The College Hill Independent Vol. 41 Issue 6

VOLUME 41 ISSUE 06 30 OCTOBE R 2020

A BROKEN SYSTEM SET ABLAZE

WRESTLING WITH THE ESTABLISHMENT

Seeking safe shelter on the island of Lesvos

An interview with State Senate Candidate Jonathon Acosta

WHY ARE MY COUNTRY’S TREASURES SITTING IN YOUR GLASS CASES? How the RISD Museum’s website reflects its colonial foundations

Indy Cover

Untitled Ella Rosenblatt

Week in Review 02

Jacinda Ardern is Queen Bowen Chen Slippery Releases Gemma Sack & Alan Dean

Nation + World 03

A Broken System Set Ablaze Marina Hunt

Metro 07

Counselors Not Cops Mara Cavallaro

09

The Lotus Pepper Olivia Mayeda

Features 10

California Smoke Dims the Rhode Island Sun Elana Hausknecht

11

Wrestling with the Establishment Rose Houglet

From The Editors The apartment and furniture would have been nothing extraordinary as belonging to a homely Non-Fiction track department assistant with a stubborn countenance, and stalwart limbs set out to advantage in knee-breeches and gaitered Salomon Speedcross-es. Such this individual seated in his arm-chair turned to a portrait of my jealousy — a crisped curry bun lying on an oiled wrapper, Koh-I-Noor writing erasers, a ribbon of the shiniest quality. Crocheted figures of gerbils scattered upon his desk. Rose scented butter for the hair. A digital keychain of a digital pet affixed to his purse. He is to be seen in any circuit of five or six miles among the Hill, if you go at the right time after dinner. But Mr. Heathcliff forms a singular contrast to his abode and style of living. He is as much a graduate as many a mid-distance runner: rather slovenly, perhaps, yet not looking amiss with his negligence, because he has an erect and handsome figure; and rather morose... He’ll love and hate equally under cover, and esteem it a species of impertinence to be loved or hated again. No, I’m running on too fast: I bestow my own attributes over-liberally on him. That day, on the Green, Mr. Heathcliff may have entirely dissimilar reasons for keeping his hand out of the way when he meets a would-be acquaintance, to those which actuate me. Let me hope my constitution is almost peculiar: my dear mother used to say I should never have a comfortable home; and only last summer I proved myself perfectly unworthy of one.

Arts + Culture 15

Why Are My Country’s Treasures Sitting in Your Glass Cases?

Yukti Agarwal & Dway Lunkad

Science & Tech 17

Click Here to Claim Your Prize Andy Rickert

Literary

13

06

14

19

Chateau Gato Drake Rebman

Ephemera

A Moment of Peace Anna Kerber

X

Place, Memory, Projection Nathaniel Hardy

List

Tara Sharma, Sara Van Horn, & Mehek Vohra

MISSION STATEMENT The College Hill Independent is a Providence-based publication written, illustrated, designed, and edited by students from Brown and RISD. We are committed to publishing politically engaged and accessible work. While the Indy is financed by Brown University, we hold ourselves accountable to our readers across the Providence community. The Indy rejects content that explicitly or implicitly perpetuates racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, xenophobia, ableism and/or classism.

Though this list is not exhaustive, the Indy strives to address these systems of oppression by centering the voices, opinions, and efforts of marginalized people in Providence and beyond.

The Indy is constantly evolving: we are always working to make our staff and content more inclusive. Though our editing process provides an internal structure for accountability, we always welcome letters to the editor.

STAFF Week in Review Amelia Anthony Nick Roblee-Strauss | Nation + World Emily Rust Leela Berman Giacomo Sartorelli Anchita Dasgupta | Metro Ricardo Gomez Deborah Marini Peder Schaefer | Arts + Culture Seamus Flynn Alana Baer | Features Alina Kulman Alan Dean Edie Elliott Granger | Science & Tech Gemma Sack Anabelle Johnston Thomas Patti | Literary Kate Ok Bowen Chen | Ephemera Sindura Sriram Anna Kerber | X Maia Chiu Ethan Murakami | List Tara Sharma Sara Van Horn | List Designer Mehek Vohra | Staff Writers Uwa Ede-Osifo Mara Cavallaro Muram Ibrahim Justin Han Izzi Olive Bilal Memon Seth Israel Nell Salzman Victoria Caruso Zach Ngin Evie Hidysmith Kaela Hines Ella Spungen Sarah Goldman Alisa Caira Laila Gamaleldin Drake Rebman Morgan Awner Elana Hausknecht Rhythm Rastogi Nicole Kim Lucas Gelfond Rose Houglet Joss Liao Nicholas Michael Belinda Hu Leo Gordon CJ Gan Vicky Phan Tammuz Frankel Amelia Wyckoff Auria Zhang Olivia Mayeda Justin Scheer Gaya Gupta Eduardo Gutiérrez Peña Marina Hunt Issra Said | Copy Editors Christine Huynh Grace Berg Jacqueline Jia Elaine Chen Sarah Ryan Jasmine Li Nina Fletcher Madison Lease Alyscia Batista | Design Editor Daniel Navratil | Designers Anna Brinkhuis Katherine Sang Kathryn Li Isaac McKenna Miya Lohmeier Clara Epstein | Illustration Editor Sylvia Atwood | Illustrators Sandra Moore Katrina Wardhana Floria Tsui Mara Jovanović Hannah Park Jessica Minker Rachelle Shao Yukti Agarwal Sage Jennings Ophelia Duchesne-Malone Joyce Tullis Charlotte Silverman Simone Zhao | Business Isabelle Yang Lauren Brown Evan Lincoln | Web Designer Sindura Sriram | Social Media Christina Ofori | Alumni Relations Jerry Chen | Spanish Translation Felipe Félix Méndez | Senior Editors Tara Sharma Sara Van Horn Cal Turner | Managing Editors Audrey Buhain Andy Rickert Ivy Scott | Managing Designer XingXing Shou *** The College Hill Independent is printed by TCI Press in Seekonk, Massachusetts.

30 OCTOBER 2020 VOLUME 41 ISSUE 06

@INDYCOLLEGEHILL WWW.THEINDY.ORG

Week in

Swamp Monsters ILLUSTRATION XingXing Shou DESIGN Isaac McKenna

D E T I VO

Zealand’s Muslim community and her quick action to enact the strictest firearm legislation that the country had seen in decades.

Speaking to a more technologically savvy audience, she has been known to sidestep mainstream media by communicating through Instagram and Facebook live streams.

However, in less publicized news, in mid-2019 Ardern was the subject of public backlash over her handling of a housing project that was slated to be built on Ihumātao, land considered to be sacred by the local Māori people and located just three kilometers outside Auckland International airport. Ardern’s apparent escalation of the land dispute and lack of support for the native people left the public wondering how the seemingly progressive PM would not back the preservation of the ancestral whenua (the Māori word for land). Arden since has announced that no housing will be built until an agreement is reached, and the Māori continue to occupy the whenua, past the eviction date of July 23.

At the Indy, contributors for “Week or so in Review'' hope to see Jacinda Ardern backing more indigenous people and perhaps, less of Kanye West in general. - BC

SLIPPERY RELEASES

BY Gemma Sack & Alan Dean

in a 5-1 vote to remove West from the ballot.

In the 2008 and 2012 presidential elections

BY Bowen Chen Wisconsin voted blue by wide margins, 13.9 and 6.9 percentage points respectively, so it came as In the past weeks and months, there has been a a surprise when Trump won the state by less than lot of news circulating regarding the upcoming 1 percentage point in 2016. West, when asked presidential election. You’ve noticed it— whether he was concerned about taking Black Instagram stories of your friends with I Voted votes from the Democratic candidate replied, stickers, just to let you know that they voted and “To say that the Black vote is Democratic is a form reminding you how you haven’t voted yet; when of racism and white supremacy.” For reference, your mom calls about your mail-in ballot, lying long-term studies from the Pew Research center on the kitchen table on the wrong coast; a text have shown that over recent years, 87 percent of from Kelly, who works at #VoteTogether, asking if Black Americans identified or leaned towards you’re interested in hosting a virtual voting party the Democratic Party. The West campaign in the area. Here at the Indy, we get it. Simple ended up suing the Wisconsin Elections things can sometimes be difficult. Nevertheless, Committee but was overruled by a judge, who we encourage you to go out (or even better, stay explained his ruling on time—a clock struck at in) and vote! Mail in that absentee ballot and you midnight ushers in a new day—delivering a loss too can flaunt your virtual voting sticker to your for both West’s Wisconsinite supporters and that 500 followers. While you’re busy Googling which problem set you turned in drunk on the wrong corner the stamps go on, here’s some election side of midnight. news you might not have heard, or care about.

In other more viral election news, New Presidential candidate Kanye West and his Zealand re-elected Prime Minister Jacinda running mate, Michelle Tidball, are officially Ardern early last week in what has been described off the Wisconsin general election presiden- as a landslide victory. Winning 64 of the 120 seats tial ballot. While the decision to remove the in Parliament, the Labour Party’s leader became unlikely pair of billionaire rapper and biblical the first Prime Minister to be elected without life coach might not come as a surprise to many, having to form a coalition since New Zealand the circumstances of the appeal to the Wisconsin introduced the proportional Parliamentary Elections Committee were certainly unusual. system. For those unfamiliar with this form The legal proceedings, which took place over of government, multiple factions exist within Zoom, largely centered around the semantics Parliament, unlike North American bipartiof what it meant to “turn in documents no later sanship, and parties must lobby for support than 5 o’ clock,” an argument you might expect and form coalitions in order to reach a majority to find in your multivariable calculus syllabus vote. The surge in support for the Labour Party but not in a courtroom. An attorney for West’s has largely been a result of Ardern’s response to campaign had reportedly filed their nomina- the COVID-19 crisis. Since the beginning of the tion papers late—a minute late. The challenging pandemic, the country has had fewer than 1,500 lawyer used a procession of affidavits and film total cases and 25 deaths, and over the past six footage to place West’s attorney entering the months has had fewer than 30 new cases a day. building “no later than 14 seconds after 5,” and Ardern has long pulled on the nation’s heartthe physical papers in the elevator at 5:01, not the strings, the Labour Party’s underdog Hail Mary filing clerk’s possession. The West campaign’s candidate giving birth during her first electoral lawyer and other Republican commissioners term and becoming the first world leader to responded that the etymology of the phrase “no bring her baby to a UN general assembly. She later than 5 o’ clock” implied the inclusion of the was thrown into the global spotlight in 2019 minute of time up until 5:01. They also argued following the shootings at Christchurch when an that West’s attorney being in the elevator with a Australian gunman murdered over 50 worshipstaff member was enough to indicate a transfer pers at two separate mosques. Ardern was of papers. The commission ultimately concluded praised for her unconditional support for New

JACINDA ARDERN IS QUEEN.

02

WEEK IN REVIEW

Four years and countless op-eds after President Trump’s arrival at the White House, it would still seem to most observers, left and right, that the ‘swamp’ of the American intelligentsia is far from ‘drained’—except, perhaps, the nether regions of CNN legal analyst and New Yorker columnist Jeffrey Toobin. Last week, Toobin made headlines when he discovered that he had not, in fact, “muted the Zoom video” on a call with colleagues:; he unwittingly lowered his camera, revealing that he was pleasuring himself, allegedly on another video call with a webcam model.

The New Yorker meeting, a ‘simulation’ of election night in which he was playing the role of the courts, instead resulted in Toobin’s speedy trial in the court of public opinion. Toobin has since been suspended from the New Yorker pending further investigation, and CNN said in a statement that they have given him time off from his talking head duties “while he deals with a personal issue” (presumably, the personal issue of his other “head”).

Toobin’s trouser snake, however, is not the only slithering menace on the loose, as another unwanted discharge tainted the waters of that very same masturbator’s hometown only a few weeks earlier. Last week, media outlets reported that in late September, an unknown man dressed entirely in white had been caught in the act of releasing approximately 100 Asian swamp eels, a predatory invasive species, into Brooklyn’s Prospect Park Lake.

The eel-dumper justified his actions to bystanders with good will and lofty intentions. When a local fisherman filming the incident threatened to call the police, the would-be animal rights crusader, who declared he had bought the eels “at the store” (likely a live fish market), proclaimed repeatedly without explanation, “You don’t need to call cops, I save lives!”

As Toobin pleaded ignorance, the man in white attempted to placate the fisherman by holding out his hands and showing him that it was just “a little eel.” (The average size of an Asian swamp eel ranges from 12 to 18 inches—the College Hill Independent cannot, however, comment on the size of Toobin’s “little eel.”) Witnesses to both incidents have been left to ponder how much danger one to one hundred slimy members could pose, as both wildlife experts and media pundits weigh in on the matter. In contrast to Toobin’s career pitfalls, the Parks Department does not plan for the time being to take any active measures against the eels: Asian swamp eels, nocturnal predators who burrow in sediment by day, are notoriously difficult to trap. In an illustrative example of Darwinian “survival of the fittest,” the Indy is left wondering whether perhaps had Toobin himself adapted to nocturnal behavior, he could still be prowling through the sediment today.

A number of prominent male writers and commentators have been quick to jump to Toobin’s defense, proving that the media ecosystem is very hospitable to men who behave like him. Though the #MeToo movement has, to some degree, punctured the insulation of predatory men in the media from the consequences of their actions, the jury is still out on whether or not Toobin will be able to hibernate through the controversy and emerge with his career intact. The eels, however, are unlikely to survive the winter in the unfamiliar environment of the lake, though climate change may ultimately create more comfortable conditions for the eels than expected. Jeffrey Toobin, on—and in—the other hand, will winter safely inside, where he can crank up the heat and keep jacking off.

-GS & AD

30 OCTOBER 2020

A Broken System Set Ablaze

BY Marina Hunt ILLUSTRATION Ivy Scott DESIGN Daniel Navratil

Thirteen thousand refugees and migrants were uprooted once again when Europe’s largest refugee camp, Moria, on the Greek island of Lesvos, went up in flames on the evening of September 8. The first night of fires destroyed most of the camp. The next night, a second fire broke out at a nearby informal settlement, turning what was left of the camp to ash.

The day after the first set of fires, Greek officials reported that they were deliberately started by asylum-seekers protesting the mandatory confinement. Residents of the camp refuted this saying that the instigators were in fact locals and far-right groups frustrated that their home island has come to be a key entry point for refugees seeking asylum in Europe, according to BBC. Yaser Taheri and Milad Ebrahimi, young Afghan filmmakers who were residents of Moria for 11 months, complicate these dominant narratives with footage they shared with BBC. Footage from the day after the first fire shows migrant families preemptively evacuating the camp after hearing that an unidentified group planned to burn the rest of the camp, suggesting the second fire was not a spontaneous event. Yaser later overheard a group of camp residents say “tonight we are going to set the rest of the camp on fire, and local people will help us.” While Greek authorities have arrested six Afghan migrants accused of starting the Moria fire, there has not been any investigation into the allegedly involved locals, and there is no indication that there will be.

The residents, most of whom came from Afghanistan and Syria, had been living in overcrowded and unsafe conditions since the camp’s founding in 2015. Home to 20,000 refugees by early 2020, the camp was built for only 3,000, leaving many to build their own tents on the outskirts of the camp and forming a sprawling informal community. Then COVID-19 broke out at the start of September and a lockdown was imposed, further restricting the movement of refugees. Those living on the outskirts of the camp were barred from re-entering the formal site to access food, facilities, and the small stipend provided by the United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR).

Ultimately, clashes broke out between Greek authorities and asylum-seekers aggravated by the lockdown, leading to the first fire and eventually the second.

The Moria camp is only one of many that have suffered from the European Union’s inability, or rather unwillingness, to reform its flawed asylum policy. Without a clear plan in place for relocating asylum seekers, border countries like Greece have been left largely responsible for the influx of migrants arriving on their borders and shores. And at a moment when more people than ever are seeking asylum in Europe, a rightwing and protectionist shift worldwide has fostered increasingly intolerant attitudes and policies toward perceived outsiders. This is felt by the people living in Europe’s refugee camps. Of the asylum-seekers involved in setting the fire, Milad told BBC: “They were angry, they wanted to change something. They wanted Europe to watch, to see the reality of Moria.” +++ The Moria fire and the frustrations that produced it are one more reminder of the long-term consequences of the European Union’s ad hoc and crisisdriven response to the refugee crisis that arrived on

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million project to be completed Seeking safe bya $74 the end of April 2021, according to government spokesperson Stelios Petsas. shelter In August, it was found that Greek officials had secretly on the expelled at least 1,072 asylum seekers, sailing them beyond island of Greek territorial waters and Lesvos abandoning them in inflat-

Europe’s borders in 2015, but had been growing in the Middle East for years. By 2015, four million people, mostly Syrian, had managed to get to Turkey, Lebanon and Jordan, but the vast majority had no secure legal status in those countries. Few people had the right to work, none were formally recognized as refugees, and many children could not go to school. After four years of living under these circumstances, and with no signs of change, Europe became a seemingly more attractive option. But Europe’s migration system offered few formal channels for gaining asylum, so the many refugees escaping the civil conflict in Syria and ongoing violence in Afghanistan and Iraq embarked on their own perilous journeys by land and sea. By the end of 2015, nearly one million asylum-seekers had reached Europe.

What began as a humanitarian issue soon turned political. European leaders began tightening border controls. A March 2016 deal between the Turkish government and the European Union marked the first major attempt to address the influx of refugees in Europe, establishing a policy of sending back most refugees arriving in Greece and other border countries to Turkey. In return, Turkey received $6.7 billion in EU aid to put toward Syrian migrants and refugees turned away at European borders. The deal aimed to deter refugees from attempting dangerous journeys by offering a legal option of resettling in Turkey, where nearly three million refugees, mostly Syrian, already lived at the time. But the deal also stranded those already on the Greek islands closest to Turkey, leaving tens of thousands of asylum-seekers in limbo, not knowing if or when their cases will be reviewed. This is still the case today.

In February 2020, President Erdogan of Turkey announced that his country could not handle the new wave of refugees arriving from Syria and would no longer enforce the 2016 agreement, which evidently relied too heavily on Turkey’s shaky willingness to host more refugees.

Thousands of migrants trying to get to Europe soon arrived at a border lined with baton-bearing Greek riot police officers.

Following a tense clash between migrants and Greek authorities, Petsas announced that “our government is determined to do whatever it takes to protect our borders,” according to a New York Times report.

Greece has since come to the fore of European efforts to block the stream of refugees seeking asylum, with the election of conservative Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis in 2019 intensifying the crackdown on refugees arriving in Greece. Soon, a wall will go up along Greece’s border with Turkey. Sixteen miles of fencing will be added to a pre-existing six mile segment,

able life rafts, according to analysis of evidence by the New York Times. In response to charges that these expulsions violated international law, Petsas said “Greece has a proven track record when it comes to observing international law, conventions, and protocols.”

While the Greek government’s crackdown on migration is reflective of a domestic shift toward protectionism, it does not exist in a vacuum—rather, it is the result of years of shouldering most of the work of receiving and accommodating asylum seekers to Europe. When the migration crisis came to a head in 2015, the EU’s migration system, known as the Dublin system, put the responsibility of determining asylum claims on states of first entry. It intended to avoid endless shuttling of asylum seekers from state to state. However, Southern European states, including Greece, immediately came under pressure to respond to the influx of refugees, regardless of their infrastructural capacity to host asylum seekers and efficiently review their cases. Relocations under this system were conducted primarily on an ad hoc basis, relying on the fickle willingness of member states to accept refugees.

While some EU leaders have since called for bloc-wide solidarity in addressing the refugee crisis, member countries have disagreed on how to manage asylum procedures. Some have taken the lead in expressing solidarity for and taking in refugees.

Germany, for example, issued an open border migration policy in 2015, accepting over one million refugees that year.

Others, like Hungary, have not wavered in their firm anti-immigration stances. When the EU asked Hungary to find homes for 1,294 refugees in 2015, the government instead spent around 28 million Euros on an anti-migration campaign. By the end of that year, 391,384 refugees had entered Hungary through its southern border, meaning around 70 euros per refugee were spent “on a campaign of intolerance,” according to the Migration Policy Institute. In 2016, the Hungarian police recruited 3,000 “border hunters” to patrol the razor-wire-topped fence on Hungary’s southern border, and beginning in December moved to close most refugee camps.

There are also countries that at one point took a moderate position toward refugees but are now hardening their posture— in some cases for reasons of political expediency. France is one example, where President Emmanuel Macron ran as a centrist in 2017 and supported an open-door refugee policy throughout his campaign. Then, in 2019, Macron passed legislation designed to discourage vulnerable asylum-seekers from trying to reach France while encouraging skilled foreign workers to apply for visas. “My goal is to throw out everybody who has no reason to be here,” he said to Valeurs Actuelles, a right-wing magazine. Some critics argue that these tougher policies are aimed at garnering the support of conservative voters ahead of the 2022 election.

What is clear to most, however, is that the flawed migration system that created Moria and similar camps in Greece necessitates reform to the EU’s migration system and asylum policy.

“It’s obvious to everybody that ad hoc solidarity or voluntary solidarity is not enough,” said EU Commissioner for Home Affairs Ylva Johansson in September 2020.

Her comment followed the European Commission’s announcement of the New Pact on Migration and Asylum, which would impose legal obligations on EU member states to host an assigned number of refugees, or else contribute through other

30 OCT 2020

forms of solidarity.The deal emphasizes moving away from a system that places responsibility on the country of first arrival to one that prioritizes the well-being of children and other vulnerable groups. This “compulsory, flexible” form of solidarity allows EU member states to choose between relocation or financial contributions to make more efficient the process of sending back people whose claims are denied. This approach intends to allow countries reluctant to take in refugees, like Hungary or Austria, to contribute to addressing the refugee crisis in other ways.

While the new pact does address structural flaws in the EU’s existing migration system, “a glaringly absent element is a roadmap for legal migration,” points out a report from the Center for Strategic and International Studies. The Center’s report also highlights that the solidarity clause seems to be legally binding only under “pressure” situations, and otherwise returns to being voluntary. “By proposing ‘return sponsorship’ as an alternative to genuine relocation, the EU Commission makes an insult to the principle of solidarity, by actually deputizing returns to countries that reject solidarity,” tweeted Philippe Dam of Human Rights Watch.

Some European leaders have publicly expressed their unwillingness to commit to such a plan.

Hungary, Austria, the Czech Republic, and Poland in particular have led the charge in opposing any EU deal that involves migrant quotas. “One thing is clear: the mandatory distribution of migrants has failed and has no future in the European Union,” said Austria’s Interior Minister Karl Nehammer. “The protection of Europe’s border and the cessation of illegal migration...” should be at the center of the new pact, said Czech President Andrej Babis in a tweet.

The situation in Germany continues to be more promising, in part thanks to citizens who took to the streets following the Moria fire to advocate for refugees, chanting “We have space!”. In response to public pressure, the

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

government committed to taking in 1,553 asylum seekers from 408 families living on the Greek islands.

“No one will be satisfied,” said Commissioner Ylva Johansson to journalists ahead of the proposal’s unveiling, alluding to the fact that the pact asks for compromise from all governments, including both those blatantly opposed to accepting migrants and those most committed to a more comprehensive migration policy. +++ While EU leaders discuss and argue over the logistics of the new migration pact, the conditions at refugee camps in Greece are far from resolved. They continue to exist within the same system that created Moria. Among these is the new camp that was built to replace Moria in the weeks after the fire near Lesvos’ main town of Mytilene.

A video from early October published by DW News, a German media outlet, shows gusts of wind blowing a collection of white UNHCR tarpaulin tents to a sharp lean, threatening to uproot the stakes pinning them to the ground as they’re swallowed by a torrent of rain water, mud, and sewage. The video turns to two young residents of the camp hammering at the stakes, while a third stands nearby, using a bucket to divert the stream rushing toward the tent.

This new camp, where 7,500 of those who fled Moria now live, has flooded twice within the span of two weeks.

Dubbed Moria 2.0, the site is expected to become home for all 12,000 migrants and refugees displaced by the fire. It is situated on a former military firing range, raising concerns that the residents are at risk of lead poisoning from the bullet casings, shrapnel, and other used ammunition strewn about the site. “There is no water, no toilet, no food,” said Zahnab, a 24-year-old Afghan woman living there, to Al Jazeera.

It’s not just that the site itself makes for incredibly compromised living conditions, falling short even of minimum standards for dignified living under international law. Residents have additionally been forced to start from scratch in making the place more liveable for themselves and their families. “What happened at the old Moria camp was that people used their own agency and their own inventiveness and initiative to landscape the area,” said Yannis Hamilakis, a Greek native who has spent more than four years conducting ethnographic and archaeological research on Lesvos, to the Indy. “They could at least live in some kind of acceptable, or at least bearable, conditions. Now, it’s a little bit more problematic.”

Several former residents of Moria expressed that they would prefer to continue living on the streets than to re-enter a camp. But Greek authorities have said that only people in a refugee camp would have their asylum cases processed, forcing asylum seekers on Lesvos to choose between joining others at the new camp or else risk having

their cases thrown out.

The UNHCR visited the new camp following heavy rainfalls on October 8 to identify the people whose tents were most affected by the rain and provide new ones, according to a statement by UNHCR spokesperson Shabia Mantoo.

Mantoo described the area as prone to flooding and said the site is not at present equipped to provide sufficient protection against the continued storms and increasingly lower temperatures expected this fall. The UNHCR has committed to delivering insulation kits, as well as plywood flooring, for family tents in advance of the colder weather. Mantoo stressed that “these are only short term interventions” and that “large-scale efforts are required,” including the transfer of more refugees to the mainland for “better accommodations.” These comments express an unsettling level of uncertainty from an organization meant to be responsible for ensuring the rights of refugees and migrants worldwide.

“This is not a system that is designed to protect the right to asylum,” said Carmen Dupont, the head of advocacy at Lesvos Solidarity, a community-based NGO, in an interview with RTE news. “At a time when we hear from the European Union: ‘No more Moria,’ a new Moria has been built and the conditions—as far as we hear from the people inside— are worse than at the previous camp.” A better model, Dupont suggested, is the Pikpa camp founded by Lesvos Solidarity.

Pikpa is an open refugee camp home to 100-120 migrants at a time, often among the most vulnerable. Led as a collaboration between volunteers and the residents themselves, Pikpa is committed to providing dignified living conditions, legal support, and skill-building opportunities for migrants. It’s estimated that over 30,000 individuals have stayed at the camp since 2012.

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While both volunteers and residents agree that Pikpa is far more representative of the standard that should be the norm for refugee camps across Europe, Greek immigration minister Notis Mitarachi recently announced his decision to mandate the termination of Pikpa and the Kara Tepe camp, another site that served as one of the only alternatives to the harsh conditions of other camps on the island. According to an Urgent Action letter drafted by Amnesty International, all 100 asylum seekers at the camp, including 21 unaccompanied minors, would be pushed out if Mitarachi’s plan goes through.

In a letter, 26 European Parliament members said it would be “irrational and counter-productive, if not to say inhumane, to close down structures that have been working well overall and that are still offering shelter and basic services in a more dignified way than any other actor on the island.” In addition, more than 200 Greek and international organizations, academics, and other actors across Europe signed a joint statement urging the Minister of Migration and Asylum, Notis Mitarlakis, and local authorities to “save dignity, save Pikpa and Kara Tepe.” While Greek authorities have not yet released a written statement reversing the decision, the Greek Ministry of Labor announced on October 14 the postponement of the eviction of the Pikpa camp.

Reports from September 2016 about the Moria camp foreshadow recent events, painting an eerily similar picture to the present situation. “Thousands of refugees detained at one of Greece’s biggest camps… have fled the facility amid scenes of mayhem after reportedly setting fire to it on Monday,” reads a report from the Guardian in 2016. Riots were believed to have been fueled by frustration over the notoriously slow pace with which asylum requests were being processed. Thousands were left without shelter. What’s clear is that this has been happening for years, and the EU’s migration system needs an overhaul. +++ Lesvos has long been one of the key entry points for migrants seeking to live in Europe. For years, it was called the “Island of Solidarity,” said Hamilakis.

Many Greeks living there are descendants of immigrants who came over a century ago, often from the very same regions in the Middle East from which most migrants are coming today.

“My grandmother used to say: even us Greeks had a difficult time when we came here,” said Lesvos resident Panagiotis Deligiannis to BBC. Many Lesvos residents bring this perspective, and “everyone helped” out of solidarity when refugees first arrived on Lesvos in 2015, said Deligiannis.

But without enough support from the EU, Moria grew, and some residents began to feel swamped as migrants sometimes outnumbered villagers by a factor of more than 10 to 1, Panagiotis said to BBC. To quote EU Commissioner Johannson, the fire in Moria was “the result of a lack of European policy, of a common European migration and asylum policy.” Frustration with the Greek and European governments, exhaustion from

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years of sharing their home island, and the consequent rise of protectionist attitudes combined to diminish feelings of solidarity towards migrants on Lesvos. Its residents have perhaps lost sight of their link to the recently-arrived migrants, many of whom left their home countries in search of something better, taking their lives into their own hands, as many of the Greeks on Lesvos did decades ago.

In the wake of the Moria fire, Amir Ali, a young Afghan refugee who has lived on Lesvos for four years, wrote a poem for COV19: Chronicles from the Margins, an artsbased digital ethnography that publishes the work of refugees. To the Greek people, he writes: “Tell your politicians to evacuate the island/ Tell them to stop taking money for a situation they can’t manage.” To the Greek government: “Please believe me/ Refugees would love to leave your village, city and country/ If only you would let them/ Refugees would love it even more if they could go home/ But they can’t.”

Amir’s message has yet to reach those for whom it was intended, but at the very least, the Moria fire has recentered European attention on the migration crisis, an essential goal the Afghan filmmaker Yaser Taheri attributed to the migrants allegedly involved in starting it. European leaders have been forced to confront the inadequacy of the European migration system, to look at the reality of what this system means for the lived reality of so many people, to think about the human dignity of migrants. But confronting, looking, thinking, is not enough. More action is required. Protesting migrants understand this, as do the residents of Lesvos and European allies. It has yet to be seen whether European governments and the international community will step up in a meaningful way to ensure, as Johannson promised, that “we shall have no more Morias.”

MARINA HUNT B’21 urges you to consider donating to Lesvos Solidarity.

30 OCT 2020

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

EPHEMERA

06

COUNSELORS COUNSELORS NOT NOT COPS COPS

BY Mara Cavallaro ILLUSTRATION Mara Jovanovic DESIGN Clara Epstein

content warning: police brutality, school shootings, and suicide As early as the 6th grade, Jayson Rodriguez saw police officers arrest, tackle, and harm his peers at Gilbert Stuart Middle School. Videos of this police violence would circulate on Instagram and Snapchat but consistently go undocumented by school administration, despite the surveillance cameras lining the hallways.

Students of color regularly come from over-policed neighborhoods to over-policed schools, and at just 12 years old, Jayson had already learned daily acts of resistance and self-protection. “I would give police side-eye and try not to interact with them,” he recalled, now a senior at The Met High School in Providence. If his friends were acting out in class, he would warn them not to misbehave, or the white teacher would call the police. The threats of arrest and violence hung over everything—lessons, breaks, and lunchtime. “I’ve seen my friends get beaten by police officers at school in the hallways, in the cafeteria… that’s a trauma that is normalized,” Rodriguez said.

“turnaround plan” for the PPSD made no mention of SRO removal. Instead, Infante-Green said in a statement that there were “pros and cons of the SRO initiative; these include instances where officers have served as mentors for our students.” She committed to doing a survey this past summer of students, teachers, and families regarding SROs. If this survey was in fact completed as promised, youth organizers were neither invited to participate nor informed about any results, Rodriguez said.

PASS is currently working on an email campaign to better hold Mayor Elorza, Governor Raimondo, Commissioner Infante-Green, and Superintendent Peters accountable to Providence students and their safety. The letters begin: “Schools are supposed to be places that use love and support—not surveillance, intimidation, and threat of arrest—to help students “I’ve seen my friends get beaten by police learn and grow.” An updated PASS petition from 2020 officers at school in hallways, in the cafeteria… reads, “We are outraged with the murders of Breonna that’s a trauma that is normalized.” -Rodriguez Taylor, Tony McDade, Ahmaud Arbery, and the countless Black individuals who have fallen victim to police As part of a contract between the Providence brutality and anti-Blackness hatred. As we mourn the Public School District (PPSD) and the Providence community members we have lost, we must also work Police Department, eight armed police officers quickly to ensure the true safety of our community.” currently rotate among the district’s schools as School The three overarching petition demands urge Resource Officers (SROs). In Rhode Island, police offi- community leaders to (1) Remove all School Resource cers are stationed at just over 24 percent of all schools. Officers (SROs) from Providence schools, (2) Hire Police presence is also felt across public schools in the health and safety staff focused on alternative measures United States despite a growing body of evidence that for conflict resolution, and (3) Increase the number of indicates SROs are ineffective and violent, dispropor- support staff in schools. tionately disciplining and arresting students of color, These demands have yet to be met.

LGBTQ+ students, and students with disabilities.

In Providence public schools, Black and Latinx +++ students are arrested at much higher rates than their peers, according to data provided by the Providence 1. Remove all School Resource Officers (SROs) Alliance for Student Safety from 2016-17 to 2019-20. from Providence schools Black students make up 16 percent of total district enrollment but 30 percent of all student arrests. Latinx Providence Police have had a significant presence males comprise 36 percent of PPSD enrollment but in local public schools since the mid 1990s, when the make up 44 percent of student arrests. first officers were stationed on PPSD campuses. By 2013, there were 11 SROs spread across two public middle “When you walk in, there is an officer right schools and seven public high schools in the district. there... I am being targeted like I’m not a student This physical restructuring of schools as policing but a criminal. You already get racially profiled environments—with SROs and surveillance technolin your neighborhood, and then you see officers in ogies—has largely been introduced as a response to school.” — PPSD alum (quoted in PASS petition) mass shootings in schools. Unfortunately, in practice, it has pushed misbehaviors that used to be handled by Providence student groups have been advocating schools into the criminal justice realm. While in theory for SRO removal since late 2018. At that time, the officers are stationed in schools to deter violence, in Providence Student Union (PSU), for which Rodriguez practice they criminalize misbehavior. “Disorderly is now Leadership Team Co-Director, began the conduct” resulted in five times as many arrests in Counselors not Cops campaign demanding that the schools with in-school police officers than in schools city reallocate resources from law enforcement to without police, according to a Justice Policy Institute mental health support staff. In December 2019, PSU, report. In Providence, 36 percent of arrest charges were the Providence Youth Student Movement (PrYSM), for “disorderly conduct.” SROs mean more student and the Alliance of Rhode Island Southeast Asians for arrests, and students of color are disproportionately Education (ARISE) joined forces to form a new coali- represented among the arrested. tion: the Providence Alliance for Student Safety (PASS).

During the 2018-19 school year, SROs made In February 2020, Councilwoman Nirva LaFortune 114 student arrests in Providence Public Schools, (Ward 3), Councilwoman Katherine Kerwin (Ward according to the annual Providence Police Department 12), and Councilwoman Rachel Miller (Ward 13) intro- Report. “Arrests” can mean referrals to law enforceduced a resolution that draws from Providence youth ment, “Training School,” and/or Family Court in the organizing to demand both the removal of SROs from cases when students are not released to their parents.

Providence schools and increased funding for coun- An ACLU report on SROs in schools documents that selors and support services. “being arrested has detrimental psychological effects Rhode Island Education Commissioner Angelica on the child; nearly doubles the odds of dropping out of Infante-Green, however, issued the following state- school, and, if coupled with a court appearance nearly ment in response: “If incorporated as part of a larger quadruples the odds of dropout; lowers standardized strategy that also includes restorative practices, the test scores; reduces future employment prospects; and presence of School Resource Officers in schools can be increases the likelihood of future interaction with the a positive experience that allows our students to build criminal justice system.” a relationship and trust with law enforcement.” Both Even for those who avoid criminal justice interdata and student testimonials indicate Infante-Green’s actions at school, the presence of police officers can visions for SROs are fundamentally at odds with the undermine academic engagement and achievement restorative justice practices she purportedly supports. long-term. For many students, and especially students In addition, Infante-Green and new Providence of color, police in schools present a threat to safety School Department Superintendent Harrison Peters’ and learning. Notably, while “perceptions of a positive

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school climate are associated with improvements in academic achievement,” negative perceptions have been linked to higher rates of detention and suspension, according to an Indiana University review.

Outside of formal policing, another component of the reconfiguration of schools as policing environments is a broad over-emphasis on zero-tolerance policies. The prevalence of these policies indicates an impulse to remove and punish students who misbehave, leading to an increase in both out-of-school suspensions and expulsions across the United States, even for non-threatening infractions. Suspensions are now so widely applied that most are not for violent behavior, but rather for subjective violations like disrespect, disruption, and attendance problems, according to the same review.

Within the PPSD, whose makeup is 91 percent students of color, 197 days of school are missed each year due to out-of-school suspension per school in the district, according to a ProPublica report documenting the 2015-16 school year. Exactly 2,212 students—9 percent of the district— received out-of-school suspensions that academic year.

Punitive discipline that excludes students from the classroom has been shown to undermine educational opportunity, school engagement, and academic achievement. Removing a student from class makes it more difficult for them to be engaged with the material, and therefore makes it more difficult for them to master that material. Instead of deterring students from future misconduct, suspensions increased the likelihood that students would be suspended again, according to numerous studies. Research also suggests that being suspended increases the likelihood that a student will drop out of school, which in turn significantly increases the likelihood of incarceration.

Taken together, the consequences of police presence and widespread exclusionary discipline practices are often referred to as a school-to-prison pipeline that pushes students out of the classroom and into the criminal justice system. Police presence in schools is one tool in a larger system that criminalizes students rather than supporting them. +++

2. Hire health and safety staff focused on alternative measures for conflict resolution This demand from PASS includes two specifying subpoints: “Hire community intervention workers, behavior interventionists, and/or restorative justice coordinators at a ratio of 250 students or fewer per health and safety staffer,” and “These health and safety staff will be in charge of creating a unique safety plan based on restorative justice that meets the schools’ individual needs. These plans should include a peer mediator component.”

In stark contrast to zero-tolerance policies that have led to an uptick in student arrests, suspensions, and expulsions, restorative justice practices prioritize communication rather than exclusion. Those involved in non-violent behavioral incidents are welcomed into a community circle where they are guided through discussion that provides accountability and closure without exclusionary or drastic punishment. Studies indicate that in schools where restorative justice has been implemented, suspensions and serious behavioral incidents have declined. Other reports similarly indicate improved school climates following introductions

30 OCT 2020

The Fight For Police-Free Providence Schools of restorative justice.

Although in the PPSD Code of Conduct the District claims that it employs elements of restorative justice, the next paragraph of the document praises police officers and the SRO program for creating “lasting relationships among students, schools, parents, and Providence police,” noting, “PPSD believes that SROs are effective when they are placed inside schools to facilitate issues that may arise, while also providing positive role models to students.” Restorative justice, however, stands in direct opposition to the retributive justice represented by SROs and the prison-industrial complex that capitalizes on and thus encourages the expansion/proliferation of criminalization and prisons.

Unlike punitive discipline, restorative justice philosophies view people as capable of growth and change and worthy of dialogue and inclusion.

The Met High School in Providence, where Rodriguez is now a senior, is a public charter school that practices restorative justice. Rodriguez notes that he feels safer knowing he will not have interactions with police officers. “Students deserve a space that is not over-policed,” he said. If a conflict occurs between students at The Met, safety teams lead restorative circles with all those who were involved. By contrast,

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only 28 percent of PPSD 6-12th graders trust that in the event of a conflict or problem, their “school community will hear their side of the story and take it seriously,” according to the Rhode Island Department of Education (RIDE).

In June 2020, the Oakland Unified School District board in California voted unanimously to disband their on-campus police force and redirect the $2.5 million spent annually on law enforcement to student support services and restorative justice. The measure, titled the George Floyd Resolution to Eliminate the Oakland Schools Police Department, is paralleled in Minneapolis, Denver, and Seattle public school districts.

among students during the 2018-2019 school year.

Providence schools need more extensive support infrastructures. Providence students deserve to attend schools where they feel safe, heard, and supported through networks that are ready when students need them.

The Counselors not Cops petition demands that the City of Providence hire enough guidance counselors, nurses, and mental health providers to ensure a ratio of at most 150 students per type of support staff. Further, these new staff should engage individualized plans tailored to the needs of their school sites. Although not specified in the PASS petition, Providence teachers have also expressed the need for more support staff, especially bilingual counselors and translators. +++ Central to the fight for police-free schools is a commitment to rethinking what safety looks like. It 3. Increase the number of support staff in schools doesn’t look like police officers in schools making law enforcement referrals for misbehavior. It looks like Just 24 percent of 6-12th graders felt either restorative justice and available mental health and “extremely” or “quite” connected to adults at their guidance support staff. Schools should be spaces of school, according to RIDE data. Only 33 percent felt learning and community, not criminalization. they mattered to others at school, and only 40 percent felt they truly belonged. The Washington Post reported MARA CAVALLARO B’22 asks that you consider that one PPSD school had 70 cases of suicidal ideation signing the Counselors not Cops petition.

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The Making of Food Truck Home Cooking At six years old, Young Nguyen tucked herself into the underbellies of a shrine. A heavy, cement Buddha guarded her from above.

It smelled like lemongrass, the way the temple always did in the summer. Young was hiding from the temple’s nuns, who had woken her up for early morning meditation and chanting. She thought the nuns were beautiful, and one day she wanted to enrobe herself in bolts of saffron, tend the vegetable garden, and cook sweet and sour soup for the whole temple. But right now, she wanted to nap.

Fifty years later, Young isn’t a nun, but she meditates into her sleep and chants through even the shortest car rides. She still wakes up early, now to pickle daikon in sweetened vinegar to a luscious translucency and mill rosy chicken livers into pâte for her food truck.

Young’s eatery is a staple on College Hill, tenderly named Lotus Pepper. +++ The southern countryside of Vietnam, where Young grew up, was a battlefield. At the urging of her mother, Young spent the summers at Bach Van, a Buddhist temple where her aunt was a nun and where both of her grandmothers lived in their old age. Glassy rice paddies appended Bach Van, a refuge from the near-constant barrage of warfare in her hometown of Chau Thanh in the ‘70s.

The day Young’s mom went into labor, word spread that American fighter jets were headed to the Mekong Delta. Within hours of her birth, Young was being cradled through the stiff fronds of a nearby grove. Her grandmother and her older sister took turns holding her. Her father bore her mother, exhausted from labor, on his back. Relatives shuffled through the forest alongside them. Young would later hear tales of the cloud of smoke erupting behind them as the foundations of the hospital collapsed into flames.

“Can you believe that?” Young asked, “I survive. My mom and my family, we survive. A lot of people died, but my family survive.”

On Young’s fourth birthday, February 7, 1968, American bombs killed hundreds of civilians in her province of Ben Tré during the Tet Offensive. That day, an American officer told reporter Peter Arnett, “It became necessary to destroy the town to save it.” +++ When I had Lotus Pepper for the first time during my freshman year in college, it wasn’t the exquisitely golden batter on the fried tilapia that made me think of home—it was the rice. Raised in a Filipinx and Japanese household, I know two things with confidence: the dependable chime of a gloriously oblong, transgenerational rice cooker and what good rice tastes like. The attentiveness of Young’s cooking down to the gentle, vinegary bed of rice made me think of my mom and grandmother’s food and their stories of migration. I wondered what histories had culminated in a pepper blossom on wheels. +++ Under the increasingly bare elms of Brown’s Main Green just up the street from Lotus Pepper’s lunch rush, Young told me she grew up the youngest of 14. While her older siblings were at work or school, she was in the kitchen with her mother and grandmother, learning to handle knives, season broths, and produce a near industrial amount of food for her returning sister and 12 brothers.

She left Ben Tré for Saigon when she was 17. In the city, she sold bánh mì and home-brewed soy milk, which she still makes, straining the liquid from the pulp and carefully stirring the milk over heat at her home in Cumberland. “Too much sugar in soy milk from the market,” she said.

When Young came to the States, she discovered that supermarkets didn’t sell the ingredients she grew up with, and those that did still didn’t taste right. The banana blossoms at specialty markets were limp in their cellophane bundles. “Nothing tastes good,” she said.

She insisted that “the flavor, the smell, not strong like Vietnamese.”

Even the herbs and vegetables she grows herself aren’t as flavorsome.

Young shrugged, “something in the soil.”

Young’s adherence to traditional processes compensates for a deficiency in ingredients. The dishes Young grew up with take time.

Amanda Ngo B‘21, who interpreted for Young when she preferred to express herself in Vietnamese, recalled Bánh Xèo, a starchy staple Amanda grew up with in her own family home in Massachusetts.

Young nodded, “At home, we mix the flour, coconut, and turmeric powder and you let sit for at least half hour before cooking, but the restaurant they do it right away.” Patience in process is crucial to depth of flavor, a tenet Young feels many restaurants, Vietnamese or not, have forfeited for swifter production and profits. “You have to wait for the flour to open,” a blooming of ingredients that is ripened only by time. Young wants her cooking to renounce this neglect of time when she eventually opens a brick and mortar: “I love what I cook, and I want to do exactly what I learned.” For Young, the traditional means taking care and time to taste everything you cook.

Sometimes, when she’s not at the truck, she calls her son to remind him to taste the marinades, the sauces, the pâte. +++ In 1988, Young was living in Saigon, a mother of two very young kids and divorced. Without their father’s financial support, Young knew she wouldn’t be able to give her two children, Thang and Thao, the lives she wanted for them in Saigon. She decided to leave her children in the care of their grandmother until she could secure their admittance into the US. In 1989, Vietnam was still at war with the Khmer Rouge at its southwestern border, and it was illegal for Vietnamese citizens to leave the country without special permission. Young contacted a friend who was part of an illicit operation to help folks leave the country, and he secured a spot for her in a fishing boat. It took her four attempts to actually disembark—the Vietnamese police arrested her once, and it took her a few days to break out of her jail cell. She finally pushed off from shore with 51 other people. It was typhoon season, and their boat was immediately storm-battered. Young thought she might die, but with time, the clouds dissipated. They had arrived at Pulau.

I ask her what those three years were like at the Indonesian refugee camp. “Like hell, honey,” she sighed over the phone to me one evening. With liminal legal status, refugees weren’t allowed to leave the island. But Young’s first three months on the island were spent in a hospital bed anyway. On the boat ride, Young had felt a deep pain in her abdomen and bled longer than her usual period. At the camp’s hospital, doctors found an infection in one of her ovaries, which had to be removed in surgery.

Even though her sister married an American soldier and had been in the US since the ‘70s and could sponsor her, it still took three years for Young’s immigration papers to be processed. “But that’s normal,” Young said. Many people she knew were there for five, ten years.

When I asked her about the friends she made at the refugee camp, she laughed, “Oh boy, the whole island they know me.” Young

BY Olivia Mayeda ILLUSTRATION Jessy Minker DESIGN Miya Lohmeier opened a cafe, which became a beloved fixture of the community.

She had a TV installed, one of the few at the camp, and everyone would come to watch soccer, to see what was going on in the world outside the camp. Young took in nine teenagers who were traveling alone, two girls and seven boys who called her “auntie.” They were the main reason she opened the cafe, to feed them and herself with the profits they made. They catered parties together, serving chicken, the most accessible protein, in as many forms as they could—stewed, curried, fried. Young kept in touch with many of them after they were reunited with relatives in Canada, California, and Austria. Some are married now and have kids of their own.

Young’s deep care for others and her culinary talents brought her community in the US, too. She bought a vacant storefront on Thayer Street, the heart of College Hill, where she owned a nail salon for five years. She called it Forever Young. When homesick college students came to her salon, missing the flavors of home, Young brought her kitchen to them in steaming tupperware. They loved her cooking and urged her to open a restaurant. Over those five years, Young witnessed restaurants come and go, barely breaking even. She needed to find a way to sell her cooking without perpetual overhead.

When she decided to open a food truck, she told no one. She went alone to New York to look for trucks, but none that she saw were in good condition. She asked a friend to drive her to Connecticut to see a truck she’d found online. “I bargain, I buy right away,” she remembered with pride. When I asked why she told so few people, she laughed, “I think sometimes when you tell people, it won’t work.”

When she left Vietnam, most of her family had no idea she’d gone.

“I understand they worry about it, but if I tell them, everybody hold me back” she shrugged. A few close friends and family did help her along the way. Young believes, “You have to know who are strong mind, who will support you. No matter what, you have to try. You don’t try it, you don’t know.” +++ When she left home, Thang was ten and Thao was seven. In the absence of paperwork proving their relationship to her—their birth certificates were taken by their father years ago, never to be seen again—Young’s last hope was a DNA test. Except the US government wouldn’t permit the DNA tests as proof, and there wasn’t an American embassy in Vietnam until 1995 to assist her. She called neighboring American embassies in Thailand and elsewhere in the hopes that they’d advocate for her. She solicited a letter of support from Bruce Sundlun, the governor of Rhode Island at the time.

The separation from her children, her parents, and everything else familiar weighed heavily on Young. “Sometimes feel lonely, always feel lonely,” Young corrected herself. “Homesick a lot and depression, but I have to get up and go forward no matter what.”

Young’s voice, hushed in memory, trembled gently. “Tear every day.”

After years of continuous pressure on as many key players as Young could identify, her DNA sample was accepted by the American embassy in Thailand, and she was reunited with Thang and Thao.

They had been separated for five years. +++ When she was little, Young would accompany her mom to the farm she worked at harvesting coconuts. Young says that one time “a landmine blows up under me. I see the fire, everything red around me. My mom she saw that and the smoke and she thinks I died. But I don’t get hurt or nothing. I don’t know how I survive a lot of things. I don’t know.”

“I believe some Buddha protect me. Because I almost get killed from the bomb, from the shooting a couple times.”

“When you see the Buddha, it always stand up in the lotus,” she replied when I asked her about the blossom’s meaning to her, “The lotus comes up from the muck. No matter where you come from, where you live, if you want to be a good person, you can change.” As for the pepper, “my life very difficult. Spicy life, not happy life, but I can still become the lotus.” +++ Young hopes to open a brick and mortar in Providence, somewhere students can have dinner and experience the comfort of a homecooked meal. While the pandemic has delayed her plans, she’s confident about the future. “I know that when we open the restaurant, we’ll do well,” she said.

“Yesterday I cooked, and I only wanted one bowl of vegetable soup,” Young told me during our final phone call, which I took while searing eggplant in coconut oil, “but it took me two hours.” This is the casual dedication to process and flavor Young nurtures for herself and others. She promises to make Hu Tieu Chay for me one day, a broth of carrots, pears, daikon, lotus root, celery, and onion deepened by sugarcane and soy sauce and garnished with basil from her garden in northern Providence.

OLIVIA MAYEDA B’21 only buys jasmine rice in bulk and daydreams about the roast duck over rice special at Good Fortune.

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30 OCTOBER 2020

CALIFORNIA SMOKE DIMS THE RHODE ISLAND SUN

BY Elana Hausknecht ILLUSTRATION Rachelle Shao DESIGN Miya Lohmeier

Organizing for Climate Justice in the Long Shadows of the Wildfires

My first day of work in California was hard. I knew it would be hard when I signed up with Americorps to build and maintain trails in the state’s public parks and opted into 10-hour days of wheelbarrowing, carrying two-hundred pound rocks, and cutting back overgrown brush. But that first day was especially difficult because it rained—not something I’d thought to imagine, as a New Yorker whose primary education on the subject of California came from pop hits about sunny beaches. It was not a light drizzle, not even a heavy downpour, but the worst kind of in-between: a rain that can only be described as “spitting” and blew my trail-constructing helmet off my head every few minutes and soaked straight through my rain jacket. When I finally lay down in my tent that night, everything was soggy and cold. “January 16th, 2020,” I logged in my journal, “I hope it stops raining.”

My wish came true: it was a very, very dry winter. That was one of only two rainy days over the entire three months I spent there before the lockdowns began and the work got cut short and I retreated back across the country to shelter in place. I wouldn’t return. +++ It’s hard to recall the moment I first heard about the fires that scorched Big Basin State Park, where the trail-building program had been based. I remember the text from my friend, also named Elana, who lives in San Francisco and who often drives the two hours south to Big Basin to be among the respite of the ancient Redwoods. “U know huge fire @ boulder creek where u were :( all the trees in big basin got scorched,” she wrote on August 23. And the screenshot Ashley—my closest friend from the program—sent me a few days before, that showed the grassy campus where we spent our off-days tinged reddish orange, the sky a chemically deep yellow. The caption read: “Shortly before being evacuated, our little campus nestled in the Redwood forests of coastal California became a hellscape (no filter).”

Later that week, Fran, who had shown me the ropes that first rainy workday, texted me a screenshot from our teammate Kevin’s Instagram Story: one of our cabins in flames, looking more like a bonfire than a housing unit, with the word “heartbroken” across the top. Finally, definitively, came the New York Times article that my mom forwarded me. High-resolution images of charred, fallen tree trunks, of the remains of an abandoned picnic (juice boxes somehow seemingly untouched), and of Big Basin’s park headquarters, a building where many of my work days had started, completely burned to the ground, only a few stones from the fireplace still upright. The pictures were accompanied by anecdotes from three of the park’s loyal visitors who told of their experiences hiking the park’s 30-mile Skyline to the Sea trail, now presumably, no more.

Ashley, Fran, and I had hiked that trail together the weekend before we were sent home. The trail had been very quiet and we’d taken our time, listening to the sunlight hitting the leaves, singing a song our coworker had written as we looked out towards the ocean. “If coronavirus gets really bad,” we said to each other, “we can just spend our days off work out here.”

Deep in the park, we couldn’t hear the ambulances, couldn’t see the unemployment websites crashing, couldn’t anticipate that this place would be fundamentally altered in a few short months.

The forest and its silences felt like a layer of insulation against realities we sensed were looming. +++ In the weeks after Big Basin burned down, the climate crisis remained on my mind. Along with the grief for a place so altered that it was now hard to recognize, the anxiety of waiting for updates from my trail crew friends still working in California, and the defeat of knowing I could never comprehend the magnitude of what was happening there an ocean away, I also felt a sense of hope. Every day, I walked three miles from my apartment in Fox Point to a small park off of Atwells Avenue, in Mount Pleasant. There, I and a few other canvassers grabbed campaign literature and clipboards to knock doors for David Morales, who was running to represent the neighborhood in the RI House of Representatives. Two weeks out from the election, David’s campaign was continuing to build momentum as he ran on an unapologetically left platform of universal healthcare, robust funding for public schools, and a Green New Deal.

And he wasn’t alone. David was one of 19 climate champion candidates whom Sunrise Providence, a local chapter of the national youth-led movement for climate justice, had endorsed

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for State Legislature positions. As we neared election day, I spoke with other Sunrise volunteers knocking doors all across the state, and a clear picture began to emerge:; the platform we were supporting—a holistic approach to addressing climate change that held economic and racial justice at the core of its work—was something folks in Rhode Island really wanted. Sunrise’s guiding principle is to build influence by connecting deeply with tons of individuals, and then to translate that “people power” into political wins. For the first time, it felt like that theory was beginning to prove true in practice. It felt like our methods could scale:; we could share our strategy with organizers in other states and win critical downballot races all across the country. It felt like it was within our reach to gain the power we needed to address the climate crisis.

In many ways, this was true. Two weeks later, we won— in his three-way race, David got 50% of the vote and twelve other endorsed candidates also won their races. The election was technically a primary, but for most of those candidates, including David, there will be no Republican challenger in November. They are headed to the statehouse next year: a new wave of legislators who will fight to make our state resilient to climate change and transformed towards justice in the process. At the socially distant victory party the night of the election, we gathered around a small bonfire, celebrating the work we had done, and, thanks to our wins, the work we would get to do.

But elsewhere, crisis was imminent. The following day, September 9, my housemate told us that her boyfriend, studying remotely from the Bay Area, was “crying, loudly” because at noon a heavy layer of smoke had clouded out the sunlight. The pictures of San Francisco looked like someone had taken the sky above our housing in Big Basin and dragged the saturation all the way up, from that chemical dark yellow to a downright uncanny burnt orange. +++ In early elementary school, I went through six-month phases where I was gripped by a certain fear. First it was wolves: specifically, that the Big Bad Wolf would come into our house. I still remember how I pictured a huge grey wolf in our kitchen, standing like a human, so tall that its ears touched the ceiling. After that, I moved on to less fantastical fears: that my parents would die unexpectedly, that I would get lost and never find my way back home, and that a flood would sweep us all away. With each one of these anxieties, my dad would patiently explain why I shouldn’t worry: because wolves don’t go into people’s homes, because he and my mom were young and people mostly die when they’re old, because he wouldn’t let me get lost, and, for the floods, because our house was on a hill and the water wouldn’t reach us.

I remember how that last explanation calmed me; I had walked up and down the hill many times. I knew it was true that our house was almost at the top, and that the water couldn’t possibly get that high. I realize now that it didn’t occur to me to wonder: if and when that flood happens, what will happen to our neighbors who live below us? +++ This June, four months into quarantine and two months before the burn at Big Basin, there was another fire. My partner, staying with his family in Tucson, AZ, watched as an initial bolt of lightning in the mountains north of the city grew into a blaze that raged through the entire month.

During our nightly phone calls, I witnessed him staring out his window, watching the flames grow in size. He’d often reverse the Facetime camera to face the mountains, so that I could see what he could. But lying in bed in New York, I saw mostly darkness and a few tiny, pixelated orange spots. As my partner worried about evacuating, I found it hard to imagine standing where he was, hard to imagine the pixels expanding

in definition from the phone screen to become an immediate threat.

The weekend before the election, feet sore after miles of walking, brain fuzzy from long conversations with voters and not enough water, I approached the last house on my list. After three quick knocks, waiting at a respectful distance for someone to come to the door, I glimpsed a TV through the curtains. “FIRES OUT WEST,” the banner at the bottom of the screen declared, amidst footage of yet more flames. I stood there even though it had become clear no one was home, riveted by the screen. Is this the same fire that burned through Big Basin? Is this footage from Tucson? After months of statistics about “percent containment” and acres burned and evacuations, I almost didn’t want to know.

I eventually turned away and drank in the view of the lush, green park across the street. The scene before me felt completely irreconcilable with the images I’d viewed through the window.

I experienced the fires in 2-D, compressed through a rectangle screen, never once breathing in the smoke or evacuating my home or walking back afterward to survey the remains. Though I consumed endless media about the fires, they still felt far away.

Yet, the distance I maintained from the fires out west was fragile at best. Slowly but surely, the smoke from that coast rode the waves of cross-continental wind to arrive here. The week after our primary wins, the California smoke dimmed the Rhode Island sun and turned our sunsets hazy. +++ Last Thursday, Ashley texted me a picture. In the top left corner, the sky is blue, but then comes a billowing cloud running horizontally across the frame. Below it, a small town looks like it’s deep in the middle of the night: all the street lights are on, and no one’s on the roads.

After spending the past six months working at home in North Carolina, Ashley moved to Colorado last week to start a new job. Accompanying the picture, she wrote, “It’s super windy and kinda smoky. Here’s a pic of a fire that’s 15mi away.

Currently safe here though.” The closer I try to look at the photo, double-tapping and spreading my fingers to expand, the more the details I seek dissolve into a grainy blue-black.

I emphasize-react to the image and text back, “Whoa thanks for sending. Stay safe.” Then, I open a Zoom meeting with a Sunriser in Cranston to strategize on how to get local Green New Deal legislation passed. Across my text app and my Zoom box, I try to grasp it all: California to New York to Rhode Island to Arizona and, now, to Colorado. How to comprehend these gaping distances, all while I remain here, stuck at my desk inside?

As I type this essay, I’m wearing my Sunrise shirt. An organizer gave it to me in the summer of 2019, on the way to my very first action, where we were disrupting a democratic fundraiser to demand that the DNC hold a climate debate. The shirt was printed in 2018, after the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report announced that we needed to get to zero net emissions by 2030, or else face irrevocable damage to our planet and all of us on it. “12 years,” it reads. “For the air we breathe / For the water we drink / For the places we call home,” it says on the back.

Now it’s 2020, so I guess the shirt should say “10 years”. But isn’t the countdown over? Shouldn’t the shirt just say, “Now”?

Or, “Yesterday”?

I try to hold simultaneous timescales of Urgency and Too Late together in my mind. I try not to numb myself to the grief of the past few months, or let that sense of grief block out the fact that transformational possibilities still remain. I glance outside and notice that the haze has cleared up, then turn back to my screen: connect to audio, turn video on. I try to get to work.

ELANA HAUSKNECHT B’21.5 has come to appreciate rainy days.

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WRESTLING WITH THE

ESTABLISHMENT

In his Central Falls and Pawtucket community, Jonathon Acosta is known simply as “coach.”

Acosta oscillates between his role as an educator, school administrator, Brown University sociology PhD student, city councilman, and— following the most recent primary—candidate for the Rhode Island State Senate in District 16.

Like Tiara Mack, whom the Independent interviewed earlier this month, Acosta is a member of the Rhode Island Political Cooperative. He has shifted between many communities: A first-generation Colombian-American, he spent his early childhood between Jackson Heights, Central Falls, and Colombia before relocating to Miami at six years old. He stayed there through high school, moving to Brown University and (briefly) Cuba for his undergraduate years.

Acosta then returned back to Miami before finally landing in Central Falls.

What grounds him throughout these changes is his dedication to “true community engagement,” as he put it—the desire to be intimately integrated in the lives of those around him, however and wherever he shows up. As a graduate student, he engages with “public sociology,” a lens rooted in community involvement, and studies social stratification, segregation, race/ethnicity, and class. As a middle school math and athletics instructor, he lives in the Central Falls school district and shares his knowledge of wrestling to support students. As a City Councilman, he pushes for transparency in governance and community representation.

As a Juvenile Hearing Board member, he helps bolster Central Falls’s program to protect youth from the criminal-legal system.

A few weeks after the Rhode Island primaries, the Independent interviewed Acosta to talk about how his background and life outside of politics informs his progressive policy platform.

The interview was lightly edited for length and clarity.

Indy: Could you tell me a little bit about your background and childhood?

Jonathon Acosta: I’m a first-generation Colombian-American. My father immigrated to the United States in his mid-20s, my mother came when she was 17, and they met in Jackson Heights, Queens, and got married after my mom got pregnant at 18. We moved around a lot when I was a kid, and Central Falls and Pawtucket, at that time, were manufacturing destinations for poor migrants from Colombia, especially. My grandmother was living and working in factories across the northeast and settled in Rhode Island, where my mother and I moved after my parents split up.

I lived in Central Falls and Pawtucket for about three years, where my mom was raising me and her younger brother (my uncle). Shortly after he graduated Central Falls High School, we moved down to Florida because my mom hated the cold weather. At that time, she had been working

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low-wage jobs for a long time and was trying to get professional certification in healthcare, so she sent me to live in Colombia with my grandmother for kindergarten and part of first grade. I lived there for a year and learned to read and write in Spanish at the school where my grandmother was a teacher. Once my mom got her nursing aid certification, I came back to the US and grew up mostly in Miami.

Indy: What then led you to apply to Brown?

JA: When it came time to apply to college, I was a shoot-for-the-stars kind of guy and felt like I wanted to go to an Ivy League school. I applied to a bunch of them and, at the time, my uncle was still living here in Rhode Island and encouraged me to consider Brown. Ruth Simmons had been president for a few years at that point, so he was like, “We have like the first woman and the first woman of color to be a president in the Ivy League schools. You should really think about us,” and it ended up working out. I got into Brown and studied Ethnic Studies and Political Science as an undergrad here. I also studied abroad in Cuba,

BY Rose Houglet ILLUSTRATION Simone Zhao DESIGN XingXing Shou

which had a significant impact on my worldview. I saw firsthand how people, society, and politics are more complex and messier than supposed ‘ideological commitments’ might suggest. ‘Democracy’ and ‘socialism’ are not dichotomous variables but rather processes that fall on a spectrum. I didn’t have the language at the time to articulate it that way, but I knew that something was wrong with how we were categorizing countries, governments, and people.

Indy: Did these experiences with various education systems inform your decision to become a teacher and to run for City Councilman?

JA: I really only ever lived in places where I wasn’t a minority. Jackson Heights had a huge concentration of Colombians, and so did Central Falls. Then I lived in Miami, which is a mecca of Latino immigrants in the US. And then I got to Brown, and I was like, “What the fuck is this?” There were not a lot of people that looked like me, and there weren’t a lot of people from low-income backgrounds. I started to increasingly feel indebted to the folks who had helped me get to Brown and particularly

30 OCT 2020

An Interview with State Senate Candidate Jonathon Acosta my teachers. I had gone to public school in Miami Dade, but they were pretty good public schools. I felt like a lot of those teachers had put me on the path to be able to end up in a place like Brown— and working as a teacher, for a while, seemed like one of the best ways to kind of pay that forward. In fact, when I signed up to do Teach for America, it was with the understanding that I would only do it if I got placed in Miami, and I did before coming back to Rhode Island.

Then, my experience in the education system mad me realize that we were hedging a lot on schools and thinking that schools are the great equalizer, which is not true. We often expect schools to do a lot more than they have the capacity and the resources to do. It seemed to me that segregation was largely driving a lot of our school outcomes, which felt like something that needed policy-based, legislative solutions and got me thinking more about politics and eventually set me on the path that I’m on now.

Indy: What has it been like to represent—as a city councilman and now running for this position—a community that you grew up in and taught in?

JA: I think Rhode Island as a state, and Central Falls especially, are both pretty unique places.

People tend to talk about the size from a deficit perspective, but I think that their smallness makes it so that you can connect with a lot more people and have a bigger impact in some ways. When I lived here as a child, my mother was a secretary for this organization called Proyecto Esperanza, or Project Hope, that did advocacy work for Latino folks and for undocumented folks. My grandma was a factory worker, and she’s pretty religious and became part of the local Catholic community.

My uncle is a high school teacher. So, there were already connections to the community here. And when I came back, I re-sparked relationships that my family had built in the past but also became an active member of the community myself. I’m a coach in a wrestling program. I was an assistant principal and a dean at a middle school. I was doing that stuff before stepping into politics, and so when I did, it didn’t feel like a carpetbagger or like an outsider coming in. It felt like the next step in work that I was already trying to be a part of.

Indy: I’m curious about two aspects of your involvement in the community in particular.

Could you elaborate on your experience as a wrestling coach?

California did to implement a full ban on any private or quasi public-private detention facility.

That would effectively make the Wyatt illegal after the end of its contract. I don’t believe in profiting off of the detention of human beings, which I think people are starting to recognize nationally and at the state level. Mass incarceration just didn’t work; it’s a racist, classist project that wasn’t effective, was super expensive, and is really trying to deal with symptoms rather than the disease. I Indy: On a related note, could you also speak to think the disease is poverty, inequality, lack of your connection to the Colombian community in access to food, housing, and work. If we address Central Falls today as compared to when you were those things, then we don’t have to worry about mass incarceration in the way that we’ve been growing up? doing it.

JA: The Colombian community is still strong.

I was actually just honored this past year by All that to say, we start local. For example, by the Colombian American Association here, reversing legislation that created the opportunity which was a big honor for me having been here to make something like the Wyatt, and we do a when we had very little formal structure and little bit more norming on things like the Juvenile now witnessing this whole association. When Hearing Board. Right now, state legislation allows I was a kid, the community was based around us to run hearing boards at the municipal level, informal spaces: I remember being around folks which has created great variation in their effecwhile laying on a bunch of jackets that my mom tiveness. I think we’ve been very fortunate at the put on the ground as she sang at nightclubs or local level of Central Falls that we had a mayor watched big soccer games in the community, for and two police chiefs in this time who have been example. It’s been really great to connect back really supportive of the Juvenile Court, but there to the Colombian community in more formal are certain municipalities where they hear less ways. But I do need to acknowledge the fact that than 20 percent of eligible cases. You’re talking Central Falls is not a distinctly Colombian place about dozens, hundreds of kids a year that are anymore; it’s definitely a Latino place. The lega- then being pushed into family courts. I think a cies of the Colombian migration here are defi- little bit better norming on that, tied to our plan nitely still around and prominent. But it’s changed to legalize recreational marijuana and expunge a bit, and that’s cool, too. There are many things records, would be a multi-pronged approach. It’s the government still needs to recognize to better also one for which a lot of people are already on serve all of these communities, though. We found board and maybe just need to have the resources out during a council meeting in the last year that and infrastructure to execute it. we didn’t have any dispatchers at the fire police department who spoke Spanish. You have to have Indy: What do you hope to see in the future of the an eye for that and have come from that experi- progressive movement based on the work that ence in order to realize those gaps, for the most you’ve done alongside other candidates in Central part. I’m coming now to think of myself definitely Falls and in the RI Political Coop? still as Colombian, but I also think more about my pan-ethnic identity as a Latino person who can JA: I would like to see a few things happen. I think it’s important for us to better inform the public so work and support other Latinos in the city. that they can get activated and notice how policy Indy: Especially with the tight budget that we issues are all intertwined. One example of how to will be facing this year, what kinds of policy issues inform the public is Moira Walsh’s podcast, “Can we fix it?” which provides a leftist analysis of RI would you want to push on day one? politics or the weekly policy chats on Facebook JA: Well, I don’t think it has to be a tight budget. I that my campaign did leading up to the primary. mean, if we just implement some reform and tax I got the chance to articulate my policy platform, households that make above $467,000 dollars a bring in guests with perspective on the issue, and bit more equitably, then we don’t have to face the help show folks how interconnected policies are. barrier that we’re looking at right now. So I reject that it has to be the type of austerity budget that I also have a feeling that we’re going to have an even bigger slate in two years, which would be people are saying that it has to be. really dope, and it will gain more momentum. It’s Indy: An area of your policy that I’m interested not enough, though, to say these are our legislain, especially given the recent uprisings against tive priorities; the other side is already not only white supremacy, is your vision for resisting the funding candidates but also feeding them talking carceral system. I know you’ve been engaged points. We need to have that same kind of infrawith the Juvenile Hearing Board and participated structure built out on the left. And I think, unforin activism against the Wyatt Detention Center. tunately, we don’t. We’ve still been arguing over What is your policy platform around issues of principles rather than tangible legislation. policing and criminal-legal systems? What kinds of potential limitations do you foresee as you work ROSE HOUGLET B’22 would be a trash wrestler, too. to enact those visions? we started the team here at the middle school to help create a pipeline into the high school’s team.

We’ve grown the team and been really proud of the program, and a lot of people now know me as “coach.” The combination of wrestling and my other involvements have made it so that there are now a lot of youth and families who know they can reach out or communicate with me about whatever they might need.

JA: As far as wrestling goes, I think it’s important to know that I was a trash wrestler. I wrestled in high school for three years and pretty much got my ass kicked for all three years. But I’m a strong believer—and part of this is based on my following of Che Guevara to be honest with you and his experience in Cuba—of using anything that you have to give back in any way. I always felt that we all have some kind of gift or time that we can give back in some form. I started coaching in Miami, and when I came back to Rhode Island, we didn’t have a wrestling team where I was teaching. I felt like the sport was a great way to get out a lot of energy, to kick ass in a sanctioned space, and, occasionally, it was a good behavior management thing. So JA: I think one thing is learning from what

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There’s a crusty furball in the cookie jar And a Siamese cat ‘round the grandma clock With a polydactyl claw on the minute hand So the time’s stopped in the Chateau Gato.

There’s a white-haired lady in the bedroom Weaving her hair into a flog; She can spin real fast and whip the bad cats.

The lady’s name is Maud.

The Chateau squats on a half-acre plot, But it’s still a half-mile tall Its northside neighbors lie in shadow And Suzie Delahunt enthralled.

Suzie’s a girl scout Tik-Tok-er Ten and a half years old.

She’s got pumpkin colored hair and a peter pan collar.

She packs a lip of Skoal.

Patty yelps, “That house is haunted!”

Suzie: “Nah, it’s just against code.”

Eileen: “We’ll get no candy here!

That shack’s a witch’s home!”

Suzie spat some tobacco juice Just next to Patty’s toe.

“Then I’m getting that Witch’s candy Or a pillow case of bones.”

Maud peered down from the fiftieth floor And saw the three girls there.

She could see the nervous, furtive looks And Suzie’s icy glare.

“Cats! Fetch my wand!

There’ll be business at the door.”

Maud donned her black and crusty hat— Picked her broom up off the floor.

Chester found the witch’s wand, And Pooky pointy shoes.

Coco set a mise en place For a heinous witchy brew.

Newt tails! Lizard eyes!

Kidney of a snail!

The only missing ingredient Was an orange ponytail.

In high white socks she took the gate While Patty and Eileen quivered, “Don’t do it, Suze. Don’t die tonight!”

But Mrs. Delahunt hadn’t raised a quitter.

“Each of my cats has its own floor, and I’ve trained them to do my bidding,” said Maud.

They fetch my wand and help me kill Filthy little girls I’ve caught!”

The path was rough, the stones uneven.

An icy pall descended.

‘Round Suzie’s white and fuzzy arm A clammy tendril bended.

Patty and Eileen sat agape on the gutter As the house spewed bright green light.

In silence, each held the other’s hand, Knowing Suzie was in heaven that night.

Now upon the breach Suzie raised a petite fist.

A crow fell silent; a squirrel froze; The blades of grass grew stiff.

The green light died, scraping clamor began, And the girls started to weep.

The witch must have been setting the table For a feast of Suzie meat.

KNOCK KN—

Patty and Eileen gasped when the door shot open, And raised their timid brows.

There was Suzie Delahunt, Bloody but unbowed.

The door opened , And Suzie missed.

“Who’s the one who dares To disturb my rest?”

The witch, grimacing wide, towered in the doorway.

“Suzie Delahunt, but I’m Ariel?

From The Little Mermaid?

“If you don’t have any candy that’s okay I guess.

I mean, it is Halloween.

But you can make it up with a Tik Tok. Want to learn how to Tap In?” The witch replied, “Time is still in my home, So there’ll be neither tocks nor ticks, But come inside, dear, meet my cats.

Here’s an armchair. Sit.” The floorboards creaked as Suzie walked Into the putrid gloom.

The parlor smelled like a litterbox, And her armchair a tomb.

“Well, lady, you sure have a lot of cats,” Suzie said as one curled around her leg, “I’m a dog girl, myself...

Did I ever get your name?”

“Come on in, girls, the water’s fine.

That witch wasn’t hard to whup.

Watch out for the cats though, They’re always underfoot.”

“Suzie, how’d you do it?”

“It was really no big thing.

I got her with a wicked hook, And knocked that broad out clean.

“So, you girls want to live here?

I mean... we’ll get it up to code.

We could live and ‘Tok and have a ball.

In my new house: Chateau Gato.”

DRAKE REBMAN B’22 will neither be tocking nor ticking on Saturday night.

BY Drake Rebman ILLUSTRATION Sage Jennings DESIGN Clara Epstein

chateau gato

Down on the street, meanwhile, Suzie was also getting prepared.

She tossed in a fresh lip (spearmint) And a bobby pin in her hair.

It takes a special kind of kid To look death in the eye.

Suzie’s nearsighted, so it may have been Dumb fate that All Saints’ night.

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THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

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WHY ARE MY COUNTRY’S TREASURES SITTING IN YOUR GLASS CASES? Nestled in between College Building and the Metcalf Building of RISD on North Main Street sits the sandstone-orange, Bauhaus-looking building called the Chace Center: home to the RISD Museum. Founded in 1877, the RISD Museum has one of the most extensive collections of historic and contemporary art in the United States, which includes paintings and sculptures; decorative arts; prints, photographs, and drawings; as well as costumes and textiles. I was particularly fascinated by the vastness of the collection of textiles and costumes in the museum, and my love for fabrics has made me a frequent visitor to that section of the museum.

During my very first week as a RISD student in the fall of 2019, I remember seeing the most beautiful Indian textile mounted on a wooden plank in one of the main galleries. It was a fine Palampore, almost 10 feet in length, that dominated the room despite its faded ivory base, which was speckled with subtle hints of old rose and madder-colored buds in the form of a beautiful blooming bush. At first sight, the style of the painting and imagery on the Palampore closely resembled the style often employed in the Far East, in contrast to the imagery I had often seen employed in traditional Indian textiles. I quickly went to the RISD Museum’s website after my visit, seeking more details on this piece that had sparked so much confusion in my mind.

However, to my dismay, the information I found was even more scarce than the few lines that outlined the exhibited work in the physical museum space itself. This beautiful historic textile was cataloged minimally: Indian Palampore, 1775-1799 MAKER: Unknown CULTURE: Indian TITLE: Palampore YEAR: 1775-1799 MEDIUM: Cotton plain weave, hand-painted DIMENSIONS: Length- 325.1 cm (128 inches) A few months later, I visited the Metropolitan Museum of Art (MET) in New York City, and by some great coincidence, one of the exhibits I saw had another Palampore textile proudly on display. A quick visit to the MET’s website gave me much more insight into the origin and story of Palampore textiles:

The decision to keep such information off the face of the website could also be purely logistical. A museum of such scale has thousands of works in their collections and tucked away in the archives and the task of presenting so much information can be a challenge. However, I would argue that this challenge is of topical importance in this time of social distancing where almost everything has shifted to a virtual space. People currently value the accessibility of an online resource as more of us confront the limitations of physical space itself.

These challenges serve as a reminder of many of the challenges of the museum space itself. The ‘Museum’ as an institution is a product of a colonial idea of cultural exchange. The fact that objects from all around the world have been removed from their geographically native spaces—from the hands of their makers themselves—and placed within the pristine confines of the white walls within a museum space for a distant public to behold is a sharp parallel to the entire expedition of colonialism itself. The balance of powers that be in this equation rests strongly in the hands of the colonizers. Even today, the voices of the white-dominated Western society seem to echo most resonantly within the museum space.

The museum is nevertheless a ubiquitous institution in our world. I find myself angered when I come across artwork that has been looted from India now sitting in the MET, the Victoria and Albert Museum, and even the RISD Museum. Thousands of creations are packed away in vast underground archives, while few lie delicately displayed in these grand white rooms. These creations are praised, adored, appreciated for their ability to enrich the sensibilities of the West. It seems unfair. The value of this work to the communities for which it was created, where it was stolen from, should not be left unspoken because western countries take ownership over the work itself.

While the damage of the past cannot be undone, it is somewhat comforting to see the websites of the MET, Smithsonian, or LACMA, and the manner in which even the most minute of artifacts from my country have been documented and preserved in their digital commons. These museums have, at the very least, made strides in presenting information to the public as best they can. However, the same cannot be said about the RISD Museum. I feel disappointed when I log onto the RISD Museum’s website and see a beautiful Chamba Rumal, which is part of their collection, catalogued on the website as merely a ‘Rumal (Cover)’ with no further information. The RISD Museum’s publication Selected Works proves that they already possess the information within their system, as seen in the description of another textile known as Chintz Tent fabric:

Palampore Late 18th century This type of dyed cloth, known as a palampore (from palangposh, the Hindi term for bedcover), was made in abundance in India for foreign markets in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and their decoration, often with a central tree laden with fruits and birds, combined patterns from English embroideries, Chinese decorative objects, and Indian textiles. In Europe, they were used as bedcovers and were also hung on the walls of bedrooms. In Southeast Asia, where this piece might have been traded, such textiles were displayed during religious ceremonies.

This incident begs the question: why is it that the museum of an educational institution as well-known as RISD doesn’t seek to elaborate and educate audiences about the cultural and historical significance of the works they keep in their archives?

One possibility might be an absence of extensive research conducted on the history of these works. This seems unlikely, considering that most well-known museums do keep sufficient information about the works in their collections. I would believe that the museum, one of the most public spaces at RISD, would strive to keep in-depth information about the works they hold, considering that the museum is one of the greatest resources for RISD students. Additionally, when I purchased the RISD Musuem’s Selected Works book, I realized that it contains a more detailed account of the culture and history of many of the works held within the walls of the museum. This discrepancy makes the website resources seem lacking in their attention to the art.

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How the RISD Museum’s website reflects its colonial foundations

BY Yukti Agarwal and Dway Lunkad ILLUSTRATION Yukti Agarwal DESIGN XingXing Shou

However, when I open up the website to the catalogue of that very same work, I don’t see any mention of the fact that the textile is a Chintz in the first place.

Why does the RISD museum solely provide this information to the person who chooses to buy a physical copy of their book?

Why is this enriched cultural learning not available to those interested in virtually researching the subtlety of the works held in the United States’s 20th-largest museum? This act of reserving nuanced knowledge to those who are privileged enough to visit the museum space and buy the book only exacerbates the RISD Museum’s foundational problems in the way it chooses to present art and cultural artifacts. The power of an art museum lies in its ability to connect people to knowledge and beauty that was historically the privilege of a wealthy few. This also brings with it the responsibility to present the artworks not just as objects of aesthetic appeal, but also as objects which hold a certain cultural and historical value.

It is important that RISD, as a fairly influential educational institution, takes on these challenges. Recently, after the Black Lives Matter Movement, the RISD Museum worked tremendously to decolonize the museum, evidently seen through their extensive initiatives outlined in the article “Confronting Ourselves Together.” This process of inclusion can be continued through the process of updating each and every catalogued work on the museum’s website. The information provided can also be developed with intellectuals, scholars, or enthusiasts from the works’ countries of origin to make sure the information echoes native voices, rather than reinforcing a western, colonial perspective. A personal suggestion in this regard would be to work with the students on the RISD campus and collaborate with institutions across the world to create a nuanced database that not only provides refined information to the audience but also brings to the foreground native voices.

Finally, it is important to remember that the appetite for knowledge and justice of the coming generation is always larger than the one before . I write this as a response to seeing a lack of adequate representation of art that I recognize and cherish, which begs the question: how many others feel the same way about how their culture is represented? While the RISD Museum is not the only museum that faces this challenge, it is one of the few that has the resources, support, and access to many individuals with the necessary skills to take this on and bring about change. For those who have taken advantage of it, 2020 has given the world an opportunity to reflect on its complicated relationship with colonialism and work toward new solutions. It is past time to decolonize the ‘Museum’ space and make it a place of celebration for diversity, inclusion, and cultural immersion.

practices the craft.”

Chintz Tent Hanging (information from the RISD Museum’s Selected Works) “Entirely hand painted, this tent hanging is an example of the finest seventeenth-century Indian chintzes. It is one of a group of nine panels that were originally joined to form part of a movable wall used in the tents of a sultan’s encampment whenever he traveled. Together with a summer carpet now in the Cincinnati Art Museum, the set can be traced to the collection of the Mughal general Mirza Raja Jai Singh, who ruled in Jaipur from 1621 to 1667. The exuberance of line and soft, saturated color of this important piece are characteristic of the best work produced in the Deccani sultanate of Golconda, where chintzes made for domestic and foreign markets added to the fabled wealth of this diamond-rich kingdom.”

YUKTI AGARWAL B/RISD ‘24 and DWAY LUNKAD RISD ‘24 can’t believe they finally memorialized one of their fervently heated 3 AM debates in writing.

+++ Before I sign off, I want to present the cultural significance of two works which I mentioned above—the Chamba Rumal and the Chintz Tent—because I believe that these works deserve to be viewed and appreciated with their intrinsic cultural and historical value and not just in isolation as works with mere aesthetic appeal.

Chamba Rumal (information from the MET Museum website, and other books on Indian Textiles) “In the foothill kingdoms of Himachal Pradesh, in northern India, rumals (Hindi for handkerchief ) were decorated as presentation cloths. No more so than at the court in Chamba, where a tradition of silk embroidery developed. The majority of Chamba rumals depict scenes celebrating the life of Vishnu in his avatars (divine appearances on earth) as Krishna and as Rama. These embroideries served as covering cloths during the presentation of offerings and gifts.’” Chamba rumals are embroidered with a technique known as ‘dophar’ where the front and the back of the cloth have the exact same appearance. The use of deities as imagery on the cloth made the napkins a sort of mobile shrine which were popular around the region. Today, there is only one family in the village of Chamba, in Himachal Pradesh, who still

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BY Andy Rickert ILLUSTRATION Audrey Buhain DESIGN Audrey Buhain

ick H

e z i r P r ere to Claim You

Ethan Zuckerman was not in hell when he invented the pop-up ad. The designer these windows compete over a finite physical space. However, this economy first programmed the now-ubiquitous tool while working for a website hosting is completely user-determined. By clicking, the user pulls a window ‘above’ service in the dot com era at the turn of the century. The internet then was small its neighbors to the foreground of the OS. The fluid manipulation of windows and round. It was still unclear how money could be made. His platform, Tripod. is what allows for the hypertext navigation that characterizes the personal com, ran the gamut; they tried pay walls, t-shirts, taxing profits made off their computer. By opening a new window, the user splits their navigation across a clients stores. Advertising was the only model that worked. Hosting a broad new vector. They can flip through the windows they have ‘open’ without ever range of websites allowed for a big enough platform to notice trends in the losing their bearings. activities of its users, and then market to those users accordingly. If Zuckerman However, the window is as much of a veil as it is an opening. Theorist of had owned theindy.org, he would have used his knowledge of my appreciation cyberspace, Wendy Chun, calls computers “Ideology machines,” following for alt weeklies to market to me on every other page in his dominion. theorist of capitalism Althusser’s understanding of ideology as that which Most early web advertisements took the form of long columns and banners “represents the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of in the margins of a web page. These resembled print media in their conventions existence.” This term is often used to describe commonly held beliefs within and approach; the image would take enough space to catch the reader’s atten- a culture that have been produced through its institutions. Ideology never tion, but not too much that they distracted from the rest of the page. However, presents itself as ideology, it operates through representing its relationships as web browsing presented unique problems for advertisers. Whereas a traditional natural rather than contingent. Chun extends this concept to software, which advertisement (television, magazine, road-side mural, etc.) would assume a “offers us an imaginary relationship to our hardware: they do not represent the very general audience in its tone and content, a web page was far more partic- motherboard or other electronic devices but rather desktops, files, and recyular and much less regulated. Since an advertiser buys a spot from a web host cling bins. Without OS, there would be no access to hardware—there would be that platforms thousands of pages instead of a particular location, the ad could no actions, no practices, no user.” end up anywhere, next to anything. Zuckerman cites this concern of placement In this case, the virtual space of user interface—windows, links, images— of the ad as a sort of Y2K villain origin story: “We came up with [the pop-up can be understood as a sort of metaphor. A Macbook user presses a key on an ad] when a major car company freaked out that they’d bought a banner ad on a open Google Doc. Hundreds of computations fire off in the box under their page that celebrated anal sex. I wrote the code to launch the window and run an keyboard. Data is sent through fiber optic cables underground to a server ad in it. I’m sorry. Our intentions were good.” hundreds of miles away, before coming back to the computer, and all that is The pop-up quickly morphed into something grotesque. Rarely would the represented is the emdash inputted from its keystroke. This is not necessarily to ad feature an insurance company or a toothpaste brand; most offered perverse say that computers should disclose their computations—these would be impospromises of free money or horny singles in the neighboring town. It was sible to understand. Rather, this theorization reveals how in interface the user common to visit the same website every morning and receive the same pop-up doesn’t encounter a natural object, in the same way they might a piece of paper awarding the 1,000,000th visitor. Click here to claim, the ad coaxed. Your or actual window, but a relationship. The virtual space transforms indeciphercomputer has a virus. Update needed. Download Now. Register Now. You have able networks and processes into familiar visual metaphors. Manipulation of a message. Congratulations, you won. the keyboard and mouse translate human ideas (language, cartesian space) into While some looked like a tabloid designer had been asked to build a casino a computer’s language—the monitor translates its answer back, ad infinitum. out of HTML, many appropriated visual cues from the rest of the operating The interface sets bounds on what the user imagines as possible; it produces a system. Pop-ups used familiar icons, colors, and buttons to resemble the exact reality that both elides and makes legible the actual processes of the computer. errors or messages they purported to be. Some pop-ups even featured fake Thus, the decisions made by Tripod.com are ultimately attempts to answer close buttons that delivered the user to the advertiser’s page. Consistent across questions of ideology. How can the avenues of profit be represented, given that all pop-ups, however, was the namesake act of popping up in a window separate any representation will change what the user imagines their computer to be? In the from the web browser, and lingering in the foreground until the user closed it. nascent internet of the dot com era, these imagined relationships are particuMost modern operating systems display content in “windows”: rectan- larly vulnerable. Many families are purchasing their first personal computers gular frames that can be stretched and repositioned across the screen to display for their household, and the connection between the trash can icon on the content. The window is malleable. Like language or capital, windows allows for desktop and the destruction of data from a hard drive can’t yet be taken for a disparate range of entities to become interchangeable, homogeneous. Emails, granted. The pop-up initially presents itself as an attempt to produce a certain error messages, movies are all within windows. Aside from three buttons on the virtual reality; the content of the ad is in a separate window, a separate locatop of the screen—expand, minimize, and close—the window makes no impo- tion, and has no connection to the page that made it appear. Time has shown sitions on its content or its spectator. Because the physical computer monitor this approach to be unsophisticated. Of course the pop-up occupies a different occupies a fixed resolution, a specific number of pixels on the screen, there will window, but it emerges after a specific action from the user: visiting a page. always be an economy among windows; while there is theoretically an infinite The pop-up conceals nothing, it is just annoying. The internet would have to number of windows that can be opened in the virtual operating system (OS), produce new solutions to resolve this question.

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+++ “To give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected,” reads Facebook’s mission statement. A decade after Ethan Zuckerman coded his first pop-up ad, Mark Zuckerberg dropped out of Harvard to start his social network. The revelations of Tripod.com’s targeted advertising model were only beginning to be actualized. Scholars contrast the era of Tripod, “Web 2.0,” where web content and navigation was mostly determined by links set up by individual users, to “Web 3.0,” where navigation is shaped through massive data collection that makes “recommendations.” While the pop up ad has largely fallen out of use in Web 3.0, its legacy in the history of advertising can be traced to many modern design decisions.

Every major tech company to champion “connectedness” as the core of their platform in the last decade is in the business of collecting and selling the personal data of its users—this fact, while a trite observation today, nevertheless remains consequential. VPN and alternative search browsers have been built as solutions to the data-mining problem, but rarely are these alternative practices adopted—most users are relatively unbothered by the mass collection of their information. Rather than situate this indifference as a personal failure on the part of the user, it is more reasonable to look at how our unwitting trust in global tech companies has emerged from an indifference hardwired into the computer system.

The ideologies that structure the way we browse the internet are both visual, per Chun’s description, and narrative. The visuals of a given interface often confirm the narratives told in the marketing of tech itself, whether at conferences or in commercials. We are told that the internet is “open,” that as users we are the captains of our fate. We come to believe that the savvy user can get from point A to point B to retrieve certain information, but also make new discoveries entirely. While the user might be recommended something new on their Instagram feed via a convoluted algorithm that closely monitors their browsing habits, this encounter feels like an act of discovery. And yet, each celebrated “connection” is paradoxically both a miracle of the computer system and something concrete formed by the user. Though the system makes connections for us, we are actors, rather than passive consumers, in a constant give-and-take relationship with the machine we are operating, seemingly organic and unmediated.

Similarly, in “visiting” a web page, I am “there”—I am directly connecting to a server somewhere and sending data back and forth in an allegedly reciprocal, consensual relationship. This, of course, is not true. As Chun illustrated, “the moment you … turn on your computer … your Ethernet card [the part of the hardware that connects a computer to a network] participates in an incessant ‘dialogue’ with other networked machines.” Using the internet means entering into a vast network of actors, the majority of which remain hidden from the user. Whether or not this dialogue is communicated to the user is dependent on the design of the interface. Either way, the hardware carries on, sending data back and forth under the user’s nose.

To “Google” defines an action as much as it does a site or company.

Googling is the same as using a hammer or starting a car. This is partly because the interface presents Google as neutral, trustworthy, no-bullshit.

The design is so functional the user forgets that what they are looking at is the product concrete design choices. It is naturalized. For any major tech

company, choices in representation are directly in the service of power.

Because users feel comfortable when they navigate and share, hoards of personal data can be collected and sold to advertisers. The mythos of the web elides the perpetual surveillance that makes it profitable. This surveillance is only disclosed in terms and conditions documents and small notifications that serve to do the legal bare minimum. As such, the most valuable resource for these services is trust. Even if one public scandal after the next exposes the processes behind the interface, as long as the user believes that the data mining will not be used against them, there is some bliss to ignorance. Having now gone full circle, advertisements are integrated into a homogenous plane as the interface; the Instagram ad appears in the same feed as the Instagram post, only presenting itself as an ad in a small disclaimer beneath it. The flow of web surfing is only lost when something disrupts the direct navigation that defines the network, like a dead link, private account, or pop-up.

Pop-ups have become largely obsolete in the last decade. The websites that tend to feature these ads most prominently are sketchy, weird corners of the internet: the kind of websites used to illegally stream movies, where the fear of catching a computer virus or getting scammed out of credit card information is high. In a way, the fear is a fact of the pop-up ad. The ad’s presence signifies that a website has fallen out of the modern conventions for profit. When encountering a pop-up ad, the user grows extra careful. The naturalized, familiar visual cues of the interface are turned on their head.

Navigating the sketchy web page necessitates a self awareness from the user that there are processes behind the interface against their own interest.

Every “download” button on the page transforms from an opportunity for connection into a threat. The X button, an image that has become so common it feels like a tool, doesn’t work anymore. The fluid control the user wields between windows is ruptured by the sudden presence of the page.

For a brief moment, there’s a new captain of the ship.

The irony, of course, is that this has always been the case. Navigation has never been unmediated, the user has never visited a page without being tracked. While Web 3.0 excels at concealing this, the ideology of the pop-up ad is so primitive that it unravels the entire relationship the user imagines they hold to their computer. The glitch communicates danger better than any terms of service document.

It’s not unreasonable to say that if personal data was given the pop-up ad treatment then our approach to contemporary software would change dramatically. It is completely unreasonable to suggest that any of these companies would implement something like a pop-up ad to make their consumer frustrated enough to use their service with caution. The extraction of personal data will almost certainly continue to be perceived as a non-issue because the extraction cannot be felt; it lacks virtual representation, imposing itself only in the uncanny Uniqlo ad that emerges after a text conversation with a friend about cardigans. The pop-up remains an artifact of a period where surfing the web felt unsafe. The internet has not become any less safe since then, but it sure is wearing prettier clothes.

ANDY RICKERT B’21.5 is in your area.

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

SCIENCE & TECH

18

These community health centers accept all insurance and have a sliding-scale system based on income for patients without insurance.

Designed by Mehek Vohra

HEALTHCARE RESOURCES

BAIL FUNDS & MUTUAL AID

Blackstone Valley Community Health Center: Pawtucket & Central Falls - 722-0081 Thundermist: West Warwick & Woonsocket - 615-2800 Tri-County Health Center: Johnston & North Providence - 351-2750 Providence Community Health Center: Providence - 444-0570 East Bay Community Action Program: Riverside & Newport - 437-1008 These clinics provide free and/or low-cost health services: Clínica Esperanze, Providence - 347-9093 Rhode Island Free Clinic, Providence - 274-6347 If you have COVID-19 symptoms, there are several locations in Rhode Island where you can get tested. For more information, please visit https://health.ri.gov/covid/testing/ Para más asistencia en español, llama a la línea de apoyo de AMOR: 401-675-1414.

AMOR COVID-19 Community Support Fund.

Donations go to support sanitation equipment for vulnerable populations, as well as direct financial assistance to families in need. Donate here: https://bit.ly/2UmYJXr. To get involved as a volunteer, packaging and distributing mutual aid, visit https://tinyurl.com/amor-covid-volunteer.

FANG Collective Community Bail Fund.

As jails and prisons continue to become coronavirus hotspots, they present extremely unsafe conditions for those inside, many of whom are held because they can’t afford bail. Help bail people out from the Bristol County House of Corrections and the Ash Street Jail through this fundraiser organized by the FANG Collective: https://gofundme.come/f/fang-bailfund Project LETS Mutual Aid Fund.

Project LETS is working in coalition with grassroots organizations in Rhode Island to provide direct financial assistance to the most marginalized and vulnerable in our community.

Donate here: https://projectlets.org/covid19

PROTESTS & EVENTS Saturday, October 31: AMOR winter mutual aid drive drop-off; 3–6pm at 545 Pawtucket Ave, Pawtucket. Drop off new or gently used winter clothing of all sizes (coats, hats, gloves, mittens, boots) and nonperishable food items to be handed out in mutual aid packets at the 11/3 March to Shut Down Wyatt.

Saturday, October 31: Trick or Treat at PVD Arts Halloween Market at Lippitt Memorial Park, 9am – 2pm. The last of the season’s artist-run weekly arts market will feature tricks and treats galore.

Saturday, October 31: Riff Raff’s outdoor courtyard bookstore-bar is the place to be for a socially-distant Halloween “party”, 6pm–10pm. Celebrate the holiday in style: sip mulled cider, browse contemporary paperbacks, get a tarot reading, see and be seen.

Tuesday, November 3: We Keep Us Safe: March to Shut Down Wyatt, 1pm – 5pm. March with AMOR RI through Central Falls to demand an end to the local ICE detention center where COVID-19 has been spreading rapidly. Check the facebook event (https://www.facebook.com/events/775973329866273/) for the march route, where mutual aid packages will be handed out at each stop.

Wednesday, November 4: Make it Count: Post-Election Day Rally for Justice and Action, 5pm at the Rhode Island State House. Regardless of the outcome of Tuesday’s election, this is a rally for the continual local and national fight for a more just and equitable future. Hosted by the RI Working Families Party, Sunrise Providence, and Direct Action for Rights and Equality.

Ongoing: “Steps to End Prison and Policing: A Mixtape on Transformative Justice.” A nine-part video series made by activists (including Mariame Kaba, Mia Mingus, and Ejeris Dixon) offering critical political frameworks for this moment.

Proceeds go to BIPOC transformative justice organizations based in Chicago.

This week, and for the foreseeable future, the Indy will publish community aid funds and other ways you can contribute to pandemic relief and mobilize for racial justice, in addition to our traditional event listings.

ELECTIONS Ongoing: Sign up to phonebank remotely and/or canvass in person in Southern RI for local progressive candidate Megan Cotter. Sign up at https://actionnetwork.org/forms/ volunteer-for-megan-cotter.

Ongoing (through November 3): Volunteer as a nonpartisan poll watcher on behalf of Common Cause RI to assist voters and reduce intimidation. Read about it and sign up here: https://www.commoncause.org/rhode-island/ourwork/expand-voting-rights-election-integrity/election-protection.

Sign-up to call voters in swing states and phonebank for the Green New Deal through Sunrise RI: https://bit.ly/3lKhE9q