AWOL - Issue 024

fall 2018 | issue 024

AU? #MeToo Tackling Sexual Misconduct at AU

THE DISTRICT AT DAWN: Legalizing Sex Work in D.C.

LETTER FROM THE EDITORS fall 2018 | issue 024

Dear Readers,

MISSION

AWOL’s 24th issue represents a decade’s worth of critical, subversive, and irrepressible journalism. We are proud to serve as editors-in-chief for such an important milestone in this publication’s history.

AWOL Magazine aims to continue pushing both ourselves and American University to be more critical of issues that deserve to be understood with nuance; to work subversively when dismantling barriers that suppress certain voices; to love irrepressibly when it comes to serving our community.

We ignite campus discussions on social, cultural and political issues. We want to make our campus more inquiring, egalitarian and socially engaged.

Our stories have an angle, which is different from having an agenda. Our reporting is impartial and fair, but our analysis is critical and argumentative.

We were independently founded by American University students in 2008. While we are still student-run, today we are housed under AU’s Student Media Board. AWOL is a member of the Associated Collegiate Press and Generation Progress Voices Network. This publication has won awards at the National College Media Convention, and its writers have won awards from the Society for Professional Journalists and the College Media Association.

EDITORIAL EDITORS–IN–CHIEF

Katya Podkovyroff Lewis Benjamin S. Weiss

MANAGING EDITOR

William Fowler

CREATIVE DIRECTOR PHOTO DIRECTOR

Ben Black Melany Rochester

STAFF EDITORS

Reina Dufore, Michael Karlis, Taylor Sabol, and Savanna Strott

COPY EDITORS

Kayla Benjamin, Alec Schemmel, and Braeden Waddell

ILLUSTRATORS

WRITERS

Liana Bernstein, Ben Black, Gillian Ferreira, Chloe K. Li, Rabia Muhammad, and Jake Reimer Lana Green, Chloe K. Li, Katherine Long, Emily Martin, Gwyn Morgan, Rabia Muhammad, Luci Rascher, Aqsa Rashid, Taylor Sabol, Alec Schemmel, Grace Vitaglione, and Braeden Waddell

FIND US ONLINE WEBSITE ISSUU TWITTER FACEBOOK

www.awolau.org www.issuu.com/awol @awolAU www.facebook.com/awolAU

Our print magazine started in 2008 as a “dirty little zine,” thrown out by university employees across campus. Since then, we have exponentially grown in staff size and student participation on American University’s campus; introduced podcasting and mini-documentaries to our repertoire; and continued to “push ourselves and [AU] to be more critical of issues that deserve to be understood with nuance”.

2018 has been an eventful year on a national and local scale. AU is no exception.

As a community, we’ve weathered all manner of crises, advocated for issues important to the student body, and explored new horizons of dialogue in our politically-charged climate. Last semester, our writers approached injustices ranging from international issues down to campus-level communities. This semester, we continue to address diversity and inclusion as AU works towards greater inclusivity.

As a publication, AWOL has always strived to call attention to issues that don’t always register in the university’s collective consciousness. Our drive and willingness to cover the stories that need to be told is part of what makes our publication so unique, and we hope that this issue exemplifies that. It’s what attracted a record number of first-year students to AWOL this semester, and it’s what will continue to inform our work into the future.

AWOL has made unprecedented strides in journalism at AU this semester, both editorially and within multimedia. We are proud of our creators and their commitment to the craft of journalism. This commitment resulted in a monumental increase in the regularity of our content and the levels at which AU students engage with it. Our award-winning podcast, only one year old, is expanding rapidly. New shows like Bisexuali-tea and Not Your Average Podcast give underrepresented communities on campus a platform to have their voices heard. Our videography team continues to create landmark mini-documentaries that further AWOL’s editorial mission.

AWOL, to us, represents the best that journalism — and the university — has to offer. Students come to D.C. and AU with dreams of changing the world.

Investigative journalism is undeniably an agent of that change. By shedding light on important issues and holding our leaders accountable, our publication is making a measurable impact on the way our peers interact with issues on campus and in the District as a whole.

We remain faithful to AWOL’s mission to “ignite campus discussions on social, cultural, and political issues,” particularly surrounding the array of issues within Diversity and Inclusion both on and off AU’s campus. Our 24th issue features a spiritual successor to AWOL’s Issue 10 cover story, “The District After Dark: Keeping Sex Workers on the Street” as a throwback for our 10-year anniversary.

We hope this issue makes you angry for all the right reasons.

In solidarity, Katya Podkovyroff Lewis and Benjamin S. Weiss

POLITICS PAGE 4

4 FIRST WORLD PROBLEMS THE WEST’S INDIFFERENCE TOWARD THE ROHINGYA CRISIS

6 PASSING: MULTIRACIAL IDENTITY IN A DIVIDED AMERICA

Aqsa Rashid

Gwyneth Morgan

Western media and governments give the crisis lip service,

Exploring multiracial experiences in the modern political

but little action.

climate.

CAMPUS LIFE

9 INCLUSION DELUSION STUDENTS OF COLOR STRUGGLE WITH TOKENISM AT AU Chloe K. Li

Katherine Long

PAGE 9

Understanding the difference between dialogue and tokenism.

Trigger Warning: Topics such as sexual assault and

12 AU? #METOO TACKLING SEXUAL MISCONDUCT AT AU

harrassment will be discussed in this article.

15 AMERICAN UNIVER$ITY THE STUDENT WEALTH GAP Rabia Muhammad Low-income minority students struggle to find their place in private universities.

THE DISTRICT PAGE 18

COVER STORY

18 THE DISTRICT AT DAWN LEGALIZING SEX WORK IN D.C. Taylor Sabol A spiritual successor to AWOL’s Issue 10 cover story, “The District After Dark: Keeping Sex Workers on the Street.”

21 HELTER-SHELTER MOTEL LIVING FOR D.C.’S HOMELESS POPULATION

25 STEPS TO RECOVERY THE OPIOID EPIDEMIC IN D.C.

Lana Green

Luci Rascher

D.C.’s homeless face tough conditions in government-provided

Combatting Opioid Abuse Amongst Teens and Young

housing.

Adults in the DMV

29 PHOTO ESSAY: THE DESOLATION OF THE WEST Shane Matheu Ryden The deserts of the West have a presence in their absence.

CULTURE PAGE 35

35 SEOUL SEARCHING K-POP’S CULTURAL DIVIDE

39 HERE IN MY GARAGE. . .

FALSE PROMISES FROM “WEB INFLUENCERS”

Grace Vitaglione

Alec Schemmel

A conversation about K-Pop’s appropriations from Black culture.

Internet “mentors” use misleading language and imagery to gain followers.

43 GHOST STORIES THE PARKER FAMILY MURDER Emma Herbst Clarksdale, Mississippi’s infamous true story.

PROFESSOR PROFILE:

HEALTH PAGE 47

47 SNAP INTO FOCUS THE FIGHT FOR FOOD SECURITY

49 MARGARET STOGNER ENVIRONMENTAL MEDIA TODAY

Emily Martin

Braeden Waddell

SNAP continues to run under old legislation after Farm Bill expires.

A Conversation with AU Professor and Environmental Filmmaker

MULTIMEDIA TEAM PODCAST DIRECTOR PR DIRECTOR VIDEOGRAPHY DIRECTOR PODCAST ASSISTANTS

PR ASSISTANT

Zach Vallese

Listen for free on www.awolau.org or your favorite podcast listening app.

Verónica del Valle Georgia Bergin

BISEXAULI-TEA

Luci Rascher, Verónica del Valle, and Braeden Waddell

Bisexuali-tea is a bi-weekly podcast produced by AWOL and hosted by Rin Ryan and Sasha Fernandez. The show discusses various topics related to LGBTQ+ life in college.

Caroline Morgan

PODCAST TEAM

Alejandro Irizarry, Sasha Fernandez, Ian Gardner, Nana Gongadze, Katie Hoffkins, Ethan Lipka, Gwyn Morgan, Emily Pullen, Rin Ryan, Shane Matheu Ryden, Grace Vitaglione, and Isabel Wottowa

PR TEAM

Dana Colarocco, Emma Greenberg, Katrina Kavanaugh, Dez Kum, and Maya Shydlowski

VIDEOGRAPHY TEAM

AWOL PODCASTS

Dana Colarocco, Rosie Haase, Katie Hoffkins, Alejandro Irizarry, Ian Gardner, Rose McDonnell, Jake Raimer, and Shane Matheu Ryden

DEAR VIEWERS/LISTENERS, We appreciate the increase in our teams as well as engagement with students on campus. This semester, the multimedia department of AWOL has taken new strides toward creating content that we hope you have enjoyed.

Podcasting has become a movement at American University. When we started our first podcast, Ripped from the Wall, last year, it was a triumph in the progression of multimedia in AWOL. Since then, we have created numerous podcasts that help break barriers and tell stories that are yearning to be told.

Our podcast team has grown immensely and we have earned many great achievements in the past year such as winning Best Podcast at the 2018 Apple Awards.

We are all excited to see where podcasting will take us in the future and we are always ready to tell the next story.

The Fall 2018 Video Team was completely comprised of AWOL newcomers. We spent the semester building the team from the ground up. From finding a story to learning shooting techniques to becoming familiar with editing, the team came together as one to create what was for many members their first mini-doc.

Thank you for watching and listening, we hope you continue for semesters to come.

Best, Georgia Bergin and Zach Vallese

Ryan and Fernandez were tired of a lack of representation in the college media community concerning LGBTQ+ issues, so they created this show. This lighthearted podcast is meant to be a safe space for all queers and allies to tune in and commiserate over shared dating horror and love stories, news and events related to queer life, as well as some of the common issues of just trying to survive the college years. In each episode Rin and Sasha take on a different topic, they will feature guests from time to time, answer your questions, and talk it out over tea.

NOT YOUR AVERAGE PODCAST On the podcast, Not Your Average Podcast, Podcast Director, Zach Vallese, interviews students who do interesting things.

Each episode is a fun conversation providing a new perspective on student experiences.

RIPPED FROM THE WALL Ripped from the Wall is harkening back to our original message of hard-hitting, investigative reporting about controversies at American University.

Before AWOL was an official part of Student Media, in 2008, a group of students pooled 400 dollars in savings and set out to produce a zine that seeks to “ignite political and cultural discussions on campus by providing a space for students to question the structural and social framework of American University,” as described in issue 2 published in 2008, the oldest surviving AWOL Magazine. As the history of the magazine has been passed down to us, after the first issue of the magazine was created and distributed around campus, the administration asked school staff to remove and throw out all copies that they could find. For the magazine, then an unofficial and underground publication questioned the authority of American University in ways they felt were unorthodox.

This podcast aims to bring that same kind of journalism to your ears by investigating stories about American University and The District that some don’t want to be told.

COMING SOON. . .

AWOL’S MINI-DOCUMENTARY ON CAPITOL HILL BOOKS The video team traveled to Eastern Market to create a mini-documentary on Capitol Hill Books. The shop was recently bought by a group of members of the community.

We were able to interview the former sole owner, Jim Toole, about the shop and are in the process of creating a piece which not only profiles Capitol Hill Books, but Toole as well. Capitol Hill Books is a unique space which celebrates reading and knowledge and is determined to preserve bookstore culture.

FIRST WORLD PROBLEMS: The West’s indifference towards the Rohingya crisis Western media and governments give the crisis lip service, but little action.

STORY BY AQSA RASHID ART BY RABIA MUHAMMAD In the past year, over 700,000 Rohingya asylum seekers have fled from Myanmar in search for cramped refugee camps and an improved life from their troubled homelands. The Rohingya, a Muslim ethnic minority group of the primarily Buddhist Rakhine state, have fled in large numbers to the neighboring state of Bangladesh after Myanmar’s military launched a crackdown in response to attacks on border posts by Rohingya rebels.

The government of Myanmar denies the Rohingya citizenship on the basis of their minority status in the state, and sees them as illegal immigrants from Bangladesh. Though this crisis has been ongoing since the 1970s, recent years have seen an upsurge in political violence instigated against the Rohingya, as well as an uncontrollable refugee crisis.

Their case is one of textbook ethnic cleansing — yet many believe that Western media hasn’t provided the issue enough coverage.

According to the 2017 United Nations definition, ethnic cleansing is rendering an area ethnically homogeneous by using force or intimidation to remove persons of given groups from the area. Despite fitting all of the criteria of a genocide and gaining recognition from international organizations, these atrocities have received a lack of attention from the international community.

Myanmar’s de facto leader and nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi, who is known in her position for defending democracy, has

not condemned the acts of terrorism that the military junta have enacted.

“What makes this situation interesting is that the nobel laureate, who has the freedom of defending democracy, is defending her government against the Rohingya,” said American University professor and Diplomat in Residence Anthony Quainton “The Rohingya are abandoned by the people who support democracy. The leader thinks these people don’t belong.

The international community isn’t forcing [Myanmar] to do anything. These people are simply tragically stuck in the corner of Bangladesh.”

Other than the U.N. noting that the Rohingya situation is the “world’s fastest growing refugee crisis,” little to no action has been taken. There seems to be a general consensus that there is injustice happening, though the discussion on sanctions has been muted. A particularly prominent issue is the perceived lack of press coverage by Western media with regard to the crisis.

“This is both about how media affects foreign policy and how foreign policy affects media,” Quainton said. “If the media doesn’t pay any attention to a problem it’s very unlikely you’ll get a critical mass of citizens unless they’re already predisposed to this issue like the Burmese Rohingya refugees are.”

However, according to Krishnadev Calamur, foreign policy columnist at The Atlantic, this is not a surprise when it comes to covering non-Western affairs.

“Journalists in any capitalist city around the world are very officially driven process. If the prime minister of a state says something, it becomes news automatically,” Calamur said. “The capital city covers government, so we cover government.

It’s the mindset that if they aren’t talking about it, then what’s the point of writing about it. Whether that media coverage is supportive or critical, it is still influenced by the leader of a country.”

Unlike other conflicts, such as the Syrian refugee crisis, the Rohingya Muslim Crisis does not affect Western politics directly since the Rohingya are seeking refuge in Bangladesh and other South Asian neighborhood countries. The lack of U.S. involvement makes it less relevant for American media consumers, according to Imam-ad-Dean Ahmad, Muslim chaplain of the Kay Spiritual Life Center and American University Physics department professor.

“The media is interested in what will sell to them, and they do not see the Muslim community as a market, so they don’t have the incentive to put the effort into it that is required,” Ahmad said.

Quainton said that the reason why some genocides may get more media attention than others would have to do with the democratic constituency present.

“Not only students, but the American public as well tends to listen, when there’s

FALL 2018 | 4

AWOL MAGAZINE a credible spokesman from the aggrieved group.” Quainton explained. “People have seen the pictures of the camps in Southern Bangladesh but there are so many pictures like that that these are no worse pictures than so many others. This is very sad, but there’s just a kind of sense of ‘what can we do now; they just don’t get the attention that they deserve.”

It is important to look at how this issue may affect students in American University’s School of International Service.

American University currently prides itself in its international relations curriculum, its status as the eighth best school for international relations, and its Princeton Review rank as the most politically active student body in the nation.

Yet, the student body seems to remain concerned about issues that are centered around U.S. foreign interest or are popular or heightened by the media.

“Even in the course I teach where we are talking about genocide, there’s a fatalistic sense of ‘its too bad,’” Quainton said. “ There’s very little sentiment among the students and the current administration does not have any care towards this cause.

I don’t get the feeling that students or faculty want to see the U.S solving everyone else’s problems.”

Although the Rohingya crisis may not be directly affecting the U.S., it is still a crisis.

Ahmad believes that it deserves attention from the international community.

“Even though there’s no attention by the U.S., government, there should be an interest in making our students acquainted in this issue because the issues that come

5

up with this genocide are issues that will come up in the future where there will be US government interest,” Ahmad said.

Furthermore, Ahmad said that this problem begs students to delve into it more deeply.

“To speak now as a scientist, I think social scientists should also think, where theres

a social phenomenon happening in your place of study, you should be interested in pursuing it and understanding it.”

Regardless of the bits of relief provided by the UN to these persecuted groups, there remains a sense of stagnancy in terms of the problem progressing. Although humanitarian groups and the Western nations recognize the Rohingya as a persecuted minority, the government of Burma and an overwhelming majority of its people see these people as a foreign group with a separatist agenda that is fueled by their distinct and erroneous religion, Islam.

But, Calamur said that regardless of how

severe this problem may be, it is hard to measure the way it can impact people abroad, even if they were to be exposed to the problem.

“You can’t force people to feel. Being attuned to human suffering takes effort. And we take effort only with things that benefit us. In the case of the Rohingya, nothing is benefitting us to care. If America started taking in a large number of Rohingya refugees, people would know about the conflict here. But that’s the thing. Bangladesh takes them. America does not,” Calamur said.

This difference in perception is what will make any possible resolution of the Rohingya issue extremely difficult, and especially more controversial within a student body that has political opinions. In the case of educating students in SIS, Ahmad said that it must start with people looking past their self-interests.

“You can’t put pressure on government until you get yourself organized properly,” Ahmad said. “You first need to put pressure in education. you have to get the intellectuals to get up to speed and be concerned and to motivate them. Then they can influence the masses who in turn, in a democracy, can influence the policy makers, and create the change we need.” ◼

Aqsa Rashid is a freshman studying International Studies.

POLITICS

PASSING: MULTIRACIAL IDENTITY IN A DIVIDED AMERICA Exploring multiracial experiences in the modern political climate.

STORY BY GWYNETH MORGAN ART BY RABIA MUHAMMAD AND BEN BLACK FALL 2018 | 6

AWOL MAGAZINE The 2016 Election marked the eruption of nationwide unrest in America. Partisan politics were amplified, further polarizing the country and its people. Disagreements and a pressure to choose between two opposing sides became more prevalent than any other time in the 21st century, particularly in the realm of race relations.

Amidst this divide exists a multiracial identity crisis in which those who identify with multiple races have trouble understanding where they fit in.

Rachel Hong, a graduate student at American University who works with the Asian-American Student Union and The Center for Diversity & Inclusion explained that being multiracial can make it difficult to navigate certain situations.

and understandings of their cultures, they often struggle to find authentic acceptance in their communities and continue to battle with the dread of being ‘other.’

According to Pew Research Center, out of the 6.9 percent of U.S. adults that identify as multiracial, 1 in 8 say that their mixed racial background has made them feel like an outsider.

Leah Donnella, a news assistant for NPR’s Code Switch podcast, reflected on her experience growing up as half black and half white: “I just wanted to be unambiguous and I think for me that meant wanting to be unambiguously black all the time,” said Donnella. “That was hard also because I grew up in an extremely white place. There were not a lot of other black kids, so I was kind of, in some ways, trying to create a community that didn’t exist.”

Even with this steady rise in the multiracial population, the 2010 U.S Census did not include a category for those who identify as multiracial and will not include it in 2020.

The path to acceptance is further blurred for multiracial people who are white passing or have the privilege of being accepted in society as white instead of a person of color. For many multiracial people, this white-passing privilege can further isolate them from the communities of color they feel connected to.

“I’m very, very aware of the passing privilege I have,” Hong explained.

“Even within my own family I have sisters who look way more Asian than I do and I have a different experience navigating Hong, who is a quarter Japanese, a quarthe world than they do. I personally... alter Korean, and half Irish-American, exways am more cautious identifying as a plained: woman of color because I am more white passing and when “I often felt way too people do think For many multiracial people, this white-passing Asian for white spacI’m not white...it’s es and my white relaseen as very beauprivilege can further isolate them from the tives, and I feel really tiful thing that I’m really white compared half Asian and half communities of color they feel connected to. to my Asian relatives white. So while as well. So, it’s like that is oppressive you’re never quite enough of anything in one way, I’m not in physical harm beto feel like you totally relate. Same thing The inability to find and create communicause of my identity,” said Hong. with Asian spaces with my peers as well. I ties is something all too familiar for muljust never feel like I have the full Asian or tiracial people. Although Pew Research Many multiracial people continue to face Asian American experience.”

Center notes that about 9 million Ameroppression, regardless of being white-preican chose to identify with two or more senting. Beyond the white privilege that Struggling to find a place of acceptance is races as of 2013, there still appears to be works to benefit them in society, their not new to the multiracial community. minimal room for acceptance into existing identity can be a target of racial exotificacommunities or the creation of distinctly tion.

Yuni Higgs, another biracial student at multiracial communities.

AU, described what it was like to grow up The experience of multiracial people, even as Korean and white.

According to a report from Gretchen Livif they are white passing, still isn’t exactly ingston, a senior researcher with Pew Resynonymous to their single-race counter“I’ve struggled a lot trying to figure out search Center, the number of multiracial parts. where I fit in,” Higgs said. “A lot of the time children in America has nearly tripled people tell me I’m not really Asian or I’m from 5 percent in 1980 to 14 percent as “I just never feel like I have the full Asian not really white, so growing up, I struggled of 2015. About half a century after Loving or Asian American experience, but I’m a lot to find a community.” v. Virginia, the Supreme Court case that clearly not living the same lives as my legalized interracial marriage, about 17 white friends who are blonde and assumed Multiracial people in America continue to percent of new marriages are multiracial to be from here,” Hong said. face a schism in identity. While most mulcouples, the report states. tiracial people have genuine connections Being white passing can limit a person’s connection to their racial identities, causing them to feel like an outsider because of

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POLITICS appearance and cultural understanding.

The same struggles are often experienced by those whose races contradict. When identifying with two races that have historically been defined as the oppressor and the oppressed, it can be even more difficult to form deeply rooted associations to each culture. While one may feel connected to their cultures, acceptance within each community can be challenging to find.

As a result, some people who identify as multiracial are trying to find a place in their respective racial communities and different social environments while also getting involved in activism around issues concerning people of color.

“I work at CDI right now, and we are trying to make space, like just invite people to eat food and to talk about whatever they want to talk about when it comes to their racial identity...So there’s steps,” Hong explained. “There’s definitely faculty and staff on campus who are very interested in this. And there’s a lot of students as well.

A lot of leaders of student organizations identify as multiracial. But I think we are working to make it a whole thing, that students know that there is a community here,” she said.

Donnella explained that it has been an ongoing question and journey to figure out what it means to have a white mom and a black dad and where that positions her in relation to other people.

“I always have the sense that there are big parts of what it means to be part of either group that I don’t have, that I haven’t experienced.” Donnella said. “I’ve never felt really rejected from any group, but I felt the need to do some explaining or qualifying in my own mind and having to [say] it’s okay that I haven’t had these experiences or I don’t connect over this thing because, nobody can do that for any group, for everything.”

When one’s racial identity is comprised of opposing races, it can be even more difficult, especially if each racial group has experienced drastically different societal experiences.

“I think it’s not that I ever wanted to change my race, I just wanted things to be easier.” Donella said. “I think part of that was the fact that I was in a very, very white place and there just wasn’t a lot of space to be different in so many different ways and race was certainly one of those ways. So, I don’t think I ever wanted it to be white, I wanted [my race] to not be an issue” Donnella makes specific reference to an interaction between her and her mom: “I remember one time I was a freshman at college and my mom came to visit me and she asked me, this broke my heart, she said, ‘Are you embarrassed that I’m your mom?’ Because I was walking around campus. And I said, ‘No, I’ve never been embarrassed about that’.”

American University, some efforts have been made to create spaces for multiracial people to share their experiences. The Center for Diversity and Inclusion has hosted Multiracial Mixers and plans to host more, but there is still room for improvement.

“I don’t think AU is particularly worse than anywhere, I just think that our conversation about race is really bad,” Hong said.

“We just haven’t figured out how to do it [in a way] that makes space for a variety of identities or experiences. And I don’t think that’s just about multiracial people, I think that’s just about making spaces for women of color in conversations about race, making space for LGBT people in conversations about race, along with people who grew up in different racial identity. A lot of students don’t feel like they have space to express their full identities, because there is so little space to be a minority student at all,” she said.

Since race is such an integral part of someone’s identity, being multiracial can make it hard to find a sense of community. However, being multiple races can help how people understand the world around them and how they understand themselves.

“It’s not that I ever wanted to change my race, I just wanted things to be easier,” Donnella explained. “I think part of that was the fact that I was in a very, very white place and there just wasn’t a lot of space to be different in so many different ways and race was certainly one of those ways. So I don’t think I ever wanted to be white, but I wanted it to not be an issue.”

Gwyneth Morgan is a freshman studying journalism and multi-ethnic studies.

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AWOL MAGAZINE

students of color struggle with tokenism at AU

:

understanding the difference between dialogue and tokenism

STORY BY CHLOE K. LI | GRAPHICS BY JAKE RAIMER said. “I am usually the only Asian person in a classroom and that often leads me to feel tokenized.”

SARAH, WHOSE NAME HAS BEEN

changed to protect her identity, was sitting in her 8 a.m. criminal justice reform class waiting for the clock to hit 9:25. As the minute hand inched towards the five, she and another black classmate were suddenly called on by their professor, who requested their opinions on mass incarceration.

Sasipong explained how problematic this is, because she recognizes that she does not speak for all Asian-Americans due to their diverse experiences.

“Being called out in a class filled with white students was not the best feeling,” Sarah said. “Even if he didn’t mean for us to represent our race, it still feels like that.”

This case was reported to the Center for Diversity and Inclusion, a campus resource committed to respecting and valuing diversity on campus, according to their website.

But, the investigation has since been closed. Although the CDI is an important part American University’s diversity and inclusion efforts, there is still noticeable tokenism of students of color.

THE FALSE AND INCORRECT DIVERSITY OF AU 9

Lucky Sasiphong, a junior at AU and vice president of the Asian American Student Union, said their experience is similar to Sarah.

“I am one of maybe two or three people of color in a classroom,” Sasiphong

“It’s hard because we don’t represent every API [Asian Pacific Islander] person on this campus,” Sasiphong said about the AASU. “It’s been really difficult when like we feel like we have to speak for everybody on this campus.”

AU has been slowly increasing the diversity of their student body. Today, 43.9 percent are now are students of color, which includes white-passing Latinx individuals and white-passing visa holders.

The official statistics on AU’s demographics cannot be found on AU’s website, but according to College Factual, Latinx students are now 12.1 percent at AU, followed by black stu-

CAMPUS LIFE

STEP PROGRAM STUDENT BREAKDOWN

The goal of most professors, especially at an institution like AU, is to teach in a way that is less abstract and more tangible. Professor Clayton is one of many professors who believes actively calling on students of color makes the learning material easier to grasp.

He emphasized the importance of hearing real life experiences, instead of reading from a textbook when it comes to these experiences for “more conventional students.”

dents at 6.8 percent, and Asian students at 6.2 percent. The remaining 8.8 percent did not report their race or ethnicity.

AU faculty is less diverse than the student population, as only 34% identified as an ethnicity other than white.

The largest minority faculty group identified as black, which is 14.8 percent; significantly greater than the black student population. The second largest group is Asian as 6.4 percent, followed by Latinx at 5.8 percent. The remaining 7 percent did not report their ethnicity.

PROFESSORS ROLES IN TOKENISM

At AU, faculty members are teaching more than basic academic subjects like science and math; they’re discussing subjects like mass incarceration, police militarization and global inequality. Professors are then faced with the challenge of teaching these topics to students of color on a predominantly white campus. This is the case for Professor Alexander Clayton, who teaches Introduction to Systems of Justice.

“If I ask you what four plus four is, and you say ‘I don’t want to answer that question,’ that’s different than when I

times, that means bringing the white perspective down, and sometimes that means bringing the non-white perspective up.”

Professor Nuku Ofori, an adjunct professor in the Sociology department, offers a different method.

ask you what’s your experience with race and you don’t want to answer that question,” Clayton said. “When it comes down to personal viewpoints and beliefs, if someone says they don’t wanna talk about it, then next person [can answer it].”

However, Professor Clayton does believe his method has flaws.

“When I call on students in class like ‘tell me your experience’, that is tokenism to a certain extent,” Clayton said. “And I don’t have a good answer to whether I should be doing that or not. I question myself sometimes.”

Clayton’s approach is based primarily in his hope to increase participation from students of color in class. “[I] try to put [the perspectives of non-white students] on an equal footing with the white hetero cis male perspective, and to try to prop that up in some ways,” Clayton said. “Some-

“There is a level of consciousness as a black male teaching mostly white students,” Ofori said.

Due to this, Ofori is sensitive to perceptions of race, stating that he doesn’t want to just critique, and would prefer to focus on teaching without threatening students. Ofori suggests making issues about race tangible for white students, to begin with “something [common] as a tool….[and] analyze that.”

Ofori also emphasizes the importance of creating “a common language” and using “tools to address social phenomenons.”

“This method disarms students and disarms defensiveness,” Ofori said about this, based off of his experience at Georgetown University. Professor Ofori believes his method allows white students to engage in conversations about race and inequality without feeling the need to defend themselves.

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AWOL MAGAZINE

“I can then acknowledge race and ethnicity as complementary to these issues…. White students can still speak on these topics about race and inequality,” Ofori said.

STEP: THE GOLDEN STUDENTS OF AU’S DIVERSITY AND INCLUSION INITIATIVE

One little-known program organized by the CDI is the Summer Transition

and 3 percent international students.

There was a total of 33 students enrolled in STEP this year.

“It made me feel bad about myself,” Jacqueline Martinez, a current freshman at AU and participant in the 2018 STEP program, said. “I don’t know if it was the way it was phrased, but it just made it seem like I needed additional help or they wouldn’t want me at all. It was kinda like a test.”

growing Asian-American Pacific Islander population at AU. “When I was a freshman, AAPIs were only 3 or 4 percent of the student population,” Sasiphong said. “Now it’s 7 percent. That’s amazing!”

Sarah also commends AU, stating that she does notice the effort, especially with the CDI.

“CDI does a lot and they’re “I am one of maybe two or three people of color in a classroom,” great to edSasiphong said. “I am usually the only Asian person in a ucate and to classroom and that often leads me to feel tokenized.” make communities,” Sarah said about the programs that Enrichment Program, commonly known as STEP. Admissions hand- To this day, Martinez and other par- CDI offers, including their intergroup dialogues and workshops. picks around 100 students whom ticipants still are not sure why they they believe need extra support tran- were chosen and were never given an explanation by the school.

However, predominantly white instisitioning into college and gives them tutions like AU, even with resources a choice: attend STEP for eight weeks like the CDI and STEP, struggle with in the summer, or forfeit your accep- “It was a rude awakening of what was to come in the fall, ” Martinez said, supporting students of color without tance. referring to her experience at Eagle them feeling segregated or tokenized. “[Admissions] selects students for Summit. “When I told people I was in STEP who have demonstrated excel- STEP, I got a lot of mixed reactions. “Although [my professor] felt like they Maybe they were jealous, but I’ve were giving us a platform to speak, we lence throughout their application heard some things like it’s for the colhave hands that we can raise,” Sarah but may have attended an under resaid. ◼ sourced high school,” Andrea Felder, ored students, for the poor students, Provost for Undergraduate Admis- it’s for the dumb [students].” sions, said. “They may be first in their family to attend college, they may come from a rural/urban community, or have otherwise shown they could use the additional support before beginning their academic career at AU,” Felder said.

While the selection process is undisclosed to both the participants and the CDI, there are commonalities among participants. According to Office of Enrollment, the 2018 STEP class was 55 percent black, 30 percent Latinx, 6 percent Asian, 6 percent multiracial,

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“I do feel like STEP lowkey tokenized their students because when someone asks why they were chosen, they shy away from the answer,” Shahad Mohieldin, another 2018 STEP participant, said. “But they say that if we gave you all the resources AU has, you’ll become the best students. If I go off to do great things in the world, I feel like I have to credit STEP.”

WHAT’S NEXT?

AU diversity rates among the student population are rising. Sasiphong discussed her excitement about the

Chloe K. Li is a freshman studying journalism and education.

CAMPUS LIFE

AU? #MeToo TACKLING SEXUAL MISCONDUCT AT AU Trigger Warning: Topics such as sexual assault and harassment will be discussed throughout the course of this article.

STORY BY KATHERINE LONG ART BY LIANA BERNSTEIN | PHOTO BY BEN BLACK

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AWOL MAGAZINE WITH SEXUAL ASSAULT BEING a current and national issue due to the presence of the #MeToo movement, college campuses struggle to determine the best way to combat these situations.

American University was subject to an investigation by the U.S. Department of Education for failing to deal with a sexual misconduct case in an immediate manner in 2016. Just a year earlier, AU had been under investigation for their inadequate actions in responding to a sexual assault report from April 2015. According to the Washington Post, this brought the number of universities being investigated under Title IX by the DOE up to 104.

Title IX was emphasized during Obama’s presidency, as his administration held a strong importance for civil rights, increasing the number of reported sexual assault cases within college communities. As stated in the FBI’s annual crime report this September, there was a 20 percent increase in reports of sexual assault since 2013.

American University has been continuously finding ways to take greater responsibility and action on these cases.

Traci Callandrillo, Assistant Vice President of Campus Life at American University, participates as a faculty mentor in the Sexual Assault Working Group. This is a group specifically made to understand where the university needs to improve regarding sexual assault and violence, and how they must continue to follow Title IX guidelines.

The SAWG is unique to AU, having an outlet to discuss sexual assault issues was a stepping stone for the programs implemented later on.

“It’s been in existence for 11 years, so when SAWG came into existence we didn’t have OASIS, the Health Promotion and Advocacy Center, or advocates on campus. So structurally, a lot of things have changed,” Callandrillo said.

These complex situations give universities extra difficulties when it comes to under-

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standing and deciding the best ways to tackling reported assault cases.

“There were some hard years in there, from students letting us know that we weren’t getting it right or that we were only getting some things right but not other things,” said Callandrillo.

Callandrillo said she is attempting to listen and respond, as well as thinking about the best way the institution can take care of its students and take responsible stances on sexual misconduct.

One of the most difficult hurdles for universities in addressing sexual misconduct lies in the partying aspect on college campuses. A large majority of sexual misconduct or sexual violence situations take place in an environment where young adults participate in alcohol or drug consumption.

According to the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, over one-third of full-time college students ages 18 to 22 participated in binge drinking in the past month, and about 1 in 5 used have used a drug in the past month.

In November 2017, the #MeToo movement caught the attention of many across the nation, allowing survivors of sexual assault to share their stories and stand up to those have brought trauma and harm to them.

The #MeToo movement has brought even greater awareness towards sexual assault claims and rape cases, including how they should be handled.

Organizations such as “Time’s Up” were created after the movement in order to raise money towards lawyers, legal funds, and organizations for women. They also work to educate individuals on how to deal with sexual harassment cases.

According to University of Arizona professor Mary Koss, 7.7 percent of male students admitted they had engaged or attempted forced sex, and most didn’t realize it to be a crime. Furthermore, 63.3 percent of men who admitted to such actions also admitted to committing multiple acts of rape. RAINN concluded that within undergraduates, 23.1 percent of females and 5.4 percent of males experience rape.

These are just a few of the statistics that reveal the magnitude of this issue.

There is no concrete statistical evidence that the #MeToo movement has aided the fight against sexual misconduct on college campuses, but it has raised awareness of the issue. While more people are sharing their stories, there is no data that suggests the number of sexual assaults is decreasing.

“We did have an uptake in reports of sexual assault last year because of the #MeToo movement, but it’s hard to measure what is making a difference. The discourse that we’re having is bringing it much more into awareness,” said Callandrillo.

Between the 2013-2014 and 2016-2017 academic years, the number of sexual assault

CAMPUS LIFE cases at Harvard rose by 65 percent. This shows a direct correlation to before and after the presence of the #MeToo movement.

The #MeToo movement has given many sexual assault victims a voice, with CBS News finding that 1.7 million tweets across 85 countries used the hashtag in order to make their voices heard.

“My concern is that we are still in a period of deconstruction,” Callandrillo said, “In the next few years, I think we will continue to see a fair amount backlash. However, with each piece of backlash, I think there will come a point where people will have had enough.”

On the other end of the issue, the Trump Administration is pushing to place new policies relating to sexual misconduct on campus, led by Education Secretary Betsy DeVos. A draft of the new policies proposed by Devos reveals that universities could be held responsible for fewer incidents and not be required to investigate if they are not directly given to an official or if the situations had taken place off campus grounds.

Amber Athey is a journalist for the Daily Caller with a conservative-leaning and a strong stance on the #MeToo movement.

On Oct. 23, American University’s Young Americans for Liberty hosted an event originally titled “No, Don’t Believe All Women,” the title of Athey’s speech on a response to the movement.

After receiving backlash, the event title was changed to “Your Due Process #MeToo,” stating that it would better reflect the contents of the speech.

“I want to be clear that the title of my speech is ‘No, Don’t Believe All Women’, and I don’t care if that upsets you. This speech was in fact intended to upset people. In this current era of hyper-political correctness, I want to challenge the idea that college is a place where you are supposed to be comfortable,” Athey said at the beginning of her speech.

Her speech discussed why it is not fair to believe all accusers of sexual assault, saying that all women should be heard, but not necessarily believed.

The presence of this event sparked controversy, prompting AU students to stand outside the event and protest.

Holding signs saying ‘Believe All Women’ and ‘Me Too’, they proceeded to chant and walk around the inside of Mary Graydon Center where the event was taking place.

“Nowhere is the #BelieveAllWomen lie more widespread than on college campuses, which have perhaps the worst track record when it comes to properly adjudicating sexual assault claims,” Athey said.

College campuses have a striking amount of difficulties when it comes to dealing with these issues, and on a campus as politically active as AU, these conversations remain complicated.

“I’d like to see our conversations get a little more complicated

and nuanced while engaging in conversations within the community,” Callandrillo said, believing that the first step to tackling this issue is by confronting it externally.

This is an idea that has just recently begun nationwide because of the #MeToo movement.

“We are talking about issues that are much larger than this institution, but it is our responsibility to respond and figure out how we approach these issues,” Callandrillo said.

When approaching these issues, events such as these occurring on campus have caused students to believe that these issues are being denounced by the institution as a whole, as seen with the protestors chanting during Athey’s speech.

While some see the presence of speakers such as Athey to be harmful to AU’s environment, it is difficult to determine whether or not we can hinder free speech in this case. With an issue as complicated as sexual misconduct, tackling it as a college community raises many difficulties and questions.

“It can be hard to make clear connections to what’s working because there is no amount of assaults that’s acceptable, that’s zero. We’re not there,” Callandrillo said.

The future of combating sexual assault on AU’s campus has no definitive answer as of now, but faculty and community members work towards ensuring the safety and support of students.

“I don’t have control over humans and their behaviors, but I do have control over our resources and how we use them to support people who’ve experienced an assault. It is important to show that we put this issue front and center and that it matters to us,” Callandrillo said. ◼

Katherine Long is a freshman studying Journalism.

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AWOL MAGAZINE

$ $ AMERICAN UNIVER$ITY: THE STUDENT WEALTH GAP $ $ $ low-income minority students struggle to find their place in private universities.

STORY AND ART BY RABIA MUHAMMAD IN RECENT YEARS, PRIVATE

universities are increasing their enrollment of low income students. There are also more students of color on private campuses. And yet, the circumstances for low-income students have worsened.

These students now face additional challenges.

The American Enterprise Institute reported that the past two decades have shown us a steady increase from 15 percent to nearly 25 percent enrollment rates for low-income students pursuing a bachelor’s degree at 200 of America’s most selective universities.

However, higher enrollment rates do not erase the struggles faced by many low-income students.

Ammarah Rehman, a current senior at American University, said, “When I first got here, I never grew up with people with this sort of wealth. A lot of people have a privilege to say they are a student first and put their academics first, but I don’t have that privilege.”

Kati Haycock, president of the Education

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Trust, said in a press release, “Too many flagship institutions are literally turning their backs on academically qualified low-income and minority students in favor of the children of the elite.”

Many low-income minority students interviewed feel as though they do not receive the necessary help and support to succeed at elite institutions.

Samah Mohamed, a recent graduate of American University, said, “I’m a first generation college student... and both my parents didn’t go to college. I am Muslim, I am practicing, I am black, I am Sudanese and African-American… I always felt like I wasn’t American enough or qualified to be the American ideal.”

Still, Mohamed was driven to continue her education at American University, and acknowledges the many expectations for her to be “perfect.”

AEI also reports that the annual net tuition increase for low-income students has been only $1,358 compared to the $8,162 increase for high-income students. While there is a $7,000 difference in annual net

tuition between lower and higher income students, data surrounding information on low-income students is often incomplete, skewed, and does not reflect diverse experiences of all low-income students, according to the Brookings Institution.

Although wealthy private universities are increasing their enrollment of students in this demographic group, PBS found that many low-income students who are able to enroll in wealthy private universities graduate at far lower rates than their wealthy peers.

A study published by the Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Workforce found that 57 percent of low-income students who also work do not earn any credentials within six years.

Rehman expressed how, as a low-income student, she has faced difficulty with financial aid at university.

“The tuition increased almost $2,000 this year. I was billed the same amount freshman year living on campus as I am billed now,” said Rehman.

CAMPUS LIFE Rehman has foregone a meal plan and has moved off campus to stave off costs of living in D.C. and attending American University. She emailed the Office of Financial Aid asking if there were additional resources in the form of grants to counter this increase.“They were unhelpful,” she said.

come students, but wider for low-income minority students. The achievement gap demonstrates that low-income students are less likely to be successful academically than their peers. Half a century later, the achievement gap has not narrowed considerably for low income minority students.

Although Rehman says the service she receives from the Financial Aid Office is acceptable, they are unable to help her and students like her to combat tuition increase.

Students find themselves exploring their identities in college, but many face the added expectation of being model students and model representatives of the communities they identify with, despite their financial circumstances.

transfer student and I went to community college for my first two years in an effort to split the cost, and it still wasn’t really enough,” said Mohamed. “I actually had to take two semesters off at AU just to ask around my family and work more to make the money to come back.”

A second issue surrounding underrepresentation is miscommunication. Many low-income minority students find they cannot share their stories with school faculty or adequately take advantage of school resources. Many also face the additional obstacle of communicating to

“The tuition increased almost $2,000 this year.

I was billed the same amount freshman year living on campus as I am billed now,” said Rehman.

The Office of Financial Aid does not have any current concrete initiatives to help low-income students afford university tuition increases, but they do offer financial support through different grant programs.

An Institute for Higher Education Policy report states that academically-based aid is shifting away from students with the greatest financial need, and colleges are using institutional aid to compete for middle and upper-income students instead.

Most low-income students who also identify as minorities face additional obstacles when they must work against the inequalities they face as minorities.

Rehman said, “It definitely didn’t help being low-income, a woman of color, a Muslim. I felt like I was advocating for all these identities [with which they identify]” The Coleman Report, published by the United States Department of Commerce in 1966, showcased that the academic achievement gap is wide for low-in-

Opportunity Adrift, a publication of the Education Trust, revealed in 2010 that private institutions take great pride in marketing initiatives that aim to foster access and success for these students. It revealed that representation of minority students entering classes increased slightly, but low-income student of color representation has relatively declined.

Graduation rates are even more telling of unequal opportunity for low-income minority students.

The Brookings Institute report said that for all students enrolled in four-year colleges around the country, the graduation rate is approximately 59.6 percent in 2014.

At a closer look, white students graduate above the average at 63.2 percent while black students graduate at 40.9 percent and Hispanic students graduate at 53.5 percent.

Mohamed expressed that even when she has attempted to decrease her financial burden from tuition increases, she has experienced difficulty keeping pace.

“I’ve been working since I was 17 and I worked while I was at AU. I was also a

professors about possible assignment extensions or even what challenges students of this background are facing.

Rehman said she found it difficult to effectively communicate with her professors in the face of financial struggle simply because they would not understand her unique circumstances.

“A lot of the professors here come from an elitist background, and I don’t think they really even care. Even if they do care, they’re not relatable,” Rehman said. “[They] can’t even begin to understand what I’m going through. It’s almost not worth it… I have asked for extensions but I don’t go to them to talk about my life.”

However, Mohamed expressed that students may not feel comfortable asking for extensions on academic assignments.

“I was never comfortable asking for extensions ever, and I never actually asked for extensions, and I handled everything the way that I could, and it shows. There were times where I did not do well, and it’s clearly on me, but I wasn’t comfortable asking to extend a deadline,” said Mohamed.

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AWOL MAGAZINE Although school resources like health centers, gymnasiums, and wellness organizations exist, many low-income students experience difficulty finding sustainable support.

During the course of obtaining her degree, Mohamed felt she struggled particularly with utilizing campus resources that aim to support students in difficult backgrounds.

“I would have loved to speak to a therapist or counselor and actually, I did,” She said.

“But it ends when the semester ends, and you essentially end.”

Tuition increases, minority affiliations, and inadequate or unsustainable support systems create uncongenial environments for many low-income students in private universities.

However, the previously mentioned Georgetown University study found that most low-income students recognize the value in a private university. They see private education as a direct investment and path to lucrative networks and careers which are paths more accessible by their wealthier counterparts. “[American University is] private for a reason, and it’s exclusive for a reason, and costs more for a reason. I learned better, and I chose to go to this school, and it was actually the only school that had my major... I made this decision and I am paying for this decision,” said Mohamed. ◼

Rabia is a junior studying international studies.

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THE DISTRICT

COVER STORY

THE DISTRICT AT DAWN: LEGALIZING SEX WORK IN D.C. A spiritual successor to AWOL’s Issue 10 cover story, “The District After Dark: Keeping Sex Workers on the Street.”

IN 2017, D.C. COUNCILMEMBERS

at-large David Grosso and Robert C. White Jr. introduced the “Reducing Criminalization to Improve Public Safety and Health Amendment Act,” which would decriminalize and remove all criminal penalties for sex work in the D.C. This law would decriminalize the buying and selling of sex in both public and private spaces in the District. This contrasts the Nordic Model approach to sex work, which has been adopted in countries like Norway and Sweden and only criminalizes those who purchase sex. However, sex trafficking would remain illegal in the District and the law only covers consensual sex among adult sex workers and their clients.

An Urban Justice Center report found that over 80 percent of street-based sex workers experience violence during their work.

“Following an Amnesty International report addressing how criminalization was not the best way to address sex work, I was encouraged by activists in D.C. to work to identify and promote the best ways to address the issues surrounding commercial sex,” Councilmember Grosso said.

Thelaw would make D.C. the first city in the United States where sex work is decriminal-

ized, besides Nevada, which has approximately 21 legal brothels. The legislation also establishes a task force to evaluate the effects of removing criminal penalties for commercial sex and to recommend other efforts to improve public health and safety for sex workers.

Penelope Saunders, coordinator at Best Practices Policy Project. a national organization dedicated to supporting people in the sex trade and related communities, said, “The task force is a vital part of the legislation because for three years, it evaluates if the new laws have the desired impact such as reducing violence against those who engage in sex work.”

Best Practices Policy Project and other progressive organizations in D.C. gathered together to form the Sex Workers Advocacy Coalition to offer their support to Grosso and to help him develop this legislation. Councilmember Grosso collaborated with multiple sex worker advocacy organizations in the District to develop the legislation, including HIPS, ACLU-DC, and Whitman Walker Clinic, among others.

“The task force gives voice to the community,” Councilmember Grosso said. “We want to involve diverse voices, including active and retired sex workers and communities where sex

STORY BY TAYLOR SABOL ART BY CHLOE K. LI

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AWOL MAGAZINE work is traditionally practiced.”

The only politicians running for office who have formally opposed the bill in a questionnaire are current Council Chair Phil Mendelson, mayoral candidate James Butler, and former D.C. Superior Court Judge and Ward 1 candidate Lori Parker.

Mayor Muriel Bowser has not made a definitive statement on the decriminalization law.

In a questionnaire administered by the Gay and Lesbian Activists Alliance, Council Chair Mendelson explained his opposition to the bill. He wrote that “there is a great deal of collateral crime associated with commercial sex work” and therefore, “now is not the time” for full decriminalization of sex work.

Mendelson did not respond to a request for comment, as his committee has yet to review the legislation.

Proponents of the legislation argue that the current criminalization of sex work only promotes violence and sexual exploitation while harming vulnerable communities, due in part to stigma and discrimination.

A Sex Workers Advocacy Group report states that globally, sex workers have a 45 to 75 percent chance of experiencing sexual violence at some point in their careers and 32 to 55 percent chance of experiencing sexual violence in any given year.

Open Society Foundation also reports that criminalization of sex work has a greater negative impact on groups already facing discrimination, including communities of color, gay and trans people, people with disabilities, immigrants, and people with criminal convictions.

“Our society is made of institutionalized racism and bias,” Councilmember Grosso said. “Therefore, it is more likely that a person of color or a trans woman of color is arrested for commercial sex than a white individual.”

Many sex workers, when faced with violence and abuse during their line of work, neglect to turn to law enforcement due to fear of arrest or exploitation. An Alliance

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for a Safe & Diverse DC report states that in the District, one in five sex workers has been approached by police asking for sex.

Saunders said that police are often the perpetrators of abuses against sex workers. Where sex work is criminalized, police wield power over sex workers in the form of threats of arrest and public humiliation.

“Despite passing decriminalization laws, police may go on arresting people for other reasons like trespassing or continue to arrest people for commercial sex with little accountability,” she said.

Criminalization also makes it more difficult for sex workers to access non-judgemental health services. This is especially true for contraceptives, like condoms, and STD testing. Sex workers often fear arrest if they carry condoms or negotiate condom usage with their clients.

“People who need condoms and other health services are constantly faced with policing,” Saunders said. “This law helps sex workers talk easily about these services [with clients] and not be fearful of carrying condoms and other resources for their work.”

Many sex workers also avoid state institutions, including those that provide

health services, due to stigma and fear of arrest.

“This legislation can help sex workers take the precautions they need to protect their own health,” said Yvette Butler, director of policy and strategic partnerships at Amara Legal Center, which provides free legal services to individuals whose rights have been violated while involved in commercial sex.

A criminal record for sex work can also act as a barrier to government services and moving away from sex work for employment.

“People involved in commercial sex, either by coercion, choice, or necessity, are often vulnerable,” Butler said. “A criminal record from sex work only makes them more vulnerable because then they cannot access housing, employment, and other resources.”

THE DISTRICT

“Our society is made of institutionalized racism and bias,” Councilmember Grosso said. “Therefore, it is more likely that a person of color or a trans woman of color is arrested for commercial sex than a white individual.”

Many sex workers face issues surrounding housing, drug abuse and trauma.

Saunders explained that with the passage of this legislation, the resources that previously went towards the policing and criminal enforcement of anti-prostitution laws can go towards resources for social services for sex workers and related communities, including the trans community.

“Decriminalization is important because historically, the state has tried to control and regulate sex workers for the supposed benefit of society,” Saunders said.

“Therefore, sex workers reject the idea of government control and overregulation through legalization of sex work [and prefer decriminalization].”

Advocates for sex workers argue that decriminalization empowers sex workers to make decisions about their own work and ways of obtaining income without government regulations.

Saunders said, “The term decriminalization is more of a political stance. We want to end criminalization of people’s everyday lives.”

Opponents of the legislation worry

that it will promote sex trafficking and other human rights’ abuses against sex workers. However, the UNAIDS Guidance Note on HIV and Sex Work highlights sex worker organizations as best positioned to refer women and children who are victims of trafficking to appropriate services.

Councilmember Grosso discussed how decriminalization could help the city by identifying and partnering with sex workers to “keep an eye out” and combat crime in the sex worker industry, especially regarding sex trafficking and minor involvement.

“Society has tried to control sex workers at every level, and we need to be prepared for that,” Saunders said. “Decriminalizing sex work is not the end of the fight for sex workers’ rights; it’s the beginning.” ◼

Taylor Sabol is a senior studying Public Health.

“[At Amara], we view our role as a nuanced educational look at how decriminalization could affect our clients,” Butler said. “There can be a push for more engagement between sex workers’ rights and anti-trafficking organizations.”

Councilmember Grosso is planning to reintroduce the legislation at the beginning of the next legislative session and is continuing to build his support and elevate the conversation surrounding decriminalization. This bill will make the District a national example of how change could potentially come about for the lives of sex workers.

However, there is still more work to be done for the rights of sex workers in the District. Butler argued that more education is necessary to address assumptions and humanize the people involved in commercial sex.

FALL 2018 | 20

HELTER-SHELTER MOTEL LIVING FOR D.C.’S HOMELESS POPULATION D.C.’s homeless face tough conditions in government-provided housing.

STORY BY LANA GREEN | ART BY CHLOE K. LI

THE LAST TIME 8-YEAR-OLD Relisha Rudd was seen alive was March 2014. Rudd was living at District of Columbia General, a former hospital converted into a homeless family shelter, when Janitor Kahlil Tatum, posing as a doctor, kidnapped her. Authorities later found Tatum with a self-inflicted gunshot wound by the same gun that he used a few hours earlier to kill his wife.

Rudd is still missing and family members and authorities speculate that she is dead.

The D.C. General Homeless Shelter is known for its notoriously bad conditions including infestations of rodents, cockroaches, mold, and several sexual assault allegations against the staff. One of Mayor Muriel Bowser’s campaign promises was to demolish the infamous D.C. General and replace it with six smaller homeless shelters.

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Currently, only two shelters, The Kennedy Shelter in Ward 4 and The Horizon Shelter in Ward 7 are complete.

D.C. General is expected to be closed by the end of the year, but on October 11, 34 families remained in the shelter while the city continued demolition on sight. Families will end up either in rapid re-housing or motels intended as temporary shelters.

Despite general agreement that D.C. General needs to be demolished, Mayor Bowser is under scrutiny from several homeless organizations like Washington Legal Clinic for the Homeless, Empower DC, Bread for the City, and Washington Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights and Urban Affairs, for starting demolition on building nine, an abandoned building beside the main shelter, with families still inside. Homeless advocates also argue that the city is pushing families

THE DISTRICT out before replacement shelters are built, disregarding overcrowding in motels and setting families up for failure with rapid re-housing.

“The original commitment from the Mayor was not to close D.C. General down until the replacement shelters were ready so that we could be sure there was enough capacity for all the families in the system,” Amber Harding, a homeless advocate and attorney at The Washington Legal Clinic for the Homeless, said.

In August, seven D.C. Council members urged Bowser to postpone demolition after reports of high levels of lead 250 feet away from buildings with

over 100 families inside. Instead of halting demolition, the city required weekly lead and asbestos testing.

“I feel like it’s been rushed personally because the land is sold to developers and the city is all about making money,” Ward 7 Advisory Neighborhood Commission candidate, Jewel Stroman, said.

“I don’t think there’s really too much concern over lead exposure. We have lukewarm babies at the shelter, we have infants, and all this demolition work going on. It shouldn’t be going on. There’s babies there. But when the cameras come around, everyone from Mayor Bowser on down will talk about how much they care about these families.”

Stroman associated the demolition with other potential incentives. “They want to hurry and tear the shelter down, get those people out of there, so they can build these multi-million dollar condos or whatever and it has a lot to do with gentrification. That’s just my personal feeling,” Stroman said.

She did not think D.C.’s low-income population stood to benefit from the move, either.

“I don’t know who [the land] is going to go to, but I know where it won’t go.

It won’t go to those families who need it. It will not go to the low-income residents of this city,” Stroman said.

Families removed from D.C. General are currently living

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AWOL MAGAZINE in motels or D.C’s rapid re-housing.

According to a report by Washington Legal Clinic, D.C’s $31.6 million rapid re-housing program burdens low-income families and sets them up for failure.

“Except for Washington, no state relies more on rapid re-housing programs than the District, with rapid re-housing accounting for nearly one out of every five ‘beds’ in the homeless services system,” the report states.

The Clinic’s primary concern with the current system is that low-income families are expected to pay up to 40 percent of their income to housing and end up homeless when they can’t pay their rent, and many housing developments don’t fit families’ housing needs.

“It’s a program that isn’t really set up to support people the way they need to be supported in this frontal market, and sometimes people end up worse off after they’ve been through the program because they end up in debt to landlords or evictions on their record,” Attorney Amber Harding said.

“However types of consumer debt, because they have to pay such a high portion of their income in rent. They sometimes have really bad conditions in the apartments, and then, at the end of that time period, they’re often facing eviction.”

Harding said that most of the families that were moved out of DC General are concerned about rapid re-housing and conditions in motels.

The DC Department of Human Services, started its rapid re-housing program in 2012 which is designed to

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help families find and stay in housing with rental assistance and case managers. The argument against the program is that families can’t increase their income fast enough to pay for the rent, especially in an expensive city like D.C, and end up homeless or suffer at the will of landlords who care very little about their residents.

“A lot of the rapid re-housing families, they get mistreated by these slumlords and DHS does not hold these landlords accountable at all,” Stroman said. “They do whatever they want to do and still get there money at the end of the month and these families meanwhile have to suffer.”

Another concern is the current condition of motels housing homeless families. The District started housing homeless families in motels in the 1980s. A report from the DC Fiscal Policy Institute found that the city spends 16 million dollars on motel rooms for temporary housing.

According to Stroman, who was formerly homeless in 2016, motels often have mold, flooding, and rodent problems. She recalled an infant next door to her dying from an asthma attack triggered by what the residents think was exposure to mice and rodents.

dismissed after Stroman petitioned DHS and contacted the media, but DHS gave the woman a ten minute notice to vacate the Inn, said Stroman. After Stroman got in touch with the director of DHS, the victim was placed at the Holiday Inn. “It’s my belief, and it’s her belief, that all of this happened because she spoke up at that meeting with the director,” Stroman said.

Although motels are supposed to act as temporary housing for families, the turnover rate of social-service caseworkers is so high that families have lengthy stays in motels that don’t meet their needs.

“We need the city to do something, besides just use these motels as permanent placement because that’s not what they were ever set up for,” Stroman said. “There’s no reason, I understand that DC may have a shortage of housing or whatever, but why are people in motels for eight, nine, 10, 12, 14, 18 months. That’s crazy.”

Stroman said the city has been using hotels as permanent placement.

“That’s what they say when the cameras come around, but we know differently,” she said.

Additionally, Stroman said several families from the motels are not being provided food although motels are supposed to act as temporary shelters.

She also said there were incidences of motel security personnel abusing their power.

Resident Kelisha McDougald of Motel 6 on Georgia Ave. said, “That hotel was so awful and disgusting; it had so many mice and so many roaches, drugs, prostitution running rampant.

The thing was it was still operating as a motel and a shelter.”

She makes specific reference to a meeting in May where a woman reported that she had been raped by a guard at Days Inn. Two weeks later, the security officer arrested her on allegations of assault. The charge was

McDougald admitted she was no stranger to a mouse or two but that these conditions she was living under cause her anxiety to “go through the roof.”

THE DISTRICT “I had to stay up to guard my kids just to make sure no mice crawled in their belongings or in the bed with them.

Or any of the other activities going on in the hotel got around them,” McDougald said. “It got to the point when I started sleeping in the lobby to catch workers and DHS as soon as they came in to tell them about the rodent situation. And I was laughed off, I was dismissed.”

According to families trying to move from temporary motels into voucher housing or rapid re-housing programs, including Stroman and McDougald, case managers are rarely helpful, and the turnover rate is so high that families feel they have no guidance or relationship with their caseworker.

McDougald said that because case manager turnover is so high, families rarely get adequate housing. According to the Virginia Department of Social Services, the turnover rate for family service specialists was 60 percent in their first year.

“They have case managers; we call them case manglers, they have social workers. But a lot of caseworkers are just overworked, their caseloads are too heavy, and the turn around rate is so crazy,” Stroman said. “A lot of these case workers get burnt out quick, and they can’t deal with it so they quit or they go to another agency. In the meantime we have families that are not getting the services they’re supposed to get.”

Overcrowding in motels is also a concern. As the motels accept more residents, resources are likely to be minimal. D.C. spends approximately $3,000 on motel housing per family a month and most families stay in motels for several months or even years.

“Since families stopped being placed in D.C. General, which was last May, we’ve seen the census for the hotels increase by quite a bit. So we are seeing more and more families getting placed in those hotels that are all out on New York Avenue,” Harding said.

Melanie S. Hatter from the Homeless Children’s Playtime Project said that the conditions in motel housing are not ideal for children involved in the program.

In 2009, The Children’s Playtime Project started a program at D.C. General for a safe place to interact and play including a toddler, intermediate, and teen program. In January of 2017, they started a new program at the Quality Inn Hotel on New York Avenue NE after leaving D.C. General. They have limited space, and when they asked the Quality Inn for more space and the use of their ballroom, they asked them to pay $1,000 per week.

Children are often forced to stay in a room and struggle to stay occupied at motels during the day. Hatter expressed the struggles for homeless children but acknowledged the dire conditions of D.C General and the necessity of its demolition.

Despite criticism, Bowser’s first replacement shelter is a success with brand new interiors and an apartment building feel, and the number of homeless families dropped 19.4 percent. This year, Bowser’s administration secured $15.6 million for programs related to affordable housing.

The new budget also allocates “$10 million to increase the Home Purchase Assistance Program and Employer-Assisted Housing Program and $6.5 million for the Emergency Rental Assistance Program,” according to Street Sense.

Homeless advocates remain skeptical as Bowser pushes rapidly forward despite concerns of lead and discrepancies in her original plan for the closing of D.C General.

“These homeless families and these poor families do not have a seat at the table as far as when decisions are made, when laws are passed, and revelations are made,” Stroman said. “No one cares what these families have to say.” ◼ Lana Green is a freshman studying journalism and CLEG.

“The issue with the hotels is that it’s what we call “pop up playtime,” Hatter said. “We don’t have our own dedicated playroom- we have to basically come in, pull out all the toys from storage, set everything up, and have the kids come in and play. When they’re done we have to break everything down and pack it all away. We’re making it work, but it limits the kind of programming we can do, the kinds of toys that we can bring in,” she said.

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STEPS TO RECOVERY: THE OPIOID EPIDEMIC IN D.C. Combatting Opioid Abuse Amongst Teens and Young Adults in the DMV.

STORY BY LUCI RASCHER ART BY GILLIAN FERREIRA

25 | AWOL MAGAZINE

174 PEOPLE DIE EACH DAY from a heroin or opioid overdose, according to the latest preliminary data from the Center for Disease Control and Prevention. In the D.C., Maryland, and Virginia area particularly, heroin overdoses have spiked dramatically in recent years with increases of 27.9 percent in Virginia, 62.1 percent in Maryland, and 74.7 percent in D.C. from 2015 to 2016.

In October 2017, President Trump declared the opioid crisis a public health emergency. However, declaring a public health emergency does not equate to additional funding for opioid prevention programs, and the necessity for tangible and proactive addiction health care has never been more pertinent.

In 2017, 3.1 percent of adolescents and 7.3 percent of young adults aged 18 to 25 misused opioids, while an estimated 886,000 people, or less than one percent

of the American population, used heroin.

Young adults aged 18 to 25 have the highest usage rates of heroin nationally.

Regina LaBelle, a public affairs strategist in the D.C. area who specializes in the opioid epidemic, said, “the opioid epidemic began with prescription opioids and huge increases in prescription opioid prescribing due to a variety of factors including the marketing practices of the pharmaceutical industry and the need for pain treatment in the US.” The vast majority of deaths from opioid-related overdoses tend to be in the 50-59 year-old age range, with 60-69 year-olds in the second highest group.

“Increasing availability of illicit fentanyl, a powerful opioid that is often mixed with heroin, has driven much of the increase in opioid involved overdose deaths in the region,” says LaBelle.

This is a possible reason for the uptick in the amount of overdoses amongst lifelong heroin users. The introduction of fentanyl has had the most dramatic impact on heroin and fentanyl-related deaths in D.C. and Maryland especially.

Fentanyl is now the most lethal cause of overdose amongst all opioid users.

“Fentanyl is cheap, and cutting fentanyl into heroin is cost effective for traffickers,” said Labelle.

In 2016, fentanyl surpassed heroin and opioids as the greatest cause of lethal overdoses in Virginia and nearly matched the lethality of heroin alone in Maryland.

According to the D.C. Office of the Chief Medical Examiner, by 2016, the District’s rate of fatal narcotic overdoses matched the per capita death rate of Ohio, New Hampshire, and Pennsylvania, with only West Virginia remaining higher.

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AWOL MAGAZINE The Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration has identified several risk factors that put teens and young adults at an increased risk of heroin and opioid use. They include mental health disorders, high levels of pain or chronic pain, a prior history of drug or alcohol addiction, and a genetic predisposition for addiction.

“The longer a person takes opioids, the greater the risk for developing an opioid use disorder,” says Labelle.

Factors that can help to buffer against an increased likelihood of opioid misuse include having a long-acting opioid

The Truth Initiative, the national non-profit public health organization dedicated to eradicating tobacco usage, found that 73% of people who misused or were dependent on opioids in the past year also used tobacco in the past month.

Factors that increase one’s likelihood of heroin usage include personality characteristics such as cynicism or a high level of anger towards the self and others, early onset of tobacco and/or other drug usage, having been in jail or a detention center, increased access to heroin within one’s social network, and a history of abuse or depression.

The SUPPORT (Substance Use-Disorder Prevention that Promotes Opioid Recovery and Treatment for Patients and Communities) Act, passed this October, is helping to remedy that. The act passed several reforms to Medicare, Medicaid, and public health care to help combat the opioid crisis, including making the buprenorphine prescribing authority for physician assistants and nurse practitioners permanent. Waivered practitioners are now allowed to immediately start treating 100 patients at a time with buprenorphine, rather than the previous 30 patient cap, so long as they have board certification in addiction medicine or

“Unfortunately, treatment resources for young people are somewhat limited. We too often wait for someone to hit “rock bottom” until they get help, and as with any other chronic condition, early intervention is key,” said LaBelle. prescription, a lower dosage prescription, or only being prescribed Schedule III or IV opioids, having a greater perception of substance abuse risks, and community norms against prescription drug misuse.

According to LaBelle, “There is no one reason why an individual would use a substance. It could be to try something new or, in the case of prescription opioids, to deal with untreated pain. But heroin is seldom the first drug an individual will use.” According to the National Institute of Health’s National Institute on Drug Abuse, nearly 80 percent of Americans using heroin reported misusing prescription opioids prior to using heroin.

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Certain factors can place heroin users at a higher risk for overdose. These include being homeless, having a long history of injection drug use, using heroin in a public space, and decreases in the cost or availability of heroin.

“Another factor that plays into overdose rates is the lack of availability of evidence-based treatment,” said Labelle.

“The most effective treatment for opioid use disorder involves the use of one of three FDA approved medications, buprenorphine, methadone, or naltrexone.

Unfortunately, availability of treatment using these medications remains limited nationwide, and the DMV is no exception.”

addiction psychiatry or if the practitioner provides MAT in a qualified practice setting.

“One primary step all of us can take is to recognize that addiction is a disease, words matter, and we can save lives by carrying naloxone,” said Labelle.

Any individual in the DMV interested in learning how to obtain naloxone, which reverses opioid overdoses and is more commonly known as Narcan, can undergo a training course and authorization to carry naloxone in their state or di strict.

National campaigns like the Truth Initiative are taking the lead in proactive

THE DISTRICT awareness campaigns to mitigate the increase in opioid and heroin users. These campaigns are especially geared towards young people.

The Truth Initiative has found that there’s a significant knowledge gap about opioids and their risks amongst young people.

The organization also found that there is a great amount of desire amongst young people to be a part of the solution within their communities.

The Truth Initiative is working in conjunction with the Ad Council to use its recognition for impact. About 77 percent of Americans under 25 recognize the Truth brand and in the past twenty years of its existence, the Truth Tobacco Prevention Campaign has prevented an estimated one million youth and young adults from smoking. The Truth Initiative is hoping to have this same impact on the opioid epidemic.

Organizations in D.C. like Drug Free Youth, Sasha Bruce Youthwork, and Whitman-Walker Health aim to prevent opioid misuse and addiction. These organizations have programs in place specifically to mitigate opioid addiction rates amongst teens and young adults and provide addiction counseling services to those experiencing substance abuse disorder .

Drug Free Youth has four prevention centers around D.C., or one for every two Wards. The prevention centers work in the community to provide drug education. The organization, provided by the D.C. Department of Behavioral Health, encourages an open dialogue surrounding drugs and alcohol between teens and their parents or caregivers.

The Department of Behavioral Health’s “More Harmful Than You Think” campaign is aimed at educating young people about the dangers of prescription pill and opioid misuse as a proactive step towards prevention in the community.

Sasha Bruce Youthwork started in D.C. in 1974 as a volunteer network aimed at counseling homeless youth. It is now one of the largest providers of services for homeless youth, including helping young

people find safe homes, gain access to physical and mental health care, and family-strengthening programs. As homeless teens and young adults are at an increased risk of drug addiction and overdose, Sasha Bruce is helping to reduce this risk.

Whitman-Walker offers community-based health services, with special expertise on the LGBTQ and HIV-positive community, another especially at risk group for drug addiction in the DMV. Whitman-Walker offers individual and group psychotherapy for addiction, with an emphasis on identification and modification of counterproductive thinking patterns.

Medication-assisted treatment is a leading strategy in promoting full recovery from opioid addiction. According to the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, medication-assisted treatment is the use of medications, in combination with counseling and behavioral therapies, to provide a “whole-patient” approach to the treatment of substance use disorders.

Prescription medications used in Medication-Assisted Treatment help to normalize brain chemistry, block the euphoric effects of alcohol and opioids, relieve physiological cravings, and normalize body functions without the negative effects of the abused drug or severe withdrawal symptoms.

those seeking treatment for addiction stems from misconceptions about substituting one drug for another and a lack of training in MAT for physicians. Discrimination against MAT patients is also a factor, though there are state and federal laws that prohibit it.

“Unfortunately, treatment resources for young people are somewhat limited. We too often wait for someone to hit “rock bottom” until they get help, and as with any other chronic condition, early intervention is key,” said LaBelle.

To help end the opioid epidemic, students and residents of the DMV can “recognize that addiction is a disease not a moral failing. And that it can happen to anyone, in any family. The words we use to describe substance use disorders, and the disease of addiction, can result in punitive responses.”

According to LaBelle, “Addiction is a public health issue and substance use disorders can be prevented, treated, and people can and do recover.” ◼ This article is dedicated to my loved ones who have passed.

Luci Rascher is a sophomore studying International Studies.

SAMHSA has found Medication-Assisted Treatment to improve patient survival, increase retention in treatment, decrease illicit opiate use and other criminal activity among people with substance use disorders, and increase patients’ ability to gain and maintain employment. MAT can also contribute to a lowered risk of contracting HIV or hepatitis C by reducing the potential for relapse.

The use of Medication-Assisted Therapy in heroin admissions with treatment plans was only at 28 percent as of 2010 according to SAMHSA’s Treatment Episode Data Set 2002-2010. The apprehension for health care providers to adopt MAT as an addiction treatment strategy and the lack of availability of MAT for

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PHOTO ESSAY

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ce nden . e p e ind at g he nd my n u i o f r I The deserts o e . l t e wel powerfu f the West have a pre in the s nd th s sence in their absence. T tion is viscerally a a y l o s e d a r i e , h D s . t i n o dt there, stood barefoot in its ll plai dunes, and in that way, I still, even now, feel my being connecte empty t sti s i s o , r c s a Nights in the bitt d d in er cold. T as I sound of the w t stan h e stones and the sands. T e i h T t . n u s s e i h t f o t h g a i l e t i h h e w n e sight of dust d om evils on the horizon ays, barr ar fr F . . It is a surreal place. It is an entity in its own right. Open as it l now d k n i h I e bears the mark b s s ,a s of other lives lived wi h ings left it then ograph thin its bounds. Abandoned towns and doors left ajar. T w e n k I as am now, in the capital ci phot ty, I know that I will never be estranged from the West because I know it now it in these

“A DUNE’S EDGE”

“BENEATH THE DUNE”

“MEN AND SAND”

“REST IN RHYOLITE”

“UNTITLED 2”

“UNTITLED 3”

“SMALL MEN”

AWOL MAGAZINE

SEOUL 서울 SEARCHING 수색 K-POP’S CULTURAL DIVIDE A CONVERSATION ABOUT K-POP’S APPROPRIATIONS FROM BLACK CULTURE.

K-POP, THE KOREAN POPULAR music genre stereotyped as nothing more than makeup-clad boys, crazy music videos and the “Gangnam Style” dance, has become a sensation around the globe.

K-pop, though, is a whole lot more than its stereotypes — it is an entire music industry, with all of its own inner complexities and issues.

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The Gangnam Style fad has died, but this genre’s international popularity has risen astronomically in recent years. According to Entertainment Tonight, the megastar K-pop boy band BTS just broke Taylor Swift’s record for the most viewed music video within 24 hours. The attendance this year at Korea Convention (KCON) in Los Angeles alone was a record breaking 94,000 people, as reported by Broadway World.

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STORY BY GRACE VITAGLIONE

ART BY BEN BLACK

While K-pop refers to Korean popular culture in general, the music itself can have different definitions depending on each person’s perspective.

Jisung Kim, a first-year student at American University, called it “an approach to American music with a Korean twist.”

Lauren Seals, a senior at AU and president of the AU K-District Dance Team, add-

CULTURE ed “[K-pop has] a Motown perspective brought into it, because if you look back into the history of Motown, it was very curated. So I think K-pop takes that same popular method and really makes it work.”

The true beginning of K-pop actually lies in the 1987 South Korean presidential elections.

Prior to the 1987 elections, South Korean media was heavily controlled by the state.

Most music people listened to was determined by winners of weekly musical talent shows on one of the two broadcasting networks: Korean Broadcasting Systems (KBS) and Munhwa Broadcasting Corporation (MBC).

The music was also tightly controlled and often banned for any content that was deemed inappropriate. Independent music-making was practically unheard of.

However, the 1987 election changed all that because it became the election that truly democratized South Korea.

Entertainment content, like music, was no longer so restrained, and South Koreans

had the opportunity to listen to American music for the first time. This led to what many credit as the first K-pop song: “Nan Arayo (I Know).”

The hip hop-inspired single was performed for the first time on April 11, 1992 at a talent show by Seo Taji and the Boys, the first group of its kind in South Korea.

Their performance that day gained them the lowest score of the evening, but 17 weeks at the top of the charts and a record that lasted for fifteen years.

Many other artists followed quickly in their footsteps, chasing the success the group had acquired with their Western, hip-hop style music that was sung in Korean and performed with highly choreographed dances.

K-pop companies then started stepping onto the scene for the first time, with the development of the “the big three”-- the three largest and most successful K-pop companies that still dominate much of the market today.

One of the big three, SM Entertainment, brought South Korea H.O.T., or High five Of Teenagers — the first exemplification of an idol group. The five-member boy group had all the major characteristics of today’s idol groups: a combination of singing, dancing and rapping with an emphasis on style, looks, and personality.

That first idol group also set the standard for the genre’s emphasis on machine-like perfection, a characteristic that attracted many fans but also led to a harmful culture of placing the idols’ wellbeing at a lower priority. As a result, many K-pop fans are the first to point out problems with the industry, since those issues center around how idols are affected.

Seals went in more depth when asked specifically about problems in the industry: “Notice how people say the K-pop industry, because it’s very factory-run. There’s no real care for the well-being of the idol, and the fact that they just want them to churn out music and produce and release and promote—that’s not sustainable.”

Even though K-pop fans are often the ones

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AWOL MAGAZINE to call for better treatment of the idols, the fans’ own mindsets often become part of the problem. Much of this is due to the capitalist nature of the industry and how it runs on those problematic mindsets, Seals said.

“The expectations that idols are your property is one of the biggest issues that I still struggle with,” Seals said. “Because if the fans put in money, they think ‘I own you.’ So I think one of the biggest issues I have with the industry is the entitlement fans feel with the idols.”

taking [rap] and turning it into bite-sized little soundbites,” Maria Freedman, a firstyear student at AU, said. “It’s like a costume. They’re putting on this persona, and a lot of them don’t get what that means, like why that persona was the culture around rap music.”

“That was one of the reasons I took a break from K-pop for a little bit,” Seals said “There have been cases where I just don’t listen to groups anymore because the scandal was so bad that it hurt me on a personal level, being a black person, where I was like—you know what, I can deal without

ing, they’re just doing it,” Kim said.

A lot of fans say the same; many South Koreans don’t know the implications behind these kinds of actions.

“My opinion on appropriation and K-pop at first was that they don’t really know better because there aren’t a lot of Americans there, but that’s not true,” Seals said. “Especially with globalization of social media, there’s no excuse at this point.”

There is also the issue of international fans appropriating Korean culture. This raises

“In the industry, they’ve really been trying to appropriate black music and rap music and things like that. And I think they don’t know that they are…but without knowing, they’re just doing it,” Kim said.

International discussions on K-pop often deal with cultural appropriation. K-pop began from a hip-hop inspired song and most songs feature rap, even if they’re not considered “hip-hop music.”

Because black hip-hop artists created rapping, some consider this to be appropriation.

Many K-pop artists will also wear stereotypically hip hop clothing or act in a certain fashion because of how they perceive hip hop culture. G-Dragon, a prominent member of the very popular boy group Big Bang, wore dreads in his solo music video “One of A Kind,” and there have been some cases of other idols donning blackface, such as when the girl group Mamamoo painted their faces with brown paint in an on-stage parody of Bruno Mars’s “Uptown Funk” song.

“It’s a problem within Korea that they’re

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their music. Overall, it’s just….something that can’t be avoided.”.

The American perspective makes appropriation in Korea difficult to look at, according to Elizabeth Anderson, a sophomore at AU and part of the K-District Dance Team.

“As far as the dreads and the grills go, there seems to be a different perception of racism in Korean culture,” Anderson said.

“And I don’t want to speak for it, because I’m not Korean and I’m a white American, so I see it through a lens. From what I’ve seen, it’s not really seen as appropriation in Korea. It’s just seen as a style or trend.”

Jisung, who is Korean American and who grew up in America, but lived in Korea from 2013 to 2015, has been able to see the perspectives of both cultures.

“In the industry, they’ve really been trying to appropriate black music and rap music and things like that. And I think they don’t know that they are…but without know-

questions around where to draw the line when it comes to appreciating versus appropriating Korean culture.

One example of this is the K-pop group “EXP Edition.” This is the first K-pop group that has white members—in fact, three of the four members are white (one is half Japanese and half German). They sing in Korean, live in Korea and market themselves as K-pop idols.

When asked about EXP Edition, Minkyu Sung, a first-year at American who was born and raised in South Korea, said K-pop is getting more diverse.

It’s true that more and more K-pop idols are coming from countries other than South Korea, with one example being the popular boy group GOT7, who include Chinese-American, Chinese, and Thai members. Traditionally, idols have been either been from an Asian country or had Asian ancestry.

“There are members of groups from like

CULTURE Taiwan and Thailand, but they’re still Asian so it’s more normal. Still, as a listener of K-pop it can be weird to listen to a white K-pop group, ” Sung continued.

cringy koreaboos.” The consequence of this has been a general perception that all K-pop fans are like that, which is now a common stereotype.

“America has a legacy of orientalism and fetishizing East Asian women and dehumanizing Asian men, and I think that’s where the sour taste in everyone’s mouth comes from,” Seals said “I think that’s where the fury of the fandoms comes from, where it’s like, America has done this, so why do you need to have your white hands on something that is produced from South Korea?”

The term “Koreaboo” is only really used by international people to point fingers at other international fans, which begs the question of whether Koreaboos are seen as a real problem by native Koreans.

Freedman said the members of EXP Edition are “Koreaboos,” which is a familiar term to many in the international K-pop fandom.

“Koreaboos only take the K-pop and K-drama parts, the parts they like about K-pop culture and claim it as their own… but the parts they take are only the parts that are prepackaged to be acceptable,” Freedman said “There’s so much more to Korean culture and Korea itself that they are just so ignorant of and don’t even consider.”

Since the rise of K-pop internationally, the term “Koreaboo” has become popularized as some fans have been accused of fetishizing Korean culture, such as on the Tumblr page “Koreaboo Stories,” where anonymous users post stories about people they deem to be koreaboos. This is exemplified in one anonymous user’s post, where they stated, “A lot of my school mates are getting into Kpop/Kdrama and even into Korean Culture just because it’s a fad and it pisses me off because they’re

“I like to share the culture of Korea, but…

Korean culture is very broad, and K-pop is just a tiny part. So when people like K-pop but aren’t understanding of the whole Korean culture, that’s when it’s not as good,” Sung said.

Kim was more concise in his opinion of Western fans in general: “I don’t really think it’s cultural appropriation, I think it’s just more of like an appreciation rather than appropriation.”

Beyond individual joy, some are still hopeful for larger positive consequences of the spread of K-pop, beginning with the possibility of changing how East Asians are represented in Western media.

“I’ve definitely noticed a stereotype with Asian men being small and just there for comedic purposes, as well as seeing Asian women as submissive or sexually fluid.

Also, I would like to see a lot more Asian American acceptance in the music industry,” Seals said.

Some argue that K-pop could have a large role in changing these stereotypes, especially because of the genre’s emphasis on modernization and breaking old traditions.

“People around the world think that East Asians are really quiet and respectful of their elders, but we’re not all like that. And K-pop is definitely changing perceptions, because...they are showing that they are not the typical Asians people think of,” Sung said.

Seals, while less sure about the role of K-pop, still could see the possibility of change when asked if K-pop could change those perceptions.

“In a very small way, K-pop is a slice of a lot of different Western and Eastern influences, and it definitely doesn’t represent Eastern Asia at all. I think it just helps with the ideas. With K-pop one of the selling points is its sexy concepts, which has helped out in that it shows that Asian men can be sexy,” she said.

The K-pop industry is certainly more complex than many may think, with appropriation, globalization, and modernization all rolled into one booming music genre. For many people looking at this industry from the outside, this can all seem pretty overwhelming.

To new fans, Freedman advised, “I feel like there’s no right or wrong way to get into K-pop. You might cry about not being able to go to those concerts, but I feel like K-pop kind of speaks for itself.” ◼

Grace Vitaglione is a freshman studying Journalism.

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“HERE IN MY GARAGE...” false promises from “web influencers”

internet “mentors” use misleading language and imagery to gain followers

STORY BY ALEC SCHEMMEL ART BY CHLOE LI AND BEN BLACK

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IN 2017 DIGITAL ADVERTISING revenue surpassed television, broadcast, and cable advertising combined. With the increased potential to earn money online, digital advertising has produced a lot of hype, therefore intensifying the interest of others to get involved.

McKinlay spent years buying into various influencer programs with extremely unsatisfactory results. He said that influencers themselves know that their offers, be it a course or a tool of some sort, are not as good as they are trying to lead hopeful candidates to believe.

Digital marketing advertisers, or ‘Wealth influencers’, use a bevy of unethical marketing practices, including bogus ads, fake followers, and fraud, to seek out dupable web browsers and brands also attempting to grab a piece of this digital marketing pie.

What influencers’ pitch may have worked for them to create success, but it doesn’t necessarily mean it will also help someone else achieve the same.

“They’re basically selling people the idea of being successful, but the only reason that these people are successful is because there’s a lot of people who will come together and try to understand this,” Dr. Ben Wright, a professor in the Marketing Department at American University’s Kogod School of Business, said.

In 2015, an Australian construction worker named Tim McKinlay left his job to enter the space of making money online himself.

“I grew to really dislike the daily grind, so I decided that I was going to find a way to earn money online somehow,” McKinlay said.

It was this motivation for a career change that led an inexperienced McKinlay into the waiting arms of digital marketing influencers.

“I think it’s kind of exploiting a specific segment of the market of individuals who maybe aren’t happy with their job, or maybe want to reach that level of fame,” Wright said.

People who are unhappy with their job can become an easy target for online wealth influencers offering them a pitch that is too good to be true. They claim to have all the answers needed to make money online, or some secret formula to get you there. However, it only takes a quick YouTube search of “Make Enough Money Online to Quit Your Job” for anyone to find an endless list of online marketers all claiming the same thing.

“I don’t think there’s any research that shows that [influencers] are actually successful in doing that,” Wright said. “It doesn’t lead to more successful entrepreneurs I don’t think. I mean, I don’t know how they would measure that.”

These influencers have created complex ‘funnels’ that are a series of steps meant to compel an initial action. Funnels create awareness and interest around a brand that builds an audience for them to sell their products to. Commonly, something free is offered to coax Internet users into their community - something known as the foot-in-the-door technique. This is where their sales originate from. It becomes a numbers game to obtain the most followers in order to entice high-paying advertisers wishing to get in front of wide, and sometimes targeted, audiences.

In the business of digital marketing web traffic is money that influencers can coax paying brands with. This can result in deceptive practices meant to leverage influence into revenue. The few influencers who actually are popular stay relevant and profitable by continually producing content that keeps them that way.

“These people get a following and they just grow it because they kind of exploit all these different platforms, like podcasts, like YouTube, like webinars, like live events, that’s where they make their money,” Wright said. “They end up charging people, or there’s paywalls involved, or they get advertisers to come in.”

Simple pageviews can translate into advertising revenue for a publisher, or at least compound their followership and prove to brands they own the influence they claim. This has lead to a clickbait culture,

especially among digital marketing influencers using their ostensible images of success.

“They all seemed to be the same,” McKinlay said. “They tell you what you want to hear, so you buy hoping this is the one.

This space is just so full of scams it is hard to believe.”

“I think that the barriers [of] entry are lower today for someone to develop this kind of skill-set and develop this personality and popularity,” Wright said. “I haven’t seen anything that shows there’s a certain blueprint to lead to it. Think about viral marketing in general with digital marketing, it’s a lot of dumb luck, there’s not really a blueprint to get a video to go viral.”

In any case, added McKinlay, regardless of the sales strategy it’s a matter of whether the person pitching is transparent about their service, and whether they provide their audience with value.

McKinlay now owns affiliateunguru.com and several other niche sites devoted to making money online.

“It took me just under two years of working my butt off to reach a full-time income,” McKinlay said. “It was really a case of finding something that actually worked and that I could build a business with.”

Indeed, there are some services or products offered by these influencers that can be helpful to an eager, tech savvy twenty-something looking to make a little extra money.

“On one hand, there is nothing wrong with pitching a good product that the person will find valuable,” McKinlay said “Assuming that the ‘free stuff ’ is of a high value, the offer is legitimate and full of value, and the marketing itself is ethical.”

“On the other hand, when that ‘free offer’ contains little or no value, and the products that are pitched contain little to no value, and the marketing itself is unethical, then it is a problem,” McKinlay said. “And unfortunately, this is a lot more common within the ‘make money online’ world.”

FALL 2018 | 40

AWOL MAGAZINE “Anybody can try and get a following going,” Wright said. “I don’t really know that their skill is linked to much other than crowdsourcing and getting people interested in what they’re talking about. I think that, maybe, is what they’re selling.”

Tai Lopez is one of the original and most infamous influence marketers to have hit the scene. Opinions about him vary widely depending upon who you believe but he has made a lot of noise in the digital advertising space.

Lopez was a college dropout, but he has been in the wealth management business since the early 2000s, according to his LinkedIn profile. In 2008, he became the owner of one of the world’s largest online dating companies, Elite Global Dating LLC. This is where stuff starts to get a little funky. Tai’s company gained a horrible reputation for using misleading tactics for nefarious reasons and also received complaints about his company through the Better Business Bureau.

Enter the “Nobody to Somebody Theorem” an idea about how random people, like Lopez, gain their fame and following.

A product of internet bloggers, this theory says that a “nobody” creates compelling content, such as a tour through a mansion, to portray themselves as a “somebody,” to eventually earn the façade that they are indeed important and deserve your attention.

Lopez, for example, features fancy sports cars, enormous mansions, and other extravagant items to give the impression that he is indeed “living the good life” as he calls it. In addition to his lavish lifestyle he also boasts about various levels of life and business experience, which according to his record, may raise some eyebrows.

A video set inside “his” garage, featuring a Lamborghini and an entire wall of books that Lopez claims to have read, was one of his original and most popular advertisements.

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“Here in my garage - just bought this new Lamborghini,” Lopez said in the opening of his video. “It’s fun to drive up here in the Hollywood Hills. But you know what I like a lot more than materialistic things?

Knowledge. In fact, I’m a lot more proud of these seven new bookshelves I had to get installed to hold 2,000 new books that I bought.”

However, marketing expert Neil Patel said during an episode of his Marketing School podcast “I’ve been to his home, I’ve seen a lot of the stuff, you know he’ll talk about cars, he’ll tell you he leases them.” He was also quoted having said during the same episode “I was at his house and we were shooting a video and there was all this cash on a table and it was fake cash, and [Tai] even tells people, ‘Yeah, its fake cash.

I don’t want real cash because then someone is going to rob me’.”

Often influence marketers flaunt their phony success stories as a means of ‘proof ’ that what they are selling you is the answer you’ve been searching for. However, their solution may not even be the method for their own success, said McKinlay, and in fact the truth of how they got there is often an entirely different story.

Influencers function to grab the attention of Internet users with promises of success, but the key, said McKinlay, is to look past this superficial image and ask yourself if it seems too good to be true. McKinlay knows personally that in the world of online money there is no such thing as quick and easy success, and anyone who pitches that is a sham.

While Lopez does not appear to be a scammer his noticeably false claims are hard to ignore. With a quick google search it’s

CULTURE from the thousands of followers who became drawn in by his image of success and happiness.

Oyefeso was sentenced to two and a half years in prison for driving over a creditor who had loaned him money to purchase a Land Rover.

“He makes a number of claims about his wealth, but I have seen no evidence of this,” said Oyefeso’s defense counsel in court, according to dailymail.uk.

Elijah was hardly the motivated young man he portrayed himself to be. In fact, Oyefeso’s business model, or message, was practically nonexistent, according to several bloggers from a forum at BinaryOptions.net.

Innovation is the introduction of something new. Nothing “wealth influencers” are peddling online is innovative; everyone is just teaching a different way to tie a shoe. If gaining popularity and earning viewership was as simple as they portrayed it to be, then the advertising market that makes all of these shenanigans even worth it wouldn’t exist in the first place.

easy to find a long list of people alleging inappropriate business practices on Lopez’s dating sites. Ultimately, this may or may not be true, but for someone pitching their success as a brand, these complaints fly in the face of their main selling point.

“Most of the articles I’ve seen more recently are taking down the credibility of these people,” said Wright.

There are also influencers with more obviously deceptive reputations than Tai Lopez. Elijah Oyefeso, a young 20-year-old Nigerian-born UK trader and self-proclaimed millionaire, enjoyed flaunting his luxury automobiles on social media much like Lopez until he got arrested in 2017.

Oyefeso gained a huge social media fan base in the UK parading his ostensible wealth and knowledge of trading in the stock market. His scheme is much the same as the rest, earning commission

“[They’re] making money by selling out venues at universities, cities, and convention centers by trying to use this entrepreneurial mindset,” Wright said. “My guess would be that’s where they make a lot of their money.”

According to Wright, there’s a difference between being a brand ambassador, someone not working for a company but basically showing off the functionality or usefulness of some product, versus someone who’s just trying to grow a following.

In the end, they are basically just disseminating information for the sake of disseminating it, he says.

“I think a lot of it’s linked to they think it’s almost a fast track to celebrity and fame,” said Wright. ◼

Alec Schemmel is a junior studying journalism.

“From my perspective as an investor, if I had a nickel for everybody in my office who said ‘I have a great idea, give me money’ I’d be rich because the answer is an idea means nothing. Creativity is great, but that’s not an innovation,” Jonathan Aberman said during a social media event in Fairfax, VA. Aberman is the founder of an innovation consulting and venture capitalist business, Amplifier Ventures, and hosts an entrepreneurial podcast “What’s Working in Washington”.

Nonetheless, over time Tai Lopez has been able to leverage his “somebody” status into success selling his program, “The 67 Steps,” and continuing the growth of his brand. People who have had a negative experience with something usually have more incentive to speak up about it, and there could be some insightful parts of Lopez’s program. However, the experience of these “influencers” is not in business, or in happiness -- it’s in generating a buzz and earning clicks.

FALL 2018 | 42

GHOST STORIES THE PARKER FAMILY MURDER Clarksdale, Mississippi’s infamous true story STORY BY EMMA HERBST PHOTOS BY SHANE MATHEU RYDEN

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EVERY SMALL TOWN has a ghost. For many, this ghost manifests itself as an urban legend--a hook-handed man, an escaped mental patient, the local Boo Radley. But the ghost that haunts rural Clarksdale, Mississippi has a different name. Clarksdale’s ghost haunts a charred plot of land at the end of a driveway, circumvented by a backwoods highway, fifteen minutes from the nearest town, five from the nearest neighbor.

Highway 322 is sandwiched between sprawling bushels of cotton, Mississippi’s cash crop, occasionally alternating between paved asphalt and loosely adhered gravel. The highway extends its reach for miles upon miles of nondescript cropland-- the passing cotton gins being the only indicator of the change of location.

Yet, on this indeterminate highway, tucked into the northwestern corner of Mississippi, lies a patch of permanently blackened, untilled land-- an unmarked gravestone and scorched reminder of Quitman County’s heinous claim to notoriety. The now-empty lot stands in place of what was once the sight of rural Mississippi’s display of grandeur: a two-story country home, housing a happy family of four, coupled with a red Chevrolet Silverado pickup truck.

But rather than housing a lively household, the empty lot on Highway 322 lives in sinister infamy as the site of a gruesome quadruple homicide. And lingering at

the back of that now empty lot sits a man named Anthony Carr-- the Clarksdale ghost who’s been rotting on Mississippi’s death row for the past 28 years.

According to the Old Farmer’s Almanac, the winter of 1990 was an unequivocally hot one with the highs being in the upper sixties, the lows just grazing the fifties. On the night of February 2nd at around 9:15 pm, Carl Parker aged 58, his wife Bobbie Jo aged 46, and their two children Greggory, 12, and Charlotte, 9, piled into their car following a Friday night service at the Riverside Baptist Church and proceeded towards their rural Quitman County home just off Highway 322, according to caselaw.com.

Approximately three hours later at around 11:00 p.m. that night, while driving east on that same highway, Billy King arrived as sheets of rain pummeled his windshield. As his vehicle approached the now infamous driveway that dog legged into the Parker residence, King’s body became enveloped in heat. Suddenly the sixty-five-degree warm winter air seemed to pale in comparison, as Carl Parker’s stolen red Silverado pickup truck sped off into the highway’s abyssal frontier.

The fire burned for four and a half more hours, and while the bodies of Carl and the two children was retrieved by firemen within their first hour on the scene, Bobbie Jo’s body, that was found in the southwest wing, sat in the house for another three

hours and, by the time it was recovered, was burned beyond all DNA recognition.

To this day, the body that rests under Bobbie Jo Parker’s headstone is only assumed circumstantially to be hers.

Fifteen miles away awoke Clarksdale resident Eddie Lee Sprawls to the sound of a car door slamming-- the door of a red Silverado pickup truck. Situated in between two abandoned houses sat Carl Parker’s stolen vehicle; its bed filled will furniture, appliances, and valuables, its driver’s and passenger’s seats filled with two unidentified black men. And just as Sprawls wiped the sleep from his eyes and dialed 9-1-1, the two men, who would later be identified as Anthony Carr and his accomplice Richard Simon, fled into the night towards Highway 61, not to be seen until morning.

According to local legend, the killings had been the product of a robbery gone wrong-- that the Parkers had become victim to one of the most grisly homicides in Southern history simply because they were home.

The prosecution had a different idea. In their eleven day dissection of the case, DA Laurence Mellen detailed Carr and Simon’s premeditated intent to kill the family of four, sexually abuse nine-year-old Charlotte, and torch their residence in addition to burglarizing the home. The family had all been shot by both a .32 Winchester rifle and .38 revolver, and Mellen placed Carr’s hand behind the triggers. The prosecution had a clear case-- a well respect-

ed, church-going family of four murdered in their home by two, African American vagrants from West Memphis. However, looming over the prosecutions impending success was their first misstep in the form of a testimony by a man named Anthony Washington, Carr’s cellmate.

Washington came as a last-minute witness enlisted by the prosecution claiming that, while awaiting his trial, Carr, after being administered a blood test, asked, “if they could tell if [I] raped that little girl?”

According to the “Statement of Facts” excerpt from Carr’s trial, Washington, who had been reading up on the case for the past week, then asked him to elaborate, eliciting, “We had a ball” from Carr as he rose his fingers to his head, mimicking a gun. Washington’s statement was a hit, sufficing as a clear admission of guilt from the party on trial. The jury sentenced Carr to death in less than a day.

In the fourteenth century, a man named William of Ockham authored the phrase, “lex parsimoniae ” or the law of briefness — Occam’s Razor — stating that the simplest answer is often the right one.

In the case of the Parker quadruple homicide, the simplest answer states that on February 2nd, 1990, Anthony Carr and Robert Simon murdered, raped, arsonized, and burglarized a family they didn’t know. But what happens when the simplest answer starts to crumble-- what happens when the simplest answer becomes the most convoluted?

In 2004, Anthony Carr filed for post-conviction relief through the Mississippi Supreme Court citing thirty explicit examples of how his case had been mishandled.

In it, Carr’s legal team attached the transcript to a testimony of Anthony Washington’s stating that “All [he knew] when [he] testified for that capital murder case was that the State was going to work something out with [his] case.”

Washington goes on to state that while he didn’t know how much time he was going to get off in exchange for testifying against Carr, he had knowingly testified with the intent of getting a reward.

A 2017 report conducted by The University of Michigan’s Law School, in tandem with the National Registry of Exonerations, stated that, in death row cases involving African American defendants, state-induced perjury was the third most common reason for false convictions.

Washington, having never received his shortened sentence, has since retracted his statements-- the only concrete piece of evidence placing Carr as anything other than Simon’s co-conspirator.

However, the leading cause of false death row convictions falls under the umbrella of what’s referred to as a “Brady Violation,” or the obstruction of evidence that could potentially sway a case in either direction.

It’s a concept that, due to the vagueness of what actually qualifies as being able to “sway a case”, has been subject to great controversy depending on the way in which it’s ruled-- whether it be for convicting innocent parties or setting free rightful criminals. In the case of Carr and his 2004 post-conviction relief request, he claimed that the state had knowingly excluded testimonies that would have potentially swayed the length of his sentence. In

it, he cites a completely blacked-out statement from Robert Simon given on the morning of February 5th in which Simon implies that he had been paid off by a third party to kill the Parkers.

Simon stated that “[Redacted] told [him] that he needed a job done and drew [him] a diagram of the Parker house․ [He] asked them why he wanted them killed, and they told [him], said ‘It was none of [his] business.’ ” Simon went on further to state that he would be paid off a considerable amount of money for his services. In a sworn affidavit from 2001, the Mississippi Highway Patrol Criminal Investigation Unit stated that the defense, at no point during the trial, even knew this statement existed-- that it had been practically buried by the prosecution.

Because of the wide berth of potential ground covered by claiming a Brady violation, a four-pronged vetting process was implemented, raising the question of if the evidence had been disclosed to the defence, “would it have created a reasonable probability that the outcome of the proceedings would have been different?”

ulation of 10,000, 7,000 of which were black.

Zero — the number of black jurors assigned to Carr and Simon, despite the fact that according to the U.S. Census Bureau census, Quitman County’s population was 70% African American. I In spite of the landmark Supreme Court Case Batson v. Kentucky, credited with ending racially-motivated jury nullification, dismissing a jury member on the basis of race is still remarkably easy and goes largely unpunished, the New Yorker reported that this made Batson look spineless shell of a Supreme Court precedent.

In a 1996 Court of Appeals, Illinois Judge James Flannery referred to the Batson process as a “charade,” going as far as to list the unjust dismissals of potential black jurors that he has had to deem as “race-neutral” during his term as a judge.

In other words, the court was ruling on whether or not the burying of crucial evidence even mattered. But on that same day in 2004, the state of Mississippi ruled that, even if Carr’s original defense had had the redacted and buried information, the outcome of his case would have remained unwavering, denying Carr’s relief on all counts-- solidifying his place in line for the death penalty.

What is it about the outcome of this case that is so profoundly unsettling? The answer comes in the form of two numbers: 63 and zero. 63 — Anthony Carr’s I.Q. score, a number falling well within the range of the I.Q. diagnostic criteria for the mentally disabled, according to the Pediatrics in Review.

Both Carr and his cohort scored within the bracket of medically mentally handicapped, Carr reportedly barely touching literacy — another fact basically discredited and thrown away during their trials.

To make the waters even more muddied, the African American pair was tried by an all-white jury — an all-white jury in a small, Mississippi Delta town with a pop-

Whether you care to adhere to the train of thought that race played a critical role in Carr and Simon’s convictions or not, it is impossible to ignore the overarching problem-- that Anthony Carr and Robert Simon existed within a system that was statistically stacked against them. Allwhite juries have an 81% chance of convicting a person of color, yet when just one person of color is added to a jury, this number disparity is practically decimated as reported by The Quarterly Journal of Economics.

What’s wrong is that there is no simple answer — no resolve to this mystery is palatable. Either one must accept that two twenty-year-old men committed a gruesome quadruple homicide in cold blood just for the mere convenience of it, forever shattering the naivety of small-town existence or one must accept that two mentally handicapped black men, tried by an all-white jury sit as placeholders, aimlessly awaiting release through unjust lethal injection.

It all trickles down to our human instinct to crave simplicity. Occam not only highlighted our tendency to take the path of least resistance but to believe it as well.

On a neurological level, our minds have a needlessly difficult time coping with the

inability to answer questions and it’s this chemical imbalance that makes us so fascinated with the unsolved.

But it’s this same instinct that makes this case so frustrating, for there is no path of least resistance. Every possible outcome forces its believer to accept that there will never be an incomplex resolve — that the simple question of what happened to four people for two hours on a single night in 1990 evokes the most convoluted, multipronged reverberations of vastly differing, contradictory accounts, all swearing to their utmost accuracy.

It’s for this reason that Carr, stuck in the eternal limbo between guilt and innocence, will forever haunt Highway 322 in tandem with the Parkers, immortalized in the penmanship of local reporters and that charred monolith — the abandoned Parker acreage, since relinquished to the deterioration of time and the stranglehold of kudzu.

For while the physical manifestations of that fateful February night become ephemeral under nature’s inevitable withering, the Ghost of Clarksdale, Mississippi remains untouched, preserved by the Delta air that flows through the gates of Mississippi’s Parchman Penitentiary, scuffing the shoes of its spectral death row inmate — stationed 30 miles south of Emmett Till’s grave. ◼

Emma Herbst is a freshman studying Journalism.

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AWOL MAGAZINE

SNAP INTO FOCUS: THE FIGHT FOR FOOD SECURITY SNAP continues to run under old legislation after Farm Bill expires.

STORY BY EMILY MARTIN | ART BY GILLIAN FERREIRA THE FATE OF THE

with exceptions for recipients who are disabled or have a child under the age of six.

Legal experts and advocates in the field of public benefits say SNAP continues to run under the system established by the previous bill in 2014, and it will until new legislation is passed. Melissa Jensen, an anti-hunger program associate at advocacy group D.C. Hunger Solutions, said in an interview that operating under the old bill is a “best case scenario” until a new bill, like the Senate’s new version, is passed.

The stricter work requirements in the bill are not guaranteed to increase employment, however.

Brian Campbell is a senior policy advisor at the Economic Security Administration, a branch of the D.C. Department of Human Services that determines eligibility for programs such as SNAP and Temporary Cash Assistance for Needy Families.

Campbell said in an interview that DHS has found that there is no direct correlation between removing benefits from a household and increased employment or work engagement.

Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program is hanging in the balance after the House of Representatives failed to a pass a new version of the Agriculture and Nutrition Act, known as the Farm Bill, before the September 30th expiration date of the previous bill then adjourned for this session.

“The House version of the bill is getting, thankfully, a lot of that negative attention because it’s a terrible bill,” Jensen said.

“The real question is, are Senators going to compromise on some of the worst areas of the House?”

According to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a research institute that advocates for state and federal policies related to poverty, the House’s bill contains changes that would cause more than one million low-income households to lose or reduce their benefits. The bill would institute work requirements for SNAP participants aged 18 through 59 to work at least 20 hours a week, according to the Center,

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“I think the question is: should SNAP or any entitlement program be tied to engagement in a work activity,” Campbell said. “Or should it be designed for ensuring that there’s a minimum level of food security within a household, regardless of what is the engagement of parents or the adult.”

Campbell said that the new requirements may take away the benefits from some

low-income households. Jennifer Mezey, a supervising attorney in the Public Benefits Unit at Legal Aid Society D.C., agreed.

Mezey represented SNAP recipients in a lawsuit against DHS for its backlog on applications, according to Street Sense, and continues to help resolve what she called “challenging cases” that recipients send to a specially-designed email for Legal Aid Society.

“I suspect that we both would agree that it would be pretty disastrous,” Mezey said in an interview. “You would have to divert a whole lot of resources from efforts to make food stamps more available to fund efforts that would probably not help that many people, and would instead just put up additional barriers.”

Campbell said that DHS aims to balance encouraging work with recipients with ensuring food security in households because other issues are tied to food insecurity, resulting in what he called a “downward spiral.” Jensen also said that the work requirements would have a substantial impact on the population aged 50 to 69 who

HEALTH

are retiring or ready to retire because they have become reliant on it with little to no source of income.

“In low-income neighborhoods, in Wards 7 and 8, I feel a lot of the time that SNAP is basically a part of retirement,” Jensen said. “If you’ve worked a low-income job your whole life, you don’t have substantial savings to retire on, and part of surviving is you leave your job and you apply for SNAP.” Wards 7 and 8, the southernmost wards of the District, have the highest concentrations in the city of individuals on the SNAP program. All the wards are almost even in population, according to Campbell, yet 29 percent of Ward 8 and 23 percent of Ward 7 are SNAP recipients, and the next highest concentration is 14 percent in Ward 5.

Allison Miles-Lee, a managing attorney of public benefits for Bread for the City, a nonprofit that provides food, medical care, legal services and more to reduce poverty, criticized DHS for its shortcomings in food insecurity in the District, especially in Wards 7 and 8. Miles-Lee is also part of the prosecution for the DHS lawsuit along with Mezey, and she said the lawsuit’s purpose is to get DHS to acknowledge the growing issue of wait times and to improve it.

“If DHS had to implement anything, forget it,” Miles-Lee said. “I do not have a lot of faith in DHS’s ability to make any changes. … If any directive comes down from the federal government and requires them to make some sort of changes in the that way they process and approve cases, I think that opens up the possibility of inadvertent errors happening.”

Jensen, on the other hand, said that she thinks that DHS is taking critiques seriously and trying to improve. Mattie Harrison, a recipient of SNAP, said in an interview outside the Taylor Street Service Center that the department has been “pretty good” to her. She said she was at the center to ask for assistance after her water had been turned off the day before, but the center was unable to help. Marvin, another recipient who declined to give a last name, said in an interview outside the same service center it is easy to communicate with DHS. Another man outside the Taylor Street Service Center identified himself as a recipient of “food stamp and medical” services from DHS, but declined to give his name.

Jensen also said that D.C.’s food insecurity issue is discussed often and has a lot of momentum, which would be good for progress and improvements.

“These programs should just exist for people,” Jensen said. “They should be easy to use, they should be open to everyone and we should do everything we can to reduce the stigma around them because people should be able to eat, no one should judge anyone for being able to eat.” ◼

Emily Martin is a senior studying journalism with a minor in music.

“D.C. takes care of their citizens and that’s all I’m going to say. It’s a blessing what they do with their medical because I’m sick sick,” he said. “It’s a blessing.”

Harrison said that the new work requirements will help with employment, but Marvin said they could make it harder to receive SNAP benefits. Jensen echoed the sentiment that many recipients are satisfied with DHS’s services, but many still suggest possible improvements.

For now, the bill sits in waiting until after the congressional midterm elections in November when Congress returns. If it does pass, Mezey said that D.C. may still be able to offer a waiver for the new requirements to recipients, which they currently offer.

Miles-Lee also said that DHS terminated without notice recipients waiting for recertification in their system when they switched to new computers in fall 2016.

She said the problem has been mostly resolved, but the original rollout of the computers was against the advice of experts.

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PROFESSOR PROFILE:

margaret stogner ENVIRONMENTAL MEDIA TODAY

A CONVERSATION WITH AU PROFESSOR AND ENVIRONMENTAL FILMMAKER An interview with Margaret Stogner, the executive director of AU’s Center for Environmental Filmmaking, helped give a perspective on the interaction between contemporary environmental film and the world of internet and social media.

STORY BY BRAEDEN WADDELL

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Environmental media is a broad and multifaceted field covering an array of preservationist and conservationist themes relating to natural resources, landscapes, and wildlife. Environmental media is historically designed not only to raise awareness of the impacts of human activity on the planet, but to make their messages actionable by inspiring audiences to take up their cause. Huge changes to the circulation and effectiveness of environmentalist messages came with increased internet access across the globe, as well as the advent of social media.

Q: Could you give me a brief overview of your history in environmental media and filmmaking, and highlight some of the topics you have covered in documentaries you’ve produced?

A: I’ve been working in environmental filmmaking and photography for many years, it was certainly a passion and an interest of mine since I was little. I was at National Geographic for about 9 and a half years, and, during that time, made a number of films about the environment in that larger sense of the word. Not just wildlife and natural history, but also about habitats, people and animals, environmental issues that might affect a certain population.

There wasn’t a big emphasis, when I first started, on things like climate change, but there certainly were significant interests in how pollution can affect a community, or a watershed, or an animal population.

Or how development in a certain area was causing species endangerment, and the conflict between species and humans.

This is something that we navigate through this world, trying to figure out how to be at peace with each other.

For me, when I think about the environment, I really think about that larger, global perspective.

Q: Is there a specific structure or process that you teach your students on how to produce content that is not only designed to introduce an issue, but also make that issue actionable?

A: I have a particular interest in audience engagement, and I think one way that you can call people to act is to engage them in

a significant way. So, how do you do that?

Film is really good at connecting people viscerally, emotionally, that brings us together in that shared humanity.

I think the range goes from very heavy, onthe-nose advocacy stuff to films that try to convince people to take more action, and films that try to get people engaged.

We’re in a very fragmented media world these days. You have to look at multiple ways of engaging. It’s not just the film itself, its the whole impact campaign and social media campaign that you’re creating around that film to give people different entry points to take action.

Q: Do you feel high-quality film is essential in environmentalist media or is it more about the message?

A:“It’s about the storytelling. I think you have to have a powerful story. The more powerful that story, the less its going to probably matter if it is pristine, high-end cinematography.

I’ve seen great stuff done on iPhones.

There’s room for all of it. A phenomenal amount of media consumption now is mobile. There’s lots and lots of room for short digital videos with strong stories, you don’t have to hit people over the head with a message, you’re looking for good stories and interesting characters. There’s such a huge arena for mobile content, there’s a place for that.

Q: Do you think that the urgency developed around huge issues such as climate change is helpful in engaging and maintaining audiences, or does it push them away?

A: Big overarching stories have to be broken down to be made accessible to audiences.

You don’t have to hang everything on just one frame. There are different angles that you can look at when you’re thinking about the environment. It can be a really complex, multidimensional viewpoint about how you find the right story and the right entry point to engage audiences.

It is really important to focus on what we can do. Those kinds of stories that help people understand the importance of what we can do as individuals and as a community are the ones that keep us engaged.

Q: Where do you think environmental media will go from here?

A: I think we’re going to see [Environmental Media] continue to fragment, we’re going to see more and more ways to tell stories. Each new media technology that comes out is a new opportunity to engage people. I don’t think that one necessarily replaces the other, it’s that the other becomes a smaller piece of the pie.

Survival stories, resilience stories, innovation stories: that’s what keep people interested. We just have to keep being creative in how we look for those stories that engage audiences. ◼

Braeden Waddell is a sophomore studying journalism.

FALL 2018 | 50

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