01.02. MY HOOD by COGNITIVE LIBERATION

01.02. MY HOOD

SEP 2014

CGNTV/LBRTN !

N O I T A C I F I R T N GE W E N E H IS T

M S I L A I COLON !1

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01.02. MY HOOD {standing up for our communities}

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ACTIVISM IS A PRIVILEGE words of Alexandra Juhasz 06. I, TOO, AM HARVARD by Kimiko Matsuda-Lawrence 09. JUVENILE IN JUSTICE by Richard Ross 16. VERIDICAL PARADOX by Sonya Teclai 22. CARICATURE OF A YOUNG BLACK MAN #3 by Lyndon Nicholas 21. EMPTY NET SYNDROME by New Craft Artists in Action 27. HOME COURT [cover art and interview] by Eve L. Ewing 30. VACATED by Justin Blinder 38. TAKING UP SPACE by Brianna Suslovic 46. ONE NATION, DISCONNECTED by Maria Smith 49. ON SAVIOUR COMPLEX by Renne Fox 52. ABOUT 55. THANK YOU 57.

ACTI VISM IS A PRIVI LEGE

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At the heart of the 1980s and 1990s AIDS movement in America stood the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP), the direct-action activist group founded by Larry Kramer. ACT UP’s strategic intelligence, connections to seats power, and sexual atmosphere will forever mark activism history. ACT UP’s demise emerged from within as the HIV epidemic and the issues that surrounded it began to be acknowledged across all socioeconomic and racial spheres. ALEXANDRA JUHASZ eloquently expresses these experiences as she reflects upon her time in ACT UP in an interview with the ACT UP Oral History Project, providing brilliant insight and reflections on the movement. Note that the language has been slightly adapted for a better read (no words have been extracted from the interview’s transcript). You can read the full interview at ACTUPOralHistory.org.

There were feminists that I knew, who I respected a lot who were also somewhat – what’s the word I want? Oh, it’s not skeptical. You know, how could it be – this organization that came from nothing – that took to itself the languages (the languages of feminism, the languages of gay and lesbian civil rights, the languages of civil rights) had so much money, had so much power, so quickly. If you did s o m e t h i n g t h r o u g h AC T U P, i t h a d infrastructure, it had support. If you did it anywhere else, it didn’t.

So what did you see when you got to ACT UP?

Exactly what I wanted to see – exactly what I wanted; the same thing my students want now; the same thing anybody wants who is politically disgusted with our society and wants to be in a room with other people who are too, and who wants to be in community – to be in a progressive community. I mean, you just felt it. And it was probably really small when I first started to go, actually. It became very big very quickly. It was this mix of, like, sexiness, fashion, style and an intelligence and a goal and community. And, I haven’t felt it since, in the same, you know – with that same vibrancy. And, you know, I mean, I think – again, I don’t want to romanticize it, because it was born from grief, and it inspired grief. But, it felt really incredible, too. I mean, and I think, part of why it felt so vibrant was because so much was at stake, really. And, I mean, that was very clear – even when everyone was flirting, and even when everybody looked so beautiful. It was clear, always in that room – what was at stake for people. So, there was a tension within the AIDS community from the very beginning, about what kind of work counted as activism – allegiances and alliances that had a lot to do with race and class primarily. And, most of the people that I was dealing with, around women and AIDS were feminists who were coming out of women of color organizing. In the eyes of those people who saw themselves as activists – people who were working within the beginning of a AIDS infrastructure – you know, it was to be arrested and to be that flamboyant, spoke – smacked of a kind of elitism and privilege that these women themselves who worked in these agencies were skeptical about. I mean, as far as they were concerned, you know – this was not the communities that they were serving.

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It was an incredible learning lesson about power, about how you can be as smart as anyone and not have access to it. It’s like a lot of the people who came to ACT UP – the politicos, who had come from other organizations and who had worked in struggles that stayed small and stayed poor and stayed invisible and stayed all the things they did. It’s not like people were smarter in ACT UP. It’s not like – you know, the issue was different. I can’t put a gloss across them all – but, you know, people just tapped into money, the places where there’s power. You know – the heads of hospitals, the heads of news agencies, the person who runs The New York Times – whatever it was. And, if we didn’t – if someone at ACT UP didn’t know t h o s e p e o p l e, t h ey k n ew h ow t h o s e organizations run; they knew how they ran, as insiders, because people who worked at them, in a way that, in organizing that I’ve done since, it just hasn’t been the same immediate access to both money and structures of power.

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ACT UP has its pulse on cultural institutions; institutions of images and thoughts that create memory and create meaning. They did it and we will be

remembered because we’re archiving ourselves, because the Ford Foundation is paying you to do it. And the Guggenheim paid before that. I mean, that’s what AIDS activism had; that’s why the cameras are there. That’s why, I sort of wanted to talk to you about how we were all in the Whitney [graduate program] together, and how we were all graduate students and professors and – I mean, you know – it wasn’t just that we had contacts with where money is. It’s that we were also where culture is made – not necessarily where money is, but that we had that capital as well, and it was the convergence of actual money, actual power, and intellectual capital and cultural capital, that I don’t know comes together in quite the same way in other movements. [There] was a class issue that would be understood as a raced issue. And there was a lot of tension on the floor, around race. I don’t think it was characterized as class, as often, and a lot of conversation about that…I think there was a lot of posing... as I remember it, there was a certain set of, you know, behaviors and mannerisms and way of talking and a set of values that people performed, that were classed – that have to do a lot with gay male culture, probably... ACT UP was, like, a kind of reflection of a certain kind of white, gay male privilege. It was campy, it was fabulous. It’s connected to power and class – upward class mobility.

care of, you know? Most of the people in the world who have HIV and have AIDS don’t feel entitled to anything, you know? They’ve been taught to not be entitled.

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You know, this is the dilemma of being – in a certain sense of being a progressive intellectual, a progressive or cultural worker – someone who has more entitlement than the people with which one is organizing. In many cases, not always. I mean, certainly around feminism, around lesbian politics, you know – but I think as people interested in social justice in America, you know, race and class – they’re big. And I have both racial and class privilege. So, for me, that has made me want to imagine and think about and practice what I said before: less hierarchical forms of collaborative activism. And, it has also asked me to think about how power is always alive in any social situation and power can’t be erased. But, that being aware of the power entitlement is an important part of creating community – progressive community. So, I mean – I don’t know – that’s become a certain – a kind of life work struggle for me. And, I don’t mean a struggle to be better, I mean a struggle to think about; a struggle to kind of engage in processes that allows that to stay open, as a question…Well, when we can figure out ways to talk to each other and join each other in dialogue – dialogue laced with power, dialogue organized around difference, and yet imagine methods that allow us to speak to each other – that’s when things will actually change, and I saw that in my lifetime. I think it can happen again. I don’t know why it shouldn’t.

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ACT UP is rooted in a sense of – I don’t even want to use the word privilege – I want to use a different word, which is entitlement, that most women – certainly women of color, and certainly poor women of color – don’t have an entitlement to – look, AIDS activism happened because people who were entitled suddenly were getting what they entitled to, which was to be taken

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#ITOOAMHARVARD !

Kimiko Matsuda-Lawrence

Kimiko Matsuda-Lawrence ‘16, the playwright of I, Too, Am Harvard decided to collect the stories of Black students at Harvard after some disarming personal experiences her freshman year with racial discrimination on campus.The play quickly became a international movement uplifting the voices of students of color in universities across the globe. Cognitive Liberation interviewed Abigail Miriam ‘15, a member of the I, Too, Am Harvard team, about the movement’s beginnings and future.

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“ It was an electric performance. !

I, Too, Am Harvard was a production involving many students. Ten students auditioned for the acting roles. They are black students at Harvard College and it was a play composed mostly of monologues from interview excerpts that Kimiko had done. The performance also included musical performances, all of which were students from campus or members of Kuumba [Harvard’s gospel choir and host of the Black Arts Festival in which the play was featured].

It was a really powerful performance, for everyone in the room. For the black students, the administration, the students of color—really everyone in the room. It was an electric performance. I don’t think that people thought that it would affect them in the way that it did. When people laughed, they really, really laughed because these were real people’s words. Nobody hand-wrote the script. Someone in an interview actually said, you know, ‘This is what a white party looks like...this is what a black party looks like…’ And the way that the actors so masterfully showed the contrast between those two things, it was funny! And everyone was laughing.

And when one of the actors talked about her experience being a black woman in the sciences and how powerless she felt to be vulnerable in any way to ask for help because she felt that people in her major, people in her department, would view her as just the dumb black girl— that is something that resonated with a lot of people in that audience and opened the eyes of other people in that audience who didn’t know that pressure existed. So, what I think people got from the performance—not even talking about the talkback that we hosted afterwards—I think they just saw the range of experiences that many black students on Harvard’s campus experienced on a daily basis, regardless of if they are very aware of the pressures that they feel as a black student or not. That in itself was a huge achievement of the play because it did a lot to demystify and unmask what the black students on this campus, and behind this campaign, are saying when they say that they feel different. I think that it was a great way to show how black experiences on campus can be different.

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Kimiko has always understood art to be a powerful form of activism.

I think that guidance under Professor Glenda Carpio, and also being exposed to other forms in which art had been used for activism, helped her see how some artistic form could be very, very powerful in conveying these experiences. She could’ve written a term paper, it could’ve been a pre-thesis kind of paper; but the way that academic papers resonate with people, the way that articles resonate with people, is very different from the way that art can resonate with people. And how spoken language, acting, music, the visual presentation of a scene, rather than reading a scene on paper, it’s a very, very different feel. It goes back to what I was saying before: the electricity of a performance. I really felt like the atmosphere changed as the actors were saying these experiences, even though I had heard many, if not most, of the things that they were saying in conversations at dinner. I think a lot of black students on campus have conversations similar to those that were portrayed in the play all of the time. Nothing was really a surprise to me, and yet the way that it was conveyed through this artistic form, through the crafting of the play, how the play was constructed as a narrative, it resonated with people in a way that other forms would not have been able to do.

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Advice from the I, Too, Am Harvard team.

We hesitate giving any advice of the utmost authority because this campaign became a lot more than we realize it would be when we started it. So, we humbly realize that we ourselves are also still learning. That being said, two things have been really important in our experiences. One, is getting the word out. Media attention has been one of I, Too, Am Harvard’s greatest privileges. People have been watching us. Not just people on campus, and not just other college students, but members of the larger media and other very loud voices in American discourse and international discourse; and they have wanted to help us. So, to the extent that these other I, Too campaigns can get either local media or alumni (famous alumni or alumni who have been vocal about these issues) to support their voices in being heard by their university’s administration and have them reach out to them and build those relationships, they should because there is so much that even the best organized campaign cannot do without support from the outside.

The other thing I think is—this is may not be the most conventional advice, but it is something that has always been helpful to our team, which is: Always be willing to return to the goal. Always be willing to discuss with your team: What exactly is it that we really want and how can we get it? Because, March 7th, when the play came out, we had a very clear understanding of what our goal was. A week passed, the media picked it up, people were asking us all kinds of questions and we got confused. We were like, ‘Are we doing this now? Are we doing that now?’ And the fact that we always came back to the team—we’re always reevaluating, but the fact that we had our eyes set on that goal has been a huge part of why the campaign has still been grounded even four, five months later. The reason why I think that advice is maybe more meaningful than saying ‘Oh, call your dean and make an appointment’ is the context of our campuses are very different. I don’t know the type of access that students have to their deans, I don’t know the type of access that students have to other powerful individuals on their campuses. But as long as they are always willing to go back to their team and figure out what their goal is and how they get there, they will be able to navigate the network that is specific to their campuses.

The I, Too, Am Harvard team is currently working on a book project to document both the movement on our campus and the movements that have been inspired by the I, Too, Am Harvard online campaign at other universities. We are trying to compile photos from different campaigns and we are reaching out to other students on other campuses for written pieces for this book. We are also currently in the process of planning a student activism conference for students of color, at Harvard’s campus, for leaders of student activist movements similar to the I, Too movements. We really hope that it will be a fruitful way to share what we’ve learned from our experiences and collaborate with other students and really make the reach of what has been happening on other campuses extend far beyond.

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Juvenile In Justice is a project to visualize the American juvenile justice system. It documents the placement and treatment of American juveniles housed by law in facilities that treat, confine, punish, assist and, occasionally, harm them.â&#x20AC;Š

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“When I came in I was 15. I’ve been here for over a year. I’m XX3. They put me in XX3 once I was sentenced in 90-to-life. I can’t parole until 72 years. Technically, they can’t give you a life sentence, but they did. I wouldn’t call myself washed because I’m coming home. I think the most I’ll do is 30, but I’m appealing. Washed means, like, I’ll get rid of you. I’ll wash you away. You’re washed by an institution. An institution can do that to people…but I’m going to keep myself positive. I’m a member of the Fudge Town Mafia Crips in Watts. I was 16 when I was sentenced. And they have me housed like this in case I hurt myself. But I’m in the SHU because I’m an HRO (high risk offender.) My mom and dad visit. I have two brothers, I’m the youngest. I need three and a half credits for my high school diploma. Once I get my credits they’ll send me to YA — y o u t h a u t h o r i t y. Gangbanging is deeper than territory. It used to be about respect for people. That changed in the 80’s, with crack and sherm. Drugs affected everything then. Rival gang members have issues that are deeper than colors. Colors don’t mean much anymore. Red and blue, doesn’t matter. I wear whatever I want. There’s no structure within the gangs. No rules to follow. Lots of the crime comes from fights. Lots of the fights come from drugs. I didn’t ask for this. At 12 my mind was somewhere else. Then I went to Marcham Middle School, there are five different hoods there. Even earlier, in sixth grade, I was already in a gang. Respect comes with pride. And we do things to gain respect. Sometimes there’s just too much pride involved. Why do you fight? Why do you shoot people? Because nobody wants to lose in Watts. Everybody knows everybody. So it’s not too hard to figure out what’s going on. Why you’re looking so hard at fighting depends on the details.”

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D.D., age 17

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“I’ve been in and out of halls. I keep on finding myself in here. Now it’s been three or four times. I started hitting the pookie (meth pipe) when I was 13, in middle school. I started stealing from my parents and whatever just to get meth. I only attended NA on an outpatient basis. But I’d go when I was high, when I had access to it. So nothing really changed. Everything bad happened when I was high. It all happened so fast. Here I talk to a therapist a lot. Mostly every day. I have court tomorrow. I’m going to tell the judge I want to do something about my addiction. I’ve only been here a few days, so my mom or my dad haven’t visited me yet. My parents don’t use. But my sister just got released from rehab today. My older cousin used to use. And I would go to his house when my parents were working. My cousin gave me my first hit. He cut up crystal for me. Then he showed me how to smoke it. I’m detoxing right now. And I’m having withdrawals, so they’re watching me. I went to high school, but I never really went to school. I was too busy getting high, or would go to school high. I have a boyfriend. He used to use with me, but he got clean. I hope the judge allows me rehab. I need to get clean. I look in the mirror and say, ‘Who am I?’”

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K.I., age 16

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VERIDICAL PARADOX SONG BY SONYA TECLAI

! LAND OF THE FREE, HOME OF THE BRAVE MORE LIKE TAKE YOU FROM YOUR LAND AND MAKE YOU A SLAVE WIPE OUT YOUR CULTURE AND CALL YOU A RACE FORCE YOU TO SPEAK THEIR DIALECT BUT YOU WILL NEVER BE FULLY EQUIPPED

STATISTICS SHOW WE ARE NOT EQUAL BUT WHOSE STANDARDS DO WE REALLY MEET TO, HUH? ANSWER THAT TO AUTHORITIES INFILTRATED WITH CORRUPTION UNJUST LAWS THAT DEEM JUSTICE, I MUST THEN THE RULES THAT WE’RE SUPPOSED TO LIVE BY JUST TO SURVIVE IN A SYSTEM MADE FOR ALL OF US TO DIE WE MUST THRIVE IN

YOU CALL ME AN ANGRY BLACK WOMAN I SAY I’M AN HONEST AFRICAN WHO BEARS WITNESS TO WESTERN CIVILIZATION’S INFILTRATION INTO MIND FRAMES OF OUR NATION WITH INTENTIONS TO PURSUE OUR DEMISE, BEHIND YOUR LIES

BUT THESE ARE HUMAN LIVES DON’T YOU SEE THAT THESE ARE HUMAN LIVES?

I AM NOT IGNORANT I AM REVOLUTION I AM THE YOUTH I WAS BRED TO SHED LIGHT I AM THE TRUTH

I PROMOTE PEACE AND DON’T FIGHT FAIR WHAT’S THE PREMISE OF SOMEONE WHO HAS FAITH AND LACKS IT WHEN THEY SCARED? WE UP TO CHURCH AND PRAYER THEN CONTINUE SINNING BECAUSE WE’RE TOLD THAT THERE’S NO LIMIT TO FORGIVENESS SEE, I BELIEVE IN GOD BUT TELL MY POPS TO KEEP US STRAPPED BECAUSE I DON’T BELIEVE IN PEOPLE THEY ALL CHANGE WITH CIRCUMSTANCE IF IT’S IN SELF-DEFENSE THEN MURDER IS ACCEPTABLE? WE CAN WAGE WAR WHEN IT’S SENSIBLE?

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WE GOT RELIGIOUS PRACTICES AND SACRILEGIOUS PRACTICES BACKED UP MANIPULATION OF HOLY SCRIPTURES FIGURE, WE BREAK BREAD THEN SIP LIQUOR THEN GO ON ABOUT OUR BUSINESS AS THE RIGHTEOUSNESS WITHERS FATHER FORGIVE US FOR CONTRADICTION IN THE FLESH IF IT BENEFITS OUR NEEDS AT THE TIME, YOU’LL BE SUPPRESSED WE’RE CERTAIN THAT WE’LL MEET OUR DEATH GUESS ABOUT OUR MAKER CAREFUL WHAT YOU BELIEVE IN ‘CAUSE IT’LL TAKE YA

I’M AN ENIGMA SAY ‘NIGGA’ LIKE THERE AIN’T A STIGMA AND I HAVEN’T BEEN TO CHURCH SINCE… DAMN, I CAN’T REMEMBER PREACH MORE THAN I PRACTICE BUT MY SOUL’S IN TACT THEY TELL ME ‘YOU SO HONEST SONYA, YOU COULD NEVER BE AN ACTRESS’ THAT’S ASS BACKWARDS I ACT A FOOL JUST GOT MY HEAD ON STRAIGHT I WAS JUST A YOUNGIN' AND AN INGRATE WATCHIN’ MTV CRIBS FIXATED ON HOW ENDS INFLATE MEDIA SLAVE CAN YOU BELIEVE I WANTED TO BE A CARAMEL CHICK PUSHING CINNAMON COOPS DARK CHOCOLATE INTERIORS, INVISIBLE ROOFS COP A SIX STORY PAD WITH A HELLA PAD, HELLA MAD HAD ME RESENTIN’ WHAT I NEVER HAD

ALWAYS CHASIN’ THINGS THAT CAN’T BE CAUGHT AND CATCHIN’ THINGS THAT SHOULD BE DROPPED I’M HARD HEADED INSECURE BUT CONFIDENT VERIDICAL PARADOX SO UNORTHODOX, YEAH

DON’T LOOK HOW I TALK DON’T TALK HOW I WRITE I’M A LADY BUT I’LL STILL FIGHT IF THE REASON IS RIGHT YES, I’M SAYIN’ I’M THE BEST SHIT, I’M BETTER THAN WHAT’S OUT DON’T SPEAK NO DOUBTS I’LL LEAVE YOU WITH YOUR FOOT IN YOUR MOUTH

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lyndon nicholas, Nyack, N.Y. Northeastern University, Class of 2016

I’m a rising fourth-year English major, secondary education/history minor at Northeastern University. Although I’m originally from Brooklyn, NY, I’ve also lived in Rockland County and am currently living in Boston, Massachusetts. Personally, I’m passionate about reading, writing, music, education and social reform, and the status of minority populations in mainstream culture. My submission is part of a larger collection of stories meant to highlight how popular culture loves to categorize young minority men into boxes like gangster, blerd, athlete, rapper, and so on. This particular story addresses that of the urban gangster, and plays with the gangster mentality while still humanizing the actions of the character to a degree. I didn’t create this story, society did. Society creates this story of the urban black youth in trouble with the law, but what society sometimes fails to recognize is that this isn’t always the case, and that this isn’t the only alternative. It gives the faces of millions of individuals one identical, homogenizing, superficial, mask, and we are asked as young minority men not only to accept this, but to assume that mask.

There are urban youth who never touch drugs or alcohol, who go to Ivy League schools and become doctors or lawyers or educators or politicians. Sure they are very few and far between, but they are a possibility. These aren’t the stories that we hear in mainstream society. Instead we hear about the drugs, the violence, the misogyny, and this becomes the story that people focus on but, more importantly, the ones that young minority men use as examples for their own life and their own life expectations. This is the story of one such male who does just that.

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Caricature of a Young Black Male #3 I remember the first time I killed someone. They said get that nigga, and I did. I got em. They was hangin out on the stoop on Linden and East 31st. The pavement they was standin on colored just like us—grey and indiscrete—just like how you posed to feel when that’s your whole life. Our whole life in these few blocks. These few blocks are you, with their empty dime bags, and blood stains, and spilled booze, and broken needles that nobody cares about. And that’s you, that’s yo team, that’s yo hood, that’s what you reppin. You reppin these streets because they made you, because they are you, and that’s all you ever gon be. And they was right there. And we rolled up and we rained on em, a monsoon, a hurricane, and most of em just kinda slumped. And everybody in the neighborhood heard it. They knew that we was out here, and that we in control. And I got mines and I saw him slumpin too, his eyes still open. He was smirkin like he was laughin at somethin, some joke that I didn’t get. I popped him a couple more times and we was already the next block down in a couple seconds, and I’m thinkin what you laughin at now? I ain’t no joke. And maybe the cops came but they just swept up the bodies and ain’t nobody come round tryna figure it out. I ain’t see no news stories or nothin. I was disappointed. I wanted the whole block, the whole hood, the whole world to know that we run these streets. And only sometimes when I’m asleep I see his body just slumpin there with no face. A sea of red all around him eatin him up and I see my momma sittin there cryin and it’s me and I’m drownin in that sea of red and I wake up in a puddle and I’m drownin but it’s just tears and I hear the gunshots and I’m dead but those bullets wasn’t for me and I’m good and I ain’t even flinch no more. I just go back to sleep and think bout gettin outta here. The other person I killed was a white dude comin out from a bar. He kept smirkin at me like he was better than me. Perfect, straight-white teeth, ivory tusks from an elephant, each one pale and brittle. Snap em. I could just snap each one in my fists. I look at him and I look down at me, and I see the black and the dirt, and I ain’t good enough or somethin. His Rolex flashes pale and blinds me, and I can’t see nothin. He sees me and he’s laughin at me for sure: he and all his friends and family and everyone around him all safe and white and happy and laughin at me, at us. And he’s sayin to me with his eyes you ain’t shit to me, and I’m thinkin to myself I’ll show em. And I did. I walk up to him real cool-like, flash him the knife, and take him into an alleyway. He shoulda never stepped into my hood. I own these streets.

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What you think I’m playin? Like I’m some nice little black boy? Nah I grew up real quick, 16 is a grown man out here. I’m a veteran out here. He thought he was Moses and I was the sea, and I was just gon let him walk right through cuz that’s how it’s posed to be. Except nah, bet. It didn’t happen that way. I look into his eyes and he starts shufflin and squirmin, and I ain’t even do nothin yet. Like just my presence was messin with the sanctity of the holy temple of Christ himself. His teeth flash as the moon peaks from behind the clouds. Safe, untouchable. It’s that smirk, those teeth, those pillars, columns on a great temple to be worshipped, fragments of brilliance to be admired by the masses, like those columns at the high school I used to go to fore I dropped out like we all do. Then my fists flew not with the wrath of God but like man, a beast, an animal. Fury and wrath and emotion and I’m just poundin, flailin at the world. The alleyway just a canvas, a pathway between reality and fantasy, between complacency and wrath. Here lay the Red Sea and it dare not part. Teeth flyin, white stars poppin out breakin up the black sky. And I ain’t me, I’m all of us: my homies, my family, my block, everybody. We finally got a chance to get em, and that’s what we doin we gettin em. We finally got the power. When I left he was layin there, eyes and mouth hollow, meaningless—like mines always feel. I never told nobody bout that and I saw it on the news the next night. They was out lookin for me for a while but they ain’t know who I was and I think they stopped lookin a while back. I still ain’t sleep too good cuz now I got both of em sittin here, corpses on my shoulders. And they ain’t talkin or nothin, they just sit up there laughin. And I tell em to quiet down, but it don’t do nothin. I still have that dream every night. I still hear the gunshots. But I still got all the power, ya feel me? When we drivin in the whip, or out hustlin, or just sittin on the block, it ain’t change nothin. My pops is still dead. My grandma’s still sick. We still broke and goin nowhere. Nothin ever changes, and maybe we all stuck here forever. And I still see that smirk. And I still wonder, what’s everyone always laughin at? Today I’m just chillin boutta ball up. I ain’t even lookin at that car rollin up and slowin down and the windows lowerin, and when I hear my name I smile cuz in my hood I’m the king. Everybody knows my name. I have all the control, I have all the power, and if I die today people gon remember me. Then I remember that first kid, but I ain’t even remember his name no more. I laugh cuz I know he was triflin and I ain’t gon go the same way. Imma get outta here and imma be doin big things, y’all gon see. I ain’t just gon be some faceless body slumpin on the sidewalk that everyone forgets in a year or two. I’m different. I ain’t never gon fade away. And so I heard someone yell my name and I’m smilin a little, then one of em yells get em and they got em…

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NEWCRAFTARTISTS INACTION CURE EMPTY ! !

NET SYNDROME

The New Craft Artists in Action (NCAA) is a flexible collective that formed in Boston around 2010 by several artists and activists that often employ craft-based techniques in their work. Together they hand-make original, functional basketball nets to hang on empty hoops around the world. Sometimes they joke that they are trying to cure â&#x20AC;&#x153;Empty Net Syndrome.â&#x20AC;? NCAA participate in exhibitions, workshops, and community events in order to bring athletes, artists and neighbors together to learn about collaboration and creative problem solving.

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While this project's influence has reached many parts of the globe, its roots in Massachusetts are appropriate because basketball was invented here in Springfield. The first hoop was a recycled peach basket which is also fitting given the rich history of the textile industry and strong tradition of fiber art and craft here. We like to think that we're returning the game to its roots in a way that challenges the commercial, consumer-centric goals of professional spectator sports of today.

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There are a few things we're thinking about here. We would like for youth and participants to think of selfexpression as being just as important as physical competition. Learning to make useful objects also encourages resourceful and creative problem solving that enriches the overall experience of playing. And we hope that our efforts in collaboration with a diverse range of neighborhood participants will carve out a space for less traditional identities on the court and in public spaces. Feminists, queer-identitified people, or any underdogs who need some support can work together to build a new game and infrastructure. So far it has panned out beautifully and we've been blown away by the feedback and help we've received by collaborators everywhere.

Maria Molteni

molteninetworks.tumblr.com !29

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HOME COURT Eve L. Ewing

Poets José Olivarez and Ben Alfaro are co-authors of the newly-released Home Court, a collection of poems about masculinity, basketball, and life in their respective towns of Calumet City, Illinois and Detroit, Michigan. Writer and artist Eve Ewing, who created the cover art for Home Court (opposite), spoke with them about the collection and what it means to be from where they’re from. But first, a few words from Ewing about the cover art:

Home Court (2014). Paper collage; watercolor. Shown on left. My hope for the cover art of Home Court was to celebrate our shared heritage in the postindustrial Midwest: Ben is from Detroit, I am from Chicago, and José is from Calumet City, which is just outside of Chicago. We come from places that get maligned for their less-romantic, rustier parts: sneered at for the old factories, derelict homes, the history of unsavory industries like meatpacking or bootlegging, warehouses, the huge overgrown swathes of land. People have a lot of disdain for the aesthetics of the post-industrial Midwest, and furthermore, these places can stand in for the decline of capitalism or the failures of American promise-- the terrifying fact that production and effort can, if you’re not careful, lead to obsolescence and abandonment. But I find that there is a strange, unheralded beauty in the hollowed-out ruin of a building, the unexpected graffiti on an underpass, or the noise of a freight train in the night. Currently, I live on the East Coast, and if I am not careful I can spend a lot of time closing my eyes and daydreaming about driving to Chicago, and the moment when you emerge from the corn and the soybeans into the realm of soot and old rail cars. In my reverie, I am going fast on the expressway in the midst of a sunset that never ends-- an eternal golden hour-- and the light refracts off of the crumbling bricks and the prairie weeds and I know I am home.

- Eve L. Ewing

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DO THE WORK AND DON’T COMPLAIN: An Interview with José Olivarez and Ben Alfaro by Eve L. Ewing   WHERE DID THIS PROJECT BEGIN?

powerful, and that’s something I’ve been thinking about. How can you connect, through poetry or any artistic medium, with a broader audience? And I was thinking a lot about masculinity, and what it means to be a feminist. I identified as a feminist ally, but the more I reflected on it, the more I felt like I didn’t always earn that title. And at the same time I was in these classes as a teaching artist, working with young men and creating positive spaces—and then the second we would get out in the hallway, I would hear the B-word. And it became clear that the conversation in the classroom was not enough to change the broader antiwoman culture.

Ben Alfaro: The whole thing that really sparked this project was that we both wanted to write poems that were directed in some capacity toward the young men that we work with, utilizing our stories and our mistakes as young men as a model for how to reassess masculinity and work toward a new paradigm of what it means to be a man. The work is grounded in the idea that we have all these messages in our lives that tell us what kind of men we’re supposed to be, even if in our hearts we don’t believe those philosophies or we don’t think they’re the best practices—we still try to meet them despite knowing better. So the poems are to rewrite that trajectory—the idea that becoming a good man, whatever that means, is a daily practice.

HOW DO YOU KEEP THE WORK ACCOUNTABLE TO THE PEOPLE AND PLACES THAT YOU WROTE IT FOR, AND DO YOU FEEL LIKE YOU’VE SUCCEEDED IN THAT?

José Olivarez: When we started the project, I had just heard Junot Díaz speak about This Is How You Lose Her. And he talked about how his critics always say that all he does is curse and talk about sex. And he said that what they don’t understand is that he’s using that language because the people he’s trying to reach, that’s how they talk—essentially, his homeboys, in places like Patterson, New Jersey. So it doesn’t make sense to cut out that language, given the audience that he’s trying to reach…But he’s also read bell hooks and Toni Morrison, and their critiques, and can embed that into the work. The work can act as a bridge between bell hooks and people in Patterson, New Jersey. So I heard that, and I thought, that’s really

Alfaro: We’ve had a lot of opportunities to read the work in different communities, different cities, and sort of try out new pieces. Looking back, we have 100 poems that didn’t make it into this book. These are the poems that, at the end of the day, will matter the most. There’s a lot of exploration about geography—poems that have nothing to do with sports, nothing to do with what it means to be a young man. Like a poem that’s about what it’s like to not have a car in Detroit. Poems about Detroit, about Cal City —all these geographic memories that are universal in some sense. They all speak to an everyman work ethic. Because the book is, you know, a long ode to the Midwest. These

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poems are about working folks trying to find a place in the world.

created. Even in a place like Cal City, there are incredible people. I wanted to show those people how much it meant to me that I was able to share with them.

WHAT DOES THAT MEAN TO YOU—FOR THE WORK TO BE AN ODE TO THE MIDWEST?

B EN , YOU MENTIONED THE IDEA OF Alfaro: There’s an unwritten culture here that you go to work, you do the work, and you don’t complain about it. Deeper than that, it’s also living in Rust Belt cities, old manufacturing cities where structural violence has been built on histories of racism and discrimination. There are so many harmful forces going on that you just learn to grow with, you learn to deal with out of habit. Not to say that in other places in the country there aren’t those same p r o b l e m s, b u t I f e e l l i k e i t ’s s o institutionalized here in a way that…the geography itself is steeped with this long, painful history. Detroit, Chicago, Cleveland, St. Louis. All these cities have this same experience. The world at large and the money at large has turned its back on us, and all we have left is each other. That sort of camaraderie is the guiding force of a lot of communities, and we want to shine some light on that.

HANDLING THINGS ON YOUR OWN AS A

MIDWESTERN IDEAL. RECENTLY DETROIT AND CHICAGO ARE PLACES THAT HAVE BEEN IN THE MEDIA A LOT AND THERE’S A LOT OF PUSHBACK FROM PEOPLE IN THOSE PLACES, SAYING, “YOU KNOW WHAT? WE WOULD PREFER IF YOU JUST DIDN’T TALK ABOUT US AT ALL, ACTUALLY. WE WOULD PREFER TO BE IGNORED.” Alfaro: Right. Or, just let us tell our own stories. I tell students in writing workshops right away: everyone in the world has something to say about your hometown. And none of that matters. What matters is your story. You have a responsibility to be ambassadors for your city. Your life is a primary text. New York Times can write whatever they want. Olivarez: The Midwest—huge portions of the c o u n t r y, g e o g r a p h i c a l l y s p e a k i n g — sometimes feels like it’s own country. Like Chicago sometimes feels like a separate United States from New York or Connecticut or wherever. Because of that, when they report on us, they treat it as if it’s a foreign place. They treat it the same way they treat special reports abroad. What that inculcates in us, as Midwesterners, is a sort of outsider perspective. You see that how people talk about you isn’t exactly how you look at yourself. You see this disconnect.

Olivarez: I have such a deep love for the Midwest and what it means to be a Midwesterner, to the point that sometimes it’s illogical and it clouds my ability to be in other places. Right now I live in New York and I have a hard time embracing New York because I feel like New York gets a lot of love anyway. For me, it was important to include that love in the poems because it is a part of me, but also because, as Ben said, there is a chip on your shoulder coming from the Midwest. The idea that no one is listening to us. People think about New York and L.A. and forget that in the middle of the map there is a lot of beautiful culture being

LIKE A DOUBLE CONSCIOUSNESS. Olivarez: Yes. That is what’s present. So for me, that’s important because my parents are 33

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immigrants. So part of the story that I tell is what it means to be an immigrant, what it means to not be able to communicate properly, what it means to always have to be critically aware of what everyone in the room wants and what they’re thinking so that you can move through that space and not be called out, and not be picked on.

AND WHO ARE THOSE VOICES, FOR YOU? W HO IS DOING THAT WORK , IN YOUR OPINION?

SO WHAT WOULD PEOPLE INFER ABOUT THE PLACES THAT YOU’RE FROM IF THEY READ YOUR WORK?

Alfaro: Francine Harris. And in particular it really is a lot of women of color who are doing phenomenal work. Aricka Foreman, Vievee Francis, Airea D. Matthews, Angel Nafis. All of these are powerful voices laying the groundwork for a new path.

Alfaro: Jamaal May. Olivarez: Kevin Coval. Nate Marshall. Danez Smith, coming out of Minneapolis.

Olivarez: I think that people who have only known of these places as the media portrays them, as violent places full of people who are poor, and it’s all struggle and everyone dying all the time, hopefully they’ll learn to take a second look and think about what it means to perpetuate those stories.

Olivarez: I think you can also look at musicians. Jamila Woods, Saba from Pivot, Noname Gypsy, who is genius. Chance the Rapper, who is also brilliant. Defcee. Malcolm London, as an artist and an activist, is incredible. You got people like Theaster Gates, who is an artist, but who is also doing development and community-building. Any corner that you talk about there are people in the Midwest who are really defining what that art might be.

Alfaro: We’re trying to illustrate more broadly the spectrum of our homes. So it’s not that violence doesn’t exist. It’s just that it’s not strictly that. We’re trying to give voice to the voiceless, but also, we’re trying to paint pictures of our homelands that are more accurate and more honest to what they are, versus what’s easy to sell.

Alfaro: And the current and the future of the Midwest, I think, is coming on the past of people like Dudley Randall and Gwendolyn Brooks. There is such a lineage of incredible artists before this generation that I think is important to recognize. This isn’t like a turn in the road and the Midwest finally shows up. We been here.

Olivarez: See, I don’t like that phrase, “giving voice to the voiceless.” I look at it as… there’s no such thing as the voiceless. People tell their stories all the time. We just might not be listening. And right now, the list of literature that is coming out of Chicago…a lot of my favorite writers right now are writing in those places. There is an incredible amount of culture in all media being developed in the Midwest. Our goal is to add to the voices that are coming from these places who are defining what it means to be from the Midwest.

The title of the book unites the idea of a geographic home with the metaphor of sports, and a lot of the poems are about sports. Why do you think notions of home are bound up in sports in that particular way —not just for you, but in American society

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Alfaro: I struggle with that. I wonder how much of it is micronationalism and how much of it is that I genuinely like watching the competition. I think that at the end of the day I like the competition and I like seeing the body used as instrument.

more broadly? It’s such an important part of how people rep where they’re from. Alfaro: I think there’s a personal and a cultural level to it. For me, on a personal level, there are a lot of people, particularly men in my life, whom I only had bonding moments with through sports. Whether it was going to a sporting event or watching a big game, that was the one time that was demarcated as our time to bond and share words with each other. That was how I came up understanding sports. And it’s also—I don’t like being so militaristic, but it’s like each team is a little militia. And it’s the closest thing we have to gladiator culture— the idea that you get to watch warriors go against warriors from another geography. And when the Pistons win, it’s not a basketball team winning. It’s an entire city, an entire state winning. It gives you something to believe in.

WHAT DO YOU SEE AS THE DEFINITIVE POEMS THAT REPRESENT THE BODY OF THE WORK?

Alfaro: The closest one, for me, is “On Exhaustion,” a tribute to my friend David Blair, who passed away. The poem is a constant barrage, with very little punctuation —a series of moments collaged together, navigating the great parts and the awful parts in equal balance. And that’s part of the core of the book. This is not an ideal place, and it is not a warzone either. But it has components of both of those, like any place does. It’s like Audre Lorde said, “there is no such thing as a single-issue struggle because we do not live single-issue lives.” The poems are navigating the fact that the same way people aren’t linear, and people are complex, so are spaces. So are our homelands.

O l i v a r e z : T h e r e ’s s o m e t h i n g r e a l l y communal about sports…And here in the United States there aren’t a lot of places where people can gather and be with one another. With sports, there are all these communal events where you feel like you become bonded with whoever else is watching, and it feels really special…The reality is that living in Detroit or Chicago, or any of these places, it’s not always easy. There’s not a lot of love that the city has for you. You love it, and you come to hate it at the same time. Sports are a way to keep the city bonded, and let you put aside for a moment those feelings of being so frustrated.

Olivarez: One of the poems that I really like in the collection is “Boys Will Be Boys,” which is a poem that I wanted to write because I wanted to explore the violence that is embedded into everyday life. In thinking about my hood, or any place, there is life and possibility, and there is violence. Any moment can erupt into beauty, or into disaster. There is infinite possibility in the everyday life of people going about their days.

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EXCERPTS FROM HOME COURT

!! Boys Will Be Boys after Ross Gay

Was with my second grade genius brains that I devised a plan to ensnare my crush, my friend Janet, who ignored my longing second looks, was what I was supposed to do, a boy in love, and Janet just needed a helping hand, was during a game of tag or hide and go seek or some other game where we divided by gender and found ways to touch, I let myself get tagged it and instead of chasing after one of the fat and slow boys, I chased Janet around the schoolyard, cupid’s harp song loud in my ears like it always is for the young and love-dumb, Janet giggling innocently as she ran herself into a corner and I, chasing too closely with cupid’s song pumping red through my body and my heart pounding too wild with lust, I slipped and tackled her in a willful accident, found myself on top of my crush, Janet’s long brown hair in the dirt like earthworms, she pushed me off and I laughed the laugh of the stupid and powerful, was what i was supposed to do, pin her down 'cause love told me to, and she was supposed to be still, collected in a pocket of my heart, but she got up, and she went to tell the teacher as my boys high-fived me, celebrating the everyday violence that means nothing to the ignorant and strong, we were just playing we tell the teacher and she makes me apologize, and I was just playing like a boy laughing as he cuts the heads off of earthworms in the name of science, in the name of anything, but his own cruel hands.

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On Exhaustion after Adam Falkner & Aracelis Girmay Between two barren homes near Van Dyke and Davison, Tori's grandmother rakes crabgrass, teasing out splintered whiskey glass and torn tire scraps from the neighborless lawn each weekend against the buzz of interstate and the grayed balloons of barren liquor stores on fire never asking how her lawn manages to refill like a prescription or grow over knotty no matter how long she combs or how she pours a dedicated stare at my passing car window as if I placed this mess, as if asking how I arrived which is to say commuting on a frozen afternoon near Marcus Market to my first apartment spending hours hauling a record store in categorized milk crates up the steep slide of a December staircase or again months later at that same stoop eyeing an out-of-place cardboard box piled over in the shape of a crescent on the parking lot floor being dressed in slow snowfall which I would later learn to be a man freezing with too much potion poured down his sick pipe, or how he would then throw an emptied glass bottle at my car door when I asked if I could help in any way so I called an ambulance and not the police â&#x20AC;&#x201C; just thankful it wasn't another found cadaver, which is to say it was just a dress rehearsal or some notion of vanishing, I learned it first with Marco when he watched his own legs lift off the rusted grill of an off-duty school bus barreling down Rosa Parks while walking toward Avery for the last scraps of weed to wrap his stale blunt around when he told me how it happened as if it were some other body, some other burden than his own, as if the anecdote of claiming his cracked sternum made him any less accountable for its breaking or if injury spurred enough wind or heart behind his swollen chest to call Charlie for bail on two separate occasions once from a jail cell in Kentucky, again from a detention center in Chicago or when he asks me to spot him on rent because it's the third time this week heâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s had a blade pulled and I think of how he disappears for months on end or how the last time I saw him he told me he was a father and I bought him a whiskey and then myself a cab to catch a show with my last cash and a tailpipe spewing like a factory lung between its legs, how the show was standing room only, all fists like sledgehammers shattering the hot air, how it was a Crowded House and Blair wore many hats, poet and promoter and spitfire and logistics and split a cigarette with me between sets as a line cook would and I offered him a water and he said beer and we drank vodka warmed from the heat of so many packed bodies, a boat deck of full pews, not unlike his funeral as if only drags later at the thrum of a heat stroke in the busiest summer any of us had known, on the hottest day in July probably on record and I played Stevie Wonder the whole drive holding how it stung as it went down in one hard swallow unsettled and hot in my chest, like skipping the procession to make it back to work on time, or convincing myself that not seeing his body buried in a wooden box for too long would breathe it back, or to just stay busy, or the realization you've run out of gas on the freeway twice in the same week which is to say making it to work at all like it's not work enough to just wake most days, some lesson in overtime wages, in graveyards and salt lines in paces similar to a plank or steps toward some finish line tape some crescendo that doesn't require any blood or condolence, how he stays, even when he goes, and I wait, watching the basketball sun hang in the sky, then fall, only to bounce back up each morning like some haunting reminder of how syncopated our factory bones bustle, telling me over and over again to step on, praying I'll meet you again in the middle of a suitcase or on a barroom dance floor, or walking down Woodward whistling in Highland Park and tell you, friend, how long it's been since we caught our own breath. for D. Blair

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VACATED Justin Blinder

Vacated examines whether temporal differences in Google Street View's cache can be used as a device to narrate rapidly changing urban landscapes.Â It was created to raise awareness about the prevalence of historical data (often collected by large, multinational corporations) hiding in plain sight. The project reverse engineers Google Street View to highlight the changing landscape of various neighborhoods throughout Manhattan and Brooklyn, in New York City. The project focuses on neighborhoods in which housing costs rose dramatically during the Bloomberg Administration, finds buildings constructed in the past four years using the NYC Department of City Planning's PLUTO dataset, and leverages Google Street View's cache to visualize absent lots just before new buildings were constructed.

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Vacated mines and combines different datasets on vacant lots to present a sort of physical façade of gentrification, one that immediately prompts questions by virtue of its incompleteness: “Vacated by whom? Why? How long had they been there? And who’s replacing them?” Are all these changes instances of gentrification, or just some? In previous decades, vacant lots were signifiers of blight rather than impending real estate developments. While we usually think of gentrification in terms of what is new or has been displaced, Vacated highlights the contested meanings of such buildings via their momentary absence, either because they’ve been demolished or have not yet been built. All images depicted in the project are both temporal and ephemeral, since they draw upon image caches that will eventually be replaced.

Journalists and social scientists have documented widespread gentrification—the physical, economic, social, and cultural transformation of lower-income neighborhoods into ones aimed at higher-income households and visitors—over the past decade. But it remains difficult for the average person to relate to these large, complex shifts in political economy, or to pinpoint what’s happening. Ultimately, Vacated is a street-level walking tour of changes usually depicted from an aerial view, on a macro scale— it depicts some obvious examples of dramatic change in our urban landscape, but in the end, it's up to the viewer to decide whether this change represents widespread gentrification, and whether the benefits outweigh the costs.

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brianna suslovic, Syracuse, NY ! I am a mixed-race, Black queer womyn with a passion for reproductive justice. I like thinking about how my own identities intersect and interact with others. In this vein, my piece is a thought exercise on power, belonging and community. At college, I’ve found myself feeling nervous about speaking up, taking space, and settling in. Why? This piece is an affirmation to myself and to others, a reminder that we deserve to exist, especially in spaces where we haven’t been seen or heard before. In line with my understandings of justice and representation, radical resilience is rooted in claiming space that couldn’t even be accessed in the past.

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! TAKING UP SPACE ! Late night.

I am walking through campus, alone, passing grassy patches bisected by paths for walking. A lone passerby. How did I look? Male? Female? Black? White? Whose silhouette emerged from the darkness? I am looking into the eyes of a white man’s statue. Is he looking back? Students piss on the blessed statue that others kiss. What does this say about our elitism? Their elitism? My own? I am living in buildings made with slave labor, inhabited by white males for centuries and built with servant’s quarters. And what am I? Black body in white space, a dark void in a vacuum learning how to command a room, demand attention with my unashamed existence, be present in a way that they’ve all done

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for generations. Queer voice in seas of straightness rippling waves with the tides of sexuality and identity, watching lovers curl in my direction and flow back out with the calling of the moon. Womyn at a poker table full of men, straight-faced, unflinching and learning how to posture, network, own as much space on the couch as possible. I am here. No, rather, I am here for a reason with a purpose because I deserve it like they do. I am here for the backbreaking brick-and-mortar work three centuries prior the creation of womenâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s learning space two hundred years before the expulsion of queerness a mere century ago. Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;m here not because anyone let me in, but because others fought to open the doors. I am taking up space here like I deserve to.

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ONE NATION, DISCONNECTED !

Maria Smith

Maria Smith is a junior studying Economics at Harvard University. For years, Maria has been involved with issues of digital equality in Kansas City, Missouri and is a passionate activist for global health equity on Harvard’s campus. This work with the Harvard Law Documentary Film Studio is her first filmmaking experience.

One Nation, Disconnected illustrates this issue of Internet accessibility through the eyes of a young woman whose story exemplifies the stark reality of today’s digital divide, an issue garnering little public attention and even less action. Nearly three million New York City residents lack in-home broadband access. The documentary’s protagonist describes her struggles as a NYC high school student, for example, camping out in public libraries for a thirty minute time slot at a computer.

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The Federal Communication Commission (FCC) has previously determined that broadband is not telecommunications and is therefore exempt from consumer protections such as provisions for universal access and affordable prices. This has enabled a few providers to grow into monopolies and prevent Internet affordability and hence accessibility across rural as well as urban areas in the US. Nearly 30 percent of Americans lack Internet access at home, and lack of access disproportionately affects poorer Americans: 99 percent of households making $150,000 or more have Internet access, compared to only 57 percent of households making $15,000 or less. The numbers are also divided among racial lines: 74% of whites, 62% of African Americans and roughly half of Hispanics (56%) have broadband access at home. Two current threats to Internet accessibility would widen the gap between those who can readily access online content and those who cannot. The first is the Federal Communication Commission's (FCC) proposal to kill net neutrality. The proposal would permit Internet providers to discriminate online by charging content providers extra fees to fast track their content. The second is Comcast’s pending takeover of Time Warner Cable, which would make Comcast a controller of a lion’s share of the Internet and cable markets.

We cannot allow Internet accessibility to continue to exacerbate racial and economic gaps, deepening inequality among people in the United States. Join the fight to preserve an open and accessible Internet!

!Maria Smith ! ! !

WHAT CAN I DO?

01. Send a comment to the FCC to preserve Net Neutrality and reclassify Internet Service Providers as common carriers.

http://act.freepress.net/sign/internet_fcc_nprm_oliver?source=takeaction

02. Call the FCC! http://act.freepress.net/call/internet_wheeler_nn/

03. Sign the petition to stop the Comcast and Time Warner merger. https://act.freepress.net/sign/consol_comcast_twc/

04. Submit a filing to the FCC regarding the proposed merger. (use “proceeding number” 14-57) http://apps.fcc.gov/ecfs/upload/display?z=62jv5

05. Call Congress. http://act.freepress.net/call/internet_congress_nn/ !50

SCENES FROM ONE NATION, DISCONNECTED

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ON SAVIOUR COMPLEX When you’re advocacy work is uplifting, not speaking for, the voices of those to whose community you don’t belong to. Words by Renne Fox, a doctor with the international humanitarian organization Médicins Sans Frontières/Doctors Without Borders (MSF).

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! If we allow ourselves to see our humanitarian experience as occurring between ‘two worlds,’ or seeing crisis as involving a difference of essence, and not merely of degree vis-à-vis our culture of origin, we fall prey to the romanticism characteristic of colonialism. Each of us is drawn to the challenge of improving the human condition, but the adventure of MSF field experience should not be interpreted as an ‘initiation’ into some higher more profound form of understanding of the human condition. To romanticize it in this way is to mystify the humanitarian experience: to pretend that some fundamental transformation takes place in our way of seeing the world, is in effect to exploit the plight of the people we aim to assist as an opportunity for our own personal development. The fantasy of MSF field experience as a ‘rite of passage’ onto some higher plane of human understanding is replete with narcissism —even more repulsive because this so-called initiation is parasitic on the ‘host’ of the suffering we seek to eradicate. In short, there is absolutely nothing ‘otherworldly’ about humanitarian experience in the field: to assume so is to posit an artificial difference in kind between ‘us’ and ‘them.’

Excerpt from Doctors Without Borders: Humanitarian Quests, Impossible Dreams of Médicins Sans Frontières, pg. 39-40

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ABOUT !

In social movement theory, cognitive liberation â&#x20AC;&#x153;denotes a threestage shift in consciousness: first, individuals no longer perceive the system as legitimate or just; second, those who once saw the system as inevitable begin to demand change; and third, those who normally considered themselves powerless come to believe that they can alter their lot in life.â&#x20AC;? Revolution can only occur once those who are aggrieved experience this cognitive liberation. Cognitive Liberation is a national, virtual magazine to showcase students who are creating art for social change. This art and literature magazine serves to catalyze action and disruption around the issues of our generation. Activism through expression.

! COGNITIVELIBERATION.ORG || @COGLIBMAG

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THANK YOU ! ABIGAIL MIRIAM RICHARD ROSS LYNDON NICHOLAS MARIA MOLTENI EVE L. EWING JOSE OLIVAREZ BEN ALFARO BRIANNA SUSLOVIC JUSTIN BLINDER MARIA SMITH RENNE FOX SONYA TECLAI ALEXANDRA JUHASZ

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