The College Hill Independent Vol. 33 Issue 9 by College Hill Independent

THE

COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT A BROWN / RISD WEEKLY NOV 18 2016

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A BROWN / RISD WEEKLY VOLUME 33 / NUMBER 09 NOV 18 2016

INDY COVER

#SanctuaryCampus Along with our peers, the College Hill Independent urges Brown University to protect its most vulnerable populations.

Untitled Staveley Kuzmanov

NEWS 02

Week in Review Kelton Ellis, Andrew Deck, and Jane Argodale FROM THE EDITORS

METRO 03

Building Racial Justice Isabel DeBre

What They Told Us The Indy Staff

ARTS 05

Violence, Silence, and Art Will Tavlin

9 3/4 Devika Girish

Valley of the Dolls Liby Hays

FEATURES 13

Olive Tree Max Schindler

-DO

Dogalectic Brigitte Santana, Gabriel Matesanz, and Dolma Ombadykow MANAGING EDITORS

TECH 07

This past week has felt, to me, like an unending day after a night without sleep, a borderless haze. But, as election day becomes last week or last month, so too have the tangibilities of Trump begun to replace the hypothetical him. His blatant racism and sexism and xenophobia and transphobia have hardened themselves into the ethos of the everyday— both in ways that are absolutely and definitively not new, as well as ways that seem repurposed with an unapologetic vigor. As the daughter of a refugee, I’ve spent a large portion of the past week wondering what it means to seek safety in this country, what refuge might look like here, look like now. As a white-passing person of color attending an elite university, I’m also wondering how to negotiate my relative safeties. I’m feeling grateful for the threads of community and radical love that have boiled to the surface of this past week’s rage and tears and assaults. I’m left wondering how and where and in what ways to take care of myself while also centering the people who are most affected by this election, most affected by the histories of violence this election perpetuates. I’m wondering how to mobilize along the lines of my privilege, how to learn from but not lean on the people who have continuously fought to persist in the wake of these violences, and how to prioritize the safety of black, trans, immigrant, indigenous, Muslim and female-identifying bodies in the months and years to come.

Pretty Good Protection Jonah Max

Sophie Kasakove Lisa Borst Jamie Packs NEWS

Camila Ruiz Segovia Shane Potts Liz Cory

METABOLICS 15

Kombucha Blues Raina Wellman

LITERARY 17

Ribbit Naïma Msechu

EPHEMERA 06

METRO

Jane Argodale Will Weatherly Marianna McMurdock ARTS

Will Tavlin Ryan Rosenberg Kelton Ellis FEATURES

Advice Desk M+P

Dominique Pariso Elias Bresnick Dolma Ombadykow METABOLICS

Sam Samore Isabelle Doyle

X 18

Race Lift jodofo

SCIENCE

Fatima Husain TECH

Jonah Max OCCULT

Sophia Washburn

LITERARY

Stefania Gomez

Julie Benbassat Dorothy Windham Pia Mileaf-Patel

EPHEMERA

Patrick McMenamin Mark Benz X

Liby Hays Nicole Cochary

DESIGN & LAYOUT

Celeste Matsui Meryl Charleston Andrew Linder Ruby Stenhouse WEB MANAGER

LIST

Charlie Windolf

Malcolm Drenttel Alec Mapes-Frances

BUSINESS MANAGER

Dolma Ombadykow

ILLUSTRATIONS EDITOR

Gabriel Matesanz

SENIOR EDITOR

Alec Mapes-Frances

STAFF WRITERS

Hannah Maier-Katkin Kim Meilun Jack Brook Eve Zelickson Saanya Jain Anna Hundert Andrew Deck Signe Swanson Josh Kurtz STAFF ILLUSTRATORS

Frans van Hoek Teri Minogue Yuko Okabe Ivan Rios-Fetchko Maria Cano-Flavia Kela Johnson

MVP

Will Tavlin The College Hill Independent — P.O. Box 1930 Brown University Providence, RI 02912 Letters to the editor are welcome. The Independent, a family-run publication, is published weekly during the fall and spring semesters and is printed by TCI Press in Seekonk, MA.

WEEK IN MINOR DEMOCRATIC VICTORIES BY

Kelton Ellis, Andrew Deck, and Jane Argodale Gabriel Matesanz

ILLUSTRATION BY

HECK YEAH HARRIS To temper your cynicism, if only just a little: last week, amid the presidential election’s literal upset, Kamala Harris shines forth. Harris knows firsts well. In 2010, she was elected Attorney General of California, simultaneously becoming the first woman, first Indian-American, and first Black lawyer to hold that position. The state elected her again in 2014, with over 57% of their votes. In her tenure, Harris refused to defend California’s ban on same-sex marriage, and served as an advocate for reform on immigration and criminal justice protocols. President Obama respected her charisma and talent so much that he considered nominating her for a federal position several times. When Eric Holder stepped down as US Attorney General in 2014, her name was floated as a replacement, as it was for the nation’s highest court when Antonin Scalia died earlier this year. In any case, Harris still made it to Washington—she’ll own some firsts again, becoming the first Indian-American and Black politician to represent the country’s most populous state in the Senate after sweeping up 62.6% of the vote last Tuesday. And no wonder Obama considered nominating her; so many news outlets have already drawn comparisons between Harris and our—sadly :(— outgoing president. Harris, like Obama, was catapulted to national fame by a splendorous address to the Democratic National Convention. She, too, had an international upbringing that took her all the way to Montréal! for high school. Her success as a biracial, HBCU-educated, liberal politicker represents some hope that America has come closer to equality, despite overbearing evidence to the contrary. It’s so, so easy to despair right now, and yet some hope rests in the newly quadrupled number of women-of-color in the Senate, of whom Harris is probably the biggest star. Therein lies some redemption, some indication that America hasn’t totally forgotten its more positive ideals. Democrats have been maligned in the political press for their lack of local grassroots organization compared to Republicans, which has left the party more bereft of future powerhouse candidates than their GOP counterparts. But there’s Harris, in all her ambition, already being floated as a 2020 presidential candidate before she’s even scaled Capitol Hill. Hillary Clinton wasn’t able to break through that oft-mentioned glass ceiling, but perhaps Harris can. She’s well on her way if she wanted to, and she’d be busting through another one while she’s at it. Besides, what a great rebuke to this opportunistic infection of a president-elect we’ve found ourselves with. And let’s not forget: whatever it is, a woman of color probably did it first. -KE

TIPPING THE SCALES In a country that fails to provide even half a living wage to workers, the restaurant industry sets the bar even lower. The federal minimum wage in the US is $7.25 an hour. In 17 states, however, waiters, bartenders and hosts are guaranteed only $2.13 by their employers. Other states offer meager improvements on this baseline, with Rhode Island setting its minimum at $3.19. This loophole, called the “tipped minimum wage,” assumes that service employees will recoup the difference in tips. They often don’t. While restaurants are mandated to cover the difference between tips and the federal minimum wage, the Department of Labor estimates that 84% of employers don’t comply. Black employees, who have been found to receive considerably less in tips than their white counterparts, bear the brunt of these wage shortcuts. As do women, since waitresses—who represent 71% of tipped servers—face heightened sexual harassment in their place of work and are twice as likely as the general public to use food stamps. The “tipped minimum wage,” which has been in full force since the ’60s, ensures “that women who put food on the tables in America can’t actually afford to feed themselves,” Saru Jayaraman, a labor activist and co-director of Restaurant Opportunities Centers United told Mother Jones. Last Tuesday, two electorates voted on ballot initiatives to remove this federally sanctioned wage gap, drastically changing the quality of life for several thousand restaurant employees in the United States. Maine joined eight states that have eliminated the “tipped minimum wage.” The first East Coast state to do so, Maine promises a $12 minimum wage to all workers, including those receiving tips, by the year 2024. The city of Flagstaff, Arizona followed in its wake, approving a solid $15 minimum wage for tipped workers by 2026. It’s a small victory, as democratic victories tend to be. But for thousands of employees the difference between $2.13 and a living wage may be the difference between surviving paycheck-to-paycheck and peace of mind. It shouldn’t be underestimated. The fight doesn’t stop with Maine. One Fair Wage campaigns sponsored by the Restaurant Opportunities Centers United are ramping up in DC, Illinois, Massachusetts, Michigan, New York, and Pennsylvania. For those who are able, lend your voices, contribute your money and volunteer your time. -AD

LEGALIZED IT Another small progressive victory took place in several state-level referendums across the country on election day. Voters in California, Massachusetts, and Nevada legalized recreational marijuana use, joining Alaska, Colorado, Oregon, and Washington, where recreational marijuana use was already legal. A similar measure passed in Maine (nice work this week, Maine), though opponents are demanding a recount before the law goes into effect. The votes will likely lead to increased pressure on the federal government to change marijuana’s classification as a Schedule I drug, which heavily restricts its use, and allow states to regulate marijuana similarly to alcohol. Rhode Island, where a legalization bill has been proposed but not voted on in the State House, is now likely to follow the lead of Massachusetts—the first state in New England to legalize marijuana— when the new legislative session begins in January. Newly re-elected Speaker of the House Nicholas Mattiello promised to look into the issue, telling WPRI, “It’s going to be readily accessible to our citizens. We’re going to have a lot of the concerns that marijuana creates right here in Rhode Island, right here on our border, with none of the revenues to help us address that.” The recent wave of legalization measures in states reflects changing attitudes towards marijuana, but also towards the decades-long War on Drugs, which has sought to end drug use through criminalization. Despite criminalization at the federal level and in most states, marijuana use in the United States has doubled in the last decade, according to a study published by the JAMA Psychiatry Journal in 2015. Arrests for marijuana possession, which account for most marijuana-related arrests, disproportionately affect people of color, despite a slightly higher rate of use among white people. According to the ACLU, Black people are 3.73 times more likely than white people to be arrested for marijuana possession nationally, and 2.9 times more likely in Rhode Island. State director of the Drug Policy Alliance in California Lynne Lyman praised the ways in which California’s legalization law addressed such disparities, saying in a statement, “with its carefully crafted provisions for helping to heal the damage caused by the war on marijuana to poor communities and people of color, Prop 64 represents the new gold standard for how to legalize marijuana responsibly.” The bill includes provisions that clear the criminal records of those who would not be breaking current laws. Legalizing marijuana and furthermore expunging the records of those who have been arrested for marijuana are important steps in curbing the abuses of the United States’ legal and prison systems, which have historically targeted people holding marginalized identities. -JA

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

NEWS

THIS IS SOLIDARITY Rhode Island's growing Racial Justice Coalition

Isabel DeBre Kela Johnson

ILLUSTRATION BY

“We want people in the streets. Unions stopping work. Consumers refusing to buy. Bystanders stepping in, everyone calling racism out.” The voice of Mike Araujo, the director of Rhode Island Jobs with Justice, rises in intensity. In a phone interview on how the election has altered the activist scene in the state, Araujo tells me, “It’s time for a maximalist anti-racist, anti-bias, no-compromise approach. The legislature is going to have to catch up with us.” Great uncertainty lies ahead, but it is likely that under Trump’s presidency, the state can expect a significant reduction in federal funding to schools, housing, and medical support. Police will no doubt rely even more heavily on racial profiling tactics that will endanger RI's Black community, Latinx community, immigrant communities, and other marginalized communities. “Even if Trump follows through on a fraction of his plans, there will be an absolutely devastating impact,” says Araujo. One of the worst election results for Rhode Island, says Araujo, is that right-wing Republican Nicholas Mattiello, who ran an openly racist campaign against “Rhode Island’s illegals,” won Speaker of the House, causing local advocates to worry about the difficult road ahead for justice legislation. “Rhode Island has the opportunity to be a truly inclusive state because of our diversity, our racial and ethnic make-up, and the fact that we literally work feet away from each other,” Araujo says. “This is the time to make that happen.” +++ It is fortuitous then that in August 2016, months before news of Trump's presidency left much of the nation reeling, The Racial Justice Coalition of Rhode Island (RJC) coalesced. It aspires to fill what its coordinator Jenn Steinfeld calls a “gap in Rhode Island’s collective efforts to address racial and economic equity,” and to bring groups that have rarely, if ever, worked together, to the same table in order to target the systemic problems confronting marginalized communities. Created and funded by the Economic Progress Institute (EPI), the Coalition consists of eleven local organizations, both policy institutes and grassroots activist groups: The EPI, The Latino Policy Institute at Roger Williams University, Progreso Latino, The Refugee Dream Center, Jobs with Justice, Amos House, Direct Action for Rights and Equality (DARE), The Cambodian Society of Rhode Island, the NAACP Providence Chapter, The Opportunities Industrialization Center of Rhode Island (OIC), and The Providence Youth Student Movement (PrYSM). The Coalition is still seeking indigenous/Native American representation, Steinfeld tells me, in order to address the residual colonial violence that indigenous communities face, which has been starkly highlighted by the North Dakota Access Pipeline protests at Standing Rock. The Coalition convenes once a month to plan projects, critique government policies with an eye toward their impact on racial disparities, and mobilize support for collective campaigns. Brainstorming for the RJC began when several community groups teamed up with the EPI to offer feedback on its 2015 Workers of Color report, which analyzed state income, unemployment, and educational disparities through a racial lens for the first

METRO

time. The report came to unnerving conclusions: Rhode Island’s racial disparities are much starker than those in other New England states. Compared to the rest of the region, the Ocean State’s economy took the worst blows during the recession and is struggling to recover—exacerbating historical racial disparities in unemployment and income. The median income of Black people in Rhode Island, for example, is just half that of white people. The researchers also disaggregated the Southeast Asian population’s data in Rhode Island from the larger Asian demographic (which typically fares better than white workers in income, education, and employment) for the first time, revealing inequalities more severe than expected: Cambodian, Hmong, Laotian, and Vietnamese people in Rhode Island are just as likely to live in poverty as Blacks and Latinx people, with a far higher high school dropout rate (50 percent). Latinx people fared worse than any other minority in the state in terms of housing, income, and segregation. At 16.2 percent, Latinx unemployment ranks the worst in the nation. Latinx homeownership rate is only 26 percent, compared to a national average of 63.5 percent, according to the Census Bureau. “It isn’t just about owning a home,” says Anna Cano-Morales, director of the Latino Policy Institute (a member of the Coalition). “It’s everything that comes with it: the equity you build, the stability you feel, the possibility of taking out another mortgage to pay for your child’s college education.” This American dream is unattainable for the vast majority of Rhode Island’s Latinx population. Due to the particular severity of disparities between Latinx and white people, the concerns of the Latinx population occupied the heart of the study. Because the report did not prioritize the experiences of Black Rhode Islanders, the Racial Justice Coalition urged the EPI to publish a new report in early 2017 focusing exclusively on the state of Black workers, analyzing the ways disparities in education and incarceration affect the economic well-being of the Black population.“We have a Latino Policy Institute in the state, but no specific think tank or research group calling out what’s going on with the Black community in Rhode Island,” says Steinfeld. “Black families have historically had their wealth tied up in homeownership, which the recession hit hard. One sixth of Black men are behind bars. Police are more present in public schools than guidance counselors, disproportionately detaining and disciplining Black students. These are all problems the RJC needs to address if we want to tackle the roots of structural inequality.” From the report, the Coalition will create and lobby for a policy platform that would amplify the current campaigns of DARE, Jobs with Justice, and other organizations, including the passage of the Community Safety Act and DARE’s Behind the Walls project for prison justice reform and reentry supports. “At some point we stepped back and realized that we might have been aware of these problems, but we weren’t treating them as the living and breathing human tragedies they represent,” Doug Hall, head researcher for the EPI 2015 Workers of Color Report, says. “Now that we have the numbers and know what needs to be done, it’s a matter of political will.”

+++ Fred Ordoñez, executive director of DARE, tells me about the Coalition’s plan to support the organization’s efforts to stop the Public Housing Authorities (PHA) from discriminating against people with arrest records—a policy that tears families apart and deprives a sizable population of affordable housing, disproportionately affects Black and Latinx people. This campaign has come a long way, but it needs a push, an amplification, to become a state priority—a push that only a coalition could provide. The RJC plans to mount political pressure on the board that oversees the PHA, presenting them with statistics that situate the campaign against housing discrimination in the context of the state’s racial and economic crisis. “RJC has the potential to lift up our work, to take campaigns to the state level that would otherwise not make it there,” Ordoñez says. The Coalition is too new to have taken concrete action on its projects, especially because “we want to spend time educating ourselves on what it’s like to work together, learning about each other’s populations and programs, and pausing to articulate a vision for what a racially just Rhode Island even looks like in the first place,” coordinator Steinfeld says. But the RJC’s plans are brewing. They stem from the structural problems that the EPI report exposed, and from the campaigns that organizations have been spearheading in silos. To address the disproportionately low incomes of Black, Latinx, and Southeast Asian workers (intimately tied to low home ownership rates), RJC plans to fight for a $15 minimum wage, which groups like Jobs with Justice have supported for years. To address educational disparities, the RJC will testify in support of the All Students Count Act, which PrYSM has pushed for—requiring public schools to disaggregate data for Southeast Asians and English Language Learners in order to expand those students’ access to educational support. To address Latinx and Black unemployment, the Coalition plans to investigate why large companies that receive large tax breaks as an incentive to hire minorities and women are not doing so, and seeks to pressure the city to hold these employers accountable. Most recently, the RJC galvanized support for homeless advocates at Kennedy Plaza. In response to the plans of Joseph Paolino’s Providence Downtown Improvement District to “clean up” central downtown by criminalizing panhandlers, the Coalition published an op-ed in RI Future on October 24 to bring a racial perspective to the debate, resist the call for increased policing, and locate the importance of public space in the revolutionary history of New England commons. The Coalition’s members mobilized on September 14 to protest Paolino’s press conference, and more broadly, the displacement of homeless people, increased levels of discriminatory policing practices, and other insidious effects of Downtown’s gentrification. Dozens of activists from DARE, the NAACP, Cambodian Society of Rhode Island, and Rhode Island Jobs with Justice turned out on behalf of the Coalition, and will continue to do so as discussions with the Downtown Improvement District develop. The Coalition has also endorsed DARE’s list of policy solutions to this problem, including mandatory Homeless Bill of Rights training for police and RIPTA officers, the support of downtown food

NOVEMBER 18, 2016

distribution, the provision of downtown amenities, and more. “This is solidarity: us showing up for each other,” says Steinfeld. +++ Solidarity does not necessarily imply harmony. The Coalition is realizing that community conversations can be messy, as it works to navigate groups’ differences in hopes of reaching consensus. “There’s generational conflict, tactical conflict, strategic arguments, as well as self-interest playing into group conversations,” says Araujo. “Groups like the NAACP, Progreso Latino, and Cambodian Society serve such specific communities, and sometimes those communities are competing for the same nickel, and so haven’t always had their individual positions aligned for a common purpose.” Some Coalition members claim to be "apolitical" (EPI), others “radical” (PrYSM), some focus on research (The Latino Policy Institute), others on activism (DARE, Jobs with Justice). Some have worked within the system of state and private foundations, and others against it. In the past, Ordoñez tells me, “Rhode Island organizations have been pulled apart by the powers that be. If state policy makers need POC representatives

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

standing behind them for press conferences or supporting their policies, they string local organizations along, and it ends up hurting communities of color.” “This is especially true when it comes to tax agreements for large corporations in Providence to hire minorities,” adds Araujo. “These policies don’t benefit all races and ethnicities of the working class, but there’s pressure for certain community organizations to sign on to them.” According to Araujo, politicians use these tactics bluntly in Rhode Island, and “with Trump’s recent cabinet selections, it looks like national political triangulations and divisions will resemble Rhode Island’s.” Although at times difficult, the Coalition is strengthened by its diversity. “For the RJC, diversity is not some multicultural buzzword,” says Sarath Suong, director of PrYSM, which organizes Southeast Asian youth against police violence and for other social justice issues. “This group is a representation of people of color really struggling in this state.” For Suong, the Coalition means strength in numbers. “Solidarity demands a lot of people and their connections testifying at the legislature and pushing politicians for change.” For Ordoñez, the Coalition’s power comes from overcoming historical isolation and division so that “we can finally sit at the same table, where we have the

power to collectively determine what is good or bad for our communities.” For Araujo, the Coalition is about addressing structural problems: “A lot of institutional settling has happened among labor and civil rights activists, who are tired after decades of work. The Coalition is bringing new energy and a larger scope to our individual work, to help us think back to the root causes of disparity.” For Steinfeld, it’s about intersectionality: “We’ve spent most of our time understanding one another and how the problems facing our communities overlap. We’re not going to do something that just serves a single population or solves a single problem—when we’re together, we’re thinking about how homelessness, incarceration, racism, poverty all interact for our policy platform.” The Racial Justice Coalition extends discussions of racism into discussions of the American economy and connects immigrant and Black freedom struggles, in hopes of, as Araujo says, “changing the reflection we saw in the mirror last Tuesday.” ISABEL DeBRE B'18 stands in solidarity

METRO

ROOMS FOR FEAR Imagining art after Trump

Will Tavlin Gabriel Matesanz

ILLUSTRATION BY

In her essay “No Place for Self-Pity, No Room for Fear,” Toni Morrison recalls in the Nation a moment after President George W. Bush’s 2004 reelection, feeling helpless and depressed. She recounts telling a friend, an artist, over the phone: “It’s as though I am paralyzed, unable to write anything more in the novel I’ve begun. I’ve never felt this way before, but the election.…” Morrison’s feelings were echoed this past week in a viral blog post by the literary quarterly the Paris Review. “On a morning like this, when America has chosen a bigot and a xenophobe as its next president, my job feels pointless,” wrote web editor Dan Piepenbring. The Trump political order has already produced abject levels of racism, Islamophobia, xenophobia, transphobia, sexism, numerous and intersecting oppressions too many to count. That these biases, suffused in the media and everyday interactions—and intensified in the face of blatant hatred—would inhibit artists from carrying out their work is only natural. But, “this is precisely the time when artists go to work,” Morrison argues. “There is no time for despair, no place for self-pity, no need for silence, no room for fear. We speak, we write, we do language. That is how civilizations heal.” Morrison’s prescient essay was published in 2015, but in the wake of the election that propelled Donald Trump and his accomplices to a terrifying axis of power, its instruction feels more prophetic, more relevant, more urgent than ever. What does art imagine in the time of violence? The United States has of course always been violent; those holding marginalized identities have emphasized this fact since the country’s inception. The political calamity we witnessed last Tuesday merely made visible structural and interpersonal violences to many who would usually miss it, or willfully ignore it. When large portions of America woke up last Wednesday, they discovered what others have known all along: we are on the precipice of a steep cliff—some of us more vulnerable to harm than most. What will artists tell us this time? What have they told us before? +++ Untitled (Portrait of Ross in L.A.) is a pile of candy. In a gallery, the installation—around 175 pounds of individually wrapped, multicolored sweets—spills into a corner of a room in which it’s displayed. Before he died of AIDS-related illnesses in 1996, conceptual artist Felix Gonzalez-Torres was making lots of untitled portraits. They were of his father, of his friends, conceptual works that used candy, lightbulbs, and plastics as stand-ins for his subjects. Untitled (Portrait of Ross in L.A.) is of Gonzalez-Torres’ late lover, Ross Laycock, who also died of AIDS-related illnesses five years before Gonzalez-Torres. Writer and critic Richard Rodriguez once called AIDS a “plague of absence”: an absence of the white blood cells that could protect one from other diseases; an absence of his friends, neighbors, lovers, who slowly disappeared from public life, one by one.

ARTS

In 1987, six artists famously launched Silence=Death, a campaign that printed its eponymous equation in white Gill Sans capital letters underneath a pink triangle onto posters, billboards and gigantic neon signs throughout Manhattan. Cited in art blog Nomos of Images, the New Museum’s then-curator Bill Olander (who also succumbed to AIDS) stated that Silence=Death “was among the most significant works of art that had yet been inspired and produced within the arms of the crisis.” The campaign was a civic gesture to make private lives public, to make the invisible visible. To tell President Reagan that to be silent, as he was for over four years in office before publicly uttering the word “AIDS,” is to be a complicit accessory in the deaths of thousands. Gonzalez-Torres’ work is also preoccupied with public complicity. When displayed, Untitled (Portrait of Ross in L.A.), invites viewers to take pieces of candy from the 175 pound pile, corresponding to Ross’s ideal body weight, until it shrinks and disappears. In a video of the installation in the Met Breuer from this past year, some gallery-goers take candy from the portrait, but others hesitate nervously; they are unsure whether or not they should follow Gonzalez-Torres’ instructions. The truth is that it doesn’t matter. To take its gift and unburden the pile, to teeter on the edge of participating, to notice its company, read its demands and ignore it completely, to acknowledge the installation in any capacity is to be complicit in the decay of its body. +++ On a wall, Alfredo Jaar has created 500 silhouettes of human faces that reflect in adjacent mirrors as to appear infinite. In a room, the viewer stands in total darkness for one minute. In the span of 90 seconds, the silhouettes are fully illuminated, and then darkened again for 30. The visual effect imprints innumerable dots of light onto the viewer’s periphery once they leave the room of darkness, into daylight. This is Geometria de la Conciencia (“Geometry of the Conscience”), a memorial to victims of the 17-year Chilean dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet, housed inside the Museum of Memory and Human Rights in Santiago, Chile. Jaar, a visual artist, architect and filmmaker, was born in Santiago 17 years before Pinochet overthrew Salvador Allende’s democratically elected socialist government in 1973. According to Chile’s National Commission for Truth and Reconciliation Report, conducted in 1991, Pinochet’s regime was responsible for torturing 28,000, exiling over 200,000, and disappearing 3,095 citizens. The number of disappeared peoples could be more; Pinochet’s killing program, which began a week after his bloody coup, is said to have erased hundreds more people than the official commission could accurately cite. How Chile and its citizens have inscribed the memory of Pinochet’s regime continues to pose new, problematic questions. At the time of his death in 2006, Pinochet faced 300 criminal charges—including countless human rights violations and the embezzlement of nearly $28 million USD—and served only house arrest. Right-wing political voices continue to emphasize a rhetoric of reconciliation. “The past has already been written,” former President Sebastian Piñera stated at the Chilean government’s 40th anniversary memorial of the 1973 coup. “We can recall it, we can study it, we can debate

it, but we cannot change it. Because of that, we should not remain prisoners or hostages of that past.” At another memorial ceremony, held at the Villa Grimaldi detention center, Socialist Party politician, and current President, Michelle Bachelet stated that reconciliation is impossible without justice. “A dirty wound cannot heal,” she told mourners. What appears as an infinite number of illuminated faces in Geometria de la Conciencia alludes to the countless disappeared under Pinochet; those who might never be found, never counted. But the anonymous silhouettes also gesture towards the 17 million Chileans who are still untangling the memory of the disappeared. The relationship between these bodies, the disappeared and the living Chilean public, is violent. Like Jaar’s memorial, it must be illuminated before it can stabilize. +++ An utterance commonly heard after last Tuesday’s election: we survived Reagan, we survived Bush. As many have aptly responded, a lot of people didn’t. An estimated 362,000 people died of AIDS-related illnesses between 1981 and 1996 in the United States. Pinochet, whose coup was assisted by the CIA, disappeared thousands. The aforementioned installations were selected arbitrarily; they by no means stand in for the endless number of violent interventions conducted and assisted by the United States. Only this: an art that grapples with the chaos our country now faces, that could reify it and let our “civilization heal,” might account for those who’ve been made missing. In the United States, the disappeared are the 2.5 million deported by Obama, the roughly three million who face deportation should Trump’s rhetoric be actualized. The disappeared are the more than two million people currently incarcerated in United States prisons, they are the thousands of innocents killed in the Middle East under the guise of ‘intervention.’ They are the marginalized. They are more than this article can name. “Like failure,” writes Morrison, “chaos contains information that can lead to knowledge—even wisdom.” Such is art’s role, she argues. Now more than ever. WILL TAVLIN B’17.5 will consume your art.

NOVEMBER 18, 2016

DEAR INDY... BY

M&P

At this point, the election was more than a week ago, but I am still having a really hard time doing anything or focusing on my work at all. I keep getting distracted by apocalyptic tweets, or heartbreaking articles about various rights that will be stripped away in the coming months, etc. Is it appropriate to feel something close to grief, and for how long? When is it time to put away my sadness and frustration and get to work? P: It makes total sense to me to feel grief, fear, or sadness right now. I would be more worried if you felt no longer capable of having these feelings (though I would not fault anyone for feeling numb or disconnected, this being really just a more public pronouncement of already existing oppressions and evils). I also think it’s unfair to yourself to imagine all the things you have been doing in this grief as merely distractions. Reading up about the country’s past and possible futures, showing up and caring for your loved ones, going to community meetings or protests: these are all important types of work. Your feelings are not divorced from work—neither the work you’ve been doing since the election nor the “work” that you feel you have been neglecting. At the same time, the day to day work of living—showing up to your job, completing your schoolwork, feeding yourself, or providing for others—is not the only outlet you have for these feelings. Thinking that you must invest every waking minute with your frustration is unfair to yourself. Rather, your feelings and frustrations should make you rethink what you categorize as your “work,” both to give yourself credit for the positive things your life already involves and to set up outlets for future change. The election has triggered a lot of visceral upset among my immediate friends, and consequently they have been very detached and removed lately. In many ways, I believe the recent occurrences have exacerbated issues that have already existed. Although I also tend to pull away during difficult times, I’m now finding the loneliness difficult to cope with. Everyone I am close with seems to be ambivalent toward me, and I’m having trouble finding people to lean on. How do I go about forming new relationships, while also making my needs heard, especially during such a universally traumatic time? M: If you were worried about the state of your friendships prior to the election, now might be the best time to make a new friend. Despite everything else, I’ve witnessed a tremendous amount of love and support for those expressing grief, loneliness, and alienation. Is there someone you’ve always wanted to be better friends with, but maybe aren’t as close as you would hope? Given the circumstances, this person might be more willing than ever to listen to a stranger or acquaintance give vent to their frustrations, hopes, or whatever it is that you feel your friends haven’t been hearing. In fact, this person might need someone to listen to them as well. It is important that our friends be there for us in trying times. We need community in this moment more than most. So, I’d recommend that you put yourself out there just a little more than you might ordinarily be comfortable with. You’ll find a new friend or two. And the next time disaster strikes, you might just have a solid network of support.

M: It depends on what would count as reconciliation. On one hand, you might be asking how it is that you reconcile yourself to this fate, as if confidence necessarily comes at the expense of one’s ability to be intimate. Here, we have a question of somehow cognitively adjusting to the extant circumstances. My take: you’ve misdiagnosed the issue. This scenario smacks of a case of self-absorption rather than self-confidence. It would seem that you have too thin a conception of human needs if you’ve found that you are enough. At the same time, I don’t wish to diminish the importance of self-reliance. However, your inability to feel romance would seem to signal a coordinate capacity to treat your would-be romantic partners as a means of self-assurance rather than ends. This is, in a way, a kind of objectification, a solipsism of sorts. Get out of your own head. Other people are just as important as you, and, as you will almost certainly discover, immensely enriching as both lovers and friends. Now, if you had meant to ask how to actually change the situation rather than casually resign yourself to a loveless future, I’d recommend thinking of your relationships less in terms of how you’ve been made to feel. If your romantic partnerships have been primarily about boosting your own confidence, you’ll need to find other reasons why one might wish to be intimate with another. Perhaps you’ll remember that these kinds of relationships can be mutually supportive. You may find that the feelings of romance are more concerned with being the source of someone’s joy rather than being the object of someone’s desire.

from M&P. You know, the beat of your own drummer. But—and especially at a time like this—I’d caution that you not grow too complacent in your self-confidence. Receiving advice is not only about improving yourself. It is also about listening to other people, to their needs, to the ways you’re affecting their lives. To think oneself above receiving advice is in some ways to think oneself above listening, which seems to be a dangerous proposition. Consider being more vulnerable. Don’t forget that your own happiness and feeling of not needing advice is in lots of ways predicated on a whole network of people who support you (from those who produce your food to those who cuddle with you at night). Take their advice more seriously than ours. Or at least don’t announce so vocally how much you feel like you don’t need to listen.

I’ve had the same song stuck in my head for 72 hours. What should I do to rid myself of this sonic specter? M: You need to go listen to something else. Things worth considering: G.L.O.S.S. - “Fight” Gillian Welch - “Lowlands” Topaz Jones - “Tropicana” Hope Sandoval - “Day Disguise” Waylon Jennings - “Mommas, Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Cowboys” Bessie Smith - “Devil’s Gonna Git You” Marching Church - “Not Worthy” Please believe me when I say that I don’t need any advice. P: While we here at the Advice Desk are by no means in the business of forcing advice onto people, I’m worried that there may be a bit of arrogance in announcing that one does not need any help, that one cannot improve in any way (even if merely to an anonymous question box). Not that we are necessary the ones to tell you how to improve, I would in fact encourage you in asserting that you do not want advice

My ability to feel romance has plummeted in coordination with my self-confidence improving. I’m really happy but also a little bummed. How do I reconcile this?

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

EPHEMERA

CORRUPTED INSTALLATION Protecting privacy under the 45th president BY

Jonah Max

When Donald J. Trump assumes the presidency on January 20, he will be stepping into an office whose powers have swelled to phenomenal heights over the past 15 years. What were once considered controversial executive practices under Bush and Cheney have now been ossified as bipartisan security measures under Obama. Programs such as Bush’s warrantless wiretapping originally drew censure from prominent Democrats who, in a 2006 Senate Resolution, considered it an act of executive “overreach” founded on “twisted interpretations” of the law. Not only has this sort of indiscriminate warrantless surveillance come to define Obama’s NSA as the Snowden leaks documented, but it also has been adamantly defended by the very Democrats, Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer among others, who had originally seen such programs as a serious threat to Americans’ privacy and civil liberties. In 2013, Pelosi went so far as to hold private meetings with House Democrats and Republicans to ensure that a bill curbing the NSA’s surveillance capabilities would not be passed. Other Bush-Cheney operations such as Guantanamo Bay’s detention camp have either been continued by the Obama administration, or, in the case of targeted killings and drone operations, have been radically expanded. What was once a fledgling program run out of the CIA has become the cornerstone of Obama’s military interventions in Somalia, Pakistan, Yemen, and elsewhere. For every drone operation authorized by Bush, 10 operations have been authorized by Obama. His administration has also realized new avenues along which executive power could be extended, such as using an executive order designed to sidestep Congress’s more democratic means for lawmaking, or its reliance on the Espionage Act which it has used against more whistleblowers than all previous administrations combined. Many now watch in horror as Trump assumes all of these powers and policies long defended as appropriate and necessary by Democratic elites, who seemingly presumed that one of their own would succeed Obama. As Slate editor Franklin Foer wrote last week, Trump is taking over “the office of the presidency at the peak of its imperial powers.” What makes this all the more frightening is that Trump has thus far laid out exceedingly little of his plans for the White House. During the campaign, political operatives, pundits, and citizens alike watched on as the businessman wavered between racist demagoguery and authoritarian rhetoric without putting forth substantial policy, believing this would even-

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tually discredit Trump rather than enliven his base. What we are now left with is a faint outline—strongly girded by sexism, racism, and homophobia—of vague ambitions and untenable objectives. On the question of cybersecurity, Trump’s website states that his administration will “develop the offensive cyber capabilities we need to deter attacks by both state and non-state actors and, if necessary, to respond appropriately.” How are we to understand a term like "respond appropriately" here? How would the Trump administration determine the difference between state and non-state actors? Similar questions emerge when one examines his stance on drone operations, which he has referred to as simply “necessary” yet has failed to articulate what exactly they might be necessary for. Donald Trump is, of course, not the first politician to traffic in vagaries, but the explicit danger and murky constitutionality of the security policies he does choose to elucidate—such as “taking out” the families of suspected terrorists—demands this sort of vigilant questioning. Moreover, since Trump’s policy is so often utterly indiscernible, one must assume that the vast majority of executive responsibility will be relegated to his entourage of Islamophobes, hardline imperialists, surveillance state specialists, and Christian radicals—tenuous members of the DC elite so unsavory and collectively despised by their colleagues that their only chance at political relevance was through Trump. What might a kill list look like under Chris Christie? The NSA under Rudy Giuliani? Drone operations under General Mike Flynn? Now more than ever, it is essential to remember that it is our data that scaffolds these surveillance and security organizations and operations. It is our emails and search histories that fill the memory banks of XKEYSCORE, a NSA program designed to identify and monitor nearly every human who sits down at a computer. It is our tele- and internet communications that corporations, at the behest of the government, feed PRISM, another data collection program helmed by the NSA. In the past, some may have felt overly comfortable relinquishing their rights to privacy and, in essence, fueling these surveillance systems, believing a ‘beneficent’ administration would never abuse these powers. After watching Trump’s campaign tenaciously pursue and distribute the contents of a private email server with the single goal of personal destruction, however, one must imagine far fewer feel comfortable now. Even before Trump,

these systems have always been intimately tied to violence—the data-gathering operations run by the NSA and CIA generate what security operatives call signals intelligence (or SIGINTS), the information ultimately used to determine whether or not a person should be placed on one of the White House’s kill lists, lists which Trump will soon take over. While it may seem like a small step in warding off such pervasive, dark futures, it is essential—especially for those engaged in political activity, who have been disproportionately targeted by the American security apparatus in the past—to take time now to protect our data and preserve our privacy. Below the College Hill Independent presents a preliminary guide to data protection. ENCRYPTING EMAIL COMMUNICATION WITH PGP In the late ’80s, computer scientist and anti-nuclear activist Phil Zimmermann watched as Congress began to roll out new surveillance legislation designed to collect and track digital and telephone communication in the US. In an effort to counteract these far-reaching policies and preserve the privacy of American citizens, Zimmermann released the source code for his encryption program PGP (which modestly stands for Pretty Good Privacy) in 1991. Zimmermann’s program is not only capable of quickly encrypting text, but it also, to this day, remains unbroken. That is, the encryption is so robust that even if a PGP-encrypted message were to be intercepted by the most capable employees of the NSA or Great Britain’s Government Communications Headquarters, they would still have no ability to read the message itself. While the science behind PGP and related programs is exceedingly complex, the system itself operates on a simple lock and key principle. When one downloads a PGP encryption program (we recommend GnuPG for Windows and GPGTools for Mac, both free), they are given a unique public and private key. This public key (the lock) can only be opened with your specific private key (the key). The idea then is to send copies of this public key to all of your contacts, so when they want to send you a message, they just have to put it in an email encrypted with your public key. Once you receive this encrypted email, you simply decrypt (unlock) the email with your private key.

NOVEMBER 18, 2016

This process can run in both directions, with the sender always encrypting their message with the receiver’s public key, and the receiver decrypting the message with their own private key. By following these steps and encrypting sensitive information,we can insure our own privacy as well as the privacy of all those who come in contact with the email. Furthermore, as Zimmermann points out in PGP’s first user manual, once these encryption systems become ubiquitous (particularly among those who have no intention of nefarious activity), the desire within the US security community to make such techniques illegal will, in turn, be undermined. REROUTING YOUR INTERNET ACCESS THROUGH A VIRTUAL PRIVATE NETWORK While Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) were originally designed to protect large corporations from hackers in the 1980s, they have become an invaluable tool for any citizen who fears their internet activity is being watched. Anonymous VPNs provide their users access to the internet without exposing their IP address or any other geo-locating tag by tunneling the user’s internet traffic through a remote server. Without a VPN, such information could easily be used to

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determine the identity of a computer user and their location. This past month, the ACLU claimed that IP addresses and geo-locating tags were used by local law enforcement to determine who attended Black Lives Matter protests in Baltimore and Ferguson. By using anonymous VPNs these sorts of surveillance efforts are critically compromised. Furthermore, by rerouting through a remote server, VPNs also often allow users to circumvent censorship protocols and access information otherwise blocked in their area. While different VPNs operate in drastically different ways, we recommend the anonymous VPN TorGuard, which runs a shared IP configuration across all of its servers. This means that every member of the network, regardless of where or who they are, appears to be working on precisely the same computer at the same location. Since TorGuard’s server holds no log of who is using it, all users are protected and completely unidentifiable to any other party, even TorGuard itself. Furthermore, all of TorGuard’s traffic is strongly encrypted, so if data were to be intercepted, there would be no way to find out what that data is. While PGP works like a lock and key, TorGuard’s VPN works like “I’m Spartacus!” where everyone, by accepting the same identity, becomes unidentifiable and protected by the community against accusations of wrongdoing.

END-TO-END ENCRYPTION FOR SMS For those who own smartphones, one of the fastest ways to curb government surveillance and preserve privacy is by switching from in-house messaging applications (such as Apple’s Messages or Android’s Messenger) to third party applications that prioritize encryption and security. For instance, Signal (which is free of charge and can run on both iOS and Android) not only provides stronger encryption than standard SMS, but the company also maintains no trace or record of its users. Therefore, if law enforcement were to ever ask Signal to turn over their users’ data (a shockingly common practice), they would be unable to comply, preserving their users’ privacy. Signal also encrypts user phone calls; in fact, the encryption protocols used are written by PGP’s own Phil Zimmermann. While this is by no means an exhaustive list of programs, incorporating these encryption measures marks an essential step in preserving one’s privacy and security. Especially now. JONAH MAX B’18 [AD2FABA4]

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CITY IN RESISTAN

Providence community leaders weigh in on organizing after the e BY

The Indy

ILLUSTRATION BY

Ruby Stenhouse

Like many people, we are still trying to process the events of the past two weeks. To help make some sense of what the election means for us and our communities, we decided to reach out to some people who are already engaged in fighting the racism, sexism, xenophobia, and countless other oppressions that Trump's election has emboldened. The Indy asked activists, organizers, and political leaders the following question: “What do you see the proposed policies of a Trump presidency threatening here in the state of Rhode Island, and what measures of resistance do citizens and policymakers need to make now?” Here’s what they told us. AARON REGUNBERG, State Representative We are potentially facing a war on immigrants, a war on reproductive rights, a war on working families and labor, a war on the climate, a war on access to health insurance, the list goes on. A war on LGBT rights. That’s why I think it’s so incredibly important that we are ready here in the state to step up and to do whatever we possibly can through state and local policy to defend and protect our communities and continue moving towards a fair and more equal society. And that means again, if they’re going to come after our immigrant brothers and sisters, we need to fight—for example, to make Rhode Island a sanctuary state. If they’re going to repeal Obamacare, we need to step up and pass a universal health insurance system at the state level just as Massachusetts did. If they’re going to roll back climate action, we need to go all in on renewable energy at the state level, which we need to be doing anyway. If they’re going to mess with reproductive rights, then we sure as hell better pass legislation affirmatively legalizing abortion in Rhode Island, which we don’t have now, it’s all Roe v. Wade. If a Trump-led Department of Labor is going to be rolling back protections for working-class families, we need to step up and continue passing minimum wage increases, and paid sick days and protecting the rights of workers to organize here at the state level. And we need to be working towards communities of color for leadership. We need to be prioritizing the sort of fundamental short-term imminent danger that some folks are in, and that’s really really critical. I also think we need to do that work, and we need to also prioritize creating an aspirational economic agenda that can bring working class folks of all races together. There are a lot of white people across the country and here in Rhode Island, where Trump did much better than people thought. There are some who are terrible racists and there are some who are suffering and having legitimate anxieties. And they’re being fed false, noxious solutions by Donald Trump, and we need to offer the actual solutions like a living wage, and tuition-free public college that will bring folks together so we need to be both engaging on the defensive front and fighting an offensive. One that can create a new kind of politics where we can come together and win.

METRO

JORGE ELORZA, Mayor of the City of Providence [speaking at a press conference] I know that the results and the reality of last week’s election are still fresh in the minds of many people in our city, as they are in mine. Because of Tuesday’s result, I am more convinced that the work we do here on the local level is essential to safeguarding the principles that define us as a community. We cannot stand idly as members of our community are bullied, targeted, and scapegoated on the national stage. And with so much uncertainty in the days ahead, it’s important to support one another in every way that we can. That’s why I’m doubling down on my vision of One Providence, and on advancing a society that reflects the values that have already made our country great, values such as inclusion, values such as equity, and respect for the dignity of every single individual. I’m happy to announce that every single week between now and Inauguration Day, I will be announcing a new policy, initiative, or a gathering or event, to give reassurance to our most vulnerable and marginalized residents that our city stands with them. These policy announcements will focus on local immigration reform, implicit and embedded racism, criminal justice reform, police-community relations, environmental justice, and support for women and families, Muslims and religious minorities, and the LGBTQ community. These announcements will be an overt expression of our values as a city. While folks may feel threatened by what they hear at the national level, I want them to know that they are supported and they are safe here in Providence. Today more than ever, Providence needs to lead the way in creating an inclusive, compassionate, and forward-thinking society, and our One Providence initiative is how we are starting this endeavor. People are very fearful. Some of the most troubling concerns that have reached me both directly and indirectly are from kids in our schools. We have kids who have asked their teachers whether their friends who are Latino are going to get deported. Kids have been watching for the past year, year and a half, and it registers in their minds, and even though they can’t make out the details, they know that what has been spoken at the local level has a very direct, deep and meaningful impact even at their home level. That’s part of what’s so troubling. Across the board, I hear it from the immigrant community, I hear it from the reproductive rights community, I hear it from the environmental justice community; folks are concerned about what may happen come January 20, and as I mentioned before, that makes me more convinced than ever that the work we do here at the local level to make sure that we advance these principles is more important than it’s ever been. All we can go on is by a person’s words. It is my sincere hope that what [Trump] has said up to this point is not truly what he means, and not what he intends to do. But we can only go on what he has said that he wants to do, and that’s why people in the community are so concerned. And that’s what this One Providence initiative is about: give them reassurances that regardless of what they are hearing at the local level, that they are valued, they are safe, and that they are part of our community here in Providence.

STEVE AHLQUIST, reporter, Rhode Island Future The big things are some of the things [Elorza] mentioned. The rights of various religious minorities, minority rights, undocumented people, even homeless people are going to come into this at some point, and ecological or environmental concerns, environmental racism. I mean, we’ve got, right now, a FERC (Federal Energy Regulatory Commission) that approves everything that goes through. What’s going to happen down there [in Washington DC] is that they’re going to be empowered by having even more power. No one’s going to wind FERC back right now. Pipelines are going to be everywhere. Some of the stuff that keeps undocumented people safe here could be rolled back, because some of that stuff is by executive order by Obama. There will be people who are completely legal right now, and they’ll suddenly not be legal anymore, and that could happen with the reversal of one order, easily. Concrete measures we’re taking right now, I think state-wide, on all sorts of different levels: push the state to be more responsive to citizen’s needs, and to push the city, which I think Elorza’s doing some good things on this, honestly, I think these are good initiatives he’s talking about. And then it will be community defense; it could literally come down to resistance, getting in front of ICE trucks, hiding people in your basement. It will literally be at that point. That’s what we’ll be doing. I mean, I won’t be doing it, I’ll be covering it, but it’ll be out there. And from the point of view of a free press, we have a responsibility here to not turn people over to a fascist government. I don’t care what kind of press you are, you don’t just say, “oh, I’m going to be neutral on the rights of human beings.” I know some of them can be, I just can’t.

VANESSA FLORES-MALDONADO, Community Safety Act Campaign Coordinator, STEP UP Coalition Trump’s policies are across all margins attacking all marginalized people, so if you’re a woman, LGBTQ, trans, he’s not your president whatsoever. Some people are saying he will not be so bad, but he’s been attacking people. He wants to lock up and detain two to three million immigrants, and even just his plans for climate change, even his economic stuff, it’s gonna affect homeless people, low-income people—I wouldn’t be surprised if he got rid of welfare completely. It’s just an attack on every single type of marginalized person. It’s nice to see that people are making Google docs and already standing up for each other though. My job, working as Community Safety Act coordinator—it’s gonna get harder and harder. My job is basically [advocating that] Black lives matter, and his platform is “all lives matter” or “white lives matter.” Our jobs are much harder and it’s gonna suck, because I think it’s a two-edged sword. Because there’s racists and misogynists who don’t think we should exist and white liberals who don’t actually talk to us or ask what we need. There are a lot of organizers who are white, privileged, and telling communities what they should be doing, when these communities who are being marginalized, exterminated, and attacked, know what we need. We don’t want your safety pins, we want your money and your resources and your time.

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election

FRED ORDOÑEZ, Executive Director, Direct Action for Rights and Equality

SAM ADLER-BELL B’2012.5, Policy Associate in Civil Liberties Program, The Century Foundation (NY)

KAREN McANINCH, Business Agent, United Service and Allied Workers of Rhode Island

There are immediate threats that certain populations are already facing right now. The harassment is only going to escalate as the freedom to be a racist gets more institutionalized, and within institutions, whether it’s schools or nonprofits or government agencies. There’s going to be more assaults. People need to meet with their own at first. That’s what we’ve been doing, and a lot of folks are doing, just sort of meet with your own allies, because everybody’s trying to figure things out and not everyone’s at the same place or facing the same problems. If we haven’t done the work together, it’s only going to get in the way if certain people try and book into the process at the moment. They can have their own meetings with their own friends and talk about what they’re willing to do, what kinds of commitments they’re willing to give. There are groups who are made up of memberships that are going to be the most targeted; there’s Southeast Asian queer folks like at PrYSM talking about what kind of actions they’re going to have and what systems of protections they’re going to have. There’s groups made up of immigrants and undocumented people; they’re coming up with what kind of processes or mechanisms they’re going to need or build for immediate protection. People are meeting about those things right now and the immediate threat of assault; I would say those groups will come out at some point and say, “this is what we need from the general population.” Wait for those groups to come up with those things. I would say that for white folks who haven’t been plugged in, they should try and join White Noise Collective, because the White Noise Collective is a place that will take a white person who hasn’t been plugged at all and organize them, so that when there are needs, like “Hey, we need help here for this event, we need food for this,” that sort of thing, there’s a clearing house where we can pass those things and White Noise can put that out. The city policies that we’re fighting for as an organization is the Community Safety Act, that people like Elorza are pushing back on and the City Council is pushing back on—these protections are going to be needed now more than ever, because Trump has said he’s pushing for stop-and-frisk and all the horrible criminalization measures that target people of color. He wants to amp all that up. We’ve been working to dismantle what’s been going on, so we’ll be calling out for support on those campaigns. Groups will start to consolidate initiatives, saying, okay, it looks like these groups are supporting this particular initiative as resistance, and that will get out to all the different groups. People who aren’t connected to anything will hear about those and say, we’ve thought about that issue, and that’s where we can plug in. Some of it is patience, some of it’s respect. We, and when I say “we” I mean the collective we, not just DARE, we’re going to need all the sorts of solidarity possible.

My number one piece of advice in these times: Listen to organizers. Listen to the people who have been doing resistance and movement work for years, for decades. They know how the levers of power move. They know how to throw sand in the gears of American empire. Listen to them. You may feel a desire to build something utterly new. And perhaps you should. But so should you embrace the wisdom of those who were already building. Maybe the resistance you envision already exists; it just needs more hands, more minds, more voices. You don’t need to lead. Join. Be a hand, a mind, a voice. My second piece of advice: Don’t listen to columnists. All week, I’ve seen elite media figures dole out advice about what and when and whether to protest. About which signs to carry and which chants to avoid. The depths to which these people misunderstand politics cannot be overstated. They dislike protests because they’re loud, because they’re messy, because they create traffic, because their meaning can’t be reduced to seven column inches. Don’t listen to them. The comfortable easily mistake their delicate sensibilities for political prudence. Ignore them. Listen to organizers.

One of the most depressing things for me personally is that some people in our organization probably voted for Trump. That’s really hard to deal with. Apparently union members across the country voted almost as much for Trump as for Clinton. A lot of people had a lot of misinformation, but there’s also a lot of legitimate discontent and people thought Hillary Clinton’s administration would just maintain the status quo. And then there were a lot of people who were just disenchanted with both candidates and maybe didn’t vote at all. It just gives me a really sinking feeling to think that these people didn’t think about how this was going to have a very serious effect on labor rights. There’s nothing to stop Trump from taking away the improvements that have been made during the Obama administration. The National Labor Relations Board under Obama has made it a lot easier for people to unionize—that’s how the grad student unionization happened. Also under Obama, many more people who make less than $47,000 a year became eligible for overtime. All those successes will get ratcheted back. A best case scenario is that this will be no worse than Reagan and Bush. But it probably will be worse. It’s just so hard when you spend all this time working on something and then just see it all get torn down. Rhode Island still has a fairly positive labor presence, so there’s hope that the state will be able to mitigate some of the harmful policies Trump will try to introduce. Maybe Rhode Island can continue to be in the right place on the minimum wage even if the national minimum wage isn’t there. I am a little concerned, though, that I haven’t heard a whole lot from the governor of the state on any of this. I’m also concerned that Rhode Island probably won’t be in the forefront for women’s issues or abortion rights because of the strong Catholic presence in the state. And there’s been a reluctance to support those things even from Raimondo and other women in the state. That’s one of the hardest things to move forward on. I can already see things changing. I was walking into the Arcade the other day for lunch and there was something spray painted on the steps that had the n-word. I’ve never seen that in downtown Providence before. I feel like that’s something that wouldn’t have happened before the election. Hopefully that was an aberration, I hope it dissipates. But I don’t know that it will without people speaking up.

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OMAR BAH, Executive Director, The Refugee Dream Center One of the biggest worries is the fear and negative attitude that the environment of Trump’s presidency has created. People fear for their lives, just walking around on their street. [At the Refugee Dream Center] we work mostly with Black people and Muslims and it is difficult for them to feel comfortable—constantly worried they’re going to be discriminated against. We’re preparing for Trump to make it even more difficult for refugees to come to the country, particularly from Syria. Many people have come here and left their families behind, who are waiting to come join them. Now many families will continue to be separated—people here are going to continue to live in distress and isolation, feeling that they are living in a country where they don’t belong. It’s very hard for people; they are mourning because their families are not going to be able to come. The hope of being reunited is slim. With Trump, refugees are not going to get food stamps or housing—they are going to be stagnant, without being able to get their basic needs. But the most important immediate problem is the separation of family members who cannot be reunited. We are going to stand up to hate and bigotry and any attempt to harass refugees. We’re not going to stand by and watch refugees be targeted. And we have support—on the local level we’re working with many other groups, as part of Resist Hate RI. People are very energized. We’re also organizing community forums to educate refugees about their rights. People are scared because they don’t know the rights they have, that can’t be taken away.

MIKE ARAUJO, Executive Director, Jobs with Justice When we look at the groups that Trump has named— undocumented workers, women, LGBTQ people— he’s talking directly about the community we work with. He’s looking at the entire working population of Rhode Island. The day after, people were stunned. Folks in traditional labor really believed that Hillary was going to win. At this point, we’re trying to assess our vulnerability and asking ourselves whether or not the federal government has the apparatus to enact any of the things that he’s asking for. And if so, what we can do to mitigate the effect of any of those policies. But it’s not just about preventing deportation from the federal level—it's about changing the opinions of 40% of Rhode Islanders who voted for someone who they know is a racist. People need to realize that their neighbors’ humanity has to be their concern, it’s not a choice. It’s a question of humanity.

METRO

PA S T TENSE

Notes on nostalgia BY

Devika Girish Julie Benbassat

ILLUSTRATION BY

The latest season of Black Mirror opens with the cheeriest episode in the history of the bleak, techno-dystopic series. San Junipero takes the idea of a nostalgia-industrial-complex and runs with it. The episode is set in a world where “nostalgia immersive therapy” allows elderly, terminally ill folks to plug their minds into a cloud and relive the decade of their choice in a fictional SoCal town of endless youth, sunshine, and debauchery. When they die, their consciousness is uploaded to the cloud, and they live a happy afterlife of eternal present in a gilded, candyfloss past. +++ That nostalgia could be a reprieve from death would have seemed ludicrous to the man who came up with the term in 1668 to describe a deathly affliction that plagued Swiss mercenaries in Europe in the 17th centuries. Swiss physician Johannes Hofer initially considered the words “pothopatridalgia,” “nostomania,” and “philopatridomania;” but finally settled on “nostalgia”—a compound of the Greek words nostos, for homecoming, and algos, for ache or pain, to describe the fatal effects of longing for home. Symptoms of this “neurological disorder of essentially demonic cause” apparently included obsessive thinking about home, bouts of weeping, anxiety, palpitations, fever, anorexia, and insomnia, among others. Recommended cures ranged from letter-writing activities and opium to leeches and stomach-purging. Throughout the 18th and 19th centuries, nostalgia was considered a contagious “military disease” and diagnosed in troops fighting the Thirty Years War, the Napoleonic Wars, and even the American Civil War: According to “The Medical and Surgical History of the War of the Rebellion” compiled by the General Surgeon of the U.S. Army in 1870, 5000 soldiers were reported to have been suffering from nostalgia during the Civil War, and 74 allegedly died from it. These reports apparently started a spate of feigned nostalgia among soldiers all over Europe. Distinguishing the pretenders from actual sufferers became a subject of great interest in military campaigns. An enterprising Russian general in Germany in 1773 came up with an effective solution: He warned his troops that the first man to succumb to nostalgia would be buried alive. The number of reported nostalgia cases immediately plummeted. In the 19th century, as immigrants began to flood into the United States and reminisced about the lives and families they had left behind in Europe, American doctors thought of nostalgia as an “immigrant psychosis.” +++ I experienced an immigrant psychosis of my own earlier this year while reading, of all things, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child. I spent almost my entire my childhood with my nose in a book; my memories of home are, largely, memories of reading. When I moved halfway around the world to go to college four years ago, I realized that my literary upbringing was an invaluable survival skill. Books are an immigrant’s best friend: Lay your roots not within walls but within hardbound covers, and you can carry your home in your backpack, safe from the psychoses that plagued the 19th-century immigrants to America. Or so I thought. As I started to read the book, I found myself overwhelmed with a deep, aching melancholy. I found myself mentally straining against the spaces between the words, grasping for something beyond the pages of the book, beyond the materiality of the subleased Washington Heights apartment in which I was staying for the summer. Platform Nineand-Three-Quarters, I realized, wasn’t embedded in some hermetic literary universe impervious to the specificities of the world around me. What made it so

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magical wasn’t just the cacophony of wizards, witches and spells, the smoke of the steam engine, the swoosh of owls and robes. It was also, quite essentially, the blazing sunlight that sliced in through the windows of my home in India as I spent entire afternoons reading the Harry Potter books as a child, the heat that churned the summer air into a sedative, the hum of the gigantic desert cooler rumbling through our flat’s marble floors as it blew water-flecked air on to me, the scent of red chillies wafting perpetually from the kitchen. As I read through the book, I yearned for a Hogwarts that tasted like home. I powered through to the end as fast as I could, unable to stop but unable to dwell in the memories it so elusively—and painfully—evoked. And then, without opium or leeches at hand, I settled for wine and fell asleep weeping. Yearning for home, however, was just part of it. Distance is recuperable; time is not. As I read in my New York apartment, I knew that I could return to my home next summer and read the book in its sunlit, chilly-soaked heat, but time would no longer stretch on either side of me like a ceaseless present tense. I would no longer collect words off the page like shiny pebbles, thrilled at how foreign the English language felt to my Hindi-accustomed tongue. I would no longer be able to visualise a thestral with the powerful clarity of a child who hadn’t yet become enchanted by the screen. It was the realization of having traveled, irreversibly, to not just this new place but also this new point in time, that overwhelmed me with nostalgic longing. +++ In his “Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View” (1798), Kant noted that when the homesick revisit the places of their youth, “They are greatly disappointed in their expectations and so cured. Though they think this is because everything has changed there, it is really because they cannot relive their youth there.” His evocation of nostalgia as a longing for one’s past instead of one’s home anticipated the reformulation of nostalgia as a temporal rather than spatial concept in the late nineteenth century. After decades of failed cures and futile attempts to locate a pathological “nostalgia bone” in the body, definitions of nostalgia finally disappeared from professional literature and shifted from the medical to the cultural realm. No longer a pathology, nostalgia came to be regarded as an emotion in the twentieth century. “So easily and naturally does the word come to our tongues nowadays,” wrote sociologist Fred Davis in 1979, “that it is much more likely to be classed with such familiar emotions as

love, jealousy, and fear, than with ‘conditions’ as melancholia, obsessive compulsion, or claustrophobia.” +++ If nostalgia became associated with a specific time rather than place in the 20th century, it has become severed from all specificity in the 21st, existing simply as a sentiment attachable to any representation of pastness. Arjun Appadurai famously described this phenomenon as ersatz nostalgia: “the viewer need only bring the faculty of nostalgia to an image that will supply the memory of a loss he or she has never suffered.” The analog fetish, the popularity of period dramas among audiences that never lived through the eras in question (Mad Men’s target demographic in 2015 was 25- to 54-year-olds), pop culture’s tendency to reproduce and reboot the past until it loses all historicity (in 2011, Nickelodeon starting rebroadcasting “classics” of the ’90s to spectacular ratings)—all demonstrate the millennial tendency to nostalgize in the abstract. The ease of digital archiving makes this proliferation of nostalgia so frantic that there now exists as oxymoronic a term as “anticipatory nostalgia”: the desire to memorialize the present (often at the press of a button) before it is lost to the future. It might be easy to dismiss all this as soulless simulacra, but nostalgia remains surprisingly powerful even as a depersonalized, commodified sentiment. Take, for instance, the appeal of a show like Stranger Things to a non-American young adult like me. I neither lived in the America of the 1980s, presumably populated by mom jeans and mixtapes and Spielberg movies, nor grew up with cultural memories of these artifacts. And yet, I watched the show with a bittersweet nostalgia inspired not by a particular historical reference, but by the show’s romanticised construction of historicity: the ways in which it distilled the diverse experiences of an entire generation into a Rubik’s cube and an E.T. homage, and embalmed them with saturated colors and a John Williams-esque score. It was, in a sense, the inverse of the immigrant psychosis. If the fantasy world of Harry Potter made me ache for the materiality of a specific place and past, the specificity of Stranger Things made me ache for the abstract fantasy of pastness: the conceit that our complex and fractured experiences of the present eventually congeal into a monolithic and mythical past—a past that can be reified, through the workings of ersatz nostalgia, within an object, a sound, a TV show, or even a clickbait GIF-set. DEVIKA GIRISH B’17 takes the bait.

NOVEMBER 18, 2016

HOLDING GROUND Defending a home in Palestine BY

Max Schindler

When asked what her family will do if the army demolishes the village, Soraya, 16, hesitates: “We’ll go to Yatta,” she says, gesturing towards the nearby West Bank market town. “No,” her mother interrupted. “We’ll stay here. Don’t say that.” It’s a question on the mind of every resident of Susiya, a Palestinian village of tarpaulin huts and sheep pens that faces a pending demolition order for December 12, after being razed four previous times by the Israeli army in the past 30 years. The embattled 400-person village has attained iconic status in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as doves and hawks draw lines in the sand over its fate. Supporters of a two-state solution are making a hard-pressed, last stand effort after years of relentless settlement construction supported by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Right-leaning Israelis want the Palestinians evicted so they can expand the nearby Jewish settlement, also called Susiya; Western diplomats drive by weekly in four-wheelers to the isolated hamlet in the South Hebron Hills, taking case interviews and reporting back to Washington and Berlin about the plight of a negotiated peace. Other envoys include leftist Israeli and international tour groups, who stop by in a show of solidarity with the village. The groundswell of international attention on Palestinian Susiya is matched by the Israeli government’s spotlight on the Jewish settlement of Susiya. In a symbolic gesture, Israel’s hawkish defense minister Avigdor Liberman chose to visit the settlement of Susiya on the first day of Israel’s school year in 2016. Defense ministers do not typically visit schools, let alone give speeches inside them. Liberman hunched in the doorframe of a class and spoke of the rights of settlers to live in the West Bank—making no mention of their non-citizen Palestinian neighbors. With Trump’s election, the work of diplomats and human rights advocates may become even more difficult. The president-elect’s main Israel adviser, Jason Dov Greenblatt, once lived in a nearby West

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Bank settlement and served as a combat soldier there. Trump will likely replace the few left-leaning American State Department staffers who have offered a sympathetic ear and called on John Kerry to intervene to “save Susiya.” The hopes of a gun-toting former settler like Greenblatt heeding Palestinian human rights claims is slim. +++ Though Susiya has drawn outsized attention, the situation in the village is far from unique. As part of Israel’s 50-year military occupation, the Oslo Accords divided the occupied West Bank into Areas A, B, and C. While Areas A and B (making up 40% of the West Bank) are under the autonomy of the Palestinian Authority, Area C (making up 60% of the territory) is under direct Israeli control. Susiya is one of an estimated 180 villages and communities located in Area C. In Area C of the West Bank, all Palestinian building must be approved by the Israeli authorities. From 2009 to 2013, Area C Palestinians filed 2,000 building permit requests. Only 44 were approved according to B’tselem, an Israeli human rights organization. In their claim to building rights, the Palestinians of Susiya cite Ottoman-era title deeds from 1881. While the Israeli army has verified the documents’ authenticity (according to the Israeli newspaper Haaretz), the army fails to acknowledge their legal value. +++ A few hundred meters away from the ripped, dusty tents of century-old Palestinian Susiya sits the red-slated roofs and verdant gardens of the Israeli Susiya. A group of right-wing, religious Jews founded the settlement of Susiya in 1983. Around 1,000 Israelis live in the settlement, and in the last election most

voted for the far-right, religious Zionist party. The settlers rarely if ever interact with their Palestinian neighbors, except for the occasional act of vandalism, desecration of an olive grove, or physical assault. The homes of the settlers are connected to the electrical, water, and sewage grid set up by the Israeli government. The settlers pay a few dollars per cubic meter to get piped water from the public-owned national water carrier while the Palestinian dwellers pay five times the price for water tanks from a private company. Palestinians are entitled to basic services provided by their occupier under international humanitarian law, yet Israel fails to comply. Relief organizations such as the Red Cross and humanitarian aid from European countries have stepped in to fill the void left by Israel’s failure to provide these services. In the past decade, the German government installed solar panels in the village. Other European Union countries contributed slides and ladders for a makeshift playground. Italy donated a shipping container that functions as the de facto town hall. EU diplomatic stickers are plastered on many of the buildings as a plea for consular protection, a warning for soldiers who seek to bulldoze the village. Despite the political and psychological limbo of living in non-permanent housing, life continues. While living and volunteering in Susiya from May to August 2016, I spent much of the day bantering with the women in the kitchen, chopping vegetables and stewing soup. I would carry huge sacks of fertilizer as the women dumped manure into the taboon oven hearth. While most of the women never stopped working, the men lounged about for much of the day. They would shepherd the sheep in the early mornings and late afternoons, sometimes helping with the olive harvest or beekeeping. We would sip multiple cups of tea daily. Most families were large, ranging from six to eight children. The kids would run about the place, poking fun at visitors and villagers alike. The tents

NOVEMBER 18, 2016

granted little in the way of privacy, allowing relatives and neighbors to stop by for a chat at all hours of the day and night.

scorched, barren Judean Hills. Then we’d break the fast together, one feast after the next, waiting for the news about the demolition.

+++

On most days, I taught English to the children. The boys would yell and shout at me, getting bored easily. That left me with a trio of teenage girls wanting to study. They were each entering senior year of high school and preparing for their tawjihi—the high school graduation exams. We’d sit under a gnarled olive tree, gossiping and joking. Soraya, a dark-skinned, ambitious 16-yearold, is the best student in the village. She talked of wanting to study at the local Polytechnic University in Hebron to become a journalist. Soraya’s mother, Iman, liked to attend the lessons, too, even if she was afraid of speaking. One class, we practiced asking each other our ages in English. Iman refused, acting suspicious. “Why do you want to know my age? What for? Are you going to talk to the army about me?” Iman’s husband, Mahsem, would tell me little by little about his family. “My grandfather, Mahmoud Jemol, he was killed by settlers,” Mahsem confided in me towards the end of my stay, pointing in the distance towards the army pillbox that now sits on the site of his grandfather’s olive field. As Mahsem talked about the killing, Iman interrupted with a shrug. “What can we do, one of us will next be dead,” she said with a deep chuckle. “Let’s have some tea.” Not every villager has felt the brunt of physical assault but all feel the constant threat of Jewish settler and army violence on their way of life. 15 years ago, the army attempted to prevent the villagers from using the water well, in an attempt to force them off the land. An army bulldozer lifted pieces of a rusting car into the wells, permanently poisoning the water source. Most of the Susiya residents knew no Jews aside from soldiers or settlers. Weekly, a half-dozen left-wing Jewish activists would visit the village. They would banter and sip on tea with a few of the male village heads. But the rest of the villagers kept their distance from the “foreign” ajnabi visitors. Villagers puzzledly asked me why I would “flip” sides. Some even accused me of being an agent in the mukhabarat, the secret police, or the Mossad, Israel’s CIA. As the lone Jew during the month-long Ramadan fast, many of the heavier and sweatier tasks fell on my shoulders. In late afternoon, the men would sleep as I’d shepherd the sheep grazing over the sun-

After multiple stays on the demolition, Israel’s High Court convened on August 1, 2016 to discuss Susiya’s fate. Representing the village were attorneys from Rabbis for Human Rights and B’tselem, while defense ministry officials stood across the aisle. A dozen of the Susiya village elders sat in the front-row, decked in white linen shirts. Most speak no Hebrew and they asked around for ad-hoc translation. In the court petition, the villagers’ attorneys requested that Israel’s military recognize the legality of Palestinian structures built without a permit, given their Ottoman-era title deed to the land. Yet from the initial courtroom conversation, it seemed unclear whether the justices read the attorneys’ petition. The court’s chief justice, Miriam Naor, began the hearing with a confession. “I don’t understand the petitioners. I don’t understand the state. I don’t understand anything,” Naor said, as courtroom spectators guffawed at her admission after years of legal wrangling. “The state’s position is not clear. I have difficulty with the fact that the state comes to court with one file after another and says we haven’t decided,” Naor continued. Naor shook her head. Despite criticizing both the petitioners and the state, Naor rejected the appeal and said that the decision over Susiya’s fate rested with defense minister Liberman. When the RHR attorney tried to clarify whether the demolition orders were still in effect, Naor interrupted. “Don't ask me [stupid] kitbag questions,” Naor said, a Hebrew slang term referring to the iconic olive green duffel bag Israeli soldiers carry. In basic training, when an army officer orders a conscript to, let’s say, run around a tree 30 times, one unassuming new soldier will always ask, “shall we bring our kitbag?” Now everyone must lug the 50-pound packs on their backs.

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

+++ For four months this summer, I lived with Nasser Nawaja’s family, eating with his relatives on the threadbare concrete and sleeping each night on mats alongside his two sons. Nasser is the head of the village and he works for B’tselem, an Israeli human rights organization which fights the military occu-

pation. The group employs a few dozen staffers to videotape, record and document army and settler brutality in the West Bank. As a local staffer for the HR group, Nasser’s job functions like a 311 line. Nasser’s job entails not just fighting the impending destruction of Susiya, but responding to violence throughout the South Hebron Hills. All hours of the day and night, Nasser got calls and texts from friends and colleagues. An army bulldozer is driving towards a family home in the nearby wadi (valley), a relative would telephone. Soldiers are detaining a friend at the checkpoint, we’d hear. A settler brandished his gun and is now threatening locals, we’d see on Facebook. After each update, Nasser would holler and we’d jump into his beaten-up, duct-taped Toyota Camry, holding a camera and Wi-Fi stick in case we needed to submit a human rights report to B’tselem or to a journalist willing to show the world what was happening. Nasser has a Rolodex of human rights activists and diplomats campaigning on the village’s behalf. Despite their heartfelt appeals, the Israeli government plans for demolition continue forward. +++ Azzam, 55, a resident of Susiya who used to work in Israel, spent 23 years working as an electrician for Israeli utility companies until the Second Intifada in the early-2000s. With suicide bombings across Israeli cities and an Israeli army siege on Palestinian towns, Azzam could no longer get a work permit. He lost his job and has worked as a shepherd in Susiya ever since. “I want to work on my lands that they took,” said Azzam, gesturing south towards the Jewish settlement. He keeps his arm outstretched, jabbing at the horizon until he gets tired. “Four times, Susiya has been destroyed by the Israeli army. It wouldn’t surprise me if they did it again. With the past four demolitions, we slept outside under the trees. We did that during the winter,” he said. When asked as to what he will do if the bulldozers return, Azzam paused. “Look, I was born in Susiya,” he said. “My childhood was in Susiya. I became a man in Susiya. And I’ll never leave Susiya.” MAX SCHINDLER B’16.5 brings his kitbag wherever he goes.

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MICROBE CULTURE A conversation with Sandor Katz Raina Wellman ILLUSTRATION BY Sophie Kidd Meyers BY

Using some of Sandor Katz’ fermentation recipes, I’ve cooked up Sweet Potato Fly, Ginger Bug, and Rice Beer. Hailing from rural Tennessee, Katz is a well-known fermentation expert and advocate, described by the New York Times as “one of the unlikely rock stars of the American food scene.” His work, as an author and fermentation workshop instructor, embraces self-sufficiency and accessibility. In a time of industrialized food systems, Katz encourages everyone to become more engaged in creating and understanding their food. He believes DIY fermentation offers a flavorful alternative to the problematic organization of monocultures, synthetic chemicals, and CO2 producing transportation systems. Though he acknowledges that reclaiming food is not just about fermentation, Katz discovered that many of the questions that arise once you start interrogating your food—how it is produced, where it came from, and by what process it was made—can be answered by fermentation. The fermentation of food is an ancient practice, the earliest record dating back to 6000 BCE in the Fertile Crescent. Today, grocery aisles are filled with fermented products—from bottled beer to kimchee. Yet fermentation is much more than the process of converting carbohydrates to alcohol. The anaerobic conditions and chemical conversions can be used to create bread, sauerkraut, yogurt, olives, cheese, and vinegar or be applied to a variety of vegetables, fruits, dairy products, grains, beans, and meat. As a leading educator within the field of fermentation, Katz’ knowledge goes beyond the “bougie” applications consumers typically think of, like $7 bottles of kombucha, to introduce a variety of recipes within his books—from kvass to sourdough. Beyond providing instructions, he also delves deep into fermentation, discussing its multifaceted anthropological history and cultural significance while also revealing its specific biological processes. His work promotes tailoring our food consumption to facilitate the healthy symbiotic relationship we have with microorganisms. In a telephone conversation with The College Hill Independent, Katz discussed the dangers of antibacterial soap, a new fermentation recipe discovery, and his long-lasting love of sauerkraut.

The Art of Fermentation, as well as Wild Fermentation and The Revolution Will Not Be Microwaved have inspired many people to get involved with food activism and fermentation. What initially got you involved? SK: When I moved from New York City to rural Tennessee in 1993 I definitely had a background in all different kinds of activism. When I got involved in gardening and producing food, there was a kind of reclaiming to it. I was reclaiming skills that in the past would have been common everyday skills. But in our society, where fewer people are involved in food production, most of us are obtaining our food from the system of mass production and distribution. Many of us have been developing a critique of that food system—the diminished nutritional quality of food that has been produced through that system, the environmental destructiveness of the mass production of that food, factory farming, chemical agriculture, and the economic ramification of taking food production out of our communities.

The Indy: Your book, the New York Times bestseller

METABOLICS

The Indy: Can you speak more on how fermented food cultivates healthy microbial communities? SK: When we eat any kind of living fermented food we’re introducing elaborate microbial communities into our bodies. They have a complex interaction with the bacteria in our intestines, they stimulate improved immune responses that contribute to better digestion and their genetics become available to all the bacteria in our intestines. In a very literal way, they enrich the environment for the bacteria in our intestine and they contribute to greater biodiversity. The Indy: What do you think of current fermentation trends, like kombucha? How do you see fermentation being further integrated into contemporary diets? SK: In the scheme of fermented foods and beverages that people eat, kombucha is completely marginal. Coffee is fermented, bread is fermented, cheese is fermented, cured meats are fermented and most condiments use vinegar, which is a product of fermentation. You can’t get through a day without fermented foods; you don’t have to go buy a bottle of exotic kombucha. Virtually every individual in virtually every region in the world is eating and drinking fermented foods and beverages at every meal. The products of fermentation have never waned in popularity—bread, cheese, coffee—all have high profiles in our culture. Fermentation is so present in our lives. Nobody stopped eating fermented foods; it just shifted to a factory somewhere else rather than happening in people’s kitchens or communities. The Indy: Part of your practice, as a writer, educator and fermenter, is encouraging everyone to get involved in the fermentation process. What is an easy way to get involved with creating fermented cultures?

The College Hill Independent: How do you think fermentation plays into human-to-human interactions as well as microscopic relationships? How can we make friends, not enemies with bacteria? Sandor Katz: I taught my first workshop in 1998 and I was always sharing products of fermentation with people, so it’s definitely been an ongoing part of my life. As soon as I started teaching fermentation workshops, I recognized that there was a huge interest. A lot of people are interested in fermented foods and a lot of people are afraid of fermented foods. People project fear onto the process of fermenting foods, because we’ve been taught to be afraid of bacteria and because we have this narrative about good and bad bacteria. So people feel afraid and kind of disempowered. They imagine that these processes are somehow complicated, that you need to be able to identify the bacteria to make sure that the right ones grow, but in fact, according to the US Department of Health, there has never been one single case of food poisoning or illness documented from fermented vegetables. That’s a very impressive safety record. Mostly I try to demystify the process for people, make them realize that it isn’t something scary and risky. It is straightforward, incredibly safe and easy.

microbial communities self regulate. They’re very competitive environments. Our major line of defense against the relatively small amount of bacteria that can manifest as illness in human beings is bacteria. So the antibacterial soaps that are promising to kill 99.9% of bacteria gets rid of what protects us from the .1% of bacteria that can get us sick. By repeatedly using products that kill the bacteria on our hands, on the surfaces all around us, we’re making ourselves more vulnerable to bacterial disease.

As I was getting involved in learning food production skills and getting to know other people that were similarly motivated to learn about food production I just sort of conceptualized it as a grassroots movement to reclaim food. That became even stronger after Wild Fermentation came out and I went out on my book tour. People come at [the food movement] from a lot of different angles, but there is a shared sense that our food supply has been largely hijacked by large profitdriven actors. What can we do to reclaim our food? The Indy: Can you explain the perceived difference between good bacteria and bad bacteria? As a culture, are we too obsessive with our antibiotic usage? SK: We don’t know enough about bacteria to categorize it according to our value system. In terms of targeting individual species, microbiologists are coming to the conclusion that the concept of species does not even apply to bacteria because they have so much genetic flexibility that any bacteria could become any other kind of bacteria. I think more helpful than characterizing individual bacteria as being good or bad is talking about microbial communities. Healthy

SK: I would encourage anybody to start fermenting vegetables. It’s straightforward, you don’t need to get any special starter cultures, there’s no risk whatsoever, it’s easy, it’s incredibly delicious and it supports good health. I think there’s so much to recommend it. It’s a great place to start and people can be incredibly creative. Fermented vegetables are not just sauerkraut. You can mix up the type of vegetables you are using and how you work with them. I am continually experimenting with new things. Just this week I made a batch of gochujang, which is Korean fermented chili paste. I found some directions in English and was able to assemble the ingredients. My learning curve has been ongoing. When there’s something you want to make you just have to understand the principles involved. Fermentation is about somehow manipulating environmental conditions to encourage certain organisms to grow while simultaneously discouraging other organisms from growing. This isn’t done in laborites with microscopes; fermentation emerged in ancient, simple kitchens.

NOVEMBER 18, 2016

THREE COMICS AND A WORDSEARCH BY

Brigitte Santana, Gabriel Matesanz, and Dolma Ombadykow

- BS

HEGELIAN DOGALECTIC

- GM

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NOVEMBER 18, 2016

THE FIRST FLIPBOOK BY

Naïma Msechu Julie Kwon

ILLUSTRATION BY

When I was young, I lived in a house brimming with piles. They were everywhere: piles and piles of things that filled hallways and doorways and all of the rooms (living, dining, bed, bath) except the kitchen and guest bedroom. From the floor to a foot below the ceiling, piles not of trash but of treasure. The neighbor kids often asked me to list what was in the house, and I’d have to ask them which part—I knew where everything was by the time I was nine. My mother taught me room by room (there were 16) and floor by floor (two, plus the basement and the attic), and it was tricky because there wasn’t really a particular order and new things were added all the time. There were boxes of plastic shopping bags; Ziploc bags filled with twist ties; real-hair wigs on head mannequins whose plaster faces reflected each other’s blank stares across the valleys between piles; chests with more mothballs in them than clothes; assorted shin-guards; spare antlers; exactly 37 gloves, pairless; shelves of canned bamboo shoots my mother had grown herself; and more, way more, depending on which room you followed the winding path to.1 Many of the treasures were heirlooms (when I was really young, I thought my mother said air-looms and spent hours trying to weave air between the bumpy continents of the eight spinning globes) given to my mother by her mother, and her mother’s mother, and her greataunt, and her normal aunt, and never by men. I asked my mother why we didn’t have anything from male relatives, but she merely laughed and said it was because they kept all their air to themselves. Even so, the idea of owning something intangible didn’t seem strange to me. I was used to it. The crowning piece of my mother’s residential collection was absent. Missing, rather—she was sure it was there, and because she was sure, I was sure too. My great-great-grandmother had given her an elaborately hand-drawn flipbook for her seventh birthday, and though I’d never seen it, she assured me it was a thing of beauty. A thing of beauty, she said, hand-drawn and precise the way only women back then could do it. She told me about it when I turned eight and became old enough to memorize the house’s treasures: “Those pictures you flip and they show a different moving picture? It’s like that, Emma. Children have them.” And soon I had them too, tons of them (cars crashing into walls, calico kittens chasing gilded butterflies, clowns dancing and squirting water out of their red noses), but none like the First Flipbook.

LITERARY

The First Flipbook displayed the developmental stages of a frog: egg to tadpole to tadpole with hind-legs to tailed frog to a real one that jumped from lily pad to lily pad until it reached a water lily—as pure and white as you can imagine, my mother told me—and smelled it, and smiled. Frogs don’t usually care much about how flowers smell and they don’t smile, but this one did. A thing of beauty. The flipbook was longer than most, not to mention much better drawn, but what was truly spectacular, she said, was the way it made you feel: tingly with excitement during the watery metamorphosis and exhilarated during the hippity-hopping journey across the pond and then happy, oh so happy, when the frog arrived at its snowwhite water lily. My mother didn’t know how she’d lost it but she knew it was while she was pregnant with me. She was forgetful then, because I was suckling on her memories through our umbilical cord, and she left it atop a pile. By the time she realized she’d lost it, it had been covered by other items. Or maybe it had slipped and gotten trapped between treasures. In any case it was gone and it was my job to find it. My mother was sure I had the memory within me, deep inside what she called the whirly-twirly mass of my brain. She told me that if I could just learn where everything else was, the lost flipbook would reveal itself on my mental map. So I memorized the locations of all of the treasures2 and spent hours sifting through them, taking apart piles and putting them back the way I’d found them3, and repeating the process in my head at night before bed, and then again in my dreams. I would run through the rooms, fast, until the treasures blurred and the house became its own cluttered/glinting/fragrant flipbook, but I couldn’t tell what picture it made and the only feeling it gave me was one of swampy dread. Once, I did an entire circuit of the house seven times (a book in a first floor hallway had told me it was a magic number; I did everything in sevens in those days) without stopping, and collapsed in the attic, light-headed and so nauseous I felt I would puke right there, lying at the base of a pyramid of stacked Folgers coffee containers. I closed my eyes, and the lists in my head were jumbled from the running and it took me a while to straighten them out, and all the while I was close to tears and then I was crying, crying hard as I thought of the piled treasures, of cross-stitched quilts here and Limited Gold Edition Disney VHSs there

and the three crates of laundry detergent two—no, three? No, two—rooms over, and of what was over and under and in-between everything, and my cheeks were wet because I had stolen my mother’s memory and I didn’t know how to get it out, I didn’t know how to give it back, its amphibian happiness was wedged in the folds of my silly brain, yes in the folds of it like my brain was a pleated chiffon dress. There was one of those in the basement bathroom along with several lacy numbers my mother was saving for my prom, and I’d checked there, I’d checked there, but I’d check there again and again and probably still not find it. It was then that I realized the memory of the First Flipbook might jump around like its frog, hopping away just as I got close so that I would never catch it, and I kept weeping until my mother came up the stairs and told me it was dinner time. She looked at me, supine at the base of the Classic Roast pyramid, and told me not to cry because I’d find it, I’d find it because I had to, because it was in there—the mind loses nothing except what is stolen from it—and I followed her all the way to the gleaming, pile-less kitchen, wishing my hiccups were ribbits, wishing I could turn into a frog.

The first floor coat closet alone held packaged thank-you cards, Tupperware containers full of paper clips and safety pins, an array of lunch boxes, several sewing machines, stacked coffee filters like a tall multifoliate blossom, a ten-piece set of sterling bowls, twelve folding chairs, and a treadmill neither of us had ever used. 2 I had mnemonics to help me remember them, sentences so long I thought they might be stories, different for each room and so nonsensical that I shared them with my mother at teatime and she laughed and laughed. The living room, for example, started like this: Scaly wolves drop fifty leagues into ravines where furry fish live and skin them for warmth for justice for revenge… 3 This meant handling glass cases of punctured beetles, boxed board games, rolled posters, mini TVs flashing emerald and fuchsia and electric blue light, metal tins of saffron and paprika and nutmeg, rubber-banded battery clusters, unused floppy disks, and, among many more such treasures, spare computer keys with an abundance of S’s, a silent hissing. 1

NOVEMBER 18, 2016

List

󰁒󰁒/󰁒8 -󰁒󰁒/2󰁋

Eli Keszler - Northern Stair Projection @ Boston City Hall (6:309pm)

Trans March of Resilience @ Knight Memorial Library (10:30-1:30pm)

1st of Reading A Furtive Movement Act 1: The Use of Farce @ AS220 Blackbox (8-11pm)

 Gay Goth Nite Providence  @ Aurora (9pm-2am) Normal is an illusion. what is normal for the spider is chaos for the fly -MA 19

Vision for Black Lives: End the War on Black People @ The Humanist Hub, Cambridge MA (4-6pm) A workshop in response to the Movement for Black Lives’ policy platform, the Vision for Black Lives. 19

Plums / Hypoluxo (NY) / Crumb / Blau Blau @ askaPunk in Allston, MA (8-11pm) I don’t like mixed colors that much, like plum color or deep, deep colors that are hard to define. -EK 20

Mudfest Fallfest 2016 @ Nessarella Farm, Hallifax (9am-5pm) War has rules, mud wrestling has rules - politics has no rules. -RP

In honor of National Trans Day of Remembrance, there will be speakers, community partner resources, self-care activities, and an open mic space for storytelling and community building. 20

FREE PINBALL SUNDAYS @ Shelter Arcade Bar As a child, I remember my dad would sometimes drive me into town with him to play pinball machines together. It’s a bittersweet memory but also a favorite. -IA 21

Tell State Leaders We’re Counting On Them: Resist Hate! @ Rhode Island State House (12-1pm) Working Families Party invites you into the State House to tell state leaders that we don’t fuck with Trump. 21

Janet Echelman, Soft Structure: Sculpting at the Scale of Cities @ MIT Department of Architecture (6-8pm) Painting is so poetic, while sculpture is more logical and scientific and makes you worry about gravity. -DH

SEND A PIC OF YOUR DRUNK UNCLE TO LISTTHEINDY@GMAIL.COM

In NYC in 2012, there were almost 700,000 people stopped … More than half of all stops were conducted because the individual displayed “furtive movements.” Readings from a new play by Providence local Vatic Kuumba explores the politics of moving while Black. 22

Americans in Revolt: Sarah Jaffe @ AS220 (7-8pm) Awake, arise or be for ever fall’n -JM 22

CityArts Staff Gallery Show @ 891 Broad St, Providence (5:30-7:30pm) A guilty conscience needs to confess. A work of art is a confession. -AC 23

Fetty Wap, Young Thug @ Dunkin’ DOnuts CeNTER (7-11pm) You don’t really gotta rap no more; you can just say the verse with a swag now. -FW When I go to clubs, I don’t have to wait outside. -FW Gucci Mane is my favorite artist, -FW 24 Read about the history of colonialism. Know whose land you stand on. Talk with your family. Give thanks if you don’t need to fight or pray for your water. Read the #standingrocksyllabus.