Nicholas Ruiz-Huidobro Magdits

HEALING FROM HOME

By Nicholas Ruiz-Huidobro Magdits

New Haven’s low income, uninsured, and migrant communities shoulder the burden of extra mental health challenges during the pandemic.

After shuffling through some pages, Dr. Michelle Silva found the passage she was looking for. “Trauma waits for stillness,” she read. Silva is a clinical psychologist at the Hispanic Clinic of the Connecticut Mental Health Center. The bookshelves in her office—packed with clinical files, tomes of Sigmund Freud and Ignacio Martín-Baró, refugee children’s books, and novels like American Dirt, from which she had just read—neatly framed her Zoom background. “Usually, people can find ways to cope and keep busy,” she said. “But isolation can be stillness in some ways—a forced stillness.” As a psychologist with an interest in attachment theory and liberation psychology, which engages with themes like systemic oppression in marginalized communities, Silva wondered how the current pandemic would complicate an already challenging mental health epidemic.

Quarantine, lockdown, and self-isolation, while essential to viral disease control, can be deleterious for mental health. Humans are social creatures, and the pandemic is forcing people to act against their survival instincts—to turn away from others. A recent epidemiological review by Dr. Mahbub Hossain and colleagues reported that those quarantining in isolation suffer greater levels of anxiety, depression, trauma, and other adverse mental health outcomes.

On March 23, Governor Ned Lamont issued a statewide stay-at-home order. By early summer, New Haven schools and universities emptied. The streets were quiet, the silence broken only by police cars and their projected bilingual recordings of Mayor Justin Elicker urging people to social distance and wash their hands in both English and Spanish. Almost six months later, Connecticut’s consistent and precautious COVID-19 response has placed it among three other states that are ‘on track’ to contain the virus. But the social and psychological repercussions of an indefinite pandemic have taken their toll. Although reports like those from Mental Health America rank Connecticut among the states with best overall mental well-being, the pandemic has had a deeper impact on the mental health of New Haven’s low-income, uninsured, and migrant populations, who already disproportionately endure psychosocial stressors.

The pandemic and the economic downturn it catalyzed have incited skyrocketing rates of unemployment, income loss, and food and housing insecurity. Within the New Haven Latin American community that the Hispanic Clinic serves, legal status and loss of community only exacerbates patients’ daily trials. “When we think about legal status,” said Silva, “there’s a real investment, in the current context, for them to try to keep a low profile and remain invisible if they can. The pandemic has heightened that sense of separation, of isolation, and been really, really challenging for people.”

Even procedures like contact tracing, which the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has signaled as a key factor in slowing the spread of COVID-19, pose a perceived risk among undocumented immigrants seeking treatment. A phone call asking an undocumented person whom they have been in contact with may force them to choose between their public health duty and their family’s security. Having to grapple with a choice between one’s health and legal status, on top of everyday financial stressors, can be an anxiogenic experience.

For Silva, seeing her patients struggle with these issues is particularly personal. Born to Ecuadorian immigrants in Connecticut, she grew up speaking Spanish and English. However, with her bilinguality came responsibility. Her mother has a chronic medical condition, and Silva often had to interpret interactions with doctors and medical staff. “Doing that cultural brokering and being the oldest of two,” she said, “I very early on had experiences of what it feels like to try to access services, particularly health services and insurance, not knowing the language, and being constrained by things like medical insurance.” She feels that this has made

her more sensitive to the realities of some of her clients. “For me, the human connection and the development of interpersonal relationships [is] really important,” she said. After discovering a passion for psychology in high school and “sticking to it” through a master’s and a doctoral degree, Silva feels she “get[s] to combine the personal with the professional in this work. I get to work with the immigrant population and, at the same time, address mental health-related concerns that [...] impact very much people’s overall wellbeing.”

The uncertainty of the pandemic only complicates many patients’ access to medical care. Because many members of the Latin American community in New Haven have low socioeconomic status, they often do not have the luxury of working from home at a socially distanced desk. “This is one more piece, one more stressor,” said Silva. “It’s clearly highlighted the disparities that exist in the system for ethnic minority communities. […] They are the essential workforce, having to go in and work.”

As disclosed by DataHaven in 2019, 94 percent of people in the Greater New Haven area have health insurance. However, for communities disproportionately suffering from mental health issues during the pandemic, having access to adequate and affordable mental health care can be extremely difficult. In 2017, Milliman, a leading consulting firm specializing in insurance and health care, released a damning report stating that Connecticut had some of the nation’s worst disparities for affordable mental heath care access. Insurance companies denied patients’ insurance claims for mental health treatment at a higher rate than physical health treatment. Out-of-network patient visits are ten times more likely for behavioral health concerns than those for physical ones.

Sean Scanlon, Representative from the 98th district in the Connecticut General Assembly, took it upon himself to right this wrong. His landmark bill, the Mental Health Parity Act (House Bill No. 7125), went into effect in January 2020. It requires insurance companies to treat mental and physical health claims indiscriminately and to submit an annual report for accountability. Although it’s too early to say if it’s working, Scanlon said, he is optimistic because “whenever somebody is watching, people act differently.” According to him, insurance is one of the greatest reasons why people with mental illnesses do not get treatment—a trend that began in the 1960s.

When private insurance was established after World War II, said Scanlon, “the standard practice [for mental illness] was still, ‘Let’s institutionalize these people. Let’s put them in this big facility and throw away the key.’” After a wave of psychiatric deinstitutionalization in the 1960s brought about outpatient mental health care, insurance companies didn’t cover it. “Only the people who had money could afford to access that [care]. Everyone else was either becoming homeless, living in shelters, or struggling with substance use disorders because they’re using drugs to cope with the fact that they have an untreated mental illness,” Scanlon said.

These patterns of stigma and neglect deeply influenced Scanlon’s family and his professional life. “My

Rep. Scanlon introducing his landmark bill to the Connecticut General Assembly.

father, who is no longer alive, struggled with alcohol addiction in his life, and I saw that up close,” he explained. “I saw that folks like my dad are often the kind of folks we like to sweep under the rug and pretend don’t exist and don’t talk about.”

When Scanlon was elected in 2014, soon after the beginning of the third wave of the opioid epidemic, he focused on reform and destigmatization. “I’ve seen addiction and understand the damage that it causes and the fact that it’s a disease and not a [moral] shortcoming,” he said. For Scanlon, mental health and substance use has always been a personal issue, “and it’s a personal issue to one in four people in [the U.S.].”

The pandemic provides a major stress test for Scanlon’s bill. The Elm City has seen over one hundred deaths related to the virus and almost three thousand more infections, but for the overwhelming majority of the population, the greatest impact on their lives will not be physical. It will be mental. “For people who have substance use disorder [or other mental health conditions] and haven’t been able to get their treatment or see their provider,” argued Scanlon, “[the added] stress

of this virus or perhaps the stress of losing your job could manifest itself in a relapse.” If someone living in New Haven is dealing with mental illness and is both unemployed and uninsured, the chance of them seeing a clinician to help them cope with their trauma is often “next to none.”

It is precisely this population—unemployed and uninsured individuals—that organizations like HAVEN Free Clinic seek to serve. HAVEN is a student-run clinic that provides all of its patients with medical, legal, and social services, including behavioral health care, completely free of charge. Although it is student-run, a panel of professional advisors supervises each department to minimize patient harm and ensure that the rigorous standards are met.

Crystal Ruiz, a second-year Masters of Public Health candidate in Social and Behavioral Sciences at the Yale School of Public Health, is one of the co-directors of

“For people who have substance use disorder [or other mental health conditions] and haven’t been able to get their treatment or see their provider, the stress of this virus or perhaps the stress of losing your job could manifest itself in a relapse.” —Representative Sean Scanlon

the clinic’s Behavioral Health Department, or BHD, a relatively new addition to HAVEN. “Because HAVEN serves a population predominantly made up of Spanish-speaking refugee immigrants,” remarked Ruiz, “it became clear that they were struggling with a lot of trauma, a history of traumatic events that they didn’t have any outlet for.”

It can sometimes take months to see a mental health professional, said Ruiz. But at HAVEN, people “can come in and request an appointment with us weekly, and we can see them a lot sooner. If they do require a higher level of care, then we refer them to one of our partnering institutions like the Hispanic Clinic,” Ruiz explained. BHD’s volunteer training program reflects its goal of providing more accessible care. The department is inspired by Indian psychiatrist Vikram Patel’s philosophy of making up for a dearth of mental health services by training community members as “lay practitioners” to deliver psychosocial interventions for mild mental health issues.

This commitment to community engagement is at the core of both Ruiz’s work at HAVEN and her studies at the School of Public Health. After switching from an undergraduate program in biochemistry to one in medical anthropology, she was “exposed to a lot of the intersectionality that is present in health care,” which encouraged her to learn about “why certain immigrant and refugee communities develop, not necessarily mental disorders, but adopt behaviors that create opportunities for harm.”

Her academic interests, along with a desire to find community within a school that does too little for the underserved populations in New Haven, drew her to HAVEN. In a city where 44 percent of Latinos either received postponed care or no care at all for a health condition in 2018, Ruiz is disappointed that she always sees the impetus coming from students. Given that Yale is a predominantly white institution, however, she is not surprised. “It was just weird being presented with a really amazing opportunity—studying at the School of Public Health—but then not being able to contribute anything to the community.” Considering the amount of physical and economic resources that Yale takes from New Haven, Ruiz wanted to find a way to give back, and one of those outlets was through HAVEN. “I thought it was great because our main population is Spanish-speaking. They’re usually Latinx [community] members, and that’s [...] my community, who I identify with. Being able to provide direct care to people in my community makes me feel like I’m back at home.”

Insurance and a shortage of mental health services aren’t the only limiting factors to accessing care, however. Many living in low-income communities, Silva mentioned, also have unequal or sparse access to technology, which is especially harmful during a pandemic when mental health care has gone virtual. “Challenges include whether our patients even have access to WiFi,” Ruiz started, “if they have a phone that has the capacity to support Zoom or support video conferencing, if they have unlimited versus limited minutes, if they have access to a quiet space to discuss some of their personal medical concerns.”

Both Silva and Ruiz supervised a transition to telehealth due to the ongoing pandemic. While HAVEN’s IT team was able to quickly set up HIPAA-compliant communications systems for the clinic as soon as Governor Lamont hinted that clinics would have to close, virtual health care presents a new set of problems. “It’s very hard to see certain signs and symptoms via a laptop or a phone screen,” Ruiz said. Some changes in therapy have been more prominent. Silva recalls that, in recent sessions, “a lot of our time was spent on just checking in on people coping with COVID: Do they physically

have any symptoms? [Are they] social distancing, mask wearing, [following] all the precautions? [...] We’re still trying to find the balance between that piece plus their ongoing treatment goals.”

Stigma surrounding mental health, especially in Hispanic immigrant communities, poses a significant challenge to providing effective virtual care through

Students consult with a professor at the HAVEN clinic.

the Behavioral Health Department. State-mandated isolation and social distancing measures mean patients spend more time at home with their families, which makes talking about mental health issues more complicated. In Silva’s practice, many patients “enjoy coming to treatment and leaving their homes because a lot of their stress is related to their home environment.” The privacy and freedom to talk in the office is no longer there, which limits how much progress patients make on their treatment plans. At HAVEN, this manifests itself in limited responses on the questionnaires used to screen for symptoms of psychopathology: “There are some things you don’t feel comfortable saying around other individuals,” Ruiz mentioned. “Much of the time when they’re answering our questionnaires, they’ll limit their responses to yes, no, yes, no [...]. They don’t feel very comfortable with elaborating and providing further information.” Ruiz sounded tired over Zoom. After a long day of classes, coordinating BHD meetings, and participating in clinic-wide subcommittees for research and departmental enhancement projects, she understood that her clients were likely also overworked and still trying to adapt to the new telehealth system.

Despite the uncertainty New Haven is wading through, the city has slowly come back to life. Over the summer, a socially distant Wooster Square Farmers’ Market reopened, and medical students handing out surgical masks joined the protests against anti-Black police violence. At the Hispanic Clinic, Silva’s team modified an in-person group program with twice-a-week, threehour meetings for Zoom. “Once we were able to use

Zoom to get the group going again, they advocated for stuff like more time and more frequent meetings,” said

Silva. “There were definitely some bumps along the way, [...] but once they got connected, they absolutely loved it.” No matter the circumstances, people need to feel connected to each other. For Silva, there was a clear lesson learned: “Even if there is some discomfort in the process—like the technology piece—they’re willing to put up with that, to follow through with their treatment.”

Humans are naturally social creatures, but the pandemic has shown that they are adaptable, too. However, as the pandemic continues to rage throughout the country, mental health will not just be a priority— for many, it will become a necessity for survival.

In the aftermath of the 1918 Spanish influenza pandemic, survivors experienced significant increases in sleeping disturbances, depression, and trouble coping with everyday life for years after the pandemic’s end, Norwegian historical demographer Svenn-Erik Mamelund conservatively noted in 2003. Psychiatric hospitalizations also saw an unexpected rise in first-time patient admissions in the following years. If past pandemic responses have any bearing on the future, current epidemiological trends show cause for concern. “Anxiety is way up, depression is way up, suicidal thoughts are way up, [and] using is way up,” said Scanlon. While it’s too soon to understand how much COVID-19 will affect mental health, one thing Scanlon knows for certain is that the psychological ramifications of the pandemic will persist well after we have a vaccine.

—Nicholas Ruiz-Huidobro Magdits is a senior in Trumbull College and an Associate Editor.

Librex et Veritas By Kapp Singer

A student’s app ignites a fierce debate over anonymity and freedom of speech.

Sitting on my parents’ orange couch while scrolling through Librex one afternoon, I came upon a post entitled “African-American and Ethnicity studies are bullshit.” Tapping on this title, I opened the post, which described how these fields of study are “designed to lure unsuspecting poc…. by majoring in these, students gain no practical skills” and become trapped in “the cycle of poverty.”

The post had garnered a significant number of upvotes that day, so Librex—an anonymous discussion forum exclusively for Ivy League students à la Reddit or YikYak—brought it to the top of my feed. Responses ranged from firm endorsements—“This is a take I can firmly agree with.”—to dismissive opposition—“Nah you can find a great job no matter what you major in.”

The mission of Librex (“‘Libr’ for libre [as in free], ‘ex’ for exchange”) is to “democratize college discourse and create a space for honest open discussion about what’s going on in your campus community,” per the app’s website. Ryan Schiller ’21, the founder of Librex and currently the only full-time employee, released his product on iOS in September 2019. Today, the app boasts around 11,000 registered users, 3,200 of which are active daily, spending over an hour on average perusing posts and messaging others (though I recently came upon a post confessing a fivehour Librex binge). An Ivy League .edu email address is required to log on to the platform, and once inside, the user is greeted by an infinite scroll of posts.

In an effort to understand the motives behind controversial content on the platform, I matched with the student who wrote the post. On the app, users can send private messages to the author of a specific post or comment.

Only identified by the Librex UI’s pill-shaped badges for each school, the Harvard student explained, “So my post is what we call ‘bait’ here on Librex. It’s definitely not my true thoughts. I’m just happy a lot of people have taken the bait. Although, I’m shocked some people support this.” Eager to incite a reaction, stir up the comments section, and amass attention, people bait all across the internet—this isn’t by any stretch a feature or quirk of Librex. But I was shocked by how shamelessly this person owned up to it.

“So you don’t actually believe any of this stuff?” I asked to clarify. “No I think it’s dumb. I’m black and double major in African American studies. Just thought it’d be interesting to see what people thought. I also don’t argue with the comments. I’m more interested in seeing how it plays out.” Reticent to disclose even their name’s first initial for fear of being identified, the user vanished back into the app’s anonymous mist after just a few more

questions.

Taking this Harvard student at their word, the post would fall in the category of well-intentioned baiting. But they just as easily could have lied to me, aiming to be a hurtful troll the whole time. In the end, does the intention even matter when everything is anonymous?

On any given day, Librexers—this is what they call themselves—discuss politics (“Renaming the past”), imposter syndrome (“How is everyone so put together and so far ahead already???”), and sex (“I’ve never had an orgasm”). They express their worries (“My dad is in the operating room rn”) and ask critically important logistical questions (“Is toads closed forever?”), but between the banal is a world that much more closely resembles the digital fringes. Schiller acknowledges that “any time there is anonymous discourse among thousands of people, there will be users who don’t contribute positively to the discussion.” But how does Librex decide what stays and what goes? What is useful, what is hurtful, what is truthful? And who makes the decisions?

In a February 2020 interview with the Yale Herald, Schiller explained that he felt “isolated and alienated” after his sophomore year, often wondering if others would judge him for ideas brought up in class. He wanted to give students a space where they could air sensitive thoughts without the fear of being called out.

Today, Schiller seems much more comfortable expressing his views on controversial topics. Casually, he revealed to me his belief in the state of Israel (“I’m a big religious Jew. I’m also a big Zionist”), which he surely knows could be an unpopular stance on Yale’s left-leaning campus.

But for those who can’t sit so openly and confidently with their ideas, Schiller brought forth a solution. A Math and Global Affairs double major without any coding skills, he googled his way through every question over the summer of 2019—“how do you make an iOS app,” “how do you get it on the Apple Store”—and ended up with a basic framework for the application. Along the way, he temporarily sought others to help him with development, outreach, and design.

The app’s user base stayed small for a while, with around 100 daily active users in February 2020, but steadily grew as Schiller expanded piece by piece to the rest of the Ivy League—from Yale he moved to Dartmouth, then came the rest.

As COVID-19 hit, kicking students off campus and sending them home, Librex blew up. The platform teemed with discussion about how schools would respond to the virus, when or even if students could go back to campus, and what Zoom classes would look like. A contentious point of debate on Librex at this time was about whether or not Yale should enact a universal pass (UP) policy to accommodate the immense range of learning environments at home. Over the phone, Schiller praised the platform for providing a place for “people [who] didn’t feel like they could speak on their opinions [on UP]” publicly. But this open debate, though occasionally productive, also included derisive digs. After Yale converted all classes to pass/fail, a post appeared on Librex and subsequently made the rounds on Facebook and Twitter that simply read “congrats poor people.”

In late May the Twitter account @LibrecksApp emerged. The account owner reposts screenshots of offensive posts on the platform, mocking Librex’s generous content moderation and circulating especially offensive or off-color posts. At the same time, content moderation entered the national discourse when, on May 26th, Twitter fact-checked the President for the first time by placing a label below his erroneous claims that mail-in ballots lead to voter fraud. In the following weeks, Twitter continued to place warnings on the President’s tweets, attaching a notice of violation of Twitter’s content policy for “glorifying violence” over his incendiary re-invocation of the phrase “when the looting starts the shooting starts.” The question arose, where does a social media platform end and a publication begin?

It’s a debate that may never be resolved. Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook), Jack Dorsey (Twitter), Susan Wocjicki (YouTube), and Steve Huffman (Reddit) are constantly weighing decisions on this question, and some have taken more drastic steps than others. In late June, Huffman banned over 2,000 subreddits including the massive Trump-focused thread “The_Donald” in accordance with a new content policy of no hate on Reddit, whereas Zuckerberg has favored inaction, stating that Facebook won’t be “arbiters of truth.” Many Librexers expressed frustration to me about large social media companies. One anonymous user told me, “I used to love Reddit, but then they caved to the mob” and have now moved to Librex for its anonymity and looser moderation policies.

Librex is moderated according to three simple rules:

“Be legal: No spam, threats, or darknet type stuff;” “Be a mensch: No targeting individual students or professors (excluding public figures);” and “Be specific: No sweeping statements about core identity groups.” If a post breaks the rules, it’s removed. Repeat offenses or an especially egregious transgression: the user is banned. In theory, it’s a simple rubric.

But stark lines quickly become blurry, black and white turning to a mute grey—a post rarely fits neatly

into this scant set of guidelines. This is where the moderation gets fun, S. told me.

S., a junior at Princeton, has been a Librex moderator since April. He entered the volunteer role after responding to a Librex posting by Schiller advertising open moderator positions (posts made by Schiller and other affiliates of Librex are signed with a gaudy purple script font “– The Librex Team”). S. interviewed with Schiller via the matching feature—anonymously, of course—and was accepted shortly thereafter.

Speaking to me through the phone over background sounds of his sister playing “Für Elise” on piano, S. told me that when a post is reported, it is brought to the moderation team for debate. In a Facebook group chat alongside twenty-three other volunteer moderators from across the Ivy League, S. argues for why or why not a post should remain up. The two dozen mods—which Schiller told me represent a diversity of socioeconomic statuses, countries of origin, political viewpoints, and races (over half are PoC)—can debate for hours whether or not a post is against the rules.

If there’s too much disagreement in the text chat, the moderators will have lengthy video calls. Schiller explained to me that the team has built a sort of case law, whereby they compare reported posts with past decisions in an effort to maintain a consistent modera

“The two dozen mods—which Schiller told me represent a diversity of socioeconomic statuses, countries of origin, political viewpoints, and races (over half are PoC)—can debate for hours whether or not a post is against the rules.”

tion scheme. And when Schiller recruits new moderators, he sometimes gives them sample moderation questions to see how they respond.

A favorite of his, he told me, is whether or not you remove a post claiming that “all men are trash”—a question that Facebook used when they were first creating moderation standards. “There’s no right answer to that necessarily,” he told me, “although I think there are better answers and worse answers.”

The founder said that he would likely message the user to let them know that the proclamation is not the kind of discourse expected on Librex and the post would likely be removed “because it’s a sweeping statement against a core identity group.”

Schiller often benchmarks his moderation practice against Facebook’s: in another instance, he justified that a Holocaust-denial post should remain up by saying “even Facebook allows it.” A disgruntled moderator quipped: “ah yes let’s take our moral cues from daddy zuck.”

The whole operation has an air of professionalism to it until you look at the moderation chat itself. In a series of screenshots leaked by ex-moderators, we get a glimpse of the post evaluation process.

Before even examining the substance of the chat, another detail jumped out at me: pseudonyms the moderators had given each other. There is, for example, “Grandmaster’s Padawan,” (S.’s name) “Grandmaster Big Brain,” “EtErNaL��,” and “Daddy,” which is, unsurprisingly, Schiller. The nicknames are transient, continually edited and tweaked by the moderators: at one point Schiller becomes “papi.” “The moderators can be silly sometimes,” he told me.

The nicknames also hint at yet another layer of anonymity, perhaps spurred by the worry that their identities will be revealed. After screenshots of the moderator chat were first leaked to Twitter in late May by an ex-moderator from Dartmouth, there was a palpable fear in the chat. After Schiller informed the moderators of the leak, S. writes, “Holy [new message] Shit [new message] @Daddy did I get cancelled.” Schiller (Daddy) replies, “I think ur ok for now.” A few messages later S.’s fear returns: “I’m gonna get cancelled.”

The content moderation chat brings to light the debates of what should be allowed to exist on the internet, what is considered hate speech, what is said satirically versus seriously. These questions are asked behind closed doors, which Schiller explained to me is because “these are very sensitive issues and oftentimes issues that involve identity and involve how we see the world. And it’s important that our moderators feel like they are safe to actually speak what they think is like [sic] moral.”

The moderator chat, as Schiller described it to me, is a discourse unencumbered by judgement, a place where moderators feel comfortable to voice their true opinions while discussing the complicated politics of post removal.

But an ex-moderator from Dartmouth, who left Librex over frustrations with the culture of the company, described that the chat is full of slights and disrespect. In a message they told me, “i started to get really tired of the job when there was a conversation in the

mod group chat about racist content and i asked if we should leave up racist posts even if they technically lie outside of the community guidelines and ryan said yes”—a discouraging instance given their impetus for becoming a moderator stemmed from a belief that maybe they could be the one to “change the content for the better & reduce the harassment/ hate speech.”

The ex-moderator expressed anger over an instance in which their moderation decisions were overridden by Schiller. In late May during elections for the Dartmouth Student Assembly, candidate María Teresa Hidalgo ’22 and her running mate Olivia Audsley ’21 were continually harassed anonymously on Librex. The Dartmouth reported they were compared to fascists and that one post “threatened to call Immigrations and Customs Enforcement on Hidalgo… Despite her own American citizenship.”

After Librex announced that Hidalgo and Audsley did not qualify as public figures and therefore could not be targeted by name on the platform—a decision which took several days while the offending statements festered on the platform—the ex-moderator began work on deleting the hurtful posts: “i started taking everything down (very relieved) but [Ryan] put back a ton of posts where only their initials were used.”

After being called “oversensitive for telling someone why the redskins logo was bad and promptly made fun of for defending [themselves],” they finally resigned as a moderator. “it was just like. why do i bother.”

In another instance in the moderator chat, the group discusses a post denying the Armenian genocide. Grandmaster Big Brain takes a hard-line stance: “it’s not sexist, doesn’t attack a class, just reflects the poor state of historical education.”

Another moderator responds, “it’s like… denying genocide.”

Big Brain retorts, “Yes, but it doesn’t go against the rules [new message] Trust me, I find it disgusting—but at the same time we are not policing for facts.”

Schiller affirmed this belief to me over email. I asked how Librex deals with misinformation and he replied, “In general, the Yale community is good at pointing out misinformation through comments and voting.” He believes in minimal regulation: falsehoods should remain on the platform and be downvoted to the bottom of the feed rather than moderated away. ***

Schiller’s platform allows Ivy League students to explore ideas and learn from each other, as many users told me. While matching with people, almost everyone I spoke with loved the app (selection bias, of course), and most accepted the trolling as a necessary inconvenience.

“‘So you don’t actually believe any of this stuff?’ I asked to clarify.

‘No I think it’s dumb...just thought it’d be interesting to see what people thought. I also don’t argue with the comments. I’m more interested in seeing how it plays out.’”

J., a Columbia student who quickly matched with my post soliciting user interviews, explained that he’d actually learned a lot from Librex and had his beliefs challenged and changed. He told me that as a Chinese-American, he often felt resentment towards the ways affirmative action disadvantaged Asian-American college applicants, until he had some conversations on Librex that helped him build a more nuanced understanding of the lasting effects of slavery and prejudice against Black people. “[Librex] helped me be more receptive and less apathetic and self-interested than I was before.”

Schiller’s quest to give students a platform for free speech and debate has been certainly realized: speech is definitely free, debate plentiful. But the extent to how far “free” should go, and whether the outcome of that decision is good, is another question entirely. Although access to anonymous speech on Librex is spread equally across the Ivy League, the bigoted posts enabled by the anonymity tend target certain groups more heavily: Black students, overweight students, undocumented students, transgender students, among other minorities.

One critic of Librex, Anyoko Sewavi (Dartmouth ’23), who posted a YouTube video in July reacting to racist Librex comments from other Dartmouth

students, told me that she initially witnessed productive discussions and believed anonymity was a “good concept.” But “then came the trolls.” Sewavi, who is Black, told me that “seeing that Dartmouth is the main school writing racist comments is just unnerving, it’s uncomfortable, and honestly it’s just exhausting to see…. I wouldn’t know if I walked across campus and someone felt this strongly about me being Black.”

Our phone call finished on an optimistic note, with Sewavi explaining to me that the relatively small size of Librex enables opportunity for systemic change on the platform, and perhaps social media as a whole: “If they take trolling seriously, and there’s actual consequences for these comments and actions, then maybe in the future it will snowball and set an example for other anonymous social media apps.”

Others have also spoken out against the app, such as the actress Skai Jackson who posted on Twitter screenshots of Librex posts with the caption “This app is called Librex, so sad people are saying disgusting things on here…” The attached posts claimed “Fellow racists. I have a plan to increase racism” and “Black people need to learn grammer [sic].” It’s hard to know if the posts were eventually removed.

Librex as a platform does not create the cesspools of flippant, divisive callouts that sometimes permeate its users’ devices. Rather, the anonymity gives these ideas a convenient breeding ground. The platform is a magnifying glass on the internet—a tangible diorama of the same behavior that permeates the bigger social sites. I recently came upon a post with 22 upvotes confessing: “For a forum filled with Ivy League kids, the content here is remarkably similar in quality to Reddit and 4Chan.” Yet this behavior feels much closer to home when we see it on Librex. We know that the content that so often ends up being debated in the moderation chat is made by the people that live around us, that attend class with us.

On Librex, offensive posts appear often—posts about why undocumented people should just move to Canada, or how the n-word “triggers libtards.” But despite the occasional moderation blunders, my experience browsing the app has gradually included less and less brazenly insulting content since I downloaded it in April. Perhaps the moderation team has honed their technique in an attempt to balance strict free speech and the app’s role as a useful and good platform. But the internet’s propensity to breed bigots and fuel flame wars, intensified by Librex’s feature of facelessness, may be insurmountable.

Schiller conceded to me that any online community has its bad apples—a statement that felt a bit like admitting it’s the fault of the water and not the holes in the hull that causes a ship to sink. But when a leak does emerge and trolls inundate the platform, anonymity protects and emboldens some while others bear the brunt of unchecked speech.

- Kapp Singer is a junior in Grace Hopper College

BEASIE GODDU

RENEE ONG

FEATURE

ART IN

New Haven’s artscape has been resculpted by the coronavirus pandemic and recent social movements. ELI MENNERICK

Daniel Pizarro was eating cereal when I met him, pale sunlight pouring from a window beside him. He sat in his East Rock home that July midmorning while I sat a few miles away at my own apartment, in front of a laptop screen. Even over Zoom, Pizarro’s voice was warm. He had curly, dark hair and a full beard.

Pizarro is a graphic designer. When the pandemic arrived and the shutdown began, he lost 80 percent of his client-based jobs. Luckily, though, he’s found new work through his connections with New Haven nonprofits and grassroots organizations. For the last year and a half, he said, he’s been trying to build a name for himself by using his graphic design skills to further social justice work in New Haven. He’s designed flyers, videos, posters, and graphics for Junta for Progressive Action, Cancel Rent CT, and City Wide Youth Coalition, among other groups. “Some of it’s been paid and some of it hasn’t,” he told me. “But that community has really held me through this pandemic.”

Across the country, artists face a fate similar to Pizarro’s. As of August 24, Americans for the Arts estimated that 94% of artists in the U.S. lost income due to the pandemic—an average of $22,200—and 63% became unemployed. The total income lost, they reported, was $50.6 billion. As author William Deresiewicz wrote in The Nation this May, “The major basis of much of the contemporary arts economy—live, in-person, face-to-face events—has been destroyed.”

This past summer, Pizzaro led a three-week youth program at a local arts nonprofit called Artspace. The program was supposed to be in-person. But after the pandemic arrived, Pizarro and the other program coordinators reimagined the entire curriculum, reducing the number of students from around twenty to only eight. They purchased iPads, styluses, and animation software for the students. The class met on Zoom and focused on digital art. Miraculously, the transformation was a success. “They’re all making amazing art,” Pizarro said during the second week of the class. “And they pick up on it so quickly.”

The summer course—Artspace’s Summer Apprenticeship Program—explored graphic design as a tool for activism, using the art of the Black Panther Party from the 1960s and 70s as a model. The curriculum’s focus on the Panthers is

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one of a few initiatives Artspace has developed this year to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the New Haven Black Panther Trials, including a gallery exhibition inspired by the legacy of the Panthers and a podcast about the trials in New Haven. Lisa Dent, the Executive Director of Artspace, told me that these projects had been scheduled for a couple years—well before the pandemic, and well before the protests in response to the murder of George Floyd. But the projects suddenly became timelier than anyone expected.

After the murder of George Floyd, protests swept the nation. According to The New York Times, between 15 and 26 million people had participated in the protests by July 3, making it the largest protest movement in U.S. history. These protests pushed the long-standing injustices of systemic racism and anti-Blackness into mainstream attention and prompted many people to work toward change within their disciplines. For those in the art world committed to broad political change, the questions are, in Dent’s words, “How do artists engage in social justice? How can artists support that work or be supported during that work?”

According to Pizarro, the students in Artspace’s Summer Apprenticeship Program discussed how lessons from the Panthers can be applied to the contemporary Black Lives Matter movement.

“We’re not telling them what to do, but we’re allowing them the space for self-expression, and to contribute to this idea that artists in this moment do have a role to play.”

“Some of the main messaging that [the Panthers] talked about, like police brutality, is directly paralleled with the BLM movement in this moment,” Pizarro said.

But what exactly, is the connection between art and activism? What can art do that, say, protest and community organizing cannot? Pizarro emphasized that art is profoundly personal and expressive and that it can help individuals find their voices within a movement. “The students are trying to figure their place out, and they’re creating work that directly speaks to that,” Pizarro said. “We’re not telling them what to do, but we’re allowing them the space for self-expression, and to contribute to this idea that artists in this moment do have a role to play.”

It’s one thing to say that artists have a role to play in this moment. It’s another to clarify those terms. What role, and which moment? How exactly should art engage with a protest movement—not to mention a pandemic?

The category of art, and even of contemporary visual art, is vast—perhaps too vast to generalize usefully about what role it should play right now. Different kinds of art will inevitably engage with social justice in different ways.

Althea Rao, for example, decided to put her project Vagina Chorus on hold during the pandemic. Until the end of July, Rao was an Artist-in-Residence at Artspace, which means she had around-the-clock access to studio space owned by the nonprofit. Vagina Chorus, one of the projects Rao was developing in that studio, involves a group of performers using a “vaginal insertive pelvic floor trainer” combined with a “Bluetooth enabled bio feedback algorithm” to “sonify the internal movements, producing immersive light effects and a symphony of sound waves, forming a chorus,” according to Rao’s website. In other words, the performers create a music and light show by squeezing their pelvic floor (an exercise called a kegel).

The project is designed to address urinary incontinence, which, as Rao told me, “is closely tied to childbirth, menopause, all of these physical events that a person who has a uterus might have over their entire lifespan.” The major symptom of urinary incontinence is leaky urine. Rao said that while urinary incontinence has been stigmatized and ignored for too long, it was understandably overshadowed by the pandemic. “It’s just a matter of urgency,” Rao said. “If someone is worried about, ‘Okay, I don’t even know where I’m going to live tomorrow, I cannot physically socially distance, and I might die if I get [Covid-19],’ and then you’re talking to them about, ‘What about your leaking problem?’ they probably won’t want to talk about that. It’s not as important.”

How should Rao’s project engage with the current moment? The question sounds misplaced. If your art is about urinary incontinence, then it’s about urinary incontinence — not the pandemic, and not necessarily the BLM movement.

Though the pandemic has halted performances of Vagina Chorus for a while, it’s also provided

Rao an opportunity to reimagine her project in a form that respects social distancing measures. “I’m resisting the idea of having this be a virtual performance,” she told me. “So if I’m still doing an in-person performance, can social distancing be an intentional element of blocking the stage? Can this parameter, instead of preventing a meaningful engagement, become something that’s challenging and exciting?”

She imagines something like a silent disco party at sunset. Inside a glass building, the performers will do their kegels and execute “pelvic floor exercise-inspired choreography.” Sitting outside, audience members will hear the music through personal headphones and watch the light show through glass windows. “As daylight fades away,” Rao writes on her website about the reimagined project, “Vagina Chorus will illuminate the audience’s view and mind.”

“Without the parameters of social distancing, I wouldn’t even have thought of [using headphones or performing in a glass building,]” Rao told me. “And now, these technical elements have become a very interesting add-on.”

Other artists have been creating new works more or less directly in response to the pandemic. Artistic partners Aude Jomini and Eben Kling are working on a custom modification (a ‘mod’) to a videogame from 1993 — and, in the process, leaving behind more traditional gallery spaces. Jomini, an architect, and Kling, a painter, are frequent collaborators who have contributed to multiple exhibitions at Artspace over the past few years. The game they’re customizing is called Doom and it normally involves shooting your way through hordes of demons. In the nearly thirty years since its release, fans have made countless mods for the game. The mod Jomini and Kling are designing is set in New Haven and uses original drawings by the two artists for the characters, buildings, objects, and weapons in the game. Jomini and Kling gave me a tour over Zoom; it’s a surreal landscape. We walked around a pixelated Long Wharf, the screen-share jumping and lagging every so often. Kling’s carefully handdrawn characters looked slightly warped on the screen, and Jomini’s original buildings, towering above the streets, were gray and a little grainy.

The two artists see their project as a refuge from the pandemic. When they couldn’t safely go downtown in real life, they made their own digital downtown. It felt too passive, Kling said, to spend these months just waiting for the pandemic to blow over, creating paintings and other physical artworks that couldn’t be shown until a safer time.

“I think both of us were already slowly drifting away from more traditional gallery spaces,” Kling said. “Making art-objects or traditional kinds of paintings and putting them in a gallery and having people come in and look at them and talk about them — it just doesn’t sound very exciting to me anymore.”

Their Doom project is in many ways the opposite of traditional studio art. It’s a democratic medium— anyone can make a mod, with little technical skill required. More importantly, it escapes what Jomini calls the “baggage” of traditional art. When you make traditional studio art, “You’re always pigeonholed within a certain discipline and what you’re referencing within art history, and there’s a way in which that’s so deadly to me,” Jomini said. “It’s a kind of death-making—this collecting and selling and pouring all your thoughts into this object, which then becomes precious. That is not really interesting to me.”

This idea of art as a precious object, which dwells in the dim, regal hall of a museum, is similar to the philosopher Walter Benjamin’s concept of “aura.” Aura, Benjamin wrote in The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, is the reverence we have for “authentic” works of art—the awe we feel, for example, in front of the original Mona Lisa and not a copy of it. Like Jomini and Kling, Benjamin believed aura was outdated—and that it would be destroyed by the advent of photography, film, and other modern forms of mass-producible art. For Benjamin, rejecting aura was a political choice. In his preface he declares, “The concepts which are introduced into the theory of art in what follows… are completely useless for the purposes of Fascism. They are, on the other hand, useful for the formulation of revolutionary demands in the politics of art.”

But when I asked Jomini and Kling whether they saw their artistic practice as political, they answered cautiously. Kling called it a “slippery term.” “I do think a lot of previous work that I’ve made is social commentary to a certain extent. But it’s not really political in any kind of partisan way,” said Kling. Jomini agreed, saying that she’s wary of thinking of art as “a tool” for political messaging. “Yeah, I’m wary of that kind of utility, too,” Kling said. “The line at which you cross into the world of propaganda is pretty fucking thin.”

I asked specifically about the Black Lives Matter movement—had it prompted any thoughts about

how art can or should engage in political movements? Kling, who is white, said that the question is what’s useful to the movement and what’s not. For example, he said, “If there is going to be a large-scale painting project, [since] I have designed and realized large scale murals in the past, that’s the kind of thing I would like to utilize in those moments. But I don’t know if I’m somebody to go back into the studio and make a bunch of paintings about the Black Lives Matter movement.”

Jomini, who is also white, agreed that art was not the best medium for her to engage with the BLM movement—in part, she said, because it shouldn’t be a priority to make white artists a central “part of this discourse.” It’s better, she said, to attend physical protests, and to work for broader, systemic change within organizations. “It’s about doing the hard work of sitting on these committees, getting up earlier, talking to my boss and talking to other people at work and doing outreach to the Yale School of Architecture… all these larger organizations are what will change the tide.” But, she emphasized, that work isn’t part of her artistic practice.

It seems true that institutional change is more important than making art about the BLM movement. But it seems equally true that art is not outside politics—it’s always implicated in politics, because politics pervades all life. Does this mean that all artists committed to social justice have an obligation to use their art as a form of activism? It’s a tricky question. Forcing artists to make art about politics won’t lead to meaningful progress—not least because they won’t make good art if their subject is prescribed. But let’s assume you’re an artist who wants to use art to aid social justice. What should you do?

Benjamin ends “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” with a call to action. Humanity’s “self-alienation has reached such a degree

Local Artist Kwadwo Adae stands in front of his Women’s Empowerment Mural in October 2018

that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order,” he writes. “This is the situation of politics which Fascism is rendering aesthetic. Communism responds by politicizing art.” If this sounds melodramatic, it’s useful to remember that Benjamin was writing in Germany during the 1930s. But his main point could be universalized: to resist fascism, we must politicize art. Do Benjamin’s theories apply today? Should artists, in response to the momentous events of the summer, politicize their art? What would that mean?

I asked Pamela Lee, an art history professor at Yale, to explain how art can do political work. “It’s a great question, and it’s also a question that, if you’re going to pursue it, will take you several decades,” Lee said, laughing slightly. At the simplest level, “art represents something,” she said—and that something can be political. “The most famous example is Picasso’s Guernica, the work that monumentalizes the catastrophes of the Spanish Civil War. And the question that always follows is, ‘Well, did that ever save anyone from dying? Did that stop fascism from taking hold in Spain?’” But in Lee’s opinion, those questions are misplaced. “In 99 percent of cases, I don’t think there is such a direct causal connection between how art produces politics,” she said. It’s ridiculous to ask Picasso’s canvas to halt Franco’s tanks.

Art can also be political if it’s “pure propaganda,” Lee said, the classic example being the socialist realism of the Soviet Union. But Lee pointed out that the art commissioned by the Popes during the Renaissance was also unabashedly political—it was intended to “advance [the Popes’] position on the geopolitical stage.”

Ultimately, Lee said, “art is always political,” but that doesn’t mean the subject matter of art must always be political. Art is political “in the sense that it’s a kind of occasion… the occasion for a whole complex of social relations.” Who gets to see this piece of art? Who owns it, and how was it produced? How much is it worth? Who determines its worth? “For me at least,” Lee said, “these are political questions—not by way of partisan politics, but by way of access and power.”

Lee makes an important distinction; to say that art is “political” can mean two different things. It can mean, on one hand, that art participates in an activist project. But it can also mean that art is just one more part of our vast social world, its histories, and its complex relationships—all of which is inevitably implicated in politics. All art is political in the second sense, but not in the first. And, in Lee’s opinion, that’s okay. We shouldn’t critique artists, like Jomini and Kling, whose art isn’t explicitly engaged in activism. “I think that artists should do what they want to do,” she said. “If you want to paint flowers, why shouldn’t you? … I can say that all art is ideologically or politically stratified, but I don’t think that means that an artist is under any pressure to conform to some perceived notion of what constitutes the political.”

“Art,” she emphasized, “can be speculative.” It’s important for artists to have the freedom to experiment, to imagine what “the political” can be. Art’s power rests on this unfettered creativity. Dictating a “proper” way for art to be political risks stunting art’s ability to imagine new ways of being in the world—and, counterintuitively, its potential to imagine political change. “I think this is the bottom line here: artists are not just reflecting society and culture, they’re producing it,” Lee said.

“It’s about doing the hard work of sitting on these committees, getting up earlier, talking to my boss and talking to other people at work and doing outreach to the Yale School of Architecture… all these larger organizations are what will change the tide.”

Pizarro and his students met every day on Zoom for three weeks. Sometimes guest speakers visited. Addys Castillo talked to the class about her role as the Executive Director of Citywide Youth Coalition, a nonprofit that focuses on getting young people involved in anti-racist organizing in New Haven.

Art is political “in the sense that it’s a kind of occasion… the occasion for a whole complex of social relations.”

Nontsikelelo Mutiti, a graphic designer and a friend of Pizarro’s, also visited. One day during the program, Pizarro assigned the students a documentary about the Black Panther Party to watch for homework. The next day, as a surprise, Pizarro announced to the students that Ericka Huggins would be visiting class that day. “They were starstruck,” Pizarro said. The students got to meet a real-life, former leader of the New Haven Black Panther Party, just after learning about the Panthers’ historical significance. Huggins spoke to the students about Black female leadership and the importance of “taking time to heal” during the labor-intensive work of activism.

Some days, the students worked on self-portraits. Others, they practiced digital typography, or creative writing. They even did theater exercises together, all without ever meeting in person.

“With any environment where you meet new people, you’re sort of shy in the beginning,” Pizarro told me. “But I think that is particularly true with how young people behave in a digital space.” His students, at first, didn’t want to show themselves on camera. “We’re sharing our intimate spaces, like our room. Some people might be a little shy about that.” But over the three weeks, Pizarro said, the students blossomed. He encouraged them to have breakout sessions so they could get to know one another without his help. The theater exercises, especially, helped Pizarro and his students break past their discomfort. They forgot their lines, they did silly improv skits, they laughed together. “It was really a joyful experience that I didn’t expect,” Pizarro said. “You know, I’m a graphic designer. Graphic designers tend to be more shy, more introverted. And I do exhibit some of those things. If I embrace something like theater, I’m able to come out of my shell as well.”

The pandemic has created new challenges not only for Pizarro’s classroom, but for his broader philosophy about art’s role in society. “I see artistic practice as a social practice, as one that contributes to this idea of movement building,” Pizarro said. “Take protest for an example,” he continued. “We can discuss how protest actually is an art form, right? It’s a performance. It’s a performance to inject the necessary conversation, because the media is not covering it in a way that we want it to.”

Not only are protests a form of communal performance, they’re also a collective of individuals using visual art. Protestors make signs, design shirts, paint banners, and generally use a visual language (a fist in the air, kneeling in silence on the street) to express their demands. “It’s such a beautiful thing, to understand art as communal,” Pizarro said. “We’re taught that art needs to be separate, that it’s this precious object we just stare at on a wall. And it feels so distant, and we don’t see the artist. But in protest, you see all the artists; we’re all there. We can dialogue. We can see each other. We can smell each other. We can touch each other.”

Of course, the pandemic makes this harder. One of the challenges with moving everything online, Pizarro said, is figuring out how to preserve a sense of genuine human connection. “We have to pour more of ourselves into the Zoom process,” he said. “We have to open up more, to open up faster, and not be afraid to share deep parts of ourselves.”

I met Kwadwo Adae outside his studio on a misty, humid Friday in July. He wore a lab coat covered in paint splatters of all colors, along with boxy glasses, gray slacks, a blue face mask, and orange gloves. He gave me a light fist-bump in greeting. Inside his studio, potted plants sat on window sills, and paintings lined the walls—vast canvases of flowers, and portraits, many half-finished. Adae creates these paintings in his studio, but he also normally teaches four or five classes a week here through the Adae Fine Art Academy. Children’s classes are on Saturday, adults come during the week. Normally, he also teaches art to senior residents at local assisted living facilities and to young adults at the West Haven Mental Health Clinic.

The assisted living facilities shut their doors in February. Adae closed his art academy in March. “All of the teaching, all the in-person teaching I’ve been doing for the past fourteen years, was just unavailable,” he told me. Suddenly, without the income from teaching, he was at risk of losing his studio space.

Adae began to rely on selling his paintings. Luckily, they’ve been popular. “People have been coming out of the woodwork,” he said. “A lot of the floral paintings have been going.” He allows customers to pay in installments because so many have lost jobs. He also started teaching online classes. On Tuesday evenings, he heads to his studio, sets up an Instagram livestream, and records himself giving lessons on figure drawing. He asks those who watch the video to donate via Venmo. “People have been generous,” he said.

Adae had a tight schedule when I met him. Artspace had commissioned him to paint nine portraits of protestors and community organizers in New Haven for their “Revolution on Trial” exhibit, commemorating the 50th anniversary of the New Haven Black Panther trials. A few of the portraits sat beside us on easels while we talked. Each protestor stood defiantly in the exact center of a canvas, staring straight ahead. The backgrounds were solid colors, one bright red, one orange, one blue. A mass of people with raised fists and protest signs crowded each horizon.

Adae, who is Black and the son of Ghanaian immigrants, is often out in the streets with the protestors he paints. In 2017, he became heavily involved in the activist group Justice for Jayson, which emerged after Bridgeport police officer James Boulay shot and killed 15-year-old Jayson Negron. At one protest, Adae saw Negron’s little sister speak to the crowd. “She was 13, tops,” Adae said. “And she got on the mic and addressed the protesters and it was extremely inspiring—and heartbreakingly sad. She should be hanging out with friends. None of this should be her life. But because of this incident, it’s her life.”

“I cannot just sit and do nothing and watch people that look like me get slaughtered,” he said. Since then, Adae has continued to be involved in local activism. By attending protests over the years and around the city, he has gotten to know a handful of other regular activists in New Haven—many of whom became the subjects of his current portrait series.

“These are people that I see in protests, people that I’ve linked arms with against cops. And I’ve had the thought in my mind, ‘Okay, if this police officer swings a baton at this person… I’m getting in between them,’” Adae said. “I would take a nightstick for this person.” And yet, Adae said, even after all this, he realized he didn’t know his fellow protesters. He called it “a strange but beautiful relationship.”

For Adae, art and protest overlap. “Everyone can do something to be heard and to stand up against an injustice,” he said. Since Adae is trained as a painter, he uses those specialized skills “to make murals about activism, to paint activists.” Much of Adae’s art is community-oriented; it aligns with Pizarro’s belief that all art should be a form of “social practice.” For example, Adae has painted many murals across New Haven — art that is resolutely public, not tucked away in a museum or a gallery. He’s currently working on a mural in Dixwell in response to the shooting of Stephanie Washington and Paul Witherspoon by Yale and Hamden police officers in 2019. The mural depicts four brown sparrows taking flight—small, everyday birds, painted large enough to cover the side of a building. Sparrows, to Adae, symbolize peace and freedom—the very things, he said, that police violence robs from a community. His mural, he hopes, will be a reminder that “We all deserve peace; we all deserve freedom.”

At the end of their program, Pizarro’s students produced an exhibit of digital artwork. Actually, there were two exhibits—one online, and one in-person at Artspace’s physical gallery, which is publicly showing the “Revolution on Trial” until October. Online, the works are subtly animated. In Abdulrahman Elrefaei’s project, a TV flashes, declaring the phrase, “The media does not cover the whole story.” In Natalia Maria Padilla Castellanos’s piece, protest signs jump gently back and forth, emblazoned with phrases like “No justice, no peace” and “Las vidas negras importan.” The work depicts a Black Lives Matter protest “ascending through the streets of Antigua, Guatemala,” in the words of the artist’s statement. In the front line of the protest are real people: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Cori Bush, Rigoberta Menchú, Nontsikelo Mutiti, Addys Castillo, Ericka Huggins.

At Artspace’s physical gallery, in one room of the “Revolution on Trial” exhibit, each student’s project is duplicated many times, each replica stacked vertically, like a film strip. I thought of Benjamin’s