The College Hill Independent Vol. 34 Issue 5

THE

COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT A BROWN / RISD WEEKLY

MAR 10 2017

34

05

COVER

Untitled Utē Petit

NEWS 02

Week in WTF is Happening in the UK Sophie Kasakove, Lance Gloss, and Sam Samore

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Protecting Trans Health Jack Brook

METRO 03

Bite The Hand that Feeds Zack Kligler

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DMV as Panopti-con Jane Argodale

ARTS A BROWN / RISD WEEKLY VOLUME 34 / ISSUE 05 MAR 10 2017

11

CTRL + F CJ Park

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A Good Bad Feminist Brionne Frazier

FEATURES 13

SCIENCE

FROM THE EDITORS

Last Wednesday, National Grid shut off the gas in my house for almost a week. Every night that followed, the temperature in Providence fell into the single digits. I felt frostbitten and powerless.

Then I found out about the George Wiley Center, a Rhode Island advocacy group that has been organizing around utility justice for almost 40 years. Here are some things I learned about your rights as a utility consumer, from their website.

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1. The proposed shutoff will take place between 12:01 a.m. on November 1st and 11:59 p.m. on March 31st and you qualify under the Nat. Grid’s definition of “Financial Hardship” OR you or anyone you live with is seriously ill.

2. A child under the age of 2 is living with you.

3. You are not issued a written notice through the mail—or electronically, if you’ve agreed to it—no less than 10 days before they shut it off.

Stay toasty, friends.

ARTS Ryan Rosenberg Will Weatherly Saanya Jain

NEWS Piper French Hannah Maier-Katkin Roksana Borzouei

FEATURES Julia Tompkins Erin West Andrew Deck

WEEK IN REVIEW Sam Samore

METABOLICS Dominique Pariso Elias Bresnick

METRO Shane Potts Jane Argodale Camila Ruiz Segovia Jack Brook

SCIENCE Fatima Husain Liz Cory

Bad Lands Keven Griffen

OCCULT 05

Intolerant Lactose Signe Swanson

LITERARY 18

National Grid cannot legally shut off your gas or power if:

MANAGING EDITORS Will Tavlin Kelton Ellis Dolma Ombadykow

Choices, Choices Katrina Northrop

Copy & Paste Ryan Rosenberg

EPHEMERA 12

The Vibratory Theory Anna Bonesteel

X 17

Taxonomy of Randomness Liby Hays

- SG

TECH Jonah Max Malcolm Drenttel

X Liby Hays Nicole Cochary

OCCULT Lance Gloss Robin Manley

LIST Lisa Borst

INTERVIEWS Patrick McMenamin LITERARY Stefania Gomez Isabelle Doyle EPHEMERA Anna Bonesteel

Letters to the editor are always welcome. The Independent, a family-run publication, is published weekly during the fall and spring semesters and is printed by TCI Press in Seekonk, MA.

STAFF WRITERS Eve Zelickson Marianna McMurdock Signe Swanson Josh Kurtz Zack Kligler Brionne Frazier Chris Packs Kion You

ILLUSTRATIONS EDITOR Gabriel Matesanz

DESIGN EDITOR Chelsea Alexander

STAFF ILLUSTRATORS Frans van Hoek Teri Minogue Ivan Rios-Fetchko Maria Cano-Flavia Pia Mileaf-Patel Kela Johnson Julie Benbassat Dorothy Windham Anzia Anderson Isabelle Rea Claire Schlaikjer

DESIGN & LAYOUT Celeste Matsui Meryl Charleston Andrew Linder Ruby Stenhouse Mark Benz

COPY EDITOR Miles Taylor

WEB MANAGERS Charlie Windolf Alberta Devor BUSINESS MANAGER Lance Gloss

SOCIAL MEDIA Jane Argodale Signe Swanson SENIOR EDITORS Alec Mapes-Frances Sophie Kasakove Lisa Borst Jamie Packs MVP Zack Kligler THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT — 69 BROWN ST PO BOX 1930 PROVIDENCE, RI 02912

THEINDY.ORG / @THEINDY_TWEETS

WEEK IN

WTF IS HAPPENING IN THE UK? Sophie Kasakove, Lance Gloss, & Will Weatherly ILLUSTRATION BY Claire Schlaikjer DESIGN BY Alec Mapes-Frances BY

“The Pub is Closed, Long Live the Pub!” The walls of the nation-state are looking a bit knackered, but the walls of the pub have already collapsed.

Ever since the British have had hops, hot and smelly pubs have been a staple of the United Kingdom’s national culture. But in recent years, due to the rising price of alcohol, bans on indoor smoking, and the bloody EU, they’ve seen a steady decline.

According to the Guardian, there were only 52,750 UK pubs by the end of 2015, down from 69,000 in 1980. In 2009 pubs were closing at a catastrophic 45 a week. The rate of decline has since slowed to 21, but the decline continues all to pot.

Even Brexit can’t save the pubs. Much to the chagrin of Brexiteers, for whom the Brexit vote was a welcome promise to reclaim the real pre-post-imperial British culture from within the Indian-cuisine-coming-soon-sign-covered, boarded-up windows of England’s pubisphere, the British beerocracy has given bugger all aid to the public.

Pub advocates lost the plot this week in response to the release of the first post-Brexit budget, which includes raised taxes on small businesses. In response to attacks on the budget as a damp squib, Chancellor Philip Hammond explained that these measures are necessary for building a large enough reserve to cope with any potential post-Brexit turbulence.

The post-Brexit government’s ongoing assault on pubs have many pub-goers asking an important Q: what is British culture anyway?

In true Brexit fashion, many pub advocates have taken matters into their own hands. With over 185,000 members around the world, Campaign for Real Ale (Camra)—est. 1971—has been leading the pub-crawl.

Camra’s recent beer festivals have fermented into a bubbling political scene. A volunteer at Camra’s most recent festival said, in a video posted on YouTube, “It’s ruddy good fun. Really good beer. It’s really nice to meet people who like ruddy good beer.” Another said, “It’s fun to be at. There’s beer. You can drink beer. Lots of beer.”

In this heated publitical climate, many pubs have been doing some soul searching and reevaluating what it means to be a pub. Some have even gone so far as to abandon their usual flat, warm cask-ale for craft beer, and, when times get really desperate, for actually fizzy, cold beer, which the British have historically mocked as American piss. In an exclusive interview with the College Hill Independent, Filk, the owner of the popular Oxford pub, the Gardeners Arms, lamented, “We can no longer just be a boozer, every pub does food.” Many pubs have been forced to resort to using technology. Data from consumer analysts at The NPD Group shows the number of people ordering food from pubs online or through smartphone apps soared by 59 percent last year, with deliveries of pub classics like bangers, mash, and casual misogyny, now accounting for 4 percent of the UK’s takeaway market.

In a recent development, the Sun reported that singer James Blunt stepped in to buy the Fox & Pheasant pub in Chelsea under company name ‘James Blunt Pubs Ltd’ in order to save it from demolition, boasting to a friend that, ‘It’s going to be a pub full of aristocrats and even royalty,’ according to TimeOut London. It remains to be seen whether this two-for-one coup can save the prince and pint from their bad publicity.

Paint the town…

Cloudbusting

‘Twas yellow broke the mellow last week—the yolk-yellow of a Vauxhall Corsa automobile, belonging to Bibury, UK resident Peter Maddox. The kerfuffle in question peaked with the vandalization of the car the night of February 22. But our story begins back in 2015, when Mr. Maddox—age 84—bought the car.

Within weeks, a string of neighbors and visitors had taken to their Twitters to bash Mr. Maddox’s abominable auto, which had so disrupted the visual peace.

Bibury is, after all, an officially registered Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty—one of 350 conserved sites in Wales, England, and Northern Ireland. (Scotland’s Trust, naturally, maintains its independence).

You would say that Bibury deserves the designation, if you’re into the picturesque. The village goes for a classic ‘nature’ look. The type of place where you look around, half-expecting an elf to pop out.

Instead, they got a vroom-vroom lemon-drop with an ecoFLEX engine. Vocal among the dissenters was @ KookyCotswolds, who tweeted a photo series of the abomindation in context.. Amidst the rolling hills, stone cottages, and towering oaks, one can’t help but spot the parked lemon. Kooky’s caption: “Bibury’s elephant in the room. The picture postcard street photobombed by the ugly little yellow car—every day.”

Kooky seems to have missed the fact that elephants are almost never yellow.

The controversy then died down a bit, only to be resurrected a few weeks ago. In that sleepy corner of Gloucestershire, in the shadowy silence of a Sunday night, one or more vigilantes seized their chance to rectify Peter’s visual violation. Expert vandals they were, too. They smashed two windows, scratched each individual panel (to maximize repair costs), and etched the words “Move Freddie” into the bonnet (aka the hood, for our US readers). Who is Freddie? No one seems to know. Perhaps it’s what the neighbors have nicknamed the car.

Many of the townsfolk have expressed their sympathy in the aftermath of the attack. But these are the same townspeople whose autos range from forest green to forest brown. Local police Sergeant Garrett Gloyne seems to consider all of the residents suspects. In a statement, he reaffirmed that the car had been “a bone of contention” among the villagers, and he has set his team to conducting door-to-door interviews.

Mechanics have estimated £6,000 in damages to the car, for which Peter hopes to get a write-off. But Mr. Maddox and his corn-flour Corsa are determined not to take this lying down. Peter has promised to buy a lime-green vehicle if the repairs on this one prove costlier than the value of the car. A solidarity convoy of yellow vehicles is also scheduled to roll through Bibury on April 1, now dubbed Bright Yellow Day by Peter’s supporters. Peter himself will not be accepting the proceeds of fundraising associated with the event.

These will be directed to The Butterfly Garden, an education and therapy initiative for the disabled of Gloucestershire. To this end, Peter has set up a crowdfunding portal, where he has raised almost £800. Help Peter reach his goal of £2,500 at www.justgiving.com/ fundraising/brightyellowconvoy-butterfly.

Kate Bush—art-pop innovator, interpretive dance connoisseur, and the impersonation I whip out to make my mother feel weird about the time she went to art school in 1983—remains a time capsule for many reasons. Until the end of last year, she represented the best kind of ‘80s lady politics: progressive feminist reimagining of classic novels in songs like “Wuthering Heights” and, in “Running Up that Hill,” a parable of gender inequality in which, instead of settling for finding as much power as the men in her life, she literally asks to trade places with God. 1983 Art School raved about Britain’s latest popular symbol of female empowerment, just as much as I did when I was 15 and unearthed three LPs of The Dreaming in basement boxes.

It seems like the world’s been doing a lot of digging around musty ‘80s relics lately, and the truth is that most of them should have been left to foster particularly funky mold. The UK’s current faux-populist, pro-Brexit Prime Minister, Theresa May, seems like she found former uber-conservative PM Margaret Thatcher next to a stash of (obviously unopened) copies of The Queen is Dead. While current comparisons between Thatcher and May in British papers have rested on little other than their status as successful female politicians (and stern, stiff-lipped dispositions), there is a sadly valid tradition of austerity politics that is much stronger than their shared steely gaze.

This made it particularly strange that Bush, a once-trendsetter for a world Thatcher wasn’t even remotely aware of, strongly endorsed May at the end of last year. “I think it’s the best thing that’s happened to us in a long time,” Bush commented to the Canadian magazine Macleans. “[May is] a very intelligent woman but I don’t see much to fear. I will say it is great to have a woman in charge of the country.” It was a comment that necessitated as much unpacking as Bush’s flailing, leotard-centric choreography. It’s hard to argue with the “great[ness]” of female representation in high politics. But the idea that this means “nothing to fear” for the refugees threatened by her strict border policies is a harder sell than 50 Words for Snow, by far Bush’s most boring album, which is actually about snow. Maybe I’m being reductive, but it’s not as reduced as Bush’s career at this point.

It’s hard to watch the woman who asked to be God give her support to such an unmerciful power.

The mark of true progressivity—from 2017, and not dug up from our parent’s basements—might be to do some (cloud)busting of past idols, thanking our heroes for the work that they have done without relying on them to carve the path for further progress. But if I return to the lyrics of “Wuthering Heights”—a person locked out in the cold, asking for Heathcliff’s mercy to be allowed to come home—I might still hear a valid parable for the stakes of May’s violence, even if the woman who authored those words has chosen to stop hearing them. As she sang out on the moors: “How could you leave me / when I needed to possess you? / I hated you, I loved you, too.”

—WW

—LG

—SK A: Sandwiches and genteel racism

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

NEWS

02

BEYOND DAKOTA ACCESS FANG Collective brings the anti-pipeline fight home to Rhode Island

BY Zack

Kligler

ILLUSTRATION AND DESIGN BY

Jamie Packs

At 10AM last Thursday, three people affiliated with the FANG Collective, an activist group dedicated to environmental justice, locked themselves to the doors of the Citizens Bank global headquarters in Downtown Providence. Using bike locks attached around their necks and door stoppers to block entry to the building, Eleanor Meshnick, Mayo Saji, and Trina Powers sat silently holding signs that read No Bayou Bridge, No Mariner East, and No DAPL. The lockdown targeted Citizens Bank to protest the corporation’s $72.5 million line of credit to Sunoco Logistics, a main backer of the Dakota Access pipeline and other pipeline projects. Half an hour later, Powers, the only one of the three who was not physically locked to the building’s doors, was arrested. As several police officers walked her away from the building, she held her No DAPL sign in her teeth. By 11AM, an hour after the lockdown began, both Saji and Meshnick had also been arrested.

All three protesters were arrested on misdemeanors and released the same day with a filing (meaning their records will be clean after one year). As the protestors emphasized to the Independent, this legal stipulation is a privilege not afforded to those carrying out similar actions against the Bayou Bridge pipeline in Louisiana, Mariner East pipeline in Pennsylvania, and Dakota Access pipeline in North Dakota. “Those activists are working so much harder every day and have to plan so much more last minute than we did,” said Saji. “It was more important that we were trying to support people on the front lines doing it every day.” Meshnick emphasized this disparity, “Currently people in North Dakota are getting felonies for the same crime, and some of them are spending years in prison for it.” As the lockdown was executed, FANG spread word of the protest on social media, asking people who had money in Citizens Bank to close their accounts. By midday, a Facebook Live video of the lockdown had already garnered thousands of views. As of a week after the protest, the video had garnered over 1,000 shares and 41,000 views. +++ Formed in 2014 as a coalition of groups fighting hydraulic fracturing (fracking) across the Northeast and Midatlantic, the FANG collective quickly gained a prominent role in local and regional environmental justice activism.

While the FANG was originally an acronym for Fighting Against Natural Gas, the collective changed its name to simply FANG last year to reflect the broader scope of their activism. Since 2014, FANG has lead several local campaigns in Rhode Island. The group has recently been working with the Mashapaug Narragansett tribe to lead the #NoLNGinPVD campaign, a push to prevent National Grid from constructing a natural gas liquefaction facility on the South Side of Providence. As a result of FANG’s actions, including a sit-in at National Grid’s headquarters in Waltham, Massachusetts, construction

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METRO

on the plant has already been delayed months from its intended start date.

FANG is also working to prevent the construction of a fracked-gas pipeline and a new power plant in Burrillville, Rhode Island. While protests have failed to prevent the pipeline’s construction, the fight against the power plant is ongoing. Since late 2015, over 30 cities and towns across the state have passed resolutions opposing the Burrillville plant. While these resolutions are largely meant to pressure Governor Raimondo to block construction, others are fighting the Burrillville plant in the courts. The Conservation Law Foundation filed a lawsuit last week opposing the power plant on behalf of Burrillville residents. The fate of the lawsuit and the plant as a whole remains unknown.

For the past several months, the FANG Collective has been working with indigenous activists and others on the “Shame on Citizens” protest campaign, which is meant to financially target Citizens Bank for its funding of Sunoco Logistics. FANG’s direct action on March 2 was just the most recent push of the Shame on Citizens campaign. On February 8, activists at the Red Warrior camp, one of the camps resisting the Dakota Access Pipeline at Standing Rock, called for a national day of #NoDAPL action in response to the Army Corps of Engineers’ granting of the final easement for the pipeline.

Responding to the call, FANG held a demonstration of over 100 people outside of the Citizens Bank headquarters to protest the bank’s financial involvement in the pipeline. Randy Noka, a Narragansett Tribal Councilman, delivered a speech to protesters, indicting Citizens Bank, saying “corporate greed can’t come at the expense of the environment, and certainly can’t come at the expense of aboriginal people.” Noka continued, “as a native person, a Narragansett, we know all too well some of the travesties that have been done to our ancestors; we’re talking more than that now, we’re talking about the environment, our rights being trampled on.”

Julie Richards, an indigenous activist with the Mothers Against Meth Alliance—a group fighting meth addiction on the Pine Ridge reservation in South Dakota—attended the demonstration Downtown. Richards was enthused by the energy she saw: “It was really awesome, I was really happy for the turnout there… [I] thought it was really important.” At the demonstration Richards, alongside FANG member Nick Katkevich, attempted to enter the Citizens Bank headquarters to discuss their grievances with company executives. But police officers blocked Richards and Katkevich from entry. A week later, representatives from FANG were allowed to enter the bank’s headquarters to deliver a letter expressing their grievances to company executives.

When representatives from Citizens Bank remained silent, organizers felt the need to escalate to direct action.

“We really tried to have conversations with them and we’re still open to having a conversation,” Katkevich told the Independent, “but these issues are such an immediate

MARCH 10, 2017

thing that we needed to escalate and we needed to take action.”

FANG had carried out similar lockdown actions in the past, including one at TD bank in October to protest a loan the bank made to finance the Dakota Access Pipeline. Other members of FANG had traveled to Standing Rock to protest on the front lines. Much of the urgency of last week’s action “came from the Trump administration pushing forward all of these new pipeline projects,” Saji, a first year Brown student, told the Independent. The action last Thursday also served to direct some of the attention garnered by #NoDAPL to publicize other anti-pipeline fights being fought by indigenous people and other front line communities.

Katkevich described FANG’s work to expand awareness for additional fracking operations as “bringing the other pipelines into the narrative.” In particular FANG has been working with those fighting Louisiana and Pennsylvania to work and do trainings on the ground, and collaborating with local leaders to execute solidarity actions like last week’s. Several leaders of these frontline fights also released statements of support for last Thursday’s action outside Citizens Bank. Krystal Two Bull, an Oglala Lakota and Northern Cheyenne activist and the founder of the Red Warrior camp at Standing Rock, echoed Katkevich’s sentiment. “We still stand.

We continue to fight. From the start, we have said this fight is larger than Standing Rock.”

Cherri Foytland, who works with Bold Louisiana, a group leading the fight against the Bayou Bridge Pipeline, also asserted that the fight against pipeline finance and construction will not end at Standing Rock. “If Energy Transfer Partners and Sunoco Logistics thought that Standing Rock was something, wait till they come to the Bayou,” wrote Foytland in her statement. “We will fight their Bayou Bridge oil pipeline at every level. It’s time for institutions like Citizens Bank to wake up and cut their financing to these dangerous pipeline projects.”

FANG has been working closely with Foytland, and several FANG members have flown to New Orleans to organize the Bayou Bridge resistance and train activists locally in nonviolent direct action tactics. Katkevich also explained FANG’s ties to the Mariner East fight, “we’ve got some personal friends who were there at the beginning when things formed 3 years ago. They’re fighting Mariner East out there and FANG is helping, with our limited capacity, to support them in that fight.”

Meshnick told the Independent that fighting pipelines both on the ground and through their financial ties is key to FANG’s mission, “It was important for [FANG] to get a wider scope, and hone in on the people who are perpetuating this violence rather than the violence itself.” Katkevich also emphasized the importance of waging battles against fossil-fuel infrastructure on both of these fronts. Public officials have begun taking up financial fight against pipelines alongside FANG. Providence City Councilman Seth Yurdin, a long time

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

proponent of fossil-fuel divestment, has introduced a bill to the city council that would divest all city financial holdings from Citizens Bank, Bank of America, and JP Morgan Chase, in light of their connection to Sunoco Logistics. As Yurdin told EcoRI News, “Now more than ever, local governments need to support important issues like the opposition to DAPL.” Members of the Narragansett tribe are also leading this local divestment push. This Saturday, March 10, No DAPL RI, a group of activists coordinating local work to support Standing Rock, is organizing a “prayerful gathering and march” to advocate Providence divestment and in solidarity with the Native Nations Rise march on Washington D.C. In a statement to the Independent, No DAPL RI explained the motivation behind the march: “We fully support the sovereignty and rights of the indigenous community, at large and at home. We stand with them as they march on Washington, DC, and in cities across ‘America,’ to demand their rights be recognized, before the US government, and the world.”

As stories of the destruction of the Standing Rock camps spread across the country, and as images of burning shelters that once housed resistance spread through the media, indigenous people and frontline activists in Louisiana, Texas, Pennsylvania, and Rhode Island are pushing the public to recognize that fights for indigenous sovereignty and environmental justice are present everywhere. “I think folks are realizing now more than before that these pipelines, this infrastructure, these fights are happening all across the continent,” said Katkevich.

“And almost no matter where you live, there’s probably an extraction site or a pipeline site or another type of infrastructure site.” Richards emphasized Standing Rock’s place in a legacy of indigenous resistance, “We’re in the fight of our lives right now, and we have to do whatever we can to shut them down; remember the Battle of Little Bighorn, look how many people came together at standing rock, that’s only a small portion of all the native people on turtle islands.”

For indigenous activists and others on the front lines, the evacuation of Standing Rock does not mean defeat, but a greater commitment to dismantling a larger system. As Krystal Two Bull explained, “it is about more than this one pipeline. It is about protecting the Water for the future generations of all People. It is about dismantling and taking back power from a system that prioritizes profit over human lives. We must put an end to this.”

ZACK KLIGLER B’20 urges you to join the FANG collective and No DAPL RI at the State House at 10AM this Saturday.

METRO

04

RESTRICTING THE PUBLIC BY

Jack Brook

Pia Mileaf-Patel DESIGN BY Chelsea Alexander ILLUSTRATION BY

content warning: transphobia Gavin Grimm had a speech written down, but he didn’t bother to look at it. When he took the stand before the Gloucester County School Board in Virginia to deliver testimony for a disputed school bathroom policy, he realized there were some basic facts he needed to establish first. Grimm, a recently transitioned male student, had been referred to exclusively as a girl by all other past speakers in the debate over allowing trans students the use of school facilities that corresponded to their gender identity.

“I cannot use the women’s bathroom, quite frankly, because I am not a girl,” Grimm told the school board in 2014. “I understand that it might be hard for some of you to look past biology and XY and XX [chromosomes], but we know scientifically that this is not a choice. All I want to do is be a normal child and use the restroom in peace.”

Grimm had begun to transition at the start of his sophomore year at Gloucester High School in Virginia.

He notified the administration, and for the first two months he used the boy’s bathroom, like every other male student. Then, as news spread, parents began to complain, and the school board voted six to one—despite Grimm’s compelling testimony—to deny him the right to use the men’s bathroom. The administration attempted to accommodate him by designating a single bathroom as unisex. But, as Grimm made clear, this was not enough.

“It’s an exclusion,” Grimm told CNN last week.

“It’s saying that I’m not fit for being in communal spaces with my peers—that I’m different from them, not deserving of the same opportunities my peers get. I don’t pose a threat or any kind of harm to people using the correct bathroom.”

Grimm sued the school district and won his case—a legal challenge backed by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU)—in the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals in April of last year. This fall, the Supreme Court granted Grimm a writ of certiorari, committing to hear his case in the spring of 2017. The core of the case rested upon whether gender identity should be interpreted to be part of Title IX regulations, which are designed to prevent sex-based discrimination at schools and colleges—specifically, the question of whether transgender students should be allowed to use school facilities that correspond to their gender identity. Despite its promise, last week on March 6th, the Supreme Court issued a terse one-sentence statement refusing to hear the case, effectively vacating the prior ruling from the lower court.

Because the appellate court based its ruling on Title IX guidance from the Obama administration (a position now void under Trump), the Supreme Court asked for the case to be retried. The Grimm case, widely expected to be a landmark civil rights case, had lost its legal momentum.

“The underlying principle that discrimination against transgender individuals is a form of discrimination on the basis of sex has been widely accepted in the lower courts for years,” noted ACLU lawyer Joshua Block in a letter to the Supreme Court last week, expressing regret that the matter would not be decided once and for all at the nation’s highest judicial level.

The Obama administration had previously issued a Dear Colleague letter—a notice clarifying the administration’s official policy in educational matters—last May, warning school districts that their refusal to allow transgender students access to proper facilities would lead to a loss of federal funding. On February 22 of this year, however, Betsy DeVos and the Department of Education, pressured heavily by Attorney General Jeff Sessions, issued their own letter, rescinding the official White House stance on the issue and leaving schools to decide who could access a given facility. This effectively granted each district what amounted to an unchecked level of control over students' bodies.

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NEWS

“It’s a states’ rights issue,” White House press secretary Sean Spicer told reporters at a recent press conference, the Trump administration’s go-to justification for civil rights violations. “If a state wants to pass a law or a rule, that’s their right. But it shouldn’t be the federal government getting in the way of this.”

In reality, as numerous activists have pointed out in past weeks, the Trump administration’s agenda is not so much about states' rights but about the exclusion of trans people from public spaces.

“When trans students are told that they cannot use public facilities, it doesn’t only block them from the toilet—it also blocks them from public life,” trans activist Janet Mock wrote in the New York Times on February 23.

“It tells them with every sneer, every blocked door, that we do not want to see them, that they should go hide and that ultimately they do not belong.” +++ The fundamental issue that Mock describes—government-sanctioned discrimination and erasure of identity—has extended to the healthcare system as well, where the trans community must now also face the rollback of rights preventing stigmatization in yet another aspect of their lives. On March 6, the same day as the Supreme Court’s refusal to hear Grimm’s case, the GOP announced its replacement for the Affordable Care Act. Among other major changes, the new plan would defund Planned Parenthood, which heavily relies on the $500 million in federal money it receives each year. Along with limiting access to abortions and other forms of care, defunding Planned Parenthood could leave thousands of transgender people unable to receive coverage for gender-confirmation surgery and hormone therapy.

The ACA rollback might offer more consequences.

In 2015, the National Center for Transgender Equality

reported that a third of transgender Americans had delayed or not sought care because of past negative experiences in the healthcare system. The creation of the ACA, however, proved revolutionary for the trans community by beginning to destigmatize access to the healthcare system, which, like public bathrooms, is an essential aspect of a person’s everyday life.

In May 2016, the Department of Health and Human Services issued a regulation clarifying that section 1557 of the ACA, which prevented discrimination based on sex, included transgender patients in its scope.

Without the ACA’s federal oversight, private insurance companies have no incentive to include trans-specific healthcare needs in their coverage. The trans community hasn’t found support at the state level either—31 states lack any explicit policies against transgender discrimination in either private insurance or Medicaid, and only 14 states have explicit anti-discrimination measures for both types of insurance. And not all federal health insurance programs were included in the 2016 regulation: national programs that do not fall under the authority of the ACA, like the Veteran’s Agency and the Defense Department’s TRICARE system, also lack anti-discrimination policies.

In many regions across the country, trans people, especially those seeking hormone therapy, may have to drive for hundreds of miles or across state lines to find a clinic that can accommodate their health needs. While as of last year, according to Slate, Planned Parenthood offered at least 26 different locations for hormone therapy across the country, there are still substantial numbers of trans-identifying individuals in the Midwest and South whose needs may not be met.

“For some people, [Planned Parenthood] is the only place within a reasonable distance that they can get health care or transition health care,” Jay Wu, a spokesperson for the National Center of Transgender Equality, told the Independent. “A lot of people face discrimination

MARCH 10, 2017

The Trump administration and the exclusion of trans people from public spaces

in undergoing routine healthcare—they can be harassed or even denied service because they’re trans. Seeking care that is traditionally seen as gendered can be difficult if you’re trans, like if you need to get a pap smear and you’re not a woman. Outside of Planned Parenthood, it’s not always possible to get that in a respectful or sensitive way.”

The repercussions of private healthcare have already begun to negatively impact the trans community.

Last month, Wisconsin blocked a prior state regulation forcing insurance companies to include gender confirmation surgery in their coverage. Similarly, the University of Arkansas suspended trans health coverage for its employees, even though such coverage had been mandated by the Obama administration at the beginning of 2017.

This trend could well become the norm, as the Medicaid expansion that proved crucial for enabling lower income people—those earning under $17,000 in the 31 states that participated in the expansion—will be cut by 2020 under the GOP’s new plan. This same group made up the vast majority of Planned Parenthood clients as well, with 78 percent of patients in 2015 falling into this income bracket. Taking away both Medicaid and Planned Parenthood—while harming low-income families across the board—will have a particularly acute effect on trans and gender nonconforming people, who often find themselves caught in the intersection of poverty and discrimination.

As a 2015 report by the Movement Advancement Project and Center for American Progress underscores, there is strong evidence to indicate that transgender people are at an economic disadvantage in the US. The study found that trans people are four times more likely to have an annual income below $10,000 than cisgender people. This rises to six times as likely for trans people of color. The roots of this disparity are twofold: legal discrimination in healthcare and employment limit their ability to participate in the workplace, while unsafe

environments in schools can limit trans people’s access to education.

In this sense, there is a circular nature to the transphobia put forward by the Trump administration.

By denying the right for students like Gavin Grimm to use the proper bathroom, the government diminishes the quality of their education and their ability to learn.

Likewise, as LGBTQ+ activists have highlighted, when a trans person feels uncomfortable participating in basic functions of everyday life, like using the bathroom or going to a doctor’s appointment, their participation in the public sphere becomes threatened and stigmatized.

All of these factors contributes to and exacerbates the burden of marginalization that weighs down upon members of the trans community.

“To have those rights rescinded feels like a slap in the face, it feels like not acknowledging the humanity of who trans people are,” actress Laverne Cox told Mic last week. “It sends a message to trans kids that they are less than. And the second you start feeling less than, you internalize shame, you internalize all the things that keep you from living your best life.” +++ The discriminatory messages sent through the policies of the Trump administration—whether on the level of bathrooms or healthcare—create an environment that encourages systemic violence against the trans community.

In one week in February of this year alone, four transgender African American women were murdered, of the total seven transgender people killed in 2017 so far, according to the New York City Anti-Violence Project.

Moreover, a study from the Williams Institute at the UCLA School of Law underscores the harsh consequences that arise from the public stigmatization of trans

identity, reporting that forty percent of trans people attempt suicide at some point in their lives. This risk, the report states, increased significantly when trans folks felt that they didn't "pass" for the gender they identify as.

The repeal of the ACA also threatens those living with HIV/AIDS. Because of government failures to provide healthcare resources and policy changes necessary to fully address the issue, trans people are more likely to test positive for HIV. According to the Center for Disease Control, nearly 60 percent of African American trans woman contracted HIV at some point in their lives.

Whereas before the ACA, a quarter of people with HIV had no health insurance whatsoever, Obama’s Medicaid expansion provided the greatest source of insurance coverage for those suffering from HIV, with 42 percent of people in this group now covered by Medicaid. By contrast, the Kaiser Foundation estimates that only 15 percent of people with HIV currently lack coverage.

Prior to the ACA, Medicaid had only been open to pregnant women and those with disabilities, meaning that someone who contracted HIV could only receive Medicaid treatment after it reached advanced stages.

The reduction of Medicaid will mean that, once again, low-income people at risk of contracting HIV will have to wait until it’s too late before they can receive subsidized care.

"The evidence is iron-clad that when people with HIV are treated and their viral load is suppressed, their likelihood of transmitting HIV goes down to almost zero," John Peller of the AIDS Foundation of Chicago told Reuters. "So, any kind of interruption in care is going to result in more cases of HIV." +++ Trump and his allies appear to be facing significant pushback to their so-called reforms, not only from liberals but from those within their own party. A gay GOP group, the Log Cabin Republicans, published an open letter to Betsy DeVos and Jeff Sessions on March 3rd citing “deep concerns” over the decision to validate transphobia in the education system. The letter implored the administration to sustain the “positive elements” of Obama's legacy.

“Remember nothing is ever wasted,” Chase Strangio, an ACLU lawyer working on Grimm’s case, wrote on Twitter this week. “Our work here, in our lives, in our histories, moves us towards justice.”

Across the country, activists, student groups, and politicians have rallied—Austin, Texas, the University of Arkansas, and Trump Tower in New York City have all been the site of recent protest. LGBTQ+ organizations like Lambda Legal Services have promised to sue “any school district that discriminates against trans students,” while others like GLSEN have created policy toolkits to fight for change on the state and federal level.

“We’re doing everything we can to resist these rollbacks,” says Wu, of the National Center for Transgender Equality. “We’re doing everything we can to make sure that folks in the trans community know that. We’re refusing to give up the idea that we cannot have forward progress during this administration and that we cannot make progress for rights of trans people in the next four years.”

JACK BROOK B’19 urges you to make a donation to Lambda Legal Services at lambdalegal.org.

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

NEWS

06

REPRESENTING HERSELF Roxane Gay and the multiplicity of female experience Brionne Frazier ILLUSTRATION BY María Cano-Flavia DESIGN BY Chelsea Alexander BY

Roxane Gay contains multitudes. She is a professor, author, comic book writer, professional Scrabble player, tweeter and pop culture aficionado. Her book of essays, Bad Feminist, became a New York Times bestseller, but her work spans both fiction and nonfiction—and covers subjects such as race, religion, relationships, gender, and family. With the release of her first novel in 2014, An Untamed State, Gay alerted the world to the vitality of her voice and of her characters.

Gay visited Brown University on February 14, 2017, in the wake of the much publicized controversy around her relationship with the publishing house Simon and Schuster. In early January, Gay pulled her upcoming novel, How to Be Heard, from the publisher in protest of its then-planned (and now cancelled) publication of Milo Yiannopoulos’ memoir, Dangerous.

During the lecture, Gay maintained that her protest was not meant to censor or silence him, as free speech is well within his rights. Rather, she called him out as a “man-child” and provocateur who consistently promotes misogyny, harassment, and reduced legal protection for LGBTQ+ individuals.

Gay acknowledges that people are imperfect and can’t be expected to be the perfect figurehead for the identity they hold. Managing the illusion of perfection is just too great of a burden to carry. Her short story collection, Difficult Women, takes great pains to give this dimension to every character. In Difficult Women, the female characters are never flattened to their identity as just women. The briefly mentioned zumba instructor in the first vignette of the short story “FLORIDA” is revisited in a later section in order to account for her story and perspective. In one moment, she is known only in relation to her career, but later Gay illuminates her home life, relationship issues, and search for friendship. Additionally, “La Negra Blanca” follows a mixed race woman who works as a stripper in order to pay for college. Here as well, Gay distinguishes her character by acknowledging the centrality of sex and sexuality in the young woman’s life while also bringing attention to the ways that race, class, and education shape her conditions.

While many of the short stories are not explicitly political, they stand in contrast to a society which tends to institutionally privilege some voices over others. The addition of voices from women of color into literature is in itself a radical progression. In Gay’s memoir Bad Feminist, she returns to this point using Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s TED Talk on this subject in 2009, entitled “The Danger of a Single Story.”

Adichie speaks about the historical whiteness of literature and that the inclusion of Black voices continues to revolutionize it. As the first Black woman to write a comic book for Marvel, Gay is stretching the spaces in which Black and female voices have been limited.

This inclusion into previously exclusive spaces comes with a responsibility of precedent, one that Gay takes in stride. I interviewed Gay over email in late February. Responding to my comment that Difficult Women contains a number of multifaceted characters, Gay explained, “I do feel a responsibility to create nuanced, interesting characters who don’t reinforce stereotypes. The older I get and the more mature I get as a writer, the more I try not to respond to certain expectations because they get in the way of the writing.”

She engages with this topic often in her best-selling memoir Bad Feminist. In the essay entitled “Girls, Girls, Girls” she explains how the heavy criticism of

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the lack of racial representation in HBO’s Girls is valid, but not one that requires boycott or protest.

Essentially, she says, it is not the first program to properly represent, and most likely will not the last. In the essay, Gay explains, “It is unreasonable to expect Dunham to somehow solve the race and representation problem while crafting her twenty-something witticisms.” Dunham uses Girls to think through her experiences as a young woman and represent a vision of life that she believes is missing in many primetime shows. Though it is far from unproblematic, Gay claims in the essay, few things truly are.

To this point, in early March, Gay jokingly tweeted, “I realize you are hyper criticized buuuut I am going to criticize you.”

Progress can arise from productive criticism, especially when the piece in question has such a large social impact. Pop culture greatly impacts the way we view society, and its rules and lack thereof. As Gay told me, “It is a reflection of the culture at large, our norms and values, and it’s also a useful tool for reaching massive audiences.”

However important, writers should not feel pressure to always get representation right, because, Gay writes, “that is too great a responsibility for any writer to take on.” Rather than discrediting all of Dunham’s work, it can be used as an invitation to ongoing, productive critique from an intersectional group of critics.

By working with willing artists and creators, more can be done for promoting equality of representations and prevent the stereotyping of women in art.

“There is absolutely political power in pop culture,” Gay wrote to me. “A lot of shifts and growth in our cultural tolerance have come from pop culture.”

In the titular short story, “Difficult Women,” Gay problematizes American tropes of one dimensional female characters. She explores the lives of those labeled as “loose women,” “frigid women,” and “crazy women,” then continues to elaborate upon the nuances of their lifestyles as well as the circumstances that formed their experiences. She explores the loose woman who grew up without support from a family, the frigid woman who fears sexual violence and is not required to “put out” when asked, and the crazy woman who earned her label by calling a man to talk after a date. This emphasis on distinctive personalities creates a more nuanced narrative of the lives of women with respect to race, class, and sexuality.

This theme of bearing the responsibility for representation is well addressed in Bad Feminist, as the title suggests. Roxane Gay is a bad feminist. Roxane Gay enjoys music that has misogynistic undertones (and overtones) and she watched ABC’s The Bachelor even before women of color were well represented. But, as she argues in her writing, she is still a feminist all the same. During her Valentine’s Day lecture at Brown, Gay reiterated that she is “not the application reader

at feminist central” in response to a question about Ivanka Trump’s status (or lack thereof) as a feminist.

This is not because she does not have an opinion of the subject, but rather because she understands that she cannot speak on behalf of all women, feminists, people of color, or Libras. Even though, Gay is asked to do emotional and physical labor to assist writers and speak at various conferences about diversity, she does not see it as her job to decide who is more or less problematic.

On March 8 of this year, she tweeted “One of the most common emails I get is, ‘Will you please read my work and tell me if I have the talent to pursue writing?’ and subsequently, “And what they’re looking for is validation or a reason to believe in themselves.

Look. I cannot give that to you. I am not a gatekeeper.” While it is not uncommon for aspiring artists to seek advice from an idol like Roxane Gay, it can often come disguised as a request for free labor. Gay does not have the responsibility to read, edit, and publicize an aspiring author’s work, because it is not her job.

“So many people asking me for so much and it makes me just shut down and play games on my phone,” she lamented on her Twitter earlier this week.

Gay expands on this point in a later essay in Bad Feminist, where she criticizes The Help for it’s thematic emphasis on the “magical negro,” an all-knowing Black person who is expected to answer white peoples’ questions about race, life, and other complex issues. In many novels and films, Gay argues, a Black character is used to enlighten the white leads. This exposes the danger of continuously portraying people of color as existing only to service others.

The issue with this representation is that it continues the expectation that a select few people exist to educate the ignorant or lost. “I’m nobody’s mother,” Gay said with a hint of exasperation during her February lecture.

Roxane Gay’s work questions the norms and biases that exist in many premises and assumptions about women. It is available to those who already subscribe to the idea of intersectional feminism or others who seek to gain perspective or challenge their own ideas about race, class, and gender. Her writing provides narratives for people who are often portrayed without subtlety and for those who wish to broaden their perspective beyond that of a single story. It is the continuation of a struggle for representation of gendered and racialized bodies that activists have waged for decades. It is a struggle that will continue to be fought until work such as Gay’s is a norm and no longer the exception.

BRIONNE FRAZIER B’20 wants you to be difficult.

MARCH 10, 2017

THE GILDED RULE Signe Swanson ILLUSTRATION BY Kela Johnson DESIGN BY Mark Benz BY

content warning: racism, Nazism +++ “Populists don’t need to be popular. They just have to take power by appealing to an exclusionary and artificial sense of the ‘real people.’”

-Tweet by writer Vivek Nemana, in response to Black activist Samuel Sinyangwe, who dared the media to call Trump a populist in light of the historically sparse inauguration crowd.

On a Friday night in early February, neo-Nazis shut down actor Shia LaBeouf’s livestream at the Museum of the Moving Image in New York. LaBeouf had intended for the livestream to create a space for unity, inviting the public to participate in a chant of “he will not divide us!” on camera. The politics of the installation were undeniably complicated—a rich white man spearheading his revolt at a museum complicit in the gentrification of a Queens neighborhood. LaBeouf’s ‘us’ is also vague, referential only to the antagonist, ‘he.’ Still, the symbolism of the performance art was clear—we, everyone who does not support Trump, will stand in solidarity with one another.

Not long after the piece began, a group of Neo-Nazis intervened in the form of shirtlessness and milk-chugging. They danced around LaBeouf’s camera gulping milk, letting it spill from the corners of their mouths. Milk is now a symbol of whiteness in far-right spaces, namely the /pol/ (politics) board of 4chan. President of the National Policy Institute and white supremacy cheerleader Richard Spencer keeps a milk emoji between his first and last name on Twitter.

White supremacists, obsessed with their bloodlines, claim that European genetics are endowed with God-given lactose tolerance. 4chan is cluttered with saccharine poetry about dairy. /pol/ laments the socalled ‘vegan agenda,’ code for the nonexistent ‘global Jewish conspiracy’ they frequently scapegoat.

The white supremacists and internet trolls who occupy /pol/ celebrated a victory when Trump assumed office. As did the alt-right, a nebulous political group that claims to be more moderate than the neo-Nazis. The lines between these groups are often blurry.

Some members of the alt-right see white supremacists as co-opting their movement. Trump voters, though invariably oppressive, are also not necessarily as belligerent as neo-Nazis, but all of them voted for the same guy, enticed for many of the same reasons.

The use of milk as a white supremacist symbol ties neatly into a rhetoric of ‘the old days.’ ‘The old days’ are ‘in’ right now: “Make America Great Again,” the backbone slogan of Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, screams bleak sentimentality. Woman in the kitchen in an apron with the necessary groceries: butter, milk, eggs. The milk man delivering cool glass bottles of cream out of his tin truck. Blonde children dipping homemade cookies into milk. What’s more wholesome than a milk mustache? The neo-Nazi psyche congratulates itself in opposition twenty first century corporate progressivism, a world where you don’t even have to kill a cow to eat a burger. One neo-Nazi who goes by @Baked(milk emoji)Alaska on Twitter keeps the words ‘good Christian boy’ in his bio.

Good, meaning not bad. Christian, meaning not Muslim. Boy, meaning not girl. The language with which the American far-right brands itself is one of wide gaps and impenetrable binaries. A language with walls. “Us only” is code for “no one else should exist.”

Family, tradition, and wholesomeness speak into existence a romantic nostalgia for an exclusionary America. The America of “Make America Great Again” is a country without any protections for those most marginalized by rampant nationalism.

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

In 2014, I worked with the Democrats during a congressional race in New York’s 11th District. One of my tasks was voter registration. I often did this job at public parks, especially the boardwalk, a favorite meetup spot of Sunday-afternoon fishermen. The seaside was lined with cliques of muscular middle-aged men in white undershirts, chest hair poking out from their fleshy, tan pecs. One beautiful day, I approached a fisherman and asked if he was registered to vote. “No, all politicians are crooks,” he spat back.

The man arched his back tall. The sun cracked open the shore and everything smelt like sardines. “If I was president,” he mused, “I’d bring the military in to kill all the politicians.” I told him to have a nice day.

His intensity wasn’t surprising. The man may as well have been my own father, a retired police officer who used to take me fishing at the same boardwalk. At any rate, I could see my dad inviting him on a hunting trip with him in upstate New York, where his whole family keeps a moldy trailer atop eighty acres of land.

The trailer’s interior is decorated with a Norman Rockwell painting, some deer skulls, and a picture of Osama bin Laden. Bin Laden’s portrait, crudely cut from some early 2000s front cover of the New York Post, is nailed straight into to the mobile home’s yellowed plastic wall. A cowboy-style subtext reads “Wanted Dead or Alive,” but someone crossed out the latter option with a red Sharpie.

I wouldn’t be surprised if the fisherman recently made an exception to register red for Trump. The president’s speeches are strikingly similar to the conversations between everyone at the boardwalk—concerned with bootstrapping and rugged masculinity. Trump chooses to use working-class language, maintaining a faint New York accent despite being an Ivy League-educated billionaire. This fact appeals to my blue-collar community, as it appeals to the white voter who feels forgotten by ‘establishment politicians.’

Last September, Trump began marketing himself to ‘deplorables,’ repurposing a statement that Hillary Clinton made at an LGBT for Hillary fundraiser in Manhattan: “half of Trump supporters belong in a basket of deplorables.” So successful was this reclamation that on January 19, a coalition of Trump fans hosted the “Deplora-ball,” an unofficial inaugural ball in honor of the incoming president. On www.deploraball.com, organizers proudly announce, “We’re not bragging when we say we memed a President into office.” The Deplora-ball officially banned individuals known for spouting white nationalism or anti-Semitism, including @Baked(milk emoji)Alaska, who actually played a large role in planning the event. Still, the organizers’ proud irreverence, evidenced by their meme obsession, mirrors the very nihilism that enables white supremacists on online forums like /pol/. What’s more: the event attracted plenty of factionless Trump supporters. One of the Deplora-ball’s most prominent guests was Scott LoBaido—an ‘artist’ who lives right by my boardwalk, known for slapping a trademark American flag mural on every pizzeria, handball court, or municipal building he can find.

Trump’s appeal—the appeal to the ‘deplorable’—is where most spectrums of the emboldened right wing converge. The deplorable, anti-elite, hard-working, ‘real’ American becomes the base of Trump’s populism. To appeal to this ‘authentic’ voter, Trump speaks colloquially, and with a simple vocabulary and choppy syntax that has proven nearly impossible to translate into foreign languages. International news outlets struggle to make Trump’s language palpable to their

audiences while preserving its sentiments. In an interview with the Los Angeles Review of Books, French translator Bérengère Viennot expressed how incomprehensibly Trump’s English reads in French. She must either translate verbatim, confusing her francophone readers, or express his content in clear language— thereby making him sound like a regular politician.

This problem is fitting for a man so concerned with isolationism.

Trump gloats about America, referencing nothing.

A favorite slogan of the Trump administration is “we will make America WIN again,” where ‘win’ is a cliffhanger to bloat with blunt pride. His lack of specificity, his confident emptiness, makes space for the nationalism suggested by the word “America.”

Another Trump favorite is ‘bigly.’ He’s going to save the country, and he’s going to do it ‘bigly.’ ‘Bigly’ is doubly fictional: it is both a made-up word, and it forges a reality in which politicians do not have to be educated, sensible, or polite. ‘Bigly’ is itself a symbol: audial, and thus involuntary, bloated with an appeal to empty nothingness. +++ Almost all Americana imagery is an assertion of power over what is perceived as untamable, wild space.

Picture a pickup truck, any pickup truck. A big strong machine to pummel down the American road with a sunk back, open wide like palms out for communion. A burly man in Dickies loads carpentry supplies to build a cabin in some anonymous woods. Car companies market their biggest and most industrial machines with this trope in mind: picture a Dodge RAM, branding itself with the image of a sturdy mountain goat.

Mid-19th century American colonialism found validation through Manifest Destiny, the thought that everything west of the Mississippi was free to take.

This ideology, produced by Christian and colonialist fervor, was only possible through the erasure of Native lives. The assumption of free land (to be filled up with white culture) has always been integral to the maintenance of white supremacy.

Trump wants to ‘bring back our jobs’ from ‘China.’ He wants to put ‘our factories’ back in ‘our cities.’

It’s not actually that easy at all to reverse decades of globalization. But who cares? Isn’t it ‘our’ God-given right to take back what has been ‘stolen?’ +++ It didn’t take Trump long to redesign the oval office.

The first furnishing to go was Obama’s ‘quote rug,’ a large decorative tapestry stitched with inspirational quotes by former presidents. In its place Trump laid out a monochrome golden rug with golden tassels lining the ends. The room’s curtains, which had been crimson, are also gold now. Trump smooths the same gold lacquer over the White House as he has to his own last name: on every Trump Tower, Trump Hotel, and Trump Taj Mahal, white space hides under a gilded sheen.

SIGNE SWANSON B’19 thinks crimson is a better color anyway.

OCCULT

08

BRINGING THE TRUTH TO LIGHT Navigating sexual assault in the national parks

BY Keven

Griffen Juan Tang Hon DESIGN BY Mark Benz

ILLUSTRATION BY

In January 2017, Badlands National Park released a series of tweets that rocketed the National Parks Service to the center of a political firestorm.

“The pre-industrial concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was 280 parts per million (ppm). As of December 2016, 404.93 ppm,” @BadlandsNPS tweeted.

A minute later they added, “Today, the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is higher than at any time in the last 650,000 years.”

By insinuating that rising levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere are caused by human activities, Badlands directly contradicted President Trump’s statements that climate change is a hoax. Moreover, in tweeting about the issue at all, Badlands violated a ‘communication blackout’ ordered by President Trump’s transition team, which came after the official National Parks Twitter account (@NatlParkService) retweeted photos comparing the size of President Trump’s inauguration crowds to President Obama’s from 2012. According to that request, agencies including the Department of the Interior—which heads the National Park Service—were asked to stop sharing information that was not directly related to park activity, safety, or events.

The tweets were later deleted, but rogue National Park Service Twitter accounts soon began to proliferate, amassing millions of followers. The accounts, which generally focused on climate science or climate change, have been championed by some on the left as a heartening act of political resistance. In speaking about anthropogenic (human-caused) climate change as a scientific fact, many also saw the National Parks as standing up for the scientific goals of truth and objectivity, values that many scientists feel are being threatened by the Trump administration’s apparent disdain for facts. Refusing to compromise in the face of political pressure, Badlands did what every objective scientist strives to do: leave the emotions by the wayside, and focus on the facts.

Yet these tweets—and the media attention that accompanied them—were anything but an exercise in objectivity. The agency is charged with protecting hundreds of delicate ecosystems and important heritage sites around the country, many of which are disproportionately threatened by rapid alterations in climate.

The agency has also had other concerns recently—issues that they haven’t been as keen to share on Twitter. Although 2016 marked the centennial celebration for the agency, the Park Service spent most of the year battling a series of sexual assault lawsuits filed in parks across the country, including icons like Grand Canyon, Yellowstone, and Yosemite. Alongside allegations of widespread sexual harassment, misconduct, and outright assault, there have been claims that administrators in many cases knew about the problems and failed to act, sometimes for years. Additionally, park officials have failed to “go rogue” to defend Title IX or to criticize President Trump’s pejorative remarks about women. If the National Park Service stands as a symbol for truth,

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SCIENCE

objectivity, and political resistance—a status the media were quick to confer on the agency following the Twitter war—then these lawsuits must also be interrogated. +++ The National Park Service has a long history of sexual harassment. In 2000, the national average for women experiencing sexual harassment was a little less than 1-in-2 for federal employees, according to a survey commissioned by the Park Service in that year. According to that study, 76 percent of female Parks Service Police officers said they had personally experienced sexual harassment during their tenure, while 81 percent stated that they knew someone who had experienced either sexual harassment or gender discrimination while working in the Parks Service. The rash of allegations made across the country in 2016 indicate that the problem is still pervasive. At the Grand Canyon in 2016, investigators from the Department of the Interior described a “15-year failure” to act on issues of sexual harassment—verbally and physically inappropriate conduct towards primarily female park employees that had gone unchecked for over a decade. Since the publication of that report, employees have come forward at Yellowstone, Yosemite, Cape Canaveral National Seashore, and others, bringing national attention to an apparently widespread problem.

It’s not just relegated to Park Police officers, either.

Many people who work in the Park Service do so as field researchers or scientists, studying topics that range from biology to archaeology. A 2014 study published in Nature reported that 64 percent of scientists surveyed (mostly archaeologists and anthropologists) had been sexually harassed while doing field research—most of them female trainees ranging from the high school to postdoctoral level. The same study found that a third of female respondents reported incidents of sexual assault, and that women were 3.5 times more likely to experience harassment than men. Although these respondents were not necessarily part of the Park Service, this study indicates that small groups of people working in close quarters in the backcountry are frequently subjected to higher assault.

The National Parks were founded with the idea that people—specifically white men—needed a respite from industrial society when the dirtiness and structure of their urban lives became too much to bear. John Muir, who was influential in establishing Yosemite as one of the nation’s earliest parks, wrote that, “thousands of nerve-shaken, over-civilized people are discovering that going to the mountains is going home,” a sentiment that envisions the parks as a place to be free from the rapidly encroaching bounds of society. Yet for Muir and others, the return to freedom was not to be delivered equally. In order to fit places like Yosemite Valley and Yellowstone into their vision of wilderness, early Park administrators

ordered indigenous people to abandon lands within the borders of proposed parks—a process that was neither orderly nor peaceful. Early parks were designed to allow primarily wealthy, white men to experience the wildness of an imagined primeval state, conferring absolute freedom to behave as they pleased upon these lucky few while simultaneously displacing and erasing thousands of others.

This sense of entitlement—the idea that certain people can behave however they want in the wilderness because it’s a healthy escape from their daily lives—is the root of many of the sexual harassment complaints reported in the National Parks Service. Victims describe a culture where mistreatment was common, but consequences slow in coming—especially when these incidents took place far from cities, roads, or cell phone service.

Perpetrators of sexual harassment are refusing to respect the boundaries set by their female peers in wilderness settings, and the lack of supervision in many backcountry assignments compounds the problem.

With no witnesses, cases of this nature often boil down to hearsay arguments that are difficult to resolve. Many women have chosen to leave the parks rather than wait for their case to stagnate in a bureaucratic backlog. In 2016, women made up just 8,700 of 23,000 total Park Service employees, according to an article in the Atlantic.

Women also occupy far fewer supervisory roles than men. Without greater representation within the agency, it becomes harder and harder for women to speak out about the mistreatment they may be facing, particularly if they feel uncomfortable reporting it to a male colleague or supervisor.

This is not to say that the Park Service is unaware of—or refusing to address—the sexual harassment that takes place in its environs. Facing pressure from Congress, Director Jon Jarvis promised that the agency is taking sexual harassment very seriously, and multiple Congressmen, media outlets, and grassroots organizations have sworn to hold the National Park Service to that statement. Yet the agency has a long way to go before female voices are heard and valued to the same extent that male voices are, and that doesn’t even begin to touch on the representation of people of color, LGBTQ+ folks, and other underrepresented groups within the agency.

Under Trump, there will likely be minimal pressure to develop a more rigorous policy for dealing with sexual assault in the Parks. As a segment of the federal government, Badlands and the National Park Service will likely continue to be censored on Twitter, or even in the pamphlets and resources shared at information centers in the parks themselves. After the backlash from the Badlands tweets, it is likely that official Park Service platforms will continue to be barred from sharing objective truths, or be used to disseminate such information in the near future. But the media have no such constraints,

MARCH 10, 2017

and their coverage of this episode is part of the problem.

Although the sexual harassment cases were covered in the months leading up to this incident, few if any news outlets mentioned those allegations while they touted the Park Service as a rebel agency, standing up for truth in the midst of swirling misinformation. Many on the left were quick to herald the anonymous rangers at Badlands as heroes; the same people usually quick to call for increased egalitarianism in the workplace. Letting the Park Service off the hook for one issue because it doesn’t fit with the new narrative is not only dangerous, it also does the agency, and the public, a disservice.

In the sciences, it is often said that the strongest arguments are those that don’t ‘cherry pick’ their data to fit hypotheses; rather, they use all of the data in their

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

wheelhouse in pursuit of the truth. In the recent and softer light shining on the NPS, this kind of objectivity is difficult to come by, particularly when some evidence might be damaging to the new and valuable public image. In the Park Service, that means admitting to a legacy of sexual harassment and colonialism while also acknowledging how important it is to tackle climate change. In science, similar challenges apply. While many of the people who study climate change have long wished to stay out of the political fray for rear of seeming biased, a more critically conscious objective under this administration is to openly acknowledge the on-theground realities that affect the topics researchers study.

Issues like climate change do not exist in a vacuum: they have ramifications that span from the mistreatment

of female field researchers to the vulnerability of those affected by rising seas and changing weather. Just as the Park Service will be able to do its best work by bringing the whole truth of their complicated agency to light, the scientific community may want to consider that the most important facts are sometimes those that are the least easy to digest. Engaging with politics and activism doesn’t lessen objectivity: it just demands that researchers remain conscious of the ways their work impacts the communities they strive to serve.

KEVEN GRIFFEN B‘17 believes in going rogue.

SCIENCE

10

HOW I NEVER BECAME AN

INTERNET RAPPER

BY

CJ Park

ILLUSTRATION BY Gabriel

Matesanz DESIGN BY Celeste Matsui The frontier is an important kind of -topia for the Western imaginary. Media theorist Lev Manovich looked at computer games from the 90s as models of how we navigate virtual spaces. He underlined the notion that “narrative and time itself are equated with the movement through 3-D space,” reminding us of a now archaic mythology: the Web as the American Wild West. The adventures our computer games afford us are troubled by histories of the American settler, carving his ways into the unknown. +++ Iraqi. Refugee. Crossfaded and surfing perpetually through a sea of unknowns, Zahra is my host tonight and the following four nights. His face is scattered across the apartment; I first notice it plastered thinly across the fridge. Our interactions this week have been padded for the most part, couched in small talk and a quiet appreciation for each other’s clothes. Tonight, we are wearing similarly oversized fits. I read solidarity into our ability to blanket these lanky Eastern bodies. I didn’t even see you. Astonished that he isn’t the only one up at this hour, he edges closer. What are you—writing?

I explain my practice poorly, leaving pauses for Zahra to interject and steer us somewhere new. Let me show you what I’m writing. +++ I am allocated one of his three monitors. Zahra has written a hollow black block of an ocean into existence.

Above its surface, a sparse line of dark mangroves hover, gently hurdling into a beckoning distance. I tell him I like the color palette, wading through still waters.

There is no avatar. left click: shoot right click: suspend right click x2: some semblance of gravitational order I test the left mouse, sending a blank human form into the void. I click again, tracing the tired trajectory of bodies flailing softly. Try hitting a tree. Making contact with the mangroves triggers something radical in their make-up: the branches petrify and emanate a series of cold emerald flashes before regenerating and continuing their linear buoyancy. The trees continue moving.

If there is a second level to this game, I cannot find it. The waters do not end. Wherever I float, the trees feel close, like how the moon chases cars. I make bolder efforts to master and alter the landscape. I rattle the left mouse, firing into a skyline littered with empty silhouettes before freezing them mid-air.

Disdain undisguised, Zahra remarks that I am playing the game like a fucking first person shooter.

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left click: *release right click: suspend right click x2: *precipitation I promise to be more mindful of the inert bodies, scrutinising their graphics. The bodies are so blank they look 2D, I begin to explain. Already, Zahra is toggling through alternative textures and color schemes on the monitor adjacent. By rendering these humanoid figures to match the derelict trees above, Zahra enacts a shift that feels elemental. Bodies and trees come raining down, dissipating beyond the horizon.

The environment is refreshed—beautiful as ever, but a touch more cohesive. I accommodate the possibility that these projectiles are infinite iterations of Zahra.

There is a strange comfort in the freedom of releasing and suspending the self to no end.

I like how you’re playing it, I just don’t think most people would play it this way. Zahra is scratching his frazzled hair. I divert my gaze as he turns to tap my elbow emphatically. What I want… is for everyone to play this game. But they won’t get it because they just won’t get it. Zahra disengages from this emotional lapse to unmute his computer. So there is a soundtrack. The noises are cluttered at first. Frenziedly, they flicker amongst a pool of piano keys until sweeping sharply into a four-by-four beat. A trap song? The dizzying familiarity spoils the ether. The mystic ecology of this game has cracked. The hi-hats are quantized in a way that convinces me trap cannot be Zahra’s signature sound. I ask where the music comes from, earning an indignant radio silence. I made it, he says, cocking his head. I like when people don’t know who I am. It’s funny. +++ I am an hour deep into this game before it hits me that I have already been acquainted with Zahra’s work. His music has found its way into my downloads folder from as far back as 2013. I urgently rack my computer for some vestige of his creative personae. I find one of his monikers embedded in the track credits alongside the names of people I might call heroes, representatives of New York’s influential alt-rap circuits. I decide to press him on it. His lips crease playfully and the stories roll through.

He recalls a time when Queens rapper Heems of Das Racist wore an obtuse headscarf to a music video shoot because he couldn’t recite his own lyrics. I deduce that my last Heems experience must have been further down the rapper’s sartorial timeline, some time after he had tweeted “taliban chic” into existence. The year is 2015: too far into his Xanax stupor, Heems has taken his pants off on stage. Members of the audience are denouncing his use of the n-word in a drivelling rant. “Look, I went to W E S L E Y A N,” he answers.

I left the venue flanked by two good white friends who mused to each other about Das Racist (RIP) and the importance of brown man rap commentary in a post 9/11 America. Heems went on to lecture at London’s School of Oriental and African Studies days later, where students held the man accountable for his

performance. Opening up about his struggles with substance abuse, he offered an apology that I’ve heard him say before, only reading it this time struck me harder: “I’ve always felt bad about appropriating an artform that isn’t mine.” +++ Zahra chooses to lecture me on doing you and becoming somebody. I retain the following: I could be famous. I could be famous if I really wanted it, and Zahra wanted me to want it. Zahra’s throat fry is peaking.

Eyes unusually glazed, Zahra looks like he might cry.

If Zahra cries tonight, it is because he is not famous.

There are never enough people tuning into his livestreams, engaging with the delicate facets of his character. It is the static truth that shows itself as he shuffles across his apartment floor, punching his keyboard and wrestling vitamins out of pill jars. Ignoring my request for something to smoke, Zahra corners me on the edge of his patio, where he demands that I pelt a glass bottle onto the street below. Now. Throw this. He shakes his head sadly as I sidestep him. That’s the problem. You don’t write games—you just play them. I nod, confused.

Word games, I suggest tentatively, are something I do.

But you can’t show them to me. I nod again before flinching as Zahra open-palm slaps me, catching the side of my head. My skin feels raw against the wind, but I feel outside of myself this morning.

I am reminded of a line from Antoinette Rouvroy, who once wrote that the virtual is about conceptualising the self outside of oneself. The virtual dimension produces a “melancholy arising from the inescapable experience of never being able to own or possess oneself, with an attempt to recollect oneself over time—” The worlds that Zahra codes late into the night are mathematical proofs of a man working himself mad for recognition. Zahra’s music has taken him places, but it is the prospect of moving out and moving on that pains him the most. The mystery of Zahra’ sadness is no longer a crypt but an open patio, two stories above concrete.

Zahra apologizes, caressing the side of my face for a moment before pulling me in for a hug. The next time you’re in the city, I won’t be living on Nostrand Ave. Swivelling beside me, he points to a white box down the street that will soon flourish as an Urban Outfitters or American Apparel. He spits in its direction, chasing it with the butt of a cigarette. Time moves differently for a refugee.

Zahra collects himself when the time has come for crooked cops to collect their cut from the club downstairs. We peer over the rooftop together, watching bottle glass crunch under their boots. In one final gesture, Zahra tells me that I will never be shit. Not ever.

CJ PARK B’17 always felt bad about appropriating artforms that aren’t his.

MARCH 10, 2017

A SECRET YESTERDAY, A MOVEMENT TODAY The fight to ensure reproductive rights for Rhode Islanders

BY Katrina

Northrop ILLUSTRATION BY Claire Schlaikjer DESIGN BY Chelsea Alexander

In the spring of 1965, Edith Ajello became pregnant after having sex for the first time. She was 21 yearsold, unmarried, and a college student at Bucknell University in Pennsylvania. Ajello wasn’t ready to be a mother. Roe v. Wade, the landmark Supreme Court case that guaranteed the right to an abortion in the first trimester of pregnancy, would not enter the court system until 1973. She was stuck.

Ajello, now a Democratic Rhode Island State Representative, is a co-sponsor of the Reproductive Health Care Act, a bill that was proposed on February 2, 2017, to ensure every woman’s right to an abortion in Rhode Island—regardless of whether Roe v. Wade is overturned by the Supreme Court. According to the language of the legislation, “This act would prohibit the state from interfering with a woman’s decision to prevent, commence, continue or terminate a pregnancy prior to fetal viability.” It would also prohibit the state from restricting any medically recognized form of abortion or contraception.

Because of the current Supreme Court vacancies to be filled by President Trump, the court will likely tilt towards a pro-life majority in the next four years.

To fill the seat of the deceased Justice Scalia, President Trump nominated Colorado federal appellate judge Neil Gorsuch on February 1, 2017. Although Gorsuch has never ruled on abortion in his judicial career, he upheld the right of companies not to provide contraceptive coverage due to religious objections in the 2013 case of Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc. v. Sebelius. Under Trump’s court, there is a real possibility that Roe v.

Wade will be overturned in the next four years. If so, the national right to an abortion would no longer be guaranteed, and individual state legislatures would determine abortion laws.

Ajello received the upsetting news of her pregnancy at the end of her junior year in college. At the time, she was worried that she wouldn’t be able to finish her final papers and exams. She went to one of her professors in a panic, hoping he would let her finish the class’s coursework over the summer. She found herself divulging her secret, and after a lengthy conversation, the sympathetic professor suggested the possibility of an abortion. It was an idea Ajello had not considered.

The professor referred Ajello to a doctor in a neighboring town who would perform the procedure safely. Though the abortion was illegal, Ajello was lucky to have access to a qualified and willing physician, unlike many others who were forced to risk their lives by attempting self-induced abortions. Ajello remained at Bucknell after the semester ended. She took summer classes so she could graduate a semester early.

Her boyfriend was fully supportive of her decision at the time, but they broke up soon after the operation.

None of Ajello’s friends were on campus, and she remembers crying often. “I felt very alone,” she told me over the phone.

Ajello didn't share the story of her unplanned pregnancy with her friends. Rumors circulated around

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Bucknell, but she ignored them, hoping that her friends would ignore them too. Ajello didn’t publicly acknowledge her abortion until one night fifty years later, at a Rhode Island Planned Parenthood annual dinner event. At the dinner, a speaker challenged everyone in the room who had undergone an abortion to stand up. Ajello hadn’t intended to ever make her abortion public, but something in the moment moved her. She stood up.

“That was a seminal moment,” Ajello told me.

Looking around, she saw that other women, some friends and some strangers, were standing alongside her. “I realized that this is something that many women have in common, although they’ve never talked about it.” +++ On February 1, 2017, Rep. Ajello shared the story of her abortion in front of the Rhode Island State House in a televised press conference. Originally, the conference was only supposed to include the legal details of the Reproductive Health Care Act. But when Rep. Ajello offered to share her personal story in front of the cameras, State Senator Gayle Goldin, the bill’s Senate sponsor, agreed that it would humanize the polarizing issue and increase support for the bill.

The Reproductive Health Care Act is co-sponsored by 36 of the state’s House Representatives. The same legislation has been proposed at every session for decades in order to make clear Rhode Island’s commitment to reproductive rights and to protect against anti-choice federal administrations. The bill has never received adequate support or public attention in Rhode Island, but the sponsors are more optimistic this year due to the threat of President Trump’s restrictive reproductive rights policies. “It is even more important now because of the election of that man,” Rep. Ajello told me. The Illinois and New York state legislatures have recently proposed similar legislation, attempting to ensure abortion rights within their own states, even if Roe v. Wade is challenged.

The Reproductive Health Care Act must be approved by a committee first in both the Rhode Island House and the Senate, before reaching the floor for a vote. Some legislators worry that House Speaker Nicholas Mattiello will block the vote, as he was endorsed by Rhode Island Right to Life (RIRTL) this past election cycle, and has refrained from commenting on the bill thus far. In the Rhode Island State Senate, Senator Gayle Goldin is working hard to eliminate roadblocks to the bill’s passage. “There is a different kind of momentum this year,” she said to me over the phone, citing the election of new state representatives and the community’s desire to push back against the Trump administration. If the bill reaches the Senate and House floors, the votes could take place anytime before the end of the legislative session in June.

+++ Many women have expressed to Rep. Ajello that they feel less alone and more comfortable sharing their stories with friends and family after her announcement at the State House news conference. Although it shouldn’t be necessary to have a personal connection to support abortion rights, Ajello tells me, “the more people who know someone who has had an abortion… the more real it gets to people, and the more sympathetic it gets.”

One woman from East Providence even called to say that she went to the same Pennsylvania doctor for an abortion as Rep. Ajello had. The only negative response she has received came from a blocked number.

After she picked up the phone, a male voice said, “You should have been aborted.” Ajello hung up. “I decided that we didn’t really have much to talk about,” she said.

The most outspoken opposition to the bill has come from RIRTL. Affiliated with the Catholic Diocese of Providence, the group works to lobby against any state legislation that legalizes abortion and supports candidates who share that goal.

Rep. Ajello often speaks to constituents that oppose abortion on religious grounds. “I respect that religious belief. But I don’t share it, and I don’t think our laws should share it,” she said. “I’m not advocating that religious people have abortions. I’m not advocating that anyone has an abortion.” At the same time, Ajello feels strongly that everyone who becomes pregnant should have the opportunity to make their own choice. Barth Bracy, the executive director of RIRTL, believes that granting women this choice is a mistake.

Over the phone, he spoke in unequivocal terms. “This is the most extreme bill that has ever been filed in this state.”

Bracy acknowledges that there is more public attention to the bill this year, but he doesn’t believe that this translates into legislative success. He blames this attention on “hysteria that has been preyed upon

by Planned Parenthood and Representative Ajello.” In painting women’s concern over losing abortion rights as “hysteria,” Bracy does not acknowledge the substantial consequences of lacking control over personal life decisions. This is not a removed legislative battle, as he depicts it, but a personal struggle to ensure that women have both the right to abortion and the right to have the option available. +++ Democratic Representative Susan Donovan, one of the other co-sponsors of the bill, said to me at her State House office, “to be honest, I didn’t think that we would ever be at this juncture again.” Roe v. Wade was decided when Representative Donovan was in college, and she remembers when it was necessary for women to cross state lines to get an abortion. Because

MARCH 10, 2017

there is a real chance that abortion rights will be taken away in the near future, she said that “it is time to think about this again, and to start asking people where they stand.”

Rep. Donovan said that her political stance comes down to the important distinction between wealthy women and disadvantaged women. Low-income women do not have equal access to abortion, and thus they have lower rates of abortion than their high income counterparts, according to the Brookings Institution. This, along with the fact that low-income women are twice as likely not to use contraception, leads to low-income women’s disproportionately high rate of unplanned pregnancy.

Contributing to the vicious cycle of poverty, unplanned pregnancies limit women’s career opportunities and earning potential.

“If we legislate against abortion, women with means will always be able to cross state lines to get [one],” Rep. Donovan told me. But women living near and below the poverty line don’t have the same resources or mobility. “Imagine living in a state with a lot of restrictions, where you would have to drive 700 miles to get an abortion, and you don’t even own a car. That’s scary stuff to me.” The challenge of having to drive across state lines in order to have an abortion is not purely a logistical issue—this type of barrier further exacerbates the systemic oppression at work. Low-income women are not only forced to pay for this trip, they are forced to take time off work, and undergo a difficult procedure far away from any emotional support system. These factors impose a structural bind on all women, but low-income women, and especially women of color, suffer more due to their lack of resources, access, and political voice.

laws prohibit any state funds from going to abortions.

Because of these provisions, Planned Parenthood’s abortion services are funded solely by private donors and individual patients.

On March 6, Planned Parenthood rejected President Trump’s offer to preserve federal funding if the organization stops providing abortion services. Due to this rejection, Planned Parenthood will likely lose all federal funding under Trump’s American Health Care Act, which was released on March 7 to replace the Affordable Care Act. This loss of funding would even extend to services other than abortions, such as pap smears, HIV testing, and maternal care. Most federal funding of Planned Parenthood comes in the form of Medicaid reimbursements for low income patients. If President Trump follows through on his promise to defund Planned Parenthood, the organization could not receive reimbursement for serving low income patients who rely on Medicaid. According to a report by Planned Parenthood, 79 percent of the organization’s patients are at or below the poverty level. Without federal assistance, low income patients will not be able to access Planned Parenthood’s basic health and preventive services. Lacking necessary preventative care, disadvantaged women’s rate of unplanned pregnancy will rise, further exacerbating the impact that poverty has on a woman’s access to healthcare.

Craig O’Connor, the Director of Public Policy and Government Relations for the Planned Parenthood of Southern New England, acknowledging that many disadvantaged women rely on Planned Parenthood for their basic health needs, released a written statement asserting that regardless of defunding, “we are here for our patients—our doors stay open, no matter what.”

as alone as I did back then,” she said. Unfortunately, women still face immense societal stigma around abortion. And although there has been measured progress on the dialogue surrounding reproductive rights, women of color and low-income women still face disproportionate marginalization and economic hardship as a result of these structural barriers.

In the event that the bill fails, Rep. Ajello will reintroduce the legislation again next year, and organizations like Planned Parenthood will continue the fight to provide sustainable health services and develop advocacy platforms for reproductive rights issues. In Ajello’s opinion, compromise isn’t possible on this issue.

If Roe v. Wade is overturned, it will not be people like Representative Ajello who will face the most harmful consequences, it will be marginalized women who are already impacted by forms of systemic oppression. “We cannot go back there,” Ajello said.

KATRINA NORTHROP B’19 believes in the right to choose.

+++ +++ Planned Parenthood is the leader in advocating for reproductive rights in Rhode Island and an active supporter of the Reproductive Health Care Act. Opponents of the bill have criticized Planned Parenthood’s advocacy, saying that the organization is reaping economic rewards from its abortion services. “This is all mixed up and not accurate,” Rep. Ajello says, responding to these critics. In fact, the Hyde Amendment, which is a 1976 legislative provision, prohibits federal funds from going to abortions, unless in the case of rape, incest, or risk to the mother’s life. Additionally, Rhode Island state

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

After the pivotal Planned Parenthood dinner, when Rep. Ajello first publicly divulged her abortion, she decided to tell her daughter. “It was a very matter-of-fact discussion,” mostly concerning the details of an abortion and why some people decide to take that step.

“I think it is impossible for younger women, like my daughter, to comprehend how different things are now,” she said. It was important for Ajello to make her daughter understand the difference in today’s environment. “I hope women who get abortions now don’t feel

FEATURES

14

DISPATCHES FROM THE DMV Confronting bureacracy and emerging victorious

BY

Jane Argodale

ILLUSTRATION & DESIGN BY Ivan

Rios-Fetchko

Distractions can be physical or mental in nature and are often a combination of both. A physical distraction is one that causes a driver to take his or her hands off the wheel or eyes off the road, such as reaching for an object. Mental distractions are activities that take the driver’s mind away from the road, such as engaging in conversation with a passenger or thinking about something that happened during the day.

–The Rhode Island Driver’s Manual, Author Unknown We missed the exit for the Rhode Island Department of Motor Vehicles Headquarters (DMV) in Cranston for the second time in a row. Through the car window, I watched the first wave of people enter the building as we sped by. A friend and I, both of whom had reached our early twenties without ever learning to drive, got a ride from another friend so that we could get our permits and remedy the situation. Ironically, the easiest way to reach the place that decides whether you may drive is by driving.

Growing up in New York City, learning to drive was not a rite of passage for me or my friends. On the verge of turning 21, I still can’t think of a single close friend of mine from home who has their license. For us, the real milestone was getting to ride the subway without parental supervision. After that, the whole city was ours, and there was no good reason to face the perils of driving through the choked Manhattan grid or searching for a sliver of space in which to parallel park.

But then I came to Providence, where over time I was gripped by fantasies of summertime drives along the bay to Newport, buying more groceries than I could ever carry at Price Rite, and actually learning how to change a tire—something I’ve been told I’m supposed to know how to do. Whenever a friend offers me a ride here, it feels like I’ve been opened up to a whole new world. But I hate being dependent on others, and I especially hate the feeling that I missed out on learning an essential life skill. So about five years late, I cracked open the Rhode Island Driver’s Manual (in PDF form on my laptop), and started studying for my permit test.

We arrived shortly after 8:30AM (when the DMV opens) but a long line had already formed on the second floor.

This line was really a line for another line—you wait to see a clerk, tell the clerk what you’re there for, and are given a slip of paper with a four-digit number. Halfway through this line, I took my passport, Social Security card, voter registration, and L-1 form out of my backpack. Nervous that I could be missing something essential, that I’d be turned away and have to come back, I glanced at each of these items over and over, mentally checking off the list of required documents to receive the learner’s permit. With each round of this anxious game, I only became more uncertain.

When I finally reached the front of the line, I dropped all of my documents on the desk in front of the clerk, and blurted out, “Hi, I’m here to get my learner’s permit—I have my passport, my social security card, my voter registration, and the form.”

The clerk opened my passport to the ID page, glanced at everything else, smiled at me, and said “looks good,” before he gave me my ticket, with the number 5016.

The ticket puts you in the real line—the DMV’s digital line. When your number comes up on the televi-

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sion screens above the waiting area (I admit this is a meaningless phrase since the whole DMV is really a waiting area), it’s your time to shine under bureaucracy’s fluorescent light. +++ Limited self-awareness may be the cause of fear or other strong emotional responses. The more you know about yourself and why you act a certain way, the better you can control your actions. If you can predict the emotional responses of other drivers, you can better prepare your own responses.

The chairs in the waiting area are arranged in backto-back rows. Alongside the large windows, it almost looks like an airport terminal, though rather than providing a view of planes leaving for other, better places, there’s just the Rhode Island Traffic Tribunal. The Adult Correctional Institute is also nearby—another, darker site of bureaucracy—perhaps run as seamlessly as the DMV. There’s another set of inner windows that provide a view of the ground-floor atrium below. From the center, the four walls reach to the top of the building that enclose the floors above, like building façades. On one of these walls, a banner hangs with the words “Customer Service Is Our Priority!” The building’s layout is that of a poorly-formed panopticon—they couldn’t even bother to make it a circle, and for some reason there are blinds on many of these inner windows. The building is not so much meant for watching as it is for waiting. Besides the handful of booths staffed by clerks, where the DMV’s actual services are carried out.

In the second-floor waiting area, I watched as a state trooper stood by one of the inner windows, peering down with a focused but relaxed look on his face. He caught me staring. I looked back down at my phone. +++ It is easy to become angry with another person or driver without knowing exactly why. Drivers have different goals. Sometimes you are in a hurry. Remember, however, that other drivers do not know your goals or have anything against you.

The first line to get my ticket only took about 20 minutes. From there, it took about two hours for my number to finally be called. In America, the DMV is a cultural shorthand for dreary hours of waiting and incompetent bureaucrats, but I mostly found myself entertained. The faces of the older people around me, many of whom had brought their children or were missing work, suggested that my amusement was an anomaly, a product of the novelty of the experience and the fact that I didn’t have anywhere else I needed to be that morning.

Next to the ticket numbers, the DMV TV screens showed a series of advertisements on a loop, including ones for a law firm that will represent people contesting their traffic tickets and a personal breathalyzer. The latter seemed at least somewhat questionable—I still have yet to actually operate a car, but I would like to think that if I were tipsy enough to consider using a breathalyzer to check my blood-alcohol-content, I simply wouldn’t drive. And after reading the Rhode

Island Driver’s Manual cover-to-cover the night before in preparation for my permit test, which urges drivers not to drink at all with a litany of terrifying statistics about drunk driving-related deaths, I was particularly confused by the DMV’s apparent endorsement of this product. Then again, it was unclear why the DMV even had a closed-circuit television channel—were all the patrons who had woken up at the crack of dawn to be here supposed to be interested?

I was working my way through this problem when my number was finally called, at around 10:50AM. Finally, this was my moment. I went up to my assigned counter, presented my documents and ticket, and was given another ticket that allowed me to take the permit test. I entered the computer lab in which the test was administered, presented my ticket at yet another counter, and was told which computer to take the test at.

The DMV lost its novelty when I began the test and found myself guessing on most of the questions—I’d clearly spent too much time on the sections of the Driver’s Manual that gave oddly helpful advice for dealing with your emotions while driving, and not enough time on the technical details of driving—the meanings of various signs, parking distances, the steps involved in making a turn, and right-of-way rules. Losing one morning to this place was perfectly fine for me, but the idea of making a second trip to wait two hours and retake a multiple choice test yet again sounded miserable.

I finished the test and hit the submit button. I resigned myself to this possibility—only for the screen to announce in a blue pixelated font that I had passed. +++ TEXTING WHILE DRIVING IS FORBIDDEN IN THE STATE OF RHODE ISLAND! Evidence suggests that text messaging (or texting) often requires the driver to both look at the phone and manipulate the keypad with one’s hand.

I stood in the remaining two lines triumphantly. The first was to check out of the testing area, the last was to take my photo and sign my name for the permit.

I came away with a printed-out piece of paper that served as a stand-in for my actual, hard plastic permit, which should arrive in the mail any day now. I still have a mandatory 30-day wait, at least one road test, and another trip to the DMV between now and the moment when I will finally be allowed to drive. But my name, photo, and address are already in a new database, deep in the Rhode Island DMV’s hard drive, my own little mark on the cold, bureaucratic heart of the Ocean State.

JANE ARGODALE B’18 would like to drive to another universe, once she may legally do so.

MARCH 10, 2017

A HUMANIZING EDUCATION An interview with Antonia Dardes and Jeff Duncan-Andrade Anne Fosburg ILLUSTRATION BY Isabelle Rea DESIGN BY Celeste Matsui BY

Critical pedagogy is an emancipatory approach to education. The practice maintains that methods of teaching and learning must respond to the current social, political, and historical climate by modeling the dynamics of a more just world. It is grounded in recognizing the humanity of both students and educators. The framework began through Brazilian educator and activist Paulo Freire’s participatory adult literacy projects in the 1940s and 1950s. These projects were the basis of Freire’s foundational text, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, which proposes methods to contextualize and humanize educational communities.

I’m speaking with Antonia Darder, a Puerto Rican scholar, poet, and activist who is an endowed chair of ethics and moral leadership at the School of Education at Loyola Marymount University, and Jeff Duncan-Andrade, an associate professor in Education at San Francisco State University and a high school teacher in Oakland, California. Darder is the author of three books on critical pedagogy, most recently A Dissident Voice, and Duncan-Andrade is the author of The Art of Critical Pedagogy—his research interests include urban schooling and curriculum reform. Below we discuss approaches to critical pedagogy, the importance of educating in political crisis, and the structural barriers universities have institutionalized to accessible, critical education. +++ The College Hill Independent: How do you see critical pedagogy fitting into the current political moment?

Are there different demands on those involved in educational communities?

Antonia Darder: What happens when someone like Trump comes into the White House is that we begin to experience a great deal of pressure, and that pressure begins to be felt more broadly than just by those who have historically lived in economically, culturally, and politically oppressed conditions. In that respect, I’m glad about it. I hope that maybe it will be a historical moment that will be catalytic and push us toward a more humanizing understanding of ourselves. I hope that we will begin to understand that we need to find another way of creating community across difference rather than having the annihilation of difference.

People have taken critical pedagogy and reinvented it in relationship to disability studies, in relationship to feminism, in relationship to racialized populations, and that is a really wonderful phenomenon. My hope is that people can become a bit more politically mature in understanding critical pedagogy and understanding its possibilities not as a formula and end-goal but as a set of principles that can help us think differently about the world.

Jeff Duncan-Andrade: A lot of the suffering that we see around the world is the direct result of the colonial project. One of the mistakes that’s made by educators in this country is operating from an ahistorical perspective. If you’re going to talk about a project of freedom or democracy you have to go back to the foundation.

Public schools in this nation were founded as a colonial project, and we’re making all these adjustments in schools to the curriculum and the pedagogy without actually interrogating the foundation, the purpose.

What are public schools for? Why do we send kids to public schools for 13 years? If the answer to that question isn’t to create wellness and justice, then everything that you do going forward is going to be corruptible. We keep measuring all these things that are really a measure of compliance with the historical imperative of the colonial project, which is to create institutional rationalization for inequality.

The Indy: Could you speak to the tension of thinking about critical pedagogy as an object of study versus thinking about it as a set of tools or a worldview?

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

AD: I think that critical pedagogy is mostly a way of thinking about the world. It’s not a formula of how to make sense of it, it’s just saying that in order to make sense of the world, we must engage a multiplicity of dimensions and relationships. There’s a tendency for people to look for formulas. So much about this is being able to think in a multi-dimensional way, with greater complexity, with greater ambiguity, rather than to look for certainty in ways that actually end up functioning in a pretty authoritarian manner. There’s got to be a moral compass. Within critical pedagogy that moral compass begins with the notion that education must be uncompromisingly focused on engaging the oppression that the majority of people in the world are subjected to. Part of this is understanding that in order to create an inclusive world, we have think about how our system continues to produce have-nots.

Critical pedagogy also requires a redefinition of what it means to have, which requires stepping outside capitalist logic.

We need to think about the political economy in a different way. We need to think about the needs of communities differently. We need to think about solving problems in a way that is grounded more in the realities of the lives of the people who are most affected by political policies.

The Indy: I think that part of that project is opening up our definitions of value, and identifying how we’ve internalized the logic of a capitalist economic system in our thinking about relationships and communities.

How might the university community be able to provide channels for that cognitive work to happen in service of liberatory education?

AD: This issue is far greater than a cognitive issue. We are struggling to find the language that critiques and engages the problematic roots of certain questions.

How can we work in the interests of democratic life and a more humanizing education?

JDA: I think critical pedagogy has to start somewhere, and I think we see that perhaps best modeled in departments of Ethnic Studies or departments that are explicitly taking on forms of structural inequality in our society. But Ethnic Studies runs the risk of being trapped in its own department and then facing the narrative of, “Oh, if you want to talk about these things you go to Ethnic Studies, but in history or literature or sociology or psychology we don’t have room for that—you have to go to Ethnic Studies to have that conversation.” If we have these spaces in universities where we can have these critical conversations, what does it mean for those conversations to become a part of an institutional culture? What does it mean to have this frame as a normalized part of every instructional paradigm?

The Indy: How do you navigate the tensions of being committed to emancipatory pedagogy, or education that confronts inequality, in the context of a university that continues to reproduce systemic oppression?

AD: Well I don’t think you can go anywhere and not hit contradictions and conflicts. You can’t even do it in people’s personal lives, let alone the lives of institutions. It’s first and foremost recognizing that these contradictions are going to be there, and they are, to a certain extent, fundamental. I am very frustrated with these universities—I think one of the greatest problems we’re dealing with is that they were set up for the elite, and when you go to their foundations you find that they weren’t for women, they weren’t for people from subaltern [lower-status] classes. They perpetuate a particular culture of dominance.

But you also see a kind of democratic rhetoric that moves through the university. So you’ve got a tension between the dominant paradigm of the institution and these liberal values that have followed these institutions since their inception. And suddenly

there’s a whole larger societal push to be more accessible. One of the powers of hegemony is that it adjusts to and accommodates the pressures that are being put on it while discarding that which would require deep structural change. Educators are struggling with what’s on the surface. It’s tough because you often can get a certain amount of change on the surface, but then you begin to see that it’s just changing the surface and the problems are still being carried out with the same values, ambitions, and perspectives that in the end leads to the same kinds of exclusion.

Somehow we have to get down to what is informing a university’s values and relationships and behaviors. We have to create a more dialectical relationship between how we engage the surface questions and the ethical and cultural questions undergirding the surface that determine who’s in control, where the money goes, how the elements of power are configured, what legitimate knowledge is considered to be, and what is alternative.

The Indy: I’m thinking about the idea that philosopher and social activist Grace Lee Boggs has written about politics as a living practice that exists on every scale of our lives, and the incredibly hopeful potential of that kind of all-pervasiveness of the political. What are your thoughts?

AD: I keep looking for the power of solidarity. How do we build solidarity around difference? We have differences that we have to respect and they don’t have to destroy our capacity for solidarity. Part of the struggle is addressing both intellectual formation and the kind of bankruptcy of community that seems to come along with intellectual formation. If you’re my comrade, if you’re my sibling in the struggle, then I have to care about your evolution. And I should be able to expect you to care about mine. This is what community is about. It’s a lot of what Paulo Freire meant when he talked about the issue of humility. For him it had to do with understanding ourselves as interconnected. Once we see ourselves as interconnected then there’s a sense that in order for me to continue my journey—I need you and we need each other. Our paths cross from moment to moment. Somehow the things we do are beyond simply ourselves.

INTERVIEWS

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THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

LITERARY

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friday 3.10 Native Nations Rise RI State House / 10am Show up in solidarity with RI’s Indigenous communities as the Standing Rock Sioux march on Washington in defense of their sovereignty.

Proxies Psychic Readings / 8pm What are the objects, voices, sensations that represent hope?

“Proxies” is a community space for listening, healing, playing into the histories and futures of folks at the margins. Feat. the Indy’s own Stefania Gomez!

saturday 3.11 Workshop: Getting Started with Backyard Chickens NRT’s Sheep Pasture (North Easton, MA ) / 9am Per the Code of Ordinances of the City of Providence, residents are allowed to keep a maximum of six hens within city limits!

Absolutely no roosters though.

saturday 3.11 - sunday 3.12 “Engineer it! Shadow Science” Providence Children’s Museum / 11am We’re unsure about this one. Your kid will either learn how flashlights work, or get pulled in to doing undercover recon for the deep state. Either way, it’s free with admission.

sunday 3.12 Winter Tree ID The Arboretum at Blithewold (Bristol, RI) / 2pm Blithewold (whose name I won’t make fun of because there’s already a lot of mean humoUr about British stuff in this week’s Indy) is a fancy 19th-century mansion and gardens about half an hour south of Providence. Reflect on social mobility at this guided tour of the estate’s “prized collection of trees.” Rich people will collect anything!

monday 3.13 Knife Defense: Reverse Hold Seminar Red Seal Martial Arts (Lakeville, MA) / 8pm For only $30, learn the basics of “Hard Single Strikes, Combinations Attacks, ‘Woodpecker’ Attacks, and ever-dangerous Grab-n-Stab Attacks.” tbh, I’d rather learn to ID trees.

Glenn Jones w/ Laura Baird and LaRochelle AS220, 8pm (free) Glenn Jones is a guitarist I really love. He makes music in the American Primitive style, so if you’re into John Fahey or anything like that, you should for sure go. One time I drove three hours to see him play at a tea shop in Charlottesville, Virginia.

He kept introducing songs as being about specific places in New Jersey, but none of them had any words.

tuesday 3.14

Ladies Rock Camp Final Showcase Aurora / 7pm New lady musicians playing songs they just wrote! Featuring drums instruction by the multitalented Ashley Guerrero, who also RI Young Republicans Meet and Greet Bo’s Billiards / 7pm made this here embroidery: Tuesday is also pi day. This list writer is not not not saying you should go throw a pie at a Young Republican, but the address of Bo’s Billiards is 33 Lambert Lind Highway, Warwick, RI.

wednesday 3.15 Socializing with Socialists Courtside Sports Pub (Cambridge, MA) / 6pm Hosted by the Boston Democratic Socialists of America, this meetup offers a space to build solidarity, especially for those new to organizing. Leave your pies at home, these folks seem nice.

thursday 3.16

No Fats No Femmes: An Interactive Discussion with Jamal Lewis Brown University’s Petteruti Lounge / 7pm Activist and performance artist Jamal Lewis presents clips from their documentary, No Fats No Femmes, an interrogation of desire and digital media. weekly alternative fact: