The College Hill Independent Vol. 38 Issue 6

09 Inside Guantánamo Bay

08 Recoloring World War I for the screen

07 Fiction: Money in My Mouth

Volume 38 • Issue 06

March 15, 2019

the College Hill

Independent

the Indy

a Brown * RISD Weekly

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ly Week

A B row

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Contents

From The Editors

Cover Untitled Justin Han

‘Twas a brisk March morning. Our collective innards grumbled, as we approached the refectory’s gates. A newsboy, clad in dungarees and flat cap, waving a piping hot noser fresh from the press. His ruddy cheeks bellowed with boyish fervor—he sang, “Get your noser! Fresh Nosers here!”

News Week in $$$ 02 Zachary Baytosh & Sarah Clapp

When we opened its pages, a glass of nectar in hand, our jaw dropped as we read the fated headline: “New Issue of the Indy Just 20 Pages Of Word Association.”

Unfounded accusations of pretension, nonsense, and verbal spewage—in this publication?! Blood, sweat, and tears are poured each week into this vaulted publication to produce articles of lucidity and insight. What libel! Without cause or provocation.

Debilitated with anger we slumped in our seats. So lonely in the ratty, fork in hand, the Iliad—unread. Temporality, opulence, Taylorism, Narragansett Lager, UNITE HERE!, brother, MMT, inside baseball, interpolation, tote bag.

03 Everything but the Kitchen Sink Jesse Barber Metro 05 Building a Bigger Table Amelia Anthony Literary 07 Money In Your Mouth Tabitha Payne 13 3 Stories: Money Matters, Bean Soup, Horse Betsy Roy, Star Su, Lucy Qiu

-BM & NRS

Arts Unliving Color 08 Ben Bienstock 12 Tidy Futures Nickolas Roblee-Strauss

Mission Statement

Features Among the Iguanas 09 Jessica Bram Murphy

Ephemera 11 Which Providence Pest Are You? Claire Schlaikjer & Nicole Cochary

The College Hill Independent is a Providence-based publication written, illustrated, designed, and edited by students from Brown and RISD. We are committed to publishing politically engaged and accessible work. While the Indy is financed

by Brown University, we hold ourselves accountable to our readers across the Providence community. The Indy rejects content that explicitly or implicitly perpetuates racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, xenophobia, ableism and/ or classism.

Science & Tech 15 Power Plants Shannon Kingsley

Though this list is not exhaustive, the Indy strives to address these systems of oppression by centering the voices, opinions, and efforts of marginalized people in Providence and beyond.

X 18 A Brief History of the Rückenfigur Alexandra Westfall

The Indy is constantly evolving: we are always working to make our staff and content more inclusive. Though our editing process provides an internal structure for accountability, we always welcome letters to the editor.

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Survivors Have Said “Me Too” Marie Lachance

Week in Review Sarah Clapp Maria Gerdyman News Jacob Alabab-Moser Jessica Bram Murphy Giacomo Sartorelli Metro Julia Rock Lucas Smolcic Larson Sara Van Horn Arts Ben Bienstock Alexis Gordon Liby Hays Features Tara Sharma Cate Turner

Shannon Kingsley Lily Meyersohn Literary Shuchi Agrawal Justin Han Isabelle Rea Ephemera Nicole Cochary Claire Schlaikjer X Jorge Palacios Alex Westfall List Ella Rosenblatt Signe Swanson Will Weatherly

Science & Tech Miles Guggenheim

Special Projects Harry August Lucas Smolcic Larson Eve Zelickson

15 MARCH 2019

VOL 38 ISSUE 06

Staff Writers Jesse Barber Jessica Dai Brionne Frazier Eduardo Gutierrez-Peña Mohannad Jabrah Nickolas Roblee-Strauss Sophie Khomtchenko Emma Kofman Alina Kulman Dana Kurniawan Bilal Memon Kanha Prasad Star Su Marly Toledano Copy Editors Grace Berg Seamus Flynn Sarah Goldman Matt Ishimaru Sojeong Lim Yelena Nicolle Salvador Caroline Sprague

Design Editors Lulian Ahn Bethany Hung Designers Amos Jackson Cecile Kim Ella Rosenblatt Katherine Sang Christie Zhong Illustration Editors Pia Mileaf-Patel Eve O’Shea Ilustrators Sam Berenfield Natasha Brennan Natasha Boyko Bella Carlos Julia Illana Angie Kang Jeff Katz Halle Krieger Katya Labowe-Stroll

Sophia Meng Sandra Moore Rémy Poisson Mariel Solomon Miranda Villanueva Claribel Wu Stephanie Wu

Managing Editors Ella Comberg Tiara Sharma Wen Zhuang

Business Maria Gonzalez

MVP Bilal Memon

Web Ashley Kim Social Media Ben Bienstock Pia Mileaf-Patel Alumni+Fundraising Katrina Northrop

Signe Swanson Will Weatherly

*** The College Hill Independent is printed

by TCI Press in Seekonk, Massachusetts.

Senior Editors Olivia Kan-Sperling Katrina Northrop Chris Packs

@THEINDY_TWEETS

WWW.THEINDY.ORG

WEEK IN $$$

BY Sarah Clapp and Zachary Baytosh ILLUSTRATION Rémy Poisson DESIGN Bethany Hung

One-Student Schoolhouse Facing overcrowding last school-year in Cheyenne, Wyoming school administrators resorted to shuffling students around the district in an effort to “maximize every space,” the Casper Star Tribune reported at the time. “We couldn’t afford to build all these new schools,” the Tribune quoted the chair of the Wyoming legislature’s school facilities committee this past September, discussing faltering funding, “so we decided we wanted to move more toward asset preservation.” This seems to mean, roughly speaking, not building all these new schools for the time being.

Someone must have forgotten to inform neighboring Albany County. Just this past week local newspapers reported that the Albany County school district is planning on opening a new elementary school. Enrollment? One. The Cozy Hollow School is the second one-student public school to open in recent years, and is actually a re-opening of a modular classroom that’s been sitting unused for a decade. Located sixty-ish miles north of Laramie, Wyoming (population 30,000) roads to and from the Cozy Hollow School are often so blocked by snow as to be completely impassable. “It gets pretty quiet in the winter,” the lone teacher who lives full time at neighboring Notch Peak (enrollment: also one) commented to the Laramie Boomerang, their local newspaper. She was at one point snowed in for three weeks straight.

Unable to move actual mountains, the Albany County School District seems resolved to move metaphorical ones. They aren’t alone. Data in the Wyoming Department of Education’s Fall Enrollment Survey identify twenty-two schools with an enrollment of under ten students. Together, the two one-student elementaries in Albany County are likely to cost around $150,000, the Associated Press reports, or $75,000 a student: six and a half times the average national per-student cost of public school, and four and a half times the average in Wyoming. After paying for the teachers’ salaries, the classrooms (one built in an abandoned barn), and the tank-like treads to drive through the snow, it all starts to add up. Still, it’s an amusing turn of events for the self appointed “Equality State.”

Yet there is kind of a romantic nobility to Wyoming’s sort-of dedication to education, if you look hard enough, and, at this point, maybe school districts should keep building schools while they still can. Wyoming has historically relied on coal money for most of its education funding, money which is drying up. That being said, as idyllic as a school per child might seem it does not present a particularly practical long term solution. Neither, apparently, does anyone else.

To quote a state lawmaker’s comments in a local paper (after voting against a tax to fund Wyoming’s indebted education system): “Maybe, one day, coal will come

back.” As to whether the broader distribution of educa- are more accustomed to half-zips than pinstripes. In tional resources in Wyoming (or America) is fair, you’d the new professional world, where technocrats and have to ask a resident of the “Equality State” about it. their overworked personnel wear hoodies, wearing a three-piece suit seems less imperative to bringing in -ZB the billions.

Now that Wall Street has shown that it’s open to Goldman Slacks following trends other than racketeering, it remains to be seen if the (lack of) dress code will actually go The only thing that can fix the economy is more denim, into effect. Finance bros are reportedly flummoxed. according to Goldman Sachs. In a March 5 memo, Swaddled in Brooks Brothers since they slipped out Chief Executive Officer David Solomon absolved of the womb, they cannot fathom what “business the firm’s formal business dress code, citing “the casual” looks like. There’s nothing casual about changing nature of workplaces generally in favor of managing assets, so can business really be conducted a more casual environment.” At long last, after years in salmon shorts? As for the women of finance, the of yearning for a wardrobe as free as the markets they change is even more opaque. They are already given disrupt, Goldman employees can raise capital while vague instructions for how to look while scrutinizing bearing their midriffs, wearing khakis, or both. But stocks; are they also expected to wear the “Midtown before his fleet of investment bankers can wander into Uniform” made famous by male financiers (gingham an H&M and buy a velour shirt, Solomon wants to shirt, J Crew chinos, Patagonia 'Better Sweater Vest’ in remind his underlings that “all of us know what is and grey)? Or will an all salmon pantsuit suffice? The Dow is not appropriate for the workplace:” you can do your Jones might be dropping, but confusion is on the rise. insider-trading, but you can’t wear anything bejeweled. Goldman Sachs has long been known as a “white shoe Solomon might have been inspired to bring chill firm,” a slang term originating from the white Oxfords vibes to the boardroom after witnessing the crowd worn by WASP men working at 'prestigious businesses' at one of his EDM sets in the Bahamas. Known on in the 1950s (according to Investopedia). Surely they did the circuit as DJ D-Sol, Solomon spins his remix of not mean “white Adidas.”

Fleetwood Mac’s “Don’t Stop” at festivals worldwide, Your typical investment banker may never sporting faded t-shirts and Millennial pink caps. But feel liberated enough to cuff their jeans, but this more likely, corporate leaders see that their analysts, Independent journalist is thrilled that she will not have associates, and other agents of fiscal tomfoolery are to sacrifice style for substance when she becomes a overwhelmingly young, belonging to generations that Goldman Girl upon graduation (doing what is known

at the Indy as “selling out”). We do not have to give up scuffed Blundstones, sweaters inherited from our dads, and beanies that don’t cover our ears when we give up our ethics. Maybe if the bro-bourgeoisie can see that being allowed to wear a crew-neck is not as calamitous as being caught profiting from the financial crisis, they will follow the path so boldly pioneered by DJ D-Sol and finally realize: you really can have the best of both worlds.

-SC

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EVERYTHING BUT THE KITCHEN SINK

BY Jesse Barber ILLUSTRATION Eve O'Shea DESIGN Christie Zhong

How Modern Monetary Theory reimagines government spending A few weeks ago, a group of children confronted Senator Dianne Feinstein to plead for her to make a commitment to fighting climate change by endorsing the Green New Deal—a nonbinding resolution co-authored by Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez that proposes converting 100 percent of energy production to renewable sources and guaranteeing a “family-sustaining wage” for all people in the US. “We’re the ones that are going to be impacted,” one child told her. The children and the adults in the group stressed both the urgency of climate change and the ambition required to address it. “There is no way to pay for it,” Feinstein harshly explained. “That’s the big reason… it just doesn't work like that.”

If any of these audacious children were versed in Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) they would have called bullshit. MMT proponents—some progressive academics, others lefty activists—say the US government thinks about spending and the national deficit all wrong. The US government could pay for large parts of the Green New Deal today because the national government can never run out of its own money. The question of 'how to pay' for big policy proposals like the Green New Deal is a misunderstanding of how spending works. As President Roosevelt did with the original New Deal or President Truman did with weapons production for WWII, the government could simply spend the Green New Deal or Medicare For All into existence.

In a nutshell, MMT supporters say that the government can spend much more money that it currently does because inflation, not the deficit, should be the limit to government spending. Because the US government spends by simply creating money, they claim that, with appropriate economic governance, ambitious programs such as the Green New Deal can be paid for today, simultaneously improving the lives of people who are left out of the private economy and combatting climate change. At a minimum, MMT explains that the US government has been underspending. At its most extreme, it calls for a complete revolution in governance, addressing social inequality by providing a job, housing, and healthcare for every American.

The College Hill Independent spoke with several leading MMT proponents who have continually attempted to make the theory accessible to politicians, major media outlets, and Twitter followers—helping propel MMT into the national spotlight. Presidential candidate Senator Bernie Sanders and newly elected Representative Ocasio-Cortez have both had economic advisors from the MMT community. A Huffington Post article published in October called it the “Biggest Idea in Washington.”

a kitchen sink. Government spending is the faucet and taxation is the drain. The US government introduces money into the private economy through spending and drains money out through taxes.

The flow of the faucet has nothing to do with how much water goes through the drain. This is one of many places where MMT deviates from mainstream understandings of economics: the theory claims that the government’s ability to pour dollars into the economy is not limited by the amount of taxes that it collects­—after all, the government’s doing so creates money. MMT, therefore, claims that the actual mechanism by which the US government spends is not a bank account full of tax dollars, as many politicians assume, when they ask, “Where are we going to find the money for Medicare For All?” “As a monopoly supplier of US currency with full financial sovereignty, the federal government is not like a household or even a business,” Stephanie Kelton, leading MMT proponent, professor of public policy and economics at Stony Brook University, and former economic policy advisor for Bernie Sanders, wrote in a HuffPost opinion article. “Congress can pass any budget it chooses, and our government already pays for everything by creating new money.”

If an individual or a business spent more money in a month than it raised in revenue (i.e., ran a deficit), it could eventually go bankrupt. However, a government that has its own sovereign currency (meaning it is not attached to any other currency or backed by a physical substance like gold) cannot go bankrupt for lack of money. This fact differentiates the US government budget from state and municipal budgets, who must fund their expenditures with tax revenue or borrowing capital. “You never run out of money when you're the issuer of money,” explained Grey. “That's as silly as saying that the referee in a football game has run out of points to issue.”

If the government spends more money than it collects in taxes, mainstream economics calls this “the national deficit." However, MMT does not see the deficit as necessarily negative as mainstream economists do. The more water that flows out of the faucet, the more money there is for everyone in the sink, the non-government sector. As Kelton put plainly in an episode of The Wilderness podcast, “red ink for the government is black ink for the people,” meaning the bigger the national deficit, the more aggregate wealth there is for everyone else.

“There are a lot of deficits that we have in the economy,” Grey told the Indy. “We have a health care provisioning deficit. We have an education provisions deficit. We have a housing supply deficit. There are a lot of deficits that are bad, but the government deficit MMT and the faucet model is just a record of the money that has been spent into the economy minus the money that's been taken back Politicians from across the aisle criticize the Green out.”

New Deal by asking, “How are we going to pay for it?”

The real indicator of excessive government MMT says that this approach to government spending spending, MMTers say, is inflation. If the dollars in the is a falsehood. At its core, MMT is about the nature private economy outgrow the ability of the economy to of money. Rohan Grey, founder and president of the provide goods and services for those dollars to buy, it Modern Money Network—a progressive student- may cause inflation. Until that point, there is nothing driven economic initiative—and doctoral fellow at inherently bad about running up a deficit. To return to Cornell Law School, told the Indy that studying the the metaphor, MMTers say that the limit to how much economy without studying how money itself func- water can be poured into the sink should not be how tions is like describing the game of football as two much water pours out of the tap, but rather whether sides, running around, trying to score points without the capacity of the sink can withstand the water that is describing the rules that structure the game. introduced.

I started following the MMT Twitter-spher—a mix MMT economists also say there is much more of tenured economics professors and radical activ- room in the sink than people think. The government ists—about 9 months ago after being introduced to it by has yet to test the limits of the sink and thus has missed a friend. Growing increasingly curious about MMT, I the opportunity to encourage maximum growth. With contacted some professional MMTers through Twitter, the unrecognized capacity of the sink, the government who were eager to give me their time, and I reached a has the ability to put into place ambitious policy plans conclusion: MMT envisions the private economy like like the Green New Deal, Medicare for All, or a federal

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jobs guarantee—a program that would provide a living wage to all people who want one. But MMT does not just advocate for more government spending; it advocates for more government spending in the right way.

“We are also interested in the question of distribution. What if your sink is tilted one way and all the water accumulates in one corner of the sink?” Pavlina Tcherneva, an associate professor of economics at Bard College, explained to the Indy. “How the government spends, how it runs the faucet, how it helps balance the sink [the economy] really matters, because it looks like [savings have] been accumulating to one part of the sink.”

“We have the public financial resources,” said Professor Tcherneva. “We're interested in how to mobilize the real resources to guarantee basic economic security for people, like jobs for all, Medicare, decent housing, education. Those are some basic human necessities we think we can fund, and economic policy should provide.”

Mainstream economics disagrees with MMT on several points, including how inflation and its negative effects are created and the political feasibility of MMT’s policy prescriptions.

The practicality question How possible, then, is something like the Green New Deal or the federal jobs guarantee? What happens if politicians start using MMT as their frame for the economy today? MMTers argue that the type of deficit spending that MMT advocates for has frequently been used in US history and can be employed today.

“Today, some critics are saying ‘Oh, if we adopted the MMT paradigm, you know, the sky would fall,’” Tcherneva told the Indy. But she is quick to stress that we are already funding our deficits the way MMT describes. There are plenty of examples where the US government has chosen to do something important and spent the money. “Whether that was putting a man on the moon, whether it was launching a New Deal in the depths of a depression, whether it was waging war in the trillions of dollars, whether it was rescuing the financial sector overnight," said Tcherneva. "All it took was Congress to appropriate the budget."

Fadhel Kaboub, an associate professor of economics at Denison University, compares the Green New Deal to the c0untry mobilizing its war efforts during World War II, describing how, in the months preceding the war, the US government completely retooled the economy to produce weapons at a historic rate, reaching full employment and beyond. Price controls and wartime bonds were used to release inflationary pressures and the US economy and quality of living skyrocketed because of jobs that the government spent into existence—rather than funded using tax revenue.

Kaboub advocates for the government to treat our current situation similarly. Instead of a foreign military threat, he said, today we are facing a climate crisis, an income inequality crisis, an unemployment and poverty crisis: “We want Congress to use the power of the purse like it did in 1940 to fund the Green New Deal, to completely retool the economy and to allow us actually to win this thing, to fight climate change in the next 10 or 12 years.” In addition, Kaboub said that by offering a living wage and a stable job to anyone who wants one, the private economy will have to raise their wages and improve their benefits to compete with the public sector—increasing economic stability for everyone.

Orthodox critiques Critics of MMT and the Green New Deal often latch

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onto the issue of inflation. The mainstream understanding is that deficits lead to inflation. Deficits will lead to interest rates going up, which will “crowd out” the private sector and stunt economic growth. This is what the majority of high school and college economics instructors teach and one of the central issues from which MMT diverges.

MMTers respond to such critics by saying that inflation is more complicated than simply putting too much money into the private economy. “I have a very hard time finding historical cases where inflation was produced because of a robust, extremely strong aggregate demand,” said Professor Tcherneva, meaning that increasing government spending at high rates of growth, and thus a possibly increasing deficit, will not necessarily lead to inflation. After all, the $1.5 trillion dollars of taxes just cut by the GOP did not create meaningful inflation, and federal jobs guarantee could cost only $350 billion, estimates Stephanie Kelton in a March 7th Bloomberg Opinion article.

MMTers say that inflation occurs when spending outpaces the currently available supply of workers and productive capacity. Because there is unused capacity and potential for growth in the economy, for example the potential labor of the millions of unemployed people in the US, the economy has the ability to absorb increased government spending if it is spends in the right ways. Again, think of it like the extra capacity in the sink.

With smart spending, MMTers claim, we can grow the economy in the right way, serving the people who are not currently being served and providing a quality job for everybody. Moreover, MMTers claim there are a range of ways to address inflation concerns if they arise, including by regulating how banks operate and by taking money out of the private economy through taxes. They take inflation very seriously, but unlike deficit hawks, they just don't treat it like a Boogieman that may be waiting around every corner.

While some mainstream economists accept MMT’s basic analysis of deficit spending, many disagree with them here. New York Times columnist Paul Krugman criticized a few MMT-based economic conclusions in a series of strongly worded articles in the last month.

He believes that increased government spending while operating at full employment could slow economic activity. Lawrence Summers, in an opinion column for the Washington Post, wrote about the danger of a collapsing exchange rate, given increased government spending. In a post on New Economic Perspectives, an MMT-dedicated blog, William K. Black called recent

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

articles about MMT “the massive, coordinated assault” by the “most elite forces of orthodoxy” and a “counterrevolution against the ascendancy of progressive core policies.” In another blog post, Larry Randall Wray, a professor of economics at the University of MissouriKansas City, explained that the numerous recent articles from ‘neoliberal’ economists have consistently misrepresented the ideas of MMT and the arguments of MMT-supporting economists, to which Stephanie Kelton joined in with a response to Krugman of her own in Bloomberg Opinion. Bill Gates called MMT “some crazy talk” in an interview with The Verge, but then agreed with its approach to deficit spending.

Another common critique of MMT is that it is apolitical. While measures like price controls, credit policy, and taxation can address inflation, national policy is rarely received with bipartisan support. Some critics fear that partisanship and bureaucracy would prohibit politicians from responsibly stabilizing the economy if inflationary pressures do arise. In short, spending more money is risky and the US political landscape cannot be trusted to handle time-sensitive decisions.

Proponents of MMT have an answer to that as well.

“We are not so stupid that these critics of ours think that we are sitting around saying, ‘Let’s spend a bunch today and then if something bad happen we’ll wake up that morning and try to do [something],’” Grey told the Indy. “What we are talking about is designing a framework that already bakes in the way to respond in those moments.” Additionally, Grey suggested, laws can be passed to give independent agencies the ability to adjust conditions as they happen, like the Federal Reserve does for interest rates.

Money as a public good

entity capable of providing jobs for everybody.”

In other words, MMT says, unemployment, entrenched poverty, inadequate access to healthcare, and a certain quality of life are, in a way, a governmental choice. The US government controls the flow of money and is thus responsible for providing enough of it for all people. They are obligated to use the monetary system to address inequality and poverty.

Rohan Grey described a vision of a just economy plainly: “The key is we want to spend more money, but we want to spend it the right way, not on bailing out banks, not on giving tax cuts to the wealthy, not on funding the military industrial complex. We want to spend it on things that will actually improve people's lives.”

For many, the Green New Deal is the first step in the direction of a more just economic system, a system that currently does not work for many people. The Green New Deal, Professor Tcherneva says, not only attempts to address climate change, but also makes sure everyone has a “good job,” and a basic quality of life—through a federal jobs guarantee. In that way, it fights on two fronts. It addresses climate and social concerns in the appropriate way: together.

A federal job guarantee, which is part of the proposed Green New Deal and has long been supported by MMTers, has the potential to support those who are not served by the private economy.

“Those people who are always stuck in unemployment and become labeled as unemployable, which ... is usually a reference to women, minorities, people with disabilities, people who have a criminal record ... they tend to be the first to be fired when the recession hits and they tend to be the last people to be hired when the economy starts to boom,” Professor Kaboub told the Indy. The federal jobs guarantee would help change that. “You take people as they are, where they are, and you do on-the-job training if necessary, paid on-the-job training,” continues Kaboub. “Whereas the current system they say ‘oh you're unemployed it’s really your fault.’”

Beyond specific policy prescriptions, MMT advocates for a new way of thinking about money and about the government’s responsibility to the people. “We are wealthy enough to be able to provide for some basic economic rights,” said Professor Tcherneva. “And that is the moral principle that a lot of us in the MMT community ascribe to.”

While many MMTers support specific policy prescriptions like a federal jobs guarantee and the Green New Deal, proponents of MMT also have something to say about what our future should look like and the government’s role in a just economy. It represents a radical shift in the way we think about money. “If you understand that the currency is a public good…because it's a public monopoly,” said Professor Tcherneva, “then the government has a very crucial obligation to serve the public purpose… to employ the public's money for the public good.” Grey added, “A job guarantee is a way of saying, ‘let’s stop acting like jobs grow on rich people or jobs grow from the private sector and start acknowl- JESSE BARBER B’19 sorta looks like Bernie Sanders edging the truth,’ which is that the public sector is the circa 1961.

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BUILDING A BIGGER TABLE A look at Cohen v. Brown and legal battles over Title IX, in athletics and beyond

BY Amelia Anthony DESIGN Lulian Ahn and Wen Zhuang ILLUSTRATION Natasha Brennan

content warning: sexual assault Lifetime civil rights attorney Lynette Labinger is v. Brown—in which Labinger played for the students’ sharp and confident, sitting across from me in an team. The plaintiffs were mostly varsity gymnasts, ornately-decorated office that disguises the kind of with the lawsuit’s namesake Amy Cohen as co-captain, rfspartan fortitude that civil rights law requires. We’re joined by members of the volleyball and water polo at the Rhode Island ACLU’s office on Dorrance Street, teams. where Labinger has been recently entrenched in the “Suing the school was a last resort,” said Lisa Stern contentious fight for the Reproductive Health Care Kaplowitz, one of the plaintiffs in the suit and former Act (RHCA), the bill codifying Roe v. Wade into Rhode varsity gymnast recently inducted into Brown’s Hall of Island state law passed by the Rhode Island House Fame, in an interview with the Independent. She recalls of Representatives last week. She’s no stranger to having to hand-sew her teammate’s practice uniforms tough fights—almost three decades before the RHCA, due to a lack of funding, and an infamous bus ride in Labinger took on Brown University, representing the New England weather where the door wouldn’t students in a mammoth Title IX case that stemmed fully close. from cuts to women’s varsity teams in 1991.

Cohen v. Brown would go on to define how athletics Title IX prohibits discrimination on the basis of departments manage participation opportunities at sex at all levels of federally-funded educational insti- Brown and surrounding universities. Almost 30 years tutions; however, it has historically been most visible later, following recent federal announcements of for its gender equality protections within collegiate changes to the ways universities must interpret Title athletics. While Brown University, on its website, IX regarding sexual and gender-based violence, this currently boasts the “largest [athletics] program for case exemplifies the complexity of the law’s impact on women” in the nation with 21 varsity teams, it was gender equity in higher education. entangled in a Title IX athletics case from 1992 to 1998. Labinger’s case, Cohen v. Brown, was brought +++ by students against the university, which announced demotions for four sports teams in 1991 for financial “The message was, this happens, we point out Title IX reasons. Women’s gymnastics and volleyball, as well to them, and they put the teams back—except ours,” as men’s golf and water polo, were no longer to be Labinger said in a recent interview with the Indy, referoffered at the varsity level. According to a Brown Daily ring to the initial mindset of the plaintiffs. “We had not Herald article at the time, the cuts were supposed to started looking into anything about the team structure, save the university about $75,000 annually. The cut how well they were supported, and how other teams teams were allowed to compete at the “club varsity” were supported.” Throughout the course of the case, level, surviving only on private funding. however, Labinger’s team of civil rights lawyers would However, this relatively small amount of savings discover an overall disparity in support for women’s came at a large cost to the university, as affected athletic program. They deposed all the coaches on the students subsequently filed a class-action lawsuit men’s and women’s teams and examined equipment, against Brown for an alleged Title IX violation. Brown budgets, and practice schedules. chose to fight the case instead of settling, and so At the time of the suit, Brown had large particibegan a lengthy and expensive legal battle—Cohen pation across the board on varsity sports teams, with

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men’s participation about 11 or 12 percentage-points higher than women’s, whereas the enrollment of undergraduates in the university was about equal.

When the Athletic Department made cuts to varsity teams, they did so equally—the same number of men's and women’s teams were cut (two each).

According to the federal Office of Civil Rights’ official Policy Interpretation, in order to be in compliance with Title IX, “intercollegiate level participation opportunities for male and female students” needed to be “provided in numbers substantially proportionate to their respective enrollments.”

The main arguments concerned how to count.

Labinger’s team said that the percentages of men and women competing in varsity sports should match those of the undergraduate enrollment. Brown, on the other hand, argued that the “participation opportunities” at the time reflected student interest in athletics, and that men had more interest than women. The university also rejected this idea of strict proportionality, claiming that it created quotas and stated in a post-hearing memorandum “Title IX is not an affirmative action statute.”

In the first trial in 1992, the plaintiffs asked for and were granted a preliminary injunction, which restored their teams to varsity status. Brown fruitlessly appealed the injunction in 1993. The second round of trials took place in 1995, and Brown would once again appeal a lower court’s decision in the plaintiffs’ favor.

After the First Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the lower court ruling, Brown even attempted to appeal again to the Supreme Court in 1997, a petition that was rejected.

Cohen v. Brown was the first Title IX case of its type to receive an appellate court decision. The Civil Rights division of the Department of Justice even filed an amicus curiae brief in support of the plaintiffs in the appeals court.

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"No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance."

“By the time we settled the case, it wasn’t just women’s volleyball and gymnastics that got restored,” said Labinger. “We also got women’s water polo and women’s skiing.” In the years after the settlement, Brown’s athletic department additionally developed varsity women’s golf and equestrian teams. Men’s golf and water polo were also restored.

“We’re not playing musical chairs on a finite table,” Labinger said, referring to the amounts of teams in the athletic department’s budget. “We’re talking about building a bigger table.”

The desired effect of Cohen v. Brown, in line with the results it achieved at Brown, was for schools to bolster their women’s athletic departments, matching investment in men's programs. However, this response wasn’t universal. Providence College, for example, ended up cutting their men’s varsity baseball team in 1998 to get their athletic participation numbers in proportion with their undergraduate enrollment. Rev. Terence J. Keegan, then executive vice president of the school, told the New York Times in 1999, “We just couldn’t risk that kind of litigation,” referencing the costs of the Brown lawsuit to justify the decision.

In cases like Providence College, this ‘less, not more’ approach to Title IX can create an animosity towards the law and end up hurt both men’s and women’s athletics programs across the board, argued Paul Whitty in a 2002 article in The Cowl, Providence College’s student newspaper. “The law that was meant to promote female athletics was only limiting male opportunities,” he writes, “Title IX” has become a hated term by many at Providence College and other schools across the country.” But Title IX is first and foremost an anti-discrimination law, and subsequently, rulings like Cohen v. Brown are meant to reinforce gender equality.

Technically Cohen v. Brown is still active, and relevant, at Brown. As part of the suit, Labinger and her team still receive annual reports about sports participation numbers on men’s and women’s teams. The settlement mandated that percentages on sports teams

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

- Title IX of the Education Amendments Act of 1972

for each gender reflect the undergraduate enrollment of each gender within a margin of 3.5 percent, and Labinger’s team calculates these percentages each year to ensure the university stays accountable to its women athletes. +++

courtrooms. As Brown University President Christina Paxson stated in her response letter to these changes, this shift “may deter students from reporting sexual misconduct,” and “campus disciplinary proceedings are not, and cannot ever be, substitutes for or analogs to courts of law.” Rhode Island Governor Gina Raimondo and Postsecondary Education Commissioner Brenda Dann-Messier also sent in a letter in opposition of the changes.

However, in a city as full of colleges as Providence is, some sort of uniformity across schools could be beneficial. Providence-based criminal defense lawyer John Grasso wrote in a Providence Journal opinion article last year that “campus sexual misconduct is handled much differently at Providence College than it is at Brown University than it is at the University of Rhode Island.” Grasso concluded, “In my experience, no two colleges or universities follow the same process and the result is grossly disparate and inadequate treatment of the very students it intends to protect.”

In 2016, Brown University was sued by a Providence College student after she was allegedly sexually assaulted by three Brown football players. She claimed that Brown University did not provide her a prompt investigation in accordance with Title IX. The case was dismissed in district court, and the decision was upheld in appellate court, on the grounds that third-party students are not protected under a university’s Title IX. From establishing how gender equality in sports actually looks to constructing systems for survivors of sexual and gender-based violence to hold perpetrators accountable, Title IX has been expanded from a single sentence to a sweeping piece of legislation affecting all realms of campus life across the nation. It has always been contentious and complex, from 1972 to 2019.

Title IX is a single sentence, without any mention of the word “athletics.” In 1974, in order to calm fears that Title IX would lead to the "possible doom of intercollegiate sports," as the head of the NAACP Walter Byers put it, Texas Senator John Tower proposed an amendment to exempt athletics from the scope of the law. Congress rejected the Tower Amendment and instead mandated that the Department of Health, Education and Welfare develop regulations on how to apply the law to athletics. Today, Title IX’s teeth come from Policy Interpretations, documents developed in 1979 by the Office of Civil Rights that outline specific guidelines on how to maintain gender equality across its many fields.

Alexander v. Yale in 1980 was the first case in which sexual harassment charges were brought up against a university under Title IX. It established that sexual harassment could constitute sex discrimination, and was therefore a violation of Title IX. Consequently, most universities created systems for students to file sexual harassment grievances.

Last November, Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos announced proposed changes to Title IX’s sexual and gender-based harassment regulations.

Secretary DeVos’s new regulations include controversial provisions as to how universities conduct investigations into alleged incidents. Specifically, they extend due process protections to these campus investigations, including a “presumption of innocence throughout the grievance process, live hearings in the higher education context,” and “the opportunity to AMELIA ANTHONY B’22 wants to be a lawyer. test the credibility of parties and witnesses through cross-examination.” In effect, these proposed changes would transform internal campus investigations into

METRO

06

MONEY IN YOUR M And then the money was in your mouth. So much money you were always eating salad, those pretentious, extortionate salads your father would have laughed at if he were still alive to be offended. He would have hated the ludicrous prices these new Manilenyo cafés calligraph onto their green Parisian chalkboards for salads with vegetables you’ve never even heard of, salads that you wash down with high-calorie cocktails flaunting their feathers like that peacock you and your father saw at the Manila Zoo once, the peacock who died years after he did, but when you read about it in the back of the Philippine Inquirer you wept anyway, like you were a little girl again, opening the door for your Tito1 whose mustache hung like an apology over his lips.

Did you really come this far to just eat vegetables?

A piece of arugula tumbles through your lips, the bitter taste stinging a part of your mouth you didn’t know was there. When you were growing up your mother would spoon the palengke’s2 day of vegetables, fresh fish, and rice onto your richer friends’ plates like she was embarrassed about it. The two of you would sit together watching commercials for those bright red sausages you couldn’t afford on the little box of a television she finally bought with her sari-sari3 store money because Dad said he wouldn’t pay to let that Marcos4 propaganda bullshit into your home. And then your mother would say, hush, don’t talk like that, and cross herself, and Dad would say, well what can I say that’s worse than what I’m already doing. And everyone knew this was true. And then she would shrink­—you envy that she’s lost twenty pounds since all that happened—into a little bundle by the television, neatly folded like a towel at the foot of the bed. Now it was 2001 and those sausages were cheaper than anything, and vegetables pricey as schoolbooks, and every Filipino was stuffing themselves with meat enough for the nation to go up a couple pant sizes, and now that you think about it you wonder if that’s what’s making these 7,107 islands sink deeper into the sea. And this is how you find yourself, here in this upscale Makati café, pushing arugula away with your fork, trying not to think about the bathroom scale this morning. Your fiancée Jhun-Jhun noisily siphons another square from his 12-ounce steak.

You met Jhun-Jhun at the law firm. He is confident, bright, with a big smile that unveils both his top and bottom teeth. He’s the boss’s kid, a few years younger than you, and devastatingly ripped like a page from a banned book. So at first you say, that’s sweet, baby, but I can’t. And of course that all gives way, something about that ease in his walk, the puppyishness he brings to all things. Although sometimes his intellect was wanting, you needed that lightness when you were curled over your casework for the umpteenth hour, folded up like a towel at the foot of the bed.

Jhun-Jhun isn’t his real name, of course. It’s a play on Junior, and his real name is Jia, which you believe is Chinese for auspicious, but you’ve forgotten and you’re too embarrassed at this point to ask. No one in the Philippines goes by their real names, and this wasn’t something you knew was abnormal until you left the country the first time, when the firm took you on that trip to Japan on your last year of law school. That trip you swore you wouldn’t go because you knew it’d sway you. And then you went anyways, because it would make your mother sad if you didn’t, your mother who just wanted you to enjoy life, she never put any pressure on you like everyone else’s, she prayed you would have what she didn’t. She would always say, anak5, you do the best you can and you hope it’s enough. On the trip, you wonder if maybe this is the best you can do.

While you are downing the hundred-dollar sake you do not think about your father’s father, the guerilla the Japanese waterboarded and chained up to die in a city plaza.6 And so the money was in your mouth. So too was the hundred-dollar Nigiri baring its belly of uncooked fish. You were not wondering why was it so expensive not to cook fish when you signed your full name on the dotted line. Your real name that your father would call you even after everybody decided your name was Cora.

In all its long-ness, you think the signature looks like it belongs to somebody else.

Cora, baby? says Jhun-Jhun, bringing you down from your reverie. His eyes are inquisitive and reflect

07

LITERARY

UTH

the yellow of the hipster string lights that hang behind you. He wants to leave and buy the TV now, before there’s sobrang7 traffic and you’re stuck on EDSA8 the next hour and a half. You wonder how it is you caught such a good one. You almost forgot, you were here because you’re buying this new thing called a flat screen, which looked like a regular television if you pulled the ends really hard. How nice it’ll look in our new home.

I’m good baby, you say in English. Just thinking.

That’s my girl. He scruffs your hair. Always thinking so much!

The department store is in the basement of a mall.

Despite malls never having windows so you can never tell the time of day, somehow your body could always sense whether you were above ground or not. You hate basements, you wonder why this is, and decide there must be some evolutionary basis to it as Jhun-Jhun totes you into the place, gesticulating about a basketball game you did not watch, and smiling a good afternoon at all the young, well made-up clerks who eye you with envy for having reeled in such a prime specimen.

You know they are wondering after the years on your own body, wondering after how to poach him. They chatter affectionately at Jhun-Jhun, and he never hears the flirtation ringing in their gills.

Downstairs, sir, the clerks giggle, B2.

And so down, down the escalator you go.

You’re safe in the electronics section, where the clerks are all men, thank God, and the place is still enormous. Like schools of fish, the fluorescent paradise teems with mestizo9 families cruising confused children in strollers, Koreans smart in blue and white, and aging matriarchs with blue uniformed house help in tow like an early funeral procession. This mall is frequented by foreigners, which is how you know it’s high-end and the bathrooms have toilet paper. The store is full of electronics nobody needed invented, the kind that are bought with excitement, used one or twice, then dispossessed into clutter cabinets for the lone task of collecting dust. You want to beeline to where the televisions rise out of the white tile like obelisks – their silky screens flash mangroves stretching out of emerald seas, hot air balloons climbing, and chefs tossing rainbow salads in slow-motion – but Jhun-Jhun must stop at all the shiny things, like a magpie assembling a nest.

Back when the money was not in your mouth, would you stop at the flowers too? Hell, are there still flowers in Manila? To be honest, you never looked anymore, you were always in the car. You should ask your mom, it’s been a while since you called her.

Somehow you lost time for all this, and reaching back you forget what a flower actually smells like, and the only scent that comes to mind is the French eau de toilette you bought last week. But you do remember that your father’s favorite flowers were the bougainvillea, those brusque flowers that bloom without caution, and the fuchsia ones outside your house were flourishing that day your Tito arrived with his hat in his hands. What news. You didn’t even know they had taken Dad in for questioning. Now you were lucky just to be getting back his body. Because of his activism, you were used to him being away weeks at a time, but when you heard he was gone forever something like an earthquake came, you cried and fell onto everything and the little box of a television came crashing down onto the tiles. You buried him with his journals, you

BY Tabitha Payne ILLUSTRATION Alana Baer DESIGN Christie Zhong

swore you would finish what he started, and it wasn’t until the money was in your mouth that all your words got swallowed back into a place deeper than a grave.

That one looks fine, honey. This is your every reply to the parade of near-identical flat screens you’re judging today. But Jhun-Jhun is thorough, Jhun-Jhun wants to live without regrets, Jhun-Jhun will pry the clerk until the poor guy pulls out every last television pamphlet and half of his hair.

You are at the store an hour, and then two. Sitting onthe fold-up chair watching the televisions spin through their umpteenth cycle of otherworldly video clips, you feel your stomach grumble and do nothing.

You chew on some arugula you find between your molars. It tastes like dust.

You know what, Cora, I don’t care anymore, says Jhun-Jhun, who’s finally lowered them down to two.

They’re both great. Just please, pick one.

A peacock flashes onto the screen of the one to the left. It walks across the stage, brilliant color arced like the inside of a flame. And then it is gone, replaced by a white girl with whiter teeth, writhing in sand.

That one, you say. That one is best.

That evening a typhoon of people storm EDSA. You wish you were out there with them, you hate Errap10 as much as anybody, but there are so many people that you’re afraid to open the SUV door. The mosaic of hundreds of thousands of yearning faces wave like a flag against the car window. Maybe change will really happen this time, maybe your fathers will finally sleep easy beneath softening soil, and maybe all that money will be spat out. You hold all these glorious thoughts up against the light, turning them slowly in your hands. Yet the glistening images and thundering chants of the people, which thrum and rise and dip as if coming in and out of water, somehow make you feel like mourning. All this movement happening outside of you. You sit in the car for hours, glacially pushing against the masses, the brand-new television sleeping like a baby in the backseat.

1 uncle 2 wet market 3 a small odds and ends store operating out of someone’s home 4 Ferdinand Marcos, Filipino dictator, ruling from 1965-1986 5 child 6 the Japanese occupation of the Philippines took place between 1942 and 1945 and resulted in the deaths of tens of thousands of Filipinos 7 too much, very 8 short for Epifanio de los Santos Avenue: Manila’s most important highway, which is unendingly inundated with traffic and was the marching ground of two peaceful revolutions against corrupt presidencies. The first, the People Power revolution in 1986, ousted Marcos after decades of repression and disappearances. The second, in 2001, is my first memory. I remember not understanding what was going on, feeling a thousand feet tall sitting on my father’s sturdy shoulders, looking across an endless sea of heads, all of us chanting, ERRAP RESIGN 9 mixed white and Filipino 10 nickname for Joseph Estrada, president who was removed from office by the EDSA II movement

15 MARCH 2019

UNLIVING COLOR

BY Ben Bienstock DESIGN Amos Jackson

Colorization and popular history in Peter Jackson's director's cut of the First World War

About a half an hour into They Shall Not Grow Old, the new documentary by Lord of the Rings director Peter Jackson, British soldiers leave their black-and-white training camps and arrive in color on the widescreen Belgian battlefields of the First World War. The transition is momentous even as the entire audience is expecting it; here is the moment where we are finally, more than a century after the Armistice of 1918, to understand the reality of the war as soldiers ‘actually experienced it.’ By restoring and colorizing newsreel footage (as well as correcting speed discrepancies and adding sound and speech with the aid of lip readers), Jackson attempted to “reach through the fog of time and pull these men into the modern world, so they can regain their humanity once more—rather than be seen only as Charlie Chaplin-type figures in the vintage archive film.” But colorization is never that simple, and though Jackson seeks to “bring the past alive,” adding color does much more than just that, if it even does it at all.

Jackson, a New Zealander who dedicated the film to his British grandfather—a veteran of the war—was commissioned by the Imperial War Museum in 2015 to make a documentary commemorating the centennial of the war’s end. From hundreds of hours of the Museum’s clips and oral testimonies of British soldiers, Jackson cut a one hour and 40 minute documentary that follows soldiers through the terrors and tedium of the war.

Though in the film’s post-credits, behind-thescenes documentary, Jackson claims They Shall Not Grow Old is not a “historical film,” it is nonetheless based on a strong historical and ideological argument: in order for audiences to connect with footage of the First World War and understand the conflict as a real event, the footage must be colorized. After all, as the film’s trailer says, “The people who experienced it did not live in a silent, black-and-white world.” But does colorization actually make the past any less distant, or make historical images any more real?

Colorization operates on three primary levels: aesthetic, commercial, and ideological. These three concerns are not independent of each other, but rather almost always intertwine: for example, in the 1980s, Ted Turner, believing that teenagers raised on color television couldn’t stand black-and-white movies, added color to his archive of classic MGM films to attract younger audiences, creating new versions that critics panned for their washed-out look and lack of visual subtlety. Colorization is an ideological process because it reflects the colorizer’s belief that the blackand-white cinematic past would be more enjoyable and believably real to contemporary audiences if it were in color. More than the other two, the ideological dimension becomes especially significant when documentary films, which are not only works of art but also works of history, are colorized.

This is not to say that They Shall Not Grow Old has no important aesthetic successes or failures. On the contrary, the beauty of many scenes (including a gorgeous recurring shot of shadowed soldiers and horses returning to camp under purple and orange twilight) makes a strong case for the visually expressive merits of colorization. The grass in Belgian fields is not just green, but many greens that cascade as each individual blade flows in the wind. But while Jackson’s precise treatment draws the audience’s eyes and hearts to the natural beauty of the landscape, it has the

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

opposite effect when depicting the men who fought the war. The soldiers are real the way wax figures are real; the execution is always slightly off, but it would feel cruel and obvious to point it out. One cheek here is too pudgy, a mouth droops and bulges there. Motion is a crapshoot—a milky smooth face can suddenly smudge with a turn of the neck or an open-mouth grin of blackened teeth. Though the filmmakers sometimes do not seem to know how living humans look, they certainly know how to depict bloodied corpses, and therefore make the poor decision to depict them a dozen or so times.

Anxieties over colorization’s visual effects are nothing new: well before critics and theorists in the 1980s traded barbs over Turner’s televised version of It’s a Wonderful Life, silent-era Hollywood purists supposedly said adding color to black-and-white films was like “putting lip rouge on Venus de Milo.” But the stakes are different in this case. No one needs to be concerned that They Shall Not Grow Old defaces the legacy of a beautiful film past in a shallow search for 16-year-olds’ eyes and cash. They Shall Not Grow Old does not ask what colorization does to film, but what it does to history.

It would be easier to buy the film’s view of history if it were applied consistently throughout. Only footage of the war itself is colorized, making it seem that though Jackson wants to bring the past alive, the only past he considers worth resurrecting is that of young British men killing and being killed. Meanwhile, the bookending depictions of everyday British life remain in the supposedly non-real world of grainy monochrome, as if the stories of women factory workers and schoolchildren deserve to remain distant. Regardless of what Jackson thinks, this footage is emotionally affecting, and the social history it embodies does more to reduce historical distance than any amount of digital color.

When Jackson denies that They Shall Not Grow Old is a historical film, what he means is that it is a war film. After the credits, he brags that he did such a good job with the restoration (which is true, though the best evidence is the few moments of restored black-andwhite clips) that he was able to zoom and pan to make the century-old footage feel cinematic to 2018 audiences. There’s something strange about mining newsreel footage and photographs of dead bodies for Saving Private Ryan–style drama, but what’s worse is that though this choice may make the film more compelling, it reveals the inherent contradictions of its ideology of colorization. If Jackson sees colorization as a way of reaching audiences—only a month after its wide US release, They Shall Not Grow Old is already one of the highest-grossing documentaries of all time—then aping the visual style of popular war films is a good strategy. But if he is trying to present the reality of the war as soldiers experienced it, then editing that reality codes the footage as modern and fictional, inserting artifice where it is not welcome.

The irony of colorization is that it is a process that uses overt artifice to make a film look more real. But all film—and all history—is, on some level, artificial.

We can try to understand the past, even hope to learn from it, but we will never be able to experience it firsthand through any representation. What does it matter if historical footage of the First World War is in black and white? For a century, people around the world have understood the war through black-and-white

photographs and films, and this has created a visual shorthand for understanding the war in its historical context. Colorization initially jars us because it troubles this unspoken code and shows us that the past was indeed in full, resplendent color. This is an unequivocally good thing; in order to dislodge and replace narratives that prevent us from reckoning with the past as it occurred, new visions of history must unsettle us.

Our ideology, in other words, must be shaken, and new narratives must settle it. This is the process of history creation: formulating and reformulating to move ever further toward a truth we’ll never get to.

Authentic color images of events typically seen in black-and-white upend our historical imagination not because they show us that the past was in color, but because they reveal that people saw in color and sought out technology that would allow them to represent the world with a broader palette than black-and-white film allowed. Bill Manbo’s Kodachrome photographs from within a Japanese-American internment camp in Wyoming, published in the 2012 book Colors of Confinement, force us to reconsider our distance from the Second World War and the era of fascism through the representation of blue ties and pastel pink dresses, brown rust and green leaves. But these images stand as a counterpoint to black-and-white photographs; without colorization’s ideological attempts to restore colors that were never there to present the past ‘as it really was,’ Manbo’s photographs do not replace blackand-white images. Rather, they serve as evidence that Japanese internment was neither a black-and-white event nor a color event, but an event that affected people whose experiences cannot be reduced to the images that photographers and filmmakers represented using the materials available to them.

But the colorization in They Shall Not Grow Old cannot capitalize on the moment of unsettlement because its representation of the past is artificial and looks artificial. After the soldiers arrive in Belgium in shocking color, the jarring feeling of historical unease doesn’t end until after the credits, when Jackson shows the audience how he colorized the film; only by seeing the black-and-white and colorized clips side-by-side can we again feel stable in our understanding of what is real. Colorization forever changes the way audiences view the original images and the history they depict, but this doesn’t mean that the new perception is ‘better’ or ‘more accurate.’ If audiences walk into the film imagining the First World War in black-and-white and leave with an image of it as a high-resolution computer game, then colorization has not brought them closer to the past at all. By presenting the colorized film as more ‘real’ than the black-and-white original footage, Jackson hides the artifice and ideology that support the colorization process. Black-and-white, in his estimation, is an aesthetically and historically compromised format that cannot adequately convey truth. But colorization is an inherently flawed process, and its shortcomings may undermine the historical awareness that Jackson seeks to create. In the end, a black-and-white past is no less real than one cast in wax.

BEN BIENSTOCK B’20 has finally decided that it’s okay that he imagines the past in black-and-white.

ARTS

08

AMONG THE IGUANAS

On life and the pursuit of death in Guantánamo Bay content warning: descriptions of death and torture In Taíno, an indigenous language of the Caribbean men accused of plotting the September 11 attacks on islands, Guantánamo means “land between the rivers.” the World Trade Center and the Pentagon as part of It is the name of a province in southeast Cuba and its the government-sponsored Victim Witness Assistance capital city. It is also the name of the oldest overseas Program (VWAP).

US naval base, established in 1903. Nearly 100 years Six months prior to my visit, I read an op-ed titled later, in January 2002, the base became the site of “Guantánamo Is Delaying Justice for 9/11 Families” an infamous detention camp. The word has come to and discovered Peaceful Tomorrows, a nonprofit represent a generation of violence against Muslims, peace advocacy organization comprised of individof fear-driven reactionary policies, of crimes against uals who lost loved ones on September 11. Intrigued, I humanity in the name of national security, of excep- sent the article to my sister, Leila, and within weeks, tionalism, and of lawlessness. we met with members of the organization. Phyllis and The word Guantánamo is now synonymous with Orlando lost their son in the attacks; within weeks, terror, torture, and detention. A mere mention of the half-delirious from shock and grief, they wrote a letter word elicits a near-ubiquitous shudder, or a groan. It to then-President Bush urging him to abstain from war. evokes images of blindfolded, handcuffed men in In 2012, Phyllis traveled to Guantánamo with VWAP. orange jumpsuits, people labeled “the worst of the Leila and I contacted the program coordinators and worst,” suicide bombers and radical Islamic funda- began our quest to see the place for ourselves, to begin mentalism, prison bars and military personnel, the to grasp what has been done in our father’s name.

American flag.

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Walid bin Attash, The realization that Guantánamo exists physi- Ramzi bin al-Shibh, Ammar al-Baluchi, and Mustafa cally, not only as a metaphor or imagination, struck me Ahmad al Hawsawi have been charged with 2,973 relatively recently. Until last year, my mental image individual accounts of murder, for each victim of of the place was analogous to my conception of the the attacks, along with a multitude of other crimes: Bermuda Triangle; bizarre, amorphous, not quite real attacking civilians, intentionally causing serious but with grave consequences. Last summer, I visited bodily injury, murder in violation of the law of war, Guantànamo and learned that it is, in fact, very real. Its destruction of property in violation of the law of war, remote location and shroud of secrecy do not occlude hijacking an aircraft, terrorism, and providing material its physical presence. support for terrorism. My father, Brian, was a victim; Early on in my trip, I learned about the wildlife on September 11, 2001, he went to his office on the at Guantánamo: the island is populated with hutias, 105th floor of the North Tower and died. His remains known as banana rats, and Cuban rock iguanas, an were never found and I do not know how, exactly, he exceptionally large species of lizard. Soldiers and civil- perished. Instantaneously, perhaps, as the first plane ians on the island discuss these species with a sense of collided with the building; or, slowly, as smoky toxic pride. At the island’s gift shop, plush stuffed hutias and fumes seeped through the lower floors, suffocating. rock iguanas line the shelves, nestled between baseI am lucky to have been spared the sight and ball caps bearing the name “Guantánamo Bay” and scent of the towers in flames. When I visited the base, coffee mugs that read “Straight Outta Gitmo.” the prosecutors in the case continually discussed, in graphic detail, the suffering that occurred on that +++ day. In court, prosecutors repeated the number 2,973 again and again. As if the scope of the accused’s crimes I visited the naval base-slash-detention center to somehow negated the government’s own transgresobserve pre-trial hearings for the case against five sions, its neglect of rule of law.

09

FEATURES

At a group dinner, a man who lost his wife casually asked one of the VWAP coordinators what she thought of torture––an issue that is central to defense arguments but is largely denied by prosecutors. “Waterboarding isn’t torture!” she shouted, face red from rage and whiskey. “These men haven’t seen torture! Torture is your wife, standing at the top of the World Trade Center, deciding whether to jump or to get burned alive! That’s torture!” I am of the belief that both can be defined as torture. I am also deeply offended by the use of pain to justify violence. +++ Restorative justice, according to the Centre for Justice and Reconciliation, “repairs the harm caused by crime.” It is best accomplished, the theory stipulates, through cooperation with all stakeholders. This community-driven approach emphasizes collaborative—rather than punitive—solutions to harm, both within and outside of the criminal justice system. The goal is transformation: by recognizing and acknowledging harm that has been inflicted, communities can work toward understanding the underlying issues that prompted the perpetrator to act, build bridges, and heal collectively.

I do not know exactly how this concept can be applied to violent, irreversible crimes. I do know, however, that violence cannot be the answer to violence, and that the deaths of these rapidly aging men will not undo the death of my father or other victims. Yet, ten years after the 2008 arraignment of the alleged perpetrators, government prosecutors remain mired in the pursuit of the death penalty.

Evidence of guilt is compelling; the attorneys tasked with defending the so-called “9/11 five” do not deny that their clients were involved in the meticulously orchestrated and catastrophically-enacted events of that day. Yet, of the 779 Muslim men who were or are detained in Guantánamo, only nine have been charged with any crimes, and none have been tried. Hundreds of former detainees, all innocent,

15 MARCH 2019

BY Jessica Bram Murphy ILLUSTRATION Giacomo Sartorelli DESIGN Amos Jackson

have been released; after enduring years of torture and captivity, many live in exile, unable to return to their countries of origin, traumatized. At least six men have committed suicide while in captivity, and three others have died of other causes. Forty-one detainees remain in Guantánamo, including many who have been cleared for release but remain stalled by bureaucratic procedural stagnancy and apathy. Some were teenagers when they were kidnapped; eighteen years later, they approach middle age, graying with the stress of torture and indefinite detention.

The location of the prison in which the remaining detainees are held is top secret. One defense team filed a motion to see the prison several years ago. Once the motion was passed, military personnel blindfolded attorneys and drove them in circles around the base on the way to the prison. That way, they couldn’t trace the geography or maintain a coherent mental map. The five accused are also blindfolded on their way to and from court each day that the hearings are held. +++ When I visited Guantánamo, I traveled with nearly everyone involved in the case, other than the defendants, to observe or participate in the legal proceedings. Teams of prosecutors and defense attorneys and their respective staff members boarded the plane, making small talk, as they do before each round of pre-trial hearings, which occur every couple of months.

This process began in 2008; ten years and hundreds of court motions later, the pre-trial hearings have become routine. Thirty rounds of proceedings have taken place, largely outside of public discourse and media attention.

The flight was oddly normal; the captain made announcements over the loudspeaker about the weather and predictions about turbulence, and flight attendants demonstrated emergency protocol. Upon arrival, other victim family members and I were given a thick “Welcome to GTMO” information packet and a summary of the motions that were to be discussed in this round of hearings. We were handed the naval base’s monthly newsletter, titled “GTMO Life” with the subheading “Morale, Welfare, & Recreation.” It lists events and announcements, mostly for the thousands of military personnel stationed at the base and their families, ranging from Sunday night bingo to dodgeball tournaments for military personnel and their families.

Our chaperones, coordinators of VWAP employed by the Chief Prosecutor, also handed us a copy of the accused’s manifesto—a statement, released under dubious circumstances, claiming responsibility for the attacks. Then they warned us: media representatives and defense attorneys will try to talk to you, and you are not obligated. They also repeated, many times, that the defense teams were “solely responsible” for their respective clients—the men alleged to have murdered our loved ones. Despite these warnings, I wanted to talk to the defense attorneys, the people closest to the detainees. +++ The makeshift legal complex––unironically named “Camp Justice”––is set up to prevent any accidental or intentional leaks of classified information; the main section of the room is where the judge, the five defendants and their respective teams of lawyers, and the multiple teams of prosecutors. Dozens of Joint Task Force (JTF) soldiers line the room. (By my estimation, there are at least three to four soldier guards per detainee, in addition to others who stand by the door.)

There is a transparent wall, made up of three thick layers of soundproof Plexiglas, between the courtroom and the observation room. Family members, NGO observers, members of the media, and a few legal personnel who have not received security clearance sit behind this wall. Family members of military personnel, perhaps bored of the island’s greasy bowling alley and monotonous kickball tournaments, are also eligible to watch the proceedings. We can watch the hearings as they are happening, peering through the glass, but we hear a recording of the proceedings with a 40-second time delay. If information is released that

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

the convening authority posits as a threat to national security, a button is pushed to stop the recording.

We entered Camp Justice early on Monday morning. After passing through three separate rounds of metal detectors and military guards checking our identification badges, we were given the opportunity to approach the glass partition and take a closer look at the defendants before the judge appeared and the proceedings began. My sister and I stood at the glass, silently staring at the men accused of enacting the attacks that killed our father and many others.

Neither of us have clear memories of the day— Leila was three, and I was five—so we experienced September 11 differently from the other members of our group, each one at least forty years older. My generation has no memory of a world in which the attacks did not happen. We grew up with this reality, with its consequences, with its weight. Although I feel disconnected from the events of that day, and have only fragments of recollections, this historic event has indelibly shaped my life.

At the end of the day, after court was adjourned and everyone began to leave the courtroom, my sister and I walked back to the side of the Plexiglas with the best view of the defendants. We stared, noticing Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s bright red beard, studying the wrinkles in his face. We watched as two of the defendants spoke to their lawyers, smiling and shaking hands. They were alive: living, breathing. After a minute or two, Ramzi bin al-Shibh noticed us, looked directly at us, smiled, and waved, as if to say, I see you staring. We made eye contact, then I quickly walked away.

What could he possibly be thinking in this moment? How did he end up here, sitting in a courtroom in Guantánamo Bay, shortly before returning to his cell? How did I end up here, on the other side of the Plexiglas, craning my neck to stare?

In a meeting with defense attorneys, I learned that Mr. Mohammed—as the primary defendant is called— once arranged for flowers to be sent to a lawyer on his team when she fell ill. I learned that he prepares food for his lawyers when they visit his cell; once, he made cheese by storing yogurt in an old sock and waiting for it to ferment. Apparently, when he hears news of Palestinian children killed by Israeli military forces, Mr. Mohammed cries.

Political rhetoric and public discourse paint terrorists as non-human, as aliens. Another family member on my trip, who had been to a previous round of hearings, informed me on the plane ride to the base: “these guys don’t have two heads.” At least three of the five accused are admitted mass murderers, yet they are all people. It is a challenge to reconcile the humanity of people who fail to recognize the humanity of their victims. It is a challenge to acknowledge the gravity of the government’s absence of humanity for its own victims. +++

part of the reason the case is dragging along so slowly: the credibility of the accused's statements have been tainted by their treatment in US custody. In discussions with attorneys, I learned that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (self-proclaimed architect of the attacks) claims to have suffered brain damage as a result of oxygen deprivation during the 183 times he was waterboarded. Mustafa al-Hawsawi, accused of transferring money to the 19 hijackers, suffers from rectal prolapse as a result of forceful so-called medical examinations; as a result, he can hardly sit without agonizing pain.

My outrage coexists with understanding. In Guantánamo, I felt the penetrating shock of the attacks and the unequivocal fear they provoked. I abhor the reactionary violence inflicted on innocent men who were tortured and held captive in Guantánamo, and I mourn the hundreds of thousands of lives lost in wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan, soldiers and civilian. +++ According to VWAP coordinators, many family members of victims would give anything to see these men killed. Many would be thrilled to personally execute the accused. Often, pain motivates this desire for justice.

A woman who lost her brother in the attacks and shares many of my beliefs speculated that those whose life trajectory changed insurmountably after the attacks—for instance, someone who lost a spouse in the infancy of a marriage, or a child who never met a parent—demand the death penalty. Some feel it is unfair for the people who killed their loved ones to go on living, decades after so many lives were cut short.

Others want the alleged perpetrators to feel the same pain they feel; the throbbing heartache, the hollowness of loss.

This crime is different from most: it was a suicide mission, and the 19 people who carried out the attacks—who murdered the pilots, hijacked the planes, and flew directly into the towers—are dead. The five defendants in this case may be culpable to an extent, but their activities were removed from the events of the day. Moreover, the fatalities of the attacks were inadvertent; no members of Al Qaeda had animosity towards the victims as individuals. Rather, the group targeted symbols of American greed, impurity, and imperialism; icons of their perceived threat to their religion and way of life.

The death of these five men, regardless of their involvement in the attacks, would not bring back my father or any other victims. A capital sentence would be a symbol of martyrdom for the perpetrators of these attacks and an empty victory for government prosecutors. But there is also no chance that these five men will ever be released. They will either die before the trial happens or they will be sentenced to remain in detention in Guantánamo Bay for life. A plea deal could end legal proceedings that cost millions of dollars a year, but that deal was negotiated and quickly abandoned.

The consequences of the tragedy of 9/11 have multiplied across continents. Guantánamo Bay is reflective of a false imperviousness, an illusion of immunity to the rest of the world. Victims such as my father deserve justice—justice that has yet to be served—but propagating pain cannot be the answer.

There is no such thing as War on Terror because War is Terror. I first read this phrase later in the summer, after returning to the mainland US, on a sticker in a hippy gift shop in New York, resting on a dusty shelf between recycled-paper notebooks and fair-trade-handmade jewelry. The timing was appropriate; the phrase captures much of what I struggled to comprehend JESSICA BRAM MURPHY B'19 is still processing. in Guantánamo. This trial, if it ever takes place, is an opportunity for the country to hold itself accountable for its actions in the wake of a massive attack on US soil.

Perhaps that is what restorative justice looks like: using tragedy to prevent more tragedy, using violence to prevent more violence. This case can be used to understand the events of September 11, the factors leading up to the attacks, and the government’s consequential responses.

In December 2012, the Senate Intelligence Committee published a report detailing the use of torture in the CIA’s Detention and Interrogation Program. This 6,000-page document revealed the brutality of so-called “enhanced interrogation” techniques. I gleaned details from the report during my trip; the issue of torture dominated the hearings and it was a major topic of discussion. Treatment of defendants is

FEATURES

10

WHICH

PROVIDENCE PEST ARE YOU? START

NOPE

YUP

Is the carrion rank?

Is sacrificing the brood acceptable if not necessary?

Are you afraid of wind turbines?

You like dogs, ya?

A rotting stump – will you consume the inhabitants?

Ravage the koi pond?

Hot pavement?

Saving yourself for wild raspberries?

Are you still sober?

The body of the Big Blue Bug reflects sound waves; are you horny?

Do you scamper via the IPS (Interdimensional Pipe System)?

Garbage water pooling under the Chevy Silverado, does it beckon?

A pale blast of moonlight hits the sidewalk... keep scraping by

HOARY BAT

CANADA GOOSE

DEAD ANIMAL

You are melodramatic and would, in general, be unbearable were it not for your unconventional beauty which you deploy every now and then when the shit hits the fan.

You are stoic, dedicated, and prone to lashing out when you feel threatened. People underestimate you, but you could break a child’s arm if you needed to.

Your delicate leathery paws scratch for my skin. You were my light, you gave everything you had.

VIRGINIA OPOSSUM

You are a tough nut to crack; no-one can get enough of you.

You keep everyone on their toes with your forked penis AND/OR bifurcated vagina.

shed a tear

COYOTE

A Coyote. Jesus, well, you are adaptable and white suburban females fear you. You exploit and rupture the pathetic bonds they make with those scruffy loser toys they masquarade as dogs.

TIDY FUTURES

BY Nickolas Roblee-Strauss ILLUSTRATION Ella Rosenblatt DESIGN Lulian Ahn

The work of decluttering with Marie Kondo As we entered 2019, a push for dispossession caught the nation by storm. Brendan Hurley, manager of Goodwill Industries in the Washington, DC area, observed a 66 percent increase in donations to his stores over the weeks that followed Netflix’s Tidying Up with Marie Kondo’s introduction to the streaming platform on New Year’s Day. While an unforeseen national move to declutter could be an unrelated spontaneous action, this new anti-material effort sweeping households is usually attributed to Tokyo’s Marie Kondo and the dissemination of her KonMari method. Decades into an era known for its ubiquitous consumption, this move to simplification reminds one of accumulation’s drawbacks. Perhaps there is some irony to the show being a product, serialized in its form, that speaks to this issue. And yet for all its roots in consumerism, Kondo’s questioning of our relationship to commodities exists alongside a conversation with their real purpose—tangible and otherwise—making necessary social change no longer implausible.

Tidying, as the title suggests, is central to the show—encompassing the assessment of possessions, their placement, and their presentation. Kondo frames the act as a step toward cultivating a happy home and a functioning family. As we are entrenched in and overwhelmed by the sheer volume of objects we live with, the cases explored on the show work towards the alleviation of object-induced anxieties. A tidy house, most would agree, is a space conducive for happiness.

The process of tidying illuminates an unanticipated aspect of how untidy homes exasperate existing societal disparities. We come to understand how people relate to their stuff and how, in the absence of healthy relations, some, more than others, must compensate to keep a household afloat. The domestic space upholds gender roles that delegate the emotional burden of clutter—and decluttering—to women. Tidying Up follows women in careers across the workforce who are always strained by the disproportionate weight of the home. With this reality, it can be inferred through Kondo’s messages, a tidy house may offer itself as an equalizer—from order, an unrealized equitability among partnerships.

In the vein of popular self-help and home improvement shows before it, Kondo’s addition to the genre offers an aspirational view into the lives (and changes to them) of people not so unlike you and I. What is unexpected, however, is the way in which this show—more than its predecessors—presents personal application of its ethos of cleaning. A philosophy first and foremost, the KonMari method is intended to be accessible.

The traditional self-help or home improvement show features experts imposing certain value judgements on the subject and providing a new (and improved) way of life. Still, even in the absence of a strong aesthetic projection (that might take the form of purchases or renovation) on Kondo’s part, the before-and-after element of the show is consistent with the genre’s form: after an emotional journey a big reveal concludes the episode, fulfilling audience expectation. Regardless, Kondo explicitly does not enter a home with the intent to personally make any changes. Insteadm she applies the principles outlined in her book, The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing, to each episode’s family, assigning her clients the task of wrestling with their possessions and encouraging them to orient their practice of tidying around their personal relationships to objects.

Each episode follows a new family—mostly couples (some with and/or expecting children), but also one woman whose husband has recently passed— and their personal relationships to clutter. The houses range from small apartments to the villas of suburbia, homes just moved into and homes lived in for over 50 years. The clutter sometimes overwhelms, creating

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

narrow pathways through a house, while other homes maintain a veneer of tidiness over jumbled drawers and closets. A delightfully eager Kondo (accompanied by her charming translator, the show’s unsung heroine, Marie Iida) enters each home and after a short discussion on the family’s goals, greets the house with a moment of closed-eye silence. Then, Kondo guides each family through her five-step process and we, the audience, come to understand Kondo’s process of decluttering. Across the families, the willingness and ease with which they engage varies.

The first step in Kondo's process, clothes, becomes central to each episode. After piling all of one’s clothes on the bed, one asks, “Does this bring me joy?” Kondo illustrates how joy should make one feel by holding a beloved object of her own in hand and responding viscerally to her own love for this same object. In the absence of this sensation, she suggests thanking it before letting it go as to assuage guilt or bad feelings one might have from parting with it. This phase demonstrates her folding, a throughline across the series. As in her book, she details how each item should be folded all with the goal of visual order, easy access and, of course, that elusive feeling of sparkjoy. This general approach follows the families through the categories: books, papers, komono or miscellaneous, and memorabilia.

Five of the show’s eight episodes follow heterosexual couples (and thrice their families) naturally exploring the gendered dynamics of domesticity.

Even when the homes are found in rather unalarming states of chaos, their untidiness reveals the burden of labor on the women who preside over it. The interviews with the male partners conducted aside from the process exhibit mere annoyance or frustration while the moments with the female partners showcase a tremendous pressure and acceptance to failure in spite of unrelenting efforts.

One episode, “The Downsizers,” introduces us to the Mersiers, a family of four who relocated from Michigan to Los Angeles to pursue career opportunities in hairstyling and music. Katrina and Douglas, with their children Kayci and Nolan, present as creative and beaming. A year into living in LA, Katrina says they don’t feel like home in their two-bedroom.

With pressure straining an otherwise idyllic family life, Katrina turns to Kondo for help. During Kondo’s tour, Douglas opens the kitchen cabinets to show the messy array of spices stressing him out and inhibiting him from even entering the space if avoidable. “She’s the only one who’s aware of everything,” he says, “Katrina bears a lot of the weight of keeping things organized.”

Nolan, age 12, speaks on how he finds things in his new home: “I spam her phone until she answers. That’s how much I depend on her.”

Kondo inquires as to how Katrina envisions the future, and as Katrina anticipates holding the reins of the family, Kondo intervenes with her own goal of a home crafted by and serving all members of the family.

In reflection Katrina states: “I wasn’t setting myself up to win. As a mom, I was doing too much I was being a make-it-work maker, not a home maker…no one person can do it all…I think they will be more proactive now that they have a sense of where things are.” While still very much at the helm at the family, we observe Katrina—with the burden of combating clutter no longer her task alone— renew her intentions to provide the best for her family manifested in a continued sense of tidiness.

It is clear that the barrier between Katrina and a comfortable home was the labor—both mental and physical—which she endured for the continued functioning of her household; but at what cost? This work of untangling messes is an unnecessary strain on a woman whose efforts are better spent elsewhere, in

Katrina’s case, pursuing her career and building on her loving familial relationships. With a tidy house and a KonMari-esque relationship to objects, one can begin to see a world where one’s stuff no longer precludes self-fulfillment. In Kondo’s tidy home, the burden of clutter dissolves, allowing for a fresh start where equitable distribution of labor begins to be possible.

She stresses, in this episode, that the responsibility of tidying is on the entire family—but in order for them to develop that habit, they must build spaces around their wants and question their possessions.

An obstacle to this self-interrogative relief is the shallowest embrace of the KonMari method: the notion that Kondo envisions tidiness as something regimented. While Kondo offers guidelines for the practice, the process self-generates, with all actions of the family’s own volition and done in the absence of Kondo and cameras over weeks or even months. This reimagining by skeptics of Kondo and her ideology is unfounded and ultimately contrary to the charming, sensitive, and tactful approach she recommends to her clients. Twitter audiences have specifically criticized her suggestion that families limit the number of books on their shelves to 30. A fear of anti-intellectualism and the image of book burnings ignite robust backlash to this nudge toward self-curation. But, while Kondo, like many people, enjoys the feeling of book lined walls, Kondo sees an incredible waste of books remaining on shelves unread, unshared, unborrowed.

The KonMari method should not necessarily lead to a minimalist household. In fact, if an organized clutter resulted, the better! All that changes: the tidyer’s relationship to the objects. Everything, Kondo argues, should have a purpose, and if that purpose is its spark of joy, that is function enough. One might even envision a future, many tidies forward, in which our whole cultural connection to objects has evolved.

As a viable approach to equalizing labor distribution in households, KonMari may have further benefits.

As the world’s resources are increasingly depleted, a more tactful and joy-sparking connection might be the subtle transformation our consumption-heavy society needs to evolve away from the material while conserving an experiential quality of life.

Kondo often brings a boxes and boxes into her client’s home to break down drawers. She sorts her objects by size and function. The clarity of this compartmentalizing reflects the corresponding mental shifts that Kondo aims to inspire. Envisioning spaces as not merely tidy but as stepping stones toward improved futures is integral to Kondoite home improvement. The KonMari method entered American cultural consciousness to applause and uproar. Embrace it, thank it, or find a more suitable box.

NICKOLAS ROBLEE-STRAUSS B’22 folds his socks.

ARTS

12

Money Matters

by Betsy Roy You wouldn’t believe what I’d do for money. Like, seriously! It depends on the time of the month, if rent’s due, if I’m menstruating, if I’m having a depressive spell—I’ll take a job at Cinnabon, Athena Parking Garages—whatever you got, I’ll take it. Maybe, you’d do the same. Like a bear, or some pet-shop rodent, I hoard. Money and empty gin bottles, thumbtacks, decorative pin cushions and Forever 21 jewelry.

I didn’t use to chase the dollar—didn’t need to, I was the world’s foremost expert on an esoteric game— Runescape, I love you. Not to brag, but I’m a legend in some circles. You can find me as a guest on morning talk shows, or at gaming conventions. If you’re willing to pay, I’ll even make an appearance at your kid’s bat mitzvah; or your wedding. For an additional fee, I’ll play Runescape with you. You could call me a ‘consultant’, or the ‘ghostbusters’ of the whole gaming-world.

I was the best miner, I hoarded the most raw material, I raided dungeons. People cared. In Runescape you can create a potion to get ahead. IRL, all we have is money and safes and banks and secret shoe-boxes filled with cash. My identity was Runescape. Was. Who plays old-school Runescape anymore (honestly,

if you know anyone hmu)? No one—and it’s rough on onions—I don’t want to cry over dinner. my sense of self and my (in)ability to forge an identity outside of the capitalist paradigm—you know.

I need another job. I’m fresh out of food and could really go for a Philly Cheesesteak (yeah, I know Did you ever beg your parents to take the training melted cheese shimmers and squeaks in the light— wheels off your bike, even when everyone knew you don’t use my words against me—don’t remind me of had no fucking clue how to ride? You wanted to plow my father). As I was saying, I’m working the reception across the suburbs on your very own puce vehicular desk of Villa-e-Carly, a defunct Nickelodeon hotel contraption. And your parents took the training wheels that’s now targeted towards Silicon-Valley-oriented off and you found yourself plummeting head-first into venture capitalists on a pit-stop in Bakersfield. In its your neighbor’s recycling bin? And you scream-cried heyday the hotel featured rooms designed around and your dad refused to put the training wheels back specific TV shows and had breakfasts with ‘characon, using your own words of independence against ters.’ I could scribble a sign saying back in a minute you? and jog to the vending machine down the hall, could pull the fire-alarm, cause a diversion. Or, I could eat That’s how I feel about food. Can’t live with it, can’t the fruit out of the decorative bowl on the counter live without it. Food’s gross. I’ll give you an example. (they might be made of wax). Wax probably has less Vegetables have more bacteria than meat. Twinkies bacteria than real fruit. Maybe, I could apply for a job never decompose. Chickens lay pink and blue and at the CDC. I’ll probably end up in an empty guessometimes yellow eggs—so why do you only ever see troom playing Runescape on my iPhone 4, conspire white or brown eggs at grocery stores? Don’t give with the mice—make a plan to steal kitchen scraps. me some ‘go to a farmer’s market’ crap. I can’t afford That was a joke, Villa-e-Carly doesn’t have mice (on that. Who at Stop & Shop is hiding all the pastel-col- days that don’t end on y). Prices range from $20-60 a ored eggs? I sniff a ploy, something off—like when a night, but if you come in today or tomorrow I’ll give player has too many gravestones in Runescapes. And you a discount.

I refuse to ingest anything that shimmers in the light, or oozes, or squeaks, or smokes in the oven. Also, I hate

ILLUSTRATION Carly Paul DESIGN Lulian Ahn

“Tomorrow,” the mother said, frowning. “We will try again tomorrow.” The daughter opened her mouth but she knew better than to tell her there doesn’t need to be a tomorrow. There doesn’t need to be a we. Another gulp of beans and waning light of kitchen. The bean sand spread, melding tongue to roof. The daughter wanted to rub the mountain between her mother’s brows, lather until the seams fell away as clean and smooth as the enamel bean pot. Her mouth is full enough so she says nothing.

Bean Soup

by Star Su “Do you have enough blood?” the mother asked her.

“Ouch,” the daughter said. The word left her mouth even before her mother’s fingers tightened around her knuckles, white on white. The moon was fat enough for its beams to slice through night, for her to see her mother’s hair shimmer. She notices for the first time, the strands of white. Like cobwebs, she wonders if they had been there all along. Or perhaps they were spun over night.

“You don’t,” the mother answered before she could.

“I will get you more.”

“Daughter,” the mother said. “It’s time for bean soup.”

Together, they peered into the pot.

“It’s so watery,” the daughter said, taking a sip.

“Well it is soup,” the mother said. She scraped the bottom of the pot, unlodging the bean sediment until the soup swirled with silt. She filled her bowl to the brim. The daughter knew better than to tell her it was enough. “Here’s some beans. No liquid.”

“Can’t you make it like stew?” The daughter drank, pushing her spoon against the pulp to strain it. She preferred to chew her beans, to feel the resistance of skin against tooth.

13

LITERARY

“Daughter,” the mother said the next day. “It’s time for bean soup.”

“This,” the daughter said, chewing. “It’s—” “It’s almost a paste now,” the mother said, chewing.

“Good,” the mother said, smoothing the bag of beans “You know how long it took?” the mother said. to read the back.

“Almost—”

“What’s wrong?” the daughter said.

“What about moon cakes?” the daughter said, giving it a stir. “You can fill them with this right?” Though it was “This can’t be right,” the mother said. “It says there not the new year and the moon was not round, she felt isn’t any iron.” that she could still ask for this richness.

“Oh,” the daughter said. She put her lips to the spoon, “See?” her mother said. “You’re craving it. Your blood blowing on the beans, rose-colored steam rising. needs the beans.”

“Hm,” the mother said, putting on her glasses.

“What about you?” the daughter said, examining the dregs. “Don’t you need it too?”

“What is it?” the daughter said, swallowing too quickly.

The beans don’t make it all the way down, lodged in But the mother’s back was washing the pot already. her chest.

Her hands were plunged into the waters, dark with the remains of the beans. When she was sure her mother “It says this is heart food,” the mother said. Her would not turn around, the daughter licked the bowl, eybrows formed a gentle temple. The daughter imagabandoning spoon. ined climbing its steps, on a day where the skies were pale and clear. There was a pressure in the center “Daughter,” the mother said the day after. “It’s time for of her. It could be the beans, aching to slide into her bean soup.” stomach, or it could be her blood, aching to slide away from her.

“I have my period,” the daughter said, hoping this would put a stop to the beans that had produced this “How is your heart?” the mother asked. The daughter slurry of darkness. She had enough blood. swallowed.

15 MARCH 2019

Horse

by Lucy Qiu horse sized hole of ~ mouth, * ask a million things

*

open

ask

-

/

in

~

could not tell

-

but there is a horse in ~ throat

for how long that horse has been there, things cotton ball

*

*

,

*

*

could tell

horse

sized

throat

*

cannot

, tell

want to replace the horse with but cannot:

a slotted spoon.

uterus,

-

~,

-

a butterfly ,

a

see, the horse has buried its head deep in

gnarled

wrangling

~

pit / if

hear whispers of m\

around

horse does not have a

horse’s tail swishing against ~ tongue

name, because names are for

things that stick and stay

why so many chinese restaurants have paintings of horses

wish horse

would just ,

mouth,

-

it is likely to be

wondering

~

-

!

out

jump

!

join

wall horses

not

~ but

until someone else lays claim

does don’t let horse hear m\ say that,

to this horse

not or it will want to stay longer

horse

it is

m-i-n-e,

*guess like horse is

horse has m\ horse has m\ 8 o’clock so many things /stress in flames cidre brut father calls bleeding out the exit / 12 o’clock / xtra strength / 4 o’clock / mustn’t forget 5 o’clock chastity / 8 o’clock / double this timebelt horse

* wonder if * because * wake up horse riding m\ does

or am

look tired

*

from carrying around a horse all the time horse horse is the first to greet m\ before the sun sometimes

riding horse not

?

this is not the kind of horse to ride like

not the kind of horse so many things /stress in flames cidre brut father calls bleeding out the exit not a kind horse

* *

wonder if

*

look tired

wake up

horse riding m\

or am

from carrying around a horse all the time horse is the first to greet m\

*

chastity belt horse

riding horse

?

before the sun sometimes

this is not the kind of horse to ride

not the kind of horse not a kind horse

* go to the pool and it is the only place * can float, horse leaves for a little swim and * hope to whoever can hear, for horse to break water no more

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

LITERARY

14

BY Shannon Kingsley ILLUSTRATION Dylan Williamson DESIGN Christie Zhong

POWER

PLANTS

Scrutinizing the US' biofuel future In the depths of a swamp forest, the ferns are dying.

Fanned bodies bowed together, these giant leaf-like forms topple and entangle as they bury upon one another to form a mass grave. The swamp forest becomes a murky crater of life and death, as each fern rooted in its soggy substrate ultimately lies to rest in the place of its birth. Void of oxygen and bacteria, the bottom of the forest holds millions of ferns, tree-like lycophytes, and primitive conifers. Over time, as these plants compress into the Earth, intense heat and pressure force them to refigure into dense black masses— the carbon-rich matter we now call coal.

Fast forward 300 million years. These ferns are reborn, wisps of their fronded bodies unfurling into the air as burning coal transforms water into steam to propel the churning cycle of a turbine. As the coal burns, harmful compounds that have been locked within these plants since the Carboniferous Period are released into the atmosphere, creating a noxious mix of sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxides, and carbon dioxide. Once, these ferns served as natural air purifiers in the prehistoric landscape, releasing excessive oxygen outputs that contributed to the proliferation of giant, diverse plant and animal species. Today, in the form of coal, their corpses pollute our air, sicken vulnerable communities, and contribute to acid rain, smog, and rising global temperatures. Clicking on a light switch, we repurpose the 300 million-year-old lives of plants into electricity. Starting a car engine, we break the hydrocarbon bonds held in the plankton and algal remains in petroleum (gasoline’s crude state) and release carbon monoxide, nitrogen oxides, and particulate matter. To curb the devastating effects of coal and gasoline on the environment, the production and consumption of biofuels as an alternative source of energy began to accelerate in the United States.

15

SCIENCE & TECH

In 2017, the US produced 774.6 million tons of coal, equivalent to the weight of nearly 120 million adult African bush elephants. In the same year, 29.9 percent of electricity generated in the United States came from coal, marking a nearly 20 percent drop from 2008 to 2016—a downward trend the Union of Concerned Scientists predicts will continue. Yet the use of biofuels, meaning any plant-based renewable energy, stood at a mere 11 percent in 2017. Most scientists agree that coal and other extensively-used fossil fuels, such as petroleum and natural gas, no longer serve as viable energy sources, so biofuels undoubtedly offer a better alternative. But just because an energy source is “renewable” or “bio-based” does not mean it is automatically environmentally sound or sustainable. The replacement of nonrenewable fuels with biofuels must be closely scrutinized: biofuel production and consumption in the US engender a host of issues concerning the growing competition for agricultural land use, rising global food prices, and the extent to which they actually mitigate greenhouse gas emissions. +++ Biofuels, which encompass all energy sources derived from living material, can be broken down into three main categories, or generations, of renewable energy.

First-generation biofuels consist of fuels derived directly from food sources—namely corn, wheat, and sugar cane—while second-generation biofuels primarily derive from non-food crops or crops that can no longer be used as food sources. Cellulose-based biomass, a significant second-generation biofuel, is derived from the leaves and stems of plants. The average greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from corn ethanol stand at 34 percent lower than gasoline, while

cellulosic ethanol boasts 97 percent lower GHG emissions than gasoline. These statistics take into account the emissions caused from land use changes, or the changes associated with the conversion of land for processes such as farming or urbanization. This data demonstrates the extent to which second-generation biofuels may far exceed first-generation biofuels in mitigating GHG emissions. Lastly, third-generation biofuel encompasses energy sourced from algae—a new and promising field of study in the US. But despite the greater environmental benefits of cellulose-based ethanol produced from non-food biomass, its commercial production remains relatively small. Ethanol produced from corn (and biodiesel produced from soybean) reigns as the primary biofuel produced and consumed in the US. Corn ethanol also represents one of the most highly-controversial biofuels in the US today in debates that pit political and economic agendas against the environment and public health. In Council Bluffs, Iowa last October, President Donald Trump announced his commitment to implement—with the “support” of the Environmental Protection Agency—the year-round sale of E15, a blended gasoline with 15 percent ethanol. Previously banned from sale during the summer months by the EPA due to its contributions to high levels of smog and its volatile nature, the sale of E15 would purportedly provide economic support to Iowa farmers. However, as the Washington Post points out, Trump’s benevolent gesture toward Iowa’s farmers ignores the grave realities of ethanol production: the accompanying rise of food prices, the use and destruction of valuable farmland for non-food products, and the immense energy expenditure necessary for corn distillation.

Corn ethanol does not constitute a suitable biofuel option largely because it does not meet the criteria for

15 MARCH 2019

an ‘ideal energy crop’—that is, a plant that can perform high rates of photosynthesis and maintain a long growing season. These processes contribute to greater carbon dioxide capture while increasing the crop’s energy content. Additionally, an ideal energy crop yields a high harvest index, which is the percentage of above-ground matter than can be harvested as usable biomass. Many perennial grasses, which die back each year and regrow in the spring from their rootstock, meet the characteristics of an ideal energy crop. On the other hand, annual grasses such as corn must be replanted each year and typically require greater fertilizer input. Panicum sp. (switchgrass) and Miscanthus sp. (silvergrass) are two perennial grasses that could potentially serve as better biofuel sources than corn. With extensive root systems that reduce soil erosion, the uncanny ability to adapt to varying climates, and biomass yields greater than their corn equivalent, Panicum and Miscanthus could provide a more sustainable alternative to corn-based biofuels.

In 2013, Purdue University scientists Qianlai Zhuang, Zhangcai Qin, and Min Chen compared the water use, land use and biomass production for corn, switchgrass, and Miscanthus to determine which crop could most efficiently produce 79 billion liters of ethanol. They found that Miscanthus required only half of the cropland and two-thirds of the water compared to corn to produce the same amount of ethanol—a result that strongly suggests its viability as a biofuel source.

Yet the use of agricultural land for fuel production and the release of carbon emissions from land use change serve as particularly complicating factors that extend beyond a potential shift to perennial grass biofuel production. On the most basic level, the use of land for biofuel production instead of crop production decreases the land available for food production.

In turn, as the National Wildlife Federation predicts, this land use change could lead to greater GHG emissions, reduced biodiversity, and destruction of wetland and forest habitats. This argument, however, poses a double-edged sword: while some land use change resulting from biofuel production has indeed caused more harm than good in reducing the effects of climate change and crop production, some land being used for biofuel production is not suitable for food crop production in the first place. This dichotomy questions whether biofuel production should occur on land unsuitable for farming because any agricultural practice inevitably leads to greenhouse gas emissions. Furthermore, crops grown for biofuel—even when grown on land unsuitable for farming—replace natural carbon sinks, such as forest or prairies, that prove highly productive in capturing large amounts of carbon dioxide to clean up our atmosphere. Although some policymakers argue that biofuel crops also act as carbon sinks, the re-emission of this captured carbon dioxide through the burning of biofuels negates any claim that biofuels are “carbon-free sources.” Although potentially growing switchgrass or Miscanthus could lower GHG emissions as compared to other biofuels crops, the growth of any land-based biofuel will always require extensive space, water, and energy, while still contributing to climate change. +++ The impact of US biofuel production reaches far beyond national borders as biofuel production has also been attributed to higher global food prices and increased global hunger. Especially during periods of increased demand for biofuel, corn ethanol production yields greater monetary profits than corn grown for food. As more land becomes devoted to biofuel production, farmers growing corn for food must increase their prices to meet consumer demands while coping with the market’s decreased corn supply. The 2008 global food crisis marks an extreme example of the effects of biofuel production on food security and land use. Influenced in part by the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007, which mandated a fivefold increase in the use of biofuels in the US, the global food crisis saw frightening consequences: the highest wheat prices in 28 years, tariffed imported gas and subsidized ethanol blends in the US, and a 8.4 percent decrease in overseas aid to developing countries in 2006 to 2007.

Although the Energy Independence and Security Act was seemingly a step in the right direction, this legislation contributed to the astronomical increase in

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

global food prices; some farmers struggled to meet the demands of the biofuel quotas, while others raised their food prices to compete with the market. The higher energy prices for imported fuels versus biofuels increased the demand for biofuels, which significantly influenced the United States’ production of corn ethanol.

This ramification was evident in 2008, when corn ethanol constituted 20 percent of the nation’s corn crop; today, that number stands at 25 percent of US-grown corn. During the 2008 food crisis, political leaders, economists, and Midwestern farmers claimed that biofuels contributed minimally to the drastic rise in food prices. Instead, they cited the rising frequency of droughts and the increasing global demand for protein as significant contributors to the jump in food prices. Yet a private World Bank report obtained by the Guardian says otherwise, asserting that biofuels forced global food prices up by 75 percent. Although there are many variables affecting increased food prices and global hunger, the need to reassess the United States’ role in contributing to these rising statistics through its corn ethanol production remains paramount. +++ Perhaps, then, a return to our roots could reinvent our fuel future. Slipping onto the scene 500 to 700 million years ago, macroalgae represents a vast array of photosynthesizing, plant-like organisms commonly referred to as seaweeds. Although microalgae have been rigorously explored as an energy source due to the high concentrations of oil found within their cells (which help keep them afloat), the study of macroalgae has recently emerged as an area of growing biofuel research. In the US today, kelp, a type of brown algae, spearheads this research because of its high photosynthetic rate and unparalleled biomass yields. Additionally, the ability to farm seaweed in open-ocean systems nearly eliminates any land use change or energy expenditures typical of land-based biofuel production. In an interview with the College Hill Independent, Dr. Lindsay Green-Gavrielidis, a seaweed ecologist and postdoctoral researcher at the University of Rhode Island, attested to the dynamic nature of macroalgae and the myriad ecological and economic benefits they offer. Considering the sustainability challenges involved in growing an organism as an alternative fuel source, Dr. Green-Gavrielidis explained how the need for water use creates competition between industries and people already vying for dwindling water supplies. Meanwhile, a competing need for space poses questions about whether the space should be left as a natural ecosystem, used for farming, or occupied by human populations. “It’s all these competing interests that make it very attractive to be able to use the ocean because you don’t have to do anything to the seaweed,” she said. “You put it in the ocean, you tend to it, you make sure nothing bad happens to it or the gear you’re using, but you’re not giving it fertilizer, there’s no need to use water—all of that is there.”

Consistent with all alternative fuel sources, however, seaweed poses its own set of drawbacks.

For one, only small companies in the US currently engage in seaweed farming. The practice in the US is also relatively new, so many companies remain in the preliminary stages of their research. These two factors mean the current seaweed farming system lacks the investment and infrastructure necessary for biofuel production. This ultimately puts the US far behind many other countries that have been pursuing seaweed-based biofuels for many years. Taiwanese shrimp farmers have incorporated seaweed into their shrimp cultivation practices, leading to cleaner water and the production of seaweed biofuel; Israeli farmers have implemented multi-species farming systems, allowing for better exchange of nutrients and permitting seaweed cultivation for biofuel; Sweden has developed large-scale systems of kelp production for food, bioplastics, adhesives, and biofuels. The success of these global seaweed production systems make the rise of US seaweed biofuel research a hopeful prospect.

Twenty miles off the coast of Los Angeles, a team of researchers at the Wrigley Institute of Environmental Studies are endeavoring to create a “kelp elevator” to make the large-scale production of seaweed biofuel a reality. The team first cultivates the kelp in nurseries on

land, and then places a pipe containing the cultivated juvenile kelp plants 30 feet below the ocean’s surface.

Ultimately, their project aims to engineer a contraption that can lower the kelp bed to obtain nutrients in the depths and raise the kelp bed to obtain sunlight.

This technology would allow for full-fledged seaweed farming miles from the shore.

Despite the lack of infrastructure and investment in seaweed farming for biofuel, seaweed provides innumerable environmental benefits that make its general cultivation worthwhile. Elaborating on the services seaweed farming provides, Dr. GreenGavrielidis explained that “in the process of photosynthesis, seaweeds take up carbon dioxide and nitrogen and phosphorous and all these things we’ve come to view as negatives because we have an excess of them in our coastal waters. Seaweeds take them out and turn them into biomass, so harvesting the seaweed effectively removes these compounds from the environment.” Although Dr. Green-Gavrielidis explained that the processing procedure for converting seaweed biomass to fuel could potentially re-emit some of these compounds into the atmosphere, she stated, “From a farming perspective and the work that I do where you end up selling the seaweed as a food, you are just removing that carbon dioxide, that nitrogen, that phosphorous from the coastal environment.” Research on macroalgae is just beginning to emerge in the US and the feasibility of seaweed for fuel is still largely unexplored. However, the affirmed positive environmental and economic benefits from seaweed farming point to promising potential for the use of macroalgae in the biofuel industry. +++ Biofuels are indisputably an efficient, practical technology that could potentially mitigate the effects of climate change on the environment. Yet every time we convert an area of land to the growth of corn for fuel instead of food, we must radically rethink our priorities and the grave realities of land use change and biofuel production: we may emit more greenhouse gases and we may cause more people around the globe to go hungry. As Nature posits, “The only way that biofuels could help reduce emissions is by reserving additional land not currently acting as a carbon sink to be used for biofuel production.” The use of land for food and non-food crop production is inextricably tied to GHG emissions and water consumption, and although cellulosic ethanol provides a push in the right direction, it fails to address major climate change issues: land use and conservation, water consumption, and carbon dioxide output. Even microalgae, which the United States Department of Energy claims can produce up to 60 times more oil than land-based biofuels, falls short in providing a sustainable biofuel future. It occurs largely on land, uses extensive watering systems, and oftentimes relies on artificial light. The endorsement of microalgae by oil companies such as Exxon raises questions about whether certain biofuels gain support because the infrastructure and markets for their consumption already exist—factors currently outweighing the environmental implications of their production.

In “The Place of Plants,” environmental philosopher Michael Marder writes about how the world meets plants: As sessile beings, plants remain rooted in place, incorporating their environment into their bodies and ever-adapting to the world around them. “Attentive to the places of [their] growth… plants grow in contiguity with, not against, their environmental niches.” In this sense, humanity also has to extend itself in a direction that attends to this space. In doing so, returning to parts of our environment that have been here the longest, there may be answers in algae.

SHANNON KINGSLEY B’20 doesn’t like corn.

SCIENCE & TECH

16

SURVIVORS HAVE SAID "ME TOO"

BY Marie Lachance ILLUSTRATION Sophia Meng DESIGN Amos Jackson

Now what should their perpetrators say?

content warning: sexual assault “Hey, I have a really serious question for you that hasn’t been addressed ever,” reads the text on my screen from a boy I haven’t spoken with since high school graduation. It is fall and I am sitting on my couch, watching Christine Blasey Ford testify on live television.

“That one night I had a party or when I drove you home that other night was that sexual assault? bc rn with this whole kavanaugh trial, I feel super guilty bc it was so weird and we never talked about it afterward.”

I think about the two of us in his car, parked in an abandoned elementary school parking lot long past my curfew. I think about him unbuckling his seatbelt and forcing his hand down my pants. I think about the only words I was able to say at the time: “I want to go home, I want to go home, I want to go home.”

I laugh. Laughter is all I can manage after three years of processing what this boy did to me. It is all I can manage after years of therapy and countless nights spent wrestling with the concoction of guilt and disgust and confusion his abuse has caused me.

And now he wants to know if this was assault. He feels guilty. He hasn’t processed what has happened— he needs me to do that for him. And as someone who has been taught to do men’s emotional labor for them, I do. I tell him that yes, what he did to me was assault.

“I’m sorry Marie.”

“I’m sorry if I caused any trauma.”

“I can’t justify it at all, all I can say is I’m sorry.”

He isn’t offering excuses, he isn’t attempting to justify his behavior, he isn’t asking for forgiveness. He is simply sorry.

And suddenly I am filled with rage. The damage has already been done—no apology can ever change what this boy has put me through. The only way I have been able to persevere as a survivor is to demonize him, to define him by what he has done to me. Maybe this isn’t fair, but it doesn’t have to be. Trusting my own narrative is how I survive. I have no room for the needs of someone who has caused me so much harm.

And now this boy, who had already stolen so much from me, takes the only thing I feel I have left: my agency to hate him. +++ The #MeToo movement produced many apologies, and by now, we are familiar with the way they sound.

Apologies can serve as neat and just conclusions of an otherwise turbulent storm. When Louis C.K. publicly apologized for sexually assaulting five women last fall, Americans responded with a mixture of satisfaction and criticism. While some people were quick to critique the language he used or his motives, there did seem to be a general consensus that his apology was a necessary step forward. We were fixated on his actions, rather than the reactions of his survivors.

Of course, apologies are cathartic for many survivors and can be an essential part of the healing process.

In response to Brett Kavanaugh’s infamous sexual assault trial, essayist Caitlin Flanagan describes her own experience with sexual assault in the Atlantic.

Her perpetrator eventually apologized, enabling her to forgive him for his abuse. She writes, “He’d done a terrible thing, but he’d done what he could to make it right. I held nothing against him, and still don’t.”

While this is an entirely valid response, apologies are

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FEATURES

not wanted by every survivor, a distinction Flanagan fails to make.

She goes on to compare her experience with Christine Blasey Ford’s, which is riddled with complications: one survivor cannot truly speak for another.

Every survivor’s healing process is unique and valid.

Yet Flanagan extrapolates from her own experience, hypothesizing that the reason Ford is still traumatized from her sexual assault is because Kavanaugh never apologized. But this is not Flanagan’s conclusion to draw—just because she benefited from her perpetrator’s apology does not mean others must.

To Flanagan, an apology is a box that must be checked on the to-do list of overcoming trauma—a step that will supposedly absolve the perpetrator and free the survivor. This troubles me for two reasons.

First, I don’t believe perpetrators should be able to insert themselves back into survivors’ lives at their own discretion. Apologies, by nature, request a response from their recipient. And if this communication is unwanted by the survivor, it can feel like yet another breach of consent. When my perpetrator apologized to me, I felt as though my agency to choose how I heal as a survivor was erased. He chose for me, placing him at the center of my healing process. Whether he recognizes it or not, what he did to me has altered my life, and an apology—no matter how genuine—can never change that. Of course, some survivors need to hear an apology in order to move forward. But I felt as though my perpetrator’s apology was simply a means of relieving his guilt, serving only himself. For me, my abuser’s apology will always be a reminder that he can move past the mess he has made while I continue to carry this weight.

Second, apologies provoke empathy that many survivors do not want to feel. The majority of victims know their perpetrators before any harm occurs, leaving many survivors vulnerable to emotional manipulation, or feeling forced to forgive. My perpetrator was my close friend at the time. I needed a ride home from a party, and because I had been drinking and he was sober, I trusted him. After his apology, I felt the need to placate his guilt. It would have been so easy.

I had once cared about him, and his apology made me feel guilty for allowing him to wallow in his own remorse when my forgiveness had the potential to set him free. I was in the position to absolve someone I had once known and trusted. Was I evil to deny him that?

Feeling empathy for someone who harmed me in such an intimate way is confusing and painful. After the incident, we remained friends for months. We never discussed it, and this silence made me doubt the validity of my feelings. When my friends heard what had happened, they interpreted it as just another hookup, and I couldn’t bear to tell them otherwise. I knew he had taken advantage of me, but I didn’t yet have the vocabulary or strength to explain why or how. In her podcast “The Heart,” Kaitlin Prest explores the “invisible, social, and historical contexts at play in these intimate moments” that cause us to react to trauma in the ways we do. These are the contexts that made me feel as though I wasn’t entitled to my own narrative. That I was instead obliged to put his needs before my own, even after he had caused me harm—to, in the words of Prest, “give up in a way that [felt] so comfortable to me.”

While his apology may have granted him freedom

and relief, allowing him to go “back to normal,” I do not share in this luxury. Survivors of sexual assault cannot go back to normal. To me, his apology was nothing more than an unwanted reminder of the burden I will always carry with me as a survivor—the burden that he placed on me. +++ So, where do we go from here? The #MeToo movement happened, revealing names of those in power who we now recognize as perpetrators. Many of them have apologized or want to apologize to survivors. But we haven’t stopped to consider what these apologies demand from survivors, for instance, the burden of re-engaging with trauma. These perpetrators demand for us to empathize with someone who has caused harm. They demand even more emotional labor—yet another violation.

The healing process is about the survivor, not the perpetrator. We must foster a culture that respects the agency of survivors and allows them to make their own decisions on how to continue on with their lives post-assault. Perpetrators must hold themselves accountable without depending on survivors to mediate that process; they have caused harm, and now they alone are responsible for it. They must confront what they have done, educate themselves, even if this process is emotionally taxing. This model reinforces the autonomy that survivors should have in deciding what is best for their safety and healing, and doesn’t allow perpetrators to ambush them with apologies they may not be ready for. +++ I wish my abuser had never apologized to me. I wish he could have addressed the harm he had caused, grappled with his guilt, and become a better person without placing that burden on me. Two other people have sexually assaulted me, and I haven’t heard from them since. I have to say: their silence does make me wonder if they even know what they did to me. I wonder if they regret their abuse. I wonder if they have hurt others, and worst of all, I wonder if my silence enabled it.

I am grateful to Christine Blasey Ford, and I’m glad that her testimony forced one of my perpetrators to confront the harm that that he caused me. But it enrages me that it took him three years and such extreme circumstances to put a name to his actions— and still, he needed me to do this work for him. It enrages me that on top of the hell that processing trauma entails, the person who caused me this pain is sorry. He wishes he hadn’t hurt me. Well, guess what—I wish that too.

If you know me, you know I am okay. I laugh and I experience joy and I am okay. My trauma resides somewhere deep in my bones, and sometimes I feel it nag at the corners of my mind. But what happened to me is not who I am. I won’t let it be. I am defiant in the face of my trauma. I live to prove it wrong. And this does not make me a vessel for forgiveness or empathy I have no space for. I am focused on me, and my future. His journey is his own, and frankly, I want no part in it.

MARIE LACHANCE B'20 won't take sorry for an answer.

15 MARCH 2019

FRIDAY 3.15 Potty Mouth Paint Event Pea Poddery (2364 Diamond Hill Road, Cumberland) 6:30-9PM “No image is inappropriate and no words will be shunned.

Absolute freedom to do whatever you want with your piece.” In other words, this is your chance to paint a mug that says “fuck” on it.

“My Father’s Cigar Event” Tammany Hall (409 Atwells Avenue) 4-8PM Someone named John Gallogly will be hanging out at Providence’s very own homage to old-timey graft, offering “tremendous deals up to 25 percent off cigars and boxes!” As the event description intones, even if smoking something called “My Father’s Cigars” sounds a little too Freudian for your taste, you should… “Do it For Johnny!”

SATURDAY 3.16 Stories of this Land Southside Cultural Center of Rhode Island (393 Broad Street) 9AM-3:30PM This day of conversation asks the question: "Why does it matter for people who work and live on this land to know and tell its history?” Speakers will include local historians, an educator from the Narragansett tribe, and a scholar of US slavery, followed by workshops teaching participants how to tell their own stories about their connection to their land “so that we can become better educators for when people visit our farms, homes, and neighborhoods.”

Retro-Computing Open House Retro-Computing Society of Rhode Island (118 Manton Avenue) 1-8PM I can’t imagine being able to fit more than like, one or two of these old dinosaurs in a room, so “open house” might be a bit of a stretch here. But if any of you dear readers go, would you bring all the old floppy disks we have stashed in a corner of the Indy office to find out what it is we’ve actually published?

SUNDAY 3.17 Skulls from Near and Far Museum of Natural History and Planetarium (1000 Elmwood Avenue) 11AM-12PM // $3 You don’t usually think about skulls in terms of their distance from you, but I guess if you had a bunch of skulls in close proximity that’s probably something you would want to know.

Anyways, take a tour through the museum’s skull vault and learn to identify the boney remains of your favorite Rhode Island critters.

MONDAY 3.18 Opening Day! Attleboro Farms (491 Hickory Road, North Attleboro, MA) 9AM-5PM O, Vernal Sprites & Ephemeral Faeries of the Equinox...! Come to the seasonal opening of Attleboro Farms’ greenhouses and nurseries this Monday and buy, like, a tulip plant to celebrate the arrival of spring. Honestly, apropros of nothing, I myself probably won’t manage to make it across the state line in time for this glorious event, but I would if I could.

TUESDAY 3.19 Software Basics: InDesign AS220 Industries (131 Washington Street) 6-9PM This workshop will provide attendees with a basic intro to Adobe InDesign, which is also the software that we here at the Independent use to design and lay out our newspaper every week! Really a great opportunity—especially for writers who want to self-publish—to learn how to navigate an otherwise tricky-to-use program. Just don’t get *too* good at InDesign, or else you might be tempted to start your own, rival Providence alt-weekly.

WEDNESDAY 3.20 Monthly Lessons Rock Spot Climbing Providence (42 Rice Street) 6-6:30PM $5 Rock climbing is, imo, the de-facto national sport of a certain ilk of Ivy League students with disposable money and their own Subaru Outbacks. Also, it’s a favorite pastime of one of the best professors I’ve ever had, who uses the adrenaline that rock climbing induces in him to cope with the dread he derives from reading what’s on his own syllabus (Heidegger)!

THURSDAY 3.21 Food, Farming, and Our Future: Panel on Sustainable Agriculture Providence Community Library (78 Hope Street) 7-8PM The recent construction of a meat processing plant in North Kingstown marks the disturbing advent of factory farming in Rhode Island—a practice that’s not only barbaric, but dangerous to the local water supply. In response, this town hall will center on the following questions: “What is the future of sustainable food in Rhode Island? What can we do to build a food system that protects ecosystems and public health? In the era of climate change, what would a truly sustainable food system look like?”