The College Hill Independent Vol. 34 Issue 4

THE

COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT A BROWN / RISD WEEKLY

MAR 03 2017

34

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COVER

Tar Baby Chelsea Alexander

NEWS 02

Week in Animal Disorders Signe Swanson, Jack Brook, and Sam Samore

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Statement on Standing Rock Native Americans at Brown

METRO A BROWN / RISD WEEKLY VOLUME 34 / ISSUE 04 MAR 03 2017

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Riding the Wave Zack Kligler

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"Come on! Wow! Woo!" Chris Packs

ARTS FROM THE EDITORS

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Today, we are reflecting on what Donald Trump’s travel ban means for members of our community.

Mattress Surfing Rebecca Hansen

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They Know that We Know Noah Ezer

For Khaled Almilaji, a doctor from Aleppo, Syria, Trump’s travel ban meant that he couldn’t come back to Providence to finish his Masters in Public Health at Brown University. It also means that he is unable to reunite with his pregnant wife who lives in the United States. Khaled traveled to Turkey to assist with humanitarian work for his home country. He was about to take a plane back to Rhode Island when he found out that the US Consulate had revoked his student visa. This happened on January 17, 2017. He remains in Turkey.

Help us bringing back Khaled to Providence. Use the hashtag #KhaledBackToBrown and find the petition demanding his return at goo.gl/forms/nfjUgzE0L98jlif82

FEATURES 05

Against Association Neidin Hernandez

07

The People's Memory Ilgın Güney Korugan

TECH 15

Warhammer William Samosir

LITERARY 17

— CRS

Quarters Stella Akua Mensah

EPHEMERA 14

Sketches Jake Shore

X 18

MANAGING EDITORS Will Tavlin Kelton Ellis Dolma Ombadykow

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

TECH Jonah Max Malcolm Drenttel

X Liby Hays Nicole Cochary

OCCULT Lance Gloss Robin Manley

LIST Alec Mapes-Frances

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

eek Jo-Ann Huynh

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 Cliare 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 Maria Cano-Flavia THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT — 69 BROWN ST PO BOX 1930 PROVIDENCE, RI 02912

THEINDY.ORG / @THEINDY_TWEETS

WEEK IN ANIMAL DISASTERS BY

Signe Swanson, Jack Brook, and Sam Samore ILLUSTRATION BY Gabriel Matesanz

BOVINE CHRONICLES

NUCLEAR MELTDOWN IS (NOT) A BOAR It’s safe to say that the weather has been wrong these days on planet Earth. This fact is particularly true in the Czech Republic, where an unusually cold winter has local wild boars resorting to a diet of ‘false truffles.’ Hidden under the snow, these ‘shrooms’ are just as deceptive as their name implies. While truffles do confer nutrients to the wild boars, the cost of this nourishment is steep: they have been absorbing the radioactive isotope Caesium-137 for all thirty years since Ukraine’s Chernobyl Disaster, when at least 5 percent of the Chernobyl power plant’s radioactive reactor core spilled into the surrounding environment.

In 2017, wild, angry pigs are the real life torch-bearers of nuclear meltdown, running around the Sumava mountain region with contaminated flesh.

The boar has a proud history of symbolizing strength in cultures around the world. The wild boar is a symbol of courage and ferocity in Celtic and Arthurian lore. In Hayao Miyazaki’s animated epic Princess Mononoke (1999), the boar is the guardian of the forest.

In Rhode Island, the boar is the face of cold cuts. In the Czech Republic, wild boar meat is a delicacy, a traditional component of hearty Czech goulashes. Its sudden inedibility poses a threat to stew, not to mention the heart and soul of this national dish.

This isn’t the first time that radiation from Chernobyl has left its glowing marks on traditional cuisine.

The 1986 disaster immediately brought about bans on food exports from countries as far away as Norway, devastating European import stores in immigrant neighborhoods across America. Today’s a-boar-ration threatens mushroom picking—a classic Eastern European leisure sport. (In elementary Russian textbooks from the 80s, it’s common to see the phrase “I pick mushrooms” taught alongside words like “love,” and “Sunday.” ) It is hard to find representations of post-Soviet Eastern Europe that do not portray the region as monolithically decrepit and folksy. The same reason why we call old-lady headscarves babushkas in homage to the Slavic grandmother is the reason why we apply the image of a still-writhing Chernobyl to everything beyond the now-drawn Iron Curtain. Pictures of the Chernobyl plant—the shell of a nuclear dream enveloped in weeds—support American stereotypes about the borscht belt. Former Soviets are day-drunk in Adidas tracksuits. They have pet bears on unicycles.

Mafia connections abound: Moscow-based pop duo t.A.T.u.’s third most popular song on Spotify proclaims loudly and clearly: “NOT GONNA GET US!” Most importantly, Putin is a con artist ex-KGB authoritarian imperialist. But is Trump any different?

Do we not have gross problems of environmental racism in the US? There may be radioactive mushrooms in Eastern Europe, but the United States is a few pithy executive orders away from seeing the EPA abolished.

America is bad. Russia is bad. But somewhere in a very icy field near the Austrian border, I wish I could be like the boars: carefree, eating mushrooms, unbothered by the stakes of the word ‘false.’

-SS

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

Freddie remembered a time when things were different. When he could look up and feel a breeze against his face, walk across an open pasture with grass, and stand around without a care in the world, chewing cud with his friends. He had dreams then.

Until they came for him. Took him to a dim room in a concrete jungle far away from the open hill, surrounded by strangers, huddled dirty and catatonic, pressed together in caged rooms. Once a week, on Fridays, some from their number taken away, never seen again.

He saw light ahead, rushed forward past cages and bloody floors and the hind legs of fellow bovines hanging from racks, out into sunlight. He paused, took his bearings. Buildings rose up all around, higher than any he had ever known. Giant monsters roared by; people everywhere began to stare and point. A sign on the corner read, Welcome to Jamaica, Queens. He didn’t know where that was, but he knew he had to find his pasture. The shout of his captor jolted him into action; he began the brief, glorious act that would define his life, trotting forward with the frantic bovine energy, crying out to the masses for help—but when he looked closer he saw to his horror that some among them clutched hunks of his fellows in their hands.

With equal shock they looked back as their food ran past them.

If you were walking down 165th Street in Jamaica Queens, on the afternoon of January 21, 2017, you would have seen Freddie in his last ditch effort to avoid the grisly fate that awaits stock cattle. The authorities eventually detained him and managed to wrangle him back to his cell in the Archer Hallel Live Poultry shop. Freddie’s captors informed the press that he would be executed the next day, as intended.

But Mike Stura had different plans. An animal rights activist who ran the Skyland Animals Sanctuary & Rescue Center in New Jersey, Stura saw the news of Freddie’s plight on TV and frantically drove overnight with his trailer to the slaughterhouse. The next day, he managed to bargain for Freddie’s release.

The epic saga—which circulated widely in the bovine community—appears to have inspired his fellow steers. A month later, a bull broke free of his confines in another Queens slaughterhouse and evaded authorities for several hours. Lacking Freddie’s good fortune, however, the bull suffered serious injuries and died as police detained him with high powered tranquilizers.

Perhaps a not-so-subtle sign from the universe telling New Yorkers to become vegetarians.

-JB

BEE AFRAID, BEE VERY AFRAID “Why are there bees? Where are they coming from?

And why are they in a very specific area of the beach?”

These are the chilling words of Martha Duff, resident of Naples, Florida, as reported by NBC Miami. She was responding to the thousands of dead bees who have recently been washing up on the shore of Naples beach, in Southwest Florida on the Gulf of Mexico. No one can quite figure out the cause of the phenomenon—as one expert told NBC, bees on the beach is very unusual.

Of course, for those of us connected to the bee world, a different question poses itself: “Why are there humans?” We are in the midst of a man-made catastrobee, a climate change and pesticide driven decline in bee population so precipitous that former president Bee-rock Obama implemented the first ever national strategy for improving the health of bees in the spring of 2015.

But bee-death still looms. Bayer, a chemical, pharmaceutical and life sciences company, whose products include the neonicotinoid insecticides largely responsible for the bees’ demise, is currently seeking to merge with Monsanto, the massive multinational agricultural corporation (pending regulatory approval). Should the merger go through, it will mean unprecedented expansion of the use of neonicotinoids on farms around the world, spelling certain trage-bee.

In November 2016, a sudden proliferation of memes regarding Jerry Seinfeld’s 2007 animated film Bee Movie appeared across social media. They were mostly YouTube videos with titles such as, “The entire bee movie but every time they say bee it gets faster,” “The Bee Movie But every time they say Bee, Shrek Screams ‘DONKEY’,” or “The Bee Movie trailer but every time it says ‘bee’ the full bee movie is played at 30 times speed.” I would like to propose my own: The Bee Movie but every time they say ‘bee’ you do something to save the bees.

“Why are there bees?” Martha asks. Does evolution have a goal? I could not say. But the fact remains that the bees are here, in the “very specific area of the beach,” and they are dying. What can we do? SumOfUs, an advocacy organization, is attempting to use legal routes to stop the merger. They are accepting donations for the effort.

Bee the change you want to bee in the world.

-SS

NEWS

02

RAISING PRICES, CLOSING DOORS RIPTA fare hike impacts Rhode Island's most vulnerable

BY Zack

Kligler

ILLUSTRATION BY Nora

Gosselin

content warning: mental illness, isolation, stateviolence Blossom Segaloff lives on the East Side, in a small apartment in an affordable housing community intended for seniors. Paintings by her mother and late husband hang from the walls of her apartment. She proudly shows me a portrait her mother painted of her when she was eight years old. In it, Segaloff stands in a red hat against a backdrop of pale blue flowers. She’s kept the painting since childhood, but this is the first apartment in which she’s had enough space to display it. It now hangs over her bed. At 86 years old, Segaloff lives almost entirely off her monthly $725 social security benefit. She says that her monthly payment increased only two dollars from last year. “What in the world do these people think?” Segaloff laughed resignedly as she spoke. “How could they possibly think there’s been only two dollars of an increase in the price of things?” Living on a fixed income, every aspect of Segaloff’s life has to be budgeted. She pulled out a notice from her building’s administration warning that the price of laundry had increased several dollars to offset the cost of new machines.

“Things keep going up,” she says. Since the beginning of last month, one new expense has stretched Segaloff’s budget even closer to its breaking point.

On February 1, 2017, the state of Rhode Island officially terminated a four-decade-old program whereby low-income seniors and people with disabilities were granted no-fare passes on transit offered by the Rhode Island Public Transportation Authority (RIPTA). The program’s termination affects nearly 4,000 seniors and 9,000 Rhode Islanders with disabilities. RIPTA’s original policy proposal called for an increase to $1 for a ride and 50 cents to transfer, half the cost of the full RIPTA fare. But after public pushback lead by organizations such as the Rhode Island Organizing Project (RIOP), Rhode Island Coalition for the Homeless (RICH), and the Senior Agenda Coalition of Rhode Island, Governor Gina Raimondo pressured the RIPTA board to instead increase fares to 50 cents per ride and 25 cents per transfer. While this reduction was a win for community opponents of the fare hike, the 50 cent fare hike is still a debilitating blow to many Rhode Islanders. Under a 50 cent fare, a mere four bus rides completely offsets this year’s $2 increase in monthly benefits. For Segaloff and thousands of others living under similar circumstances, a few extra dollars can make or break a monthly budget already strained to its limit.

The fare increase comes after years of financial struggle for RIPTA, and a two-year fight between Governor Raimondo, state legislators, the RIPTA administration, and local advocacy organizations seeking to prevent the increase. In an attempt to mitigate the impacts of the hike, the Governor has instituted a pilot program whereby the state distributes a limited number of free ten-ride passes monthly to seniors and veterans.

But the program does not provide enough passes to distribute to all of those seniors and veterans affected, and the passes themselves cover less than a third of the financial burden these communities now face, as no-fare pass users typically ride the bus more than thirty times each month. Furthermore, the ten ride passes are not available to the larger group of riders who are disabled.

Less than a month into the new reduced-fare program, the Independent sat down with several Providence residents, like Segaloff, to discuss the ways in which the fare increase is already impacting their access to resources.

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METRO

+++ Since the fare increase, Segaloff, who has limited mobility, has had difficulty making it to her regular doctor’s appointments. Segaloff’s struggle is not an uncommon one. Nearly 10 percent of Rhode Island’s seniors live below the federal poverty line, which, according to the Department of Human Services’ most recent report, is the largest percentage of people in any Northeast state.

Meanwhile, 28 percent of Rhode Island residents with disabilities live in poverty, compared with 12 percent of the general population, as reported by the 2016 RI Disability Compendium. Most of these Rhode Islanders are unable to afford private transportation, and both seniors and those living with disabilities often have more difficulty walking long distances. Seniors and people with disabilities are also more in need of accessible healthcare and more dependent on RIPTA than others. For those who live in Providence’s low-income and predominantly Black and Latinx neighborhoods, where healthcare resources are already particularly scarce, the new fare compounds the difficulty of getting proper healthcare.

Many of those who spoke to the Independent described their difficulty accessing care under the new system.

Wilfredo Santana attends the Oasis Center, a community space and support facility for adults with mental disabilities. Santana described the way the new fare was impacting his health, “I had to cancel a bunch of doctors appointments that I really needed. I have a problem with my ear and it could cause a complication cancelling the appointments because I haven’t been able to get back and forth.” Santana said that if he doesn’t have an appointment soon, it’s possible he could lose his ear.

Wendy Thomas, a lifelong Rhode Island resident and member of the RIOP, has had similar problems accessing medical care. After enduring three heart attacks and a hip replacement by age 52, Thomas’s health problems forced her to retire early. She now lives mostly on her monthly Social Security disability check. Thomas explains that she’s now on twelve different medications, and recently had to pay $1.50 to go to and from her pharmacy only to discover that one of her copays had soared from $3 to $50—part of a larger trend of price increases on common medications. Thomas couldn’t afford her medication this month, and added that she had been feeling the physical consequences of the increase directly. “I’ve had a lot of chest pain the past two days and I think it’s the anxiety from all of this stuff going on,” she told the Independent. Christine Tate, another member of RIOP, has also had trouble affording medication: “I can’t choose between my medicine and the bus. It’s insulin, I need that. I’ve got two more prescriptions to pick up this month. If you go a quarter into [your budget] you either don’t have your prescription copays or you don’t have a ticket to the pharmacy.”

Many of those who have had their passes revoked have also struggled with food insecurity. Seniors and people with disabilities are often less able to carry large quantities of groceries in one trip. As a result, many have been forced to choose between spending extra money on a bus fare to a large supermarket multiple times per week, or buying at higher prices at local grocery stores.

Tate described the issue on a small scale: “At the corner store, a little bottle of hot sauce like this is $3.49,” she held out her fingers to demonstrate the size, “Come on,

for that you could get a big bottle at Stop n’ Shop or Price Rite.” Segaloff described shopping at the supermarket as one of her primary social activities. “I tend to go to the market at least every couple of days. And there I’m known, people are friendly to me, they know me by name… in a way it’s my little social club.” Since her pass was revoked, Segaloff has had to reconsider the necessity of such small pleasures. Meanwhile, many who have had their passes revoked can also no longer afford to travel to soup kitchens for free meals. RIOP reports that attendance at the Providence In-Town Churches Association soup kitchen is down 25 percent since the beginning of the month.

The social isolation imposed by the fare increase has also had a serious impact on the health of many people living with mental illness. The financial burden of even a 50 cent pass lead many of those who spoke with the Independent to choose confinement in their own homes over the risk of breaking their budget. Tate normally manages to volunteer at the soup kitchen at Mathewson Street Church four or five days a week. Soon after the fare increase, however, the cost of the bus had already become prohibitive. She says that the week before she we met, she spent an entire seven days in her apartment, unable to get to her regular appointments and commitments for fear of breaking her budget. Tate suffers from depression, and after a week alone she noticed she was losing the willpower to leave the house entirely. She teared up in frustration as she explained the difficulty she experienced and her anger at the state: “Why can’t they help us be without depression? We are without food, we can’t even get the money together to get on the bus and go see a person. The more we stay inside, the [greater the] depression.” At the time we spoke, Tate didn’t know how she was going to get to her psychiatrist appointment on the East Side later that week. Santana expressed a sentiment similar to Tate’s: “If I couldn’t get [out] I would probably be sitting at home depressed thinking about things I shouldn’t be thinking about, and that’s happening to a lot of people.” +++ Charlie Feldman, the Director of Communication at the Oasis Center, explained the consequences of the social isolation faced by people who struggle with mental health: “Mental illness can be isolating. People tend to withdraw from society because they’re either judged or not accepted. If people can come here, it gives people support to embrace recovery.” This cycle of isolation is a commonly acknowledged risk factor for mental illness. A 2009 review of data on mental health and social isolation in the Journal of Health and Social Behavior found that “a large body of research suggests a potentially strong correlation between…isolation and mental health problems, especially depression. Loneliness is a key predictor of depression among older adults, in particular.”

Feldman elaborated on the failed logic of the fare increase: “If people can’t afford to come here then that whole process is going to be disrupted, and recovery won’t happen. Then people end up in the hospital in the emergency room, and that will end up costing the state more money in the long run.” This is a common argument that has been made by detractors of the fare hike, who say that while ending the no-fare program may

MARCH 03, 2017

shrink RIPTA’s budget, it will ultimately cost the state more money in the long-run. Citing increased hospitalizations, particularly of people with mental illness, and increased incarceration of seniors and disabled people who cannot afford to travel to see their probation or parole officers, advocates for seniors and people with disabilities argue the policy will be an even greater burden on state resources than the no-fare program.

An estimated $900,000 would be required in the state budget to maintain the no-fare program. The cost of an average hospital stay, which for most no-fare pass users is covered by Medicare or Medicaid, hovers around $10,000, according to the Healthcare Cost and Utilization Project. Meanwhile, the Vera Institute for Justice reports the average yearly expense of incarcerating one person at Rhode Island’s Adult Correctional Institute as around $50,000. By this logic, fewer than 100 hospitalizations or fewer than 20 parole violations that result from the new fare would cost the state as much money as the no-fare program required to function.

In addition to increasing the burden on the state, activists add that the fare hike will also increase dependence on independent organizations and nonprofits that are already struggling to secure proper funding. Support organizations are under pressure to purchase and distribute free passes, but don’t have the funding to do so. The fare increase also prevents many retired low-income people who volunteer from attending their regular commitments at those same organizations. Thomas, who is a member of RIOP, said that in the second week of the month a nearby soup kitchen was already missing thirty regular volunteers. Thomas herself was unable to pay the bus fare to her regular volunteering commitment at Mathewson Street Church the day she spoke with the Independent, and instead had to walk from her home in Smith Hill. She didn’t know how she was going to walk back up the hill without putting her heart at risk. When asked how this affected her, Thomas replied simply with a sigh: “It’s one of those weeks.”

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

+++ Several Providence residents who had their passes revoked spoke of an acute feeling of disrespect on the part of the state. William Strom, a member of the Oasis Center, explained, “I don’t feel respected, I feel like I’m being put down because I’m disabled. It’s like we’re lowest on the totem pole and I don’t know what it’s going to take to get it through RIPTA’s head that we can’t afford this.” William Rogers, who attends the Center with Strom, put it succinctly, “It kills me that they’re trying to legislate against poverty.”

The February 1 fare increase hurts in marginalized communities particularly because of its place in a statewide pattern of targeting low-income Rhode Islanders.

A rash of attempted anti-panhandling ordinances last year, heavily fought by the Rhode Island ACLU, sought to target people experiencing homelessness and poverty across the state. On a larger scale, Governor Raimondo’s 2017/18 budget proposal makes clear the continuation of her administration’s policy of choking off state spending for social services and benefits, which her administration calls “consumption-oriented spending.” In particular Raimondo has publicized a $100 million savings in Medicaid spending, and aims to save $39 million more this year.

This proud proclamation rings particularly hollow in light of policies like the fare increase, which propagate negative health outcomes for many Rhode Islanders on Medicaid and Medicare. This realignment of the budget is framed by the administration as a forward thinking investment in growth, but amounts to the construction of Rhode Island’s ‘future’ on the backs of its most vulnerable.

The trend towards cuts in services and benefits is not without opposition by some more progressive lawmakers. State Rep. William W. O'Brien and others have already introduced bills that would reinstitute the no-fare program, but even in a best-case scenario, the legislation won’t be voted on and instituted until this

summer. In the meantime, Rhode Islanders like Christine Tate have been left out in the cold.

Tate has lived in Rhode Island for more than four decades. After moving to the state at age 18, she took up work as a nursing assistant and eventually raised a son and daughter in Providence. Throughout this time she worked side jobs in a clothing factory and as a hotel maid. After 21 years of nursing work, Tate was forced to move on from the job because of injuries she suffered to her back. Not one to resign herself, Tate went on to work in a restaurant kitchen for nine years. A back surgery and a hip replacement later, one day she got down on the floor and couldn’t get back up. Tate had to undergo a second back surgery. Qualifying for disability benefits, she reluctantly retired early. Today, Tate lives alone, her son passed away in 2003 and her daughter lives elsewhere. She gets by on around $700 a month in benefits. As Tate sat in the small RIOP office, she explained the depth of her disappointment in the state government. She summarized the anger and frustration felt by many Rhode Islanders with similar stories: “The people that stayed here, worked here, slaved here and made their lives about building up Providence, now they’re tearing us down…We already gave to the system, now the system should be able to give back to us.”

ZACK KLIGLER B’20 thinks public transport should stay public.

METRO

04

CRITERIA FOR MEMBERSHIP Racialized anti-gang policies target undocumented immigrants under Trump

BY Neidin

Hernandez Anzia Anderson Celeste Matsui

ILLUSTRATION BY DESIGN BY

Daniel Ramirez Medina was asleep in the living room of his father’s home in Des Moines, Washington on the morning of February 10, 2017, when agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) arrived at the front door with a warrant for his father’s arrest.

According to a report filed by the agents involved in the arrest, ICE received verbal permission to enter the house and upon encountering Ramirez immediately questioned him about his place of birth, his immigration status, and his criminal history. Ramirez was then taken into ICE custody and transported to Northwest Detention Center, a privately owned ICE holding facility in Tacoma, Washington where he remains to this day, contesting his detention from the inside of his cell.

Ramirez is a recipient of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), a federal program started by the Obama administration that provides work permits and protection from deportation for undocumented immigrants who came to the US under the age of 16.

ICE spokesperson Rose Richeson released a statement explaining that “Ramirez [was taken] into custody based on his admitted gang affiliation,” which Ramirez denies saying. His DACA status has been terminated over these allegations of affiliation.

On February 13, three days after Ramirez’s arrest, a group of immigrant and civil-rights attorneys headed

by Mark Rosenbaum filed a petition in Seattle federal court on his behalf asking for his immediate release on the grounds that his detention violates the Fourth and Fifth Amendments. The amended petition filed on February 22 argues that ICE assumed Ramirez was in a gang based on his race and tattoos “despite having no evidence to support its false allegations.” Determinations of gang membership do not require evidence of criminal activity and are often made based on the visual assessment of one or two law enforcement officials.

An ICE directive published in 2006 provides a list of ten criteria for identifying gang members. Evidence

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FEATURES

that might be used to classify an individual as a gang member includes tattoos representing a specific gang; public association with a known gang member; displays of gang signs or symbols; gang clothing; having been arrested with other gang members on two or more occasions; written or electronic correspondence implying membership; or identification as a gang member by a reliable third-party source, such as informants, jail, or prison. An individual need only meet two of the ten criteria in order to be classified as a gang member by ICE. Under these specifications, gang members can be identified based on their association with other gang members, creating an illogical and self-referential definition of the term rendering it meaningless. Determinations of gang membership can be made on the basis of unverifiable information provided by third-party sources.

The broadness and circularity of the criteria used in the identification of gang members have troubling implications. According to the rules put forth by ICE, if people believe someone is a gang member, then they are one.

The consequences of this fallacy carry dire consequences for brown and Black people, who are disproportionately classified as gang members based on established stereotypes of what a gang member is, who they are, and what they look like.

According to the brief filed by his lawyers, Ramirez was first questioned by ICE at the time of his father’s arrest. Ramirez presented agents with his DACA identification card and work permit. When agents asked him if he had ever been arrested he told them that he had. His single brush with the law occured in 2015, when he was arrested by a State Patrol trooper for speeding and was issued a ticket for $150. For ICE, this was justification enough to transport him to a holding facility for further questioning.

At the facility, court records filed by the Department of Justice (DOJ) say Ramirez was asked whether he had ever been involved in gang activity. “No, not no

more,” Ramirez responded. He explained that he had left California where he spent time hanging out with the Sureños, a Mexican-American street gang operating primarily out of the American Southwest. Ramirez also said that now he associates with the “the paizas.”

Although several minor gangs throughout the U.S. have names that include some variation of the word paisanos, or countrymen, the term is used colloquially among people of shared Mexican descent to denote camaraderie and friendship. ICE, however, took his statements as an admission of gang affiliation.

As he stated in court documents, Ramirez was born in La Paz, the capital of Baja California Sur, inspired the tattoo on his left forearm of a star filled in with blue ink and surrounded by the words “LA Paz BCS.” In the Department of Justice court documents, ICE asserts that BCS does not stand for “Baja California Sur,” as Ramirez claims but rather “Baja California Sureños,” providing further evidence of Ramirez’ gang membership, which Ramirez has consistently denied.

On the same day as his arrest, Ramirez filed a classification appeal with the Northwest Detention Center requesting to be removed from a high security gang unit to a lower custody level. As further evidence of his gang ties, ICE officials pointed to the written statement Ramirez provided on the appeal form that reads “I have gang affiliation with gangs so I wear an orange uniform.” Before this sentence, on the first line are faint pencil marks that appear to have been partially erased.

A brief filed by Ramirez’s lawyers alleges that the erased portion previously read “I came in and the officers said I have gang affiliation...so I wear an orange uniform,” and was altered to make it appear as though Ramirez had admitted gang affiliation. Whether or not the written statement was tampered with, the second and final sentence of the statement stands as an unequivocal denial of gang affiliation: “I do not have a criminal history,” writes Ramirez, “and I’m not affiliated with any gangs.”

MARCH 03, 2017

+++ President Donald Trump's executive order on immigration signed on January 27, 2017 has provided ICE with the legal backing to increase its arrest and deportation efforts, allowing ICE to expand its targets from people with serious criminal convictions to any undocumented person in the United States. Obama era-policies strongly discouraged ICE from questioning and detaining suspected undocumented bystanders or from carrying out pre-planned immigration raids. A fact sheet released by the Department of Homeland security stated that under Trump’s executive order: "ICE will not exempt classes or categories of removal aliens from potential enforcement...All of those present in violation of the immigration laws may be subject to immigration arrest, detention, and, if found removable by final order, removal from the United States." Trump’s campaign rhetoric on immigration was underpinned by efforts to generalize all undocumented people as criminals, focusing a disproportionate amount of attention and vitriol onto Muslim and Latinx immigrants. The executive order has delivered on Trump’s campaign promises to crack down on undocumented people.

The vague and subjective criteria for gang member classification offers ICE broad leeway for expediting deportation processes for those suspected of gang affiliation. Trump infamously launched his candidacy by characterizing the majority of undocumented Mexican immigrants as criminals, gang members, and rapists. In an interview with online publication the Intercept, Mizue Aizeki, the deputy director of the Immigrant Defense Project, said that “by throwing around the label of ‘criminal,’ the Trump administration will continue to exacerbate the harms caused by the extensive criminalization of communities of color—including racialized policing.”

According to the Washington Post, a concerted wave of immigration raids in mid-February resulted in the arrest

of 683 undocumented immigrants.

In California and other states, efforts have been made by immigration activists to shield federal law enforcement from accessing information on statewide gang databases. ICE uses a gang-tracking software application known as ICEGangs modeled on California’s CalGang database, which has come under fire for weak oversight, lack of transparency, and making excessive errors. A 2016 state audit examined four user agencies, including the Los Angeles Police Department and Sonoma County Sheriff Department, found that 23 percent of the roughly 150,000 entries could not be substantiated. Out of 100 individuals reviewed by auditors, 13 were inappropriately included. 93 percent of all individuals entered in CalGang were male and 70 percent were Latinx.

Recent sociological research indicates that the majority of U.S. cities remain largely segregated by race and socioeconomic status, a pernicious legacy of discriminatory housing processes and systemic concentrations of poverty within cities. Latinx people comprise the majority of entries in databases such as CalGang.

Due to the relative racial homogeneity of American families, neighborhoods, and communities, brown and Black people, disproportionately represented in gang databases, are more likely than people of other races to associate with known or suspected gang members. Law enforcement rely on visual cues about how a person dresses, how a person speaks, and where that person congregates in order to identify gang members, which makes brown and Black people far more likely to be identified as such than people of other races.

In the current political climate of increased hostility toward immigrants, undocumented or otherwise, racist anti-gang policies put undocumented Mexican immigrants in a precarious position. Daniel Ramirez Medina’s arrest is but one example of the fragility of measures designed to protect undocumented people. His DACA status and all of its protections were dissolved upon contested and unsubstantiated allegations of gang affiliation.

Applying for DACA is a burdensome process that can take up to four months to complete. The Department of Homeland Security also charges a filing fee and a biometrics fee, which totals around $500 per applicant and per renewal. In addition to having a clean criminal record and proof of high school enrollment or graduation, applicants must pass a series of FBI background checks intended to determine whether that person may present a threat to public safety or national security.

Ramirez was granted DACA status in 2014 and his status was renewed in 2016. That he passed successfully through the application on both occasions signals that there was no information uncovered in any background checks that would indicate gang affiliation. Ramirez’s classification as a gang affiliate was made unilaterally by the ICE agents involved in the February 10 raid on his home.

Trump’s executive order has called for the hiring of 10,000 new ICE agents and the expansion of the number of detention centers in the US. ICE has been empowered to target any undocumented immigrants convicted of a crime, no matter how small. The New York Times conducted interviews with 17 agents across the country and noted that several have described their jobs as becoming “fun.”

Daniel Ramirez Medina remains in the federal detention facility where he has been since his arrest on February 10. His next hearing is set for March 8 when a judge will decide, after hearing oral arguments, whether the case belongs in the US District Courts or immigration court.

NEIDIN HERNANDEZ B'19 is thinking about ways to resist.

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

FEATURES

06

IN CHILE, A PEOPLE’S HISTORY Memorializing state violence on their own terms

Ilgın Güney Korugan ILLUSTRATION BY Maggie Tseng DESIGN BY Celeste Matsui BY

The 38th building of Londres Street in Santiago de Chile has an important place in the memory of many Chileans. Over 200 civilians from leftist political parties were detained and tortured in the two-story building in a 10-month period between 1974 and 1975 during one of the most intense attacks by Augusto Pinochet’s military regime on the leftist opposition.

Immediately after the US-backed military coup against president Salvador Allende in 1973, General Augusto Pinochet—who led the coup—began a violent purge against Chile’s political left. The people targeted were mostly from the Revolutionary Left Movement (MIR), the Socialist Party, and the Communist Party.

During the dictatorship, which lasted until 1990, close to 80,000 people were forcibly interned in detention centers around the country. These centers were usually manned by the National Intelligence Organization (DINA), which used methods of torture to gain intelligence about the political opposition and resistance. Under Pinochet’s military government, more than 30,000 civilians were tortured, and 3,000 were murdered or forcibly disappeared. Though these are the official numbers reported by the Chilean government, many survivors believe that there were many more who were subjected to state violence in those years.

Since the regime, Londres 38 has been reclaimed by survivors and families of victims, and turned into an espacio de memorias. It’s appearance has been kept as similar as possible to when it was operated by the DINA. The squeaky floorboards are old and jagged, the rooms are empty, and every step echoes off the walls. The largest room on the second floor is where prisoners were interrogated, others on the first floor.

Alonso, one of the interns at Londres 38, tells me about the process of the building’s recuperation. The Chilean government tried hard to obscure the location, he says, but the people would not give up. There were protests outside of the building denouncing the government. Finally in 2005, 15 years after the military regime ended, Londres 38 was opened to the public in memoriam of those who were tortured or killed inside.

The current function of the building is to serve as a space for survivors to discuss their experiences and memories of the regime. Londres 38 holds workshops and discussions in an effort to actively counter the official memory, and connect the leftist struggle of the 1970s with the politics of the present. There are guided tours and discussions that are lead by the volunteers and interns. Alonso tells me that many of the visitors are either survivors or family members of victims of state violence who come to share their experiences.

Through these activities, survivors of the regime can collectively create their own history of Pinochet’s dictatorship. Alonso emphasizes the importance of this collective memory in the face of what he calls the “official memory” of the state. The government has, in fact, funded many sitios de la memoria around the same time that Londres 38 was recuperated in order to confront its violent past. The official memory around the era is one of victimhood, according to Alonso. He gives the example of the Museo de la Memoria y Los Derechos Humanos (Museum of Memory and Human Rights) inaugurated in 2010 by President Michelle Bachelet.

“The museo is a museum of the violation. They talk about victims. They don’t talk about resistance or survivors.” When the official memory of the dictatorship is

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one of victimhood, it can be easy to forget the resistance and power of the people. The space provides an opportunity for these stories to be heard and recorded as an act of defiance to the official memory.

In our discussion, Alonso focuses on the organization’s workshops that respond to the dictatorship and its negative legacies. José Huenante, for instance—a 16-year-old boy of Mapuche origin, the largest indigenous group in Chile, was forcibly disappeared by the Chilean police in 2005 under Bachelet’s government— was the first forced disappearance after the end of the dictatorship. The current government makes an effort to hide the state violence that has been taking place even after the military regime by continually emphasizing the violence of the Pinochet dictatorship.

The fact remains that Chile is still suffering from policies instigated during Pinochet’s rule. During the regime, a number of reforms, pushed by the US, were implemented in Chile’s constitution, which are still in effect to this day. Rapid privatization and environmental degradation are results of these laws past that place investors’ rights at a very high level. Londres 38 makes sure to address current political issues in relation to the legacy of the dictatorship during its workshops and guided tours.

Privatization reforms pushed by Pinochet have led to the expansion of Chile’s two biggest industries, copper mining and forestry, both of which operate on indigenous lands. Various Mapuche communities have also been struggling with state-sponsored construction projects that threaten to contaminate their land.

For instance, Mehuín, a fishing community in the south of Chile, has been resisting pipelines that would contaminate their ancestral home, after having protested for years the construction of a cellulose factory that killed all of the swans in their lake. Curarrehue,

another Mapuche community that is struggling with the state, is currently fighting to stop the construction of a hydroelectric dam that would cause cause damage to one of their rivers. The laws created under Pinochet that protect the rights of the investor over environmental or land rights make the struggle even harder for the people of Currarehue.

Since the current government still uses the constitution established under the dictatorship, a number of laws remain in place that criminalize political protest.

The Pinochet legacy is also visible in the Anti-Terrorism Law, a law that has been used by the democratic governments of Chile following the dictatorship to criminalize civilians of Mapuche descent. This has resulted in many arrests and state-induced disappearances, even after the dictatorship’s end.

The past and current struggles of the Mapuche communities and other Chileans remain hidden because the official memory of the dictatorship, supported through government-funded sites of memory, schoolbooks, and mass media attempts to purposefully silence Mapuche voices.

The Chilean government has adopted the phrase Nunca Más, never again, in relation to the sites of memory. Alonso tells me that he believes the slogan Nunca Más should be changed to No Más (no more).

ILGIN GÜNEY KORUGAN B’18 questions the state.

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FORGING HOME, FORGING INTIMACY ProvSlam and the next generation of youth poetry

BY

Chris Packs

ILLUSTRATION BY Teri

Minogue DESIGN BY Ruby Stenhouse

“I’m so excited, and you should be too.” Cutting through the animated flow of chatter, Charlotte Abotsi, the master of ceremonies and co-director of Providence Slam Poetry (or ProvSlam for short), passionately sets the tone of the evening. The subdued décor of AS220 and a comparatively invigorated audience provided the backdrop for the Youth Grand Slam Final on February 16, 2017. The slam elects five youth poets (19 and under) each year to represent Providence at Brave New Voices (BNV), an international youth poetry festival.

Set this year in San Francisco, California, BNV serves as a space for artistic growth and collaboration for youth poets from 72 cities across the world. In Charlotte’s words, “It’s a big fucking deal.”

Although only five out of the eight qualified performers would move on, beneath the competition lay a more powerful element of camaraderie and community.

“Ultimately, we try to harness the underlying competitive energy into collaborative energy, so that the space stays rooted in our shared love of writing and fosters growth over typified notions of success,” says Muggs Fogarty, another co-director of ProvSlam who has represented Providence seven times in slam festivals throughout the nation. Overseeing this election process are five random individuals from the crowd who serve as judges and who score each performance on a scale from 1.0-10.0. According to the ProvSlam website, judges must “not know any of the competitors personally,” and “[have] a pulse.”

Addressing the arbitrary role of the judges in her introductory remarks, Charlotte encouraged the crowd to be the real judge. She explained, “the judges ain’t shit. It’s up to you to sway the fuck out of the judges with applause and with love.” She quickly backtracked, adding, “just kidding, everyone is great.” The audience accepted the challenge, greeting every poet with shouts of encouragement and groans of disbelief at the judges’ scoring. The crowd’s distaste for the judging process while light-hearted, points to the challenge of the evening’s task: selecting a team of five to go San Francisco. +++ Originating in the mid-1980’s from the work of Marc Smith in Chicago, Slam poetry is considered the artistic descendant of jazz, hip hop, and beat poetry.

Seeking to separate himself from the insulated world of academic poetry, Smith thought that poetry should be performed, rather than merely read. Smith’s theories of competitive performance poetry influenced communities across the nation, including in Providence.

Jared Paul, founder of the Providence Youth Slam in 2002, recalled to the Independent how “Patricia Smith, one of the most famous spoken word artists...and Mike Brown, who were on that Boston team that represented Boston at nationals at the first time, came down to Providence to get the poetry reading started here––the First Poetry Slam.” After their founding in 1992, the Providence Slam Team went on to win the National Poetry Slam in ‘96; ProvSlam has remained an integral part of the national slam poetry scene ever since.

ProvSlam works as a platform for historically marginalized voices to engage in a public discourse through the lens of poetry and storytelling. In their mission statement, ProvSlam self-identifies as a community that “values respect and safety for all who enter our space, a diversity of voices, courageous engagement with language and truth, exposing silenced narratives, and supporting one another along the way.” The audience at AS220 reflected this intended mission: the youth that occupy the community, both at the Slams and through the organization’s workshops, use slam to make their voices heard on a number of issues—the

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

significance of which are certainly amplified in this time of cultural upheaval and renewed political oppression. Each year, the ProvSlam community forms a delegation to represent Providence at a number of slam poetry competitions. At the February slam, everyone had the BNV on their mind.

For those who had never been to a slam before, Charlotte explained that “we never start a slam without spilling some motherfucking blood.” This, of course, refers to the sacrificial poet round, which is intended as a reference point for judges and opens the official performances for the night. This evening’s sacrificial poet was last year’s Youth Grand Slam Champion, Sin Seven, who delivered a powerful indictment of America’s history of anti-Blackness by relating how the “slave house [has] turned to public house and slave ship [has] turned to prison bus.” Lines with this sort of resonance are met with passionate applause, snaps, claps, drumming on chairs, stomping on the ground, and vocal inflections. “Emmett turn to Rodney and now Rodney turn to Michael, they’re the same people they just got beaten at different times.” Yes! Oh! Come on! Wow! Woo! Perhaps the most visible element of continuity this evening was the call and response element of the poems, as poets and audience members fed off each other’s energy. “It’s always high energy,” says Alyssa St. Franc, a BNV team member this year, “you hear snaps, claps, people will moan, things like that. So it’s like a back-and-forth type thing so the energy is always like the audience is always alive, or like there’s always a reaction, whether it be good or bad.” In a break from normative performance, the poet and the audience feed off one another’s energies, adding to the sense of collaboration in the room.

Following Seven, who was joined by other BNV alums, the slam was split into three rounds, each featuring all eight poets. Methodically, poets came on stage and performed their original work. “It’s very bare—just you, your poem, and your body,” Muggs says. In response, Alyssa noted the importance of audience involvement, explaining how, “when you’re up there, and you’re like oh my god, I don’t know if someone’s going to like what I’m saying, and then they react as you’re reading it, it gives you like the power to like—it gives you the power to keep going and be better.” Indeed, poignant moments were most often derived from this sense of call and response. For example, in the final poem of the night, the future Youth Gland Slam Champion, Blessed Sheriff, opened energetically, “To the man-bun-wearing, no-shoeshippie who said he only dated Black girls.” Met with deafening applause, Blessed’s performance could barely be discerned amid the wave of positive feedback from the crowd.

While a few poets appeared nervous, the more confident ones soared over the muffled music from the next room over. Some chose to perform their work in a style influenced by rap, others embodied a slower cadence, drawn out, each word decided. Such stylistic differences, says Alyssa, work within the collaborative environment to motivate the poets to push their limits.

“Hearing other people’s styles and how they write and how they perform is really influential and helpful because you’re just like, well, I don’t know what else to do... So I mean just seeing other people do it, it’s the same thing, they just do it in different ways. And that’s part of what makes it really special.” This shared experimentation Alyssa refers to works to demystify the slam, allowing new performers to learn from the community as they enter in.

“Young people have to exist within a funny predicament of living highly regimented lives with littleto-no autonomy,” Muggs says. “Like having to raise

your hand to go to the bathroom while also being expected to make incredibly difficult decisions about life and self. So, having a place that is safe, that encourages expression without censorship, provides mentorship and collaborative opportunities, becomes an essential part to helping young people to start articulating and realizing who they are and who they want to be.” In this articulation of identity, such themes of experimentation with content and form rise to the surface of the ProvSlam community, as poets seek to balance their role as students with their creative lives on stage.

After an evening of celebrating each competitor’s poetic voice, the five ‘winners’ were chosen—the first ever delegation, says this year’s coach Chrysanthemum Tran, composed entirely of “all Black and brown girls” from Providence to be sent to BNV. Though the judges final decision was a reminder of the competition at hand, the poets felt supported either way. The moment was no longer about those who would take a plane to California, but about the more powerful themes and stories shared by performers and absorbed by the community that night. After the team was announced, the winners and losers were hardly discernible in the crowd, as every poet congratulated each other and interacted with the same sense of camaraderie they shared before the competition. When asked about the importance of the space ProvSlam cultivates, Muggs explains that “youth cultural production is always going to be at the forefront of any chosen [artistic] medium. It’s always going to be the youth who are making the most radical critiques and who are going to expose and articulate best the nuances of any current political/social climate. Personally, I think this generation is the most fearless, queer, intersectional, hilarious, and loving that I’ve been able to witness.”

CHRIS PACKS B’20 encourages you to donate to the BNV team’s travel fund, linked on the organization’s website, provslam.org

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KEEPING THE FIRE WITH US A Reflections on the #NoDAPL movement

BY A

collective of Native Americans at Brown (NAB) who went to Standing Rock Cano-Flavia DESIGN BY Ruby Stenhouse ILLUSTRATION BY Maria

In response to the proposed construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline in April 1, 2016, owned by Energy Transfer Partners, L.P., Native American activists of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe and their allies created several campsites in Cannon Ball, North Dakota. The activists, who refer to themselves as Water Protectors, began small grassroots resistance actions starting in April 2016 with the establishment of the Sacred Stone Camp on LaDonna Brave Bull Allard’s land on the Standing Rock Sioux reservation. Eventually, as the camp outgrew LaDonna’s property, another camp was formed—the Oceti Sakowin, along the banks of the Missouri River in the unceded land of the 1851 Fort Laramie Treaty.

Several calls to action against the Dakota Access Pipeline were made by LaDonna Brave Bull Allard, youth movements and organizations, and several tribal members of the Standing Rock Sioux tribe, whose 1851 Treaty rights were violated by the construction of the pipeline. Since the establishment of the camps, support came from over 200 tribes, non-Native supporters, and international campaigns and organizations.

In response to this large-scale mobilization of Water Protectors, police from 24 counties and 16 cities from 10 different states, along with private security forces hired by the Dakota Access Pipeline companies, have been involved in the militarized police presence at Standing Rock. As of November, total policing costs for Standing Rock within the state were $10.9 million, and the Morton County police have spent an additional $8 million, equipping police forces at Standing Rock with military-grade equipment including land-mine-resistant trucks, armored personnel carriers, rubber bullets, tear gas, water cannons, and pepper spray.

On January 24, 2017, Donald Trump signed an executive action renewing construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline and the Keystone XL Pipeline after further construction had been halted in December of 2016. This order effectively swept aside ongoing human rights abuse cases at the hands of police enforcement and legal precedents that rejected the legitimacy of the pipeline. The Dakota Access Pipeline will now carry 500,000 barrels of crude oil per day from the North Dakota Bakken oil fields to Illinois, crossing under the Missouri River and into Sioux lands outlined in the Fort Laramie Treaty, endangering the drinking water and environmental health of millions in the immediate vicinity of the pipeline on reservation lands and downstream of the pipeline.

An emergency evacuation order for the Oceti Sakowin camp issued by the governor of North Dakota and the Army Corps of Engineers was enforced on Wednesday, February 22, 2017. Protectors have gathered their belongings, camping gear, and cultural items. Longhouses and structures have been burned and left as ashes as a sign of respect and to avoid degradation by the police.

Although the camp has been evacuated, the resistance remains.

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+++ We, a collective of Native students at Brown University, visited Standing Rock and stayed at the Oceti Sakowin camp from November 17–20, 2016. We felt this was an important step for us to take in order to support the camps beyond financial means and to be a part of a movement we are all personally invested in. In the camp, we participated in orientations, attended meetings, helped construct traditional winterized houses, and worked in the main kitchens.

This experience was invaluable and sustaining. We are still reflecting on this moment and our experiences visiting the Oceti Sakowin camp. Some days, we can talk and laugh about our time there and we can give you the sorts of stories you want to hear—the types that will lift you up and give you hope. But other days, we are holding our breath waiting for the next piece of bad news about the people out there; some days we can’t focus because we are waiting to hear about what is going on. We are waiting to hear about our friends and families. Some days, there aren’t really words we can give you in this imperfect language, language which is not our own, to describe the experience of having been at Standing Rock.

For many of us, the camp was a place of renewal and resilience. This camp was a place of ceremony and as Native peoples, we cannot convey that experience with words. It was ceremony when we were helping Winona Kasto cook indigenous foods in her kitchen to feed Water Protectors, cutting vegetables, cooking stew, shucking corn, and serving food. While we helped clean up afterwards and move boxes of food in preparation for winter, we listened to Winona—her warmth and wisdom sustained us much more than we could have sustained her. It was ceremony as we met camp elders like Lee Sprague, who was a part of the Cold Water Rescue Team that helped plan actions against the pipeline along the Missouri River, while also ensuring the safety of water protectors in and along the river using traditional Anishinaabek winter and wild-ricing technologies. He was working to build Pueblo-style houses and an off-grid community in preparation for the sub-zero winter temperatures. The people we met, the stories we heard, and the songs we listened to are all sacred.

As young Native students who have entered this movement alongside many youth organizers, this moment in history builds upon the movements of our elders, who fought in past struggles. This movement has mobilized resistance to settler colonialism and built coalitions of indigenous peoples and people of color across diverse communities who have historically been oppressed. The teachers of these lessons of historic resistance against US empire have included the ancestors of the Lakota, Black freedom fighters of the Civil Rights era, the Black Panther Party, the American Indian Movement, the leaders of Idle No More, and environmental justice movements. We also recognize the labor

of women, gen folks and youn Standing Rock can improve ou more intention our common st We canno our trip to Stan elected, or wh friends and fam water cannons gratitude towa sent us out the support, and th Now, seve Dakota, the W Standing Rock are being force from the Digit of smoke rising Oceti Sakowin riverbanks in s tion. Seeing th above feels like were there. Th themselves, rem of resistance ar those who hav at Standing Ro this resistance people there, t there, the peop common histor tion, marginali owe it to them with us.

So after th time, we’ll hav Even after the Water Protecto the Dakota Ac tribe’s land. H ate our role in decolonize her come back to a and silences. S here, that cont go—from Prov still see violenc tions of power zation that too rooted themse in Standing Ro So what does r in solidarity wi When we different attem whether it’s at

MARCH 03, 2017

AND THE RESISTANCE IN US

nder non-conforming folks, LGBTQ+ ng people within these struggles and in the k movement. By recognizing their labor we ur future coalition-building in order to be nal with uplifting marginalized identities in truggles for liberation. ot explain to you what it was like to plan nding Rock as we watched Trump get hat it was like to leave camp and have our mily attacked hours later with flames, s, and rubber bullets. We feel immense ard everyone who checked in with us, who ere with their prayers, their love, their heir solidarity. eral months after our trip out to North Water Protectors and members of the k Sioux from the Oceti Sakowin camp ed from their homelands. Drone footage tal Smoke Signals website captured plumes g from the longhouse frames, with the n camp sprawled out across the Missouri skeletal resistance, preparing for evacuahe muddy network of camp roads from up e an eerie echo of what we saw when we he veins of campgrounds wrapped around minding all of us now that the movements re breathing, moving, and living through ve stood in solidarity with the movements ock. In this moment, we are reminded that will continue, and that we owe it to the the people who supported us in getting ple who shared news with us, who share ries of colonization, oppression, racializaization on this land in turtle island—we m to continue to carry this heart and life

he banks of the river flood in the springve to ask ourselves—what will come next? physical evacuation of the camp, the ors continue to resist the construction of ccess Pipeline on the Standing Rock Sioux Here, as students we will constantly negotiactivism and what it means to continue to re in this space at Brown University. We a campus full of pristine brick buildings Silence on the violences that happened tinue to this day. Wherever it is that we vidence to Bismarck and back again—we ce. These violences continue when institulike Brown do not talk about the coloniok place on this land. Violences spread and elves across turtle island, continuing today ock. University silence is always violence. resistance look like here, coming from and ith Standing Rock? e come here to Brown, we are met with mpts at dispossession. And so resistance, t Standing Rock or at Brown, involves

finding out how to reclaim, how to resist dispossession.

When we try to think of what resistance looks like at Brown, and what solidarity looks like for us within Native Americans at Brown, we try to think of the moments of love, the landscapes of community that we are able to create for ourselves within this place that allow for us to resist dispossession, that allow us to reclaim our voices, sense of selves and self-worth, the spaces that allow us to heal and feel whole. When we think of these moments of resistance and love, we think of the communities that stood with us as we worked to get Brown's Fall Weekend holiday changed to Indigenous Peoples’ Day, the communities that we stood with and that stood with us during the student walkout held just days before we left for Standing Rock. We share laughter with each other even when we are in moments of pain and uncertainty that help us through the day-to-day. We think of the mentors and faculty members who remind us each day to love bigger and stronger—who have pushed us to fight harder and stood by our sides every step of the way. And we think about what we have seen spring up at Standing Rock, the survivance that has flowed out from that space. +++ The public and government response to the Standing Rock movement lays bare the ways in which the United States, a settler-nation, continues to ignore, profit, and take land from Indigenous peoples. The evacuation order ignores the treaty and land rights of the Standing Rock Sioux tribe and the months of global activism against the construction of the Dakota Access pipeline.

The pipeline was rerouted through sacred sites, through sacred land, and near the drinking water of the Standing Rock Sioux tribe when its original route went too close to the predominantly white city of Bismarck. The current leader of the United States has made active financial and political investments in the companies that have made the Dakota Access Pipeline possible. In spite of court rulings, in spite of human rights laws and basic constitutional rights, in spite of continued efforts by the Water Protectors to ensure access to clean drinking water—the Dakota Access Pipeline construction continues.

Native people and their allies are being actively policed, criminalized, and attacked because they are fighting to maintain their basic rights to self-definition, a future for themselves, their communities, their land, and their water.

Let us state this very clearly and in no uncertain terms: this is what settler-colonialism looks like. This is what capitalism looks like. This is what white supremacy looks like. This is what we mean when we, as Native peoples on turtle island, say that the United States is a colonizing force. This fight is older than the United States itself—it’s also what the United States is built on.

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But, when we look at what has been happening at Standing Rock, we have to recognize first and foremost that this is also what decolonization looks like. This process of decolonization, of resistance, and of resilience—of living as indigenous peoples on this land—is something that was alive long before the United States.

It will continue long after this moment in time. Our ability to imagine a decolonial future is our resistance, and it will be our liberation.

NATIVE AMERICANS AT BROWN suggest these readings and ask that you support the following organizations: Suggested Reading + Liz Hampton, “Sunoco, behind protested Dakota pipeline, tops U.S. crude spill charts,” Reuters + David Kirby, “North Dakota’s Oil Spill Record: 85 Pipeline Accidents in 20 Years,” Take Part + Derek Hawkins, “Pipeline 150 miles from Dakota Access protests leaks 176,000 gallons of oil,” Washington Post + Matt Chrisler, Jaskiran Dhillon, Audra Simpson, "The Standing Rock Syllabus Project," Public Seminar + Liz Hoover, Gardenwarriorgoodseeds blog + Adrienne Keene, Native Appropriations blog Places You Can Donate + Sacred Stone Legal Defense Fund + Oceti Sakowin Camp + Standing Rock Sioux’s Dakota Access Pipeline Donation Fund + Lee Sprague’s Coldwater Rescue Team: Pueblo Camp (Lee Sprague) Canoe fund + Pueblo Food Drive for Standing Rock + Water Protector Legal Collective (formerly Red Owl Legal Collective) + Standing Rock Medic & Healer Council + Indigenous Rising Media / Indigenous Environmental Network + Oceti Sakowin Camp (Seven Council Fires) Fund + Digital Smoke Signals Media + Legal Funds for Red Fawn, a trained medic providing medical assistance helping injured water protectors during a police raid when she was arrested by officers.

For links to articles, donation sites, and additional readings, view the online version at www.theindy.org/1069

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ART AS THERAPY, THERAPY AS ART Emma Sulkowicz and the limits of hearing

BY Becca

Hansen

ILLUSTRATION BY ILLUSTRATION BY

Gabriel Matesanz Andrew Linder

content warning: sexual assault At the Healing Touch Integral Wellness Center in Philadelphia, visitors come prepared to discuss their relationships, insecurities, deepest anxieties, and whatever else ails them in their 30-minute, $30 appointments. But unlike a traditional clinic, Healing Touch is staffed not by licensed therapists but by performance artist Emma Sulkowicz.

Described as a “parafictional medical clinic,” visitors begin by filling out a questionnaire that asks typical questions (Are you experiencing physical pain?) and less typical ones (Have you ever cried while viewing art?).

Sulkowicz wants to parse out the healing function of art, to map out its nuances and possibilities. “If the thesis of this project is that art heals in ways that medicine can’t, I’m trying to figure out what that means,” Sulkowicz told the Daily Beast in January.

Sulkowicz isn’t looking for a straightforward answer here. She’s aware of the dark side of seeing art as therapy: if we demand that art heal, we condemn art that doesn’t. She faced such condemnation for the work that made her famous, Mattress Performance (Carry That Weight).

For the nine-month project, her thesis at Columbia University, she carried around a 50-pound waterproof mattress whenever and wherever she was on campus.

She followed a pre-written set of rules, promising, for instance, to never ask for help carrying the mattress (although she could take help if offered) and to leave it on Columbia’s campus if she went elsewhere. And she promised to continue to do so until she graduated or until the man who assaulted her was expelled.

Sulkowicz reported the assault in 2013 after she discovered he had targeted at least two other women.

Despite their testimony, the university decided he was “not responsible” for all three incidents. The New York Post broke the story in late 2013, and Sulkowicz joined Senator Kirsten Gillibrand to call for stricter sexual assault policies at universities. In the summer of 2014, after nearly a year of activism, Sulkowicz developed the idea for Mattress Performance.

Critics generally reacted positively to the piece: it was named 2014’s art piece of the year and an act of “pure radical vulnerability,” by critic Jerry Saltz, and described as “symbolically laden yet drastically physical,” by the New York Time’s Roberta Smith. Even then presidential candidate Hillary Clinton weighed in, calling it an “image [that] should haunt all of us.” But in 2015, controversial art critic Camille Paglia criticized Mattress Performance as a “protracted masochistic exercise where a young woman trapped herself in her own bad memories and publicly labeled herself as a victim, which will now be her identity forever.” She draws on Freud’s ideas surrounding exhibitionism, arguing that “[t]o go around exhibiting and foregrounding your wounds is a classic neurotic symptom…no one sees the pathology in all this.” Paglia says that the project would have earned a D if produced for her art class (she doesn’t actually teach art classes; she teaches media studies at an art school).

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MARCH 03, 2017

To Paglia, Sulkowicz is sick, and the art is a symptom.

As an art critic, her job is to think about art in a meaningful way, but in the face of Sulkowicz’s project she seems to say, This isn’t art, and it’s not my job to deal with her.

She collapses the categories of art, art piece, and story, throws in a set of assumptions about the therapeutic value of art, and then dismisses the project entirely. This is the dark side of equating art with therapy.

In 2015, Sulkowicz performed Self-Portrait at the Coagula Curatorial gallery in Los Angeles, a work that touches on the critiques made by critics like Paglia.

During the project, performed a year after Sulkowicz graduated and put down her mattress for good, the artist stood on a pedestal and invited visitors to the gallery to stand opposite her to talk. Conversations ranged from small talk to deep political or artistic debate, but if they asked her to describe the assault, they would be referred to a pedestal stationed alongside her. There stood Sulkowicz’s robotic replica, “Emmatron.” The Emmatron was uncanny in its similarity to the artist—same size, a similar outfit—but wore a permanent expression of sorrow, or melancholy, or maybe apathy, depending on how you looked at it. Visitors directed to the Emmatron could ask it to describe the night of the assault via an application on an iPad, and they would receive a prerecorded answer.

Self-Portrait offered up what visitors demanded—the details of what happened to her—but removed “her” from the equation. 'Her' story is embodied in artificial imitation. In effect, the piece tells the story without providing a victim, without providing even a subject.

In doing so, Self-Portrait rewrites our interpretations of Mattress Performance—it severs the connection between artist and story, artist and mattress, and then creates an entirely new relationship. Sulkowicz deems herself the art piece, but does so on her own terms. In outsourcing the story to her robot companion, she can circumvent any accusation of masochism or neuroses. It’s not 'her' telling the story anymore. In the process, Sulkowiscz demonstrates that maybe telling the story (and carrying the mattress) was less a product of her masochism and her neuroses, and more the product of ours—our demand to hear, again and again, what happened to her.

At their core, Self-Portrait and Mattress Performance can’t be reduced to trauma narratives or expressions of pain— they’re about Sulkowicz, sure, but they also lay bare the relationship between the viewer and their expectations of suffering. +++ For years, critics have struggled to understand art that experiments with audiences' expectations of trauma. In 1994, critic Arlene Croce coined the term “victim art” to describe works that focused exclusively on the artist’s pain without providing any sort of anticipated relief.

Her focus was Still/Here, a dance piece by Bill T. Jones that projected testimonies of terminally ill patients on a screen hanging above his dance performance.

“I have not seen Bill T. Jones’ ‘Still/Here’ and have no plans to review it,” Croce begins in the New Yorker.

She considers Still/Here to be part of a larger movement in art, which “forces” the viewer to feel sorry for artists “because of the way they present themselves: as dissed blacks, abused women, or disenfranchised homosexuals—as performers, in short, who make out of victimhood victim art.” This art becomes a sort of pity party,

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where the artists victimize themselves, and the audience “find[s] something to respond to in the litany of pain.”

Croce means this as criticism—the viewer and the artist are both narcissists, obsessively re-enacting their own suffering.

‘Good’ art, according to Croce, isn’t about this repetition of pain—it’s about relief. To Croce, to live is to suffer, and art needs to offer a way out. Croce and Paglia both measure art on its ability to offer a form of catharsis, a term first presented in Aristotle’s Poetics, written in the third century BCE. According to the widely accepted understanding of catharsis, a viewer feels pity and fear while watching a tragedy, and, at the end, is purged of those emotions. It’s sort of a steam engine view of the human experience—we have a buildup of internal feeling and every once in awhile, for our health, we need to release some valve and let it out. In this view, art is what allows us to live full, healthy lives.

Despite this common understanding of the value of catharsis, Aristotle never actually defined the term, and scholars deeply disagree over its true meaning. In the 1970s, Brazilian artist Augusto Boal argued that catharsis is not an inherent quality of art, but a tool of state control and oppression. He centered his analysis on tragedies. In the common structure, the hero begins with a major flaw that, over the course of the play, is eliminated. The audience, who sympathizes and empathizes with this hero, is similarly purged of antisocial elements—that, to Boal, is catharsis. He described this process in his book, Theatre of the Oppressed ,as the “coercive system of tragedy,” a system of intimidation whereby the audience is forced to conform to an existing social ethos. “[This structure] is designed to bridle the individual, to adjust him to what pre-exists,” Boal writes. And this isn’t necessarily a bad thing if the existing social ethos is fair. “The coercive system of tragedy can be used before or after the revolution,” Boal writes, “but never during it!” During the ‘revolution’—or, really, in the process of enacting any substantive social change—we need not adjust ourselves to a pre-existing social ethos, but to reimagine it entirely. So-called victim art demands this readjustment, and so, by definition, cannot offer relief.

If critics like Croce and Paglia judge victim art art based on its inability to be cathartic, they’re missing the point entirely. In effect, they’re demanding that the artist fit into existing society, and there’s no room for social change; there is only the personal failure in an ever-constant status quo.

In response to the expectation of catharsis, Boal developed a radical approach to theater that attempted to address oppression both inside of and outside of the theater space. In his Theatre of the Oppressed, the audience is encouraged to participate—to test out solutions, discuss oppressions, and, in effect, “rehearse” for the revolution. In practice, this theatre can take many forms.

In some performances, even, audience members are allowed to interrupt the play and make suggestions for how characters should address or react to mistreatment.

In others, they actually take the place of actors and carry out the play anew.

With Mattress Performance, Sulkowicz intentionally sheds the expectation of catharsis, and like Boal incorporates action and resistance into her piece. Now that the piece has ended, it’s reduced to famous images—Sulkowicz on the cover of New York Magazine, Sulkowicz carrying the mattress at her graduation—and these have come to define the project. But Sulkowicz’s piece

was not just an image or a symbol. It was an embodied performance—a young woman carrying a ridiculous, bulky object—and allowed for action. Over the course of Mattress Performance, Sulkowicz kept a document of her interactions with strangers. In the end, it totaled some 59,000 words. One of the first to help Sulkowicz was a homeless man who saw her grip weakening. “He was the first person who helped without some sort of pre-constructed belief for why they were going to help,” she told New York Magazine. “He was like, ‘Oh, look, a struggling girl—let me help her and be a nice human being.’” And with that, Sulkowicz flips the demand of catharsis on its head. Relief becomes not an imperative but a choice. It occurs as a moment in time experienced over the course of a piece, not as its final conclusion. It comes through communal experience, not delegation of action. And, however temporary, it’s the artist, not the audience, who gets some relief.

If we refuse to see her piece on an aesthetic level, refuse to interact with it as artwork, we miss a host of meanings. We limit her critique to the politics of Columbia without acknowledging that she’s also shedding light on our own demands and expectations—demands that are aesthetically-based, but are also deeply political. +++ Sulkowicz acknowledged some of her problems with Mattress Performance in an interview the Daily Beast: “Even when I wasn’t carrying my mattress, people on the street would touch me as if I were a saint who could heal them or something, which was of course a violation of me.”

They offered up their own stories of sexual violence and expected some kind of help, but often hurt Sulkowicz in the process. “I’d be like, ‘Ah, I just want to buy eggs! This is triggering!,’” she says. Even though Sulkowicz wasn’t offering a traditional form of catharsis, her audience still demanded something from her—a form of vulnerability that required a fair amount of unseen emotional labor.

Healing Touch perhaps represents the next step in Sulkowicz’s exploration of these themes. For the project, she directly confronts and experiments with art as therapy, with therapy as art. In charging for sessions and limiting them to thirty minutes, Sulkowicz further foregrounds the labor that’s demanded of her. In focusing on visitor’s pain, rather than hers, she re-affirms her own boundaries. And, she asks us to re-think our expectations of healing. “Definitions...that meant smoothing things over, getting over it, and moving on just weren’t interesting to me,” Sulkowicz told New York Magazine in an interview last January. Though she questions whether charging for her recent performance renders the work inaccessible, Sulkowicz acknowledges, this is all an experiment. She told the Daily Beast, “I want this to be a space where people can safely explore their emotions— that’s what I think a ‘safe space’ is—and figure out what they need from art.” And what we “need” from art, might not be what we expect.

REBECCA HANSEN B’17 expects compensation.

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WHAT’S SO FUNNY? On Migos, anti-Blackness, and representation BY

Noah Ezer

ILLUSTRATION BY Bryn

Brunnstrom DESIGN BY Celeste Matsui I. “My nigga just focus, I’m tryna paint you a picture. We stuck in the moment.”

– Vince Staples, “Señorita” In one of the annotations for his 2015 single “Señorita,” on the music encyclopedia site Genius, California rapper Vince Staples explains why he doesn’t care for explaining his lyrics. “People don’t know what a fuckin’ Douglas Burger is,” he begins, gesturing to the neighborhood-specific references interwoven throughout his dry, rapid-fire flow. “People don’t care about what’s happening in Long Beach, or Compton, or Watts. They still look at us like we’re living in a Mack 10 video. When they look at these areas, and look at these people, they don’t see themselves.”

Last summer, Staples promoted his most recent EP, Prima Donna, by performing festival sets internationally and doing the type of low-cost human interest pieces that raise the profile of both the artist and the outlet alike. Staples speaks openly in these videos about being a high-profile Black person on the internet, and about life in his predominantly low-income Black and Latinx home neighborhood of Long Beach, California. Referencing the lyrical content of songs like 2015’s “Norf Norf” and 2016’s “War Ready,” he speaks candidly about the types of violence that disproportionately affect low-income communities, the resulting deaths of loved ones, and the dangers of romanticizing his life.

At the same time, in a months-long series of (now deleted) tweets, Staples retweeted and replied to users who used him as an outlet to test their hot takes on the numerous, high profile murders of Black Americans at the hands of the police. After a particularly incendiary series of messages directed at him in early October, two months after the release of Prima Donna, Staples ceased personal use of his Twitter account.

II. “You telling a story bout me, I’m the author.”

– Offset, “Story I Tell” Emerging on the rap scene in late 2011, Atlanta-based trio Migos has been far less prolific on social media.

Their flow—a familial cypher of triplets and adlibs, fluidly distilling Southern trap into a stream of collective consciousness—differs wildly from Staples’, but their lyrics speak to their relationship with the north side of Lawrenceville, Georgia similarly to Vince’s own songs about Long Beach: narratives of friends lost to violence, relationships that shift after success, and structural racism ring true across both coasts. Online, Quavo, Offset, and Takeoff’s words are reserved for promoting singles, tour dates, and displays of gratitude for their success. Their relative silence betrays their deeply personal lyrics.

Migos was unable to book their first set of late night shows and fluff pieces until January, when writer, director, actor, and artist Donald Glover thanked the group for their most recent number one single, “Bad and Boujee,” during his Golden Globes acceptance speech. Despite having had 17 separate songs on the Billboard Top 100 and numerous hits as a featured artist outside of their usual genre, the trio was repeatedly rejected by network representatives. Limited by the ‘dangerous’ images associated with their style and their race in the minds of television programmers, Migos’ relevance was ignored.

Since the popular vilification of ‘gangster’ rap and valorization of ‘conscious’ rap during the Culture Wars of the ’90s, the contributions and commentary of certain kinds of rap music have been downplayed and billed as ignorant as a direct result of anti-Black

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racism. Artists like Migos and Staples have been artificially distinguished from rappers like Common and Mos Def, whose lyrical style have consistently afforded them late night spots since the early 2000s.

Instead of understanding them all as differing presentations of shared social issues, white audiences’ relative preference for a syllabically-dense, ‘You speak so well’ style of Black performance has prioritized rappers whose commentary is ‘clean’ and direct. This has left representations of ‘ignorant’ rappers to stereotypes that refuse to engage the meaningful content of their music.

III. “That’s part of our job… What you need to do is go on Twitter, search your favorite Black person’s name, and put nigger in the tweet.

And that’s really what, that’s when you get into the real dark side of twitter.”

– Vince Staples, “Vince Staples vs. The Internet,” Pitchfork TV Selling music doesn’t pay the bills like it used to.

Streams on sites like Spotify pay less than a cent per play, and fans no longer have to purchase albums to hear specific songs. Audienceship doesn’t equate to immediate financial success; increasingly, artists need to be able to bridge the divide between digital clout and physical presence. Touring and publicity are now a necessity. To generate interest outside of producing music, musicians’ bodies become promotional brands, synthesizing their personalities and creative output into a form that sells concert tickets.

Similarly, as publications like Vice, Complex, and even Sports Illustrated expand their online content, they have needed to develop new ways to maintain readership. As celebrities became brands, publications became platforms. They sustain themselves through ad revenue instead of direct sales: they need to constantly create digestible content to grab, then hold, your attention.

The demand for artists and publications to remain in the public eye has caused a need for both to produce material quickly. Quickly produced interview segments have emerged to fill this void, often relying on a performer’s pre-established persona to generate viewer interest and involving rapid-fire question and answer or displays of what makes artists unique. To remain financially solvent, some musicians make as many of these as possible, and content distributors slot as many people into their specific format as their audience will tolerate. Enter, Noisey’s The People Vs., enter Pitchfork’s Over/Under. Enter Sports Illustrated’s Extra Mustard.

The buy-in for Extra Mustard’s most recent celebrity segment is fairly simple: Migos is popular.

Their music fits easily into predefined and marketable stereotypes of rap music. Their bodies fit into the stereotypes laid out for Black artists who rap. Decades of images built up by the implicitly—if not overtly— racist dialogues surrounding the value of rap music and the people who produce it spread through news, film, and television, shape the landscape around them.

Their actual identities become secondary to the idea of a ‘rapper,’ constructed by anti-Black imagery as a commodifiable version of the similarly racist ‘thug.’

Quavo, Offset, and Takeoff are reduced to aesthetics and product before they say a word.

In the Sports Illustrated studio, Migos sits in a row in-frame. Quavo asks a producer to clarify the idea for the video they’ve already begun filming, not having been told that the camera is on. Intercut with video clips and lyrics from “Bad and Boujee,” they read you a recipe for underseasoned chili.

IV. “I am highly offended by the term conscious rap, don’t associate me with that. Like what does that even mean? You’re telling me everybody else is unconscious? Sound like some bullshit if you ask me.”

– Vince Staples, Twitter (now deleted), August 12, 2015 This genre of video has made me uncomfortable for a long time. Each time one comes out, I’m reminded of the ways in which my non-Black classmates and coworkers are quick to dismiss the words of rappers like Migos or Staples but are desperate to have their songs on the ‘fire’ playlists for a party. Their specific type of Blackness is reduced to a spectacle reliant on racialized tropes of ignorance and assumed difference.

The supposedly entertaining or comedic value in these clips, then, often comes from the supposed incongruity of ‘ignorant’ rappers being knowledgeable.

About 40 seconds into their February, 2017 episode of Pitchfork’s Over/Under—in which musicians are asked if they find a series of things overrated or underrated—Migos are asked to rate pharmaceutical mogul “Martin Shkreli” and “Monogamy.” Both times, unable to initially answer, one of the trio asks the interviewer to clarify. Cut together in tight succession, their questions take the form of a joke. The title card is a setup; you expect Migos to have an opinion on whatever follows. Beat. The punchline is that they don’t know how to answer. The question changes.

Staples, by contrast, is able to answer every question in his 2015 episode of the series. In his statements are ideas that, put in an academic setting, would be labeled as valid theories instead of humorously profound insights. Around two minutes into his interview, when asked his opinion on “Keeping it Real,” Staples outlines that if “you’re a fake-ass motherfucker, you’re not keeping it real by being real.” Vince then asks us, “But what’s real? ‘Cause… some people are just not real. And they know we know, but we gotta act like we don’t know that they know that we know. But at the end of the day, they know that we know that they know that we know. And they pretend that they don’t know.” Framed with words like performativity, ontology, or phenomenology, this line of questioning could be the subject of scholarly study, made legitimate to an ‘intellectual’ audience. Instead, the topic changes to ‘cyber-bullying.’

Each of these videos exists in a larger web of Black representation shaped by historically racist influences. Content distributed online is contextualized to viewers through historical knowledge and other media.

When more consideration is afforded to rappers like Kendrick Lamar or Common, artists like Vince Staples and Migos are left in positions which uncritically reinforce an anti-Black understanding of what being a rapper means. By relying on the blackface minstrel tropes of the idiot savant and the Sambo, the style of comedy edited into these clips punches down across time.

I want to find these videos funny. Maybe in the future, when representation becomes more meaningful, I can. But for now, I just don’t get the joke.

V. “Until people really see themselves within other people, they can’t genuinely care for their betterment. It’s hard to understand and respect things that are different than us.”

– Vince Staples, Genius Annotation for Señorita NOAH EZER B’19 is poppin’ with a pocket full of cottage

MARCH 03, 2017

ALL FUN AND GAMES Embodiment, empathy, and combat in e-sports

BY William

Samosir ILLUSTRATION BY Claire Schlaijker DESIGN BY Andrew Linder

Upton, New York, 1958. Engineer physicist William Higinbotham repurposes one of Brookhaven Laboratory’s military computers, giving birth to the first video game Tennis for Two—the progenitor of the 1972 smash hit Pong. From this moment, the computer, military, and entertainment industries develop interdependently, resulting in the creation of discrete, yet mutually-informing tools, mechanisms, and imageries that reinforce a range of militaristic strategies. This relationship is termed the Military Entertainment Complex (MEC).

I grew up playing video games (and unblushingly, I still do), ranging from the pastoral single player simulation Harvest Moon to Massive Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games (MMORPGs) such as Ragnarok and World of Warcraft. As shaped by these simulations, my art practice attempts to examine the virtual and computational phenomena of new media through deconstructing my embodied experience with digital systems—eventually delivering their constituent components as physical objects. These notes are written to clarify and systematize my recent explorations on the MEC. Its section titles are fragmentations of a dated response that I chanced upon in my investigations at a forum on Steam—an online video game distribution platform. The following question was asked anonymously on October 9, 2012.

Q: “If the real military is like Team Fortress 2, would you join it?”

A: “Why not? …”

You put your right hand on a computer mouse and double click the program’s icon. You log in, and after a brief moment, the cursor slides towards the “Find a Match” button. And click!

You are now queued for virtual combat. Whether it is a Multiplayer Online Battle Arena (MOBA) or an online First Person Shooter (FPS), these simulations allow users to experience a fabricated extension of reality.

A player is transported into a multiplayer online battlefield—a hermetic digital space bordered by predefined rule—and introduced to its cyclical, artificial carnage.

There, each battle victory against opposing human players is translated into scores and statistics on a digital leaderboard. Such competitive simulation falls under a category called e-sports—a billowing industry of nearly 200 million viewers and participants. E-sports is viral. It is a fast-growing cult, unrelenting in this screen-centric world (and, similar to traditional team sports, replete with loyalties, rivalries, and merchandise). The international e-sports company Electronic Sports League (ESL) organizes tournaments in real arenas worldwide, with hefty prize pools—some of which exceed 20 million dollars—amassed from the sale of user-generated virtual trinkets in mostly free-to-play games.

Whether one desires to be a participant or a spectator, e-sports will provide the thrill and adrenaline of competition. “... You respawn after you die, …”

In most arenas, sports involve the performative exertion of the body, attesting to physical presence and its boundaries: calluses; skins that sweat as the mouth gasps for oxygen; breathing organs within tissues. E-sports, on the other hand, obscures corporeality by relocating the majority of physical labor to the computer itself.

Behind the plastic and metal frame sits the frantically computing GPU, cooled by a whirring fan. The basis of rules and fair play in traditional sports, from something as formal as having different weight-classes to instinctively calling timeouts in the case of injuries, is also

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replaced by the accumulation of digits. E-sports games such as the MOBA Defense of the Ancients 2 (DoTA 2) and the FPS Overwatch pit players against others based on their in-game levels, ranks, and grades—numbers that increase as a player sharpens their gaming acuity and the nimbleness of their fingers.

In e-sports, human players become virtual bodies with features that are exaggerated, idealized, dramatized. Appearing through rendered data points, they lack the likeness of an organic being. They do not mutate and decompose. They aren’t programmed to. A data point cannot suffer physical wounds; they are only rearrangeable. Characters simply re-spawn after they are defeated. Once it is “game over,” a player can easily repeat the process and take on the assumed position of another: male or female, human or mutant, ally or enemy. Nowhere in e-sports has there been an accretion of virtual ‘corpses’ on the battlefield. Players in Team Fortress 2 (TF2) and Counter Strike: Global Offensive (CS:GO) restart as clean, unharmed characters after each death, and the digital arena empties itself from virtual ‘corpses’ and their remnants.

With a self that is reduplicated and repurposed on each terminating step, is it even worth attempting to project ourselves onto these artificial bodies? “... you can take an unbelievable amount of shot before you go down, …”

E-sports has successfully transformed the physical viewership experience, amassing localized crowding of the pre-internet arcade machine—such as Donkey Kong and Street Fighter—into virtual international congregations.

With the outlook of virtual reality industry generating 30 billion dollars in 2020, e-sports is anticipating a new era of viewership—one that is facilitated by HTC Vive, Oculus Rift, or even Google Cardboard. Last October, ESL One New York became the first premier tournaments to be streamed in virtual reality, and its partner Sliver.tv—an e-sports streaming website—successfully raised 6.2 million dollars from various venture capital firms to develop a 360-degree live view of an in-game broadcast. As e-sports joins the virtual reality bandwagon, spectators are now both within and without the game, transgressing the very assumption that the spectatorial realm of e-sports is detached from a bodily experience.

Similarly, while virtual reality is not yet fully integrated into the playing mechanism of competitive gaming, the visual environment of e-sports—specifically FPS—is capable of accommodating the transition towards embodying a virtual body. In MOBA games, a player controls a separate character—a “minion”—from a third-person god’s-eye-view. Yet, in FPS, while given freedom to traverse the game landscape, a player is simultaneously positioned in the subjective shot of the

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camera—a condition that is intimate to the human body.

Semi-2-dimensional e-sports games such as Street Fighter V, Super Smash Bros, and the online card game Hearthstone are also widely recognized. But in their popularity, these pale in comparison to MOBA and FPS. The visual experience of high-budget FPS war games such as CS:GO, Call of Duty: Black Ops, and Battlefield 4, is realistic, ‘authentic,’ and intensely haptic. In these games, a player is invited to synthesize their senses with the console and the screen interface. Even the most subtle bodily function and response are mimicked through and defined by a programmatic effect. Playing as an infantry who is running through bombarded grounds, a user’s camera view shakes and stumbles. A digital sniper holds their breath as a player aims their crosshair, and the ensuing sound of muted virtual heartbeats induces real-life suspense in the user. Simultaneously, a player’s identity is color-coded, categorized, and ultimately reduced into an identifiable template for the sake of function. Human presence transforms into machine: an entity whose predefined purpose is to kill and conquer an opponent, be it through forces of rampage or silent surgical means. An enemy character does not cry for help or scream in agony as it is being attacked and ‘injured,’ nor does it beg for mercy before the final blow. Instead, it fights back for the score, the pride, and the sensation—and so does the player, for the possibility of virtual deaths is nothing more than a programmatic incentive. “... and you get access to ridiculous weapons …”

In 2002 the United States Army released America’s Army, a military First Person Shooter and a strategic communication device—the game was intended to provide a virtual army experience. It was rated T, for Teen. Although this game reduces the complexity of war, it trains players in necessary militaristic strategy (such as flanking around the enemy’s offense, not grouping around choke points, and seeking high ground positions). Most importantly, America’s Army enhances one’s real time decision-making skills in high stress environments as they communicate through headsets with remote microphone communication (an object that is reminiscent of the military’s Advanced Combat Helmet). Players are also pressured to accustom themselves with maps via a dynamically changing aerial-view Heads Up Display (HUD), a process similar to large-scale planning done by military intelligence.

While this particular video game is visibly marketed and labeled as a military simulation, its mechanism is analogous to that of fantastic and caricatured e-sports— those premised on fictive worlds supposedly detached from any real-life consequences. In MOBA games such as DoTA 2 or League of Legends—where players control mystical characters who cast magic and arcane spells in

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battles—real time and remote coordination is key toward winning. These combative strategies are also of value in the semi-cartoon TF2, as well as the recently acclaimed semi-caricatured Overwatch.

Although decades-old arguments from cultural conservatives like Bill O’Reilly and Jack Thompson have overemphasized the impact of video games on young and predominantly male psyches, the logistical overlaps between e-sports and the military are becoming ever more apparent. Interviews gathered from artist Omer Fast’s project titled 5000 Feet is the Best (2013) revealed that former Predator drone pilots feel as if their controller and on-screen Graphical User Interface (GUI) are that of a video game. Additionally, it is difficult to dismiss the British Army’s usage of an Xbox 360 controller—the very console one would use to play the sci-fi FPS Halo 3—in operating an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV). A player’s embodied knowledge of a console always bears the potential of being re-appropriated and re-wired across networks and platforms. In fact these kinaesthetic abilities have been exploited by the military to economize the production of war technology.

A console, then, can be lethal. As video game interaction broaden its scope from being handheld (keyboard, mouse, and joystick) to occupying the other senses (A 5.1 surround sound spatialization in FPS games and giant virtual reality gaming chairs), the console extends its function to the totality of the body—blurring virtual and physical sensations.

But, to what end do they reshape and reconstruct a player’s embodied knowledge of video games? “... Who wouldn’t join?”

- dirangre3 10-09-2012, 04:33 PM In her essay “Visibility Wars,” writer Rebecca Solnit posits that we are living in the age where the battlefield is anywhere and everywhere. War occupies the full spectrum of the digital and the physical, the terraria and the outer space. The idea of an army is no longer contained and singular. Its architecture finds its way from the kernel of a massive organization into the everyday, therefore forming a network of subsistence. And here, e-sports has become a catalyst for this expansion. With the accelerated and unstoppable growth of competitive gaming, e-sports is producing a swarm of players, viewers, adherents who can be activated and deployed.

Nonetheless, the massiveness of e-sports and its real time kinaesthetic nature are a potent tool for revealing the invisible MEC framework. Through its own epic phenomena, e-sports can acknowledge the MEC, therefore raising an awareness to its followers and redirecting the purpose of embodying video game acts.

The Electronic Entertainment Design and Research (EEDAR) reported in 2016 that 66% of e-sports players and spectators are located in China, North America, and

Europe—70% of whom are male. In considering embodied knowledge of e-sports video games as an object of power, it is imperative for e-sports to be all-inclusive in order to avoid privileging certain demographics. By accommodating the representation of various culture as well as body shapes, types, and attributes, e-sports becomes a reminder of social reality—of something essentially human. As a high-budget FPS, 2016 Overwatch has been praised for this gesture towards inclusivity. Out of its 23 multi-ethnic characters, 10 of the possible selections are female. The game portrays a queer character named ‘Tracer,’ who challenges the representation of a stereotypical FPS avatar.

While Overwatch has garnered over 20 million monthly players, it is hasty and superficial to declare e-sports as a progressive entity. In most e-sports video games, the majority of humanoid characters which do not follow popular body idealization assume a male gender: Pudge from DoTA 2, Junkrat from Overwatch, and Dr. Mundo from LoL, just to name a few. Moreover, bodies of most female e-sports characters are still confined to a fixed, overly sexualized template.

What is more striking is that games such as CS:GO and TF2—which have 400 thousand and 50 thousand daily players respectively—only offer strictly male characters in their default selections, most of which are white. The absence of empathetic and bodily encounter in e-sports, then, might not be due to a game character’s virtuality, but to the erasure of diversity and complexity from the image of a body.

“If the real military is like TF2,” asks dirangre3, “would you join it?” Perhaps TF2 is not just a cartoon parody of the army, and perhaps millions of players already join this supposedly imaginary military from behind the computer screen. As interactive entertainment technology slowly envelops our body, e-sports becomes the contemporary pastime, an embodied and palpable fantasy.

It’s all fun and games—until we remember what’s behind the camouflage.

WILLIAM SAMOSIR R‘18 needs to start doing some actual, physical exercise.

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QUARTERS (EXCERPT FROM “ON CURRENCY”) Stella Akua Mensah ILLUSTRATION BY Gabriel Matesanz DESIGN BY Ruby Stenhouse BY

Oftentimes, people tell women not to wander off.

When we are small, they mean to stay in the yard, and now they mean not to fly away or fight their tightening knuckles, or figure out how to love ourselves in a violent world. I wandered anyway, like always, but farther now than ever before. Some men want to keep us blissful, and others just want to keep us. I’ve never been kept for too long, or gobbled. So I wandered into the motherland of a violent world, one hand-crafted by the fists of foolish men who don’t know how to keep their hands to themselves. ~ When I was a little black girl, I collected quarters.

So American, this currency, old white men’s faces irremovably stamped into its copper and nickel. I was a little black girl, and I loved my quarters—those tiny etchings of North American nature frozen into miniscule grandeur. I’d always wanted to be able to say I collected something, and without thinking of it with any significance, I decided on quarters. They were special only in that they were many, and they were mine. They’re sitting in a tiny jewelry gift-box on a shelf at the head of my childhood bed.

When I returned to America, this currency felt so impenetrable, so oppressive. Taxi rides I’d spent ten cedis on in Ghana—the equivalent of $2.50—were now $45. A day’s worth of meals at the market would never have cost me more than twelve cedis—$3. The bills felt so aggressive in my palms, and nothing in this country ever seemed to warrant what it cost.

The only cost of mine that changes little across any ocean is that of walking while a woman, while Black.

When my ancestors were stolen from our country and beaten into new names, new nakedness, the Women in my bloodstream stood upon an auction block, bare.

Took up space, still, bore their teeth for inspection, made their bodies hard but could not ward off any finger or fist that made itself entitled to the curve of their hips, or glint of their ribs, emerging. Men placed a number value on each Woman’s form, her strength, her sexual “usefulness.” One Woman on the auction block, when asked to widen her lips and show her teeth, said, Why don’t you look between my legs and see what teeth are down there?

When I became a Big Black Woman, I felt my body morph into an item for the taking, years after auction blocks. Even in the motherland, the legacies of sale live in our flesh.

So how are we, who are never let walk without inspection, still able to place our feet to this red Earth? I’m asking myself this with building fury each day.

When I step off a filled-up page, folding into memory, I throw a coin into some water-body at my feet, and ask vein-Mothers for a road to take, and how.

17

LITERARY

MARCH 03, 2017

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THE LIST

Permanent Parabasis, Gallery 99 (99 Governor St., Providence), 7 – 11 PM

The second show to be held at Gallery 99, Permanent Parabasis features recent work from young artists. Attempts have been made to address and modify the architecture of the gallery space (an apartment, and former storefront?).

Curated by Gabe Cohen and Lee Pivnik for FRI-ENDS.

re|ACT: symposium on arts and environment, Granoff Center for the Creative Arts, all day

re|ACT is a symposium programmed by the Brown Arts Initiative at Brown U, bringing together artists, deisgners, and scholars from a variety of disciplines.

Panel topics are Water + Constructed Space, Mediascapes, Sonic Ecologies, and The Plastic Ocean. Your friendly List Writer recommends the keynote address by Mierle Laderman Ukeles (at 7:30 PM on the 4th). Perhaps best known as Artist-in-Residence at the New York City Department of Sanitation, an unsalaried position she has held for 36+ years, Ukeles works between public and conceptual art; her concerns include feminism, work, and domestic and civic “maintenance” which remains largely silent and invisible. The full schedule is available at https://sites. google.com/a/brown.edu/bai-symposium2017/schedule.

Stand With PP (Greater Boston), Boston Common, 11 AM – 1 PM

Maple Sugaring tour, Caratunk Wildlife Refuge, Seekonk, MA, 9 AM – 12 PM, $12

La Neve EP Release! w/ Creamer / Victoria Piña / Divided Self, Aurora Providence, 9 PM, $7

Come out to support Planned Parenthood. This is a counter-rally organized in response to recent national anti-choice rallies (“Defund Planned Parenthood”).

“Discover how Native Americans started maple sugaring and how to make this sweet syrup in your own backyard.

Taste first hand this delectable treat over breakfast. Sample pancakes, muffins and other tasty treats—all with fresh maple syrup.” Audubon recommends that any interested maple-heads register in advance.

La Neve is the solo project of Joey La Neve DeFrancesco, one of four punx in Downtown Boys and half of dance duo Malportado Kids. His new EP, American Sounds, is out on Don Giovanni Records.

Dancey political jams!

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New England Regional Turfgrass Foundation 2017 Turf Trade Show, RI Convention Center, 4:30 – 7:30 PM

This is N.E.R.T.F.’s 20th annual Turf Show. 375 turf-related booths await you. Meet professionals from all over the industry, on the cutting edge of turf management. There’s going to be a lot of turf. The featured speaker is a USAF “war hero and PGA professional.”

Networking 4 Success, East Bay Chamber of Commerce, 9AM

“YOU WANT TO BE SUCCESSFUL. WE WANT YOU TO BE SUCCESSFUL. JOIN US.” I don’t know what this is but was struck by its succinct Facebook event description. 9AM on a Tuesday is prime networking time.

International Women’s Day Forum, 9A Hamilton Place, Boston, 6:30 PM International Women’s Strike, everywhere

March 8 is an international day of action “organized by and for women who have been marginalized and silenced by decades of neoliberalism directed towards working women, women of color, Native women, disabled women, immigrant women, Muslim women, lesbian, queer and trans women.” Don’t go to work, school, etc. The Boston forum will include speakers from Boston Socialist Alternative and Boston Democratic Socialists of America (DSA).

ProvDSA March General Meeting, Rhode Island Working Families Party (118 Gano St., Providence), 7 PM

Providence DSA is holding its general monthly meeting this evening. Check it out, learn about their current goals/ actions, everybody jump on Socialism Train. https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=KSq1Z9tQW0Y

Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Spider’s Stratagem, Cable Car Cinema, 7 PM, $10 suggested donation

Magic Lantern continues its anti-fascist film series at Cable Car with this dreamy Italian flick from 1970, in which an adapted Borges story memorializes life under fascism. Admission proceeds will support Fuerza Laboral, a RI labor and immigrant rights organization, and graduate student unionization at Brown U.