing education is only part of an ongoing conversation about what a computer science education is to begin with. Decades ago, computer science was just another esoteric STEM field, and students enrolled primarily out of curiosity or interest; today, however, computer science undergrads are overwhelmingly career-focused. But a computer science degree, at least at most universities that value a liberal arts education, teaches much more than what is required in the day-to-day experience of a software engineer: the curriculum that undergrads are required to take is arguably meant for enrichment, contextualization, and personal interest rather than vocational training.

A ‘tech ethics’ or ‘responsible computing’ program that doesn’t deal with thornier issues more than one step removed from technical topics will always remain woefully insufficient. It’s never just about the technology, but rather, all the issues that are inextricable from it: labor and capital; warmaking and American imperialism; gender, race, and politics. In short, CS ethics curricula must address power. After all, what is often decried as the core harms of the tech industry today are not necessarily intrinsically about the technology itself, but about the ways in which the industry has taken advantage of its unique position in the American economy.

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

For example, the exploitation that tech companies euphemistically call “gig work” relies on minimum wage stagnation and the collapse of social mobility. Grubhub stealing drivers’ tips, or Uber and Lyft spending hundreds of millions of dollars in the California Prop.

22 fight to ensure that they could continue denying benefits to their drivers both seem like the opposite of socially responsible computing. These were features that engineers built. Many of the industry’s ills are even further separated from the actual tech—skyrocketing housing prices and rampant gentrification in tech hubs like the Bay Area and Seattle have contributed to increasingly endemic homelessness in these areas. The recency of the 1960s’ civil rights movements is thrown into even sharper relief when one considers that so many critical computing advances—the first computers, the birth of the internet—happened in parallel, and it was no coincidence that Black Americans were at every turn excluded from participation in this revolution, whether as students, engineers, or users. But none of this would fit neatly into content for a specific course.

One of Harvard’s stated goals for their EthiCS program—and one of the goals that must be implicit in any responsible CS education program—is for students to be able to think through ethical quandaries they may face in the future and to decide when particular technology should or should not be built. While this goal is still too constrained in scope to encompass many issues that are only tangentially technical but core to responsible computing, avoiding broader conversations about power means that current approaches are inadequate to even address this objective. The surveillance, military, and policing tech currently developed by private companies and government contractors (Amazon’s Ring home security cameras, for example, which many police departments are able to almost unilaterally, warrantlessly tap, or Microsoft’s ICE contracts and Google’s Department of Defense contracts, which were the target of substantial employee agitation) must be considered in light of the historical coziness between the CS academy and the military. More importantly, however, the question of whether something should be built cannot be answered fully without a consideration of what constitutes good governance, of what one considers to be acceptable behavior by a government, police force, or military.

Finally, beyond the sort of content that an ethics program may (or may not) cover, it needs to eschew the illusion of neutrality, to have the courage to take sides. Teaching ethics or responsibility apolitically is an oxymoron, and yet so far, it feels like Brown’s program has danced on the line of pretending like it’s possible. This, of course, is also a remnant of the (obviously mistaken) perception that the curricula we’ve been taught as computer science students in previous years were neutral to begin with, and an underlying impulse not to rock the boat too much. In the past, we’ve tried to avoid being prescriptive about our own opinions, hoping to prompt discussion and raise issues rather than unequivocally denounce or endorse particular issues. Across most programs, it seems, the goal is simply to pose questions and hope students come to an answer of their own.

But while respect for a plurality of perspectives is generally desirable and necessary for prompting reflection and good-faith discussion, a responsible computing program hoping for any sort of credibility must at some point be willing to take a firm stance on certain issues rather than waffle about ‘multiple valid interpretations.’ At some point we must call a spade a spade, e.g. working with ICE as participating in human rights abuse. Otherwise, it simply continues to perpetuate the same sort of neutrality that justified Facebook’s refusal to take action against conspiracy and misinformation on the grounds that it would “disproportionately” affect conservative accounts. Sometimes, all

perspectives really aren’t valid, and we should stop pretending like they are. +++ At the end of the day, the core motivation behind most, if not all, “ethics education programs” is fundamentally to ask CS students—the engineers, product managers, and founders of the future—to care about other people, to consider one’s place in the complex, fragile fabric of society, to participate in building a better world rather than take the six-figure check and retreat to the comfort of a luxury condo. The allure of a tech job and therefore the CS major is the promise of immediate wealth. This context, coupled with the enrichment versus vocational training question for CS education in general, cannot be ignored when considering the overall effectiveness of a program like Brown’s.

Is the tech industry so destructive because its workers haven’t taken ethics classes, or is it because all the incentives are stacked the other way? In other words, the existential question for every CS department running a responsible computing program is whether the program is well-positioned to drive meaningful, material change—or if it simply provides more ‘enrichment’ for students who will pass through the program and promptly forget the content along with their other elective courses.

I fear that a course-focused approach to teaching tech ethics content development runs the risk of implying that responsible computing can be reduced to checking disconnected items off a list of hot topics, that having a general awareness of popular issues— automation, algorithmic bias, data privacy, deepfakes, dark patterns in design—is sufficient to be a responsible technologist. Certainly, awareness is better than nothing, but when it’s not clear why these issues are related to an individual’s day-to-day work, it’s much easier to abdicate responsibility.

The punchline of the conversation about power, of course, is that we, Brown CS undergraduates, have power, by virtue of being Brown students and Brown graduates, by virtue of being able to code, by virtue of proximity to corporations that can move massive amounts of capital. There’s a reason software engineers make so much money: because they each generate so much value for their employers, even more than six figures a year. That’s a source of power, too. Understanding and recognizing this power is the only way to process one’s relationship towards issues like potential automation-related job losses, gig worker protections, or the amplification of anti-Blackness by search engines—even if one’s day-to-day work feels completely unrelated.

To put it bluntly, if students are not empowered to do something about the issues raised in class, then these programs may be excellent content-wise, but they will ultimately be theoretical, intellectual exercises rather than skill-building experiences that shape how students engage with the world and the future.

As we discuss the extent to which the technologies we build shape the world around us, it’s even more important to confront the extent to which we as individuals have the power to shape the world. Nothing about the status quo was inevitable; the technological progress, systemic racism, and widening inequality of today were all contingent upon decisions made by millions of individuals over the course of history. I hope that in the future, rather than calling attention to a few hot-button issues, responsible computing programs will begin to help students understand their role in broader systems of power—and empower them to take action.

JESSICA DAI B’21 is working on trying not to break things.

S+T

16

he s; the swamp (t re o sp l a g n fu f no ry core, e disseminatio gical to her ve lo o ec l, TS porosity; th ta en ures. p): TS is elem an thought fig te ro p ch su primordial sou rs vo une or surprise she fa tive, the comm ec ll is co e and so it is no th rs fe e pre ural fibers). th sh at s, (n n rs io lo at co rm ch fo in social simply she wears ri nchy. no, TS is rhizomatic. u cr se st ro p ju t er o h n . p st h, a co-o —a sign whic nchy,’ or at le ll a ru ‘c er t ft es a g g s, su ce e’s a pis is not to and grace. (sh y it id u fl s se es poss share.) u, too. incredibly, we manifests in yo l’ a ic g lo o ec e h ord resence and ‘t u utter the w p yo ’s S s; p T li in r u e m yo spend ti fingers finger to s though your ought with a a th te la in cu se ti u a es g p s. u you elocution; yo elegant as her ss so le er aw fl ev h n it re w a ’ t yours ‘alluring to her the ether—bu equally subject m o re fr a s ll a se : ra m h o p m pull r carda sons, the flavo landscape, per gift. e is. listen; it’s a careful exeges or sitting by th r, o o m a n o r desert o irs, her S serene, in a ut when she st T b . es ay in d g a y in im ra ke e on change on a s to revel; to ta ex ed ne ee e ff sh co s. f o re o s b window itch. TS nagging inner a ys ra et b e d stri ke a lover. e fields the stage; to ta and i walked th S T g, in d en e to b e world seemed to sally once, when th li rain, stening e th in n w o et through a of her hom le for Audible op pe al rm no ’s s. rooney red between u a sh s d u rb ea f al, dated single set o oted some ban n r o at rr a n ’s ly, rooney unison, ginger in d ce in w e the detail and w an earbud from , ch n re w to t IO the qu o so as n ick-witted crackling above es n li er w o p , the cryp rg o b other’s ear. cy tic, the co ly Y in esterday ung a n a ed y, the acr rm s p fo i li tt in er p g p TS and obatic! co w ood on th er by h et g to g n to ru e st d e w g a la o y b m e a w em en’s comm cross-cou ass rattle. ntry punk une, ng droll irish p , d p se o C p wire transmitti e a im t gl r in i h k a in a r th tt little boy’s coat. OK d, and i , maybe it shuffled onwar usness. io sc n co l ’s ca T gi n lo h ot all tha ere’s IO in eco t simple. for an instant, the archiv e s ; IO on th & I walkin e mounta g through in; IO th e s u burbs on of the pa th e first lon ndemic, s g days plitting h eadphon perched o e s like teens n a pile o , f boulder s, stretche patch of d out on grass. IO a the bafflin gly brillia spontane ous plan; nt; IO wit IO in a r ha ed playho of soup to u s e with a p share; IO ot forever im turns of p p r in ted on ev hrase. In eryone’s fact, IO is sentence, a single b cursive sc ending ript and d ecisively an openin penned, w g left exa ctly wher ith e at the Ro she is—a ck where fi rst floor d she’s tapp esk ing out so head tilte mething d toward new, the wind ow, pullin hair towa g blades o rd the su f own n in diag onals as th a though ough eac t she coa h were xed with her bare hands.

DESIGN Liana Chaplain

17

EPHEMERA

04 DEC 2020

g n o s e n o h p e l e Q t d l o an �

�

�

0

BY Ivy Scott ILLUSTRATION Jessy Minker DESIGN Audrey Buhain

fecking disaster I absolutely cannot go back how can I show my face again should I just die it might be better for me to just die Thomas can probably take care of Grandma oh God please make this all go away— Something interrupts Artemis’ panic and she abruptly stands up, wiping sweaty palms on her saltdusted cardigan. Oddly, it is the sound of silence. The clicking has stopped. Artemis rushes up the stairs, breathing heavily and empty corn nuts bag in hand.

Nothing’s seriously wrong, Grandma just wants her attention. As with grandmas in general, this is often the case.

“Grandma?”

Clickclickclickclickclick.

“What? No, Grandma, I still don’t want to talk about it. Later, okay?”

Artemis is almost at the stairs when she realizes the sack of corn nuts is still empty.

“Hey, Grandma?”

Grandma looks up, still knitting. Artemis waves the empty bag from across the room. In one fluid motion, knitting needles are transferred to one hand, while the other hand scoops up another four-pound burlap sack of corn nuts and launches it across the room. Her aim is no better than last time—in fact, it’s worse. The sack pitches into the cat, burying him beneath its weight.

For a moment, neither woman is sure if he’s dead.

He’s not, but his breath is raspy and you can tell from the way his tail is bent out of shape that he’s on his ninth life. In the morning, he’s gone.

“Feck, I mean fuck, I don’t know.”

“What?”

“I- I don’t know. I said I don’t know.” No response.

“Look, I’m sorry about the whole leaked-documents-company-anti-corruption-scam-trying-to-putyou-out-of-a-job thing. I’m glad it failed, I don’t even know how to lead a corporate uprising. You go on strike and schist, right?”

“What? Artemis, I don’t care about that. I know you don’t know how to lead a corporate uprising. I’m just still pissed that you bit me.”

“Oh, right. Uh, yeah, sorry about that, too.”

“That was really fucking weird.”

“Correct.”

“I’m not gonna press charges or anything, but you should probably see someone about that.”

“Right, will do. Listen, speaking of that, could you come over?”

“Like, now?”

“No, whenever. Like, sometime today would be good.”

“Why?” Now it’s her turn to pause. Artemis doesn’t want to tell him, but there really isn’t any other option. She can’t think of anyone else who will know what to do.

“Tom died.”

“As in, like, eyebrows cat?” She could already hear him sniffling through the phone.

“Thomas, yes.”

“Artemis, are you joking right now?”

“No. Grandma killed him.”

“She killed him?”

“Yes. Long story, just please come over, okay?”

“Yeah, okay. I’m hanging up now.”

“Okay, bye.”

Jonathan waits for the click before slamming his head into the wall. Thud. Again. Thud. Again.

He’s hoping if he slams hard enough, he’ll get a concussion and forget the past 24 hours. That would actually be fantastic. Eventually, suspecting that he will smash through the drywall, he stops, moaning a narrow variety of expletives under his breath.

Thud. Thud. Thud. But it’s not his head.

Pratik.

“Bro, it’s Artemis again. Making a lazy effort to muffle the phone in his shirt, he asks, “Are you gonna fire that crazy bitch?”

Jonathan shakes his head. “Not today.”

“Alright, bro, your call,” says Pratik, handing him the phone. “Hey, can you just bring the phones down when you’re done? Hard to service those customers without one, you know?”

“Sure thing, Pratik. Thanks.” Pause. “What is it, Artemis?”

“Oh, um could you bring a bag of corn nuts0when you come? The four pounder.”

“Yeah, whatever you want. Can I hang up again?”

“Mhmm. See you soon.” Click.

Jonathan decides that he actually does not care about the wall.

Thud. Thud. Thud. �

Home is where the corn nuts are. Cheap and salty, stock gas station food but the only place you ever find them besides the gas station is at home. Crunchy.

Not airy, unfulfilling, stuck-in-your-teeth potato chip crunchy. Pebble crunchy, broke-teeth crunchy that makes your jaws strong, and hopefully your gums, too, since Artemis doesn’t floss. Dense, compact, crumbfree, which is important when you’re a messy eater and always trying to look professional. Not especially healthy, but not bad for you either. A lot like home. It has been the worst day, and Artemis is very ready to go home.

The front gate swings shut with a click and Artemis thinks, as she always does, how out of place a front gate seems in a city. It’s pleasantly improper, in a Central Park sort of way; the click is like the turn of a key in a lock, sealing her into a microcosm, a 70 square-foot world where everything is safe.

The door is unlocked, it always is, and it always gets stuck on the way back to the doorframe so a regular-sized person would have to give it a bit of a shove. Artemis jumps and throws her weight against it, a violent action performed so routinely that the cat barely raises his eyebrows. Grandma is paying atten+++ tion but acts like she isn’t; her existence is measured only by the clickclickclick of knitting needles.

Artemis had already pretty much decided she was “Four out of ten,” Artemis sighs, opening her mouth just going to stop showing up to work and get fired by to say more and then deciding against it. default. Seeing Jonathan daily was making her bitter, The clicking gets quieter. Grandma’s existence the office atmosphere was dismal, and the pay could fades with the sound of her needles, breath growing barely be considered above-mediocre. The plan was to faint, but she wants to hear Artemis talk. It is a labor lay low for a couple weeks and then quietly apply for a of love. similar job at a similarly dismal company in suburbia.

“I don’t want to talk about it, if we’re being honest.

She would use her savings to take the train.

Nobody died, it was just a long day.”

Now, that’s not even an option. clickclickclickclickclick. Still knitting with one hand, She had railed at Grandma last night, screaming Grandma uses the other to throw the sack of corn nuts through tears as her own tiny frame cradled Thomas’ at Artemis. It’s her non-dominant hand, and she has still-warm carcass, the stubble rubbing her hands raw terrible aim anyways. The corn nuts hit the wall, shateach time she shifted his weight. Grandma’s range tering the picture frame that hangs there. Glass sprays, of emotions was greatly limited by her extremely old hitting the cat but not the knitting needles. His paws age, but Artemis could tell she really was sorry. The are calloused so it’s probably fine. The naked canvas clicking got quieter and quieter until it was almost painting of Artemis’ mother as Madonna with Child inaudible, and Artemis finally stopped yelling for fear snaps up like a window shade and then rolls halfway that Grandma might disappear, too. Even today, the back down, bobbing briefly before settling at quarvolume of clicking was noticeably decreased, and it ter-past. Artemis sighs and picks up the corn nuts, would probably stay that way for whatever brief durarubbing the dust on her sweater before popping them tion constituted the rest of her life. into her mouth. A sweep of her foot, perfectly aimed Artemis sits in the red-velvety old chaise lounge from over a year of repeating the same motion on the that smells appropriately and eternally like a dusty same carpet, sends the crumbs flying into a corner for cupcake, nestling the receiver of Grandma’s old phone Thomas to nibble later. She will pick the glass up from between her ear and shoulder. Her finger swirls the the floor and out of the cat’s skin tonight. For now, she rotary dial as the numbers ring, “6 - 3 - 1 - 4 - 8 - 3 - 2 - 5 � goes downstairs.

4 - 7.” The line rings only once.

IVY SCOTT B’21.5‘s corn nut phase ended in The land that the property was built on is incred“GudClip Manufacturing Company, here to address sophomore year. Now, she eats pita chips. ibly uneven, enough that only half of the basement all your paperclipping needs! How can I help you?” has windows that go somewhere. You can gaze wistArtemis sighs into the phone. “Pratik, hey. Could I fully into a parking lot from one side, but on the adjamaybe please speak to Jonathan?” cent side, the ceiling starts to slope down so that the � “Artemis?” windowsills are almost perfectly flush with the side“Yeah.” walk. As a slightly younger child, Artemis used to pry A pause, uncomfortable even from this distance.

--the window open and wait for people to walk by so she “Are you sure that’s a good idea?” could reach her arm out and grab their ankles. Now she “Please, Pratik.” Another pause. He sounds just like is less pesky and more pensive, and prefers to swing � her grandmother. “No, Pratik, I’m not sure that it’s a in the hammock and watch people’s feet go by. It’s not good idea, just put him on the phone.” a fetish. You can learn a lot about a person from their “Okeydokie.” There is the sound of heavy breathing 'l shoes. as Pratik runs up three flights of stairs. It’s not even She unties the bag before climbing into the that urgent, Pratik just loves running. He also hates I hammock. Grandma loves to throw corn nuts, and so the office. Once, he told Artemis that he pretends he’s to prevent the sack from bursting, one of them always stomping on Corporate America every time he goes I ties the neck tightly in a sailor’s knot. From her perch, upstairs, which she found a bit pathetic. Pratik wants to Artemis watches flocks of loafers and heels go by, be a wrestler, Artemis is pretty sure, but he’s too skinny. crunching and trying not to think about anything that Bones like chopsticks, his high school coach once said, happened today. She is mostly successful until one and from then on you never saw Pratik without a carton particular pair of blue oxfords reminds her of Jonathan: of Muscle Milk. current employer, grad school roommate, original Finally, the last thud, and some mumbled greetThomas-owner, old partner in a far too passionate ings. Artemis hopes Pratik didn’t use her name, but she it’s-complicated-ship, and now, arch nemesis in office thinks he probably didn’t. He’s a decent human being. warfare.

“Hello?”A low voice. Jonathan.

“Office politics,” she whispers to herself fever“Hi,” she squeaks, knowing he will recognize her ishly. “None of this is personal, it’s just office politics.” anyway. More sighing.

Artemis makes one last feeble effort to soothe her fraz“Artemis, why am I not hanging up the phone right zled nerves before her mind begins to spiral. now?”

Oh my God what have I done this is an absolute

Q

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

LITERARY

18

HEALTHCARE RESOURCES

These community health centers accept all insurance and have a sliding-scale system based on income for patients without insurance.

Blackstone Valley Community Health Center: Pawtucket & Central Falls : 722-0081 Thundermist: West Warwick & Woonsocket: 615-2800 Tri-County Health Center: Johnston & North Providence: 351-2750 Providence Community Health Center: Providence: 444-0570 East Bay Community Action Program: Riverside & Newport: 437-1008 These clinics provide free and/or low-cost health services: Clínica Esperanze, Providence: 347-9093 Rhode Island Free Clinic, Providence: 274-6347 If you have COVID-19 symptoms, there are several locations in Rhode Island where you can get tested. For more information, please visit: https://health.ri.gov/covid/testing/ Para más asistencia en español, llama a la línea de apoyo de AMOR: 401-675-1414

BAIL FUNDS & MUTUAL AID

AMOR COVID-19 Community Support Fund. Donations go to support sanitation equipment for vulnerable populations, as well as direct financial assistance to families in need. Donate here: https://bit.ly/2UmYJXr To get involved as a volunteer, packaging and distributing mutual aid, visit: https://tinyurl.com/amor-covid-volunteer FANG Collective Community Bail Fund. As jails and prisons continue to become coron- avirus hotspots, they present extremely unsafe conditions for those inside, many of whom are held because they can’t afford bail. Help bail people out from the Bristol County House of Corrections and the Ash Street Jail through this fundraiser organized by the FANG Collective: https://gofundme.come/f/fang-bailfund Project LETS Mutual Aid Fund. Project LETS is working in coalition with grassroots organizations in Rhode Island to provide direct financial assistance to the most marginalized and vulnerable in our community. Donate here: https://projectlets.org/covid19

LOCAL & ONLINE EVENTS

Saturday, 12/5: The weekly Saturday morning Hope Street farmers market has moved to its winter location at the new Farm Fresh RI Market Hall at 11 Sims Ave. Find all your favorite RI and MA farms and food vendors from 9am–1pm.

Sunday, 12/6: Holiday Flea Market at the Farm Fresh RI Market Hall (11 Sims Ave) from 11am–3pm. Scavenge for antique jewelry, handmade candles, ornaments, vintage clothing and more.

Sunday, 12/6: Shop for the holidays and dine at the Hope Street Outdoor market from 9am to 6pm!

Wednesday, 12/9: Join Youth Pride, Inc for a weekly online discussion called The Way Out at 4pm about relationships, school/work, sexuality and gender, fighting discrimination, mental health, and current events. Open to all LGBTQ+ youth ages 14 to 23. More information at: https://bit.ly/37qiWRj Ongoing: Demand that Invesco—a major bondholder for the Wyatt Detention Facility in Central Falls which maintains the prison’s contract with ICE—divest in a move toward shutting the facility down for good. Call or email Aimee Partin at (404) 724-4248 or aimee. partin@gmail.com.

designed by: mehek vohra