The College Hill Independent Vol. 43 - Issue 3

THE INDY*

03 “RIGHTS NOT RESCUE” 05 BLACK TIME, MIRRORED 09 AFTER ATLANTA

Volume 43 Issue 03 1 October 2021

THE TEMPORAL ISSUE

* The College Hill Independent

THE INDY* This Issue

Masthead*

00 “MESHWORK”

WEEK IN REVIEW Alisa Caira Asher White

02 WEEK IN WEEK IN REVIEW

FEATURES Ifeoma Anyoku Emily Rust Gemma Sack

Ariana Padovano

Tammuz Frankel, Alisa Caira, & Asher White

03 “RIGHTS NOT RESCUE” Lily Pickett

05 HOW THE BODY MIGHT APPEAR IN AND OUT OF TIME Gala Prudent

NEWS Kanha Prasad Nick Roblee-Strauss ARTS Edie Elliott Granger Nell Salzman EPHEMERA Chloe Chen Lauren Lee

08 CAN IT BE SILLY Constantin Gardey

09 POEMS

Jenna Cooley

11 THE GOOD, THE BAD, THE ENDURING Chanikarn Kovavisarach

13 ENEMIES TO THE WEST Kanha Prasad

METRO Isabelle Agee-Jacobson Leela Berman Ricardo Gomez Peder Schaefer SCIENCE + TECH Lucas Gelfond Amelia Wyckoff BULLETIN BOARD Lily Pickett X Yukti Agarwal Justin Scheer

15 RIP TIK

Loughlin Neuert

17 11/11 TRANSACTION Justin Scheer

18 DEAR INDY

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

Amelia Anthony

19 BULLETIN

ALUMNI RELATIONS Gemma Sack MVP Isaac McKenna

From the Editors The Impossible Burger in the Clamor of Conmag

DESIGN EDITORS Isaac McKenna Gala Prudent COVER COORDINATOR Iman Husain

MANAGING EDITORS Mara Cavallaro Anabelle Johnston Deborah Marini 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 Jenna Cooley 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 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 Lola Simon 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

In crinkled metal, Fall’s first gift—impossible burger, unlikely Seitan—slightly sweet we hid in soft tomatoes, it rained yesterday Impossible debts Sweetmeats meet sweats amongst friends Instead, just gift Take burger as gift Food sovereignty, or stealing?

Indy says, “no waste”

-RG, LP, + GS

01

Volume 43 Issue 03 1 October 2021

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

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... Week in Reviews TEXT ALISA CAIRA & ASHER WHITE DESIGN CLARA EPSTEIN ILLUSTRATION SYLVIE BARTUSEK

Week in Long Ears:

Described as “sweet, sassy, smart” (nicer words than anyone has ever used to describe me), three-year-old hound Lou is now a record breaker (!!!). Lou’s owner always technically knew that Lou’s ears were long, but it was the months of complete isolation during the pandemic that finally drove her to a personal low of measuring her dog’s ears. Thankfully, this tragic pastime proved worthwhile when Lou’s ears measured a whopping 34 centimeters, about nine-tenths as tall as your average bowling pin and one-fifth as long as a king sized bed, earning her the world record. In her free time, Lou is apparently a “wonderful wine tasting companion,” despite her airbudding alcoholism, and tends to provide free therapy for her owner due to her stronger-than-average listening skills. - AC

Week in Scooters:

As the chaos-filled memories of JUMP bikes and Bird scooters slowly faded from Providence’s consciousness, a new e-scooter rose from the ashes to fill the motorized hole left in Thayer Street’s heart. Spin Electric Scooters, a company owned by Ford, reintroduced scooters to the city in late June. Nowadays, fleets of e-scooters are just as abundant as the Providence River’s gondolas. Lovers (or ‘bros’ just being cost-effective) can be seen perched on the same scooter, making their way down Benefit much faster than the lowly pedestrian.

However, another recent world record was not set on a Spin scooter, nor was it set by a student too lazy to trek back up College Hill.

Rather, this record was broken by a cat and a dog—classic enemies—as they teamed up to ride a toddler-sized scooter together. Somehow, they were not the first cat-dog duo to attempt such a feat, but they were the fastest! Lollipop and Sashimi rode 5 meters in 4.37 seconds—much faster than I can move anywhere, scootering or not. - AC

Week in Severe Intestinal Trauma:

On Sunday afternoon, a group of foodies brought international notoriety to the small town of Little Falls in upstate New York by breaking the Guinness World Record for Longest Charcuterie Board. At 315 feet long, the board boasted an enormous assortment of jams, meats, and cheeses—presumably emptying the local Whole Foods of its entire inventory.

The board was assembled outdoors at Veterans Memorial Park, where visitors must have been delighted to see the legacies of soldiers honored with tiny meats and ornate, dainty little cheeses. Ticket-buying spectators were invited to take their own portions of the charcuterie, given that they stayed to participate in the similarly record-shattering World’s Most Insufferable Dinner Party. - AW

Week in Seasonal Transitions:

Transitioning away from the oddly-thriving world of record breaking: Starbucks brought back its signature pumpkin drinks on August 24 while Trader Joe’s released its pumpkin products on September 10. As of now, it is unclear whether every CVS in Providence has started to sell Halloween-themed candy, and we have only received reports of approximately three to five leaves falling off trees (*write to Dear Indy with any and all updates on fall foliage fall-outs and other amorous arborous affairs*). Yet, it is obvious that Autumn is in the air and in the profit margins of a few selected companies. Stay tuned for further updates on skyrocketing amounts of Instagram posts in pumpkin patches and an excess of picked apples that no one will actually follow through to make apple pie with. - AC

Week in Cosmic Curses:

For half a decade, Ed Sheeran’s apologetic smiles and hapless demeanor have elicited a sort of pity rarely alloted to international pop stars. He has the aura of a high school guidance counselor and a timid Best Buy employee, a prevailing sense of regular-guy modesty that often veers close to self-doubt. Whatever flame-resistant insecurities still plague Sheeran were certainly exacerbated this week as actual-regular-guy Ty Jones from Manchester, England spoke out about his experiences as an Ed Sheeran lookalike. He’s been mobbed by fans, chased by paparazzi, and awarded free meals.

Ultimately, words cannot describe their likeness, which must be seen to be believed. Both are undeniable Weasley-core heroes with honest

eyes and somewhat weak posture. Ed Sheeran’s competition is quickly skyrocketing to national notoriety across the pond. OG Ed needs a new look: as another ginger British lad threatens his hard-earned glory, perhaps it’s time for Sheeran to rethink The Shape of Himself. - AW

Week in Ugly Buildings:

Since 2010, Beijing-based architectural firm Archcy has run a poll to decide the ugliest buildings in China. Past winners include a building that looks like a giant penis and shoots fireworks from its tip, winning because of its aesthetic and biological accuracy. This year’s current frontrunner is a giant gate at Zhejiang University. Apparently, it has “no use,” but does have five arches. The rise in ugly buildings has led the Chinese National Development and Reform Commission to say that ‘ugly’ buildings should be banned, without providing any actual definition of ugliness. As they say, beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and ugliness is in the use of government funding to create buildings shaped like violins. - AC

Week in Magic:

This week marked the closure of the beloved Fox Point institution East Side Mini Mart, which for decades has sat on the corner of Brook and Power, serving locals everything from shaving cream to rye bread. East Side Mini Mart was notorious for its diverse and plentiful array of snacks (often sold at tempting 150 percent mark-ups; this particular Indy writer was known to ‘liberate’ a Klondike Oreo Bar from the freezer in the back now and again) and its swarms of bald police officers who would hover around the entrance like wasps at an August picnic. It was an unmissable stop on any drunk adventure, a wonderful early-morning granola-bar bazaar, and a perfect opportunity to ruin your dinner with a 5 PM Dorito bag.

It follows the late Piezoni’s, which left the very same strip mall in 2019. Rumor has it the building is being demolished to make way for a Brown University dorm, but I can’t imagine Brown would ever sacrifice a local business for its own benefit. - AW

VOLUME 43 ISSUE 3

02

“Rights not Rescue”

TEXT LILLIAN PICKETT

DESIGN ANNA BRINKHUIS

ILLUSTRATION IZZY ROTH-DISHY

METRO

Carceral ‘Care’ in Rhode Island’s Anti-Trafficking Industry

03

On April 9, 2018—just four months after her 18th birthday—Isabel Reyes faced a sentence of up to 50 years in prison in Providence District Court for a felony charge of ‘trafficking a minor.’

Two months prior, in February, she and another teenager ran away from a group home in Newport, where they had been placed by the Rhode Island Department of Children, Youth, and Families (DCYF). In the few days before the girls were found, Reyes posted explicit ads on sites like Escort Wiz and Secret Arrangements, writing that she and her companion were ‘willing to work.’ State child-welfare officials and the Providence Police department finally tracked the girls to a motel in Warwick, where they were found in a room with a 50 year old man, who was “checked and released,” according to police reports.

Like many young people who are failed by Rhode Island youth services, Reyes saw the commercial sex market as an opportunity to meet her basic survival needs, and was punished for it. Without access to safe housing, a stable income, food, or community beyond that offered by foster care and group homes—places which may be unsafe themselves—young people without networks of support may at times resort to the sex industry to survive. This practice is best described as “survival sex,” a term which emphasizes the underlying structural problems behind youth involvement in the sex industry, as opposed to terms like “trafficking” which center individual bad actors and erase the coercive force of poverty.

To say that youth are involved in survival sex dispels the myth peddled by the criminal-legal and child welfare system: that sex-trade involved youth are mostly young girls totally controlled by ‘pimps’ as ‘victims of child trafficking.’ In reality, the majority of youth involved in the sex trade in the United States are introduced to the industry by other networks of young people trying to survive dire situations.

Claiming to support vulnerable youth, nonprofits and public agencies like DCYF that are part of the ‘anti-trafficking’ movement emphasize

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

individual criminals and bring policing into situations that should be structurally oriented toward providing safety and care.

In a study of 1000 youths engaged in survival sex across six cities in the US conducted by John Jay College in 2013, 97 percent of those surveyed reported that they did not have “pimps” or “traffickers” forcing them into the sex trade, but instead relied on other young people to teach them how to find clients. Many also identified as transgender or queer, having escaped homophobic, violent family situations.

Many reported that their greatest problem—and the reason for their involvement in the sex industry—was a lack of access to safe housing.

The dominant narrative of the ‘evil trafficker preying on vulnerable young women’ serves to distract from state-sanctioned conditions of poverty that lead young people into the sex trade, while justifying the expansion of carceral systems of prisons, policing, and child welfare that further harm the people these systems claim to protect. Under the auspices of ending child trafficking, Rhode Island channels millions of dollars into state agencies (police, prisons, and DCYF) that regulate and disrupt Black, brown, and Indigenous families through intrusive monitoring, the forced removal of children, and incarceration. The public services that youth desperately need are systemically defunded in favor of these violent agencies; in 2020 alone, Governor Raimondo funded state police and DCYF at a combined budget of almost $369 million, despite failing to provide a dedicated funding stream for affordable housing.

While DCYF, the carceral system, and private organizations continue to profit off of anti-trafficking narratives—prosecuting ‘traffickers’ and ‘rescuing victims’—the material needs of young people like Reyes and her companion are violently pushed aside. +++ At the 27th annual “Take Back the Night March” in 2005, local anti-trafficking advocate

and University of Rhode Island professor Donna Hughes condemned the state of Rhode Island for its failure to address what she called “the human rights struggle of our time—the ability of men to buy women and children for sex acts.” Hughes implored protestors to “join the fight,” claiming that the “global abolitionist movement against sex trafficking is gaining momentum.” Her speech predicted a resurgence of the anti-trafficking movement in the following decades—a movement that would draw wide support from abolitionist feminists, conservatives, liberals, evangelical Christian groups, wealthy philanthropists, and many more.

The lack of adequate public services available to youth engaged in survival sex is very much the result of the anti-trafficking movement and its focus on individual bad actors rather than structural inequity. The moral imperative of the call to end the sexual exploitation of children has produced what critical scholars such as Laura María Agustín have termed an “anti-trafficking rescue industry,” in which “social helpers”—from public agencies and non-profits to vigilante civilian saviors—aspire to save women from “sex slavery,” relegating them to the role of the passive victim. The so-called rescue industry thus seeks to control working class sex workers, migrant women, and poor youth involved in survival sex through criminalization or protection, using the passive victim category as justification.

The resurgent moral panic around sex trafficking quickly took hold in Rhode Island. In 2009, the anti-trafficking lobby succeeded in recriminalizing indoor sex work, which had been legal for the last 30 years due to a loophole in state law, by conflating sex work with trafficking itself—an argument that sex worker rights advocates have fought long and hard against.

Recriminalization has had horrible impacts on working class women in the state—in the last decade, law enforcement has targeted many sex workers and massage workers, arresting and incarcerating women who were working together as “trafficking rings,” and deporting migrant

METRO

workers under the guise of rescue and protection. Call Off Your Old Tired Ethics (COYOTE RI), a local sex-worker rights organization, has been actively fighting to decriminalize sex work in the aftermath of 2009. Their slogan, “rights not rescue,” challenges the passive victim category and emphasizes the lack of economic and social freedoms afforded to sex workers under new anti-trafficking policies.

The passive victim trope has also been mobilized by anti-trafficking advocates in an effort to move away from responses that solely criminalize youth engaged in survival sex, bringing many state and nonstate actors into “the fight.”

Where as sex-trade involved youth might have only interacted with law enforcement in the past—and been viewed as ‘juvenile offenders’— now, under the banner of the anti-trafficking movement, youth interact with law enforcement, social services, non-profit victim advocates, and more—and are described as victims first and foremost. This collaboration between the police, DCYF, and non-profits has been painted as a more victim-centered approach to cases of child trafficking; still, the enmeshment of these actors creates an environment of carceral ‘care’ that traps youth under the auspices of saving them, all the while ignoring their underlying needs.

As sociologist Jennifer Musto describes in Control and Protect: Collaboration, Carceral Protection, and Domestic Sex Trafficking in the United States, collaborative responses to youth engaged in survival sex blur the line between punishment and protection, leading to practices that she terms “carceral protectionism.” While youth may not be arrested for trading sex, Musto argues, their movements are restricted and controlled under the guise of rescue not only by police, but also child welfare and non-profit organizations. +++ In 2013, state and non-state actors in Rhode Island began work on a multi-pronged approach to ending child sex trafficking that blurs the line between systems of care and control. In that year, Day One—a nonprofit sexual assault and trauma center—assembled the RI Human Trafficking Task Force, with the ultimate goal of building avenues of collaboration between law enforcement, social service providers, and non-profit organizations. The task force convened non-profits like Sojourner House, local, state and federal law enforcement, DCYF, medical providers like Hasbro Children’s Hospital, and lawmakers, eventually unveiling a statewide “uniform response protocol for the commercial sexual exploitation of children,” which dictated a standardized routine for each case of child trafficking in the state.

The uniform protocol introduced the multi-disciplinary team response (MDT) “in order to provide wrap-around services to those youth that were at risk or confirmed victims,” JoAnne Waite, Clinical Director at Day One told the College Hill Independent. Entangling police, social services, and non-profit child advocates, the protocol conflates criminalization and care while failing to actually address the needs of youth engaged in survival sex. At the protocol launch in January 2016, task force members emphasized that the MDT response would have a two-fold impact: firstly, it would aid in police investigations, and secondly, it would “[ensure] victims have access to the services and treatment they need and are not treated like criminals.”

The steps laid out by the protocol present carceral activities as protection and rescue for youth. For example, the “on-site assessment” process encourages police to take cash and phones away from young people, “collect evidence” at the crime scene, and interview victims on site. “Ideally,” the protocol details, “the interviewer will not wear uniform/carry firearms,”

suggesting that police are often those in the initial position of interacting with young people, despite how traumatizing that experience might be. Though the protocol requires that officers “treat children as victims; not suspects,” it still demands that police photograph the victim, arrest anyone else present at the scene, and, when necessary, use restraints on victims to transport them to Hasbro Children’s Hospital for evaluation. The paradox of “saving children” against their will without providing access to basic needs illustrates the blurring of protection and arrest in the uniform protocol.

Caught between the categories of victim and offender, youth are then detained by DCYF and medical providers under the guise of protection.

Bella Robinson, sex worker rights activist and community organizer told the Indy, “I attended a Day One child exploitation event in 2015 where someone from Hasbro hospital publicly admitted that after they rescue a teen, if they think they’re going to run, they lock them down on suicide watch for a few days. What kind of care is that?” Here and throughout the process, the MDT response outsources carceral techniques to actors that purportedly care for youth.

Altogether, the process for “on-site assessment” of children engaged in survival sex simply amounts to arrest. While the protocol tries to soften the carceral approach of police by asking that officers “make sure that children know they are not going to be arrested,” it prioritizes the prosecution of the alleged “crime” over the wellbeing of the young people involved. +++ After the point of initial contact, youth are funnelled into a child welfare system that not only fails to meet their material needs, but exposes them to more risk and harm. As the MDT process moves forward, young people are subjected to a series of meetings, organized by Day One, which involve DCYF agents, the prosecuting attorney on their case, an assigned social worker, health care provider, and any guardians.

The focus of these meetings is to constantly assess the child’s wellbeing, make sure they end relationships with “associates from whom the victim should be separated,” determine where they should be placed (in foster care, a group home, or with guardians), and keep up with investigative leads. The meetings serve to surveil rather than support youth. Bella Robinson told the Indy, “Day One RI admits that they do not house any of the youth that they rescue through traumatic raids and arrests. Instead, teens are placed back into foster homes and the majority of them just run away again.”

The uniform protocol acknowledges that “involvement in the child welfare system” can “create a climate of risk in which children and teens are more susceptible to exploiters,” while ultimately cycling youth back into this very system. As an agency predicated on the removal of children based on allegations of neglect related to poverty, DCYF harms children and communities while ignoring the structural causes for their hardships. The violence of forcibly removing children from their families is only part of the Department’s failures—in recent years, DCYF has also been directly investigated for placing children in dangerous situations in both foster care and group homes after ‘rescuing’ them.

In 2019, the tragic death of nine year old Zha-Nae Rothgeb illustrated that DCYF fatally fails to support the safety of children. In the aftermath of the child’s death, an investigation by the RI Child Advocate demonstrated that the Department was notified several times of the child’s dangerous living conditions and repeatedly took no action. While local media represented DCYF’s failure to intervene as the central problem in this case, vilifying the child’s adopted mother for neglect, this story

represents how spending on this overstretched, ineffective agency could be better allocated to actually helping families take care of their children.

As a result of the tragic incident, and the tens of deaths of youth in state care over the past few years, then-DCYF Director Trista Piccola was urged to resign. Since then, the Department has undergone several restructuring campaigns to improve vigilance on foster placement assessments—a doubling down on individual, carceral responses to a structural problem.

As sociologist Dorothy Roberts describes, any critique of the US carceral regime must include the “family regulation system,” which she argues is a more apt name for child welfare services like DCYF that harm families and communities. Like the movement to abolish systems of policing and incarceration, Roberts points to a small but growing movement—ignited by Black mothers who have been separated from children—to dismantle agencies like DCYF and imagine new methods of caring for children and meeting families’ needs. Defunding DCYF would free up millions of dollars that are currently spent on separating children from families and detaining struggling youth, and would allow those funds to be diverted to the people themselves.

Beyond lobbying the state to redirect funds away from systems of policing and the family regulation system, young people and their allies in Rhode Island have been building and imagining alternative networks of support and community. For example, Honoring Youth Power and Experience (HYPE), a program run through House of Hope, offers support to youth experiencing homelessness by connecting young people to available housing resources, with the understanding that youth in precarious situations cannot wait for the state to take their material needs seriously. The Providence Youth Student Movement’s Queer Housing Initiative (QHI) also attends to the current needs of young people. Instead of relying on the state to provide safe housing, those involved in the QHI are creating cooperative living situations with a focus on care and community building for queer and trans youth. Co-ops like these can intervene at moments where young people might instead engage in the sex industry in order to afford housing and other basic necessities; they may also provide support for youth who’ve already begun to rely on sex work in order to survive.

Instead of targeting struggling youth engaged in the sex trade with carceral ‘care,’ the state should attend to the material needs of young people who may not have access to traditional family support systems. This means taking money away from carceral family regulation systems, and instead funding public services to make sure that all people, not only young people, have access to basic necessities—free and safe housing, medical care, quality food, and more. Beyond the bare minimum, Rhode Island should also invest in community housing initiatives that imagine new ways of caring for youth.

Finally, Rhode Island needs to stop the policing and incarceration of sex workers under the guise of ‘ending trafficking,’ because decriminalizing survival sex for youth means decriminalizing sex work altogether.

LILY PICKETT B’22 wants you to (1) think twice (or maybe thrice) before calling a trafficking hotline and (2) follow COYOTE RI on Instagram (@coyote_ri) & Facebook (COYOTE RI).

VOLUME 43 ISSUE 3

04

HOW THE BODY MIGHT APPEAR IN AND OUT OF TIME

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Or, black time, mirrored. mirrored.

TEXT GALA PRUDENT

DESIGN CLARA EPSTEIN

ILLUSTRATION OLIVIA LUNGER

A Note Regarding Our Time

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In a moment of near-global quarantine, time is of an unusual essence. A whirlwind of essential times fly past us: deadlines, re-opening times, remaining time, in two weeks time... It is in this context that time has become experientially elastic. Hours, days, and weeks feel the same—I look up and am surprised to see that a month has escaped me. In my own mind, this new time, slippery as it is, requires a new name, as it’s distinct from the relatively predictable, economically affirmed temporality that preceded our current state of crisis.

As the economy slows, the implications of our capitalist, colonialist time reveal themselves: in that moment more than a year ago now, when our daily rhythms were first interrupted, time and labor became no longer intrinsically linked in our experience of the world.

It’s in the wake of this labor-ed time that an especially precarious temporality has emerged.

Impending debts, expiring unemployment, and strikes to secure ethical labor practices each assert the possibility that we are stuck in an age of the precariat, in which experiences of time and economy are linked by labor’s elusive nature.

We are also encountering another phase at the brink of disaster, a position once realized by the threat of the Cold War, again by the height of the AIDS crisis, and again by Y2K—and now by the possibility of mass-death-via-viral-infection (as well as the disappearing possibility of an environmentally-secure future). It’s in these moments that, as a society at large, we must brush up collectively against the impending reality of our own death. Our shared time is forced to inhabit a new and frantic tempo.

I imagine this experience of time, inseparable from the constant coming-ness of death, to be aligned with an ever-existing black time. Given the conditions under which blackness might be traditionally conceptualized, visualized, and

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

imposed—colonialism, subjugation, and exploitation, for example—black life is inseparable from the time in between now and death. Additionally, black death (not to be confused with the bubonic plague) is a publicized fact and, as such, is available in the public domain, only solidified by each retweet of every publicized brutality. Black time, as I imagine it, is a distinctly corporeal time, and also a precarious economic time, aligned in many ways with the temporal consequences of illness and its trappings.

We remain in a government-sanctioned, precarious time, and as long as we do, we inhabit that time that was already invented by the appendages of black existence. This is not to say that, as a society, we have inhabited black time itself—only that our time has been remade in the image of a distinctly black time. We are forced to become hyper-aware of the ways that our bodies work and do not work on both economic and social scales; we are encouraged to do so with at least one eye on the waning space between our nowness and our own disappearing.

This is to say: our shared time is transforming in our bodies and before our eyes.

It comes as no surprise that with a suspended economy, time exists in a suspended state, allowed to flounder in front of us like a fish on a reeled-in line, pulled from its underwater home.

As time has become suspended, so too has my own body. As isolation drones on, I notice my body drifting away from itself: a finger on one side of the room and a mouth on the other (my hair has moved to a different neighborhood).

When I wake up, I spend a few extra hours demanding my body to contract into a manageable singularity, usually making a few concessions before I’m able to get out of bed.

Writing in short form has become, for me, a sort of productive escape from our contemporary time’s slipperiness. Suddenly, in the process of both reading and writing, a solid personal time is invented and thoroughly experienced.

We have arrived at text’s tempo: as it is engaged, read, or experienced, text is propelled into time. It’s a static thing, until read, when it suddenly transforms the mind into a malleable landscape and material. In order to do this, though, text is also experienced in and activated by a forward-moving time, as a reader’s eye navigates from left to right, and again as the plots of our novels move ever-closer to their own death, signified by the last line of a book.

Making time is difficult, and so I thank you in advance for endeavoring to create a personal time that will propel you through the following text.

Mapping Blackness and its Overflow How is the body distinguished from the space within which it exists? I feel inclined to point to touch as the primary mode through which the body’s limits are negotiated and defined. The surface of the skin serves as a tactile end zone, proposing that our workings might be housed within a singular, tangible, corporeal container.

Even before an infant’s visual apparatus is fully developed, when the world is still made up of black-and-white blurs without depth, touch serves as the most accessible means to understand the difference between your body and the thing that holds you, whether that thing is a person or a crib or a garment. Even in the dark, touch allows us to locate ourselves and others.

Vision is the secondary way in which we locate our bodies and the bodies of others in space. While vision is less physically involved, I propose that vision is an extension of touch—in the act of seeing, we are opened up to an imagined future touch. There is a critical distinction between touch and vision. Touch, imagined here in its innocence, is instinctive. Its intuition predates the conscious mind: in states of inebriation, for example, when the mind has become compromised, the body slackens to protect it from harm. Visuality, on the other hand, is a social action—it’s tied up with names derived from learned language and a constant process of relegating those things that appear in one’s vision into formal order. It’s in this moment that the black body comes into play: how that body is processed through visual mechanics and recognized; how it might elude the mechanics of recognition; and how touch, even of the self, sometimes is not enough to confirm a body’s existence. The boundaries by which a black body is recognized are often negotiated contextually. By its definition, blackness cannot be held by a single body and, instead, is defined by excess—poetically, for example, throughout Alexis Pauline Gumbs’ Spill: Scenes of Black Feminist Fugitivity—but also, in Fanon’s working definition, by what it is not and what it cannot be, “for not only must the black man be black; he must be black in relation to the white man.” The vertical architecture that houses colonial concepts of blackness requires blackness to be both too much and too little, which locates black life in an inherently un-locatable zone—if measured on a digital scale, it might read “error.” In our quantified structures of constant visual analysis, blackness’s omnipresence becomes problematic as it constantly eludes its own definition.

It’s within this impossible framework that I understand Fanon’s fifth chapter of Black Skin, White Masks, “The Fact of Blackness” or “The Lived Experience of the Black Man” depending on which edition you find yourself reading.

After being confronted by the words, “Look,

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a negro!” uttered by a white child on a train, Fanon writes: “Where am I to be classified? Or, if you prefer, tucked away?”

It’s upon being recognized that Fanon’s body is thrown into a state of disarray. However, the distress of his splitting self is not only related to the impossibilities of a singularly tangible or fully visible blackness alone—Fanon’s distress is only accentuated by the fact of his body within time, as the layers of his surface wholeness dissolve: “Below the corporeal schema I had sketched a historic-racial schema…

Then, assailed at various points, the corporeal schema crumbled, its place taken by a racial epidermal schema,” he writes. In his writing, Fanon’s life occurs within a looping racial tempo—first comes being, followed at some point by being seen in stark relief to that which he has believed himself to be, then an explosion, and then receiving himself “sprawled out, distorted,

recolored, clad in mourning,” again and again.

It is also time that, in part, defines Fanon’s “slow composition” of the “self as a body in the middle of a spatial and temporal world.” Unlike touch’s inherent absentmindedness, the truth of Fanon’s dedicated “definitive structuring of the self and of the world” requires the black subject to process their own body through those same mechanisms which have shattered it and handed it back to be “put together again by another self.”

“Where shall I find shelter from now on? I felt an easily identifiable flood mounting out of the countless facets of my being,” Fanon asks.

From what is Fanon seeking shelter? I argue that he seeks to shelter himself, not only from vision and visibility, but also from time’s chronology, as it is time’s sequence that makes him feel “responsible at the same time for [his] body, for [his] race, for [his] ancestors,” as he discov-

ers his (subject) position alongside “legends, stories, history, and above all historicity.” In this looping tempo, time and the body are linked once again. As the body shatters, so restarts the journey already experienced, and so is recalled the historicity which has placed the body in this particular line of vision in the first place. It’s on this note that I find myself intrigued by trauma as a trigger for reliving, which might function as an inadvertent method of molding time’s forward-moving nature. How does the body react to deviations from time’s one-directional path?

Toni Morrison’s Sula opens with Shadrack, the book’s emblem of insanity, dealing with the aftermath of traumas he encountered while at war. Shadrack’s bodily extensions in the beginning of Toni Morrison’s Sula are a prime example of how the black body might react to its own temporal wandering. After his traumatic experiences during World War I, which go mostly un-

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indistinguishable from one another when “he saw the fingers joining the laces, tentatively at first, and then rapidly.”

His bodily world, imagined and experienced by the mind, tangles further with the external world.

Shadrack is negotiating with the possibility of his own objecthood as space and time become porous.

“The four fingers of each hand fused into the fabric,” Morrison writes, “knotted them-

FEATS

articulated except for a graphic scene of a body scattering across a landscape before his eyes, Shadrack’s “implicit knowledge” of himself, in Fanon’s words, is gravely disturbed. While Fanon describes articulating his own body in space—“I know that if I want to smoke, I shall have to reach out my right arm and

take the pack of cigarettes lying at the other end of the table. The matches, however, are in the drawer on the left, and I shall have to lean back slightly”— Shadrack’s own body is no longer able to fit within the requirements of language or the visual field: “With extreme care he lifted one arm and was relieved to find his hand still attached to his wrist,” Morrison writes. “Slowly he directed one hand toward the cup and, just as he was about to spread his fingers, they began to grow in higgledy-piggledy fashion like Jack’s beanstalk all over the tray and the bed.”

It’s only out of the line of sight that his body returns to a familiar state, or at least one that does not have to be constantly considered and reevaluated. “With a shriek he closed his eyes and thrust his huge growing hands under the covers,” Morrison writes. “Once out of sight they seemed to shrink back to their normal size.” In his disrupted time, exploded by the things that he has seen, Shadrack’s entire material being and personhood are called into question. “Twenty-two years old, weak, hot, frightened, not daring to acknowledge the fact that he didn’t even know who or what he was,” Morrison writes. Even those undeniable things—historicity, for one—that had positioned Fanon on the train are intangible to Shadrack.

Any form of spatial or temporal orientation proves itself absent: “With no past, no language, no tribe, no source, no address book, no comb, no pencil, no clock, no pocket handkerchief, no rug, no bed, no can opener, no faded postcard, no soap, no key, no tobacco pouch, no soiled underwear and nothing nothing nothing to do… he was sure of one thing only: the unchecked monstrosity of his hands. He cried soundlessly at the curbside of a small Midwestern town wondering where the window was, and the river, and the soft voices just outside the door…”

Shadrack’s body experiences multiple times and no time; his time is experienced through multiple bodies and no body—which could be described as an extreme and accelerated version of the simultaneous excess and lack that aim to situate the condition of blackness under colonialism. The body has been reduced to a membranous vessel whose exterior boundaries can be passed through. As he tries to untie his shoelaces, the ontological distinguishing that Fanon so carefully described dissolves as Shadrack’s body and the material world become

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THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

selves and zigzagged in and out of the tiny eyeholes.”

Shadrack’s bodily time is only repossessed when he is able to see himself indirectly through the reflection in the prison toilet bowl: “There in the toilet water, he saw a grave black face. A face so black it astonished him.” His bodily disarray is quelled by this moment of gazing at himself in that dark toilet bowl water.

“He had been harboring a skittish apprehension that he was not real—that he didn’t exist at all. But when the blackness greeted him with its indisputable presence, he wanted nothing more. In his joy he took the risk of letting one edge of the blanket drop and glanced at his hands. They were still. Courteously still.”

Shadrack has reconstructed himself, and, again, his time has resumed in a state of relative order—so has his body, which, at least for a moment, is in time with itself.

I wonder about the role of a mirrored surface in Shadrack’s radical self-recognition. The toilet water allows Shadrack to view himself through a mediating surface. The surface of the water also allows Shadrack to observe an entity that, like him, cannot fully inhabit itself. The mirror, heterotopic in nature, is at once itself and not itself—an object and also everything that sits in direct opposition to it. The mirror allows the black subject to inhabit the view from which they are observed and to look at oneself while executing this discreet escape. Looking into a mirror produces a simultaneous rejection and embrace of the position of an external viewer. In the mirror, you are you, you are that which observes you, you are the glass, and you are that wall over there. You are at once a self, an image, and a series of objects. You exist in multiple times and backwards times: the you that you see in the mirror is actually the you of a millisecond ago. When shattered, you can refract light all over the room.

Alexis Pauline Gumbs’ Spill: Scenes of Black Feminist Fugitivity says it all: in one description of the unnamed subject’s wondering. “only i believed the space-time continuum couldn’t hold as much of me as i was able to accept,” she writes. “she looked at herself in the mirror and all over the dance floor and flashing on the tv and wondered how did i spill. how did i spill out everywhere?” The mirror, in both Sula and Spill, becomes the site at which time is logically escaped, where the body is rightfully everything and is whole in its everything-ness, across dimensions, distortions, and even hairline frac-

tures in the glass. The mirrored zone is where out-of-body and out-of-time align to create an infinity of seen bodies staring at one another and an infinity of times that can be experienced simultaneously. +++ Can I put my body back together? In this state of disarray, I feel inclined to the artisans of wholeness in order to find a way. A light shines through from the canon of black art: Sensing that her body might be dissolving while reading Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, Adrian Piper looks through a camera and into a mirror to confirm that her material being still exists in her 1971 series titled Food For the Spirit. Her search for her own body yields, perhaps, more than she was looking for. Piper exists, physically and temporally, in multitudes: her body is reproduced endlessly and in its own times. Like Fanon, she has discovered her body all over the room. She is able to inhabit all possible subject positions at once, even in the absence of a second viewer.

In the barrel of the camera lens, and again in the mirror, she finds herself—barely perceptible; haunting the frame in iterations and gradations of gray and darker gray. A sternum emerges from the pool of the room. A groin recedes into somewhere. Her body and its multiples—produced endlessly with every gaze and reflection (in the mirror on the wall, in the mirror inside the camera, in the lens, in Piper’s own eyes as she gazes into the perpetual and dimensional dimness)—transcend the temporality of looking. Even when I think I have found her, quantified her, or held her in some way, her form escapes me again.

When I look at her inside the image, I have the feeling of both reading and writing. I read the image as I might a topography, and take notes as though I am hearing a recipe, passed across oceans and conjured only alongside speech. I realize, slowly, that this is why I look: she remains whole even as her body is splayed across the landscape of chronology.

I can feel that time when I look at her—the kind that can only be produced when you read and write. The one that is galaxies away from the temporality of our precarious economy or unstable biology. In it, my body finally condenses again, or at least is allowed to exist in a state where spectral form is to be expected. My body aligns with Piper’s. It exists across the room (and outside of it, too) but is radically whole in its spectral form. My mouth might even float back to my body and move in conjunction with it.

Perhaps it is the mirror—not the camera—which allows this radical coming-together.

Looking back to Food for the Spirit, I understand how it is the magic of the mirror that allows Piper to perform double sight. She can see and be seen by herself. Her vision and the tools through which her image is reproduced meet each other across time. Adrian Piper becomes proleptic: she does exist before she existed; she will exist after she exists.

A mirror helps me put the scattered pieces of my body back together. It says more about me than my three IDs and my debit card combined, each anticipating its own expiration date. Functional even in states of brokenness, the mirror will always remind me that I exist. It is my multiplicity, embodied. When passing a window on the street, I glance at it, sometimes to see what lies behind, but more often to confirm that my body still exists—even if I experience life in my own broken, scattered, personal time.

GALA PRUDENT B’2? likes looking in mirrors.

CONSTANTIN GARDEY can it be silly

EPHEMERA

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LIT

Sestina

TEXT JENNA COOLEY

DESIGN SAM STEWART ILLUSTRATION LUCIA KAN-SPERLING

I come back to the same thought so many times it must be home.

The whole of it a glinting suspension. I wait so long daylight dissolves and oozes in my mouth.

It’s hard. Time passes sideways because I’m in love with a girl, the feeling chews on loneliness makes suburban teeth crunch like plastic.

09

I can’t stop eating candy. The taste the sick sound of plastic peeled. Synthetic fruit. Manufacture a taste and call it home.

This is what they mean by eating feelings. Gnawing loneliness until gnawing is the sinewed quality of waiting which has its roots in a little girl lying counting teeth like sheep in her mouth.

Aging is the body getting used to disuse. Decay starts in the mouth.

I guess mortality gave birth to plastic & it terrifies me, this time thing, I use the word girl because who gave me permission to love a woman? To call her body home?

Wanting is a unit for measuring time; time as a unit means wait for something, skyward, for loving that isn’t loneliness.

I want to shed this second skin. I hate the melodrama of loneliness spoken out loud. How nothing feels clumsier than a mouth insistent on space, insistently filling it, why not wait & find diversion elsewhere, the urban variety of plastic glistens. Gorgeously. I confuse object with home, as if this same body did not echo when I was a girl.

The issue being how in all of this I see this girl, my friend rambles about how a mouth tastes but all I feel is loneliness I want to say fuck taste I want to find a home in her. Home with her. It’s a practical and poetic matter, her mouth: saving grace, fuck grace, fuck edenic plastic like I’m running with scissors in my hands, fuck the wait.

It’s said that things come to those who wait a lie you only tell little girls, never their brothers, let them run, wave their plastic guns. Maybe waiting becomes the same thing as loneliness: love is a chewed thing growing bitter in my mouth, I look out the window and stay home.

Because no weary plastic wanting can unravel waiting, a quicksand home dissolving into its own distance, each moment without this girl grows resonant. As if words alone could fill my mouth.

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LIT

Hyphen The bird sings at 2:47 am. I wonder if she is confused. I say she, perhaps because she is a flying thing. Flight frightens a patrolled sky as an interrupted airspace or the body interrupts space. I remember reading once I move / to keep things whole.1 After all I never choke when it’s going down. Just taste the aftershocks mechanically. Trace a frozen molar in performance of penitence & get back to it.

It feels silly to ask if the body is whole. Trajectory is nonexistent, or trajectory is at war with itself. The body warps through time getting longer and more brittle each year and each year we scoop more from it. The remaining fibers of an unseeded cantaloupe have always revolted me. Revulsion is a way of knowing my body exists as a separate entity. The T cell targets & destroys virally infected cells. Sometimes the body attacks itself. Everything happens in both cell & organism. Nothing is surprising. Only nothing would surprise us now. Do birds lose their voices?

I want to be something of which I am the only one. Unfortunately it cannot be hyphenated. Then someone might know me.

1

Mark Strand, “Keeping Things Whole”

After Atlanta i find that my body has become a nonplace // Its currency a dissonant residue turning stale in my knuckle where even violence could not take root Where the key between my fingers was symbolic / not self-conscious / where i remembered my face is not mine // That it is intimate to no one // i hesitate in doorways i check my reflection in the glass eyeball of a taxidermied marmot Your desire vacillates in direct proportion to the capacities of this body as a vessel if i etch my skin with all you have confided // will you tell me i am you // America i ask you this hard i tell you i prefer the catharsis of a cup of dirty water and ice cubes thrown on my head from a third story window to the glint of your canines but maybe we don’t deserve catharsis / this is the rotting bloom of inheritance for every Golden Record every love song sent longing into space there is an exit wound and there is a girl realizing / how little an exit wound says // how little the moment can exit itself but also how capable the stain remover how acrobatic coaxing blood from cement how we slide from aporia to catchphrase to collective amnesia In another week / we will be reminded again / of the billion ways in which the nation betrays the body // i do not resemble anyone i look like // i do not bear looking well / Perhaps someone once found an archive in a kiss but i’m still waiting for someone to plant a proverb in my palm that does not dilute my body into metaphor Remember how violence could not take root / as if there is deficiency even in this Which is to say nothing / in my body refracts light The body becomes unreceptive / which is to say there’s only so much a body can take / before it becomes transparent If the body was ever anything / but a hierarchy of needs with its tongue in its mouth you blue thing you / passage through yourself your profanities pale because is there anything / more profane than the desire to fold the body around its own / trembling, to find in folding a harbor / to misplace the body onto its own weaponry Make / of the body its desire to wound / or / be wounded / make of the body / nothing more. As if my only / resistance / will be // the obsolete grammar // of my bones / jamming / in a vulture’s / throat // JENNA COOLEY B’24 would like to know which birds she heard singing on Thayer at 2:47 AM.

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TEXT CHANIKARN KOVAVISARACH DESIGN BRIAANNA CHIU

ILLUSTRATION CAMILLE GROS

S+T

THE GOOD, THE BAD, THE ENDURING

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An exploration of the future of archiving and the limits of human memory

Soft creaks of wooden drawers, card catalogues pulled out to quickly reference before being neatly slipped away. Quiet hums of cooling systems and generators, the vast underground spaces of data centers in the heart of old mines all across the United States, from Kansas City to Livingston. Giggles over a crackling fire, a folktale retold, over and over again.

We’re all archivists. In an effort to resist memory fading over time, we create and maintain records, from photo albums dating back to the 2000s to old drawers of schoolwork and certificates. As curated collections of memory, archives represent both what we remember and how we remember them. Whether they take tangible or intangible forms, archives are created every day in our own acts of remembering.

The creation of an archive represents a fundamentally human instinct to preserve knowledge for the future. Consisting of 1800 complete tablets and almost 5000 fragments, the clay tablets of Ebla—a 3rd-millennium BC kingdom, now modern-day Syria—provide monumental insight into the writing system of Sumerian scribes and the development of local language systems in Ebla. The tablets that log the kingdom’s imports and exports also provide information on the region’s economic and political relations in the Early Bronze Age. Our impulse to archive continues today, extending beyond clay tablets to shelved records of paper, all sorts of textual and visual documents arranged in an indexing system to aid reference and retrieval. Even though they seem to present a holistic–if incomplete and evergrowing–record of information on all sorts of subjects, archives are not objective, neutral sites of human memory and knowledge. They are institutions fundamentally shaped by power.

French philosopher Jacques Derrida wrote in Archive Fever that “there is no political power without control of the archive, if not of memory.”

Archives shape and are shaped by the systems of power in the context of their creation or their operation. What is ‘sayable’ and ‘unsayable’ by contemporary terms is translated into what is omitted and what is added to the collections: “the archivization produces as much as it records the event.”

Archives function as a mediator between the past, the present, and the future. They are central to the conception that we know what we know about our individual or collective past through what we can verify. When an institution charged with the authority of remembering records an event, it gives that event immense power: if it’s not in the archive, then how can it be true? How can it be worth remembering? As

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Steven Lubar, Brown Director of the Center for Digital Scholarship, writes, “how we remember shapes what we remember.” +++ But archiving is only one method of preservation, and it is changing vastly. The exponential growth of digital archives–those born digital and those that are a result of physical collections getting digitized–raises a new set of questions in addition to the problems already posed by archivists about approaching their own work.

Digital archives are often presented as the final form of knowledge preservation: thousands upon thousands of textual, visual, video, and even aural items are continuously available, with the metadata (the description of an item’s contents, context, and form) all tied in neatly into one link.

That concept alone presents plenty of issues.

For those who don’t have access to a digital device or a strong internet connection, digitized collections become knowledge that is wholly inaccessible. Furthermore, there are concerns of responsibility for whoever digitally maintains the archive, like creating metadata for new items that are added and dealing with operational costs.

The digital is frequently presented as the solution to the limitations of the physical, but it doesn’t take much to realize that digital archives are not the be-all-and-end-all. Digitization demands the consideration of form alongside content, and as technology evolves, archivists are forced to confront issues of data migration and storage in order to keep archives accessible.

As we accrue more and more data onto a ‘cloud’ of seemingly infinite storage, the digitization of content suggests permanence and longevity. But this is simply untrue. The existence of the Lost Formats Preservation Society, a project dedicated to “saving formats from obscurity,” is a testament to this. The extensive collection highlights the vast number of formats that we have gone through, collectively creating and discarding at an increasing rate over the years as we seek physical mediums that can store more data to suit our needs.

Digital storage is ephemeral, and digital archives are increasingly volatile spaces: whether it’s a matter of random server fires, accidental rain clouds, or inaccessible files, digitization can make our past more fragile instead of making it more enduring. Ever-increasing file formats pose a huge question for determining the best form of storage for the long term.

Another pressing concern for digital archives

is the environmental ramifications of current methods. Storing all the data and metadata for digital archives on cloud storage systems means making use of data centers and their immense processing power. Yet, given the high energy consumption for operating hardware and cooling systems, these data centers also generate extremely high amounts of carbon emissions. Indeed, according to Forbes earlier this year, data centers consume nearly 1 percent of global electricity demand, contributing to 0.3 percent of all global carbon dioxide emissions.

Swedish researcher Anders Andrae predicts that data centers alone could produce 3.2% of global carbon emissions by 2025.

The methods of storage are untenable.

There’s no point to figuring out how a PDF can be accessible forever if server farms will be incapacitated by flooding from natural disasters and climate change. The mutually destructive cycle between data storage and climate change is a painfully difficult one: natural disasters threaten to destroy existing archives and stores of data, while data centers consume larger and larger amounts of electricity and increase carbon emissions, thus exacerbating the climate crisis.

It’s evident that the digital is deeply tied to the physical, and neither are immortal.

Where do we go from here?

Archiving inherently requires storage space, whether its shelves upon shelves of labelled boxes or terabytes of hard drives. The solution for long-term storage could lie in newer technologies, like glass or DNA. Microsoft has been working with the University of Southampton since 2017 on quartz-glass-based storage system, while bioinformatics researcher Nick Goldman

S+T

has been working on the possibility of encoding data into synthetic DNA strings since 2011.

Both offer attractive solutions: glass could last a billion years, and DNA offers the possibility of storing massive quantities of information at a high density—indeed, MIT is already working on efficient retrieval techniques for DNA to mimic how archives work.

There’s also the possibility of returning to a format we once used, thousands of years ago.

Martin Kunze has been working on storing information in ceramic “microfilm,” creating a modern version of ancient clay tablets. His work echoes Stewart Brand’s idea that “there is still nothing in the digital world like acid-free paper.” Acid-free paper has been storing all our precious documents for centuries and, treated properly, could last millennia. Reintegrating older methods of knowledge production can have profound consequences for our future. +++ Digital archiving raises questions many questions about data storage and its environmental impact, given the inherent connection between the archive and the technicalities behind it. But digital archives are also a space of fundamental transformation.

Archivists must reckon with how digital archives provoke new questions about how archiving can change the institution and also work against it. How do digital archives reinscribe the same systems of power and inflict the same harm of traditional institutional archives?

Can they correct them?

The emergence of community archives into the information mainstream has been largely aided by the growth of digital archives.

Histories, folktales, and information once passed around minority communities–more so in oral forms than textual–were brought to the fore.

Once excluded from Western conceptions of knowledge, these archives break down what an archive can be and what form that information can take. These types of archives provide a platform to historically underrepresented groups to not only address previous gaps in the archive, but also to do so on their own terms.

One such example is the Southeast Asian Archive at UC Irvine (SEAA), which aims to document the history of Southeast Asian diaspora. Documenting the material and oral history of the Cambodian, Hmong, Laotian, and Vietnamese diaspora, the archive makes these experiences accessible to those outside of the community as well as those within it.

For 2nd- or 3rd- generation immigrants,

for whom this past may seem inaccessible, the digital archive restores the possibility of learning about the deeply individual and intimate experiences of one’s heritage. For individuals within those countries, who may have had that past erased from official narratives of history, this archive represents a chance of grounding a history only spoken about in hushed whispers.

Circumventing issues of censorship, infrastructure, and decentralized or disconnected national archives, the SEAA’s digitality is key to inverting institutional and historical erasure while using those same tools to provide access, simultaneously maintaining its original form of inter-generational knowledge transmission.

Some community archives venture further and reject traditional Western organizing systems. The Xwi7xwa library employs First Nation knowledge organization systems to an archive of Indigenous history created entirely on First Nations knowledge organization systems.

It rejects colonial classifications, such as the oft-used Library of Congress subject headings and terminology, and prioritizes Indigenous values.

By collecting materials that are written from First Nations perspectives and privileging issues of interest to First Nations and Indigenous people, the archive purposefully addresses gaps in traditional archives and histories.

Additionally, the archive highlights materials produced by First Nations scholars, researchers, and writers.

Like the SEAA, the Xwi7xwa library’s digital nature enables an increased scale of access, allowing everyone, and not just those in Canada or attending the University of British Columbia, to access its collections. In its work to counteract the historical imbalances embedded in Western history and traditional Western archives, accessibility is key to the diffusion of knowledge and correcting the unevenness of knowledge production and preservation.

While these were digitized archives, born-digital archives, like the Black Trans Archive, present a radical reimagining of what an archive can be in every aspect. Functioning as an interactive online video game, the website aims to tell and preserve the experiences of Black trans people through different keyboard prompts and pathways.

The website was envisioned by its creator, animator, and artist Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley as a site that can be a place of homecoming for Black trans people, while allowing cis people to interact through a series of songs, poems, and visuals to understand the ways that trans experiences have been erased and buried, and what

complicity and meaningful allyship actually look like.

Built by Black trans developers, the Black Trans Archive is meant to be coded so that it can never be deleted. The digital is central to how Brathwaite-Shirley conceives of correcting archival erasure; for her, only Black trans people can properly record and archive each other, and this online archive, which people are able to add to, is meant to create space for exactly that. +++ The complexity of archives—as collections of human memory, as able to preserve or destroy, and as sites of erasure or restitution—forces us to confront what we choose to remember, why we chose it, and what that remembrance looks like. The digitality of archives enables a reimagining of that.

Though not without its flaws—and grave ones, at that—digital archives can be a chance for voices previously marginalized in, or entirely removed from, the archival record to reclaim the space taken away from them. By rewriting the boundaries of what constitutes an archive and what is considered knowledge itself, community archives challenge the ways Western academia has enshrined itself as the only valid form of producing, transmitting, and preserving knowledge.

In highlighting alternate modes of knowledge and remembrance, these community efforts offer suggestions for what the future of archiving can look like. Solutions for storing and preserving collective memory beyond the digital age might lie in knowledge systems and formats previously ignored by conventional archival wisdom, or in rejecting notions of linearity to progress how we archive. Our desire to remember and be remembered is a difficult one to satisfy, but, as long as it persists, we do too.

CHANIKARN KOVAVISARACH B’23 finally learned what happens to an email when you accidently click “archive” instead of “delete.”

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12

ENEMIES TO

TEXT KANHA PRASAD DESIGN FLORIA TSUI

NEWS

On CAA/NRC, J.Sai Deepak, and ‘India, that is Bharat’

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In an article published in Open The Magazine on December 29, 2019, Indian Supreme Court lawyer J. Sai Deepak drew a parallel between the protests across India against the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) and the National Registry of Citizens (NRC) on the one hand, and recent attempts by legal scholars in the West to articulate a ‘Global Citizenship Model’ on the other. India’s ruling Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government led the passage of the CAA and NRC in 2019, which prompted fears amongst many that together, the two acts would directly threaten the citizenship claims of India’s more than 200 million Muslim inhabitants. The Global Citizenship Model (GCM) is the name of an ongoing project of legal scholars in the United States to protect the human rights of populations who are marginalized within and outside Western cultures. In his piece, Deepak argued that the opponents of the CAA/NRC and the legal scholars theorising the GCM were covertly cooperating to undermine the sovereignty of states like India by forcing them to open their borders to ‘harmful’ state and nonstate actors claiming ‘victim’ status.

The anti-CAA/NRC protests vacated India’s streets in March 2020 after being subjected to the violence of the Delhi riots and forced closure by the government because of the COVID pandemic. Since then, Deepak himself has been engaged in writing a book called India, that is Bharat: Coloniality, Civilisation, Constitution, which was published on August 15, 2021. Like his 2019 article, the book is concerned with how India can reclaim its threatened sovereignty. But threatened by whom? By no one in particular, but rather, a form of consciousness stemming from the West that he calls “coloniality”. In a curious manner then, the book mirrors his earlier critique of the opponents of the CAA/ NRC acts and the proponents of the GCM whom he saw as working hand in hand. For here, it is India that must recognise and claim its marginalization and victimisation from the West. But by making a form of consciousness his target, Deepak also veils what are to him its Indian hosts. The trajectory of his work over the last two years thus gives us an insight into the manner in which Hindu nationalists have positioned themselves intellectually in a global debate on sovereignty by harnessing scholarly and activist languages of decolonization. But to understand his argument, one must first understand the three acts, the ruling regime’s intentions behind them, and the ferocity of the protests they caused.

The CAA/NRC The passage of the Citizenship Amendment Bill as the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) on December 11, 2019 launched a nationwide wave of protests. The CAA amends the Indian Citizenship Act to create a passage to citizenship for Hindu, Sikh, Parsi, Jain, and Christian immigrants from Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Bangladesh who entered India before 2014.

With this bill, Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his cabinet intended to make India a safe haven for those persecuted minorities living in its neighbouring countries. However, the act

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failed to include Muslims from these nations on this list, as well as neighbouring countries such as Myanmar and Sri Lanka where Muslims are persecuted minorities.

The act marked the first time in India’s history when a religious basis for citizenship was introduced. As many protestors and commentators would observe in the months to follow, the exclusion of a passage to citizenship for Muslim immigrants specifically contradicted Article 14 of the Indian Constitution, which stipulated the equality of all citizens before the law.

In contrast with the CAA, the National Registry of Citizens (NRC) has a longer history which is now being nationalized by the present regime. Since 1951, the government of the northeastern state of Assam has repeatedly tried to create a register of the citizens living there due to the continuous trickle in of immigrants from the erstwhile dominion of East Pakistan.

In the view of the government and many of Assam’s inhabitants, unchecked immigration would dilute Assamese identity and control over land. The reproduction and maintenance of the documentation needed for identification—title deeds, birth certificates, bank statements etc.—

by Assam’s residents were next to impossible given the state’s flood-prone climate and large illiterate population. The scale of the state’s effort to identify undocumented immigrants was only compounded after 1971, when the number of refugees to Assam increased drastically following the Bangladeshi War of Liberation.

Nonetheless, intermittent efforts by the state’s government to update the registry have proceeded slowly until the present. With the return to power of the BJP in May 2019, however, the Assam NRC has now become a model for Home Minister Amit Shah. His national ambitions are centered around rooting out what he and many in his party see as an ‘epidemic’ of Muslim refugees entering from Bangladesh and Myanmar into India, whom he referred to on multiple occasions as “termites” and “intruders.” And so, though the Assam registry of citizens has always involved the central g=overnment, its proposed transformation into the NRC would put the full force of the central government behind a nationwide effort to identify and expel Muslim immigrants.

The anti-CAA/NRC protests Soon after the passage of the CAA, protests began to erupt in cities and towns across the country, led primarily by Muslims and university students. The large scale protests started on December 14, 2019 at Jantar Mantar—the capital city and Delhi’s most popular protest site—and continued the following day outside Jamia Milia Islamia (also in Delhi) and in Aligarh Muslim University (in the northern city of Aligarh), two historically Muslim universities. The police responded with heavy-handed force to the latter two protests, beating students with batons and launching tear gas into university libraries and dorms. As they spread from Delhi to states like West Bengal (in the East) and Karnataka (in the South), the protests took on a more civilian and national character. When asked by various news channels about their reasons for protesting, many protestors cited a logic outlined by Home Minister Shah in his speeches. At a rally on December 20 in West Bengal, for example, he told his audience, in no uncertain terms, to “understand the chronology: first we will implement the CAA, and then we will implement

the NRC.” The CAA would provide non-Muslim immigrants and those non-Muslims who had been living in India a claim to citizenship without requiring material proof, leaving those most at risk of being excluded—Muslim immigrants, as well as Muslims with multiple generations of ancestral ties to India—without any recourse against attacks on their status. Together, the CAA and NRC constituted a direct threat to the citizenship claims of over 200 million Muslims in India. And it was understood by its opponents as the government’s subtle first step towards the implementation of the Hindu rashtra (or nation), the ideological culmination of Hindutva. Within this vision, India’s Muslim community stood as the primary obstacle to the fulfillment of the Hindu rashtra.

Deepak thus penned his defense of the CAA and NRC against the rising swell of the protests. But rather than the protestors’ self-proclaimed defense of secular and constitutional values or their objection to Shah’s “chronology,” Deepak saw a more sinister and global influence lurking behind their motivations. The ‘script’ that these protestors were realizing, he argued, could be found most clearly in a 2005 article titled “Globalized Citizenship: Sovereignty, Security and Soul” by the legal scholar Berta E. Hernández-Truyol. Hernández-Truyol suggests that universal human rights can only be properly realised under a global citizenship model (GCM) which would necessarily place limits on the sovereignty of states. Such a model, in Deepak’s version of her argument, would allow people marginalized within and outside Western cultures (women, racial, ethnic, religious, cultural and sexual minorities, the poor, and the differently-abled) to claim refuge and even citizenship by claiming rights independent of their nationalities.

Ultimately, what bothers Deepak about such a model is that it would eventually lead to the withering away of state sovereignty, and with that, the withering away of nation-states themselves. To briefly paraphrase his argument: each nation is defined by a certain history, and citizenship in a nation is inextricably linked with belonging to this history. In his words, “the concept of citizenship affects the very identities of nation states as well as civilization states, which should not be pejoratively dismissed as ‘ethnonationalism.’” Sovereignty is thus the duty of a nation to privilege and protect its own citizens. With the GCM, in Deepak’s view, the power to define who is and isn’t a citizen of a nation-state (like India) would be increasingly taken out of its hands.

The GCM would also potentially allow for a disruption of sovereignty from within. Individuals who earn citizenship by claiming a marginalized status, according to him, could foment movements for “indigenous rights” or “self-determination” that exist within India.

This argument in particular must be understood as a veiled reference to the people of Kashmir, amongst whom the movement for a right to self-determination today is strongest. In fact, framed as they are through the abstract language of a lawyer, Deepak’s enemies are never directly named but appear in this piece solely as thinly-veiled “opponents.”

But what does he suggest as the link between the global proponents of the GCM and the Indian opponents of the CAA/NRC, without which, we can dismiss his argument as fearful speculation? As I mentioned earlier, Deepak argues that the protestors’ intentions to de-

NEWS

THE WEST

fend constitutional values are a mere ruse with which they can become hosts for the potential actualisation of global humanitarian citizenship models. Towards the end of the piece, he names “human rights and secularism” as the bludgeons with which the latter might beat India into obedience. Deepak’s external opponents would be armed with human rights and his internal opponents with secularism, one of the hallmark values of the Indian Constitution. To undo such a relationship, Deepak argues that the constitution itself must be subordinated to history: “History provides a state with the strongest possible Constitutional, factual, and logical justification for the manner in which it chooses to exercise its discretion, particularly in sensitive matters such as grant of citizenship to foreigners. And no test of reasonableness or canon of equality under Article 14 of the Indian Constitution precludes the state from drawing from history. If anything, the Constitution as a document must be alive to history, since it is a product of history.” What this ‘truer’ history is, Deepak would only sketch out comprehensively in his 2021 book India, that is Bharat.

Learning from his enemies While the anti-CAA/NRC movement continued to attract more supporters across India in January and the first few weeks of February 2020, it was halted abruptly following the ensuing Delhi riots and COVID pandemic. The riots, which coincided with former US President Donald Trump’s visit to Delhi, were a series of massacres carried out by Hindu vigilante groups against ‘anti-nationals’ in the Seelampur and Jaffrabad neighbourhoods of Northeastern Delhi, which have a significant working-class Muslim presence. The killings resulted in the deaths of 53 people, 36 of whom were Muslim. The forced closing of all protest sites by the government soon followed as COVID began to surge through India mid-February. The central government also used the pandemic as an opportunity to arrest many of the movement’s key leaders under false accusations that they had fomented the February riots. Sharjeel Imam, a prominent face amongst those arrested and a key organizer

of the female-led Shaheen Bagh protest site in Delhi, has now been in jail for more than 600 days.

In the length of its manhunt, the state did not find or name the theorists of the GCM that Deepak was so convinced stood behind the anti-CAA/NRC movement as their potential suspects. Since 2020 however, Deepak himself has been engaged in the writing of a book which curiously mirrors his opponents’ global claims to victimhood. In India, that is Bharat: Coloniality, Civilisation and Constitution, published on August 15, 2021, Deepak inserts India into a global history of Western colonialism that begins in 1492.

The title of the book summarises its argument concisely. “India, that is Bharat” is lifted verbatim from the opening phrase of the first article of the Indian Constitution. Here, the modern nation-state of India is equated with Bharat, the Sanskrit name for a primordial Indo-Aryan civilizational entity whose borders are approximately contiguous with that of former British India (though in some versions it stretches to encapsulate the broader South and Southeast Asian world). But despite its appearance in the constitution’s first article, Bharat does not contribute in any substantive way to the constitution, according to Deepak. Instead, the Constitution is hostage to ideas like secularism, tolerance and humanism. These ideas, he argues, are the byproducts of a history of European colonialism which started with Christopher Columbus in 1492 and continues into the present in the form of “Western imperialism.” Global in its scope, European colonialism introduced these ideas to non-Western peoples along with a host of others as universal truths that disguised their origins in a Christian political theology. In its British avatar experienced

by India, European colonialism ossified Indian society through the categories of caste and religion which it thought defined its particularity. By confining these aspects of Indian society to a private sphere governed by religious laws, the colonial state promised non-interference or ‘toleration’ in private matters, while setting itself up as the pedagogical vehicle which would guide India’s public towards a society governed by liberal secular ideals. In this narrative, India’s postcolonial leaders simply assumed the role left behind by the British in managing India, and these colonial ideals were imprinted on the Constitution. Even though India has been formally decolonized, its constitution is still hostage to “coloniality.”

In borrowing this concept of “coloniality,” Deepak makes clear his debt to the work of decolonial scholars such as Aníbal Quijano, Walter Mignolo, and Sylvia Wynter. But Deepak’s arguments (about caste, for example) also bear resemblance to those made by certain historians of South Asia within the Subaltern Studies’ school. After inserting India into a history of European colonialism familiar to both of these traditions, Deepak extends it backwards to include what he calls “Middle Eastern coloniality,” a phenomenon specific to India.

Selectively quoting passages from the anti-caste thinker B.R. Ambedkar’s 1946 book Pakistan, or, the Partition of India, he stretches the period of India’s colonization backwards to the 8th century, when Islam arrived there as a political force with Muhammad bin Qasim. Bharat’s “indigeneity” then, must be recovered from both Middle Eastern and European coloniality, whose shadows extend into the present.

Taking 1492 as a midpoint, Deepak’s narra-

tive of coloniality extends backwards to the 8th century and forwards to the present. But while we may rightfully debate the dubious historical veracity of the former, it is the latter extension which makes his history properly political in its concern with India’s future. Walter Mignolo recognises this in his favorable review of the book: “Decoloniality doesn’t propose a return to a pristine past, but the reconstitutions and restitutions in the present (and towards the future) of destitutions in the name of modernity, rationality and emancipated thinking … such is the argument that Sai Deepak builds, and invites us to think and work decolonially towards pluriversal futures.” Mignolo’s endorsement of the book makes clear his persuasion by Deepak’s argument that it is only a reconstituted Bharat that can break through an India which still performs the destructive work of “coloniality.” Most importantly for Deepak, inserting India into this deep history would make the core values of its 1947 constitution its product, rather than the work of people like Jawarhalal Nehru and, indeed, B.R. Ambedkar. “Making the constitution alive to history” for Deepak is to simultaneously remove it from its pedestal at the origin of modern India and begin its substantive transformation into the constitution of an imagined “indigenous” Bharat.

In 2020, Mignolo wrote an adulatory foreword to another book published in that year titled The Haitians: A Decolonial History, by the sociologist Jean Casimir. It is indeed true that in addition to precedents from its own colonial past, Haiti’s present-day hostage to US humanitarianism holding present-day Haiti hostage bears resemblance to Britain’s humanitarian justification of its colonization of India until 1947. The same continuity cannot be drawn however, for modern day India, which is at least in this respect a sovereign nation-state.

Deepak’s deployment of “coloniality” as a kind of consciousness stemming from a continuing Western cultural (rather than political) imperialism helps us make sense of this. For, in a manner similar to those individuals that the GCM sought to protect, Deepak has now reconstituted India as a victim to a “Western imperialism” with a deep history, but with no present-day political embodiment. Rather, the real enemies who keep India hostage to this consciousness remain internal: university students and professors, liberal activists and defenders of the Constitution, and, most importantly, Indian Muslims. For all his willingness to rid India of the excrescence of “colonial” values like secularism, toleration and humanism, Deepak holds steadfastly onto the value of sovereignty.

On August 8, 2021, a little less than two years after the anti-CAA/NRC protests started at Jantar Mantar, a different kind of protest took place there. This one, led by the BJP and nonstate Hindutva organizations, protested against “colonial era laws” that supposedly treated minorities preferentially. Present there were also protestors who called for extreme violence against Muslims. Could Deepak’s work over these last two years serve as a script for a now politically dominant Hindu nationalism that is eager to make itself a victim to global forces?

KANHA PRASAD B’21.5 is looking for enemies to work with.

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METRO ILLUSTRATION JESSICA MINKER DESIGN ISAAC MCKENNA TEXT LOUGHLIN NEUERT 15

The Ripp le RIPTA’S Effect of Wave

On April 1, 2021, it got much harder to purchase single-use two-hour bus passes in Rhode Island. These blue and white paper cards, known as ‘riptiks,’ have been a mainstay of the Rhode Island Public Transport Authority (RIPTA) infrastructure for over a decade. For almost as long as there has been a modern RIPTA bus, there has been an accompanying riptik in thousands of back pockets, wallets, and purses.

By November 1, they will be phased out entirely as part of RIPTA’s shift to a ‘smart’ pay system. This policy, its motivations, and its omissions are an example of how our uncaring political systems make even the most practical and popular policies harmful. Discussion about riptiks needs to be contextualized within existing struggles over transportation, finance, and housing in Rhode Island.

The new ‘tap-to-pay’ system, Wave, allows users to pay from a balance using either their smartphones or a more durable, reusable plastic card. “Smart Card or Mobile App, the choice is yours,” reads the agency’s website. Other options will remain. In addition to Wave, riders can still pay with an assortment of monthly and daily passes, as well as permanent bus passes issued to seniors and people with legally recognized disabilities. Cash is still valid on all RIPTA transit, though exact change is required.

The decision to make this switch stretches back a half-decade, to a 2015 internal study of the flaws in the RIPTA fare system. Surveys with drivers and customers outlined the complicated and time-consuming nature of issuing paper transfers. 30 percent of drivers, for example, believed that their riders were missing opportunities to save money due to the complexities of the fare and transfer system. At the same time, a majority of those surveyed expressed the desire to be able to pay for RIPTA with their phones upon boarding.

Problems didn’t end there, however. The

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

units that accept payment (be it cash, riptiks, or another type of swipeable pass) on RIPTA’s buses, installed in 2008, were already becoming finicky by 2015. Constant maintenance on the fareboxes ran up both a huge bill for RIPTA and slowed down boarding times significantly.

By the end of 2015, consistent farebox malfunctions were so numerous and troublesome that the study offered the possibility of hiring a full-time farebox technician. At the time of the study, 85 percent of drivers favored the introduction of a ‘tap’ system (à la Wave) to make “[their] role in helping customers board... easier.”

Easing the process of issuing transfers, reducing reliance on the malfunctioning fareboxes, and meeting the expressed desire of both drivers and customers to pay via tap (whether by phone or card) were three of the biggest takeaway goals of the study. They dovetailed quite neatly into the Wave program.

Paper products sold by RIPTA, such as the single-use riptik and the six dollar one-day pass, are currently the only products to be directly phased-out as a result of Wave. +++ RIPTA has not been transparent about the transition. Their website contradicts itself, saying both that the sale of all paper products has been discontinued and that they can still be purchased at Kennedy Plaza and three Providence-area grocery stores. The Kennedy Plaza ticket window, as of September 22, remains closed, and cashiers in Eastside Market, Shaw’s, and Stop and Shop were unable to help The College Hill Independent buy a riptik. Stop and Shop did carry paper day passes, but not single-use tickets.

A group of RIPTA managers standing outside of the Transit Center at Kennedy Plaza

(KP) responded with a unanimous “no” when asked if one could still buy a riptik inside the KP transit hub. “No, no, there’s nothing in there,” one told the Indy. “You’ve got to get on the Wave app, you’ll like it better anyway.” Pressed on whether one could still pay with a riptik, a manager assented, “Yeah, you can, but only until November 1.”

A group of drivers interviewed at the other end of Kennedy Plaza did not entirely agree with the picture painted by management. When asked if they were planning to stop accepting them on November 1, as RIPTA’s website and managers had said, the drivers said they were not. “I think we are still accepting them though, even if you cannot buy them,” said one driver, who wished to remain anonymous.

There are two things that drivers and managers agreed upon: Wave is a better deal for the customer, and will be easier to manage for RIPTA staff. Both groups assured me that Wave would be user-friendly and would save the average customer money by rolling the savings of a transfer, daily, or weekly pass in with each use.

The two dollars charged to a rider’s Wave account for a single ride automatically starts earning them a rebate on further purchases.

That is, if at any point a rider would have saved money by purchasing a ‘bulk’ ticket or a transfer, the Wave system will not charge them. In this way, Wave makes it harder to accidentally spend more money. This model has worked in other cities—systems like Seattle’s ORCA and London’s Oyster follow a similar logic, enabling frequent riders to save in bulk while still paying as they go.

In a way, this is an economic logic that may seem to be at odds with a capitalist profit-seeking setting. The 2015 report clarifies even further why RIPTA would choose to enact a policy that seems to shed profit: they want increased state funding. “The ideal would be to

METRO

have more state assistance for RIPTA to support these subsidies,” clarifies the report. A tap-topay system like Wave makes RIPTA easier to ride, and cheaper to operate without upping the price of a fare.

Keeping people happy with the speed of boarding and maintaining low fares is essential to boosting RIPTA’s ridership. Boosting ridership gives the agency better standing to argue for an increased budget. Wave as a bargain then starts to make sense.

The riptik, on the other hand, is not a bargain. It costs two dollars, and is good for a two dollar fare. +++ While most RIPTA riders would have benefited from a clearer and better-communicated transition period (getting drivers and management [and the website] on the same page would be a good start), it’s not exactly clear, to RIPTA at least, who would be upset with the phasing out of the riptik.

The short answer is that RIPTA’s policy leaves out many Rhode Islanders experiencing homelesness. As an outreach worker and co-coordinator of a nighttime outreach program, I’m frustrated, and so are others in the housing justice community. Shaina Garro, an outreach worker with the House of Hope, summed up some of the problems with the elimination of the riptik in an email to the Indy: “Moving to digital is tough for our folks who do not have access to phones. Those who do have phones are not always able to charge them. Phones get lost/stolen a lot due to having to sleep outside and keep track of all of their possessions at once. The same goes for a physical card.” Some of what makes a Wave card or account convenient to someone with stable housing does the opposite for someone without. RIPTA’s assumption that Wave is uniformly easier to use leaves those experiencing homelessness behind.

The second problem is one of supply. A steady stream of donated riptiks, in the last ten years, has formed a core part of the services and goods offered by many of the night-time street outreach groups across the state. Distributing those tickets throughout the community is both a form of wealth redistribution and a way of connecting clients with mobility and transportation. According to Garro, the tickets are popular.

“Riptiks are one of the top asks (if not the most requested) and this will significantly impact the people we serve,” she wrote. It’s not just the end of the riptik in general that prompts frustration from outreach workers and advocates, but also the removal of a reliable source of donated free tickets. There is no evidence that RIPTA has a mechanism of donating Wave points.

Outside of using Wave, a switch from riptiks to cash is thorny for outreach groups with a standard practice of not carrying large amounts of cash. A bundle of riptiks ensured the ability to facilitate agency through transportation for any clients looking for a ride on a bus. “How do we, as outreach workers, pass along a riptik to folks that don’t have a phone or money in a debit card?” asked Barbara Freitas, founder and director of the Rhode Island Homelessness Advocacy Project. Disrupting the established flow of riptik L outreach L people means that “there’s gonna be a lot of people that miss out,” she told the Indy.

RIPTA’s phasing-out of riptiks comes at the same time as Rhode Island’s shelter waiting list exceeds its overall shelter capacity, and with a mounting slate of evictions as the CDC’s moratorium is now lifted. This winter promises to be difficult, and the resources mobilized to erect shelters in the days around Hurricane

Henri prove that the state’s failure to act in the realm of housing is due to apathy, not budget constraints.

The McKee administration, despite several meetings with housing advocates and service providers, has refused to take steps to resolve these problems, thus putting hundreds of lives at risk. The state has slow-played finding a site for the Echo Village tiny homes project, and Rhode Island continues to spend a fraction of what its neighbors pay per capita on affordable housing. On any given night, the state’s shelter infrastructure is full, and the state continues to fail to put together a plan to expand capacity for the winter. Put together, the scenario is bleak, and the removal of riptiks feels all the more disheartening.

It would be easy to read the transition from riptik to Wave as class warfare. Examples of clear-cut anti-homeless infrastructure in Rhode Island (benches with center armrests and spikes under bridges) and policy (the planned relocation of the Kennedy Plaza transportation hub) abound. Coupled with a logic that phones and debit cards are universal ways to pay (they are not), Wave seems like yet another change designed to harm those at the bottom of the nation’s class hierarchy. +++ But a recognition of the structural nature of the oppression of class under racial capitalism should undermine simplistic, conspiratorial readings. A structural read necessitates the realization that policy, even otherwise good and sensible policy, becomes violent when enmeshed in a violent system. If the government treated housing as a human right, provided access to affordable places to live, and ensured a living wage, thus creating the circumstances for everybody to keep and hold a phone or permanent card, this policy would be excellent. We cannot have a tap-based system in Rhode Island that does not disadvantage people experiencing homelessness—not because of the nature of a tap system, but because of the nature of housing.

That being said, observers of this transition period would do well to remain vigilant on the future of Wave. Should RIPTA move to eliminate cash-based transactions—and the 2015 report does detail some frustration on behalf of management and drivers with cash—such a policy would be explicit class discrimination. +++ There is a totalizing current in journalism that each piece of writing needs to do a specific piece of work—that the act of thinking and recording is valuable only insofar as it produces a set of results. As an outreach worker and a writer, I’d like to take this time to push back against that idea. Documenting change over time, entering it into the record and the archive, and using that documentation to record how systems of power hurt us and those we care about is not just useful as a means to an end. Learning something fundamental, though potentially unrealized, about our city and world is a necessary first step to imagining better futures.

The story of the paper riptik and of its disappearance sketches out another wrinkle of this country’s economic reality. When we discuss class, we often (quite rightly) turn to painting lines along differing magnitudes of income and relationships to capital and labor.

But there is another difference along lines of class: that of the material of finance. Billionaires and mega-millionaires flick indescribably vast sums across markets with buttons, homeown-

ers and retirees cash checks at counters, tipped wage-earners feed stacks of bills into ATMs. The medium changes.

For those of us who work in retail or pay for our laundry with quarters, the national coin shortage was a fundamental part of last year. For those whose commerce takes place entirely online, it wasn’t. For those of us who rely on the post office and money orders to do our checking, the threat of Louis Dejoy’s postmaster-generalship was grave. For those whose commerce happens online, it wasn’t.

The lesson, then, is that there has never been one US dollar. There are countless. Numbered among them was a sea of deep blue, dogeared, two-dollar bills—riptiks—that floated around Rhode Island for the last half-century.

They were part of the currency as much as anything else, a dollar (or two) just as anything else. I’ve seen them bartered and sold, shared and given, folded and torn. I’ve seen them be a receptacle for gum. I’ve scratched phone numbers and addresses on their back.

After the night of October 31, they will be out of circulation. +++ There are two clear solutions to this problem.

First, RIPTA could continue to accept riptiks past the November 1 deadline, and continue to allow bulk purchases and donations to housing justice groups. There is no clear reason why the introduction of Wave means curtains for the riptik. This proposition would turn a win-lose policy into, at the very least, a win-draw.

More optimistically, the story of the riptik points to the promise of imaginative radical policy in Rhode Island. The interviews with management and drivers, coupled with the 2015 report points to the fact that Wave appears to have been born of a genuine desire to make paying for the RIPTA easier and cheaper for riders. This policy, indicative of a real push to get more people to ride, goes hand-in-hand with a recognition that demand is the real driver of whether a public service can stay relevant. The 2015 internal study that documents the desire from customers and drivers for a smart fare system says just as much.

Making cheaper fare (such as stacking single uses into day passes) a cornerstone of Wave signals an acceptance that RIPTA’s survival hinges on getting people to use RIPTA, not on nickel-and-diming those already riding. What then, can be gleaned by stretching that idea— that ridership drives success—to its maximum?

Rhode Island and the RIPTA are fertile ground for a bold, free, public transportation system.

Wave asks the rider “why pay for what you’ve already bought?” by providing them with free transfers and access to bulk passes. A fare-free system asks the rider ‘why pay for what you’ve already bought?” by giving the tax-payer their money’s worth directly. Wave makes malfunctioning fareboxes less important, a fare-free system removes them entirely.

This model, now being piloted in cities like Chapel Hill and Albuquerque, is a far more bold plan than Wave—going all-in on the generative and inclusive nature of the system, while providing universal, equitable access. A real winwin policy solution needs to come at a scale that lets it push against the scale of systems. There is something of value in the impetus for Wave.

It should be stretched to include everyone in Rhode Island.

LOUGHLIN NEUERT B’22 prefers not to ask how much longer and when.

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THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

JUSTIN SCHEER “11/11 TRANSACTION” X

DEAR INDY

debauchery, and revelry this week. As a Libra, Indie believes in striving the perfect balance between working hard and playing hard. And October is the perfect month in which to shirk all responsibilities in the name of a good time—between frolicking in fall leaves, downing pitchers for Oktoberfest, and Halloweening for at least two weekends, there’s lots to celebrate.

— Libras, Capricorns, and Cancers are especially invited to submit to Dear Indy via email at dearindyemail@gmail.com or via the anonymous form, accessible from the QR code below.

Dear GG,

TEXT AMELIA ANTHONY

Our dear Indie is turning twenty-something, so in celebration, she’s answering some pertinent questions about merrymaking,

Rest assured—karma will bring you It’s finally party time again. How to come up

you a way shittier gift, sooner

with party themes that aren’t contrived?

than you think. One time a

Not everything can be camp…right?

guy who I had been seeing for eight months gave me a bag of hot cheetos for my birthday.

Dear Party Down,

DESIGN GALA PRUDENT

another boyfriend who will give

Of course everything can be camp, lil Ms. Susan Sontag. But here are some themes I’ve been workshopping that you can steal for your next bash of 5+ students: Hunters and Gatherers, Spring Breakers, reign of terror/guillotine, insane clown posse, and/or 2012-2014 tumblr. You may not even need a theme if you have an activity instead. Someone I knew threw an “enemy” party in which they invited pairs of nemeses to beef with each other. One of my dear roommates is trying to get us to host a Sock Wrestling night (in which opponents strive to wrestle a sock off their opponent’s foot). Make sure your theme isn’t overcompensating for what actually makes a good party: free alcohol AND MIXERS, danceable music, and plenty of hot and horny randos. (I’m happy to be one of them—email me).

Dear Big Bang, Unfortunately I can’t quite offer a comprehensive, step-by-step guide to getting some group sex, especially since so much of it is spontaneous. Has

My friend group is like primed to have an orgy this semester.

How do we go about starting that, and how do we go about navigating the afterwards?

anyone in your group hooked up before? That could help break the ice of this first encounter. I’d start by asking around to test the waters. If you all begin to know that everyone’s down, it could happen sooner than you think on a late, late night. Maybe watching a sexy movie together (probably not Eyes Wide

Shut ) could put y’all in the mood. Keep at the front of your mind the most important principles of all sex (i.e. agency and consent, respect, clear minds all around) and have a great time.

The post-coital period, as they all are, probably will be a little awkward. I’d keep preserving your friendships the highest priority during the aftermath—and agree together on whether this night will stay your little secret or become a piece of Providence folklore.

Hi Giftless, Easy—take them out (meaning you pay) for casual dinner and/or drinks. Or if you’re not even hanging out before 10pm yet, a bag of candy from Seasons and a six pack should suffice. Bonus points for a handwritten card, perhaps on a post-it, that says something sweet but short with NO mention of the future. Sign it with a heart <3 but not with “Love,” !

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THE BULLETIN

TEXT LILY PICKETT DESIGN ISAAC MCKENNA ILLUSTRATOR VALERIE NAVARRETE DESIGN OPHELIA DUCHESNE-MALONE ILLUSTRATION ARIANA PADOVANO

THE BULLETIN

Upcoming Community Events -----

Ocean $tate Ass Fundraiser Friday, Oct. 1 from 7 PM to midnight.

Wine, music, hot cool merch, hot babes, lots of fun! O$A is a local, sex-worker led organization—all money raised will go towards supporting their mutual aid funds and organizing efforts.

Location: Fortnight PVD, 187 Mathewson St., Providence.

Red Ink Book Talk Friday, Oct. 1 at 7 PM Punk historian Alexander Herbert, author of the “Punks Around…” fanzine, will be coming to talk about his years of research and interviews on punk rock. The book talk—titled “Punk Rock in the USSR and Russia”—is free and BYOB. Location: Red Ink Community Library, 130 Cypress St., Providence.

Eviction Clinic Saturday, Oct. 2 from 9 am to 12 pm DARE (Direct Action for Rights & Equality), the George Wiley Center, the Center for Justice, RI Housing, Rep. Leonela Felix, and Dr. Luis Daniel Muñoz will be hosting an evictions clinic at DARE. To pre-register or to volunteer email EvictionClinicRI@gmail.com or text “EvictionClinic” to 1 (833) 866-1664.

Location: DARE, 340 Lockwood St., Providence AMOR Outdoor Movie Night Thursday, Oct. 7 from 6 PM-10 PM A spooky classics double feature event to raise funds for AMOR RI (Alliance to Mobilize Our Resistance), a grassroots community organizing alliance “mobilizing at the intersections of race, class, gender, sexual orientation, and immigration status to prevent, to respond to, and to end state violence against our community.” They’ll be playing Hocus Pocus (1993) and Candyman (1992). Tickets are being sold on a pay-what-you-can sliding scale from $15 to $100. Buy tickets at: https://givebutter. com/AMORMOVIE Location: Revival Brewing Company, 50 Sims Ave., Providence.

Further Reading...

We put together a list of some podcasts, news articles, and books recommended by the authors of this week’s Metro articles for more information on housing, homelessness, sex worker rights, and the anti-trafficking industry.

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For more media like “Rights not Rescue”: Podcast: COYOTE RI — Sex Worker Storytelling Series on Spotify Documentary: (Sex)ual Healing presented by The Sex Worker’s Project of the Urban Justice Center Books: Jennifer Musto, Control and Protect: Collaboration, Carceral Protection, and Domestic Sex Trafficking in the United States Molly Smith and Juno Mac, Revolting Prostitutes: The Fight for Sex Worker’s Rights For more media like RIP Tik: UPRISE RI News Articles: Homelessness advocates erect tents on the State House lawn to be noticed (https://upriseri.com/tentsstate-house-lawn/) Providence destroys homeless encampment - and people’s lives (https://upriseri.com/providencedestroys-homeless-encampment/) Mutual Aid: See Andrea Smith’s GoFundMe under “Community fundraisers”

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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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.

AMOR Raffle (Alliance to Mobilize Our Resistance) tinyurl.com/amor-raffle-2021 Raffle tickets can be purchased online until October 6 or in-person at the October 7 movie night. All funds go towards AMOR’s general operating costs, which will support their community organizing, resource coordination, case management, and more! Raffle prizes include a Frog & Toad gift card, a knit socktopus, and more!

Community Cares: Sponsor a Family for the Holidays (by DARE) https://bit.ly/DareCC Fill out this Google Form to sponsor a family for Thanksgiving and/or Christmas.

COYOTE RI Closet (Call Off Your Old Tired Ethics RI) Now accepting donations of hygiene products and new and 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.

PVD Student Union’s Well-Being Fund (by Providence Student Union) Venmo or Cash App @pvdstudentunion Through this fund, Providence public high school students are able to apply for financial support to buy anything from school supplies to laptops.

Providence Community Fridge Location: 640 Broad Street https://gofund.me/7ef40d4a Take what you need, leave what you can. Bring food and other household needs to keep the community fridge and shelves stocked! Or, donate to PVD Community Fridge’s GoFundMe, linked above, to help offset costs of acquiring a fridge and keeping it stocked. Stop by if you’re in need of groceries or household items!

Upcoming Actions -----

RI Together for Abortion Justice Saturday, Oct. 2 at 2 PM Join the Socialist Contingent—the Party for Socialism & Liberation (PSL) and Breaking the Chains—in fighting back against the Supreme Court’s failure to uphold the legal right to abortion by allowing Sen. Bill 8 to go into effect in Texas.

Location: 1 Providence Pl., Providence

Action from STOP -----

Hello (again!) to the readers of the Indy. This is a message from the Stop Torture in Our Prisons (STOP) coalition of Rhode Island. We’re a group of advocates and directly impacted people in Rhode Island that are fighting to end the long term use of solitary confinement in Rhode Island’s prisons. Solitary confinement is torture—in Rhode Island, people can be left alone in a cell for months and sometimes years.

This cruel punishment takes a serious toll on incarcerated peoples’ mental and physical health, and has proven to vastly increase violence inside prisons. STOP’s primary goals are to end the use of solitary confinement and to shut down the High Security Center (Rhode Island’s Supermax prison), where about 85 people are currently held in indefinite solitary confinement.

We need folks to sign up for a doorknocking campaign happening in Barrington on Saturday, Oct. 2nd, time TBD. There, we’ll be asking Senator Cynthia Coyne’s constituents to call her and ask her to cosponsor the Restrictive Housing Act—a piece of legislation that limits the use of solitary confinement in RI—and make sure it gets out of committee this spring. If you have any questions please call (401) 5360744 or email jascencao@opendoorsri.org.

Check us out at closehighside.com.

Accounts to follow to keep up with community actions & efforts ----(Instagram/Twitter)

DARE: (@dare.pvd / @darepvd) AMOR: @amornetwork (both) Tenant Network: @tenantnetworkri (both) Grasping at the Root: @wegrasptheroot (both) Railroad: (@railroadpvd / @pvdrailroad) Abolish PVD: @abolishpvd (twitter only) STOP: @closehighside (instagram only) Black and Pink: @blackandpinkpvd (both) Harm Reduxx: @harm_reduxx_pvd (instagram only) QTMA: @qtma.pvd (instagram) COYOTE RI: (@coyote.ri / @coyoteri)