Spring 2018 Issue 1

TUFTS OBSERVER vol. cxxxvI

ISSUE 1

TUFTS STUDENT MAGAZINE #Memory

table of contents MEMORY: More than photobooks, more than sepia-tinted documents, memory might be swing sets or long sleeves or the smell of dried apricots. Snapshots of the past work their way into our consciousness, both collective and individual.

And while memories might obscure more than they illuminate, we continue to turn backwards toward the past in search of truth, or comfort, or both.

PASSING IT DOWN

3 - feature

By Jordan Lauf

STAFF

OPINION

CAMPUS

2 - LETTER FROM THE EDITOR

6 - MEMORIALIZING A PAST NOT YET PAST

8 - RETHINKING TATTOOS

ARTS & CULTURE

POETRY & PROSE

INSET

10 - decolonial atlas

12 - UNCRACKED

13 - A MESSAGE

By Carissa Fleury

By Gabriela Bonfiglio

By Claire Pinkham, William Liu, and Abigail Barton

By Carissa Fleury

By Sonya Bhatia

By Jonathan Innocent

POETRY & PROSE

VOICES

CAMPUS

17 - CLOROX-SCENTED ELEGY

18 - Where Our Memories Live

20 - AN OBSERVER RETROSPECTIVE

OPINION

news

ARTS & CULTURE

22 - Defunding Justice and Peace

24 - Algorithms Against Bail

26 - [Fergie Voice] 2000 and Late

By Maya Pace and Colette Midulla

By Gabriela Bonfiglio and Merissa Jaye

By Chris Paulino

By Sarah Walsh

By Myisha Majumder

By Issay Matsumoto

FEBRUARY 5,2017 Volume CXXXVI, Issue 1 Tufts observer, since 1895 Tufts’ student magazine CONTRIBUTORS Lauren Ballini / Sandra Burbul / Madeline Lee / Claire Pinkham / William Liu / Rebecca Tang

STAFF EDITOR IN CHIEF: Carissa Fleury MANAGING EDITOR: Emmett Pinsky CREATIVE DIRECTOR: Kyle Scott PRODUCTION MANAGER: Chase Conley FEATURES: Jordan Lauf / NEWS: Sonya Bhatia, Vivian Tam / OPINION: Britt, Gabriela Bonfiglio / ARTS & CULTURE: Henry Jani, Chris Paulino / CAMPUS: Riva Dhamala, Lena Novins-Montague / POETRY & PROSE: Merissa Jaye, Priyanka Padamim / VOICES: Alexandra Strong, Juliana Vega / COLUMNS: Myisha Majumder, Sivi Satchi / COLUMNISTS: Trina Sanyal, Georgia Oldham, Rachel Wahlert / PHOTO DIRECTOR: Abigail Barton / PHOTO: Roxanne Zhang / LEAD PHOTOGRAPHER: Jordan Delawder / ART DIRECTOR: Annie Roome / LEAD ARTIST: Nicole Cohen / MULTIMEDIA DIRECTOR: Kayden Mimmack / MULTIMEDIA TEAM: Deanna Baris, Dennis Kim, Peter Lam, Emily Lin, Hans Tercek / VIDEO DIRECTOR: Aaron Watts / VIDEO: Emai Lai / PODCAST DIRECTOR: Izzy Rosenbaum / PODCAST TEAM: Daniella Faura, Malaika Gabra / PUBLICITY DIRECTORS: Alyssa Bourne-Peters, Ashley Miller / PUBLICITY TEAM: Ellie Mcintosh, Sarah Park, Amy Tong / STAFF WRITERS: Ben Kesslen, Jonathan Innocent, Issay Matsumoto / DESIGNERS: Kareal Amenumey, Niamh Doyle, Daniel Jelcic, Kira Laurig, Erica Levy, Zahra Morgan, Priya Skelly LEAD COPY EDITOR: Owen Cheung / COPY EDITORS: Jesse Ryan, Jennifer Han, Ruthie Block, Anita Lam, Ryan Albanesi, Brittany Regas

letter from the editor

I am a nester. The first thing I do when I move into a new house is open the blinds and make my bed with freshly laundered sheets (preferably dried by sunlight). After this, I hang up the small collection of art pieces that have made their way to me to make the space feel like my own. The last two steps are the most vital: finding the right spot for my plants and placing my large library of books across the four different bookshelves I’ve gathered over the years. To me, these make a home.

“Home” means different things to everyone. A piece of land, the melody of a certain song, the temperature of the breeze in the place you had your first kiss, the specific lilt in the laugh of a loved one.

Across the years, my idea of home has changed. During my years at Tufts, home has looked like a tiny room in Houston Hall with walls filled with pictures from my past. An even smaller single in Wren where I woke up each day in beautiful golden light. My FOCUS-mom’s bedroom with a wall mural of Shel Silverstein’s Giving Tree overlooking us as she turned from mentor, to friend, to family. The crinkling of my best friend’s eyes when she smiles on a warm day. Home is both nervously holding my partner’s hand on our first date and the comfort and ease that comes with holding each other now.

Most of all, I’ve found, home is a magazine on Tufts campus, where over 40 people squeeze into a tiny design lab above a former coffee shop. Home is the sound of late-night laughter, the clicking of keys, and the smell of early morning food orders. Home is collaborative playlists, the patterned carpets that sometimes make their way into my dreams, and the smell of lavender chamomile pillow mist that awaits me after walking home at 5:30 a.m. in the soft, gray light after pressing “save” and sending this week’s magazine to the printers. Home is the Observer—the practices of care, the gathering of stories, the comfort of collaboration, and the celebrating of student art, voices, and lived experiences.

Over my time here, the Observer has become a space where we can push, critique, and learn from each other with critical compassion. One where we can open ourselves up: to our pasts, to the mistakes that haunt us, to the power structures that weigh heavily on many of our bodies and lives. One where I and others can carve a home for ourselves.

I can’t wait to continue on the Observer’s journey this semester. Thank you for letting us share glimpses of our home with you.

Carissa Fleury

2 Tufts Observer February 5, 2018

ART BY ANNIE ROOME

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PAssing IT Down

The Challenges Of Preserving Institutional Memory AS A STUDENT ACTIVIST GROUP

I

n May of 2015, a small huddle of tents stationed near Ballou Hall interrupted the smooth green of the Academic Quad. The students gathered there were members of the Tufts Labor Coalition, a student group that “promotes community and solidarity between Tufts students and campus workers,” according to their Facebook page. In 2015, it had been announced that Tufts planned to fire about 35 members of the janitorial staff after learning that the university was paying more than similar schools for cleaning services. Janitors and members of TLC organized together to convince the administration to postpone the layoffs until the spring of 2016, giving the janitors’ union and Tufts’

facilities contractor, DTZ, more time to renegotiate contracts. The group launched a campaign that culminated in a week-long hunger strike and occupation of space near Ballou Hall. Yet, after no agreement was reached with the university, out of concern for students’ health, and with the semester coming to a close, the hunger strike was ended. With most students unable to remain on campus after the end of the school year, TLC members packed up and went home for the summer. Now released from the media microscope that student activists had successfully placed them under, the administration took advantage of an empty campus to pursue their initial agenda. That August, four janitors were let go.

The TLC hunger strike is indicative of the inherent limitations of student activism that, by nature of the academic calendar and the four-year-degree system, has a very short window in which to accomplish massive goals. When students are only on campus for six months out of the year, and most graduate the university after four years, it is difficult for advocacy and activist groups to maintain momentum and preserve institutional memory. Student activists then must expend extra energy in order to both achieve their goals and ensure that knowledge, tactics, and relationships are passed down from upperclassmen to new recruits.

When students have so little time on campus each year, current campaigns are

By Jordan Lauf

February 5, 2018 Tufts Observer 3

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often given priority over the collection and preservation of institutional knowledge. While this strategy enables groups to focus all of their energy and resources on one movement, some student activists feel these campaigns could have benefitted from more knowledge about past movements. Anna Gaebler is a TLC alum who graduated in 2016 and participated in the 2015 hunger strike. Gaebler felt so strongly that the entire movement could have benefitted from more intimate knowledge of past TLC strategies and techniques that she completed a senior project on that very campaign, crafting a student activist’s guide to contacting the media. “During that campaign I had no idea what I was doing, and it would have been really helpful if someone had given me a guide that said ‘okay this is how you call a reporter, this is what you say, this is how you talk to them about your issue,’” she shares of her motivation behind the project.

Gaebler further said that at the time of her graduation, the group had no official procedures in place to preserve TLC knowledge and memory or pass that knowledge down to new members, and current TLC member Lindsay Sanders shares that there still isn’t. Part of this is due to the ever-changing flow of students involved in the organization. “We’re a non-hierarchical organization, so people step up and do work when they feel they have the capacity and are moved to do so. And that means we have a lot of rotation in our membership base in who’s showing up to meetings and who’s taking notes and who’s facilitating,” Sanders shares. “…so trying

to have a more structured orientation, I don’t know if it would really work for us, because we have so many new people coming in so often and at different times.”

And these high turnover rates for membership often effect the momentum and spirit of campus movements. Anissa Waterhouse, a senior, was involved in campus activism with the Indict Tufts Movement, which worked to support Black Lives Matter and highlight the ways in which students at Tufts were complicit in systemic racial injustices and violence against Black people. But, after returning from a semester abroad in Ghana to find the We Are The Three Percent Movement underway, Waterhouse suddenly felt personally disconnected from the new leaders of the campaign, which brought demands to the university to increase the percentage of Black students and Black faculty members to 13 percent, among other things.

“we need to prepare the people younger than us to think about how they are going to mobilize when we’re not there.”

4 Tufts Observer February 5, 2018

“…Coming back being like, well I really strongly organized for the Black community my sophomore year, like I come back my spring semester my junior year, and it’s completely different,” she says. “Maybe not a completely different movement, but there are different people organizing with completely different styles, and so I felt very disconnected from that movement.” She goes on to relate that while she was completely in support of the movement itself, due to preservation of her own health, Waterhouse elected to not continue in campus activism after returning abroad.

Activist groups that have formed more recently have an easier time. United For Immigrant Justice, a student group advocating for the rights of undocumented immigrants in the Tufts community and formed in 2013, have managed to maintain energy and momentum by the nature of their relative youth and due to the results of their activism. Senior UIJ member, Emma Kahn, still remembers the early days of the group’s formation. “My year was there when [UIJ] was first there, so our institutional memory is we were there as first years, and we saw the policy changes that happened and we were involved in policy changes and we were friends with the founders,” she says.

In 2015, a campaign for educational equality for undocumented students launched by UIJ resulted in Tufts’ decision to consider all undocumented student applicants as domestic applicants, and to offer these applicants financial aid if necessary. For Kahn, who was involved in the campaign and remembers when the group was mostly made of students who were not undocumented, this victory lent UIJ a momentum that hasn’t slowed. “We’ve actually grown in

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energy over the years,” Kahn says. “I think the biggest reason is because when UIJ was founded, there were no open undocumented students in the group, partially because Tufts wasn’t open about accepting undocumented students. And every year since then, we’ve had the majority of our students enter UIJ saying I’m here because I am able to attend this school because of UIJ’s campaign.”

But for groups with longer histories, organizing without benefitting from the knowledge and strategies of past members proves more difficult. “We…were brand new to anything resembling organizing, had no mentors who are older than seniors…to guide [us] and help our organization figure out our strategy and what we were doing, and so I think resources could go a long way,” Gaebler says of the struggles particular to student activism.

To Gaebler, those resources should include both a history of TLC’s past successful campaigns, and general information about how to organize.

And it is not only organizing strategies that are negatively impacted by the difficulties of preserving institutional memory at a four-year university. For groups like TLC, which rely on strong partnerships with laborers and unionists, the graduation of leaders often means the end of key relationships. “So when people graduated, then the relationships that organizations had with those individuals were often severed,” Gaebler shares. Sanders says, though, that during the most recent organizing around janitorial contract negotiations, TLC was very successful at implementing a formal shift system, where students would visit custodial staff members during their shifts in order to develop friendships between students and workers.

The academic calendar also presents challenges unique to student activists who are often gone during the summer and for

ART BY REBECCA TANG

a month during the winter. During Waterhouse’s time with Indict Tufts, she felt that the group lost momentum after returning from winter break. “We didn’t want to organize over break, we wanted people to rest and take care of themselves,” she says.

Sanders felt that the university purposefully used the academic calendar against them. “The calendar itself has been used against us in a lot of ways. The contract dates are often set for right when the semester ends, or when students aren’t on campus, which is sometimes intentional because they know there will be less people around to speak out against whatever happens,” she shares. Student activists not only have to work harder to achieve their goals under time restraints but are often fighting against and administration that is willing to use an empty campus to their benefit.

Working to effect change under such limited time restraints often necessitates the prioritization of current projects over long-term goals such as developing strategies to preserve institutional memory.

“I think there’s also some potential for some awesome mentorship and passing on of skills between juniors and seniors and freshmen and sophomores,” Gaebler says, “but in the thick of it, when you’re focused on your goals, I think that kind of gets passed over sometimes as a secondary project and not really important, even though to sustain the long-term goals of the organization, it is truly important.”

Kahn agrees. “It’s just about the timing of campaigns, and like if they happen, and there are first years who are part of the campaigns, then like you can probably keep that for four years until those people graduate, but it’s kind of hard to keep that cycle,” she says.

Groups like UIJ at Tufts are beginning to actively work to combat the limitations of student activism through creating better strategies for preserving institutional

memory. “We have a pretty comprehensive Google drive, we have a Tufts Box that we actually share with some of our administrative partners, where both entities, or all entities involved are able to keep track of things that we need to keep track of… we every GIM try to do a brief history, or things that we’ve done, things that we could keep doing,” Kahn says. And institutional memory doesn’t have to be a written record. For Waterhouse, it was key that underclassmen be included in organizing, so that they would be able to carry on the institutional knowledge after the upperclassmen graduated. “If there is a hierarchy in activism, it’s that we need to prepare the people younger than us to think about what they are going to do in the future and how they are going to mobilize when we’re not there, because there is constant change,” she says.

Though student activism presents some particular challenges for those involved, leaders are by no means pessimistic about their efforts to affect change. “[Organizers outside of college] have a longer-term vision of what change looks like and that forms how they organize,” Gaebler says. “But that’s not to say that the turnover that is inherent to student organizing means that it can’t be effective.” Indeed, from the successful campaign to celebrate Indigenous People’s Day in place of Columbus Day, to the push to demand that Tufts accept and protect undocumented students, to the most recent successful janitorial contract negotiations, students at Tufts have continued to demonstrate that four years might be short, but it’s enough time to make a difference.

February 5, 2018 Tufts Observer 5

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MEMORIALIZING a PAST NOT YET PAST

By Jonathan Innocent

"I

am interested in how we imagine ways of knowing that past, in excess of the fictions of the archive, but not only that. I am interested, too, in the ways we recognize the many manifestations of that fiction and that excess, that past not yet past, in the present.” — Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being

The day you are born, you inherit your history. The Middle Passage, nominally the Atlantic Ocean, is also an ancestral graveyard to those who are born with the inheritance of the survivors of the transatlantic slave trade. In Christina Sharpe’s book In the Wake, she provides a few definitions of “the wake,” and each uniquely speaks to the ways in which the past resides within the present moment. The wake is not only what’s left over from the past, but also the process by which we, who are born in the aftermath, seek to imagine and reimagine 6 Tufts Observer February 5, 2018

the ways of life and being that were lost.

This year, a unique and important development in the tradition of such wake work will be opened to the American public: the Equal Justice Initiative’s (EJI) National Memorial for Peace and Justice. The memorial, planned to open in 2018, is meant to honor the over 4,000 victims of lynching in America between 1877 and 1950.

EJI was founded in 1994 by social justice activist and lawyer Bryan Stevenson; the organization is collaborating on this project with MASS Design Group, a Boston based architecture firm whose mission states: “Architecture is never neutral. It either heals or hurts. Our mission is to research, build, and advocate for architecture that promotes justice and human dignity.”

It is Stevenson and EJI’s hope that their memorial and other subsequent instances or forms of public commemora-

tion of lynching play an important role in the process of reconciliation, whereby our communities can begin to heal and grow through the recognition of their communities lowest, darkest moments.

Personally, I would argue against benevolent notions of reconciliation as it pertains to the collective remembrance of lynching, and all other projections of White Supremacy at the expense of Black lives and existence. To reconcile—as noted by the “re-"—is to bring things, or communities, or a nation, back together. This very word presupposes that there was ever a common sense of humanity prior to the race-based institution of slavery. And, considering that for the subsequent four to five centuries following the beginning of the Middle Passage were all about tearing Africans (a denomination that had never before existed) away from their past lives, any real reconciliation would only be posART BY ANNE LAU

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opinion

sible if the diaspora could accurately retrace their history to the first instance of displacement within their ancestry.

A lynching, as defined by the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, is a verb meaning to “put to death (as by hanging) by mob action without legal approval or permission.”

It’s also important to note that lynchings are not synonymous with hanging; lynching also includes beating. By my own definition, lynching is a tactic on the part of White supremacists to terrorize oppressed people—to strike fear in the hearts and minds of those who would seek to imagine realities, futures, or identities that did not uphold Whiteness as the pinnacle of human existence. This memorial, both in its intent and design are meant to counter the intangibility of Whiteness and provide a physical space by which to interrogate our past. As a visitor to the memorial, you are meant to bear witness to the names and places touched by lynching and, by extension, the perils of White Supremacist hierarchy, and to actively ground yourself in the past in the present.

The main section of the memorial is a square with a courtyard in the middle that is meant to take visitors “on a journey.” As one walks through the memorial, they will pass large, rust colored, rectangular columns meant to symbolize the bodies of lynching victims. The floor of the memorial gets progressively lower, until the blocks hang above the visitors’ heads. There are 800 columns, symbolizing 800 counties in which White Americans perpetrated lynchings. The names of the 4,000 victims EJI documented will be inscribed on the columns. The memorial will sit atop a hill overlooking Montgomery, Alabama, one of many cities still riddled with Confederate statues and monuments.

Outside and adjacent to this main structure, a duplicate of each column will be laid on the ground. This is the first piece

of the memorial that is interactive; counties are meant to come claim their column and place it standing up at a lynching site—a physical enactment of uplifting and remembering the murdered. The second interactive piece, called the Community Remembrance Project, began in 2016 to ask community members to return to the site of each lynching, dig up dirt from the site, and place it in a jar labeled with the name of the victim, along with the date and place they were lynched. The jars will be placed together in an exhibit of the museum titled “From Enslavement to Mass Incarceration,” where the sheer number of jars, their diverse range of names and col-

"History is messy for the people who must live it."

— Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past

ors, and the labels without full information will all work to reinforce the physical remnants of lynching in the American South.

In his own words Stevenson has said, “I think we want to sober people. There are cultural spaces around the world that do a very good job of creating a consciousness that this is a memorial to people who have been victimized in a painful and difficult way—the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin and other sites of conscience like that that are very powerful. They create an awareness of a particular history. In Auschwitz and other places in Europe, you sense that,

you see that. We wanted to replicate that for this site.”

Ultimately, lynching is merely one of the tactics White Supremacists have used to deter the spirit of the oppressed peoples of America. Whether it be the robbery and exploitation of Native people and lands, or the plundering of natural resources found in the Caribbean isles, the Americas, Africa, or South Asia, many the atrocities of our past have often been left without remembrance, representation, or wholehearted reckoning. American lynchings did not end in 1950 (the last year of incidents recorded and memorialized for the project). Many lynchings have gone unreported as communities turned a blind eye to the de facto execution of people deemed criminal for being too black, too feminine, too sexual, too spirited, too rebellious, too…human.

We are living in history; today will become another yesterday, and tomorrow is another today in waiting. EJI’s national memorial is yet another opportunity for the communities of this country to make the past manifest itself in the present, in the physical, and in our collective social consciousness. The memorial, however, is not the end all be all for the process of wake work, which has to be even more various, in-depth, and transcendent than the atrocities which necessitated this work in the first place.

February 5, 2018 Tufts Observer 7

FEATURE

NEWS

Re - thInking tattoos

By Sonya Bhatia

content warning: sexual violence

“M

PHOTOS BY LAUREN BALLINI SKETCHES BY SANDRA BURBUL

8 Tufts Observer February 5, 2018

y tattoos are me, and reflect my gender in a way I wish my mirror would. They’re reminders to love myself, whoever I may be, and to stay fixed in a state of softness and changing and growing,” shared Matthew Wilson, a senior. The industry of transforming one’s body into a living and breathing canvas has gained popularity in our modern era.

According to an article in The Atlantic released in 2016, about one in five people in the US have a tattoo. They are even more popular among millennials, with nearly 40 percent having one.

Although tattooing in Massachusetts has transformed from an illegal activity into a mainstream industry, a closer look reveals an often sexist workplace in a business dominated by White men. The tattoo industry is not unaffected by systems of power, including sexism, racism, and transphobia. According to many anecdotes and an article in Ebony, tattoo artists of color are underrepresented in the industry. In 2010, a Columbia University study revealed that one in six tattoo artists are women.

While there is little data on female tattoo artists, there is even less on transgender and gender non-conforming tattoo artists. But the consensus is clear: the tattoo industry can often be an unwelcoming space for marginalized gender identities. In addition to being underrepresented in their field, tattoo artists with marginalized gender identities are faced with more scrutiny by their male counterparts, especially in their early years in an already grueling and unforgiving business.

Despite the targeted and misogynistic treatment they receive, these tattoo artists prove their tenacity. Roz Thompson, a tattoo artist at Boston Tattoo Company, talked about the difficulties of her apprenticeship: “There were a couple of tattooers there that did really try to discourage me, which

is part of the apprenticeship process. You have to have a thick skin, people will criticize your work; in that sense, some of the things that were said did target me in that way.” These verbal comments did not dissuade her from moving forward.

“I didn’t really dwell on it. I buckled down and worked harder.”

Sandra Burbul, a tattoo artist at Kaleidoscope Tattoo, described one discriminatory encounter. “When I entered the workforce, one male coworker would be like, ‘yeah if I opened a shop, I would never hire a woman, maybe to answer the phones’, being serious.” However, he didn’t faze her.

“He was a very small man with a giant ego, so it didn’t surprise me. You could tell what kind of person he was.”

For clients, including Tufts students, tattoos tell stories of their diverse identities, and they want an experience with an artist who respects that significance. Senior Ray Bernoff got a Common Eastern Gardner Snake tattoo because “it was a symbol of transformation and renewal because I’m trans.”

MJ Griego, a senior, said their tattoos reflect their continued struggle with selfcare. “Spoons are regarded as indicators of energy in disability communities, and being able to accept my mental illness and struggles with chronic fatigue has been important to the constant work of taking care of myself. Tattoos have given me a way to literally make art a piece of my body, and by connection attach my friendships to myself forever.”

From the perspective of the artist, Thompson said, “the favorite tattoos I have done are the ones people getting them are most excited about, so even if it’s not something I would not get personally myself, [it’s] the most meaningful to them.”

Burbul has a different viewpoint, saying, “It doesn’t have to have some cosmic significance. You like it: that’s significant!”

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Thompson recognizes her identity affects her relationships with clients.

“Women and marginalized people, especially part of the LGBTQ community— whatever the impression of a male tattoo artist is, they would just be more comfortable in the hands of women.”

Sophia Isidore, a first-year, said she had reservations about having a male tattoo artist because “the way men have historically projected themselves in the tattoo world is aggressive. I can imagine myself being under the needle, feeling not so empowered and if it’s going to be on my body, I want to feel that I can voice myself completely.”

“

“

Tattoos have given me a way to literally make art a piece of my body, and by connection attach my friendships to myself forever.

One Tufts student in the class of 2021 is a trans tattoo artist, and finds the interactions between others of marginalized gender identities the most meaningful aspect of his work. “You get to sit down and learn from that person. That’s something really significant because there are so many different ways that people are trans and it’s really cool to listen to people’s stories.”

Trans and gender non-conforming students echo the need for tattoo artists who are not cisgender. Yoji Watanabe, a sophomore, said, “I want to empower

artists I appreciate, so the artists I try to choose generally share some of my own gender, spiritual, and cultural experiences.

I’ve definitely been thinking a lot about getting pieces from femme, non-binary, and trans people.”

Hayden Wolff, a first-year, shares. “I live in the Bay Area and my biggest regret is not getting my tattoo in San Francisco in a queer-friendly tattoo shop.” Hayden is planning on getting a tattoo related to queer identity, and wants to find an artist who is “female or queer,” explaining that “it means more if that person gives me the tattoo.”

Mar Freeman, a junior, reflects on an experience with a queer woman tattoo artist. “I felt a lot more comfortable. I just felt I didn’t have to worry so much about the way I presented myself.” They also think about their future tattoos in terms of their position as a consumer. “I definitely want to keep looking out for other marginalized identities. I want to make sure that I am supporting people that I can because that’s what putting my money means to me and I am spreading wealth equitably.”

In addition to marginalized gender identities, students of color seek artists with marginalized racial identities. Wilson, a Black student, said that for their next tattoo, “I would likely search for a Black artist to support the community and more likely ensure a comfortable experience.”

The tattoo industry has recently had its own revelation with the #MeToo movement about the power dynamic between a client with a marginalized gender identity and a cisgender male tattoo artist. The spark of the movement, according to an article on Jezebel, started with male tattoo artist Alex Bokyo in the Detroit area. There have been over 200 women who have various testimonies of Bokyo sexually violating them. Among the statements

were instances of Bokyo groping them during appointments or being talked into sending him nudes or topless photos for “reference materials.” Building awareness, Instagram account @watchdogtattoos posts photographs of tattoo artists with sexual misconduct charges, including sexual assault, indecent exposure, and rape.

Students of marginalized gender identities are aware of this issue, as they distance themselves from the idea of a cisgender male tattoo artist. Sophomore Adrienne La Forte comments, “Getting a tattoo is something very intimate with you and your body. I have had enough bad experiences with men that I would not be comfortable having a man tattoo me any place more intimate than my arm or any sort of limb or extremity.”

On the flip side, women and trans tattoo artists with cis male clients can also experience an imbalance of power. Burbul remembered a particular client: “This was years ago. He was weird. Like he had his hands in his pants, like he was playing with himself. In that case, I chose to ignore it. I was embarrassed by it, that I didn’t want to address it. And I also wanted to be paid.” As Burbul noted, a client possesses a heightened power in their dynamic—they are paying the artist—which further complicates the position of the artist in these situations.

Despite challenges, Burbul and Thomspon experience a deep love for their work as tattoo artists. When asked her favorite thing about the job, Burbul replied, “Being able to make my own future in a sense. I have full control over what I do.”

Thompson answered, “You get to meet so many different types of people.

I’ve tattooed firemen, lawyers, doctors, astrophysicists, librarians, housewives, guys getting out of jail—you know, all different walks of life.”

February 5, 2018 Tufts Observer 9

FEATURE

ARTS & CULTURE

S

ound floods your ears as you walk into the Decolonial Atlas exhibit.

Throughout the space, images and sounds overlap with each other. Close your eyes and hear the sound of children laughing—open your eyes to see them “burying” someone in a grave of red clay.

Watch a screen filled with slow dancing and hear chaos, gospel, and the pounding of drums echoing through the headphones from other works nearby.

Curated by Pilar Tompkins Rivas and located at the Tufts Art Gallery, the exhibit is full of these contradictions, and within these contradictions lies mesmerizing beauty.

“It’s an incredibly impactful work... concerned with the interconnectedness of the world, but also the cost of that,” says Art History professor Adriana Zavala.

“There’s a lot of video work in the show, but there are also works on paper, paintings, objects, sculptures, photographs.

It’s very much an immersive exhibition.”

Walking through the exhibit elicits moments of sensory overload, but that weight is tapered by an equally intense reverence.

Just as impressive is the sheer number of artists, 19, included in the exhibit, such as well-revered contemporary artists like Jef-

frey Gibson, Laura Huertas Millán, and Postcommodity (an interdisciplinary arts collective comprising of Indigenous artists Raven Chacon, Cristóbal Martínez, and Kade L. Twist).

Some especially distinctive pieces include Ricardo Estrada’s piece Tezcatlipoca, and Carolina Caceyedo’s Spaniards Named Her Magdalena, But Natives Call Her Yuma. American Studies Professor Jami Powell describes the Tezcatlipoca piece: “a skateboard deck featuring a depiction of the turquoise mosaic mask of Tezcatlipoca—an important deity in the Aztec pantheon—wearing an L.A. Dodgers Jersey.” Powell was enamored by this work, saying that “the gold leaf on this piece shines beautifully under the gallery lights and immediately drew me in.”

She continues, “however, the complexity of this piece and the way it conveys the myriad entanglements of contemporary Chicano experience is really incredible.”

Estrada’s piece contains layers of meaning that highlight the ways that art can engage with both complex histories as well as culturally specific references. Powell elaborates on some of these intricacies. “I mean, the figure itself is based on a 15th century mask that has been in the collection of the British Museum since the 1860s. On top of that, Estrada layers and incorporates images from his own experiences growing up in L.A. through the use of a skateboard and the Dodgers jersey.”

Walking towards the back of the exhibit, viewers are drawn into Carolina Caceyedo’s visually stunning work. Her multimodal piece includes split-screen video as well as overlapping audio and oral storytelling about the narrator’s relationship to water. Each screen shows different images, either congruent or contrasting. There are often images of the privatization of water in Caceyedo’s native Colombia and stirringly silent video of walls of fully armed police officers in riot gear walking through the streets. Simultaneously, lullaby-like messages are whispered above your head in a mixture of English and Spanish. The viewer must strain their ears to hear Caceydo’s words clearly, and risk losing track of the quickly-transitioning video, or keep their eye on the video only to miss the dialogue, catching moments of phrases like “America is dying because we forgot the instructions on how to live on Earth,” “it is underwater that the evidence of the dams’ violence is hidden,” or “a dam is a siege of nature.” The end result leaves the viewer feeling haunted, split, and submerged.

For many, the exhibit’s existence holds profoundly personal meaning. Zavala, whose work is deeply immersed and concerned with Latin American art, was so moved with the exhibit that she based her graduate seminar, Decolonial Aesthetics in Latin(x) American Art, on the collection.

“All of the artists whose work are in the exhibit are Latin American, broadly de-

EXHIBITING NOW: decolonial atlas

By Carissa Fleury

10 Tufts Observer February 5, 2018

ART BY ERICA LEVY

fined, US Latinx, and American Indian or Native American. The majority have their origins in Latin America.” In a largely White-dominated space like the museum and art world—93 percent of museum directors are White, as are 92.6 percent of museum board chairs, and 89.3 percent of board members—having an entire exhibit dedicated to art by Latinx and Indigenous artists is not common. “For me, the opportunity is rare that I have one, let alone 22, works that come from the part of the hemisphere that is closest to me and my work. We have a whole gallery of them... engaging with complex yet intersectional issues,” Zavala says.

Another strength of the show, outside of its showcasing of innovative work by marginalized artists, is its diversity in content matter. “I feel like I could grab any person on campus and take them over [to the gallery] and there would be something [in the exhibit] to speak to them,” Zavala says. She continues, “A student in the sciences might be interested in the work that counters extractivism. What is resource extraction? For students in the humanities, there’s plenty to think about in terms of how globalization impacts different communities differentially.”

Running parallel to the exhibit are a number of events for the public to attend, including a performance by one of the featured artists, a curator talk, and a symposium. Eulogio Guzmán, a lecturer in PreColumbian Art and Architecture at the SMFA, along with Jami Powell and SMFA

professor Anthony Romero, are in the midst of planning the symposium centered on the Decolonial Atlas exhibit: “A Decolonial Atlas Open Seminar: Recasting Indigeneity.”

The symposium is, as Powell describes, “a reading group that more deeply explores the major themes of the show: Recasting Indigeneity, Intervening in the Archive, Resisting Extractivism, and Dislodging Time. The reading groups will lead into the symposium, Decoloniality: Aesthetics and Methodologies the evening of March 1, which features a curator talk and a performance by Anthony Romero and Josh Rios as well as a panel discussion the afternoon of March 2.”

The organizers hope that the symposium will allow the audience and viewers of the exhibit to delve into the details of the exhibit more thoroughly. Powell adds that “in planning the symposium, we wanted to expand on the idea of bridging the two campuses [Tufts and SMFA]—and really communities of artists and academics—by facilitating conversations between people who in a really overly-generalized way fall into the categories of academic or artist.”

The exhibit is, Guzmán says, in many ways a showcase of “indigenous innovation, intelligence and strategy.” He emphasizes how Decolonial Atlas is one of a kind in many ways: “a brilliant show and a great opportunity for students to see a lot of the cutting-edge work and inventive approaches towards trying to gain a greater understanding of what has happened over the past 500 years.”

February 5, 2018 Tufts Observer 11

FEATURE

POetry

clorox-scented elegy

By Sarah Walsh

From on top of the roof, I hope you distill me into heady gaze as uncompromising as a codeine problem.

Sometimes things are all right. Your hands catching flame, we can laugh, for once, at your dousing-yourself-in-gasoline-problem.

Sometimes we’re at the pool. It’s rock-candy crystal blue and feels like nothing. We baptize and drink from it and don’t talk about you going. Sunwashed teeth grin around the indifferent emblem of a nicotine problem.

With your lips corked you broke the wall in the laundry room so a stowaway could sleep under the staircase. One day I hear his balmy breath with a start. Your fidelity smells like detergent.

Years later, I develop a spending-time-on-washing-machines-problem.

I’ll definitely never go on a cruise ship again. Shimmering atlantic basketball court island, you don’t teach me to be the underdog in time.

This place is gone; I know what happened here. But if we’re pretending you’re here we can pretend you never had one.

12 Tufts Observer February 5, 2018

ART BY ERICA LEVY

fold here

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PHOTOS BY CLAIRE PINKHAM

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PHOTOS BY ABIGAIL BARTON

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fold here PHOTOS BY CLAIRE PINKHAM (LEFT), ABIGAIL BARTON (TOP TWO), AND WILLIAM LIU (BOTTOM)

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Poetry

un-cracked

By Gabriela Bonfiglio

you said it as if you were trying it out: as if those words were round and had a radius just taller than your mouth, as if you were making space for them, deliberately, intentionally. in a way that i knew you meant them, you held them like an uncracked egg. the other day i had a flashback, the trigger was just that i couldn’t pick music, and i was mostly naked and crouching on your floor scrolling through spotify, in your house that runs probably at 60 degrees which is Not Too Cold when we are in bed together, or in the mornings when the sun has beat the house gently for a few hours before we’ve woken up. i love you had to come after all that, of course it did, that day i was crouching and you were so different, you didn’t care at all what music i played. you didn’t scoff or hurl “Really??” too loudly across the room at me when i suggested something a little off center. and when all of sudden it was him and not you in the room, and i never cry anymore but i started to, and the tears were so loud against your comforter, you said what i needed, and then it wasn’t too much to ask for a tissue even though neither of us has an easy time getting out of your bed, and when you came back you held me until i felt un-cracked again.

ART BY MADELINE LEE

TuftsFebruary Observer5, 2018 February Tufts5, 2018 Observer17 7

FEATURE

My grandmother is the strongest woman I know.

Her history and her memories weave a colorful picture. In my memory, she starts her story as a young woman graduating university in a British colony with an English degree. My memory continues with her arranged marriage and the birth of her four children, all of whom she raised on a large property with farm animals that she happily tended to every morning. She lost her husband in her 50s, but continued to travel on her own and pay for her children’s weddings. And then I was born, and her story became our story.

When I was two years old, my grandmother slipped on an escalator in London, but emerged unscathed. My sister and I came up with a song in our native tongue of Bengali about her fall—the memories now documented in old VHS tapes. Whenever I play them, I can hear the sound of my grandmother’s contagious laughter at our silly melody. She had no serious medical conditions and lived life simply to be happy and to help others.

Soon after I turned 14, she was diagnosed with Parkinson’s. Before her diagnosis, I had never heard of that P word before—Parkinson’s.

18 Tufts Observer February 5, 2018

Every now and then, I sit on the bed she lived in and out of since I was five, and I close my eyes. I try and remember—all the memories. Three always come to mind.

The tapes in my brain rewind, and a scene appears, almost in stop motion. The gaps between movements have faded plenty over the last 12 years, but the moments still appear.

I remember running into her room after getting mad at my parents over something silly. She was sitting on the left corner of her bed by the lamp, reading her bulky novel with her glasses on the bridge of her nose. She looked up and saw me with my arms crossed, huffing and puffing with my face all red. She placed her book down and took off her reading glasses, daintily placing them on her bedside table and sighed with the hint of a soft smile: “Myisha, come here.” And I ran straight into her arms and cried with all my might, until I slowly fell asleep.

I remember sleeping in that bed after she moved back to Bangladesh when I was ten years old. Now I had a bed and a room all to myself, but the last five years had been spent sleeping next to her. While trying to sleep in the bed alone that night, I tried to picture what it had been like with her sleeping next to me. I tried to recall the stories she would tell me about the red princess—me—and the purple queen—herself. I would whisper the same stories to myself until I drifted asleep.

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getting over hardship together and feeling relief. While memories of that caliber may never be created again, they were created once, and they live deep in your mind and in your heart. We must celebrate life alongside mourning loss and live life intentionally, so there are no What Ifs when our loved ones pass.

For now, I watch my grandmother at a distance.

I watch as she slowly loses parts of herself every day, and I refrain from speaking to her as much because I want to remember those beautiful parts of her that she gave to me. I am forced to ask myself constantly—is not wanting to talk to her selfish? Why can’t I choose to remember all the good things as our time dwindles away, instead of seeing her lose memory of me day by day? Why can’t I celebrate her life and her memory instead?

Our story is touching on the last few chapters but the rest of the novel is full of happiness.

I have always thought of my grandmother as the embodiment of the meaning of her name: Rani—queen. Every story with a princess is supposed to come with a happy ending, so why can’t I do the same for a queen?

But these days, more often than not, I remember sitting in that bed when she asked me: “Myisha, what does Parkinson’s mean? What is it going to do to me?”

I asked all of my friends if any of their loved ones had been impacted by it. I searched countless forums on the internet trying to figure out how to cope with this slow, painful loss. My memories of my grandmother from my childhood were full of light and happiness—comfort, above all.

Now, it was my turn to be the caretaker.

So, I fibbed a little and I told her: “It means your hands shake sometimes…and you gradually lose control…but don’t worry, it isn’t fatal. I have friends with grandparents who have that condition.”

It was the first time I lied to her, but it made her feel better even if it was just momentarily, though I saw the hints of worry in her brown eyes.

There are technical, almost sterile definitions of Parkinson’s, but there are personal, warm definitions, too. Definitions based on experience, and mine is full of an indescribable sensation.

The meaning of Parkinson’s last four years is interacting with someone who is losing memory of you, but still having distinct memory of them. It means repeating yourself and telling stories of the past as if the person you’re telling wasn’t there, even though they were. It means walking into the room you shared and feeling the memories try and slip past your fingers, but grabbing onto them as hard as you can, screaming with all your might.

Most recently, it means having to tell them over the phone who you are because they get confused trying to match voices to faces. It also means listening to them as they fade into a cloud of disarray and hallucination, unable to keep a conversation going for more than three sentences. It means knowing you can’t help them because you’re thousands of miles apart, but that they’re happier in the place they were born and raised—in their homeland.

Memory is fleeting, but memory can also be what you make of it. The memories you have of a loved one who passed, or is passing, can disappear when you allow it to because it’s too painful to remember. But I encourage everyone to remember, no matter how much it hurts. Remember all the joyful memories—from silly little things to

ART BY RIVA DHAMALA

She is still a queen— She is halfway across the world and I miss her dearly…and I pray for her even though it makes me weary.

But she asks this of me, and she’s never asked much of everyone in her life.

Even though the queen must be cared for now, and though the clock of her life nears midnight and the day may end, that doesn’t mean she’s any less of the queen she always was.

She is still a queen, Even if she may not be in hers, She is a queen in my mind, And now in yours too.

February 5, 2018 Tufts Observer 19

FEATURE

Campus

an observer retrospective

By Issay Matsumoto

F

irst published in October 1895, the Tufts Weekly debuted as a weekly newspaper without graphics or art on the first page. Over 70 years later, in 1969, it became the Tufts Observer. Since then, the magazine has continued to evolve. Like many other communities at Tufts, the writers, artists, and editors of the Observer are part of a human tradition that is constantly re-evaluating itself, and mapping the changes that have put themselves in their present and future realities. In this issue, themed Memory, we’re looking back at our own history.

The current form of the Observer has departed greatly from the Observer of the 2000s. Back then, issues tended to be lighthearted and included satirical police reports, restaurant reviews, and sports coverage. The Observer ran headlines such as “Pats Silence Doubters 30-14” or “Get Ready to Party this Saturday, African Style” (September 13, 2002). Today, the Observer represents a different flavor of journalism.

Vinda Souza (née Rao), A06, Editor in Chief of the Observer in Spring 2006, was on staff when the magazine began to make a gradual, tonal shift. “[The Observer] morphed from something that was a little bit more fun and disorganized into something that was a little bit more serious and kind of a counterpoint,” Souza explained. According to Souza, part of this shift in the mid 2000s included increased intentionality about the topics the Observer covered and the people interviewed.

She said, “From an editorial perspective we tended to focus on stories that were much more inclusive and tolerant in what we went after.”

Significantly, the Observer took on a new role of opposing on-campus conservative rhetoric, largely in response to another campus publication, the Primary Source. Souza reflects, “[I]t went from sort of a Vanity Fair-style ‘everything happening’ publication, to a more political and targeted publication that was 20 Tufts Observer February 5, 2018

a counterpoint to the Primary Source.” Primary Source was a conservative campus publication that published articles such as “O Come All Ye Black Folk,” a parody Christmas carol claiming that the sole reason that the incoming Black first years were admitted was because of affirmative action. Frequently under fire for content that targeted people of marginalized backgrounds, the Primary Source disbanded in 2013 for failing to meet TCU’s mandated membership requirements.

By the time former managing editor Eve Feldberg, A17, came to the Observer in Fall 2013 as a copy editor, the Observer was encouraging section editors and designers to work more collaboratively on the publication’s layout. This elevated the Observer’s visuals, strengthening itself as a platform to lift marginalized voices on Tufts campus. “[W]e really...tried to start thinking about how the images we used can play a role in upholding dominant narratives of society or disrupting them. And I think there’s a consensus that as a publication we want to work towards disrupting dominant narratives and giving a space to marginalized voices and ideas,” says Feldberg.

Feldberg learned from other staff members who were leading by example. “It wasn’t like a unanimous, all at once thing...It’s not that there was suddenly this moment of reckoning or agreement. It was really a slow cultural shift...It starts from a few people doing some-

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Campus

“Discussions of intentionality, social justice, and objectivity in student publications will continue to be essential to the Tufts journalistic community vitality.”

thing differently, other people seeing how that goes...

It’s not like I came to college being like, ‘We need to think about race when we think about reporting.’... It was the result of my studies and relationships I built with people to push me to think about these things.”

Like Feldberg, former Fall 2015 Editor in Chief Katharine Pong, A16, observed that her own development as a journalist was marked by a greater awareness of the publication’s potential as a platform for uplifting marginalized voices. Pong recalled a February 3, 2015 opinion piece, featuring opposing views on the hashtag, #JeSuisCharlie, which was indicative of the editorial board’s attempts to uphold traditional journalistic values.

“I felt that in order to be perceived as a ‘credible’ news source or publication, the Observer couldn’t be ‘too political’ or ‘too biased’... A lot of times, my and my fellow editorial board members justification for [coverage like the February 3, 2015 opinion piece] was that we needed to give voice to diverse people and viewpoints on campus, including those we didn’t agree with. It felt uncomfortable when we did it, but our rationale was that it was only fair.”

But toward the end of Pong’s time at the Observer, Pong felt more inclined to break with this tradition, in part due to the people she surrounded herself with. “One of my best friends [former managing editor Eve Feldberg] was really helpful in pushing me ART BY NICOLE COHEN

to think through why I felt this way and how I could bring my understanding of power dynamics into my thinking about the Observer and its on-campus voice.”

The Observer still finds strength in change. Today, Tufts journalists across publications reflect on their roles in making the organizations and institutions of which they are a part. Discussions of intentionality, social justice, and objectivity in student publications will continue to be essential to the Tufts journalistic community vitality. At the Observer, we continue these discussions between friends, colleagues, administrators, and even in articles about ourselves.

February5, 2018 Tufts Observer 21

FEATURE

defunding justice AND PEACE

By Maya Pace & Colette Midulla

I

n August of 2017, Peace and Justice Studies (PJS) majors received an email from the recently appointed PJS Program Director Erin Kelly informing them that their major was undergoing changes and that she would be their new departmental point person.

Rumors of these changes had begun to circulate in the spring semester prior to when Tufts fired the program’s Associate Director Dale Bryan due to budget cuts.

Since then, the University has presented multiple reasons for the disappearance of the major, most recently indicating that the new Civic Studies major within Tisch College will serve as a replacement for PJS. While the rationale for defunding the PJS major isn’t entirely clear, money has always been central to Tufts’ justifications.

This narrative continued through the past semester, during which “restoration of PJS” was listed as one of the “requests for funding” at the Budget Transparency Town Hall on December 5. This appeal for restoration was placed next to other “requests of our community in recent years” such as need-blind admissions, increased Pell Grant students, all-gender bathrooms, 22 Tufts Observer February 5, 2018

and part-time faculty union demands. In placing these requests for funding side by side, the University implies that only some can be funded, and pits the continuation of the PJS major against other critically important requests for funding that would make this campus safer and more accessible for students of all identities.

The Dean’s Office has recently cited lack of faculty interest, instead of funding, as the primary reason for cutting the major. The fact that no faculty stepped up to direct the major, says Dean Bárbara Brizuela, is a testament to this disinterest. Paul Joseph, a professor in the PJS and Sociology departments, agrees that there has been less energy in recent years for the major; he added that, “the visible participation of the faculty in the program has not been what it has been in the past.” Dean Brizuela says, “the reason that the deans’ office approached PJS last year was that over the course of several years we could not find any faculty interested in directing or providing leadership for the program.”

Steve Cohen, senior lecturer in the Education department and teacher of the Senior Seminar for PJS, says that he was offered the position of Director of PJS, but would have had to stop teaching his only PJS class to take on the role. “The fact that I turned down the directorship had nothing to do with lack of interest,” he said. Current PJS faculty simply don’t have the capacity

to take more on. “It’s one thing for faculty to be supportive of a program,” says Joseph. “It’s another thing for tenured track faculty to have their primary research and work in the program…I am the only tenured faculty whose research and teaching lies squarely in the field.” Joseph continued, “In my opinion the Arts and Science administration should show its support for the program by making a joint program/ department hire of a faculty member with the appropriate background.”

Without new hires, the PJS program does not have the number of faculty it needs to teach its core courses. Faculty hires are slim this year across Arts and Sciences, and only happen as a result of departmental requests. Since PJS is not a department but a program, they cannot request new faculty. The framing that lack of faculty interest has spurred these changes is unfair and scapegoats current PJS faculty. Abigail Alpern Fisch, a sophomore in the department added, “The idea that there are not ‘invested faculty,’ for PJS is not a fair evaluation of the many individuals who have been dedicated to the program for over 20 years.”

Student interest in PJS has remained strong and even grown in recent years, but student needs do not seem to be playing a role in this decision. The reason for Tufts’ move away from the major “certainly wasn’t that the number of students in PJS ART BY NICOLE COHEN

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opinion

CIVIC STUDIES LOOKS TO ESTABLISHED FRAMEWORKS OF DEMOCRACY TO CREATE CHANGE; PJS LOOKS TO DISRUPT AND BREAKE THOSE FRAMEWORKS TO CREATE CHANGE. was dwindling,” says Cohen. The number of graduating majors in PJS is larger than many majors at Tufts, including all of the Arts majors and around 75 percent of the engineering and math/science majors.

Alpern Fisch recently created a project that includes testimonies speaking to the importance of PJS—it demonstrates that, in fact, students come to Tufts directly because of the PJS major. Alpern Fisch notes that, “After collecting and organizing insights through either in-person interviews or an online Google-form, a consensus exists among members of the Tufts community, both past and present, that Peace and Justice Education is a thematic and academic discipline that warrants study in higher education.” Seemingly, student interest would be able to overcome monetary and hiring obstacles. Cohen says. “I don’t yet see the precise reason that there wouldn’t be a PJS major going forward.”

That’s where Civic Studies comes in.

Tufts is $161 million in debt, and while Tisch College can’t directly fund a major, they can provide “in-kind” donations by way of programmatic support and support for new hires. Peter Levine, a faculty member at Tisch College who has been heavily involved in the visioning of a Civic Studies major since 2007, says that the Political Science department, with help from Tisch College, recently hired the Newhouse professor of Civic Studies. This position will involve joint work between the School of Arts and Sciences and Tisch College. “There are a bunch of faculty who are interested in the Civic Studies angle,” notes Levine. “We are already committed

to bringing people to Tufts who are involved.” Tisch has the money to seek out and hire faculty that are excited about the program, whereas Arts and Sciences in general has chosen not to prioritize this type of commitment for PJS and has instead transferred responsibility to Tisch in permitting the replacement of PJS with Civic Studies.

Civic Studies and PJS are intrinsically different studies and cannot be collapsed into one. Levine says that Civic Studies “start[s] with the active citizen” considering the question of how “active and responsible people [can] change the world.”

The term active citizen and the Civic Studies proposal as it currently stands rest on several antiquated and harmful notions of engagement—first, that all “citizens” can actively and equally engage with their government if they just try hard enough.

Second, that government will respond accordingly. Third, while Tisch might seek to redefine it, the term citizen still carries the weight of immigration status. In contrast, in this year’s Disorientation Guide, a PJS major wrote, “Does the major seek to critique the status quo? Every goddamn day. But my professors, advisors, courses, materials, readings, and peers have asked me—even required me—to not stop there, but to go further, to create positive alternatives, and hopeful spaces.”

Civic Studies looks to established frameworks of democracy to create change; PJS looks to disrupt and break those frameworks to create change.

The majors also differ in their pedagogies and how they frame learning. PJS works within a concrete framework of lived experiences and case studies that exemplify theory within the conversation of change-making. Civic Studies will be based primarily on theory, and on philosophical conversations about what active citizenship should look like. In the Intro to PJS class, students consider Palestine, Abu Ghraib and the war in Iraq, the Holocaust, post-conflict reconciliation in Rwanda and South Africa, LGBT asylum and international refugee law, and mass incarceration in the US. This learning style has benefited us tremendously and shaped our experiences in PJS. This will not carry over in Civic Studies. These are two different intellectual spaces: one

designed around engagement with and exploration of questions such as “what is justice?”—as Levine notes—and one for those who learn better by looking at a decolonized version of history grounded in real world examples of injustice. The latter is the kind of learning that Tufts should be supporting, not defunding.

Let us be clear, then, that PJS is being cut—that we are indeed losing the major.

Let us not soften the blow by saying that it is merely being reborn as Civic Studies. Let us do our job as students and as “active citizens” and fight for what we care about. Let us continue on the work of Peace and Justice Studies in an institution, and often a world, that seems to think it is replaceable.

February 5, 2018 Tufts Observer 23

FEATURE

NEWS

E

very night, in every part of the United States, adults who have never been formally tried in court fall asleep between prison walls. They are in prison because they could not afford to pay bail.

Cash bail, originally designed as a down payment to ensure that a person shows up to their court date, functions to keep lowincome individuals in jail while awaiting trial. In response to this injustice, The New Inquiry, a media non-profit, founded Bail Bloc, a desktop application that uses the technology of cryptocurrency to turn the processing power of personal computers into bail money for low-income incarcerated folks.

The Bail Bloc application raises money for the Bronx Freedom Fund, a nonprofit dedicated to assisting lowincome individuals with bail. Bail Bloc works by turning an individual’s computer processing power into cryptocurrency, converting cryptocurrency into dollars, and donating those dollars to the Bronx Freedom Fund, which then uses that money to keep people out of jail while they await trial.

When people download Bail Bloc, their computer takes on the function of “mining” for the cryptocurrency Monero.

Monero, like its more famous counterparts Bitcoin and Etherium, protects and validates online transactions through a kind of digital ledger called a blockchain.

Blockchain technology is effectively a ledger of every digital transaction that ever happened. The blockchain is maintained

by a network of computers simultaneously running computations that validate groups or “blocks” of transactions. Individuals who participate in this network of digital ledger keepers validating the Blockchain are compensated through cryptocurrency.

This process of acquiring cryptocurrency though validating blocks of digital transactions is called “mining.”

Maya Binyam, editor of The New Inquiry, explains why mining cryptocurrency is particularly appropriate response to the bail system. Binyam notes, “[Bail is] a way of mining low-income and marginalized communities for resources.”

She is referring to the fact that even when an individual pays bail, not all of their money gets returned. Legal systems, even in blue states like Massachusetts, charge a bail commissioner fee for every bail posted—in MA that fee is a flat $40. Atara Rich-Shea, Director of Operations at the Mass Bail Fund, discussed at length how this fee, and bail in general, add up to “a system that not only steals great amounts of capital from our communities for a significant amount of time, but also keeps a significant amount of it.” She added, “This is money that could’ve been going to food and rent and raising kids,” and she spoke about the burden on families and communities that coming up with this money can take.

Courts often ask for an amount of bail that far exceeds an individual’s ability to pay, targeting low-income people, specifically people of color. Whether

cryptocurrency against incarceration 24 Tufts Observer February 5, 2018

someone awaits trial in jail or at home is completely arbitrary in relation to the issues of guilt and innocence—it has everything to do with class and access to funds. This is the place where discussions of prison bail and cryptocurrency intersect. One of Bail Bloc’s creators, Grayson Earle, noted that the application “does have an internal rhetorical argument inside of it.” He pointed out that the Bail Bloc application effectively argues, “Money isn’t real...if we can generate value out of thin air.”

While the value of the US dollar is constructed, the system of prison bail creates devastating and very real implications for those without access to wealth. This issue is systemic; according to the Bronx Freedom Fund, only one in 10 people in NYC are able to pay the bail requested of them. This results in the other nine out of 10 awaiting their trails in jail.

According to CityLab, 62 percent of people incarcerated have not been convicted. In short, bail practices are one of the largest contributors to mass incarceration.

By Gabriela Bonfiglio & Merissa Jaye

GRAPHICS BY NICOLE COHEN

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News

bail bloc reminds us that we do not need to approach the architecture of technology with passivity-- we can choose how to use the hardware, software, and computing power in the laptops we carry to class every day.

This is where Bail Funds, like the Massachusetts Bail Fund, come in. These organizations meet the immediate need of paying bail for people who cannot; when that person attends their trial, the bail is returned to the fund. For this reason, Rich-Shea calls organizations like hers “the ultimate renewable resource.” The Mass Bail Fund in particular, is staffed entirely by volunteers with legal or other relevant expertise, meaning that every donation goes directly to helping individuals and their communities.

Until recently, bail funds have largely been reliant on monetary donations from individuals and organizations. Rich-Shea characterized Mass Bail Fund’s funding as coming mostly from community members donating $500−$1000 or less, including many online donations ranging between $25−$100. They also receive a few unsolicited larger grants a year, totaling around $25,000. The Fund also puts on occasional fundraising events, including a recent Holiday Bail Out with Black Lives Matter Cambridge. Rich-Shea emphasized the importance of monthly donations as money the Fund can count on every month.

The first collaboration Rich-Shea noticed between tech and bail funding was on Twitter, where activists have begun speaking about the bail issue and pointing followers to bail funds. Rich-Shea recalled that when Mass Bail Fund was in danger of shutting down in August, activist Mariame Kaba called her followers to action and raised $50,000 in one week. Rich-Shea added that through Twitter, around a quarter million dollars were raised for bail funds in the month of December.

Another tech innovation to increase bail funding is Appolition, a phone app which automatically donates your spare change to National Bail Out. Together, these initiatives represent an opportunity to weaken the prison-industrial complex, taking more and more people out of prisons, and therefore requiring prisons to lower their capacity or risk losing shareholder value.

In about a month, Bail Bloc raised around $3,000—a meaningful contribution to challenging bail. A few thousand dollars will not end incarceration in the United States, and technically speaking, direct

donations to the Bronx Freedom Fund are more effective than just downloading the Bail Bloc application. However, Bail Bloc is not just a means of raising funds, it functions as a rhetorical software, a computer program that makes an argument.

Bail Bloc reminds us that we do not need to approach the architecture of technology with passivity—we can choose how to use the hardware, software, and computing power in the laptops we carry to class every day. And at Tufts, where computer science is the most popular major, Bail Bloc is a particularly pertinent reminder that software engineering, like creating buildings or newspaper articles or economic policies, is not a neutral tool.

Grayson commented, “all the people at Tufts studying computer science...they have to be creative — not just good programmers, but critical thinkers.”

Bail Bloc challenges us to expand our imagination of what we can do with the hardware, software, and computing power of laptops, to educate ourselves on the injustice of the bail systems, and to think creatively about what tools we have available to take on the web of political, economic, and social issues that produce the present reality of mass incarceration.

February 5, 2018 Tufts Observer 25

FEATURE

Arts & Culture

[fergie voice]

2000 and late

how 2008 pop culture grounded our current sociopolitical world

By Chris Paulino

I

t has been ten full years since 2008—a time when Flo Rida’s “Low” was the number one song on the charts (and continues to be in my heart), High School Musical 3 was released, and the Jonas Brothers wore purity rings. And that’s most of what was on my 11-year-old radar.

But there are ways in which the seemingly menial focuses of TMZ-based 2008 gossip created the foundation for the more ludicrous headlines of our day. In the budding age of Facebook (founded in 2004), YouTube (2005), and Twitter (2006), 2008 was the time that social media began to take its now all-powerful form. So what roots are we to find? Should we go digging?

For one, the public’s consumption of Britney Spears’ emotional rollercoaster ride into and through 2008 helped establish the presumed entitlement to all aspects of celebrity lives. Most people place Spears’ deepest valley at the moment of her 2007 buzz cut, but she was also very publicly hospitalized twice in January of 2008. She was then placed on temporary conservatorship, meaning a guardian or a protector was appointed by a judge to manage her financial affairs and/or daily life; these guardians are appointed most often due to physical or mental limitations, or old age. Over the course of the year, she regained custody of her two children and eventually released her sixth studio album, Circus, on November

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28. The first two singles released from the album, “Womanizer” and “Circus,” hit number one on the Billboard Hot 100. In a Billboard article from late October 2013, Keith Caulfield points out “Womanizer” was Spears’ first number one single since her 1999 “Baby One More Time” sensation. Caulfield also notes that during her December 2, 2008 live performance of “Womanizer” on Good Morning America, “a reinvigorated Spears returned to the airwaves,” adding that “her career has mostly flourished since then.” Indeed, her ninth studio album, “Glory,” was included in year-end lists of best albums by Slant Magazine, Digital Spy, Fuse, Glamour, AOL, and Rolling Stone. Her August 2016 performance of “Make Me…” a few days after the album’s release at the MTV Video Music Awards was a success, and her first time returning to that particular stage since her decidedly “controversial” performance of “Gimme More” in 2007.

(By which I mean: she half-heartedly lipsynched, tottered around off-balance and rigid, and at one point grabbed the junk of someone on stage with her. There were also pole dancers.) Spears performed her final show of the Britney: Piece of Me tour on December 31, 2017, a performance that netted 1.172 million and was “broadcast live with performances of “Toxic” and “Work Bitch” airing on ABC’s Dick Clark’s New Year’s Rockin’

Eve to a record audience of 25.6 million.”

Britney’s highly personal, and no doubt painful, mental health journey was bore for the world to see, judge, and poke fun at. But everyone loves a comeback kid.

And of course, complete transparency with the public about your private life and process of healing is the price you pay for fame and commercial success.

Speaking of complete transparency with the public, January 2008 is also the month that Tom Cruise’s legendary Scientology promotional video was leaked.

I remember the Tom Cruise scientology jokes, but this was something that went right over my sixth-grade, five-foot-high head. Nick Denton’s January 15 coverage of the video on Gawker’s site quips, “if Tom Cruise jumping on Oprah’s couch was an 8 on the scale of scary, this is a 10.” Cruise’s interview portion is incredibly convoluted and onomatopoeia-heavy, with a few pretty sinister cackles. The most summary Cruise quote would be “I wish the world was a different place. I’d like to go on vacation, and go and romp, and play, and just… and do that, you know what I mean? I mean. That’s what I want it to be, okay? That’s how, you know, there’s times I’d like to do that. But I can’t.

Because… I know. I know.” The clip of the interview ends with a dramatic voice over that states, “A scientologist can be defined by a single question: would you

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want others to achieve the knowledge you now have? In answering that question, Tom Cruise has introduced LRH technology to over one billion people of Earth. And that’s only the first wave he’s unleashed. Which is why the story of Tom Cruise, Scientologist, has only just begun.”

Evidently, the entire 40 minute special was for a 2004 meeting of the International Association of Scientologists at which Cruise was given the “freedom medal.” The Church of Scientology didn’t respond well to the reproduction of their content, and claimed copyright infringement on several publications of the video, resulting in far more media attention than it likely would’ve otherwise received.

In the same month, Andrew Morton appeared on the Today Show to (somewhat defensively) discuss his forthcoming book, Tom Cruise: An Unauthorized Biography, in which he writes of Cruise’s relationship with the Church. When Meredith Vieira questioned Morton’s decision to call Cruise “compelling and dangerous,” Morton responded, “I think in this age of celebrity, where celebrities get a free pass to assert as opposed to argue, where they get access to presidents, prime ministers, and politicians not because of what they know but because of who they are, that— then that is—that’s a dangerous slide into an unreflective world.” This is a pretty fair

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description—the narrator of the video mentions Cruise’s meetings with NASA as well as a Japanese Prime Minister (and calls him “America’s samurai”).

What better way than Morton’s quotation to describe the last decade politically? While the 2008 campaign and election of Barack Obama were historic, the effects it had on the US racial climate are of great relevance now, one decade later. The country’s first Black president led many to make the bold claim that the US had become a post-racial utopia, which the years since have proven unequivocally false.

Most recently, Gallup’s June 7–July 1, 2016 results show that nationally, 29 percent of adults believed that as a result of Obama, race relations in the country had improved either a lot or a little compared to the 46 percent who believed they had gotten a lot or a little worse. This is a big shift from October 2009 results, in which 41 percent of respondents felt there had been a net positive result and only 22 percent felt there was any negative. Additionally, the percentage of adults who worried a “great deal” or a “fair amount” about race relations in the US rose from 45 percent in 2008 to 62 percent in 2016.

Also of contemporary importance is the Birther Movement that grew from the 2008 election and Trump’s eventual

involvement in it. His 2011 letter in USA Today titled “Obama, come clean” may have been of the same generic, jokey pabulum as Spears and Cruise at the time, but we (should, at the very least) know better now.

Discussing moments like Spears’ meteoric rise and Cruise’s cultish rants in conjunction with a presidential election and subsequent changes in perceptions of race relations may seem ham-fisted, but in the same decade, Trump managed to seamlessly permeate the barrier between pap and politics. 2008 headlines with Trump’s name covered his separation with Ivana, his buying (or not buying) of Ed McMahon’s house, and one from Fox News titled “Pop Tarts: Donald Trump Gets Emotional Over Christina Aguilera.”

2018 Trump headlines include “Trump says he rejects feminism because he is ‘for everyone,’” “Trump taunts Jay-Z about black unemployment,” (over Twitter, of course), and “Trump says he didn’t know UK far-right group were ‘horrible racists.’” Perhaps the events of 2008 can teach us that the more we idolize celebrities, blur the lines between public, private, and political, and refuse to concern ourselves with the truth, the more the world will seem to fall apart.

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MEET THE COLUMNISTS

TRINA SANYAL Trina is writing this column to talk about her laugh. Her laugh is open-mouthed, molars showing, and undeniably loud. Trina thinks she’s funny (she’s not really but she wants to be), and believes wholeheartedly that humor is not only for those who can afford to attend shows, not only for cis White men, and not only for those with quiet laughs. Trina hopes to make this column an exploration of the intersection between marginalized voices and comedy as a means of social justice. Trina is excited to be talking about her laugh—what makes it grow, what makes it powerful, and what makes it an unyielding force of resistance.

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Georgia OLDham Georgia Oldham has lost everything from pens to pets, family heirlooms to furniture, substantial sums of money to the second grade spelling bee. Join her as she explores all the things there are to lose (and find) in this satirical, illustrated column. Each week, she’ll illustrate and examine one of the things she has misplaced or rediscovered, mundane or extraordinary.

RACHEL WAHLERT The Boxes: Female. Age between 18–26. Multiracial. Upper class. Third generation. Student and laborer. Culturally Catholic. Liberal. Sociology major.

INFJ. Did you learn anything about Rachel? What can you guess, stereotype, wonder? Boxes she’d make up: Loving. Extroverted introvert. Food lover. Outdoorsyish. Self-reflector. Racially ambiguous. Leader. Outsider, imaginative cook, volunteer, friend. All of these are drops in the ocean that is RACHEL. Together they configure a current of what she is right now.

This column is an extension of her thoughts. All parts of her identity affect what she knows or what she perceives the world to be. It’s not the whole picture; it’s just an excerpt. This is an excerpt of her. She is Rachel.

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PHOTO BY CARISSA FLEURY

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