The College Hill Independent Vol. 43 - Issue 7

THE INDY*

05 INSTITUTIONALIZING THE PTP 11 THE WOMAN THAT LOVES YOU 13 DINÉ BIZAADÍSH BIHOOŁ’AAH?

Volume 43 Issue 07 12 November 2021

THE LINEAL ISSUE

* The College Hill Independent

THE INDY* This Issue

Masthead*

00 “DIABOLIC FANTASIES & COMPOSITE ANIMALS”

WEEK IN REVIEW Alisa Caira Asher White

Viraj Mithani

02 WEEK IN THE WELLNESS ECONOMY & CROSSWORD Asher White & Maya Polsky

03 THOUGHTS ON THE BLACK DIASPORA

Osayuwamen “Uwa” Ede-Osifo

05 INSTITUTIONALIZING THE POLITICAL THEORY PROJECT Peder Schaefer

07 AT THE END & PRAYERS FOR THE GODLESS Sierra Martin

08 “FINISHING TOUCH” Quinn Erickson

09 “MY LIGHT IS A TUMOR, MY BLACK IS A VOID THAT LIGHT UP THE ROOM” Gala Prudent

FEATURES Ifeoma Anyoku Emily Rust Gemma Sack NEWS Kanha Prasad Nick Roblee-Strauss ARTS Jenna Cooley Nell Salzman EPHEMERA Chloe Chen Lauren Lee METRO Leela Berman Ricardo Gomez Peder Schaefer SCIENCE + TECH Lucas Gelfond Amelia Wyckoff BULLETIN BOARD Lily Pickett X Yukti Agarwal Justin Scheer DEAR INDY Amelia Anthony

10 CONJURING THE RABBIT

LITERARY Alyscia Batista CJ Gan

11 THE WOMAN THAT LOVES YOU

OUTREACH COORDINATOR Audrey Buhain

Danielle Emerson Corinne Leong

13 DINÉ BIZAADÍSH BIHOOŁ’AAH? Danielle Emerson

15 DIGITAL DIRTY WORK Sacha Sloan

17 “SEASONAL” Chloe Chen

18 DEAR INDY Amelia Anthony

19 THE BULLETIN

From the Editors twenty birthdays, twenty wishes.

1. longer wednesdays. 2. infinite wishes. 3. every day, a good yawn when you wake up. 4. peanut butter. 5. iphone autocorrect that doesn’t misspell your name. 6. every birthday ever will fall on a friday. 7. always be first in the eventbrite queue. 8. to be a Tank. 9. world peace. 10. a very good book. 11. and a jolly good read! 12. two healthy acls. 13. warm sun through a window on a cold november day. 14. to be a mermaid. 15. a swattable fly. 16. wait, no flies! 17. actually, some flies! for biodiversity. 18. prosperous years and much happiness. 19. a silly little kiss on the head. 20. an experience—something poetic, without trying. 21. and an xtra wish just for anabelle -IA, MC, (and, if you tell us what it is, it’ll be ruined, just as a heads up). DM, & IM

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Volume 43 Issue 07 12 November 2021

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

MVP Peder “The Tank” Schaefer BIRTHDAY BBY Anabelle Johnston

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 the Wellness Economy TEXT ASHER WHITE DESIGN ISAAC MCKENNA ILLUSTRATION JOHN GENDRON

As the days begin to bend into darkness and the leaves become brittle in the last amber glare of autumn’s cold sun, it is paramount to maintain both psychic and physical wellness. Despite the resetting of our clocks, this week has shown some promise in the pursuit of a healthy diet and exercise routine: 1. Owners of fresh Adidas track suit pants and Apple Watches will be positively delighted to learn of the past month’s innovations: a first-of-its-kind 2 Gallon (!) Water Box was rolled (er, pushed) out by Essentia last month. The box boasts Essentia’s beloved Supercharged Ionized Alkaline Water in a container that uses 80% less plastic, is 90% more stackable, and is 100% less convenient. The Supercharged Ionized Alkaline Water 2 Gallon Box© is ideal for those who would prefer to think of their water bottles as “carry-on luggage,” in addition to college-aged partygoers who find Bota Box wine to be “too alcoholic” for their tastes. The Supercharged Ionized Alkaline Water 2 Gallon Box© is filled to the brim with 99.9% pure water, according to essentiawater.com. As unwanted minerals from Providence’s historic pipelines continue to build up in this Indy writer’s gallbladder, Essentia’s new product is certainly a relief. Buy as many as you can, as soon as you can—this is perhaps Essentia’s last triumph before they are sued by the country of Denmark for using their flag as a logo.

2. Meanwhile, Dairy Food Magazine (find them online at www.dairyfoods.com, though be careful—you only get 2 free articles!) published on Monday, Nov 8, that cultured dairy has seen a 12% increase in revenue this year in the US. Talk about bloating! Since 2020, Stonyfield cottage cheese sales have swollen by 20%, and yogurt continues to lurch upwards. Those looking to get in on the gut-biome action are encouraged to purchase the 3 oz. Peach Chobani in the Thayer St. Metro Mart that has also been swelling since June 2020.

The Indy is proud to offer both health industry updates and wellness tips alike as we enter cold and flu season—stay vigilant by getting enough sleep and taking a few shots of Pepto with that Go-Gurt.

Mixed Media PUZZLE MAYA POLSKY

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Catherine up a Creek?

Way out there Corp. bigwig Take a gap year Inadvertent baseball target Barrette, for one “Lobster Telephone” meets “Jolene”?

Weight Flair Scuffle Best ever, slangily Recent recall acronym “Feeling Good” meets “Water Lilies”?

The best puzzles have a good one CPR specialist These, in Marseilles Simile connector Pyramid architect Genre for Sly and the Family Stone Famed New York high school, or a hint to this puzzle’s theme?

Those, in Mallorca Short (of) New ___ Prefix with -friendly Swine, for one Renovated “Just Dance” meets “The Ballet Class”?

Important no. for shareholders?

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Serving of butter Auction actions Oil grp.

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Arizona flat-top Norse goddess who wrestled Thor Shoe material for half of 58-across Sandwich inits.

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Actor who played 9-down Table salt component Insulted, slangily Where it’s fun to stay Gwyneth’s daughter Indian term of address Video game series full of crime and cars, abbrev.

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VOLUME 43 ISSUE 7

02

FEATS

THOUGHTS THE BLACK

TEXT OSAYUWAMEN “UWA” EDE-OSIFO

DESIGN GALA PRUDENT

ILLUSTRATION MICHELLE DING

On Movement, Taste, and Cultural Sustainment

03

Sometime last semester, when I was living 15 minutes away from campus, my newfound independence grew tiring. Cooking—which I called my greatest feat, for a year prior I had not even been able to boil rice—was an additional burden in a moment when everyday tasks seemed heavier than ever. So, one evening when I no longer felt the energy to cook, I decided to order takeout from one of Providence’s Nigerian restaurants. I missed home, and though I grew up viewing any re-creations of my mother’s food as valiant duplicates but never the original, I felt a prolonged desire to taste the dishes that would not greet me for another three months.

Perhaps because I ordered 15 minutes before closing, they threw in an additional bowl of rice, fried plantains, and tomato stew along with complimentary puff puff—a Nigerian delicacy made from deep-frying dough. As I attempted to capture the essence of what puff puff is to my roommate, she said, “Oh! So it’s your culture’s fried doughnut?” I paused and replied, “Yes and no. It’s not a fried doughnut, it’s puff puff.”

Both at their core are fried dough. Nonetheless, my friend and I went back and forth about their names.

So many moments of ‘your culture’s this’ being ‘my culture’s that’ occur, particularly within the Black diaspora. Beef patties are flakier than empanadas, and empanadas have more filling variations than meat pie. But, in the end, they are all filled with meat and surrounded by a type of dough. Maybe my initial resistance to calling puff puff a doughnut was because it felt like a tiny cultural betrayal. Often, we take pride in boasting about the uniqueness of our cultures. I think of the West African dish jollof rice, made from baking rice mixed with a generous amount of tomatoes, tomato paste, onions, bell peppers, and other vegetables. Every year, debate wages on between Nigerians, Ghanains, Liberians, and Sierra Leoneans over whose country has the better jollof rice—as if one country’s honor, pride, and joy hinge on the title of having the tastiest version. Food, perhaps, carries this weight because of the meticulous process of creation. The way I season my food is how my mother seasons her food, using Adobo and Maggi cubes for savory taste and cayenne pepper for a hot spice. And my mother’s style of cooking is learned from her mother, and I imagine that my

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

grandmother also learned from her mother, and so the family lineage traces upwards. Cooking is an amalgamation of precise and imprecise measurements, ordered and unordered steps, negotiable and nonnegotiable ingredients—in part because each recipe is tinkered slightly as it is passed on. I have begun to wonder, with puff puff favoring Southern fried dough, what other cultural markers have been passed on within the Black diaspora?

Diasporic thinking is an exercise in mystery-solving. Imagine a vase, shattered to pieces, then scattered across the world haphazardly—or perhaps not haphazardly, but methodically, in a triangulation of coastal lands. The pieces as tiny shards have jagged edges, which may appear painful to touch because of the pain inflicted upon them, but they are not—not entirely. With the passage of time, the pieces arrange them-

it can be transformed. I referenced “appropriation” to showcase the erasure of Black people— of Afro-Argentines who shaped one of the most important traditions in Argentina’s popular culture. Appropriation, in this context, was the brazen refashioning of customs that had once been rendered viscerally undesirable by Eurocentric societal norms. The “transformations,” the woman referenced, cannot occur between dominant in-groups and marginalized outgroups. When white people appropriate, they exploit and sever people of color from cultures they created. But transformations do occur. It is within the Black diaspora that I see this practice of passing on and reshaping cultural markers reminiscent of previous ones.

There is a certain beauty in the Black diaspora’s evolution into distinct communities separated by geography, language, religion—and

selves into new vases, new bodies, new communities, and new histories. It is difficult, then, to even trace back to one singular point in time— maybe even futile to attempt.

In the Instagram comments of an article I wrote about Black influence on the whitewashed tango of Argentina, an Argentinian woman criticized my word choice of “appropriations” in describing how modern tango evolved.

“No one invents anything,” she wrote in Spanish. “Everything is transformation and new versions of what already exists.”

I did not reply. If I did, I would have told her that we agree on that front. Indeed, science tells us matter cannot be created or destroyed, but

yet forever linked in some cultural regards. In the wake of destruction and in the afterlives of colonialism and slavery, transformations embody the resilience of the diaspora. If appropriation is inextricably linked to the erasure of Black culture, then Black culture is sustained through the existence of the Black diaspora. +++ On the A train of the New York City subway, at the peak of the afternoon rush hour, the train car would be packed to the brim. Mostly, young students sat, some in uniform, others not, returning from school, and employees commut-

FEATS

ON DIASPORA ing from their Manhattan jobs, who were thirty minutes into the ride with twenty more to go.

In these crowds, subway performers managed the impossible: carving out a tiny circle where they could dance. I had seen many dancers on the trains, but one person dominated the train I took twice a day: Kid the Wiz, a Brooklyn legend.

The scene often began like this: Kid the Wiz’s crew would hop on the trains chanting, “Showtime, Show-show time!” as they performed their litefeet routines, a dance that originated in Harlem among Black street performers. An enormous grin shone on Kid the Wiz’s face as he took off his snapback hat, flipped it around his elbow without using his hands, and then flipped it back onto his head.

Litefeet got its name for how quick the movements of dancers were, with backflips turning into frontflips turning into intricate footwork, giving the audience the feeling that the dancers were indeed “weightless.” This, to me, seemed to be a rewriting of history: To be a Black dancer suspended mid-air, emulating superheroes by defying gravity and using their core body strength to hang from the poles or even jumping over their own legs without losing balance.

I mean to say that Black people have not always been portrayed as superheroes. But, in these moments, where the litefeet dancers would walk in slow motion mid-air, for however long it took for the train to get to the next stop, it felt like an alternate world.

Josephine Baker, an iconic Black dancer and performer, often played racially ambiguous characters in her movies, who were distinguished from the omnipresent backdrop of respectable, white, French society through solo and flamboyant dancing. In contrast, during Baker’s prewar peak of fame in France, many popularized dances featured clasped partnership—waltzes across the dance floor, starkly different from the way Baker would command attention when she stepped onto a stage. French fascination with Baker’s dancing, in part, represented white audiences’ curiosity to witness the exotic “Other,” so the spotlight was always on her. Despite the contested arena of her performances, her being a Black female dancer with global fame was ground-breaking.

I bring up Baker, now, because just as with her dancing, litefeet performances often concentrate the audience’s gaze on one person at a time as they showcase their respective talents.

The car trains of the subway provided constantly rotating audiences. The conversion of the trains into a stage was difficult to ignore given

the booming music from the speakers the dancers brought or the hard thump from feet landing after flips. When the chant of “Showtime” rings out in the air, there is no need for humility or even to stick to any choreographed moves. In my predominantly-Black middle school, we would attempt to create these litefeet circles at recess, all vying to be the most “valid” in the eyes of our peers. Freestyling was not for the weak.

Circa my eighth grade year, subway performances became less frequent. Years later, I learned that the then-police commissioner had branded subway dancing as a disturbance to the quality of life for others, which stemmed from “broken-windows” policing theories. The commissioner claimed visible signs of agitation or social disorder would invite more crime.

The leap from subway dancing to imminent crime requires a bit of imagination, but this criminalization is not new. Black movement has often been criminalized for what it represents: community.

The creation of a diasporic community was evident in my middle school, where the majority of us were immigrant children—Jamaicans, Haitians, Grenadians, Nigerians, Trinidadians— performing this African-American street dance.

My school was a microcosm of the Caribbean and African communities left in our gentrifying neighborhood, Crown Heights. All across the nation, each state had various street dances, from club in New Jersey, jigging in Philly, and many more, reminiscent of dances my cousins and I would do at Nigerian weddings.

I add here, though, that the way cultural practices have been diffused across the Black diaspora is also not a one-way street, meaning that the food, dance, and music that give essence to the Black diaspora do not only trace backwards to the past, but are also iteratively influenced by the present. Modern genres of music that gained popularity in the United States, such as rap, have thriving subcultures in the United Kingdom, the Caribbean, and West Africa. Growing up, when I thought about Black people’s liberation struggles, I viewed them mostly as impersonal and political. But the Black diaspora reminds me of another venue of struggle: the interpersonal realm. Dancing, cooking, singing, and all forms of cultural expression are vessels through which Black people have been able to feel and to be alive (aliveness as a spectrum of human emotions). Arenas where we resist being acted upon and where we exist outside foreign attempts to define us.

The Black diaspora is difficult to define

given how conceptions of Blackness are not uniform globally. Some ethnic groups within societies around the world still grapple with whether they identify as Black and are still uncovering narratives of Black culture in the history of their countries. Still, despite contested constructions of race, I felt most connected to other Black people or Black descendants in the spaces where we found commonality in our upbringings. A cursory glance at the similarities in distinct Black cultures may lead to the conclusion that similarities are mere coincidence or even intrinsic to Black existence, without questioning their origin. The Black diaspora’s essence may have been shaped heavily by survival tactics of displaced peoples’ who struggled to adapt through isolation and deprivation meant to break down unity, meant to reaffirm the myth that they were not human. I don’t mean to say, then, that the Black diaspora is emblematic of global Black unity. But, what the similarities speak to are a continuity of cultural practices that does fit neatly into the categories of nationhood or even “Blackness” itself. The diaspora speaks to each other, then, in an iterative dialogue. The diaspora represents a multitude of stories with the weaving motif of Black aliveness. Perhaps the difficulty in tracing how the diaspora interconnects is the point—that to survive, only those who are part of the culture need to know how the culture functions.

OSAYUWAMEN “UWA” EDE-OSIFO B’22 encourages everyone to buy puff puff.

VOLUME 43 ISSUE 7

04

Institutionalizing the Political Theory Project

TEXT PEDER SCHAEFER

DESIGN SAM STEWART

ILLUSTRATION XINGXING SHOU

METRO

How an ideological Trojan horse might breach Brown

05

Last month, Brown University faculty were introduced to a carefully written proposal for the creation of a new Philosophy, Politics, and Economics Center (PPE Center) at the University that would “build upon the current network of faculty” involved with the Political Theory Project (PTP). The proposal is measured in its language, and on its face it’s seemingly benign: a few new professorships, a greater standing for the PTP within the bureaucracy of the University, more funding for post-doctoral students, and a commitment to “advancing inquiry that crosses disciplinary and ideological divisions.” But a closer scrutiny of the proposal and the organizations and people behind it show that the PTP is the tip of the iceberg of a nationwide right-wing ideological offensive, and the establishment of a new PPE Center at Brown would be a dangerous perpetuation of these ideas.

The PTP was founded at Brown in 2003 by John Tomasi, a professor of philosophy in the political science department. Per their mission statement, the PTP seeks to “investigate the ideas and institutions that make societies free, prosperous, and fair.” They stress “viewpoint diversity,” and support three faculty and two staff members, along with a number of student groups on campus. The PTP backs organizations like the Brown Political Review and the Philosophy, Politics, and Economics Society, where they pay students to engage in weekly discussions on political theory. They’ve hosted debates via their Janus Forum lecture series on issues like teachers unions, whether or not the United States should support Israel, and inequality, where they seek to invite “established scholars with alternative perspectives to present their research in direct conversation with one another.” The PTP currently receives no funding from Brown, and is paid for only with external donors, including over $3.8 million from Koch-affiliated organizations since 2005. As is, the PTP is small and seemingly innocuous.

However, according to the proposal recently obtained by the College Hill Independent, administrators and faculty within the University are currently working to shift the PTP into the PPE Center at Brown—with the same faculty and mostly the same mission, but under a different name. This shift from being a “project” into a University-funded “center” would further institutionalize right-wing economic and social ideas at Brown by tying the project of the PTP to the British academic discipline of PPE, a cognitive shift that borrows legitimacy from a completely separate intellectual field that models itself as ‘centrist’—to build a hub for for right-wing thinkers for years to come. It’s Dennis Prager of the popular PragerU YouTube channel, but with extra steps.

And with the push towards becoming a PPE Center, the faculty associated with the PTP are geared to make an even larger impact at Brown. A potential consequence of a stronger Koch presence on campus is the spread of a “form of libertarianism that is probably better understood as corporate supremacy or property supremacy,” Nancy MacLean, a professor of history and public policy at Duke University and a Brown alumnus, told the Indy. In 2017, MacLean published ​​​​Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America, a book that investigates in-depth the

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

Koch-affiliated networks that are connected to the PTP. When asked about her biggest worries about the shift from the PTP being a “project” into a “center,” MacLean said that it’s “frightening to me, because that means they are trying to put a bigger Trojan horse on the Brown campus…It’s an enterprise to capture students, to deliver propaganda under the guise of education, and to expand their movement.” Faculty and students are beginning to organize against the institutionalization of corporate power and money at Brown, but if they don’t act soon, it might be too late.

Where’s the money coming from?

Tomasi, as well as other PTP-affiliated faculty members, are deeply tied to a web of rightwing donors who, in the words of MacLean, are engaged in one of the “most arch-right political projects you can imagine.” The Kochs—who famously made their fortune in the fossil fuel industry—and the foundations that have upheld their legacies, have financed organizations opposed to government action on climate change, racial discrimination, and regulation of corporations. Recently, these foundations backed groups that have fought mask mandates, and have perpetuated theories of mass voter fraud.

They’ve heavily backed the Federalist Society, a law group working to move federal courts to the right, a process which RI Senator Sheldon Whitehouse has described as “court capture.”

The Koch foundations have also made a concert-

“If Brown decides to transform the PTP into a full center, with the full backing of the University behind it, Brown will become another node in an ever expanding array of right-wing economic thought.” ed effort—and have spent nearly $350 million doing so—since 2005 to spread right-wing, libertarian economic ideas across the United States, by supporting academic centers, tenured professorships, and research in line with their ideals at over 300 universities. The PTP at Brown is merely one of many footholds that they have for their economic and educational agenda.

Tomasi has been linked to these right-wing donors for decades, and he’s continued to reach out to them to help fund the PTP during his time at Brown. His PhD at Oxford was funded by the John M. Olin Foundation, a conservative American grant-making foundation which donates heavily to conservative-leaning causes. In 2010, he won the aptly-named Charles G. Koch prize, awarded to a prominent alumnus of the Institute for Humane Studies at George Mason University, a Koch funded academic initiative that they poured over $45 million dollars into from 2005 to 2018. Tomasi is also linked to the

Ayn Rand Society, the Heritage Foundation, and Libertarianism.org, all right-leaning organizations with ties to big conservative donors like the Koch-associated foundations. All of this information Tomasi displays publicly either on his CV or on his Brown-run website. Tomasi, after multiple inquiries, was not able to be reached for comment on this article.

The most recent data available shows that the Koch-associated foundations have directly donated $3.8 million to Brown from 2005 to 2019, including almost $1.5 million in 2018 alone. According to IRS 990 forms, $653,442 went directly to the PTP in 2016. It’s unclear where the rest of the money went. In their “Proposal to Establish a Center for Philosophy, Politics, and Economics,” the authors write under the “Funding” subheader that “the PTP strictly adheres to Brown University’s gift policy, which separates academic programming decisions from any particular donor interests or grant requests.” However, tracing the politics and theories of the project and its associated faculty shows that the right-wing logics of the Koch-associated foundations is inextricable from the PTP, despite Brown’s gift policy.

When asked about this gift stipulation, MacLean said “she would laugh cynically in [the] faces” of academic administrators who think they can keep Koch foundation money separate from the academic programming decisions within the University. “I would like them to release all the donor agreements, because time and time again, contrary to what they tell students and faculty, they come with strings that matter,” said MacLean.

Ideas matter Although the PTP will hold up their invitations to speakers like Noam Chomsky when accused of upholding one-sided viewpoints on markets and the economy, it is overwhelmingly true that its academic projects revolve around work which promotes and spreads right-wing ideas.

Tomasi, for example, teaches classes on prosperity, libertarianism, and market democracy in Chile. His syllabi, while they contain a small taste of leftist ideas in thinkers such as G.A. Cohen, are chock full of economic libertarians like Freidrich Hayek, Milton Friedman, and, strangely enough, Stephen Moore, who helped write Donald Trump’s tax cut bill he passed in 2018.

To be more specific, the concern with teaching right-wing libertarian economists is that their ideas are used as justification for the perpetuation of policies that favor the rich and powerful, in part by utilizing market-centric economic theory to divorce the lived experiences of precarity from the results of their studies—a process that, ultimately, leads to policies that harm marginalized populations. This is also known as neoliberalism. Libertarian economics centers the idea that the welfare state needs to be dismantled and public services need to be replaced with private entities. Economists affiliated with the University of Chicago, such as Milton Friedman, began pushing the idea in the 1960s and 70s that governments needed to deregulate industries and remove antitrust laws, and instead only intervene in the economy via changes in monetary policy. The spread of these ideas has led to the gradual deconstruction of the welfare state in America in the past 50

METRO

years, leading to increases in poverty, people experiencing homelessness, and economic insecurity for millions of Americans. The PTP is merely another node from which these ideas propagate, and that propagation would increase if the PTP became a fully fledged center.

Going mainstream at Brown via the formation of a “center” would hold special prominence for the Koch-affiliated movement, as no other Ivy League university has a center founded with Koch-affiliated money. While most Ivy League schools take some money from Koch-affiliates, MacLane emphasized that “it is so valuable for them to have a center at a place like Brown.”

A close scrutiny of the professors currently involved in the PTP, and who would be involved in the PPE Center, shows that they’re spreading far-right ideas. “These are not normal professors,” MacLane told the Indy. “These are foot soldiers in an ideological project.”

In Jane Meyer’s book on the pervasive impact of money in politics, Dark Money, she writes that Tomasi “slyly” told a reporter for a conservative magazine that “after a whole semester of Hayek, it’s hard to shake them off that perspective over the next four years,” and that Tomasi is one of the Koch’s “pet professors.” MacLane added that bringing undergraduate students into the Koch foundation fold as early as possible was central to their mission.

And it’s not only Tomasi. A number of faculty and staff currently associated with the PTP, such as Daniel J. D’Amico, David Skarbek, and Emily Skarbek, fall in-line with the rightwing politics of Tomasi and the Koch-affiliated foundations. D’Amico, the Associate Director of the PTP, studies prisons and mass incarceration through a market economics lens, often arguing in defense of private prisons and “market provided criminal justice services.” David Skarbek, an associate professor, also studies incarceration and imprisoned populations through an economic framework—at one point, he published a paper on how applying a “rational choice framework” to ships carrying enslaved people shows that “slaves [sic] could more effectively overcome the collective action problem when there were fewer slaves [sic] aboard,” again divorcing lived realities from the study of those same individuals. Skarbek, who teaches classes such as “Crime, Punishment, and Politics” believes that increasing the number of police officers on the ground and incarceration are both effective methods of controlling ‘crime.’

“If you dig into what the actual ideology that is being taught, you are looking at the radical right of this country,” MacLane told the Indy.

ter” would have on Brown. The authors of the “Proposal to Establish a Center for Philosophy, Politics, and Economics” stress their desire to combat specialization by bringing an “interdisciplinary approach to education and scholarship.”

They write on page two that merely naming the center a center of “political theory” would not do justice to the work of scholars who are trying to understand the origins of social institutions that are “free, prosperous, and fair.” On page four, the authors express excitement about greater course offerings and a PPE concentration, aiming to increase the number of students they engage. There are also hopes for more faculty appointments, an increase in the number of graduate fellows, and an increase in seminars to foster “interdisciplinary excellence and produce engagement.”

Also troubling is the proposal’s Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion statement. The center claims that they’ll diversify faculty hiring by posting on diverse job boards like “WorkplaceDiversity.com” and “VeteransConnect.com,” all with the goal of finding candidates from “historically underrepresented groups” who also have research interests that “align with the mission of the Center.” What they neglect to mention is that the ideas that they’re seeking to spread through their center historically have marginalized the very groups that they seek to recruit from.

Finally, in their emphasis on diversity, equity, and inclusion in their course catalog, the authors stress that classes taught by current PTP faculty like Tomasi’s “Prosperity” and David Skarbek’s course “Crime, Mafias, Prisons” “have in the past, naturally dedicated specific lecture space within their respective seminars to address topics of diversity and inclusion.” This claim is also questionable, as as the core thinkers that most members of the PTP engage in are white, male, right-wing political economists, such as Hayek and Friedman, who push a view of the world that justifies the presence of the wealthy and the few at the expense of the poor and the many.

The move to “center” Understanding the PTP as an outpost of rightwing economic thought conjured into being by the Koch-affiliated foundation’s money—and not as a entity engaged in genuine “viewpoint diversity,” as the public relations wash would make it seem—reinforces the impact that transforming the PTP into an academic “cen-

Faculty resist Faculty at Brown are actively organizing against the expansion and institutionalization of the PTP. An internal faculty petition obtained by the Indy writes that “Our objections reflect deep concerns that are both local to Brown and that extend far beyond our campus. Simply put, there is no way to disentangle the proposed cen-

ter from the PTP’s origins as a component of a well-documented political project to undermine the scientific consensus around climate change and to roll back the gains of the Civil Rights Movement.” The letter, which is addressed to the Academic Priorities Commission (APC) at Brown, asks them to better “scrutinize the proposal now under consideration” and make public the funding that PTP has received over the past two decades, as well as question the DIAP claims made by the authors. The letter continues, saying that “Brown is one of several campuses nationwide where these ‘dark money’ investments have culminated in the creation of Philosophy, Politics, and Economics programs.

Indeed, to make this endeavor “permanent” on campuses like ours has always been the desired goal of this project’s funders.”

Naoko Shibusawa, associate professor of History, American Studies, and Ethnic Studies at Brown, told the Indy that, “The reason why faculty would be opposed to [the PPE Center proposal] is how this would be attached to furthering the Koch agenda, in ways that would be contrary to the very values and mission that Brown is trying to promote. Feminism, reproductive rights, anti-racism, science. These are things that matter to faculty and this is why we think it is a step-backwards… It would contradict and undermine the very goals that we are trying to reach.”

What’s next?

The PTP’s transformation into the PPE Center is not yet a done deal. There’s still time to organize against its approval. Faculty sources say the University’s internal APC is taking faculty input until November 15, and after that the proposal would go through a series of internal votes before going to a full faculty vote sometime this academic year.

If students and faculty take a stand, they can stop the Koch foundations’ right-wing outpost from getting a stronger foothold at Brown. But if they fail, and if Brown decides to transform the PTP into a full center, with the full backing of the University behind it, Brown will become another node in an ever expanding array of right-wing economic thought.

PEDER SCHAEFER ‘22.5 will probably end up on some sort of blacklist for writing this article.

VOLUME 43 ISSUE 7

06

At the End content warning: references to domestic violence, homophobia, transphobia Ninety days I knew you. Well. Five years but ninety days when you count it all together, add up the hours-minutes-seconds until echoes seep from our temples, dripping forward into the dirt. Watch it turn to mud beneath our toes, soft ghosts lost to the quiet—who am I without you to tell me what I see what I hear how I taste—I feel your skin in the space beneath my palms.

I want you to bury me here, scared as I am to drown.

TEXT SIERRA MARTIN

DESIGN ISAAC MCKENNA

ILLUSTRATION SYLVIE BARTUSEK

LIT

+++

07

Do you remember that day, our last? Step right up step right up everybody wins. You hated the phrase, I knew you did; Pop Warner and a scar on your cheekbone, the shape of your father’s ring. 42-7. But the day felt so bright, desperate fervor lost to the candy-coated smoke on our tongues, that I forgot everything in the wake of your smile. Giant pandas, Eva! And teddy bears and flamingos and purple dragons—we’ve got to get one, we’ve got to.

First-Team all-conference right here, if I can’t pop a balloon what can I do? Turns out nobody wins, but you laughed all the same.

Hand over mine, drag us through the hot summer air—you nearly trip over your laces but pull me further instead, still graceful in the dust. Face-painting free if you know the artist. We sold to him once at a concert, half oregano but he failed to notice. He still offered to brush soft bristles against your neck, draw a flower in the dip behind your ear—I wanted to kiss you there, in the space between its petals.

Fold a twenty and place it in the jar. Tip for good service.

In mirth we hid what we could not say. For all our pretense, we knew when it ended—green-brown sleeves pressed and hung over the bed frame, life signed away in a name that didn’t belong to you—but perhaps the words would mean nothing if we refused them life, truths beating fruitlessly against our lips. I love you I hate you who am I without you. We watched the sunset instead, climbed a roof and swung our feet above the crowds (you pretended to step on them like ants, there’s Tyler Barrington, pow! David Powers, boom!) and I didn’t notice the rusted sill, the chipped paint on the siding. Just the ends of your shoelaces, muddy from where they had untied.

I searched for dawn in the beat of your

heart against my chest, cheeks dry in the silence (your Dad said boys don’t cry but our tears had simply run out long ago). Found it in your smile.

I remember the day you first told me, light blue nails and a patterned dress that fell above your knees. You hadn’t known the correct size, told the cashier you needed a gift for your girlfriend but we weren’t anything yet and it wouldn’t have mattered besides. We were always something, even at twelve with pebbles-snails-secrets in our pockets, and the dress wasn’t meant for me or Katie Lynch or Jessica Lopez, it was yours from the moment you spied flowers in the lace. I watched the fabric billow as you spun in circles, bright and loose like the dancers on TV—Quiero Bailar!—watched your cheeks pinch at the edges. I look pretty.

We crushed the ants for as long as we could; stayed long past when the sky turned to shadow, thunder bleeding redwhite-blue in a celebration we would never claim as our own. God shed his grace on thee. Shoved away the memories as they beat against our skulls—lipstick stains on the carpet, the tube left abandoned beneath the bed. They’ll stamp it out of you, see if they don’t. You wouldn’t let me sign my name on your cast, never picked up the pieces of that shattered bookcase.

Left the splinters alone to bleed.

After: twin rainbows in the hollows of our cheeks, dust-soaked sneakers and platitudes lost on my neck (bruises but not the kind that hurt, could never hurt so long as it’s you). Your mother pressed her hands to my face, calloused thumbs tracing the line of my jawbone. You’ll still come around, won’t you? I opened my mouth, closed it; couldn’t speak beneath the hollows scraped in my throat. Of course I’ll visit, I can’t leave you with him. I’ll bring dinner every Thursday, put rice-beans-chicken-tomatoes in the pot to simmer, and one day she’ll knock on the door, step over the threshold and drop her bags in the hallway. If I stay she’ll come back. I nodded instead—noncommittal. I wanted you to leave just as much as I wanted you to stay, and wasn’t that the crux of it all.

You knocked my shoulder against my own, caught my eye and squeezed my hand.

Five years, Eva. You better stick around—don’t want to leave Mom all lonely for when I get back.

I felt tears burn like salt in the pockets of my eyes. I did not let them fall.

Prayers for the Godless I will never leave this place. Dig my feet into sand-earth-mud and scream, rest my secrets on the night air. Silence. My mother says that I am her breath become life and she never lies, eyes like endless marigolds—sometimes I cry and my tears belong to her too. If this is all I am, an amalgamation of whispers lost to a vacant heart, how do I feel the skin beneath my palms? I dig and I dig and I dig but the land finds no purchase, drip-dry stains on the grass. Impermanence.

Does God seek shelter from the rain? I never heard from him.

My mother sings in the quiet, τι είμαστε αν όχι το φως. What are we if not the light. I envy her faith in the inevitability of it all, envy the ivy as it curls tendrils around her spine. She has never watched her nails tear apart at the beds, blades quiet as they press into your skin. She says she lost me to the hitch of a sailor’s breath, nimble fingers

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

and an ace of spades—but then the sun always falls to storm, shadow-soldiers buried deep in their graves. Some things are too ugly to call your own.

I feel fingers trace names-words-facesprayers on my back. παρακαλώ σώστε την αδερφή μου, παρακαλώ σώστε τη μητέρα μου, παρακαλώ σώστε με παρακαλώ σώστε με παρακαλώ σώστε με. Please save my sister, please save my mother, please save me please save me please save me. Please. If I am a woman I am the worst of them, those who run from waves and hide in the curtains, blink through the dust and hope for nothing—born with the weight of a widow’s song. Why do we die before our mothers.

Why do we die at all?

SIERRA MARTIN B’24 wants a marigold painted behind her ear.

QUINN ERICKSON “FINISHING TOUCH”

X

VOLUME 43 ISSUE 7

08

09

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

GALA PRUDENT “MY LIGHT IS A TUMOR, MY BLACK IS A VOID THAT LIGHT UP THE ROOM” EPHEMERA

LIT

Conjuring the Rabbit content warning: neglect, references to domestic abuse mother or painted this piece reluctantly. Her mother always complimented its depth, never once sounding disappointed or spiteful. Mim wondered if her mother saw it the same way she did. Hollow, fragile, and stiff. Mim wondered.

The gallery always felt stuffy, filled to the brim, invisible hands cramming and squeezing and twisting against open space. Mim kept the windows open, begging fresh air to replace its stale counterpart. But choppy wind cascaded like tangled hair, catching uncomfortably in her mouth and ears. Another week crept by, and Mim eagerly awaited the Rabbit’s arrival.

When her mother talked about him, there was no quiver; gone was her mother’s usual tremble.

Her voice turned firm and stout. Mim wondered what it was about the Rabbit. Maybe he granted wishes, each art piece a physical representation of their bond. Maybe his eyes enchanted shopkeepers, turning them into better, temporary versions of themselves. Or maybe the Rabbit was

VOLUME 43 ISSUE 7

ILLUSTRATION SYLVIE BARTUSEK

DANIELLE EMERSON B’22.5 welcomes all newcomers to her door—just knock twice.

DESIGN ISAAC MCKENNA

just kind—kind enough to ease her mother’s nervous falters.

At six a.m., Mim’s mother chased her up the stairs. I want to meet him, she said.

You’re too young. Her mother frowned. He doesn’t care for children.

I help run your gallery, she cried.

You’re still a child. Two short knocks interrupted them. Quick, she hissed. Climb the stairs.

Mim knew her mother was a witch. She also knew her father had been human, or at least, looked human. The next evening, while conducting her daily rounds, Mim snuck into her mother’s office. Her mother usually spent the day after the Rabbit’s visit organizing a new display.

He had brought another basket. It twisted and twined, like roots crisscrossing beneath the base of a large oak tree.

Her mother, preoccupied with the Rabbit’s latest piece, ignored Mim. So she snooped, digging through old boxes and tattered notebooks. Eventually she found photographs. She thought they were stolen until Mim spotted her mother’s round, youthful face.

She counted the people in the photo. One, two, three—none of them looked familiar—four, five, six—wait—seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven— here’s one she recognized.

The man looked angry, maybe confused. But the shape of his face drew her in. Sharp along the sides but curved around his chin. Eyes, pools of black. But she knew, if people asked, he’d call them brown. Hair, dark and straight, falling flat against his cheeks. Skin, brown. Mim knew right away this man was her father. The human.

Mim’s mother owned an art gallery. Mim hated the art gallery. Her mother never paid her any attention. Never asked her how her day went

after school. Never offered to make tea in the evening. Never lulled her to sleep with a song.

All Mim’s mother cared about was the art gallery and the Rabbit. She acted as though they were her children, the Rabbit’s pieces; cradling them, wiping their noses. It churned Mim’s stomach as she watched from the corner.

Mim showed no sign of magic. Like her father, she felt very much human. She had no doubt he was dead. Magic was considered special, perhaps even sacred. A wood witch and a human together broke a million rules.

Mim considered running away. But she knew no human would take her in. And no witch would recognize her as one of their own. So she stayed.

Eventually, Mim asked about the photographs. She framed her question as an accusation. Why do I recognize him? Tears threatened to spill from the corner of her eyes. He shares my being. Why? She wanted her mother to say it—to acknowledge her father, the human. Mim’s mother said nothing, her features solemn and distanced.

Mim thought back to the Rabbit’s first visit.

Her mother rushed Mim up to the attic, hastily throwing in a blanket and bread before locking the door behind her. Mim listened to her mother’s footsteps scurry down the staircase before completely disappearing. She remembered how quiet it was, her breathing seeming to echo in the empty space. Slowly, Mim wrapped the blanket around herself and sat with her back against the door. She grabbed the bread, brushing off the dust before taking a bite. From three floors above, Mim heard the knock, loud and clear. Her mother’s steps returned as she opened the door.

The visitor conjured a strange air. Mim couldn’t hear the visitor’s voice, but her mother sounded steady, cautious. The visitor only stayed for a couple minutes. Soon, Mim felt the attic door open behind her.

Who was that? She asked.

Mim’s mother shook her head. He’s just a friend.

The visitor brought a sculpture. The copper material looked like branches, outlining a bare tree. Later, Mim spotted footprints. She didn’t like how her mother treated them like nothing, merely sweeping the leftover dirt outside. Mim was sure a man visited, but the footprints left behind were a rabbit’s.

That man, who is he? Mim didn’t know if she was asking about her father or the Rabbit. But she didn’t have time to ponder it. Swiftly, her mother struck her across the face. Mim noticed the scars along her neck, the fear that laced her irises.

Don’t speak nonsense. Her mother said. You sound like your father.

Mim realized she’d never find out who that man was.

Mim’s mother owned an art gallery. Not a fancy one. An art gallery that smelt like bare neglect and lost love. It stole your identity and demanded entrance into your dreams.

An art gallery that catered to everyone’s worst self, a step away from morality and a turn down distrust. Tread carefully, remember to check your pockets. Expect to be confronted, not by a person, but by cruel judgment.

Not a tasteful one. An art gallery full of discarded musings. Filled to the brim with rotten tomatoes, boxes full of old books, and jars listing essential oils. Frayed paintings, depicting faint smug smiles; the corner of their mouths upturned. Mim knew they were mocking her from a time beyond her own. She’ll never know their secrets, and the people in the paintings took too much pleasure in her frustration. If she closed her eyes, Mim could hear their whispers, like ants along the wall. And if she took a deep breath, Mim could smell wet fur.

TEXT DANIELLE EMERSON

Mim’s mother owned an art gallery. Not a fancy one. An art gallery that smelt like burnt toast and fried eggs on a hot summer morning. It filled your nose, turning the air stale, perhaps even static, robbing you of your first breath. Every morning, the gallery stretched like threaded string, taunt with her mother’s expectations. Spiders sought refuge in nooks, and stray cats snuck into crevices on the roof. She could hear their scuffles, flickering like fireflies around her ears. If Mim spoke, the entire building might collapse.

Mim’s mother owned an art gallery. Not a sophisticated one. An art gallery that catered to jaded travelers, beckoning with the promise of a roof and warm tea, tucked away from unsympathetic weather. Newcomers huddled underneath the gallery’s outdoor tapestries, woven together with glaring silk, pictures of woodland creatures eaten out by moths, and counted their blessings.

Patches of dark scarlet commonly stained their clothes. It rarely rained, but when it did, mud footprints trailed outside their window. It never took long for the strangers to disrupt the soft pitter-patter with two—always two— harsh knocks. Mim’s mother owned an art gallery, and everyone called it home.

Mim’s mother had a soft spot for the wicked and discarded. An art gallery full of local pieces dedicated to Mim’s mother—including dead animals found alongside the road and rotting vegetables curled around peeling frames. Art, she called it. Contemporary. Novel.

Fresh, she said. Mim noticed desperation lined her mother’s voice: raspy and wet. Her bangs, matted to her forehead, also dripped with sweat. It wasn’t unusual, but the sight always spun her thoughts like the spiderwebs caught in their high ceilings.

Mim watched as she dusted a new piece. I like it, she said. Is it his?

The gallery accepted new work daily. Mim had never seen the Rabbit, but she knew her mother favored his art greatly.

An original. Her mother smiled.

Mim angled her head to the side. It looks like a basket.

It’s something like that.

The Rabbit visited her mother every Friday morning. Mim was never allowed downstairs during his visits. She’d stare outside her open window, wind freezing, biting, and cruel. Like every other stranger, he knocked twice before her mother opened the door. Mim held her breath, listening for a deep voice through the wooden floorboards. But the house creaked and groaned, seemingly on purpose. Mim became used to cramming frustration down her throat, only to have it pinch and creep its way back up again, drawing growls from her stomach.

Each evening, Mim wove herself between the display cases—gliding atop mismatched socks, leaving smears in the dust. Along the walls, faces stared back at her. Portraits. Mim recognized a few of them. Their eyes were dark like her own.

There were only a handful she couldn’t place, eyes much too bright, starkly bright. On the very back wall, centered above the gallery’s newest exhibit, was her mother. Curated with dark brush strokes beneath each eye. The right corner of her lips turned downwards.

Her portrait looked empty. Mim didn’t know the artist, but she wondered if they hated her

10

TEXT CORINNE LEONG

DESIGN MICHELLE JIEUN SONG

ILLUSTRATION LOLA SIMON

ARTS

The Woman that Lo

11

On Crying in H Mart and motherlessness

I see my father in my face, his inexact imprint, where my cheeks grow broad and my nose fans out like a fish’s fins. I can’t sift my face for signs of my mother in the same way because I’ve never seen a picture of her. I might even say she doesn’t exist. But that doesn’t stop me from wondering if it’s her when my hair air-dries curly, or when my doctor tells me I’m still five-foot-two, the same height I’ve been since the fifth grade.

My parents are gay men. My birth involved four parties: my biological father, my non-biological (but equally fatherly!) father, an anonymous egg donor, and the surrogate I used to visit with my family every year until my parents learned from their Facebook timelines that she was an outspoken anti-vaxxer. I am well acquainted with every actor involved in my creation, except for one. I never had the urge to meet her.

I had never wondered much about her at all, except to soothe my vanity by wondering which aspects of my appearance she had influenced. I know she was blonde, which my biological father is not. I know she went to UCLA, the same school I transferred out of this year.

The death of my mother will feel different than the death of my father. My best friend told me this from the passenger seat of my car, the seat from which she always tells me things because she refuses to drive, even in our asphalt city of Los Angeles. We were listening to Japanese Breakfast’s Jubilee, which is supposed to be about joy. Losing my dad will be so, so sad. Just devastating. I rolled the windows down and she rolled them back up. Losing my mom, though… She imagines it would be like having something cut out of her. It would be the anger that accompanies theft, the pain of a raw incision, the loneliness and bewilderment of being alienated from someone who was your mirror image. +++ My best friend bought me Crying in H Mart for my nineteenth birthday.

It’s a memoir by Michelle Zauner, the lead singer of the band Japanese Breakfast, in which she details the premature death of her mother and her ensuing disconnect from Korean culture. As a mixed Asian American, I expected to resonate most with the scenes describing Zauner sobbing as she passes through aisles of soybean milk, Calrose rice, and bottled teas, wondering if she can be considered Korean if she doesn’t know which seaweed brands are authentic and which will get her laughed out of a college cultural society. Zauner’s grief is one

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

doubled in magnitude, the loss of her mother compounded by the loss of one of her last remaining links to Korea.

But the allure of Crying in H Mart for me resides not in its depictions of the cultural anxieties I’ve experienced. Instead, when I recommend the memoir to friends, I think about what I haven’t experienced. My heritage isn’t universal, but having a mother (nearly) is. I don’t expect all of my friends to know why I prefer 蘿蔔糕 to 芋頭糕, or why I cringe when they stab their chopsticks into a bowl of rice, the two twiggy implements perpendicular to the tabletop. But my motherlessness precludes me from an entire dimension of understanding. Crying in H Mart exposed me to a new crisis, one less actionable than aspiring toward Chineseness as I stumble over the four tones of a language not even my father speaks. Zauner writes about her mother with such longing and identification that I begin to doubt the depth and validity of my experience as a human being. She walks into the spaces in my life that other people fill with mother and encircles them in yellow caution tape.

“Sometimes my grief feels as though I’ve been left alone in a room with no doors,” Zauner writes of her mother’s death. “Every time I remember that my mother is dead, it feels like I’m colliding with a wall that won’t give.” Zauner’s mother Chongmi died of pancreatic cancer when Zauner was 25 years old, an event she describes in harrowing detail alongside anecdotes of their fraught relationship during her adolescence.

I can’t say exactly why Zauner’s memoir awakened in me a discomfort with my motherlessness that many other heartfelt motherdaughter tales (Joy Luck Club, Lady Bird, Gilmore Girls) could not. I suspect it could be the fact that Crying in H Mart is obviously the work of a songwriter, in the same way that the precision of Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous and Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar is obviously orchestrated by poets. Zauner’s language is heavy with the clipped descriptions and odd metaphors that enable her discography to entrance.

She introduces her husband as a man whose laugh “sounds like a cross between a muppet and a five-year-old girl.” A crematorium employee wraps her aunt’s ashes in “what looks like deli paper,” folding her neatly into “a sandwich.” Charming and tragic anecdotes intermingle, snapshots of her young-love wedding bumping up against the death of a loved one.

The skill with which her prose is handled probably has less to do

ARTS

oves You with the memoir’s hypnotic nature, however, than its honest shape.

Earnestness is the operating principle of Crying in H Mart. Flipping through its pages, I can’t help but think they comprise the words she wants to say most in the precise way she wants to say them. “I felt like no one would ever understand my pain unless I wrote it down in really grotesque detail,” Zauner stated in a 2021 interview with The Independent. This sentiment echoes throughout her writing. She focuses with brutal intensity on the memories that still plague her, describing her mother’s “bloated belly” and cries of agony as she endures “a feeling so excruciating it bursts through the foamy ceiling of narcotics like a bullet.” She follows, in complete nonchalance, prose bereft of detail, with “my mother’s last words were pain.” In this sentence-to-sentence dissonance I can hear a panicked guitar riff behind her words. It builds in both volume and fury, then flattens into a wave of blank sound. +++ I have been guilty of the naïve belief that grief is a doorway you can stroll in and out of. I don’t mean I have fooled myself into thinking that the death of my own parents won’t destroy me. The thought of losing them preoccupies me intensely. But I am reminded often of the specificity and inescapability of grief that arises from a mother’s death.

With it come tales of the intensity of a mother’s unparalleled love.

“When I got hurt, she felt it so deeply, it was as though it were her own affliction,” Zauner writes. “No one in this world would ever love me as much as my mother.”

The thing that gets me about Crying in H Mart, more than anything, is that Zauner has no interest in idealizing her mother.

Their relationship is understandably fraught and complex. Chongmi is a woman who is chiefly concerned with her physical beauty, shames Zauner’s career aspirations, and declares with malice that she aborted her second pregnancy because Zauner was such an awful child. But in the wake of her death, none of this matters. Despite her cruelty and imperfection, Chongmi’s maternal presence and care remain invaluable—the very existence of Crying in H Mart is a testament to that, and of Zauner’s immeasurable grief over her loss.

Sometimes I feel like I’ve been locked out of an essential human experience, a thing so integral to personhood that I must be an alien creature hobbling over the earth. Whether or not I will be adequately wounded by the death of my parents is not the point. But Zauner has convinced me that grief diagnoses the relationship between the surviving and the dead, that it is proportional to love and connection.

She writes of an unspoken battle of sorrows between herself and her father, the two of them weaponizing their devastation to determine “who loved [Chongmi] more” by first demonstrating “who had more to lose.” And if there is no loss more profound than that over a mother, can’t the same be said of love?

My relationship with my parents is uncomplicated. I become aware of this any time I am with my friends from high school, whose home lives seem to be defined by their mothers. Comparison between our parents follows the late nights of early summer, during which we shuffle around in the fluorescent and often faltering lights of Hollywood and Koreatown, our feet growing swollen in our impractical footwear. My friends will call me at an indeterminate hour the following afternoon, often still in bed, bemoaning a morning of assuaging their mothers’ worries. She said she couldn’t even close her eyes until I got back, they tell me.

She was up watching The Crown and checking my location until like, four. One tells me these summers are the most troubling seasons because they are spent living alone with her mother. Their feelings become one the moment her house key hits the lock.

My parents sleep soundly through my absence. I tell them where I am going and they don’t ask questions. Fights and tearful heart-tohearts range from rare to nonexistent. We are separate entities, likely with less at stake in each other than the average mother and daughter.

They have never been my mirror. If I am becoming my parents, as the maxim goes, it is because I have begun to make questionable driving decisions and now say something if a restaurant gets my order wrong. I am not a vehicle on a magnetized track, struggling each moment to pull away from the oncoming obstacle.

While I am mindful of the tension and claustrophobia my friends have faced with their mothers, their relationships remind me that claustrophobia implies proximity. My friends vent semi-frequently about their moms, but their complaints are colored by love. Their speech is shaped by movies watched together late into the night, of favorite meals prepared without request, of conversations playfully disparaging those who have hurt them, their wounds dreadfully alike. Zauner also showcases the simultaneous suffocation and beauty of the mother-

daughter dynamic. The constant, intense interactions that estranged Zauner from her mother during her adolescent years are the very same ones that allow her to declare her every action proof of her mother’s existence in the wake of her death. “If I could not be with my mother, I would be her,” Zauner says. I don’t know that I could resolve to do the same on behalf of my parents, and not for lack of wanting to.

To say any of this feels treacherous. I love and appreciate my parents beyond anything else. If I have problems, it is certainly not because of them. I have had a healthy and peaceful upbringing, and I am grateful for the freedom and independence it afforded me. I would not trade either of my parents for a mother, even if it meant someone could tell me what my first word was (neither of them remembers), even if it meant someone could have guided me through life step-by-step, rather than handing me the tools to build one and hurrying me along my way. There is also, of course, the unwanted social burden of my family standing in for every same-sex-parented family in existence. If I admit I sometimes wonder what it would be like to have a mother or acknowledge something precious in motherhood that can’t be replicated in any other relationship, someone will inevitably use it as ammunition against same-sex couples writ-large. But I am allowed to look tenderly upon things I don’t have, the same way a kid with straight parents is allowed to wish their mother had more time to spend with them, or their father didn’t sneeze so damned loudly. The same way Zauner, as a teenager, had wished her mother had been able to accept the differences between them. +++ I tried to write a poem in my senior year of high school about my egg donor. It was a shallow attempt. I remember my creative writing teacher reading it over and sitting numbly before me, as if hypnotized by the wood grain of the budget-bought school desk that separated us. He had a lot to say about it, my small and sickly excuse of a poem. But the only thing that stuck with me was the wonder in his voice when he said she could be dead and you’d never know.

The feeling that arose in me then was something like the donorbaby of panic and resignation. Panic because I may have lost my chance to know her. Resignation because I knew that even if I hadn’t, I would never try to. My teacher’s epiphany reduced me to one of those faulty Hollywood storefront lights my friends and I passed under in the summers, the bulb finally burnt out after years of pointless flickering.

I had never been bothered by the unlikelihood of meeting my egg donor before, but in confronting the destruction of any such possibility, I was defeated. Somewhere in the recesses of my mind, I think, I had always treated our meeting as a certainty meant to be delayed. In another, shallower part of my brain, I knew the reason I had never thought about her death was because I had never thought of her as one of the living. But I am getting to be the age she was when she donated the parts of her that would become me. With every year or even day I amass, the world opens up to me a little more, the unbearable depth and complexity of every person, alive or dead, clinging to me like a stubborn child. I imagine her in the supermarket, in her kitchen, commuting to work. The smallness of her life, if it persists, runs parallel to mine.

Before the conversation regarding my poem (ever-so-creatively titled “Donor”), I rarely thought of my egg donor. The idea of her death nonetheless sent me into habitual mourning. The thing is, my grief over my donor mother is pocket-sized. Just a splinter-thin sliver of the grief most people will eventually feel for their late mothers. I think one of the greatest gifts she gave me, other than life itself, was protection from the pain that comes with losing your mom. Zauner writes in Crying in H Mart of her perception that the world had fractured into two categories of people in the wake of Chongmi’s death: “those who had felt pain and those who had yet to.” I am grateful that I will forever be considered— by many metrics of the mothered—part of the latter.

My dad told me a few months ago that at the time of her donation in 2001, my egg donor stated on paper that she would not be opposed to meeting the children her eggs produced. As of yet, I have no intention of ever meeting her. Still, I think about her sometimes. When I do, I think of a pain I will never have to shoulder. Sometimes I even think of love.

CORINNE LEONG B’24 saves money on Mother’s Day.

VOLUME 43 ISSUE 7

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Diné Bizaadísh Bihooł’aah?

TEXT DANIELLE EMERSON

DESIGN FLORIA TSUI

ILLUSTRATION HANNAH CHANG

NEWS

(Are you learning Diné Bizaad)

13

Yá’át’ééh, shí éí Danielle Emerson yinishyé. Adooné’é nishłigí éí Tł’ááshchi’i nishłí dóó T’aneezahnii éí báshishchíín. Áadóó Áshįįshí éí dashicheii dóó Táchii’nii éí dashinalí. Akoot’éego éí asdzáán nishłį. Naa’táá’ní Neezdęę naasha. Brown Universitydi ííníshta’.

Shimá éí Debbra Chiquito wolyé. Áadóó éí Shizhe’e Travis Emerson wolyé.

Hello, my name is Danielle Emerson. I am from the Red Bottom People Clan, born for the Tangle Clan. My maternal clan is the Salt People Clan, and my paternal clan is the Red Running Into the Water People Clan. I am a Diné woman. I am from Shiprock, New Mexico.

I attend school at Brown University. And my parents are Debbra Chiquito and Travis Emerson.

The first thing you learn to say in Diné Bizaad as a Diné youth is your introduction. Your name. Your clans. Who you are. Who you’re born for. Where you come from. Who your parents are. And, as a new addition, where you currently attend school or study. Despite not knowing how to speak Diné Bizaad fluently, my siblings and I all knew our introductions growing up. Whether we realized it or not, language learning and language revitalization have been a part of our lives since birth. Like many other Diné youth across the Navajo Nation, English is our first language.

Though we’re not fluent, Diné Bizaad still upholds a sense of comfort, cultural-strength, and personal identity. +++ Language revitalization isn’t rebuilding something lost, but rather nourishing roots that have always been present, just below our skin’s surface. My 16-year-old sister told me on a FaceTime call that being Diné “means learning [our] culture, participating in [our] culture, making [our] ancestors proud, [and] making Nina [our older cousin sister] and auntie proud.” My sister shared how language learning is an extension of familial and land relationships. She noted that Diné Bizaad is spoken and heard the most “at the [family] farm. Mostly [our mom] and auntie talk [Diné Bizaad] a lot there. And Nina has those ‘word of the day’ things.” She went on to say her language-learning journey requires personal interactions—it necessitates “having someone speak it to me, being around elderly people who speak it. To have it more and more in my everyday life.” As the first generation on my mother’s side of the family not to speak Diné Bizaad fluently, my younger siblings and I are always learning. And we’re taking steps, no matter how small.

Learning to speak Diné Bizaad follows no single technique, whether you’re in a classroom, listening to family, working through self-teaching workbooks, or navigating language software.

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

My mother told me that Navajo was her first language and that there was a period between elementary school and highschool where she didn’t speak Diné Bizaad for a while. It wasn’t until “after graduating high school, that [she] relearned it more, because [she] worked with [Diné] patients more [as a dialysis worker].”

When I asked if she remembered learning Diné Bizaad from her mother, father, or older sister, she said: “I don’t even remember, it was just nature. I don’t even remember learning [Diné Bizaad].

I just understood it. Relearning it after high school was a little hard because I didn’t speak it for a long time. It was hard. I even took a class at San Juan College [a local community college about thirty miles off the Navajo Nation]. I tried learning how to write and read. Even speaking was hard! But listening everyday with patients, my mom, my dad, and my sister—that was probably the only reason I relearned it...being around other people who spoke it.”

Unlike my mother, my aunts, and grandparents, my Diné Bizaad learning took place coterminously both within and outside of school.

Kirtland Central High School—on the northern edge of the Navajo Nation—is less than thirty miles outside of my hometown, with an 80.1 percent Native/Indigenous student population and a Diné student majority. Kirtland is a part of the Central Consolidated School District (CCSD), one of New Mexico’s only public schools that has made agreements with the Navajo Nation for no-cost long-term land leases on Diné Bikéyá (Navajo land). Because the district at large serves a 91.40 percent Native/Indigenous student majority, most CCSD schools offer Navajo (Diné Bizzad) Language and Government classes and Diné clubs, programs, and cultural events. For example, during the Navajo New Year (Ghaají/October), the Northern Navajo Nation celebrates with a local fair in Shiprock. Early winter ceremonies and dances are held in conjunction with fair rides, rodeos, and a community-led parade. Growing up, CCSD schools would cancel classroom activities on the Thursday or Friday before Shiprock Fair Weekend. CCSD, while a state-run public school district, makes an effort to be inclusive and respectful toward Diné culture with these small but growing gestures.

Though I didn’t participate in Navajo Language classes in elementary school and middle school, I still grew up engaged in community-led activities (winter storytellings, winter games, cultural video viewings, etc.). Navajo Language teachers, in my experience at Kirtland Central, were generally the only Diné teachers in the school. There might’ve been three or

four Diné substitutes and office assistants, but most core-curriculum teachers were white or Asian-American, either from the neighboring Mormon community or the East Coast (NY, MA, CT, and NJ). Of course, this differs as you travel further onto the Navajo Nation, which touches parts of New Mexico, Arizona, Utah, and Colorado, and consists of various school districts, serving thousands of students—some state-run like CCSD, some private like Navajo Prep and Rehoboth Christian School, and some public charter schools like Dził Ditł’ooí School Of Empowerment, Action & Perseverance (DEAP) and Diné Dream Charter School. Nonetheless, the Navajo Nation is home to thousands of Diné families, students, elders, and youths who should be granted freedom to shift and develop the technique of language teaching, grounded in cultural foundations.

I took my first official Navajo Language class my sophomore year of high school. I still have old assignments, ranging from Awééts’áál (Cradleboard) fill-in-the-blank vocabulary worksheets to Na’atł’o’ baa Hane’ (The Stories of String Games) check-lists. Students were required to learn the stories behind ten Diné constellations and recreate their string-game counterparts via demonstration— my friend Mykel and I mastered five on our own, then taught them to each other before presenting-deadline day. I continued with Navajo Language II during my junior year and Navajo Language III my senior year. Like me, my sixteen-year-old sister didn’t take her first Navajo class until her freshman year of high school when, unfortunately, her class was over Zoom. She shared how “Mrs. Sorenson was nice…[we’d] make flash cards and learn bathroom vocabulary. She taught us how to introduce ourselves, but [class] was more focused on finishing assignments.” Teaching Diné Bizaad on Zoom wasn’t the best method for my sister. She said, “we’d turn on our cameras and say stuff, then she’d correct us.” Through technology, she was grateful to continue learning Diné Bizaad and have it count towards graduation credits, but language learning requires all the senses, breathing life into words and conversation. My sister believes she would learn Diné Bizaad best by “being around more people who can and want to speak Navajo with each other,” not simply as a skill, but as a livelihood—a way of being.

In high school, my Navajo language teacher was very diligent in ensuring her students knew how to translate and construct written sentences—that they knew how to translate readings from Navajo-to-English, and English-to-Navajo. Though this was helpful when it came to tests and class time, it means that I’m now more adept at writing sentences in Navajo and then reading those sentences aloud after I’ve got them on paper. In turn, I struggle to mentally form sentences in my head without a written aid. When I listen to the radio back home, I struggle to make sense of what the broadcasters are saying in Diné Bizaad. Where-

NEWS

“The only wrong way to speak your language, is to not speak it at all.”

Written on the wall of the school in the Native Village of Point Lay, on the North Slope of Alaska, in the Arctic.

as, if the words are written down, I’m able to read and understand what they say better. On the other hand, my mother, aunts, and grandparents can’t read or write Navajo, but they speak it fluently as their first language. My mom shared: “During my time, [Diné Bizaad] wasn’t taught in school. I know in your time it was, but not for me. They had Navajo Government, which was basically a history class: how the Navajo Government was established and run.

But as far as the language, that wasn’t taught.”

Access to Diné Bizaad within the public school curriculum is still fairly new. +++ My younger brother didn’t take any Navajo Language classes in school. Instead, he focused on learning from our grandmother and mother. It’s common for most Diné students to forgo language classes and nourish more in-person, familial bonds. Not all language revitalization efforts take place in classrooms.

They’re conscious community decisions: each made and exercised daily, no matter how small.

As my mother put it: “I think interacting with someone [while speaking Diné Bizaad], conversation-wise, talking with my sister seems to flow better. When I talk with her, it’s easier.” I imagine language learning, especially as a youth, flourishes in the comfort and familiarity of family—more likely with someone you’re already close to. Our mother went on to share that speaking Diné Bizaad with other Diné “makes [connections through language learning] easier, especially when I have to talk with a patient [at work]. So, I guess just interacting with people [is the best way to teach Diné Bizaad].”

Unlike the three of us, my youngest sister started taking classes in second grade. The moment she reached twelve-years-old she was speaking more Diné Bizaad than my father.

There are times she’d turn and ask me how to say specific words. Sometimes I’d know them.

“That’s dah woozh (strawberry); to say ‘you like it,’ you’d say, ‘ch’iiyáán dah woozh ayó shił łikan.’ Other times, I tell her to ask elsewhere: “Hmm, I don’t know how you’d say TV, ask Mom or Auntie”.

Contemporary language revitalization efforts across the Navajo Nation have reblossomed as K-6th grade programs, when kids are better able to absorb language. In 2004, in the Navajo Nation capital, Window Rock, New Mexico, Tsé Hootsooí Diné Bi’ Olta’ opened its doors as a Diné Bizaad language immersion elementary school. Today, the school has one hundred and thirty three students. They’re all greeted by a motivating reminder at the entrance: “Béédaałniih: Diné bizaad bídahwiil’aah. Táadoo biligáana k’ehjí yádaalłti’í. Ahéhee.” In English, the sign says: “Remember: We are learning in Diné. Please leave your English outside. Thank you.” Language revitalization has no age limit.

Diné Bizaad revitalization efforts only require curiosity and a love for your culture. My youngest sister, though now a moody thirteen-year-

old, still carries that youthful, curious wonder. . +++ In 2020, the Navajo Nation Department of Diné Education and Diné Studies Conference Inc. jump started the establishment of the Diné Bizaad Subcommittee in an effort to establish immersion schools and support the tribe in certifying and funding these projects. The Navajo Nation Committee meetings haven’t included Diné Bizaad Subcommittee updates, likely due to the prioritization of COVID related programs and concerns. But on August 24, 2021, new legislation sponsored by Navajo Nation Council Delegate Daniel E. Tso was introduced that “supports the implementation of the Tribal Remedy Framework to address educational transformation to meet the needs of Indigenous students attending the state of New Mexico Public Schools.”

Of course, it’s difficult to gauge the impact of these council meetings, especially on Native/ Indigenous youth far from our nation’s capital.

The administrative side of language revitalization, while necessary, removes individual experiences and creates generalizations. Everyone’s language learning process—their methods, their comforts, their familiarity—differs from person to person, from family to family, and even from community to community. Like many other languages, there are two dialects of Diné Bizaad: Northern and Eastern. Richer community-centered Diné Bizaad programs would uplift the specific Diné communities they’re supporting.

Whether in Shiprock, New Mexico, or Chinle, Arizona, pedagogy should connect culture, language, and practice, based on unique community values, prioritizing the student—how institutionalized language learning should be.

My mother touched on how Diné students should focus on learning their language in a way that matters most to them—in a way that matters most to their families, and ultimately sustains their language and cultural-wellbeing. Of course, learning Diné Bizaad, in all its forms, is important. But, as a Navajo Language student who was encouraged to focus on the written aspect, and now feels a small disconnect, I wish interpersonal language-learning-engagement was practiced more in public schools and post-secondary Diné curricula. Language needs to be spoken. It needs to be heard. We’re learning Diné Bizaad to speak it. And it needs to exist outside of traditional western classrooms in order for our youth to thrive—after all we’re learning Diné Bizaad to thrive.

To end my conversation with my sister, I asked: out of those you are close to, who speaks Diné Bizaad? She took a moment to think about it, and answered, “my mom. I know she speaks [Diné Bizaad] fluently, but she doesn’t speak it a lot lately.” Our mother scoffed off camera, but didn’t say anything. My sister continued, “Auntie speaks it a lot. She’s fluent and she has that [Navajo] accent when she speaks English. I know you, my older sister, speak it sometimes.”

I felt a little proud to be included, especially since I’m not a fluent speaker. “I know Sarah [our youngest sister] speaks it pretty well, but she’s losing it a bit.” This breaks my heart.

Though our younger sister knows so much, we both recognize that language learning is a muscle. My sister ended with, “I know how to say my clans, but that’s basically it for now.” That she said ‘for now,’ and not ‘that’s basically it,’ or ‘but nothing else’ makes me hopeful. Whether language learning takes place in a classroom with other lively students, or at a kitchen table with caring grandparents, or in your bedroom at 7 a.m. listening to KNDN “All Navajo All the Time’’ radio, or even at a free three day Diné Language Immersion Camp at the University of New Mexico, Native language revitalization starts with the people—Diné language revitalization starts with us, Diné: the people. It starts with knowing who you are, who you’re born for, and where you come from. +++ Speaking Diné Bizaad, no matter how fluent or practiced, is a powerful act. My mother, along with other Diné Bizaad speakers, have their own language learning and language speaking stories: “I don’t remember [learning], because [Diné Bizaad] was my first language, that was all I ever knew. And I never knew that until my parents told me. They told me later on, when I had gotten away from Navajo, and was trying to relearn it. I was talking to grandma about it, and she was like, ‘Why are you trying to relearn it? Navajo was your first language.’ Auntie and grandma used to tease me, cuz they’d say I was a real good [Diné Bizaad] speaker as a child.

And I just laugh ‘cause I can’t imagine.” I’d like to think that my grandmother’s words could be rearranged, tweaked just a little, to say, “Why are you trying to relearn it? Navajo is who you are.” I am my culture. And my culture is my language. Native language revitalization isn’t a new movement. It is who we are as Indigenous people—asserting our innate sovereignty over a violent settler-colonial state. Diné asdzaan nishłi. Áadoo Diné Bizaad bíhoosh’aah. Nisha’?

I am a Diné woman. I am learning to speak Diné Bizaad. What about you?

DANIELLE EMERSON B‘22.5 loves making Diné Bizaad vocab flashcards with little doodles.

VOLUME 43 ISSUE 7

14

S+T TEXT SACHA SLOAN

DESIGN SAM STEWART

ILLUSTRATION HANNAH PARK

Content warning: difficult themes

15

As the summer came to a close, Facebook was riding high, fresh off of an unexpected victory against a Federal Trade Commission antitrust suit. Come September, though, the company fell into hot water once again. The Wall Street Journal began rolling out a series of articles, based on leaked internal Facebook documents, that detailed how the company knew about but did not address problems ranging from disinformation to dangerous content on its platform. Practically every other major news organization joined the fray in October.

On October 3, the source of these internal documents, Frances Haugen, revealed her identity on 60 Minutes. Since then, the Facebook product-manager-turned-whistleblower has testified in front of the U.S. Congress and the U.K. Parliament about Facebook’s negligence.

More than just providing evidence of the avarice that guides Facebook’s decisions, Haugen has reinvigorated the fight to reform the tech behemoth. But as governments seek to rein in the monster Facebook has become, they must not overlook the needs of the oft-forgotten people who keep the social media platform going: human content moderators.

In 2018, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg laid out a rosy future for automated—not human—content moderation tools, predicting that “through the end of 2019, we expect to have trained our systems to proactively detect the vast majority of problematic content.”

That future hasn’t materialized. One of the takeaways cited most often about the trove of Facebook documents is just how ineffective the company’s artificial intelligence content moderation tools really are. Haugen herself invoked the failures of AI content moderation in her testimony to U.K. lawmakers. Recent academic reports call for Facebook to expand, even double, its human content moderator force.

Before Haugen, the company’s calculated opacity around their content moderation efficacy data made it impossible for outside groups to independently assess Facebook’s AI moderation record. But the leaked files show that in March 2021, Facebook researchers concluded that their AI removed only three to five percent of hate speech and 0.6 percent of violent content and incitement of violence. Facebook’s automated tools have confused videos of mass shootings with car washes, cockfights with car accidents.

Faced with a tsunami of vaccine disinformation, the tools flopped yet again. The flimsy reports Facebook has offered in the past few years about the efficacy of their tools fall apart under the light of Haugen’s revelations.

AI simply hasn’t advanced enough to adequately replace human content moderation, and the near-future doesn’t look much different.

Zuckerberg’s vague claims to the contrary are nothing more than public relations dissembling.

It’s a classic example of Potemkin AI: the tech industry-wide phenomenon in which grandi-

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

ose, misleading claims about the capacities of next-generation AI cloak the often-exploitative human labor under the hood.

“Dealing with ambiguity is something we need humans for,” Julia Netter, a Brown University professor and the coordinator for the university’s Socially Responsible Computing Program, told the College Hill Independent. Via pattern recognition, computers can reliably detect obvious forms of disallowed content, such as gratuitous depictions of violence, Netter explained. And these technologies are certainly improving. Many cases fall outside of these obvious categories, though, and require a human’s touch.

“Some gratuitous depictions of violence serve a political purpose; they can be important pieces of criticism of a regime, of what’s going on in the world,” Netter said. “[Machines]

“As governments seek to rein in the monster Facebook has become, they must not overlook the needs of the oftforgotten people who keep the social media platform going: human content moderators.” may be able to detect that this is a depiction of violence, but the gratuity aspect is actually much harder. You need to know the historical context, the political context, who’s posting it— these are all elements of human judgement that humans are not perfect at, but are fairly good.”

One key example is Facebook’s 2016 removal of the “Napalm Girl” photograph, a famous Pulitzer-prize winning picture from the Vietnam war that shows a nude 9-year-old girl running from napalm strikes. Facebook initially removed the photo from its platform for nudity, but put it back after international backlash.

Netter is “agnostic” on whether machines will eventually be able to perform these tasks.

But “right now,” she told the Indy, “these complexities are beyond the scale of algorithmic content moderation.” +++ Facebook’s content moderation started innocently enough: in the first few years of the company’s life, content moderators were mostly recent college graduates in San Francisco. As the company swelled, its moderation needs changed. In 2009, Facebook first began outsourcing its content moderation to consulting

groups and opened an office in Dublin, Ireland.

Then, in 2010, Facebook opened an office in Hyderabad, India.

To power its flagship platform, Facebook wrings human content moderators of their mental wellness. Moderators spend their entire workdays sifting through graphic and violent content—child pornography, murders, dismembered limbs, and other detritus of human depravity that most people never encounter.

As Facebook’s star has risen over the past five years, countless stories of the plight of moderators have leaked out to the public: a stressed 42-year-old man dying of a heart attack at his desk; workers doing drugs in the stairwell to cope with their tasks; mental breakdowns and lifelong PTSD diagnoses. “I don’t really want to be numb to human suffering,” former moderator Josh Sklar told NBC News. That the gore is seen through a screen does not lessen the trauma it causes.

The work of content moderation is inherently grueling, but Facebook’s mistreated, overworked, and underpaid moderators are further degraded by the company itself. Moderators told The Verge about draconian work expectations in which breaks are fleeting and a few mistakes can leave them jobless. Instead of providing adequate access to clinical psychiatrists (the current ‘wellness coaches’ don’t suffice), moderators told Business Insider they were recommended karaoke, painting, and breathing exercises after exposure to severe content. And through all of it, moderators are made to lock away their cellphones while in the office and sign overly restrictive non-disclosure agreements that prevent them from discussing their experiences openly—or advocating for change.

That hasn’t stopped some from breaking their NDAs. In 2018, a former subcontracted content moderator named Selena Scola sued Facebook for creating an unsafe workplace that caused mental health issues. In response, Facebook paid a $52 million settlement last year, giving all current and former content moderators a minimum of $1,000. Court documents involved with the settlement suggest that around half of all Facebook moderators develop mental health disorders as a result of the work.

Facebook currently employs more than 15,000 content moderators globally, most of them contracted through third-party consulting and staffing companies. As subcontractors, these workers don’t get the same benefits as full-time employees of Facebook. Unionization, which would give subcontractors greater bargaining power, is rare. Facebook’s largest client in this field is Accenture, a blue-chip consulting firm that employs more than a third of Facebook’s content moderators. Facebook and Accenture formed their partnership in 2010. They seldom mention the other company by name.

Today, Accenture receives more than $500 million from Facebook per year for its services. By laundering their dirty labor through consulting firms like Accenture, Facebook separates itself

S+T

DIGITAL DIRTY WORK The Human Toll of Facebook’s Content Moderation

from the ethical concerns, legal liability, and bad press associated with the exploitative style of content moderation on which the company relies.

The upper echelons of Facebook reap riches from the subcontractor workaround. Zuckerberg’s net worth is close to $118 billion, and the average Facebook employee makes over $240,000 a year. Accenture’s CEO, Julie Sweet, reportedly pocketed $17 million in 2020 alone, a large jump from 2019. But most of Facebook’s subcontractors make a fraction of those amounts. Accenture’s content moderators receive between $16.50 and $18.50 an hour, compared with the $50 or more an hour the New York Times estimates they produce for Facebook.

Headlines over the past few years have trumpeted these inequities, but Facebook has made only halfhearted attempts to address them. The corporation continues to ignore its workers and deny content moderators safe working conditions. “People often don’t realize that we are quite essential workers,” one anonymous moderator told The Verge. Right now, Accenture moderators are running a mobile billboard calling on Ms. Sweet to stop exploiting them. Amid these unjust labor conditions—or perhaps because of them—the digital content moderation industry is thriving. It’s projected to top $8.8 billion by 2022.

Today, subcontracted content moderators at Facebook work at the bottom of a stratified tier system. The third, outermost tier, referred to internally as ‘community support’ or ‘user support’ teams, comprises outsourced and often international subcontractors. These workers deal with ‘low-priority’ content cases: pornography, bigotry, advocacy of violence, etc. They work in countries like the Philippines, India, Mexico, Ireland, and Turkey in call center-like structures.

Conversely, ‘Tier 2’ moderators primarily live in the US and supervise these international ‘Tier 3’ workers. Tier 2 moderators review “prioritized” content, including politically sensitive content and imminent threats of violence, self-harm, or terrorism. ‘Tier 1’ moderators are mainly lawyers and executives who work outside of company headquarters. They deal with the content that could go viral, or make headlines—Trump’s tweets, for example. The recent Facebook investigations detail how these Tier 1 moderators frequently ignore their own policies and give free passes to certain high-profile users. On all consequential decisions, Zuckerberg himself has ultimate authority. +++ The structure of content moderation at Facebook reflects and reinforces problems within.

But problems worsen for workers further from the U.S. market. “In the U.S., people can speak up for their rights,” one Indian former content moderator told the nonprofit news site Rest of World. “But it’s not the same here.”

Accenture’s thousands of moderators are

concentrated primarily in Manila and Mumbai. Despite this, Filipino and Indian workers were not included in Facebook’s recent $52 million settlement. One Facebook moderator in India compared the moderation center floor to a “sweatshop.” The parallels to current and historical forms of global labor exploitation are not hard to draw.

“If you build an economy that heavily relies on outsourced content moderation in these places, it raises interesting questions of power,” Netter told the Indy. The success of some lawsuits in the US could push Facebook to rely even more on foreign moderators who live in countries with weaker labor laws. For example, last fall reports surfaced that Genpact, a major Indian Facebook contractor, had pressured its employees to return to the office during a COVID-19 surge under threat of termination.

Fully automating content moderation, or ending subcontractor outsourcing (as one high-profile New York University study recently suggested) also comes with labor-related problems. “If these economies depend on this content moderation existing, we create a dependency,” Netter said. Once workers “depend on this kind of labor, automating it, if it were possible at some point, also comes with drawbacks.”

Ultimately, outsourcing the dirty work of a multinational Western company to a former US colony and other countries in the global South constitutes a revamped, digital-age colonialism. +++ If moderating the posts of billions of people in real time feels like a losing game, that’s because it is. Facebook’s capitalist greed notwithstanding, if they could figure out a silver bullet for content moderation they’d jump on it just as quickly as anyone. Humanity—with its differing regional norms, languages, political environments, and ideas about right and wrong—refuses to fit into easy, checkable boxes.

What’s more instructive than speculating about the future, or lamenting content moderation as a whole, is treating with respect the people who work to make our social media platforms safe.

On the Facebook side, that means fairer compensation, better working conditions, open access to adequate mental health counseling, more freedom to speak about their experiences: generally, baseline benefits that Facebook employees receive.

Facebook should be putting more effort into creating computer-based alternatives to human content moderation that shield moderators from the worst of their work—better pre-screening processes, for instance—rather than depending solely on cheap human labor. And, perhaps

most importantly, it is imperative that Facebook ends its strategy of constant opacity and deception. If Facebook executives truly don’t want the world to rely on leaked documents that, according to the company, mischaracterize its work, they should provide this information themselves. “If we don’t see something, we can’t reason about it,” Netter told the Indy. “We need to see the moving parts of content moderation.”

The company must reveal its content moderation programs and data so policy decisions can be based on facts, not speculation.

Facebook is only one element in the equation, though. If labor laws are insufficient to protect content moderators, governments should consider new regulations for this work.

And we, too, must pay due attention to the workers scrubbing our social networks. As with other types of difficult labor on which our societies depend, people don’t like to think about content moderators. Instead, when the issue of content moderation crops up, public discourse often centers on political polarization, partisan censorship, or freedom of speech. These highbrow, philosophical issues, while important, conceal the human toll social media moderation takes.

And Facebook is all too happy to help us forget. The company welcomes its users’ continued alienation from the people who toil for their scrolling. The question of content moderation comes into focus as an existential quandary: can we embrace new technologies without resorting to new forms of injustice?

SACHA SLOAN B’23 misses Dear Blueno dearly and hopes for its swift return.

VOLUME 43 ISSUE 7

16

EPHEMERA CHLOE CHEN “SEASONAL” 17

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

*

dear indie > special edition > missed connections

DEAR INDY

Seeking couple who fucked in my shower (Fox Point) me, host of the saturday halloween party…u, the hotties who fucked in my shower… i cant stop thinking about u 2 when i shampoo…invite me next time? message me with the color of the shower curtain and we can have some fun ;)

halloween fursuit girl (Downtown Providence) you had the head removed to eat some tendies. partial suit, more sensible for the weather, colors derivative of the sparkledog era. looking to meet up and yiff if you’re single, trade art if you’re not. i’ll keep an eye out for you by the tendie fryers.

old man with bewitching odor (Kennedy Plaza) as the first tremors of decay shook the leaves from the trees, we stood shoulder to shoulder waiting for our carriage. you were fixated on a loose button from thy ragg’d doublet. you smelt of wet onion rings and paper pulp. entering the twilight of thy life… maybe 70, succumbing to old age. a sense of unmistakable entr’py passed betwixt us. it is urgent we consummate. how i would like to accompany thee to a scalding dip in yon roman tub.

F4M Looking for guy who probably has video game chair (Thayer St.) you vaped in my face accidentally — a hot, minty whiff of fresh air. you were wearing a dirty adidas jacket that looks like it was used to clean a movie theater. i want to be your spitrag.

ode to the hot UPS guy (Fox Point) i’ve been waiting for u to come back around (since ur route changed between aug 20 and aug 24 2020.) i liked ur presence and ur mid-thigh shorts at my door so much i went into a little bit of credit card debt. o, jake gyllenhall-esque hottie, i’d open your package anyday. swing by anytime and dont mention how much i bought from shein back then. xo

Morning after Halloween surprise (Hope St.) TEXT AMELIA ANTHONY

morning after halloween surprise 10am nov 1……….. you, a woman who may have served a tenure as the president of the rhode island school of design ……… me, a hot bitch wtih a doctors note saying i am sterile…… and a costco membership……. you, having accidentaly made eye contact with me while pulling out of yourr driveway…….. me, hgaving stood there frozen ever since…..

Conmag Cutie (Main Green)

Scan Me! (Submit)

•

DESIGN GALA PRUDENT

we both looked up in frustration from our laptops and met eyes. seeing u was a burst of inspo. u, hard at work on a complicated reporting project me, fabricating submissions for my navel-gazy advice column hit my line via the QR code over there —> or at dearindyemail@gmail.com

do NOT contact me with unsolicited services or offers. Love, Indie xo VOLUME 43 ISSUE 7

18

THE BULLETIN

THE

BULLETIN Upcoming Actions & Community Events Saturday, Nov. 13 @ 4PM: Rally at the State House for ARPA Spending Join the Rhode Island Political Co-op, BLM RI PAC, Providence DSA, Sunrise RI Youth, Rebuild Woonsocket, and community members on Saturday to demand that the General Assembly and Governor Dan McKee make a plan to spend our full $1.13 billion in ARPA funds, call a special session to start spending it now, and spend it rescuing our communities.

Location: Rhode Island State House

TEXT LILY PICKETT

DESIGN BRIAANNA CHIU

ILLUSTRATION VIRAJ MITHANI

Sunday, Nov. 14 @ 3-5PM: Queer Knitting Circle at Small Format Want to learn how to knit or refresh your knowledge? Looking for more queer community? Bring needles and yarn for a lesson! The group will meet every Sunday through January 1st!

Location: 335 Wickenden St. Friday, Nov. 19th @ 6-11PM: Community Court Debt Fundraiser DARE’S Behind the Walls Committee is throwing a party at Revival Brewing Company to raise money for our Community Court Debt fund.

100% of the proceeds will go towards paying off community members’ debt. Come through to enjoy art and music, and support DARE’s efforts!

Location: 50 Sims Ave Saturday, Nov. 20th @2-5PM—Transgender Day of Remembrance Vigil Join organizers at Youth Price INC. for National Transgender Day of Remembrance (TDOR) for a vigil to honor the memory of transgender lives lost. Food, games, artists, and speakers will be present. Scan the QR to RSVP. Location: 743 Westminster St. Tuesdays @ 6-8PM: Queer Gourmet at YPI Each week, Youth Pride Inc. staff will teach a new recipe along with foundational cooking skills! Register at www.bit.ly/ypiqueergourmet Location: 743 Westminster St.

Mutual aid* & community fundraisers

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

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

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

COYOTE RI Closet (Call Off Your Old Tired Ethics RI) Now accepting donations of hygiene products and new or used clothing at the Love and Compassion Day Health Center; 92 East Avenue, Pawtucket RI, 02904. Contact Sheila Brown (401)-548-3756 to donate or collect items. 

 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. 

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. 

A message from Teamster Local 521 and the Johnson Brothers strikers.

An interview with the strikers will be appearing in Issue 8.

Johnson Brothers RI is one of the largest family-owned liquor distributors in the United States, yet it pays wages in RI as low as $15 per hour. They also expect those low paid workers to fork out up to $20,000 annually in healthcare premiums and deductibles for a family plan with prescription coverage.

When the company committed unfair labor practices, wouldn’t agree to adding helpers on larger loads and proposed a work schedule change to cut any hope for overtime pay, the

workers decided to withhold their labor and strike.

Johnson Brothers wants to starve these longterm employees into submission instead of agreeing to a fair first contract with the workers.

Many liquor stores, bars and restaurants are refusing deliveries from Johnson Brothers until the strike ends. Still, some stores have not stood in solidarity with workers, and are continuing to stock Gallo brand wines and liquors distributed

by Johnson Brothers.

If you shop at stores that carry Barefoot Wine,

High Noon Seltzers, Carlo Rossi, and other Gallo brand wines and liquors, be aware that the presence of this merchandise means that these stores are NOT supporting local workers and our families, who are paying too high a price. Let

them know it’s bad taste to attack RI families who

are organizing for better wages and conditions.

Let Johnson Brothers know about your concerns at 651-649-5800 (Corporate) or 401-583-0050 (Rhode Island).

DON’T BUY: • Barefoot • Apothic • Carlo Rossi • Carnivor, Chateau Souverain • Columbia Winery • Ecco Domani • Edna Valley Vineyard • J Vineyards & Winery • Louis M. Martini • MacMurray Estate Vineyards • Mirassou • Orin Swift • Talbott Vineyards • William Hill Estate Imports: • Alamos, Brancaia • La Marca

• Las Rocas • Martín Códax • Whitehaven • Allegrini Argiano • Jermann • Pieropan • Renato Ratti Other: • High Noon Seltzers • New Amsterdam Vodka and Gin • Familia Camarena Tequila • RumHaven • E&J Brandy • Diplomático Rum • Scotch whiskies from Whyte & Mackay