The College Hill Independent Vol. 43 - Issue 9

THE INDY*

03 NOT SICK, BUT INJURED 05 CORRUPTION ON A CORPORATE SCALE 13 HOW TO WATCH SNOW

Volume 43 Issue 09 3 December 2021

THE ILLUSTRATIVE ISSUE

* The College Hill Independent

THE INDY*

Volume 43 Issue 09 03 December 2021

This Issue

Masthead*

00 “BLIND WORSHIP”

WEEK IN REVIEW Alisa Caira Asher White

02 WEEK IN GOING FOR THE GOLD

FEATURES Ifeoma Anyoku Emily Rust Gemma Sack

Danyang Song

Loughlin Neuert

03 NOT SICK, BUT INJURED

NEWS Kanha Prasad Nick Roblee-Strauss

Hanna Aboueid

05 CORRUPTION ON A CORPORATE SCALE

ARTS Jenna Cooley Nell Salzman

07 THE PAINTED DESERT PROJECT

EPHEMERA Chloe Chen Lauren Lee

Jack Doughty & Rose Houglet Allegra Friedman

METRO Leela Berman Ricardo Gomez Peder Schaefer

09 ITERATIONS Nell Salzman

10 HEAVY METAL DRUMMER BOY Dorrit Corwin

SCIENCE + TECH Lucas Gelfond Amelia Wyckoff BULLETIN BOARD Lily Pickett

11 CHOREOROBOTICS Saraphina Forman

X Yukti Agarwal Justin Scheer

13 SNOW POEMS Arden Shostak

14 “OPEN BOOK (OVERSHARER)” Lily Chahine

15 MAJOR MERGER

DEAR INDY Amelia Anthony LITERARY Alyscia Batista CJ Gan OUTREACH COORDINATOR Audrey Buhain

Bilal Menon

17 UNTITLED

MVP Sam Stewart

Elleen Kim

18 DEAR INDY Amelia Anthony

SENIOR EDITORS Alana Baer Audrey Buhain Andy Rickert Peder Schaefer Ivy Scott XingXing Shou STAFF WRITERS Hanna Aboueid Rachel Carlson Lily Chahine Bowen Chen Jack Doughty Osayuwamen Ede-Osifo Danielle Emerson Mariana Fajnzylber Tammuz Frankel Leo Gordon Rose Houglet Jana Kelly Nicole Kim Bilal Memon Loughlin Neuert Rhythm Rastogi Issra Said Kolya Shields Sacha Sloan Ella Spungen COPY EDITORS Rebecca Bowers Swetabh Changkakoti Megan Donohue Elizabeth Duchan Jayda Fair Sarah Goldman Zoey Grant Anushka Kataruka Madison Lease Jasmine Li Abigail Lyss Addie Marin Kabir Narayahan Eleanor Peters Janek Schaller Gracie Wilson Xinyu Yan

DESIGNERS Anna Brinkhuis Briaanna Chiu Ophelia Duchesne-Malone Clara Epstein Jieun (Michelle) Song Sam Stewart Floria Tsui Sojung (Erica) Yun Ken Zheng WEB DESIGN Andy Rickert ILLUSTRATION EDITORS Sage Jennings Hannah Park ILLUSTRATORS Yukti Agarwal Sylvie Bartusek Gemma Brand-Wolf Ashley Castaneda Hannah Chang Claire Chasse Luca Colannino Michelle Ding Quinn Erickson Sophie Foulkes Camille Gros Joshua Koolik Lucy Lebowitz Olivia Lunger Talia Mermin Jessica Minker Kenney Nguyen Xing Xing Shou Joyce Tullis BUSINESS Jonathan Goshu Daniel Halpert Isabelle Yang — The College Hill Independent is printed

by TCI in Seekonk, Massachusets.

*Our Beloved Staff

Mission Statement

From the Editors Do you notice where your feet land along the grid of linoleum tiles? Urban development has turned the world into a massive hopscotch, a rigid choreography that moves us along the endless array of infrastructure. Occasionally, there are ruptures: where the wires of chainlink fence break off, where the gnarled root of a tree warps the pavement, where a river intercepts a state line.

In Chicago, the lake effectively serves as a coastline: real estate is more expensive, teens are compelled towards it on drunken nights out, and it’s where the mechanics of the city’s development are most transparent: concrete chips off into rocks, rocks into pebbles, pebbles into sand.

Traveling by bus around New England is a great way to discover the point at which cities break off into towns, towns into buildings, buildings into piles, and piles into dust. New Haven, a system of cold cement geometry, seems indestructibly austere, but its residents vibrate against the alleys like prayers in the cracks of Jerusalem’s Wailing Wall. The abandoned lots of post-industrial Detroit became the site for a major urban gardening movement; women hang laundry between the ancient gravestones of sultans and emirs in the City of the Dead, a vast neighborhood of cemeteries in Cairo. Sara Ahmed writes: “A path is made by repeatedly passing over ground. We can see the path as a trace of past journeys made out of footprints, traces of feel that tread and in treading create a line on the ground… When we see a line of the ground before us, we tend to walk on it… but [the path] before us is only an effect of being walked upon.”

-AW

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

COVER COORDINATOR Iman Husain

MANAGING EDITORS Mara Cavallaro Anabelle Johnston Deborah Marini

19 THE BULLETIN

01

DESIGN EDITORS Isaac McKenna Gala Prudent

The College Hill Independent is a Providence-based publication written, illustrated, designed, and edited by students from Brown University and the Rhode Island School of Design. Our paper is distributed throughout the East Side, Downtown, and online. The Indy also functions as an open, leftist, consciousness-raising workshop for writers and artists, and from this collaborative space we publish 20 pages of politically-engaged and thoughtful content once a week. We want to create work that is generative for and accountable to the Providence community—a commitment that needs consistent and persistent attention.

While the Indy is predominantly financed by Brown, we independently fundraise to support a stipend program to compensate staff who need financial support, which the University refuses to provide. Beyond making both the spaces we occupy and the creation process more accessible, we must also work to make our writing legible and relevant to our readers.

The Indy strives to disrupt dominant narratives of power. We reject content that perpetuates homophobia, transphobia, xenophobia, misogyny, ableism and/or classism. We aim to produce work that is abolitionist, anti-racist, anticapitalist, and anti-imperialist, and we want to generate spaces for radical thought, care, and futures. Though these lists are not exhaustive, we challenge each other to be intentional and self-critical within and beyond the workshop setting, and to find beauty and sustenance in creating and working together.

WEEK IN REVIEW

Week in Going for the Gold TEXT LOUGHLIN NEUERT DESIGN ISAAC MCKENNA ILLUSTRATION JOSHUA KOOLIK At the end of the third game of the World Chess Championship, defending champion Magnus Carlsen looked crestfallen. He wasn’t upset about the result (the third draw in a row) or about the length of time that the game took (a grueling 2 hours and 45 minutes). Rather, Magnus was mad that he had to pee in a cup.

It seems that in its eternal mission to place chess in the international sporting pantheon alongside the World Cup and the Olympics, the International Chess Federation, usually known by its French acronym FIDE, has opted to institute the seemingly ridiculous anti-doping piss tests for chess. Not quite a World Cup, rather more of a World C-U-P. Ian Nepomniachtchi, Magnus’ challenger, made a couple of quips about the testing at the post game press conference, but he knows all too well to take doping seriously. While Carlsen is allowed to play under Norway’s flag, Ian’s Russian flag has been banned from all international competitions following the 2019 report of state-sponsored doping. Like Russian athletes in the Olympics, Ian has had to play under a pseudo-Russian banner.

The history of cheating and chess is rich, but has far more to do with computers than with pharmaceuticals. Basically any piece of electronics is capable of running a program (called an “engine”) that is dozens of times better than any humanoid, so most efforts go into making sure that online players haven’t used computer assistance. This spring saw the clearly documented case of a billionaire obviously and sadly using a machine to defeat former World Chess Champion Viswanathan Anand. Sometimes, accusations can get outlandish: the International Master Anna Rudolph of Hungary was once accused of hiding an engine in her lip balm (?!) but nobody in the community has ever cried foul about the use of performance-enhancing substances. It feels like a non-issue, and even if it were, who would care?

Not Queen’s Gambit’s Beth Harmon, that’s for sure. Would everybody’s favorite fictional phenom have ever made it out of Kentucky if arbiters had asked her to take a drug test at each tournament? When I sit down to play a game (or twenty) online, I fully expect that whatever Russian teenager I’m playing is fully wired on

watered-down adderall and Alenka, and more power to them!

Magnus later told the media that his frustration with the test was because it would cause him to miss a football match he wanted to watch, which raises some questions about the duration of a urine test. He was quite miffed, but protest isn’t really an option. Even the world champion has to abide by the rules and in this case, en pissant was forced.

Chess has long had an image problem; it now has an image opportunity. The game has experienced an explosion of popularity since Queen’s Gambit premiered, nearly tripling the number of accounts on chess.com. But with their stuffy suburban-parent attitude, FIDE is blundering the chance to turn the briefly-interested into lifelong fans. Those captivated with the stylish mid-century playing halls of Queen’s Gambit must be put off by the sterile glass arena of the championship, corporate logos littering a fluorescent room. The actual games haven’t proved particularly decisive either (though game 2 had its moments of imbalance) and if the games continue to be draws—which they

might—this could likely mark the peak of chess’ mainstream appeal.

The College Hill Independent would love to see chess lose the high-and-mighty act. It’s all pawns and no dope! We want a return to a zoinked-out Mikhail Tal playing all night, or the CIA slipping Bobby Fischer a secret powder to help him beat the Soviets. We’d love to see GM Nona Gaprindashvili sink the entirety of the 5 million dollars she is suing Netflix for (a defamation suit related to Queen’s Gambit) into researching some cutting-edge chess pharmacology. Heck, I’d say it’s past time for chess to have an LSD-induced brilliancy, à la Dock Ellis.

Lance Armstrong, for what it’s worth, could ride his bike really fast, and I always liked those bracelets. What’s the big deal with some extra oxygenated blood?

Magnus and Ian may protest FIDE for interrupting their flow, and the chess world may protest the uptightness, but most worried about this development should be French Grandmaster Alireza Firouzja. After all, if FIDE can insist on making the World #1 go #1 whenever they want, one wonders what they can ask of the World #2.

Chess Puzzle White to move and mate in two (not in three!)

Difficulty: Hard A newspaper clipping of this puzzle, by J. Hartong of Rotterdam, spent 50 years folded up alongside my grandfather’s travel chess board (pictured to the right), and has only recently seen the light of day. The puzzle is an instructive one, good for practicing broad, shallow calculation. It is very important that the solution is a mate in two, meaning that after white’s first move in the sequence, any response that black has can be met with checkmate on the next move. Set it up on a board! Try out some candidate moves!

The answer can be found on the back of the paper [the Bulletin].

A hint: All of the pieces on the board are important for the solution.

VOLUME 43 ISSUE 9

02

TEXT HANNA ABOUEID

DESIGN ANNA BRINKHUIS

ILLUSTRATION JOHN GENDRON

NEWS

NOT SICK, BUT INJURED

03

Embodied trauma and the violence of linear time It’s easy to see the way space is governed all around us: land theft, privatization, border control and anti-immigrant policies. Similarly, time is constantly being governed and commodified by states through wage labor, incarceration (“doing time”), and imposed notions of productivity. These methods of state coercion over-police and exploit marginalized people using definitions of time and space that are largely at odds with their lived experiences. Contrary to the dominant western understanding, time is far from linear for people living with embodied trauma (i.e. PTSD). The past is not separate from and behind the present behind the future, and histories cannot always be encapsulated using linear progressive retellings like those found in textbooks. In her essay “Violence and Time: Traumatic Survivals,” scholar Cary Caruth explains that “if we are to register the impact of violence we cannot locate it only in the destructive moment of the past, but in an ongoing survival that belongs to the future.” The idea that time is experienced differently for people with embodied trauma is especially important to any discussion of temporal oppression because many marginalized communities live with embodied trauma caused, exacerbated, and unacknowledged by the state. While dismissed by these exploitative institutions, the relationship between embodied trauma and the violent imposition of linear time has long been expressed and denounced by marginalized people in testimonies, poems, oral retellings, essays, and music. +++ In her book, Citizen: An American Lyric, Claudia Rankine compiles poems, images, essays, and unconventional writing practices—mostly in the second person—to discount the notion of time as a linear entity. She rejects the separation of past and present, proposing instead a complex understanding of past experiences living within and being expressed through the present, effectively blurring the lines between these two constructions. She uses the physical presence of the body as a space through which to discern the relationship between the past and the present. All the while she illuminates how the dominant understanding of time and our relationship to it harmfully decontextualizes our “present” experiences. Rankine specifically focuses on the way the dominant adherence to linear time invalidates the experiences of ongoing, embodied trauma lived by Black Americans.

The world is wrong. You can’t put the past behind you.

It’s buried in you; it’s turned your flesh into its own cupboard.

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

Through the use of position words (“behind,” “in”), Rankine explicitly denies the portrayal of time as a linear entity with the past behind the present, and instead produces a counter image of the past residing within the present (body/ flesh), forming and informing it. Rankine roots her discussion of time within the body, turning the body into a metaphor for the present through which she asserts the past’s inextricability from it.

You are not sick, you are injured — / you ache for the rest of life. / How to care for the injured body, / the kind of body that can’t hold / the content it is living?

Rankine counters the notion that the ways our bodies encompass (or fail to encompass) our past experiences is a sickness, and instead calls it an injury. Labeling the body as injured by this unacknowledged cohabitation instead of being sick centers the trauma while also emphasizing that someone/thing put it there, where it should not have been. The question posed describes a body that can’t hold the content it is living, which reads as an acknowledgment of the body’s (and the present’s) inability to keep the past within its physical confines, to keep the boundaries from merging and the past from bubbling up. +++ Yes, and the body has memory… The body is the threshold accross which each objectionable call

passes into consciousness — all the unintimidated, unblinking, and unflappable resilience does not erase the moments lived through, even as we are eternally stupid or everlastingly optimistic, so ready to be inside, among, a part of the games.

In a section following Serena Williams’ tennis career, Rankine refuses the decontextualization and unrooting of Williams’ aggressive reactions to certain media-blasted situations, asserting that her body is not playing the game of tennis (and is not moving through life) in a manner unrelated to her past experiences, which Rankine explains is a long history of blatantly unfair referee calls, derogatory media coverage, and public mockery. Rankine specifically presents an understanding of Williams’ angry outbursts as the manifestation of “anger built up through experience and the quotidian struggles against dehumanization every brown and black person lives simply because of skin color,” an anger that “is really a type of knowledge.” This knowledge, built up through years of shared violence, surpasses the individual lifespan and encompasses generations.

As Caruth writes in her essay, “Violence and Time,” “It is because violence inhabits, incomprehensibly, the very survival of those who have lived beyond it that it may be witnessed best in the future generations to whom this survival is passed on.” Anger as the manifestation of centuries of embodied understanding and lived

NEWS

experiences disrupts the linearity of time, establishing the past and present (as portrayed by the physical body and its actions, its anger) as interwoven. The intergenerational nature of this anger refutes the idea of time experienced on a solely individual level, and further presses the relevance of embodied trauma to understandings of temporal oppression (i.e. the violent imposition of linear time). Traumatic experiences characterize the lives of many marginalized people, which is already largely unacknowledged as is, but trauma is also embodied in more than just the person experiencing the traumatic events firsthand, which increases the “injured” population exponentially.

In the quote above, Rankine also alludes to the urge to buy into and be a part of “the games,” which can be understood as larger society, especially when recalling the last line in the book: “It wasn’t a match, I say. It was a lesson.” This “eternally stupid or everlastingly optimistic” urge is accompanied by a searing sense of both disappointment and constant disbelief, both of which are evoked many times throughout the book. One prominent way in which this disbelief—“code for being Black in America”—is expressed is through the constant iteration of the phrase “what did you say?” The sheer repetition of this phrase throughout the book betrays its significance. Most of the times it is brought up, it is in disbelief over a blatantly racist act or phrase that the narrator experiences. But this phrase is not only significant in the way that it highlights the (“optimistic”) reaction of being taken aback during these instances of harm, it also says something about the way the narrators grapple with memory in these instances. In these moments of conflict, of tension, the barrage of questions related to “what did you say?” make an appearance.“Who did that to whom on which day? Who said that? She said what? What did he just do? Did she really just say that?” The rapid fire, confused nature of these questions could be understood as the narrators second-guessing themselves, feeling as though they need to incessantly question their memory to be certain that they have in fact been harmed. If Rankine is making an argument for the centrality of one’s past to their present, this inability to be certain of the past and the untrusted/fragmented way in which it is remembered is incredibly detrimental, especially when we recognize the fact that this uncertainty isn’t inherent, it has been violently conditioned.

The sighing is a worrying exhale of an ache. You wouldn’t call it an illness; still it is not the iteration of a free being. What else to liken yourself to but an animal, the ruminant kind?

The past is further expressed in the body through the “sighs” described as uncontrollable expressions of a slow, lifelong suffering. Ruminant animals are characterized by their need to chew and regurgitate their food more than once, and to digest it multiple times in different stomachs. By likening “yourself ” to a ruminant animal, Rankine is likening the act of regurgitating food to the unstoppable sighs. When read in the context of the story as a whole, the sighs are understood as her body’s physical expression of the pain its lived experiences have created within it, the embodied trauma it has accrued through years of generational and personally-lived racial violence. As such, the sighs represent the necessary regurgitation of evidence of the past that is embedded in the body, a past that can’t be digested in a healthy manner, as it is not even acknowledged.

Sometimes you sigh. The world says stop that.

Another sigh. Another stop that.

As the book emphasizes many times over, “the world” insists that this connection between the past and the present is nonexistent. If sighing—much like Serena Williams’ anger—is to be understood as an acknowledgement and expression of the interconnectedness of the

past and the present, of the effects of the past living within the present body, then it is unsurprising that a world built on the idea of a decontextualized present would be so opposed to it. In fact, there are few things that are more dangerous to colonialism than the disruption of the constant decontextualization of our present, whether this decontextualization manifests itself as “objectively”-taught history classes or the unwillingness to acknowledge the systemic and weaponized nature of poverty. Not only does Rankine call out and dismantle the way linear conceptions of time perpetuate and create embodied trauma, but she also stresses the fact that these notions are heavily embedded in the language we speak. +++ In a similar vein, Samera Esmeir’s essay, “1948: Law, History, Memory,” highlights how the Israeli legal system used a positivist historical conception of time to invalidate the testimonies of Palestinian Tantoura Massacre survivors in court. The court case in question is the 2001 libel case against Theodore Katz, an Israeli graduate student at Haifa University who wrote a master’s thesis in March 1998 that incorporated the testimonies of Palestinian survivors from the village of Tantoura. The thesis specifically included testimony that acknowledged the occurrence of Israeli-led massacres in Tantoura in 1948, part of what has become known to Palestinians as “Al-Nakba,” or “the catastrophe,” of 1948. Al-Nakba is often described as the culmination of years of settler colonial tactics used by Israeli settlers to remove indigenous Palestinians from the land, a year that marked the genocide and forced expulsion of at least 700,000 Palestinians from their ancestral land in order to make room and allow for the supremacy of Israeli settlers on it. Katz’s court case is important because it was the first of its kind, the first case to bring the occurrence of Al-Nakba, which Israel vehemently denies, into legal question.

As Esmeir explains, the Israeli legal system relied on a linear progressive history to delegitimize the Palestinian survivors’ testimonies.

Esmeir defines this positivist idea of linear time as one that establishes the dichotomy of past versus present, focusing on “significant” events along this timeline, the objective truths of which can be methodically articulated. She traces this ideology back to French Humanism, in which historiography stopped being influenced by and immersed in collective memory, and instead turned to the fabricated notion of “objective fact,” one that has been created in opposition to the lived experiences of marginalized people and continues to be weaponized against them.

Esmeir argues that it is necessary to step out of and dismantle this positivist framework when attempting to understand the Tantoura survivor’s testimonies as historical retellings.

She arrives at an incredibly powerful conclusion: the “incoherence, contradictions, and absences” present in the Tantoura survivor’s testimonies should be understood as signifiers—not negators—of the Tantoura massacres, which she frames as “the [ongoing] death of human relationships” of those Palestinians. The trauma these survivors currently embody as a result of these massacres are evidenced, not discredited, in these historical retellings that don’t abide by linear ideas of time. As Esmeir writes in her paper, “The [retellings] of the [Tantoura] survivors reveal a different conception of time, in which past and present are not separate, and in which the emphasis is not on isolatable and describable events or massacres but on the terror that governed Palestinians’ lives during the war.” Beyond embodied trauma as a factor in the survivors’ nonlinear retellings, Esmeir argues that specifically death (and absence, nonexistence) are what render the memories of survivors’ narratives unable to fit the linear model of historical time, as death cannot be reduced to

the past and lives on with its survivors.

Esmeir also explains how Israeli (and further, western) law’s dependence on this positivist historical conception—and the subsequent idealization of directness and disinterest in the development of historical “truths”—leads to the frequent discrediting of oral accounts. Written accounts, often state-developed and state-maintained, provide a material, linear account of historical events, and—by virtue of their written nature—become devoid of contradictions, lack of order, and multiplicities. This, of course, cannot be said of oral retellings. Because many Palestinian narratives exist in direct opposition to the state and its documentation, it is important to not only acknowledge but also prioritize oral retellings in understandings of Palestine’s history. A disregard of oral accounts as a critical aspect of Palestinian history serves to gatekeep this history, denying the presence and acknowledgement of “ordinary” Palestinians within it while privileging the Israeli state.

The court case ended before it really began, with Katz signing a settlement agreement denying any evidence of a 1948 massacre, which he signed in acknowledgment of the fact that the Israeli legal system, rooted in the genocide of the Palestinian people and the simultaneous denial of this genocide, would never rule against its own interest. Esmeir further underscores the way the Katz court case reflects the systemic nature of anti-Palestinian sentiment in Israel, writing that, “The briefs filed with the court, the preparations for the hearings, the examination and the cross-examination of the witnesses, and the judges’ remarks during the hearings are all important factors in making (im)possible the articulation of the survivors’ narratives about death and violence.” As such, Esmeir goes beyond a simple critique of the judge’s ruling to implicate everyday, small-scale court procedures in the privileging of linear conceptions of time over lived experience and the subsequent invalidation of Palestinian survivors’ testimonies. +++ While seemingly natural at best and harmless at worst, structures of linear time stand in opposition to the lived experiences of many marginalized people, and so their imposition has been and continues to be violent in nature. These structures are integral to notions of productivity, individualism, and progress, which are central to the maintenance of global capitalism.

Linear time is institutionalized and infiltrates all aspects of our everyday lives, including the very language we use. Caruth, Esmeir, and Rankine make evident the harm that notions of linear time have on people with embodied trauma through discussions of diagnosed PTSD patients, Palestinians, and Black Americans respectively. Rankine acknowledges the way these notions manifest in academic writing and attempts to subvert them by implementing images, mixing poetry and prose, developing a narrative in the second person, and blurring the lines between “fact” and fiction, and refusing to adhere to formal grammatical conventions and sentence structures. Similarly, the oral retellings centered in Esmeir’s essay serve as nonlinear narratives of time that are rooted in lived experiences. Both mediums present alternatives to dominant, state-reinforced linear narratives that can and should be looked to as examples of conceptions of time that reject a violent temporality.

HANNA ABOUEID ‘24 believes in incoherence, contradictions, and absences.

VOLUME 43 ISSUE 9

04

Corruption on a Corporate Scale

TEXT JACK DOUGHTY AND ROSE HOUGLET

DESIGN DEB MARINI

ILLUSTRATION SAGE JENNINGS

METRO

Brown Corporation members are stiflling organizing for Palestinian liberation on campus

05

On the afternoon of October 21, 2021 the Brown University Corporation moved a meeting scheduled to be held in Friedman Hall, due to the threat of a sit-in organized by the “Does Brown Care” campaign. This avoidant maneuver was emblematic of the Corporation’s blatant ignorance of the demands of the campaign, calling for living wages for university staff, for Brown to pay its taxes due to the City of Providence, and for the improvement of labor conditions of Brown Dining Services (BDS) employees. Ranking members of the governing body—now over a meal at Bacaro Restaurant—evaded the pressure built by the work of student activists, the kind of stonewalling the Corporation has long enacted against organizers from Brown Students for Justice in Palestine (BSJP). On this very day, Corporation members also disputed and argued against the validity of a years-old recommendation by the Brown Advisory Committee on Corporate Responsibility in Investment Policies’ (ACCRIP), as a result of BSJP organizing, to divest from holdings enabling Israeli Apartheid.

Since the publication of BSJP’s confrontation with the Corporation in February 2021 in the College Hill Independent, matters of divestment have yet to appear on the official meeting minutes, which are public record.

The Indy obtained a fifty-minute recording of the corporation gathering on October 21, which evidences the Corporation’s ongoing commitment to stifling discourse surrounding justice in Palestine. In a recurrent fashion, members of the Brown Corporation dismiss and ignore the concerns of BSJP organizers that the University maintains investments in multinational corporations upholding structural human rights abuses in Palestine. When asked by a BSJP organizer if Brown University President Christina Paxson presents topics to be deliberated to the larger governing body, Secretary Richard Friedman B’79 responded, “Yes.” Undoubtedly though, the composition of the Corporation at large is enabling this disruptive administration, and working to ensure that ACCRIP’s recommendations for divestment fail to actualize.

Set for a vote between December 1 and 15, an upcoming Graduate Labor Organization (GLO) divestment referendum is bound to be received and considered by Brown’s executive governing body, whose members often wield weighty and problematic conflicts of interest—notably with weapons manufacturers, Wall Street banks, and dark money– filled private equity managers. Naming how this blatant and consistently unscrutinized corruption is an impediment to divestment

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

proceedings, a considerable portion of the graduate student-led Palestine Solidarity Caucus’ (PSC) memo sent to GLO at large stresses the following: “We know that Brown has been using wealth generated from graduate labor to invest in companies profiteering from human rights violations and war crimes committed against Palestinians. Through its investment in corporations that facilitate Israel’s occupation of Palestine, Brown is an active agent in enabling Israel’s brutal military occupation to continue.

As a crucial workforce at the university, we believe we should have a say on this issue, and a right to refuse the colonial conditions of our work… As grad union members working at Brown University, we fight to improve our conditions of work by building collective power and holding our employer accountable.”

This movement to “hold Brown accountable” for its enablement of human rights abuses in Palestine will necessarily usher in a challenge to the investments, involvements, and positions of Corporation members that profit from that same military occupation. Their commitments, and how they promote Brown’s antagonism toward Providence’s spaces for anti-Zionist organizing, must finally be responded to by the Administration as a result of this upcoming referendum.

body as well as the faculty—which is the first time any University in the US—voted to divest from Israeli Apartheid, and there is a history of it with divestment from South African Apartheid as well as divestment from the genocide in Sudan.

Inside October’s Corporation Meeting: Situating Brown’s Complicity in the Occupation

Friedman invokes the supposed ‘constitutionality’ of the Corporation’s conduct, but it is important to note that the censure of many of these companies does not come only from student organizers, but is also reflected in international law: Until 2016, Zuber’s affiliate Textron manufactured “cluster munitions”—devices that scatter many smaller ‘bomblets’—associated with massive human casualties in urban settings. Textron extra-legally manufactured and distributed these weapons for six years, even after the United Nations prohibited the “use, development, production, and acquisition” of them in 2010.

As it stands, members of the Brown Corporation maintain a conviction that conflicts of interest (COI) do not shape the proceedings of the body in its discretion over University investments. Discussion at the corporation meeting on October 21 makes clear that they perceive their stewarding of the expansion of Brown’s ballooning endowment to be ethical and in the best interest of both the student body and Providence. Knowing members’ holdings actually enable the ongoing occupation of Palestine, BSJP organizers have repeatedly attempted to confront the Corporation about their highly problematic connections, such as ones to Textron, a military-industrial conglomerate valued at $11.7 billion. In response, they are met with condescending dismissals and argumentations against their concerns that must be exposed, as demonstrated through BSJP’s question-and-answer exchange with Secretary Richard Friedman from the October 21 Corporation meeting: BSJP: I personally am really curious—there are many members of the Corporation who have very explicit conflicts of interest even with the idea of divestment alone, some whom are on Company boards who would maybe be affected by it. There is a member of the corporation who is literally, I think, a VP [(correction: on the Board of Directors)] at Textron which is a military weapons manufacturer—how is that accounted for?

Friedman: It’s not me! *laughs* BSJP: No, it’s not you, I think her name is Maria Zuber… That is a very clear conflict of interest in my mind as to why Corporation members wouldn’t want to act even now that the student

Friedman: On your issue on conflicts, your perception of a conflict, they’re not true conflicts. They’re more sensitivities than they are conflicts; they’re not really conflicts.

Here, Friedman defends members maintaining financial engagements in companies that uphold and profit from the occupation while they deliberate divestments that would affect these companies’ bottom line. To do this, he ultimately argues there is nothing wrong with holding investments and positions in alignment with one’s own “sensitivities” to an issue. Students then attempted to hold him to account for this egregious statement, responding: Student B: “Can you clarify what would be a ‘real’ conflict?”

Friedman: “A conflict would be something that somebody just can’t do because you just literally can’t do it, constitutionally let’s say.”

Student B: “Wait so are you talking about a conflict of interest? I’m just confused about what you’re referring to as a conflict.”

Friedman: “I’m just responding to [BSJP]’s question about the conflict with these private equity people and those on the board of Textron. Of course [they] can. [They] can choose to sort of support divestment. It’s not a conflict, that’s a sensitivity: [They] could explain to the board of Textron, which is a government supplier, that quote-unquote [they’re] actually okay with it [divestment]. That’s not a conflict.

I know what conflicts are; I’ve spent my whole life dealing with what’s a true conflict versus a sensitivity that you feel troubled by. Conflict is different. These aren’t absolute conflicts; this is just awkward.”

These involvements that Secretary Friedman attempted to dismiss as inconsequential, benign, and just “awkward” differences of opinion are widespread across members of all ranks on the Corporation, and lay bare the effects this governing body as a whole has had on upholding Brown as an institution complicit in and enabling of the material and financial mechanisms of the occupation of Palestine.

METRO

Corporation Members and Their Ties In February 2020, the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) published an non-exhaustive list of companies complicit in Israeli occupation, namely Israel’s “settlement enterprise”—and its profiteering from the expansion of illegal settlements in the West Bank. Notable entities listed are multinational companies that are often easily consolidated into several categories, some of which include communications technology, cybersecurity, military-industrial, and banking/financial institutions. Below, we’ve outlined the conflicts of interest and ties of several high-ranking members of the corporation with leadership capacities, as associations these members maintain should be subject to particular scrutiny given their positions of influence.

Vice Chancellor Allison S. Ressler: Vice Chancellor Ressler is on the Management Committee of Sullivan and Cromwell, LLP. There, she oversees the Global Private Equity Group as its co-head. Ressler is a globally-lauded expert in mergers and acquisitions law, and was recently recognized as “Dealmaker of the Year” for stewarding the sale of Barclays Global Investors to BlackRock. Respectively, these firms are the largest global investor in the arms trade, and the single largest investor in weapons manufacturing globally. Barclays, in fact, was involved in financing Textron’s manufacture of the world’s most “advanced” cluster bomb.

BlackRock—the largest private asset manager in the world—maintains $5.7 billion invested in Boeing; $2 billion in General Dynamics; $4.6 billion in Lockheed Martin; $2.6 billion in Northrop Grumman; and $6 billion in Raytheon, which all are implicated in the military occupation of Palestine. Glaringly, Lockheed Martin’s F-16 Jets are responsible for the death of 225 Palestinian children in Israeli warplane attacks in 2014’s ‘Operation Protective Edge’ alone. Moreover, BlackRock’s highly profitable iShares investment branch is heavily invested in Elbit Systems, Israel’s largest publicly traded weapons manufacturer. BlackRock has also recently become a significant stakeholder in Bank Hapoalim, an institution tied to the financing of illegal Israeli settlements by the United Nations.

Ressler’s involvement in the fusion of these firms should not be overlooked as divestment calls are underway.

Treasurer Theresia Guow: Treasurer Guow is one of America’s wealthiest venture capitalists, with a net worth exceeding $500 million. She is the founder of Aspect Ventures, a venture investing firm in Silicon Valley. Most recently, Guow oversaw the $1 billion Initial Public Offering of ForeScout, which provides cybersecurity services to the Department of Defense (DoD) across every branch of the US Armed Forces, and serves on its Board of Directors. The Treasurer, in a recent interview with Forbes, signaled that Aspect Ventures’ most notable investments include ones in Cato Networks, an Israeli cybersecurity company. Directors of Cato Networks have previously served in what we will refer to as the Israel Occupation Forces (IoF). Cybersecurity is a tremendous industry in financially supporting Israeli occupation, with the State’s array of firms exporting $1,246 per capita of “hi-tech goods and services.” Many Israeli tech-entrepreneurs, including founders at Cato Networks, served in

the IoF’s Web Surveillance branch, 8200, which developed out of militias under British Mandate Palestine tasked with intercepting and decoding communications among Palestinians to squander anti-colonial resistance.

Former Chief Investment Officer/Trustee Joe Dowling: Joseph Dowling, who has overseen Brown’s Investment Office since 2013 and helped to expand the endowment by $1.7 billion, is global co-head of Blackstone Alternative Asset Management. Blackstone is a New Yorkbased investment firm which recently launched Blackstone Growth (BXG), an investment fund worth $4.5 billion. In part, this fund will be deployed to “vetted” Israeli firms deemed ‘suitable’ for investment. Having recently expanded into Tel Aviv to work largely with start-up Israeli Tech Firms, Blackstone has appointed Yifat Oron to lead their new office. Previously, Oron operated as CEO of LeumiTech, the tech banking branch of Bank Leumi Le-Israel, another financial-institution associated by the UN with funding illegal settlements in the occupied Syrian Golan and West Bank.

Fellow Brian Moynihan: Brian Moynihan currently serves as the CEO of Bank of America (BoA). Along with Verizon and Pfizer, Bank of America is among one of the major US Corporations with foundations giving money directly to non-profits that fund Israeli settlements. Most disturbingly, BoA has contributed to a pool greater than $15,000 donated to the One Israel Fund. One Israel Fund gives cash to settlements spanning the West Bank, more specifically to settler security guards who operate to block Palestinians’ freedom of movement. One Israel Fund, along with Central Fund, donates to an Israeli government-linked campaign to target and surveil the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement. Between 2001 and 2014, One Israel Fund raised $26 million from donors and directly transferred $960,000 to militants in Israeli settlements—namely to finance the acquisition of “armored vests, security vehicles, guard trainings, and surveillance equipment.” In the following years, it delivered armored vests to every “security guard” in the occupied West Bank.

tion. Because this obviously invokes student life, the corporation’s refusal to comply with the demands of student activists is particularly authoritarian.

One massive footprint of the Corporation’s refusal to divest is seen through the Brown School of Engineering’s Corporate Advisory Board, members of which include a chief engineer at Raytheon and a senior director at Boeing. Raytheon Missiles and Defense produces the anti-missile defense system that composes ‘The Iron Dome,’ Israel’s anti-rocket system.

With facilities in Portsmouth, Rhode Island, Raytheon enables militarism abroad, while also maintaining border regimes at home through its contracts with US Customs and Border Protection. Beyond ‘academic’ partnerships, Brown holds investments in these companies, such as Boeing, which provides Apache attack helicopters to Israel that have been central to assaults on Gaza in 2008 and 2014.

Even without a voting majority imploring Brown to divest from the Israeli Occupation, doing so is an absolute human imperative.

Undergraduates, graduate students, and faculty at Brown have mobilized to challenge the colonial conditions that define life, work, and study within the University. Well-aware of their positions, members of the Brown Corporation are adamant in their loyalty to redirecting and dismantling student movements that challenge their colonial inheritances. Past referendums, and ones to come, are key instruments the University community can mobilize to disrupt the conflictual holdings of the Corporation, and their perpetuation of colonial violence in Palestine.

JACK DOUGHTY B’23 and ROSE HOUGLET B’23 think the Corporation should feel really awkward, and yearn for its members’ swift resignation.

Realities of the Corporation’s Control: Brown Enabling Israeli Occupation from Providence One of the Corporation’s guiding commitments is to “preserve and enhance the University’s financial strength, provide for its financial support, and maintain sound financial controls, enabling the University to pursue its mission at the highest levels of distinction.” Brown, under the Corporation’s leadership, undeniably sustains itself financially by engaging with corporate and political entities in Providence that exploit the city’s and state’s labor and land—many of which amass capital from the occupation of Palestine. The entire operation of Brown is, by proxy, impossible to disaggregate from Israel’s colonial occupa-

VOLUME 43 ISSUE 9

06

THE PAINTED DESERT PROJECT Driving down US Highway 89 through the Navajo Nation, I pass through the arid semi-desert. The Painted Desert, with its badland hills stacked with layers of red and lavender rock, extends over 160 miles to the southeast, and the flat horizon line gives me an unobstructed view of the sacred San Francisco Peaks to the southwest. This region marks the heart of the Colorado Plateau, the ancestral lands of the Navajo, Hopi, Havasupai, Hualapai, White Mountain Apache, and Kaibab Paiute tribes. The Navajo Nation is home to roughly 180,000 tribe members.

The great landscape of Northern Arizona contains seventeen state and national parks, attracting me and nine million other visitors to the area this year alone. Tourism started booming here when the US government built Route 66 in 1926, allowing out-of-towners to more easily visit Grand Canyon National Park, which opened in 1919. White tourists flocked to the area not just for its natural beauty, but to experience what postcards and hotels advertised as the “Wild West.” Posters promoting train travel beckoned city dwellers to see the “land of history and mystery” and “exotic curiosities,” portraying native tribes and pueblos as ‘savage’ and frozen in the past. As I browsed travel guides for my trip, an ad popped up on GrandCanyon.com for an “Indian Adventure Tour,” and I wondered what separates me from the blonde, blue eyed men posing in photos at the Wigwam hotel in the 1920s.

As I drive through the reservation, Diné vendor’s stalls occasionally pop up along the road, exaggerating the area’s vastness. Their signs advertise produce, snacks, and handmade crafts. Amidst the mostly empty, sometimes weathered stalls, a freshly painted yellow sign catches my eye: “Native People are resilient,” it reads. “We will make it through this pandemic.”

Several hours into my trip, I exit the reservation and enter Gray Mountain, Arizona, when a flash of unnatural oranges, pinks, and purples catches my eye. The abandoned motel across the highway, I realize, has been converted into a giant mural. I immediately pull off the road, into the former parking lot of an empty trading post, to take a closer look.

The art piece spans three separate buildings, with the largest mural standing at the two-story section in the center. Bright yellows, oranges, and pinks at the edges of the building melt into cooler blues, with a giant eye’s violet iris at the center, its black pupil reflecting an orange desert landscape. The colors intermingle with black calligraffiti and several smaller eyes that dot the second story. The smaller, one-story building to the north features portraits of three Native women, their expressions strong and unwavering. To the north, blocky white and blue letters span the third building. They read: “AMERICAN RENT IS DUE.” This installation represents one of the latest additions to the Painted Desert Project, which connects Native and non-Native public artists with the reservation through mural opportunities. The five artists behind this piece, all Native themselves, are: Thomas “Breeze” Marcus – Tohono O’odham/Adimel O’odham/ Ponca/ Otoe Vyalone – Zuni, Raramuri, Chicano Douglas Miles – Apache Jerrel Singer – Diné LivA’ndrea Knoki – Diné Dr. Chip Thomas, a Black physician from North Carolina, is the

TEXT ALLEGRA FRIEDMAN

DESIGN OPHELIA DUCHESNE-MALONE

ILLUSTRATION MICHELLE DING

ARTS

Reclaiming colonized space through art on the Navajo Nation

07

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

curator behind this mural, having founded the Painted Desert Project in 2012 after living and working on the reservation for 34 years. Thomas moved to the western region of the Navajo Nation in 1987 to repay a National Health Service Corps scholarship by working in an area with limited healthcare. At first, locals viewed him as an outsider. “There’s an expression within the community that I learned shortly after I came that, unless you’ve been around for a couple of years, people don’t really take you into your trust,” he says in an interview with the Thomas S. Kenan Institute for the Arts.“It’s really about them observing you and seeing if your words are consistent with your actions.”

Three decades later, he feels he has earned that trust and channeled it into the Painted Desert Project. Thomas explains on his website, though, that he did not start making art as a means of community engagement. Rather, he began wheat-pasting his own photography around the reservation in 2009. Drawing inspiration from large-scale photographs he saw pasted in Rio’s favelas on a trip to Brazil, Thomas often used buildings as canvases for his work. His images found homes on old gas stations, billboards, and trading posts, which Anglo-Americans owned and ran beginning in 1870 until they found more profitable ventures elsewhere, abandoning their businesses. Thomas’s images featured portraits of Native people, taken with their permission, and symbols of Navajo culture: a couple on their wedding day, an elderly woman with a bible, and sheep, representing life and wealth.

Thomas describes his work from this early period as a “guerilla art project” that received mixed responses from a community. The Navajo Nation has a complicated history surrounding photography. In the 19th century, white photographers like Frank Rinehart and Edward Curtis often represented Indigenous people as long-gone, primitive objects of colonial fascination: a Rinehart print portrays a Sioux man in a traditional headdress against a backdrop of ornate flowers and modern bookshelves; a Curtis photo called “The Vanishing Race” shows faceless native figures on horseback, disappearing into the wilderness. Anglo-American photography often portrays Native Americans as primitive, static artifacts of study rather than living, breathing people who still exist. And even though Thomas’s photos challenged this stereotype by showing Native people in their everyday lives, older members of the community still reacted to his work with suspicion. Thomas sometimes neglected to consult building owners too, once offending a roadside stand owner when he pasted a photo of a peyote bud onto his stand without asking first. The owner was a Fundamentalist Christian and rejected the Native American Church, which uses the plant as a sacrament. +++ Two months into Thomas’s project in 2009, however, the role of his art in the community shifted. Thomas came across an empty roadside stand that he assumed to be abandoned. Enamored with its bright red color, he used it as the background for a photo of Diné Code Talkers, famous figures who used their native language to transmit secret Allied messages in the Pacific War of WWII. One week later, Thomas returned to check on his piece and found the stand owners’ repairing the stall. They explained that Thomas’s photo had attracted so much tourist attention that they were reopening the stand to take advantage of the potential business. Thomas realized then that public art could benefit the community. Now, the Painted Desert Project collaborates with stand owners to help revive their stalls and deteriorating buildings in the surrounding area.

Thomas’s collaboration with these business owners highlights the serious economic disenfranchisement of the Navajo Nation, where the unemployment rate is 42 percent. Roadside stands can serve as supple-

ARTS mental income, but are costly to maintain. Limited job opportunities often push heads of households to leave the reservation for work.

These economic conditions are the effects of decades of land and labor rights violations by the US government. The federal government, not reservations themselves, own and manage all native lands. As a result, many Native Americans living on reservations do not own their land or their homes. Shawn Regan, a public affairs fellow at the Property and Environment Research Center wrote that, by holding native land “in trust,” ostensibly “for the benefit of current and future generations,” the settler colonial government denies Native people and tribes autonomy.

This system makes it impossible to mortgage assets for loans. And for this same reason, reservations with abundant natural resources such as coal and uranium, like the Navajo Nation, do not benefit from their own land. Instead, they must go through at least four federal agencies before beginning energy development, causing many investors to avoid these regions entirely.

For Indigenous people denied property ownership even on what the state calls federally recognized native land, roadside stalls and trading posts can be economic lifelines.

Uniquely situated with Lake Powell and Zion National Park to the North, Flagstaff and the Petrified National Forest Park to the south, the Grand Canyon to the west, and the Navajo National Monument to the east, northern Arizona receives heavy visitor and local traffic. With their attention-grabbing visuals that contrast the natural landscape, the murals of the Painted Desert Project encourage tourists to stop as they pass through these areas, boosting roadside sales.

But the Project challenges the legacy of tourism in the region even as it seemingly encourages it. The mural in Gray Mountain reclaims a motel from the Whitings Brothers hotel empire, which once included 12 locations across former Route 66, which stretched from Chicago to Santa Monica until 1985.

Route 66 represented Western expansion, post-WWII optimism, and for many white tourists, the exoticism of Native culture. By framing Native Americans as a relic of the past, northern Arizona became an abandoned, history-filled region ripe for tourism developments. White-owned businesses exploited this image, opening teepee-themed motels and paying local natives low wages to serve as guides on historically inaccurate “tribal tours.” And when Route 66 closed, hotels like the Whitings Brothers Motel shut down, becoming abandoned reminders of the tourism industry’s exploitative past and present—today, despite the millions of people who pass through the Navajo Nation each year, the reservation lacks the infrastructure for hotels and restaurants and struggles to profit significantly from visitors to the region. So, even as the mural attracts tourists like myself, it also forces us to consider the potential harm our presence brings. The piece condemns the motel, the industry it represents, and the American settler-colonial state. “AMERICAN RENT IS DUE” is not a metaphor, but a demand for land reparations and decolonization.

And for artist Douglas Miles, who completed this part of the mural, his intent extends beyond the Navajo Nation. “I wrote that as a painted prayer,” he says of the quote, which he felt inspired to write upon seeing the remnants of the hotel. The words, which came to Miles as he reflected on the colonial history of the space and how he and the other artists reclaimed it, mirrors theory by Russell Means, an Oglala Lakota activist famous for occupying federal property to demand Native land rights. “A prayer not just for Native people,” Miles says, “but for all people of color who are exploited in this country.

For their land, their work, their body.” +++

says their programming gave students a “chance to think differently” about art and its relationship to self-representation, oppression, and activism. “What matters,” Miles says of the Project, “is that our art is coming from our communities. And that is also primarily for the local community.” The act of reclamation that comes with painting on abandoned walls, especially those left by colonial forces, strengthens this focus on art made for and by Native groups.

Thomas believes in creating art for the community because of its healing potential. And that is something the Navajo Nation needs, Thomas says, as it grapples with immense intergenerational trauma as a result of land theft and cultural erasure. As a physician, Thomas says he “attempts to create an environment of wellness in the individual so they can realize their aspirations.” This project is his way of doing that on a community level, by beautifying the area and celebrating the Nation.

He obviously can’t speak to the response of the entire community to his project, he tells the Art Institute, but he does hear reactions from people who reach out to him locally and on social media.

“There was one guy who told me when he’s driving around in his truck with his grandma, and anytime she sees the pictures of sheep, she just gets a big smile on her face and starts laughing,” he says.

“So that’s my metric for success.

Happy grandmas.”

Thomas’s mission matters even more today, amidst Covid-19. The pandemic has disproportionately affected the Navajo Nation and tribal communities in the United States, as a result of poor healthcare resources, crowded housing that makes social distancing impossible for many families, and limited access to running water, which requires family members to risk exposure to the virus as they seek potable water. Due to these factors, Native communities face three times the hospitalization rate and twice the death rate of white Americans, even with some of the highest vaccination rates in the country. Thomas’s current work addresses the crisis, communicating critical health information like quarantine and mask guidelines on buildings around the reservation.

The artists behind the Gray Mountain installation, who completed the mural at the height of the pandemic, in November 2020, say Covid-19 was at the forefront of their minds as they worked on the project.

Thomas “Breeze” Marcus explains that they painted the mural with the idea of “giving life,” both to a previously colonized, now abandoned space and to the Diné Nation at a time when many people from the community were dying from the virus. With its explosion of vibrant color against the backdrop of abandoned hotel walls and the colonial legacy they evoke, the Gray Mountain mural truly embodies this message of life and resistance against death and settler colonialism. It is a reflection of the resilience of Native artists who “do not have the luxury of approaching art as a cool, casual way to make money,” Miles says, and instead must use it to create hope, speak up for their communities, and to reclaim stolen spaces on their own land.

ALLEGRA FRIEDMAN B’21.5 is thinking differently about abandoned spaces.

Miles’s comments highlight’s Thomas’s primary intention for the Painted Desert Project: to send a message of hope and empowerment to the Diné community. Thomas and the artists he invites to participate in the Project incorporate community outreach into their art-making process through mural workshops for local youth. In 2016, for example, artist Demian DinéYazhi hosted free-writing and monoprint workshops with students at Shonto Preparatory School on the Navajo Nation. DinéYazhi

VOLUME 43 ISSUE 9

08

ITERATIONS FEATS

A cosmic how-to

First, try to be something. A forward on the soccer team or a lifeguard. An old Irish woman in a play or a neighborhood dog-walker. A school trouble-maker or a baker. A piano prodigy. Have various levels of success with each of these experiments, but know that early failure is necessary for personal growth. It will give you something to talk about on bad first dates or during forced conversations with your relatives at Thanksgiving.

As a first-grader, show your shaded drawing of the living room to your mom. She is kind and tells you that everything you do is impressive.

She has a strained relationship with her own mother and because of this she thinks that she must be your confidant, best friend, and advice-giver. She believes in not shaving your legs and wearing exclusively second-hand clothes. “I wish I had your artistic ability,” she says.

In fourth-grade, while standing outside for choir practice, stare at the large sweat stains that seep through Mr. Brown’s oversized blue polo shirt. Make a promise to yourself that if you ever have a sweat problem that bad, you will seek medical attention. Play hamster with your friend Sadie at recess. Run. Join a recreational soccer league. Get really good at cherry bombs in four square. Keep a journal and write sentences with words that you don’t know the meaning of. Tape a tiny picture of your brother in the front of the journal, with the caption: “This is my brother. He is horrible, idiotic, and dense all at the same time.”

Cry at night because you think about things you’ve said that day that might have been offensive or mean. Stare out your window as you fall asleep and promise yourself that you will be

TEXT NELL SALZMAN

DESIGN FLORIA TSUI

ILLUSTRATION CLAIRE CHASSE

Inspired by Lorrie Moore’s How to Become a Writer Content Warning: suicide mentioned

09

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

better tomorrow.

Babysit for the twins that live across the street. They have bright blonde hair and you love them. They love you, too. Until the day a piece of Play-Doh goes up one of their nostrils.

You think that you fish it all out, but when the mother comes home she is able to dig out a sizeable blueish green nugget. You are not asked to come back.

Another babysitting family has a deranged dog. After you put the kids to bed, the dog’s demons really come out. You run around the house while it chases you. It has a limp and eyes that flash red.

A third family has three kids that don’t know the meaning of “no.” In a game of Houdini, they manage to tie your limbs and arms together with duct tape. It’s really fun until you realize you are actually tied up with duct tape and can’t move. You have been locked in the closet for an hour when their dad comes home.

He’s mortified, but you are more mortified.

burning the candle at both ends. Ask her why people waste over half of their lives sleeping.

In your last year of high school, go to late night coffee shops to read about American history. Cheat on computer science tests, but never skip a page of a novel in your literature classes.

Decide that the good thing about needing so little sleep is that you can do all of your reading.

Identify more closely with Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment than you would like, and wonder how you would murder a corrupt pawnbroker if you felt like it was your destiny to do so. Then ask yourself if the thrill you still get playing hide and seek while babysitting is similar to the thrill that Raskolnikov feels after barely escaping his act of killing.

Your favorite teacher tells you he majored in English. “I would be happy to discuss with anyone why it was the best decision I ever made,” he says in a dry voice.

+++

Get stuck with a roommate freshman year of college who never asks you how you are doing and is always talking about how hungry she is. Tito’s bottles line your conjoined desks and take-out boxes pile up on the tiled floor. Think about how the biggest transition you’ve had before going to college was learning to walk. Then reflect on how grateful you are to know how to walk, and kick yourself for not being grateful to be in college. Figure out that to escape the large groups of people that flock your room, you can go out the back door that opens onto a large park. Lie in the middle of the grass and stare at the web of branches that covers the sky.

One of the first assignments for your creative writing class is a poetry journal. Carry around your brown Moleskine for a week and record every step, every leaf on the ground, every sound. Your favorite entry is about a man you run into one afternoon playing the saxophone under a highway bypass. His slow, sad melody reverberates through the air, rustling the trash that clings to the cracks in the sidewalk.

Hear your classmates recite their entries and realize that yours will never measure up.

The teacher hands your work of labor back with the comment: “Sweet and simple, a pleasure to read.” Look at her sprawled handwriting and feel like you want to scream. You’re tired of being sweet and simple. The next assignment you hand in is darker. It’s about two children who are playing with ice picks and one accidentally stabs and kills the other. Both families leave town. Your professor asks you after she reads it if you are okay.

Sophomore year, decide that you will become a live music enthusiast. Develop a massive

In seventh grade, get a role in a professional production of Oliver Twist. Consider a career in acting. Wear breeches cinched tightly with safety pins and run around the stage singing about what it’s like to be an English orphan boy in the 1830s. Have voice rehearsals with a bald, Canadian man who talks openly about his sex life. Think about how beautiful four-part harmonies are when they’re done right. Develop an infatuation with the lead, Nancy. Her voice is like honey and her hair is perfectly curled.

The man who plays Fagan, the leader of the orphan pack, is the most talented person you have ever met. He’s a washed up actor who tried and failed to make it on Broadway. Your parents go see him in a solo production he’s in about a radio broadcaster who struggles with his own mortality. They come back raving and tell you how lucky you are to learn from him. Fill in character charts about your own orphan boy— who your parents are, what you like to do most, and what your relationship is like with the other characters. “Even the ensemble should know these things,” Fagan tells you.

Fagan died from suicide in the middle of the run. One day he’s swinging his watch around on stage and the next he’s gone. A new Fagan replaces him, but it will never feel right.

Think about how acting—putting yourself in someone else’s shoes—requires so much empathy that it can be draining and fatal. Decide it’s not for you.

Senior year, your doctor tells you that the way you function off of four hours of sleep is not normal. “You should consider a career as an FBI agent,” she says. Your mom says that you’re

+++

FEATS/LIT

crush on the lead singer of the most popular student band on campus. Stay up late in the library swapping albums. Copy his Marvin Gaye playlist, but don’t tell him.

Get a record player and hang your favorite bands on the walls of your dorm room. Sneak into the practice rooms after hours to play piano. Think of names for your future band: Men in Clogs, Campus Cat, Surprise Coffee Bean, Blasted Noodle, Broke Yolk.

Never actually join a band.

Write down bits and pieces of things that people say that you like: the math major at the dining hall’s theories of topological equivalence, the idea of controlled manic-ness, what makes letters different from essays, moral virtues.

Keep mental post-its to refer back to. Wonder to yourself if it’s okay to steal stories from the world around you. Worry that you are a kleptomaniac for other peoples’ thoughts.

Decide that environmental studies classes just aren’t doing it for you and that you’ve always liked reading and writing more. In a panic, ask your therapist what you should major in.

Like everyone, she tells you it doesn’t matter, that you should take what you love and run with it. Tell her you understand, then walk back to your dorm room crying.

Date someone you like for the first time.

Pull an all-nighter with him just because you can. Sleep in the student lounge and wake up at 5 a.m. with light streaming through the big windows. Walk to a diner. Stare at the mishmash of posters on the wall as you eat your hash browns and drink your coffee.

At parties when people ask, explain that you’ve switched to comparative literature. They wonder what it is, why you like it. Explain that you are obsessed with the narratives of the world around you. “Oh, narratives. Very nice,” they laugh. Let feelings of inadequacy creep in.

Ask yourself if it would be feasible to switch to public policy or history.

In your writing seminars, students discuss theory, figurative language, sentence placement.

“Does the message come across?” “How’s the length?” “What didn’t work?” Everyone has their own opinion. The students with the most opinions smoke cigarettes and speak five languages.

Heavy

I feel my top lip tremble each time my tongue stretches up to lick it. They’ve been chapped for a week now, and Mom says they won’t get better unless I use the stupid lip balm she brought home from the pharmacy. But every time I put it on, my lips tingle more. It’s peppermint flavored. She says the tingling means it’s working. That they’re healing. I hate that they look glossy, too. So instead, I let my lips suffer in the freezing air and chafe every time they meet the edge of each individual envelope. I’m on number thirty-five. One hundred twenty three more to go.

My living room is suffocated by tinsel and wooden nutcrackers, whose gazes are creepy, invasive, and impossible to escape. It smells like a Christmas tree farm has invaded my home and brought all its kitschy, capitalist decor with it. Mom and Dad dragged the other two on their annual ice skating and hot cocoa jaunt. I told them they can shove candy canes up their assholes if they think there’s any chance I join them.

So now I’m stuck here stuffing envelopes with pictures of our family that in no way represent who we are. We’re standing on the shore of Lake Michigan wearing matching white outfits purchased for the sole purpose of wearing them in this photo. Mom kept the tags on mine and returned it afterwards; she knows I’d never be caught dead in anything cable knit. Wyatt and Gracie are smiling for once, and Mom and Dad are holding hands. I’m tempted to write on the back of each card in permanent marker, “Jerry has been sleeping in the guest room for the past seven months, and Wyatt and Gracie haven’t spoken since he left her pet fish to starve six weeks ago when she dragged Mom and Dad to the three day-long interstate spelling bee. Merry fucking Christmas!”

It’s impossible to hear myself think with Frank Sinatra droning on about white Christmases and blue Christmases and old Christmases and new Christmases. I switch the record to one from my private collection. Mom’s music taste is the soundtrack to a phony Hallmark movie, and she would be appalled to know that I’m choosing Wilco over Christmas carols this late in December. It’s like, the second Thanksgiving is over, we’re supposed to mask depression with holly jolly and coat every problem we possess in a thick layer of powdered sugar? Bullshit.

Five large socks dangle dangerously from the mantel, as if daring each other to taste the flames.

They’re cable knit, like the sweater Mom forced over my neck, with a silver initial sewn into each of them. A nauseating scent of pine permeates the air radiating from the fireplace. It’s everywhere. On my lips, in the stockings, in the envelopes. Why do we associate mint with freshness? To me it just smells stale.

“Heavy Metal Drummer” turns to “Little Drummer Boy” as soon as the minivan crushes the gravel outside the big bay window. I watch through the glass as Wyatt careens out of the car, clutching a colossal candy cane that could support the weight of a real-life elf.

“Hey Declan,” Mom asks, “What number you on?”

“Thirty-seven.”

“Let me grab the gifts out of the closet and some wrapping paper, and I’ll come join you.”

She sends my siblings off to bake cookies with Dad – the dough is premade, though, and they’ll use little snowman cookie cutters, of course, because God forbid anyone ever color remotely outside the lines. It’s as if neither of my siblings will notice that the paper their gifts are wrapped in (smooth and red, smothered in perfect peppermints) has been sitting on the dining room table for weeks.

They’re always skeptical that Santa’s handwriting looks exactly like Mom’s. This is the year I’m gonna tell them. They have to know. And when I do, I’ll also play that Wilco song for them. They’ll like it, I think. I know they will.

Drummer Boy

Your mom calls and asks if you are sleeping enough. Your ex-boyfriend asks to get together again. Decline.

Friends text you to see if you’re okay. Tell them that you’ve been writing like crazy and pondering the cosmos. Go for ten mile-runs every day and cry and think. The nights that your roommate spends at her girlfriend’s are your favorite. The apartment feels soft and safe, and you can drink coffee and pace around with your laptop, reading your own work out loud. You wonder if the people that live below you can hear you. Decide you don’t care.

Discuss ideas with everyone. Beg for suggestions. Toil over sentences. Try an especially ambitious sample on a friend, only to have her look at you with sympathy. “It’s really good,” she says, but her voice cracks.

In an exercise, one of your professors tells you to think and write about three moments you’ve felt deeply over the past few years. Give a lukewarm attempt: you lost a family member, you fell off a roof, and you were seriously heartbroken for the first time.

“It’s like getting the wind knocked out of you. Puts everything about your life into perspective, and makes you just want to dish out love to everyone who is deserving,” you write about the first.

NELL SALZMAN B’22 is sleep-deprived.

TEXT DORRIT CORWIN

Metal

+++

“It knocks the wind out of you. After falling two stories onto concrete and somehow being okay afterwards, it is easier to believe the universe actually has a plan,” you write about the second.

The third is too painful. You decide that you don’t have the words to describe it yet.

Go for a night walk with some friends and stand over a bridge that intersects the highway. Ask yourself whether you focus more on the cars going away from you or towards you.

Decide that for whatever reason, you are drawn to the cars going away. Wonder what everyone driving is thinking right now and try to come to terms with the fact that people are casually hurtling along the road in metal boxes at over 70 miles per hour.

Come to the conclusion that you are still young, that you still have a thousand versions of yourself to live, that you don’t need to be ‘something’ just yet.

DESIGN SAM STEWART ILLUSTRATION LOLA SIMON

DORRIT CORWIN B’24 believes that it is possible to love both Wilco and Christmas at the same time.

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o b t i e o s c r r o o Ch

Dancing robots, DARPA, and the limits of ar t as critique

TEXT SARAPHINA FORMAN

DESIGN SAM STEWART ILLUSTRATION SARAPHINA FORMAN

S + T

Content Warning: military and police violence

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Over eight million people have watched a blackand-yellow dog-shaped robot moonwalk, twerk, and bob its head with impeccable rhythm to the song “Uptown Funk” by Mark Ronson on YouTube. In another video by the same major robotics company, Boston Dynamics, a human-sized robot leaps over large wooden crates in a gymnasium, doing “parkour.” A third video features an ensemble of Boston Dynamics’s robots dancing to “Do You Love Me?” by The Contours and has gained over 35 million views.

These dancing robot videos elicited a strong reaction from me, although I wasn’t sure if I was laughing due to amusement or discomfort.

And I wasn’t alone. Among the multitude of humorous YouTube comments (“Did a robot just flex its I/O port at me??”), there was a comment with thousands of likes that read, “When you realise people are starting to get a bit scared about your creations & decide to do a funny video to throw them off the scent.”

Someone else simply commented a cryptic “IT’S HAPPENING.” It’s in Boston Dynamics’s interest to make viewers laugh, just as I did, because public perception of robots is generally hesitant and distrustful. A recent Brookings survey found that 61 percent of adult Americans reported that they were uncomfortable with robots, 23 percent were unsure of how they felt, and only 16 percent felt at ease with them. Boston Dynamics’s videos attempt to change this negative perception of robots by presenting them as amusing and friendly. Meanwhile, the dancing itself trains the robots to move in more complex ways, generating better robotic technology.

While we’re laughing, we are less likely to think about the fact that the robots were built with funds from the Pentagon and that what we’ve been watching could be considered propaganda.

Many of Boston Dynamics’s robots are funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), an agency within the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) that generates new technologies for the United States defense forces. DARPA funds are used to create technological weapons, and the technology in these military inventions is then commercialized. This means that DARPA’s fingerprints can be found on a host of products not typically associated with the military. For example, DARPA funded the creation of bomb disposal robots, which a private commercial company then translated into Roombas (robot vacuum cleaners). This innovation illustrates the slippage between technology for the military and technology for public consumption. This slippage goes in the opposite direction, too: more general technological innovation can be weaponized (e.g. nuclear fission being used for atomic bombs on a level of destruction greater than many scientists intended). Military advancement and technological development are caught in a constant feedback loop, no matter how innocuous the innovation may seem. So the root issue isn’t that technological development is being funded by the military, but rather that this military exists in the first place.

This spring, a new class at Brown called Choreorobotics 0101 will explore dancing robots, both by programming dances and critiquing the artform itself. But when critique is coming from privileged and powerful places like Brown, how critical is it, really? And when the critique involves technological research that benefits the institution being critiqued, can this critique still contribute to positive change?

While Choreorobotics 0101 may provide

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

interesting opportunities for commenting on injustices surrounding the arts, technology, and the government, we should not lose sight of the fact that we should be dismantling the military industrial complex which lies at the heart of the root injustices.

Boston Dynamics and military buyers Choreorobotics 0101 is made possible by Brown’s Computer Science Department’s purchase of two robots from Boston Dynamics. The Office of Naval Research funded the purchase, in the form of a grant that Brown applied for in conjunction with UMass Lowell and the Naval Undersea Warfare Center.

Emerging from a MIT lab dedicated to legged robots, Boston Dynamics was founded in 1992 by Marc Raibert thanks to significant funds from DARPA. Their breakout creation was BigDog, a robot for the US military to carry hefty loads and maneuver over difficult terrain.

In Boston Dynamics’s early years, they collaborated closely with DARPA, the Pentagon, and the Naval Air Warfare Center Training Systems Division, although their robots have also been made available commercially and used by other countries’ defense and police forces.

In 2013, Alphabet, Google’s parent company, purchased Boston Dynamics along with eight other robotics companies. Together, the nine companies formed Replicant, Google’s new robotics division. Andy Rubin, the founder of the division, left the company in 2014 and in 2015 Alphabet sold Boston Dynamics to Japanese tech giant SoftBank. Although the head

of Replicant said that this decision was made because of their limited resources, this also might be tied to Google’s value of appearing ethical. Google, the company with the unofficial motto of “Don’t be evil,” has a history of going to great lengths to remain moral in the eyes of the public. For example, after employees protested an artificially intelligent military program in 2018, Google shut down the project and released guidelines for ethical artificial intelligence. Given Google’s emphasis on appearing principled, it would make sense that Google didn’t want to be known as a defense contractor, especially when linked with the contentious subject of robotics. Holding onto the DARPA-funded Boston Dynamics would threaten this principled reputation.

Even Boston Dynamics has attempted to distance itself from its military connections. The Boston Dynamics website now states, “We will not authorize nor partner with those who wish to use our robots as weapons or autonomous targeting systems. If our products are being used for harm, we will take appropriate measures to mitigate that misuse.” However, Boston Dynamics also states that “serving government customers tasked with preserving safety and security is in alignment with our mission as long as that work remains consistent with our terms of use, which prohibit weaponization, targeting and violation of privacy and civil rights laws.” This deliberately weak language allows for continued contracting. For example, the police could potentially utilize robots for harmful activities since they are technically not engaged in war. In addition, it does not mean much for

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Boston Dynamics to pledge compliance with “privacy and civil rights laws” since the rate at which new legislation is passed struggles to match the rate of technological development that may be in need of regulation. Given the limited restrictions, it’s highly unlikely that collaboration with the government, police, and military is free of transgression.

Indeed, Boston Dynamics’s ties to the military remain robust. Just this past spring, the French news organization Ouest-France reported that Boston Dynamics’s Spot was among five robots tested for viability in combat by a French military school. Local government authorities in Singapore used Spot to enforce social distancing by using cameras to monitor people in an area and playing a pre-recorded social distancing reminder to violators. The New York Police Department (NYPD) utilized Spot multiple times as well, before a viral video of Spot patrolling a Bronx neighborhood and public outcry forced them to discontinue. Boston Dynamics is still enabling the government to devote precious resources to strengthening law enforcement rather than to helping communities. And if the government is in the mood to be not-so-benign, they have high-level robots at their disposal to empower them in their destruction.

Robotic warfare is a good example of technology being used in harmful ways. Although the specific method of remote control can greatly influence psychological experience, robotic warfare generally allows the aggressor to emotionally distance themselves from their target. In addition, pressing buttons and risking machinery rather than bodies make violent acts easier to carry out. Because robotic technology makes brutality easier, it would likely make brutality more common. For example, in 2016, Dallas police forces killed a man they deemed dangerous by attaching explosives to a robot and sending the robot to the man. A human police officer would likely not have been sacrificed in this way; the lowered stakes of violence that come along with robotic technology could lead to harsher, more militarized policing. Robots are not only tools to make police more powerful; they also can encourage a greater quantity of policing in the first place. For instance, in Chula Vista, California, the police are allowed to send in camera-equipped drones as first responders to 911 calls. In some cases, police officers have chosen to deploy drones in situations where they are not necessary—calls to address a “water leak” or “fake COVID testing,” for instance. The overuse of drones means that there is heightened government surveillance of the community.

Boston Dynamics is not funded by DARPA so that they can create dancing robots. Rather, Boston Dynamics began hiring choreographers and training their robots to dance simply because dancing is a difficult task for machines to perform. This makes it ideal for testing and improving their robotic technologies. Marco de Silva, the engineering lead on Spot development, told The College Hill Independent in an email, “We use dancing as a means to push the boundaries of robotic agility, and the resulting advances are useful in other real-world applications.” Plus, the cuteness factor of dancing robots increases support for the implementation of these robotic technologies.

Choreorobotics on and off College Hill Technology and creative disciplines are often thought to go hand in hand. But in the modern-day world where art heavily relies on technology (e.g. social media) to be viewed, the historically-accurate synergistic portrayal of art and technology may now be misleading. People’s basic rights and livelihoods are dictated by Big Tech; there is no equivalent Big Art. Given this power imbalance, is art able to use technology (e.g. Adobe Apps) as much as technology uses art (e.g. Apple product design)? With power comes politics, the inevitable and often overlooked player in the intersection of art and technology.

The relationship of these three domains has long been close and complicated. These days, art that borrows from the world of technology is everywhere, especially given the endless material provided by our globalized, digitalized, and chaotic world. Choreorobotics, loosely defined as the practice of making robots dance, is an example of an intersection between art and technology. The field is rather nascent, but artists like Catie Cuan, Amy Laviers, Meritt Moore, Grisha Coleman, Monica Thomas, and others are pioneering the scene with everything from setting sequences on robotic bodies to collaborating with artificially intelligent choreographers to dancing pas de deux with robot partners.

Choreorobotics also marks one of the latest developments in the presence of intersectional arts on College Hill. This spring’s new class was composed by Associate Professor of Computer Science professor Stefanie Tellex and Senior Lecturer in and Associate Chair of Theatre Arts and Performance Studies Sydney Skybetter. The class will be co-taught by Skybetter and Eric Rosen, a graduate student of Tellex who has also contributed to the design of the class.

Skybetter is a classically-trained choreographer who has received recognition from the likes of Dance Magazine and the New York Times for his groundbreaking choreorobotics work.

He is well aware of the ethical dilemmas tied to choreorobotics, especially when it involves collaboration with and payment to the military-affiliated Boston Dynamics. The Indy spoke to him about the contradictions in technology, art, and socially-responsible action.

Skybetter, “in a very direct way and a very ambivalent way” is “inspired by the work of the company Boston Dynamics.” The dark juxtaposition of playful dances with state-tied war machines is not all that unexpected to him. Skybetter said, “The history of the western dance tradition has always been enmeshed with state and military power. Ballet since its 17th century origins has been intensely wrapped up in French colonial power…. So, I’m actually not surprised that state-funded military robotics deals with dance.”

What disturbs him about choreorobotics is not just the institutions he must interact with, which are somewhat familiar given the wealth involved in the dance world, but also the broader ripples of the work he creates. Skybet-

ter notes that, unlike his usual art where “the duration is pretty set—there’s a show, and the show is over, and then you go home,” a dance involving robots might reach far into the future.

He said, “When you train a robot how to dance, what you’re doing is training it how to navigate questionable terrain, you’re training it how to navigate among a complex matrix of bodies and obstacles.” Essentially, “you’re teaching it how to navigate warfighting; you’re teaching it how to do policing.” Given the rapidly developing quality of these robotics fields and the intentional opacity with which the government renders them, Skybetter said, “my implication as an artist and others’ implication in these systems is unknown or unknowable.” Even if it is not possible to come to a definitive conclusion, it feels important to investigate these implications before jumping into work that deals with the systems. Accepting this uncertainty feels like its own definitive conclusion, and, especially because of the secrecy blanketing much gov-

ernment research, feels unproductive. Plus, the military implications of Brown’s research are clear, given the naval origins of the funding used to purchase the two robots.

Despite the unclear implications, Skybetter still engages in choreorobotic work. He said, “Artists, content creators, and makers of all sorts functionally don’t have a choice but to make art using technology that comes from questionable places and is deployed on platforms that are owned by surveillance capitalist companies.” How does one critique systems that one is implicated in? According to Skybetter, “it’s really fucking complicated.”

Skybetter isn’t the only artist wrestling with these complexities by engaging in dialogue with Boston Dynamics’s promotion of playful robots.

This past February, the ‘prankster art’ internet collective MSCHF took a stand against the misleading nature of the dancing videos. MSCHF created an installation where participants could remotely control a paintball gun attached to Spot—a task much more similar than dances to the aggressive action Spot’s military buyers might use him for. (Boston Dynamics offered MSCHF another two Spots for free if MSCHF agreed to not pull the stunt, and when they did, Boston Dynamics tweeted their disapproval at this “provocative” display.) However, MSCHF was able to purchase the $75k robot with funding from millions of dollars of ‘outside investments,’ including from the Silicon Valley powerhouse venture capital firm Canaan Partners. To critique Boston Dynamics, MSCHF, like research at Brown University, continues to rely on a morally questionable institution of power, which inherently limits how subversive they truly can be.

It is a bit of a paradox: those who have access to collaborate with nefarious companies are often the same people who benefit from them the most. This often gets in the way of meaningful critique.

Who’s on stage Nothing will be accomplished from ignoring this conflict. Skybetter thinks that even the simple act of facing the conflict can be fruitful: “The ethical entanglement is the thing I want us to learn from. I think that the tangle more than almost anything else is what it means to be in this work.”

Privileged entities can try to proceed through the ‘tangle’ by using their power for the better. Skybetter tries to act like a parasite on a capitalist host and is “constantly thinking about how I can be moving resources—time, attention, cash etc., against the aims of the originators.” Skybetter also mentioned that, in his choreorobotics class, “the vast majority of artists that we are going to be studying and learning from are women and people of color.”

But learning from these artists does not make the work acceptable if the learning is still enhancing these robots’ capabilities to be used by the state to disproportionately harm people of color in the United States and abroad.

Even if we take contributions to military development out of the equation, studying diverse subjects is not a final solution to the problem.

Art by definition highlights the voice of the artist. So, powerful entities simply making art that ‘critiques’ problematic institutions emphasizes privileged perspectives and thus does little in the way of dismantling these institutions. We often forget about this context in the classroom or studio setting. The exclusionary nature of institutions that have access to critiques of technology (e.g. disciplines like choreorobotics) falls along expected class, race, and gender lines.

These institutions need not to just incorporate other voices in their art, but to structurally yield their power.

SARAPHINA FORMAN B+RISD ’26 is implicated in the systems she criticizes in this article.

VOLUME 43 ISSUE 9

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LIT ILLUSTRATION SOPHIE FOULKES DESIGN ISAAC MCKENNA TEXT ARDEN SHOSTAK 13

How to Watch Snow

Dream

Look for feathers floating from a pillow torn open in the sky. A cloud falling apart. A salt shaker.

White flower petals. Frozen tears from wishing for summer. Music notes. Falling kisses from angels.

Kisses from no one. Silver. Plating for the trees.

Jewels for your hair. For your eyelashes. Wool roving. A carpet rolling out. An unfurling. A field.

A ghosting. A light. A lightness. A brightening.

A hush of white. A quieting. A burying, like time over memory. A burial. A motion to watch outside your window. A glasslike motion. A falling. Small crystals, all different, all touching. A touch that melts. A collection. A way of forgetting. Small things vanishing. Big things, too. Like time falling softly over memory. A star in the window. A plague of moths. Moths eating up lace. Lace unstringing.

A dress hung over the door like a ghost. The tears of a ghost. The tears in the dress. The choice of forgetting. Like a blanket of ash atop memory. Like a mirror in pieces. Like feathers. Like angels torn open in the sky. Or just flower petals. A light, just beyond the window, silver brightening. A cold, like glass. A cold forgetting. White flowers that bloom only when forgotten. Crystalline. Small diamonds.

A pearl on your eyelash. A memory gone.

you are walking the perimeter of a dream snowflakes hover you move through them your footsteps stitch lines in the snow hemming the edge of a frozen lake

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

you are dreaming a silver gelatin photograph high in the air an arrow of geese are slowly staging a passage through a door you cannot see snow is falling through the silence birch trees watching as you pass them each night you step into a dream and only half of you steps out

LILY CHAHINE “OPEN BOOK (OVERSHARER)”

X

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TEXT BILAL MEMON

DESIGN ISAAC MCKENNA

ILLUSTRATION HANNAH PARK

METRO

Major Merger

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Lifespan, CNE, and Brown merger promises local control of care—threaten price increases

On April 26, Lifespan and Care New England (CNE)—the two largest hospital systems based and operating in Rhode Island—filed a merger application with Brown University as an affiliated partner. Approximately 80 percent of all inpatients in Rhode Island currently pass through a hospital owned by either Lifespan or CNE. Last month, on November 16, the Rhode Island Department of Health and Attorney General’s Office deemed the merger application complete, kickstarting the 120-day review period. During this period, these state agencies can either approve the merger, approve with conditions, or deny the application.

All aspects of care from routine check-ups to the most specialized procedures stand to be affected by the formation of a new all-encompassing health care network. A merged corporation, with near monopolistic market dominance, would substantially dictate the future of health care in the state. Brown’s role as an affiliated partner further complicates the stakes of the merger. A larger hospital network promises additional research opportunities and research dollars to affiliated faculty and a more comprehensive training experience for medical students.

But it remains unclear whether the interests of the Warren Alpert Medical School necessarily align with what is best for the rest of Rhode Island.

Proponents of the merger argue that consolidation will ensure that the state retains and attracts health care professionals and will lead to substantial investments into cutting-edge research programs. On the other hand, the merger risks an increase in health care costs should the merged entity capitalize on the resulting lack of competition and raise prices.

Untangling the interwoven threads of labor, research, costs, and quality of care is essential towards understanding how the merger will impact the future of Rhode Island; and importantly, whether it should be allowed to proceed. +++ Central to the narrative from hospital administrators is the fear that if the merger is rejected, a larger out-of-state health system will acquire Lifespan or CNE. If this were to occur, health care decisions that affect Rhode Islanders would be made outside of the state and would be less easily subject to the demands of local regulatory

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

bodies, advocacy groups, and unions. Moreover, should a hospital network from Connecticut or Massachusetts lead the acquisition, specialists and other experts currently in Rhode Island might migrate to New Haven or Boston to be closer to the medical communities associated with the Yale and Harvard Medical School, two of the premier academic hospital networks in the country.

There is precedence for this fear. Although talk of hospital mergers has been in the air since 1998 when Lifespan and CNE initially proposed to merge, concern reached a fever pitch between 2017 and 2019 during the merger review process of the Massachusetts-based Partners HealthCare and CNE. Lifespan, at the time, launched an opposition campaign saying that it would increase health care costs and lead to job displacement. Former Governor Gina Raimondo went so far as to call for an in-state merger to avoid the possibility of out-of-state influence.

Sensing the sour political climate and a doomed approval review, Partners and CNE withdrew their application.

The Frequently Asked Questions of a joint informational website created by Lifespan, CNE, and Brown reads, “The danger if they [the hospitals] do not merge is the likelihood that, eventually, one or both health care systems would be compelled to merge with national, for-profit hospital systems or other regional systems from the north or south. This could have the damaging effect of moving high-quality, specialty care out of the state, further distancing it from our local communities.” At this point, one could quite rightly interject and ask, if Lifespan and CNE are so horrified by the prospect of external acquisition, why would they be partner to it? And why would the regulatory bodies that review hospital mergers acquiesce to a merger with an out-ofstate entity when past and current government officials, including the former Governor, have made their views of the subject clear?

The answer lies in the daunting world of hospital finances. Should Lifespan or CNE stand on the brink of bankruptcy, a merger may be the only way to save the hospitals that serve a vital public function. Rhode Island cannot afford a hospital like the Women and Infants Hospital, home to one of the few intensive neonatal units in the state, to close due to bankruptcy. If this were to occur, acquisition, even by an external corporation, may be preferable.

The hospitals’ balance sheets are confidential

to the public, but are a key set of documents that regulators are currently reviewing. The credit ratings for bonds issued by the hospitals give us a proxy for the institutions’ financial stability.

Hospitals issue bonds in order to raise money when they cannot afford their current expenses, such as when planning to build new facilities.

Credit agencies assess the probability that the bond will be paid in a timely manner and assign institutions with a “credit outlook.” Through the pandemic, the credit outlook for Lifespan remained positive while multiple ratings agencies, such as Standard and Poor’s (S&P) and Fitch Ratings, downgraded CNE’s credit outlook to negative. The financial instability of CNE’s financial instability falls inline with a larger trend; hospitals across the country experienced a decline in revenue over the course of 2020 as profitable elective surgeries were postponed in service of immediate COVID treatment. CNE’s credit score only increased recently, with S&P citing the merger as the chief cause for confidence in the future of CNE. But just as a viewer of nightly news might hear of the trillions of government debt and fear the imminent demise of the American economy, to focus only on credit ratings would be to paint too grim a picture of the state of Rhode Island health care. If one reads the press releases from Lifespan, CNE, and Brown, it would seem that the health care system is flush with green.

Brown, for its part, pledged to spend $125 million over the next five years in the new entity to support new research. Lifespan and CNE also pledged an additional $10 million over the next three years to “identify and improve the social determinants of health.” While the exact uses for the pledged money have yet to be determined, the promises speak to the liquidity of the healthcare industry. If the hospitals have millions to spend on vague future programs, it is hard to believe they are on the edge of shutting down.

When pressed, hospital executives insist that their organizations are not at imminent risk.

After state senator Joseph Shekarchi expressed concern about the future of CNE’s Kent County Hospital in Warwick, CNE’s President, Dr. James Fanale, told the Boston Globe that the health system is “resilient.” Dr. Fanale insisted, “We’re not going belly up. We’re not going to close.”

Proponents of the merger are walking a thin tightrope between casting doubt on the strength of their businesses by insisting that external acquisition is looming and maintaining

METRO

confidence in the “resilience” of the system, possibly a hedge in case the merger is not approved. Parsing these rhetorical gymnastics, we can conclude that while the hospitals are financially strained at present, it is unlikely that they are on the brink of collapse. +++ We cannot declare the argument for the merger mute just yet. While fear of external acquisition is the most potent manifestation of the desire to keep care local, threats to local access remain even without the threat of an out-of-state takeover. Namely, partners of the merger argue that Rhode Island is at a competitive disadvantage in the labor market for specialists and other highly skilled medical professionals who often seek employment near or in areas with active research. With merger, the hospitals say, Rhode Island can better compete with neighboring Connecticut or Massachusetts for specialists.

Enter Brown University and the Warren Alpert Medical School. Currently, Brown is partnered with seven affiliated hospitals, including both Lifespan and CNE facilities. Medical students train and faculty members conduct research in these locations. If the merger is successful, dozens of locations will be added to Brown’s network, creating an academic health care system that would follow patients literally from birth to death. According to the Dean of the Medical School, Dr. Jack Elias, in an exchange with the College Hill Independent, “The main reason [the merger will benefit the School] is that it will help us advance training for the medical students.” Students will have access to the same patients as they jump from different hospitals with different records and physician groups. For example, as is often the case, a baby with health issues may be first treated at Women & Infants, a CNE hospital, but when they are older, they may end up at Hasbro’s Children Hospital, a Lifespan hospital.

The same phenomena, better access to patients throughout their lifecycle, explains how the merger might benefit research. The addition of new hospitals with different areas of focus creates new opportunities for Brown faculty.

Consolidating patient data into a single system allows for longitudinal studies that track patients over their life. While individual patient records are easily electronically shared across hospital

systems, linking patient records systematically requires legal and logistical challenges. +++ To what extent does the new research produced in partnership with Brown benefit those not directly affiliated with the University? Rhode Islanders may save a trip to Boston or New Haven for access to experimental procedures and specialists in areas where new research is directed—changes especially important for those populations without reliable means of transportation. But these gains stand to be overshadowed if prices for treatment rise due to a lack of competition between hospitals. In arguing that the merger will allow the hospitals to stave off future acquisition, proponents are implying that hospitals stand to financially benefit from the merger. Executives cite cost reductions created by efficiencies in the management of patient records. However, health care experts across the state say that price increases are a likelier source of future revenue growth.

In response to the prospect of the merger, the Office of the Health Insurance Commissioner (OHIC), the state agency responsible for regulating health insurers, published a working paper characterizing the health care landscape in Rhode Island. The report concluded that the local health care market at present is relatively competitive compared to markets nationally. And while the price of healthcare services in Rhode Island is below the national median, hospital utilization is above the median. These facts taken together suggest that consumers and patients currently benefit from the vitality of health care competition in the state, which the merger puts in jeopardy.

Both studies that analyze the relationship between competition and prices across space (cross-sectional) and those that examine trends of prices in a specific location across time before and after mergers (longitudinal) point to the positive effect of consolidation on prices, i.e., mergers increase prices. In 2020, at the request of Congress, the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission reviewed an extensive swath of cross-sectional and longitudinal reports and concluded, “The preponderance of evidence suggests that hospital consolidation leads to higher prices. These findings imply that hospitals seek higher prices from insurers and will get

them when they have greater bargaining power.”

Patients are not the only actors that stand to lose if the hospital market consolidates. Lifespan and CNE are among the largest employers in Rhode Island, with Lifespan the state’s largest private employer. Over the past few years, nurses’ unions and the hospitals have been engaged in a series of contentious contract negotiations centered on the untenable nurse to patient ratio.

A spokesperson for the United Nurses and Allied Professionals told the Indy, “The real problem for the Union is the staffing issues. That is definitely the number one issue in negotiations.”

As a result of the shortage, nurses are stretched thin and overworked. Some nurses fear that the merger would give hospitals more power in labor negotiations to slow hiring of additional nurses, letting the patient to nurse ratio balloon.

Lenny Cioe, a nurse and a candidate for State Senate, told the Indy, “Their [the hospital’s] main cost is nursing and staff. With the merger they are going to try and lower the ratio between nurses and patients.” He continued, “Healthcare will, I’m sorry, put profits over people.”

Cioe went on to contest the hospitals’ account of how the merger would streamline paperwork. He said, “As is, all the computer systems talk to each other. All this is doing is creating a corporate monopoly in healthcare in Rhode Island” Lifespan and CNE are 501(c)(3) nonprofits.

However, it does not follow that the hospitals are uninterested in increasing revenue and cutting costs. Presidents of both corporations receive salaries in the millions and are judged by their boards, as boards are wont to do, by fiscal outcomes. When the credit rating of CNE slumped, the President of CNE forewent his salary, an experience he would surely not like to regularly repeat. It is a rare occasion when recourse to ‘basic economics’ is straightforward.

At risk of sounding glib, let us remember that monopolies, with few exceptions, are bad for consumers and workers alike. Nowhere could the stakes of this truism be higher than in cases of life and death.

BILAL MEMON B’22.5 is wary about merging, be it in traffic or in the healthcare system.

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EPHEMERA ELLEEN KIM UNTITLED 17

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

5G

9:43 PM

DEAR INDY

Indie’s coming at you quick with some rapid-fire Q&A this chilly week!

DESIGN GALA PRUDENT TEXT AMELIA ANTHONY

All my love,

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THE BULLETIN

TEXT LILY PICKETT

DESIGN BRIAANNA CHIU

ILLUSTRATION DANYANG SONG

Upcoming Actions & Community Events

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Friday, 12/3 @ 6PM: Liberation Flick - Soy Cuba Why are there constant imperialist plots against the socialist state of Cuba to overthrow it? To discuss this, join PSL RI to view “Soy Cuba” for a December Liberation Flick at RedInk Library.

Along with the film we will have an overview of Cuba before the revolution; we will then discuss gains made since the revolution; followed by a discussion on the US blockade and the current round of US interference.

There will be food!

Location: Red Ink Library, 130 Cypress St, PVD

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COYOTE RI Closet (Call Off Your Old Tired Ethics RI) Now accepting donations of hygiene products and new or used clothing at the Love and Compassion Day Health Center; 92 East Avenue, Pawtucket RI, 02904.

Contact Sheila Brown (401) 548-3756 to donate or collect items.

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Queer and Trans Mutual Aid PVD Venmo @qtmapvd, PayPal.me/qtmapvd Support mutual aid for LGBTQIA people in Rhode Island!

There is a current backlog of 31 requests, equal to $3,100. Help QTMA fill this need!

Saturday, 12/4 and Sunday, 12/5 @ 2-8PM: Maker’s Market and Zine Swap at RiffRaff Head to RiffRaff Bookstore and Bar on Saturday to check out the Maker’s Market, featuring locally crafted art and wares. On Sunday, meet local zine makers, learn how to make your own zine, trade and buy at the Zine Swap (co-sponsored by @binchpress and @queerarchivenetwork)!

Location: RiffRaff Bookstore and Bar, 60 Valley St

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Monday, 12/6 @ 7:30-9:30PM: Zine-Making Workshop SOMOS, VISIONS, & the Indy welcome Brown and RISD students of color to a zine-making workshop in the BCSC lounge. Provided: food, prompts, materials, good spirits. Please bring: thoughts, drafts of poems, and images.

Location: Brown Center for Students of Color, 68 Brown St. Sundays, 3-5PM: Queer Knitting Circle at Small Format Want to learn how to knit or refresh your knowledge? Looking for more queer community? Bring needles and yarn for a lesson! The group will meet every Sunday through January 1!

Location: 335 Wickenden St. Tuesdays, 6-8PM: Queer Gourmet at YPI Each week, YPI staff will teach a new recipe along with foundational cooking skills! Register at www.bit. ly/ypiqueergourmet Location: 743 Westminster St.

Mutual aid* & community fundraisers *Mutual aid is “survival pending on revolution,” as described by the Black Panthers. Join in redistributing wealth to create an ecosystem of care in response to a system of institutions that have failed or harmed our communities.

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Kitchen Supplies Drive (by Youth Pride RI) Looking for kitchen supplies donations, including: knives (chef and butcher), cutting boards, stainless steel cooking utensils, medium sized pots, sauce pans, skillets, spatulas, mixing bowls, baking supplies, other cookware that is stainless steel and NOT teflon based. If you have something to donate, email info@youthprideri.org.

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Community Cares: Sponsor a Family for the Holidays (by DARE) https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdKdWKQaT0KNpc1qF1SLwwF-B9O3dzJD9PQscqUxepdWuoBUw/viewform Fill out this Google Form to sponsor a family for Thanksgiving and/or Christmas.

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

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Kennedy Plaza Survival Drive (by Wide Awake Collective) Venmo WideAwakes-PVD, Cashapp: $MutualAidMondays Support the weekly survival drive at Kennedy Plaza!

This drive distributes food, water, hygiene materials, warm clothing and other important items to folks in Providence who need them.

GoFundMe for tents for people experiencing homelessness (by Andrea Smith) tinyurl.com/tentsri All donations go towards buying tents for people currently living in inhospitable places, to be distributed by service providers and street outreach teams. There are currently over 1,000 people on waiting lists for individual and family shelter, while the state has only 608 year-round shelter beds, all of which are currently full.

Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing In October, administrators at Brown University presented a proposal to faculty members to expand the Political Theory Project—an academic center partially funded by the right-wing Koch brothers— into a new Philosophy, Politics, and Economics Center. After faculty organized against the initial proposal, it was seemingly shelved by Provost Richard Locke in light of negative feedback. But just last week, a new proposal emerged for a PPE Center aligning it with the center-left, Oxford-styled Philosophy, Politics, and Economics, white-washing the proposal as merely another ‘interdisciplinary’ center at Brown.

Now the proposal is being fast-tracked for a full faculty vote on December 7, only two weeks after it was released to faculty after passing the University’s Academic Priorities Commission on November 21.

Locke, in an email to faculty organizing against the PPE Center and acquired by the College Hill Independent, claimed that the new proposal will split the PPE Center more fully from the Koch-brothers tainted Political Theory Project and will not “‘reward bad actors’ and institutionalize some past practices that many colleagues on campus found distasteful.” He also claims that the “funding for the PPE Center does not come from ‘dark money.’”

But a close reading of the new proposal shows that there is no clear stipulation that ‘gifts’ to the PPE Center be unaffiliated with Koch brothers’ money, no additional oversight of donations aside from Brown’s gift policy, and finally no requirement that donor agreements with the PPE center are made public.

According to Locke’s email, Joseph Edelman— a hedge fund billionaire—and Mickey Targoff—a corporate executive—have agreed to fund the center, along with a number of other donors who declined to be named because they have children enrolled at the University. Altogether, questions remain about the sources of funding, how those sources are impacting academic programming choices, and whether or not the PPE Center would take Koch money in the future.

To put it simply, even though the new proposal is dressed up as a center-left academic institution, and has the financial backing of center-left donors, doesn’t mean it isn’t an illiberal rightwing institution dressed up in sheep’s clothing.

There are also NO requirements that the new PPE Center not take Koch brothers money in the future, nor any way to ascertain if any current donations are stipulated on some political project or another.

If you want to act against a proposal that could provide a foothold for the spread of big money right-wing ideology at Brown, ask your professors to vote NO against the PPE Center proposal at the next faculty meeting on December 7, and demand that the University make all donor agreements for the new PPE Center public.

Here is a list of faculty members who have agreed to attach their names to the PPE Center: David Skarbek, Political Science (Political Theory Project) Melvin Rogers, Political Science Bonnie Honig, MCM and Political Science Juliet Hooker, Political Science Rob Blair, Political Science Ryan Doody, Political Science (Political Theory Project) David Estlund, Philosophy Richard Locke, Provost

-Peder Schaefer

Advocates Demand that Governor McKee Address Rhode Island’s Homelessness Crisis Advocates estimate that over 600 Rhode Islanders are currently living outside without any access to shelter as temperature begin to dip below freezing. This is unacceptable.

Governor McKee has the ability to put everyone without shelter in a hotel room for the entire winter using just 1 percent of the state’s ARPA budget.

From the organizers of the sleepout: On Tuesday, December 1, State Senator Cynthia Mendes led a group of organizers and community members in sleeping outside the State House. The group is planning to sleep outside until they are sure that RI’s acute houselessness crisis has been resolved and that no one will freeze to death this winter. They will be sleeping outside as long as is needed. To mitigate the risk that this action is disrupted by police, the group is working to keep the number of people sleeping outside the State House under control, but if you would like to stay the night with the group at some point please contact Alex Kithes at 401-216-5136.

People staying the night are expected to bring their own supplies. While police cannot currently cite an ordinance or law prohibiting this action, there is a risk of arrest. Anyone who stays the night should be willing to accept this risk. To decrease the chances that the action will be disrupted by the police, the group is also asking that no one bring weapons, alcohol, or drugs into the space. If you have a sleeping bag, sleeping pad, or tent that you are willing to lend but cannot sleep out that would be greatly appreciated as well. Again, you can contact Alex at 401-216-5136 with any questions.

The Bulletin is for local organizers, small business owners, and community members to share mutual aid funds, events, and information to mobilize support for direct action against structural violence in our community.

Do you have an event, action, or other information for the Providence community that you’d like to see shared on this page? Email us at indybulletinboard@gmail.com!