The College Hill Independent Vol. 43 - Issue 5

THE INDY*

03 AUTHORSHIP AND OWNERSHIP 11 REDISTRICTING REDUX 15 FINDING LOVE IN FOOD

Volume 43 Issue 05 22 October 2021

THE ANNOTATED* ISSUE

* The College Hill Independent

THE INDY* This Issue

Masthead*

00 “ZOOTED”

WEEK IN REVIEW Alisa Caira Asher White

02 WEEK IN REVIEW

FEATURES Ifeoma Anyoku Emily Rust Gemma Sack

Aida Sherif

Matt Coosh & Gina Vestuti

03 AUTHORSHIP, OWNERSHIP, AND THE BOUNDS OF, DECENCY Katherine Xiong

NEWS Kanha Prasad Nick Roblee-Strauss

05 DISTANCED TALKS

ARTS Jenna Cooley Nell Salzman

06 “HOLIDAY BLUES”

EPHEMERA Chloe Chen Lauren Lee

Nicole Konecke

Sichen Grace Chen

METRO Isabelle Agee-Jacobson Leela Berman Ricardo Gomez Peder Schaefer

07 “EGG WOMAN” Sylvie Bartusek

08 FIRST BORN, SECOND PERSON Aleina Markham

09 SOFTWARE RECONNAISSANCE Lucas Gelfond

SCIENCE + TECH Lucas Gelfond Amelia Wyckoff BULLETIN BOARD Lily Pickett X Yukti Agarwal Justin Scheer

11 REDISTRICTING REDUX

Saraphina Forman & Peder Schaefer

15 FINDING LOVE IN FOOD

DEAR INDY Amelia Anthony

17 “BAGGAGE”

LITERARY Alyscia Batista CJ Gan

Eric Guo

Mehek Vohra

OUTREACH COORDINATOR Audrey Buhain

18 DEAR INDY Amelia Anthony

ALUMNI RELATIONS Gemma Sack

19 BULLETIN BOARD

MVP Anabelle Johnston

From the Editors Quick tips for making noodles by hand for first-timers: 1. Dough has a strange and beautiful memory. It holds onto everything that you give it, gently. Gently.

2. My mother taught me once—after fifteen minutes of weary spongescrubbing—that the best way to get oil out of a plastic tupperware is with a handful of flour. Sprinkle and tease it into every little corner, and it will absorb the oil into itself, become a little clump that you can pinch between your fingers.

3. It remembers every whisk, knead, fold, roll. The sworls of your fingers. The little loving beads of perspiration that form in the lines of your palm from working, working the dough. It remembers when you tuck it in with a wet cloth, an overturned bowl, under which it breathes, and rests, and grows.

4. It seems impossible, how you flood these sandy, gritty grains with water, wriggle and push it around, and it takes every piece and becomes this single, warm, pliable ball-thing full of delicious possibility and futurenoodleness. This is the magic of becoming. It is arcane, unpredictable, sticky, and precarious (things can break still). But also, magical.

5. If it does break, remember that things can be remade still. Add more water, or more flour, depending. And remember, gently, that this is your first time making noodles by hand.

(How do you know the dough remembers, you ask? Here. Have a bowl.

Have a taste.)

-CJG

01

Volume 43 Issue 05 22 October 2021

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

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

by TCI in Seekonk, Massachusets.

*Our Beloved Staff

Mission Statement 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 21 Points

TEXT MATT CUSCHIERI DESIGN FLORIA TSUI ILLUSTRATION SAROSH NADEEM

1. Waterfire is over. This week marked the last lighting of the year. Yesterday was another unseasonable muggy day and today was as well.

2. Lots of birthdays this week!

3. The New York Knicks won. A pattern of winning has emerged in the NYC athletic powerhouse. All the fans are whooping. Julius Randle delivered the nail in the coffin with a buzzer-beating two-pointer after missing on two points earlier at the free throw line. New York’s greatest sporting achievement since 2012 has emerged, with the Knicks going undefeated in the preseason.

4. A local freshman began listening to Mitski.

5. Conan O’Brien came a while ago. How do we know? He wouldn’t shut up about it!

6. Waterfire sent encompassing moans through the atmosphere. Many nations were represented. Sweden’s flag was there, Argentina’s flag was there, the United States of America’s flag was there, Greece’s flag was there. Great Britain’s flag and the European Union flags were kept at a distance from one another. Chile’s flag was there. Ghana’s flag was there. South Korea’s flag was there. Japan’s flag was there.

7. October has established itself this month.

8. Sarah Jessica Parker came a while ago. How do we know? She wouldn’t shut up about it!

9. Some recommend forgoing Halloween and Thanksgiving and looking forward to non-denominational Christmas. Questions to ask yourself would be: “Who will receive a present from you?”; “Will you and the pals do Secret Santa this year even if you had a lot of fights about Covid last year?”; “Is there a spending limit?!”

10. The age old question “Can you be too jacked to rap?” was answered this week as Dwayne the Rock Johnson’s first foray into music was released into the public; the public replying, “Maybe!”

11. This Week in Shocking reintroduced Belgian musician Stromae as he released a middling single, Santé, and two new man-buns. Haters would say it was a return to form, with fans replying, “It’s not that bad!”

12. Adele also released a single! How do we know? She wouldn’t shut up about it!

13. People are loving Squid Game, but I’m loving the calamari at Kleo’s! I am also loving the pizza at Flatbread and the barbacoa bowl at Chipotle.

14. I am loving coffee at Louis’!

15. I am also loving coffee at Bolt!

16. I am also loving coffee at Dave’s!

17. A local junior spread joy!

18. The MLB is having its playoffs currently but nobody really knows! Some are blaming millennials, I am blaming the sport itself!

19. A local sophomore decided to forgo a meal plan after not loving the food last year.

20. This week in architecture: Everyone loves Brown’s buildings on Thayer Street.

21. This week in niceties: Everyone’s been very friendly to me! It must be the October air or my new slacks!

Week in Camp Rocket TEXT ALISA CAIRA DESIGN FLORIA TSUI When this Week in Review writer was ten, they received the absolute honor of attending the Jonas Brothers: Live in Concert tour. With Camp Rock star guest Demi Lovato, the group graced the stadium-sized crowd with iconic songs such as “Play My Music,” “Year 3000,” and “Introducing Me.” Since then, the Jonas Brothers have both broken up and gotten back together (who could have predicted that in 2010), while Demi has been pursuing… non-music related activities.

Demi has had a whirlwind of a life which, tragically, we don’t have time to explore all the details of. But, we will go into the ~essential~ things for any Demi connoisseur (referred to as “Lovatics”) to know. Demi broke into this author’s personal life with the wondrous Camp Rock and its bigger, better sequel Camp Rock 2.

After their Disney days, they made the leap of faith from childhood stardom to being a real-life X-Factor host. Lovato has since amassed 100 million Instagram followers, released two platinum albums (four gold), and has, obviously, acted in some of the most acclaimed films of the 2000s: Princess Protection Program, Smurfs: The Lost Village, Zoolander 2. More seriously, Demi has accomplished all of these things while becoming public with their eating disorder, drug addiction, and coming out as queer. Not to mention the Poot Lovato scandal. Now, they are coming out as a ufologist.

Usually, the reality TV content that appears on my Twitter feed is vis-a-vis the boy I used to

hookup with live-tweeting the Bachelor in order to get his band’s account more followers (I’m okay, thank you). However, a new hashtag, #UnidentifiedwithDemiLovato, has recently started to break through these desperate, hastily-created Bachelor memes. Unidentified with Demi Lovato is the cumulation of Demi’s extraterrestrial interest, which blasted off on their 28th birthday when they made contact with aliens, who they call extraterrestrials so as to avoid dehumanizing them.

Neil deGrasse Tyson, meanwhile, called these subjects ‘aliens’ when he responded to the singer’s claims that calling extraterrestrials ‘aliens’ is offensive. He even went so far as to declare that extraterrestrials “have no feelings,” which, ultimately, feels wildly presumptuous and potentially catastrophic. I, likely along with Demi, am pretty sure that extraterrestrials need a good cry every now and then, just like anyone else.

Demi also understands that extraterrestrials appreciate a good pop ballad. In their show (which I did in fact buy a Peacock subscription for), they at one point offer an extraterrestrial—referred to by the otherworldly name ‘Carmen’—a rendition of their 2011 hit “Skyscraper.” It’s an apt choice and a prescient song, including lines like: “But I am closer to the clouds up here” and “Skies are crying. I am watching.” Carmen seemed to enjoy the song, as some electronic devices in the room beeped after the performance. Demi gratefully respond-

ed, “That’s the coolest standing ovation I’ve had,” which seems like a tad of an overstatement on how much Carmen liked the song.

Over the course of the four episodes, Demi, their sister, and their best friend participate in quintessential paranormal investigation activities such as 1) Discerning the word ‘hello’ from electronic static 2) Watching a dot move on a blurry camera and 3) Talking to people who have, allegedly, seen things, according to said people. Yet fans’ reception of the show has been less than glowing. Reviews on IMDb range from “there are scenes that will shock and mindblown u… [heart emoji][alien emoji]” to “Don’t claim to be abducted unless you have facts Demi!” The discourse is tense.

Ultimately, whether extraterrestrials are real or not,* what seems to lay at the real core of Demi’s show is the continued projection of pop-stars into the stratosphere and beyond.

Nowadays, a star’s course doesn’t end at a music career, a Disney+ premiere, or an X-Factor hosting gig, but instead at the very edge of this known planet. Demi’s skyward gaze reflects a larger trajectory of Earthly celebrity to cosmic explorer: just a few weeks ago, William Shatner made history as the first actor (and, notably, the first secret mole-person) to reach space. Demi suggests that extraterrestrials might already live amongst us. As more celebrities find their way to the stars, their theory may prove more true everyday. *they are.

VOLUME 43 ISSUE 5

02

AUTHORSHIP, OWNERSHIP, AND THE BOUNDS Responding to “Who is the Bad Art Friend?”

TEXT KATHERINE XIONG

DESIGN ANNA BRINKHUIS

ILLUSTRATION MICHELLE DING

ARTS

OF DECENCY

03

a subpoena earlier this year. These correspondences, dating back to before “The Kindest” had been published, “prove” Dorland’s claim that Larson and her crowd knew and fully intended for the short story to be a mockery of Dorland by a different (character) name. She and her friends were still in Dorland’s Facebook group, frequently ripping into Dorland’s newest updates together in their own private group chats. Message after message seemed to confirm that Larson had treated at least initial drafts like a way to excoriate Dorland behind her back. In them, Larson notes that she did lift parts of Dorland’s letter word-for-word in initial drafts—something that made her feel “like a good artist but a shitty person.” Despite Larson’s own misgivings, however, she kept a loosely veiled version of Dorland’s words in the drafts that made their way to print in American Short Fiction. Dorland’s letter was just “too good.”

There’s a lot more to say about this debacle—about the vicious, mocking text messages Larson exchanged with her writer friends behind Dorland’s back, about the lengths both Dorland and Larson went to defend themselves (socially and legally), and about the insularity and territorialism built into creative writing circles. At the heart of the problem remains the original theft. Dorland donated her kidney and wrote a letter as a celebration of human connection—her story. Larson read the letter as self-serving, and she rewrote it and reframed it that way—her story.

Will Dorland’s case, which accuses Larson of violating the copyright on her Facebook post, succeed? Probably not. Though Dorland’s letter had been written down, and thus had copyright protection, she would have to prove that she suffered sustained financial loss from Larson’s use of her letter. Even then, Larson’s recycling of Dorland’s letter might qualify as transformative use, which extends fair use protections to works that excerpt the original for the purposes of commenting on it. This ruling might protect Larson from legal action, but might also implicate her in something more reprehensible than borrowing a few lines from a Facebook post. If courts rule that “The Kindest” is using fiction to comment on Dorland’s life through Larson’s eyes, that would resituate it as a direct commentary on Dorland’s life. In other words, Larson would have to implicitly admit to writing an entire story for the sake of publicly shaming another person. +++

On October 5, the New York Times released “Who is the Bad Art Friend?” a 10,000 word article on a literary firestorm at least six years in the making. The story had it all: potential copyright infringement, Facebook friend drama, long and protracted legal battles that embroiled an entire literary festival, a treasure trove of subpoenaed text messages. Official media commentators and angry Twitter meme-makers alike have taken it upon themselves to deliver judgment on the two main figures involved, writers Dawn Dorland and Sonya Larson.

For irony’s sake, here’s my own rendition of these two strangers’ story. Writer Dawn Dorland (40s, white) donated her kidney and created a private Facebook group to share about it. Another writer who ran in similar circles and had been invited to that Facebook group, Sonya Larson (40s, Asian American/mixed

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

race), interpreted a letter Dorland shared about the kidney donation as a white savior-y call for attention. She wrote a short story, “The Kindest, about a white woman donating a kidney, which included a letter whose wording was very close to Dorland’s. The story got published. Dorland found out from someone else. Dorland got hurt.

She threatened legal action against American Short Fiction and the Boston Book Festival’s 2018 One City, One Story program, which had published Larson’s story, until both outlets pulled the piece. When Larson filed her own suit in response, Dorland went back on the offensive.

Her case against Larson has been in the works since April 2020.

Part of what makes the “Bad Art Friend” story so compellingly salacious is all the emails and texts between Larson and her friends—good gossip—Dorland’s lawyer uncovered through

All questions of fair use and copyright aside, how must it have felt for Dawn Dorland to know, with certainty, that an entire group of writers she admired had seen how she told the story of her own life and come away with a reality entirely foreign from the one she knew, the one from which she wrote? How does it feel to realize the reality you thought so hard about putting into words sounds nothing like the reality other people are writing about you? At best, it’s rattling; at worst, you might start to wonder if your grip on reality is the problem.

So maybe it’s understandable that Dorland’s initial lawsuit wasn’t limited to copyright violations, but also included 12 counts of intentional infliction of emotional distress. This claim has already been dismissed; to have succeeded, Dorland would have had to prove that Larson’s conduct went “beyond all possible bounds of decency, and is regarded as atrocious, and utterly intolerable in a civilized community.”

Nevertheless, that Dorland filed this claim at all is telling for multiple reasons. These suits were frequently weaponized by upper-class white women against people of color throughout the first half of the 20th century—part of the reason standards for emotional distress claims have been raised so high. Yet Dorland’s decision to file such a far-fetched and historically-burdened claim reflects the very real and unignorable magnitude of the distress that comes with being written into someone else’s narrative.

ARTS

In her interview with the Times, Larson characterized “The Kindest” as an attempt to grapple with the self-aggrandizement of white saviors, to make sense of what might happen if such a character didn’t get the validation she felt she was owed. Alternatively, we could interpret “The Kindest” as her attempt to work through her experiences with Dorland, who Larson has consistently characterized as a writer weaponizing her whiteness to silence writers of color in her messages to friends and to news media.

But who is the white savior of Larson’s narrative, technically? “The Kindest” is a work of fiction. If the story’s white kidney donor is really only a thinly-veiled Dorland, this character becomes both a fiction with no real-world referent and a ghostly reproduction of a very real person. To what extent can we call this piece ‘fiction,’ if its storied reality comes into such close conflict with the reality of Larson’s frustrations with the real-world Dorland?

In trying to answer this question, we could read through Larson’s many text messages with her writer friends for clues on what she meant for this work of fiction. But doing so would play into one of the first impulses that gets drilled out of you when writing essays in high school–– talk about what the author accomplishes, not what they intended. The author is dead by necessity. In Foucault’s words, writing requires a “voluntary obliteration of the self.”

And yet the author’s ghost lingers. Their name, attached to a body of work, changes the work’s meaning. It matters that the name attached to the original letter is Dawn Dorland’s, and that her name stands in for the person Dawn Dorland. It matters that readers of Larson’s story might read the letter Larson reproduced and conjure person Dawn Dorland and not just her unmoored words in spite of any half-hearted attempts Larson made to detach Dorland’s words from Dorland’s name. It matters that Larson took the words out of person Dawn Dorland’s Facebook, even though those words, ontologically, had been severed from their author. We need to believe that an author is real, and can thus be held responsible. The author is dead, but her ghost can stand trial. +++ A thought experiment, featuring fiction that isn’t really fiction: suppose you catch someone close to you in one of their lowest moments.

Suppose you were hurt by them, or had to care for them, or simply had to watch them suffer. If you’re a writer—and only writers ask this question—you may wonder: how involved must I be to write about this? Is this experience “mine” enough to write about it?

I should note that this question of mining one’s own life for story fodder is also a modern construction. Writers were always claiming from ‘real’ life to write fiction, of course, but the idea of doing so—actively, with intent—had survived unproblematized until relatively recently.

Nowadays, as specificity and granular detail has become a sign of ‘good’ writing (as carried by the legacy of literary realism and by the steady rise in confessional modes, like confessional poetry and autofiction), writers are not just invited to, but encouraged to, draw from life. As the creative writing cliche goes: write what you know.

Writing what you know is also a good way of avoiding lawsuits. It’s no coincidence that autofiction, a form of fictionalized autobiography that typically centers on the writer’s life with some fictionalized additions, is taking off during the fair use and copyright age, when writers are now being sued for copyright infringement just for sharing tropes. Nor is it a coincidence that autofiction has been emerging in the social media age, where your writerly “brand” now relies on hypervisibility, and in some publishing circles, a performance of personal closeness with one’s fans.

So we reach into ourselves and share the most intimate parts with the world. To some extent, this can be a good thing, an empowering

thing, even. The way we learn to make sense of things emerges from the way we learn to read and how willing we are to give ourselves over to the ‘truth’ of the written word. Forms like autotheory and autofiction lean into this truth, placing ourselves in relation to other texts as a way of reaching a greater self-understanding, a better recognition of our place in the world.

But suppose you spent the whole of your life consciously thinking and writing this way.

How many of the people in your life would you drag along for the ride? How often would you find yourself in a room full of people and think, I could get a story out of this? How often would the people you love find you writing tighter and tighter circles around them—or characters who are not them, but in every meaningful, personal way, still are?

Such are the hazards of what I call ‘writer brain’: everything looks like a story. Everyone around you becomes a character to pick apart.

Everything in the world looks a little fake because you can see the strings attached. Maybe non-writers also see the world this way, full of embedded meanings to close read, but it’s jarring to realize that you’re living in a perception of a moment only you can access. That your perception comes with a constant textual output, a constant sense that you are both in the moment and that you are watching from a distance, that the moment is alienated from you by walls of written meaning. Writer brain builds walls around you and elevates your reality, letting you lord over the people you love because you think you’ve figured out all their strings. I stopped writing for a long time because I hated this part of me but couldn’t turn it off. +++ A confession: I have been the ‘Bad Art Friend.’

More specifically, I have been the ‘Bad Art Daughter.’ Like many of the teenage poets and writers around me growing up, I saw writing as a pure, uncomplicated means of understanding myself, a project of introspection amplified by teenage narcissism. As conflicts with my mother were the dominant drama of my life at the time, much of my ‘personal’ art in fact fixated on her.

All through high school, I wrote stories about thinly veiled versions of my mother, some of which actively took words from her mouth and refitted them to serve my own purposes.

In the rare instances when she caught me, these stories themselves amplified our frustrations with each other and worsened our misunderstandings. All through high school, my thoughtlessness only widened the rifts between us, turning conflicts that might have healed with time into long, protracted scars. It’s for this reason that “Bad Art Friend” shocked me: I expected that older, more experienced writers would know better. Reading through Larson’s

subpoenaed text records, however, I found that these writers could have chosen to know better—but instead doubled down on their own self-righteousness.

So often the conversation around art is, can you write about something? Why isn’t the question should you? As Katy Waldman of the New Yorker noted, “When you put another writer’s life in your art, you commit a kind of proleptic plagiarism—you steal their material.” As if theft is any more defensible when done in the name of making art.

To return to the central question: Where did the harm begin? Larson’s lifted quotes? Her choice to submit the story for publication? Her catty online gossip? Or the fact that she wrote this story at all? I would argue that Larson’s misstep was not just choosing to write the story despite her own misgivings, but also her expectation that channeling the very act of writing would somehow offer her impunity from the backlash that came afterwards.

She certainly isn’t the first writer to make such a mistake. Far too often, we lift and uphold writing as a paragon of truth-telling, self-understanding, and revelation while simultaneously stepping away from it, as if to say, it is just writing; it does not have to impact the real world.

Far too often, we try to have it both ways, where we get to write whatever we want in service of this nebulous higher power ‘art’ and never deal with the consequences of our actions. No laws stand in the way of Sonya Larson writing about a kidney donor like Dorland—no laws except common courtesy and a willingness to admit when you’ve done wrong.

Not that this simple truism occurs to many writers. “When this blows over…this whole situation is going to be fodder for an AMAZING essay that you are going to publish in some high-profile place,” wrote Celeste Ng—yes, that Celeste Ng—to Larson in a 2018 email. And there was her writer brain, firing away.

KATHERINE XIONG B’23 is still getting over writer’s brain.

VOLUME 43 ISSUE 5

04

LIT

distanced talks

TEXT NICOLE KONECKE

DESIGN SAM STEWART

ILLUSTRATION JESSY MINKER

content warning: eating disorder, body dysmorphia, mentions of bodily harm

05

we can talk candidly <earnest talks/somber talks> <serious/honest/firm talks> the way your eyes glitter in sadness is enough to temper a hurried heart <muffle the rain/dim the lightning/quiet the wolvenous thunder> my love, my love : I may be comfortable without clothes draped over my body but I have never been comfortable in my body I tried once, to rid of it<maybe I’m trying again/ I don’t want to/ I fear it/ the return is pulling at my ankles> my muscles atrophied my skin inched closer to bone until they were not mine the skin the bones I, a skeleton deception, my clothes fingers spindly, & so were my toes deprived & wanting, wanting always always wanting the before <she was familiar> before acting in discipline & order generating chaotic confusion <I know nothing else…anymore> my love, my love : this is more than a past of mine it spreads its tentacles through my hands as I write this poem HERE in present tense I am consumed & it awaits me at future’s gate mirror percepts & reflects & deceits urges me to sleep through morning & hold off until evening to indulge & if I meet it sooner, my mind grows gloomier & tears prune my cheeks <a struggle to drain these words into your palms> my love, my love : I don’t want you to be concerned I’m okay, I’m okay you are the only person I can’t deceive the one proficiency I have vanishes with you my love, my love : my breath burrows in a rift every opportunity I have to tell you it stays there protected until the moment evaporates I know we have a silent understanding <a nebulous understanding> <an unconfirmed understanding> my love, my love : I face you through this poem NICOLE KONECKE B’23 wishes she had a Sphynx cat to drink tea with.

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

SICHEN GRACE CHEN “HOLIDAY BLUES”

EPHEMERA

VOLUME 43 ISSUE 5

06

07

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

SYLVIE BARTUSEK “EGG WOMAN” EPHEMERA

LIT

FIRST BORN, SECOND PERSON content warning: difficult themes you are sixteen and still take the steps two at a time because you are good at plenty of things but never at patience. the first thing your friends notice about coming over to your house is that they can’t. your sister carves words into the walls with her fingernails: i, want, have, no, there, mother. you erase them when you can, trace them over when you can’t. the smell of eggs makes you nauseous in the morning but you eat them hot out of the cup regardless. wet hair freezes tight to your scalp at the bus stop when it’s cold. your father slams the door on his way out. you slam it after him. you just have to have the last word. the kitchen table tilts to one side like a shipwreck in slow motion; dishes slip and shatter. you hide your diary under your bed. when your mother finds it and reads it all the way through, you take it out and hide it better. the driveway burns the soft soles of your bare feet. you dance anyways. you watch TV at night with the lights off in your room alone and with the door locked. your sister’s secret raises the hair on the back of your neck. you want to be normal, or close enough that nobody can tell the difference. the mail goes unanswered for months. you silence your phone and pretend like you lost it just so you don’t have to call the doctor back. you turn the music up so loud you can’t hear yourself think. your sheets grow stains. your skin grows scars. the rabbit dies and you give it a decent burial. the shelves collect dust as if nobody’s home at all. you eat ice cream straight out of the carton until your mouth goes numb with cold. your hands shake when you write but you only grip the pencil tighter. you fall asleep in class. you break the mirror with an open palm or a closed fist. you say it was an accident. you live.

UNTITLED IV.

VOLUME 43 ISSUE 5

ILLUSTRATION OLIVIA LUNGER

ALEINA MARKHAM B’22 exclusively wears pink.

DESIGN ALANA BAER

A. There are some things about me that will never change.

1. My favorite color is pink. I have a younger sister who is deserving of my love and protection. I can’t fall asleep with the light on. I run cold, and keep one drawer entirely full of socks for when my feet freeze in the winter. I bruise easily but bleed seldom.

B. I am afraid of becoming.

1. Becoming like my mother. Becoming the type of person who drinks coffee in the morning. Becoming a “young professional.”

Becoming an example.

C. I am becoming.

1. There is no escape.

D. The world will break me in two if I let it.

1. Pull your dress down and slut and you can’t go out wearing that and maybe she deserved it?

2. No way you of all people got into that college and you’ll fail out in a year and how did you outscore me on that exam?

3. God shut the fuck up and you stupid little bitch and you don’t deserve to be happy and why don’t you just leave?

E. I will not let it.

F. There are some things about me that cannot help but change.

1. Who I love.

2. What I want. a) I used to want to change the world, or at the very least leave it a little different. I wanted to be an astronaut, a ballerina, a rocket scientist. I wanted to be seen, looked at, admired. b) Today I would settle for knowing what I am going to eat for breakfast in the morning.

3. Who I am. a) I shut doors, but I know exactly what it is that I’m leaving behind. b) I like prunes.

(1) Not because my mother likes them. c)I wear skirts at knee-length.

(1) And I can name what I want when my hem touches the tops of my thighs. d) I had my second kiss at twenty-one.

(1) It took me four years to build up the courage again.

(2) It took me four years, but then I kissed my best friend. e) There are things I will carry all my life, but I have learned how to lighten the load.

TEXT ALEINA MARKHAM

I. Girl A. My earliest memory is of the door shutting on a view of my father’s desk. I told it goodbye when I left, though I did not yet know exactly what it was that I was leaving.

B. I liked prunes because my mother liked them, and I had no sense of self that was not also my mother.

1. I told her no and meant it for the first time when I was six, over a piece of candy that tasted sweeter for being forbidden.

a) I did not get my way.

b) I used to think my mother knew everything, or at

least everything worth knowing.

C. I met God at seven, holding my newborn sister’s hand. She was small, and strange, and mine.

1. I read books on childcare as if I were the mother, and was always careful to place the palm of my hand over the softest spot on her skull when I held her.

a) I was afraid to hold her.

(1) She’s grown taller than me now.

D. I was loved, but not correctly.

II. Teenager A. I started wearing skirts. They were long, caught around my ankles, and I liked the way they moved when I walked.

1. I can measure how much confidence I had in myself by a hem line. a) Knee-length, and I thought I was the most beautiful girl in the world. b) Over my calves, and I was having a bad day. c) The tops of my thighs, and I wanted something I could not even name.

B. I don’t entirely remember being sixteen.

1. I was too angry.

2. I was too desperate.

3. I may have stopped existing for a day or two, at sixteen. I may have begun to unravel. a) I still find loose threads even now.

C. I was running a marathon with no end in sight. The goalposts moved as soon as I laid my eyes upon them.

1. I put on my first training bra at fifteen. All the other girls had push-ups.

2. Heartbreak at sixteen hurts just as much as it does at any other age. a) Even when unraveling.

3. I had my first kiss at seventeen. I was told this was too late. a) I wish it had been later.

III. Woman A. Turning eighteen is not so much a revelation as a release. It means everything. I am free of highschool, of the terrible picture on my driver’s license, of my inability to buy a lottery ticket. I am my own woman.

1. Whatever I excise, whatever I abandon, there are things I will carry all my life. I cannot escape what I am. No matter how far or fast I run, at the end of the road I find my own heart waiting. a) Before I am a person, I am a collection of small and secret moments held close like the most precious of talismans. b) Before I am a person, I am.

B. Turning eighteen doesn’t mean much. A ticking over of a single second, and I am still the same person I was the day before.

1. A ticking over of a single second, and I am suddenly too big for my bones.

C. I started to make my own appointments at the doctor’s office.

D. I changed my legal name.

1. Every seven years, my skin cells regenerate completely. Nothing that laid hands on me then can touch me now. I am made anew.

2. The name I answer to is mine alone.

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SOFTWARE RECONNAISSANCE An interview with Lachlan Kermode.

Content warning: state violence

TEXT LUCAS GELFOND

DESIGN SAM STEWART

ILLUSTRATION QUINN ERICKSON

Lachlan Kermode is a Research Fellow at Forensic Architecture, an interdisciplinary research agency based at Goldsmiths, University of London, that investigates human rights violations. Forensic Architecture regularly embarks on these ‘investigations,’ using open data sources to produce visualizations, reports, and other documents which have then been used in national and international courtrooms and exhibited in various museums. The College Hill Independent sat down with Kermode to talk about his work on the project. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

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how those events might have occurred. This is where the ‘forensic’ of Forensic Architecture comes in.

Forensic Architecture is not a forensic agency for hire; we’re a research agency with a particular political project. We only work with those persons and organizations who are having violence done against them by a state or statelike entity. We never work for the state, which is the traditional mode in which forensics has been employed, to reinforce state narratives and reinscribe violences that the state is affecting.

Rather, [we] try to use those same tools—or appropriations of those same tools—to articulate the ways in which state violence is operating.

At the same time [we’re working] to investigate the tools themselves and to understand to what extent it is possible to use these tools to document these violences LG: You just answered like two or three of my next few questions [laughs]. Why do you think architectural techniques are particularly suitable for this work?

LG: How would you describe Forensic Architecture?

LK: Forensic Architecture is a research agency founded by Eyal Weitzman in 2010. Today [we conduct] human rights investigations as an agency, working in a range of different places around the world. [Our early work was informed by] Eyal’s dissertation on the Israel-Palestine occupation [sic] and the ways in which violence was [enforced] through a sort of “architecture of violence.” Through that work, Eyal and his collaborators realized that architecture was an important way that you could articulate the [perpetuation of violence] around the world.

“Architecture,” here, has been used in the literal sense of the term—[the study] of physical buildings and other sorts of material traces. So from that, he founded [the agency], which [now includes] around 25 people. With a range of collaborators we’re looking to develop new ways of doing human rights investigations using open source material. [I’m using] open source here not in the software sense, but in the journalistic sense: sources that are in the public domain.

[Our work is] driven by the idea that architects understand space, and the way that the material impacts of certain events might inscribe themselves in space. So if you are using architecture as a method, you can look at the way certain events, such as bombs dropping, [inscribe] themselves in the landscape, and then use [this] space as a method for reconstructing

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LK: [...] Architecture was the founding technique really, because Eyal is an architect, and his early collaborators were architects as well. I was brought on to the project as a researcher in 2018 not as an architect, but as a software developer; since I’ve been working with Forensic Architecture, I have been looking [...] at ways to use software and code to document human rights violations.

The framing of Forensic Architecture has been very helpful for me with respect to software and code because [Forensic Architecture utilizes] architecture which is a tool not [wholly] for [the] state exactly, [but is] a tool that has been developed within certain institutional parameters that make it compromised as a political technic. Computing and software sit in the same realm, and thinking about the ways that you can and can’t use those tools in order to do the sorts of political work that I’m interested in doing and that Forensic Architecture is interested in doing.

Eyal has sort of come up with this way of thinking through how you can and can’t use these tools [in practice and in theory]. And so my interests, my continued work with Forensic Architecture, and also my interest at Brown, in some sense, is to continue thinking through how you can and can’t use software as part of a sort of non-state-driven political practice.

LG: So you already sort of touched on this, but Forensic Architecture describes itself as ‘emergent practice.’ What is it like to work in a field of ‘emergent practice’ and how do you feel the organization worked to define that while you were there?

LK: [...] Forensic Architecture takes each new investigation as both a site to politically articu-

late and investigate the origins of the violence as they were done, and also as a methodological challenge. So, we really take on investigations where we feel like our particular way of working can contribute to the discourse around that series of events or to some sort of methodology [in] human rights research and/or the art world and/or academia.

An example of this was an investigation I [did] in 2018 and 2019 called the Battle of the Ilovaisk, where we were looking at the Russian occupation of a particular location in eastern Ukraine around 2016 and wanted to show that there was Russian military presence. It’s sort of broadly known that there was Russian military presence, but the Russian state obviously denies this [...] Russian tanks rolled in from across the border, and there’s satellite evidence, widespread accounts that say this to be true [...], but in a court of law, the more evidence you can get, the better. And so there’s lots of public domain evidence of this—people uploaded videos to YouTube, there’s lots of testimony regarding the fact[s] and images, and even Russian soldiers posting photos of themselves. There was already a lot of good work that was done on this battle in particular, and the documentation primarily

by Bellingcat and other organizations that we work with.

“My interest…is to continue thinking through how you can and can’t use software as part of a sort of nonstate-driven political practice.”

So in this investigation, we looked to collect all of that open source evidence and put it into an interactive platform so that it could serve as a historical document both for human rights litigation in the future, and also for academics and people looking to research this event. We were also looking to find evidence that potentially hadn’t been found by previous investigations. It was through this investigation that we [worked] through using machine learning as a way to recover evidence that hadn’t necessarily been found previously, using image classification algorithms and object detection algorithms on public domain media, on YouTube, and on other platforms, to try to find instances of tanks. Tanks were the object that we focused on in this investigation because tanks are a fairly good indication of military presence. And in this investigation,, there was a particular kind of tank, the T72V3, that was only manufactured

by Russia and hadn’t been exported anywhere

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else. So the appearance of this tank in eastern Ukraine was a clear signifier of Russian military presence in this region at the time [...] we both developed our ability to create these open interactive platforms, and we came to [develop] an open source software that we now maintain called TimeMap, which is a cartographic [visual] platform for plotting time-space events on a cartographic map on the web.

We went on to use that methodology in a range of investigations, including what is [apparently] our best-known work in the US, which is the work that we did for the Whitney Biennial, documenting the use of Safariland’s tear gas canisters around the world. We used that same technique—of using object detection image classification algorithms—to predict the [likelihood] of the appearance of a tear gas canister in images to try to find video evidence of Safariland’s canisters being used at various sites around the world.

LG: Can you talk more about that specifically? I remember you’d mentioned collaboration with artists to train these machine learning models to recognize tear gas canisters.

LK: So when we started on this investigation into Warren Kanders*, he was on the board of the Whitney at the time, and that’s [why we investigated his firm], Defense Technology.

There were a lot of protests around the Whitney Biennial calling for [him] to step down from the board, and so our contribution to the biennial was to investigate his complicity in war crimes around the world by looking at documentation for Defense Technology canisters [...] When we started on this project, we looked for a particular type of canister [and] we decided to start with this one called the Triple Chaser gas canister, which is a type of tear gas canister that splits into three in this kind of visually distinctive way. The same way that the T72B3 tank could be specifically traced to Russia as a

site of origin, the Triple Chaser tear gas canister could be traced to Safariland, which is a part of Defense Technology [...]

So we started with the Triple Chaser gas canister, and we realized pretty quickly that there [weren’t] a lot of [images of] this chaser gas canister [to use as training data for machine learning models]... We got to an idea of training classifiers, using synthetic data, which you can see in technical write ups on the Forensic Architecture website, but that was through [an iterative process] of starting with what we knew about both the object of interest, machine learning in general, and what we had done before.

Then we found as many instances as we could of the Triple Chaser gas canister online, including documentation on the manufacturing, like on the [sites] where they sell these canisters, and where they’re listed, and in catalogs. That amounted to roughly 120, 130 images, many of which were obscured, which we figured wasn’t a good enough set of training images to train [classifiers], we would have to do some very specific kinds of learning in order to get that to work. The collection of those images was done by an artist who was a part of Forensic Architecture.

Maybe I should backtrack and say that Forensic Architecture is an [interdisciplinary] agency with people from a range of different technical expertises. So there are people like myself from software, there are architects, there are filmmakers, there are artists of other descriptions—photographers, and 3D photographers, as well—and lawyers, and journalists, and people who fall in between all these categories. So when we start on an investigation, a subset of us will get together whose expertises might be relevant, and we’ll talk through what’s possible in terms [of] those sets of technical expertises, and also in terms of [the time frame] and the subject matter at hand, and then start one way or another, working through developing a methodology for the investigation and working on the investigation itself.

So in this case of the Chaser investigation, I kind of offered this idea of machine learning as a way that we could potentially document it. One of the journalists who we were working with had worked on these interactive platforms similar to Ilovaisk before, so he started collecting information and detailing the operations and the export of munitions of

*Warren Kanders is on the advisory council for the Institute at Brown for Environment and Society. He has funded a lecture series for the Brown Arts Initiative since 2017.

Defense Technology.

At the point where we realized that we didn’t have enough [data] to train an algorithm in the way that we were hoping to, we brought in 3D artists and architects and used their expertise to develop 3D models of the canisters that we were interested in finding, and then brought in someone else who had game engine development expertise and helped us to put those models into a game engine—at that time, it was Unreal [Engine], I think—and render out synthetic images of the 3D models that the architects have modeled, which I then took and transformed into training images, which we then used. We were working in collaboration with a group called Element AI, who were helping us to train models along with myself. Once we had the results, I put [them] into a platform, which we then handed back to the journalists who would then use it to augment the knowledge base that he was working on. So that’s not specific to all forensic active investigations, the way that that sort of pipeline worked, but that was a very rambling explanation of how [the Safariland project] developed and how it took place.

LG: What skills would one need to be the sole ‘tech’ person on a team that has no other software engineers?

LK: [...] I do think that there’s a lot more that we could teach in terms of collaboration across different modes of working, and also harking on that same point, the idea that code is not always the solution and that sometimes, there are things that people with different expertises can do, and not even things like, you know, ‘codes is not always the solution’ or ‘we shouldn’t make an app for this, we should just talk to people kind of thing,’ although that is often the case, like, often the app doesn’t need to be made. But also, in terms of technical matters, sometimes sitting down, opening a text editor and writing a script in Python is not the most efficient way, or the fastest way, or the most desirable way to get a job done. Sometimes it’s better to give it to an architect, for example, who has a very sophisticated knowledge of a 3D software like Blender, and can work out the solution to the problem in a much more efficient way, than as a software person would be able to work out. I don’t know that this is something that we can embed into the computer science curriculum specifically, but it was very humbling as an experience, to come into a research agency that was full of people who work in complex technical modes, and realize that software and coding is a very constrained way of thinking in many contexts and if only I could get out of my bias and think about opening up a 3D software engine like Blender and do it visually, I would do it twice as fast.

LUCAS GELFOND B’ 24 is trying to pick up TensorFlow.

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How Rhode Island’s flawed redistricting process could wreak havoc upon progressive movements and divide local communities

METRO TEXT SARAPHINA FORMAN & PEDER SCHAEFER

DESIGN ISAAC MCKENNA

ILLUSTRATION SARAPHINA FORMAN

Redistricting Redux*

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THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

*adjective (post-positive): brought back; revived

Midway through a Providence County meeting of the Rhode Island redistricting commission, former state representative Joe Almeida turned to Ryan Taylor, a white election consultant hired by the state, pointed his finger at him, and asked, “How many people of color you got working for you?”

The answer? “None.”

That was only one of a number of noteable moments at the public hearing last Monday, where community organizers, civic leaders, and citizens spoke to Rhode Island’s 18-person redistricting commission: a group of legislators predominantly appointed by Senate President Dominick Ruggerio and Speaker of the House Joseph Shekarchi, two conservative Democrats.

The public attendees sought to make their voices heard on the most pivotal of issues in a redrawing of our electoral and political boundaries that only happens every ten years.

Almeida said that he was at the meeting to “make sure the minority community is represented.” Dixie Sampson, a member of the League of Women Voters of Rhode Island, was there to ensure that “the people who have lived in the community a long time are the ones to map it.” Andrew Poyant, a candidate for City Council, came to the microphone with a child in tow and told the commission that their family’s Elmwood neighborhood shouldn’t be split between three districts. Lenny Cioe, candidate for State Senate District 4 against Ruggerio, told the history of redistricting gone wrong in the 1980s, when the Democratic party tried to draw maps to benefit incumbents and reduce POC representation. He said that greedy legislators “are dividing up communities just in their grab for power.”

The committee members pushed back against the suggestion that they are political props—at one point former-Senator Harold Metts, who lost in 2020 to progressive Tiara Mack, said “I’m not anyone’s lackey”—but the voices of the community begged the question: who really controls redistricting in Rhode Island? And what does it mean for movements for justice in the state?

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The stakes For decades, organizers in Rhode Island have been working to bring attention to issues like housing for all, action on climate change, and reimagining Rhode Island’s regressive income tax policy. Even though Rhode Island is a ‘blue’ state, state policy doesn’t reflect many of the policy values that national Democratic voters hold, nor the organizing energy and needs of local communities. For example, Democratic leadership in the state’s House and Senate do not support policies like Medicare for All or a Green New Deal, and some are even anti-abortion. In response, progressive groups with electoral leanings—such as the RI Political Cooperative, the Providence branch of the Democratic Socialists of America, and Reclaim RI—are working to challenge more conservative Democrats in local Democratic primaries, trying to take the energy and momentum built up by organizers on frontline communities and turn it into policy at the State House.

Next year, dozens of progressives are planning to run for office across the state, marking 2022 as a potential ‘make it or break it’ year for progressive electoral power in Rhode Island. It’s into this progressive wave that the politically thorny question of redistricting in 2021 enters.

In the US, redistricting happens every 10 years, after the completion of the most recent Census. Following the 2020 Census, state legislatures across the country—including Rhode Island—have begun to redraw these state-level electoral districts taking into account the new data. The 2022 election will be the first election under the new redistricting maps.

Electoral politics and community organizing don’t have to be at odds. Instead, with the needs of frontline communities centered, electoral organizing can be generative, as progressive electoral victories and changes in government policy at the State House further empower local activists to protest, educate, and organize with their neighbors. For example, groups like the People’s Port Authority, which works to stop the construction and expansion of fossil fuel facilities in the Port of Providence, have begun

to throw their support behind electoral movements like the Rhode Island Political Cooperative (RIPC). Monica Huertas, an organizer with the People’s Port Authority, ran for office with the help of RIPC in 2018 while continuing to do community organizing and engaging in a Climate Justice Plan, hoping to reimagine the port of Providence with the needs of frontline communities emphasized.

Progressive groups have been moving towards electorialism while still engaging in other important organizing work like education and direct action. That shift underscores the importance of the redistricting process as a tool for progressive electoral power in Rhode Island.

In the fight against inequality, political bias in redistricting plays a key role, as the conservative Democratic incumbents who control the state legislature will again try to redraw maps to benefit their own electoral chances first and foremost.

Rhode Island politics is dominated by the conservative Rhode Island Democratic Party and long-time conservative politicians such as Senate President Dominick Ruggerio, Speaker of the House Joseph Shekarchi, and Chairman of the Democratic Party Joe McNamara. Like most states, Rhode Island does not use an independent redistricting commission. Instead, Ruggerio and Shekarchi appoint 12 of the members to an 18-person commission that, while ostensibly charged by state law with getting ‘community input’ from throughout the state, unilaterally prepares a redistricting map that the Rhode Island General Assembly must then approve. The politicians who control the State House are the same politicians who will redraw the boundaries, and in the face of a progressive electoral coalition that is growing in strength and power, they will try and shift the boundaries to protect themselves, if they can.

At stake is the conservative or progressive control of the Rhode Island General Assembly, but also questions of political representation for Rhode Island’s growing Latinx population: how the “mixed-race” designation on the Census impacts POC representation, and how

incarcerated peoples are assigned to districts, or disenfranchised, by the drawing of new maps. In Rhode Island, redistricting is another tool being used by the conservative ‘old boys’ club’ to keep progressive movements that are fighting against income inequality, action on climate change, and a more progressive taxation system at bay.

By studying the process of political redistricting and the power tensions inherent within, progressive organizers can be better prepared to fight against such electoral malfeasance.

Gerrymandering basics Gerrymandering is the practice of drawing political districts to give certain parties advantages in elections. Coined in an 1812 political cartoon emphasizing the absurdity of Massachusetts politician Elbridge Gerry’s salamander-shaped district, gerrymandering is not as fun as its name makes it sound.

Many gerrymanderers use a process called ‘packing’ and ‘cracking’ to manipulate political outcomes. Members of a redistricting commission can ‘pack’ many voters of the opposing party into a small number of districts and then ‘crack’ the rest of the electorate by making the desirable party a slim majority in the remaining districts. No matter how voters are distributed, it is nearly always possible for district-drawers to manipulate maps to benefit their own party.

For example, conservative Democrats in Rhode Island could ‘pack’ progressives into a small number of districts concentrated around colleges and universities and ‘crack’ the rest of the districts so that conservatives eke out a slim majority. This could dilute the voting power of progressives.

Sometimes, packing and cracking is not even intentional. For instance, the Latinx population in Rhode Island has been growing over the last decade, but it has been mostly concen-

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METRO ILLUSTRATION SARAPHINA FORMAN DESIGN ISAAC MCKENNA TEXT SARAPHINA FORMAN & PEDER SCHAEFER 13

trated in Central Falls and South Providence.

This means that it is difficult to draw maps that don’t ‘pack’ the Latinx community into a small number of districts, limiting the electoral power of Latinx voters. Gerrymandering is illegal, but beyond a failure to comply with the Voting Rights Act, it is mainly up to states to decide what counts as gerrymandering. Rhode Island’s state statutes stipulate that districts must be contiguous, or connected. The state constitution additionally specifies that communities of interests should be “preserved” and districts must be “compact.” But what does this mean? This vagueness provides an opportunity for states to sign off on biased districting plans.

Political geometers, such as Moon Duchin, a researcher and founder of the Metric Geometry and Gerrymandering Group (MGGG) at Tufts University, use math to combat the problem of biased maps. One of the most viable methods for assessing the degree to which districts are biased and for creating fair plans, according to Duchin, is the sampling method. This works by running algorithms to generate “reasonably imperfect” maps, seeing how biased they are in favor of a certain party, and then seeing if the actual map is an outlier. The bias of a districting plan is determined by weighing it against other plans that fit the given constraints of the same region. Probabilistic models like Markov chains and random walking can help with these computations. Sampling can be used to assess a host of different biases, be they partisan, racial, or other.

The mathematics of redistricting is a fairly recent field that has been rapidly developing.

Statistical tools more capable of determining bias can allow for more voter empowerment, but only if the commissions and consultants they hire choose to use them. Another result of new technology is increased transparency in the redistricting process. For example, MGGG has created Districtr, an online tool where anyone can try drawing the districts for themselves for redistricting commissions to take into account.

All of this allows communities to have more of a say in political decisions that will affect them and create fairer boundaries—but only if people in power let them.

Rhode Island redistricting gone wrong John Marion is the executive director of Common Cause Rhode Island, a public-interest lobbying organization that seeks to encourage accountability, transparency, and ethics within government. Marion has worked on issues of ethics reform and redistricting in the RI General Assembly for years.

“Right now we have a [redistricting] commission that is 100 percent appointed by the legislature,” Marion told the College Hill Independent. Of the 18 seats on the redistricting commission, 12 are required by law to be current legislators, and there are no conflict of interest rules for any member of the commission. For Marion, the question of whether or not the commission is unbiased is moot. “They choose people who are loyal to the legislature’s point of view,” he told the Indy. That “point of view” is decidedly conservative, in line with the conser-

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

vative politicians who selected them.

In the months before the COVID pandemic, Marion and Common Cause were working on a campaign to push Rhode Island toward an independent redistricting commission. He says that instead of the current redistricting process, independent experts should be hired by the state. However, implementing an independent redistricting commission in Rhode Island would be difficult—an amendment to the state constitution would need to pass with a simple majority through both houses of the General Assembly and then pass by referendum from the voters.

In short, the legislature would have to vote for something that would take its own power away.

Marion said the few states with independent redistricting commissions had referendum laws that meant enough signatures could get an issue on the ballot. That’s not the case in Rhode Island—all referenda must first pass the General Assembly—and after COVID hit, Common Cause’s campaign for independent redistricting was dead in the water.

Now it’s too late to mandate an independent redistricting commission in Rhode Island, and for at least the next ten years, Rhode Island’s political boundaries will be drawn by a commission compromised by conflicts of interest. Legislators on the commission will protect their own seats or try and change district boundaries to benefit themselves, such as pro-life Democrat Harold Metts, who lost to progressive Senator Tiara Mack in 2020.

One issue brought up by Metts again and again was how to district people who are incarcerated in the Adult Correctional Institute (ACI)—the Cranston-based complex where all of Rhode Island’s prisons are located. For decades, Rhode Island has engaged in racist prison gerrymandering, in which people incarcerated in the ACI—unable to vote under state law—are placed into only two districts, disproportionately increasing the voting power of the surrounding residents. Every district is meant to have roughly the same number of people, but increasing the number of people in a district with incarcerated individuals who cannot vote increases the voting power of the other individuals in the district. This makes it so a local politician has to expend less energy and funding on canvassing voters, because there are fewer voters in the district, and each voter they do

reach out to will have disproportionate power compared to individuals in other districts.

The districts that have incarcerated individuals within them—State Senate districts 27 and 31 and House district 15 and 20—have voters with additional voting power. On the other hand, the home districts of incarcerated individuals, who are disproportionately POC, lose voting power.

The commission has called prison gerrymandering a “next decade” issue that the legislature needs to act on, but Marion with Common Cause has testified to the committee that Pennsylvania dealt with prison gerrymandering without any legislative action. Metts, a member of the redistricting committee, has pushed for action on prison gerrymandering, but nothing has happened yet.

Frustrations with the committee don’t end with prison gerrymandering. The redistricting commission has hired Kimball Brace, a wellknown Democratic consultant who has been used by blue-leaning redistricting commissions across the country to draw maps that benefit Democrats. Brace has worked with his company, Election Data Services, in over 30 states and has been regularly hired by Rhode Island’s legislature since the 1980s. He’s infamous for his GMANDR license plate and was even the subject of a Daily Show skit in 2013 in which he portrayed himself as an artist engaged in using data as his medium of expression. According to a 2015 study by political scientists Nicholas Stephanopoulos and Eric McGhee from University of Chicago, Rhode Island is one of the most effectively gerrymandered states in favor of conservative Democrats in the country. Brace’s work is in large part the reason for that distinction.

When the Indy asked Brace point-blank if he was planning to gerrymander the state for the conservative Democrats who had hired him, Brace pushed back. “I don’t gerrymander. I draw districts,” he told the Indy. “People may think I’m gerrymandering, but any change of a line is the potential gerrymander in some people’s minds.” He acknowledged that he has a deep history in redistricting across the country and that some folks disagree with the lines he’s helped draw, but he emphasized that “the more you’re involved with redistricting, you’ll learn that everything is in the eye of the beholder.” As far as the progressive versus conservative split

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in Rhode Island, Brace said, “Yes, I recognize that there are progressives and conservatives, but that’s not of interest to me. You’re trying to create a compromise. You’re trying to create something that will get the most votes in the legislature. That’s what’s key.” Any maps that Brace creates with the redistricting commission will have to be approved by the General Assembly. What he failed to mention is that the Rhode Island General Assembly is already dominated by conservative Democrats who have the votes to alter or pass whatever maps they please.

Meanwhile, MGGG, Moon Duchin’s political geometry lab, hosts trainings on Districtr several times a month, makes sure their codes are widely available, and prioritizes the feedback they receive from public portals. Most of the time, MGGG is asked by states to create district plans, and they sometimes evaluate additional states “for fun.” In these evaluations, MGGG assesses plans that community members create on Districtr and uses that input as a central component in their district drawing process, as opposed to the mostly data-driven and legislator approved methods of RI’s commission.

However, Chanel Richardson, a research analyst and software developer at MGGG, told the Indy, “Unfortunately, because we are a small lab, a lot of the time we just do exactly what we’re asked to do.” That means that “if someone from Rhode Island isn’t contacting [MGGG] to say ‘Hey, can you do this sort of evaluation for us?’” then MGGG will not work on redistricting that state.

Even though Rhode Islanders have access to redistricting programs like Districtr and are able to provide community input through public hearings and drawing maps on the state redistricting commission’s website, that doesn’t mean that community input will be used by the mapmakers. “[The redistricting commission] has the appearance of transparency because they have more public hearings and are seemingly taking the public input,” said Marion. “But [whether] they take that into account when the maps are actually drawn is not clear.” Marion said that in many states with independent redistricting commissions, the maps are drawn at public hearings in front of community members, but in Rhode Island, consultants like Brace and Election Data Services draw maps behind closed doors. It’s unclear what the exact relationship is between the consultants and the members of the commission and how often they have independent meetings to work on the redistricting maps. While the public has access to the same data and map-drawing tools as the consultants, whether public input is actually heard is uncertain.

As for the fate of progressive politicians biting their nails about the redistricting plans being drawn by conservative Democrats, Marion said there’s not much progressives can do until after the maps are first released to the public, near the beginning of December. Progressive Democrats, especially those who voted against or are running against leadership in the Senate, could be at risk of faulty redistricting that favors the incumbents. At that point, Marion said progressives have two options: they can try and rally public opinion against the biased maps, shaming the members of the commission into making changes, or they can sue under the Voting Rights Act. Lawsuits have worked in the past—in the 1980s a lawsuit against Rhode Island Democratic Party Chairman Rocco

Quattrocchi led to changes in the entire state redistricting scheme, and a separate lawsuit by a progressive city councillor saved his ward. But that litigation only works half of the time.

For now, progressive politicians will have to see what the conservative-domianted redistricting commission and Brace come up with.

A Progressive Case Study: Lenny Cioe A Lenny Cioe victory against Dominick Ruggerio in the 2022 Democratic primary would have an outsized impact on progressive politics in Rhode Island. Ruggerio has fought against expansions to Medicare benefits for Rhode Islanders for decades, is backed by the NRA, and voted against codifying Roe vs. Wade into state law in 2019. He’s also fiscally supported dozens of conservative Senate Democrats across the state—most campaign donations come through Ruggerio first, as the Senate President—meaning his loss would cut the head off a campaign apparatus that is meant to benefit those in power and their priorities most.

Redistricting is a potent tool Ruggerio could use to try and stay in power, and it shows how local communities are threatened by gerrymandering. For example, Cioe pointed out that if he is “districted out, it would divide the Kennedy School community in half.” Likewise, “it will cut the Fruithill community in half.” Dividing communities is a form of ‘cracking,’ weakening the voting power of these groups. It’ll be important to closely watch what the redistricting commission decides in Cioe’s district as an indicator of wider trends of political redistricting in Rhode Island.

Cioe ran against Ruggerio in 2020 and lost by a slim margin. Ruggerio got 54.7 percent of total votes while Cioe got 45.3 percent. However, in the city of Providence, Cioe got 61.1 percent compared to Ruggerio’s 38.9 percent.

Cioe won five of the nine precincts, most of them concentrated in the more southern part of Providence, while Ruggerio won four in the northern section. For example, in Precinct 2410 (North Providence Youth Center), Ruggerio got 69.7 percent to Cioe’s 30.3 percent. However, in Precinct 2844 (Providence College, Schneider Arena), Cioe got 65.0 percent of the votes to Ruggerio’s 35.0 percent. The precincts nearer to Providence College voted for the progressive candidate in much higher numbers. This shows how even small changes in district location have tremendous impacts on election results because of the communities clustered in certain areas.

Cioe is a progressive Democrat and a member of the RI Political Cooperative, and he made talking to communities a goal of his last campaign. He supports an independent redistricting commission and emphasizes that “redistricting should not be about a grab for power; it should be about holding communities together.”

At the committee hearing, Cioe spoke. He told the story of Rocco Quattrocchi, a Democratic Party Chairman in the 1980s who had redrawn the district maps to benefit himself and other Democrats while decreasing POC representation in the State House. “Senator Dominick Ruggerio and Representative Joseph

Shekarchi are dipping into Rocco’s political playbook,” said Cioe. “They’re handpicking people to be on this board to do their bidding for their power grab and to divide up communities without regard to the people of Rhode Island.”

Members of the committee appointed by Ruggerio and Shekarchi, such as Alvin Reyes and Antonio Lopes, pushed back against Cioe’s assertion that they were there to do Ruggerio’s bidding, stating they were independent of any political pressures. Cioe responded that a truly independent redistricting commission would have members appointed by Rhode Island’s Attorney General, not the legislature. Ruggerio was not present at the meeting.

In one ear and out the other At the end of the period of public testimony at the redistricting commission hearing in Providence, Enrique Sanchez, an organizer with the Black Lives Matter RI PAC, spoke. He called out Metts for being an appointee of Ruggerio’s on the commission, there to do his “bidding.” After a back and forth with different members of the commission, including Kaprece Ransaw telling Sanchez to “respect your elders,” Sanchez retired to the back of the room, his points made.

Senator Stephen Archambault, chairman of the commission, silently shook his head.

Nearly a dozen people spoke at the committee hearing. But whether or not their perspective will actually be integrated into the maps is a separate matter, a matter that will have telling implications for the electoral power of progressive movements in Rhode Island in 2022 and the future of legislation—a Green New Deal, affordable housing, progressive income taxes— that our communities need.

So, for now, progressives wait, the meetings go on, and they hope against hope that the members of the committee will truly keep their word and refuse to do anyone’s bidding.

Good luck, Rhode Island.

PEDER SCHAEFER B’22.5 & SARAPHINA FORMAN B+RISD’26 think that Rhode Island’s flawed redistricting process is a point in favor of an anarchist society, in which no redistricting is necessary.

VOLUME 43 ISSUE 5

14

Finding Love in Food

TEXT ERIC GUO

DESIGN BRIAANNA CHIU

ILLUSTRATION ASHLEY CASTAÑEDA

FEATS

How food shapes who we are

15

In the past few weeks, I’ve felt a profound sense of loss when it comes to food. When I returned to campus in August, I began with a proper cooking routine—every week I would go to the grocery store and I would cook two times a day.

My roommates and I filled the kitchen with a lively warmth as we shuffled around scouring the internet for recipes, throwing ingredients together, simmering stews, and baking cookies, shaking the house with an implacable mirth we thought would never end. These were the days before classes began.

But, as with all routines, things came to an end. The kitchen became devoid of its former life. On most days, my roommates cook, but the excitement that came from all of us coming together has left. I have sunk into a cycle of complacency—instead of cooking my meals, I frequent the same off-campus eateries everyday—and once inside, it becomes extremely difficult to break out. Regrettably, for the sake of convenience, I have stopped cooking.

I think about all of this as I sit quietly on campus, munching on the burrito I got from Baja’s for the third time this week. I try to observe––as I’ve always loved doing––the complex combination of flavors that make up the food I’m eating. This time, the tastes blend into a single, coherent mess, and I cannot discern the details.

It worries me that food, which played a huge role in my personal life past year, has become uninspiring again. I survey my surroundings and see other people with their lunches.

One of them is eating a salad from Brown’s Blue Room; another is clearly eating food she brought for herself from home. They chew their food with a continuous rhythm, and I wonder whether they’re thinking about what they’re eating, too. I take another bite out of my burrito and quietly slip the rest of it back into the paper bag. The remains of the burrito end up in the trash can, where I will never see it again, and I leave the Green and return to my routine of studying. It’s just a phase, I tell myself. Once my course load lightens up, I’ll have more time to cook.

That time doesn’t come.

During the winter of 2020, my mother and I began a weekly tradition of making soup dumplings every Sunday morning. It was born out of necessity. Neither of us were feeling particularly confident about life. Though we never talked about it, our unhappiness was implicit in our actions. I had decided to take a gap year and stay at home, and the effects of isolation were weighing on me. My mom, whose work as an X-ray technician meant that she always had to be concerned about exposure to COVID, always came home stressed and exhausted. After half a year of general fatigue, it became clear that our routine had to change.

One December morning, I asked my mom if she wanted to make soup dumplings together.

Food brings me comfort––it is the warm blanket draped over my body by a bowl of hot soup or a plate of boiled dumplings, the feeling of crawling into my bed on a stormy evening. It reminds me of distant memories, of the food my

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

mother cooked for me growing up, and of the various culinary experiences I’ve accumulated over the years. On that cold, forlorn morning, I began to think about my childhood at home and those occasional weekends when my mom would make dumplings for the family because even though she admitted she was not excellent at making dumplings, she knew that I loved eating them. There were also those times in the winter when she would prepare a batch of chicken soup and at dinner time would urge me to drink a bowl before eating, instructing me in her calmly affectionate way that it would make me smarter and stronger. These moments had a special tenderness to them. My mother was not simply cooking for me; after all, if her goal was merely to feed me, there were far easier, less time-consuming ways to do that. It was only then that I understood the depth of her care for me. I began to realize the only thing that could bring me a reprieve from my isolation and allow me to return my mother’s affection for me was cooking together. It made sense to make soup dumplings, a dish my mother and I both loved.

She accepts my proposal without hesitation.

Maybe she had been waiting for me to ask her this question for a long time. We had prepared meals together before, but nothing so ambitious as soup dumplings––making great soup dumplings requires time, patience, and skill. We prepare the ingredients: ground pork, soy sauce, scallions, ginger, and gelatin for the filling; flour, salt, and water for the dough. She shows me how to make the filling, knead the dough, and wrap the dumplings. Next to her graceful fingers, my hands are inexperienced. I marvel at how she rolls out the wrappers with ease: her right hand moves the rolling pin up and down gracefully as her left hand turns the thin dough.

Each roll elongates the wrapper, and in a few seconds, a perfectly round wrapper is formed.

It doesn’t take much to realize that every act of food is an act of love. My mother and I exchange no words as we roll out the wrappers and shape the little dumplings. They stand plump and round, some perfect and some overflowing, distinguished by the skill discrepancy between me and my mother. These imperfections are not blemishes: they are a reflection of familial love, the one that connects child and mother. As my hands clumsily guide me through the motions of rolling out the wrappers, I think about all the words I’ve failed to say to her. I think about the culture I was raised in, where important words are kept inside, feelings pushed below the surface, and love never expressed. This gap year is the last extended period in my life where I can spend time with my mother doing nothing but cooking together.

The thought of us growing old, of these experiences remaining only memories, makes me want to freeze time and never let it go. But that isn’t possible. “Pass me the filling,” I say to her.

Everything else is left unsaid.

Perhaps there is no better way to express my love than making dumplings. Perhaps food, a fundamental part of human existence, is the best expression of love––better than the cre-

ation of poets, whose words, while beautiful, lack the intimacy that food possesses. Perhaps what I want to say to my mother was already said when I asked her to make soup dumplings with me. The simple act of making and giving food, of sitting down at a table with a loved one, is enough for me.

One of my favorite movie scenes is the ending of Pixar’s Ratatouille. Ego, the most acclaimed and intimidating of food critics in the Parisian food scene, comes to visit the restaurant. In a pivotal moment of the restaurant’s career, Chef Remy makes an astonishing decision to serve Ego a simple dish: ratatouille. The other chef, Collette, responds in shock: “Ratatouille? It’s a peasant dish.” Remy persists, however, and serves Ego an upscale version of what one would normally consider a common dish. The enormous impact the dish has on Ego is brilliantly displayed. Upon taking a bite, Ego’s eyes widen, and suddenly we are transported to a scene in his past. Ego, a young boy, comes home with bruises and a broken bike. His mother, in a moment of tenderness, comforts him by serving him a plate of ratatouille. Here we see Ego’s humble background, and so does he. More than just nourishment, food is a remembrance of things past––it reflects who we are as people, and it is an expression of unconditional care.

We finish steaming the dumplings, and I place them on the dining table. I know that biting into one right away would burn my mouth, but I do so anyway, and I feel the mixture of scalding broth and savory pork filling overload my senses. This is the result of hours of intense labor, and immediately, my mind begins wandering in memories. I’m reminded of the summer I spent by myself in Shanghai––those languorous, humid days when I strolled through the old city, exploring the unknown and stumbling across a restaurant where I had the best soup dumplings of my life. The memory shifts, and I am now back in high school, at lunch, eating from my thermos those lukewarm dumplings my mother prepared for me, a sign that I was different from the other kids but in no way lesser. (One of my friends would write in my yearbook: “I love that you bring dumplings in your thermos.”) Finally, I am reminded of elementary school—the days when my mother would get home from work with little time to eat before picking me up from school. Knowing that I would be hungry, she would bring me a little snack that I’d promptly devour in the car.

It occurs to me that all these latent memories are connected in an endearing way––by the love I have for my mother and the love she has for me. I don’t say the three words to my mother, but I feel them.

I realize, upon reflection, that the sense of loss I feel is a loss of love. The busy schedule I subject myself to at school gives me little time to cook, and with that comes losing a way for me to express my love for myself and others.

When I come home from studying, I enter the kitchen with a sense of longing.

I decide that tomorrow I will go to the grocery store, and I will begin to cook again.

FEATS

Soup Dumpling Recipe Shanghai-style soup dumplings––traditionally known as xiaolongbao––are a happy marriage between soup and dumplings, two staples of Chinese cooking. To get the broth inside the dumpling, it must first solidify into a thick jelly, which is then mixed in the filling and wrapped in the dough. As the dumplings steam, the jelly melts, creating that savory soup that spills out when you bite in.

Here is a recipe that my mother uses. In the spirit of home cooking, we don’t always follow the same recipe, but this will produce good results.

Ingredients For the broth: • 0.5kg chicken back/wings • 1kg pork neck bones • 1-inch knob ginger, smashed • Salt (by taste) • 2 bay leaves • 6g whole white peppercorns For the filling: • 300g ground pork • 3g sugar • 6g soy sauce • 60g ginger water For the dough: • 200g bread flour • 100g hot water • 3g salt Directions 1. Combine broth ingredients in a stock pot and cover with cold water. Bring to a boil, reduce to a simmer, and simmer for 3 hours. Strain broth, season with salt, and refrigerate overnight until set into a firm jelly.

2. To make the filling: combine pork, soy sauce, sugar, a pinch of salt and mix until a paste is formed. Add ginger water slowly and continue to mix until fully incorporated.

3. Cut the gelled broth into small cubes and mix it into the filling. Keep filling in the refrigerator until ready to use.

4. To make the dough: combine flour and salt, then mix in the water. Knead the dough until fully incorporated, then cover with a damp towel and let sit for 1 hour.

5. Divide dough into 4 sections. Take each section and roll out into a long strand, then cut the strand to make 10g sized balls. On a well-floured work surface, roll out each ball into a round, flat wrapper, around 1 mm thick.

6. To make the dumplings, place a small amount of filling onto each wrapper.

Pleat the edge of the wrapper with thumb and index finger, rotating the dumpling as you go while keeping the filling in the center. Once you reach the other end, connect the two ends of the dumpling and twist the top, then pinch it closed. Repeat with the rest of the dumplings.

7. To cook the dumplings: place a steamer lined with parchment paper over a wok with 2 inches of water. Let water come to a boil over medium heat. Carefully, place dumplings into the steamer. Steam until fully cooked, around 8 minutes, and serve immediately. Repeat with the remaining dumplings.

ERIC GUO B’23 can be found in his kitchen.

VOLUME 43 ISSUE 5

16

X MEHEK VOHRA “BAGGAGE” 17

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

DEAR INDY

This week, Indie’s back with answers to Providence’s piping hot questions. Together, we’ll explore how love, sex, and relationships often come with an awful lot of logistics. Reach Indie via email at dearindyemail@gmail.com or via the anonymous form linked below. Or catch her drinking “witches brew”—equal parts apple cider and bourbon—at the next Halloween bash.

Dear Searching, Ugh, the elusive meet-cute is unfortunately hard to come by, especially in Providence, where seeing a hot person you haven’t already had a fling with is a rare occurrence. I will offer that dating apps can help speed up the process—if you’ve matched with a cutie and run into them Dear Indie, somewhere, it’s basically a meet-cute except you already know they think you’re hot. Otherwise, linger at quaint coffee shops, which are plentiful here, carry a I’m so sick of dating apps. big stack of rare books and wait for the perfect moment to drop them in How can I increase my a crowded place, and shop at small boutiques or antique stores for a very likelihood of a meet - cute? specific item that the hot person of your dreams would also be looking for.

Love, Searching for the Spontaneous If you’re just looking for the rush of a meet-cute—the feeling like your love is star crossed—I suggest latching onto any bit of cosmic coincidence in a potential boo and romanticizing the hell out of it. I dated someone for a bit because we figured out that we once lived a few streets away from each other in a different city. I dated someone else for nine months because we had consecutive birthdays!! It was fate!!

Dear Indie,

Dear Indie,

Dear Bisexual Blues,

arting Any advice on st hip” with an “open relations not even sure someone you’re nship with? you’re in a relatio s

Love, Ambiguou

Dear Ambiguous,

Some questions you can use to spark the DTR convo: “do you refer to me as your partner/girlfriend/boyfriend/lover/etc?” or “is it weird if I post this picture of you on Instagram?” or “have you told your parents/ friends from home/therapist about me?”

Should I just get over it and move on?

Does this make me a bad person?

Love, Bisexual Blues

Either way, I suggest you talk to him about it. He could be more open-minded than you think. There’s a lot of room between “just getting over it” and breaking up to pursue these connections.

How s

hould

Dear Poster,

Dear In

die,

I soft l

aunch

Love, P

my new

oster

boyfrie

nd?

*boyfriend

VOLUME 43 ISSUE 5

DESIGN GALA PRUDENT

Fall is the perfect time for a soft launch! (For those unfamiliar, “soft launching” is the process of slowly and subtly revealing you have a new boo on the gram.) How about a story of his hand picking an apple, tagging the farm but not his handle? Or a photo of twin pumpkin spice lattes captioned #fallvibes? Leave crumbs for your IG stalkers—a mirror selfie in a bathroom that doesn’t look like yours, a weeknight dinner pic, two drinks at the Point Tavern, tagging him in a meme on a popular page. Use comments sparingly during the soft launch. Non-heart emojis on select pics of his should suffice: a star, the green check, a butterfly or bug. The soft launch is a great way to check in and make sure you and your boyf* are on the same page about your relationship—because what if he’s more on J. Cole’s wave: “Fuck your IG, I put something on your sonogram.”

TEXT AMELIA ANTHONY

This question is so tantalizingly vague. Define the relationship first! And let your lover know that you’re not looking for monogamy while you’re at it.

(Actually, first figure out if monogamy will be a deal-breaker for you, if you think you might not be on the same page.)

An active imagination is nothing to apologize for!

You cannot hope to police your fantasies. (I also feel obligated to interject that I don’t really believe in “good” people or “bad” people—we all have the capacity to do both good and harm unto others etc etc etc.)

Do these fantasies consist of just sexual connections with women or of a world without you dating him?

I’ve been with my boyfriend for over a year now and I love him a lot, but recently I can’t stop fantasizing about having sex with women again!

18

THE BULLETIN Mutual aid* & community fundraisers

Keeping up with Striketober

*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.

This month, workers all over the country are collectively expressing their unwillingness to labor under poor conditions and for meager wages, a moment that labor activists have begun to call “Striketober.” The sheer number of workers preparing for or engaging in organized strikes this month is staggering; in all, about 100,000 workers are striking or have threatened to strike in the past month.

Last week, more than 10,000 John Deere workers in Iowa, Illinois and Kansas began striking for higher wages after contract negotiations fell through on Oct. 14. Deere CEO salaries increased by 160 percent during the pandemic, while the contract offered to workers would only increase wages by 5-6 percent. On the fifth day of the strike, representatives from John Deere and the United Auto Workers met on Oct. 18 to continue negotiations. In addition, roughly 28,000 health care workers at Kaiser Permanente in California and Oregon voted this month to go on strike if their contract demands are not met, joining healthcare workers around the nation in demanding better conditions.

On Oct. 1, for example, more than 2,000 healthcare workers in Buffalo, NY, went on strike for better pay, working conditions, and staffing.

Support for unions is at its highest since 1965. Beyond the organized strikes of this month, “labor shortages” across the country are revealing worker’s power to push corporations and bosses to follow through on a national living wage, as people continue to refuse to work for anything less.

Stand in solidarity with workers fighting for better futures—don’t cross the picket line!

BULLETIN

———

Community Cares: Sponsor a Family for the Holidays (by DARE) https://bit.ly/DareCC Fill out 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.

Queer and Trans Mutual Aid PVD Venmo @qtmapvd, PayPal.me/qtmapvd Support mutual aid for LGBTQIA people in Rhode Island! There is a current backlog of 31 requests, equal to $3,100. Help QTMA fill this need!

Kennedy Plaza Survival Drive (by Wide Awake Collective) Venmo WideAwakes-PVD Cashapp: $MutualAidMondays Support the weekly survival drive at Kennedy Plaza! This drive distributes food, water, hygiene materials, warm clothing and other important items to folks in Providence who need them.

DESIGN OPHELIA DUCHESNE-MALONE

ILLUSTRATION AIDA SHERIF

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.

Upcoming Actions and Community Events ———

Rally with Rent Control Providence: Evictions are Spooky Saturday, Oct. 23 @ 1pm Location: Burnside Park Join DARE’s Tenants and Homeowners Association in fighting for rent control in Providence. Come out to the rally and protest Rhode Island failing to protect tenants by neglecting to establish an eviction moratorium.

Costume Contest & Double Feature @ Red Ink Community Library!

Oct. 23 @7 PM—Movie night @ Red Ink! Location: 130 Cypress Street Screening Killer Klowns from Outer Space and The Day the Earth Stood Still. $5 suggested donation // BYOB

———

Updates on Strikes Covered Last Issue ———

Kellogg Strike On Tuesday, Oct. 19, about 100 third-party ironworkers, carpenters, electricians, and tradespeople went back to the Kellogg’s cereal plants to avoid defaulting on their contracts. Still, the roughly 1,400 unionized employees at Kellogg’s cereal plants in Michigan, Nebraska, Pennsylvania, and Tennessee that went on strike Oct. 5 are still on strike as of Oct. 19, with no updates on negotiations. According to president of Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco Workers & Grain Millers Union (BCTGM) Anthony Shelton, Kellogg demanded that workers cede quality care, retirement benefits, and holiday/vacation pay. *Try not to buy Kellogg’s, Keebler, Pop-Tarts, Eggo, Cheez-It, Club, Nutri-Grain, Rice Krispies, Froot Loops, Special K, All-Bran, Bear Naked Granola, Mini-Wheats, Morningstar Farms, Gardenburger, Austin, Carr’s, Famous Amos, Pringles, Ready Crust and Kashi.

International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees (IATSE) In the wake of the IATSE strike authorization vote two weeks ago, the union has managed to reach a tentative three-year agreement with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP) for The Basic and Videotape Agreements which would affect 40,000 film and television workers represented by 13 West Coast IATSE local unions. The agreement was released on Oct. 16, just two days before the strike was set to begin. #DoesBrownCare fights to amplify the demands of workers with Brown Dining Services (by Matt Rauschenbach) Last week, a coalition of students released a statement decrying the conditions of our dining halls in response to a Brown Daily Herald article entitled “We’re in desperate need of help.” In that piece, speaking under a pseudonym for fear of disciplinary action, a worker said that once students bring an issue to the forefront, the administration listens. The goal of #DoesBrownCare is to outline broad goals: better wages, better conditions, better communication, and more. The specific demands of workers must happen once contract negotiations begin in November.

As students at Brown, we have an obligation to make noise; and once we have, we have the responsibility to step back and let workers lead the way with specific demands.

Go to bit.ly/doesbrowncare and sign your name. Add your voice to the nearly 700 (as of Tuesday, Oct. 19) students who know that workers deserve better.

In addition, we will be having Days of Action over the next week to put pressure on the administration from many different angles. Each day of action will take no more than 10 minutes. Sign-up and receive the logistics for each day in your email in the morning at this link: bit.ly/ actionsignupbrown.

Even having this discussion at a University with a nearly $7 billion endowment is embarrassing. We have one question: does Brown care? It is up to the administration to take action and show us the answer.

Scan QR to sign the petition.

From DARE: STAND with our youth and ask Judge Forte to immediately release this child!

On Sept. 16, organizers with Direct Action for Rights and Equality (DARE) and the families of children targeted by the Providence Police Department this past summer marched to demand 1) that authorities release the child still in custody; 2) that all of the charges from the Sayles Street incident are dropped; 3) that the Law Enforcement Officer’s Bill of Rights (LEOBoR) be repealed; and 4) that the city defund the Providence Police department.

This week, DARE gave the following update on the fight to realize these demands: “Body cam footage was released this summer of city and state police viciously beating and spitting on three boys in the Manton projects (tinyurl.com/manton-ave). One of the three—a fifteen year old—has been incarcerated since July 9th. He has been denied release FOUR times by Judge Michael B. Forte, although he went through brain surgery just weeks before the assault for a preexisting condition and police reopened the incision, splitting his head. He has missed medical appointments while incarcerated and is experiencing severely painful headaches.”

Sign the petition to encourage Judge Forte to free Swervo now! tinyurl.com/free-swervo