BPR Fall 2022 Issue 1

FALL 2022 ISSUE 01

SPECIAL FEATURE SCARS

All societies are burdened by their pasts. Misguided and self-interested decisions by previous leaders, structural inequalities that have been left un- or only half-addressed, or even a few strokes of bad luck can leave lasting scars. And like those on the human body, political scars are not only cosmetic—they are also reminders of past injuries and reveal our attempts to heal from them. Here on College Hill, for example, Brown has long grappled with its connections to the Atlantic slave trade. The university’s effort to better understand and teach students about these connections represents a process of healing. But the scar—and the legacy of oppression that Brown took part in—will never disappear. Political scars are not only part of a society’s identity, but they can also shape its future. In Russia and Ukraine, the scars left by financial crises and political turmoil after the fall of the Iron Curtain helped create the conditions that led to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Scars, therefore, do not just reveal a past injury. They also inform how we respond to current issues. They can cause us to lapse into old, harmful habits or make shortsighted decisions, reproducing the injuries that created the scar in the first place. Or they can also do the opposite, reminding us of our past mistakes and spurring careful thought about the future.

The authors in this magazine’s special feature explore all of these dimensions of scars. In his article, Nealie Deol examines how the Partition of India and Pakistan in 1947 led to mass violence against the Sikh minority but also fostered a Sikh identity that defined Punjab as its homeland. The scar left by Partition helped galvanize Sikh political nationalism.

Our authors also discuss how scars can perpetuate cycles of self-interested and misguided political decision-making. Francisca Saldivar investigates how the scars left by 70 years of oneparty rule by the PRI in Mexico still shape politics today. Despite being elected on a reformist platform, President Andrés Manuel López Obrador has made alliances with PRI members to expand executive power through a new national security law. Ian Stettner examines how the botched raids in Somalia in 1993 left a scar on American foreign policy, pushing the country toward harmful isolationism. He argues that the scars of past blunders can cause foreign policy-makers to overcorrect for past mistakes. And lastly, some authors explain how we must learn from scars to prevent future harm. Elliott Smith contends that overturning the Insular Cases—a series of Supreme Court decisions that rule that the US Constitution does not apply to territories, and thus that residents there do not possess the same rights as people in the states—presents an opportunity to mend the scars left by racism and imperialism. Will Forys zooms in on Tangier, a small island in the Chesapeake Bay that is sinking as sea levels

rise. The environmental disaster facing Tangier, and the resulting cultural loss, will leave a scar. But it will also, quite viscerally, demonstrate the urgency of tackling rapid climate change.

We hope these articles will make you consider the varied ways in which scars can impact our political past, present, and future. How are societies to learn from their past scars, and who decides how they do this? And are there are times where it is more productive to just try to wipe the slate clean?

− Gabe and Matt

EXECUTIVE BOARD

EDITORS IN CHIEF

Gabe Merkel

Matt Walsh

CHIEFS OF STAFF

Casey Chan

Sarah Roberts

CHIEF OPERATING OFFICERS

Daniel Halpert

Gidget Rosen

SENIOR MANAGING

MAGAZINE EDITOR

Nathan Swidler

MANAGING

WEB EDITORS

Chaelin Jung

Morgan McCordick

Mathilda Silbiger

CHIEF COPY EDITORS

Robert Daly

William Lake

INTERVIEWS DIRECTORS

Alex Fasseas

Miles Munkacy

DATA DIRECTORS

Zoey Katzive

Arthi Ranganathan

CREATIVE DIRECTORS

Christine Wang

Daniel Navratil

MULTIMEDIA DIRECTOR

Elijah Dahunsi

LEAD WEB DEVELOPER

Sarah Roberts

CONTENT BOARD

MANAGING

WEB EDITORS

Chaelin Jung

Morgan McCordick

Mathilda Silbiger

SE NIOR EDITORS

Natalia Ibarra

Sarah McGrath

Isabella Yepes

EDITORS

Ben Ackerman

William Forys

Jillian Lederman

Alex Lee

Matthew Lichtblau

Kara McAndrew

Francisca Saldivar

Isaac Slevin

Jack Tajmajer

ACTIVISM SECTION EDITORS

Sofia Barnett

Amanda Page

Gabby Smith

STAFF WRITERS

Ilektra Bampicha-Ninou

Omri Bergner-Phillips

Anna Brent-Levenstein

CREATIVE BOARD

CREATIVE DIRECTORS

Daniel Navratil

EDITORIAL BOARD

SENIOR MANAGING

MAGAZINE EDITOR

Nathan Swidler

MANAGING EDITORS

Alexandra Mork

Joseph Safer-Bakal

Ye Chan Song

ASSOCIATE EDITORS

Grace Chaikin

Harry Flores

Isabel Greider

Lauren Griffiths

Justen Joffe

Caroline Parente

David Pinto

Cole Powell

Bianca Rosen

Antara Singh-Ghai

Bryce Vist

Archer Zureich

STAFF WRITERS CONT.

McConnell Bristol

Morgan Dethlefsen

Neve Diaz-Carr

Henry Ding

Juliet Fang

Amina Fayaz

Michael Farrell-Rosen

Sophie Forstner

Isabella Garo

Oamiya Haque

Ashton Higgins

Katie Jain

Elsa Lehrer

William Loughridge

Bruna Melo

Christina Miles

Alexandra Mork

Kayla Morrison

Rohan Pankaj

Annika Reff

Andreas Rivera Young

Jodi Robinson

Bianca Rosen

Mira Rudensky

Zane Ruzicka

Ellie Silverman

Elliot Smith

Ian Stettner

Peter Swope

Maddock Thomas

Man Hei Christopher Wai

Jesse Ward

Ben Youngwood

Sofie Zeruto

Suzie Zhang

COPY EDIT BOARD INTERVIEWS BOARD

CHIEF COPY EDITOR

Robert Daly

William Lake

MANAGING COPY EDITORS

Andrew Berzolla

Isabel Greider

COPY EDITORS

Emily Colon

James Dallape

Khalil Desai

Mira Echambadi

Juri Kang

Connor Kraska

Caleb Lazar

Dorothea Omerovic

Jimena Rascon

Lilly Roth-Shapiro

Roza Spencer

Audrey Taylor

Sabina Topol

Hao Wen

Logan Wojcik

Ivy Zhuang

INTERVIEWS DIRECTORS

Alex Fasseas

Miles Munkacy

DEPUTY INTERVIEWS DIRECTORS

Mira Mehta

Samuel Trachtenberg

Alexandra Vitkin

INTERVIEWS ASSOCIATES

Ahad Bashir

Carson Bauer

Omri Bergner-Phillips

Allie Chandler

Léo Corzo-Clark

Elise Curtin

Elijah Dahunsi

Alexander Delaney

Mira Echambadi

Ava Eisendrath

John Fullerton

James Hardy

Alice Jo

John Kelley

Stella Kleinman

Sam Kolitch

Seungje (Felix) Lee

Alexandra Lehman

Alyssa Merritt

Lauren Muhs

Hai Ning Ng

Matteo Papadopoulos

Maya Rackoff

Anushka Srivastava

Emma Stroupe

Anik Willig

Hiram Valladares Castro-Lopez

Yuliya Velhan

Tucker Wilke

Christine Wang

DESIGN DIRECTORS

Erin Isla Roman

Hope Wisor

GRAPHIC DESIGNERS

Muhaddisa Ali

Patrick Farrell

Youjin (Amy) Lim

Kara Park

Alina Spatz

Erica Yun

Airu (Ivy) Zhang

Tina Zhou

ART DIRECTORS

Rosie Dinsmore

Jacob Gong

Lucia Li

Anahis Luna

Lana Wang

Kelly Zhou

DATA BOARD

DATA DIRECTOR

Zoey Katzive

Arthi Ranganathan

DATA DESIGN DIRECTOR

Lucia Li

DATA ASSOCIATES

Veer Arora

Carson Bauer

Allie Chandler

Elsa Choi-Hausman

Khalil Desai

Ryan Doherty

Raima Islam

Asher Labovich

Nicole Lugo

Javier Niño-Sears

Colby Porter

Logan Rabe

Francisca Saldivar

Jake Siden

Giang Thai

Harry Yang

Yifan (Titi) Zhang

DATA DESIGNERS

Icy Liang

Hannah Jeong

Mahnoor Rafi

MULTIMEDIA BOARD

MULTIMEDIA DIRECTOR

Elijah Dahunsi

MULTIMEDIA ASSOCIATES

Ilektra Bampicha-Ninou

Garv Gaur

Ashton Higgins

Julia Kostin

Haotian Luo

Daniel Ma

Ruairi Mullin

Taha Siddiqui

Michael Seoane

Jonathan Zhang

COVER ARTIST

Nicholas Edwards

ILLUSTRATORS

Jason Aragon

Ashley Castaneda

Naya Lee Chang

Jocelyn Chu

Kyla Dang

Thomas Dimayuga

Nicholas Edwards

Pauline Han

Maria Hahne

Grace Li

Elizabeth Long

Wenqing (Ash) Ma

Temilola Matanmi

Rosalia Mejia

Kennice Pan

Ji Hu Park

Shreya Patel

Kira Saks

Evelyn Tan

Ayca Tuzer

Madison Tom

Rachel Zhu

BUSINESS BOARD

BUSINESS DIRECTOR

Daniel Halpert

Gidget Rosen

ASSOCIATE BUSINESS DIRECTORS

Charlie Key

Stella Kleinman

Meghan Murphy

BUSINESS ASSOCIATES

Charles Adams

Ely Brayboy

Charles Capstick

Cannon Caspar

Morgan Dethlefsen

Peter Edelstein

Ellyse Givens

Anna Lister

Nicolas Pereira-Arias

Martin Pohlen

Eloise Robertson

Talia Sawiris

Hannah Severyns

Alexandra Mork

Hai Ning Ng

Uprooting

Sarah Roberts

Special Feature: Scars

Corrupt Coalition

Nealie Deol

Somalia Syndrome

Ian Stettner

Francisca Saldivar

Down Goes Tangier

William Forys

Elliot Smith

Borderline Raiders of the Lost Art

Grace Chaikin

Interview: Ashley Mears

Alyssa Merritt

David Pinto

Interview: Nicholas Kulish

Mira Mehta

Bianca Rosen

Julia Kostin

Interview: Ethan Nadelmann

Alex Fasseas & Elise Curtin

Soccer Offers a Shot at a Bigger Goal A Rose By Any Other Name Everyday

Isabel Greider

Leaving Legacies

A unique opportunity to reform college admissions

by Ben

The Supreme Court is poised to rule that affirmative action is unconstitutional after hearing a pair of cases on the subject this fall. If the Court makes such a ruling, colleges and universities should seize the opportunity to institute comprehensive admissions reform. Affirmative action is unpopular and possibly unconstitutional, but athletic commitments and legacy admissions are similarly problematic and should be eliminated as well. There is little reason to believe that these policies are necessary to produce an exceptionally qualified and diverse student body. In their place, colleges and universities should pursue a model prioritizing academic merit alongside consideration of unique backgrounds and perspectives.

The admissions practices of colleges and universities, particularly “elite” ones, draw frequent fire from both ends of the political spectrum. Liberals focus on the inequity of legacy preferences and athletic admissions, which they argue perpetuate racial and socioeconomic inequality. Conservatives, on the other hand,

argue that race-based affirmative action policies are inherently racist, counterproductive, and unconstitutional. Opinion polling suggests that affirmative action, legacy admissions, and athletic recruitment are unpopular with most Americans. Even in the face of all this criticism, elite colleges and universities like Brown continue to defend their admissions practices, arguing that they are necessary to protect diversity and foster strong alumni relationships.

This fall, the Court will hear two cases directly challenging affirmative action. Students for Fair Admissions, a group opposing affirmative action, has sued both Harvard University and the University of North Carolina. It argues that racial preference policies violate Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, and judging by past decisions, it appears Chief Justice John Roberts and other members of the Court’s conservative majority agree. In Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District 1, Roberts famously held “the way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.” Justices Thomas, Alito, and Kavanaugh have similarly expressed their skepticism toward racial preferences, and given the current makeup of the Court, an outright ban on racial preferences in admissions is a strong possibility.

Despite issues in their implementation, affirmative action policies were born out of a commendable desire to rectify America’s deeply ingrained history of systemic racism and pro-

Behindmote diversity on college campuses. Defending the continued use of racial preference, Brown University President Christina Paxson argues that race represents a “really important piece of information about a person in the life that they’ve experienced.” Yet, race is just one facet of an individual’s lived experience. Racial background does not automatically consign someone to a given perspective. Other factors like socioeconomic class, geography, and family structure can be equally fundamental. For many candidates, race may be fundamental to their identity, but for others, it could be tangential. Making assumptions about an individual’s lived experience based on the boxes they check on paper is lazy policy at best, and racist at worst.

One could argue that it is also entirely unnecessary. College applications already give applicants ample opportunities to demonstrate their diverse perspectives via personal essays and activity descriptions. By comprehensively evaluating each candidate’s unique identity, schools should be able to assemble a diverse array of backgrounds without considering an applicant’s race as part of their application.

If affirmative action is eliminated, athletic commitments and legacy preferences should follow. Elite colleges and universities downplay the importance of athletics or legacy status in admissions, but research suggests that both can play a much larger role than administrators care to admit. Admissions data from Harvard, published in the ongoing lawsuit, is staggering. One model suggests that from 2014 to 2019, legacy candidates and athletic recruits enjoyed an increase in admissions odds by factors of eight for legacy students and five thousand for athletes. Another study, from 1983-1997 of other elite research universities showed those candidates enjoyed more modest admissions odds increases of three (legacy) and four (athletes) times.

It is unclear why elite schools sacrifice academic standards to extend commitments to athletic recruits. Ivy League recruits are technically subject to the same admissions process as regular candidates, but coaches can extend “likely letters,” a massive boost to admissions chances. One study finds that at top research universities,

“Opinion polling suggests that affirmative action, legacy admissions, and athletic recruitment are unpopular with most Americans.”

Ackerman ’24, a Political Science concentrator and a Content Editor for BPR illustrations by Jocelyn Chu ’23, a Biophysics concentrator

the athletic admissions advantage is roughly equivalent to a 200-point increase in SAT score. At Harvard, data suggest that the academic credentials of a non-athlete candidate with a 1% chance of admission would have a 98% chance of admission as an athlete with their same academic credentials. One justification for this disparity may be that recruits devote a large portion of their time to their sport, explaining their relative shortcomingsvv in the classroom. Indeed, exceptional achievement on the field, court, or ice is a clear demonstration of dedication and non-academic merit which ought to be considered in college admissions. However, the same is true for any candidate with significant extracurricular pursuits. It is wholly unfair that an athlete can subvert college admissions standards, while a world-class violinist, accomplished community organizer, or champion-level debater receive no similar advantage.

To make matters worse, given the extremely expensive nature of American youth sports, athletic commitments favor individuals with access to expensive club lacrosse teams, personal pitching coaches, or private squash clubs to train at. As such, athletic recruitment perpetuates a pipeline from privileged prep schools to elite colleges and universities. Granted, athletics can certainly be a valuable part of a col-

lege experience or school culture. But this can remain true without admissions commitments, which result in Ivy League athletes academically underperforming. MIT, for example, extends no “likely letters” or any other form of admissions commitments, yet maintains 33 varsity athletic programs. Other top colleges and universities should follow suit—keep the sports teams, drop the commitments.

Similar to athletic admissions, legacy admissions serves a privileged class of applicants. At Harvard, the acceptance rate for legacy students from 2014 to 2019 was 33%, dwarfing the overall 5.5% acceptance rate during that period. Even though legacy applicants are more likely to be wealthy and white compared to the average candidate, administrators like President Paxson and Brown University Dean of Admissions Logan Powell defend their special treatment. Legacy status, they promise, is only a “minor” piece of a much larger puzzle that admissions officers consider. Even if true, this does nothing to absolve the practice. Few would or could defend racism or sexism in a hiring process by claiming that it was only a “minor factor.” To properly justify legacy preference, universities must provide a compelling reason. Some argue that financial considerations are at play—yet evidence suggests that legacy admissions does not impact alumni donor behavior. Rather, legacy admissions are a relic of an era in which universities functioned largely as prestige propagators and have no valid place in the current admissions landscape. Several top schools have already recognized this and moved to eliminate the practice—MIT, Amherst, and the University of California system, to name a few. Brown should be expected to follow suit.

By moving beyond affirmative action, legacy preferences, and athletic commitments, colleges and universities can remake their admissions processes in a more equitable mold. A federal ban on affirmative action presents a chance for comprehensive admissions reform— colleges and universities must seize the opportunity.

“Other top colleges and universities should follow suit—keep the sports teams, drop the commitments.”

Zach Stern (ZS): What prompted you to start Project DATA?

Young Mie Kim (YMK): For almost my entire career, I have been studying passionate publics: people who care about political issues because of their particular values, identities, or interests, like those who care about the abortion issue because of their religious beliefs. I realized that these people tend to put their issues ahead of their political party identification and that they tend to distrust mainstream media, opting instead to spend a lot of time on social media platforms like Facebook. They’re mobilized because of the issues they care about, and in the data-driven, algorithm-based digital age, I realized that political leaders and campaigns try to identify these passionate people using data and microtargeting tools because it’s much easier for political campaigns to persuade people who are very passionate about particular issues given their personal concerns. These groups are scattered around the country, so it has traditionally been hard to identify and mobilize them, but with microtargeting tools, you can now do just that. I realized that studying advertising—the outcome of every deliberate strategy—would be a good way to examine how political campaigns identify these people and come one step closer to understanding the strategies and tactics that they use.

That’s why I started this project, but I quickly realized that political ad data on social media is not publicly accessible. Even when Congress investigated Russian election interference after the 2016 election, they relied entirely on data that the platforms voluntarily handed over to them, so I hired a computer scientist and developed an app that tracks digital political ads across social media platforms—a user-based and real-time reverse-engineered

Disinformation and Democracy An Interview with Young Mie Kim

Young Mie Kim is a professor at the School of Journalism and Mass Communication and an Andrew Carnegie Fellow at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Professor Kim’s research centers on the influence of digital media on political communication in contemporary media and politics across political campaigns, issue advocacy groups, and voters. Professor Kim’s most recent project, Project DATA, employs a real-time, userbased ad tracking tool to study the sponsors, content, targets, and algorithms of online political campaigns across social media platforms. The project analyzes the often obscured operations of digital campaigns while highlighting pernicious microtargeting practices.

tracking tool that would allow us to track who sent ads and captured ad content. In addition to the app, we also surveyed users on their demographics and their political attitudes so that we could reverse-engineer how the ads targeted particular groups and build targeting profiles for political ads. It is very important to have an independent investigator outside of the tech platforms, and this project collects data independent of these tech platforms through our user-based app.

ZS: How has the project developed from its first election cycle in 2016 to the 2018 and 2020 elections?

YMK: I started this project to investigate how passionate publics are identified, targeted, and mobilized on political platforms by political campaigns, and initially, I ran a candidate campaigns analysis, looking, for example, at Hillary Clinton and checking how many ads matched in our dictionary. We realized that many ads had unidentifiable sponsors, so we tracked the landing pages of these ads to identify the sponsors. But half of the sponsors we examined were still not identifiable because they were not registered with the Federal Election Commission. Some nonprofits are exempted from disclosure requirements, but if this were the case we should have been able to find them in the IRS data that we looked through. Still, half of the sponsors were not identifiable, so we left them aside because there was nothing to do. Then, one year later, the House Intelligence Committee released meta-information on Russian ads, and after matching this data with the landing pages from our data, many of the suspicious groups that we identified turned out to be Russian groups. Since then, our research has become more forensic, trying to identify

the strategies and tactics of Russian actors and Russian election interference patterns. We then realized that domestic actors also used similar techniques, so we have been trying to understand the relationship between domestic and foreign suspicious groups.

ZS: What do you think Congress could and should do to combat the spread of false information and online voter suppression on platforms like Facebook?

YMK: We have laws and policies that can regulate online disinformation, including election interference, but these policies are so outdated that they don’t adequately regulate disinformation on these platforms. We need ad archives, for example, that include targeting method and targeting information so that the voters can decide whether to trust particular information. The Facebook whistleblower, Frances Haugen, also pointed out that we need greater algorithm regulation and transparency. Without adequate regulation, we’re going to have very limited solutions. There are a number of different ways you could do that. Some people argue for algorithm auditing by a third party or agency. Australia recently passed a bill that requires Google, Facebook, and other large tech platforms to share how they formulate their news recommendation system and then share that information with major news organizations, since people now find these stories on social media rather than directly from news websites. That market-intervention kind of regulation is one example, but there are a number of different ways you could work the algorithm component.

Edited for length and clarity.

Interview by Zach Stern ’22

Illustration by Christine Wang ’24

You Can’t Just Reform Colonialism

by Maddock Thomas ’26,

Economics

Staff Writer

Puerto Rico is one of the most diverse and culturally rich parts of the United States, with a population equivalent to the 32nd most populous state. Puerto Rico, however, is also a US colony and home to the nation’s second-largest police department, after the New York City Police Department (NYPD). The Puerto Rico Police Department (PRPD) is not only large, but it is also deeply corrupt and repressive. It has spent the past century overseeing mass surveillance of pro-independence activists, jailing journalists, and violently suppressing peaceful protests. Founded as the Insular Police to protect American interests in Puerto Rico, the PRPD continues to serve that purpose today, albeit with a change of name. Not only do the police serve to maintain the current colonial order, but they also actively contribute to criminal activity on the island.

The PRPD’s predecessor, the Insular Police, was established under the Bureau of Insular Affairs, a bureau within the United States War Department. From its inception, the Insular Police, which remained a quasi-military organization until 1996, was tasked with repressing Puerto Rico’s supporters of independence, the “independistas.” The police notoriously imprisoned journalists who questioned the US occupation of Puerto Rico, illegally gathered carpetas (or files) full of personal information on tens of thousands of Puerto Ricans with intent to blackmail, and responded violently to protests. One of the most infamous events in Puerto Rican history is the 1937 Ponce Massacre, during which police fired on unarmed marchers, kill-

ing 19 and injuring over 100. The PRPD has also collaborated with the FBI to attack left-wing movements by supporting right-wing terrorism during the 1960s–1990s.

Now, as a civilian organization in the 21st century, the PRPD continues to act militarily to suppress protests challenging the colonial status quo. The PRPD regularly responds to peaceful gatherings with excessive force, violating the First Amendment. In fact, a report published by the Department of Justice (DOJ) outlines that the PRPD is “broken in a number of critical and fundamental respects.” In addition to suppressing political freedom, the PRPD is one of the most violent entities in the United States. According to the ACLU, the PRPD was responsible for three times more civilian deaths than the NYPD between 2007 and 2011, despite New York City having twice the population.

Transforming the Puerto Rican Police Department requires challenging the imperial order

“Not only do the police serve to maintain the current colonial order, but they also actively contribute to criminal activity on the island.”

an intended

and Applied Mathematics concentrator and a

for BPR illustrations by Lucia Li ’24, an Industrial Design major at RISD

The PRPD’s blank check to enforce the colonial status quo has also led to deep-seated corruption and impunity from the law within the force. As the DOJ report states, “More PRPD officers are involved in criminal activity than in any other major law enforcement agency in the country.” In fact, during the period from 2005 to 2010, more than 1,700 PRPD officers were arrested for criminal activity. And this is considered a significantly lower number than the actual crimes committed by officers. This inadequate records management is unsurprising for the department: During their “Mano Dura contra el Crimen” (“hard on crime”) program in the 1990s, the PRPD went from over-reporting to under-reporting homicides by a margin of more than 100 deaths per year to make its program appear successful rather than harmful. The PRPD frequently lies on reports to hide the department’s failngs.

Yet the PRPD’s repressive, violent behavior described by the DOJ was not news to those who had been targeted by it. A student leader at the University of Puerto Rico, where peaceful protests had been broken up using clubs and pepper-spray, responded to the report, asking “Who in Puerto Rico doesn’t know that the Puerto Rico Police Department does this daily?” This report succeeded in bringing the issues with the PRPD to the attention of the mainland, where the ACLU lobbied for reform. As a result, the PRPD entered into a 10-year consent decree and com-

“The failure to reform the PRPD is a disheartening symptom of the continued hold of the United States on Puerto Rico. So long as the PRPD continues to uphold the colonial order, the United States has no incentive to reform the agency.”

prehensive reform deal with the DOJ in 2015. Though the reform was hailed as “historic” by the ACLU, the department’s fundamental role in reinforcing existing systems of power—including US colonial dominance—quickly came into conflict with the requirements of reform. The federal government had forced the PRPD into the reform program originally, but it appears to have quickly lost interest in carrying out the reforms it outlined. The federally-appointed monitor for the reform program, Arnaldo Claudio, recalls submitting eight reports during his tenure about the continued illegal use of force and constitutional civil rights violations by the PRPD. The federal government provided him no support. In May of 2019, after almost five years directing the effort to reform the PRPD, Claudio resigned, saying, “I don’t want to be associated with such a system. There is something called resignation and something called ethical and moral values.”

In June, shortly after Claudio’s resignation, protests swept the island following a leaked text chat involving then-Governor Ricardo Roselló revealing corruption and deep-seated misogyny in Puerto Rico’s government. Notably, the chat also corroborated Claudio’s accusations that the federal government had no desire to reform the PRPD. As Marisol Lebrón, an Associate Professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz whose work covers Puerto Rican policing, describes, “The chat itself reveals that for the past five years, the federal government did not work with the local authorities [...] to address police repression or stop human rights abuses.”

Unsurprisingly, in response to these mass protests, the police were soon deployed. Despite supposed sweeping reform, they turned to century-long tactics of violence and colonial repression. During one protest, the police were heard shouting “Su actividad ha dejado de estar protegida por la Constitución” (“Your actions are no longer protected by the Constitution”) before tear-gassing protestors, beating them with clubs, and shooting them with rubber bullets.

The continued failure to reform the PRPD is a disheartening symptom of the continued hold of the United States on Puerto Rico. So long as the PRPD continues to uphold the colonial order, the United States has no incentive to reform the agency. It is therefore necessary to change the colonial condition in order to address police violence in Puerto Rico and bring actual safety to Puerto Ricans. However, any such change will be violently opposed by the PRPD, as it has been for over a century. This seemingly irreconcilable situation does not mean change is impossible, but thanks to the PRPD and its approval from the United States, the decolonization of Puerto Rico will be no easy task.

“In fact, during the period from 2005 to 2010, more than 1,700 PRPD officers were arrested for criminal activity. And this is considered a significantly lower number than the actual crimes committed by officers.”

Elijah Dahunsi (ED): For our readers who may not be familiar with finance or economics, what exactly is private equity (PE)?

Eileen Appelbaum (EA): A PE firm is a type of Wall Street investment firm that sponsors investment vehicles known as funds. One of the partners of a private equity firm is the general partner. The general partner makes all the decisions for the fund, in addition to recruiting potential investors. These other investors are called limited partners.

The general partner representing the private equity firm puts in one to two cents for every dollar that the limited partners put in. It’s important to note that once investors invest in the fund, they have no say over what is done with the money. Rather, the general partner and the employees of the fund go looking for prospective companies to buy. PE funds finance these purchases with a combination of debt and money invested in the fund. Sometimes these companies survive, and sometimes they don’t.

ED: What specific motivations draw PE firms to the healthcare industry?

EA: PE firms have, relatively speaking, only recently gotten into healthcare, choosing to initially buy hospitals. A main motivation for these purchases was the passage of Obamacare. Though many political observers harbored doubts about the bill’s ability to pass, executives in PE were confident that the bill would pass and be fully implemented. Acting on this confidence, many PE firms purchased hospitals with the intention of capitalizing on cash flows from Medicare, Medicaid, and the VA (Veterans

Healthcare for Sale An Interview

with Eileen Appelbaum

Dr. Eileen Appelbaum is the co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, Washington, DC; a fellow at the Rutgers University Center for Women and Work; and a visiting lecturer at the University of Leicester. Her research focuses on the effects of organizational restructuring on firms and workers, private equity and financialization, and work family policies. Her book, Private Equity at Work: When Wall Street Manages Main Street, coauthored with Rosemary Batt, was named a finalist for the 2016 George R. Terry Award and one of the four best books of 2014 and 2015 by the Academy of Management.

Affairs) system—government agencies that account for 50 percent of all healthcare costs. So PE involvement in healthcare is essentially taxpayer-financed capitalism.

Some prominent PE firms involved in this hospital investment scheme were Cerberus and Leonard Green. Despite owning so many hospitals, these firms did not make a considerable amount of money running them. Instead, they made most of their money by stripping the hospitals of their real estate, selling this real estate, taking the cash, and leaving hospitals to pay rent to a Real Estate Investment Trust (REIT). These REITs owned the properties and buildings that purchased hospitals had previously owned. PE firms made money from these REITs through dividend recapitalizations—a process where purchased companies pay dividends to PE firms with cash accrued from high-interest junk bonds.

In the case of purchased hospitals, this increased debt limited profitability. When these hospitals predictably began to struggle, vulnerable communities were negatively affected. These include white communities in rural areas and Black communities in inner cities. It was just unconscionable.

Eventually, the instability of Medicare and Medicaid rates disincentivized PE firms from buying hospitals. To accrue more stable revenue streams, PE firms instead turned to physician practices. These practices, unlike Medicare and Medicaid, enabled PE firms to make money through fixed contracts with hospitals.

PE firms focused their purchasing efforts on practices associated with medical specialties where patients had a higher degree of fully

complying with treatment. These specialties include emergency medicine, radiology, and anesthesiology. To expand their control in these specialties, PE firms, like Blackstone and KKR, sponsor large companies, such as TeamHealth and Envision, respectively, composed of physician practices. Once a practice is purchased by a PE-owned company, the company, which exists outside insurance networks, has complete control over the billing of the practice.

ED: So how do you best regulate against the growing influence of private equity in healthcare?

EA: There’s a legislative remedy that controls surprise medical bills which passed in a bipartisan manner in both the House and the Senate in December of 2020. This mainly benefits those under private insurance because Medicare and Medicaid already control unexpected medical bills. Another legislative proposal made by Elizabeth Warren—The Warren Stop Wall Street Looting Act—would reform the WARN Act, making workers’ pay the foremost priority in cases of bankruptcy.

There are also regulatory opportunities at the state level. Many hospitals in this country are nonprofit hospitals that do not pay taxes. If these hospitals are bought by for-profit companies, state attorneys general can find ways to make these hospitals give back to the community. This happened in Rhode Island. As a result, the two hospitals in Rhode Island have a good chance of surviving.

Edited for length and clarity.

Interview by Elijah Dahunsi ’25

Illustration by Christine Wang ’24

Waking Up From Pipe Dreams

The dangers of carbon capture

by Lauren Griffiths

The residents of Yazoo County, Mississippi were confronted with a danger the world had yet to behold in February 2020: a carbon dioxide (CO2) pipeline explosion. Within minutes, residents were dazed, foaming at the mouth, and left unconscious by the green cloud sweeping over their town. Individuals who were not too disoriented to walk scrambled to their cars—the most logical escape route. Those who made it as far as their vehicles were met with the frightening realization that the gas had paralyzed their cars’ engines. They were trapped.

While this was the first noted instance of mass outdoor exposure to piped CO2, it is unlikely to be the last. The tragedy of Yazoo County is a clear warning sign of the United States’s unpreparedness to handle a CO2 pipeline network expansion, which recently passed legislation is destined to bring.

The Yazoo County explosion occurred after a 24-inch pipeline carrying concentrated CO2 and hydrogen sulfide ruptured in a heavily wooded area near the town of Satartia, Mississippi. While CO2 is commonly thought of as harmless, at high concentrations it displaces oxygen from the air, causing asphyxiation in humans and preventing cars from burning fuel. The fossil fuel company that operates the pipeline, Denbury Inc., had taken little action to warn the community about this potential danger. For 15 minutes, even Denbury workers themselves did not realize that the fog from the explosion was CO2.

CO2 leaks had also not been on the radar of the nearby firefighters, sheriffs, or hospital staff, particularly troubling given that 49 indi-

viduals were hospitalized due to asphyxiation. Thankfully, although residents still report lingering physical and mental impacts from the explosion—such as lung dysfunction, stomach disorders, and mental fogginess—there were no fatalities. As far as pipeline explosions go, Yazoo is lucky. Many of America’s pipelines lie much closer to towns than the one near Satartia. Moreover, many of these towns have populations significantly larger than that of Satartia. Additionally, the Denbury rupture happened at 7:00 in the evening, when people were awake and responsive to both their surroundings and local authorities. Had the explosion happened just a few hours later, rather than breathing apparatuses, first responders might have needed body bags.

Such a scenario could take place in the future preventative action is not swiftly taken. A

report published in March 2022 by the Pipeline Safety Trust (PST), a prominent pipeline safety group, warned that the nation’s CO2 pipeline regulations are dangerously insufficient and fail to address public safety risks. This report was published in response to a rush of multibillion-dollar CO2 pipeline projects following the Bipartisan Infrastructure Bill’s vast allocation of funding to the carbon capture and storage (CCS) industry. The PST’s report urges the US Department of Transportation’s Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration (PHMSA)—the agency with authority over CO2 pipeline safety—to update its regulations as soon as possible.

As we await these updated regulations, new pipelines are being planned in populated areas, posing a risk to the surrounding communities and raising significant concerns regarding envi-

’24, an Environmental Studies and International and Public Affairs concentrator and an Associate Editor for BPR illustrations by Jason Aragon ’24, an Illustration major at RISD

ronmental justice. Hazardous waste facilities and fossil fuel extraction, processing, and transportation infrastructure have often been located near marginalized communities. Therefore, it is reasonable to worry that CO2 pipeline pathways could follow similarly harmful patterns if environmental justice is not centered during the CCS expansion process. Major pipeline proposals also currently face opposition from landowners and advocacy groups, as these projects require companies to build through private property and residential communities, displacing some and endangering others. Community members fear not only for their personal safety in the aftermath of the Satartia explosion, but also for their livelihoods: Soil and water contamination pose serious threats to crop security. Their resistance has increased the difficulties developers encounter when acquiring voluntary agreements with landowners for pipeline rights-of-way through their properties. Nevertheless, developers can still obtain rights-of-way via eminent domain authority, which typically involves receiving siting permits from state utility regulators. This example, in addition to the necessary preparations of states and communities for potential pipeline leakages, exemplifies the large role of local and state authorities in dealing with CCS expansion. States and municipalities must recognize the importance of CO2 pipeline safety and act accordingly. With the power to implement their own pipeline regulations, swifter implementation capacities, and a better understanding of their communities’ needs, state governments should pursue the recommendations outlined by the PST and provide support for municipalities to institute emergency preparedness procedures as soon as possible.

On the federal level, the PHMSA responded to the Yazoo explosion by announcing new safety measures in May 2022 intended to protect Americans from similar failures. The recommendations include research solicitations to strengthen CO2 pipeline safety; the encouragement of pipeline operations to plan for risks that could threaten pipeline integrity; and the development of updated standards for CO2 pipelines, which contain requirements for emergency preparedness and response. While it is a critical step forward, this announcement is just that: an announcement. It does not guarantee implementation of the crucial regulatory changes proposed by the PST nor does it acknowledge the necessity of funding for local towns and municipalities to properly set up preparation mechanisms. Only stringent regulations on both the federal and state levels can ensure all potentially impacted communities are equipped to respond. The upcoming regulations should ensure such preparations never need to come into play.

The lack of awareness and preparation for this potential danger is especially frightening considering recent investments to expand our nation’s CO2 pipeline network. The Inflation Reduction Act enables a large upscaling of the carbon capture industry through updates to the 45Q tax credit, which incentivizes the use of carbon capture and storage. By increasing the government subsidy from $50 to $85 per metric ton, CCS is now much more financially viable for producers. Last year’s Bipartisan Infrastructure Bill provided $100 million to the Department of Energy to design a pipeline network to transport compressed CO2 emissions to underground storage sites, $2.1 billion in loans and grants to build said pipelines, and $3.5 billion to construct four atmospheric CO2 removal facilities. All this means that the industry could grow 13-fold by 2035. For many years, concerns about the United States’ limited preparation for CO2 pipeline emergencies were simply passing wonderments of distant futures. Now that the country has made significant strides in climate change policy, these casual hypotheticals are becoming dangerous realities.

While the country’s groundbreaking climate legislation should be lauded, it must be coupled with regulations to address the risks that accompany CCS expansion. Agencies like PHMSA are in the process of updating regulations, but further steps must be taken to fund local emergency response teams, implement additional local and state regulations, and reduce the public safety risks to surrounding communities. In doing so, we can prevent disasters like the one in Yazoo County.

“Had the explosion happened just a few hours later, rather than breathing apparatuses, first responders might have needed body bags.”

Hyding in

Plain Sight

How the Hyde Amendment quietly undermines reproductive freedom and what states can do to fix it

by Alexandra Mork ’25, a Political Science and History concentrator and a Managing Editor and Staff Writer for BPR

Infographics by Hannah Jeong RISD ’26 and Icy Liang ’25

“I’m not going to be able to do anything more… this is my only option,” a single, working mother of three told a phone counselor at the Women’s Medical Fund in November of 2017. With only $125 in savings, she was forced to turn to a private abortion fund to help pay for expenses that her insurance would not cover and her family could not afford. Tragically, stories like this one are not uncommon. Worse, some women are altogether unable to access reproductive healthcare during their pregnancies, leading to forced births.

Forced birth is gendered violence. First and foremost, it is a clear violation of bodily autonomy. Beyond that, it also traps people in cycles of structural violence from which they have little hope of escape. The Guttmacher Institute reports that “women who do not obtain an abortion they wanted have four times greater odds of subsequently living in poverty and three times greater odds of being unemployed six months later, compared with women who are able to obtain an abortion.” Moreover, women forced to carry unwanted pregnancies to term experi-

ence higher rates of medical complications and chronic pain, as well as worse health outcomes overall than those who receive their desired care.

Prior to the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization Supreme Court decision, the United States federal government protected people’s fundamental right to choose. But for many, this was a right in name only. The stories of people who struggle to pay for reproductive care are too often left untold—they are confined to the solemn halls of doctors’ offices, desperate phone calls with help lines, and hushed conversations with loved ones. Nevertheless, these stories are all around us.

This silent suffering is not inevitable. The federal government once funded over 300,000 abortions annually through Medicaid, a program which provides health insurance to roughly 80 million mostly low-income Americans. But in 1980, that number dropped to almost zero. The cause of this precipitous decline? The implementation of the Hyde Amendment.

Included in annual appropriation bills since the 1970s due to pressure from pro-life members of Congress, the Hyde Amendment prohibits the use of federal funds to cover abortions. This means people on Medicaid or the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) must pay for abortions out of pocket. This restriction places an undue burden on those who are precisely the least able to afford it: One-half of all the women and girls of reproductive age who live in poverty are enrolled in Medicaid. For these individuals,

paying hundreds or even thousands of dollars is a huge, often insurmountable barrier to receiving care. Consequently, in states that do not fund reproductive healthcare themselves, one in four women on Medicaid who seek abortions are ultimately unable to obtain them.

A congressional repeal of the Hyde Amendment would be the most effective way to minimize forced birth across the nation and help ensure that all people—regardless of income, veteran status, or incarceration—have the right to choose. However, such a repeal currently faces an uphill battle in the Senate due to

united Republican opposition, as well as pushback from a few Democrats. Thus, one critical near-term goal for reproductive rights activists should be pressuring states to cover the costs of abortions for people on federal insurance.

While some states already cover abortion costs, the majority do not—nearly eight million women across 34 states and the District of Columbia are directly affected by the Hyde Amendment. And in Colorado, Delaware, Nevada, and Rhode Island, Democrats have failed to act in spite of the fact that they hold trifectas in state offices.

Far too often, even women who are able to get abortions must do so at great personal cost. In one study, more than half of participants spent over one-third of their monthly income on the procedure, with many delaying paying their bills or foregoing meeting their material needs. And even with these sacrifices, over half of the women in the study were forced to defer their

“Prior to the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization Supreme Court decision, the federal government protected people’s fundamental right to choose. But for many, this was a right in name only.”

abortions to raise money for their procedures. These delays not only raise the costs of the procedure itself, but also increase the likelihood of medical complications.

While some postpone or forego care, others, like Rosie Jimenez, resort to unsafe methods. When the Hyde Amendment took effect, Jimenez was a 27-year-old college sophomore on Medicaid. Because her insurance would not cover the costs of her abortion, Jimenez could not afford to see an OB/GYN to obtain the procedure. So, lacking other options, she turned to an unlicensed midwife. After days of bleeding, Jimenez died of an infection, leaving behind her four-year-old daughter.

Jimenez’s widely publicized story has led her to be called the “first victim” of the Hyde Amendment—but she was certainly not the last.

And because of the intersections of race, gender, and poverty, repealing the Hyde Amendment is an issue of social as well as economic justice. Nearly 30 percent of all Black women between 15 and 49 were enrolled in Medicaid in 2019, and Black women seek abortions at higher rates than their non-Black counterparts. Furthermore, Black women experience disproportionately high rates of maternal mortality when they carry pregnancies to term. Together, these facts illustrate a harrowing reality: Black women are disproportionately likely to seek access to abortion care, disproportionately likely to be denied such access, and disproportionately likely to suffer the consequences of those denials.

The Hyde Amendment also hurts other groups who rely on federal funding for their insurance, including many government employees, veterans, federal prisoners/detainees, and Native Americans. For people who are incarcerated, this can mean carrying unwanted pregnancies to term within prison walls and without adequate medical care, giving birth in shackles or solitary confinement, and being separated from their newborn children. For indigenous women, the Hyde Amendment represents just one of many violations of their bodily autonomy. Many Native health clinics delay care due to understaffing, fail to provide emergency contraceptives, and, until recently, did not reliably offer birth control.

This is particularly concerning given that Native women are the most likely to experience rape of any ethnic group. While the Hyde Amendment does now carve out exceptions for rape (as well as incest) on paper, actually obtaining funding in these circumstances is a

“Together, these facts illustrate a harrowing reality: Black women are disproportionately likely to seek access to abortion care, disproportionately likely to be denied such access, and disproportionately likely to suffer the consequences of those denials.”

different story. The amendment’s narrow criteria for exceptions create bureaucratic hoops for patients and providers to jump through. An analysis published in the American Journal of Public Health conservatively estimates that, of 1,165 abortions that “qualified for federal Medicaid funding in the year before the interview, 736 were not reimbursed.”

Like Native women, women in the armed forces are also disproportionately harmed by these bureaucratic obstacles. In fact, almost a quarter of servicewomen are survivors of sexual assault. That women who sacrifice their bodies for their country are denied the right to bodily autonomy by the very nation they serve is a disgrace.

By funding abortions for those who want them, states could take a step toward resolving these injustices. Moreover, in addition to helping pregnant people in their own states, funding insurance for abortions would also enable blue states to indirectly protect the rights of women in red states by reducing the pressure on abortion funds. This is particularly relevant in the wake of Dobbs as thousands of people must now take time off work, organize childcare, and cross state lines to receive basic medical treatment. These additional expenses, which can reach over $4,000 per person, have further strained already under-resourced abortion funds. In ensuring that their own residents can use government insurance to pay for abortions, liberal states can enable abortion funds to assist more women in anti-abortion states.

The time to act is now. Pro-life advocacy groups have achieved enormous legislative success despite their relatively small base through

the persistent and passionate advocacy of their most zealous supporters. Now, pro-choice groups may be ready to bring the same level of energy. After Dobbs, people across the nation are particularly alert to issues of reproductive justice. A recent Pew poll found that 56 percent of midterm voters currently consider abortion a top voting issue, in comparison to less than 40 percent a decade ago. Moreover, 71 percent of registered Democrats now say abortion rights are very important to their vote, indicating that we are in a potentially time-sensitive moment for the expansion of reproductive rights. With the political wind from Dobbs at their backs, liberal states have a critical opportunity to connect the right to choose in theory with the right to access in practice.

“While the Hyde Amendment does now carve out exceptions for rape (as well as incest) on paper, actually obtaining funding in these circumstances is a different story.”

The Fight for Fairness in Food An Interview with Kiki Louya

Kiki Louya is a chef, entrepreneur, food activist, community partner, and storyteller from Detroit who was recognized by The New York Times as one of “16 Black Chefs Changing Food in America.” To bring her visions of equity for food and farm workers to life, she founded the award-winning food markets Folk and The Farmer’s Hand, as well as Nest Egg Detroit, the nation’s first entirely women-owned hospitality group. She most recently served as the Executive Director of the Restaurant Workers’ Community Foundation (RWCF), which raises and distributes funds to empower workers in public discourse and workplace policies. Louya is currently working on new sustainable food concepts in Detroit.

Hai Ning Ng (HN): The RWCF published a set of draft guidelines for a more equitable restaurant industry. What was the starting point for those guidelines?

Kiki Louya (KL): I think one overarching theme is the idea of respect. Some parts of the restaurant industry have been trying to legitimize restaurant workers as skilled laborers by requiring culinary degrees. But at the same time, workers with culinary degrees might have paid $60,000 for that education, only to be paid less than $10 an hour for their work. Ideas about respect and legitimacy also have to include conversations around access and fair compensation.

That said, we need buy-in from consumers, too. Consumers have to value not just the end product, but

Interview by Hai Ning Ng ’23

Illustration by Christine Wang ’23

also the people who created that product. If one is willing to pay for an incredible grass-fed steak, they also have to believe that the farmer who raised it deserves a living wage, as does the butcher, the cook who cooked it to temperature, and the server who put it on their plate. We’re not going to be an equitable industry if our customers don’t respect the work we’re doing.

HN: The guidelines also included sections on specific issues such as healthcare and immigrant justice. Could you tell us more about what they entail?

KL: Because restaurant work touches on so many different aspects of our society, I think it holds up a mirror to how we treat others within our communities. First, restaurant work can be very dangerous. You’re working in a very fastpaced environment with knives and high heat, and you’re on your feet for up to 16 hours a day, yet many restaurant workers go without health insurance. The majority of restaurants don’t have any healthcare plans, and if you’re being paid subminimum wages, you can’t afford to elect into health insurance, either. As time wears on, the physical health issues and the stress can really take a toll on one’s mental health. Subsequently, many people turn to substance use just to cope. One thing we’re doing at RWCF to combat this vicious cycle is giving grants to organizations providing free or very low-cost mental health services to restaurant workers across the country.

Second, there are a lot of undocumented immigrants in the restaurant industry. The risk of deportation means that they often feel they cannot speak up for themselves. Additionally, delivery personnel under third-party services like Grubhub and DoorDash are considered contracted workers rather than full-time employees. This means the companies are not on the hook for providing them with benefits and other employee protections. At RWCF, we’re supporting organizations addressing immigrant rights issues. For example, some organizations provide resources in different languages for workers—undocumented or not—to understand what to do if they’re furloughed or if they need rental assistance, mental health services, urgent care services, etc.

HN: How can a restaurant avoid gentrification and instead engage with and support its community?

KL: Restaurateurs and developers in general are looking at real estate in terms of trying to get a great property below market value. But we also have a responsibility to that existing community to include them in the decision-making. Otherwise, we have simply created a spot in their neighborhood that they may not be able to afford to dine in. Considering the community doesn’t have to mean changing the entire menu or concept; it could also mean having specials, having lower-cost menu items, a five-dollar burger night, a loyalty program, a seniors’ program, a neighborhood discount, a pay-what-you-can or pay-itforward system, and so on. There are so many options if we just start thinking outside the traditional restaurant model.

We also have to think critically about the opportunities we’re giving to people in the neighborhood. Are we

offering them employment opportunities? Do we interact with the community at all? If we find that we are not interacting with community members at all, then we can probably come to the conclusion that we are harming them instead.

HN: How can people who live in cities support better food systems?

KL: I think even people who live in urban areas have “access points,” like farmers markets, which are great places for small farmers and makers to sell their products. I’m also seeing more local goods in smaller stores such as mom-and-pop shops, which tend to work with farmers located on the periphery of their cities. Most states do have a good farming community, and once you start going to the farmers market and seeing some familiar faces, you’ll want to see them every single week.

It’s also really great if you can grow your own produce. Even if you don’t have the privilege of having backyard space, you can grow things in pots or windowsill units or even inside your home. This past winter in Michigan, I grew potatoes and kale. Some urban communities have community gardens, and they’re very much worth it if you can get a plot. It becomes a built-in community with people you can learn from and trade with, so that’s always a good thing to look out for if you move into a new neighborhood.

HN: How do your identities and experiences influence your work?

KL: I think being a chef has absolutely brought me closer to my culture and heritage. My dad immigrated here from the Congo, and growing up as a first-generation African American in this country, the things I ate weren’t really understood by my classmates. But as I got older and started working in the food industry, I learned more about how my culture and other cultures influenced America and American cuisine as we know it today, and seeing those linkages made it feel more like a melting pot than I had ever really thought of it as before. My mom’s family is from the American South, and I used to feel shame around Southern food, too, because it was viewed as unhealthy. But now I just see these beautiful culinary traditions in all the things that we do, and I think having these varied perspectives makes me unique.

Besides my heritage, I think growing up in Detroit was definitely a formative experience. Being from Detroit is interesting because we’re like no other city, yet we’re also a mirror image of what has happened in this country in the last century, from the Ford Motor Company and the advent of automobiles to the Civil Rights Movement. Having this background is why I think a lot about people’s histories, how we treat others, and how every little interaction that we have matters.

“Consumers have to value not just the end product, but also the people who created that product.”

Uprooting Insecurity

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In 1967, civil rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer purchased 40 acres of land in the Mississippi Delta. This plot was to be the headquarters of Hamer’s Freedom Farm Cooperative (FFC), a community-based agricultural and economic development project in Sunflower County that sought to support and empower poor Black farmers and sharecroppers. The FFC offered a variety of services to its residents, from affordable housing to scholarships for local Black high school students. Although the cooperative started with only 40 acres, at its peak in 1971 the FFC spanned more than 600 acres and was home to a vibrant community.

The FFC dissolved when Hamer died in 1977, but not without leaving an impact. Generations of Black farmers and activists have followed in Hamer’s footsteps. While agricultural spaces have a long history of exploiting Black labor, Hamer’s FFC is just one example of how these spaces can give rise to a resistance that centers Black farmers, who have long been unsung advocates for food justice and food sovereignty. Hamer saw self-sufficiency as a tool to empower rural Black sharecroppers, tenant

farmers, and domestic workers. Today, activists like Hamer show that self-sufficiency is not only important in the fight against food insecurity, but it is also a key strategy in addressing racial inequality in the United States.

While the United States produces more than enough food to feed everyone in the country, food insecurity in the Black community remains a critical issue. Black Americans are disproportionately impacted by food insecurity as a result of historical inequalities and racial discrimination that continue to this day. Trends in Black farmers’ land ownership provide a striking example of this oppression on a large scale. In 1910, Black farmers owned 17 million acres of land. By 1997, this number dropped to 1.5 million acres, a 90 percent decrease compared to a mere 2 percent drop in white farm acreage over the same period. Even as recently as 2020, Black Americans were 3.2 times more likely to experience food insecurity than white Americans.

Black farming cooperatives and agricultural justice initiatives nationwide are making strides to address these issues, in particular with their efforts to promote food sovereignty. Food sov-

Sarah Roberts ’24, a Computer Science and Religious Studies concentrator and a Chief of Staff for BPR

illustrations by Maria Hahne ’24, an Illustration major at RISD

Uplifting Black and marginalized communities by promoting food sovereignty

“Activists like Hamer show that self-sufficiency is not only important in the fight against food insecurity, but it is also a key strategy in addressing racial inequality in the United States.”

ereignty, as defined by the US Food Sovereignty Alliance, is “the right of a people to determine their own policies relative to food and agriculture as opposed to having their food supply subject to market forces.” Organizations like the National Black Food and Justice Alliance (NBFJA), for example, are focused on “developing Black leadership, supporting Black communities, organizing for Black self-determination, and building institutions for Black food sovereignty [and] liberation.” By investing in essential infrastructure to build self-determining food systems and economies, the NBFJA provides Black Americans with the opportunities to create and maintain their own food sources, insulated from white-dominated power structures that contributed to their food insecurity in the first place.

Similar to the NBFJA, Soul Fire Farm was directly inspired by the FFC. Soul Fire Farm is an Afro-Indigenous-centered community farm committed to uprooting racism and seeding sovereignty in the food system. Over 160,000 people participate in the organization’s food sovereignty programs every year, which include

training for Black and brown farmers as well as reparations and land return initiatives for northeast farmers. Soul Fire Farm seeks to reclaim Black and Indigenous peoples’ collective rights to exercise agency in the food system, just like the FFC did. This right has long been denied to Black people. By divorcing their activism from the US food system and promoting self-sufficiency, Soul Fire Farm is able to prioritize the self-determination of Black people.

NBFJA and Soul Fire Farm are just two of the many organizations that demonstrate the power and resiliency of the Black community and the importance of reinforcing their rela-

tionship with the land. These initiatives can be seen as reconceptualized models of the FFC, mirroring many of Hamer’s original goals. With enough resources, they are able to support the self-sufficiency and self-determination of Black communities. This is not only a powerful step in the fight against food insecurity, but also in the struggle for racial equality in the United States. In the words of Leah Penniman, the farm manager and founding co-director at Soul Fire Farm: “If we can have our farms, if we are able to can and preserve for the winter, if we own food hubs and food co-ops as a community, that security becomes the basis for freedom.”

“By divorcing their activism from the US food system and promoting self-sufficiency, Soul Fire Farm is able to prioritize the self-determination of Black people.”

Sikhism, 75 years after independence

by Nealie Deol ’24, an Applied Math-Economics concentrator

It may be forever unknown whether a London barrister named Sir Cyril Radcliffe, sketching a map in the summer of 1947, pondered the words written a century earlier by his compatriot: “The pen is mightier than the sword.” Still, the lines Radcliffe drew would in time prove the adage’s validity. On August 15 of the same year, those lines defined the borders of the newly independent nations of Hindu-majority India and Muslim-majority Pakistan, cutting a wound deeper than what could have been produced by the sharpest of blades.

What ensued was the largest migration event in human history. Hindus and Sikhs left the newly formed West and East Pakistan for India, and Muslims left India for Pakistan, with the total number of displaced people estimated at 15 million. Thrown into a state of chaos and confusion, the ruptured border provinces of Punjab and Bengal saw massacres, forced religious conversions, arson, and sexual violence ravage communities that had coexisted peacefully for centuries. While no precise measurement of the death toll exists, between 500,000 and two million people are estimated to have died either while migrating or in the widespread carnage.

For the Sikh population, the wounds of partition stung even more. Whereas Muslims ended up in Pakistan and Hindus in India, demands for an independent Sikh state were brushed aside. That two-thirds of the northwestern province of Punjab—including where the highest proportion of Sikhs lived, and even where Sikhism’s founder, Guru Nanak, was born— became part of West Pakistan only added salt to the wounds. Nevertheless, the scars of decol-

onization shaped a novel Sikh identity rooted in the notion of Punjab as a homeland. In asserting their territorial claims, Sikhs forged a consciousness that underwrote, if not drove, their advocacy for greater autonomy from the Indian central government over the ensuing decades.

Although Punjab formed the geographic backdrop for Sikhism’s origin and much of its evolution, it did not figure centrally into how most Sikhs viewed themselves until partition. Scholar Harjot S. Oberoi traces the transformation of Sikh metacommentaries, or “stories that [a people] tell themselves about themselves,” as a proxy for identity construction across four historical periods: the Guru Phase (1600-1707), the Heroic Phase (1708-1849), the Colonial Phase (1850-1947), and the Nation-State Phase (1948-present). During the first, Sikhs were characterized by their studying Guru Nanak’s and his nine successors’ teachings (bani), founding congregations (sangats), and sharing communal meals (langars). After the last living Guru passed, Sikhs relied on external symbols (the five k’s), a code of discipline (rahit), and scripture (Guru Granth Sahib) to bind the community (Khalsa). The Golden Temple in Amritsar served as a holy pilgrimage destination, but Punjab was still never explicitly linked to Sikh selfhood.

When it became clear in the late colonial period that Punjab might be split, the Sikh political party—the Akali Dal—passed a resolution invoking Punjab as the Sikh “homeland and holy land” and calling for “the creation of a Sikh state.” They justified their petition by professing “intimate bonds of holy shrines, property, language, traditions, and history” to the area, citing the domain of the last Sikh ruler of Punjab, and advocating for the protection of Sikh “religious, cultural, economic, and political rights.” Even though British officials overseeing the transition and non-Sikh independence leaders disregarded

illustrations by Rosalia Mejia ’23, an Industrial Design major at RISD

their appeals, Sikhs had formally articulated an ideal concept of belonging in the postcolonial paradigm tied to a sense of place in Punjab.

In the post-partition era, Sikh leaders in Punjab continued pushing for territorial rights, now facing an Indian federal government, controlled by the Congress Party, that seemed just as impervious, if not hostile, to their claims. The Indian government opposed carving out an independent religious state, so the Akali Dal agitated for a “Punjabi Suba,” or a state within the republic whose population would be majority Punjabi-speaking. A decade-long campaign resulted in the Punjab Reorganization Act of 1966, which further separated Punjab into a majority Punjabi-speaking (and Sikh) state bearing the same name, a majority Hindu-speaking (and Hindu) state of Haryana, and a union territory called Chandigarh that would serve as the capital city of the two states. Since the Act also specified that Punjab would receive only 23 percent of its river waters, with the rest diverted via canals to Haryana and the state of Rajasthan, the Akali Dal remained profoundly dissatisfied. In 1978, the party re-litigated its grievances by drafting the Anandpur Sahib Resolution, which pressed not only for the redistribution of river waters in Punjab’s favor but, more broadly, for “an autonomous region … wherein the Sikh interests are constitutionally recognized as the fundamental State policy.” The charter, though not secessionist, argued for Punjab gaining total jurisdiction over its administration and law with the central government’s reach limited to matters of foreign policy, defense, currency, railways, and communications.

It is overreach, however, that explained the rise and fall of a more radical brand of Sikh separatism in India throughout the tumultuous 1980s, and the movement’s modern-day vestiges in the Sikh diaspora. The Indian National Congress Party’s errors started with meddling in Punjabi politics, which contributed to the rise of Sikh militancy. In June of 1984, after already suspending the Punjabi state government the year before, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi sent federal troops to raid Sikh militants taking refuge at the Golden Temple in Amritsar, Punjab, which resulted in hundreds of casualties and damage to the shrine. The attack created tremendous ripple effects, beginning with PM Gandhi’s assassination by Sikh bodyguards that in turn spawned anti-Sikh massacres abetted by Congress leaders and the police. Attempts at conciliation with the Sikhs of Punjab gave way to a series of military operations and police action that, by the early 1990s, largely quelled the Sikh struggle.

Nonetheless, the events of 1984 galvanized the Sikh diaspora, which today constitutes the strongest force behind the drive for regional autonomy. Outside of political lobbying and demonstrations, its core campaign has been organizing an unofficial consensus-building referendum among international Sikhs, with an eye toward petitioning the United Nations for an independent state in Punjab on the basis of it being the Sikh historic homeland. The partition of British India into India and Pakistan, excluding Sikh governance, sparked the creation of a new Sikh identity focused on the idea of Punjab as the just place for an autonomous nation. Although unsuccessful to date with respect to their supreme objective, the Sikhs of Punjab persistently advocated for their religious, cultural, linguistic, regional, and territorial rights. Accordingly, they established themselves as a resolute political force that has grown and endured well beyond Punjab’s borders.

“While no precise measurement of the death toll exists, between 500,000 and two million people are estimated to have died either while migrating or in the widespread carnage.”

The lasting impacts of America’s raid on Mogadishu

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In 1993, the United States launched a series of raids on Mogadishu, Somalia so disastrous and publicly humiliating that they would redefine presidential decision-making for the next decade. Now, in the wake of America’s exit from Afghanistan, a similar peril looms if we fail to learn from our past.

The year is 1993. Ignited by the killings of 24 Pakistani peacekeepers, the raids on Mogadishu are the culmination of a monthslong UN-backed manhunt for Somali warlord Mohamed Farrah Aidid. As the international community prepares to intervene, they have no knowledge of the warlord’s recent alliance with

a little-known Islamist group operating out of Sudan or the arms and training his soldiers have received from them. Often touted as the group’s major contribution, their coaching instructs the Somali militiamen on the use of rocket-propelled grenades—in particular, to “aim for the tail rotors of US Black Hawks.”

In the afternoon of October 3, US Army Rangers launch an assault on the Olympic Hotel in Mogadishu in search of Aidid. When the dust settles, 18 US soldiers are dead, 73 are wounded, and two Black Hawk Helicopters lie in pieces on the streets of Mogadishu. Hours later, television screens across the United States show images of the carnage: American bodies stripped naked and dragged through the streets; one soldier held hostage and another beheaded. For a newly-elected Bill Clinton, the shift in public and congressional support is palpable, as a Gallup poll will later confirm. On October 7, Clinton issues a televised announcement of full withdrawal from Somalia, after which polls indicate that the mission’s 73 percent approval rating has fallen to an abysmal 21 percent.

This turn in public sentiment, coupled with pushback from Congress, convinces Clinton to sign Presidential Decision Directive 25, overhauling US policy on multilateral intervention and sanctioning a new policy of partial isolationism. Clinton’s message is clear: Unless a mission has full support from the public and Congress, a low risk of US casualties, and a clear exit timetable, foreign intervention will not be considered.

As one senior State Department official quips during an off-the-record discussion, “it was almost as if the Hutus had read it.” As the directive is drafted, the stage is being set for a new civil conflict—this time in Rwanda. Disseminated by radio from the capital of Kigali, Hutu nationalist propagandists incite ordinary citizens and militias to take up arms against one of the country’s ethnic minorities: the Tutsi. The United Nations Assistance Mission for Rwanda

Ian Stettner ’25, an International and Public Affairs and Middle East Studies concentrator and a Staff Writer for BPR illustrations by Ash Ma ’25, a Graphic Design major at RISD

(UNAMIR)—the UN peacekeeping operation established to assist in Rwanda a mere two days after the incident in Mogadishu—is not only critically understaffed, but also lacks a mandate to collect weapons, protect civilians, or even assist with the repatriation of refugees. US reluctance to intervene drives the UN’s discussion on Rwanda, including a failed motion to terminate the mission altogether. In the words of a State Department cable: “Rwanda may be the case the [National Security Council] is looking for to prove that the US can say ‘No’ to a new peacekeeping operation.”

That week, the mission takes another blow as 10 Belgian peacekeepers are killed and their government issues a full withdrawal. In their address, the Belgians echo American sentiments after the fall of Somalia: The mission was “pointless within the terms of the present mandate” and exposed their soldiers to “unacceptable risks.” The genocide lasts three months: In the conflict, hundreds of thousands of Rwandans are killed and millions are displaced.

For the West, Mogadishu was a lesson in the perils of modern intervention. It showed how increased media coverage shrinks the margin of error, how the real battle is fought for public opinion. For the terror group who sponsored the Somali militiamen, Mogadishu carried a different lesson entirely. Seeing the battle’s impact on US policy, the group gains confidence and notoriety, hones its mission, and directs its attention more fully towards the United States. The US withdrawal only serves to encourage their belief that America lacks the political determination to back up its military might. The group’s leader, Osama bin Laden, will go on to mastermind the deadliest terror attack the United States has ever seen.

The year is 2021. The abundance of support the September 11 attacks conjured for the war in Afghanistan has long subsided, replaced with an ever-growing belief that the US invasion was a mistake. America’s military strength is not in question—it took the United States a matter of months to capture Kabul and install a new leader back in 2001. What has changed is public

support for the mission. After years of troop reductions, President Biden finally orders a full evacuation from Afghanistan in August of 2021. And as the aircraft take off over Kabul Airport, they leave the country under the same despotic leadership it knew before 2001.

What will the Taliban and other involved groups like Islamic State-Khorasan Province learn from this? That winning victory over the United States is not about imposing costs on the military, but instead about swaying public opinion? Whose egos will be boosted? Whose strategies will change?

Equally important—what will we learn? As anti-Afghan War sentiments have increased in the last 20 years, a broader movement of isolationism has gripped the United States. Emptied coffers, dead Americans, and a vastly exceeded exit timetable have impacted the public in much the same way that our failure in Somalia did. In December 2021, for the first time since 1952, as many as 40 percent of Americans said that the United States should “mind its business” internationally. Even while examples of preventable genocides and under-resourced interventions scatter our history books, isolationism once

again becomes an attractive policy position. Just as generals are prepared to fight their previous war and not their next, politicians are forced to engage with international crises in the shadow of their most recent failure. This overcorrection plagues American foreign policy. Because of Vietnam, we missed Cambodia. Because of Somalia, we missed Rwanda. What will we miss because of Afghanistan?

“For the West, Mogadishu was a lesson in the perils of modern intervention. It showed how increased media coverage shrinks the margin of error, and how the real battle is fought for public opinion.”

Granting constitutional rights to residents of US territories

by Elliot Smith ’26, an International and Public Affairs concentrator and a Staff Writer for BPR illustrations by Rosie Dinsmore ’24, an Illustration major at RISD

Over 3.5 million Americans currently live in the United States territories, a number that is roughly equivalent to the populations of the five smallest states combined. These residents of Puerto Rico, Guam, American Samoa, the US Virgin Islands, and the Northern Mariana Islands exist in a legal limbo—undoubtedly part of the United States, yet denied the full rights afforded to US citizens born in one of the 50 states. The legal basis for this system was established by the Supreme Court in the early 1900s when they

ruled in the Insular Cases that the Constitution does not fully apply to “unincorporated” territories. While the Territory Clause of the Constitution allows for territorial incorporation, thereby enabling US settler colonialism, territory status was generally thought of as a temporary designation on the path to statehood. By inventing the term “unincorporated territory,” the court created an alternate pathway of indefinite colonial administration. Struggling to decide how to handle the large swaths of territory acquired after the Spanish-American War, the Court was heavily influenced by fears of non-white populations joining the country, with Justice Henry B. Brown warning in Downes v. Bidwell that “savages” and “alien races, differing from us” might become “entitled to all the rights, privileges, and immunities of citizens.” While widely recognized as misguided and racist, the Insular Cases continue to subject the residents of the US territories, 98 percent of whom are racial or ethnic minorities, to second-class status.

The case of Fitisemanu v. United States until it was denied certiorari by the Supreme Court in October, offered a chance to address this scar on our national history. The plaintiffs, three American Samoans living in Utah, argue that the Citizenship Clause of the 14th Amendment, guaranteeing citizenship to anyone “born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof,” automatically grants citizenship to those born in the territories. While Congress has extended citizenship to the other four inhabited territories through legislation, American Samoans retain US national status and are prohibited from holding certain federal jobs or voting in elections even after establishing residency in a US state. The plaintiffs asked the court to formally overrule the Insular Cases, something that would have wide-reaching implications. The Court may have chosen not to take up the case this term. But considering Justice Neil Gorsuch’s argument in United States v. Vaello Madero that the Insular Cases “deserve no place in our law” and Justice Sonia Sotomay-

“While widely recognized as misguided and racist, the Insular Cases continue to subject the residents of the US territories, 98 percent of whom are racial or ethnic minorities, to secondclass status.”

or’s recent statement calling them “odious and wrong,” the Court increasingly appears ready to reject the legal basis for perpetual colonialism in the unincorporated territories.

The government of American Samoa’s brief urged the Court not to hear Fitisemanu, arguing that the constitutional separation between the states and the territories is essential to preserving fa’a Samoa, or the traditional Samoan way of life. The government worries that applying the Constitution’s Equal Protection Clause to American Samoa would endanger the hereditary titles and land ownership essential to the matai system, potentially leading to the type of cultural erasure experienced by Native Hawaiians. These concerns raise an important question: How can we as a country address the racist logic found in the Insular Cases while ensuring that those efforts do not further harm indigenous communities or go against the wishes of those living in certain territories? I argue that the Court should still overturn the Insular Cases, but that this action must be accompanied by new political frameworks that support the self-determination of those living in US territories.

Applying the Constitution’s Equal Protection Clause to the territories could theoretically open the door for challenges to the constitutionality of the matai system on the basis that it discriminates against nonindigenous residents. But constitutional scholars and advocates have argued that this outcome is unlikely. First, the due process and equal protection clauses already apply to American Samoa based on the precedent set in Balzac v. Porto Rico. If someone wanted to challenge the constitutionality of the matai system, they could do so irrespective of the outcome of Fitisemanu. Secondly, the constitutionality of this type of land inheritance was already challenged in the Northern Mariana Islands, where the residents are American citizens, and was deemed constitutional by the Ninth Circuit. I seek not to minimize the concerns raised by the government of American Samoa, but rather to show that it would be unlikely that repealing the Insular Cases would lead to the erasure of American Samoan cultural practices. Repealing the Insular Cases should focus on repairing historical harm and present

injustice, and the courts have numerous tools to protect indigenous rights if a legal challenge emerges.

Overturning the Insular Cases would, however, immediately deliver numerous practical and symbolic benefits. For example, over 100,000 American Samoans living in the mainland United States would be able to vote in state and local elections and run for office. American Samoans would also be eligible to serve as officers and join Special Forces units in the military—something they are currently prevented from doing despite serving in the military at higher rates than any other state or territory. If someone can proudly serve in the US military and risk their life for this country, they should not be prevented from serving in leadership positions because a 5-4 majority of the 1901 Supreme Court did not want “alien races” to enjoy the same rights as white Americans. As a group of current and former elected representatives from Guam, Puerto Rico, the US Virgin Islands, and the Northern Mariana Islands

“If someone can proudly serve in the US military and risk their life for this country, they should not be prevented from serving in leadership positions simply because a 5-4 majority of the 1901 Supreme Court did not want,“alien races”, to enjoy the same rights as white Americans.”

point out, the citizenship status of people living in those territories would also be protected, since Congress can theoretically revoke their citizenship at any moment under current laws. Repealing the Insular Cases would enshrine citizenship for those born in the territories as a constitutional right, protect the rights of those living in the territories from the whims of Congress, and affirm their equality with those born on the mainland.

Overturning the insular cases can also serve as an opportunity for the Court to admit that the racist logic used to justify perpetual US colonialism was wrong. As Neil Weare, the founder of the organization Equally American, explains, the Insular Cases rely on similar racist attitudes as those that undergirded Plessy v. Ferguson, which created the “separate but equal” doctrine. While Plessy was overturned in 1954, the Insular Cases, decided by many of the same justices, remain fully enforceable. A Supreme Court decision formally repudiating this decision would serve as a powerful recognition of the injustice imposed on Americans living in the territories. This acknowledgement would be largely symbolic. As Christina Ponsa-Kraus writes in the Yale Law Journal, overruling the Insular Cases would not radically change the current system— the territories would remain territories with no voting representation in Congress. The symbolic significance of overturning this shameful precedent could, however, spark greater attention to the issue. Just as overturning Plessy in Brown v. Board of Education sparked decades of legal and political challenges that advanced

racial justice in the United States, part of the importance of a reversal of the Insular Cases would be the subsequent political efforts that stem from it.

Rejecting the framework of the Insular Cases would put significant pressure on Congress to address the territory problem, an opportunity it should use to promote the self-determination of those living in each territory. Since the notion of an “unincorporated territory” would no longer exist, all US territories would theoretically have to be on the path to statehood. For some places like Puerto Rico, where in 2020 a majority of voters supported statehood in a referendum, statehood might be a desirable path, although there would likely be significant opposition from some lawmakers in Congress. Other territories, such as American Samoa, that have expressed reservations about further integration with the United States, might seek an alternate path. For example, American Samoa could seek independence as a Freely Associated State, an option that would give them complete sovereignty, including representation at the United Nations, while maintaining some of the benefits provided by the United States as part of an international agreement. Rather than repurposing the racist framework of the Insular Cases, this type of inclusive political debate that would move territories towards statehood or independence would best serve the need for self-determination in the territories. While the courts have no ability to compel congressional action on re-evaluating the status of the territories, a rejection of the Insular Cases in Fitisemanu could have increased political pressure on lawmakers to address this long overdue issue.

The Constitution makes no provisions for second-class citizenship or permanent colonialism. Overruling the shameful and racist doctrine that the court invented a century ago in the Insular Cases need not, however, come at the expense of indigenous rights. Rather, it is precisely the practical and symbolic significance of overruling this precedent that might spark a genuine effort to recognize the right of the residents of the territories to self-determination and representation, using both legal and political means to advance a more just future.

The persistence of political deceit in Mexico under AMLO’s presidency

by Francisca Saldivar ’24, an Economics and International and Public Affairs concentrator and a Content Editor and Data Associate for BPR

illustrations by Ashley Castaneda ’23, an Illustration major at RISD

This past September, Mexican deputies voted to pass a constitutional amendment granting the Ministry of National Defense control over the National Guard until 2028. Not only does the amendment give the executive branch unchecked power, but its method of passage also raises suspicion around its legitimacy.

The current president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO), was elected in 2018. Due to the amendment’s highly controversial proposition, AMLO’s party, the National Regeneration Movement (MORENA), had been unable to garner the two-thirds majority in Congress necessary to pass it. When the day of the September vote arrived, however, representatives of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI)— MORENA’s main opposition that ruled Mexico in a one-party state from 1929 to 2000—voted in favor of the president’s amendment.

In alienating the other opposition parties in its current coalition and raising tensions within its own party, it is evident that the PRI had little to gain from this maneuver. Rather, it was individual PRI politicians, not the PRI itself, that gained political capital from this vote. AMLO’s ability to garner support for a highly controversial amendment demonstrates that practices of manipulation and corruption reminiscent of the one-party state still dominate Mexican politics.

AMLO grounded his 2018 presidential bid in anti-establishment rhetoric, pointing a finger at the PRI’s corruption. He consolidated his anti-neoliberal and populist campaign into

one phrase: out with the “mafia of power”—the old-guard PRI politicians with long histories of nepotism, electoral fraud, and mishandling public funds. In June of that year, AMLO and his newly-founded party MORENA won the general election with an impressive 53 percent of the vote, while the PRI only scrounged up 16 percent. AMLO took this resounding victory as a mandate from the people to upend Mexico’s institutions, including those supervising domestic security.

The September amendment’s transfer of power from civilian forces to the Ministry of National Defense called into question how effectively the National Guard has suppressed crime since its creation in 2019. Despite campaigning on the demilitarization of police, AMLO launched the militarized National Guard to curb crime rates. Yet since his election in 2018, those rates have only increased. Now, AMLO claims this new amendment will bring legitimacy and efficacy to the National Guard.

The United Nations has heavily criticized this change. In a September 9 press release, Acting UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Nada Al-Nashif raised concerns over the lack of civilian oversight of the National Guard under the Ministry of Defense, which violates Mexico’s Constitution. The PRI’s vote in favor of militarization thus undermines the rule of law and protection of human rights in Mexico.

Behind the PRI’s vote, allegations of corruption and political manipulation further taint its

credibility. In the past four years, the PRI, as one of the government’s most critical opponents, has held its ground against MORENA’s policies. When the National Guard constitutional amendment was introduced, the president of the PRI, Alejandro Moreno Cárdenas, posted on Twitter, “I am voting against the militarization of the #NationalGuard. I am convinced that it must remain a C I V I L institution.” Yet merely five days later, alongside other PRI members, Moreno Cárdenas backtracked and voted in favor of the constitutional amendment. Since then, the Mexican media has highlighted his alleged illicit enrichment—the use of public funds to increase one’s assets—in the state of Campeche. News sources claim that his vote might garner him ALMO’s favor and consequently impunity from prosecution. Moreno Cárdenas has been vocal in denying these claims, but allies of the

PRI have already broken their coalition, destroying the only counterbalance to MORENA’s legislative supermajority. Claims that AMLO used Moreno Cárdenas’s illicit past to advance his agenda while simultaneously antagonizing the opposition highlight the persisting impacts of Mexico’s political corruption and backroom deal-making.

When he launched his presidential bid, AMLO hoped to change the political landscape of Mexico’s government. He proclaimed his presidency to be Mexico’s “fourth transformation”—an ode to the three previous transformations in Mexican history: the Independence War (1810), the Reform War (1857), and the Revolutionary War (1910). His most recent maneuver to force the PRI to vote for a highly controversial constitutional amendment elucidates one thing: The underbelly of political processes in Mexico has not changed as much as he proclaims.

“In alienating the other opposition parties in its current coalition and raising tensions within its own party, it is evident that the PRI had little to gain from this maneuver. Rather, it was individual PRI politicians, not the PRI itself, that gained political capital from this vote.”

The Global Climate Crisis Embodied through the Sinking of a Virginia Town

by William Forys ’24, a Biology and International and Public Affairs concentrator and a Content Editor for BPR

infographics by Mahnoor Rafi RISD ’23 and Harry Yang RISD ’25

In 2015, researchers from the US Army Corps of Engineers published findings that were likely unsurprising to Chesapeake Bay area residents: Tangier Island is sinking, and fast. A tiny island west of Virginia’s Eastern Shore and the current home to about 400 people, Tangier is highly vulnerable to rising tides and harsher, more frequent storms brought on by rapid climate change. Current estimates predict that the island will be completely uninhabitable by the 2050s, generating hundreds of climate refugees and signaling the beginning of an era in which Tangier’s fate may not be all that uncommon. The drowning of the island’s rich culture under the Chesapeake waves represents a history lost to negligence. Our passive indifference will make it no less tragic.

Long before the arrival of English colonists, Tangier was a hunting retreat for groups indigenous to the Eastern Shore, such as the Pocomoke people. The arrowheads still dotting the beaches suggest that a diverse community flourished on the island for centuries. English colonists displaced many Chesapeake Bay Native communities and drew up a remote fishing and agricultural village largely secluded from the mainland. To this day, the list of surnames of the island’s residents is short and

aligns closely with the records of those who arrived there centuries prior. Tangier briefly became a place of refuge for enslaved people in the region during the War of 1812, when hundreds fled to the British Fort Albion to trade military service for emancipation. Today’s residents of the island still have a distinct English dialect, owing to their relative solitude on the open waters of the Bay. The loss of two-thirds of the island’s landmass over the past two centuries has rendered farming impossible, leading the islanders to adapt and embrace crabbing as their primary industry. Unfortunately, Tangier’s rich history seems to be drawing to a close, with pessimistic climate projections dampening any hopes for natural resource preservation.

Policymakers face a uniquely bleak and wildly expensive set of options to mitigate the devastation of Tangier. After decades of inaction, Senator Tim Kaine (D-VA) and Representative Elaine Luria (D-VA) are currently fighting to secure $25 million to augment the island’s anti-flooding barricades. While an undoubtedly

well-intentioned effort, there is little evidence that this project would do much more than prolong the continuing loss of land mass. The aforementioned US Army Corps of Engineers study predicted that it will cost $250-$350 million to fully protect the island from rising sea levels and $100-$200 million to relocate the island’s residents to solid ground. Given this grim prognosis, it seems unlikely that this amount of federal money would be well spent on such stopgap projects. As one local journalist put it, “Mother Nature seems determined—and destined—to win” the fight against communities like Tangier. Unfortunately, Tangier will be neither the first nor the last piece of Chesapeake Bay history lost to erosion and rising tides. About 500 islands have essentially vanished since the early colonial period. Despite the severity of the situation, even the island’s current residents are unsure about Tangier’s future. High levels of doubt regarding the effect of rising sea levels, coupled with the unsubstantiated reassurances by former President Trump that the island

“A tiny island west of Virginia’s Eastern Shore and the current home to about 400 people, Tangier is highly vulnerable to rising tides and harsher, more frequent storms brought on by rapid climate change.”

has “hundreds of years more,” have severely undermined efforts to sound alarm bells. Tangier Mayor James Eskridge stated that he loved Trump “as much as any relative [he’s] got” after Trump personally called him to claim that erosion, not rising sea levels, was the main cause of landmass loss and to encourage Tangier residents not to worry about tides or the island’s longevity. Local ambivalence, however, cannot allow Virginia’s policymakers to be complacent in preparing for necessary relocation efforts. Ignoring a crisis does not alleviate its effects: Indifference is in itself a political choice, a mortgage on vulnerable coastal communities. If hundreds of islands with centuries of cultural importance sink into the water, will they make a sound? Will we finally prepare for ecological destruction and the generation of countless climate refugees both in the United States and abroad?

The plight of Tangier might be distant in the mind of the average American, but communities across the nation are facing the same intensifying issues. In 2016, the Department of Housing and Urban Development set aside $48 million to relocate the Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw Native community away from the increasingly unlivable Isle de Jean Charles in Louisiana. The relocation process is itself a grim cautionary tale, reminding us that ensuring equitable distribution of resources to the hardest-hit groups is not nearly as simple as one may hope. Albert Naquin, chief of the local band of the Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw, protested that Louisiana has excluded indigenous perspectives from the relocation process, asserting: “The state stole our plan to get the money, and now they are running off with it.” Dense urban areas have also borne the brunt of rising sea levels and harsher storms. Staten Island neighborhoods like Ocean Breeze have yet to fully rebuild after Hurricane Sandy ten years ago and have no plan to do so any time soon. The vulnerability of waterfront land devastated by the storm inspired the New York State government to buy affected people’s land at pre-storm prices. One resident, Joe Herrnkind, decided to participate in the program and permanently relocate from Ocean Breeze, saying that he was “reluctant to put someone else in harm’s way.”

The United States contributes to making Tangier and countless places like it uninhabitable through its reliance on fossil fuels. As a nation, we owe it to climate refugees—including the final generation of Virginians to live on Tangier Island—to offer financial and community support during this transition. Irreplaceable pieces of our cultural heritage may be vanishing before our eyes in the Chesapeake and around the world, but the warning signs of ecological catastrophe are as visible as ever.

Raiders of the Lost Art

by Grace Chaikin ’25, an International and Public Affairs and History of Art and Architecture concentrator and an Associate Editor for BPR

illustrations by Kennice Pan ’23, an Illustration major at RISD

Stories of valiant archeologists who discover and expropriate ancient and powerful artifacts from dangerous places have long captured public imagination. Be it Indiana Jones or Laura Croft, the heroes often encounter violent insurgent groups that seek to gain profit or supernatural powers from the artifact in question—a representation that could not be further from reality. These depictions glamorize the illicit trade in antiquities, a practice that routinely benefits from bloody conflict and cultural erasure. Meanwhile, they ignore the darker, more insidious side of the trade altogether.

Conflict antiquities—cultural heritage items used to finance insurgencies, war, and global terrorism—flow through local, regional, and global markets within the underbelly of the art and antiquities trade. Media coverage surrounding such artifacts disproportionately emphasizes the destruction of heritage and history, from the Islamic State’s iconoclasm of historic sites to the more recent Russian invasion of Ukraine. Although these instances draw public attention and outrage, they are but the most recent consequences of a greater systemic issue. In fact, conflict antiquities make up only a small portion of the black market’s pernicious profits. The vast majority of the illicit antiquities trade operates in a subtler legal gray area, driven by the clandestine forces of supply and demand.

Since the 1970s, cultural heritage has been disappearing at a rapidly increasing rate as historical objects are funneled from their original settings into collections across the world in a perverse form of global commerce. Beyond the Middle East and Ukraine, artifact looting is a growing issue in regions like India, Southeast Asia, China, Latin America, and North and Cen-

tral Africa—areas relatively rich in heritage sites and poor in manufactured capital. The black market for antiquities has two distinct components: illegal excavations, at the beginning of the supply chain, and stolen artifacts already in circulation. And the means by which these illicit objects end up in legitimate spaces for art and culture like museums, private collections, and auction sites? A sophisticated network of global antiquity dealers connecting buyers to artifacts.

As the key middlemen of the trade, highclass art and antiquities brokers source looted relics behind the facade of genuine archeological work. With this fake provenance, they then sell the items to public and private collectors

The dark underbelly of the international art market

“Ultimately, the ability of the illicit antiquities market to operate through many of the same avenues as the industry’s legitimate counterpart further complicates the effort to disrupt this harmful trade.”

alike. The difficulty of marketing and selling classical art and artifacts has created a need for such brokers. Even in well-advertised private auctions for museum-quality goods, 25 percent of the lots typically fail to sell. The black market for cultural heritage is unique: It depends on people who are highly educated in the history of art and architecture, a notoriously insular field that respects and props up the opinions of a few, established authorities. These figures are often the same people that occupy prominent and, more importantly, legal positions.

The difficulty of proving that an advertised antiquity is illegal, combined with the low priority that law enforcement places upon investgating such objects, affords impunity to dealers. Ultimately, the ability of the illicit antiquities market to operate through many of the same avenues as the industry’s legitimate counterpart further complicates the effort to disrupt this harmful trade.

Public apathy toward artifact theft, particularly in the highest demand nations of the United States and the United Kingdom, renders much of the trade invisible. Indeed, dealers reap the benefits of weak regulation. Further compounding the issue, these influential intermediaries often establish mutually beneficial relationships with powerful elites, like politicians, that insulate their operations from scrutiny and large-scale regulation.

As it currently stands, prohibitions on the antiquities trade have been relatively narrow and ineffective in limiting the scope and prevalence of the trade. However, efforts by police and customs officials can occasionally identify and prosecute criminal actors. Just last year, American hedge fund billionaire and prolific art collector Michael Steinhardt agreed to surrender $70 million worth of illicit objects. Each article in the collection was purportedly purchased under the pretense of false documentation from dealers, granting Steinhardt with impunity from legal repercussions. A lengthy global investigation revealed that the artifacts were indeed looted from their source countries and smuggled out by illicit trade networks. Despite multiple previous encounters with law enforcement, however, Steinhardt faced no punitive action aside from a lifetime ban on purchasing relics.

These enforcement actions are time consuming, and costly, they often require significant cross-border cooperation by law enforcement agencies—so difficult to organize and execute that they rarely occur. Apart from these high-level sanctions, we are currently left with only low-level self-regulatory initiatives: dealers’ codes of ethics and museum acquisition statements, policies easily rendered null by causal negligence.

Thus, more mid-range provisions—in addition to prosecution—are necessary to allow for significant fines and seizures in cases when a dealer or buyer is found to have transacted without having exercised due diligence. These measures would present regulatory alternatives that could circumvent the high standard of proof required to convict dealers criminally. As it stands, such seizures are only possible through cumbersome diplomatic negotiation or lucky cases where a misdescription is noted at customs. Furthermore, the usual mechanism

“Despite multiple previous encounters with law enforcement, however, Steinhardt faced no punitive action aside from a lifetime ban on purchasing relics.”

requires source countries—often unable to afford expensive international civil litigation— to overcome the substantial burden of proof to seize an illicit object from a dealer. When stacked against the sway of savvy dealers, this rarely comes to fruition.

The most notable example of an acknowledgement of the difficulty of proof, in relation to prosecutions for dealing in stolen cultural property, is the 2003 UN Iraq Sanctions Order. The order prohibited the import or export of any cultural property illegally removed from Iraq since 1990, completely nullifying the burden of proof required for objects of Iraqi origin. Because the illicit goods in circulation were indistinguishable from the licit ones, the order served to kill the London market for Iraqi antiquities altogether. In this case, the outcome was, in fact, desirable. But the development of more workable, reliable, and accessible modes of seizure is still necessary to transform the practices of the open antiquities trade at large.

The influence dealers exercise on the fields of art and art history cannot be overstated. Dealers frequently maintain mutually beneficial relationships with political actors and those occupying industry positions. In recent years, antiquity dealers of New York City and London have organized and elected interest group representatives, which utilize lobbying power to dismantle regulation or prohibition attempts by archaeologists and other academics. One such group, the American Council on Cultural Property, was notably directed by Ashton Hawkins, the former executive vice president and counsel to the trustees of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. A broader approach—one aimed at undermining the subversive system of trust and reciprocity among actors in the illicit market—is long overdue.

Mechanisms to grant and revoke licenses specific to antiquity dealers, currently absent on the global stage, should be crafted in ways that allow for greater transparency in stock-held and transactional activity. The revocation of an illicit dealer’s license would deny the dealer the right to do business in the region in question. Until these regulatory policies are enacted, networks of dealers will likely continue to rely on esoteric models of trust to exploit the neocolonial values

of a largely unregulated system. Licensing systems would address much of the current legal ambiguity, shifting the enforcement mechanism from routine oversight and regulatory letter-writing to desistance, enforced suspensions, and revocation.

We must conceive of the illicit antiquities trade the same way we see high-end, white-collar, corporate, and even state crime. In doing so, the discussion about regulation can move past calls for the same costly and ineffective international litigation. Evidence-based solutions, such as dealer licensing systems, would make the illicit antiquity trade more visible, crippling this longstanding network of high-level theft.

“The influence dealers exercise on the field of art and art history and its regulation cannot be overstated.”

Exploitation and Gender Inequality in the Elite Global Party Circuit An Interview with Ashley Mears

Ashley Mears is an Associate Professor of Sociology at Boston University and a former fashion model. She is also the author of Pricing Beauty: The Making of a Fashion Model and Very Important People: Status and Beauty in the Global Party Circuit. She studies the connections between economic, gender, and cultural sociology with a focus on the value society places on people and on things. Specifically, the ethnographic study she conducted when writing Very Important People shines a light on the pervasive gender inequality and systems of exploitation built into the global party circuit.

This interview is part of a series conducted in collaboration with the Stone Inequality Initiative at Brown’s Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs.

Alyssa Merritt: Before conducting your ethnographic study for your book Very Important People, you experienced the world of elite nightlife firsthand as a young fashion model. What was this transition into elite nightlife like?

Ashley Mears: During the summers before I graduated college, I would travel abroad for short-term modeling

Interview by Alyssa Merritt ’23

Illustration by Christine Wang ’24

contracts. When I was 19, I traveled to Milan alone. My modeling agency arranged my flight and my apartment and had a driver meet me at the airport. When I got off the plane, jet-lagged, there was Maximo. He’s a nice young guy; he gets me a cappuccino, takes my baggage, and helps me get to the apartment. Then, he lets me know that there’s a dinner that evening, and I’m invited. I thought, “What a nice guy! My luck, this Maximo!” It took me a couple of weeks to realize that he didn’t just work for the agency; he worked for the club through the agency and getting the girls was part of his job.

This is all part of a side economy or parallel economy in elite nightlife that was supported by and supported fashion modeling. Models are poorly paid on average. Places like Milan and New York have a lot of transient young women who are coming through and staying in less than ideal housing situations with other people who are their same age and are newcomers in the industry. Nobody has money, and their kitchens are not fully stocked. Promoters offer a valuable service by bringing them into the clubs. This service is worth something to models, but it’s worth more to the promoter because it means he gets paid a good wage. It’s worth even more to the clubs and the men cycling in and out of the clubs; they use the presence of women to inflate their own status and signal their own significance to other elite men like themselves.

Alyssa Merritt: When you first began your research, did you receive pushback from other academics who did not consider the world of partying to be a legitimate area of study?

Ashley Mears: On one hand, you can really turn any topic into a sociologically relevant topic, which is what I love about sociology. On the other hand, there are definitely more legitimate topics related to inequality and the stratification of gender, race, and class that form the bread and butter of the discipline. Studying sitting elites is increasingly seen as important because of the vast wealth inequality globally, but the study of inequality in sociology is largely driven by studying the poor, not the rich. Studying elites is kind of a new frame, but it’s still within classical sociological concerns of power, financial resources, and stratification. However, studying something as feminized as what I study—my dissertation, for example, was about fashion modeling—definitely made me aware of the need to frame it about things bigger than fashion. Now, fashion is a trillion dollar industry, but, at the time, I had to show how my work was relevant because it was about inequality. I was fortunate to be working in my department at Boston University (BU) because sociology at BU is an interesting and eclectic place. I was aware that there could have been a mismatch between the things that I’m interested in and the things the discipline has traditionally been interested in, but I was fortunate to be working at a university that saw the value in my project.

Alyssa Merritt: What gives you hope that any change will happen?

Ashley Mears: I actually don’t have hope. Gender, economic, and racial inequalities are embedded in institutions. There are so many manifestations and symptoms

of these problems, and there are so many different possible solutions. A deeper solution to the problem of gender, class, race, and exclusionary practices and exploitation in elite nightlife might also be connected to the same problems that have created this vast economic inequality and disproportionate control of resources among a tiny group of people in the world. Of all the problems around those issues, elite nightlife is not going to be at the front of anybody’s mind.

However, that is not necessarily the only measure of the value of doing research. This case is valuable to understand because it helps us realize how prevalent this dynamic is. When I give talks about my research, people always respond with something like, “Oh my gosh, I’m from a small town in Ohio, and the bar on Main Street operates under the same logic!” Hierarchies, exclusion, and boundaries operate all over, so thinking through these exceptional cases helps us understand the dynamics that we’re more familiar with.

Alyssa Merritt: What words of advice do you have for young, college-aged women who might find themselves tempted into this life of partying and luxury?

Ashley Mears: I think about this often. My advice would be something along these lines: Recognize what the system is, what personal gain can be achieved, and what losses exist structurally. Recognize that these losses are perpetuating a system of gender inequality, classist inequality, and classist exclusion. I do think that is a bargain that a lot of people—my younger self included—are okay with making, but that understanding should be taken seriously and with full awareness.

One cool thing about publishing a book like Very Important People is that, because it was aimed for a broader audience, I got a lot of emails from people that I didn’t expect to hear from. One woman was a mother whose twenty-something-year-old daughter was in New York, partying with promoters late at night. Having read my book, the mother emailed me worried about her daughter. My advice to her was that her daughter was at the age where someone probably can use the scene in a more strategic way, akin to that of promoters. This is a space where you can get cultural and social capital, can leverage those gains in your own projects or entrepreneurial ventures, and can gain exposure to a world you may otherwise not get access to. I do think that is an experience worth having. It can be risky, especially if somebody is inclined to drink a lot or take drugs. That is cause for legitimate concern because these are young people, and things can go very wrong, but those more horrific cases are rare. My advice was to go in and get what you can out of it, but be aware of what the systems are also perpetuating.

Edited for length and clarity.

“Studying sitting elites is increasingly seen as important because of the vast wealth inequality globally.”

Ego, ENLARGED

Megaprojects spell a new era of pork barrel politics

by David Pinto ’24, a History and Modern Culture and Media concentrator and an Associate Editor for BPR

Sometimes truth is stranger than fiction. Take ‘The Line’—a megacity under construction with two parallel skyscrapers stretching 105 miles horizontally through the Arabian desert. Or ‘Hyperloop’—Elon Musk’s proposed high-speed transport system that will whisk passengers through vacuum-sealed tubes at 700 miles per hour. Dictators, entrepreneurs, and eccentrics are selling us dreams of a utopian future, where miraculous design and technology are used to

build perfect cities. But as the saying goes, if it seems too good to be true, then it probably is.

In the 21st century, a new form of ‘pork barrel’ politics has arisen. The wide appeal of science fiction is being used to manipulate, distract, and oppress. Megaprojects like President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi’s new Egyptian capital offer simple solutions to complex problems. Plagued by over-ambition and under-execution, more than 65 percent of megaprojects fail. Even so,

illustrations by Jacob Gong ’24, an Illustration major at RISD

these multibillion-dollar fantasies serve political ends. Today, figures like Elon Musk and Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman (MBS) use sci-fi megaprojects to promote self-serving political agendas and commercial interests.

According to McKinsey & Company, megaprojects are undertakings backed by governments or entrepreneurs with “bold ambitions.” This egomania is the core similarity connecting MBS and Elon Musk. Of course, there is no moral equivalence between the two men; the former is a brutal dictator, the latter a loudmouth executive. They represent profoundly different interests, but the comparison can help us understand megaprojects as the political and commercial instruments they are.

Since seizing power in 2017, MBS has uprooted Saudi Arabian society. Initially praised in the West for challenging religious influence and expanding women’s rights, he grew notorious as a murderer of Saudi journalists and Yemeni civilians. Like many autocrats, MBS wants to cement his legacy by erecting giant monuments in his name. His $500 billion pet-project, ‘Neom,’ will do just that, creating a new economic zone in the desert to challenge Dubai and Abu Dhabi. Projects like The Line, incorporated within Neom, will attract investment and tourism to help wean the Saudi economy off its dependence on oil exports while framing MBS as Saudi Arabia’s modernizer.

With an erratic public persona and diverse business ventures, Musk has always advocated for free enterprise, not government, as the driver of innovation.

When plans for the California High Speed Rail (CHSR) were announced in 2013, he was quick to attack the idea and propose his own solution: the Hyperloop. Musk proposed shooting magnetically levitating pods down a vacuum-sealed tube at the speed of sound. He later admitted this was a ploy to get legislators to

cancel CHSR, as a bullet train from Los Angeles to San Francisco would damage Tesla sales. This was a textbook example of gadgetbahn—a futuristic transport scheme based on implausible science. Moreover, it was a familiar story of the car lobby interfering with plans for public transport. It wasn’t until 2016 that Musk founded the Boring Company and began working in earnest on Hyperloop. In this way, MBS and Musk both leveraged their wealth and reputations as “visionaries” to fabricate public confidence in their own megaprojects. The common denominators are vanity and self-interest.

To get an expensive megaproject off the ground, you need to sell the idea. To that end, companies and governments systematically exaggerate the benefits and underestimate the costs associated with megaprojects. With The Line, Neom promised a “civilizational revolution” that would solve the myriad problems of urban sprawl and pollution—a noble goal. Instead of cars, there would be a high-speed transport system traveling the length of The Line in under 20 minutes—sound familiar? Like many millennials, the 37-year-old MBS loves sci-fi, particularly the ‘cyberpunk’ genre. He even brought on Hollywood designers and CGI artists from films like The Dark Knight and Guardians of the Galaxy to craft the futurist aesthetic of his new city. Neom’s promotional videos make for uneasy viewing, with CGI mirrors jutting through the desert and claustrophobic canyons complete with hanging gardens and flying robots. Far from a green urban oasis, The Line looks more like a petrodollar hellscape. Nonetheless, the glitzy marketing campaign gave the project viral reach, with the videos accruing almost 500 million views on YouTube. How and when this mammoth feat of human engineering would actually be built remained a mystery.

Similarly, Elon Musk made false promises about the Hyperloop. He pledged to create a vacuum through hundreds of miles of tunnelway capable of dashing passengers from New York to Los Angeles in under 45 minutes. And it was going to be cheap. His initial cost estimate put the project at only $6 billion, compared to the monstrous $100+ billion price tag of CHSR. To this day, no one knows how he arrived at that number. But that never mattered. The Hyper-

“The wide appeal of science fiction is being used to manipulate, distract, and oppress.”

loop concept had served its purpose: generate attention and grow the legend of Elon Musk at the expense of serious proposals for public infrastructure. As with The Line, Hyperloop served more as a marketing stunt intended to halt CHSR than a serious proposal.

Once they have gained popular acceptance, sci-fi proposals work to the political advantage of their patrons. Amid depleting oil reserves and a global push toward green energy, the Gulf States have been racing to find solutions. Neom is Saudi Arabia’s answer to the “economic miracles” of the UAE: Oil production once represented 50 percent of Dubai’s GDP, but only accounts for 1 percent today. As part of his Vision 2030 plan, MBS plans to diversify the Kingdom’s economy by boosting non-oil sectors like tourism, foreign investment, and technology. More broadly, Neom is an attempt to boost the Kingdom’s prestige and shed its negative image in the international community. Though The Line will probably never be built as envisioned, even a scaled-back version would act as a hotbed for testing technology and attracting investment.

Compared to MBS, Elon Musk made his Hyperloop project more replicable. With the ensuing media furor, Silicon Valley investors were quick to bankroll various Hyperloop startups; Richard Branson’s Virgin Hyperloop took the lead in 2020, conducting its first successful passenger test. But the Hyperloop idea has undergone massive changes since its inception almost 10 years ago. Most companies have pivoted away from passenger to freight transportation as the safety, comfort, and viability of transporting people at 700 miles per hour is

dubious at best. The Boring Company has only managed to produce the ‘Vegas Loop’—a tourist gimmick funneling cars through a short tunnel. And then there’s the cost. Unsurprisingly, Musk’s cost projections were wildly off-target, with studies now suggesting the project would demand $10 million to $20 million per mile of track. Musk’s false projection of costs and benefits represents a typical pitfall of megaprojects.

Neom is also facing major challenges in getting off the ground. The murder of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi in 2018 spurred a mass exodus of consultants from the project, including lead architect Norman Foster. Inconveniently, it turns out the ‘blank’ swath of desert promised for the building site is inhabited by over 20,000 members of the Huwaitat tribe. The forced evictions have already begun, with Saudi security forces fatally shooting one man after an altercation. And those are just the human rights issues. The Line is facing major engineering challenges. The project was conceived in terms of fantasy rather than construction. Logistics were given little to no thought at the conceptual stage, and supply line issues have plagued construction from day one. Andy Wirth, an American businessman who worked on Neom, told Bloomberg: “We were hanging buildings on the side of cliffs, and we didn’t even know the geology.” This demonstrates the giant rift between

ambition and feasibility. What Neom will resemble once—if ever—complete remains unclear. For now, the hard launch has done what it was intended to do: get people talking.

Though profoundly different public actors, Elon Musk and Mohammed Bin Salman have leveraged their resources, positions, and personalities to propel their fantasies into public discussion. Their marketing stunts have served political and commercial agendas, distracting the public from real issues and wooing them with fake panaceas. These sci-fi megaprojects dish out false promises of ‘civilizational revolution’ to manipulate policymakers and investors, diverting resources away from more plausible alternatives like CHSR. Reckless megaprojects are a recurring feature of poor governance. Think back to when Kim Jong-un spent $750 million constructing a giant luxury hotel, while 60 percent of North Koreans lived below the poverty line. Conceptual flaws doom most megaprojects from their onset. Though they sometimes end up taking more realistic forms, it’s unlikely proposals like The Line and Hyperloop will ever fulfill their big promises. For this reason, we cannot be seduced by sci-fi fantasy and must work to direct public funds toward more practical solutions.

Interview by Mira Mehta ’25

Wealth, Philanthropy, and Regular People An Interview with Nicholas Kulish

Nicholas Kulish is an enterprise correspondent for The New York Times, where he has been writing since 2005. Over the course of his career, he has covered topics ranging from German politics to New Orleans’ recovery from Hurricane Katrina. He is also the author of Last One In and The Eternal Nazi. More recently, he has written extensively about wealth and philanthropy in the United States.

This is part of an interview series conducted in collaboration with the Stone Initiative on Inequality at Brown’s Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs.

Mira Mehta (MM): Great wealth is a complicated and controversial subject. How do you approach covering it, and do you have any advice for student journalists who want to write about it?

Nicholas Kulish (NK): I was a foreign correspondent for a lot of my career, and in other countries, especially in EU countries, there’s just not this extreme, extreme level of income inequality that we see in the United States. Philanthropy is also viewed very, very differently in Europe than it is here. I think it’s because the gulf between everyday people, even what we used to think of as rich people—doctors and lawyers and businesspeople—and the ultra-wealthy is so great that it can be difficult to conceptualize. The New York Times Magazine did a series of illustrations in its “Billionaires” issue to try to put Jeff Bezos’ wealth into some kind of context, like mountains and trips to Mars versus one step. And I think it was still very difficult to conceptualize, but I think that my advice is to try to always keep in mind what the median American or the average citizen of the world is experiencing, how they’re living, and what is available to them. It is very important to keep the emphasis on regular people and not let things turn into a celebrity magazine version of looking at billionaires. There are royals, movie stars, and now billionaires that have fallen into that mix as well, and it becomes voyeuristic the way that we’re looking at them, rather than thinking about things from a policy standpoint or from a “what is a just structure for society?” standpoint.

MM: Can you speak to what the idea of becoming a billionaire means as part of the American dream?

NK: I do think that a lot of Americans really do still believe in the American dream, even if statistics show that income mobility today is far less than it was in previous generations, even in some countries that are more associated with having advanced welfare states. I think that people are still attracted to that idea, that if they could come up with a great idea that they might have a yacht and an airplane and go to the Academy Awards and live that lifestyle. The question, I think, that we always hold in the back of our minds as skeptics is: Can every person with a good idea have equal access to the means and support necessary to turn that into a billion-dollar idea? And the answer is definitely no. Facebook was not the first social networking site. And maybe fitting a certain profile and being in San Francisco and having access to venture capital and support is actually more important than the quality of the idea. And that, I think, is something that we always have to keep in mind, even as the dream itself does still look great from afar when you don’t scrutinize it too closely.

MM: What influence do the ultra-wealthy have on policy and the ideas people consider acceptable and favorable?

NK: I think that the ultra-wealthy definitely have a lot of influence on politics and policy, and a lot of it is subtle. When you have a political system that is as reliant on campaign spending as our system is, it means that a lot of politicians themselves are very wealthy. And then you also have them spending a lot of their time fundraising, and therefore spending a lot of their time at events with other extremely wealthy people.

And groupthink is real, whether it’s us with our friends at the cafeteria or the bar, or it’s a group of people at an expensive restaurant, even from stray comments like, “Oh, these regulations are killing my business,” or “You wouldn’t believe how much I paid in taxes last year.” Beyond the direct lobbying and the groups that are attempting to write laws for legislators, there is also that sort of soft power or influence of who your peers are and who you’re trying to appeal to. You’re not spending a lot of time with laidoff steelworkers or Lyft drivers who barely make back their gas money or grocery store clerks; you’re spending your time with other extremely well-to-do people.

MM: What is something people misunderstand about philanthropy or the ultrawealthy?

NK: As someone who writes about philanthropy, the one thing that I think gets overlooked a little bit is that philanthropy is more of a symptom rather than a root cause. People are scrutinizing philanthropists, and rightly so, but the issue that lies at the heart of it is: How can anyone be worth $100 billion, or now even $200 billion? And that is, ultimately, the core issue, even beyond how exactly they spend that money for either good causes or political ones. I just always kind of try to return to that core question of the wealth disparity as much as the fight about philanthropy itself.

Illustration by Christine Wang ’24

Soccer Offers a Shot at a Bigger Goal

How soccer could be a catalyst for gender equality in the Arab world

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The ball snakes from left to right, slicing across the glossy gym floor as our opponents close in on the goal. With five minutes left in the game, they are dead-set on breaking the tie. And, unfortunately for my team, their odds look pretty good.

Their best player races intently toward the goal, weaving in and out of our wall of defenders until I am the only person standing between him and the goalie. His leg snaps back to shoot. I form my clammy hands into fists and force open my eyes, resisting the urge to squint. I wave my foot around wildly in front of me with the skill of someone who can count the number of soccer games they’ve played on one hand. By some stroke of beginner’s luck, my foot finds the ball and kicks it forward. It cuts into the midfield. We score. The gym echoes with a remix of cheers and high-fives.

We talked about that game for the rest of my six-week stay in Oman. It was not just about emerging victorious in the match—this victory represented the culmination of our efforts to obtain permission for the women in my study abroad program to play soccer alongside our male peers and teachers. What was really amazing about that game was the fact that three American women were on the court, contrary to all gender norms in Oman. Our program directors initially told us that it would be impossible for us to participate. Yet after we expressed repeated interest and demonstrated a real knowledge of the sport, they gave us a shot. Over time, the experience of playing together cultivated unbreakable bonds that inspired broader changes in their views of women’s athletic capabilities. Soccer provided my friends and me with the opportunity to challenge rigid

gender norms—and it could do the same for Omani women at large.

Soccer’s extraordinary appeal makes it a remarkably effective launching pad to improve women’s rights in the Arab world. Supporting women’s soccer teams unlocks pathways for women’s participation in a variety of different spheres, including political organi zation and celebratory displays of national iden tity. Whether it’s on an individual and informal level—like my own experience playing soccer in Oman—or at the professional level, normalizing and broadcasting women’s athletic capabilities is a powerful tool to unravel limitations placed on women’s social and political freedoms.

Soccer in the Middle East, as in much of the rest of the world, has captivated the general public. “Egyptians,” the New York Times writes, “are attached to soccer the way the French are to wine.” Soccer is the most celebrated sport in the Arab world. The team-oriented aspect of the game forges connections between players that build community and contribute to the sport’s intrinsic association with national culture. Egyptian writer Nasser Iraq refers to soccer as his first love, recalling scrimmages with his friends as daily occurrences that formed an instrumental part of his childhood. Playing soccer was a pivotal bonding experience for Iraq and his neighbors growing up, just as it was for me while visiting Oman and for almost every boy living in the village I was staying in.

Soccer is also inextricably linked to political movements, acting as a microcosm for ongoing political struggles. A commonly asked question in Egypt is: Do you support Al Ahly or Zamalek? These are the two largest soccer clubs in the nation. However, they are just as much political

started as a magnet for fans disillusioned with colonial rule—their president in 1956 was none other than former Egyptian president and revolutionary leader Gamal Abdel Nasser. To this day, the league continues to attract supporters discontented with government corruption and elite dominance. Their archrival Zamalek was formed in 1911 as a mouthpiece for the monarchy. During the Arab Spring, the Al Ahly ultras—an extreme branch of Al Ahly fans— staged a series of protests to speak out against former Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak’s regime. These protests played a significant role in his eventual overthrow in 2011.

Because of its access to culture and politics, soccer could be a vehicle for allowing women to participate in the political movements and cultural connections that are sparked in soccer fields and stadiums, as well as backyards and playgrounds, across the Middle East. However, soccer’s full potential for charting new ground

Bianca Rosen ’25, an International and Public Affairs and Middle East Studies concentrator and an Associate Editor and Staff Writer for BPR illustration by Elizabeth Long ’24, an Illustration major at RISD.

in women’s rights is not being realized because of restrictions and limitations placed on women’s participation.

In some Middle Eastern countries, even attending a soccer game as a woman is challenging. Iran provides an example. Many women are forced to dress as men in order to enter Azadi Stadium in Tehran, furtively slipping past security guards to sidestep Iran’s ban on women attending soccer games. Twenty-nine-year-old Sahar Khodayari was arrested by the morality police for cross-dressing to watch a soccer game live. In September 2019, Khodayarie set herself on fire outside the courthouse after finding out that she would have to serve six months in prison. Her death was a call to action, spotlighting the crippling lack of women’s rights in the country. Regulations barring women from games are still in place, although a few exceptions were made due to intensifying pressure from FIFA and international audiences following Khodayari’s self-immolation.

Not all countries are as rigid as Iran. Many allow women to spectate and participate in the sport freely. However, a combination of cultural norms, religious tensions, familial pressures, and societal stigmas still dissuade women from playing soccer. In Morocco, a country that as of 2008 boasts a national league with 24 teams, women are discouraged from playing soccer because they are told that it poses a threat to their femininity. Similarly, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) requires women to seek permission from their fathers to play soccer. In some cases, women’s fathers are their biggest supporters. But in others, they serve as an insurmountable obstacle. Ayesha, a player on the UAE’s women’s national team, lives a double life, concealing her soccer career from her father by using a fake surname. She said in a 2018 interview that if her father found out about her soccer career, he would “pull me out of school and not allow me to continue my education.”

Beyond social pressures, there are economic barriers to women’s equal participation. Women’s soccer is not seen as profitable in the Arab world. The women’s soccer league in Morocco is granted a mere $3,000 a year from the Moroccan Football Federation to fund everything from travel expenses to uniforms to coaches, while male teams receive income from ticket sales and are often the targets of wealthy donors and sponsorships.

In these countries, establishing a women’s team is only half the battle, and women are left to fight the other half on their own. “An attitude of ‘we have done enough, girls have a league and are allowed to play,’ has developed among government officials and local leaders,” reported Nicole Matuska for the Middle East Institute.

Even with these limitations, existing women’s soccer teams are making differences just as the game did for my group in Oman. For instance, Honey Thaljieh, co-founder and former captain of the women’s national soccer team in Palestine, initially faced resistance

from her father for her soccer pursuits. As the team garnered more publicity in the media, his mindset changed. Thaljieh stated in a 2021 interview that her father “became proud seeing that I am portrayed in TVs and magazines and newspapers, raising up the voice, fighting for other girls, fighting for humanity, fighting for rights [...] So for me, football was the way, actually, to fight for a lot of issues.”

As Thalijeh’s story demonstrates, soccer has an innate ability to pull people together, while exhibiting women’s abilities. So, as existing limitations to women’s participation erode, soccer can become an even more important engine for furthering women’s status and rights.

This theory has substantial academic grounding. In Women’s Studies Quarterly, Martha Brady wrote that “by seeing girls in this new action-oriented role, boys learn about the strengths, capabilities and contributions of girls and women, which in turn may begin to reshape male perception of appropriate roles for females.” A psychological theory called the contact hypothesis seems to back this idea, asserting that “social prejudices between groups can be reduced through meaningful intergroup interaction.” This theory was tested by Stanford University on a soccer field in 2020. Experimenters had Christians and Muslims in northern Iraq play soccer together, finding that, through the sport, religious tensions were assuaged and friendships were formed between the players. Soccer could have a similar effect on gender, as it did for religion in this study.

I began with a personal experience about a recreational soccer game in Oman that challenged cultural norms and cultivated incredible connections. That anecdote is a tiny window into a much broader phenomenon: the power of soccer in the broader fight to achieve greater women’s equality in the Middle East. By sharing sweat, effort, disappointment, and triumph on the field, or enthusiasm and euphoria in the stands, soccer helps fans and players alike break down barriers. That is exactly what the women’s rights movement in the Arab world needs.

“Because of its access to culture and politics, soccer could be a vehicle for allowing women to participate in the political movements and cultural connections that are sparked in soccer fields and stadiums, as well as backyards and playgrounds, across the Middle East.”

A Rose By Any Other Name

The real reasons countries rename

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illustrations by Ayca Tuzer ’24, an Illustration major at RISD

Why would a country choose to change its name?

Historically, name changes have often followed regime changes, especially after decolonization. Ceylon became Sri Lanka after the departure of the Portuguese, and Rhodesia became Zimbabwe when British colonialism ended. Sometimes the name was changed to align the exonym (the name used outside the location) with the endonym (the name used inside the location). Examples of this include the change from Persia to Iran and the Ivory Coast to Côte d’Ivoire. Likewise, a country’s name is also the brand it shows to the world; “France” conjures thoughts of croissants, vineyards, and the Eiffel Tower, for example. That being so, in the past decade, a number of countries have changed their names for one purpose: marketing.

The Kingdom of Eswatini is nestled into the eastern border of South Africa. It is one of the last remaining countries on earth with an absolute monarch, and it was previously known as Swaziland. King Mswati III changed the name of the country in 2018 for one reason: Swaziland was a remnant of colonial rule, the word being an amalgamation of Swati and English languages. The new fully Swati name “Eswatini” means “place of the Swazi.” Additionally, in his explanation for the name change, King Mswati said, “Whenever we go abroad, people refer to us as Switzerland.” The former governor of the Central Bank of Eswatini also remarked on the confusion, citing the French as particularly culpable. The name change was thus partially an attempt to create a distinct brand for the nation and to increase name recognition outside of the country. A unique identity is essential for attracting foreign attention—be it investment, journalism, or tourism. Being confused with another, more visited nation was not only hindering Eswatini’s attempts to gain prominence on the world stage, but also diminishing its funds, attention, and influence.

In 2022, the Turkish government, led by President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, changed the country’s exonym to Türkiye, replacing the Anglicized version of its name with its correct pronunciation. Some have argued that the renaming is part and parcel of Erdogan’s campaign to fuel nationalist sentiment, a reflection of his rhetoric and policies suppressing the Kurdish minority. And yet, marketing also seems to be a clear impetus in his decision. The Turkish Radio and Television Corporation (TRT), the state broadcaster, emphasized how the government was vexed

that the name was shared with the animal commonly associated with Christmas and Thanksgiving in the United States. They also disliked that the first Google search results of “Turkey” are a bird, and felt that the dictionary definition of “turkey” as “something that fails badly” and “a stupid or silly person” was unseemly. The TRT explicitly connected the name change with rebranding, explaining that the government wanted the country’s name to encapsulate and export their own culture and heritage, not refer to a festive, flightless fowl. As only the exonym has been changed, it is evident that the government wants to convey to foreigners an image of a culturally-rich destination in an exotic location for tourists to visit.

In another example, the Netherlands formally dropped the synecdoche “Holland” from all official communication and promotional material in 2020. There are indeed regions in the country named North and South Holland, but this change has nothing to do with language or colonization: Holland has been used interchangeably with the Netherlands because it is the nation’s strongest economic area. The Dutch government is fully cognizant that their brand is encapsulated in their name, and decided that the easiest route to change their reputation would be to change their name. The Dutch government spent 18 months working on a branding campaign to enhance its country’s image. This includes replacing the logo of the “Holland tulip” next to the word “Holland” with a stylized “NL” to be used by businesses, academia, and cultural and sports organizations. The Minister of Finance explained that they wanted one unambiguous logo by which the country could be recognized to help attract investors and

Julia Kostin ’26, an International and Public Affairs concentrator and a Multimedia Associate for BPR

“A unique identity is essential for attracting foreign attention be it investment, journalism, or tourism.”

talent. Holland is the most popular region for tourism in the Netherlands, perhaps even too much so: By 2030, the country could see 42 million tourists annually, outstripping its population nearly 2.5 times over. The tourism board has stopped promoting the most famous attractions and begun focusing instead on lesser-known sites in other regions of the country. In addition, younger tourists that are unfamiliar with the nation often associate the country with recreational drugs and the red-light district—a reputation that the government would like to do away with. “We are fully aware that internationally, a strong image of the Netherlands contributes to achieving political objectives, promoting trade, attracting talent, investment and tourists, and encouraging cultural and scientific exchange,” the head of public diplomacy at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs remarked. Thus, the Netherlands is attempting to change its public brand in order to change the behavior of its consumers and tourists.

After changing their names, these countries must ensure that their new names are adopted and implemented. Domestic actors play a crucial role in exporting these new brands—Eswatini companies must also change their name, and Dutch institutions need to use the new logo to make the change recognizable. Additionally, international actors should adopt these changes, rendering rebranding dependent on the acceptance of the targeted audience; Eswa-

tini is still labeled Swaziland on Google Maps, and Google autocorrects Türkiye to Turkey. Furthermore, changing the name of a nation is not without cost. A country must alter hundreds of administrative, promotional, and mundane details to align with the new name, from license plates and letterheads to official documentation and currency. While the Netherlands did not change its formal name—presenting fewer obstacles for its adoption—implementation of the informal shift has still been spotty. “Holland” is shorter and more convenient than the clunky title “the Nether lands.” The Board of Tourism, however, has yet to change their website domain from “holland. com,” despite having changed their logo (which alone cost 200,000 euros). A small elephant hides in the corner: Only time will tell if these name changes prove effective. The worth of their steep price tags remains to be seen.

The Politics of Marijuana and the War on Drugs

An Interview with Ethan Nadelmann

Described by Rolling Stone as “the point man” for drug policy reform efforts and “the real drug czar,” Ethan Nadelmann is widely regarded as the outstanding proponent of drug policy reform both in the United States and abroad. After receiving his PhD in Political Science from Harvard University, Nadelmann went on to teach at Princeton University from 1987 to 1994. He then founded and directed The Lindesmith Center (1994-2000) and the Drug Policy Alliance (20002017), during which time he and his colleagues were at the forefront of dozens of successful campaigns to legalize marijuana and advance other alternatives to the war on drugs. His 2014 TED Talk on ending the drug war has over two million views, with translations into 28 languages. Nadelmann currently hosts the leading podcast on all things drugs: PSYCHOACTIVE

Elise Curtin and Alex Fasseas (AC & AF): In a recent episode on your podcast PSYCHOACTIVE, you discussed cannabis reform with House Republican Nancy Mace. Despite Mace’s pro-legalization stance, Republican support remains scarce. First, why is it that legalization is a partisan issue? And second, what in your opinion is the best argument to convince someone with conservative views to support legalization?

Ethan Nadelmann (EN): On the one hand, there’s always been a partisan divide between the Democrats and the Republicans on legalizing marijuana, which in large part had to do with marijuana’s association with rebellion and cultural opposition in the 1960-70s. So you always had that divide. On the other hand, among my most passionate allies were the Republicans with a libertarian leaning—

Interview by Alex Fasseas ’23 and Elise Curtin ’23

Illustration by Christine Wang ’24

granted most of the base of my support was still on the left. For instance, when former governor of New Mexico Gary Johnson became one of the first governors to boldly step out in favor of marijuana legalization, he became my great ally on the issue.

Another one of my allies, believe it or not, was Grover Norquist, the founder of Americans for Tax Reform. His famous line was, “I want to make government so small, you can strangle it in a bathtub.” So this is a guy who I politically disagree with on the large majority of issues, and yet he’s my close ally on drug policy reform. He arranged for me to speak in plenary sessions at multiple Conservative Political Action Conferences (CPACs), where I would always debate someone from the right-wing. And there would always be people in the audience yelling things like, “Get him off the stage!” or “He works for Soros!” But by the end of the debate, I would always receive more applause, because all the young conservatives showing up to CPACs were sympathetic to legalizing marijuana, and even some of the older, more libertarian-minded folks were, too.

Over the last decade or so we’ve started to see a majority of young Republicans and representatives like Nancy Mace come out in favor of marijuana legalization. When you look at red and purple states—South Dakota, Montana, Arizona—voting for marijuana legalization, you’re seeing the divide between the Democrats and the Republicans become less substantial. Another example is support for legalizing medical marijuana, which used to be overwhelmingly Democrat with only a handful of Republicans. And then as Democrat support grew from 60 percent to 90 percent, Republican support blossomed to about 60 percent in the last few years.

In terms of convincing Republicans, I think it really comes down to two arguments: decreasing police overreach and potential tax revenue. More specifically, we’d rather have the cops focusing on real crime instead of busting young people for weed. And second, we’d rather have the government taxing and regulating marajuana instead of letting the gangsters make all the money. In almost every state, these poll-tested messages have appealed to both Democrat and Republican swing voters.

EC & AF: What are some often-overlooked positive or negative externalities that accompany the legalization of marijuana? For instance, how might it function as a substitute for other psychoactive substances?

EN: There are two interesting areas of study that look at substitutability with marijuana. One is vis-à-vis alcohol; some studies show that legalization results in a reduction in alcohol use—how significant it is is hard to say. The second area is with opioids; there are now at least 10 studies that suggest that the first few states that legalized medical marijuana have had lower rates of opioid overdose fatalities. That is likely due to two factors: First, people experiment with substituting cannabis for opioids in order to deal with certain types of pain. The other factor has to do with the fact that cannabis is an enhancer, so patients can take a lower dose of opioids when combined with cannabis and still get the same pain relief effect.

In terms of negative externalities, one of the principal arguments used against marijuana legalization is that it

can lead to an increase in use among adolescents. But what critics fail to account for is the fact that adolescents are the ones who already have the best access to marijuana. So even when we started legalizing the stuff, adolescent use did not go up. In fact, some places even saw a decrease in adolescent and college-age users.

Where use did go up was among people between their 40s and their 90s; there’s been a fourfold increase in my generation’s use of cannabis over the last 10 years, and it’s because people are substituting it out for alcohol, prescription drugs, sleeping pills, etc. I know a lot of couples who have been in a monogamous relationship for 20, 30, 40 years where cannabis plays a central role in their ongoing sexual relationship. It can act not so much as a Viagra, but as a way for people to stay connected, to shift their context. So I think that’s where we’ve seen some real positive susceptibility.

Obviously, the advocates—myself included—want to emphasize the upsides and the safety of marijuana, but I always felt that our credibility was greatest when we acknowledged right at the outset that cannabis is a psychoactive drug that can be harmful to people. On the other hand, one could point to the fact that for many people, the worst thing that ever happened to them from their marijuana use was getting busted for it. The government—specifically the National Institute on Drug Abuse—spends billions of dollars to show the negative harms of marijuana, but they never spend the money to show the negative harms of being arrested and incarcerated, even for just a few days, for possession.

EC & AF: Looking to the future, what upcoming project are you most enthusiastic about?

EN: The issue that has really galvanized me in the last few years since I stopped running the Drug Policy Alliance have been the debates surrounding e-cigarettes and harm reduction. Evidence shows that if you take an adult smoker who’s addicted to cigarettes and has been unable to quit, and transition them over to e-cigarettes, you cut the risk to their health by roughly 95 percent. And that’s because most of the harm of tobacco comes not from the nicotine, but from the burnt particle matter and the carcinogenic tars which can lead to heart and lung disease, and eventually death.

On the other hand, nicotine consumed in an e-cigarette has relatively little harm to your health. You can be on nicotine for the rest of your life, and maybe there’s a cardiovascular risk as you get older, but overall it’s not that dangerous as a substance. What that means is that if all 40 million Americans who are currently addicted to cigarettes switched to e-cigarettes, it would represent one of the greatest advances in public health in American history. Ultimately, however, the reason we can’t have tobacco harm reduction is because most people and policymakers view it as a big child protection act.

So this is the issue on which I’ve become most animated. And I think there’s a possibility that a generation from now, the war on drugs is not going to be about marijuana, cocaine, heroin, etc. It’s going to be about tobacco.

Edited for length and clairty.

“If all 40 million Americans who are currently addicted to cigarettes switched to e-cigarettes, it would represent one of the greatest advances in public health in American history.”

He’s Hustlin’

by Isabel Greider ’25

Editor

Managing

Editor

“A village boy has become the president of Kenya,” President William Ruto proclaimed during his September 13 victory speech. A crowd of tens of thousands, sporting the bright yellow of Ruto’s United Democratic Alliance (UDA), erupted in cheers.

In a country so often dominated by political dynasties, Ruto is an underdog. Originally from the Rift Valley Province in western Kenya, he grew up selling chickens and groundnuts by the road, acquiring his first pair of shoes at the age of 15. During his campaign, he capitalized on these humble origins, championing himself as the representative of what he dubs “hustler nation”: a culture of hard-working, self-bettering Kenyans. His strategy worked. Millions of Kenyans crossed ethnic lines during the election to bring to power a politician to whom they could relate.

Although the election was close, the salience of class in this year’s election represents a shift from the tribalism that typically drives Kenyan politics. The country’s dynastic political scheme is epitomized by two prominent families: the Kenyattas and the Odingas. Together, Jomo Kenyatta and Jaramogi Odinga fought against British colonial rule and secured the country’s independence in 1963. Following their victory, Jomo Kenyatta became the country’s first president, with Jaramogi Odinga as his vice president. Their alliance, however, was short-lived. In 1966, two years after taking power, Jomo Kenyatta was galvanized by both regional tensions and policy disputes into firing Jaramogi Odinga from his government. The feud, stemming from this more than five-decades old incident, has persisted over the course of a generation, creating a rivalry between Uhuru Kenyatta (Jomo’s son) and Raila Odinga (Jaramogi’s son).

In March of 2018, the long-standing antagonism was halted with a handshake. After a private meeting, Uhuru Kenyatta, who was president at the time, and Raila Odinga, who was running for president, posed for a photo-op in front of Kenyatta’s office in Nairobi. In an attempt to reconcile Kenya’s foundational dynasties and to secure his legacy, Uhuru Kenyatta endorsed Raila Odinga’s presidential campaign in February of this year and called Ruto “untrustworthy.” In doing so, he also subverted the long-standing tribal rivalry between the Luo and the Kikuyu, the two communities to which Raila Odinga and Uhuru Kenyatta respectively belong.

Though an endorsement from the then-president initially seemed to bolster Odinga’s campaign, Ruto’s emphasis on class struggle nullified the benefits of Uhuru Kenyatta’s support. As Ruto began to frame the race through the language of “hustlers” against “dynasties,” voters began to see the endorsement in a new light. During the presidential race, the immense wealth of the Kenyattas and the Odingas underscored Ruto’s unmistakable relatability.

Suddenly, the family alliance became a liability for Odinga’s campaign as voters feared a continuation of the corruption they experienced under Jomo Kenyatta. After all, despite their rivalry, the Kenyattas and the Odingas live remarkably similar lifestyles. While each family’s exact net worth is unknown, according to a 2021 leak the Kenyattas have owned a network of offshore companies for decades. The assets of one of these companies alone was worth $30 million. Raila Odinga has claimed to be worth 16.5 million dollars, although some contend that this number is artificially low. His wealth is considered evidence of his corruption, a particular cause for concern amongst voters given that he has been implicated in various scandals, including a plot to sell nonexistent gold to foreign leaders.

To be clear, Ruto’s humble upbringing does not make him exempt from corruption. As a businessman, he has been the subject of

land-grabbing controversies for decades. Notably, in 2013, the High Court of Kenya ordered Ruto to relinquish a 100-acre farm in the Rift Valley Province after he illegally seized the plot from a farmer. Perhaps even more distressingly, the International Criminal Court accused Ruto of instigating violence in the wake of the 2007 presidential election, which culminated in 1,200 deaths. However, during the 2022 election, Ruto’s corruption was shrouded by that of his opponent. In essence, because both Ruto and

How Ruto’s populist appeal diminished voting along ethnic lines in the 2022 Kenyan presidential election

, a History concentrator and an Associate

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for BPR illustrations by Madison Tom ’23, an Illustration major at RISD

“While Kenya had one of the fastest growing economies in Africa until the Covid-19 pandemic, twothirds of Kenyans live in poverty, and among Kenyans ages 18 to 34, the unemployment rate is nearly 40 percent.”

Odinga have been deceitful politicians, voters were forced to choose the lesser of two evils.

Ruto played up the economic concerns of the populace to ensure voters would see him as the better option. Though both Ruto and Odinga are far wealthier than most Kenyans, Ruto emphasized that this has not always been the case for him. Donning a wheelbarrow as his campaign symbol, he gained the trust of voters to tackle the country’s economic challenges: While Kenya had one of the fastest growing economies in Africa until the Covid-19 pandemic, two-thirds of Kenyans live in poverty, and among Kenyans ages 18 to 34, the unemployment rate is nearly 40 percent.

Ruto’s “bottom-up” economic model spoke to the pressing needs of these struggling groups. In a 2021 tweet, Ruto promised to focus

on “DELIBERATELY creating Jobs, LIBERATING hustler enterprises from shylock-credit exploitation & unfair regulation and EMPOWERING our resource-poor farmers/herders to produce.” Combined with his campaign’s focus on his humble beginnings, this allowed him to garner the support of Kenyans experiencing economic precarity. Ultimately, Odinga’s dynastic origins made him the less appealing candidate to resolve these longstanding issues.

By emphasizing class, Ruto diminished the importance of tribe—indeed, Kenyans of all ethnicities struggle financially. Although tribe did play a role in the election, some ethnic barriers broke down, exemplified by the voting of the Kikuyu, Kenya’s largest ethnic group and the one to which the Kenyattas belong. Despite urges from Kikuyu elders to elect Odinga—due to his endorsement from Uhuru Kenyatta and because his running mate, Martha Karua, is Kikuyu—most of the Kikuyu voted for Ruto. That they ignored their elders’ caution against “sell[ing] their souls to Dr. Ruto” suggests that there is lingering resentment for the Kenyattas’ economic policies.

Jomo Kenyatta’s promise to foster the formation of a socialist state sharply contrasted

his actual record of supporting free-market capitalism. His economic scheme, focused on generating as much wealth as possible, failed to accomplish any redistribution of preexisting resources. In particular, to avoid forsaking the agricultural prosperity established by the colonial government, Kenyatta refrained from breaking up large-scale land ownership. For the Kikuyu—who are primarily farmers—this was divisive, as some Kikuyus cite Ruto’s own agricultural ventures as a reason for their support for him.

Undoubtedly, the results of this year’s presidential election indicate a diminishing focus on ethnicity by the Kenyan electorate. In his acceptance speech, Ruto expressed his gratitude for the “millions of Kenyans who refused to be boxed into tribal cocoons.” Evidently, he recognizes that had the Kikuyu followed the advice of their elders and maintained their tribal alliance with the Kenyattas, he would not be president. If this trend continues, positive social implications could follow such as a decrease in widespread tribal violence. However, whether the decreasing salience of tribe in the 2022 elections represents the beginning of a growing trend or merely a singular anomaly remains to be seen.