Color

WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY

POLITICAL

REVIEW 32.1 | Winter 2020 | wupr.org

movement

Table of Contents 6

Color

National

International

Political Color-Coding & Voter Exploitation Hannah Grimes

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The Return of the Yellow Vests Aruni Soni

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Redlining, Red Embers, Golden State Max Lichtenstein

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Coloring Outside the Lines Rohan Palacios

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What Magenta Tells Us About Political Interpretation Elena Murray

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Southern Conservatism: A Cyclical Plague Hannah Richardson

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Grey Rainforest, Concrete Jungle Ishaan Shah

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Theme Art Thomas Fruhauf

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Color. Color? Color!

Merry May Ma

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Blue Lives Matter Jaden Lanza

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It is 2020 and India Bleeds Saffron Tanvi Kohli & Siddhi Vora

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The EU Green Deal Lacks Eastern Support Lilly Wurm

Peloton, The Gift that Gives a "Beach Bod" Clare Grindinger

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Coral Bleaching: Loss of Color, Loss of Life Christian Monzรณn

Executive Order on Judaism is a Mistake Fadel Alkilani

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CCP vs. Religion, A Century Long Battle Nkemjika Emenike

Brown is...

Jordan Coley

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One World, Overarching Theories Nicholas Kinberg

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Is Violence An Appropriate Strategy for HK

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Human Rights on the High Seas Elizabeth Piasecki Phelan

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White-Washing in the Climate Movement Alaina Baumohl Theme Art Haejin An

Editors' Note Executive Director Ishaan Shah Editors-in-Chief Hanna Khalil Sophie Attie Design Director Catherine Ju Staff Editors Jaden Lanza Max Lichtenstein Christian Monzon Rohan Palacios Features Editors Nick Massenburg Megan Orlanski Assistant Design Directors Leslie Liu Jinny Park Programming Director Liza Sivriver Treasurer Clare Grindinger Web Editor Adler Bowman Web Assistant Editor Yanny Liang Front Cover Elizabeth Phelan Back Cover Reshad Hamauon

Dear Readers, Color has the power to bring life, vibrancy, and joy into our everyday surroundings, challenging monotony. In some cases, it evokes familiarity: the faded tones of a beloved blanket from childhood or the bright pink we painted our bedroom walls as a teenager. Other times, the wide range of hues reminds us of all that is left to be explored in the world. Like all the topics we choose to tackle in WUPR, the subject of color easily blurs the line between the personal and the political.

An aesthetic marker, color can also be a way for us to classify, stereotype, and segregate. It is easily endowed symbolic meaning, creating shortcuts to understandings of community, geography, and power. Whether you use it as an indicator or simply allow it to be a harbor of visual pleasure, color provides a lens through which we view and comprehend everything that surrounds us.

In this issue of WUPR, from the red of conservative states to the blue of police uniforms to the rainbow of shades in coral reefs, our writers have explored the varied and layered meanings of color. In her article, Lilly Wurm explores the possibilities of an EU Green New Deal without strong support from more recently joined, former Eastern-Bloc countries. Alaina Baumhol challenges the climate movement’s erasure of activists of color, highlighting key figures that are not receiving mainstream media attention. In their feature piece, Tanvi Kohli and Siddhi Vora analyze the rise of saffron fascism within India, contextualizing the BJP’s recent policies targeting Muslims. Back in California, Max Lichtenstein highlights the growing homelessness and housing crisis in San Francisco and Los Angeles in the face of environmental injustice, stigmatization of the poor, and systematic redlining.

In addition to pieces approaching our theme, we also have submissions representing stories from around the country and the world. Fadel Alkilani dissects a recent executive order discussing the status of Judaism in the United States. Elizabeth Piasecki Phelan discusses human rights issues with ambiguities surrounding international water status. In her piece, Clare Grindinger ponders recent controversies surrounding the popular Peloton fitness bikes. Hannah Richardson looks at the sometimes toxic environment that surrounds her in her hometown in the South, exploring the many ways in which conservative values are expressed and spread in Southern U.S. states.

These are just a few of the various topics tackled by our writers. While reading this issue we hope you will take some time to reflect upon what colors ignite you, surround you, and define you in this vibrant world that we live in.

Warmly,

Theme Spread: Haejin An Feature Designs: Leslie Liu Jinny Park

Hanna Khalil and Sophie Attie Editors-In-Chief

WU Political Review

Political Color-Coding & Voter Exploitation Hannah Grimes Artwork (right) by Leslie Liu, assistant design director

W

hen you look at Elizabeth Warren’s merchandise website, you see a collection of blue: navy blue hats, royal blue shirts, blue text on white pins. Likewise, in Bernie Sanders’ store, you will find blue beanies and sweatshirts with red only used to emphasize key words in long blue phrases. This is the same for most Democratic candidates. Alternatively, Republicans rely on red. A glance of a red hat in a crowd leaves the impression of a Make America Great Again cap, and Republican leaders rarely wear blue neckties. This red vs. blue color-coding has become so ingrained in American politics that it seems natural. We accept that red states are Republican and blue states are Democratic.

Political color-coding disguises itself as a longheld tradition. Especially to young voters, it seems as if party colors are fixed into the very foundation of American politics. This isn’t the case.

Before the 2000 presidential election, both parties used the entire American red, white, and blue to symbolize their campaigns, and colors were randomly assigned on election maps each year. In fact, during the 1980 election, Republicans were assigned blue on electoral maps. Ronald Reagan’s votes were blue, while Jimmy Carter’s were red. NBC newsman David Brinkley famously referred to the election map outcome, which showed Reagan's landslide win, as a "suburban swimming pool.” This red for liberals and blue for conservatives is standard for the rest of the world. For example, in both the United Kingdom and France, blue symbolizes the conservative party and red represents the left.

NBC continued this color scheme until 1996, but neither party definitively claimed one color.

In 2000, however, electoral maps used blue for Democratic candidate Al Gore and red for Republican George W. Bush. On election night, neither Gore nor Bush had a majority vote to turn the maps blue or red. The initial result was

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so close that it forced a recount in Florida, which held the election for 36 days. When Florida was finally revealed to be a “red state,” Bush won in one of the closest elections in U.S. history. Likely because of this historic election’s stand-still turmoil, red and blue were solidified as polarized colors. Florida became permanently red, permanently the state that elected Bush, and all other states fell into their respective color schemes.

This permanence was also due to the longawaited use of full-color electoral maps by The New York Times and USA Today, first published in 2000.

The color choices were not given much thought.

According to Archie Tse, senior graphics editor for the New York Times, their spread used red for Republicans because "red begins with r, and Republican begins with r." When these colors became mainstream, politicians ran with them, now using the colors as widespread marketing tools.

This color-coding is one of the most successfully subtle tactics of America’s political polarization.

It’s increasingly easy to stereotype everyone in the southern red states as extremely conservative, and blue states like California and Oregon are commonly believed to have liberal cultures.

Candidates understand that they have a backing in their historically approving states, so “purple states,” or swing states, are targeted most in competitive campaigns. We have this clear-cut distinction of red vs. blue, but it isn’t as clean a divide as many Americans believe.

Stephen Ansolabehere, a political scholar at Harvard, states, “At the individual level, most Americans are ideological moderates rather than extremists, on both economic and moral

issues.” Further, Stanford political science professor Morris P. Fiorina claims that each state actually has significant representation of both conservatives and liberals that win elections at all levels of government. When reaching beyond the extremely divided, sometimes blinding arena of political campaigns, it becomes more evident that the color of each U.S. state is not clearly “red” or “blue” but is rather a varying shade of purple.

The idea of entirely red and blue states dangerously simplifies the political process by creating a stigmatizing climate and an undereducated audience. The polarization of these color schemes has been intensified to transform voters into consumable products whose properties or beliefs can be easily exploited and manipulated by political professionals. Political figures have used these colors to create approachable marketing techniques that clearly work. It is hard to imagine Donald Trump selling a royal blue MAGA hat.

We have turned complex and inscrutable political parties into simple primary colors, both helping and hurting American voters. Yes, political parties need to be simplified to resonate with a larger audience, but this ingrained color-coding does much more than that. It exists as Pavlovian marketing with no room for purple products.

We have started to define ourselves based on the color of our parties and their surface-level beliefs rather than their actual tactics all because “red begins with r, and Republican begins with r."

Hannah Grimes ‘23 studies in the College of Arts & Sciences. She can be reached at hannahgrimes@ wustl.edu.

Color

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WU Political Review

Grey Rainforest, Concrete Jungle Ishaan Shah, executive director

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alking along the dirt footpath, I watched a family of white spotted deer feeding on the leaves of a rosewood tree. A pair of rhesus macaques quietly dart between their toes, leaping onto a nearby branch and quickly darting up a neem tree. A trio of Hanuman langurs rests on a pile of hay picking through their fur, their jet-black faces opaque against their bushy beige and grey bodies. As I looked off into the distance, I saw twelve, fifteen, and eighteen-story high-rises nearby, disappearing in and out of the smog. The grey, heavy fog drifted through the rainforest over the eightfoot tall concrete gated wall. The metal rooftops of slum settlements peeked over the divide, the thick forest brushing against the haphazard assemblages, covered with lightly torn blue tarp.

On one side of Sanjay Gandhi National Park (SGNP) is Mumbai, a bustling metropolis eighteen million people strong with a population density of 73,000 per square mile. On the other side, less than five miles away, is a similarly dense suburb, Thane, with a population of over two million. Within the park, nearly three thousand indigenous people, Adivasis, call the rainforest their home and lack access to electricity, schools, and hospitals in the city next door.

Also living in and around the park are 25 lions, 21 leopards, two to three tigers, over 1,000 species of plants, 251 species of birds, and 5,000 species of insects. As I described my first visit to SGNP to my uncle, he described the park more as a “zoo” rather than a truly “natural forest.” My father who had lived in this city for over twenty years had never been until our own vacation. Is this park a pristine natural forest, a lightly managed expansive zoo, an urban greenspace, or a reservation?

While SGNP will never neatly fit into any of these categories, its existence is a feat in itself.

It challenges ideas of American exceptionalism surrounding the norms of conserving urban biodiversity, protecting unique ecosystems, and protecting the rights of indigenous people. In both, the National Park Service Organic Act of 1916 and Wilderness Act of 1964, the fallacy of “un-peopled wilderness” became the legal standard for American conservation

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As I looked off into the distance, I saw twelve, fifteen, and eighteen-story high-rises nearby, disappearing in and out of the smog. efforts, leading to the systemic dispossession of American Indian peoples from their land. Not all American national parks have removed Indians from their land, and particularly many Alaskan national parks allow tribes to live within them and use the park’s natural resources for their own survival. But the vast majority of American national parks erase the history of Indian peoples who once occupied their territories and force them to move to designated reservations on much smaller pieces of land that are far away from American cities.

While the local government and the indigenous people have come into conflict over how much infrastructure the Adivasis require to survive in the forest, a substantial number of indigenous people remain in the national park, even as the second largest metropolitan area in India pushes precariously into the park’s territory. Looking at a satellite image of the park demonstrates its unique location; a deep green patch is cut off on three sides by a dense cluster of grey and brown dots, a river cutting through the top edge of the park. The park and the city have thus had a variety of fierce conflicts. Leopards have been an active threat in the nearby suburb and were responsible for over 20 human deaths in one week in 2004. There have been multiple efforts to improve traffic from Mumbai to Thane including a recent proposal to build a series of six underground tunnels 60 meters below the park. Adivasis in the park understandably want consistent transportation access to Mumbai

schools and hospitals so that they do not have to build their own inside the park. To prevent indigenous people from immersing Ganesh idols in the park’s Dahisar River during the Hindu ceremony, Ganesh Chathurthi, three artificial ponds were created just outside the park for immersion ceremonies.

There are many stakeholders involved in the maintenance of the park from grassroots conservationists to the upper class of Indian society to the developers to the indigenous people to India’s Forest Department. Often there is no right answer when considering whether to develop or conserve, but the park continues to support a biodiverse set of flora and fauna, house many people, and serve as a great resource for the city next door for both tourism and leisurely use. The closest American equivalents like Chugach State Park (Anchorage), McDowell Sonoran Preserve (Scottsdale) , Franklin Mountains State Park (El Paso), and the Bayou Savage National Wildlife Refuge (New Orleans) are similarly sized to SGNP, but they do not allow indigenous people to live within these parks, nor are they located near America’s largest, centrally-located cities.

In contrast, in SGNP, many of the indigenous people also work for the Forest Department to help with park conservation, profit from tourism off the park, and continue to live in relatively accessible villages that most tourists and Mumbai residents are likely to see on a trip to the park. Furthermore, working for the park is not a requirement for Adivasis to remain within SGNP unlike in Yosemite, for example, where rights of Indian peoples who had been living in the park for centuries were slowly eroded until only families of employees could live in the park in employee housing after 1953.

While wild urban ecosystems are becoming more important to American cities, none are as ambitious, large (34 sq mi), and respectful to indigenous people as SGNP. The majority of urban greenspace in cities is in privately owned gardens and yards, a consequence of grotesque abuse of the concept of suburbia in America and beyond. While it is possible to manage urban biodiversity through coordination of thousands of tiny privately owned patches, it is also

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possible for Americans to give up their expansive yards in favor of a more centrally managed urban wild that allows indigenous people to continue living in the area and better supports urban biodiversity. Americans in the past have worked to address greenspace management issues by dividing land between separate stakeholders (indigenous people, conservationists, private landowners, urban citizens), but SGNP demonstrates that greenspace management can successfully support biodiversity and appease multiple parties within a mixed-use framework.

It is essential to embrace conceptions of wilderness, which include people within them, if we want to live in harmony with what we call nature. The separation of people from nature reinforces stereotypes we have about nature ,which leave them “un-peopled,” allowing us to exploit their natural resources indirectly without observing and learning about the historical, aesthetic, and social value of biodiversity and the natural world. Globally, and especially in urban areas, we are experiencing intergenerational environmental amnesia, the progressive erasure of what we think of as nature because of the human development of our surroundings.

Human development has replaced the ponds, streams, and woodlands of our surroundings with fountains, pools, and urban parks, carefully trimmed and maintained by an extensive landscaping management team. Fewer and fewer children today spend time in nature with unstructured time to explore the outside world.

The surveillance of children by parents and other adult chaperones has dramatically increased

Is this park a pristine natural forest, a lightly managed expansive zoo, an urban greenspace, or a reservation?

The majority of urban greenspace in cities is in privately owned gardens and yards, a consequence of grotesque abuse of the concept of suburbia in America and beyond.

and nature and the forces by which humans pollute, litter, and choke the natural environment around us. American national parks hide behind a veneer of cleanliness even as many of America’s most iconic wild animals (red wolf, sea turtle, giant sea bass, condor, etc.) are threatened by anthropogenic climate change, overconsumption, and pollution. SGNP is not untouched, but neither is any American national park nor any part of our planet due to the transnational impact of global warming. To pretend that we are somehow separate from the natural world around us is worse than acting like it does not exist.

with the simultaneous rise of stricter regulation of appropriate use of natural landscapes. Today’s children and adults live in a world which restricts people’s interaction with greenery and also un-peoples the greenery itself when interaction is allowed.

On one hand, the preservation of SGNP and the restoration of indigenous people to American national parks is essential to preserving the memory of human interactions with nature as both residents and visitors. On the other hand, SGNP’s proximity to Mumbai itself “urbanizes” its perception, forcing humans to directly perceive the impacts of human development on the park. The low-lying smog blanketed over the high rises of Mumbai’s suburban skyline wiggle through the park, visibly making the park seem less “natural.” The plastic and paper waste scattered at the edges of the park’s gates interrupts the underbrush, distracting us from the pristine hundred-year old trees rising above the garbage. Are our own national parks clean? Or are we hiding behind the slow violence of climate change whose changes we can only perceive over a timescale of years rather than hours? At its worst and at its best, SGNP is deeply honest about the conflict between human development

Ishaan Shah ‘20 studies in the College of Arts & Sciences. He can be reached at ishaanshah@wustl. edu.

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WU Political Review

Artwork by Thomas Fruhauf, staff artist

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Color

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Not every “color” means something bad. In a traditional poem from the Tang Dynasty, "Swallow Flies as It Sings," Gao Shi writes, "The smoke and dust of the Han family is in the northeast, so the Han soldiers will leave home and defeat the thieves. Men are born to be strong and patriotic, and the emperor gives them a face filled with co l o r. "

Merry May Ma Artwork by Merry May Ma, staff artist hat do you think of when you see the word “color”? You may think about arts, colorful pencils, beautiful paintings on a wall, people’s various skin tones, or the rainbow flag that supports LGBTQIA+ people. But if I go back home to Shanghai, China, I may use the word “color” to emphasize my anger, to express a person’s health, to deliver the coming of spring, and so on. Many uses of “color” in Chinese are completely different than that in English, and here are some examples: “I will give you some color to see see!”

If you hear something like this on any street in China, this line may sound confusing. What does it mean? Someone is going to paint and show it to someone else? Does this person run an art store that is famous for its colors?

Well, all of these explanations are plausible but not accurate. This sentence simply means “I am going to punish you!” Color, here, means something similar to “dangerous acts” or “punishment.” Thus, if you hear someone say, “I will give you some color to see see!” something awful may happen.

Due to the funny and vivid use of “color” in this idiom, it has become very famous in China, and people find it even funnier when translating this idiom into English. Literal translations in any language’s idiom can be funny and may lose some of their original meanings. Thus, if you hear a Chinese person saying this idiom in English, he or she may want to make you laugh instead of warning or punishing you.

“A face filled with color!”

It sounds strange, right? What does a “face filled with color” look like? Forgive my literal translation. Here, “a face filled with color” equals “a face filled with gratitude.” The back story is when strong, masculine Han soldiers won battles, the emperor was happy and awarded those soldiers. Thus, “color” can also mean a feeling of gratefulness.

“Face color” ≠ “Skin Color” In English, if we associate “color” with the face, we may think of color of the skin. But in the Chinese language, “face color” has little to do with skin color. While I write this, my mom talks to our dog, saying, “His face color doesn’t look right.”

Well, here is my hilarious literal translation again. “Face color” here means “facial expressions,” “countenance,” or simply “face.”

What is “face color”? Is it about skin color? Why would my mom say the dog’s skin color isn’t right? “Face color” has nothing to do with the color of the skin, but the quality of skin. If someone is healthy, he or she will display an apple-like

face. Well, don’t throw eggs at me. I don’t mean that everyone’s face looks like apples, literally, or that everyone has a round face. “Apple-like face” is a metaphor for healthy, smooth, and soft human skin. I won’t say my dog has an “applelike face” because animal faces can vary from one to another, and it is not easy to define what skin is healthy for them. My dog has a snowwhite face, so if you somehow see him blushed, tell me right away.

Secondly, “face color” can express what a person feels. There is a famous idiom in the Chinese language that says, “we should act according to people’s face color.” Here, “face color” means facial expressions or what others think. People who have a higher emotional intelligence understand what others think or feel more quickly and accurately, so they can avoid unnecessary conflicts with others. Similarly, people who can empathize with other people well can interpret nuanced facial expressions on others’ faces correctly and make emotional connections with people in need. “Watching people’s face color” has been an important skill in China because everyone wants to live harmoniously with others.

Additionally, in Chinese’s traditional Peking Opera, actors will wear colorful masks to demonstrate the personality of the characters they perform. For example, a black face refers to a strict, serious person who seldom smiles while a white face refers to a suspicious and deceitful guy. A red face symbolizes honesty and loyalty while a blue face expresses a person’s unruliness and aggressiveness. Since colorful masks

Some master poets in ancient China can not only use vivid colors to deliver pictures in front of our eyes but also can arouse our feelings by employing colors in a poem. However, some of the greatest poets successfully arouse certain feelings in us without using any color in a poem.

In the following poem called Fishing in Snow, Xu’s translation not only demonstrates the snowy world surrounding the lone fisherman, but also exudes a feeling of coldness and loneliness of the fisherman on a freezing day. What strikes me is that Xu delivers the color white without mentioning “white” in this poem: Fishing in Snow (Tang Dynasty) Liu Zongyuan From hill to hill no bird in flight; From path to path no man in sight.

A lonely fisherman a float is fishing snow in lonely boat.

(Original Chinese version:

represent different personality when a character appears on stage, the audience can directly tell the personality of the character without guessing it.

To conclude, “face color” not only expresses the health status of the face or tells us how a person feels but also represents characters’ personalities.

“Green water joins the far-off sky.”

Let’s return to translation again. Among all the greatest translators alive, I admire Xu Yuanchong the most. I am flipping through his book called Song Lyrics in Paintings and on page 3 there is a poem about a boat on a river. In The Orchid Stream, with the tune title, “Phoenix Perching on Plane Tree,” Cao Guan writes: The laurel boat cleaving the waves slowly goes by, Mist veils peaks low and high, Green water joins the far-off sky.

My pocket with verse and rhyme is filled up, In high spirits I drink in my golden cup.

The willow down and flowers in flight tease my eye, A soft breeze blows in the vast sky, Through willow branches swallows fly.

Whose green bamboos invites me to the door?

I moor my boat at sunset and go to the shore.

(Original Chinese version:

Noticeably, the color green appears in the third line and the last line. The first line about the “green water” delivers a picture: an endless river like book pages unfolds in front of my eyes. Far, far away, a line connects the river with the sky.

The poet is in a good mood, and there are hundreds of wonderful lines emerging from his mind.

However, in the last line about “green bamboo,” the original Chinese does not contain anything about green. Green here also means a feeling of freshness. Similarly, in English, “green horn” means “an inexperienced or immature person, especially one who is easily deceived.”

Not only does “green” symbolize freshness, it also represents the coming of spring. “Green” can be used as an adjective but also as a verb in Chinese, and there is a saying that says, “Spring breeze greens the south of the Yangtze River again.” Here, “greens” means “make something green,” a verb that vividly delivers a picture in front of my eyes. Spring breezes blow by and on barren trees grow fresh leaves. The grass sprouts, gradually spreading out like a green blanket. Spring is like a happy artist who can’t wait to decorate everything. Therefore, even “green” is only a word in the Chinese language, it can mean a fresh feeling or symbolize the coming of spring.

I often imagine the story from a bird’s eye view, like flying above an icy lake, and I can see a fisherman fishing down below. He is more likely to fish some ice and snow than fish in such a freezing winter. The lake is wide and white, and the man is as small as a sesame seed. A vast feeling of coldness and loneliness would suddenly drown me and drag me into the freezing world, and I can’t help but feel very sympathetic for the lonely fisherman. I hope he can fish something valuable and get home soon.

Here, the power of color lies in the fact that color is not told, but shown.

Just like an ancient Chinese philosopher Lao Zi says, “The most beautiful sound can’t be heard.

The most powerful creature can’t be seen . This sentence means that in nature, the more magnificent something is, the more inclusive it will be.

Color is a powerful word because it is so flexible and inclusive that it can deliver a thousand meanings in a thousand different scenarios and languages.

Merry May Ma ‘22 studies in the College of Arts &

How to deliver a colored scene without talking about color

Sciences. She can be reached at liangboma@wustl. edu.

WU Political Review

Blue Lives Matter Jaden Lanza, staff editor

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ver the last decade, American politics has become plagued by intense hyperpolarization that distorts our perception of key social issues. We have been witnessing the production of manufactured deceit across political and media spheres in the country that has, and will continue, to prevent serious change.

There are few better examples of this than the rise of the "Blue Lives Matter" movement—a crusade lambasting the alleged hateful persecution of police officers in the United States.

Fictitious to its core, the very foundations of our understanding about criminal justice has been steeped in normative myths about policing, crime, and race.

A particular narrative has persisted in conservative political circles as well as in mainstream media outlets, especially after events like the 2014 Ferguson riots: police officers are being targeted merely for their identity as police officers.

There has been a dramatic spike in the number of officers being murdered, with the FBI reporting a 61% spike from 2015 to 2016. Notorious incidences such as the Dallas "revenge killings" elicited anxiety among law enforcement personnel and sympathizers that police are now targets.

Contrary to many critiques of Blue Lives Matter, the idea that the police have their own identity and social class is not false. What it means to be a police officer is indeed more than just a job and a uniform—one that has historical roots in America’s city police departments. The 19th century New York City Police Department slowly came to consist of a majority of ethnically Irish officers. Police are also regular people who have friends, family, coworkers, go to events, and go to church in communities they identify with. But law enforcement officers gradually socialized into their own independent group identity. A sort of ‘police culture’ took root through generations, constructing the worldview of those within it. A noble vision of policework is embodied in officers’ identities—that they honorably protect and serve—that obscure the harmful systemic actions of their departments.

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The magnitude of deaths on each side, and the social significance thereof, are simply incommensurable.

The evolution of police departments into more brutal roles began early in America’s history. For a time, the political establishment in New York City had fears that Irish-descendant officers would not properly police the same communities they grew up in. These fears were put to bed when the force loyally looked past ties of kinship and ethnicity when they quashed white working class riots in 1863 and 1871. ‘Blue lives’ are real, and officers sincerely identify with their occupations. This is the essence of a deep, fundamental problem with policing that shouldn’t be ignored, as historian Matthew Guariglia argues: “By dismissing Blue Lives Matter as nothing more than trite sloganeering, we erase the centuries of history that helped to create these discreet, insular and intergenerational communities of police—and miss why it is such a powerful rallying cry.”

Rhetoric about "blue lives" is quite honestly a clever tactic for disarming opposition to police brutality or other law enforcement discrimination and malfeasance. America has a patriotic history of holding law enforcement in high regard as honest defenders of the republic. This is how conservative movements effectively architected "Blue Lives Matter," something that coopts the language and philosophy of Black Lives Matter activism. Lawmakers in at least 14 states across the country have proposed bills to make killing a police officer a felony regardless of circumstances, with Louisiana even classifying

it as a hate crime—an incredibly dangerous precedent. Hate crimes are meant to be penalties for the targeting of particular social groups with immutable characteristics, such as race or sexuality. Adding police to the list of protected classes is both baffling and worrisome, lending credit to a narrative that police are persecuted for no reason other than being police.

The "war on cops" narrative is made up. The FBI report showing a 61% increase in police deaths is referring to a total of 66 officers being feloniously killed in 2016, which is used in bad faith as evidence of increased anti-police antagonism stemming from events such as the Ferguson riots. The thing is, the year-by-year variation in police officer deaths has been statistically insignificant for the last twelve years. The average number of officers feloniously killed was 51, with the worst year being 2011 with 72. If you look at FBI data for 2019, the number of felonious killings of officers has fallen, with 39 killed up to December 2 compared to 53 in 2018 at the same time of year.

Make no mistake, being a police officer is not a ‘safe’ occupation by most standards. But statistics unambiguously confirm that it hasn’t really become any more dangerous and isn’t even in the top 10 most mortal occupations, with fishersmen and farmers more likely to die on the job.

Police are more likely to kill themselves than by a criminal, and in the same year 41 officers were killed, police killed 990 civilians.

The slogan "Blue Lives Matter" is a marketing technique meant to discredit movements of activist groups like Black Lives Matter that seek to address the United States' longstanding history of racial injustice. It’s a perverse attempt at mystifying the public about racial issues, policing and injustice by equivocating the deaths of a few hundred police officers with the deaths of ten-fold that number of civilians—and over a century of racist policing. Legally classifying certain forms of disobedience toward law enforcement as a hate crime makes the absurd pretension that a heavily armed organization with a monopoly on the legitimate use of force

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on the streets is in actuality a disadvantaged class requiring even more special protection and distinction than it already possesses.

When it comes to blue lives, not even fellow police officers are fully welcomed into the fold— if they happen to be black. In St. Louis, though they share the same uniform, strained race relations color the interactions between members of the city police department. This came to a head in 2017 when black officer Milton Green was shot by a white colleague in the street. Offduty but nearby a recent crime scene, Green approached a detective he knew while showing his badge before being shot in the arm. Green, who had been harassed by other cops in the past before he could show them his badge, believes racial bias played a role in his shooting by fellow deputy Christopher Tanner: “Me being black with a gun, you never gave me the chance,” he said.

Even the strong bond among the boys in blue evidently cannot bridge racial divisions. Much like department responses to racial antagonism within the communities they police—such as the woeful handling of events after Ferguson—the issue of race is usually quietly neglected within the St. Louis police department itself. According to the New York Times, black officers often do not say anything when faced with racially offensive comments by officers they work with, and “Similarly, some white officers say they grow resentful when black colleagues suggest there is racism within the department.”

In the past and present, law enforcement has always been treated by society as heroes and as protectors of their communities. Imagining police as having persecution comparable to that of black lives is a butchery of history and erasure of the unique racial discrimination that faces African Americans—which includes harassment and neglect by law enforcement. The statistical reality of the so-called war on cops in contrast to the very real war on black lives makes Blue Lives Matter bills particularly baffling and worrisome. Black Lives Matter activist Daunasia Yancey remarked, “I think that this 'war on cops'

Legally classifying certain forms of disobedience toward law enforcement as a hate crime makes the absurd pretension that a heavily armed organization with a monopoly on the legitimate use of force on the streets is in actuality a disadvantaged class requiring even more special protection and distinction than it already possesses. rhetoric is just another way to protect police from accountability.”

The magnitude of deaths on each side, and the social significance thereof, are simply incommensurable. No comparison can be made between the infrequent attacks on law enforcement and the deliberately racialized harassment and surveillance of regular citizens by police.

Legislation in recent years to classify killing officers as a felony or hate crime regardless of

circumstance is as superfluous as it is punitive; criminals who kill the police virtually always receive the longest available prison sentence in courts across the country even without new legislation.

An incredible double standard exists: no comprehensive condemnation of the killing of unarmed black civilians by police has been made by police departments or associated criminal justice institutions ever. Meanwhile, Black Lives Matter has denounced the murder of police officers repeatedly but was accused by members of a police union anyway of being directly complicit in killings without evidence. The rise of the group was in fact correlated with a slight decline in officer deaths in 2016.

More robust resistance against police brutality manifested in the last decade, and concerted disinformation campaigns have been distorting how we think about American policing. We are told that those in power are actually vulnerable and persecuted, and that those protesting racial persecution are outrageously indignant and exaggerating or are perpetrators of violence themselves.

We must reject these narratives that seek to reduce the gravity of police brutality and view law enforcement as the real victims. The notion that police uniforms bring distinction to an officer other than authority and impunity should be roundly dismissed. Regressive attitudes on policing and race must be replaced with genuine efforts at repairing injustices in American cities and reclaim law enforcement as what it should be: demilitarized, locally representative and conciliatory forces in their respective communities.

Blue lives don’t in fact matter—insofar as doing so intentionally mystifies and legitimates assault on black lives.

Jaden Lanza ‘23 studies in the College of Arts & Sciences. He can be reached at jadenlanza@wustl. edu.

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It is 2020 and India bleeds saffron.

Within the past year, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Home Minister Amit Shah’s Hindutva (Hindu Right) agenda has violently manifested itself through an escalation of India-Pakistan tensions over the Kashmiri occupation, including increased military presence and human rights abuses, the revocation of Article 370, which further stripped Muslim-majority Kashmir of its autonomy, and the longest internet blackout in any democratic nation’s history. With the reigning Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) at India’s helm, saffron terror, a term used to describe acts of violence motivated by Hindu nationalism, and fascism grip the country as the Hindu Right’s agenda seeps into the lives of over one billion people.

The Modi-Shah governance model rests upon a Hindutva ideology that led to the United States banning Modi from entry in 2005 under the International Religious Freedom Act provision of the Immigration and Nationality Act. Under Modi’s leadership as Chief Minister of Gujarat, a state in western India, and as the current PM, India witnessed the genocidal ethnic cleansing of Muslims in the 2002 Gujarat Pogrom which resulted in over 2,000 deaths, a steep escalation in cow vigilantism, and overall rise in Hindutva driven communal violence against its 200 million strong Muslim minority population. The BJP has emerged as an alternative political force to the Indian National Congress Party through emotionally charged anti-Muslim rhetoric with the purpose of transforming India into a Hindu nation-state, in which Muslims are relegated as second-class citizens.

During December of 2019, the Modi-Shah government signed into law the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA). The CAA amends the Citizenship Act of 1955—the first citizenship law established post-Independence and post-Partition. The CAA grants citizenship to Hindus, Sikhs, Christians, Jains, Buddhists and Parsi refugees from Afghanistan, Bangladesh, and Pakistan who have migrated to India before 2014, a cutoff lacking justification. The Act allows those who have been designated as minority religions a fast track to citizenship with a reduced five-year residency requirement as opposed to eleven years for everyone else. The UN has lambasted the law as “fundamentally discriminatory in nature” as it willfully excludes Muslims and other religious minority groups facing persecution in South Asian countries. Shah argues that Muslims do not face religious persecution as Islam is the majority religion in Afghanistan, Bangladesh, and Pakistan, and therefore their exclusion from the Act is justifiable. This is wholly untrue as the Ahmaddiyas and Baluchis in Pakistan face religious persecution.

Moreover, the Rohingyas from Myanmar, Muslim and Hindu Tamils from Sri Lanka, and Uighurs from China do not receive protection under the bill. Those who are a part of the six religious communities coming from Afghanistan, Bangladesh, and Pakistan will not be considered “illegal migrants.” The Citizenship Act of 1955, defines illegal migrants as foreigners entering India without a valid passport. It is unclear what will happen to those not protected under the CAA. However, concentration camps have been built in Assam, and preparations to build more are being undertaken in Maharashtra, Karnataka, and West Bengal.

The CAA works in tandem with the National Register of Citizens (NRC) and National Population Register (NPR) to create a citizenship model rooted in inhumane exclusion and hierarchy.

The National Register of Citizens (NRC) was mandated by the Citizenship Act of 1955 and has currently only been implemented in the Northeastern Indian border state of Assam, which was partitioned in 1947. The error-ridden NRC places the burden of proof on the people to prove their citizenship by submitting documents to prove their family’s residency in India. In Assam, over 1,900,000 people were excluded from the NRC’s list published in August, forcing them to appeal to the Foreigners' Tribunal to prove their citizenship. Asking those living in poverty or in difficult terrains, landless tribal groups, migrant laborers, and illiterate populations who face obstacles in producing documentation of residency is inherently patriarchal and casteist. The implementation of the NRC in Assam demonstrates that even those who are able to produce documents can be arbitrarily deemed as illegal by the officials of Foreigners' Tribunals. If the Foreigners' Tribunal does not accept the claim, then the claimant must appeal to the High Court of Assam or the Supreme Court. If this fails, the claimant will be sent to a detention camp. It is important to note that this discrimination compounds itself upon already oppressed and marginalized groups, including Muslims, Dalits, transgender persons, those with disabilities, women, and migrant workers.

In addition to the NRC, the National Population Register (NPR) registers the “usual” residents of India to produce census-like data.

“Usual” residents are those who have resided in an area for at least six months or plan to reside in an area for the next six months.

Based on the NPR, the Indian government seeks to create a list of “doubtful citizens,” although there is no articulated definition of a doubtful citizen. Shah looks to make the BJP promise of an expanded NRC into a reality. At the end of this process, those who are declared as non-citizens will become stateless.

The majority of the over 1,900,000 people left off of Assam’s NRC list are Muslim, with Muslims constituting about 34 percent of the state’s overall population. There are documented cases of people committing suicide out of anxiety and fear over the citizenship list and possible detention in the camps. Over 26 people have died in these facilities. Even nursing mothers and children are held in the concentration camps. In a disturbing turn of events, many of the laborers who built the facilities in Assam are now being sent to those same camps after facing exclusion from the NRC and being designated as illegal migrants. The number of those detained in these concentration camps could exceed the approximately one

million Uighur Muslims currently held in China’s mass internment system. If those detained in the camps are deported from India, there could be a greater wave of forced statelessness than the ongoing Rohingya Muslim refugee crisis, in which over 1.3 million people are displaced. The National Human Rights Commission visited two of the facilities in the last year and stated the migrant detainees to be deprived of the rights of convicted prisoners. The United Nations, Human Rights Watch, and the US Commission on International Religious Freedom all agree that the institution of the CAA, NRC, and concentration camps in India constitute an international humanitarian crisis.

In the last two weeks, Indian citizens, beginning in Assam—have come together all over the country to protest the CAA, NRC, NPR, and saffron fascism. Over 25 people have been killed, with many thousands more facing violence and detainment at the hands of the Indian police. Thousands of diasporic South Asians have joined them all around the world, their transnational solidarities reaching everywhere from San Francisco to London to Tokyo. It’s important to recognize the prolonged efforts of these protestors, especially considering the persistent resistance to Modi’s reign since 2014.

However, in the midst of these protests, there’s been a disappointing lack of engagement from many within the Indian diaspora. To amass social capital, many practice henna-turmeric liberalism— as activist Instagram @southasia.art terms it—which is built on a “reclamation” of Indian identity marked by multicultural (song and dance) performance, colorfully marketable “Indo-chic” products such as henna, bindis, and paisley designs, and self-Orientalizing technologies. Troublingly, this performance of identity is accompanied by toothless commentary and apolitical stances on domestic

and global issues. This activism is heartbreakingly inadequate. The majority of Indians living in the United States are raised in castles of privilege, and their lack of transnational activism to comment on movements such as #StandWithKashmir or #ResistCAA due to self-imposed lack of knowledge/confusion/ignorance is not a get out of jail free card. Posting one Instagram story, watching a Hasan Minhaj episode, and professing ignorance in the hopes of being excused does not cut it. In fact, henna-turmeric liberalism practiced by anyone risks silent complicity. Activism is not a metaphor and must be accompanied by tangible and material actions.

It is key to first and foremost acknowledge our diasporic privilege when building transnational solidarities with those on the Indian subcontinent. However, this acknowledgement itself is not a form of solidarity. To rectify a malaise of diasporic indifference and silent complicity, steps to increase activist and advocacy skills must be taken. One way to do so is to become involved in Ekta (meaning: unity), a discussion group focused on increasing social awareness about South Asian identity, culture, and current affairs on Washington University in St. Louis’ campus. Ekta will be hosting a teach-in about the current state of affairs on the Indian subcontinent this semester, during which we will take steps to increase dialogue, call and email our representatives to support Washington Rep. Pramila Jayapal’s resolution urging the Republic of India to end the restrictions on communications and mass detentions in Jammu and Kashmir as swiftly as possible and preserve religious freedom for all residents, and hold a skill building workshop on resisting saffron fascism. Ekta emphasizes a non-hierarchical and egalitarian form of organizing, based in consensus and community in its methodology, unbound by nationality and religion. We enthusiastically welcome collaborative programming and action with individuals and groups, as evidenced by our “Jaago” Diwali piece. Please reach out and join us in transnational solidarity, silence is simply no longer an option.

Tanvi Kohli '20 studies in the College of Arts & Sciences. She can be reached at tanvikohli@wustl.edu. Siddhi Vora '21 studies in the College of Arts & Sciences. She can be reached at siddhi.vora@wustl.edu.

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WU Political Review

The EU Green Deal Lacks Eastern Support Lilly Wurm

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he European Union’s Green Deal, which is the product of the European Commission’s President Ursula von der Leyen, has the goal of making all of Europe carbon-neutral by 2050, entailing a net-zero carbon footprint, meaning that carbon emissions and carbon removal combine to equal zero. The Green Deal has another goal: to encourage sustainable development of Europe’s stagnating economy. Some important aspects of the deal include renovating old buildings to be more energy efficient, updating public and private transportation systems to decreasing excessive emissions, and decreasing dependence on carbon-based energy sources. Not only does the plan focus on emissions, but also on decreasing and eliminating physical waste, such as non-biodegradable plastics. Although establishing environmental goals for EU member states may improve publicity, many former Eastern-Bloc countries will struggle to meet different markers showing progress due to lack of funding, interest, and relevant infrastructure. In recent years, this has been a common critique of the EU, as many Eastern countries hastily entered the EU without proper integration, leaving them asking for more money and richer countries complaining about giving it.

Many of these qualms confused me until I learned more about how the EU functions. I spent my junior spring semester studying the intricacies of the European Union. The program is headquartered in Germany’s “greenest” city—Freiburg—set in a valley of the Black Forest surrounded by mountains perched with wind turbines. The city is frequently recognized for its dedication to the environment, such as its extensive tram and bus system, large swaths of solar panels, and a hydro-plant in the Dreisam River that provides its 200,000 residents with clean and accessible energy. Unlike other German cities with similar sizes that prioritize coal due to their proximity to coal mines, Freiburg has prioritized clean energy in the city’s development since World War II.

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Unlike Freiburg, most of Eastern Europe was not decimated by bombs in WWII, and instead, most of its current infrastructure was built by the Soviet Union and has been poorly maintained due to under-funding. This is one factor that led to the large “Eastern Expansion” in 2004, when many former Soviet-Bloc countries like Poland, Lithuania, and Slovenia tried to enter the EU. The EU sponsors billions of dollars to all countries within the EU, and many countries, like those in Eastern Europe, receive a disproportionate amount to what they give to the entire EU. According to the EU website, Poland receives €11.921 billion in EU funding while only contributing €3.048 billion, which accounts for only 0.68% of total EU funding. As the Green Deal requires countries to spend more and more in updating infrastructure and changing supply chains, more and more countries will struggle to meet said requirements by the 2050 deadline of carbon neutrality.

I find Poland to be a great example of a country that, even with investments from the EU, will not have the money, nor the desire, to make needed changes. Especially with its current party in power, Law and Justice, which calls itself an “illiberal democracy,” Poland will be unable to make needed changes to its economy within the near future. Many illiberal democracies deny the effects of climate change, thus making it difficult to establish national policies that help stop excessive emissions. Without national recognition of poor climate policies, there would thus be less money allocated to help those issues. The Polish budget is spread thinner and thinner by lawmakers, who recently started a new initiative, giving Polish families the equivalent of $100 a month for child support— hoping to boost the economy by allowing more parents to work. There is only so much money in their budget to allow for costly investments that may not be as beneficial in the future as initially thought. Poland will not have the ability to grow its economy, which already struggles to grow and innovate. Unlike a city trying to reach

carbon neutrality, an entire continent attempting to achieve carbon-neutrality may be a stretch.

The goal of 2050 is laughable without proper guidelines accounting for intergovernmental accountability, as Ursula von der Leyen will only be President of the Commission for the next eight years. Other intergovernmental agreements, like the Paris Climate Accord, have lacked any profound impacts on emissions counts of different countries around the world— for example, China’s emissions have begun to grow again after years of stagnation, according to the Climate Action Tracker. I hope that more countries will prioritize clean energy, as the more clean energy providers enter the market, the more the price will be driven down, allowing it to become more accessible than other forms of non-renewable energy.

Lilly Wurm ‘20 studies in the College of Arts & Sciences. She can be reached at elwurm@wustl.edu.

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Artwork by Merry May Ma, staff artist

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WU Political Review

Coral Bleaching: Loss of Color, Loss of Life Christian Monzón, staff editor

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omewhere in Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, a yellow fish just emerged behind a bright pink coral. A nearby black-tipped reef shark (with a remora under its belly) chases a school of bright blue fish as a jet-black stonefish hides in the sand below, and an orange scorpionfish swims amidst the chaos. Somewhere else though, the reef lies barren, with white coral parched under the hot Australian sun and the few fish living there starving with little oxygen.

No fish, no sharks, no color—in their place lies a desolate wasteland where a beautiful ecosystem once thrived.

Coral reefs attain their beautiful color not from coral tissue but from the algae living within it that help process oxygen and create compounds for energy. Coral bleaching occurs when algae densities decline or their photosynthetic pigments disappear, and if color cannot return (i.e. if algae population or pigmentation cannot recover), the corals die. Usually, coral whitens because algae cannot function properly at abnormally hot temperatures. Amidst global climate change combined with other humanmade threats like overexploitation, overfishing and nutrient overloading, algae within coral cannot cope with rising temperatures in the ocean. Surveys of the aforementioned Great Barrier Reef suggest that more than a third of its corals had died by 2015. While reefs occupy just 1 percent of the world’s marine environment, nearly 25 percent of marine species live in reefs. In other words, among the most destructive impending ecological disasters will occur beneath the waves as climate change and coral bleaching intensifies in the next decades.

So why are healthy coral reefs so important, and how could coral bleaching affect human communities?

Healthy coral reefs use rough surfaces and complex structures of coral, fish, and anemones to dissipate waves and buffer shorelines

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from currents and storm surges, which helps reduce the loss of life and property damage during natural disasters. Reefs also protect and shelter fish, which in turn provide food for over a billion people worldwide. Certain species like sponges produce chemical compounds that can help develop new medicines that can treat cancer, heart disease, and other diseases for which medicine is otherwise difficult to access. Many tourists explicitly seek out reefs to witness their raw beauty. Through fisheries, pharmaceuticals, and tourism, estimates show coral reefs provide a global $29.8 billion net benefit while potentially offering food and medicine to underprivileged areas. If corals die, fish disappear from the area, destroying the ecosystem and diminishing potential for fishing and medical research—and the several million people living in U.S. coastal areas near coral reefs would lack an essential buffer to intense storm surges and tropical storms.

Despite the alarming acceleration of the bleaching crises this decade, we can learn successful means of countering environmental destruction from an unexpected source: Belize. In 2009, the Belize Barrier Reef Reserve System (the world’s second largest behind Australia’s) faced bleaching due to offshore drilling, rapidly deteriorating mangrove forests and intensified coastal development so severe that UNESCO added it to its list of most endangered world heritage sites.

Belize’s Supreme Court ruled oil contracts illegal, and its government later banned offshore drilling altogether. Mangrove-cutting faced strict regulations, the government heavily restricted fishing of sensitive species and plans to ban all single-use plastics. UNESCO removed the reef from its list, surveys of the reef note greater concentrations of live coral and herbivorous fish, and a country with a GDP of $8,300 per capita proved that coral reefs could recover from certain death.

Although not completely regenerated, the once seemingly imminent doom facing Belize’s coast is now distant and unrealistic.

Political opponents of such measures, however, spin success stories like Belize into issues of public health and security. For example, in 2019 ,city leaders in Key West, Florida banned the sale of certain sunscreens deemed chemically harmful to coral in the Great Florida Reef (the world’s fourth-largest reef system). Republican politicians framed Key West leaders as instigating high rates of skin cancer and discouraging the use of sunscreen—they ignored that locals have hundreds of sunscreen options without the banned ingredients. Even in Belize, Conservative backlash against environmental laws highlighted that it harmed small fishermen and lacked effective enforcement—again, narratives emerge to unjustifiably declare mutual benefit for the environment and fisheries unattainable. In reality, while Belize’s reef recovered, fish stocks remained stable. Opposing interests will always frame environmental benefits as offsetting potential public goods. However, in protecting coral reefs, society can improve the environment without significant public harms.

But amidst the numbers and logic behind most environmental policies, coral reefs represent not only significant ecological and economic potential but awe-inspiring natural wonders whose fragility underscores their serene beauty and impressive organization. A healthy, colorful coral reef—with its bright reds, blues, yellows, and greens—should inspire us more than a dull white reef devoid of life can discourage us.

Christian Monzón ‘22 studies in the College of Arts & Sciences. He can be reached at christian.monzon@ wustl.edu.

Alaina Baumohl Design by Jinny Park, assistant design director ince 1979, researchers have had evidence that increased carbon dioxide emissions will raise average global temperatures by several degrees. Over the past four decades, scientists have continued to sound the alarm on the need to dramatically reduce human emissions of greenhouse gases, especially carbon dioxide. Environmental activists have worked tirelessly to advocate for stricter emissions standards and to end subsidies on oil Additionally, international bodies made up of delegates from various countries have been formed to discuss action and pass protocols.

Although the possibility of a climate crisis isn’t new news, over the past few years, the reality of climate change has become an increasingly massive threat in the eyes of more and more people. [insert figure 1] And, over the past few months, the climate movement has also received increased media attention thanks in large part to a surge in climate activism around the world. Recently, the mainstream media has mostly focused on one activist in particular- Greta Thunberg.

In September of 2018, angered by Sweden’s failure to meet the goals of the Paris Agreement, Greta announced to her parents that she would go on a school strike from August until the Swedish elections. By the beginning of

September, enough strikers had joined Greta that she decided to continue striking every Friday until Sweden joined the Paris Agreement.

This “Fridays for Future” movement was joined by tens of thousands of other students across Europe through the end of 2018, and on September 20th 2019, the largest global climate strike in history took place. According to Vox, there were over 2,500 strikes in more than 163 countries and across all seven continents.

Many have coined this influence the “Greta Effect”. As the climate strikes were occurring in September, the number of searches for ‘climate change’ was at an all time high.

Her speech at the United Nations Climate Summit to heads of state went viral, spreading her message to a worldwide audience: “We are in the beginning of a mass extinction, and all you can talk about is money and fairy tales of eternal economic growth. How dare you.”

While it is clear that Greta’s call to action has inspired millions to take some form of action on the climate crisis, we must pay attention to why her voice has stood out amongst thousands of scientists and other activists screaming the same message for decades.

Why has a white, European teenager become

the face of a movement that disproportionately affects and will continue to devastate the lives of indigenous people, and other minorities and people of color around the world? Shouldn’t we instead be amplifying the voices of those who are most vulnerable?

In an EPA study from 2018, it was found that people of color are much more likely to live in areas with high pollution, and to breathe polluted air. The study focused on particulate matter, which is a known definite carcinogen that contributes to lung conditions, heart attacks, and premature death.

Although issues linked to climate change, such as air pollution, are felt most harshly by those in

poverty and people of color, the environmental movement actively marginalizes those voices.

In the United States, discriminatory hiring practices and racial prejudices have caused black and brown people to be excluded from environmental activism work. According to the Los Angeles Times, while minorities “make up about 38% of the U.S. population, they represent 12% to 15.5% of the staffs of environmentally focused foundations, nonprofits and government agencies.” The environmental movement is extremely whitewashed, and the platform Greta Thunberg has been propped up on is just another example of this.To be clear, this is not a criticism of Greta or her activism in particular. She has been the

first to acknowledge her own privilege and that she is one of the “lucky ones”. She has tried to amplify the voices of other activists, particularly indigenous activists such Tokatawin Iron Eyes, as well as tried to encourage journalists to ask her fellow activists and organizers questions.

While Greta has helped encourage international dicussion and action around climate change, it is crucial to keep in mind how racial discrimination and oppression influences the narratives directing the climate movement and the solutions that will hopefully result from it. The only effective way to mitigate the inevitable consequences of climate change is collective action, and collective action means listening to everyone’s voices, not just those that are the easiest to hear.

Alaina Baumohl '23 studies in the College of Arts & Sciences. She can be reached at a.baumohl@wustl. edu

WU Political Review

Artwork by Haejin An, staff artist

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The Return of the Yellow Vests Aruni Soni

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f the title above sounded more like an 80s action movie, or a squad of superheroes in yet another dystopian universe, it most definitely is a consequence of my flare for dramatization, but you just might want to read on. If the words, however, automatically induced an image of a mob of protesters, donning flashing yellow, simmering with an apoplectic fury, you must have a serendipitous knack for guessing (or probably are politically informed, but let's face it, the former is far more interesting). Originating in France, yet far from a fashion statement, the yellow vest movement—or, the movement gilets jaunes, if you want to sound more sophisticated because French just does that—is a spontaneous political movement that ignited in November 2018 and is still kindling over a year later.

Distingué, the peri-urban residents of France , require private modes of transportation unlike the urban dwellers who are affluent enough to travel with the daily assistance of public transport given their higher sources of income. And so, France's president Emmanuel Macron, or as he has been dubbed, the “president of the rich,” would most likely pose as the maleficent villain in the narrative of the yellow vest movement.

The protesters initiated this battle in response to a hike in fuel prices in October 2018, lamenting the disproportionate burden of taxes that had fallen upon the working and middle class. An online petition created in May 2018 to lower fuel taxes gathered the support of almost a million signatures, and before Macron could say macaron, the disgruntled population had taken to the streets on the 17th of November, marking the beginning of an epic struggle.

The move to levy fuel taxes struck a chord with the public, interpreted as yet another shrug of

The yellow vest movement is still kindling over a year later.

Emmanuel Macron was caught in an unprecedented wave of uprising against the entire establishment. indifference towards the suburbanites and rural dwellers of France from the upper echelons of society, oblivious to the necessities and workings of their lives. The yellow vests have now demanded policy changes to arrangements that play favorites with the wealthy, lowering fuel taxes and raising the minimum wage being a couple examples from the eclectic manifesto of 42 demands. And why fashion yellow of all the colors known to humankind, you ask? The credit goes to a viral video encouraging fellow motorists to wear their hi-vis yellow vests (required to be stored in vehicles by a 2008 French law) as a symbol of solidarity. And thus, the yellow vest movement was born.

Macron’s popularity had already been dwindling by early 2018, due to a lack of approval of his reformist approach in practice. He had not ever faced serious political opposition before, and in his desire to advance France’s position in the global economy by discouraging fossil fuel use, he was caught in an unprecedented wave of uprising against the entire establishment. Just as of December 2019, the protesters reappeared in full force, this time infuriated by Macron’s proposal of a redesigned pension plan. The current system works in a classic redistributive manner with a legal retirement age of 62, where benefits of regularly paid payroll taxes are earned after 41 to 43 years of contribution. The catch? There exist a boggling 42 different kinds of plans, each managed by labor unions, the state, or a mix.

Macron’s desire to streamline the 42 schemes into a single points-based system has not boded well with the public, leaving unions feeling

insecure of their workers’ rights.

On one side, instead of splurging 14% of their GDP in pension plans, Macron wishes to stabilize France’s financial footing to prevent an economic collapse and create a simpler system in the process. With rising life expectancies, he intends to introduce a shiny “pivot age” of 64 after which members are to receive their full pension, giving a whole new meaning to the Beatles’ When I'm 64. But like any adult who is more than likely to be dissatisfied with their occupation, who wants to work an extra two years of their life? The already disgruntled rural workers are afraid they will miss out in the process because a special few of the dizzying 42 plans give them better benefits than others, which might be lost in the procedure of unification. The lack of clarity from the government in defining how exactly a pointsbased system would function has left the public distressed, failing to pacify infuriated unions and only angering the moderately opposed.

The gilets jaunes have given inspiration to other protesters who have been subject to similar democratic deficiencies. Grievances of social inequality have been given a voice by the yellow vests and are now echoing around the globe, from Israel to Latvia to Russia, as protesters congress in yellow vests, a fresh symbol of revolt.

As for the true gilets jaunes, their fire is far from being extinguished, and whether their thirst for justice is quenched is yet to be seen.

Aruni Soni ‘23 studies in the College of Arts and Sciences. She can be reached at aruni.soni@wustl. edu.

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WU Political Review

Redlining, Red Embers, Golden State Max Lichtenstein, staff editor

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cross the Bay from San Francisco’s Financial District, home to all six of the city’s Fortune 500 companies, sits the High Street homeless camp in Oakland, California. The 100 or so residents here make homes of shelters thrown together from abandoned cars and materials scavenged from dumpsters. They live among rats and with no running water. One UN representative has compared the camp to the slums of Delhi, the kind of Global South poverty many Americans scorn as foreign and unimaginable in their country. This intensely visible display of inequality and destitute living conditions is commonplace across California, the sunny and optimistic home of Hollywood and Silicon Valley. According to The Atlantic, 130,000 Californians are homeless—accounting for roughly one in four homeless people in the United States. Astronomical housing prices, the legacy of racist zoning laws, and increasingly frequent and intense natural disasters have exacerbated one another to make the Golden State of opportunity largely unlivable, even for renters and homeowners.

While California is often seen as a “preferable” place to be homeless in the U.S., with its mild climate and forgiving winters, homelessness poses extreme health hazards everywhere.

Many of these issues go without saying: without a stable place to live, consistent access to food and medication disappears, and many of America’s homeless suffer from untreated mental illness and violent crime. The wildfires that have plagued both California’s rural and urban areas have made homelessness even more dangerous. With nowhere to go, many Californians are unable to obey emergency warnings to stay inside amidst harmful particulate matter in the air. These conditions can make breathing extremely difficult after prolonged exposure, especially since lung diseases like asthma already affect the homeless at twice the rate of the general population. Impossibly long waitlists plague permanent supportive housing, while temporary shelters fill up quickly. These

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overnight homes are also unforgiving to extenuating circumstances like drug addiction and are prone to the spread of contagious illnesses.

As a result, many of California’s homeless have no choice but to face the volatile conditions of wildfires, especially in San Francisco and Los Angeles, which are both vulnerable to fires and have the highest concentration of homeless residents in the state.

California’s natural disasters have also been a major perpetrator of homelessness and the housing crisis in and of themselves. One woman in Oakland’s High Street camp lost her home in a 2014 wildfire, and later her livelihood when her place of work was lost to another fire. Real estate agents report that they anticipate even higher rents in the aftermath of the fire because of the sudden influx of people on the housing market.

An earthquake of unprecedented magnitude, “the Big One,” which the West Coast anxiously anticipates, could leave hundreds of thousands more without a home. If California infrastructure struggles to support the issue as it stands, a catastrophe of that scale could render all progress in public housing and other resources completely insufficient. FEMA earthquake specialist Forrest Lanning puts it bluntly: “There’s no way to accommodate those number of people in the Bay Area.”

Deeply rooted historical trends can help explain how California got here, and the demographics of its homeless population. One of the most striking physical reminders of the state’s housing crisis can be seen on L.A.’s “Skid Row,” a stable community of homeless Angelenos spanning blocks in the shadow of Downtown Los Angeles’ looming skyline. In Los Angeles, the homeless population is disproportionately black to a shocking degree. African Americans make up just eight percent of L.A. County but account for a staggering 42 percent of its homeless residents. A long history of racist zoning laws usually associated with the Rust Belt of the Midwest can help explain the epidemic of black homelessness

across California, especially in Los Angeles County. In a process known as redlining, housing authorities restricted black families escaping the segregation of the South to certain parts of South L.A., while real estate agents marked these areas as “undesirable for investment,” preventing the residents of these majority-black neighborhoods from obtaining home loans. Declining employment opportunities alongside skyrocketing rent prices have drained an area once hailed as the epicenter of black culture in L.A., driving many of its residents into homelessness and areas like Skid Row. Today, racism and bias against felony records (again disproportionately held by black Angelenos) continue to obstruct securing a mortgage or apartment lease—an informal manifestation of redlining. With fires and earthquakes becoming an increasingly relevant threat for California’s homeless, the problem’s racial roots highlight the disproportionate effects of climate change on not only the poor but on racial and ethnic minorities. In a state at the forefront of environmental collapse, the Hollywood, tech, and business elite can easily pack up their lives and leave upon the final tipping point—be it an extremely destructive earthquake or a fire that devastates city centers. The residents of Skid Row, however, have nowhere else to turn.

What’s more, the homelessness crisis shows no sign of improvement. Despite the billions of dollars that California lawmakers have poured into various solutions, Los Angeles has seen a 36 percent increase in homeless individuals since 2010, and San Francisco has seen a 16 percent increase from 2011. The construction of new shelters with thousands of new beds can still only accommodate so many and fails to get at the systematic injustices that have plagued African-American communities in California’s urban centers. Furthermore, the dense urbanization that would help solve the problem faces vicious opposition from “not in my backyard” homeowners—California liberals who support affordable housing on paper, but not when it involves development in their neighborhoods.

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This hypocritical attitude applies doubly to the development of homeless shelters. On a recent visit to Los Angeles, I walked through Venice, a hyper-gentrified neighborhood with mega-mansions, man-made canals, and its fair share of A-list residents. While Venice seems to tout the culture and aesthetics of Los Angeles’ politically progressive reputation, I saw yard sign after yard sign reading “Fight Back Venice” along the canals.

I later learned that this rallying cry belonged to a movement opposing what they called “The Monster on the Median,” a proposed public and transitionary housing complex on a large public parking lot. This movement follows a similar outrage at the prospect of a shelter between Venice and Santa Monica. These residents despise the visibility of the homeless epidemic in their affluent neighborhood (I also saw many intentional obstructions on public sidewalks), yet also categorically reject attempts to house and protect this population, which would also defer them from their sightlines. Despite the logic and accordance with fair housing laws behind projects in areas like Venice, they demand that the city focus on shelters and public housing in less desirable neighborhoods—where they won’t need to think about it.

Even those who can afford to rent have been driven into far-away suburbs and towns and face grueling, sprawling commutes to get to and from work. 54 percent of residents in Los Angeles County are “rent burdened,” paying more than 30 percent of their income on rent—with more than half of this population paying more than 50 percent of their income. In San Francisco, HUD defines a family of four earning $117,400 as “low income.” Facing opposition from homeowners in urban centers, development in these peripheral towns allows more families to work in California’s cities but puts them at serious risk for harm in a wildfire. Many of these communities exist in the wildland-urban interface (WUI), artificial municipalities among forests and hills already vulnerable to fires, but even more so through the manmade construction

In a state on the forefront of environmental collapse, the Hollywood, tech, and business elite can easily pack up their lives and leave upon the final tipping point—the residents of Skid Row have nowhere else to turn. that offers additional kindling. Herein exists a vicious cycle—absurd rent prices drive even the middle class to these environmentally volatile areas, and the development needed to accommodate them causes destructive fires, creating new waves of homelessness and spiking rents.

There exists a ferocious synergy between racist public policy, housing prices, homelessness, and climate crises in California. All of them drive one another, drawing the very livability of the 31st State into question. California lies at the forefront of several issues facing America at large: income inequality, the tangible impacts of climate change, and the continued legacy of postwar segregation. At the same time, California embodies ideals of manifest destiny and Americana at large. Hollywood is the bastion of all American pop culture, and Silicon

Valley led America into the tech boom of the 1990s. While the collision of housing and climate emergencies in California may seem an insurmountable disaster, America must not look away. For these phenomena may well be a harbinger of things to come nationwide, and a screaming sign of the need for immediate structural change. In September, California approved a bill that would establish statewide rent control, which establishes important protections against evictions and is certainly a step in the right direction. However, even with these rent caps, housing prices remain egregious and widely out of reach, with or without rent increases over five percent. Furthermore, landlords may respond by opting out of the rental business entirely, and pivoting to owner-occupied homes. While symbolically significant, the move fails to get at the real concrete solution of affordable housing construction. To get at the root of California’s crisis, lawmakers and residents alike must embrace the dense development of affordable and public housing in the city’s urban centers—and yes, among the wealthy. It’s time to stop treating the homeless like a blight on America’s urban landscapes and to instead offer direct support within our communities and promote climate-conscious urbanization in the process.

Max Lichtenstein ‘20 studies in the College of Arts & Sciences. He can be reached at max.lichtenstein@ wustl.edu.

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Artwork by Catherine Ju, design director s kids, questions regarding “identity” were an opportunity for my younger sister and I to show off the IndianVenezuelan-Irish heritage that we knew would prompt further questions from confused friends and only slightly less puzzled adults. Over time, “identity” evolved into something more meaningful; at times a source of insecurity about our appearances, linguistic limitations, and larger place in the world, but also a license to travel between communities, inhabit different spaces, and better empathize with people from different backgrounds.

In the US, Indian-Americans make up about 1% of the population. “Indian” is a categorization that contains countless linguistic, cultural, and religious identities including people like me who come from mixed-race families. This diversity is already present at Wash U, and a growing number of students identify as mixed-race. Yet oftentimes our identities still bewilder and even intimidate our peers. This is true especially in communities like the Indian diaspora which, despite increasing instances of cultural mixing, often remains insular in the United States. In the hopes of demonstrating our community’s diversity, and making that diversity more accessible, I talked to four South Asian Wash U students about their mixed-race identities. Their answers demonstrate the wide range of experiences present in our community as well as reveal profound similarities across different upbringings.

Soraya Moss ‘20: It’s funny because you say it’s very simple but sometimes it’s not!

My mother was born in Guyana in South America, which was a British colony until the 1960s. Since it was a British colony there was a large Indian population there, and her ancestors came to Guyana from [the Indian state of]

Gujarat. She grew up in this mixed CaribbeanIndian culture. My dad is of Irish, Scottish, English, and French descent, and was born in New Jersey. To be honest, when talking to people about myself, I usually say just "mixed." It depends on who’s asking, I’ve had a lot people assume I’m just Indian, and sometimes that’s just easier.

Ajay Walther ‘21: I’m a mixed kid, I identify as half-Indian, half-white, my mother is from India and my dad is German-American raised in California. I identify as a biracial Indian-GermanAmerican kid, and I definitely identify strongly with being from New York.

Sameer Chaparala ‘23: My mom is from Morocco and my dad is from India. I don’t fit in a general category, like ‘African’ or ‘Asian’ so that’s why I always add the specific countries.

Olivia Shaw ‘21: Half Indian and half white. Both my parents were born in Canada, and I was born and raised in Toronto before moving to the US in middle school. I would say that I am not at all culturally Indian…when my grandparents moved to Canada, they didn’t try to take any culture with them, they really tried to assimilate. So I would say that I am culturally Canadian.

SM: I strongly identify with the Indian community, and my aunts and uncles do as well, but my immediate nuclear family doesn’t. My mom is a strong lady, but I think being from where she’s from and being a woman and a woman of color has been more of something that held her back than propelled her forward and for that reason, she doesn’t really talk about it. Most people assume that the reason I started doing classical Indian dance was my mom—it was actually my dad who pushed me to do it. It’s funny because I have it in my blood, but I really grew

in the Indian community because of the dance that I was doing. Bharatnatyam classical dance became such a huge part of my identity…I think I attribute my identifying with the Indian community to that.

AW: Definitely through Ashoka (Wash U’s South Asian Student Association). In my friend group from home I’m often the only brown kid there, I’ve never had that full experience of being part of a brown community with kids my age.

Despite all of its flaws, Ashoka has been that cultural home for me, where I can appreciate and flourish in my culture and also express my culture to others.

SC: The Indian American community is big everywhere, even if it’s as a minority it’s still prominent. I tend to gravitate toward that, especially since everybody looks pretty much like me, so it’s easier to find that community. When I was younger my grandparents would also take me to the temple all the time.

OS: I feel like I don’t really. Sometimes I wish that I was more able to relate. My mom doesn’t talk about identity, she’s just Canadian. In my mind, things are not as segregated in Canada, so I don’t think she ever felt like she needed another strong identity.

AW: I come from three different religious backgrounds. My dad is an agnostic who was raised in a Protestant Christian background and my mom comes from a blended Hindu and Sikh background. One struggle for me was figuring out which religion to adopt, and I’ve probably rolled with Sikhism the most because I have had the most exposure to it and identify with the values. At the same time, I believe in all three, and the values they share. I’ll hit up mass on Christmas, the Gurudwara on Sikh holidays, and

the temple for Hindu celebrations.

SC: There are two different religions embedded in [my family]. Growing up I would do a Pooja for Ganesh and also do Ramadan and Eid celebrations. I don’t think about it too much; they both exist in my life.

OS: On my mom’s side my grandfather’s family is Christian, and my grandmother’s is Sikh, they moved to Canada to be together and they both dropped religion once there. My dad’s family is lightly Christian meaning that I went to church a couple times a year. Religion is not a big part of my immediate family life.

SM: When I came to college was the first time, I had a blank slate to decide who I was going to be and how I was going to present myself. I was more appreciative that my identity could be something I chose without anyone’s input. I feel like a lot of people take offense to the question of “what are you?”… I honestly don’t have a problem with that because I relish in talking about my past and sharing it with others.

AW: The fact that I get to embrace the positives and the negatives of both cultures. When you’re a mixed race kid you have a broad perspective from observing how cultures do things differently from one another. I think it has made me a lot more open-minded.

SC: Definitely travel. My parents had the ability to travel and I therefore had the opportunity to visit my grandparents and cousins in both Morocco and India. Also, definitely appreciation for culture. I’ve been exposed to so many different aspects of culture, whether it’s through food, rituals, or languages.”

SM: I am familiar with all the tropes from different communities where parents want to push their children to marry within the same identity.

Coming from a mixed background kind of dissipates that, because there’s no pressure, you’d be a hypocrite! So that implicitly plays a role because the pressure to marry within a group isn’t there. I feel like I kind of dodged a bullet with not having to be forced to marry someone of a certain identity.

SC: I feel like I’m probably more open relationship-wise since my parents are from different backgrounds. If everything around me was only Indian, then I might have a different mindset about what love looks like.

OS: I don’t know if non-mixed race people think about marrying someone of a different race and having mixed race children, for me, regardless of who I marry that’s going to be the case for me, so I don’t really think about that. I do want to raise my kids Canadian. It’s a different political culture. Everything that I value in terms of social equality and environmental protection is more strongly valued in Canada.

SM: Everyone has their qualms with filling out applications that ask about ethnicity. Culturally and ethnically, a lot of my identity conforms to Guyana and the Caribbean. But if I were to fill out Caribbean on an application it falls under the category of black. I always wish that those questionnaires had “fill in the blank” rather than “fill in a bubble.” In moments like that my identity comes into question because my family hasn’t lived in India for several generations. Where do you draw the line from where you’re from?

AW: There are moments where I don’t feel like I belong to either community…I’ve definitely had my fair share of people, both brown and white, telling me that "oh you’re not really brown or not really white." I’ve even had people in Ashoka tell me that to my face and behind my back. I definitely subconsciously put myself through the process of proving my identity because of the fear of being brushed off as "whitewashed’ or just white. I try to put myself out there and that subconscious feeling is what got me so involved in Ashoka in the first place.

SC: I have this identity, but I don’t know what to do with it or what it means. My identity is different than someone who is "pure Indian" but I don’t know how to feel about that…does the identity even matter if I physically look like this [Indian]? I thought about it a lot coming to college and trying to find a community. Sometimes I wish I could look half-Moroccan, but other than that I’m chilling.

OS: White people know I’m not white. Actually a lot of people assume I’m of Hispanic descent; it happens several times a year where people, both older white people and Spanish native speakers, just start speaking to me in Spanish. That’s a tangent, but in general, I don’t feel like I fit into either community (white or Indian). In the US, white people assume that I’m part of a different community. Struggling with these aspects of my identity didn’t really happen until I came to the US. AW: I want people to know that you should never feel ashamed of who you are. Bring out the best in yourself and in where you come from.

Rohan Palacios ’21 studies in the College of Arts & Sciences. He can be reached at rpalacios@wustl.edu.

WU Political Review

What Magenta Tells Us About Political Interpretation Elena Murray, staff writer Artwork (right) by Leslie Liu, assistant design editor

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hat is a color? If answering pragmatically, one might claim that a color is the wavelength it occupies on the visible spectrum of light. But while this interpretation easily accommodates colors like red and violet, which are perceived respectively at about 700 and 400 nanometers, other colors simply do not appear on the visible light spectrum.

Magenta and other red-violet mixes are perceptible and publicly acknowledged yet possess no identifiable wavelength on the visible light spectrum. Instead, magenta occupies a psychologically—and evolutionarily—advantageous position by merging the ends of the ROYGBIV spectrum to complete the color wheel. When presented with wavelengths from both ends of the visible light spectrum, the brain “invents” a new color rather than averaging the wavelengths. It thus perceives magenta, a useful moderation between red and violet, and not a shade of green around the 550nm literal average of the two colors. In other words, when the brain is presented with confusing and conflicting information in the real world, it transforms the input’s perception into one that is pragmatic and helpful, rather than puzzling. Intuitively, it makes more sense that a combination of red and violet would not result in green, but instead in a red-violet mix like magenta.

The interpretation of conflicting political information involves the same process as the brain’s perception of magenta, though admittedly with far greater conscious input than unconscious calculation. For instance, when an individual hears two pieces of mutually exclusive news, they do not interpret the average to be true, but instead form an interpretation that remains consistent with their worldview. Should someone learn from one source that a specific presidential candidate’s healthcare proposal will cost $30 trillion and hear from another that it will only cost $10 trillion, that person will likely not assume the literal average of $20 trillion to be

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Magenta is out there—anyone can see it. the true cost. Instead, an educated and informed reader will judge the plan’s probable cost based on external applicable information, such as the relative credibility of each source or an acknowledgement of their own political perspectives.

Similarly to the brain’s evolved and unconscious creation of magenta due to its practical utility, interpretations of political information follow a conscious process involving assessment within a broader context, rather than a simple average.

Conflicting pieces of news, in other words, do not cancel the information out in the eyes of the reader. If a reader learns from one source that an impeachment investigation was performed in a biased and partisan manner yet reads in another that the same inquiry was fairly undertaken as a matter of national security, they do not “average” the information in an assessment which deems the inquiry to be politically-moderate or unimportant. Instead, the neutral and educated reader considers additional information in a pragmatic attempt to reach a sufficient and sensical conclusion, such as by considering each source, assessing their own biases, or searching for additional information to clarify the grey area.

Some readers, however, choose to ignore certain information based on personal biases—to see only the red or the violet in their conscious interpretation, rather than the magenta in existence. In the debate over the Black Lives Matter movement, for instance, conservative individuals may reflexively respond that “blue lives matter” or that “all lives matter.” By doing so, some Americans choose not to acknowledge one side of the story that creates the society all Americans share and occupy, thereby excluding

even a consideration that an idea, movement, or ideology may be more complicated than it seems. It is the exceptional political conflict that is simple, one-sided, and demands a noncontroversial solution. But when today’s multi-faceted issues are simplified to the point of appearing easily-solved, confusion and anger result from any inaction to address them, and any differences in supposedly-obvious solutions cause further frustration.

As a result of the complexity of most contemporary political issues, a sophisticated response is typically required. The average American, however, does not possess the expertise to analyze and rule on the appropriate outcome for every issue from foreign policy to environmental laws.

They must either rely on others to synthesize competing information and develop a solution or forge ahead on their own and often miss the mark in their reasoning. Some choose the latter path yet still wholeheartedly believe in and argue for their simplistic and flawed plan.

It is thus the duty of those educated citizens to see the magenta in the world, to look beyond the surface-level red or violet and beyond the basic and absurdly green average, to investigate and distinguish between the simplistically appealing and the complexly accurate. Without the appropriate consideration, the wrong responses will be implemented, and the same problems will continue to plague society. Magenta is out there—anyone can see it with enough time and training. But the only ones who have any hope of purposefully resolving the magenta problems of the world are those who can truly examine, acknowledge, and understand the complexity of crises.

Elena Murray ‘22 studies in the College of Arts & Sciences. She can be reached at elenamurray@wustl. edu.

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WU Political Review

Southern Conservatism: A Cyclical Plague Hannah Richardson Artwork (right) by Leslie Liu, assistant design editor

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he South: a land filled with big trucks, sweet tea, confederate flags, and raging conservatives. I am a born and raised Southern girl, and growing up in the heart of the bible belt has definitely had its challenges. Most “misconceptions” people have of Southerners are true. No, we do not wear cowboy hats and ride around on horses, but a lot of us are racist and are Trump supporters and are ignorant.

My whole life, my grandparents and older relatives tried to raise me under the influence of their conservative and republican beliefs, making sly comments here and there about people of color or people in the LGBTQ+ community, and for a while there I believed them. I walked around my elementary and middle schools spewing out the same fake claims they told me after they had heard it on Fox News. I am ashamed of that, and while I could make excuses about how I was young and uneducated, I truly believe that at this time and era of society, holding beliefs that demean and degrade someone for some part of their identity that is unchangeable is wrong and cannot be justified.

I will never forget the day my aunt gave me my first anti-LGBTQ+ speech. We were in her car on the way to the mall and the topic of my at the time step sister came up. She was openly gay, and to my relatives that was in no way ok. She said to me, “Do not ever let her push her ways onto you, you are not like that. It is not that I am homophobic, I just do not think it is ok for gay people to try and force their ways of life onto people who do not want it.” That conversation never sat well with me. Her treating someone’s identity as if it was a disease left me questioning my family’s beliefs and whether they were truly moral.

I believe it is a choice to not be racist and sexist and homophobic and hateful, it is not something that is innate or bred into people.

While it is widely taught in the homes of white

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Southerners, it is still something you can choose to resist, especially when privileged enough to have access to resources such as education and the secular exposure that comes with social media. Having such resources at your fingertips is definitely beneficial when it comes to the uneducation of southern conservatism.

For me, social media and school played a large role in my political and worldly knowledge. I started high school in 2016, one of the more politically charged years of my existence, and I had no choice but to pay attention to what was going on in our country because it was one of the only things being talked about. My high school at the time was very culturally diverse, and I am so grateful for that, as before that year I had only been exposed to white southern culture. Armed with this newfound exposure, I started looking into world issues and political news myself, taking my beliefs into my own hands. This was the catalyst for my love of politics.

However, this is not the case for many. While I grew in my secular knowledge throughout high school, and became a proud member of the political left, most of my fellow southern peers moved in the opposite direction, becoming conservative with the help of their parents and grandparents’ influence. This is common for a lot of young people in the South, but I strongly believe this does not have to be the case for everyone. While it is definitely hard to go against the wishes and beliefs of one’s family, especially when it can involve such strong things such as politics and social issues, it is possible to educate yourself and stand strong in your views.

With this, I strongly believe that education is key to breaking the cycle of Southern conservatism.

Taking the time to pay attention to multiple news outlets and both sides of the political argument can be helpful. When provided both sides of the issue, a person can then take a stance, but unlike before, it will be an educated and well thought

out stance. This and the willingness to listen to what others have to say can help halt the cyclical political belief system in southern America.

Many Southerners attribute their right wing standings to their strong religious beliefs, but that is in no way an excuse. While there may be aspects of different religious doctrines that seemingly justify acts of cruelty or discrimination against certain groups of people, in no religious word is hate encouraged, and that is what this Southern Conservatism is. It is a hatred for people who do not fit inside the expected mold.

Religion is probably one of the biggest justifications people in the South provide when asked about their staunch right positions on political and social issues. It is hypocritical. In what religious work does it say to hate someone based on their skin color or socioeconomic status?

This is another way I believe people can work to stop the Southern conservative system. By correcting and educating our relatives, peers, and fellow Southern citizens on things that are offensive or racist or homophobic, we can play a small role in this halt of a cyclical plague. I try to do this a lot when I am home on break visiting relatives. Most of the time they get upset, and some arguments start up, but when I keep persisting and correcting, they eventually begin to listen and take my comments and corrections into consideration. This is something so simple, that can eventually have such a large impact.

It can sometimes be hard for people from predominantly blue areas to fully understand just how staunchly Republican the South can be. It is, in a way, a cycle. Typically parents will raise their children under their own conservative beliefs, and those children will then grow into strong right-wing voters who then raise their children the same way they were raised, and the cycle continues like that for generations, and sadly, a lot of people never take the time or care to stop

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the cycle and educate themselves about making their own choice on where they actually fall on the political spectrum.

I have spent my entire life watching this cycle, watching it take my friends, peers, and even my siblings. The south is toxic, politically. Having different opinions is looked down upon, and a lot of times, people will try to shame you about your beliefs and claim “you are just too young," "you have no world experience,” or “this is just a phase, when you get into the real world, you will realize how wrong you are.” I myself have been bullied by my older relatives for my political beliefs, having them tell me I’m just an “oversensitive libtard” or “a puppet for the left-wing agenda.”

It is truly sad when you cannot be in a room for more than 30 minutes with your family before politics are brought up and it is 10 against 1, or without one of your relatives letting the N-word slip and making an offensively racist comment about someone they saw at the store that day.

This is common in the South too, Southern conservatism is mean and aggressive and does not tolerate dissenters.

According to an article in Psychology Today, Trump supporters and conservative voters are strongly affected by a psychological phenomena called the fear factor. This article states, “science has shown that the conservative brain has an exaggerated fear response when faced with stimuli that may be perceived as threatening,” and that typically people who are self-declared as right leaning politically tend to have a larger amygdala, which would biologically explain their over-stimulation when it comes to things that scare them. This clearly shows why many conservatives, especially Southern ones, get so aggressive and angry when they are faced with someone who does not agree with them or who is not like them.

The fact that a lot of Southern behavior surrounding politics can be attributed to a psychological phenomenon shows that it can, in fact, be unlearned and disassembled. A psychological state like this is not bred or innate, it is learned and observed, which means that it can be unlearned.

There is also a large denial culture in the South.

People tend to make offensive comments about others, but then deny that those comments are racist or homophobic or ignorant. One of the most common phrases in the southern language is “I am not racist, but...” I am not racist but what?

Ostracizing someone for the color of their skin is ok? Wishing harm on someone because they are not like you is ok? No, these people are blatantly racist, but they do not believe it because they see what they believe and how they act as morally right, and that is how they justify their hate-filled, conservative, cyclical lives.

When I finally left the deep South and came to college here in Missouri, it was a shock to be surrounded by so many liberal-thinking young people. I had never experienced that before, typically only knowing or befriending one to two left-leaning people throughout my youth. It was amazing to be immersed into this knowledgeable atmosphere, where young people could speak their minds freely and not be shamed for it, and I think it has furthered me greatly in not

only my political and social views but also my love for politics overall.

With this, I also realized how sad it must be for anyone else who maybe at one time shared similar moral and social beliefs with me but were victims to the Southern conservative cycle.

However, it is not too late.

My purpose in writing this piece is not to hate on the South and complain about Southern conservatism, even though it is very pernicious.

I however want to show to others, especially those who may share the same experiences that I have, that it is possible to not be sexist, racist, homophobic, or hateful when coming from a strictly conservative upbringing. It is possible, using your given resources, to educate yourself and form your own beliefs, no matter how wrong people may claim it is. It is also possible to play a role in the correction of other people by pointing out and educating them on what is right and wrong. With these attempts at breaking the conservative system will come an eventual halt of the overall cycle. This is how we, together, educate ourselves and the people around us in order to stop the corrupt plague that is Southern conservatism.

Hannah Richardson ‘23 studies in the College of Arts & Sciences. She can be reached at hrichardson@ wustl.edu.

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WU Political Review

Peloton, The Gift that Gives a “Beach Bod” Clare Grindinger, treasurer

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don’t remember the first time I rode a Peloton bike, but I was turned. The spunk, energy, and excitement to be a part of this exclusive family was real. Robin Arzòn became my hero, Ally Love became my best friend, and DJ John Michael was my shining light. I knew Peloton, an exercise equipment and media company focused on creating a community around owning a stationary bike and/or treadmill, was elitist and the price tag made it unaffordable to most, but it became an addictive exercise routine for people in the wealthy suburb I grew up in. Peloton extended its pseudo-accessibility by having a digital app for its members that came with the fifty-dollar monthly membership cost, so I could take Peloton classes on the bike or tread in my gym while I was abroad.

Most of my friends knew that I was up to date on the Peloton craze, so this past December, when the internet blew up over a new video advertisement for Peloton, I received a lot of text messages asking for my thoughts. The ad depicts a young white mother gifted a Peloton bike for the holidays by her husband. She originally shows apprehension, nervously starting her first class, blogging every moment. She comes home from work in her pink heels, noting that she has committed to five classes in a row. The ad was critiqued for many reasons: for having a skinny woman depicted in the ad as opposed to any other underrepresented size, for having a husband gift a bike to a wife, as if he is telling

The ad depicts a white young mother gifted a Peloton bike for the holidays by her husband.

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Peloton marketing itself as accessible is only fooling itself. her she should work out, and for the gift of the Peloton itself—an absurdly expensive, inaccessible luxury.

The ad was parodied and mocked on Saturday Night Live, twitter and other social media platforms. Ryan Reynolds even hired the actress playing the Peloton woman to be part of his commercial advertising gin, which poked fun at the Peloton ad. In the commercial, two women are at a bar with the Peloton actress and they tell her, “to new beginnings,” hinting that her husband was a bad person and ending the commercial with, “you look great.” Other people on social media wrote about the inaccessibility of the bike through their marketing, since the bike was placed in a room that looks like a modern wood, Zen garden den cleaned by a housekeeper in a high-rise. Peloton attempts to be inclusive and affordable, having a $58 pay plan for 39 months. Additionally, the ad targets young people who seem to be fit before they start Peloton.

This ad reflects how we, in the United States, see health as a white woman’s goal for the “benefit” of her husband. Beach body ads have, for years, showed advertisements of white women in bikinis but have never focused on men in their swim trunks. In the UK, the Advertising Standards Authority banned ads like “Beach Body Ready” because they objectify women.

Women are told (usually by men) to define themselves by their body type, and the body portrayed by the actress in the ad was the conventional slim, fit white woman. The woman

blogging further marginalizes certain bodies, reflecting this body imagery beyond the world in the ad into the social media realm. Social media, through influencers and bloggers, are one of the biggest forces painting this image of a slim white woman as the male definition of an ideal body.

Peloton, which relies on the social media feed of their instructors, pushes fitness, which can be a good thing, through a very narrowly defined idea of beauty.

After the chaos of this ad, Peloton, which recently went public in September 2019, saw its stock price decrease by nine percent. Peloton, however, does not think that the change in the market and the backlash of the ad had any correlation and the company did not take the ad off the air.

Everyone wants what Jimmy Fallon, Madonna, and the Obamas have—a million-dollar home, a nice car, and a private, two-thousand-dollar bike in the slick, open windowed extra Zen room purely for exercise, but that’s simply not plausible for almost all Americans. Peloton marketing itself as accessible is only fooling itself.

While I would love to be gifted this fancy, nice bike, I understand that Peloton’s marketing narrows their consumer base to an elite, already slim, white minority and only furthers the stereotypes and exclusivity that comes with the American imagery of health. While it may seem hyper-sensitive to critique a thirty second ad, the way a company markets to the American public largely reflects trends in the culture of fast-growing companies like Peloton, who claim diversity in studio classes and who have the power to challenge these gendered patterns.

Clare Grindinger ‘20 studies in the College of Arts & Sciences. She can be reached at cgrindinger@wustl. edu.

National

Executive Order on Judaism is a Mistake Fadel Alkilani

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ast December, President Trump signed an executive order (EO 13899) protecting Judaism under Article VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits discrimination “on the basis of race, color, and national origin in programs and activities receiving federal financial assistance.” This move immediately sparked a varied response from people of all backgrounds. Conservatives applauded the move, citing the high rate of anti-Semitic crimes recorded by the FBI. The anti-Semitic stabbing that occurred during Hanukkah celebrations at the end of the year serves as a reminder that this concern is extremely valid. However, this executive order, named “Combating Anti-Semitism,” does not truly do what it claims.

Many Jews responded to this move on Twitter, drawing a comparison to what Nazi Germany did as one of the first of many steps to the Holocaust, when Jews were considered as a separate race and ethnicity. By considering Judaism a protected class under “race, color, and national origin,” some fear that the anti-Semitic notion of Jews having a differing nationality, implying support of a foreign nation over American interests, will be propagated by this administration.

Given that Trump was attacked by groups such as J Street less than a week before this executive order for stating that American Jews should support him out of loyalty to Israel—the same anti-Semitic trope—this fear is compounded.

Saturday Night Live decided to poke fun at the executive order, saying that Trump can now say his daughter is “in an interracial marriage,” while showing Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner, both of whom appear white, drawing laughs from the crowd. This shows the second problem with this move: Judaism isn’t necessarily any specific color. While most Jews are white, there are Jews of Ethiopian descent, converts from various racial backgrounds, and adoptees of different colors into Jewish families. Additionally, white

This executive order, named “Combating Anti-Semitism,” does not truly do what it claims.

Jews have the privileges that white people have in America based on appearance: people of color face many implicit judgments when it comes to dealing with police, for example, that white people, and by extension, white Jews, do not face.

Since this executive order deals with color and race, classifying Judaism as a specific race or color ignores the reality of how race and color are perceived.

Another criticism is that the move will stifle anti-Israel and pro-Palestinian activism on campuses. The executive order singles out college campuses, specifically, as the focus of the President. Since the executive order adopts the IHRA definition of anti-Semitism, valid criticisms of Israel, and by extension, First Amendmentprotected free speech, may be restricted. The IHRA definition includes examples such as “claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor” and “drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis,” and has been criticized for being too vague to be used as a legal standard, and is even considered by the IHRA as a “working definition.”

Many perceive this definition as troubling due to its conflation of anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism, which is the opposition to the creation of a Jewish state in the land currently occupied by Israel. One can oppose Zionism on democratic grounds, such as believing in the separation of church and state, or that Palestinians deserve to have the same representation in the country by which they are governed. There are multiple

Jewish groups, and many other groups besides, that criticize Zionism and the creation of the State of Israel, and these groups are clearly not anti-Semitic. Additionally, numerous United Nations resolutions criticizing Israel on human rights abuses have been proposed, though they are often vetoed by the United States. Israel’s actions have caused much criticism on the left, and pro-Palestinian groups are active on college campuses across the nation. This definition means that any of these actions and much of the activism surrounding this issue may be considered anti-Semitic and will thus be stifled in universities that receive federal funding. Since most universities receive federal funding, universities across the country may take a hard line on anti-Zionism to ensure their funding is secure.

The result is more restriction of speech criticizing Israel than speech criticizing America, which is ridiculous.

Anti-Semitism is a real problem. Judaism, however, should be protected by the federal government as a religion, not under Title VI. Trump’s executive order invokes anti-Semitic stereotypes, assumes Jews are a homogenous group, and stifles speech. Given the President’s numerous anti-Semitic comments, it is reasonable to assume that this order is a political move to energize his Evangelical Christian base and solidify Israeli support, much like when he moved the American embassy to Jerusalem.

Jewish Americans should not see this executive order as a comfort; it is a danger to freedom for us all.

Fadel Alkilani ‘22 studies in the School of Engineering & Applied Science. He can be reached at falkilani@ wustl.edu.

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WU Political Review

CCP vs. Religion, A Century Long Battle Nkemjika Emenike

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or most modes of transportation in China, from planes to trains to subways, there is usually a security check one must go through in order to reach their destination. As a high school student in Beijing, I noticed as I took the subways that there seemed to be individuals that had a harder time getting through these checkpoints compared to others. The guards heavily question them, asked for IDs, and ruffled through their belongings, all while letting others pass by with ease. These individuals that were stopped usually didn’t speak with the Beijing accent and they most certainly did not fit into the city’s metropolitan aesthetic. Most of these people were ethnic minorities; though Chinese by citizenship, they were not part of the Han Chinese group that dominates most of mainland China. Many had come from small villages and towns, looking for the abundance of opportunity offered by cities. Needless to say, these guards’ treatment of these ethnic minorities as invasive outsiders was reflective of the Chinese Communist Party’s greater view of its underrepresented groups.

The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) thrives off being the sole source of power in China— whether it be political, religious, or cultural. Ever since the CCP took control over the People’s Republic of China in 1949, they have implemented the ideals of state-atheism, believing that if the people were to rely on religious institutions, then the all-encompassing power of the Communist Party would be undermined.

During the Cultural Revolution, Chairman Mao Zedong ordered religious mosques and temples to be destroyed along with other traditional relics. Since the Great Opening in 1978, the time period right after the fall of Mao Zedong wherein China began to open up to the rest of the world both politically and economically, the CCP has allowed for religion but with many restrictions.

Christian churches are under heavy surveillance, and the power to appoint its bishops is exclusively reserved for the CPP. Similarly, the CPP has taken control over appointing the next Dalai

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Lama, who is regarded as the most important spiritual leader in Tibetan Buddhism. The current Dalai Lama has been a refugee in India since the late 1950s.

Religious persecution and restriction is not a new occurrence for the People’s Republic of China, but currently, international attention has been raised over the detainment of Uighur Muslims in the autonomous region of Xinjiang. The exact number is unknown, though it is thought that there are about one million Uighur Muslims currently detained in internment camps. While the Chinese government has claimed that these camps are for voluntary re-education, camp escapees, international agencies, and other individuals of the Uighur community say otherwise.

Survivors have come out of the camps and have stated that detainees are forced to denounce their religion and are encouraged to pledge allegiance to the Chinese Communist Party. They are forced to learn the Mandarin language and are not allowed to engage in religious activities such as prayer or reading holy scripts. The CCP has claimed that this is meant to counter terrorism and separatism within the region, while many Uighur Muslims and human rights activists argue that this treatment is unjust and a complete abuse of power.

My goal is not to paint China as a villainous country who is doing some unprecedented act; the fact of the matter is China’s treatment of Uighur Muslims has been met with widespread condemnation from Western media, and rightly so. However, there seems to be no effort coming from the United States to reflect on similarly discriminatory policies put in place by our own government to silence marginalized populations. In the 1960s, the FBI along with the United States government labeled civil rights activists as “terrorists” and utilized heavy surveillance on black communities. More recently, our current administration attempted to institute a ban that restricted entry from travelers and refugees from majority Muslim countries. I caution

us—by which I mean those who have been raised under Western ideals—to think about the ways we discuss such issues like the Uighur Muslim detainment. There seems to be a holier-than-thou attitude taken by American press and public officials—articles from a variety of news outlets have come out drawing attention to these horrendous human rights abuses while many countries have made efforts to limit trade relations with China. We condemn one country’s treatment of their religious minorities while simultaneously encouraging a culture that promotes a similar discrimination to the minorities in our own country. This does not by any means excuse the actions taken by the Chinese government against its Muslim citizens, however, I do wish the same energy being put into chastising the Chinese government was given to other countries including our own, who commit similarly heinous crimes against humanity.

Nkemjika Emenike ‘23 studies in the College of Arts & Sciences She can be reached at nemenike@wustl. edu.

International

One World, Overarching Theories Nicholas Kinberg

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his article is in response to Jack Snyder’s article in Foreign Policy, published on November 2004. Snyder’s thesis is that the three principal theories of international relations, realism, liberalism, and idealism, each explain some aspects and fail to explain other aspects of the international system in our post9/11 world. We can posit a theory that integrates all three: idealism is a subset of realism.

Liberalism is a subset of idealism for the United States and the Western world.

Realism is the idea that the international system is in a constant state of anarchy. States are the primary actors of the international system, are self-interested, and are each competing for power and security. Realism explains why the US has vigorously prosecuted its War on Terror despite the supposed restraints of international institutions. Realism does not explain why smaller powers like the United Kingdom and Japan have failed to ally each other in the face of an all-powerful US. Liberalism is the idea that the spread of democracy, increasing economic integration, and the growing strength of international organizations will make war less likely and peace more likely.

Liberalism explains why the spread of democracy has become a prime objective of US foreign policy but does not explain why the US has failed to work through international organizations to legally achieve its goals, like the overthrow of Saddam Hussein.

Idealism is the idea that the international system is shaped by the individual cultures and values of state and non-state actors. Idealism explains why the values of different groups, cultures, and countries are reflected in the growth of international terrorism and anti-globalization movements but does not explain why those same

Idealism is a subset of realism. Liberalism is a subset of idealism.

The US perceives the pursuit of liberalism as the pursuit of its national interest, owing to idealism. groups and countries all over the world commit human rights violations that are supposedly in contravention to the values these groups and countries claim to hold.

Idealism is a subset of realism. This is because while values may inform the ways by which a state attains security, the objective of states is still to obtain security. The US and other states pursue security through their own might. That might simply translate into support for international institutions. In other words, US idealism is liberalism. The US has consistently demonstrated this since the Second World War. Ignoring the policies of the current administration, the US has strengthened international institutions like the World Trade Organization (WTO), the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), and the United Nations (UN), resulting in an expansion of capitalism and democracy.

Several administrations have stated that the security of the US increases with the construction of an international democratic and capitalist world order that is dictated by the international rule of law.

According to John Mearsheimer, a professor of international relations at the University of Chicago, Russia pursues its interests through three guiding principles: (1) secure enough land throughout Eastern Europe, Central Asia, and East Asia such that it is difficult for any opposing power to attack the central government in Moscow, (2) compete for regional hegemony by undermining US influence in Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and Central Asia, and (3) please the Russian people by presenting to the populace the image of Russian imperialism. As a result of

the flatland between Europe and Russia, Russia’s idealism manifests in its obsession with space between itself and its rivals. This is due to the three land invasions that have nearly destroyed Russia over the last two hundred years: the French invasion of the early nineteenth century and the two German invasions of the two world wars. Because of the anarchy inherent in the realist international system, Russia’s idealism is a subset of realism.

According to The Great Wall and the Empty Fortress: China’s Search for Security, China pursues its interests through two guiding principles: (1) formulating the ultimate response to the “century of humiliation,” which took place from 1839 to 1949, and (2) provide high living standards to its populace as part of the social contract between the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and its citizenry. Therefore, China’s idealism manifests in regaining its identity as the “Middle Kingdom,” able to defend itself and claim hegemony in East Asia. Its identity and pursuit for security are mired in the anarchical international system, again described by realism.

Therefore, liberalism is a subset of idealism and idealism is a subset of realism. All actors, still mainly states, have an interest in security and power. This interest in security and power manifests in the different cultures and histories of each state. To them, their culture and history are the tools by which they obtain security.

Nicholas Kinberg ‘20 studies in the College of Arts & Sciences. He can be reached at nicholaskinberg@ wustl.edu.

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WU Political Review

Is Violence An Appropriate Strategy For HK? T

he current protest is a ripple of the long-standing agony over the call for universal suffrage. However, the situation quickly escalated and went out of control. A BBC comparison of 2019 to the 2014 Umbrella Movement suggests that protestors today are far more inclined to cause damage to infrastructure and use aggressive tactics against the police. More and more leaders in the democratic camp are compelled to take a stand on the use of violence in the movement they represent.

Most of them chose the “no division” policy, which means they disagree with using excessive violence but decline to publicly denounce it. They believe universal suffrage is ultimately what all these protests are about and want to focus their energy on “the way forward”. Yet tolerating violence within the democratic camp could cause additional difficulties for future negotiation and fuel the mistrust between Hong Kong and Beijing.

Besides a few peaceful highlights, such as the two-million-person demonstration in June and the orderly District Council election in November, the current movement in Hong Kong made most of the headlines by violence on the street. In the last few months, mainstream Western media provided abundant photo evidences of Hong Kong protestors and police armed against each other. Reporters also detailed a number of clashes where the protestors threw Molotov cocktails at metro stations, police stations, and perceived enemies armed and unarmed, while the officers fired rubber bullets, tear gas, and water cannons into crowds both armed and unarmed. By December 27, the Wall Street Journal reported 6,000 arrests and hundreds of people injured.

Police injury numbers are less transparent and reported case by case. High-profile deaths and injuries include a student, Chow Tsz-lok, who died from falling when chased by the police, three protestors shot and wounded by the police, an elderly street cleaner who died in a crossfire between pro- and anti-government

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Violence seemed to have replaced the issue and become an issue in and of itself. forces, an old man set on fire while arguing with protestors, four “martyrs” died of suspected suicide, a pro-democracy politician, Andrew Chiu, attacked by a bite on his ear, and a pro-Beijing lawmaker, Junius Ho, stabbed in the street.

Looking at these stories and numbers, one can hardly remember that the goal of the movement was still to realize universal suffrage. Violence seemed to have replaced the issue and become an issue in and of itself.

Yet many leaders in the democratic camps insisted on the “no division” policy, which means they admit radical protestors as allies though disagree with the approach. In an interview on Deutsche Welle, Tim Sebastian, an award-winning journalist, questioned Joey Siu, a moderate student leader in the City University of Hong Kong, as to why she would not denounce her peers for using violence. Siu reiterated the “no division” stance. She was not alone. According to a September BBC report, Yaoting Dai, a moderate leader who started the 2014 Umbrella Movement based on Gandhi’s principles, applauded young protestors today for their courage and effective mobilization structure.

He did not support “physically harming people” in the protest but “would rather condemn the government.” In the same report, Aohui Cen, an influential student leader in the 2014 Umbrella Movement and a moderate himself, acknowledged violence as “an appropriate strategy” given the disproportional repression forces of the Hong Kong government.

Both Dai and Cen mentioned two reasons that justified “no division” for moderates. First, moderates could not get what they wanted from the government. Second, radical protestors appeared reasonable enough compared to the police that they provoked more sympathy than fear. Multiple sources seemed to support the latter claim. In an interview conducted by this author, Jill, a Taiwanese girl working in a multinational corporation in Hong Kong who did not participate in any kind of political events, said “both parties [used] violence…but police are the ones using excessive violence”. The only incident she witnessed protestors using violence involved one of her colleagues getting punched in the face for shouting “we’re all Chinese.” By contrast, she recalled seeing the police arrest a central banker in the metro station just because he swore at them, herself being tear-gassed two times when walking on the street and being chased down the street three times because the police “can’t distinguish who’s a protestor”.

Jane, a college girl in Hong Kong who has not participated in any protests but closely followed updates on social media, described the police as “less predictable” and protestors as “[minding] their own business.” For example, “protestors are just protesting peacefully… yet the police would suddenly charge… Literally the guy is just walking, and he wasn’t even a protestor, and the police would just bump into [him] or push him onto the floor… Some people are arrested and they are under total control, [but the police] would still beat them or pour water on them or pepper-spray them in the face.” During the siege of Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Jane recalled that the police tried to arrest everyone on campus, without justification and abiding no law.

There are good reasons to believe that the protestors, despite using violence, caused far less harm than the police, which explains why most people in Hong Kong support them morally and emotionally. Yet moderates should notice that protestors naturally adopt a different set of

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tactics and language than the politicians. Their violent encounters with the police revealed the malfunctioning of the police system, which was not the center of democrats’ agenda before 2019. Their reliance on social media encouraged all participants to upload footages and stories and as a result directed lots of attention to daily maneuvers on the street. Though not uncommon in other modern social movements, these tactics still need more tests on their justice and effectiveness in Hong Kong.

For example, Jill recalled seeing several videos gone viral on social media recording horrible actions such as protestors setting an old man on fire and police rape. However, she could not track the source of these videos and suspected some sensational ones to be propaganda materials. In fact, a handful of Instagram accounts and local media uploaded hundreds of short footages about police brutality. Most are poorly sourced and some interviews are conducted wearing masks for safety reasons. Mainstream western media could only verify and cover a small fraction of the overwhelming local news feed. Other tactics with a strong guerilla flavor involve two mobile apps designed by the opposition. One app could rate the political leaning of restaurants, and users have reviewed more than 1250 stores on it, sometimes citing private speech of restaurant owners in the review. Another could track police crackdown 24 hours on a map. It claims to receive financial sponsorship from a small-brand browser, a VPN, and crypto donations. Users can submit “intelligence” to the app, whose operators promised to verify and provide a credibility rating for all posts.

Despite its creative tactics and popular support, the opposition campaign never catered to Beijing as an important stakeholder but rather confronted it as a rival. Such an approach could not yield a viable solution, implied Richard C. Bush from the Brookings Institute. In his 2016 policy brief, Bush identified the radicalization of the democratic camp as a major obstacle to

These tactics are not uncommon in other modern social movements, but their justice and effectiveness in Hong Kong still need more tests.

Hong Kong’s democratic transition. Beijing and Hong Kong should meet in the middle, which could mean creating “pre-candidates” for Chief Executive nomination, allowing popular moderates to win publicity and get on the final ballot. However, this proposal, submitted by the Hong Kong government to the Legislative Council (LegCo) in April 2015, did not enlist the support of radical democrats in LegCo and therefore failed to reach Beijing, which was then ready to compromise. He characterized the radical wing as “rather fight than win” and called for one moderate voice to represent the democrats in future negotiations with Beijing.

Cen, who officially took the “no division” stance, also confessed that the decentralized organization structure in this protest made it harder for both sides to negotiate and to arrive at a transition-phase settlement.

In the meanwhile, protestors seemed patient with the outcome. “We protestors found that the routine demonstrations cannot effectively exert pressure on the administration. Since the administration still remains a haughty attitude towards the opposition, I think that this standoff couldn’t have a final solution in the short

term. To ease social schism, the very only solution is that the government should reply to the demands, or at least make some concessions,” said Jess, a mainlander schooling in Hong Kong who “[joined] every peaceful protest on the weekend as possible as [she] can” since August.

On the way forward, Beijing’s judgment of the situation is key. Cen criticized Beijing for holding the bias that democracy necessarily means a coup or Hong Kong independence when in fact democracy would improve the legitimacy of the government and ease social conflict. Bush also called Beijing “paranoid” about “imagined threats”. These words are reassuring, and with all good intentions. One should hope everyone in Hong Kong holds such an educated view on democracy as Cen does himself, or leaders in Beijing as innocently misinformed as Bush described. However, seeing all the Molotov cocktails, police brutality, and inflammatory videos online, we imagine that both parties will have a hard time staying rational, united, and willing to cooperate.

This writer of this article, a Wash U student, requests to remain anonymous for the safety of herself and her family in mainland China. The author has used pseudonyms for those interviewed, who have also requested to remain anonymous.

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WU Political Review

Human Rights on the High Seas Elizabeth Piasecki Phelan Artwork (right) by Natalie Snyder

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he ecological degradation of the ocean has rightly attracted a great deal of attention and concern; a myriad of problems stem from resource extraction, overfishing, and rising waters due to climate change. However, another pressing concern with regards to the ocean is the flagrant disregard for human well-being and dignity on international waters.

From the refugee crisis to piracy to human trafficking, the legal ambiguity of international waters paves the way for human rights issues requiring urgent attention.

International waters comprise 50% of the planet’s total surface area and are technically not under the jurisdiction of any state. The most comprehensive international legal treatise concerning oceans is the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS). This so-called “Constitution of the Oceans,” drafted by the U.N. in 1982, contains no reference to human rights whatsoever. This is ostensibly because the original purpose of the document was to promote peaceful security at sea and to clearly define which countries have economic access to particular regions of sea. It is still deeply concerning that a nation’s right to economic access to

From the refugee crisis to piracy to human trafficking, the legal ambiguity of international waters paves the way for a variety of human rights issues that need urgent attention.

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A nation’s right to economic access to waters have been enshrined in international law before respect for human well-being. waters have been enshrined in international law before respect for human well-being.

Out of the entire UNCLOS text, a mere two sentences in the treatise mention human well-being. Article 146 states that “necessary measures shall be taken to ensure effective protection of human life. To this end the Authority shall adopt appropriate rules, regulations and procedures to supplement existing international law as embodied in relevant treaties.” In essence, the only legal document concerning international waters effectively shunts the issue of preserving human rights to different international treatises, but fails to state which documents in particular should be consulted.

In documents concerning international human rights, there is likewise an absence of concern for happenings on the ocean. The UN Human Rights Commission has released documents on how to protect the rights of those at international borders, but relatively little attention has been paid to the rights of those on the open sea.

This has led to openings where trafficking and human slavery is able to subsist.

Dr. Nathan Miller, a marine scientist, says that the process of transshipment, or transporting goods via ship from one country to another, is primarily how humans, drugs, and other

contraband are smuggled through international waters and can result in human slavery. “Human rights abuses have been associated with transshipment. By allowing fishing vessels to remain at sea for months or even years at a time, captains are able to keep their crew at sea indefinitely, resulting in de facto slavery,” said Miller, noting that these events primarily happen in international waters. “Nearly half of the events we tracked occur on the high seas and involve vessels that are registered in countries which may differ from the vessel’s owner and provide minimal oversight. This means that a vessel may be held to less strict standards and regulations than its home country would require.”

Currently, any nation could theoretically take judicial action on a vessel that was found to be violating international human rights law under the concept of universal jurisdiction. However, due to differences in national law (and because some nations don’t recognize international courts), there is no reason to trust individual nations to deliver justice and deter further human rights abuses.

The freedom of the high seas was championed in the 15th century by philosophers such as Hugo Grotius and was widely embraced by European powers in order to facilitate large-scale exploration and colonization. A nation’s ability to freely access the ocean directly ties into the ability of its citizens to travel and is an important component of the economic development of many nations. Yet this principle has also paved the way for rampant human rights abuses, overfishing, piracy, and other criminal acts. There is a clear and urgent need for international bodies to remedy this loophole and for human rights on the high seas to be better protected.

Elizabeth Piasecki Phelan ‘21 studies in the College of Arts & Sciences. She can be reached at phelan@ wustl.edu.

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