NUPR Spring 2021

On December 9, we published the Fall 2020 issue of our magazine, capping a year marked by increased recognition of systemic issues. Four weeks later, a mob of Trump supporters—emboldened by election-fraud lies furnished at the highest levels of media and politics—stormed the US Capitol, reminding us that our problems don’t magically disappear when the calendar flips.

The insurrection is the defining political moment of our time, not because of how viscerally shocking it was, but because it revealed the defining political problem of our time—there is no universally recognized baseline of fact to guide political debate.

We cannot counter rampant misinformation solely with regulation and policy. It requires actively and consciously seeking out the truth every day, even down to fact-checking the content flooding our phones. This requires a massive shift in how we live our lives, but we must try nonetheless.

Our club and our publication are a small, closed circuit of debate and discussion, which places this ideal within reach. Every factual claim in this magazine has a cited source behind it, and while we surely miss the mark from time to time, we pursue reputability and credibility in our writing and editing. We strive to enforce the kind of universal fact-checking and argumentative accountability that the wider world lacks.

The writers and editors whose work you’ll find in this magazine are not professionals. They are undergraduates who devote remarkable energy and passion to their political arguments and to those of their peers. They are, without exception, industrious and creative. Their work is, without exception, exceptional.

And they produce it against the backdrop of the world we’ll all soon graduate into, one in which turbulent technologies and decentralized debate are misleading and misinforming millions. What you’re reading is us learning how to exist and express ourselves in that world. It’s the product of raw ideas discussed, debated, scribbled, refined, and presented.

It’s our pride and joy, now and always.

Milton Posner Editor-in-Chief

Kamran Parsa Co-President

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Kamran Parsa Co-President Mia Vuckovich Co-President Milton Posner Editor-in-Chief Evelyn Hou Creative Director Grace Horne Communications Director Chantal Cheung Digital Director Maxwell Huber Podcast Director Rowdie McDonald Treasurer

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Founded in 2010, the Northeastern University Political Review seeks to be a non-affiliated platform for students to publish articles and podcasts of the highest possible caliber on contemporary domestic and international politics, as well as critical reviews of political books, film, and events. We aspire to foster a culture of intelligent political discourse, promote awareness of political issues, and provide a forum for students to discuss their views and refine their options.

We hope to reflect the diversity of thought and spirit at Northeastern, including the dual ethic of academic and experiential education our school embodies.

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ccording to an October 2020 survey, most French citizens are anti-immigration. President Emmanuel Macron's 2018 immigration legislation certainly fit this sentiment; since then, his administration tightened asylum rules, made it harder for immigrants to access health care, and cracked down on Islamic practices.

Macron later reversed his stance and announced that, amidst the COVID19 pandemic, frontline immigrant workers would receive fast-tracked citizenship status. This program, which France initiated in September to prepare for a second wave of cases, requires regional offices to accelerate the naturalization process for foreign workers who “have proved their commitment to the country” during the pandemic. Health-care workers, cleaning professionals, childcare workers, store clerks, and others are eligible.

As of December 23, nearly three thousand people had applied for French citizenship, with more than seventy applicants gaining citizenship and about seven hundred in the final review stages. The office of Marlene

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Schiappa, the junior minister for citizenship, explained that “They all proved their commitment to the nation, and it is now the turn of the republic to take a step towards them.”

France is not the only country struggling with COVID-19, nor is it the only one

As the pandemic continues, the efforts of essential workers need to be recognized. Other countries should follow France’s lead and offer fast-tracked citizenship for their frontline immigrant workers.

As the pandemic continues, the efforts of essential workers need to be recognized.

Other countries should follow France’s lead and offer fast-tracked citizenship for their frontline immigrant workers.

Normally, a successful applicant for French citizenship must be a resident for five consecutive years, with a stable income and demonstrated integration into French society. These strict requirements have led to a downward trend in French immigration, which decreased by about 10 percent between 2018 and 2019. With the accelerated program, eligible frontline workers must live in France for only two years.

This fast-track program is not the first time France has granted citizenship to those who contributed to the country.

Didier Leschi, the director of the French Office of Immigration and Integration, said the fast-tracking measure was part of “a long tradition that can be traced back to the French Revolution, which is to grant citizenship to the benefactors of the country.” He added that while the tradition typically applied to individual and exceptional cases, “here, a collective effort was rewarded.”

One such exceptional case is that of Mamoudou Gassama, a twenty-two-year-old

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to have a population of immigrant workers on the front line. However, the French government is the only one awarding citizenship to its frontline immigrant workers.

from Mali, who climbed five stories of an apartment building, jumping from balcony to balcony, to save a four-year-old boy who was dangling from a railing. Macron granted Gassama citizenship for his brave acts.

Similarly, in 2019, the state awarded three Americans citizenship for thwarting a 2015 terror attack on a Paris-bound train.

France strayed from tradition by rewarding a large group of people with citizenship because of how hard the pandemic has hit the country. As of April 4, the country has seen almost five million confirmed cases and one hundred thousand deaths. Though testing is widespread and mostly available, authorities have acknowledged that cases are likely underreported due to data-gathering problems.

France is not the only country struggling with COVID-19.

Between December 2019 and April 2021, there were more than 130 million reported cases and 2.8 million deaths worldwide. The US ranks first in total cases and deaths, with India, Brazil, the UK, and France joining the top ten.

France is also not the only country to have many foreign workers on the front line. In the US, nearly 20 percent of essential workers are immigrants, making them a crucial part of the fight against the pandemic. In Europe, immigrants make up an average of 14 percent of essential workers, with migrant workers accounting for 18 percent of frontline workers in cities. Unlike immigrants, migrant workers do not seek permanent residency, and instead travel temporarily— often seasonally—for work.

In Bahrain, a small island nation in the Persian Gulf, immigrants comprise over half of the workforce, including half of the country’s nurses. Bahrain experienced a surge in cases earlier this year, with a threefold increase in new cases from January to February. Given countries’ reliance on the immigrant population and ongoing surges in cases, a fast-tracked citizenship option like France’s would be the least they can do.

If France is leading the way for better treatment of frontline immigrants, the UK is moving in the opposite direction. Britain is forcing migrant health-care workers to return home as visas expire. These deportations come even as the country faces a shortage of over one hundred thousand health-care workers, severely impacting its response. Since foreign workers constitute about 15 percent of health-care staff, deporting them will only hurt the country's ability to fight the virus.

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Other countries could face risks welcoming people back from the UK, where a more transmissible and deadly strain of the virus has proliferated and spread. It raises the question of why London is enforcing these visa expirations and whether or not they could extend them or offer citizenship like France.

As a stopgap measure, the Home Office announced last March that doctors, nurses, and paramedics would automatically have their visas extended, free of charge, for one year. But this extension only applies to about three thousand workers, excluding the large majority of migrant frontline workers.

In response to concerns over the deportations, one member of Parliament introduced

just doing their jobs, and that alone should not grant them citizenship. After all, if we reward all frontline immigrant workers, we must also reward citizens who work on the front line. It wouldn’t be fair to recognize immigrant contributions and not others.

Proponents of the UK proposal believe their plan grants the workers settlement and allows them to remain without granting citizenship. It is viewed as superior to the French program that rewards an unlimited number of foreign workers.

These views are flawed. While it is true that frontline workers are not working solely for recognition or reward, they are choosing to remain in a foreign country to help, rather than returning home. In some cases, these workers face unsafe living conditions, lack fundamental rights, and are more likely to contract the virus than citizens. As Marlene Schiappa says, immigrant workers are helping the nation, so the government must reciprocate their efforts.

The UK solution is the first stage to obtaining British citizenship, but it is insufficient. The benefits of permanent citizenship are twofold. For one, it resolves the labor shortage in the field, where manpower is most needed. And second, if indefinite leave to remain allows for all the same rights as citizenship, why not take the extra step? Instead of expressing temporary appreciation for frontline immigrant workers, countries can offer gratitude with permanent citizenship.

Some argue that France’s tradition of granting citizenship only to those who help the country highlights its anti-immigrant position. Citizenship based on bravery means you can become French only by doing something French people would never do.

Perhaps during normal times, it is an appropriate critique that underscores how hard it is to gain citizenship. However, as the pandemic rages on, frontline workers deserve to be rewarded for their efforts based on those same standards of bravery.

As the world continues to battle the virus, the efforts of essential workers mustn’t go unnoticed. France has taken a progressive approach by awarding citizenship, and the rest of the world should follow suit. Granting essential workers citizenship could be the catalyst France needs to combat xenophobia and foster a lasting environment for positive policy changes for all immigrants.

Granting essential workers citizenship could be the catalyst France needs to improve attitudes toward immigration and foster a lasting environment for positive policy changes for all immigrants. a bill that calls for migrant health-care workers to be granted “indefinite leave to remain.”

Also known as “settlement” or “permanent residency,” indefinite leave to remain refers to an immigration status in which there is no time limit on a person’s stay. They are free to study, work, live, and access health care.

Unlike citizenship, a person can lose their status if they live outside the country for two consecutive years.

As of April 4, the bill is awaiting its second reading in the House of Commons, as deliberations have halted due to the pandemic.

Many have called on Parliament to debate it remotely, but that's improbable. Since a non-government official introduced it, the bill will likely get less time for deliberation, hindering its ability to get passed. But the bill could popularize the issue further.

The migrant bill is similar to the French immigration program, but it grants only indefinite leave to remain—not citizenship—and solely focuses on health and social care staff.

Currently, migrants working on the front line are behaving more like immigrants than migrants. Rather than traveling seasonally for work, many are trying to extend their visas to help the UK through the pandemic. This bill would allow them a more official immigrant status since they will live indefinitely in the UK. Some might argue that frontline workers—regardless of citizenship status—are

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he Supreme Court’s 1973 decision in Roe v. Wade was a turning point in US history—a celebratory moment where freedom triumphed and the fundamental human rights of bodily autonomy and personal choice were extended to Americans with uteruses.

The landmark decision has been one of great controversy, with efforts to overturn it starting from the time of the ruling. The confirmation of Justice Amy Coney Barrett, likely cementing a conservative Supreme Court majority for a generation, intensifies that threat. Abortion access is just one of many issues in danger—the Court’s majority also threatens LGBTQ+ rights, the Affordable Care Act, birth control access, worker protections, and environmental conservation.

It’s hard to imagine life without Roe's protections. It did much more than federally protect the right to abortion—it revolutionized gender relations and restructured American society.

Life pre-Roe was defined by severe restrictions on women, including a lack of constitutionally protected patient–physician privacy and a lack of liberty to determine personal destiny. With that restriction came inherent second-class status, threats of bodily harm, and often death from unsafe, illegal

abortions. Roe also directly impacts many transgender and gender-nonconforming people who are often erased from the conversation surrounding abortion rights.

The argument against Roe usually falls along religious (often Christian) lines based on a subjective morality that resonates with only a minority of Americans. Indeed, over 60 percent of Americans believe it should be legal in all or most cases. Those who are pro-choice herald abortion rights as fundamental, while those who are anti-choice—the term “pro-life” being misleading and based on propaganda—deem it a sin.

But a safe and legal abortion is a human right; the freedom to choose the fate of your body inherently differentiates between freedom and oppression. The UN Human Rights Committee affirms that abortion is a human right and that restricting such access violates the right to life. Reproductive rights are human rights.

While Roe has been under attack for decades, the Trump administration ushered in an era of renewed action against reproductive rights. In 2016, then-candidate Trump explicitly outlined his anti-abortion beliefs and intention to appoint “pro-life” justices to

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the Supreme Court, and he followed through.

Today, Roe is more of a symbol of federally ensured equality than a guarantee for reproductive justice. The decision has come to represent autonomy beyond the right to abortion—it represents freedom and gender equality more broadly.

In 1992, Planned Parenthood v. Casey became the controlling precedent on abor-

Roe did much more than federally protect the right to abortion—it revolutionized gender relations and restructured American society.

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tion. It upheld Roe’s core right to abortion but simultaneously granted states new power to restrict the procedure.

The biggest threats to abortion access today are these state-level restrictions and the defunding of organizations dedicated to reproductive justice, such as Planned Parenthood.

Since Casey, but especially in the last decade,

many Republican-controlled states have enacted abortion restrictions, including sixweek bans that criminalize abortions after a fetal “heartbeat” can be detected—long before most people know they are pregnant.

Overturning Roe would signal that the opinion of cisgender men is still the federal government’s top priority.

It would also open the door for more restrictions, virtually eliminating legal abortion in many states. Without Roe, abortion would likely become illegal in twenty-two states; 41 percent of women of reproductive age would see their closest abortion clinics close, slashing their chances of terminating an unwanted pregnancy.

Women lacking money and time cannot cross state lines for abortion access. In the year following a Roe reversal, red-state clinic closures would deprive an estimated 90,000–140,000 women of access to abortion care. That could translate to an increase in self-administered abortions, some of which can cause bodily harm.

Roe has consistently taken on ideological perspectives as identity politics define the norms of civic engagement. Although the decision outlines bodily autonomy by ensuring the constitutional right to an abortion, its impact does not end there.

Overturning the decision would deal a major blow to the American economy. And while it feels reductive to condense a human rights dilemma to an economic analysis, it’s worth exploring given that many antichoice voters are fiscally conservative and haven’t considered Roe’s economic impact.

Republican-aligned anti-abortion rhetoric, in working to overturn Roe through religiously based ideology, contradicts core GOP beliefs.

When Roe was decided in 1973, it revolutionized the American workforce. Not only did the number of reproductive-age women entering the workforce increase dramatically, but so did the number of women aged eighteen to twenty-four enrolling in four-year colleges and universities. Poverty and crime dropped.

Access to safe and legal abortion saved lives.

When people can control their family planning, more of them will enroll in college, contribute to the workforce, and accumulate security and personal wealth. When women can fully participate, GDP rises and poverty drops. Without Roe, fewer women will contribute to economic growth.

Women denied access to abortion are six times more likely to enroll in federal assistance programs and four times more likely to live below the Federal Poverty Level, statistics that remain consistent for years after giving birth.

If Republicans continue to defund and deregulate government assistance and social

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welfare, overturning Roe v. Wade would expand the number of families living under the poverty line. Many of the states that passed six-week bans also restricted family planning services and assistance programs.

As abortion access remains a key issue among voters, a shift from ideological warfare to Roe’s economic impact must be emphasized.

States do not have the infrastructure to accommodate the born, and Republican-led federal initiatives work to ensure that. This disregard for post-womb life negates the term “pro-life,” especially since these cuts disproportionately affect Black families.

Access to abortion is not simply an ideological battleground. While the attack on reproductive justice is at the forefront of the decision, there are far-reaching implications for the nation if Roe is overturned.

The US economy may be permanently changed—a reality that must be centered in the conversation around health care and constitutional protection.

With the right to choose comes the bodily autonomy essential to being an equal citizen.

Without autonomy to choose, people with uteruses are denied the capacity to make personal decisions and lack the democratic freedom and civil rights to master their destinies.

As abortion access remains a key issue among voters, a shift from ideological warfare to Roe’s economic impact must be emphasized. Shifting from social partisanship to policy analysis may be the last chance of upholding the decision and protecting reproductive rights.

While talks of expanding the Supreme Court permeated through the Democratic Party during Barrett's nomination, President Biden avoided discussing the matter, suggesting instead to implement other judicial reforms.

Court reforms are necessary to ensure the longevity of abortion rights. Republicans acted egregiously to promote their agenda, hypocritically advancing Barrett’s confirmation mere weeks before the November election. In 2016, Republicans argued that, in an election year, the people should decide the next justice with their vote. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell subsequently

blocked the Obama administration from filling Justice Scalia’s seat.

McConnell also blocked appointments to many federal courts during Obama’s final two years, boasting that he was in charge—a clear sign that he doesn’t care about the will of the people. Courtpacking could be a viable step toward combating this political warfare and appointment weaponization. Better yet, setting term limits for Supreme Court justices might be the only way to combat court-related partisan warfare.

So what can Americans do to preserve reproductive rights and justice in this country? The simple answer is: act now. Vote for local, state, and federal officials who will protect reproductive rights. Call your representatives and urge them to protect Roe. Take to the streets, respond to surveys, and create and sign petitions—these actions can help legislators visualize where public sentiment lies.

Donate to family support and abortion funds.

Act like the lives of your neighbors depend on it, because they do. Act like your life depends on it, because it does.

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T

he 2020 election saw several competitive southern Senate races. As Election Day crept closer, polling was tight in North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia.

But there was another competitive race hiding outside the Democratic Party’s consciousness for most of the election cycle. In ruby-red Mississippi, Democrat Mike Espy overcame a twenty-five-point polling deficit, narrowing his race with Republican incumbent Cindy Hyde-Smith to one point. For the first time in recent memory, Mississippi Democrats dared to dream of statewide office.

Espy and Hyde-Smith were no strangers. After Governor Phil Bryant appointed Hyde-Smith to the Senate in 2018, Espy launched—as his team described to me—a last-minute and underfunded bid in the ensuing special election.

Despite Espy’s experience as a three-term congressman and the first Black secretary of agriculture, he couldn’t beat Hyde-Smith after forcing a runoff.

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Espy’s 2020 campaign—which I joined as a senior research associate—did not suffer the same issues as his 2018 attempt. He filed early and assembled a team of experienced operatives. He raised $15.7 million from over 200,000 donors, historic numbers for any

The bridge is three-fourths finished. But you gotta keep building.

advantage—and their seven-to-one paid media edge—to work. They ran television ad after television ad, some positive about Espy’s character and many negative about Hyde-Smith’s.

They attacked her for supporting a repeal of the Affordable Care Act. They criticized her refusal to hold town halls. They condemned her numerous votes to cut vital state funding.

And they highlighted her ranking as the least effective and most Trump-loyal senator—all to assert that Mississippi deserved better.

Espy’s statewide tour included over one hundred COVID-compliant events. As his campaign reached its end, Espy pushed harder with a five-day get-out-the-vote bus tour. All the while, Hyde-Smith refused to debate Espy, ducked media questions, and allowed only her staunchest supporters into rallies.

“For [her campaign], there was a danger to including media or extending invites to people who might ask reasonable questions or demand accountability,” Espy Communications Director Kendall Witmer argued.

Meanwhile, the MSDP unleashed a grassroots organizing campaign never before seen from a Mississippi Democrat. Volunteers and staff knocked on almost 600,000 doors, focusing on infrequent voters who had avoided the ballot box since President Obama’s 2008 campaign.

The MSDP also launched a voter suppression hotline staffed by dozens of lawyers, paralegals, and volunteers. According to MSDP Director Jared Turner, the initiative was better funded than any prior attempt from Democrats in Mississippi. It sought to give Espy a fair chance in a hotbed of voter suppression, and it received hundreds of thousands of calls.

Beyond finances, the 2020 cycle seemed perfect for Espy. He and his campaign deftly “met the moment,” as Espy put it, on race and health care. As police violence and racial justice captured the political discourse like never before, Espy spoke about his experiences in the civil-rights-era South.

He retold the challenges of integrating his public high school, from teachers blasting him with fire extinguishers to his peers hurling the n-word at him.

Meanwhile, Hyde-Smith recited “law and order” talking points as she dodged questions on her history of racial insensitivity. In 2014, Hyde-Smith posted an image on Facebook of her wearing a Confederate soldier’s cap, rifle and all. Four years later, she said she would attend a public hanging.

Espy labeled her “an anachronism, a throwback to the past.”

When the pandemic hit in March, the

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statewide candidate in Mississippi, let alone from a Democrat. Meanwhile, Hyde-Smith raised a quarter of that, less than any Senator seeking reelection. In one filing period, Espy outraised her forty-five to one.

Espy’s campaign and the Mississippi Democratic Party (MSDP) put this fundraising

Madison County Board of Supervisors hired Espy; there, he developed the county’s COVID response plan, finalizing it just nine days after Mississippi reported its first case. That same week, Hyde-Smith said the pandemic would be over in “a couple of weeks.”

As the state’s CARES Act money ran dry in June, Espy’s nonprofit—Hope Credit Union— facilitated nearly one thousand Paycheck Protection Program loans to struggling employers unable to obtain loans elsewhere.

Meanwhile, Hyde-Smith repeatedly encouraged gutting public health guidelines and pushed to reopen businesses.

In the fall, Espy held socially distant campaign events and called for statewide mask mandates and principled leadership in Washington. All the while, Hyde-Smith was in the Capitol obstructing relief efforts with her Republican Senate colleagues. The senator even took an August recess despite writing an op-ed castigating senatorial “quitting” a year prior.

Even before COVID-19 gripped the American zeitgeist, Espy’s campaign centered health care, and for good reason. Mississippi ranked dead last in health system performance, had the fifth-highest rate of uninsured residents, and featured an ailing hospital system suffering from perennial closures.

Like Democrat David Baria, who ran in Mississippi’s other 2018 Senate race, Espy argued that expanding Medicaid in Mississippi would alleviate much of the state’s health problems. This expansion would cover 210,000 more residents, cutting the uninsured rate by almost 75 percent. Over just one decade, the state would receive an estimated $11.1 billion in additional federal funds and billions more in hospital reimbursements.

And this wasn’t a secret among voters.

Before Espy began campaigning, nearly two-thirds of Mississippians supported the initiative.

“I want to be the health-care senator,” Espy preached from the stump. “I am running to move Mississippi forward.”

Yet on November 3, Cindy Hyde-Smith was victorious, finishing with ten percent more of Mississippi’s largest vote total to date.

The tight polls were invalidated as President Trump turned out droves of ardent supporters.

“Trump, for whatever reason, turned out these voters who can’t or won’t be measured,” Communications Director Witmer concluded.

During the final weeks of the cycle, HydeSmith did her best to remain composed in the

face of mounting pressure. By staying out of the spotlight, she allowed Espy to gain ground, but it didn’t matter in the end. As GOP strategists predicted, Mississippi conservatives showed up to vote for Trump. And if they were voting for Trump, they might as well vote for his loyal servant too.

But the result is misleading—an ill-fitting headline to a historic Democratic effort.

Mike Espy shined on a night of countrywide Democratic losses, receiving a higher percentage of Republican crossover votes than all but one Democratic Senate candidate. In three Mississippi counties, the winning ticket was split Trump–Espy. He inspired a record-breaking Black turnout, receiving more votes in Mississippi than Obama ever did. “[It] was a huge, ginormous step for Mississippi Democrats,” Witmer noted.

“We can’t stop doing the investment that’s needed in the South.”

“The bridge is three-fourths finished,” Espy explained. “But you gotta keep building.”

If Democrats ever want to win statewide office

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Mississippi Democrats and national leadership must shift their attention from candidates (many of whom lost) to states, their infrastructure, and their people.

in Mississippi, they cannot give up. They must continue organizing, raising money, and proving viability. They must continue knocking on doors, registering voters, and explaining to downtrodden Mississippians how a vote for the right leader can change everything.

Espy Campaign Manager Joe O’Hern adds that “It got better because a group of us tried . . . you need people to try.”

But this organizing cannot come only when elections approach. To change the state's political dynamics, a multi-faceted, multi-cycle, year-round effort is needed. In Georgia, it took eight years of organizing, fundraising, and tenacious leadership from Stacey Abrams to carry the state from red to purple.

However, it may prove even harder for the Magnolia State to find such success. MSDP Director Turner explains that as the poorest

state in the country, “Mississippi doesn’t have an internal fundraising base . . . we don’t have a lot of money.” Herein lies the biggest challenge for state Democrats: persuading Washington insiders, wealthy PACs, and campaign committees that they are viable contenders who deserve political infrastructure investment.

Even as polling tightened to a five-point race in August, and even as Espy outraised Hyde-Smith nearly three to one in quarter two, national Democrats took little notice.

Only after a week of campaign social media posts admonishing Democratic leadership did Espy receive a meager portion of the national fundraising tsunami that followed Ruth Bader Ginsburg's death. “If we had not done what we had done [on social media], we would not have gotten any of that,” O’Hern claimed.

But Mississippi Democrats cannot pray for the death of a Supreme Court justice and an ensuing fundraising deluge each cycle. At some point, they must prove viability.

“It’s a proverbial catch-22,” Espy explained.

“To get the attention of [national Democrats], they have to consider you as viable. And they can’t consider you as viable if you don’t have the resources.”

Mississippi is likely years away from proving this viability. Hundreds of thousands of eligible adults are not registered to vote and remain unengaged in politics. Moreover, Mississippi has yet to see the demographic changes experienced by other competitive southern states, including an influx of young, Black voters into larger cities. And running an experienced candidate with deep in-state ties such as Espy may not be possible each cycle.

Mississippi Democrats and national leadership must shift their attention from candidates (many of whom lost) to states, their infrastructure, and their people. Democrats started this work in Georgia—which helped them win the 2020 presidential race and the 2021 Senate runoffs—and must continue it throughout the South. Senior officials must deprioritize short-term success and begin investing in long-term voter relationships.

Espy gave Mississippi Democrats a real chance in 2020 and into the future. But as the fight goes on, Mississippians must resist demoralization and urge Democratic leaders to join them in building out infrastructure and civically engaging voters.

If they do, Mississippi will flip. As Reverend William Barber of the Poor People’s Campaign observed, “Mississippi isn’t a red state; it’s an under-organized state.”

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Perspectives

12 — SPRING 2021

nupoliticalreview.com

Perspectives

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s the insurrection at the US Capitol unfolded on January 6, media outlets scrambled to analyze the motivations behind it. Commentators tried to make sense of the far-right agitators who attempted to halt the democratic process, and some, like CNN’s Anderson Cooper, made comments about their class.

“They’re going to go back to the Olive Garden and to the Holiday Inn that they’re staying at, and the Garden Marriott, and they’re going to have some drinks, and they’re going to talk about the great day they had in Washington,” Cooper said.

The rioters were misguided by Trumpian politics and lies. But to suggest Trump supporters are inherently lower- or middle-class and to mock them for it, as Cooper did, only further alienates these classes from the mainstream media.

Cooper’s comment was outwardly classist; it paints a clear picture of the dichotomy between a rich journalist and his perception of what was funny about the largely middle-class Trump crowd. It draws attention to one of the greatest problems of modern news: the mass media is not representative of the masses.

Reporters and editors overwhelmingly fall into the category of coastal elites, forming a homogeneous bloc of journalists who supply the bulk of the country’s news.

This dangerously separates journalist from citizen and elite from working-class, thus presenting a view filtered by wealthy individuals and corporate conglomerates.

A 2018 study in the Journal of Expertise found that nearly 50 percent of journalists at the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal attended elite universities—and about 20 percent of those attended Ivy League schools. Only a handful of schools fed into the NYT and WSJ mastheads. Elite universities are historically accessible only for the White, upper-class majority, and an opportunity gap for lower-class and minority students plagues higher education.

Thus, the media becomes an assortment of conversations and analyses bound by a harmonization of ideologies, of class interests, of wealth.

It becomes a reflection of the rich, a source for the privileged. It matures into a compilation of ideas accessible only by those with similar educational privilege—making it impossible to read or consume for the rest of the country.

Elitism within journalism, particularly in national models, muddles the pursuit of

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objectivity; it creates a writer–reader dynamic that dissuades relatability. It places in question the integrity of journalism predicated on elevating voices, particularly marginalized ones.

Cosmopolitan newspapers—those that serve a national or broader audience—are a relatively modern convention. The initial shift to cosmopolitan models occurred in post-Civil War America, when technological advancements allowed information to circulate farther and faster. A greater shift came in the 1960s and 70s when larger national issues—like Watergate and the Pentagon Papers—needed to be examined on a broader scope that

Journalism should be practiced by objective methods, but passion in journalism is powerful and shouldn’t be dissuaded. A dispassionate journalist looks from the outside in and simply brushes the surface of facts rather than analyzing the core of the problem. Elitists especially fall victim to this problem, as they try to tackle the true problems of society but cannot quell their inherent elitist biases.

As media analyst Howard Ziff surmised, “The true state of every nation is the state of common life.” Modern media must shift to recognize that the cosmopolitan, elite classes are not the majority.

Reporters and editors overwhelmingly fall into the category of coastal elites, forming a homogeneous bloc of journalists who supply the bulk of the country’s news. reflected national interests, not just local ones.

Papers like the Washington Post and the New York Times seized the opportunity to present the news in a much wider scope.

But in recent years, top cosmopolitan papers have become elite-run-and-read. No longer can an aspiring journalist climb the ladder with a few good clips and a dream; young journalists must be educated by top universities with impossibly low acceptance rates, expensive tuition fees, and elitist mindsets. In some ways, I have succumbed to the mindset this very essay dissuades; I am pursuing a Northeastern education because I was taught that doing so is the most reliable path to industry success.

Walter Lippmann—a twentieth-century media icon who established modern journalism ethics—believed in journalistic objectivity centered around a “disinterested” pursuit of truth, one dictated not by passion but by secure fact-gathering and honesty.

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The journalism industry has championed the dispassionate cosmopolitan model since the 1970s and has struggled to cover topics such as race, finance, and politics.

In 2011, the Urban League of Greater Madison (ULGM) proposed opening a charter school for African American boys. The proposal reignited conversations on race in the Midwestern city and garnered a lot of media attention. But in the eyes of community activists, news organizations failed to properly cover the story, as their White journalists reported with “a passive sense of objectivity.” Reporters shouldn’t show up to neighborhoods when they need a story, community leaders said; they should build trust, attend community events, and cover community positives.

Modern journalists should not strive for a severe rendition of objectivity nor a form of opinionated journalism; instead, they should focus “on evidence, coherence with expertise and knowledge, and inclusion of diverse perspectives.” After all, objectivity that privileges elite sources is flawed.

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Journalism that encourages a focus on the elite, for the elite, by the elite is a failed model.

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The journalistic mishaps that occurred when handling the ULGM’s proposal inherently relate to class and race; the annual incomes of Black households are consistently

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lower than incomes of other races, and the topic at hand was the founding of a charter school. But other examples also point out the dangers of an elitist cosmopolitan model.

CNBC has published “money diaries'' that champion elitist ideals while patronizing the poor for an inability to budget (when of course, poorer people experience less financial elasticity). The “liberal bubble” of the mass media prevented it from diving deeper into the political views of noncoastal states prior to the 2016 election, including those of the White working class. This oversight prompted a severe miscalculation of electoral trends and perhaps even led to a Trump victory.

Journalism that encourages a focus on the elite, for the elite, by the elite is a failed model.

In The View from Somewhere: Undoing the Myth of Journalistic Objectivity, transgender journalist Lewis Raven Wallace describes his time at WBEZ as a Pritzker Journalism Fellow, a program created to diversify the station. The program invited two community-focused fellows to learn about and practice journalism, simultaneously better connecting the station to its listeners.

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In recent years, media conglomerates have tried to improve their diversity numbers. The New York Times has released yearly diversity and inclusion reports that quantify its attempts to create a more diverse newsroom. In 2018, the Washington Post revealed initiatives to “build a stronger culture of diversity and equity” in the company. In neither of these—which reflect other papers’ and stations’ diversity attempts— is class mentioned. They instead focus on race and gender which, while incredibly important, also indicate the class gap in journalism.

Race, gender, and class are the three pillars of intersectionality—what makes diversity truly diverse. But fewer studies focus on class than on gender and race.

Modern education is almost entirely driven by class. Affluent high schools have largely turned into college prep schools, bound by SAT tutors and supportive parents galore. Take the 2019 college admissions scandal, in which upper-class parents paid their kids’ way into elite schools. The debacle revealed unwritten rules and games of college admissions played only by the 1 percent and elite universities.

It may be argued that class does not dominate gender and race but integrates with them to form an identity. And I would agree—the three are nearly equal. But because we are made so aware of our gender and racial identities through modern education, and because access to higher education is determined by class, class variance is indeed the most important function of diversity.

Yet, ironically, class is the least valued sector of identity when it comes to diversity goals.

While newsrooms are paying more attention to race and gender diversity goals—hiring more people of color, women, and nonbinary journalists—the class gap has only widened. Since the rise of cosmopolitan journalism, the industry has only gotten more elite.

It seems newsrooms are favoring Lippmann’s dispassionate, knowledgeable, prestigiously educated journalist. And of course, intelligence and knowledge of public affairs are valuable. But these characteristics are becoming less accessible to all classes when modern education so blatantly favors those in the upper class.

To start closing the class gap, media companies must first acknowledge its existence within their walls.

Is it so radical to suggest a media community that reflects the class diversity of the public it serves?

While the project was great in theory—as it aimed to resurrect the community–news relationship public radio stations once championed—it fell short in practice. Wallace was instructed to steer clear of stories that were connected to his previous activist work on transgender issues and White privilege.

Already, WBEZ was attempting to sever Wallace’s identity from his work.

After finishing his fellowship, Wallace worked in public radio for Marketplace, covering marginalized communities and their economic issues. As a part of his personal interest in this work, Wallace published a Medium opinion piece about the downfalls of objectivity in modern journalism. To Marketplace, Wallace’s article contradicted their organizational values of objectivity and neutrality, even though these “values” aren’t mentioned in their ethics code. Nevertheless, Marketplace fired Wallace, and its vice president deemed his coverage “advocacy journalism.”

These examples are not explicitly about class, but they inherently tie into the classism of modern cosmopolitan journalism, which fails to achieve the diversity goals it supposedly champions.

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True objectivity cannot exist unless journalists and their audiences lay on an equal playing field where journalist may be reader and reader may be journalist. The historical norm and recent escalation of elitism within journalism are dangerous to democracy and further divides the public.

Boston Globe editor Lylah Alphonse explained that “there’s still this assumption that all readers are homogeneous . . . that our readers are all affluent and White.” But they’re not, and modern newsrooms need to reflect that to better serve and understand the public. Media, according to Alphonse, must “get to know the people who are not just part of your coverage, but who are consuming your coverage” to create truly diverse newsrooms.

If cosmopolitan papers are stringent about objectivity and local papers are focused on community, as Ziff suggests, is it so idealistic to combine these ideals and connect to communities in a factual, empathetic way? Is it so radical to suggest a media community that reflects the class diversity of the public it serves?

Modern media can be a precarious place.

Distrust and fake news are on the rise. In order to reconnect the media with the public, cosmopolitan papers need to look at diversity as a function of class. They need to employ more working-class journalists, those without college degrees from elite universities, and those from rural ZIP codes.

The press is supposed to be the fourth estate of democracy—the “final check” in our system of checks and balances. The media should constantly question and analyze the motives and influences of our government from all angles, not just from an elite perspective.

Modern papers have a great opportunity to truly connect with communities, and they must seize it. They should move toward a model of journalism that peels back layers of objectivity and focuses on building community while sharing a variety of news—not just news for the upper class.

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etflix’s adaptation of the novel Hillbilly Elegy garnered criticism from critics for allegedly portraying rural Americans negatively and glorifying author J. D. Vance’s escape from poverty. The controversy began before the film’s release, as critics’ overwhelmingly negative reviews contrasted with audiences’ positive responses.

Hillbilly Elegy follows Vance as he overcomes cycles of poverty in rural Ohio to attend Yale Law School. In describing his family’s intergenerational trauma, Vance successfully analyzes the plights of rural, White, working-class Americans.

The movie begins with Vance in law school, attending interviews for summer associate jobs. While Vance dines with his top-choice firm, his sister Lindsay calls him to reveal that their mother Bev relapsed in her opiate addiction. The film follows Vance through his interviews and his return home to help his mother. Numerous flashbacks depict how his family ended up in Ohio from Kentucky, from his grandmother Mamaw getting pregnant at thirteen to his mother’s abusive acts to the beginning of her addiction to Vance joining the Marines to escape poverty.

Hillbilly Elegy shows that people must make better choices to overcome poverty, namely

generational poverty. But it also acknowledges that people need positive support systems to help them overcome vicious cycles. That’s why Bev and Vance’s stories turn out differently despite their similar origins.

Bev was the salutatorian of her high school and put herself through nursing school as a single mother, but she still could not pull herself out of poverty because she had no one to support her. She slips further into her addiction and struggles to raise her children.

She turns to men for support, hoping to find someone who can give her family a better life.

Vance could have become like Bev; he was hanging out with the wrong crowd, drinking, and getting into legal trouble—all because he had no one to guide him. His behavior changes only when Mamaw intervenes, as she takes custody of him and forces him to change. Vance would not have the work ethic that got him accepted to Yale Law—or college or the Marines—without Mamaw’s guidance and sacrifices. Mamaw prioritizes Vance’s education over her

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own needs, even purchasing him an $85 calculator instead of her necessary medication.

Vance’s story shows that having some kind of support system—regardless of circumstance— is critical to overcoming systemic poverty.

Despite the movie’s seemingly irrefutable message and the book’s glowing initial reception, critics rejected the film and its themes.

Notable reviews called Hillbilly Elegy “one of the worst movies of the year” and “not the fun kind of bad,” accusing the film of seeing its characters as selective evidence that poverty is the fault of the poor.

Hillbilly Elegy humanizes low-income rural Americans, which is critical to achieving a civil, culturally unified America. The critics’ dismissive response mirrors the US’ ignorance toward poverty in Middle America.

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The Atlantic’s David Simms accused Vance and the film of mischaracterizing Appalachia.

He believed Hillbilly Elegy “overcompensates for its straightforward storyline by ladling on the histrionics, such as . . . Bev’s harrowing behavior (at one point, she threatens to drive her truck into oncoming traffic with J. D. in the car).” Despite these storylines coming directly from the book and Vance’s life, Simms believes that these “histrionics” are exaggerated and have no broader purpose, leading me to wonder whether we watched the same film.

Vulture’s Alison Willmore is more explicit about her distaste for the movie’s message.

Despite recognizing that “the screen version of Hillbilly Elegy is . . . not bent on making a case for how poverty is the fault of the poor,” she also believes the movie is “not about anything else either.” She perceives the characters as “selective evidence shoring up an argument that’s too distasteful for [the film] to make.”

However, the movie clearly credits poverty to generational issues. Near the one-hour mark, Bev refuses treatment as she watches her son charge thousands of dollars on credit cards to pay for two weeks of her rehab. Vance yells at his mother outside the center, criticizing her selfishness and lack of willpower, even asking her if she is “just too lazy to try.”

If the scene stopped here, the critics might have a point, but it does not. Lindsay also responds to Vance’s criticisms: “Don’t be stupid . . . Mom and Aunt Lori, they had it worse than us. It was a war in that house.”

The film shifts to a flashback depicting Bev’s trauma—namely her father’s alcoholism and her mother, Mamaw, responding to numerous beatings at his hands by setting him on fire.

These scenes show that Bev didn’t have a support system, especially from her mother. And this realization

contextualizes Bev’s addiction just as Vance does in the book—not excusing it, but explaining it.

In an interview about the movie’s negative reception, Vance expanded on the film’s conclusion: “People have to be able to hold two thoughts in their head at the same time. You can believe that people have very tough circumstances and that we as a society have a responsibility to give opportunity and hope to people no matter the circumstances they came from and then, on the other hand, that people have some responsibility and some personal agency despite rough personal circumstances, right?”

While the film implies that people must make better choices to overcome poverty— namely working hard, following the law, and choosing a better path—it does not blame poor people for being poor. Yet, critics seemed to misrepresent the film willfully to appeal to their preconceived narrative.

Take Sarah Jones at Vulture, who stated that she “did not expect to like this movie.” When Jones described the scene at the rehabilitation center, she interpreted the movie’s depiction of Bev as “the culprit, a recalcitrant good-for-nothing who let her health insurance lapse and can’t muster a little gratitude when her suit-jacketed son tries to put her stay on his credit cards.”

However, Bev changes her mind about treatment after watching her son struggling to pay the expensive fees, even firmly stating that she’s “not a charity case.” Bev didn’t want to take anything else from her son because she felt that she had already taken enough. At best, Jones misrepresented the scene because she forgot what happened; at worst, she was too busy trying to confirm her own biases.

Either way, her review failed to understand and examine the film’s tenets—a disservice to those looking for a critical take.

Other critics blamed the film for oversimplifying Vance’s Appalachian upbringing and for intertwining immorality and poverty.

Having read the book and watched the movie, I will attest that the movie simplifies its source material, as all film adaptations do.

But I disagree with the critics who claimed that Hillbilly Elegy fails to feature complex ideas. The movie and the book have the

same overarching thesis: sometimes, you have to leave behind the people you love for self-preservation.

At the end of the movie, Vance chooses to leave his mother in a motel room after she almost relapses—even though he seriously considers staying when she asks him to—in order to get to an interview with his topchoice law firm the next morning. He helps his mother in every way he can but does not risk his future. It is a powerful and controversial conclusion that many critics overlooked in constructing their narrative.

Hillbilly Elegy does not vilify poverty, as many critics claimed. It places some responsibility on the individual but acknowledges the generational challenges that make assuming this responsibility difficult. Vance is not the hero of the story, and Bev is not the villain.

Vance’s future successes aren’t presented as a consequence of his superiority, exceptional talent, or work ethic. They are a product of his Mamaw’s intervention and his support system—all things Bev never had.

Critics did not hate Hillbilly Elegy because it blames the poor for being poor or oversimplifies Appalachia. They hated it because of their preconceived notion of Vance’s right-leaning political beliefs, which are not discussed in the movie. Jones even criticized Vance’s politics explicitly in her Vulture review, portraying him as connected to the alt-right when he is a moderate conservative.

Furthermore, a scene toward the end explicitly addresses systemic barriers. The story flashes back to when Mamaw took custody of Vance. We see her requesting extra food from Meals on Wheels and struggling financially to support her grandson. These scenes showed how necessary Mamaw’s sacrifices were for Vance’s success.

“There are ways in which I sort of fit comfortably in the conservative coalition and ways in which I don’t,” Vance said of the criticism of his politics. “But I’m very clearly on the American right, so I think [it’s] a little bit of ‘we’re giving this conservative too much air time, so let’s change that.’”

The critics assigned beliefs to the movie that weren't present, ignoring the heartfelt, impactful, and effective storytelling to criticize an irrelevant notion of poverty they incorrectly associate with the right.

Hillbilly Elegy did not vilify the poor, but the critics certainly vilified Vance and his discussion of the plights of Middle America. Another Vulture critic deemed the book and film “unnecessary; nobody needed to ‘suddenly’ understand the Appalachian region or its problems, because Appalachian studies is a real field of scholarship. You can get degrees in it!”

To understand how ridiculous this was, imagine if the critic said this about a film focused on African Americans or LGBTQ+ people. By that logic, films like Get Out, Moonlight, and Call Me By Your Name aren’t necessary because we have African American and queer studies. Just because you can study a topic does not mean that laymen understand it.

There is value in creating an artistic depiction of other cultures, allowing audiences to forge emotional connections and sympathize with those portrayed.

Hillbilly Elegy humanizes low-income rural Americans, which is critical to achieving a civil, culturally unified America. The critics’ dismissive response mirrors the US’ ignorance toward poverty in Middle America.

Rural America has declined for decades as urban population centers have grown, largely because of cheapening rural resources and labor.

Rural Americans, including the Vance family, have suffered from outsourcing, automation, and technological progress. Between 2001 and 2018, the US–China trade deficit effectively eliminated more than 3.7 million jobs, 75 percent of which were in manufacturing.

Shrinking industry continues to hit historically major manufacturing hubs in Ohio and Pennsylvania. In 2019, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan each lost more than four thousand factory positions. Globalization is critical to economic development, but there are overlooked consequences to progress. We can’t artificially reinstate these industries;

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we must—as Vance explained—help rural . . . an agenda?” I think so, and George does too, answering that “The campaign against Americans transition into more lucrative and the film—made by the standard-issue libsustainable careers. eral filmmaker Ron Howard, by the way—is Liberal policies are disconnected from purely political.”

Middle America, exacerbating inequality between rural and urban voters. For example, Even when critics discussed the film’s acting, their ideological bias reared its ugly head. The Atlantic’s Simms characterized Mamaw’s portrayal as “steely goofiness—dressed in a fright wig and baggy sweatshirts, she bustles around every scene cursing and yelling tough-love homilies at the camera lens.” He accused the actor of misrepresenting Mamaw and Appalachia, but the portrayal aligns with how she actually behaved.

Hillbilly Elegy did not deserve this backlash. While the film credits individual choice in the poverty student loan forgiveness would require conversation, it does not ignore generational the working class to subsidize college issues. Having a success story doesn’t mean debt. Climate action policy—primarily there were no challenges, and it doesn’t rules established by the Environmental imply that there are no government-sponProtection Agency—hurts rural sored solutions to those challenges. industries, notably agriculture, coal,

The only thing these critics proved and manufacturing. Abolishing the is their inability to analyze films that do Electoral College would make rural not confirm their biases. Through this voters feel even more disenfranchised, failure to fairly review art, critics deter only exacerbating the culture war. film studios from taking chances on Despite supporting policies like these, unconventional stories, leading to some Democrats have the audacity to say fewer films tackling controversial rural voters are voting against their interests. social issues. And this gatekeeping And now critics have the audacity to only stifles conversation, further condemn Hillbilly Elegy for “misrepresenting” Appalachia, “blaming” poor people for limiting our understanding of being poor, and “intertwining” immorality one another. and poverty. They disliked the movie because they disagreed with Vance, and they willfully misrepresented the film to align it to their preconceived perspective.

While responding to a negative review, Princeton professor Robert P. George wondered if such critics “might have . . . I dunno

Through this failure to fairly review art, critics deter film studios from taking chances on unconventional stories, leading to fewer films tackling controversial social issues.

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e have to look past the circling buzzards.

After Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died in September, many observers lamented the Republican leadership’s rank hypocrisy in immediately filling her seat despite stonewalling Merrick Garland four years earlier.

But the critical problem wasn’t the GOP’s disregard for the rule they’d concocted. It was their normalized use of ridiculous rules of engagement.

Amy Coney Barrett was nominated by a president who lost the popular vote by almost three million votes, then confirmed by a Senate majority representing 13.5 million fewer people than the minority. Barrett, Neil Gorsuch, and Brett Kavanaugh, all installed under these circumstances, are empowered to interpret the Constitution for life.

These appointments happened because the mechanisms that translate our votes into representation do not work.

And it’s not just the presidency and the Senate. From who votes to how they’re grouped to how ballots are tallied, the mechanisms are broken. Some snapped under the pressure of demographic shifts, others were dismantled recently and intentionally.

The point is not necessarily that these flaws benefit Republicans, although they do.

It’s that in order to translate the public’s will into policy, democratic institutions must represent the public. Ours don’t. And as far as national policy goes, none of us will be fairly represented until all of us are.

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special status, or some other solution. Only through full voting rights can they pressure the rest of the country to stop treating them as second-class citizens.

Residents of states have full voting rights on paper, but not always in practice. For instance, every state except Maine and Vermont strips the voting rights of felons. Seventeen states restrict voting for felons in prison, twenty require them to clear parole or probation, and the rest strip the right temporarily or indefinitely even after a person clears both.

These laws disenfranchise roughly five million Americans, nearly half of whom reside in states that penalize people after they

Voter fraud is a pretense to require the sort of ID that poor, old, and non-White voters find it tougher to obtain. These laws seem race-neutral, but the outcomes are not, and Republican legislators know that.

In 2016, a few months before racially biased voting laws boosted Trump and GOP candidates nationally, a federal court invalidated a North Carolina law for targeting Black voters “with almost surgical precision.”

But the Supreme Court has not been so kind. For decades, the Voting Rights Act compelled jurisdictions with histories of voting discrimination to pass federal scrutiny when they changed their voting laws. The Court gutted this mechanism in 2013, contending that preclearance had worked in halting voter suppression and was thus outdated. Doing so, as Justice Ginsburg pointed out, was “like throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you aren’t getting wet.”

By rejecting reasonable proactive restrictions and leaving citizens to sue after the unjust elections happen, the Court ushered in a wave of discriminatory voter ID laws.

States scrapped laws that made registration and voting easier. An estimated two million people lost their voting status.

And all of this is to say nothing of strategic voter roll purges, the moving of voting sites, and the limiting of voting times, which make it harder for people, especially people of color, to cast ballots. Especially in the South, commonplace and racist voter suppression perpetuates generational disenfranchisement, a reminder that American democracy has always been defined just as much by who it has excluded as who it has included.

Nor is it the only state-level policy that dilutes certain voters. Lawmakers gerrymander districts, drawing boundaries to spread their supporters, pack their opponents, and reap the resulting advantages. They’re choosing their voters, and thus deciding elections, years in advance. It’s democracy in reverse.

Commonplace and racist voter suppression perpetuates generational disenfranchisement, a reminder that American democracy has always been defined just as much by who it has excluded as who it has included.

To ensure proper democratic representation, people must choose their representatives.

It’s axiomatic, and yet we can’t get it right.

Washington, DC, residents can’t vote for the congresspeople who control their budget. US citizens in Puerto Rico, Guam, the Northern Mariana Islands, and the US Virgin Islands also lack voting representation in Congress, and cannot vote for a president empowered to send them to war.

Some Supreme Court justices defended these undemocratic precedents because the “alien races” were not ready for AngloSaxon democracy.

The federal government ought to honor each jurisdiction’s preferred path to equal representation, be it statehood, amended

complete their sentence. Black people, who are disproportionately victimized by mass incarceration, have lost the right to vote at nearly four times the rate of non-Black people.

Felon disenfranchisement is easy to accommodate because the felons are tucked out of sight, first physically, then socially.

That doesn’t make it logical, ethical, or acceptable, nor does it scrub the reality that disenfranchisement deliberately deprives Black people of influence. An inalienable, meaningful right to vote is one that cannot be lost, even after a conviction.

Not that it’s the only way politicians manipulate whose vote counts. For decades, Republican officials have deployed voter fraud as a smokescreen for all kinds of voter suppression, and President Trump epitomized this. For one, they want to require voters to present a photo ID. It’s a solution without a problem. Voter ID laws supposedly combat voter impersonation fraud—a person pretending to be someone else to vote unlawfully. Unsurprisingly, this is rarer than being struck by lightning; after all, who would risk prison time to cast a few extra votes? Even the conservative Heritage Foundation, which falsely claims voter fraud is a serious problem, can list no more than thirteen impersonation cases over the last four decades, a minuscule fraction of ballots cast.

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Both parties do it, but Republicans stand out in their scope and shamelessness. A coordinated redistricting effort after the 2010 census handed the GOP a massive advantage in numerous House races, one they are poised to refine after the 2020 census. One glance at some of these districts and the goofiness is obvious.

Redistricting ought to be carried out by independent citizen commissions which, while imperfect, are infinitely better than brazenly partisan politicians warping maps to protect their power.

You’d think a system built on voter consent would require that candidates win a majority to be elected.

No dice. Most US jurisdictions use firstpast-the-post voting, under which candidates need only a plurality. A candidate can win even if a majority of the public detests them and would gladly rally around someone else.

Some voters forgo their top choice in favor of a palatable candidate they think can win.

Under ranked-choice voting, voters rank candidates in order of preference. If one candidate wins a majority of first-place votes, they win the election. If not, the last-place candidate is eliminated and their voters are reassigned to their second choice. This continues until one candidate wins a majority.

Ranked-choice voting is the best salve for swelling partisan polarization. Voters could pick third-party and independent candidates without wasting their votes. Democrats and Republicans would be incentivized to appeal more positively to more voters instead of attacking each other, and the intra-party ideological diversity and moderation we’ve lost in recent decades could return.

But more importantly, rankedchoice voting ensures that the candidate with the most support wins. It gives the best possible

representation to the greatest number of people. It bestows a mandate to govern.

One person cannot perfectly represent thousands of constituents. And rankedchoice voting has its flaws, namely that it won’t reassign everyone’s vote because the process ends once a candidate wins a majority.

But it is vastly better than firstpast-the -post at translating voter preference into elected representation.

Congress and the states can and should make it universal.

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with “but some states will have more power.”

It also wrongly assumes that populous, diverse states would be ideological monoliths.

A national popular vote would force candidates to appeal to voters nationwide, as national candidates abroad do. As-is, American presidential campaigns focus on

Democracy poses many hard questions. Whether the country’s leader should be the most popular choice is not one of them.

On November 7, as news outlets called Pennsylvania and the election for Joe Biden, it was hard to ignore Biden’s seven-million-vote margin that, were it the deciding factor, would have spared the country some suspense.

The president of the United States wields unimaginable power and influence, yet we elect them with an archaic system that has virtually no modern analogue. It’s an undemocratic inheritance from founders who feared universal public engagement in civics.

By tying each state’s votes to the number of congresspeople it wields, the Electoral College grants disproportionate influence to smaller states at the expense of larger ones. Wyoming voters, for instance, command more than three times the influence of voters in each of the twenty-one most populous states.

Besides the blatant unfairness of valuing votes unequally and allowing popular vote losers to be president—which has happened twice in twenty years and is likely to happen more often—the College also creates safe and swing states. In safe states, voters supporting the favored party assume their vote isn’t needed, and voters opposing the favored party assume a loss is certain. Demolishing the College equalizes votes and would likely skyrocket the country’s abysmal turnout.

The solution is a national popular vote.

And no, this wouldn’t allow California and New York to decide. That misconception is so far removed from common sense that the objective truth of “everyone’s vote is equal and states don’t play a role” is somehow answered

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the same eight or so swing states and ignore everyone else. And yes, this includes largely rural states, which are overlooked because they aren’t swing states.

Though the College can be abolished via constitutional amendment, a more feasible solution is the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, wherein ratifying states commit to casting their electoral votes for the winner of the national popular vote. The compact takes effect once states holding a majority of electoral votes ratify, at which point the College is retained but rendered irrelevant.

Fifteen states and Washington, DC, which total 196 electoral votes, have passed it. Though the path to 270 would require a few states to cede their outsized influence, the compact would take effect if it were ratified by the nine states where it has passed one or both houses of the legislature. It’s tough but doable.

The Constitution allows state legislatures to select electors as they see fit. The tricky part comes in its prohibition of compacts between states, but court decisions have clarified that

If a legislature represents cows better than it represents people, it’s time to redesign it.

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this applies to compacts that boost state power at the expense of the federal government or other states. This compact does neither; it is state legislation changing state laws to make every state equally irrelevant to the process. It leaves all voters on equal footing.

Democracy poses many hard questions.

Whether the country’s leader should be the most popular choice is not one of them.

If a legislature represents cows better than it represents people, it’s time to redesign it.

Such is the case for the Senate, where Wyoming voters wield sixty-seven times the influence of their California counterparts.

A majority of the country’s population is represented by just eighteen senators.

While a few other nations feature disproportionately selected legislatures, none are as skewed as ours.

The Founders adopted the two-senators-per-state rule at a time when the country was just the East Coast, and when its population was one-eightieth of what it is now. Today, the Senate favors smaller, predominantly White states so much that it has normalized minority rule.

These problems are exacerbated by the filibuster, an accidental rule responsible for a Dr. Seuss reading on the Senate floor. By allowing senators to speak indefinitely and stall votes, the filibuster ensures that legislation cannot pass without a sixty-vote supermajority to end debate.

It turns smaller states’ outsized control of the chamber into a chokehold. Though some contend it protects debate and the rights of political minorities, it actually allows them to obstruct the majority. There’s a reason the principles it represents have been all but abandoned in European democracies.

In recent decades, Senate productivity has plummeted as filibuster use has skyrocketed. Substantive gun violence, health care, and climate change reforms, among others, were either filibustered outright or

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dropped because a filibuster would have killed them. While abolishing the mechanism is necessary to break the deadlock, the body needs a bigger remedy.

Congress could divide large states to level out representation. A federal law would give populous states—those with X times more people than the least populous state—consent to divide as long as the state and its residents agreed to it. While it would be tough to avoid gerrymandering—citizen commissions could help—and solve logistical and administrative challenges, it is a promising and constitutional solution.

There is also the nuclear option: abolishing the Senate by constitutional amendment.

government. It’s one party holding the country ransom despite lacking popular support.

No solution is perfect. But with minority rule in the Senate growing ever worse, the status quo is unacceptable.

Democracy relies on peaceful revolution.

At set intervals, we overthrow the government at the ballot box and replace it with one we like better.

Maintaining a vast, populous, diverse democracy is hard enough when everyone is represented fairly. When they aren’t, you risk a less civil regime change.

Every citizen should be allowed to vote, no matter where they live, what ID they have, or what mistakes they’ve made. Everyone should be able to rank candidates to best express their preferences. And everyone’s vote and representation should be weighed equally regardless of where they reside.

These are basic principles, yet we’ve been getting them wrong for more than two centuries. Some were implemented through misguided design, others were shoehorned in later. But either way, we need to address them. We don’t get to complain about political polarization, toxicity, and stagnation without recognizing that it’s a mechanical problem. We have these battles because our rules of engagement take us there. And they’re getting worse.

American democracy probably doesn’t represent you properly. But with a few small tweaks and some large ones, it can.

We don’t get to complain about political polarization, toxicity, and stagnation without recognizing that it’s a mechanical problem.

We have these battles because our rules of engagement take us there.

Senate-specific functions would be given to the House, with the same majorities required to confirm nominees, impeach officials, ratify treaties, and the like.

Though amendments cannot deprive states of equal Senate representation, abolition would be constitutional. Every state is equally represented in a body that does not exist.

Per one estimate, 70 percent of Americans will live in just fifteen states by 2050. Thirty percent of the public would control 70 percent of the Senate. This imbalance does not ensure “everyone’s voice is heard.” It doesn’t “preserve states’ rights.” It isn’t federalism as it’s meant to be. It’s just unrepresentative

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hat race should I be today?”

This is what YouTuber, model, and makeup mogul Nikita Dragun “jokingly” asked her Twitter followers in response to her history of racial insensitivity. She has repeatedly tried to appear Black—one day her skin is pale, the next it’s dark. She has also worn box braids, twists, cornrows, and durags to sell this facade. As a result, Black people have accused her of blackfishing and appropriating Black culture.

Blackfishing is when a person alters their appearance through tanning, makeup, hairstyling, or cosmetic surgery to portray themselves as Black. It’s a form of cultural appropriation, as users steal from Black culture to achieve “Blackness.” In a 1945 essay, Professor Arthur E. Christy coined cultural appropriation as “the unacknowledged or inappropriate adoption of the customs,

practices, ideas, etc. of one people or society other races get tan. Later, she admitted that by members of another and typically more her complexion was not natural but insisted that she does get darker when under the sun. dominant people or society.”

This sort of cultural appropriation gets Of course people tan. That’s not the probconfused with cultural exchange—cultures lem, and Dragun knows that. The problem is sharing their ideas, traditions, or knowledge. that she spray tans and contours her face to There is nothing wrong with exchange; in appear Black. Worst of all, she promotes her fact, it’s something to celebrate, as it unites merch and makeup lines shortly after each people and combats insensitivity. However, controversy. appropriation is not exchange, nor does it Dragun’s “joke” reveals a blatant disreincrease understanding. As actress Amandla gard for the Black people she hurts, and her Stenberg explains, “appropriation occurs “joke” showcases her willingness to mock when a style leads to racist generalizations or them. Still, she acts innocent, even playing stereotypes where it originated, but is deemed the victim to avoid scrutiny. as high-fashion, cool, or funny when the privi- Dragun claimed that people have used her tan to invalidate her mixed Asian and leged take it for themselves.”

Somehow, Dragun feigns ignorance and Hispanic heritage. She explained that people acts as though she is not purposefully appro- would mock her skin tone and comment priating Black culture. When a Twitter user “she’s Hispanic today” on pictures. She added accused her of blackfishing, she replied that that she does not have to pick a side. But

people aren’t criticizing her for failing to pick a side or for appropriating Hispanic culture; they’re criticizing her for stealing Black style.

Dragun knows what blackfishing and cultural appropriation are. She acknowledged the double standard between Black and non-Black people when it comes to wearing Black hairstyles. In most states, schools and employers can ban natural hairstyles, which protect and maintain Black hair. In 2010, a Black woman named Chastity Jones had a job offer rescinded because she refused to cut her dreadlocks. Multiple federal courts declined to remedy the injustice.

In 2018, a Black girl was sent home from Christ the King Elementary School in Terrytown, Louisiana for wearing a braided hairstyle with extensions. The school cited its “natural hair” policy, which targets Black styles. A year later, Boston’s Mystic Valley Regional Charter School gave two girls detention, removed them from their sports teams, and barred them from attending prom—all for wearing box braids. The school claimed that allowing the “expensive” hairstyle would differentiate students based on socioeconomic status.

Box braids aren’t a status symbol, and their cost fluctuates. The braids can cost between $50 and $200 in Greater Boston and last up to three months; that price is within the same range as other hairstyles, including the perms and relaxers the girls previously used. Some people can also braid their own hair or ask relatives to do it. Even the extensions can be cheap—as low as three dollars per pack. The school just used its policy to discriminate against Black students and control their hair.

While Black people face discrimination for their hair, Dragun can flaunt hers without hardship. Even though she’s not White, Dragun knows she’s more privileged than Black women. She’s claimed that her appropriation was appreciation—that she was trying to uplift and celebrate Black women. Instead, she paraded her privilege by taking advantage of Black culture and exhibiting blackface in its expanded modern form.

Blackface—“when people darken their skin with shoe polish, greasepaint or burnt cork and paint on enlarged lips and other exaggerated features”—originated in New York City during the 1830s. White performers would don woolly wigs and depict Black people as lazy, superstitious, and hypersexual.

Thomas Rice popularized it in 1928 through his character “Jim Crow.” As his show

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grew popular, more performers depicted his character. Through minstrel shows—theatrical performances portraying racial stereotypes—White actors mocked, demeaned, and dehumanized Black people.

Soon, Black people were wearing blackface and portraying harmful stereotypes in the same shows; Bert Williams was so successful that he became the highest-paid African American star in the world.

Hollywood eagerly capitalized on blackface’s popularity. The Birth of a Nation—a 1915 Ku Klux Klan propaganda film—featured mostly White actors depicting Black men as sexual predators and simpletons. In 1936, Fred Astaire painted his entire body black for Swing Time; the director, studio, and distributors took no issue with it. Judy Garland donned blackface for Babes in Arms the same year she shot The Wizard of Oz. Although blackface was growing less prevalent by then, filmmakers continued incorporating it. Some, like Dixie’s creators, argued that it preserved historical accuracy, but Dixie falsely claimed that minstrel shows emerged accidentally, revealing its true intention to whitewash blackface’s history.

Even as blackface faded from the silver screen, it never really disappeared,

By appropriating “Blackness,” celebrities and creators flaunt their privilege and deprive Black people of opportunities.

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and remained common in comedy. The 1986 film Soul Man centered around a Harvard freshman darkening his skin to qualify for a scholarship. In the late 1990s, Jimmy Kimmel wore blackface and spoke in a blaccent—an imitation of African American Vernacular English—to “poke fun” at NBA player Karl Malone. He also used the n-word repeatedly when mimicking Snoop Dogg. In 2013, Kimmel said that he prefers to portray Black people in his sketches.

Saturday Night Live has also played on blackface and Black stereotypes for laughs.

In 1984, Billy Crystal used blackface to play singer Sammy Davis Jr., and in 2000 Jimmy Fallon used it to portray comedian Chris Rock. A year later, Darrell Hammond donned it to impersonate Jesse Jackson. Fred Armisen—who is part Venezuelan, Korean, and German—darkened his skin to portray President Obama multiple times.

The show also used Black actors to portray minstrel stereotypes. Eddie Murphy’s beloved impersonation of Buckwheat—a

Black actor from the child troupe “The Little Rascals”—involves him mocking and exaggerating the actor’s accent. He makes this the butt of all his jokes.

Hollywood stereotyped Billie “Buckwheat” Thomas throughout his career; as a child, he was cast in films with horrible racial messaging. To see a Black man portray Buckwheat and further exaggerate these racist stereotypes is disgusting and heartbreaking.

Thomas’s co-star in “The Little Rascals,” George McFarland, hated the impression since it came “at the expense of the people in his family.” Murphy’s portrayal is Black blackface.

Yet when Murphy hosted SNL and revived the character in 2019, he was generally praised.

Buzzfeed’s Terry Carter Jr. included the impression when explaining why Murphy is “the GOAT.” Murphy even won his first Emmy for the episode. At best, the impression didn’t disqualify him; at worst, it’s part of why he won.

Last year, SNL had Leslie Jones portray Meghan Markle’s fictional third cousin— Shantay Thomas from the “Compton Thomases”—in the sketch “Etiquette Lessons.”

As a condition to see Markle’s newborn, Thomas must take etiquette classes. When the instructor meets Thomas, she quips that “this will be an experiment,” indicating that Thomas does not belong at the christening.

Each time Thomas errs, the instructor mocks or assaults her. Besides stereotyping Thomas as uncultured, ill-mannered, and loud, the sketch proved extremely insensitive given the pervasive violence Black women face.

As people unearth more cases of blackface, only some perpetrators face backlash.

Kimmel garnered more controversy than Armisen because he mocked Malone, while Armisen presented Obama as stoic and intelligent. Armisen’s mixed race and his less severe makeup also helped him evade scrutiny. It appears that some actors get a pass so long as their intention is not to demean Black people.

In a similar vein, those who appropriate Black culture do not always intend to demean Black people. When the average person appropriates Black culture, they’re following the trends that have normalized it. Celebrities, influencers, and fashion designers set these trends, blurring the lines between Black and American culture. Black people push to hold influential

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people accountable because they’re erasing Black culture.

These celebrities do not get to claim good intentions. Their actions harm the Black community—something Black people clarify every time the issue emerges. Nikita Dragun may say she’s not trying to offend Black people, but she uses outrage to promote her products. Likewise, Bhad Bhabie, the Kardashian–Jenners, and countless other celebrities do not get to act innocent while

followers thought she was Black or mixed.

Then an old, lighter-skinned photo surfaced. Her hair was straight, contrasting the usually curly or braided locks. She had also thickened her lips since then, further replicating stereotypical Black features. Black people accused her of blackfishing, arguing she did so to gain sponsorships and brand deals.

The first Twitter user to criticize Hallberg noted that “Black features sell but not on black people.” Hallberg used “Blackness” to advance her modeling career at the expense of Black models.

It’s frustrating and insulting to see White women rewarded for stealing a beauty culture that’s often disrespected and deemed inferior to European standards.

Sponsorships and brand deals should not go to people who pretend to be Black. Yet Hallberg still receives work from companies looking to hire darker models. Pretty Little Thing and Fashion Nova sponsor her posts and cast her for modeling gigs, capitalizing off her blackfishing.

Fashion Nova in particular has used blackfishing models to market their products.

YouTuber and makeup mogul Jackie Aina cut ties with Fashion Nova, noting that it markets to Black women without representing different skin tones on its social media. In particular, the company would hire racially ambiguous or lighter-skinned models as diversity tokens.

This, coupled with their blackfishing models, reveals the company’s disregard for Black women. Companies that hire blackfishers are encouraging this behavior and emphasizing just how unwanted Black models are.

Cultural appropriation is robbery disguised as personal freedom. When non-Black people appropriate Black features and culture, Black people pay the price. We must watch as our culture is ripped from us. We must watch it get repackaged as American culture without any mention of its origins. We must watch as our opportunities go to appropriators. And we must watch silently because if we make a sound, our cries are deemed an infringement on their expression.

Beyond spreading this hurtful message, appropriation makes it harder for Black people to gain recognition for their culture. As philosopher Charles Taylor explains, “identity is partly shaped by recognition or its absence.”

People suffer when their society illustrates a demeaning picture of them.

Appropriation can also confine a culture to stereotypes, affecting how outsiders view the community and causing marginalized people to view themselves as these stereotypes. committing cultural appropriation; they purposefully fuel Black outrage for profit.

By appropriating “Blackness,” celebrities and creators flaunt their privilege and deprive Black people of opportunities. In 2017, makeup mogul Jeffree Star—whose past (and present) is riddled with racism— didn’t hire a Black model to promote his collection; he just made Dragun darker to achieve “representation.”

When influencers blackfish, they take space from Black people. Professor Alisha Gaines explains that these influencers “put themselves out there [as Black] and have all of these followers thinking they’re someone that they’re not.” They then curate entertainment through this “Blackness,” competing with those who are Black.

Furthermore, these influencers get sponsorships for being “Black.” Emma Hallberg, a Swedish Instagram influencer, built a brand off her glow—the highlight that reflects off

Darkening one’s skin for entertainment has always been disparaging. Problem is, it’s not just paint anymore. her deep complexion. She amassed a huge following because of her pretty makeup, trendy clothes, and stylish hair. Many of her

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Nonrecognition causes invisibility, where stereotypes to drive character arcs. At best, the marginalized community cannot relay these characters are stale; at worst, they’re what’s happening to it. When a community inaccurate and offensive. is invisible, outsiders misunderstand its cul- Blackface is most harmful in its purest, ture, making it easier for them to steal it and original form, but that does not excuse its pass it off as theirs. Appropriation can also other iterations. Yet celebrities always give confine a culture to stereotypes, affecting flimsy justifications for harming our commuhow outsiders view the community and caus- nity. First it was “historical accuracy,” then it ing marginalized people to view themselves became an “imitation tool.” Now it’s “flattery,” “appreciation,” or “representation.” as these stereotypes.

Darkening one’s skin for entertainment I am not flattered when Nikita has always been disparaging. Problem is, it’s Dragun or anyone else darkens their skin to look like me. I do not apprenot just paint anymore. ciate it when they take our culture without considering the harm that it causes. And I am not represented Blackface has always found new forms when someone creates and portrays a stereotyped version of me. when the old ones become taboo.

The shift from mimicking features to mim- It’s not the end of the world icking skin tone supposedly aided imitation. when one non-Black person wears Yet Kimmel and Fallon did not have to portray dreadlocks or darkens their skin. But it Malone and Rock—they chose to do it and saw reminds me of the rights I do not have—my no problem using blackface for comedy. SNL right to wear my hair however I please and my and its network, NBC, did not object either. right to exist as a Black person in this country.

It’s tiring how many celebrities have used When White people repeatedly appropriate my culture, they normalize these practices. imitation to excuse mockery.

It’s also tiring when White actors voice They swipe opportunities and prevent us stereotyped Black characters. They’re mock- from profiting off the culture we’ve built. ing Black people through animated Black I am tired of giving celebrities and creators the benefit of the doubt. I am tired of bodies. That’s blackface.

Take Cleveland Brown from Family Guy. hearing apologies unsupported by action. I Until recently, he was portrayed by White actor am tired of people telling me that I am too Mike Henry and was a token for the show to sensitive or that I should not be offended. make racist jokes. In one episode, Cleveland’s It’s condescending when people try to wife didn’t want him hanging out with Peter, explain what is happening to me when I am the White main character. Nevertheless, Peter the one experiencing it. meets with Cleveland behind her back, dressing as a cop to hide his identity. To maintain his cover, Peter assaults Cleveland with a baton. When mutual friend and actual policeman Joe arrives, he tells Peter to “save some for me” and joins him in brutalizing Cleveland.

Henry’s spin-off The Cleveland Show proved equally racist. As Professor John McWhorter explains, the show is “basically Family Guy in blackface.” The show’s creators didn’t even try to make Cleveland or his family distinguishable from other characters.

Their race was the only thing that set them apart and made them worth watching.

Henry countered that “no one of color has had a problem with it”—a bold, uncorroborated assertion. Even more so, it’s not up to people of color to determine whether Cleveland is offensive. It’s up to Black people, and I say it’s offensive.

Henry added that most of the actors were African American. But it does not matter that the cast is Black when most of the writers aren’t. When writers' rooms lack Black voices, they’re more likely to rely on Black

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When someone appropriates Black culture, Black people should be left to steer the conversation and state what needs to change. So the next time a celebrity does these things— because there will be a next time—Black voices must be centered and celebrated.

Instead of buying products from people and companies that appropriate Black culture, support Black-owned businesses. Donate to

The dual cures of cultural awareness and sensitivity can only be used once the blackface comes off.

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organizations dedicated to increasing Black representation. Vote for candidates who will progress and protect civil rights. Be actively anti-racist and condemn all forms of blackface.

The appropriation of Black culture fuels racism against Black people, just as the appropriation of Native American, Latin American, Islamic, and Asian cultures fuels bigotry against those communities. The dual cures of cultural awareness and sensitivity can only be used once the blackface comes off.

And it’s only by amplifying Black voices that non-Black people will grasp just how wide the blackface spectrum is.

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he national pastime needs national control.

Major League Baseball operates as a monopoly, enables stubborn and avaricious owners, and allows teams to take advantage of their host cities.

While the NBA and NHL implemented a centralized “bubble” as a COVID-19 safety measure in 2020, MLB allowed teams to play in their home communities. As a result, players and staff contracted and transmitted the virus among teammates and the public, often without punishment for careless conduct.

The organization has repeatedly condoned cheating, responding only to government intervention. When a steroid epidemic came to light in the early 2000s, MLB brass cracked down only when pressured by President Bush and Congress.

MLB’s then-commissioner Bud Selig knew about this rampant drug abuse problem for more than a decade yet failed to act even as steroid use increased among high school athletes. Many young baseball players lost their lives to these illegal substances; some even cited their favorite stars as a catalyst for their drug use.

To rectify MLB’s economic exploitation of cities and communities, indifference to public health, and cavalier attitude toward detrimental behavior, the league must be stringently regulated and its teams placed under public control.

Cities often front the cost of new stadium construction without reaping significant economic benefits.

Twenty-seven of MLB’s twenty-nine American stadiums received a taxpayer subsidy to finance their construction. The two exceptions—Boston’s Fenway Park and Chicago’s Wrigley Field—were erected decades before such public funding became commonplace.

Public funding most often comes via municipal bonds issued by a team's host city, which are exempt from federal taxes. This practice has led to staggering losses for the US treasury— nearly $1.6 billion since 2000.

Besides these direct subsidies, cities often agree to fund additional infrastructure improvements in areas surrounding new stadiums. While these undertakings undoubtedly facilitate economic growth and benefit communities at large, they also enrich bloated teams that do not contribute their requisite share.

In 2005, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced plans for new Mets and Yankees ballparks with a firm promise of no taxpayer subsidies. His word proved insincere, as the projects received hundreds of millions of dollars in subsidies and benefits that are not granted to most businesses. As development advanced and stadium price tags swelled, the city pumped unsightly sums into unanticipated project components at the behest of team ownership.

In the late 1990s, San Diego voters signed off on constructing a new downtown ballpark for the Padres with a pledge from the city that the deal would pay for itself. Two decades later, San Diego continues to pour millions from its

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To rectify MLB’s economic exploitation of cities and communities, indifference to public health, and cavalier attitude toward detrimental behavior, the league must be stringently regulated and its teams placed under public control.

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tourism tax fund into the stadium’s operations and maintenance, siphoning money that could be allocated to public entities.

More recently, Miami covered nearly three-quarters of the cost of the $650 million Marlins Park through high-interest-rate

bonds that will eventually cost the city nearly $2 billion. The New York Times described it as one of “the more lopsided deals in professional sports,” though not uncharacteristic of stadium financing agreements. Miami has reaped few benefits from the ballpark, as the Marlins continually see record-low attendance. Faltering fan turnout compounded by a lack of business development near the stadium has left residents disheartened. Despite acquisitive and exploitative decision-making, owner Jeffrey Loria sold the team in 2017 for nearly eight times what he paid for it.

Cities often also cover peripheral infrastructure expenses to facilitate transportation to games. Take the Oakland A’s, whose stadium is accessible via a public transit system that costs billions to maintain. Or look to New York City, where the Metropolitan Transit Authority spent tens of millions to renovate train stations adjacent to the Mets’ Citi Field. The MTA asked Citigroup to buy the naming rights to the station, hoping that private investment could recoup some of the cost. Citigroup refused.

Team executives claim that new infrastructure helps to develop downtrodden communities and enable job growth.

But there are serious questions as to whether the cities’ gains are enough to offset the teams’ appropriation of public resources.

Stadium construction is not the engine of employment that proponents claim it to be. One researcher found that jobs decrease precipitously after stadiums are built. Scholars contend that claims of massive job growth are hyperbolic. Economists concur that stadium subsidies are unviable and ineffective, with 86 percent of those surveyed advocating for their elimination.

Another study noted that many high estimates of job creation are predicated on a “multiplier effect” in which theoretical economic growth spurs spending, jobs, and

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investment—meaning many venue proposals lack tangible short-term models. This multiplier effect often does not materialize; sports economist Michael Leeds asserted that if Chicago lost the Bears, Cubs, White Sox, Bulls, and Blackhawks, the economic fallout would be minuscule, adding that “a baseball team has about the same impact on a community as a midsize department store.”

Further research backs the notion that professional sports provide no significant boost to a city’s economy. In fact, they often have a negative impact, as most benefits are accrued by owners and players, not the municipalities whose taxpayers support and finance the teams.

Especially as COVID-19 disrupts cities’ ability to repay their stadium debts, it is critical to seek solutions to such economic inequities.

Proven, rational steps can be taken at the federal and local levels to increase fairness and flexibility in funding stadium construction.

of the city’s esteem for “hard work and family.”

St. Louis is consistently ranked as one of the country’s top “baseball cities,” with players and team officials extolling the uniquely unabashed support of Cardinals fans.

If cities are going to lend financial support and cultural significance to MLB, then they are entitled to a cut of teams’ economic successes. This is not a novel proposition; cities had previously sought revenue from concessions and advertising in return for public funding. However, in 1986, Congress prohibited municipalities from using stadium revenues to pay off the debt from tax-free bonds. While the provision was designed to prevent cities from assuming a disproportionate amount of a stadium’s cost, it engendered the opposite effect. Now, local governments front most of the costs while owners rake in revenue.

There are several alternative models for public ownership, the most prominent being the Green Bay Packers of the NFL. A nonprofit corporation owns the Packers and issues shares to hundreds of thousands of stockholders. While the stock itself hardly compares to a typical investment—it pays no dividends, does not benefit from earnings, is not tradeable, and has no protection under securities law—the holdings confer some control to fans and create intangible public value.

Packers’ shareholders hold voting rights and select a board of directors to manage the front office. Nominally, this allows for some jurisdiction over management, though fans do not play an active role in trades or freeagent signings. Nonetheless, the Packers have won more games than all but one NFL team.

What’s more beneficial is the leverage shareholders have over the team’s position in the community. The Packers’ structure has enabled the team to remain in Green Bay—by far the smallest major-league market in the country— for over a century. When the franchise was at risk of financial collapse in 1950, it issued shares

If cities are going to lend financial support and cultural significance to MLB, then they are entitled to a cut of teams’ economic successes.

Proposals to end the tax-exempt status of stadium bonds gained traction under the Obama and Trump administrations but were ultimately unsuccessful. While team owners should be compelled to bear the brunt of venue funding, additional remedies are necessary to impart greater economic value to fans and communities.

Beyond economic support, baseball teams are incomparably integrated into the collective cultural consciousness of many locales. The Cincinnati Reds have been cited as an emblem

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of stock to residents, the revenue from which allowed the team to remain in the area. It was later written into the Packers’ bylaws that if the team were dissolved or sold, its assets would be distributed to local organizations. The team’s board of directors operates a charitable foundation that donates millions each year to Wisconsin charities and community programs.

Stadium construction and renovation are financed by a shareholder-backed reserve fund, not municipal bond sales or tax breaks that deprive governments of revenue. While the shares are more like fan club passes than they are investment securities, there are some good ideas at play with the public ownership model.

The Institute for Local Self-Reliance, a nonprofit that combats monopolistic economic power, looks to the Packers as a prime example of protection against covetous owners. Fans are more disposed to support teams that are “permanent, rooted civic assets.”

A greater number of stakeholders means greater odds of success in a smaller market.

Some minor league baseball teams have employed a similar structure. Take the Wisconsin Timber Rattlers, who allow members to vote on a board of directors, among other perks. The team’s governing organization is self-sustaining and not-for-profit, with all revenues going toward operations and stadium expenditures.

The Timber Rattlers’ model has proven prosperous, as they have been featured on the list of highest-earning minor league teams eighteen times in the last twenty-five years. The Syracuse Chiefs—before they were purchased by the Mets in 2017—also had thousands of shareholders, as do the Auburn Doubledays.

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A public ownership model for MLB teams would enable increased fan influence on franchises and create greater loyalty to cities by

A public ownership model for MLB teams would enable increased fan influence on franchises and create greater loyalty to cities by preventing rapacious owners from exploiting them. preventing rapacious owners from exploiting them. And baseball is particularly apt for the public ownership model.

MLB games are televised predominantly to smaller, localized markets. This contrasts with the NFL and NBA, which routinely attract millions of viewers to nationally aired games. Even MLB’s marquee matchups, like the playoffs and the AllStar Game, have considerably smaller national audiences relative to the league’s competitors.

That’s not to say people don’t watch baseball; it’s just an exceptionally local sport. MLB’s strong, local fan bases attend games at a rate that outpaces the NFL and NBA, and local MLB broadcasts are among the highest-performing airings in their respective regions.

The public ownership model would be particularly effective in a sport where fans are concentrated in certain regions. Experts and scholars have proposed community ownership as a safeguard against team contraction and relocation, as fans have more cause to commit to cities than do private owners.

Public stakeholders would develop systems of ownership with transparent management driven by a dedication to the sport. As it stands, MLB owners “work hard to keep their books closed to the public,” which often results in efforts to stymie investment in their teams.

Take Philadelphia Phillies owner John Middleton, who claimed last year that a staggering $2 billion in losses would prohibit the team from signing major free agents. But the Phillies’ losses actually amounted to just $145 million.

The New York Yankees—despite their status as the most valuable team in baseball and propensity to spend big on players—have claimed “massive losses” and are operating on a budget.

The Tampa Bay Rays (who reached the 2020 World Series) and Chicago Cubs traded away their best pitchers to slash payroll.

Even though teams endured losses during the pandemic-shortened 2020 season, their financial hardship is not anywhere in the range of what owners and the league asserted.

FanGraphs investigated the finances of the Atlanta Braves—one of the few teams with accessible financial reports due to their publicly traded parent company. It found that the Braves’ television revenue compensated for a lack of fans at games; while their books were in the red for 2020, widespread declarations

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of devastating losses were inconsistent with verifiable financial information.

Owners’ proclivity to downplay their financial capabilities has materialized in a more systemic and persistent manner. When it appeared likely that COVID-19 would delay the season, team owners agreed to grant players full service time and prorated salaries for 2020 regardless of how many games they played. But as negotiations progressed, owners repeatedly advocated for players to take further pay cuts. Agent Scott Boras—who negotiated over one billion dollars in contracts in 2019—expressed his frustration that owners were unwilling to build off the foundation of prorated salaries that had already been codified. “You don’t privatize the gains and socialize the losses,” he said.

Beyond the benefits of community ownership in stadium construction and team expenses, public stakeholders without a profit incentive would be more inclined to protect players. And players have often advocated for their communities in the absence of—and sometimes in defiance of—owner-driven endeavors.

Mets first baseman Dominic Smith co-founded Baseball Generations, a nonprofit that works to uplift underserved Black kids through athletics. After the shooting of Jacob Blake in Kenosha, Wisconsin, Smith led a charge to boycott the Mets game in protest— despite team owner Jeff Wilpon’s diminished suggestion to walk off the field briefly and resume an hour later.

The Players Alliance, an advocacy group of Black MLB players, pledged that its members would donate a portion of their salaries to racial

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justice initiatives. Team owners, on the other hand, contribute large sums to Republicans who decry such initiatives. Four of the top ten political spenders among major sports owners are MLB owners; the chairmen of the San Francisco Giants, Atlanta Braves, and Arizona Diamondbacks have donated hundreds of thousands of dollars to Republican-affiliated political action committees.

cities like New York to great effect. Underserved groups such as felons, young people, and those with barriers to civic participation—particularly people of color—can benefit greatly from participatory budgeting. Allowing team earnings to be reinvested in community-led initiatives would similarly strengthen these groups, which are disproportionately displaced by stadium construction. Even holding elections for teams’ management and front offices could increase voter turnout.

Baseball is a powerful economic, cultural, and social institution that serves as a reflection and reminder of history and behavior. Take Jackie Robinson’s trailblazing majorleague debut—a critical moment in the Civil Rights Movement—or the formation of the MLB Players’ Association, which paved the way for collective bargaining and organized labor in every other major sport.

A transition to public ownership would reinforce values of collectivism and engender a shift in attitudes toward community institutions.

Rethinking the purpose of municipal mainstays is the first step in creating an economic system that benefits those who work to support it.

If cities could serve as governing bodies for teams, with residents and fans as stakeholders, game revenues could be allotted to a host of local undertakings.

Hardworking players contribute directly to a team’s success, so it's important to protect them and their interests, especially against owners who boost policymakers and power brokers whose actions and rhetoric hurt communities.

The US government is no stranger to public ownership and nationalization. Community ownership, or even full government control, would also engender civic participation. If cities could serve as governing bodies for teams, with residents and fans as stakeholders, game revenues could be allotted to a host of local undertakings.

Participatory budgeting—which allows communities to allocate funds to municipal projects of their choosing—is taking off in major

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R

obert Williams had just pulled into his Farmington Hills driveway after another long day’s work, relieved to spend time with his wife and two daughters.

Nothing seemed amiss.

But something was very wrong. A police car waiting down the street inched forward, trapping Williams against his own house. Two officers approached, cuffing him in front of his family as they cried out in bewilderment and distress. His wife’s pleas to learn where he was being taken went unanswered, though one of the officers snarkily replied, “Google it.”

Williams was driven to a nearby detention center, where law enforcement took his mugshot, fingerprints, and DNA. He was held overnight, interrogated by two detectives, and assigned a court date. But, once in court, prosecutors dropped the charges.

His arrest, they admitted, was based on “insufficient evidence.”

Later, state police revealed their “insufficient evidence” was the product of a facial recognition machine learning algorithm. It had analyzed grainy video footage from a robbed Detroit retail store and determined that Williams was the offender, even though Williams recalled he looked nothing like the robber.

Williams’s wrongful arrest may be the first of its kind, but it won’t be the last. One in four law enforcement agencies has unregulated access to facial recognition software, and more than half of Americans are in police facial recognition databases. It also isn’t surprising that Williams—a Black man—was the first case; according to the National Institute

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of Standards and Technology, a majority of facial recognition software is racially biased.

To be fair to the Michigan police who arrested Williams, it seems outlandish that machine learning could be racist.

Machine learning algorithms are just lines of computer code that minimize error between values in a dataset—called training data—to generate predictive models.

Adding the resulting SSEs allows the algorithm to generate a total SSE unique to each split. The split that produces the smallest total SSE is considered the best and is recorded for later.

Imagine using a machine learning model to analyze a dataset describing crime in North Carolina. If we fed the variable “population density” to a machine learning algorithm, it would split the data into different groups for every density value until it found the split that minimized the total SSE. But the dataset includes other variables, such as year, probability of arrest, and police officers per capita. Machine learning algorithms account for the different variables in training data by minimizing the total SSE for each one, then selecting the best split out of all the variables.

The algorithm repeatedly forms subsets and splits the data within each one until error reaches zero or a set endpoint. The best splits are organized into a model that can be fed new data to predict outcomes.

These complex calculations have no obvious racist influences; machine learning algorithms themselves can’t discriminate.

However, the data that programmers feed to algorithms can train them to.

Machine learning algorithms themselves can’t discriminate. However, the data that programmers feed to algorithms can train them to.

Error is calculated however the coder wants it to be, and the code runs until error reaches zero or the coder instructs it to stop.

For instance, one form of error used in machine learning algorithms is the difference between a value and an average value.

This allows programmers to quantify the error of entire datasets. For every value in a dataset, an error can be squared and summed with the other errors, producing a sum of squared errors (SSE).

Some machine learning algorithms minimize dataset error by forming smaller subsets and recalculating the SSE for each.

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Machine learning models have no ethical code. If predicting an outcome by race minimizes error and improves predictive accuracy, the algorithm will do it. The same is true when predicting by sex, religion, nose length, or any characteristic.

In practice, this means that demographically skewed datasets can train discriminatory algorithms. It doesn’t matter whether people use machine learning for facial recognition or medical diagnosis—biased training data creates biased models.

For instance, imagine a Bostonbased technology company, Boston SuperTech, using machine learning algorithms for hiring. They use a database of employees’ demographic information, ratings of their old résumés, and their time spent at the company to train a basic Categorization and Regression Tree (CART) model. Then they leverage the CART to predict which incoming job applicants are likely to spend at least ten years at the company.

None of this sounds unreasonable on its face. Maybe staying at the company appeals to some groups of people more than others, or maybe people with stronger résumés are more likely to climb the corporate ladder.

But if Boston SuperTech applied this algorithm in hiring, nearly every minority applicant would be turned away. The model racially discriminates by using ZIP code as a stand-in for race. ZIP codes 02124, 02125, and 02111 are the only majority-minority districts represented in Boston SuperTech’s employee database. The CART model would classify applicants from all of them as unlikely long-term hires.

Minorities have been underrepresented among computer science majors for over two decades, so most of Boston SuperTech’s previous long-term hires were White. When Boston SuperTech gave the CART algorithm their training

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data, the algorithm took advantage of Random forests predict outputs by aggrethe indirect association between race gating hundreds to thousands of individual and corporate loyalty to improve decision trees’ predictions to generate a “forest” of trees. But this makes it extremely predictive accuracy.

Just like in Robert Williams’s case, difficult to understand why a random forest machine learning translated neutral predicts the way it does. One random forest can generate thousands of decision trees, each with its own set of rules.

And random forest decision trees are generated differently than CARTs, making them orders of magnitude more complex.

To figure out if a random forest is discriminating the same way Boston SuperTech’s CART model did, a scientist would need to follow many rules and outputs for thousands of individual trees. It’s simply not feasible.

So scientists generate databases designed to test algorithm fairness, then run them through allegedly discriminatory models. If outputs differ intentions into blatantly unjust outcomes. from expected nondiscriminatory results, Seemingly reasonable corporate practices— then a model is probably discriminating. But like using machine learning to predict cor- creating a database and accessing a compaporate loyalty—can embed discrimination ny’s modeling software aren’t easy.

It has taken scientists months or years to in hiring. root out discriminatory hiring, ad delivery, and facial recognition models created by Amazon, Facebook, and Google, respectively. This difficulty is why scientists will In this hypothetical, Boston SuperTech probably never know just how many discould generate a visual output of their CART criminatory algorithms exist. model and discover that it uses ZIP code as a More than half of hiring managers and recruiters report that artificial intelligence—a proxy for race.

However, scientists can’t visualize most broad term used to describe machine learning machine learning models as easily. More concepts—is helpful in sourcing and screenadvanced modeling methods, like random ing job candidates. Yet the effort needed to forests, are more accurate than simple CART- uncover bias means that only a fraction of companies’ algorithms will be investigated. like models but are much less interpretable.

To demonstrate the ease with which machine learning can discriminate, I created my own facial recognition random forest model and tested it with images of White and Black faces.

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T H E DATA D I L E M M A PA R T T WO: A MINI E XPERIMENT To demonstrate the ease with which machine learning can discriminate, I created my own facial recognition random forest model and tested it with images of White and Black faces.

My model identifies faces by reading the spatial distribution of color across an image and comparing it to images I’ve told it are faces. If the color distributions of a new image are similar enough to one it already knows is a face, then it predicts that the new image is a face as well.

For the purposes of this experiment, I trained my model only on White faces.

Because White and Black faces have different color distributions, I hypothesized that my model would recognize new White faces more often than it would recognize new Black faces.

As expected, when I exposed my model to fifteen new White faces and fifteen new Black faces, it recognized 87 percent of the White faces, but only 33 percent of the Black faces. A

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However, any disparity in the racial makeup of training data could result in discrimination, even slight disparities that aren’t obvious to the human eye. If my model were more accurate, it would recognize faces according to smaller differences in skin tone. These more detailed predictions would be more difficult to test for discrimination; testing databases would need to include many more than thirty images and each image set would need to be categorized by more specific criteria.

Regardless, my experiment shows that if machine learning models are trained on the wrong dataset, their predictions will be biased, even if the code itself isn't.

Machine learning is extraordinarily useful. It can be applied in all manner of scientific research, from ecological surveys to biological protein modeling. Doing away with it entirely would be disastrous.

But in many social, political, and economic contexts, machine learning just isn’t the right tool. Its very nature is to decide outcomes according to broad group trends in whatever time period its training data is from.

For instance, if a machine learning model were created in 1970 to help colleges admit biology majors using data from the past five years, it would probably recommend they admit mostly men. If an identical model were created in 2008, it would probably recommend they admit mostly women. This is because

Outside of scientific research, machine learning should be applied sparingly.

chi-squared test confirmed that my model’s facial recognition depends on race (p=0.003).

Of course, in the real world, facial recognition models aren’t trained just on White faces.

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between 1965 and 1970, approximately 30 percent of biology majors were women, while between 2003 and 2008, about 60 percent were.

And blatant bigotry pervades many historical group trends. Facebook’s discriminatory ad delivery program learned to show “home for sale” ads to White users because minorities were less likely to engage with these types of ads, but this pattern of behavior can be traced back to slavery, redlining, and discriminatory lending. These practices stymied minority wealth accumulation, reducing their home-buying potential today.

Outside of scientific research, machine learning should be applied sparingly.

Corporations and government agencies must be required by law to prove that their algorithms do not discriminate, or else be forbidden from using them at all. And even when implemented, institutions should interpret model outputs in the context of other data before making decisions.

For now, people are better decision-makers than algorithms.

T

o say that The Taming of the Shrew is a less popular work of Shakespeare would be an understatement.

The play is commonly passed over for better-known tragedies like Hamlet and Othello, or even other comedies like Twelfth Night and A Midsummer Night’s Dream. If you read it in high school or have seen it performed, it was probably with many a disclaimer about its misogyny.

And for good reason. One need only look at the title. The shrew—a derogatory term for a woman perceived to be ill-tempered, argumentative, or outspoken—is Katherina Minola, the eldest daughter of a Paduan Lord.

Katherina is notoriously strong-willed and

uninterested in playing the part of a demure, passive woman. This alienates her from the men in Padua, who decry her father, Baptista, for raising a headstrong shrew. If they had their way, they’d have nothing to do with her.

Yet they must, for Baptista decrees that if Katherina is not married, none may have the hand of his younger daughter Bianca, the quiet, submissive picture of the cult of domesticity. She is courted by Hortensio and Gremio, as well as Lucentio, a university student.

Enter Petruchio, a friend of Hortensio’s from Verona who has come to Padua to seek a wife. “I come to wive it wealthily in Padua,” he says. “If wealthily, then happily in Padua.” Bianca’s suitors enlist Petruchio

to “tame” Katherina, leaving the others to vie for Bianca’s hand.

While the play’s title is sexist enough, it is Petruchio’s “taming” behavior—psychological manipulation, physical torture, and emotional abuse—that is truly egregious. In their first conversation, Petruchio decides he’ll undermine every word Katherina speaks.

“Say she be mute and will not speak a word; Then I'll commend her volubility.

And say she uttereth piercing eloquence; If she do bid me pack, I'll give her thanks.

As though she bid me stay by her a week; If she deny to wed, I'll crave the day When I shall ask the banns and when be married.”

The extent of Petruchio’s depravity can be seen later when he breaks Katherina’s spirit through physical torture. Petruchio flies into a rage at his chefs just to deprive her of food, PETRUCHIO: Good Lord, how bright and then ruffles the bed sheets and curses loudly to keep her from sleeping. goodly shines the moon!

KATHERINA: The moon! the sun: it is not Petruchio’s “taming” is textbook spousal abuse. He proclaims his actions are done moonlight now. “in reverend care of her,” a tactic domestic P: I say it is the moon that shines so bright. abusers often use to portray their behavior as K: I know it is the sun that shines so bright. benefiting the victim.

P: Now, by my mother's son, and that's myself, It shall be moon, or star, or what I list, Or ere I journey to your father's house.

Go on, and fetch our horses back again.

Evermore cross'd and cross'd; nothing but cross'd!

HORTENSIO: Say as he says, or we shall never go.

K: Forward, I pray, since we have come so far, And be it moon, or sun, or what you please.

An if you please to call it a rush-candle, Eventually, Petruchio wears Katherina Henceforth I vow it shall be so for me. down, getting her to accept him as her P: I say it is the moon. master. In the final scene, after Lucentio K: I know it is the moon. marries Bianca and Hortensio weds a P: Nay, then you lie: it is the blessed sun. wealthy widow, the three men wager on Petruchio is not satisfied until Katherina which of their wives will come first when gives in completely, assuring him that “what called. Much to everyone’s surprise, only you will have it named, even that it is; and so Katherina appears. She chides the other women and urges them to “place [their] it shall be so for Katherina.” hand below [their] husband’s feet,” for “Thy husband is thy lord, thy life, thy keeper, thy head, thy sovereign.” The speech completes Katherina’s about-face in just five acts.

So what’s the deal here? Why should we care about this play? We know it was misogynistic, but that was then and this is now, right?

The problem is that the play, for all its faults, is not simply a product of its time. It represents a patriarchal mindset that lingers today. Though women have made great strides toward equality, there is still much to be achieved, and cultural reactionaries threaten to roll back what gains have been made. An entire online ecosystem, the manosphere, has convinced a generation of young men that their culture has been undermined by feminism.

Among them is Jordan Peterson, a Canadian psychologist who has made a name for himself by railing against what Later, Petruchio resorts to full-on gaslighting, testing Katherina’s submissiveness by bending her perception of the world to his will.

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The play, for all its faults, is not simply a product of its time. It represents a patriarchal mindset that lingers today.

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he sees as the breakdown of the successful Western model and the patriarchal system that produced it. Peterson has shown disdain for modern feminism and questioned whether its aims are just. The #MeToo movement, in his words, reflects “a bigger problem in society, which is that the birth control pill has enabled women to compete with men on a fairly equal footing. But we still don’t know what the rules are that should govern the behavior, the interaction between men and women in places like the workplace.”

Peterson’s fears display a curious irony: he champions Western civilization but bemoans the sexual liberation that makes it unique. Likewise, patriarchy doesn’t exist but also isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

Peterson’s opposition to feminism has endeared him to young men, who Peterson was once bewildered to find constitute 91 percent of his YouTube audience. Peterson flaunts his psychological background to offer a vision for young men unmoored by political correctness and gender parity, which he derides as a “murderous equity doctrine.” His 2018 self-help book 12 Rules for Life explains his reactionary worldview: men need to get tough. “Men demand it, and women want it.” Violent men are bad, Peterson claims, but their violence is bolstered when men are not allowed to embrace their masculine impulses.

Peterson’s outlook stems from his beliefs on the inherently gendered nature of order and chaos: “consciousness is symbolically masculine and has been since the beginning of time.” Alternatively, “chaos—the unknown— is symbolically associated with the feminine.”

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Simply contextualizing The Taming of the Shrew as a product of another time will not deter today’s generations from its misguided teachings.

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In Peterson’s view, Petruchio is not a masculine oppressor worthy of scorn. Instead, he is someone we should emulate to bring back our lost culture. Peterson is Petruchio’s

intellectual successor and takes just as much issue with “shrews” (he calls them “harpies”).

The opposite would be Bianca’s suitor Lucentio, who woos Bianca by disguising himself as her tutor. One might infer that Lucentio would be the sort of man Peterson disapproves of; unwilling to embrace his masculine impulses to rein in Bianca, whose femininity forebodes the “Dragon of Chaos.” Peterson would see Bianca’s unwillingness to obey Lucentio’s request summons as karma for this failing. Fail to put one’s foot down, and women run amok.

Peterson firmly believes in the female desire for domineering men, even suggesting that “feminists avoid criticizing Islam because they unconsciously long for masculine dominance.” Indeed, Peterson’s words often parallel the final speech of the temperamentally lobotomized Katherina.

Quoth she to the other brides: “I am ashamed that women are so simple, To offer war where they should kneel for peace . . . Come, come, you froward and unable worms!” Quoth he: “It’s sane women who have to stand up to their crazy sisters and say ‘look, enough of that, enough man hating, enough pathology, enough bringing disgrace upon us as a gender.’”

Simply contextualizing The Taming of the Shrew as a product of another time will not deter today’s generations from its misguided teachings. For they are exactly its appeal to pro-patriarchy reactionaries, who find joy in what was once gone, yet may be again. Fans of Jordan Peterson would not see in Petruchio a man who should no longer exist; they’d see a reflection of their future, should they “toughen up.”

Peterson’s worldview resonates with those who feel lost and adrift between changing gender norms and lingering cultural conservatism. Instead of adapting to the former, Peterson, in effect, preaches they should emulate Petruchio and adopt the latter.

This attitude has dangerous ramifications not just for the young men being pushed toward a perverse vision of self-actualization, but for the women who bear the consequences. This past year—with people trapped in their homes due to COVID-19 lockdowns—saw a spike in domestic violence against women,

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even as calls to hotlines plummeted (with women unable to safely contact help).

The United Kingdom faced a national reckoning on gender-based violence after the kidnapping and killing of Sarah Everard

female characters were portrayed by young men. This suggests that there might be some irony in a man dressed as a woman extolling the virtues of patriarchy.

Other productions portray the relationship between Katherina and Petruchio more positively.

These do not cast Katherina as a woman whose will is suppressed; they show Petruchio offering Katherina a companion in a society that scorns her. Their first conversation, though tense, reveals something other characters miss: Katherina, for all her bluster, is quite witty. The dialogue between the two characters goes back and forth like a tennis match, the two trading puns and double entendres with ease.

The play provides some basis for the “two misfits” interpretation. Petruchio shows up to the wedding late, wearing ridiculous clothing, and offends the guests by acting as boisterously as possible. An attempt to quell any dissent from Katherina by outdoing her? Perhaps. But one could also make the case that Petruchio’s differences from the rest of society—after all, he is the only one willing to handle the misunderstood Katherina—make him the perfect partner for her. Such is the approach of the contemporary adaptation most people know, Ten Things I Hate About You. These interpretations may be a stretch. But reframing the play is more effective than discarding it—the failed approach of some cultural conservatives to literature they despise.

People like Jordan Peterson do not pop up overnight. Nor will his odious ideology disappear with him. If we are to create a new world of gender equality, we must look to our past for guidance.

The lessons we draw from the play, and the message we choose to send when it is performed, can be drastically changed. (for which a London police officer was charged) and the subsequent police brutalization of female attendees of a candlelit vigil. The outcry was a painful reminder of the unfulfilled aims of the 1977 “Reclaim the Night” protests, which demanded a change to the culture that made women feel unsafe at night. Our culture directly descends from that which played Petruchio’s torture of Katherina for a punchline.

Yet we should not abandon the play altogether, for the play is not the cause of this epidemic of angry young men. The lessons we draw from the play, and the message we choose to send when it is performed, can be drastically changed.

Some directors take advantage of the play’s often-cut-for-time framing device, wherein a drunken man wakes up and is told he is a king. Unbeknownst to him, he is the subject of a prank played by a wealthy lord, who orders his servants to deceive the drunkard. As part of their ploy, actors put on a show.

The play-within-a-play setup could imply that what we are seeing is meant to be satirical. Further supporting this interpretation is the fact that, in its original production, the

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